Okay.

I would like very much tonight to tell you about some various techniques, and I am sorry that I am not going to be able to tell you about the technique in which I am sure most of you are most interested; that's 88.

Now, many people down through the ages have adventured upon a technique which is known in psychiatry as having been authored by a fellow by the name of – well, he calls himself Krishnamurti. This Krishnamurti is out in Los Angeles or someplace, and he has a technique which he calls "awareness through action," some such thing. "Awareness of the present through action" or "the present through action" or some such thing.

The reason I'm not going to tell you about 88 is 88 requires a lot longer buildup than three days. It actually is much simpler. It's a brand-new method of running, but it requires an enormous amount of preparatory survey – reorientation.

And the idea has been around for an awfully long time that all a fellow had to do was pay attention to present time and he was all set! This was an inarticulated, unexplained effort to get into present time.

So instead of that, as preparatory to 88, I'm giving you a technique – Technique 80 – which, by the way, you will be able to use on the general public.

You know, you walk into a mental institution, by the way, and you just walk up to a certain number of patients and you say to each one in turn – you say, "Come up to present time." And you go over to the next patient and you say, "Come up to present time." And out of every five or ten or something like that, some fellow who has been crazy as a bedbug up to that moment will say, "Gngh! What am I doing here?" He's in present time.

You can't use Technique 88 very much on people. You try to persuade them as to what you're doing, and one of them is liable to say to you that you have to be a mathematician in order to run it. This isn't true. It just happens to be a little bit out of their common run of understanding of the MEST universe.

One notable example of this was a young lady in an institution. I think it was up in Michigan. A Dianeticist went through the institution and was talking to the psychiatrists and so forth and said, "Well, you see, it works like this." And turned around to a young girl and he said, "Well" (she was drooling and hadn't talked and didn't talk to anybody and way out of communication) – he suddenly said to her, "Come up to present time!" She shook her head, swallowed a couple of times and said, "All right," and that night gave a speech at a party saying how glad she was to be there. She had simply come up to present time. She had a terrific case of acne and it went away in three days, and she stayed in present time and she was perfectly sane afterwards.

And furthermore, when you talk about Technique 88 it makes people feel just a little bit strange, and they're afraid to stamp on something or something like that, because they're afraid their foot will go through. It makes the whole universe look sort of like a thin piece of Czech glass and makes you feel like a very small child playing with it.

So just the suggestion to some people that there is a present time they can come to, or a present time does exist, occasionally seems quite sufficient to bring them into a state of at least neurosis.

Because the truth of the matter is, actually, with 88, theoretically – just theoretically, fortunately – you could go far enough with Technique 88 not to just have the preclear go poof! but to have the room go poof! And this is hard on rooms and so on.

Now, don't for a moment, however, be deluded into believing that the technique of getting into present time or being aware of present time is any very high-level technique nor any very high ambition.

I don't think anybody actually will apply 88 to the point where this solar system will go poof! like that and so forth, because I'm asking everybody a favor that I run on 88. I say, "Now you have to do me one favor." And, of course, when they all get through - they don't know this yet; I won't tell them what the favor is – it's leave the solar system! Well, they're committed to this one favor, so you're safe. Anyway. . . Actually, that's not the favor I'm going to ask them, but...

The psychotic lives in and is aware of the past.

Now, what I am going to talk to you about is Technique 80, which is actually preparatory to 88.

The neurotic lives in and is aware of the present.

Technique 80 can be used very widely, and it is very close to the ultimate in ARC – affinity, reality and communication. So in these three lectures I am going to develop affinity, reality and communication for you as far as I can so that you can use it and use it very, very well. And I will give you, with that, this technique.

And the very sane lives almost exclusively in the future. He has to, of course, live in the future because he keeps catching up with himself so fast! You know – Rrrrr! He's got to be in the next moment all the time, otherwise he's not anyplace! And it's just a headlong javelin throw down the time track when a fellow is in good shape.

This technique has to do with a progress up the dynamics to a point where you are, theoretically, in contact at considerable distance and can be almost anything. And when I say be almost anything, I mean you could be an icebox or a Cadillac or anything while you're still being yourself. Sounds fantastic, doesn't it?

Now, therefore, let's take this old, moth-eaten idea, awareness of the present. Now let's make it workable for the first time. Let's not say, "Well, the way to awareness of the present is to every morning get up, and you take two dumbbells and you knock them together – bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop – and you hear their noise, you see? Then you put them down again and you're in present time." Well, it makes money but it's not a good technique. You can tell somebody that "Well, the way to really get sane is to go out and mow the lawn. Yeah, go through all this physical motion. That's the thing to do." "What you need are sports. Go out and play tennis every day. Action, action, action!" Or, "Work hard."

But it's very, very fascinating that you are highly individualized and you will never be more than yourself, but your self and your individuality can get up to the high point of your own recognition not only of a brotherhood with the whole universe but a sort of a recognition of yourself as the universe.

These are all rather – rather control-mechanism therapies, by the way. You tell somebody that if he exercises his arm long enough like this, he will eventually get big muscles and this is good and he will be healthy – of course, he'll get an oversized heart, but his muscles will get bulgy.

This is very dangerous for people if they are low on the tone scale, to get the idea that they're the whole universe. I've been around in institutions occasionally and run into fellows who thought they were God, and other things. And they weren't well, because they tried to reach it by the reverse route. And they backed down tone scale to get there, and the only place a fellow gets when he goes down tone scale to get there is dead.

Well, naturally, if you create enough facsimiles of terrific effort you're going to get a bulge, because you're going to turn the facsimiles into such heavy effort, you see, that they turn into MEST itself! And gradually you bulge all over, but you can't do anything. Ha! That's the truth of the matter. That's muscles! Muscles! Very good thing, muscles. I'm not sure what's good about them but they're very good.

Well, in this series I'm going to tell you how to get UP tone scale to get there and still retain your potentiality of action.

Now, production of awareness of the present by creation of heavy MEST facsimiles is not a good technique, but let's develop awareness of the present so that we can develop awareness of the future, so that we can then go far enough ahead so we don't have to be aware of the present. That's really good.

The most important factors involved in thought or the material universe are the subdivisions of thought itself. And these subdivisions are affinity, reality and communication. There are three parts of thought; there are three parts of life; there are three parts of living. And it makes a very interesting triangle. And we don't have a blackboard here. Do we have a blackboard? So you'll just have to paint this in the air.

By the way, you can go around and see the present and compute on the present and have a good time with the present and everything else, recombining it continually so that you will have a better future.

Oh, it's black behind me, so it's very easy, you see, to just paint this in the air. [See diagram one in the Appendix.]

Actually, the business of action is the business of recombining the elements in the present or putting new elements into the present so that you've got a future.

You ever run into anybody when they walk in an old, knocked – down dilapidated house, they don't see the cracks in the walls or the scratches in the floor or anything else? They see this beautifully modernistically furnished apartment. They say, "That's very nice. That's very nice.

Imagine a circle, a circle up here. You talk about a symbol; this is a timeless symbol. And by the way, although Dianetics has never existed before on the time track evidently, this symbol has existed there. And that symbol must come from practically the beginning of all time. And this is a circle and inside the circle is a triangle, and inside the triangle at the top is the figure infinity and at the bottom is a zero.

You say, "What's very nice about it? Look at the cockroaches and so forth."

You should remark that symbol fairly well. The big circle could stand for the universe, perfection, completion or the continuation of time after the end of time. In other words, time ends and begins at the same point.

Well, when you say that, of course, you're in the present. But this happy, cheerful person that's with you says, "Well, these, these purple and green drapes, and so forth, and we put the chow bench there and-very beautiful place. Fine. Swell."

Now, here you have the triangle. And at the top of this triangle we have affinity, over at this corner of the triangle we have reality and over at this corner of the triangle we have communication. And then we have the infinity mark up at the top, and at the bottom of the triangle we have a zero.

And by the way, the ultimate of that is for this person to walk in and take a look at this, and all the cracks go pop! the floor polishes, the drapes go wheww! And somebody else walks in and they say, "My God!" You create an illusion so solid that it comes into being!

You all remember Shakespeare's quotation "To be or not to be, that is the question." The infinity is beingness or "to be." The zero is "not to be." And zero and infinity, so far as the thought and the universe are concerned, are the same thing.

Don't think there is any trick, though, to creating illusion that comes into being. Any one of you continually creates illusions which become being – any one of you does this.

Thought is all or thought is nothing. A facsimile or an independent thought could exist on the head of the pin.

You say, "Now, let's see. I think I'll wash my car." Why do you want to wash the car? Well, you want the – you've got already the illusion of a clean car. You see? You say, "Illusion-clean car." Now we'll take some MEST action in the physical universe and. . . clean car. Of course, that took physical labor. It doesn't matter whether you took physical labor or you suddenly went out and you said, "I want a nice clean car. Isn't that pretty?" Glitter, and it's all clean. That's that. Really no reason why you couldn't do that, but that's the reductio ad absurdum of this.

Now, the problem is, here, that a thought can exist on the head of a pin. Let's say all the thought that went into the Encyclopaedia Britannica, so far as shape and size is concerned, as thought is concerned (thought itself, not words written on a page), you could put it all on the head of a pin. In other words, it's just symbolizing for you a zero. Or you could take the thought, just this one small thought "cat" (you think "cat"), and that thought could be as big as this universe or all the island galaxies. You see, it just doesn't matter, then. It's that big or it's that tiny; all that thought can be that tiny or that little thought can be that big. These are interchangeable.

Most people take it out by being very efficient with their motion so that they create an illusion and make an actuality out of illusion.

Now, we talk in Advanced Procedure and Axioms about the state of beingness, the prime thought – the prime thought. That prime thought is "to be." And that prime thought is infinity, because when a person decided to be everything he could be, he is of course deciding to be infinity. That is the most he could decide to be. So there he is, clear up, the top of the tone scale – infinity. That is ultimate beingness. But what does that mean? That means that he would be not only himself but could be or would be everything. That's an ultimate in beingness.

Take Hollywood, for instance. Hollywood films a play called "Streetcar Named Desire", and it has all of these tenements on New Orleans, and the fine ironwork, and it has the various styles that are in use, and it has all these various things and so on. The next thing you know, why, somebody is building something someplace out in Keokuk and it has some ironwork on it. And somebody designs a new dress someplace, and it's the dress that they saw in "A Streetcar Named Desire".

Now, at the bottom you could have a prime thought of not-beingness. Well, how not-being can a person not-be? Well, that's zero. And so you have the two decisions, the two possible decisions in the business of living: infinity or zero.

What was that movie? "Forever Amber". Here is Amber. All right, Hollywood turns the crank on the illusion they have created. Actually they had to build the illusion before they could turn the crank on it, but it comes out as an illusion. And the next thing you know, you look in all the store windows and so forth and you see Forever Amber's hat. The illusion is produced and then people accept the illusion, and it becomes a reality the moment they agree upon it. You see?

Fortunately, most of us exist somewhere on a gradient scale. That is to say, from 0.0 up we decide on just a little more and a little more and a little more beingness, until at last we have decided to be quite a bit – at least ourselves. And then up we go a little higher and a little higher along all the dynamics. And when we have gone out on all the dynamics and have at least developed the capability of being all the dynamics, we have arrived at ultimate beingness. But of course, you get to the beingness of infinity, it could just as well be zero, because when you are that high on the tone scale, you could simply re-decide. So it would be one or the other.

So future is the creation of a future illusion and the working toward that illusion to make it a reality.

Gradient scale of beingness. Now perhaps you understand a little bit better what is meant, then, by this zero and infinity. And perhaps you understand a little bit more what is meant by "to be." This is quite important. Just to say "to be" is to utter only a verb.

Some people drop off so that they just create future illusions. And by the way, this must be very good, because everybody is so down on it. They say, "Don't daydream. Don't daydream! That's bad! What you want to do is work. That's good. Muscles and so forth. Don't daydream."

We are not addicted to uttering undefinables if we can possibly avoid it. So let us examine what we call the dynamics in this business of beingness. There are eight dynamics. Dynamic one, as far as beingness is concerned, would be to be oneself.

But some people get hopeless about making the illusion into a reality, and so all they do is dream the illusion. But believe me, that is far in advance of never having an illusion.

Now, you understand that you have in all existing volumes before this date the eight dynamics described in terms of survival. I'll give you that difference in a moment with what I'm telling you now.

That person who only has present time – God help him! Look at him. You can look at this place here or look at some similar place and you say, "Well, it has this factor and that factor and this factor and that factor." Most of the people putting this place together right now aren't looking at it. They don't see this place this way. They've got it all built!

There's the beingness of one, and that's a great deal different than the survival of one. There's the beingness of one, of yourself.

You'd be surprised, but where you're sitting right now – probably there's a building there.

And then there's the beingness of the second dynamic, the beingness in the sphere of creation, children, future, or (and get this one) illusions. That's the second dynamic. Illusions comes in there. And Frank Lloyd Wright down here building a town is just creating an illusion by that definition, you see? That's what I mean by an illusion. Constructive line comes on the second dynamic.

Thought becomes matter, and matter can come out of thought. And when your thought gets into bad shape and you're not directing it well at all, it'll turn into matter eventually, but the wrong way! So that when you try to go in through MEST energy and action into the real universe just as such – MEST action only, with no aesthetic, no art, no dream, none of these things – you're just going to go into the present, and that's not good enough. It's good enough for a raving psychotic to be in present, but it's not good enough for you.

Now we take the third, the beingness of a group. Around here, the people who are here have begun to experience, to a very large measure, this beingness of a group. A group becomes its own life, and each one becomes the life of the group. But anyone could detach himself from the life of the group and you'd still have a life of the group. Even if all the members of a group disappeared, there would still be a record of an existing group. It's very interesting; it's almost mystic, but it becomes very unmystic when you experience it. It becomes as solid as this platform.

Now, when you take the will to do action, and to that you add aesthetics, shape, form, dreams, illusion, now you're moving up into the real band of sanity. That is the real band.

Now there's the fourth: that is the beingness as a species – one single species. And I won't say man with this new definition of the dynamics. I don't mean just man. I mean the species to which one belongs. Fortunately, many can expect to get out of the rut of being a Homo sapiens. I say that brutally, because Homo sapiens today isn't doing too well. I'd hate to think of a dynamic being devoted wholly to Homo sapiens as he acts.

There's an old, old poem that says, "And the best of a man is gone when the best of his dreams is dead." And it finishes up to the effect that when the last of his dreams is dead, he's dead too. And that's very true. But actually, when the last of his dreams is dead, he's just moved into present time only. That's a hideous place to be! So I just give you the difference of goals.

Five would be all life.

The Krishnamurti goal, and so forth, would be the goal of now – if he could just get people into a neurotic state he'd be happy. We want people up here – whssh! – way up! And the way you get way up is to be you, and then be! be! be! all the way along the line.

Six would be the MEST universe – the material universe. But remember, in each case it's the beingness of it.

So, let's examine, then, and find out what "be" is. It has three component parts: affinity, reality and communication. These three things together, by the way, can be demonstrated to be mathematics.

And seven is the beingness of all thought, any thought.

Mathematics itself is based upon the interaction of affinity, reality and communication. I won't bother to go into that. But it actually is very simple.

And, of course, the eighth dynamic is merely an infinity turned on its side; eight turned on its side gives you an infinity. And so you have, there, "beingness of all." And most creeds and so forth, when they say "beingness of all," they codify this and they say God, and then they put God up in armor or something, put him on a pedestal and reduce him down to a very finite affair. They're very quick to depart from that infinity. So let's not confuse a religious symbol for an infinity of the eighth dynamic, because the infinity of the eighth dynamic simply means, in our terminology here, the "beingness of all." It has no other codification. It doesn't say that all is good, bad or indifferent; it just says it's all. You say an infinity – infinity of beingness.

For instance, you're trying to get figures and symbols to agree, and you're trying to get a communication by the whole operation between your mind and somebody else's. And you are examining similarities and identities – in other words, affinities. And you can interact with affinity, reality and communication and you get mathematics. You also get understanding; understanding consists of this. And you also get, of course, higher-up beingness – be.

Well, now, there are the eight dynamics.

The gradient scale of be, then, is the gradient scale of ARC. And a low, low level of ARC is survive, and a higher level is beingness.

Now let's take up this factor: Low on the tone scale, at about 4.0 on the tone scale, we have survival – in its crude definition we have survival. Now we go up the tone scale to about 8.0, and we get into the realms of beingness with identity. And then we go up the tone scale again and we hit about 32.0, something like that, and we're starting to get into the beingness along all the dynamics. And actually, you can plot this tone scale by starting in at the bottom with one, and as you go up the tone scale, plot the rest of the dynamics in: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, and eight is 40. These things will occur, more or less, in that staggered fashion up the tone scale. [See diagram two in the Appendix.]

What do we mean then by ARC?

Affinity. Affinity could be defined as love, but that would be a very poor definition for it. It means the tendency to adhese or cohese to something else, or not to cohese to something else. In other words, affinity doesn't mean love. It means love, hate, apathy; it means anything along the line that would have to do with describing an emotion. But it's not quite the emotion either.

But when we talk about survival normally, we mean survival of a body, we mean the survival of one lifetime, we mean the survival of a very finite, specific thing, and we only mean that it must continue to exist at any cost through a span of time. Well, that's sort of silly, because you actually control, command and create time. So as you go up the tone scale, you're not asking for anything to survive against a span of time. You want something to be, and to be does not include time; survival includes time.

We have, then, a molecule in this piece of iron here, or brass, and that molecule has a tendency to stay near another molecule. What's that tendency to stay near? Well, it comes under the heading of one has an affinity for the other. And affinity runs down the tone scale till we'll find two objects which won't stay together – they will move away from each other. There are certain chemicals that do this. They have a low affinity for each other, until the affinity reaches zero. In other words, affinity can be repulsive as well as attractive.

Now, you notice as you come down the tone scale, you get into more and more and more and more time – more and more and more time till you get down to 0.0. And that's all time – is in any instant, in death. You take the death of a body, or apathy, just above that level: An instant of it can be an eternity. It can be an eternity.

So, affinity is the relative identification or similarity or differentiation amongst whatever you want to say it's amongst. That's affinity.

You'll find the engrams that people are dragging along the track with them are engrams which have that eternal factor of apathy in them. Here is one instant of not-beingness so low that that not-beingness becomes, in itself, a survival along all time. A person can get an apathy engram a trillion years ago and still have that moment in existence today. I'm talking now about the span of all lives. It's very simple to see.

You say, "One person has affinity for another." It would be a specialized use of the word.

But up here at the top of the tone scale you have the reverse. You can put a complete universe or the span of all lives into an instant at the top. What you're doing is reversing it, so that as you go up the tone scale you become more and more and more capable of action per given instant.

This word is taken, by the way, from the vocabulary of the magician, about 900 A.D. He had no way to sum up love and love. And he bridged it by saying "relative affinity." Because there is the love of an individual for an object, of a person – a man, for instance – for a man, which merely means affection. There's the love of people, one for another. And then there happens to be a second dynamic connotation of the word, "love." And "love," of course, is what they sing about down on Tin Pan Alley: moon, June, croon, soon and love. Love. So, you don't get a plain look at it. Actually, either love is a part of affinity, so it's relative affinity.

Of how much action are you capable in one second? Well, at the bottom, you're capable in that one second of complete motionlessness, and at the top, you could live a whole lifetime, theoretically, both sides. In other words, you go up the tone scale, you get more and more and more and more time, actually, because you get up the line to where you are time and then you're controlling time and then you create time.

Affinity is a relative thing. It runs all the way up from actually being so close an affinity to something that you are the thing, down to not being anything, much less being in affinity with something. And it passes through the stages of being repelled, hating, so forth. Those are all relative affinities.

Now, if you see somebody who is flying around like mad, and he just seems to get all sorts of things done, he never complains about the fact that he hasn't any time; sometimes he looks around rather puzzled and wonders why somebody else isn't moving as fast as he is. And he just keeps getting these things done – brrrrrr! And comes four o'clock in the afternoon and he figures he's loafed all day.

All right, let's take communication. You think that communication perhaps consists of somebody saying yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, or somebody writing down on a Western Union telegraph blank. Oh, no. The most intimate communication which you have is right now probably your tactile sense. You touch something, that's communication. Another sense of communication is sight, another one is hearing. These are communications. The use of sound and words are highly specialized communications. ALL perception is communication.

And there's somebody else: They get up and they walk around and they work real hard, and they got one envelope addressed at supper time! And yet they think they've been moving all that time. They think they have; they have a concept of it.

Now, there are various gradient scales of communication. Communication starts in at the bottom of the tone scale with no communication, goes up through perverted communications, comes up to real communication or real sight, comes on up the tone scale – we're all this way, by the way, going through the MEST universe. You know, you send a sound wave out and it hits somebody's ear. Here is "I" and here is "I" and you go through the MEST universe and you get from "I" to "I" by perception, you see?

Now, just a little bit higher than that, the person senses his inability to control time or realizes time is whipping him, and so he starts in with this kind of thing: "But I have no time to do anything." And he'll sit around for hours and tell you how he hasn't any time to do anything. "Why, I couldn't even start it – I mean, I wouldn't have any time to do it if I did start it." And so on, "There's no use to do it anyway, because – I mean, you couldn't hardly get it finished; there's just no time." That's at 1.5, by the way. 1.5s are wonderful at this. They will explain to you for hours how they haven't five minutes. Usually they haven't got five minutes to themselves, they have to do so much for others. (You never notice them doing this, but they tell you.)

Here's a person, here's a person. They hear each other, they see each other. You're going through the MEST universe. You're using energy waves, sound waves, all that sort of thing. And it goes up through the tone scale up to there and suddenly starts to bridge, and goes from person to person without the MEST universe being in there.

So anyway, as you go on up the scale, you have more and more time. Now, isn't that peculiar? It simply means that at the bottom of the scale your capability of handling MEST has dropped to the point where all that happens in your interaction is that MEST handles you.

And its first method of doing that is by emotion. You get an emotional interchange of waves. Now, you've experienced that. If you want to run back on the tone scale, by the way – pardon me, run the tone scale down along the level and just see if you can experience any time you've ever had anybody's counter – emotion, you will find that the person who hated you the most is a person who was just stuck right on the track right there. An emotional wave was proceeding from that person, and that emotional wave was aided and abetted by the fact that you were resisting that person, so it has actually gone up above what we normally consider to be matter and energy and space and time and has gotten into the band of an emotional wave. It really is a wavelength. It's a pretty crude wavelength.

And if you ever see somebody laid out on a bier (b-i-e-r) – if you ever see anybody laid out that way – you will know instantly that they have inherited all of the universe wrong way to. That is to say, they are now in possession of the whole thing – dead. Actually, they have completed what could be called a cycle, but it'd be a mistake to do so, because what's really happened is the whole universe suddenly inherited them.

But you can feel that. If you think of somebody who hated you, you'll find out that their hate's bunched up on you someplace. You're actually getting a communication line direct without intervention of sight, sound or anything else. It's an emotional wave. It's still a wave action, however.

They are owned now. How much owning can there be? Well, the ownest owningness that you can do, as far as owning is concerned and so forth, would be at that level of 0.0. That's what makes MEST so attractive; MEST is dead. Even though it has joints in it and moves and wheels turn and belts spin and so forth, that thing is still a dead thing. You know that very well.

Now you go up the line a little higher and you get into the band of enthusiasm. You ever felt somebody else's enthusiasm? You ever felt the contagion of enthusiasm? All right, there is that. It is a communication. It is a wave motion that people in pretty good shape feel easily. People who are down though – they are low on the tone scale, of course – never could tune in on enthusiasm; it's just a little bit too high up. The wave is different.

Female voice: “MEST?”

And then we go way on up the tone scale to a figure that looks like a point – that many zeros out, and we get the wavelength of aesthetics – very, very high! [See Ron's handwritten notes on the wavelengths of the tone scale in the Appendix.] And yet not so high that we couldn't duplicate it today with our electronics. But it's way up there! That's aesthetics.

Yeah. M-E-S-T.

And you get a person as he drops down the tone scale, he becomes less and less able to do aesthetics or appreciate aesthetics. One of the most aberrative incidents you had in your – in this lifetime, by the way, was running up to one of your parents and saying "It's pretty," and they say, Well, Junior, wash your hands for dinner." In other words, they said, "Aesthetics – phhh! Aesthetics – nah. What you want to be is practical!" The use of "practicality" is very poor.

Female voice: “What's that?”

But do you know that the aesthetic wavelength and that band immediately below it and above it and around the mid-band of aesthetics – is practically a disintegrator wave; it just thaws through all thought of a lower tone.

Oh, I beg your pardon. That's such a coined word in Dianetics; I beg your pardon. M-E-S-T: It means matter, energy, space and time.

You can produce a piece of beauty or, if you please, an aesthetic ugliness of such a magnitude that you just stop people in their tracks! You can blow away and erase their anger, hate, discomfort or anything else with an aesthetic.

Female voice: “Oh, okay.”

But when you can generate an aesthetic that high, you are so high up the tone scale that you practically own them. And they realize it, and they say "Hmm! Ohhh!"

M-E-S-T. It's the first letters of it. An old engineering trick of taking the first letters of something and getting some things that sound like "ENIACs" or... The most wonderful words are being coined these days in engineering.

The way you really fix up a society is to kill all its artists, like they do in the United States. They don't let an artist exist in this country. One of the things they do is they try to teach him in the university. You can't teach the guy aesthetics; he has to come clear down here on the band of the tone scale to get into MEST communication level with somebody who is going to teach him about something which is – whssht! – way up here! Can't do it. An artist is an artist. And any one of you is an artist if you are up in that band, if you can emanate that band. Nothing under the sun will mold up faster than that band. It'll go into anything.

Now, here then is this gradient scale of beingness: not-beingness is dead; beingness is full life. And those are the two ends.

A story somebody mentioned to me the other night: a crowd became very angry at an artist in some ancient civilization; it became furious with this artist because he had taken a slave and had made the slave pose so long and so arduously that the slave had sickened and died. And the artist had used him as a model, and the crowd grew very, very angry and they were storming his doors and about to tear the house down, when the artist simply walked out and held up the picture he had made of that slave. And the crowd stopped, and that stopped all the motion as far as they were concerned and they went home. That was the answer.

So we take this symbol; we take this symbol of the circle, the triangle and the infinity and the zero, and we can behold, in that, something which would symbolize all you need to know about anything, anywhere, to accomplish anything that you want to accomplish. Of course, it needs a couple of billion words of explanation, but it's been there for an awful long time and it's a very good symbol to remember.

It's very hard to see this today, because they turn art immediately into a commercial channel, quickly. Kill it! Bring it down the line.

The circle: The universe and the continuum of time; the beginning is the end of all.

Do you know that it was against the law to do any artwork in this country 175 years ago? That you could be whipped, stoned? People like Paul Revere had to take it out by saying "It's practical." And so they made silverware and ironware and things of that character because it was against the law for them to do anything else. Bluntly against the law! We've gotten a little bit better, so we must be coming up the tone scale a little bit in some respects. All right.

The triangle: That means thought. And the three corners of the triangle are affinity, reality and communication. And they're the three component parts of thought (I'll explain to you why); ARC, they make up thought.

When you examine this band, this is a band of communication. And there isn't anything very mystic about it; it's about as mystic as sitting down and reading an oscilloscope. There it is, and there are the wavelengths, and that's that.

And there's the fact that you mustn't overlook, is this triangle of thought is imposed upon and becomes the circle of the MEST universe. The triangle is one end, the high end of the tone scale-all thought. And the circle is the bottom of the tone scale and it says all MEST – the universe, the circle, circular time, so on. And there is thought impinged upon the universe.

You can commit aesthetic waves in combinations so that they will re-emanate on an aesthetic band. That's quite a trick. It's done instinctively; it's not done much by rules and laws. But if you wanted to get down to it, you could write up all the laws that had to do with aesthetics.

And that combination, then – the circle and the triangle – is exemplified by infinity (the allness of everything). And that is how much you could be: you could be both the circle and the triangle, or at the bottom, zero, which means that you could actually be neither, nothing, and that's not-beingness.

Now, there's communication. And the highest level of communication there is, is art, and the lowest level there is, is a whip. And you can take your choice in a society of whether or not it's going to be an aesthetic or a whip.

Actually, all a person would have to do theoretically is simply decide to be. I stressed that in November and a lot of the boys really strained at it. I said there's no reason you had to go back on the track and erase engrams. Why don't you just suddenly say "I'm going to BE"? Of course, if you felt this violently enough, you'd of course disappear and swell up and be the whole universe. But it's unhealthy, because the fellow decides this and he decides at the same time that he probably can't be this, and he decides that this can't be because it isn't, and so forth. And so instead of going up the tone scale like a WAC Corporal (that's a rocket, by the way), he goes down the tone scale and out the bottom, because he gets the sensation of running head-on into MEST.

And all the past generations that we are in intimate contact with took the whip! But they're still communication lines.

But there you have the triangle of thought on the circle of the material universe, and the decision: the circle, the triangle, the decision.

Reality is another thing, and rather frightening to realize that the only reality, the only reality you know in common with other people is that reality on which you and they have agreed. This is an old one in Dianetics, very old one.

Actually, that's all you need to know. You should take that and you should figure and you should say to yourself "Gee, that's true!" and say, "Zip!" There's only one trouble with saying "Zip!" Too many other people trying to say "Zip!" at the same time, originally on the time track, made a sort of a collision. And some of the people who were zipping this way ran into some of the people who were zapping that way, and it became a little bit confused on who was zipping and who was zapping and some of them became MEST. And becoming MEST is a very bad thing to do.

We're all sitting here and all of a sudden this cat walks in. We all saw a cat. We agree that thing is a cat. Fellow walks up and he says, "That wasn't a cat, that was a Cadillac."

Homo sapiens is just a hair above MEST, just a hairline above it. Pretty grim. He's running on the first dynamic; he makes a complete practice out of going around and saying "I'm not, I'm not, I'm not being. I'm not being. Yes, I'm not," so on. "Well, I'm not so good at that, but uh. . ." and "What is your opinion?" and, "Do you approve of me?" and "Do I have a license to survive from you?" and so on. And he just is going around all the time making up this business at zero. And somebody who comes along and says to him all of a sudden ìI amî (something or other). They say, "Oh, he's opinionated, he is. Ha-ha. Huh! Huh! Invalidate him! Nullify him! Kill him!" because he's liable to upset this zero. And this zero is so easily upset that-do you know that Homo sapiens can only survive about sixty-nine years? Imagine, sixty-nine trips around the sun, that's all he can survive. It's hardly worth paying a nickel for. Well, it's a ride you get, sixty-nine round trips.

You say, "It wasn't. It was a cat."

And then what do they do with him? They take him and his education and everything else and they bury him. I don't know why they bury him. They don't even make a practical use out of his body! It's very remarkable. The only ones that profit by the body is the florist.

Well, it's a rather a pointless argument, because all reality is established by is the majority opinion. One for you to think about. All the reality there is, really, is a majority opinion.

Although I did hear about a battlefield one time in France where ten thousand men – knights and yeomen and so forth – had been killed, and it'd been nice and green ever since and the wheat grew well there, so it does have some advantage.

So you get into a minority on reality, and people start really fighting you. They say, "He must be crazy. He doesn't agree with us." Well, their reality might be entirely a psychotic reality in that it was not good for their beingness. They've all decided not to be, you see? They say, "Well, we'll just – what's real here is not-beingness. Nothing exists; that's real. We have all agreed that nothing exists."

But what I'm getting at is he's trembling right on that zero; he's making a cult out of not-beingness. And any time you do that, watch out, because the fellow's just wshhh-wshhh!

The United States right now is on the very astonishing basis of "We have all agreed the atom bomb does not exist." Ha! Well, it doesn't exist! There's only one unfortunate thing about that, is they are not joined in that agreement with Russia. The atom bomb would practically cease to exist if everybody in the United States and everybody in Russia, or even the majorities in both places, were in perfect agreement that the atom bomb didn't exist. Or if they were even in agreement that it was not a threat, it would cease to be a threat. That would be a real thing, then, wouldn't it?

Now, the state of beingness up here would be a very interesting one to reach, particularly if you could reach it with such full determinism that you could be any part of it at will – any part of it – of the gradient scale between zero and infinity. If you could be any part of anything at will and really be that part of that thing at will, on any dynamic, you would be attaining toward the potentiality of zero to infinity at your own decision, in other words. You could say, "The third dynamic. Well, I'm not going to be the third dynamic right now, I'm going to be the fourth." And you could make up your power of decision on the line. Or you could simply go up tone scale and say, "I'm infinity." Be an interesting experiment.

Well, enough people agreed hard enough one time about the MEST universe to make various things in the MEST universe. And that's the long and short of it, and that's why you got a MEST universe. That's reality!

How do you get there? What do you have to do to get there? We have this symbol of the circle, the triangle, infinity and zero. It actually tells you all you need to know with a few dozen more lines and a lot of explanation. How do you get, then, up toward infinity? And how can you monitor and modulate your own existence and your own conduct in such a way as to be anything you want to be?

But if you go around searching for what people say you must face and call reality, in other words, if you go around obeying this thing "Well, the only thing that's wrong with you can be healed and so forth if you just face reality. Now, if you will just pay me twenty-five dollars an hour and face reality, we'll all be nuts." Excuse me, I mean, we'll all be rich. That's wrong too, because the patient would be poor. That is your standard therapeutic advice, however. Face reality! In other words, agree with everybody!

Tell you how low this society at this time is: The biggest ambition of everybody seems to be "I want to be myself." The poor guys, they haven't even gotten to the first dynamic.

Well, I don't know how sick you can get reading Dale Carnegie, but it's not well. Because to some slight degree you become that with which you agree. If you agree that the desert is a dirty place, you will become dirty. Blunt as that! You become to some degree that with which you agree. And the only way you can escape it is to go up – high enough up the tone scale so that you are creating an illusion for yourself.

Okay. Let's take a break.

I saw a cartoon one day, a wonderful cartoon, a wonderful cartoon. It said, "Doctor, I just go on day after day facing the same grim reality." He had learned to face reality 100 percent and he was a sick man.

What you've got to teach a man to learn, if you are going to teach him to learn anything, is you've got to teach him to face his own illusions. To hell with his reality – everybody has got reality. Throw it overboard.

You start agreeing with every reality that you run into and you will have a good time!

Now, in Dianetics you go out in the society and you wonder why you have gone out of communication just a little bit. It's because you don't any longer agree with their reality. You've said their reality is too MEST! Because, you see, reality is on this gradient scale too.

And you've seen a society which is perfectly willing to be in chaos. What's this? This thing is in chaos; it's a solid chaos. It's going in all directions this way and so on, and it's going all so furiously and so fast and with so much force that it became solid, and so there it is, a solid chaos.

And you get the society: as it goes down the tone scale it approaches that chaos. And when you get a living culture which has gone down the line to where it doesn't care about this and it doesn't care about that and it says this is that and so on, and so on and so on, it's getting too close to being a dead culture. And you, being a little higher up the tone scale, say, "Hey. I don't want to be that dead." That second, you've gone out of agreement with it! So your reality goes out of it and you go out of communication with it.

Did you ever see a Republican and a Democrat communicating? No, you've seen them talking, not communicating.

One of them says, "And you take that FDR you had! He ought to have been taken out and shot!"

And the other fellow says, "And Eisenhower -- yap, yap, yap."

They're just talking – yap, yap, yap – no communication. Why? But it's too broad a thing to say no communication, because actually it is a point on the communication tone scale: It's hate-opposed. And so you've got this, and there's just no line hooked up through, because at this same point there's no agreement. And, believe me, there's no affinity; they don't like each other.

And you can say, just bluntly, that there will be as much communication as there is affinity; there will be as much agreement as there is communication; there will be as much affinity as there is communication. They just interact, interact – any of the three points.

So, you've got this whole band. if you want to go up tone scale, you'll finally arrive at the beingness which is an aesthetic beingness, and there alone is enough horsepower to come right around and actually create or disintegrate matter. I snuck up on you with that one, but that's what you do.

Somebody thought this universe up, and I do mean "thought it up." That's why you can erase an engram. That's why a fellow who has too many engrams eventually dies; he just gets to be matter.

How dead can you get? Matter.

All matter, you could say, is dead thought.

Now, we're not trying to produce on you here "all is illusion" and "God is sex" or whatever that creed was. All we're trying to introduce here is just this simple fact that here's a band, and from the top to the bottom of this band, you actually have one thing: motion. It goes from no motion, which is the static – the extreme static of thought – to the frozen motion of matter. There is your band: motion which is more and more solid, more and more in close proximity, till you get clear to the bottom.

And way up here at the top we call this theta, just for a term. We come a certain ways down the band, as long as it will tolerate sanity and thought – and we say from the top down here to the bottom level of sanity and thought "This is theta."

Now, from the point where it will no longer tolerate sanity, but life is in support and so forth, from there on down we call it enturbulated theta, or entheta. And from this point, from the bottom of entheta which is about death – from there on down (but these are overlapped slightly here and there) – you have material universe. That's MEST. And this has been sitting on a tone scale looking at you for a long time. But there it is, it's a gradient scale.

You can stop kidding yourself anymore about "getting away from reality," by which you would mean "getting away from the material universe" or doing this or doing that.

If you want to get rid of the material universe, you'll have to erase it.

Best way I can think of to erase it – if we all sat down and looked at a stone long enough it'd disappear. We're not that high up the tone scale. The best way to make a stone disappear is to hit it on the aesthetic band. If you were way up, that you could probably do. But that's an extreme.

And all we are trying to do with Technique 80 is hook in affinity, reality and communication. First, find the point from which you are emanating; that's quite a trick. Next, at least take complete possession of your own body, and do it in the present and future, not the present and past. And then take possession of the dynamics as they go out from you, and be able to get into full, high-level ARC on those dynamics.

But this doesn't mean, doesn't mean, that you would suffer by going into ARC with something that was low on the tone scale. By building yourself up and by having a jumping-off point of you finding out who you are and then taking possession of your body and going on from there – you can't be enturbulated afterwards on the line, but you are volatile enough to be, at will, any point on the tone scale you have to be, to be. And at the same time you could soar up and be, at will, high enough on the tone scale to influence the beingness of any other dynamic. And that is the goal.

And the way you do this is with affinity, reality and communication alternately. And you'll find out that as you practice these, taking it in the smallest sphere you've got .. And by the way, the sphere you'll start with on an awful lot of people will be a tiny pinpoint of self that they will eventually find is probably resident well to the back of the head or in the nose or just behind the left eye. And this tiny little thing, all of a sudden, is them. And they say, "For heaven's sakes! I finally found me! I'm not very big!" And you get them expanding out from there until they've conquered their nose, and then get them to a point where they've conquered their left ear and their right ear and so on – conquest! And keep stringing the wire, and eventually you will have them conquering themselves.

You don't pay any attention to engrams, not in this technique, because you are dealing with present and future. That's different, you see? That's different.

You ever hear of anybody erasing a future engram? Well, you actually can! Because an individual could postulate a thorough upset in the future for himself. He's been so afraid of the future, he's been so afraid if something happened to him, that he makes a facsimile of it. It's a solid facsimile; it'll have thought, emotion, effort and everything else in it. And you send him up and he'll erase it. He will also live up to it.

Your fortune teller who sits over the crystal ball and says, "In your future, I see a ...." (and they look at you closely) "a dark. ... a dark" – you don't like that, so they say – "a light .... a light .... a man – woman, yes!"

And you look astonished.

And so they say, "Yes, a light-complected woman, who has light brown, light uh ... light uh ... corn-silk ... No ... light red hair! That's right." You say, "And it's very bad." Huh. The way you tell a fortune, you know? You just gauge, gauge.

Of course, anybody who is telling a fortune on that level shouldn't be telling a fortune anyhow. Really, the way you tell a fortune is move over into the guy's head, see? And you go .. whoosh, whoosh, whoosh .. and you say, "Gee whiz, he did!" And you say, I see that there was a very bad incident when you were twelve." You move into him and make your body talk; it's very simple. He is flabbergasted too; he can be counted on being flabbergasted.

The point I am making is that as your gradient scale comes up, you are more and more able to reach and be where you choose to be from any emanation point, because you'll find the point that is you finally becomes you, and you'll finally find that your action is so free that you are free to act in any environment merely by wishing to act, wishing to be.

And on your future time track you are not laying down engrams of disaster; you are laying down engrams, if you want to call them so, or solid structures of high-level beingness. And you can put them in or knock them out at will.

Did you ever see a fellow dream a dream and then never let go of it? You know, he says, "Rurhhh!" He's got it, he'll never change any part of it. He just can't change it; it's stuck. He's too consistent. He's going to have a bad time; he's going to have a bad time.

Other people come around sometimes and stick him with his own dreams; that's a little bit different. It makes him – necessary for him not to only erase parts of his own dream, but to turn around and erase them too.

So you see what this technique consists of: ARC on all the dynamics to achieve ultimate beingness. Not to just be in agreement so that you can sell somebody something, but to volatilely be somebody else so thoroughly, if you want to be somebody else so thoroughly, that you change them on the tone scale.

In other words, you decide to be George, not the tone level of George. You get the difference?

Now, this society and all its salesmanship schools and everything teach people how to be the tone level of! You see? They confuse beingness with point or gradient scale of beingness.

So they say, "Well, the way you sell tractors to this fellow is you just agree with everything he says." The salesman that does this is sick. All right. He will get sick after a while, too.

No, the thing to do is if you want to be that other person, you just sort of – you know that other person, and you be that other person. But you could be him on your tone scale. All of a sudden the guy picks up and becomes very cheerful.

You could theoretically sit at a table and look around the table at a lot of men, and each one in turn, pick each one up the tone scale – wsht, wsht, wsht, wsht, wsht. Make the experiment some time. Get a little processing on 80 and make the experiment; it's very interesting. Old men – their wrinkles smooth out of their face. They all of a sudden will relax; they look comfortable.

Faith healing is actually this technique; it's actually this technique. But in faith healing they give you the terrible lot of arbitraries. The way faith healing is practiced, they say, "Well, now, you take the pain away from the person, you experience the pain yourself and then you ..." and so on, see?

Nah! If you can experience somebody else's pain, you have no business doing faith healing! You've got to be hot enough – you've got to be a hot rod on this basis, you know? And you've got to be able to move in and be so much in motion yourself that the moment you move in, that any pain they've got goes pyeww!

Pain can't hit you if you are up the tone scale; it can't. You're up above the counter-effort band as far as pain is concerned. Neither can you get confused or ridden over in any way.

So, you find ARC. But what kind of ARC?

You will find out, oddly enough, that as you get ARC on your own body, there will be times when you are unable to go into ARC with your right foot, with an ARC 16.0, because your right foot, to be pulled up the tone scale, has to be hit with a 0.5. And you say, "All right, at 0.5 and so forth. Let's see, what's my right foot feel? It's dead! All right, it's dead." So you hook up a dead communication line, you understand? It's a communication line of death. That's a hook-up. That's also an agreement; that also says, "Well, I am awful sorry for you, foot." And the foot says, "I've been sitting down here all this time and nobody paying attention to me or anything." And you say, "Yeah, that's too bad."

Of course, you really don't give a darn about the level; you're just trying to bring it up the line. And so you come up the tone scale with the foot. See? Then all of a sudden you've got the foot alive, and there it is; you don't just try to go bluntly into the line.

But somehow or other, if you have to, smash a communication line through to it, any way you can get through to it.

But you'll find out that in running a preclear, this nice little technique by which you say, "Now, there are various points on the tone scale, emotionally, and those points are so-and-so and so-and-so on emotion. All right, what is the emotion of your right ear?"

And the guy thinks for a moment. "Apathy," he'll say. "My gosh, yes, it's apathy."

"All right. Feel apathy with your right ear."

"Okay, I did."

"All right. Now what do you feel with your right ear?"

"I don't know. I don't know – sort of scared or something."

"All right. Feel afraid for your right ear."

"Okay. Okay. Yeah. You know, it – it feels resentful now."

"Okay. Okay. Be resentful with your right ear.

"Resent, resent, resent." Yeah. I don't know. It's bored with the whole thing."

"All right. Feel bored with it. All right, let's feel enthusiastic with the right ear now."

"Yeah," the guy says, "yeah, yeah, yeah, I can do that. You know that ear is alive? It's been dead for the longest time."

The next point on the line, of course, is, "What affinity does your right ear feel?" You just come up the emotional scale again on the level.

"What is the quality of communication with your ear?"

Now, let's not worry about the communication line, let's just worry about being in communication with it. And at no time – and this is an essence of the thing – at no time try to pick up an understanding: "What does your right ear think about life?"

"Well, it thinks mathematics is too hard."

Oh, you can get some wonderful ones: "It has the feeling that it's about to be cut off."

Don't say "All right. Run the feeling that it's about to be cut off."

You know what you'll do? You'll just throw the guy into an engram. You're running past and present when you do that!

And I'll show you another trick about this, because as soon as you start up from 4.0, you move into the future. So as soon as you get the right ear to be enthusiastic, your next step up the line is "How does it want to be?"

And you'll find it'll sag a little bit. Now pick it up for him, emotionally. ARC, ARC, ARC. "What's it in agreement with? What would you have to do to agree with it?" etc., etc., etc.

There's a plotted line which I will give you in more detail tomorrow night.

But it's stringing wire with ARC to every part of the body, and then stringing wire on the next dynamic and then on the next dynamic and then on the next dynamic and the next dynamic, until you have strung wire in the present and the future along all the dynamics.

By that time you probably won't be nine feet tall, you will probably be anywhere up to 186,000 miles per second long or something like that. I'm not quite sure what you will be, but it'll be interesting.

The Theta Clear has been in process now, as a developmental process, since about, as such, the first of January 1951. The experiments were started on it in Palm Springs. I kept the lid on it; it's such a habit with me to keep the lid on it that I feel strange about taking any part of the lid off. But it has gone along all that time until now. I know what it can do.

Technique 80 is a little more experimental. You will have some odd experiences in running it. And as far as I know now, the best stunt that you can use in running this technique is lay off of understanding. Don't worry about the fellow running concepts of thought. Let's just hook up ARC with that particular point, and then let him practice. Then you have to get him to practice this way: hook it up with the right ear and the left ear, and then hook it up with both at once and then alternately, and then both at once, then with the skull and with the eyes, then with the mouth, the ears, the eyes, the skull – combinations. See, he can be any combination he wants to, till all of a sudden he's just up speed. His speed has come up to a point where you say, "Well, be aware of your hands."

And "Yeah! I got hands. What!"

It's interesting that unawareness of the present-time body is itself grace and aesthetics, good health, sanity and happiness.

It's very odd. So let's not struggle so hard for awareness. Let's struggle for the awareness level which will have to be bridged to get us into a good state.

Tomorrow night I will take up this technique in a little more detail, take up ARC in a little more detail, as they apply to this particular thing – the treatment of the body and all along the dynamics.

And until that time, I bid you all good night.

Thank you.