There is a basic rule which is covered in the first book and which was more specifically delineated by Fellow of Scientology Dick Halpern, that the psychotic is concerned with the past, the neurotic is barely able to keep up with the present, and the sane, as we jokingly called homo sapiens in 1950, are concerned with the future.

Earlier material in Scientology has adequately covered the phenomenon of the overt act. More is known about this phenomenon today.

This division could be more specifically made by realizing that the neurotic is barely able to confront the present but that the very, very sane confront the present entirely and have very little concern for the future, being competent enough in handling the present to let the future take care of itself. Looking into the past and looking into the extreme future alike are efforts to avoid present time and efforts to look elsewhere than at something.

The overt act is the manifestation of retaliation. There are two types of overt acts. One is the simple motivator-overt act whereby something is done to the preclear and then the preclear does the same thing to somebody else. There is the second type called the DED-DEDEX wherein the preclear all out of his own imagination has done something to somebody else and then it has been done to him. In both of these one will find the motivator and overt act in a bundle and the DED-DEDEX in a bundle; in other words, the overt act phenomenon is the interlocking of incidents so that both incidents become more or less obscured.

You have known people who would reply on an entirely different subject when asked about anything; when consulted concerning the weather, they would reply about a meteorologist. The inability to look at something becomes first manifest by thinking before looking; and then the actual target at which one should be looking is more and more avoided until it is hidden entirely in a mix-up of complications comparable to a government bureau. This is the mechanism of the post-hypnotic suggestion as covered in Book 1.

There are several ways of undoing these. One of them is with Acceptance Level Processing. Where a person continues to complain about the things another person has done to him, all the auditor has to do is to discover what the preclear did to that person. In other words, a preclear who complains about A in actuality is suffering from a hunger of overt acts from A. The preclear has done something to A (or thinks he has done something to A) which makes it possible that A will retaliate. The retaliation has not occurred. This leaves the preclear with a hunger of overt acts from A. All the auditor has to do is listen to the complaints the preclear makes about the various people, and then have the preclear mock up as happening to himself these people causing dreadful things to occur to the preclear. This solves the bulk of overt act cases. Remember that the things happening to the preclear have to be done in quantity.

Here basically we have people’s fear of things exploding. Any and every serious injury which has left the preclear hung up on the time track appeared to him at the time as an explosion and actually might have contained an electrical discharge. You will find preclears with ailing stomachs who will trace the moment when they began to have stomach trouble to the feeling that something had exploded in their stomachs. Thereafter they will be trying to keep the explosion from happening again and will avoid looking at the explosion. Running cycles of explosions as covered in PAB No. 12 resolves this condition. It permits people to look straight at things again without fear. People who wear glasses and, indeed, people who are blind, cannot look straight at something but must either avoid looking at it or not look at it at all.

Another method of handling overt acts is to finish off the cycle of action. The preclear has wanted to kill somebody. He has wanted to kill somebody repeatedly and yet has not done so. The matter is obvious. One uses Creative Processing and has the preclear sufficiently and often in large quantities kill this other person. This finishes the cycle of action.

The avoidance of reality is merely an avoidance of present time. Theta could be considered to be a sort of scanner which is motionless. It is not moving. The MEST universe is changing and interchanging, and the products and forms constructed and organized or regulated by theta change, and this change is in itself time. Time depends mainly upon the creation of new space in the MEST universe. It could be hazarded that new space is created in the MEST universe at the rate of l/c,*In physics “c” represents the velocity of light in a vacuum: approximately 186,000 miles or 299,793 kilometers per second. which is to say that each new motion of a particle is a creation of new space. What is happening is that the particle seems to be moving in space and the space is motionless. Space disappears at the rate of l/c and new space is created at this rate. This gives to particles apparent motion. The boys in nuclear physics will be discovering this in a couple of hundred years but there is no harm in giving a tip-off of it here. This is of no great concern to the auditor but might clarify for him the apparent change of theta itself. If theta itself is apparently changing, remember that it is visible only because particles change. The theta is not moving; it is a true static.

Yet another method is simply to have the preclear, without any further investigation of his case, start mocking up the side of the overt act phenomenon which seems to be missing. If this preclear is complaining about terrible things having happened to him, the auditor can be sure that the preclear has a hunger for things to happen to him. The preclear is started then on a process of simply having things happen to him. All manner of terrible things are made to occur to him at other people’s hands. His father shoots him many times, his mother repeatedly strangles him, his dog bites his head off, his wife runs off with another man and so on and so on until the starvation is remedied.

An individual who will not look at the MEST universe must look either ahead of it into the future or behind it into the past. One of the reasons he does this is because there is insufficient action in the present to begin with; and then this thirst for action develops into an inability to have action and he decides that all must be maintained in a constant state and he seeks to prevent action. This also applies to pain. People who are somewhat out of present time have a horrible dread of pain, and people who are truly out of present time — as in a psychotic state — have a revulsion towards pain which could not be described. A person entirely within present time is not much concerned with pain and even might create some for the sake of randomity. Although people have hard words for the sadist, it must be remarked that the sadist rarely permits any pain to happen to himself.

In the opposite case where the preclear is tremendously pugnacious and very threatening toward all the world, the auditor can be certain that the preclear, by this dramatization in present time, is trying to fill in a stagnation of action against other people. In this case one simply has him kill, maim, blow up and generally dispose of in many ways, shapes and forms, a great many people, particularly those he says he would like to murder.

The avoidance of work is one of the best indicators of a decayed state on the part of a personality. There are two common denominators to all aberrated personalities; one of these is a horror of work and the other is a horror of pain. People only mildly out of present time, which is to say, people who are categorized as sane, have already started to apologize about work in that they work toward an end reward and no longer consider that the output of effort itself and the accomplishment of things is sufficient reward in itself — thus the whole network of gratitude or admiration as necessary pay for energy put forth. The parental demand for gratitude is often reflected in a severely aberrated preclear who is given to feel he can never repay the enormous favors conferred on him by being worked for by his parents. Actually, they need not be paid; for, flatly, if it was not sufficient reward to do the work of raising him, they are beyond being paid; in other words, they could not accept pay.

One must not omit the overt act phenomena concerned with spirits, ghosts and God. People who spend too much time propitiating God are in actuality certain beneath the surface that they deserve a great deal of punishment from that being. People get to such a level of identification with Christ that they will run the Crucifixion complete with somatics and, indeed, there are several instances in history where on the holiday of the Crucifixion persons spontaneously bleed from the “thumbs.”

Taking the very, very sane person in present time, one would mark a decline of his sanity by a shift from an interest in present time to an overwhelming interest in the future, which would decline into considerable planning for the future in order to avoid bad things happening in it, to, finally, a shunning of the future because of painful incidents, to a shuddering and tenuous hold on present time, and then an avoidance of both the future and present time and a shift into the past. This last would be a psychotic state and is, indeed, the definition of a psychotic state in Scientology.

Where you have an individual going into the valence of another individual, you have the overt act phenomenon so interchanged and mixed up that you are only certain of the fact that the preclear is in the valence of the other person. Handling this overt act phenomenon one would simply create with mock-ups many things happening to the person whose valence has been taken, and then, in reverse, the person whose valence has been taken making many things happen to the preclear. This is run back and forth, back and forth, first with the preclear receiving overt acts, then as the other person receiving overt acts, until the gap between the two personalities widens sufficiently to inhibit further identification. Where you have a preclear solidly in grandmother’s valence, you can be certain there was a lot of trouble between the preclear and grandmother. The way to run this is to have the preclear injuring, maiming and killing grandmother in various ways and then having grandmother injure, maim and otherwise harm the preclear. This is helped out by having grandmother injure others than the preclear and having others than the preclear injure grandmother.

An extremely effective remedy for a person whose concern about the future is great is the application of Creative Processing in brackets, having him mock up repeatedly and in great quantities, as in PAB No. 8, horrible things happening to himself, to others, and others making horrible things happen to others, all in the future. One would find out what this person had originally worked toward in the future, and then would discover its decline. One would then have horrible things mocked up to make the goal impossible and unreachable. In the case of a mechanic, one would have him mock up being fired, being mangled by the machinery, being left by his wife and children because he was only a mechanic, being shunned by the factory, making terrible mistakes which brought death to his fellow workers, having other people have similar things happening to them, and other people making other people undergo similar future experiences.

In this manifestation of sudden assumption of valence on the death of an ally, the preclear is certain he is responsible for the death of that ally. He does not know how this can be, but he is certain that it has taken place. An auditor can be certain that the preclear, prior to the death of the ally, actually was guilty of many overt acts towards the ally. The death will not come to view until the auditor has run the preclear doing many things to the ally and the ally doing many things to the preclear as above.

One holds on to things in the past on the postulate that they must not happen in the future. This sticks the person in the past. This is, in essence, the whole goal of education and experience. One is trying to instill into somebody sufficient fear of the future in order to cause him to be cautious. This, of course, holds the individual on the track.

In some of the very difficult cases, the most serious problem is this assumption of another person’s identity in this lifetime. The solution of this affords great relief to the preclear.

The ultimate failure, of course, is death, and an auditor will be surprised how avidly a preclear will mock up his own death, death for members of the family now living, and how rapidly this will bring into view grief charges on people who are already dead. But one should not merely have the preclear mock himself up dead; one should have him dying several varieties of deaths; and then, of course, being put into a coffin, stuck in the body and unable to get out and lying there in a mouldering or formaldehyded corpse for aeons and aeons and never escaping. Edgar Allan Poe, by the way, is a wonderful source of such mock-ups.

In honest truth, the reason the preclear is stuck in the MEST universe is the overt act phenomenon. Space, energy, objects and time have done so many overt acts to the preclear and the preclear actually has done so many overt acts in the opposite direction, that the preclear now considers himself MEST. If you happen to be processing a scientist, be sure to remember this: he is not only studying the significance which immediately followed the explosion (the total of which significance is that there has been an explosion), but is also guilty of a great many activities which he at least thought were detrimental to the MEST universe at large; and the MEST universe in the form of inflicted accidents, explosions and so forth, has done many acts to him. We find these fellows, quite ordinarily, with many physical attributes of the MEST universe; which is to say, impartiality, a rotund body (imitating planets) and in a situation of stopped motion which would do credit to a policeman, or a Federal court judge.

This method of processing the future can be combined with SSSA.

Inaction and indecision in the present is because of fear of consequences of the future. Once one has made the preclear mock up these consequences in quantity, he can more comfortably face present time.