This is December the 21st, a second lecture of the day.

December 21st, the first lecture of the day. Today we are going to go into some material here with regard to auditing and the use of SOP 8 -C.

And this evening we are going to cover something that you may have heard of before: We're going to cover knowingness and certainty. And we are going to cover this so that you can orient what you know about this material in terms of where you're going with the material.

First thing we're going to examine is directional matters, such as accepting direction. Now, accepting direction is, of course, receiving orders; which is, of course, having postulates which must be obeyed or having postulates which one might or might not obey.

Now, if you will look into Issue 16-G ... If you haven't got a copy of 16-G, why, we've got plenty of them at the HAS. You can get any quantity of them. I mean, the little book is very — was printed up in that fashion so it could get very wide distribution. They're only fifty cents. And actually, in trying to convince people what this is all about and so forth, well, that's a very handy one to have.

A preclear is as good as he can make a postulate and execute it or have it come about. Now, he's as good as he can make a postulate come true and he's no better than that, and he never will be any better than that. He says, "It's going to be green," and it turns green. Now, that's that.

Now, Issue 16-G has in it a lot about somethingness and it has a lot about nothingness and it has a lot about certainty and so forth. Now, certainty as itself and added to somethingness and nothingness makes quite a process — just as it is there in 16-G, it makes quite a process.

Now, a preclear who can't put a mock-up out there and say, "It's now going to be green," and have it turn green, is having difficulty with directional control from this standpoint: He starts to resist orders. And from resisting orders, he of course deteriorates into resisting his own orders. His self-determinism, then, is put up, as such, to resist the self-determinism of others — which is other-determinism — and to keep it from encroaching upon him.

But let's go a little further right now, and take that same material and see where we get by taking the material in the Doctorate level tapes, 8-8008 — and I believe that's mentioned in that book, too — convincingness. Convincingness. And you'll find that proof and convincingness and certainty are very often on an impact, inflow basis. And the individual that you're auditing wants desperately — I couldn't make this too strong to you — he wants desperately a convincingness, but he is interpreting it in terms of being hit. So he is overjoyed to get a somatic.

If you could envision a preclear as standing there with his own self-determinism as an arrow which he is ready to shoot in any particular direction, and he has a free choice of directions, and then if you will envision another person coming up with an arrow with which he's going to shoot the preclear, we'll find both arrows classify — one for one person, one for the other person — both arrows classify as self-determinism.

And you're trying to fix him up so he doesn't have to have all those somatics, and he wants a somatic. So you're going one way, and the preclear's going the other way. Well, never the twain shall meet if this keeps up. Because the certainty you want to give him has nothing whatsoever to do with reaching over and hitting him a poke in the nose.

But now supposing our first person there is going to use his arrow to prevent the second person who came up from shooting. Now, it doesn't matter whether this arrow is going to be shot at the first person or shot at game the first person was going to shoot or simply shot away and wasted, if the arrow or the threat of the arrow is going to be used to deter the flight of the second person's arrow, and if we're calling these arrows self-determinism, we'll see that a person is employing his self-determinism to interfere with or resist the use of somebody else's self-determinism.

Now, by the way, there is a lot of things like a friendly poke in the nose. Men are always wrastling around and shoving each other and so forth. Actually, they're handing certainty out, in their own fashion; and that is, by the way, their method of reassuring each other. I've seen a couple of guys go a long way with this. They have gotten to a point of always poking each other. That's just saying, "I'm here, you're there," and so on. And in a good humor, a person will take a lot of punishment.

Now let's put this in terms of flow. Here's an individual, he has some flow, which we will call self-determinism. Another individual comes up and he has some flow which for him is self-determinism. Well, for each one of these individuals, the other's flow is other-determinism. And so they decide to use their flows cooperatively and so overcome some obstacle — no conflict. Actually, they can take orders from each other with great ease and without being even slightly aberrated.

Did you ever notice a little kid on a change of mood? On this — the change of mood: You're playing with a little kid, and you rough him up and you drop him and you push him around, and he falls down and he bumps himself and he's all perfectly happy because you're playing with him. You know, you're just horsing around, the way men call it, and the next thing you know, you decide you've had enough of this, and you say, "No, no. Go away." And you give him the lightest, lightest push imaginable, which immediately becomes agony to him, and he breaks into tears. But he's just got through almost having his brains knocked out. Now, what is this? What's the difference between these two things?

But now they turn around and begin to use these flows against, each, the other flow, and of course you'll find out that it will lock up and fix. The main thing that will fix is that there will be an exact point of meeting of the two flows. And if one is concentrating all of his self-determinism in one direction only and fixing it in that direction only, he is then unwilling to unfix it since he feels he would be overcome by the other-determinism he's holding back, and so does not free his own self-determinism at that spot. And not having freed it at this spot is, of course, to some degree, left without the benefit of this flow we were calling self-determinism. Now, this doesn't happen until he begins to use his self-determinism to overcome somebody else's self-determinism.

Well, the basic difference between them is, of course, the intention of the inflow. And you have run on him the usual curve of DEI. First he wanted this inflow because it was perfectly cheerful, and now you're enforcing a slight inflow on him. So you and he were cooperating. You were cooperating. Your beingness, your other-determinism and so forth was — your determinism and his determinism, both self-determinisms were aligned in the direction of having a little action and having a little motion. And your little push toward him was in the direction — that hurt his feelings, as he says — your little push was with the intention of stopping motion and stopping the fun. Now, you see the difference between those two things?

Now let's take the mest universe as a unit which overcomes self-determinism. We find out the individual. . . Let's see self-determinism in terms of a flow again — a stream of water or something on the sort — if the individual turns a fire hose against a building, he fully intends that fire hose, however, to go right on through the building and out the other side. And lo and behold, it doesn't — it hits the front of the building and stops right there; so we have a limited distance.

Now, actually, that's the only difference between harmful or contrasurvival or bad other-determinism, and other-determinism at large.

Now, the next thing that happens is that he is liable to decide that the best thing to do is to turn on more water with the fire hose, so as to blow down this barricade which is facing him with this fire hose. And he dedicates his action to ridding himself of the wall which is stopping him from using his fire hose as he wanted. The fire he was trying to put out or something of this sort, was eight blocks away, but the stream of water had to go through a building before it got there. So he just stands there and tries to go through the wall. Now, that would be stupid. You'd say the best thing to do is just go over to where the fire is, eight blocks away, and put it out. But individuals don't do that. They find a wall interposing between themselves and their goal and they decide they'll devote all their time to the wall.

Now, a person can stand up to an awful lot of beating and punishment in life as long as he doesn't begin to interpret it that life is trying to stop him. And when life starts to stop him, he feels that life is playing against him. And in a severe state of this, you will find somebody with a paranoia, they call it. By the way, that's — that simply has engrams at the bottom of it, mostly. There are other ways to work it out, but it's just too much inflow and the engrams at the bottom of it are uniformly "against me." Now, "Everything is against me," the fellow says.

This is a failure in terms of End of Cycle and is in itself End of Cycle. The individual does not accomplish with his self-determinism what he has intended to accomplish with it, and so fails to reach a goal.

Well, of course, if everything is against him, all the obstacles are against him. This is pretty tough.

Now, there's a first goal on the track that an individual turned aside from. And that first goal, of course — that's the most aberrative cycle on the track. It's the first unfinished cycle on the track. And it was at that time when the individual set out to do something, decided to use energy, power or space — whatever he was going to use — and discovered there was an obstacle in his path, and out of his own self-determinism simply stopped going toward the goal he had first chosen and without altering that postulate or without saying he wasn't going toward that goal anymore, turned aside to batter down an obstacle he thought was interfering with his attainment of that goal. And then devoted all of his time to the obstacle, and the obstacle itself became the end-all of existence. See, then he spent all of his time on the obstacle. And his life from that point there on, all down through the spirals, is a consistency in terms of that.

You know, they — I can usually tell a person who is in this condition merely by looking at his chest. A person who has everything against him has a very, very flatly formed chest — very, very flat. And there isn't anybody present that has this kind of a chest so just stop worrying about it. And those people who will hear this tape later — they haven't got flat chests like that either. (audience laughter)

He decides he's going to go toward a certain goal and then he discovers there are a lot of interposing obstacles. He takes his self-determinism and crunches it in against the first obstacle and tries to get rid of it so that he can get to his goal. And maybe he succeeds, that's all right. And he goes to the next one, and crunches against it.

But here we have a problem in, "Is life stopping me or is it helping me go?" That's all. You see that? Life stopping me or is it helping me go? And you know, you can help a guy go so fast that it stops him. Put him in front of a blast of dynamite and turn his back to it and set it off and he'll go all right — but that's a different kind of goingness.

An individual going — the shortest line is that line between two points, so the individual who decides he's just going to go through these obstacles will occasionally find himself standing up in front of an obstacle and just chewing away at it endlessly until he forgets where he's going; and after that, he just chews away at the obstacle. Any preclear who sits down in an auditing chair is chewing away against an obstacle he at one time or another decided to clear away so that he could reach a goal. Hence the efficacy of End of Cycle Processing.

Now, as long as life helps him go, life assists his livingness, and it's all a fine game and so forth — punishment? Good heavens, you can run into the sides of mountains and plow into planets and have all sorts of things happen, you see, and you say, "Ha-ha," and dust yourself off and that's — just nothing to it. But then somebody gives you the idea that this wasn't in fun, that it was really meant for you personally and that it was really an effort that was going to stop you, and that you should be stopped and so forth and that is why all this is happening to you, and after that, you completely reevaluate intention on the part of the mest universe. You don't treat the mest universe, then, as something you made, or an ally, you treat it as your randomity. And it's your randomity. It's the other team. You start to fight it.

In End of Cycle Processing you merely keep mocking up a finished, completed task — a goal. You mock him up dead, life completed, and so on, up to a point where he's attained that goal. Life in itself is a sort of a battering ram against obstacles. It's only when the individual drops away from his original and basic purpose and begins to fight those things which were merely interposed, and then makes it an end of all existence simply to fight that obstacle or those obstacles, that we get an aberrated condition.

It's about as sensible to start fighting the mest universe as it is for a football player in the middle of the game to go over and start kicking the goal posts. That's just as sensible. And — or to go rushing out and scuffing up the white lines. It's an improper randomity in terms of the laws of games. He's gone out and found the barriers, you see, and he's decided to do something dreadful to the barriers, merely because he can't win.

Now, here is an individual who is using his directional control, his own self-determinism, his commands, you might say, his ability to make postulates (these are all the same thing, you understand — directional control, ability to make postulates, self-determinism), he's using that now to clear away an obstacle from a path which he has forgotten.

Well, a preclear who's having a difficult time of it has chosen the MEST universe for his randomity, which is to say, he considers that all these little taps and pokes which he's received are now personally intended to stop him. And it's mostly a matter of mood, and that's about all it is — a matter of mood.

Always, in any track, you will find this taking place: that the individual is not fighting the goal toward which he is originally dedicated; he's fighting some sub-sub-subobstacle. Well, he's fighting these obstacles to a point where he thinks he has mental obstacles. And, of course, the only kind of an obstacle there would be, really, would be a mental obstacle, but he has his mind confused with a system of walls, and he begins to believe himself entirely hemmed in.

The basis of all that sort of thing is a postulate. A fellow says, "I'm against you and you're against me and let's have a game — and you're the enemy. Bang, bang, you're dead."

That's because he's used his self-determinism to batter against obstacles that he might well have passed around or just gone through. It's very amazing. You get some preclear out of his head and you send him up around the Moon — there are about thirty thousand meteorites a day land on the Moon up there, so there's always a plentiful supply of them flying through the air — and you tell him to find a meteorite and get in front of it and move along in front of it so that it won't hit him. And oh, even his body in the chair and even his beingness — you could just feel the awful strain of trying to keep ahead of this meteorite.

And the other fellow says, "No, I'm not dead." Little kids do this all the time when they wrastle around.

And well, that's fine up to the point where you tell him — he goes on a strain right up to the point where you tell him — "All right, now just pass through it and be behind it." And he smiles or giggles, he feels silly. And, of course, there is no obstacle there for him. There's an obstacle there. Anybody could find that as an obstacle, but it's no obstacle for him. He just passes through it and he's on the other side of it. And you tell him to follow the meteorite for a while and he's very amused about this. He can do this with great ease, but it's something that doesn't occur to him in a moment of stress.

They do it in college — the university today, for instance, has managed to make a fine go of it. They couldn't make education pay and they've made football pay. And they don't have to educate anybody anymore. They just get that big stadium there that is surrounded by ... A college — what is that? A college is a — a university is a small number of decrepit buildings surrounded by a million-dollar stadium.

What I'm showing you there — you say, "Be in front of that meteor now." He's in front of the meteor and he's scared stiff of it. The thing starts coming in — he's got to ride just a few feet ahead of this plunging thing through space, and he knows that he'd just be knocked to pieces if he ever let up. Why does he know this? Well, let's look at communication. It's because when he forced self-determinism against walls and barriers, they blew up, didn't they? Very often they blew up. Well, on a communication line, if he has done this many times, of course, he expects it to happen to him. And yet you have him out of his head and, of course, he doesn't have any mass, and so you just tell him to pass through it.

Well, anyway, the point is that the serious part of life (now, you know, serious — that means nobody's your friend and so on) starts in on this basis: "Well, you lost, and your team lost and there was something very wrong and unbeautiful about that. There's something very wrong with you having lost."

Well, the first thing he learns from that is that he doesn't have any mass. But the point that is most important is it shows him that he doesn't have to worry any further about those overt act — motivator sequences against the mest universe and against a lot of things, because he can be the effect. He is not damageable.

And you say, "You mean there's something wrong about the losing side of win/lose?" Well, this, by the way — sometime on the track — boy, that was a new idea to you. I bet you went and you just thought this over and thought this over. So — you didn't quite believe this, so he proved it to you, and then you were convinced.

Well, an individual forgets this and he begins to fight these obstacles, like the preclear fights the front of the meteor. And he fights obstacles, and he puts sweat and strain into it — he, a thetan, actually starts putting sweat and strain into stopping an obstacle and — or battering one down that's in his path and so on. And he forgets — let's say he went out to rescue a beautiful damsel who was in the upper part of a castle. And he got down to the lower door of the castle and he found out that door was really battened down; he couldn't anywhere enter that door. And instead of just flipping out of whatever he was using for a body and flipping up into the upper category of the castle, up — part of the keep — and simply making the girl walk down the stairs and open the door (which is locked from within, probably), why, instead of doing that, he stands there and hammers and pounds at the door, you see, and bang, bang.

Now, the only convictions that are bad convictions, then, are convictions on the basis that losing is wrong. And that Wrongness is an untenable place to be. Wrongness is something you can't have and you must avoid it and you must fight being wrong and you must fight losing. Now, the main thing about a game is to fight losing.

And you know, he'll do that — this is a real silly one but it's true, a thetan will do that — he will do that until he forgets that he was doing it in order to rescue a girl. He can't get in and he'll get to a point where he considers that doors are to be battered. That's finally what he has learned. In other words, the mest universe has taught him this. Well, he's permitted himself to be taught. It's only because he forgot the end goal.

The devil with fighting losing! There's plenty of opposing players — fight them.

Well, I have just made that terribly exaggerated. I doubt very many thetans would for — would turn aside from rescuing a beautiful damsel. But they very often will turn aside from something which doesn't have the same aesthetic drive, and they don't have quite the same lure at the goal line. And they'll just stand there and batter obstacles, and after that the end-all of existence is to batter obstacles. And then finally, because they've battered enough obstacles — on communication, you see, a fellow slips around and becomes the effect of his own communication — they think the end-all of existence is to resist being battered. That's the best they can do — resist being battered.

"Well," you say, "well now, wait a minute, wait a minute. Win and lose. You see, the score is up on the Scoreboard, and when they have more points than you have, why, you lose. And that's disgraceful and nobody will look up to you. Because you aren't as big, because you must have lost because you aren't as big."

Now, you say to the fellow, "Be two feet back of your head." He can't do that. Why? He is something which must resist being battered. Well, how did he get that way? Well, he got that way by overt acts against the mest universe and he has no motivators unless he himself is something that has to resist being battered. mest universe resists being battered if you decide that you're going to go on the wavelength which will be able to batter it.

That'd be a brand-new idea to you early on the track. The only way he could prove it to you — the only way they could prove it to you that losing was disgraceful was not afterwards to talk to you or notice you. You were nothing then, you see? So you're liable to become nothing if you lose. And people proved this and proved this until you were convinced of it and that became a certainty.

Well, there's the way — that's the way a thetan gets into this situation of self-determinism-other-determinism. Well, battering a wall is about the same as resisting other-direction.

There's nothing wrong with losing. Do you know that the finest part of strategy is in pretended loses? Hm.

Now, here's the wall standing there and the wall says, "You go elsewhere."

You take somebody like George Washington and put him up against the dame-hungry generals that they sent over here to fight the Revolution — this fellow was so high-toned he had to get a parachute to go down to strike high C. And — he was quite a fellow.

Well, the guy says, "No! I'm going to go through you."

And his reputation, by the way, as a militarist is fabulous in Europe. In European military academies and so forth, they teach all about George Washington; teach all about Robert E. Lee — these are the tacticians and the strategists. Because a man without much of an army and without a popular support from the people and with practically nothing of the sort, kept a war going against one of the greatest, if not the greatest, military power on Earth. And without a navy and without anything at all, kept a war going and won it, for years — by going on and losing.

And the wall says, "You go elsewhere." Any wall is just saying that to you: "I'm not — I'm going to resist all effects. You're not going to have any effect on me, effect on me, effect on me."

Now, he lost often enough so that the British, who were already sold on this, thought they had to win, you see. And they couldn't win — they couldn't really win — they were kind of fighting against nothing, and they'd keep striking at this.

That's what the wall's for. That's what it was built for. I mean, that's — everything in its beingness has to do with just that. It's going to resist all effects and the fellow has to go elsewhere. And it's telling him that. It's saying, "Beat it. Use the door. Do anything, but don't try to batter me."

And when it was obvious that Washington had lost, just obvious — I mean, if he'd gone in and talked to Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne or if he'd gone down there and talked to Howe, Howe could have shown him on tactical maps, by textbooks, he could have shown him — he could have had numerous aides-de-camp around to prove to him, completely, that he had lost.

And the fellow after a while — overt act-motivator — he goes away, and he didn't go through the wall, you see. He decided to batter his way through the wall instead of move through the wall. And he goes away someplace and he says, "Well, don't you try to batter your way through me. 'This great rock from its base shall fly as soon as I.' " (Lady of the Lake)

And unfortunately, Washington never went down and had the conference. And he just kept on losing. He lost with perfectly good spirit. And he lost with enough good spirit that nobody could prove to him this was disgraceful, so he eventually won. He just wore the heart out of the attacking and occupying troops. He was known as, and is known today in military textbooks in Europe, as the great Fabian of modern times. He just melted away.

We have a situation where a fellow's going to "hold this line in spite of anything that happens." What's he holding the line for? Well, probably there's some havingness behind him which he is trying to protect. He — there's a havingness there. Well, he thinks he can't duplicate the havingness and he knows he can't have any more, and it's all scarce, and the drama is real good, so he stands there and holds this line. Well, to a point where it drives a person into an aberration where he thereafter will hold all the time, this thing is idiocy — strictly idiocy.

Now, that's all due respect to the British — the British are very good fighters. But they had difficulty here with this war because it wasn't popular at home either, and they kept sending over troops.

Well, let's take — you know there was a very single-minded general once. Probably the only single-minded general who ever had a mind that you really could call a mind, was a fellow by the name of Alexander — Iskander of the Two Horns. In India today they still frighten their babies to sleep by saying Iskander of the Two Horns will get them. And they still remember him, and that's 300-and-something b.c. that he took a slight excursion over into India.

And as I say, these generals could have proven adequately to all these Colonials and to Washington they'd lost the war. And it was — they'd go out, you know, and they'd knock off half an army and they'd raid all sorts of country and they occupied the principal seaports and they'd tie up all the shipping and they cut all the communication lines and so forth, and the Revolution was still in progress. See, they couldn't reach deep enough to convince. Took them years and years and years to fight that war out. But you see how that is?

Well, it wasn't because he was so horrible, it was just because — he was a very beautiful young man — and it was just because he was so single-minded. And the laws of war of that time insisted that you put up two lines of men who then resisted each other. This did not fit with Alexander's frame of reference. The Germans say, "Alexander was no strategist." They frown on this whole thing. He just kept winning every battle he was ever in, you see. We find lots of strategy, but they don't call it strategy unless there's two lines of men resisting each other, and that is the definition of war and "we must fight by the definitions."

I don't think Washington had the word in his vocabulary, as far as lose is concerned, because he wasn't insisting on winning all the time. Now, if he'd listened to the Continental Congress, why, he would have gone in there and fought pitched battles and tried to win all the time, and he would have been fixed on winning or fixed on losing to a point where the American Revolution never would have finished up the way it finished up.

Iskander had his single-mindedness crop up many times, and he had the idea that the war was being fought between the opposing ruler and himself — this he had figured out. And he had a group of cavalry known as the companion cavalry and these people had the greatest mortality rate of anybody in the army. But Alexander would look around and he'd line his men up and he'd go through all this nonsense and rigamaroles, and he had a lot of good generals and so he had them all line up the men and get them resisting other men and so on.

Now, you'll get some football player, and you just convince him he's got to go in and you give him a big sales talk: He's got to win, he's got to win, he's got to win. And this apparently is something that'll give him an enormous amount of verve, see, and it'll make him hit that line real hard. And it'll make him resist, you know, and use force and use a lot of effort. And it never occurs to anybody in the football world that these games are lost or won in terms of lightness and lightheartedness. When these teams start to get real grim, why, they start to lose. Because they think the goal posts — they get — after a while they'll think the goal posts are against them and luck's against them and so on. It's a game. And they forget they're playing a game and it becomes very, very serious and so they get very, very tired and other things happen to them — a lot of things happen to them.

All he was interested in is where's that king? "Where — where is he? Where is he? Where is he? Oh, there he is! Let's go!" See? And he'd swam-bam, lance-point straight through the enemy line, straight through the bodyguards of the king, and straight through to the king. And that was, of course, the end of the war. You see? He was a single-minded young man. He didn't believe in this barrier problem. But he's been condemned ever since by military strategists because he was never a strategist, you see; he didn't — just didn't fight by the rules of war.

And what is this seriousness and tiredness and so forth? These are the mechanisms of convincing people that they can lose. Now if you can just convince somebody that he can lose, he can lose. And until you convince him he can lose, he can't lose. This may be a little bit hard to grasp offhand, but it happens to be the living truth.

Well, let's get these two solutions. It's an interesting fairy tale, but there's also something there for a thetan to look at: The place to be when you're engaged with a directed force is behind the directing force of the obstacles which confront you, and have him move them! This is very simple.

Here we have conviction, proof, convinced. Now, I saw this operation played once on an industrial leader of some magnitude. And this industrial leader had no concept of losing. It just never occurred to him to fight or do anything else in terms of win or lose. And he married a girl who started to get very sympathetic about how tired and overworked he was, because she didn't like him down at the office all the time. She liked to go out to Sun Valley and up to the Canadian Rockies and meet some young fellows and so forth, and so she wanted him to — pull him around the country, so this was the operation. And this is the way it went: "Oh dear, you're so tired, and you look so upset. Now, you must be very careful of yourself. And why don't you go down to the doctor's office and get yourself a physical checkup and so forth."

You know, if Alexander had really been smart, he simply would have flipped out of his head and flipped behind the head of Darius and said, "Sound retreat," and he would have had Darius's body say to the trumpeters, "Sound retreat and surrender." Then he wouldn't even have had to have bothered to clean up the battlefield. But of course that would have meant his men wouldn't have gotten the baggage and so forth, so he didn't have them do that, I guess.

And, of course, the doctor tipped off in advance to say, "Oh yes, you need a rest. You do, you need a rest. And I'd say that you should go to the Sun Valley and the Canadian Rockies." This man became a ruin, he became a walking ruin.

But the point is that there — there's almost a perfect solution. See? I mean, it — obstacles just all melt away. Well, in any problem any individual has ever confronted, the obstacles themselves would melt away. There are no obstacles. But there's an awful lot wrong with his modus operandi in overcoming them. There's no obstacle that cannot be overcome. There are obstacles — but there is no obstacle that cannot be overcome. What is wrong there is that the individual doesn't go about overcoming them properly.

Well how, then, do you convince somebody he can lose? You say, "You poor fellow, you've lost. See? Look how slow I am at the thought that you have not triumphed. So, because you have not triumphed, then I am sympathizing with you, and therefore, you're slow." See how hard you'd have to work there? You see? Poor fellow. He's lost. "Well, even if your friends won't talk to you anymore because you've lost — even if your friends won't talk to you Anymore, I will. I'll stand by you loyally to the bitter end — even through this."

This even goes down to the point of the fellow — he has ten thousand pounds of gunpowder and all he has to do is get rid of this wall and it doesn't matter how he gets rid of it. And he's got the gunpowder there and he can blow up the wall anytime he wants to blow up the wall, but he decides the best way to do it is to train an ant army and give them a terrible appetite for the type of stone in the wall and have them chew it away.

How's it done? It's done on the basis of sympathy.

Well, really, that's three times as sensible as most of the solutions that you'll run across in people. If you asked them what they were trying to do, they probably couldn't tell you. That's the first thing they wouldn't be able to tell you.

And you want to start taking apart a case, you take it apart at the — at sympathy. If you really want to take apart a GE or take apart almost anything, you just get that sympathy out of there. Because you get all sorts of things and combinations of just this: "So sorry you've lost." "I'm so afraid for you now, you've worked so hard. Are you sure you're not going to have a nervous breakdown?" This has never occurred to the fellow.

The first four Acts, by the way, of the Handbook for Preclears are still very good. They take up a point which this later — later techniques haven't repeated. And in the Handbook for Preclears there, you have some Acts there with regard to goals.

By the way, I know about this industrialist for the good reason that I processed him. That was the end of a beautiful marriage. I — as I was processing him — I didn't know what was wrong with him, I was just processing him along using relatively routine techniques and so on, and life was going along, and nothing to it. And finally, when he suddenly — I realized he was coming in, there was something about his wife, and more and more and more, and he was starting to damn and fume, and he was coming uptone like mad. And we were just springing him loose on various combinations of co-action.

And I saw a preclear one time that had been audited for quite a while, and I gave her the Handbook for Preclears — very resistive case, very resistive case — I gave her the Handbook for Preclears and told her to work out the earliest Acts. Well, actually, it's Act Two and Three that are important there. And she sat there with a pencil, and she just went into a fog. This was the first time she'd ever been confronted with the subject of what are your goals. "Three things in the past that you meant to do and didn't do" and so forth — words to that effect. It just asked her, searchingly, what she was trying to do, you know? And it asked her in such a way that she could understand this.

Now, you understand that duplication itself, with a certain intention, is sympathy. And the more we'd run this sort of thing and the more we'd duplicate forms and so forth, the sorer he got; because he was just artificially and temporarily suppressed into that band — very, very artificially and very temporarily. And I tried to persuade him, now, to be a good chap and send his wife around for a bit of auditing.

And she wrote there, and she got more and more dazed and then all of a sudden, the brightest lights of comprehension began to appear in her face. (I wasn't talking to her, I was sitting over at the desk writing some papers while she just sat there and did this.) And she — all of a sudden, she just started to brighten up and, why, she just remembered what she was trying to do in life. And she was spending all of her time battering away against the obstacles.

"Hm-hm-hm! In the gutter first!"

Well, in auditing, if you please, she spent all of her time simply battering away against the obstacles. But what did she pick as an obstacle in auditing?

She didn't, of course, go into the gutter, she married one of the nice young fellows that had been hanging around, and I think now is working as a waitress someplace supporting him. But anyway ... So she had a happy ending. (audience laughter)

Now, a thetan after a while gets terribly shortsighted. He should have, very early in processing, some very strong glasses — I would say about eight feet thick at least — because is he lost in terms of shortsightedness!

Now, the point I'm making is, is here we have — here we have operation number one, which remains the most disguised as an operation and that's just this: Co-motion brings about enough commotion to eventually cave somebody in. He, at length, doesn't know which direction he is going.

The first thing such a person picks up in auditing, no matter how they react, is the auditor, as an obstacle. The auditor is other-direction. And such a case sets himself simply on this basis: He makes it the end-all of existence to try not to be directed by the auditor, but to try not to be directed by the auditor to the extent that the auditor doesn't find this out. That's usual state of case. That's covert overcoming of obstacles.

I watched this happen to a little child not too long ago. I'd seen this little baby around, and it had been wonderful to me that the baby had — was evidently made out of India rubber or something, you know? Baby come tumbling down the steps, crash, you know, and pick up — "Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!" — very funny. And go out and bump into something and get a big gash on his head and "Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!" See? It was going along all right.

Well, they overcome the obstacle of an auditor's direction either by not doing it or by doing something else or by doing it wrong, and in such a wise, getting themselves beautifully messed up.

Well, that was because the person closest to the baby didn't ever pick the baby up. Never said anything about it. Didn't say, "Oh, you poor thing. Oh, it just must be terrible and oh, does it hurt urns? And here, I'll kiss it all and make it so well," and so on. And — this sort of thing had never gone on in this baby's life, so the baby could practically have cut the top of its head off and probably grown another one.

Well, what's getting messed up there? Basically, it's the system of postulates. This person's forgotten where he's going, he doesn't know what he's doing, he doesn't have any purpose in life. The obstacles he's been confronted with are too great for him — they are unsolvable. And he figures that they were so important — they're unsolvable and he computes that they're so important that he, of course, just has to stand there on an unsolved obstacle. And that's where you'll find him on the track — on all of the unsolved obstacles.

And the baby wasn't doing much falling, by the way; but when the baby fell, it didn't know what it was to be upset about this, because it never interpreted falling in a term of loss. It merely accepted falling and so forth as an inevitable consequence of trying to learn how to run a mock-up. And just inevitably, that's what would happen — fall. All right. Well, that's good sense isn't it? If you don't learn how to run the mock-up right away, of course, you're going to drop it a few times. And it's not destructible, you can always get another one — sort of the baby's attitude about the whole thing — and just doing marvelously. And then they got a nurse.

And you'll find him as a preclear, very usually and very standardly, not doing what you're doing as an auditor. Because the first and primary barrier has to be crossed before the preclear will (quote) "work." And if that first barrier on the case is crossed by the auditor immediately at the beginning of the case — right away — you won't have any further trouble with it.

Well, I knew they'd gotten the nurse a day after they'd gotten the nurse — just the day after — without being told they'd gotten a nurse, simply because I saw the baby crying and being very upset about having tripped. Sure enough, the baby tripped, started to cry and I said, "Oh-oh, some of the relatives have moved in, or the personnel of the house has changed — oh, they've got a nurse." And here she came and she swooped down the steps and she swooped the poor little baby up and said, "Oh, you poor little thing. Oh, did it hurt ums?"

Now, we're trying to restore self-determinism, and life itself is a process of self-determinism, and low on the Tone Scale it's self-determinism — you know, rrrrrrr-rrrh! And up on the Tone Scale, it's really self-determinism.

And the baby wasn't hurt. And the baby was going, "Waaaaaa!" Had been taught to lose, see?

Now, you're going to run into a lot of fellows that say, "All I — oh, all I have to do is be self-determined to be Clear? Rrrrr, rrrhh! All right, let's see, you're in my road and I'll have to knock you off, and you're in my road and I'll have to knock you — I'm self-determined! Oh, you're going to accuse me of not being self-determined, I'll show you!" Self-determinism operating amongst Homo sap. He gets up to that point very easily. He gets up to a fine 1.5 which is total obstacle. The definition of 1.5 would be just that — total obstacle.

Havingness. Sympathy is good to eat, if you've had so much of it forced upon you with force that you have to have it and have entered the lower DEI cycle. But get that — a person has to have entered the lower DEI cycle before he wants sympathy. He's had to have enough sympathy forced upon him so that he wants sympathy.

All right, what are you trying to do with this preclear? Well, you're trying to get this preclear self-determined. You're trying to get him to a point where he'll follow his own direction, hm? He could make a postulate and make it come true. Well, he — at the time you pick him up he can't get mock-ups, he can't do this, he can't do that. He's unable to make things go away and come in and he's not able to put space amongst terminals and he can't take space out and he can't duplicate nothingness and ordinarily he's having some difficulty of some kind or another all the way along the line. And furthermore, he's in competition with the mest universe and he's losing. Well, that's because, you see, he's chosen these obstacles as things he has to resist instead of things to admire or play with or so on.

Any person present basically has no desire whatsoever for mest or sympathy or physical sensation, so on — basically none of them. But if any of these things were of — in the past. . . You can strip these off, by the way, in processing. But if any of these — any of you, in the past, hadn't had sympathy thrust upon you so suddenly that you couldn't withdraw from it quickly — if you hadn't had this happen, you never would have desired sympathy at all. See?

So you've got this character, he's on your hands, and the first thing he can't do is follow your direction. Why? Because any other-determinism either swamps him and just becomes his determinism in an apathy case . . . That, by the way, is the state of hypnosis — that is hypnosis: it's swamped by other-determinism so that anything the other-determinism does, says, is of course — becomes the person's own postulate.

A duplication of you or a duplication of what you were doing, in terms of energy, was thrust on you so suddenly and so quickly that you couldn't very well escape from it. And you, overt act-motivator, have thrust upon either — other people, so suddenly and so quickly this, that of course, you implanted a desire to go have more.

If you want to put somebody into a deep trance, you would just make them resist to a point where anything the resistance did, stuck. And that is an engram and that is hypnosis, that's electric treatments and so on: They merely overcome all the self-determinism and plow through, so thereafter anything that anybody does or says is the self-determinism of the preclear.

Now, this works out in terms of accidents. You know, there's some fellows around that just drool at the thought of having a nice, juicy accident. And that's because they've had enough — they've had accidents pounded into them so often. They become accident-prones. You meet some of these boys — they become very, very bad stuntmen and so forth. You run into them in Hollywood sometimes, and they — they're practically always out of employment because all they're out to do is kill themselves.

Now let's look at that in terms of the dwindling spiral of self-determinism. The dwindling spiral of self-determinism is the introduction of other-determinisms. So a person is more and more other-determined up to a point of where he looks at a wall and he feels like a wall, he looks at a tree and he feels like a tree, he looks at a dog and he feels like a dog. A preclear runs an engram and he's restimulated. See? I mean this same breed of cat, all along. This "everything is an obstacle," but these obstacles are something which he doesn't resist anymore — these obstacles are something he obeys. He is a case of obedience to obstacles. Well, that's apathy.

You see, they've been banged around so often that it becomes desirable to be ruined. You know? Well, that's the desire for it. They're in a hectic state.

Now, we go up there a little further along the line, in grief, and any obstacle is — has to be held against, weepily. And it's all obstacles, but they all have to be held against weepily, you know. Grief is a hold. Grief is a lower harmonic of anger, 1.5.

And another thing, up the band, the stuntmen they do have ordinarily — these fellows are marvelous. One fellow, for instance, I ran into one time, had to run through a burning building. And he stood there and he looked over the sets and he showed them where he wanted this and that and so forth, and they were getting all set to film it and he turned around and he said, "Is that all the fire you're going to have? Well, that isn't going to make much of a show. Go on, turn up the fire." And they looked at him, because it was roaring so hot then it was practically melting the celluloid on the film, you see? And he says, "Put some coal on it." And he walked over and got a coal oil can and heaved it into the fire.

Now we go up just a little bit higher on the thing and we find out that obstacle is something we run away from. As soon as we see an obstacle, we flee. That's because we know we can't overcome an obstacle, you see. We have to withdraw.

Well, you know this Christmas tree and curtain liquid that they use that makes things noninflammable? You know, they spray curtains and Christmas trees and things like that so they won't burn? Well, of course, he was saturated with this stuff and — just saturated, his hair and everything else. And he took this big can of fuel, see, and gave it a yo-heave so he'd really get some flames. As a matter of fact, he walked into the beginning of the fire before the take, and just threw it onto the fire. And of course it burst and roared and so forth.

Now let's take it in terms of reach and withdraw. Down in an apathy case, the fellow's been reached to a point where he's convinced he can be reached at any time. And if you ask this apathy case, "Now, look-a-here, eighteen years ago you were a member of a gang of kids. Now, today if they wanted to, could they look you up and find you just by thinking about it and ruin you?" He's liable to say yes. Why? He can be reached.

And he ran through the fire and caught on fire in a couple of places, and walked over and put out his hair and — because he'd burned a little bit, and put out his — a couple of spots in his clothes and so forth, and dusted himself off, and in general, he was not hurt! He had gone through practically everything you could think of in terms of stunts.

Now there's, by the way, the way you define the integrity of an individual. You — it's whether or not he can be reached. It's a colloquialism. So any obstacle reaches him, anything reaches him, and space collapses on him with great ease. I mean, he looks around and space all collapses; nothing to that. Down comes the space, crash. The second he sees an obstacle, he's it. All obstacles reach him. Well, that's apathy and in that vicinity of the band. All right.

Now, a few days later he was supposed to dive off the top of a high building and fall for a considerable distance. Well, they had a net down there. He didn't like the net. He thought the net was constrictive or something of the sort. And so he just got them to move the site of the set over to where he could fall into water — you know, fall off a cliff into a river. Shallow river, but he said, "That's easy to fall into." Down he goes — zoom, crash, see? Nobody expects to see him alive again. They picked him up, he wasn't hurt. Nothing wrong with him.

Now, fear — the thought of an obstacle makes him weak and frightened. He is in a constant state of precipitate withdrawal. He's almost withdrawing all the time, you see? Almost. But lookit there, that's way up on the Tone Scale. The fellow actually thinks he can withdraw before he can be reached. He still has a little hope there. So there's a little hope introduced into reach and withdraw. You see, he does withdrawing — he doesn't do any reaching.

Now, another fellow trying the same stunt knows so well, you see, that he can't do it or he can't live through it and he knows he'll lose — he's convinced that he can lose and so he manages to lose. Well, this is a certainty. But it's not really a certainty that a fellow's going to lose. What it is, is a certainty that one has a certainty.

A person is covert in all of his reaching at the fear band. And I mean just reaching. When I say reaching, I mean reaching with a hand, reaching with a letter, reaching with a vehicle. He's covert about reaching. He'll start in to go to Kokokomo, you see, and he'll find a real good reason why he should stop in, in Bayville. And then that night, surreptitiously, he'll catch himself driving down to Kokokomo, you see. He tells everybody he was going to Bayville and he winds up in Kokokomo, but he really intended to go to Kokokomo. You'd be surprised! I mean, this isn't for any reason at all, rather than the tone level of the case; this is just the way he behaves. Says he's going to Bayville so that he can get to Kokokomo. And he'll play all sorts of tricks on himself this way.

What kind of a certainty is it, though, that he has? He's been convinced. He's been convinced with sympathy that this is the way the game is played. He's in terms of agreement. It takes this sympathy itself in order to bring about one of these hectic, heavy states of agreement through a large mass of people.

Now we start up the line a little bit further and we find out that 1.5 is the fellow that can't reach and he can't withdraw and he's darn sure nobody else is going to with — reach or withdraw either. That's 1.5. Hold!

You call it sympathy. I don't care what you call it. Being sorry, now, is a form of sympathy — and we get into shame, blame and regret. Regret runs the time track backwards. It holds the fellow up on the time track, then. He's trying to withdraw from an incident. Shame, blame and regret.

And we go up a little higher than that, we get antagonism. So we get reaching with anger because the fellow knows it's an obstacle. He knows it's an obstacle. He doesn't have to be convinced, he doesn't have to be told.

"Sorry" is the first entrance into shame, blame and regret. A fellow walks up to somebody and hits him, then he sees he hurts the other person. Now he doesn't want to duplicate that communication and so he says, "I'm sorry" instead of duplicating it, you see? He doesn't want to duplicate it, so he tries to substitute there a duplication and he says, "I'm sorry." Well, what happens? He's sorry he used force. Oh-oh.

You say to this person, "Good morning."

If a man is sorry he uses force, we get into the most fascinating problem in the world, which is he's going to run a shorter and shorter cycle. Any time he applies effort to any problem, he's going to feel sorry. And so we get an inability to use force leading to the feeling of degradation: shame, blame and regret.

"What's good about it!"

What are shame, blame and regret? What's guilt? Guilt is "I'm sorry I used the force." See? Now, that can't come about — and this will become very clear to you right now — that can't come about unless a fellow sees something wrong in being the effect of force. And if he is convinced that there's something wrong about being the effect of force, he thereafter can't use it. And his only salvation lies, as I told you a week or so ago — the only salvation he'll ever run into, really, is to be strong. And so he's sorry about his own force.

Why does he say this to you? Well, it's very simple; nothing to it. He just knows you're an obstacle, he knows the morning's an obstacle, he knows he'll have to reach these things. He might as well slap at them a little bit, preparatory of pushing them over.

Well now, you can recognize that. You can see — well, there's something wrong with being a dead body. I am sure that early on the track any of you could have run into this experience.

And then we go up a little higher and we get to boredom at 2.5. And boredom is, "Well, I — what's the use of reaching it? I know it's an obstacle and it'll probably reach back," and it eddies around a little bit and they're not quite stable. And "There's not much point in trying to go toward any particular goal because, heck, there's just more of these obstacles and I can reach them all right. But you know, there's no point in it because they're just there and there's nothing much you can do about it but they're — there they are, and — why be interested?" I mean, you see, if you demonstrate that you care, somebody's going to shove another obstacle in front.

Fellow walks up to you and shoots you. And you sit there and you say, "Huh!"

And then they run on a computation of "I don't care." You'll run into this on a case: "Well," case says, "yes, I could do this, I can do that, I can do something." And all this — they're just happy, no communication changes and so forth. And you'll find out what they're into: they don't care.

And you reached around, or your friends took care of him or something, and then your friends said, "Oh, you poor fellow, you're wounded."

They'll do anything you say, really, and they're quite cheerful and they're in fairly good shape. They don't care. They're sort of a dish towel or something that's being pushed around or a New York society debutante or an old mop or something. They — just anyplace you sort of put them around, they stay.

You said, "I am?"

Well, it's not an apathy case because they constantly communicate and chatter and reach and withdraw and so forth. There's action there, there's motion there, but it's all meaningless. And if you crowded them just a little bit, you'd know immediately they had no goal.

And they said, "Yes. Why, look at that! You're bleeding."

And that problem's first entrance, really, is in terms of goals. They come up scale — you make them recover a few goals they once had and they come up scale. End of Cycle and so forth will get them out of that real fast. Or Handbook for Preclears — just open it up, the first few Acts of the thing, and let them do it.

And you said, "I am? Well, so I am. Well, well! Well, as I was saying . . ."

That, by the way, is merely a searching investigation of this life's goals, the early steps there. And they'll all of a sudden — you've made them confront a fact. You've made them look at something, and that is the one thing which they mustn't look at. And that is that they're not going anyplace anymore. They can reach, they can withdraw — obstacles reach and other things reach and other people reach and withdraw and so forth. And all this time there's — underneath all of this "don't care" is a terrible sorrow. They don't care because they know they're in the same room all the time or they're in the same cube of space all the time; they're never going to get out of it. And they hide that from themselves by saying, "Well, I don't care. Doesn't matter if I don't get out of it. Oh, well, here today and gone tomorrow. Well, nothing to it. Might as well. What a bore. Ho-hum."

And he'd say, "Wait a minute, you're supposed to be — you're wounded too badly, you've got to be dead. You're dead. I mean, you can't go around that way again, your mock-up's only got one arm." And he said, "It's bleeding to death," and so forth.

They're not bored, they're frantic. And the first thing you'll meet up with in that case, by the way, is you'll hit a higher harmonic of fear. It's not the lower harmonic of fear, it's a — there's a higher harmonic of fear. And that higher harmonic is somewhere up there — they'll sag from 2.5, which is just riding above it, to 2.2, which is the upper harmonic of fear — 2.2. And they'll just sag there, down there to 2.2.

And you say, "What are you talking about?"

That antagonism rises up into a higher-grade fear, and the boredom case will sink down to 2.2 before he rises up any, and he will go up there above enthusiasm. Just above enthusiasm there's another much higher harmonic of fear. The fellow says, "If we try hard, if we get in there, if we make it good, if we get these obstacles just right and if we go through, why, gee, we can have everything just fine!" And you get him up just a little bit higher than that and he realizes that there are obstacles, see? And he figures out, well, it's — momentarily, if he just gets up enough speed and enough steam, why, he's all right; but he's liable to have to withdraw, you see? But he's perfectly prepared to do that and charge again, but he — you know? That's enthusiasm. It lies just above enthusiasm. All right.

And, "Well, you're dead."

Here we go in terms of reach and withdraw, in terms of obstacles, in terms of determinism — we have to get clear up out of those bands before we get anything like freedom. And those are the basic harmonics and emotions of man. And they are listed from 0.0 to 4.0 not because they exist only from 0.0 to 4.0, but those are the compulsive levels. And from 0.0 to 4.0 what you see listed there is Homo sapiens, and he is at these points compulsively and without an understanding of why or where. He doesn't direct those emotions; he is the result. He is being an effect in that band, and that's Homo sapiens. All right.

"Well, what's being dead?"

Now, where does this lead us as an auditor? Well, we've got the problem, immediately, of the self-determinism of the preclear. He has to be able to get up to the point where his postulates stick. In other words, he has to decide, "I feel fine today," you see, and then feel fine. He has to be able to decide, "Well, let's see, I think this afternoon we'll go down and cut a record and make it real good and so forth — enjoy ourselves down at the studio. Yeah," and that afternoon be down at the studio enjoying themselves. He's got to be able to say, "Well, I guess I'd better make it all right over there in Keokuk and square that around over in Keokuk," with some assurance that he's going to go over to Keokuk and straighten it out, whatever is all wrong.

"Well, you can't use that mock-up anymore and you don't know anything about the mock-up anymore and you know, it's — you're dead. You're dead."

That's making a postulate stick, and that's represented with an individual when you say, "Put up a mock-up out there. Now turn it green." He puts a mock-up out and it's green. He may want to know how green, and you say, "Very green." He'll get a very green mock-up. Not because you said so, though.

"I am?"

But do you know that there's a level of case where you can run the mock-ups? I hate to have to throw you that one, because you're going to be sure you're looking at it much more often than you are. That's a real low case. It is a hypnotized subject. You can make him see mock-ups because you tell him to see them. And that's your hypnotized subject — mock-ups.

"Well — uh, yeah, it's part of the game. And we won't speak to you anymore, we won't play with you anymore, because you're dead."

You say, "All right, now see the kangaroo," he'll have a kangaroo. He's just a spectator; total effect. But that fellow's in a deep hypnotic trance and that's unmistakable — his eyes are dilated and so forth. But you'll see him walk in as a case. Once in a while, you'll see him in as a case, but he's unmistakable.

And you probably said, "Well, all right, I'm dead. Let's see, where can I find another mock-up?"

What would you do? How would you detect this case? This case, you see, will (quote) "work" (unquote). He'll do everything you say — he'll do it all — with no communication changes. That's your first cue. If you were stone-blind to everything else, that would be your first cue: He never gets a communication change. He just goes on doing exactly what you say.

And that was the way it went. You wanted to be friendly about the whole thing. But that couldn't happen unless you wanted to be friendly about the whole thing, or you thought that there was a scarcity of games and you thought you had to stay in that one.

"All right, now," you say, "get a pink rabbit. Now turn it purple."

So now, after a while, why, you came up against a fellow and he'd had half his leg shot off or something of the sort, and you said, "Hey, I just shot you and you're dead."

Well, the constant repetition of the command phrases in there would jar him sooner or later into the realization, "You know, I might be turning this purple myself." But he'd be at a level where he's — he'd be there looking at the pink rabbit that you just put in front of him and turned purple. You did it, he didn't do it. No responsibility, no responsibility, no responsibility. Well, this case is in a trance. And I'll tell you what other shapes this case is in so you won't think you're looking at him more often than you are.

And he says, "Yeah?" Meantime reaching for his VM pistol or something of the sort.

He walks into the office and he stands there and waits to be told where to go in the room. And then, if he goes there and he sits down and so on, if you were to stand up and take off your coat, he would stand up probably and fumble with his. And if you were then to sit down and cross your legs, he would then probably sit down and cross his legs. Or he would be in such a stupor that he would merely sit there with his eyelids fluttering and if you were to say, "You are now a dog — bark!" he would go, "Woof, woof." And that's how bad-off that case is. Because you're going to be sure you're looking at this case when you're not. But there is that case.

You said, "But you're dead." And you — so you shot him again and you said, "Now, you see? You're dead."

Now, you can put a person into that trance artificially with drugs, you can put him into it with hypnosis itself and so forth. You can make almost anybody do that by monotonously making him combat you as an other-determinism. If you can make him consistently and continually combat you as a self-determinism, eventually everything you say to him will come true for him.

And he said, "I am not. I am not dead."

There's why commanding officers have to be beasts. They make the crew fight them, fight them, fight them, fight them, fight them. The guy's tough — fight him. After a while he said, "The sea is red today." It's red. I've even heard sailors on ships and boys in companies of men make such statements about it: "He says it's green, so it's green." Corporals are very fond of making this remark. And what he's saying to them all the time is, "You're in a state of trance, don't forget it." Now we wonder why when people come out of military services they're not quite in good condition. They had a four-year dope-off. Anyway . . . There's nothing wrong — nothing wrong with the militarism that demobilization and disbandment won't cure.

And you said, "Yes you are!" And so you started to shoot him again, at which time he drilled you between the eyes. And you already knew you could be dead, you see, and you'd failed to make him dead, so you realized you'd been betrayed. And having been betrayed, you pulled back in your anchor points on this whole subject of being dead and that made you dead, you see? This whole mock-up going on in that fashion.

When we're looking at any command system, we're essentially looking at cause-effect. Now, what's really good condition? Is good condition resisting all effects? No, because that would result — a person who was resisting other-determinisms would of course, you see, eventually get his other — his own overcome. If he set up his own determinism as its resistance to all the deter­minisms around him, he would eventually lose his own determinism. Because he's fighting other-determinism, he will become other-determinism. And that is an inversion — call that an inversion. He's become another determinism. All right.

Well, this would all be very difficult to attain — an understanding of this — if one didn't recognize that communication setup. We got A at one end of a communication line and B at the other end of the communication line. Now, let's just change the A and the B to cause at one end of the communication line and effect at the other end of the communication line. A person who wants to be cause must be willing to be the effect of what he's causing.

Is it optimum for an individual just to simply obediently and slavishly do everything he is told? No. Because he's already become other-determinism.

A person is unable to be cause and get away with it, to the degree that he is unable to contemplate being the effect. And if he can't be the effect, he can't be the cause. So he winds up in the middle of the line; he doesn't want to be the effect, he doesn't want to be the cause. He doesn't want to reach for anything and he doesn't want anything to reach for him, just because it's all so confusing, and it all started in because somebody wanted a friendly atmosphere and so on.

Well, is it optimum for an individual to obey any order? Shouldn't he just go on being completely independent and just neglect everything that's said to him and everything around and so forth, and just throw it all aside and so on? Wouldn't that be the best way? Nope.

Well, now it'd be a little bit difficult there — you see, whatever he puts in at cause, has to duplicate at effect. And if he can't duplicate it at effect or if he's unwilling to duplicate it — what it is, he's unwilling to duplicate it at effect. He wonders after a while, "You know, I keep saying a new body will now appear out in front of me." And you know, no new body appears out in front of him. Why? Well, he can't be cause. What is cause? Cause of everything.

Because he would have moved to that perilously tenable, if at all, goal — antisocial. He would have moved out. He would therefore, in order to exist on the same plane with the rest of the society, have to engage in entirely different and separate pursuits, which of course means that he would be avoiding many areas. He would be avoiding many, many, many areas, and in such a wise, would be entirely constricted, restrained — so that's not self-determinism either. You know, he goes around concentrating all the time on, "Well, we'll neglect all these orders and we'll just — so on, and we'll just leave that alone and we won't fight that, we'll look over this way and smile, all the way knowing it's over there on the right side." No, that keeps him from looking over on the right side. No.

He can't be cause of a new body appearing out in front of him. He has to go steal one. Why does he have to go steal one? Because he can't cause one. Why can't he cause one? Because he's unwilling to be an effect.

What's an individual in real good shape? An individual in real good shape is able to take orders, give orders, work cooperatively with orders, see where they're going — even perform unreasonable orders, give unreasonable orders, watch other people perform them, so forth — as a complete interchange of self-determinism. He's perfectly willing to work in the lines or he's willing to work at a command post. He can just work anyplace. And when an individual is really free, he is able to be anything.

A person who is unwilling to be an effect will then be unable — not just has a difficulty, but he'll be — if he's unwilling to be an effect, he'll be unable to be a cause. So he says — if a person's perfectly willing to be the effect of a dead body and bodies being shot and hanged and chased and so forth, why, he can say, "New body will now appear" — boom, it'll appear.

One of the basic drills is: "Be your body, be the space back of your body, be the room." All right.

In other words, you have as much abundance as you are willing to be cause. And you are as willing to be cause as you are willing to be an effect. Because this always happens on a cause-effect line: The fellow says, "Boom, you're dead." And he's unwilling to be around at the other end of the line and get dead.

A fellow has a somatic. You want to know how to turn a somatic off? The fastest way I know of to turn a somatic off with the least after-repercussion is simply to say to the individual, "All right, now be your body." See, he's in a body — I mean, he doesn't know anything about this — techniques or anything else. And you say, "Be your body. Now be the pain. Now be the body, be the pain. Be the body, be the pain. Be the body, be the pain." Say it slowly enough so that he can be both of them.

So he says, "Boom, you're dead" — hold back from being dead! So his cycle of action is: "All right, boom, you're dead. Now I've got to hold myself back from being dead. Now I finally killed him, didn't I? I sure did. He's dead, he's no good. But he's just kind of pathetic lying there." What'd he do? He pulled in a part of the mass of energy of this fellow who was so sorry at being killed. So it's by contagion.

If he's seeing a picture and this picture's bothering him, say, "Now be yourself, now be the picture. Be yourself, now be the picture. Be yourself."

It's tricks that thetans enter in. So the second he pulled back, right after he was cause — he pulled back, actually, and narrowed his space — but he actually pulled back, regret at being killed. Cause in killing amounts to, then, regret at being killed — boom.

And he says, "Oh, the heck with it."

So the next time he starts to shoot somebody, his draw is a little slower. He's unwilling to be cause. He has to think it over. He thinks maybe he'll go down and talk it over with the boys before he does this, and the next thing you know, why, he sends for the sheriff. And the next thing you know, why, I don't know — he's a dishwasher in a restaurant or something. I mean, he thinks life's all agin him. See, he's unwilling to be an effect, and boy, is he. He gets to be the effect of every moment of the clock. Just because he can't be an effect, you see, he has to be an effect. He has to resist being an effect.

Because this is the basic of randomity. Randomity is the ratio of predicted motion to unpredicted motion; that's all randomity is. And how does this unpredicted motion come about? Well, it can be bad to have randomity or good to have randomity; that would be all in whether or not the individual was resisting these incoming motions or not, whether he could go with them or not.

Well, that which you resist will inevitably overreach you. So if you resist being an effect, you become an effect. You got to be able to be willing to duplicate what you cause. And if you're willing to duplicate what you cause, then you, of course, are willing to be an effect.

Below on the Tone Scale, in the tone of apathy, you'll get the individual being entirely wishy-washy — entirely wishy-washy. He just (mumble). He can't play the role he's in. He just — other-determinisms hit him and he just goes this way and he goes that way and he goes the other way.

Now, a lot of people will say, "Well, now look, pain is very undesirable and that isn't anything we want anything to do with at all. Nuh-uh, pain's — pain's not desirable. No. Work is not desirable. Effort is not desirable. These are very many undesirable things. These things are bad." Well, we get right back to the Factors and we take a look and we say it's evaluation — consideration only.

Well! Well, on the — up on the Tone Scale we get somebody who can play any role and continues to know he is playing a role, even though he is playing it with complete sincerity. He knows it's a game and he can enjoy the game. He can be a real good private; he can be a real good king. When he's playing the role of a private, he plays the role of a private. And when he plays the role of a king, he can play the role of a king. And if as a private, he feels that his rights are being encroached on as a private and he should do so-and-so about them, he should be able to do that with verve. And when he is a king and feels that he ought to execute — that the state expects him to execute the umpteen-bumpteen prisoners who have just been delivered, he should say, "Off with their heads! I'll have a cup of tea now."

Evaluation is consideration. Consideration is what says something is bad and something is good. And if a person agrees with a consideration that a lot of things are bad, they wind up bad.

It's when an individual takes it upon himself to be the "only one" with this postulate with it, "Ever afterwards, I'll never be anything else but the one I am." He doesn't see life as a continuing script. You see, he feels sometime or other . . . There's a great author someplace, he figures, and this great author is writing a script of which he is the effect and he can even faintly hear the patter of typewriter keys in the sky, you might say, and he's kind of scared of the script. And he knows that he'll be cast in one role and he will never be in another role. So in view of the fact that he succeeds or fails in a role, will have to do with the judgment which elects him to the new role.

What do you know? You start running on an individual just this one and no other thing — you just start running this one thing on him: wasting pain in brackets. And if you work at it hard enough, you'll discover that pain is desirable. And if you run wasting work in brackets, you'll discover on your preclear — he'll discover that work is valuable. It's something you want.

Honest, really, there isn't anybody that interested in him. Where did he get this conceited? His — the total reward, his entire pay, will be the ability to play any role with verve. To be the most convincing private in the regiment — as far as dramatics — with no strain. And be perfectly willing to unbecome a private when that role seems to be running out. And with great calmness, become a general. And as a general, hate privates like mad; and as a private, hate generals like mad — and never pile up a single ridge.

And if you run it a little bit further, you'll find out it's kind of inhibited again because it's going to run back up the DEI cycle, which is a repetitive cycle, so it'll go IED. And work, then, is not desirable, but it's less onerous. And you'll get him up to a point where he's perfectly willing to work like mad. There's nothing wrong with work. Why — work? Why, the — you don't work to retire, you work to work. That's why you work. You work in order to handle effort. Because the handling of effort, is itself, the essence of motion.

Now, there you would think, "Well, gee! There's — life is not serious now. And you don't take life seriously, then you can't. . ."And the fellow won't be able to finish it because of just that: If you don't take life seriously — um-bumph. Well, if he understands that you can't unsurvive, he hasn't the brass to go on with it.

Therefore, if we can't have work, we can't have motion. If we can't have pain, we can't be an effect. What's it amount to, then? Pain is so scarce, we can't have pain.

Now, is it more fun to be in a play — a production on a stage — or to work in a meat market sweeping up the floor? Now which is the most fun? Huh?

You'd be surprised how hard you tried as a little kid to get some pain. Everybody kept yanking you away from hot stoves and yanking you out of radiators and yanking you out from underneath the wheels of cars. Oh, you wouldn't have gotten run over very often! But the point is, you're valuable.

Now, would it be more fun to play the part of the disreputable janitor in the meat market on the stage or to play it down at the meat market? Now, which place would you enjoy most? Now, down in the meat market, you know, you have to make it survive and keep it standing by and go through the same motions and so on and so on and so on, and on the stage, why, the — you have an audience.

Now, there is a cruelty — there is a cruelty; it's "make them live." Which is "make them realize that pain is" — this is a simultaneous statement — "make them realize that pain is awful stuff. That's real bad. That makes you lose, pain does." See? "Because you can't develop spontaneously enough effort to win, you poor fellow, and we feel so sorry for you." See how that works out?

But let's just forget the audience and throw the audience out. Did you ever see a group of actors put on a play without any audience? Have you ever seen a group of actors in a rehearsal? Of course, that's the hope and expectation of audience to some degree. But do you know I have seen more darned actors sitting around enjoying themselves hugely — and by the way, these are great actors, I mean, as far as — not great in terms of total track, but certainly great here, within this little breath of the moment and the various mediums of the theater which we have.

So if you can make pain scarce and make effort scarce, you've made energy scarce so a fellow can't get big mock-ups and he can't replace everything.

And one of those would amaze you, because most of the people who are really good, who have their name in lights — they're really good. I mean, there isn't anything that helps success like being a success. This just is wonderful. And there's nothing helps being a success but just doing what you can do about eight times better than anybody else. That really just helps out. Not necessarily because you're in competition with other people, but just to do a good job. There's a terrific satisfaction in doing a good job — terrific. Most people get distracted from it.

Some people, by contagion, you see, get hectically engrossed in winning. It's an insanity. "Let somebody else win once in a while," some guy fairly high-toned says, "I'm tired of watching the same deal." Even a fight crowd is high enough toned every once in a while to start booing the champion. They're tired of seeing him win. Let somebody else win for a change.

But here's your individual, here is your individual — three or four actors and this one guy who is real good. They're sitting down — I've seen them do this — they're sitting down and they're reading Shakespeare. My goodness! You know, the ability to read straight off a script which you don't ever know and speak it with perfect expression, and to speak something like Shakespeare in a totally natural voice, is fantastic! It takes quite a trick to do this. An artist has to work a long time to do something like that — or he does it right away quick because he knows how — either way. And these boys — just enjoying themselves hugely.

Well, the point is that this fellow goes on and he wins and wins and wins. He thinks the end-all of existence is winning. It isn't. It's living.

One day this was happening and I went into the room where they'd been, and it was about ten o'clock at night. And I said, "Isn't it about time Hamlet had some coffee?" And they woke up, you know, and they said, "It's ten o'clock! Boy, we'd better get out of here. We have to be on the set tomorrow morning." Do you know, they weren't even rehearsing a part. They had no reason whatsoever — they weren't practicing, they weren't trying to make themselves any better — nothing. They were just enjoying doing exactly what they were doing. And the people that were there are big names, they're big names in lights — they're good. Well, of course, they had no great worry and pressure on them, you can say. Oh, yes they did. There's nothing quite as onerous and horrible as having your name in lights in terms of people pawing and clawing.

And you take an — then you get to some fellow — some kid, he won't do anything. He doesn't dare do anything. You say, "Why don't you dare do anything?"

But here these people could do a superlative role and enjoy just being the role without any audience at all. When you can be your own best audience and when your applause is the best applause you know of, you're in good shape. And when you can play a real good role — when you can go down here and be the mule or be the general with equal verve, in the total spirit of play, and do it with terrific sincerity — you're living!

He says, "I might lose."

Now, here on Earth, everybody knows they can't have it, so they make it expensive and you pay for watching people to do it on the stage. But that's life. That's existence. It isn't a serious grind that we all have to take very seriously and be very, very careful about and be very careful of the obstacles and resist everything that comes up — that's existence. All right.

And you say, "What's wrong with losing?"

Your preclear will never get up there so long as he thinks he has a serious vested interest in resisting everything which happens around him. The guy doesn't even have enough presence to play the role of preclear. Now, when you've got a guy who hasn't even enough presence to play the role of preclear, after he's elected to be a preclear, or after you've started processing him, you've got a problem on your hands. But you've got the problem of all existence sitting right there in the chair. That is the problem of existence: This person is unwilling to play a role — not the role of preclear — he's unwilling to play a role.

"What's wrong? I mean, that's bad."

Why? Because he has to resist all exterior direction. He has to do something else, because his life, which he has to protect, is in great danger because he accepts another order. If you were to say to him, "Put out your cigarette," he'd probably be offended and leave. You know, you've insulted him. You've given him an other-direction. Well now, that's what you're going to run into preclear after preclear after preclear after preclear.

You say, "What's wrong with being wrong? I mean, what's this business about being wrong? Is something going to happen to you if you're wrong?"

Now, you can run into it in another fashion: This preclear is bored and doesn't care. Well, you've got Handbook for Preclears to solve that, to some degree. I would just go into it if the fellow obviously didn't care whether he could do these things or didn't do them, otherwise, and kept laughing at you and chatter­ing and, "Oh, well, it's kind of pointless anyway, and so forth. Yes, I can do that. Why am I doing this? It wouldn't do me any good. I mean, you know, it doesn't do any good."

By the way, writers and athletes alike, musicians, get to a very interesting — an interesting state. They fight being wrong. They fight making that error. They're afraid they'll make that mistake. They're afraid they'll make that error. They must say the right word. They mustn't say the wrong word. They mustn't say the wrong word. That just spins them right on in.

You're dealing there with somebody who is eddying around in the middle of the most horrible obstacles they ever heard of. And they don't know it. They've even forgotten what obstacles they were fighting. Well, you better show them a few goals toward which they were headed and it'll level them out enough so that they can at least play a role.

They mustn't pitch that ball a little bit too far. They've got to pitch that ball exactly where they pitch it. They'll be wrong if they pitch it a little short. This is what eventually caves them in. Their competence goes to pieces. Why? Because they're fighting being wrong. Is there anything wrong with being wrong?

But your first job as an auditor, whether it is by — in terms of overcoming the goals, or in terms of making it possible for this individual to do this: to discover that by following the order of another, he doesn't cave in — discovering that it is safe, that it is perfectly all right, to follow the direction of another person. And when the individual discovers this, you as an auditor can then go on and push him the rest of the way up and give him back to himself. And until he's discovered that, you won't be able to do it.

A writer every once in a while can sit down and start forcing himself to write gibberish. Just gibberish — I mean, being wrong as wrong could be. I sat down one time and made myself write some gibberish — this never happened to me, by the way, but I heard of — I ran into a couple writers who did have it happen to them. I straightened them out on the line and I thought, "Gee, you know, I bet I've got a lot of verbal accumulations whereby I'm afraid to be wrong. Lot of verbal accumulations on the line, a lot of symbolical errors that are liable to pop up. I just wonder if I shouldn't wash those out. Let's see, how will I go about it? Well, let's do it from action."

If he's just sort of onerously doing these drills because he hopes they'll make him better, you see; and if he does the drills, then he'll get better and he won't have to go on resisting all of life around him. And he's willing to just not resist quite so hard while he's sitting there in the chair just for the sake of your commands coming through, he'll tolerate your telling him to do these things — that's just about all he will tolerate — you're just going over against a problem of other-direction.

So I sat down and I started to write gibberish, you know? I was going to be as wrong as you could get, see? And boy, I sure got wrong, you know? I mean, real wrong — I wrote the wrong words and spelled them wrong and I hung the sentences together wrong and I made the villain the wrong villain for the wrong story and made the hero the right villain and got them all snarled up one way or the other and then disrelated paragraphs and so forth and sent it in. And I'll be damned if they didn't print it.

The fellow is a problem of obstacles. When you say other-direction, you mean problem in obstacles. See? Other-direction is obstacles. Anything that is an other-direction is an obstacle to him; he has to fight it or back away from it or do something about it. That's why your preclear doesn't follow your auditing commands and why they refuse to get well for you, when they refuse to get well.

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

Well, we're very close to a level of technique where you can just keep slugging away and the fellow will get well anyhow — he'll come out of that. Because we give him space, we show him there's no obstacles there, we demonstrate to him that he can look around, he can find places he's not. He locates himself as not facing that wall at Antietam or something of the sort — he's not there yet — he's not still there, that was a hundred years ago. And he isn't being run into by a fire truck, and a lot of things aren't happening to him we find — he finds, as he goes through this, so he gets less and less obstacles, so he gets better and better on the subject of direction. But your first job is to get him to take direction.

Well, you've got a problem any time you get an individual fixed on an idea and unable to change the idea. You get him fixed on the idea that he can lose, and the one thing he mustn't do is lose — he'll lose. See how — what the trick is? Merely because you can overreach him by so many inflows.

Now, in the past we have erroneously simplified this by calling it "in and out of communication.""The person is somewhat out of communication with the auditor. How do we get into communication with this very, very, very bad-off case?" and so forth. We've made it a problem of communication instead of a problem of postulates. So let's put it into the field of postulates and we find out it's a problem of other-direction. The individual can understand every word you say, he just simply cannot bring himself to follow through. See? He can't obey your direction. It's a problem of other-direction.

So let's get back to this certainty: If an individual has to be certain, if he has to know — why does he have to be certain? Why does he have to know? Well, because he can be uncertain, of course.

So your first problem in that case is to do just this: Make it understood to him, by directing him to various places in the room, to precise, exact spots in the room, making it very, very clear to him that he can go to those spots, that he can arrive, that he can reach those spots — you see, this is all being done at once — that he can move himself around, but most of all, that you can move him around. And when you have taught him that you can move him around without any great damage occurring to him, then you can teach him that with your direction senior, he can move himself around by sending himself places. And you can even show him that he can decide to go places and then change his mind about where he's going and go to an entirely new place, without falling apart.

Well, how could he be uncertain? Well certainty is composed of somethingness and certainty is composed of nothingness. And these two things together compose a maybe. And that maybe is a certainty. So the fellow doesn't know whether there's nothing there or something there, so it must mean that it was, at some time, terribly important whether there was a somethingness or a nothingness present — terribly important, somewhere.

You've finally shown him not only can he follow direction, but he can follow directions even wrongly and still arrive and not be damaged. He can follow directions wrongly and still not be damaged.

Because he's gotten into the addled state now, when he says there's something will appear, nothing appears. He says nothing will appear, something appears. That's an inversion.

He's fighting madly not being wrong. He mustn't be wrong, he has to be right. And as long as he has to be right, he's fighting being wrong. So he's afraid of being wrong. So you can even solve that for him, to some degree.

Or he gets into the addled state of, "All right. Now, let's put a mock-up out there" — the auditor says, "Let's put a mock-up out there of your father."

And when you've done this for a case for a while, you have — well, sometimes you do this for somebody, though, that's — call that Opening Procedure. And you'd just do that, one way and the other, drill him around — have him move around the room, actually move around the room, and then have him move himself around the room under your direction — tell himself to go places and then decide to go there and arrive there. You just do that for an hour, and in an awful lot of cases, you'd find they'd start falling apart in your hands.

And he says, "I get it, it was very flickery and wavery — boy, and I think it's one of my mother, I'm not sure."

You've got a problem of other-direction on any case you process, and the end goal is a return to the individual of his self-determinism. Well, self-determinism means the ability to direct himself, so therefore his postulates must be rendered out of danger.

Well, he's just fought being wrong and fought losing and he's just fought being bad and fought being inaccurate and so forth. Well, when you get him up the line, if you get him up the line to a good, high point, he'll be so relaxed that it won't occur to him that there would be anything wrong with misplacing a paving brick, if he were laying paving bricks. That wouldn't — there's nothing wrong with that. If he were driving a car, it wouldn't give him a great deal of concern that he'd throw the thing into the ditch. And what do you know, he'd never throw the car into the ditch. See?

Okay.

It's what you must not do. "These are the effects which you must resist." Society tells you all the time, "These are the effects you must resist. You mustn't at any time have these effects. These effects are very bad, and you mustn't have these effects. You've got to resist these effects, and you've got to fight these effects. And the more you fight these effects, why, the better off all of us will be — because you'll be dead, sucker!" They might as well just add the words, just like that, because that's the way they were basically intended on the track.

Now, somebody comes along and he finds himself capable of being much more capable than he ever was before. He finds himself extremely capable. And he finds out he has a right to be nothing as well as a right to be something. He has a right to lose as well as to win. He has a perfect right not to know, as well as a right to know.

What have you done there? Other-determinism. So the intention of other-determinism gets up to a point of "we must have a game." He's perfectly willing, then, to engage in a game. If people consider the game that they're playing terribly serious and awfully onerous and very upsetting and full of lots of liabilities and traps that he may fall into, well. . . You say, "Gee, what do you know, a bunch of broken pieces."

By the way, have you ever stepped on a blade of grass? You know that you probably hurt it? Now, just think of that for a moment, now. You hurt it. Mm-hm.

What if you were floating so high above life that when you stepped upon somebody's tender feelings it was like stepping on a blade of grass? Now, you've never considered that hurting grass was very, very dangerous or very damaging to existence. You're perfectly willing to go out and hurt grass. And I bet none of you have gotten down and clawed a lawn and stripped it all down and tore up all the grass and thrown it all away.

Well, I'll tell you — if you got — you could do this as an experiment. You could just get ahold of somebody and convince him how horrible it was to hurt grass. That grass is composed of little cells which themselves are very, very vital little cells and they feel pain and they work hard. All these years, they work hard to make this little blade of grass. And they fight there through snow and through rain and so on. And they're out there exposed in the weather all the time, see? And if you have a — you don't even have to have a violin playing in the background "Hearts and Flowers." You just don't have to have anybody doing that, because eventually it'd get him.

And he'd think, "Gee, isn't that something," and he'd be walking down a walk, you know, and he'd very carefully stay on the walk, you know? He'd be — very carefully stay on the walk. But now he's got a reason why he's staying on the walk. Up to this time, he stayed on the walk simply because one walks on walks. But now he has a big, deep significance about staying on walks. He stays on walks so that he won't hurt little blades of grass.

And if you went on harping on this with him — it might not even be necessary to even mention it again, but the next thing you know, this individual would be saying, "Grass. Grass — it's keeping me on walks. It's restricting me." Stamp! Kind of covertly. And he might have been wearing white shoes that day and the grass got them a little bit green when he stamped — chlorophyll in them, you know — motivator. Here we go.

This man will eventually wind up — he'll wind up going around the world getting new kinds of lawn mowers that chew grass up very painfully. And after a while, he'll get down to a point of where if anybody wanted to really get him in line, anybody really wanted to get him in line, they'd just have to say to him — you know he's being very overt at the moment, he's saying, "I want some too, and I can play in this game and I'm not dead," and so forth — that's all somebody'd have to say to him is, "Grass." At that moment he'd fold up and go into apathy and you'd win, you see? Real cute trick.

Well, that's the cycle of how it would go. Well, now just look at it in terms of bodies. Now let's just put a body there instead of a blade of grass and see how this works. See that? And you've got the same story. Except you aren't quite likely to look at it in terms of bodies, because you got a supereducation on the subject of bodies.

Well, the reason men go around hacking them to pieces, the reason men go around distributing them in wars and chewing them up and being insane on the subject; the reason they throw them onto operating tables when all that's wrong with them is they need a bean taken out of their ear or something like that — they chew up a couple of ribs, and cut their throats and then tell the relatives they bled to death — I mean, almost anything can happen, see? You get a big drama going on here, all on the subject of trying to crush blades of grass.

Why? The basic entrance on it is, "Those poor little bodies. You know, there they are. They work, and they work hard and they try to get along in life and so on. And there you are, you big bully, you — you thetan, you. You big bully. You went along and that body — do you realize that that body had to be raised for about fifteen or twenty years before it got up to the point where it had that much sexual sensation in it and so forth? And you went along and bow! you hit it and there it is, and you killed it. Do you realize it will never be beautiful again? You realize you've spoiled something that you can't replace?"

You say, "What do you mean I can't replace? I can replace it. A body will now appear." One does, but it's kind of shaky. See? You got no confidence now in the fact — you've destroyed something that's irreplaceable.

That's the biggest argument that can be leveled to anybody — against anybody, is that he destroys things that can't be replaced. Many a conqueror has gone down in history simply because he's destroyed things that can't be replaced. Attila the Hun, I think, guaranteed his position in history just by this operation.

Well, that may be or may not be — we're not interested in whether or not — what the moral values are of bodies, but we're interested in the thetan. And we find out the individual is the thetan, and that he has been sold a bill of goods which has to do with "it has been proven to him that he should feel bad about his force and power, so that he will not harm bodies because they're kind of sacred and he can't replace them." And he's — it's been proven to him. He is convinced that this is the case and he feels sympathetic to it.

Now, you notice when I exteriorize somebody, I always have them pat somebody on the head and say, "Poor body. Poor body." That's just to get rid of some of that sympathy. You do this sometimes, by the way, and quite usually — I think you've seen it here in a couple of demonstrations — individuals say, 'Yes, I had a somatic." Well, that somatic will immediately follow. Because in order to get a thetan really sold on this, you'd have had to — you've set up a booby trap like a body — it'd have implants in it which would cause people to feel this way.

So the thetan sees the body behaving on a stimulus-response mechanism in a certain way, and he thinks he caused the behavior. Never occurs to a thetan that he wouldn't cause something, till after a while, he looks at all the things he causes, he notes they're all wrong. His values are all backwards, as far as he's concerned. He's got to preserve things which he can't replace. You see, he knew he could replace them, so why preserve them? And he gets into a dreadful state and he gets stuck in the body and you have a hard time getting him out of the body and so forth.

Well, "sorry to be so convincing" is an entering wedge on this sort of thing. There's a — we were talking about it the other day — there's an implant I discovered a long time ago, whereby a fellow has a dome and it's got lightning in it and a black sky and thunderbolts and so forth. Well, it's fitted over him and turns on more or less at his wavelength, or it simply forces at him long enough to be his wavelength, and the energy in it is terribly forceful but not necessarily unpleasant. And the feeling that goes with it is "sorry to be so convincing," that's the way it adds up in English — the implant, of course, is not in English. It's not words that are in it, it's just that: A fellow is overcome by something which is an unpleasant sensation to him, probably, just because it's somebody or something else's sensation; but it's not unpleasant, really, and it just keeps — pushed in on him until he himself has a desire for it, and that is sympathy.

And the basic implant on sympathy in the GE is probably this "sorry to be so convincing," you know? "Here I'm using all this force on you, and I'm awfully sorry for it." Now, there we go.

Now that gives an individual a certainty about force, that he'll get sympathy for it. And Homo sapiens has agreed that when force has been applied beyond one's ability to resist, that one will then get sympathy for it. And so Homo sapiens goes around trying to get force applied hard enough so that he'll get sympathy for it. And we call that motivator hunger.

Many a preclear is holding on to engrams because he doesn't have enough motivators. Well, that's just because he's been cause, cause, cause and he's been unwilling to be the effect and unwilling to be the effect, till he's left vacuums on the other end of the comm line. And he'll flip the comm line someday, and he'll become the vacuum. He could become the effect. He's fought it and fought it and fought it; and he didn't want to be in there and he didn't want to be in there — and he's in there.

So that's in terms of flow. And as long as one plays around with flows, he gets into these odd and various manifestations. What has this to do with certainty?

Well, it's what has one been taught he must have, in terms of impact, to have certainty. Certainty is not an impact, certainty is knowingness. So one must have sold out his own certainty and knowingness in return for a system of impacts which themselves pretended to be certainty.

Why'd he do this?

Well, so he could win. See, if you win you lose, in this universe. If you worry about winning, you're going to lose. And if you worry about losing, you're going to win. What you should be thinking about — "Is it an interesting game I'm engaged in?" you should be thinking to yourself. "Is this interesting?"

"Gee, what do you know — real interesting game we were playing and so on, and we were — just terrific action. We were out there in a storm and we all got killed and drowned."

"Well, what are you doing with that body?"

"Oh, I mocked it up. It isn't very experienced yet and so on — it really isn't."

Well, that's lots of fun, that's lots of randomity. And from down the line, somebody gets an idea that he'd better be much more convincing than anybody else, and that's part of the game, too. But the entering wedge of that game is, is you get so convincing that you actually convince people.

You convince them what? That things are bad. That certain things are bad. And that it's bad over there, and you'd better not go over there because it'll be hurt, and pain is bad. You'll be hurt, you'll hurt something. Pain is bad. Work is bad.

You take a whole culture which is sold on the idea of retiring — they're sold on the idea of no motion and no action. You see that? Because work, in essence, is simply the handling of effort. The use of effort. And if using effort is bad, why then, of course, one goes toward a time when he won't have to use any effort. Well, that's sure backwards. Because the only fun there is, is using effort or action or so forth, and moving around in space and so forth. That's fun. And when it becomes a goal not to do that, of course you've got everything backwards. Because the goal is then not to have any fun.

'Well, if I work hard and save all of my money, in the future, I will be in a point where I won't have any fun." That doesn't sound logical. And yet, the fellow's saying the same thing when he's saying, "Well I'll work till I'm fifty-five and then I can retire, and I can go have my orange grove and then I can have some fun."

Did you ever run into these fellows who had bought an orange grove at sixty-five or seventy or something of the sort, and they'd retired and so on and they didn't work anymore? Did you ever run into any? I mean, it's real grim, real grim. They blow their brains out every once in a while. They die quick, too. Their wives generally outlive them.

Unless the fellow was doing this — now, this is a different goal: "I'm going to work for a while here until I accumulate enough money so that I can invest it and get an orange grove that I can really work on. You know, I'll just raise more oranges than anybody else, and that's what I'm going to do, see? I'm going to work at this job until I get all that money and then I'm going to buy this orange grove and then we'll really get to work. And we'll raise all these oranges and we'll do this" — he keeps going toward the goal of effort. As long as he goes toward a goal of effort he's okay. As long as he goes toward a goal of "loaf," why, he's not okay, in terms of motion.

And when I say effort, I don't mean so much "effort" on the motion — I mean, on the looking band, and so on. He's perfectly willing to handle objects and handle energy and so forth. He sees nothing wrong with this — boy, he's in real good shape. You can tell the tone of the culture to the degree that an individual can work.

And you can tell something else: You can tell whether or not a person is neurotic and potentially psychotic on the basis of whether or not they can work. And if they can't work, why, you're going to have a rough case. You're going to have to ride them right on up through.

Now, way above this, there's another one. "Sorry to be so beautiful, look what it has done." Because the first conviction is the conviction of beauty. And so you go way up above the line of force and reach for that one.

Now, it's seldom you can run it straight out of a preclear because you'll hit force first — "sorry to be so convincing." But "Sorry to be so beautiful. Look what I have done by being so beautiful. I convinced them to a point where they're all slaves."

Okay.