I want to cover with you this morning a little more about the various states of existence.

I want to talk to you about extremely elementary processes.

Now, all we need to know about existence is that it is, you see? Whatever complexityit has, it still is. Now, it isn't ever was, which is the most interesting part of this particular nomenclature. There isn't any will-be-ness and there's no was-ness; there's simply isness.

In view of the various factors in Scientology, we can discover that some extremely elementary processes could be designed if we would look at these upper-echelon factors.

Now, if we talk about existence, people spontaneously add to it will-be-ness and wasness. See? So existence is not the word we want. We want the word isness. We want just the word we're using. We want that state which is.

Now, let's look, first and foremost, at this thing called isness – reality. How much in the way of processing could you get just out of this concept: that there is such a thing as isness – an existence? How many processes could you possibly do? Well, actually, you could do a very great many.

Now, the Dhyana makes the error of "beginningless and endless time." But that is not really an error. It's an error as far as the symbols involved are concerned. Now, we don't know that the symbols that were used by Gautama to describe this manifestation added up into English as "beginningless and endless time" – you see, we've already crossed one language jump – and so we don't quite know what he was talking about. It was an interesting thing that you could represent this by a continuous line which joined itself. Any kind of a complexity of circle, in other words, would represent the fact that we had a beginning-less and endless somethingness.

But let me call your attention, very quickly and abruptly and immediately, to a very singular fact – if I have not mentioned it before – and that fact is simply this: that to give a thetan exercise in getting ideas is minimal. A thetan can always shift around his considerations one way or the other, but it depends upon the scope he is willing to shift them around on.

Now, that is too complicated an explanation. In view of the fact that time depends upon a postulate, you could say, "Yes, it is beginningless and endless." You could say as well that it's linear; you could say as well that it is continuous; you could say as well that it's Eastern Standard or sidereal. It doesn't matter now how you qualify it. Having once made the postulate, you can then go on making further postulates. Nobody is going to limit anybody in making postulates.

Now, an individual on one point – that is to say, a receipt point of the communications formula – an individual standing on this receipt point would feel himself limited to the degree that he had to be on receipt point. So he would then feel that the consideration that he was on receipt point, or was being the effect of existence, would monitor his ability to make considerations. That is to say, he would not feel, then, that he was free to make any other consideration above the level of the fact that he was on receipt point. Now, all of his other considerations, then, would fall below this level.

But there happens to be, strangely enough, a truth lying back of time-there is a truth lying back of time. Time is a postulate.

Now, let's take somebody who considers himself to be on cause point and solely and entirely and completely on source point – source point, cause point; receipt point, effect point. (Formula of communication: cause, distance, effect – the most elementary statement of it – involving attention and duplication.) And we would discover that if an individual was monitoring himself with one basic consideration, his consideration would then fall below, and his ability to change his mind would then fall below, that basic consideration.

Now, it doesn't even have to be agreed on. You could have a time span all by yourself. You could shut your eyes and say, "Now I've sat here for a million years." In the next two seconds, you could say, "I'm going to sit here for a million years." Nothing about this – that's real time. Don't be so baffled if you dream for five seconds about a five-hour time span. You've just repostulated some time, that's all.Unless you continue to postulate time, you haven't got any. And that's the first and foremost thing you can know about time – unless you continue to postulate it, you haven't got any.

Basic consideration could be "I am on an effect point"; that is, "I am being the effect of many flows and messages and that sort of thing, and this is very bad." Now his considerations are various.

Now, that fellow who depends on a clock up there to move time for him is going to get in trouble sooner or later. He's going to get (quote)"stuck on the track"(unquote) and (quote)"out of pace with his fellow man"(unquote) because he's depending upon their agreement on time to give him time. And the only way he can have time is to continue to postulate time.

Let's take this most basic consideration: "I must get off this point." You see, "I am on this effect point and I do not like this." Therefore, he makes the consideration that he must get off of this point.

One of the roughest things you will discover with anybody who is having trouble with his case is to have him put something on the future time track. And he'll say, "Oh, no!"

Well, what is monitoring the consideration that he must get off the point? The fact that he's on it, of course. You see?

Now, one of the ways to do this: You say, "Can I have an appointment with you? Let's make it at 2:05 this afternoon."

All right. Now let's take it reverse-end-to, and let's get an individual who finds himself on source point. This individual is on source point and there he sits on source point and he's being cause: he's being the source of the impulses or particles which are going across the distance and hitting effect points. Well, this individual is saying, "Now I mustn't cause anything bad. I must cause only good things. And I must do this and that for people," or "I must do this and that for this or for that," or something of this sort, you see?

"Hell, no!"

And what is this host of considerations being monitored by? Of course, that he is on a cause point; he's on a source point of a communication – synonymous here: cause and source, effect and receipt – naturally.

See? I mean, that's upsetting.

All right. Now, if he discovers himself suddenly on the receipt point of something, this fellow is really dismayed. You get the dismay? His basic consideration is that he's being cause point, and yet all of a sudden he receives something – oooh! Now, that would be a breakdown – basically and primarily – would be a breakdown of his isness; his reality, a breakdown of his isness.

That's why, when you pick somebody up off the street, you don't tell them to come around to see you later at your office. You've undoubtedly picked up somebody who has attention on the subject of postulating time. The thing for you to do is to take him right over to your office, if you possibly can. You see that? Don't put something on the future time track for him any more than you can help, because the person who is really in difficulty, who has psychosomatic ills and so forth, has stopped postulating time. And the moment he stops postulating time, he doesn't have any.

He can then have a break of reality only to the degree that other-determinism brings into question the postulate on which he is operating. See, he can have a break of reality only to the degree that other-determined hammer-pound brings about an invalidation of the postulate on which he's basically running. He says, "I'm cause and I'm being a good fellow and I'm doing this and doing that," and all of a sudden he gets jailed. My, this is upsetting! But what is his basic consideration? That he is occupying a cause point.

Now, how much time has a fellow got and how much time is he rushing and how much time is he sitting still with? And all of this is all very interesting, except it depends on just this one fact: Your individual is or is not postulating time for himself.

Now, let's take this in a very minor fashion and let's take somebody who has superparalysis of the medulla oblongata or some very, very serious ill, such as entire closure of the pocketbook. And we find him trying to change this condition. Now we've entered into another field. See? We've entered into not-isness and then we've entered into alter-isness, you see? Now, he has this terrible ill. He has this mental difficulty. He has some other difficulty or other and he now says, "It mustn't exist." That's his statement there. "It mustn't exist." And his next statement after that: he said, "All right, don't exist!" Grrrr.

Looking over a very busy career, I can see definitely the speed factor of composition as derived from strictly one postulate. I used to write about a hundred thousand words a month by writing three hours a day, three days a week. Now, that's a lot of words, but it never occurred to me that it was a lot of words. In other words, you simply postulate that that much action can fit in that much time. You postulated the time. There's nobody sitting there agreeing with you or disagreeing with. Actually, you're just walking free. Well, I might as well have postulated eight million words in one hour per month. I was just saying how much physical-universe time can be allocated to the time span which I am using in which to compose. You see that? You get that as a difference.

Well, what do you know? It keeps on existing. Well, "All right," he says, "I'll change it on a gradient scale. I'll chip away at the corners of it," and so forth. Well, he'll at length decide he can't do anything about it.

Now, let's take anybody out there doing a job of work, and we'll find something very, very peculiar. We'll find somebody who is just working like mad-he's just working, working, working, and he's just got to get it all done, he's got to get it all done. And the end of the day comes and he has nothing done. You know? It's all in a confusion. And he was awfully busy all day but nothing happened. Did you ever run into anybody like this, huh?

One of the actions that he would finally do would be to draw a black curtain over the thing – that's one of the basic actions on this. He says," Now, look. I can't change it at all." He's trying to affect not-isness by using alter-isness. See? Not-isness would not take place by a postulate, he discovered – or thought he discovered – so the basic thing he must do immediately then is to start changing it on a gradient scale, which is to say, alter-isness. And it just stays right there. And he is already running on a failed postulate of not-isness.

And the next day he goes on and – oh, he's just so busy – he's just got to do this and he's got to do that. And he finally is sitting still, presenting a very funny and silly picture. He's sitting still, not even moving, not even talking, not even writing – accomplishing absolutely nothing – telling you how awfully busy he is and how he hasn't got any time. And he'll eventually collapse down to the point where he has no time of any kind whatsoever to employ on anything and that's why he's sitting there. But that's perfectly reasonable to him; that's perfectly reasonable.

So what's his activity of change?

He'll get so he can't start anything. Why? He has no time in which to start it, much less to finish it. So he starts in originally by saying, "Well, I haven't got time to finish it," then "I haven't got time to do it well," then "I haven't got time to do it. I haven't got even time to start it." And then, finally, "I can't think about doing it."

His activity of change is then proceeding from the basic postulate that it must not be, which is proceeding from another basic postulate that it is, which is proceeding from the basic postulate that he's there in the first place (you see that?), which is proceeding from the basic postulate that there must be a "there" for him to be at.

And that's what happens to a person's doingness. It's his ability to postulate the amount of time. And the only confusion that you would get into about this is the fact that we have an agreed-upon time span. But you might recognize that the time for an entire nation or an entire earth could thereby go awry.

So we trace back these basic postulates and we discover a little rule here. And this little rule is that an individual has a condition and the condition continues to exist as long as the individual has a condition.

How much can you do in an hour? In an hour? What's an hour? An hour is the length of time it takes the sun to move fifteen degrees in the sky. The sun isn't doing anything. What's this coordination?

Now, that sounds like an idiotic little rule, but it's a very, very true little rule. It'll continue as long as he has a condition.

Well, you'll find out that when a country can still postulate time or a world can still postulate time, then, an hour would be a tremendous amount of doing-ness. They would have a festival at sunrise and a couple of games, you know? And then along about noon, why, have a feast. And that leaves them all afternoon – that leaves them all afternoon completely empty – and so that would be a good time to go boating so that they would have time in order to practice up for the dance they were giving that night. And then they'd finish up about midnight and say, "My, what an idle day!" This is the amount of time they could postulate in terms of doingness. Do we have time to do it or don't we? is the question.

Well, why does he have a condition? He must have a postulate about the condition before he has the condition. Right? So there's a more basic postulate every time you find such a condition.

This is very simple to understand if you understand that time itself is merely a postulate. It's a postulate.

In order to get over something, you have to have postulated that you have it. In order to recover, you must postulate that you have something from which to recover. In order to go through the actions of emptying a pocketbook, you must have had to have postulated that it was full and that it should be emptied.

Now, what is the – if it's a postulate, does it have an anatomy as such? Well, yes, it's a complexity of postulates, the way you look at it in this particular universe at this time, but not very complex.

Now, you're all too prone to look at existence and say," Well, there's existence there, and now we'll make some postulates." No, this is not quite the direction that we're drifting. You'd have to make the postulates to have existence there so that you could make some postulates to recover from having the existence there.

Time depends on change. In order to have time, you have to alter things, because isness has a condition there – alter-isness. In order to get an isness to persist, you of course have to have something there about persist, which would consist of the time postulate. The way the postulates have gone together which make up this universe – not the theoretical way in which they could go together to make up a universe… Get this as a different thing. You see, you could go about this just all out in an entirely different fashion and postulate time and still have time, but it would not necessarily be the postulates which were made and are made and are in this universe right here and now. See? It wouldn't necessarily be the same set of postulates if we suddenly dreamed it up.

Let's get back to this isness. A condition has to be postulated before it can be unpostulated. That's right, isn't it? Well, so that any condition to have any existence or persistence must be based on time of some sort. Well, therefore, there must be a time postulate. And we find out that an individual doesn't have any time unless he continues to postulate it. An individual ceases to have time to the degree that he ceases to postulate it.

So we have to subject the postulates of time to a little subjective truth-proof, you know – and get ourselves a test on it. And we find out that we can make things persist by changing them. If we keep on changing something and change it and change it and change it and change it, we're getting persistence. But actually, what we're doing is postulating the time for it to persist in.

Now, when I say "cease to postulate time," I don't want you for a moment to get the idea that there's any witchcraft involved, that you have to go out with spider webs and mix them up with four quarts of morning sunlight and stir them all up with a whisper. There's no witchcraft involved in making this postulate. It's simply this kind of a postulate: "Continue." Just get the notion of continuing something and you will have a time continuum.

And when an individual has stopped postulating time, he's stopped perceiving. So perception and the postulate of time are identical phenomena. You see? Perception and postulation are the same thing.

Now, you could get that notion right now. Just sort of get an idea of a little piece of space out in front of you there and you have the notion "Continue" about this little piece of space. All right. That's making time. You've made time. That's all the postulate there is. There isn't even the words "Now I am going to make some time and I am going to cause the time to persist and continue." No, it's just urn-mmm. You see, you can do anything.

You should recognize, very clearly, that time is a postulate. Because when you're working with a preclear who is having difficulty perceiving, you know that there is something wrong with the time postulate, therefore there is something wrong with change. See?

All right. Now this time continuum is a tremendously interesting thing, particularly in view of the fact that so many people have agreed upon it. But their apparent agreement with it leads them to depend upon other people finally to carry on the agreement while they just sit there. And what do you know? Eventually they just sit there!

Alter-isness is that part of the time postulate which we can most evenly and closely observe. And we find out that changing things brings time into being. It causes a persistence; we get a continuance of time by alter-isness. The mechanism of alter-isness gives us a perception of time.

Now, you'll find many a boy who's having a bad time simply sitting at home in his bedroom – just sitting there. What's he stopped doing? Well, he couldn't have any motion, he says.

We find out somebody who is in a state where he believes he is about to perish will then try to change everything in his vicinity, right up to the point where he knows completely that he is perishing, at which moment he will simply succumb – bang! – and he will cease to exist or persist, you know, as that particular individuality. And he as himself without that individuality will proceed on and pick up another body.

Well, motion consists of this: consecutive positions in a space. Now, he'd have to conceive that he had some space and that he'd have to have some consecutive motions in it.

All right. We'll get the tremendous amount of change or accomplishment which has to take place immediately before death. Here we have people all around the place who aren't doing anything, their affairs are in horrible condition, they're out on the street or in businesses and so on.

If you could just ask such a person to go out and trim the hedge – just no more, no less – just tell him to go out and trim the hedge; if you ask him to go out and put a piece of chalk on the sidewalk all the way around the block, every five feet, you would see considerable recovery in his case.

Now, if we were to go up to these people, one after the other – you know, I mean, let's put on a – oh, carry a little black bag (I'd forgotten what galaxy I was in for the moment). That's the badge of office – a little black bag and a stethoscope. One doesn't quite know what one does with a stethoscope but it's interesting. A stethoscope won't detect whether or not a person is dead or not, you know, really – they often miss. It's not a reliable instrument, but it's a badge of office.

Why? Well, he knows that he'd have to go all the way around the block or he knows that he would have to finish trimming the hedge. See? Or he would have to come around to his door again, you see, on the block, or come around to the other side of the yard. In other words, he can continue to postulate a time continuum against the objects which are already there.

A stethoscope is the dramatization of the serpent, of the caduceus. That's right. I'll have to write a paper on that. (Most acceptable thing I could possibly write for the AMA.)

Now, you could just say to this fellow, "All right. Now get the idea of moving this dish. Now move it." Now get the idea of moving this dish again. Get the position you're going to move it to, now. Now move it." "Now get the idea of moving this dish. Now get the place you're going to move it to, and move it."

Anyway, we have the little black bag and we go up to this fellow and we say to this fellow, "My dear fellow, I must inform you," having tapped the stethoscope against his chest, so he knows he's being hit by a snake (I think that's about it – yes, I'll have to write that paper). Anyway, we tap him and we say, "Oh! We have just learned through this diagnosis that you only have three months to live."

Hard as it might seem for some people to conceive, an individual can be made violently ill with this. Why? What's kicking back there? The thetan can't get that sick, certainly. Well, this individual's agreement with the body – he is the body, the body is himself, therefore, everything that happens to the body is what happens to himself and everything that happens to himself is what happens to the body. In other words, he's in a superidentification.

The funny part of it is you'll see a busy man, promptly. He'll really get busy. Well, he'll sit down in a slump, you know, for a moment or two – that's just the impact. And then he'll say, "Let's see. Time. Time. Oh! Alter-isness, alter-isness, alter-isness, alter-isness, alterisness, alter-isness, alter-isness," you know, change – "I've got to get my will straight, I've got to get this straight, I got to get that straight and I got to get Mary moved out of that house into the other house which I've been building. Gotta have this and that." And the months go by and the months go by and the years go by, and he's still alive.

What postulate is this individual already riding with?

"Well," you say, "the doctor was wrong." No, the doctor wasn't wrong. As of that moment, the experience of the doctor demonstrated to him that people who had this illness (who had not been told that they had only three months to live) died in three months. What he's left out of it is the factor on people who have been told they only have three months to live. You tell somebody that he only has three months to live, and he will, of course, throw into gear – or not to necessarily say that he would throw into gear, but he could throw into gear – the only mechanism available to him to cause persistence in this universe, and that is alter-isness. And he would change, change, change, change, change, change, change, change, change, change, change.

Now, let's take a look at isness. He has to conceive that he has a body before he can recover from one.

He right away has got to change his condition; that is the first thing he thinks of. You think that this is just natural that he would do that. No. We're talking on a higher echelon of philosophy. You tell him he's only got three months to live. "This is an unacceptable fact to him," you say, "and so therefore he's got to change his condition." No, worse than that – worse than that. He's got to change his condition. If he has no time persistence, he has got to change his condition. The one thing with which he can gain persistence is alter-isness. If he would simply change the furniture around in his office he'd live better. I mean, he'd live a little longer – the amount of change – because he can do that successfully.

Let's get this salient and horrible fact, that this whole thing is monitored by isness, no matter how much not-isness. You see, not-isness is always pursuant to isness. No matter how much alter-isness that takes place… You see, you've got an as-isness, then alter-isness has to take place to get an isness. Well, if you have any isness persisting on a continuum – and that is our basic definition of isness. Isness is something that is persisting. As-isness is something that is just postulated or just being duplicated, you see?

It's unsuccessful changes which fix a person and cause a not-isness to occur.

As-isness, that's just no alteration taking place, and as-isness contains no life continuum, no time continuum, nothing! See? It'll just go anytime you postulate a perfect duplicate for anything – same space, same object, same time-boom! If you postulated it all the way through without any limiter postulate hanging around at all, it would just be gone, and that's all there is to it. It'd be gone for everybody else too.

Now, unsuccessful and successful are themselves postulates. You know, "I am this individual, and this individual is supposed to persist." You could just as well say, "I am this individual and therefore this individual is not supposed to persist." I mean, you could make up your postulate that way just as well as the other way.

This isness is your monitoring postulate.

But the accepted chain of considerations which go in to make up art criticism, appreciation, win-lose and so on – we just have a set of considerations. And we say, "Well, they are successful changes as long as the individual is doing it, and the changes are unsuccessful as long as somebody else is doing it." And that's very much a part of the win-lose factor and of the time factor, too. That's self-determinism. One merely has made the postulate that as long as one does it one is successful. You know, as long as one is able to accomplish the postulate, this makes up win. "I am now going to pick up my right finger. I won!" You see? "Picked up my right finger; I made the postulate good."

An individual couldn't possibly get into trouble with as-isness, except if you consider losing everything trouble. But it would be things that he was losing which he either didn't want or had just postulated into existence. In other words, as-isness is an exact duplication or an exact creation. All as-isness is doing is merely accepting the responsibility for having created it, and anybody can accept the responsibility for anything. That's all as-isness is when it operates as a perfect duplicate.

Well now, what's happened to the preclear is, he has made the postulate and then something has contraried the postulate to such a degree that he is fixed; he is fixed, he cannot change. You see?

There's two kinds of as-isness: there's the as-isness, you postulate it in the space and time; you know, you postulate it right there where it exists. And the other one is, the as-isness where you re-postulate it; you see, you just postulate it again. The object already exists. There is an isness being approximated as an as-isness and it becomes an "as-is-that-isn't"; it becomes, then, a not-isness.

When he makes the postulate, it just works out – in this universe; not necessarily the most theoretical or most optimum setup you could make, but in this universe it just happens to work out that this is the way it was. When you made a postulate and then didn't accomplish the goal postulated in that postulate (remember you were postulating time to postulate a goal), when you were unable to reach that particular attainment, then, of course, you hadn't changed anything.

If you just created it as an as-isness, unless you altered it rapidly, you would get a notisness. And if you exactly approximated an isness as an as-isness, you would again get the same result. You got the same result both times – not-isness.

Well, the way you could make time was by changing the position of something, and that's the way time is made in this universe: change the position of something in space. Time is made by changing the position of something in space. And so we get all of the neutrons and the morons vibrating at a vast rate of speed, but a uniform rate of speed, changing their position in space. And then we can look around at several of these particles, such as the sun, Earth and other things, see that they're changing their relationships to each other in space at a uniform rate, and having perceived this, why, then, of course, we are looking at a change in time. Change of position brings about time.

As-isness, perfectly done, if not followed by alter-isness becomes a not-isness, quickly and immediately – but right now.

There is no such commodity as time. It isn't anything that can be poured from one bucket to the other. But then this happens to be true of matter too. You can't pour matter from one bucket to another, actually, unless you first made a postulate that you could. And in such a wise, time cannot take place until a postulate is made concerning it, and in this universe the postulate had to do with change of location in space. And when change of location in space occurred, then time occurred.

Now, you've had that experience in knocking out engrams, facsimiles and so forth. It hasn't occurred to anybody yet, fortunately, to simply exactly approximate the body. Treat the body as an as-isness and go your way. Well, you say, well, it's got a lot of facsimiles and so forth. All right. Treat them as the same as-isness, all in one operation – boom.

Well now, you could change something's location in space simply by lying about it, and you'd get a persistence. You'd come off as-isness. Now, the moment you change something's location in space, you come away from as-isness, and it doesn't unmock, so you get persistence.

But of course you had to assume you had a body before you could possibly treat it with an as-isness.

Now, an individual is as well off as he can change things in location in space. Let's take up the Prelogics and we find out the Prelogics – those that precede the Logics and Axioms – have to do with "a thetan is an energy-space production unit and that a thetan can change objects in location in space." And right next door to that, we have the fact that a thetan can create objects to change in space of his own creation. In other words, he can do all of these things, and we get that, in this universe – and this is pretty common to most universes – we get those postulates as the conditional postulates upon the universe.

Now, existence goes this way: there is an isness. And then the individual – and this is the only error you could make, and this is another method, slightly, of getting a continuation, because it is an alter-isness. You see? There is an alter-isness right there between isness and not-isness. The second you say, "There it is. Now I don't want it and it doesn't exist," you see, you've postulated that you're changing it. But it is a very abrupt and particular kind of isness, is not-isness.

Now, he makes another postulate and that other postulate, of course, is that something can persist and that there is a time stream, that there is a persistence and so on. And this postulate is represented as time. So when we locate something in space, we are actually working with the time postulate: persistence.

And instead of following isnesses with not-isnesses, we followed them with asisnesses, nobody could ever possibly get into any trouble. The way you get into trouble is to follow an isness with a blunt, thud, not-isness. You say," There it is. I don't want it. It isn't." Oh-oh. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh!

If you see somebody who has failed often, what do you mean by failed? He has decided to move something in space and then hasn't. Total anatomy of failure: He has decided to move something in space and then hasn't. The way it's recognized in this universe, that's the total anatomy of failure.

Now, what's the difference between these two operations? Very interesting difference. You've got an isness. Here's an ashtray. You don't want the ashtray anymore. One operation – a correct one, as far as you're concerned, if you just really didn't want it anymore – would be simply do an as-isness. You know, as-isness, perfect duplicate. Boom! – gone. See, you haven't got an ashtray anymore. Certainly you haven't got one.

Of course, he could simply postulate that he'd failed. So that's another anatomy of failure. He's always free to do that. You can, yourself, do that, not to run out anything or anything of the sort, just simply say to yourself that you failed, not for any cause, reason or anything else. "I failed and therefore I have to feel a certain way," and so forth, and then feel that way. You could. Or you could simply postulate, "I've won." Not won anything, you understand, you just postulate that you've won now, and the conditions of winning are feeling good, which is part of the woof and warp of postulates, and therefore "I feel good"– having given you a reason to feel good.

This baffles people when you're running perfect duplication on Opening Procedure by Duplication, and you include in it the step "Make a perfect duplicate of it." The thing disappears if they're going real good. Then they're asked to come back to it and pick it up, and this seems to be an invalidation. It isn't invalidation, because they're in agreement with the auditor and the auditor has repostulated it into existence. So they actually, by just saying, "All right" and walking back to it again, they have to postulate it into existence to pick it back up again, and they miss that step.

Or why don't you just postulate that you feel good? It doesn't matter where you enter into this. There is no sensible concatenation here. We are only talking about an agreed-upon concatenation.

So in running Opening Procedure by Duplication, you would have to say, "All right. Now, consider a book is over there." "Now walk over to it." "Now pick it up," and so forth – weight, color and get a description. "All right. Now make a perfect duplicate of it" or "Put it down. Make a perfect duplicate of it." "Now walk away from it."

This universe and the postulates which formed it is not necessarily the best universe that could be made. It just happens to be the universe we're sitting in and it happens to be the universe in which our postulates are being made and unmade, and it just happens that it went together on these four conditions of as-isness, alter-isness, not-isness and isness. So we've got these four conditions, and those four conditions, of course, woven together, make this universe act like it does and behave like it does and gives you the ideas of what a win is and what a lose is and so on. It's on a postulate basis.

Well, you tell an individual to walk away from it, he's just as-isness'd it. See? It's gone.

But the most curious manifestation of all of this is the manifestation of time. And that is our main interest here this morning. And we have this matter of time occupying a considerable space in the field of aberration. And that is because of this: It is the one postulate where an individual begins to depend on other-determinisms more than any other way.

You'd say instead, "Walk over to the other book." Now, when he finished that, when it comes to this first book, "Now consider there is a book over there." "Now walk over to it and pick it up and make a perfect duplicate." Of course, it's gone again.

You see, we see the sun moving and we take the cue from the sun as to how much time we have. We see clocks moving and we take the cue from them as to how much time we have. That tells us how much persistence we have. Oh, so we're being told by these objects whether we can live or not, aren't we? That's just the most curious of things in this universe, that one would take his clue as to whether or not he was going to persist on whether or not the sun moved a certain direction or distance. That's idiotic. So the sun did figure eights. If I'm not dependent upon the sunlight, I'm certainly not going to die just because of that.

This invalidative factor of agreement is that for you it's gone and for somebody else it's still there, finds agreement. Your willingness to be a good fellow, which postulate you are also running on, lets the other fellow put it back there again. So an individual can get upset about as-isness. Now, this just isn't auditing, this is in living. You say that car isn't there anymore and then your wife keeps bawling you out because that car is still sitting out there – mass of junk. Well, you've decided it wasn't there anymore. To heck with it. And she wants it moved! Well, you listen to this for awhile and you finally come off the postulate, and postulate that there is an isness out there and go do something about it, you see? Then you have to use action. Well, if you could just ask her to just look at it, make a perfect duplicate of it, then you'd both be happy. Then maybe the neighbors would complain. Well, instead of going into terrific agreement with these neighbors, and so forth, you just have them come over and make an as-isness of the thing. They wouldn't see the car anymore either.

And a thetan is not dependent on sunlight. Quite the contrary, a thetan is dependent for his good health on manufacturing his own jolly old energy; he's not dependent on the sun manufacturing his energy for him. That's just an intricate hook-together. And that, again, depends on postulates.

In other words, we would keep this up until anybody who had a basic vested interest in agreeing with the car had finally seen – and actually this would be the long way around. These individuals that are doing this, by the way, all consider themselves to be occupying a finite point of individuality and existence, you see? And they won't take the responsibility for every other person's consideration. To make a thing really disappear, you just have to take the responsibility for every viewpoint in the whole universe and say "As-is" – different operation.

Well, now, the postulate of time could be simply, cleanly made in some universe, and say," Well, there will now be a continuance for one and all," and that would be that. But that wasn't the way it was made in this universe. It was made on the basis that when as-isness is postulated, in order to get a persistence we have to practice alter-isness. We'll have to change the thing in location, one way or another, in order to get a persistence.

But to follow an isness with an as-isness brings you into an actual not-isness – thing doesn't exist; an actual not-isness. But if you just postulate against this thing that it doesn't exist – and you've said a not-isness right here, you know; you didn't do an as-isness – you've done what? You have refused the responsibility for having created it and you have said, "Somebody else creates it and I don't want it." You've said "somebody else." You've postulated the existence of somebody else with regard to this thing, and you've said, "Another determinism is placing this thing before me and therefore I don't want it, so therefore I'm going to say that it isn't but it really belongs to somebody else."

Now, people get inverted on this in this universe, so they take an isness and they change it in location; it starts disappearing.

We have to postulate another determinism, which is to say, refute the responsibility for having created the object, before you can get such an appearance as a not-isness.

Did you ever have somebody move a postulate with a mass of energy around? He starts moving it around and the energy mass starts disappearing.

Now, an individual can fail utterly. There's the Empire State Building, and he says," It isn't architecturally sound. It doesn't exist as far as I'm concerned." He's trying to postulate a not-isness; he's trying to make it unreal. He has to postulate right along with this that somebody else created the Empire State Building to get what we consider unreality or the manifestation of unreality. See? And the case which gets these unrealities is handling life on this basis: "Everybody else put it there and created it, and I really don't dare interfere with any determinism on their part, so I'll just kind of dim it down a little bit. I'll say it's not there."

But what started disappearing? It was the energy mass, wasn't it? Hm? It was not the postulate, particularly. He just got used to that postulate and he finally took it over as his own postulate. So what!

He goes rushing down a mountainside in a car that has the brakes burned out on [it], and there's a big boulder right down at the bottom of the hill, and he runs right straight into this big boulder – crash! – and just before he hits, you can always find him postulating this: "It's not there and I'm not here." Crush!

Now, therefore, a person can invert in this universe, and we run into isness followed by not-isness. A person can finally say, "Well, if I move something around, it'll disappear." He's made it a counter-postulate.

Only, you see, he doesn't do an as-isness. He doesn't say "I'm in a car rushing down the mountainside. I have the responsibility…" – you know, just this feeling; you wouldn't say all these words: "In a car rushing down a mountainside and all these people are in this car, and I'm in this car too; and there's a boulder there and the car is going to hit the boulder." Asis! – bing! No car, no boulder, no mountainside, no people. It would happen, even before he hit the boulder. See? Something would happen at this point.

Well, he's perfectly at liberty to make a counter-postulate, but it isn't the postulate on which this universe is made. This universe is rigged so that that postulate will avail not to an individual. You know, that's part of the considerations that make it up: that if you've got something and then you say it doesn't exist, you're stuck with it. That's this universe.

This is a very curious lot of phenomena that we're fooling around with here, and of course, we have no serious intent with this phenomena, which is a fortunate thing. Otherwise, somebody realizing exactly how this is done would sooner or later, maybe, unmock the Republican Party or Russia – leave a hole. And of course to do that you would have to accept the viewpoint of two hundred million Russians or something like that. You see? And you could unmock Russia if you did that. But you'd have to take full responsibility.

Now, alter-isness produces two types of persistence: we get persistence as isness and we get a persistence as not-isness. See? The fellow is persisting, but he doesn't want to be there. Well, he's persisting because he doesn't want to be there. This, too, is a change, although he's fixed in a locale. Now, there's the fellow who is persisting because he wants to be there and he's persisting because of change.

Now, what's this full responsibility? Full responsibility merely says this: "I created it." When you ask somebody to make a perfect duplicate of it, he's going through the mechanics of creating it. Therefore, it disappears. He knows, unless he throws some other-determinism in on the thing – in other words, practices some alter-ism on its creator – that it's not going to exist at all.

They're both alter-isnesses. An individual's desire to change continues his persistence in the spot he's in, if he cannot move. But he had to postulate that he couldn't move before this could happen. So we get the dwindling spiral.

Now, the physical universe, as we look at it right around us here, is an isness for one reason only: we all agree that somebody else created it. Whether that is God or Mubjub or Bill, we agree that somebody else brought these conditions into existence. And as long as we are totally agreed upon this, boy, have we got everything solid. And the moment when we agree otherwise and we say, "Well, we made it," then it starts to get thin. Now, this will worry a preclear. It's just as if he feels he could never make another one. It'll get thin for him.

Now, we also get the manifestation of accumulating energy on a preclear. Every time a preclear has said, "Now I am going to move," and hasn't moved, or he says, "Now I am moving and I'm going to continue moving," and he's stopped – you know, such as you're walking down the street and you walk into a lamppost – any time this has occurred, he has lost, which is to say, he's got a counter-postulate. So he adds up loss as stationary.

In the processing of reality, if you just handled isness all by itself, you would just have an individual start to look at what he considers to exist. And we would take the most solid manifestation of that and that would be the space in the vicinity, the walls in the vicinity, so on. That would be the most elementary process that we could do. We just start spotting spaces and walls – just that, no more. And we just keep spotting them and spotting them and spotting them. And let what happens happen. That's all – just let what happens happen. Just ask the individual to keep on spotting things. Very permissive, you see?

This universe, you see, brands everything which isn't moving as innocent, and the things that are moving are guilty – always. So he's lost.

Now, supposing he kept on looking at them with his physical vision. We find out that he would get up to a certain level and then he'd start to have body somatics. Because making the body do this continually and so forth is actually processing a reality vaguely in the direction of an as-isness. See, it's not bluntly or sharply in the direction of as-isness, it's just asking him to process it a little bit in that direction. "Let's just take these walls as you find them." You know? "Let's take the spaces around here just as you see them." In other words, "Let's look at another spot and let's look at another spot and let's look at another spot. Let's just take these things as you see them." And of course after a while the walls are going to get brighter and brighter and brighter and brighter and brighter and brighter and bri… and duller and duller and duller and duller and duller and then gone.

Well, how do you lose then? By getting fixed in a place. That's how you lose.

Well, when they get bright, bright, bright, bright, bright, that's all right: the body will still feel pretty good. But when it starts getting dull, dull, dull, du… thin, thin, thin, the body doesn't like this; it does not think this is the best thing to do. It would not recommend this as subject matter for an article in Bernarr MacFadden's magazines. Because it knows it'll fall if it stands in space.

Now, an individual who is unable to move objects out of a certain location, eventually gets to a position where, when he's trying to move these objects out of this location, he recognizes a failure, and so he goes into apathy. He says, "I don't have enough energy to do this."

So therefore this very, very simple process would not necessarily have to be completed simply by remedying havingness, but just by getting the fellow to close his eyes and spot anything he could see, no matter how vaguely, as a thetan. Just spot anything he sees. If he sees a nothingness, okay; if he sees a somethingness, okay. Just get him to spot it. We don't care what he sees. We might indicate various directions, but we would make a very bad mistake if we indicated them as body directions – on your right, on your left, above your head. Oh, no. No, no. We just ask him to look around, and what he sees, "Spot a couple of spots on it." "Now, did you do that? "Now, something else: "Spot a couple of more spots on that."

What nonsense! He doesn't have energy enough to move energy? Why doesn't he just postulate it someplace else? (But that's another thing.) He could say it is as it is and it would disappear, and then he postulates existence someplace else and then change that around so it couldn't be disappeared again, and he'd be all set. What's he doing picking things up?

Well, we know already, if we've run it permissively in the environment, he's had to point them out and walk around to them, he will obey orders. Now that we've got him to a point where he will obey orders on this subject, we can trust him to close his eyes and spot spots or spot spaces or spot anything he wants to spot with his eyes closed. And we just simply keep on spotting them.

Now, a drill, however, in moving things and putting them back in the same place again will run out this consistent, continuous failure, and so you get Opening Procedure by Duplication and its tremendous effectiveness. If it's done with a little bit heavier object than is ordinary, an individual recognizes he can even pick up and put back into place the same object and win, not fail: you've changed the basic postulate by which he's working in this universe, which is to say, if he can't move he's failed.

And that would be the most elementary process there is in Scientology.

All right. However that may be, we have these various conditions. And the point we want to drive home, immediately and right this minute, is that time depends, in this universe, on alter-isness – at least the desire to change. So anybody who is desiring to change is persisting in time. And people who do not want to change, and so forth, do not persist in time.

The whole universe is rigged around these postulates.