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

The four conditions of existence are actually variations of existence itself. They are certain attitudes about existence, and they are the basic attitudes about existence. Now we could include a great many more attitudes, and we would find that we were deriving them all from these four. But we could take these four and find out that we were deriving them all from one – Is-ness, or reality.

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.

There has to be an Is-ness before you can do an Alter-is-ness. There has to be an Isness before you can do a Not-is-ness – unless of course you want to postulate it in reverse.

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.

But we are talking now about this particular universe and how it got here and we discover as we look along the track, that these four conditions of existence, that all existence, presupposes the postulate known as TIME.

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.

Now time is just a plain ordinary postulate which says that out of a non-consecutive beingness, which doesn't exist forever, we would get then a parade of time. A time continuum.

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.

There's no forever, it would just be there – no forever, no instant involved. There just isn't any consecutive existence at all. And then out of this we would have to make a postulate that there would now be consecutive existence, existences, or a consecutive series of states.

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 an individual who is simply occupying space without any energy involved whatsoever doesn't have a good feeling about this. Without any space he could have a good feeling about it. No space, no energy, no continuum – he could have a fairly good feeling about this, but when he gets into the occupying of a space, now he has this feeling of foreverness unmocked. He makes that uncomfortable for himself, so he will now go on creating consecutive states of existence. He can have a game. Space is necessary to start this game but when you've just got space and nothing else, it's rather unbearable. You're already occupying, so there is an existence there, but it isn't an existence which has any consecutive difference of state. And that's real poor. This is a kind of feeling you run into in space-opera.

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.

Here we have, then, a state of existence being conditional upon a time postulate which would include a space-energy manifestation, and this would be a simultaneousness.

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.

There would be no question about whether you made the postulate for space and energy before you made the postulate of time. There is no question of any postulate before or after because you have not postulated the postulate which causes a before or after, and that postulate would be time. So actually, to have a game, there must be a simultaneous action whereby you postulate space-energy-time – space, energy, continuous existence. Which is an As-is-ness of space – altered, energy – altered, time – altered. So these items have to have the time postulate with Alter-is-ness in them in order to get a persistence. That's how it's done in this universe. You don't "just have to do this all the time". But when those three consecutive postulates are made simultaneously, why we then have a continuum of existence, demarked by differences of position of the particle in the space and we have time being marked out for us very neatly. We have to alter positions in order to get a continuousness. We have to say it is here, now it's here, now it's here, now it's here.

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!"

There's another way of making time come true. We say space, no space, space, no space, space, no space, space, no space. You're postulating, however, that you can do this before you can say space, no space, space, no space. Well now, this postulate is so easy for a thetan to make, it might be considered a native part of his makeup. So we have before this an ideal state, that is to say an idealized or theoretical state. We have this theoretical state whereby we merely have a Static which has no space, no mass, no wave length, no motion, no time, which has the ability to consider, and we are dealing with the basic stuff of life. Just by definition.

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."

It is very peculiar that: "We, mixed up in all of this energy and so forth and way on down the track from the time this postulate was made" – do you see anything specious about the way that remark hangs together – "Way on down the track from the time this postulate was made" – Very difficult and very strange that we could even discuss this higher state of existence which was made trillions of years ago? No. You see, it must have been concurrent with this, right here, and so we don't use the word existence, we use the word "is". We don't use the word "then" or "will be", we don't go back into the past or go into the future for this continuousness at all. It just is.

"Hell, no!"

Now, in past ages it was just: "Well, reality is reality and you'll have to accept it.

See? I mean, that's upsetting.

There's nothing more you can know about it than that." Oh yes, there is a lot more you could know about reality than simply, it is.

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.

So, it is not a complete and embracive definition of reality. It's not complete and embracive because reality has a certain mechanical structure and that structure is composed of these four states of existence. And it would actually take all these four states of existence to make the kind of existence which we are now living and that is to say, we would have to have Is-ness then Not-is-ness and Alter-is-ness and did it strike you before that we might have forgotten and might never have known about and it might not have had called to our attention directly, this other state? We've always had these three states, Alter-is-ness, Not-is-ness and Is-ness.

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.

Alter-is-ness and Not-is-ness, of course, are variations of Is-ness and depend upon Isness. But there is a fourth one and that is As-is-ness. And that condition natively exists at an instant of creation, yet it also can be made to exist again any time anybody wants to make it exist again, simply by saying AS IS. If anybody had truly and actually accepted reality and had got all of his fellow beings to simply accept reality, we wouldn't have any. But whose reality? Whose reality in each case? Somebody else's. So this reality was actually another condition, other-determined As-is-ness. Other determined. Which is Not-is-ness!

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.

The way you get Not-is-ness is to say "as is created by you". That's an awful one, that's a big curve, and that is Not-is-ness. It's an As-is-ness created by somebody else, which of course isn't an As-is-ness at all. It's a very specious As-is-ness, and naturally the world would sort of look unreal to everybody if Joe Blow and Doctor Stinkwater and the Heavily Laden Order of Pyramids all said "This is reality and this is As It Is and you'd better accept it." That's a Not-is-ness, isn't it? So if everything starts to sort of dim down on you and you kind of find things going out, and getting sort of resistively thin – all transparent-but – they're-there, or, they're "all hung with black sheets" – you must assume at that time that you have faced up to too many As-is-nesses which somebody else created.

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?

Somebody else says, "This is the way things are." And you've had that. You get that operation in conversation: "And yesterday you said to me, just when I got up, you said to me, you never work, you are a dirty loafer, you remember that, don't you?" I think every familial unit of thetans should always have, not a Bible, but so and so's Rules of Evidence, lying right there to be resorted to at any time, and there ought to be a Court in every neighborhood to which you could repair and decide whether or not this was an As-is-ness or a Not-is-ness.

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.

Now what is a Not-is-ness? A Not-is-ness comes about in that exact manifestation, or simply by the separate postulate: "Well, it is and I regret it. It isn't." You know, you could have made it and then said it wasn't. Oddly enough, if you made it and you know you made it, you have a special case of being in a position to say any time, "It doesn't exist now," and it won't – if you have also accepted responsibility for having created something and said, "I made it." So we see that there are two different conditions of Not-is-ness.

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."

One is just vanishment.

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.

The other one is an Is-ness which somebody is trying to postulate out of existence by simply saying "It isn't."

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?

A Not-is-ness, in our terminology, would be this second specialized case of an individual trying to vanish something without taking responsibility for having created it. Definitive, positive and precise definition.

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.

And the only result of doing this is to make it all unreal. To make it forgotten. To make it "back of the black screen". To make it transparent. To make it dull down. To give it over to a machine. To wear glasses. Anything that you could possibly do to get a dimmingdown of an Is-ness.

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

And that is done by saying just this, just this precise operation and no other operation: "I didn't make it. It isn't." "I didn't do it, so it doesn't exist.', And that will always bring about this second condition, the one we give the term of Not-is-ness.

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.

"I didn't create it. I had nothing to do with it. I have no responsibility for this at all, so it doesn't exist as far as I am concerned." An individual doesn't have to operate on these postulates at all, but he is running on this makeup of postulates. He, of course, then will trigger in all the rest of his postulates and they'll cross-reference in to sticking him right there with it. He's Not-ised it and he's got it.

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.

Now he thinks the only way he can get rid of it is to dim it down, dim it down.

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.

You can process a preclear on a gradient scale of change on something – and this is of great interest to us – if the gradient scale is back toward his acceptance of responsibility for having created it. It would not be far enough to go, in Dianetics, simply to find out that your mother did it, that "it was what your mother said". That wouldn't be far enough to go.

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.

This is built into the woof and warp of the track, the very composite of postulates on which an individual is running.

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?

You would have to go back this far: you would have to postulate: (1) that the time Mother said it was NOW, and, (2) that the time when Mother said it caused the time when I said it (a million or fifteen billion years ago) to key in. (key in (Verb): An earlier moment of upset or painful experience is activated, restimulated, by the similarity of a later situation, action or environment to the earlier one.) Every time somebody else can put one of your own pieces of mental machinery or one of your engrams into restimulation, it is only because he can work on something which was natively created by yourself. All things carry the germ of their own destruction, and you postulate the germ of your own destruction.

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.

So any engram, as we were operating with it in Dianetics, was actually a key-in. When I discovered that the whole track ran back, back, back, back, BACK, it was, "Oh! We're back to where the guy did it in the first place!" Well, that was very interesting, and one result was the essay on responsibility in Advanced Procedure and Axioms.[#bookmark10 1] The essay on full responsibility.

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, a fellow did. He created the condition from which he is now suffering, and he didn't even create it in other wise than he is now suffering it. But it has been keyed in and he has consented even to its being keyed in.

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.

Nothing, really is sneaking up on anybody. That's a horrible thing, isn't it? People haven't even made it worse. But we're having a good game. If that game is a game called psychosomatic illness, bereft lover, neglected baby, it's still a game. And as such, the individual is still playing all roles.

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.

Now what happens is that as an individual goes along the line, he starts identifying himself with the source point and receipt point of the communication line. As a child, he identifies himself as the one who is talked to. Very seldom do you discover a little child giving mother a good lecture. If you had, you probably would remember with great satisfaction, the good lecture you gave your mother.

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.)

Here is a condition in which the individual has identified himself with a continuous effect point, or a continuous cause point, and having said "I am now on this point," he now makes his considerations below the level of that point. He has considered he is on that point.

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."

Henceforth all further considerations are monitored by this consideration that he's on the point, as long as he considers he's on that point. And he would have to recognize that he was on the point (an As-is-ness) before he would come off the point.

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.

A process immediately occurs to us on such a level. If you just simply ask an individual a question such as this over and over and over and over: "Where could you be, where you would be willing to recognize and realize that you were?" And you would just run a gradient

"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.

1 Advanced Procedure and Axioms: Book by L. Ron Hubbard scale all the way back up the line, to the point where the individual recognizes, finally, "You know, I'm sitting right here!" There wouldn't be any mysticism involved in this.

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.

Now, these conditions of existence are composited up in an inter-dependency one upon another. An Is-ness exists only because of As-is-ness. As-is-ness took place in the first place.

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

It got created. Then we had to alter it slightly to get an Is-ness. We had to give up some responsibility for it and we had to shift it around. A Not-is-ness then exists in order to provide a game.

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.

A game is an Is-ness which is being handled by Not-is-nesses. A football game could be added up in terms of these conditions of existence. One side has the ball and the other side must Not-is the side that has the ball, and the side that has the ball has to win – in other words, has to arrive at a receipt point.

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."

We get the communication formula itself as being below the conditions of existence and we get affinity, reality and communication as simply being the methods by which existence is conducted. It is not the interplay of existences. So we're dealing with a higher echelon than ARC right now.

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?

Affinity really is merely the consideration of how well it's going. In the agreement or reality itself we're talking about Is-ness and that is the corner where we enter this ARC triangle. We just slide into that triangle of Affinity-Reality-Communication on that Is-ness point of reality, and then it is modified by affinity and communication, which of course come in simultaneously with it. We discover then that these conditions of existence would add up to all manifestations of behavior. There would be a great many of them. There would be a finite number, however. It would be the number of possible combinations, singly, doubly, trebly or quadruply, of these four conditions of existence. We get this individual who in only 75% of his life is trying to say Not-is to, another 10% of his life he's giving an Alter-is, one hundredth of one per cent he's giving an As-is, or trying to give an As-is to – and the remainder is Reality. Acceptable reality. And that would be just one makeup of a personality.

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 we say that there is a gradient scale of Is-ness, a gradient scale of Alter-is-ness, a gradient scale of As-is-ness (which there isn't) and a gradient scale of Not-is-ness, why we can see then that you could take these gradient scales and in one combination and another, have a character composited from them.

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.

Characterization must be made up, in great degree, from these conditions of existence. Some space, some energy, and his considerations of Is-ness, Not-is-ness and Alter-is-ness.

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.

We would not say that any part of his characterization was made up of As-is-ness, because if it was it wouldn't be there.

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.

One also has been trained to believe that loss is bad. This is just a reverse postulate, made just to keep life interesting. Loss is bad, therefore he has a tendency to avoid As-is-ness.

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.

Therefore he will avoid duplication – he'll avoid all kinds of things. He's afraid he'll unmock.

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.

He's afraid he'll vanish. Here he is stuck in, eighteen feet thick, and you couldn't get him out with a pneumatic drill, all scheduled to go back to the between-lives area (Betweenlives area: The experiences of a thetan during the period of time between the loss of a body and the assumption of another. See A HISTORY OF MAN by L. Ron Hubbard) and pick up another baby.

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.

Silly, isn't it? But it doesn't matter too much. Any life or continuance, to him, has begun to be better than no life at all.

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.

You could say, well then why would you process somebody? Well, let's look at that. In order to accomplish a two way communication, just after the basic and most rudimentary chitterchat, I would start asking somebody why he was being processed. And you know, I'm just wicked enough to go on asking the person why he is being processed for hours. Until he can at least find one reason why he is being processed. It's a very interesting process. A preclear comes in saying, "Process me," and you have always supposed they knew. Well, at this point they don't have any idea at all why they want to be processed.

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.

A process which would be quite powerful would be: "What wrongness or what wrong thing would you find other people would accept from you?" or "What could you do that was wrong that other people would accept?" and then "What wrongness could you accept from other people?" – back and forth and back and forth. Here goes the guy's manners, his social pattern, his behavior pattern, and everything else will just go by the boards running that process but he won't be able to tell you, first and foremost, why he's being processed.

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.

He won't be able to tell you he wants to feel freer. He won't articulate any of these things. He'll just sit there and want to be processed. What toward? Until you've gotten him to put a little time on the track, he will use "forever" in processing, because he's sitting in forever.

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.

He isn't moving on the time continuum. Well, if you can't get him processing toward some goal or other or in some direction, he just makes processing the end all of everything and he'll just go on being processed forever. But if he's going to be processed forever, he'll have to hold onto his aberrations forever, otherwise he couldn't be processed forever, could he? And that's why some cases stay so long in processing. It's actually as elementary as that.

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.

So I have been sorely tempted to alter that early auditing step to just this: "Well now, give me some goals you have in processing." And just keep it up until it's no longer forever, and the preclear has a future.

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.

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.

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

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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, 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.

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.

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

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."

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?

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.

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.