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

This morning I'd like to talk to you about the various "reasons why." We have a lot to do with reasons why in spite of the fact that a fellow who goes around all the time finding reasons why is usually not in particularly good shape.

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.

But there are a lot of "reasons why" the states of existence and conditions of existence are put together the way they are put together. If they weren't put together in this outrageous fashion – that as-isness followed by alter-isness gives us isness, followed by an alter-isness, of course, or desire to, which brings us into not-isness and which then brings us into alterisness, which brings us into not-isness, which brings us into alter-isness, which brings us into not-isness… There's a good reason for all this, an excellent reason for all this.

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.

And I'm talking to you, right now, about the fundamental of all aberration which is, incidentally, the fundamental of all existence.

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.

There is a very, very strange condition here. If a thetan were to remain with an asisness, he would thereafter have nothing. You see, a perfect duplication of the as-isness would cause the as-isness to disappear. Therefore, immediately after the postulation of some object, it is necessary, by mechanics – and it just happens to be so in this universe. It isn't reasonable. It's not reasonable; it's just the way it is in this universe. Therefore, right in the field of mechanics we get the fact that the as-isness must immediately be altered in order to become what we call a reality. And thus people attempt various mechanisms.

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.

One of those mechanisms is the device of God. We're not saying now that there is not a God and all that sort of thing. But if there were never any type of alter ego of this character, there wouldn't be any permanent reality.

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, it's one thing for there to be a God and quite another thing for everybody to blame everything on him. The most barbaric manifestation that we have generally includes a deity. The savage out in the Gullaby Isles is practicing this. He says the fault is the trees and the river sprite and so forth. I'm talking to you now about the mechanism of "use of" rather than the "identity of" when I mention God.

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.

All right. God, then, is to blame. If we make something and have some hard luck, something like that, the way it looks to us here at this stage of development, we can then say," Well, God did it to us and he has afflicted us" and so forth.

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.

Well, quite in addition to that, every primitive people has the legend of a Creator. They have to have a legend of a Creator, otherwise they would never have anything. The immediate and intimate use of the legend of the Creator is to continue an existence.

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!"

Whether you build it or not, you can cause something to vanish simply by looking at it as it is – whether you built it or not. Somebody else can put up a mock-up of some kind or another and merely by your perceiving it and making a perfect duplicate of it, you can vanish it. It is not necessary that you exclusively devote yourself to the vanishment of those things which you yourself have made. That is not necessary in order to carry through this cycle. Somebody else could have made it and you could have made a perfect duplicate of it – an asisness, in other words – and it would have vanished.

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."

Now, we're talking about something which is very, very easy to work with. We're talking about something which can be subjected to objective proof. I can ask you to make a perfect duplicate of something, which is to say, get it in the same space, same time continuum, using the same mass, and your perfect duplicate will cause it at first, probably, if you're having a hard time of it, to brighten up, and then it will fade. And the next thing you know, even though you've made very poor perfect duplicates, why, you sort of get the idea of looking through this item. And so it is with all of existence. Unless, in other words, there was a legend of other creation than your own, you would not at any time be able to have anything.

"Hell, no!"

The first and most fundamental principle of havingness is it must have been created by somebody else, and thus we get business.

See? I mean, that's upsetting.

Now, when you ask a person to remedy his own havingness, this is perfectly all right. You're asking him to make nothing of something. He actually can, but the reason it does him so much good is he's forgotten that he can. You ask him to mock something up and pull it in. In other words, you ask him to mock it up and alter it.

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.

Why doesn't it remedy a person's havingness simply to mock something up – just get a mock-up? It doesn't remedy a person's havingness. Well, it doesn't remedy his havingness because if he leaves it there it will simply disappear. And there's many a preclear gets very upset because his mock-ups all disappear. He puts up a mock-up and it disappears. Well, that's because he doesn't alter it in position. He puts the mock-up up and right where it is, he leaves it there and of course it dissipates and disappears.

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, those preclears that put up a mock-up and leave it in the same place, which does not disappear, are working on a machine which does their mock-ups for them and for which machine they have no responsibility. You see that?

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.

If you ever get a preclear whose mock-ups persist exactly where he put them, you're working with somebody who is doing mock-ups with a machine. And he's doing them with a machine, not because he's crazy, but because this is the only possible way he could make them to persist. The machine changes them. And he himself knows that he did not put up the mock-up. He knows this. If he didn't know that, the mock-up again would disappear. So it is not a very undercover fact with which we are working.

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?

All right. Let's take this legend of the Creator and discover that it is quite uniform, it is found in every savage tribe, it is found across the face of the world and it is found throughout this universe – the legend of the Creator.

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.

Very well. We can say there was a Creator, and he created everything and that's fine. Well, if this were the case, why, that's fine too because it wouldn't unmock. In other words, things would not disappear if there were a Creator who made everything.

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."

You could even use this as a tremendous argument to prove that there was such a thing as a Creator and he made everything – just by the fact that it's here. And if you had made it and continued to accept your responsibility for it, it wouldn't be here. So there must have been a Creator. You could go at it with this type of logic.

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.

However, it works this way: If somebody else, other than yourself, made a mass of energy, all you would have to do would be to come along and fish around for its approximate moment of creation and duplicate it and it would then disappear.

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?

So whether the Creator created everything or not, it's a certainty that you, in order to continue with the physical universe, have to, to some degree, lay the blame on some other identity and say, therefore, this postulate, whether he created it or you created it, does not enter the question at all. If you duplicated it, it would go away, you see, regardless of who created it. This happens to be not too easily subjectable to proof, but we're talking now about a very basic fundamental. And it is necessary for you to carry around the postulate that somebody else created it in order for it to exist.

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.

It's a little bit difficult to prove this; you have to work with a preclear for a short time. But the main difficulty of proof which lies on this track, the main difficulty of proof is simply proving who made the mock-up in the first place. You see, if it disappeared because you duplicated it, why, then you probably made it. But it doesn't matter, then, whether we use this one way or the other. We don't have to admit that you could make anything disappear whether you made it or not. We don't have to admit that to continue along with this proof. What we are coming down on here is this matter of responsibility.

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

We learned in Dianetics the fact that people would not accept responsibility for their own acts. And actually they're as bad off as they will not accept responsibility for their own acts. And everything is other-determined to the degree that they will not accept such responsibility. As a matter of fact, you can cover a complete Dianometry, Scientometry – anything you want to call it – a complete set of tests which will demonstrate that there is a direct ratio between the health and ability of the person and his willingness to accept responsibility. But the funny part of it is, is that only goes up to a certain point. And when you achieve that point of acceptance of responsibility, havingness as such, and the universe, or that part of one's interest in the universe, would vanish.

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, here is the bodhi. Here is the individual who aspires to the attainment of perfect serenity. He can't have perfect serenity and have something, because he'd have to give away a certain amount of his responsibility in order to continue it in existence.

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.

Do you see that? Havingness would only persist so long as he felt somebody else had had a hand in creating it. You see that? And the moment he said, "I created this, 100 percent, all the way along the line," he wouldn't have a thing. You see that? The perfect duplicate, here, is what we're looking at again. So therefore, the condition of becoming a bodhi is the condition of having nothing.

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.

Well now, a thetan is very able to have something or nothing at will. But it happens that he is appealed to, very often, on the basis that all something-nesses, including space, would vanish. He thinks this might be a good thing.

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.

The only protest a thetan has, actually, is somethingness. And if you want to say what is wrong with a thetan, you say "somethingness" and you have stated it. He has something; there is something in existence.

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?

He is perfectly willing to have many somethings but after a while the communication formula comes into effect and he becomes frantic about it. Now we're talking about something terribly elementary. In spite of the fact that it is deeply pervasive as it is in life and existence, it is terribly simple. It is one of these idiotically elementary factors that everybody could have overlooked forever. They would have had to have overlooked it; they didn't even dare tread on the edges of it for fear everything would blow up or disappear.

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.

All right. A thetan makes something. And because he himself, natively, is a static, capable of consideration, has no mass, no form – as a spirit he has no form, he has no mass, he has no wavelength; he only has potentials: potentials of locating objects in space and the potentials of creating space, energy and objects and the action of locating those objects in that space.

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.

And with this as his potential, the moment that he makes something, he violates his own communication formula.

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.

Now, a thetan in excellent condition is able to communicate easily with something. He can simply change his mind about this and work it around. But the formula of communication becomes native to the creation of space, energy and mass. And that formula is, of course, cause, distance, effect, with a perfect duplication taking place at effect of that which emanated from cause. Now, that is the communication formula. And that becomes the formula the moment you have space. Up until that time, you have all cause and all effect capable of occupying exactly the same location, since there is no location.

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.

So, a thetan is perfectly able, way up the scale, in order to occupy the space of anything and so duplicate that thing. But his formula, when he's doing this, is not cause, distance, effect. It's just cause-effect. That would be the formula he'd be operating with because he wouldn't communicate across a distance to something, since he wouldn't be occupying any cause or effect points.

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.)

But he can't have a game if he does this; he can't have mass if he does this. If every time he selects out an enemy and then communicates to the enemy and simply becomes the enemy at that point, he couldn't have an enemy very long, could he?

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."

If he said," I am fully responsible for everything and I will now make a plot of land," and he mocks up some space and a plot of land, and he's fully responsible for it and what happens? It's gone. He mocks it up – it's gone.

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.

All right. If he mocked it up and altered it or changed it, he could then bring about the phenomenon of persistence, which is itself time.

"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.

When you say survive, you're saying time. Just put those two together and make them synonyms and you understand all you want to know about time. It's a consideration which leads to the persistence of something. And you can enter all the mechanics into time that you want to and you can paint it up in any way you want to. And you can write textbooks on it and test it and buy very fancy watches and chronometers and set up observatories to measure the movement of the stars. And you still have: Time is a consideration which brings about persistence, and the mechanics of bringing about that persistence is by alteration. And so we have alter-isness taking place immediately after an as-isness is created, and so we get persistence. In other words, we have to change the location of a particle in space. You see? We have to alter position – that's the first thing. And so we get time as the co-action of particles. Time is the difference of two positions in space of the same particle.

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.

All right, there can be many ways that we can go about that, but we're mainly interested in how it's done in this universe and how a thetan quite ordinarily does this.

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

He has to change the position of something in order to make it survive. If he wants something to vanish, he will have to approximate it – in other words, he will have to make a perfect duplicate of it – use it's energy, in its space, in its location and at its time in order to cause a vanishment of it. Well, therefore, his whole responsibility cannot continue the moment he moves something. And after he goes on for a slight distance with this, then he must conceive, in order to get an automatic response, that that thing that is moving, is moving under another responsibility. Otherwise, he'll have to stay right there and move it. But if he says it's moving under another responsibility, therefore he can set up an automaticity which will continue its motion. So he has something persisting.

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 is elementary. This is elementary in terms of time, in terms of space. But every time that we say persistence – we say survive, and so on – we're simply saying time. Time is a continuum. A continuum of what? A continuous motion of particles.

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."

Now, here is something very peculiar. When an individual tries to unmock himself, when he becomes very unhappy of life, and so on, he will hold himself still. When he tries to unmock things, he will try to hold them still. His idea is that if he can just reassume this basic motionlessness, then all of his troubles will disappear. He has so long practiced alter-isness – you see, he's so persistent on the subject of persistence – that he doesn't hold himself still at the first instant of his creation of mass. You see, he doesn't take that postulate into effect. He doesn't use that postulate. What he does is declare that something has other responsibility than himself. And then he tries to hold this thing still and in such a wise it'll disappear.

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?

Now, let's get back to this communication formula. A perfect duplication would be cause and effect in the same point in space, wouldn't it? So communication, as we consider it through space, is not a perfect communication system.

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.

You, on one point in space, communicate with something at another point in space. And if you continue to interpose a distance in between the things or space in between the things, you get, even then, the basic of persistence. You see? All you've got to do is get that distance in there.

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.

And now we have this taking place: a thetan cannot duplicate a mass. That is to say, he cannot himself actually be a mass. He can conceive that he is by saying," Now look at all of this mass which somebody else put on me." You see? "I didn't create this mass," and so forth. Well, then he can conceive himself as mass.

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.

But he starts to get very unhappy about communicating with something-nesses because he has this distance factor and he is a nothingness.

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.

Now if he can be the somethingness on the same point in space where that exists, then he feels very, very good about things. You see that? He feels all right, simply because he's occupying the same space. Well, that's perfect communication for him, that's a perfect duplicate. But if he totally occupied it at its instant of inception, it would disappear.

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.

So he gets caught between not wanting to communicate with something and wanting to have something. You see, to really have something he'd have to occupy its same space. To communicate with something he has to stand off at a distance and pretend that he is something.

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.

Communication as we know it, for instance, in this universe, is cause, distance, effect. Perfect communication, like a perfect duplication, is the point. The point. There's something on this point and the thetan can also occupy this point, therefore he can have something and he can communicate with something. But if he says it belongs utterly to him and he's occupying its basic point, it'll disappear. You see that? He has to have another Creator. He has to have some other author of the universe. If he doesn't have, why, it will disappear.

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, we could inquire, at some length I suppose, into the tremendous complexity of this and why is this? A thetan should simply be able to say, by postulate, "Well, it's as it is and it's going to persist as it is, and we'll just make this postulate and that'll be that." But the funny part of it is, that doesn't work this way. And it looks here like we have an arbitrary which has been entered in from some quarter or other which we don't fully comprehend, even at this moment. But this universe went together on the basis of: as-isness is vanishment. You make one just as it is. All you have to do is pretend, as if you were making it at this moment. You see? And boom. It's gone.

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.

Now, you see then the necessity – at least in this universe – to have another determinism at work. Well, that's just one point. We see it in terms, then, of the Creator. That's fine. This does not enter the question of whether or not there is or is not a God. We're just talking about whether or not people blame God or why they blame God or why they put things on to God. Well, if they didn't, they wouldn't have anything.

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.

Now, the other point involved here is people blaming each other. They stand there and one says, "You said that, and that's your fault and this is why we had this fight," and so forth. And the other person said, "No, that wasn't the way it is. You actually were the one that started all this." And we get them talking back and forth.

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.

We've talked to a preclear, we want to know what's wrong with this preclear. Well, it's what Mother did to him, not what he did to himself. And yet we can't conceive, actually, that an individual could actually become aberrated without his own consent, and sure enough, he can't. He can't become aberrated or upset or thin or lean or fat or thick or stupid or anything else without his own consent. Because he is part of the agreement pattern. Unless he has agreed, himself, to other entities of agreement, why, he can't get stuck with any kind of a pattern.

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.

Now, let's look at how that adds up. And we find out that if an individual, to have something, went into agreement with other-determinisms and said these other-determinisms caused all this, why, then, you see, he could sit there comfortably with something persisting.

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.

But what did he have to do basically? He said, "In order to have anything, I've got to go into communication with these other-determinisms and blame them, or fix the responsibility of causation upon these others."

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.

So the child blames his parents. He gets up into the age of puberty, he runs into sex, sex tells him he can't survive – that's the basic manifestation of sex; tells him he can't survive – and he begins to worry about this fact. Why, here he is all equipped to make another generation. He's hardly started living this one and that's a confusing and upsetting fact. And "Look-a-here, I am already being warned in advance that someday I'm going to die."

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.

If you ever wanted to see anybody morbid or read any morbid poetry or anything of the sort, why, you should just dive right into the teen age. You never saw such complete sadness on any subject. Well, they've been told they can die, and the appearance of sex, physiologically, told them they can die.

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

All right. They become anxious, then, about surviving, so they have to turn around and blame somebody for something, anything! Simply by blaming somebody they obtain a continuance of whatever condition they are in at the moment. In other words, they can continue to survive simply by turning around and saying," Well, the trouble with me is all what my father and mother did to me." Then they can get more survival.

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.

So if you were to take somebody and bring him very, very close to death and cause the chilly breath to draft down his neck, you will find him, very shortly, blaming something else than himself. But he runs in a cycle on this. He discovers that the situation is untenable – well, then he'll blame himself.

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!

Why does he blame himself at that point? He wants to unmock it. And he actually has forgotten the mechanisms of unmocking. By blaming himself, by taking it upon himself, by holding it all close to his own bosom, he thinks, "Now that it's my fault, why, it'll all unmock." And he's a very surprised person when it doesn't unmock. He merely gets upset.

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.

And the other one is, he finds his condition of survival desirable, and when he finds it even vaguely desirable – I don't care if he's a slave in the bottom of a salt mine working out a sentence for having voted – the fact is that this individual obtains continuance by blaming others.

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.

So we go through a cycle of blame somebody else: that means, "I've got to" or "I want to" or "I haven't any other choice but to survive and the best answer is survive, so therefore I'll just blame everybody else." And the mechanism of blaming oneself is unmocking oneself – unmocking oneself and the mass with which he is immediately and intimately surrounded. So people go through these two cycles and they invert. And that is the basic inversion.

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 start in by saying," Well, somebody else was responsible for the creation of all this," and they're quite happy about this and they stand off and look at it. And then they begin to get tired of communicating with these something-nesses because they cannot enter into a perfect duplication. They are a nothing, that's a something. They begin to get impatient about it after a while, so they decide to unmock it.

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.

So they say," I did it" while they're looking at it. And they look at it and they say, "Well, I did it. Well, there's something wrong here. Come on, come on, come on. I did it." Stuff goes right on. They don't fix it up in the same part of a space in which it was initially mocked up; they don't try to duplicate it with its original mass; they omit some of the basic steps of saying" I did it." And they're trying to go up against the postulate with which they did it.

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.

Now, having made this postulate and said already it belonged to somebody else, now they try to take it back. And their next move is to try to squash up these energy masses. You know, use more force in order to flatten force. And he is on his way – this thetan – right away. See, he's on his way, because the more he tries to use energy to knock out energy the more energy he's going to have and the more dislocated the basic particles of that energy are going to be, and he'll just get more and more and more and more persistence. And if he keeps on protesting all the way on down, it'll just become more solid and more solid and more solid and more solid.

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.

When he's protesting, he's saying it's other-determinism. He protests by saying, "It's my fault. Now I'm going to disappear and die and that will make you sorry." You see? But, again, he's entering a protest into the line.

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

So we get this basic thing of other man's responsibilities – that God is responsible and so forth – as being the fundamental here in terms of persistence and survival. We have to have another determinism at work or we get no persistence whatsoever. And so we get these postulated other-determinisms.

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."

And when you recognize this very, very clearly in your preclear and in creation itself, it will cease to be as entirely baffling as it may have in the past.

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?

Okay.

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.