Okay. Now we have these various conditions of existence – four various conditions 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.

These four conditions of existence which we are studying are actually variations of existence itself. They are certain attitudes about existence and they are the basic attitudes about existence.

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, we could make many more attitudes and we would find that we were all deriving them from these four. But we could make these four and find out that we were all deriving them from one: isness, or reality.

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

There has to be an isness before you can do an alter-isness; there has to be an isness before you can do a not-isness. Isn't that right?

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.

Okay. There has to be an isness before you can do a not-isness. Unless, of course, you want to postulate it in reverse. But we are talking, now, about this particular universe and how it got here.

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.

And we discover as we look along the track that these four conditions of existence presuppose the existence of a postulate known as time. In other words, all existence presupposes the postulate time.

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, time is just a plain, ordinary postulate which says out of a nonconsecutive beingness, which doesn't exist forever – there's no forever, see? It would just be there, see? No forever involved, no instant involved, it just hasn't any consecutive existence at all. And out of this we would have to make a postulate "there would now be a consecutive existence" – consecutive existences. Or there'd have to be a consecutive series of states. And out of this consecutive series of states, we would get, then, a parade of time; a time continuum.

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, an individual who is simply occupying space without any energy involved whatsoever has the same feeling, but a bad one – he doesn't have a good feeling about it. 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 matter of a space, now he has this feeling of forever-ness unmocked. He makes that uncomfortable for himself, so he will now go on creating consecutive states of existence and have a game. Space is necessary to start this game, but when you've just got space and you've got nothing else, it's rather unbearable. Do you see that? 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. You get this feeling every once in a while in space opera, if you're ever fooling around with that.

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.

All right. Now, here we have, then, existence in one state being conditional upon a time postulate which would include a space-energy manifestation. We have to have space, we have to have energy, and now we don't necessarily have a consecutive existence, do you see? But this would be a simultaneousness. There would be no question about whether you made the postulate for space and energy before you made the postulate of time, or the postulate of time after you made the space-energy manifestation. Be 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.

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.

So, actually, to have a game, it's a simultaneous action whereby you postulate space, energy, time – space, energy, continuous existence – which is an as-isness, space, altered; energy, as-isness altered; time, as-isness altered. Your three items there have to have the time postulate with alter-isness 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.

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.

We have to alter position in order to get a continuousness. We have to say, "It is here.

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

Now it's here. Now it's here. Now it's here."

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.

Now, there's another way of making time come true. We say "Space-no space, spaceno 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."

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.

Well now, this postulate is so easy for a thetan to make, it might be considered a native part of his mock-up. So here we have, however, before this, an ideal state – that is to say, an idealized or just a theoretical state – we have this theoretical state whereby we merely have a static which has no space, no mass, no wavelength, no motion, no time, which has the ability to consider. And we are dealing with the basic stuff of life, just by definition.

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?

Now, 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 – you see anything specious in the way my remarks are hanging together? – 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 never say – we don't use the word existence, we use the word is. We don't use the word then or will be. See, we don't go back into the past or go into the future for this continuousness at all; it's just is.

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, in past ages it was only necessary to say," Well, reality is reality and you'll just have to accept it, you know. It's just reality. Nothing more you could know about it than that."

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.

Oh, yes! There's a lot more you could know about reality than simply it is.

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.

So, is, 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'd actually take all these four states of existence to make the kind of an existence which we are now living, and that is to say, we would have to have isness, then not-isness and alter-isness. And did it strike you before that we might have forgotten and might never have known about, and it might not have been called to our attention directly, this other state? We've always had these three states: alter-isness, not-isness and, of course, isness.

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.

Alter-isness and not-isness, of course, are variations of isness and depend upon isness. But there was a fourth one, and that's as-isness, and that is a perfect duplicate. As-isness. And that condition natively exists at an instant of creation. It exists at this instant of creation. And it also can be made to exist again anytime anybody wants to make it exist again simply by saying, "As is."

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.

If anybody had truly and actually sat down and accepted reality and had got all of his fellow beings to simply accept reality, we wouldn't have any. That's all.

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.

So I think it must have been a half-hearted thing or acceptance of reality in the past must have been defined as "Let's see, now. I think everybody should be unhappy, miserable, oooh, three-quarters dead, enslaved under very thorough control. Now, that is reality and I want you to accept it."

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.

That's what the psychiatrist does, you know? "You'll just have to accept the fact that you're a homosexual."

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.

The fellow has made it plain many times that he wasn't a homosexual, he's a heterosexual.

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.

"Well, you're really a… You're really a… a paleontological uh… aphrodisiac. That is exactly uh… the psychiatric classification that we got out of a Latin book and you'll just have to accept this reality or we won't have any more to do with you as a patient. We'll kick you the hell out of here." You know. Good, solid treatment. I'm afraid this was the way reality was being classified all along the track.

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.

"I'm going to dream something up and I'm going to hold a gun on you." "And the trouble with you is you won't face reality." But whose reality? Whose reality in each case? Somebody else's! So this reality was actually another condition: other-determined as-isness, hm? Other-determined, which is not-isness.

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.

The way you get not-isness is to say, "As is created by you." Aw, that's an awful one! That's a big curve. And that is not-isness. It's an as-isness created by somebody else, which of course isn't an as-isness at all. It's a very specious as-isness. 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." We've got a not-isness. Isn't it?

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.

So if everything starts to sort of dim down on you and you kind of find things going out, you know, and getting sort of resistively thin… Do you know what I mean? Resistively thin; they're all sort of 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-isnesses which somebody else created.

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.

In other words, somebody else says, "This is the way things are and you said it." 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 when they get all together, and so on, 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-isness or a not-isness.

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.

Now, what is a not-isness? A not-isness comes about from 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.

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

Now, the funny part of it is that if you made it and you know you made it, you can always say," It doesn't exist now." By saying what? By saying "I made it." It as-isness'd, see? You accept the responsibility for having created it and you get a not-isness.

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.

So there are really two conditions of not-isness: there's just vanishment or the other one, which is what we mean, which is an isness which somebody is trying to postulate out of existence by simply saying "It isn't."

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 not-isness in our terminology would be this specialized case of an individual trying to banish something without taking responsibility for creating it. Definite, positive and precise definition: trying to vanish something without taking the responsibility for creating it.

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?

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 dim-down of an isness. And that is done by saying – just this, just this precise operation; no other operation: "I didn't make it. It isn't." See? "I didn't do it, so it doesn't exist."

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.

And that will always bring about this other condition of not-isness.

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.

See? "I didn't create it, I have nothing to do with it, I have no responsibility for this at all, so it doesn't exist as far as I'm concerned." "Nhrrn-nrrn-nrrn-nrrn."

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.

Now, built into the woof and warp of the track, the very composite on which an individual is running – he doesn't have to run on these postulates at all, you see, but he is running on this makeup of postulates… He of course, then, will trigger into all the rest of his postulates and they'll cross-reference into sticking him right there with it. He's got it.

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.

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

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, the funny part of it is that an individual can run a gradient scale of change on something if the gradient scale is back toward his acceptance of responsibility for having created it.

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.

It would not be far enough to go, in Dianetics, simply to find out that your mother did it. That was what your mother said. That wouldn't be far enough to go. You'd have to go back this far: Mother said it – you know, you'd have to postulate that the time was now – Mother said it, and that keyed in the fact that here on the track, whether a million, two billion, eight billion, sixteen trillion years ago, "I said it."

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.

Every time somebody else can put one of your machines 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 have postulated the germ of your own destruction. And then later on people come along and because you're in communication with them, and so forth, they can give you a key-in.

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.

So any engram, as we were operating with it in Dianetics, was a key-in. When I discovered that the whole track ran back-back-back-back-back – back. "No! No! No!" Backback-back. "No! My golly!" Back-back. "Where the heck are we now? Oh? Oh!"

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.

We're back to where the guy did it in the first place. Well, that's very interesting. And the result of that was the essay on responsibility in Advanced Procedure and Axioms – the essay on full responsibility.

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.

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 it being keyed in.

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

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 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, 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 little child, he's the one who identifies himself as the one who is talked to. Very seldom do you ever discover a little child giving Mother a good lecture. You seldom discover this. But if you do remember it, you probably remember it with great satisfaction of the good lecture you gave your mother.

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.

Here is a condition: 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. See, he's considered he's on the point. Now all further considerations are monitored by this consideration that he's on the point, as long as he's on the point. Now, he'd have to recognize that he was on the point (an as-isness) before he'd come off the point. You see that?

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.

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

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.

All right. Now, these conditions of existence could be composited up. They are interdependent, one upon another, you see?

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.

An isness exists only because of as-isness – as-isness took place in the first place; it got created, then we had to alter it slightly to get an isness; we had to give up some responsibility for it and we had to shift it around. A not-isness, then, exists in order to provide a game.

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.

A game is an isness which is being handled by a couple of not-isnesses, or an isness being handled by a not-isness, any way you want to look at it.

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.

A football game can be added up in terms of existence, see? Here we have one side and it's got the ball, and so the other side must not-is the side that's got the ball. The side that's got the ball has to win – in other words, to arrive at a receipt point someplace along the line.

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.

We get the communication formula itself as being lower than 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.

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."

All right. Affinity really is merely the consideration of how well it's going. Agreement or reality itself, we're talking about isness. And there is where we enter the corner of the triangle. And we just slide into that triangle on that isness point and then it is modified by A and

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."

C. They, of course, come in simultaneously with it.

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.

But those are just a way we play the game, such as some people use drop kicks and some people use punts. This doesn't matter much. We could also add other ways to play this game, but that happens to be the way the game is being played.

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.

All right. And we discover, then, that all of these conditions of existence then would add up to all kinds of manifestations of behavior. They would add up to all kinds of manifestations of behavior. Oh, there'd just be lots of them. There'd be a finite number, however; it would be the number of possible combinations, singly, doubly, trebly or quadruply of these four conditions of existence.

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.

And if you want a little exercise sometime in geometry, you ought to do that. How many combinations can we get out of any set of four? Well, we can basically get any one of the four, can't we? But we found these four were somewhat interrelated, so it'd be hard to get just one of the four. But we could recognize one of the four as being its own state. We could isolate it. So there could be any one of these four.

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, there could be any two of these four in combination with the other two, and then any three of these four in combination with the other three, and any four of these four all acting and all in combination, and then all of these things in various degrees of action.

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.

We get this individual: only seventy-five percent of his life he's trying to say not-is to; another ten percent of his life he's giving an alter-is; one one-hundredth of one percent 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.

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.

If we said that there was a gradient scale of isness, a gradient scale of alter-isness, a gradient scale of as-isness (which there isn't), a gradient scale of not-isness, why, we would see, then, that you could take these gradient scales and at one grade or another have a character composited from them. You see? And then we would have a characterization.

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.

What is the basic character of anybody? The basic character of anybody must be made up in some degree horn – must be made up from (in conditions of existence) – some space, some energy and his considerations of isness, not-isness and alter-isness. It's not necessarily true that any part of his considerations are made up of as-isness. Because if they were, they wouldn't be there. In other words, he also has been trained to believe that loss is bad. This is just a reverse postulate, just to keep life interesting. Loss is bad. So therefore, he has a tendency to avoid as-isness. So therefore, he'll avoid duplication, he'll avoid all kinds of things. He's afraid he'll unmock. There he is, stuck in eighteen feet thick, you couldn't get him out with a pneumatic drill, all scheduled to go back to the between-lives area and pick up another baby, and he's afraid he'll unmock. Silly, isn't it?

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.

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

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.

You say, "Well, then why are you processing somebody?"

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, let me tell you something about that. ARC Straightwire is listed in the first issue of The Auditor's Handbook as the third step of Intensive Procedure. In order to accomplish all three goals of getting into a two-way communication and so forth, 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 start asking a person why he's being processed for hours until he can at least find one reason why he's being processed. I would merely substitute, then, "Why are you being processed?" – or "Toward what goal are you being processed?" would be a much politer way to say it and maybe a better communication – "Toward what goal are you being processed?" as step three instead of ARC Straightwire. It's a very interesting process!

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.

Most preclears come in, they say, "Process me." "Why?"

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.

You would say immediately, and you have always supposed that they must have a good idea why they want to be processed. They don't have. They don't have any idea at all why they want to be processed. Because they want to be an exterior thetan? No, they might not even know about this. They just know there's something wrong with them.

Okay.

The most horrible technique you could run on anybody in terms of producing results, tearing off their heads and everything else, would be "What wrong-ness or what wrong thing would you find other people would accept from you?" "What could you do that was wrong that other people would accept?" See? "Now, 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. He won't be able to tell that he wants to feel freer and so forth. He won't articulate any of these things. He'll just sit there and want to be processed.

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

So I've been sorely tempted to alter that step three to just this: "Well now, give me some goals you have in processing." And just keep it up.

Okay?