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.

We start out at the beginning or anywhere along the road with this as the highest truth. We are dealing with a static which can consider. That it can consider and then perceive what it considers, makes it a space-energy-mass-time production unit.

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 don't ever get hung up on whether or not the actuality that is made is an actuality.

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

This is the wrong way to approach this problem. It's the way people have been approaching this problem for so long that the problem has remained wholly abstruse. That you can perceive something and that you can perceive that somebody else also perceives something qualifies only one of these conditions of existence, and that's Is-ness. And that is reality: Is-ness.

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 you simply say something is there, and then perceive that it is there, means simply that you have put something there and perceived that it is there. That's what it means.

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.

It's no less an Is-ness. That nobody is there to agree with you at the time you do this does not reduce the fact that you have created an Is-ness. It is an Is-ness. It exists. It exists, not “just for you”. It just exists, you see. Now if you were to desire that that persisted, you would then have to go through a certain mechanical step, you would have to make sure that you did not prefectly duplicate it. That is: create it again in the same time in the same space with the same mass and the same energy – because it would no longer be there.

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.

But what have you done really when you've done that? You've just taken a thorough look.

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.

And what you create will vanish if you simply look at it, unless you pull this trick: unless you pull the trick that it is alterable, and that you have altered it. Now if you say that you have altered it, and now that you have forgotten the exact instant it was made and the character of it, it of course then can persist. Because you can look at it all you please – with your first look, you might say – and it won't vanish.

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.

Don't look at it however with your second look because it will be gone.

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.

For instance – if we looked at the front of a room and saw an object we would simply have to look at it and conceive ourselves to have made its exact duplicate, or counterpart, which is to say conceived ourselves to have made it. No more, no less than that. And of course it will get rather thin. To some who are having a rough time with conditions of existence it will first get brighter and brighter and brighter, and then get thinner and thinner and thinner, and it'll disappear for one. This is a curious thing, but is immediately subjected to and you can subject it to a very exacting proof.

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.

Let's look at this very carefully – at what reality is. Reality is a postulated reality.

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

Reality does not have to persist to be a reality. The condition of reality is simply Is-ness. That is the total condition of reality.

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 we get a more complex reality when we enter into the formula of communication because this takes somebody else. We have to say we are somebody else now viewing this and that we don't know when it was made or where it was made, to get a persistence of the object for that somebody else.

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.

But let us say we just more or less accidentally go into communication with somebody else, and we have an argument, a chitter-chatter back and forth, about what this thing is.

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?

If that other person perfectly duplicates exactly what we have created, it will, again, disappear.

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.

It doesn't matter really who created it, he only has to assume that he created it for it to disappear for him. In other words he has to duplicate it in its same space, same energy, same mass at the same instant it was created and it will disappear for him. So you and he had better alter this thing which you made so that you can both perceive it.

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 then we get what is known as an agreed upon reality, and that is an Is-ness with agreement.

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.

Now actually the word reality itself is commonly accepted to me on that which we perceive. This then is the real definition for reality, the one which is commonly used, and that would be: an agreed upon Is-ness. That would be a reality.

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.

A NOT-IS-NESS is a protest. The common practice of existence of course is to try to vanish Is-ness by using it to destroy itself – taking a mockup such as a building or something of the sort and trying to destroy it by blowing it down with dynamite. This is very practical application, this material. It isn't esoteric, it doesn't apply only to the Engram Bank (Engram: A mental image picture of an experience containing pain, unconsciousness, and a real or fancied threat to survival; it is a recording in the reactive mind of something which actually happened to an individual in the past and which contained pain and unconsciousness, both of which are recorded in the mental image picture called an engram. “Engram bank” is a colloquial name for the reactive mind. It is that portion of a person's mind which works on a stimulus-response basis) – this is just existence.

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.

Is-ness can be translated quite generally as existence. We get a Not-Is-ness being enforced upon an Is-ness by the quality of the Is-ness itself, or, by a new postulate with which the individual is saying it's not there.

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.

This new postulate, in which you simply say “It's not there” does not pattern itself with the mechanics of the creation of the Is-ness, the exact time of creation, the exact space, the exact continuance, same mass, same space, same time. And as a consequence, saying, “All right it's not there”, it will probably dim down for you. But you have to do something else.

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.

You have to put a black screen up or push it away, or chew it up, or do anything to it here rather than giving it a perfect duplicate.

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.

So its a Not-is-ness when we say something doesn't exist which we know full well does exist.

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.

Now you have to know something does exist before you can try to postulate it out of existence and thus create a Not-is-ness.

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.

The definition of Not-is-ness would be simply: trying to put out of existence by postulate or force something which one knows priorly, exists. One is trying to talk against his own agreements and postulates with his new postulates, or is trying to spray down something with the force of other Is-nesses in order to cause a cessation of the Is-ness he objects to.

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 this is the use of mass to handle mass, of force to handle force, and is definitely and positively wrong if you ever want to destroy anything.

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.

That is the way to destroy yourself, which is why nations engage in it. Force versus Force. We see a very badly misunderstood rendition of this in early Christian times with the introduction of the idea that if you were hit you should turn the other cheek. The truth of matter is that if it were rendered in this wise it would have made much more sense: when you encounter force don't apply more and new force to conquer the force which has been exerted because if you do you will then be left with a chaos of force, and pretty soon you won't be able to trace anything through this chaos of force. So turn the other cheek is actually very workable if it's simply translated to mean force must not be used to combat force. The way to properly handle such a situation is just to duplicate it perfectly.

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.

Now, let's go into this business of a perfect duplicate. A perfect duplicate, again, is creating the thing once more in the same time, in the same space with the same energy and the same mass. A perfect duplicate is not made by mocking the thing up alongside of itself. That is a copy, or more technically a facsimile, a made facsimile. Copy and facsimile, by the way, are synonymous, but a facsimile we conceive to be a picture which was unknowingly or automatically made of the physical universe, and a copy would be something that a thetan on his own volition simply made of an object in the physical universe with full knowingness. In other words, he copies it and knows he is copying it. A facsimile can be made without one's knowledge by mental machinery or the body or something of that character.

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.

What we are talking about here is a perfect duplicate, mechanically, but it is more important to recognize it in the terms of our four categories of existence. It's AS-IS-NESS. If we can recognize the total As-is-ness of anything, it will vanish. Sometimes, if it had many component parts, we would have to recognize the total As-is-ness as including the As-is-ness of each component part of it. And in that lies the secret of destroying actual matter. And actual matter can be destroyed by a thetan if he is willing to include into the As-is-ness which he is now postulating toward any objects which exist – toward any Is-ness – the As-is-ness of each component part.

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

A thetan created a mockup, and this mockup was agreed upon very widely, and another process, Alter-is-ness was addressed to it and it became more and more solid and more and more solid – and then one day somebody cut it in half and dragged part of it up the hill to make somebody's doorstep.

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.

That's already, you see, out of location. Same place is part of a duplication, and it's already been removed from the place where it was mocked up and moved up to the top of the hill and now it's making somebody's doorstep. Those people themselves wouldn't quite remember where the doorstep came from if asked suddenly, but after a while those houses up there – by the way, just mockups like everything else – are torn down, and somebody picks up this doorstep and chews it up for road ballast, throws it out in the road to be used as road.

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.

And the road they make with it just runs just fine, and it runs alongside of some wharves, and one day the road is no longer being used. They now have a big long steel pier coming out there, and somebody uses a steam shovel to pick up a load of rocks and gravel, dumps them into the hold of a ship which is going to South Africa, and they unload this ballast in South Africa, and the natives use it to gravel the garden, and at length there's a volcanic explosion it's buried under twelve feet of lava, and time marches on, and this thing is getting more and more remote from its agreed upon time, its agreed upon original position – and the moment it was postulated, as related to the time span of the people who were agreeing upon 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?

You see they've agreed upon a time span, so this thing is aging and they've agreed upon this space too and it's getting moved around in this space, and here atom by atom as the eons move along, this object which was part of an original mockup is now distributed all over the planet.

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.

It would all be fairly hard to trace unless as a thetan you suddenly took a good look at it and sort of asked it – or just located it easily.

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.

And the law of conservation of energy blows up right here.

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.

In view of the fact that the time itself is a postulate, it's very easy to reassume the first time of anything. Just as you ask a person in Dianetic auditing to “go back to the moment when”, he could reassume the time, and if we had just added “the place where” and then said “Okay, now duplicate it with its own energy”, why it would have blown up.

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.

This is not a process we would use today particularly, but is one you should know about.

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.

To create an As-is-ness one would have to create the As-is-ness of the object itself and all of its parts, and only at that moment would he escape the law of conservation of energy.

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.

Conservation of energy depends upon the chaos of all parts of all things being mixed up with all the parts of all the things. In other words we couldn't have any conservation of energy unless we were all completely uncertain as to where this atom or that atom originated. And if we were totally uncertain as to the original creation spot in the space of the atom, molecule, proton, whatever – if we were to remain totally ignorant we of course could not destroy it, because force will not destroy it. Force will not destroy anything made of force.

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.

In view of the fact that you would have to make as many postulates, practically as many As-is- nesses, as there are atoms in the object, why it looks awfully complex unless you could span your attention that wide and that fast, at which point you would be capable of doing an As-is- ness of it and your operational level would be such that the conservation of energy (itself a consideration) is exceeded.

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.

Now we've taken care of As-is-ness by the mechanics of a perfect duplicate. The As-is-ness would be the condition created again in the same time, in the same space, with the same energy and the same mass, the same motion and the same time continuum.

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.

This last, the same time continuum, is only incidentally important. It only comes up as important when you're crossing between universes, and particles do not cross between universes. A particle is only as good as it's riding on its own time continuum. Destroy the time continuum, and of course no activities can take place from that moment forward.

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.

Let's say that Group A has made a set of postulates which gives them certain energy and mass, and over here is Group B, and they get together and mutually agree to accept each other's masses. This would never get to the point where the mass created by Group A and the mass created by Group B would interchange. Somebody has to be around always who was part and parcel of the creation of the mass looked at, at least by agreement – and then we would get a time continuum, we would get a continuous consciousness. It's this they are talking about when they talk about Cosmic Consciousness, which is a very fancy word for saying, “Well, we've all been here for a long time”.

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

Now let's take this As-is-ness and let's discover that a thing will disappear if a mockup will disappear, and that too can be subjected to proof very easily.

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.

If a mockup can be vanished simply by creating it in the same time and the same space with the same energy and the same mass, in other words by just repeating the postulate, if it would disappear the moment you applied As-is-ness, then people would begin to avoid As-is-ness in order to have an Is-ness, and that is done by Alter-is-ness.

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.

We have to change the character of something, we have to lie about it for it to exist, and so we get any universe being a universe of lies.

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.

When this universe of lies compels you to tell its truths you can get very confused.

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.

Going back in history, we find people on every hand telling us, “Well, maybe there was such a person as Christ, and maybe there wasn't, and maybe he said this and maybe he didn't and maybe the material came from here or came from there”, and boy are they giving him survival! Survival itself is dependent upon Alter-is-ness.

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.

In order to get an As-is-ness to persist it is absolutely necessary that its moment of creation be masked. Its moment, space, mass and energy, if duplicated, would cause that to cease to exist. The recognition of As-is-ness will bring about a none-ness – a disappearance.

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.

In other words, a return to the basic postulate. You'd have to make the postulate all over again, and then, to get it to exist any further, why you would then have to go forward and change it in such a way that people would not actually be able to recognize its source at all.

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.

You have to thoroughly obscure the source to get a persistence. Be sure you see that.

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'd have to say it came from somewhere and someone other than the actual source.

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."

People have done this with such things as Dianetics.

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."

One rave on the subject claimed it was really invented in the late part of the eighteenth century by a fellow by the name of Hicklehogger or Persilhozer or something of the sort. This is a fact. Here we had something which could be unmocked very easily because it was set up to be unmocked, to get at the As-is-ness of things, and in view of the fact that it was set up to unmock, then it becomes very, very easy to simply say that its As-is-ness was such and such and so and so, and it would have practically disappeared if you'd continued to assert that its As-is-ness was what its As-is-ness actually was. In order to get a persistence of it of any kind, we would have had to have done something very strange and peculiar, we would have had to alter it. We would have had to enter the practice of Alter-is-ness. And if we try to alter something bad – then, too, we'll make that persist.

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.

Knowing that life is basically a consideration of a Static which is not located in time-space, which has no mass, energy or wavelength, and knowing also that As-is-ness is a condition which will unmock or disappear, that you have to practice Alter-is-ness in order to get an Is- ness, and that after an Is-ness has occurrred the mechanism of handling it is to postulate a Not- is-ness, or use force to bring about a Not-is-ness, and that any further Alter-is-ness practiced on it will only continue to create an Is-ness of this new condition, and that every new Is-ness is going to be met by the postulated or force-handled Not-is-ness, and that every Not-is-ness is going to be followed by an Alter-is-ness which is going to result in a persistence of what we now have, we begin to see after a while that there is no way out of this giddy little maze of mirrors except this recognition that we have a static that can consider, and that the pattern by which we arrived at what we call reality, solidity, is contained in these four conditions.

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.

The cycle of existence is, then, for a static to consider an Is-ness as an As-is-ness. It just says: There is. And then to alter the As-is-ness even to his own recognition and obscure his knowingness as to that As-is-ness to procure an Is-ness. Then, having procured an Is-ness, he usually can be counted upon sooner or later to practice a Not-is-ness, and not liking the result since the Is-ness he was contesting doesn't disappear, it simply hangs up, and he gets unhappy about it. He now would practice a new Alter-is-ness, which would get a confirmation of the Not- is-ness he now has, which would then persist.

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 we find that life can enter itself upon a very, very dizzy cycle and these inversions then follow: the new Is-ness is treated with an Alter-is-ness, is followed by a Not-is-ness, and is followed again by a new condition, which is persisting – a new Is-ness. And so we get this back- and-forth and see-sawing around.

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 all this depends upon a basic postulate that we agree that things proceed in a fairly orderly fashion or uniform rate of spacing or at speed or at tolerance or something of the sort.

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.

Time has to be entered in there, and we must have had a postulate right in there ahead of all of these Is-nesses that would determine when, and in the absence of that one you'd get no time continuum, so there'd never be any such thing as a persistence. So time fits right in there.

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 do you see this progress of these various conditions? I think that the problem of existence now narrows down just to this: an examination of Is-nesses. But the agreements as to time itself are conditional upon what was created in the time stream, and we get a basic postulate in there resistant to all effects as being time itself.

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.

Well, these are the four conditions of Is-nesses and the various definitions which accompany them and will explain any manifestation of life, human behavior, matter, energy, space or time.

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, 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.

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.

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.

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.

Okay.