Now let's talk a little bit about how your preclear might possibly recover from the state which he conceives himself to be in.

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

We consider now that the pattern of existence through which he has been is a very definite track. It is a track which starts in with as-isness. And this, of course, includes space.

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

You might possibly completely miss a case if you didn't realize that as-isness has to start with space. You see? You yourself could get so concentrated on objects and on energy, and you yourself get frantic along these lines, you might overlook this fact of space. You see, because a thetan can more or less communicate with space with great ease. You see? The body has gone too far on this track to do this easily. The body gets sick when it communicates with space. But a thetan can communicate with space rather easily.

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

And the as-isness begins with space. And then it gets into, of course, simultaneously, energy and mass. Now, space-energy-mass, the consideration of it, are all simultaneous. There is no consideration here related to time. Now we have to move the anchor points of the space in order to get a continuance of the space and move the energy itself in the space and change them in some fashion or another in order to get a continuance of that energy.

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

And it's the first moment, then, we have a simultaneous action, because we have not yet postulated time. Well, a thetan doing this would, theoretically, pass immediately from asisness into alter-isness – just immediately. He'd have to or he would have no continuation of any kind. In other words, it wouldn't exist unless he intended to change it. You see, he'd have to make the intention of change simultaneous with the action of creation. And if he did not, he would get a disappearance immediately of that mass.

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

All right. He passes, then, into alter-isness, which is a simultaneous action with asisness (at first), and then of course immediately becomes an action of continuation. And we get isness, which is this reality that we talk about: space, energy, objects. Just exactly why we consider this combination to be a reality, that reality is isness and so on, is a little bit dull. Because the fact of the matter is reality itself, to continue as a reality, would not be an isness at all but a continuous alter-isness. So we get isness, actually, as a hypothetical state.

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

Now, the fact that the thetan is a static, that's not hypothetical or theoretical. That's a fact. The fact that he is a static that can consider and can produce space and energy and objects – now, that's not hypothetical; that's a fact too. We have facts, facts, facts all the way along here until we get to this thing called reality, and we suddenly discover that isness is hypothetical. What we call reality is hypothetical. Therefore, we'd better just keep calling this thing reality, and "everybody knows" what reality is.

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

The basic goal, by the way, of a barbaric cult known as psychology, which is practiced in some American universities, this stressed enormously the whole subject of reality. I mean, you talk about the amount of learnedness which has been pressed up against the cheek of reality, the tremendous quantity of discourse on the subject of: "Let's see. If there was a wood and a tree fell and there was nobody to hear it, why, therefore… And then, of course, there wouldn't be a sound, would there, if there was nobody to hear the sound. Because, you see, trees aren't alive."

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

Well anyhow, this short-circuitedness and complete confusion on the subject of reality stems from the fact that in the whole field of as-isness, the creation of space, energy, objects, alter-isness, isness, not-isness and more alter-isness, there is only one hypothetical state. Just one state is hypothetical and that's isness. And that's completely hypothetical. It never exists. It can't ever exist. It has to be alter-isness or as-isness.

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

And, of course, as-isness can exist. As-isness can exist. It really would have to be able to exist if you can repeat it. You see? It must be in existence if you can repeat it and cause a vanishment of mock-ups or objects or spaces. So it obviously exists.

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

But this is not true of isness. Reality does not exist, because it precludes a stop. You see, it precludes that there's a stop right there – zoom. There just isn't any such stop. It is continuous alter-isness.

Now, in past ages it was just: “Well, reality is reality and you’ll have to accept it. There’s nothing more you can know about it than that.” Oh yes, there is a lot more you could know about reality than simply, it is.

When people stop altering the positions of things and stop altering anchor points and stop pushing things around one way or the other – whether they say they're doing it or they say it's being done on an other-determinism, or however – the moment that they just relax on this whole thing, they get the condition which your preclear quite commonly is found in, of no longer postulating time.

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 would actually take all these four states of existence to make the kind of existence which we are now living and that is to say, we would have to have Is-ness then Not- is-ness and Alter-is-ness and did it strike you before that we might have forgotten and might never have known about and it might not have had called to our attention directly, this other state? We’ve always had these three states, Alter-is-ness, Not-is-ness and Is-ness.

See, the mechanism of saying "It will continue because I'm saying somebody else is responsible" is of limited use. It's a very limited use.

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

You set up a machine – let's go into that a little closer – you set up this machine or something to go on and shift and change the anchor points of the space, manufacture the energy involved and take care of the objects. And you set up this machine, you say, "I'm no longer responsible for this. I have no further responsibility for this now, and therefore it's others' space and it will go on happening, and therefore I can continue to have this space because somebody else is making it." See, we could get into that rather shifty bypass. And so we could, then, have – not over too long a time – but we could have a consistent alter-isness.

The way you get Not-is-ness is to say “as is created by you”. That’s an awful one, that’s a big curve, and that is Not-is-ness. It’s an As-is-ness created by somebody else, which of course isn’t an As-is-ness at all. It’s a very specious As-is-ness, and naturally the world would sort of look unreal to everybody if Joe Blow and Doctor Stinkwater and the Heavily Laden Order of Pyramids all said “This is reality and this is As It Is and you’d better accept it.” That’s a Not- is-ness, isn’t it?

And this alteration would continue to take place and continue to take place as long as we at least kept one tiny little fingernail on the machine over here. We weren't looking to see, you see, that we had the fingernail on. But as long as we had that fingernail just touching that machine we were all right. See, we said, "Just that much of it is ours." You see?

So if everything starts to sort of dim down on you and you kind of find things going out, and getting sort of resistively thin - all transparent-but- they’re-there, or, they’re “all hung with black sheets” - you must assume at that time that you have faced up to too many As-is-nesses which somebody else created.

And he says, "I have everything all set up; it's beautifully set up and it'll all run automatically and I don't have to worry about it anymore. After all, a fellow created this universe, other people are the ones who caused time to take place – they tell me when to get up and when to go to bed, and I've just got everything all set, and it's totally other-determined now." It becomes just that: totally other-determined. But it also, for the individual, passes by the boards. He's no longer postulating a persistence, he's no longer changing any objects in space, and so he will simply sit still. Everything gets very dim; everything gets very thin and so on.

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

Well, the funny part of it is, in that state, he couldn't even keep an aberration going. But his alter-isness has been practiced so long after the fact of not-isness, that even though he sits still, he'll keep on changing something. And that condition is known as figuring, thinking – thinking as we call figuring. He'll try to change something and he feels, "Well, I will just sit there and think and that will keep the universe moving, it'll keep time going," and so on. There's only one trouble with this: he is dealing basically with the root stuff of what makes universes. But now that he has sunk into that category where he's doing nothing but "consider" again – he is not creating or moving anything – he is going to have a very difficult time of it. In fact, everything is just going to get dimmer and dimmer and less real and less real.

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

Well, what will persist there is that which he is still changing, which is his worry about his aberration. In other words, the only thing – this is not esoteric or difficult – the only thing which goes on persisting is that which a person is actively working to change. Now, that's a horrible thing, isn't it? But that's all that goes on persisting.

One is just vanishment.

Now, it is not true, then, that you get into a static, completely fixed state by changing something. You can pass up or down on the line of not-isness and alter-isness. You could actually alter conditions. Things can get better because you work at it. If you don't believe this, go out sometime and sit down in the middle of a field out on some mountainside. You just sit there, you see? And you make no provision whatsoever for work of any kind. You don't try to make a camp – you don't do anything like that. And you could make it much better for yourself and much more interesting simply if you'd go out and start dragging in some brush and make yourself a lean-to and fix yourself up a fireplace and bank your lean-to in such a way as the water won't run into it. It doesn't matter what you do. As long as you're moving pieces of mass around, you would then get up to a point, however – you think you're working toward that point, usually – where you wouldn't have to do anything else. And of course the moment when you get to the point where you don't have to do anything else, (quote)"time hangs heavy on your hands,"(unquote). Why does it hang heavy on your hands? Hangs heavy? It isn't even moving.

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

No, time is going to move as long as you go and move pieces of bark and trees and dig little ditches and scramble for a living, and so on, go out and fish and so forth. You're going to get time. And you can sit there for a number of years and just have a busy time of it and be quite interested in existence and so forth and go right along happily. And then all of a sudden you win – they got a carrier pigeon to you, or something of this sort – and you found out that you won the Irish Sweepstakes. And now you can hire twelve men to keep this camp. And this camp turns into a mountain lodge and you get all the machinery you possibly can from the city. And boy, while you're doing this, this is tremendous, you see? So you finally wind up with a swimming pool and a beautiful hot-water heater and you wind up with everything nicely appointed, and what do you know? You've got everything done, you see – it's all finished – and you sit back and you are just exactly in the same position, as far as time is concerned, of you sitting on a mountainside moving no masses of any kind whatsoever. (Quote)"Time is hanging heavy again on your hands."

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

You can only have those things which you handle; you can only have those things which you move around.

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 dimming-down of an Is-ness.

But an individual gets into a tremendous protest against mass. He has decided that continuous survival of things is very bad. In other words, he starts to fight survival itself with not-isness.

And that is done by saying just this, just this precise operation and no other operation: “I didn’t make it. It isn’t.” “I didn’t do it, so it doesn’t exist.’,

Now, as you know, not-isness is a highly specialized activity. It is the activity, actually, of causing something to vanish or dull down or become less, simply because it is too much. See? There's too much isness, the fellow considers, you know. He's gotten too much persistency, too much survival: Joe Jinks that got him across the barrel in a bank, you see, and took all his money away from him, and – well, there was just too much isness, you know? And the best way [thing] to do about that is to cause a not-isness, you see, and let's just fight everything.

And that will always bring about this second condition, the one we give the term of Not-is-ness.

Now, let's examine a war, for instance. A war is just simply each side saying the other side must cease to exist. And they are doing it with shot, shell, lead, dynamite, spears, arrows, deadfalls, and they're using energy, you see, to make other things cease to exist. Well, it was perfectly all right as long as you were building your camp, you see? But if you suddenly started to fight a war with somebody on the other side of the mountain, whereby you were saying he must cease to exist, you are fighting persistence by causing persistence. Now, get that: you are fighting persistence by causing persistence.

“I didn’t create it. I had nothing to do with it. I have no responsibility for this at all, so it doesn’t exist as far as I am concerned.”

You want to know why a war, which shouldn't ever take more than a couple of days, goes always on and on and on and on and on. They got so bad a few centuries ago that they had a hundred years of nothing but war, and everybody was saying everybody else mustn't exist. And they kept moving objects around to cause existence to cease. Now, you get how these postulates could become completely tangled?

An individual doesn’t have to operate on these postulates at all, but he is running on this makeup of postulates. He, of course, then will trigger in all the rest of his postulates and they’ll cross-reference in to sticking him right there with it. He’s Not-ised it and he’s got it.

And the thetan does this because he so loves a problem. And that is the most problem there is. A thetan loves a problem. And that is the basic of problems. You move masses around – which, basically, you see, causes persistence – in order to cause persistence to cease. In other words, a hundred-percent paradox: cannot exist, can't ever happen, never has happened, and yet he will do this. But he is never happy doing it. There is no serenity involved in this. It becomes nothing but a complete chaos after a while.

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

Probably the only joy any soldier ever gets out of a war – and don't, for heaven's sakes, don't spread this around because the society doesn't believe you should do this – the only joy anybody ever gets out of a war is by kidding himself that he has made absolutely nothing of something. You know, whether it's enemy troops or tanks or ships or something like that, there's a big whee in this, a big thrill. (Combat troops know about this.) It's only when they cease to make nothing at will, apparently, that they become very downhearted.

You can process a preclear on a gradient scale of change on something - and this is of great interest to us - if the gradient scale is back toward his acceptance of responsibility for having created it. It would not be far enough to go, as in Dianetics, simply to find out that your mother did it, that “it was what your mother said”. That wouldn’t be far enough to go. This is built into the woof and warp of the track, the very composite of postulates on which an individual is running.

Hardly anybody would be able to comprehend what is known as a military rout whereby a body of troops suddenly is instantly and immediately disheartened and just completely quits. It's a strange phenomenon, a phenomenon which has been rather incomprehensible: how fast troops will go into a complete, headlong retreat.

You would have to go back this far: you would have to postulate: (1) that the time Mother said it was NOW, and, (2) that the time when Mother said it caused the time when I said it (a million or fifteen billion years ago) to key in. (key in (Verb): An earlier moment of upset or painful experience is activated, restimulated, by the similarity of a later situation, action or environment to the earlier one.)

Well, let's say they keep shooting at a castle on a hill. And they just keep shooting at this castle and shooting at this castle, and the castle keeps shooting back, and they keep firing at the castle and the castle keeps shooting back. Well, just about that time they start to go to pieces in morale. They can't make nothing out of something, observably; the castle continues to live.

Every time somebody else can put one of your own pieces of mental machinery or one of your engrams into restimulation, it is only because he can work on something which was natively created by yourself. All things carry the germ of their own destruction.

They bog down on that rather badly. They get to be rather 1.5. (And, actually, that is the manifestation of 1.5: people using force to make nothing of something which continues to exist in spite of it.) And they'll suddenly drop. It isn't a slow curve. They enter it rather slowly and then they'll just suddenly go to pieces – their morale will go to pieces and so forth. Because the only compensation they have for war is the fact that as thetans, you see, they can observe that they are at least going through the motions of, and have the manifestation of, making nothing of form. And the sadness underlying it, to them, is the fact that they don't make nothing of it, really.

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

Beyond this point there's still all kinds of suffering takes place, and sadness, and it goes on and on. But you start moving that many particles with that much velocity, such as a German 88, and you'll get persistence. I mean, that shell bursts. We don't find the fellow on the ground is still there – the fellow that it hit in the vicinity of – but there's persistence. Somebody has to go through his effects, and then somebody's got to write a letter home and say he died a hero, and then somebody else has got to carry the news through. And then there's people at home. And he's left a hole in the society one way or the other. And this goes on and on and on. And then years later, why, they dig up what's left of him and ship him back over and put him into a cemetery. You know. I mean, there's persistence occasioning here.

The essay on full responsibility.

And what's persisting here? Well, there was that particle, it sure was moving fast. And any time we get a particle moving with this much velocity, we get some persistence. And in a war all they can think of is terms of more and more and more particles moving with more and more velocity to cause less and less persistence on the part of the enemy.

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

You want to know why the German nation keeps fighting and keeps overrunning its borders. Well, it can't do anything else by this time. I mean, from legion times forward, people have been going in there saying, "You mustn't persist. And these fast-moving particles which we're making you handle will make it so."

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.

Oh yeah? This can't be, you see?

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

So we lead into anything about which we find man extremely puzzled. We lead into that one little formula there of: "We're going to take particles" – which is the mechanism of making things persist – "we're going to take particles and make things not persist." And any time you find anybody in (quote) "difficulty" or in the middle of a problem, just look at the basic anatomy of a problem, which is that anatomy. It's "We're going to cause a nonpersistence by the use of the mechanisms which cause persistence." You see that?

Here is a condition in which the individual has identified himself with a continuous effect point, or a continuous cause point, and having said “I am now on this point,” he now makes his considerations below the level of that point. He has considered he is on that point. Henceforth all further considerations are monitored by this consideration that he’s on the point, as long as he considers he’s on that point. And he would have to recognize that he was on the point (an As-is-ness) before he would come off the point.

You're going to get a game. There's undoubtedly going to be a game occur here. Going to be lots of problems.

A process immediately occurrs to us on such a level. If you just simply ask an individual a question such as this over and over and over and over:

Now, you want to know how to take apart a problem: Just look where the person is using the particles which, you know, by changing them, will cause persistence in order to make a nonpersistence. In other words, in order to create a not-isness. Where is he using alter-isness to create not-isness? He'll be using alter-isness to create a not-isness, and of course will be getting, consistently and continually, an isness, which is a continuous state.

“Where could you be, where you would be willing to recognize and realize that you were?”

I say it's a hypothetical state. It's hypothetical because you can never stop it, you can never arrest it and you can never take a look at it. You know? Any time that you really recognized an isness and so forth that was not in a state of change, why, it'll disappear. It'll vanish or it'll dim down. Something will happen with relationship to it. So you always have to look at the change. This is the fellow living up the time track; this is the fellow living in the past, and so forth. He's looking at the changes, he's looking at the changes, and he isn't looking at the reality.

And you would just run a 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.

Actually, that's a very healthy state of mind. You talk about healthy mind states – that's a fine, healthy mind state: The fellow is looking at the changes, he's looking at what will be, he's very cheerful about how many particles he can move around and cause something to come into existence or persist, or he knows the proper modus operandi for knocking things out that he wants to destroy: just as-isness. And that would destroy it perfectly adequately and he could start in again.

Now, these conditions of existence are composited up in an inter-dependency one upon another. An Is-ness exists only because of As-is-ness. As-is-ness took place in the first place. It got created. Then we had to alter it slightly to get an Is-ness. We had to give up some responsibility for it and we had to shift it around. A Not-is-ness then exists in order to provide a game.

Well, if you, as I say, want to look at the basic mechanics of any problem which is causing any trouble, why, you just find the matter of the particle motion – the alter-isness, in other words – which is aimed with the goal of not-isness. And of course that's impossible. Your preclear who is hanging fire in processing, by the way, he's doing this. He's using particles to knock down ridges, something on this order. Actually, he'd feel a lot better if he'd simply go out and trim the hedge. You know, let him move around something that is not quite as damaging, with the same goal. Because if he's all messed up with his engram bank, and he's all messed up with tremendous ridges and black ridges and that sort of thing, and he sits there as a thetan creating particles and bombarding these ridges, what are you going to get? You're going to get a persistence of ridges, aren't you? So that kind of processing won't do him a bit of good – actually, it won't do him a bit of good.

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

That's why we never use flows in processing. You can process objects if you want to, and you process space if you want to, but we'll just stay away, as a general principle, from flows. Why? This is a flood of particles moving this way or that, so we just won't bother with flows in processing. And, therefore, running of concepts attended by the running of flows is just something we won't have much to do with.

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

Now, your thetan has a great objection – because of this communication formula as used in this universe – a great objection to somethingnesses. He looks across a distance and he sees a somethingness, and this begins to tell him after a while that he has to be a something too. And he doesn't like this. He doesn't enjoy this, really, because it's an other-determined something that he has to be. It's by looking at a wall he has to be a wall, you see? And that's what this universe is dictating to him.

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

Well, actually, because it's all a consideration in the first place, he doesn't have to fall into that little grave. He doesn't have to fall into that one; he doesn't have to do that kind of a shift at all. He can simply say," I'm looking at the wall," and see the wall. You see? But after a while, he gets into the mechanics of perception, the mechanics of communication, he's using energy in order to communicate with energy.

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

There's nothing wrong with that except to the degree that he loses his fluidity on it. As long as he could maintain the idea that he was simply communicating by postulate, that he was communicating, he's doing all right. Well, when he drops below that level and you get enforced communication – when he's made to stand still and be talked to, you know; when he's made to stand to and hold that ridge, you know, and when he's made to sit there and absorb that textbook (you know, any one of these things; he gets under this bombardment) – and he starts fighting the communication formula. And of course we get a persistence, then, of this universe's communication formula.

Characterization must be made up, in great degree, from these conditions of existence. Some space, some energy, and his considerations of Is-ness, Not-is-ness and Alter-is-ness. We would not say that any part of his characterization was made up of As-is-ness, because if it was it wouldn’t be there.

Remember, this universe has got a communication formula. And that formula is based on the fact that two things can't occupy the same space. So, immediately, we fall away from "cause, effect and no-distance." You see? Well that, actually, is a bottom scale. But bottomscale cause and effect occupying the same space, is almost occupying the same space. They're not a complete identification of source point and receipt point. There's still a slight distance, no matter how downscale you go. It's only way upscale that you can get a perfect identification between cause point and effect point. These two points can be coincident way upscale. Well, all right, if they can be coincident way upscale, an individual could put a distance on them or anything. But to the degree that he began to agree with this universe, he would have to have a distance across which to look. Because he can't occupy the same space as the object at which he's looking. See, that is this universe's formula.

One also has been trained to believe that loss is bad. This is just a reverse postulate, made just to keep life interesting. Loss is bad, therefore he has a tendency to avoid As-is-ness. Therefore he will avoid duplication - he’ll avoid all kinds of things. He’s afraid he’ll unmock. He’s afraid he’ll vanish. Here he is struck in, eighteen feet thick, and you couldn’t get him out with a pneumatic drill, all scheduled to go back to the between-lives area (Between-lives area: The experiences of a thetan during the period of time between the loss of a body and the assumption of another. See A History of Man by L. Ron Hubbard) and pick up another baby. Silly, isn’t it? But it doesn’t matter too much. Any life or continuance, to him, has begun to be better than no life at all.

And that's, by the way, native to a lot of universes. It's how you keep everything stretched apart. You say, "Two things can't occupy the same space. Therefore, we've got to have a lot of spaces and things more or less fixed in these spaces, and we've got to keep them all apart. And therefore they are separate objects…"And we go into a lot of stuff like that, but we also go into the communication formula. And it says, then, that cause point can't occupy the same spot as effect point. So we've got cause, distance, effect as this universe's communication formula.

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

Now, as the individual agrees that two things can't occupy the same space, and as he agrees with this communication formula, he then gets into a situation where he says, "Now, look at all these somethings around here. And I am actually basically a nothing, and therefore if I have to duplicate these by becoming a something, I don't like that. I can't retain my own native form and so forth. I'm in bad shape here. I can't fly around and be a spirit. I've got to be pinned down here, I've got to be an energy mass in order to look at these energy masses."

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

And he doesn't like this. He objects to this.

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

So we get to the other manifestation on the track: The only objection the thetan has to anything, if he's having a big objection, is to something – just any something.

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

Then this, of course, will invert. And having objected to a something hard enough, you see, he'll turn around after a while and start objecting to a nothing.

So I have been sorely tempted to alter that early auditing step to just this: “Well now, give me some goals you have in processing.”

Now, how is it then that we get any change at all if not-isness doesn't work? Well, there is the system known as valences. One ceases to become himself and becomes something else as his sole method of change. See that? He's causing a persistence by saying, "Things mustn't persist." And he keeps saying, "Mustn't persist, mustn't persist," and it goes on persisting. And he uses more particles and more particles and more particles, and pretty soon the United States Army is wearing coal-scuttle helmets. See? Just like that. The government says, "Down with Karl Marx. Down with Karl Marx. Down with Karl Marx. And everybody is now going to be taxed according to his ability to pay…"See that?

And just keep it up until it’s no longer forever, and the preclear has a future.

So we get another type of change. If two things can't occupy the same space, therefore, we are an identity persisting. Therefore, the best way to get a change and get an utter change is simply to be somebody else. In other words, completely shift valence. And because we want to win all the time, why, naturally shift to winning valences compared to oneself.

Well, if one thinks one is losing, then anything can start looking like a winning valence. A beggar, utterly penniless and about to die, would look like a winning valence to some people.

And we get this valence-shifting going right along with "two things can't occupy the same space." So an individual goes out of this spot and over onto another spot. And when he is running a lot of not-isness, you can expect him to do a lot of valence shifting. He can't continue to be himself because he's in communication with nothing.

Well, at that time he will start to believe that he must have nothingnesses. And he goes from there into having to have somethingnesses. And he goes from there into having to have nothingnesses by change of valence. And, actually, no other deep significance to it.

Okay? Got it?