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

I want to talk to you now about four conditions of consideration.

Now, all we need to know about existence is that it is, you see? Whatever complexityit has, it still is. Now, it isn't ever was, which is the most interesting part of this particular nomenclature. There isn't any will-be-ness and there's no was-ness; there's simply isness.

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.

Now, if we talk about existence, people spontaneously add to it will-be-ness and wasness. See? So existence is not the word we want. We want the word isness. We want just the word we're using. We want that state which is.

That it can consider and then perceive what it considers makes it a space-energy-masstime production unit. That it can perceive what it considers makes this static into a space-energy-mass-and-time production unit.

Now, the Dhyana makes the error of "beginningless and endless time." But that is not really an error. It's an error as far as the symbols involved are concerned. Now, we don't know that the symbols that were used by Gautama to describe this manifestation added up into English as "beginningless and endless time" – you see, we've already crossed one language jump – and so we don't quite know what he was talking about. It was an interesting thing that you could represent this by a continuous line which joined itself. Any kind of a complexity of circle, in other words, would represent the fact that we had a beginning-less and endless somethingness.

You see, don't ever get hung up on whether or not the actuality that is made is an actuality. 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, up to this time, pretty darned abstruse.

Now, that is too complicated an explanation. In view of the fact that time depends upon a postulate, you could say, "Yes, it is beginningless and endless." You could say as well that it's linear; you could say as well that it is continuous; you could say as well that it's Eastern Standard or sidereal. It doesn't matter now how you qualify it. Having once made the postulate, you can then go on making further postulates. Nobody is going to limit anybody in making postulates.

That you can perceive something, and that you can perceive that somebody else also perceives something, qualifies only one of these conditions of existence. It qualifies only one of the conditions. That's isness. And that is reality – isness.

But there happens to be, strangely enough, a truth lying back of time-there is a truth lying back of time. Time is a postulate.

Now, 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. But that is no less an isness. That nobody is there to agree with you at the time you do this does not reduce the fact that you have created an isness. It is an isness. It exists. It exists. Not just for you. I mean, it just exists, you see?

Now, it doesn't even have to be agreed on. You could have a time span all by yourself. You could shut your eyes and say, "Now I've sat here for a million years." In the next two seconds, you could say, "I'm going to sit here for a million years." Nothing about this – that's real time. Don't be so baffled if you dream for five seconds about a five-hour time span. You've just repostulated some time, that's all.Unless you continue to postulate time, you haven't got any. And that's the first and foremost thing you can know about time – unless you continue to postulate it, you haven't got any.

Now, if you were to now 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 perfectly 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, that fellow who depends on a clock up there to move time for him is going to get in trouble sooner or later. He's going to get (quote)"stuck on the track"(unquote) and (quote)"out of pace with his fellow man"(unquote) because he's depending upon their agreement on time to give him time. And the only way he can have time is to continue to postulate time.

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

One of the roughest things you will discover with anybody who is having trouble with his case is to have him put something on the future time track. And he'll say, "Oh, no!"

Now, if you say 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. Don't look at it, however, with your second look, because it'll be gone. Again, you will have duplicated it – a perfect duplicate.

Now, one of the ways to do this: You say, "Can I have an appointment with you? Let's make it at 2:05 this afternoon."

The definition of a perfect duplicate is creating a thing again in its same time, in its same space, with its same energy, mass, motion or continuance. Now, that's a perfect duplicate. For instance, if we looked here at the front of the room, 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, conceive ourselves to have made it. Just conceive ourselves as creating it, in other words – just no more and no less than that. And, of course, it would get rather thin. But to some who are having a rough time with conditions of existence, it will 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 it is immediately subjected to and can be subjected to a very exacting proof.

"Hell, no!"

All right. Now, let's look at this very carefully and let's look at what reality is. Reality is a postulated reality. Reality does not have to persist to be a reality. The condition of reality is simply isness. That is the total condition of reality.

See? I mean, that's upsetting.

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.

That's why, when you pick somebody up off the street, you don't tell them to come around to see you later at your office. You've undoubtedly picked up somebody who has attention on the subject of postulating time. The thing for you to do is to take him right over to your office, if you possibly can. You see that? Don't put something on the future time track for him any more than you can help, because the person who is really in difficulty, who has psychosomatic ills and so forth, has stopped postulating time. And the moment he stops postulating time, he doesn't have any.

But let us say we just, more or less accidentally, go into communication with somebody else, and we have an argument – that is to say, chitter-chatter back and forth – about what this thing is. If that other person perfectly duplicates exactly what we have created, it will again disappear. 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'll disappear for him.

Now, how much time has a fellow got and how much time is he rushing and how much time is he sitting still with? And all of this is all very interesting, except it depends on just this one fact: Your individual is or is not postulating time for himself.

So you and he had better alter this thing which you made so that you both can perceive it. And then we get what is known as an agreed-upon reality, and that is an isness with agreement.

Looking over a very busy career, I can see definitely the speed factor of composition as derived from strictly one postulate. I used to write about a hundred thousand words a month by writing three hours a day, three days a week. Now, that's a lot of words, but it never occurred to me that it was a lot of words. In other words, you simply postulate that that much action can fit in that much time. You postulated the time. There's nobody sitting there agreeing with you or disagreeing with. Actually, you're just walking free. Well, I might as well have postulated eight million words in one hour per month. I was just saying how much physical-universe time can be allocated to the time span which I am using in which to compose. You see that? You get that as a difference.

Now actually, the word reality itself is commonly accepted to mean "that which we perceive." Now, this, then, is the real definition for a reality – the one that is commonly used – and that would be an agreed-upon isness. An agreed-upon isness – that would be reality.

Now, let's take anybody out there doing a job of work, and we'll find something very, very peculiar. We'll find somebody who is just working like mad-he's just working, working, working, and he's just got to get it all done, he's got to get it all done. And the end of the day comes and he has nothing done. You know? It's all in a confusion. And he was awfully busy all day but nothing happened. Did you ever run into anybody like this, huh?

All right. So much for that.

And the next day he goes on and – oh, he's just so busy – he's just got to do this and he's got to do that. And he finally is sitting still, presenting a very funny and silly picture. He's sitting still, not even moving, not even talking, not even writing – accomplishing absolutely nothing – telling you how awfully busy he is and how he hasn't got any time. And he'll eventually collapse down to the point where he has no time of any kind whatsoever to employ on anything and that's why he's sitting there. But that's perfectly reasonable to him; that's perfectly reasonable.

We have another condition. A not-isness is a protest. The common practice of existence, of course, is to try to banish an isness by using it to destroy itself. They take a mock-up of some kind or another, such as a building or something of the sort, and they try to destroy it by blowing it down with dynamite or doing something like that. (I mean, it's a very practical application, this material I'm giving you. It isn't esoteric; it doesn't particularly apply to the engram bank. This is just existence.)

He'll get so he can't start anything. Why? He has no time in which to start it, much less to finish it. So he starts in originally by saying, "Well, I haven't got time to finish it," then "I haven't got time to do it well," then "I haven't got time to do it. I haven't got even time to start it." And then, finally, "I can't think about doing it."

All right. Is can be translated quite generally as "existence."

And that's what happens to a person's doingness. It's his ability to postulate the amount of time. And the only confusion that you would get into about this is the fact that we have an agreed-upon time span. But you might recognize that the time for an entire nation or an entire earth could thereby go awry.

All right. We get a not-isness being enforced upon an isness by the quality of the isness itself or by a new postulate by which the individual is saying "It's not there."

How much can you do in an hour? In an hour? What's an hour? An hour is the length of time it takes the sun to move fifteen degrees in the sky. The sun isn't doing anything. What's this coordination?

Now, this new postulate does not pattern the mechanics of the creation of the isness. See, the new postulate by which you simply say, "It's not there," doesn't pattern itself with the exact time of creation, the exact space, the exact continuance – same mass, same space, same time – and as a consequence, we say, "All right. It's not there." It will probably dim down for you, but you have to do something else: you have to put a black screen up or push it away or chew it up or do something to it here rather than giving it a perfect duplicate (which we'll get to in a moment). But we do something else here. We say," It's not there." And that's notisness. We say something doesn't exist which we know darn well does exist. See?

Well, you'll find out that when a country can still postulate time or a world can still postulate time, then, an hour would be a tremendous amount of doing-ness. They would have a festival at sunrise and a couple of games, you know? And then along about noon, why, have a feast. And that leaves them all afternoon – that leaves them all afternoon completely empty – and so that would be a good time to go boating so that they would have time in order to practice up for the dance they were giving that night. And then they'd finish up about midnight and say, "My, what an idle day!" This is the amount of time they could postulate in terms of doingness. Do we have time to do it or don't we? is the question.

Now, you have to know something darn well does exist before you can try to postulate it out of existence and thus create a not-isness.

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

Now, the definition of not-isness would be, simply, a definition of "trying to create 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 postulate or is trying to spray down something with the force of other isnesses in order to cause a cessation of the isness he objects to. And this is the handling of mass to handle mass, of force to handle force and is definitely and positively wrong if you ever want to destroy anything. That is not the way to go about destroying something; that is the way to destroy yourself, which is why nations engage in it. Force versus force.

Now, what is the – if it's a postulate, does it have an anatomy as such? Well, yes, it's a complexity of postulates, the way you look at it in this particular universe at this time, but not very complex.

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. Well, that's a very, very bad thing to do. Now, the truth of the matter is, if it were rendered this wise, it would have made much more sense: When you encountered 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, you see? So "turn the other cheek" is actually a very workable situation if it's simply translated to mean force must not be used to combat force.

Time depends on change. In order to have time, you have to alter things, because isness has a condition there – alter-isness. In order to get an isness to persist, you of course have to have something there about persist, which would consist of the time postulate. The way the postulates have gone together which make up this universe – not the theoretical way in which they could go together to make up a universe… Get this as a different thing. You see, you could go about this just all out in an entirely different fashion and postulate time and still have time, but it would not necessarily be the postulates which were made and are made and are in this universe right here and now. See? It wouldn't necessarily be the same set of postulates if we suddenly dreamed it up.

Now, the way to properly handle such a situation is just to duplicate it perfectly.

So we have to subject the postulates of time to a little subjective truth-proof, you know – and get ourselves a test on it. And we find out that we can make things persist by changing them. If we keep on changing something and change it and change it and change it and change it, we're getting persistence. But actually, what we're doing is postulating the time for it to persist in.

All right. Now let's go into this business of a perfect duplicate. A perfect duplicate, again, is, you might say, 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.

And when an individual has stopped postulating time, he's stopped perceiving. So perception and the postulate of time are identical phenomena. You see? Perception and postulation are the same thing.

Copy and facsimile, by the way, are the same words. But a facsimile we conceive to be a picture which was taken 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 copied it – he knows he's copying it. A facsimile can be made without one's knowledge by a machine or the body or something of that character.

You should recognize, very clearly, that time is a postulate. Because when you're working with a preclear who is having difficulty perceiving, you know that there is something wrong with the time postulate, therefore there is something wrong with change. See?

All right. This 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-isness. If we can recognize the total as-isness of anything, it will vanish. Sometimes if it had many component parts, we would have to recognize the total as-isness as including the as-isness of each component part of it.

Alter-isness is that part of the time postulate which we can most evenly and closely observe. And we find out that changing things brings time into being. It causes a persistence; we get a continuance of time by alter-isness. The mechanism of alter-isness gives us a perception of time.

Now, in that lies the secret of destroying actual matter. And actual matter can be destroyed by a thetan if he is willing to include in the as-isness – which he is now postulating toward any object which exists (toward any isness) – the as-isness of each component part.

We find out somebody who is in a state where he believes he is about to perish will then try to change everything in his vicinity, right up to the point where he knows completely that he is perishing, at which moment he will simply succumb – bang! – and he will cease to exist or persist, you know, as that particular individuality. And he as himself without that individuality will proceed on and pick up another body.

Now, let's look at that very rapidly and recognize here that a thetan created a mock-up and this mock-up was agreed upon very widely, and another process, alter-ism, which we'll go into in a moment, was addressed to it and it became more and more solid and more and more solid.

All right. We'll get the tremendous amount of change or accomplishment which has to take place immediately before death. Here we have people all around the place who aren't doing anything, their affairs are in horrible condition, they're out on the street or in businesses and so on.

And then one day somebody cut it in half and dragged part of it up the hill to make somebody's doorstep. And that's already, you see, out of location. Same place is part of this mock-up – same space, same place. So it's already been removed from the place it was mocked up, you see, and it's been moved up to the top of the hill. Now it's making somebody's doorstep. Now, those people themselves don't quite remember where the doorstep came from, if asked suddenly, but after a while these houses up there – and, by the way, just mock-ups like everything else – are torn down or something, and somebody picks up this doorstep and chews it up for road ballast; throws it out in the road to be used for road. And they make a road with it and it just runs just fine. Well, this is alongside of some wharves, and one day, why, the road is no longer being used – they now have a big, long steel pier or something that comes out there. And somebody uses a steam shovel to pick up a whole bunch of rocks and gravel and dump them into the hold of a ship which is going to South Africa or something of the sort, and it takes it down there. And they unload this ballast, and the natives use it to gravel the garden or something, and at length, why, there's a volcanic explosion; it's buried under twelve feet of lava.

Now, if we were to go up to these people, one after the other – you know, I mean, let's put on a – oh, carry a little black bag (I'd forgotten what galaxy I was in for the moment). That's the badge of office – a little black bag and a stethoscope. One doesn't quite know what one does with a stethoscope but it's interesting. A stethoscope won't detect whether or not a person is dead or not, you know, really – they often miss. It's not a reliable instrument, but it's a badge of office.

And time marches on, in other words. And this thing is getting more and more remote from its agreed-upon original position, much less its postulated moment – the moment it was postulated as related to the time span of the people who were agreeing upon it. You see, they've agreed upon a time span, so this thing is aging. And they agreed upon this space too, and it's getting moved around in this space. And here, atom by atom, as the aeons roll along, this object, which was part of an original mock-up, is now distributed all over the place.

A stethoscope is the dramatization of the serpent, of the caduceus. That's right. I'll have to write a paper on that. (Most acceptable thing I could possibly write for the AMA.)

It'd be fairly hard to trace unless you suddenly took a good look at it and sort of ask it, or located it easily.

Anyway, we have the little black bag and we go up to this fellow and we say to this fellow, "My dear fellow, I must inform you," having tapped the stethoscope against his chest, so he knows he's being hit by a snake (I think that's about it – yes, I'll have to write that paper). Anyway, we tap him and we say, "Oh! We have just learned through this diagnosis that you only have three months to live."

Now, conservation of energy blows up if anything is created in the same time and space. In view of the fact that the time itself is a postulate, it's very easy to reassume the first time of anything. Just like you ask a person in Dianetics to go back to the moment when. Well, he could reassume the time. And if you would also ask him to go to the moment when and the place where – if we had just added that – and then said, "Okay. Now, duplicate it with its own energy," why, it would have blown up. And this, by the way, runs out engrams and it blows up engrams like mad. It is not a process that we would use today, particularly, but it's a process that you should know about.

The funny part of it is you'll see a busy man, promptly. He'll really get busy. Well, he'll sit down in a slump, you know, for a moment or two – that's just the impact. And then he'll say, "Let's see. Time. Time. Oh! Alter-isness, alter-isness, alter-isness, alter-isness, alterisness, alter-isness, alter-isness," you know, change – "I've got to get my will straight, I've got to get this straight, I got to get that straight and I got to get Mary moved out of that house into the other house which I've been building. Gotta have this and that." And the months go by and the months go by and the years go by, and he's still alive.

So a person, to create an as-isness, would have to create the as-isness of the object itself and all of its parts. And only at that moment would he escape the law of conservation of energy.

"Well," you say, "the doctor was wrong." No, the doctor wasn't wrong. As of that moment, the experience of the doctor demonstrated to him that people who had this illness (who had not been told that they had only three months to live) died in three months. What he's left out of it is the factor on people who have been told they only have three months to live. You tell somebody that he only has three months to live, and he will, of course, throw into gear – or not to necessarily say that he would throw into gear, but he could throw into gear – the only mechanism available to him to cause persistence in this universe, and that is alter-isness. And he would change, change, change, change, change, change, change, change, change, change, change.

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.

He right away has got to change his condition; that is the first thing he thinks of. You think that this is just natural that he would do that. No. We're talking on a higher echelon of philosophy. You tell him he's only got three months to live. "This is an unacceptable fact to him," you say, "and so therefore he's got to change his condition." No, worse than that – worse than that. He's got to change his condition. If he has no time persistence, he has got to change his condition. The one thing with which he can gain persistence is alter-isness. If he would simply change the furniture around in his office he'd live better. I mean, he'd live a little longer – the amount of change – because he can do that successfully.

And in view of the fact that you'd have to make as many as-isnesses as there are the atoms in the object, why, it looks awfully complex, unless you could span your attention that wide and that fast. And of course, at that moment, why, it would blow up.

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

Therefore, conservation of energy is exceeded. It itself is a consideration.

Now, unsuccessful and successful are themselves postulates. You know, "I am this individual, and this individual is supposed to persist." You could just as well say, "I am this individual and therefore this individual is not supposed to persist." I mean, you could make up your postulate that way just as well as the other way.

Now, we've taken care of as-isness by this mechanics of a perfect duplicate. As-isness would be the condition created again in the same time, in the same space (same place), with the same energy and the same mass, the same motion, in the same time continuum.

But the accepted chain of considerations which go in to make up art criticism, appreciation, win-lose and so on – we just have a set of considerations. And we say, "Well, they are successful changes as long as the individual is doing it, and the changes are unsuccessful as long as somebody else is doing it." And that's very much a part of the win-lose factor and of the time factor, too. That's self-determinism. One merely has made the postulate that as long as one does it one is successful. You know, as long as one is able to accomplish the postulate, this makes up win. "I am now going to pick up my right finger. I won!" You see? "Picked up my right finger; I made the postulate good."

The same time continuum is only incidentally important. It comes up as importance when you're crossing between universes. And particles do not cross between universes. A particle is only as good as it is riding on its own time continuum. You destroy the time continuum and, of course, no activity can take place from that moment forward. That's completely aside from this. I mean, here's group A and they made a set of postulates which gives them certain energy and mass, and over here is group B and they make a certain set of postulates. Unless group A and group B get together and mutually agree to accept each other's masses, why, you just would never get to a 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. See, he has to be around, at least by agreement. And we get a time continuum. We get a continuous consciousness.

Well now, what's happened to the preclear is, he has made the postulate and then something has contraried the postulate to such a degree that he is fixed; he is fixed, he cannot change. You see?

Now, it's this thing that they talk about when they talk about cosmic consciousness, which is a very, very fancy word for saying "Well, we've all been here for a long time." We could translate it much more intelligibly that way.

When he makes the postulate, it just works out – in this universe; not necessarily the most theoretical or most optimum setup you could make, but in this universe it just happens to work out that this is the way it was. When you made a postulate and then didn't accomplish the goal postulated in that postulate (remember you were postulating time to postulate a goal), when you were unable to reach that particular attainment, then, of course, you hadn't changed anything.

All right. Now, let's take this as-isness and let's discover that if a thing will disappear, if a mock-up will disappear – and that too can be subjected to proof very easily – if a mock-up can disappear simply by creating it in the same time, in the same space, with the same energy and same mass (in other words, just repeat the postulate, you might say), if it'd disappear the second you applied as-isness, then people start avoiding as-isness in order to have an isness. And that is done by alter-isness.

Well, the way you could make time was by changing the position of something, and that's the way time is made in this universe: change the position of something in space. Time is made by changing the position of something in space. And so we get all of the neutrons and the morons vibrating at a vast rate of speed, but a uniform rate of speed, changing their position in space. And then we can look around at several of these particles, such as the sun, Earth and other things, see that they're changing their relationships to each other in space at a uniform rate, and having perceived this, why, then, of course, we are looking at a change in time. Change of position brings about time.

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. Then when this universe of lies compels you to tell its truth, we can get very confused. We go 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 wrote this and maybe he didn't, and maybe the material came from there and it came from there" and boy, are they giving him survival.

There is no such commodity as time. It isn't anything that can be poured from one bucket to the other. But then this happens to be true of matter too. You can't pour matter from one bucket to another, actually, unless you first made a postulate that you could. And in such a wise, time cannot take place until a postulate is made concerning it, and in this universe the postulate had to do with change of location in space. And when change of location in space occurred, then time occurred.

Why? Survival itself is dependent upon alter-isness – a-1-t-e-r. Alter-isness. In order to get an as-isness to persist, it is absolutely necessary, then, 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-isness will bring about a noneness – bring about a disappearance. In other words, a return to basic postulate. See? 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. You'd just have to obscure the devil out of the source in order to get a persistence. You see that? You'd have to say it came from somewhere else, by somebody else.

Well now, you could change something's location in space simply by lying about it, and you'd get a persistence. You'd come off as-isness. Now, the moment you change something's location in space, you come away from as-isness, and it doesn't unmock, so you get persistence.

Now, you see, people have done this with such things as Dianetics. The last rave I read on this subject claimed that it was really invented in the late part of the eighteenth century by a guy by the name of Hickelhauser or Persilhozer or something. This is a fact. I mean, here we had something which could be un-mocked very easily because it was set up to be unmocked – see, just set up to unmock. Very, very easy to simply say that its as-isness was such-and-so and so-and-so, and it would have practically disappeared if you'd continued to assert that its as-isness was what its as-isness was.

Now, an individual is as well off as he can change things in location in space. Let's take up the Prelogics and we find out the Prelogics – those that precede the Logics and Axioms – have to do with "a thetan is an energy-space production unit and that a thetan can change objects in location in space." And right next door to that, we have the fact that a thetan can create objects to change in space of his own creation. In other words, he can do all of these things, and we get that, in this universe – and this is pretty common to most universes – we get those postulates as the conditional postulates upon the universe.

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 have altered it, we would have had to have entered the practice of alter-isness. Now, we begin alter-isness and we have the thing persisting. Something will persist, then, only so long as it is not perfectly duplicated – which is to say, its as-isness isn't recognized. You see that? So that if we try to alter something bad, we'll make it persist, one way or the other.

Now, he makes another postulate and that other postulate, of course, is that something can persist and that there is a time stream, that there is a persistence and so on. And this postulate is represented as time. So when we locate something in space, we are actually working with the time postulate: persistence.

But don't think that if you're going to alter something just as-is we will get an isness. Anytime we practice alter-isness on anything, what do you know? We will get an isness, whether it's bad or good, beautiful or ugly. Whenever we practice alter-isness, we are going to, then, get a persistence of the condition.

If you see somebody who has failed often, what do you mean by failed? He has decided to move something in space and then hasn't. Total anatomy of failure: He has decided to move something in space and then hasn't. The way it's recognized in this universe, that's the total anatomy of failure.

Now, this is about the highest common denominator that you could talk about this on. So that if you knew this data you could, however, practice alter-isness. Oh ho! If we just took an ax and took a long, sharp heave and blew the whole thing up in smoke – bang! Ax blade went all the way through.

Of course, he could simply postulate that he'd failed. So that's another anatomy of failure. He's always free to do that. You can, yourself, do that, not to run out anything or anything of the sort, just simply say to yourself that you failed, not for any cause, reason or anything else. "I failed and therefore I have to feel a certain way," and so forth, and then feel that way. You could. Or you could simply postulate, "I've won." Not won anything, you understand, you just postulate that you've won now, and the conditions of winning are feeling good, which is part of the woof and warp of postulates, and therefore "I feel good"– having given you a reason to feel good.

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

Or why don't you just postulate that you feel good? It doesn't matter where you enter into this. There is no sensible concatenation here. We are only talking about an agreed-upon concatenation.

The cycle of existence is, then, for a static to consider an isness as an as-isness. See? It just says "There is." That's as-isness. And then to alter the as-isness, even to his own recognition, and obscure his knowingness as to that as-isness to procure an isness. That having procured an isness, he usually can be counted upon, sooner or later, to practice a not-isness. And not liking the results, since what he – the isness he was contesting, you see, doesn't disappear. It simply hangs up and he gets unhappy about it, you see? He now would practice a new alterisness – which would get a confirmation of the not-isness he now has – which would then persist. And we find out that life can enter itself upon a very, very dizzy cycle. The new isness is treated with an alter-isness, is followed by a not-isness and is followed again by a new condition, which is persisting – a new isness. And so we get this back and forth and seesawing around.

This universe and the postulates which formed it is not necessarily the best universe that could be made. It just happens to be the universe we're sitting in and it happens to be the universe in which our postulates are being made and unmade, and it just happens that it went together on these four conditions of as-isness, alter-isness, not-isness and isness. So we've got these four conditions, and those four conditions, of course, woven together, make this universe act like it does and behave like it does and gives you the ideas of what a win is and what a lose is and so on. It's on a postulate basis.

Now, this depends upon a basic postulate that we agree that things proceed in a fairly orderly fashion or a uniform rate of spacing or at speed or at tolerance or something of the sort. Time has to be entered in there. And we must have had a postulate right in there ahead of all of these isnesses that would determine whens. And in the absence of that one, you'd got no time continuum, so there'd never been any such thing as a persistence. So time fits right in there.

But the most curious manifestation of all of this is the manifestation of time. And that is our main interest here this morning. And we have this matter of time occupying a considerable space in the field of aberration. And that is because of this: It is the one postulate where an individual begins to depend on other-determinisms more than any other way.

Now, do you see this progress of these various conditions?

You see, we see the sun moving and we take the cue from the sun as to how much time we have. We see clocks moving and we take the cue from them as to how much time we have. That tells us how much persistence we have. Oh, so we're being told by these objects whether we can live or not, aren't we? That's just the most curious of things in this universe, that one would take his clue as to whether or not he was going to persist on whether or not the sun moved a certain direction or distance. That's idiotic. So the sun did figure eights. If I'm not dependent upon the sunlight, I'm certainly not going to die just because of that.

I think that the problem of existence now narrows down just to this: an examination of the actual agreements of time to blow all the conditions of isnesses. But the agreements as to time itself are conditional upon what was created in the time stream, and we get basic postulates in there, resistant to all effects, as being time itself. Resistance to all effects.

And a thetan is not dependent on sunlight. Quite the contrary, a thetan is dependent for his good health on manufacturing his own jolly old energy; he's not dependent on the sun manufacturing his energy for him. That's just an intricate hook-together. And that, again, depends on postulates.

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

Well, now, the postulate of time could be simply, cleanly made in some universe, and say," Well, there will now be a continuance for one and all," and that would be that. But that wasn't the way it was made in this universe. It was made on the basis that when as-isness is postulated, in order to get a persistence we have to practice alter-isness. We'll have to change the thing in location, one way or another, in order to get a persistence.

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

Did you ever have somebody move a postulate with a mass of energy around? He starts moving it around and the energy mass starts disappearing.

But what started disappearing? It was the energy mass, wasn't it? Hm? It was not the postulate, particularly. He just got used to that postulate and he finally took it over as his own postulate. So what!

Now, therefore, a person can invert in this universe, and we run into isness followed by not-isness. A person can finally say, "Well, if I move something around, it'll disappear." He's made it a counter-postulate.

Well, he's perfectly at liberty to make a counter-postulate, but it isn't the postulate on which this universe is made. This universe is rigged so that that postulate will avail not to an individual. You know, that's part of the considerations that make it up: that if you've got something and then you say it doesn't exist, you're stuck with it. That's this universe.

Now, alter-isness produces two types of persistence: we get persistence as isness and we get a persistence as not-isness. See? The fellow is persisting, but he doesn't want to be there. Well, he's persisting because he doesn't want to be there. This, too, is a change, although he's fixed in a locale. Now, there's the fellow who is persisting because he wants to be there and he's persisting because of change.

They're both alter-isnesses. An individual's desire to change continues his persistence in the spot he's in, if he cannot move. But he had to postulate that he couldn't move before this could happen. So we get the dwindling spiral.

Now, we also get the manifestation of accumulating energy on a preclear. Every time a preclear has said, "Now I am going to move," and hasn't moved, or he says, "Now I am moving and I'm going to continue moving," and he's stopped – you know, such as you're walking down the street and you walk into a lamppost – any time this has occurred, he has lost, which is to say, he's got a counter-postulate. So he adds up loss as stationary.

This universe, you see, brands everything which isn't moving as innocent, and the things that are moving are guilty – always. So he's lost.

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

Now, an individual who is unable to move objects out of a certain location, eventually gets to a position where, when he's trying to move these objects out of this location, he recognizes a failure, and so he goes into apathy. He says, "I don't have enough energy to do this."

What nonsense! He doesn't have energy enough to move energy? Why doesn't he just postulate it someplace else? (But that's another thing.) He could say it is as it is and it would disappear, and then he postulates existence someplace else and then change that around so it couldn't be disappeared again, and he'd be all set. What's he doing picking things up?

Now, a drill, however, in moving things and putting them back in the same place again will run out this consistent, continuous failure, and so you get Opening Procedure by Duplication and its tremendous effectiveness. If it's done with a little bit heavier object than is ordinary, an individual recognizes he can even pick up and put back into place the same object and win, not fail: you've changed the basic postulate by which he's working in this universe, which is to say, if he can't move he's failed.

All right. However that may be, we have these various conditions. And the point we want to drive home, immediately and right this minute, is that time depends, in this universe, on alter-isness – at least the desire to change. So anybody who is desiring to change is persisting in time. And people who do not want to change, and so forth, do not persist in time.

The whole universe is rigged around these postulates.