This is the fifth evening and the first lecture of this last evening of this series.

The genus of computation, then, is: "Is there a hidden influence or isn't there a hidden influence?" In other words, "I don't know and I'm not sure." And the way to — and the way to set up, then, and run out all the computations in the bank would actually be to run up this doubt. "Is there a hidden influence?" versus the doubt, "Is there a hidden influence?" Double Terminal, in other words, as thought. "Is there or isn't there?"

I'm going to talk to you tonight very swiftly. In two hours I'm going to cover the technique which we will call Standard Operating Procedure Utility and give you the basic modus operandi of how you become things and what the most general fear is with regard to living.

The darnedest things will fall out in the fellow's lap because you've just pulled the bathtub plug on every circuit he's got. Every circuit he's got is based upon that thought: "Is there a hidden influence or isn't there a hidden influence?" And what do you mean by hidden influence? That — it means communication, then, that means beingness. "Is there, in that blackness, a beingness I do not know about?"

In other words, in these last two lectures, this last two hours, I'm going to try to cover with you what man has been trying to find out for an awful long time.

Now, I'll tell you about blackness. You have a lot to do with blackness, a lot of worry about blackness. Why? Because blackness is hard to tell apart; therefore, it identifies with each other.

When you know you know this material, you'll know that you know. It's very simple material.

You want to know why you want an identity? Why you're carrying a face around? You know a face is a terrible liability, like fingerprints — bad liability.

We have here, first and foremost, how you become and why people don't become.

The soul doesn't have a face; it doesn't want one. You don't even want to concern yourself for two seconds with this idea of an identity, "My name is Jones," and yet you think it's terribly desirable. You actually have this feeling, an enormous desire to have an identity.

All right, what is the modus operandi of becoming? How do you become something?

What happens to a man who is trying to get famous? You know, for a long time I've been scared stiff that somebody someplace or other would really nail down this work. And sure enough, once in a while it kind of starts to happen this way. And that's because they might as well take you out and shoot you.

Well, you know how you become something. You study. You apply your-self. You get some influential friends. You inherit some money. You do other things. And if you do all these things well and if you have a good honest face and your service record is good and your fingerprints aren't on file in too many places you will become something.

Identification is solid, immovable, not fluid, has nothing to do with motion. I'm very fond of motion. I like to move around. And what do we find here when we — when we get identification? We find no motion.

Well, that's — that would be nice if it were true. It would be very nice if it were true, because you have two billion Homo sapiens currently engaged in following that modus operandi. You also have an enormous number of insane asylums and prisons. I wonder if there's any coordination between those two facts?

Well, why would you want to saddle yourself with this? Why would you want to saddle yourself with this identity? And what is this thirst for identity, and what is this thirst for fame? And what is this ambition "I've got to amount to something. I've got to be something."

Unfortunately, for Homo sapiens, his modus operandi of becoming is just about as reverse-vectored as you could get. He's mired down in the MEST universe, and he thinks he has to follow the course which led MEST into being MEST.

Was it something somebody implanted in you? No, it wasn't. You did it yourself.

Now, you understand that we have scouted and plotted, and in the work which has preceded this work, we have a very complete map, really, of how MEST became MEST. We know the basic thing: the thought, then some space, then some terminals and lines and particles and then we get counter-action between two terminals and they get driven tighter and tighter together. And then they know they mustn't be each other; and then the next thing you know, they are tighter and tighter, and it goes right on down the line. That's the dwindling spiral.

You could say this: The whole thing is done by mirrors. It's all done by mirrors. You'll find your preclear, by the way, sitting around with mirrors around him. If you wanted to really startle your preclear, you say, "Look to the left and right and tell me what you see?" And a lot of your preclears will suddenly say, "You know, I see a . . . There is a mirror sitting down on the floor, and I am reflected in it." He'd say, "I never noticed this before. Why, there's one out in front of me! Why, there's one behind me."

Well, that winds up, evidently, in conservation of energy. Winds up in the laws of physics: interaction, laws of motion, all that — inertia, so on. These things all evolved from that upper line.

There sure is. Now, I've never mentioned this little phenomenon because it worries people to death and I couldn't give you an accurate rundown on how to use it or what it was. That's the way you kind of double-terminaled things, once upon a time. Mirrors rub things out. Instead of using a felt on the blackboard, all you do is use a mirror on the facsimile and it rubs out. You can mock up mirrors and make mirrors and they'll do this trick. People think they can't make these mirrors anymore; therefore, they've got to have the facsimiles. They — it sounds very incredible but they are — these mirrors sitting around.

And if you want to have some fun sometime, why, take a week off, and just plot for your own satisfaction from that, on your own initiative, just how it came about from these basic principles and you will see that it is really quite simple.

Now, the one thing that a mirror could never differentiate very well was something black because you didn't want to put the mirror up to it because you didn't know quite where the blackness started and where it ended and how deep it was, or anything else. You couldn't tell about this blackness!

Having evolved this, it is going to take me probably the next twenty years to write enough material on various subjects in order to cover behavior aspects in man and in the physical universe. It's probably going to take me that long to do that because there's a terrific amount of complexity comes out of this little simplicity. And the background data which I have accumulated makes it necessary that I go ahead and do that just as part of the responsibility.

Furthermore, you're continually liable to this: Something is liable to reach out of the blackness and grab something that's yours — no good, no good at all. So this stuff blackness is something you stay away from.

But as far as the overall look is concerned, it's very simple.

And if you face blackness and push against blackness, you are a mirror, you see? In essence, you are a mirror. So what's it look like? It looks like if you push against the blackness, the blackness is pushing against you. And if somebody can sell you on the idea — just overbalance it slightly — that the blackness is pushing against you, you will then fight evil. You will fight blackness and fight evil and that will mean a closure of terminals with everything bad. That's all anybody has to do is come along and say, "There's something bad about something or other" and immediately somebody will start fighting it. And then he'll wind up with it.

Now you see, then, that the track of evolution from space, terminals, "Let there be light," and so on, right on down along the line to hard matter and no space and great value and everything scarce, you see that agreeing with this modus operandi will of course take you right straight on down the line on a dwindling spiral until for all intents and purposes, you aren't.

Blackness, blackness. Why does your preclear have blackness sitting above his head? Well, one of the things is he's liable to put blackness above his own head. Why? He wants to be a hidden influence, that's what. He wants to be a hidden communication line and he'd just love to operate as he's operating, and go right on and somehow or other survive it, although he knows there's bad liabilities to it. And he's put the blackness above his head to protect himself. Against what?

You see how that would be?

Against a mock-up that has been used on him: God. "Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take . . ." and a kid starts screaming quietly inside him-self and he says, "My God, I thought things were bad enough in this universe, but now, by golly, something's going to reach down out of the night sky and pick my body up and cart it off and I'll never get it back, and I like this body." That's the way the kid interprets that sort of a nonsense.

If you agree with the MEST universe, you're agreeing with this modus operandi. And if you agree with this modus operandi, then you can become the MEST universe under compulsion of agreement. Do you see that?

And the Devil — the Devil is down below. All religions, primitives and so forth — there is Yamalek a queen of the underearth, and so forth. This devil has this approximation just everywhere! Oh, you've got this devil as a standard idea all over the place, and he always lives under the ground. And he's liable to reach up out of the ground and grab you and drag you down into the ground so you'd better put a lot of blackness under you, and then he won't find you. So you see, blackness is desirable; it hides one.

By agreeing with the MEST universe continually, you also pick up the compulsion to hold off anchor points, to defend, to protect, to get in there and fight, to keep terminals apart, to criticize, evaluate and flounder around like mad, and never find any peace of mind, but find less and less and less peace of mind, until you find your entire environment is falling in on you!

From what? From hidden and mysterious influences. What kind? The kind you can't be sure whether they are there or not. So to control people, to get them to computing, to nail them down, to pin them in one place and so forth, you just give them some kind of a fancy stock story about "There may be a hidden influence there; there may be not a hidden influence there."

You can't hold those anchor points out there anymore. The horrible joke is there were no anchor points to hold out there.

It's a very strange thing that the Western civilization at this particular time is fixed upon a particular god who is kept in a trunk. But it's a funny thing but they just don't even have a good identification for this particular being.

But this is — this by the way, as a highly generalized solution, has been tried many times. There are many people who have come up in the last few thousand years and said, "All is illusion, all is illusion, all is illusion, God is good." And they buried them, too.

It's fabulous, fabulous. You go from religion to religion and everybody says, "This is a Christian religion." And every one of them tells you something different about this hidden influence.

The agreement with the MEST universe — well, you had to know what you were agreeing with before you knew whether or not you were agreeing with it! Well, that's why we've got a map. We've got a good map. And therefore, it really isn't dangerous for you to approximate the MEST universe. Not if you know how the MEST universe works. Not if you know what human behavior is and what energy behavior is in relating to it, then it doesn't become dangerous even vaguely, to play along with any part of this. You can do anything you want with it.

"Is it a good influence or a bad influence?" Well, people will argue about this, and argue and argue and argue. The whole civilization — throughout Europe and America — went mad over this, and have been crazy on the subject for a long time. They're not near as mad as they used to be.

Just because you have a bottle of milk sitting in front of you is no reason why you mustn't drink the milk, you see? If you have a bottle with "contents unknown" sitting in front of you and you say, "Well, am I going to take a swig of this or am I not?" you're in the same frame of mind as most people are with regard to MEST: "Should I own it or shouldn't I? If I do, what'll it do to me?" You know, big doubt, uncertainty.

But two thousand years ago, twenty-five hundred years ago, you wouldn't have heard much of this sort of thing. You'd have heard much more about — arguments about whether or not — whether or not the bird flying overhead was carrying a message from some spirit.

But if you know it's a bottle of milk, you can go ahead and drink it. And if you know it's a bottle of poison, you can throw it in the garbage. That's about all there would be to it in the line of thought.

You would have heard a lot about that. But you wouldn't have heard about a mysterious, outright hidden influence.

But if you thought that there was always going to be something unknown about it then you would always be in the position of a man sitting at a table, looking at a bottle, "contents unknown," and you'd be trying to look into that bottle to find out what was in that bottle. Should you drink it? Should you throw it in the garbage?

In other words, I want to impress upon you that this is a new idea. It is a new idea! It is not an old idea, and it is not held in common with the greater part of the peoples of the earth — that God is something that exists every-where and is above your head. That's a new idea. And that the Devil — the Devil is always underfoot and is about to grab you. That is not an old time-worn idea. But primitive peoples will cook this other one up.

And that is what is known as a maybe. And a maybe is a double flow, or a controversion, to such a degree that an individual is hung up on it. And the anatomy of maybe is the anatomy of procrastination and suspense and duration, and all the rest of these things. Maybes dissolve because energy dissolves under the impact of admiration. You can admire anything that is enduring and it'll fall apart. Stop admiring my car out there!

Well, what do these ideas come from? Why do we have, though, this kind of an idea of influencing spirits above and below and on every side — these hidden influences? And what's this got to do with you wanting an identity? Well, if you have an identity, then such a god could get you, couldn't he, if you have an identity. So therefore you don't want an identity but you have one, and you have a desire to be identified.

Now, here we have then — we see this anatomy of maybe. "Should I drink it or shouldn't I drink it?" Now, what state do you find — well, let's be real blunt — what state do you find all of your preclears in? You find one in one peculiarity and another one in another one, but there's one thing that is common to every preclear, and that is he's sitting on the middle of a maybe. He has an uncertainty.

Is it something anybody did to you? No, it's a mistake I'm afraid we all made, a very simple error. What this — you see, a person could be extremely religious and not buy this particular deity. It's a very funny thing, but you don't have to buy this deity at all. He's a highly specialized deity. As a matter of fact, oh, I'd say something on the order of three-quarters of the people on earth don't happen to believe in this kind of a god today, so it's specialized.

Now, you could flounder around and you could resolve several uncertain-ties out of his life, and what do you know, he becomes more certain. And when he becomes more certain, he is more able to act. And as soon as he is able to act, then he is well. Now there, as far as you're concerned is — ever since we had Technique 80 (we have tapes of that here) we've known this is the case.

But, all deities and all devils and all spirits have this in common: They're liable to come in from somewhere and grab you. And then what — then what we're arguing about is — when we argue about deities and devils and so forth, we're really talking in terms of somebody trying to make a physical actuality out of something which would never present a physical appearance. Isn't that odd?

If you could resolve a maybe, why, you were in good shape; or if you could just make him ram through some communication lines to some doubts. The second he'd run his communication lines out to his injured knee or some-thing of the sort, he was in communication with it, why, pow! he didn't have any injured knee anymore. You should test this sometimes just as a basic peg on which so many of these discoveries are founded. If you throw a communication line into some part of the body which is ailing and just insist that the line go there and the line come back from that part of the body to you — just insist upon it — you'll see pain blow up. It just — it just disappears at an awful rate of speed. And this is communication. So communication was important. I found out empirically that communication was more important than anything else.

In other words, you do not have to call yourself "irreligious" simply because you don't happen to buy a materialistic god or devil. You'd say, "Well, I don't believe God or the Devil is made out of matter." That makes you more religious than the guys down the street because they claim that materialism is bad, and yet they have a materialistic God. Why? Well, he can grab you. He'd have to have something with which to grab you.

Actually, communication is more important than the maybe because the maybe would merely say, "Do I dare communicate with it or not?" That's all a maybe is.

This is interesting; you can go around and around on this one. I'm only stressing this at this time; I'm just threading this in sideways. You're much closer to a religion than man has ever been before.

So the fellow is in the halfs-twilight, the twilight of "maybe he'll communicate and maybe he won't communicate, and maybe he should and maybe he can't, and maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe," and there he sits.

All right, let's take this hidden influence. All right, it can most easily hide in blackness, can't it? So you've come along, time after time, you see this blackness and you don't want to get your mock-ups close to it, because it's — you're liable to get your mock-ups stolen. You don't want to put anchor points into it because they're liable to disappear.

And if his mock-ups are bad and he can't see them, he's sitting on a maybe, but he's also sitting on "Do I dare communicate with it or not?"

By the way, don't think it's peculiar that a fellow has blackness around him. You know, you can have black anchor points, blue anchor points, yellow anchor points, clear anchor points, orange anchor points — any kind you want. And black anchor points is routine.

Now, we know basically that space — and you can test this so easily — space is compounded from just a viewpoint of dimension. So if you don't have a viewpoint of dimension you'd kind of automatically be everything, wouldn't you? Unless you were holding down an arbitrary dimension that you said nothing else dare occupy. The second you were doing that you were saying, "Something can hurt me." Now, you see the difference there?

But you'd want a black anchor point to sort of shoot into that cloud of blackness and then bring it back and find out if there was anything in there. Let's penetrate that cloud of blackness and find out, because otherwise we couldn't perceive in there.

A fellow, he just doesn't bother to take a viewpoint of dimension. If he did that, he'd get this funny feeling of "Gee, you know, I'm just everything. I'm a whole universe," if he just didn't take any viewpoint of dimension at all. It's a strange state of mind. Well, people won't let themselves get into that state of mind because this is dangerous. They know that the second they did that, everything would move in on them right now! They never make the test.

What are you doing when you do that? You're saying, "Who are you?" "Who are you?" And of course, you always fail to find out because he isn't anybody. Because 99 percent of the blackness has nothing in it, so therefore you continually fail with this question "Who are you?"

There is an odd technique of simply letting go of what you're holding on to. You'll find the individual is holding on with great force on to various things in his body, and he knows that there's pressure there. Well, instead of letting him try to rub out this pressure, let him just let go of what the pressure is pressing against. You just sort of — it's just sort of a letting-go technique. It just sort of sorts it out. Well, you just stop his guarding, you stop his protecting. And what do you know, the second that he does this the pains go away. He just lets go of whatever is facing whatever is pressing, you see, because he's creating the pressure both ways. And when he discovers this, he thinks that something alien is pressing against him. Now, he doesn't even know that he's holding the thing which is being pressed against, and he doesn't realize that he's also the alien thing doing the pressing! And as a net result, he can get into a fine state of divided terminals.

And then you say, "Well go ahead and be something. What is this blackness?"

He says, "This is not me, this is me and I have to hold that off," and then he doesn't know that he is pushing that other terminal, pushing it in, and he's creating the pressure.

People talk about coming into the MEST universe. Their first warning about the MEST universe is the fact that a whole lot of blackness came over them and they were quite upset about it, and so they were scared. "Who are you?"

Fellow says, "I've got a terrible migraine headache and it just entur--serve me all — ." Why, he's the fellow who is holding the head in such a way that this pressure can come in and press against it. He's doing the pressing and he's holding the line so that it gets pressed against; he's doing both. And if you just simply ask him, "Will you please let go of the press-in?"

Now, if you asked this question and failed to find it out long enough, you'd finally wind up starting — asking yourself, "Who are you?" "Who are you?" "Who are you?" You'd go nuts, in other words, and you'd want an identity.

"Oh, I can't do that," he'll say.

You'd get an identity to demonstrate to the blackness that it should have an identity — there is only a kind of a reason there. But you're acting as a mirror. You're acting as a mirror. So the questions you ask of the blackness, if you fail, you will ask of you. And you'll say, "Who are you? What are you trying to be? What are you going to be?" Anything like that. And from that genus you get into the error of wanting desperately an identity, and wanting to be something! Because you want that blackness to be something, not to be that black nothing!

"Well, why don't you let go of what it's pressing against?" This is a brand-new thought to him. Yeah, this is a hidden one. He didn't realize he was holding on to that, so he lets go of that, and there will be a sharp flip as the motion moves on through. He's let go.

And that anxiety, you find a little child, he's going out "Who's in that night outside?" Show him the dark and he takes a look at that darkness and he says, "Hm, no! No, there's things in it."

What's he done? He's increased his beingness by taking responsibility for the terminals! That's all. He said, "I'm these two terminals." He hasn't really let go, you see? He says, "I don't want to be the two terminals." But he reacts best if you just sort of ask him, "Well, just let go of them." In other words, you're asking him, "Don't worry about them," and sure enough, that blows up. Now, that's just a test technique, but an interesting technique because it demonstrates so forcefully the basic truth of what we're working with here.

And if you observe a child in a primitive culture, if he has to walk abroad at night, "Who's there?" he will say around the corner of the roads and so forth. "Who's there?" And he might eventually wind up in this pure fright and he'll say, "Well, I'm here anyway." Well, then he'll start asking himself "Well, wait a minute, who are you?" Why is he asking himself that? It's merely because he asked out there. He doesn't care who he is.

Now, here the fellow, he's under terrible pressure all the time in the area of his chest, and he's not only doing the pressing, but he's holding the thing which it's pressing against. And he's doing both of these actions so he's having a terrific battle with himself! That's real cute. He's having a terrific battle with himself.

It's to his advantage not to have any identity. Identity is a liability.

Ran into a preclear one day, he said a thetan was attacking him. Well, that's fine, a thetan was attacking him, and it turns out to be that what was attacking him was the facsimile of their assumption of the body. They didn't want to be that thetan anymore, that's why they became a body, you see? So they didn't take responsibility for that area anymore, so they said, "It must be somebody else." And they were fighting themselves like mad.

You won't understand this, your preclear won't understand this completely until he double-terminals blackness — matches two black terminals, two black patches, each one asking the other one "Who are you?" And that is a technique right there; that is one of the things which you must do in this process is double-terminal two patches of blackness, each asking the other, "Who are you?"

In other words, they're just — this reminds you of — you've seen comedies, comedies where the lights go out and everybody goes sock, sock, sock and then when the lights go on again, all the villains are beating each other up, and the comedian has gone up on deck someplace, something like that, you know. Well, the comedian in this case is the hidden influence. The hidden influence has always gone up on deck somewhere and left you in there fighting you. Actually, there isn't a flatter statement could be made. That's just what's happening.

And the fellow will say, all of a sudden, "You know, I've been trying — trying to get an identity all these years, and I don't want any identity. I don't know what this is that just came over me, but I really don't want an identity!" Well, now, he doesn't have to understand this mechanism. That's what will happen to him. All right.

Somebody came along and said, "You better fight you," and gave you a good reason why, but he didn't tell you he was there telling you. And then he kind of slid away and you've gone on fighting you ever since, and you don't know that it's a comedy. It's rather a tragic, grim comedy when you see how far down the line an individual could go on fighting himself.

Then what's Standard Operating Procedure here? It concerns itself with primarily clearing up the thetan rather than stepping him out of a body. You are clearing him up and clearing up his universe. And that sounds very funny "clearing up his universe," but his universe is sitting right there — he's in it. He's sitting right there, and it happens to be in confluence with the MEST universe. And you're trying to square him around so he's got a recognition of his beingness.

But if you were to mock up the preclear punching himself in the nose time after time, he would eventually begin to laugh, because the truth of the matter is that's what he's been doing for just ages. He's been punching him-self in the nose continually. That's all he's been doing and that's all the pain and travail he has.

Of his identity? No, you want a high level of "I am" and a very low level of "I am Joe." You see?

It's very interesting, by the way, to get a preclear to look back over his track and see the number of things which have hurt him in life. You don't ever use a technique that evaluates and points out to somebody for some-thing. The hell with that! That's just phooey. That's going at it the hard way and the long way around and so forth. That's just no good.

And you want all that blackness out of there and you want all those anchor points under control.

You just sit there and you keep asking him if this means anything to him or how does he figure on that or what does something else mean to him, and if you do that long enough, he'll go blow his brains out. So it's not that it's bad it's just going to take you a long time. It's just not a workable technique.

Well now, the best ways to do this, you can get him out of a body, and so on. So therefore, the first step in this Standard Operating Procedure would be identical with the first step you have been using right straight along.

So where we have, then, a good technique — where we have a good technique is where the preclear fights it out himself and you just pitch in the suggestions of various things for him to sort of fight out himself. That would be a nondirective technique. That would be a — what's known as a permissive therapy. And the least directive, of course, a technique is, the better it restores the individual's self-determinism.

You just tell the thetan to be a couple feet back of his head, and operate him from there.

Now, the only thing that's been injured is his idea of his self-determinism, and if that's all that's been injured, then you'd certainly better not introduce anything that cuts him back down again. He's just fighting himself, that's all.

Now, do you run him with Double Terminals? Yep. You have him double-terminal things.

And you ask this fellow, all right, all these points in his life when he got into real trouble, and if he were going over this meticulously and you had all the data, you'd find out that he started each one of them. He has become in each case the effect of his own cause.

Do you operate him in locating himself throughout the universe in various dangerous places, and mocking things up to be them? Yes, yes.

You say, "Well, who else had something to do with this?" And the truth of the matter is nobody else! And it's the weirdest thing why this works out this way, but it works out this way with mathematical precision! It is a ghastly thing for a man to suddenly notice this! He just wasn't enough of things in order to keep the ball rolling. He limited his beingness for one reason or another, and when he limited his beingness for one reason or another, he was in the soup! He was no longer willing to be something!

Now, your second step that you would do would have to do with "mock-up of beingness." Mock himself up as this and that — double-terminaled. And you put him on an E-Meter, you'll find out what he's afraid to be. Then you have him make a double terminal of it out here until he's perfectly willing to be it. Now, you get that as a technique?

Well now, he might have had good reasons why he was no longer to be something. The — actually, he could have worked it out and said, "Look, I'm evaluating. I'm going to concentrate what I am doing over here, and I'm going to let that go." He can certainly expect to be kicked in the teeth by what he let go, because he simply said, "I'm no longer willing to be it" and it's going to kick him in the teeth. He's going to be in bad shape because of that.

Give him a run on the E-Meter and say, on the E-Meter — and he says well, one thing he's awful afraid of is, boy, is he scared of being Pop! "Ohhh! no, I don't want to be my father!" Well, if he doesn't want to be his father, he isn't going to step out of a body. The reason he isn't going to step out of a body is because he doesn't want to be something. The second he doesn't want to be something, you're going to get a double terminal setup that collapses terminals.

Well, sometimes, even when he knows this, he says, "Well, I'll let go of this thing anyhow and take the consequences and go along the line and finish this up."

If a person doesn't want to be something, he's going to become it. So therefore it's necessary for you to double-terminal Pop out here; double-terminal Father that he is trying to be so different about.

Actually, that's the story of most any man. He has abandoned something because he felt he should in order to give time and beingness to something else. And the society is pretty well rigged, the chips have been stacked, the cards have been cold-decked against him, so that actually the society itself was forcing him to make such evaluations and abandonments.

He doesn't want to be Father, so you want to get the people in this lifetime — for Step II — the people in this lifetime he doesn't want to be and just double-terminal them. He doesn't want to be Sister, he doesn't want to be Papa, he'd kind of like to be Mama. Well then, if he'd kind of like to be Mama, you going to double-terminal Mama? Skip it. He wants to be Mama, doesn't he? Therefore, Mama isn't particularly aberrative.

But it was he who made the first choice to be the thing which he is now going to abandon. And it's only because he made a choice to be it that he later abandons it. You see, he couldn't abandon something he never wanted to be. Nobody ever forced anybody to be anything. They just think they did.

He should want to be Papa, he should want to be everybody! He should be completely relaxed about it.

Well, what's this — what's this that's sort of going along, and making these people so confused then? They really cause their own grief. And you, by the way, you could set up an entire school of processing and so forth which would — simply said, "Man is the cause of his own woes," and when the pre-clear comes in, why, you say, "All right. Now you did that. All right. Now weren't you willing to suffer for it?"

Now, that would be Step II: is clean up the personnel that he doesn't want to be.

And the fellow would say, "Well, let's see . . ." And you could point this out and the next thing you know, why, you could have some terrifically successful thing going, because it would be a sort of a nasty, mean way to operate and your preclears would feel you must amount to something if you had that much right to insult them, and you'd probably be terribly successful. But anyway, anyway — the . . . You know, get them to confess. Anyway, when you — slow fuse.

And by the way, Step II, I point out, is the step you would enter automatically. You see, it's a very light step; this is not an important step. It's thetechnique you would use in an office on an individual who has some worries.He comes in and he says, "I'm worried." Well, if you want to gunshot out all those worries get him to double-terminal his wife facing his wife and just hold her there. He's a man; he's trying not to be a woman. The obvious part of his trouble is that. There's something he doesn't want to communicate with.

When you have — when you have a preclear before you, you are certain, then, of this: He's fought himself to a standstill. He — you can put that down as — when that guy, no matter what, you see, you're liable occasionally to get tipped over a little bit about a preclear. You're liable to get passionately enmeshed in his existence. The horrible things that have happened to him and the awful betrayals from which he has suffered are such that your sympathy gets elicited, particularly if you're sitting in the same kind of a chair in the same position as he is.

You can spot it on the E-Meter what he's particularly upset about communicating with. It will usually be an opposite-sex member, because he can't be them, therefore he has to stop their motion, and he's failed to stop their motion so he therefore doesn't want to be them. So if he doesn't want to be them, then he's going to have trouble with them. He doesn't want to communicate with them, but he has to communicate with them and this upsets him. So just double-terminal somebody like this. All right.

And you're liable to kind of forget where the roof is and so forth, and that's one — that little phrase — you put it down on your desk blotter or some-thing of the sort and take a look at it when you look at the preclear.

Let's go into Step III of this. And Step III is an important step and is consecutive with Step I. If he didn't step out on Step I, do Step III. And Step III is simply this: Make him double-terminal postulates; make him double-terminal the feeling of doubt against the feeling of doubt. Make him have — double-terminal the feeling of "I don't know" against the feeling of "I don't know." Get a feeling of "I've got to keep my pictures" against "I've got to keep my pictures." I've said this, you know, as being very aberrative — pictures.

Anything that's wrong with him, he caused it. Any fight that he's engaged in, he's fighting himself.

And they've got to — various things. And if you just look at him, you'll know that's — he's worried about something. You just ask him what he worries about.

You can write it down as a horrible condemnation that this preclear's worst enemy is himself. And what do you know, people throw that as an insult at people. It happens to be the truth! No one has any real enemy except himself when it comes down to this.

"Well, I worry 'cause I don't know, I think all the time. I worry all the time. I think all the time. I worry all the time."

The more you work on this, the more the macrocosm appears to be the microcosm — the more you work on it. So where we have a preclear who is in a sad state of affairs, he's fighting himself. What's that mean? That means that he has (1) been something which he now does not want to be. See, he's had to — assumed a terminal and then abandoned a terminal for something bad to have occurred. You know that, as the first — just one glance, that he's a man, isn't he? He's alive, isn't he? Well, that's — follows as truth; he's abandoned a terminal which he's had now — which he once assumed. And that he is fighting himself.

Well, you could even go so far as to just get himself facing himself worrying all the time. But just get the idea "worrying all the time" versus the idea of "worrying all the time." To a large degree, he'll stop worrying.

And that applies to a psychosomatic. He's holding on to what is pushing him. And by the way, all you have to do is get him into communication with the area, and he finds out he's holding on to it, he'll let go.

But what's at the bottom of that pile of worry? Is: "Is there a hidden influence or isn't there a hidden influence?" Now, you just face that thought facing that thought. Well, what could you do? You could say, "Is there a devil or isn't there a devil?" And he'd say, "Well, I don't worry about God and the Devil anymore. I used to do that when I was a little kid. But I remember I used to have nightmares about it, but I haven't worried about it for years. Ha-ha." Oh yeah?

Now, these are not terribly workable techniques, though. Why? Well, it's a funny thing about techniques, very funny. I have, well, I have a rather critical eye toward techniques. I generally look over what I dream up and label a technique. I generally test it. I know this is not customary amongst men but I have that peculiarity. Waste my time maybe, but I do that.

Well, if this fellow can't get out of his body, he's got a big, black, weighty patch right on the top of his head — pow! He put it there. He figured it out when he was a little kid. "Let's see, God's going to get me and grab my body. The best thing for me to do is to put a big, black patch over the top of my head and make myself invisible from above. I'll try anyway." It's silly — silly.

And I have found that in techniques, I have found, that there are techniques which you would think were just wonderful. I mean, you could sit down and you would be scribbling along and you'd be thinking about something, maybe working on a preclear, and you'd all of a sudden think of this gorgeous technique! Theoretically, it can't miss. It is the most marvelous technique!

So you would terminal, "Is there a God or isn't there a God?" "Is there a devil or isn't there a devil?" Just double-terminal this idea — this question.

Well, of course, it would be kind of embarrassing if you tried it on a preclear, because you might find it wouldn't work, so the best thing to do is not try it on the preclear. The best thing to do is write it up in a book and get it published by the Fairhope Herald, or something.

So that if you're dealing with computation, what you want to do is double-terminal questions. You see that? The questions he's demanding all the time.

And there are lots of these techniques. And just — I, by the way, I probably know five or six hundred of them; they don't work. That's all that's wrong with them.

So that tells you immediately that you take the bottom of the Chart of Attitudes on your Double Terminal questioning. You say, "Who am I?" versus "Who am I?" Or you'd get a patch of blackness saying to a patch of blackness, "Who am I?" versus "Who am I?" Just take the Double Terminal postulate idea on the Chart of Attitudes right there at the bottom. Bottom of the chart, bottom of the columns — those are very easy to run.

But, for instance, I'll give you a technique right now which is the most beautiful technique you've ever heard of. You'd just — you could just swear, I could tell you tonight, I could tell you, "Now, this is the highest echelon technique you will achieve. And this is the highest echelon. This happens to be true, this is the highest echelon technique. And this is what you'd better know and what you'd better practice."

Or any kind of a question you want or think of or anything this fellow tells you — worried about — you tell him, "Just put it up on the wall and make it face that."

And you'll all go out of here and you'd get a lot of preclears, and you'd try to run this and you'd try to run this, and you'd try to run this, and you'd say, "Well, damn it, it's obvious that's the technique. Why doesn't it work? It's so obvious that it's the technique!" You all — you're all going to agree with me in a second.

Now, you're going to take care of what we've been calling V Level Cases — we're not calling V Level Cases anymore. We don't care about classification of cases anymore, beyond this classification: You tell somebody to step out of his head; you work him there. If you tell somebody to step out of his head and he doesn't work there, you just work him where he is and then tell him to step out of his head. We really don't even need a step to tell you that he has to step out of his head.

This technique is you process out and concentrate on this fact: The one postulate that is back of the trouble with all postulates is the only one you process out of the preclear, and that is, "Postulates must endure!"

All right, your next step on the line after you've handled some postulates and so forth like that, you'll find out this — you'll find out that you bet-ter do, then, a mock-up of people grabbing his anchor points and so forth. And the technique is a very simple one. You just get people picking him up and dragging him away — double-terminaled, in the form of mock-ups. And then people pushing him back to himself again, in the form of the mock-ups.

And you think that over for a moment, you'll get the idea there, "Of course that must be the only technique, the only thing wrong must be that: postulates must have duration." Now, you could come up bright and smiling, you know, and hand out this technique to some poor guy. And he could go over here, and he'd just beat his brains out! There's nothing going to happen, just nothing. It's the awfulest blank you ever wanted to look into.

Just get them dragging in and pushing in — dragging out and pushing in his anchor points. And he has his anchor points. He's pushing in and dragging out anchor points. And then get him to work anchor points. And you'd call this step, the full step, the "work anchor points step" — you see, work anchor points.

I know hundreds of techniques like this. For instance, somebody came out and he said, "Well, the trouble with everybody is," he says, "they haven't seen the light. So what we've got to do is just make them see the light." Well, of course, if they make them see the light hard enough, they'll get them into an electronic. But it's a — but it's a beautiful technique. It sure puts people into apathy and you really can control them. Anyway!

And now, number two of that, of course, is very trivial. You don't care anything about mocking up members of the family — you can omit it. But it's a nice one to have around, because it's a good workable technique and people really react on it rather rapidly. And you're not interested in that technique, then, so much — number two.

The next — another technique there — there are lots of these things. You'd think that this technique would come right in on two terminals, and so forth. You feel that all you had to do is process out all the loneliness an individual had, with two terminals, and all you had to do was process out all the loneliness and he'd be all set. Phooey! Nothing happens!

But boy, are you interested in this fourth one I just gave you. Boy, you're really interested in that. And your — could be interested in it to this degree: When your preclear shows up, you start running this in all of its varied forms. Anything you can think of being taken away from him on a double terminal basis — anything you can think of.

So, it's not — it's not good enough to be theoretically perfect. That's not good enough. You can be theoretically perfect, your mathematics can be utterly without flaw, and you can be so far off home base that you'll want to go find Newton and the rest of the boys that invented these mathematics and shoot them dead.

And what do you call this whole step, this fourth step now? It's the resolution of loss, fear of. And that, of course, is the resolution of ridicule and betrayal. Loss, ridicule, betrayal — they're all done there in Step IV. And how do you do this? You just have people on a double terminal basis or things on a double terminal basis, any variety of things you could think of.

For instance, I just gave you that example, postulates must endure. That's obviously — out of that, then, must come terminals and space and energy, and that's why the MEST universe goes on and on and on, and obviously this is all there is wrong with a preclear is postulates endure. You'll find him worried about this, too, by the way. You'll go up to somebody and you'd said, "You know, I tell myself something and it comes true, and I do it. And I do it days later sometimes, and I don't dare say anything to myself because I take myself literally and I do it." Well, it's obviously number one psychosis. Only it won't process.

You see, I don't have to lay down a pattern for this because you could just take a dictionary and start running through a dictionary. You could take anything that gives you a list. And they pick up and take away from him an anchor point and hold it out there. Or they take it out there and they laugh over it or they wreck it or they do anything of the sort on a double terminal basis, you see?

All right, once in a while, by the way, you might — you might high-pressure some preclear into springing himself just by giving him that one. You can high-pressure him too into springing himself if you tell him "Now look, all that's wrong with you is — all that's wrong with you is you read advertisements and you believe them."

Any kind of a thing, whereby here's your preclear, and they pick up his body or his wallet or his cap or his automobile or his wife or his cow, or any-thing you want to think of in terms of — anything a person could possess, and they carry it away.

And he would say, "You know, that's true." Oh, he'd feel very reverent about that time. You'd say the — "You read advertisements, and when you were young you read advertisements and these advertisements worried you. And we just process out of you all your advertisements that you've ever read, and you'll be well." And if you told him hard enough, he'd get into a state of hypnotically believing he was well. That's kind of different, you know, from really being up there. All right.

And you know what you want to do as the roughest part of that step — and hold your hat on this step, and don't hit this step into a preclear who is bad off — is remember that the sixth dynamic is the main target. Take planets away from him and give planets to him. Planets are surrounded by blackness and planets are bright. They are apparently faces, and he has faces so tied in with planets that his interpersonal relationship is horrible.

Let's get back to this other now. What — what then establishes this technique? What establishes whether it's true or false? Well, it's whether or not it works on a lot of preclears. That's what establishes it.

For instance, he sat here and looked at the moon just for ages. There was the moon up there, see? And it's got hidden influences every — all over on Earth here primitive people such as the US Department of Agriculture believe in the hidden influences of the moon. You have the entire sexual cycle running on the hidden influence of the moon.

And do you know that there's techniques right above "mock-up beingness," and techniques right below "mock-up beingness," both of which appear to be more workable. But it was because of empirical tests of this whole range of techniques, see? There could be techniques of the echelon of lines, techniques of the echelon of terminals, techniques that had to do a little higher up with postulates. "Why did you have to have ideas in the first place? What are your originality," for instance, and so on. And "What about putting out anchor points and bringing them in again?" And the — "Where did you get the idea to do that?" You could go over this thing, you see, and you'd get lots of techniques that would lay out each one along this line, and then you could do something about solving it.

You know what you do with the moon? You just have people take the moon away from him, and people giving him the moon, and people taking the moon away and giving people the moon — double-terminal, you understand, either side — two people always, two moons always, in and out.

Well, where did it work?

Now, the first thing you know, he'd say, "You know, my — I — all of my sexual experiences . . . I just recall a whole lot of things. And you know, I think we've kind of solved this whole case because, you know, I can see the whole Freudian imputation and comfloration on the left-hand side of the ruddy rod here. And I've got it all figured out, and I'm just delighted and now that I have solved uh ..."

Well, the fact that it worked right there at the point of beingness showed up the fact that beingness and communication were the same thing! It was just this fluke that it showed up right there where it did, and it processes right there. It doesn't process any higher and it doesn't process any lower.

And you say, "All right, now. Get the moon and have them drag it out here."

Isn't that sad? Completely cut the throats of all future investigators. But they're going to come around and give you these techniques. You're going to hear about — all about these techniques just below that level, and all above these techni — . I've got them threadbare, looking for something.

"No, no! I've got to tell you about this."

Because look-a-here, it's obvious that everybody has to have lines. How does he get anything? Then it's very obvious, then, that if he has to have lines, the MEST universe is making him use sound, and that's not a — that's not a thetan communication line. So if the MEST universe makes him use sound, and he's really supposed to have an anchor-point communication line, obviously this error, then, would be the error you would process. And what happens when you do that? You'll find your preclear wound up in the grave of every ancestor he's got! You haven't got time.

But the point is that it just happens that sex was so hidden and misunderstood and not understood, that you get the principal hidden influence of night when sex mostly took place, and it's all locked in together. And is sex important in that regard? No! Not even vaguely.

Well now, you've got Admiration Processing. You've got admiration/ sympathy, and we can give admiration/sympathy to this fellow for being so dead in so many places, and so forth, and what do you know, we just find him in more graves. And he gets sadder and sadder, and there's more and more psychosomatics turning on.

What is important? The moon has gravity; it causes tides. A person actually can sense a change in his own body of gravitic influence. Anything that's got as strong a pull on Earth as to hoist twenty-eight feet of tide up in the Bay of Fundy — the — picks up the whole bosom of the ocean, lifts it into the air feet every time it goes by. You think your preclear sitting there isn't going to notice this? He's just been noticing it for a long time and he doesn't think he notices it anymore.

What's happening? These darn communication lines are popping open. He was smart, he had them shut down, and you're going to be awful dumb; you're going to come along and open them all up. Don't stand below a lake of ink and open the flood gates!

And you get planets in general, and the whole system of planets will start to unwind. And he'll start again a new yak. He'll tell you, "My golly, what do you know, I'm sure that I have crashed on a planet sometime or another. And he'll start to tell you all kinds of incidents of this and that.

Now you'll say, "Well, all this preclear has to do is to get rid of all of his blackness and teach him how to handle blackness and naturally his occlusion will go away." Well, obviously, obviously that would happen. Only it doesn't happen. He takes all the blackness that he had stacked up in the room and he puts it out in the front yard or something like that and then the next day, why, he's going to blow his brains out. Why? "Well, the blackness is now in the wrong place." So you put it back in the room and he's happier. So you see, that wasn't a technique.

And do you listen to these? No, you don't. Don't double-terminal crashing on a planet; just double-terminal up planets being taken away from him and planets being given back to him again.

It's — well, we're right on the groove, right on the line when we say that beingness is communication and that one can communicate only with those things which he's willing to be. And one fights or is afraid of only those things which he is not willing to be. And therefore, one will not communicate with those things which he is not willing to be. He will simply fight them. But this collapses his lines on them and he finds himself becoming them. That person becomes those things of which he is most afraid. Isn't that grim.

Now, hold your hat and don't run that on a case that's about to spin, because he'll really spin in on you. Now, that's the resolution of anchor points under that Step IV. Now, you could even call these techniques rather than steps and get away with it.

You'll find anybody — you'll look over the cells in teeth and that sort of thing. And they've really got postulates in them; it's kind of spooky. You'll find out the one thing that they're just frightened to death of, why they got those anchor points way in, just one thing: They're afraid of being a mouth.

Now, there's another one with that same step. "Throw two anchor points up to the ceiling and hold them there." And it's all part of the same step. You find out this person doesn't easily let things be taken away or pulled back or anything of this sort. Well, he's out of present time. You can give him some time on just putting up a couple of anchor points and holding them there. That's all under anchor points — that whole technique.

It is a universe which is driven together by terror; an emotion of terror of the like of which one has never really seen, unless he's got really down there and looked at it. You can say, "What in the name of Christ could every-thing have been so afraid of to have pulled in its anchor points this hard?" Your immediate assumption would be, "Gee, there's something really terrifying!"

Then what's V? V would be double-terminaling the body and doubleterminaling — guess what? The MEST objects which the body is ordinarily surrounded with because these are much more aberrative than the body.

Yes, there is. There is the terrification of being afraid of being afraid. They're afraid they'll be afraid.

He is in the body because he is protecting himself from walls, sofas, chairs, vases. I just demonstrated this a little earlier. We got action on doubleterminaling MEST objects, so number II is quite a different step than number V.

You go around to little boys and you ask them what are they mostly afraid of and they will tell you a lot of objects, but if you really want to get down there and ask them real quick, they're afraid of being afraid. Now, if you're afraid of being afraid of something, then you'll become afraid of some-thing and can get into a state of terror about nothing.

And number V is down there in logic because he's so mixed up in gravity and so mixed up in hidden influences and so mixed up in this other stuff that you've got to double-terminal the living daylights out of an awful lot of MEST objects before this person is even vaguely aware.

And what have they gotten into a state of terror about? What was there to be afraid of? Well, afraid of the idea that you might be afraid. And if you're afraid enough of being afraid then you'll become afraid, and if you become afraid then you'll — can be afraid of becoming more afraid; and then you'll become more afraid, and you'll get yourself up into a full state of terror and pull in the anchor points real tight; and you'll get smaller and smaller and hold on to what MEST you've got. And you'll organize it and you'll work harder and harder and get more and more logical and more and more logical and more and more logical and then you'll do nothing but work, work, work, work, work with no admiration whatsoever. And that's the cycle.

Your scale of ARC is the scale of how much MEST has entered into the eing. A person behaves like MEST low on the Tone Scale and behaves like a thetan high on the Tone Scale. So there's your Tone Scale. The Tone Scale is the gradient scale of the amount of MEST which has been entered into the beingness of a person.

It's not a very, very difficult thing to understand how this would come to pass. So, we have then .. .

MEST, of course, runs backwards. It does. And very low on the Tone Scale you'll find this. You start — tell him to start to put out his anchor points. And he says, "You know, the more anchor points I put out, the harder facsimiles push in against my face." Why is this? Planets, that sort of thing, have so often overcome his own concepts of height, gravity, control and so on, that at last his own anchor points are beginning to work backwards.

By the way — by the way, that's another one of these techniques, you say, "Gee, you know, that's a good technique! You just process out the fellow's fear of being afraid. Yeah, it gets the whole line."

When he says, "Out with the anchor points," they come in. When he says, "In with the anchor points," they go out. And he's gotten very upset, so he abandoned the use of anchor points.

No, it doesn't. I'm sorry. It's another one of those dead alleys that is probably going to appear in some doctorate thesis someday. Anyway We have this, then, "afraid of being afraid" as observable, but not reach-able because that's the reason techniques don't work. It obviously could be there, but it isn't reachable.

How do you cure this? You just throw them out and bring them in a few times, and he says, "They were running backwards." So what's that mean? He goes up the Tone Scale the second he recovers this control and handling of anchor points.

Try and process a postulate sometime directly as a postulate and you're not going to reach it by flows, you're not going to reach it in any way, shape or form. It's buried in ridges. The second you start to get the thing, you start to work at it, ridges start to flow in all directions and so forth, darnedest things start to happen when you start to dig up by force some of these things like "afraid of being afraid." You know, it's sort of booby-trapped. What's the right way, then, to go into this hall? Well, you get this. This is quite obvious, then. You get "fear of being is fear of communicating." A fellow's perceptions are bad, so therefore his fear of being is bad. Why is his fear of being this bad? Hah, let's take it backwards.

So this level of step — this V Level of step — you could call the resolution of MEST. You've got to resolve MEST. Then it is for a low-level case. You've got to resolve MEST, that's all, or you're not going to get anyplace with this case.

Why is his fear of being bad? Because his perception is just terrible. His perception is so bad that he doesn't know what it is he's trying not to be. And we get into this dizzy spin of the fear of the hidden influence.

This case tells you he can get computations, he can get ideas. Don't — don't bother to run those very much. Try and double-terminal up some MEST for him. Get him — see if he can't get — see if he can't get a chair facing a chair, a black spot facing a black spot. Spot control is right there on that level — only you want two spots, not one.

The hidden influence! "We all know there are hidden influences." Now, here's another one you can say about any preclear who comes in and sits down in the chair and gets processed. You can say this about him: He knows there is a hidden influence someplace.

Any one of these techniques will apply, actually, to any case. You've got to resolve MEST before this fellow gets very happy about it. MEST has kept betraying him.

When this gets terribly bad, you get your advanced states of paranoia. But you don't have to look for the advanced states of paranoia. Just stop this fellow driving this bus out here and say, "Do you think there are any hidden influences in your life?" He'll look around, "Well, I don't like to mention it but as a matter of fact, the manager of this line has had his eye on this job for his son-in-law for a long time. Ahem! Of course, I haven't any evidence of this, you understand."

Now, that's — leaves you another whole case level, and this is for the neurotic person. How do you solve a neurotic person? ARC Straightwire, next-tothe-last list of Self Analysis. And he just goes over it and over it and over it.

Well, you'll get one of the reasons why he's holding that job down so hard. Somebody is liable to occupy it. And yet — yet he's never checked it up, but it so happens that the manager doesn't have a son-in-law.

And then you continue on with the list of mock-ups of Self Analysis, that's all. Simplest technique imaginable. In other words, you've got the whole technique in a book.

There's always something like this wrong with the hidden influence.

You say, "The person can't get mock-ups; he can't get anything; he can't figure anything; he just wants to think; he just wants to do this" — ARC Straightwire. You get him to remember something real, some time when he was in communication, and so on. So he finally says, "Look, I have lived."

Now, you'll find other people; you'll wonder why they are so successful in life and yet why they're so hated. Be running a bank someplace, something like that. They've always got a hatful of hidden influences to hand out to people — always got a hatful of them. They say, "Well, I was talking to the board of directors the other day, and the board, well, that matter of the divorce you had, they wondered whether or not that . . . Of course, they didn't say anything personal about this you know. (People don't say anything personal about this really. They don't mention it very loud, they mention it quietly once in a while and — but always behind your back.) But they decided that they weren't going to renew your loan. However, however, out of my influence, well, I was able to prevail upon them to give you a ten-day extension and so forth."

And then from there you go on to making him make up mock-ups. Well, you can make him make up mock-ups for quite a little while, but all you want is just stability out of him. You want some kind of stability and then you just start over these other steps.

Of course, the funny part of it is, there has never even been a board meeting, you see? It's just complete, complete balderdash. This person has always got a hatful of hidden influences. That is the single, worst, solidest, best method of making people go down to a flyspeck in this universe, is the hidden influence.

Where do you enter these other steps? Anyplace. What are you trying to achieve? You're trying to achieve a lot of beingness for this thetan — as a thetan. You want him to get back his own facsimiles; you want him to be able to handle his own anchor points perfectly. That's what you're trying to achieve.

Now, then what would be the worst hidden influence? If beingness and communications are so important and if they interlock, then the worst hidden influence would be a hidden communication, wouldn't it? Now oh, if you could convince everybody that there was a hidden communication someplace, they would go mad! And so they do. Try it sometime. Try it sometime.

And I could stand here, and it would be very nice if I could just go on and talk about this for a long time and give you a complete blow-by-blow. But you know something? We have entered a level of technique where you can't go wrong. What do you know?

Tell somebody that is perfectly sane, well-balanced and so forth, and say, "Well, I got a letter this afternoon, mentions your name," and then shut up. Don't say another word! They're sunk!

Because you start playing around with things being taken away from and brought back to, and so on, this individual, he's going to start telling you, "There's something very strange around here but you know, I'm really not me. I'm not . . ." so on. In other words, he'll start telling you.

Sometimes people try this with me in organizations. They start sending through to me a very selected line of letters, you see? They say, "We received two hundred letters today, we're sending along one of them to you." It's a terrible letter, it's just horrible. So that leaves you wondering, "What's the other hundred and ninety-nine say?" Well, they would never send those to you for this reason: the other hundred and ninety-nine are good letters. Anyway, that's driving in a person's anchor points.

On that level of drill, then, of regaining the control of anchor points, you have the essence of all of this. Will he get out of his body afterwards, automatically? Yes, sure. He'll get out and he'll come back in or he'll do anything he wants to with it. But you're rehabilitating an individual. And it isn't a tricky technique; that is to say, it's not going to suddenly trip you up.

One of the best ways that this can be accomplished is to infer hidden influences.

When it's done on you, you will understand all of a sudden, that you're coming up to a level of knowing you know. And when you know you know, of course you know, and that's the end of that. So you have Scientology, able at last, to arrive at a level which says, "Scientology, the science of knowing how to know."

Now, as I told you earlier, there is the black cloud and the white cloud and the vacuum. The vacuum is always a hidden influence.

And what's your preclear — what's your goal with the preclear? Well, you bring him up to a point where he knows how to know, that's all. And he knows he knows. And that's — and so it's very pat, isn't it? It's almost as if I thought it up much earlier and had named it just that for that particular reason, and had all this data all the time and was making all of you poor people labor along with bum data. It's one of those accidents.

What is there about this confounded thing called a vacuum? If some-thing has nothing in it, then it is more powerful than it has something in it, and you're just talking about a vacuum, that's all you're talking about.

Anyway, your preclear is brought up to a level of knowing how to know. Then do you have to tell him he's a thetan? Do you have to tell him how to operate? Do you have to tell him he doesn't belong in a body? Do you have to tell him what the soul is? Do you have to tell him what God is, something of the sort? No.

You get near that thing, and it will pull away from you any MEST you've got your hands on. It's a vacuum. Nature abhors a vacuum, they used to say.

But you're going to find, as you start doing this, there's a lot of things he's afraid of, and so you have to know that if one thinks there is something bad about something — one: He will close terminals with it.

Actually, what do you know, the physical scientist found this out a long time ago, but it wasn't applied to anything else: If you were standing in front of a vacuum and it were pulling the packages out of your hands, why could it pull the packages out of your hands? Because there was pressure behind you where there was something. Get that misdirection? Why is it that a vacuum works at all? You have a vacuum in a thermometer tube, and the tube obviously pulls, mysteriously, all this stuff right up into the tube, and it's a vacuum. Why, heck, that's the way all thermometers work.

And anything he's doing that is bad — boy, nice little rule right here, the operating rule of auditing: Anything he thinks is bad is something he has closed terminals with against his will. Other-determinism, in other words, has entered in.

You say, "That's terrible. I wonder how on earth this comes to pass?"

You're not even now trying to restore the self-determinism of the thetan. You're trying to put back into its operating condition a human soul.

Well, it comes to pass not because the vacuum is pulling up anything into the tube, but because there is no pressure in the tube, but there's pressure outside the tube which pushes.

Now, let's take a look, and it's . . . The soul, of course, knows how to know. There's no good in having a soul that doesn't know anything about knowing. You don't even think you're it, and it's not there and all this maybe, and a lot of other things wind up.

Now remember that about the hidden influence: It is not any pull that nothingness has. It is always a push of something, always a push of some-thing. And that something is not invisible to the preclear; he's right there with it. It — he knows all about it.

Now, the beautiful rule here is that anything he's afraid of is something with which he has closed terminals. Anything he is doing that he thinks is wrong or that you think is wrong and so on, is being done because he thinks it's wrong too. Anything you or he thinks is wrong, is wrong. And what's wrong about it is because you or he think it's wrong. In other words, what's wrong with wrongness is wrongness. Isn't that simple? All right.

You just say, "Well, why don't you just let go of the thing?"

So how do you get away with this? Double Terminal. It's a double terminal. He thinks black is bad, so he closes with blackness. Why does he close with blackness? Because he can't control his anchor points, not because he has to have a facsimile run out! His anchor points are going backwards!

"Oh, I couldn't do that."

He's a mirror and he says — somebody came along, and they said, "You know, all policemen are bad." At that moment he starts to fight policemen and he pushes on policemen. If he pushes hard enough on policemen, police-men will arrive right in his lap.

"Well, why not?"

People — criminals go around trying to find out how they can break the law. They always wind up in the wrong place. All right.

"Well, I'd never get any more." You 'see, scarcity. Scarcity. "I'd never get any more of this." He's in a bad way.

Now, there's your modus operandi of aberration. It's a mechanical modus operandi. The person forgets how to use his anchor points because they start turning backwards. They go backwards because he's in this universe with heavy gravities and with MEST that can't be punished, and so forth. And so his anchor points — he abandons using them. He said, "I won't use my anch — I will never put out my anchor points again," or something of this sort.

But he's afraid of becoming a hidden influence. What's a hidden influence? A hidden influence is nothing. The hidden influence in this universe is nothing.

So therefore, anytime he sees something that's bad, he closes with that terminal. So you've got a problem here of closed terminals. How do you resolve closed terminals? You've got two ways to resolve them. You just double-terminal them out here and let them discharge, or you simply have the preclear mock somebody picking them up out of him and carrying them off again.

You'll find out readily enough when you start processing beingness out of a preclear, you'll find out all of a sudden, by the process which I will give you, he will recognize something. He'll say, "You know, there's really not — there's really not an object which is I." This will come to him as a little bit of a surprise. He'll tell you this; you don't have to even give him a clue. "There really isn't anything that is I. I don't have a form. I don't exist, really, except as I ... Gee, I'm only trying to be things; I am not anything." And he gets real upset right about that point.

He's — all of a sudden say, this is silly, he'll say, "Well, I've always been scared of streetcars," and we've just double-terminaled two streetcars, see, being carried off from the preclear out here into the darkness and dumped. "Now, I can get rid of streetcars any want — time I want to get rid of street-cars. I always thought you had double terminal streetcars. I mean, I thought that streetcars were always going to fall in on you." Of course, he'd never had a chance to run one out because he only had one streetcar. And he never mocked up a second one. He didn't know that his mock-up would work better in this universe than another one. All right.

Oh, I'm sorry, he is something, he is something. He is a capacity to create. And if you want to know whether or not a capacity to create is worth being, look at the pure joy there is in the field of creating arts. If you've ever seen anybody absorbed in anything, it's a painter with a brush or a kid in a kindergarten with a crayon. Oh, boy. So that's not a little thing to be at all. And that's what he is. He is a potentiality of creating something. He is the directive, creative urge and instinct. He's nothing in terms of matter but he can create any quantity of it.

One of the main things, then, is communication lag index, and that rises and you're trying to arrive at a communication change. How do you arrive at a communication change? By handling anchor points. That's the next one. All right, now if we have a communication change in the individual, we have a change of beingness, don't we? Well, we want to change the beingness of the preclear for the better, so if we want to change his beingness for the better, then we change his communication index, which is changing his anchor points, or changing his beingness, which is changing his anchor points, because it's changing his space.

So he all of a sudden tells you with horrible feeling that "I can't — I'm not really anything!"

And if we want to change the things he thinks are bad, all we've got to do is resolve the fact that he has collapsed on his terminals with something that's bad and we've done it. We've done it. And all other techniques are rococo. They're just gilding the lily. But these other techniques are valuable.

He's looking for the reason why. I mentioned to you a little earlier people all come along and they want to know the "reason why," and the reason I got bogged down originally in this whole work was I knew there was no reason why for all this. Couldn't find any reason why.

There's one tiny, little special technique — I give you an idea of this — special technique that comes out of this matching postulates. It's terribly interesting. It's the order lag. There's a communication lag and then there's the order lag.

Well, to hell with the reason why. When you say, "reason why," this says logic, you see? And what's wrong with your preclear is he gets logical. See? Your "reason why" is based upon the fact that there is prior cause which makes me an effect, and the fellow is always pushing himself up the time track from cause and is never being cause.

When a person gives himself an order how long does it take for it to go into action? He says, "All right," and he says, "now I'll put on the brake." How long does it take him to put on the brake? Five hours or a fifth of a second?

So the highest thing a thetan can be is cause of creation, cause of creative instincts, cause of creative beingness, cause of motivation.

Well, you know fellows have setups on certain circuits that are — have terrible order lags, so they think the order is never obeyed. That is when somebody else has handled their body for them too often and too long, and they get a terminal set up in there and a circuit set up in there so that they've got a big order lag on one subject. That's one subject, and they've got such a big order lag on this subject that they can't handle it.

He is motivation! But when he says, "I am not anything," he is saying, "Nothing existed before I exist, which gives me a form I don't have any further responsibility for." In other words, he's in the optimum condition, There is no more condition more optimum than "I am what I create myself to be at any instant." That is really optimum. That is too juicy. That's too wonderful. Nobody could be that! And yet, that's what every thetan is!

Now, in other words, an order should go through immediately. You should say, "Eat," and the body eats. And yet the order lag will be "Eat." Well, the fellow goes and washes his hands and he puts on his coat, and polishes up his shoes and he walks out, and he reads the afternoon paper a little bit and he comes in and he says, "Dinner ready yet?" He's known it for a half an hour.

And he said, "And there's no reason why." He said, "Nobody came along," he suddenly realized, "nobody came along and gave me a top hat and said, 'You are now a top hat.' And that's what I'm complaining about." The fellow's complaining — the fellow is complaining because he is not permitted to be an effect!

Then they get a new cook next week and that's the way it goes, you see?

He's complaining because he's being permitted to be unlimited cause. That's a heck of a thing to complain about, isn't it?

Now, that would be an order lag. He tells himself to eat and then he does eighty other things. What is this? This is a circuit, same kind of a circuit that gives you a communication lag and it's hidden on a hidden influence. There's some kind of a hidden influence about eating and he's . . . so on.

So there is a goal on the line. What do you want? What do you want to make? What do you want to create? What effect do you want to create? It's just yours — wham! There isn't any more than that.

But somebody has controlled his eating for him. This is where an inter-posed control has happened. And what do you know, the hidden influence is a study of interposed controls. Hidden controls have been put in the line. He gets so afraid of hidden controls that he knows he's got circuits.

I mean, you've said the most superlative superlative you could say when you say somebody — somebody is the potentiality of directed creation.

So you find out he has a habit, or the preclear has something you don't — he doesn't like to do, you'll find him going backwards.

He doesn't need facsimiles to remember anything. He doesn't need energy. He doesn't need terminals. He doesn't even have to communicate with anything if he doesn't want to. He's cause.

He says, "I don't like to smoke. I'm not going to smoke; therefore, I'm smoking. I don't like to smoke! And yet I'm smoking. So I don't like . . . Oh, dear! Well, I don't think I will smoke anymore. Where's a cigarette?"

And look at cause up there at the top of the Chart of Attitudes and you will find that cause goes along with a lot of other desirable things. They're all about at the same band, and all those things exist up there at that band. All right, enough for that.

Now, there you're just getting the reversed angle on this. Now, you'll get somebody saying, "I think I'd like a cigarette" and twenty minutes later suddenly lights one spontaneously and recalls nothing about having ordered himself to then. So he'll say, "You know I get — I get impulsive! I have impulses which tell me to do things. And I don't know where they came from because I don't remember back two hours."

What keeps him from being that?

Order lag time. You've got a communications lag index and an order lag index, then, and you could measure out of any individual his capability, his beingness and so forth. What interposes this? Is just can't handle communication points over a certain period of time or in a certain area or on a certain subject. What do you do with this, then? You get him to pick up this mock-up and push it out and pull it in and push it out and pull it in, until he can at last push this subject out and pull it in at will. And the darnedest things will turn up.

"Oh, there might be a hidden influence."

He's never able to get up in the morning; he's always tired when he gets up in the morning. He doesn't want to get up in the morning until 8:30 and he knows he ought to be up in the morning at 8 o'clock and he can't get up in the morning. And this is what he's telling you about and this is why he's worried. That's just because there is a period in his life when somebody else got him up when he was groggy, something like that, all the time. That's interposed control.

"Oh, what kind of a hidden influence?"

Now, you'll find out, he says, "I can give up cigarettes, I can give up cigarettes, I can give up cigarettes; I try and I try and I try." And what do you know, you find out that he's been punished into having an order lag so that he has to smoke cigarettes. He got punished for smoking, which gives him too much MEST universe, so that he says, "Mustn't smoke — smokes." And it's just a snapped-closed circuit just of that character, and it's just as idiotic as that.

"Well, there might be."

The MEST universe goes backwards. He's got too much MEST universe in him. When he says do one thing, he does the opposite. That's a habit. And that is not an order lag time, that is an order lag reversal or an order reversal.

In fact, he might run into a vacuum. And everybody knows a vacuum pulls in. That's really the truth. "He might be a vacuum." It doesn't ever occur to him that he could mock the whole thing up again afterwards.

You'll find these things are solvable in forms of communications points. The fellow says, "Put out your communication points" and all the communication points go backwards. You solve that, you've solved his habits. You've solved all these various things that he couldn't control otherwise.

So the state of your preclear is — actually can be graphed on a curve of the amount of ability to create which he has retained. The amount of action he can initiate is also an index. How much action does he initiate? How much is he willing to do with his hands? All of these various things are indexes.

That is really the subject of auditing. Now, there's a great deal that you could practice; there's a great deal that you could know. There are a lot of techniques here. I'll give you just a brief rundown.

But the primary index is how much does he wish to independently create? What is his creational desire? Now, it gets better the better he gets. That is one index that is just as solid as the Rock of Gibraltar. That is one like the communication lag index. The creative instinct of the individual: What is this creative instinct? Your preclear gets as well as that is restored, and it is a beautiful little thing to work with.

You could double-terminal anybody or you can double-terminal any MEST object facing itself and the object will discharge and run out all of its aberrative content — that's all. You can double-terminal postulates — any postulate facing another postulate — and it will run out, desensitize. That's a technique.

Because one day your preclear comes in — he doesn't think you know he's doing anything particularly — and one day he comes in and he says to you, he says, "You know, I always wanted to paint, and I bought a brush yesterday." Here he goes. You don't care whether he ever paints or not. That's a silly thing to do anyhow, paint. You get it on you, and so forth.

You can put up two communication points up to the corners of a room and simply hold them there. And if you'll hold them there long enough, you'll come up to present time. That's another technique.

But you have restored his creative instinct. Now, it is being directed toward MEST, you see, handling MEST and meshing the MEST around, and so on. Well, he'll even unfix from that and he'll get to a much higher level of creation. He wants creation with duration. That is the level of the painter and that level is way higher than any level there is out in the society, it's up there in the stars.

Double-terminaling MEST objects — planets, suns, walls, furniture, cars and so forth — is really another technique, because it's so effective. All right.

It's so incomprehensibly high to Homo sapiens that he'll stand around and look at a painter with his jaw dropped. And the painter, had a picture exhibited and thought well of and so on, this is way up in the stars, this is dwelling on the Olympian heights with the gods. And it's about I would say — I would say, oh, about a hundredth of the way up the Tone Scale you're trying to bring the pre-clear up; it's on its way, you see, we've really got it pegged. All right.

The double-terminal of the corners of the room is merely a technique to get somebody to present time. It is not nearly as effective a technique as the last technique I'll mention, which is simply getting his anchor points carried in and out by him and by others, on a double terminal basis.

Now, let's tell you some more about this hidden influence. How is a person pushed down scale? By being restrained from being. If he's restrained from being, he goes down scale. Then why and how do you possibly convince anything that could create or be anything that it should be restrained from being?

And that, at this time, is the most effective technique which I know, because it brings the person up to knowing how to know, by restoring to him the ability to handle the only thing by which he can know: anchor points. And it solves the case and it solves his curiosity, and it solves his knowingness and it brings him into present time, and a lot of other things.

Well, I tell you how you do this. This is ... You just tell him anything he's trying to be has gotten something hidden and it's bad. Something bad about it and it's hidden. And he gets convinced of this and so he doesn't want to be these things. And so he thinks he is hanging in on his privacy of him-self and he thinks that he'll violate everything if he ever steps out of his own head or steps out of his own nose or steps out of his own right ear or wherever he's saddled down to at the moment you start processing him. And he thinks that he mustn't do this and the reason he mustn't do this is because if he moved out any further he'd run into a hidden influence.

Now, you can interplay these techniques, however, and interuse these techniques to get yourself out of any sudden little difficulty you'll run into.

You can actually measure your preclear's case level with his belief in a hidden influence. "What do you think is in this room that you don't want to walk out into it?"

He comes into session and he's so worried, he's just so worried, he's just so worried; he doesn't quite . . . So you say, "What are you worried about?"

He thinks over it for a while and he says, "I don't know, there's some-thing in the corner." He doesn't say right away what's in the corner. He said, "There's something in the corner."

"Well, my boss, and so on and so on and so on."

"What do you think might be in the corner?" Well, tell him to mock some things up in the corner, and he suddenly realizes there's nothing in the corner.

And you'd say, "Mock up the boss facing the boss."

He's restrained by that shadow. In Self Analysis, this story about the fish in Lake Tanganyika and the shadows that go down to the bottom and — of the lake. The shadows are used as the bars which trap the fish, and the shadows could be called hidden influences.

"Well, that wouldn't help because it's something I don't know, you see? I mean, I don't know whether or not . . ." and so on.

Now, darkness and nothingness are quite interesting. You can never quite trust something which has nothing in it because it might have some-thing in it. Same way with blackness; blackness may not be just blackness. It may be blackness and something else. That is why blackness closes in on so many preclears. It might be blackness and something else. But remember, he's as willing to use blackness as anybody else. He's as willing to use this modus operandi as somebody else.

Now, you say, "Mock up the boss facing the boss."

Once in a while, some fellow without very good sense gets going on the subject of "Well, I intend good and I'm going to use these things for good." I — some goof ball like myself. He'll run himself down scale at an awful rate of speed if he doesn't watch himself. Because he's suddenly abandoned 50 per-cent of things, just abandoned them, because he says, "I want to be the other 50 percent." He's immediately said, "There's 50 percent good and 50 percent evil and I'm going to be one of the 50 percent good." Now, he's down 50 per-cent. He's — he goes on down from there, see? He says, "What's good?" Then anything that's evaluated as good, he will become. Horrible state of affairs.

"Oh, all right. Mock up the boss facing the boss."

Now, you won't perceive what you won't be. That's obvious, isn't it? We've gone over this, over and over, and being is communicating. You won't be what you won't perceive and you won't perceive what you won't be.

"You got him there?"

So, of course, if you don't perceive what you won't be, you're wide-open to believe that there is a hidden influence in it. And the way you won't be it is because it has subjected you to that horrible thing known as betrayal!

"Yeah."

And the track of any thetan is the track of betrayal. They have been betrayed!

"Now, mock up the office wall behind him versus the office wall behind him and get the boss too. Get the whole scene there facing the whole scene: the wall, the chair, the desk of the boss versus the wall, the chair, the desk of the boss. Get those facing that on a double terminal basis. You got that?"

There are two mechanisms you should know; one is the mechanism of betrayal, which is the knock-in of anchor points. One's anchor points are pulled out and then they are suddenly knocked in. That operation, when done exteriorly by somebody else is betrayal. And it gets so bad that the individual won't put out his own anchor points and pull them in himself because he's been betrayed.

"Yeah, yeah, hmmm. What am I worried about this for? What are you doing this for? Why don't we get down and do something important on the case?"

And the other is being ridiculed. And ridicule is pushing the anchor points in and then pulling them out and holding them out. You can get out of any preclear the feeling he is being ridiculed by just saying, "All right, now get the idea you put your anchor points way out. Now they are being held out." He doesn't like that. He gets the feeling, the sensation of being ridiculed.

"Well, it's because you're worried about the boss."

So these two things happen with the out-and-in workout of anchor points. In other words, out-and-in beingness, see, ridicule and betrayal. These are the two horrible things that happen, and that is their operation in terms of anchor points.

"I'm not worried about the boss. What are you talking about? You must be crazy!"

So if a person has been betrayed, then he won't look! One of the reasons he won't look is he wants somebody else to feel ashamed.

You can take any kind of a standard reaction on an individual, and do that with it, either by thought or by terminal. Then can you alter your own mental state of beingness at will? Yes, you sure can. Can you alter a preclear's at will? Boy, you've said it.

Now, I'll give you this little technique in passing. You double-terminal up all the people the preclear has had trouble with, just match them and just have them say, "We're sorry we hurt (whatever your preclear's name is)." And my gosh, what do you know, they just start disappearing into the limbo. Zongzong-zong! They just keep diving out of sight and disappearing and you get Mama and Papa. You get Papa mocked up double facing Papa, you know, Papa facing Papa and saying, "Oh, we're so sorry," or looking slightly toward the preclear, "We're — I'm so sorry what I did to poor Algernon." You know, the preclear begins to feel better and better.

Now, how do you process a whole group of people? You could process them with Self Analysis, mock-ups only. Or you could process them very broadly on beingness. Let's double-terminal these things, and be them double-terminal, then, and be them.

He mocks up Mama doing this and he mocks up — you mock up family doing this and the dog's doing this and the car doing this and inanimate objects doing this and so forth, and gee, he feels better and better and better.

And a guy doesn't have to be able to get two terminals on these things. And you say birds and bees and fish and chairs, and be a chair and be a light, and you just keep on with this for a long time with individuals.

He's been holding on to these things to make people ashamed. So you just mock them up that people are ashamed and say, "Okay, Bud, you can let go of them."

Can they single-terminal these things safely? Yes. Because they always double-terminal them. That's a joke. Of course, they can single-terminal them because they can double-terminal them. Because they're a terminal and any-time they mock one of these things up you've got two terminals there, even though one is superimposed over the other, so it's always a double terminal. But it doesn't run out very well.

Oh, he'll — he glories in this. By the way, he'll do this by the hour. This is wonderful.

So you group process in terms of double terminal mock-ups, preferably of MEST objects, and preferably easy MEST objects to look at. And you give — if you're giving double terminal stuff, give quite a lag, quite a long time after your command, that you give the next command.

You also mock himself up being ashamed of what he's done to others, double-terminal himself, you see? Only you'll find out he doesn't do that very much or very often.

In other words, say, "All right, now let's be a wall. Now get a wall facing a wall. Any wall." Be satisfied to let it rest for a few minutes, and give your next one.

And you can put that down as one of the techniques which you'll find yourself using. That is the technique of apology; that's matching terminals with apology. "We're so sorry." You could call the technique "We're so sorry." And you can just put that down; you just match these terminals, one facing the other, and you just have them fall away.

"All right, be a chair facing a chair."

By the way, they do that, you see, and the terminals behave that way automatically. They start falling away from the preclear. You can match up Papa facing Papa and they'll — he'll be quite big at first, and you — the pre-clear will have a hard time getting rid of him. And all of a sudden all quite automatically, why Papa will be facing Papa saying, "I'm so sorry, what we did to poor Algernon" and swish. You mock it up again, "So sorry what we did to poor Al — " swoosh. "So sorry — " swashoosh! And he says, "Gee, this is fun." Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. Well, let him do it.

Not fast is it? But desperately effective, desperately effective, and that's what you want.

And he'll find that some of it's fantastic, some of the things you can get. Very often a person will want to mock himself up doing that, and he'll just continue that for a long time and then he feels very happy and you say that's that. Makes him feel lots better.

Your optimum Group Process, however, is Self Analysis for large groups (very large groups) because it'll get them there, eventually.

What this is, is just running out shame, you see, the overt act. It's just — he's been holding on to these things to make somebody apologize, so you just let somebody apologize.

Why? Because it's telling the thetan that he can do the one thing which he can do, and that's create.

Well, the reason why he's — because he is not going to put out his anchor points again, he's going to shame somebody else by holding his anchor points in, because what do you know about betrayal. The fellow says, "Look what they did to me." Well, if he's saying, "Look what they did to me," he's not going to be something else. He's going to sit there and say, "Look what they did to me." And these fellows are going around with these little purple flags and little facsimiles, saying, "Look what they did to me. Look what they did to me."

All right. Let that be a talk on this subject. I know that you're going to have success with these techniques. And I know this is very easy.

You see, it's better to be something than nothing, and people who have been betrayed are interesting, because everybody gets interested in an occluded case. They've been betrayed. All right.

If anyone should ask you what you were doing and why you were doing this, and that the thetan is so-and-so and such-and-such, and they try to draw you into a big argument; they're trying to tell you there are hidden influences around someplace that tell you you shouldn't monkey with this, or something of the sort, all you have to do is drop a real slug on them and it just knocks off the whole conversation rather rapidly, and said, "Well, you see, we do happen to be freeing the human soul, and bringing salvation to an individual before he dies." That settles the argument.

Let's take a look at it. That — it's very, very amusing to you once you start running this.

I want to thank you very, very much for your attention.

Now, ridicule is something they don't brag about so you don't run this in very much. But they're still holding on to ridicule, but they'll generally be holding on to it because they ridiculed somebody else and they don't want to be in that category.

Good night.

You see, in each case they were really ridiculing themselves. "Do not send to find for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." Nothing to that. The reason why the fellow is saying, "I have been betrayed, look at me," is because he did it to me and he — you see? And "he" and "me," in this case, are the same thing. So he's saying, "me," it's better for me to be here as "me" as the betrayed party than to be this character over here that everybody despises, and so forth, that did the act.

Furthermore — this is totally mechanical — there is no admiration really connected with being betrayed or being ridiculed so nothing came along and admired it out of existence. That which is not admired endures. So betrayal endures. Nobody admires betrayal, much less the person who was betrayed, and he's the person who should admire it out of existence.

So you snap somebody's anchor points out and then shove them in real hard, that's betrayal. If you pull them out and hold them, that's ridicule.

If you put somebody on the stage, force them to be on the stage in a ridiculous situation, won't let them come off the stage they feel they have been ridiculed. Forcing people to exhibit, in other words, or be seen.

So, when we look this over, then, all control is effected by hidden influences and the hidden influence is always nothingness. The thetan is under compulsion to be something, and thus is afraid of being nothing because he believes it to be a hidden influence.

You keep a thetan from being — from what he is — by convincing him that what he is, nothingness, is a hidden influence.

Practical jokers are dramatizing the hidden influence. There are many other such instances.

Now, the only fear is the fear of becoming something. And what you've got to rehabilitate, then, is you've got to rehabilitate the ability to be, which automatically rehabilitates the ability to perceive.