Which is the most effective, running a direct concept or wasting and so forth? Come on, which is?
Audience: [various responses]
Male voice: Concept.
Concept was more effective than wasting it on up the line, huh?
Audience: [various responses]
Male voice: They do different things.
They both do different things.
What did it do to you?
Female voice: It made me feel mean and ornery.
Male voices Concept is very effective until I ran out of something.
Ran out of something - ah! Well, all right
Come on, which do you find the most effective now? Let’s just make up your mind.
Female voice: Well the first part made me go down lower\ it just practically knocked me out.
It did, huh?
Female voice: Yeah, ifthat’s being more effective, I guess that’s more. . .
Well now, that’s a nice, refined, narrow use of it. Did you feel better when you wasted them?
Audience: No. [various responses]
Well, that you will find to be the case. And that’s why I ran you on a concept first. But I evidently didn’t make my point too well. Do you feel better now?
Audience: Yes.
Did you feel better when you finished running those concepts?
Audience: Yes.
You still felt better. Well, the stuff is pretty hard to make it unworkable. But the living proof of the matter is, is most of your preclears that come up won’t be able to get even a concept of something except in a symbolical form until they’ve wasted it. Wasting betters a case and running the concepts has a tendency to bog it, you’ll find by experience.
Don’t evaluate a technique by how deeply it slugs your preclear out, since he’ll just eventually just run out of havingness, you know. He’ll just run out of havingness and then we won’t know quite what we’re doing, one way or the other. But wasting, saving and so forth is better on the thing.
All right. What did you get on symbols? You find out anything about yourself? Yes?
Female voice: I did. I found I’d been doing it all my life.
Doing what?
Female voice: The brackets you were running - I suddenly discovered that that. ..
Saving symbols, desiring ...Female voice:. .. had been the masses - that I’d been doing - resisting this and resisting that. And I found that people had been doing it to me all my life and I hadn’t known it.
That’s right, that’s right. Well, I tell you, it’s a remarkable thing, but people talk a lot about "Well i£ just other people didn’t mess me up and so forth, why, I’d get along all right.” And the truth of the matter is, they’re really not very dangerous to each other. They’re really not. As people, they’re dangerous to each other, but you’re not people. You get what I mean? It’s a little abstruse, maybe, but you get what I mean?
Female voice: No.
It’s a little abstruse. I’m not insulting your intelligence. I mean it’s just - there is a point there. If our purpose is to preserve a bunch of bodies and if we’re sort of here on a mission of putting them all on ice, well, yeah - yeah, people can be very harmful to people. See that? But if we’re here for the business of livingness - which is not necessarily the business of preserving a body at all - let me assure you that there’s something very dramatic in throwing one away with great elan. Why, we find out that people are very far from dangerous to people but are necessary to complete livingness.
And so we get pulled between these two things: life’s insistence upon survive and preserve and repair and patch up and the static, a thetan’s desire to live. And an individual is caught between these two points. Of course, he’s caught in lots of points, but the main thing it is, is gee, he’d sure like to live and, golly, he sure has to preserve this body!
Well now, when they start resisting, they get worried about preserving and that is about the only big major trap there is, is resistance, resistance. You can get somebody to resist something, why, you’ll just fix him all up. There’s no truer truism than "that which you resist you become.”
All right. Now, what’s a symbol?
Female voice: A form of an idea?
Oh, that’s very close.
Female voice: Somethingyou can present something else?
That’s very close.
Female voice: Somethingyou live by.
Yeah, that’s an ideal, that’s not a symbol. That’s all right, that’s one of its variable meanings. I mean . . .Well look, we have a lot of divergent ideas on what a symbol is. It happens that, for our purposes in Scientology, this thing called a symbol can be given a finite definition which will clarify a great deal of the work we are doing. And it’s a very precise definition - very, very, very precise. That is, a symbol is an idea which is fixed in energy which is mobile. Which is mobile.
Male voice: How tr that differentfrom a postulate?
From a what?
Male voice: A postulate.
Oh, the difference between a symbol and a postulate. Ah, yes. Well, we’ll get to that in a minute. A symbol is a postulate which has already been fixed. A postulate is something which an individual makes. When he has made a postulate, he thereafter may fix it in a mass and give it mobility.
Female voice: Could the symbol be a way of ascribing automaticity to our postulates?
Yes. Yes. That’s where we’re going. You’re a very, very bright girl this morning. Did the processing do it or a night’s sleep?
Female voice: Could be, since I’ve been so deep in apathy all night and I’m coming up again now.
Why were you in apathy?
Female voice: I don’t know, [laughing] There you are! There’s your answer.
All right. Now, let’s take a look at. ..
Female voice: No fault of the auditor, Ron, she’s a very good auditor.
I would never have thought of it unless you’d mentioned it there. Who is the auditor? Let’s “chastise” her. [laughter]
Female voice: She did a good job.
All right. Now, let’s take a look at this thing called a symbol. And let’s look at that definition and now let’s take another definition, let’s take the definition of work in physics.
We all know what work is, don’t we? But in physics, work is a very finite definition. And when you say “work” in the science of physics, you mean foot-pounds of energy, you mean distance-mass-gravity factor. You’re talking about something terrifically finite, you understand that? So let’s understand, right here, the difference between а - you might say - a type of definition which amounts to a law and a definition out of a dictionary on a word. You see, they can vary slightly.
Now, if we take this thing called symbol and we give it the definition we have just given it and if we use that definition, we are thereafter able to understand and codify a great deal of livingness and see what is taking place in this livingness. It broadens, somewhat, the definition of symbol.
A postulate is something that you can give or take or pull or hand out or do almost anything with. But when you make a postulate into a symbol, you have surrounded the symbol with mass-energy of one kind or another - and you have granted it mobility. You have fixed it in energy and granted it a mobility. It’s a neat trick, isn’t it?
Now, let’s take a symbol - the letter “a”, the article "zz”in the English language and you see that the moment we put it into the airwaves, we have given it some mass and handed it some mobility. Well, this makes it very difficult to locate. Theta, according to the Prelogics, creates space and time and energy in which to locate things. It is very happy when it is fixing things accurately in space and your preclear will get as well as he can fix things accurately in time and in space and he’s very happy about that, you see?
Now, let’s take this thing he does with this thing we call a symbol - ha-ha, boy, ha! Isn’t that a wonderful thing. We wrap it up in energy and then we give it mobility and, after that, it’s lost but it’s still there. So it compounds into invisible barriers and into the most confounding and incomprehensible of puzzles. Take the letter “a” in the English language, let’s garb it in printer’s ink, put it in a book and then the book moves out of the library onto laps and back onto shelves and back onto laps and here it goes! And it’s got this letter “a”, this article "z/”in it. It is a symbol and it just keeps on moving and you never get track of it afterwards. The only thing which can pierce sixteen-inch armor plate is a symbol.
A bullet is not, accurately speaking, a symbol. All a bullet is, is some mass. Now, it can be mass with meaning. It could be a silver bullet, but just a bullet - it’s just a mass. You could set it up and say, “Now this is a symbol of war” and discuss it and give meaning to it. As long as you use it actively and expend it - create it and expend it and locate it and fix it—it’s not a symbol, it’s just mass. See, that’s just a piece of energy. But now, let’s take the letter “a” and put it in printer’s ink.
All right. Now let’s take another symbol. We’ll call it “police.” It’s a word, isn’t it? That’s all it is, a word. All right, we take this word and we garb it in energy, we give it an ideal and we make it mobile and we get it lost and then we don’t know where it is and the next thing you know, it’s after us. You see that about police? Now, let’s take somebody who is present here. This person has been trained in judo, he is really an expert in judo. He is very good with a Colt pistol - extremely good with a Colt pistol. His alertness is good and his reaction time is much better than normal. All right. Will you please tell me why this person should be afraid of a police officer?
A police officer is seldom a good shot, is poorly if at all trained in judo and has reaction time which is mostly fat. And yet, if a police officer were to walk in the door and say, “Come down with me to the jail and lose two days,” this fellow would probably go along with him. Why? Why? It’s nonsensical. Well, it’s because the individual here has a symbol called “police.”
Now, let’s suppose this individual didn’t have this word called “police” and didn’t know the meaning of police and had no further significance to police and some character in a uniform walked in the door and flourished a gun on him, why, he’d just bury the guy that walked in at the door, that’s all. You see that?
Life would be awfully simple, wouldn’t it, if we didn’t have a symbol? It would be simple, 5 direct and without a long time lag. Because the only real trouble with the police is if he killed this fellow, then some more police would come tomorrow - he thinks - according to the symbol. Actually, they might not, they might say, “Well, we’d better not arrest that fellow.”
You see whither we are going with this thing called symbol? It’s an embracive idea and it gets fixed in mass. And because it’s mass and because a thetan is often hungry for energy, he will pick up one of these things. And because he objects to their confounded mobility, he will try to hold one still and after that, having resisted it, he will become it.
A body could be said to be a symbol. It’s mobile, it’s an idea, it’s fixed in mass and we find, strangely enough, that a thetan who believes he’s a body has already adopted a great number of ethics, ideals and otherwise and fixations and arbitraries. And when we start to process him, we exteriorize hirn and he says, “I’m not a body! Huh!”
And what do you know, you shed, at that moment, an enormous number of the arbitraries which have been holding him into a persistence in life and denying him livingness. He hasn’t any action or anything else, as long as this takes place—his fluidity. So the effort of the individual to fix and unfix ideas in matter, in energy, shows up immediately and intimately on the business of the symbol. Right?
So these damn things float around and people try to nail them down. A bibliophile is actually trying to nail down a bunch of symbols. He thinks they’re valuable and desirable. He didn’t start that way. That which a person resists, he will eventually find very valuable and very necessary. He wants it, he knows he wants it.
Symbols. It’s a fantastic thing. If an entity shows up or something like that - you’re exteriorized someplace and you all of a sudden see this character - and by the way, I don’t know that a thetan is the only livingness. I just happen to know that you’re thetans, you see? But I also don’t know if there’s such a thing as an evil demon that exceeds the value and power of a thetan and, as a matter of fact, Г know quite the contrary. Those things which show up in that form succumb with such speed that they appear to be more symbols than anything else. All right.
Yes?
Female voice: Could you say a symbol was an enforced idea of a selected mass?
No. No. You have already limited it. It might be an invited idea. It might be a very pleasant idea. It might be a hidden idea. Don’t add intention to the symbol. Intention is entirely separate from this definition. There’s symbols and men can add all sorts of intentions to all kinds of symbols.
Let’s take the symbol called “freedom.” Let’s print it up on a poster, that puts it in mass. And then the poster can appear almost anyplace and then somebody comes along - some politician - and starts screaming “Freedom.” Well, what’s this politician want to do? He wants to do some slavery. So, what’s his intention with regard to the symbol? The symbol is a weak and will - less thing which is a tool in the hands of anyone and depends for its existence - as do all things, except the static itself - on agreement. And when you have grasped this principle entirely and completely, you will understand not only what an engram is, what an aberration is and what your preclear is frantic about.
A thetan fixes and unfixes ideas in energy. When he builds something, he fixes it in energy. Rather simple, isn’t it? When he takes something down, he unfixes an idea out of energy. Now he’s got all these floating ideas in energy - they’re mobile, they go all around. He can’t locate them - they’re here today and gone tomorrow. Will-o’-the-wisp. It’s a Fabian warfare he fights. So he gets a passion for having everything nailed down.And this passion sticks him on the time track, fixes him in energy masses such as engrams, gives him automaticities, makes him do all the damnedest foolest things that you can think of
A symbol has a greater liability than it has a value. But it has a great value. If we continued to talk or converse directly as a fluid flow of ideas, our beingness would at once be very perceivable. But by avoiding, by hiding, we can put our ideas into symbols and then transmit them. And the symbols so transmitted, then do not disclose what we may wish to hold back as our basic intention. And so we get everybody looking through the symbol to find the meaning behind it. And this is a constant dramatization on the part of a thetan. He looks through the symbol to find what’s behind it.
In such, words to him are invisible barriers. They’re barriers because they’re made out of mass. They actually have mass. You can cut some out of a book sometime and weigh them if you want to. Spoken words actually have mass. You can put up a Koenig photometer and talk at its gas flame and you will see immediately that something is vibrating that gas flame - something which is not just wind but a vibration is activating the particles of air. And so we have a fluid flow of ideas which are yet floating along in an energy mass.
Now, we start to process an engram out of somebody and we find out that we’re running one of the most complex symbols you ever looked at. It’s got Lord knows how many perceptics in it and it’s got all kinds of things - a wonderful gimmick, an engram. Now, you start to process this engram today and you think you’ll finish it off tomorrow but it’s gone and then it recurs six months from now. In other words, it has mobility.
When you are pursuing, exclusively, the course of searching for and eradicating the symbol, you are just dramatizing whole track. Because a thetan has really never done anything else in terms of worry or anxiety or upset and so forth. As long as he can get in there and shoot, he’s all right. As long as he can get in there and build a house and tear it down, he’s all right. And as long as he can put up a great big beautiful mock-up that’s just pretty or blow one up, he’s all right. As long as he can engage in a game which has an actual finite football and chase that football up and down the field and knock people flat and do all sorts of things, he’s all right.
But the second he begins this endless task, this endless chase of the symbol - the findingness of the hidden meaningness behind thee - he’s a lost dog. Because the symbol is lost. And so the thetan who tries to locate them, himself, gets lost. And the lost feeling which an individual has is the pursuit of the symbol. Not the pursuit of a great big oak tree, not the pursuit of this and not the pursuit of finite things, solid things, and not even the pursuit of thought. Thought itself is not necessarily a flock of symbols. Now you understand that? Thought is postulates.
Now, a thetan, in his ideal state, can make a postulate and make it stick and make it act and take it up and throw it out. Now, he can, in his ideal state, make a symbol and tear one up. He can explode one that comes into him, he can blow it, he can release it, he can change his mind.
But once he has become so engrossed in this search for the meaning behind symbols that he has accumulated, Lord knows how many in packed masses, when he is no longer able to face up to them, when he believes that symbols are more powerful than he - he the creator of symbols, you see, is now being bludgeoned by the symbols - that’s an engram in restimulation. The creator of engrams, you might say, suddenly finds himself being hit by engrams. He believes that he himself must be of a lower order of symbol. So therefore, he must have mass. So therefore, he can’t make postulates. So therefore, he can’t undo postulates. So therefore, when he makes up his mind wrongly, it stays made up wrongly. Why? Well, because he can’t undo this.
And so out of fixing and unfixing ideas and the floating and mobile character of symbols, we actually get the mechanical-rhe. mechanical side of sanity and aberration. We also get the mechanical side of exteriorization. The deeper an individual gets into symbols,
Now, when you have a good command of what a symbol is and the chasing of symbols this way and when you get an understanding of what a thetan is and that he is a static - he is a static which can place itself or perceive from himself at any point over any set of particles at will and instantaneously - why, We see that we are trying to remove a preclear up the scale from the point of being a mass or a symbol or an answer, up toward a point where he is creative and where he can make postulates and so on. The second that he can do this, he can impose space on terminals and he can exteriorize very easily. He has no difficulty in retaining his identity, but he has his identity all mixed up with symbols.
Now, let’s take this thing called a name. An awful lot of preclears are in terrible shape simply because of their name. You take the fellow’s name and you move it around as a symbol, in moving postulates, and all of a sudden the case begins to free up.
Silly name. There’s a case, a notable case, that had been audited by practically every auditor in Greater New York and was audited by a member of the First Unit. And this case’s name added Up to “water.” And all this case ever did for an auditor was blow grief charge and got no better. This case was being the symbol - being water and would just dramatize this and continued to dramatize this and continued to dramatize it until all of a sudden, why, the auditor would say, “Well, we blew that big beautiful grief charge and so the case will be better.” But the case was no better. So this became an enormous mystery.
So a thetan becomes something and sells himself on the idea he is it merely because he’s so exhausted in this combat with symbols, freedoms, ethics, ideals, evils - these things become symbols - and he avoids them one way or the other and then he doesn’t know what to avoid because they’re mobile. And he never knows where they’ll turn up or anything else. His identity is something that is quite treacherous. Identity is a very treacherous thing, it turns up in police stations.
Most of the boys you are having trouble exteriorizing, by the way, have a record a light-year long. That’s right, they have a record a light-year long. That doesn’t mean they’re criminal on Earth or in this lifetime - but they’ve had their days. Put them on an E-Meter and you keep knocking it off the pin. They’re wanted in this galaxy and that galaxy - that sounds like just space opera, but it happens to be very true.
Now, they are dodging. They’re dodging the symbol called “law and order.” Well, can’t they create law and order? Well, they sure can. Well, what are they dodging law and order for? Well, that’s because they know they have an identity. But do they? An identity is forced upon one until he believes he will desire it. He begins to resist an identity until he is an identity. The one thing that I can tell you every thetan has in common is a terrible background of resistance to bodies. Oh, but thoroughly, the last thing in the world a thetan would be, would be a body! So here you are. That’s a resistance to a symbol, in essence, because that symbol is an identity. And as an identity, it fixes the individual instead of him fixing it.
Now, we have a problem with any symbol: is the individual fixing the symbol or is the symbol fixing him? And the way you keep symbols from fixing the individual that are pinning him down is very easy. You just mock it up and move it around until he realizes he’s moving it, it’s not moving him. You let him find it, in other words. It’s an End of Cycle Processing to mock-up symbols. Sure, because he’s been looking for a symbol.
All right. Have him mock-up the symbol called “freedom.” Whole populaces have gone to their death, whole civilizations have been destroyed, simply by people looking for freedom. The greatest slaveries ever established on Earth were established in the name of freedom. Why? Because everybody was trying to close terminals and locate it and find it and so forth and they were trying to find freedom by avoiding slavery. So they closed terminals with slavery and there they were. Freedom was the opposite to slavery, so they had to fight slavery in order to have freedom and that made slaves out of them. This is the most elementary of problems. It is not even difficult. But it lies in this exact field: a thetan conceives that he has mass if he conceives that he is a symbol. If he is an identity, why, then he feels he has mass, so he becomes, to that degree, hard to exteriorize.
There are several ways to solve this. He believes his entire beingness depends on his having a name. If that’s what his entire beingness depends upon, why, good heavens, of course then he’s going to be nailed down. How else could he be nailed down but by resisting a symbol - а name? He didn’t want a name at first, that’s why he thinks he has to have one. And we get this “what you resist you become.” An individual resists having an identity and eventually becomes an identity.
Well, then this is the problem in exteriorization and it’s that intimate. Anybody who’s difficult to exteriorize, who simply - “Be three feet back of your head” and you’re not three feet back of your head, is a symbol. He’s not a being without mass. And there are many symbols which are greater than he.
One of the ways of doing it is simply just take a look over the numbers of symbols which are greater than himself, in terms of an E-Meter - just ask him that, “On the eight dynamics, what symbols, what words are bigger than you are?” And you’ll get the most interesting responses on a needle. Then you simply have him mock these up and move them through space from point to point, back and forth, up, down and around until he’s moving them, they’re not moving him.
And he says, “Well, I’m not - I’m bigger than that!”
And the next thing you know, you say, “Be three feet back of your head” and he is.
Your problem of exteriorization, then, departs from an understanding of this: that a thetan in a creative state does not himself have mass and an understanding of how he gets mass. He gets mass by becoming himself a symbol. Of course, the last thing in the world he is, is a symbol. It’s like a fellow who makes drums all his life and eventually sits down in the corner curled up like a drum and expects somebody to beat on him. This fellow hates drums - so he becomes a drummer. See that?
Now, why is this? Why does a fellow become what he resists? Well, he just sweeps down on it in this fashion: he starts fighting it with energy and he gets more loses than he gets wins and so he gets to be it. Now, let’s get that much more simply. Let’s get the problem of the stuck flow: the fellow talks in one direction too long, he’ll get a stuck flow. Now, the way you unstick this flow is to reverse it or get some mock-ups and get it budged out of line, get it squared around and knock it off.
Well now, when he starts resisting something, very arduously starts resisting something - you know, crush, crush, crunch, crunch - he gets a stuck flow. Similarly, when he starts giving postulates toward something (in other words, commands or orders in one direction) and it never gives any back, he gets on a stuck flow. He eventually gets to the point where he can’t force anything along that line and the line itself will collapse. And that is the end product of a stuck flow: it collapses into a mass.
All communication lines eventually wind up to be one terminal - both ends. Anytime they stick too hard on a flow, why, they’ll eventually do that.
So your thetan stood outside the body for a long time giving it orders, telling it to destroy itself or something and, eventually, why, the very mass of material which he put out in one direction became a stuck flow and we got a collapsed terminal proposition.
Now what’s a collapsed terminal? That’s something that should have two ends which now has both ends in coincidence - both ends in the same place. Now that’s a collapsed terminal.
You’re going to hear this phrase an awful lot - collapsed terminal. Better get used to it. You’ll notice many preclears have collapsed terminals. Well, right next door to a collapsed terminal is becoming the thing you’re collapsed with. You’re right there, so you must be it. That’s the immediate assumption.
Now, thought is very agile. But when it gets fixed in terms of a symbol, it becomes much less agile. It loses its creativeness. Let’s take the plight of the writer who writes, writes, writes, writes, writes Western stories. He will eventually start wearing Western clothes, even though he lives in the middle of Brooklyn. It’s inevitable. He becomes the mass of symbols which he puts out. A method of whipping this, for a writer, a method of whipping this is a very simple one: just write in that many lines that you can embrace - never bother about names, identities, things like that. Sign yourself Henry Pillibomb and ...
I used to write Western stories many, many, many years ago and my name was W R. Colt. and you will still find me in the library. And the funny part of it was, is all the time I was writing Western stories, I was really interested in yachting. Never had anything much to do with the West and as a matter of fact tried not to close terminals with it because of my early boyhood misadventures with mustangs, which I do not consider very romantic. They are very bad transportation, but they work if you hit them hard enough in the head with a leaded quirt, [laughter] I mean, the SPCA and I have never seen eye to eye on the subject of horses which will buck you off and tromp on you.
When I was six, by the way (I remembered this the other day when I was talking about this down at the Congress but I didn’t tell it) I went, “Oh God, I had an argument with the SPCA when I was six.” I had managed to bring to curb, by running him into a brick wall, a twelve hundred pound Kentucky saddler that somebody had foisted off as a riding horse. And I couldn’t stop him. And he was going places and he wasn’t bright enough to climb the wall or do anything imaginative like that, so he merely ran into it. And of course, he fell down, so I sat down on him and - waiting for him to more or less come to and shake himself out of it. And this lady came up and, lo and behold, it was the SPCA, because this happened within a half a block of the capital of Helena, Montana and they had quarters right in that vicinity in those days. And she started to sound off about cruelty to horses. And I don’t know where she got off bawling out a six-year-old boy who had just almost lost to a twelve hundred pound horse! But we had quite an argument which almost put me in police court, which was to the effect - I said, rather profanely, that she ought to engage herself in forming a society for the prevention of cruelty to children by horses [laughter] and that she belonged to the wrong gang.
She didn’t appreciate this. She went and told some of my relatives. And they, of course, told me off. She was a very influential person. I think her husband was the Treasurer of the State of Montana or something, you know? I mean - influential - had money. (Had the State’s money anyway.)
Now, where it comes to any of your stuck flows, what happens? What happens on the management of a horse? You just manage enough horses and you lose a few times and you’ve got a continuous flow of commands going to this horse and going to this horse and you just go down to Virginia sometime and find out what happened to some of those fine old families. You go in and knock on the door and they say, “Ne-ee-ei-ghh!”
So here you have a problem - you have a problem in symbols. The horse has a fixed idea. He doesn’t want to do what you want to do. That’s his one fixed idea, so you fix a lot of ideas into him that he does want to do it and you fix them in in various ways: with sugar, with leaded quirts, with spurs, with petting. It’s all done and nearly every rider does it with all those, unless of course he’s smart enough to simply be the horse. Because that’s where he’ll wind up anyhow.
So the problem is, however, if you’re unwilling to be a horse and insist on using a horse, then you of course will become the horse against your wishes, on an inversion, which makes you a compulsive symbol. You know, you’re compelled to be a symbol. .That individual who can fluidly be something and then be something else is a very dangerous fellow indeed - he’s not fighting - that’s not fair! He’s happy though.
So anyway, as a writer, I used to solve this rather uniformly. I wrote stories in rotation. I would write a Western story and then a sea story and then I’d write a detective story and then I’d write a flying story and then I would write an article for somebody or other and then I would write something for one of the superslicks which, by the way, paid me much less than the cheapest pulp.
Yes, I wrote in one time to the American Mercury and asked them why didn’t they bring their rates up to what they were - а pulp paper - because they were published on pulp. And shortly afterwards, after I’d gotten busy on this and made jokes out of it and talked in front of the American Fiction Guild on the subject of the pulps and kept describing articles in the Mercury and so on, why, they began to frown on this sort of thing and my name became non persona grata with them. So I had to sell them under two other names, [laughter] Now, as long as one was willing to do that, that was fine. That was just beautiful.
But then one day, why, you up and you write yourself something and you’re silly enough to use your own name on it and you get fixed with an identity of having done something. So there you are. And actually, anybody’s career, whether as a writer or as a Homo sapiens or a streetcar conductor or any other darn thing, winds up the same way: he starts out playing a game of streetcar conductor, then he knows he doesn’t want to be the streetcar conductor, he resists being the streetcar conductor and then he becomes the streetcar conductor - a symbol. So you only become a symbol by resisting something.
Being something is quite something else than being a symbol. You understand that? You can be a man, you can fejohn Jones. Well, if you can be John Jones, then you want to be free to un-be John Jones. And the freedom of beingness should be equaled, in every case, by the freedom of un-beingness. And if you can parallel your freedoms so that you have the freedom to be and the freedom to un-be, as well as the freedom not to be, why, of course you exteriorize beautifully and you’re very happy and all things work out wonderfully. And also, all the problems of auditing are solved for the auditor before he gets there.
But when the auditor gets there, if he takes what we’ve been talking about this morning and uses this, why, he’ll find out that he finds processing very simple. Because, obviously, the fellow who is sitting there in front of him - preclear - is being Jones, a body, Earth, Galaxy 61,1954. And there he is.
Well, the fellow isn’t happy or he wouldn’t be there. Well, what’s he unhappy about? Well, he must be unhappy about being a symbol. Well, let’s take the biggest symbol that he is and just have him be it. And then un-be it. And then be it and then un-be it, on some sort of a gradient scale, which will eventually rescue to the individual his freedom “to be or not to be, no longer a question.”
And that, in essence, is your highest echelon of processing. You can develop any God’s quantity of techniques out of that. The only thing else you’d need to know about that would be a little bit more about the theory of communication. Because communication, cause and effect and duplication all are tied in very tightly. But we’ve covered enough for one morning. It’s not a very big subject. I mean, the subject of communication is idiotically simple. That’s the trouble with it. It’s so simple that everybody misses it.
Well, it’s like this business of symbols. Now you use that definition for a symbol and you’ll win. It isn’t whether or not that definition is good in the field of English or in the field of medicine or in the field of writing - we’re not interested in whether or not this these fixed ideas in it. Because this mass of energy with its fixed ideas in it was bigger than the preclear and so could victimize him and make him sick. Well, we had the means of eradicating it, one way Or the other, with greater or lesser success. And so, as we could knock out that mass called a symbol, we could make our individual relatively well as
Now, do your techniques sort of fit on this gradient scale of what we’ve been going into? Well, all right. We have then, in all the processing we’re doing, the problem of identification and differentiation, as we always have had, but we can sum that up now in terms of communication. We can sum it up in numerous ways. But the simplest statement that we can make of any of this is the right to be and the right to un-be. And if a person has fought being something for a long time, then he is it compulsively. He has no more determinism about it. But if he simply merely became it - you know, he just decided he’d become that and then he decided he’d un-become it - nothing is simpler.
No thetan ever snapped into a body unless he laid his hand on it in anger. You just don’t walk up to a body and put a beam on him and snap in. You don’t even walk up to a body and put a beam on it and have it be hurt badly and snap in. You have to walk up to the body with the intention of anger in order to snap into one suddenly and inexplicably.
You have to have conceived that bodies are evil and, therefore, something to be resisted, in order to be trapped in one.
You have to conceive that theta traps are very bad in order to get trapped in the theta trap. It’s almost impossible for a thetan to get trapped. But there is the one modus operandi of his getting trapped: being afraid of getting trapped, of course. And he postulates that he’s afraid of getting trapped in order to set an example so other thetans will be afraid of getting trapped - and they will get trapped. So he does too.
Fellows go down to the Gold Coast and the Ivory Coast and the Slave Coast of Africa and spread Christianity in order to buy slaves. Boy, they got to be the most psalm-singing, praying people you ever heard of. And Christianity, at the time they were using it, was no more than a tool - an effort to get some slaves trapped - you know, make the tribes docile enough so they wouldn’t fight against being bought. And they wound up as devout Christians - the people who were doing this. Fascinating, isn’t it?
So that, to be caught in a trap, you must have set the trap yourself. So in any case - as you go along and run any case, you want to know what’s wrong with the case, you could be very self-righteously accusative of the case and say, “When did you do it?”
Fellow says, “Everybody is mean to me.”
“When were you mean to everybody?” Unfortunately, this individual’s recall is not adequate to tell you this because it goes over too many millennia, that’s all.
Problem of processing get a little simpler to you, right there?
All right. Now, let’s just look at what else we were doing there this morning. This condensed scale of energy, of Lookingness - and when you go into energy, you go down from Knowingness into the rest of the band. And that band is Knowingness, Lookingness, Emotingness, Effortingness, Thinkingness.
You know where it goes there?
Female voice: Symbols.
That’s right. Thinkingness. Thinking condenses and becomes a symbol. A. symbol is condensed thinking. You know where it goes then?
It goes into Eating, it enters the Applause Scale at that point and that drops down to Eating. And you know what condensed eating is?
Female voice: Sex?
Sex. So you see what a terrific band of understanding we’re looking at here in terms of human experience, it’s a big band. Actually, condensed eating is sex. But you go on up there, you go to the Applause Scale and then you get up into Symbolisms and then you get up into Thinkingness and then you get up into Effort-Effort is pretty high.
But you get this thing repeating, over and over and over, and when it’s repeated and repeated and repeated, why - as it goes downscale - why, it evidently becomes MEST. We cannot justify that in just one-two-three, you know? I mean we can’t say absolutely this is the case. It just happens to be the existing theory. The rest of this is not existing theory. The rest of this just happens to be a lot closer to fact than “the acceleration of gravity is 32.2 feet per second.”
When we get down to Sex - you know, Eatingness and then Sex and, above that, Symbols and, above that. Thinking and Effort and so on - when we’re dealing with these things, well, we’re dealing with a fact that is better and more useful than 32.2 feet per second.
The definition of a symbol is actually a little more valuable to you than any of the definitions of physics. Because it was in desperation of chasing symbols that Man located physics.
Well, do you feel better Or worse through that little run this morning?
Audience: Better.
Feel a little bit better. Well, fine.
Now let’s just take two seconds here and do the rest of it.
Okay. Be a body.
Be a girl’s body.
Be a boy’s body.
Be an old man’s body.
An old woman’s body.
A young girl’s body.
A young boy’s body.
Be an Eskimo’s body.
Be a cat’s body.
Be a horse’s body.
Be a dog’s body.
Be a cat’s body.
Be a stone.
Be a body.
Be a stone.
Be a body.
Be a book.
Be a body.
Be a book.
Be a body.
Be a book.
Be a body.
Be the letter “alpha.”
Be a body.
Be freedom from want.
Be a body.
Be a murderer.
Bea victim.
Be a murderer.
Be a victim.
Be a murderer.
Bea victim.
Be a murderer.
Be a policeman.
Be a victim.
Be a doctor.
Be a murderer.
Be a policeman.
Be a hospital.
Be a stone.
Be a hospital.
Be a stone.
Be a hospital.
Be a stone.
Be a hospital.
Be a stone.
Be a hospital.
Be a stone.
Bea victim.
Be a murderer.
Be an electric chair.
Have the emotions of an electric chair.
Be a victim.
Be a murderer.
Be a burglar.
Be a sidewalk.
Be the sky.
Be a wood.
Be a sky.
Be a wood.
Be a sky.
Have the emotion of a sky.
Be a wood.
Have the emotion of a wood.
Be a murderer.
Have the emotion of a murderer.
Be a victim.
Have the somatic of a victim.
Have the emotion of a victim.
Have the viewpoint of a victim.
Have the knowingness of a victim.
Be the symbols of a victim.
Be the applause of a victim
Be a police officer.
Be the police force.
Have the viewpoint of the victim.
Have the viewpoint of the murderer.
Be a duck.
Have the emotion of a duck.
Have the motion of a duck.
Be a duck hunter.
Have the emotion of the duck hunter.
Have the viewpoint of a duck hunter.
Have the lookingness of a duck hunter.
Have the knowingness of the duck hunter.
Be a duck.
Have the emotion of the duck.
Have the knowingness of the duck.
Have the lookingness of the duck.
Have the effort of the duck.
Be the duck hunter.
Be the gun.
Be the pellets.
Be the pellets in the duck.
Be the duck.
Have the emotion of the duck.
Be the duck hunter.
Have the eatingness of the duck hunter.
Be the eatingness of the duck.
The eatingness of the duck hunter.
The eatingness of the duck.
Be the duck eating.
Be a fish being eaten by the duck.
Be the fish.
Swim. Be the motion of the fish.
Be the emotion of the fish.
Be the motion of the body out on the sidewalk.
Be the motion of the body out on the sidewalk.
Now be the body.
Now be the room.
Now be the motion of the body.
Now be the motion of the body out on the sidewalk.
Now be the corner.
Now be the motion of the body walking down to the corner.
Okay. Be a thousand feet up.
Give me some places where you’re not.
A place where somebody else isn’t.
Be yourself.
Give me some more places where you’re not.
Okay. Now give me several things that you can lose.
Several things that you can afford to lose.
Now check over some things you have not lost.
Now some things which you own.
Now some things which you know absolutely with certainty that you do not own.
Bethem.
Be them one right after the other.
Okay. Find the two back points of the room.
Now sit there for a moment and look and don’t think.
Now look through whatever you’re looking at.
Okay. What you got?
Okay. Feel better?
Female voice: Yeah. Hungry . . .
You’re hungry?
Female voice: Starving.
Put some people in your stomach.
Female voice: Something I might just do.
Well, go ahead! [laughing]
Now look, cannibalism, for the duration of this class at least, doesn’t go! [laughter]
How do you feel? Feel a little better?
Female voice: Yeah.
Who exteriorized on that one?
Anybody exteriorize on that for the first time? A little patty-cake way of exteriorization. Did you?
Male voice: I don’t know.
He doesn’t know. We have to solve, on some of these cases, degradation because of exteriorization before they’ll exteriorize. Because most of the people here who aren’t exteriorized right now have, at one time or the other, and then they felt very degraded for having done so and that’s what you have to solve with the case.
Well, that’s beside the point. SOP 8-C is still very much in order just as it rolls.
[woman coughing]
[to woman] Pearl, be your lungs.
Be your body.
Be your lungs.
Be your body.
Be somebody else’s lungs, [man coughing] [laughter]
Pearl, is that what you did? Did you do that?
Male voice: No, I’d been holding that off.
Oh, you had.
[to woman] Feel a little bit better?
Female voice: Tm all right.
Ah, yes. Well, you be your lungs again.
[various students coughing]
All right, both you and Pearl and you, be somebody else’s lungs now.
Be somebody else’s lungs.
Now be somebody else’s lungs.
And be those lungs with ТВ.
Now add lung fever.
Now wheeze and pant and can’t get air, as the lungs.
Now get a gleeful feeling of actually lousing them up. Just get what you’re doing to this person with your ТВ and so forth. Just fix them up but good.
Now be the person.
Now be the lungs.
Now be your lungs.
Now be the effort of your lungs. Okay? You still holding back a cough? You still afraid you’re going to cough?
Female voice: Well, not just now.
All right. Okay.
That better?
Well, I hope you’re feeling better, but the practical truth of the matter is, you characters, I didn’t process you this morning to make you feel better. I’ve tried to give you the opening gun on randomity and automaticity, beingness and resistance.
All right.