Any subject which is attempting to codify knowledge wants as little as possible to do with loose ends – with exceptions. I love these so-called laws which begin "Now, the following theory so-and-so and so-and-so is absolutely true." And then it lists exceptions and it lists practically everything that should have been covered by the law, and then it lists doubtfuls – everything else, We don't want any loose ends hanging out on this at all. As a consequence, I have to go into this subject to keep it in the MEST universe and to handle it in the second echelon, the MEST universe. I am not talking to you now, particularly, in the third echelon.

But we do care very much about this manifestation when we start tracking back preclears. The discovery of the existence of memory filed complete against time was in itself a considerable discovery, because it started to lead in toward a discovery of the source of individuals and individuation. An exploration of this line, of course, would naturally parallel to some slight degree any other search ever made on the subject. It would parallel biology, it would parallel religion, mysticism. It would to some degree parallel anybody or anything that ever thought along this line – the difference being that now we had a tool, we had a precision investigation tool. We had an application – a technique of application which could sort out delusion from actuality and which could recover any and every incident in the entire life span of the individual.

You see, now there are three echelons: The first is simply considering the organism. First echelon, which was Dianetics, is considering the organism as it. It is just it, that's all. It's an organism. It is a body and it is a mind and it is a brain and it's all one. And it's a unit and it's an individual, and it gets conceived and is born and it dies and that's that. And it considers it as very much a part of the MEST universe. Now, considering it from that angle, you can still produce very good results.

The advent of this tool was a long time ago – about fourteen years ago, actually, and it was not in very full use, really, until about five years ago, and then it was in VERY full use. And the more it was used – the technique of discovering the recalled memories of an individual – the more was learned. And understand, it was being learned for the first time on a precision-tool basis. That is a bit different than other parallel lines of research.

The second echelon considers the identity or the description of – an accurate and demonstrable description of – thought itself as something which is not of the MEST universe.

Now, you take mysticism. Mysticism was a HIGHLY valid line of research – HIGHLY valid. It, however, contained many speculations, and in itself said that it contained many speculations, and when employed would quite often throw the mystic into a very bad state of disrepair. As a consequence it was not a particularly safe tool, but it was a tool.

Now, the third echelon is a study of why did it all come about in the first place and why is it happening.

The line of Religion was to some degree also a tool. I would hardly know where to define or divide mysticism and religion, except perhaps religion is a codified mysticism – codified and handed out sort of by rote.

We are still very much in "how" when I start talking to you about the MEST line, the MEST body line – that is to say, the genetic line – its offshoots of the dead body line, and the theta body line.

You couldn't expect a population at large to be able to understand mysticism. It is a highly complex subject – VERY complex. It has many schools. But religion could be handed out, so perhaps – just a codification of what were considered to be good points of behavior, optimum behavior, and good catch points that would catch people's imagination or attention. These things put together in a package could be considered religion.

You will find cases to which you will have to apply the knowledge I am about to give you in order to resolve those cases.

There have been many, many, many religions – oh Lord, just hundreds of thousands, millions of religions. The religions which we happen to be operating on, on earth today, are most of them about two thousand years old, oddly enough. Those in India are older than that. But all these religions are really very young. Compared to mysticism itself, they're all young.

It will sound, perhaps, mad and wild to you, but that's nothing compared to how it will sound to the preclear. And that is nothing compared to the confusion in which you will find the preclear because of this.

Mohammedanism, Christianity, Buddhism, to name three, are remarkably parallel. As a matter of fact, Christ is one of the prophets in Mohammedanism and is given joss for being so. Buddha paralleled quite remarkably and preceded, Christ.

Now, anything which tends to reduce the amount of confusion and upset in a preclear, in other words, to advance him further up the track toward knowingness, is legitimate processing – anything. Education, anything. You can teach a person Scientology and find them coming up in tone, just because it's closer to the truth than they have ordinarily been progressing.

Another religion, and way off from Christianity and the rest of it, is Confucianism. It's actually a philosophy of how to be a conservative citizen who is supposed to keep his nose clean. Let's be very colloquial about it, because there's no reason to treat these things seriously. This fellow Confucius said, "Well, let's all be mild and down Tone Scale and we'll all get along." And this philosophy pervaded China. Very remarkable. I think, probably since communism came in there, they've stopped it. But for many, many, many centuries the civil servant of China had to go down into the Confucian temple in Peking, and he'd sit there and read these enormous tablets and he'd have to know them all by heart. And if he knew them all by heart, then he could handle the post office inkwell or something of the sort. Rut that was more a philosophy than a religion.

In all of the fields of knowledge, a unification of knowables is desirable.

Now, you start talking about religions, I've seen some interesting religions in my day, very interesting. All through the – in this life – through the South Pacific down to the south of here and so on. There are lots of them in existence. And always, the top bracket, the boy up at the top of the religion who was busy monitoring it and handling it for the populace, was a mystic. So, you see, there is where I draw my conclusion that mysticism sort of overlies religion.

And when I start talking to you about the individual and individuality, I have to take in factors which, when you look at preclears, you will find to be very, very much in evidence. These factors consist of the fact that one theta body can take care of several individuals and ordinarily does.

So here is a line of research, but nobody was willing to take this line. They would take religion. It didn't require any understanding; it just said, "You've got to have faith, fellow, And if you have enough faith, you've got faith, and && that's fine. Now just step up here to the rail, drop your nickel on the drum" and froth a little bit, and && you're all set," As a matter of fact, it works. It works.

What happens on the theta body line is very interesting. You find the theta body line starting out as an individuality. It progresses a little way through the MEST universe and may unite with another theta body line or two more, and then spread out from that and become several lines again.

There's no sense being light about it particularly, because it was a terrifically necessary tool in handling civilizations where one had no real insight into what made the mind work. You could take religion and you could say, "Well, we may not get you in this life, fellow, but we're going to get you in the next." And that would make fellows pause.

In short, here you have your original theta body line, it comes along, it goes along fine, and this lifetime, it's one. And then it hits a lifetime strata and it becomes three or four. And then these three or four come in again to just one individuality again.

Now, for instance, any area which was punitively religious might be considered by you to be a very holy area. Hm-mm. An area was given religion to the exact ratio that it was bad, wicked and evil. And the more wicked it was, the more they gave it religion, until religion would look like a tidal wave after a while, trying to hit this place and knock it flat.

The only conflict here is the fact that you're accustomed in the MEST universe to arithmetic. And of course when you're dealing with something which is out beyond the MEST universe, you are not dealing with arithmetic. Arithmetic is based on the MEST universe. Mathematics apply to this universe and nothing else.

You take the accounts of the early days of America, and you'll find a thievish, cutthroat existence being lived by our Pilgrim Fathers, the like of which would sound awfully awfully bad to a Boston censor. And how did they get to him? How did they get to these fellows? Well, they got to them with religion – crush! Their punitiveness was actually an effort to make a civilization by codified laws. And that was the use of religion. And that IS the use of religion. And any thinker or philosopher back through all times agrees with that definition. It's not my definition. Religion is a mechanism for the control of the people. It is not an effort to promote understanding. Mysticism, however, was an effort toward reaching an understanding. That gives you some separation of data in the matter.

Now, here you have this operation: this body line then, may go out as two bodies. You could actually track somebody back and find him living twice through the same age period. You can find him living twice in the past, through the same years. But more importantly, more important to you as an auditor, you can find a preclear living in four or six or ten entities right here on this universe at this moment. And you can demonstrate it in any way you want to demonstrate it, and even write letters to the other identities, if you want to go that far, and tell them what they had for breakfast.

Now, I don't know of very many more routes of understanding that were punitively followed or pursued, beyond mysticism, magic. Magic, by the way, is a very precise study. Most people think of magic in terms of stage magicians or something of the sort. It's not. Magic is not. It is a method of producing effects by using, for cause, the supernatural. And there's spiritualism, as something which is not mysticism. These are routes, routes, routes.

Now, up above the line of knowingness – this knowingness is a sort of individuality; it's a sort of a manifestation in front of a curtain. Here, let us say, [marking on blackboard] is a curtain, and here is "I" over here, but back of "I" there's a lot of knowledge can be concentrated, and "I" sort of shuts that off and says, "Well, that doesn't apply to me." Well, very often it applies to him so strenuously that if he doesn't know about it, he's going to be a sick man. Now, that's no good.

And what are all these people studying, and where are they trying to go, and what are they trying to get? They're trying to get the source of man and trying to discover the extent of, and recover the use of, all of his latent powers of personality. And that, actually, is the complete goal in this search. Not necessarily to uncover the gods and shake them by the right hand. Let's recover man and find out if man ever was a god. And if he was, why did he stop being a god.

So, we'll go down the line here, and we'll find this "I," let us say, in this life. That was one "I". Now, we take this span here with four lives, and we've got "I" here, and we've got "I" here [blackboard]. That's not back of each other, you understand; these are just curtains. And there's an "I" in front of each curtain, but actually back of this is the same theta line. Actually, back of this you have just this theta line going along; it's the same line. It just depends on how many individuals come off of it this time.

An effort to discover what is an individual: Is there such a thing as a relatively pure individual? If so, and if there ever has been, how did he get debased? Or, if there is a debased individual at the source, how do you purify him and raise him up?

You'll find a situation back through the evolutionary stretch where the "I" is dividing ∑, as in the Helper, And you'll find this division, division, division, division, then you'll find all the divisions sort of coming back in together, and then going all out and being different entities again and coming back in and – it's wonderful.

These are very serious studies, and these have been studied by man through all of his days, however many millennia that is. These things are actually studied by the Australian bushman, as primitive as he is. And they are studied by the head of a corporation in the United States, no matter how big and materialistic that is. Oh yes, he studies them, he very definitely does. He wants to know how to get good personnel and make them better. Oh, he hires people to give them tests and he hires morale experts and he hires this and that and so forth. He works on this ceaselessly: how to make these people better, how to make them cooperate better and so on. In other words, it's a material study, or it is a spiritual study, whichever way you want to look at it. But that's what you're studying in Scientology.

It could be very confusing if you permitted it to confuse you. The only reason you could be confused about it is you're fairly low on the Tone Scale and you said, "I'm going to be me, and that's all there is to that," and "There's nobody else is going to share any part of anything I'm doing," and "I can't be anybody else but me."

And I'm trying to bring it home to you that it hasn't been very long that we've had a tool by which to recover some actual data. In the first place, it was not known too well that man could pick up these memories, these facsimiles, complete and in their entirety, that they were all on file. Techniques for picking them up and examining them minutely were not known. As a result, man's knowledge lacked the sense, measure and experience factor.

Well, that would be very nice if it would work out like that; however, it doesn't. If you notice on the column on the Chart of Attitudes, up at the top of the column, at some unimaginable number height way above 40 – you've got "everyone." You would have everyone; you really would have. It'd come back to the main theta body, the BIG theta body. And if you could back up the Tone Scale far enough or high enough, theoretically you could be everyone, theoretically. As it is, you only back up far enough usually to be a few. And very few people have backed up into "knowing" far enough to be more than a rather aberrated "me." So you see, it's just how many, how far you want to go up the line.

Therefore, what I tell you about this from here on is based on study using a new tool. The laws of delusion and the laws of actuality have been looked over very thoroughly. You can tell the difference between a delusion and an actuality; any day, you can tell the difference between the two. Laws of delusion follow certain definite laws, and laws of actuality follow certain definite laws. Sorting out carefully, and more carefully than was ever sorted out in the past, all hallucination and delusion from this body of data that can be sorted out from it, we examine, then, nothing but that which remains as actuality.

Now, in the old days there used to be this sort of an arrangement: The mystic considered this would be a master. [marking on blackboard] You see, there would be a master, and this master had in charge this many individuals, and this master monitored those individuals.

And we discover something that looks like this: We discover that there is a main body of thought, just as there is a main body of potential knowledge. That thought and knowingness are themselves equivalents; they are more or less similar, they're the same order of thing. Data and knowledge, and the very thing on which one records experience, are similar things.

The second you start to clear up a preclear any distance at all, he will come up the line just about so far, and then he'll get to a point where he'll start short-circuiting.

Now, here we have this, what we call, main body of theta. Now, we find breaking off from this main body of theta (which, by the way, has no space or time) – we find breaking off from it and entering upon, to some slight degree, the track of time, a small bit of the whole universe. In other words, more or less the same thing, but on a smaller edition. Now, you – it's very hard to use words like smaller and bigger because, you see, something that has neither space nor time is neither small nor big. It doesn't either have portions as we know them in the MEST universe, but this does not mean that in its own universe it does not have portions.

Now, you notice these are closer and closer together. Now, theoretically this master is a master line. It's very "knowable" – I mean, it knows a great deal; it's quite high up the Tone Scale. That's sort of like – it isn't a master. What you've run into there is your consecutive whole theta body as applies to the individuation.

So, we take this little bit here, and all of a sudden it stands out there – it breaks away.

You know, there originally, I drew this circle of theta, and showed you how this little bit broke off here and started down the line. Well, this is the little bit, really, and little bits of it are off here. And those little bits are "I."

Now, it inherently knows, it is cause, it is a high state of beingness, it is a pure theta entity.

Now, it'd be all very well if it worked out that smoothly, but it doesn't work out that smoothly. What happens is that they're at different degrees – they're different proximities, you might say, to this single master thing.

Now, many of these break off, many of them break off. There are lots of them. Lots of them break off, And each one at that moment of breakaway is in the first stage of its individuation. It has entered upon the track of time, and at that moment it becomes an individual to that extent that it is separate from other individuals. It possesses the potentiality and capability of animating and motivating matter, energy in space and time. And so it breaks off and enters upon this time track here, and it becomes a little bit of MEST to the degree that it is entered upon MEST.

So here's one that is very close in and here's one that's just a little bit out. And here's a line which is a spur line and has two. In other words, there's these various patterns.

But it never ceases to be anything but what it is. But that it enters upon MEST merely means that it's being recorded on by MEST, not that MEST becomes a part of it. But the more recordings it gets – the more recordings it gets from MEST, the greater the effort it makes to align and straighten out the chaos which is the material universe, the more turbulent those recordings look, until it itself no longer completely knows. It knows less and less and less and less, the more and more and more it experiences.

Now, this one which has the two down here at the bottom, you clear up this preclear and you'll get him there. And as soon as he gets there, he can sense the fact that he's somebody else, too, somewhere else. And he'll become quite confused. And then he'll say, "I'm me, and that other person can go to blazes."

Now, where it goes from here, one is not quite prepared to say, after it leaves this MEST universe at the end of ALL of its existences in this MEST universe. One is not prepared to say at this time, but one can guess. It either joins a new pool of theta over here which is changed somehow, or it simply goes back and joins that one. Now, we haven't, at this time, been there to that point where it finishes this line. So let's just talk about it from a time standpoint.

He may do that and as soon as he does that, you get a sort of a jealousy factor entering in between these two individuals who are the same individual. They won't admit their similar individuality. You can put a preclear on a machine and you can demonstrate to him how he actually has several personalities. Actually, he's in contact with several personalities which aren't aware of one another's existence at all. You make them aware of one another's existence and they'll start to demonstrate some jealousy, one to the other. One is going to be more powerful than another and so forth. Fascinating.

Here we are in time, and we find this entered in upon the material universe. How long does it stay there? Well, it stays there for a long, long time. And it becomes more and more individual; it becomes individuated. As it comes down Tone Scale, it becomes more and more individual.

So here you have this fellow, and you're going to back this fellow up here until he lies across that line. Well, the next thing you know, he's going to start to run this person's engrams. Just like that. Well now, you're fairly all right if you go well back on the track to run engrams for this person, because then you'll run engrams which are mutual to each. What you do is run engrams that are sitting around in this, and it'll influence both of these and they'll come out to parity. They'll also come out into awareness of each other. They'll go through a symptom of worrying about "Let's see, Now, if I am me, and I am thee, too, then will I have to be aware of thee 100 percent or me 100 percent!" and "What are we going to do?" and "Supposing we're going to get all our thoughts tangled up." Well, actually, their thoughts were most gorgeously tangled up. They were really tangled, up to the time you started to process this person, because this person was being influenced from quarters he had no idea of at all.

Did you ever read anything by Charles Dickens? You will notice in those books that actually he doesn't characterize anybody. He uses an eccentricity, an aberration, and this aberration sort of walks around through the story and is a funny character. And by the way, watching this aberration parade through the story is very amusing reading. But there is individuation by aberration. The more and more aberrated it becomes, the further and further it separates, why, the less and less it has in common with its original intent and the more and more individuality it has, until it passes a center point – a low point (it's not center point, it's low on the scale) – and after that sort of reassumes a similarity to all other entities. And then – means it's just too deeply pushed into the MEST universe and it is mostly, if you looked at its recordings, just MEST universe.

For instance, every once in a while you'll find a preclear who will sit around and listen to advice from somebody. He will. He'll sit around and he'll get inspirations or he'll get something from somebody else or something else, and what he's doing there is about the same equivalent, but much different – a mind-reading act, sort of. He's over on the other side taking tips from what somebody else knows. And he says, "This is inspiration. This is my intuition at work."

That's somebody below 2 on the tone scale. They aren't even eccentric, really, below 2 on the Tone Scale. They have a horrible degree of similarity. Where you get your eccentricity, where you get your actual individuality, is between 32 and 2 on the tone band. And there's a terrific differentiation and difference in individuals along about 8 or 10. There's where you get your highest demonstrated individuality, actually, and below that it sags off pretty badly.

And here's some other fellow sitting over someplace, working like mad, working something out and figuring something out. Well, that's where he's getting the data. Now, for instance, you take Kelly and Bessemer. This is a notable example – Kelly and Bessemer. One sat in England and one sat in Kentucky, and they invented – within two days of each other, completed the invention of – a process of making steel. And they call it today the Bessemer process. They might as well call it the Kelly process, because it was invented simultaneously in both places. Same guy.

Now, its modus operandi – that is to say, the way it works along the space-time line – is quite simple. It has prepared for itself at the beginning of time a genetic line – a protoplasm line. Life has worked up protoplasm lines. It could even be a different – slightly different form of this theta works up these protoplasm Lines. But it knows enough to work up a protoplasm line, and so you get procreation – get and beget, and beget and get, and get and beget, and so forth, column after column. And this protoplasm line goes along through time. The funny part of it is, is there's a terrific desperation on the part of an unknowing theta which has lost its individuality to keep that protoplasm line continuous, keep it continuous.

There's nothing much to this. Alexander Graham Bell busily invented the telephone here; it was simultaneously invented all over the world. There was practically every country in the world had some facsimile of Alexander Graham Bell – wonderful transfer.

And actually, it is a reservoir or a treasure of structure – to a large degree it's inherent structure – and what has been learned about structure carries along this line. The horrible part of this is, however, that the protoplasm line, evidently, could be cut off sharp and theta, on one world, could begin all over again and still keep it rolling. And it probably wouldn't take it very many thousand years to have it back up to the present form you're in now. It would not be very disastrous, in other words, to have an enormous change. For instance, the surface of the earth could change so that it was uniformly 150 degrees Fahrenheit; it'd wipe out all life immediately. Wouldn't be very long before theta had readapted itself to the point where it had 150 degree capability in the organism.

What's quite remarkable about all of the research in which I have been engaged is it hasn't flashed up anyplace else. And that's remarkable! It has not come up anyplace else on earth. On earth. (laughter)

Now, the point is, then, that here you have line one, which is a genetic line. Now here in this physical universe we have this genetic line. [marking on blackboard] This genetic line goes from conception, birth, procreation; conception, birth, procreation. Doesn't include the death line. Conception, birth, procreation – that is its cycle. That is strictly genetic. Genes, chromosomes, sperm, ovum, XY factors and so forth – that's a good solid line that keeps going there. Now, it's sort of the stuff that the theta line uses to build its houses.

But this jealousy of identities was such, actually, that in the early days when I was working on this I was experiencing a terrific anxiety. I knew the next five minutes somebody was going to appear on the stands with this first book I wrote on the subject. You see, I knew somebody else knew. I knew somebody else was working on it too. And they were. But not here on earth. Anyway ... (laughter)

Now, over here – over here paralleling it, is a theta line, and that's a theta body line. Now, this is the original stuff here. [tapping on blackboard] It's gathering all sorts of its knowledge. And its cycle – its cycle is preconception – severa1 days preconception – conception, birth, procreation, death – jump-off; preconception, conception, birth, procreation, death, jump-off. You know, I mean your death factor comes in there every time, so that your order of cycle is different.

Well now, what I'm talking to you about, you'll find applicable. There are preclears right here in this audience that are sort of vaguely "not me." And it's kind of "not me" a little bit. And they think to themselves, "Well, any moment now I'll be me." But you start them up the line, you get them going a little bit further and evidently something kind of bats them down again. You can't figure out what's batting them down. They start up Tone Scale and BAT – they'll go down again. Put them on the machine and simply ask them this question: "Is there somebody else holding your aberrations in place?"

Preconception: it joins the line before conception. And by the way, you can run almost any preclear back into several days before the conception sequence, several days – oh, usually on either side. And you run them up to conception, then it runs on up the line; birth, runs up the line; procreation, up the line; death. That's the theta line. Then a NEW preconception – joining of the genetic line – and so on. In other words, this theta line is wandering along here in and out on the genetic line, and the genetic line is sort of like passengers getting on and off a railroad train. The genetic line is a consecutive railroad train and the theta line is a passenger line.

It says "Yes" – bang, machine operates.

Now, oddly enough – oddly enough, not all of this theta does a departure on death. Very strange manifestation. You'll find this in preclears quite ordinarily. They do a departure, all right, at the moment of death, with most of the theta. I say "most of the theta." Some attention is still being placed on the body, and there is still some interest on the part of this theta body in the body that's being buried. And so you get another line, which is the dead man line. And there you have actually some attention still in the corpse.

"Where is this person?" and there'll be a little twitch, and you'll ask him – well, according to continents, Earth, anyplace else, stars, so on.

And it's a most remarkable thing. You start to run some poor unsuspecting preclear back up the line – and all of a sudden he runs the death all right and then keeps right on going – in the body, in that body. And there he is in the casket and they bury him. And twenty-five years later what's happening to him, then, he's probably being troubled by seepage. (laughter) And then they run it along a few years afterwards and the chest bones cave in, and "Now, what's happening to you?"

All of a sudden, BOW, you'll get something. Maybe the fellow is in Birmingham or something of the sort, and you've got across on the line. Well, the second you get this awareness, two things may start to happen. You may start to pick up the fellow's engrams from Birmingham. And if you do, go ahead and run them. They're common engrams on the line. But all you're doing is running locks off of common engrams. You see, it's theta, it's facsimiles, and they've got, actually, banks in common.

"Well, I've sort of turned to dust now," and so on. And I've picked up – have picked up funeral orations, & remarkable funeral orations & – and all sorts of bric-a-brac.

Well, your preclear has never had, really, this feeling of "I am." He never quite had this feeling, "I am." He always has this feeling, "Well, I might be if ..." Well, that "I might be if," is he's just a little bit off the line back to the main individual. He's just a little bit off the line.

Theta, in other words, is still keeping an eye on that body. Of course, there's no limit to what theta can keep an eye on or what it can give its attention to. And it actually isn't anything trapped in the body; it's just the fact that this theta line, having lived through that body for one lifetime, is accustomed to keeping an eye on it, so it just sort of – on the side, sort of keeps an eye on it.

You can put him back on the line again. You'll have to jockey him around a little bit, and the next thing you know, why, he'll be responding up as an individual. Nothing much to it. He will go through a period of worry.

And you find some poor little kid five years of age, and Mama says, "Now, you have to sleep in the dark."

Anyway, here we have – here we have here an individual going down Tone Scale. Now, actually an individual could go down Tone Scale simply by having more and more things happen to him, and he becomes more and more individuated. And he becomes so individual that he doesn't even exist in the theta body at all; he's dead. And that's very individual, to be dead. It means simply that as long as you consider the MEST organism as the only identity a person can be or have, you get into terrific complexities, because how individual can it be? Well, when it's gone 100 percent MEST, of course.

Well, he's still got some of his attention, without knowing, you see – because individuation is a separation from knowingness – without knowing it, underneath his level of monitoring, he's got an eye on his old corpse. And "Mama, I see skeletons!" he will say, and he'll have horrible nightmares about it. And she'll come in, of course, and turn off the light and lock the door on him and punish him if he keeps this up. The point of the matter is, he is – he's lying there in a coffin someplace in East Yardsborough and seepage is troubling him, or something.

Now, watching this, then, you'll find there are complexities in auditing for which you will be, sometimes, at a little bit of a loss to account for. And by the way, this is quite remarkable: There is a mystic practice of concentrating until you get a visio. And you'll get visios in far cities, in far places, without doing any teleportation of yourself or your soul or anything of the sort. You just lie down and concentrate and get a visio. And you'll get a visio of your – of doing something. Some of this is accounted for simply by, all of a sudden, being the other you – being the other you.

One naval officer ran his mother, and lo and behold, way back someplace or other she had gotten stuck in a glacier. And the theta body had had so many facsimiles of trying to get her out of this glacier that a LOT of attention stayed on this body in the glacier. And mama was having chills and fever and chills and so on, and he never did get it completely run out, but he said, "That's all right. She's been stuck in it for the last couple of thousand years. Who cares?" (laughter) And Mama, by the way, was quite perplexed – quite perplexed to find herself a dead body in a glacier.

There are probably as many as four or five fellows on earth that are almost my duplicate, for instance, physiologically. Almost – poor fellows. Now, one of these fellows used to get me in trouble all the time.

Anyway, you can run anybody through this sequence if you want to fool with it. You'll pick up some very, very touching things. You'll pick up the widow coming to the grave and putting flowers on it and so on. Although the fellow is six feet under, you see, he can still perceive, because theta – it does not have a location in space or time. It just thinks it has.

I walked up the steps of the Cuban Embassy one day and – in Washington, DC, and there was a Spaniard coming down the steps and he said, "Ay, Pedrito, como esta?" And I said, "I'm very sorry, I'm afraid I don't know you."

All right. I ran one, one time, of consecutive Confederate Memorial Days. Year after year they all came around and they give the same powwow about "our brave Southern dead" and so forth. So one day I wrote down the whole oration. It didn't vary. Boy, was that histrionic. God! It's no wonder I never wrote with that prose line.

And "Oh, that's all right, Pedrito. I won't tell anybody you're here." (laughter)

But don't become mistaken on the fact that theta cannot do a consecutive line, because it definitely can – a simultaneous line, a parallel line, and so on. Because it doesn't have location in space or time, it can be in more than one place at once. Because "one place," you mean that, that's MEST universe, and theta isn't in MEST universe, you see? At no time is it ever in MEST universe, so therefore it can be in body one while it is still in a grave with body minus one, while it is still on a genetic line or willing or ready to take off on another genetic line as another body. And even so, it can go over and do a life continuum for somebody else simultaneously.

And I said, "Well, that's fine"

It can do all of these things. It just means a great complexity to it. Problems. In other words, too many facsimiles don't jibe with enough facsimiles, and so it starts getting confused. It doesn't know – doesn't know what it's supposed to be monitoring in the physical universe, and it gets confused about what it's supposed to be monitoring.

He said, "Well, you can even pretend you don't remember me. It's still all right, Pedrito, I'm your friend" and so forth and "I hope everything. comes out all right."

Now, the more it learns and the more it knows, the easier it is for it to control and monitor; the more it can coordinate. The more data can be brought together into the same package, the same bundle, the more it knows. And this doesn't say that it immediately becomes just one individual. It just knows more about who it is. And if you had somebody really cleared up the line, he could probably think as any one of three or four individuals and think in the past too, and he would not even be faintly confused about it.

And I said, "Well, thank you," and went on into the embassy.

But what – when he doesn't know that he is anything or is anywhere else than where he is, he gets these strange things happening to him and he gets very confused; he doesn't know where they come from. And as a net result, he can demonstrate far more aberration than he can demonstrate if he just knew what was going on.

I forgot about it until one time I was in Puerto Rico, and I was trotting down a trail and three Brazilians – Brazilian engineers – were coming up the trail on horses. They took one look at me and they said, "Ay, Pedrito, como esta?" and threw their horses across my path. And they wouldn't let me go anyplace. And then this stuff – "You can tell us. We won't write anybody. We won't let anybody know we saw you" – a big routine. And they finally had me cornered so tightly that nothing would do but what I went over and drank brandy with them and played chess; and they sure figured out I was putting on a good act. (laughter)

An unknown datum can produce aberration. And when theta – a theta body does not know what is going on, it definitely can exhibit very aberrated behavior. But if it knew for sure and with good reality that it was, for instance, inhabiting ten bodies – it was ten people simultaneously, right there – if it just knew that and if it knew for sure what its track was and knew more or less where it had come from and knew more or less what had happened to it, and knew it with some security, everything would go up Tone Scale for that theta body without running a single incident.

To this day, none of those fellows would do anything but claim that I was putting on a good act.

Now the test of this – I have been giving you as a study or a scheme of theta – a test of this is does a person come up the Tone Scale and become less aberrated by just knowing about this and experiencing it himself? And the fact of the matter is, he very definitely does, So for my computations, this has worked out and past theories have not.

Well, a little more time went by – in another place down in Latin America, and a fellow walked up to me. I was sitting in a bar. He reached in his hip pocket, and if I hadn't kicked hard at his shins, I probably would have been a dead man.

They threw him out promptly, and I scratched my head and I said, "I'm not in trouble with anybody down here that I can think of," Till all of a sudden I remembered, "By golly! I bet that fellow would have jumped if I had said I was Pedrito.

Well, fine, fine. Until, one time in Panama – one time in Panama, a girl took one look at me (the most scathing, scorching look you ever saw) in the street, sniffed, put her nose very high in the air and crossed the street diagonally. So I said, "Pedro's been here." (laughter)

I finally found out who Pedro was. He'd undoubtedly run into me, too. I finally found out who he was. He was the son of a rich Brazilian family and he had the wrong political color. And he had gone bad in an awful hurry down in Brazil, and he was being looked for by the police of about five or six countries, as well as the parents of several girl.

And during the war – during the war, I got a report that I had reported in at a place where I hadn't been. And my ears went up like a foxhound's, ha-ha-ha-ha, because Pedrito was a Nazi. And my picture was on file with the Federation Aeronautique Internationale as an international pilot, and those were in France. And full records of me were captured when the Germans took Paris. And, of course, all they had done was backtrack me, look me up, take ahold of Pedrito and cross orders.

I don't know what happened to Pedrito. I often wondered what would have happened if I'd ever met Pedrito in the line of duty during the war.

I am sure, though, to this day – to this day, that there is more there than just a physiological resemblance.

Now, possibly many of you have had this experience. You've probably seen people who looked like you or who acted like you or something of the sort.

Oddly enough, when you meet them you are apt to be a little bit cross about it. It is almost a byword that people who have the same name will be hostile to each other. People who have the same looks may be hostile to each other if they meet themselves accidentally. And it is just in that wise that – it's just in that wise that people who have or are operating from the same theta line become jealous of each other. They will actually flick across and louse each other up.

I am sorry to have to report that, because all should be sweetness and light. But you, every once in a while, will run into somebody on the theta line through the preclear. And if I didn't tell you this could happen, then I would not be doing well by you at all. I would be hiding something which you might need to have.

And when you do, you or the preclear may think you have run into some manifestation similar to the guardian angel manifestation, which is entirely different again. And you will be apt to believe that the other individual is far smarter and knowledgeable than your preclear. Not so. They're both aberrees. And you will find that it's just as difficult to convince this other person to do something.

Now, I don't know how successful you can be in running out somebody else's engrams while he's walking around, eating, sleeping and so forth. I don't know how this can be done at all, but I do know this: Your preclear can go back before the point of separation and run out engrams in common which will unburden the track. And that, as near as I know, is about as far as it can go.

We have conducted an experiment of trying to run out all the engrams for the human race. That's right. We've actually sat down, with far greater thoroughness than would ordinarily be demonstrated in a laboratory, and tried to run out all the engrams of all the race.

Interesting experiment. And the only trouble is, after we had reduced these engrams which theoretically should have been in common to everyone, we still had aberrees.

And the point is there, do we all come from a common source and is this common source, at its first impingement upon the MEST universe, subject to an aberration which if run out would then loosen up the tracks for everybody?

Nope. It's not a common source to that degree. You can't find the first engram in common to everybody, as far as I can find out at this time.

Now, this may all sound very peculiar to you, but when you're exploring with new, efficient tools you're apt to find and come across data which is unknown.

People are quite ordinarily afraid of the unknown. They would rather have a religion than a mysticism. That's right. They would rather have – by and large, broadly, they'd rather have it all codified and presented as being very finite and down to earth, and there's one God (except there's twelve). "There's one God, and we worship twelve idols and one God. And you bat yourself this way and that and that straightens you all out. And there's somebody that you tell all this to and that squares the rap."

Now, that's good and simple, but it unfortunately does not make well people. So we have to look a little bit further for this line. And in all of this research, a very cold eye has been kept on fact – a very cold eye.

What I've just told you about branch lines and so on may be something you may never run into in an auditor. Don't go asking for trouble. But you will have preclears come to you who will not be able to run their own engrams. They will start right out running somebody else's engrams. And then those engrams will promptly look, to them, highly unreal – something that couldn't have happened. And they will practically spin on it unless they know that they can run somebody else's engrams. Now, there may be a half a dozen people in the world whose engrams they can run.

And it may be that you can get your preclear so far up the Tone Scale – way, way up the Tone Scale in all manifestations, registering very high on the machine and so forth – that you could bat around and pry into almost anybody's engram bank if you wanted to.

That would be something else entirely. But boy, a fellow would really have to be high to do that.

All right. What you are interested in doing is returning to an individual all the knowledge of which he is capable as an individual. Where you want to stop his being an individual and start his being a saint, or something of the sort, is pretty well up to you and to him.

But I can tell you that the borderline is something that can be overstepped. It can be passed, and it will be passed with considerable upset and confusion unless you do have some inkling of what you can meet.

Now, all of our work is directed toward knowing more about more. There is a history, a complete history, to this theta line, as pertains to the inhabitants of the planet Earth.

This line is very much in common, it has a certain history; its theta background is in common. Its genetic background is to some degree in common, but not to the degree of the theta line. The constant line is the theta line. The constant line is the theta line, and by the theta line I mean that line where the individual uses the genetic line to make one or many bodies that pass through time.

And the theta body inhabits the other body from just before conception until slightly after death. And this theta line is subject to several individual bodies, and it passes very happily through time.

Now, that body we have in common pretty well – I mean, its history. The history of your theta body and the history of my theta body has terrific, terrific differences, but it has its principal incidents in common. That doesn't mean that the incident happened to you and happened to me too, but it means that an incident happened to me like the incident happened to you.

& And I'm now going to give you a talk on what these incidents are &