And this is January the 18th, 1954.

The earlier lecture, which was a theoretical lecture on time, is actually necessary to this lecture. Time-time and havingness, time and particles.

You can get all fogged up about time if you want to, but about the only barrier that is the apparently untappable barrier is time. But an examination of this theory and practice will unbaffle you with great speed as far as time is concerned.

Time, the barrier. And, I repeat, you’ve heard this remark often. It is quite important: The MEST universe is a game consisting of barriers. The MEST universe is a game consisting of barriers. When all seems lost, for God sakes, look at that. When all seems lost, that one will bring you out of the wilderness. It’s a game consisting of barriers.

And at first, the individual consents to a certain series of barriers and these become very solid and very real to him and so he plays a game. Then the next thing that happens is he begins to conceive that there are more barriers than there are and he gets up to a situation where he thinks there are “thought barriers.”

You know, “I can’t think about certain things because if I think about certain things, I would have to go out beyond that barrier” and, of course, he can’t go beyond that barrier because-he knows he can’t go beyond that barrier because there isn’t any barrier there. But that’s true of the whole universe: there is no barrier there. But the “thought barrier” is down there at the last stage after Effort, you know, that’s why Effort and then Think-why they come together in that order on the scale from Know down to Sex. There’s Effort and then, under that, Thinkingness.

Well, all right, the fellow gets here, he sees this wall, he looks at the wall and he says, “That’s a fine wall” and so forth. Well, that’s the barrier he agreed upon and then these others sneaked in on him. And he begins to believe that any action or motion which he undertakes will find, intervening between him and it, a barrier-one of the several types of barriers which there are in the MEST universe.

And those barriers are very few and they’re very specific and there aren’t any additional barriers to them. The first barrier is space and the second barrier is energy. You know, you could have an area so-space so flickeringly dangerous in terms of energy that an individual would not like to cross it. So that becomes an energy barrier and this, when condensed, becomes an object barrier. An object is a wall, a truck-anything which can stand in the road. And the next barrier out from this is, of course, time. And that is the hardest barrier to define, because it exists so that the playing field will continue and so that the events which have taken place on the playing field will no longer be on the playing field in that form. And so time, as an invention, is quite a barrier.

Now, the problem of livingness is an obstacle race with regard to these barriers. It is an obstacle race, really, in the sense of we’ve got to travel from spot A to spot B, but it’s one that must persist through time. So we get an almost indefinable barrier and then say that an individual has to tour through and cross this barrier. Well, there’s no crossing it, of course. You could just sit still in one place and if you maintained yourself in a state of sanity, you would eventually have crossed the time barrier. There’s nothing to this. It does not require travel.

Now, an individual will get confused on this and people have this: they think the future is over to the right, the past is over to the left, present is out in front of them and various combinations of this character. And they think time has direction.

Well, this is all very interesting, because time doesn’t have direction. And yet, by getting through time, they think that they should get across an area of space. And so we get a preclear being very upset about staying in one place or maintaining himself stationary or immobile. He feels, then, that he is not keeping up with the game because he is not going across something. So we get a very hectic state and the thing called time, according to one of the Axioms of the Logics and Axioms of 1951, is the single arbitrary that causes aberration. Therefore, any process which handles time is actually of great benefit.

An individual has to have some clarity on the subject of what is space and what is an object and what is energy, in order to understand what is time. But that you handled all the space on the case would not mean that you had handled all the time on the case. So, our ultimate in processing is to get this time barrier nailed down, so that time becomes a very important thing to processing. The moment that we had a direct process for time, processing itself became a very easy thing.

Now, when we speak of more obstacles, let’s look over the problem of knowledge. And we find out that an individual cuts down his knowingness, at first, by creating space and saying he doesn’t know what’s over there. Space is antipathetic toward knowingness because it requires lookingness in order to know. Before one has space, of course, one simply knows.

Now, the low-toned case, by the way, can get into a beautiful state of confusion and get down there in thinkingness and start pervading energywise all over the place. And he gets buttered all over the universe and he thinks that he’s in a high state of knowingness.

Well, he’s in a high state of guessingness, but he’s not in a high state of knowingness. This is the mockery side of the Tone Scale.

They got that way pretty badly in the East (I mean, by that, India) and it confounds a person very much that their knowledge is so uncoupled to certainty itself. Well now, certainty itself is an upper echelon of-а very high upper echelon of certainty. Certainty and knowledge are the same thing.

Well, this inverts to a point where an individual takes his only certainty in terms of a playing field. And a playing field is of the essence, he thinks, in terms of action, motion and continued interest.

All right When we have time as an obstacle, we of course don’t have a span. And time only becomes an obstacle because it confounds the individual who is having trouble with space. Individual has trouble with time, he has trouble with space; he has trouble with space, he has trouble with time. That’s because space is conquered by removing one’s self or his viewpoint between A and B. Space is conquered then by travel and time is not conquered by travel.

In science fiction we have “time travel.” That’s terribly interesting and, in spite of any remark I might have made to the contrary earlier by a year or something like that, the past is not attainable, nor is the future itself attainable. But one can know what has been in the past and one can know what has been in the future, mostly because where pure knowingness is concerned, there is neither past nor future. And where the universe is concerned itself, there is only, in terms of time, a changing pattern of particles. And this changing pattern of particles itself brings about an illusion which we know as time and time is an illusion.

Now, an individual can predict the position of particles as well as he can know. He can’t predict them any better than that. The problem of competence is, in itself, the problem of confidence. Competence is the ability to predict two particles, their position in relationship to each other-that’s two plus particles, more than two particles, at least two. One particle has no position. I mean, there’s just one particle and there’s no other particle to relate it to, so it has no position.

Now, the first particle, of course, gets its assigned position just by simply saying it’s there and the second particle gets its position by saying that another particle is next to it.

People get to believe that the universe, then, has a “prime post unposted”-they think there’s a basic particle to which all other things relate. They get this mixed up with God and we have a Prime Mover Unmoved. But the position of this particle and all other things relative to that particle would be a very orderly way of having a universal time and so forth. It doesn’t work that way, however. Every particle in this universe is in relationship to every other particle in this universe.

Now, a thetan can simply step sideways from this type of particles, which you might say MEST universe particles, and create his own particles, create his own timespan and his own universe. And as a consequence, we have a problem in three universes, so we have a problem in three times. But the time in the MEST universe is a very simple thing. It simply depends upon particles moving in relationship to particles, without any particle being the prime particle.

Individuals, however, believing there is a prime particle, will conjure up one and say, “Well now, this is the particle by which I am relating all other particles.” And an individual can use-for instance, let’s take somebody who lives in a mountainous country and there’s a big, nice mountain up there and it’s sitting up there very, very visible against the sky and it seems to be utterly timeless. And the relationship of people to the mountain would be his concept of time and that would be his concept of position.

Now, there sits the mountain-that’s “prime post unposted.” And “Joe is gone” means Joe is gone away from this mountain. “Joe has been gone away from this mountain many motions of Mary,” you see. And that means he’d been gone a long time.

You know, Mary has been going back and forth to an office for two years, but this two years-we’ve gotten into the big trap of a symbol. What it actually is, is Mary has been going back and forth to this office so many times. See, back and forth to this office, all the time we’ve got-and the office is in relationship to this mountain, so her relative motion in relationship to the mountain... See, the office is transient, you can’t depend on that office, but you can depend on that mountain. So, we get Mary going back and forth that many times and Joe being gone that many times Mary has gone back and forth, you see? And so we get, then, what a person refers to and calls “a long time.”

But this thing called time is, you might say-there are several types of symbols and one of them is, of course, the undefined symbol. It’s a symbol which is a meaningless symbol, and it’s that which throws language for a loop. Language becomes aberrative to the ratio that it has in it undefined symbols, so nobody has defined this thing called “time.” Everybody kind of knows what you mean when you say “time.” And nobody came along and said what time was.

A physicist doesn’t know what time it is. If you want to see somebody rocky on his pins on the subject of time, you go talk to a physicist. You talk to a physicist about time and he immediately starts wildly chattering about space. It hasn’t anything to do with time. He starts talking about the speed of something and when it exceeds this constant of c, why, it foreshortens invisibly because of the common denominator of poop. Well, it’s pure balderdash!

A particle, by the way, gets up above c with great ease. That’s one of the most obvious things, because, you see, if a particle couldn’t move above c and couldn’t move at c-which was Einstein’s latest adventure into Alice in Wonderland’s wonderland—his latest adventure was that, “at the speed c, everything stopped forever.” He’s trying to get things stopped, he’s up there at Princeton and Princeton has got things pretty badly stopped anyhow. They have a lot of gray granite that sits around-it’s architecturally very perfect-but their idea of speed ends with trying to get somebody to class.

When he announced this, he announced one of the most idiotic things which science has been presented for a long time. But he’s a boy, he’s right there, you know, with the atomic wizards and all that sort of thing and they’re-all think this too. And they’ll speculate and talk about this and they get wilder and wilder and more and more symbolical and symbolical until they get lost.

Look, if 186,000 miles a second brought a particle to a full stop, the sunlight would never reach Earth. It happens to be traveling at 186,000 miles a second, so obviously it can’t move to Earth. And yet this terrific simplicity would just miss the boys entirely. Why? Because they’re wandering, see, into this vast morass of symbols which are undefined.

A mathematician gets into beautiful condition-he puts down lambda and a half a dozen other symbols and then he defines them for you and if they don’t fit in his equation, he defines them some other way half way through the equation. He’s just as happy as can be to do this.

Well, you see that, don’t you, that you’d never have sunlight on Earth if light stopped at 186,000 miles a second. As a matter of fact, in space opera, a ship is going slow at five light-years, that’s five times 186,000 miles a second. Otherwise, you’d just be forever between galaxies.

I’m not now talking and using space opera to controvert the great brains of atomic physics, but it seems like a few tubemen and so forth, up in space, could give them a lot of lessons. Because here is an idiocy that any child can see: that we’d never get any Sun shining on us if Einstein’s theory was correct-which it doesn’t happen to be.

All right. This adds up to this fact that we have a Sun here which has a series of particles moving from it at such velocity and in such abundance that we cannot count them and you could not look at the Sun today and look at the Sun tomorrow and see any difference between the two Suns.

Now, possibly by some very, very, very intricate system of measurement and with a great deal of equipment and that sort of thing, you could count the number of photons and probably find that it would change from day-to-day and time to time or you could measure sunspots and you would find that these, too, would grow and shrink. But snnspots are kind of funny. For a month, without alteration, I have watched a sunspot traveling around the Sun. The Sun moves very, very slowly, really. It has a period of revolution just like Earth has. And you can watch these sunspots and you can watch them travel across the face of the Sun, but they wouldn’t be very good to tell you what day it was because they themselves are changing at a vast rate of speed on the face of the Sun. In other words, here’s an indeterminate particle.

7 Well now, let’s take the Sun, however, and find that we have another orb going around the Sun, which is Earth, and this describes a vast orbit around the Sun and therefore we have two particles. And so the other particles are so small and so mixed up that we couldn’t tell by that exactly what time it was, so we have to look at the two particles-Earth and the Sun-in order to get some idea of time. But if you just had these two particles, you would have to add a lot of knowingness to know what time it was, too.

See, but you could observe something about Earth. You could observe from any given spot on Earth, a consistent look and you would find that there was a tilt going on. You know, as Earth gets around, it’s on a tilted axis and so the tilt itself would give us the idea that Earth was in motion with relationship to the Sun. And in addition to that, Earth has another motion: it rotates and so the Sun is visible and then not visible.

If you were standing off in space someplace and looking at Earth and looking at the Sun, you’d never know what time it was. See, I mean, it wouldn’t tell you a thing. It takes a much more minute observation from the knowingness angle, that is, the data angle on the surface of the Earth, to use these two items for time. Because you have to be down there on Earth and notice the position of the Sun in relationship to the horizon on Earth in consecutive days in order to see that we were advancing in terms of time. Well, advancing and retarding and that sort of thing.

All we would notice, really, that the Sun and the horizon were altering position. Let’s take every day the Sun goes across, but that’s uniform, every day the Sun goes across. Okay. Well, is it higher or lower in relationship to the horizon? And that would give you time. So that time requires what? It requires a viewpoint, you’ve got to have a viewpoint in order to see this. If you didn’t have a viewpoint, why, you know, some scientist could come along and say, “Well, you look-a-here, you could get a viewpoint there, you could put a little recorder down on Earth and this recorder would take the angle of the Sun to the horizon and so forth and it would write it down right there what time it was.

And you’d say, “Who’d read the recorder?”

“Oh well, you could have a robot that would read the recorder and so forth.”

“Who would wind up the robot?”

“Oh well, of course, you could have these robots turned out...”

“Who would build them?”

“What do you mean putting this ‘who’ in here all the time. We hate people!” [laughter] That’s the immediate answer to that. It takes, actually, a viewpoint to measure this thing called time.

Now, the funny part of it is that radium does a kind of a cockeyed job of measuring time. It deteriorates at a certain rate of speed. But to have time, who observed its whole mass to get its half mass? Radium doesn’t care what time it is, nobody cares what time it is. The universe would just go run on and on and on and on and on and on and on without anything happening at all with relationship to time if somebody didn’t care what time it was. So, we’re just looking at it in a complete reverse when we say, “Well, matter establishes time.” It doesn’t. You establish time and you know what time it is because you know what time it is and there’s just about-that’s the end of it. And then you prove it to yourself by seeing two particles in position with relationship to each other.

You should be able to have a time factor sharp enough so that you would be able to look at these two particles, one to the other, and tell what time it was in relationship to some other time. But a time is always in relationship to another time unless you simply know what time it is.

Knowingness itself is the only thing which can exist without a dichotomy. Certainty can exist without a dichotomy. A person can be certain without being more certain than and less certain than.

So, we have walked out of the universe, because this is a double pole universe-two side universe-plus and minus. And we’ve walked out of the universe the second we enter in knowingness. And so, therefore, using this universe as a stopwatch or something to tell us what time it is all the time is kind of silly. It’s a rather large watch and wouldn’t fit well in your pocket at all.

These watches that you carry, of course, are set, wound up, taken care of, all in relationship to the position of Earth and the Sun. Well, the position of Earth and the Sun is so crude-Earth runs twenty minutes ahead and twenty minutes behind in its rotation. It loses a day on the swing. There’s an awful lot of odds and ends of disrelated data entering into time on Earth. Till somebody comes along and tells you very convincingly (he has to use a loud voice to be that convincing) that-he tells you what time it is, because he points to a clock face or a stopwatch. And you can laugh at him because the clock face and the stopwatch is set up on the most jerry-rigged time system you ever heard of.

If you wanted to get some historical idea of what time was all about in terms of watches, it would amuse you very much. If you wanted to look it over, you would be tremendously amused because the number of hours the day has been divided into and how many hours the day hasn’t and has and all the rest of that and how many times this has been done this way and that way, rather shakes one’s faith in that twelve-hour dial. This is a very silly gradient, by the way-to divide a day into twelve hours.

There is a galactic time, however, in which this planet sits. It’s a galactic time which Ю is your navigational time for this galaxy and it has two binaries which are unmistakably shaped. That is to say, it’s a double star and this double star flickers around itself in such a way and the second star is so positively unmistakably shaped that-and so is the first one-that the two of them form many particle pictures as they travel around each other. And so this setup then gives you a very good idea-as a matter of fact, you could observe them, you could tell what time it was. It’s the time when the pole of one of them, which ordinarily is the pole, has turned over and is facing the other one and so on. And it’s very precise. They’re standing out there all by themselves, so that nothing is slowing down or fixing up their motion in strange ways. Well, now that would be a pretty good way to tell time and it’s . . . But it still depends on what? On knowing what time it is. See, you have to have some need for time or knowingness about time before anything happens with relationship to time. Otherwise it’s just a playing field.

Did you ever go out to a stadium and look at a football field when there was no game, no audience, nothing? There’s just a football field and it’s sitting there with two sets of goal posts. And by golly, you could hold a stopwatch in vain on those goal posts and you’d never get a game going. You could do all sorts of things and you’d never get a game going there until you had players and referees and umpires and pieces and spectators and-oh gosh, all this tremendous thing moves in on the football field, immediately the football field comes alive, it has purpose, has meaning. And so it is with this universe.

A person fighting time is the silliest picture, is you can’t fight time. Not only is it shadowboxing, it’s worse than shadowboxing nothing. You can go out and box nothing if you want to or you can step off the bottom step into what you thought was a solid floor and find that there’s another step there. You can do all sorts of things like this, but what you get down to is that time is a symbol and there’s not even a nothing there to fight See, you’ve got this beautiful symbol. But, however, the symbol does have definition. The symbol has the definition of havingness. Well, why does it have that definition? It’s because these particles move in relationship to each other on a very beautifully agreed-upon pattern. And from one end of this universe to the other end of this universe, they are moving at that patterned speed.

It is the most elementary thing you would do to have a constant playing field. You would get all the particles in the field rated in such a way that they would all move. And then you get all the players to agree on that rate of motion and you would have this beautiful picture of knowing how fast they were moving so they were moving that fast. And it’s very constant.

Now, what’s present time in this universe? Don’t make a mistake on this one, by the way. I’ve said this before. Present time in this universe would be for the total universe in any given instant. There isn’t present time here and a past time someplace else. The individual sees that, but it doesn’t exist. You see, he’s in present time here and because he ate breakfast (as I covered before someplace else), why, he thinks it’s past time there now. Why? Because that’s where he’s having breakfast and he isn’t there having breakfast anymore. Well, there’s a present time for there, too.

There’s this thing called communication time lag. Now, that means that a particle starts out from the Sun and travels for several minutes and gets to Earth. Actually, probably, no particle travels, but that’s beside the point. No particles travel anyhow, there aren’t any particles.

But where we have a communication time lag, if you’re depending on particles to bring you a patterned picture of what happened over that-a-way, you’re always late. You see that? The Sun blows up and then you don’t know about it for several minutes.All right. Let’s say you’re looking at the pattern of particles coming from the Sun and then the Sun blows up. Well now, you look at the pattern of particles of the blow-up. Now, supposing you saw the Sun start to blow up and you had it in your power to reach out and put it back together again and keep it from blowing up. Now, if you were depending on photons and here you were standing on Earth and you saw the Sun suddenly blow up and you reached over there to stop it from blowing up, you know, and pat it all back together again and make a mass out of it, you would think you had failed. You think you wouldn’t have that much power or force. Why? Because obviously you must have catalyzed it or you must have done something desperate there or at least you didn’t do anything to help it.

Get the picture of present time in both of those places, see, you’d have to be instantaneously at the Sun and on Earth. And when the Sun starts to blow up, he’d have to be right there and know it was blowing up right there and smash it back together again at that moment if he had it in his power. He couldn’t sit here on Earth and wait for the Sun to blow up.

And this, in itself, is an anxiety which people get into. They have had this sort of thing happen to them often enough. Soldiers are always getting into a backwards frame of mind when they’re shot. Of course, if there is enough battle noise and confusion, they can’t distinguish it one from the other. But in a skirmish or something like that, a bullet hits them and then they hear the crack of the rifle. That’s because sound only travels at eleven hundred feet-per-second-they never had any warning. And this universe is a playing field which never gives you any warning.

So, the thetan goes around depending on particles and trying to have a warning. And there is nothing sillier than that because he can’t have a warning from particles, any particle that arrives with a message is talking about something that is in the past. And this is reflected in a psychotic to making him believe that ‘‘all is in the past.” Has to be, of course, because every particle he receives is past. Any message he receives from anywhere in this universe is in the past, if it’s telling about an event.

But present time for this universe would be accomplished this way: you’d just have to stop every particle-if you could stop every particle in the universe for a moment, you would have at that moment a complete pattern. Every particle has a present time and that would be present time for the universe. See, it would be-the position of every particle at any given instant would be present time.

Now, please don’t fall across this one, because you will if you’re not careful. If you stopped Earth and Sun at the moment of the explosion-you stopped all the particles and examined them, you would find out that there was a present time for each one of those particles and that it was the same present time. The fact that it is conveying a message from one location to the other has no bearing upon present time. Because a message is always after the cause and the cause is always before the message.

Cause-people who are very bad off keep coming around-in a session they drive you mad if you happen to be going into this with somebody who is completely looped off on an inverted 8, which is about as far south as you can get. They keep going into this one: “I know, but... why... why was it all built?” And they just keep going into this, you know-why? Why? Why?

Well, that’s another beautiful symbol: why? They’re so inverted by communication, you see, the communication is always in the past, so that they believe that cause is in the past. See? Cause, if anyplace, is in the future, it’s not in the past. Cause always precedes effect. If you had a stopwatch going and it hit at zero and you said, “I am now going to move this ashtray. Move-stop” and it now said eight seconds, well, by golly, if you look at the sweep second of the hand, it does look like cause was in the past. You see, because the past is eight seconds back of eight, see, that’s when you said it. Well, that’s just the standard way of looking at time and it’s inverted, that’s inverted.

Look, let’s string out the co-motion of the particles and let’s find out that here we are, saying, “I am going to move this ashtray. Now, I have moved this ashtray.” Why sure, you said cause was in the... Now, we look at it again and we say, “Well, cause was in the past then, wasn’t it?” The hell it is. Let’s take a look at this ashtray. Let’s not look at the statement, let’s look at the ashtray. And we find out, “I am going to move this ashtray” and we move the ashtray, we discover immediately that the intention to move the ashtray was in the future of the motion of the ashtray. See that? It’s in the future of the motion of the ashtray, it has to be.

All right. And let’s run it so it’s backwards now and let’s move the ashtray. Now, I have moved the ashtray. Well, the thing that would straighten it out for you is cause and effect. You’re the effect of the ashtray. The ashtray has moved. Now you look and say, “Ha! The ashtray has moved.”

Whereas, you say, “Now the ashtray is going to move.” And the ashtray moves.

Now, let’s look at it from the viewpoint of the ashtray and discover that the future is controlling the ashtray. Now, this is not too hard to get through your thick skulls, but you better get it through your skulls right now. [laughter]

You say, “I am going to drink a cup of tea.” So you make a cup of tea and you drink it. What is cause of the cup of tea? It certainly has to be in advance of the cup of tea. Has to be. That it goes before the cup of tea is the use of one of these indefinite symbols. You say, “It goes before the cup of tea.” It doesn’t go before any cup of tea, it’s ahead of the cup of tea.

Let’s drive an automobile down the street and say, “Now I am going to turn the corner. And when we have turned the corner, why, we say, “Well, cause was in the past.” In the past, we caused the turning of an automobile. No, this is the way cause would be in the past: you would turn the automobile around a corner and then say to yourself, “Well, now, I’m going to turn the automobile.” But, which is the effect there, huh? You were being the effect of the automobile if you work it that way. Most drivers drive that way, kind of. They get into more trouble and more accidents. They must lead. They must lead the action.

There is only one way to bull through it if you don’t understand it by this time. There would be only one way to bull through it and that is simply to handle Opening Procedure now on “I am going to,” until all of a sudden time goes flip on you. And you say, “For heaven sakes, a fellow is always riding way up the time track from the events. He is causing a cup of tea to be drunk and he becomes the effect of the tea.” And when you see it that way to, all of a sudden, why, you stop looking for cause in the past. Cause can’t be in the past of the event.

What you’ve got there is the late particle. And you watch that particle travel and so you say, “All right, the particle was in the past, because the time it arrives is in the past.” It’s a past particle, always is. That’s because the Sun blows up and then several minutes later, you get the arrival of a message that the Sun blew up.

You experiment with it and it will be very clear to you. I’m not going into it any further, because we’ve got to talk about a process.

Havingness would be masses of particles and objects. (A couple of you are chewing your fingernails.) Havingness is determined by masses of particles. That is to say, it takes masses of particles to make an object, it takes at least four particles to make a piece of space. You can arrange four particles in a tetrahedron so they will make some space. But any way you look at it, in order to have some havingness, in order to possess something, there’s got to be some particles, because this is, by definition, what it means. So that havingness has a lot to do with particles, then, doesn’t it?

And losing something would have to do with the particles no longer being under your-in your sphere or under your control or in your ownership, you might say. You’d lose something.

Something you’re trying to acquire would have to do with piling up a whole flock of particles slowly or predicting there are going to be a whole lot of particles there and then putting them under your control and so on. That would be havingness in the future. See that? So that in each way you look at it, you’ve got some particles there you’re accumulating or deteriorating.

Now, in view of the fact that all particles are in motion, at all times, you have the problem, staring you in the face, of things getting more massive or accumulating particles or things losing particles or things being static in the number of particles. But how long will something remain static? Well, sometimes quite a while.

For instance, I have a ring here, the gold of which is about a thousand years old and the stone, a carbuncle, is probably about thirty-five hundred years old. All right, this is a mass of particles that have stayed that way for an awful long time and Man has a tendency to sort of worship at the shrine of endurance of particles.

But if we look at this stone very carefully, it has a very small carving of Hercules on it (he is a very old deity) and we look at this and we see that his club-and it’s pretty worn, and it’s remarkable that it’s in this good a state of preservation, but we can barely see this symbol and we can barely see one of his feet. It’s pretty thin, in general. And we look up at it through the light and we find out that where it hasn’t really suffered very much in time, really, an opacity has set into it which shouldn’t be there and so on. In other words, a change has taken place. It took it maybe thirty-five hundred years to do it, but it did.

On the other side of it, here we have a scarab. There’s a little scarab-he’s pretty tough and some mummy had him on a string of beads around his neck back in Tutankhamen’s time or something of the sort and there’s a hole bored through the little scarab here. But here this-again, very old, but it still shows time, time has passed. By what? Its wear.

This gold-time has passed. You can tell very easily by looking at it. In other words, there hasn’t been a “no change” here. And we’re saying, “Isn’t it terrific that this thing could endure this long.” Yes. Yes, it’s just terrific, but it is enduring within our tolerance of what we call endurance. But I’m afraid the workman who made this would be very upset, if he could see it, because it’s nowhere near as nice as it was the day he turned it out. And if he’d turned it out like this on his bench, he’d probably been very upset and he’d probably have thrown it in the trash heap, because it would have been an imperfect carving to him. Of course, if this had been made in Christian times, why, everybody would have been very elated because they could have sold it then as a worn relic if it had been turned out that way. The biggest commerce of Christianity was relics.

However, this stone does show time’s passage and yet this is one of the harder stones, the carbuncle, and one of the-this scarab shows time’s passage.

All right. How do we know time passed? Well, some particles are missing, this thing is deteriorating, see, slowly, slowly, slowly.

Well, all right, let’s take some sodium and drop it in some water-boom! It deteriorated! In other words, we completed an entire cycle of the MEST universe there, from the moment we dug up and refined the sodium to the time we dropped it in the water. But this is a much longer cycle that we’re undertaking. And what makes it a long cycle or a short cycle, in other words, what makes it a time cycle? We drop the sodium in, we don’t have it anymore, do we? It went bang. We’ve got a nice memory of a bang, but the particles of sodium are now scattered all over the place. So our havingness is not in a lump. It doesn’t mean any particles have been destroyed, though, not a one has been destroyed. We’ve gotten a dispersal. Over this cycle, we have a slow dispersal-long time, short time, time. It has to do with the co- (hyphen) motion of particles. And that’s all it has to do with and plus your knowingness that it has been a short time or a long time.

And it’s only been a short time or a long time to the degree that you value the time, which is the amount that you would value the particles in their position, one to each other.

So, we get this deterioration of the sodium, boom! The particles of sodium are now scattered around.

But where is Columbus’s Santa Maria? Where’s that ship? Well, it obviously is 1492. And well, it’s long gone, it’s a long time away and it’s far from us and... Oh, balderdash. Why, one of the molecules of the Santa Maria might be sitting right here in this room. Because with the change and deterioration of all of the particles of that ship, we get them buried in the mud someplace and rivers washing them out to sea and we get the change of tides and the currents of the oceans and the evaporation of water and the kick up and wind of sand. And it works it around and little fish eat them and people eat fish and here we go, you see, these basic particles are still there. They’re still the same particles, they aren’t in the same pattern. The form is no longer there. You see that? No form.

So time is a matter of form. And form itself is a matter of knowingness. And we get back to, then, an individual-and here you better pick up your attention very definitely because this sits back of a process which you’re going to be doing for a long time and we lead right up to that-an individual which won’t let some particles disperse or who won’t let them accumulate must be braced against something else then: particles themselves.

He’s erecting a barrier against dispersal and a barrier against accumulation of particles. And his sole objection is that two particles are going apart or that two particles are coming together-two plus, you see, in terms of figures-but that’s his basic objection. His objection is that two particles are going to go apart or that two particles are going to come together. I don’t care if there’s eight billion particles-you see, the basic on that is that there are a couple of particles there. So, his total objection is dispersal or accumulation of particles and this is in terms of motion, too!

A fellow only objects to motion in terms of the fact that particles are getting together or particles are flying apart or particles are liable to fly apart.

And when an individual is braced against this shift of particles, he, of course, stops time. He can’t help it, because time is basically knowingness. It isn’t that he suddenly and mysteriously bases a couple of figures here, you see, and braces against anything necromantic that goes back into a central time machine that jams its gears. It’s nothing elaborate, it’s just the fact that if I determine that these two ashtrays will not come any closer together, that’s all right, they can sit right there. But now let us suppose that somebody else starts pushing these two ashtrays together and I have to hold these two ashtrays apart in order to keep them apart. I’m making good my basic postulate and that’s all an individual is trying to do.

And an individual who gets an anxiety about his postulates-his rightness and wrongness-of course is going to stop time because he continues to try to make good his basic postulates.

Somebody else starts to shove these two ashtrays together and I hold them apart. It’s completely unimportant, even vaguely, it’s completely unimportant that these two ashtrays come together or stay apart. And yet, because I’m holding them apart, somebody pushes them together and because they’re pushing them together, I try to hold them apart. And you’ve got the basics on a game called the MEST universe, right there.

You’re trying to hold up a certain piece of space, so, just because you’re trying to do that, somebody else tries to push it together and just because they’re trying to push it together, you’re pushing it the other way. And the second that you start to brace yourself against the “accumulation,” which is to say, particles staying together, or the “dispersal,” which is to say, particles going apart-as soon as you brace yourself against this action happening, you to that degree stick yourself on the time track.

Now basically all we’re looking for is present time, which is to say, “let be what is.” Let’s let the dead past bury the dead-which is to say, the thoughts and barriers of yesteryear-and go and let’s look and see what is the arrangement of particles which is now taking place and take an interest in that arrangement of particles.

If you were to make a clear statement in his level of understanding, a clear statement of his condition, to any preclear, you would make it in that frame of reference, probably not in those same words, but you would make it in that frame of reference.

And what is wrong with any preclear is the two particles-he’s trying to keep two particles from coming together or two particles from going apart. And any time he’s got himself entirely braced to prevent this, he kept on bracing himself. The particles themselves, God help him, have long since gone down the sewer and blown off the chimney and been wafted away by the rains of yesteryear. But he has a mental barrier now which is erected to brace against these particles. They’re no longer stopped, they aren’t even there. And yet, he’s all set to prevent these particles, which, themselves, are missing.

And here, then, is the problem of mental activity. In order to have a game, whether it’s a game of football or a game of business-any kind of a game-we have to control, which is to say, start, stop and change particles. The business of control is the business of starting, stopping and changing.

Let’s take commerce. The boys in Chicago make a terrific game out of taking the wheat exchange there-these grains of wheat-and they start them and stop them and change them in order to cause starting and stopping and changing of other particles known as dollars. And stomachs don’t even enter into it.

If you walked up to one of those fellows on the Chicago Exchange and you said to him, “Do you know that wheat is a foodstuff?” “Yes,” he’d say, “very valuable! People will pay anything for it when they’re starving. How can we make them starve?” He wouldn’t say it in that many words, but it would boil down to it after a while. “How can we make this stuff scarce, so that we can stop it, till its price goes up, so that we can then move it, so that its price will come in on us?” And that’s the game he’s playing.

Plus this game: “How can we make somebody else’s wheat get more abundant someplace or another and so cave in the price and so bring less money in on them, while wasting and sacrificing all their wheat? And in that fashion, then, we will have them broke and out of the game as competitors.” And the crocodile smilingly polishes his tail.

When you talk about hockey and when you talk about a love affair, you’re discussing, at once, time, of course, and the motion of particles.

Now, the motion of particles themselves cause emotion. And if you put a beam on the wall and then move away from it real slow, stretching the beam, just moving away real slow in relationship to the movement of the MEST universe particles, you get the emotion of “beautiful sadness.” So a love affair which has dragged out (which is to say, the motion of the particles, so on), it becomes very sad. [laughter]

Now, in this way, you get the behavior of these particles. Well, there’s two kinds of particles actually in action. There are the particles which you’ve just kicked together-you know, created up against the MEST universe-which you know are your particular brand of particle-and then the particles which you are probably making called the MEST universe. And that’s a different type of particle. Well, those MEST universe particles follow a law-oh boy, do they follow a law! They’ve had the law laid down. And they move in exact relationship to certain other laws, they obey the influences of other particles and so on. And it’s a very, very tight, well-modulated game, in terms of particles.

But your particles aren’t modulated by anybody but you-or somebody else. That is to say, another being like you can monitor your particles, some way, sometimes.

Volney was out to see me last night and again, why, his hair was standing on end. I showed him what faith healing was. [laughter] And proved it on his meter. Well anyway... I showed that I could lay energy down in him by touching him-not just by looking at him, that was bad enough-but by touching him, to the degree of lighting his whole cheek up, just by touching his cheek with my fingertip. And he said he’d known something about this and some people could do it and some people couldn’t. And “That’s right,” I said, “Well, that determines whether or not you’re a good healer or not, you see” and so on. All it determines, actually, is your electrical output.

Now, you can manufacture particles, but you’re not supposed to, so you have to get very covert about this. And your main object in life is “how covert do I have to be to keep on manufacturing particles?” We’ll go into this later.

So we have then-we have then, simply this problem: we’ve got this if we’re running competence, confidence, any one of these things which has any certainty in it. It’s just how many particles'is the individual trying to stop, in how many places which aren’t there anymore? And how many is he trying to pull apart that aren’t there anymore either?

And that’s all you object to in terms of sanity and insanity. And your index of this is how much is the fellow in present time?

You know, a lot of fellows are sitting around trying to pull future particles apart which aren’t together yet. And that in itself is anxiety.

All right. They’re also trying to hold future particles together that aren’t apart yet, they don’t exist yet. They’re trying to predetermine a pattern ahead of the forming pattern. And control, in itself, is this problem-and there’s nothing wrong with control, there’s no game unless you control particles-is you predetermine what their pattern will be and then fit the particles into this pattern. And that’s how you make a postulate stick with relationship to particles.

You can handle particles as well as you don’t use energy to handle them. That’s funny, isn’t it? As long as you use knowledge and not energy to handle particles, you can handle particles. As soon as you start using energy to handle other energy, why, of course, you’re just as good as you’ve got masses of energy to handle other energy. And it becomes an elementary problem in physics, but it certainly doesn’t become a problem in control of the mind.

Most of your boys who are bogged down, who ride below 4.0 on the Tone Scale, are trying to handle energy with energy and that doesn’t go.

All right. What’s “being stuck on the time track”? That’s a time when you have tried to hold two or more particles apart or tried to hold two or more particles together. And a fellow is as stuck in the past as he is still trying actively to hold these particles apart or push these particles together.

But sometimes he gets so bound and determined to handle and hold particles which are no longer there that he hasn’t any concentration on existing present particles. In other words, he can’t have in present time, which is to say, he can’t have time.

You talk about time, you’re talking about the co- (hyphen) motion of particles. If you’re talking about time, then you’re talking about particles. When you’re talking about particles, you’re talking about havingness, so time is havingness. And when you talk about the present, you are talking about the existing pattern of particles as of this instant. And when you’re talking about the past, you’re talking about the particle pattern as it did exist. And when you talk about the future, you’re talking about the particle pattern as it will exist.

Now, the past, present and future of this room hasn’t anything to do with a change in space, it has only to do with what is going to be the shifting pattern of particles of various kinds in this room which you recognize as change and the rate of change of those particles.