Spotting Spots in Space and the Remedy of Havingness is itself a total process. It has many ramifications. It is, you might say, a family of processes. There are many such families of processes, but actually it belongs to the family that we would call Opening Procedure of 8- C or the Opening Procedure family. This is actually a low order of Change of Space so it belongs also to another family, it belongs to a Duplication family, since Change of Space is actually a dramatization of the formula of communication. In Change of Space you dramatize the communication formula with the preclear exteriorized. (You have him be at one point then be at another point, then be at the first point and be at the second point, etc.) That first point is the source point of something, usually, and so he – by being the cause and then being the effect and finding out there is a vast distance between them – becomes rather relaxed about the whole thing. But Spotting Spots and Remedying Havingness could then be said to be cousins to two families – to Change of Space and to Opening Procedure.

The reason why we relate it to Opening Procedure is that that is the way you are going to produce the most effect with it. As though it were Opening Procedure.

The first contest is to get the preclear to find the spot in space. That is the first contest. The preclear will go around and he will find large spots, two or three feet in diameter.

He'll go around and find only spots which come out so far from the walls. He can't find a spot independent of the room itself. His spots have energy in them, they have masses, they have color, they have size. In other words he runs into a lot of trouble. If he does locate a spot it's likely to be "suspended four or five feet above the floor on something that looks like a microphone stand".

The various manifestations which occur are quite fascinating, but all of them are completely useless. You want to get the preclear over these as fast as possible.

You get him over them simply by having him spot some more spots in space. That's all. Space where? In the space of the room. And you have him locate these spots in such a wise that he can go over and put his finger on them. Now, when you have him capable of spotting two or three spots, you've usually shot his havingness to ribbons. So you have to remedy havingness right away. If he starts to get queasy, sick, upset in any way remedy his havingness.

There's nothing more destructive to havingness than spotting some spots in space.

This is a precision action – you want him to spot a spot in space and then be able to spot it again. That spot is only a location. It doesn't have mass, and you want him to be able to put his finger on it and take his finger off of it, and put the finger of his other hand on it, and take it off, and move his body into it and move his body out of it and so forth. This is a location, and the more certain he becomes of these locations the better he is, and the next thing you know – why, he's able to tolerate space. And you accomplish this by remedying havingness all the way along.

Now let's suppose you had an individual who had an enormous struggle in spotting some spots in space, and the first spots he spotted were fairly large, and you just kept on nagging him until he finally got actually a location in space – and he started to get sort of upset.

Remedy of Havingness had not been done yet, and he feels rather queasy about the whole thing. Then you say, "All right, mock up something that's acceptable to you and pull it in," and he says, "What mockup?" And you say, "Well, just put something out there – a dead body." "What dead body?" "What are you looking at?" "Nothing." "What are you actually looking at?" An interesting contest will come in at this point – getting him to tell you what he is looking at. What he's looking at in this case is usually blackness, and he won't tell you he's looking at blackness. This is "nothing" as far as he is concerned, but he's looking at blackness, and to get him to finally tell you what he actually is looking at is part of your first contest. "What are you looking at?" Well, it doesn't do you very much good with an individual who can't get any facsimiles, mockups, anything of the sort whatsoever, to mock something up and pull it in, because he's going to have too hard a time.

But supposing he can get a vague or indistinct image out there. Is that good enough? Yessir, that's good enough. Have him mock up several of those and pull them in on the body, and then go on spotting spots in space.

But supposing he couldn't get any. None.

Then enters upon the scene this interesting single straightwire question. The agreement between the MEST Universe and the preclear gets down to a point where the preclear has agreed entirely that two things cannot occupy the same space, and after that he is not able to pull anything in, which is the biggest trap you have, because the way a preclear makes something disappear, makes it vanish utterly is to pull it all the way in, and if he can't pull anything all the way in it continues to persist. How would someone fix up a being so that he's packed in energy masses? By getting him to agree that two things could not occupy the same space, and after that he couldn't destroy any energy mass that was around him. Quite Machiavellian. Well, Count Alfred Korzybski devoted a book to this called, "Science and Sanity", and there are others who have written on this subject, but they go back to Korzybski, and: "It is utterly impossible for two things to occupy the same space." And if that book has any message, it says, Differentiate amongst your words and statements and thoughts, and, two things can't occupy the same space. You nearly summate General Semantics when you say those two things. Now, there is a lot to this, you understand. He examined the mechanics of this, but he examined them in complete agreement with the physical universe. With somebody who has studied General Semantics, you've got a picnic on your hands in doing a Remedy of Havingness. You wouldn't have realized it or recognized it but you have. He can't pull anything in. He can't remedy havingness and therefore can't destroy energy. Why can't he? Well, two things can't occupy the same space, so if he wanted to mockup a car out there to pull it in and remedy his own mass, he of course couldn't do it because he is already occupying the spot where the car would come into, therefore he couldn't remedy his havingness. The mockup disappears just before it gets to him, and the underlying agreement back of that is two things can not occupy the same space. This is of course an utter falsity.

It happens to be a condition which when imposed resulted in this physical universe.

That law is what keeps the parts and parcels and spaces and planets of this universe apart. It is an enforced differentiation in this universe which makes space for this universe. That is the law which keeps the space stretched in this universe. So of course Korzybski would get all involved with differentiation. Differentiation on the basis of the MEST universe holding itself apart. Well, that isn't differentiation. So as a result you'll have trouble at this point with anybody who has been in General Semantics. Here is this mockup disappearing just before it gets to him – in other words he isn't remedying havingness. Now, how do you know he isn't remedying havingness? Because he stays upset, of course. That's all.

He's spotted some spots in space, and "these aren't anything you can feel". It just made him feel kind of frantic, and made him feel kind of upset, and made him feel sick at his stomach – these are common manifestations – and then you said, "Mock up an acceptable…", and he says, All right. And you say, "Well, have you got a dead body there, or what have you got mocked up there?" and he says, "Well, I don't know – I've got a wrecked car," and you say, "Well, okay. Pull that wrecked car into your body. Now pull another one into your body, and pull another one into your body, and pull another one into your body". And you say, "How do you feel?" "I feel… just as frantic as I did," and so on. He isn't pulling anything into his body. It's disappearing before it gets to him, it's dissipating and other things are occurring there, so that his havingness isn't being remedied.

By the way there's a total process on this. You just simply have the fellow mock up things and pull them into his body, and the more massive the better, until you get planets and stars and black suns and all kinds of things being pulled into his body, and you'll start something called an avalanche after a while, and the planets start coming in with a roar, and it's quite an interesting phenomenon. I've seen one run for three or four days. They blow up every facsimile that gets in their road, they'll blow up the entire energy behavior pattern of the preclear if you keep on remedying havingness.

But if remedying havingness doesn't straighten him out it's because he has agreed to this single agreement which doesn't happen to be true, that two things cannot occupy the same space. He's agreed to that so thoroughly that he can't remedy his havingness.

The reason I'm stressing this is so that you will remember why you ask the preclear this question (and that this is the question, and that there isn't any other question) and that question is simply this – "What wouldn't you mind having occupy the same space as you're occupying?" Well, he's got to change his mind immediately, and two things can occupy the same space, in order to fulfill this condition, and without your explaining to him how, he had to change his mind.

Sometimes it takes them five minutes, sometimes it takes them five hours, but the roughest case I know of at this time had to be given this for two hours before he could finally accept something in his own space. That is to say, until he could find something that he wasn't unwilling to have occupy the same space as himself. And this question was asked this case over and over and over and over. This case had never been able to remedy havingness, never been able to get mockups, never been able to do this, never been able to do that. Well, he remedied his havingness, and he got into fine fettle and doing very well indeed. This changed his case. If you're doing a lot of Change of Space you remedy havingness on the thetan. Have him put up eight anchor points and have him pull them in on himself, and eight more and pull them in on himself, eight more and pull them in on himself. When his body gets upset and restive, we simply do this. If he really pulls them all the way in they will disappear.

That is how you make things disappear. All space is an illusion, therefore if you pull in all anchor points of course there's no space, so what happened to the anchor points? Well, they didn't exist in the first place, so if you make them occupy the same space as you they'll vanish, and actually recognition simply depends on occupying the same space with. That's why Beingness Processing works.

On this factor of recognition and knowingness in terms of beingness and facsimiles, etc., we simply get this: is he willing to occupy the same space as it? And if he is, it will blow, and if he isn't it won't. So if we get a case who can't remedy his havingness being therefore unable to destroy a concept, a lock, a secondary, and an engram. If he can't remedy havingness, he can't occupy the same space with. If he can't occupy the same space with, he naturally conceives that it's making space, so therefore it has validity. And it won't pull all the way in.

This process is very elementary but it could be hashed up most gloriously by over – running the preclear on spotting spots in space until he was good and groggy, upset and quite ill, and then expecting him to work in some fashion or another. Well, you would have driven him down tone scale to the point where he can hardly hold onto anything long enough to do anything about it. So, you're now going to remedy his havingness and do the rest of this? No, you do this early. Remedy his havingness long before he needs to have it remedied. You don't wait for signs. You could make them appear if you wanted to, but you just do this as a routine process. Whenever you spot a spot in space you remedy havingness, that's all.

The process we're interested in is this one: Spotting Spots in Space. We're not really interested in remedying havingness because this is only dramatizing his dependency on it, so we're just giving priority to the important thing here, and the priority is the spot in space, that's what's important. The remedy of havingness is incidental.

Why does his havingness chew up? There must be something awfully wrong with the way this fellow's handling energy for his havingness to chew up simply by trying to remedy it.

All right, what do we do here specifically? We ask him what could occupy the same space as he's occupying. If we had any doubt about this, and here's where we get the answer to your question about that, if we had any doubt about this we would take up this problem before we fooled around with any spots in space. We would look at this fellow and there he is gaunt and emaciated or bloated, or anything strange with his physiology – and we would say "Oh, this guy has a little bit of trouble with havingness." You know, he's a banker or something. We could tell professionally. He's a commissar, a banker or a general? There's something wrong with this guy's havingness, otherwise he wouldn't be where he is, that's obvious, if he has to have in some other fashion than simply having.

Using a system like "becoming a general". That's a method of having, you see. You go to West Point, and don't talk back, and graduate, and don't talk back, and get into a War Department post, and don't talk back, and coast along, and don't talk back, and then you have to, of course, get more and more suppressed about how famous you've got to be and the next thing you know, why, you will start to accumulate troops to remedy your havingness… and you've got a U.S. General. You don't do anything with the troops, just accumulate them.

That's not just being snide about generals. You can look at somebody and tell whether or not he's having a lot of trouble with havingness. If he's having trouble with havingness, then it might be very wise for you to just sail in on that basis. Let's fix it up quick before we render him liable to anything. That would be a good idea.

But what's important about this process is Spotting Spots in Space. What do we do with all these spots in space? We just spot them, that's what. Well, I know, but what do you do with them after you spot them? Well, you spot them. Well, after you've spotted them then what do you do with all these spots in space? Well, you spot some more of 'em. That's what you do.

Don't look for any deeper significance in the technique than that except this: the preclear is sitting on three kingpin significances, (1) that he's there but he's gotta leave, (2) that he's there and fixed there forever – being fixed against his will, and (3) that "it was there in that spot but now it is gone". Three considerations there that are very aberrative on the track. Well, you could run these with this process. You spot a spot in the room and have him move the spot into his body. Have him stand there. You tell him: "Now get the idea that you can't remain there. All right. Find another spot. Okay. Now move out of the spot you're in and move this next spot into your body. You got that? All right. Now get the idea that you can't stay there." You just do this in sequence. He's in the spot, "Now get the idea that…" and you are making him dramatize the basic formula of self-determinism, the location of objects in space. And if you make him locate objects in space one after the other he'll make considerable gains. Put this consideration onto it, that he can't stay there, and have him move to the next spot.

You just spot the spot and have him move to it, and you can run the consideration that he can't stay there.

And we have him move onto a spot and then get the idea that he's fixed there and can't move, then we have him change his mind, not just break or disobey his postulate, we have him change his mind, and pick out a new spot, and move into it, and get the idea he's got to stay there forever, and then have him change his mind about staying there forever and get a new spot and move it into his body and get the idea he's going to stay there forever. You'd be surprised at the agony and weariness and tiredness that this one runs.

The next level is to have him spot the spot and get the idea that something very precious has just left there that he will never see again. You have him do this: just walk around and spot these spots and get the idea each one has just been vacated. There is the manifestation of the fellow trying to fill in the spots with energy – the mechanism that he's undergoing, and it has a tendency to blow this.

So there are three conditions – there are probably others, but those are certainly important conditions. Why? Well, what is the manifestation of facsimile? The manifestation of facsimile is not being able to remain in a spot, having to get out, and cussedly taking along a picture of it so that one can say he's still there. That's the rationale behind the facsimile. The facsimile is the solution to the problem.

So then, what is this thing called unreality? Unreality is that activity the preclear has engaged upon whenever he was forced to stay in a place where he did not want to be. His answer to this was to make it all unreal, so that he wouldn't really know he was there. He's trying to be self-determined anyhow, and the way he's being self-determined is to make it all unreal. He could say, "Although I am forced to stay here in prison, stone walls do not a birdcage make." That's why they put psychotics in cells. (Well, that didn't quite add up to a solution. That's just a reason as reasonable as anything else in that field, which has to do with nuttiness, so don't expect it to be reasonable.) All right, he'll make things unreal then, if forced to stay in the same place. He'll dim down his perceptions on things. That merely says that he's unwilling to be there.

Now what's this thing called occlusion? Occlusion comes about as the consequences of loss. Something precious has disappeared from the person, and if he could still see, he'd notice it was gone, and this would be more than he could bear, so the best thing to do would be to cover it all up with blackness and that'd be that. That would be a good solution, wouldn't it? Let's just hide the whole thing. Let's just hide the problem and then let's just abandon the whole idea, and then, you see, we could still pretend that it's still there.

This is the basis of "it's too good to use", also. People will get to the point where if you give them something extremely valuable they will not wear it or use it. They promptly hide it. Well, that's because they know, if they know anything, that they lose things like that.

I remember giving a very dear lady, my grandmother, a present one day because she was going around wearing a watch that was a shame – very disreputable – and I gave her a new watch, and she kept right on wearing this old disreputable watch. And later on I was going around looking for something and opened up a drawer, and there hidden in the bottom of the drawer was this brand new, very nice, rather indestructible, by the way, good watch. And I asked her why she wasn't wearing it and she said, "Oh, that's much too nice to use." And so I began to wonder about this a little and went back and just glanced through some of her things there, and do you know she had more things that were too nice to use! It was a tremendous abundance.

She couldn't use it, though, it was all too nice.

Well, people do this in another way. When they've lost something they turn everything black. They just hide it and they hide the fact that they've lost it. Also this is "no responsibility" and other factors. And occlusion adds up to too many considerations. Actually the basic occlusion is mystery. Unpredictability. "It's gone and I didn't predict it would went, and so… it's all black." Well, here you're making the preclear predict that something is going to disappear.

So there are these methods of handling spots in space, and these are the main considerations. Now, don't for a moment believe that there are eighty-five other considerations that can be added into that type of processing. The basic Pre-logic on which this is based is a very precise thing. It says: Theta locates things in time and space and creates time and space and things to locate in them. Self-determinism is one's ability to locate things in time and space, and this is directly processing self-determinism, so it doesn't go out in all directions. It's right there and it's on those three considerations: the consideration of loss, the consideration of "I got to stay here so I'll make it all unreal," and the consideration of "Well, I can't have that place any more so I'll carry a picture of it." Most of your preclears whether they know it or not are walking around with a childhood home over their heads. They can't have that spot any more – the orientation place – so they think, to see at all they'd better carry it around with them.