I want to talk to you about extremely elementary processes.

The four conditions of existence are actually variations of existence itself. They are certain attitudes about existence, and they are the basic attitudes about existence. Now we could include a great many more attitudes, and we would find that we were deriving them all from these four. But we could take these four and find out that we were deriving them all from one – Is-ness, or reality.

In view of the various factors in Scientology, we can discover that some extremely elementary processes could be designed if we would look at these upper-echelon factors.

There has to be an Is-ness before you can do an Alter-is-ness. There has to be an Isness before you can do a Not-is-ness – unless of course you want to postulate it in reverse.

Now, let's look, first and foremost, at this thing called isness – reality. How much in the way of processing could you get just out of this concept: that there is such a thing as isness – an existence? How many processes could you possibly do? Well, actually, you could do a very great many.

But we are talking now about this particular universe and how it got here and we discover as we look along the track, that these four conditions of existence, that all existence, presupposes the postulate known as TIME.

But let me call your attention, very quickly and abruptly and immediately, to a very singular fact – if I have not mentioned it before – and that fact is simply this: that to give a thetan exercise in getting ideas is minimal. A thetan can always shift around his considerations one way or the other, but it depends upon the scope he is willing to shift them around on.

Now time is just a plain ordinary postulate which says that out of a non-consecutive beingness, which doesn't exist forever, we would get then a parade of time. A time continuum.

Now, an individual on one point – that is to say, a receipt point of the communications formula – an individual standing on this receipt point would feel himself limited to the degree that he had to be on receipt point. So he would then feel that the consideration that he was on receipt point, or was being the effect of existence, would monitor his ability to make considerations. That is to say, he would not feel, then, that he was free to make any other consideration above the level of the fact that he was on receipt point. Now, all of his other considerations, then, would fall below this level.

There's no forever, it would just be there – no forever, no instant involved. There just isn't any consecutive existence at all. And then out of this we would have to make a postulate that there would now be consecutive existence, existences, or a consecutive series of states.

Now, let's take somebody who considers himself to be on cause point and solely and entirely and completely on source point – source point, cause point; receipt point, effect point. (Formula of communication: cause, distance, effect – the most elementary statement of it – involving attention and duplication.) And we would discover that if an individual was monitoring himself with one basic consideration, his consideration would then fall below, and his ability to change his mind would then fall below, that basic consideration.

Now an individual who is simply occupying space without any energy involved whatsoever doesn't have a good feeling about this. Without any space he could have a good feeling about it. No space, no energy, no continuum – he could have a fairly good feeling about this, but when he gets into the occupying of a space, now he has this feeling of foreverness unmocked. He makes that uncomfortable for himself, so he will now go on creating consecutive states of existence. He can have a game. Space is necessary to start this game but when you've just got space and nothing else, it's rather unbearable. You're already occupying, so there is an existence there, but it isn't an existence which has any consecutive difference of state. And that's real poor. This is a kind of feeling you run into in space-opera.

Basic consideration could be "I am on an effect point"; that is, "I am being the effect of many flows and messages and that sort of thing, and this is very bad." Now his considerations are various.

Here we have, then, a state of existence being conditional upon a time postulate which would include a space-energy manifestation, and this would be a simultaneousness.

Let's take this most basic consideration: "I must get off this point." You see, "I am on this effect point and I do not like this." Therefore, he makes the consideration that he must get off of this point.

There would be no question about whether you made the postulate for space and energy before you made the postulate of time. There is no question of any postulate before or after because you have not postulated the postulate which causes a before or after, and that postulate would be time. So actually, to have a game, there must be a simultaneous action whereby you postulate space-energy-time – space, energy, continuous existence. Which is an As-is-ness of space – altered, energy – altered, time – altered. So these items have to have the time postulate with Alter-is-ness in them in order to get a persistence. That's how it's done in this universe. You don't "just have to do this all the time". But when those three consecutive postulates are made simultaneously, why we then have a continuum of existence, demarked by differences of position of the particle in the space and we have time being marked out for us very neatly. We have to alter positions in order to get a continuousness. We have to say it is here, now it's here, now it's here, now it's here.

Well, what is monitoring the consideration that he must get off the point? The fact that he's on it, of course. You see?

There's another way of making time come true. We say space, no space, space, no space, space, no space, space, no space. You're postulating, however, that you can do this before you can say space, no space, space, no space. Well now, this postulate is so easy for a thetan to make, it might be considered a native part of his makeup. So we have before this an ideal state, that is to say an idealized or theoretical state. We have this theoretical state whereby we merely have a Static which has no space, no mass, no wave length, no motion, no time, which has the ability to consider, and we are dealing with the basic stuff of life. Just by definition.

All right. Now let's take it reverse-end-to, and let's get an individual who finds himself on source point. This individual is on source point and there he sits on source point and he's being cause: he's being the source of the impulses or particles which are going across the distance and hitting effect points. Well, this individual is saying, "Now I mustn't cause anything bad. I must cause only good things. And I must do this and that for people," or "I must do this and that for this or for that," or something of this sort, you see?

It is very peculiar that: "We, mixed up in all of this energy and so forth and way on down the track from the time this postulate was made" – do you see anything specious about the way that remark hangs together – "Way on down the track from the time this postulate was made" – Very difficult and very strange that we could even discuss this higher state of existence which was made trillions of years ago? No. You see, it must have been concurrent with this, right here, and so we don't use the word existence, we use the word "is". We don't use the word "then" or "will be", we don't go back into the past or go into the future for this continuousness at all. It just is.

And what is this host of considerations being monitored by? Of course, that he is on a cause point; he's on a source point of a communication – synonymous here: cause and source, effect and receipt – naturally.

Now, in past ages it was just: "Well, reality is reality and you'll have to accept it.

All right. Now, if he discovers himself suddenly on the receipt point of something, this fellow is really dismayed. You get the dismay? His basic consideration is that he's being cause point, and yet all of a sudden he receives something – oooh! Now, that would be a breakdown – basically and primarily – would be a breakdown of his isness; his reality, a breakdown of his isness.

There's nothing more you can know about it than that." Oh yes, there is a lot more you could know about reality than simply, it is.

He can then have a break of reality only to the degree that other-determinism brings into question the postulate on which he is operating. See, he can have a break of reality only to the degree that other-determined hammer-pound brings about an invalidation of the postulate on which he's basically running. He says, "I'm cause and I'm being a good fellow and I'm doing this and doing that," and all of a sudden he gets jailed. My, this is upsetting! But what is his basic consideration? That he is occupying a cause point.

So, it is not a complete and embracive definition of reality. It's not complete and embracive because reality has a certain mechanical structure and that structure is composed of these four states of existence. And it would actually take all these four states of existence to make the kind of existence which we are now living and that is to say, we would have to have Is-ness then Not-is-ness and Alter-is-ness and did it strike you before that we might have forgotten and might never have known about and it might not have had called to our attention directly, this other state? We've always had these three states, Alter-is-ness, Not-is-ness and Is-ness.

Now, let's take this in a very minor fashion and let's take somebody who has superparalysis of the medulla oblongata or some very, very serious ill, such as entire closure of the pocketbook. And we find him trying to change this condition. Now we've entered into another field. See? We've entered into not-isness and then we've entered into alter-isness, you see? Now, he has this terrible ill. He has this mental difficulty. He has some other difficulty or other and he now says, "It mustn't exist." That's his statement there. "It mustn't exist." And his next statement after that: he said, "All right, don't exist!" Grrrr.

Alter-is-ness and Not-is-ness, of course, are variations of Is-ness and depend upon Isness. But there is a fourth one and that is As-is-ness. And that condition natively exists at an instant of creation, yet it also can be made to exist again any time anybody wants to make it exist again, simply by saying AS IS. If anybody had truly and actually accepted reality and had got all of his fellow beings to simply accept reality, we wouldn't have any. But whose reality? Whose reality in each case? Somebody else's. So this reality was actually another condition, other-determined As-is-ness. Other determined. Which is Not-is-ness!

Well, what do you know? It keeps on existing. Well, "All right," he says, "I'll change it on a gradient scale. I'll chip away at the corners of it," and so forth. Well, he'll at length decide he can't do anything about it.

The way you get Not-is-ness is to say "as is created by you". That's an awful one, that's a big curve, and that is Not-is-ness. It's an As-is-ness created by somebody else, which of course isn't an As-is-ness at all. It's a very specious As-is-ness, and naturally the world would sort of look unreal to everybody if Joe Blow and Doctor Stinkwater and the Heavily Laden Order of Pyramids all said "This is reality and this is As It Is and you'd better accept it." That's a Not-is-ness, isn't it? So if everything starts to sort of dim down on you and you kind of find things going out, and getting sort of resistively thin – all transparent-but – they're-there, or, they're "all hung with black sheets" – you must assume at that time that you have faced up to too many As-is-nesses which somebody else created.

One of the actions that he would finally do would be to draw a black curtain over the thing – that's one of the basic actions on this. He says," Now, look. I can't change it at all." He's trying to affect not-isness by using alter-isness. See? Not-isness would not take place by a postulate, he discovered – or thought he discovered – so the basic thing he must do immediately then is to start changing it on a gradient scale, which is to say, alter-isness. And it just stays right there. And he is already running on a failed postulate of not-isness.

Somebody else says, "This is the way things are." And you've had that. You get that operation in conversation: "And yesterday you said to me, just when I got up, you said to me, you never work, you are a dirty loafer, you remember that, don't you?" I think every familial unit of thetans should always have, not a Bible, but so and so's Rules of Evidence, lying right there to be resorted to at any time, and there ought to be a Court in every neighborhood to which you could repair and decide whether or not this was an As-is-ness or a Not-is-ness.

So what's his activity of change?

Now what is a Not-is-ness? A Not-is-ness comes about in that exact manifestation, or simply by the separate postulate: "Well, it is and I regret it. It isn't." You know, you could have made it and then said it wasn't. Oddly enough, if you made it and you know you made it, you have a special case of being in a position to say any time, "It doesn't exist now," and it won't – if you have also accepted responsibility for having created something and said, "I made it." So we see that there are two different conditions of Not-is-ness.

His activity of change is then proceeding from the basic postulate that it must not be, which is proceeding from another basic postulate that it is, which is proceeding from the basic postulate that he's there in the first place (you see that?), which is proceeding from the basic postulate that there must be a "there" for him to be at.

One is just vanishment.

So we trace back these basic postulates and we discover a little rule here. And this little rule is that an individual has a condition and the condition continues to exist as long as the individual has a condition.

The other one is an Is-ness which somebody is trying to postulate out of existence by simply saying "It isn't."

Now, that sounds like an idiotic little rule, but it's a very, very true little rule. It'll continue as long as he has a condition.

A Not-is-ness, in our terminology, would be this second specialized case of an individual trying to vanish something without taking responsibility for having created it. Definitive, positive and precise definition.

Well, why does he have a condition? He must have a postulate about the condition before he has the condition. Right? So there's a more basic postulate every time you find such a condition.

And the only result of doing this is to make it all unreal. To make it forgotten. To make it "back of the black screen". To make it transparent. To make it dull down. To give it over to a machine. To wear glasses. Anything that you could possibly do to get a dimmingdown of an Is-ness.

In order to get over something, you have to have postulated that you have it. In order to recover, you must postulate that you have something from which to recover. In order to go through the actions of emptying a pocketbook, you must have had to have postulated that it was full and that it should be emptied.

And that is done by saying just this, just this precise operation and no other operation: "I didn't make it. It isn't." "I didn't do it, so it doesn't exist.', And that will always bring about this second condition, the one we give the term of Not-is-ness.

Now, you're all too prone to look at existence and say," Well, there's existence there, and now we'll make some postulates." No, this is not quite the direction that we're drifting. You'd have to make the postulates to have existence there so that you could make some postulates to recover from having the existence there.

"I didn't create it. I had nothing to do with it. I have no responsibility for this at all, so it doesn't exist as far as I am concerned." An individual doesn't have to operate on these postulates at all, but he is running on this makeup of postulates. He, of course, then will trigger in all the rest of his postulates and they'll cross-reference in to sticking him right there with it. He's Not-ised it and he's got it.

Let's get back to this isness. A condition has to be postulated before it can be unpostulated. That's right, isn't it? Well, so that any condition to have any existence or persistence must be based on time of some sort. Well, therefore, there must be a time postulate. And we find out that an individual doesn't have any time unless he continues to postulate it. An individual ceases to have time to the degree that he ceases to postulate it.

Now he thinks the only way he can get rid of it is to dim it down, dim it down.

Now, when I say "cease to postulate time," I don't want you for a moment to get the idea that there's any witchcraft involved, that you have to go out with spider webs and mix them up with four quarts of morning sunlight and stir them all up with a whisper. There's no witchcraft involved in making this postulate. It's simply this kind of a postulate: "Continue." Just get the notion of continuing something and you will have a time continuum.

You can process a preclear on a gradient scale of change on something – and this is of great interest to us – if the gradient scale is back toward his acceptance of responsibility for having created it. It would not be far enough to go, in Dianetics, simply to find out that your mother did it, that "it was what your mother said". That wouldn't be far enough to go.

Now, you could get that notion right now. Just sort of get an idea of a little piece of space out in front of you there and you have the notion "Continue" about this little piece of space. All right. That's making time. You've made time. That's all the postulate there is. There isn't even the words "Now I am going to make some time and I am going to cause the time to persist and continue." No, it's just urn-mmm. You see, you can do anything.

This is built into the woof and warp of the track, the very composite of postulates on which an individual is running.

All right. Now this time continuum is a tremendously interesting thing, particularly in view of the fact that so many people have agreed upon it. But their apparent agreement with it leads them to depend upon other people finally to carry on the agreement while they just sit there. And what do you know? Eventually they just sit there!

You would have to go back this far: you would have to postulate: (1) that the time Mother said it was NOW, and, (2) that the time when Mother said it caused the time when I said it (a million or fifteen billion years ago) to key in. (key in (Verb): An earlier moment of upset or painful experience is activated, restimulated, by the similarity of a later situation, action or environment to the earlier one.) Every time somebody else can put one of your own pieces of mental machinery or one of your engrams into restimulation, it is only because he can work on something which was natively created by yourself. All things carry the germ of their own destruction, and you postulate the germ of your own destruction.

Now, you'll find many a boy who's having a bad time simply sitting at home in his bedroom – just sitting there. What's he stopped doing? Well, he couldn't have any motion, he says.

So any engram, as we were operating with it in Dianetics, was actually a key-in. When I discovered that the whole track ran back, back, back, back, BACK, it was, "Oh! We're back to where the guy did it in the first place!" Well, that was very interesting, and one result was the essay on responsibility in Advanced Procedure and Axioms.[#bookmark10 1] The essay on full responsibility.

Well, motion consists of this: consecutive positions in a space. Now, he'd have to conceive that he had some space and that he'd have to have some consecutive motions in it.

Well, a fellow did. He created the condition from which he is now suffering, and he didn't even create it in other wise than he is now suffering it. But it has been keyed in and he has consented even to its being keyed in.

If you could just ask such a person to go out and trim the hedge – just no more, no less – just tell him to go out and trim the hedge; if you ask him to go out and put a piece of chalk on the sidewalk all the way around the block, every five feet, you would see considerable recovery in his case.

Nothing, really is sneaking up on anybody. That's a horrible thing, isn't it? People haven't even made it worse. But we're having a good game. If that game is a game called psychosomatic illness, bereft lover, neglected baby, it's still a game. And as such, the individual is still playing all roles.

Why? Well, he knows that he'd have to go all the way around the block or he knows that he would have to finish trimming the hedge. See? Or he would have to come around to his door again, you see, on the block, or come around to the other side of the yard. In other words, he can continue to postulate a time continuum against the objects which are already there.

Now what happens is that as an individual goes along the line, he starts identifying himself with the source point and receipt point of the communication line. As a child, he identifies himself as the one who is talked to. Very seldom do you discover a little child giving mother a good lecture. If you had, you probably would remember with great satisfaction, the good lecture you gave your mother.

Now, you could just say to this fellow, "All right. Now get the idea of moving this dish. Now move it." Now get the idea of moving this dish again. Get the position you're going to move it to, now. Now move it." "Now get the idea of moving this dish. Now get the place you're going to move it to, and move it."

Here is a condition in which the individual has identified himself with a continuous effect point, or a continuous cause point, and having said "I am now on this point," he now makes his considerations below the level of that point. He has considered he is on that point.

Hard as it might seem for some people to conceive, an individual can be made violently ill with this. Why? What's kicking back there? The thetan can't get that sick, certainly. Well, this individual's agreement with the body – he is the body, the body is himself, therefore, everything that happens to the body is what happens to himself and everything that happens to himself is what happens to the body. In other words, he's in a superidentification.

Henceforth all further considerations are monitored by this consideration that he's on the point, as long as he considers he's on that point. And he would have to recognize that he was on the point (an As-is-ness) before he would come off the point.

What postulate is this individual already riding with?

A process immediately occurs to us on such a level. If you just simply ask an individual a question such as this over and over and over and over: "Where could you be, where you would be willing to recognize and realize that you were?" And you would just run a gradient

Now, let's take a look at isness. He has to conceive that he has a body before he can recover from one.

1 Advanced Procedure and Axioms: Book by L. Ron Hubbard scale all the way back up the line, to the point where the individual recognizes, finally, "You know, I'm sitting right here!" There wouldn't be any mysticism involved in this.

Let's get this salient and horrible fact, that this whole thing is monitored by isness, no matter how much not-isness. You see, not-isness is always pursuant to isness. No matter how much alter-isness that takes place… You see, you've got an as-isness, then alter-isness has to take place to get an isness. Well, if you have any isness persisting on a continuum – and that is our basic definition of isness. Isness is something that is persisting. As-isness is something that is just postulated or just being duplicated, you see?

Now, these conditions of existence are composited up in an inter-dependency one upon another. An Is-ness exists only because of As-is-ness. As-is-ness took place in the first place.

As-isness, that's just no alteration taking place, and as-isness contains no life continuum, no time continuum, nothing! See? It'll just go anytime you postulate a perfect duplicate for anything – same space, same object, same time-boom! If you postulated it all the way through without any limiter postulate hanging around at all, it would just be gone, and that's all there is to it. It'd be gone for everybody else too.

It got created. Then we had to alter it slightly to get an Is-ness. We had to give up some responsibility for it and we had to shift it around. A Not-is-ness then exists in order to provide a game.

This isness is your monitoring postulate.

A game is an Is-ness which is being handled by Not-is-nesses. A football game could be added up in terms of these conditions of existence. One side has the ball and the other side must Not-is the side that has the ball, and the side that has the ball has to win – in other words, has to arrive at a receipt point.

An individual couldn't possibly get into trouble with as-isness, except if you consider losing everything trouble. But it would be things that he was losing which he either didn't want or had just postulated into existence. In other words, as-isness is an exact duplication or an exact creation. All as-isness is doing is merely accepting the responsibility for having created it, and anybody can accept the responsibility for anything. That's all as-isness is when it operates as a perfect duplicate.

We get the communication formula itself as being below the conditions of existence and we get affinity, reality and communication as simply being the methods by which existence is conducted. It is not the interplay of existences. So we're dealing with a higher echelon than ARC right now.

There's two kinds of as-isness: there's the as-isness, you postulate it in the space and time; you know, you postulate it right there where it exists. And the other one is, the as-isness where you re-postulate it; you see, you just postulate it again. The object already exists. There is an isness being approximated as an as-isness and it becomes an "as-is-that-isn't"; it becomes, then, a not-isness.

Affinity really is merely the consideration of how well it's going. In the agreement or reality itself we're talking about Is-ness and that is the corner where we enter this ARC triangle. We just slide into that triangle of Affinity-Reality-Communication on that Is-ness point of reality, and then it is modified by affinity and communication, which of course come in simultaneously with it. We discover then that these conditions of existence would add up to all manifestations of behavior. There would be a great many of them. There would be a finite number, however. It would be the number of possible combinations, singly, doubly, trebly or quadruply, of these four conditions of existence. We get this individual who in only 75% of his life is trying to say Not-is to, another 10% of his life he's giving an Alter-is, one hundredth of one per cent he's giving an As-is, or trying to give an As-is to – and the remainder is Reality. Acceptable reality. And that would be just one makeup of a personality.

If you just created it as an as-isness, unless you altered it rapidly, you would get a notisness. And if you exactly approximated an isness as an as-isness, you would again get the same result. You got the same result both times – not-isness.

If we say that there is a gradient scale of Is-ness, a gradient scale of Alter-is-ness, a gradient scale of As-is-ness (which there isn't) and a gradient scale of Not-is-ness, why we can see then that you could take these gradient scales and in one combination and another, have a character composited from them.

As-isness, perfectly done, if not followed by alter-isness becomes a not-isness, quickly and immediately – but right now.

Characterization must be made up, in great degree, from these conditions of existence. Some space, some energy, and his considerations of Is-ness, Not-is-ness and Alter-is-ness.

Now, you've had that experience in knocking out engrams, facsimiles and so forth. It hasn't occurred to anybody yet, fortunately, to simply exactly approximate the body. Treat the body as an as-isness and go your way. Well, you say, well, it's got a lot of facsimiles and so forth. All right. Treat them as the same as-isness, all in one operation – boom.

We would not say that any part of his characterization was made up of As-is-ness, because if it was it wouldn't be there.

But of course you had to assume you had a body before you could possibly treat it with an as-isness.

One also has been trained to believe that loss is bad. This is just a reverse postulate, made just to keep life interesting. Loss is bad, therefore he has a tendency to avoid As-is-ness.

Now, existence goes this way: there is an isness. And then the individual – and this is the only error you could make, and this is another method, slightly, of getting a continuation, because it is an alter-isness. You see? There is an alter-isness right there between isness and not-isness. The second you say, "There it is. Now I don't want it and it doesn't exist," you see, you've postulated that you're changing it. But it is a very abrupt and particular kind of isness, is not-isness.

Therefore he will avoid duplication – he'll avoid all kinds of things. He's afraid he'll unmock.

And instead of following isnesses with not-isnesses, we followed them with asisnesses, nobody could ever possibly get into any trouble. The way you get into trouble is to follow an isness with a blunt, thud, not-isness. You say," There it is. I don't want it. It isn't." Oh-oh. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh!

He's afraid he'll vanish. Here he is stuck in, eighteen feet thick, and you couldn't get him out with a pneumatic drill, all scheduled to go back to the between-lives area (Betweenlives area: The experiences of a thetan during the period of time between the loss of a body and the assumption of another. See A HISTORY OF MAN by L. Ron Hubbard) and pick up another baby.

Now, what's the difference between these two operations? Very interesting difference. You've got an isness. Here's an ashtray. You don't want the ashtray anymore. One operation – a correct one, as far as you're concerned, if you just really didn't want it anymore – would be simply do an as-isness. You know, as-isness, perfect duplicate. Boom! – gone. See, you haven't got an ashtray anymore. Certainly you haven't got one.

Silly, isn't it? But it doesn't matter too much. Any life or continuance, to him, has begun to be better than no life at all.

This baffles people when you're running perfect duplication on Opening Procedure by Duplication, and you include in it the step "Make a perfect duplicate of it." The thing disappears if they're going real good. Then they're asked to come back to it and pick it up, and this seems to be an invalidation. It isn't invalidation, because they're in agreement with the auditor and the auditor has repostulated it into existence. So they actually, by just saying, "All right" and walking back to it again, they have to postulate it into existence to pick it back up again, and they miss that step.

You could say, well then why would you process somebody? Well, let's look at that. In order to accomplish a two way communication, just after the basic and most rudimentary chitterchat, I would start asking somebody why he was being processed. And you know, I'm just wicked enough to go on asking the person why he is being processed for hours. Until he can at least find one reason why he is being processed. It's a very interesting process. A preclear comes in saying, "Process me," and you have always supposed they knew. Well, at this point they don't have any idea at all why they want to be processed.

So in running Opening Procedure by Duplication, you would have to say, "All right. Now, consider a book is over there." "Now walk over to it." "Now pick it up," and so forth – weight, color and get a description. "All right. Now make a perfect duplicate of it" or "Put it down. Make a perfect duplicate of it." "Now walk away from it."

A process which would be quite powerful would be: "What wrongness or what wrong thing would you find other people would accept from you?" or "What could you do that was wrong that other people would accept?" and then "What wrongness could you accept from other people?" – back and forth and back and forth. Here goes the guy's manners, his social pattern, his behavior pattern, and everything else will just go by the boards running that process but he won't be able to tell you, first and foremost, why he's being processed.

Well, you tell an individual to walk away from it, he's just as-isness'd it. See? It's gone.

He won't be able to tell you he wants to feel freer. He won't articulate any of these things. He'll just sit there and want to be processed. What toward? Until you've gotten him to put a little time on the track, he will use "forever" in processing, because he's sitting in forever.

You'd say instead, "Walk over to the other book." Now, when he finished that, when it comes to this first book, "Now consider there is a book over there." "Now walk over to it and pick it up and make a perfect duplicate." Of course, it's gone again.

He isn't moving on the time continuum. Well, if you can't get him processing toward some goal or other or in some direction, he just makes processing the end all of everything and he'll just go on being processed forever. But if he's going to be processed forever, he'll have to hold onto his aberrations forever, otherwise he couldn't be processed forever, could he? And that's why some cases stay so long in processing. It's actually as elementary as that.

This invalidative factor of agreement is that for you it's gone and for somebody else it's still there, finds agreement. Your willingness to be a good fellow, which postulate you are also running on, lets the other fellow put it back there again. So an individual can get upset about as-isness. Now, this just isn't auditing, this is in living. You say that car isn't there anymore and then your wife keeps bawling you out because that car is still sitting out there – mass of junk. Well, you've decided it wasn't there anymore. To heck with it. And she wants it moved! Well, you listen to this for awhile and you finally come off the postulate, and postulate that there is an isness out there and go do something about it, you see? Then you have to use action. Well, if you could just ask her to just look at it, make a perfect duplicate of it, then you'd both be happy. Then maybe the neighbors would complain. Well, instead of going into terrific agreement with these neighbors, and so forth, you just have them come over and make an as-isness of the thing. They wouldn't see the car anymore either.

So I have been sorely tempted to alter that early auditing step to just this: "Well now, give me some goals you have in processing." And just keep it up until it's no longer forever, and the preclear has a future.

In other words, we would keep this up until anybody who had a basic vested interest in agreeing with the car had finally seen – and actually this would be the long way around. These individuals that are doing this, by the way, all consider themselves to be occupying a finite point of individuality and existence, you see? And they won't take the responsibility for every other person's consideration. To make a thing really disappear, you just have to take the responsibility for every viewpoint in the whole universe and say "As-is" – different operation.

But to follow an isness with an as-isness brings you into an actual not-isness – thing doesn't exist; an actual not-isness. But if you just postulate against this thing that it doesn't exist – and you've said a not-isness right here, you know; you didn't do an as-isness – you've done what? You have refused the responsibility for having created it and you have said, "Somebody else creates it and I don't want it." You've said "somebody else." You've postulated the existence of somebody else with regard to this thing, and you've said, "Another determinism is placing this thing before me and therefore I don't want it, so therefore I'm going to say that it isn't but it really belongs to somebody else."

We have to postulate another determinism, which is to say, refute the responsibility for having created the object, before you can get such an appearance as a not-isness.

Now, an individual can fail utterly. There's the Empire State Building, and he says," It isn't architecturally sound. It doesn't exist as far as I'm concerned." He's trying to postulate a not-isness; he's trying to make it unreal. He has to postulate right along with this that somebody else created the Empire State Building to get what we consider unreality or the manifestation of unreality. See? And the case which gets these unrealities is handling life on this basis: "Everybody else put it there and created it, and I really don't dare interfere with any determinism on their part, so I'll just kind of dim it down a little bit. I'll say it's not there."

He goes rushing down a mountainside in a car that has the brakes burned out on [it], and there's a big boulder right down at the bottom of the hill, and he runs right straight into this big boulder – crash! – and just before he hits, you can always find him postulating this: "It's not there and I'm not here." Crush!

Only, you see, he doesn't do an as-isness. He doesn't say "I'm in a car rushing down the mountainside. I have the responsibility…" – you know, just this feeling; you wouldn't say all these words: "In a car rushing down a mountainside and all these people are in this car, and I'm in this car too; and there's a boulder there and the car is going to hit the boulder." Asis! – bing! No car, no boulder, no mountainside, no people. It would happen, even before he hit the boulder. See? Something would happen at this point.

This is a very curious lot of phenomena that we're fooling around with here, and of course, we have no serious intent with this phenomena, which is a fortunate thing. Otherwise, somebody realizing exactly how this is done would sooner or later, maybe, unmock the Republican Party or Russia – leave a hole. And of course to do that you would have to accept the viewpoint of two hundred million Russians or something like that. You see? And you could unmock Russia if you did that. But you'd have to take full responsibility.

Now, what's this full responsibility? Full responsibility merely says this: "I created it." When you ask somebody to make a perfect duplicate of it, he's going through the mechanics of creating it. Therefore, it disappears. He knows, unless he throws some other-determinism in on the thing – in other words, practices some alter-ism on its creator – that it's not going to exist at all.

Now, the physical universe, as we look at it right around us here, is an isness for one reason only: we all agree that somebody else created it. Whether that is God or Mubjub or Bill, we agree that somebody else brought these conditions into existence. And as long as we are totally agreed upon this, boy, have we got everything solid. And the moment when we agree otherwise and we say, "Well, we made it," then it starts to get thin. Now, this will worry a preclear. It's just as if he feels he could never make another one. It'll get thin for him.

In the processing of reality, if you just handled isness all by itself, you would just have an individual start to look at what he considers to exist. And we would take the most solid manifestation of that and that would be the space in the vicinity, the walls in the vicinity, so on. That would be the most elementary process that we could do. We just start spotting spaces and walls – just that, no more. And we just keep spotting them and spotting them and spotting them. And let what happens happen. That's all – just let what happens happen. Just ask the individual to keep on spotting things. Very permissive, you see?

Now, supposing he kept on looking at them with his physical vision. We find out that he would get up to a certain level and then he'd start to have body somatics. Because making the body do this continually and so forth is actually processing a reality vaguely in the direction of an as-isness. See, it's not bluntly or sharply in the direction of as-isness, it's just asking him to process it a little bit in that direction. "Let's just take these walls as you find them." You know? "Let's take the spaces around here just as you see them." In other words, "Let's look at another spot and let's look at another spot and let's look at another spot. Let's just take these things as you see them." And of course after a while the walls are going to get brighter and brighter and brighter and brighter and brighter and brighter and bri… and duller and duller and duller and duller and duller and then gone.

Well, when they get bright, bright, bright, bright, bright, that's all right: the body will still feel pretty good. But when it starts getting dull, dull, dull, du… thin, thin, thin, the body doesn't like this; it does not think this is the best thing to do. It would not recommend this as subject matter for an article in Bernarr MacFadden's magazines. Because it knows it'll fall if it stands in space.

So therefore this very, very simple process would not necessarily have to be completed simply by remedying havingness, but just by getting the fellow to close his eyes and spot anything he could see, no matter how vaguely, as a thetan. Just spot anything he sees. If he sees a nothingness, okay; if he sees a somethingness, okay. Just get him to spot it. We don't care what he sees. We might indicate various directions, but we would make a very bad mistake if we indicated them as body directions – on your right, on your left, above your head. Oh, no. No, no. We just ask him to look around, and what he sees, "Spot a couple of spots on it." "Now, did you do that? "Now, something else: "Spot a couple of more spots on that."

Well, we know already, if we've run it permissively in the environment, he's had to point them out and walk around to them, he will obey orders. Now that we've got him to a point where he will obey orders on this subject, we can trust him to close his eyes and spot spots or spot spaces or spot anything he wants to spot with his eyes closed. And we just simply keep on spotting them.

And that would be the most elementary process there is in Scientology.