All we need to know about existence is that it is. Whatever complexity it has, it still is. It isn't ever was, which is a most interesting thing about this particular nomenclature. There isn't any will-be-ness and there is no was-ness. There is simply Is-ness. Speak about existence, and people spontaneously add to it will-be-ness and was-ness. So existence is not the word we want. We want the word Is-ness. We want just the word we're using. We want that which is.

With the data we have on these conditions we can talk a little bit here about how your preclear might possibly recover from the state which he conceives himself to be in.

The Dhyana makes the error of "beginningless and endless time" but that's not really an error. Probably it is an error as far as the translation of the symbols is concerned. We don't know that the symbols that were used by Gautama to describe this manifestation add up into English as beginningless and endless time. We've already crossed one language jump and so we know that much less of what he was actually saying. But it was an interesting thing that you could represent this by a continuous line which joined itself. Any kind of a complexity of circle, in other words, would represent the fact that we had a beginningless and endless somethingness.

We consider now that the pattern of existence through which he has been is a very definite track. It is a track which starts with As-is-ness, and this of course includes space.

Now, that is too complicated an explanation. In view of the fact that time depends upon a postulate you could say, yes it is beginningless and endless. You could say as well that it is linear. You could say, as well, that it is continuous. You could say as well that it is Eastern Standard, or Sidereal – it doesn't matter now how you qualify it, having once made the postulate, you can then go on making further postulates. Nobody is going to limit anybody in making postulates.

You might possibly completely miss in auditing a preclear if you didn’t realize that As-is-ness has to start with space. One could get so concentrated on and frantic about objects and energy, this factor of space might be completely missed. A thetan can communicate with space with great ease. The body has gone too far on this track to do this easily. The body finds it quite sickening to communicate with space, but a thetan can communicate with space rather easily, and the As-is- ness begins with space, and then it gets into, of course simultaneously, energy, and mass.

But there happens to be, strangely enough, a truth lying back of time. Time is a postulate. It doesn't even have to be agreed on. You could have a time span all by yourself.

Now space, energy, mass, consideration of, are all simultaneous. There is no consideration here related to time.

You could shut your eyes and say, "and now I've sat here for a million years".

We have to move the anchor points of the space, in order to get a continuance of the space, and move the energy itself in the space, and change them in one fashion or another in order to get a continuance of that energy, and when this has not been introduced we have not postulated time. A thetan doing this would theoretically pass from As-is-ness into Alter-is-ness just immediately. He’d have to, or he would have no continuation of any kind.

"In the next two seconds", you could say, "I'm going to sit here for a million years".

In other words it wouldn’t exist unless he intended to change it. He would have to make the intention of change simultaneous with the action of creation. And if he did not he would get a disappearance immediately of that mass.

There's nothing unheard of about this – that's real time. Don't be too baffled if you dream for five seconds about a five hour time span. You've just repostulated some time, that's all.

He passes then into Alter-is-ness, which is a simultaneous action with As-is-ness at first, and then of course immediately becomes an action of continuation, and we get Is-ness, which is this reality that we talk about - space, energy, objects.

Unless you continue to postulate time, you haven't got any. And that's the first and foremost thing you can know about time.

Just exactly why we consider this combination to be a reality, that reality is Is-ness, is a little bit dull, because the fact of the matter is that reality itself to continue as a reality would not be an Is- ness at all but a continuous Alter-is-ness.

That fellow who depends on a clock up there to move time for him, is going to get in trouble sooner or later. He's going to get, "stuck on the track", and "out of pace with his fellow man", because he's depending upon their agreement on time to give him time. The only way he can have time is to continue to postulate time.

So we get Is-ness actually as a hypothetical state.

One of the roughest things that you will discover with anybody who is having trouble with his case is to have him put something on the future time track. He'll look at that and say, "OH NO!" You say to someone, "Let's make an appointment. Let's make it at 2.05 this afternoon".

Now the fact that the thetan is a Static - that’s not hypothetical or theoretical. The fact that he is a Static that can consider, and can produce space and energy and objects, is not hypothetical. That’s true.

Oh no. That's upsetting. That's why when you talk to somebody on the street, you don't tell him to come around to "see you later at your office". You've undoubtedly picked up somebody who has attention on the subject of postulating time. The thing for you to do is take him right over to your office right now, if you possibly can. Don't put something on the future time track for him any more than you can help, because the person here who is really in difficulty, who has all the usual human difficulties, psychosomatic ills and so forth, has stopped postulating time. And the moment he stops postulating time, he doesn't have any.

We have facts, facts, all the way along here, until we get to this thing called reality and we suddenly discover that Is-ness is hypothetical.

Now, how much time has the fellow got and how much time is he rushing and how much time is he sitting still with – all these questions are very interesting except that it all depends on just this one fact: your individual is or is not postulating time for himself.

In the whole field of As-is-ness, the creation of space, energy, objects, of Alter-is-ness, Is-ness, Not-is-ness and more Alter-is-ness, there is only one hypothetical state. And that’s Is-ness. It never exists. It can’t ever exist. It has to be Alter-is-ness or As-is-ness, and of course As-is-ness can exist. As-is-ness can exist. It really would have to be able to exist, if you can repeat it. It must be in existence if you can repeat it and cause a vanishment of mockups or objects or spaces, so it obviously exists.

Looking over a very busy career I can see definitely the speed factor of composition as derived from strictly one postulate. I used to write about 100,000 words a month by writing three hours a day three days a week. Now, that's a lot of words, but it never occurred to me that it was a lot of words. If you simply postulate that there's that much action and it can fit into that much time, you have postulated the time. There's nobody sitting there agreeing with you or disagreeing with you. Actually, you're just walking free. Well, one might as well postulate eight million words in one hour per month. This was just saying how much physical universe time could be allocated to the time span which I was using in which to compose. You get that as a difference.

But this is not true of Is-ness.Reality does not exist. Because it says there is a stop. And there just isn’t any stop. It is continuous Alter-is-ness and when people stop altering the positions of things and stop altering anchor points, and stop pushing things around one way or the other whether they say they’re doing it or they say it’s being done on another determinism, or however, the moment they just relax on this whole thing, they get the condition which your preclear quite commonly is found in, of no longer postulating time. You see, the mechanism of saying “It will continue because I’m saying someone else is responsible” is of limited use. It’s of very limited use.

Let's take somebody doing a job of work – you will find something very, very peculiar. You find somebody who is working like mad, he's just working, working, working, he's just got to get it all done got to get it all done – and the end of the day comes and he's got nothing done. It's all in a confusion. He was awfully busy all day but nothing happened.

Let’s go into that a little more clearly - you set up this machine - or something to go on and shift and change the anchor points of the space, manufacture the energy involved and take care of the objects. You set up this machine and you say: I’m no longer responsible for this. I have no further responsibility for this now, and therefore it’s other space and it will go on happening, and therefore I can continue to have this space because somebody else is making it. You see we could get into that rather shifty by-pass, and so we could then have - not over too long a time - but we could have a consistent Alter-is-ness, and this alteration would continue to take place as long as he at least kept one tiny little fingernail on the machine over here. We weren’t looking to see that we had, but as long as we had that fingernail just touching that machine we were all right. We said just that much of it is ours.

And the next day he goes out and he's so busy, he's just got to do this and he's got to do that, and eventually you find him just sitting still, presenting a very funny and silly picture.

The moment that an individual entirely relaxes and he says I have everything all set up, it’s beautifully set up, and it will all run automatically, and I don’t have to worry about it any more, after all a fellow created this universe, other people are the ones who caused time to take place, they tell me when to get up, when to go to bed and I’ve just got everything all set and it’s totally other-determined now - it becomes just that totally other-determined, but it also, for the individual, passes by the board.

He's sitting still, not even moving, not even talking, not even writing, accomplishing absolutely nothing, and now he is telling you how awfully busy he is and how he hasn't got any time and he'll eventually collapse down to the point where he has no time of any kind whatsoever to employ on anything, and that's why he's sitting there. But that is perfectly reasonable to him. That's perfectly reasonable.

He’s no longer postulating a persistence, he’s no longer changing any objects in space, and so he will simply sit still. Everything gets very dim, everything gets very thin. Well, the funny part of it is that in that state he couldn’t even keep an aberration going. But his Alter-is-ness has been practiced so long after the fact of Not-is-ness that even though he sits still he’ll keep on changing something, and that condition is known as figuring, thinking, thinking. He tries to change something, and he feels, Well, I will just sit here and think, and that will keep the universe moving, it will keep time going. The only one trouble with this is, he is dealing basically with the root stuff of what makes universes but now that he is sunk into that category where he is doing nothing but consider again, not creating or moving anything, he is going to have a very difficult time of it. In fact everything is going to get dimmer and dimmer and less real and less real.

He'll get so that he can't start anything. He has no time in which to start it, much less to finish it. So he starts in originally by saying, Well, I haven't got time to finish it, then, I haven't got time to do it well, then, I haven't got time to do it, then, I haven't even got time to start it. Then finally, I can't think about doing it.

What will persist there is that which he is still changing, which is his worry about aberrations.

And that's what happens to a person's doingness. It's his ability to postulate the amount of time, and the only confusion that you get into about this is the fact that we have an agreed upon time span.

This is not esoteric or difficult. The only thing which goes on persisting is that which a person is actively working to change. You can only have those things which you handle. You can only have those things which you move around.

But you might recognize that the time for an entire nation and an entire earth could thereby go awry.

But an individual gets into a tremendous protest against mass. He has decided that the continuous survival of things is very bad. In other words he starts to fight survival itself with Not-is-ness. Now, as you know, Not-is-ness is a highly specialized activity. It is the activity actually of causing something to vanish or dull down or become less, simply because It IS too much. There’s too much Is-ness, the fellow considers. He’s got too much persistency, too much survival - Joe Jinks that got him across the barrel in a bank and took all his money away from him, and, well, there was just too much Is-ness, and the best thing to do about that is to cause a Not-is-ness, and let’s just fight everything.

How much can you do in an hour? What's an hour? An hour is the length of time it takes for the sun to move fifteen degrees in the sky. Now the sun isn't doing anything.

For an example, let’s take a war. A war is just simply each side saying the other side must cease to exist, and they are doing it with shot, shell, lead, dynamite, spears, arrows, deadfalls, and they’re using energy to make other things cease to exist. Well, it was perfectly all right as long as you were building your camp, you see, but if you suddenly started to fight a war with somebody on the other side of the mountain, whereby you were saying he must cease to exist, you were fighting persistence by causing persistence. If you want to know why a war which shouldn’t take more than a couple of days, goes on and on, and on, and on, and on - they got so bad a few centuries ago that they had a hundred years of nothing but war - everybody was saying everybody else mustn’t exist, and they kept moving objects around to cause existence to cease. Now you see how these postulates could become completely tangled.

What's this co-ordination? When a country can still postulate time or a world can still postulate time, then an hour would be a tremendous amount of doingness. They would have a festival at sunrise and a couple of games, and then along about noon, why, have a feast, and that leaves them all afternoon, that leaves them all afternoon completely empty and that would be a good time to go boating, and then they would have time to practice up for the dance they were giving that night.

And the thetan does this because he so loves the problem, and that is the most problem there is. The thetan loves a problem, and that is the basic of problems. You move masses around, which basically causes persistence, in order to cause persistence to cease. One hundred per cent paradox. Cannot exist, can’t ever happen, never has happened, and yet he will do this. But he is never happy doing it. There is no serenity involved in this. It becomes nothing but a complete chaos. Probably the only joy any soldier ever gets out of a war (and don’t spread this around, because the society doesn’t believe you should tell this) the only joy anybody ever gets out of a war is by kidding himself that he has made absolutely nothing out of something. Whether it’s enemy troops or tanks, or ships, or anything, there’s a big WHEE in there some place, a big thrill. Combat troops know about this. It’s only when they cease to make nothing at will, apparently, that they become very downhearted.

And then they would finish up about midnight and say, my, what an idle day! This is the amount of time they could postulate in terms of doingness.

Hardly anybody would be able to comprehend what is known as a military rout, whereby a body of troops, suddenly, and instantly and immediately disheartened, just completely, completely quits. It’s a strange phenomenon. It has been rather incomprehensible how fast they keep shooting at a castle on a hill. And they just keep shooting at this castle, and shooting at this castle, the castle keeps shooting back, and they keep firing at the castle, and the castle keeps shooting back. Well, they start to go to pieces in morale. They can’t make nothing out of something. Observably - the castle continues to live. They bog down on that rather badly, they get to be rather 1.5, and actually that is the manifestation of 1.5 on the Tone Scale. People using force to make nothing of something which continues to exist in spite of it. And they’ll suddenly drop. It isn’t a slow curve. They enter it rather slowly, and then they will just suddenly go to pieces, because the only compensation they have for war is the fact that as thetans, you see, they can observe that they are at least going through the motions of and have the manifestation of making nothing of form.

Do we have time to do it, or don't we? That is the question.

And the sadness underlying it to them is the fact that they don’t make nothing of it really.

Now in view of the fact that time itself is merely a postulate this is very simple to understand. If it's a postulate – does it have an anatomy as such? Well, yes – it's a complexity of postulates, the way you look at it in this particular universe at this time, but not really very complex. Time depends on change. In order to have time, you have to alter things, because Isness has a condition following it called Alter-is-ness – which has to take place for something to persist. This is the way the postulates have gone together which make up this universe – not the theoretical way in which they could go together to make up a universe.

Beyond this point still, all kinds of suffering takes place, and sadness, and it goes on and on, but you start moving that many particles with that much velocity, such as a German 88, and you’ll get persistence. That shell bursts, and we don’t find that the fellow in whose vicinity it hit is still there, but there’s persistence. Somebody’s got to go through his effects, and then somebody’s got to write a letter home and say he died a hero, and somebody else has got to carry the news through, and then there are people at home, and he’s left a hole in the society one way or the other, and this goes on and on and on, and then years later they dig up what’s left of him and ship him back over and put him into a cemetery. There’s persistence occasioning here. And what’s persisting?. Well, there was that particle - it certainly was moving fast, and when we get a particle moving with this much velocity, we get some persistence, and in a war all they can think of is terms of more and more and more particles, moving with more and more velocity to cause less and less persistence on the part of the enemy.

Get these as different things. You could go about this just all out in an entirely different fashion and postulate time and still have time, but it would not necessarily be the postulates which were made, and are made, and are in this universe right here and now. It wouldn't necessarily be the same set of postulates, if we suddenly just dreamed it up.

If you wanted to know why the German nation keeps fighting and keeps overrunning its borders, well it can’t do anything else by this time. From Legion times forward people have been going in there saying, “You mustn’t persist, and these fast-moving particles which we’re making you handle will make it so.” Oh really? This can’t be, you see.

So we have to subject the postulates of time to a little subjective proof, and get ourselves a test on it. And we find that we can make things persist by changing them. If we keep on changing something and change it and change it and change it and change it we're getting persistence. But actually, what we're doing is postulating the time for it to persist in.

When we find anything about which Man is extremely puzzled, we lead directly into the one little formula which is the mechanism of making things persist: we’re going to use particles to make things not persist.

And when an individual has stopped postulating time he has stopped perceiving. Perception and the postulate of time are identical phenomena. Perception and postulation are the same thing here.

And any time you find anybody in difficulty or in the middle of a problem, just look at the basic anatomy of a problem which is that anatomy.

You should recognize, in auditing, very clearly, that time is a postulate. When you are working with a preclear who is having difficulty perceiving, you know that there is something wrong with the time postulate. Therefore there is something wrong with change.

It’s, “We’re going to cause a non-persistence by the use of the mechanisms which cause persistence.”

Alter-is-ness is that part of the time postulate which we can most evenly and closely observe. And we find that changing things brings time into being. It causes a persistence and the mechanism of Alter-is-ness gives us a perception of time.

And you’re going to get a game - there’s undoubtedly going to be a game occurr here. There are going to be lots of problems.

We find that somebody who is in a state where he believes he is about to perish will then try to change everything in his vicinity, right up to the point where he knows certainly that he is perishing, at which moment he will simply succumb, bang, and he will cease to exist or persist as that particular individuality and he as himself without that individuality will proceed on and pick up another body.

If you want to know how to take apart a problem, just look where the person is using particles which you know by changing them will cause persistence, in order to make a non-persistence.

We get the tremendous amount of change or accomplishment which has to take place immediately before death. Here we have people all around the place who aren't doing anything. Their affairs are in horrible condition.

He’ll be using Alter-is-ness to create a Not-is-ness, and of course will be getting consistently and continually an Is-ness. Which is a continuous state. It’s a hypothetical state, because you can never stop it, you can never arrest it, you can never take a look at it. You know that any time you really recognize an Is-ness - not in a state of change - why, it will disappear, it will vanish or it will dim down, something will happen with relationship to it, so you always have to look at the change.

If we were to carry a little black bag and a stethoscope (that's the Badge of Office – a little black bag and a stethoscope. One doesn't quite know what they do with the stethoscope but it's interesting. It won't detect even whether a person is dead or not. A stethoscope is actually a dramatization of the Serpent of Caduceus) and we walk up to somebody and say, "My dear fellow I must inform you," having tapped the stethoscope against his chest so he knows he's being hit by a snake, "I must inform you that we have just learned through this diagnosis that you only have three months to live." The odd thing about this is that you would see a busy man promptly. He'll really get busy. He'll sit down in a slump for a moment or two. That's just the impact. And then he'll say, Let's see. Time. Time. Oh. Alter-is-ness, Alter-isness, Alter-is-ness, Alter-is-ness, Alter-is-ness, change, change, got to get my will straight, got to get this straight, got to get that straight, got to get Mary moved out of that house into the other house I'm having built. Gotta have this and that, and the months go by and the years go by and he's still alive.

This is the fellow living up the time track, this is the fellow living in the past. He’s looking at the changes and he isn’t looking at the reality.

Well, he'd say the doctor was wrong. No, the doctor wasn't wrong, as of the conditions of that moment, the experience of the doctor demonstrated to him that people who had this illness (who had not been told that they had only three months to live) died in three months. What he's left out of it is the factor on people who have been told they only have three months to live. You tell somebody that he has only three months to live and he will throw into gear the only mechanism available to him to cause persistence in this universe. And that is Alteris-ness. And he would change, change, change. He right away has to change his condition. That is the first thing he thinks of. One might think that it is just natural that he would do that. No. We're talking on a higher echelon of philosophy. You tell him he's only got three months to live, this is an unacceptable fact to him you say, therefore he's got to change his condition. No – worse than that. Worse than that. If he has no time persistence he has to change his condition. The one thing he can do from which he can gain persistence is Alter-is-ness. If he would simply change the furniture around in his office because he can do that successfully, he'd live a little longer. It's unsuccessful changes which fixate a person and cause a Not-isness to occur.

Actually that’s a very healthy state of mind.

Now unsuccessful and successful are themselves postulates. "I am this individual and this individual is supposed to persist" versus "I am this individual and this individual's not supposed to persist". You could make up your postulate that way just as well as the other way.

The fellow’s looking at the changes, he’s looking at what will be, he’s very cheerful about how many particles he can move around and cause to come into existence or persist. Or he knows the proper modus operandi for mocking things up that he wants to destroy, just As-is-ness. And that would destroy it perfectly adequately, and he could start in again.

But the accepted chain of considerations which go to make up, for example, art criticism, appreciation, win-lose and so on – we just have a set of considerations. These changes are successful as long as the individual is doing it, and the changes are unsuccessful as long as somebody or something else is doing it. And that's very much part of the win-lose factor and also of the time factor. That's self-determinism. One merely has made the postulate that as long as one does it one is successful. As long as one is able to accomplish the postulate this makes up wins. I am now going to pick up my right finger. I pick up my right finger. I won. That is, I made the postulate good.

To look at the basic mechanics of any problem which is causing any trouble, just find the matter of the particles, the particle motion, the Alter-is-ness in other words, which is aimed with the goal of Not-is-ness and is an impossibility. You’ll find that’s your preclear who’s hanging fire in processing. He’s doing this. He’s using particles to knock down ridges (Ridges: Solid accumulation of old, inactive mental energy suspended in space and time), something on this order.

What has happened to the preclear is that he has made the postulate and then something has contraried the postulate to such a degree that he is fixed. He is fixed and cannot change.

Actually he’d feel a lot better if he’d simply go out and trim the hedge. Let him move something around not quite as damaging but with the same goal, because if he’s all messed up with his engram bank, and he’s all messed up with tremendous ridges and black ridges and that sort of thing, and he sits there as a thetan creating particles and bombarding these ridges, what is he going to get? He’s going to get a persistence of ridges. That’s why we never use flows in processing. You can process objects you want to, you can process space if you want to, but we’ll just stay away as a general principle from flows.

It just works out that way in this universe – not necessarily the most optimum set-up that could be made. When you made a postulate and then didn't accomplish the goal postulated in that postulate (remember you were postulating time to postulate a goal) when you were unable to reach that particular attainment, then, of course, you hadn't changed anything.

Now your thetan has a great objection, because of the communication formula as used in this universe, a great objection to somethingnesses. He looks across a distance and he sees a somethingness and this begins to tell him after a while that he has to be a something too, and he doesn’t like this. He doesn’t enjoy this really, because it’s an other-determined something that he has to be. It’s looking at a wall, he has to be a wall, you see. And that’s what this universe is dictating to him. Well, actually, because it’s all a consideration in the first place, he doesn’t have to fall into that little grave. He doesn’t have to do that kind of a shift, at all. He could simply say I’m looking at the wall, you see. But after a while he gets into the mechanics of perception, the mechanics of communication. He’s using energy in order to communicate with energy. There’s nothing wrong with that, except to the degree that he loses his fluidity on it. As long as he could maintain the idea that he was simply communicating by postulate, that he was communicating, he’s doing all right, but when he drops below that level - and you get him forced to communication, when he’s made to stand still and be talked to, when he’s made to stand to and hold that ridge, when he’s made to sit there and absorb that textbook, any of these things, he gets under this bombardment, and he starts fighting the communication formula.

Time is made by changing the position of something in space and so we get all of the neutrons and the morons vibrating at a vast rate of speed, but a uniform rate of speed, changing their positions in space. Well then we can look around at several of these particles such as the sun, earth and other things, see that they're changing their relationships to each other in space at a uniform rate, and having perceived this, why then of course, we are looking at a change in time.

Of course we get a persistence then of this universe’s communication formula.

There is no such commodity as time; it isn't anything that could be poured from one bucket to the other (actually this is also true of matter). Time does not take place until a postulate is made concerning it, and in this universe the postulate had to do with change of location in space. When it occurs, then time occurs.

Remember that this universe has a communication formula, and that that formula is based on the fact that two things can’t occupy the same space, so immediately we fall away from cause, effect and no distance. Cause-and-effect with no distance is not the same thing as the bottom-scale manifestation, where complete identification never actually occurrs. There’s still a slight distance no matter how downscale you go; it’s only way upscale that you can get a perfect identification between cause point and effect point. These two points can be coincident way upscale. Well, if they can be coincident way upscale, the individual could put a distance on them or whatever he liked, but to the degree that he began to agree with this universe, we would get the manifestation of “have to have a distance across which to look” because he can’t occupy the same space as the object at which he’s looking.

You could change – the location of something in space simply by lying about it. And you'd get a persistence. You'd come off of the As-is-ness. The moment you change something's location in space you come away from As-is-ness and it doesn't unmock and so you get persistence.

That is this universe’s formula, and that by the way is native to a lot of universes - it’s how you keep everything stretched apart. You say two things can’t occupy the same space, therefore we’ve got to have a lot of spaces and things more or less fixed in these spaces, and we’ve got to keep them all apart and therefore they are separate objects and we go into the communication formula. Cause, Distance, Effect.

Now an individual is as well off as he can change things in location in space. Looking at the Pre-Logics, which precede the Logics and Axioms of Dianetics, we find that they have to do with an energy, and they tell you that a thetan is an energy-space production unit, that a thetan can change objects in location in space, and right next to that we have the fact that a thetan can create objects to change in space of his own creation. In other words, he can do all of these things and we get, in this universe (and this is pretty common in universes) those postulates as the conditional postulates upon the universe. Then one makes another postulate, that something can persist, and this postulate is represented as time, so when we locate something in space we are actually working with the time postulate. Persistence.

As the individual agrees that two things can’t occupy the same space, and as he agrees with this communication formula, he then gets into a situation where he says, “Now look at all these somethings around here. And I am actually basically a nothing, and therefore if I have to duplicate these by becoming a something, I don’t like that. I can’t retain my own native form. I’m in a bad shape here. I can’t fly around and be a spirit. I’ve got to be pinned down here. I’ve got to be an energy mass in order to look at those energy masses,” and he doesn’t like it. He objects to it. And so we get to the other manifestation on the track.

If you observe that somebody has failed often, then what do you mean by failed? He has decided to move something in space and then hasn't. In this universe, that's the total anatomy of failure.

The only objection a thetan has to anything, if he’s having a big objection, is to something. Just any something. Then this of course will invert and having objected to a something hard enough, you see, he’ll turn around after a while and start objecting to a nothing.

Of course, he could simply postulate that he'd fail and that's another anatomy of failure. He's always free to do that. You can yourself do that. Not to remedy anything as an auditing procedure or anything of the sort –simply say to yourself that you failed. Not for any cause, reason or anything else, just, "I failed and therefore I have to feel a certain way" and then feel that way.

Now how is it then that we get any change at all if Not-is-ness doesn’t work? Well, there is the system known as valences: one ceases to be himself and becomes something else as his sole method of change. You see that? He is causing a persistence by saying things mustn’t persist, and he keeps saying, mustn’t persist, mustn’t persist, and it goes on persisting, and he uses more particles and more particles and more particles - and pretty soon the United States Army is wearing coal-scuttle helmets. Just like that. And the Government says, “Down with Karl Marx, down with Karl Marx, down with Karl Marx - and everybody is now going to be taxed according to his ability to pay.”

You could do that, or you could simply postulate, I've won, not I've won something, just postulate that you've won, and the conditions of winning are feeling good, which is part of the woof and warp of postulates, "And therefore I feel good" – giving you a reason to feel good.

So we get another type of change. Two things can’t occupy the same space, therefore we are an identity persisting, therefore the best way to get it changed and get an utter change is simply to be somebody else. In other words completely shift the valence, and because we want to win all the time, why naturally, shift to winning valences compared to oneself. If one thinks one is losing then anything can start looking like a winning valence. A beggar utterly penniless about to die would look like a winning valence to some people. And we get valence-shifting going right along with “two things can’t occupy the same space”. So an individual goes out of one spot and over onto another spot and when he is running a lot of Not-is-ness you can expect him to do a lot of valence shifting. He can’t continue to be himself, because he’s in communication with nothing.

Why don't you just postulate that you feel good? It doesn't matter where you enter, doing this. There is no sensible concatenation here, we are only talking about an agreed upon concatenation. This universe, and the postulates which formed it, is not necessarily the best universe that could be made. It just happens to be the universe we're sitting in and it happens to be the universe in which our postulates are being made and unmade and it just happens that it went together on these four conditions of As-is-ness, Alter-is-ness, Is-ness and Not-is-ness, and these four conditions woven together make this universe act as it does and behave as it does and give you ideas of what a win is and what a lose is and it's all on a postulate basis.

At that time he will start to believe that he must have nothingness. And he goes from there into having to have somethingnesses and he goes from there into having to have nothingnesses by change of valence, and actually there is no other deep significance to it.

But the most curious manifestation in all of this is the manifestation of time, and we have this matter of time occupying a considerable part of the field of aberration. And that is because time is the one postulate where an individual begins to depend on other-determinisms more than any other way.

We see the sun moving and we take our cue from the sun as to how much time we have. We see clocks moving and we take our cue from them as to how much time we have.

And that tells us how much persistence we have. So we're being told by these objects whether we can live or not. And that's just the most curious of things in this universe, that one would take his cue as to whether or not he was going to persist, from whether or not the sun moved a certain direction and distance. It's idiotic. So the sun did a figure eight. If I'm not dependent upon sunlight I am certainly not going to cease to live just because of the sun. And a thetan is not dependent upon sunlight. Quite the contrary, a thetan is dependent for his wellbeing on manufacturing his own jolly old energy. He's not dependent on the sun manufacturing his energy for him. That's just an intricate hook-together. And that again depends on postulates.

The postulate of time could be simply cleanly made, in some universe, saying "Well, there will now be a continuance for one and all", and that would be that. But that wasn't the way it was made in this universe. It was made on the basis that when As-is-ness is postulated, in order to get a persistence, we have to practice Alter-is-ness. We have to change the location of something to get a persistence.

People get inverted on this in this universe, so that they take an Is-ness and they change it in location and it starts disappearing.

Suppose you have a person move a postulate around with a mass of energy. He starts moving it around – and the energy mass starts disappearing.

But what started disappearing was the energy mass, wasn't it? It was not the postulate, particularly. He just got used to that postulate and he finally took it over as his own postulate.

And a person could finally say, well if I move something around, it will disappear. He has made a counter-postulate.

He is perfectly at liberty to make a counter postulate, but this is not the postulate on which this universe is made. This universe is rigged so that that postulate will avail not, to an individual. That's part of the considerations that make it up. If you've got something and then you say it doesn't exist – you're stuck with it.

That's this universe.

Alter-is-ness produces a persistence, but then we get two types of persistence. We get persistence as Is-ness and we get a persistence as Not-is-ness. The fellow is persisting but he doesn't want to be there. Well, he's persisting because he doesn't want to be there. This, too, is a change, although he's fixed in a locale. And secondly there is the fellow who is persisting because he wants to be there and he's persisting because of change. They're both Alter-isnesses. An individual's desire to change continues his persistence in the spot he's in, if he continues his persistence in the spot he's in, if he cannot move. But he had to postulate that he couldn't move before this could happen. And so we get the dwindling spiral of the MEST universe.

We sometimes see the manifestation of accumulating energy on a preclear. Every time a preclear has said, Now I am going to move, and hasn't moved, or has said, Now I am moving and I am going to continue moving, and he is stopped (walking down the street, walks into a lamp post) – any time this has occurred, he has lost, which is to say, he has got a counter-postulate. So he adds up loss as stationary.

This universe, you see, brands everything which isn't moving as innocent. And things that are moving are guilty, always. So he's lost. Well how do you lose, then? By getting fixed in a location. That's how you lose. An individual who is unable to move objects out of a certain location eventually gets to a position where, when he is trying to move these objects out of this location, he recognizes a failure and so he goes into apathy. He says, "I don't have enough energy to do this".

What nonsense! If he doesn't have energy enough to move energy, why doesn't he just postulate it some place else? But that's another thing. He could say it is as it is and it would disappear and then he could postulate its existence somewhere else, and then change that around so it couldn't be disappeared again and he'd be all set. What's he doing picking things up? A drill – simply in moving things and putting them back in the same place again – will resolve this consistent continuous failure and so you get a process such as Opening Procedure by Duplication and its tremendous effectiveness. If it is done with a little bit heavier objects than is ordinary then an individual recognizes very thoroughly that he can pick up and put back into place the same object and win, not fail. You've changed the basic postulate by which he is working in this universe, which is saying that if he can't move, he has failed.

However that may be we have these various conditions and the immediate point here is that time depends, in this universe, on Alter-is-ness. At least the desire to change. Anybody who is desiring to change is persisting in time, and people who do not want to change do not persist in time.

The whole universe is rigged around these postulates.