I want to talk to you about extremely elementary processes.

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.

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.

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, 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

So what's his activity of change?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

Actually that’s a very healthy state of mind.

What postulate is this individual already riding with?

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

This isness is your monitoring postulate.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.”

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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."

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

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.

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.

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.