And this is the first afternoon lecture of the 24th of November, 1953. And the name of this lecture could very well be "the death wish." We're going to talk about death.

Okay, This is November the 24th, first morning lecture. And this morning we are going to go on into V, VI and VII on SOP 8-C.

And soon as we get down to technique level V, we have to talk about death — same with VI and same with VII,

Now, there's going to be a little more about this than what I'm giving you this morning, but I'm going to give you a very swift rundown of it.

It is very difficult for somebody to recognize the operation that goes on here with Earth and with life, so long as they believe that continuous and consistent, persistent survival is in itself desirable. Do you understand that?

You must realize that the whole problem in Step I is a problem of location. Location consists of being able to possess or not care who possesses anchor points. Location depends upon anchor points because it depends upon space.

All (quote) "thinking" (unquote) on this and many other planets is oriented toward a persistency of survival as a unit organism, and as long as one holds with that philosophy, one would never understand what is going on.

Now, let's take the definition of space: Space is a viewpoint of dimension. This gives us a very workable basis for a great many techniques. But our viewpoint of dimension, as a definition, permits us for the first time to crack this problem, because we see at once that we have location in terms of barriers or limitations. "I know who I am because I can't drive a car." You get the idea? "I know who I am because I can't. I know who I am because I am not."

As long as one believes, for instance, that work and pain are undesirable, and that unconsciousness is desirable, he's going to stay in a very horribly aberrated state; because he's got his vectors reversed.

Now, there's a silly technique that you could just run on this; this is not a technique at all — a usable technique as you would say — but it's just a foolish one. And — all right, you ask somebody, "Are you Joe? Are you Bill? Are you Pete? Are you Henry? Are you a streetcar conductor? Are you a politician? Are you a dogcatcher?" And what do you know? If you've got that right there, you get a little — slightly heightening sense of identity.

There are two conditions: there is the condition known as "reality" — that's the one you see on the bulletin boards and which is advertised in the public school, and which is carried out by the police safety campaigns and so on. That's reality, and that's a universe operation — persistence as a unit organism.

Well, that's the idea band of location. See, "I am not so-and-so, therefore it follows that I must be somebody else." Well, this is the problem of "who." People have gone around all the time saying, "I am (identity)," whatever the identity was; and they say, "I am this identity." And somebody else says, "Well, gee, I'm at least not that identity."

And then there's "actuality," which is that work is tremendously desirable, that pain is a sensation which in itself is desirable, and that persistence as a unit organism is almost untenably undesirable.

This is why we love criminals, and why we nurse, as a civilization, criminals to our bosom and take care of them and put them in cages and give them all the headlines and so forth — just to give somebody something which he is not. You see? It makes people happy. They read the paper and they find out about the "Smorgasbord kid-slapping case" or something, and they say, "Well, my name is not Smorgasbord." Imagine the unhappiness, however, of Mr. Smorgasbord of Keokuk who reads that story.

Now, looking at these factors, if we recognize these two things, we'll be able to (quote) "understand life" (unquote).

Now, one of the unhappy things that occurs to a person is to find somebody else with his name. This is kind of upsetting, you see, because he can't say, "I am not George." Aaahh! So the best thing he can do is to substitute some sort of a barrier between George and himself, and hate George or something, you see. And this convinces him that he's not George.

You're trying to understand life and you're trying to know. In order to know, you have to be aware. So, we have consciousness as being another thing which is tremendously important. And if you believe that unconsciousness is relatively desirable, again you're on a reverse vector. Complete consciousness is desirable. That's not ultimate consciousness — that's enough consciousness to know at least what you're choosing for randomity at the moment.

This is an interesting game because, you see, you don't have a name. There is no such thing as a "who." You're you, you see; you're not a name or a label or something of the sort. Well, a person, when he starts struggling against location, starts losing his sense of identity; but he's already, remember, struggling against location. So if you want to solve this problem of identity, you solve the problem of location, which is a higher level than identity. Identity is almost lost in the swamp. There's hardly anything lower than "My name is George," you see? "My name is Bill." "I am somebody because I am Oscar Schnitzowitz the Eighth," see? No, he isn't; he isn't anybody because he's — that's a symbol. And if somebody wants to push around a symbol and be a symbol for years, why, this is fine. But he's not in too good a shape as a result.

And we find that unconsciousness, however, in many individuals, is a substitute for the impossibility of fighting survival as a unit organism. One cannot fight this. It's enforced by the police, it's enforced by the church, it's enforced by the family, by the culture, by the mores.

An awful lot of people that you run into are having so much trouble with this that they're trying to make something out of their own name, but desperately. So as one of the lower steps in 8 -C, we make the person work with his name. I could tell you some very funny ones on this. A person has lost himself locationally, and then finds himself as a name.

One can even be arrested in this society for committing suicide. If you commit suicide and fail, they throw you in the clink. And all teachings incline toward fearing death — death is something to be afraid of. "After you die you go to hell" — that is simply a religious hammer and pound to get you to drop your nickel on the drum.

One of the main troubles with a body is that it's mobile; it doesn't grow like a tree, and therefore it can't be located against three or four or five other trees. You see, it's mobile and it drifts around, so a person gets upset about that, so he becomes this symbol, because symbols are things which drift around, too.

And so we have a person trying to be unconscious in order to end survival as a unit organism. Do you see that? It's a halfway end of cycle — unconsciousness. So unconsciousness itself is never desirable, except when one is completely overpowered by other-determinism. And then of course unconsciousness is a token of death, just a token. And then one doesn't feel or register — he says — what is being done by the other-determinisms.

So, with our first step, we have the step of location. We also have this problem of identity. And if anybody, however, is going to exteriorize on Step I, he's not having too much trouble with identity; not having too much trouble. You have to get down to IV and V before you really get into trouble with identity.

All right, this is a terribly interesting situation. We have then the very factors of pain, unconsciousness, as being the aberrative common denominator of all engrams, for instance. One of them is an effort to die — unconsciousness; and the other one is an effort to prove to oneself that one is alive. And so we have a somethingness (the pain) surrounded by the nothingness (unconsciousness) which in itself made the aberrative characteristic of the engram. And much more important than this, however, to us, is it tells us of an end of cycle.

Well, let's take up some more of I — location. This has to do, then, with anchor points. And so we have, as part of I, a drill which I gave you earlier in this series, which has to do with coloring and changing, altering, anchor points. Because one cannot have location unless one has anchor points. And if every­body doesn't own the anchor points — if they all belong to the state, if they all belong to the Slipslap Estate, if they all belong to General Motorcycles or something; you see, if all these belong to some huge corporation or if they all belong to the Ruff Corporation of America, or something like that — these things are all uniformly somebody else's anchor points. And so we don't get a location.

The first time an individual went unconscious he probably said, "To hell with the mock-up, here I go" and then had to come back. He's been doing this for trillions of years: Trying to get rid of the mock-up, trying to shove off and take another run at it. And somebody is always around insisting, and the automatic machinery of the mock-up itself and the automaticity of this entire universe, insist that he pick up the mock-up again. And he stays in a state of semicon-sciousness as a protest thereafter. It parks him right on the track. And there is the most significant parking place of your preclear on the time track, and there is the Resistive V, with this slight addition: The Resistive V went — normally somewhere on the track, he went, left a body, found nothing, and came back.

Now, in essence, what is wrong with a case that is down below the level of I, doesn't exteriorize easily — well, what's wrong with this case? Several things, but they're all a gradient scale of anchor points. Whose anchor points, see, is the first problem that enters in there. Whose? Sense of location. Fascinating. See, they're not being any identity. The problem of who owns the anchor points becomes a very foolish one and a very silly one.

Somebody has a terribly "lost" feeling. They had a body somewhere else. There's this mechanism known as the "body in pawn" — there's all kinds of mechanisms like this all up and down the track, they've been all over the place. One doesn't have to go into the incredible at all, it's much simpler than this, but you should know this data.

See, in Step III, if you do one of the space tricks, and you simply have one of these tricks of putting somebody — have him put up space using deeds of title for anchor points. That's very silly, you see. "It's my house." Why is it your house? Well, it's your house because somebody gave you a deed of title. Well, this is what we know as "license to survive," you see; it's some — there's a deed of title.

And this terrible "lost" feeling that people get is proceeding outward from a body, and coming back into the body in pawn, and it's dead or it's gone. See, they — intention is to go back to the body in pawn, to leave the body which has just gone unconscious, or they just think is dead or is going to be too mangled up to make life interesting — not mobile, and they go back to the body in pawn area, and find the body in pawn gone.

Now, it isn't that these deeds of title and so forth are worthless, this is not the point. The point is that when you depend upon the deed of title to tell you where you are, it becomes very silly. Now, just try to integrate that one with something more than Homo sapiens logic and it just doesn't integrate. You depend upon a deed of title to tell you where you are; and yet that is exactly what a deed of title is trying to do.

They will thereafter go to psychiatrists and wander around and stumble and so on. The body they have, they don't want, here on Earth, and the body in pawn is missing. And it causes a considerable disturbance. Here again, you have location. They want to be located. The body in pawn is an anchor point which locates them. When they lose that anchor point they get nothing but blackness. They can't find their way. Because they're finding their way — if they have to find their way — between two anchor points: the one on Earth and the body in pawn. And they shuttle between these two, and if one of them turns up missing, then they have "prime post unposted" — no exit. And now you try to exteriorize this fellow and he knows he doesn't have anyplace to go because he's under the delusion that he has to have a body in pawn to which he must exit. So he pings, right there, and he stays put.

"I have a deed of title and therefore I am someplace." Oh, no. No, because you have a deed of title to a house up here a few blocks away, would be no reason why you were in that house, but it would be a location or point from which you could operate. And as long as you had a feeling like you knew where the house was, and the house was yours, therefore, you had the right to orient yourself with regard to it. But listen to this: if you couldn't be up high enough, or know hard enough, the space and the intervening space and the relative direction to that one anchor point at all times, you'd still be lost, no matter how many deeds of title you had.

Now, the other part of it is, he gets hung up with the effort of trying to stay conscious while unconsciousness is pounding him from every side, or trying to remain unconscious while people are trying to make him conscious — and the last is the least kind.

And so it is. A fellow who has — gets the idea, "Well, let's see, deed of title locates me, so therefore if I own 8 billion, 645 thousand deeds of title or something, why, I'm all set." And well, that's fine. But of course, the more he gets of these, and the more mobile they are, and the more he depends on them, the less he knows who he is. Because, you see, in the first place he isn't anybody. When I mentioned that number of titles, I was going to point out what a piece of money is. It is a potential title to some food, to a ride, a taxicab — they haven't figured out yet how to get dollar bills into slot machines, but they'll have to shortly, at the rate of inflation. And here we have a mobile deed of title, assigned to a mobile person, in an effort to give him an identity, which is to say a location. Oh!

He's left this body — this body, you say, is dead or near death, being operated on, it's just been run over or crashed in a plane or something of the sort, and he leaves this body. And on running engrams and so forth, of trying to find people on the track, you can overlook every portion of every kind of an incident except this one: Dead body — he shoves off, then comes back because he couldn't find the body in pawn, or if he did find it, the body down there woke up — somebody brought it back to life. And he's being forced to stay alive. And after that, he acts like it to the whole society.

And into this, we immediately get all the goofy problems of economics, taxation, political control — these problems all come under that heading and fall immediately below that frailty. Because you — if you were to take — you notice, by the way, restaurant owners very often do this. Restaurant owners are consuming so much in a restaurant, they sort of form a vacuum there, you know, and they kind of stick against it. And they have a rough time with the flow of commodity, because there's tremendous commodity flow, you see. And they'll decide that they'll make something immobile, so they will take the first dollar the store earned, or something like that, and they'll paste it up on the wall. They do this in bars and restaurants because, you see, there's so much flow; and you'll see that one thing.

Now, when he's trying to stay unconscious, he's actually not trying to stay unconscious at all. He's trying to find that point of death where he departed, you see, so he can depart again, because he thinks the exit is there, and he is otherwise lost. So he's trying to stay conscious and something is making him unconscious, and then it reverses. He'll protect the mock-up for a short time, and then when he gives up, he goes unconscious.

Well, actually, the proprietor — you'd be surprised, but the proprietor of the shop always knows where that thing is, you see? All else may fail, but there's that dollar bill. And it's an amusing thing to speak to them about that dollar bill and see the sort of comfortable look come on their faces, see? There it is, that's one dollar they've got nailed down!

Now, if somebody revives the body, makes it conscious again, they snap him back into it. And there's all sorts of incidents occur, such as he can appear in a body-in-pawn area and it seems to be that whoever is there knows the body on Earth isn't dead, you see. And they just turn him around and give him an implant and shoot him back the other time, and he comes up at the other end of the operation having been gone during the entire operation. He isn't even in the operating room. You want to know what happens to people during operations — they generally leave.

Well, now you get people with an idea that they aren't anything (see, they've gone down through the band), but now they're going to try to be something which somebody else gave them. Now, this would be honors and titles, and that's real amusing, too. And nobody seems to find this funny in this society at this time, which is something that continues to amaze me — that somebody would know where he was because he was a general. You see, that's utterly silly. In the first place, he might as well just pass in his chips as far as his health and personal comfort's concerned, because he has been presented with an anchor point which he doesn't own and which can be taken away from him unless he behaves in a certain way. It is a mobile anchor point and it exists only as a symbol — they give him a piece of paper which he can put in the safe or something of the sort, saying he is a general, and now he is supposed to be this anchor point. Oh, no. Anytime, anytime anybody tries to be an anchor point, he's in trouble — believe me, he's in trouble.

Now, the first time this happens here on Earth, the more intolerably persistent this society gets. People are so careful — they used to say, "Well, if the bears don't get him, he'll live to be a fine young man. If he doesn't go out and fall in the river, why, we'll have him around yet." There was no great scarcity, you see, of the body, that sort of thing, and they — and in a relatively primitive society with lots of menaces and dangers, you had him able to get out and get messed up, and if he got too messed up, he didn't have any tremendous strings on him. That is to say, he didn't have this horrible, mawkish, "you've got to stay with us."

Space is a viewpoint of dimension. What do you think happens to somebody who is trying to be a piece of energy? Who is trying to be an anchor point, much less be a symbol? Well, what do you think happens to this person? Well, it's just exactly what you see in case after case as they go by: no space, of course! See how ridiculous this is? The fellow runs fresh out of space the moment he says — and you can find, by the way, in a person's lifetime when he suddenly decided to be something. He decided to be a piece of energy; God help him when he decided to be a symbol. You know, "George" — has to be a symbol. Or a general — that's about the lousiest symbol anybody could be. And I don't mean "lousy" there in a more grammatical sense, because generals very often have enough orderlies to take the cooties out of their clothes; they have DDT in these more modern wars. But they do manage to get crawled over considerably.

And then in this society today, with school programs for safety, with this, with that, yap-yap, yap-yap, yap-yap, the chances of getting killed are getting slighter and slighter and slighter and slighter.

Now, where we have a title which is a big, big title; I mean, where we have an important thing, or the person by reason of this has a certain command and influence — just by reason of this thing having been presented to him from some other determinism — we've got real trouble with a case. We've got trouble — right now.

With penicillin, with all of these other persistent drugs, we're getting a point where the individual is unable to get rid of a mock-up. Just that — he can't get rid of the mock-up. So he goes out in the war, and if he were fighting the war of 1610 or 1505 or over in Flanders, and he walked through the castle breach, something like that, and somebody took off half his face with a morning star, believe me, if the blow didn't finish him, the bugs would, and he'd be out of there in a few days, see?

Well, what's the matter with this fellow? He isn't located. Why isn't he located? He isn't located because the main thing he is using as an anchor point is a symbol, so he's on an inversion of energy. Right away he's on an inversion of energy, because you'd have to take this symbol and convert it to energy, and then convert the energy back into a real anchor point, which he could then be far enough away from to view, in order to put him in a position where he would have space and mobility, the truth of the matter is. But this symbol, which isn't anything, which drifts everyplace, which can be taken away from him — of course, if that's his location, he's noplace. And so you will find him; so you'll find him. You'll find him unable to get anchor points, to put up anchor points and so on.

But now what do they do? They pick him up and they give him sulfa, and they patch him up and they do some plastic surgery, and he's in the hospital being tortured for months, all under the conclusion that he hates pain and can't stand pain — he's already gone that far, you see. And he's patched up some more, and then older and less able, and with what beauty he has completely spoiled, he has to drag this goddamn mock-up around for the next thirty or forty years! See that? See the philosophy behind this "make him persist."

Now, it works the same way with somebody who is having trouble with money. All due respect, there are two classes of individuals that have to do with money. One is the entrepreneur — he is the person who makes it as he needs it and spends it. And the other one is the case that — you couldn't get me to process one of these for all of the spaceships on Venus, you just couldn't, because — that's the capitalist. Because his whole goal is, "If I can hoard up enough anchor points, I then can put out enough batches of anchor points so that they will multiply new anchor points."

The unkindest thing you can do is to make somebody persist that way. That's the unkindest thing anybody can do, is to take serious battle casualties, for instance, and patch them up. Imagine the sadism of this universe when today they still have casualties, immobile casualties, from World War I in veterans' hospitals — no good to anybody, but still alive. They've got a thetan parked right there — boom. And boy, that thetan is really in apathy — ahaaa! Oh no.

Now, get what this boy is doing: He's taken a mobile commodity — dollar bills, credits, so forth — and he has made this an anchor point. Now he's going to put out these masses of anchor points (which didn't belong to him in the first place, you see) and then they're going to multiply, and that's the way he's going to get energy. That's how he's going to get new anchor points. Not by work, not by effort, not by thinking up ideas, but just by being kind of shifty and slippy about the whole thing.

Well, his knowledge of what he is, where he goes and what he does deteriorates because he holds on to that unconsciousness. If he could just convince them he was dead! If he could just convince this thing, this mock-up, that he was dead, it would let go of him, he thinks. If he could just kill it, some fashion or another, why, he could shove off. Because, you see, his perceptics aren't ordinarily bad.

Well now, your entrepreneur is always visible in the society because he lives rather well. He does things that are — a little color and flash. Your capitalist is practically invisible in a society — the most shoddy characters you ever wanted to run into. Their conversation is entirely engrossed with these — anchor point called a dollar.

Now, one of the most astonishing things that is — can happen to somebody is to go along a number of years blind and then get blown up violently enough to exteriorize suddenly with full perception. You generally will find somebody parked around about that point when they've been tortured too much in the life they're living about getting rid of the mock-up. They'll go back and find these astonishing moments, trying to reassure themselves that if they do leave the thing, if they do give it a swift kick, they can still see, still feel, and still find another mock-up. It's fascinating.

The funny part of it is that they have almost uniformly thrown this thing called aesthetics out the window. And they make the world's roughest case; because they're trying to hold mobile anchor points close to them, and that's their location. Where? What's their location? You just get the idea of the wsshhh! This stuff, they've got eight billion of them tomorrow, and then they loan twenty kropotniks — I think a kropotnik — an interesting coin: when you have seventy thousand of them, you owe somebody fifty cents. (audience laughter)

Here you have this — the whole of the universe sort of militating against good sense. And good sense is to live fast, live beautifully, and live dangerously. And if you get bashed in, knock it off! Get another one.

But anyway, there you see what happens when it's somebody else's anchor point, and then they have made this anchor point their anchor point. They're trying to be this anchor point, they're trying to be a millionaire or something of the sort — well, you've got real trouble right away with the case. And boy, no kidding, those things process — you just might as well take a sledgehammer to them. These people are practically solid ridges. I know, I've practiced on a few of them, and it's just gorgeous.

But the universe wants to tell you it's all scarce. "You can't get another body — no, you have to patch up that one you have."

Well, it's nothing to do with the fact except that anchor points are now so unreliable and so scarce that anything resembling energy has to be held very close to them. And the funny part of it is, the only real anchor point any person or any being will ever have, is something he knows he created and put there himself. Now, there's the very best anchor point. And it doesn't matter whether it's kind of small or lopsided or anything of the sort — if he put it there himself, you see, why, he can be happy about it.

That's why I've been telling people here for a year — psychosomatics, ho-hum. And if you as an auditor think you're going to do yourself any good by specializing in knocking out psychosomatic ills, you're going to go downhill. Why? Because you're creating and furthering this whole idea of superscarcity in this universe.

Even though some — well now, some people will go into this level: they'll do terrible things, they'll commit crimes, just so they know they did something somewhere. Little kids who have been disenfranchised by parents and so forth will go around and break windows in old houses and things like that, and they go drifting by — he broke that window. See, he thinks in terms of destruction. He has actually created an effect, not created some energy or space or something of the sort, so he's .. . And there is your juvenile delinquent. He's dashing all around madly trying to give himself some kind of a location. Because you go back into his home and you'll find out it's usually a broken home — he doesn't even have his home as an anchor point.

What is a solution to a nonsurvival problem? A solution to a nonsurvival problem is a thing which cuts out the randomity which proceeds from that moment because of nonsurvival. People who go around all the time figuring out how to survive longer are wasting randomity: they're wasting motion, wasting action, wasting adventure. And what do you know? It isn't that I'm saying this, or that this is a philosophy which I have invented for your delection, nor is it that this is — merely makes good reading or good talking, this happens to make excellent processing.

Now, you see, this is all under the head of location. What a simple problem it is. Somebody says — thinks that this might look simple to me, but it isn't quite that simple. Oh no, it's that simple. Let's take George Doakes as a preclear, and we put George Doakes down in the middle of eight anchor points — he can make these anchor points and throw them up. Have him take a look at all eight of them and find out he isn't in any one of them, and have him change them around to a point where they know they're his, and a feeling of happiness and relief and relaxation comes over him. I don't care who he is — Bill, Pete, George Doakes — it doesn't matter. He's got some space, and he isn't being anything and he is being located by what he has created.

You must understand some of this material quite subjectively in order to recognize what the devil is wrong with a V, VI, VII; why don't these people, you know, snap to, and exteriorize easily?

Well now, it's not necessary to create an anchor point in that way. When somebody is going through the whole routine of creating all the anchor points he sees, day after day, he just goes through this, and he's going through this under the delusion that all these belong to somebody else, he's in a state of delusion. So what is the delusion? The delusion is that anchor points are otherwise and elsewhere owned, and are therefore very scarce. You cure that delusion, you can cure any case of anything.

Well, let's look at the case — just take any case and let's diagnose him. He's got a black field. That in itself is not important — it's not — beyond telling you that he's automatically unmocking everything before it can happen, and he's using the method used by the mest universe itself, which is black space. So he's unmocking things before they happen, which means he is planning for further survival continually — he's on an inversion. These people are very careful, they're very prudent ordinarily, and they're quite clever, and they certainly can make things persist, believe me. Whether it's an aberration or anything else, they'll just drag it out till the last dog is dangling by the neck.

Now, therefore, part of I is this drill which changes around the emotional status and the fixed characteristics of mest objects up to a point — that is, by changing their color, by changing their emotional status, by putting some thinkingness into them and so forth — up to a point where a fellow can have some anchor points. So that's all under location, isn't it? All right.

This is the one thing — now, that's obvious about them, but there's something else you might not notice at firsthand. They have collapsed "know" and "not know" so that they are on a maybe. You see, "know" is always the cause end of a communication line, and "not know" is the receipt end of the communication line. And when "know" and "not know" — when the terminals collapse, and it comes right straight together, you see, why, they get on this tremendous maybe of "know-not know." They don't know whether they're there or not there, or so on. That's the appearance they give. But — none of these are important mechanisms, but this one is — this one: They get a mock-up, and you tell them to put it away, and they get it back. They put it away, and it comes back. Now, just watch this, watch this. For instance, how many here, once they've banished a mock-up, are very prone to have it turn up for a little while? Sure. Or when they banish it, they get a little shadow of it. They always have a little shadow of it — same thing.

Now, we go on down the line and we just find this same problem repeating and repeating and repeating.

Now, just go over this exercise:

But there is something overhanging all of these steps which you must know about, and that, of course, is knowingness. And so, when we get down to Step III and we start to knock barriers to pieces — in Step I we just color them and so forth, but in Step III we're just looking right straight through them. We're just going to unmock barriers and unmock barriers until he can put some barriers there and know he's putting them there. And when he knows that, he's — really knows something, believe me.

Mock up a small ball and throw it directly away from you in front. (pause)

But remember, it comes down to the basis of knowing. It is not necessary to perceive to know; it is not necessary to perceive to know. It is not necessary to be located by anchor points; one need only know that he is located, and he is located. You see, there's something senior to all of the mechanical operations; and this senior thing is called certainty. Well, people put up a great many barriers against their own certainty. A certainty of location without having a location and nothing with which to locate one, is of course the most senior type of knowingness you could have with regard to location.

What does the ball do? What does it do?

Now, let's take this Step III, and as we look out in the six directions and come back each time and know, we're just reversing the process of why the fellow started looking — very simple. All right.

Male voice: It comes back at you.

And we go down to Step IV and we then sort out, by handling the mechanisms, the machinery he uses to create, survive and destroy that following list. And you do that, you run that cycle of action, you see, I mean, that is a cycle — not a cycle of action in that case, it's a cycle of state. There's the created things, there's the persisting things and there's the destroyed things. So, on that step we simply go in at the beginning and we "waste mechanisms which," and we waste them in a bracket. He wastes one for himself or wastes a dozen for himself — it doesn't matter whether you use one or thousands. He wastes a machine which creates admiration or he wastes something which creates admiration.

That's right. What does it do? Did you do that?

And be a little bit wary of the use of this word "machine" too much — actually, it's proper, but it means many things to many people. A machine is merely a definition of something which makes or does. All right. It means "maker."

Second male voice: Uh, yeah, it's out there still.

We waste a mechanism which creates admiration, or a being that creates admiration, for himself. Now we have him have somebody else up there wasting one for that person's self. And then we have somebody wasting one for somebody else — a machine that creates admiration. Now we come back on this, and we have somebody else waste one that's his, and then we have him waste one that's somebody else's — a machine that creates admiration.

Good.

Now remember, there are two more steps here. There are a lot more steps. And this is one of these superpatterned packages that just goes all ways from the middle, and it grabs on to all these brands of knowingness, you see. A fellow has gone down, in the point of anchor points, so far that he thinks he has data, see, to know. And he is — we're in — already into that, where a fellow has put up barriers against his knowingness directly, direct barriers against knowingness. And that's that list — that Step IV list of SOP 8.

Second male voice: Quite a ways out, though.

Now, the next step on the bracket, of course, is to have him waste — several ways you can work this. This is one of the best ways to do it: Have him waste a machine that causes admiration to persist; and then somebody else waste a machine that causes admiration to persist; and then somebody waste somebody else's machine that causes admiration to persist; then somebody waste his machine that causes admiration to persist; and him waste somebody else's that causes admiration to persist.

Good, fine.

Now, we haven't really beaten this thing to pieces yet. Now we're really going to beat it to pieces: Have him waste a being or machine that destroys admiration; somebody else waste a machine which destroys admiration; somebody else waste somebody else's machine that destroys admiration; and somebody waste his machine that destroys admiration; and him waste somebody else's that destroys admiration.

Well, that time when the ball came back tells you of somebody being forced to continue his existence after he's already kicked it off. Just that little exercise tells you that. Just ping — just like that.

Now, it would just seem to you as an auditor that this is completely interminable as a process, but it does some of the strangest things to the case — boom, wham! We've added now the DEI cycle to Expanded GITA and we're resolving scarcity on all parts of the band. So let's go into the next stage of it, which is to have him save. Get him saving a, or many items which create admiration; somebody else saving many; and somebody else saving somebody else's and so forth. Creates admiration. Now, somebody saving an item for him which creates admiration and him saving one for somebody else which creates admiration.

Anytime you tell some preclear "All right, now make it disappear. Make it disappear. Now, get another one. All right, now make it disappear," and they say, "What will I do with the first one?" — or if you're very, very clever and alert as an auditor you will say, "Did the first ones come back?" — you all of a sudden know what this case is doing. Same thing as the ball — you can ask this same case to throw the ball away from in front of him, it'll come back and hit him. Or it won't move at all, or it'll just go in random motion. When the ball just goes in random motion, that just tells you that they don't know whether they're there or have left or it's Christmas. The ball just starts whanging around, going into random motion in all directions and so forth, and they can't anticipate it. This is pretty grim.

Now him — this is just one of those things. We have him, now, saving an item which makes admiration persist; and somebody else saving an item which makes admiration persist (you get how this works?); and somebody else saving somebody else's item which makes admiration persist; and somebody saving something of his which makes admiration persist; and him — something which makes admiration persist for somebody else — saving it. All right.

This just tells you that — this is the reflex. That's "know" and "not know" collapsed together which is a communication line, and it leaves them hung up in the middle of the communication line. They obviously must be in the middle of the communication line if they threw the ball and received the ball, see? So here's a particle en route.

Now we get him saving an item which destroys admiration; and somebody else saving an item which destroys admiration; and somebody else saving somebody else's item which destroys admiration; and somebody saving an item for him which destroys admiration; and him saving one for somebody else which destroys admiration.

Well, how do they get the idea they're a particle en route? Well, a body almost kicked off, and they had this tremendous struggle: They tried to keep it from becoming unconscious, and then they failed to keep it from becoming unconscious, and being unconscious, tried to leave, and then they had to bring it back to consciousness again because others insisted. You follow that?

Okay, now we get him accepting something which creates admiration; we get somebody else accepting something which creates admiration; and somebody accepting something from somebody else which creates admiration; and him accepting from some specific source something that creates admiration; somebody else specifically accepting from him something which creates admiration. Next stage.

First they wanted to be conscious and that was defeated, and then they wanted to be unconscious and shove off, and that gets defeated. And when you get a mock-up which comes back after it's been banished — by the way, sometimes they don't come back for five hours. One guy I knew didn't get them back for about a week. He got them back, though, regularly and uniformly, about a week later. This was what's known as a communication lag. I would say, in such a case, that you have this person back on the track about umpteen billion years, see? I mean, he's been at this and doing it a long time. And don't think it just happens once; it'll happen a lot of times.

It — this is — honest to Pete, this beats to pieces all possible combination of admiration. It just beats it to pieces. Many times you'll have to go over one of these brackets a couple of times. You'll be surprised how people will stumble around on these things, and it — so on. All right.

How many times have you read about or thought about or you recall, of somebody being unconscious and other people standing around and shoving ammonia at them and cuffing their cheeks and chafing their wrists and shaking them by the shoulders and trying to bring him to?

We get, then, him accepting something that persists, then the remaining bracket. And we get him accepting something which destroys admiration, and remaining bracket. And then we get him desiring something which creates admiration, and the remaining bracket. And then him desiring something which makes admiration persist, remaining bracket. And then him desiring something which destroys admiration, and the remaining bracket.

It even got to be a habit back in the days of Camille — you know, she was the one that made TB popular in America. And here we have this continuous dramatization — everybody's saying, "Persist! Persist! Persist! Persist!" And nobody — ever occurs to anybody he might not want to, except very sadly, "Well, she has ..." — oh, dramatic, you know, three-dimensional, eighty-five foot screen in full color, or back in Vitagraph, with a three-foot screen in full jerk — "Well, she has no further will to live. Send for her son and maybe he can bring her back."

And then we get him — this is the complete, all-the-way-through, super-bracket on Step IV. Fortunately, you only have to use it on about five items. The next one up, of course, is him being curious about something which would create admiration, and the remaining bracket. And then him being curious about something which made admiration persist, and the remaining bracket. And then him being, again, curious about something which destroyed admiration, and the remaining bracket on it. And that would be it, and the whole thing would consist of the entire Step IV.

Now, very often with this auditor-preclear arrangement where the preclear "does the bunk," the preclear can only be persuaded to come back for the auditor. But the auditor always persuades him to come back because the society does not permit him to have an inanimate mock-up!

And you would hit with this — if you just went at it in that laborious fashion, one end to the other — you would hit with it every possible upset that a person had ever been through that was hanging major. And you start through that, and all of a sudden your preclear is going to start spilling tears or being very upset or being very nervous, one way or the other — because you're tearing down his (quote) "thought barriers" (unquote). The barriers to knowingness is what this consists of, and that handles these. You've got to get his knowingness up a little bit before you can do anything else with him, because he's stumbling around all the time thinking there's "something to know" about these things.

The reason people love murder stories has nothing to do with loving police — there's at least a dead body in them. And the fellow who does an able job of murder writing, who knows that, just mops the field up every time. And he just ruins all his competition — just keep dropping the bodies, fellow. Don't put much mystery around about it, just drop the bodies. (audience laughter) Kill them quick and impressively — big impacts! Slow deaths don't sell well. You can see why.

Well, there is! There's something terrific to know about work, and there's something terrific to know about pain. Pain is so valuable that hardly anybody can have it anymore. Isn't that interesting? But you know that you run this on the fellow, and he concludes that all by himself — he just concludes it. "Why, pain's very, very valuable," he'll say. And then he gets up along the line, "Yeah," he'll say, "I can have pain." He's real happy now; he can have pain — fine. Mama slapping him for playing with broken glass and everybody kicking him around and rushing him to hospitals just because he broke his leg, or — you know, gave himself a little pain.

But an entire society (I don't say this is one — it is, but I am not saying that in this paragraph), an entire society gets to a point of where it's begging to be unconscious. See, it's just dramatizing the organism. Just begging. And all of its mechanisms and everything else it's got set up to keep saying, "Live! Live! Live!" and pretty soon, the whole society is lying around just begging for death, actually. And robots, by this time, are the ones that go along and they do all the work, and they put the food into the mouths, and they turn on the heat at the right time, and change the ventilation systems and move the bodies elsewhere and so forth, ur-ur-ur-ur. That's the way it goes. The universe becomes more and more automatic. For one reason only, and that is, it's rigged to persist. It has no motto but persistence.

The thetan — you — identify yourself with being a body. There's a point in a person's lifetime that you can find on any E-Meter, practically on any preclear, where the person suddenly made up his mind to be the body — probably in his teens or late childhood. You know, he just suddenly made up his mind to go whole hog on the thing and just be that body and really make a good deal out of it and so forth. Well, boy, he decided not to be a viewpoint; he decided to be an anchor point. Rrrr.

The very first fact a person learns when studying about matter — whether in chemistry or physics — is simply this: "it persists," only they call it "conservation of energy." I don't know how they get that fancy phrase out of the mere fact that this stuff can't be destroyed by chemical means — they never add that, you know. They had no proof that this was not true; it just never occurred to anybody to modify the statement to what they really knew. They know that this stuff cannot — they know this completely — that this material, this matter of the mest universe cannot be reduced and vanquished and made to disappear forever by chemical or physical means; that's all they know. See, they don't know anything beyond that.

You can get this as a little test — you can just get the guy with the idea of space and then energy, and space and energy, and space and energy, and that incident shows up. See, because energy is not space; and if a fellow is fresh out of space, he's really out of space. All right.

They could surmise that there could be some kind of a machine called a disintegrator, but every textbook you see on the subject doesn't even permit the disintegrator to appear. So here's the universe dramatizing persistence.

So we've got the barriers to knowingness in Step IV. And if you wanted to take that whole list and run it on that whole bracket — and actually, probably — probably we ought to take this and just write it out into one terrifically long, long column, step by step, and let somebody run it on somebody sometime. Because if you ran it on somebody exteriorized, it would knock apart any bar­rier he has ever imposed to his detriment against his knowingness.

It has a cycle. This is a cycle of this universe, it is not even necessarily the cycle. That's why we're studying this cycle.

Well, you got to get it on work, because work's valuable. You'll find out the reason he can't have work is because he can't have work. Another one that he has to have run on him in this society, of course, is pain, because pain is very scarce. And another one is money. And although it sometimes hits a preclear too low to be run, the whole idea of viewpoints is run on out with the thing.

And when you're processing somebody in this universe, you have to process time, because that is what is meant by persist. Time, persist, conservation of energy — these are synonyms for our purposes.

Now, there are other ways of solving the other things: love and hate and so forth, those are very important ones. And he finds out — and this one, please don't miss this one: healthy bodies. The fellow will find that he has — a medium state of sickness is the only acceptable, agreeable thing he can have. And you're trying to make somebody feel good, and he can't have a healthy body. And there's the barrier right across the track of your auditing. He's afraid that if he runs what you run there, or something of the sort, he'll actually get well, and then he's not acceptable anymore. Terrific computations on this.

Time — any time you say time, you're just saying persist. That is the motto of time. That is what time is, that is what time means. Time means a uniform rate of persistence. And it gets so bad that people can't conceive of the fact that there is no time. And yet all they are is standing suspended, you might say — motionless, not moving, not going anyplace — over a pattern of shifting particles in which they believe. And so we have this incredible picture of a time taking priority, and time driving everybody in every direction.

And if you were to take each one of those, with that full bracket: waste, save, accept, desire, be curious about, each one, see — a full bracket for creation of an item, a full bracket for making it persist, and a full bracket to destroy it — you have relieved the major barriers to knowingness, which are very important to a person at the level at which you're processing.

So we enter into every step, wherever we can, the cycle of action; since the cycle of action is itself time. And we have two things with which we're dealing: We have location, and we have time. Knowingness is senior to both of them. But cycle of action, time, persistence . . . The prayer of anybody in this universe is — of course the ambitiousness of a thetan is fantastic, he's always trying to start something, too — but his prayer as far as mock-ups are concerned, is "My god, someday end it!"

There's an item missing on the 16-G list, which is "nothing." You can see how this item would be missing. It goes through the typewriter and the transcriber and it goes onto the first copy and the stenographer looks at it and says, "Oh, well. Okay." And then it goes through the typographer's hands and — I mean, the linotype operator's hands again; well, he misses it again. I put it back in there about three times. And I think the first time I put it through, I omitted it. Well, it's a very easy thing to omit.

There's Schopenhauer, The Will and the Idea — the "death wish." Men have written about this since man could write. He's written about this desire for death, and nobody has believed much in a death wish. A death wish isn't popular.

And you'll find that with any of those items, including this item "nothing" and so on, with any of those items, you will get some sort of a gain or a knowingness on the part of a case which he didn't have before. And, of course, what you're trying to do is give him some certainty. Well, believe me — he becomes certain that such and so has been happening in his life, he gets real happy about it.

In my early studies, I couldn't see where the death wish fitted in, or what it was all about exactly — where it collided with logic and reason. Well, it doesn't. It just happens to be end of cycle, that's all. And if you name it dramatically "the death wish" it becomes incomprehensible to people because they look around and they say, "Well, I don't want to die. I want to live better."

Now, there's nothing like running a little wrinkle of this. This fellow is puzzled and he keeps complaining about his parents. And all he can think about — he complains about his parents, see, his complaints about his parents, a medium state of acceptability of illness, and so forth. What is his acceptance of his parents? See, what's their acceptance to each other? It'll work out that. And all of a sudden he'll recognize, "I needn't be complaining about my parents all the time, because what they wanted obviously was a bad little boy. And what they wanted was a sick little boy. What they wanted was a stupid little boy." Or "What they wanted was a little girl that whined. Or what they wanted was a little girl that couldn't work," or something. And they all of a sudden say, "Well, that's — I don't have to be that person! To hell with it!"

And then you say, "Well, how about your teeth? Let's see, you've got several wisdom teeth, you've got some molars and so forth, and when they start to go to pieces what about that?"

And their whole character and outlook on existence will shift. They're trying to be accepted by their parents. Why? Because their life started by stealing an anchor point — one baby. They stole the anchor point, now they're trying to make the anchor point theirs, and they can only make it theirs by taking it away from their parents. And they get into the most dreadful snarl on this, because they're trying to be an identity which they know doesn't belong to them. You've got to solve the ownership of this body. There are many ways to solve it, some of them very simple. All right.

"Well, I'll think about that when that happens."

Now, let's move right on out of IV and go into V. And everybody's ears go up, because we've been validating blackness like mad as a barrier. V is the occluded case. There are many, many, many ways to handle occlusion; I mean, they're just endless. If you simply have somebody ridiculing an occluded case — you just have people out there, standing out there ridiculing them, and have mobs of Papa and mobs of Mama and mobs of women and mobs of men in the case of a girl; ridicule, ridicule — why, you'll all of a sudden find out that they're just trying to cover it all up and wipe it all out and get through some­how or another. And they'll talk a lot about betrayal, but what they're afraid of is ridicule, which is to have the anchor points out.

And you say, "Well, now, you know, people get old, they have heart trouble and that sort of thing, you know."

So the anatomy of the case, as far as knowingness and anchor points is, is they've got their anchor points in, which makes them out of space. And however desirable it may seem to them at first glance to have all their anchor points in, it makes them difficult to process — but not very.

"Well, no. Well, I'll get through that somehow, I guess. I hope."

Now, what is the story from V down — V, VI and VII — just like that. Well, what is this story? What common denominator is there?

They have no wish to go through that; I mean, it's nonsense. Why go through butchering up a mock-up? It's much more fun to be outside doing the butchering. (audience laughter)

The V is trying to hold his anchor points in and collect enough already-made energy in order to have, at least in himself, an anchor point, whether he's out of himself or not. He's still trying to collect energy and call it his — he isn't making any — and it tells you his creativeness is shot. But what's mainly shot is his destructiveness; his destructiveness.

But pain itself being scarce, they are on the basis of "they must persist because the pain is too great to die."

And he's got the handiest little jim-dandy machine which you ever saw. It unmocks with blackness — and this wouldn't be so bad, you know, but it unmocks with blackness before the thing is created. You got that handy little one? He reversed the cycle of action, in other words. It's running D ... It — a cycle of action running down scale DEI in that sequence — they're running I-E-D. They're on an inversion.

As long as death is considered painful, and as long as the soul can be conceived to be punished after death by going to heaven and sitting bored forever — what a wonderful invention! I mean that's the most wonderful invention of the early centuries of the last two millennia — gee, gorgeous. You sat on a cloud thrumming a harp, which was probably out of tune. Yeah, wearing a halo, lit by the courtesy of Yahweh.

And if you want to really give one a bad time, this is the process for it: just have them get the idea of something being destroyed before it can be made, and have them do this with black mock-ups. Destroy it before it can be made, and destroy it before it can be made; and more automaticities show up, and you handle these little automaticities, and this gives them twinges and so forth. And you go back and you'll find out they've had certain effects in their life, which occurred suddenly. You handle these effects and you'll find out that they normally have a very strong personal problem of one kind or another, such as another person. And you'll find their emotional shut-off occurred, for instance, when their husband left them, or something on this order. It's — again, here is the case on which we bust out the E-Meter.

Of course, this was an effort to keep people from dying. They painted this wholly colorless, grim, gruesome idea of being bored for an eternity; and they were always careful to say "eternity" too. Or they got burned, see, and burned to a cinder forever. That's real interesting, you see, how you got burned to a cinder forever. They had no slightest concept of the conservation of energy. No wonder a physicist despises some of the religious textbook, you see, because the idea of fire, unfed, persisting forever, is highly untechnical.

Outside of your routine drills which can be done in a group, processing the case without an E-Meter is — for you as an auditor, outside of routine drills — is almost a waste of time. And this is where we do an assessment; down to there you don't need to. Because this case is double-terminaling like mad. He believes so thoroughly in energy, that anytime he puts out a mock-up, he gets discharges between the mock-up and himself.

So, on the two sides, we have science and religion at war and both of them are not at war at all — they're hand in glove. I think they put on a huge show in order to have a dichotomy.

Now, when he starts putting emotion in the walls and that sort of thing, it discharges so fast and furiously against himself, it's remarkable. Now what you're dealing there with is an inversion, a marked inversion, see? It's just backwards. He wants to put out white, he gets black. He's going to put a beam going straight ahead, and he gets a beam going straight in. He's got this stuff upside down. He's sitting, actually, in the middle of a black ridge. You can just take two black ridges and put them side by side and you'll get more action than you've seen in a long time.

But when it comes to somebody being free to jettison the mock-up, this is a computation which is kind of new in this universe — kind of new. And it would help you a lot as an auditor to recognize that you could run mock-ups without being too closely associated with them. Not because it's dangerous to be associated with them at all, but they just aren't that — they aren't quite that interesting, and they don't produce enough randomity.

But the case has a tendency to remain — what you do with a case is give them an assessment. This guy is occluded. All right, we get down to V — he can't do any of these things well, so on. We're going to be wasting time unless we just suddenly take this case and assess him and find out where he's locked up emotionally. Where's he trying to unmock before he can create? There's a thought so bad that it must be unmocked before it's created; and he's had people around him who tried to end him and his creation before he could create. See, they tried to reverse. And what do you know, that's the trick of the mest universe: unmock you before you could create. And we're now looking for the first time at the real gradient scale, as we go down, in terms of location. It is the curve of losing creation and losing destruction.

Now, this society is moving at a rate which — well, I'm sure that the rate at which this society is moving would make a turtle seem like a jet plane, as far as it's concerned. It is almost stopped, as far as randomity is concerned.

So, as we go down this curve, we find that the mest universe, more and more, is being depended on. And in particular, one factor in it is being depended on to destroy, and that factor is time. One is depending on time to wipe it out. And you will find out that a V puts up a mock-up and then waits for it to disappear. What does he think will make it disappear — if he gets any kind of a mock-up at all? He thinks time will. "Time will unmock before he can create," is the eventual computation he runs into at the lower part of the V band. "Time will uncreate before he can create," is the lower part of the band. The upper part of the band is, is just "time will uncreate it for me" — dependency on time to do destruction, and dependency on other energy for creation. So we get tremendous dependency on the mest universe which is, in essence, black space — hence, the blackness.

You can stand down there on the corner for hours and hear lots of fast cars, hear lots of perfectly savage, careless, stupid drivers and everything else. Nobody gets hit! You can stand there for hours — no randomity.

Now, dependency on mest universe, dependency on this and dependency on that — if you just started out on any course of action which resolved these various dependencies. We find out that he's locked up at the age of twenty-eight with his first wife having deserted him. See, pain. All right. We find out his emotions turned off more or less at that time. If we merely get him reaching and withdrawing from her, we get some effect; reaching and withdrawing from her. Very often one of these cases will just hang right up there till somebody says, "All right. Now, start reaching for this girl. Now, withdraw from her. Now, reach for her, and withdraw from her."

Here are police standing around everywhere — over here in New Jersey, by the way, they're very definitely dramatizing the Fifth Invader. It's just wonderful — you see these Jersey State Police? That is the uniform of the Fifth Invader Force. And "Friendship is dying together" from the Fifth Invader Force — it's gorgeous. I mean, I bet — every one of those cops looks sick; he looks real sick, see? Well, he's keyed in across the boards. But they're carrying this mock-up, and they got to make it persist and make everybody else's mock-ups persist. It is a religion actually — "Let's all get down and pray that our mock-ups persist." The arms fall off and the legs fall off and the eyes fall out and they develop psoriasis and syphilis and we still drag them along the streets, you see? "Make it persist."

All of a sudden he'll say, "She's in Keokuk, and I — to hell with her." And his emotion will be on.

What an enemy of beauty that concept is. The dramatization that only a good — the only good paintings there are, are at least three hundred years old is another symptom of this, you see? "All good paintings are old paintings." This is some kind of an effort on the part of an artist who is more sadistic than I care to have around, or an art critic, to make people recognize that it can only be beautiful if it's old or something. This is completely in reverse to the fact of the case.

Well, he's depended on time to wipe out his sorrows — that's another thing he's doing, you see. "After — if I live for a while, why, it'll all come out all right and I'll forget it all. And time will let me forget. Time is the healer." Time is the great charlatan. Time never healed anything. And he's depending on time to heal it for him. In time, his emotions will turn on again; in time, he will find somebody else; in time, this way. And he gets down to the bottom of the band and he's really dependent on time, then time itself — he's getting anxious; he doesn't dare start something, because he hasn't enough time, you see that? He doesn't dare start something.

Now, you go back and look at some of the bodies that have been around on the track — you look at some of these bodies. Well, you go back there about a thousand years and get a good look at it. And go back there a couple of thousand years and get some good looks at it, and they're very beautiful, very beautiful — and boy did they die young.

Now, this can be, by the way — a person can get into that position where he just isn't putting in enough time to get everything done that he wants to get done. That's entirely different than this tremendous anxiety which comes over somebody that he doesn't dare start anything because he won't be able to finish it. It doesn't matter how much ability he may think he have natively, but his creativeness went by the boards just with that one. He can't start it, because he'll never be able to finish it.

You know, it's only been the fashion to live for a while in this society here. It's only been the fashion in the last thirty, forty years, fifty years. They've only dragged in this carcass on this continent.

Now, we find artists hanging in the middle band. They start things and they never end the story, or they never finish the painting. If they finish the painting, they feel they'll be dead. These people can't arrive, and that's typical of anybody in that particular band. He may be very able; he may be making quite a success out of it, but nevertheless, he has tremendous anxieties about arriving, because arriving to him is synonymous with death. And he is running away from death so hard that he has inverted the cycle of action by dependency on the mest universe and time.

Male voice: How does India stack up on this?

Now, this process — you can run this V case on any one of these steps that I've given you right now. SOP 8-C is that versatile. He doesn't have to have a special step; he can be run on any of these steps. But when we say V, we are saying he is so match-terminaled with the mest universe, he is so identified with a body and so on, that every time you try to exteriorize him, you're going to run into this big trouble of discharges. When you try to put up emotional patterns, you run into these discharges and — of emotion. And flows — he gets into flows very easy. And the blackness persists and persists and persists and persists.

They've got a tremendous philosophy on it: they just say, "Breed like hell, boys, breed like hell — and let the mock-ups fall where they may." Their god Juggernaut is interesting that way; they can always go out and throw themselves under Juggernaut.

Well, the trouble with a blackness persisting — he's got things which — the machine which makes blackness is the mest universe, and his dependency on the MEST universe gives him a machine that makes blackness. By the way, you can sometimes get him like this: you can have bottles spouting out blackness and just have him keep putting up bottles spouting blackness and bottles spouting blackness or little machines making black clouds or something like that, one after the other, and gradually his blackness will dissipate.

Nobody ever objects to anybody in India being found dead. So they're dead. They're dead. They get married when they're twelve or fourteen, kick the bucket when they're twenty-one, twenty-eight — real quick.

Sometimes you can put his father out there or his mother or her mother out there, something on the sort of half a dozen times, with the idea of ridiculing, shutting off his communication, other people shutting off his communication, people putting — making him put his attention on himself and so forth, and all of a sudden, boom! The case comes out of the brush.

The only trouble with the people is, it's too hot there and they key in all the prenatals they've got. It is about 90 — any time you get a climate which is approaching 98.6, you can get the whole prenatal bank keyed in almost perpetually, because that's the temperature in the prenatal bank — 98.6. That's why hot countries turn feminine, so forth, so it's not a hardy country. But way up north, those boys live with kind of wild abandon, too — they always have.

But all of those are gunshot tech — pardon me, they're not — they're very specific techniques that you have to work with, with considerable skill. It's much easier if you actually know what he's doing. He can't see through blackness. And anything he puts there is going to be destroyed before it is created. Now we wonder why this fellow can't get a mock-up. Naturally, the thought to create anything brings about the fact that it's destroyed, and that fact is made by the mechanisms he has, to be primary to its creation. Something gets destroyed before it's created.

But you go around graveyards of 1870,1880 and start reading the tombstones and here is this old man of seventeen who kicked the bucket and left a wife and two children and so on. It's real young. And here's this old scrooge — this just completely worn-out dog of twenty-eight who lived almost forever — and gee, they were glad when he shoved off. Lived practically forever.

Now, you wonder how the devil that could possibly happen, but it can happen. It's an interesting thing to have him just keep putting out: "Just get the idea of destroying something and then putting it out; and destroying some­thing and then putting it out; destroying something and then making it; destroying something and then making it," and all of a sudden, the man's sitting there looking at the history of his life. He sits around, and he sits around for hours, and says all these horrible things will happen if he does so-and-so. See, he's going over the complete pattern of destruction before he creates anything. The only way to live is create it and throw it in their teeth and to hell with them. Nothing can happen to you anyhow.

Once in a while somebody puts up his head with 101 years or 110 years old, he is — and expects to be congratulated.

He's reversed this, reversed this. And although he, on the surface, may not give you any indication of this, he has learned to uncreate his emotions before he feels them. Horrible! It took me a long time to find out what people on that band were doing, and it was very curious.

Well, if you don't have the technology, if you don't know how to make a mock-up run pretty easily and how to patch its beauty up and so forth, the best answer — if you can't keep one running persistently beautiful, then the best answer of course, is to get another one.

But there are many such drills, and let's take Step III and apply it to the V, and let's find out nothingness in all directions. And let's take Orienting Straightwire, which is that part of Step I which asks him where he isn't, and we'll find out that works on him. And we find out, however, that Step II doesn't work on him. That's just a ... Well, it works to some degree, but just don't bother with it too much — that's automaticity and so forth — because his barriers are the barriers of thinkingness.

But in a society where they keep them going regardless of how they look, what can you do? Well, it's as much as your life is worth to get born into this society. I mean you as a thetan — I mean, just as much as a guy is worth.

When we get to Step V, we specifically ... So you can use Step I and Step III on a V, and you will actually mess him up if you use Step IV. So just omit II and IV for a V. But you can use all the I and all the III you want to on a fellow who's quite occluded. And you can use these special categories which go into V.

Boy, they even give him a machine now that chews his rattles for him. And he goes on up to about four or five, and they're going to — they've got all the space opera he could possibly manage, they're going to key all that in on him. And then they're going to — about the age of five he suddenly wakes up to the fact, "You know this stuff doesn't shoot! Huh!" He'll try it on his teacher or something of the sort the first day in kindergarten — it doesn't work.

Now, to better understand V, let me tell you what happens at VI. Here this person at VI is not holding his own anymore. In mock-up form, things are being presented to him — he has almost continuous automaticity in mock-ups, almost continuous. There's always some flying random motion on the subject of mock-ups. He is being presented with all of the light and everything which he has.

And then they keep him in a cage for the next sixteen years — great society. Just the place we need for lots of randomity and action and sport and fun. So aesthetic, too. You turn a button and something goes myaah and a picture comes on, which is a horrible grade of picture.

Now, this flying, random automaticity. He's being presented — he asks for a plate and he gets a cow, and the cow is wiggling its ears. And just about the time he's supposed to do something with the cow, why, it changes into a rabbit and jumps over a tree. It isn't how silly the mock-ups are, it's how uncontrolled they are. And this person is almost in continuous automaticity — just continuous, consecutive — he can't control any mock-up.

Somebody televised a color program the other night — Donald O'Connor on "The Colgate Comedy Hour" — they did it all in color, but I noticed the set was picking it up in very poor black and white. I finally realized what they were doing with that; they had actually put some color into the TV set in order to televise it in color. It made the black and white pictures look very — really a lot better than they ordinarily look — you know, the black and white screen. It's not pretty, though. Television is just stinking as a picture.

What do you think a VII is? A VII is where the mest universe itself has moved in and is beginning to present the wrong object. The fellow looks at an ashtray — right there in the broad daylight, looks at an ashtray and finds himself looking at a black widow spider, not an ashtray. He is looking at a box of matches that we all agree is a box of matches, only he knows that that thing is a coach. And this is where it is.

Radio: They just got radio up to a point where it was worthwhile, with FM, where you got some kind of sound that was fairly reliable, and then knocked it out. They couldn't stand that.

So we start at V, we've just got a battle in progress with the mest universe, time, so forth. Now we get a VI, the battle is already lost in mock-ups — every­thing's automatic. And it isn't necessarily true, you see, that a V just graduates on down to VII; he doesn't do this. These guys go on and on and on, and they keep fighting the battle, getting better and getting worse. Because normally, somebody who's going succumb in this universe, he just succumbs right straight through I, VI, VII. See, boom! And we've got him. And the fellow who isn't going to succumb, he goes through II, III, IV and V — that route. Then he gets down at the lower rungs of V, and he battles and fights around and roars around at himself and at others and fights through the machinery and finally abandons the whole damn thing and starts it all out new again. And he's always perfectly willing. By the way, it's the willingness to persist by change which marks him as different.

So, now they've got movies up to the point, though, where you have — if anybody — an usher were to walk across the stage during the picture, why, he'd have the audience yelling at him for fifteen minutes to get out of the way of the screen. You know, they've got those screens up there now, and it makes the women — oh, about 40-foot amazons or something, they look like. They sort of lean over the audience as though they're about to devour the audience at any moment. And the men — the men there — they're sort of leaning over the audience too; this is tremendous. And trains come by eight times life-size and so on, and the audience sits there and realizes that it's awfully small. They've been told that all during school, and told it every place. And they're less and less significant, and that there's more and more significance to be found.

I had these two states described one time, very well. And you take a psycho — psycho's going down the road, and he goes right straight down the road and all of a sudden a little zephyr comes along and goes whhhh! at him, and he just moves off the ruts and bumps into the fence. And he caroms off the fence, because it sent him in the other direction, he walks diagonally across back — the road, and he runs into a small tree and it kind of pushes him that way, and he's walking back down the road he just came, but then he hits a culvert and he stumbles there, and he has to turn around to examine something, so when he stands up from turning around, he's going down the road the first way he was going, but he hits a stone, and this caroms him off to the other side of the road. See, in other words, he's just being blown in all directions.

Anytime you get a society which does not permit anybody to jettison the mock-up, which has everything all rigged up automatically ... If you fell in a fit out here on the street, see, they've got it all rigged up; I mean, ping! ping! ping! you'd be in a hospital, and then you'd recuperate — brother, you sure would, see?

Now, let's take the other kind of case, the potentially (quote) "sane" case; this is why we can't just say this is a dwindling spiral into insanity, because it's not. And we take this case, and he's going down the road and he gets hit by a truck and he picks himself up and he walks on down the road — he isn't going quite so fast, but he's still going in the same direction, see. And at that moment, why, a tree falls across the road and hits him with one of its branches and he climbs over the tree and he's going a little bit slower, but he's going on down the road in the same direction. And something slams him on the right side and it turns out to be a baseball thrown from a sandlot and so forth. And he picks it up and throws the baseball back and goes on down the road.

This is interesting, isn't it? That it doesn't — it just doesn't occur to a person that it's not a particularly desirable thing to have around — a society which just keeps on running forever and ever, no changing it, getting more and more solid, and people wanting more and more unconsciousness and wanting less and less pain. And no work — that's the big motto.

You get the idea between these two characters? One is actually being — as much as anything else, he's determined to be prime post unposted. He's not going to move out of his course, that's all. God help anybody that pushes him out, because he just resists back. And this is a losing game to some degree. But nevertheless, he can always just skip the whole thing, you see. If he's going to change at all, he's going to move himself on his own self-determinism to an entirely new road, and then he's going to go down in that road in the same fashion. That's the — that's essentially the differences in these cases. All right.

And on those gauges — you get with that gauge a pretty decent idea of what man is combating. He's running almost exactly backwards. The idea is if you've got a mock-up, let it be a beautiful mock-up and expend it, see? You can always make a new mock-up. But now, they've made it so complex to get a new mock-up, see? Oh, there's big systems, big communications systems.

So, a VI is being presented in mock-up form — his own stuff's all unmocked and substituted for in mock-up form. And a VII, he's all unmocked and so is the mest universe. And he's being presented with another universe by superauto-maticities. As far as V is concerned (I'm showing you it's not sequitur), the mest universe is unmocking before he can mock up — and remember he is the fellow who is running the machine called mest universe, see? I mean, he's running his own machine that creates this. He's using blackness there because the mest universe is blackness, and he of course has to manufacture an awful lot of blackness.

You read all about it when you're a kid, you see, and then you're forbidden it all during school, and then you finally propose to the girl, and you court her for a long time, and then you finally marry her with all this and that.

He's probably gotten awfully good at manufacturing blackness in space opera. I have not found anybody who was — with occlusion who was not a past master in space opera. You start running him along the line on space opera and brother, you really got it; you really got it. And a lot of I's I've run into, I've had to — when they've been in space opera — I've just had to bail the hell out of them on blackness. You know, they keep running into pockets of blackness and that sort of thing.

They got this communications system of how you get a new mock-up, see? And then you have a baby and it's not yours. You're still running the same mock-up — what a gyp! You know, if you pry into cases, you'll find out that they're quite upset by this. Every once in a while, they suddenly realize they're not running this new mock-up — they don't have a new mock-up.

Also, there's several black theta traps. There's one up here, the Horsehead in Orion — the black Horsehead in Orion — is a theta trap, and guys can get stuck in things like that. But they're really there because they need the stuff, you understand; they need blackness. Basically, there's somewhere on the line where they decided blackness was good, and they've been using it ever since.

Well, all due respect to that, life is neither bad nor good; but it gets over­balanced once in a while, and then somebody gets hard to pry out of his head. Well, how do you pry people out of their head? Well, they certainly can't go on the idea that "everything's got to persist, got to persist, got to persist," and that they "must remain unconscious, must remain unconscious." I mean, you can't pry them out of the head — they're not happy about it either.

Well, you put up black barriers for such a case and have him see through them, by doing what? He's got a black barrier, so you put up a black barrier two inches in front of him, two inches in front of the last one, have him see through the last one at the new one. Now you put up a new black barrier outside the second one you had him put up, and have him see through that at this new black barrier. And so you get his black barriers further and further from him, and interspacing this with what I gave you yesterday for III, which is to say, seeing nothing in all directions, and so forth. And believe me, this boy will crack up, but royally, as far as an occluded case is concerned. And not crack up into psychosis; he will just get meaner and meaner, and finally break through and become a Step I.

What happened to them? They died and they had to live. You can just count on that, see? They dragged around a body that was blind — remember that, in every black case; it's always there — they dragged around a body that was blind, they dragged around one that should have dropped dead, they were brought back into the land of the living. And even now as you process them, sometime in this present life they have been brought back into the land of the living against their will and they're still under protest; and they don't like people for making them do it, either. They'll go on, sort of soberly and somberly and with great protest inwardly, and they'll do some kind of a job outwardly and so forth. But to hell with it! They're still dragging that mock-up. And they want a new one.

But the only way you can possibly exteriorize this fellow is get him to a point where he can unmock the body as it remains sitting there. The body's going to leave before he does. You understand that? So you just make that possible.

Now, as consciousness deteriorates, a person becomes less and less aware of what has transpired. And during the last few decades here on Earth, con­sciousness has gotten so poor that there's been no spontaneous recall on earlier existences, and actually no great awareness on what a person was doing.

Okay.

Actually, in this universe — those beings that have been in this universe the whole track — it was probably several trillion years ago when they first started to do a flip on real close remembrance of what they were doing, you see? Because the amount of consciousness which a person can have and the amount of consciousness which he has are two widely different things.

Now, "awareness" — consciousness is awareness. Awareness itself is perception. You want to know why this case is black — he's just unwilling to be aware. And he's using time to destroy it all. He's sort of broken down to the point of where he says, "Well, sooner or later it'll wear out." And sure enough, when you ask him to fix up a mock-up, he'll make awful sure that there's some methods of getting eaten up or chewed up or used up in some fashion or another, before he's really going to make a mock-up.

Now, if you were to mock up a big machine which guaranteedly would eat up his mock-ups, he would be very happy to make one. But you're not liable to get him to make one until you get such a guarantee across to him.

It isn't willfulness on his part — he's actually stumbling along, lost in this counterpoint of, one, "We must all survive, and the whole universe must survive, and you mustn't cease to survive at any moment."

See, there are many ways of surviving. It's all — you're all going to survive anyhow. But the point of it is, is somebody saying, "You've got to survive as a unit organism" — boy, is that introducing an arbitrary. I dare say, there have been — there are people right here who have been laboring under this as an onerous arbitrary. There must be at least four or five here. This is an onerous arbitrary.

So they picked the mock-up up out of the wreck, so they picked it up off the operating table, so they went on living. "The hell with them — kill it!" Nope, not against — it's not allowed. They know they're going to be arrested if they'd commit suicide. And they're not even supposed to appear in the between-lives area if they've done something like that. I mean, they're supposed to make it all persist. Rrrh!

Now, you as an auditor come along, and you take this fellow and you say, "All right. Be three feet back of your head."

He says, "To hell with you. You're a human being. You're making me do it. And I don't want it. I haven't got any other mock-up in the first place. I haven't got anyplace to go. I'm lost, like everybody else. So there's nothing you can do about me. (I'll make you persist, damn you — I'll make you persistently audit.) How long are we going to make you audit? Let's see now, uh, huh-huh, rawrrh." And they lick their chops hungrily, and start all out for a thousand-hour session.

Persistence! They're not doing it mean, it is just these factors which are adding up to this conclusion, see? It's just got to persist. All right, they'll make it persist.

Now, there's this one, you know: "Did you ever make your mother wrong by doing exactly what she said? Hm?" That's known as a "white mutiny" in the navy. Everybody does exactly what they're supposed to do, and of course the whole ship will sink, in fact.

Well, people are making people wrong. How are they making them wrong? Well, you go on living and you're making them dead wrong, because it's dead wrong for you to go dragging around the mock-up after a certain period of time.

When a mock-up loses the potentiality of high joy and sensation and high velocity, well, it's time to bury it with, preferably, military honors after some enormously grand sacrifice, you know? Bing! Crash! Boom! Skyrockets, you know? Bang! Lot of randomity, and then everybody says, "Poor old Bill. He served his country; he's gone. He rescued his whole regiment at the cost of his life. And got a 'posthumorous' medal too." (audience laughter) So there's Bill. Well, all right.

You'd be surprised how many times your preclear at the age of twelve, ten, thirteen, fourteen, started thinking: "Gee, if I could only serve my country with my life." You look a little deeper, and he's inquiring for the way out. That would pay for his jettisoning the responsibility he has to his friends and family. So he's trying to equate this. What's the basic solution he's trying to solve?

Every time he solves the problem on the basis of more safety, less death, and so on, he digs himself in deeper; because he is wasting, in the real universe, all future randomity. He's cutting down all car wrecks, he's cutting down all deaths by battle, he's cutting down all this and all that — he's just making randomity short.

It isn't that randomity is death, but you can't have much randomity if you're afraid of dying, and if nobody will let you die, you see? If — fear of death — 'Too much love of living and too much fear of dying makes cowards of us all," somebody said. The hell it does. The mest universe doesn't let you die. And so of course, if you have to be careful not to die, you can't have any randomity. So, boy, does it get dull.

And then they tell you, "Well, you'll be in heaven eight billion years," or an inconceivable time. You're in heaven for fifteen minutes, by the way, only it is not heaven — that in terms of mest time.

Well now, where do we have an entrance to the problem? What process do we use that solves this?

We have just straight, ordinary, routine duplication in Creative Processing. We just duplicate the incident. That's the most basic one we've got, see? And at V level, we can double-terminal it. You know, just double-terminal somebody trying to stay conscious while people want them to be unconscious. And then we double-terminal people wanting to stay unconscious while people want them to be conscious. We could just double-terminal this and get away with it, see? That's about the crudest process.

Well, in view of the fact that your pc doesn't have very much mock-ups or something like that, we could still get away with this. If he puts up his mock-up often enough, he'll eventually get one there. It's wiping out before he puts it up; because he's trying to wipe out a mock-up, and he is damned if he'll put out more mock-ups. They won't let him go free. So he's certain to have an "unmocker" before it's created — certain to have that. It's not too much action which is worrying him, it's too little. And so he answers this with no action. He's in full protest, resistance to the universe. All right, that's our first technique.

Well, what's our next technique? As I say, end of cycle, of course, is a finite stop. You'll find people who have not finished a spiral. Couple of hundred billion years ago, he was in some kind of a spiral, and gee, he was young and he was going to do so much, and they were on their way to attack . . . He had one small — he had one small rocket ship or something of the sort, and he was on his way to attack the main fleet as a complete sacrifice and his starboard tubes exploded because of an engineering error and it blew him up. End of spiral. See, it's just hanging there. He didn't get a stop action; he didn't complete the action.

That isn't a bad one. He'll bring that one out to you and show it to you like a kind of a medal, see.

It's that stinking one where he died in that tenement, without ever having lived. He went on for years and he never lived any of those years. That is the worst of it; he's always waiting for life to begin. And that's much closer to a start, so it's much more persistent and much more severe as a chop of cycle. Because he did get started, he did have a body, but then nothing ever happened. And boy, that guy is — that guy's stuck right there with getting the body. And you'll find people who are stuck in the Assumption have had this happen to them.

If you find somebody hung up badly in the Assumption, he just never considers that he ever got to do anything in this life, that's all. Doesn't matter what he has done — not in terms of action, of color, beauty and drama. He hasn't had these things, so if he hasn't had them, he's just stuck right at the start. And the start was when he was damn fool enough to pick up this particular mock-up and find out that Papa was safety-crazy, and that Mama wouldn't even let him burn his hands, and they put him in a cage and gave him a good education for just years and years, and this guy's just beat, that's all — he just never gets started. He'll be stuck in the Assumption. And you can just conclude, on any case that's stuck in the Assumption, that this is his course of action and he just never got it started — complete lack of drama.

Now, we've got end of cycle on this one. We mock him up trying to resist unconsciousness and succeeding and the other people trying to make him unconscious, perishing. That finishes the cycle of action. See, they're trying to make him unconscious and he kills them. That doesn't appear to be an end of cycle, does it? And yes it is. That's a reflex action.

See, he tried to be conscious, and he succeeded in being conscious. And we know that, because he put a period to the people trying to make him unconscious, see? Nothing to it. All right, that's not a strong end of cycle.

The other one: We mock him up as unconscious — mock up a body as unconscious, preferably two bodies as unconscious, and have him leave. And two more bodies as unconscious and have him leave. And then we're really going to have to complete the cycle of action on the next one, which is to mock up two bodies unconscious, he leaves and the bodies die. But you needn't add that in until you've done it a few times to kind of break him in. But that's the technique. Get them good and dead. Real nice and dead. You know, impossible to survive. You know, cut their throats and fix up their arteries so no blood will pump, and take — bring their heart out and cut it in half and mangle it up one way or the other and so, till we know there's an absolute period on that body.

When you've done this as a cycle of action — the body goes unconscious and he leaves, and the body dies — that's at least an end of a cycle of action. And you'll get some that show up: his dental operation, or an incident two hundred years ago, earlier incidents of when he ran into this planet. This stuff will start pouring off. Do you validate it? No. You just keep running end of cycle, end of cycle.

What's end of cycle? Dead. It's the best end of cycle there is.

The guy landing on a planet, dead. That's a good end of cycle, see? He tried to get to the anchor point, and he got there and he died. And some beautiful sadness of him having executed the mission is liable to turn on, but don't bother to rub it out. More important — end of cycle.

Now, let's run the rest of the end of cycle. He gets to the body-in-pawn area and finds a body. Now we run this one for a while. We get him coming into an area and finding the body alive, and taking it away. And we just keep running this in duplicate mock-ups — that is to say, just making them appear and dis­appear or throwing them away or something of the sort.

And at first, they'll come back like mad. He'll make a mock-up disappear and back it'll come again. And he'll make it disappear and back it'll come again. And if you run it for a while, if the case doesn't know what you're doing, he gets frantic. He just wants to rrrr! All these times when he's safely, carefully, shoved off and — mock-up's spoiled, so what? So what? He shoved off — gone.

Now you're only handling bodies, but you've ended enough cycles on the body that you've solved that problem for him. See, you've got time. He's got this stuff off the time track. He's not trying to finish this, which is in itself the key to persistence — "trying to finish." All right.

What's our next clue on this? You have to handle this as a thetan. Now, what's end of cycle for a thetan? As far as this universe is concerned, to be it and eat it — finish it — boom! That's end of cycle for this universe. Would make us process it out, huh? Just blow it up. Get the idea?

You'd be surprised — thetans would come along early on the track, they'd blow up a planet. Why? Just to put a finite end to something. But that's a finite end for the thetan in this universe. Have him eat it up, blow it up, smack it up, smash it up, expand it up. Do everything there is to do, one after the other — any way you could think of finishing off the mest universe.

Now, we're not teaching destruction or advising destruction, it just so happens we're talking about life and the spirit's action with regard thereto. And the second we study this, we find out that the beast of a jungle is a pantywaist. He's a punk.

It's a symptom of thetans, by the way, that their teamwork long ago deteriorated, and now it's come back together again as a body. And you will start pushing somebody up the track, and his own teamworkingness is liable to deteriorate, and then come back.

It is real rare, you know, that a thetan — most thetans that you see around, they won't talk to you and so on. They don't have anything to say, unless you're just hypnotically strong, as far as they are concerned. They just — you kind of trance them and then they chatter. Fantastic, but true.

They're quite scared; they're quite leery. That is, every time they have a mock-up, somebody's stolen it.

What's he trying to do? He's trying to put up a mock-up that is beautiful, that will produce some randomity and do something. And he's trying to keep others from interfering with the game.

Now, how many ways are there to stop a game? And one of them is "make it continue forever." And that's the way you really stop a game. And to my calculation this game has been stopped, on mest time for itself, about two hundred billion years. It's really been on crutches.

Why, you know, the fastest spaceships were going here a relatively short time ago, a million years or so ago — about the fastest they were going was fifty, sixty light-years. They just slowed down to a stop — hardly anything.

I imagine now if there's saucers out there or something like that, they're probably traveling at five hundred thousand miles a second, if that — slow.

Now, the point I'm making here is, how many ways are there to stop a game? Well, actually, for thetans, the best way to stop one is start one; that stops a game. There isn't any reason to blow up the playing field — no reason, no good reason, if you can just start a game for it. So you might as well set your mind to what you're doing.

If you continue to process on the basis that you think all of this super-survival, drag it out as a unit organism, is desirable, that pain is detestable, that unconsciousness is desirable, why you're going to have an awful hard time processing a V — because that happens to be a lie, those things happen to be a lie.

Unconsciousness is not desirable. You want better perception, you'll have to give him more consciousness. Pain is desirable, work is desirable, and end of cycle, always — end of cycle. And he's left and come back, and the mock-up which a V is running at this very second — this very second — the mock-up which that V is running ceased to serve him properly, according to him, many, many years before.

Now maybe you can process such a case with a little understanding.

That's all.