I want to cover with you this morning a little more about the various states of existence.

There are extremely elementary processes we discover could be designed when we look at the various factors in Scientology which we would call very upper echelon factors.

Now, all we need to know about existence is that it is, you see? Whatever complexityit has, it still is. Now, it isn't ever was, which is the most interesting part of this particular nomenclature. There isn't any will-be-ness and there's no was-ness; there's simply isness.

How much in the way of processes could we get just out of the concept of Is-ness?

Now, if we talk about existence, people spontaneously add to it will-be-ness and wasness. See? So existence is not the word we want. We want the word isness. We want just the word we're using. We want that state which is.

Just that one datum. Well, actually we could get a very great many.

Now, the Dhyana makes the error of "beginningless and endless time." But that is not really an error. It's an error as far as the symbols involved are concerned. Now, we don't know that the symbols that were used by Gautama to describe this manifestation added up into English as "beginningless and endless time" – you see, we've already crossed one language jump – and so we don't quite know what he was talking about. It was an interesting thing that you could represent this by a continuous line which joined itself. Any kind of a complexity of circle, in other words, would represent the fact that we had a beginning-less and endless somethingness.

But let me call your attention abruptly to the singular fact that to give a thetan exercise in getting ideas is of minimal use. A thetan can always shift around his considerations one way or the other, but it all depends upon the scope he is willing to shift them around on.

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

An individual on one point, let's say the receipt point in the communication formula, would feel himself limited to the degree that he had to be on receipt point. So he would then feel that the consideration that he was on receipt point or was being the effect of existence would monitor his ability to make considerations.

But there happens to be, strangely enough, a truth lying back of time-there is a truth lying back of time. Time is a postulate.

That is to say: he would not feel then that he was free to make any other considerations above the level of the fact that he was on receipt point. And all of his other considerations would fall below this level.

Now, it doesn't even have to be agreed on. You could have a time span all by yourself. You could shut your eyes and say, "Now I've sat here for a million years." In the next two seconds, you could say, "I'm going to sit here for a million years." Nothing about this – that's real time. Don't be so baffled if you dream for five seconds about a five-hour time span. You've just repostulated some time, that's all.Unless you continue to postulate time, you haven't got any. And that's the first and foremost thing you can know about time – unless you continue to postulate it, you haven't got any.

The formula of communication – "Cause-Distance-Effect" is the most elementary statement of it – "and involving attention and duplication". We would discover that if an individual were monitoring himself with one basic consideration, his considerations would then fall below, and his ability to change his mind would then fall below, that basic consideration.

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

A basic consideration could be "I am on an effect point. I am being the effect of many flows and messages and that sort of thing – and this is very bad. His considerations are various. "I must get off this point". Or, "I am on this effect point and I do not like this".

One of the roughest things you will discover with anybody who is having trouble with his case is to have him put something on the future time track. And he'll say, "Oh, no!"

Now, one of the ways to do this: You say, "Can I have an appointment with you? Let's make it at 2:05 this afternoon."

Now let's take it reverse end to, and let's get an individual who finds himself on source point. There he sits on source point and he's being cause. He's being the source of the impulses or particles which are going across the distance and hitting effect point. And then this individual is saying: "Well now I mustn't cause anything bad. I must cause only good things" and he must do this and that for this or for that.

"Hell, no!"

And what is this host of considerations being monitored by? Of course, the fact that he is on a cause point. He's on a source point of a communication. (Synonymous here: cause and source, effect and receipt.) And if he discovers himself suddenly on the receipt end of something, this fellow is really dismayed. Here he has this basic consideration that he's being cause point, and then all of a sudden he receives something! Now that would be a breakdown – basically and primarily – of his Is-ness. His reality.

See? I mean, that's upsetting.

He then can have a break of reality only to the degree that other-determinism brings into question the postulate on which he is operating. You see, you could have a break of reality only to the degree that other-determined-hammer-pound brings about an invalidation of the postulate on which he is basically running.

That's why, when you pick somebody up off the street, you don't tell them to come around to see you later at your office. You've undoubtedly picked up somebody who has attention on the subject of postulating time. The thing for you to do is to take him right over to your office, if you possibly can. You see that? Don't put something on the future time track for him any more than you can help, because the person who is really in difficulty, who has psychosomatic ills and so forth, has stopped postulating time. And the moment he stops postulating time, he doesn't have any.

He says, I am cause and I am being a good fellow and I am doing this and doing that – and all of a sudden he gets jailed. My, this is upsetting. But what is his basic consideration? That he is occupying a cause point.

Now, how much time has a fellow got and how much time is he rushing and how much time is he sitting still with? And all of this is all very interesting, except it depends on just this one fact: Your individual is or is not postulating time for himself.

Let's take the example of somebody who is in a condition and who is trying to change this condition. Now we've entered into another level. We've entered into Not-is-ness and then we've entered into Alter-is-ness, you see. He has a terrible ill. He has this mental difficulty. He has some other difficulty or other and he now says it mustn't exist. And in his next statement he says, All right now, don't exist.

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

Well, what do you know, it keeps on existing. Well, all right, he says, I'll change it on a gradient scale. I'll chip away at the corners of it.

Now, let's take anybody out there doing a job of work, and we'll find something very, very peculiar. We'll find somebody who is just working like mad-he's just working, working, working, and he's just got to get it all done, he's got to get it all done. And the end of the day comes and he has nothing done. You know? It's all in a confusion. And he was awfully busy all day but nothing happened. Did you ever run into anybody like this, huh?

He'll at length decide that he can't do anything about it.

And the next day he goes on and – oh, he's just so busy – he's just got to do this and he's got to do that. And he finally is sitting still, presenting a very funny and silly picture. He's sitting still, not even moving, not even talking, not even writing – accomplishing absolutely nothing – telling you how awfully busy he is and how he hasn't got any time. And he'll eventually collapse down to the point where he has no time of any kind whatsoever to employ on anything and that's why he's sitting there. But that's perfectly reasonable to him; that's perfectly reasonable.

One of the actions that he would finally do would be to draw a black curtain over the whole thing. That's one of the basic reactions of Not-is-ness. He says, Now, look, I can't change it at all, so he's trying to effect a Not-is-ness by using Alter-is-ness. Not-is-ness would not take place by a postulate, he discovered (or thought he discovered), so the basic thing he must do immediately then is start changing it on a gradient scale, which is to say Alter-is-ness – and it just stays right there. And he is already running on a failed postulate of Not-is-ness. His activity of change is then proceeding from the basic postulate that it must not be, which is proceeding from another basic postulate that it is, which is proceeding from the basic postulate that he's there in the first place. You see that we're just proceeding from the basic postulate that there must be a there for him to be at.

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

So we trace back these basic postulates and we discover a little rule here. An individual has a condition and the condition continues to exist as long as the individual has a condition. It sounds like an idiotic little rule but it's a very, very true little rule. It will continue as long as he has a condition. So every time you find a condition? He must have a postulate about the condition before he has the condition. So every time you find a condition there's a postulate.

And that's what happens to a person's doingness. It's his ability to postulate the amount of time. And the only confusion that you would get into about this is the fact that we have an agreed-upon time span. But you might recognize that the time for an entire nation or an entire earth could thereby go awry.

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

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

One is all too prone to look at existence and say, well, there's existence there and now we'll make some postulates. No. This is not quite the direction of drift. You'd have to make the postulate to have existence there so that you could make some postulates to recover from having the existence there. And any condition to have any existence or persistence must be based on time of some sort. There must be a time postulate.

Well, you'll find out that when a country can still postulate time or a world can still postulate time, then, an hour would be a tremendous amount of doing-ness. They would have a festival at sunrise and a couple of games, you know? And then along about noon, why, have a feast. And that leaves them all afternoon – that leaves them all afternoon completely empty – and so that would be a good time to go boating so that they would have time in order to practice up for the dance they were giving that night. And then they'd finish up about midnight and say, "My, what an idle day!" This is the amount of time they could postulate in terms of doingness. Do we have time to do it or don't we? is the question.

And we find that an individual doesn't have time unless he continues to postulate it and ceases to have time to the degree that he ceases to postulate it.

This is very simple to understand if you understand that time itself is merely a postulate. It's a postulate.

When I say cease to postulate time, I wouldn't want you for a moment to get the idea that there is any witchcraft involved, that you have to go out with spider-webs and mix them up with four quarts of morning sunlight and stir them all up with a whisker. There's no witchcraft involved in making this postulate. It's simply this kind of a postulate: Continue: Just get the notion of continuing something and you'll have a time continuum. Get the idea of a piece of space out in front of you and have the notion, Continue, about this piece of space. That's making time. You've made time. That's all the postulate there is. There isn't even the words, "Now I am going to make some time and I am going to cause the time to persist and continue." No, its just continue. You didn't say continue.

Now, what is the – if it's a postulate, does it have an anatomy as such? Well, yes, it's a complexity of postulates, the way you look at it in this particular universe at this time, but not very complex.

This time continuum is a tremendously interesting thing particularly in view of the fact that so many people have agreed upon it, but their apparent agreement with it leads them to depend on other people, finally, to carry on the agreement while they just sit there. And what do you know, eventually they do just sit there. You'll find many a person in this state, simply sitting at home in his bedroom, just sitting there. Well, he couldn't have any motion, he says.

Time depends on change. In order to have time, you have to alter things, because isness has a condition there – alter-isness. In order to get an isness to persist, you of course have to have something there about persist, which would consist of the time postulate. The way the postulates have gone together which make up this universe – not the theoretical way in which they could go together to make up a universe… Get this as a different thing. You see, you could go about this just all out in an entirely different fashion and postulate time and still have time, but it would not necessarily be the postulates which were made and are made and are in this universe right here and now. See? It wouldn't necessarily be the same set of postulates if we suddenly dreamed it up.

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

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

If you could just ask such a person to go out and trim the hedge, just no more and no less than that, or if you asked him to go out and put pieces of chalk on the sidewalk all the way around the block every five feet – you would see considerable recovery in his case. Why? Well, he knows that he'd have to go all the way around the block or he knows that he would have to finish trimming the hedge, or he would have to come around to his door again in the block, or come around to the other side of the yard. In other words, he can continue to postulate a time continuum against the objects that are already there.

And when an individual has stopped postulating time, he's stopped perceiving. So perception and the postulate of time are identical phenomena. You see? Perception and postulation are the same thing.

You could just say to this fellow, Get the idea of moving this dish. Now move it.

You should recognize, very clearly, that time is a postulate. Because when you're working with a preclear who is having difficulty perceiving, you know that there is something wrong with the time postulate, therefore there is something wrong with change. See?

Now get the idea of moving this dish again. Get the position you're going to move it to now.

Alter-isness is that part of the time postulate which we can most evenly and closely observe. And we find out that changing things brings time into being. It causes a persistence; we get a continuance of time by alter-isness. The mechanism of alter-isness gives us a perception of time.

Now move it. Now get the idea of moving this dish, now get the place you're going to move it to, and move it. Surprisingly enough an individual will sometimes turn on a violent body reaction on this.

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

What's kicking back there? It is the thetan's agreement with the body, to the point where he's saying he is the body, the body is himself – therefore everything that happens to the body is what happens to himself and everything that happens to himself happens to the body. In other words, he's in a super-identification. And he would come through this to where he could have some future.

All right. We'll get the tremendous amount of change or accomplishment which has to take place immediately before death. Here we have people all around the place who aren't doing anything, their affairs are in horrible condition, they're out on the street or in businesses and so on.

What postulate is this individual already riding with? Let's take a look at the Is-ness of this. He has to conceive that he has a body before he can recover from one.

Now, if we were to go up to these people, one after the other – you know, I mean, let's put on a – oh, carry a little black bag (I'd forgotten what galaxy I was in for the moment). That's the badge of office – a little black bag and a stethoscope. One doesn't quite know what one does with a stethoscope but it's interesting. A stethoscope won't detect whether or not a person is dead or not, you know, really – they often miss. It's not a reliable instrument, but it's a badge of office.

And we get the salient and horrible fact that this whole thing is monitored by Is-ness.

A stethoscope is the dramatization of the serpent, of the caduceus. That's right. I'll have to write a paper on that. (Most acceptable thing I could possibly write for the AMA.)

No matter how much Not-is-ness is taking place, you see Not-is-ness always pursuant to Is-ness. No matter how much Alter-is-ness takes place – you've got an As-is-ness, then Alter-is-ness has to take place to get an Is-ness. Is-ness is something that is persisting on a continuum.

Anyway, we have the little black bag and we go up to this fellow and we say to this fellow, "My dear fellow, I must inform you," having tapped the stethoscope against his chest, so he knows he's being hit by a snake (I think that's about it – yes, I'll have to write that paper). Anyway, we tap him and we say, "Oh! We have just learned through this diagnosis that you only have three months to live."

That is our basic definition of Is-ness. As-is-ness is something that is just postulated, or just being duplicated – no alteration taking place.

The funny part of it is you'll see a busy man, promptly. He'll really get busy. Well, he'll sit down in a slump, you know, for a moment or two – that's just the impact. And then he'll say, "Let's see. Time. Time. Oh! Alter-isness, alter-isness, alter-isness, alter-isness, alterisness, alter-isness, alter-isness," you know, change – "I've got to get my will straight, I've got to get this straight, I got to get that straight and I got to get Mary moved out of that house into the other house which I've been building. Gotta have this and that." And the months go by and the months go by and the years go by, and he's still alive.

As-is-ness contains no life continuum, no time continuum. It will just go – every time you postulate a perfect duplicate for anything: same space, same object, same time – boom! If you postulated it all the way through, without any limiter postulate hanging around at all, it would just be gone and that's all there is to it. It would be gone for everybody else, too.

"Well," you say, "the doctor was wrong." No, the doctor wasn't wrong. As of that moment, the experience of the doctor demonstrated to him that people who had this illness (who had not been told that they had only three months to live) died in three months. What he's left out of it is the factor on people who have been told they only have three months to live. You tell somebody that he only has three months to live, and he will, of course, throw into gear – or not to necessarily say that he would throw into gear, but he could throw into gear – the only mechanism available to him to cause persistence in this universe, and that is alter-isness. And he would change, change, change, change, change, change, change, change, change, change, change.

Now this, then, Is-ness, is your monitoring postulate. An individual couldn't possibly get into trouble with As-is-ness. Unless you considered losing everything trouble – but it would be losing things which you either now didn't want, or had just postulated into existence.

He right away has got to change his condition; that is the first thing he thinks of. You think that this is just natural that he would do that. No. We're talking on a higher echelon of philosophy. You tell him he's only got three months to live. "This is an unacceptable fact to him," you say, "and so therefore he's got to change his condition." No, worse than that – worse than that. He's got to change his condition. If he has no time persistence, he has got to change his condition. The one thing with which he can gain persistence is alter-isness. If he would simply change the furniture around in his office he'd live better. I mean, he'd live a little longer – the amount of change – because he can do that successfully.

All As-is-ness is doing is merely accepting responsibility for having created it, and anybody can accept the responsibility for anything. That's all As-is-ness is, when it operates as a perfect duplicate.

It's unsuccessful changes which fix a person and cause a not-isness to occur.

There are two kinds of As-is-ness: There is the As-is-ness where you postulate it in the space and time – you postulate it right there, and there it exists.

Now, unsuccessful and successful are themselves postulates. You know, "I am this individual, and this individual is supposed to persist." You could just as well say, "I am this individual and therefore this individual is not supposed to persist." I mean, you could make up your postulate that way just as well as the other way.

And then there is the As-is-ness where you repostulate it. You just postulate it again.

But the accepted chain of considerations which go in to make up art criticism, appreciation, win-lose and so on – we just have a set of considerations. And we say, "Well, they are successful changes as long as the individual is doing it, and the changes are unsuccessful as long as somebody else is doing it." And that's very much a part of the win-lose factor and of the time factor, too. That's self-determinism. One merely has made the postulate that as long as one does it one is successful. You know, as long as one is able to accomplish the postulate, this makes up win. "I am now going to pick up my right finger. I won!" You see? "Picked up my right finger; I made the postulate good."

The object already exists, there is an Is-ness being approximated as an As-is-ness, and then it becomes an As-is that isn't. It becomes, then, an actual Not-is-ness. So if you created it, if you just created it as an As-is-ness, unless you altered it rapidly you'd get this Not-isness. And if you exactly approximated an Is-ness as an As-is-ness, you would again get the same result. Same result both times – Not-is-ness. As-is-ness, perfectly done, if not followed by Alter-is-ness, becomes a Not-is-ness. Quickly and immediately. You've seen that as an auditor, erasing parts of the reactive bank – facsimiles, etc.

Well now, what's happened to the preclear is, he has made the postulate and then something has contraried the postulate to such a degree that he is fixed; he is fixed, he cannot change. You see?

It hasn't occurred to anybody yet, fortunately, to simply exactly approximate the body! Treat the body as an As-is-ness and go your way. Well, you say the body has a lot of facsimiles and so forth. All right, treat them as the same As-is-ness, all in one operation – boom. Of course you had to assume you had a body before you could possibly As-is it.

When he makes the postulate, it just works out – in this universe; not necessarily the most theoretical or most optimum setup you could make, but in this universe it just happens to work out that this is the way it was. When you made a postulate and then didn't accomplish the goal postulated in that postulate (remember you were postulating time to postulate a goal), when you were unable to reach that particular attainment, then, of course, you hadn't changed anything.

Now, existence goes this way – this is the only error you could make, and this is another method, slightly, of getting a continuation, because it is an Alter-is-ness. There is an Alter-is-ness right there between Is-ness and Not-is-ness. The moment you say, "There it is, now I don't want it and it doesn't exist", you've postulated that you're changing it. It's a very abrupt and particular kind of Is-ness – it's a Not-is-ness.

Well, the way you could make time was by changing the position of something, and that's the way time is made in this universe: change the position of something in space. Time is made by changing the position of something in space. And so we get all of the neutrons and the morons vibrating at a vast rate of speed, but a uniform rate of speed, changing their position in space. And then we can look around at several of these particles, such as the sun, Earth and other things, see that they're changing their relationships to each other in space at a uniform rate, and having perceived this, why, then, of course, we are looking at a change in time. Change of position brings about time.

If instead of following Is-nesses with Not-is-nesses, we followed them with As-isnesses, nobody could ever possibly get into any trouble. The way you get into trouble is to follow an Is-ness with a blunt, thud, Not-is-ness. (1) There it is. (2) I don't want it. (3) It isn't. Oh ho! What's the difference between these two operations? It's a very interesting difference: You've got an Is-ness. You have an ash tray, you don't want the ash tray any more, so the one operation, a correct one as far as you are concerned if you just really didn't want it any more, would be simply to do an As-is-ness. A perfect duplicate. Gone. You haven't got an ash tray any more. To follow an Is-ness with an As-is-ness, brings you into an actual Not-is-ness right there.

There is no such commodity as time. It isn't anything that can be poured from one bucket to the other. But then this happens to be true of matter too. You can't pour matter from one bucket to another, actually, unless you first made a postulate that you could. And in such a wise, time cannot take place until a postulate is made concerning it, and in this universe the postulate had to do with change of location in space. And when change of location in space occurred, then time occurred.

Or, on the other hand, you didn't do an As-is-ness. And you've done what? You have refused the responsibility for having created it, and you have said, Somebody else creates it and I don't want it. You've said somebody else. You've postulated the existence of somebody else with regard to this thing and you've said, "Another determinism is placing this thing before me and therefore I don't want it, so I'm going to say that it isn't, but it really belongs to somebody else." We have to postulate another determinism, which is to say, refuse the responsibility for having created the object, before we can get such a thing as a Not-is-ness.

Well now, you could change something's location in space simply by lying about it, and you'd get a persistence. You'd come off as-isness. Now, the moment you change something's location in space, you come away from as-isness, and it doesn't unmock, so you get persistence.

Now, an individual can fail utterly. This is a very curious lot of phenomena that we are looking at here, and of course, we had no serious intent with this phenomena, which is a fortunate thing. Otherwise, somebody realizing exactly how this is done, would sooner or later perhaps unmock the Republican Party or Russia, leave a hole, and of course to do that, you would have to accept the viewpoint of 200 million Russians. You could unmock Russia if you did that, but you would have to take full responsibility.

Now, an individual is as well off as he can change things in location in space. Let's take up the Prelogics and we find out the Prelogics – those that precede the Logics and Axioms – have to do with "a thetan is an energy-space production unit and that a thetan can change objects in location in space." And right next door to that, we have the fact that a thetan can create objects to change in space of his own creation. In other words, he can do all of these things, and we get that, in this universe – and this is pretty common to most universes – we get those postulates as the conditional postulates upon the universe.

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

Now, he makes another postulate and that other postulate, of course, is that something can persist and that there is a time stream, that there is a persistence and so on. And this postulate is represented as time. So when we locate something in space, we are actually working with the time postulate: persistence.

The physical universe as we look at it right around us here is an Is-ness for one reason only. We all agree that somebody else created it, whether that is God or Mugjub or Bill. We agree that somebody else brought these conditions into existence, and so long as we are totally agreed on this, boy have we got everything solid. And the moment we agree otherwise, and we say, Well, we made it – it starts to get thin. This will worry a preclear for a moment. It's just as if he feels he could never make another one. It'll get thin.

If you see somebody who has failed often, what do you mean by failed? He has decided to move something in space and then hasn't. Total anatomy of failure: He has decided to move something in space and then hasn't. The way it's recognized in this universe, that's the total anatomy of failure.

In the processing of reality, then, if you handled Is-ness all by itself, you would simply have an individual start looking at what he considers to exist. And the most solid manifestation of that would be the space in the vicinity, the walls in the vicinity, and so on. That would be the most elementary process that we could do. Just start spotting spaces and walls, and let what happens happen. That's all. Just ask the individual to keep on spotting things, very permissively. Suppose he kept on looking at them with his physical vision – we find that he would get up to a certain level and then he'd start to have body somatics (Somatics: perceptions, stemming from the Reactive Bank, of past physical pain or discomfort, restimulated in present time) because making the body do this continually is actually processing a reality vaguely in the direction of an As-is-ness. It's not bluntly or sharply in the direction of As-is-ness. It's just asking them to process it a little bit in that direction: 'Let's take the spaces around here just as you see them.' 'Take the spaces around here just as you see them.' 'Look at a spot. Look at another spot. Just take this things as you see them.' And of course after a while, the walls are going to get brighter and brighter and duller and duller and – gone.

Of course, he could simply postulate that he'd failed. So that's another anatomy of failure. He's always free to do that. You can, yourself, do that, not to run out anything or anything of the sort, just simply say to yourself that you failed, not for any cause, reason or anything else. "I failed and therefore I have to feel a certain way," and so forth, and then feel that way. You could. Or you could simply postulate, "I've won." Not won anything, you understand, you just postulate that you've won now, and the conditions of winning are feeling good, which is part of the woof and warp of postulates, and therefore "I feel good"– having given you a reason to feel good.

Well, when they get brighter, that's all right. The body will still feel all right, but when it starts dulling down the body doesn't like this. It does not think this is the best thing to do. It would not recommend this as subject matter for an article in a body-building magazine.

Or why don't you just postulate that you feel good? It doesn't matter where you enter into this. There is no sensible concatenation here. We are only talking about an agreed-upon concatenation.

Because the body knows it will fall if it stands in space. Therefore this very, very simple process would not necessarily have to be completed by remedying havingness, but just by getting the fellow to close his eyes, and spot anything he could see, no matter how vaguely, as a thetan. Just spot anything he sees. If he sees a nothingness, O.K., if he sees a somethingness, O.K. Just get him spotting. We don't care what he sees. We might indicate various directions but we would make a very bad mistake if we indicated them as body directions. On your right. On your left. Above your head. Oh no, no. We just ask him to look around, and what he sees, spot a couple of spots on it. Did you do that? Now something else, spot a couple more spots on that. Well, we know already that if we've run it permissively in the environment, he's had to point them out and walk around to them. He will obey orders.

This universe and the postulates which formed it is not necessarily the best universe that could be made. It just happens to be the universe we're sitting in and it happens to be the universe in which our postulates are being made and unmade, and it just happens that it went together on these four conditions of as-isness, alter-isness, not-isness and isness. So we've got these four conditions, and those four conditions, of course, woven together, make this universe act like it does and behave like it does and gives you the ideas of what a win is and what a lose is and so on. It's on a postulate basis.

Now that we've got him to a point where he will physically obey commands we can trust him to close his eyes and spot spots or spot spaces or spot anything he wants to spot with his eyes closed. We just simply keep on spotting them, and that would be the most elementary process there is in Scientology.

But the most curious manifestation of all of this is the manifestation of time. And that is our main interest here this morning. And we have this matter of time occupying a considerable space in the field of aberration. And that is because of this: It is the one postulate where an individual begins to depend on other-determinisms more than any other way.

You see, we see the sun moving and we take the cue from the sun as to how much time we have. We see clocks moving and we take the cue from them as to how much time we have. That tells us how much persistence we have. Oh, so we're being told by these objects whether we can live or not, aren't we? That's just the most curious of things in this universe, that one would take his clue as to whether or not he was going to persist on whether or not the sun moved a certain direction or distance. That's idiotic. So the sun did figure eights. If I'm not dependent upon the sunlight, I'm certainly not going to die just because of that.

And a thetan is not dependent on sunlight. Quite the contrary, a thetan is dependent for his good health on manufacturing his own jolly old energy; he's not dependent on the sun manufacturing his energy for him. That's just an intricate hook-together. And that, again, depends on postulates.

Well, now, the postulate of time could be simply, cleanly made in some universe, and say," Well, there will now be a continuance for one and all," and that would be that. But that wasn't the way it was made in this universe. It was made on the basis that when as-isness is postulated, in order to get a persistence we have to practice alter-isness. We'll have to change the thing in location, one way or another, in order to get a persistence.

Now, people get inverted on this in this universe, so they take an isness and they change it in location; it starts disappearing.

Did you ever have somebody move a postulate with a mass of energy around? He starts moving it around and the energy mass starts disappearing.

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

Now, therefore, a person can invert in this universe, and we run into isness followed by not-isness. A person can finally say, "Well, if I move something around, it'll disappear." He's made it a counter-postulate.

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

Now, alter-isness produces two types of persistence: we get persistence as isness and we get a persistence as not-isness. See? The fellow is persisting, but he doesn't want to be there. Well, he's persisting because he doesn't want to be there. This, too, is a change, although he's fixed in a locale. Now, there's the fellow who is persisting because he wants to be there and he's persisting because of change.

They're both alter-isnesses. An individual's desire to change continues his persistence in the spot he's in, if he cannot move. But he had to postulate that he couldn't move before this could happen. So we get the dwindling spiral.

Now, we also get the manifestation of accumulating energy on a preclear. Every time a preclear has said, "Now I am going to move," and hasn't moved, or he says, "Now I am moving and I'm going to continue moving," and he's stopped – you know, such as you're walking down the street and you walk into a lamppost – any time this has occurred, he has lost, which is to say, he's got a counter-postulate. So he adds up loss as stationary.

This universe, you see, brands everything which isn't moving as innocent, and the things that are moving are guilty – always. So he's lost.

Well, how do you lose then? By getting fixed in a place. That's how you lose.

Now, an individual who is unable to move objects out of a certain location, eventually gets to a position where, when he's trying to move these objects out of this location, he recognizes a failure, and so he goes into apathy. He says, "I don't have enough energy to do this."

What nonsense! He doesn't have energy enough to move energy? Why doesn't he just postulate it someplace else? (But that's another thing.) He could say it is as it is and it would disappear, and then he postulates existence someplace else and then change that around so it couldn't be disappeared again, and he'd be all set. What's he doing picking things up?

Now, a drill, however, in moving things and putting them back in the same place again will run out this consistent, continuous failure, and so you get Opening Procedure by Duplication and its tremendous effectiveness. If it's done with a little bit heavier object than is ordinary, an individual recognizes he can even pick up and put back into place the same object and win, not fail: you've changed the basic postulate by which he's working in this universe, which is to say, if he can't move he's failed.

All right. However that may be, we have these various conditions. And the point we want to drive home, immediately and right this minute, is that time depends, in this universe, on alter-isness – at least the desire to change. So anybody who is desiring to change is persisting in time. And people who do not want to change, and so forth, do not persist in time.

The whole universe is rigged around these postulates.