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

I want to talk to you now about four conditions of consideration.

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

We start out at the beginning, or anywhere along the road, with this as the highest truth: We are dealing with a static which can consider.

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

That it can consider and then perceive what it considers makes it a space-energy-masstime production unit. That it can perceive what it considers makes this static into a space-energy-mass-and-time production unit.

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

You see, don't ever get hung up on whether or not the actuality that is made is an actuality. This is the wrong way to approach this problem. It's the way people have been approaching this problem for so long that the problem has remained, up to this time, pretty darned abstruse.

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

That you can perceive something, and that you can perceive that somebody else also perceives something, qualifies only one of these conditions of existence. It qualifies only one of the conditions. That's isness. And that is reality – isness.

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

Now, that you simply say something is there and then perceive that it is there means, simply, that you have put something there and perceived that it is there; that's what it means. But that is no less an isness. That nobody is there to agree with you at the time you do this does not reduce the fact that you have created an isness. It is an isness. It exists. It exists. Not just for you. I mean, it just exists, you see?

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

Now, if you were to now desire that that persisted, you would then have to go through a certain mechanical step: you would have to make sure that you did not perfectly duplicate it. That is, create it again in the same time, in the same space, with the same mass and the same energy, because it would no longer be there.

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

But what have you done, really, when you have done that? You've just taken a thorough look. And what you create will vanish if you simply look at it, unless you pull this trick: unless you pull the trick that it is alterable and that you have altered it.

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

Now, if you say you have altered it and now that you have forgotten the exact instant it was made and the character of it, it of course, then, can persist. Because you can look at it all you please with your first look, you might say, and it won't vanish. Don't look at it, however, with your second look, because it'll be gone. Again, you will have duplicated it – a perfect duplicate.

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

The definition of a perfect duplicate is creating a thing again in its same time, in its same space, with its same energy, mass, motion or continuance. Now, that's a perfect duplicate. For instance, if we looked here at the front of the room, saw an object, we would simply have to look at it and conceive ourselves to have made its exact duplicate or counterpart, which is to say, conceive ourselves to have made it. Just conceive ourselves as creating it, in other words – just no more and no less than that. And, of course, it would get rather thin. But to some who are having a rough time with conditions of existence, it will get brighter and brighter and brighter and then get thinner and thinner and thinner. And it'll disappear for one. This is a curious thing, but it is immediately subjected to and can be subjected to a very exacting proof.

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

All right. Now, let's look at this very carefully and let's look at what reality is. Reality is a postulated reality. Reality does not have to persist to be a reality. The condition of reality is simply isness. That is the total condition of reality.

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

Now we get a more complex reality when we enter into the formula of communication. Because this takes somebody else. We have to say we are somebody else, now, viewing this and that we don't know when it was made or where it was made to get a persistence of the object for that somebody else.

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

But let us say we just, more or less accidentally, go into communication with somebody else, and we have an argument – that is to say, chitter-chatter back and forth – about what this thing is. If that other person perfectly duplicates exactly what we have created, it will again disappear. It doesn't matter, really, who created it; he only has to assume that he created it for it to disappear for him. In other words, he has to duplicate it in its same space, same energy, same mass, at the same instant it was created and it'll disappear for him.

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

So you and he had better alter this thing which you made so that you both can perceive it. And then we get what is known as an agreed-upon reality, and that is an isness with agreement.

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

Now actually, the word reality itself is commonly accepted to mean "that which we perceive." Now, this, then, is the real definition for a reality – the one that is commonly used – and that would be an agreed-upon isness. An agreed-upon isness – that would be reality.

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

All right. So much for that.

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

We have another condition. A not-isness is a protest. The common practice of existence, of course, is to try to banish an isness by using it to destroy itself. They take a mock-up of some kind or another, such as a building or something of the sort, and they try to destroy it by blowing it down with dynamite or doing something like that. (I mean, it's a very practical application, this material I'm giving you. It isn't esoteric; it doesn't particularly apply to the engram bank. This is just existence.)

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

All right. Is can be translated quite generally as "existence."

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

All right. We get a not-isness being enforced upon an isness by the quality of the isness itself or by a new postulate by which the individual is saying "It's not there."

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

Now, this new postulate does not pattern the mechanics of the creation of the isness. See, the new postulate by which you simply say, "It's not there," doesn't pattern itself with the exact time of creation, the exact space, the exact continuance – same mass, same space, same time – and as a consequence, we say, "All right. It's not there." It will probably dim down for you, but you have to do something else: you have to put a black screen up or push it away or chew it up or do something to it here rather than giving it a perfect duplicate (which we'll get to in a moment). But we do something else here. We say," It's not there." And that's notisness. We say something doesn't exist which we know darn well does exist. See?

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

Now, you have to know something darn well does exist before you can try to postulate it out of existence and thus create a not-isness.

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

Now, the definition of not-isness would be, simply, a definition of "trying to create out of existence, by postulate or force, something which one knows priorly exists." One is trying to talk against his own agreements and postulates with his new postulate or is trying to spray down something with the force of other isnesses in order to cause a cessation of the isness he objects to. And this is the handling of mass to handle mass, of force to handle force and is definitely and positively wrong if you ever want to destroy anything. That is not the way to go about destroying something; that is the way to destroy yourself, which is why nations engage in it. Force versus force.

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

We see a very badly misunderstood rendition of this in early Christian times with the introduction of the idea that if you were hit you should turn the other cheek. Well, that's a very, very bad thing to do. Now, the truth of the matter is, if it were rendered this wise, it would have made much more sense: When you encountered force, don't apply more and new force to conquer the force which has been exerted, because if you do, you will then be left with a chaos of force. And pretty soon you won't be able to trace anything through this chaos of force, you see? So "turn the other cheek" is actually a very workable situation if it's simply translated to mean force must not be used to combat force.

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

Now, the way to properly handle such a situation is just to duplicate it perfectly.

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

All right. Now let's go into this business of a perfect duplicate. A perfect duplicate, again, is, you might say, creating the thing once more in the same time, in the same space, with the same energy and the same mass. A perfect duplicate is not made by mocking the thing up alongside of itself. That is a copy or, more technically, a facsimile, a made facsimile.

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

Copy and facsimile, by the way, are the same words. But a facsimile we conceive to be a picture which was taken of the physical universe. And a copy would be something that a thetan, on his own volition, simply made of an object in the physical universe with full knowingness. In other words, he copied it – he knows he's copying it. A facsimile can be made without one's knowledge by a machine or the body or something of that character.

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

All right. This is a perfect duplicate, mechanically. But it is more important to recognize it in the terms of our four categories of existence. It's as-isness. If we can recognize the total as-isness of anything, it will vanish. Sometimes if it had many component parts, we would have to recognize the total as-isness as including the as-isness of each component part of it.

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

Now, in that lies the secret of destroying actual matter. And actual matter can be destroyed by a thetan if he is willing to include in the as-isness – which he is now postulating toward any object which exists (toward any isness) – the as-isness of each component part.

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

Now, let's look at that very rapidly and recognize here that a thetan created a mock-up and this mock-up was agreed upon very widely, and another process, alter-ism, which we'll go into in a moment, was addressed to it and it became more and more solid and more and more solid.

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

And then one day somebody cut it in half and dragged part of it up the hill to make somebody's doorstep. And that's already, you see, out of location. Same place is part of this mock-up – same space, same place. So it's already been removed from the place it was mocked up, you see, and it's been moved up to the top of the hill. Now it's making somebody's doorstep. Now, those people themselves don't quite remember where the doorstep came from, if asked suddenly, but after a while these houses up there – and, by the way, just mock-ups like everything else – are torn down or something, and somebody picks up this doorstep and chews it up for road ballast; throws it out in the road to be used for road. And they make a road with it and it just runs just fine. Well, this is alongside of some wharves, and one day, why, the road is no longer being used – they now have a big, long steel pier or something that comes out there. And somebody uses a steam shovel to pick up a whole bunch of rocks and gravel and dump them into the hold of a ship which is going to South Africa or something of the sort, and it takes it down there. And they unload this ballast, and the natives use it to gravel the garden or something, and at length, why, there's a volcanic explosion; it's buried under twelve feet of lava.

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

And time marches on, in other words. And this thing is getting more and more remote from its agreed-upon original position, much less its postulated moment – the moment it was postulated as related to the time span of the people who were agreeing upon it. You see, they've agreed upon a time span, so this thing is aging. And they agreed upon this space too, and it's getting moved around in this space. And here, atom by atom, as the aeons roll along, this object, which was part of an original mock-up, is now distributed all over the place.

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

It'd be fairly hard to trace unless you suddenly took a good look at it and sort of ask it, or located it easily.

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

Now, conservation of energy blows up if anything is created in the same time and space. In view of the fact that the time itself is a postulate, it's very easy to reassume the first time of anything. Just like you ask a person in Dianetics to go back to the moment when. Well, he could reassume the time. And if you would also ask him to go to the moment when and the place where – if we had just added that – and then said, "Okay. Now, duplicate it with its own energy," why, it would have blown up. And this, by the way, runs out engrams and it blows up engrams like mad. It is not a process that we would use today, particularly, but it's a process that you should know about.

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

So a person, to create an as-isness, would have to create the as-isness of the object itself and all of its parts. And only at that moment would he escape the law of conservation of energy.

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

Conservation of energy depends upon the chaos of all parts of all things being mixed up with all the parts of all the things. In other words, we couldn't have any conservation of energy unless we were all completely uncertain as to where this atom or that atom originated. And if we were totally uncertain as to the original creation spot in the space of the atom, molecule, proton, whatever, if we were to remain totally ignorant we, of course, could not destroy it, because force will not destroy it. Force will not destroy anything made of force.

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

And in view of the fact that you'd have to make as many as-isnesses as there are the atoms in the object, why, it looks awfully complex, unless you could span your attention that wide and that fast. And of course, at that moment, why, it would blow up.

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

Therefore, conservation of energy is exceeded. It itself is a consideration.

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

Now, we've taken care of as-isness by this mechanics of a perfect duplicate. As-isness would be the condition created again in the same time, in the same space (same place), with the same energy and the same mass, the same motion, in the same time continuum.

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

The same time continuum is only incidentally important. It comes up as importance when you're crossing between universes. And particles do not cross between universes. A particle is only as good as it is riding on its own time continuum. You destroy the time continuum and, of course, no activity can take place from that moment forward. That's completely aside from this. I mean, here's group A and they made a set of postulates which gives them certain energy and mass, and over here is group B and they make a certain set of postulates. Unless group A and group B get together and mutually agree to accept each other's masses, why, you just would never get to a point where the mass created by group A and the mass created by group B would interchange. Somebody has to be around, always, who was part and parcel of the creation of the mass looked at, at least by agreement. See, he has to be around, at least by agreement. And we get a time continuum. We get a continuous consciousness.

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

Now, it's this thing that they talk about when they talk about cosmic consciousness, which is a very, very fancy word for saying "Well, we've all been here for a long time." We could translate it much more intelligibly that way.

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

All right. Now, let's take this as-isness and let's discover that if a thing will disappear, if a mock-up will disappear – and that too can be subjected to proof very easily – if a mock-up can disappear simply by creating it in the same time, in the same space, with the same energy and same mass (in other words, just repeat the postulate, you might say), if it'd disappear the second you applied as-isness, then people start avoiding as-isness in order to have an isness. And that is done by alter-isness.

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

We have to change the character of something; we have to lie about it for it to exist. And so we get any universe being a universe of lies. Then when this universe of lies compels you to tell its truth, we can get very confused. We go back in history, we find people on every hand telling us "Well, maybe there was such a person as Christ and maybe there wasn't, and maybe he wrote this and maybe he didn't, and maybe the material came from there and it came from there" and boy, are they giving him survival.

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

Why? Survival itself is dependent upon alter-isness – a-1-t-e-r. Alter-isness. In order to get an as-isness to persist, it is absolutely necessary, then, that its moment of creation be masked. Its moment, space, mass and energy, if duplicated, would cause that to cease to exist. The recognition of as-isness will bring about a noneness – bring about a disappearance. In other words, a return to basic postulate. See? You'd have to make the postulate all over again, and then to get it to exist any further, why, you would then have to go forward and change it in such a way that people would not actually be able to recognize its source at all. You'd just have to obscure the devil out of the source in order to get a persistence. You see that? You'd have to say it came from somewhere else, by somebody else.

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

Now, you see, people have done this with such things as Dianetics. The last rave I read on this subject claimed that it was really invented in the late part of the eighteenth century by a guy by the name of Hickelhauser or Persilhozer or something. This is a fact. I mean, here we had something which could be un-mocked very easily because it was set up to be unmocked – see, just set up to unmock. Very, very easy to simply say that its as-isness was such-and-so and so-and-so, and it would have practically disappeared if you'd continued to assert that its as-isness was what its as-isness was.

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

In order to get a persistence of it, of any kind, we would have had to have done something very strange and peculiar: we would have had to have altered it, we would have had to have entered the practice of alter-isness. Now, we begin alter-isness and we have the thing persisting. Something will persist, then, only so long as it is not perfectly duplicated – which is to say, its as-isness isn't recognized. You see that? So that if we try to alter something bad, we'll make it persist, one way or the other.

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

But don't think that if you're going to alter something just as-is we will get an isness. Anytime we practice alter-isness on anything, what do you know? We will get an isness, whether it's bad or good, beautiful or ugly. Whenever we practice alter-isness, we are going to, then, get a persistence of the condition.

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

Now, this is about the highest common denominator that you could talk about this on. So that if you knew this data you could, however, practice alter-isness. Oh ho! If we just took an ax and took a long, sharp heave and blew the whole thing up in smoke – bang! Ax blade went all the way through.

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

If you know that life is basically a consideration of a static which is not located in time, space, which has no mass, energy or wavelength, then, if you know also that as-isness is a condition which will unmock or disappear; that you have to practice alter-isness in order to get an isness; that after an isness has occurred, the mechanism of handling it is to postulate a not-isness, or use force to bring about a not-isness, and that any further alter-isness practiced on it will only continue to create an isness of this new condition, and that every new isness is going to be met by the postulated or force-handled not-isness, and that every not-isness is going to be followed by an alter-isness which is going to result in a persistence of what we now have – we begin to see, after a while, that there was no way out of this giddy little maze of mirrors except this recognition that we have a static that can consider, and the pattern by which we arrived at what we call reality, solidity and so forth is contained in these four conditions.

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

The cycle of existence is, then, for a static to consider an isness as an as-isness. See? It just says "There is." That's as-isness. And then to alter the as-isness, even to his own recognition, and obscure his knowingness as to that as-isness to procure an isness. That having procured an isness, he usually can be counted upon, sooner or later, to practice a not-isness. And not liking the results, since what he – the isness he was contesting, you see, doesn't disappear. It simply hangs up and he gets unhappy about it, you see? He now would practice a new alterisness – which would get a confirmation of the not-isness he now has – which would then persist. And we find out that life can enter itself upon a very, very dizzy cycle. The new isness is treated with an alter-isness, is followed by a not-isness and is followed again by a new condition, which is persisting – a new isness. And so we get this back and forth and seesawing around.

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

Now, this depends upon a basic postulate that we agree that things proceed in a fairly orderly fashion or a uniform rate of spacing or at speed or at tolerance or something of the sort. Time has to be entered in there. And we must have had a postulate right in there ahead of all of these isnesses that would determine whens. And in the absence of that one, you'd got no time continuum, so there'd never been any such thing as a persistence. So time fits right in there.

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

Now, do you see this progress of these various conditions?

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

I think that the problem of existence now narrows down just to this: an examination of the actual agreements of time to blow all the conditions of isnesses. But the agreements as to time itself are conditional upon what was created in the time stream, and we get basic postulates in there, resistant to all effects, as being time itself. Resistance to all effects.

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

Well, anyway, these are the four conditions of isnesses and the various definitions which accompany them and will explain any manifestation of life, human behavior, matter, space or time.

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

That's this universe.

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

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

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

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

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

The whole universe is rigged around these postulates.