Okay. Now we have these various conditions of existence – four various conditions of existence.

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

These four conditions of existence which we are studying are actually variations of existence itself. They are certain attitudes about existence and they are the basic attitudes about existence.

How much in the way of processes could we get just out of the concept of Is-ness? Just that one datum. Well, actually we could get a very great many.

Now, we could make many more attitudes and we would find that we were all deriving them from these four. But we could make these four and find out that we were all deriving them from one: isness, or reality.

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.

There has to be an isness before you can do an alter-isness; there has to be an isness before you can do a not-isness. Isn't that right?

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.

Okay. There has to be an isness before you can do a not-isness. Unless, of course, you want to postulate it in reverse. But we are talking, now, about this particular universe and how it got here.

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.

And we discover as we look along the track that these four conditions of existence presuppose the existence of a postulate known as time. In other words, all existence presupposes the postulate time.

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, time is just a plain, ordinary postulate which says out of a nonconsecutive beingness, which doesn't exist forever – there's no forever, see? It would just be there, see? No forever involved, no instant involved, it just hasn't any consecutive existence at all. And out of this we would have to make a postulate "there would now be a consecutive existence" – consecutive existences. Or there'd have to be a consecutive series of states. And out of this consecutive series of states, we would get, then, a parade of time; a time continuum.

A basic consideration could be “I am on an effect point. I am being the effect of many blows” - 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”. Therefore he makes the consideration that he must get off of this point. Well, what is monitoring the consideration that he must get off that point?

Now, an individual who is simply occupying space without any energy involved whatsoever has the same feeling, but a bad one – he doesn't have a good feeling about it. Without any space, he could have a good feeling about it – no space, no energy, no continuum; he could have a fairly good feeling about this. But when he gets into the matter of a space, now he has this feeling of forever-ness unmocked. He makes that uncomfortable for himself, so he will now go on creating consecutive states of existence and have a game. Space is necessary to start this game, but when you've just got space and you've got nothing else, it's rather unbearable. Do you see that? You're already occupying, so there is an existence there, but it isn't an existence which has any consecutive difference of state. And that's real poor. You get this feeling every once in a while in space opera, if you're ever fooling around with that.

The fact that he’s on it, of course.

All right. Now, here we have, then, existence in one state being conditional upon a time postulate which would include a space-energy manifestation. We have to have space, we have to have energy, and now we don't necessarily have a consecutive existence, do you see? But this would be a simultaneousness. There would be no question about whether you made the postulate for space and energy before you made the postulate of time, or the postulate of time after you made the space-energy manifestation. Be no question of any postulate before or after, because you have not postulated the postulate which causes a before or after. And that postulate would be time.

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.

So, actually, to have a game, it's a simultaneous action whereby you postulate space, energy, time – space, energy, continuous existence – which is an as-isness, space, altered; energy, as-isness altered; time, as-isness altered. Your three items there have to have the time postulate with alter-isness in them in order to get a persistence. That's how it's done in this universe. You don't just have to do this all the time, but when those three consecutive postulates are made simultaneously, why, we then have a continuum of existence demarked by differences of position of the particle in the space, and we have time being marked out for us very neatly.

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.

We have to alter position in order to get a continuousness. We have to say, "It is here.

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.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 it's here. Now it's here. Now it's here."

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.

Now, there's another way of making time come true. We say "Space-no space, spaceno space, space-no space, space-no space, space-no space." You're postulating, however, that you can do this before you can say" Space-no space, space-no space."

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.

Well now, this postulate is so easy for a thetan to make, it might be considered a native part of his mock-up. So here we have, however, before this, an ideal state – that is to say, an idealized or just a theoretical state – we have this theoretical state whereby we merely have a static which has no space, no mass, no wavelength, no motion, no time, which has the ability to consider. And we are dealing with the basic stuff of life, just by definition.

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

Now, it is very peculiar that we, mixed up in all of this energy, and so forth, and way on down the track from the time this postulate was made – you see anything specious in the way my remarks are hanging together? – very difficult and very strange that we could even discuss this higher state of existence which was made trillions of years ago. No. You see, it must have been concurrent with this, right here. And so we never say – we don't use the word existence, we use the word is. We don't use the word then or will be. See, we don't go back into the past or go into the future for this continuousness at all; it's just is.

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.

Now, in past ages it was only necessary to say," Well, reality is reality and you'll just have to accept it, you know. It's just reality. Nothing more you could know about it than that."

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.

Oh, yes! There's a lot more you could know about reality than simply it is.

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.

So, is, is not a complete and embracive definition of reality. It's not complete and embracive. Because reality has a certain mechanical structure, and that structure is composed of these four states of existence. And it'd actually take all these four states of existence to make the kind of an existence which we are now living, and that is to say, we would have to have isness, then not-isness and alter-isness. And did it strike you before that we might have forgotten and might never have known about, and it might not have been called to our attention directly, this other state? We've always had these three states: alter-isness, not-isness and, of course, isness.

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.

Alter-isness and not-isness, of course, are variations of isness and depend upon isness. But there was a fourth one, and that's as-isness, and that is a perfect duplicate. As-isness. And that condition natively exists at an instant of creation. It exists at this instant of creation. And it also can be made to exist again anytime anybody wants to make it exist again simply by saying, "As is."

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.

If anybody had truly and actually sat down and accepted reality and had got all of his fellow beings to simply accept reality, we wouldn't have any. That's all.

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.

So I think it must have been a half-hearted thing or acceptance of reality in the past must have been defined as "Let's see, now. I think everybody should be unhappy, miserable, oooh, three-quarters dead, enslaved under very thorough control. Now, that is reality and I want you to accept it."

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.

That's what the psychiatrist does, you know? "You'll just have to accept the fact that you're a homosexual."

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.

The fellow has made it plain many times that he wasn't a homosexual, he's a heterosexual.

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.

"Well, you're really a… You're really a… a paleontological uh… aphrodisiac. That is exactly uh… the psychiatric classification that we got out of a Latin book and you'll just have to accept this reality or we won't have any more to do with you as a patient. We'll kick you the hell out of here." You know. Good, solid treatment. I'm afraid this was the way reality was being classified all along the track.

You could just say to this fellow, Get the idea of moving this dish. Now move it. Now get the idea of moving this dish again. Get the position you’re going to move it to now. Now move it. Now get the idea of moving this dish, now get the place you’re going to move it to, and move it. Surprisingly enough an individual will sometimes turn on a violent body reaction on this.

"I'm going to dream something up and I'm going to hold a gun on you." "And the trouble with you is you won't face reality." But whose reality? Whose reality in each case? Somebody else's! So this reality was actually another condition: other-determined as-isness, hm? Other-determined, which is not-isness.

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.

The way you get not-isness is to say, "As is created by you." Aw, that's an awful one! That's a big curve. And that is not-isness. It's an as-isness created by somebody else, which of course isn't an as-isness at all. It's a very specious as-isness. And, naturally, the world would sort of look unreal to everybody if Joe Blow and Doctor Stinkwater and the Heavily Laden Order of Pyramids all said, "This is reality and this is as it is, and you'd better accept it." We've got a not-isness. Isn't it?

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.

So if everything starts to sort of dim down on you and you kind of find things going out, you know, and getting sort of resistively thin… Do you know what I mean? Resistively thin; they're all sort of transparent, but they're there? Or they're all hung with black sheets. You must assume at that time that you have faced up to too many as-isnesses which somebody else created.

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

In other words, somebody else says, "This is the way things are and you said it." You get that operation in conversation. "And yesterday you said to me – just when I got up, you said to me, 'You never work, you are a dirty loafer.' You remember that, don't you?" I think every familial unit of thetans when they get all together, and so on, should always have, not a bible, but so-and-so's "Rules of Evidence" lying right there to be resorted to at any time. And there ought to be a court in every neighborhood to which you could repair and decide whether or not this was an as-isness or a not-isness.

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.

Now, what is a not-isness? A not-isness comes about from that exact manifestation, or simply by the separate postulate "Well, it is and I regret it – it isn't." You know, you could have made it and then said it wasn't.

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.

Now, the funny part of it is that if you made it and you know you made it, you can always say," It doesn't exist now." By saying what? By saying "I made it." It as-isness'd, see? You accept the responsibility for having created it and you get a not-isness.

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.

So there are really two conditions of not-isness: there's just vanishment or the other one, which is what we mean, which is an isness which somebody is trying to postulate out of existence by simply saying "It isn't."

There are two kinds of As-is-ness:

A not-isness in our terminology would be this specialized case of an individual trying to banish something without taking responsibility for creating it. Definite, positive and precise definition: trying to vanish something without taking the responsibility for creating it.

There is the As-is-ness where you postulate it in the space and time - you postulate it right there, and there it exists.

And the only result of doing this is to make it all unreal, to make it forgotten, to make it back of the black screen, to make it transparent, to make it dull down, to give it over to a machine, to wear glasses – anything that you could possibly do to get a dim-down of an isness. And that is done by saying – just this, just this precise operation; no other operation: "I didn't make it. It isn't." See? "I didn't do it, so it doesn't exist."

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

And that will always bring about this other condition of not-isness.

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-is-ness. 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.

See? "I didn't create it, I have nothing to do with it, I have no responsibility for this at all, so it doesn't exist as far as I'm concerned." "Nhrrn-nrrn-nrrn-nrrn."

It hasn’t occurrred 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.

Now, built into the woof and warp of the track, the very composite on which an individual is running – he doesn't have to run on these postulates at all, you see, but he is running on this makeup of postulates… He of course, then, will trigger into all the rest of his postulates and they'll cross-reference into sticking him right there with it. He's got it.

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.

Now, the only way he can get rid of it now is just to dim it down, dim it down.

If instead of following Is-nesses with Not-is-nesses, we followed them with As-is-nesses, 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:

Now, the funny part of it is that an individual can run a gradient scale of change on something if the gradient scale is back toward his acceptance of responsibility for having created it.

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.

It would not be far enough to go, in Dianetics, simply to find out that your mother did it. That was what your mother said. That wouldn't be far enough to go. You'd have to go back this far: Mother said it – you know, you'd have to postulate that the time was now – Mother said it, and that keyed in the fact that here on the track, whether a million, two billion, eight billion, sixteen trillion years ago, "I said it."

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.

Every time somebody else can put one of your machines or one of your engrams into restimulation, it is only because he can work on something which was natively created by yourself. All things carry the germ of their own destruction. And you have postulated the germ of your own destruction. And then later on people come along and because you're in communication with them, and so forth, they can give you a key-in.

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.

So any engram, as we were operating with it in Dianetics, was a key-in. When I discovered that the whole track ran back-back-back-back-back – back. "No! No! No!" Backback-back. "No! My golly!" Back-back. "Where the heck are we now? Oh? Oh!"

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.

We're back to where the guy did it in the first place. Well, that's very interesting. And the result of that was the essay on responsibility in Advanced Procedure and Axioms – the essay on full responsibility.

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.

Well, a fellow did. He created the condition from which he is now suffering. And he didn't even create it in other wise than he is now suffering it. But it has been keyed in and he has consented even to it being keyed in.

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:

Nothing really is sneaking up on anybody. That's a horrible thing, isn't it? People haven't even made it worse. But we're having a good game. If that game is a game called psychosomatic illness, bereft lover, neglected baby, it's still a game. And as such, the individual is still playing all roles.

“Let’s take the spaces around here just 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.

Now, what happens is that as an individual goes along the line, he starts identifying himself with the source point and receipt point of the communication line. As a little child, he's the one who identifies himself as the one who is talked to. Very seldom do you ever discover a little child giving Mother a good lecture. You seldom discover this. But if you do remember it, you probably remember it with great satisfaction of the good lecture you gave your mother.

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. 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. 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.

Here is a condition: the individual has identified himself with a continuous-effect point or a continuous-cause point. And having said "I am now on this point," he now makes his considerations below the level of that point. See, he's considered he's on the point. Now all further considerations are monitored by this consideration that he's on the point, as long as he's on the point. Now, he'd have to recognize that he was on the point (an as-isness) before he'd come off the point. You see that?

A process immediately occurs on such a level. If you just simply ask an individual, Straightwire, this question over and over and over and over and over: "Where could you be where you would be willing to recognize and realize that you were?" "Where could you be that you would be willing to recognize that you were?" And you just run the gradient scale all the way back up the line to the point where the individual recognizes, finally, "You know, I'm sitting right here!" There wouldn't be any mysticism involved in this.

All right. Now, these conditions of existence could be composited up. They are interdependent, one upon another, you see?

An isness exists only because of as-isness – as-isness took place in the first place; it got created, then we had to alter it slightly to get an isness; we had to give up some responsibility for it and we had to shift it around. A not-isness, then, exists in order to provide a game.

A game is an isness which is being handled by a couple of not-isnesses, or an isness being handled by a not-isness, any way you want to look at it.

A football game can be added up in terms of existence, see? Here we have one side and it's got the ball, and so the other side must not-is the side that's got the ball. The side that's got the ball has to win – in other words, to arrive at a receipt point someplace along the line.

We get the communication formula itself as being lower than the conditions of existence. And we get affinity, reality and communication as simply being the methods by which existence is conducted. It is not the interplay of existences – so we're dealing with a higher echelon than ARC right now.

All right. Affinity really is merely the consideration of how well it's going. Agreement or reality itself, we're talking about isness. And there is where we enter the corner of the triangle. And we just slide into that triangle on that isness point and then it is modified by A and

C. They, of course, come in simultaneously with it.

But those are just a way we play the game, such as some people use drop kicks and some people use punts. This doesn't matter much. We could also add other ways to play this game, but that happens to be the way the game is being played.

All right. And we discover, then, that all of these conditions of existence then would add up to all kinds of manifestations of behavior. They would add up to all kinds of manifestations of behavior. Oh, there'd just be lots of them. There'd be a finite number, however; it would be the number of possible combinations, singly, doubly, trebly or quadruply of these four conditions of existence.

And if you want a little exercise sometime in geometry, you ought to do that. How many combinations can we get out of any set of four? Well, we can basically get any one of the four, can't we? But we found these four were somewhat interrelated, so it'd be hard to get just one of the four. But we could recognize one of the four as being its own state. We could isolate it. So there could be any one of these four.

Now, there could be any two of these four in combination with the other two, and then any three of these four in combination with the other three, and any four of these four all acting and all in combination, and then all of these things in various degrees of action.

We get this individual: only seventy-five percent of his life he's trying to say not-is to; another ten percent of his life he's giving an alter-is; one one-hundredth of one percent he's giving an as-is, or trying to give an as-is to, and the remainder is reality, acceptable reality. And that would be just one makeup of a personality.

If we said that there was a gradient scale of isness, a gradient scale of alter-isness, a gradient scale of as-isness (which there isn't), a gradient scale of not-isness, why, we would see, then, that you could take these gradient scales and at one grade or another have a character composited from them. You see? And then we would have a characterization.

What is the basic character of anybody? The basic character of anybody must be made up in some degree horn – must be made up from (in conditions of existence) – some space, some energy and his considerations of isness, not-isness and alter-isness. It's not necessarily true that any part of his considerations are made up of as-isness. Because if they were, they wouldn't be there. In other words, he also has been trained to believe that loss is bad. This is just a reverse postulate, just to keep life interesting. Loss is bad. So therefore, he has a tendency to avoid as-isness. So therefore, he'll avoid duplication, he'll avoid all kinds of things. He's afraid he'll unmock. There he is, stuck in eighteen feet thick, you couldn't get him out with a pneumatic drill, all scheduled to go back to the between-lives area and pick up another baby, and he's afraid he'll unmock. Silly, isn't it?

But it doesn't matter too much. Any life or continuance to him has begun to be better than no life at all.

You say, "Well, then why are you processing somebody?"

Well, let me tell you something about that. ARC Straightwire is listed in the first issue of The Auditor's Handbook as the third step of Intensive Procedure. In order to accomplish all three goals of getting into a two-way communication and so forth, just after the basic and most rudimentary chitterchat, I would start asking somebody why he was being processed. And you know, I'm just wicked enough to start asking a person why he's being processed for hours until he can at least find one reason why he's being processed. I would merely substitute, then, "Why are you being processed?" – or "Toward what goal are you being processed?" would be a much politer way to say it and maybe a better communication – "Toward what goal are you being processed?" as step three instead of ARC Straightwire. It's a very interesting process!

Most preclears come in, they say, "Process me." "Why?"

You would say immediately, and you have always supposed that they must have a good idea why they want to be processed. They don't have. They don't have any idea at all why they want to be processed. Because they want to be an exterior thetan? No, they might not even know about this. They just know there's something wrong with them.

The most horrible technique you could run on anybody in terms of producing results, tearing off their heads and everything else, would be "What wrong-ness or what wrong thing would you find other people would accept from you?" "What could you do that was wrong that other people would accept?" See? "Now, what wrongness could you accept from other people?" Back and forth and back and forth. Here goes the guy's manners. His social pattern, his behavior pattern and everything else will just go by the boards running that process.

But he won't be able to tell you, first and foremost, why he's being processed. He won't be able to tell that he wants to feel freer and so forth. He won't articulate any of these things. He'll just sit there and want to be processed.

Well, what toward? Until you've gotten him to put a little time on the track, he will use forever in processing because he's sitting in forever. He isn't moving on the time continuum. He's off the time continuum. Well, if you can't get him processing toward some goal or other, or in some direction, he just makes processing, of course, the end-all of everything, and he'll just go on being processed forever. But of course if he's going to be processed forever, he'll have to hold on to his aberrations forever, otherwise he couldn't be processed forever, could he? It's actually as elementary as that why cases stay a long time in processing.

So I've been sorely tempted to alter that step three to just this: "Well now, give me some goals you have in processing." And just keep it up.

Okay?