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

With the data we have on these conditions we can talk a little bit here about how your preclear might possibly recover from the state which he conceives himself to be in.

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.

We consider now that the pattern of existence through which he has been is a very definite track. It is a track which starts with As-is-ness, and this of course includes space.

Now, 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.

You might possibly completely miss in auditing a preclear if you didn't realize that As-is-ness has to start with space. One could get so concentrated on and frantic about objects and energy, this factor of space might be completely missed. A thetan can communicate with space with great ease. The body has gone too far on this track to do this easily. The body finds it quite sickening to communicate with space, but a thetan can communicate with space rather easily, and the As-is-ness begins with space, and then it gets into, of course simultaneously, energy, and mass.

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?

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

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.

We have to move the anchor points of the space, in order to get a continuance of the space, and move the energy itself in the space, and change them in one fashion or another in order to get a continuance of that energy, and when this has not been introduced we have not postulated time. A thetan doing this would theoretically pass from As-is-ness into Alter-isness just immediately. He'd have to, or he would have no continuation of any kind.

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.

In other words it wouldn't exist unless he intended to change it. He would have to make the intention of change simultaneous with the action of creation. And if he did not he would get a disappearance immediately of that mass.

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.

He passes then into Alter-is-ness, which is a simultaneous action with As-is-ness at first, and then of course immediately becomes an action of continuation, and we get Is-ness, which is this reality that we talk about – space, energy, objects.

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.

Just exactly why we consider this combination to be a reality, that reality is Is-ness, is a little bit dull, because the fact of the matter is that reality itself to continue as a reality would not be an Is-ness at all but a continuous Alter-is-ness.

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.

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

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.

Now the fact that the thetan is a Static – that's not hypothetical or theoretical. The fact that he is a Static that can consider, and can produce space and energy and objects, is not hypothetical. That's true.

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

We have facts, facts, all the way along here, until we get to this thing called reality and we suddenly discover that Is-ness is hypothetical.

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

In the whole field of As-is-ness, the creation of space, energy, objects, of Alter-isness, Is-ness, Not-is-ness and more Alter-is-ness, there is only one hypothetical state. And that's Is-ness. It never exists. It can't ever exist. It has to be Alter-is-ness or As-is-ness, and of course As-is-ness can exist. As-is-ness can exist. It really would have to be able to exist, if you can repeat it. It must be in existence if you can repeat it and cause a vanishment of mockups or objects or spaces, so it obviously exists.

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."

But this is not true of Is-ness.

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.

Reality does not exist. Because it says there is a stop. And there just isn't any stop. It is continuous Alter-is-ness and when people stop altering the positions of things and stop altering anchor points, and stop pushing things around one way or the other whether they say they're doing it or they say it's being done on another determinism, or however, the moment they just relax on this whole thing, they get the condition which your preclear quite commonly is found in, of no longer postulating time. You see, the mechanism of saying "It will continue because I'm saying someone else is responsible" is of limited use. It's of very limited use.

Now, 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.

Let's go into that a little more closely – you set up this machine, or something, to go on and shift and change the anchor points of the space, manufacture the energy involved and take care of the objects. You set up this machine and you say: I'm no longer responsible for this. I have no further responsibility for this now, and therefore it's other space and it will go on happening, and therefore I can continue to have this space because somebody else is making it. You see we could get into that rather shifty by-pass, and so we could then have – not over too long a time – but we could have a consistent Alter-is-ness, and this alteration would continue to take place as long as he at least kept one tiny little fingernail on the machine over here. We weren't looking to see that we had, but as long as we had that fingernail just touching that machine we were all right. We said just that much of it is ours.

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."

The moment that an individual entirely relaxes and he says I have everything all set up, it's beautifully set up, and it will all run automatically, and I don't have to worry about it any more, after all a fellow created this universe, other people are the ones who caused time to take place, they tell me when to get up, when to go to bed and I've just got everything all set and it's totally other-determined now – it becomes just that totally other-determined, but it also, for the individual, passes by the board.

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

He's no longer postulating a persistence, he's no longer changing any objects in space, and so he will simply sit still. Everything gets very dim, everything gets very thin. Well, the funny part of it is that in that state he couldn't even keep an aberration going. But his Alter-isness has been practiced so long after the fact of Not-is-ness that even though he sits still he'll keep on changing something, and that condition is known as figuring, or what we call thinking. He tries to change something, and he feels, Well, I will just sit here and think, and that will keep the universe moving, it will keep time going. The only one trouble with this is, he is dealing basically with the root stuff of what makes universes but now that he is sunk into that category where he is doing nothing but consider again, not creating or moving anything, he is going to have a very difficult time of it. In fact everything is going to get dimmer and dimmer and less real and less real.

So, 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.

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

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."

This is not esoteric or difficult. The only thing which goes on persisting is that which a person is actively working to change. You can only have those things which you handle. You can only have those things which you move around.

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.

But an individual gets into a tremendous protest against mass. He has decided that the continuous survival of things is very bad. In other words he starts to fight survival itself with Not-is-ness. Now, as you know, Not-is-ness is a highly specialized activity. It is the activity actually of causing something to vanish or dull down or become less, simply because It IS too much. There's too much Is-ness, the fellow considers. He's got too much persistency, too much survival – Joe Jinks that got him across the barrel in a bank and took all his money away from him, and, well, there was just too much Is-ness, and the best thing to do about that is to cause a Not-is-ness, and let's just fight everything.

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."

For an example, let's take a war. A war is just simply each side saying the other side must cease to exist, and they are doing it with shot, shell, lead, dynamite, spears, arrows, deadfalls, and they're using energy to make other things cease to exist. Well, it was perfectly all right as long as you were building your camp, you see, but if you suddenly started to fight a war with somebody on the other side of the mountain, whereby you were saying he must cease to exist, you were fighting persistence by causing persistence. If you want to know why a war which shouldn't take more than a couple of days, goes on and on, and on, and on, and on – they got so bad a few centuries ago that they had a hundred years of nothing but war – everybody was saying everybody else mustn't exist, and they kept moving objects around to cause existence to cease. Now you see how these postulates could become completely tangled.

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

And the thetan does this because he so loves the problem, and that is the most problem there is. The thetan loves a problem, and that is the basic of problems. You move masses around, which basically causes persistence, in order to cause persistence to cease. One hundred per cent paradox. Cannot exist, can't ever happen, never has happened, and yet he will do this. But he is never happy doing it. There is no serenity involved in this. It becomes nothing but a complete chaos. Probably the only joy any soldier ever gets out of a war (and don't spread this around, because the society doesn't believe you should tell this) the only joy anybody ever gets out of a war is by kidding himself that he has made absolutely nothing out of something. Whether it's enemy troops or tanks, or ships, or anything, there's a big WHEE in there some place, a big thrill. Combat troops know about this. It's only when they cease to make nothing at will, apparently, that they become very downhearted.

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

Hardly anybody would be able to comprehend what is known as a military rout, whereby a body of troops, suddenly, and instantly and immediately disheartened, just completely, completely quits. It's a strange phenomenon. It has been rather incomprehensible how fast they keep shooting at a castle on a hill. And they just keep shooting at this castle, and shooting at this castle, the castle keeps shooting back, and they keep firing at the castle, and the castle keeps shooting back. Well, they start to go to pieces in morale. They can't make nothing out of something. Observably – the castle continues to live. They bog down on that rather badly, they get to be rather 1.5, and actually that is the manifestation of 1.5 on the Tone Scale. People using force to make nothing of something which continues to exist in spite of it.

"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.

And they'll suddenly drop. It isn't a slow curve. They enter it rather slowly, and then they will just suddenly go to pieces, because the only compensation they have for war is the fact that as thetans, you see, they can observe that they are at least going through the motions of and have the manifestation of making nothing of form.

"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.

And the sadness underlying it to them is the fact that they don't make nothing of it re-ally.

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?

Beyond this point still, all kinds of suffering takes place, and sadness, and it goes on and on, but you start moving that many particles with that much velocity, such as a German 88, and you'll get persistence. That shell bursts, and we don't find that the fellow in whose vicinity it hit is still there, but there's persistence. Somebody's got to go through his effects, and then somebody's got to write a letter home and say he died a hero, and somebody else has got to carry the news through, and then there are people at home, and he's left a hole in the society one way or the other, and this goes on and on and on, and then years later they dig up what's left of him and ship him back over and put him into a cemetery. There's persistence occasioning here. And what's persisting?. Well, there was that particle – it certainly was moving fast, and when we get a particle moving with this much velocity, we get some persistence, and in a war all they can think of is terms of more and more and more particles, moving with more and more velocity to cause less and less persistence on the part of the enemy.

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.

If you wanted to know why the German nation keeps fighting and keeps overrunning its borders, well it can't do anything else by this time. From Legion times forward people have been going in there saying, "You mustn't persist, and these fast-moving particles which we're making you handle will make it so." Oh really? This can't be, you see.

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.

When we find anything about which Man is extremely puzzled, we lead directly into the one little formula which is the mechanism of making things persist: we're going to use particles to make things not persist.

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.

And any time you find anybody in difficulty or in the middle of a problem, just look at the basic anatomy of a problem which is that anatomy. It's, "We're going to cause a nonpersistence by the use of the mechanisms which cause persistence." And you're going to get a game – there's undoubtedly going to be a game occur here.

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.

There are going to be lots of problems.

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."

If you want to know how to take apart a problem, just look where the person is using particles which you know by changing them will cause persistence, in order to make a nonpersistence.

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.

He'll be using Alter-is-ness to create a Not-is-ness, and of course will be getting consistently and continually an Is-ness. Which is a continuous state. It's a hypothetical state, because you can never stop it, you can never arrest it, you can never take a look at it. You know that any time you really recognize an Is-ness – not in a state of change – why, it will disappear, it will vanish or it will dim down, something will happen with relationship to it, so you always have to look at the change.

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."

This is the fellow living up the time track, this is the fellow living in the past. He's looking at the changes and he isn't looking at the reality. Actually that's a very healthy state of mind.

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

The fellow's looking at the changes, he's looking at what will be, he's very cheerful about how many particles he can move around and cause to come into existence or persist. Or he knows the proper modus operandi for knocking things out that he wants to destroy, just As-is-ness. And that would destroy it perfectly adequately, and he could start in again.

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."

To look at the basic mechanics of any problem which is causing any trouble, just find the matter of the particles, the particle motion, the Alter-is-ness in other words, which is aimed with the goal of Not-is-ness and is an impossibility. You'll find that's your preclear who's hanging fire in processing. He's doing this. He's using particles to knock down ridges (Ridges: Solid accumulation of old, inactive mental energy suspended in space and time), something on this order.

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.

Actually he'd feel a lot better if he'd simply go out and trim the hedge. Let him move something around not quite as damaging but with the same goal, because if he's all messed up with his engram bank, and he's all messed up with tremendous ridges and black ridges and that sort of thing, and he sits there as a thetan creating particles and bombarding these ridges, what is he going to get? He's going to get a persistence of ridges. That's why we never use flows in processing. You can process objects you want to, you can process space if you want to, but we'll just stay away as a general principle from flows.

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

Now your thetan has a great objection, because of the communication formula as used in this universe, a great objection to somethingnesses. He looks across a distance and he sees a somethingness and this begins to tell him after a while that he has to be a something too, and he doesn't like this. He doesn't enjoy this really, because it's an other-determined something that he has to be. It's looking at a wall, he has to be a wall, you see. And that's what this universe is dictating to him. Well, actually, because it's all a consideration in the first place, he doesn't have to fall into that little grave. He doesn't have to do that kind of a shift, at all. He could simply say I'm looking at the wall, you see. But after a while he gets into the mechanics of perception, the mechanics of communication. He's using energy in order to communicate with energy. There's nothing wrong with that, except to the degree that he loses his fluidity on it. As long as he could maintain the idea that he was simply communicating by postulate, that he was communicating, he's doing all right, but when he drops below that level – and you get him forced to communication, when he's made to stand still and be talked to, when he's made to stand to and hold that ridge, when he's made to sit there and absorb that textbook, any of these things, he gets under this bombardment, and he starts fighting the communication formula.

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.

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

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."

Remember that this universe has a communication formula, and that that formula is based on the fact that two things can't occupy the same space, so immediately we fall away from cause, effect and no distance. Cause-and-effect with no distance is not the same thing as the bottom-scale manifestation, where complete identification never actually occurs. There's still a slight distance no matter how downscale you go; it's only way upscale that you can get a perfect identification between cause point and effect point. These two points can be coincident way upscale. Well, if they can be coincident way upscale, the individual could put a distance on them or whatever he liked, but to the degree that he began to agree with this universe, we would get the manifestation of "have to have a distance across which to look" because he can't occupy the same space as the object at which he's looking.

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.

That is this universe's formula, and that by the way is native to a lot of universes – it's how you keep everything stretched apart. You say two things can't occupy the same space, therefore we've got to have a lot of spaces and things more or less fixed in these spaces, and we've got to keep them all apart and therefore they are separate objects and we go into the communication formula. Cause, Distance, Effect.

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!"

As the individual agrees that two things can't occupy the same space, and as he agrees with this communication formula, he then gets into a situation where he says, "Now look at all these somethings around here. And I am actually basically a nothing, and therefore if I have to duplicate these by becoming a something, I don't like that. I can't retain my own native form.

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.

I'm in a bad shape here. I can't fly around and be a spirit. I've got to be pinned downhere. like it.

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.

I've got to be an energy mass in order to look at those energy masses," and he doesn't He objects to it. And so we get to the other manifestation on the track.

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.

The only objection a thetan has to anything, if he's having a big objection, is to some-thing. Just any something. Then this of course will invert and having objected to a something hard enough, you see, he'll turn around after a while and start objecting to a nothing.

Now, 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.

Now how is it then that we get any change at all if Not-is-ness doesn't work? Well, there is the system known as valences: one ceases to be himself and becomes something else as his sole method of change. You see that? He is causing a persistence by saying things mustn't persist, and he keeps saying, mustn't persist, mustn't persist, and it goes on persisting, and he uses more particles and more particles and more particles – and pretty soon the United States Army is wearing coal-scuttle helmets. Just like that. And the Government says, "Down with Karl Marx, down with Karl Marx, down with Karl Marx – and everybody is now going to be taxed according to his ability to pay." So we get another type of change. Two things can't occupy the same space, therefore we are an identity persisting, therefore the best way to get it changed and get an utter change is simply to be somebody else. In other words completely shift the valence, and because we want to win all the time, why naturally, shift to winning valences compared to oneself. If one thinks one is losing then anything can start looking like a winning valence. A beggar utterly penniless about to die would look like a winning valence to some people. And we get valence-shifting going right along with "two things can't occupy the same space". So an individual goes out of one spot and over onto another spot and when he is running a lot of Not-is-ness you can expect him to do a lot of valence shifting. He can't continue to be himself, because he's in communication with nothing.At that time he will start to believe that he must have nothingness. And he goes from there into having to have somethingnesses and he goes from there into having to have nothingnesses by change of valence, and actually there is no other deep significance to it.

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?