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

The four conditions of existence are actually variations of existence itself. They are certain attitudes about existence, and they are the basic attitudes about existence. Now we could include a great many more attitudes, and we would find that we were deriving them all from these four. But we could take these four and find out that we were deriving them all from one - Is-ness, or reality.

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.

There has to be an Is-ness before you can do an Alter-is-ness. There has to be an Is-ness before you can do a Not-is-ness - unless of course you want to postulate it in reverse.

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 we are talking now about this particular universe and how it got here and we discover as we look along the track, that these four conditions of existence, that all existence, presupposes the postulate known as TIME.

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.

Now time is just a plain ordinary postulate which says that out of a non-consecutive beingness, which doesn’t exist forever, we would get then a parade of time. A time continuum.

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.

There’s no forever, it would just be there - no forever, no instant involved. There just isn’t any consecutive existence at all. And then out of this we would have to make a postulate that there would now be consecutive existence, existences, or a consecutive series of states.

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?

Now an individual who is simply occupying space without any energy involved whatsoever doesn’t have a good feeling about this. 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 occupying of a space, now he has this feeling of foreverness unmocked. He makes that uncomfortable for himself, so he will now go on creating consecutive states of existence. He can have a game. Space is necessary to start this game but when you’ve just got space and nothing else, it’s rather unbearable. 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. This is a kind of feeling you run into in space-opera.

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.

Here we have, then, a state of existence being conditional upon a time postulate which would include a space-energy manifestation, and this would be a simultaneousness.

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.

There would be no question about whether you made the postulate for space and energy before you made the postulate of time. There is 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 actually, to have a game, there must be a simultaneous action whereby you postulate space-energy-time - space, energy, continuous existence. Which is an As-is-ness of space - altered, energy - altered, time - altered. So these items have to have the time postulate with Alter- is-ness 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. We have to alter positions in order to get a continuousness. We have to say it is here, now it’s here, now it’s here, now it’s here.

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.

There’s another way of making time come true. We say space, no 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 now, this postulate is so easy for a thetan to make, it might be considered a native part of his makeup. So we have before this an ideal state, that is to say an idealized or theoretical state. We have this theoretical state whereby we merely have aStatic which has no space, no mass, no wave length, no motion, no time, which has the ability to consider, and we are dealing with the basic stuff of life. Just by definition.

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.

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” - do you see anything specious about the way that remark hangs together - “Way on down the track from the time this postulate was made” - “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 don’t use the word existence, we use the word “is”. We don’t use the word “then” or “will be”, we don’t go back into the past or go into the future for this continuousness at all. It just is.

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, in past ages it was just: “Well, reality is reality and you’ll have to accept it. There’s nothing more you can know about it than that.” Oh yes, there is a lot more you could know about reality than simply, it is.

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.

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 would actually take all these four states of existence to make the kind of existence which we are now living and that is to say, we would have to have Is-ness then Not- is-ness and Alter-is-ness and did it strike you before that we might have forgotten and might never have known about and it might not have had called to our attention directly, this other state? We’ve always had these three states, Alter-is-ness, Not-is-ness and Is-ness.

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.

Alter-is-ness and Not-is-ness, of course, are variations of Is-ness and depend upon Is-ness. But there is a fourth one and that is As-is-ness. And that condition natively exists at an instant of creation, yet it also can be made to exist again any time anybody wants to make it exist again, simply by saying AS IS. If anybody had truly and actually accepted reality and had got all of his fellow beings to simply accept reality, we wouldn’t have any. But whose reality? Whose reality in each case? Somebody else’s. So this reality was actually another condition, other- determined As-is-ness. Other determined. Which is Not-is-ness!

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.

The way you get Not-is-ness is to say “as is created by you”. That’s an awful one, that’s a big curve, and that is Not-is-ness. It’s an As-is-ness created by somebody else, which of course isn’t an As-is-ness at all. It’s a very specious As-is-ness, 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.” That’s a Not- is-ness, isn’t it?

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.

So if everything starts to sort of dim down on you and you kind of find things going out, and getting sort of resistively thin - all 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-is-nesses which somebody else created.

All right. So much for that.

Somebody else says, “This is the way things are.” And you’ve had that. 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 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-is-ness or a Not-is-ness.

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.)

Now what is a Not-is-ness? A Not-is-ness comes about in 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. Oddly enough, if you made it and you know you made it, you have a special case of being in a position to say any time, “It doesn’t exist now,” and it won’t - if you have also accepted responsibility for having created something and said, “I made it.” So we see that there are two different conditions of Not-is-ness.

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

One is just vanishment.

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."

The other one is an Is-ness which somebody is trying to postulate out of existence by simply saying “It isn’t.”

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?

A Not-is-ness, in our terminology, would be this second specialized case of an individual trying to vanish something without taking responsibility for having created it. Definitive, positive and precise definition.

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 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 dimming-down of an Is-ness.

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.

And that is done by saying just this, just this precise operation and no other operation: “I didn’t make it. It isn’t.” “I didn’t do it, so it doesn’t exist.’,

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.

And that will always bring about this second condition, the one we give the term of Not-is-ness.

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

“I didn’t create it. I had nothing to do with it. I have no responsibility for this at all, so it doesn’t exist as far as I am concerned.”

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.

An individual doesn’t have to operate on these postulates at all, but he is running on this makeup of postulates. He, of course, then will trigger in all the rest of his postulates and they’ll cross-reference in to sticking him right there with it. He’s Not-ised it and he’s got it.

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.

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

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 can process a preclear on a gradient scale of change on something - and this is of great interest to us - if the gradient scale is back toward his acceptance of responsibility for having created it. It would not be far enough to go, as in Dianetics, simply to find out that your mother did it, that “it was what your mother said”. That wouldn’t be far enough to go. This is built into the woof and warp of the track, the very composite of postulates on which an individual is running.

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.

You would have to go back this far: you would have to postulate: (1) that the time Mother said it was NOW, and, (2) that the time when Mother said it caused the time when I said it (a million or fifteen billion years ago) to key in. (key in (Verb): An earlier moment of upset or painful experience is activated, restimulated, by the similarity of a later situation, action or environment to the earlier one.)

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.

Every time somebody else can put one of your own pieces of mental machinery 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 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.

So any engram, as we were operating with it in Dianetics, was actually a key-in. When I discovered that the whole track ran back, back, back, back, BACK, it was, “Oh! We’re back to where the guy did it in the first place!” Well, that was very interesting, and one result was the essay on responsibility in Advanced Procedure and Axioms.

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.

The essay on full responsibility.

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, 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 its being keyed in.

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.

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.

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.

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 child, he identifies himself as the one who is talked to. Very seldom do you discover a little child giving mother a good lecture. If you had, you probably would remember with great satisfaction, the good lecture you gave your mother.

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.

Here is a condition in which 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. He has considered he is on that point. Henceforth all further considerations are monitored by this consideration that he’s on the point, as long as he considers he’s on that point. And he would have to recognize that he was on the point (an As-is-ness) before he would come off the point.

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.

A process immediately occurrs to us on such a level. If you just simply ask an individual a question such as this over and over and over and over:

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

“Where could you be, where you would be willing to recognize and realize that you were?”

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.

And you would just run a 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.

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.

Now, these conditions of existence are composited up in an inter-dependency one upon another. An Is-ness exists only because of As-is-ness. As-is-ness took place in the first place. It got created. Then we had to alter it slightly to get an Is-ness. We had to give up some responsibility for it and we had to shift it around. A Not-is-ness then exists in order to provide a game.

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.

A game is an Is-ness which is being handled by Not-is-nesses. A football game could be added up in terms of these conditions of existence. One side has the ball and the other side must Not- is the side that has the ball, and the side that has the ball has to win - in other words, has to arrive at a receipt point.

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.

We get the communication formula itself as being below 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.

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.

Affinity really is merely the consideration of how well it’s going. In the agreement or reality itself we’re talking about Is-ness and that is the corner where we enter this ARC triangle. We just slide into that triangle of Affinity-Reality-Communication on that Is-ness point of reality, and then it is modified by affinity and communication, which of course come in simultaneously with it. We discover then that these conditions of existence would add up to all manifestations of behavior. There would be a great many of them. There would be a finite number, however. It would be the number of possible combinations, singly, doubly, trebly or quadruply, of these four conditions of existence. We get this individual who in only 75% of his life is trying to say Not-is to, another 10% of his life he’s giving an Alter-is, one hundredth of one per cent 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.

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.

If we say that there is a gradient scale of Is-ness, a gradient scale of Alter-is-ness, a gradient scale of As-is-ness (which there isn’t) and a gradient scale of Not-is-ness, why we can see then that you could take these gradient scales and in one combination and another, have a character composited from them.

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.

Characterization must be made up, in great degree, from these conditions of existence. Some space, some energy, and his considerations of Is-ness, Not-is-ness and Alter-is-ness. We would not say that any part of his characterization was made up of As-is-ness, because if it was it wouldn’t be there.

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.

One also has been trained to believe that loss is bad. This is just a reverse postulate, made just to keep life interesting. Loss is bad, therefore he has a tendency to avoid As-is-ness. Therefore he will avoid duplication - he’ll avoid all kinds of things. He’s afraid he’ll unmock. He’s afraid he’ll vanish. Here he is struck in, eighteen feet thick, and you couldn’t get him out with a pneumatic drill, all scheduled to go back to the between-lives area (Between-lives area: The experiences of a thetan during the period of time between the loss of a body and the assumption of another. See A History of Man by L. Ron Hubbard) and pick up another baby. 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.

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.

You could say, well then why would you process somebody? Well, let’s look at that. In order to accomplish a two way communication, 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 go on asking the person why he is being processed for hours. Until he can at least find one reason why he is being processed. It’s a very interesting process. A preclear comes in saying, “Process me,” and you have always supposed they knew. Well, at this point they don’t have any idea at all why they want to be processed.

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.

A process which would be quite powerful would be: “What wrongness or what wrong thing would you find other people would accept from you?” or “What could you do that was wrong that other people would accept?” and then “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.

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.

He won’t be able to tell you he wants to feel freer. He won’t articulate any of these things. He’ll just sit there and want to be processed. 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.

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.

He isn’t moving on the time continuum. Well, if you can’t get him processing toward some goal or other or in some direction, he just makes processing the end all of everything and he’ll just go on being processed forever. But if he’s going to be processed forever, he’ll have to hold onto his aberrations forever, otherwise he couldn’t be processed forever, could he? And that’s why some cases stay so long in processing. It’s actually as elementary as that.

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.

So I have been sorely tempted to alter that early auditing step to just this: “Well now, give me some goals you have in processing.”

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

And just keep it up until it’s no longer forever, and the preclear has a future.

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.

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.