Now let's talk a little bit about how your preclear might possibly recover from the state which he conceives himself to be in.

Here we take up the various reasons why.

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

We have in Scientology a lot to do with reasons why, but the fact is that a fellow who goes around always looking for reasons why is usually not in particularly good shape.

You might possibly completely miss a case if you didn't realize that as-isness has to start with space. You see? You yourself could get so concentrated on objects and on energy, and you yourself get frantic along these lines, you might overlook this fact of space. You see, because a thetan can more or less communicate with space with great ease. You see? The body has gone too far on this track to do this easily. The body gets sick when it communicates with space. But a thetan can communicate with space rather easily.

But there are a lot of reasons why the states of existence and conditions of existence are put together the way they are in this outrageous fashion in which As-is-ness followed by Alter-is- ness gives us Is-ness, followed by an Alter-is-ness, or desire to, which brings us into Not-is- ness, and which then brings us into Alter-is-ness, which brings us into Not-is-ness which brings us into Alter-is-ness, which brings us into Not-is-ness.

And the as-isness begins with space. And then it gets into, of course, simultaneously, energy and mass. Now, space-energy-mass, the consideration of it, are all simultaneous. There is no consideration here related to time. Now 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 some fashion or another in order to get a continuance of that energy.

There’s a good reason for all this. An excellent reason for all this.

And it's the first moment, then, we have a simultaneous action, because we have not yet postulated time. Well, a thetan doing this would, theoretically, pass immediately from asisness into alter-isness – just immediately. He'd have to or he would have no continuation of any kind. In other words, it wouldn't exist unless he intended to change it. You see, he'd 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.

We are talking right here about the fundamental of all aberration, which is incidentally the fundamental of all existence.

All right. He passes, then, into alter-isness, which is a simultaneous action with asisness (at first), and then of course immediately becomes an action of continuation. And we get isness, which is this reality that we talk about: space, energy, objects. Just exactly why we consider this combination to be a reality, that reality is isness and so on, is a little bit dull. Because the fact of the matter is reality itself, to continue as a reality, would not be an isness at all but a continuous alter-isness. So we get isness, actually, as a hypothetical state.

There is found a strange condition here. If a thetan were to remain with an As-is-ness, he would thereafter have nothing. Therefore, immediately after the postulation of some object, it is necessary, by mechanics, and it is just happens to be so in this universe it’s not reasonable, it’s just the way it is in this universe - which puts you right in the field of mechanics) that the As-is- ness must immediately be altered in order to become what we call a reality. And thus people attempt various mechanisms.

Now, the fact that the thetan is a static, that's not hypothetical or theoretical. That's a fact. The fact that he is a static that can consider and can produce space and energy and objects – now, that's not hypothetical; that's a fact too. We have facts, facts, facts all the way along here until we get to this thing called reality, and we suddenly discover that isness is hypothetical. What we call reality is hypothetical. Therefore, we'd better just keep calling this thing reality, and "everybody knows" what reality is.

One of those mechanisms is the device of God. Now then, we’re not saying that there is not a God. But if there were never any type of alter ego of this character there wouldn’t be any permanent reality.

The basic goal, by the way, of a barbaric cult known as psychology, which is practiced in some American universities, this stressed enormously the whole subject of reality. I mean, you talk about the amount of learnedness which has been pressed up against the cheek of reality, the tremendous quantity of discourse on the subject of: "Let's see. If there was a wood and a tree fell and there was nobody to hear it, why, therefore… And then, of course, there wouldn't be a sound, would there, if there was nobody to hear the sound. Because, you see, trees aren't alive."

It’s one thing for there to be a God and quite another thing for everybody to blame everything on him. The most barbaric manifestations that we have, generally includes a deity. The savage out in the Gullaby Isles is practicing this - he says that the fault is the trees and the River Sprite and so forth. I’m talking to you now about the mechanism of use of, rather than the identity of, when I mention God.

Well anyhow, this short-circuitedness and complete confusion on the subject of reality stems from the fact that in the whole field of as-isness, the creation of space, energy, objects, alter-isness, isness, not-isness and more alter-isness, there is only one hypothetical state. Just one state is hypothetical and that's isness. And that's completely hypothetical. It never exists. It can't ever exist. It has to be alter-isness or as-isness.

All right, God, then, is to blame. If we make something and have some hard luck, something like that, the way it looks to us here at this stage of development, we can then say, “Well, God did it to us and He has afflicted us.”

And, of course, as-isness can exist. As-isness can exist. It really would have to be able to exist if you can repeat it. You see? It must be in existence if you can repeat it and cause a vanishment of mock-ups or objects or spaces. So it obviously exists.

Quite in addition to that, every primitive people has the legend of a creator. They have to have a legend of a creator, otherwise they would never have anything. The immediate and intimate use of the legend of the creator is to continue in existence.

But this is not true of isness. Reality does not exist, because it precludes a stop. You see, it precludes that there's a stop right there – zoom. There just isn't any such stop. It is continuous alter-isness.

Whether you built it or not, you can cause something to vanish simply by looking at it as it is. Somebody else can put up a mock-up of one kind or another and merely by your perceiving it and making a perfect duplicate of it, you can vanish it. It is not necessary that you exclusively devote yourself to the vanishment of those things which you yourself have made. That is not necessary in order to carry through this cycle. Somebody else could have made it and you could have made a perfect duplicate of it - an As-is-ness - and it would have vanished.

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 an other-determinism, or however – the moment that they just relax on this whole thing, they get the condition which your preclear quite commonly is found in, of no longer postulating time.

Now we are talking about something which is very easy to work with and which can be put to objective proof. I can ask you to make a perfect duplicate of something, which is to say, get it in the same space, same time continuum, using the same mass, and your perfect duplicate will cause it first, probably, if you’re having a hard time of it, to brighten up - and then it’ll fade.Well, the next thing you know, even though you’ve made very poor perfect duplicate, why, you sort of get the idea, of looking through this item - and so it is with all of existence. Unless, in other words, there was a legend of other creation than your own, you would not at any time be able to have anything.

See, the mechanism of saying "It will continue because I'm saying somebody else is responsible" is of limited use. It's a very limited use.

The first and most fundamental principle of havingness is: it must have been created by somebody else. And thus we get Is-ness. When you ask a person to remedy his own havingness, this is perfectly all right. You’re asking him to make nothing of something. He actually can. But the reason it does him so much good is he’s forgotten that he can.

You set up a machine – let's go into that a little closer – 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. And you set up this machine, you say, "I'm no longer responsible for this. I have no further responsibility for this now, and therefore it's others' space and it will go on happening, and therefore I can continue to have this space because somebody else is making it." See, we could get into that rather shifty bypass. And so we could, then, have – not over too long a time – but we could have a consistent alter-isness.

In a Remedy of Havingness you ask the preclear to mock something up and pull it in. In other words, you ask him to mock it up and alter it. Why doesn’t it remedy a person’s havingness simply to mock something up - just get a mockup? It doesn’t remedy his havingness because if he leaves it there, it will simply disappear. Many a preclear gets very upset because his mockups all disappear. He puts up a mockup and it disappears. Well, that’s because he doesn’t alter it in position. He puts the mockup up and leaves it right where it is and of course it dissipates and disappears. Now those preclears who put up a mockup and leave it in the same place, which does not disappear, are working on mental machinery which does their mockups for them and for which machine they have “No responsibility”. He’s doing them with a machine not because he’s crazy but because this is the only possible way he could make them persist. The machine changes them and he himself knows that he did not put up the mockup. He knows this. If he didn’t know that, the mockup again would disappear. So it is not a very undercover fact with which we are working.

And this alteration would continue to take place and continue to take place as long as we at least kept one tiny little fingernail on the machine over here. We weren't looking to see, you see, that we had the fingernail on. But as long as we had that fingernail just touching that machine we were all right. See, we said, "Just that much of it is ours." You see?

Let’s take this legend of the creator. We discover that it is quite uniform. It is found in every savage tribe. It is found across the face of the world. And it is found throughout this universe. The legend of the creator. Very well, we can say there was a creator and he created everything and that’s fine. And if this were the case, why, that’s fine, too, because it wouldn’t unmock. In other words, things would not disappear if there were a creator who made everything. You could even use this as a tremendous argument to prove that there was such a thing as a creator and he made everything, just by the fact that it’s here and if you had made it and continued to accept your responsibility for it, it wouldn’t be here, so there must have been a creator. You could go at it with this type of logic. However, it works this way: if somebody else, other than yourself, made a mass of energy, all you would have to do would be to come along and fish around for its approximate moment of creation and duplicate it and it would then disappear. So whether the creator created everything or not, it’s a certainty that you, in order to continue with a physical universe, have to, to some degree, lay the blame on some other identity.

And he says, "I have everything all set up; it's beautifully set up and it'll all run automatically and I don't have to worry about it anymore. 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 and 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 boards. 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 and so on.

Therefore this postulate, he created it or you created it, does not enter the question at all. If you duplicated it, it would go away regardless of who created it. We’re talking now about a very basic fundamental, that it is necessary for you to carry around the postulate that somebody else created it in order for it to exist.

Well, the funny part of it is, 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-isness, that even though he sits still, he'll keep on changing something. And that condition is known as figuring, thinking – thinking as we call figuring. He'll try to change something and he feels, "Well, I will just sit there and think and that will keep the universe moving, it'll keep time going," and so on. There's only one trouble with this: he is dealing basically with the root stuff of what makes universes. But now that he has sunk into that category where he's doing nothing but "consider" again – he is not creating or moving anything – he is going to have a very difficult time of it. In fact, everything is just going to get dimmer and dimmer and less real and less real.

Now it’s a little bit difficult to prove this. You have to work with a preclear for a short time. But the main difficulty of proof which lies on this track is simply proving who made the mockup in the first place. You see, if it disappeared because you duplicated it, why then, you probably made it. But it doesn’t matter then whether we use this one way or the other. We don’t have to admit that you could make anything disappear whether you made it or not. We don’t have to admit that, to continue along with this proof. What we are coming down to here is this matter of responsibility.

Well, what will persist there is that which he is still changing, which is his worry about his aberration. In other words, the only thing – this is not esoteric or difficult – the only thing which goes on persisting is that which a person is actively working to change. Now, that's a horrible thing, isn't it? But that's all that goes on persisting.

We learned in Dianetics that people would not accept responsibility for their own acts, and actually they’re as bad off as they will not accept responsibility for their own acts. And individuals are other-determined to the degree that they will not accept such responsibility.

Now, it is not true, then, that you get into a static, completely fixed state by changing something. You can pass up or down on the line of not-isness and alter-isness. You could actually alter conditions. Things can get better because you work at it. If you don't believe this, go out sometime and sit down in the middle of a field out on some mountainside. You just sit there, you see? And you make no provision whatsoever for work of any kind. You don't try to make a camp – you don't do anything like that. And you could make it much better for yourself and much more interesting simply if you'd go out and start dragging in some brush and make yourself a lean-to and fix yourself up a fireplace and bank your lean-to in such a way as the water won't run into it. It doesn't matter what you do. As long as you're moving pieces of mass around, you would then get up to a point, however – you think you're working toward that point, usually – where you wouldn't have to do anything else. And of course the moment when you get to the point where you don't have to do anything else, (quote)"time hangs heavy on your hands,"(unquote). Why does it hang heavy on your hands? Hangs heavy? It isn't even moving.

As a matter of fact, you discover a complete dianometry, scientometry, anything you want to call it, a complete set of tests, which will demonstrate that there is a direct ratio between the health and ability of the person and his willingness to accept responsibility. But the funny part of it is, this only goes up to a certain point and when you achieve that point of acceptance of responsibility, then havingness as such, and the universe, or that part of one’s interest in the universe, would vanish.

No, time is going to move as long as you go and move pieces of bark and trees and dig little ditches and scramble for a living, and so on, go out and fish and so forth. You're going to get time. And you can sit there for a number of years and just have a busy time of it and be quite interested in existence and so forth and go right along happily. And then all of a sudden you win – they got a carrier pigeon to you, or something of this sort – and you found out that you won the Irish Sweepstakes. And now you can hire twelve men to keep this camp. And this camp turns into a mountain lodge and you get all the machinery you possibly can from the city. And boy, while you're doing this, this is tremendous, you see? So you finally wind up with a swimming pool and a beautiful hot-water heater and you wind up with everything nicely appointed, and what do you know? You've got everything done, you see – it's all finished – and you sit back and you are just exactly in the same position, as far as time is concerned, of you sitting on a mountainside moving no masses of any kind whatsoever. (Quote)"Time is hanging heavy again on your hands."

Now here is the Bodhi. Here is the individual who aspires to the attainment of perfect serenity - he can’t have perfect serenity and have something, because he’d have to give away a certain amount of his responsibility in order to continue it in existence. Havingness would only persist so long as he felt somebody else had had a hand in creating it. And the moment he said “I created this” one hundred percent all the way along the line, he wouldn’t have a thing. The perfect duplicate here is what we are looking at, again. Therefore, the condition of becoming a Bodhi is the condition of having nothing.

You can only have those things which you handle; you can only have those things which you move around.

A thetan is very able to have something or nothing at will. But it happens that he is appealed to very often on the basis that all somethingnesses, including space, would vanish. He thinks this might be a good thing. The only protest a thetan has, actually, is somethingness.

But an individual gets into a tremendous protest against mass. He has decided that continuous survival of things is very bad. In other words, he starts to fight survival itself with not-isness.

If you want to say what is wrong with a thetan, you’d say, “somethingness”, and you have stated it. He has something. There is something in existence.

Now, as you know, not-isness 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. See? There's too much isness, the fellow considers, you know. He's gotten too much persistency, too much survival: Joe Jinks that got him across the barrel in a bank, you see, and took all his money away from him, and – well, there was just too much isness, you know? And the best way [thing] to do about that is to cause a not-isness, you see, and let's just fight everything.

He is perfectly willing to have many somethings, but after a while, the communication formula comes into effect, and he becomes frantic about it. This is something that is terribly elementary. In spite of the fact that it is as deeply pervasive as it is in life and existence, it is terribly simple. It is one of these idiotically elementary factors that everybody could have overlooked forever. They would have had to have overlooked it. They didn’t even dare tread on the edges of it for fear that everything would blow up or disappear.

Now, let's examine a war, for instance. 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, you see, 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 are fighting persistence by causing persistence. Now, get that: you are fighting persistence by causing persistence.

All right. A thetan makes something, and he himself natively is a Static, capable of consideration, has no mass, no form - as a spirit he has no form - he has no wave-length, he only has potentials. He has the potential of locating objects in space, and the potential of creating space, energy and objects and the action of locating those objects in that space.

You want to know why a war, which shouldn't ever take more than a couple of days, goes always 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, and everybody was saying everybody else mustn't exist. And they kept moving objects around to cause existence to cease. Now, you get how these postulates could become completely tangled?

And with this as his potential, the moment that he makes something, he violates his own communication formula.

And the thetan does this because he so loves a problem. And that is the most problem there is. A thetan loves a problem. And that is the basic of problems. You move masses around – which, basically, you see, causes persistence – in order to cause persistence to cease. In other words, a hundred-percent 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 after a while.

A thetan in excellent condition is able to communicate easily with something. He can simply change his mind about anything and work it around. But the formula of communication becomes native to the creation of space, energy and mass, and that formula is, of course, Cause- Distance-Effect, with a perfect duplication taking place at Effect of that which emanated from Cause.

Probably the only joy any soldier ever gets out of a war – and don't, for heaven's sakes, don't spread this around because the society doesn't believe you should do this – the only joy anybody ever gets out of a war is by kidding himself that he has made absolutely nothing of something. You know, whether it's enemy troops or tanks or ships or something like that, there's a big whee in this, 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.

That is the Communication Formula. And that becomes the formula the moment you have space. Up until that time, you have all cause and all effect capable of occupying exactly the same location, since there is no location.

Hardly anybody would be able to comprehend what is known as a military rout whereby a body of troops suddenly is instantly and immediately disheartened and just completely quits. It's a strange phenomenon, a phenomenon which has been rather incomprehensible: how fast troops will go into a complete, headlong retreat.

So a thetan is perfectly able, way up the scale, to occupy the space of anything, and so duplicate that thing. But his formula when he’s doing this is not cause-distance-effect. It’s just cause, effect. That would be the formula he’s operating with because he wouldn’t communicate across a distance to something, since he wouldn’t be occupying any cause or effect points.

Well, let's say they keep shooting at a castle on a hill. And they just keep shooting at this castle and shooting at this castle, and the castle keeps shooting back, and they keep firing at the castle and the castle keeps shooting back. Well, just about that time they start to go to pieces in morale. They can't make nothing out of something, observably; the castle continues to live.

But he can’t have a game if he does this. He can’t have mass if he does this.

They bog down on that rather badly. They get to be rather 1.5. (And, actually, that is the manifestation of 1.5: people using force to make nothing of something which continues to exist in spite of it.) And they'll suddenly drop. It isn't a slow curve. They enter it rather slowly and then they'll just suddenly go to pieces – their morale will go to pieces and so forth. 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. And the sadness underlying it, to them, is the fact that they don't make nothing of it, really.

If every time he selects out an enemy and then communicates to the enemy and simply becomes the enemy at that point, he couldn’t have an enemy very long, could he?

Beyond this point there's 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. I mean, that shell bursts. We don't find the fellow on the ground is still there – the fellow that it hit in the vicinity of – but there's persistence. Somebody has to go through his effects, and then somebody's got to write a letter home and say he died a hero, and then somebody else has got to carry the news through. And then there's 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, why, they dig up what's left of him and ship him back over and put him into a cemetery. You know. I mean, there's persistence occasioning here.

If he said I am fully responsible for everything and I will now make a plot of land, and he mocked up some space and a plot of land, and he’s fully responsible for it - what happens?

And what's persisting here? Well, there was that particle, it sure was moving fast. And any time 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.

It’s gone. If he had mocked it up and altered it or changed it, he could then bring about the phenomenon of persistence, which is itself time.

You want to know why the German nation keeps fighting and keeps overrunning its borders. Well, it can't do anything else by this time. I mean, 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."

When you say survive, you’re saying time. Just put those together and make them synonyms and you understand all you want to know about time. It’s a consideration which leads to the persistence of something, and you can enter all the mechanics into time that you want to, and you can paint it up in any way you want to and you can write textbooks on it and test it and buy very fancy watches and chronometers and set up observatories to measure the movement of the stars, and you still have “Time is a consideration which brings about persistence”. And the mechanic of bringing about that persistence is, by alteration. And so we have Alter-is-ness taking place immediately after an As-is-ness is created, and so we get persistence. In other words, we have to change the location of a particle in space.

Oh yeah? This can't be, you see?

Let’s get back to this communication formula.

So we lead into anything about which we find man extremely puzzled. We lead into that one little formula there of: "We're going to take particles" – which is the mechanism of making things persist – "we're going to take particles and make things not persist." And any time you find anybody in (quote) "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." You see that?

A perfect duplication would be cause and effect in the same point in space, wouldn’t it? So communication as we consider it through space is not a perfect communication system.

You're going to get a game. There's undoubtedly going to be a game occur here. Going to be lots of problems.

You on one point in space communicate with something at another point in space and if you continue to interpose a distance in between the things or space in between the things, you get even then the basic of persistence. All you’ve got to do is get that distance in there, and we have this taking place.

Now, you want to know how to take apart a problem: Just look where the person is using the particles which, you know, by changing them, will cause persistence in order to make a nonpersistence. In other words, in order to create a not-isness. Where is he using alter-isness to create not-isness? He'll be using alter-isness to create a not-isness, and of course will be getting, consistently and continually, an isness, which is a continuous state.

A thetan cannot duplicate a mass. That is to say he cannot himself actually be a mass. He can conceive that he is by saying now look at all this mass that somebody else put on me. I didn’t create this mass.

I say it's a hypothetical state. It's hypothetical because you can never stop it, you can never arrest it and you can never take a look at it. You know? Any time that you really recognized an isness and so forth that was not in a state of change, why, it'll disappear. It'll vanish or it'll dim down. Something will happen with relationship to it. So you always have to look at the change. This is the fellow living up the time track; this is the fellow living in the past, and so forth. He's looking at the changes, he's looking at the changes, and he isn't looking at the reality.

He can conceive himself as mass. But he starts to get very unhappy about communicating with somethingnesses because here is this distance factor and he is a nothingness. Now if he can be the somethingness on the same point in space where that exists, then he feels very, very good about things. He feels all right simply because he’s occupying the same space. Well that’s perfect communication for him. That’s a perfect duplicate. But if he totally occupied it at its instant of inception it would disappear.

Actually, that's a very healthy state of mind. You talk about healthy mind states – that's a fine, healthy mind state: The fellow is 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 something to come into existence or persist, or he knows the proper modus operandi for knocking things out that he wants to destroy: just as-isness. And that would destroy it perfectly adequately and he could start in again.

So he gets caught between not wanting to communicate with something and wanting to have something. You see, that to really have something he would have to occupy the same space. To communicate with something he has to stand off at a distance and pretend to be a something. Communication, as we know it in this universe, is cause, distance, effect. Perfect communication, like a perfect duplication, is: the point, the point, there’s something on this point. The thetan can also occupy this point, therefore he can have something, he can communicate with something, but if he says it belongs utterly to him and he’s occupying its basic point, it will disappear.

Well, if you, as I say, want to look at the basic mechanics of any problem which is causing any trouble, why, you just find the matter of the particle motion – the alter-isness, in other words – which is aimed with the goal of not-isness. And of course that's impossible. Your preclear who is hanging fire in processing, by the way, he's doing this. He's using particles to knock down ridges, something on this order. Actually, he'd feel a lot better if he'd simply go out and trim the hedge. You know, let him move around something that is not quite as damaging, 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 are you going to get? You're going to get a persistence of ridges, aren't you? So that kind of processing won't do him a bit of good – actually, it won't do him a bit of good.

Therefore, he has to have another creator. He has to have some other author of the universe. If he doesn’t have, why, it will disappear.

That's why we never use flows in processing. You can process objects if you want to, and you process space if you want to, but we'll just stay away, as a general principle, from flows. Why? This is a flood of particles moving this way or that, so we just won't bother with flows in processing. And, therefore, running of concepts attended by the running of flows is just something we won't have much to do with.

Now, we could enquire at some length into the tremendous complexity of this and why is this. A thetan should simply be able to say by postulate, well, it’s as it is, and it’s going to persist as it is, and we’ll just make this postulate and that will be that. But the funny thing is that it just doesn’t work this way, and it looks here as though we have an arbitrary which has been entered in from one quarter or another, which we don’t fully comprehend even at this moment. But this universe went together on this basis of: AS-IS equals VANISHMENT. You make one just as it is - all you have to do is pretend as if you were making it at this moment - and boom, it’s gone.

Now, your thetan has a great objection – because of this 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 by looking at a wall he has to be a wall, you see? And that's what this universe is dictating to him.

You then see the necessity, at least in this universe, to have another determinism at work. Well, that’s just one point. We see it in terms then of the Creator. That’s fine. This does not enter the question of whether there is or is not a God. We are talking about whether or not people blame God, or why they blame God, or why they put things onto God.

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 fall into that one; he doesn't have to do that kind of a shift at all. He can simply say," I'm looking at the wall," and see 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.

Well, if they didn’t they wouldn’t have anything.

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. Well, when he drops below that level and you get enforced communication – when he's made to stand still and be talked to, you know; when he's made to stand to and hold that ridge, you know, and when he's made to sit there and absorb that textbook (you know, any one of these things; he gets under this bombardment) – and he starts fighting the communication formula. And of course we get a persistence, then, of this universe's communication formula.

The other point involved here is people blaming each other. They stand there and one says: You said that, and That’s your fault, and this is why we have this fight, and so forth. And the other person says, No, that wasn’t the way it was, that’s an entirely different situation, you actually were the one that started all this.

Remember, this universe has got a communication formula. And 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." You see? Well that, actually, is a bottom scale. But bottomscale cause and effect occupying the same space, is almost occupying the same space. They're not a complete identification of source point and receipt point. 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, all right, if they can be coincident way upscale, an individual could put a distance on them or anything. But to the degree that he began to agree with this universe, he would 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. See, that is this universe's formula.

We talk to a preclear and we want to know what’s wrong with this preclear. Well, it’s “what Mother did” to him, not what he did to himself. We can’t conceive that an individual could actually become aberrated without his own consent, and sure enough he can’t. He can’t become aberrated or upset, or thin or lean or fat or thick or stupid or anything else without his own consent because he is part of the agreement pattern, and unless he has agreed himself to other entities of agreement, why he won’t get stuck with any kind of a pattern.

And that's, by the way, 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 a lot of stuff like that, but we also go into the communication formula. And it says, then, that cause point can't occupy the same spot as effect point. So we've got cause, distance, effect as this universe's communication formula.

Now let’s look at how that adds up. We find that if an individual to have something went into agreement with other determinisms and said these other determinisms caused all this, he could sit there comfortably with something persisting. But what did he have to do? Basically he said: in order to have anything I’ve got to go into communication with these other-determinisms and blame them or fix the responsibility of causation upon these others.

Now, 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 and so forth. I'm in bad shape here. I can't fly around and be a spirit. I've got to be pinned down here, I've got to be an energy mass in order to look at these energy masses."

So the child blames his parents. He gets up into the age of puberty, he runs into sex, sex tells him he can’t survive - that’s the basic manifestation of sex - tells him he can’t survive and he begins to worry about this fact. Why, here he is all equipped to make another generation, he’s hardly started living this one, and that’s a confusing and upsetting fact. He’s already warned in advance that some day he’s going to die. To see something really morbid, read some teen-age writings. You never saw such complete sadness anywhere. Well, they’ve been told they can die, and the appearance of sex, physiologically, told them they could die. They become anxious then about surviving, so they have to turn around and blame somebody for something, anything, and simply by blaming somebody they obtain a continuance of whatever condition they are in at the moment. In other words, they can continue to survive simply by turning around and saying, Well, the trouble with me is all what my father and mother did to me. So if you were to take somebody and bring him very, very close to death and cause the chilly breath to draft down his neck, you would find him very shortly blaming something else but himself. But he runs in a cycle on this. He discovers that the situation is untenable. Then he’ll blame himself.

And he doesn't like this. He objects to this.

Why does he blame himself at that point?

So we get to the other manifestation on the track: The only objection the thetan has to anything, if he's having a big objection, is to something – just any something.

He wants to unmock it. And he actually has forgotten the mechanisms of unmocking. By blaming himself, by taking it upon himself, by holding it all close to his own bosom, he thinks: Now that it’s my fault it will all unmock, and he’s a very surprised person when it doesn’t unmock. He merely gets upset. And the other one is, he finds his condition of survival desirable, and when he finds it even vaguely desirable - it doesn’t matter if he’s a slave in the bottom of a salt mine working out a sentence for having voted, or whatever - the fact is that this individual obtains continuance by blaming others. So he goes through a cycle of Blame somebody else, that means I’ve got to or I want to, or I haven’t any other choice but to, survive, and the best answer is survive, therefore I’ll just blame everybody else.

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.

And the mechanism of blaming oneself is unmocking oneself. Unmocking oneself and the mass with which he is immediately and intimately surrounded. People go through these two cycles and they invert, and that is the basic inversion. They start in by saying, Somebody else was responsible for the creation of all this. They’re quite happy about all this and they stand off and look at it and then they begin to get tired of communicating with these somethingnesses, because they cannot enter into a perfect duplication. They are nothing, that’s a something, they begin to get impatient about it after a while, so they decide to unmock it. They look at it and say: I did it. Well, there’s something wrong here. Come on, come on, come on. I did it. It goes right on. They don’t mock it up in the same part of a space in which it was initially mocked up, they don’t try to duplicate it with its original mass.

Now, how is it then that we get any change at all if not-isness doesn't work? Well, there is the system known as valences. One ceases to become himself and becomes something else as his sole method of change. See that? He's 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. See? Just like that. 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…"See that?

They omit some of the basic steps of saying I did it and they’re trying to go up against the postulate with which they did it.

So we get another type of change. If two things can't occupy the same space, therefore, we are an identity persisting. Therefore, the best way to get a change and get an utter change is simply to be somebody else. In other words, completely shift valence. And because we want to win all the time, why, naturally shift to winning valences compared to oneself.

Having made this postulate and said already that it belonged to somebody else, now they try to take it back, and their next move is to try to squash up these energy masses, use more force in order to flatten force, and he is on his way, this thetan, right away, you see, he’s on his way. Because the more he tries to use energy to knock out energy, the more energy he’s going to have, and the more dislocated the basic particles of that energy are going to be, and he’ll just get more and more and more persistence, and if he keeps on protesting all the way on down, it will just become more solid, and more solid and more solid, and more solid, because he’s protesting that it’s other-determinism then he protests by saying it’s my fault. Now I’m going to disappear and die and that will make you sorry. But again he’s entering a protest into the line.

Well, if one thinks one is losing, then anything can start looking like a winning valence. A beggar, utterly penniless and about to die, would look like a winning valence to some people.

So we get this basic thing of other men’s responsibility, or “God is responsible”, as the fundamental of persistence and survival. We have to have other-determinism at work or we get no persistence whatsoever.

And we get this valence-shifting going right along with "two things can't occupy the same space." So an individual goes out of this spot and over onto another spot. And when he is running a lot of not-isness, 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.

And so we get these postulated other-determinisms, and when you recognize this clearly in your preclear and in creation itself, it will cease to be as entirely baffling as it may have been in the past.

Well, at that time he will start to believe that he must have nothingnesses. 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, no other deep significance to it.

Okay? Got it?