This is the second afternoon talk on the Professional Course. We're continuing a description here of Scientology 8-8008 and the essential elements of this technique.

We have an overall technique here which is quite embracive. If you think this technique is insufficiently complicated, I'm very sorry. If you think it's too simple, that's probably what's wrong with it — because its elements are very, very simple.

You take a gradient scale — a gradient scale on creation and destruction of all dynamics, all personalities, all beingnesses with which the person is surrounded, and get this one: all facsimiles which he is bothered with — and you create and destroy those objects in a totally creative manner in his own space and time reference.

Now, this technique does not — repeat, does not — include Straightwire as we know it, the running of locks, the running of secondaries, the running of engrams. It does not handle them on the reduction basis of Dianetics. It is not even vaguely interested in erasing anything by repetition, so on. These are no object.

Now, you should know that an engram can be contacted by an auditor in the preclear and it can be run through several times and, if it is early enough on its own chain, that it will desensitize. In other words, the energy in it will wear out enough so that the engram is no longer effective. This is true also of a secondary. Now, you do that by contacting the exact perceptics in the engram.

Now, that is a process. That is a process which got us there. It works, that process — it does. We graduated from this into handling actual facsimiles simply as energy, because we found that the facsimile was on a ridge. All these ridges, they were electronic barriers, you might say, which surrounded an individual or were glued to his personality. You might say they were actual electronic entities — and they were entities too, by the way. The entities you hear about are just these ridges.

A ridge is a more or less chaotic but solid mass of energy which through its solidness has become timeless.

The material universe is here and is this solid — because it is so solid, it is so far below apathy that it is timeless. You understand how that could be?

If you'll notice that a preclear who is in apathy has a very sticky bank — very sticky. Well, if it got just a bit stickier it'd be actual matter. Well, this stickiness is made up of ridges, and these ridges can become more and more solid, and more and more solid. Now the more solid and the less free energy is, the less time and space there is in it, so it becomes timeless.

A preclear has an incident, one part of which is apathy. You find this incident in restimulation — that is to say, you find it riding in present time with him and having a command value over him. And what is the other characteristic you find out about? You find out that the thing is practically solid. The point where he's stuck in it is practically solid. Well, that point is timeless. It is so solid that it is actually — acts like a sheet of cellophane or a — that would be the best comparison; it just doesn't destroy.

The least destructible material is MEST. It's the least destructible material that we know about and it enforces itself on the preclear because it can't be destroyed. If it exists, it exists, and he can't do very much about it.

For instance, you would be appalled if I suddenly said, "All right, now this is a student exercise for today. You there, I want you to take that chair and I want you to reduce it."

The fellow would say, "Well, you can't do that."

Oh yes, you can. If he was in good enough shape he could take that chair, molecule by molecule by molecule by cubic millimeter by cubic millimeter by cubic centimeter and we wouldn't have a chair.

The actual fact of the matter is that energy can form into a solid mass. It can form into a solid mass and, having formed into this solid mass, can then be unformed.

Now, the material universe has this conservation of energy. I think that's just one of the rules of the game. You're not supposed to destroy something in the material universe.

And you'll notice nearly every preclear has an awful time trying to destroy things. He usually has an awful time. You say, "Destroy this, destroy that." "Oh, no."

Now, he's all right. You get him up to a point, yeah, he can destroy his own illusions or his own visions of things. Now, if you were to turn around to him and say, "Here's a breadcrumb, reduce it." Well, he's perfectly willing to take out a match and burn it or go by the rules of the game.

And you say, "We're going to destroy this by a different set of rules and that set of rules is just expand and contract that piece of matter until it turns into free-flowing energy and flows away and disappears."

And he'd say, "Oh no, oh no, that's — that's beyond my capabilities." Oh no, it's not.

You're asking him to do exactly the same thing when you ask him to "Pick up a ridge. Now expand and contract it until it's gone." You're asking him to do the same thing on a lesser magnitude when you say, "Pick up this heavy engram, heavy effort engram. Now work it one way or the other, perceptic by perceptic, until it's gone." You're asking him to do the same thing.

You're asking him to do the same thing if you say, "All right. There's a secondary, there's a lot of grief or fear in it. Now you just run that through and you run that through . . ." You're sort of rubbing it out, like using the preclear for an eraser. And you're just taking this energy and you're just scrubbing it out. And it's the same way with a chain of locks. There's no difference in _these processes.

The reason why the crumb of bread is fairly timeless is because it's part of the material universe.

The reason why a piece of granite lasts longer than a piece of sandstone is merely that the piece of granite has more mass and less time in it. So it lasts forever.

At the top end of the scale we have theta imposing time, space and energy — but time and space. So the theoretical top, top, top of the scale with which we're working at this moment is imposition of time and space and the bottom is imposition of energy.

Now, we've got: Theta imposes time and space. And what does matter do?

Matter does not impose time and space. It simply goes crunch. It cannot locate itself; it is in chaos; it is without direction. It just wanders and stumbles and fumbles and bumbles around, just wonderfully. And unless theta comes along, directly applies itself to that piece of matter, it goes by these chaotic mischances and averages and so forth which are called the science of physics.

'We have brimstone and it will combine with sulfur." Now that's chemistry, but those are actually — are just little discoveries there. They find out that pieces of MEST act differently when combined with other pieces of MEST. And this is a wonderful study, don't get me wrong. There is nothing wrong with that study. I recommend it by all means, that it should be studied sometime when you don't have anything to do. If you get so bored, that you just — go and study these combinations, because the second you start studying them you start validating this mischance, this adventure, this completely chaotic, bumbling, unthinking, undetermined, roll around and fall this way and fall that way.

Don't start looking at the planets and the suns as you have in the past and say, "Isn't that wonderful?"

I'm asking you to change your plane of reference. "Isn't it wonderful how those suns stay there and keep shedding that brilliance, and how those planets go round in that exact order, and it's just wonderful how all of this takes place, and how flowers grow. And oh, this is so mysterious and this is so wonderful and, boy, am I an atom compared to that elephant." Because you can do the same thing on a different set of laws.

It isn't wonderful, really. It's remarkable, which is an entirely different thing. It's remarkable that a bunch of guys could get so doggone monotrack and so unimaginative as to let the laws of inevitable average, you might say, of all illusion, take place.

And if something like — supposing you heard an after-dinner speaker and you — maybe you were secretary of the club and every meeting he made a speech and he told the same joke. And you were secretary of this club for five years and there was a meeting every week, and he told the same joke and he told it in the same words. How would you feel if all of the members of the club, every time they heard this joke kept saying, "Isn't that wonderful? Isn't that remarkable?" Well, that's just about the same thing.

You get this MEST universe bumbling along. It's actually not anything like a perfection. This Earth, for instance, is supposed to be a sphere. And it's not a sphere — it's a spheroid, but it's an oblate spheroid, to use the proper solid geometry term for it. It's flat on top and it bulges at the equator, and if it spun the other way it would get flat someplace else, and it's a very irregular sphere. Some places the crust is forty miles thick, someplace it's many hundreds of miles thick. It might be that there's molten earth just forty miles below you here, that you're living on this thin crust, but other places it's very thick and goes practically down solid to the core.

The Mississippi River, for instance, and the Nile River — the Nile River runs downhill but the Mississippi River runs uphill. Now that's quite remarkable. It's just because of these wild gyrations — I mean, they're wild! Just because they're repeated all the time, it does not say immediately that they're wonderful. They're wild. We've sort of hypnotized ourselves, in the universities particularly, into believing that all these things go according to a perfection. And they don't.

There's supposed to be a planet out here in the fourth ring, and there isn't. There's a bunch of chips. You go out and look at the sun. That sun is supposed to be in perfect condition. Actually it's a huge atom bomb which is burning for a long time and it's got holes in it, oh boy! The regulation burning surface of the sun is tremendously variable. It must vary by hundreds of thousands of degrees centigrade around the surface of the sun.

There probably is no back side to the moon. If you were putting together something perfect . . . When I say there's no back side, there's a hole back there. The moon is very off-balance; the same side always faces Earth. It's just rocked down and been stopped by gravity until that happens.

Now I'm not berating this, but I'm just saying let's kind of come off the awe level on it, because you could do the same thing. And that is, of course, subject to your own test. You just have to take my word for it for the moment.

But it's an accumulation of created energy. And if you accumulated enough energy and if you held on to it hard enough and if you were such a capitalist, if you were so vested interest, so status quo, that you even had a law passed saying that at no time would any of this energy deteriorate but it would only convert, you were just going to get more and more and more matter — you would get what? You'd get an expanding universe. You would get one that's terribly solid and you would get one which was bungling along in a chaos, unregulated. It would have been set up once and then it just keeps on going, keeps on going, accumulating more, accumulating more, accumulating more.

And you get a being who comes into this space-time reference. That being is theta — he's a thetan. He is able to impose space and time, and furthermore he can create space and time, and in addition to that, he can place created energy in spaces and times which he creates. Now that is a very, very remarkable — a very remarkable skill. And that is observably with you — observable, very observable.

And when you start running this technique 8-8008, it will become more and more plain to you; because you don't have to go up to the level of making the space and time, and creating it, and creating a universe, to prove to yourself that you can. You observe it on this low echelon.

If what I'm telling you isn't true, then there'd be no reason under the sun why 8-8008 would have the fantastic effect on the preclear that it has. Tried techniques, techniques, techniques — we've got more techniques than anybody ever heard of in the field of the mind.

In any month, in Dianetics, we accumulate more techniques about the mind than have been invented in the last five thousand years. In any month. It's just fabulous.

If you want techniques, if you want phenomena, you could fool around and fool around with this, because why? It isn't any compliment to myself or to researchers in this. It's just the fact you get out on the main line and the material keeps accumulating and accumulating, and you get bigger and bigger bins and there's more and more material; and nobody is evaluating it because you say, "Well, that's — that's — we'll look at that some other day."

It's not important right now because we're after this: We're after bringing up the capabilities of a being. So we want to know what a being is and then we want to bring his capabilities up to that ideal. That's our ambition.

So we find out that the ruddy rods go off on the gammawhoogits and that people can do an ESP while standing on one leg at Piccadilly Circus and we find out all these other interesting data.

We also find out that a preclear pulls a ridge off of himself — we wonder about the actuality of these things sometimes — he pulls a ridge off of himself and I tell him, "Well, all right. Now where do you want to dump it?"

"Oh, I — there's cats all around the backyard here, there's several cats out here."

"Well, all right, dump it on a cat."

And you hear this piercing scream out in the backyard as this cat gets a ridge dumped on him.

And you say, "Well, that's very amusing. Dump another one on him." "Oh, I don't want to; that really upset him."

"Well, dump another ridge out there."

Scream! Another cat!

Somebody walks into the room where you're doing the processing and he says, "Did you hear that noise outside?"

And the preclear and you say, "Didn't hear anything. Did you hear something?"

This is very interesting, isn't it?

All right. Then, we've got right there the source of animal magnetism. Ho-ho! This is the big curiosity all down through the years, animal magnetism. Can you regulate the behavior of an animal? Yep. Yep.

I made a couple of tests on it. I was making a cat hungry. The cat wouldn't eat, so I just kept making the cat hungry, so it'd eat. I'd tell the cat to go eat, just to be conversational. But I'd spot a beam on the cat's motor controls and so forth and I'd think, "Hungry, empty stomach," see? And the cat would sort of look haunted for a moment and go over to the dish and start chomp, chomp, chomp, chomp. And this was a very finicky cat that hitherto would never eat. Nibble. Animal magnetism.

So, there's — anybody who wants to wander along this, like you walk through a bookstall, he can find himself just — oh! just boundless material to work with.

Well, let's do animal magnetism. How would this affect animal husbandry?

A lady popped into the Foundation one day not too long ago and she says to me, "I have just invented Dianetics for dogs," and she says, "I'm — I just invented it."

And I said, "All right. What do you do for a dog?"

"Oh, I don't know. I've just invented the fact that you could apply Dianetics to a dog, and I am a dog breeder and I'm going to apply this so that I get better dogs." "Well, yeah. But what are you going to do with it?"

"Well, I don't know yet, just give me some time. That's my profession, that's what I'm going to do with it and goodbye."

And I said, "Goodbye."

I don't know, maybe by this time we have dogs that will talk or play the piano, or maybe they've all become very stupid or — I don't know what's happened to these dogs.

But there's just more of that sort of thing has happened along the line. You can wander, in other words, through this material, but we want a beeline.

Now, the beeline lies in the direction of enhancing the ability of theta and devaluating the ability of MEST.

Now, if you can balance your preclear — your preclear has become really unbalanced. He's over there on the MEST side of the ledger, and the MEST side of the ledger can determine nothing. It has no determinism; it places nothing in time and space of its own.

A planet blows up or something, and it runs into another chunk and that runs into another chunk and it scatters around somehow and that scatters into another . . . You see how random? Very, very plus randomity — no determinism about it. You never heard of a planet saying, "Let's see, I don't think I will blow up, but if I do blow up I'll put it in the left-hand pocket over there and make a billiard on Mars." No, you never had a planet thinking that. What you just had was a great big unmanageable piece of MEST go kaboom and then, sort of, the sun has a pull which is there because it's a built-in characteristic, and something else has a pull and it sort of wanders around. Just happenstance.

Blow up a test tube full of goo in a laboratory and it never thinks what part of the wall it's going to spatter itself on — never thinks about it for a moment. It doesn't put anything in time and space, much less create some time and space.

But a thetan has this other characteristic which is the reverse of that. Your thetan could do this. He could say, "All right. Let's see, first let's create a space area. Now let's say this time area is so-and-so. Now we'll create a test tube and we'll put it full of goo and what we want is a big purple spot just under the lampshade."

Boom! He's got a purple spot under the lampshade and that was what he wanted. Now he'll take apart the rest of the thing and take the purple spot .. . No reason particularly to do this, but what he could do is choose the time and space. Now he could do something else with that purple spot. Now he could put it in another space area on another time stream. Now, that's your theoretical capability. He could take a universe and put it on another time span. He could do this, theoretically.

Now, how do we know that he could do this? Because we've seen him do it? Partly, yes. And the other thing is, is that when we grant the fact that he's capable of doing this, we are suddenly cognizant of ability in processing.

When we suddenly say — we say, "We're going to slant our processing in the direction of this capability," what do we get? We get a preclear getting over this and that and getting better, and good shape this way and that way, with great rapidity. But as long as we follow only the happenstance laws of energy, as long as we only erase engrams, we are still agreeing with the MEST universe and we are heading in the capability of MEST.

So we mustn't head in the direction of MEST at all. What we've got to do is head in the direction of the highest level capability of theta which we can discover; and that highest level capability at this moment happens to be location of space and time and energy, creation of space and time and energy, creation of matter and relationships, conservation of all of these things and destruction of all of these things — destruction of space and time and energy, and energy forms in space and time, on all dynamics. It's very interesting.

That is the direction toward which we aim our processing. Now, we want to make our preclear capable of doing this, so that any technique which we invent — any technique we invent to accomplish this — is going to be a valid technique, if it is oriented. Now, that's what's known as orienting a technique. What is the technique designed to do? And if the technique is designed to accomplish any of the points which I've just gone over, it's a valid technique — soon as you apply it, it'll work.

You just figure out a technique which will let somebody switch around time. This little boy is in bad shape. He's sick. And you say, "What am I going to do for this little boy? He can't run engrams, he can't run locks, I can't get in communication with him to do very much of anything. What can we do with him? What can we do with him?"

You could just take one point and you could invent yourself a technique. You'd say, "We will improve his command of time."

There's thousands, hundreds of thousands, billions of ways you could do this. You say, "We'll improve his command of time."

He's stuck on the time track someplace or he wouldn't be sick. What do we do for him?

Well, there'd be very interesting things. You just — we could take up any of these. We could take up space, we could take up energy, we could take up any of these points and give him a command over them. Give him a command over anything, no matter how tiny it was, here's a gradient scale. Give him a command over something. He's lying there, helpless.

Get that characteristic of illness. In illness, the being is helpless in handling space, time, energy and matter. Now, this is not a symptom of his being sick. This is the cause of his being sick. He has in some fashion become helpless in handling space, time, energy. He's become helpless in creating, conserving, destroying, altering space, time, energy, matter — either of his own, of the MEST universe, or somebody else's universe, or several somebody else's universe. You can't get into communication with him very good.

You could do many things. It'd depend on how inventive you were, what you did. There just could be thousands of techniques. Here's this little kid lying there helpless. What do you do with him?

Well, just one turns up just to mind because I mentioned it the last time I was talking here: Clocks driving the kid to school. "You want this kid to get well, huh?" you say to Mama.

Mama says, "Oh, yes, my darling baby, I — poor thing, poor thing. Sympathy, sympathy, sympathy, drool, drool, drool — I'll run and get something for him; I'll convince him he's helpless, one way or the other."

And you say, "Well, now where — you don't mind, then, sacrificing a pound or two?"

And Mother says, "Oh, no, no, no, nothing," and so on.

You say, "Where's the clock he goes to school by?"

"The clock? Well, oh! that's — that's — sacred piece of MEST. It's up there on the mantelpiece."

I say, "Well, give me the — give me the clock."

"What are you going to do with it?"

"Well, never mind. You said you could put out a pound or two. Would you rather put it out on pills or a clock?"

All right, we got that. We put this clock on the bed. We attract the kid's attention to the clock and we direct him to take the clock and put it over here on the bed and we direct him to put the clock closer to him on the bed, then we direct him to put the clock further from him on the bed and then we make him put the clock on the other side of him. He'll start to brighten up. Why? This thing is his boss.

All right. Next step on the thing: Show him the back of the clock. Let him vary the hands, change it, put it a half an hour later, an hour earlier, fool with it. He's in bad communication, you understand? I mean, you've just got a tactile and you can get his attention and he feels very apathetic about the whole thing — he'll start to brighten up. It'll be unintelligible to anybody else why he's brightening up but he'll brighten up. You can guarantee that because you're on the main track of processing.

So after you've fooled around with the clock and you put the clock on the floor and you put the clock up here and there — you'll have him sitting up on the bed in a very short space of time, and you have him put the clock up there. Then have him take this clock — take this clock and choose some instrument of his own desire and have him smash the clock. And then have Mama give him a shilling because he smashed the clock.

Now, the kid's going to be well. All. right. The chances — the chances are very good that that's about — that'd be a good process. Why? Because it is symbolically reestablishing his command over time in the MEST universe.

Now, we have that. What could we do with space? What could we do with space?

Well, we could get his little sister's doll house, or something of the sort, and make him change the partitions around in the doll house. Or we could make him force somebody to change the location of objects in his room or give him something of his choice in terms of space — any way we could improve his choice of space, any way we could do so. Or we could do it on the level of possessions. Let's get a possession he does not like and let him dump it. Let's get a possession that he likes and let him have it.

There's a famous, famous old story about the father who worked so hard and the little boy was dying. These fabulous German folk tales that just drool on and on and on with super-saccharine sympathy.

The little boy was dying and the father tried everything he could think of to make the little boy well, and the father was very poor. Everybody in these stories is very poor. I don't know where all that poorness comes from, but — must come from an inability to handle space, time and energy. But he finally got poorer and poorer and poorer and poorer and it got poorer and poorer and the boy got poorer and poorer and the father spent his whole week's wages to buy a little animated clown, because the boy would mutter in his delirium the name of a clown. And the boy would keep muttering this name so he bought him this mechanical clown — put a whole week's wages in on the clown, and the little boy opened one eye and took one look at the clown and closed his eye again. That was all.

So finally the father went over to the circus and got the most famous clown in Germany — that was the guy's name — to come over and see the little boy and the little boy promptly got well. The little boy took one look at the clown, the clown balanced an Indian club on the end of his nose and asked the little boy how he was, and the little boy sat up in the bed and he became very bright and he was well. That's a famous old German folk tale. Probably happened, for anything to be hitting that close on the button.

This little boy, by his desire and request, actually had managed to move in time and space the most famous clown in Germany. Naturally, this really made him well. This put him right up there.

Now, generally what they do with kids is to give them things that continue to move them — them — in space and time. They hold them down; they give them more time.

You give a kid toys, toys, toys, toys, toys, you'll bind him down on the time track. You're giving him less and less time, less and less time, less and less creation.

You say, "When I was a boy they didn't give us toys like this. They used to make us make them out of this and that."

Well, those were real good toys when they made them like that, although I remember the fastest friend of my youth was a small teddy bear that was given me, and the teddy bear was the same size I was. And it was called "teddy bears" because Teddy Roosevelt had refused to shoot a little bear that somebody had brought him to be shot and he created quite a rage for these little dolls, a little fuzzy bear.

That bear was the same size I was. But nobody ever thought that bear was very important. And I used to tear the head off the bear regularly — about, oh, I don't know, twice a week — and people would have to sew the head back on again. And I used to complain because they'd sew the head back on so that the head wouldn't turn — it was fixed so it'd turn — and I'd make them take the stitches out again and sew the head back on so that it would turn. And I suddenly remembered something about the bear: it was the only toy I had nobody cared about but me. So as a net result, you see, I had something I could handle in time and space.

The essence of this, then, in processing, is: What imposes time and space on the individual?

Whatever imposes time and space on the individual tends to convince the individual, or tries to tell the individual, that he is MEST, not theta. His ambition is to be theta, because he is theta.

A goal you would say, would be an effort to approach its own basic characteristic.

There's something about goals. Let's say — let's say you have the basic characteristic of a wagon is to be a wagon. That's right, it's just as foolish as that, but the basic characteristic ... And let's — supposing we violate this, and we make this old wagon — it has the ... Let's say it hauls manure. And this old — this old wagon has this. It was built to do that, it always did that, and all of a sudden somebody makes it into a hearse. Now that wagon's going to have things happen to it. It was not built to be a hearse. It smells. People keep thinking it's the corpse, and it's just the past of the wagon. And the wagon is ridiculed and falls apart and somebody will discard it, whereas if they had kept on using it for what it was intended — what was its basic goal?

Now, this will add up to people. A caste system in a society is really more workable than a system in the society which has no levels. One of those can become very vicious because the agitator in the society runs around and then he can tell everybody, "Now look, you too can be the Grand Bolinkas," or something. And this fellow, by IQ, by position, by inherited training, by education and everything else, this guy is fully equipped, fully equipped, to run an underground railway train. And yet he goes around thinking all the time, "Well, someday I can be the Grand Bolinkas." And he's very unhappy, miserable. He rushes around with this idea, "I'll be the Grand Bolinkas someday," and boy, nobody can be Grand Bolinkas then, nobody. Not that anybody wants to be.

Here's somebody else. You take this little girl and she's a very vivacious girl. She can make people very pleased with their lives, and so on. And perhaps she's ideally fitted — by her own real goals and hopes and training and other things, she's fitted to occupy a certain strata. And people come around, keep telling her, "Well, you — this is a free country and therefore you have a perfect right to be the Grand Bolinkasess. And what you should do is — really, Lana Turner doesn't have anything that you don't have. Therefore, you should be Lana Turner." This girl goes around in complete misery.

I ran into a psychotic, by the way, who was psychotic for one reason only. Everybody kept telling her that she looked like a movie star. She did — very, very faint resemblance to Katharine Hepburn. And it robbed her of her identity. She lost her own identity. Not only was she a body but now she'd slid over into being a movie star. But now she realized she wasn't a movie star and she'd slid even further than that. She was so confused about her own identity that it was fabulous. Of course, there were many other factors in her existence. But everybody was imposing space and time on her by telling her what she ought to be; therefore everybody else could choose her goal for her and then force her to follow another goal, or tell her that she couldn't fit herself to any goal, and so on.

Because people use this not ... You take a caste system, it very often debars the very able from being more able, very often has — it works the opposite direction completely. But it does at least permit this: a fellow to have his self-respect in being what he has to be.

And — we've got that. Well now, if we just release that, now we say, "We don't know what you are and therefore you ought to always be something else than what you are," the fellow can't ever have a finite goal. He can't be the best water tender the Borinkan line ever had. Mm-mm, no. People can come around and say, "You ought to be this, you ought to be that, there's something ..." In other words, people can control him by unbalancing him.

So this big yap about "we must be all free to become kings," or something of the sort, is very good revolutionary propaganda, but is not very workable, because it permits people to be controlled — controls them to an enormous extent. It says, "You have no vested. interest in the society unless you have reached the highest point of the society. And if you aren't struggling to reach the highest point of the society and aren't in contest with everybody else then you possibly — you can't possibly be happy. So therefore, what you want to do is all band together somehow and be the lowest point of the society." I mean, it really gets confused.

This maybe doesn't appear apparent to you right now, but just think about it.

What if nobody could say forthrightly and make it stick: "I am such and such and I am doing so-and-so and the service which I am performing here is needed and is useful." Suppose he could never nail himself down in that but always was in this sort of a spin — always in this sort of a spin: "You could really be doing something else that would be far more useful than what you are doing, and really nobody needs you anyway, and you've actually failed even though you're the best water tender in the Borinkan line — you've actually failed because you're not the Grand Bolinkan. And therefore nobody needs you, and if you think you're important go down to the graveyard and take a look; that's full of guys who thought they were important too."

In other words, this fellow was elected to be in a time and place and then people can rush around and say to him, "There isn't any time and place there — ha!" See? I mean, it allows this big control mechanism to enter.

So beware of constructing your own universe too loosely. If you construct it loose enough you will find that a very horrible thing will take place: You'll find out that the ambition of everything that you give life to, is to be you.

If the ambition of everything you gave life to is to be itself, you'll have a workable universe. But if the ambition of everything you gave life to is to be you, you'll have an outfit of paranoids who all have to be God. That'd be an entirely different thing, wouldn't it? That'd be very upsetting and it'd be very hard to run a universe like that.

Now, you want to know what's wrong with a state? It can become so static, as did the Roman Empire under the regime of Augustus, that a man could never be anything but what the state determined. The state had to pass on what the man could be. The eldest son of the farmer had to till the soil. The eldest son of the smith had to be a smith. There was nothing — no change. Big static, no variability.

The Roman Empire collapsed! The republic went by the boards; everything went by the boards. Christianity came in. Disaster after disaster occurred. Chaos reigned. Well, that had nothing to do with Christianity coming in, of course — although there was a tidal wave, came in shortly after Christianity. It was very destructive. The Mediterranean disappeared for about twenty-four hours and went up and stood in a mound out in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea and then — and then came back again. Really wiped things out.

Now, the point I'm making is, is that's a terrible, unchanging static — then there's no randomity there at all, you see? There isn't any adventure. The whole Roman Empire was at a point where you had to be a Roman, and there was only one country and that was Rome, and that extended to all the borders of the civilized world and there was no other civilized world. That would be a very, very interesting thing.

You have the idea, for instance, you can go — pop over to France. Supposing you were a Frenchman and the French government said, "Well, we don't care much for you. In fact, we're going to hang you." And you could somehow or other slip out from under and go over to Holland and sit down, and the Holland government say, "Hello. Sign here."

But in the Roman Empire it wasn't like that. When you went out to the last boundary of the Roman Empire, you stepped from there into a land of people who beat drums or ate raw liver or something. They were just grim. Just no civilization. None. The white man who gets back in the bush and he just never sees another white man again and he'd never have a razor, he'd never have a bullet for a gun or anything like that. He'd just get suddenly shoved into the middle of some Godforsaken barbaric spot — boom — from there on.

Well, that was the second you stepped off the Roman Empire into the rest of the world. If you were not in good with the Roman Empire, you were done. It was the empire of "no place to hide"; therefore, the Roman Empire could place time and space on the individual to a degree unknown today and so could assume this terrific static, cut down its randomity. The second it did that, the whole Roman state went mad. Interesting, because it made every Roman citizen MEST. Nobody could impose any time and space on himself at all and, as a consequence, everybody had to become MEST. You see?

I'm just pointing that up as a long, drawn-out example just to drive it home, that you can take a state and it can go to the point where you tell everybody in the state, "Well, you have no personal goal; there is no such thing as a personal goal anyway, and there's an unachievable personal goal and everybody knows you more or less can't achieve that and there are no rules and it's just ..

Well, that's a form of chaos. That's a complete chaos, because there's no goal. Individuals don't prosper in the absence of goals. It's saying to everybody, "You can't be anything unless you achieve this rank of the 'Placer-of-time-and-of-spacers' — unless you are the only one who says, 'Time and space, time and space,' and the energy in the time and space. If you're that person, you're all right, but nobody else in the society is all right except that person."

You see what a society that's "free" runs into? It says, "Then there's only one job, that's the Grand Bolinkan. And he's the only one that it's worthwhile being, because he's the only fellow that can really impose any time and space." It's a complete myth, by the way. The Grand Bolinkan can't impose time and space. If you'll look at such fellows, they become old and haggard in a very short space of time. They are obviously MEST belonging to the state.

All right. Let's take the other side of it that says, "Everything is imposed on time and space and you've got to be in the time and space imposed," and so forth.

You'd have two universes of opposite polarity and neither one would work. One is all static: everybody has got to be everything which he's got to be and he's got no choice of any kind. Or everybody has to be the thing which has choice or he will have no choice. One is the completely free state; the other is completely frozen state. You have theta and MEST there, actually, in essence.

A happy randomity lies between these two points, so that you could actually fix up your preclear so he was able to order everything in all directions — just complete, utter despotism — and he wouldn't be a happy man.

That's why he finally broke down and got into the MEST universe a little bit. Now it was all right for him to be in the MEST universe a little bit, but to be in the MEST universe and say, "I am MEST. I am a body. I am a thing made out of MEST. I have only within myself the laws and capabilities of MEST and I am not capable of anything else" — which is the usual state of Homo sapiens — why, he's nothing.

But at the same time, I'm showing you now why the absolute is unobtainable in making one's own universe. The absolute is a bit unobtainable — is because you get up there so high you have a despotism and you are the despot, and you get bored with it and you want some chance to enter in on it. So, you'll buy somebody else's illusion, full knowingly, in order to enter it in upon your own universe in order to produce some randomity and something with which you'll have to cope and some problem you'll have to solve. You'll know more about this on a complete review of the Axioms.

Well, this should tell you, then — this should tell you, then, that there could be a sickness of a fellow being a despot. There could be. Well, let's say you ran into this big motor manufacturer and he was quite ill. He was bored with it all and he wasn't getting on in life or anything of the sort and he was ill. And yet everybody had to do everything he said. Everybody had to do everything that he said. There wasn't any chance of his stepping outside that frame of reference at all. Now, supposing you ran into that as a case. It would actually require, theoretically, the reduction of some of his despotism and the entrance into his existence of a little more randomity.

If you came up and said, "Well, you know, it's a funny thing, although you do rule absolutely in this motor empire of yours, it so happens there's a janitor in plant number five who never follows your instructions." This guy is liable to snarl and roar and thump around and so forth. He's got to find that janitor. He's got some randomity.

That's a silly example, perhaps, but you actually could have a fellow so burdened with an ennui caused by an inability to be disobeyed — you theoretically could have that. But I'm giving it to you theoretically because you won't find it in this universe, and you won't find it in anybody who's got a body.

If you find this motor manufacturer, you'll find out he is really sick because nobody obeys him. Nothing obeys him. He says, very logically, "I have just sold a hundred thousand cars. Our plant capacity is two hundred thousand cars and I just sold a hundred thousand cars to Buenos Aires. And all we have to do is manufacture them in the next couple of years and we're all set and all the employees will be paid and everybody will be very happy."

And the vice-president will sit down with the board and they will figure out 8,675 reasons why they are actually in bankruptcy and why this can't be done. And we'll finally find out that somebody doesn't make a ruddy rod for that particular car; and ruddy rods cost one penny apiece and so therefore the whole project's got .. .

And this fellow, whatever he's doing, whatever he'd want to do, he has to get up and go down to the board meeting, take the head off the vice-president, throw it in the middle of the table, jump on it a few times, go around and convince every member of the board that he's about to be eaten alive, beat the thing down through the lines, open the communication lines where they are shut, procure the material, build the first car himself, put it on the boat, drive it for the Argentinian . . . I mean, almost that bad.

What's wrong with him is he can't get anybody really, although he ought to. And again, we have a divergency of goals.

So, it ought to be dawning on you that a thing tries to reach the goal which it is. Its goal is to be its own beingness and its randomity is how short-it falls of being its own beingness — and that's its randomity — and its struggle to be its own beingness.

This should tell you volumes in therapy. This should just tell you about therapy — it appears to be so simple and it is something that you say, "Well, of course I know that and nobody would overlook it." But don't you overlook applying this. Don't overlook — just because it's simple.

The goal of a thing is to attain its own beingness.

You've got to handle the future in processing, in the MEST universe. You've got to handle the time track into the future if you're going to produce a fast, good result, and therefore you're going to have to handle the goals of the individual. And if you handle the goals of the individual, you have to find out what were the goals of the individual and when did they fail in his lifetime. And with this process you would do an assessment of this character.

We have a definition: What is a goal?

A goal is to attain one's own beingness.

What is the goal of theta?

The goal of theta is to exist as theta, which happens to be completely motionless. It has no motion in it, it has no wavelength in it, it has no energy on it. All it does is impose space, time, energy. It's a static. It's complete motionlessness.

What is the goal of theta in terms of the MEST universe?

It would just be to impose things on the MEST universe, if it had a goal about the MEST universe. That's all. To impose things, not to be the MEST universe. That is not its goal, that's its ultimate. The reductio ad absurdum, actually, of theta is complete motionlessness and an unlimited imposition of time and space from that motionlessness. Fascinating. If it's able to do that, it would be itself.

And what's the goal of MEST? And this should tell you a lot about down Tone Scale, low-toned people — the goal of MEST.

When people are well down and plowed into the MEST universe they have the goals of MEST, and those are laid out on that Evaluation Chart. And I have seen no reason ever since that was written to depart from it, even in one spot, one hair.

Because the goals of MEST are the beingness of MEST, and that's chaos, disorderly chaos. And if it moves anything, it does it with force. And the goal of a MEST person, if he tries to do anything, is to employ force, heavy force.

Well, a person has got to be able to use MEST universe force. He's got to be able to use force in one characteristic or another, just so that he can impose his will on force. You're not asking him to use force, you're asking him to get up to a point where he can impose his will on force, and if he can impose his will in an unlimited fashion upon force itself, believe me, he's never going to use it. He doesn't have to. He never has to employ force. He thinks that something so-and-so and so-and-so and it becomes so-and-so and so-and-so. Where's the force? Wouldn't be any force. He would actually be able to think force out of existence.

You get this silly situation. This fellow would get into a boxing ring and his opponent would leap out of the corner with a big maul fist clenched to hit him in the head — bang! The other boxer would be awfully surprised, awfully surprised. He either wouldn't have any fist or he would cease to exist and be back in his corner again — but the fight would never get to the first gong. Or the fight would all be over and the opponent boxer would be in the dressing room and so on, in horrible condition, and everybody in the crowd would be convinced there had been a fight, but there wasn't any.

In other words, you've just got enormous randomity of what would happen between two human beings using force, one of which uses force and the other which uses theta. Now, the one who wants to use force wants to get in there, slug and hit; and the heavier, the bigger the boxer there is, the more he specializes in chaotic use of. He's got so much weight and so much strength and so much force and he can absorb so much punishment that he can permit himself to be hit at will; therefore, he needs no defense. And he can hit at will, therefore, and obviously if anything ever connected with one of those blows, it's gone.

So all he has to do is step into the ring and hit one blow — and that was Joe Louis. He needed no finesse, no dodge, nothing. He might even have had a shadow of these things, but eventually he was knocked to pieces. His body couldn't stand up under that amount of punishment, which was probably a great surprise, especially to Joe Louis. I should think he would have been utterly amazed the first time he ever got beaten up in a ring. Probably never entered his calculations.

His calculation was "force does it." He was imposing non-beingness on his opponent, non-beingness in terms of force. It's very fascinating that Joe Louis was himself quite a guy — is quite a guy. And it's very fascinating, however, that anybody with a wild or radical idea can come around and talk to Joe and sell him a bill of goods. This fellow is an utter puppet in the hands of anybody who operates from the theta side of the ledger, just a puppet; he dances on any string. Isn't that fascinating.

And it happens that that's the case with nations. If any nation were involved in the wild hysteria of war, all force, force, force — you know it's the strangest thing that it's never happened that somebody suddenly got up and said into the middle of this chaos, in a loud, firm voice so that it could be heard — which said, "There is a better way to do this and it is so-and-so and so-and-so." And didn't go around and suggest it to somebody, but said, "It's so-and-so and so-and-so and that's the way it's going to be." And got four people to do it, and then eight people to do it, and then twenty people to do it and twenty-four hours later had the whole nation doing it. Isn't that strange? It's mostly because theta realizes it can't reach — possibly reach its goal in this universe. It just couldn't do that. It's too simple — too simple.

I put this to test, by the way. I have told a group of men that the time and the place was this and the goal was that. Just like that! No compromise or apology. Here was a group of men used to using force and nothing but force, you see? Force. That was the big stuff, that was to what they went down. All of a sudden you just said, "This time, place, object," and they didn't even look like they believed it, but the next five minutes, that was it. I mean, it wasn't a case of "Let's think it over and let's believe it and then we will become it, maybe, in a reserved fashion." No, we just created it.

You should know that you as an auditor, operating from an altitude of some success in the line, can actually just tell the time and space and the preclear that all is well, and it is.

That's faith healing. Do you get it as a definition? You get a definition now for faith healing. The fellow — only the faith healer comes around and says, "You've got to have faith, you've got to do this, you've got to do that and wiggle your left ear and believe it and think the right thought and so on. And if you go at it in exactly this order and you do this and you drop the right penny in the right collection plate, and don't think of the word hippopotamus at midnight, you'll get well."

And of course, the poor patient says, "Have I got to do all this?"

Actually, the only really successful faith healers of which we have any record at all — amongst those, of course, Christ — you won't find even in the most misquoted version of the life of Christ, him going around and saying, "Well, now think some right thoughts, now ride on the right foot, now the left foot, now don't think of the word hippopotamus, now we will all get down on the bed together and pray." No, he says, "You're well. Pick up your bed and walk." Boom! Fellow's well. He can't help but be well. He's hit by an impact — he's hit by this impact of certainty — complete, absolute certainty that this is the time and this is the space in which the person is well.

It isn't done by force; it's done by a complete disdain of force or a complete control of force. So force, so what!

Now, bountifulness and so forth — it says he provides fish and bread, something, for the multitude. He says, "All right, there's some fish and there's some bread. All right, that's the way it is." And everybody eats. Fascinating. All he's doing is operating from a high post of imposition of energy and space and time in the shape and form of energy, that's all.

And the funny part of it is, is you don't have to get down and grunt and moan and grip yourself and twist earrings around twelve times or part your hair with a saber-toothed tiger, or beat a drum or wear an amulet. All of those things are symptoms of fear. They say, "I can't do it."