It has taken me a long time to get the ammo stuffed into the breech, the pointer on his ledge, the trainer swiveled around in the right direction and get a hand on a lanyard.

I happen to believe in action — lots of action. As a “philosopher” I am a complete bust, because everything is all set for the philosopher if he is just permitted to think and maunder around and monkey around with something and write it down in a book, let the book get dusty and write some more and let that one get dusty and so on.

I was interested in the field of engineering because engineers build things. I found out that when you tried to build things in this world the steel would stand up but the human beings wouldn’t. Isn’t that interesting? So I decided to do something about it if I possibly could. There wasn’t quite a bit done about it then, but the direction of it is action — definite action.

We have a world today where everybody is busy blowing each other up, with secret police running inside and outside and economics going up and down like barometers before a hurricane. People are shivering in their tracks, the workers are all throwing down their chains so people can put bigger chains upon them, institutions are being built to take care of the insane so that we can have more insane, people are being thrown on operating tables and hacked up, children get started into their lives with eight strikes against them and everybody is busy fighting for a little piece of dirt that is floating around in the solar system. What a limited view man has had!

Trying to do something about that takes action.

The production of an attitude of mind capable of constructively resolving the problems of man and delivering into his hands the conquest of the material universe happened to lie through the field of epistemology, and that channel went through the human mind. And that all leads out into action.

So, this gun is pointed — laid, trained — loaded and cocked. It has taken a year and a half to find out how to tell people to do what, to produce a frame of mind which was up the tone scale.

But there is in existence now a package which handles this, with ramifications such that you in the field, wherever you are, are not occasioned too much turmoil or difficulty because of some alteration in the package. This bridge is built pretty wide now and as a net result we can be a cause which will undoubtedly produce at least a very interesting effect upon the society.

So when we think of cause and effect, the cause-and-effect situation in Dianetics is a very interesting one to examine. What are we trying to cause and what will be the effect? We can take that up a little later.

Right now, let’s just take a look at the great purity of philosophy. I wish Kant were alive today, and Hegel and a few of the boys. Would they have fun: you would keep showing them phenomena and they would show you their mystic numbers.

Of course, that kind of a situation can’t exist today; fortunately we have an enlightened world. You can show individuals phenomena and they immediately recognize them as phenomena and work with them — I wish!

Cause and effect: Once upon a time there was a life source, and it developed into a more complex life source and that developed into a more complex life source. We can say that what it was trying to cause — one of the things it was trying to cause, certainly — was a conquest of the material universe. That may be just one of its goals but it is still a very important one. It is important because when you get an individual way up above 20.0, he starts to separate from the material universe. He is neither happy nor healthy nor anything else. Regardless of what he is trying to do, when he starts going out through the top he starts to leave the material universe and he ceases to gain in his conquest of it.

Now, when an individual goes down from 20.0 he also loses contact and loses the ability to handle the material universe.

When you find a person operating at optimum — healthy, unworried, successful, everything running for him, things working — he is riding at about 20.0 or ten points to either side of it, and he is in good shape.

We could get into a big argument about whether or not an individual is in good shape when he is healthy and strong and happy and effective and efficient and so forth. Maybe that individual isn’t in good shape; maybe the ideal would be something else. Maybe the ideal living organism would be something else. Possibly somebody could say, “Well, the ideal state is to sit on a bed of spikes and be able to resist the pain of the spikes.” Somebody else can do that if he wants to, but he sure isn’t going to get anything done!

So what are we trying to cause? We will just postulate that it is the conquest of the material universe and when an individual begins to produce an effect, the effect he is producing — when it is a good effect — is an alignment of the inherent disorder in the physical universe.

When an individual fails as a cause, he becomes himself chaotic. His living body is part MEST; even his own MEST starts to demonstrate the chaotic effect of the material universe.

A very ideal situation would be to be pure cause but this is, of course, the ideal state of being, which is up above the level of the ideal state of action. If an individual is fully responsible, then the individual is full cause along all dynamics, isn’t he? If he is going to survive infinitely or something of that sort, he is again full cause. He says “I am” as his state of beingness. He goes into a big state of beingness, “I am.” That means “I am cause.”

We notice, as we look this over, that two things happen to a human being: he ceases to desire to be a cause or negates against being a cause, and he negates against being an effect. He does not want to be either a cause or an effect. He is a cause and something happens and it goes wrong and therefore it is fault, blame, regret and so forth. All of these things follow out from cause and he is in trouble. On the other hand, the individual does not want to be an effect of somebody else’s cause; he fends off from being this.

But an individual can desire to be a cause and he can desire to be an effect. So actually this thing works out the way you have seen so many of these things work out.

Up along the top of the scale you have desired cause; below that you have enforced cause (that is blame) and still lower you have inhibited cause. And then you have desired effect, enforced effect and inhibited effect.

Now, out of this formula — and you can call it a formula if you want to, because an awful lot of things work out when you start looking at this — come many complexities in the organization of living. Actually, it is a restatement of approval, regret, survive, full responsibility, full state of beingness and so forth. But it can be codified this way.

We are just making a restatement in terms of cause and effect. What is full responsibility? A fellow who is at full responsibility is willing to have caused anything, so that is way up top.

Desired cause: When you get an individual down the line to a point where he no longer desires to be cause, he is pretty badly off. When you take an individual and enforce the fact upon him that he is cause, just the act of enforcing it upon him is blaming; it says, “You’re cause” — and when he starts to blame himself finally, he comes down to the point where he won’t be cause for anything. He won’t be cause for the satisfaction of his own hunger. He won’t cause anything to happen.

And then we have desired effect: You would be surprised how many effects there are that are desirable. There are the effects of food, clothing, shelter and pleasure. Individuals desire to be an effect.

The old mystic, the old-time ascetic, knew exactly how to get into a state of affairs where he went way up toward 40.0. He just said, “No pleasure, no effect — no effect of anything.” And of course, he went right on out through the top. He didn’t accept any cause on the line, particularly, but he refused to be an effect of any kind, and so there he went. You can see them today in India up in the highlands. They are very interesting people; of course, they don’t have much understanding of humanity. You go over there and you say, “It’s all right to be sitting there with your legs crossed, with the lice running up and down in the hems of your white robe, but it’s not my idea of a good way to live life” — nothing happens.

The ascetic knows a lot better than to ever permit himself to be an effect of anything, because the second he permits himself to be an effect, he opens the door to somebody or something else’s cause.

There is contained in this all the ramifications of how you go about being a saint. And if you want to get there and become a saint, just close all those doors of effect and you will be a saint. (If you close the doors of food too, you will be a dead saint!)

Now, on effect, a person has to agree to be aberrated. That, by the way, is in the first handbook; a person has to agree to be aberrated. Here is one of the methods he uses to agree: He wants to be affected this way and that way and some other way, and then some other way and some other way. Eventually he has the doors wide open and anything can roll down that channel. He starts to hit a dwindling spiral the moment he wants to be an effect.

The young artist who says “Ah, I want to live! I want to know how life will affect me, and so forth” — he finds out. He stops painting too, because as long as he is an artist he is cause; as long as he is cause he is an artist. But when he becomes effect, he becomes chaotic, unplanning and so on.

Then there is the second dynamic. Poor old Freud: he was so close aboard the boat that I suppose that was why society got so mad at him. When he developed the libido theory he was looking right straight at this; there it was. You open the door to be an effect and you become one. What you do to become an effect becomes then the channel of aberration. An individual says, “I want to be affected pleasurably. I want to be very definitely and desperately affected,” and so forth, and it is very interesting that he will be affected by his counter-efforts and by everything else.

We take the second dynamic: There is a solid communication line on the second dynamic — tactile. You want to know why so many men take their wives’ orders? They want to be an effect — they have a tactile communication line — and the wife says, “Go out and jump in front of the locomotive, please,” and they do. Why? They are an effect; therefore they have elected her to be cause, particularly if she is ornery about it. She is cause. If she can ever accomplish getting blamed on the second dynamic, she is really cause — her word is law! That is how blame operates. Anything you blame becomes cause; it becomes higher and more powerful than you and it can therefore and thereafter regulate you. You blame it — you say, “There’s cause” — and you are saying at the same time, “I’m not cause.” And thereafter from that source you get your orders.

If you want to know how to make an engram really effective against you, all you do is blame it on somebody. Blame its restimulation upon the auditor, blame a dental operation upon the dentist, and that engram — and dentists and auditors — thereafter will have a peculiarly powerful effect upon you.

If you want to get a preclear into a complete, apathetic, slavish state — in other words, if you want to get him into the state of a psychiatric patient — all you have to do is demonstrate to him that it is his fault, continually demonstrate to him that this was his fault and that was his fault, until all of a sudden he ceases to want to be cause. Then get him to blame you and blame you very heavily. (This is, by the way, psychiatric practice.) Eventually, of course, if you can get him to blame you as the auditor and blame you and blame you, pretty soon you will really be cause. You can say, “Do a loop,” and he will loop. That is how you set it up.

If you want to really rule an organization, be so ornery and so mean and do so m any overt acts that there won ‘t be an in dividual in that organi z ati on but will blame you, and after that they do everything you say.

How is a marine company run so well? The officers in the Marine Corps know all about this, evidently; they evidently found out about this somewhere under the walls of Tripoli’ or something. The officers don’t have anything much to do with the troops. They aren’t the cause of anything or the effect of anything, particularly; they sort of hold off. They are the people that give the sergeants hell once in a while, maybe. They set a good example in battle. It is the British Army and British Marine Corps philosophy from which that is borrowed.

They get it all blamed on the sergeant. The sergeant takes all the blame. It is his fault, but it is also his blame. Everybody blames him actively and then they have a good, smooth-running company.

Don’t think for a moment that that sergeant can come down along the line and go into ARC with all these enlisted men and have anything happen in that company. It won’t. Why? Because he is then not cause — they haven’t elected him cause.

Now, do you elect an individual cause by going around and voting? No — elected officers are rarely successful officers. Why? You have to blame yourself; you elected them, didn’t you? So what you really should do is elect a group to appoint an officer, and you would get results then.

For instance, the government of the United States would be far more fascistic if Congress were permitted to select, after Congress was elected, a president. We would have a government there that would really be operating with a meat chopper. Only we don’t want a government like that. Furthermore, we don’t want all the government we pay for.

So you open up a channel by which you will be an effect: you can expect that channel, as you roll along, to be an aberrative channel. This gives food, clothing, housing and, in particular, sex (because it has a communication channel that is tactile) terrific emphasis. What do you worry about all the time? Food, clothing, shelter and the second dynamic.

The only reason you worry about them, the only reason they don’t happen almost automatically, is that you want to be an effect. So a person is made to work for his food. It is a very funny thing that nobody ever set it up s o a person had to work for his after- s have loti on or ski ing tri p to S un Val ley or other odds and ends, and gave him the food. That doesn’t quite work out. The employer has uniformly selected a channel where the individual is of necessity effect and he has used that for pay. Also, he gets obedience when he does this.

As a matter of fact there are a lot of lessons to be learned here. There are a lot of things that have been overlooked. There are lots of ways to crack a blacksnake whip over men, there are lots of ways to enslave them; there are lots of ways to un de rm ine person al ities and c haracter an d everyth ing el se in this. This is a real hot package! I think it would sell very, very quickly in Moscow or Washington. The package is hot. But it doesn’t get very hot if an auditor knows about it.

“Let’s scan everything and every time in your life when you postulated to yourself that you wanted to be an effect.” “Let’s scan every time you blamed anybody for doing something to you.” Let’s get those out of the line and the first thing you know, the individual starts up the tone scale. Why does he start up the tone scale? Because you are taking away all the times when he desired to be an effect.

Now, when an individual desires to be an effect of his own memories, this is really royal! A person starts in saying, “Well, I’d like to cherish this memory. That was an awfully good show; I’d like to think about that later. I hope nobody spoils this illusion for me.” He has been an effect. He has been watching this beautiful picture or a dance or ballet or something of the sort and he says, “I want to cherish this memory, I want to keep this around.” All of a sudden he has assigned value to memory, value to a facsimile. That is the first crime.

Value the show, be damned! Go to it tomorrow night, go to it next week or go to other shows. The only moment you are alive is now. There isn’t any other moment.

When individuals pick up past memories and cherish them, the first thing you know, they find themselves cherishing material objects, and then they start wondering what all this burden of psychosomatic illness is. An auditor tries to get them to let go of this but down at the bottom is a terrific desire to be an effect.

You start going down the line and you say, “When did you want yourself to be influenced pleasantly by a memory?”

The preclear sort of squirms for a minute and says, “How did you know?”

Freud was to some degree right. On the second dynamic, because of this tactile communication system, you have a complete setup. And then the society fixes up everybody by saying, “No, you’re not twenty-one yet and you have to get married.” So a person goes through all his teens desiring to be an effect, but every time he is it is illegal in some fashion or other. So he not only desires to be an effect but he has to hide the effect. Pretty soon he hides it from himself. And about the time he gets to be forty-five or fifty somebody says, “I wouldn’t go out with him.” He loses his potency because he has hidden it all! All the way down the line he has pushed it back. He desired to be an effect and then he said, “No, I’ve got to hide this because if people found out the horrible things that I did, why, I would be ruined socially. So therefore I have to hide all this wanting to be an effect.”

He is thirty-two years old and he goes to a motion picture. It shows the Rockettes or something of the sort and they are doing a beautiful dance, and he is sitting there and the plot runs off in front of his face. A couple of teenagers down the line seem to be getting a big bang out of this movie but he doesn’t seem to be able to. Then he goes outside and he looks and there is green grass and blue sky, and a couple down the line seem to think that that is very nice but for some reason or other it doesn’t look very nice to him anymore. And he all of a sudden realizes that the world is not pleasant to him, that he does not any longer experience pleasure. So then he cooks up a big dream of how he is really going to make sure that Mary and the kids are secure or something and nobly goes on his way.

What he has actually done is he has desired to be an effect, hidden it, put it back, got up a lot of blame and then, out of fear of shame (which is what guilt is; it is down between 0.9 and 0.6), he has just hidden all this. He hides it from himself. His memories become dangerous. He does not dare exhibit his memories so he starts telling people, “Well, I forget. I don’t know her name. I don’t know where that was.” He knows he is dodging something but he can’t figure out quite what he is dodging. The facsimiles are really handling him.

You should understand this point very clearly: There is a great world of difference between looking at present-time reality and looking at the memory of present-time reality. That is why we are calling them facsimiles, because they are facsimiles: you make a box top that looks just more or less like it and send it in and you get your spoon. It is not the real thing. And handling it is handling a memory; it is not handling a concrete past. It is like handling a motion-picture reel or something of the sort; it is not handling a past.

You can go back down the time track and find the time you were in San Francisco or Dallas or someplace. You can remember that right this minute — when you were at some other place. Now, right here in present time, think how far away that was: not in time; think in miles — distance. Just get a concept of these towns being well over the horizon. They are a long way away. That is reality.

But an individual who is building up a “hide,” building up a shame, getting all loused up with wanting to be an effect this way, that way, other ways and so forth, eventually starts to hide his own memories. And then all of a sudden he says, “I’m hiding these things; therefore they must be dangerous. You know, they must be awfully dangerous — I have to work so hard to hide them.” And then he either gets to you or they get him.

But there is a whole sphere of aberrative operation contained in this: a person’s desire to be a cause, his efforts to keep from being an enforced cause — ”you’re to blame” — and his efforts to keep from having cause in-~ hibited in him.

What happens here? A couple doesn’t want children. That is sex: desired cause of children. The first thing you know, it isn’t any fun anymore. They don’t want to be cause, so they come down the tone scale. The second they don’t want to be cause they start down the tone scale and there goes the old shell game.

Now, we take somebody around grief: You talk to them crossly, roughly or something of the sort and you tell them they have got to straighten up, and all of a sudden they begin to cry, quite unexpectedly. You say, “Oh, gee, I was too rough.” You didn’t want to be a cause. You didn’t want to be a cause of their tears, so you go into sympathy.

Actually, most of the things that anybody has ever been mad about in this world don’t amount to anything. You go back over the things you have been mad about in the past and if you really take a look at them they look pretty silly to you. They are generally an effort to enforce cause elsewhere. That is really what anger is.

Grief is “I’m not cause. Look what you’ve done to me. You’ve ruined me.” That is grief.

Apathy is “Well, here I lie — you can’t think I caused anything, can you? I’m innocent. Look at me. I’m innocent.”

But real cause way up at the top gets confused by a 1.5 with 1.5 enforced cause. So a fellow who is causing something encounters a 1.5 and the 1.5 says, “He’s trying to force cause on me because he’s trying to cause something. Therefore it’s causing; therefore the only thing I can possibly do about the thing is stop it! So therefore I’ll stop all cause that I see around and I will pretend that I am cause. I won’t do anything to be cause, but I’ll pretend I’m cause and I’ll tell everybody how much time I have to put in being cause all the time. But I won’t do anything, so I won’t have to be cause. And then I’ll show them that they’re cause and then I’ll get sympathy.” At 1.5 a fellow really wants sympathy and approval. He is really trying to take out a license from you to survive.

If you ever doubt this, get somebody who is terrifically angry at you sometime and just question him about what approval you can show him. He will break down and do a complete explanation. A person at 1.5 is applying for a license to survive; he is applying for it by making himself horrible to have around.

At 0.5 the person is making himself completely innocuous, innocent, enervated — ”I’m just a poor little thing; you wouldn’t refuse me a license, would you?”

There is the gradient scale of cause. If you want to know where an individual is on the tone scale, see how much he is willing to cause. But then look at the quality of what he is willing to cause.

Now, on the effect line, an individual can safely be an effect on any channel he wants to be an effect on — he is completely safe in being an effect — as long as he doesn’t negate being a cause on any channel. Because if he desires to be an effect everything is all fine, but if all of a sudden he negates being a cause he is prime to suddenly become an effect — and he will get it.

This is the same as the individual you sit down and tell to sit quietly and concentrate on nothingness. He then is an effect; you are making an effect out of him, and the more of an effect he is, the more counter-efforts he will continue to get.

There are individuals who are sort of plowing through life and they have wanted to be an effect on many things and they don’t want to cause very much. They won’t eat much and so forth; they are kind of just maundering through life gradually, slowly, carrying along. They aren’t a cause, they aren’t an effect, but they sure are close to going out the bottom and they sure give you as an auditor a lot of trouble. One of the reasons they give you trouble is they are not going to be an effect on what you say either, because that is the last ditch.

You find such people going around worrying about things; they have to concentrate awfully hard on being right if they are going to be alive at all. They correct you when you use an improper word. They leave an idea to go sidetracking over to make sure that the words are all right and so on. They do all sorts of interesting things. They are an effect, but they are so close to being a real, unlive effect (how much of an effect can a person be? Dead!) that when you try to affect them with something and you use a little bit too much horsepower on the thing, you will drive them right out through the bottom.

But if you start using powderpuff techniques they can throw you out, for the good reason that they don’t want to be any more of an effect. You, asking them to do something, are asking them to be more of an effect. This is a weird one. How do you get to it? How do you solve it?

They usually got that way because there was a lot of stuff on cause and effect. There have been a lot of people around them telling them that they were cause, “and cause is important, it’s serious.” This is blame — ”You see what you caused now! This is serious. You ought to know better than to do such a thing. You’re to blame!” and so on.

Actually the button behind these buttons is the seriousness with which the charge of cause is leveled at individuals. If you want to start repairing this individual, you pick up about the lightest button you can find on the case. It will be one of those buttons on our chart, and it most likely will be a “serious” button of some sort. You can’t run anything very heavy on these people. When they are way down on the tone scale, you can even get them to work a lock and the lock won’t blow; it is just too heavy for them.

In processing they can’t be an effect, and yet they won’t cause themselves to climb up the tone scale and get well. That is why these cases give you trouble. So what do you do? Actually there is something you can do: You can just follow the general steps leading into the solution of insanity — mimicry and so forth. You can get them in. They are willing to mimic you because you are obviously alive. Then you can find out who they are being insane for on a life continuum.

And by the way, practically every insane person is busily being insane for somebody else, not for themselves. The nobility of the human race! They lie there and let prefrontal lobotomies be performed on them, they let electric shocks happen to them, they let themselves be shot with sodium pentothall — they even let psychiatrists talk to them! In other words, they will go through anything to hang on to somebody else’s goal to be insane. That is very fascinating.

There may be a faster way of hitting the case, but in Handbook for Preclears there is a list of the exact steps you take to bring a psychotic out of it. What you hit after that is probably a life continuum, and the case should blow very quickly.

I want to give you the source on cause and effect: The basic concept on cause and effect is Persian. I first learned of it out of a manuscript which was published about A.D. 850. It talks about the role of a practitioner of the Magi. He is supposed to cause things and it warns him not to be affected by them. That is all it says. I ran into that thing head-on and I scratched my head over it for some time and tried to figure it out. I figured there was something more there and more than they knew they were writing. I coasted along for quite a while before I finally got it disentangled.

Now, processing the life continuum is actually Postulate Processing. Postulates cause life continuum; it is the variety in which they are made and the difficulty of getting to them that gives trouble.

An individual says, “I’m going to try to help, and I want him to be well, and I want him to be happy,” and then all of a sudden that other person is dead. The individual has then had his own postulates torn up and thrown in his face. He said, “I’m going to do something,” and then something prevented it from happening; something caused death. So he says, “I must have done it because I said I was going to do otherwise, and I must be to blame because I said I was going to help and I didn’t. My postulate is wrong, so therefore I’m wrong, so therefore I must be to blame on this death.”

This is true along any line of postulates. Postulates lie behind this sort of thing. An individual makes a postulate of one sort or another and it follows on out.

The trick in processing the life continuum is in how you dig up these postulates, because that was such a terrible failure that to get this death undone and get some of the somatic off it and get it squared around and get back to the actual postulate really requires a little bit of doing. Once one understands, however, the mechanics of the emotional curve and running a little bit of effort and so on, these postulates will fall out. It is when you get the earliest postulates off the thing that the case starts falling apart in an awful hurry. Postulates are very, very important!

Cause and effect is very much to the point in this. A woman says to herself one New Year’s Eve, “I’m not going to smoke anymore, I’m going to be nice to my husband, I’m not going to burn any more steaks, I’m not going to talk about Mrs. Wompatattle anymore and I’m going to be nice to the children. Now, there, I’ve done my New Year’s Day duty.” She writes them all down and breaks them all on the second day of January and goes into a decline and is hell to live with the rest of the year.

Why? Because postulates were made which had to be altered but weren’t altered, so the individual was going up against these postulates with a solid crunch. After she had made this postulate, every time she smoked she was calling herself a liar, because she was going up against the postulate.

It works out this way: On Tuesday you say “I’m never going to have anything to do with Annabelle anymore — never!” and on Wednesday you go over to her house. That is a failure. It is a failure to you with you because you said so-and-so and then you made a liar out of yourself, so you failed.

What happens is that an individual cannot make a single postulate without becoming the effect of that postulate, because an individual is riding in a time continuum. He can’t say “I am going to be a so-and-so” without moving on forward in time to a position where he is supposed to be the so-and-so. And he becomes a so-and-so even in his own eyes.

Cause and effect: A postulate is a cause, and the second the individual moves away from that point in time he becomes the effect of this postulate. S o an in dividual is be ing continu ally an effect of his past whether he likes it or not. He is continually an effect of his past unless he gets swiveled completely out of valence or something of the sort, or unless he starts life over again or decides to be suddenly all over again. As a matter of fact, you could decide that and just drop all the past facsimiles and everything else and let them all go by the boards. You would have a fine case of amnesia, but you would be very happy! Every once in a while somebody does this; he just swivels completely out of valence and he is no longer subject to his own postulates. He says, “I’m somebody else. Now I am somebody else.” People who change their names effect this to some degree.

This is why postulates are so important — because of cause and effect. A postulate is cause, a conclusion actually can become a cause, an evaluation can become a cause, and the individual moving along on his own time continuum then becomes the effect of this cause. You should be very chary of making promises. You say, “All right, next Tuesday I will...” but you probably won’t be there. So just before you say “Next Tuesday I will . . .” make sure you say “(You know when I promise people things I never mean it.) Next Tuesday I will. . .” And you will be able to go through all next Tuesday without keeping any appointment or doing anything and feel perfectly at ease and go to bed that night with no conscience whatsoever.

What is conscience? It is simply negating against your own — not somebody else’s — causes. If there is such a thing as conscience, it would be that. You have said on Tuesday, “All right, I will be a good boy, I won’t do it anymore. I won’t do it anymore, I’ll be a good boy” — not under duress or anything like that!

Then, come Wednesday, you are walking home from school and everything looks fine to you, particularly those apples. So you shin over the fence and you climb the apple tree to get a whole bunch of apples and you put them in your shirt and you get back on the road again. You start walking along and then for some reason or other you feel guilty. You know nobody is going to come and take you off to jail — not for stealing some apples — and you try to figure this out. “What’s wrong? Is it because I’m afraid of somebody catching me or something?” You consult everything but your own postulates; you consult everything else. And so you finally get the weird ideas “I am afraid of police. I’m afraid Papa and Mama will punish me. I’m afraid I will be deserted by the whole society and left to die upon these arid plains of the Bronx” — anything but the fact that “-last Tuesday I said I would be a good boy, and now I’m not being a good boy.”

You are your own judge and, believe me, all too often you are your own executioner. Fascinating, isn’t it?

Now, if you can remember sometime in your life when you felt guilty of something, you can go back earlier and find the postulate that you are guilty of disobeying. There is really only one person you are going to disobey and that is you. You are the only person it is serious to disobey, and that is only serious until you get up the “serious” button. After that you say, “Well, let’s see, next Tuesday I’m going to be the Sultan of Siam,” and next Tuesday instead you are a hobo — so what?

I have heard individuals say, “You know, I have to take the rest of life unseriously and I take only myself seriously.” There it goes, from the first dynamic out. You might think that this is the sort of thing that obtains on every hand — it does. But the only reason you take yourself seriously is that so many other people have. This is a beautiful operation: You make a person make a postulate, then you make them make the postulate again and make it again, and then all of a sudden you find them disobeying their own postulate. Then you say, “Hm-hm. You yourself said . . .” “Now, you promised Mama that . . .” That is the way it works. So these things start to look serious to you.

Also, remember that every time in your life that you got hurt, you made the decision which got you hurt. Therefore you are liable to start taking your own decisions seriously, particularly if you agreed sometime or another that Mama hurt or that hurting was bad or if you are taking part in a life continuum for someone who believed that pain was horrible.

The actual truth of the matter is you could probably stand up to anything as far as pain is concerned. I would bet that a Chinese torturer couldn’t make much of an effect on an individual unless he was severely aberrated on the subject of how much pain should hurt and how important pain was.

You know where this comes from? This comes from the one-life theory. This theory was arrived at without any scientific conclusion and without much thought. It was probably postulated sometime in the past in an effort to control individuals and to impress little children into the fact that they had to behave and do what they should do, because you would have an awful time trying to control people who believed they would have another chance. So you get them to make the postulate when they are still tottering around and tripping over their triangular pants that they only live once and that life is serious and it is important. Then you can lay a lot of regret into the life too. A person is swinging along, getting along fine and all of a sudden it occurs to him when he is twenty-two that he will never again be twenty-one. He gets married and he says, “I’ll never again be free. I’ll never again be able to take out four girlfriends in the same night.”

Life is sown with these horrible regrets. An individual begins at last to look back to the times when he should have but he didn’t, and does he regret that! Because he has been taught that “you only live once and you’ll never have another chance.”

This also makes a person very brave on the battlefield. It is really horrendous that this boy goes out and lays down his life. That is great stuff; you can play it up very strongly. The whole truth of the matter is, it was very, very fine of the boy to go ahead and do what he thought he ought to do. But he did it! He had full responsibility when he did. The only reason that this could be considered very bad is if one were holding on to a one-life theory. Then it becomes horrible; it becomes strictly nightmare stuff! Little children start dreaming about coffins and this and that; people all around them are telling them “You’ve only got one life to live!” and the child is trying to fight himself out of this one way or the other.

I would have had a very easy mind during the last war. I used to get pretty wrought up on two counts: my own life was skidding by ineffectively and my own work was not being performed, and on the other hand the lives and energies of a great many men were being wasted. I still protest their being wasted, because it is an ignoble waste! That is real waste.

But if you really want to hang it up as something just utterly gruesome, convince a man that he has only got one life and then take it away from him.

What we will do for randomity in this society!

Don’t get me wrong. Any part of any life laid down for a cause is a very worthwhile proposition. It is real sacrifice; there is no doubt about that. But don’t rub it in!

I don’t care whether you pick up this other theory or not. Just remember that you have thoroughly agreed and have had it postulated into you, “of your own free will, out of a vast amount of phenomena which has been examined thoroughly by experts all through the ages and found to be utterly and completely true and without any slightest contradiction,” that you only live one life!

One of the horrible things you can do is just show that the evidence doesn’t exist on the other side and then show people that you have something. And as long as it stays a reasonable society, a society which always will agree with you when you show them the phenomena, we are safe!

Therefore, a whole new process here really opens up to your eyes when you look at cause and effect. You have seen it in Advanced Procedure. An individual throws himself wide open to be an effect and after that can really be an effect. But this is perfectly all right. In order for him to be an effect — affected pleasurably or by pleasure — he also has to be willing to be a cause.

An individual who goes through life only wanting to be an effect is a sick person. I would bet that you have an acquaintance or a preclear who, if you kind of looked at them and took a real quick glance at them right this instant, is going through life being nothing but an effect, and who is bound and determined to be nothing but an effect. They sometimes will justify it by wanting to be an effect of pleasure — they want to enjoy life and so forth, they say. They don’t want to cause enjoyment in life: they want to enjoy life.

Now, all of the ramifications which come off this are very obvious. You really need no more than this.