I am going to tell you now about an interesting, fabulous, colossal, unprecedented phenomenon which is just about as fascinating to watch as a five-ring circus. Let’s give it the very staid name of “the life-continuum theory.”

One of the many interesting phenomena that led up to where we are now is the phenomenon of epicenters and control centers. The fact is, there are many, many control centers. There are probably hundreds of thousands of them.

It is a bit more than a theory. It has phenomena accompanying it which go crunch! Anyone who has had terrific difficulty in resolving a case in himself or in others has been crushing his skull into the life-continuum theory and attendant phenomena, so you had better know this one.

If you know anything about the theory of the epicenter, you will see how a control center comes into being. The control center is just the organism taking the position of the new counter-effort. Every time you have gone through a failure and come up on the other side you have generally gotten a new epicenter. Actually these are “subposts.” Every one of them is a subpost, including the top control center. This may all seem very confusing to you; believe me, it was confusing to me too.

The life-continuum theory probably has several explanations. I do not wish, at this time, to tell you that the explanation is this or is that. I will just give you several explanations for it, because you will find-out that sometimes it works out one way and sometimes it works out another way. There is undoubtedly a central explanation for this manifestation, but I cannot tell you at this moment exactly what that is. It is probably going to be days before we know!

Here you are looking at not an opinion but phenomena, and this phenomena is discoverable. You can trace down, for instance, the control center setup of the right elbow. Where is the control center in the right elbow? Any time you take a little child you are fooling around with and stick your fingers in between those two bones at the right elbow you will find the control center. Every one of these control centers is a nerve-coordination point, which is actually a new switchboard.

The point is that an individual tends to carry on the fears, goals, habits, tokens and manifestations of the failed, the departed or the dead.

We are talking physiologically at this point. Your control nerves come in to certain points in the body. There is one in the stomach area. Evidently man got hit often enough there to eventually have enough counter-effort in that area for him to have to take care of it structurally, so he got a control center setup. You hit somebody there and he gets pretty sick.

It would be a considerable joke on the cynics of the past if we were to discover that our primary motivation — each and every one of us — was to help; if “survive” were best interpreted by each individual in terms of “you will survive,” not “I will survive.” That would be very interesting, wouldn’t it? I don’t say that this is the case, but I do know that you can persuade individuals to get well and get up on their feet solely to help somebody else when they will not do it for themselves. And I do know that an individual will run engrams, secondaries, somatics, he will stand on his head, hang out the window, climb the Woolworth Building or anything else, rather than run out and conclude and end a life continuum in which he is engaged. And whenever you have come up to a point in a case where the individual is just plain not resolving on something, you have run up against a life continuum.

There are control centers at the elbow, the wrist and in each finger. It is no joke that a writer starts to think with his hands.

The immediate miracle occurs when the individual is not engaged very heavily on life continuum, and when you can get to, accidentally or otherwise, his decision to be sick. If you can just get to his decision to be sick and run something off the incident — a little emotion, anything (I don’t care what it is) — it will just go by the boards. But if he is holding this in trust for a person who is departed, failed or dead, he won’t give it up until you process it very properly and very correctly.

You may have seen a Japanese vaudeville artist write upside down on one line and backwards on another line simultaneously. He has just thrown a “disconnect” into the machinery and he can think independently with one hand or the other. Actually, you could probably carry forward not just one but several thousand simultaneous trains of thought.

As I look around the environment I see a few pairs of glasses. I can tell you that in many, many cases those glasses are being held for somebody who is departed, failed or dead. That is all there is to it. The individual has taken this other person’s goals and said, “This person will live.” And this other person “goes on living,” evidently, as long as the individual holds the somatic or the habit for him.

These phenomena are discoverable along this genetic line. You start going back along the genetic control-center line and you will find these control centers, one by one, each graduating to a new control center.

I knew about this manifestation in July of 1950, but I didn’t know the depths to which it extended. At that time I was definitely trying to lash it in by itself when another whole series of phenomena presented themselves suddenly, abruptly, and could not be ignored. These were the phenomena of past deaths.

Somebody started this nonsense of saying the mind was in the head or something of the sort. That doesn’t happen to be true. The mind isn’t anyplace; that is the big joke. But there are all sorts of switchboards and each one of these central switchboards has a contact on its own line of experience. These evidently cross-feed data, one to the other, until you get your summations and evaluations of data and they sum up.

Somebody comes up to you and says, “Do you believe in a past death?” I can tell you this: A past death is discoverable by Effort Processing any time you want to run the effort within the effort within the effort. You start a fellow out — ”What is the effort not to see?” “What is the effort to have that effort not to see?” — and just run him back down the line like this. “All right, what is the effort to have that effort, now?” “What’s the effort to have that effort?” “Now, what’s the effort not to have that effort?” “All right, what’s the effort to have that effort?” The first thing you know, there he is lying at Antietam or Shiloh or with the children all standing around him on a farm in Sicily, and you haven’t said a doggone word about past deaths. But there he lies and he tells you all about it.

Now, if you can ever reach it, there is a control center above all other control centers, and it has been there all the time. And probably when you got that one nicely established and so forth, you would find out you could establish a higher one above it. There seems to be an infinity of control center levels.

If you didn’t run it and if you just busily invalidated it and said “Oh, well, there can’t be such a thing,” he would go into a state of collapse on you. When past deaths get invalidated the person gets pretty bad off.

But when you are dealing with a preclear, you are dealing with somebody, generally, who is on such a gross point of material-universe being that he is more or less running on the rightside or the left-side control center. People who have strokes just have one control center go on strike; it kicks the bucket. It says, “I don’t want to go on living anymore.” One half of their body goes paralyzed and that sort of thing. One control center, in terrific protest, picks up an old facsimile and says to the other control center, “I’m not in there pitching no more!” and that is that. I am talking about phenomena, and this is just something which you will observe.

We are not dealing with belief in this regard, we are dealing with something that is very concrete. It is phenomena, and on investigation this phenomena turns out to be very phenomenal.

The dentist has long held the idea that one tooth aches when another tooth aches — that is to say, there is a sympathy of toothache. Tooth A starts aching and its mate starts aching, but there is nothing wrong with its mate — nothing wrong with tooth B. It is tooth A that has — thinks it has — something wrong with it. That is fascinating, because it leads us off into the doggonedest process that you ever heard of. It is the “internal sympathy” process — internal sympathy. Tooth B sees poor old tooth A going by the boards so tooth B actually gets sympathetic, and I mean that on an emotional level. It gets sympathetic.

Somebody comes up to you and says, “Well, this past-death genetic blueprint, and so forth — it doesn’t say anything about that in William James. ”

If you want to run out somebody’s toothache, get the individual’s sympathy for that tooth and that tooth’s desire for sympathy for the individual. You can actually get an emotional-curve line on this; there is actually an emotional interchange amongst organs of the body.

So immediately you say, “Well, we’re not interested too much in that,” and you let the conversation drag for a little while. Then all of a sudden you ask him, “Can you imagine a clam?” and make a motion with your thumb and forefinger of a rapid opening and closing.

This is very interesting for you to know, because if you were able to do just this and nothing but this, you would have a well preclear. If you could get every organ of the body in full communication with every other organ of the body — if every part of the body were in communication with every other part of the body, if every control center or old epicenter were in contact with the rest of the epicenters — you would have a well preclear.

Exactly what the manifestations would be if you asked a person this question are as follows: The person begins to feel sympathetic — he begins to feel sad and so forth. People don’t feel sad over clams! Then pretty soon he will do some kind of a valence shift, and then his jaws’ hinges will begin to hurt and he will feel kind of bad about the whole thing. If you don’t run it out it will hang with him for a while. But you haven’t told him anything. All you said to him was “Can you imagine a clam that is going this way, kind of fast?” and you rapidly flapped your thumb and forefinger together. That is the death throes of a clam. They can’t writhe around, they can only flap.

You start getting somebody in contact with his liver, if he has some bizarre pain in his liver, and you just get communication to the liver and work on it for a while, and you are liable to turn up with an emotional situation between the individual “I,” wherever it is located, and the liver. There is an internal interplay in the body. And why shouldn’t there be? The body contains hundreds of thousands of colonial aggregations of cells, and each one of these has joined up with the others. Each one of these has its own genetic background; each one of these has its own thought pattern, its own experience pattern. They are in there pitching just as long as they figure out things are all right and the control center that should be in charge is in charge. But all of a sudden the fellow starts shifting around on control centers, wavering, he gets beaten down into apathy and he is no longer in charge of his own body. When this happens — he goes down to 0.5 or somewhere like that on the tone scale — you get the same interchange from one part of the body to the other that you get from one human being to the other. You actually have the proposition of an individual who feels so sorry for some part of his body that it is in continual trouble.

So if you feel sort of ornery and somebody comes up and gives you a lot of 1.1 nonsense, you just say, “Can you imagine a clam?” Because they will move over and get inside that clam, eventually. They will see it, exteriorized; they will pick it up on its death and then they will move over and get inside the thing. Then they will start talking about the “poor clam”; because the clam, on the genetic-blueprint line, happens to be what you are now using for jaws on the roof and floor of your mouth. This bivalve stage was a very static state. A clam is not mobile; he does not go very far and he gets rather impatient. And the whole thing is sort of a series of holders. It is a mean spot on the track.

Actually, every tooth in your head has a potential service facsimile which it will turn on to get sympathy. I am very sorry to have to tell you about that because it means that the human body is, after all, built out of the material universe. I don’t think you will ever take it up to static.

But how come we are running the death of the clam? That does not put it on the genetic line, unless this clam died and then made some new clams. No, it didn’t do that.

I examined this from an engineering viewpoint. I found out that the static is, evidently, at minus 273 degrees centigrade. That is the temperature of the static. It would have to be, because that is the temperature of no-motion. A static has no motion in it.

All I am telling you about is phenomena. You can believe what you please.

So I put this to the test: I set an individual down and got him to concentrate on a state of notbeingness. He started to get counter-efforts which he had not handled in the past, because he was slowing down. He was sitting there motionless, relaxed, in a state of not-beingness. These counterefforts kept coming in and hitting him, and I would say, “That’s all right. Just calm down.” Bang! — another one. The next thing I knew, he began to chill. He started to chill.

Take a person with a terrific toothache: there is something behind that. The type of mollusk which is on this line evidently had spores or barnacles which were around on its upper lip, inside. It apparently procreated more or less in this fashion. These things were tight-sealed, and evidently, after a clam got kicked out on the beach, these spores weren’t dead yet but the clam was. And the sun blazed down, and all of a sudden they did the strangest thing — you wouldn’t expect a tooth to do this: they exploded! The gas pressure inside that inner barnacle that would become a tooth some day went bang! and it spattered. There is a somatic for each cell in there as it is dying and then there is an explosion.

Now, this is the sort of a rat race that a person can get into if he starts practicing very great concentration and an abandonment of the physical body. This is all right; there is nothing wrong with practicing it — but he gets into this situation where he goes up the tone scale above

So, you take somebody who has one of these terrific toothaches and he goes and ties it all up and tries to hold it down and so forth. You ask him, “What’s the matter with your tooth?”

20.0 and starts to travel too slow. When he gets way up at the top, if he can take his body through it, that is all right, but these cells don’t stand up very well under a very quick freeze. It is cold. If you don’t believe it, put it to test. It might take you some months to get up to speed again, but if you want to put it to test, go ahead. We did it to a couple of boys, and they are not quite right yet.

“Oh, it just — just feels like it’s going to blow up!”

People in spiritualism and mysticism have noticed that a great quietness, a lot of going into trance and so forth eventually does something to somebody. And that is evidently what it does.

You say, “Can you imagine yourself being inside that tooth and then just suddenly shattering?”

Understand now, we are not talking in terms of right or wrong — whether it is right or wrong or otherwise to do this. If you want to go out through the top, go! Use complete self-determinism. If you want to go out through the bottom, just keep taking in lots of sympathy and using your service facsimile and it won’t be long.

And the person sort of apathetically says, “Yes. That’s the way it feels.”

We used to have a skipper the crew was always threatening to mutiny against, and he said, “This gangway is open to all parts of the world.” That tone scale sure is.

And you say, “All right, do so.” “Why, I even get a sort of a sound.”

Now, the tone scale is plotted from 0.0 to 40.0. Tone 0.0 is stop and 40.0 is stop too, actually. At 20.0, theoretically, you get optimum motion.

“Do it a few times. Do it a few times. Do it a few times. Where’s your toothache?”

The human being who is in a state of optimum motion probably doesn’t exist. Man is usually way down the line from there. If he gets up to 4.0 he is a heck of a lot higher than normal, and there is a long distance to go and a lot of speed to pick up between 4.0 and 20.0.

“Gone!”

The tone scale is a circle. It starts at 0.0 and goes on up through various strange manifestations (including normal) to 4.0; it starts getting up above 4.0, goes on up to 20.0 — which is optimum motion, theoretically — and then starts to slow down again through some interesting aspects.

Dentists are always talking about teeth bursting and this is a great restimulator.

The Chart of Attitudes has a plot across the top of an ideal state of being, but nowhere does this chart say where these ideal states occur, except that they are above about 27.0. They are certainly above 27.0; they are spotted anywhere between 27.0 and 40.0, and where each one is, I don’t know. I just happen to know empirically they are all there.

The toughest nerve in the body, one might say, and probably the oldest nerve, is what they call the fifth nerve; it goes right around the whole jaw. When you start monkeying with one side of this nerve, a lot of other points on the nerve go by the boards. You get sympathy from one tooth to the other tooth and you get explosions for all these teeth.

So, it may be that some of these come in at various speeds.

There is another manifestation: The clam shell snaps shut, and sometimes there is a piece of sand in there and it comes down on these little soft spores that will become teeth someday. Bang! It is quite a somatic. But you can get a person to run these out when he has a toothache and he will feel better. The tooth has a tendency to rehabilitate as long as it isn’t in sympathy for some dead tooth, mourning for the dead.

It is certain that there is a band between 38.0 and 40.0 which is as thoroughly insidious as the band between 0.0 and 2.0. It would be a rough deal if somebody got up in there. Yet they do this every once in a while over in India.

Why is it that when you get one tooth pulled the tooth next to it starts to ache? You can say, “Well, it laid in an engram and there’s a holder there and so forth.” That is complicated, because it doesn’t resolve on that. But it resolves on “Let’s see, can you imagine yourself being a tooth, feeling sorry for another tooth just as that tooth gets pulled?”

Now, every so often somebody who doesn’t know what he is talking about says Dianetics has to do with mysticism. I don’t wish to be blunt about it — I want to be courteous about the whole thing — but these people sure don’t know mysticism.

The person says, “Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I can do that.”

Mysticism is a channel for discovery. It is not a subject. It is a process, you might say; it is a field of traffic which one uses to discover what might be wholly true. It is an effort to discover that. But it is a channel; it is an activity. Dianetics is a subject. Dianetics is actually in bin three.

“Now, can you feel sympathy?”

I have talked about this before, but let’s take a look at this proposition of three bins. Everything in bin one may or may not be known, but if anything in bin one can be experienced, felt or measured by any process at all by a human being or life in any form, then it is knowable. Furthermore, this is the bin of near-absolute truths.

They say, “Yes (sniff).” And the tooth will rehabilitate.

This is the mysterious, this is the unknown, but it is not the unknowable. The unknowable is over someplace else. That is where they buried Spencer; l that is where they buried Kant. Hegel is buried lower down — that is closer to hell!

The tooth is a pretty bad experiment on the genetic line. People have trouble with them; they have to get pulled out all the time and all that sort of thing.

Everything in bin one is potentially knowable, one way or the other. But how do you find out about it? We can call that bin two; it is actually a series of tracks and there are a lot of them there. Religion is one of them, mysticism is one of them, magic is one of them — I mean oldtime magic, which was a highly codified thing. Even science is one of them. Science is a sort of a limited — and I do mean limited — methodology, because science insists upon observation without inductive jumping to the conclusion and then trying to ride back on it. We actually expanded, in Book 1, the definition and activity of the general scientist.

You can actually do a great deal of work as an auditor about and around, if you want to monkey with this on Effort Processing. You can do a great deal of work with this, because in this area is the first interpersonal relationship. The hinges at the sides of your jaws go back a long way, back to this bivalve organism. Way back on the track is this conflict: The two hinges are not in agreement with each other. One tries to open and the other wants to stay closed, and there is a battle to find out who is boss. Eventually they find out who is boss; one goes into apathy and the other one after that is the boss, and they are very happy about the whole thing. But they find out that even then they have trouble. So they do something that the United States and Russia ought to do: they move the government of Russia into the United States and the government of the United States into Russia.

It caused quite an activity at Bell Labs, by the way, at the time this was going forward. There were several engineers over at Bell Labs who were perfectly delighted to sit down and try to figure out “What is this thing called scientific logic?” The interesting thing was they came up with a brand-new idea on it, and it was a better one. I imagine everybody believes this has been science now for a long time. It is not true.

Any time you have that sort of a situation happening, you are not going to get any fights. That is approximately the setup you have. You could actually go back down along the channel with Effort Processing and straighten up and rehabilitate the left control area into the right side of the body and the right control area into the left side of the body and fix it up so an individual wouldn’t have strokes or anything of the sort. You just get each side clear across in control; you would find yourself running an awful lot of engrams in order to do it. But you get this cross-communication line resolved and an individual feels a lot more comfortable afterwards, because many places along the lines these things are hung up and they are not resolved.

The scientist goes from an enormous number of observations to what he considers to be a conclusion that is a super conclusion; no other conclusion can be made from this data but that conclusion. And that is the way science has worked.

There is the most serious conflict on the control-center line. You start monkeying around with control centers and you are liable to find yourself back along this line someplace.

But they have actually evolved in the field of electronics and physics and so forth a new level of activity. They call it mathematics. That is a swell new name for inductive logic. In mathematics you take a lot of symbols and you throw them into a hat and scramble them up and you bring out an answer and say it is absolutely true because it came from the field of mathematics. (Oh, yeah? Have you ever read an income tax return?)

Now, you can do the same thing with any kind of Effort Processing. As a matter of fact, somebody has got to go back along the line and, just with Effort Processing, locate the manifestation that was back of each one of these epicenters and conflicts. You could take almost any preclear that worked fairly well and you could easily go trace them down and find out what these epicenters were.

The point is that science joined to mathematics makes an inductive deductive type of methodology by which you recover data. But what is it? It is one of these tracks in bin two. There have been tracks in there for a long time. They had them in India and Persia and China and all over the place.

For instance, once upon a time the arms terminated at each of the joints. In other words, at some time or other, each one of these centers was the extremity. And at some time or other, practically every epicenter was, itself, the boss. At some time or other each one has been the boss. And just as a ship will disintegrate when it gets each department out of coordination with every other department, so will the body disintegrate when you start getting control centers abdicating. One arm decides it is not going to coordinate anymore with the other arm, and that is where you get lack of coordination in sports and so forth.

Men have been trying for many ages to recover data out of bin one and get it into bin three. And what is in bin three? That is usable, relative truths. That is what we think we know.

But you do this with Effort Processing ; you don ‘t do this by suggesting it to somebody. You don’t have to suggest anything. You just start getting the effort within the effort to do the effort to do something or other.

Now, Dianetics is a channel which is at once a composite of any usable channels into an outlined method of exploration of bin one. And that quite bluntly contains anything that is workable, anything that is useful, as a method of discovery. What are these methods? They have been a lot of things; I don’t care what they are. Practically any channel known has some part of this. It is a broad track, but don’t think that there aren’t other methods outside of Dianetics that can discover what is in bin one. That would be a very limited scope. Undoubtedly these methods exist, and Dianetics has done the rather horrible thing of picking up as part of its channels the practices of hypnotism, mysticism, spiritualism, magic, science, mathematics and so on — anything and everything which man thought man knew — and looking these things over, in trying to get into bin one. And believe me, any one of those tracks is a valid effort, a valid channel of discovery. As a result we have pinned down in bin three and located a very large number of phenomena about knowledge and about the human mind. They are in bin three.

“Can you feel any communication along that line?”

Where do you want to study Dianetics? Do you want to study it in bin three — relative, workable truths which, by their application, can resolve a great many of the ills, aberrations, misunderstandings and conflicts of men? There is a lot of that pinned down in bin three. And you can take a Cook’s tour through the phenomena of Dianetics and leave somebody mighty shaken at the other end of it — mighty shaken. There are about two hundred new phenomena you can show them.

“No, no.... Yes! Yes, I can feel communication.” All of a sudden a sharp somatic will go on and off or something like that will happen.

But Dianetics still goes on as a channel. Only it is not narrow-minded: it decided that any route you can get anything out of bin one on, travel it!

It is interesting that at every point of termination of an organism the individual goes out of valence. There is the basic valence mechanism: the person dies and he goes out of valence! You can run these and run these and run these in individuals. So we are not talking about whether or not we are running a flock of past deaths or whether we are running our own past deaths or the past deaths of somebody else or anything else. It doesn’t matter what we are running. It happens that that is the phenomena.

And anybody that says Dianetics is mysticism is insulting neither mysticism nor Dianetics, particularly, because how do you think man got up high enough to get science? This person is overlooking the fact that there are concrete, positive phenomena that are as real and as easy to locate and as invariable as “you have to pick up the pitcher and pour it into a glass in order to have a glass of water.” Let’s not be sloppy with our thinking on this. We have these phenomena. I don’t care what else is discovered, these phenomena will continue and remain.

You can argue with the phenomena just like you could argue with your right hand against the radiator of a Mack truck in low gear. Unless you take account of it as an auditor, you are going to find some of your preclears, as you do Effort Processing on them, way back down the time track saying, “It’s so funny, I . . . claws! I feel like I have claws! You know, I’ve felt like that half my life. I’ve got claws here. And I’ve very often got claws here.”

By the way, the science of physics is no better off than that. And as a matter of fact we may at this moment be just a little bit better off than the science of physics, because the science of physics is doing mathematics along in this line: c plus 30284 divided by 1 over infinity plus 6297 equals 1 — quantum mechanics. (Of course, that is a very slap-happy rendition of quantum mechanics.)

You tell him, “Get the effort to let go.” “No-o! “

You ask, “Hey, hey! What are those odd numbers you’ve got in there? We know what c is — that’s the speed of light.”

“Well now, come on, just get the effort to let go, the effort to let go. Get the effort not to let go, then.”

The subject of nuclear physics is being regulated by a mathematics which requires what we call “bugger factors” to balance. You say, “What are these things?”

Crash! If you work on him for a short time, he will fall. The reason he won’t let go is he was hanging on to a tree with claws. And he had himself suspended and he had been hanging there for a long time. It was eight thousand feet down to the bottom of the ravine and he knew he was skidding and the bark was slipping. He has been trying to hold on now for a few eons. Then all of a sudden you come along and you fix it up so he can’t hold on anymore. And if you really fix him up so he can’t hold on anymore, he will fall, and you will watch him fall right there on the couch.

“Well, it doesn’t balance unless you put them in.”

When you have run people through falls, you have generally stopped them midway so they were still in the air, because the mind has the perfect belief that it can stop time. So it can, in the mind, but not in the physical universe.

And you say, “Is this the way you’re figuring out those atomic piles?”

So here is your individual: He will be lying on the couch in certain ways, certain attitudes, and he will twist in certain ways. He is trying to do something about a fall, perhaps. He can tell you about this fall he makes, and you can process this part of the fall and that part of the fall and this part of the fall and that part of the fall, but you are just not going to get anyplace with this fall unless you watch him fall. You can see him let go, and he will hit — crash! — and then you can run out the rest of the engram. You have to run out all the parts of it. They try to hold themselves in midair, in other words.

“Yes.”

But that particular form I was telling you about was a sloth. The sloth was awfully dumb. This creature (the sloth or the tarsier) was liable to come along, run into a tree limb — bonk, bonk, bonk, bonk — and then all of a sudden say, “There’s something hitting me.” Then he would look up and go through the terrible worry of trying to figure out the solution of how to go up the tree without hitting the limb. Occasionally he would abandon the whole thing and go down the tree and climb another tree rather than move just far enough to miss the limb.

So we are better off than that; our preclears don’t explode.

If you want to fool around with scientific investigation, could you louse up a preclear! You could go back and find this type of life form and that type of life form, this effort and that effort and other efforts, and fool around and fool around. You could go back to photon conversion and all sorts of things. It doesn’t matter much what you do about it.

We have two levels, then, in Dianetics. Actually, they should be differentiated by two names. This channel should probably be called something like Scientology (a new coined word); it probably should be. What is it? It is a route — the study of science or the study of truth or the study of knowledge — because it is “the study of”; it is not an -etic, meaning “science of.” And in bin three should be Dianetics.

There is a lot of work lying there for somebody that will be done someday, but it involves literally thousands of hours of auditing. And, of course , once the preclear realizes that all the efforts and counter-efforts have been run out all the way back down the track, then he disappears! Because all you are composed of, actually, is just efforts and counter-efforts. Every effort you have was, at one time or another, a counter-effort. So what are you composed of? You are composed of counter-efforts. Therefore, after you have run out all the counterefforts on a case from one end to the other, your preclear should theoretically vanish. This would be interesting to see. My scientific experimental nature sometimes toys with the idea but I haven’t picked a candidate yet.

Regardless of what we use to compose our Scientology, when we nail down these phenomena with tenpenny spikes, we have recovered data to the field of useful, relative truth. It is useful, relative truth: You can take an individual and do this and do that. You don’t just take one individual and do this and do that, you can take all individuals and do this and do that. Of course, sometimes you have to do something to the individual before you can do these things, but you will find the phenomena go on from individual to individual.

Now, at each one of these periods of cessation of a life form there are several manifestations which occur mentally. You run out some effort or emotion on the line and postulates begin to show up. You will find out that there is a thought which comes before all thoughts, but each later thought is derived from every past thought. In other words, there is the prime thought which has nothing earlier, but then there are thoughts from there on out which are derived from efforts and counter-efforts — these create new thoughts. But the thought itself is what holds the whole thing together. The whole package is in suspension with the thought.

It must be a pretty good track, this track of Scientology, because it has sure been producing an awful lot of stuff. As a matter of fact, sometimes I think maybe we ought to get some concrete and kind of seal that channel off for a few minutes. But it is going so fast, actually, that it is resolving cases before you get a chance to resolve them with the earlier techniques. It resolves them with a faster technique. So you are saving time anyhow.

You run a past death down to the point where you get thoughts coming out and you will find that these thoughts are very interesting. They consist of “I wish I were somewhere else,” “I’ll pretend I’m somewhere else,” “I’m really not here at all — I am not here,” “I’m going on; my life is elsewhere,” “I shouldn’t have been here,” “I deeply regret this whole thing,” and so on. In other words, it is an effort to cancel out the whole incident and somehow keep going.

The codification of the Axioms and Logic’s made it possible, however, to lay out a form.

You will quite often run down a thought chain with an individual and find them lying someplace in a pile of rocks or something of the sort. They tell you this; you don’t ask for it. They say, “Why, here I am, wishing I could keep on going somehow. In spite of being here, I wish I could keep on going.” It is a holder. He says, “In spite of being here, I wish I could keep on going.” So he sort of carries these somatics along. He sort of postulates a new body for himself or something of the sort.

Some of the things I will be going over are in the stage of workability — high workability — but what explanation is assigned to the phenomena belongs temporarily in bin two; it is still in process. So you have the phenomena and you have the technique of how you resolve it, and then there is this wide-open channel that tells you there is probably more to be learned. And there is a horrible, insidious fact about all this: Bin one never empties into bin three; it is inexhaustible, utterly inexhaustible.

The only reason I am telling you all this is that you are going to run into it. I can’t do anything about it. I wish I could pass a law or something and say this won’t obtain anymore. It isn’t a case of “believing in”: it is phenomena which you will discover. And as you discover it, you had better know how to handle it.

But upon the alertness and the ability to know of the individual depends how well he can use bin two and how much he can drag for himself out of bin one. Because in bin one is everything: Here is life eternal, here is happiness, the basic truths behind Freemasonry, the Catholic Church and so on — all of these things have some basic truths behind them. Whether they have attained those truths or not is beside the point. There are a tremendous number of answers; theoretically, there are answers to everything under the sun.

I would not take this phenomena and describe it to your preclear. I wouldn’t fool with this. I wouldn’t coax him into any of this because he could start using it, for one thing, as a dodge mechanism. Another thing is that he can get so engrossed in it — because it is very interesting — that he forgets all about present time. And he can sort of do an automatic reversal on himself: he can introvert to the extremity of wondering who he was, where he was, who the dame was, where he went and did he really go to the ball that night, and if he hadn’t ordered the gun fired at that time would he still be alive? And he starts worrying about who won. I have seen this come up: “Who won?”

What I am giving you here is the basic idea of how I have been working in order to get enough data into the field of useful, relative truth to resolve cases.

You say, “Well, let’s get back — I mean, let’s “

We can perform some miracles with this stuff. But I don’t say that a miracle has to be performed in every case as it comes along. The devil with that; let’s just say that it performs miracles. I call to your attention that it has been an awfully long time since anybody was producing any assembly line miracles — quite a while. That doesn’t make either thee or me a citizen of Nazareth, but it certainly makes us interesting.

“But who won?” “Well, what was the name of the battle again?”

Now, on motion, I can tell you what lies out in advance. It is fairly easy to figure out. There is something on the motion line, some sort of a central governor that we are all running on; and if you could just somehow or other hit this button and speed up, none of your engrams would bother you. This has something to do with the speed of running. Unfortunately it doesn’t have anything to do with human memory. It is something else.

“Well, just a minute,” and he goes through it and says, “Yeah, that’s right. Shiloh. Who won?”

This is quite an advance — being able to take a 200-inch telescope and look ahead a little bit and see that there is an end of track. There is an answer up there someplace. Of course, the second we get there, we will see that there is another end of track visible by a 400-inch telescope. But the point is that I have been looking in advance toward this thing now for some months, and it doesn’t seem to be very much closer, so we just might as well bow our heads and get to work on what we have. I am not apologizing to you for not having discovered this, but it is certainly there. It has the same shape as every other discovery in evolution.

And you say, “The Union.”

A discovery in evolution is an interesting thing. It is first used to play around with — just to say “Well, maybe ...” and think happy, fuddled thoughts. The second somebody finds out something about it, they find out the black side of it and then somebody comes along and says you shouldn’t do this anymore and picks it up and carries it on to a high degree of workability. That happened to gunpowder and atomic physics. Gunpowder was first used to make noise — celebrations and so forth — and then somebody said, “It’ll kill people. Gimme!” Then they started fixing it up and later on, not too long ago, they said, “You know, this stuff is handy in mining,” and they started to build dams and mines and use gunpowder all over the place.

“I don’t believe it!”

They are doing the same thing with atomic fission. They never learn by these cycles; it just seems to go by a cycle.

You can get yourself into some interesting situations like this. You can also back a preclear all the way up to number one — the first motion, the first impact. If we were all from the same life static, theoretically, if you ran out the first impact it would run out for everybody. But I have run several people on it and it hasn’t been run out in them. Each new person has a new first impact, so it kind of looks different. It is an interesting problem, and something you can get bogged down in very easily.

So right now, this little discovery I am talking about — which we will call the “governor” for lack of a better term — can be used on the black side. There are several of these little gimmicks that can be used on the black side today.

But it is phenomena, and as phenomena it demands the attention of the auditor. And by the Auditor’s Code, the auditor must not evaluate for the preclear. I am merely telling you that your preclear is not insane because he believes at this moment that he has just gotten through getting an arrow through his midriff. He is not insane: he probably has an arrow through his midriff. So what? But it is very interesting. You must know that this can happen to your preclear; otherwise you are going to get him in trouble.

You could have somebody sit down and you could say, “Well, now, just concentrate on not being. That’s right, just sit there. Sit there quietly and concentrate on not being.” You can do this to anybody, and after he has sat there for a little while, you begin to get your results.

I am not here trying to sell you the idea that there are past lives or that reincarnation is the stuff or anything of the sort. This is phenomena. It has been established as phenomena.

In spiritualism they used to think these were idle spirits slapping people. People sit there in a state of not-beingness or something of the sort, concentrating, waiting to hear something from the environment.

And this is what I ran into that had to be handled before researching further into life continuum.

By the way, I don’t say there aren’t such things as idle spirits. There is no reason to cut off these communication lines, any more than I would cut off any other communication line: spiritualism, medical-doctoring, witch doctoring or any of these things; it doesn’t matter. You want to keep those channels open; don’t close them just because you are mad.

Now, what is life continuum? Is it a restimulation of an individual’s desire to go on living when he is dying? Is that it? That could be one explanation. Is it a key-in of some old past death of his own, when he sees somebody die? That could be an explanation. Do these life continuums fail to come up just because you haven’t run out the proper past deaths of the preclear? However that may be, there are an awful lot of preclears you are not going to take the glasses off of or the arthritis away from or anything else unless you solve life continuum. It is simply this: Somebody fails, departs or dies, and the individual then takes on the burden of this person’s habits and goals, fears and idiosyncrasies. These are sometimes very easy to resolve and sometimes they are very hard to resolve.

I have seen a medium get a bruised cheek from a slap from an “idle spirit.” It’s quite interesting. The person sits there, there is a jolt and then you turn on the lights and you see finger marks or something on the cheek. (Boy, does that sell the suckers!) But this was done in honest experimental endeavor to find out if there was anything there, and we got these finger marks.

The last one of these I ran into was rather amusing; it resolved in about three minutes. This girl had been getting a little sore on her nose and she had been putting ointment on it and trying to ignore it, but every time she forgot the salve this little sore would come back.

Not very long ago, I just had somebody sit down in a state of nonbeingness — knowing very well that such a thing as a counter-effort existed in a facsimile — and this person got a black eye! You can do that to people.

I said, “Well, do you know anybody else who had a sore nose?”

Now, that demonstrates that we can slow down a governor. You are not dealing with a facsimile when you make a person do this. It is just a mechanical action: you take his MEST body and make it sit still, and you have persuaded him to slow his governor down. How to speed it up is what we want to know — the devil with slowing it down. A person will sit there and get black and blue, get chilled and so forth, and he will go around pretty wobbly for quite a little while. He will have an awful time speeding up again.

After a moment of thought she said, “Yes, my father” — and she sagged on the tone scale.

What is the gimmick that lets him speed up again? Evidently, if you could get this little gimmick that makes a person speed up again, if you could find in yourself the state of beingness — how do you “be”? — all of these low-tone facsimiles wouldn’t stand a chance, because you would merely reach out and assimilate every last counter-effort that you haven’t used in the past and just promptly take them and use them. They do have a certain value. In other words, you could theoretically speed up above the level of these facsimiles. This little gimmick has something to do with motion, it has something to do with speed. A person gets down below a certain level and the rate of speed of the facsimile counter-efforts is greater than the rate of speed of the individual, so they have force against the individual.

“Well, did your father ever worry about his nose?”

How slow can you get? Dead! It comes way down. Or, how slow can you get? Out through the top. You could get that slow — where you just sort of step off in body — but it would be a pretty chilly business, I am afraid.

“Yes, yes, yeah. I got a — matter of fact, I remember him standing looking at himself in the mirror. And I thought . . .”

The people who practice this out in the Orient demonstrate, evidently, that there is a separation of the theta and MEST as you go on up the line too high. You get up at the top and they are completely separated. These people don’t seem to go through the top complete with body. They are not in good health; they just don’t pay any attention to the fact that they are completely disintegrated. You never saw such detached, disinterested, spiritual, aoristic people in your life. And they are fascinating. What they are doing is going out from the top.

“What did you think?”

What the great American public does, and the public of the rest of the world, is decay out through the bottom. It is practically the same thing, but on one the theta is self-determinedly separating from the MEST, and on the other route the MEST is falling apart and kicking out the theta. It just depends on which is boss; the end result is no-motion in the static.

“I thought to myself, if he’d just ignore it, it would be all right.”

There is the distinct possibility that the reason you go on living and dying and living and dying and the genetic line keeps rolling and everything else is that people keep going out through the bottom. There may be some distinct difference between going out through the bottom and going out through the top. I am talking, now, about phenomena, not about anything else. You have seen people decaying and going out through the bottom. You may not have seen somebody going out through the top. But if you wanted to go look, I could sure tell you where to look.

“Well, what was he doing for it?”

These people have enormous presence when they start going out through the top. It is fascinating. There is terrific volume to the atmosphere around these people. They are very wise too; they are up there around “I know,” and they really do. But of course they don’t know and do anything about it; that is the difference. They are fully responsible.

“Well, I don’t know what he was doing for that, but I know what I’m doing for this one; I put this salve Cuticura on it.”

Your idea of full responsibility might be “Well, I’m fully responsible and I’m going to do something about it.” That is way down the tone scale from the real thing. These boys are fully responsible — they really are — but they don’t do anything about it. There is no action, in other words, as they start up.

“Now, what kind of salve did he put on it?”

I am sorry if this leads you into the belief that we are investigating anything but human beings and phenomena, because that is exactly what we are doing. In the past it was customary to cut off and say “Verboten, bar sinister, mustn’t touch, wrong fraternity” to a lot of these lines of research. One of the principle reasons why we have made so much progress in Dianetics is that we just opened up all the channels; we took the various blocks off and let it flow.

She thought, and then all of a sudden she started a big line charge — “Cuticura!” That sealed the bargain, and there went the sore nose. The spot, which was about as big as a quarter, disappeared within half an hour. The person had been holding on to this life continuum, holding on to this idea.

Now, somebody comes around and tells you, “You know, Dianetics is really spiritualism.”

I doubt that there is a person around who isn’t busily holding on to something for somebody who is dead, departed or failed. And when I say departed, I mean just simply that: they are no longer around.

You look at him and say, “I’ll let you in on a little secret: It’s not spiritualism — not very much, anyway. It’s actually ancient magic from 632 A.D., Persia. Of course, we wouldn’t let many people know this. Oddly enough, it is also modern psychiatry.” Don’t let anybody get you into an argument on this basis, because it takes in all of it, across the boards.

This is the liability of the ally. Each one of these people that you are holding it for is an ally. Hand book for Preclears sorts these people out quite a little bit, but you can do a lot more with this life continuum than just that. There is a lot to it.

The discoveries of (pardon me while I snicker) modern psychiatry have been examined in this field and they have definite negative value. You have found out just as I did that human beings can’t be electrocuted and made sane, nor can they be carved up and served for roast beef or scrambled brains on toast or something of the sort and made sane. So these things have negative value; there has been a tremendous amount of experimentation. They have also demonstrated that the handling of people by shooting drugs into the body doesn’t work either. Of course, I must say they certainly took long enough on this subject, since it was used quite a bit and abandoned by the practical Romans about 2300 years ago.

For instance, you can ask the preclear, “Well, do you know somebody that used to want to make people happy?”

The Greeks were doing it with hellebore — convulsive shock; they broke people’s spines and did interesting things to them, just like today. The Romans came over and looked at the Aesculapian methods and decided “Well, we’ll keep on praying to the goddess Febris. We’re all set.”

“No. Nobody in my family!”

Remember, the Roman was practical; he was an engineer. He built very good roads, and he wouldn’t listen to something that was highly impractical. I just don’t see quite what has happened in this society. The same thing does not obtain.

“Well, how about a pet? How about a dog?”

These techniques have all been thoroughly investigated. Down in Ecuador, many, many hundreds of years ago — maybe thousands (I didn’t ask the fellow I was talking to at the Explorers Club how old the last skull he found was) — they evidently were treating insanity by brain operations amongst the ancient Incas. Only they had sense enough to know what they were doing. What they would do was take some fellow who had had his head bashed in with a stone ax or something like that, and they would trepan and relieve the brain pressure. They didn’t go in and try to cut out the medulla oblongata or something just to find out if he would bleed. They had sense back in those days, in other words.

“Yeah, I had a dog once.”

The Romans knocked off from shock therapy and the Incas did no more than trepanning with the brain. Of course, people were getting pretty desperate as the middle of the twentieth century approached, to the point of doing almost anything. And they did.

“Well, did that dog want to make people happy?”

Now, I have given you this as background, not to supply you with idle chatter. All of this data is the background of the Chart of Attitudes. This chart is a very workable chart. It had two origins: One was the origin of derivation; it was derived from the Axioms. Its other origin was empirical testing, trying to find out what the ideal conditions of well-being, health and happiness are. What is an ideal condition for man? No matter if it isn’t a practical condition, what is an ideal condition? From this we can get a gradient scale between survival and death; we can get a gradient scale between right and wrong.

“Yes! “

We have known these things a long time. But what are the buttons? We went looking for these buttons and we found that they lie on these gradient scales. We have an ideal state of being at the top and we have along the bottom a state of being which may or may not be ideal, according to your lights. In between we have gradient scales from each one to the other.

All of a sudden you realize you have hit something with this person, because he is sort of wincing and jolting a little bit. You explore it just a little bit further: “What else does a dog like to do? What does a dog like to eat?” Let’s find out a few more things about what dogs like to do. We have already noticed that our preclear is sitting there panting like a- dog.

These twelve buttons are very inclusive. There may be some more buttons someplace, but every time I find a new button and I say “Yeah, a new button. Three cheers,” I find out it is just a rephrasing of one of these twelve.

One of two things can happen: either this dog all of a sudden blows just by being recognized, or it has to be processed out on the basis of sympathy, blame and regret on the death or departure of it. You are actually processing what the individual is dubbing in for the dog’s somatic; the individual dubs this in out of his own bank for the dog’s somatic. You run this somatic and then he will get another somatic, and you can run that one and you can run another one and you can run another one. The mechanism you are working with is the mechanism of the preclear dubbing in something for the dog, and he has an unlimited supply of chronic somatics. As long as that dog is there having to be continued in life for, the preclear will just take more and more chronic somatics and substitute them for this dog. He will find other things that dogs do. It can get pretty bad sometimes.

We look at this chart and we see 27.0 to 40.0 is the top band. To give you an idea of it, look at “fully responsible.” In that top band, fully responsible is just that — fully responsible. A little bit lower than that, to get motion out of it, it would have to be “I’m fully responsible and I’ll do something about it.” And a little bit lower than that is “I’m fully responsible for everything but that.” And at that moment you have selected a counter-effort or a counter thought or a counteremotion to give yourself some activity.

You start examining the number of deaths and failures there have been around an individual and you will discover the number of people for whom he is potentially carrying a life continuum. Sometimes he is carrying it for a little baby: he has felt something for a little brother or somebody — a little brother or sister who died maybe when he was only eight or nine months old. You will find some weird computation on the order of “Well, the reason I have to be inactive and do nothing is because that’s what a baby does. That’s why I drink all that milk! “ A life continuum, however, has other mechanisms involved in it. A person must have wanted approval from this individual whose life he is continuing. You can find moments when he wanted their approval. He must have regretted their death and he must have felt defensive for the departed individual toward the rest of the family. This preclear, no matter how tiny he was when this happened, is the defender for the person who eventually dies. He goes on defending on the basis of “You see, I can have all these bad habits and I’m living; therefore this person was right.” What is the advantage in making a person right? You bring them back to life. If a person is wrong, they are dead.

Do you get the idea? At 20.0 a person has picked up an awful lot of things about which he can do things. He can have action. There is a great deal of motion at 20.0, but a person at 20.0 is able to align or misalign motion at will without getting it snarled up. He is very well in control of this motion. Way down the scale, the motion is manhandling him. At 4.0 he is still being manhandled by motion. But up in the higher levels he is handling motion.

Then there is blame and there is regret. You start running just blame, regret, shame, approval, desire to contribute to — various lines like that — on one of these allies, and it will blow up for the character. The whole death will blow out.

Now, in order to have any action whatsoever he would have to select something out — move it out of his sphere of responsibility — in order to make it better. Furthermore, he would have to care whether or not it was better. And he would also have to care whether he was anybody or whether it would do anything to him or anything he had in order to make it better. There is reasoning.

You do it on regret and blame: “Do you remember blaming yourself for this death?”

In order to get motion, you have got to have action; you have got to have protagonists and antagonists. There has got to be counter-effort and effort. You go up the scale from that point and it all becomes effort — ”So what?”

“No, no, I couldn’t have blamed myself for my grandpappy’s death; I just couldn’t have done . . .”

Something may happen to upset this rather upsetting picture, and I hope it does. It looks, by the way, as if there may be a whole new universe on the other side of that static and that is a fascinating one.

“Let’s run regret on your grandfather.”

I was doing some work one day on the possible number of spheres of action, and all of a sudden it turned out that there was an infinity of universes and that time was three-dimensional! If you don’t think this doesn’t make randomity, I don’t know what does, but it is interesting. Don’t ever misinterpret me; I am not saying, “Well, now, I know everything there is to know in bin one; I’m going to let you guys in on it.” I am not a psychiatrist.

“What do you mean ‘run regret’?”

Now, the Chart of Attitudes is an extrapolation from the first tone scale chart in Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. l That chart has infinite survival as its top; it has a gradient geometric scale. The Chart of Attitudes is the same as the first chart, except that it has more data on it. That is all it has — more data. It gives an ideal state of being and an optimum-motion band, and down at the bottom are the lower levels that you are trying to cure.

“Can you feel a feeling of regret in present time?”

If you were to take the buttons on this chart and apply them to each and every dynamic and not do anything but that, you would have very nearly every possible combination of the things that could be wrong with a case.

“Well, I guess so, faintly.”

So this chart is quite a chart. It is nothing more than the first chart refined by empirical observation, as done in the C hart of Hum an Evaluation in Science of Survival, and then computation from the Axioms in order to derive the chronic attitudes.

“All right. Let’s just run the feeling of regret on the subject of Grandfather.”

Nobody says this chart is finished, but where it is not finished is in how many attitudes are derivable from top to bottom.

“But on what specific incident?”

The first thing that you should know about this chart is that it is a prediction chart; it will predict what a person’s attitude will be on one of these buttons in response to something.

“Well, have you got a visio of him anyplace?”

It is also a character-index chart; you can take this chart and spot the individual on it and then look for his behavior on the Chart of Human Evaluation. This is very good, because this chart will analyze where the individual is much more rapidly than the Science of Survival chart. You may have had trouble with that chart. So this chart is necessary to it. You look on this chart and you can spot a person’s position more easily, and then you can go over into the Science of Survival chart and find out what he is going to do in terms of behavior.

“Yes, I’ve got one visio of Grandfather — got a very good visio.”

But its foremost use is in processing because it will tell you everything that has to be hit in a case, everything that must be hit in a case, before you can be completely at ease about the individual being back to battery — up to 20.0. You have to run these things. It doesn’t take much running and it is very fascinating how much you can get on a case.

“Well, just run regret off that visio.” And all of a sudden more data comes in. “Well, just run some more regret. More regret.”

You could take this chart, a knowledge of the life-continuum theory (which is covered later) and a knowledge of shame, regret, blame and the emotional curve, and you wouldn’t have to run any engrams and you actually wouldn’t have to run any secondaries.

“Oooh, it was my fault that he died!” Something like that blows into view — run out that feeling, its conditions and so on. You will also find there was an enormous amount of approval desired from Grandfather and there was also a terrific desire to contribute to Grandfather and an in ability to do so — all of this.

All this brings us down to the important points today in bin three. Data in bin three is always under new evaluation. Don’t ever think that it is otherwise. The second it stops being under evaluation a stagnation sets in which is very unhealthy, just as sometimes too much motion, too much change, too much reevaluation, is also unhealthy.

So you run these various things and run the thought chain of “Well, I ought to defend him,” and “You can’t talk about my grandfather that way,” and “He’s all right,” and the thought chain of “Well, I’d like to be like him. He’s big and strong.”

So let me go over those points again with you: A knowledge of the Chart of Attitudes, a knowledge of shame, regret, blame, the life continuum and the emotional curve, will enable you to button up your cases. There is not a case around that will not resolve that way. I know; I have been working with this.

You get the combination? It is any part of any of these combinations. You see what those combinations are? It is just a sympathy line between Grandpa and your preclear; it has all the component parts that sympathy is made out of — contribution, desire for approval and all of this. And you just run this up the line.

There is a codified method of using those which I put out in Hand book for Preclears that takes it up more or less consecutively the way it should be. But you as auditors had better know what there is to know about the basic theory here. Additionally you must understand Effort Processing; that is in addition to those items. You can resolve cases — when I say “resolve cases” I mean make them wide open so that anything can be run on them — by these first processes I announced. But if you are going to run everything on them that should be run, you have got to know Effort Processing.

Always run regret; if he can’t get any visio on something, if you can’t really find anything, get the counter-emotion of Grandfather.

If you know those things you can be like Izaak Walton’s Compleat Angler; you can be the “compleat auditor.”

“Remember when your grandfather felt happy?”

Now, every once in a while you see somebody around dabbling at a case, monkeying with it and so forth, but nothing is happening. There is only one reason nothing is happening: they just aren’t using an up-to-date procedure; that is all.

“I can vaguely get an idea.”

An auditor had to be awfully clever a year ago to get the computation on a case.

“Well, when did he feel sad?”

You run shame, blame and regret on a case — just those. The preclear has a visio: make him run shame on it, make him run regret on it. He has this visio and you just say, “Well, can you feel regret on it? Feel it a few times. All right, feel it again; feel it again; feel it again.”

“Oh, he wasn’t sad, he was drunk.”

“Well, this reminds me of the time I drowned all of my grandmother’s kittens, and my little brother got sick with the measles and I was on the other side and they kicked me down. And, my God, I’d forgotten all about that, and that’s horrible, and that — that’s why I’m in the shape I’m in today! My, you’re a clever auditor!”

“Well, can you get the counter-emotion of your grandfather drunk?”

It is interesting that you can do that.

“Yes! Yeah, I got a visio of him.”

As far as locating the engram necessary to resolve the case, file clerks are sometimes terrible to work with on getting this thing. They usually hand it up to you, but they generally give you the engram necessary to resolve the engram necessary to resolve the engram by early Standard Procedure, which exhausted the perceptics out of engrams so that they couldn’t be restimulated. That is perfectly fine; it is perfectly good procedure to exhaust the perceptics out of the engram so the engram can’t be restimulated anymore. The trouble is, the perceptics are not always lying on top; sometimes the effort is.

Now run regret, and all of a sudden this stuff starts blowing into view. Here is the way you pick the lock on the occluded individual — the occluded case or the wide-open case where the whole track from one end to the other is dub-in. A person whose whole track is dub-in, one of these terrific dub-in cases, is so full of regret that they have moved not only to occlusion but to complete dub-in!

Now, if you want a technique, I can invent a few techniques for you (there will be a lot of them coming in from the field — there are all the time). Here is one: “Give us the engram necessary to resolve the case. What’s the first phrase of this engram?” The preclear says so-and-so. “All right. What’s your effort to have that phrase?” and you just run him on effort through the rest of the engram.

If you want to see what dub-in is, get somebody who is relatively occluded in your own case — anybody who is a little bit occluded — and get the visios on the stories they told you. You will find out you might not be able to see the person who is telling the stories, but you can get the visios on the stories they are telling.

That is worthless technique number one.

Then you just run regret on those stories and run regret on those visios. The next thing you know, this person will blow into view, or the visios will at least turn black. That is much preferable to having a phony picture. You just run it a little bit more and get it off and you have your case set up.

Next one: “Give us the engram necessary to resolve the case. Give us a flash: How do you feel emotionally?” He tells you. “All right, reexperience that emotion. Go on, experience it; experience it.”

Now, whatever the mechanism of past death is, I don’t know. I didn’t invent it. And nobody, by merely saying it doesn’t exist, is going to banish the phenomena. It is not a subject for argument. It is simply a subject for the auditor to be alert on. It may be some of the source for this life continuum, but believe me, life continuum is nothing very unsolid.

The fellow says, “But I got a somatic!”

You can really demonstrate life continuum to an individual. If you want to shake your preclear right down to the depths of his soul, you just start monkeying around with life continuum. Run the feeling of regret off a few visios which he has that he has always sort of worried about. He will hand you the whole computation on his case if you start doing this. Then run some blame — ”Who did you blame it on?” and so on. He will come back into control of enough facsimiles to think on this subject.

“That’s all right. Experience the emotion. Experience the emotion through it.”

“Who did you blame it on?” Blaming is handing over the facsimile to somebody else or even handing the facsimile over to some part of your own body so that you as an “I” can’t control it.

“The emotion changes.”

Anyway, just run blame and regret on the case for a little while and the first thing you know, he will start telling you all about how he is so guilty because of what he did to . . . Or he will start telling you, “Oh, my poor, dear grandmother. I didn’t help her enough. I should have done more for her while she was alive and now she’s dead. I can’t help her anymore,” and so on.

“Well, all right, let it change. Experience the emotion. Where’s the somatic?”

You say, “Well, what would you say Grandma’s goals were?” and he will give you the character description of his aberrated self.

“It’s gone.”

You find some poor fellow who is busily being a salesman. He is not a good salesman; he is not a bad salesman: he is just busy being a salesman. But he is a failure at it, really. He hasn’t picked himself up by his bootstraps through salesmanship , and he has always sort of thought on the side that what he really wanted to do was build model trains or something — manufacture them or something along this line. He had big ideas, but he gets over on these ideas only very occasionally. You start asking him, “Who wanted to be a salesman in your family?”

Another one: “All right. Give us the engram necessary to resolve the case. When did you decide to use that?”

“Oh, nobody.”

The fellow says, “Well, just then. Just then.”

“Let’s think again. Is there anybody who is dead that wanted to be a salesman in your family?”

“No, I mean when did you used to hand this thing up?”

“Oh, nobody but my father.”

“Well, I don’t even know what it is!”

“All right. Let’s pick up the times when you defended your father to your mother or the rest of the family about salesmanship.”

“Well, that’s all right. What do you think it was? Just imagine how you would use this engram.”

“Oh, I couldn’t remember anything like that! No sir. No, no.”

“Well, I would use it to get eggnogs. (What am I saying?)”

“Just run some regret on your father.”

“Well, when was the first time you decided to be sick so you could have an eggnog?”

“Regret. Regret. Oh! Yeah, there was a time! Yeah, there was a time, by George, and they were awful mad at him. He’d worked all summer and he’d sold all these things and so on. And I said — yeah! I said they shouldn’t pick on him that way and . . . Hmm!”

And he says, “Why, that’s right. I used to decide . . . Isn’t that funny? Tee-hee.” And the engram is gone.

“Do you blame yourself for your father’s death?”

These are the levels of processing. Any one of them would supplant early Standard Procedure — any one of them. They are very valid, because the fellow is holding on to his engram by thought, actually, but it can be separated from him and thrown away forevermore by running the emotion off of it, because that is how he holds it in. He can’t get hold of it to get the emotion off it — good joke on him. Or you could run the effort out of it and he would have nothing left to get hold of. So there are three levels you can hit on this. Those are the ways you could hit cases. When you talk about resolving cases and getting cases open and making cases run, this is certainly what you have to know.

“Oh, well, yes. Yes.”

Don’t dilly-dally about using it. You have a lot of cases around and you haven’t got much time. Just look them over and scan a few buttons off them and straighten them up. You can take any case you may have messed up and get them back to battery this way.

“Well, how do you blame yourself for your father’s death? What did you do that caused your father to die?”

Of course, I know you have never messed up a case; but you know the time that fellow charged out of that fear secondary you tried to get him into? You can get him out of it with this. You just figure out about what tone level he was in when he came out. He has probably been saying you were responsible ever since, and that gives you continued control over that engram. Only he hasn’t got control over it anymore because he said you were responsible for doing it.

“Well . . . (sniff, sniff) nothing very specific.”

Now get him to figure out that you were responsible and get him to run that feeling, and then get him to run the feeling on the fear engram of who was responsible in it, and it will come back under his control. He will just park it under file 864B972A and skip it. That is about the way it works.

“Well, what did happen?”

But don’t under any circumstances underestimate a technique just because it isn’t spectacular. You have to ask yourself — and answer yourself truthfully — the question “Do I process people because I like to see them four feet off the couch? Do I process people because I like to embarrass the neighbors by their screaming? Or do I process people because I want them to be self-determined individuals?” If the last is the right answer, you go on processing. If it isn’t the right answer, you straightwire yourself with this chart until you can give the right answer. A

“Well, he was out in the field one day and he was cranking the tractor, and all of a sudden he leaned his hand on the radiator. I said, ‘Are you all right?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, I’m all right.’ And I said, ‘Is anything wrong with you?’ ‘Well, my heart kicks up once in a while.’ And I made up my mind right then to tell my mother and some of the neighbors to try to keep an eye on him, but you know, I didn’t. Maybe if I’d told the neighbors at that time, why, he might have lived a few years longer. There’s just some tricky thing in my mind that kept me from telling my mother about that, and I don’t know what that could possibly be.”

At this point in the lecture a gap exists in the available recordings. The tape recording resumes immediately after a break taken by Ron and the audience and the second half of the lecture is contained in the next chapter. We have been unable to find any recording or transcript for the missing section.

And you say, “Well, are you guilty then, to some degree?”

“Well, guess I am.”

“Let’s see, now. Let’s pick up the number of times that your father at some time or other told you you’d better not worry your mother.”

“Oh, that! Oh, yes. Yes. Not to tell my mother about this, not to tell my mother about that, not to tell my mother . . . you know, that was why I didn’t tell her that, because . . . Well, what do you know! I’m not guilty of my father’s death!”

Every individual considers himself fully responsible — inherently and natively — all the way down through all the dynamics. Everyone does. There isn’t a person around who doesn’t inherently and basically consider himself responsible all across the dynamics and who is not having trouble with having to keep the world sort of compartmented off so that he doesn’t have to realize that he is really responsible for it.

That is true, isn’t it? How can you feel yourself guilty, for instance, for the death of some animal if you don ‘t originally feel that you are responsible for the animal?

What is blame? Blame is a negation of your responsibility. You can blame self; that is the last stage. Or you can blame somebody else. That is an effort not to be responsible.

So, here is this little boy and he feels that he is responsible for his father’s death. That means he is responsible for his father, natively.

By the way, this really starts to pick up in processing. You can actually meter an individual’s progress up the tone scale by the degree of his responsibility across all the dynamics. As he comes up the tone scale he gets into these various degrees of responsibility — various spheres. And what is one of the commonest manifestations of aberration? At low levels, you will find that an aberrated individual will not take any responsibility. They get rid of it — pick up the rug and sweep it under.

At anger, a person thinks that he is being forced to take responsibility that he does not want. He is not being fully responsible. You take a person who is very cheerful and happy and enthusiastic about life in general and suddenly start challenging them about this and that and so forth, and you can’t upset them very much. Why? Because they have already taken responsibility for you too!

Now, evidently you can’t just go around and say “I’ll be fully responsible for everybody and everything and so on, and I’ll be responsible from here on out.” But it is very interesting that if you want to put something across, let us say, in a sales conversation or to somebody, you can do it by taking responsibility for the other person. Let’s take a relative that you normally quarrel with, and you are going to have to talk to this person: If you say to yourself just before you talk to him “Well, I’m responsible for everything they say, anyhow. I’m responsible for them,” it’s weird but they do what you tell them to do.

I started out some little time ago to try to solve interpersonal relations. We got some interesting stuff. The first thing that turned up was Black Dianetics on interpersonal relations: How do you drive somebody crazy quickly with an emotional curve? You create an emotional curve — you build the fellow way up to the top of this curve and then drop him in the least possible time as low as you can on the curve. The way you do this is by using any of the twelve buttons, and you bring him up as high on that button as you can bring him and then drop him suddenly on the emotional curve. You get a very interesting reaction. He will go into doldrums. You can do it fast.

You can do it on cause and effect. You can say, “You know that preclear you were running the other night? You know, that preclear you worked on quite a bit and so on — you were working her over to get rid of everything she was doing . . . And, you know, it was very good processing you did there, and remember everybody in the room was so satisfied with the way you were doing the job?”

The fellow says, “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.”

“She’s in the hospital and she says you did it!”

It doesn’t even matter whether it is true or not. If you said, “Well, she shot herself last night and the parents said you did it,” that would fix him right up. He might not even bother to ascertain the truth of it.

That is dropping the emotional curve on an individual. You can do that on any button. You can build a person up the scale, on a button on how much he knows, for instance, and then prove to him he doesn’t know. And you can build him up the scale into being a fine cause and then demonstrate that he is really just a low-level effect. You can pull him up the scale on his state of beingness. Women do this quite a bit; they say, “Oh, my dear, how well you look in that hat. I’ve always liked it.”

The individual tries hard for a while to be responsible for everything and then he sort of dwindles down the line and he gets responsible for less and less; he starts blaming after a while and giving away responsibility. He gives away more and more responsibility and he just comes down to the end of the line and he isn’t responsible for anything. He is finished.

That happens fast whenever he picks up a life continuum. Somebody dies that he wanted to contribute to, that he wanted the approval of, that he felt regret for, that he blames himself for the death of and that he has defended against the family — all of these conditions answered — and he will carry on that person’s life. Only, he will carry on their life just exactly as they looked at life.

So you will have an individual who is apparently reacting as though he were down around 0.5 on the tone scale; he will be limping along at 0.5 and having a heck of a time. You just ask him these questions and winnow it out and he will come back up and all of a sudden be himself. It is not a question, even, of valence. He has just taken on all these goals — all the goals, the fears, the desires, the deformities and everything else of the departed and the dead.

At what moment does he decide to do that? The first moment he decided to emulate them, the first moment he decided to be like them in his life, the first moment he decided he liked them, and the first moment he had to defend them, regardless of their age.

And then he picks up these things and out they go. As you pick up these things in processing, you can see remarkable changes in some preclears. Sometimes a case won’t even start to resolve unless you pick these up. It is just stuck, that is all. The fellow is being Grandpa or Aunt Emma or somebody, and he is just being this person. And maybe he is being a lot of people and having a lot of trouble trying to reconcile all this. But why won’t he give it up right away?

When you find a person who is ill — particularly because of a life continuum — you really have to search around sometimes to get him to release it. Sometimes you will find his case wide open up to the moment when you decide to run out the death of the person whose life he is continuing; at that moment he will shut off all of his perceptics and everything else and go completely blotto! This has happened, evidently.

What is an occluded case? You can put it bluntly and say, “Well, he doesn’t want to get well — the nasty fellow. Let’s slap him on the wrist.” Or you can tackle it intelligently and say, “What blame and regret, contribution and so forth must we get off this case in order to spring the death that has all this shut up on it?” Sometimes we have to even spring the postulate first. The first postulate is “Well, I don’t want to see, I don’t want to hear, I don’t want to do any of these things, and so forth.” Why? He hasn’t even got an evaluation as to why he postulated these things. But there, if anywhere, is where your auditor is going to have to use some good horse sense.

And I don’t care if you know Effort Processing and you know how to run engrams or secondaries by early techniques or anything else — you are not going to get Grandpa’s death unless you get rid of the life continuum. In other words, we have resolved what this gimmick was.