Now I want to talk to you about the most fundamental fundamental that there can be fundamental below the level of consideration.

I haven't talked to you very much about considerations. There really isn't very much to say about considerations. And I made a considerable number of lectures on the subject of consideration; everybody appears to be very confused after I lecture on the subject. Because consideration is a consideration and all things are a consideration of the consideration, so that if you consider something which is considerable, why, you have considered it. And various phenomena such as space and energy and time, matter and so forth, is produced on the basis of consideration. So consideration of A is senior to A. Consideration of R is senior to R. And consideration of any and all parts of C are, of course, senior to any and all parts of C.

When you're dealing with A, R and C you have entered into a very early level of anatomy as far as the business of life is concerned. But you are not into the first and immediate level of anatomy as far as mechanics are concerned. There is a level lying between considerations and A, R and C, and this is isness. It's the consideration of isness.

Things are because you consider that they are. And, therefore, something that is, is considered is. If you don't consider that it is, it of course can be considered to be something else. But if you recognize that it is a consideration, you only have to recognize that it is. If you recognize that something is, then you recognize merely that it is a consideration. As soon as you have recognized that something is, you have reduced it to a consideration. And that's that.

Now that you know all there is to know about Scientology… What's the matter, don't you follow me there? All right, we'll go into that again. Considerations are senior to A, considerations are senior to R and are considered senior to C or any part of C.

One has affinity because he considers he has affinity; one has reality because he considers he has reality; one has agreement because he considers he has agreement; one has disagreement because he considers he has disagreement; one has the third dynamic because he considers he has a third dynamic; one has a second dynamic, but some people don't, and so on.

Any part of the dynamic principles of existence – create-survive-destroy, ARC, the Chart of Attitudes, top and bottom, the entire Scale of Emotions, Know to Mystery – are all preceded by a consideration. In other words, they are postulated into existence.

But right with consideration we have the most native and intimate mechanic which precedes all other mechanics, and that mechanic is isness. We have to consider that we can consider before we can consider an isness.

One considers that one considers and, therefore, what one considers is, is. So therefore, anything that is, is considered as being. What is, is as it is considered to be.

Now, the moment that you recognize, then, the isness of anything, it will disappear. To have something, to have anything over a long period of time, particularly, you have to beware of recognizing what it is. Because if you look at it with the recognition of what it is – simply its isness – this simple recognition will, of course, vanish it. So you have to be careful, if you want something, not to recognize what it is.

Now, one of the best ways to have something for a long time is to put something in your pocket, you see, and then forget that it is there. And you'll have something in your pocket. You'll have something in your pocket even though you've forgotten it's there. And that's the safest method of possession, is to forget that you have it. Because if you remember that you have it, you won't have it.

Now, this would all be hopeless if there weren't another factor way above consideration. And that is knowingness. You know anything you want to know and you know anything that has gone on.

Now, let's take the person who is using facsimiles in order to tell him what has happened. He looks at the facsimile, the facsimile has certain pictures and symbols in it, so then he knows what took place. Well, he had to know what took place in order for a facsimile of that incident to be created.

Now, he knew what took place, so he could create a facsimile of the incident, and he does this on an unknowingness level. But above this level, he can then look at the picture and know what took place. But he had to know what took place before he made the picture. Now if the picture is gone utterly and completely, he would still know what took place, unless he has the consideration that he has to have a picture in order to prove to himself what took place.

Now, anybody would know anything that was going on if he didn't have to prove it. Proof, conviction and so forth is a very early level of aberration itself. As soon as you have to start proving things and convincing people of things, why, then you have to get into agreement with them. And in order to do this, you have to alter isness. You have to have something to persist long enough for them to see it, so that they can then understand what it is. So, in order for them to really understand what it is, you can't possibly put up something that they understand what is. Because if they saw completely what it was and what is, why, then of course, naturally, it would disappear, so you would not have been able to have proven it.

I hope you follow this very closely. Because, actually, everything I'm saying makes sense if strung together and looked at in a rational way. But if you try to alter it, if you try to alter it around, then you'll be able to remember it perfectly. But if you merely accept exactly what I am saying in each and every second that I am talking and so forth, you know this already, so it won't exist.

Now this is a very bad thing, I realize. So the best thing for me to do would be to color – if I really wanted this material to be remembered – would be to color the material so that it appeared to be something else than what it was. That would be the easiest way to get it remembered, to get it complied with – to color the material.

And now, I could do that, for instance, by talking about your egg-libido and your reconscious. I could quote authorities who didn't exist – that's always best, you know; that's really a curve, you see? Nobody can ever see those, so they can't ever disappear. And I could quote these authorities which didn't exist but which you couldn't disprove didn't exist, and we could go on about the counter-reflex of the ceretapal palsy and the og-libido, the bog-libido, the sog-libido and the mog-libido. And that we would categorize these things as explanatory to the behavior of fecie preservation on the part of young alligators. And this, of course, would then be utterly comprehensible because it could be so well remembered. See, it could be remembered perfectly, in every detail, particularly if it were altered from what I was really talking about. I was trying to talk to you about turbo-electric systems with that amount of data in it. We could go that far afield and you'd find that your brain would start hanging up on these non sequitur facts. Did you ever notice that?

Well, as a person becomes unable to recognize the isness of the things, he can't get jokes anymore. Every datum that comes in must have a significance. You see, it never occurs to him it doesn't have a significance. There must be a deeper significance for something to remain. So this accounts for the facsimile bank of an individual, particularly when that facsimile bank of the individual is badly jammed and so on. Now we get somebody who has a badly jammed bank and we tell him, "You have a right foot. All preclears have a right foot. In order to clear a preclear all you have to do is reach over and touch their right foot, then have them touch their right foot, then you touch their right foot, then they touch their right foot and they would be cleared."

And this might be true, you see? And you put it out in this wise and you explained it very carefully and you went over it many, many times. And he would get into an auditing session and he would say, "Now, let's see, what is the significance of touching the right foot? Well, obviously, the significance of touching the right foot means, of course, that the preclear must always be right. So, therefore, what we should run on the preclear is the number of times that he has been wrong. Now, the best way to run this would be to remain out of contact with it." So the auditing command that he said, obviously, was "Bury and occlude and never have anything to do with all the times you've been wrong." And that would be the auditing command which would evolve out of this.

Well, he would certainly get a preservation of data, wouldn't he? And boy, he'd really get a preservation of engram bank on the preclear, wouldn't he?

Well, let's talk about these various categories of isness, and we find out each one has a gradient scale. And first there is as-isness. This is the first level that we encounter and is actually the disappearance level. As we are content or can accept things as they are, they won't exist. That is absolute. If we are content with and can accept things as they are, they won't exist,

Why? The simple recognition of their existence will blow them into a consideration. A wall? What wall? We really know what a wall is; there isn't going to be a wall.

That's as-isness. And we see that mechanically. We have a lower mechanical strata on that which is a perfect duplicate. If we make a perfect duplicate of a wall, boom! – no wall. All right. That might be just for the thetan, but it's certainly no wall. I at least will lead you down the track to believing that you are not about to destroy the physical universe. Because I wouldn't want you to shy off from these processes just because they knocked out the physical universe.

Anyway, the next stage down the line from as-isness is alter-isness: the effort to preserve something. By altering its characteristics, we make it as a simple consideration and then we alter the method by which we made it. In other words, let's dodge on it. Having mocked it up, we will now dodge and say, "Joe mocked it up." Well, this is as far wrong as is necessary to get something to exist. But you have altered an as-isness slightly in order to keep it from being perfectly duplicated. Now, if it is perfectly duplicated, of course, it's in its own time, its own space, with its own energy and mass and it, of course, would cease to exist. So we enter into the field of alter-isness as a method of preservation. And one seeks, then, when he makes an object or a space, to get it to exist simply by saying, "Somebody else did it," or "It is a different kind of space," or "Its method of construction was different." We say, "God made it" or anything that would throw somebody off the track. Well, supposing God did make it; that would be all right. It'd still blow if you looked at it, recognizing that God made it. Your consideration is altered just enough so that you'll get your continuation of it.

Now, people get into alter-isness simply by the process of having had too many things disappear. So we get a person who has lost many things, then trying to change everything. He's trying to shift the as-isness of everything. He's trying to shift from as-isness to alterisness. And so therefore he's got to change the significances and structure and background and everything around him, so that then these things will continue to exist. And that is his first impulse.

Now, alter-isness is simply the mechanism by which we persuade things to exist. We say they're something else than what they are, and after that they exist. See? Because one hasn't duplicated them. We build a brick house and then cover it up with shingles, you see, and then say and insist in argument that it is built out of lumber. Well, that would rather consist of an existence. You would get into enough of an argument with people trying to buy the house, and so forth, who could observedly see there was not totally a lumber house for them to get upset and worried enough. And that house is liable to persist in one's own ownership for some time if he just did that sort of thing.

All right. We get alter-isness, then, totally mechanically as a method of getting things to continue their existence. Now that's an important fact.

Although the nomenclature here is simply chosen at random, it's a pretty good nomenclature because it says exactly what it means.

The control case, by the way, is an "alter-ist." He's got to change, change. Well, he's lost too much. So now he's got to change everything, but he's not satisfied with anything. If he were walking down the street in a limber and loose fashion, he would think he had to walk in a tight fashion, and so forth. He's become anxious about things disappearing, so he, of course, has to alter everything he sees in order to keep these things from disappearing.

All right. Now let's get into the next category. And we get not-isness. Now this fellow has altered things up to a point of where they're beginning to persist most damnably. In fact, he's upset about their continuous persistence. He doesn't think this is a good thing, to have a Fac One camera staring him in the face all the time, to have the walls of the room appear to be 180 feet tall – although they're only nine feet tall. It's not a good thing, this alter-isness, he's concluded: he's changed too many things; he's lost track; he isn't quite secure in what the things were in the first place, he's shifted them so often. (He's like the small boy who has told so many lies that he can no longer remember what lie he told, and so he's stuck with the lies and so becomes a human being.)

Now, the next step there, not-isness, is manifested as unreality and is in itself the mechanism we know as unreality.

Now, the next category: that's where things fade down, disappear, are made to be further away, dimmed, poor perception, fellow is trying to make nothing out of things, he has to wear glasses that make objects much smaller. That's a case of not-isness.

Okay. Now we go into the next category, which is the category of just plain isness. Well this, of course, is not a bad thing. This in its highest level is what we call reality. That's just plain isness. But we could spell this with bigger and bigger caps. See, we could keep spelling is there with bigger caps and bigger caps and bigger caps and finally spell it with an exclamation point which would represent a psycho.

There is a dragon in the middle of the room. And he knows this. There are many other things which he doesn't know, but he knows this. When he gets a mock-up of an anchor point, he makes a pyramid out of solid iron. When he is asked to pick up one of his mock-ups, he knows he doesn't have that much strength. The world is too real!

Now, once in a while, when somebody is just about to kill you, cut your throat or eat you up or arrest you or do something of the sort, you get an enormous flash of isness – a recognition of the situation. Boy, this is! It is real! Glug! A moment after that, you're liable to get – or postulate, as you would – an immediate reaction of not-isness. It's not real. A fellow will flare up and daze in about that order, from isness to not-isness in a sudden emergency.

Now, alter-isness, not-isness and isness would be, then, the categories which can be aberrated. But remember, these are not basically aberration. They only become aberration when they go entirely beyond the ability of the person to re-recognize as-isness. When a person has lost his ability entirely to recognize as-isness, he's gone. After that, he's stuck with, and only has one of the remaining three – alter-isness, not-isness and isness – or one of the three. All three or one or two of the three – some such combination – with no as-isness left. Therefore, he gets everything persisting around him, he gets everything less and less changeable and he goes into a dwindling spiral. Because he has lost his quality of as-isness. That's all he's lost. When he loses that, of course, he gets stuck with one of these other qualities or some combination of them. You see how that is?

The psycho who is walking around is made well simply by touching a few walls. I mean, you have him go around and touch walls for a little while and all of a sudden he says, "This is a wall!" And he feels much better and he knows he's in communication and so forth.

Well, that's because he either has a case of not-isness: "There are no walls," or isness: "There are walls all through the room and all through my mind, and I have barriers everywhere, everywhere, everywhere," or "There are no barriers anywhere, anywhere, anywhere," which is just variations of not-isness and isness. And you've shown him that there were walls and these were agreed-upon walls. And of course that's way upscale because you have demonstrated to him something closer to an as-isness.

Now, each one of these is a gradient scale. And you know that you can recognize poorly enough the actual as-isness of something – you know, I mean you just draw back just a tiny bit from the as-isness of something. In other words, indulge in just a little bit alter-isness or just a little bit not-isness or just a little bit isness – you know, making it a little bit more – and it'll persist with great satisfactoriness. Of course, if you walk up to it and simply hit it with as-isness, it's not there anymore. You follow this very carefully? Because it's quite important, although the technology which we're using is elementary.

Now beware, beware, beware – ding-dong. You get this real carefully, now. I'm only going to mention this once. And I don't want to hear anybody going off the deep end in some direction or another, mounting a horse and dashing off in some direction. Many philosophies could be adjudicated out of these four categories. And believe me, any philosophy there is, has been adjudicated from these four categories. This is the root of all philosophy as well as all existence. And you're standing right there at the tiniest co-point between mechanics and considerations that we have so far attained.

All right. Now, you could then develop, as I said, many philosophies out of this. Now, the first and most dangerous of them would simply be this one: "Well, I just have to accept everything as it is and, therefore, what we're really supposed to produce out of this is an apathy, because if I had to accept everything as there is there'd be nothing left but apathy because if I can't change this and mess it up somehow or another… No, but I'll go into apathy. Yeah, I know what the auditor wants, he wants me to be apathetic about the whole thing."

This is too easy a philosophy; this is the philosophy of Zeno. "You can't do anything about it, so you might as well accept it," and everybody go into apathy and cut his throat anyhow.

Well now, we have an enormous number of things which we could say, list or categorize in terms of the philosophy of this, and this is only one of them that will hit your preclear. You see, he has to be able to accept his own restlessness before he can be restless. He has to accept his own dislike of things before he can dislike things. Remember, he has to accept something before he can have it – the case he's in! Because he has to get back some as-isness before he can have any as-isness.

Well now, he has to get back some as-isness before he can become fluid in his practice of as-isness, alter-isness, not-isness and isness. And the business of life requires that he be quite able in all four categories. It's necessary to be able in all four categories, not just asisness. So you're not particularly specializing in this.

But when it comes to this universe, you will discover that as you return your preclear to as-isness, things disappear. That may be regrettable, it may be interesting, it may be this and that, but those things too, just like opinions of art, are merely considerations.

Now, the first step that we would adventure upon in this, would be a step which would be immediately addressed to such a thing as exteriorization. You would merely find what part of the body was acceptable to the preclear – you know, what part of the body was he able to accept as is. And we would go on asking this question and asking this question and asking this question. We could vary it by saying what part of the body would he be at liberty to alter as to its position or shape? What part of the body would be acceptable to him on an absent basis? What part of the body would be acceptable to him on a much more present basis. For instance, just a hand walking all around all by itself.

Indicated processes. Actually, this processing is so good that you can almost take any part of it and just work with it. Indicated process on as-isness is simply done with that command: "What part of your body is acceptable to you?" "What part of the environment would be acceptable to you?" And you merely have him improve his considerations. And if he hangs up too long, you could say, "Well now, can you accept your dislike of – – – – ?"And, of course, it just involutes. He could just watch it. It just sort of goes away. It's terrible. The first thing he could recognize is the fact that he disliked the environment. All right. Well, can he accept his dislike of the environment? The second he does this, he has recognized the asisness of his dislike, which moment will blow it.

Now, you can get him to recognize the existence of anything as such and it'll disappear, just by getting him to accept parts of the body, just on this simple auditing command:" What part of the body could you accept?" "Give me another part of the body you could accept."(There's tremendous comm lags on this.) You could say," Well, how would it have to be altered for you to accept it?" "What would it be fine to have absent about this body?" Then we can turn around and say, "What's the acceptance level of your body about a thetan?"

Well, he doesn't do this by mock-ups, you understand. That's the trick. Get him to concentrate on the actual body. Does it accept the thetan this way or that way or how? What condition? "What distance could your face tolerate to a thetan?" We already have this on exteriorization processing, but without this one fact stressed which makes the difference between a workable technique and a nonworkable technique: "What distance is acceptable?" "What distance would be comfortable from your face to the thetan?" "Well, where would your face accept a thetan?"

And the first thing you know, you have spotted the preclear. I mean, the face seems to have spotted him. Then he spots himself.

But the whole thing would run out without any such complexity of command at all. You would merely ask him "What is acceptable to you in the environment?" "Look around." And simply go over it, one item after another item after another item, and his considerations will improve, which is the modus operandi behind 8-C Opening Procedure, except you're not doing it with any further consideration.

If you ran 8-C Opening Procedure long enough on a preclear, he would find the entire environment he'd been working in, certainly, very, very acceptable to him.

We could just continue to run this as "What part of the environment is acceptable to you?" And he begins to check them off, check them off, check them off, check them off, and he would eventually get down to his body. And having gotten down to his body – and taken care of the space around the body and that sort of thing – having gotten down to the body, we'd take it by parts of the body: "What parts of the body are acceptable to you?" And just on and on and on, and he'd be out there standing in back of his head.

Now, that's the easiest method of exteriorization I know, and the method which I commonly use when I am balked by a preclear, because it's an easy and certain process. It's a rather short process, really. You just ask him to pick up the as-isness of his environment and body, and if he really recognizes it, believe me, he'll be outside. And that is simply done with that auditing command. This is the easiest process I know of anyplace, anywhere. So, we have it.

Once in a while he says, "Well, I really dislike this and that." "Well, can you accept your dislike of it?"

This will involute it, which is the only additional command I think I've ever used.

Okay. So much for as-isness, alter-isness, not-isness and isness. All cases fall into these categories.