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.”

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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. ”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Gone!”

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

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.

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.

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?”

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

“Now, can you feel sympathy?”

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“Can you feel any communication along that line?”

“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.

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.

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.”

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?”

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

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

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

And you say, “The Union.”

“I don’t believe it!”

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

“What did you think?”

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

“Well, what was he doing for it?”

“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.”

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

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.

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.

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.

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

“No. Nobody in my family!”

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

“Yeah, I had a dog once.”

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

“Yes! “

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

“Let’s run regret on your grandfather.”

“What do you mean ‘run regret’?”

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

“Well, I guess so, faintly.”

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

“But on what specific incident?”

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

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

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

“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.

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.”

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.

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.

“Remember when your grandfather felt happy?”

“I can vaguely get an idea.”

“Well, when did he feel sad?”

“Oh, he wasn’t sad, he was drunk.”

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

“Yes! Yeah, I got a visio of him.”

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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

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?”

“Oh, nobody.”

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

“Oh, nobody but my father.”

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

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

“Just run some regret on your father.”

“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!”

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

“Oh, well, yes. Yes.”

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

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

“Well, what did happen?”

“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.”

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.