January 21st, 1954, afternoon lecture.

The material I’ve been giving you is, of course, subject to many interpretations. Let me give you a slight warning about interpreting it. It is what it is, that’s what it is. It’s like old Popeye, you know, “I am what I am, that’s what I am.” It is as workable as it is not interpreted.

I am not even vaguely interested in validating any school of thought or invalidating it. All I know is, is none of them have made somebody well, but I’ve been trying to. That’s all I know, that’s what I know.

Now, the material is extremely simple to use and, therefore, is terrifically variable. Any time you are operating from a simplicity, you get an enormous potential variation. Well, we know enough now, I hope, in the first couple of weeks here, to know where we can go with material. All right.

Let’s take any of these processes, then, that we know and let’s put them into this particular type of process.

People are rather spontaneously calling this Livingness Processing and that’s an easy way to refer to it. It’s not a very polite or beautiful name, but it’s an excellent way to refer to it. All right.

If we call this Livingness Processing, we still keep in mind what we’re trying to do: we’re trying to inject some livingness. We’re not trying to run out anything, we’re not trying to exhaust any energy, we’re not trying to get the deep significance and understanding of the whiff-whiff bird who flies backwards all night. We are not trying to do a lot of things. All we’re trying to do is inject enough livingness into the beingness and environment of the individual so he can take a long breath and relax.

An individual is as anxious as he is dead. If you don’t believe that, you should talk to some of these boys. Although they appear to be in apathy, right under the crust of that apathy there is a wild apathetic anxiety. Now, a person can go to a point of death, of course, which is very, very close to bottom, almost at bottom, where he’s no longer anxious about it. That’s because he’s already accepted death and so he’s dead. So let’s look at death as a gradient scale of having accepted death.

Accepting death begins with an individual’s (quote) “recognition” (unquote) of the slaying potential of one segment of his environment. That is the first acceptance of death: the first moment that he recognizes there is something in the environment which can kill him.

Now, to win back up there, you don’t run out all these moments when he accepted that something could kill him. You don’t do that for two reasons: one, he’s got them pulled in on him because his havingness is already on a starvation level and so he’d rather have the engram than nothing. And he knows he can’t have and so on, so as we start to run these out he just pulls more and more in and we get on to an endless chain.This can be remedied by simply making him mock-up masses of energy and pull those in. That isn’t so good either. It also can be remedied by putting an enormous amount of stress on nothingness. But again, that isn’t so good.

Let’s give him enough livingness so that he can afford a little dyingness.

Some fellows have to have a hundred million dollars before they can afford a ten cent bauble for the kid. And some fellows have to have five dollars before they can spend four ninety-five on the kid. And some fellows have to have five dollars before they can go in debt twenty bucks. These are different viewpoints on the subject of plenty.

Well, let’s not worry too much about the preclear’s viewpoint on plenty. Let’s just realize that if we have him reinvest in the stocks and bonds of livingness that he can sever a few bondshimself.

He has a body because, poor thing, that’s all he has. That’s all he’s got left. And he has to keep it in bad shape because if he didn’t, it’d get stolen on him. That’s usually, by the way, the reason a body is in bad shape-the fellow is trying to get down below the acceptance level of the community. Good joke on him. If he really got it in bad shape, he’d be tremendously acceptable.

All right. He’s trying to keep from being robbed one way or the other, betrayed or destroyed, all of which adds up to destruction or death. He’s trying to keep from hitting that end of cycle.

How many ways сan he hit that end of cycle, by the way? Well, he can hit it by failing or hit it by dying or hit it by arriving. That’s one for you to put down in red ink. The fellow can hit end of cycle by arriving. Remarkable, isn’t it? That’s because the curve in this universe goes from creation through survival to destruction. And so when an individual reaches the end of any cycle-of-action, he’s sure that he has reached a failure in most cases. This person is so glad, so happy (this is people who are in kind of poor shape)-this fellow is so glad, he’s so happy to get home and, however, a moment after he’s home there’s-gee, there’s a lot of things wrong with home. You know, nobody is glad enough to see him and so forth. And actually, all he did was just get home, walk in the house. You see, he has arrived. He has hit an end of a cycle having to do with a communication line. He has hit E on the communication line.

When he said “Now I’m going to go home,” he was cause and he was all picked up and real cheerful about it, you see. And when he got home, he wasn’t near as satisfied.

He told somebody else to come and see him and when he told somebody else to come and see him, he’s cause and he’s very happy about it and so he sits and waits for them to arrive and, boy, is he cheerful about them being on their way. But the moment they arrive, gee, he doesn’t want to see them at all. This is sort of the nature of the beast, Man, he has to be pretty well uptone before he can strike into these altitudes where he can arrive, happily.

4 So another goal we have is to get the preclear up to a point where he can arrive happily. Why can’t he arrive happily? Well, if he’s low on the scale of livingness-which is to say, already well entered into the scale of dyingness-any arrival he makes is an end of cycle and any end of cycle is death. So he can arrive as well as he can live.

Well, this has to do then with the fellow’s goals, doesn’t it? And ambitions. We have this individual who all his life has been trying to hammer and tongs away and become a great cabinetmaker. But at the moment that he is about to be put in charge of an enormous shop of cabinetmaking, he manages to fall and wreck his right hand so that he can’t be a cabinetmaker. He doesn’t dare arrive. To arrive is to die. Just draw those two cycles together there. Draw the communication graph and the curve of the MEST universe, which is Create-Survive-Destroy. And above that you’d have your communication graph, which is C to E, a straight line. And we get the same effect from these two things.

A person in such a state is happy to talk, but unhappy about listening. Interesting, isn’t it?

All right. Look at that cycle-of-action of the MEST universe and a communication line, add them up. This individual is an effect to the degree that he’s dead. Being dead and being an effect are the same thing to an individual in this universe. A total effect. And by a total effect, the fellow more or less means he’s dead. He’d have to be the total effect of everything, you see, to be dead. So he’s as dead as he has to be an effect, he’s as dead as he has to watch TV to live - You see that clearly? He’s as dead as he has to be entertained artificially, that he can’t furnish any of his own entertainment.

So imagination itself comes early on the curve, doesn’t it? And sure enough, that is " the creative line of the curve. A writer quite customarily is very inventive in the early part of the story and is terribly pattern at the end of it.

I remember one very fine old action writer, Peter В. Купе, who did this constantly. He had the most terrific beginnings on his stories-tremendous characters and so forth. And by the time he had run about half his course it, was getting more and more pattern В and the end of it you could hardly bear. I mean, you could immediately predict that end of it.

So it is with an entire career of a writer. At the beginning of his career, he is quite imaginative and at the end of his career he is quite laggardly about finishing his communications. This isn’t that he has written too much and it isn’t this and it isn’t that, It’s just that as he went along in his career, he bought a little more dyingness with each passing story. How did he buy this? He bought it in terms of his own ideas, his criticisms, his failures and his recognition of how tired he got and his recognition of what hard в work it was and his recognition that other writers did, after all, exist. And each time he recognized these things, he went a little bit further down on his own writing curve. So at the end of his career, he was writing a pattern plot with pattern characters. Clarence ) Budington Kelland. This man would astound you if you could read some of his early work. There is nothing more imaginative than some of Kelland’s very, very early work. But it has to be quite early because he entered into the curve fast.

Now, the funny part of it is, is these fellows tend to persist-these fellows who hit some kind of a pattern. Because the acceptance level of the society is a rather unchanged pattern. “Let’s get something we like and keep eating it because we know it won’t disagree with us, providing it isn’t very dramatic.”

Now, the society, at large, goes over this by common agreement, not by enjoyment. The acceptance level of the individual for a story is quite different than what he believes he should read. The society tells him he should read this and should read that and so he goes on reading these things rather haggardly. His acceptance level is quite something else.

And so it is with life. The preclear sitting in front of you there is trying desperately to measure up to what he conceives to be society’s acceptance level of life and him. He’s trying to measure up to this standard because he believes a standard of livingness exists. He believes there is such a thing. He’s heard “standard of living.” He’s heard of all kinds of trick phrases. He’s heard of “standards of conduct.” He’s heard of all these things, one after the other, all his life, because people have just kept talking to him as though they knew. So he is up against this thing called “the hidden standard.” They never told him what the hidden standard was, actually, he merely had to look around and observe and finally approximate it as well as he could guess at it and know, then, that he’s probably riding a big maybe and he’s probably wrong. But that is his standard of living.

Because somewhere, somehow, there is such a thing as a standard of painting and a standard of writing, a standard of living, a standard of dancing, a standard of driving a car, a standard of watching a movie. How are you supposed to act when you watch a movie, huh? Well obviously, you must have to act somehow or another. Well, if people who don’t measure up to this standard-they might not even be bothering him, but he does worry about it.So he came back a few minutes later and he says, “Well, is it that you cut down his perception or... ?”You know, somebody comes in and eats peanuts too loudly or something of the sort. The noise isn’t going to hurt him any, but he has to resist this noise because somebody has, obviously, not measured up to this standard of livingness.Now, I would like you to take somebody by the throat someday and ask them very kindly and very calmly, particularly somebody who has just gotten through criticizing you, “Would you please now give me the ideal standard of conduct for what you’ve just been criticizing me about. Now, let’s not go into my foible that we just covered with such volume, but let’s go into the ideal standard of how you do that.”

You’ll leave the guy with his mouth open. He won’t be able to tell you, because it’s an empty hole, it doesn’t exist.

That is the big trick of control, is to assume that you know some method of conductor some ideal standard of some sort, you see, and you just assume that you know it (outwardly) and then keep measuring people up to it-to them. Well, you don’t ever have to tell them what your ideal is. Well, it’s a good trick. Because they figure you must know what the ideal conduct is and so therefore, necessarily, they must be off of it if you say so.

So this is how you make the thetan wrong. Really, all you can do to a thetan is make him wrong. You can’t do much else to him.

I played that trick, by the way, on a student in Camden. A very dirty trick it was. I said, “Now, how do you make a thetan deteriorate?” I asked him.

And he said, “Well, for my money, the only way you could possibly do it is to make him wrong.”

And I said, “Well now,” I said, “you think that over for a little while.”

So he came back a few minutes later and he says, "Well, is it that you cut down his perception or... ?"

“Yes,” I said, “that’s a good one. Lookingness. Yeah, you cut down his lookingness and that’s the way you do it.” And I said, “But if I were you I’d think that one over, too.”

And he came to class and he was very blue and he was back in his head and he was feeling very sad about life in general.

And I gave him as an example of exactly how you dropped a Tone Scale on an individual. And he sat there and he laughed like a fool because, of course, his first answer had been absolutely right, but I’d made it wrong. By doing what? By pretending there was some other answer. There wasn’t any other answer. And yet I’d just say, “Well, now you think that over for a little while.”

Now, don’t think because we assume this that there aren’t a series of elements of life. There are. There are. But look how new and strange this is-we’re the ones that are digging them up. And we find out how they fit and where they fit and out of that we’re getting good sense, we’re getting some rise in tone. Because we’re, for the first time, insisting that this hidden standard be blown to glory and if there is a standard, let it sit out in the sunlight where everybody can see it. Not back in some dark alley where somebody pretends it is. So that when some little kid comes along and he’s doing badly in studies and so on, he can have something to look at and say, “I wonder how I’m doing.” Well, here’s some elements of livingness. He can compare himself to those and he can find out how he’s doing. The Tone Scale is the first real attempt to give a good solid evaluation on “How am I doing?” It even translates over on to a meter, which is pretty precise “How am I doing?”

Well, when it all adds up to all, it’s “How much living am I doing and how much dying am I dramatizing?” Because one doesn’t do dying, one simply dramatizes it.

The only thing that could be wrong with a thetan on a high echelon is that he could be made wrong. You see, that’s the highest echelon of how a thetan deteriorates.

But let’s look at it now in terms of evaluation. And he takes to evaluation and thinkingness and lookingness and all sorts of things in order to prove himself right. Well, he gets fixed on things he has to prove himself right about. And every time he fixes on something he has to prove himself right about, he has fixed upon the very thing which has caused his dyingness. See? “I was wrong, now I’ve got to prove myself right. Now, let’s figure out how I was wrong.” Okay. I mean, he’s done!

Well, it’s a strange thing that he can endow any concept with energy of a peculiar kind and behavior so as to make it live. And there are two ways of endowing it: One is by resisting it. And the other is just by endowing it-straight. Either way, he will. Now, the last way is the only practical way. And that statement is made out of a depth of experience-with this I would hate to sound again, especially on a Sunday afternoon.

If it is let go, it’s gone. If it’s neglected, it’s gone. If it’s looked through-which is another way of letting go and neglecting-it’s gone. Because it doesn’t have body and it doesn’t have horns. And the only person that’s got hold of it is a thetan himself and he’s got hold of both sides of it. He’s got hold of the side of it which is crushing it against him and he’s got hold of the side of it which he’s trying to keep from crushing him in. And if you could make a thetan let go of both sides of any one of these ridges, they’d blow.

Why doesn’t he? Well, because he realizes he has to have things in order to get along and he doesn’t have enough, so of course he can’t let go. So he doesn’t even dare let himself know what he’s holding on to. Because if he knew, then he might let go. It’s a very dizzy little spiral he gets into. In order to have a game at all, he has to have something, he thinks, So naturally, he holds on to things. And he’s holding on to both sides of things.

So our problem is not to cure his resistance. Now, I gave you some little time ago and told you at the time I gave it to you, this is not a process that would teach you something and that is resisting lookingness, resisting this and resisting that. Remember, I had you run it as a concept just so that you could get a good idea of what this was.

Well now, let’s enter that data into our immediate material here and we find out that an individual, then, is a study-when he has had unhappy experiences-a study in letting go and a study in having. In order to keep him from dying, we will have to get him into some sort of a selective let go. Because the only thing that’s going to kill him is him. You see that? He’s somehow or other going to work it around so he’s going to get killed if he keeps holding on to things.

Let’s take this poor fellow who is holding on to a Fac One facsimile-it’s murdering him! It’s ruining his eyesight, it’s giving him tuberculosis, it’s caving him in, in all directions, and yet, there he has it.

And you say, “Why don’t you let go of the other side of it and stop pushing it against your chest one way or the other?” Or we just have him be the automatic machine that is pushing it against his chest (there’s another solution to that).

But he-“Oh well, all right.” And he’ll let go of it and by tomorrow he will have its predecessor on the track and he will have that cradled to his bosom. Why? Because letting go of that has interfered with his havingness. So we will at once have to remedy this by increasing his potential havingness so that he can let go and neglect some of the things he has. Life is abundance and death is scarcity. So we have to give him an abundance.

Well, let’s look at what these mock-ups are that he has. And we find these mock-ups are actually livingness compressed into a frame of reference which represents something he cannot possess in the MEST universe. The MEST universe is that far from being a trap that it is tremendously valued by the individual. So much so, that it is supplanted and substituted for in terms of duplicates and mock-ups. That’s cheerful, isn’t it? Now that’s not new to you. I’ve talked to you about that before.

But you can count on this: that every scrap of energy of his own creation which a preclear is holding in reference to his body is a relatively unacceptable substitute for something or many things which he cannot actively have in the MEST universe. We’ve got several kinds of banks and several kinds of energy. A preclear’s own universe is of an entirely different complexion. And you as an auditor practically never come into conflict with it. Neither does a preclear. He has that carefully put aside and hidden from view. What you’re in conflict with are those things which he is substituting for the things he cannot have in actuality and reality in the MEST universe.

A great deal of study of this problem has resulted in those conclusions. The answer to it is the efficacy of Creative Processing, the efficacy of throwing out eight anchor points and bringing them together.

I have driven preclears into convulsions by throwing eight anchor points together and stuffing them into his chest-just that-convulsions! Which very soon passed away and left him in the most pleased, calm frame of mind you ever saw. He didn’t have enough energy. And not having enough energy, he had to have the next best thing to energy: a mock-up or a facsimile. And the facsimile which this preclear (who was about to go into convulsions) was holding on to was about the heaviest one he had, which was diphtheria. So it wasn’t there by accident.

Now, it’s no good to level a finger at a preclear and say, “You did it all yourself. And it’s all your fault and you’re all to blame.” Because the truth of the matter is his life took a nose dive the moment he first made that statement, “All right, I did it. All right, I did it.” That’s his first nose dive. “I didn’t say, ‘I’m guilty,’ you know.” “All right, I did it.” Because he has, for the first time, singled himself out as a separate identity from other identities to be blamed or to cause. That’s his first nose dive.

Up to that time, he was just very happy about the whole thing and “they did it” and “he did it” and “other people did it” and so forth. But then he got pushed and threatened and hammered on to a point where he finally said, “All right, I did it.” And from that time on, he was having a rough time of it. That also checks against the meter and checks against the preclear because you can make a preclear feel better by running this. All right. That’s a very interesting concept up the line.

Well, havingness is his bugaboo. As soon as he drifts away from creativeness, he drifts away from the only remedy he has for self-havingness. And so he has to use things which he has created or he has to weigh very heavily on machines to which he is covertly furnishing energy, about which he doesn’t know. And we get these individuals pulling facsimiles in on themselves and doing all sorts of strange things. They start to put up screens to protect themselves from things which they’re pulling in against themselves. Curious, isn’t it?

Well, it’s not much of a puzzle. If you start to run it on a preclear in that frame of reference, you will discover that your preclear keeps on going uptone.

It’s a very, very strange thing, this business of havingness. It was quite a discovery when I made it. I was very elated. And then I found out that it could be remedied by getting the preclear used to and getting him to accept nothingness. Nothingness would make him violently ill at first, but nothingness was a better remedy than somethingness because it was closer to truth. Therefore, havingness itself is a very curious remedy. Nothingness was a cure for it: the right to be nothing.

What a long breath some kid takes whose family has pounded and hammered him to be, at length and at last, a great pianist. And you start processing him and you just give him the right to be nothing. He heaves a long sigh of relief and after that, he doesn’t have a sick moment.

That we classify as the obsession to be. And when one is-that is to say, when one has become, one has arrived. And if one is already in a state closely approximating death, then one becomes very anxious indeed about being. His total thought is to un-be.

A man is not well who simply exteriorizes because he’s tired of being a body. He isn’t well if he is getting processed so that he can escape. His actual goal is action and interest right here and now. He’ll escape from a body as well as he doesn’t have to.

Universe is full of those little contradictions because it’s a double terminal universe. It really is a double terminal, not a matched terminal universe. You understand that? Each pole of a motor, for instance, has to be plus and minus, at the same time, in order to get a current going. You’ve got two poles and each one is plus and minus, which actually gives you four terminals. Leave that to an electrician, sometime, to explain it to you if you don’t understand it. He won’t understand that at first either until he starts looking at his motor and then he’ll start scratching his head and then he’ll be saying, “Well, I’ll be damned. That’s true. That means that the alternating current graph given in all electrical textbooks is incorrect.” And it is.

All right. A study of havingness, then, reveals to us that an individual is interested in the game, really. He’s interested in it being a game. And it has ceased to be a game when he no longer had any fun with it. That is to say, when his total game came to be the combat of dyingness instead of the conduct of a game. The dyingness of knowingness is his first alarm.

His first real worry, anywhere, is when he doesn’t know something that he can’t remember having determined not to know and that becomes alarming to the individual. For instance, you know very well you ought to be able to remember your childhood. There wasn’t anything very strange about it that you shouldn’t remember. So you begin to think there must have been something awfully wrong about it. It’s not uncommon to have somebody believe he must have murdered somebody when he was ten or eleven and he’s forgotten about it.

It’s even stranger that you can’t remember the lives you’ve just led, because you’ve led them. This is very strange, you see. And this gets alarming to a preclear that he can’t remember his childhood. Because he has substituted a thing called a memory machine for his own knowingness. And the substitute of a memory machine and a forgetting machine-a mocker and an unmocker-for basic knowingness was one of his big giant strides downwards toward dyingness. Because he conceived he did this so that things would be remembered by him, which taught him a lesson.

So it must have been that he adopted a memory machine the day he conceived he could die. Lose and die are the same thing to a thetan. Because the only way a thetan can die is to lose. So it becomes, actually, very evident what this individual is doing: he’s substituting things for his own knowingness and in that substitution he gains a new knowingness which is a very false one. But nevertheless, it’s quite true that he can die and that he will forget everything after he is dead. He sometimes becomes very anxious for this one.

If you don’t believe it, you will run a preclear now and then who begs for some narcotic which will give him an amnesia. All he’s doing is trying to key-in his automaticity that causes him to forget his entire past at the moment of death. It’s just an automaticity.

All right. Automaticities and energies and other things to the contrary, the thetan has one thing different from MEST: he can get ideas. That’s the first obvious difference between a thetan and MEST. Yet there is another senior difference: he can bring a mass of MEST to life by gluing it together and organizing it with his own endowment of livingness. He can make something live.

And this is his highest ability. So perforce, is an ability which he tends to discard as he gets down toward dyingness. The reason he tends to discard it, as he goes down toward dyingness, can be multiple. He can discard it, for instance, because he believes that the sooner he dies, the quicker-the better run he’ll have at the next one. He believes that if he ceases to endow all the environment around him with life, it will cease to inflict itself upon him. And if he could just thoroughly enough disendow it, it would vanish. He believes all sorts of curious things about this endowment of livingness. He becomes afraid to think certain things for fear they’ll come true. That’s a parallel statement to “endow certain things because they’ll live.”

He has run into the “Frankenstein effect” He has created something which he neglected to tell to stop and which, thereby, became a monster. And that is the Frankenstein effect. You’ll find that on somebody’s track-anybody’s track, anywhere. He’s created something, he wants to stop it and he can’t stop it, because he created it to resist all effects, which I’ve gone into earlier. You know, that was part of the creation of it. It was supposed to resist all effects. And he didn’t say, “Except mine.” That was his main difficulty. So it just went on and lived and lived and lived and didn’t stop and it started doing things and that made him bad cause and he decided the thing should die. And therefore, if he had to remain in its environment, if it should die, then-it wouldn’t die, then, his only next answer was to die himself, of course. And so we get an introduction of death into the track.

Well, this ability of the thetan to endow with life is manifest, for instance, in a circuit. An individual will set up some sort of an automaticity which is supposed to talk or remember or do something for him-feed him music-and then it will go on playing when he thinks he Wants music. And this is very cute, but if it’s running a lot faster than he is-and he set it up when he was very bold and dashing-immediately afterwards, having set it up, he became its effect, didn’t he? And so immediately, we have a problem of slower speed on the part of the thetan. He can do less.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with setting up automaticities because we’re not trying to reach a ceiling of how fast can We get, because we’d pass right on out of any kind of a game that we could possibly contact. How selectively can you speed up to get into the game and how much can you continue to know so that you can patch yourself up if the game throws you over to the losing side? Well, that’s what we’re interested in. We’re very interested in that.

We’re interested, theoretically, in these higher upper reaches of serenity, but I don’t think you’d care to stay serene very long. It isn’t that you would experience any time particularly, but it’s just there’s lots of things to look at. You never saw anything quite as amusing as a thetan looking at things. And he goes around and he’ll look for it by the hour.

So we have the endowment of livingness as a thing which is at once his reason for being and his salvation and his reason for dying.

As he begins to resist other livingnesses, he resists livingness itself. But as he resists other livingnesses he, of course, puts up various energy barriers to them and actually serves to catalyze their livingness against him.

There are certain fishes, for instance, which when put together in a tank will fight. There are certain forms of life which when confronted with a barrier will charge. And it is one of the peculiar things of life that it fights resistance. It doesn’t fight the easy way to go, it normally fights resistances because that’s the game itself. That’s the basic game: you fight resistances.

So the making of his first chess player to play chess with him is setting up his first resistance, which becomes, at last, the inner fight between himself and his resistance. And we get combat back and forth, gory and bloody and endless, between himself and himself. You never saw so much dust or blood as a man will scare up and drop around his own beingness. He just-one or a couple of guys and you would be utterly amazed at the conflict and combat. Well, that’s because his zone of action has narrowed down to the First Dynamic.

Well, this endowment of livingness, then, becomes the most important factor to address in processing. And now that it has been isolated and rather validated, it can be seen immediately that if an individual went around endowing with livingness those things which he either resisted or endowed with livingness (either way) and if the individual was always looking for something wrong, what would happen? Isn’t that cute, huh? Isn’t that horrible? If he was always looking for something wrong, what would he wind up with?

Well, let’s look at a demon circuit again and find out a little more about the chess player and find out that a thetan very often sets up a demon around the model of an associate.

This girl has been living with this fellow for a long time and they’ve got crosscurrents going between them. But this girl is pretty beefy, you know, she can really throw out the endowment there and she’s the spark plug of this team and she sets up this fellow to do certain things for her. And, wonder of wonders, he keeps falling down and failing and dragging around miserably. But she finally loses him. Some nitwit comes along that hasn’t got any looks and is awful sloppy and that’s his acceptance level and off they go. And this leaves this girl, who is to become your preclear, all in a bog. She has things that resist her all the time and she can’t sort of operate anymore, but she can remember times when she did.

This is not a recommended process, but this is a very funny manifestation which you would find in this case if you cared to look. She’s still got an endowment of the man she lost. She still has this thing set up as a demon circuit. And when she gives herself an order, it hits this circuit and fails. And so she has set up a failure circuit simply by endowing something, by insisting it do something. You know, she ranted and raved around and said he ought to get a job and he shouldn’t sit home all the time and so forth. And so finally she tells herself, “Well, I ought to get a job” and she finds herself sitting home. It’s real crazy, isn’t it, of it? And yet this is what the result of giving herself such an order is. She is shunting it through this kind of a circuit.

Now, you could knock out all these circuits and this would all be very well. But the funny thing is the more you sat and processed this girl (unless you did it very expertly), the more you processed her past, the more chance you have-this isn’t absolutely necessary that you would-but the more real chance you’d have of endowing her past itself with beingness and so endowing it with life so that it could strike back at her with malice aforethought.

Now, you’ve energized the demon circuits that she has set up on a 76-trillion-year track-if you did a real good job of it-without raising her potential one iota. You didn’t even give her practice in endowing. Why? Because everything you’re endowing is by resistance.

That’s why auditing can only succeed, when it has to do with erasing engrams, over a limited time period. You erase engrams just so long, see, and after that your boy goes into a slump. Well, why does he go into a slump? Well, you processed past the limit. And the limit was, is how many engrams do we endow with life in order to get this one up?

Well, all the time you’re processing engrams, you are, to some slight degree, endowing that machine with life which produces the facsimiles out of the preclear’s own knowingness. That’s real cute, isn’t it? So you could process an awful lot of engrams, but every time you did, you endowed that machine with a little more life. And because the preclear is basically hungry for energy, boy, he’ll just pull that stuff in. He is a closed circuit, actually. If you were to trace him electronically, you’d find he had a closed circuit.

Well, we’re not even trying to validate energy when we do this, but this, unfortunately, is something that any thetan will do. This is an inescapable mechanism which, long since with your preclear, has gone out of control. He is no longer selectively able to endow or not endow as the case may be. It isn’t under his determinism and not being under his determinism he is, of course, in considerable trouble.

Well now, he’d have to be quite a boy. You’d have to have him way up Tone Scale, really, before you could knock out and redetermine his determinism about endowing life. “Now I’m going to endow this with life. Now I’m going to endow that with life.” It would just be a sort of an empty process. And you’re much more likely to kick your preclear down into the basement running that process than otherwise. Why? Because, boy, that machine is a big machine. That’s the biggest he’s got. It’s the machine which lights up all the other machines so that all the machines will work.

As far as the machines are concerned, your most legitimate, broad target-which yet is riot a good target for an auditor, but it’ll work, it’ll work-is the machinery which finds things wrong. That gets into effect this way: the individual begins to find out there’s a certain amount of dyingness in the environment. So therefore the environment is a threat. So therefore he sets up observation posts and things which watch the environment and will warn him when anything is wrong with the environment, which is to say, threatening or dangerous with the environment.

He hands over his observation to a machine which utilizes experience with regard to this environment and therefore, thereafter, he is becoming more and more alert to wrong things and less and less alert to right things. All of his machinery, that he is holding in close and energizing at the time you will be processing him in this culture, will be centered on this machine which makes everything wrong. It looks for wrongnesses. Anybody who comes along and tells the preclear there is something wrong with him-which is to say, invalidates him-is liable to give him a good hard shove on his own machinery. So we have somebody who-all the time going around invalidating himself. If they just didn’t invalidate themselves all the time, why, they’d get someplace. They know this. Well, what’s happening with that pc? He’s sliding off into the valence of one of his “find-it-wrong machines.”

So here’s a highly generalized type of machine in the bank-very generalized-“find something wrong.” Quite important, that machine is. Because you have a tendency as an auditor to kick it in and so slow down the case by trying to find out what’s wrong with the preclear. So he immediately starts to look to find out what’s wrong with him and, unfortunately, you begin to endow with life that machinery and those incidents which themselves tell him things are wrong.

So it has been, very cleverly, selective types of auditing and processes which have carried us through to this point. Geographical position processes, you will notice, are not in this category. That isn’t a bad process, that’s a good process. Negative material in all ways is a fairly good thing to process because you’ve got nothingnesses. You see? Processing toward nothingness and endowment would go hand in hand because you can’t endow nothingness.

But many an individual has such automatic machinery on endowment that when he says there’s a nothingness over there, a baseball or something appears in it. “There are no baseballs in-oh, yes there are.” Just that fast.

We don’t care anything about that machine, but that demonstrates that he is endowing, one way or the other, an awful lot of things.

So this endowment, perhaps, is a bad word to use because in psychotherapy they have continuously used this word “endowment.” “What is the endowment of the individual and yap-yap.” We’re not interested in what the endowment of the individual is. They’re talking about some static thing. We’re talking about how much can this preclear create life and how much life can he create in what? Pygmalion.

Why is it that the story, this oft repeated and continuing story like Pygmalion, has fascinated Man all these years? You find some of the most interesting fairy tales that have run down through the years and that children listen to breathless-not because they’re good stories particularly or well told. Well, we find out that such a story as the Gingerbread Boy, all kinds of things like that-endowment with life. Why is it that the witch stays continuously in child lore? Not because she exists anymore as a profession (she was a good honest profession once and then the doctors took over and ruined it all), but because she could endow things with life. Well, it’s an oddity that a story of endowing with life could be so consistent.

But Man, of recent ages, and as he gets older, is getting afraid of endowing with life because, you see, every time he tries to endow with life, he brings more death upon himself. That is because he is so surrounded by automaticities that his endowment of them and his fear of them results in a cessation of livingness for himself. He makes everything so automatic, he turns everything over. He’s gotten to a point where there hasn’t been a single magician throw a pile of sand together and have it walk away, for Weeks. There just hasn’t been that sort of thing happening, it doesn’t go on anymore. That’s not because Man can’t do it, that is because Man is afraid to do it. Too many Frankenstein monsters.

All right. The open sesame in a preclear’s case would be then, “What is he endowing with life?” His asthma, his chilblains-anything he’s resisting-his headaches, all the things wrong with his wife, all the things wrong with the world and all the things wrong, all the things wrong, all the things wrong. That’s what he’s endowing with existence.

If you’ll just sit down-and although your preclear has heard this lecture, it hasn’t thrown him off guard, he hasn’t plumbed his own depths-you just ask him what he’s endowing with life right now and the guy is liable to sit there or the girl is liable to sit there with her jaw dropped for several minutes. “Uh, gee.” Because that’s the One thing he won’t look at: the thing he’s holding both sides of so it won’t hit him.

You can’t, as a thetan, hold both sides of anything without endowing it with life. This is the most horrible thing about life, is that it produces life.

All right. What process is indicated, then? Well, to a very, very limited experimental extent, “things wrong.” Mostly it’s to get a tone rise out of a preclear any time you address wrongness.

We’d better specialize, then, on the two greatest truths that we know. And one of those is nothingness and the other is an endowment of life. Let’s find what’s right, for once.

And let’s covertly get the individual to lift his attention off those things which he is currently endowing, onto things which he would be much happier if he endowed. Now that’s covert. Because you’ll get him to take his attention units off of them (quote) “strand by strand.”

You’re liable to run into some very, very nasty somatics. You’re liable to run into some almost killing somatics. But honest, run into, they’re better than not run into, because they’re the ones that are sitting right there the second the preclear looked around to take one of these little looks to find something right that you asked him to take. It had a tendency to take an edge off of a little ridge or someplace and take his attention just one unit at a time off of this thing. And it seldom comes in with a rush, but it will occasionally and in will come some mis-emotion or in will come some horrendous somatic which will practically knock him in half. He’s been sitting there carefully balancing this somatic for a long time on this body-he’s protecting the body, that’s why he’s holding the somatic there.

You say, “Now, wait a minute. That’s wrong. He’s protecting the body, therefore, he wouldn’t want the somatic there at all.”

“No, no. No. No, he’s protecting the body, that’s why he’s holding the somatic there.”

“No. You mean he’s holding it away from his body.”

“No, no. No, he’s holding it there so it won’t hurt his body.”

“Well, where’s it liable to go if he let go of it?” That’s what he doesn’t know. So he takes the safest course he knows which is to hold it forever. You know, he’ll at least have tabs on it.

The only way it goes is for him to let go of it. Where does it go? It goes nowhere. Because it is being constantly re-created in present time by his own automaticity. Isn’t that horrible? Isn’t that horrible? A fellow could get real sad about that.

There is no past energy. Energy constantly in present time is taking patterns laid down by the exact knowingness of the preclear about the past.

The thetan is a mighty smart boy. Mighty smart. But he hasn’t been able to salvage himself out of the terrible predicament of holding on when he should have let go. Because he didn’t know what would happen if he let go and now he’s even forgotten he’s holding on. But he knows there’s something there and he can’t even describe it or look at it.

Now, let me go into this aspect of it. You know about associative restimulators in the environment. You know about this. The hypnotic restimulator. Posthypnotic suggestion: the hypnotist touches his tie arid this makes the subject take off his coat. All right.

Now, what is the mechanism there? It means there’s something wrong in the environment which is not isolated or identified which the iridividual is obeying. There’s something wrong there that the individual is obeying. So he begins to obey a whole class of environment on one stimulus-response mechanism.

As you call his attention to various objects in the room, it will eventually narrow down to a point where he looks straight at what is causing him to do it and at that moment it blows up.

This has led psychotherapy into believing that recognition was the only process. And that is why psychotherapy failed. They thought you had to recognize something to make it go away. And so they started men-and would have, if we hadn’t come along here-and startedMan on the most treadmill task in the world: which would be an endless identification of things so that they would blow up and go away. Which is an endless treadmill of not knowing what comes next. Which, of course, made people sick. All right.

Let’s get, “It’s better to have recognized a few things than none, but it’s horrible to have recognized a hundred billion.” So we’ve got our saturation point. Our saturation point is three things recognized. [laughter]

Now, if you want to know about livingness, there are lots of processes and there’s lots of data. Not a single instant of the last many years of research have been in vain. There was always something to know, there was always a little more map to draw. The map has been no more than roughly filled in. The basic mechanics which you know and have been taught are all valid mechanics. But in the absence of a concept of the endowment of livingness, we were powerless to help a case swiftly. We haven’t even answered at this time this question thoroughly: Is it totally bad to endow somebody else with livingness? Does it really make a slave out of that person? We haven’t answered that adequately. We just take an extrapolated guess at it and say, “Yeah, it’s probably bad because it interrupts his self-determinism.” That’s probably the right answer, but remember we don’t know that answer completely.

We do not know this other answer completely, another answer. And I’m just being very, very honest with you about what we don’t know. And that is “Are we mocking that stuff up?” MEST. As we roll along, are we mocking it up? Every indication and plot says we are, but that’s worked out by symbolic logic, not by lookingness. And anything worked out by thinkingness may have value, but it’s nowhere near as good as just knowing.

So we’ve got material there that we haven’t-in those two instances and a few more-where we haven’t a complete, solid answer, we have only a workable answer.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re mocking that stuff up or not. If you’re having trouble with it, you had certainly better improve your ability, either to see it or to mock it up, and both processes amount to the same thing. The process to remedy your mock-up of the MEST universe would end in a better perception of it. A process which bettered your perception of the MEST universe would better your perception of it and make it less dangerous to you in each case.

So the MEST universe has not blown up, except on an isolated preclear or two, we’ve kind of had to shove the machine back into... We figured that was the machine we were shoving back and shove back into line and kind of chock it up a little bit so that things wouldn’t keep going out of plumb this way and got it anchored up. In fact, there was one right here we had to do that with.

So our entire span of information is very far from lost. This bric-a-brac will keep turning up. But remember that many of the mysteries which we have approximated with data are not, therefore, completely known. Just because we are reaching what seems to be an inevitable conclusion on something doesn’t mean that it is an absolute.

You cannot deal with data and absolutes. You can deal with a theoretical absolute nothing, but you can’t even deal with a complete nothing. An absolute nothing is a pretty hard thing to get to because there’s at least a perception of it and it probably exists in a time in a geographical area and an absolute nothing would have no perception, no time and no geographical area; see? So to get to this absolute nothing, we cut out all the rest of it and yet the thetan himself is as close to an absolute nothing as you can get. The closer he is to an absolute nothing, the more power he has. The more energy he’s packing around to confirm his identity, why, the less power he has.