And this is January the 15th, 1954.

Afternoon lecture, January 15th, we are going to talk about some odds and ends. But very specifically, we’re going to talk a little more about present time.

There are several things which you have probably caught up with, by this time, in terms of communication and experience and havingness and time and so forth. And if you haven’t caught up with them, you still have your written form of SOP 8-C, you still have your codified rote processes-just Six Steps to Better Beingness, Short 8. Short 8 is not anywhere near the process that Six Steps to Better Beingness is, by the way. And in addition to that you have, of course, as always, Creative Processing and Self Analysis.

And now, if time and havingness are similar experiences, I mean, if this abstract called “time” can be reduced to the human experience of havingness, then you ought to have quite a process there, huh?

When all else fails, why, pick up a copy of Self Analysis and you’ll find the fellow will come out of his slump. That’s an interesting fact, isn’t it? Because it’s a slow process, nobody really pays as much attention to Self Analysis as he might. This is an interesting thing that the amount of actual relief and power could be in a little book like that and have as little attention paid to it by an auditor.

And let’s just take a definition now-I’m trying to teach you to be Scientologists now, not auditors. Let’s take a definition and let’s just make a process out of it. We know all the modus operandi of processes. There are all kinds of them, there are a terrific number.

An auditor is always thinking there is something very, very much better, there is something very much faster and this is very true, there is. But in terms of patching somebody up so he really feels like he is something, why, you have a very, very good weapon in Self Analysis.

Of course, there is such a thing as knowing the efficient process that happens to resolve a certain category of thing, but let’s just take time and havingness now and let’s find out something about havingness. Just because somebody has a title to your car that you don’t have-that you lost in some fashion or other-doesn’t mean a total lack of that car unless you are so highly “only oned” that it means that something goes out of existence just because it isn’t in your vicinity. See that? And we find, then, that the car would still exist, only the ownership of it wouldn’t be yours. Now, the ownership is a symbol. The car still exists. You wouldn’t have the doingness of it, but then we’re not into doingness right here. We’re just examining havingness. Now havingness, then, goes from the gradient scale of a symbolized havingness-that is to say, a certificate of title or “It’s mine” or some such thing as that. That would be a symbolized havingness.

All right. You’ve got a preclear who is pretty rocky. And his rockiness is to a large degree-well, it rather escapes your immediate ability to grab on to. You know, you-hold the two back anchor points of the room-he can’t concentrate that much, he feels bad, his reality is poor, he doesn’t know what he can do or what he can’t do. He’s not in good shape. All right.

Now, an individual who is in this very solidly has this kind of a circumstance to combat and it’s an interesting circumstance. The only present time is where he is. It’s past time everyplace else. This would normally be true. You see, let’s just take it from the definition and the definition would say that. It’d say present time is where he is. Because he can only have if he has a symbolized ownership of and the thing close to him and the doingness of it and beingness of it and so forth. If he has an exclusive on this, why, then he feels he can have.

You want to do a fast patch-up job on this person, you know, you want him to feel better, you haven’t got much time to invest on this, let’s say, you’re not going to go all the way out and so on or you’re just simply balked. None of the other things which you know seem to function with you. Incredible as that may seem, a fellow can sometimes get a case sufficiently parallel to his own cross-up or something like that that he just doesn’t seem to be able to make any progress with this case.

Well then, if he’s in that frame of mind and if symbols mean that much to him, then the only present time there really is, is a present time right where he is. So what chance does he have to perceive distances? He wouldn’t have a very good chance to perceive over a very large distance, because the fact of the matter is, is he can only have what he owns, personally, by symbolized title. See that? That should be very clear, then, that at a distance it’d be past time.

Well, you know whether you’re making progress with a case or not after you’ve audited it half an hour. Your time look is awfully long right now, by the way, it’s terribly long. You’re evidently measuring auditing in terms of fives of hours or tens of hours. And when you can start measuring auditing in tens of minutes, you will start getting yourself some terrific results. Because you will be willing to shift what you’re doing rapidly enough to meet up with what’s working on the preclear.

So when we get this boy into spaces, we would instantly have a problem with him of no space. Why? Because the space is from present time to past time, not from space to space. Come on, wrap yourself around that-don’t make it blurred. See, we wouldn’t have a problem then from space to space, because out of the immediate zone of control-and this is the factor that goes in there and where we add doingness-the zone of control. His exclusive right in other words, to start, stop and change said automobile would be his zone of space. And when his zone of control is via the body only, then we do have a condition where the individual can be in present time only on unit space here.

In other words, if you don’t get a communication change in a couple of minutes, a perception change in a couple of minutes, you’re just not on the right track, that’s all. Well, you just better drop down later into the process or you better do something else.

See, it wouldn’t be present time there. And so it’s present time here, but the restaurant where you ate this morning is where you were eating this morning. You see, that’s the time that restaurant is in, although that restaurant exists right here. I mean there’s just no trick to observe this restaurant and perceive its counter and waitresses and everything. They’re going on, they’re doing something else, but it’s a change of pattern.

But getting back to Self Analysis, once in a while you’ve audited somebody for a half an hour or forty-five minutes and you’re getting no perception change. Well by golly, there’s one way to make that fellow feel better. And whereby he may not say he’s had it or something of the sort, you just reach back and pick up a copy of Self Analysis, open it

Now, the restaurant in past time would be the fixed pattern of particles or a fixed cycle of particles-you eating breakfast, waitresses talking to you. Well, that would now be in the past to such a person who depended for something else to grant to him the right to own.

Present Time, Self Analysis469 up at random, see what he does with these mock-ups. He says he can’t get them. He can get the idea of them, but he can’t get them otherwise.

You know, if the State of Arizona has got to send you a title before you can drive a car, why, then the chances are-or if you can’t go out here in the street and, as you examine it, own a very classy car-you know, just examine it and own it. Same thing, in essence: examination, own. You see, you have limitations of doingness with regard to the car, but actually if you completely have jettisoned this thing called symbolized ownership, you could drive the car too. You might have to use a different body, but you could drive the car without much trouble, as a matter of fact, rather easily. Most of Homo sapiens is pretty well dug in. As a matter of fact, we’re going to get together a pneumatic drill squad to get out the average citizen.

And you say “Well, okay.” And you turn over to the next-to-the-last list of the book and you read that or you read any of the back lists of the book for that matter and rephrase that next-to-the-last list, you know?

Now, what problem here is posed to the auditor? He could tell immediately-he could tell immediately whether a person was in present time or in past time. In this way, he could tell immediately if the person is in present time here and in past time elsewhere or past time elsewhere or past time here. So that would be a lower grade. Past time here, past time elsewhere. Now, that’s really pretty bad, you see?

Instead of saying, “A time when somebody was in good communication with you?” ask the fellow sometime, “How about a time somebody was talking to you and you knew what he said?” Some good communication. And this is just evading him, well, just find out “When was somebody talking to you and you knew what he said?” “Well, what did he say?” You just go over that a few times, give him a few mock-ups. And this person will not immediately grow an aurora borealis, but he’ll feel good. He’ll be able to function. Remember that, he’ll be able to function.

Now, we get into present time here, past time elsewhere and then we get into present time here and several other elsewheres are in present time too. And then we get into present time here and take the extreme on it, present time this universe. He could then observe simultaneously all the particles of the universe in any given pattern at any instant. But he’d have to be able to pervade or own the whole condemned universe before he could actually achieve this absolute trick. You see how that would be?

Now, there isn’t an auditor along the line in America who I know, who is using Self Analysisfor what it is, which is his security on a case. And that’s not true, however, in Great Britain. The boys know what that book can do over there and they use it quite uniformly and they get very excellent results with it

So let’s just look at this business of time and havingness and we find out something else immediately: that havingness consists of ownership or proprietorship, to most people, of a space or an object. That’s what havingness means to most people-space or an object or an action of some sort. But havingness really refers, as we hit it along the groove here, it actually refers to objects. And we get there, then: space, energy, object. And when we refer to havingness, we just limit its meaning there to objects and we’ve pretty well got it and, of course, a body to some degree is an object and so is a symbol-they’re mobile objects. Now, if you’re going to differentiate between a living object and a dead object, you’re going to have an awful hard time, because you would have to say, well, “a living object is something that is mobile, has life in it.”

Now, I think the main reason for this is the desire for the spectacular, probably, in case recovery. You know, as a case drifts south on the Tone Scale, you’re getting, for every tone down, a much longer recovery period. See, you get that? I mean, it’s a compounding inversion. You know, as you go up, why, things are wider and wider apart and more and more differentiated, but as they are more and more identified, yeah, there are actually longer and longer time periods involved in the recovery.

Well all right, let’s take a racing car, with you pervading it. It’s an object with mobility with life in it. You’re in it. You, a thetan, pervading it, so it must be a living object then. Well no, it’s not a living object because, of course, it’s a racing car and everybody knows a racing car isn’t alive.

Let’s take somebody who is a real screaming psychotic, I mean, a real screamer. And we worked with him real hard for a day, two days, something like that, and we’ve got him up to a point where he’s neurotic, see? But that’s with the most modern techniques, the best use possible of the most modern techniques. Day, two days, three days, we’ve got a neurotic case after we’ve finished up to that level, you see? It took a long jump, that’s a long jump.

Now, just a minute. Do you mean the difference between a biological object and a explosion-motivated object? You mean the difference between a heat engine and a biological engine or the difference between a heat engine and a heat engine? Just what do you mean there? And we get into an absurdity.

Now, we go up through this neurotic band and that’s quite a jump too. It’s nowhere near as long as a psychotic jump. But now we go up from neurotic into the milder ones and we get fast jumps. There, with the most modern things we’re doing, the jumps are pretty fast.

Mobilized, organized and well-controlled MEST objects would also perforce include bodies. Because a body has a lot of MEST in it-terrific amount of it. It lives on it, it’s a heat engine. And I don’t care if some other being has mobilized this or if you’ve mobilized this MEST and granted it beingness, you won’t get much of anywhere in materializing or animating other objects than bodies if you think you don’t have the power to mobilize any kind of MEST and make it animate.

Well, now let’s compare this, actually, with what we were doing a year or so ago. And honest, that psychotic jump could be months long. Now, I’m talking right straight out of the record book, now, of what auditors have been doing-understanding it or not understanding it with the material to hand-and they have occupied months on one psychotic. The least paying proposition I know of. That isn’t why I say “the dickens with the psychotics,” it’s the fact that if you start paying attention to the lowest band of the society and validating it, why, you’re just helping the society cave in. Let’s think about the Third Dynamic. All right.

Now theoretically, that introduces another slight absurdity that you could have this racing car out here walk down the street instead of roll down the street-you know, lift its right wheel and take a step and lift its left wheel and take a step. You, actually, could have that happen if we carried this out to the other... But we don’t know that that can’t happen, you see?

SOP 8-C, for instance, four weeks ago, was applied by a real good auditor, very good auditor, applied just as it sits there, no other way-no sudden spurts of intuition or anything of the sort-on a woman who was a real screamer. You know, I mean, it was strictly “What fog?” and a real screamer. And three days later, this woman was in excellent condition and a Theta Clear. They exteriorize very well-very stable, very sane and very happy about existence.

All right. So let’s take what we know and just skip what we don’t know, at the moment, and hit for the highest certainty on the thing and we find then that any symbol would sort of have a certain amount of life in it. You could say, “Well, a motorcycle is an idea cloaked in MEST which is animate.” Well, ’tis. It’s an idea. It doesn’t do any thinking.

Now, that went from Opening Procedure just done down the line and it actually took this auditor about three days to wade through the whole works. And she didn’t exteriorize immediately, he had to do quite a bit of patch-up before he could get her to exteriorize. Well anyway . . .

The next time you see the word “the” do some thinking, you let me know, huh? It’s an idea cloaked in energy-quite mobile, easily duplicated and so forth. So we have a symbol.

There, however, was the most optimum use of the most optimum technique by one of the best auditors we’ve got. That’s awful fast. This same auditor has had some comparable results. Another report which I have as of about three weeks ago, a five-day period was required on a man who was also strictly a screamer, as we used to say in Dianetics. You know, you run them into an engram, they start screaming. Boy, do they scream. The power of a human voice. I’ve heard them three, four blocks away and have had complaints from two blocks away. And here again, about five days. Now, this auditor wasn’t quite as good as the other auditor, that was one of the differences there.

Now, there should be some demarcation line here in terms of havingness-should be some-somewhere between some life object and a just purely MEST object with no life in it and between an idea which is a live perpetuating idea and an idea which is simply a fixed idea. Oh boy, there just ought to be there so we can classify everything, you know, and get it all into other bins where it won’t make sense.

But we can’t actually count on this happening, psychotic after psychotic. Right at this moment I can’t tell you with any great assurance that we can simply take psychotics and in three days or five days, if we were well trained, turn them out. Well, I think we could if we were talking in terms of a couple of weeks or three weeks.

The truth of the matter is when you talk about an object, you would have to qualify it this way: well, is it a self-determinedly mobile object? Well, if it’s a self-determinedly mobile object, you could either be talking then about an automatically driven automobile, self-determining along a certain course or an unlimitedly self-determined object which could create other mobile symbols-other symbols.

Well let’s, however, look at this three-day problem and find out that it took about one and three-quarters days or something like that to bring the person out of the psychotic level into a neurotic level. And then she started going on up and she spent probably something on-this is just estimations of the time required-probably half a day in the neurotic level. And then she went the rest of the way she was going on the rest of the band.

Well, when you’re talking about that last, of course, you’re talking about a thetan, you’re talking about life. But it would have to be, by definition, an unlimitedly self-determined object, which would be the difference between a fixed idea, you know, a limiterily determined object.

You see that time lag, how it also enters auditing time lag.

An automobile that could drive itself, you see, could only go down the street at a certain rate of speed, turn certain corners, perform certain functions and all of those functions would center around driving an automobile down the street and being an automobile, totally. So it’d be a fixed idea.

All right. I’ll give you a case I did a few weeks ago. And I spent two days on this case and I do not know at this moment, really, tell you the honest truth of the matter, I don’t know whether this person is going to, as a GE, pull it or not because the case was all but gone. That’s one of these cases where you actually almost fish them out of the coffin. And how this person had the nerve to walk into my office-just nerve to walk, I don’t know. And well, for me to suddenly take a bite on that one-just that sudden and swift-pretty rough.

Now, if we could exteriorize that idea and blow it up to a point where it could actually create other automobiles or create other ideas or other classes of ideas (in other words, fix ideas into energy itself, all on its own on an unlimited basis), we would be talking about a thetan.

Well, the first auditing period was four hours and the second auditing period was five hours. There were nine hours of auditing involved here. I made a Theta Clear. But the body had deteriorated way, way beyond anything you thought the body-the body was practically rotten at the toes. This was very interesting. The thetan, however, wound up in excellent condition. However, this person exteriorized rather easily. It wasn’t any particular difficult job, it was rather a routine job.

Now, there’s the essential difference, then, between a symbol and a thetan. Now, the preclear who is in present time here and past time everywhere else is pretty well sold on symbols and the next step from there is to be a symbol only and there in itself we get the definition of “limitation.” And there is limitation. Limitation of what? Limitation of ideas, limitation of the ability to duplicate ideas, limitation of the ability to fix ideas in energy. And the more a person is limited in this ability to duplicate or fix ideas, why, the less alive he is and the less in present time he is and, actually, the less havingness he can have. So we tackle this thing from three or four different ways and we all come to the same conclusion: that an individual is pretty near as fixed as he is the thing he is being by belief. See, he’s pretty near as fixed as that.

But the first four hours of that nine were occupied in trying to strike through a communication barrage which was completely nonsensical-getting in one auditing question every fifteen or twenty minutes. Fabulous, huh? Just one of those things. That was the first. Now, you can consider that a lag. How many auditing commands can you get in, is an index of what the comm lag is of the preclear. You see how this would work out? So there are different-looking kinds of comm lags-it’s all the same thing, communication lag, but how many different kinds are there?

And fixity itself says, “present time here, past time elsewhere”-to be fixed and no longer be mobile.

Well, the funny part of it was that I broke the crust on this case with, as usual, the next-to-the-last list of Self Analysis. I got this person moting from, well, pretty close to a psychosis and up through the neurotic band just by getting that sort of a twist on the case. It broke up through the neurotic band, got an exteriorization, went through some Spacations and one of the most beneficial things was getting the preclear to make some space and sit in it for a while and this was very relaxing, indeed.

To have present time everywhere would require, you see, an enormous instantaneous mobility.

And then I handled the person’s name which was one of these “pun names” and handled the name by Postulate Processing. And then did locational drills and just did a tremendous number of locational drills and did goals on the person and then did the Grand Tour.

Well, the object of which we have and the time which it represents are not unlimited ideas. And when you get something way down from being an unlimited idea-way down from that, quite fixed and so on-why, its main concern is that which it is in sympathy with. See? In sympathy. Here we have “it will agree with those things which it is nearest to.” So an individual who has to have a great deal is, of course, in sympathy with things which are, you know, other objects. And so if you’re in continuous sympathy with the MEST universe, you naturally would eventually come to believe that you yourself were a fixed idea which had no further goal than to be the idea you had fixed upon to be fixed about. You see how that is?

But the whole thing was a rather easy job of auditing, except those first few hours. That was brutal. I’d rather have been shot than leave my body sitting in that chair leaning up against the chimney looking down through the roof saying, “Grief. Yeah. Okay. Yes. Yeah, it’s very interesting. That’s very interesting. Now can you remember s— ? Up against what?”

In other words, continuous contact with objects-whether you make them or find them (but this is beside the point)-continuous contact with objects and continuous sympathy with these objects would eventually, perforce, bring you to a point where you believed you yourself were a limited object-in other words, a symbol.

“Yapity-yapity, yapity-yapity, yapity, yapity, yapity, yapity, yapity, yapity, yapity, yapity, yapity, yapity, yapity, yapity, yapity, yapity, yap, yap, yap, moom-bow.”

Well, there’s present time. Now we say, “Where is present time?” We can actually locate it when we talk about a preclear. Where is present time? Where is present time to a tree?

Comm lag. Now, there’s the other kind of a comm lag where they go silent. And this silence is about the same breed of cat, it’s just the other side of the apathy band. You know a person can be in perfect apathy and still use their voice to defend. I talked to you yesterday about defend, you know? Well, this is just another symptom of defense. A person can throw up such a barrage of words that you plain ordinary never get through this barrage of words, that’s all.

I don’t even think it’s present time outside the bark. It’s present time right inside that bark, that’s about all.

So, where our difficulty lies with a preclear is getting in that original communication and that’s your trouble with the psychotic, you see? Getting in that original communication.

Now, present time to some individuals is just to the length of their fingertips and they actually have their zone of occlusion out there to their fingertip length. It’s what they can reach and protect is the other thing which is describing it. That is the object then that they can have, is how much they can protect and they got into this cycle by trying to protect objects. (Just weaving in other stuff we’ve had on this same thing, show you we’re not departing afield in any way.)

But how long does it take to take a case from all the way south to Theta Clear? Well, it would find most of its time occupied in the lower band. You know, the first jump would be the most difficult one and then the jumps happen with greater rapidity.

All right. Now, his zone of present time is to his fingertips. That would mean that the far end of the room to this individual wouldn’t be in the same time that he was in-not quite. There would be a lapse there. And the front of the building certainly is not. So his present time would be a zone of perception. We have a zone of perception, then, having something to do with establishing time. And present time, then, would be established to a large degree by the zone of perception.

Well, there are very probably techniques which, as we swing along, will find our people more and more receptive and more and more-well, easier and easier to communicate with and will find things in a far better state of auditing in general. Probably, there’s a lot of things that we’re using crudely now, we will refine in their uses. But there isn’t too much reason to go around hoping. I mean hoping, you know, all of a sudden, well we’ll drift along and we won’t study this because Ron’s going to come up with something that is newier and brassier. That was perfectly true a few months ago.

So you take the occluded case: he’s defending himself in many ways from being out of present time. Now, I asked somebody this morning (a student had exteriorized him), told him to flinch from this and flinch from that and flinch from something else and he came up with the fact of “Well, he’s doing all right and it was all black” and so forth. And I said, “All right, well, flinch from the blackness.” And this was a big puzzler to him because he didn’t know where to flinch to. This left him no place to flinch.

The funny part of it is, right now, we find ourselves using, though, such a process as Self Analysis. That’s funny, gee, that’s been around now over a year the way it’s now written up.

So the occluded case, the occluded case, for bad or worse-by the way, you don’t get the idea these people are unable, because they’re not. They had more ability to protect and it’s been violated more often, that’s about all.

All right. What are you going to do with this preclear who doesn’t make a good jump? Let’s take a preclear who’s occluded, doesn’t exteriorize, has no certainties and so on. If you audit that preclear for fifteen minutes and the preclear is not feeling well, doesn’t feel at all in company with life, you can do a lot of things but, the odd part of it is, one of the more beneficial things you can do is just reach for a copy of Self Analysis.

And this boy, who is very, very occluded, will inevitably come up with that same question when you get him exteriorized a little bit and get him to flinching, when you tell him to flinch from the blackness, there’s no place to flinch to. And this could describe his case: no place to flinch to. And so if he can’t flinch, he can’t move, which is all he’s saying. And you ask him to be out of his head and this is like a flinch. See? Very elementary.

Mind you now, this preclear’s occluded, can’t get mock-ups, has no great certainty on anything and so forth. Now, that’s quite interesting, isn’t it?

But then, an individual’s mobility would depend to some degree upon his idea of his own security. So present time would have something to do with that, his safety. So it’d take a lot of trust to be in present time over a large area, wouldn’t it? Why, you just have to trust hell out of everything.

What you do is at least get him to make the gesture toward havingness. All right. If this person has the gesture there ready to deliver, you know, “Put up a mock-up of you getting an idea of doing something,” you’ll at least get an associated chain of thought going. And you get a little mass added to the case. Quite interesting, isn’t it?

Well, a person becomes unwilling to trust when he’s unwilling to be betrayed. Of course, the MEST universe pounding in on you twenty-four hours a day, bangity-bangity-bangity-bang-bang with particles, if you’re a particle too is, of course, betraying you twenty-four hours a day. What it does is set up on the heavy incidents of betrayal, such as the times you smashed into the wall and fell off the roof. And those impacts, you see, and those impacts themselves will operate as barriers, which themselves pile up an enormous number of particles.

Now, some of the somatics that go through as a person is just gesturing at putting up these things is fantastic. That’s because his havingness is being rebalanced or unbalanced and so on. So you can change the case. That’s the main thing which you are trying to do anyway. I hope you’re trying to do that.

This would be a very, very sad picture if г thetan were a particle. And no case would ever solve or get better. All cases would get worse, uniformly, no matter what you did to them if a thetan was a particle or, actually, if he depended on his identity for particles-his individuality rather, not his identity.

Now, where do we expect, then, our case to bog or where is the toughest point of auditing? Well, it happens that it’s right at the beginning, right there at the beginning of the case. I’m sorry that it is that way, but it is. Right at the beginning.

If he depended exclusively upon particles for his individuality, it would mean he had no sense of personal beingness unless he had some particles. Well, the particle is there to prove to you that he is too-that proves it. The particle proves it. Because particles, MEST universe particles, are visible to one and all. We’ve agreed upon those particles as being visible to one and all. So people will hold up these particles and say, “And look, this proves it.”

Now, you people could feel very discouraged about one preclear or another who insists upon being too this way or too that way, you know, doesn’t quite increase and so on. Well, with such a preclear you’re making what we would call a long haul and you’re making some kind of a break, up through the level.

Well, that means that his identity and his individuality and his beingness and his time level and everything else must have been challenged very badly, huh? If they’ve been challenged badly and if he’s challenged other people badly on their individuality and so forth and their rightness and wrongness and that sort of thing-if this challenge has gone back and forth very often, well, what’s he wind up with then? He winds up here with the idea that he’d better prove that it exists.

Now, you’re going to slow yourself down to the degree that you get anxious and start pressing. You know the fellow that presses on the golf club-he never gets on the green. Well, you’re going to err more times in auditing, in that direction, than in any other. You’re going to be pressing on that golf club and feeding out techniques and thinking it’s a fancier technique that’s needed, thinking it’s a fancier computation, and all the time, it’s right there on the stove-the old frying pan that this preclear ought to be cooked in-it’s just an ordinary frying pan and it’s just exactly what you’re doing. Your speed picks up markedly when your understanding of this point picks up.

Well, a symbol proves that he exists. That’s very plain. He has to have a symbol to prove that he exists. Well, if he has a symbol to prove that he exists, the next thing you know, he goes down the line from a symbol to prove he exists, down to the extremely fixed idea: “I am John Jones, I tend a railroad gate. Here is where I am during certain periods of the day. And that is what I do, I tend a railroad gate. I lift the side of the gate and put it back down.”

And one of the reasons a preclear doesn’t operate and one of the reasons that an auditor doesn’t operate very easily on this early span, or the early run, one of the best reasons why he doesn’t, has to do with his urgency, you know. He gets this feeling of urgency from the preclear or he gets the feeling that nothing can be done from the preclear. Here’s the big point, see? Urgent! Urgent! You know it’s very urgent. It’s an emergency proposition.

Now, if he had no other activities whatsoever, he would be what you call a fixed idea. He’s a symbol. And an autoist and the engineer of the trains use him for a symbol. That’s where John Jones is. That’s the deterioration of a thetan to an idea.

Well, let me tell you how to handle an emergency: be efficient. That’s how to handle 7 an emergency.

All right. No sense in backing up the hearse on this. I’m just showing you how many directions this goes. And our problem with a preclear returns to a problem of havingness. Now, a thetan at least can have. An automobile can have if a thetan will pretend that it can. But a thetan can have and a thetan can shift time.

I’ve seen more emergencies go to hell and really deteriorate simply because everybody had to be fast and it didn’t occur to anybody to be efficient.

But time is this shift of particles. Now, it can be an improving or a deteriorating shift of particles. And the rate of change of particles if slow, even aesthetic or something of the sort or explosive, still might be desirable. You know, a slow change of particles might be desirable, a fast change of particles might be desirable; a fast change of particles might be undesirable, and a slow change of particles might be undesirable, because all this is what? This is just consideration of havingness which goes back to an aesthetic. An aesthetic deteriorates into a utility.

I well recall one time an engine had a shell in it. And boy, everybody was rushing around there trying to put out a resulting fire and, man, they were running around there with empty extinguishers and empty buckets of sand and they couldn’t find bales of rags, but when they did find them, they couldn’t find knives to cut bales of rags and so forth. And do you know what was sitting immediately above that engine? Immediately above the engine was the valve which flooded the engine room with spray.

So, a utility is “we need this piece of energy to work pieces of energy.” There’s actually nothing more degraded than that: “we need this piece of energy to work this-pieces of energy. We need this symbol in order to move these symbols.” That’s utility.

I listened to this hubbub going on down there-just time after time, I’d call down through the speaking tube and say, “Have you got that fire out?” Expecting the tanks to go up at any moment or something to happen, see? “You got that fire out yet? Is it under control?” And then give a couple of more conning orders and then stand over the thing.

All right, what’s aesthetic? Aesthetic is “it’s pretty.” And then what’s just below an aesthetic? An art critic. It’s pretty, but is it art? He introduces a hidden arbitrary.

So finally, I took the coolest looking fellow I could see on the bridge and so forth and

And by the way, I might make a mention in passing of the hidden standard. People go around and they say, “Well, you aren’t being a good girl.” And they say, “You aren’t being a good boy.” They’re pretending to you, continually, that there is such a thing as a “good girl” or a “good boy,” you see. And they really don’t tell you what a “good girl” or a “good boy” is. See, that’s the hidden standard. They’re pretending all the time that an ideal standard exists. They’re pretending that there’s always an ideal standard for what you’re doing.

I said, “Go below and put that fire out.”

This art critic looks at your painting or your literary critic looks at your story or the poet critic looks at your poem and they look at it and they say, “Well, I don’t know. Its meter is a little bit slow. It’s uh... I don’t know, now... it uh... just... uh... Well, I tell you, it’s very hard to-to-to make you understand this, but this type of painting ordinarily should be done with a little more, you know... And... uh... umm and so...”

And he came back a couple of minutes later, just that, a couple minutes later and he says, “The fire’s out, Sir.”

Bull! That’s your art critic. He’s pretending there is such a thing as a perfect portrait, a perfect book, a perfect poem. He pretends that somebody knows what it is!

I said, “What happened?”

Nobody knows. There isn’t even a good definition for art. It’s a big, beautiful, empty word. “If it pleases you, it’s art.” Well, that’s not even a good definition, but it’s better than most. It isn’t a good definition, because it isn’t very embracive. But it’s better than most definitions.

“Well, nobody had pulled the sprinkler cord.”

I’ve read the definition of art as being “the self-created interpretation by the artist of the physical universe, for the representation of significances to his public or audience.” That, by the way, is next to the best definition I know. There are no good definitions.

Well, I swear they were fooling around with that fire for about twelve, fifteen minutes. See, it was an emergency and people get wasteful of time in the face of an emergency.

"If it pleases you, it’s art,” that’s the handiest one. And below that, this long drawn-out affair whereby it’s an interpretation of the individual and so on. And they, by the way, drag that one out every once in a while and then prove to you the movies can’t be art because they’re the product of several people. That’s beside the point of whether the movies are art or not. It’s just you can’t prove that they aren’t art by saying that several people created the work of art.

And you as an auditor, when you feel yourself getting very, very anxious about this case and pressing very hard on the case, do you know what you should do at that time? Just a little discipline for you: just reach back and pick up a copy of Self Analysis. Now, that you have done so doesn’t mean you’re rattled on the case, you understand, but this is probably what the case needs. The case actually is benefited by the feeling that there’s something slow going to be done. It gives him the reassurance too, “Well, it might not all have to be done by five o’clock.” See that? So here’s something for you to-here’s a security for you to depart from.

I’ve seen several works of art that several people have created. There’s some old buildings scattered around the world that I just know that architect didn’t build. I just have a hunch that the architect did not get out there and mount all that stone together. Something tells me his hands were still soft when he viewed the last spire completed.

I recommend very thoroughly to you, this, and I recommend it in the face of an awful lot of data. I’ve seen that, however, deteriorate when an auditor didn’t-well, when he had too much urgency, that’s all. There’s too much emergency in the air, so on, and they don’t pay attention to that little book.

Now, he might have had the basic idea, but by the time we get to rolling along on the thing, why, if anybody else is going to have a hand in it at all, we’re going to have something else than the basic intention. So if art is just the basic intention, why, then that’s fine, but I’m afraid nobody else is going to appreciate it either or ever be able to see it. Because the only way you could ever keep the basic intention pure is just exactly what you, each and every one, are doing with your mock-ups-keeping them private.

I’ll tell you the routine course of a preclear in bad shape, applying to my office for assistance. First thing I do is write them a letter-I’ve gotten down to a point where there’s a pattern of these letters.

The only reason you don’t see each other’s mock-ups is your general protest against art critics. You know, you finally don’t show them.

The first letter says, “Well, here’s a copy of Self Analysis and get somebody to read it to you or read it to the person who is in trouble, either way. Now, tell me how you make out” The second reply is to the effect that the person has now gotten worse and what are they going to do? So the letter that goes back in answer to that is, is “Get the copy of Self Analysis and use it.” And the next letter that comes back is in a reply to this copy of Self Analysis. They have received it, but they think it’s best to take the person to see somebody in Salt Lake City or on the Moon or someplace.

Well now, we get into havingness when we get into objects of any kind then, whatever the intent of the object. And the deterioration of the object is the protest of the individual or the persistence of the object is the protest of the individual, one thing or the other.

And then, finally, you’ll get a letter in-months have gone by, by now, and they write in to you and say, “Well, we took the person to Salt Lake City and we, finally, wound up and saw a psychiatrist and been in and out of a sanitarium now and has had five electric shocks and so forth and now what do we do?”

He’s either protesting because it’s deteriorating or protesting because it’s persisting.

And you write back and you say, “Please open the copy of Self Analysis and begin on page (I think it’s 66) and start in.”

But the number of times he’ll protest against a persisting object are actually fewer in the present state of the society. Individuals in society protest less against a persisting object than those which are deteriorating. They protest those madly.

Six, seven, eight months is a lag on this.

Now, the dispersal of the particles or the too close a condensation of the particles of any object is the actual protest. Two protests then. In other words, the particles are too close together now, so they aren’t making the proper form or intent or they’re dispersing in some fashion, slowly or swiftly, which again are not matching up to the intent.

And they finally do and the person finally bails out of it-z/they do it at all. But by not reaching for the technique that has some resolution for the case, they sacrifice six or eight months! Now this is what? This is a psychotic communication lag, isn’t it? That’s all.

Now, you see, that is basically havingness, would be the form of these particles-their proximity one to another. They themselves demark intent, form and everything else in terms of MEST. See that? I mean, that is an obstacle. That is to say, the deterioration, the dispersal of the particles is an obstacle to the creation of any particle which gets so acute that the person ceases to create. I mean, he just says, “Well, there’s no sense in creating, because it’s just going to fall to pieces anyhow.” He’s lost his peak, his joy of creation.

So, if you know that this is a symptom: an emergency and waste-you know the amount of waste there was in the war? When they waste time, they have to waste havingness and everything else. They finally wind up-in any emergency Homo sapiens winds up much worse off, ordinarily, than if he’d just stood back and let the damn house burn down! You see that? That an emergency attitude is one which worsens, not one which betters the situation.

The only reason to work is the joy of putting out effort. Working toward a retirement is like getting very ambitious to die. Working toward a retirement and nothing to do is the shabbiest goal that any society could ever get together with. Because all they’ll be able to do for any enjoyment they have is, actually, not to or to handle effort. But not to handle effort would have to be out of choice while still retaining the ability to handle effort. So a society that’s trying to work itself out of job, all the time, is a society which is trying to work itself into death.

Honest! In most fires, it would actually be better if they just stood back and let the house burn. I’ve seen a fire take place on a street and the only efficient thing that was done about the whole thing was to turn some water on the two or three neighboring houses so they didn’t catch fire too. That was efficiently done. And that was done by the people who owned the two or three neighboring houses, usually, and was done with a garden hose.

So it is with the thetan. He picks up these automaticities so he won’t have to do it. He’s working himself out of a job all the time. Well, that’s a deteriorating line. He works himself out of a job more and more and more and more and it’ll finally get him, believe me.

But here are all these firemen all over the place and here are these tremendous streams of water and here are the axes and the battering rams and so forth and inevitably you alwa— go back to the place the next day and take a look, it is burned to the ground. And I mean, there’s nothing salvageable about it.

All right. What’s this got to do with present time?

Well, now it didn’t much matter how much effort was put forward into the fire, ordinarily. The result is about the same-with this difference: is the more emergency there was about it, the more additional property to that property was injured.

Now, on this problem of havingness and present time, we then see that a person who is too certain that all objects will disperse or super-condense, implode or explode... You know, a dispersal of the particles of an object is simply a slow explosion or a fast explosion and the condensation of an object is simply a slow or a fast implosion-particles going inward. Implosion and explosion, then, are the two zones of worship, you might say, of the-he worships a god now, that’s the most dispersed god you ever saw.

I have seen the most wonderful things happen in fires. One time, I saw a lady in the fifth floor of a building which was on fire. She was completely neglecting the fact that she had better come downstairs and bring that baby with her. And she had some Hepplewhite, or something, china or whatever you call it and she did it all up in a blanket and she took it out on the fire escape and without even saying “Stand clear” to anybody below, dropped it five floors! Yet, she just had seconds left to clear through the areaways. That was efficient, wasn’t it? The horrible part of it was the fifth floor never burned. She would have had all of her china.

Now, where we have this as a fear, we get really what amounts to this: a protest against the change of space, because that’s a protest against the change of position of particles. The relative change of position of particles then is a protest against time because time itself is the change of position of particles, which is changes of spaces. See that?

Now, I’ve seen people rushing grand pianos out of parts of houses that weren’t even vaguely threatened during a fire and knocking their legs off and busting up their keys and everything else. And if they’d just left it alone and concentrated on the fire, they’d have had a grand piano the next day.

Now, you find people that think they have to work slowly. Now, this is born solely out of their inability to change the position of particles swiftly. They know they can’t handle that many particles that fast and so they know they have to do that slowly. That’s their survival pace and what fixes it is how slowly they have to combine or uncombine particles.

This is what’s known as an “emergency frame of mind” and it is a technical thing for you, I mean, it isn’t just a commentary name.

They look to somebody who’s running at good speed, like a diver walking across against a current on the bottom of the ocean-slow motion. They move so slow. Well, they have to do it slowly because, you see, if you yank particles apart fast or put them together fast, you get a sensation.

Now, this seems like I’ve spent a lot of time telling you about nothing, huh? Nothing. No great wisdom involved here. Well, if you just put it down there that the “emergency situation, the emergency attitude,” when we say it in Scientology, we mean a very technical thing: we mean something which is occurring without time enough and so it’s going to take a great deal of time to get it done.

Now, if you put particles together at one speed, you get exhilaration. At another speed, you get pain and at another speed, you get apathy.

When an author gets rather bad off (he has the novel to write), do you know, he’ll stand and look at it for months before he does it? He just can’t write it! Why? He hasn’t got enough time to write it.

Now theoretically, you can put particles together so fast that the ridge caused will be total apathy. And theoretically, you can put particles together, snap them together—in other words, such a change so far from their own basic agreement that they will form hard matter.

Well you say, “But look, you’ve already wasted three, four weeks. Why don’t you just sit down and write it?”

A test of this would be if you could take a large number of, let’s say, beans-if you could take a large number of beans and drop them into a compressor and then, in a microsecond, smash half a ton of beans into something a cubic foot in space, you would have a nice solid object, be teal solid. And that’s how they make the stuff out of which they make railroad car wheels these days. It’s the speed of fusion.

“Well, I can’t write it, I don’t have enough time.”

Now theoretically, you could take the tiniest number of particles, even the particles of air, and smash them together with such incredible speed that it would approach almost instantaneousness and you would get a sheet of new material which would be composed of air but which would last thereafter. See that? That’s just reductio ad absurdum on the same thing.

Well now, it sometimes occurs with an auditor that he looks at that preclear and he realizes the preclear is real bad off and the preclear doesn’t have enough time and this is restimulative, so the auditor doesn’t have enough time and so we get a fascinating problem. We get no recovery.

Now theoretically, you could take nothingness and condense it with instantaneousness and get somethingness. That’s how you make things. And then you postulate that there were particles there because you now have a particle. But that is a no-time proposition and so you can do that any time. All right.

And when I see cases hanging fire consistently and I see that we’re not getting perception changes at the time ratio of a case level in a Unit such as this-you know, we’re not at a terrifically low case level. But I see that a person is trying to audit the data which has just been given him or something of the sort-actually, what it is, to a large degree, is an emergency factor. The golf club is being pressed so hard that the ball stays right there on the tee.

Now, your preclear is educated, then, into a survival pace which means the speed of fusion and separation of particles and that is his survival pace. Automobiles should travel at twenty-five miles an hour. Traffic then doesn’t condense so that it can’t be uncondensed and doesn’t uncondense so that it can’t be condensed again. This gives him and is his liberty to take apart things which have been put together. So he will tolerate speed to the degree which he could alter-that is change or start or stop or recombine particles. That’s speed to him.

The auditor wants to shine, he wants to do something terrific, he wants to do something sensational. What he probably ought to do if his preclear isn’t making adequate progress is simply reach back for that little copy of Self Analysis and start in. Not that he can’t do it himself just that way-you know, you can just know that type of technique so well, you can just start reeling it off. It isn’t any particular insult to the preclear either, by the way.

You want to see a man rather aghast, have him watch this bean smashing machine that makes car wheels. Gee, he comes out of there and he says, “Rrrrh! God, that’s a lot of power-how many horsepower are on that thing? Gee whiz, that’s awful solid. Whoa! Wow!” But now, if you were doing it at a tremendously slow speed so that he’d have to stay there all afternoon-he could barely see the plunger press-gosh, he wouldn’t like that. See, it’s not enough havingness in the same unit of time, the other is too much havingness in the same unit of time-too much hardness.

Honest, if I could just communicate to you the number of times when I have seen a neurotic person or a person who was rather badly bogged in present time problems recover on an hours’ worth of mock-ups and that type of Straightwire. And I’ve seen these people snap out of it, stop acting goofy, stop trying to commit suicide, stop trying to do all sorts of things. It belongs in Steps VI of SOP 8 and a Step VI really doesn’t really respond to much of anything else.

Well now, right around in what I am saying right now, right around in this material, there is a way of making MEST mechanically. We know a thetan can do this, but there’s a way of making MEST make MEST so solid and so rigid, out of such apparent nothingnesses, that you could revolutionize any industry you could put your eye on. You’d have to find out how to increase and decrease its rate of fusion and increase and decrease its rate of dispersal. And if you’ve experimented around, even with the available machinery on Earth here, you could build some of the very strange metals that often are found.

Note: This portion of the lecture contains sound distortions introduced in the original recording.

The speed with which the companion star of Sirius went together is an example of this. It went together so fast that a spoonful of this stuff on Earth now weighs a ton. We have no comprehension of what kind of an element this would be. It’s right off the valence chart. It’s completely off the periodic chart of chemicals. And yet, it does weigh that much because its size is such and so and it stands in a certain degree of centripetal and centrifugal forces with Sirius itself, the speed of its rotation demonstrates how much it must weigh.

Now, the funny part of it is, it’s so mechanical that the “sanity index of the person,” which is a different thing, a little bit, than his “case index”-you know, how much problem have you got, is the big question, “How much problem do you have to handle?” Well, a person is not nearly-really just as sane as he’s handling his problems, he’s as sane as he thinks he is. And so sanity is something different than the mechanical aspects of a case and unwinding him.

Well, now here’s a lot of industrialism, but here’s a lot of preclear for you. When he runs into a wall, that’s too many particles coming together too quick! And the only thing this is measured by is this-there’s one thing that measures this: does it exceed his ability to alter the result? And powerlessness is built out of that: exceeded ability to alter the result of the dispersion or condensation of particles.

It’s a very funny thing that all these years they’ve been going forward at insanity and unreasonableness and all of that when, actually, there was a terrific amount of just mechanical bric-a-brac which was standing behind and interrupting the flow of communication and so on. The guy-really perfectly sane, but his ability, mentally and so on and creatively, is markedly cut down by mechanical bric-a-brac which doesn’t have too much to do with his sanity. Well, Self Analysis will even crack through that if long enough applied.

So a person conceives himself to have a lot of power when he can make a lot of particles disperse and no power when he can’t make a few disperse. So you find the case that is having a rough time, you find him chewing slowly away upon his ridges and he believes that he can’t make these things disperse.

There was one fellow who was one of the roughest V’s I ever saw. And he got Self Analysis for a couple of hours a day for three months-that’s a hell of a diet, isn’t it? And it never occurred to anybody to tell him just to be two feet back of his head and one day one of his friends did, almost jokingly, and he was. He’d worked himself up-sometime down the line, why, he’d cleared up enough so that he could be exteriorized easily and with some certainty and became a Theta Clear within the next day or so.

Now, this is assisted-an understanding to this, rather, is assisted by a certain Mock-up Process which you can do. You can have somebody mock-up several blocks of granite and then have him rig up tremendous machinery-enormous ten-ton bulldozers, derricks, winches, everything-to move one of these pieces of granite one-half of one inch. Have a crew of a couple of hundred men come out there and so forth.

By the way, you work somebody who is notoriously a V and you work them as a V for a long time and you just keep on working them as a V, you don’t realize that he’s become a IV and then a III and he’s up around II now. You just kept on working this V - which is persistence.

And you know, by the time you get through building this thing up and making this terrific amount of bric-a-brac necessary to move that piece of granite, it’s a distinct possibility that the preclear won’t be able to budge it. And if he does, he’s going to budge it with considerable strain.

Okay. Let’s move up the auditing a little faster by being a little more sensible about it. In other words, let’s step our pace up by being efficient rather than being in a state of emergency.

Now you have him take a feather and have him brush all the blocks of granite off the road, at which time they immediately fly. A difference of belief, a difference of concept: how many particles can I disperse, how many can I condense at what speed? Speed is relationship to how fast those particular particles are supposed to condense or disperse. And that, of course, goes immediately into an agreement, which is all reality is composed of.

Always about this time of the Unit, evidently, you’ll get a slight bog along the line somewhere, here and there, and if we don’t interrupt it rather sharply here and there, why, it’ll continue. Well, what happens is, is auditors have gotten a little bit disappointed here and there in a preclear or something. It never occurs to the auditor he’s probably overreaching the ability of the preclear, quite markedly. And it’s time when you look at a preclear-there’s plenty of time, there’s always lots of time.

We agree we have particles and then we agree that they should disperse or condense at certain speeds, that is to say, relative to other particles. So we get relative motion. We get Einstein coming out and saying, "Well, after something goes the speed of light, why, [mumbling] Q equals В equals George equals Oswald equals, so forth.” And everybody gets down and figure-figure-figure-figure-figure-figure-figures and they have a wonderful time o£ it. They don’t get very far, because they’re trying to make energy move energy. And that, of course, is a game all of its own, to make energy move energy. It’s not efficient, but it’s all right. Okay. For instance, you imbibe certain chemicals which make certain chemical reactions on a heat-combustion engine such as the body and that moves energy and energy moves energy and then some more energy moves some other energy, oh, boy!

The MEST universe is kind of short on matter, that’s true. A planet here and a planet there and a sun here and a sun there and lots more space than there is matter. That’s true, we’re kind of short on havingness, but at the same time, let’s not try to do it all in a minute. That attitude of trying to do it all in a minute is what prevents you from doing it all in a minute.

But if you were to feed somebody a ten-course dinner in one second, I can guarantee that he would explode. And if you were to feed it to him in ten years, I guarantee he’d starve to death.

And I look over this case and that case as they come along and, for instance, there isn’t a hard case present, there isn’t a real hard case present-not а гаг/hard case. Because I’ve seen hard cases in my day. When they’re almost totally occluded and almost totally psychotic, you’ve got a hard case. That’s a rough case. Not just an occluded case, that isn’t a very rough case. That’ll work out one way or the other.

So there’s a penalty goes with this, which is the measured penalty, measured by Man, against a tolerance of condensation and a tolerance of dispersal of the body itself. And so a thetan who’s gotten to agreeing with the body and agreeing with everything the body can do and so forth has agreed to a tolerance.

Now you’ve got a weapon, “double-barreled shotgun,” for one of these cases that’s tippy about this and that. Very often, you can overaudit the case, you can give them the technique they need, obviously need-the obvious computation-but this person is so bogged down in significances they can’t reach it. That’s true of a case that I saw last night. All this case needs-obviously, all this case needs is just run “Don’t touch.” That is obviously all the case needs. We just run all kinds of variations and brackets on “Don’t touch.”

Now, the body cannot hit a brick wall at fifteen miles an hour you know, just go along at fifteen miles an hour and just hit a brick wall, without some consequence. Now, it can’t hit a brick wall at fifty miles an hour-you know, no protection, nothing going to crumple up first-just hit the brick wall at fifty miles an hour and live. It is going to be in a remarkably bad state of disrepair. So the speed of tolerance of the body lies somewhere in there. So the thetan gets to believing his speed of tolerance is something.

Case was raised to be very polite and, you know, well bred and cultured and so forth and has gotten to the point where, of course, he can’t touch anything. And if you just got “Don’t touch” in various ways with Opening Procedure and brackets and ‘Where aren’t you trying to touch something now?” And “Give me three things that aren’t touching you at this moment.” “Give me three things which don’t want to touch you at this moment,” back and forth and around and around, in all possible combinations, including running some flows and some agreements and masses of viewpoints. Get masses of people out there, all of whom are agreed now (that’s Viewpoint Processing, by the way)-masses of people, all of them are completely agreed that nobody must touch anything and then duplicate it and duplicate it and duplicate it and duplicate it and duplicate it-that sort of thing, you know? Just "Don’t touch,” why, this case would recover.

The trouble with a thetan is, is he can hit a brick wall at fifty thousand miles a second-wouldn’t do anything to harm him. His tolerance is, of course, as infinite as he is a static. And it’s as finite and as cut down as he is matter or energy himself. He is as able as he doesn’t use energy to move energy and he is as unable as he has to have energy to move energy.

And instead of that, this case gets plunged into all kinds of stuff. I mean, stuff that’s way off, far away and so forth but is liable to be very quick. And everybody has been trying to heal this case quickly for over a year-case must be healed quickly. Well, if the case had been healed slowly it could have gotten well in a week or two. That’s real weird.

And he’s as much in present time, then, as he doesn’t need energy to move energy. So you just work around to that and you come right back to present time because the present time of an individual is his index of havingness.

Now, an individual who can’t make particles disperse, sticks in dispersing particles, so we get him stuck out of present time. He won’t let particles disperse, so you say, “Let go of the engram, reject it, do something with it” and he’s got it right there. He’s got everything. He’s got all of his ideas and everything right there. He’s stuck.

Most of you think of your past, when you can’t remember your whole track, you think of your past as being terrifically scattered all over the place, you know (you usually do), or terrifically condensed. It isn’t either one. Your past is not written on symbols. Your knowingness about where you have been and what you have done is not determined by the knowingness of particles, because particles don’t know anything. It is determined solely by what you know. And you know as much as you are not relying upon fixed ideas.

And it makes one feel rather strange sometimes about processing to realize that the effective process is not the most brilliant process. These two aren’t there together. The most brilliant process is not necessarily the most effective process. The most effective process is the one which works, that’s all.

Now, this whole thing about data in facsimiles and machines is quite similar to this other problem. And this problem is simply this: An individual ties a piece of string upon his finger so that he can remember to get a loaf of bread if he passes a store. And that is known as “associative remembering” and becomes associative logic and lots of other things.

Now, you’ll find various processes working on various cases. And the one thing that you must be cautioned against is working a limited technique too long on a case merely because it’s apparently working on the case. You might be taking the long road to China. You just might be.

But a thetan has all kinds of automatic machinery to tell him what he already knows and to tell him more poorly. The machinery which he has, in terms of remembering, is machinery which is a string around his finger. Just as the string around the finger doesn’t work, so this machinery really doesn’t work either.

For instance, I can solve things today with Effort Processing that would appear to be damn miraculous-the effort within the effort, within the effort, within the effort, in terms of brackets. The effort not to within the effort not to, within the effort not to, within the effort not to, in terms of brackets. I can get more perception changes on a lot of preclears, but what’s the trouble here?

A person has to have an anxiety about remembering before he ceases to remember, so we get knowingness and rememberingness and so forth. None of these things depend upon particles and so we get power itself as great as a person isn’t depending upon particles to deliver power to him.

Well, the trouble is that it tends to validate the effort band. And this is confusing to the preclear and he buries himself away from present time, slightly, although it has great effectiveness for quite awhile and it can be run for quite awhile. There’s always a time not to run it because, in the first place, it’s a GE technique normally. It’ll cure up all sorts of things, but it’s a GE technique.

A preclear is as easy to step out of his head as he is able to own. First he owns not at all and then he owns with a symbol, a deed of title, and then he’ll own just because he’s got the-the thing is something that has been around him for some time and he’s granted beingness to it. And then you have him owning much more widely. He’s owning to the limit of his perception. And then you have him owning to the limit of his knowingness-he knows about something, he can own it. And that goes on up, of course, to total knowingness, which, of course, is total ownership.

When I discovered thought, emotion and effort and put them together in 1951 and so on we had reached the limit of auditing the GE. If you’re going to audit the GE, you just look at the techniques from ’51 back, plus Creative Processing and you’ve pretty well got it, nothing much else about it.

Now havingness, therefore, is a very interesting index.

All right. Let me tell you now about something that happens to a preclear and dig you out of this a little bit. Nothing has ever exceeded this, nothing we’ve ever said or anything I’ve ever done and so forth has ever exceeded this or thrown it into question in any way whatsoever. Therefore, it must be a rather simple, central portion of auditing and it is the problem and question of present time. Nothing has ever thrown this idea of present time into question.

Let’s look out of all that theory though and bail you out of it now by simply feeding you a little process about this thing.

There is nothing wrong with bringing a preclear to present time. The whole computation involving present time is still the most centralized computation which you have, because of course the most aberrative factor is time because it’s the most hidden and strange barrier. The MEST universe is a game composed of barriers. Well, the most hidden and strange barrier is that barrier called time. And the person is in present time or he thinks he is someplace else.

Name off-give me some things now that you don’t have.

Well, in view of the fact that a thetan can evidently create time itself, it is very easy for a thetan, of course, not to be here and yet, appear to be here.

Now get somebody else chanting off some things he doesn’t have.

Now, I’ve run into people sixty and eighty hours in advance of present time. This probably wouldn’t occur to you that that was the case, but it’s true! They’re way up. This isn’t particularly good, it’s that they thought they had to crawl that far ahead of present time in order to be cause. This might be what you would call an "emergency margin.” They need that much time for a margin. You know, they’ve got to think all their problems out today-day after tomorrow. And then maybe they’ll be able to get far enough ahead of their problems today in order to have-it’s a silly picture and it is not an accurate one. They just act as though they were two and three days ahead of themselves.

Now get a couple of other people and get one of those naming some things the other one doesn’t have.

You’ll find the little child has his greatest objection to his family on these grounds: they’re not interested in now. The live up-and-coming adults are terribly interested in day after tomorrow, awfully interested in the future. And the dead ones are all interested in gone and buried yesterdays. Grandpop, and Aunt Belle, at one time or another, was the “Queen of the Mississippi”-they just don’t seem to have any connection with anything except “that time when.” And this is interesting, like a storybook, but it’s not even vaguely interesting to the kid, because he’s living right there in present time and you can run this on a preclear just as such. You could say, “All right, now get various members of your family not liking present time.” And gee, this guy will just check off the whole list if you give him enough auditing time.

All right, throw those away. And get somebody else out in front of you and get this person naming some things you don’t have.

All right. What’s this thing about present time, then? What’s it got to do with Theta Clearing? Well, I very seriously doubt, very seriously doubt this, that you can exteriorize an individual who is not in present time-at least most of him. And I would go so far as to say that a very simple statement of non-exteriorization could be made by this alone: He isn’t exteriorizing-synonym-he’s not in present time. He’s in the future or he’s in the past. He’s not here.

And let’s throw that person away and let’s get another person there and get you naming some things this other person doesn’t have.

He has to be able to exteriorize into now in order to have a certainty and perception of now. It seems reasonable, doesn’t it? Well, remember that a thetan can make time. He can make particles move, so he obviously can make time, he can make space.

Now let’s throw that person away and let’s get you naming some things you have.

Well, if he can do these things, why, then it’s very easy for him to make a time to be in. It isn’t that something is making a terrible effect out of him, it may very well be that he’s simply manufacturing a time to be in. It might not have any reality with regard to the past either.

Let’s get another person naming some things he or she has.

See, he just might have just made the time to be in, maybe the time is day after tomorrow. Of course it’s right now, but it’s day after tomorrow that he’s made to live in. So let’s not take this in the aberrated band now. Let’s stop talking about aberration and just start talking about time. And we find out that to get an individual outside and with some perception, there is a good chance of getting him out if he’s well in present time and if he isn’t, why, he won’t exteriorize into present time. And let’s just look at it like that.

All right. Let’s throw that away and let’s get two other people and one of them naming some things the other person has.

Let’s take the GE, way out of present time, and the thetan is agreeing with the GE and the thetan tries to exteriorize and of course he’s can’t exteriorize, because he’s got this horrible problem: if he exteriorized, he’d have to exteriorize in 1870 and it’s not there. And so he says, of course, “I can’t exteriorize.”

Throw that away and get a person naming some things you have.

Now, I’m not giving you the whole of the problem here when we talk about present time and so forth-you know, the other elements of the problem.

Throw that person away and get another person there and you name some things this other person has.

The problem has many elements. It has cause and communication and duplication. And it has these other factors, such as his ability to create: which is the loss of the ability to create or wonderment about creation, adding up to an anxiety about the future and about loss, is a better statement, really, of what’s wrong with the thetan.

Okay. Throw them away. And let’s check off some things which you have.

But let’s just make this crude analogy about time. See, the person can’t lose the body, because he can’t create a body and so on. Well, let’s look at this present time problem and let’s find out several things about it. Is this person so much in danger or in trouble, according to him, right in the present environment, that he can’t exteriorize into it? And that would be what would be interrupting Theta Clearing into present time. See that? And therefore, you could handle some sort of a present time problem he has. Handle it by Creative Processing, handle it by . . .

Now which you’re very certain you do not have.

Oh heck, one time I was trying to work a preclear and all this preclear could worry about was her husband being faithful to her, because the husband had recently hired a very nice-looking secretary. This was really all that was wrong. She had no other evidence, she was going around trying to manufacture evidence. And I Match Terminaled the secretary for five minutes, the problem blew up and we went on with auditing and exteriorized her and the session went right on off the line. There was no difficulty whatsoever with the case and all it required was just this. But while that five minutes was going on, first she was apathetic and then she was mad and then she was this and then she was that. Wonderful. What fireworks!

Now let’s get somebody else there and have this person naming very certainly, with great certainty, some things which you have.

Well, being a limited technique, if we’d gone on with this for the rest of the day, we’d have probably had her bogged down like mad at the end of the day. But for five, ten minutes, an hour, that was fine.

And now some things which you do not have.

Well, she wasn’t in present time. See, she was worrying about what all the evidences were, pro and con, and those evidences had all occurred in the last few days. And the funny part of it was, they didn’t occur-they hadn’t occurred but she thought they might have occurred. So she was living in day before yesterday and last week and so on, all mixed up, and it didn’t have anything to do-she wasn’t in the room.

Now let’s throw that away and get a couple of other people there and get one naming some things the other has.

Well now, if you could look at a preclear and say, “Be three feet back of your head”-he’s not. If you make the next statement, “Well look-a-here, he’s not here,” you will be, for workable purposes, right. He’s not here.

And now that the other does not have.

Now, the reasons why he’s not here is what we go into when we say duplication and communication and creation and all the rest of it—the reason he’s not here. And we add this up, we find out that there is a powerful button, oh, a powerhouse of a button! And that button is “resentment of present time.”

All right, throw them away and get somebody naming some things that you have.

Now, let’s see why that’s a powerhouse. A person who doesn’t exteriorize well has gotten into flows. The way you get into flows is the way you get into this universe. You decide to resist it. You know it can’t decide to resist you? You have to decide to resist it. And so you start matching flows. And this matching of flows is itself what causes ridges. Continuous and anxious perception will pile up effort flows, very heavy flows.And so we get the manufacture of ridges and agreement with the MEST universe being the same thing, which is just this: matching flows. It starts flowing at you and you’re just getting along fine, you’re not flowing back at it, it’s just going right on its way, just as happily as can be, but it’d love for you to team up and match and resist.

Which you do not have.

So all of a sudden, why, you decide one day that you’ll match those flows and you’ll resist them in some fashion or another and, the next thing you know, you’re slightly stuck in that time period, see, just a tiny little bit. And as these things compound more and more and more and you agree more and more and more that you ought to resist more and more and more and so on, more and more and more, and then, the next thing you know-bog. Well, that’s the mechanical-without any deeper significance-mechanical proposition behind non-exteriorization. That’s the mechanics of it. It’s just matching flows. You agree with the wavelength of the MEST universe.

Now get him naming some things this other person (he or she) has.

Now, look what a neat job it is: here comes light at such and such a centimeter of wavelength (point several zeros 3 or something like that) and in comes this light. Boy, what a tricky character you are to be able to match the wavelength of that light and so pile it up. Boy, that’s really tricky. In other words, you have to just exactly hit on exactly that if we’re using these flows. And it’s very tricky to match it up. It’s very easy to unsettle it. One of the easiest things I know of to unsettle is a matched flow from the MEST universe-it is tenuous, it is thin. It’s very hard to match one of these flows and it’s awfully easy to unbalance them.

And he or she does not have.

Now if you’ll run "resenting present time” in brackets and “desiring present time” in brackets and this little technique I gave you the other day, “the ideal person,” and having the universe-all kinds of objects in it-accusing the preclear that it didn’t create it, you know? Mountains say to him “you didn’t create me.” The ground says to him “you didn’t create me,” so forth. The sky is saying to him “you can’t create, you didn’t create me”-round and round and round and round and round.

Throw them away.

Now, that’s a little package there, which I have used-there are many of these little combination packages, you might say, of auditing-but I have used just exactly that one to exteriorize one of the toughest, meanest cases I ever ran into. And I have used that several times on preclears with considerable success. I never turned it over to another auditor before, obviously, in its component parts, because these component parts work in other combinations with other things, they certainly work together. As I say, I’ve used this, I haven’t handed it out. All right.

All right. Let’s get another person there and get you naming some things this other person has.

It’s just a routine: “resentment of present time.” Well, that merely tells him resentment, antagonism-you’ll run into apathy about present time. You’ll be very happily running the bracket and, all of a sudden, you’ll find out these two people he’s put out in front of him-he can make one of them make the other one resent present time but, by golly, this one who is making the other one resent present time is himself in apathy.

Naming some things this other person does not have.

So you want to watch this one because there are various emotions on ridges. Resentment is a flow and so it drops, of course, into ridges and the ridges are apathy, anger, boredom and these are your ridge levels. So these three things turn up.- apathy, anger and boredom, when you run resentment. What you’re trying to do is get the live flows out of the way-they’re all that bother him. And then added to this technique is anything you can think of in the line of granting beingness and being sorry for it.

Okay. Throw that away.

“Well, I granted the MEST universe beingness and now I’m sorry for it. I granted that mountain beingness and I’m sorry for it.”

And now let’s get you and another person-see how good you are-get you and another person and have this other person saying, “It’s too late.” And you saying, “No, it’s not.”

The fellow said, “Wait a minute, I never did grant that mountain beingness.”

Get that simultaneously. The other person saying, “It’s too late.” And you saying, “No, it’s not.”

“You did now!”

Now changing persons or not, get this other person saying, “No, it’s not,” when you say, “It’s too late.” You insist it’s too late. And the other person says, "No, it’s not”-disagrees.

“All right. Let’s grant that mountain beingness and now be real sorry you did it.” "Now be glad you did it.” “Now be sorry you did it.” (Just pursuing our lecture of yesterday on that.) That one added in there is very efficacious.

Okay, now get two other people out in front of you there and get one of these persons saying, “It’s too late.” And the other person saying, “No, it’s not.” Any emotional tones you want to put into that.

Actually, there’s so many ways today to crack cases it’s just-I could keep going on here for an awful long time trying to give you new combinations and so forth. But that combination I have used with great success.

Now swap the roles.

Now, why do we run this ideal person in there? It’s because the guy had an ideal somewhere, in some past life, and he’s stuck in it. And he’s trying to make the body he’s in right now compare with the body he had before and he’s not satisfied with the body he’s got now. He’s trying to live in the year ten hundred and five, he’s got an ideal person. You can do that one with mirrors or you can just do it with a mock-up. Have him stand there and grant beingness to this ideal person, have the ideal person grant beingness to him and you’ll get the kind of character he has misfittingly been trying to be.

Now have a person way out in front of you someplace and have this person saying to himself, “Oh, it’s too late-well no, it’s not. Well, it’s too late-no, it’s not”

It’s very funny to see a very good-looking guy, for instance, who’s nice and muscular, he’s got a lot on the ball and so forth, trying hard to be a-well, to be a girl. This is weird. Well, why? Why would he be doing this? His ideal person, the best body he ever had ... Now, these things don’t get wiped out, I mean, they might as well have been yesterday. The body you had in the year minus-five thousand on Arcturus might as well have been at eight o’clock this morning. I’m not trying to jam your track on you, just don’t get this old idea that “it all wears out because time goes by.” You granted something beingness on Arcturus and you’re still sorry for it, well, you’re still sorry for it, that’s all.

Now have this person put up in front of him two people. One of which is saying, “It’s too late.” And the other person saying, “No, it’s not.”

It’s all very well for you to mock-up the fact that you’ve forgotten all about that life and that life isn’t in there anymore and all that, but it just isn’t going to be effective.

Okay. Now you yourself say, “It’s too late-no, it’s not. It’s too late-no, it’s not. It’s too late-no, it’s not.”

Well, the damnedest one I ever ran into was the fellow who was holding on to a beautiful blind girl. Boy, was she pathetic. Case occluded, couldn’t see. Why not?

Okay. Now put another person out in front of you and have this other person saying, “It’s too late.” And you saying, “No, it’s not.”

“Well, when did it go off?”

And instead of verbalizing it, get the feelingness of the agreement and disagreement on this subject. And have you saying, “It’s too late.” And the other person, “No, it’s not.” Disagreeing with that fact that “it’s too late” with you.

Well, when he lost his wife. Ha! Oh!

Okay.

“Now wait a minute. Perceptions before that were good?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Yeah, oh fine.”

What the hell is this all about then? Nothing else was cracking through. Guy perfectly sane, everything was fine-couldn’t see, though.

And I broke through on this kind of a process: the ideal person was really parked on the track. And the ideal person was a gorgeous blind empress. This was a long time ago I ran into this process-even wrote a story about it once.

But my golly, I never had the processes which would have undone it swiftly until fairly recently. I undid it at the time I ran into it, but the total significance of the fact is this business about the ideal person. This was the ideal person. My God, a gorgeous blind empress. Talk about havingness-whole planet. You talk about appeal, everybody was very sad for this empress, oh, just terrifically sad. It was a very gorgeous piece of stuff.

And here was this guy being a blind empress, but he couldn’t be a blind empress, but he had terrific potentialities and possibilities in exactly what he was doing. He was an airline pilot. An airline pilot-think of it, surrounded by all these gorgeous hostesses and subservient crews and with all of Earth swishing by underneath you and, oh, terrific things to do and be and so forth. He was a blind empress, he wasn’t an airline pilot.

Well, when his wife left him, this was a key-in of the loss of that body and he just stuck in its death. The truth of the matter was he didn’t give a damn for this wife at all. She was a little girl that was very pathetic all the time. But of course, she keyed him in and there he was, so when he lost her that keyed-in the past death.

Well now, the funny part of it was, is he knew all about it After a little bit of Straightwire-I was straightwiring him to “people his wife reminded him of.” And I was beating it around and it was really no mystery. The bird had it, he knew about it! He knew he knew about it all the time, but he couldn’t think about it any of the time.

Now, have you ever had the funny feeling in auditing like-well, you just hit this lock, you knew that all the time. You knew you were trying to mimic your dog. That was why you kept trying to scratch yourself behind the left ear with your right foot and figured that was the only really satisfactory way to scratch your ear. You knew it was the dog, but you didn’t know it, you see?

In other words, this terrific panorama is sitting right there in front of the preclear and he’s never looking at it Well, that’s the way these things come up and that’s the ideal person.

And you’ll run that on an “integration of character” and if we could call this integration of character, and be very technical about it, why, we would be far off because we would be more technical than it deserves, which is the guy wants to be something else than what he is and he can’t be anything but what he is. See? Can’t be anything but what he is. So life has him trapped. He’s resenting present time, lots of reasons why.

There’s a process that’s run on that that is questionable but is-on a case that is too far down-is butchery, but you always have to run this on a thetan exteriorized: “Be the past.” “Be the present.” “Be the future.” “Be the past.” “Be the present.” “Be the future.” “Be the present.” “Be the past.” “Be the future.” Actually, Change of Space Processing, because he’s got space mixed up with the past because, of course, the past is in some other piece of space.

And you’ll find out he has the past to the right of him and the present above him or, oh, some damned foolishness. It’s usually that, by the way: the present is in front of him, let’s see, the future is to the right and the past is to the left. That’s because of the way people read.

He also has prediction machines in the future, telling him he shouldn’t know the future, and he has machines in the past, telling him not to know anything about the-or not to model it. “Don’t be a model of me,” the past is saying. You don’t care what the past is saying, the past is saying what it says.

Well, there’s another ramification of that, is your probabilities are that he’s got a duplication-mustn’t duplicate cross. You know, he’s got to duplicate and mustn’t duplicate. Well, that is-I say, the probabilities are that is basic in any case and it’s usually applied to time. He mustn’t duplicate time, he must duplicate time. He must duplicate the time he was the blind empress. He mustn’t or can’t duplicate the time he was the blind empress and so he hangs up on a maybe, “Can I duplicate or can’t I duplicate?” And this goes off into the Second Dynamic or the Third Dynamic or God knows where. That’s basic on any case. That’s the most fundamental one we’ve got, by the way: must duplicate-can’t duplicate.

Male voice: Knowing that he knew already and wouldn’t look or wouldn’t think-any more on that button down there?

Oh yeah, well there’s all of that-there’s a whole battery of buttons from Know down to Sex.

Male voice: Finding real covert ones, you can get a resisting being you would.

Well, I gave you one there one day in just resisting knowing, resisting being, resisting looking, resisting emoting and that would run out the whole darned band. That works in terms of flows. You’ve got somebody in the auditing room there, all you do is want him in present time. He’s usually not in present time, because he’d hate to be in a point of the past, but he’d love to be in a point of the past and between these two things, why, he’s hung up in two pasts which he’s trying to dramatize in his present. And you think you’re looking at somebody who simply is right there and who will exteriorize and you know they should be there but they’re not and that’s the whole problem with them.

I ran a preclear, one time, who had been a very successful gunman-brother! A space opera gunner, but a gunman. A lot of space opera-what they were dramatizing here out in the Old West was just space opera, evidently. Fast on the draw and that sort of thing. Boy, there’s lots of that in space opera.

Man, this guy’s reputation-he was not on the side of the law-but his reputation was so tough, from one end of the system to the other, that the police were terribly polite to him and, boy, was that successful. And he hit the Old West back in the ’80s and, boy, was he successful, but this was just a lock on it. And we try to give this boy anything-no, he was regretting this past dangerousness. You know, he wanted that past dangerousness again and he had no dangerousness where.he was. And between these two things-in the past he was dangerous, so he was in the past, he was not in the present.

You mustn’t continue to go-and just as a parting word on this, by the way-you mustn’t continue to go forward on the idea that it is normal and usual for a thetan to be in present time. It is not normal or usual. Staying in present time is like walking a tightrope. Because present time is going by pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa - each one of them is present time. Any moment of the past has been at sometime present time, of course.

And it’s quite a trick staying in present time, quite a trick. What’s the automatic machine that keeps him in present time? Well, when he depended upon an automatic machine to keep him in present time, it ordinarily broke down some time or another and skidded him out of present time.

That’s why holding the two back anchor points of the room is very beneficial. It takes ahold of this old machine that kept him in front of present time, you see, and it just runs it out. He’s keeping himself in present time now. See how that is? He’s just taking over that machine and the actual benefit of “Hold the two back anchor points of the room” is putting out of the automatic category, staying in present time, and the fellow gets it on to the other category.

If you ever want to see a preclear really stopped ... Preclears every once in a while tell you “they’re reaching for the bottom of the bucket,” you know, they just reach and they can’t go any further south. Yes, they can. I’ll tell you how far south is, computationally. And that is, the preclear sits there and at each instant-there are techniques, very simple ones, designed on this, by the way-any instant is lost and he’s at a dead stop. Every instance that goes by is lost, utterly. No new instant gives him something new. He doesn’t look at it like that. The motorcycle is really taking this guy down the road.

Every instant finds him stopped. And he goes through a consecutive period of stops: stop-stop-stop-stop-stop-stop-stop-stop-stop-stop-stop-stop, that’s the way he feels. And it’s all unreal and the havingness of present time-all of it is exceeding him and the fact that it has arrived is simultaneous with the fact that it is irreparably and forever lost.

He isn’t necessarily psycho, which is the oddity of it, psycho isn’t the bottom of the bucket. Ю Psycho is just a lockup on must-reach and can’t-reach, must-withdraw and can’t-withdraw. That is an emotion. Psychotic attitude is-it is an emotion, it’s a feeling. This other is the real bottom of the bucket. The fellow can be perfectly sane and be in this bottom spot, but that is the bottom spot; is every moment as it goes by is a lost moment and he counts them as lost moments, pong-pong-pong-pong-pong. But he is at a dead stop and he’s sort of jerkily going from stop to stop to stop to stops to stops to stop to stop. It’s the most fantastic sensation.

I got into a pc’s head that was going through it once, just for kicks (a very strange remark to make, but that’s the truth), and examined exactly what was happening and that was what was happening.

For about a year now, the reason I haven’t ever-I didn’t used to ordinarily, but I did once in a while-pay attention to (quote) “my own case” in order to give you data. Well, for about a year, it hasn’t been very necessary to do this. All you had to do was, you know, pop into somebody’s head and match wavelength and feel how he felt, look over his facsimiles. That’s mainly why we’ve made a tremendous amount of progress. It wouldn’t have anything to do with basic knowingness or anything like that. Well anyhow, we must investigate.

Where your preclear is concerned, let’s just go over this again. He may be an emergency situation and when the emergency situation occurs, the thing for you to do is to be very efficient.

Now, some time or other in your life, you may have run into somebody who was terribly efficient when you wanted to be terribly nervous about the emergency and there was no more maddening person than that. And you may be unwilling to be that very maddening person, so let’s get that one remedied and you don’t have to be that person. That person was merely expressing a manifestation which you can express too.

And the other one is, if a preclear isn’t exteriorizing, he’s not in present time (we’ve been talking about this for a long time). There are many methods of remedying this. One of them is simply “Come up to present time. Be three feet back of your head.” Rather fantastic technique, isn’t it? Happens to be workable. It’ll work, oh, maybe every fifteen or twenty preclears. The guy is an awful tough preclear and you know that, so you say, “Come up to present time and be three feet back of your head.” And he is, perfectly stable, very certainly.

You go into an insane asylum and you go down the aisles of the insane asylum, you tag every patient that goes by and every few patients is simply “Come up to present time” and they’re sane and they stay that way. Interesting, isn’t it?

Well now, let’s not go getting too bogged down about case state or what you are or aren’t doing or whether your auditor is simpatico with you or not. We’re not trying to make twins, we’re trying to make Theta Clears.

When you get your best innings in, is when you are being the most efficient, not when you’re being the most brilliant.

And when you look over the things that can be wrong with a preclear, why, they all add up to basically this “must duplicate-can’t duplicate” cross-up and that’s all over the track. That’s all over existence. You see the sunlight coming in through that window there? Well, it’s telling you, you must duplicate it and you’re saying, “Well, I can’t duplicate that, I got something else to do.” That’s existence in this universe.

And we go down the line from that, we find out the biggest barrier and why the MEST universe is a game of barriers. And the biggest barrier, of course, is the most mysterious one and that’s, of course, time. And the tightrope walk which the preclear is doing to try to stay in present time is an interesting walk, even when he’s the sanest. And we find that that’s very easy to handle if we handle it from the basis of people exteriorizing in present time.

As far as communication is concerned, your communication lag is your direct index of Tone Scale and it’s actually a very simple problem. And I hate to keep telling you, “It’s so simple, it’s so simple, it’s so simple.” It must be quite maddening to somebody who is trying to latch on to some corner of it, knowing all the time that it’s very difficult! But it isn’t.

You’re using tools. Now, you very often will add to a tool to its detriment. For instance, somebody was giving an assessment the other day of “What could a person create and destroy?” You know the old-time Create and Destroy Assessment on the eight dynamics, which is a very good assessment. He was giving this assessment and he was only doing one thing wrong about it: he was finding out what the preclear could create, what the preclear was willing to create and what the preclear was willing to destroy, but the auditor continuously asked the preclear “Why?” And this had gotten the preclear bogged to a point where the preclear was upset about an assessment That was easy to remedy-just adding too much.

And so there’s a little rule of the thumb goes along with all of it: The less significance you get into, the better. And if you have a question about significance, delete it. That is to say, if you want to know whether you should go deeper into this and find greater significance concerning it or not-if you got a “maybe” on that, see, then you answer the “maybe” by not going in.

That isn’t saying you should never plow into a significance. It’s just saying that if you have a maybe as to whether or not you should proceed into a significance, don’t. It’s better to err toward nothing than toward something. Your preclear is really better off to be run wholly and entirely on nothingnesses, if we were just going to do an arbitrary, stupid division of things, he would be better off to be run totally on nothingnesses than upon somethingnesses, if we had a choice between these two techniques.

And you will find nearly every auditor, early in the game, will run a great deal of somethingnesses and damn little nothingnesses.

Now, for instance, the most horrible person he doesn’t want to be is the nothingness person. See? “Look in the mirror now and see nothing, absolutely nothing.” Try it someday. “Now, look in that mirror and see nothing. Don’t see a face. Don’t see anything-the walls or anything. Just look in that mirror with your MEST eyes wide-open and see nothing.” You can make a preclear-more preclears will go into the bathroom and vomit on that one. That’s the horrible thing you mustn’t be, that’s what you feared you must become. You know, mustn’t become nothing, so you become nothing.

Okay. Let’s take a break.