Ob, Now, this is the first lecture to the first day of the Third Unit in the Clinical Advanced Course. And one of the first things we’re going to cover, naturally, is how to audit. And we’re going to cover all this material from the standpoint of how you communicate it to somebody else.

Well, that means I’ve got to communicate it to you and then communicate to you, as well, how you can communicate it to somebody else and it invites the investment of your own originality in communicating it. Because there are many ways to say the same thing. You would be amazed when I tell you that I have been saying the same thing practically for a year and each time it comes up very different. And people are quite convinced that I have then said something else that is brand-new.

But the fault there lies with me, it does not lie with thee. Trying to put into English and trying to put into a tight packet, the information of “what is livingness”-information contained in that “what is livingness”-trying to put that together tightly so it will convey a meaning which may be usefully applied is actually the biggest task in Scientology.

Anybody knows he is alive. Just think of that, anybody knows he’s alive. Well, all right. Then you would immediately ask, "All right. You know you’re alive. All right, what’s livingness?”

And the guy immediately-"Well, knowing you’re alive, of course.”

Well now, explain it to me.

Female voice: Expansion of theta awareness.

All right.

Male voice: Beingness.

What is it?

Male voice: Beingness.

Beingness.

What is it?

Male voice: That one I never had a good answer for.

That’s a good dodge. All right. Here. When you read The Factors, you get there some of the fundamentals in this thing of "what is livingness?”

But let’s never lose sight of what we’re looking at. And we’re just looking at the answer of what is livingness. Therefore, those things are best received which are couched in terms with which a person has acquaintance with, in terms of livingness.

Now let’s say, "What is livingness?” to a group of carpenters. Well, you immediately get the idea: pound-pound, hammer-hammer, saw-saw, construct-construct, draw your paycheck, kick about the foreman and so forth. And go home and you get some beer and you get drunk and it goes well with pumpernickel. And you run a car that’s not too good and not too bad and you worry about the fact because wages have dropped to sixty-five dollars an hour and you go on in along this line and that’s livingness in his first analysis.

Now, you have something wrong with this carpenter and you ask, "What is wrong with you?” Well, you shouldn’t ask, "What is wrong with you?” You should ask, "What is wrong with your livingness?” And you immediately get a slightly different change, which is a better communication.

You say, “What’s wrong with your livingness?”

Well, I’ll tell you what’s wrong with the man’s livingness. Hammer, hammer, hammer. Pound, pound, pound. Wages are liable to drop below sixty-five dollars an hour. The pumpernickel isn’t so good anymore and it’s gone up in price and he isn’t driving these days a Cadillac. He had a Cadillac last year and he had to get rid of it and get a big Buick because-you know, things have dropped.

Well, what’s wrong with livingness? Well, he’ll answer you “scarcity” if he really adds all this up. Scarcity.

Well obviously, you ask “Scarcity of what?”

And he might think it over a little bit and he’d say, “Well, a scarcity ofmm-mmm-mmmm, oh, pumpernickel. Scar— nd, that isn’t really what’s wrong. Scarcity oi-hmmm, well, it’s a scarcity-it’s a scarcity of leisure, that’s what it is. I just don’t get enough time to loaf and go fishing. I’m at it all the day, hammer and pound and so forth and I just don’t get a chance to have any leisure time. And there’s just too much work involved with this whole thing.”

And then he’d say, “Well really, that’s not the case. It’s really a trouble but the thing is, is there really isn’t enough work. And that kind of worries me.”

Well, when you started to analyze what is livingness with this carpenter, you would run into, eventually, the nothing of the wrongness and the nothing of the rightness about life and the nothing of the somethingness and the something of the nothingness. And when you got it back and forth and worked around, you’d find out it really came down to two main concerns: a concern about the nothingnesses and a concern about somethingnesses.

And when you’d run it all down, why, you would have a package, you see? It could be composed of something and nothing. In terms of what?

Well, not in terms of carpentering, that’s too specific, it would be in terms of livingness. So livingness would be composed of the somethingness of livingness and the nothingness of livingness. And the nothingness of livingness is dyingness. That’s the main thing he’s worried about is dyingness.

And so when we have to analyze all this out, we find out that anywhere we enter the problems of livingness, we come up with a somethingness and a nothingness and a maybeness. You know, is it a something or is it a nothing? Or is it a nothing or is it a something?

And out of this maybeness, then, we get a what? Maybeness is composed, actually, of something and nothing together, they make a maybeness. But this leads us off immediately into a certainness in two directions. A certain of nothing, certain of something. And we still find in the middle ground, maybeness, which is uncertainty.

Now, this divides into three zones of time and as we ask this carpenter about this, he’d say, “Well, in the old days so-and-so and so-and-so, but now so-and-so and so-and-so. However, in the future it may so-and-so and so-and-so.” And so we have a category for each one of these. The somethingness and the nothingness of yesterday, the somethingness and nothingness of today and the somethingness and nothingness of tomorrow.

Which gives us, immediately, a certainness of the somethingness of tomorrow, a certainness of the nothingness of tomorrow, a certain of the somethingness of now, a certain of the nothingness of now, a certain of the somethingness which is past, a certain of the nothingness which is past and all those things entangled make uncertainty yesterday, uncertainty today and uncertainty tomorrow.

And out of these uncertainties, his life seems to be made up. And everything he is worried about will have something to do with uncertainty. And this would immediately lead you to believe that what we would do would be immediately to untackle all the uncertainties o£ yesterday and today and tomorrow and by tackling all these uncertainties, so unravel his problem. Only the auditor who did that uniformly, would fail.

Why? Because uncertainty is not a substance. Uncertainty is a condition which results from two things: that is the lack of substance and the existence of substance. So we've got these two things. And throughout auditing and throughout instruction and wherever we go, whether we’re talking about carpenters or the livingness of a brick or the livingness of a book or the livingness of a gopher, it doesn’t matter. We’re looking at the condition of uncertainty and avoiding the processing of uncertainty. And we are applying whatever we know to the two certainties that we can reach, which is the nothing and the something, in the three zones of the major barrier there is - time.

And in essence we have, then, the package of the entire MEST universe. And it is composed, actually, of no more than these factors.

But to have any of these factors, we have to have an awareness. Without an awareness, we have no cognizance. We have no recognition of any problem. We have no recognition of any condition or any state unless we have an awareness of the condition or a state. Is that correct? Seems right. It’s as if you could overreach this material very easily. It’s what nearly everyone has been doing here, for really - hate to say it’s this long, but the truth of the matter is that we can say and agree with the libraries - thirty-five hundred years.

Well, the truth of the matter is, the last time some of this stuff was thrown around here on Earth was about eighty-two hundred years ago. And it is still kicking around, as was written down much, much later in the Vedic Hymns. And there was a lot of this stuff around about eighty-two hundred years ago or thereabouts. And a little fragment of that has leaked through.

Well now, we’re right back to actualities and blunt realities, you might say, good, solid blunt realities. And we are dealing not with an evaluation of Freudianism so that we can validate Freudianism and validate somebody’s expenditure of time on having studied

Freud. We are not seeking now to validate the Vedic Hymns and so validate somebody who has spent a lot of time studying the Vedic Hymns. We’re not trying to validate the Vedic peoples. We’re not trying to validate anybody. We’re not trying to agree with anything, in other words. That’s the furthest thing from our thoughts.

However, we have to do some agreement in terms of language. Otherwise, MEST-wise, we don’t have any communication for this instruction. Now, we’re actually running, then, for your purposes-not actually, but for your purposes-we are actually running a somethingness-nothingness, in terms of data.

We are trying, if we possibly can, to regard these simplicities of livingness as a knownness. See, these simplicities of livingness as a knownness and applying it to a nothingness of knownness, which is the preclear. And we get our something-nothing then.

Now, the data which we have here is very bluntly data which stands application. The witness of that is the fact you’ll get your first big jump, or anybody does, when he gets data certainty, when he gets into data certainty and when he gets the idea, yes, he’s certain of his data, that’s the first big certainty he gets under instruction or processing and so on.

That’s a preclear’s first big jump. You know, “Now, remember something real,” you ask this preclear.

And the preclear says - two minutes later, three minutes later, five minutes later-he says, “You know, I ate breakfast this morning and that’s really real.”

And you will break a psychosis just like that, [snap] That’s the first thing he runs into is a data certainty. Something happened to him, he knows that he remembers that it happened and he knows that it happened and therefore he has penetrated, to that degree, the time barrier. And so he is very happy about it because he’s run into a data certainty.

Now, the first data certainty you will run into under instruction, as far as Scientology goes, that there is actually data to be certain of. And the second you run into that, that there is a somethingness about this data, then you will have a big somethingness. And you’ll compare that somethingness with the nothingness of pcs that you pick out of the raw and out of the street or something and this fellow is walking around in “What fog?” You know? It’s one step further than “What room?” - it’s “What fog?”

And this chap is liable to wind up in two conditions. One, if you were to approach him with a sufficiently mystic atmosphere and to permit him only a slight inkling of what was going on, you might wind him up with a greater sanity, comparatively speaking, and you might bring to him a better standpoint as far as himself and his family and others are concerned and, boy, you’d sure bring him into a big “maybe” where you were concerned, see?

Why would you do that? It’s just because you’ve handed him this terrific somethingness, you see, and he’s only able to absorb a part of it and that clashes with his nothingness and he comes halfway out of his nothingness and halfway meets your somethingness as you present it to him, so he gets on a terrific maybe where you’re concerned.

And this’ll be true of you as an Instructor and it’s always true of the auditor. And the auditor, to some slight degree, has a rough time of it. The preclear is apt to be fighty toward an auditor. He’s apt not to thank an auditor. An auditor only saved his leg and yanked him out of death’s door and did a few other things for him and he still complains about his earache or something.

It’s really nonsensical the way preclears react, until you realize that you have yanked him from a nothingness halfway toward a somethingness and you haven’t educated him or you haven’t done anything to him to straighten him out, really. All you did was take the somethingness that you knew about and you just looked at this case and you brought a sufficient degree of communication into being with the future, a present and the past-wiped out enough barriers, in other words, in terms of distance and energy and so on. You just gave him enough reach to a point of where he was sailing straight down the road as far as handling himself was concerned.

You didn’t bring him up to a point of where he could handle life or do any fantastic stunts or anything like that. You didn’t bring him up to a big somethingness. And he’ll sit there right in the middle ground as far as you’re concerned.

And if you don’t watch it, in teaching a class of auditors, you will bring the auditors up into that uncertainness about you as an Instructor, which will then be very difficult for you. So let’s get the air clear right now because we’re on the first relay-the first point of this relay system.

Right now, we don’t intend to bring you out of a nothingness. In the first place, you’re in control of a great deal of livingness. And it’s there for you to look at and you’re not in a fog. There isn’t a one here that doesn’t have, at this moment, some certainty that what we’re doing, when applied to a human being, at least-even crudely-will produce some sort of an effect. And then we’re out of that nothingness, aren’t we? So we’re not dealing in a complete zero.

All right. So probably where we sit is someplace between a maybe and a somethingness. So let’s just take it from that maybe, between that maybe and a somethingness, and yank it over toward a somethingness as fast as possible. And then let’s deal with exactly those somethingnesses which we know and those exact nothingnesses which we know exist.

And then let’s deal, as Instructors, thereafter, in the form of trying to teach in the form of-now, I myself may fall way and woefully short of this goal-but trying to teach as much as possible in the frame of livingness of those we instruct. And by such, we will give them immediate association with the somethingness of the information instead of hanging them up on a maybe.

Now, there may be one or two here who are trained in nuclear physics. Certainly there are several here who are trained in at least high-school level physics. To these it wouldn’t appear, then, a complete darkness if we were to suddenly start out and I were to give you today the three laws of motion and as they apply to human behavior. That wouldn’t be too far afield.

Mostly we live in a mechanical society and we have, in this day and age, some inkling of this. But it would be a mistake to start out in this mechanistic approach, because we’re educated into believing that machines are inanimate, unliving objects, to some degree, and that motion itself is a sort of an unlivingness and so we would have started teaching you immediately in terms of dead tissue - the one mistake medicine and biology has repeated and repeated and repeated to a point where their advancement is cut to almost nothing.

They try to understand livingness by looking at the dead. They take a tissue and slash it out of some body and then examine this tissue and they say, “Look at all the atoms and molecules.” Balderdash. That tissue won’t work in terms of atoms and molecules. You can do all you want to it in terms of atoms and molecules and, by golly, it won’t come back to life again.

Now, on the day when that piece of tissue would come back to life again-just by studying the three laws of motion and atoms and molecules-on that day, we are then and only then justified in talking about the three laws of motion. You see, in terms of atoms and molecules, and say, “This is livingness.”

You see, if we’ve proven conclusively that dead tissue will come back to life and live and procreate and be happy and breathe and all the rest of it, by simply applying some more atoms and molecules, if we’ve done this, why, then we’re justified in talking about livingness in terms of deadness.

But today, we are not able to demonstrate this. There is no catalyst known, throughout all of modern chemistry, which will take dead tissue and make it reproduce. But we can take a Mathison E-Meter and take its probe and put it across a scar which is real dead-put the probe, in other words, on the other side of the scar and give the fellow the electrode to hold and, as an auditor, we can simply sit there and connect the two sides of the terminal - that is to say the terminals - we’d connect that probe with the beingness of the person and it goes through, pop! And the preclear knows when it goes through, pop! And we know when it goes through, And more importantly, the meter at that moment says mowwww.

And what do you think happens after that? You do that, the scar tissue goes away. So therefore, we are justified in talking about livingness in terms of livingness. And we’re not justified in talking about livingness in terms of deadness or mechanicalness or anything else and trying to evolve everything through a sea of mud.

So let’s take just what we know and go up from there and the first place we know we’re alive or moderately so.

Now, this probe experiment is one, actually, you should make, because at once we have something dead-MEST, molecules, atoms-saying that there is a livingness. We’ve made it admit it. Engineering has tried to make it admit it for a long time. It tried to steal all sorts of tissues alive and keep them alive long enough to examine them. They’ve fooled around with this (I’m talking now about engineering, not about medicine), they’ve fooled around with currents and flows and that sort of thing, trying to measure them.

Well, we made the hump. And we find out, then, that one human being can monitor an energy in another human being. Well, if this is the case, if one human being can do it in another human being and we find out that the scar tissue abates, which it does, then the subject of living is something that should be studied by the living, in terms of livingness.

And the dichotomy which we are running-that is the plus and minus on the thing-is not livingness versus deadness. That’s not what we’re running. We’re not talking about that and if you get off on that groove at any time, you’ve avoided the whole question. What we’re talking about is something essentially very simple-we’re talking about livingness in a something state or in a nothing state. And we’re not then talking about deadness at all.

And it is doubtful if the condition-deadness-is fulfilled other than in the dictionary, by definition. It’s very doubtful. If you examine all this in relative states of livingness, why, it makes kind of sense to you because it makes you immediately a cousin to the whole universe and you become less scared of it, although it terrifies you for a while when you first glimpse this fact.

And you’re talking about not-survival and non-survival, you’re talking about a relative degree of survival which goes from an unattainable absolute of no-survival to an unattainable absolute of constant, continuous survival. So when we are studying survival-when I’m talking about an absolute, I mean survival in an absolute, finite, measurable state, unchanging, unvarying and going forevermore till the end of some interminably, unterminatable time. That would be the utter absolute of survival. Unobtainable. See, neither one of these ends of this spectrum are obtainable.

So we’re studying, if we’re studying life itself, we’re unfortunately, and I say unfortunately, we’re studying a rather horrible thing. We’re studying the survival of something which tries desperately, every now and then, to become a nothing and having become a nothing, tries again to be a something. And so we get survival as the study of somethingness and nothingness in terms of form. Survival as something, since survival itself is inevitable. We’ll see that as we go along. I mean, this is one of those horrible things that it’s too horrible for an individual to immediately look at, the truth of the matter is.

I mean, we’re not up against, then, something which the imagination can’t embrace. That’s easy for the imagination to embrace, but it’s kind of horrible. If you sit somebody down and you say, “All right, now get the idea ...” (This is the way you really push this thing through at some individual, you could practically murder him.) “Now get the idea of you sitting there in just that position, thinking just that thing to the end of time without any slightest chance of any change.” The individual will practically cut his throat because that’s the one thought he mustn’t think. That’s the horrible thought. Now, I invite you to just make a little note of that and try it. And then make sure that you do it for about a half an hour and at the end of that time go find an auditor.

You will have either sunk to a “not caringness” about the whole thing, which is the most utter, complete apathy you’ve ever reached, or you will simply have picked out of it some of the certainty and truth of the fact that you’re on a track which you’re trying to vary and which is pretty hard to vary. And your effort is to vary the state of survival toward a somethingness of form or a nothingness of form. And you’re just trying to vary this, one way or the other, back and forth, enough to produce some certainty of change.

And as long as you can produce some change, you’ll be perfectly happy about it. And the less change you’re able to produce and the more times you have failed to produce a change, why, the less certain you will be that you can change and the more you are chained to the inevitable treadmill.

Societies will commit suicide. Criminals will do terrible things. Almost anything will be done by a living being in an effort to vary the state of his survival. Now he gets, finally, to where he dramatizes the one thing he’s trying to avoid-and here we get to the preclear or the group we’re processing-he finally dramatizes what he has tried for a long while to avoid: a constancy of survival. And he’s dramatizing it, which means a constancy without change.

And there sits your poor preclear. And you say, “Run this, run that, do this, do that” and he does this and does that and he runs this and he runs that and he keeps looking at you alertly, expecting some change to take place.

Well, why does he expect the change to take place? Well, I’ll tell you why he expects it to, is he knows he cant effect one. He can’t cause a change. So he’s come to you or the auditor you will be instructing, he will come to him eventually and he will look at him alertly and say—and what he’s saying as he sits there in the seat is—he’s saying just this, really, he’s saying, “My God, here I sit and life is going right on at this constant rate, a slight decline perhaps, but it’s going on at this constant rate. There’s no real variation W in the forms of things which I am producing and seeing. There is no real change taking d place and I have lost my power and ability to effect these changes and here I am. And that’s what’s wrong with me. Now, please, you are powerful, you can do something. Please effect a change-any kind of a change! Make me sick! Make me close to death! Make me d go to a hospital! We don’t care what you do to me, but please do something to effect a м change in the condition of my survival.”

And that’s all a preclear’s sitting there and asking for. He isn’t asking to (quote) “get well,” (quote) “get better” or any one of these things. He isn’t asking all those things. And the second that you, as an Instructor, can disabuse your student auditor of “get better,” “get well”-as soon as you can disabuse that student auditor of this as a goal, why, you " will have started him in the direction of auditing.

Otherwise, you’ve started him in the direction of failure. Because you’ve given him what? An unbalanced problem. You’ve said, “Now look, son, there’s only one direction we expect you to take a preclear in. And that’s to make him get better and to make him get well and to make him get whole and to make him survive and keep on living without change. And we expect you to do this to a preclear.”

And then this poor guy goes out and he processes this preclear and he makes a Theta Clear out of him. And this person is in beautiful condition on Saturday-of course, the person has cancer, that’s beside the point, and the person is also eighty-nine and that’s beside the point and so forth. And on Monday morning he gets a telephone call from " the family and they say, “He’s dead.” In the same tone of voice as you say, “You did it.” And if you’ve trained an auditor so poorly that he’s surprised, then you haven’t trained * him at all. Well, what did the auditor do? He did the most beautifully, classic job of exactly what he’s supposed to do. He made it possible for the preclear to make a change in survival. He sure did. In other words, there was victory.

Here was this poor thetan, keeping on an unchanging state, dragging around a body that was an unvariable thing, the only direction it was changing was south on its own determinism and that was such a low state there was nothing even dramatic about it, it was just sort of rotting away, you see.

And here's this thetan, he’s got to go on now for possibly-he doesn’t know, but it might be for years and years and years up to a point where they put him in a coffin, you see? And then the electronic fields sort of damp out and disappear from this body up to a point where he can suddenly do a bunk and become nothing and forget all about it and not know anything about what happened to him and be completely confused and then go on the cycle of pretending he’s something else and hooking up somewhere else. In other words, leaving it all to chance.

The auditor just picked up that whole problem, chopped it up into bits and put this answer in its place: exteriorize him, stabilize him, ditch a body, go get another one. Well now, that isn’t the end and all of auditing. That isn’t the goal of this auditor, particularly. His goal is anything that could produce a change in survival.

Now, we call that a communication change simply because communication depends on time and it depends on distance and it depends upon some kind of a sense message. In other words, it’s a form symbolized.

So the auditor’s there, we say, to produce a communication change. And we’ll hear that many, many times. I’ll say that over and over and over: “The auditor’s supposed to produce communication change. If you run the technique for three minutes and don’t produce a communication change, run something else.”

And we’ll say that over and over and over and over and over and over. Well, what are we saying? “Communication change.” We have to understand what a communication is and, well, we had better be presenting, every few minutes on a case, a different aspect of survival-a slightly different aspect of survival. In other words, he is more aware or less aware. He is surviving at a faster time rate or a slower time rate.

In other words, just keep pulling this case around, because the moment it hangs fire and starts to run constant, that is the one thing the guy is dramatizing. And that’s what’s wrong with the case. You see that?

Now, when we’re going in this direction, then, it puts us beyond being-and I don’t want to say this for public consumption, but I have to say this because there’s no sense in every auditor that comes along breaking his heart over it. I am not trying to deliver into the hands of you-even vaguely-that your mission is to save all of humanity. Because the second I would say, “Save humanity and demonstrate this and demonstrate that,” it would immediately narrow the definition down to what your understanding of saving humanity is. And let me tell you one of the most vicious and horrible societies that ever existed-one of the most vicious societies that I know of back on the track-wouldn’t let a man die. In other words, a person had no freedom to die.

Didn’t matter what kind of condition he was in, he continued to survive. That society had patched it up in such a way that we had survival as the inevitable conclusion. They had magnificent surgeons, they had magnificent electronics men. They could wire up any kind of a body to repair almost anything. They had biochemical gimmicks which would put back in the voice, which would redevelop this, which would polish up that-a fellow could be without arms and without legs and he would still be fitted by small electronic impulse generators which would control a couple of stumps for him.

He couldn’t die. It didn’t matter how ugly he was or how ornery he’d gotten or how much he’d lost or what the change was or wasn’t, this individual in this society could not die. It didn’t matter how many battles he’d gotten messed up in or how he’d served the society or something. It was the awfullest curse there was. The most terrible curse there is on the track is an unchanging state of survival.

The society dramatizes that. Instead of sending a fellow to an electric chair, they put him in jail for the rest of his life. They give him life imprisonment which is complete, unchanging, continuous, enforced survival. And if you want to make a preclear get real sick, just run out and run into and bog down on that particular computation and he gets sick.

Now, every once in a while, you get a preclear sick at his stomach and you wonder why he’s sick at his stomach. Well, it’s right there on that computation. If you start running nothingnesses-and you’ll balance it back between something and nothingness-and all of a sudden the guy is riding the continuous, inexorable center of survival and he’s just going right down the track on it. And he envisions no change from a state he is afraid of. He’s in a state which he is afraid of and now he envisions no change from that state.

And at that moment we have, entering the individual, what we call hopelessness. And what’s hopelessness? Is no change from a state one is afraid of. And the state one is afraid of is halfway between something and nothing. Neither fish nor no fish, or fowl or no fowl, or horse or no horse, or car or no car. And that’s what a person’s afraid of. When we enter effort into this, we get what is known as anxiety, you know? He isn’t over on the nothing and he isn’t over on the something side of it, he’s just hanging in the center.

Well, that is the middle course, the exact middle course, of survival. A person can say, "I am a man” and be a man. Now, you noticed a little earlier I told you beingness enters into it. He can be something, which is changing the-it’s over on the something side, you see? He can be a man.

Well, he says, “I am a man.” And he enters into this as a somethingness and he carries on in this as a somethingness and he goes along perfectly fine on this as a somethingness but it’s a lame solution, very lame solution, really. Because he is a man, except there’s always that sneaking little tap-tap-tap right back of the left ear, you know, “Or am I? Am I? Am I really? Am I not really just pretending? No, no, I am a man. I am sincere about this” and so forth.

And the more he fails at being what is defined as a man, the more he gets this little knock-knock-knock. "I’m really just pretending, I hope. I... really am pretending - I’m not quite. Am I a man?” And he begins to seek a higher state of perfection.

What is this higher state of perfection? He wants to be a man better. Now, he doesn’t want to be a better man-he wants to be a man better. You get that?

Now, if a man was defined as something that smelled-let me be crude for a moment, I seldom will be in this Unit, we’re all amongst friends here-a man is something that smells of horse biscuits and sweat and drips chewing tobacco and is in a remarkable state of unwashedness. Well, if that’s a man, and he has very, very closely approximated this condition, he’s happy! He’s real satisfied. If that’s what a man is, he is now a man, he has a conviction that he is a something. You follow that?

So, sometimes you get these tremendously successful societies of cowboys or tremendously successful societies of infantrymen-they’re dirty, they’re lousy, they’re diseased, they have venereal disease and dysentery, but that’s the way a soldier’s supposed to be and if that’s what their basic education defined a soldier as, they would be the happiest somethings you ever ran into.

They’re being soldiers or they’re being cowboys or they’re being something. But God help and the Lord smite a society which trains somebody up to be a soldier with a clean uniform, without dysentery, with nobility, glory, medals, with officers who are sensible, with a government which is sincere and with wars which have a real purpose, [laughter]

Now, if you take this poor little kid and you train him up like that and one day he all of a sudden finds himself an infantryman: dirty, dysentery, venereal disease-anything you could think of-bad rations, lousy officers, insincere politicians, a cause that isn’t worth a sniff into a matchbox, then he isn’t being something. Why? Because it’s never been defined for him as a something. He’s never defined it himself as a something.

I swear to Pete, if somebody had come along in kindergarten and taken him as a little boy and said, “Well, probably someday you’re going to be a soldier. Well, soldiers are real tough and they’re real mean and they’re real bad and they’re real no good and they actually amount to nothing afterwards as civilians because they’re so used to taking an enforced direction, they’re no good. They just have a hell of a time in life thereafter and they get dirty and they get diseased and they get shot up and nobody takes care of them and nobody cares where they’re buried and the sanctity of their existence is missing and they don’t have politicians that are any good and their officers are terrible.”

And if they just taught this little kid all these things, see, and they just taught him day after day and he read books-fictionized stories-about the lone infantryman that got away from his company and was all dirty and mean and so forth and finally got into this village. And he found in this village this dirty, horrible old woman, you see, and the two of them managed to scrounge a whole bunch of hogs that were all dirty and they managed to sell them to the rest of the company at a gyp price and this was a funny story. You know, that little kid would get to be twenty years of age, twenty-two years of age and then the government would grab him and just this sort of thing would happen.

The kid would be very happy about the whole thing. He wouldn’t complain about it. So what? He’s being something. But he never finds the mythical character and so we get the divergence between the practical and the ideal.

The mythical character is the main trap. The ideal character or the mythical character. And in such a wise, the creative artist in the society serves Satan, you could say, if Satan exists. The creative artist keeps painting up this ideal hero: a cowboy with clean underdrawers, who smells like fresh shaving soap, who is noble, who always goes to the rescue and who always has rescues to go to-that’s the most important point of it.

And this fellow, who is an admirable horseman, who loves horses, who takes good care of his horse, whose horse is faithful to him—this admirable character is always followed around by a Sancho Panza who is always devoted and all the rest of the cowboys respect him. How far can we go with this sort of stuff? See? Because that’s the real stuff that belongs out back of the barn in a big pile-talking to cowboys-that’s really where it belongs. Because after a person has imbibed this balderdash of the knight-errant, the gallant soldier, the beautiful, noble cowboy, his definition of a somethingness is an unobtainable somethingness. And so he has an unobtainable goal.

The MEST universe is never going to rig it up so that you can have somebody who is like this. In the first place, I know how to ride horses, I know how to ride horses. The way I ride a horse is never give a horse an even break when you can give them an uneven one. Horses are not there to agree with you. They are there to be ridden. And as a consequence, ever since I made up my mind to that, me and horses have just gotten along fine.

You can take a look at a horse, back into the barn and find a worse bit, find one that’s a little rusty, preferably, and has got a Spanish curb on it and that cinches down real mean-you could pull on it real hard and it’d bust his jaw. Or if he’s a perfectly mean, innocent, sweet little horse and so forth, why, give him a straight bit. Just give him a straight bit and so forth, but make sure you’ve got a leaded quirt in your pocket.

And ever since I’ve decided that it’s you and the horse, not “me and my noble steed, see, who loves me dearly,” my horses and I have just gotten along splendidly. And the horse understood what I was doing-I was riding him. I wasn’t loving him. And nobody has picked me up out of any ditches.

But I started in on this very early. I started getting my education on this before I was five. And horses look at five-year-olds and, by golly, they’re very nice. They won’t step on them after they’ve thrown them. That’s right. They’re careful of it. I’ve actually had a mustang stand with his foot raised up immediately above my stomach and not put the foot down. Which I thought was real nice. Told him so, profanely.

Well, what is this problem that we’re running into? There we have an education in terms of horses. Now, I can take an Eastern kid any day of the week and educate him to the nobility of horseflesh through the Lone Ranger or Trigger or some of these other horses that are around-the Lone Ranger, by the way, isn’t a horse, he’s only half horse. Now, we can take this Eastern kid and we bring him out and do you know before we actually get him to learn how to ride, he’ll practically kill himself. He’ll practically ruin himself before he has a chance.

And the truth of the matter is, he may get to a point through that false education of the beauties of horseflesh and the nobility and the stamina-he’s also taught that horses run all the time. In all the Western movies, horses run all the time or stand there and look noble. I’ve never seen horses walking to any great degree. If they’re walking, they’re just getting ready to run or they’ve just been running.

And so we have this problem in education. We don’t have somebody-unless we educate him just right-we don’t have somebody who is going to make a good horseman. Why? Because his basic education on the subject of horses is wrong.

Horses are there to be loved and be affectionate and to run all the time. And that’s not what horses are for. Horses are to carry you across the countryside with as least bodily injury as possible and with as little exhaustion on the part of the rider as possible and-if we’ve got to conserve horses-as easy as possible on the horse if we’ve got to conserve horses. If there’s a scarcity of horses-if, if, if. But those are “ifs.” The others are necessities, which is “horses are there to carry you across the countryside with as little threat to your security and as little upset to your dignity and seat as possible. And that’s what a horse is for.”

And you learn how to handle horses from that viewpoint and by golly, you’d make a terrific horseman. And actually, you get out and you get on a horse and you take the horse someplace, the darn horse will arrive in pretty good condition. There’s no maybe in his mind about who’s riding who. He has no doubts about it and he sees himself heading for this chaparral at a mad rate or he’s going into this giant cactus or something at a mad rate and he all of a sudden realizes that he has been doing this and avoids it.

Why does he realize it? Well, he maybe got a quarter inch of spur in his neck or he got a Spanish curb suddenly yanked down on him or he was actually spilled into the brush on the other side of it. In other words, he was picked up and removed from that course.

And the funny part of it is, is after he’s done that two or three times, he doesn’t run at giant cactus anymore. He inspects the trail in front of him. He decides, “Well, this dumb rider decides we’re all going to live, so okay, we’ll live.”

He makes a good horseman. You get him to the end of the run, he isn’t much lathered up, he’s not nervous, he hasn’t been yanked around, he hasn’t been upset by anything, because there’s no maybe on the track-he’s been ridden. When he arrives at someplace, he stands there-complete confidence.

Now, you take dogs and you want to train a dog, you get the same thing. If the dog begins to believe that you love him desperately and you won’t punish him very much if he does wrong and he is supposed to also do tricks and be cute, but he’s also maybe supposed to mind sometimes, you’ll find a dog that has a bad indigestion, he is nervous, he has a tendency to sleep. He’s not quite secure in other words he’s riding on a maybe.

He either has a master or he has a friend. He doesn’t know which. Because sometimes his friend becomes a master and sometimes his master becomes a friend. He hasn’t any certainty. The master doesn’t leave him alone and the friend doesn’t leave him alone completely, you see? So he doesn’t know which it is.

So I had a dog once that was a very good friend of mine and he practically ruined me. I was very small. And after that time, I’ve had a number of dogs who never had any doubt in their mind about a friendship. Now, I’m not talking about me-you take the dog trainer. But the point is I just happen to know something about dogs and horses a little bit. And nothing in my mind is further from a maybe. So it’s a good certainty to talk about.

And none of these dogs had any doubt in their mind, whatsoever, about our relationship. The relationship was a very definite, positive thing. And the limits to which they could stretch disobedience were exactly defined. And the most terrific example of this was a malamute, who was half malamute and half spitzbergen, and all he knew how to do was pull. And inherently-he’d inherited this from way back on the track. All you had to do was put a strap tight across his chest and he was off.

He knew nothing else. And he thought when you beat him, when you hit him, something like that, he thought, “Well, [sigh] some sensation.”

Now, I saw a woman whip that dog one time. And the dog just got happier and happier and she was laying on with all of her might! He was a big, brutal, big-boned dog-real tough. And that dog and I met and I had to do something about the dog because he had a habit of putting his paws on little children who were not quite as tall as he was in the first place and it would just knock them down, squash. And then he’d stand there and look at them, the stupid bum, “I wonder what I’ve done to the child? Do you suppose the child has done something to me? I don’t know, maybe.”

And I found out that any dog, very early, gets the idea that if you can bite him or he can bite you, why, that determines whether or not who is where. Well, instead of biting the dog, it’s sufficient to just prevent the dog from biting you. Well, how do you do that? Well, you make the dog attack you and then you pick him up on both sides of the jowls and you throw him about twenty-five feet, prying his jaws open with your thumbs.

You can do it to a wolf, the most savage wolf that ever lived, by the way. There isn’t any reason a man really should be very afraid. He ought to be afraid of a bear because a bear is a good boxer. But wolves and things like that, that isn’t too tough. Because if your timing is up, you can just grab something like that on both sides of the jowls and just keep him going. And you know, it takes the maybe out of their minds? But here we’re talking about brute force-we’re not talking about thought or brains or anything else-we’re just talking about brute force.

And here’s our problem then: What is one’s relationship with existence and what is his goals? What’s he trying to be, what’s he trying to do?

Well, the closer he can get to defining what he’s trying to do or defining what he’s not trying to do, the closer he can get to that, the more able he is to arrive somewhere. And the further he is from precisely defining these goals, the further he is from trying to arrive.

So we take the horse who is half servant and half friend, who doesn’t quite know, one way or the other, and we find him in a state of anxiety. And people come around with this horse and they wonder why this horse is so nervous all the time. Well, the horse doesn’t know what it’s all about, really. He doesn’t quite know what he’s supposed to do. And we’re very mystified because we find Tough Tony Joe down here, he has a mustang and this mustang gets his head beaten in if he ever bucks and yet this horse is perfectly happy. Perfectly happy horse-good digestion and everything.

Well, we find this other fellow with a dog, and this dog-he never pets this dog. Once in a while he says, “Good boy.”

And the dog looks at him, “Okay. So he praised me.” And yeah, we find this dog proud and happy, with his head held up and doing things and, by golly, the fellow that owns him just never pets him, never does anything much for him. But there’s no maybes. He expects him to go in a certain direction and do a certain thing and he brooks no kickback or he simply leaves him alone and never gives him an order. Produces the same effect: you have certainty. And out of certainty itself, you get pride.

And when you're trying to rehabilitate a preclear, you’re trying to rehabilitate certainty. And don’t forget that the closest next-door neighbor to that on certainty, just this general certainty, is of course, knowingness. And the closest next-door neighbor to knowingness is ability to make a postulate and have it come true. And the closest next-door neighbor to having a postulate and making it come true is arriving at a somethingness or a nothingness goal and really arrive at it.

And arriving at a somethingness point or a nothingness point depends on whether or not one can make a postulate come true.

And development of energy by a thetan is whether or not one can merely say there is energy and have energy. Now, you get how we can take a postulate now and bring it straight down from a thetan, all by himself, who says there is space, see? “There is space,” he says, “There’s space.” That’s all there is to it. He says, “There’s now space.” Okay, there’s space. And one, that comes down to a point of where he recognizes that there is a wall. It’s a matter of direction. He is able to give or receive directions. He’s able to be cause or effect. He’s able to put space there and then feel the space is there. No difference between that and being able to live in the MEST universe.

If he is able to put space there and have space there and be perfectly happy and content about it-of both causing the space and being the effect of the same space-if he’s able to do that, then let’s go right straight from there and see that he is able at the same time, then, to be compatible with the MEST universe or not be compatible with the MEST universe. See?

He’s able to be in the MEST universe and be happy about it-both happy enough to have caused it and happy enough to be the effect of it. This is a problem of postulates. It goes straight back up the track to postulates. And the postulate, the basic postulate, is there is something or there is nothing, which is a stated condition, see? A condition is always composed of somethingnesses and nothingnesses.So out of this stated condition there is something or there is nothing, we get, then, a resulting condition. And the condition of mind of the individual is that he must be perfectly aware of whether there is going to be something or there is nothing or be willing to be unaware of it. You know, surprise effects-he must be perfectly willing to have a surprise effect. Well, that’s what we get into in terms of randomity.

Well, we’re not very far afield here. The preclear is as well off, then, as he is able to experience a condition-cause a condition or experience a condition-which breaks right down to whether he is able to give or receive and act upon, to give and have or have not acted upon, or to receive and act or not act upon postulates.

In other words, direction. In other words, orders. And that degenerates into a middle ground of whether or not he knows whether his orders are being obeyed or will not be obeyed or whether he cares whether they’re going to be obeyed or not obeyed-in other words, whether he’s anxious about it or not. Or anxious about having to obey or _ not obeying instructions or directions which he receives, And we get this condition of " beingness as the first observable condition of beingness of the preclear.

And the more he goes into effect, why, the more unwilling he is to have direction because the more intolerable it will become to him to have direction and the less he will “ be able to change his own survival condition.

In order to change his survival condition, he has to have a postulate obeyed, doesn’t

So he says “Boo” and the dog doesn’t bark at all. So he says at that moment, “Well, what do you know? Some randomity has shown up.” Well now, he doesn’t feel himself called upon to unmock the dog or to be mean about it or ornery about it. The moment he’s in that condition, do you know that he’ll almost invariably be obeyed, by anything and everything, even the birds of the air and the flowers of the field? But he’s got to be in that kind of a frame of mind.

Now, it isn’t the kind of a frame of mind that you determine a preclear into or that he gets determined to have or not have. That isn’t that kind of a frame of mind. It’s a frame of mind which one obtains by a confidence in one’s own power. Which means that one has to have pride and confidence and self-respect and it all boils down to whether or not one’s got certainty. And almost any kind of certainty is better than an uncertainty. And all certainties are made of somethingness or nothingness.

A fellow could be perfectly content if he was absolutely sure that he would never have any power, that he doesn’t have any power, that he never will have any power and that this is just that. And he’s not a person of power, he’s a weakling, he’s a coward, he’s a bum. And this is the condition and this is the condition he is in and this is what he’s in and if he has no doubt about it and he doesn’t want to be anything else and he isn’t being nagged all the time to be something else, he’d be a happy boy.

And therefore, people can say with some truth, a slave is a happy man. He has no responsibility. Oh, he’s only unhappy when he thinks he might ought to have some but hasn’t any. And then we get into a different condition, don’t you see?

Now we’re not advocating anything here in terms of philosophy. We’re just talking about changing a condition. We’re talking about changing the condition of survival.

The preclear can’t, he expects the auditor to. And you are expected, of course, to train auditors so they can not only change the condition of survival of an individual but be perfectly relaxed when they don’t. And when you’ve given them this proper frame of reference in which to study, in which to work, why, we of of auditors. And you’ll have perfectly cheerful people.

Now, I seem to have covered an awful lot of ground here, one way or the other, and I'm going to cover some more in just a minute.