First morning lecture of October the 16th.

And continuing this morning some material on subjective processing.

You're going to get so confoundedly tired of subjective processing when you get through that the next time you sit down to figure you'll say, "Uh-uh. No, let's just blow the circuit instead and then do what's right."

Yesterday four were run, very particularly on subjective processes. What happened to you?

Male voice: A few somatics and one time I had a tinge just a twinge, rather, of nausea, but it didn't last long, not even long enough to say something...

Mm-hm.

Male voice: ... and it was gone. And once I felt my body was awful tired but that didn't last but a second or so. And all the time I was running it, I was kind of excited.

Mm-hm. Okay. And what happened to you, Bill?

Male voice: Well, I got rather sick. No heavy somatics, some twinges. And felt pretty relaxed last night when I went to bed.

Uh-huh.

Male voice: Feel better this morning.

Good.

One comment here: One thing you've got to be very, very careful of in such a thing as a subjective process at this case level. Bill had it all figured out, if you don't mind my mentioning this, that you ran it around the perimeter, like an automobile tire dropped over the preclear or something; you just ran it around the perimeter. He didn't get the idea that you ran it in a 360-degree sphere.

As long as he was running it on a horizontal line, like the rings of Saturn - as long as he was running it in this fashion - of course, less than nothing happened. Because when he st- but when he started running it on a 360-degree sphere, then something happened. But he ran it for two hours on the rings-of-Saturn principle. And now, naturally, this wouldn't produce very much, because this is the most able place where a fellow stops and starts things - in the horizontal plane immediately around his body. So what he did was pick up his area of best ability. Although I think if he replayed this - the morning lecture of yesterday morning, he would find shells and 360-degree spheres all over the place.

Now, that is nothing like - on an omission, something of this sort, that would just be a completely natural impulse to pick up your area of the largest defense on the ring-of-Saturn business; you see, a fellow's got his hands in a plane out from his body, and so forth.

Whereas, as a matter of fact, the area which is most subject to this sensation - I mean, where it's most subject to the process - is under the feet. If you start running lots of nothingness underneath somebody's feet, and so on, sooner or later he's going to get upset because it'll throw in all the braces he's put against falling and the body has lots of them.

Now, did anybody get the dwindling - perimeter effect? That is to say. Did you get that? It was getting closer and closer to you?

Male voice: No. I - mine was out against the edge of the limit, beyond which there was not even nothing.

Mm-hm.

Male voice: And the explosions would only come inward, because there wasn't...

You couldn't get out... Oh! Well, now, here we're getting this thing sorted out.

Male voice: The uh ...

Did you get the dwindling-sphere effect? That is to say, the sphere getting smaller and smaller and smaller.

Male voice: Yeah.

Oh, you got that.

Male voice: It was harder to make them smaller.

But now, wait a minute. How about you? You say you didn't get that effect? Well!

Female voice: Alicia tried it on me last night and I got that effect.

And you got that effect.

Male voice: Yeah, I got it too.

That's right.

Male voice: Just before lunch. Alicia ran it and ...

Mm-hm.

Male voice: ... on both of us while she's running Bill.

Male voice: I got sort of the opposite effect the first couple of times ...

And where were you throwing this material? You were saying that there was an interior perimeter.

Male voice: Well, first when I started out, there was - as far as I could think, I put a shell there. It seemed to be as far as I could think. And after I'd run about two cycles on that, I came to the realization that there was space beyond there.

Who was auditing him?

Male voice: And I was looking at it from the outside and he said, "as far as you can think" again, so I pushed it out to the edge where there wasn't any more outside.

This is not Perimeter Processing. You just think it outside toward in, from as far out as you can think. And what you were doing was throwing a shell out there and bouncing them against the interior of the shell and you did not, at any moment, abandon your exterior force screen. He was audited straight through with his screens up. Whereas the whole process is simply designed to get outside the furthest sphere and think inward toward the preclear. And that is the process - 360-degree sphere. We get that now? Do you see how that could be?

Male voice: Yeah.

All right. Now, you do this for me, just where you are there.

Think out as far as there is anything and have the thought come back toward you and explode.

You do that? Difficult?

Male voice: Seem to. I got the limiting sphere again and then had to...

All right. Well, now, put one outside the limiting sphere and have it bump.

Male voice: There was one. It came in and exploded on the outside of this sphere first or something.

See? Now, we understand something about this. You're making the guy go outside of his last defense ramparts and blow himself in. And he didn't get the dwindling-perimeter effect.

Now, there is the test of this process. If the preclear isn't doing it right, if the preclear isn't doing Perimeter Processing, he doesn't get the dwindling perimeter; it gets smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller.

Now, did anybody... What's the matter?

Male voice: Mine collapsed a couple times.

Sure. Sure.

Female voice: Then it got bigger, didn't it?

Male voice: Yeah.

It also got bigger?

Male voice: Well, it didn't get bigger steadily. It collapsed; then sometimes I'd be working along for a while with it kind of, more or less, one size, and then it'd get suddenly bigger and then it'd collapse.

Well, now, if you had a picture of this thing, you would get the most outside one - this is just a highly stylized picture; this isn't what it looks like - it's an irregular blob, not a sphere. And when you get all the way outside, you would say, "Here's a sphere." Now, the preclear is in the center of the sphere - you didn't put him there; he just is there - irregular blob.

All right. Now, he throws a thought out there, simply the idea or the concept, that there's - way out there beyond anything he can contact - there's an explosion. He's got the idea, see, just the idea there's an explosion out there. Then there's the idea all the way around him, there's explosions out there. That's all - just the idea.

Now, those explosions, the idea is that they're coming back and hitting the blob that he's in.

Male voice: It's not necessary to get clean mock-ups of it?

No. What you're operating with, with a preclear who can get clean mockups and yet who is practically in an insulated mass - what you're operating with there is he has a zone of operation which he has established for himself In order to blow up this zone of oper- in order to get the case anyplace, you got to blow up this zone of operation. And so you just get outside the zone of operation.

And the way you do that is, as far as you can think out there that there could be an explosion, and that this explosion is not necessarily, but probably is, coming back this way. You see? As far as - in his viewpoint he's seeing a lot of this current coming back this way - pam! - as far as he can think of an explosion happening. You see? Now, as you do that, then, you get a dwindling perimeter.

Now, it goes on a little experience in this line, there is another one in there that will quite often crop up and this one is a tough one, because it's kind of the center of the whole works, and that is blanks. You get the pc putting blanks out like that, as far as he can think that there might be a blank out there. See, you're not asking him to be certain there is a blank but you're asking him to be certain that he thought there was a blank out there. Get that last little line; that's the way you get the certainty into it. "Are you certain you thought there was one?"

"Yup!" See? He can be certain there's a concept sitting there.

You throw these explosions around, then you think - he thinks of nothing being out there. Every once in a while it'll occur to him, "Well, hell yes. There's nothing but space out there. We're already thinking beyond the limit of Earth. And there's nothing but a vacuum out there. Sure, there's nothing out there. Well, no, that isn't really nothing. That's a kind of a vacuum; that's different. Huh." And it'll get him figuring a little bit on the thing. But you're not interested in whether he figures or doesn't figure, you just keep him working.

So he puts nothing there, a 360-degree sphere and then he puts black explosions as far as he can think of a black explosion happening. Of course, he gets very puzzled about whether a black explosion is a black explosion. But you ask him, "Now, what would happen if it was perfectly dark and you couldn't feel anything and there was a black explosion occurred? It had no light in it and it was - happened in complete darkness and you weren't asked to feel it?" Fellow said, "Well, sure. Ha-ha! A black explosion, of course."

You say, "All right, that's a black explosion as far as you're concerned."

A little bit later these things get quite uproarious. But he could get a black explosion at that level and be content that he has said there was a black explosion there. He's happy about it. He's quite certain he said that there was, and of course, is observational, why, there must have been because he couldn't observe it. Simple.

Now, the next thing you'd get on a 360-degree sphere, in the same way - outside the sphere coming back in - is nothing.

And the very next thing you get would be vacuums - 360-degree sphere of vacuums - vacuums out there! And this time he suddenly gets the idea "You know, there is a vacuum out there." And "ruh-ruh," he doesn't like that.

And you get somebody who has been all mixed up in space opera and he has a picnic promptly. Because he possibly takes off twenty-five space helmets and throws them away. And he's trying to hold himself into spacesuits but the smell is bad in the spacesuit - so you don't want to be bad in a spacesuit, and he wants to throw it away, and... He's all confused. Because the instant that a hole occurs in a helmet or a spacesuit - sorry to ring in space opera on you so often, but this is where it occurs. The second that you let a hole get in one - somebody shoots a hole in a helmet - why, space goes thuuup! And here you have a contest whereby the fellow is trying to hold the energy in and space is trying to take it away. And that's why a fellow is afraid of ridicule, because space will take all of his energies away. All right.

And after you've done that you can throw in vacuums and then nothing again. And then throw in blanks and then throw nothing in. And you've just about done it with the whole thing. But he'll get the distinguishing factor, the difference between nothing and the blank.

What's a blank? Well, that's up to him. Actually, I'll tell you what a blank is: A blank is just a translucent "I'm not here. And I don't want any”. The postulates "I'm not here," "I don't want any," "Nothing can come in," "Go away," and so forth, all come under the heading of blank. See, "I don't want any"

And of course, that is a primary characteristic of anybody who is in an occluded state, is "I don't want any." "No buyer here!"

And you ask him to run a process - and he knows he'd like to get out of this mess - but you ask him to run a process that has to do with anything vaguely resembling the MEST universe and away we go, promptly. He isn't going to buy anything.

You start running this thing called a blank, outside the outermost sphere which he could possibly manage to hold on to, and here we'd have it, you see - blanks. He finds out a blank is different than nothing.

The component parts of this universe happen to be black clouds, white clouds, which is black particles, white particles, no particles, vacuums and nothing - just nothing of nothing.

Now, this translates, of course, in terms of actions, into white explosions (or colored explosions), black explosions, vacuums and nothing. But the thetan has an extra one - blank. The closest thing you see to a blank here in this universe is plastic, white plastic. That's probably why you don't like that funny, crinkly white plastic they very often put out as bed sheet, bed covers and things like that; it's a blank.

And, of course, it's - they've put it out so as it's a safety cover over mattresses and over things like this which is letting the mattress say, "I don't want any."

Now, you understand this a little bit better? Now, the subjective reality on this is all that you get; it's all we want.

Now, did anybody get the passing idea, while this was being run on him, of what he might be in? I'm not asking that you shouldn't adjudicate it. Did you get any better idea of where you were?

Male voice: Well, I already knew about that.

You already knew about that. Did it confirm it?

Male voice: Sure.

Mm-hm.

Male voice: In that in that twenty minutes, the whole thing came right into my body.

Mm-hm.

Male voice: And I went into home universe.

Mm-hm.

All right. Just as I say - Perimeter Processing - it has a great many variations, any type of process like this. But remember, the central idea of it is that there's a center of a thinking machine; your pc is in the middle of what he thinks is necessary as the thinking machine. And he's trying to chew himself out from the center to the edge; you see, the pc, who is occluded, is trying to chew his way from the center of this mass of energy out to the outside. He can't do that any more than a man who is in the middle of a cave-in can dig himself out. Because every time he digs he just gets more particles on him, see? So the best way to make him take it apart is to go outside and work in toward himself. This was a great surprise after a while. This is a long process; but it's a short process, sometimes, in terms of dividends.

He goes outside the mountain and blows the mountain down. And the next thing you know, why, he's out of the cave. Simple. All he has to do is remove the mountain from the outside, and he, in the cave, is out of the mountain. But if you leave him in the middle and process what's in the middle, you'll only process thoughts and concepts and keep caving everything in on him.

Now, people right here have enough reality on running concepts to know that concepts can change a person's mind, make him more sane, straighten out things with him and do a lot of things like that, but they just don't seem to get rid of any energy. That's true, isn't it?

Well, nobody had an idea of what the character of this thing was that he was sitting in. Did anybody get an idea of that while he was running Perimeter Processing? Nobody did?

Male voice: I got a funny visio of - like the impression that I got was that here is my whole track and leading all the way into the center.

Mm-hm.

Male voice: To me it's like two oyster shells.

Mm-hm.

Male voice: Kind of terraced.

Mm-hm.

Female voice: He said he was in the middle of an explosion.

Male voice: It was - I thought it was at first - it was a sphere, but I know it's not. And it's not - I'm not in the middle of it, either.

What do you suppose you might be in, with all that occlusion there? What do you suppose - what do you suppose you might be in?

Female voice: I had a warm feeling myself

Male voice: Some people might call it ...

Female voice: A peace feeling.

Male voice: Some people might call it Earth, kind of.

Yeah. What do you suppose it is?

Male voice: Well, uh ...

You see, it's a very simple thing; it's just a geographical location of a thetan. Where is the item? The item: one mass of energy in which he is enclosed. Where is it?

Male voice: Where is it?

Yeah, where is it? Not what is it. It's just a mass of energy, but where is it? That's the main idea.

Male voice: Right here.

Right here. Your conviction that it was right here with you became greater as you ran it?

Male voice: No. Sometimes I'd have a hard time maintaining a viewpoint as being in the center of it.

Mmm.

Male voice: But I stuck with it.

Mmm.

Male voice: And-uh-the reason is because I wouldn't - I tried it once or twice...

Yeah.

Male voice: ... and then I kind of felt, well, now, if I can get it out in front of me that's all very well as long as the body goes with it. But it didn't, so I...

Oh! This thing and the body have to coincide.

Male voice: No, they don't have to coincide. But the...

If the - if the body went with it, that was all right.

Male voice: Yeah, that would be all right, because then I would truly be on the outside of it.

This is in the body.

Male voice: No, it's not; it's in front of the body.

This mass?

Male voice: The edge of it is right here.

Yeah.

Male voice: It's over here.

Did solutions for this or thoughts that you might do this and that about it come through while you were processing?

Male voice: No.

Didn't process up toward a solution.

Male voice: No, I ...

.. on this?

But there was an impulse that if you get out of it that you're stuck with it. Is that right?

Male voice: No. I figured this way; I did this much figuring: That according to what you said in the lecture, you're supposed to run it from the center; that is, be in the center of it and have the explosions all around a 360-degree sphere. That's what I did.

Mm-hm.

Male voice: But there was - for a little while there it was something of a struggle to maintain that viewpoint. I caught myself when I would be - supposed to be making explosions, etc., behind me, well, I'd be looking at them out in front of me, so to speak.

Mm-hm.

Male voice: If I could've seen them, I'd have been looking at them; I mean, I'd get this kind of vision out in front of me instead of in the back.

That's right. Well, that's the ultimate effect of the process. Let's not forget that. That's the ultimate effect of the process, is simply that that happens.

Male voice: Gee - whiz! That happened in fifteen or twenty minutes.

Okay.

Male voice: Yeah, the same way with me.

Mm-hm.

Male voice: I got the feeling a couple of times of looking down on this going on. I'd have to put myself back in the center.

But as you ran it a great deal more this stopped happening?

Male voice: I made it stop happening.

Okay, now you can unmake it stop happening.

Male voice: Well, that's easy; that's real easy.

Okay. Because that's what you're trying to do.

Now, here we're running up against a problem. The problem is where instruction and processing cross and interfere with each other. You see how this is?

Your instruction is to have the pc run it from the center of the thing and there was no further instruction as to what might happen, you see, because that would be a prediction of what would happen for the pcs it was being run on.

Now, the pcs being very - being under instruction on a thing, of course, make the same process continue to happen sort of with a force of will.

The automaticity which ensues on this process is, as the more they run it - it doesn't matter, because it's - you can't damage this process; if it's run right, you just can't damage it. So whether the fellow changes his mind back or not, if he just kept running it, his force of will to stay in the center of it would get less and less sensible to him and he'd just blow.

I've had people all of a sudden wake up to the fact that they had been in front of themselves for a long time and wake up to the fact that they - it was almost impossible to operate this thing. And I've had a PC say very complainingly to me, "Well, it's impossible to be in the center of that and operate those explosions outside of it. It's not impossible, but it's almost impossible! And why can't I just stay on the outside of this and blow it up! What you're telling me to do is nonsense now!"

And I have, just as a test - have said, "Well, now, no, no, no. Now, you stay in the center of that thing, and you keep running that that way." And the fellow finally said, "Well, damn it! There's nothing to be in the center of!" Well, I said, "Why don't you be in the center of your head then?" Well, that's all right. But that didn't seem sensible either. That wasn't a good place to be.

All right. That's Perimeter Processing. The way it works - the same manifestations.

Well, the number of hours that Perimeter Processing has to be worked on somebody is not forecastable. I could give you, approximately - order of magnitude-it'd be somewhere in the neighborhood of ten, fifteen, twenty hours for your real rough, rough, rough, rough case.

We've got a case whose ridges are black and of about the same constituency as glass. There is one kicking around. He is the champion PC of all time. He is a capitalist. But boy - he's not a capitalist; he's probably a cross between that and entrepreneur but he's - boy, that guy - that guy had a couple of the best auditors we had chipping away on him with - I guess three, all told - with concrete busters and drills and dynamite and so forth. And it was just chip away, chip away. Well, now this process that I've just given you is an intensely workable process for such a guy.

Now, you can make the process complicated if he starts getting bored with it, just as a process, and you can start mocking up hordes of people underneath all this mass admiring what he's doing as he does all this. And, of course, you get a double-barreled shot at it. What's he sitting in? Technically, what we know about the mind and about the manifestations of energy, what is he sitting in?

Male voice: A ridge.

A ridge. When a PC is flying around and having a good time for himself and throwing explosions around, every once in a while you take somebody who exteriorizes at about Step III or Step II, and oh whee! Everything is fine, see? And this fellow isn't yet settled on the subject of the energy he has or can use. And he will run into an explosion. And he will simply go immediately into apathy and he will stay there for days if you don't process him.

You see, he wasn't made into a Step I, he was just exteriorized at II or III, worked a little bit at this and then not worked very well, you see, afterwards. And then he starts flying around on his own; the next thing you know, he runs into a ridge or something which explodes. And that explosion carries enough force at him so that he sinks into apathy about the whole thing. And you'd swear to Pete you had just run into a very resistive V when you start to process him again. And Perimeter Processing will fish him out of it because all he did was run into one of his own ridges.

Now, his own energy is much too thick and heavy for him to handle, so he starts running in and out of his head, you see? And he - this time when he backs out of his head it's all just fine but he's still very prone to use beams. And the more beams he uses, the more trouble he is going to get into, because when he starts using beams inside the body, the beams themselves are too short.

A very short beam used against the body, of very heavy energy, brings about the manifestation that we Call degradation. That's just too close up to look, you see? So he's using effort. And it's so low on the effort band that it's a sort of an effort apathy. Do you get the idea? And that's degradation. He'll really get that sensation.

Sometimes you'll get the happy notion "Well, gee-whiz, there's the fellow sitting right in his head there; why don't we just ask him - he's got a bad heart or something - we'll ask him to reach out from the center of his head and have him patch up the heart. See, we can't get him out of his body, but he has some sort of an idea of what this is all about. Just reach down and patch up what's wrong with the heart there." He will! And all of a sudden go nyuh! Nuhh-rahh!

"What's the matter?"

"I don't know. I just feel awfully degraded."

See, you've asked him to put out energy on too short a distance. And he put out the energy on that short a distance and it's just like glue or it's like - it's something horrible, to him. And the wavelength of it is very bad and he's just completely miscalculated it and he goes into degradation.

Now, you won't get that fellow to emit another beam of energy till you've turned around and run something on the order of Six Steps to Better Beingness or Perimeter Processing on it. Fish him out. See?

Now, the fellows every once in a while will run into the ridge and stick. That's actually all a theta trap is.

Why do you suppose fellows put up ridges around themselves full of glue and pastry? Hm? Protective mechanisms - he's afraid somebody else will pick up the body.

People have gotten quite leery of picking up other people's bodies with great ease. And some of your mystics and faith healers who start exhibiting energy and very early in the game were flying around very madly and they were doing what they describe in a book, "astral walking," which is some kind of an impression of being someplace.

"Astral walking" is putting up a - astral walking is being at A, putting a viewpoint at B and then moving B into the vicinity of a scene C. Oh, you could draw that on a piece of paper; you'd see what it is. It's being at A, putting up a viewpoint at B, in order to view a scene C. And sometimes it's even more complex than that; they will sometimes read the mind of the person who is being at A, the astral walker is making somebody else do the astral walking and is then getting the impressions of the astral walker. Do you see that? Ah, this is elementary witchcraft - elementary magic. Huh?

Male voice: Is it complicated?

It is; it's very complicated. But astral walking hasn't any great clarity either; you can get the faintest, little impressions and somebody says they're astral walking.

Now, you can make your Pc astral walk anytime you want. You can take a resistive V and tell him to drag scenery under him, and half the time he's dragging facsimiles. And he just gets tired finally of drag - that whole process depends upon the fact that he gets tired of dragging the facsimiles under him and eventually drags the real thing under him. If you never call it to his attention what he's doing he'll eventually figure it out. It's only valid as long as he figures it out.

"Well, you know, I..." he said, "you know, very early while I was doing this I wasn't dragging Saint Paul's Cathedral under me; I was dragging picture postcards of it, really, what I realize now. But at first it was awfully real; I really thought I was dragging that under me. I realize now that I wasn't, because I'm hanging on, right this minute, to the cross at Saint Paul's Cathedral, and it's cold up here." See?

All right. When we get into exteriorization, people are afraid of having other people come along and swipe the body, so they just hang up masses of glue, and so forth. And then one fine day you, as an auditor, come along and say they ought to be out of their head.

Well, this is a terrible overt act on their own part to set up things and trap thetans and protect themselves this way, and so forth. And so, they say, "Well, let's see. All right, I will do that." And they start to move, and "Oh! Wait a minute." They're stuck in a ridge, that's all. They're somewhere around the body or in the head or someplace or another.

But sometimes they are not in the body. Sometimes they are at inverted 7 or inverted 8 and you start running them and they're caught in an actual theta trap someplace else and projecting themselves here and running the body here.

Now, get the analogy between this and astral walking.

Now, you know how faint and flimsy and unreal astral walking might be if you were kind of poor at putting up viewpoints and looking with them? I mean, you put up an anchor point out here eight miles. You can do this right now; you can put up an anchor point out here on the highway and see the state of the traffic. Just put an anchor point over the highway out here and take a look at it.

But if a person isn't doing too well, that's pretty flimsy to him and it has no great reality. Now, you want to know what this feeling of unreality is which comes over your pcs? They're walking around and they're going through life and they're doing all this and all that but it's sort of unreal. And the walls don't look quite real and the floors not quite real and they don't think their emotions are very real. And they're - everything is kind of artificial and they feel detached from everything and they can't get any real emotion about anything. They're on the inverted level to such a degree and so forcefully that they're doing this trick with the body. The body is an anchor point which they have put out which is looking at scene C. See? You want to know what unreality is; there's the mechanism behind it.

They are at A, without being able to admit, even to themselves, they're at A, and they've got a body at B, carrying one of their anchor points, which is the anchor point, and it is looking at scene C. And that is what - you look at a pc and sometimes, very amusingly, you will think that he is there and that he is functioning and he is looking at things; and he is not at all. He's projected out of some cave up on Arcturus or he's being - he's projecting himself from the middle of some theta trap that he knows he can't get out of.

And once in a while you'll start to run Perimeter Processing on somebody and he sighs deeply and says, "Well, I'll try." And he chips and pounds away and pounds away. And if you just notice he's just having a hell of a time of it, you can be sure of something: he's trying to knock together a theta trap from the outside.

But this technique knocks theta traps apart. If carried on long enough, it will destroy a theta trap. So it's a very handy one to know, isn't it?

The next time, if you were sailing around and you got stuck on a post or you got stuck up in a theta trap someplace or another, you just start banging away on the perimeter of the widest outside zone that you can find and you'll come off the theta trap.

If you continue to exude energy from where you are, at the post you're stuck to, it is merely fixed up as an echo, so it echoes every wavelength that you put out.

Well, if you're making sure that you're postulating wavelengths which are a long way from the post, you will come off of the post, because you're not activating it. The only reason you're staying on the post, you see, is because you're using energy to push the post away from you.

They have on the whole track - para-Scientology - you have, on the whole track, many instances of posts. And you have a post. And this post is sitting on the - on something or other, and here it is, just as nice as you please. And it has for its call-up or something like that, it'll have some sort of a - of a beacon or something on it. And you'll say, "Gee, that's pretty. I wonder what that is?" Or as you pass by it, it will catch some sort of an echo from you and you'll say, "Gee, I know somebody over there. Must be a friend of mine," something like that. And so you put out a beam which is inquiring. And then the next thing you know, you hit this beam out again, and gee-whiz, it sort of kicks a beam back at you, and you say, "Well, that damn thing!" And you kick another beam at it and it kicks a beam at you and you kick a beam at it and it kicks a beam at you and you kick a beam at it and all of a sudden pong! There you are; and you're right straight on top of a big metal post or into a metal basket.

And every time you put out any energy or a beam to give it a shove, you're putting it out at too close a distance, so that you feel degraded. There isn't any degradation on the post at all. You just have this emotion of "Well, my energy is too thick," because it's echoing back at you, you see; it's mockery.

You put out one; it puts out one. You put out one; it puts out one. You put a very short beam out; it puts a very short beam out. So your heaviest power and force and the most condensed energy that you can level at it is all for naught and you're stuck on the post.

So, what's the answer? As you sit there contemplating your sins, you should be able to recall there are methods of getting off theta traps. And the way to do it is Perimeter Processing, explosions and nothing, and black explosions and nothing, and vacuums and nothing, and blanks and nothing, and explosions and nothing.

Where? Run by you from way outside the widest sphere which you can contact, from outside this sphere in towards you.

And it will give you enough motivators of people bombarding you for you to come up Tone Scale and admit that you have a right to get off the post; this is what it amounts to.

The next thing you know, however, you'll be drifting some distance from the post. Well, there's no reason to be afraid of the post, because fear itself is a method of dispersing. And so you start dispersing and this post will start dispersing; you'll think this would throw you off of it. No, no. This just keeps you connected electrically with it.

I hate to give you the impression that you're a flock of electric eels. But you're worse than that; you're electric eels without any bodies.

And when you - when you run into ridges - if you have trapped a lot of thetans - and you put this ridge up with the full intentions of trapping "any goddamn thetan that comes in here and tries to take this body. You aren't going to take this away from me."

See? This keys in at a moment of loss. You've got - you had a janitor for a long time. You're very attached to this janitor because he kept the floors so clean, and so forth. And all of a sudden the people next-door, or something, stole this janitor. You didn't have the janitor anymore or something like that. He goes away.

Well now, this, on a tiny, little gradient scale, is you have lost a body. Somebody took it. Well, this makes you very defensive and your immediate reaction is to say, "Uh-uh. Nah. They're not going to take my body too!" So you promptly throw up an occlusive screen around yourself, and then, you darned fool, you walk into it!

But it had an overt purpose, so immediately the motivator must follow. When you have lost a girl, a guy, a car, anything to which you were dearly attached - get that word attached - anything to which you were dearly attached, your next thought, immediately after that - if you care to lock-scan slow motion on pcs someday you'll find this very easily; lock scanning slow motion is a wonderful method of recovering intent. What is the actual intent? You just have them go over it and now scan it slowly and scan it slowly and scan it slowly and you get the actual intent.

All right, the actual intent, then, is to preserve yourself from being lost too. Because you don't have any deed, no bill of sale, there isn't anything registered down here at the courthouse which gives you the actual right to this body. The body has all the rights and the deeds and the bills of sale and the stamps and the fingerprints; you don't have any. And the fact that it's identified doesn't mean that you are the owner.

And you have the idea that it's very easy for this body simply to walk off - for you to walk out and it to walk off and then somebody else will be going down the street saying, "My name's Sullivan," and look around and use what ridges are there and activate these ridges and put up a terrific show of this. And what do you know, there's actual instances of this occur every time you turn around.

Some fellow by the name of Bill Jones all of a sudden is missing from his home. And we find him two months later having married and living with some girl called Agnes Sharp. Okay. Living with Agnes Sharp, married, and so on. But he was already married. But he says his name now is Smith. And everybody says, "Well, it's a case of amnesia undoubtedly brought about by a blow." Sure. Some thetan slides in and revives a dead body for that effect.

Somebody is unconscious - maybe he gets knocked unconscious, see? Well, this makes it possible for him to be knocked unconscious, so he exteriorizes. He - or it's a dental operation, or it's a surgical operation or it's an electric shock or it's something, you see? So he exteriorizes. The thetan who owns the body says, "Poor old body; it's dead! To hell with it anyhow; it's awful boring in Mobile, Alabama," and simply goes back through the screens.

Well, there's the body; it's not dead. But it hasn't got a spirit in it. Another thetan will sail into it and say, "Boy, oh, boy! Oh, boy! Oh, boy!"

Well, he doesn't quite - when he isn't able to pick up the proper answers out of the bank immediately, the best thing for him to do is simply load it - find out if there's some money in its pockets and load it on board a bus and take it to another town or some place, and quick. And give it any name he thinks of and engage it in any kind of a business or skill he can suddenly give it. And get it married in a hurry or do something with it. And you get this terrific shift.

Well, now this goes on in other fashions. This goes on otherwise. It's a spooky universe actually. This can go on and is the - probably the only reason why there is - once in a blue moon or a green moon - the only reason why there is any success with ECT or with surgical operations. The guy comes out of it and he's not aberrated so much anymore. He has a different personality pattern. Well, hell, the thetan who was in there got tired of all this and left! Somebody else picked up the body, and so on.

Don't follow on the immediate assumption that every pc you have, in other words, picked up this body at birth. You may have a pc who picked up the body, all right, but not at birth.

And I found a pc one time who had had seven different thetans and each one had in his own turn left. Seven different thetans. And his life broke down into seven extremely marked, different periods. Each period had its own skill and its own personality. And this is very puzzling to some psychiatrists when they examine somebody's life track.

And now you have somebody - you have this problem of the person who's being run by seven different thetans simultaneously; he turns over various personalities. These thetans are all loopy and they've just got a body amongst them; it's a club. Now, once in a while - I think Morton Prince wrote a book on a girl which describes this condition beautifully.

Just because we are all agreed that this and that is the case in this cultural level is no reason that it's true - no reason at all.

Now, I'm not trying to run bogymen in on you, because the condition is not common, but it'll happen often enough for you to be very interested.

Now, the - we got a pc present who said, "I..." told me one day, "You know," he said, "I didn't pick up this body at birth; picked this - this body was about two and a half years old when I picked it up. A little boy fell down and hit a stone, I came along and pingo, here we go." See? Kid fractured his skull or something of the sort and that thetan probably said, "Well, to hell with this," or something of the sort, and left. Or maybe didn't leave; maybe hung around in a subordinate role waiting for the body to knock off.

You've got an enormous number of variable factors which can occur. What we have tried to do here and the reason for all of the SOPs, one after the other, is try to get the technique which embraced and remedied all factors and all composites with a minimum of difficulty for the auditor, so that he didn't have to discover the actual condition in order to remedy the condition which he hadn't discovered; which necessitated a modus operandi which was embracive on the entire universe and some of it outside this universe.

Now, when we have this solved, you have much easier processing. Because every now and then you're going to get some case that just can't admit, to himself or to anybody else, what happened. Can't admit it, even to himself, because then he would know and then he wouldn't act human; then he wouldn't act normal and he might be locked up or something of the sort. So he just puts up this complete human pattern. And he thinks human beings are supposed to be this way and this way and this way; and you find out that this is everything he's exhibiting. In back of this is complete artificiality; he hasn't any conviction on what he's doing or anything else.

Well, normally, such people are doing extensional direction. They're at - they're at geographical position A with an anchor point at geographical position B, viewing scene C and going through actions in scene C, which makes everything pretty thin and pretty unreal to them.

Well, when a thetan has been really knocked around for a long time and his disappointments are great and so on, he will start taking the most unusual precautions. Now, what you need is techniques which knock apart these very unusual precautions.

You know, the US Navy - great organization - in 1896 they were - had an appropriation and laid the plans for the building of a full-rigged ship. This was only, I think, thirty, thirty-four years after iron ships had proven beyond any doubt that this was the type of vessel which should be employed by navies. And they also had at this time - nearly the entire navy was composed of iron ships; Charleston, and some of the other old fellows, I think the Oregon, and so on, were built somewhere along in there.

Anyway, they were beautifully geared up to fight the War of 1812. They were actually laying down plans there by which this... Some congressman got wind of this and screamed like mad and said, "For what?" They said, "Well, for line service, of course." Somebody tried to think of a reason why they needed a full-rigged ship and this hadn't been supplied with the blueprints, so they didn't build it.

The army today - the army, right this minute - is gearing itself up beautifully to fight the war of 1941-1945. And if left to their own devices and if not pushed about by exterior engineers and public opinion, the army would simply do that; they would build up the exact tanks that were the most successful in that war and they would build up the exact rifles and they wouldn't change a thing.

Now, the air force is very progressive because it has high motion and it has to go into fast motion so it's liable to change its equipment. Well, it's changing its equipments fast enough right now to break any taxpayer. It's trying to junk its equipment before it gets on the assembly line and this is hard to do. I was up at one of these plants one day and saw an officer there and he kept going around at the beginning of the assembly line, you know, where the fellow puts a chalk mark right there. And I thought at any moment this officer was going to blow his stack because he couldn't get that chalk mark wiped out. I mean, if he could just have wiped out the chalk mark, you see, before the chalk mark was down, he could have junked the plane and put a new plane on the line and we would've had a more modern air force. But he wasn't able to do this.

They're always in production several years late. The models which are being flown right this moment over any continent where our air force flies, the models which are in existence, would surprise you; they're good World War II planes. That's what they're flying. They're flying these - built long afterwards you understand, but that's their - built after the war and in good condition, and so forth - but that's their level of performance.

We keep reading about these Sabre jets and thundermugs and other craft, and these doggone things are, to a large degree, intensely experimental. So it breaks the taxpayer to keep doing this sort of thing and it puts out a lot of ingenuity, and see, nobody gets any agreement on it.

It's like what we've been doing in Scientology. We've been rushing forward in Dianetics and Scientology at a mad rate in order to pick up to production model. We've done a pretty good job in picking up to production model while we were in production but it was quite a rush in order to do it.

We had to find out all the factors that were involved and get a technique which resolved all these factors. Now, we haven't got the ultimate technique; we've got a technique which embraces all these factors.

You're not going to find now - I'm very certain, you're not going to find now - sudden wild variables in the cases. I'm telling you some of the variables that could be in a case, but you see immediately that as you're processing here these factors are, to a large degree, taken care of with the processes. The processes which we're using - exteriorization and so forth - naturally take care of these things.

Now, a preclear will worry sometimes. You say, "Be three feet back of your head," and he can't do it, and he'll worry about getting out himself because he's sure there are other thetans around him. Sure enough there may be, caught in some of the ridges; there may be, you see? And so he's worried about, "Well, now, if I got out of the body - if I got out of the body, you see, I'd lose my identity, because I wouldn't know which one was I." Yeah, they really will worry about that.

"Well, let's see. There's seven entities and one of these is me and which one is me? I'm not quite sure. And if I really exteriorized, I wouldn't then know because I can't look at me." See what a loopy one he's on; he's on an inverted 1 like mad. Of course, an inverted 1 is lost way back someplace.

But you see, if you'll explain it to him when he starts worrying about this, and he - you'll find a preclear tell you about this.

You say, "Now look. You see, we take six - we take eight balloons - eight circus balloons - and we mark an X on one of them. All right. Now, we bring all these balloons down together so you really can't distinguish the X. And you look over the tops of all these balloons and one of those balloons is yourself. Well, you can't quite tell which balloon is you because the X is down below mixed up with the balloons. But now we let them go free and seven balloons drift away leaving one balloon, but that's you. You haven't got to worry about it, because the second you're free, these other balloons aren't you. And you know that now."

Well, he's in there kicking around and bossing a body and bossing entities and doing all sorts of weird and conglomerate operations. And he gets his identity mixed up: he can be an entity; he can be a bedpost; he can be this; he can be that. You get him out of his head, he's like the eighth balloon; he just drifts up free. He knows who he is. That's the first time he ever gets this knowledge, when he starts blowing free out of the body. So here are all these complexities.

Now, we'll look at this problem I was telling you about of getting on a post and then prying yourself off the post. How do you get off a post?

A post is agglutinous. It reechoes against you with your own wavelength and you get to a point finally where you can't tell the difference between yourself and a post. And a guy in an insane asylum who is confusing himself with one of the bedposts is simply redramatizing one of these darned post theta traps; that's all he's doing. He's sure he's the post. All right.

Now, what the hell do you think a human body is? And the actual truth of the matter is, the problem is just that simple!

For a resistive V or a IV or a III, the human body is operating exactly like a theta trap. It has him. It reechoes against him. It attracts him with its aesthetics. It furnishes him with sensation if he puts the sensation out. And the only way he can be happy about it is to pretend that he is the body, just as, on a theta trap, people pretend they are the post.

Your problem in freeing an individual from a body can be the same problem as taking an individual off of a post - off of a theta trap - post-type trap.

Taking an individual out of the body is that problem. And there is another type trap which is the - you might say - the energy trap where he is trapped inside of a mass.

Well, the thetan caught in one of his own ridges is actually in just sort of - such a trap; he's just caught in a mass - mass of energy. And he's been in enough traps and knew he couldn't get out of those and this is still hanging around on the track and he put the ridge up there probably, in the first place, to catch somebody else and it caught him. People always get a kick out of "the biter bit." Well, this is "the biter bit"; he got too defensive and it trapped him.

Anyway, he's in, then, two types of traps: he's in a post-type trap and an energy-type trap the same way.

An energy-type trap is quite interesting. Ordinarily an energy-type trap has a very aesthetic facade. The thetan walks into the front of the entrance and he runs into vast quantities of white energy, which is quite pleasant. But as he thrashes around he goes right straight on down and the next thing you know he's mired down into black energy and it's very agglutinous and he can't get out of it easily. And this is a theta trap. It's got an aesthetic that leads him in, whether it's a musical aesthetic or a visio aesthetic and it starts in with white energy and winds up with black energy, and that's a theta trap.

All right, a ridge has this characteristic too. And facsimiles of theta traps are what thetans use in order to mock up ridges which will trap thetans. They're trapping them with the idea that a theta trap is so deadly that if they get into any kind of a situation resembling a theta trap they're trapped and so thetans can protect their own bodies. It's very simple.

It's quite a vicious problem actually: How do you protect a body and keep yourself from being knocked around or knocked off by other thetans? And you'll find your preclear is worried about this problem, although he won't tell you that he is.

Male voice: "How am I going to protect my trap?"

"How am I going to protect my trap?" Yeah.

All right. Now, you'll find somebody will start telling you after you get him half-cleared, "Well, I'm going to find a house and it's going to be up in the mountains someplace and boy, I'm just going to put theta traps all over it. Any thetan that comes in, or anything like that, tries to knock me off or put me away or do anything to me, and so forth, and I'm going to have some kind of a screen over the top of the house so they run into this force screen and try to zap me or zip me or something of the sort, why, they will be very embarrassed."

You'll get this as an ambition and it can be a tremendous ambition.

Well, "the biter bit" is the thetan that you're trying to exteriorize. (1) He knows he can't get off the post because if he puts out energy the post will just put back energy at him. (2) He knows he's in some kind of an energy deposit and he knows he can't get out of energy deposits.

But here is a method of getting out of a theta trap: Perimeter Processing. It's simply the method of getting off of or out of any type of a theta trap. Very simple.

Now, you'll find as he processes this that he'll start to sock beams into the outer screens. All of a sudden he'll start to mount up beams and shoot them in. Let him.

He's found out something; he can use a beam where he's got space, because the beam isn't so much condensed that it's degrading to him. He can't use a beam here, but he's learned that he can put up an anchor point out there and throw a beam from the anchor point. You see that?

So, he can generate energy outside the sphere, back at the sphere and so roast the sphere down.

What is aberration? I gave you a definition of a thinking machine the other day. Aberration is not straight line - something being moved out of a straight line. A beam of energy passing through a mass of energy does not operate in a straight line. If it's going through a thinking machine, it operates at odd and peculiar angles and dives and zips and zaps.

Well, that irregular and erratic course of departure is nothing but aberration. And aberration is nothing but the irregular course of departure of energy going through a mass.