And this is the second lecture of December the 14th 1953, lecture taking place in the evening.

The subject of tonight's lecture is the assignment of cause. Cause and effect is something we've talked about quite a bit. I really don't know whether you have assimilated everything there is to be assimilated on cause and effect or not. There's an awful lot to it.

The first place, there's communication. Communication is built out of cause and effect. That's all it's built out of — it's not built out of anything else but cause and effect.

One end of a line says, "A," and the other end of the line receives it. And cause and effect, in essence, to be operative even vaguely, depends upon duplication. And the modus operandi of cause and effect is duplication. Cause at one end of a communication line puts forward a certain pattern, and at the other end of the communication line, the receipt-point, that pattern should be received.

If this is the case, then you have good communication. If you don't get good duplication, you get very bad communication.

May sound very non sequitur to you, but a person who is very aberrated sexually communicates poorly. Why? They're very short on duplication. Their duplication is aberrated, so they don't communicate well.

Now, if you look up on that chart on the wall, the Chart of Human Evaluation and Dianetic Processing, you will discover that it is plotted immediately against the aberration of cause and effect. How much is the duplication of cause altered at the receipt-point because of an inability to receive? And this in itself is ARC, and that is communication, and that is the dwindling spiral of that chart, and that is how that chart is constructed.

A perfect communication line is one which receives at its receipt-point that which was sent forward at its cause-point. But a perfectly guarded communication line is one which receives nothing at its receipt-point regardless of what is sent at the cause-point. That's a completely guarded line.

There are various ways to aberrate a communication line. I give you an example of this in somebody who jams a communication line. It's very possible to do this.

You with many preclears may consider that you have a preclear who is in communication, and yet you just don't seem to be able to give the preclear a command. Why? Because you have to wait until the preclear is finished talking.

You'll find quite routinely that you will have preclears who require a great deal of care in handling. You won't realize this first off because they are apparently in a good communication state, and yet they're guarding a communication line so thoroughly that nothing is received. They put forth a barrage of words which is intended solely and completely to keep you from being cause. And so as you try to process them, you find yourself fighting through a forest of words. Those things which they are saying are not necessarily sequitur to the problem at all. But they apparently are. And a person who is very good at this leads an auditor on and on and on. And the auditor is only getting in one auditing command every half an hour. That's really bad. It isn't quite as bad — of one auditing command every ten minutes because of this barrage.

But when you've processed such cases, you will readily understand what is meant by a guarded communication, because you get no image at your receipt-point. You are being a cause, and the receipt-point does not take the image. You'll get a discussion, not the image.

If the case is very bad off, you may get a completely non sequitur discussion, and this is a psychotic. Now it's not necessarily an indictment of people who merely guard a receipt-point with communication barrages, because quite often they don't understand. And you as an auditor can then be dealing in terminology or with a language which is, in itself, unreceivable.

You see how that would be? Supposing you used nothing but technical terminology. You could say, "Now what is your postulate? What postulate did you make?"

And the preclear says, "Huh? What are you talking about?"

And you say, "Well, what postulate occurred to you at the time your mother soaked your head in vinegar?"

And he says, "I don't know. She sure did, though — but what do you mean a postulate? Nothing — no postulate occurred to me, nothing happened. She soaked my head in vinegar there — it wasn't in a postulate besides."

And you will find that from that point on, he will get more and more verbose. The more bad terminology which you use — that is, the more incomprehensible terminology which you employ in auditing him — the more verbal your preclear is going to get. Because they put up more and more of a defense barrage around the receipt-point in an effort to keep you from communicating.

Now, this gets so bad off that a person eventually starts to hold up — in a case as it deteriorates — that it can't duplicate and it can't duplicate and it doesn't dare duplicate and so forth, because horrible things might happen to it if it fell into the same image as that cause it met. It might get to a point where the case is holding up the mest universe walls and holding up all the barriers of space and the anchor points and so forth, with a communication barrage. You see they're no longer receiving, they are guarding.

And as a consequence, of course all the walls and all space caves in on them. Because let me assure you that a number of symbols will not hold up a mest wall. They just don't do it very well. Yeah, the symbols are — well, you just take anchor points — anchor points will stay out there or come in, regardless of how many symbols are hung on them or edged toward them.

Now, this is to some degree confusing to anybody who confuses a symbol and a postulate. A postulate is of course that thing which is a directed desire or order or inhibition or enforcement on the part of the individual in the form of an idea, and a symbol is an idea which is cloaked in energy. That's different.

Now, when people are communicating with symbols, such as words, and laying them out into space continually, they have an idea that the space is made rigid by their symbols. You can find this in many, many cases. They think they're holding up the universe with symbols. Symbols won't hold up the universe — nothing holds it up except its own laws. And the idea of a fixed postulate is as good as a person has not had damaged his own idea that he can fix things.

Now, how can you damage that? You can just show him he's wrong often enough so that he after a while will believe that if he puts a postulate in one place, it will actually appear in another place, and so he starts to take precautions about fixing it. And the way he takes precautions about fixing it is throw some energy at it, or connect it or associate it with some postulate which is already stable. So we take a stable postulate and then connect to it a lot of other postulates, and we get immediately not just a system of symbols, we get a system of logic. This in essence is mathematics.

Mathematics has long tied itself with great security to the symbol of zero. Now we begin to inspect zero and we find out that mathematics has been using an unqualified zero. So their logic, mathematically, does not tie down well. And you'll find mathematics uniformly failing when applied to complex problems such as aerodynamics.

It's very interesting that in aerodynamics they have to cut the propeller blade and then send it down to the laboratory to have some mathematician measure it sufficiently to make a formula to fit it. Now he sends that formula to some other factory so that they can build an airplane propeller blade just like that. And the mathematician over at the other factory writes it out very nicely, and draws and replots the curve and does a lot of things with it and sends it down to the shop. And the fellow in the shop there, he has a friend that worked in the first factory, so he just sends over and gets the other blade and makes a cast of it, and makes his blade that way. That's the way they build airplanes. Vrroom!

Mathematics is of very limited usefulness and is, as a matter of fact, not very trustworthy; simply because it is not anchored to anything which is an absolute. If there were an absolute in mathematics, it would be very safe to use mathematics. But until such time as they determine what absolutes they are going to hang what logics to, it is going to continue to be an aberrated subject.

The most trying task of any auditor is to wade through the symbol system of an individual to get the individual to mechanically comply with the auditor's order.

Where a preclear has not had results from SOP 8-C — regardless of what step you're using — within a few minutes, you should immediately assume that your symbol system or his symbol-receipt system is in fault in some fashion or another. He is not doing what you are asking him to do.

He may be very obliging. It isn't how calm a preclear is, it isn't how happy he looks, it's is he doing what you asked him to do?

You'd be surprised how happy some preclear can be when you have told him to hold the two back anchor points of the room — how happy he is to sit there and mock up lilies of the valley and throw them over his right shoulder. They'll do this. Your faith in humanity is never complete until you realize that humanity very seldom guides and is easily directed in the direction which you're trying to direct it.

As an auditor, you have a human being, and you've decided to direct him into a certain technique. Now, the chances of his going easily and continuously into that technique without jumping around, and the chances of his replying to you that he is not doing it perfectly, are quite great. Matter of fact, they're so great that they should be expected by you.

I dare say cases which are holding up here, those that aren't progressing as fast as they should, are hung up on a communication barrier of some sort or another. They might get hung up this way: They hear me — the same case that you're auditing later hears me describe a technique, and he gets a fixed idea as to how it should be run.

And then you, having received another type of an idea on how it should be run, apply it to the case, and the case then realizes that you don't know what you're doing.

Whatever he realizes, all he thinks of is that you don't know what you're doing, merely because he heard it one way, and you're not doing it that way. Never occurs to him he might have heard it wrong. Never occurs to him that you might, in applying the science very widely to what you're doing, and knowing that he was a student in a class which heard this technique, are trying to close in on him sideways as covertly as he would try to avoid it. That might never occur to him either, you see. So this little duel in which you're engaging amounts to a duel, not processing — all because of a communication barrier. And he becomes very distrusting of you as an auditor simply because you didn't audit by the book, some fashion or another.

It's all right not to audit by the book, you know. As many — matter of fact, many times you have to audit sideways from the book, many times you have to, mainly with those people who know the book.

Now I can sit down and audit an auditor and he'd think — he'd think, for the love of Pete, that I was undoubtedly using Sanskrit on him or something. He wouldn't even vaguely recognize what I was doing with him. I would just be running SOP 8-C, but he wouldn't have any recognition of any step that was being run.

How would this be? I would be asking him to put up emotions — emotions in such a way as that he was actually making space with them. And he'd go on putting up these emotions and he'd say he was running that technique and he would actually be making space, and I'd be running a Spacation on him.

That's as covert as the preclear. An auditor should never overlook an opportunity to be as covert as the preclear. (audience laughter)

You get a coincidence now between cause and effect and communication and duplication? You should get this coincidence because it's right there — I mean it's right there to be observed.

If you want a graphic representation of it — and nothing, by the way, I used to think, is true unless it can be graphed in two-dimensional space. Oddly enough, I laid that limiting barrier on my own mathematics very early in the evolution of Dianetics — as a matter of fact, long before it was called Dianetics. And I used to know that something was wrong if I couldn't two-dimensionally graph it, even though I had to demonstrate a third dimension in the graphing. If it couldn't stand on a two-dimensional plane, it was not true. There was something too complicated about it.

This is — I'm going to show you this right now. You have your problem of space. Now, a problem of space can be laid out to demonstrate a third dimension on a two-dimensional plane. You can demonstrate any such problem of space. All right.

Now let's take a look at cause and effect, and see that cause and effect is graphable on a two-dimensional plane. We draw a diagonal line on a piece of paper, and we make — mark one end of this line C and the other end of the line E. And we draw a vertical — small vertical line at C, and then draw a number of dotted lines matching it all the way down, perpendicular to the first line. And we get these little dotted lines which are images of this first vertical line we drew in front of C, and we then draw another solid line down there at E.

And we mark this little vertical line which stood up there at C — we mark this little vertical line, P-1. And then we mark down at E, P-2. Position 1, position 2. There we have a picture of a communication system. We also have a picture of where your preclear is going to be found. He is somewhere on this slant line between C and E. He is at one of these little dotted-line positions. He is as far from cause or as far from effect as he cannot cause or as he cannot be affected.

The least optimum position to occupy is exactly in the center between C and E — where a person cannot be cause but isn't effect, where he isn't effect but cannot be cause. And he sits there in the center. And that's immobility, and that's "cannot duplicate." He must prevent cause and prevent effect, he must prevent everything. He is, in essence, not a preclear, but a communication particle. He would be very happy if you put a stamp on him and glued his sweater over his head and dropped him in a mailbox. He actually thinks of himself as a communication particle.

Now, if you notice that little graph, that's a very easy graph to understand. And that's as easy as Scientology is to understand today.

What are we trying to do? We're trying to take the preclear and move his position on this slant line between C and E, up toward C, and make it possible for him to be at E without concern. We're going to move his chronic position, his stable position, up toward C from wherever it is.

Now, those little vertical dotted lines that you have there, these little dotted lines are, each one — if you marked in nine of them, you would get about the same number of inversions as there are on a case.

Male voice: Nine?

That's inversion, just about nine. You mark nine little lines, that gives you ten gradients.

A human being can invert about ten times. And we get the DEI cycle, the cycle of action, the input-output and so forth, back and forth, before a person really starts down markedly — well, you get to number 1. Position number 1 ordinarily happens when he's quite young — very young, infant. Position number 2 happens in childhood. Position number 3 happens before puberty. Position 4 happens about at puberty. Then there's position 5, and you've got the teenage position. And then we go up to the young adult at about 6. This person is getting closer and closer and closer to effect. When this person is about thirty-one, thirty-two, we get him at about position 7. About forty-two to forty-five, we get another inversion which is about at position 8, and we get then another inversion at about sixty, and that's position 9, and then he's dead. And that's about the number of times a person inverts. That is to say, their pattern of thinkingness changes with regard to their own regard of their own power or their own ability to accomplish something. Their thinkingness changes at these points.

Now, this is merely graphic, but it demonstrates the ages of people in terms of cause and effect. An infant, of course, is very far from effect. He's so drifty-around about life in general and so on, that most everything just misses him completely. And he certainly is intent upon being very causative.

Now, we get somebody, a young adult, he has already learned enough manners to realize that he can't always be cause, and he's had enough accidents happen to him so that he realizes he'd better not be effect all the time, either. And so he's starting to fall into the middle ground. This is then not a very inactive middle ground, but it is a middle ground which is relatively ineffective.

Now, as he goes down the line, if you were just to follow the cycle of life, you would mark at C, "create," and in the middle, "persist," and at the end of it, "dead," or "destroy." And you would have the cycle of action of the mest universe graphed against a cause-effect and a communication line and so forth.

Now, a communication relay system simply is composed of a number of these lines, and these lines interlocked together, should give you a communication system.

Let's take a Western Union telegraph system. And we find that a message is put in at one end, is received at the other end of a wire and is relayed over into another system, and goes along that wire and is changed at the end of that wire into another system, is relayed along that wire — in other words, this is booster systems it goes through.

Now, these booster systems, one after the other, do not change materially the message, and so that comes to be a very reliable system. And for this reason, engineers observing this say, very comfortably, that mest is something very good to work with, and they become very fond of mest because it will receive an effect, and it can be made, under the monitoring of their ideas, to carry something like an idea which they are causing. And so it appears to be a very good system.

There's only one thing wrong with it: It ceases to be a system the moment it ceases to have ideas fed to it. It is a dependency system.

If the man were standing there with no body and yet he was using all of these relay systems, you would have something very unaberrative. You'd just have a direct address to mest.

But where the individual is working through a body and into an electronic system, you get some interesting situations. Because the electronic system may have no breaks in it, but the amount of break between the thetan and the body, and the body and the first entrance into the system is very great, because there you're getting very imperfect cause and effect.

There's an old technique known as Ridge Running. It's in one of the early SOPs. You might run it on somebody sometime, it's a process of watching a little white line grow, and then go black. And then you turn it around — turn the question around and turn the flow around, and it runs white again and then goes black. And by this, you actually pattern out the communication system which a thetan uses in order to enter the body. And to a thetan, any communication system is better than no communication system, and so we get with this problem of "must have a communication system," we get the most remarkable misrelays which you've ever seen.

It is a fantastic thing. The thetan feeds in at some point — probably right in the middle of the system — feeds in a command, which then works itself through the most complicated network of ridges, which go out sometimes as far as four or five miles outside the body, and then return back into the body, and cross-plot and check and turn and change and vary in various ways, until they strike the proper activating ridges and anchor points in the body so as to cause the body motion.

You can watch this system with Ridge Running — it's a very good experimental technique. You can watch this and observe what one of these communication systems is.

Ridge Running is too hard for an auditor to run, that's all that's wrong with Ridge Running. It'll exteriorize somebody. It's too hard for an auditor to run because an auditor gets into the thing and finds himself sitting with three causative points. The thetan is obviously in three places if there are three causative points present. Well, this is very confusing to him — to the auditor and to the preclear. And if the auditor doesn't go on and handle it from there, and finally reduce all these causative points to one causative point, he leaves a very confused preclear. But a preclear will get out of his body this way and suddenly realize he can control his body from the outside.

But, as I say, it's a long technique, it's arduous and it uses energy. It has many things against it, but it's an experimental and investigatory technique, and the main thing it investigates is the communication relay system which the thetan employs in handling the body. And this system is so complex that it's almost impossible for a thetan to say to the body, "Walk," with any expectation of the body walking. It'll — liable to do almost anything. And he eventually goes into apathy and decides he can't handle the body and that the body had best be left to handle itself.

And the better part of the preclears who are having trouble getting out of their heads, the better part of these preclears (that's not the better part of preclears, that — because they — about 50 percent of them just move out, that's all; they are not hard to exteriorize), but the better part of those who are having difficulty, are having difficulty just because when they say to the body "boo" the body is liable to say "baa." And they have no reliance on this and so they begin to tighten up these lines, tighten up the control lines, and without looking at the control lines or destroying any old communication systems — they're afraid to do this — they start just trying to drive communication systems through, and so they start using effort in handling the body, and eventually their own relay problems are so great that they can't move themselves. In other words, they can't be elsewhere than in the middle of this communication system. They're afraid to leave it, it's too complex. Why? Because what they put in at cause, comes out as almost anything at effect, if it comes out at all. They've learned this.

Drills, by the way, by which an individual realizes that he is handling the body — no matter if he's still in the body — will result in clearing; they will result. It's a very long technique, you understand that — it's a very, very long technique.

What you do instead of getting somebody to train the body, is to go through monotonous and repetitious motions on the part of the body till he realizes that the body is duplicating directly a command. He doesn't realize that up to that point, he just sits there in apathy. He makes commands at the body and so forth, but his — basically self-trust is simply this, is "Will it do what I have just said it should do?"

Now, have you ever gone into this kind of a situation — is, you've determined that your answer to some kind of a question is going to be no, and that you're going to be very, very firm about something, and that's the way you're going to handle it. And as soon as so-and-so shows up, you're just going to tell him no, and you're not going to do any more about it, and that's going to be that. And then so-and-so shows up, and you look at him and you say, "Well, it's this way, and I guess I won't do it, but — oh well, all right, I will but I don't want to," and so forth. And you walk away from there and say, "Why the hell didn't I say no? Now look what I've got myself into."

Well, that is a failure of a communication relay system which a thetan interprets as his own cowardice. He says he can't stand up to something like this. No. The point is, is he's got his systems of communication interlocked with somebody else's system of communication, and the number of points is too great for him to control. See, he's got somebody else to talk to. Well, just because he has somebody else to talk to, he has another communication point. He's got another E.

And to get into this — not E-therapy. I often kick myself for ever having written "Dianetics: The Evolution of a Science," that's where E-therapy came from. As a matter of fact, the boy that was kicking E-therapy around was very, very excited and started shaking "Dianetics: The Evolution of a Science" under my nose and so forth, and pointing to the exact line which is the line of E-therapy. It's the setup of the great god Throgmagog, which is the setup of the total consciousness of the body exterior to the individual himself, and the individual will obey it. And it's in there, just in that — almost in those words. Only trouble is, it's not in there as a therapy, it's in there as an investigatory technique and has never served any other purpose than that. But it produces some lovely phenomena.

And anyway, that's completely aside the point. That's another line of communication. That's just said in there, and there is an insufficient qualification as to what it's all about.

So, let's look at this idea then. He's got another terminal standing in front of him, and this other terminal is exciting these communication relay points which he himself is trying to excite. See, he's got a problem now of some other terminal standing there and this terminal — he intended to be E, and this terminal insists on communicating, and as soon as the terminal communicates to him, why, it puts his thought patterns into an operation which backs up against these relay points which he was going to use to say no. And he can't get a current going down these lines, and as a result, he doesn't know what to do and he becomes confused, and therefore he acquiesces to some proposition that he didn't care to agree with. And there's a communication system of that character. It's fatal to have a communication system in which you cannot predict the behavior of C and E on the line I've just given you.

And let's take now a line of soldiers. We take this line of soldiers and we whisper to the first one a message. And we have that one whisper it to the next one, and without any further intervention on anybody's part, he whispers it to the next one, to the next one, to the next one. Each one whispers it to the next one all down the line and we listen to the final message. Well, I don't care what message is put in at the beginning of this line of soldiers. It can be "General Grant is attacking at midnight." And you go to the other end of the line, and you'll hear "Popcorn is for sale at Pugburg." Won't have any relationship to it. The message will have C'd and E'd wrongly enough here and there through those relay points, so that any engineer is to some degree justified by saying, "Give me good old electronics, give me good old mest. That's reliable stuff. I mean, that's good."

And he errs simply to this degree, is he is looking at lines. He doesn't need any lines to get his stuff through. The thetan up against the body has made the same error. He thinks he needs a body to make noise. He thinks he needs a body to protest against his being hurt. He thinks he needs a body to communicate for him. In other words, he thinks he needs a body as a system of barriers by which he himself can be protected — that's because he's afraid he'll be hit. He thinks he needs a body to furnish him energy. He begins to believe that he is an energy system which is not a generative energy system at all, but which is an energy system which depends upon a body for its energy.

He's bought the engineer's idea of a power plant. He thinks there has to be an engine in the motorcycle. He thinks there has to be dynamos sitting down there and providing power; that the coal has to be shoveled in from somewhere; that the sun has to put out photons which have to get into chlorophyll, which has to then be compressed, and which has to decay and be compressed for a few million years, and then has to be dug up at vast union trouble and shipped down and shoveled into this and that. He believes in a complex communication system, in other words, which furnishes energy. And any communication system, to some degree, furnishes energy.

Basically you'll find that the thetan furnishes — instead of postulates, way up the scale, he actually, when he communicates, furnishes the energy with which to communicate. He doesn't just simply furnish a zero — I mean a zero postulate.

It's all very well to work out into thought, which in itself does not have any power behind it, but you'll find out that nobody's very happy doing this. The first statement is usually a lightning bolt. Interesting, isn't it? That's why people are afraid to think. That's why they're afraid to talk, why they're afraid of their own postulates, because they get up to that band and it's something like this. It's articulated by a lightning bolt, you might say. Of course that could only be a little sixteen-microamp bolt, you know, a little tiny bolt, and which it normally is, but when they start throwing out thoughts, they'll set up a communication system for the thoughts to run on. Not spontaneously because they're built that way, they'll just throw it out because they want to see something go someplace.

And he can furnish a much better communication system than a bunch of copper wire strung all over the floor and through the baseboards and tangled up around the shoes and plugged into the wrong holes and soldered the wrong way, and then crossed someplace on the line so there's a slight short that you can't quite detect until after you get a meter all over it. There's no reason for all that.

Now, when you look at cause and effect in communication, you must realize something else is occurring. Because every time you have a communication system, you have embryonic space. You don't have full space, you see, you just have a line — you have a line; so that you have two points held apart, and these are two terminals. Well to exist, the theoretical line, you see, is something of infinite length and no duration — I mean, no dimension. Infinite length and no dimension. That would be the theoretical line. It's like a point. A point is a position without dimension in nothing. That's a point. And a line is something which is — has no thickness and has no breadth and has no finite length except as is assigned to it. A line of a certain length has no mass. A point has no mass. A point is merely a position. These are mathematical definitions.

But when we look over this problem in terms of mass and points and lines, we find that we are holding two terminals apart, no matter how thin and massless the line is. We're holding apart the points C and E.

Now, if we convert this in such a way as to have space around it, then cause would be what was putting the space up, and it would be running to E, which would be that which had the space put around it by cause. And so you would get the idea of fixing two terminals apart in any communication system.

Well now, an individual who's having trouble with his communications conceives the communication line to be as long, and as far from him, as he is fixed on it. Now, that is not necessarily comprehensible until you think in terms of collapsed terminals. Here's the "no space" individual. He has a communication line collapse. Now, that isn't because all of his communication lines are collapsed: He knows that the only thing — way he can have a communication line is to be straight up against C to E, see? He can't have any distance between C and E because he can't impose space between C and E.

And as we go along down the line, there is another way to represent this line. The line is as long as that period of life I've given you for the individual.

The line is as long as — isn't probably too comprehensible, but a person's line gets shorter and shorter and shorter and shorter, you see. Instead of him being on different parts of the line, you could represent it differently and say the line is that much shorter for each different period of life, and you would have the normal activity of Homo sapiens.

Well now, you also have this with that gradient scale: You have an individual having short lines at the wrong periods of his life. Let's take a twelve-year-old boy who has — an extreme case — twelve-year-old boy who has the communications setup of a sixty-year-old boy. See, I mean, he's — no terminals. His C to E has to be awfully close for him to communicate at all. He likes people to come around and yell in his ear and so on. He's got to come up close. You hear him talking long distance, he shouts. He's having trouble. And this twelve-year-old boy is having this communication trouble.

Well, there is obviously a remediable aberration there, usually remediable. It's this unpositional — I mean, this dispositional situation which the auditor sees most markedly. He expects somebody sixty, seventy, eighty years of age — he expects somebody in that age gradient to be having a little communication trouble. He's rather surprised when he finds they're hearing good even if their sight isn't good. He's apt to be a bit placative toward them when they keep complaining that they can't see, although their hearing is very good. You see, this person's almost eighty, and they keep telling you they can't see.

Well, what you head at is not their eyes — well, what you head at is the rehabilitation of them as a thetan. Of course, you do this in any event, and you will gradually pick up their communication level.

Well, what they want to have happen is their mest eyesight turned on. Well, this is an unthinkably difficult goal because they're asking an auditor to reverse and run back the GE. Well, this GE would rather start over again, even though he has to take his chances with sperm and ovum and birth control being what it is today, he'd still rather take his chances than keep pushing around something which is not very mobile.

And so you're up against this very definite problem on such a person. GE doesn't want to turn back, and you're expected to turn this back.

Well now, you can still do quite a bit about it, but the more you address the problems of the thetan, the happier you're going to be as an auditor, and the happier that preclear's going to be.

If you start in by trying to remedy the body, the body has its set commu­nication positions more or less per life. Now, you can turn back the body years and years and years at a time. I'll say more on that — more about that in a minute. But what you're trying to remedy is the thetan's communication lines.

You can remedy a thetan's communication lines with great ease. I mean, if you get somebody exteriorized, you can keep changing — his perception changes fairly rapidly. But it's his perception that changes. Now, his perception will change as rapidly as he does not have to prevent being an effect, and compulsively have to be cause. Now, up along early part of the line, you see, the person is compul­sively cause, and toward the later part of the line, why, they're compulsively resisting being an effect.

And those are the concentrations. And you'll find them flip-flopping all the way down. Each little gradient there is a reversal. They start in by being pure cause, you see, and then they turn into almost pure effect at that point, you see, and then they swap around completely and they're cause at that point, and then they turn around and are effect at that point — and each point, we have a different type of cause and a different type of effect.

We take an infant — an infant is mainly concerned with being cause, cause, cause, right up to the moment when it sees a bottle, at which moment it doesn't want to be cause at all. It'll be effect. It'll feed — if you have to hold — if you held it by one foot in the air, it'd still eat. It just will be total effect — very, very swift, the change.

Well now, it starts to hang up about the middle of this C-E line to a person who is on a big, impartial maybe. They don't know whether they want to be cause, and they don't know whether they want to be effect, and this person at the middle portion of the line is the despair of youth and old age alike. They're indecisional about almost anything. "Well, it's . . ." — conservative about the whole thing.

You understand they're not just agreeing with MEST on the basis of being as conservative as mest, they really don't know whether it's best to be cause or best to be effect about the matter. They don't know whether they ought to want this effect — they've got to consider that. They don't know whether they want to be cause at this point or not, and they have to think it all over very carefully. Well, it's very interesting, because they never end up with an answer. The individual worries in vain around such people, waiting for a definiteness, and that definiteness never arrives.

If you were to run End of Cycle Processing on the preclear receiving a definite answer from all kinds of people, you would all of a sudden hit the one in the bank that most played this on him. It will be a person who was more or less in middle life at the time the preclear was young. And this person has had a lot of undesirable experience — that was doing this — and so is not quite sure.

If the GE were left to its own resources without being aided or abetted by a thetan, believe me — if that were possible — believe me, the GE would follow the exact plot which I have given you earlier in this lecture. He'd just follow that plot on cause and effect. You could always predict it, and so on.

At that period of life which is the climacteric of the menopause, of course, you have no further duplication according to the thetan's plan, but now — I mean, pardon me, the GE's plan — that's the blueprint. But now you've got a thetan, and some thetans are ambitious, and some thetans are not ambitious. And you get this — the problem of the thetan backing around and battering one way or the other, and he's trying to make old bodies young and young bodies old, and he's trying to mess up this blueprint.

Now, he can do it as long as he knows about anchor points and how to handle anchor points. He can do a lot about the life span of the GE. How much he can do is something else — but he can do a lot. He can't do the utterly impossible unless he himself is in such good condition that he can practically rebuild a body.

Now, if you can get a thetan in good enough condition so he could say, "Well, there's a body," and it was there, of course he could not just rebuild the GE, he could replace it. And this would be complete rejuvenation. But that wouldn't be a rejuvenation at all, you see — it'd just be a replacement.

Well, what are the limits — what are the limits of this factor of age and the GE (just getting off to something else there for a moment)? Well, you'll find that the GE is interdependent upon all brands of life. He has lots of basic agreements. He wouldn't exist and he wouldn't be visible unless he had all sorts of agreement with life.

What kind of agreements does he have? He has the agreement that he has to eat, and the agreement that he has to feed, and the agreement he has to procreate in certain lines. And he has the agreement that he has to breathe air, and his heart beats. And he also has the agreement that he, himself is composed of an enormous number of cells, each one of which has a separate function. And everything is compartmentalized and specialized, something like modern medicine is; and everything take care of its own department and let some other department go to the devil. And the body either runs smoothly with each one of these departments cooperating with every other department or all these departments try to slop over into every other department and run their business. In that moment, the body goes to pieces.

Well, if this happy condition of everybody paying attention to himself and doing his own job in terms of cells and so on, were carried on evenly and quietly, the age of the body would not be very marked. The body would live a long time.

Man as an animal, by the way, does not live out his natural span according to other mammals here on Earth. Whether this is because he walks upright or whether he sleeps in rooms without fresh air or whether he smokes cigarettes is completely, really, beside the point. The point is that other animals live six times the length of time it takes them to reach their growth, and man doesn't.

But man is very interdependent. Yes, man ought to live to be, I think, a hundred and twenty-six — not seventy. And yet, he uniformly dies at seventy.

You take chaps who are — oh, great health specialists of the past — health faddists. It's interesting to trace back and look what's happened to these people.

There was a fellow by the name of Fletcher who had me going round and round when I was a young boy in this life. You had to "Fletcherize," you had to chew your food I think thirty-two times — chew every mouthful thirty-two times. And I wanted something to eat — I didn't want — I wasn't there to chew food, I was there to eat it. And they used to sit around the table, my aunts and so forth did, and insist that I fletcherized. And so I did, as long as they were watching, and then I'd go gulp, gulp, wash it down with water and go out and play. But they told me that this would deter me from living a long time — abusing myself to this degree and swallowing this food — because actually the saliva in the mouth was vital as an aid to the digestive fluids in the stomach.

I don't suppose they'd ever slit open a stomach and looked at it, but they'd find out that you could practically drop a paint can into the stomach and if you had anything left on the paint can afterwards, why, the fellow was having indigestion that day, not the reverse — because the stomach will digest almost anything.

Reminds me for some reason or other that goats, by the way, are — they claim that goats don't eat, really, the tin cans, they eat the paper labels off the tin cans. This would be all right, except I butchered a goat one time and found four tin cans in his stomach — but science is a great thing. Anyway . . .

We have this problem with the GE. He just runs pretty well according to his established blueprint. And this fellow Fletcher had a remarkably long life span, and he lived happily, and he died with his teeth worn to stumps, almost to the moment at the age of seventy. (audience laughter)

Now, there was another fellow — another fellow earlier than that, the mad Russian, who — the fellow who, by the way, got the only thing which prevents syphilis. Forgotten his name offhand — Metchnikoff, yes. This boy discovered that there was certain bacteria in sour milk, and if man ate — drank sour milk and so forth, he'd live to a great old age. He — by the way, he did give us a lot in science, but it's rather funny his going off into this tailspin late in his life, because he had this cellar full of sour milk and he and his friends were all sitting around drinking sour milk. And everybody was going to live to be a hundred and ten, and he died almost to the minute at seventy. (audience laughter)

And so man's effort by mechanical means to alter his life span have not been very good. But his efforts to alter it otherwise show a little bit of promise. However, there's almost everything militating against man's long longevity.

Let's take bacteria. And I'm going to say this — I always say this to any group of auditors I train, and I hope for Pete's sake they'll remember it. There's such a thing, as far as a body is concerned, as bacteria. There is such a thing as bacteria. And you've got about the — if you think you're going to remedy bacteria in the body, swiftly and completely and with a swoosh with auditing, you've got what you're doing mixed up with Christian Science. Because bacteria is hungry, and it thinks it has just as much right to survive — it runs on the same rules and the same laws — just as much right to survive as the body has. And when it starts chomping, if the body is not immune to it, if the body has no natural defenses against it, it just eats up whatever it starts to eat up, and unless stopped by some means or another, or if the body isn't given every chance in combating it, why, it can be quite successful.

Of course a successful bug is one which does not destroy its host, but just kind of makes him sick and wobbly for a long time. That's a real successful bug.

Now, the body, down through the years has actually progressed in terms of joiners. Did you ever see these fellows who had to be parts of the Knights Confiscators and parts of the City Unit Club, and parts of this and parts of that, and they always had to be joining — joining everything?

That's actually a bacterial characteristic. Bacteria has joined the body to such a degree that the body could be said to be composed of earlier joinings. That series of cells which now compose your liver once had the full intention of eating up the rest of the body. And so it is with every part of the body. It's alien. Every portion and class of cells in the body at one time was alien, and at one time was bacteria.

And now you're going to come along as an auditor, and you're going to interrupt this method of body construction and this joining. No, you're not.

In the first place, the thetan himself is the only therapeutic agent in the body. The thetan is the only therapeutic agent. Now a thetan, if you addressed a thetan alone, could theoretically get powerful enough so that he could exterminate bacteria.

Well, that's all well if it's caught soon enough and is stopped soon enough, if the bacteria isn't sufficiently virulent to cause the body too much discomfort — but after it goes beyond a certain point, you hit a point where the thetan doing anything about it, if he's going to exterminate it, if he's going to turn a death ray on it, you might say, he'll also take half the liver with him. You see that?

Did you ever pour iodine on an open wound? Our forefathers were very sold on iodine. There was a fellow by the name of Lister — Lord Lister, who used the principles of Pasteur in medicine. It was not Pasteur who put these principles into medicine, it was a fellow by the name of Lister, in England. And his antiseptic surgery, by the way, was used — these principles of antiseptic surgery were used, by Lister — until a relatively short time ago when they changed it to aseptic surgery, which means no antiseptic used. They merely have everything completely clean and free of bacteria.

Now, aseptic surgery has its drawbacks, too, because an operating room has to be dehydrated in such a way that you get no bugs and germs and so forth, traveling in the air — the air has to be filtered and so on — and it makes the climate of the operating theater actually almost totally dehydrated. If they realized what this did to an unconscious man's lungs they, by the way, wouldn't do it. They'd use Lord Lister's early preparations and skip it.

But the thing has another drawback, is ether has to be a very small proportion in such an atmosphere in order to explode. And there's another very, very interesting point about it — electrical instruments which are too dry will cause static sparks, which will explode the air.

This is far more grim — far, far more grim — than Winchell's little tale about cancer of the lungs because of cigarettes, last night.

They blow up more patients in operating rooms. They do — they just expend them madly. There's lots of them — they died on the operating table. They don't say "by static electrical explosion and ether-laden dehydrated atmosphere."

What blows up? Not the surgeons, it's the patient's lungs which are filled with ether — ether and oxygen. Oh, that's nice and gruesome, isn't it?

But there's several gases, by the way, which have been abandoned in their use merely because they're too explosive in the lungs. They've blown lungs out of too many people.

Well, if a thetan is going to put lungs back into people, if he can mock up a pair of lungs, why, he could prevent such an accident. Isn't that true? And if a thetan could mock up a new leg, he could very quickly set a leg. Is that true?

Well, if the thetan isn't up to the point where he can kill off a body and put a new one in its place — unmock a body, really, and put a new one in its place right away, right away quick, you see — I'm afraid you're going to have to realize that the GE is interdependent upon the rest of all life, and is an integral portion of this interdependency. And that it is run by bacteria, and that bacteria and broken legs and things like that happen.

And you can prevent, to a large degree, the effect of these things by knocking the thetan into some kind of shape so that he doesn't let them happen so often. But when it comes to bacteria, there's bacteria which a white man is not immune to. And there also — there's later strains of respiratory ills, later strains of colonic ills, which have been imported into the society by its broad-spread wars which the body isn't even vaguely immune to.

The first time influenza hit the United States, for instance, was I think, in 1918. And the false armistice which, when called off, precipitated the thing, actually caused more deaths in the United States than were caused on the battlefield by the war itself.

And this was a type of bug that was imported from some place or another, and I've heard many people later on being very wise, and some people say it was bubonic plague and so on. Well, I was there, and people were just wearing white masks, and it was a sort of a cold.

It's actually the same flu, more or less, that's running around now. But at that time it just hit the whole race — boom! And believe me, strong men and big thetans and little thetans, they all — their GEs all went by the boards. It just didn't mean anything at all what anybody was doing or what prayer he was saying or how fast he was reaching out with what beam, those bugs hit him and he — hit.

Now, there is such a thing as the individual can be in good shape and doesn't get ill. This is possible.

The only reason I'm talking to you about this is two things: I'm trying to tell you that as an auditor you should not immediately assume that running an engram or kicking somebody out of his head is the first thing to do in all cases. This is not true. It very often would work a lot better for you and for the preclear, in special cases, where you would simply pick up the phone and call for the local ambulance.

If you find a preclear lying alongside of the road with a broken leg, don't try to run it out. You can have him well fast enough. Let's get the leg set, hm? And let's put a tourniquet on. There isn't any kind of — anything the thetan can do to put enough blood into the system to account for the amount of blood pouring out of that artery. And so we get a situation where you'd better put a tourniquet on the fellow.

Let's not be one-sided, then, about what we're doing. Let's know when to send for an ambulance, and when somebody gets sick and otherwise.

Now, there are tremendous things that you can do for an individual — tremendous gains can be made. We have — we don't even vaguely know how young a GE can be made if you concentrate on it. It's a very funny thing, but there are many people in Scientology who are — at this time, ought to be dead.

Now, you say, "What does this thing do for rejuvenation and making people younger? What's it do for longevity?" We can't answer the question "What's it do for longevity?" But I know several people that don't even vaguely look their years, and they gradually and consistently get younger under this.

Well, if our goal was to do something for the body, if it was rejuvenation and so on, we would have some hope here. We do have hope here, but we don't have the hope of wiping out every enemy of the body. We don't have that hope. We have the hope, however, of possibly making it so much easier to make bodies that there'd be a lot less enemies, you see.

We have other hopes, but don't try to make a panacea out of what we're doing, because it won't work that way.

Yes, you can remedy any kind of a psychic or physical condition of the actual being that man is — the thetan. You can remedy any condition thereof. Possibly someday you can build a thetan up to a point where he can very easily move mountains. Possibly you can do an awful lot of things. But what you can do right now transcends man's earliest imaginings as to what a man might be capable of. You can already do this.

So, as an auditor, somebody starts running a temperature madly — yes, it might be an engram in restimulation, that might be all, and he also might have a kidney infection.

People are apt to be very critical of somebody in Scientology who becomes ill, merely because they think that "Well, he advocates health and he's an auditor, and therefore he ought to be well all the time." This is also an unreasonable proposition.

Take my own case. For instance, I ought to be dead. I should have been dead about three times in this life. I really ought to be dead. You talk about Scientology having anybody to represent — you talk about validation of what Scientology or Dianetics can do for somebody and so on — to this day I'm supposed to be 50 percent disabled from the last war.

Three years before the last war started I was pronounced dead. Very interesting isn't it? The amount of — for instance, the entire hormone system in this particular GE ceased firing twice, and got started again.

In other words, I keep picking this GE up by the scruff of the neck and sitting it back on its line.

I follow a schedule ordinarily of work and so forth, and have for a number of years, that would probably kill the ordinary mortal. And we'd have a good time — have a good time in between.

But what is the limit of this? Well, the limit is that the body's doing pretty good when it can lift about a hundred and ten pounds. It's doing real good when it can go on four or five hours or three hours sleep a night for quite a while, and still get along and work — it's really doing marvelous when it can do that sort of thing. It can walk miles and so forth — what, twenty miles, twenty-two miles, twenty-three miles — it does real good if it walks that far. It is a limited object, a body — a limited doll. It is a lot of fun to have around. It takes a lot of patching up, takes a lot of care.

You as an auditor can do an enormous amount for one of these dolls — one — an enormous amount.

Well, look at this one. I could show you health records and service records which would make — just this GE here — which would make doctors gasp. This body starts to feel seedy and kind of run-down periodically — oh, about every four, five, six months or something like that, I'll have worked it too hard and I'll all of a sudden take a look at it and say, "Gee-whiz, did I do all that to it?" And then if I don't take time off right away and kind of patch it up again and so forth, starts to look old. The age can go on and off of this body in terms of ten or fifteen years at a crack.

(Recording ends abruptly)