Let us start out with the illusion of words, the illusion of language. Self Analysis, by the way, breaks straight through quite a few illusions of that character, so I won’t spend too much time on the illusion of language. This has been covered elsewhere.
But look what you can do with language. You can say “To the rear march, to the rear march, to the rear march” and get a bunch of men spinning like gophers. Somebody can jump up and say “Now, what we should all do is go and join the colors so our great country . . .” and people will go out and get shot at. How magic this stuff is!
More than anyone else, a writer is the person who knows language as an illusion. What you can do with language! The flow of language! Things you can say! Somebody sits down in a chair and you suddenly transport him away not only to far lands but to far times or to times which don’t exist at all — all through the medium of language. It is wonderful.
A writer, after a while, begins to consider himself as a sort of a magician — that is, unless the editors and their rejection slips get to him when he is too young, before he has hardened.
The writer sits down to a typewriter and pounds out a lot of stuff and puts it out. Then other people get the idea. How did those people learn language in the first place? They learned it by observation in the physical universe, obviously.
They learn what the word pitcher is by seeing a pitcher. They learn the word up by seeing the motion and action of something going up or something being up above them. They learn down, sideways, forget, remember, and all of these things have physical-universe counterparts.
Forget means something that you have to leave alone which becomes hidden. You take enough things away from a child and he will forget-them. Being forced to forget something, then, is being forced into apathy about something. That is why the hypnotist can say “You will forget everything I have said to you, and the harder you try to remember, the more you will forget” and have people buy it, because obviously this was what the word forget meant. It meant apathy, it meant final negation against the thing: “I didn’t want it anyhow. I didn’t want it to such a point that it has even gone out of my thoughts.”
So there is a strata of thought which is rearranged according to the physical universe. Thought, words, ideas, concepts and scenes — to a certain extent these are a recorded counterpart of physical-universe activity, but that is all the language we have. It is all derived through the physical universe. And language travels by the medium of the physical universe from one mind to another mind.
Language is a great illusion. You and I see individuals told this and that and see them do this and that and therefore we say, “It must be that the words are important,” only the words aren’t important. The social order in which the individual was raised has impelled him forward and held him back and done other things with him until, finally, he is to some degree an automaton obeying the impulses occurring in the physical universe about him. That is language.
The funny part of the language is that language sets in in the mind and goes through the physical universe to get to another mind.Observations in the physical universe, by the various communicating means of sight, sound, touch and so forth, reach the individual; he perceives certain things existing in the physical universe and by perceiving them is able to get what he thinks is thought.
People try to tell you about the “stream of consciousness and that “thinking is in terms of words.” I want to point out a little trick: There is a strata of thought which can be lent to this shabby illusion, language. You could say that thought is so good that it will even respond to and communicate with language. It is so good that it can even communicate with language, and that is a long way out.
In the days when I was floundering around trying to figure out what existed where and so on and trying to tell people about it, I found out there were no words to say what I had discovered. I had to invent a new vocabulary. In other words, one has to find agreement on certain phenomena in order to get communication with people about that phenomena.
Actually, the thought one uses would be way above the level of language. Thought is going along and communicating like the dickens with itself and possibly with other thinking machines and possibly with a main theta body. In other words, thought is being very able and very rapid and it is very good. It sorts out data. It has to have enormous sorting files in order to pick up and make even simple computations. And yet it can do all this very ably.
But “obviously” thought doesn’t amount to much if people have thought and language confused; and language doesn’t amount to much, so thought doesn’t amount to much either — and people talk with a stream of consciousness in their heads!
People in the past have been walking around with these demon circuits. The best one I ever ran into was on board a U.S. naval vessel. We were getting two psychotics a week aboard. There were 550 men and 60 officers, and we were getting two psychotics a week out of that outfit. One day somebody went down to the crew’s berthing. He ran into the master-at-arms and the master-at-arms said, “Look what I have found.” So they brought it up topside and showed it to me. (I roomed with the ship’s doctor, so people would get us identified and confused; they would take sextants to him and bring me broken arms. It was a pretty crazy ship, all told.) They had this wonderful document which they had found in one of the boys’ bunks and it read as follows: “I am forward. I think I will go aft. I am going aft. I am now aft. I think I will go topside. Now I am topside, I think I will go forward. I am going forward. Now I am going below....” This went on for about a hundred pages. This man was so constricted inside this war vessel that he had evidently sprung a gasket! Sure enough, he was mixed up in a very bad misdirector and he had to keep a plot of where he was going and what he was doing.
Now, thought, when it becomes too mixed up with the physical universe, conceives itself to be bounded by the boundaries of the physical universe. People who are even around 2.0 and 2.5 on the tone scale conceive themselves to be very remarkably bounded in terms of thought. They tell little kids, “You don’t want to imagine that, Johnny.” They have the idea of bursting out of something if someone imagines too much.
Somebody makes the comment “That’s going too far.” No one has gone anyplace, but “It is going too far.” Then there are “high-flown ideas.” No ideas went anyplace. All this talk about thought is in terms of motion in the physical universe! A person is pretty aberrated if he will buy that one, because thought doesn’t do that.
Because thought can approximate the physical universe and because thought does tend to do this when it becomes too aberrated, the first and most basic illusion would be that thought is contained in the physical universe and bounded by the physical universe and then delimited and limited in various fashions by the physical universe. If this were true then no such thing as ESP, clairvoyance or clairaudience could exist, because you couldn’t go forward in time or back in time with thought because you can’t go forward in time or back in time in the physical universe. And naturally you couldn’t talk to anybody in Yokohama or think with anybody in Yokohama, because you are in New York! Everybody would say that. Or, “You are in Wichita and you couldn’t possibly talk to somebody in New York, because he is in New York.”
However, there is long-distance telephone, and as communication lines come up in the society, people are more and more willing to accept the idea of ESP. They can see it occurring with radio and they are approximating the physical universe. So it gets down to a point where even a “normal” could conceive of somebody thinking a thought in New York and another person thinking a thought in Wichita and the two people being in conjunction with each other. Because they know that you can get a radio or a telephone communication between the two, ESP becomes a possibility to them.
People become very bounded, then, by the physical universe, physically. As children, they heard “You can’t go outside. You’re outside; stay outside. Now you’re inside, you have to stay there. Now go to bed. Go to bed. Stay in your room. No, you can’t have a glass of water. No, go back to bed again.” This is childhood — ”happy, happy childhood.” The child is being handled. The school bell rings and he is at school; the recess bell rings and he goes out to recess; at noon he goes out again and then he is back in school.
Later on somebody says, “Democracy is in danger; it is being attacked by democracy.” Somebody then says to him, “Hurry up and wait,” and the fellow gets into line and he waits in that line. Then he finds out it is another line, and he gets the orders but he doesn’t know whether those orders go into effect or not because there is a directive that says “All those in classification G . . . ,” and he has to wait to find out if he is in classification G and this automatically means that he waits in the other line. Then when he gets home he will get the orders he was supposed to have had because the others have been canceled and that will give him back his transportation. But then he is supposed to report back on duty though his leave isn’t up!
Where there is a highly bounded society which doesn’t have much space and time and where everything has to be closely coordinated, you get a terrifically coordinated society. Some would call it a competitive society but that would be wrong. Societies, when they get very badly crowded, have to be coordinated, so they get shy on latitude in coordination and people have to coordinate exactly. You can’t be ten minutes late.
Sixty or seventy years ago you would tell the depot agent, “I’ll be down and I’ll take the 5:20,” and then maybe get there at 5:30.
He would look at you kind of hurt and say, “You said you would be down here at 5:20.” “Well, I’m here.”
Nobody was very hurt about this. People held trains. They had lots of time and space, in other words. But when people start running out of time and space they start handling the organisms in time and space very roughly. They have to be forced into a higher level of coordination than they would otherwise achieve on their own self-determinism. That is to say, they have to be forced into higher activity of coordination than the organism is actually adjusted to. This cuts down their self-determinism; it raises coordination but it cuts down the whole tone scale of the society eventually.
Here you have an illusion which has taken place — that thought is in time and space.
I can imagine a boxcar. There is no boxcar there but I can imagine a boxcar. I can imagine a full, regulation-size boxcar sitting on a couch. It won’t fit in the time and space but I can imagine it being there. And I can imagine picking up that boxcar and taking it out and sitting it on rails someplace and letting an engine pull it off. I can shift it, expand it, contract it, do anything with it.
Everything in this society today was once a piece of imagination; it was once a postulated illusion. It was an illusion that somebody had and they brought it into actuality, and there it was suddenly, a concrete entity. People say, “But it’s real now.” Of course it is real now, but wasn’t it also real when there was just an idea that it was going to be? The level of execution hadn’t been reached and a few other things, and the materiel hadn’t been applied for.
Somebody in Hollywood gets a big idea about a type of skyscraper and the next thing you know, somebody in New York builds one. This is quite remarkable. On everything you can see, somebody imagined it was going to exist and so it existed.
Man gets the idea after a while that he can take pure thought and just by imagining something exists create a concrete space-time-energy-level activity. In other words, he goes from the point of “I imagine this table, therefore I am going to build this table, therefore the table is going to come into existence” to the point of imagining it and having it appear, with no step in between.
It is really very doubtful that a person just by imagining something could make it exist. But if a person could imagine a change taking place in something and have it exist, could it be that enough theta could cause the mountain to move and make it so that Mohammed wouldn’t have to go over to the mountain? Could enough thought, enough people postulating a reality, cause that reality to come into existence?
There is a little axiom that is a bit off the side, but you can have some fun with it because it fits right in along the line with Dianetics: That thing of which a person is afraid, he will bring into actuality and existence. That thing of which a person is afraid, he will bring into actuality and existence.
How often this happens. A wife becomes afraid of her husband. She has no reason to be — she is really afraid of her grandfather or something — but her husband looks like the grandfather so she starts getting afraid of her husband. The next thing you know, she starts creating a situation of which she can be afraid because she has to be right. She has to be right, therefore she has to create a situation to make it so she was right.
Thought has to be accurate. Its one mission is to be accurate, and being accurate and surviving are practically the same thing. It has to be right. It will be right to that insane degree where a person will actually create those things of which he is afraid. A person is afraid something will exist so he creates its existence. You can watch this around you in human relations.
People are afraid there are certain devils of the air, great glowering beasts that are ready to swoop down and eat up little children. They are afraid of this idea and so they finally build the demon. They finally build a good concrete one out of iron and stone and they feed him babies. Many societies have done this. They are afraid that the devils are going to slay them so they offer a token slaying, as on an Aztec sacrificial block. In other words, they will take the step of which they are afraid and they will create something to be afraid of. They will make something ugly and put it in a statue and then admire it.
All sorts of oddities of behavior have collected around this postulate of the validation of an illusion. Now, the Dianetic way of saying it is if you Validate an illusion, that illusion will take on concrete form — that is to say, physical-energy form.
It is one of the processes of thought to take physical-universe matter, energy, space and time and mobilize and animate it into organisms. That is only one of the things it can do. It can go right on from there and extrapolate and actually create, out of an illusion, an actuality. You can create almost any actuality you want and it does not matter that you don’t create it by magic.
If I imagine a table and give an illusion to a table long enough, you or I will eventually build one. If I keep validating it to the point of accidentally putting something on it every night — if I say “It’s there!” and I accidentally lay something on this table — it will get on to a point finally where somebody or something will put a table there. You say, “A table belongs there,” and you have then postulated that reality. And when you get to the point of saying “A table belongs there so we are going to put something there,” then you have turned the thought or illusion into a complete table which is standing there.
It is very simple, actually. Don’t look at this on a magical basis, because the magic is fantastic enough. You and I imagine something exists and then out of physical-universe energy, matter, space and time we build it. That is magic. But in the same way, in the field of thought where a mind believes that it approximates and is bounded by the physical universe (in other words, a low-tone-scale mind), all you have to do is postulate that something exists in that mind and it will exist. That is also magic.
If you postulate that a person isn’t so good, he won’t be so good. But you can only do this to a person who is pretty aberrated — that is, a person who is pretty badly mixed up with the physical universe. An Serrated person thinks he operates on this level; he thinks his thoughts have physicaluniverse bounds, that he is bounded by space and time and so on. His thought is so enturbulated by the physical universe that he thinks it is physical universe. That is the number one illusion. Then the illusion of language joins up with this horrible thing and the next thing you know, somebody says to him, “You look like you’ve got a cold,” and he gets a cold. This is how an engram can be put into restimulation. You tell someone, “I think you’re in pain” or “I think you’re weak” or “I think you’re . . .” almost anything like this. You are saying “I think,” and he knows that thought is physical-universe stuff and that out of this thought will come a concrete entity, so therefore it exists.
The most wonderful illusion of all of this is time — the idea that thought has time in it. Thought has no time.
If you could push yourself back out of the time span and away from time into the field of thought and thought alone, you probably could do remarkable things. Certainly you would come into control of more physical universe. The more you can invalidate the amount of resistance which the physical universe makes, the more success you are going to have with it because the more your thought will expand to embrace it. Thought, belief, faith — these are expansive things.
Once there was an army of a million and a half men under the command of Darius. And Alexander came out with about eighty thousand Macedonians and Greeks and a little handful of cavalry and said, “Huh! Look at those guys! Well, you take the left flank, we’ll take the center and you take the right flank over there — and let’s go.” And Darius’ army collapsed. Eighty thousand men in hand-to-hand combat with comparable weapons cannot whip a million and a half men, obviously! But this was the group esprit of Alexander’s forces, and they hit Darius’ forces and just rolled them over like tenpins.
Alexander had that forward motion about everything. “A town? Oh, that heap of mud. We’ll take that this afternoon, but this evening we’ve got to get busy.”
At one of his furthest reaches in India he laid siege to an enormous town, a big walled city. They tried battering the gates, and archers and everything else were shooting at them and the army was getting pretty tired of this. So Alexander told his troops, “Throw me and two other guys over the wall and we will open the door for you.” So they did, and they took the town. They threw Alexander and two soldiers over the wall into the hands of the enemy forces, and Alexander went over and opened the gates.
If you looked at life this way and said “I don’t see anything that could offer me any trouble. There are no obstacles around here that I can see. As far as putting forward my ideas, as far as even thinking up ideas, as far as carrying forward in life at large, I don’t see any obstacles,” you wouldn’t have any.
Where illusion comes in is when you start getting the idea that as you go along in life there are certain things put in your path or certain obstacles put up for you. You know what an obstacle is: An obstacle is something that is hard to climb, like a mountain or a fence, and so you think there are a lot of things that would bar that route and be a lot of trouble and so on. Only there aren’t any!
Maybe you have tried to write a book, and you said, “Well, if I only . . . if things were . . . if my time was . . . if she wouldn’t . . .” and here were all these obstacles. All you had to say to yourself was “Well, there aren’t any interruptions to me writing the book, there just aren’t any,” and there wouldn’t have been any. That is an experiment which you ought to make: “There aren’t any interruptions to my getting this job done.” The only real interruptions that can happen are that somebody can come along and actually physically bar you away from progressing along a certain line — physically bar you away. Somebody could come along and smash the typewriter, for instance, and then you would have to write the book by hand. And then somebody could come along and break all your pencils, so you would have to get some more pencils or write it in ink. But if you didn’t recognize any of these things as obstacles and if you didn’t recognize any time factor in your own thinking apparatus, there would be no bar!
I used to be what they called a high-speed writer. That was because I didn’t have any time; I had no time. I was so involved in investigation and reading books that I didn’t have time to invest in writing. And yet I had to write, obviously. One has to eat — I had set that up as an arbitrary. So I used to sit down to a typewriter and knock out about a hundred thousand words a month. But I did that on only three days a week, three hours on each of those days. The result was a hundred thousand words a month. And I determined I didn’t have any time to rewrite this stuff so it had to be right the first time it was written. Therefore it went out first draft-last draft to the editor without proofreading. It ran, by the way, about one typographical error to two pages. It was numbered automatically. I never read the stuff. I said, “They have to sell the first time because I don’t have time to submit it twice,” so they sold the first time. There is really nothing to it.
But the years went by and people kept saying to me, “It is awfully hard to write. That really couldn’t have been a good story because it only took you two days to write that novel.” One could get to thinking after a while that maybe there was something to that. And then you would look at some of the people who made these remarks to you, and those people were definitely down in this MEST setup. The amount of time required to write the word on the page, they thought, had something to do with the quality of the word, and that is the most wonderful illusion I could possibly think of.
In short, what we call delusion would be the confusion between the physical universe and thinking. The more physical universe gets confused into thinking, the more possibility of delusion there is. The more engrams a person has, the more subject he is to delusion, because that is where the physical universe gets mixed in. The physical universe has entered in upon him when thought was not in command but the physical universe was in command of the organism. Every time the physical universe moved in and commanded him and he could not do anything back again, a certain amount of the physical universe could be said to have been imposed upon him.
A person’s age, his future and his survival potential are intricately interwoven with the amount of physical-universe time which has been pressed in upon him. And if you put time all the way in on him he would die, time being part of an engram. So, the more you impress the physical universe into the turbulence to which thought is susceptible, the older this person is going to get.
A fellow who has an awful lot of engrams may look young, but actually he will be old. He is held up at a certain span in life, but his longevity is not good. Every time he gets a new engram his longevity lessens. And the more physical-universe energy, time, matter and space that is pushed into this person’s consciousness and enturbulated with his thought, the less time he has to live.
What if there is none there? Supposing none of these things are imposed upon him. Supposing you got his engrams out and mostly got out motion.
Don’t you see that if you process phrases, you are not getting the actual motion off the case? You are processing a delusion, because you are not getting the time back out of the engrams. The second you stop getting the time out of the engrams, of course, you are leaving the time on the case, you are leaving the motion on the case.
What is the aging factor of a human being? It is not enough to say that it is in terms of years, because everybody has a certain amount of inhibition from gravity alone. In other words, a person is limited in his motion by various things and a recording is made of those; when those recordings are really rough, as in an engram, his life starts to shorten down. The more time, in other words, that is shoved in on theta — the more time, matter and energy, the more engrams life hands this fellow — the more his life is shortened. The fellow gets psychosomatic illnesses, he is not as healthy as he should be and he starts down the dwindling spiral.
With the tone scale you are measuring, above all else, survival potential. In the first book, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, there is a page that shows longevity in terms of the tone scale.
If you give a fellow a hard enough engram, like a .44-caliber bullet, he will stop right there; he has absorbed all the time that body can stand. He has got the works. It is unhealthy.
The more engrams a person has, then, the lower he can be expected to be on the tone scale, because he has imbibed of this delusion. The delusion is that thought consists of matter, energy, space and time. That is the ultimate delusion.
Because they have this delusion, biologists could not resolve a science of mind. They said, “Life consists of matter, energy, space and time, and the energy is the same as electrical energy and that is the end of that.”
Now, you can certainly change the appearance of individuals. I don’t say that you could make an individual live forever.
Let us take up here a very “taboo” subject: the subject of past lives. You can start examining past lives and past engrams, way back. And believe me, if you process very many people very long, you are going to have to examine this and take it in and use it, because it is as solidly there as this book. Just get back to conception sometime and find out it won’t erase. That is basicbasic, isn’t it? Sometimes you can find one up higher than conception that will erase, in this life span. But when you get back to conception, you may find you have gone into an overlap. You are back there on an engram which was laid in and is lying on some past deaths and some grief.
Now let’s go back and try to run one of these past deaths. If you have ever run any delusion off anybody, you know you can just keep running it, and you can run it in altered forms and you can run the delusion of 159 train wrecks and run this and run that and have a grand time. Nothing happens to his case except that he gets a little spinnier. But if you go back on the time track into a past death, what do you find? You find that you have to obey the rule and law of engrams: the earlier ones have to be released and reduced before the later ones will come up. That situation we discover to exist with past deaths.
So, you find a conception that you can’t erase or reduce, and it just sticks there and the preclear is very aberrated about it and upset about the whole thing. Are you going to say “Let’s go to the past death necessary to resolve this case,” or are you going to say “That’s tough. I don’t believe in past deaths, so of course I can’t run anything earlier than this conception, so I guess it just won’t reduce”? In other words, don’t think like a psychiatrist.
There are certain laws you can follow and certain tests you can make. When you get back of this life on the track you find out that you have to do some of this to resolve an awful lot of cases.
Very often you will find some fellow who has been walking around with a tremendous, horrendous somatic and whose auditor has gone nuts trying to locate this. This is peculiarly true of the fellow who will go back into the prenatal area and get just one somatic which he can’t reduce or anything. So you bring him up to present time. You take him back into the prenatal area next time and try to reduce it, but you can’t do it. There is no use in knocking your brains out. Just say, “Let’s go to the death necessary to resolve the case,” and there you will find something that will permit that somatic to go by the board, so you run it and it disappears.
As a matter of fact, I have been hammered around by a lot of so-called friends who didn’t want anything to get upset in Dianetics. I think the worst thing you could do to upset Dianetics would be to fix it up so it could not work. I think that would be the ultimate that could be done to it to hurt it, and if you omit past lives and past deaths from it, it won’t work — completely and all the way. Because of that little workability of the occasional engram that you hit, the occasional preclear who is stuck on the track because of a past life, if you just say “I’m not going to run it,” he is going to stay stuck on the track. And you don’t want that, because it makes him uncomfortable and sometimes people blow their brains out and do things like that, and while that is nothing in psychiatry or psychoanalysis, it means something to us in Dianetics.
So, you can sometimes move a preclear up the time track and get him into present time by knocking out a past death.
Did it ever strike you as peculiar that you can go back in this life in theta and not be able to change the physical universe? You can go back down your so-called time track, measured and filed against the physical universe, and get back to the time when you were about five years of age and find the most remarkable thing: you are there as far as thought is concerned, but not as far as the physical universe is concerned.
As a matter of fact, you can put a preclear there so thoroughly that he looks, acts and talks like he did as a child; you have to coax him with candy to get him to tell you anything, and so on. It is very funny to see a forty-year-old man in this situation. You take him back to the time he was three years of age and he is revivified there, and you say to him, “What are you doing there?”
“I won’t tell ya!”
“Well, what has happened to you today?” Silence.
“Would you tell me if I gave you something?” “Yeah.”
“What?”
“Well, if you give me some candy.”
Beware of revivifying anybody at the age of about six months! I took a preclear back down the track one time; I didn’t know this fellow would revivify but he sure revivified. He went back and I was just opening my mouth to ask him a question and he looked at me fixedly and said, “Waaaaaaaaa!” — a high-pitched baby scream! When I brought him back to present time he didn’t even remember it.
It is odd; he couldn’t have reached around and changed the location of the physical universe where he was, but you can change thought by processing him.
Now, that is the prime time factor. You can see that time is in the physical universe, but you can also see that you can handle theta in time almost at will. You can get the recordings of this stuff, in other words, but you can’t get it. You can’t change the physical universe, but the theta, when it gets back into that area, changes the individual physiologically to match that age. This also should tell you that theta can change to match the body to any age, and it can.
I have known actors who were pretty good at this. There was one actor who, when the character he was playing was old, really became old. People would come and slap makeup on him, but there wasn’t much reason to slap makeup on him: he was old; he was old already. I think if he had stayed “old” for a few days and played an old part, his hair would have turned gray.
It sometimes occurs that someone gets a tremendous fright or something of the sort and his hair turns gray. You can process a person who is grayhaired back to a time when he had his natural- color hair; that is no great trick. My hair had turned gray when I left the war and it has been processed back on down.
In other words, thought is controlling function and the thought will have an illusion or a delusion about what it is doing to the direct degree that it confuses itself with the physical universe. As long as it recognizes its potentialities over the physical universe and recognizes its own entity as itself over the physical universe, thought can do almost anything it wants to the organism or to the environment. But as it gets confused and finally confuses itself and gets itself to a point where it feels it is bound by the physical universe because of these delusions, it practically drops out through the bottom and gets “normal.”
Amongst other reasons, there are two particular reasons people get well in processing. The first is that you are taking the time out of the theta. Time is mixed up with the theta; it isn’t the matter and the energy and the space. You are taking the time back out of the theta, evidently, because that is the only thing which is transient in the theta. Apparently time carries a certain amount of register; things can be registered on time, and you are taking this time factor out of the theta. And if you can take the time factor, the time confusion, out of the theta — in other words, get everything spotted so that there is no time enturbulence, so that everything is carefully laid out along what time should be — you can deaberrate that human being.
And the second reason is you can strip him of the illusions by validating the actual theta itself; do this and you will have a well preclear on your hands.
It is very interesting that the invalidation of a past death brings about such a tremendous bog- down on the part of a case. The invalidation of a past death brings more bog-down than I know of in any other line. You can invalidate a person in this life, you can tell him he is no good and you can tell him that this and that is wrong with him and he won’t pay any attention to you; but if all of a sudden you say to him “You know that past death you ran yesterday? That’s no good. I mean, it wasn’t true!” he will crash. There is one reason for this. Reality has not been established for him about this, and yet it is evidently true. So, because the reality has not been established for it, it is something that is rather sensitive and you can hit it and knock it out rapidly. Watch out for that case, because when you invalidated him you knocked out many, many centuries of time. And when you enturbulate that much time that fast, you can expect to have an awfully sick preclear on your hands.
You can almost say that a preclear can be made ill in the direct ratio that you enturbulate or occlude time for him. If you wiped out the first twenty years of a man’s life he would be pretty sick. If you could only wipe out the first four or five years of his life, he would be neurotic just to that extent. And as you open up his life and respot it again, he gets well to the degree that time becomes available to him.
So, you get all the time spotted that you possibly can and get the time factor straightened out on a case — get those turbulences out of it — and you have done more for the case than you could by any other method. Put theta back in control and your preclear will get well — despite the rest of your auditing of him!
Illusion is a very precise thing, then. It could be the postulation of an actuality you mean to take place.
Delusion is something that the physical universe has forced upon you. There would be nothing much wrong with an illusion, but there would be plenty wrong with a delusion. If a person has delusions, you know very well the physical universe has walked in on him until he has confused theta with the physical universe.
But if a person doesn’t have illusions, bury him! That is to say, if he is not able to postulate and bring into being a future reality, he is no good to you or the rest of the human race. That is one of the most important functions a man or a woman can do. The woman says, “I think we will have roast beef for dinner.” That is an illusion. She hasn’t even bought it yet. But she serves it.
But beware of the man who will never say “Dear, I think we had better have a twenty-room house and a couple of good cars and live nicely,” because he won’t ever be successful. He has to postulate it before he gets there.
If this man without illusions were suddenly subjected to having a million dollars dumped in his lap by life, what would he do with it? He has nothing plotted for it. He would sit there and look at it. After all, what is it? It is a flock of paper. The government set up an illusion that it was worth something, that it had so much sweat attached to it and had so much bread attached to it and so forth — illusion.
In this whole society today you are dealing with practically nothing but these illusions. But there is one thing that you better not count off as an illusion — that theta can be in control of the organism and that time had better be very clear with an individual in his life. And if you achieve this, you will have a well individual on your hands.
It doesn’t much matter what you invalidate so long as you lay off throwing him a curve about his theta control of himself or the physical universe around him. If you cut this up and invalidate this and push him around and mess him up in general you are going to have a bad result. But you can bring him up to a point where his theta is in such tremendously thorough control that you can’t invalidate him. You could probably throw a cannon ball at him and it would bounce.