In an earlier lecture I gave you an ARC setup on Straightwire, l and I told you that it was all possible pleasure moments and aberrations. I should have added “on a theta level,” because there is a whole new set.

Dianetics is going to get too simple one of these days. When it gets simple enough, of course, it can be given to psychoanalysts or something. It would have to be extremely simple, though: they have to be taught that there is a human being on the couch, first. They have never even learned that lesson.

In the matter of Straightwire, what you are trying to do is straighten out some of the interactions among the dynamics on a theta level. ARC is very important.

Now, up to this moment it has been overlooked in Dianetics that there is such a thing as MEST in the organism. We are living in a physical universe as well as to some degree a theta universe.

MEST, of course, has been so heavily stressed by the physical scientist, and the field of physics has so far advanced itself over the field of the humanities (behavior along a theta line), that the whole social order of man today is completely unbalanced. It is unbalanced to the point where man has provided himself with weapons enough to knock out man. There was a great boast in the paper not too long ago that the United States Government had accumulated potential explosive power greater than the sum of all the bombs and bullets fired in World War II and for the seven hundred years preceding.

Evidently we are coming up against a cultural cycle or a cultural death which will take place unless it is interrupted. It will probably take some little time for it really to take place; maybe we are catching this thing just on the start of the dwindling spiral and maybe not. We can at least hope for it.

For that reason, one who is working in the field of the humanities is rather prone to say to himself that in the physical sciences they made no great progress in solving the mind, and therefore we will go over onto the other side of the picture and try to solve this thing from the theta side of the ledger. One could lean too far in that direction.

I just want to give you a quick glance at the ARC Straightwire system. l ARC Straightwire is terrifically important. It is the tool with which you are going to open up low-tone-scale cases, and those are the cases that don’t ordinarily move well. In Straightwire you have a very able and not-to-be underestimated weapon in your war against aberration.

In setting up the interaction system, we put any dynamic down on the bottom. We have ARC for each one of the dynamics above and ARC for the dynamic at the bottom on which we are working the interactions, and we can get a combination of ARC, or understanding. The first dynamics in the world can suppress a person’s first dynamic, or his first dynamic can suppress itself. The second dynamics in the world can suppress his first dynamic, or the first dynamics in the world can suppress his second dynamic. And they do the suppression on the basis of affinity, reality and communication locks.

You could set this system up in such a way that if you studied it over and looked it over very carefully and just reasoned it out yourself, you would find yourself blowing quite a few of your own locks, just by reasoning it out.Now, we have dynamics six and seven as very high-order denominators for this system — dynamic seven, theta, and dynamic six, MEST. We know that when seven and six collide with a crash we get an engram. And we know that when a loss takes place, we get a secondary. When loss is threatened there is a fear secondary, when loss is recognized we get a grief secondary and when loss is completely accepted as unremediable we get an apathy secondary; that is to say, when there is no hope ever of replacing the thing lost, that is liable to produce an apathy secondary.

If these two dynamics come together too closely with an impact we get a physical-pain engram, and if they go apart we get a loss engram, or a secondary.

It so happens, however, that secondaries are so light if there hasn’t been an initial collision of six and seven that there is no great worry. If an initial engram is not there below the secondary, then the secondary loss doesn’t get sealed up in any other fashion. There is no great complexity to it, in other words.

If a fellow stays in valence he blows his own grief. Most of the secondary grief that you are blowing off cases is, of course, grief because of valence shifts, enforcement and that sort of thing that is part of the engram content. People get out of valence, and you can take some cases and just blow somebody else’s grief off the case ad infinitum without actually improving the case very much. However, if you get a fellow out of phase, out of valence, in the basic area, and one of the people concerned in the engram is crying or giving forth commands to cry, as this fellow comes on up the line he can have his own grief but it is reinforced by this earlier grief.

Physical pain generally underlies the secondary, but this does not mean that this definition of a secondary does not hold. I call your attention to the fact that this is a relatively new definition of a secondary. It is dynamics six and seven being separated. Any death or any loss or any incident leading toward death or loss is, of course, the basic here.

There has to be such a thing as a secondary, otherwise the organism wouldn’t try to keep in balance. So we have the situations of (a) dynamics six and seven as an engram, (b) dynamics six and seven as a rationality, (c) dynamics six and seven as a secondary. Situation (a) makes it necessary for this organism to die and kick that entheta out. Situation (b) makes a healthy organism. Situation (c) is simply the process of pulling these two apart, and therefore some effort to make a new organism or something can take place. But the death has already occurred. You could say a secondary to some degree has greater force as an individual incident than an engram, because the engram has to have one more step to become death but on the secondary this second step has been taken. Therefore secondaries will pile up an enormous amount of entheta on a case. It is an actual death lying on the fellow’s time track.

This also can be extrapolated to explain one of the reasons you get valence shifts out of secondaries sometimes. For instance, Grandpa dies and the little child has a tendency to become Grandpa. What happens here is that the sixth and seventh dynamics of the child go apart. But dynamics six and seven of the engram can stay together. Under the valence shifting and so forth, the illusion is that the child’s own life has been that much diminished, but there is seemingly life force left in Grandpa and the child has a tendency to become sealed in Grandpa’s valence. It is as though, when a death takes place, the life around that death seeks to perpetuate the identity of the dead item. It is a sort of an overall theta effort to keep something going which has suddenly been stopped. A lot of interesting speculation can be done in that field.

The first thing I want to tell you is don’t underestimate this system of Straightwire!

This system can be adapted into and become Hurdy-Gurdy auditing. That is merely compartmenting it up to one individual. But remember, with each individual in the vicinity of the child you have these interactions occurring. Furthermore, you can work out as an auditor, just with Straightwire, the life relationships of the individuals in the family, one to another, until the preclear knows every possible combination that was taking place around him. For instance, you have your triangles for Papa, one for enforced ARC and one for inhibited ARC. And then you have them for Mama — enforced and inhibited. Mama is inhibited, let us say, in the vicinity of Papa, who is dominant with relationship to Mama. But Papa is not dominant, strangely enough, with relationship to the child. Sometimes you will find that Papa inhibits with regard to the child, he doesn’t enforce. Or Mama may be very, very dominative toward Papa, and Papa is ARC-inhibited toward Mama, but Mama is inhibited toward a dominant grandmother.

In other words, a child is surrounded by personalities which seem to alter. Papa is not ARC- enforced all the time; he acts differently toward different persons. And just straightening it out on the basis of the interaction of these triangles gives the interpersonal relationships of the environment of your preclear. Papa’s dramatizations may be dominant dramatizations around three members of the family, but around the fourth, who shifts Papa’s valence, you get a domination-by-nullification dramatization. In other words, Papa just tries to cut this other person down to size, recognizing this other person has more force than himself.

In such a way you can isolate the characters and characteristics and habitual phrases of all the members of the family around a preclear or of all those people surrounding his environment. It is a very interesting operation.

You can work it like this: Draw a set of triangles for each member of the family and draw lines from one to the other — for example, from Papa toward Mama. And perhaps Papa was also dominant toward Grandpa — Mama’s father — and inhibited toward his own father.

By the way, this sorts out allies. l The preclear will generally have picked up allies in this fashion: If the preclear is being treated fairly rationally by some member of the family, and this relatively rational member of the family dominates Papa and makes Papa be an ARC-inhibited, then that person has a much greater chance of being the ally of the preclear. You can actually work this out and sometimes you will scare into view completely occluded ally computations the preclear did not know he had. But believe me, they will exist.

It takes another triangle to explain this fully: a triangle for “sane.” We don’t have much use for that in earlier types of processing, but you need this triangle in order to do Validation Processing. In what situations is Papa sane? In what situations does Papa become a dominant? In what situations does he become inhibited? What are his dramatizations on enforced and inhibited, and what is his ordinary course of conduct when he is acting sanely? All these are things you really need to know.

Now, suppose that Mama is sane toward the child and dominant toward Papa. Mama forces Papa into the inhibited position, but Mama is sane toward your preclear and Papa is dominant toward your preclear. This dominance toward the preclear is something the preclear will resist and it will tend to ally your preclear with Mama. Therefore, you get a very solid ally computation, and sometimes it becomes completely covered up by the fact that Mama is dominant toward Papa. There would be enough chatter in the prenatal bank and on the case at large to pretty well occlude the fact that at least for the first four, five or six years of his life your preclear was very definitely allied with Mama. And maybe this will have escaped him because later on, as life slapped her around, Mama started to become dominant toward the preclear — some of Papa’s operation had brought her down from sanity into a dominant bracket with regard to the child.

It is a simple system. It is just the fact that whoever dominates the preclear makes it possible for the preclear to look around and discover an ally in whoever dominates the person who is dominating the preclear. It is just a system of looking for the bigger boss, that’s all.

You will find this situation obtaining, and if you use this system you will suddenly smoke allies into view much faster than you ever did before.

This is the modus operandi — with these interlocks and so forth — of Straightwire. It may look awfully simple to you; it may look so elementarily simple that you will not, perhaps, use it in its highly routine fashion.

When you start this you say to your preclear. “Let’s see when somebody forced some affection on you. Can you remember any time in the last few days when somebody forced some affection on you?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Can you remember some more of them?” “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

“All right. When did somebody force you to agree with something, or force something upon you in the way of an agreement?”

“Oh, yeah, yeah, that so-and-so.”

“When did somebody make you look at something or force you to listen or something of the sort? Did anybody do that in the last few days?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Did anybody inhibit any affection in the last few days to you?” “Oh, yeah! Yeah, that was a dirty trick.”

You are just sorting this out straight. You aren’t really getting a heck of a lot of information there. You are just doing a very rapid-fire mop-up of the recent track.

“Did anybody prevent you from agreeing with something or insist that you didn’t agree? Did anybody tell you something wasn’t so that you thought was so?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Did anybody tell you that you couldn’t see somebody or you couldn’t talk?” “Sure.”

That is just routine Straightwire, and you can sit there and you can ask these questions round and round.

You can even go back and remember all those again. You start in at the beginning and you say, “Do you remember when somebody forced some affection on you in the last few days?”

What are you doing there? You are doing a repeat Straightwire. But you are not asking him to repeat anything; you are just doing another round of the Straightwire. What you are doing is actually a second lock-scan.

You can make this fellow, actually, finally form up chains and take charge off these things. If you watch him you will see that he obviously is not getting much kick from these things. It is just mildly corrective for him. Ask him to go over them several times, but you go over them this way and using this routine several times, chain by chain. You are actually making him lock-scan.

Very often a case cannot lock-scan and the cases that will worry you will be the cases which can’t lock-scan. This technique also works very well on a case which can lock-scan. Because what is this? This is just a Straightwire effort to get repetitive coverage of the same ground. You can go over it and over it. He will go over it several times; if he gets bored with it — ”Well, so all right, so they did” — go over it a couple more times. In other words, this person’s tone will come up on these locks he is remembering, just by memory! He remembers them, he remembers them, he remembers them, then all of a sudden he is bored with them, so you ask him to remember them again and in this way you can get locks up to where they will tone 4 with Straightwire. That should be a handy little tool for you.

I want to add right here that you can, by Straightwire, make somebody start to auto-audit — by giving them Straightwire and Straightwire and Straightwire, by asking them enough questions and so forth. So how do you get away with this? You straightwire the session. When you are all through with the session, then you go straightwiring through the session and make him remember the various parts of the session and tell you about them one after the other.

What you are doing there is scanning off the session, and you should do this with a low-tone- scale preclear. Actually you should do this with almost any preclear you work; either scan off the session or give them a Straightwire through the session and you will find out that, although their tone might have been just a little bit down when you started to finish the session, by that Straightwire process their tone will come up. That is how you stop auto-auditing on a preclear who has started auto-auditing on Straightwire. This is a piece of information you should know.

Now, there are two sides to an organism. Theta plus phi equals lambda. That is a fancy way of stating that theta plus physical universe equals life.

ARC Straightwire was great stuff, but wait till you start to use MEST Straightwire. This is a brand-new technique. We have covered the theta part of the organism with Straightwire; now let’s take the MEST side.

What is MEST? Matter, energy, space and time — the physical universe. And there is matter, energy, space and time for each dynamic. The individual on the first dynamic exists in “I” as “I” exists in MEST. Half of him is MEST. His weight is MEST, his force is MEST, his energy is MEST, his space is MEST and his time is MEST.

What does this postulate? This postulates a system of interactions of matter, energy, space and time with each dynamic.

This even works with dynamic six — MEST against MEST. For example, a fellow runs his car into the garage. There is a piece of MEST he owns which has just wrecked a piece of MEST he owns. And he feels very sorry about it.

Now, you have matter, energy, space and time existing for the individual, for children and future, sex and family. The group has matter, energy, space and time; man has matter, energy, space and time; life has matter, energy, space and time. And as far as dynamic six is concerned, MEST has MEST. As far as dynamic seven is concerned, seven is of course being pushed around considerably by six — there is the engram. So you get an interplay on these.

Let’s take a look at the tone scale of MEST. There can be denied MEST, super dominated MEST, and rationally controlled and handled MEST. This would be actually the handling of MEST, the attitude of MEST and the condition of MEST.

MEST below 2.0 is enMEST, and above 2.0 it is really MEST. But enMEST is still composed, even if very cluttered up, of matter, energy, space and time. This MEST is in bad shape; it is about ready to fall apart. It is in awful condition. It has been abused and mishandled to a point where the domination in it has shown up, so that an effort to use it is fraught with great peril, actually. An effort to use enMEST at this band really endangers an organism.

For instance, take a child’s rocking horse: This rocking horse came from the store, and it has had the dickens raised with it. As it started down the scale it was bad enough; it got kind of splintery and it made the child kind of mad at it. But when it gets down to a lower level, one day one of the rockers falls off and the child busts his head open. This is enMEST.

Somebody remarked one day just as though it were news or something of value or interest that the materiel of war goes to pieces with great rapidity in war. The materiel of war goes to pieces at such an accelerated rate that it is just as though there were something a trifle metaphysical about it. One of the big tanks now costs $250,000 — one quarter of a million bucks to make one tank. That tank used as a tractor or something of the sort around a farm would probably still be around ten, fifteen years from now, even if it was left out in the weather. But they take it up on the war front and it goes rattling and banging along — maybe the roads aren’t even bad — and for some peculiar reason the life of that tank is about forty-five days or two months. Then the treads start to fall off the thing, the armor plate starts to come apart, the engine bearings start to burn out and so on.

You could say this is just heavy use. But I watched machinery in the last war. Anywhere in the vicinity of action the deterioration of equipment was fantastic. We used to throw big boat engines overboard — give them the deep-six. They were beautiful things, but they would make four or five runs to the beach, or something like that, and then there wouldn’t be any motor left.

It is just the fact, actually, that the organism using them is enturbulated — under stress. It is very logical; there is nothing metaphysical about it. The organism using them is under stress.

There are different types of MEST: there is pure MEST, which is just the chaotic universe, there is organized MEST, which is something that theta has already organized, and there is enMEST.

The enturbulated organism, entheta, is using MEST, and when entheta gets hold of a piece of MEST it really makes junk out of it quickly. Any time you want to see a piece of nice MEST go to pieces, just put it in the vicinity of entheta. Just loan your car to a 1.1 someday. You have been driving it for months over dusty roads and everything else, but it comes back and the horn doesn’t blow and there is a flat tire. You just can’t figure out what happened to this car! Entheta got up against it and it got some rough handling.

I have traced this curiously. I have watched possessions get into the hands of entheta individuals and have seen them deteriorate rapidly. For instance, we have Bill who is very entheta and Joe who is pretty fair; Joe’s portable typewriter gets left in the back of Bill’s car. It is odd, but it gets lost in the back of Bill’s car. It just gets left there. Joe had carried it in other people’s cars a lot of times, but this time when he put it in the back of Bill’s car he left it there, and it became enMEST to the extent of being lost for a little while.

Of course, the reason for this is that he gets entheta and becomes upset in the vicinity of Bill and he isn’t taking care of a possession, so he accidentally forgets his MEST and leaves it in the back of the car. It rides around in the back of the car for three or four days. This typewriter is years old and it has given good service, but all of a sudden the carriage no longer works.

This looks metaphysical but it isn’t; it is just the fact that Bill, when he drives across culverts and things like that, drives across them fast and rough.

So that is MEST that gets in the vicinity of entheta and becomes enMEST. You can trace out the cycle of possessions in the hands of entheta people that you know. Think of somebody who was pretty aberrated, and what did he do with things — his automobiles, his houses, all of this sort of thing? This is so much so that you can actually look at the possessions of an individual and to some degree spot him on the tone scale. That is something for you to remember.

Listen to how the person’s motor runs and spot him on the tone scale. That would be quite a trick. But it is simply that the MEST around this fellow vibrates finally into a sympathetic harmony with his own tone scale level. I am sorry that it has to be so simple but that is what happens. The MEST eventually gets into that band.

So, as the MEST starts down the tone scale, it gets to where it can hurt somebody or it is a mess, and down further it is actually a terrific threat, but it is liable to be such a terrific threat you don’t even recognize it as a threat at all. Down near the bottom is a Model T Ford or something like that.

It is not age alone which causes this. You can take one of the newest manufactured automobiles and put it into the vicinity of some entheta for just a matter of days, and then go out and take your life in your hands. For instance, here is this new car, a 1951 model, and it drives like a truck: it overheats, it does this, it does that.

This isn’t anything you have to even connect mystically. Somebody mentioned an airplane crash after a strike. The mechanics go out to repair the motors and here is a piece of MEST. Up to this time they have liked this MEST, everything was just fine about this MEST and they wanted to keep that airplane flying. But this day they go out and they are mad at the airline company; they work thoroughly, they work conscientiously — they think. They go through the same routine they always went through before — but they don’t screw in the oil line. And up goes this big, beautiful airplane and it is enMEST. And it sure makes enMEST out of its passengers.

There is a statement in Science of Survival on this, and there is a column in the Chart of Human Evaluation on the handling of material objects or the handling of the material universe in his periphery, but it doesn’t go into it deeply.

If you want a very fast way of spotting somebody on the tone scale, just get him to tell you about his possessions and what has happened to them. This fellow is either in the vicinity of somebody else who has those possessions — and remember this can happen too; there is more than one member of a family — or it is his fault.

It is very therapeutic to find out about this because if he is fairly well up on the tone scale and he would ordinarily have taken good care of MEST but he is in the vicinity of somebody who doesn’t, there is going to be a continual nullification by this other person of his efforts to take care of MEST, and he is going to be brought down the tone scale to a point where he is going to attempt to dominate about MEST. He will get pretty upset and, as a matter of fact, his MEST will go to pieces.

The acquisition, maintenance, care and holding of MEST is a very important part of processing. It is so important that up till now we have overlooked it. It is one of those magnificent simplicities. So you can spot somebody on the tone scale by his MEST — or enMEST, usually.

I sometimes look at this thing and I don’t quite see the connecting line, the concatenation, very clearly. I saw a brand-new Chrysler sitting on the street corner, and it was dented in all over its hood, all over its top and all over its rear by hailstones. It was a mess — great big dents! I said immediately to myself, “I won’t buy a car made that thinly!”

That may have been a little bit of a harsh judgment because these hailstones out here are pretty big. One hit a car down in a parking lot and bashed in the whole top — about a twenty-five- pound hailstone.

But here was this car all pockmarked, and I immediately thought to myself, “I wonder where the person who owns that car is on the tone scale.” In the first place, he wasn’t evidently accustomed to making provisions for his MEST. There was no shelter for this car; there must have been other things wrong. Or maybe there had been a sudden emergency caused by some other entheta individual someplace where he had to be out with his car during a storm, and storms were hitting at outlandish hours of the night. But I have seen no other car so bashed in by these hailstones; it is curious.

You start looking around and you can learn a lot about people.

You cannot have theta and MEST impinging on each other without enturbulating both the theta and the MEST.

There is an interesting postulate that one could theoretically have enough theta to be able to sort of throw it over the top of the MEST around and it would start to run. For example, the men in the Royal Australian Air Force were pretty low on the tone scale; a lot of their training consisted of snapping their heels and doing right faces. They were really pushed down the tone scale, and their equipment didn’t run. But an American would come along and he would take a look at the equipment and jiggle something and it would start to run. I have seen a master sergeant of the Australian Air Force with his lorry stopped alongside of the road waiting for some American to come by on a motorcycle or something and get his truck going again. There was a lot more verve in the Americans; there was a lot more theta, a lot more life. This might be some kind of comparison.

There is this, too: When the army starts to work to get everybody to clean things up and so on, remember that although it is highly authoritarian on this line, it is demanding that a certain order exist. Order itself is theta, it is reason and so on. However, if the commanding officer keeps going out and nagging everybody and bawling people out and so forth about how they are handling equipment, without putting a good system into line whereby this equipment can be handled, instead of getting better the equipment just goes on down, becoming more and more enMEST. It breaks down quicker and so forth.

Now, you may have become accustomed to handling MEST just as material objects. It may have escaped you that it is matter, energy, space and time. For instance, a chair is matter and energy existing in space and time. That is true enough. It is a material structure; there is a residual energy in it occasioned by the temperature of the room and by the gravity which is attracting it toward the core of the earth and so on. There are energies operating on that chair, a lot of them. And not only does it exist in space and time, it has its own space and time. Until this matter is destroyed, no matter where it is placed, you can still feel the operating energies in it and it is still occupying the same space, and in order to occupy space at all it has to be located in time. Furthermore, it has its own time: it is so many months or years old.

When something gets very, very old — centuries old — and it has managed to stand up all those centuries, we get a certain reverence for it. Take a very old grandfather clock, for instance. This thing has survived time and we have a tendency to pay a tribute to it.

Or take a very old man, and the fellow is still getting about — that is really something.

Now, we can take time away from the chair simply by making it inoperative as a chair. If we kicked the arms off it and so forth, it would then be inoperative as the item called chair and as a nice piece of MEST. This chair is good MEST; it isn’t enMEST yet, but by knocking the seat apart or something of the sort, we can take the time that it will be MEST and it will become enMEST.

You will notice that when the chair gets splintered up and so forth, a girl could sit down there and a snag would catch her silk stockings. The chair has become a little bit enMEST, and it brings about destruction to other MEST. It brings about enturbulation to her — it brings about entheta by doing that. Or some entheta individual could come along and put a tack in the chair and somebody would sit down on it. In other words, there are quite a few things you could do with this chair. But remember that it is matter, energy, space and time.

We could heat this chair up and it would have more energy than it had before, or we could put this chair in the back of a truck traveling at thirty miles an hour, and there is energy again — kinetic energy, potential energy, both existing as a result of motion.

As a matter of fact, the chair is spinning through space at a thousand miles an hour; actually, with relationship to the center of the universe, it has some 180 motions. It is going in 180 different directions simultaneously, and on atomic and molecular phenomena, the number of motions in this chair is incalculable — the number of orbits of electrons and so on. It is incalculable how many motions are taking place — the complexity of this piece of MEST. But for our purposes all we have to know about it is that when we are talking about MEST we are talking about matter, energy, space and time.

Normally when we say matter, we would just say the chair — a physical possession. When we are talking about energy we would be talking about strength, about flow of current.

The individual organism happens to be a carbon-oxygen engine. It was the fact that theta was smart enough to manufacture, make and create a self-perpetuating, self-repairing, carbon- oxygen motor that made the physical scientist believe that nothing could be smart enough to make this motor, so therefore the motor was the thing. Therefore, the motor was all of life — it had to be — so life was nothing more than a carbon-oxygen reaction The humanities didn’t get solved that way. That is dealing too much on the MEST side.

Then we have space; space is important to people. And we have time, and time is important to people. For instance, what is the commonest punishment assigned to a criminal? It is to take his space away from him and to take his time away from him.

When you lose some material object, space has stolen it from you. Space has taken it away. When something or somebody is gone too long, time has become enturbulated. You could actually go out and assign a whole bunch of labels, then; you could say enturbulated matter, enturbulated energy, enturbulated space and enturbulated time. And by recognizing there could be enturbulated matter, enturbulated energy, enturbulated space and enturbulated time, you can see immediately that there can be a lot of aberrations existing along this line. Stop and think of this for a moment: When is the first time you remember losing some space? What is the first space you ever lost? On an analytical level one of the commonest, earliest experiences is a denial of space on the one hand and an enforcement of space on the other hand — and that is school. They do the same thing to children that they do to a criminal.

Now, we have different types of MEST: we have sane MEST (in other words, MEST in good order), we have enforced MEST and we have inhibited MEST. MEST, then, fits on a tone scale.

Actually, MEST falls below the existing tone scale but we will just use the same one to give a comparison.

MEST below 2.0 will interrupt action and effort on the part of an organism. For instance, by breaking down, an automobile will make a person fail to get to the next town and so forth; it interrupts the action. The MEST will make him work far too hard on it to get where he is going.

If you can consider an organism enMEST, this is like a horse I had once that somebody gave me to ride up to the top of a mountain; I finally wound up carrying the horse up. He was one of these little Panamanian horses; you fit about two of them into a suitcase. This horse wouldn’t walk over brush and he wouldn’t step over logs or anything of the sort, so I had to pick up his front feet and put them on the other side of the log and pick up his rear end and so on. By the time I got him up at the top of the mountain he was very fresh, but boy, was I tired! That horse was actually inhibiting my action.

But MEST can dominate a theta organism. This is why people talk about “the evil of material possession, eschew all material possession,” and so forth. It actually can dominate an individual. It is significant that in this society the highest goals are along the line of acquiring MEST. However, too much of this stuff will dominate a person.

For instance, there is such a thing as a person fencing in too much space. It is all right if that space merely exists, but as soon as someone starts to acquire it and own it and put his name on it, he is then responsible for that space. And if he fences in too much space and he doesn’t keep that space up — in other words, if he hasn’t got enough theta to make enough energy and organisms and so forth to take care of that space and occupy that space — he is in trouble and it will become enMEST. If a person takes too much time on something, the same sort of thing happens.

It gets into the basis of — and you might as well interpret it this way — too much or too little: “When did you have too much space?” “When didn’t you have enough space?” “Let’s remember a time when you didn’t have enough space.” “Do you remember any incident connected to your father which restricted your space?” For example, the time this person’s father wanted him to stay home: that restricted space. That was a space restrictor.

Now, whenever you get this system worked out in your mind for what it is, you can see immediately that the living of life involves just these four problems. You have them in duals sometimes, too. For instance, “You can’t move” would be a denial of the fellow’s energy and it is an inhibition of the amount of space; furthermore, it is a curtailment of his time because it is wasting his time.

So you start right on down the line on MEST Straightwire just like you would on ARC Straightwire. It is the same proposition.

ARC ties into this as well — for instance, affinity for items and affinity for space. Would you like to go back to a certain part of the world? In other words, do you have a homesick feeling or something for some part of the world? That is affinity for space. Also, something has been thrown out of position with regard to time because what you are probably longing for is a time which doesn’t exist anymore.

There are a terrific number of MEST pleasure moments. A fellow wouldn’t go on living at all if every moment were filled with agony. Every perceptic has its MEST counterpart. Of course, by denying a person MEST — denying him matter, denying him energy, denying him space, denying him time — continually enough, you would cause his perceptics to break down. Or by forcing MEST upon him continually enough you would cause his perceptics to break down, because there is a MEST component to every perceptic. Every perceptic has its theta half and its MEST half.

Here is another road in to turning on sonic. Let’s just get this person going over the times when he lost space, the times when he lost time, the times when he lost energy and the times when he had actual material losses — objects. Now let’s go to the times when material objects forced themselves upon him, when material objects were forced upon him, when energy was forced upon him, when space was forced upon him and when time was forced upon him — in other words, when somebody else took his time and extended it, threw it out of line.

If you go on an ARC line like this you will get someplace. For instance, let’s go to the time when material objects were fun, when there was energy, when it was good to have energy — this energy, that energy — and when it was good to have space. In other words, go over the analytical moments, the sane band of MEST, for Validation Processing. Just like you go over all the sane ARC moments that you can find in the case for Validation Processing, so you would go over all the sane MEST data you could find on the case for Validation Processing by Straightwire.

You will find that among the first things a person loses as he starts down the tone scale are these various components of MEST. There is such an inter rivalry among organisms and species and so on about MEST that when somebody starts to let go of a little bit of MEST something else will pick it up, ordinarily. This gets to the point where sometimes something else picks it up before he lets go of it.

Now, let me show you a gradient scale of these MEST incidents. We start with a super sixth and seventh dynamic impingement — in other words, a MEST enforcement. MEST is enforced on the theta; that is an engram. You can postulate that there are lighter engrams, and still lighter engrams. As they get lighter, they become less engrams; they are getting into locks, and they get lighter and lighter, down to very light locks.

Then there is the secondary gradient chain. First you have the heavy secondary — in other words, heavy loss — and you go down the gradient into lesser and lesser losses as locks lying on secondaries. This is in terms of MEST and MEST only. The fellow lost space and he lost time. For instance, do you remember a time when you had to wait for half an hour to catch some vehicle? That is a MEST lock. So we have gradient scales of MEST enforcement’s and MEST losses.

Do you remember a time when somebody told you you had to stay after school? There is an enforcement of time — somebody taking up your time and doing something else with it. In both of these cases the self-determinism of the individual with regard to MEST has been interrupted. And that is the full definition: The self-determinism of the individual with regard to MEST has been interrupted, either by MEST enforcement or MEST inhibition. In either case his sane or rational control of MEST has been interrupted, interrupted by MEST being forced on him or by MEST being denied him.

For instance, take a little kid: he is always being told he has to go to bed, he has to come to dinner, he has to do this, he has to do that, he is being interrupted in his self-determinism. This is to some degree necessary in the line of training. That is an interruption of his time and it is also dictating to him what space he is to occupy.

Now let’s take the child and start denying him MEST. The best way in the world to deny a child MEST is to give him a piece of MEST and then tell him what to do with it. When he starts to do something with it on his own you tell him he can’t do that, he has to do something else with it. This is not, then, his MEST !

A theta organism which has no MEST to control becomes aberrated. If you take a person who is in a terrible state of commotion all the time and who is probably pretty entheta on the tone scale, one of the ways of straightening him out is to just shovel MEST at him. You could even shovel MEST at him by just giving him the air. You just give this fellow MEST up to a saturation point and he will all of a sudden saturate, and he will buckle down.

What you would do with a case, then, is start in on ARC Straightwire. Just set this up as a possible routine on a case. Start in with Straightwire on ARC enforced, then go in on ARC inhibited, and then go in on MEST enforced and MEST inhibited.

Now, particularly when you are doing a Hurdy-Gurdy job and you are asking about Papa — you have him thinking about Papa on ARC enforced and then ARC inhibited and so on — get him remembering about Papa and then all of a sudden throw in “Do you remember a time when you were denied some matter, a material object of some sort?” It is most likely to click in on the Papa chain. And you ask, “Do you remember when you had to take a material object?” That is MEST enforced.

The fellow will think around, “Oh, them damn beans! They were always making me eat beans.”

That is, of course, matter enforced.

What we are doing is spotting up a particular type of incident which has more concentration on the MEST side than it has on the ARC side.

Then there is energy. Find out when the fellow was given energy or had energy taken away from him or something of the sort — for example, mowing the lawn. Papa made him mow the lawn; Papa inhibited his energy by forcing him to do something other than what he wanted to do. That is an energy inhibition. Papa made him sit still: after a while he started going nuts; his energy level was up above what he was doing and his self-determinism was interrupted.

You will find out in every case that the self-determinism is interrupted along each dynamic wherever a person is aberrated. In other words, aberration is occasioned by self-determinism being interrupted along the various dynamics. This is one of the thorough ways the dynamics could be interrupted. For example, “Do you remember when your family had a car? Do you remember when you were inhibited from using it?” There is a group break. This would be an incident where you would actually get this fellow singled out from the group. Or, “Do you remember a time when there was a big party and you weren’t allowed to go to it?” There is a denial of space and time.

All of this sort of stuff will add up and you can put this down and start working with it, and you will find that people, particularly low-tone-scale people, have had a lot of trouble with MEST. After you have done Straightwire or Lock Scanning on this line, I think you will find that the person’s handling of MEST will get much better. When you do this mechanically, knowing what the basis is, your preclear will start adding it up. It is like telling fortunes. The fortune-telling cards have so many signs on them and they give a lot of possible combinations of human situations. So your fortune teller sits there and deals the cards. Other things can enter into it, but just by the process of dealing these cards he is postulating certain situations and he doesn’t have to know anything about the other person’s life to sound very, very wise indeed.

You don’t have to lay out very much or even explain ARC Straightwire or MEST Straightwire or Lock Scanning and this fellow will begin to think, “This guy is really smart. I mean, he is certainly reaching right down to the core. That was my main trouble. And that’s another tough one,” and so on.

I notice, too, that people sometimes don’t appreciate the lengths to which an inhibition of something can go — inhibiting the possession, on MEST, or inhibiting ARC. A girl who refuses to look at you, for instance, is a communication inhibition. She refuses to communicate. Her looking at you is a communication. Her refusing to answer you when you speak to her can be a very interesting one — or your refusing to answer her. As a matter of fact, one of the best ways in the world to get even with somebody is to just not talk. That is a thorough communication break — and you can’t be hung for anything. Here is this negative thing, it is not implanting anything by semantics at all, and yet a person can get very upset with somebody who won’t answer — just as a person gets very upset with somebody who insists on his talking. Either way, it is aberrative; it should sit in the middle. In other words, self- determinism should govern it, and in a group good manners should obtain.

I have been asked how it is possible to get the same result from running pleasurable analytical moments about MEST as from running analytical moments about ARC. If you are just running ARC, you are not getting the same result, you are getting half the result. If you run MEST (matter, energy, space and time) analytical moments — not pleasure moments, but analytical moments — you will get another phase of the case lifting in tone. You are not getting the same result; you are getting a comparable result in another sphere which we have neglected.

Validation Processing made it absolutely necessary to look out and find every place we could possibly look in order to discover analytical moments, and all of a sudden the whole section of MEST showed up.

It is vital to have enough analytical moments to find in a person’s life. With some of these people you are auditing you are going to start getting stumped after a while. Now you can have a whole new field of questions. “When did you take a rational look at space?” or “When did you think about some space or other?”

The fellow says, “What’s space?” He can’t translate this right. “Well, I don’t know. I remember I was surveying a lot once when I was going to build a place on it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, as a matter of fact I had this lot and I never did get around to building the house, but I had it. And I remember one Sunday I was out there. Oh yes, and Marion was there.”

All of a sudden you have a concatenation of analytical moments you wouldn’t have suspected otherwise.

“Do you remember when you didn’t have any time? Is there a chain of not having any time?” “Yes.”

“Is there a chain of having lots of time?” Right alongside of the first one will be this other one. “Yes, definitely.”

So that’s your rational chain — when the person did not feel strained about time and time was not being forced on him.

The most aberrative thing which a society could do would be to send everybody to the office at nine o’clock in the morning and make them go home at five. You would make a sheep society willy-nilly out of that; it would be a sheep society, it would wind up as one. It might even wind up to the point where it would develop modern psychology!

Now, you will notice that as a person goes down the tone scale his MEST level drops. His time factor goes out — his track has a tendency to group, mechanically. Space goes out — things appear either too close to him or too far from him; usually it is a matter of too close. The world around him starts to jam up on him if he has had space terrifically enforced upon him, and if it has been inhibited on him everything will get too unreally far away, or something like that. His sense of reality about MEST starts going out.

As far as energy is concerned, he may be a manic who says “I have enough energy to lift this 550-pound safe with one hand,” or he may be a hypochondriac who says “I’m tired all the time.” His physical-energy level is down or up if he is on the lower part of the tone scale.

I am pointing out the lower band, not because other people don’t suffer from this sort of thing, but because it is terrifically exaggerated on the lower band.

As far as matter is concerned, the person has quite a time for himself. If he is very badly off, he doesn’t even identify matter properly and he isn’t able to use it properly. His understanding of it starts going by the boards.

So you can measure a psychotic’s return to sanity with regard to his handling of time, space, energy and material. If this fellow, for instance, starts putting on his clothes, he has come up to the point where he recognizes his clothes as matter and so forth and he will use them. You would be surprised how many of them don’t recognize that. And if you get him up to the point where he can walk, handle his body and handle it fairly well, you are doing all right. If you get him up to the point where he can push a kiddy car or something of the sort, that is not too bad either. If you have ever noticed psychotics around a sanitarium using vehicles or having anything to do with vehicles, you have seen they don’t use them right. They are all loused up concerning what they are doing with them, like the fellow we saw at one hospital who pushes a wheelbarrow around with the wheelbarrow upside down. You ask him why he is carrying the wheelbarrow upside down and he says, “If I turned it right side up somebody would put something in it. I’m smart.”

Now, this is actually a development which is going to produce a lot more material for your preclear, good ammunition and so on. It may even be possible for you to clear up certain aberrations about eating, about going places and about doing things, with much greater rapidity than you were able to do before, because you are not looking for phrases; you are looking for the conceptual action as much as anything else. There are phrases which enforce all this, but this can be mechanical. There are times he can remember having to sit still when he was a child. And there are times he can remember when he was delighted to sit still. There are times when he was being beaten over the head, and so on.

I hope this review and this new material can help you out in your auditing. I know we can always use a little more material about Straightwire. I sometimes sit and look at a preclear and wish I knew a hundred new questions to ask him. With Validation Processing and now with rational moments about ARC and rational moments about MEST added into the battery, you really ought to be able to get a lot further than you have been able to before.