Thank you.

Want to talk to you a little bit more about scales. There is a great deal of modern information on the subject.

Now, in lecture fifteen, I told you about the earliest days of scales and now I want to tell you about the latest days of scales because scales have suddenly soared up through a number of important developments to something that you might consider very close to a final development.

Anything that you could develop from here on in scales would be very difficult to assume credible. You could mix the old scales but to set up this new series and then go any further, as far as a thetan is concerned, in this universe, you'd find it very, very difficult. Because this scale that I'm about to tell you about takes him on out of the universe. All right. To many people that would be of a very vast interest. Those people probably feel life isn't worth living anyway.

To some people who are not closely enough connected to life and would like to be into it a little more thoroughly and so forth, I only need tell you that you need do these principles in reverse and you'll get good and stuck in life. All right.

Life ceases to be a liability when you know how it traps and how to free. When you yourself can do that, life is no longer a liability.

Only one other consideration I would add in to that. If you have a large number of energy masses in your vicinity up in front of your theta face, whatever that is — asked a thetan one time — you ask somebody, "Where's your face?" You just keep on asking any being, "Where's your face?" And he's liable to eventually cognite on the fact that he doesn't have one. He owns one, but a thetan doesn't have a face. And a thetan, similarly, doesn't have any real connection with energy. There's no real connection with energy.

One of the first things you have to know about a thetan is that if he's stuck to anything, it's on the basis of a mystery sandwich. The thetan is one piece of bread and the energy mass he is stuck to is the other piece of bread and they are held together by mystery.

That is actually the total anatomy of how a thetan gets stuck to something: he's a mystery sandwich. All he has to do is have a mystery on how he is stuck to it and at once he's stuck to it, you see? You have that? All right. He's got to postulate there's a mystery in between.

Now if a thetan did have a great deal of these energy masses stuck to him which told him to be good, to be orderly, told him that he was — "now I'm supposed to," is the keynote of any engram. Engrams always say to the thetan, "now I'm supposed to," and he does this and "now I'm supposed to," and he does that. Machine response, you might call this — it's "now I'm supposed to." You ask somebody to run this for a little while and they feel like all the ridges are melting.

Well, you do have, in a preclear, consequences because of the close proximity of this energy mass called engrams, ridges, facsimiles — electronic phenomena. Now, today that electronic phenomena is much more important than it ever has been, because as you audit a thetan through an engram — he's taking a body through an engram — you audit him through a situation. At first glance you are auditing merely a being without mass plus a body through a MEST universe situation.

If you look it over very, very closely, however, you're auditing him through an electronic situation which exists in present time, which only has this connection with reality: that it is a picture of it. You're handling pictures, you're not handling real material. Don't you see? So that it is an electronic phenomena and, therefore, all auditing is the handling of electronic phenomena. You might not like that, but it's true.

A thetan is a much better electrician than you can hire. And he's an electric eel first and foremost, in this universe at least. And he makes pictures out of small particles of energy and he makes pictures of things that didn't happen and pictures of things that did happen and then conglomerates them and confuses them and rolls them up into ridges. And he gets himself beautifully confused, bedded down, trapped, so forth. He gets himself caught up in a vacuum, and a black mass then is used to cover up the tremendous motion of facsimiles which take place as the facsimiles fly into the vacuum. In other words, there's all kinds of electrical phenomena.

Now, as we look this phenomena over, we find that auditing addresses the phenomena and takes it apart. And that's what auditing does.

Now, there isn't any question about the fact that if a thetan were three feet from that wall that he'd be stuck on the wall — he wouldn't be, unless he were to introduce an interconnective electronic phenomena that had a mystery in it. And if he did that then he could say, "I'm stuck to the wall." And then if he didn't remember to say, "Now I'm unstuck," he would continue to be stuck. Life is basically considerations, but these considerations develop fairly rapidly into electronic phenomena.

Now, you don't have to be an electronic engineer to know very much about this. All you have to do, if you really want to know about all there is to know about body anchor points — for instance, even the body, you know, is an electrical field and we call that the body anchor points — all you'd have to do is get audited through a few of these things and see them.

I've had somebody go along for a year and a half or something like that as an auditor and he'd just never seen any body anchor points. He just thought I was kidding him or something of the sort. And all of a sudden one day he said, "I wonder what that funny globe is up there? You know, it's a funny thing. Well, there's one over there. Well, that just comes from believing Ron. I just must have made it all up." (laughter)

Well, in view of the fact that a knowledge of body anchor points can change the physical structure of the body and the handling of them can change physical structure of the body, we see that body anchor points are quite important. It's not my mission at this time to go into body anchor points, but body anchor points get mixed up with facsimiles and everything gets all tangled up and smashed down and you've finally got a preclear. All right.

What are you handling, though, basically? You're handling electronic phenomena. Whenever you have a particle which is tinier than anything a thetan considers himself to be — thetans consider themselves to have size, some slight degree — they're at least a millimeter or two feet in diameter. I mean they have their different ideas of how big they are — they have no bigness, so they're entitled to any idea they can get.

But you take something that is so small that not even light waves glance off of it, such as a photon, and he believes it's there and he's never seen it or experienced it, you get your first example of a mystery sandwich.

Now, this becomes most pronounced in the reaction of a thetan or a body to atomic fission. He never sees beta, gamma or any of these other things. He is aware of a sensation which exists in a space, so he assumes that there are particles in this space which can affect him or affect the energy masses which he considers to be himself. And so he considers that he can be affected by radiation.

Radiation is — produces the most fabulous reaction around him. If he is in very much contact with radiation he goes mad, because it tells him he can no longer create. So we must assume that radiation has something to do with the basic mechanisms of creation.

A body, for instance, in all of its reactions to radiation, simply ceases to create. The hemoglobin no longer multiplies and so the person gets anemia. These are basically noncreative activities. There is a creative stop when he runs up against energy which he himself feels he cannot handle. It's a very uncomfortable sort of feeling. But there we get a considerable mystery — there is a mystery.

And the only way he could get stuck to or attract to him any of these tiny particles or huge particles or anything else would be to have a mystery concerning 'them. Follow that very closely. Don't go jumping at the idea of these unseen particles and so forth. We — you'll find enough preclears fighting invisible thetans who attack them all night long. But an invisible particle is about the closest thing there is to a thetan, and when this invisible particle can produce an actual physical reaction on somebody then, of course, he feels that he is being outdone. Do you see this?

So we actually have this entire conflict between a thetan and electronic particles — simply a matter of jealousy. That's all. There isn't anything more serious than that. If these things were difficult to solve today, I probably would spare you the agony of knowing about them. You go around being curious enough, however, about tiny particles of electrical energy and you'll get into the whole mess of it. Next thing you know, why, you'll be three feet thick and people will be rolling you around on the tennis court.

It's a weird thing that all a thetan has to do to get connected to anything is have a mystery about it. All he has to say is "How on earth am I connected to this?" He's not at all, you see? He's floating around and he says, "For heaven's sakes, how could I get connected to that? How am I possibly connected to it? How can I get out of this thing I'm so stuck in?" And you've had it, see? It's his own postulates.

Now, how anything that doesn't have mass, basically have any motion and can only locate himself by position can get stuck anywhere is of course a tough nut to crack. But the thetan has managed it and as the years have gone along, why, he has improved his position.

Now, as we look this over as a series of phenomena, we discover it has a lot to do with scales. And the various scales which have been developed here, from the earliest to the latest, are things that you can study in your leisure time. I could mention that something that's still quite important today is the Mystery up to Know Scale. Now, that is an important scale. It simply runs upscale, more or less parallels emotional tones. And you run some preclear along the line and first thing you know, he's talking to you about how mysterious it all is. And then he sort of gets unstuck from that and he'll start talking to you about sex. And he starts — after sex, he'll talk to you about eating. And in other words, we go on upscale the remainder of that scale and we finally land somewhere in the vicinity of native state. And this is the Know to Mystery Scale. And it's another diagnostic scale.

A thetan talks about these things. You run him on an old procedure like Opening Procedure by Duplication, and he'll fast — he'll just dish this out at you. The book that he picks up and so forth, he'd be more interested in it, he'll say, if it had some sexy pictures on it or something of the sort. But he will tip his hand that he's going on upscale.

Now, it's more important to us, however, right now, than diagnosis to know the basic scale of life. And that scale is very obvious. And knowing it, a thetan can get out of almost anything. Now, how and what is this basic scale?

Well, in a native state, a thetan actually knows everything there is to know. This is a great unfortunateness. He might not know all the particulars but he certainly knows he knows. He has a tremendous feeling of being all-wise and all-pervasive. He is on the upper harmonic of where the early Indian religious philosophies took people. See, that's the lower harmonic. You might say the apathy of total knowingness would be nirvana. Well, now, he actually does get up — a thetan does get up to a point of total knowingness and it's unbearable. Of course, if he'd had no compulsion to get in the game at all, he wouldn't consider it unbearable. But he normally does.

There isn't anybody more unhappy than some chap who knows all there is to know about the ibexes pluris of the Upper Scandhoovian Yalps. And he knows all there is to know about this and there's nobody in the world even vaguely approximates his knowledge of this particular subject and he just goes into apathy about the whole thing. He's an authority, you might say, and he never even authoritates anymore. He's an "only one" on a knowingness basis. There is no rivalry. He knows everything everybody else would do on the subject and what the ibexes would do and he just knows all there is. He'd have to go and find something more to study, and that's what a thetan does. Well, in order to have something more to study, he has to go through an interesting mental piece of gymnastics. He has to say he doesn't know.

So, you don't have a postulate in native state really. There is no postulate. The fellow just knows all about it, that's all. Everybody kind of knows that he knows all about it all the time. And then he gets so smeared in and he's had enough counter-postulates, you might say, around him that after a while he merely has the idea that he knows it all and he doesn't know a thing. I've known some of the most stupid fellows that had the most terrific idea of their own knowledge of a particular subject, it's really flabbergasting. That's a complete inversion on that total knowingness. They actually are in a tremendous not-know. All right.

What does a thetan do to get out of this uncomfortably inactive state? He just knows all there is, there's nothing to do, there's time — all these things are gone away. What's he do? He says he doesn't know. And that's a lie. And that's — see,he says, "I don't know." He knows all about that window. He says, "I don't know."Not-know the window. Now, if you run just straight not-know, you get one of the most fascinating of phenomena. It is a very wonderful process. I'll talk to you about it some other time. But whole walls start disappearing and buildings and people and everything else. I mean, he really starts knocking these things out because they are something to know. They're invented knowingnesses, you see.And as he runs not-know he starts going back up toward total knowingness, he starts repostulating his original lie and starts to return to a level of knowingness. Well, there's nothing wrong with that process, that's a wonderful process. In final analysis, that's all the process there is. If you want to get out of an energy mass, all you have to do is not-know the mass and you're gone. That's all. I mean, just not-know the mass and that's that. There is no further argument about it. But it sure does take the thetan out of the game.

When a thetan "dies," heh, (quote, unquote) — when a thetan dies, he goes through this beautiful game of hanging around long enough to see who sent the flowers, and says, "Aw, I knew he was a cheap dog all the time." Shoves off in disgust.

But when he dies or goes through this game action, actually, he goes through a not-knowing process, taking no further responsibility for it. You see, basically, a thetan has really no responsibility for anything anyhow. I mean, he doesn't have to have. There isn't any reason he has to stay in there and work that brass pump. And he says, "I'm no longer responsible for anything that goes on. I not-know everything." And by the time he's a couple of thousand yards from the body, he'd say, "What past life? What past life?" He just gets rid of all of these energy masses. Sometimes he doesn't do a good job. And we get him on the couch and we're busy auditing him, you know, and we're going along just fine and all of a sudden he says, 'Well, everything is okay except this spear."

You say, "What spear?"

"The spear that's halfway through my chest."

Well, he's been living in London, they don't use spears in London; they use spits, they use various other things but not spears.

And you say, "What does this spear look like?"

And he says, "Well, it has feathers on it and — of course it isn't so much the spear as it is these three Zulus who are leaping up and down."

Well, the fellow got killed in the Transvaal War and there he is. And he's still got an old picture of some of the action that took place. Well, he pulled that in probably because he didn't have enough game in this life and he uses this old picture. So here he is with a remnant of some past life — he didn't not-know it.

You can actually, in this life, if you watch his havingness very closely and pay very close attention to his havingness, simply have him not-know that facsimile and it'll go flip, and that's that. But, remember, when he not-knows things, he doesn't have the game anymore. So we have to go downstairs into the next series of postulates on this scale. And here, then, he can still have his game and he can still practice getting stuck to things.

Now, this is a rather funny-looking scale. It's a rather odd-looking scale because know everything–not-know has a second harmonic below in knowing: remember and then forget. And forget is the lower harmonic on not-know, you see?

Now, that is simply a branch of mental activity. That really isn't the scale. That is not the action scale. And we were — we were a little bit pulled sideways by that fascination old-time psychotherapy had for remembering things and so forth. So, we don't care about that anymore. There is actually — the scale itself went this way: Know, Not-know, Interest, Curious. Now, Interest and Curious are quite amazing, because they are not quite the same thing. Curious is sort of a phenomenon of "wanting to get in there too." You know?

Now, we had an old scale that used to go Curiosity, Desire, Enforce, Inhibit as various phenomena. Well, that scale still obtains, but we find out something very interesting: that the Not-know, Curious step now goes down into a great many other factors. But I'm not even going to bother to enumerate them because they're not important. The thetan will interpret all of them in terms of either interest or curiosity.

He thinks the idea of curiosity is morbid doubt but — something of that sort — but doubt, suspicion, even the faint lines of "not quite sure about," and so on, all of these gradients are found on this scale that goes from Know, Not-know, Interest, Curious and then we go down into other manifestations and gradients of Curious. And that is the scale of stuckness. And it matches right in there against the emotional scale, which I first mentioned to you.

So we actually pick up, as mechanisms of curiousness, all of those mental, emotional reactions which make up complexities of personality and stick-to-ivity of engrams.

Now, the key objective process on this would be — actually the basic process out of which other processes come is simply "Become curious about that." Now, don't call it by name. Don't say, "Become curious about that chair," don't do that. Because now he has to not-know not only that it is a chair but that you said it was. So, you just say, "Become curious about that." And you don't name it, you present it, you indicate it. And in this wise he then is able, selectively, to not-know what he knows about it, in some little vague way, without making it vanish.

Now, if he just not-knew it, it would go. And that would be the end of that, and that would be the end of his havingness. So we play this whole thing just below. Now, understand, it's a much slower process — you can — than not-knowing. You can free the thetan out of everything and anything in all directions with not-know, but it spoils his game. Spoils his game. So by playing it on this little lower harmonic, we get into this interesting mechanism of being curious about. So you tell him, "Become curious about that," and indicate the object. You just point to it. All right. He's practicing becoming curious. Now, that is what the process is.

Now remember, we don't run things out, we run them in. We're not trying to get rid of all of the havingness in the bank. We're trying to get him to tolerate havingness. We're not trying to get rid of all of the bad times he has had in the last 76 trillion years, we're trying to get him to tolerate bad times. We're not trying to get rid of all the motion there is in that bank and, believe me, there's plenty. You start having him move facsimiles around, have facsimiles flip-flop and so forth, and your boy is liable to do some interesting flip-flops himself. But we're not trying to run out things, we are trying to get him to create them and tolerate them. And as a result, we have case wins. When you have case loses, the individual was running out a bunch of stuff and not telling you. So, we're not really trying to run out the universe or run out his whole bank or run out anything. All we're doing is we're going to give him practice in being curious.

Now, what passes for curiosity? The puzzlement of deep despair is usually what you eventually get your preclear up to that he thinks of as curiosity. Now, this is why problems are effective, because it runs curiosity. Thetan wants to get stuck to a particle, he pretends he can't see it. Now on a very tiny particle this is very easy, very simple — oh, that's delightfully simple. To get stuck to particles of air would be the easiest thing a thetan could do. He would simply become curious about what they were or if they existed. In view of the fact he's already had a hand in making them, his being curious about them is pure balderdash. But in order to have a game, he has to be. If you ask him to not-know air, he would. And that would be the end of that game, do you see?

But in order to keep him in contact with air and keep him still breathing, which some people consider important, you have him be curious about that or these things floating around. Anything you like. But you have him practice becoming curious. And he eventually gets to a point of where he can become curious. But, you'll find it running out of his bank like mad, you'll find valences and everything else stripping away in all directions. Eventually, it simply goes up to a mild interest.

You understand there is no real punishment or consequence of being stuck to energy. In the first place, energy doesn't exist. To be stuck to it is quite a trick. To have a mass there, to actually feel that nice mass which doesn't exist and which a fellow put there in the first place because he knew everything about it and then to get stuck to it in the bargain, oh, man, this takes a genius.

People go around saying, "What a victim I am," you know, "I'm stuck to all this." What he's done is really forgotten all of the ways and means by which he got stuck to it. And the truth of the matter is, he does get unhappy about it in one lifetime. At the end of that lifetime, he'll get rid of it all. But in that one lifetime, he's — finds that dragging around a crippled leg — he's forgotten the game it fitted in. Well, that's his puzzlement. It wasn't sympathy which did the transfer of a psychosomatic from one person to the other. It is simply "curious about."

Now, you as an auditor becoming curious about cases, which you do and so forth, have only one liability: If your curiosity about cases is conscious, there's no liability at all but if your curiosity about cases is obsessive, that is to say, unknowing games condition, curiosity about cases, you're sunk. You'll just never get audited out of it until you finally kick the bucket. You get the idea?

In other words, as long as games conditions are unknowing, a thetan can be trapped by them. And when games conditions are knowing, however, you can play in any game you want to play. And a game is no fun unless you know what — the game you are playing, remember that.

So we have this as the most important of all scales and the most recent scale. It's actually so obvious and so evident — problems, sensation about having problems, things like this — all of those things belong on this scale. And you'll find out it's very, very useful in auditing.

Thank you.