One thing which was not covered by the first book on Dianetics, because we did not know the answer to it, was the difference between the wide-open and the occluded case. We observed a difference which we could not explain.

Now we know that the occluded case, instead of becoming wide-open with processing, wakes up as a thetan and begins to run on the whole track, while the wideopen case, before beginning to run on the whole track, shuts down and becomes an occluded thetan. The wide-open case is wide open because it is running not as a thetan but as a Genetic Entity. When you have processed this case for a while, on the genetic line, in prenatals, in late life, in whatever has to be run, then it will stop running as a Genetic Entity and begin running as a thetan. Then, instead of having a MEST body under its own somatic direction, you have a thetan, in terrible condition, with a MEST body inserted into the middle of him.

The upgrade is from a quite sane MEST body to a quite insane thetan. But here is the catch: the thetan can handle his own affairs and get along in the world. He is not considered insane by the society — only by us. He has enough horsepower to override

his aberrations — or to use them to the disadvantage of everyone else. He may be crazy, but he also may conquer the world. Our problem is to unaberrate him so that he can conquer the world with reason instead of with force.

One of the things that this thetan has to find out, before he can be sane, is that he has been wasting a lot of his strength in “taking care of” his MEST body. And how has he been “taking care of it”?

You may get a pretty big line charge from this thetan when he finally realizes that he has been “helping” his MEST body by crushing it in a vise of energy. The preclear has headaches. Something feels like a tight band around his head. He has been trying to help this MEST body by throwing tractor waves over it, by feeding it engrams to run so that it will be better off, and he has this MEST body as if he had a long wire around it, choking it. He says, “Boy, I’m going to do a wonderful job for this body and get it well!” He chokes it some more.

At no moment does he realize that he is out there with all that horsepower and that this MEST body does not have the insulation to stand it. He is feeding in tremendous electrical impulses. He strikes this body with lightning every few hours— just to keep it in good condition — and he wonders why he has a blank feeling in his prefrontal lobes.

Then, suddenly, in processing, he realizes the horrible truth. He is complaining about this terrible somatic across his eyes and in his jaws, and then he says, “—Oh, my God! I’m doing it!” He suddenly discovers that he can tighten up or slack off this somatic at will, and he is very embarrassed about the whole thing. “I’ve been doing it to me!” He has been using this tractor wave for so long that he has forgotten how to control it.

Or you will find a thetan who is obsessed by the image of some individual. He just can’t get this individual out of his mind. And then he will discover that he has a tractor wave around this individual and is holding this individual in one place and not letting him get away. The facsimile bothers him and the individual obsesses him because of his own efforts to keep the individual close to him. He is putting out a tremendous effort to hold on to facsimiles of certain wavelengths, similar to his own, and at the same time he is complaining that he can’t get rid of these facsimiles.

In the first book we had: What has been done to the preclear? That was pretty low on the Responsibility Scale. Now we have: What has the preclear done to himself? That is much higher on the scale. Unfortunately, if the preclear is pretty low on the scale, he may have to run what was done to him before he can run what he has been doing.

In December of 1951, some individuals heard the first half of a lecture which said, “All you have to do is be self-determined!” So they went off to be “self- determined.” But they didn’t hear the second half of the lecture which said, “But you have to run engrams first.” Some of those individuals are now sitting around in apathy, anger, boredom, or hydrophobia, growling, “Well, that’s your reality ! “ They just went up the pole a little ahead of the technique.

I have no doubt that there will be a technique for doing this — possibly next year, possibly tomorrow morning, possibly ten thousand years from now. But right now we have to process preclears at the level where we find them.