And this is November the 19, first morning lecture. This morning we're going to talk about cause and effect.
It's about time we talked about cause and effect as it applies immediately to space and flows. Anytime processes put a person too deeply into space and energy, they have a tendency to fail. They give the preclear a very rough time, because he is immediately into the problem of cause and effect.
The definition of cause would be source. The definition of effect would be receipt-point and what is received at receipt-point. The word is dual, in that it can be descriptive of what is receiving (a person is an effect) and of what he is receiving (the material produced an effect, you see, or was effective). You just use it in those categories, and then apply it immediately to communication. Communication: he who writes and mails the letter is cause, and he who reads — receives and reads the letter is the effect on a communication channel. That's very simple, isn't it? All right.
There isn't any reason why there has to be any distance between cause and effect. Distance is an arbitrary: it is introducing the matter of location.
So, let's look at this very sanely and recognize that where the MEST universe is concerned, it is an effort toward the separateness, stretched apart between cause and effect by a distance. And the maintenance of this distance is one of the primary efforts on the part of an individual. A maintenance of distance. Then after a while, he has too much distance and he starts to close distance.
The first downfall of any individual comes about when he desires to be an effect. And there is a postulate sitting on anybody's track, in this lifetime and in earlier lifetimes again and again, and the earliest severe postulate on the track, which is "I want to be an effect." And this is immediately preceded by the "curiosity about an effect."
A thetan does not need to be an effect. He operates primarily as cause. But if he is continuously cause, continuously cause, he begins to suffer from a lack of randomity.
We do not know that randomity is absolutely necessary. This, again, is a matter of space and motion. A thetan does not get along well with motion. Because his attention is so fixed upon motion in this universe — upon space and upon motion — it is difficult for him to conceive a state of beingness which does not depend upon space and motion. This is a matter of too much fixed attention. Yet such states exist. He immediately characterizes such a state, however, as a motionless state, you see? Again, we've got an absence of motion as the descriptive state. Stillness is defined as something which is not moving. And in this universe we batter around from one corner of it to the other fighting along with communication channels which have to do solely with cause and effect in terms of space-energy factors. A thetan doesn't do well on them. But that's all right, he could be rehabilitated so he does do well on them.
Now, if one were to get a number of people — mock up a number of people agreeing with a number of people on the subject of "must have an effect," he has keyed the prime button of all buttons. Now, I told you that a 50 percent offensive potential and a 50 percent defensive potential were necessary to something like an optimum randomity. This is demonstrated in infantry action, it's demonstrated in national defense, it's demonstrated in any kind of activity in the mest universe which is activity, because it's a characteristic of motion in this universe: 50 percent holding, 50 percent attacking. When that ratio is overbalanced, a person begins to lose. And when it's overbalanced toward all attacking, a person begins to suffer from boredom. And when it's overbalanced on the basis of defense, he begins to suffer from an overdose of effect. And they just hold harder and harder and become more and more rigid.
Optimum mental, physical, spiritual, whatever you want to call it — but beingness, certainly — in this universe consists of 50 percent attack and 50 percent defense; 50 percent cause, 50 percent effect. If you understand that thoroughly in all of its implications, the entire field of behavior will spread out before you like a map. It's the first line of the Factors.
Now, a person begins to resist being an effect, and here we go! There it goes! He begins to resist being effect. It will eventually put him in a situation where every facsimile he has, every effect he has caused, will itself collapse on him. You see that? Because he resists it, he has to match its wavelength and if he matches its wavelength he has to fight it off. But he has machinery which is causing him to be an effect, and so he's fighting his own machinery. And that means he's putting his energy into it; and the more energy he puts into it, the more the machinery goes into action and operation, and the more of an effect he becomes. This should be tremendously obvious.
A person has had this great difficulty with effects in the past. Let's take a being who is surrounded by enormous space. There is space and space and space and space. And he puts out a wave and it just keeps going forever and it never comes back. Oh, no! A fellow operating in space opera gets into the most — he gets into the most frantic sort of a condition that you could imagine. He gets to a point where he starts using electronics, zap guns, heavily contained, armored ships. The crews go in and get automatic implantations the moment they step through the airlock after leaving the planet. I mean they just walk up off the planetary ground and into the ship and pang! they get an automatic implant that tells them they're loyal, they're not supposed to go beyond certain points in the ship, that makes their wavelength so-and-so and so-and-so. Or they just fall into their bunks and the first moment they're in their bunks, why, a gadget-gimmick opens up right over the bunk and it starts giving them a good, solid effect. It gives them barriers, in other words, it gives them bounce boards — they love them. Hate is the thing; it's hate that characterizes space opera.
Now, down here on Earth where a person has — is being subjected to the effects of bodies, gravity, all the rest of the solider aspects of energy, he of course has to specialize in love so as to melt some of this stuff down. So you get the farmers and the good people on planets and so forth, and they're all sitting around trying to figure this religious universe out from a basis of love, love, love, love, love — be kind to your neighbor, don't do unto others what you don't want undone, and so on. And they go around, and they mock up big brassy halos for themselves and they talk about love, love, love, love, love.
And then somebody amongst them gets into restim or somebody lands out of space opera, and brother, all hell breaks loose. Restim: somebody just gets . . . Not just space opera, that's just — I just throw that in to give you some kind of an idea of the desperation of men who have — the shortest little jaunt they take is four or five light-years, see. You know, just down to the grocery store to get a cup of coffee. No bouncing boards.
Well, on the planet they've been trying to melt down all barriers because they've got too many — too many limitations, too many sounding boards, too much bounce, too much echo. And where they don't have any, they're trying to put them there. And you put them there with hate and you take them down with love — if you've got to use energy. If you have to use energy. The value of energy is overstrained. (coughing in audience)
Now, I didn't expect this to — the talk I'm giving here this morning is going to restimulate a few coughs. You know, I never worry too much about coughs early in the course, but I begin to wonder about them a little bit on into a course. And I'd better tell you what a cough is. (This is not any mean effort and I hope you won't take it as a gibe.) But I better tell you what a cough is because people will go around and they'll run every technique in the book trying to get rid of some cough, see. They'll just run it and run it and run it and run it and run it. And it just hasn't any — these techniques just don't seem to be effective against this cough, see.
Well, get the idea of a cough being — in terms of effect — (slurping sound). See? The guy is saying, "Give me. Give me. Effect. Effect. Got to be an effect. Got to be an effect." That's the only button he's on. Well, of course, when he gets it in effect he says, "Boo!" and then he'll rig up a machine that'll say, "Boo!" at him. (coughing) It'll return to him (audience laughter) — it'll return to him all of his effects because he can't waste any effects. And of course, the primary one — you think I was going to say sex, but it's not sex; I'll get around to that in a moment — the primary one is aesthetics. Starvation for beauty causes a cough. Secondary, when a person can't have beauty anymore, he can have sex and it comes in on the second dynamic. Those are the two things you process, in that order — beauty and sex — in order to get rid of a cough. Or you process them, for a person who has a really bad cough, sex and then beauty. You see that? Very illustrative of this. A person is pulling in all of the effects which he has put out. And it's very surprising, every once in a while somebody comes along . . .
By the way, a wonderful way to throw somebody's automaticity just down the spout is to ask him: "How do you do it?" Isn't that cute? Guy's got a wonderful machine, he's — for years he's gone on learning to be a bricklayer. You see, he's gotten to the point where he can slap the mortar up there and slap the bricks on and slap the mortar and slap the brick and slap the mortar and slap the brick — very artistically. The mortar has, you see, a certain curve as it comes by and takes — I mean, the trowel, as it takes off the excess mortar, you see, and it pats everything into line, and it breaks bricks just so, and so on. He goes — he's a beautiful bricklaying machine. And he's been doing this for years, and suddenly somebody comes along someday and says, "How do you do that?" And the worst thing happens, somebody gives him an apprentice who keeps saying all the time, "How do you do that? How do you do that?" see. After a while the guy wonders how in the name of God he possibly ever laid a brick in his life, see? Dependency on automaticity. All right.
Let's take up the question of the actor. Oh, the nuances, the thisas and thatas — he's got every role he ever played set up as an automaticity. So he goes on the stage and robotizes for an hour or two — or in Hollywood, thirty seconds or a minute before the camera. Oh, and boy do those poor Hollywood actors have Fac One keyed in. Oooooh! Cameras, cameras, cameras, cameras, Fac One, Fac One. They all answer up on it just perfectly. And it's very funny that Superman — the boy that's playing Superman on TV has the Assumption in full restimulation. Yeah, fat! Anyway, he's really caved in. Look at him next time. He — that guy'd have no more chance of getting out of his body than if you put a — I mean, he's about the worst thetan they could have found to play the role. Anyway, a lot of people have asked him, "How do you do it?"
Now, that's the way you cave in automatic machinery. If you ever feel disturbed or if you can remember a time in your life when somebody disturbed you by suddenly looking at you and saying, "How do you do it?" and that disturbed you, you're clued right there.
How do you get rid of that? Create-destroy. Waste (usually in this sequence) — waste, save, accept, desire, be curious about, in brackets, the machine that was doing it for you. And then create and destroy the machine. And then make them that really work and throw them away, and that automaticity has blown up. You probably — each one of you probably has a time, if you just thought it over, when somebody said, "How do you do that?" and disturbed the devil out of it.
I know I ran into that in this lifetime. I — evidently someplace down the line, something I was doing had to do with sculpting, and I was doing an excellent job of sculpting. I was about — oh, I don't know, five, six years old, and I had made a whole menagerie. And a complete menagerie — was made out of clay, baked and so forth. And I draped them around and painted them up and so forth. But never occurred to me that this was strange, unusual or that anybody should be wondering about this menagerie. But the tigers were tigers, you know, and it was a menagerie, and all of a sudden my mother, of all pieces, asked me how I did it. It caved me in. I haven't touched a piece of clay since! You see? Just an automatic machine.
How do you blow up somebody else's automatic machinery? Just be very solicitous and very sympathetic about how they're doing it. Also be very solicitous and sympathetic about what's wrong with them. That caves in their automatic psychosomatic machinery. Being solicitous about their health, you see? That makes them think their health isn't under their own control, and it sets it up an automaticity on the subject of illness. You see that?
All right. Now somebody comes along to me every once in a while and says, "How do you keep on giving all these lectures and talking always about this and that and so on?" The funny part about me, I'm perfectly willing to listen. As a matter of fact, I probably listen harder than anybody else. Because very few people say anything to me, truth of the matter is. People speak to me sort of on the fly — hello, goodbye and so forth — and nobody ever sits down and says to me, "You know, I think that Alden yachts sail terrible." Nobody ever says that sort of thing to me, you know. I never get in an argument about things anymore. This is very bad. Because every time you do a lot of talking, you're going to get the effect of all of your own words — they'll just start hitting you in the teeth when you've done too much talking.
Oh, I didn't ever have much of a problem on this. It never came up as such, as a writer, on words, till an awful lot of people started showing up asking me, "How do you manage to write the number of stories you write? How do you do this, you know?" Heh-heh! And boy, I had enough automaticities set up there — wham! see? And talking and lecturing never bothered me, and Scientology, Dianetics never bothered me, till somebody started popping up in front of me saying, "How do you possibly keep coming up with data? And how do you keep on talking about it so long?" And I did a couple of blinks. It caved in a couple of ridges.
And so I went around trying to figure out a little bit just how the dickens you undid this. I'm in a — I have been, all during this processing and so forth, since the beginning, in a little worse state than somebody who is getting a process for which they're not responsible.
They always talk, you know, about "physician heal thyself," which is a sarcastic backhand slap. Because history tells you that anybody who has originated anything in the society has been blown up by it. The boy who discovered puerperal fever, by the way, died from it, and so on. Anybody who pioneers in the society goes by the boards sooner or later. Well, I don't evidently seem to be going by the boards — this makes people curious. (audience laughter)
That's simply because in the past, as rough problems have turned up, I was working on very secure basics and it was only necessary to throw together the ingredients of the secure basics and move the things out. Furthermore, I was in the fortunate condition where normally it was just a matter of changing my own mind about something, and that was effective as a process. That's all there was to it.
But when they talk about the number of ridges you've set up, see, and say, "How do you do it?" and then a couple of ridges cave in and you don't quite know what's happened to you, well, the best remedy would, of course, be the one that picked up — one of the best ones on any of this is just "end of cycle." You don't quite see how end of cycle and beginning of cycle might apply as a solid process to almost anything, but it does. It's a wonderful test process. You just start throwing things, as a finality, up until one works. And I found out that in this case, eating reels of tape was the end of cycle. So I just mocked up my stomach full of tape, that's all, and digested the tape. And it keyed right on out. As a matter of fact, the next few times that I talked, why, I was more lucid than before. I wasn't tired and had no somatics at all.
Why is this? I mean, why would you have such a simple process as this? Well, it's just that, you see, you put out an awful lot of stuff and nothing ever comes back in on the channel. And nobody stands around telling me about Dianetics or Scientology, which makes a stuck flow. The stuff goes onto tapes and goes into facsimiles and that sort of thing, so you just make yourself eat it — simple. I mean, you get back the thing. After I'd eaten a couple of thousand reels, why, I was having, for a short time, a hard time remembering what the hell I'd ever talked about.
And it was very interesting that the — I could get this facsimile speedup. I get this very easily — run facsimiles at ten, twelve, fifteen times the speed that they're supposed to go at. You know, run off birth: First labor pain, bada-zuzz-zuh-rmm-um-umm-mmm — eyes, bang! See? With all the voices going at that same pitch, see? Which makes the doctor's voice, the nurse's voice, something like that. Pick up one of these facsimiles and just pull it through very quick in order to speed up time on it. And it's yub-ya-dub-dewa-dee-wowo-ja-geewowo — goes through. If you want to know how it sounds, it sounds just like a tape recorder which is running about five, ten times its natural speed; just a scream of high uneven vibration. Anyhow, it's quite intelligible and runs out.
Well, when I did this I found, oddly enough, that the only times that really turned up as aberrative was when somebody had accidentally kicked a tape back at me. You know? Somebody turns on a tape recorder as I'm about to talk, or something of the sort and there's — he turns it on to play and the thing has still got some tape on it of what I was saying and it comes back and it says, "Baba-wawa-wawa-sum-tum-hum-hum." I'm about to talk and something else talks which is exactly on that wavelength. And these things showed up just crash, crash, crash, see, the second I started to eat some tape. Because it all wasn't on the subject of tape. You'd have thought that eating audiences or having audiences leap at you or something would have been the remedy. That is, for an actor. If you'll just have him mock up audience leaping across the footlights and eating him, he generally reaches his end of cycle on the thing. That's what he's been expecting to have happen for some time. But it isn't as general as that.
The only aberrative things are those things which come closest to Q and A. Because those are the only actual things there are. What is a microphone? A microphone is a microphone, see? I mean, that's the right answer. On cause and effect, you only get a restimulation when the same wave comes back and hits you. You see that?
Now, a person, then, has to be willing, he has to be able to put out so much cause, he has to be able to put out a lot of cause to live! And he has to be willing to receive an equal amount of effect. Now, you got that?
Now, you noticed when you were first doing this exercise of putting something in the wall, you might have said you put it there but you didn't feel any of it back. No, thank you! You didn't even think you put it there because you didn't feel it back, a lot of times, on various things. Is that right? All right.
The only reason you don't want to put it there is because you're liable to get it back. Get the difference? And when you yourself are putting in, as cause, an effect into something which is now going to come back to you — mm! That's what's wrong with the whole track.
Now, the dirtiest tricks were in the earliest portion of the track. And you find somebody putting up an aesthetic mock-up and he'd just put it up, you see, and then start to get a look at it, when he'd be hit by what he got confused about, which he thought was the effect he got from it. I want you to get this one very carefully, because we're going into the field of aesthetics and they lie instantly and immediately below knowingness. Aesthetics — an aesthetic thought can exist and an aesthetic object in space can exist. So we take a look at this thing, and we see this fellow put up an aesthetic mock-up — this is a process I'm telling you about, not an illustration. He puts up an aesthetic mock-up and somebody that he didn't know was there, hits him in the teeth with blackness. Hits him or anything else he has in his vicinity. You got this? They don't just hit the mock-up. So he thinks that his own effect from a beautiful mock-up is to be hit in the teeth with blackness.
And that's what's wrong with a case that's starved for beauty. They'll put up something and they're scared stiff if they suddenly see it. Every once in a while they do this, you know, they see this — all of a sudden a three-dimensional mock-up that they've put up there and they said, "(gasp) No!" Well, that would come under the head of successive engrams, whereby practically everything they have has been knocked flooey. They've put up a beautiful mock-up.
Now, what is a thetan trying to do in terms of space? He's trying to, actually, to put up as beautiful a mock-up as he can put up, whether he makes it out of mest or his own energy — put up as beautiful a mock-up as he can put up and have it go through graceful evolutions. That's what he's trying to do. And he is, to some degree, particularly when he gets a little antagonistic about it, at a little bit lower than that, he's trying to keep others from putting up mock-ups so beautiful that his won't get any attention. And between those two combinations, you have motive.
And don't go looking into the dung heaps of life for a motive. Leave that up to the boys that have been back on the track. Don't go looking into the sewer systems and the sordid byroads, so on, of people's lives to find out what aberrated them. They were unable to put up something beautiful. And when they had bad consequences for having done this, they caved in. And there's where you find cause and effect basic-basic. And that's what we're looking for.
The first thing that they were doing was they were trying to think a beautiful thought or something, you see. And the next in, they were trying to be more convincing by putting up something that was beautiful that had an effect on themselves. The evolution of. You see how this is? Fellow puts up a beautiful mock-up and he's hit in the teeth with blackness. And he thinks, after a while — he gets so goofy and his attention gets so knocked around by this operation, that he is afraid to put up a beautiful mock-up. Because he puts up the beautiful mock-up and he gets hit in the teeth with blackness. So he gets it crossed. He actually is working on a short circuit and this is the short circuit the mind is working on. Not any other more important short circuit. It's just the fact that he thinks if he puts up something beautiful, why, he's going to be hit with blackness from it. You see, it was a hidden influence that hit him with the blackness, but he can't be sure that it wasn't that beautiful mock-up.
Actually, all the protection he will ever have is beauty. The protection he will have has nothing whatsoever to do with a strong arm. He who lives by the sword is said to die by the sword. Of course, he who doesn't live by the sword dies much faster. But he who lives by beauty lives.
Now, the most horrible button that I've run on some preclears — just horrible — is "Every time I put up something beautiful, it's spoiled." That is the button amongst buttons. It's generally so rough that you have to play it back and forth in many variations. Many variations, such as, "Every time somebody else puts up something beautiful, I can't destroy it." And back and forth in all of its ramifications, in order to knock it to pieces. Otherwise he simply runs away from the button itself. He just does the most tremendous duck and dodge imaginable. But I've spilled grief off of preclears with that button.
Now, how do you do it? When addressed toward something which has to do with beauty, it's terrific. Because the basic purpose of the machinery is to, one, set up something beautiful, and two, destroy something competitively beautiful. That's the basic modus operandi on the most fundamental machine there is.
Now, that was automatic then. Now, the next thing he does is he wants to receive an effect from something beautiful. Now, he'll receive an effect from other people's beautiful things with great ease and aplomb until those things are used in order to trap what beautiful things he has and smear them in.
In other words, a contest starts out — a sort of a beauty contest at the beginning of track — and it starts knocking around and after a while, every time he puts up something beautiful, somebody hits him in the face with ink or plows him in. And after a while he gets to a point where he'll only put up beautiful things as facsimiles. And after a while, he puts up only beautiful things as a memory of facsimiles. And he finally gets a machine that makes pictures of effects which he has had so as not to have to enter into the contest of.
Now, you'll see immediately that most people are worried about a dwindling spiral on this basis: the dwindling spiral is itself a mean and vicious thing. Well, how does it come about? It's trying to pull in as much effect as one has put out as cause. And this inevitably winds up as what? This winds up as the inflow of the mest universe on one hand, and it winds up as a pull-in of the whole bank on the other hand. You see that? So it's always a shortening distance. It's like surveying: in surveying you cannot make a lengthening error. There's only shortening errors possible. For instance, the survey chain, when put a little bit off the pins of the survey stations which are being measured — anytime it goes immediately off an exact straight line, from pin to pin or station to station, it's shorter. So it's one of these continuous shortening errors.
Well, similarly, we have a shortening error: when we put out a cause and we want to get back an effect, we find out that the weaker the cause, the less distance one can achieve from effect. See? I mean, if you have a weak cause and you try to put it out there eight miles, you are not going to get the effect back from it. A weak cause has to go out there two feet, or something, you see. Very weak cause has to go out there two feet, and a person can receive an effect from something two feet away. Then they get along to a point where they can only receive effect from zero distance. Well, that's cause-effect instantaneous. Impact is cause-effect instantaneous. And when a person can only trust what he feels, he's into that band — instantaneous cause and effect. That's effort.
Now, we have then, as a drill, first putting out this anything — blackness, ridicule, anything else you can think of in terms of energy — into the wall until people are perfectly willing to stand up to pretty darn strong causes. And we do this on a gradient scale. They can stand up to their own strong causes. You see, they were originally convinced — what crossed up their machinery originally: They thought they were being the effect of their own cause, consistently and continually, and that their own cause — every time they tried to put out beauty, they got ugliness back, you see? They put up something beautiful and they got hit in the teeth with blackness or they got hit in the teeth with ugliness of some sort. In other words, they were convinced that the effect of their own actions was bad, by somebody short-circuiting or misevaluating or misinterpreting their actions.
That's why people hate to be responsible. It means — being responsible simply means you have to have the effect you have caused. The whole police of the mest universe, in whatever uniform, wearing whatever tin star and chewing whatever tobacco, are interested only in one thing — just one thing. And they're saying, just like a lot of puppets: "You must be the effect of what you cause, unless it's desirable, and then you can't have it." Their motto is "Anything bad that is caused must find the person the effect who caused it." And as it's left up to them to say what's bad, the sky is the limit. But you find all sorts of things against the law.
You'll find, in this society, anything beautiful against the law. Just check them over and you'll find out somehow or other there are terrific limitations against doing anything that is very graceful or something. People get real mad in this society, you see, if you go on and try to live an aesthetic or graceful existence. Well, you just try it — you get your throat cut every time. You're supposed to be — you're supposed to be socially acceptable.
In view of the fact that many things are inhibited, you run Acceptance Level Processing, you'll find out what is acceptable to most people in terms of what mock-ups suddenly are absorbed by their bank. This is what they'll look at and this is what they'll pay attention to. And it goes down lower and lower and lower. What is forbidden, in other words — that thing which is forbidden becomes a scarcity and at length becomes so scarce that one can't have it at all. Because he doesn't think it exists, after that he can't have it.
So people have machines that unmock their own beautiful things. Because if they're put up there and somebody sees them, the person himself, the viewpoint or anything else which he has, will be under attack. This society dramatizes that just gorgeously. Real crazy people do nothing but just prowl on the outskirts of anything that has dared to put up anything beautiful.
And they just prowl on the outskirts of it, just waiting. Grrrr! Bunch of saber-toothed tigers — if they were that strong — but they're not. They're about the same strength level as worms. And their idea of destroying something beautiful is to rob its planking. mest universe is very good at that. Very good at that.
Now, this is a sort of a punishment sort of a thing, when a fellow gets into a universe which is almost total inflow. And of course he goes down scale like mad. The only thing to do is to know how to balance it out. And there are many ways to balance it out.
And this drill, which we're running here, is strictly a matter of cause and effect. And actually has the exact purpose of expanding the distance over which a person is willing to be cause and receive an effect. Let's get it, then, close up and far away. What he considers to be bad effects — rage, apathy, terror, all these low-scale effects — let's get them real close up till he's able to get them in his teeth, see, right close up, his nose and his ears and his toes, and get mock-ups full of seething rage an eighth of an inch from him as a thetan. I mean, just torrents of rage. And so he — it pours through him. And he finds out he can stand that.
And let him be willing to have beautiful things out there about twenty light-years and still get an effect back from them. You see which direction we go? Because right now, anything beautiful he has is held so privately and so close, that he can't display it even to himself. You see, that's got to be held real close in, and anything evil there is must be an awful long way away. So we're just going to reverse this with this process. If we've got to handle distance in terms of cause and effect, and we'll have to be able to if we're going to stay in this universe, why, the best way I know of, at this time, to go about it is simply this drill. And you start running the higher-scale emotions further out and the lower-scale emotions closer in.
Now, for instance, we make the ashtray which is sitting right next to the preclear — we have it full of apathy and so forth, until he gets that real good. And then we put the window over there that's three or four feet away from him with some joy in it. See? Actually, this is very easy to do, because the longer distances are the higher tones. Very easy to do this.
It's hard to do it the other way. Some people all of a sudden recognize this as they run it: "My God, I may be doing this the hard way. I'm trying to hold all the beautiful things in, you see, and put all the ugly things out, and keep them out and push them out there and hold them out there — can't do it." Because what he naturally is able to do is put beautiful things way out and beautiful things close in, and ugly things way out and ugly things close in. Because it's just his consideration of what's beautiful and what's ugly, that's all. It's very simple.
Now, I don't want you to be super-puzzled about this thing called cause and effect. A person in the same instant and instant-space can be cause and can be effect. In the same instant, you understand? Has nothing to do with distance.
But now we get the universe in there and we find out by introducing the factor of distance that we have in this now, an arbitrary. It's a barrier of space. And that is the first barrier: distance. You see, no bouncing boards. Got distance, and that in itself is a barrier. And you'll find out most people will get exhausted if you start running distance. Because that's the first thing there is on the track, is too much distance and too few walls. And so they have been remedying that ever since. And boy, they remedy it up to a point where they've got all of their ridges within an eighth of an inch of themselves inside their skull and there isn't even any ridge lying outside the body. They have condensed, shall we say. And this is actually a fear of this distance without any barriers.
There are some excellent drills on this. And some of the drills which are run can be run while the preclear's in motion, which is an interesting thing. You have him walk down the street. Processing him — he's walking down the street. And he walks down the street and he — here's a little drill I was doing last night, it was very effective. There's thousands of these things, I mean, this is just one of them.
Walks down the sidewalk and as he walks down the sidewalk, off to the edge of the sidewalk, he puts a brick every five or six inches, see? Just as he walks, he puts a brick every five or six inches. All right. Now, when he's got that real good and he can put those bricks down real fine, why, you have him put them on the edge of the sidewalk, on the sidewalk itself — brick every five or six inches, you see. Then have him put two bricks every five or six inches. And then three bricks every five or six inches — till he gets the idea that he can build a little tiny wall, see, on the sidewalk itself.
And then have him put bricks in a chain across the sidewalk, so he actually is walking into these continuous mock-ups of bricks. And then you have these be about five feet high, and just have him walking on through them as he's putting them down, you see — repetitive walls — until he's walking through solid walls.
Now, if you've done your earlier drills better so that he can unmock and mock things in terms of walls easily, so on, you can have him unmock the MEST universe, and just leave the brick walls and keep walking through them. In other words, you're — it's just practice in penetration of barriers. Give some guy a real weird sensation to do this. But he has to be perfectly willing to walk through barriers, have barriers and not have barriers.
So let's get on to the second portion of our drill. The second portion is to pay attention to mocking up bad things, right close. I mean bad emotions and sensations right close, and get the good ones further and further and further away.
The third portion of it, of course, is just to reverse that again. Get the bad ones a long way away and the good ones right up close, until a person has this independent of distance. All right, that's the third step.
Now, let's get into the next real process, which is after you have mastered putting emotion, blackness, light, ridicule, so forth, into an effort, and thinking-ness into all these objects at these various distances. When you've managed that, let's go into "selective unmocking." Rather than "selective mocking."
I can assure this class that it will have a much easier time "unmocking" than "mocking." Self Analysis just simply overrides the machine and eventually keys the thing out so there's a tinkle of broken parts and a person can do mock-ups. Because he's simply taken over the operation of doing mock-ups, that's all. But let's take over unmocking and bust that machine first. Because he's got a machine that unmocks things. And he's got a machine that unmocks beautiful things, but swiftly. Anytime he puts up anything that's really pretty, something like that: "No! Don't want anything to do with it." See, because he'll be hit in the teeth by it.
The fact of the matter is, he won't be. There's nothing going to hit him in the teeth. It's true that somebody's liable to steal it or take it away if he starts making them too good. But he's never really thought of this solution, merely because he's wanted to be ornery about it, is why doesn't he make enough of them to make them a drug on the market? That'll teach people to steal his mock-ups. That is, in essence, the only safe solution. Now, people have taken that solution in other universes. They're not here. The only people that are here, have taken the reverse solution, which is "make less of them." That as a cure for theft. Theft and destruction. And that's what makes this a peculiar universe. And you can immediately see that there would be another kind of universe. All right.
You see what that drill is? Now how would you run that drill? You just run all the things which you've been running, the complete list which you have, and make sure that early on the list — that is to say, running all these ugly and mean, wicked things and so forth that have some bite in them and so forth — you let those things get closer and closer to the preclear. Till we get resentment coming closer and closer to the preclear, see? By this: We put some resentment over there in the window, which is five feet away. Then we put some resentment in the ink bottle, which is about two feet eight and a half inches away, and a little resentment down here in the ashtray, which is only a couple of feet away. And then we put some resentment on the end of his nose and then we put some resentment in his nose, then we put some resentment in his eyes, and then we put some in his hair and we put some in his ears, then we put some in his mouth and some in his teeth and some inside his head. And we fill up the whole inside of his head with resentment — all of which he's the effect of, see? This is resentment which is an effect. And you get it as though somebody else is putting it in.
Then, of course, you go a little bit higher on the scale, why, you say, "All right. Put some beauty in the end of your nose." By the way, most people find this impossible. Beauty that close up — I mean, that's got to be so much closer up that it doesn't exist. You'd get it much faster by: "Get the idea of no beauty exactly where you are." You just — ping, see? That's where he's got his beauty. It's gotten to "no beauty" where he is. You know, as a thetan, by instantaneous thought, no beauty where he is. That's the amount of beauty he gets. That beauty he gets out there, so forth — well, that's not real. It's nice to look at and it's attractive and the colors baffle his attention and so forth, but it isn't really real to him. The realest beauty he'll get is no beauty right where he is.
Now, we sort of go from that on up to the point where he's really creating something — the sensation or the feeling of beauty. Because, you see, that's senior to having something beautiful so that you can look at it. The sensation of beauty or the thought that there is beauty is senior to a beautiful object. You know, space is always senior to objects.
Now, we cure up this whole thing about space. Don't be surprised if your preclear, the second you start to run extreme distances, starts to get sick. Because he's liable to. And you start running beautiful things and you get beautiful things until he's perfectly willing to mock up beautiful planets five light-years away.
Some people, of course, are inverted on the inversion on the inversion on the inversion and they just keep involuting as they go down the track and they turn over on this. So that the ugly things are all up close and the beautiful things are all far away; and then the beautiful things are all up close, and the ugly things are far away; then the ugly things are up close and the beautiful things are far away, so on. We won't pay any attention and validate that involutionary proposition. We just do this arbitrarily and just do it. Because we pick the highest echelon on the line.
And it's time that we started putting things in things, in terms of brackets. Brackets. Now, as I said, this resentment conies right on up close to him, then you have — start having beautiful things: the idea of beauty, the feeling of beauty, in the ashtray. The feeling of beauty, peace, serenity, calmness, excitement, enthusiasm — in all — other words, everything above boredom, going further and further away as an emotion, until boy, can he get that moon up there enthusiastic. And he gets over his scarcity of emotion so that he doesn't have to have this tremendous effect all the time. And he doesn't have to have it from somebody else. But do it in brackets.
Now, how do you do it in brackets? Have somebody else put some resentment into the ashtray for you, you put some into the ashtray for somebody else, somebody else puts some resentment into the ashtray for somebody else. See? You put some in for self, have somebody else put some in for himself. And that's your bracket of five.
Now, what's the main goal of this? Again, the goal is not to be able to do a trick. The goal is to reassume command of automatic machinery. And I expect you now, when a piece of automaticity shows up in a member of the processing group, when a piece of flagrant automaticity shows up, I expect that group to plow up that machine. Plow it up, throw it away, beat it to death, kill it, murder it, see? Finish it. It'll give you some confidence. You'll tackle two or three of them and you won't do anything to them. I mean, they'll just persist. Then you attack the fifth one, or something like that, that you've tackled in the group, and all of a sudden, boy, it blows up. And mock-ups come on and the mest universe gets bright, and the fellow exteriorizes and says, "What am I doing in the head?" You know, poom! poom! and there's a little more confidence in it, and a couple of the other machines will break up. You get the idea? For instance, all sorts of things happen and all sorts of perceptions turn up.
Now, the test of whether a technique is doing anything for you is not a test of whether or not the mock-up is behaving better. That's not a test. Whether or not you can do this and whether or not — the ability, in other words, isn't the test — it's the perception or communication change. The perception change or communication change. Things get brighter to the preclear. Does he talk more readily? and so forth. This is the test.
The fellow keeps complaining about the fact that every time he puts up a small dog down on the lower left-hand corner of his dark field, the dog immediately arrives at the upper right-hand corner. He keeps complaining about this. So what? So he's got a machine that does that. Is it important? No! That's not important.
But a machine that is wiping out things he's trying to see or giving him things to see when there isn't anything there to see, these machines are quite important. Machines that make facsimiles are important. Machines that send him places are important. Machines that keep him staying where he is are important. Machines that make him concentrate are important. These things are important because they're perception machines. The behavior that he perceives tells you, by its erraticness, of an automaticity. It doesn't even tell you the fellow's goofy. It merely tells you that he's triggered one way or the other, a machine, which does something to mock-ups. This is not serious. Not serious that he has an automatic field going. That merely tells you there's an automatic machine.
And if I do anything with you folks, it's sure going to spoil your respect for this fantastically complex object, the automatic machine. I want you to be able to make these things and bust these things. Make them so they work, so you can forget about them and they go on working all day. And make them and bust them and duplicate them and so on. With just endless success.
Now, let's take one more little tiny glance at cause and effect in terms of automaticity, and you'll see what kind of a machine is the worst kind of a machine. That machine — there is a worst kind of machine — it's that machine which duplicates effects. That's the worst kind of machine there is. Not a machine that unmocks. Not a machine that mocks up. It's one that duplicates effects. Because it sooner or later will turn around and start kicking its owner. And it will reduce the amount of space the owner has and it will cave in the entire engram bank and it will collapse his time track.
Now, how does it do all that? It's just that it duplicates all of the effects. Well, that means somebody else can always come along and give the machine a kick. And there is stimulus-response: duplicates an effect. And there is overt act-motivator sequence and is the overt act-motivator phenomenon. The machine that duplicates an effect.
He does something to somebody, and a little bit later on, he has the feeling it ought to be done to him. Why? The machine duplicated the effect on this person out there, see? And he started resisting the machine after a while, and boy, he's got that machine as practically his sole randomity. His entire concentration will start going onto this machine. He starts resisting getting effects back which he has once had, which of course is a resistance to this confounded duplicator. And he's selected something out for randomity.
How do you select something out for randomity? Pang! Just select it out for randomity. Thereafter you have no responsibility for it. And boy, when you haven't got any responsibility for a duplication of effect, you haven't got any responsibility for the whole track. Nothing you ever did, therefore and thereafter, you will have any responsibility for. Somebody comes around and says, "Did you read the paper this morning?"
The fellow says, "No."
He did. He read the paper this morning. But he can't be responsible for an effect. Paper was an effect, wasn't it? So, he'll just say he didn't. He'll disclaim any action or any motion. He starts walking around in circles after a while. It's a machine that duplicates an effect. Now, I leave it to you in running that machine.
Give you another method of running automaticities. Running anything. Randomity depends upon . . . This is a rough technique; this is not an easy technique, it belongs way down the line. A rough one — is, "Be the machine. Be yourself. Be the machine. Be yourself." Because the way you select things out and produce, as I was telling you yesterday, randomity, is to say — do something and then say it wasn't you. And that brings you about to randomity. So you're not being the other chess player, and that brings about randomity. So that's the basic one.
So anything that you're fighting, you have selected out for randomity. Anything that is fighting you has selected you out for randomity.
The way to really whip a burglar who is holding you up and is about to shoot you is be him, and blow your own brains out. (audience laughter) Then the police don't even think it in terms of self-defense. You see how easy this is?
"You be the machine. Be the fellow. Now be the space around the person. Be the space inside the person. Be the space around the person. Be the space inside the person," see? Plenty of that. "Be the space of the room. Space of the body. Space of the room. Space of the body. Space of the room. Space of the body." These are effective techniques. "Be the automaticity. Be yourself. Be the machine. Be yourself." You'll find the guy flying around all over the place.
Don't think it's a light technique, though. And don't use it on a case that's having trouble.
You could have "Be the space of your body. Be the space of the room. Be the space of the body. Be the space of the room," just invalidating energy barriers, as far as his own energy bank barriers are concerned, and get away with it. But you have him start being one space that belongs to him actually, but he doesn't own anymore, and another space that belongs to him, and these spaces. And you start rocking him around in his own periphery and his own bank and his own universe, and you — on a low-toned case you really wreck him. You'll turn on somatics the like of which you never heard of.
Okay.