I want to call to your attention that what is good and workable in man is in man, and anybody coming along and trying to put in some more to make man good and workable is only going to “jim” the machinery.

We have been working on this for a long time, haven’t we?

Therefore, anything about religion (don’t let me step on your toes about religion; I’m talking about organized religion — ”Put a penny on the drum and you will be saved”) has a rather nullifying effect upon its own purpose. It was a new concept a long time ago when someone came around and told people they had to be taught to be good, they had to be taught to like people, they had to be taught to love everybody and so forth. This is adding aberration on top of aberration. It is trying to create a static in a person. There would be some boy who seemed a little bit wild to the society or something like that and they had no method of stripping out his aberration, so they just figured out some method to slow him down. It was a very simple method; they just said, “Now, you’ve got to believe!” and he stopped.

So there are two ways, definitely, of approaching this, as far as religion or anything like that is concerned. There would be the approach of an invariable sort of a response and there would be the method of trying to put something in on top of something which is already there.

I understand there is some character or other who says that I should have started out with “why” instead of “how,” and the reason I should have started out with “why” is that he says so or something. The fact that everybody had been asking why for many thousands of years and getting no answers didn’t seem to this party to be a good enough reason to abandon that particular line of approach and get some answers. That we now have answers does not seem to change this fellow’s mind, which is interesting. I don’t think he wants the problem solved. One might find out something about him, I guess.

Anyhow, I want to give you a very brief resume of Effort Processing. You are using this, but you have had a twist-up on ARC and belief.

What you are processing out of people is belief; you are processing out statics, and a static can be too much or too little motion. As a consequence, you want to find your preclear’s efforts to be convinced that the physical universe exists, other people’s efforts to convince him that the physical universe exists or that they are God Almighty or something of the sort, or the physical universe’s effort to convince this fellow that it is there.

Now, if you have ever had a preclear undergoing processing who was very skeptical about processing, you may have noticed that when this fellow suddenly ran into something that had a real live somatic on it, he told you after that, “Yes, I believe in Dianetic processing.” He hit a static. That he didn’t believe anything and couldn’t believe as well in Dianetic processing was also a static.Belief is like attention: it must be able to sweep at will and fix at will or it must be able to unfix where it has been fixed. So belief can be too sweeping or too fixed. You might say there is a span of attention on it.

If you were just to unburden a case of everything the case believed — just that — if you took off every effort to believe, everywhere in the bank, you would come pretty close to taking out every static that existed, because this impingement of theta on MEST or the impingement of the organism upon the physical universe convinces the organism that the physical universe exists.

I believe that in the absence of. any randomity whatsoever, in the absence of any variation, people would just go out of communication with the physical universe. And they do! Things get very unreal to somebody who is doing the same task over and over and over again. That is a method of dropping down into a static.

But if you think you can process preclears without the use of ARC, you have another think coming.

There is an unfortunateness in association with Homo Sapiens today. I will give you the trouble with it, very simply: There is you, and you have ARC. That is determined motion — interplay of understandings — based on your experiences and data. That is you — ARC — traveling at a certain velocity. And then there are other people.

When you go into affinity with anybody, you are agreeing with them and you have to communicate with them. If you go into agreement with anybody, you have to feel some affinity, willy-nilly, one way or the other, and some reality. You have to agree. You also have to have communication.

If you go into communication with anybody, even though it is way down the tone scale so that it is “en-affinity,” enturbulated affinity, you are still going to have to establish an affinity with this individual. And in addition to that you are going to agree with him. You answer an entheta communication line and you have established a level of agreement.

Now, sometimes randomity can be established by a missing datum. Somebody can withhold a datum and cause randomity to appear in a field of information. So one has to decide whether he will continue to withhold a datum or go into communication and put the datum into existence to knock out a randomity. The second he does so, of course, he is running head-on into this equation — if you want to call this an equation. It can be figured out into a very beautiful setup.

So you take your techniques, just as delineated in Science of Survival (Lock Scanning, Chain Scanning of engrams for high-toned cases, any of these), using and concentrating upon the effort involved — running engrams, running secondaries, concentrating upon the effort on an event level — and you are going to get results the like of which you have never seen before. But you just take the effort out.

If you feel unsure of any case that you are working, just revert back to plain Standard Procedure with a concentration on effort. So, if you find yourself balled up or something like that, Effort Processing has not invalidated the body of data of which Dianetics consists. Those techniques are still valid, only there is just a lower common denominator in this processing which produces much greater results. There was a hidden gimmick there: effort.

If you didn’t contact the effort, you could drain all the perceptics out of an engram without getting the effort out of it. You can take any preclear you have and run him back to one solid engram that you have run him through, and exhaust his effort from it, keeping him in the incident — not letting him go back earlier than the incident, but keeping him in the incident — and you will see a greater rise in tone, I will wager, than you saw in all of your processing of that preclear before.

This also applies to you. Possibly one of the things you really ought to do is just get down and pick up all the engrams you have ever run and run the effort out of them, because effort and counter-effort have created a static condition.

So we have a new set of statics in the case. It is no worse than it was before, but it is still there. There are eight and a half gallons of theta available out of that entheta area that were never tapped. You don’t have to knock yourself out or get very upset about changing too markedly; you can just take Standard Procedure and concentrate on effort. The devil with what the phrase was! What was the wiggle? Get the idea? You don’t care what this person said, because the second you get the static out of it the words have no force. The reason a person does not have perceptics is that he is not moving. Sound and sight and so on are wave motions and they are recorded as consecutive pictures of wave motion in theta facsimiles. A fellow has to be able to move on the time track in order to have sonic. Also, he has to be in valence. The quickest way I know of to get a fellow in valence is not by telling him to get into valence; that is a new arbitrary. What you want to do is run the effort. You want to run his belief out of the engram.

Belief is actually identity thinking. It is a static, and every static is every other static. Differentiation is optimum motion.

That is the way the reactive mind hooks up. So you could say the reactive mind contains all the statics save one, which is the causation static. But the existence of a causation static makes it possible for other statics to exist. You might even find a technique someday of going back and processing out the first static, though I don’t know what would happen to the preclear.

Effort Processing in its greatest simplicity would simply be Standard Procedure with a concentration on effort. You would be able to turn up a fellow’s reality with it. Any engram you ever got him into before, you could get him into again merely by running the session on the track where you processed it; he would drop into that engram. Run it again and run the effort out of it.

The effort, fortunately, will exhaust almost anyplace on the track, unlike perceptics; perceptics have to be exhausted out of engrams later and later and later. The later you go, the harder it is to exhaust one. That is not true of effort. You can pick it up almost anyplace and exhaust it, evidently, from my experience to date.

So there is Effort Processing in its essence. Keep ARC and run with the same Auditor’s Code that you have been running with. There is nothing wrong with using an Auditor’s Code, believe me, because all you do is give the preclear new counter-efforts when you start breaking it. You just give him counter-efforts in his environ which he must fight, as well as the engram, and sometimes he doesn’t have enough attention to do that and he is liable to go right straight into apathy.

But if you as auditors would simply go back over every time you have agreed to run somebody into an engram, when you agreed that this was aberrative, when you agreed that contagion of aberration was there — in other words, all these statics — when you agreed to sit still and listen to a preclear. you would jump way up the tone scale. This is the fastest way I know of getting you up there: Just remember the first time you consented to process somebody.

Now remember the first time that you consented to be processed. Remember the first time you consented to be processed?

Remember the first time you assumed a static position and traveled in time? That was at your consent. That wasn’t ARC; you had picked up a static: you were ready to believe in an auditor.

Do you remember every time you decided to believe in an auditor?

The odd part of it is, every time you decided not to believe in an auditor your reality went down, too. You can pick up sessions so they stand out like all the bright lights on Broadway. You could just pick up all the times you disagreed with auditors and auditors disagreed with you, and all the times you agreed with auditors and so forth.

Now let’s take a look at what would be the lightest and simplest technique in Effort Processing: you just disconnect the preclear from the human race. This disconnects him from the beliefs and you don’t have to recover the beliefs. All you do is recognize that he has been surrounded by aberrees’ whose ARC was low, and therefore the ARC which he has managed to contact during his lifetime has been pretty low and the level of ARC he has really postulated for himself is bound to be low.

You want, then, to lock-scan, from the earliest moment, every moment when an individual decided that he felt any affinity for anybody. You just scan that all the way through to present time. You just work it over — every time he ever decided that he felt any affinity.

You are not running lineal time lengths during all this period. You are running self- determinism by Lock Scanning. You are running the moments when he decided or he felt that he had affinity for somebody. You are running those instants of decision, because those are statics.

You knock all this out and then you turn around and you get every time he ever agreed with anybody about anything — particularly those times when he agreed a little bit against his will. You want to pick that up on a Lock Scanning basis, right on up to present time. And then you turn around and find every time he decided to go into communication with anybody — on the phone, by writing, by word of mouth. It is fairly easy. You don’t pick up all the times he was in communication with anybody, you just pick up the times when he decided to go into communication with anybody.

By the time you have scanned communication out of your preclear. you have to go back and scan affinity. You will find that 180,000 affinities have suddenly shown up, whereas there were only 12 the first time you scanned it.

You scan all the available affinities until he extroverts, and then you come down and scan all the realities — every time he ever agreed with anybody about anything. Then you turn around and you scan all the communications again.

If you were to do just that and no more, with about twenty hours of processing you would be sending preclears back out on the street without their chronic somatics. They got these chronic somatics because other people had them and they consented to have them, and they consented to slow down and they consented to be like other people and so forth. In other words, they believed. So you are hitting statics all the way along the line. The first error of belief which any individual makes is when he says “I believe I am a human being.” When a baby comes along and says “Who or what are all these things?” he finds out that they are more or less indispensable to him. And then one day he recognizes and realizes with horror that he is a human being. This keys him in! You can find that moment in practically every preclear. That is a fact. It is quite a jolt.

Some fellows stay healthy all their lives — they never realize it.

That is the simplest echelon I know of Effort Processing. The reason we would call it Effort Processing at all is that you are hitting the moments of absence of efforts, because every affinity is rather a dependence to some degree upon the rest of life — only it is an admitted dependence and an admitted non-self-determinism. That is understood.

That is for the first dynamic. You clean up the dynamics in order — one, two, three, four, five, six, seven and eight — and you clean them up the same way.

Here is a formula for processing. You can’t miss with this formula unless you try to use it against the plan and codification of the tone scale. You try to use Lock Scanning on an individual who is too low on the tone scale to lock-scan, and this individual will hang up in an engram. You know this. So on that person you use Straightwire ARC Effort Processing, because what you are doing is getting the statics. You are getting his postulation of causes for which he will become the effect. You don’t even have to explain it to him. You can really almost snore through this one with a preclear. but don’t let him boil off!

You have been embarked, or I have been embarked, upon the rather hideous task of exhausting all the entheta facsimiles in the universe. This was a big job — like the mice that run into the granary and carry away one grain of wheat per day: It takes them a long time to empty the granary. This took too long. It was taking much too long, so we had to shorten it up a little bit, and in looking around for shortcuts we found, all of a sudden, that we didn’t have to free all the enturbulated entheta in the whole universe. All we had to do was free the preclear of being in contact with it.

This is the happiest and quickest way I know to do this; you just make a genus “nonsapiens” out of the preclear. That would be the first echelon of Effort Processing.

The reason you call this an effort is that normally most of these ARCs are enforced ARCs which have been planted in him by effort, and these are key-ins of engrams. They are self- determinism’s. Really, the only real key-in that an engram gets is by self-determinism.

We have located a new button: The individual decides to have it. Of course, it seems sort of obvious that, after a fellow has been standing around for years and being slugged and beaten and cajoled and kicked and so forth, he eventually comes to a conclusion something on the order of “I’m no good” or “Yes, I’ll belong to the Republican party” or something. So he will come to these conclusions and, yes, there is a cause for those conclusions, but it is a funny thing that the intermediate step of the conclusion is the key-in. The conclusion occurs at the moment when he decides he needs this engram and he brings it right up into present time. And if by that time he is going slow enough to make such a conclusion, he is also going slow enough to get kicked by this theta facsimile so that he has to bring it in and damp it. That is a chronic somatic. That is right about the middle of the tone scale. He has to damp it out. “Yes, I’ll use my body. I will be the whipping boy for the universe; I will accept this engram which is drifting around and let it torture me.”

I don’t know where it goes after we get rid of it. Maybe it goes over and hits the Russians, but we will let somebody else worry about that.

Here is ARC Lock Scanning, then, which simply speeds the fellow up by getting him out of the vicinity of the people who have introduced statics into him. And you get him out of that vicinity, but not by hitting any engrams at all. You don’t hit any locks, you don’t hit any moments of sadness, you don’t hit any grief, you don’t hit anything except “When did you decide to like somebody?”

“Well,” he says, “does it matter who?” “No, no, it doesn’t matter. Anybody.”

He thinks it over and he says, “Well, I remember when I decided to like my wife.... Ha- ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

And you say to yourself, “What’s the matter with this preclear?” You don’t realize, and he doesn’t realize — he doesn’t have to have this explained to him — the thing is a static! It has him held on the track.

Now, afterwards he may go on liking his wife; that is her lookout!

That is the simplest echelon. The next one above this would be Effort Processing directed toward engrams — running them by Standard Procedure, using the file clerk, using everything, all the tools that you know. “What’s the engram necessary to resolve the case? What’s the beginning of the engram? All right, now, let’s contact your effort in this engram.”

He strains and fusses and fumes and wrestles his way through this engram, and you go through it until you have knocked all the effort out of it. He comes up the tone scale about five points; you run another engram. He comes up to 19.0 on the tone scale, and you run another engram till you finally get him well up the tone scale!

So that is just by itself, straight Standard Procedure with nothing but the effort. You don’t want his perceptics or anything of the sort. But there is a hooker in this, and that is that this fellow, in the middle of an engram, postulates. He says, “I wish I was someplace else,” and bounces

Now, we have never unburdened engrams down to the point of where we would find sitting right down the middle of all of this stuff a postulate, because it is underneath the effort. You have to get the effort well turned on, usually, before you hit the postulate. It is quite ordinary for the individual to say “It’s not real,” “I am not here,” “I am somebody else,” “It is later,” “This place is elsewhere,” “I’m not me, I’m the doctor.” He can postulate anything, and will. He tries to expand and contract time, he tries to expand and contract space, he tries to halt energy and matter — in short, he tries to stop or start motion. And you will find that the holders that you will be running into have to do with trying to stop motion which he thinks is going to be harmful to him.

Now, just a little test: Remember the last time you were in an accident? Let’s get a visio on it. Remember the last time?

It is all perfectly safe — you are there anyhow.

Remember the last accident you were in. Can you get a visio on it?

Now, in most cases I can tell you what that visio was: It was the moment before the impact, or it was the moment before you got hurt, and it was a visio on this.

If you get a visio of when you were a little child, being hit by a baseball or being hit by a club, what is the visio?

What visio do you get? It is probably of the object coming toward you. Probably the object is there, beautifully halted forevermore.

All you have to do is get the preclear to let it go and hit him, because it has never hit him. The reason that ball is halted there and the reason that accident is halted there is not from any fluke that was suddenly passed by a law of Congress. It is because the individual himself said “Stop!” and it stopped. In other words, maybe at 20.0 or 30.0 or 40.0 on the tone scale or something like that, a fellow can say “Time will now stop,” and all the people not lucky enough to have had Dianetics will promptly freeze, or something of the sort, and he will go on moving. Maybe he can handle and expand or contract space and time — I won’t argue about that. The point is that Homo Sapiens could not, but he continued in a persistent and dogged belief that he could.

Your Effort Processing, then, is addressed toward getting the preclear to let go of his time spans. He tries to stop motion because pain is motion. He will try to stop that pain someplace and it will hang him up, because the second he tries to stop motion he is trying to run into time, and for Homo Sapiens time is an arbitrary that he can’t handle. It is an arbitrary. If he tries to stop motion he will promptly stop time, and there he will fix, right there on the time track. So you get him down into the deepest depths of the engram when you are running effort.

Now, when you ran all the perceptics out of it — he ran beautifully, the somatics went away and so forth — just taking the residual before-and-after and-during shock of emotion out of the engram, all by itself, produced a wonderful and marked response on the part of the preclear. But if you didn’t get any emotion out of it, you maybe didn’t get as much out of that engram, and maybe if you ran too many engrams without getting any emotion out of them or anything else, maybe your preclear went down the tone scale. Fortunately he will go up the tone scale like a skyrocket if you start taking effort out of these darn things. So just reprocess them.

But when you are working him, you will find that his response level, his emotional level and position on the tone scale for the darn thing, when you really get into it, is apathy — invariably and inevitably apathy — because he has obeyed. So what you want to get out of it is his effort to obey, in this engram, these forces. (His effort to believe in this and his effort to obey are the same thing.)

When you get that, you will find he will fly out of valence. That is okay. The way you get him back in valence again is by exhausting his effort to obey. The perceptics will get worse and worse and he will go lower and lower on the tone scale; then all of a sudden he will say, “There wasn’t any reason why I should be doing what this darned dentist says.”

“Well, run it again. Now, get your effort to obey.” You don’t have to say “not obey” particularly, because he will convert that fast enough.

He will say, “But I’m not obeying him!” and he will start back up the tone scale again. But more importantly, he will get the various efforts, and believe me, there is really an effort in a dental operation.

I don’t know how the dentists manage to do it. I think most of them must be trained on the athletic field rather than otherwise. There is a lot of effort involved, and the funny part of it is that it is very strange effort that you will find in these things occasionally. You get efforts up or down on lower teeth and efforts down or up on upper teeth — and all of a sudden the preclear has a motion and a feeling like he has been pulled up the time track and that all of his engrams below are up the time track into this one, or that he has been pulled down the time track. And that is an effort grouper — just one sample of it.

Or take a fellow who falls off a building and lands flat on his back: you very often, when processing the effort out of him, have visios rolling off. His time track is collapsed at that moment. He followed the impact with his thoughts; he said, “If I fall, then the thoughts should jam up too,” so he gets a grouper.

But don’t worry the preclear for his perceptics when you are processing with Effort Processing. Don’t worry anybody and ask him for his perceptics, because of course he has no reality on an engram until you have run out his obedience to the engram. That is apathy. You will only get reality on the engram when you start rolling out his self-determinism, because where is his reality on the tone scale? Way down. It is down toward a static.

Apathy is a static. What is apathy? It is pretended death, it is a motionlessness, it is lying quiet and so forth, and of course there are no perceptics in it, because perceptics can only be seen by a preclear who is moving on the track. You have to move on the track to get a sound wave and you have to be in valence.

So, you run out the apathy of his effort to obey — his physical effort to obey. You start tuning him up, and what happens with his reality on the incident? It comes right on up the tone scale. You may have to work a preclear quite a while, but if you can’t get a preclear who will do this you had certainly better be using this ARC trick and getting him sort of separated from the human race a little bit so his case will be unburdened to a point where you can run an engram. You may be running the engrams on him too early.

Now, another fine gimmick in this is orientation in space. Run Validation MEST Processing with emphasis on his affection and his agreement or disagreement. Just get what his levels of agreement are with Validation MEST Processing as represented in Self Analysis.

This is excellent for a neurotic, completely aside from the fact that while doing Effort Processing you should intersperse it with something like Validation MEST Processing as represented in Self Analysis — particularly where you are doing it blind on a bunch of gunshot efforts and where you are taking the preclear back down the track and so on — because it fixes up the reality level of the track after it has been balled up a bit by an auditor. (That was really why it was whipped up.) You can run efforts without any reality or without the preclear knowing where they come from, with benefit to the preclear. You can do this, but I would suggest that you keep his reality patched up with something like Validation MEST Processing.

You should understand that the level of Effort Processing I just went over is single-event processing; you don’t let the preclear go back earlier than the one event. You just run the single event and run his efforts in that event and get the efforts as intimately his as you possibly can get, and you neglect the counter-efforts because the counter-efforts will blow.

The next level is backtracking Effort Processing. Here you start a fellow and you ask him for his self-determinism: “What is your effort in this engram to resist this somatic?” He gives it to you and you say, “Now, what is the effort to have this effort?” and of course he shoots right back down the track. There is an old song, “There’s a hill behind the hill behind the hill behind the hill behind the hill,” from The Beggar’s Opera, l that very beautifully describes what happens, because there is a self-determinism behind the self- determinism behind the self-determinism, in terms of time, until you shoot a fellow right straight back to the photon converter. And you probably can get him there. The point is that you don’t want him there! You can leave an enormous number of engrams in restimulation with this type of processing and it is not always good. But certainly it is a good way to get back to a nice, juicy, early one that reduces fairly well, such as his death when he was a sloth or something.

It doesn’t matter what you shoot him back to. All you have to do is ask for the effort — his self-determinism against the counter-effort in the engram where you find him — then ask for his effort to produce that effort, and then ask for his effort to produce that effort, and all of a sudden he shoots back out of this life and he is someplace else.

So all you have to do is just do this little routine with a preclear and he will wind up God knows where.

Of course, theoretically, it is much better to get him into early, early, early, early efforts and to mop these up — theoretically. But I warn you right now that that technique, for my money, is not well enough digested. You could go astray with it. You don’t have to have it at this time. You can still run a preclear on the track and so forth. You can run it just like standard processing; you can still get all these results and benefits and so on, and it doesn’t give you a big burden to carry. You don’t have to reorient yourself overnight.

You will soon find out that running these counter-efforts — whatever is hitting the preclear — is nonsense. All you want to run is his efforts to contact what is hitting him. You will find that when you have exhausted these, the engram will have lost its punch and you will have freed an enormous amount of preclear.

You will find also that he will get hung up on contradictory efforts occasionally; something will be pulling him both ways. Something will be pulling him each way, and this is the counter-effort. You ask for his self determined effort and he can’t find his self-determined effort because of the counter-effort. It is all right to try to start resolving one or the other of these counter-efforts so that you can find his self-determined effort. You just want to resolve the exterior impingement on the individual to the point where his own self- determined effort, so-called, can fly back against it, because when you get two efforts which are directly counter-opposed, they will evidently lock up two theta facsimiles. And these two theta facsimiles, locking up and impinging on each other, evidently (as far as we know at this moment) cause boil-off.

Boil-off is a symptom of doing it wrong. When you are letting a preclear boil off particularly, all you are doing is trying to exhaust all the theta facsimiles in the universe, and this is difficult to do. I wouldn’t like the job. As a matter of fact, looking back over my years of processing, I feel like I was doing just that and I must almost have succeeded. I can look back over just thousands of hours.

As far as grief is concerned, you can try this out: When you get somebody into a grief charge, run first his effort not to cry and then his effort to cry — not his tears. Run his effort to cry and then his effort not to cry, or vice versa. Run the physical effort to cry and the physical effort not to cry. You can even run the physical effort of the tear glands to produce tears, and you will shoot the whole bank out on grief charges.

Now, there is a technique of gunshot efforts that you can play with if you want to: You just start down the dictionary. Ask a preclear for his effort to be a good boy, and of course he will go into apathy. Then ask him for his effort to be a bad boy and reality will turn on someplace for him. In other words, run any time you can find a point where the society must have forced him to agree — that is a static. So his effort to be a good boy is a static and is probably an apathy. You run his effort to be a good boy; he is out of valence but he will get into valence. Then run his effort to be a bad boy and he will go on up the tone scale.

Or you can try “Let’s run your effort to wear glasses.” You will be running a static. The preclear’s reality will be bad. You just keep running efforts to wear glasses, with no reality on the thing particularly, and then you can all of a sudden turn around and — working a bit with the file clerk and keeping check on your preclear — say, “Let’s get your effort, now, not to wear glasses,” and his reality will start to turn up.

This is the mechanism on that: Any time an individual goes down to the acceptance of, obedience to or belief in — all the same thing — the absolute MEST-enforced command of another, he has gone into apathy as far as his own personality is concerned at that moment. That is a static.

Furthermore, he is held on the track at that point. Each one of those statics is an automatic holder. You will find each one of these statics to be an agreement of the individual on what he really ought to be, but it has been forced on him in some fashion or other, and each one is really non survival for him.

All effort is involved with non survival activity or overcoming non survival activity. Of course, his effort to be a good boy hasn’t anything to do with survival activity. It is non survival activity because it had to do, probably, with sitting at the table scared stiff and being told he wasn’t going to have any supper and he wasn’t going to go to bed and he wasn’t going to go to the movies and he wasn’t going to go to this or that unless he proceeded to be a good boy. So he finally said, “All right, I’ll be a good boy,” and at that moment he was done for. He postulated a cause of which he would be the effect. He hadn’t any definition for “a good boy,” but he was going to be one. Being a good boy is doing what somebody else says. Society is full of good boys; so are the insane asylums.

Now, the biggest static that you can give an individual is an enforced, pain-inflicted belief in anything — but particularly God. Any time you start handing out stuff on “Believe in God or we’ll play the devil with you,” you really get a high magnitude of static, because you are asking somebody to believe in something that has been represented as being a magnificent policeman. He is everywhere; you can’t communicate with him but you must communicate with him. He can’t communicate with you, obviously, but he is communicating with you because he is watching you all the time — but you can’t see him. You must love him or he will kill you, but does he love you? You know you love him, though you really hate to tell anybody, but you have to love him because you are in continual agreement with what he says. But nobody has agreed upon what he is supposed to be agreed upon, so naturally you are in agreement on him. This is an odd comment upon organized religion in the United States. Most organized religions don’t conduct themselves this way, so I shouldn’t say “organized religion”; I should say “zealots.” And zealots give churches more trouble than they give anybody else.

To get highly authoritative on this subject, the Minnesota Multiphasic is a test of sanity or insanity which was gathered empirically. Questions by the thousands were taken from various insane asylums and they were all assembled and empirically put together. You find that about 50 percent of the Minnesota Multiphasic applies to religion. There isn’t any accident about it. You get a pain-enforced command on the subject of something as indefinite and as misunderstood as God and you have really got yourself something.

I point this out to you, not because I am trying to unseat the Holy Rollers — they are entitled to their nickel on the drum, too — but as a beautiful target for Effort Processing, because God is a static, so when somebody comes along and forces an individual to believe in God, the individual is already approaching a static and he doesn’t have to be shoved hard until he is in a static state about it.

You might have an awful time with some little child making him be a good boy, but you won’t have much trouble making him believe in God. You don’t have to push him very far, because you are pushing him straight at a natural static. This is the static of all statics. You shove him toward this static and he will hang up there. And you can go back in any preclear with profit and unfix those statics, if you haven’t got anything better to do. You will get a marked improvement in tone because the individual will now have self- determinism on a static, which is interesting. He has self-determined belief in a static; he will believe in a static because he did believe it in the first place, before somebody came along and gave him an aberration on the subject.

Religion is very easy to use as a control whip and it has been used that way. It aberrates people pretty badly when it is used in that fashion. There are people who are aberrated in the field of religion just as there are in any other field.

The whole point I am making is that in Effort Processing you don’t have to depart wildly. You can start asking a preclear for his effort to wear glasses and then not to wear glasses. The formula is that you ask them for what they have obviously agreed to do, first (as a little general rule). They have obviously agreed to do this, they have obviously agreed to have this somatic, they have obviously agreed to have this aberration. In other words, they got a static.

“Agreed to” is used in a highly qualified sense: It is “agreed to in apathy,” and I don’t think much ARC exists in the apathy level; it is just belief. In other words, it is a frozen point.

This person agreed to wear glasses somewhere in a low level and is holding on to a somatic. By the way, his agreement to wear glasses and his wearing of glasses will hold in restimulation any engram he has about wearing glasses. So if he starts to wear glasses the engram will go into worse restimulation and then he has to get stronger glasses, so the engram goes into worse restimulation, and he is off to the races. They have worried for years about that.

There are eight muscles in the eyes. They will readjust in a quarter of a second if you clip the somatic.

I hope, now, that you have a clarified understanding of Effort Processing. You can do a lot with this. You can simply ask a fellow for his desire to be wrong, the effort to be wrong, and shoot it out. Of course, you are going to shoot at about five or six hundred thousand years of being wrong, but that is all right.

Your best bet in Effort Processing is to run on an incident level and to exhaust every engram you contact. And you can use your Straightwire on Effort Processing against his ARC. And ARC sums up into understanding, so you want any time he thought he understood another human being and so forth. You are not doing this because ARC is wrong; it is because he has been in ARC with an awful lot of aberrated people. All you do is disconnect him from the rest of the human race just to that extent so that he is not static with regard to them, and this permits his real statics on the track to start to clip out. That is run on a lock level.

You can do it by Straightwire, by Repetitive Straightwire, by Lock Scanning or by running them as locks, much as you would run an engram. Or you can do Straightwire on an engram level, paying attention only to the effort and being very alert for those postulates that the individual made himself. The second you start to unburden the effort on the engram these postulates will show up.

If you get postulates which are too late on the track to reduce — if the postulate won’t reduce — that is because there is too much effort before the postulate. Do the best you can for the engram and then pick up his effort to make the postulate. The second you pick up his effort to make the postulate, he will shoot back down the track. You will wind him up in a past death, God knows where — into another postulate.

After you have gone all the way back down the track on engrams and exhausted the earliest engram you have hit — if you have had to do it this way — treat it just like you do a chain of engrams. Engrams haven’t changed any, except the viewpoint has changed. What you want is the effort to resist the counter-effort. You get the individual’s self-determined effort and the engram blows up, and that is what you want.