I want to talk to you now about MEST Processing.

This subject actually could be the whole of Dianetics unless you have looked at it really closely. The basis of this appeared in “Excalibur,” the first book written on this subject back in 1938, which was never published. So that shows you how old this is; it is inherent in the first book, really, and it is definitely in the present book, Science of Survival, but it is not codified or punched up to a point where you would really see it clearly.

Now, if you understand this material, I think your grasp of the whole subject of processing is going to be a great deal better than it has been, and in addition to that you will be able to work your cases at least 50 percent faster. This is a big jump.

This codification is the first really major codification in two years, because it is far more important than Standard Procedure codification. I am not trying to over evaluate it, I am just trying to assign it an importance for you so you will see what we are going into. This codification, however, could not have been made without all the accumulated experience of the past thirteen years.

The first thing one had to know about was theta. If one keeps in mind with MEST Processing that it only comes about or it can only happen because of theta, he stays on good, clear ground. He can, however, very easily forget the existence of theta with regard to it, and go plunging down — as he is liable to in this material society anyhow — strictly into materialistic concepts.

The function and the effort of theta (which is life energy) is a conquest of MEST, SO far as we are concerned. Theta is engaged upon a conquest of MEST. If we take that as our basic postulate, these others follow very quickly. And I am going to give you several postulates.

Theta in its conquest of MEST conquers the MEST or withdraws and attacks MEST again. Therefore theta reaches a point where it will succumb in its attack and withdraw, and it will withdraw on down to death for the organism. But that is not death for theta.

You have theta, then, going through the cycle of attacking the material universe, conquering some portion of it, withdrawing, coming back to the attack of the physical universe, and withdrawing. That is the cycle of life and death. That is a cycle of birth, growth, decay and death. That is the tone scale, definitely, and I will show you how that is: Theta comes in to a harmonious conquest of MEST, then begins to impinge a little harder and a little harder on the MEST. When it gets down to 2.0 on the tone scale it is not doing well with this MEST; it has come to the point where it is going to have to do something drastic in order to retain possession of this MEST. As it tries and just becomes further enturbulated, it comes down to 1.5 and seeks to destroy the MEST. It drops lower than that, realizes that it is going to lose the MEST — that is fear — and then loses it, which is grief. And that is the end of that.

So we get this repetitive cycle of the tone scale, of the analytical levels of attack on MEST. Theta gets in to a point where it really isn’t fun to have MEST but the MEST isn’t raising anything very tough, and this is boredom. A little bit further in, theta is still trying to force the MEST into fusion with it, and then just below that tries to destroy the MEST and get away from it somehow or other, and backs on out. This is a continuous cycle.

You could say that the purpose of theta is to create, conserve, maintain, destroy, change, occupy or permutate MEST — the material universe.You could restate that by saying: The purpose of theta is to create, conserve, maintain, destroy, alter, occupy or permutate matter.

The purpose of theta is to create, conserve, maintain, destroy, alter, occupy or permutate energy.

The purpose of theta is to create, conserve, maintain, destroy, alter, occupy or permutate space. The purpose of theta is to create, conserve, maintain, destroy, alter, occupy or permutate time.

Now we have all four of those items. Theta goes into a harmonious action as far as MEST is concerned so long as it can maintain its own self-determinism with regard to what it is doing to MEST. It determines what it is going to do to the MEST and then continues to do it.

When any particular unit of theta is forced by MEST or by any other theta unit in its creation, conservation, maintenance, destruction, alteration, occupation or permutation of MEST, it is disturbed in its conquest of MEST.

When it is inhibited by some other theta unit, by some life organism or by MEST itself from its creation, conservation, maintenance, destruction, alteration, occupation or permutation of MEST, it is failing in its mission.

When it is being forced to do what it would naturally do or when it is being inhibited from doing what it would naturally do, it is driven down the tone scale — that is, out to a separation.

An example of this is the behavior of a child with regard to MEST: A child comes in and asks for a nickel. He can’t have the nickel so he asks rather antagonistically for this nickel. He still can’t have the nickel so he gets angry, throws a tantrum and beats his heels on the floor. After the tantrum he might, ordinarily, tell a lie. Then he would begin to cry. If he still can’t have the nickel he will say he doesn’t want it. In other words, he will go through the whole cycle of the tone scale about one nickel. You can remember or observe human beings in action around you, particularly children, and you will see them go through this cycle. It is just a tone scale cycle.

That is theta trying to acquire a piece of MEST. Theta tries to acquire MEST and can’t, so it gets antagonistic and tries to fight MEST out of existence. If it can’t, it then gets angry and very destructive about this MEST. If nothing happens there, it gets covert about wanting the MEST, trying to destroy at the same time; then it decides it can’t have the MEST — grief — and goes down into the apathy of withdrawal.

That is just theta trying to acquire MEST. Theta does a lot of things with MEST besides acquiring it. It tries to create it, it tries to maintain it and to destroy it and so on.

For instance, a little boy wants to blow up a tin can with a firecracker, so he says, “I’m going to blow up this tin can with a firecracker.”

And Papa says, “No.”

“Well, I am going to blow up this tin can with a firecracker!” “No.”

“Waaah!” — tantrum.

“That won’t do you any good, Roger; that won’t do you a bit of good.”

He will still now make some slight effort, when Papa isn’t looking, to go over and light that firecracker anyhow. If he fails on that, he will start to cry and go all the way down the line to apathy. He will say, “I don’t want to light the firecracker.”

Now, there is theta trying to destroy some matter. You follow this cycle through and you will find out that it is the same thing.

Or, here is a fellow trying to get into the back of his car. He walks up to the back of the car and he puts the key in the lock the way it is supposed to go, and it won’t move. Then he tries to force it, but it won’t move. So he gets down to a point where he wants to kick that car; he will shake it.

He will get mad at anybody in his vicinity, by the way. The wife who immediately comes in and says “But dear, if you would just operate it smoothly . . . Junior and I have no trouble” is asking to be shot between the eyes, because his tone is down at that point. If he still can’t open that thing in spite of all of this temper that he is demonstrating and so forth, he may try to go out and get a crowbar, and sort of when the car isn’t looking try to pry it open. That failing, he will go down quickly in tone about the whole thing, and although he won’t manifest grief (the only reason he won’t manifest grief is because men in this society are not supposed to cry) he will walk away and say, “I didn’t want to get in the back of the car anyway.” As a matter of fact, he did want to get in the back of the car, because all of his clothes are in there. But he can be driven through the whole cycle.

There is theta trying to occupy some space, you might say, or get into some space.

Another example is a fellow waiting in a waiting room. He comes in, he wants to see Mr. Blitz to collect a paycheck coming to him. He goes in and he quietly sits there waiting to collect this paycheck; he has expended time to earn this paycheck, and now he is being asked to spend some time in order to collect this paycheck. He is trying to conserve some time for himself actually; he is trying to handle time. Only Mr. Blitz is too busy to see him, so he sits there for a while. Blitz was a good guy when this fellow walked in, but after half an hour, he wouldn’t really be too pleasant to Blitz. He doesn’t think too much of the way Blitz wears his ties, anyway. And then somebody keeps telling him “He is just going to see you in a minute,” and so on. He will get mad after a while. If he were not in a restrained society he would probably blow his stack. But if he could not get in to see Mr. Blitz he would try to sneak in, and if that didn’t work he would begin to feel hopeless, or sorry for himself somewhere along the grief band, and then he would go into an apathy about the whole thing.

In other words, if his anger does not prevail to conserve for him that amount of time, he goes off on a curve regarding that particular unit of time.

This is very simple, actually.

Let’s go into the history of what they laughingly used to call psychotherapy. The first thing that man came up with in this line that was really effective was shock treatment and hypnotism. These are the oldest varieties — sedation, narcosynthesis, shock and, at about the same time, brain operations. These are about two thousand years old. They are still with us; there is still a strata carrying them forward because there has not been anything up to this time to substitute for them. Man tried in psychotherapy to control something. His whole object was control.

For instance, a girl runs around, she gets mad and she threatens her mother with a butcher knife, so the family rushes her down to court; a psychiatrist is called in and he says, “I’ll cure all that with a prefrontal lobotomy, then you can handle her.” Never does he say “We’ll make her sane.” He says, “You can handle her” — control.

This graduated in its cycle to a little higher level: education, an effort to educate people one way or the other — for instance, psychoanalysis, social behavior codes, enforced ethics codes and so on, trying to teach people to be sane. That didn’t work either. It is a funny thing, but the more laws that are passed, the crazier people get. For example, take Prohibition.

The next line of advance in the field of psychotherapy was permissive or nondirective therapy. Child upbringing, for instance, got along on the line of complete non direction with regard to the child. Let the child come in and smash all the Ming vases in the house, and lie down on the floor when you are trying to have an evening of bridge and scream and so forth, and you just say, “Yes, Reginald.” Don’t do anything spare the rod and that sort of thing. There was no training involved.

A higher echelon came along than this, and this was the fourth level: semantics, a study of language and an effort to make language sane enough so people learning language and using language could be sane. This was general semantics. There was also an effort there to keep from identifying one piece of space with another piece of space, one time with another time, the name with the object and the object with the title, and so on. That was very worthwhile work. This was getting up into a level that was starting to pay off.

The next advance was Dianetics, by a perceptive contact of engrams. We made a big jump. We said, “Let’s attack this entheta and get it out of there and run it out,” and we found out that this was successful. We can do something very specific and positive.

And the sixth level is MEST Processing. The reason MEST Processing suddenly occupies this echelon is a very simple one: All of a sudden we have dived below the effectiveness of language. We declare herein that we have been validating language as being aberrative. True enough, language has its aberrative factors. True enough, glanced at, looked over and so forth, language is aberrative. It is certainly insane enough. Trying to communicate with English or Chinese or something or other, trying to give somebody a symbol that stands for a thing and so on can be highly aberrative. There are all the homonymic characteristics of language, like threw and through — ”He threw the cat” and “He through the cat” — and the reactive mind has a glorious time with this. “He rowed a horse” makes perfectly good sense to the reactive mind!

So something desperate had to be done about language. We have been running it out as perceptics and locks and so forth. In MEST Processing, we immediately go into the strata underlying language and process there. We are not processing language.

Psychoanalysis had what was called dream therapy. The reason they had dream therapy was that they thought the dream told them about the patient’s psyche. This is just like the Goldil medicine man who thought that dreams told him something about his patient’s psyche. Psychoanalysis believed this in the same way, so they used dreams as a symbolic representation of what was happening with the patient. The psychoanalyst wanted to know about dreams. He pretended, and so have all of these various dream processes pretended, that by taking this dream they could discover some hidden actual incident in the patients life. For instance, a person has this dream consistently that he wants to kill Joe, his partner in business who has practically ruined him. He wants to do this. He dreams this all the time. So the psychoanalyst can figure out from this that it is because he drowned his grandmother’s kittens when he was three and has a guilt complex, and because actually his wife looks like a cat and he has always desired cats sexually, and this is the reason he is aberrated. The psychoanalyst can figure this out because the fellow dreamed all this up in present time.

What I am trying to show you is that the dream had the use of being a symbol. It was a symbol for something that was wrong in the person’s life.

In Dianetics, words stand for something that was once actual and physical in the field of MEST, but those words are not the actual physical thing; they are just symbols, they are just a dream of the original thing. That is all.

For instance, take an innocent little child, six months of age. Somebody can say a long stream of obscenity to this child and he won’t even be frightened or upset. These words mean nothing; they have no meaning to him.

Here he is at one year of age and he is toddling around the place and he suddenly gets into the sewing box or upsets it or something, so his mother says, “Get out of that!” Whether or not she said “Get out of that” is not important. What is important is what she did: she knocked him out of the sewing box!

As a matter of fact, this can get violent at times. A few years ago I was in the Miami post office and the floor, which had been newly waxed, was very slippery. A lady had a little baby of about fourteen months, and she put the baby down on the floor. The baby was crying so Mama said, “Shut up,” and gave it a little kick. Her foot caught as she kicked the baby, making it a considerable kick, and the baby, screaming at the top of its lungs, went sliding down the floor for about ten yards. All the people in this post office turned around and looked at her; that really gave her a heavy lock right there. They rejected her from the society, and nobody said anything to her.

She said “Shut up” to the baby and gave the baby a push. This would seem to have indicated to the baby, as far as action and the definition of meaning was concerned, that “Shut up” is skidding ten yards down a post office floor. This baby would definitely have to get his language reevaluated, wouldn’t he?

How does he learn what language is? He gets knocked out of the sewing box and somebody says, “Get out.” Later on, he observes Papa being pushed out of the room. Papa has been playing with the baby when the baby ought to have been going to sleep and Mama tells him, “You leave the baby alone, now; you go out of here, you leave.” And the baby all of a sudden gets the idea of leaving. How does the baby get the idea of leaving?

The words are nothing but vibrations in air, as far as their force is concerned; they are not painful. The vibrations impinge on an eardrum and they are recorded as memory. What do they tie up to and how is language learned? It is learned by MEST action. Here is individual A and individual B. How do they talk to each other? Through the physical universe. In order to say something to individual B. individual A has to put it on sound waves and get it over to B. Suppose it is just the simple elementary thing of “Yike, you’re about to be hit by a car!” or something, but it is said on the basis of “Hey! “ It is not intelligible; it is just a sound wave sent over to communicate something to this person. But it has to go through MEST.

How does this person, then, communicate? Actually, there is a theta line; people try to find it with ESP and various things like that. But short of those things, the good, solid, reliable method of communication for man is through MEST.

Now, how does a person ever learn language in the first place? He can see, he can hear, smell, taste, he has a physical body, he sees material objects, and somehow or other all of these combinations of objects and so forth add up eventually into language. But language at no time is anything more than a symbol for a MEST reality, or a MEST imaginary thing which is set up and foisted off as reality. But it is through MEST.

Language is nothing but symbols and it is not aberrative in itself. It is not the tiger: A fellow says, “The tiger is going to bite you,” or “The tiger is biting you.” Are the words the tiger is biting you dangerous, or is the fact that the tiger is biting you dangerous? That is general semantics.

I wish Count Alfred Korzybski was around these days. He would get a big kick out of this. It is definitely up his alley. He was diving for this and trying to get somewhere with this, and he carried the ball a long way on it, but he didn’t have the rest of Dianetics so it couldn’t be added up.

But we are right on the groove of what his end goal was when we say the definition of language is in terms of physical universe; the meaning of language is demonstrated via the physical universe.

Words should be used in Dianetics in somewhat the same manner dreams are used in psychoanalysis. The words will only demonstrate and show up for you, the auditor, where the actual lock is.

Now, we have been talking about locks when we should have been talking about “language locks” and “MEST locks.” We have been processing with symbology on locks when we should have been processing with MEST occurrences.

You can understand this very clearly when you look at it in terms of what you are used to thinking of. What are the most aberrative phrases you find in the bank? What are the phrases that produce the most harm in a case? They are action phrases: bouncers, groupers, denyers, misdirectors. These are action phrases. Do they lie in the field of theta? No, they don’t; they lie in the field of MEST.

Everybody has a sensation of going through space when he moves on his time track, if he is moving on the time track. A person thinks in terms of going up, down, sideways and so forth, but he is only moving through time, really. Why would he think in terms of motion when he is actually going through theta? It is because all the words which have been used to describe this are actually in terms of MEST motion — the motion of matter and energy through space and time. He has gotten this concept and he has learned language along this line and this language then means this sort of thing to him. His analytical mind is impinged upon by his reactive mind and the analytical mind knows that “Go up” means to go up. So when he is on the time track and he hits a phrase that says “Go up” he moves forward to present time. That is silly. That is just how stupid the reactive mind can get.

But it is not the phrase “Go up” which makes him go up to present time; it is the translation of the phrase “Go up” reinterpreted by all the times he observed going up or was forced to go up in actual physical being.

If you want to get the bouncers off a case, you can run “Go up” out of every lock and secondary on the case, and the fellow may still bounce in the basic area. But I guarantee you that if you got off the case all the tension and charge on the idea of going up someplace in terms of MEST, this would not happen. I don’t mean somebody saying “You go up there.” I am talking about the fellow stepping onto the elevator and it goes up, and he doesn’t like elevators because they make him sick in his stomach. Or he gets into an airplane and it goes up. Nobody says “Go up.” The words are immaterial. Somebody there might be reciting Voltaire — that doesn’t matter. It is the fact that the MEST action of going up takes place. And he has been working so fast and so furiously with language all of his life that he has overlooked something very interesting: When somebody says “Go up,” the words go up go through MEST, impinge on the ear, are translated and get into the computer mechanism, and there is a little delayed action right in there where the words go up retranslate and redefine into terms of a MEST observation. It may take only a milli-millisecond to do that, but there is actually a time there when those words cease to be a symbol and translate themselves into the actual action of going up, and then the fellow understands what you are talking about.

How does a baby learn language? By observing the MEST universe. Actually, as far as he is concerned, all organisms are MEST. YOU can readily and rapidly get into trouble if you consider that all organisms are MEST and try to carry this out to a reductio ad absurdum, because you are postulating a terribly egocentric point of view — and it is incorrect — when you say that every individual regards all other individuals and organisms in his vicinity, even though they are theta organisms, as MEST organisms.

But you can use this as an illustration; you can take the idea that a person views organisms in his vicinity as MEST. True enough, he observes the MEST of those organisms as MEST. If he overlooks the theta in them, he certainly comes a cropper in a hurry in living. If he neglects affinity, agreeing with people and trying to communicate with them decently and merely considers them MEST, he will work up to a point where he has something as ludicrous as the current society. He gets thoroughly imbued with the idea that everything around him is MEST. That is really egocentricity to end all egocentricity. However, it would account for the fact of people trying to dominate other people and people trying to nullify and inhibit other people.

Below 2.0 the regard for organisms in the vicinity happens to be that they are MEST. A person below 2.0 considers the organisms in his vicinity as MEST and merely tries to dominate or inhibit MEST. He tries to handle a human being the way he would handle MEST.

The only thing the army — which is at 1.5 — can do for a human being is dominate him. Did the colonel ever call some private in and say “Tell you what, Private Jones, we are going to have a long march this morning. We are going down here on a practice march, and we are going to shoot down at the butts there for a while. Do you feel in need of some practice? Do you think it would be a good idea if we met the enemy and practiced up like this? Would you like to do that?”

No, they say, “Private Jones, you are MEST! Stand at attention. Sit down. Stand up. Salute. About face. To the rear march. To the rear march. To the rear march. Column right.” That is how you treat MEST. They run their trucks the same way.

In other words, to attempt to dominate, or dominate by nullification, the individuals in one’s environ is to treat the individuals as though they were MEST. There is enough MEST in individuals and individuals can be far enough down the tone scale for them to react like MEST, too.

Above 2.0 the theta bracket starts cutting in. A person up along that line doesn’t try to dominate the people in his vicinity. He tries to find out what they are talking about and what they are thinking about. He gets very puzzled sometimes when he starts dealing with somebody who is 1.5. He asks this person, “Why don’t you agree with this?” The fellow gets mad, and so on. It is pretty hard to maintain a level of agreement with somebody who is down in the MEST band.

Nevertheless, if you work out what is laughingly called “human relations” in this society on a 2.0-down basis, you can work it out exclusively on MEST and pay no attention to theta at all. It is whether or not who dominates whom and who nullifies which. The regard of the low- toned individual for people in his environ is the same regard he has for MEST.

It wasn’t too long ago that women were considered to be chattels. They were MEST; they weren’t organisms. It is very interesting that such things as suttee developed as a direct result of considering women only as property and without a soul. There got to be so many murders of husbands that they finally burned the wife dead or alive on the husband’s funeral pyre automatically. They didn’t consult about it at all, they just burned her up. This discouraged husband murder, which had become common because the wife was so well owned and so thoroughly owned that she could never get free.

Slavery is still a fresh patch of blood on our nation’s history. These were individuals who were considered MEST. People advanced the most remarkable arguments in those days. I read, as a matter of fact, an essay in a church paper by a minister who was violently declaiming these statements to the effect that the Negro had no soul whatsoever, saying they should be investigated more carefully, that there was a possibility the Negro did have a soul and that it was a hard thing to credit that the Lord would make something so close to the image of being a human being without giving him something like a human soul too. This minister was really hot about it, but at no place did he go overboard and say “The Negro has a human soul.” He was very mad, though, at the people being didactic on the other side of the fence.

Now, when you find an individual who has lived too long in the vicinity of a 1.1, for instance (the 1.1 is of course regarding the organisms around him more as MEST than as anything else), you will find that this individual has been cut down below the 2.0 line. He has been made into MEST. He has been made to function to some degree as a physical-universe entity, and his ARC is really shot. ARC starts to gutter out at about 2.0.

But there hasn’t been a child raised, I am sure, so far this century — except for a few rare ones who were sort of brought up out in the open field and not in the vicinity of human beings — who was not below 2.0 chronically, particularly during his early childhood and while in the vicinity of his father and mother. What happens to children is that they are too often regarded as MEST: “My child.” No, that is Bobby!

The whole idea of ownership, by the way, starts springing into the society at about 2.5. Socialism in its high, pure-level concepts (which it never attains in practice; in practice it is a fine mechanism of taking everything away from everybody) is a beautiful, fine idea that no ownership should be tolerated. As a matter of fact, that is perfectly sound philosophically, because when a fellow tries to own some MEST the MEST starts owning him. For example, did you ever have to mow the lawn?

Here you have a concept, then, of interpersonal relations on a MEST basis. Who is whose MEST? Did the husband consider the wife MEST or did the wife consider the husband MEST, or what was the relationship? Who was on what part of the tone scale and who dominated which? You will find the reactions are quite interesting if you want to extrapolate this on out all the way. I am not going to extrapolate it out for you.

I am going to show you, however, that children are normally considered MEST because they have to be trained and are too furiously trained in the line of MEST. A child who gets mad at his parents is quickly driven down into a point of obedience. Getting angry is something that a child isn’t supposed to do.

Of course, the second you try to enforce obedience upon an angry child, the only direction he can go is toward apathy. So a child would be either at 3.5, 1.0, or 0.5 — somewhere above or below anger.

Now, if nobody pays any attention to him particularly, he can of course rise back on up to 3.5 and reason about it, but if he is forced down below that he doesn’t have a chance.

To get angry at a child that gets angry is rather unfair. If you look at it from the child’s viewpoint, here is this giant who, compared to you, would be about twenty-eight feet high and weigh several tons. And you on a little David fashion say, “The devil with you! “ and this huge monster reaches over and says, “Get mad at me, will you?” — pow! The child hasn’t got a chance. He is just run under the tank treads. So his revolts are quickly suppressed.

A child can be driven down to anger and then driven into apathy. But he will be perfectly happy to be up above 2.0, because a child is very volatile; there is a lot of free theta there. He gets up high on the scale, and then all of a sudden he gets angry and he goes down into apathy again, because somebody drives him into apathy quickly if he dares get angry.

Remember the cycle I spoke of earlier of the child who wants some MEST. Here is theta which is trying to do something with MEST. The child wants some MEST and for some reason or other can’t get this piece of MEST, so he tries harder, tries harder, gets angry, and then crashes into apathy. This is the cycle that MEST imposes on the living organism during childhood continually, and because of this, enormous numbers of locks are piled up for the rest of a person’s life.

Here is the cycle: The child wants some MEST. “Mama, I want to go swimming.” “You can’t go swimming.”

“You better let me go swimming! Jimmy Jones goes swimming.”

“No, you can’t go swimming.”

Then all of a sudden he throws a tantrum.

If the child is real smart, he will at least stop himself at 1.1 and get the hell out of there and go swimming. Otherwise he will go right straight down into grief and then into apathy. Then he will say, “But I didn’t want to go swimming.”

The first thing you know, the child starts telling you, “I don’t like to swim.” This is negation and this is the period of negation which ensues in childhood. “I can’t have it, so I might as well die away from it.”

You get a persistent action of the child trying to get some MEST, being unable to have the MEST and falling back down scale. The next thing which happens is the child has the thought that he wants some of this MEST and quickly goes down to apathy; he doesn’t even go through the anger cycle or anything. He just gets the thought “I’d like to go swimming — I can’t go swimming.” One, two. “I like to go swimming — I don’t like to swim.” “It’s a nice hot day; I would like — I don’t like swimming.” Negation. You just shorten up the cycle in terms of milliseconds until it is practically an automatic reaction. He tells you blandly, “I hate swimming myself. I never go swimming. I knew a young fellow once that drowned” — justifying why he doesn’t like swimming.

Children go through a long period of negation in childhood.

Let’s take a stammerer. The child has gone through one of these cycles over and over. He has tried to say something and he has gotten to the point where he can’t even say anything! He is not even permitted to say anything on some subject, so eventually he gets driven down through the cycle: he is forbidden to say something, so he has gotten mad and has been driven down into apathy. Now he goes through this cycle again: He starts to say something and he can’t, so he gets antagonistic, he gets mad, then he cries and goes into apathy. He is being broken all the way down the tone scale. The child will eventually get to the point of stammering — being unable to say anything — and then he says, “I didn’t want to talk anyway.”

You have probably seen people who have been broken down the line to the point where this cycle is taking place. The effort to talk runs into these MEST locks and the person doesn’t talk; he will still try to talk but can’t talk.

Now, you watch this person’s handling of MEST and you will find out it happens in the same cycle to a large degree, but fortunately different things can happen to various parts of MEST SO that a person isn’t blocked out all the way.

Something else happens with this cycle: The person tries to attack decreasing spheres. He starts failing on this big sphere, so he tries a lesser sphere, starts failing on this sphere and tries a lesser sphere, starts failing on that one and tries the next one down. What is the last one in? It is the organism itself, and that is the most intimately theta-owned material, the life organism itself, because each one of us has, as a component part of the organism, MEST. And the individual will get to the point finally where, when he thinks of attacking MEST in his vicinity, he will attack himself instead. This is the only readily available MEST he has.

So we get psychosomatic illnesses. Of course, those psychosomatic illnesses turn on, and what we know all about is the mechanism of the engram and so forth, but this is the postulate behind this mechanism. This is the cycle, evidently, which would seem to explain the necessity for the mechanism of the engram and how it works and so forth. In other words, this individual starts attacking a big periphery, can’t, tries a smaller periphery, can’t, and comes on in and finally starts attacking himself. It will go to the point where he will blow his brains out. That is suicide; that theta really took the last available MEST and left.

Of course, we are dealing with all these dynamics, and an individual, an organism, can be aberrated selectively on these dynamics. So an individual can be invalidated to himself to a fare- you-well and yet belong fairly successfully to a group. He is just a part of the MEST of the group; he is working fine on his third dynamic. But if something happened to him on the third dynamic he would kill himself out of the group. He is liable to do that if his first dynamic is very badly aberrated.

Now let me give you a very blunt example of what this MEST Processing is. Let us take this as we would use it in processing. You say to the preclear, “Is there an action phrase in restimulation? (snap./)”

“Yes.”

“Could you give me the phrase? (snap!)” “Get up.”

“Okay. Can you remember a time when anyone made you get up?” “Yeah, my mother used to say ‘Get up’ all the time.”

You don’t want this; you don’t want “Get up” as a phrase. That is just a shadow. The devil with when his mother used to say it! When did his mother kick him out of bed? When did his little brother boot him out of bed? When did somebody actually boost him up antagonistically? Those are the locks you want. They could have been boosting him up and saying “Abracadabra, baby needs a new pair of shoes.” It doesn’t matter what they were saying. You are looking for the action phrase “Get up,” and if you want to deintensify “Get up,” then you deintensify the MEST locks — the actual actions of having had to get up. Those could have taken place by being inhibited from sitting down or by being enforced on getting up.

You will find that he has just tons of these locks. You don’t run this phrase chain that says “Get up.” Run the actual rise-and-shine chain through MEST. He has watched somebody get up. He remembers having had to get up every morning at six — you don’t care who told him to get up — and you just take this chain of “Get up,” all the ways that he possibly could have gotten up or been inhibited from sitting down (which means the same thing as getting up), and run this thing out and deintensify it. If you get all that off the case there won’t be a single action phrase anywhere on the case that will have enough charge to make him bounce on the time track. I can guarantee that.

This is really coming in by the back door. The beauty of it is in terms of economy. He has probably heard the words get up thousands and thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of times in his life, but he has only been made to get up maybe a hundred and fifty times.

When I say “made to get up” I don’t mean Mama standing there saying, “George, get up. It’s time you went to school. George, you know what will happen to you if you go to school late.” This is the kind of stuff he will try to give you. This isn’t what you want. She eventually came in, grabbed him by the ear, stood him on his feet, threw some cold water in his face, got him downstairs, shoved some breakfast into him and got him off to school. That is the one you want, because after that all she had to do was tell him to get up.

Here is another example of that: There was a mate up in Alaska who was a very lazy fellow. He was extremely lazy, and he used to hang over past the midnight watch; he was supposed to go on watch at midnight but he would make the captain stay on till 12:30 or 1:00 instead of getting off at midnight when the mate was supposed to take the watch. The captain got very, very tired of this. So he thought this over very carefully, and one night he went down into the cabin and saw the mate lying there. The mate had his shirt and pants on and he was lying in his bunk sleeping just beautifully while the captain was up there in the cold standing the mate’s watch. So the captain carefully, quietly unbuttoned his shirt and laid it open. The mate had a beautiful hairy chest. The captain went up to the galley and got the ship’s cat; he came back and, petting the cat, put it down on the mate’s chest very carefully — and then he took hold of the cat’s tail and pulled!

After that it was only necessary to toss that cat down the ladder to have the mate up in time to take his watch!

The action of tossing the cat down the ladder was, of course, nothing more than the action of saying “Get up.” It meant the same thing. It was just a symbol of “The cat is going to scratch hell out of your chest!”

Now, you can take any action phrase or any set of action phrases and run down their MEST lock counterparts.

Mind you, this doesn’t have to be in childhood; don’t get the idea this has to be applied to childhood, because this sort of thing happens to people all the time. There is lots of this sort of stuff. There are lots of shadows on top of the MEST locks too — times when very light things happened. You pick up these very light things and you will start to trace back into some heavy pay dirt.

Take misdirection, for instance: Here is the little child, and he starts to go through the door and somebody grabs his arm and sends him the other way. Do you ever remember a time when you tried to go one way and somebody made you go the other way physically? You certainly can remember when it happened verbally, but that would only be a restimulator for the physical action — when someone physically made you go another way. That is a misdirector.

Then there is the holder. You have noticed that every time your preclear tries to do a scan or something like that he gets really sticky on the track. This fellow is operating from too many holders. Let’s just find the times when he has been held and made to stay in the same place. But more important than that even, let’s find the times he has been stopped, every time he tried to start when he was stopped. Who used to stop him? He remembers that somebody used to say so. It is an odd thing that people will dramatize MEST locks with their symbol words in the same way they got them; in other words, they will go through the action of the lock. So if Mama was saying continually to the child “You’ll never amount to anything,” “You’ll never get anywhere in this world,” and so forth, you will find that Mama also had a dramatization of not letting the child move! That is why this is so much on Mama’s mind. It has been very heavily defined for her, so she defines it very heavily for the child. “You’ll never get anywhere in this world” — she tells him this all the rest of his life. That is just a clue; that isn’t the aberration. The aberration is the action of stop him!

So you are looking for actual stoppings, such as the times the fellow has run into a pole with his car. Sure, it gave him an engram and it isn’t time to run this engram, but believe me, you don’t have to take him back down the track to clip these things. As a matter of fact, you had better not, because these MEST locks have a habit of going heavily into MEST and becoming engrams.

Engrams, by the way, have to be run just as before. We are not getting away from that, but what we are trying to do is get this preclear moving on the track and moving easily and get him so that he will go the proper direction on the track. If we can do all these things, we will knock out a flock of occlusions, we will get a lot more data and all that sort of thing. We are trying to mobilize him.

More than that, we are trying to deaberrate him, because some of the weirdest aberrations that you will run into are things like the fellow who has to sit in one place in one room all the time, or the fellow who has to be on the go continually — he has to walk, he has to move — he is in constant motion. You can do something about that. Who put him in motion? Not who told him to go, but who put him in motion? What put him in motion? You will get MEST locks.

There are two kinds of locks: there are language locks and there are MEST locks. The language lock serves to locate the MEST lock. So let’s deal with the more concrete MEST line on this.

You are undoubtedly going to scan somebody into an engram with this. Undoubtedly. So what? So he can’t move then for some reason or another and you can’t contact the phrase that did it! I guess you will just have to sit down and either run off the session very thoroughly, or work and slave to get up enough holders in terms of MEST locks to suddenly have him so free on the subject of holding that he will move on the track regardless of the fact that you clipped that engram.

Now, there are several postulates I want to give you. This should begin to give you some kind of an idea of how to restore self-determinism very rapidly.

A person’s self-determinism is immediately established and directly established in ratio to his handling of MEST.

Self-determinism deteriorates in direct ratio to a person’s decreasing ability to handle MEST.

Self-determinism goes down as a person comes down the tone scale. Self-determinism goes down as a person is less and less able to handle MESS:

So what do you finally get? You get a person around 0.5 whose self determinism is out. He is not self-determined; he is in a circuit. He is determined by something else, not by himself. Furthermore, he can’t handle MEST. Did you ever see an apathy case take care of any MEST? An apathy case is not self-determined; he is sitting over in circuits and all sorts of weird things. This is a direct parallel to the tone scale.

What happens is that the “I” confuses the organism itself with the MEST it cannot handle, and so self-determinism deteriorates.

In other words, something happens like this: The organism gets to a point where it obviously can’t handle other MEST, so it can’t handle itself either because its MEST counterpart is the organism. For instance, if it can’t handle space, it not only cannot put somebody through space but it can’t put self through space.

This is the tug and pull below 2.0 on the tone scale. If you have an individual riding at 1.5 and an individual riding at 0.5, the 1.5 is trying to make the 0.5 into the 1.5’s MEST; he is confusing the organism with MEST. This 1.5 is trying to take this other person and own him as MEST.

Or you have a 1.1 and a 1.5. The 1.5 is trying to make the 1.1 into his MEST, and the 1.1 is fighting back to the extent of trying to nullify the 1.5 to a point where the 1.5 is a 0.5, and then the 0.5 becomes the 1.1’s MEST. This is the leading order of the tone scale in terms of MEST below 2.0. Nullification starts being worked on a 1.5 to drop him down so he can be owned by someone at a lower band. The 1.5 will take a 3.0 and try to move him down to a 0.5 SO that the 1.5 can own him.

The organism below 2.0 is actually more MEST than theta, and entheta, being confused and chaotic like MEST, behaves to a large degree like MEST.

This is the battle of the strong and the weak — in other words, the battle of the 1.5s and the 0.5s. The only way you can possibly get along is by being up in the bracket of ARC, because these lower levels don’t win. Nobody ever succeeded in owning another organism. It can’t be done.

You can own a horse, up in the upper part of the scale; you are nice to the horse and you understand the horse and the horse understands you and you just get along fine. The horse is very glad that you are riding him and everything is happy, and that horse stays in good shape.

But if you try to own the horse — ”Okay, you brute, you beast; you’ll do exactly what I say!” — you get a 0.5 horse. All of a sudden the 0.5 horse develops spavins, spasms and etceteras.

So do children. I have had some reliable reports that there are sick children in the society at this time. The children of a parent who enturbulates very badly below 2.0 become MEST. The parent will hand out control and nullification instead of ARC data. The only way a 3.0 can operate is on data — an exchange of ideas and reaching an agreement with relationship to that data. It is very hard to get a child into agreement because the child doesn’t have any data! So the best thing you can possibly do is try to give this child some data.

People say, “You can’t have a kid running all around tearing the whole room apart. You have to restrain this kid from grabbing hold of this MEST.”

I want to give you an object lesson: If you just restrain this child from breaking enough MEST, he will get to the point where he despises MEST and he won’t handle it; he will take your car out when he is sixteen and really wreck it. And though he will tell you he was awfully sorry to wreck that car, I defy you to detect any real sorrow in him. He really fixed that MEST UP.

The question that should be asked there is “What is that child doing in the room with expensive MEST that can be broken when he is little?” That is not his environment, so you haven’t matched him to his environment. He can’t have an expensively breakable environment, then; he doesn’t have enough data.

“But the kid will break all of his toys! What do you do with that?” “Whose toys are they, yours or his?”

That’s right. So if you are going to keep from piling up the most horrendous quantity of MEST locks in a child, you are evidently going to have to give him an environ in which he can live.

I explained to a child once how important something was. He used to get careless with the mail and he would occasionally lose a letter on the road back from the mailbox. Instead of beating him (whereby he would have not only lost the letters but he would have made absolutely sure that they got left in the rain so that when they were found again they were illegible), I explained to him that the only possible way he could obtain lollipops was to see that those letters arrived, because those letters contained the wherewithal for lollipops. Lollipops — letters — checks.

“Oohh! Here comes the mail. Now I get a lollipop. Gee, Pop.”

That boy never lost another letter. It was interesting, because it was really from there that I went out and I explained to him, painstakingly, the whole economic structure of the family and exactly what made it make or break, and so forth, and told him what his part in it was. I went on ad infinitum explaining this thing. His mother, by the way, was walking around saying, “For God’s sakes, talking to this child about an economic system, about social consciousness, and so forth!” A few days later when his little sister, who was sitting at the table with him, spilled milk into his lap, he told her, “You have no social consciousness.”

All of a sudden everything I had explained to him within his frame of reference was safe. This child had been pretty destructive, too. But everything within the frame of reference of his understanding was then safe.

How you get a child up to a point where you can give him some data is probably the tough problem. But laying locks into him really messes him up.

The reason I am talking about children is not because I am trying to tell you how to raise kids; I am trying to tell you how to find this stuff in preclears. How did Papa and Mama, Grandpa, Grandma, Aunt Agnes, Bertha, the school teachers and everybody else define language for this individual? Did they send him to school and make him sit from nine till five every day, then tell him he wasn’t to watch the clock? And then tell him it was good for him? Did any of these teachers ever try to give him stuff that he couldn’t possibly use or fit into his frame of reference, and tell him that they would flunk him, that his papa and mama would probably throw him out in the cold and wouldn’t have any more to do with him, if he didn’t get an A? And therefore he had sure better pass his examinations, because if he didn’t he was going to be socially ostracized by the whole society and nobody would talk to him again, and he would be broken out of this group or this class he was in and sent back to the lower one, or he would be part of the “awkwards”? But nobody ever forced any education on him, I’m sure! How was it defined?

This subject of MEST Processing is very simple. All we want to do is find what the language stands for. I could go on and show you how the computation on the case — the aberrative computation on the case — no matter how esoteric it sounds to you, can be redefined by the file clerk and the preclear and reduced down to a MEST chain of locks which can then be run and deintensified, and the preclear deaberrated.

Any language or combination of language can be reduced down to its MEST counterpart, which would be a demonstration to the child of how he learned that language, the method by which he interprets the language. Then you run this stuff out as locks. That is MEST Processing.

You can do Validation Processing on the MEST chain. All you have to do is locate the MEST chain. For instance, you have a preclear whose action phrases are really strong; they really hold him. Of course, he has lots of charge on the bank and so forth, and we explain it that way. But let’s loosen him up on the track without having to unsnarl the whole case! We run the validation side of those chains — for example, the validation side of the “Get up” chain. Let’s find every morning that he got up to something of his own volition, self-determinedly, every time that he got up when he was glad he had something to do. You will find those periods existed only in summer and the hour of rising was very early. But you start running these, and you keep running them and keep fighting him out of the entheta and theoretically (I don’t guarantee you anything on this because I have not tried to get a preclear over onto the analytical side of each action chain in the case), if you could do that, he would move like a gazelle on the time track.

But certainly the fastest method I know of at this time of bumping a preclear up the tone scale and so forth is by doing regular processing on this MEST method, using the language as the symbol and running the MEST interpretation, which was done to him physically, enforced or inhibited, to demonstrate what it was all about. You will find there is lots of material there. I am not talking only about physical pain and the handling of the individual. There was many a time when this individual lost MEST that didn’t have to do with physical pain, that didn’t contain any words. The fact that the words are there is nonsense to you; you don’t care whether they are there or not. He lost a doll when he was two years old. (Never look for a doll in an older boy, certainly, but most children around one and a half, two, three, will have dolls.) Later on his wife leaves him. Of course, his wife leaving him is demonstrating to him that he can’t hold on to MEST. But where is basic on that chain of his wife leaving him? You can go down to the little girl he knew in school, and she left him and so forth, and then all of a sudden you get down to a phrase in an engram that says “I’m going to leave you, you brute,” and you say, “I’ve solved this.” No, you haven’t. The actual first loss of MEST that he really felt bad about is the basic on that chain. You start knocking those locks out and the next thing you know, he says, “So she’s gone, so what?” That is a very desirable state of mind.