This is December the 11th, in the year after Dianetics 1953. The subject of this morning's lecture is SOP 8-C, patter connected with it.

You learn anything yesterday about patter? Did you use what you learned?

Male voice: Yes.

Did it work better?

Male voice: Yes.

All right. Any pat technique of this character, of course, is — if you're looking for hidden meanings and hidden results and so forth, they do. Every time you make a rote procedure of this character, believe me, the hidden significances are in it. I'm not kidding you. I mean, I just wouldn't minimize that for a moment.

Well, let's take for an example now, why one should stay fairly well on the groove until he understands exactly what he's doing with experience and so forth, and seen some of it go wrong.

Let's take this "Be three feet back of the head," and ask the pre, "places where the preclear is not in present, where not in past, where not in future; where others are not in present, in the past, in the future; where objects are not in the present, past and future; where pc is not thinking in the present, past and future; where others are not thinking in the present, past and future." All right, that's Step Ia — section a.

Goes on there — Step Ib is, have him create — that's if he's exteriorized, have him create, use and destroy remote viewpoints. And ask the preclear to be in pleasant, unpleasant, beautiful, ugly, dangerous and safe places; and in own, MEST and other's universes.

Well, let's take up the first part of this, and we find out that this depends squarely on the Prelogics. And that is that theta can place in space and time, objects, energy. That's that. That just is a direct representation of that and it took a terrific amount of experience and other know-hows sliding inside on it, to make that its most workable form. And that happens to be, at this moment, its most workable form.

Now, various conditions occur. The preclear's buttered all over the universe. He's stuck in the past, as we learned in Book One. He's jammed up with this and that, something else. He's afraid of the future — all of his computing machinery (which is to say, every condensed circuit he has, certainly) got there simply because he was afraid of the future. And he's "trying to be at places" and not arriving at them. By the way, that's a different postulate than "trying to be something" — "trying to be at something." That's the "not arrive" postulate boiled down to the last inch.

And the intent of the step is to let the preclear discover where he is, so that he can know where to place things, and then bring him up through that so that he doesn't need mest objects and directions to orient himself. But it's in that order. You shouldn't try to upset him too much about things and directions and so forth, until he's real stable about where he is.

Well, by asking him where he's not, you make him look. And so we have, sleeping in this, the proposition that feeling is condensed looking, effort is condensed feeling, thinking is condensed effort, and symbols are condensed thinking. And that's underlying that, so this step's also taking care of that — very indirectly. You're asking him to look at places, you see, and he'll incidentally feel about places.

So that's one of the fastest ones out, and that's why it's Step I. Not because it's senior to that, but because if a person can do this adequately, we have him getting the following results: He can accurately place things; he can accurately orient the knowingness which is connected with where he was and what he was doing, which is about all the knowingness there is in terms of data; and where others were and what they were doing, and where objects were. And it disabuses him of worries concerning things suddenly pulling away from him which aren't there. Now, that sounds funny but, you see, he thinks things are there and he's afraid these things are going to be wrenched away from him, and these things are either terribly desirable or it'll hurt like hell.

And so we have him convinced that he is other places holding on to other objects, and this is why he's holding on to things. So we get that just as a side shot through there. And this is all worked out to a point where you make him look, you make him reorient and you make him predict, all by finding out where he's not.

So thinking is a substitution for an ability to predict. One cannot "look at" the future — he can look at a picture he makes of the future. But then one can't "look at" the present either — he can look at the present in terms of the constructed particle positions and changing particle positions in the present. And you see that he's pinned inflexibly in time. So by using this process, we move him ahead.

Now, we — he has to go ahead there, as I said one day to you — the difference between being cause of something and being an effect of something may be as little as a billionth of a second. The fellow who's having trouble with decision would have trouble with this: You're trying to move that fellow around and get him up above effect.

Now, he's being the effect of mest all the time, that's why he can't get out of his head. So let's just get him a little bit in advance and have him be the cause of mest, and — by this tiny shift of time. It's not very much, although one auditor told me one day that he's figured he was twenty-four hours out of position because he looked at his body while he was exteriorized, and it had yesterday's shirt on it.

You get this operation here, we say — the fellow — you put some toy or something in front of him and you say, "All right, now decide where you're going to move that toy to on the table in front of you." And he picks out a place, and then he moves it over there. Now he is cause because he's in advance of the motion — he's not in back of the motion, he's in advance of it.

Now, the reason he gets into a situation whereby he is not cause anymore and is effect, is because he's afraid of the future.

He feels that he has so much now to lose that his losses will be impossible to bear, so in view of the fact that he has objects in the past, he'd better go into the past because he certainly can't be certain that he will have objects in the future. Well, of course, the funny part of it is, is that he doesn't have any objects in the past. Any objects he has are straight here in present time.

And the difference between a very sane person and a person who is just a little bit neurotic and a person who is very neurotic and a person who is strictly psycho is this (this is again Book One). A person who is very sane is in present time. He has no anxiety about present time, he can move around things in present time, and he can be a little bit in advance of present time if he wants to be, and he can also remember and be a little bit back of present time. But he can be there flexibly.

Now, a person when he gets slightly neurotic starts pushing the future. "Pushing time," he calls it. Time is that horrible barrier, see. And these people haven't got enough time, they haven't got enough time, they haven't got enough time, they haven't got enough time. This whole society at this time is running on this basis. Nobody has enough time to do anything, yet they're just accomplishing nothing. It's fabulous.

For instance, I went home last night, I didn't get home till 7:15, and I had dinner, and we set up a lot of equipment and took a lot of color pictures, and put all the equipment away — well, it's a tremendous amount of equipment involved in this, you know, I mean, half a truckload — and sat down and had quite a chin-chin about life in general and so forth, and got to bed. Total lapsed time in an entire evening, including dinner, was about two hours and a half; merely because we were in action most of that time, you see? We were doing something. We weren't sitting waiting for something to happen, we were just going on doing something.

And, of course, that made an awful lot of time occur while that clock was going on from one point to another. And that's what you actually do as an individual, you make a lot of time occur.

If you're depending on an automobile to make a lot of time occur, it won't. It'll take just the amount of time that the other particles say it has to take time. But you as an individual could make a lot of time occur.

But this is only if you're not pressing the future. If you have no anxiety about the future — if you went home for instance and you said, "Well, now look, I got to get up at 5:30 in the morning. My gosh, that means I'll have to get that many hours sleep, and let's see — I better do this and I better do that. And I got to get the clock wound. Yes, I got to get that. I got to get the cat out. Yes, I must get the cat out," and so forth. "And let's see now, I better get to bed and get to sleep. Better get to bed and get to sleep because I've got to be up about 5:30. And yeah, I've got to get to bed and get to sleep. Well now, where's my slippers? Let's see, I'll find them and put them alongside there, and get this all prepared, and I get to bed and get to sleep. Yeah, I've got to get to bed and get to sleep." And you get to bed, and you say, "All right. Now, I've got to get sleep. Now, I've got to get sleep. Got to get sleep so I can wake up in the morning. Hrrmmmmm! Got to get to sleep! Hmmmm-himnrn-hmmm!" — two o'clock, three o'clock.

That is exactly what insomnia is. It's just that. It's just — just a pressing future time.

The biggest impatience that a little child has with his parents is do the parents — do these parents ever look at anything occurring in present time? And his adjudication on it is uniformly that they don't. He wants them to go to a movie and have a good time. And my golly, they lose their hats, and they lose the car keys and they do this and they do that and they get sore about something else.

Kid after a while gets the idea that any time he plans something it will be spoiled. And that starts driving people out of future time, see? "I don't dare plan anything up there. It'll be ruined if I do. I mean, I postulated that we were going to have a nice party and so forth, and yet Papa came home from the office, and here it is my fifth birthday," the kid says, "and he came home from the office and he was tired, and he tried to play or something, but that — you could see that he was under a strain. And Mother and he got cross about something or other and — so I better have things happen accidentally. See, I mean, because it's probably because I planned it would be good, you see, that it went wrong."

And little kids will sit around and figure just this way. They're forcing a child, first, by not looking at the present time . . . There isn't any reason at all why the house couldn't be on fire, you see, and then you get the fire out and you get that straightened up, but what everybody can't sit down and play a game of checkers or do something else interesting. That's another period of time you've now entered into — another sphere of action.

And yet they don't do that, they sit around and say, "Well now, whose fault was it that so-and-so and zab-zab-zaba-zaba.""And it was a lucky thing we did this. And gee, we certainly were fortunate to have the house catch on fire. And my, we are lucky that we got it out in time," and so on. And they sit around and, "My, I sure am tired, and I..." and this goes on for hours. Well, those people are stuck in the track. See, they've got a big discussion going on about it.

Yet, there is — the house is not on fire at that time. In other words, nothing is happening. Now, a child can point this out to them very rapidly.

If you were to ask a child who was listening to this dissertation and so forth — after it had gotten a little bit tiring — two or three minutes of it's all right. You discuss the fact that the house was on fire, but this is the next day! And you ask him if he doesn't think his parents are a little bit overdoing this affair, so forth, and he'd say, "They sure are." Because his consciousness of time is not so thoroughly pinned down with havingness.

There is future havingness for him. He's more or less squared away, and he feels competent to solve the situation when it arises. And let me let you in on something in case you've never noticed this: The only time you can solve a situation and remedy it is when it arises. That's the time to do it.

There is this proposition of you notice that your car tires are getting very thin and so on. Well, what are you doing with thin car tires? This just isn't — it's not that something will happen in the future just because of the thin car tires, it's actually the fact that the car doesn't run quite as well in the present, doesn't steer quite as well, unbalanced treads and so forth. It isn't riding as well as it might. And furthermore, it certainly isn't braking and stopping the way it ought to. Well, so that's a present time remedy. If you just keep everything up to the nines that you've got all the time, nothing will ever happen. You don't have to sit around and worry about car tires.

And the other thing is money. People sit around and worry about money all the time. Well, someday I'm going to pull this on some parent when he is sitting around fussing and stewing about some boy or some girl being so expensive and so forth, and talking about the scarcity of money, the scarcity of money, the scarcity of money — look at him and say, "What's the matter with you? Can't you get out and make money? What's the matter with you only making sixty dollars a week? Well, what's the matter with you?" Something wrong with you, see? There's something wrong with the guy. Anytime anybody tries to save and so forth, they're doubting their own ability to accumulate.

It's funny, but you know hardly anybody in this society at this time can own money? You'll find that out as soon as you start processing lots of preclears. They can't own money. You process them for a long time on wasting money and they get up to a point where they can accept a nickel. That's right. I mean, it's that brutal. That's not a sarcastic statement; they can't accept money.

So this money doesn't belong to anybody, and it doesn't belong to them, doesn't belong to somebody else, and it just — it just wanders around.

And if you all of a sudden decide that you're going to have some money, you can go through the necessary magic to accumulate it. You go through magic to accumulate money — various magics. Some people think the way to accumulate money is get down in a ditch and shovel for eight hours or twelve hours. They'll accumulate money — they'll accumulate just as much money as they thought they were going to accumulate. Well, that's their magic.

And other people work only to accumulate money. That is about the emptiest goal I know of.

Other people work only to retire. They work only so they won't have to work. That's the most gorgeous one of all, because they're working themselves out of their job. And then they wonder why, when they retire at sixty-five, they have a nervous breakdown and die when they're sixty-six.

But aside from that, here's this gradient of time. Your little child can tell you any time that his parents press time too hard. Well, after they've pressed the future for a while, you know — anxiety because things will happen — even though they were anxious because things would happen, even though they just knew the house would burn down and it did (they postulated it down one way or the other), then, they have to go into the past to the fact that the house burnt down, because they had postulated it into the future. So their past postulates and their past track is strewn with postulates relating to failures about postulating the future, and only the past is secure. Well, I don't know anything secure about the past. By the way, did you ever eat a piece of past? Nothing is secure about the past at all. It's indigestible.

Now, when you look this problem over, you find out that your preclear is pressing the future or he's stuck in the past, and he's not in present time. And believe me, pressing the future will eventually come up against "I have no time to do anything." See, I mean, you can press the future for a while, and this fellow who's on a terrific manic drive, see — he's going ahead into that future, he's going ahead into that future, he's going ahead into that future. There is no place there to go! What's he doing going into the future?

He could gain maybe ten times as much by simply relaxing in the present and then organizing the present in such a way as to have a consecutive future goal. He doesn't have to get all this effort and this verve and this and that into the fact he's pressing the future. Because he'll eventually wind up by just expressing the verve and doing nothing about the future.

You've seen people like that? They're always talking about the future and the future and the future and they just don't make a single motion. Endless plans. Great plans keep rolling off, of the most exact nature. They just keep rolling off, rolling off — more and more plans and plans — but nothing ever happens. That's what happens to these people.

You see some preclear, he tells you this and that, he's got lots of plans and another preclear who has — oh, tremendous plans. The difference between these two, state of health, is will the plans of one of them be executed? If a person plans something up and executes it, why, he's in good shape. And if a person plans something up and then he plans something up, one of two conditions is occurring: either his fun is simply planning, you know — but that's detectable, because he's generally planning completely; not impractically, but he's generally planning just for fun. And the other one is, he's planning practically and seriously, and he's planning and he's planning, and he just never does a thing. He isn't getting any fun out of it.

Now, people all the time — kids all the time are planning for the future — they just do it for fun. I mean, they're going to do this, and they're going to do that and so on. People frown on this being fun. You have to plan for the future seriously!

Well, how do you handle all this stuff I've been giving you here about time? That's Step Ia. It'll blow a person up into being cause. There are some direct processes on this, but this will actually blow a person into being cause.

How long would you have to use that, though, on some people, to blow them into being cause? You're going to underestimate it every time. That's all I can tell you when you say, "How long?" I'll just say you will always underestimate it.

Now, you can right now throw an estimate forward just to make that statement incredible, you see. You can say, "Oh, eighteen thousand hours, you know?" You can say, "Eighteen thousand hours is how long it's going to take." But I'm talking about an actual estimate that you'll make: "How long do I have to give him this kind of Step I — this Step Ia?" And you'll look at this preclear and say, "Well, all right, we'll give him an hour or so." I'm talking about a practical estimate now. You're the auditor and you say, "Oh, we'll do this for an hour." Nuh-uh. Just always count on that you had never given him enough Step Ia. And I gave you an example yesterday of where this thing winds up. It comes into a prediction, and the past and so on.

Do you want to know how "time-bound" an individual is? Just let me ask you at random: Where were you on the afternoon of June the 21st, 1013? Oh, you don't know. Well, I just wouldn't call that a very good memory.

What was the name of your wife three lives ago? What a stinking memory! You mean you don't come up like that (snap) — Adella or something like that. Tsk! All right. You were a girl, all right, you, of course, wouldn't have had a wife, naturally. Well, what was the name of your husband five lives ago? What's the matter, you lost your memory?

Now, you just extend it out of this realm of human agreement into the realm of knowledge. Big difference, you know. You — we get most people and you say, "What'd you do on your third birthday?"

And the fellow says, "Huh? You expect me to remember that!"

"Well, what'd you do on your tenth birthday?"

"My tenth birthday! Why, that was twenty years ago!" He stalls, see.

"Well, what did you do on your last birthday?"

"Oh, but that was almost a year ago!"

This guy is time-bound. And you're going to ask this fellow to be cause now, huh? No, you're not. You're not going to get anyplace asking him to be cause, he won't cause anything.

The biggest stunt there is, is to make a person not be cause. Then we have a nice, unrandom society that can be run, and somebody or other can sit back and say, "Isn't it nice, look at all those ants running." Only men are not ants.

The time barrier. You should have a full and complete recall on seventy-six trillion years. If you haven't got it, that's — means that you're pretty bum, pretty — pretty bad, pretty bad.

"You mean to tell me you can't even remember three thousand years ago? You can't tell me the name of your villa? You trying to kid me? Not actually — you can't really remember that. Oh gee, well let's try some other Straightwire. We'll try something easy now, we'll try to be better at it. Let's see, What is the — when was the last time you were a governor of something?' Well, I think we'd better go into elementary processes with you — you seem to have a very bad communication lag."

Now, if you ask any one of these questions, do you know that the lag time escapes your notice because it's too long. Do you know that there's always a lag time on a datum of that character? Do you know that the answer does come up? Hm? It does come up. But the lag time is too long for you to notice this is a lag time.

The lag time — the longest lag time I know of on such a question was eight years. Eight years. It took eight years for the answer to come in from whatever outpost it had been parked at. But it came in.

And I know another one that took three and a half months. I asked a fellow, rather in jest one time, "Well, where were you in 816?" You know, he said, "I couldn't. . ." He was telling me — oh, he was being very grandiose — oh, he could remember this, and boy he had his time track spotted all over the place, see. And boy, he was burrowed in there in the last — and he had the five years just beautifully organized, and this was the only thing he was interested in. He wouldn't go back of that, because he'd had a marital upset earlier.

And I said, "All right. Now," I said, "just for fun, let's try some more Straightwire. Now, where were you in 816 A.D.?"

The guy says, "You're kidding me. All right," he says, "I'll pitch in and we'll go into this childhood stuff."

He just wouldn't give me any early stuff till then. Three and a half months later, the fellow called me up on the phone, said, "I was in Florence." That's all he said, hung up. Took me a little lag time then to remember what the problem was.

But there's always a lag time. And it may be a day, it may be two days, may be three days. Quite ordinarily, it's three, five, eight days. Only that's such a long lag time, you don't recognize it as the same lag time as you ask the preclear, "All right. Now, do you recall your mother saying that to you?" You know, good old-time Book One Straightwire. "Do you recall your mother saying that?"

"Well, (sigh) see — yes, she said it to my brother once. Yeah . . . Yeah, she said it to me once. Yeah."

You get that as a lag time? Well, the same lag time takes place over three, five, eight days, three months or eight years. The same operation goes on, but you — it just becomes unrecognizable.

Well, how do you remedy this? It all depends on how much full cause-effect knowledge you want the individual to have, that's all. The many other techniques are directed toward this same thing, and none of them are even vaguely as effective as Step Ia. And it looks so mild. That's why it's effective.

And the fellow thinks, "Well, gee, I run that for two, three minutes, or five minutes or — well, we were just going over Steps I, II, and III now. Okay. Give me three places not in the past, three places not in the present, three places not. . ." That's the end of that step. Now let's go on to something important: 'Hold on to the two back anchor points of the room,' " or something.

He's missing the boat. Now, you only have to do this for a little while, or long enough to get somebody stable. When you get him stable, help him stabilize himself so he's got a little bit better certainty, you can pass on to the next step.

Tell him to mock up and unmock his own body. And, by the way, after you've done Step II several times, there's a variation on it: have the fellow start mocking up and unmocking bodies and vehicles to carry life around. Because there has been three-headed bodies — there have been three-headed bodies and things like that on the track that he's still frightened of. Weird-looking bodies, bodies completely unaesthetic, ugly bodies, all kinds of bodies. And you just start handling bodies in that Step II, and it's written in this limited fashion, in this brief form here, so it's just for your use. But you just put him up to the problem of creating and uncreating bodies, and making bodies persist and so on.

Well now, the limits, then, which surround a preclear are the barriers of these walls, the barriers of space, and mental barriers. Those are actual barriers. They're embryonic walls, you might say — walls aborning. They are walls in the course of manufacture. Some fellow tells himself every day, "I'm unable to get out of this side of the bed." Believe me, he'll, after a while, not be able to. Because he's fixing an idea in a barrier. And he fixes ideas in barriers that exist or he'll start fixing an idea — in order to fix it, he erects a barrier in a finite space and time. So he keeps on adding to this barrier and adding to this barrier, and that's what you call "training."

That's how you train a dog. You put a leash on him, and you want him to heel, why, you put the fixed idea there of heel as a word, you know, and then make it into an action, and you make that action into a barrier. You let him run against his own leash, and you snap him back of your heel. So he has evidently kind of run into something. And after a while, the symbol itself becomes the barrier.

Now, a thetan will associate a fixed idea — any time, he will associate a fixed idea with a barrier. That's very easy. Because he's trying to fix ideas. His big fixation is to fix ideas. If he is a complete nut — and that goes clear on up all the way back the track, and applies even to an Operating Thetan — he's trying to fix ideas. He's nutty on the subject. He's got to fix an idea. Because if he doesn't fix ideas, then nothing will be self-animate and nothing will be under symbolic control. So he has to fix ideas. See that? You've just got to fix ideas in things — I mean, you can't go on anything — I've got to fix SOP 8-C in your heads so that you can use it, see?

So everybody is engaged on this one way or the other. We want to fix the minimum — the best way to do it is to fix the minimum number of ideas to cover the maximum number of actions, and that's optimum. Not strain the way the Scholastics did to fix the maximum number of ideas for the minimum amount of action. That's the wrong way to train. That should be banished out of the American university. Someday they will get it into an education system rather than into an unknowing system.

That is how you unknow, because you've fixed a vast number of irrelevant material without any action intention. You know, you sit down and tell somebody to memorize, in Latin, the 8,646 separate parts of the body, instead of showing him how to be three feet back of his head.

So, how long do you carry on, on this thing? Well, gee, you can see right away that these objects that are not in the present, past and future — you're dealing with fixed ideas all the way through here, fixed locational ideas, and all of them apply to barriers. That's the simplest technique there is. You can just sit and use that technique on and on and on and on and on.

You would be surprised at how it varies. There's a tremendous amount of randomity in using it. I started using it on a preclear one day with just malice aforethought. Just one thing I was going to do to this preclear — I was going to turn up the year 1200. And I did. I made the year 1200 more real to him than 1953 ever thought of being. Of course, that was easy, because life was more real to him in 1200.

I once determined I would turn up some music out of my own bank that I'd had and composed and so forth, and so I just sat down and turned up this music. Did it on the basis of where I wasn't and where musical instruments weren't and so on, until the music, which was a symbol, was no longer fixed to the musical instrument in the time of the musical instrument, and didn't have to be there.

Well now, I can't be in the year 1000, and have everything in the year 1000, but I can certainly have the knowledge of everything in the year 1000. So you don't have to go astray on this technique, and go way abroad someplace and get over on the side of it. It's just that — it's "Give me three other things that aren't in the past." And you'll start driving this guy batty after a while. I mean, he'll run out of things.

After he's told you three times that the washtub is not in the past, he'll start to get ashamed of himself and he'll have to find something else. And with great relief, he'll say, "The tappet is not in the past." Yeah, that's good, he finally got something else. "And also the rug — the rug along side of the washbasin is not in the past."

He doesn't turn on particularly with a somatic, but he suddenly remembers, "You know, I was almost drowned in a bathtub when I was a baby? Well," he says, "what do you know?"

Now, you don't have to beat that to death, to hit that as a specific incident is to validate it. Skip it, if you want to do a good, long, fast job.

You'll see preclears doing the darnedest things. Because this is again — looking when condensed, feeling, feeling condensed becomes effort, and so on. You're making him look. And by making him look, he's willing then to know. If he can't look, he won't know. He refuses to know.

You can actually see somebody's attention on this use of Step Ia just come out from a tremendously broad, almost flat plain. They can only look — it's just like light spattering up against a target or something. I mean, the rays of it are all going out sideways from the target. Nothing is going through the target. There's something in the road of lookingness, in other words. "Target" is a bad word. Let's put up a shield in front of a target. And the light being shined on the target is hitting the shield and is going out at right angles to the incoming light, you see, and it's just spattering.

And yet, right back of the shield, there's a tremendous suction area. It's a vacuum. There's this terrific desire to look at something which one mustn't look at. So his attention is around there, and yet he's shielding himself from looking at it, and he's in this big complication.

So he'll first tell you on this subject that, yeah, he can — that "Venus is not in the past, and Saturn is not in the past, and uh-uhhhhh the asteroid belt is not in the past, and ummmyahh, da-da-da da-da-da . . ." He isn't down to Earth yet.

Now, you get him down to Earth and he'll start going out on broad continents. Now, when you get out on broad continents, he'll start getting in on nearby cities. And then he'll get in nearby cities, he'll start swinging in on the immediate vicinity. And when he gets into the immediate vicinity, he'll start pinpointing it right where it is.

Now, even though he knows this technique, he can't fool himself. You can audit this on yourself. You can't fool yourself. You know the third time that you said that, "Well, there's no bathtub in the past," that there's — possibly you're just looking down the line at the bathtub. Something about bathtubs. You're insisting there's no bathtub in the past!

You say, "Yeah, that's an entirely different thing than being completely comfortable about there being no bathtubs in the past."

"Give me three more objects which are not in the past."

So, you could handle that. It's a type of Straightwire and it's very, very easy to audit.

How many varieties of auditing can be done on this? Well, I don't know. Every time I do it, I vary it in some little fashion or another just to take the monotony off of it and so on. But I find out that there are thousands of ways to use this technique. And I find that the best way is just flatly and bluntly, "Give me one thing which is not in the past. Two, three things which are not in the past. Give me three more that are not in the past. Now give me three that are not in the future. Three more that are not in the future."

When I take a case unawares with this technique, you know, I mean, they just don't quite know what's coming, I'll vary the patter just enough. Sketch it around, then come up to the present, then go back to the past again before I go into the future. Then go into the future longer than I go into the past. In other words, vary the rhythms of it. (You can vary the rhythm of the technique, you understand, so that it doesn't become too monotonous.) And hardly ever fail to take a preclear who is just certain that he can go through this just nicely and beautifully — don't care how — never fail to take him on the future. That is the damnedest thing, according to him. Because he's "got no concern about the future, it doesn't worry him. He can take care of himself. He's a self-determined fellow. He doesn't worry about the future — never has, and doesn't intend to start now!"

"Well, give me three more objects which are not in the future."

And he says, "Well, there's — look there's no use giving you any more objects that are in the future." You can just slip right back to the past then again if you want to. There's no reason to be overbearing.

I was quite mean to one of your fellow classmates here yesterday. Yes I was, because it amounts to a communication break to be that overbearing. Rather than be that way, just slip them into the past again. Just ask them three more objects from the past and they'll eventually sort out the future.

But I've never failed to take one by storm about the fifth or sixth time you ask them about objects in the future or people in the future. It's just one of those things.

Been doing this on a type of Straightwire here for some time. It was pointed out — we were applying brackets to 8-C in the First Unit, and applied brackets all up and down this 8-C; it was rather understood there. And I'd only been running it in brackets on the subject of others — where others were concerned — "others not in the past." And it was broadened out in that First Unit, very definitely, so that we could — "others in the past, and the present and the future" and turned out to be terrifically beneficial.

Till yesterday, one of the boys of the First Unit said — I won't say exactly what he said because it was cowpuncher talk and it was — shouldn't go on the tape. But he said, "An auditor ought to hawhuh-huh have his rowrr-rurh if he fails to run 'others not present.'" He said, "Because, by golly," he says, "you know I've had a cousin right along with me all this whole time!"

Well, yes sir! Well, that's his opinion of it. If you — that's omitting a part of this particular technique. Yes, it — an omission, evidently a consistent omission of this part of this technique ever since it came out on his case, had to some slight degree stalled his case.

Look, if somebody is present in the present, he is certainly present from the past. And the past is pinned at that point, and there's the stuck.

A person who can't get out of his head can't be cause. A person who can't get out of his head must be stuck in the past also. Also he must be effect. And any ways you start adding this up, you can make it a sort of one of these mathematical philosophic machines. It comes down to this. When the people — if they can't move out of their head, they've got to be an effect.

Well, all right, if they've got to be an effect, then they must be back of present time, not in front of it. And if this is the case, then they must be having trouble with time, so therefore time must be a big barrier. And this is one of those weird ones. You can just go on, and for your own amusement, you ought to go on and argue around this subject long enough till you see that it exhausts cause, effect, attention, beingness, being at places, unable to arrive, communi­cation lines, particles and so forth. I could sit down here and just reel it all off — I mean, here you are, and not there.

The fellow can't arrive. Well, if he can't arrive, well, he isn't anyplace. This means probably that he didn't arrive, so there's something there about arrivals and so on. Well, you could tailor up this to hit that specifically: "Give me three messages which are not in the past."

A guy will turn practically green. I mean, "Three messages which are not in the past? Well, damn it, all messages are in the past, of course! It's just silly for you to ask such a question."

"Give me three messages which are not in the — well, give me one. Give me one message which is not in the past."

"Oh, it's so silly! They're — all messages are in the past, they've got to be in the past." And here we go on off into another argument. This is your "can't-arrive" case. He'll argue with you. He'll give you a real bad time when you ask him "three messages not in the past." He just flops. Period!

And yet, you'd eventually sort it out, and you get it on this basis where he can find that messages are not in the past, and he knows lots of kinds of messages are not in the past. It isn't that you're looking for a hidden significance of a telegram, you're trying to get him over looking at the telegram which is in the past. You don't want him to look at the telegram which is in the past — this is a different goal, you see — you just want to get him over having to look at it. A telegram isn't important. It's just another reason. Men got lots of reasons. If you don't believe it, why, read some of the Greek philosophers, they had reasons for everything. Roman philosophers were worse than the Greek philosophers — the Romans all had reasons why the Greek philosophers thought what they thought. The — and if I could expand your scope in any way, it would simply be along this technique. See that?

Now, there's these three things. The first certainties that a person will run into one after the other — who are under training — are data certainties. And then they get the certainty — they get the certainty they've got data, that this data is effective, that it will produce an effect. And their next certainty is — they'll get off on the basis of "is it true or isn't it true," you see — relative truths — that's a trick, "relative truths." It's whether it produces an effect or not. That's what counts. Because that's what the thetan is trying to do. He's trying to produce an effect. He's not so much interested in truth. Truth is a chimera — data-truth and so on.

You'll find a lot of people get stuck on Scientology. They — just gets all balled up because they want to know if it's the truth or if it's not the truth or something.

Well, let's look at what they want to know is it the truth about. Will it produce an effect? Well, there's lots of things that'll produce an effect, and anything that'll produce an effect has a relative truth.

Well, will it produce a very broad and uniform effect? Yeah, yeah — broad, uniform and beneficial. Yeah. When he gets this down, why, he knows then he's into that certainty; that's a data certainty.

Now, we go up the next stage: Will it arrest his own dwindling spiral? That's the first thing that he wants to run into. And he gets — finally gets a certainty on this. And then he gets a certainty on "Well, can he exteriorize and remain in such a state or does he have to be audited or . . ."

Gee, I've had more people tell me — I had an instructor in London one time, one of the — I mean, a schoolteacher in London, say, "It's all right, I feel fine, but my Lord, don't tell me I have to stay married to this book Self Analysis for the rest of my life." He says, "I work on it about a half an hour every night, in order to get over the school day." And he says, "I do it very effectively and I feel fine afterwards, but don't tell me I've got to go on the rest of my life doing a half an hour of Self Analysis every time I come home from school."

And yet, you notice he was doing a half an hour of Self Analysis every night when he came home from school — because he'd hit the point where he knew his dwindling spiral was arrested. See, he knew that would keep him from sinking any further beyond where he was. Deterioration stopped. So that's the next certainty up.

And then certainty on the auditor: "Do I have to have auditors or auditing?" and so forth. He gets a certainty on that, and then he gets a stability out there.

Then he's liable to worry about being trained, and does he have to go on studying and thinking and worrying and fussing about it, and he finally gets a certainty on that spiral being interrupted. He's achieved a stability.

Well, now, he'll struggle an awful long time to get up there to a stability, but those are certainties that he hits.

Then he'll get a certainty — he'll fool around with this certainty: Is it good to set people free or not? See, anybody — almost anybody will fool around with that certainty sooner or later. And then he decides one way, and he decides the other way, and he fools around with it, and sometimes he doesn't solve it till his own case is practically solved. The only reason he's worried about it: Is his own defensibleness adequate to having people free? As soon as it becomes sufficiently defensible, and he knows he's not hitting a dwindling spiral anymore because of it, he's free. Because he's free of the worry of whether other people ought to be free or not, which is freedom.

And when it comes to that, by the way, there are — a gradient scale there on the Tone Scale. Right down there from about 0.5 on the Tone Scale down, you get repetitive cycles.

In the first book — you'll notice the Tone Scale's in the first book there. I put that drawing in there. The first drawing of Book One, of Modern Science of Mental Health, has the Tone Scale in it.

And you notice it's drawn in a geometric progression. Well, it's a very funny thing about that thing, but do you know that geometric progressions down toward the bottom of it get so repetitive because they're halving the distances, you know, distances in half. And you never arrive when distances keep being cut in half. And that's the hideous thing, you see, about hitting death — actual death — or going down toward death. A thetan never arrives at it. See, he just keeps cutting the distance in half.

And there's an emotion down there — there's a sympathy down there, for instance, which is as solid as wood. Honest. It's tiny. In order to get it, you'd have to mock up — oh, two big crowds of little tiny specks, each one feeling very sympathetic. Each little speck feeling very sympathetic inside the crowd, and two major crowds of them, and all of a sudden, you — my gosh, could there be an emotion that solid? Could there be a sympathy that solid? Yes, there is, there's one more solid than that. You see, that's just the other harmonic down. So these harmonics keep doubling over and so on — and they never arrive, because that's the secret of the dwindling spiral. You never really arrive at the bottom of the dwindling spiral. So the certainty comes about when you can arrest it. And that's what — all we're trying to do.

So there are many of these states that an individual could run into and so on. But the final thing that your preclear will solve on the subject of it — you can expect him to solve — is whether or not he could exist alone in his own universe and so forth. Whether or not he could just take himself away from all this and so on.

And this worries him one way or the other, and he eventually finds out that he can. And that is a certainty which is above Operating Thetan. But he'll fool around with ARC and contact with his fellows way up to Operating Thetan and above. He doesn't have to, but can he? And he actually has to be in that state of where he actually realizes he can get along without anybody else in the whole firmament. He can get along all by himself, perfectly comfortably, to be completely comfortable about being with people — because you've gotten him over his dependency on it. And his terrific dependency on this is one of the big bars to his ability to take it, because he gets anxious about it, and therefore he's afraid everybody won't be his friend, and then he's sure everybody's going to be his enemy, and here we go.

So those are roughly the trail of certainties that you hit there. You might mark them down, because you'll see those repeat, preclear after preclear.

Well, now how do you arrive at these certainties? Well, one of the best ways I know of is to try to get in on the level of data certainty. See, that's just you as an auditor. Try to get in on that level. Now you, because you have a data certainty, can put your preclear into a senior certainty. He right away recognizes, if you do a good job, that as long as you're around and this subject is around and so forth, he at least can keep from going on down. He doesn't have to know, because he assumes there are others like you, or certainly there is you. So he isn't after a data certainty, and you would waste your time trying to give him a data certainty. You know, you just waste your time, because what you're trying to do is give him auditor certainty as his point of entrance.

But you as an auditor — because you peculiarly have one problem in common — you have been seeking and you are seeking, and you are seeking for just that: a data certainty. Well, let's end the cycle and goal on it or get some­where close to where we can have a security on it. And right then, an awful lot of the end of cycles which you are fighting personally will blow up, you see, because you — that's end of cycle. Your case is a little bit different than the case that you'll process out in the public, because you are interested in the data, interested in what you have been with in relative truth, and so on.

And many of you have had the experience of trying to study something in this society which didn't quite pan out, and which was sold with, if anything, even more verve than I have tried to sell you Dianetics or Scientology. Although that, somebody says is im, could say very well, and probably has said, is impossible for anybody to use any more salesmanship than I've tried to use on this.

The point is, is you hit an end of cycle on that. Well, the best place I know of for you to start in with an end of cycle is Step Ia, on a data certainty. That's the best place I know of. Mostly because it is an easy process, and because its results are easily viewed and because they happen fast and because you won't have the additional strain of feeling you're going to ruin a preclear because of it.

Now, you can do this wrong. You can do SOP 8 - C Step Ia a little bit wrong simply by keeping on insisting where objects are. Well, this makes the fellow introvert his lookingness. See, he — it doesn't make him look, it makes him not look. You see why that is? You keep up asking him where subjects are, and you're asking him to face up to reality and that sort of thing. And he is going to feel very confused, and he will very swiftly get lost. And you can be specific about specific places and objects to his detriment.

That is to say, you — "Give me — now is there a piano? Now tell me . . ."You just dreamed up a piano out of your own bank, see? And you say, "Where isn't a piano?" This fellow is not stable enough to be — have something particularly clarified. You can start in specifically and start to clear up music, or you can start to clear up poetry, or you can clear up something very specific and intimate to this preclear with this technique by saying, "All right, where isn't there a poem in the past?" And you can go on pangity-pangity-pang right like that, and a good smart, sharp auditor would. But to just suddenly pick up an object with no purpose at all, while the — with the preclear still shaky and so forth — "All right, where isn't there a bathtub in the past?" — just like that, I mean, in other words, be a little less specific.

And the worse off your preclear is, the less specific you be, till you just get general beyond general. You let it take place all automatic-like if you think your preclear is real bad.

If you were treating a psycho with this, you would be so doggone general. It's very, very easy, you know, to be terrifically sharply defined with a psycho. Oh, it's very easy to have to come down on them, to be sharp and forceful with them and so forth, because they're really practically in the state of a piece of mest. And they're a piece of mest, and you start regarding them as a piece of mest, so therefore they're something you should place.

Now, how do you feel about a table when it keeps on falling over when you're trying to stand it up in the middle of the floor? You get pretty impatient with it, and you finally stand it up bang!

Well, you'll do that with a psycho merely because he's so like MEST. But if you're going to make him something else than a psycho, you can't treat him like a piece of mest. So you just get terrifically general on this.

"All right, name — why don't you name something that isn't in the room?" You know? That's nice — "Why don't you name something. . ." He probably isn't aware there isn't anything else. "Just name something." All right. Too tough for him, see — oddly enough, just too tough. So let's get more general. "All right. Name something that doesn't exist." Too tough for him. "Okay, name something."

"Yeah, we'll call that table 'Joe,' " he'll say. See? Case entrance.

Of course, the case entrance with a psycho is establishing communication with the psycho, but remember that communication is essentially a particle motion. And the psychiatrist dramatizes an effort to communicate with a psycho when he tries to make electronic particles pass through the brain of a psycho. His drilling into the skull of a psycho is a psychotic demonstration — a psychotic demonstration of trying to reach the mind of the psycho. It never yet has done anything for a psycho.

Well, how do you get a psycho into communication with you? By imitation. If he can't do anything else, imitation. If he won't talk to you in any way, you just start doing the same things he's doing. Duplication — well, that's his act, but it has a tendency to match-terminal what he's doing and discharge it to some degree, and he will feel better.

Psycho jumping all around the room and jumping on the chairs and off of the chairs and running around in circles and singing "beautiful flowers and Ophelia" or something, and you jump onto chairs and off of chairs and do it practically at the same moment they're doing it.

Another way to handle a psycho, by the way, is "You can help somebody. Yeah. The reason why I'm trying to get you into good shape is I want you to help somebody." Or "You can help me by getting in good shape."

Big emergency, so forth, something like that — don't worry about a psycho not measuring up to it. Throw him the ball. I would not have the least qualms, for instance, in a — atomic bombing or a civil riot or something of the sort — seeing some guy who was utterly raving mad, just crazy as hell, I wouldn't have any qualms whatsoever of suddenly putting a badge and a gun on him and saying, "Keep these people in line now!" I don't care who he is.

Some girl going around screaming and just left a dead baby behind her and so forth and so on, and say, "All right, now, let's — you got some baby clothes there. Well, let's get in here and get any other baby you find on this street and so forth, and let's straighten them up so they're in good shape." Bang! out of it.

You'd be amazed how fast an individual responds as long as he feels that he can express and be part of this universe; he can express his own beingness in it. The most trouble with most people is they feel they don't dare be part of this universe. See, they're kind of hanging around the fringes and they're not quite welcome. And you all of a sudden, they can — convinced they can help somebody, why, that's terrific.

And once in a while an auditor — an auditor who is real bad off. . . Sometimes some guys are real bad off, you know, they haven't had any auditing, but they go on and audit somebody — do them a terrific amount of good.

We're not interested in the odds and ends and significances of it. It's just that I want you to get now, to some degree, a data certainty. It's too late in coming to most of you. And when we're doing Group Processes, you want to see that that takes a very prominent part in it. Knock it around, knock it around, knock it around.

Now, the only thing that can happen to interrupt this technique is that an automaticity can set in regarding it. And that can only set in if there's too much monotony with regard to the technique. And so periodically, if you were auditing just this technique on somebody, you would push the circuit thus created around. You would move it around until it blew. You just take this technique and push it around, it'll blow.

All right.