This is December the 16th, the first lecture of the day.

And today we're going to take up, on theory, assignment of cause. And I want you hereinafter as aforestated, whereas and wherein (we've just had an HAS board meeting) as in hereinafter and aforestated, pursuant to any condemnations, to recognize that you have something by which you can evaluate a technique without coming around and asking me about it. And this we will call assignment of cause.

A technique is as good as it does not assign cause too thoroughly to something other than the thetan. Now, you understand that just the principle of assignment of cause itself will pull somebody, now and then, out of the soup. But every time he assigns cause other than himself, he goes into a little bit less of a self-determined condition. You see this?

Now, because he's done this all the way back on the track — he's assigned cause and assigned cause and assigned cause — we have a problem which is undone by permitting him to assign cause lesserly. I hope that's comprehensible, but it's — see, we have then, we let him assign cause to — on a big scale basis, and then we slow that down, we get them to assign cause a little less exteriorly and a little less exteriorly and a little less exteriorly until he's cause. And that's how we get him back into a state of responsibility.

Now, you understand that a person will continue to assign cause as long as he cannot himself create. He'll assign cause elsewhere so long as he can't create. So long as he remains convinced that he can't create, then his assignment of cause goes elsewhere.

The big trick in the whole universe is leading people to assign cause. Now, we — they have assigned cause first on a good basis, and then they assign it on a bad basis. They will assign cause exterior to themselves for good effects; they say, "Well, so-and-so did that and that was a real good effect and so on."

Well, this gets them into the groove of assigning cause. And now, when they have hit that groove, they plow in a little deeper and they start assigning bad cause exterior to themselves. And then they assign good cause and bad cause, and they assign it more broad and more broad and more broadly, until at last, God has created all space, completely independent of anything anybody else had to say about it, and nobody has any part or parcel in it, and the society itself is cause. And this is cause and that is cause and something else is cause. And the preclear's not cause, but unfortunately at the time he assumes that he's not cause he's unable to generate any energy of any kind. And he just bogs right there and that's the end of him practically, for all forceful purposes.

So what is this problem in terms of Dianetics and Scientology? You'll find out the three-year stretch which you can observe, as witnessed by lectures and writings, is a narrowing perimeter of cause, which crossed — just after Science of Survival, probably with AP&A — which crossed the border and took up full responsibility. And for the first time said that self-determinism had a great deal to do with it.

Narrowing perimeter of cause. The first book, for instance, is — permits people grandly to assign cause to the family and the whole universe and to engrams and everything else, and never even mentions that the person himself might be cause. That book sold a hundred thousand copies. Assignment of cause. Okay.

Now, we notice that we're getting very much better results by bringing up a preclear into a level of cause itself, and we don't have the same public. We've got lots of public. Don't ever think we've got as little public as the medical profession would like you to believe, but — we've got lots and lots of public. The difference is that the public we're getting is now much more the responsible level of the public than the irresponsible level; it's a better public. All right.

Let's look at this, though, in terms of auditing. And we find out that the auditor is there and is a vital part of the session, so that the preclear can assign cause. But he can assign cause now to something very specific — an auditor. See that?

Now, he can narrow down the assignment of cause to the auditor, and go through his various drills, and then get up to a point where, in terms of assigning cause to engrams and energy and other things, he can have less and less assigned cause, and be more and more himself cause. And at length, when does he get rid of the auditor? Well, he gets rid of the auditor at the time when he himself is capable of being, to some degree, cause. And the problem was never resolved in earlier work by man.

As early as man had any tales that were going by word of mouth down through the tribes and so on, the assignment of cause was the primary function of the witch doctor, of any medicine man and so on. He existed there to assign cause. And everybody assigned cause to him so that he could assign cause for them. And this cause went out into the base — "Well, the explanation for why the lightning bolt hit your wigwam has to do with . . ."

And now we go into the gods of the streams and the woods and "The reason why you didn't get any game today in hunting, is because by tripping over that log and not spitting the proper ritualistic spit, you were offensive to the god of that glade. And for a small fee, I can intercede for you and make this straight. Now, this is the spitting ritual, and you must go over there now in the dark of night and if you don't get et, you will come back forgiven." Well — the assignment of cause.

Superstition is a grand, wide assignment of cause. Very indefinite, without anything specific, but tremendous amounts of imagination in it, you see. The fellow, he eats overripened whale down on the beach and he gets a stomachache, and so the god of stomachs, of course, are then cause. And he can give you one of the wildest explanations for this, you see. He says, "Well it's this way: At the confluence of the full moon, I failed to bow thrice to the right and twice to the left, and so one of the minor gods who lives in the upper tumbrels thereby took offense and has been patiently waiting since that time to incorporate my gastritis." And he's got this all worked out. Highly personalized, isn't it? So the fellow really must think of himself as quite important for gods to take such an enormous interest in him personally.

In other words, even — in spite of how bad this looks, it really isn't a negation of being cause. The fellow thinks of himself as quite important; he thinks of himself as able to offend; he's dangerous — he's even dangerous to gods and so on.

Now, when we get into logic, the assignment of cause by means of logic is the most hidden — the most thoroughly hidden and insidious method of not being responsible, known. A fellow can logically work out by gradients — gradient scales — how he himself is not even vaguely responsible in any direction, and so you get an electronic society. It is the electronic society which is in itself the most overridden by religion, since the religion is so, so well worked out. You see that? No amount of logic can replace some good, solid, imaginative superstition. Good old superstition!

You say, "Well, not going to have good luck this next month because when I first looked at the full moon — or when I first looked at the new moon, I saw it through the branch of a tree. And the branch of the tree made the sign 'Y' and that means Yamlicla, the Queen of the Underearth and so — she is not in agreement with the projects which come forward — and so we're just not going to be very active this next month." Chief of the tribe telling his tribe this sort of thing, you see — or the witch doctor and so on.

Well, so they don't do anything very much. And then they're going to have a big battle, and the chief witch doctor shoots down a bird and slits it open and throws its entrails out on a rock and by George! what do you know? You talk about omens — real good! And he tells everybody, pounds the drum and so forth, and he says, "Look at that bird. Look at those guts. Come on, get in there and pitch. We can't lose today!" Swish! They don't!

Even the Roman Empire ran on augury — as glorious an empire as that.

Well, logic won't figure it out for you, fellow. You might as well just take some kind of a beautiful, broad, grand slam against the universe, and say, "Well, the two stars which are the guardian stars of the opposing corporation happen to be in confluence with Saturn, and they're going to lose on the stock market this month. So the best thing for us to do is just make a solid push in their direction, because we can't fail. And the chief witch doctor that we've employed up there on the third floor, Room 221, has worked it all out there," and so on.

Honest. Honest. It's eight times as good. Because it is an admission of man's inability to assign cause. It's a sort of a "ha-ha" on the subject of cause. I mean, it's not a solid, known fact that he can assign cause by logic and thus predict consequences.

You get what the trick of logic is? It says, "Now, look. You, you dog, have sufficient computive ability (whatever that is) to calculate mentally the consequences of your own actions, and therefore your logic must be" — you see, he didn't have any in the beginning — "your logic must be faulty, and something must be wrong with you, because you didn't predict the house was going to burn down tomorrow, and yet you could have predicted it. I'm sure that if you'd had an electrician around to look at the wiring and somebody to hook up the baby properly, it wouldn't have burned down." And you can just go on this basis. Well, what's this? This is really crowding somebody's space. That's crowding in on him very close; that's pressing him from every side, saying, "Look, you have something known as brains, why don't you use these brains? Why don't you use this logic? You're wrong! You're to blame!" And it'll drive somebody out of responsibility. And so we get, in a modern society running on logic, less responsibility than you ever heard of in a tribe or in a great former nation.

The amount of responsibility found within the halls of a large American or British corporation — the amount of real responsibility, the willingness to take initiative and action found there — might possibly be visible in an electron microscope if quadrupled in size. They don't take responsibility.

You go up to one of these modern (quote) "captains of industry" (unquote) and ask him to give a command to the helm. He won't! He won't give a command. He won't do anything, he knows he can't do anything about it. He'll be impartial. And he'll hem and he'll haw and he'll twist his finger, and . . . Honest. You say, "Here is a man that — this man could take action." He's totally capable of bringing about certain effects, and yet he won't bring about any of these effects. He won't give anybody the word, he won't speed anything up. He sits around and waits for the union to argue with the personnel chief, and somebody or other.

If he went down himself, probably, and talked to the strikers — you know, I mean got out from behind his barricade, one desk — and went down and talked to strikers and say, "What you guys mad about, or who's telling you to be mad?" He's supposed to be the captain of that ship. Well, a strike is in essence a mutiny. The workers have no feeling that management has any responsibility these days — they don't do anything. They'd say they've got to push management around somehow or another or make it take responsibility.

The workers go out on strike mostly because they see everything so darned inefficient and everything running sort of downhill, nobody taking responsibility for them or their welfare.

Well, evidently it's quite valuable to have somebody take some responsibility and leadership in a group; because people used to work a lot harder, and they used to work with a lot more faith and a lot more enthusiasm than they do today in this society of logic.

Now I, maybe, am driving this point a little far from home. I'm trying to show to you that condemning somebody because he didn't figure out the future consequences of his action is actually a very dirty trick. Because it's based upon the premise that you can compute, with the factors available, a future consequence. That is the premise. Well, it'd take an actuarial mathematician to demonstrate this adequately — that it's impossible.

The number of factors involved in the next twenty-four hours of any day, go beyond the ability of an adding machine or a Marchant calculator — they just go beyond it. I mean there's so many factors can come in from so many directions, that to tell somebody it's all predictable and force it into his cognizance that it is all predictable when it isn't, is another kind of trick which is sort of like the early trick the thetans used to play called the "God trick." You see? You hang somebody for not using something he doesn't have. You hang somebody for not using his brains, and he's completely convinced that he has brains, and he's completely convinced that these brains will, if permitted to do so, figure out the entire future for him and just predict everything.

They have set up brains, in other words, as a crystal ball. And I assure you that a crystal ball is a lot better. Because it at least permits the thetan to sit there relaxed and know the future, rather than figure it out.

Soon as you try to put significance into data, significance into data, endlessly, endlessly, endlessly, you're assigning cause then to an infinity of confusion. Nobody ever figured it out this way.

If anybody ever used data to figure anything out, you — it runs something like this: here's the United States and here's Russia. These countries both have atom bombs. It is quite obvious that they are both full of people. It is equally obvious that sooner or later somebody is going to get mad at somebody else and they're going to start throwing these atom bombs around. And one has learned during a recent conflict that when you give men explosives, it's odd, but occasionally somebody is hurt.

And this sort of follows. I used to tell people during the last war, "Well" — they'd be complaining about the war — "what do you expect? You let fellows play around with explosives, and somebody gets hurt. And nobody ever thinks anybody will get hurt, but they put all these explosives out, and then somebody does, and everybody's very surprised."

Well, the point I'm making is, the logical conclusion is that there's going to be an atomic war. Also, the logical conclusion is that the central plains of Europe are going to get run over.

If we were running on logic at all, none of this would ever have happened. This would have gotten stopped in 1918 at Versailles. We had the power to do it at that time; everybody did, everybody could have gotten around and straightened it up. And as a result, they set up Germany so Germany couldn't do anything else but rearm, and then because Germany rearms against Russia because they want to get rid of Russia, they get rid of Germany.

And this is all done by logic. See, this is all logical, and this is the result of logic. See, it's man's insane conviction that the data will deliver into his hands sufficient material for action on his part and then that he will then take that action. But a person who continually uses data does not have sufficient energy to take any action.

And so the — everybody might know all these facts, and they act like a bunch of stuffed dummies sitting in a canoe that is drifting down a river — it just keeps drifting. Everybody figures it all out, but nobody has enough responsibility to do anything about what they've figured out. You see that?

The great military leaders of all time, by the way, have been noted for never, at any time, using anything even vaguely connected with logic. They either got hold of a good soothsayer who could say his sooths smoothly, or they went over to Delphi and asked the oracle there, and some girl stand over the crack of smoke and get a little bit drunk and quote a riddle, and everybody'd say, "Well, what do you know, there's a riddle there, we'll figure it out as we please now, and off we go." That was what Delphi was for.

And as recently as Hitler, we have things running off according to this kind of a schedule.

Well, it's not true that sanity and superstition are opposing. And neither is it true that sanity and logical arrangement of data are similar order of things. You see, sanity — if it depended upon a person's being logical all the time, a person wouldn't be sane at all. Because that's the most insane thing you can do, is use logic to predict the future. Now, that's really nutty.

The only way you'll ever know the future is just sit down and know the future. I mean, it's one of these Q-and-A propositions. But if you use data, data, data, data, data — and from day to day you use data and data, you'll eventually not be sane anymore. Because you will have told yourself all the time, "Look, I can figure it out. Look, I can figure it out. Look, I can figure it out. Look, I can figure it out." That's what you've kept saying to yourself all the time, and so you've immediately said — after each one of those, you've said, "Look, I can't figure it out. So there's something wrong with my knowingness."

So the dependency upon data comes about to the highest level of aberration there is. It makes the thetan wrong. See the big trick there? The thetan becomes wrong because of this use of data to predict.

Now, it may sound weird to you at this stage of the game, that superstition is a higher order of civilized state than a logical, mathematical order. That happens to be true, because superstition has just slumped out of the level of "Well, everybody knew if he'd just sit down and know."

Now, if you run this "where you will be" and "where others will be" present, past and future, and "where objects will be" and "who you aren't" and "who other people aren't" present, past and future, and — you know that you eventually get more and more relaxed and more and more relaxed and more and more relaxed. Well, one of the things is, is you go into the future. You begin to know where you'll be, you see, and you know where things will be, and you just know.

And now the big trick is — and this is the earliest trick after the "God trick," the earliest one — you don't have to prove it. See? You know there's no data going to be standing there to prove it for you. And the essence of mathematics is "prove it."

Well, "proof immediately introduces nontrust, and the first level of nontrust that the thetan reaches is proof. And I said the highest order of aberration in the Doctorate tapes is "convinced," you see? Well, that's proof — "convinced." That's still true.

So mathematics sits out and uses some kind of a system other than the thetan to prove that such and so is going to happen. It uses data to arrive at a conviction, and this states immediately parallel to it, that one has to have impacts in order to be certain, because the data, in essence, is a series of barriers or impacts.

So, knowingness doesn't happen to depend upon the time stream and it doesn't happen to depend upon data and it doesn't depend upon geographical location and it just doesn't have any dependency. Because highest-level knowingness and highest-level causativeness are the same statement.

The best way to know any future is to cause one. And that's why, you see, when you start consulting the oracle at Delphi, you've taken a step downhill. You've assigned cause to the future — for the future elsewhere.

And when you get down so mean and impoverished imaginatively that you start to assign prediction of the future to data — oh boy, is that debased. You see, you don't even give it the color and aesthetic of an oracle at Delphi, you see? You don't have this beautiful girl standing over the volcanic fumes and consulting with the gods and getting drunk over the fumes, and going and quoting some sort of a riddle. And the oracle doesn't get a big costly present of ivory and gold or something of the sort and there aren't — oh, and see, there's no color to it at all.

The fellow says, "Now I'm going to be logical." You know, he sits down and chews on a cigarette or something of the sort and he says, "Now, let's see, let me figure this out." What a conceited fellow he is. Anybody that'll sit down and say, "Let me figure this out," admits he's trapped somewhere.

Well, cause must be all around him — he must be surrounded. He is, too — right in close. He's right there in a very, very narrow piece of space. He can't figure it out.

If he said, "All right. Now, let's see. Now I'm going to know about it, and I'm just going to know what all these factors are going to amount to," he actually will come up with something like a solution. No matter how strange the solution may sound, that's probably what's going to happen.

But now let's go a little bit higher, and instead of saying, "Now, let's see, how can I figure this out so I know what's going to happen?" supposing he says, "Now, let's see, I'm going to accomplish end goal." See, he says this, "I'm going to accomplish end goal." And that's all he does, and he accomplishes end goal. And that's very simple. Then he really has predicted the future, hasn't he? Or he says, "I'm going to undo end goal." So he does. He's really predicted the future then.

So one predicts the future as much as one is cause. The future isn't a pattern laid out to abuse and bully you. The future is a beautiful playground that nobody happens to be combining. You talk about virgin territory — the most virgin territory there is, is the future. You can do anything you want with it. Nobody's doing anything with it.

I mean, everybody's just kind of drifting along, saying, "I'm not cause and I'm not going to do anything. I'm not going to change any particles. Let's have a board meeting. Let's have a this, let's have a that. And let's not have any cause here anyplace. Let's just drift along and skid along and go along. And somehow or other we're going to wind up somewhere or other on the track, and we'll find a future waiting there for us. Isn't it nice that we're so logical that there's always a future waiting for us."

And one day they get up out of bed and put their foot over the edge of the bed and there's no floor. And they say, "Ulp! There's no future waiting there for me." They say, "Gee, that's funny." And they feel around for the floor and hit the ceiling and — gee, it's all disarranged. Isn't it peculiar? The barriers are all upset. And they don't know which direction south is or why George isn't. They just haven't got any of this — and so on and so on and so on. They just didn't put enough future there for them to have a future, that's all that happened to that thetan.

Now he's depending on a GE to put a future there for him, see? So he leans out of bed and can't hit the floor with his hat because there's no floor there. He has to put a floor there for a floor to be there. He has to cause a future playground in order to continue to have a future playground for himself. And that's what — about what it amounts to.

So we get assignment of cause, then, as the dwindling spiral and so on. Because as one assigns cause, he's all right until he assigns something to resist. And there is his single error: He thinks things are resisting him or he is resisting something.

You know, a very laughable thing: The only thing that is totally baffling to a thetan, when he finally works this out is, you know he isn't pushing on anything? I mean, he isn't pushing on anything inside the body. He isn't even connected with what you call flesh and blood.

He can't resist if he tried! What can he resist? It's the most nice balance. It — he has to be so careful to get his wavelengths in there just right and to match up everything just right so that he will get a counter-impact. Oh, what a neat job! He just has to work all day and all night and on Sundays too, in order to get into the state of mind where he's actually resisting something and something's resisting him. In other words, so he can feel things and have impacts against walls.

Well, now one day he discovers that he isn't resisting anything one way or the other, and he puts up some force and impact into a wall and it goes kawap! see? And the wall that he's put up there, he can just see that wall cave right in and fall down. And its impact he puts into another wall, and that wall goes down and other walls go down and all the machinery he's been putting up just starts to explode.

Why? Because he's been resisting himself and that's the only person he can resist. And all of a sudden he decided — he elects to let it go. And then he starts getting mad and upset. And, as somebody said, "You — there's enough impact — you put up some of this impact, why, now every time I put it up, it takes down half of Camden." It just knocks everything flat, you see?

In other words, there's a tremendous native resistance and counter-resistance. The fellow is putting up the counter-resistance himself.

Now, did you ever see anybody use muscle-building exercises whereby they — what they call "dynamic tension," I think it is. So that you carefully — you put out your hand or something like that, and you get half of the muscles to pull back against the other half of the muscles, up to a point where you're pulling in against your own muscles, and then you go back out the same way, see? So that you're fighting your own arm up here, and it comes up here — and we go real heavy — and then you turn it around and you fight your own arm back down and so forth, so there's lots of latent stress. Boy, you develop the biggest muscles you ever saw. They won't lift a thing, but boy, you sure develop muscles. You can stand up there with a leopard skin on and they sigh worse than they do over Perry Como. Anyway . . . Although I think all those girls are hired by his press agent. Anyway — I keep seeing the same girls in the crowd.

Anyway, dynamic tension is an example of this. Here is this thetan — now, let's just take it on an energy basis: Here's this thetan carefully pushing in against himself so that he can hold out against pushing in against himself, see, and he eventually gets into a terrific muscle-bound effort. And you say, "Be three feet back of your head."

"Can't. I'm held in."

He's held in, huh? I mean, I'm afraid that I have to repress myself while I'm auditing to keep from laughing, quite often. Because you just look at the fellow and very often he has a big, black hairy arm — a third or a fifth arm or something — out there wrapped around the outside of his ridges, see, and he's just pulling in like mad against himself, see. And then he's in here again, and he's pushing out like mad against these ridges, and then he says, "The body's got hold of me, I can't move."

The trick as an auditor is to make him let go of himself. That's the only trick there is in auditing.

He says, "It's Papa that's holding me in and it's Mama that's holding me in and it's this and it's that and it's other things and it's the atmosphere, and it's the walls and the barriers, the barricades" — assignment of cause, assignment of cause.

So we get this business of restriction; he feels restricted because he is resisting. And if we can get somebody to resist something — resist evil, for instance — he will eventually resist evil until he has no space left. And then he'll have to become evil to have any space, so then he resists good until he has no space left, you see? And then he has to be good to have any space, and then he resists being good, now he has to resist evil until he has no space left. It's resisted him clean on in, you see — only he's doing it to himself, you see. You get what the inverting scale is? How we invert all the way down the line.

The fellow resists — he is good, he decides he is good. Now hereafter, he's going to resist evil. He defines what evil is — I don't care what evil is. You make evil almost anything. You can make eating ice-cream sodas evil — eating ice-cream sodas and dropping bus tokens in gutters, that's evil. And the next thing you know, the fellow does nothing but eat ice-cream sodas and drop bus tokens in gutters. And we come along as an auditor, and we find out he has this strange obsession. Well, he does these things. Well, you shouldn't pay any attention to them, it's just a symptom of this inversion and counter-inversion and inversion and inversion.

See, he resists that. Then after a while, after he's done that for a while, he resists what those things would resist, and then they swamp him out and he's — back and forth, back and forth. Each time he has to take other space — and that's the only thing wrong with an inversion, he's taking other-determinism and other space as the pattern for his own action and motion.

So we have this fellow creating enormous quantities of effort — oh, just enormous quantities of effort — and saying it's others' effort. "It's the effort of others," he says. So that all of his own strength thereby and therefore passes from him forever (unless he gets some auditing) on the basis of effort and counter-effort. There goes his strength, there goes his energy — what we were talking about yesterday.

What absorbs this person's ability to handle or create energy? It's very simple what absorbs it — he does. Well, how does he absorb it? He absorbs it by saying he isn't doing it, that something else is doing it; something else is doing all this resisting or all this pulling away. See, the other side of resisting, of course, is pulling away. People hate to be pulled away from, worse than they hate to resist, by the way. They hate to have things taken away from them.

What do we have, then, in this? We have a problem where somebody who is actually eight dynamics starts to play and counter-play all the dynamics within himself to his own loss. And the only one that loses is himself because that's the only one that's playing.

Now you start getting him out of his body, some fashion or another, and you'll find he's pushing and he's pulling and he can't do this and he can't do that. Well, let's say he got out of his body and he couldn't get a beam off of a bedpost — just like that, he couldn't get the beam off — and this made him sort of frantic. What's holding the beam on the bedpost? He is.

Well, how does he get into such a condition that he can't put the beam on the bedpost and get it off? Well, he puts a beam on a bedpost and then he, without knowing it, holds the beam on the bedpost, which scares him into confessing that he can't do anything about bedposts or beams, so he says, "I have no force or power."

How does he get into that frame of mind? Well, he gets into the frame of mind by being made to assign cause. He starts doing it himself and assigning cause and saying somebody else is doing it, and we're back to the fellow playing chess with himself. So we're back to the basic tenets of automaticity and randomity with the assignment of cause. So he says, "The assignment of cause is somebody else, it's somebody else, it's somebody else," and he just keeps on doing it for automaticity and randomity until he gets a very involved thing. He gets way out of his own location, his own personality and everything else. He can make any personality he wants to. But one of the ways to do this is to keep him from actually duplicating anything and then enforcing the fact that he must duplicate something. But you say, enforcing him to do so, or so on, would be — that's — that looks like there is something outside him which is forcing him to do it.

Well, you've got his basic wish in there to have some randomity, to have some action, and there's a button that goes with this, it's "I've got to have enemies — just got to have enemies." You'd be amazed.

"I've got to hate." And just statements like "I hate you" and so on, put up into the walls one after the other monotonously. "I've got to have enemies" as a postulate, moved around. "There always has to be another side," moved around. This sort of thing. Because his own action and counter-action is built out of these factors, that there — he's got to assume there is something else in operation before he can operate.

Well now, the truth of the matter is, he can go into communication with something else and he can go into communication with others. But they're doing the same thing he is. And they're only pretending that they're in agreement with him so that they can continue in resistance with him.

If a big bully is going to stand him up down on the corner and hit him in the nose, why, by golly, he'll get hit in the nose and his nose will bleed. There's no doubt about that whatsoever. You can observe that immediately. But don't fall into the trap of assuming just because MEST will impact against mest, that mest is — is. That doesn't prove that it is. All it proves is that mest can push against mest. That's not much of a proof.

You apply that to other things: You say, "Well, now if one fairy came up and hit another fairy in the nose and then they both flew away, you'd have to assume that there was interchange of communication amongst fairies."

And the fellow would say, "What the devil are you talking about, there's no such thing as fairies!"

And you say, "Now, just a minute, we said if one fairy hit another fairy in the nose and knocked him down and then these two fairies flew away, if this happened, then we would have to assume that there was communication between fairies."

"Yeah," he says, "what are you talking about? There's no such thing as fairies."

And you say, "Now, wait a minute, let's go over this real slow. If there is such a thing as a fairy, if two fairies met, and one hit the other one in the nose and the other one fell down and they both flew away, then you'd have to admit that there was intercommunication between two fairies."

The fellow would say, "But there's no such thing as a fairy." See? That's because he's made a prior postulate. He says, "There's no such thing as fairies." He just tells you what the prior postulate is each time. He's trying to argue with you. He isn't arguing with you. He's merely telling you that he has never agreed in this lifetime to the existence of fairies.

So, now let's put it this way: "If one prizefighter — if prizefighters exist, and if one prizefighter hit another prizefighter in the nose and knocked the other prizefighter down and then they both got up and walked away, you'd have to admit that prizefighters had communication between each other."

And he'd say, "Certainly, I know. There's — well, there's — Joe Louis hit somebody or another, sure he'd knock him down, so forth. You know, he used to pack a terrific KO" and so on. That's perfectly Jake with this character.

He's completely overlooked something; he's just overlooked something beautifully.

You've again said, "If prizefighters exist."

Well, he's already accepted the fact that prizefighters exist, so the fact that one prizefighter can hit another prizefighter in the nose proves the existence of prizefighters? Oh no, it doesn't. It proves that he has agreed to the fact that prizefighters exist.

Now, you can take mathematics and do almost anything with them, but there happens to be such a subject as an obvious truth; and that happens to be one of them. If fairies exist, and if they did hit each other then, then you'd have a communication.

Well, if you've agreed upon the existence of fairies, you'd certainly then find an impact between the two of them. If you hadn't agreed on the existence of fairies, you'd play the devil.

Now, anybody trying to find an impact — has anybody been out of his head and had a little bit of difficulty trying to find the walls? You know? They weren't there quite and the body kept disappearing and everything kept disappearing?

Well, he's just agreed so hard, that he's anxious to find it. He isn't putting it there so he can find it, you see? You get the weird trick he's doing? He thinks something is going to be put there for him to find.

Well, there isn't anything there for him to find except his own agreement that there's something there for him to find. And if he agrees to this too heavily, then he doesn't ever put anything there to find, so he won't find anything. The automatic machinery runs down, in other words, and keys out and clips out. And after a while, he hasn't got any modus operandi to put anything there, because he says it's got to be put there for him. He's assigned cause to something else to put everything there for him. You see how he does this? If he keeps assigning cause to everything else to put something there for him, why, he will eventually not find anything, anywhere; and that's what happens to perception, essentially.

Now he says, "If I..." If he assigns cause to other things to give him energy, you see, he never puts any energy there. So eventually he says, "I have no energy, therefore I am weak, degraded and have no self-respect." Well, how's he get there? Well, he gets there on logic. There's where he arrives. It's very logical. Things keep pushing against you all the time, there's something pushing against you. That's logic. That's all there is to it. And there's nothing you can do about it either, because it's so logical.

And people are always assuming this one — they assume this, and it's a hidden factor in all logics: "Well, it's logical so there is nothing you can do about it." "It's logical" and "we're helpless" are synonyms. Logic is what you make logic. It's what you have agreed to will be logical. So we get agreement on a higher level than logic any day of the week.

Now, you might think that we're utterly mad to keep on talking here about superstition being senior to logic, and this is an age of reason. Let me tell you what they did in the last age of reason: They cut off the heads of every reasonable and educated man in the entire nation, i.e., France — Revolution, end of the eighteenth century. That was the great "Age of Reason." Hardly anybody's mentioned reason since.

You know, you'd be surprised, you ought to look over their works, I mean that's all they talked about — this was the Age of Reason. Everybody had a reason. What it all boiled down to, it was a problem in havingness. There was — too many people agreed they didn't have something and there were too few who had, so that by mob rule, it would overturn. This was the fraternity, liberty and equality. You see, the peasant had, as long as he didn't get out of balance with his — the aristocrats, the peasant still had.

And evidently the peasant had agreed to put himself into some kind of a slavish role somehow or another way back, so he'd lost his independence.

Didn't happen in England, by the way. The English yeoman maintained his independence straight through. And then one day, he picked up and got very expert with a longbow. Now, that's back in — about a thousand years ago, not quite a thousand years ago. The English yeoman got very expert with a longbow, and this longbow had a very high penetrative power on armor. And so they had liberty, fraternity and equality in England for a long time before they got mixed up with it in France.

But there were no longbows in France. I don't quite know why, because they grow yew trees over there too, but it's just the way the civilizations went, is "Who could use the greatest reason?" Well, the English yeoman was very reasonable — two hundred and twenty paces worth. I don't know what the penetrative power of a longbow is, but it's getting up there close to a .22 bullet. It's — certainly did keep things nice and equal, though.

They didn't have this over in France, or they had basic agreements on impacts that were different than this. But the great "Age of Reason" was the great age of failure, and France has had a hard time picking herself up ever since. They had a kingdom later on. They immediately hired an emperor after they got rid of the aristocrats. They made aristocrats out of shopkeepers. Now, they — like Napoleon's family and so forth. They got an emperor because they were now all liberty, fraternity and "'égalidad." And after they got through with that, they got another king or an emperor and he built some wide streets in Paris — significant contribution to the world. And now they got some plains with some cows on them — not very many cows, though. The curve of civilization in France has not gone down since their Age of Reason, it has been in a full power dive — vertical. Fortunately, there's no bottom for them to hit mest, by the way — you reach — you arrive, if you're thinking in terms of theta and MEST . . . Talking about this last night, we're — the end of the product in theta and mest is you go halfway each time, see? If you're studying simultaneously theta and mest, and if you're trying to make all of your applications be theta and mest — neither overweighting one nor the other — you only get halfway to the goal each time. You split the remaining distance in half.

Now, you know the old problem of the fellow who starts out from town and he's going home, but he travels halfway home and then when he's halfway home, he travels the next halfway home — you know, half of the remaining distance. Now he travels half of the remaining distance, now he travels half of the remaining distance and half of the remaining distance and half of the remaining distance — and he never gets home. He never will, theoretically, he never will get home. He can't arrive.

Well, that's the Tone Scale, actually. Finite death is a nonarrival point. One never gets down there if he's handling equally theta and MEST. He just goes down halfway toward zero. Each time he goes halfway toward zero, and at the bottom of the line there, you get all those jammed-in inversions and so forth, right down at the bottom of the scale there. Everything is inverting and inverting and inverting and the inversions are inverting and inverting and inverting and inverting and inverting, inverting. It's always halfway to it — no death there, it's just halfway to it.

Well, looking over this problem of assignment of cause, to be a little more intelligible, you have an enormous range of things to which your preclear can assign cause.

Now, if he has to take all the cause himself, he has no game at all. You merely get him to play the "only one." And if he's still superconvinced that there are other things fighting him all the time, then, if he's superconvinced of that — "they're all against him" sort of thing — then he does wind up as the "only one."

So, we'll turn around and look at it the other way and we find out if we make him take all cause, then he has no action at all.

Now, if we make him take cause in the form of blame, then he won't want cause at all. We show him he's all bad cause and so on.

But we let him blame all of his troubles on this, and blame all of his troubles on that, and blame all of his troubles on something else, and then blame all of his troubles on something else, and blame all his troubles on something else — we could just keep going this way, by the way, if this investigation hadn't been done. If it had been done compulsively, you see, or on a stimulus-response basis, this would be exactly what would have happened. That isn't however, what happened. It follows somewhat that pattern because there's a change involved.

Well, what happens is — entirely different thing: you get lighter assignments of cause. The assignments of cause are lighter and lighter and lighter and lighter and lighter and lighter and lighter. And finally, a fellow just stands there as cause. He's saying, "Gee-whiz, how'd I get here?"

And that's the investigation; that's the track of investigation. It's toward making the individual be cause for himself, and all of its techniques are involved directly with this goal.

Now you understand how to evaluate a technique? Any technique has the liability of assigning guilt or cause or bad cause broadly to a single object — any technique does this. A technique is best which does it the least, and which most validates the individuality and causation of the preclear himself without blaming him.

Now, a technique is also as bad as it lays the blame on the preclear and as good as it permits him to assume causation without having to have blame. There's no discipline involved in processing. In this, I mean there's no punishment involved in processing. A person doesn't get well because you have punished him through something or other. That's demon exorcism. They used to think people got well because they were whipped — whipped until the demons left. They put the body into such a horrible condition that nothing could stay in it, you see, and then the fellow was well.

Probably about the first thing they chased out was the thetan. That left a lot of entities that — and the entities have the sole operation of assigning cause to everything else. All they can do is withhold information, an entity. They can't cause anything. All right. That's mostly because entities themselves are caused by the thetan, of course. They're deposits of energy and ridges operating. Okay.

A fellow always is setting up some sort of a "yes man" in — just to the right of him or left of him or back of him or something of the sort, to agree with him or disagree with him. You know, so he'll have some communication in case he's lonesome sometime.

You ever hear an old desert rat talking to himself? "Well, think I'll walk over to that cactus plant. No, I guess I better not, it's pretty hot. Better stay here in the shade of this one. Well, but the sun's getting around to the back of this one, and it won't be in the shade very long. Well, I guess I better walk over to that cactus plant there, it's got a broader lot of shade. Well, you always was a durn fool anyway, never could make up your mind."

If you listen to one of these fellows, you'd swear there were eight or nine guys there having a terrific conversation one with the other, and arguing about everything they were going to do.

They talk to their burros, and then talk back for their burros — and just as though their burro was talking. It's a wonder one or two of them don't take up ventriloquism and really fool themselves. But they're quite happy doing that.

It is supposed to be a symptom of insanity, the fact a fellow talks to himself — "I'll be talking to myself next," somebody will be saying, you know? Oh no, it's only the guy who's afraid of talking to himself that goes crazy. Fellow resists talking to himself until he talks to himself and he can't stop what's talking to him.

I ran into a fellow just the other day, about three weeks ago, who had a compulsive set of circuits which were vocal circuits. And there was a man and a woman and so forth. And they were making him miserable, they'd made him miserable for years.

He told me, he says, "I've got all I can do to keep them quiet." And the thought of making one of them talk was — would have been too horrifying to him, so I played it real smart. I had him set up a baby going "goo-goo" at him, way out in front, see — no great significance to it. And then had him set up another circuit elsewhere — vocal — doing something else. All of a sudden they — these circuits just went ping, ping, ping, see, he just blew up his resistance on them.

He's busy talking to himself on a compartmented basis, where he isn't supposed to know that he's talking to himself, and then he starts resisting talking to himself, and then he represses it madly, then he lives in fear that he'll start talking to himself. You see? You get the anatomy of demon circuits? That, incidentally, is the anatomy of demonology. You want to study demonology, you just study that curve of operation in terms of circuits.

To amuse himself, the fellow starts talking to himself, then he finds it more amusing not to let himself know that he's talking to himself, so he puts up a wall, some sort, and guards against knowing this fact, and then he — then the circuit will talk to himself self-determinedly. Might not make much sense, but it still talks to him so he can't predict what it's going to say. And we have our entrance into randomity.

The next thing you know, why, this starts bothering him because it's giving him bad advice and he's starting to have to abide by its advice, so he says, "This is horrible" and he shuts it off and gets afraid that it'll happen again, and you've got a character without sonic. That's all nonsonic is, is the fact that one's circuits might start talking. Or somebody might start screaming; that's — I've heard — run into, rather, as a sonic shut-off. The preclear is afraid he'll start screaming or afraid somebody else will start screaming or ...

Now, very often people go into operations afraid they'll say what they know. They don't know anything. That's what's fantastic about that case.

I was hanging around a VA office one day and a fellow was saying, "Well, they tell me I've got to be operated on, but if I'm operated on, I just know I'll talk."

And I listened to him for a little while, and I finally leaned over and I asked him very politely and kindly, I said, "If you talk, what will you talk about?"

He just sat there dazed, looking at me. He said, "Well, that's just it. I don't know." Finally made him — he was afraid he'd give himself away. Possibly he's afraid that he didn't have anything to give away and his imagination wouldn't be fertile enough to furnish something that would interest the nurse, or — I don't know. You get multiple conversations going on with the same individual.

Well, after he can't duplicate himself anymore, it gets harder and harder for him to do this.

So, when we talk to a preclear, we don't evaluate in such a way as to lead him to assign large cause, nor do we persuade him to assign cause. Patter, in other words, is monitored to some degree by this: "Well, you say it was your father's fault." This would be about the most destructive thing you could do: "You say it's your father's fault. Well, he probably had his reasons, too." That'd just be murder. You don't deal with this thing of assignment of cause, you're just careful to steer him off of heavy assignment of cause. You don't give him lots of reasons and talk about it, but you just figure out, "All right. Now, look," you say, "we're running all this space . . ."

Now, we're running space in such a way as to make it look like all the space is against him. That is, we're assigning other space, other space; space is others', others' — others' space.

What we're doing is validating or permitting him to assign cause for his trouble on the space which surrounds him. And he assigns this to the space around him so long that he eventually — you've confirmed the fact that the space around him is the cause of his difficulty.

If you go on using space, then, as other-determination, you have assigned cause to space, you see. So you balance the thing as a bracket. You start hammering and pounding too long upon one thing without bringing it back so that he's cause too, you don't balance it by letting him be cause too . . . We run a bracket and omit him — it's happening to him. "Wasting something for himself," is the one we omit. See that? We just omit that and we keep on: "All right, others wasting it for others, and somebody else wasting it for himself. And then others wasting it for others, and somebody else wasting it for himself. And others wasting it for others, and somebody for himself," and the next thing you know, this fellow will say, "Well, gee, the total thing that's wrong with me is because these others are wasting it for others and somebody else is wasting it for himself." You never let him get in on the act.

You'll find a case is always unbalanced somewhere, on the first time you start — run "wasting" brackets; he'll have a little more difficulty with one part of it than another.

Ordinarily "others for others" is inconceivably distant for a case that's in terrible condition. He just can't get "others for others," he can't get the idea of "others for others." Eventually as he runs along he will get it. Well, he's unbalanced to that degree. He thinks anybody that exists, actually is confronting him, and that other people don't confront other people. He has a very personalized look at the universe, believe me. He thinks this is the way it goes. See that? All right.

Assignment of cause, then — if a person assigns too much a cause, he won't communicate. You see that? He says — if he assigns cause to something, cause to something, cause to something, he finally says, "Well, the space will have to talk for me — why don't you consult God? See, I — there's no reason for me to talk, the space got to talk." Anything he has assigned cause to too long, he expects then to communicate for him. So he assigns cause to the body, assigns cause to the body — well, he expects the body to communicate for him. He doesn't ever think of communicating himself.

I had the weirdest thing happen. I was doing a little bit of very fast Straightwire last night, and a fellow threw the — this person communicated very poorly ordinarily, but he threw a postulate up against a wall; just in clearing up something, he threw this postulate up against the wall — because I told him to, you see — and he phrased it quite differently than I had given it to him. And for the first time he broke into actual communication.

The first actual communication that he did was that postulate against the wall, because it talked. It was real loud, but it wasn't loud to the ears — that's depending the body doing that. It was just real loud, see, and he used quite strange wording when he put the postulate into effect. It was quite legible. The fellow was really in communication. In other words, we broke his communication lock right there. Because we made him put up the energy, instead of the energy being put up for him. That was just running that, and that's the way it worked. Okay?

Therefore your talk to the preclear, your communication to the preclear, shouldn't continue to validate other cause, other cause, other cause, nor validate him necessarily as blame, blame, blame. Just keep it even and keep it sailing along.

Okay.