I am afraid I am going to lead you away into never-never land. Out of it will come, I hope, a useful tool of your trade.

There is a phenomenon about which you should know: the epicenter. Epicenter is taken, in its derivation, as meaning something approximating a center off the center — ”other center” or something of the sort. It is a center on the center, technically, accurately. And it is a study of the successive command posts of a human organism.

Now, “everybody knows” that the genetic line contains within it inheritable and inherited responses. Nobody has ever bothered to inform us as to how, when, which, why or what. All they did was look at a cat washing its face, which had never seen another cat, and immediately see that the cat washed its face. Obviously, this cat had learned somehow to wash its face, and it had inherited a conduct pattern genetically. Nobody explored this very far; they just said, “. . . and the elephants stand on a mud turtle, and it’s mud from there on down.”

There is some interesting data lying back on that track. We have, by empirical observation, the undoubted fact that conduct patterns are inheritable and inherited. They certainly don’t come across the bridge from generation to generation in a bunch of genes and chromosomes — those are too small. And we find out that if there is anything to be remembered it is obviously a theta facsimile. This is just genetic line, so you have a genetic line of theta facsimiles. At the very least, you have a genetic line of theta facsimiles from the moment of conception to the moment of procreation for each generation — conception to generation. That is the very least explanation you could have in view of these inherited characteristics.

Just why anybody thought this had to come along the protoplasm line is something I am not quite prepared to state at the moment, because that is an incredible amongst all incredible’s. That strains the imagination — except that people are used to looking at MEST, so they say, “Here’s a little thin thread of protoplasm traveling through time endlessly. Therefore we’ll blame everything on it. Let’s not worry about the fact it’s too small to have recordings in it. Let’s not worry about anything else to do with it. Let’s just say, ‘That’s it and it’s mud from there on down.”’ And that is approximately what has happened, and that is how we got this genetic-line postulate.

This genetic line, at best, could be a theta-facsimile line: theta facsimiles of experience recopied and available to each succeeding generation. You can prove that; you just go down and look at a cat. Any time you want to take a kitten the moment it is born and blind, and put it by itself and raise it, you will find that the kitten, without ever seeing another cat, will wash its face. That is just one example.

But there are much more pertinent examples. Horses, when they are born, generally have four hooves. This is some sort of a facsimile in operation. This is a facsimile of blueprints; that is all. You find that these theta facsimiles come along. Just why anybody thought they had to hook up to a line of protoplasm is more than I know, because they evidently, onevidence, do not hook up to a line of protoplasm; they hook up to a theta-facsimile generation line.

Actually, if we have theta facsimiles and they are observable, then it is simpler to say “Well, here is something in existence; therefore it exists, as it goes along, as itself,” than it is to say it converts into something else and becomes something else. That is a complex way of thinking about it.

Therefore a theta-facsimile track seems rather obvious for any organism. I don’t care whether you hook it up with genetics or anything else. And I would like to bring home to you the fact that there is no proof of any kind that it is a genetic line, beyond the fact that it takes a certain amount of protoplasm to manufacture a new organism. That is an observable fact. It is simpler to consider this on a theta-facsimile line.

Now, this theta-facsimile line starts in with something that probably converted photons — a theta facsimile of photon conversion — and goes right straight on up to a highly complex organism as one line. That would be one track of possible evolution. You see an individual during his lifetime accumulating these theta facsimiles. That is one track.

There is another track, and I am talking empirically; we have phenomena about this. There is a theta-facsimile track for one individual, and it stays with a MEST body. Then after the bulk of the theta has disappeared out of the body, there will still be some with it. The first time I ever started running an individual I ran into this phenomenon, but being surrounded by authoritarians, I said “All right” and went into apathy about the subject after a while, I got so much cussing around. The whole point was that I wasn’t supposed to observe that. We can take almost anybody and kick the phenomenon into existence, but we are not supposed to observe it. It is not quite clear to me, though, why we mustn’t observe a phenomenon as obvious as this.

If you want to look it clearly and bluntly in the eye, you get the situation of a body running along somatically. That is to say, there is a pattern of cells — a cellular pattern. And there are theta facsimiles of the cellular arrangement of the organism. Those facsimiles persist beyond the death of the full-unit organism.

There is also a theta facsimile of the individual as an individual and it goes along the track, so the whole individual is traveling along the track as a personality.

It is as though there were a colonial aggregation of cells which then attracted to itself a new force of theta. So you would have the life force of each one of these cells, the theta of these cells, and then when they collected together as an organism you would get an additional supply of theta which would pop in from someplace or other and make a full picture of the whole thing and carry right along with it. You could say, then, that an individual is composed of these two things: cellular facsimiles and organism facsimiles.

This is observable in the formation of groups. A number of individuals get together, form a group, and immediately the group has a life of its own. Try to dispose of groups and you will find out they don’t die easily. Any time a group forms it seems to attract an additional theta facsimile to it.

There would then be the cellular line and it would be carrying along with the theta facsimiles of the whole organism, only this cellular line keeps on going. At the moment of death, we get facsimiles of the moment of death and then all of a sudden this line sort of disappears out into nowhere and comes down into another cellular line. Hence, this first cellular line keeps on going as a cellular line until it really falls apart. You will find this in individuals.

I won’t apologize for what Dame Nature and the rest of the universe has done with its phenomena. These phenomena exist. Don’t be too surprised, then, if your preclear is running himself 150 years in the grave and is running the theta out of his bones. Don’t be surprised. As a matter of fact, be rather amazed if, without telling him, he never hits this phenomenon, because if he doesn’t hit it he is missing someplace down the track. It is a form of static which is very interesting, and it sometimes produces an aberration and a case will only resolve when you hit that particular line. The statics aren’t resolving well on the other line, then all of a sudden you get on this line, and you will find them.

In other words, there can be a theta line running in actual MEST space on four or five different divisions simultaneously. The fellow is in four graves, one disintegrated body and himself, all at the same time, concurrently. You get a little child who dreams of skeletons but who has never had any experience with dead people or skeletons, and you have one of these cases. There are undoubtedly individuals around who have some slight abhorrence of death, who have had nightmares on it.

This phenomenon exists. Please don’t take my word for it; please just look. If you don’t find it, write me. If you do, don’t think it will be news to me.

Now, with Effort Processing, you are not asking a person to winnow out his beliefs about anything. You just tell him, “Get the effort,” and there he is. As a consequence, it is not necessary for you to argue with preclears concerning this. They either land in this track or they don’t. That is one level.

Another level of operation, of course, is this main line — the whole organism theta facsimile.

There is a genetic line-up — though it is not genetic particularly — which would also explain these phenomena.

By the way, the book of Axioms, when it is published for scientific use in universities, is going to skip this whole subject. We will just let them run into this like a freight train head- on. It will give people nightmares and other people will go around and invalidate them. It will probably spin a few professors.

You could take a cadaver out of the vat in the dissection room and carve it up, and you would find the epicenter evolution of the brain demonstrable in that cadaver. I took occasion to open up a physiology book recently. I looked it over and I found a remark in it which was very interesting: It seems as though there are nerve centers and crossroads throughout the body. That book abandoned the subject there and went off on how you feed people Brown’s Mixture’ to cure them of tuberculosis. The point is that it had been noticed in cutting up stiffs that there were new nerve posts. We ran into these things head-on.

What is the evolution of the command center and control alignment center of the human mind? You can take a preclear and run him right straight back down this evolution line from epicenter to epicenter, one right after the other.

You should know about epicenters because you are going to be running preclears and you should know where they will feel the next effort. You don’t have to tell them where to feel the next effort; you can just give some attention to it if they start to get disoriented. They will tell you various things which might worry you unless you know about the epicenter, and that is the reason I am telling you about the epicenter. It is phenomena which you are going to contact, willy-nilly, so you should be prepared to brace up to it instead of going into a spin concerning it, because it can be very, very interesting.

How did the human mind, the brain, the body, evolve? You will find this if you continue processing. Also, you can install the epicenter effect in an individual — create a facsimile of the epicenter effect — very easily. All you do is have him sit down in a chair; tell him to sit down rigidly, to hold himself very rigid — brace himself and hold himself there — then you hit him alongside the head. Hit him with the side of your hand, but don’t hurt him very much. If you bring your hand in so that the contact is slow with his head but the jerk is sudden thereafter, he will get that effect.

He will also get mad because, as we will cover later, motion and emotion are identical — the same thing. Emotion is a glandular manifestation of motion so as to speed up the carbon- oxygen engine and make it do various things.

The point is that after you have smacked this individual on the side of the head, he has a new epicenter and he is groggy. If you were to give him an intelligence test or something right after you had given him a new epicenter, you would find out he wasn’t so well off. His IQ would have momentarily dropped. Now what you do is start running him through this epicenter; just scan him through the moment when you did that and he will see the new epicenter. You don’t have to tell him; he will comment that there was an instant when he knew he was really in the original position, but then he appeared to be there and in the other place — where he moved when you hit him — simultaneously. He has two positions simultaneously. Position number one is the moment before the impact, and position number two is the moment at the end of the impact. Position number two is the epicenter of position number one. In position number one, he is sitting rigidly. You hit him alongside the head — bang — and he isn’t recording because of the jolt, as far as the awareness-of- awareness unit is concerned. But a theta facsimile is made of it. There is a moment of unconsciousness where his center of control moves over and it appears to be now in the new position.

As preclears are running effort, you will find them in dentist chairs, in automobile accidents and everything else, where they are apparently facing one way but their faces are ninety degrees out. Or they will apparently be standing in one place but they will be standing over to the side simultaneously. You can ask a lot of individuals and you will find they have a sensation of being in two positions at the same time. That is the most rudimentary manifestation of the epicenter.

It has an evolutionary purpose that has to do with self-determinism and counter-effort. You can put this down as a little law: Each new generation has as its new center the common denominator of position of the last generation’s epicenters.

The individual’s center of control is in the region of his head, where his nervous system hooks up and over which and around which theta facsimiles seem to center; this is his control post or control center over the organism. From this point of emanation, theta facsimiles translate into MEST action, more or less centralized in that locale. It is an imaginary point, but it actually exists neurologically.

Now, this fellow, in one lifetime, gets hit and knocked around from various points and in various directions. The common area of these epicenters becomes the new center. So people’s neurological centers really wander all over their heads. But the center point itself is the only place where the perceptions come in and coordinate and become facsimiles.

So the fellow gets a few epicenters; his organism goes on recording at the center — all the recording is done at this center point — but all of a sudden he isn’t at that point anymore in that generation. He has been hit often enough before he is through with that generation to become occluded.

This is an analogy, but it is demonstrated neurologically. He becomes occluded; he can see things coming in and perceive fairly well, but he can’t recall very well. He has to recall back to this center.

Let’s take a little boy whose mother is fond of pushing him around. Mama, in his case, is counter-effort. The boy is trying to be self-determined, but Mama hits him into new positions — over and over, hitting him into these new positions. This individual in one generation will get an epicenter as the center of operation for himself, and when you take him back on the time track he will be looking at himself from a circle which is formed from all the positions from which he has been hit. Anywhere on that circle he is out of valence, and the reason he is out of valence is he has taken the point of counter-effort because it is too dangerous to be self-determined effort.

The next generation of this individual’s theta facsimiles will probably come together so as to form a new center from the combined counter-effort. With a new organism, theta can come in and superimpose and resolve the old counter-effort into a new center. The person is not out of valence at the beginning — but then he starts getting a lot of new counter-efforts and he starts getting this epicenter effect again, through his life, and all of a sudden his visio starts off and a lot of other things start off.

Agreement is just being oneself, to a large degree, with oneself. One goes out of communication with oneself and one isn’t in agreement with oneself and one isn’t oneself, then one doesn’t have any reality on oneself. And when one gets knocked around and given too many epicenters, one ceases to be oneself but starts to become the counter-effort and goes out of valence.

You take this person back on the track, he sees himself lying there in terrible apathy, and he says, “Oh, yes.”

Then you ask him to get an effort. What is his effort at this point? If this poor fellow ever starts self-auditing, all he will do is punish himself, because that is what the counter-effort did. So the self-auditing individual goes on and punishes himself just as the counter-effort punished him, because he is occupying the point of the counter-effort. He is out of valence, therefore he is the exterior force hurting the individual. He only gets these counter-efforts when he is being hurt, so the only thing the counter-effort really does to him, when it really starts operating on him and he starts trying to audit himself, is hurt him some more.

Anybody using E-therapy, Q-therapy, G-therapy, R-therapy, bean therapy, black-snake-oil therapy, the-preclear-will-now-step-off-the-timetrack-and-waltz therapy, l is hitting epicenters galore. He starts getting into this common denominator of the epicenters and his perceptics and so on go off. Why? He is a static. These counter-efforts have made a static out of this person. They have said, “Obey, obey, obey,” and so he has gotten to be a static.

The old self-determinism has to go into apathy before a person goes out of valence. Do you see that? An individual goes into apathy, and the second he goes out of apathy, he moves out and becomes the counter-effort. The counter-effort was hitting and punishing the individual, so he starts treating himself in just that fashion. He will give himself accidents and do all sorts of things to himself.

So the process of going out of valence is a very, very precise one: The individual goes into apathy, assumes the static of obedience because of applied force, moves out of himself into the area or perimeter of the counter effort and then regards himself from this perimeter as this perimeter of counter-efforts regarded him. The perimeter of counter-efforts is probably in disagreement with him, but it is still ARC. In order to have any motion at all, this individual has to be on the perimeter, since the center has become a static.

So the person is handling himself from an actual new epicenter and he is saying, “You do this and you do that, and I have to talk myself into it, and I have to go there and I have to do that, and, you know, I’m pretty mean to myself.” This is all the epicenter effect. Also, a person can get five or six new epicenters, group them, and you get a schizophrenic — a multivalent personality.

Here, then, is something you are going to work with continually, and this is terribly important in therapy because a lot of your cases won’t resolve unless you know it — this cycle of self-determinism goes into apathy, and the existing ARC is low-tone-scale counter- effort. The counter-effort is disagreeing with the preclear. who is in apathy. Do you expect this person to have perceptics?

What I am actually telling you here is how to turn on sonic. He is out of valence. Even if he is slightly out of valence in any theta facsimile, you are not going to get good communication — particularly because he is a static and communication requires motion. Even agreement requires motion — all of these things. He is in a point of having been stopped; this is all the times when the forces of the MEST universe and other organisms made him obey — in other words, reduced him to a static. He operates from that point on as the counter-effort.

You have to get his effort — which is no effort at all. Apathy is zero effort. A static is zero effort. The preclear who has no perceptics is in zero effort with regard to himself, and he is running and motivating himself by counter efforts. If you start to run his effort exclusively, you will start to run counter-efforts even though he is so occluded he can’t see that he is out of valence. He is out of valence (you know that mechanism exists) if he is occluded. The wrong way to do it is get him into valence. The right way to do it is to have him run no- effort, pick up locks off the case and then run some more no-effort, and all of a sudden he will start to receive counter-efforts.

Now, his ARC has gone on from a static position and will start up into the area of agreement. But it has to go through disagreement.

On a low level of ARC, what is communication? It is practically zero, isn’t it? What is reality? It is practically zero. And of course the preclear doesn’t have any reality about himself or existence or anything else as long as he is in a static state. But you start having him run no-effort and he starts up the line: “Now, how do you feel about your mother?”

He tells you apathetically, “It’s all right. It’s all right. I feel good,” and so on.

“Well, now, let’s feel this no-effort,” and he suddenly will pick up some kind of a counter- effort.

Sometimes you can get him early on the track and he will really start picking up a little self- determinism in himself, which is not a no-effort proposition but just a little bit of effort. You start multiplying this and he will come up out of the static. The second he comes up out of the static he is into ARC: “Now, how do you feel toward your mother?”

“Well, I disagree with her.”

“Good. Get the effort to disagree, the effort to disagree. Get the effort not to love her. Get the effort not to communicate with her.”

This is why this error was made recently on ARC being no longer used in processing — because it merges from a static into the lowest area of ARC. It doesn’t graduate from complete ARC into no ARC into ARC. It goes from a static — reverse ARC — into ARC. The effort to communicate is actually his first effort, but that is just a tiny bit above a static and it is an obedience effort and has nothing to do with understanding; it is just parrot- wise. You will find that earlier on the track, too.

Get that effort to disagree, the effort to refuse communication, the effort to refuse affinity, and all of a sudden he will start building up and start to get motion on the track. The only reason the fellow could be in apathy is that he is stopped. You have to get him moving in order to get a flow of time so that you can get communication.

This is all so darn mechanical. You will see it in yourselves. If you can find a moment when you were disagreeing with a parent and then get your effort to disagree, you will find that the incident will turn up a bit. When you are running this, don’t expect the whole incident to turn on at one fell swoop, because you probably would have to get a lot of these incidents before you could start to get the person into view. Then suddenly the person will turn on and then the rest of the perceptics will turn on. If you use this and fail to turn the preclear’s perceptics on in a very short space of time — if you go two sessions and you haven’t got his perceptics on — you ought to quit.

That is the mechanism of valence, the mechanism for perception, the mechanism of obedience, and the mechanism of how to get a person up the tone scale on ARC. And it is this epicenter effect.

I will tell you something more about this epicenter effect. Once upon a time there was a photon-conversion unit — a theta photon-conversion unit — and it grew and grew and it multiplied and multiplied. And one day there was a little cell and its name was Algae. Algae got there as algae from less complex forms in the same way it gets from algae onto higher, more complex forms.

We are talking about cellular alignment and coordination — the cellular body. We are not talking about the overall personality theta line which I mentioned; we are talking about the somatic-strip theta line.

Anyway, the waves come along and start beating Algae to pieces, then more waves, too much sunlight, too little sunlight, more waves — in other words, counter-effort, counter- effort, counter-effort. He incidentally probably gets driven ashore and gets a few death engrams on the beach and so forth, and all these things add up to counter-effort and more counter-effort. Algae says, “We’ve got to do something about this.”

By the way, this is a missing bridge: Evolution couldn’t take place unless it stepped across the bridge of death, because there never would have been an educative cycle whereby the organism could have found out that it had to avoid death. It never would have had any experience with death, so never would have advanced to prevent death or to do these other things.

So what Algae does is postulate a tougher shell for himself. He is then in a tougher envelope. He finds that he has to have a tougher envelope, and he gets the physical force to make a new envelope simply by using counter effort. And he makes a new epicenter for himself and says, “We have to operate from this new epicenter.” Algae’s first epicenter is pretty small, and then his next one is a little bigger. In other words, there was new structural data. Every time Algae gets a new cellular facsimile of something happening to him, he gets new data which is installed on a counter-effort basis.

But we are dealing with a basic organism here, and it is not particularly necessary to go down this low. Let’s look at the first organism form, the first colony. We can say that Algae, finally, through counter-efforts one way or the other, finds out he has to string himself together on beads and hook himself to the ocean floor — which they do. Then the colony gets a lot of new counter-efforts coming from here and there and all over. The next thing you know, it grows an envelope around itself, sort of a leaf of some sort, formed by the counter-efforts of waves and rebuilt out of theta facsimiles. The odd part of it is that this is starting to work up to a point where it is getting a common epicenter. This colony has to have a control post, and it Can be beaten around until it actually has to postulate a central post of nervous command where it can pull the switches for the rest of the organism. So it goes ahead and builds one.

Then it finds that it isn’t so good not to be mobile and decides it had better float for a while, so it builds itself into some kind of a jellyfish.

After it has built itself into a jellyfish it is quite happy. But one day it starts to run in toward the beach, and there are rocks and caverns. It goes in there and hits, scrapes and gets killed. Then it goes out and makes another jellyfish someplace with new cells, a new genetic line. It is all working out very beautifully when, again, it drifts in towards the rocks and hits rock formations and gets killed.

It gets a few dozen of these facsimiles and says, “This isn’t so hot. Every time we turn around, we get killed by a rock.”

The modus operandi now becomes very plain. You can trace back earlier than this, but it gets very plain now what is happening: Every time this jellyfish comes in and hits those rocks it gets a counter-effort against the command post of the organism. So what does it do? It builds an organism from the new counter-effort perimeter and it winds up as a shellfish. It starts as a jellyfish, without a shell, and the counter-effort’s force is always coming from a certain area. The organism has really got a new post of command; it puts its new post of command right down where you would expect it — where there are the toughest counter-efforts of all. As the waves drive this jellyfish in on the rocks, it gets tougher and tougher until it forms a shell.

So naturally the shellfish says, “There is the new post of command.” But it still has the old post of command. You start carving up animals and you will find these command posts. You start carving up preclears and you will find them too!

It is very interesting that the organism postulates, evidently, at that point, the fact that it needs two command posts. Maybe it starts with one, but it will wind up with two. The bivalve system is worked out of command posts. Why? The counter-effort which was tough now is operating on an old command post, so there are two of them. Then it goes on, gets washed ashore in the surf and gets a facsimile of being smashed up in the surf, gets washed ashore in the surf and gets a facsimile of being smashed up in the surf, has a facsimile of animals trying to get at it, has a facsimile of something or other happening so it has to hold itself shut and open itself up, and it is really in a mess because this is the most static form of life. You can run this out of preclears; you will find them in it. Don’t tell them, just run them for a while. You start running those new centers of effort — the roof of your mouth, the bottom of your mouth, and your jaw formation — and your preclears are right there in them.

The dentist comes along and he starts to chew you up and open your jaws and close your jaws without your will: that is the animals getting it, that is the surf busting it up and so forth. And the dentist will restimulate these old centers of effort. You can run them out if you want to — it will scare the preclear to death, too. You will find him running sonic on surf and all sorts of interesting things. The theta facsimiles are there, and there sure are plenty of them.

It is quite common to find preclears with lots of strange jaw somatics. Of course, “everybody knows” that if a person has a jaw somatic (a theta facsimile influencing him with this effort), the thing to do is to have a tooth pulled.

Actually, what happens when you have a tooth pulled? It is the easiest and simplest method known to establish a new counter-effort, which will give an epicenter effect that will move the preclear out of contact with the theta facsimiles which were influencing him. You run people through dental operations and you will find that the jerk of the pulling of the tooth will give him a new epicenter. This puts him out of contact with the old pain area. So “obviously” pulling the tooth was what fixed it up. And it was “obviously” the tooth.

Now, a tooth will get a hole in it or something of the sort and restimulate one of these old epicenters, and the next thing you know, the toothache goes clear around the jaw on the fifth nerve channel.

Every one of these epicenters starts to get a nerve system mixed up with it. If you look over the brain connections which are postulated to exist in the motor switchboard of the mind, you will find that the tongue and the hand are terribly exaggerated. It is odd that the tongue would be, isn’t it? That doesn’t make sense for this generation, but it does for this system.

Now, where is your new center of effort? This is all you have to keep asking of the preclear — the new counter-efforts that he is trying to face and his efforts against these counter-efforts.

The new counter-effort is all around this shell perimeter, all the way around it, and that is going to form up a new circle of counter-effort. And as that body evolves it will take up new command posts on this perimeter and start to grow in various ways. It will grow legs and get up on the beach and become a crab or something of the sort.

As you trace it up, though, you find a cycle in operation in the physical organism — a cycle of obedience and suppression. In order for the new counter-effort to become the new center of control, the old center of control had to go into apathy. It did that through successive deaths caused by the counter-effort forcing itself on there. Then the new center developed; next life, the old center really obeys that new center, physically. You get obedience of the mechanism; it is a forced MEST obedience, MEST-force obedience.

As you go on up the line — no matter what the complexities are — you get these counter- efforts hitting the old self-determinism one right after the other, right through to present time. The old self-determinism gets beaten into apathy by deaths caused by these counter- efforts. And then finally the body will overcome this, the theta facsimiles will combine, and it will build a mechanism to fit the new counter-effort.

As a matter of fact, don’t be surprised at almost any evolutionary step you find along the line. It is remarkable that preclears when you start running them and they start describing themselves, seem to show that some of the data collected by Darwin is absolutely correct. The preclear doesn’t have to know about it; he tells you what kind of shapes he is in. But you watch the preclear: He hits a death and — bang! — he is out of valence. All the way down the track he keeps going out of valence at every death. But it is out of valence into the new counter-effort. So you can keep picking this up and running this back. If you start back on the track with Effort Processing, he will be out of valence and disagreeing with the body, then into valence and disagreeing with the counter-effort and up the line from apathy, and you will wake that center up. Then you will go down and you will be waking up the next center, and you just keep on going down and knocking out a facsimile and waking up the next one and the next one and so on. If you start tracing back on Effort Processing, I don’t care how many prayers you pray, you are not going to be able to stop the preclear from going back into this stuff. He will arrive there willy-nilly.

How far back it is desirable to go is a question that has not been particularly codified. I know that the photon converter is not reducible. That is a funny statement to make, isn’t it? But somebody may be able to come along and reduce it; I hope somebody does. There must be some trick of reducing it, maybe unburdening it and reducing it in some fashion or other.

It is also interesting that the photon converter’s self-determinism is really self-determinism. It wants nothing to do with anybody. That is to say, it wants no ARC or anything, because it is a static. It is a static among statics. The second you get back into the static, you find that its effort is static. But there should be some way to do something about it. I think that is the moment, if you unburden the track above it, when the preclear goes pow! and disappears. So let’s work on that and find out — all in the name of science.

So, there is the mechanism of valences and self-determinism. Please get that cycle down pat. You will see that cycle in action and you will watch it behaving. You should try to run out the incidents you contact just like you used to try to run out engrams.

If a preclear really gets into valence on some of these earlier forms, however — if he is in valence and running them — you will find them appertaining to some particular portion of his anatomy. You will find him operating out of the old control center, because the engram was received by the old control center. And that is what you have to run out. He will be very curious to have somatics turning on elsewhere when he is obviously in this old control center and the other things didn’t exist. That is fine, but there are sure a lot of locks on top of something as early as a piece of kelp. And running this will turn on locks, because all cells are the great-great-great-great-great-great — and so on — descendants of these early forms.

Evidently, a theta line keeps right up with the genetic line, but it follows through in extremes. Theta lines intertwine with these genetic lines, but they track their own genetic lines very nicely. This doesn’t particularly upset people, not when they watch it work.

I am not going to spread this around particularly, merely because most people haven’t got much reserve about understanding it, and they certainly wouldn’t be good enough auditors to find the effect, when they haven’t even been able to locate some of the most obvious phenomena that exist. How anybody could possibly miss a phenomenon as marked as returning, 1 I don’t know. That is so elementary — how could they miss return? How could they miss the significance of recalls? These things have been studied exhaustively.

There is another aspect of this which you should know. We start with self-determinism, the current effort which is being self-determinism in the organism, operating from the control center of the body. Then there is the switchboard — you might say the motor switchboard of the body.

By the way, we are into structure now in Dianetics. We are deep into structure. We can de- structure more structure that has been postulated in the past than you can shake a stick at. For instance, the way they “cure” a toothache is just to move the fellow’s epicenter over so he can’t feel it. And his teeth keep on decaying and now he has another reason for his teeth to decay, and they all say, “Well, that’s the way it does.” The only way they know to help somebody out is kill them — introduce a new static.

Now, waves are running through this switchboard — theta impulses translating into MEST impulses. The theta facsimile is translating into the MEST-impulse motion. This is the center of operating motion, and you can find such a center in the body; it operates the center nerve control system. Then there is the motor strip, which has been sketched out in the brain.

It is very important for you to know that a person is as self-determined as his own theta facsimiles of his self-determinism are in control of his motor strip, and he is as aberrated and as interrupted as his motor strip is controlled by the environment. Does the environment control this strip or does “I” control the strip?

A psychotic’s motor strip is controlled 100% percent by the environment and other organisms in the environ, if he is really in bad shape. And when the psychotic is no longer in motion, the physical universe is in control of the motor strip and that is all there is. There is no theta there, except that which is stored and inoperative and is only operating on the cells. That gets stored in the body and they have to bury it. And you will recover this by scanning 150 years out of a preclear!

You want to remember this principle; this is an important principle because it will resolve for you a lot of cases, and it will let you extrapolate new techniques: Self-determinism is the effort of one’s running one’s own switchboard. Restimulation is the willingness of one’s self-determined effort to hand over the control of the switchboard to the environment.

Therefore, if you take a psychotic and give him orders, you are just introducing more statics because you are not touching “I.” All you are doing is operating the switchboard. And you can make him do anything you want to; you can hypnotize him or anything.

What you are trying to do is hand his self-determinism back to him. That is what you are trying to do. To do that, you go into communication with him any way that you possibly can, and you establish affinity and agreement with him by mimicry or whatever means.

One of the means of going into communication is, of course, by tactile communication. As a matter of fact, you can hit old epicenters all over the body: the cords in the back of the neck, all up and down the spine, in the elbows, in the tips of the fingers — all over the shop. You will find proceeding from each one either muscular tension or too great a laxity, one or the other. You will find areas on a preclear’s body where you can go into almost direct contact with some old epicenter and wake it up. But all you are doing, remember, is establishing communication. You can’t talk to him but you can hit through the motor strip and the old epicenters.

This is not chiropractic or anything of the sort, but there was more to chiropractic and osteopathy and Swedish massage than one, at first glance, would suppose. They do produce results; they have produced results. They best produce the results when they can knock out of restimulation an old epicenter; because, remember, the human being does not restimulate all in one piece, he restimulates selectively, and the old epicenters are still in control of various portions of the body. Although they were put into a lower echelon of control by being knocked into apathy, when they are restimulated into apathy, that portion of the body gets sick. The body has learned to work together with ARC, although it was knocked together with brute force.

Of course, you realize that by picking up old epicenters and influencing these old epicenters, you are actually going to make it difficult for a person to evolve into a policeman or something of the sort. You are actually interrupting an evolution-chain mechanism when you are doing this. But that is for one generation.

So remember this principle of restimulation. The person goes out and looks at the street, at cars and so forth, and he gets short-circuited. But the self-determinism, the control center, has consented to that short circuit! “I” in each case has consented to the short circuit taking place with the environment.

You want to pick up hypnosis? No, don’t run hypnosis ad nauseam, ad infinitum; just run the times when the fellow agreed to be hypnotized — when his self-determinism stepped in and said, “Okay environment, there you are.” Only the person’s self-determinism could hand out the control of this motor strip to the environ. The effort of self-determinism says to the environment, “Go ahead, handle my motors.” The same mechanism, self determinism, says, “All right, I can’t stand the pain, I can’t do this and that. Go ahead, Papa, I’ll obey you.”

Then Papa is monitoring this fellow’s switchboard — “Run here, run there, do this, do that, stand on your head.” There he goes.

There is something else equally interesting: When the organism goes unconscious in one position and wakes up in another position, its switchboard points and tabs are out of kilter. The grogginess resulting in the return of consciousness is simply “I” trying to find his own switchboard tabs through these epicenters, through a new epicenter and so on — they have been all messed up.

All you would have to do to drive a dog crazy is put him to sleep, give him a kick in the slats, move his joint positions all in different ways, take him a room away and stand him on his head. When he woke up, he would be crazy as a coot. That would just be treating him like people treat human beings.

This mechanism, then, is something that you should know about. And you should also know this, as auditors, about this switchboard: A fellow gets an epicenter of some sort — he is running down the street, he falls, he hits and crashes. The sidewalk is now the counter- effort and it jams part of the board. The person now feels rather uncertain about running down the street. If someone comes along and tells him “You poor little boy, here is a quarter. I’m sorry you fell down. You want to be careful running down the street,” and if this little boy is fool enough to accept the quarter, he has agreed to hook that in solidly.

Mama says, “You mustn’t run that fast, you’ll fall, you will hurt yourself,” and so forth. At the moment he agrees, that will stay solid. But if “I” says “Get in there and repeat the effort: run down the street, run down the street, run down the street; this is present time, go ahead and run. So you busted your nose, go on and run. So you crashed the plane, go on and fly tomorrow. So you had an automobile wreck, go on and drive!” — if “I” does that — this counter-effort unhooks from the board.

You mustn’t overlook that as a therapy, because that is essentially what you are doing. You are making the guy fall and bust his nose on the sidewalk and then fall and bust his nose on the sidewalk again until the motor switchboard can no longer be influenced by busting one’s nose on the sidewalk. But you are doing something more than that: you are taking the punch, the actual punch, out of the statics of theta facsimiles.

This is a therapy, and don’t neglect it as a therapy. If somebody says “I can’t walk; I hurt my leg in the war and I can’t walk anymore,” you would be very much out of order to go in and say “Well, you’ve got to walk,” because you would be just more environment taking over from “I.” What you want to do is find out when he agreed not to walk. At that moment you can cut loose the bar to the switchboard. But don’t expect him, necessarily, to walk in the next five minutes, because he won’t. What he will do is be uncertain about it for a short time until he works those centers out. This is a simple physiological arrangement.