A Rundown on Opening Procedure and Review of 8-C (4ACC 540325)
Series: 4th Advanced Clinical Course (4ACC)
Date: 25 March 1954
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
This is March the 25th, second lecture of the day.
We have a series of processes, each one of which is independent of the others, each one of which can be used in a number of ways. I'm going to go over this process series quite rapidly with you, as a review.
We've got the total of 8-C. "When in doubt, lead trump," they used to say in bridge. You could say that about several of these processes: "When in doubt, use Opening Procedure." And when you're really in doubt as to what to do with a preclear, you wouldn't go too far wrong, in fact you wouldn't go wrong at all, if you just used 8-C right straight down the line. Exteriorized, interiorized or anything else, if you just used 8-C, it's a good process.
It's a whole series. There are eight steps to it. It includes practically everything there is. It's very easy to use 8-C. The only thing about 8-C is that there are, really—an auditor who is well trained with all these tools—there are faster ways of going about it than simply going down the steps of 8-C.
Now, let's take, however, the steps I mentioned to you earlier today and go over each one of those.
Opening Procedure: you just ask an individual to move over through the room to a specific spot and touch it and let go of it. That, in its essence, is the basic woof, warp, background, the fiber, the fundamental, the concrete, the foundation of Opening Procedure. It's just asking somebody to go over and touch something and then let go of it. That's all. You could just keep this up with an individual with considerable result. You would actually get him into communication lots of ways.
Well, it starts to fall down after a while because, let us say, somebody is in a dramatization of—well, let's say he's just dramatizing, "Well, I don't know," that sort of thing. Well, you get him going on this, you find out this is slow. It's a slow process. You could go on and on and on and on and on with it, always with a little advantage, but it's slow. However, it's light and it has the advantage of placing the preclear in various positions.
And after you've done this for a while, he will follow your auditor's orders. Your auditing orders will be followed, the way some preclear who has done Opening Procedure. Whereas it very well may be that if you used no Opening Procedure, your preclear would be fouling up on your orders rather consistently and continually.
In other words, he will follow through your orders physically more easily than he will follow through your orders mentally. And it is an active check on whether or not he's following through your orders. You ask somebody to get up and go over and put his finger exactly in the center of the table. All right, he does that. You say, "All right. Now let go of it and touch the upper right-hand corner of the door, there." And he goes over and he touches that and you say, "All right. Let go of that."
Now, you can observe the fact that he does walk over and he does put his finger on that spot and he does let go of it. You cannot observe, when you say, "Give me three places where you are not," you cannot directly observe, unless you yourself are Clear beyond Clear, whether or not he is doing this. He might be sitting there saying, "Well, let's see, over there and over there and over there, ta-dah, ta-dah, ta-dah, dab-dab, uh-huh." This is not doing the process. So you could theoretically do Step I of 8-C for hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and you would say to yourself, "My goodness, Step I, 8-C just is not working on this preclear, that's all there is to that. It's just not working on him."
Oh no, that is not what's not working on him. What's not working on him is the auditor. See, the auditor is saying things and the preclear is saying, "Uh-huh" or something, but he's not doing them. So this is the breakdown.
So you secure your communication line by doing Opening Procedure. It's always a good thing to do because you change that preclear in space. And if you can change his body in space he'll, then and thereafter, have a tendency to better follow and more exactly follow your instructions.
And the entrance to his case is to discover that he can be told to do something without dying in his tracks. He can be told to do something and then do it without collapsing. Well, this he's really afraid of. He's afraid of exterior direction. Exterior direction is something that he has fought from the beginning of the track. He wanted to be cause, he never wanted to be an effect. All right.
So he said, "It's very, very, very destructive to be an effect." This he's made up his mind to. So of course, it's become destructive to be an effect. This he's agreed to, so it takes place. That which he fears comes true.
You have to make a postulate that something is dangerous before you can be afraid of it. He is actually, really, merely afraid of being afraid. And that's what he fights on the whole track. He's just afraid of being afraid, And so he becomes afraid.
Now, you see him in action when you do Opening Procedure. And you are disabusing him of the fact that something bad will happen if he follows your instructions, because he can see as he goes along that nothing bad is happening to him. He doesn't notice that there's something good happening to him. Normally he just sees "Well, there's nothing very bad happens here if I do this." And after that, why, he has some confidence in his auditor. You've changed his position in space, therefore you've taken care of altitude. But basically and fundamentally, you've taken care of the fact that he's always been afraid of being an effect and you're showing him he can be, in this respect, an effect without any great menace to him.
Now, if he keeps on fighting being an effect, which he's fought from the beginning of the track, if he just keeps on fighting this on and on and on and on and on, why, he will eventually, of course, be a total effect. And the worse off he is, the more an enforced effect he is. The more an enforced effect he is, why, the worse effect he can be. But he's doing this with his consent, with agreement, and he's finding out that it isn't bad for him.
It's because he fought being an effect that being an effect was bad. You see that? It's because he fought being an effect that being an effect was bad. If he's in real good condition, gee whiz, he could be an effect of anything. You see? He'd be relaxed about the whole thing. So we use Opening Procedure in order to bring him through and demonstrate to him that he can be an effect without great destruction.
Now, you'll notice preclears do various odd and strange things while doing Opening Procedure. They will move to do something before the command is given, they will let go of things before you said to, they will reach and grab things before you said to, they will throw the thing off, one way or the other. So the essence of Opening Procedure is to put them directly under direction.
Now, you could fail with Opening Procedure if you went at it this way (you see, you wouldn't be doing Opening Procedure; it wouldn't be Opening Procedure failing, it would be the fact that it wasn't being done): You say, "All right, go over and put your finger on the center of the table." So he goes over and he lays his hand, palm down, on the center of the table and then without you saying so, he lets go.
Well, he's not doing Opening Procedure. You said, "Lay your finger on the center of the table and then when I say, 'Let go,' let go. All right?" "Now, let go." In other words, don't let him let go prematurely, don't let him do the thing prematurely, just put him in an exact lineup of exactly what he's supposed to do. And what you tell him to do, make sure he does.
Now, if you do that—you move him around to various parts of the room, have him touch this, let go of them, and you can go into the more complicated proposition: "All right, now pick out a spot in the room to go to"—this is returning to him some of his self-determinism. And he's picked out this spot—he knows he picked out the spot. Now you say, "And now go over to it and touch it and let go of it." He does.
Now you say, "Now pick out a spot and go over to it and touch it, and now pick out a time when you're going to let go of it and let go of it at that time." For instance, "I'm going to let go of it three seconds after I touch it." See? A little bit more, a little bit more.
It's quite surprising what happens. This individual has been running on stimulus-response for so darn long that to give a direct order to himself, you see, is a novelty. It's just like running a car along the highway. A fellow picks out spots in front of the progress of the car and says he's going to run a wheel across them, like this edge of the tar strip or that part and so forth. He knows who said to do it—he did. And so, in that effect, we're stringing a straight communication line.
So Opening Procedure permits him to do this. The three steps of it are very clearly stated in Issue 24-G. But the essence of it is that what you say takes place. And then you make sure that what he says, he does.
Now, there's variations on it. You say, "All right, pick out a place to go over and touch. Now, change your mind and pick out another place. Now, change your mind and pick out another place. Now, change your mind and pick out another place. Now, go over and touch that."
Of course, you're liable to dead-end on that sometime. He's picking out impossible places, like "in the room below" or something on this order and the moment he's really picked out "the room below" as a place to touch, something like that, why, you say, "Go touch it." You could cross up on this a little bit if he starts picking out impossible places. I've had this happen in a session, by the way. The preclear was very, very puzzled as to how he suddenly flies through the window and touches that tree out there. started these impossibilities.
Well now, remember that Opening Procedure can be followed with a thetan after he's exteriorized: go here, go there and do this and do that. You can do that, you see. It can be run on a thetan after he's exteriorized.
Well, that's Opening Procedure. You've changed his position in space. You can then, with some assurance, give him an auditing command. But until you've changed his position in space a few times and put him slightly under his own direction, and very securely under his own direction while he is under your direction—see, that's the little hooker that comes in there—after you've done that, you can have some security in what he's doing.
But you will discover that you will occasionally get a preclear who's almost incapable of obeying an order. And the moment that you appear to stumble or the moment that you put a little lag time into the command or something like this, do you know that a preclear can actually start screaming and yelling at you? Oh, just howling and shouting and you "betrayed him" and so forth. What did you do? You said, "All right, now pick out a spot over there and go and put your finger on it." And he did. And you forgot to tell him to let go or something. And all of a sudden he just starts breaking into pieces because of this.
Well, so you handle this rather cautiously with any preclear that comes along. You make sure you state exactly what you want him to do and exactly where you want him to go and so forth, until you're fairly sure that he's not going to blow up in your face.
Now, you're going to run across preclears who are totally incapable of doing Opening Procedure. If that is the case, why, your level of entrance is clear back into Mimicry. Gee, they're awful bad off.
But this has another advantage. It immediately, for the auditor, spots a psycho—immediately spots a psycho. And you never run a heavy process on a psycho. You run a heavy process on them, it just bogs them down, snarls them up. I mean by heavy process, handling heavy energy and that sort of thing.
Now, you could vary Opening Procedure all over the place—as long as you are clinging to its elements, which is: follow the order. You could ask them, "Now go over and touch that tree and own it. And now let go of it. Now go over and touch that car and protect it. And now let go of it. Now find a spot" —and this is an interesting variation on it—"find a spot and stand on that spot now. And now decide that you can't stay there and move off of it. Now get a new spot, now move onto it. Now decide you can't stay there. Now move off of it."
You'd be surprised, but it'll turn on tingling on some preclears, all over the place. This is what they've been doing for trillions of years: they've just been finding a spot and finding they couldn't stay there and moving off of it. So, in essence, you're using Opening Procedure to take over a machine which places them. And that is, again, a side benefit of Opening Procedure: it takes over the machinery which pushes the preclear around and orders him into various spaces and tells him to vacate spaces.
You start doing this for a little while, you're liable to find the preclear's memory starts to blow up on you. You know, he starts to forget everything. Well, don't be alarmed at that. Every machine he's got has a forgetter in it and you start to take over machinery which makes him vacate spots—which is to say, let go of things. It's all automatic—letting-go-ness is all automatic with a preclear who is in any kind of bad condition. Everything tells him when to let go, he never tells himself when to let go. Nobody really specifically, at his determinism, ever fixed him up on this. In other words, he touched the hot stove, it told him to let go. And he's outside and it starts to rain, the rain tells him to come in. This sort of thing is going on all the time.
Well, you start doing Opening Procedure, you go a little distance and you find out his memory is starting to go on you. Well, don't worry about it, just do a little more Opening Procedure and it'll come right on through. All you've done is pass through the little curtain of the forgetter on the machine. And when the forgetter is off, you take over the machine.
You notice this, in auditing, is quite frequent. The preclear is running into his own machinery and he's forgotten it because he said to forget it and, of course, this has resulted in a forgetter that can come into restimulation and pass on out again. It isn't that Opening Procedure will do anything bad, because if the forgetter came into restimulation, it probably wouldn't stay in restimulation more than five or ten minutes if you just dropped Opening Procedure. It's just that simple. But if one does come into restimulation, he appears very foggy all of a sudden as he's doing it, why, make him do just a little bit more of it and the forgetter will pass on through.
All right. That's a rundown on Opening Procedure.
Now, let's take up 8-C. 8-C, Step I is based upon the mechanism of identification-differentiation. A preclear is bad off who is identifying and he's well off when he can differentiate.
Now, it is based also on the Prelogic, "Theta can locale space and time." And that is one of the Prelogics. It comes before logic. It's the capability of theta. It's to create space in which to locate energy and objects. And create the energy and objects and locate them in space. Or to locate energy and objects in space. This, theta does, and does very, very well. This is observably a potentiality of Life, of a life unit, such as a thetan. This is his potentiality and it's a very high-level potentiality. And when you work with that potentiality, you'll find that the case unsnarls and gets well off. Now, that's the logic it goes on. Actually, the Logics and Prelogics and so forth, the mechanisms that are used in 8-C, Step I, are listed there in Issue 24-G of the Journal of Scientology.
The two things which your preclear will run into here which will startle him is one, he can't find places where he isn't and, two, he finds people present. These two things are the most startling things that happen to him in running 8-C, Step I.
To quote the rather colloquial statement of an auditor who some months ago was running 8-C, Step I: He said, "Auditors that won't run 'Where others are not' on a preclear ought to have their butt kicked." He learned this the hard way. There's always somebody hanging around the preclear. The preclear isn't clear as a bell, he's always got somebody hanging around.
This particular auditor had an amusing experience. He'd been running 8-C, Step I, Step II and all the rest of the steps on people. He'd just been going along at a grand rate and was terrifically interested in it. And one day his co-auditor audited the thing on him according to schedule, right according to the book, didn't jump around any or anything of the sort and of course came to the place: "Now get some people, now, who aren't present." And all of a sudden this auditor who'd been going so blithely through found his cousin right there in the room with him, been there all the time, been there for years. Everywhere he'd been, this cousin had been. And this was one of his bugaboos. He had this weird feeling of another presence. It was his cousin. Not his cousin as a thetan, it was just a facsimile Of his cousin that he had running on an automatic machine that accompanied him everywhere.
And of course, this thing blew the moment he started to run "Other people who weren't present."
"Well, this person wasn't present and that person wasn't present and some other person…" He's looking right straight at his cousin. This was very odd, because the case this was being run on—this auditor who made that colloquial remark—was a very occluded case. See? He wasn't accustomed to having mock-ups show up in three-dimension full color. So this will startle up some of the most interesting things.
Now, another thing is, of course, that goes over into animals who are not present. "Animals you are not being," so forth, will get the same result. And we get this weird manifestation occasionally, somebody is being tagged around all the time or is being one of his own pets. And one case this was run on, he used to have a puppy who used to come up and jump up and lick his face whenever he came home from school. And he started running this. And he'd always had this little black spot right in front of his face. Auditors had chewed away at this madly in all directions.
And the second this question was asked, "Give me some animals that aren't present," before he even got around to the puppy, why, the puppy (quote) "jumped down" away from his face and ran all over the room and ran out of the house. This fellow was watching his puppy do that. He hadn't seen this puppy, of course, since he was five, six years of age. Well, this is the kind of thing—this is a matter... It goes into other universes, it lightly taps them apart and does things for them. He was sure in that pup's universe; that pup was sure in his.
Well, so you'll scatter up all sorts of things just by running 8-C, Step I, according to plan. That's the way it's planned. Also it takes care of the future to some degree: goals.
Now, the darnedest things happen on an individual when you start, "Get some goals you don't have at the moment." Boy, he just hasn't run end of cycle on a goal for so darn long—in other words, he hasn't arrived for so darn long, that he'd sometimes sit there for five minutes trying to think of some goal and finally come up with something silly, like, "Well, I'm not trying to boil you in cottonseed oil. I don't have the goal of boiling you in cottonseed oil. I might have the goal of boiling you in olive oil, but not in cottonseed oil." No, he knows that. Some silly entrance point like this he'd never suspect.
Well, that is administered, usually on the basis—when individually—on the basis of two, three, four items. Now, somebody who's having a tough time, you just give him one item at a time. When they've got that, they tell you and that's it. And you keep making sure they've got this.
Now, you'll run into this curious one: A person can find a lot of places where he's not, but by golly, he can't find a place where he's not thinking. Or he can find places where he's not thinking, but he can't find places where he isn't. This is your inverted case. Now by golly, there's someplace where this preclear isn't. And it's your job as an auditor, anytime he runs into a can't, simply to steer him along and work with him until he can find a place where he can. You'll find cases breaking off at the point where he does find a place where he's absolutely certain he's not. This again is mainly using that Prelogic.
But to get identification changed into differentiation, the preclear has to be able to interpose distance between himself and objects. He has to be able to interpose distance. You'll pick up many a preclear who is very bad off. How could you really tell if a preclear was bad off? Well, he couldn't get out more than about an inch from his nose with anything. He's in apathy. You could suddenly, inadvertently knock a preclear down into apathy and all of a sudden find out he couldn't even vaguely reach for the wall. He couldn't reach for and withdraw from the wall where he sits in his chair, you know? He actually wouldn't feel like lifting a hand or touching the top of his head. He's in apathy. This is a matter of the distance is too great.
So as we work with this we find that distances do strange things. And distances are a key point in this. We get some places where he's not. Well, we get out to—he says, "Uhhhh—places where I'm not... Dab-dab, dab-c/a, ta-da, da, I don't have any idea... Hmm! That's very funny, I'm all over the room." That's your cue as an auditor to say, "Well, let's find some other place. Let's look a little further, a little closer," so forth. "Hmm —m mm—mm."
Well now, you get this distance thing inverted. A person goes down through apathy and he gets to a point where he's enforcedly way out. And you might have such a case. You know, he could only get something as near to him as about two light-years. He couldn't get anything closer to him than that. Tivo light-years, that's about the best he could do—in close.
Well, he says he knows for sure that he's not at the other end of the galaxy. This, he'll finally come up with. And he knows for sure that he's not part of another galaxy. And then this will dwindle down. He'll get down to the solar system—he knows he's not in the Moon, he's not on the Sun and so on. This will dwindle down. Now, you'll see it dwindling further and he gets to the point of where, let's see, he's not in Africa and he's not in the South Pacific and he's not in Canada.
And it'll get down further: he's not in the next town, he's not in the next state. And it'll get down further than that: he's not in the next house. And then he's not in the same—he's not in certain corners of the room. And then he's not in various parts of his body.
You can run this, by the way, and run a guy right on out of his body with it. You could also run him on out of his body by getting him to answer, just repeatedly, people he is not. Objects he is not. Animals he's not. Just bing, bing, bing. This is the reverse on Beingness Processing.
Now, your goal is not to find things he is. Your goal is simply to make a thetan out of him that's clean of a body.
All right. So you find him coming down in close to where he can get things with great security right in close again. Well, don't be surprised if it suddenly goes right on out again. And the next moment, why, he's only able to find himself not at the other end of the galaxy, but it won't be as bad this time. It'll come in quicker. In other words, the inversion inverted again. He had to be way out before he could be certain. Then he had to be way in before he could be certain. Then way out. And then way in. And it'll equalize and pretty soon he'll be able to find lots of places where he's not.
But this manifestation will have taken place: you will notice at first while you're running 8-C, Step I, that the fellow is evidently consulting things. You know? He says, "Let's see some places I'm not." Well, there's something liable to tell him, "Well, you are there." He's sort of consulting things. He's searching around to find something that will place him in a place where he's not and so forth.
Well, our problem is one there of a fellow being an effect. He has to be told by the energy of the bank before he can be certain. Well, after you've run this for a while, he gets to the point where he places himself and says, "I'm not there." He's just saying—he's saying, without any further contradiction, "I'm not there, I'm not there, I'm not there, I'm not there, I'm not there." He does this with perfect certainty.
What you've done is move him over from listening to all of his machinery, over to being active about it. In view of the fact that this is a Prelogic and it's a very powerful potentiality of a thetan and so on, there's lots of benefit in that, particularly when carefully administered to a case, face to face, and you making sure that he knows for sure he's not there and finding places where he's not. You know, sort of hand—work it along.
All right. Another manifestation takes place in 8-C: he'll run into a terrific scarcity on something. Well, you watch these terrific scarcities. You're asking him animals he's not. Oh, he's not this kind of an animal, he's not that kind. He goes on and all of a sudden he says, "You know, I just can't seem to find I can't I don't know I just don't seem to think of any other animals."
There's an animal he isn't looking at, so he just momentarily avoids all animals. Fellow has named twenty animals to you and he'd tried to convince you, then, that that's all the animals there were or all the animals he knew about, because he can't name very many more animals and it's getting very hard to do. You keep on slugging with him, just make him name more animals and more animals and all of a sudden he'll have lots of animals. Well, you've just made him look at an animal. In view of the fact that people eat animals and animals eat people, there have been some close associations in this particular department.
You're liable to find some weird somatics turning on. But again, your goal is not somatics. Your goal of that 8-C is exteriorization.
Now, if there aren't any more places than the place where he is in the whole universe, he, of course, can't exteriorize. And you'll find this is mainly the case with people who can't exteriorize. There isn't any space in back of them to exteriorize into. Well, that's obvious, then, they can't exteriorize. There isn't any real rationale to it, although they'll give you lots of rationales as to why they can't exteriorize—they just haven't got any place to go. 8-C to a large, marked degree repairs this deficiency.
All right. Now, in the procedure which we're working with, the next thing which it would be quite optimum for you to go into.
Male voice: Why germs?
Hm?
Male voice: Why germs in Step I?
Oh, he's closed terminals with lots of germs. He's in the universes of all kinds of diseases, before he's through. You'll find a lot of cases will crack on germs.
Male voice: Do preclears mock-up germs…
Hmm.
Male voice: ...or are some of them really true?
We'll have to ask the germs about that. The point is that he has closed terminals with all kinds of life forms and he ordinarily doesn't think of germs as a life form or anything that really exists. They're kind of all over all the time and they're liable to sneak up on him at any moment. That's why you use germs in 8-C, Step I.
Anyway, our next procedure there: Beingness and Universe Processing. Now, these two things go hand in glove. If we think of a thinking machine, you must realize that it has a lot of stops in it. In order to do any thinking, a fellow has to have assumed, in the first place, that there's something going to stop him from using force and energy in order to accomplish his goals. He must be barriered some way or another. Furthermore the MEST universe, the physical universe, is a game consisting of barriers. Well, there are lots of stops in the machinery—terrific number of stops in the machinery.
Let's say, if you were to ask most preclears what the goal was, of Mama and Papa, or what his own goal was, it would be "to die." He has been stopped so often. Well, you ask almost any preclear, "Give me a flash answer, what's liable to happen to you if you answer that question?" He always gives you the same flash answer: "Die." These are barriers, stops.
Now, in communication we have point of departure and point of arrival. And there are places where he has arrived. Well, after he's arrived at these places, that was very undesirable, so knowing that it was undesirable to have arrived, in the future he has a tendency not to arrive. So he doesn't finish anything, so he's liable to procrastinate, so he's liable to do something else. He goes out on shunt lines and into resistances, anyplace to keep from arriving.
And you'll find that an individual in life is as alert and awake and happy as he has dreams and goals, He's got as much future as he has postulated goals for the future. He doesn't have any more future than that. Therefore, if a man is as alive as he has hopes and dreams, he certainly would be as alive as he has a future. That so? He's alive as he has hopes, dreams, goals.
Well, he gets stopped so often by actual barriers, actual barriers—walls, cars, Mama's hairbrush and so on, actual barriers—that he begins to believe, at last, that merely thinking about doing something would be sufficient to run into an actual barrier. So he thinks, "Well, I think I'll be a great painter. Well, I don't know, I really can't paint." It finally gets down to that short a line. Just the thought—he goes to a movie, he sees somebody dancing rather well and he says to himself, "Gee, I... I've certainly got to take up so... I dancing again" and so on. "I haven't been to a dance for a long—well, I couldn't do that because [sigh], well, I'm getting pretty old now, I'm rickety. I couldn't dance anymore." He thinks of a goal, he thinks of a dream, he thinks of an ambition and he immediately collapses on it.
Well now, this is a shorter cycle, perhaps, than you would ordinarily expect to find. The truth of the matter is, it's a longer period than you find. Do you know why people don't think about any dreams and goals at all? It's because of the instantaneousness of the impulse "to think about a goal is to be stopped." And they stop right there. Now, your preclear is in this department in many, many of life's activities. Just to think about doing something is enough to stop.
For instance, let's take a matter of the emperor of the world. Now, I just propose to you, why don't you postulate to yourself the goal of being the emperor of the world? Some of you could postulate it for a little while but, sooner or later, you ran into a qualification on it. You've obviously played the game of "Emperor of the World" someplace or another and been stopped. King of the Mountain sort of is the game all life plays.
But anyway, you think of that and then something discredits it. There isn't any real certainty you could get on that: "I couldn't go ahead and be emperor of the world. Who would want to be emperor of the world anyway? You wouldn't want to enslave all men, you wouldn't want to do this" and so forth and lots of reasons and qualifications.
What are all those reasons and qualifications?
They're avoidances of stop points which have arrived there by experience. He's become something someplace or another and after he became it, it became very unsatisfactory to him. Or he was not trying to be it and it hit him real hard and it hit him hard enough so that it won. He didn't win and he became it. That's a switch of valence, which is another manifestation.
There are two manifestations there: One, he became something and it was intolerable, but he couldn't escape it so he became something enforcedly. And the other thing is, he was hit by something. He was being something and he was hit by something else so hard that it switched his valence. He became the other thing which won, which was able to destroy the energy which he himself was protecting.
All right then. This matter of goals, then, becomes very intimate with beingness. Well, a person after a while—you say, "Why don't you be the emperor of the world?" There isn't any reason why you couldn't fool around with the idea of being emperor of the world and be quite pleased and be very amused with what you would do. But what would stand in your road? Well, one of the things that would stand in your road is that everything you thought of, you would then have to do.
This is what's known as "not being wishy-washy." You think of something, you postulate some sort of a goal, you attain it! It's not all right for you to walk down the pavement and think, "You know, I think I will take up painting and I'll paint these beautiful paintings," and go on down walking along the street, having seen this beautiful painting, "I think I'll do this beautiful painting and I'll have these beautiful models and so on and, gee, that'll be real nice."
And you get yourself all built up to having built a minor cathedral for your painting office down in the middle of town and then suddenly see that it's time for you to eat lunch and go over and forget about the whole thing. There's nothing wrong with doing that. That's falling short, of course, from intention. But that's in a lot better shape than most people are in. That's a lot better shape.
But we're disabused of this. This is "daydreaming," this is "bad." This is lots of things. "You shouldn't do this sort of thing. If you think of something—if you think of something, by golly, you should execute it!" "You should only be practical. You should go along through life and when you think of being something it should (1) be something you reasonably could be and (2) then go ahead, hammer and tongs, and accomplish that goal." In other words, prove it with the object. In other words, prove it. Prove a dream. Putting a goal into complete execution is just that: prove a dream.
You might think of becoming the greatest general that ever lived, some morning, and have a good time talking to yourself about it and figure it all out and the campaigns and that sort of thing. And maybe, for a while, even collect a lot of ideas about what you'd do as the greatest general that ever lived and it would be just fine. You are the guy that postulated it, nobody else did. And you're going along the line and it's perfectly fine. Now, to have to become that general would be just simply the universe foisting it off on you that you'd better prove your daydreams.
Now, let's take a slight—less scale of that. Let's take the fact that a fellow makes a picture, a facsimile. The facsimile itself is a kind of a proof to him that something exists. See, it's the knowingness itself cannot be permitted to persist unless one proves it with an object.
And that's kind of the game of barriers itself.
Well, a fellow in achieving goals runs into so doggone many obstacles, he runs into so many walls and so many parents and so many shortages of cash, which is a nothingness obstacle, that he eventually gets the idea that just to think of something is to actually collide with something. You get that?
This fellow, many, many times, has had the thought, "Well, I ought to beat up that kid next door." Well, there was a big gate in front of the kid next door's house. And it was a big gate and this little kid next door used to come around and "Yah-yah-yah" and break all his toys. "Well, I'm going to beat up the kid next door." So he races after him. The little kid runs away, gets in the gate and slams the gate. Well, the pursuer cannot open the gate.
He has this experience over and over and over and over, always this violent gate slam, every time he tries to catch this little kid. He eventually gets this as a condition: the thought of beating up the little kid makes a gate slam in his face, then the thought of beating anybody up makes a gate slam in his face. And he'll just shotgun the thing out through all of his rationale.
It's going up against what kind of a stop? A gate slamming in his face. Well, obviously, sometime earlier he must have experienced something bad in connection with a gate. He must have been a gate or been a gate slam or something and been destroyed. It's a winning valence one way or the other; otherwise, just a gate slamming wouldn't have stopped him.
If he was really in good shape, the gate slamming and forming a barrier across the line there, wouldn't even have stopped his physical progress. But he's convinced that it does, so when the gate slams, he stops. Well, he thinks of beating anybody up, then a gate slams in his face. And he goes on through life with this gate slamming in his face.
Well, it must have been based on a far more trying experience much earlier. And much earlier than that, must have been based on the postulate there could be a barrier.
Here's what's known as thought barriers. Barriers which arise and bar a person from attainment or unattainment in the future. Do you know that there are barriers which bar you from unattaining in the future? All life is rigged on the basis of, "You better keep on putting up that mock-up, you better keep putting it up and making it work and making it collect money and making it eat and so forth. And that's what you're supposed to do. And if you don't do that, we're going to give you..." And what is that barrier? "Pain and social disgrace." Mainly, chiefly pain. Pain is the forerunner of a social disgrace. All right. We've got pain, then, as a barrier. Pain is erected as a sensation which takes place to debar an individual from instantaneously declaring himself dead and out of the game. Pain is a sort of a corral which builds itself around the body, that won't let it quit. Many a man would simply give up the ghost, boom!—which is to say, the ghost being the body, give up the body with the greatest of ease. He's gone through a lot of disappointments, the body is getting a little rickety and so forth. He'd just give it up, boom.
Oh, but it isn't that simple, according to the way the universe is designed. Theoretically, in order to give up one, he'd have to kill it off and the killing-offness would consist of a great deal of pain. There would be at least 8,672.9 percent more suicides every "umph" days, to be exact, if it weren't for the fact that a barrier of pain and social disgrace did not ensue.
Now, social disgrace comes about through "You've got to be responsible for a lot of your fellows. So if you were to commit suicide, then you'd be letting down a lot of your fellows. And therefore, your responsibility in taking care of a lot of your fellows keep you in the race." See? So this, of course, in itself is a barrier.
But this again is the barrier of what? This is a barrier of a whole flock of winning valences. Mama took care of you and you're in Mama's valence so, therefore, you have to take care of others. And so we get this progression of universes entangled, enmeshed, and a person mires in deeper and deeper.
All right. When we get this problem of barriers in real hot restimulation in a preclear, we get a fellow who stops thinking. Thinking is bad enough. That's just a succession of how you leap around barriers, but he gets to a point of where there's so many barriers confronting him, he doesn't think at all, he just kind of is a lump. Well, he has become something. He's gotten to a stop point on the track. And having become a lump of energy or an airplane or a monument or a building or a bedpost, or something like that, he doesn't do any thinking while he's that object.
Now, you go into a sanitarium, you find all kinds of people around there who declare they're bedposts and so forth. Well, they don't do any thinking. If you'll just get them out of being a bedpost, they can get well. They've just hit that spot in their thinking machine. Now, you can actively throw a preclear into that position in his own bank and throw him into it and out of it, and being something assumes less and less terror to him. He doesn't improve markedly and tremendously and with leaps and bounds through being these things, but it becomes less and less terrifying to him.
Because he's resisting being about eight billion, six hundred and ninety-seven million things—again, to be technically accurate. He's just resisting like mad. He's afraid to arrive here and he's afraid to arrive there. To arrive and to be are the same thing. He's afraid to be. He's afraid to be. He's afraid to be. And he's just trying to withdraw that mock-up. He's trying to back out of the whole thing and he's in reverse.
Well, it's not good to be in reverse because you're scared. You can go into reverse anytime you want to, but don't go into reverse because you're resisting and because you're scared, because then you won't go into reverse—you'll just go on into whatever you're resisting—another mechanism attendant to the use of energy.
Well, when we see somebody can't arrive, can't arrive, can't arrive, can't arrive all the time, it must be that he can't be, can't be, can't be, can't be. Well, after you've had him be a few things, we discover some of those things which he's resisting being. He slides into those fairly easily and he says, "Oh, that's kind of funny"—more than anything else. Or it's not serious or it's curious or "Look how stupid I am. Every time I get into being this doggone bedpost, boy, am I stupid!" This funny feeling of complete, blank stupidity will hit him. And he'll slide out of it. He'll slide into it and out of it fairly easily.
You've increased his ability to be, as long as you didn't hammer and pound him and force him to be that thing in some fashion or another. You must get his beingness ability up. When you do this, although he doesn't feel he's progressing very rapidly, you're actually increasing a lot of the perimeter of existence. You're creating things he can be. And this won't show up to him until, maybe someday or another, he happens to have some kind of an idea like... You see, he can get the idea that he must check his ideas.
And one day he incautiously gets the idea, "You know, I think I'll learn how to plumber things." And he walks down the street and he sees a plumber shop and he thinks, "Yeah, that'd be a lot of fun and... making pipe and hanging that together again and so forth. And he suddenly realizes there's nothing stopping him from being a plumber. This is very surprising to him, because he never daydreamed that long before without suddenly getting his teeth kicked in. He could actually think about being a plumber, and he might not think of it for another month or more.
And then all of a sudden he thinks of something: he'd love to go for a drive. And he goes out and he gets in the car and goes for a drive and the rest of the family faints. He's never volunteered to go for a Sunday drive. He'd go to work every day and he'd go to all places, he'd drive down to the movies. But just to go for an idle drive that would arrive nowhere and get back to nothing, just to see the sights or something like this, this character has never volunteered doing. And he'd actually probably get into trouble with the whole family, they'd think he'd gone mad or something, just because it's such a change of pattern.
Well, this would be a sort of a quiet result on such processing. And that is, in essence, a quiet result on just doing nothing but Beingness Processing. Just ask him to be this and be that. Also, you change his emotional tone: a lot of his fear starts coming up. Now, it'll start to show up on Beingness Processing, a lot of fear will. So along with Beingness Processing we have to have a little remedy sitting there. Anytime he starts to get so nervous that he just can't stand it, have him mock-up his body flip-flopping and flying to pieces, or lying down and dying. And have him do that a lot of times and he becomes a bit more relaxed. You have to know that about it.
All right. It's a neat little process all by itself, picking its way through the bank. It's a process which requires a lot of savvy on the part of an auditor. And it requires enough savvy on the part of the auditor so that we don't drop the person into some kind of a very stupid beingness and then never pry him out of it. You know, we never permit him to be anything else, we just drop him into being an invisible theta trap and say, "Well, that's the end of session." We don't run him being an invisible theta trap, "Now, be the thetan connected with it."
"Oh," he says, "that's an awful apathetic thetan."
"Well, don't bother to be at the moment, just—end of session." This would be the wrong place to stop a session because, of course, the fellow's going to skid over into the other valence.
Now, that's a winning-valence beingness, as distinct from just plain beingness. Now, plain beingness is something the individual became and was sorry for it or not sorry for it. But those are serious when he became something and, boy, he had an awful time unbecoming that thing. See? He became it all right, but boy, he sure didn't have any luck unbecoming it. And that's one kind of beingness.
Now, let's get the other kind of beingness. He was being something and all of a sudden something came along and went smash, or the thing he was being went smash, and it ran into a solid enough object or a solid enough object ran into him, or a loose or limpid or lost enough object ran into him so that it won. See, he could no longer be the thing he went on being, he had to go over to what won.
You know, a theta trap is supposed to pull in thetans, and do this and do that. Well, he went over into the valence of a theta trap. You know? He got caught in a theta trap. He was being something. He had to be being a piece of energy or he'd never get caught in a theta trap. And he got caught in a theta trap and he's in the theta trap and the theta trap, of course, wins. He gets so lost and so apathetic that he just disappears as a thetan and he's a theta trap. And what's his conduct in life? Capitalism. You think I'm going to qualify that, but I'm not.
Here we have somebody who now has to dramatize—the only thing that is alive, there, is a theta trap. If you were to ask him to be this and be that, he'd eventually find himself being some kind of trap or another kind of trap and finally a theta trap, if he's run back on being some kind of a curious energy trap. And he'll eventually say there's some kind of an apathetic little animal in here or something in here. Well, that's him! And if you just asked him to be this and that, it'd eventually turn up, and the apathy would run out without you doing anything else about it. You just ask him to be this and be that and be something else, round and round, he'd eventually desensitize on this and come out as himself.
"What can you be now?" is a good way to run something like that. "Oh, I don't know, I can be the south end of this trap." "l could be the whole trap," so forth. And the awfullest apathy comes up because it's an apathy which is below the level of body death. A thetan can be deader than a body. And he'll come up through this apathy.
Well, sometimes when you haven't handled one of these things apathetically, why, within the next twenty-four hours he'll skid into this apathy again. So if you've run it too pressingly or if you've run it too arduously, you're liable to get that kind of a condition of the fellow's unbalanced, he's liable to skid into it. "Too arduously run" would be the comment on it—for the level of the case.
I mean, the auditor was too insistent. He switched him into the losing valence too often. He didn't take it quietly enough, in other words. This fellow was so afraid of being in the losing valence that he could be traps and he could be all sorts of things; he could be all kinds of thisas and thatas and he'd be objects and more objects. Then all of a sudden, as we run along, we all of a sudden find out that he then can be something vaguely alive. Well, we find this increasing.
But if the auditor, by pushing it hard, would suddenly find out that the preclear could be with great certainty this beingness—all dependent on certainty, great certainty. He's being a theta trap, and the auditor knowing the rest of the mechanism would suddenly say, "Why, now, look around inside the trap. Now, do you find a thetan in there? All right, now be that. Okay? Now, you're being that real good? Okay. Now, let's see if you can't be a thetan in another trap someplace. All right, you being that real good? Well, now let's see if we can't be a thetan somewhere else."
"Mmmmmm!"
"Well, that's about all we can do today. End of session." You see? Whee! You've just let that guy in for a lot of misery.
So the rule of the thumb: play it on the safe side. Why, just ask him what he can be now. If you just went on, searched around, "What can you be?" and "What else can you be?" and so on.
This mechanism, by the way, will unstack itself. It'll eventually just unstack itself. You can help him out a little bit to speed it up. But if you push him too hard, why, he's liable to get quite apathetic. More apathetic than a dead body, any day of the week.
All right. How does this connect with Universe Processing? Well, this universe problem is simply based upon this: A thetan has his own universe. This gets enmeshed with the MEST universe. And he then gets enmeshed with the body's universe. And now he's mixed up in three universes. And his concentration in life, let us say, is on the body, not on his own universe, really not on the physical universe; he's gone way down. He's very badly what we call introverted. Well, introverted would be this by definition, it would be somebody whose attention was solidly fixed upon the body's universe. Well, he's already two universes wrong.
Now, by common classification and definition, anybody is extroverted whose attention is on the physical universe. Obviously, it's just a little better to have your attention on the physical universe than to have it on the body's universe. But you're still one universe off. You see this?
Now, you'd have to introvert again, which is the thetan's attention on his own universe. After you'd extroverted him into the physical universe, he would introvert again into his attention on his own universe. And then he would probably extrovert as himself. So there would be quite a cycle of extroversion-introversion which would go on while you were running universes.
Well, the way you separate him out, one way or the other, is just to find out where these universes are safe. You just find out where they're safe. His explanation is that he's protecting all those things which have caught him and ate him. As unreasonable as this may seem, this is what he's doing. The reason Papa beats him is because he has to protect Papa so Papa won't get mad, so Papa won't get stomachaches, so Papa won't get a terrible headache. That's why he permits himself to be beaten by Papa. Actually, under no circumstances could he have prevented Papa from beating him, but he finally says he lets Papa do it because...
You'll run into one of these characters one time that's completely gone on this subject and it's enough to make you tear your hair. (There isn't one present, by the way.) But, this character is a psycho. And this case manifestation, when it's practically all out the bottom of the barrel, is one of the maddest things you ever took a look at.
They would stumble, for instance, against a curb and then sit down alongside the curb and touch it and pet it to make sure that it hadn't been hurt. They look at you or they're talking to you or something like that and they can just be—oh, they'd just be very insulting and nasty and mean to you and all that sort of thing, because, you see, it doesn't hurt you just to talk to you. But if you were to pick up a club or something and hit them a good sound one, something like that, they would immediately get up and wonder if they'd hurt you. See?
Any blow or contact interchange brings about the immediate manifestation of, "Did I hurt you?" The start into this is, "I don't want to hurt anybody." Person kind of says this. He doesn't want to hurt. That's common. But when it goes all the way down, any blow means that something else has been hurt other than themselves. In other words, they do a constant shift into a winning valence.
Well, that shift into the winning valence brings about a condition of shift into the winning universe. And you'll find a lot of your preclears, those that are occluded and so forth, are actually living in another universe. The thetan has a universe—that's a bad step right there. All right, he's got a universe, it's all tailor-made. Now, that universe is impinged upon the physical universe and shrunk down and smaller than the physical universe. And now this combination is now fixed upon a body's universe and is totally concentrated on the body's universe.
That's bad enough, but now we get where it's gotten in confluence with enough other people and enough other universes that this whole combination is existing inside Mama's universe—which makes it very easy because of prenatals, you know. It's very easy for a person to get the idea that he's living in Mama's universe; the body's been living inside Mama's body. Or he's in Papa's universe. And he might be in Mama's universe and then in Papa's universe. You see? And then in a steam locomotive's universe. Here we go. I mean, we just go in concatenations.
You can take anything he's been or could be with certainty and find the places it was safe and eventually you'll get some kind of weird stuff turning up about it's somebody's universe he's talking about.
Now, one thing I want to mention about that: very occasionally you can pick this all apart in a present lifetime, and actually should, until you've got the guy exteriorized. You get him exteriorized with certainty, then you can pick him out of as many universes as you want, but you get him out of the body's universe, he'll be well enough to be worked. But you start running past lives while he's in the body, you're running the body's past lives, and you're running the most garbled mess and he'll just get more and more and more garbled.
What we're interested in doing is clarifying universes. First, up to the point where he can be exteriorized. And then we can clear up all the universes we want to clear up. But that's our first goal. So you just run other universes, current lifetime, and then some SOP 8-C, Step I, and some current lifetime other universes. You could do this back and forth, quite a bit. You would spring somebody. He would eventually spring out.
Sometimes you find a lot of the objects he's being are simply statements that have been made to him by other people. Of course, anybody is boss in their own universe. So if he's in Mama's universe, then anything Mama said goes. If Mama said to him, "Oh, you're just my little racing car, aren't you?" rather consistently and continually, you'd find him able to be a racing car. It's very easy for him to find a racing car to be, because he's got numerous universes available and numerous racing cars in facsimile form are in those. She has thrown them into restimulation, in other words.
Many of your heavy object beingnesses are comments of this character to children who are, to all intents and purposes, existing in somebody else's universe. Occlusion and so forth is this manifestation of other universes.
Okay. Now, the smooth way to play this game of Beingness Processing in other universes is to find the allies for the current lifetime who are suggested by the beingnesses you've discovered. This person keeps thinking about a certain person every time he is something. You just run "Places where that other person can be safe" until those universes spring apart. That's the total command used and that's the total process used: Places where the other person is safe. And you'll finally get the universes sprung apart.
Okay. We'll take some of this up later.
PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT 600 26 MARCH 1954
A RUNDOWN ON OPENING PROCEDURE PAGE 2 4ACC-67 - 25.03.54
AND REVIEW OF 8-C