Being Made Nothing and Having to Be Something (7ACC 540630)
Series: 7th Advanced Clinical Course (7ACC)
Date: 30 June 1954
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
This is a résumé, current procedures for class use. I have now given you, today, an hour (two half-hours) of Group Processes. I gave you these primarily so that you would be able to function in running the processes contained therein.
As you see, it is possible for these processes to be used as Group Processes on people who are not in very bad shape. The other evening, a little experiment was run by one of our worthy brethren, the Reverend Belknap, and he got five poor luckless people and he put a pair of dark glasses up on one curtain and he indicated a light box on a wall at some distance therefrom and he had Attention by Duplication on these two items. I don't know if it's occurred to him yet that he hung up and selected out the paraphernalia of Fac One. [laughter]
Even then, however, his group, which was a very small group that night, was all alive at the end of an hour of Attention by Duplication. That's about all you could say for them, but they were alive.
Now, it shows you how far you can go in Group Processes. It's not good auditing, however, tb go this far. The only reason he did this was for an experiment and find out whether or not Attention by Duplication could be done on a group. Very well.
Now, wet have here a couple of half-hours of processes which are liable to knock some of the groups you'd run them on into a fine, flat, very flat spin, particularly in view of the fact they unremedy havingness with rather great speed. I want you to notice the method of remedying havingness there that was used at the last of the session—call it to your attention—"Things you wouldn't mind occupying the same space you're occupying." That was Remedy of Havingness. And I wanted to get some of your eyes uncrossed and get you somewhere close to present time. I see there's only one present who is in a rather state at the moment, but that's all right.
Here we have a process which is, essentially, an individual process being run on a group simply because the group is in pretty good shape. Now, this process, this process hardly needs a designation since it is the rather obvious, but missed (because simple), extrapolation from Something and Nothing and the Formula of Communication.
A thetan insists on a duplication, doesn't he, when he communicates. He insists on a duplication. Well of course in view of the fact that he does not have to have any mass and therefore really doesn't have any mass, he of course insists —if he's getting very obstructive on the subject of communication and very overt—he would insist on a no-mass answer, you see, he'd insist on a no-mass receipt-point, rather. And if he got communicated back to, he would insist on a no-mass answer. And people get insistent here and there on the track and then suddenly decide that, "You know, there was mass in that answer and I object to it and I don't like that and so, as a result, why, we're going to make nothing out of that."
Now, the only reason this universe is here is because of the law of the conservation of energy; otherwise, it long ago would have been taken apart. The reason there isn't any more mass in it than there is, is because thetans are not all entirely incapable in making nothing out of something. But it is not necessarily true that this is the total ambition of a thetan. But certainly any thetan who is in an interesting condition of any kind has this as the backdrop, you might say, of the condition. He's tried to make nothing out of it and he didn't succeed and it hung him with a somethingness which he then has had to accept under duress.
And he gets to a point of where, as much as he really does like some things, he begins to find a terrible intolerance for all somethingnesses. He just begins to identify. And going from this point, why, then of course, he is made to tolerate somethingnesses so long and so often that he says, "Of course, all I can have is something."
The end product of this is a stomach. See, it's always got to have something and it's always trying to make nothing out of it and it's never really succeeding at all. It's just a relay point.
Now, the woof and warp of livingness and character and that sort of thing becomes a problem at the moment when a thetan becomes obsessive on the idea of making nothing out of something. I can just see this thetan now, standing around this small mountain and insisting that it become nothing, and laying energy patterns down over the top of it and trying to blanket it and squash it and compress it and wipe it out and look through it and then change his visio and see that it's still there and so forth. You see, it just refused to accept the no-mass of his communication. It just refused to, so he got upset about it.
Well, by blocking a person continually and forever on all subjects from making nothing out of things, you will generally get them into a position where they can't make nothing out of things and you get the persistent mock-up. You get this persistent mock-up. Individual puts a mock-up up there and you tell him to, "All right. Now make it disappear." And it's still there. Well, he's gotten into the frame of mind whereby he can't make nothing
out of thinks and his mock-ups persist and they persist worse and worse and longer and longer and harder and harder and this is reductio ad absurdum survival.
And the cycle of appearance and disappearance is itself time. But time becomes totally solid to a person who is no longer able to make nothing out of something. We won't go into that any further because it's not necessary to this. Just take it there—Communication, Formula of Cause, Distance, Effect. Cause at the Source-point must be duplicated at Effect, the Receipt-point, in order for a perfect communication to have taken place. And insistence upon a perfect communication by something which has mass would be, of course, to have mass occur at the Effect-point.
On something which had no mass—a perfect duplication at the Effect-point would, of course be, no mass. So a thetan at Cause giving a message—which is to say, an impulse or particle across a distance to the Effect-point—would insist on a no-mass result at the Effect-point. See, he is nothing, so he says at the Effect-point, "That, therefore, must be nothing."
Well, this makes a thetan a very dangerous beast and he easily gets objected to. And people setting up traps. In order, they think, to have anything, it's necessary for them to deprive any working thetan of the ability to make nothing out of things. That's necessary] That's what they think.
Well actually, setting this up, they're liable to make somebody rather vicious on the subject. After all, a thetan is a rather kind, helpful fellow. He's good on all of his dynamics, he's just "Ying to get along and so on. He won't do anything obstructive, really, and get obsessive on this until he conceives something to be very dangerous to him such as a theta trap or something of the sort.
And after an individual has been in a theta trap for a while and tried to make nothing out of a t eta trap, he himself will become a theta trap. See—winning valence. He can't make nothing out of it so it must be something and that something is senior to his nothing so, therefore, he is a something. And you run many people on Beingness Processing. One of the earliest things they come up with is being a theta trap, being a trap for a spirit and so on.
The body, of course, is an interesting theta trap all by itself. And the reason thetans get trapped in bodies is because of the body-type theta traps which are on the whole track. We've investigated very often in Para-Scientology the fascinating rigs whereby a thetan gets into a certain area of a certain shape and then discovers that he cannot get out. What do you mean he can't get out? Well, he can't manufacture a distance between himself and it. And that's what you mean by an inability to exteriorize. He cannot manufacture a distance between himself and it and he cannot make nothing of it. There's two things there he can't do: he can't make nothing of the thing he's occupying the same space with and he can't put a distance between himself and it. And these inabilities result in the nonexteriorizable (without Scientology) case. And that's the end of it, really.
Anything you want to know about interiorization, exteriorization and so forth are actually answered in that. He can't create the distance and is unable to make nothing out of the object. And these things mechanically summate in: he can't look, you see.
Well, he can't communicate, he thinks, because he can't become the kind of form that's trying to communicate with him. Now, a fellow—a thetan who is being communicated at, you might say, by a mountain, to form a perfect communication with the mountain would of course have to assume, at least, the idea that he had the mass of the mountain. That would be a perfect duplicate. He doesn't have to do that to communicate at all, by the way. It's enough for him to take the picture of the mountain, hence facsimiles.
And this obsession of trying to make nothing out of something then goes into the lower obsession of "must make something out of it." And we get somebody—we give them a simple process, something like that—and he immediately tailor-makes it up into one of the most complicated processes you ever heard of. See, he has to make something of it. You find out that if you gave him a slender body, he would make it a nine-foot one if he possibly could. He has to make something out of it. There is his level of operation: he has to take something of it.
Now, you ask this person to get out of a body and, of course, he can't get out of a body because he knows he has mass. Well, he's just changed his mind to this degree.
It tells you that the people who would be immediately responsible for the manufacture of theta traps must be really obsessed on the subject of making something out of things. You'd expect these people to figure-figure-figure, to use lots of systems and so forth and so they do.
It's very humorous, by the way, to conceive of the religious deities which are worshipped in the various superstitions extant today as being represented as spirits. And the entire insistence, you see, is upon there being something there. You know, they have to build a cathedral, they have to have a naked body nailed to a couple of sticks—various barbaric representations there, all of which are on the motto, "We've got to make something of it," you see?
And then they've even made something of a spirit by saying he is all over. In other words—gee! Well, supposing you ran into a preclear who was buttered all over the universe, hm? He couldn't find a place where he was not. What would you think of that preclear? He couldn't find a single place where he was not. Maybe you audited him for fifty hours very persuasively and he still was unable to find a place where he was not, anywhere in the whole universe. Well, you'd have an idea that this guy is kind of batty. Well, there's no comparison here being drawn between this type of thetan and the Christian Yahweh who is everywhere at once. I'm not trying to draw a snide comparison here because, after all, ye must be very careful of the religious beliefs of people. And if people believe that— oh, I don't know—that animal heads jump out of the ground or that you should sprinkle water on top of babies or something like this (as though babies didn't have enough water being sprinkled around), if people have these practices and so forth, you should respect these practices. Because any time you walk in on a savage rite of some sort, you're liable to get a couple of spears in you. I know, I've had a little practice in investigating barbaric cultures. So don't you go busting up any baptisms. It's dangerous. Unless, of course, you happen to be an Operating Thetan. Then, of course, you could bust up as many as you want.
But anyway, where you have this type of highly MESTy religion, you know, "We've got to have something of it," you would rather suspect that the founding fathers and so forth were dug in to a distance, depth and spread around—you wouldn't be able to get them out with a pneumatic drill, see? Therefore, are we really talking about a religion consisting of spirits? No, it immediately tells you, you couldn't possibly be looking at the level that we know and are led to believe people are looking at in the direction of spirits.
It's quite fascinating, by the way (not to abuse the subject any further, because I'm trying to talk to you about techniques). Here, however, is your levels of case. You could expect, then, somebody who had to make something out of it and was able to make nothing out of anything, you know. I mean, he could make nothing out of nothing. There wasn't a thing anywhere he could make nothing out of—not a thing. We would expect this fellow to be slid down to a realm that he would start to embrace some sort of a religion which was buttered all over the universe and sin and "Repent ye, repent ye, the kingdom of hell has just arrived" or something of that sort. You would expect this, more or less, to happen, wouldn't you? And so it is. This stands up in sanitariums and so forth. We find the fellow who is really obsessed on the subject of religion, boy, is he making something out of it like mad.
This doesn't tell you that a fellow who's simply making something out of it is in particularly bad condition. He may be simply living a package—you know, a package beingness as different than a single beingness. A person has assumed a certain beingness which has any considerations as its pertinences. You know, he hasn't put on the hat, he's put on the whole suit. He's in the valence of Uncle Benny and his consideration—the reason he is an alcoholic is simply because he's in the valence of Uncle Benny who is an alcoholic, who beats his wife, who has the interesting habit of lying in gutters all night and things like that. And that's why your preclear is doing these things. He's simply in the valence of penny. He doesn't have any independent consideration on each one of these items. He iS just in a packaged beingness, you see, which results in these considerations. He's taken' on the whole package, in other words.
One of the things that's confusing to an auditor. He'll try to shoot a computation out of a case, when actually the computation he's trying to shoot out of the case is just one of an enormous package of such computations which themselves add up to a winning valence somewhere on the track.
Well, he e's this mechanism of winning valence. There is no such thing as a nothingness winning valence, of course, because we expect it to have mass, unless we consider space itself to be a nothingness for a thetan. See, he could get into the valence of a piece of space and they very often do.
But we would expect our winning valences, then, mainly to have mass, right? And if a thetan, however, was unable to alter his space, we would consider this then—probably one of those rare winning valences—that he was in a set piece of space as a winning valence.
I've run into such a case, by the way, a fellow who was in prison for about twenty years. I processed him and he was exactly the space of his cell. He was the space of the cell, he wasn't the walls. He had gone out of contact with the walls entirely and he was being that cubical of space—an interesting thing. Well, therefore, all the space he could get was the space of that cell, which would be the winning valence of space. Well, that's a rather special case. You don't have to worry too much about that sort of thing.
But, the main thing we're getting to here is the use of this make-nothing-out-of-it process: "Give me some things you wouldn't mind making nothing out of."
Now, let's take Pop and Mama. Pop and Mama caught this kid and every time your preclear tried to (well, you know, nothing much) break a plate, pound Mama's diamond ring to pieces with a hammer, break all the dishes in the cupboard, empty out the bath water before it could be used, tear up all the magazines in the place, spill pie all over the rug so that it can't be used as a rug—standard childhood activities. Pop and Mama kept objecting to these things. They kept saying, "You've got to preserve this item, that item, this item, that item," and so on. And "You mustn't make nothing out of... You mustn't make nothing out of... You mustn't make nothing out of it."
And one day you say to your preclear, "Get a mock-up. All right." "Throw that away and get another mock-up."
And he says, "It's still there." How come it's still there? Well, he has been trained into never making nothing out of anything. And any difficulty your preclear is in—never making nothing out of space, never making nothing out of objects and never making nothing out of people.
You walk up and insult somebody and he is sure that you're trying to make nothing out of him. We get the whole computation of offended deity. You also, by the way, run into that in children. You wouldn't ordinarily look for an offended deity to take place as a computation on a six-months-old child. But he's got it bad. He has it much worse than when he is older—offended deity. You have offended a deity. He thinks of himself that way. And you can get almost any preclear rolling, if you're ever going to get him rolling on a subjective process, by having people approach below him and apologize for having offended him. You know, just have him mock-up people coming up to him and apologizing. These people immediately go down to nothing, instantly diminish to nothing.
All right. Your preclear's occlusion, of course, is this business: he can't make nothing out of blackness. This is a difficulty. He's sure of that; if he's sure of anything, he's sure of that. Actually it's: he can't throw out enough light, really, to illuminate all of this darkness. He can't make nothing out of energy, and so forth, is the persistent mock-up, the still mock-up.
Now, how would you actually get some object to diminish rapidly? You would stop it suddenly And if you could stop it suddenly enough, believe me, it would practically go up in a puff of smoke. Take a physics example of this (I'm talking about bullets this morning). If we had a bullet coming by at sixty miles an hour and we tried to stop it, it would penetrate and so forth. It might—it would generate a little heat. But let's supposing that we had a bullet coming by at sixty thousand miles an hour. Well, whatever it hit, even if it hit a tiny blade of grass, it would simply generate heat and disappear. It wouldn't even go to pieces in terms of fragments. It would just turn into a vapor. That's an interesting fact about Velocities.
Well, all right. People who have been stopped continually have a tendency to sort of geal and congeal and come down and it's a method of making nothing out of somebody. People hopefully try to stop people quick enough, you know. Your mother tells you to go and do something and says, "Oh, no. Just a moment dear, I meant..." Screech go the brakes, arid the kid stops. And he doesn't feel good afterwards.
If you've tried to stop somebody you've just sent on a mission, immediately and abruptly after you have dispatched them—they have already been willing to take your order and then you reversed the order on them—you've got a picnic on your hands. You've cut their motion Way down and, thereby, cut their mass down. It's a method of making nothing out of things: to stop them. And that's why you get all these stuck, stopped mock-ups. Quite in addition to this—this is an interweaving mechanic with this other—when you have this persisting object here that a thetan is trying to communicate with, of course, eventually, either he has to have it communicate to him (at which moment he would become an object himself or a mock-up of an object, at least) or he would have to communicate to it, which is that it would have to disappear and get to be no mass. And that is the tug of war plus this other tug of war of "Is there distance or isn't there distance?"
And people get mighty tired when they start thinking about distances, distances which make nothing out of you. Well, that would be an unbridgeable distance for you if you were a mass. Distance only becomes important when the thetan considers himself a mass. And when the thetan considers himself a mass or is trying to protect and transport a mass, distance then becomes important. So distance, oddly enough, enters in as a factor only after the make-nothing-out-of-it factor has gone by the boards. He already believes that there are tremendous numbers of things he will not be permitted to make nothing out of. This hc believes, you sec. And after that, he's having distance trouble too. Up to that time he didn't have distance trouble, see, he could transport things across distances.
Now, I imagine while this was being run on you, many of you—well, you probably picked up incidents where you were looking up at the stars and a tremendous distance staring you in the teeth there. Well, that would be only a distance to a person, you see, as he considered himself a mass. And if he considered himself a mass which would have to be transported through physical universe space, of course, this would be a mighty problem to him.
Well now, all these commands which are given in the auditing session are usable on this. And the senior commands are just making nothing out of something. "Give me some things you wouldn't mind making nothing out of" is the key command—some things, some people, so forth—that's the key command of all of that process. And any combination thereof, on the subject of distances or otherwise, should be used on your preclear if he's having some trouble now, either with mock-ups, perception or exteriorization. Now, let's get busy with that one.
If he's having a lot of trouble with mock-ups or exteriorization or perception, why, let's beat this one to death: "Give me some things you wouldn't mind making nothing of." And then its additive commands, "Give me some spaces you wouldn't mind crossing,' would be another type of space process. In other words, the important one here is "Some things you wouldn't mind making nothing of."
Also, of course, the reverse on that, a bracket application: "Some things you wouldn't mind making nothing of you." And let's see if we can't clean this up fairly rapidly, now. We've had a lot of 8-C and we've had a lot of duplication and so forth, and let's get at it hammer and tongs and clean this up even further. There are better processes, perhaps, but there are certainly no more basic processes than that one. That's a very basic process.
Now, that is used very, very severely in conjunction with 8-C Opening Procedure. That is us d very specifically in conjunction with 8-C Opening Procedure. Now, your allowable processes, then, are Opening Procedure of 8-C, Opening Procedure of 8-D, Opening Procedure by Duplication, Attention by Duplication and ARC Straightwire on the confusing universe (just adding to your tools here) and "Something you wouldn't mind making nothing out of" and any other auditing command given in this preceding hour of Group Auditing. Those are your tools. There are six of them: Opening Procedure of 8-C, Opening Procedure of 8-D—in particular, by the way, I wanted to stress this madly—your 8-C, Opening Procedure. Don't forget that one. Remembering that certainty of communication on it is quite important. And don't forget too that if you're trying for an exteriorization, that Opening Procedure of 8-D is very, very important. So those are really very, very important processes. And particularly this one: Opening Procedure by Duplication and Attention by Duplication (quite important) and then the confusing universe, Straightwire on. And the one which I just gave you: "Things you wouldn't mind making nothing of" —key command of that process.
You'd be surprised how long that process will run. Theoretically, it should run a case right on out to Clear—just that one auditing command. The only thing that hangs it up is the agreement factor on this.
Okay. You got it now?
Okay,
CERTIFICATES OF DIANETICS AND SCIENTOLOGY
BEING MADE NOTHING AND PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT 2 7ACC-08A - 30.06.54
HAVING TO BE SOMETHING