Beingness and Protection (4ACC 540324)
Series: 4th Advanced Clinical Course (4ACC)
Date: 24 March 1954
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
[Note: The original recording has periodic sound distortions.]
This is March the 24th, 1954, first morning lecture. I want to take up, here, a few more aspects on the subject of beingness and the mechanics of protection in order to further your own auditing abilities and in order, for the remainder of this week certainly, to help your cases out.
We've got a process here which is the first process I have been able to audit preclears on, to be colloquial, "standing on my head." This is so easy, as far as strain is concerned, that it is a great relief to have and use this process.
Your strain with a preclear comes on the basis of prediction. Now, let's just take up prediction as a little separate subject, here. Prediction is the ability to know the future position of particles and spots, areas of space, in relationship to each other. That's prediction. It's knowingness of the relationship of particles or spots in space.
You see that clearly. It's a very easy thing when you consider particles in motion or areas in space—points in space, spots in space—to understand randomity, automaticity, prediction and what happens to the mind. You can understand competence by this, so on.
Now, competence itself is only this: the ability to predict the particles in relationship to each other, where they will be in relationship to each other, before they are in that position and to predict the area or point or spot in space where an occurrence will or will not take place. That's competence.
Anytime somebody is going around saying, "I don't feel very competent," or anytime you have somebody around you that isn't competent, this is the anatomy of their difficulty. They are unable to predict the relative position of particles or spots in space. They just don't predict this. And as a consequence, they're continually waiting to see where the particles will be or what spots will or will not be occupied and then they know, after the fact. And so they get their time reversed and their competence goes by the board.
Let's take some dramatic profession such as a race driver's. And this individual is a competent race driver as long as he can predict the position of his car and spots in space, which is the track, and other particles, other cars; and other particles, the rails of the track; and other particles, the mud clods on the track. And when he can predict these positions accurately, he is competent and he is a competent driver and he will win races. When he's no longer able to predict these things, when he has come down the line of lots of failures in terms of prediction and when he feels defeated about it and so forth, he won't win races anymore.
Quite in addition to not winning races anymore, he will cause accidents. That is to say, he'll just sit there and let them happen. It's the difference between the car taking him around the track and him taking the car around the track. In other words, the particles begin to predict him. The spots in space predict him. He is no longer predicting the spots in space.
So we've got other-determinism entered from a standpoint of prediction. And then in the preclear we'll get this as "have to know before he goes." In other words, he has to know the spot in space before he can know what will occur in the spot in space. He has to know it before it will occur, but he only knows it after it has occurred and so he drifts back into the past.
Well, that's competence. That's also randomity. When an individual is unable to predict enormous number of spots in space, he doesn't know what's going to happen in them, he doesn't know what's going to happen in relationship to a great many things: coincidence of particles—what particles are going to come together, what particles are going to separate apart, what's going to happen with these particles. When he is unable to do this, he has too much randomity. Randomity is the ratio of predicted to unpredicted motion. It's just a ratio, that's all.
Now, this individual can predict what is going to happen on his front doorstep as the limit of his prediction. Therefore, anything else in the yard, in the street, back of the house, above the house, below the house—all of those spots are random spots. They're spots which he's not going to predict. You see that? They're spots then which can predict him. He doesn't know what's going to happen on them. His general state of knowingness will be very foggy, he will have a tendency to go into boil-off, he'll have a tendency to do a lot of things, every time he comes up against a lot of unpredictable spots.
People get so bad off that they expect lions and tigers to jump on them in the middle of New York City. You know, they'd just be walking down—they'd think it was perfectly reasonable that a lion would spring on them at 42nd and Broadway. This is the most reasonable thing possible. They think it would be totally reasonable, while they're riding along in a train, for the train all of a sudden to fill up full of lemonade—totally reasonable. They think it would be totally reasonable to be driving a car across the Arizona desert and pull up at a filling station on Mars.
They're just unpredicted, see. Everything is unpredicted. They go down to a point of such total unprediction that anything, then, can occur and they're just in an apathy about their environment. This is delusion or hallucination.
Well, as long as a person has an idea that the town is going to remain the town, why, he's all right. You know, it's going to be the town and the people in the town are still going to be the people in the town. Well, that's a sort of a make-break point. He knows this.
Now, we go above that point, he knows the people in the town, and the town, and he's going—he can predict what is going to happen to several people in this town. He knows where they're going to be and he knows what they're going to do. These spots in space, these corners of streets and that sort of thing, he knows what's going to occur on those, he's pretty sure.
You're pretty sure right now that on the main avenue, here, that runs through the center of the city, that the traffic will keep moving on that avenue the rest of the afternoon. You're quite comfortable about that.
Well, when a person starts to go by the boards, the thought of the main artery of a town might bring in with it the fact that there's going to be a parade of snakes coming down that. This would seem totally likely—not necessarily reasonable, just totally likely.
In order to understand the conduct of somebody who is a little bit fogged-up, whose competence is off, you know—let's look at that competence, Tone Scale and so forth. This person, when you take him out on the golf links, what's the test? You take him out on the golf links, you're going to show him how to play golf. "Well, you put the ball down on the tee." And when he puts the ball down on the tee, it keeps rolling off, you know? He puts it on, it rolls off; and puts it on, it rolls off; and puts it on, it rolls off.
And finally he props it up rather painfully and he takes ahold of his club and he swishes it through the air and it goes ahead of the ball and behind the ball and almost hits the ball and stubs into the ground back of the ball. And he finally gets it beautifully lined up and tops the ball and it rolls two feet, cutting the cover of the ball deeply.
What would you expect of this fellow? Do you know that it's perfectly reasonable to such a guy, it's perfectly reasonable that as he walked down the fairway, the ground would suddenly open up and his grandmother, eighteen feet tall, would suddenly say good morning to him. This would not be an unlikely thing.
If you were to ask him this rather quickly and say, "Is that liable to happen?" "Well," he'd say, "hmm, well, of course you really never know. I suppose it could. It doesn't sound too... Well, it hasn't... Well, there's no reason why it couldn't... Well, I guess so." What do you know. This is the kind of a mental reaction.
Now, you've got overlaying this a tremendous social mechanical action going on all the time. It's the social training response of the individual—very, very stimulus-response. It's just a machine walking along there. If he's that lousy with a golf ball, if he's that terrible in his ability to make the head of a club hit the ball, there is a direct measure of his competency: prediction of particles, spot in space, see. Directly. All right.
He's got a social mechanism. What you will find out with him in conversation is that as long as you stay in the exact grooves that fit the machine, you can have social concourse with this individual.
You say, "How are you?"
He says, "Fine."
And by the way, you can also spot these people because they give a constant response to that, regardless of their condition. There are some people, you know, you walk up to them and you say, "How are you?" and they say, "Fine." You see them the next day and they're in the hospital, they've been banged up and they... "Fine." And you see them a few weeks later and they've just gone through bankruptcy or something and you say, "How are you?" they say, "Fine, fine." They’re just always "fine, fine." That's just a button. That's the button that replies when you say, "How are you?" But this passes for social intercourse.
So we say to this individual, "How are you?"
He says, "I'm fine."
You say, "How's your car doing, how's your car going? It's a nice, new car."
"Yes, I just got it. I read it—got it on the TV." He can carry along quite a program here. You say—let's say he's an accountant in his work, you talk about accountancy and he will tell you that he was able to balance the month's accounts all right and he feels pretty good about that and there's an accountant opening an office down the street. And you say, "You like Glockenspiel Beer?" And he says yes, that's pretty good beer, but he himself, he prefers, actually, Spielenglock Beer because he's seen that on television more often.
And you can carry on and you think apparently you're associating with somebody. He's just going along all right. He'll carry along all the responses. But all of a sudden—all of a sudden something really occurs in his life. Something happens where suddenly he is minus his house—it burned down. Or his wife ran off with his friend or his kid all of a sudden got hit by a car and killed or something happens that's very unpredicted, you see. This guy is a gone dog. He's gone, right there. He cannot take that in stride. He has no compensation for it. A new set of factors have been entered into the machinery which he can't adjust, mostly because he isn't adjusting the machinery.
Now, you see him after this, this new fact is playing in there all the time and there's a tremendous amount of apathy and upset and so forth. He's just gone downhill that much more.
Tone Scale. What's occurring? This fellow is going on down. He's started into a mechanical reaction standpoint. He stopped predicting particles. He started to let machinery predict particles for him. Automobiles started taking him down the road.
That's kind of the point of entrance. Everything kind of was moving him around. He wasn't moving anything around.
Everything new, Mama and Papa took care of him and his professors at college took care of him and everybody took care of him and he moved in the groove of the society and the society cared for its own. And then all of a sudden one day an atom bomb drops on the joint and the exact grooves of the machine he's running in, called life, are disrupted. He can't adjust.
He'll just go and sit down and cry or he'll just go into a catatonic state. Or all of his machinery might blow up, lacking stimulus-response, and he might become an entirely different individual. He might all of a sudden, on necessity level, surge forward, take control, command of the situation, start to build a flock of new machines and so on. This would be the latent capability of the individual.
But it isn't very likely you would find this happening in somebody who was playing that kind of a golf game that I just described to you. You can look around you, look at your drivers going down the road and you can spot those that are going to have accidents. You can spot them with great ease. They don't drive with precision. They're very sloppy. The road is something that is running the car, which is running them. And they rock from one side of the road to the other. They're over close to a white line and then they're over close to the edge. Not very wide, you see. They just don't maintain a constant distance from the edge. And if they rocked over closer to the white line, it would be because the car took them over there. And if they went over closer to the edge, it would be because the car took them over there.
And now a stoplight is something that is a signal to the car. It connects immediately with the foot pedal, which connects with the leg. And the stoplight goes on, this then causes the foot pedal to depress, which causes the leg to depress, which causes the fellow, then, to know that he has stopped because of the light. It's a fact.
If you were to put a purple caution light in the place of the yellow and if you were to put a very vivid violet in place of the green and you were to change this without having told everybody in the newspapers and spread it wide—at one corner, on any corner in town you would find more cars piling up there than you'd care to stay around and watch hauled off. It'd just be the wrong response.
Now, it would really get gruesome if you turned the lights sideways, so they couldn't tell which was the top light and which was the bottom light. You see, if they just moved over here horizontally, well, this would be grim. Just that much change, you see, would stop those brake pedals from depressing, which would depress the leg, which would cause the guy to decide to stop the car.
Now, there is an example of automaticity in relationship to competence. See these two things in relationship, now? As the individual ceases to predict particles, the particles begin to predict him. As the individual ceases to predict the spots of space and occurrences thereon, then they begin to predict him—if he's still giving them his attention.
Now, this is automatic machinery. That's how automatic machinery builds up. The individual is swamped in some incident by other-determinism. He's just swamped by it. He's overcome by the surroundings or environment. Crushed by it. After that, he recognizes the power of the environment.
And the more times it occurs that his surroundings and his environment crush him, then the more times he has conceded, he has had the opinion that the environment could override his decisions. And he gets to a point where he actually believes that the environment makes the decisions. He's not making any decisions to be overridden. It's impossible for him to do that. But the environment makes the decisions.
Now, people who are in the condition, who played that kind of a golf game I described there, would not find it surprising that fields had an opinion, that trees had opinions, that motors had opinions. If you were to tell them that motors were able to mock-up angels and so forth, they wouldn't believe you if that didn't fit in the groove.
But if you were really talking to the guy himself, it didn't fit in any stimulus-response mechanism, you would find that he would be not quite able to reject the statement, almost any kind of a ridiculous statement like that: that a motor was capable of this and that, that a motor wanted things, that, well, it's alive, it's probably more alive than he is. It predicts him all the time—changes him in space. So, of course, it has opinions.
You ask some truck driver what are the political opinions of his motor. Well, he'd probably try to figure out whether it was Democrat or Republican, Communist, before he'd catch himself and suddenly say, "What the hell are you talking about? It doesn't have any political opinions." He'd get kind of mad then, see, in an effort to throw this thing off.
But you ask some little kid this, he's perfectly willing to fit it into his frame of reference. You say, "Motors have opinions." Okay, he'll fit that into his frame of reference. It's an instantaneous postulate. Sure, he can assume this. He can assume anything. It's perfectly all right with him for motors to have opinions. So he goes around and his kiddie car and his bicycle have opinions and his bicycle easily becomes Trigger, Roy Rogers' horse. Great ease. Broomsticks, before that, could become elephants.
And he could grant the beingness to things. That's fine. Nothing wrong with that at all. Well, he can predict lots of particles in space so he is able to be very ample about the whole thing. He can predict all sorts of things, because he doesn't feel insecure about it. He isn't carefully predicting all the time. He's relaxed.
Now, we get him the other way around. He becomes disabused of the fact that the broomstick is an elephant. Somebody disabuses him of this fact. Of course, it's very hard to disabuse him of this fact. They challenge him.
In other words, the environment starts to overcome him. And as the environment overcomes him, why, then certain things in the environment, such as broomsticks, take on a fixed symbol for him which is foisted off on him. Something has granted the symbol beingness which he must then agree to. This is other-determined beingness. After that a broomstick is a broomstick, a bicycle is a bicycle.
You could throw somebody into neurosis if you were to take them forcefully and make them agree to the standard value of all the objects and symbols in their environment—you were just forcefully to make them to agree to this. If you were to take them and tell them, "Now, that wall is a green wall. Now, you agree that it's a green wall? It is a green wall. It is nothing else than a green wall and it is solid and impenetrable."
Beat them down on the subject, beat them down, beat them down. That's a green wall, solid, impenetrable, so on. "That is a doorway. It is the only place in the room where you can go in and out of the room, is that door." It might come to you rather surprising that you wouldn't normally think of a window as a method of ingress and egress. Well, it's a hole in a wall—a body can get through it. It's easier to walk through the door, but a window is an area of ingress and egress.
A little kid thinks this instantly. "Window? Well, that's the place where you can get in and out of the room." No. After a while he thinks, "A window is the place where light and air come in and you go in and out of the room by the door."
What happens, then, in terms of training? You've made him agree to tremendous numbers of symbols. You've made him agree, on a second echelon, to words representing these symbols. And he gets one more step down the line, the words represent the symbols and after a while the words, by golly, will become as solid as the symbols. And then he goes into general semantics. That's right. There's your boy with his concern about words.
He knows the symbol is powerful, so the symbol can grant power. That is to say, the object is powerful and it can then, by its power, grant as much power to the word and the word then has, eventually, more power than the object. And this is just the environment overcoming the fellow, little by little by little by little.
Why? He's started to back off from the environment and the more he backs off from the environment, the more willing he is to have some sort of a detached, jacklegged communication system which doesn't put him up against any of the objects in the environment—doesn't put him up against the environment itself at all.
He's got some communication system whereby he doesn't have to look at, be part of, run into, confront or inspect the environment. He is so convinced that he can't predict what's going to happen to that wall that it's much better for him to handle a thing which is a bunch of sound vibrations or printing "w-a-l-l" or the sound "wall" than it is for him to handle that wall over there.
So that wall overcomes him to the point where it can simply put up a little sound vibration and the sound vibration itself becomes solid. See this? It's solid to him as far as he's concerned. It's as solid as the wall.
And then as people make speech painful to him—you know, they back him up against the wall and they talk to him. He has a first sergeant that talks to him, he's got a wife that talks to him. She's got a husband that talks to her and speech, speech, speech. Speech itself is overcoming him. Well, it's deriving its power from the fact that it represents objects and power•
And speech itself starts to overcome him to a point where he eventually just backs off from speech. So he starts in by avoiding points in space. Then he starts avoiding the particles which he hasn't been able to determine—they determine him, he doesn't determine them. Then, when the particles are unpredictable, he begins to specialize in solid objects which don't move easily. And when they become unpredictable, he begins to specialize in the symbols which represent those objects.
And when those symbols become unpredictable, he of course is driven back to the solidity of the symbol itself and he refuses to talk. You see? He's just driving back down the ling, you might say, away from our natural contact with the environment.
Now, what's eating? You think that's a non sequitur. It's not a non sequitur at all, here. Eating is a method of getting some of the MEST universe which has been inspected by many communication systems to a point where you know it's very safe.
You know, the amount of sand and gravel which you imbibe is very slight. You don't imbibe much sand and gravel. When you do, you complain about it. And yet what are you actually doing when you get right up against the physical universe—sand, gravel?
Well, you can't have sand and gravel in that form. It's got to be all refined and changed and there's lots of reasons why. But let's look at the basic reason why: it's a withdrawal from an ability to actually have or contact that stuff over there. And an individual gets earlier and further and more and more distance from actually eating a mouthful of sand. He can't do it. This is one thing he'd be terribly convinced of. He could not live by shoving silicon into his gullet.
Well, yet he's doing it by remote control. He's shoving silicon and sunlight and water into his gullet, and a few other minerals, via grass and the cow that ate the grass and the guys that process cows and the market that sells cow meat and all the way on down. And via the cook, the oven, the heat has got to purify it.
And oh, man, you talk about mystic rites of how we eat some sand and gravel, minerals and water and sunlight. Well look, they're all sitting there. I mean, if you've got to have these things in order to survive... The only reason, you see, a fellow thinks he has to have these things in order to survive is simply because they have overcome his environment so often—his own person so often—that of course these are terribly necessary to him. It's obvious, because they're always overcoming him, so therefore he has to have them, obviously. Well, then, he just graduates on away from them to a point of where all this mystic mumbo jumbo has to be gone through before he can go on and live.
These are all licenses to survive. Eating is: Grass—the gravel and the sand and the sunlight and the water gave to the lichen and the moss the right to survive. And the lichen and the moss give grass the right to survive, because they're the first things that make soil.
The grass comes along, utilizes that partially worked soil, then the grass gives the cow the right to survive the cow gives the slaughterhouse the right to survive and eventually the A&P gives you the right to survive via whoever cooks for you. License to survive. This is all a graduated scale.
Now, mainly we're talking about the body's universe. Boy, it's an awful long way from that graduated scale of disconnected, connected, super-reasonable, utterly rational, terribly complex communication systems, to a thetan able to create his own energy, his own space. There's quite a difference between those two things, isn't there?
And yet the road of that difference is a continuing failure to predict the position of particles or points in space and continuing this failure to a point where an individual has to have them predicted for him more and more and more, more, more, more and more. And finally he's that far detached and he's that far overcome.
Well, let's look at very, very early now. How the devil did a guy get into that kind of a shape? How did he get into the kind of shape where he has to have a body to do his living for him? You talk about wasting living, a thetan really does when he has a body doing his living for him.
How'd he get into that kind of shape? Very simple really. His first step was making some space and then depending on the space. That cut down his knowingness. And his next step was making some energy and then depending upon the energy.
It's all right for him to make all the energy he wants to. But to make it and then depend upon it and then to get that confused with other pieces of energy and then to consider that the energy is senior to himself—you know, he's nothing and the energy is something and that something is more important than the nothing.
And then to, one by one, accumulate other spaces, other pieces of energy and to get them in confluence with other spaces and other pieces of energy—and we go on into a complex system that makes itself up to be this physical universe, the thetan and all of his various lives and so forth.
Well, the common denominator of all this is protection. It wouldn't seem like this was possible, but it is. He made the piece of energy and then he protected it. Well, why did he protect it? Must have been under attack. Anything he protected must have been under attack. But earlier than that, anything he protects must have, he conceived, attacked him. He had to start controlling something because he couldn't predict it. Therefore it was flouting his prediction. So therefore, he had to grab it real tight.
When he grabbed it real tight, he had to assume that he was it. And having assumed that he was it, of course, it to some degree was senior to him. He starts in then, and the only place he really starts going downhill is when he starts protecting, protecting, protecting.
Well, how does he get into protection? Here's what's known as self-justification. Justification. He says look—it's got him, it's got him but thoroughly, you see. In order to maintain any scrap of self-determinism, he has to pretend that he's got it. And because he can't do anything to it, he has to and does make the postulate that he's protecting it.
He can't do anything to it, well, the obvious explanation for the reason why he can't do anything to it or destroy it or knock it out, well, he must be protecting it, mustn't he? That's a very, very shifty little piece of logic in there that lies on the track in any thetan's track who has gotten down here into this level of universe. See that?
Actually, you've got sort of the idea of Mama has this little boy by the scruff of the neck and has him about three feet off the floor. She's just beaten him into jelly, see, and he is saying, "Well, the reason I don't knock her out and make mincemeat out of her is because she, after all, is my mother and I'm supposed to love her and therefore, I'm really protecting her. She has these rages and there's lots of explanation as to why she goes into these rages and actually I've got to protect my mother." Huh! Who's protecting who? But this is his chain of logic.
Now, this is inherent in life. I want to give you a little—a grimy, muddy little incident which turned up very early in my investigations, which might be of interest to you, that I got out of a preclear. It was a girl. She had run rather wild as a tomboy and she got into some kind of an altercation with some fellow who was very far from sane. He owned a lot of machinery, tractors and things like that, on a farm and he and she were always arguing with each other, see. She was very young. He didn't want her around the place and so forth.
And one day, why, he up and took a whip to, and badly cut up, her pup—little dog. See—oh, real mean, lots of justification. By the way, this preclear wasn't sane, the time I started processing this preclear—was afterwards. She turned around and got some buckets of water and threw it all over the machinery and wheeled some of the machinery—she was only about fourteen when this was happening—wheeled some of the machinery out into the rain so it'd get good and rusty, at a time when she knew he was going to be gone for two or three days.
Well, he came back home and found this machinery all rusty. She yah-yah-yah'd at him over the fence and was misguided enough to get within reach. He took her and he tied her front hands together and hung her over a fence post and he took some copper wire, about fourteen-gauge copper wire and he whipped her for about an hour. She bore the scars straight on through. Those cuts must have been somewhere in the neighborhood, most of them, about a half an inch deep. Real messy, huh?
Well, when she came to, she went off by herself and was missing for about five days. She laid under a bridge culvert and then turned up and so forth. And her mother and father, well, they're kind of weird people, they didn't pay too much attention to this. They thought that she'd been hurt in some fashion or another. And these cuts had stopped bleeding and that sort of thing and she had a tendency to kind of hide the whole incident. No satisfactory explanation.
I was running the incident and she went into a grief charge. Now, you would think, you know, "We're going to be rational now, we're going to be reasonable about this whole thing." We're going to say, "Of course, she went into a grief charge because she was being punished." Oh no. "Well, she went into a grief charge because her beauty was being spoiled, because her body was being scarred." Oh no. Well, you say, "She went into a grief charge because... hmm! Well, all right, why the hell did she go into a grief charge?" She went into a grief charge because it must have been so hard on the man. And her level of protection for farmers had led her into two places: one, the state legislature, and the other, insanity. Boy, was she protecting farmers. Oh man. She was violent on the subject. You couldn't lay your hands on a farmer. Oh no. All because of what? Because one beat her within an inch of her life. That's not reasonable, is it?
Now, you've run Beingness Processing and you know what reasonability is and how reasonable reasonability is and so forth. Well, it isn't.
Well, right at that point of impact, you get a reversal. You get a shift of valence, you get the winning-valence phenomenon. And right along with the winning valence phenomenon goes protection of the object.
The thetan never has any problems of his own. You can ask a preclear in vain to get any kind of action out of Double Terminaling or Match Terminaling "my problems." You can have him put them up, you'll get a little action on it, he'll think of a problem or two.
Compared to Match Terminaling or Double Terminaling "other people's problems," and all of a sudden, wang-nwng, boom-boom, you get energy interchanges and so forth, on a medium preclear where you get that kind of action. All kinds of automaticities turn on, zoom-zoom, bing-bing-bing, other people's problems. Well, they're protecting other people.
Well, protection is the first rational step out of a complete shift of valence. That's as close as you can get to being reasonable after a winning valence has taken place. And it is the justified explanation of why—in this girl's case—why she didn't immediately go down to the sheriff's office and have the guy thrown in jail, why she didn't go over to her father's house and get a shotgun and come back and kill him, why she didn't stay out of his reach in the first place. All of these are answered by the fact that she didn't do any of these things, so there must be a reasonable explanation as to her conduct. And that reasonable explanation is, she's protecting him. See?
Well now, this is the kind of manifestation you will find when you hit rock-bottom incidents on the track. We're only interested in rock-bottom incidents. We're interested in those stopped places in the thinking machines, those places where complete identification has taken place. We're interested in those places. Well, we hit those places with Beingness Processing and we hit their processing level intimately, then, as we go on the basis of Where Things Are Safe.
Now, you'll notice when you run something like "where doctors are safe," very often your preclear... "Well, where doctors are safe: that's right where I'm sitting, that's the only place; well, maybe one inch to the other side of my right ear, one inch to the other side of my left ear, maybe that's it; within two inches of my nose. They're safe there, but they're not safe anyplace else." In other words, this protection is terribly obsessive so that they protect, right on straight down the line, the very things which have overcome them on the track.
Well, that's gruesome maybe and very grim, but that is the mechanism which gets the thetan into this kind of a genetic and universe track. That's what occurs.
Now, where you have a preclear—occasionally you run into this with this process—you have a preclear in rage, barely held-back rage against something or someone. You've got such an emotional charge sitting on top of this that you have to fish around for quite a while before you find something he's actually protecting. You'll find that is underlying his rage.
But he is en route to a new cycle where he is being slowly overcome by his environment. And his environment has just worked him up to the point of being rage and just on the other side of this point is, he's going to protect whatever he just this moment is mad at. See, he hasn't made the cycle yet, but there you've got a slow look at it.
There are many things which this individual is still protecting, but you'd be processing, to some degree, through this rage charge. See, there are rage flares and then goes down into covert hostility and then goes down from no sympathy into protect. And the only places that are dangerous in the bank, and the only real jams, are the places which are below apathy. And you get these out that are way below apathy and your preclear starts to come back to battery.
The bulk of your preclear, as you pick him up, is below zero on the Tone Scale. That is to say, the thetan is below zero. Well, this is how you process below zero. Occasionally, you'll find the individual sitting in a body which is well above zero, as most of them are, and very angry about some sort of a situation. But if this were the case, you would handle it—rather than trying to change this processing, rather than to try to change the processes around and do some other processes and so forth—you would handle it in the same procedure line that I was talking to you about earlier, which is the procedure line of Opening Procedure and so on.
Well, we find our preclear isn't responding very well, all of a sudden we find out—he just isn't responding very well—we could find out and should handle a present time problem. That present time problem is impeding the rest of the case. He's so concerned about some present time something or other, some present time problem so pressing, that he cannot actually concentrate hard enough on anything bul that problem in order to be processed. You see that?
Now, the test of that is if you've audited him on a little Opening Procedure and he appears to be quite impatient and other-minded about it and you try him on a little bit of SOP 8-C and he seems to be still impatient, nervous, his attention doesn't fix easily on what he's doing, he's got one of two conditions: One, he's not in terrible shape, but he's got a tremendously pressing present time problem. And the other one is he's psychotic, in a dramatized problem and that, to all intents and purposes, is his present time problem. So it's either what you would consider a reasonable present time problem or a psychotic present time problem. Both of them add up to a present time problem.
Well, as you started to run this process on him, of Where Things Were Safe, and if you'd run it for a very short time, you weren't getting anyplace, you again would be tripping over this present time problem. See, there would be many ways for you to discover whether or not he had one of these either rational or psychotic present time problems—many ways for you to discover it.
It's just the fact that his attention isn't quite on it. He appears to be very impatient, he sort of darts off from anything that you try to do anything with. And the process of making things safe and so forth, if you were to work it on him for five minutes and he wasn't getting anyplace, he hadn't suddenly alerted to something, you would recognize in existence a present time problem which was very pressing.
Let him handle it. How would you handle it? What process would you use to handle it? Well, you would use mock-ups. You would use Duplication, you could duplicate the problem many times. You could handle it, as I said, mock-ups—Creative Processing. You could, because you can afford to squander a little bit of energy of the preclear's—at such a state, when you aren't doing anything else—you could give him Matched Terminals of the personnel involved.
I processed a young girl one time who had just gotten married and she was utterly convinced that her husband's secretary was going to cause a rift. Well, she was so convinced of this that she was in a frantic state and, in trying to audit her, trying to get her attention on anything one found her springing up off the couch, flinging herself down in the chair suddenly, very impatient, you know, very apprehensive, very nervous. So she was very keyed-up.
Well, this isn't a very chronic state with a preclear unless it's taking place in present time. It could be a past situation which the preclear believes completely is in present time, which again makes it a present time problem, or it's an actual pressing problem.
Her concentration was very, very bad, very poor. And so I asked her, because her husband had sent her over asking me as a personal favor if I couldn't do something about her. He was afraid she was going to commit suicide. She'd been threatening to and so forth. And she'd only been married about a week. And she just didn't look like a person who was mad, insane. She was sequitur and so on. A rather pretty girl.
And so I started talking to her about this and that and, boy—shame, you see, there was some kind of a shame on a problem—it would be an insult to her ability or beauty as a woman if she couldn't hold a man and all that sort of thing. Well, I picked the lock on it, saying that, well, it must be some kind of a present time situation.
Well, what's just happened to her? She's gotten married. Therefore, it must be something connected with the marriage. First thing one would suspect, of course, that it had to do with a first marital intercourse or something and that there'd been something very violent in that. But I didn't pay any attention much to that, rather than just asking her, and all of a sudden she just couldn't hold back the problem.
She said, "Well, right—right after we came back (we had a three-day honeymoon), he went down to the office and he stayed at work till eight o'clock that evening and his secretary was there with him." And she stated this with her voice under less and less control, see, until she was just screaming.
"Okay," I said. "Okay." This is just the basis of, "Here I've thrown myself away and here I'm married to somebody and this is what my married life is going to be and it's nothing like I was ever taught," you know, that kind of a computation.
Just had her Match Terminal the secretary, that's all. And boy, trying to get her to concentrate long enough to do that was rough. She wanted to get data, data, facts, spin, jump, swish. But I was satisfied I had that present time problem nailed, see, because it was all she was talking about, even when she'd fly out of the process.
Finally got her to steady up those two secretaries. And by the way, she wasn't getting good mock-ups of this secretary. We had to build this secretary, shoe by shoe, while she was practically spitting on the rug. We finally got two secretaries—same secretary—facing each other, the two mock-ups. Terrific action, see. And we finally got to where we could get the secretary and the husband, you know, a couple facing a couple. Zing, zing, see, fireworks and so on.
And then she went down into complete apathy, boom, see. And I just made her do it some more and made her do it some more—total process was—occupied maybe fifteen minutes. Some more, some more, some more.
She says, "Here's something very peculiar. You know, I'm almost certain that my father had a secretary. You know, that's a very funny thing. You see, my father left my mother before I was born. I wouldn't know anything about it, then, would I?" Well, so she's thinking, so what? So we put up the secretary a couple of times and the husband a couple of times more and add her in, Match Terminal. And all of a sudden she just did not care about the problem.
Almost any present time problem, beyond being stood up against the wall with a knife at your throat, isn't enough worry to think about. The present time problems people have are exaggerated simply to the degree that they exaggerate them. And this case, then, went right on and ran perfectly, smoothly, everything went along beautifully. Settled down, so forth.
Suicide impulses: we found out her mother had tried to take her life several times.
And then we found out, very oddly, that her mother tried to kill her several times. But otherwise than this, she was supposed to die. This was all this added up to. So the appearance of the secretary somehow or other connected with death. We don't care whether it was reasonable or not. And the girl came back to battery, got in very good condition, was about twice as good looking as before and everything was all right.
This didn't take much auditing to do this, simply because one recognized that one couldn't go into any devious or bad data on the backtrack or anything like that. There was a present time problem staring one right in the teeth, so one handled it any way he could: Creative Processing, Matched Terminals— didn't matter how crude—moving around postulates, just duplicating the problem many times, being other personnel connected with the problem. You could just think of more ways to do this, you see. These are all Emergency Assists.
Well, your preclear is somebody who needs first aid—first aid before you can get down to the surgery. And the funny part of it is a lot of the surgery comes up the second you administer the first aid.
So what would be your symptom of somebody really worrying about a present time problem? Your first symptom would be that the routine, rather quiet techniques of Opening Procedure 8-C and finding Where Things Are Safe wouldn't be effective. That is to say, there was an ineffectiveness going on here. Well, that ineffectiveness is not inherent in the techniques. That's nothing—praise of the techniques, this is just the fact of the case. What you're doing is talking to somebody who is out of communication because everything is being communicated through a set bunch of data—all this data is right there, just lying right there, bing.
Well, if you were to ask them, engage them in conversation, they're liable to give you some sort of an answer like this: you've gone through three or four minutes, ten minutes of Opening Procedure, you found out you couldn't get their attention very well, but they would go through it. And you went through a few lines of 8-C and, well, they couldn't get—but they went through it all right.
And you ask them things. They say, well, they couldn't really find anything like that. I mean, they're brushing all this aside, you see. You must be filtering through one of these stop spots. You're on a stop spot at that moment, see. You can't audit a stop spot with any kind of rational auditing at all. They're just stopped right there.
But you'll find out people on the street out here would run the same way. Let's take some girl immediately after her boss has said to her, "If you don't improve, you are going to get your pink slip Friday." That's all he said. And you pick her up right after she steps out of the office or anytime that morning and you start to audit her. You'll find out everything is going through present time.
Well, you want to get the person into—there's the mechanic of it—you want to get the person into present time. Present time has proven a very unpredictable place. It's just now been proven to be completely unpredictable and therefore present time is a place you certainly want to avoid, particularly this present time, right here, right now, this environment and these spots of space, Let's avoid them, And that includes you, the auditor.
So the second your preclear lets you, the auditor, fall into the classification of something to be avoided, you know they must be avoiding present time like mad.
Well, there must be some pressure on present time—big pressure on it, one way or the other, which to them is quite real and actual. You'll find out any preclear who doesn't advance very rapidly under quiet, rather permissive techniques is trying to run like hell. And you're just trying to hold him there, make him stand still long enough to get audited. Well, you certainly better find out immediately what's making him want to run like the devil, because you'll find out it's something that's sitting right in present time.
It's something like the fact that if you were doing this in a sanitarium—I'm not inferring to you by just repeating sanitarium, I'm just giving you the temporariness of insanity. See, anybody can be insane. If you've ever been mad during the last year, you were insane for a couple of moments. There's nothing wrong with being insane. (As a matter of fact you'd have to be, to be in this universe.)
Anyway—just a temporary condition, momentary. How did you feel a couple of minutes after some girl or some guy said, "No, I don't want anything more to do with you"? You've been going with him for quite some time—"No, I don't want anything more to do with you." You were sure neurotic for the next half-hour, if not the next day or two.
So you find the preclear is unable to concentrate and so forth, then it must be like he's trying to run like the devil out of present time. He's got to run out of present time, this is really no place to go to. Well, there would be lots of ways to handle this, even "Where he's safe." Find some places where he's safe.
Well, boy, he's not safe in present time. He's certainly not safe being audited. There's no more significance to it than that. There's no more reasonable to it—reasonableness. He is unable to predict what is occurring right in present time. He's—just been proven to him. So it's very dangerous to be there. Doesn't matter where he is in present time.
Now, some preclear who is waiting on a decision: Let's take somebody who is waiting to be told whether or not he's just been drafted. We're auditing young America. The government set up a beautiful anxiety and the colleges and high schools set up another one: "Will I pass?" is the educational anxiety that's set up in them. And "Will I go into the service?" is the one the government has set up for them.
They'll get the girls on this sooner or later, you wait. They've got to have some way to get a total 100 percent slavery going. Universal military training: it's a great thing for a country, great thing. Ruins all the initiative of all youth and then everybody can be part of the welfare state.
Anyway, when you get universal military training orders about to arrive in your young preclear's hands—are they going to get there, aren't they going to get there? Is he 4-F or isn't he 4-F? Or did his marriage and the fact that he's now had five kids, did this have any influence with the government? What is going to be...? What is his future? What is his future? What is his future?
He's saying all the time, "I cannot predict the coincidence of particles or the spots in space. And it's right now that I can't predict. It's right now and I've got to know which way to go and I don't know which way to go." Boy, everything looks awful random to him—terrifically random.
So anything you say is random, too. You just said something and it's terrifically random. You didn't have any reason for saying it. You said, "Give me three places where you're not." He'd just as soon, then, get six pairs of shoes he doesn't own. Why? Well, you didn't have any rationale, you're not predictable, so you can't predict either. You don't know whether you're 4-F or not. You know, the whole environment is just all fogged-up.
His problem is everybody's problem. Everybody is having the same problem. He gets an identification with everything. He's trying to escape, he can't escape. He's right there inexorably going forward into present time. See that? So he dodges. But he dodges only on these two levels: one, present time problem he can't care for, and the other one a psychotic problem so strong that it has become present time.
You go into a sanitarium, you're liable to find somebody there, you can't audit this person worth a nickel. They keep running around and screaming. You can't get them pinned down. You could ask them several times, "What is troubling you right this moment?" They probably would not get into that much communication with you because they know you must be crazy.
But if you were very, very good at it and if you could nail them down long enough, and particularly if you put an E-Meter in their hands, you would find it was something like this: there is a live volcano keeps appearing in the middle of the floor and throwing lava all over the room. Obviously, you can't be calm while all this is going on. See, there is the totality of being overcome by the environment.
Now, the present time environment has become terrifically unpredictable and they've found out the only place they could be safe was in the past, so they ran into the past like mad, because the present time was so dangerous. They go into the past because that is much, much safer—even while they're being hanged in the past is safer, even while they're being bombarded with a live volcano is obviously safer.
Just like you find someplace—the only place he can be safe is in a grave. The only place where mother can be safe—and boy is she safe there—is hanging by her neck from a lamppost. She's real safe, yeah, the fellow will tell you this.
Well, he's gone back into the past, you see, to get real safe. Or he's gone out of this universe to get real safe. And he doesn't care where he's gone to, as long as he's in a good secure position. It makes him very secure to do this and suddenly that turns unpredictable. See, his first impulse is perfectly—"Everything was calm in the past and I lived a beautiful, enjoyable life." People who have had a lot of hard luck sit around and talk about their childhoods.
So we look back—he looks back and all of a sudden, doggoned if he doesn't run into this volcano in the past, and now he can't escape from that. He's escaped from the present time, now he can't even escape from the past. He's pinned there and that is insanity.
You'll find it's a present time problem that the roaring insane pose so that you can't audit them. With these reservations, then, and with this skill, you'll find that the techniques which you have at hand will resolve cases for you. But it isn't a technique to be used by somebody who won't think and won't communicate with a preclear and who won't understand problems. Okay.
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