Evaluation (4ACC 540317)
Series: 4th Advanced Clinical Course (4ACC)
Date: 17 March 1954
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
And this is morning lecture, March 17th, 1954.
On this matter of evaluation, or on the matter of evaluation, we find that we have an individual in the state of beingness where he is on the one hand able to run on some of his own evaluations, but on the other hand where many evaluations are being enforced upon him.
Self-determinism in terms of data could be stated as making a postulate as to what's true, and that's true. And other-determinism in terms of data could be defined as something else giving a direction, making a postulate and saying what's true.
And when an individual agrees continually with other-determinism, then he is in a position where he has accepted other-determinism as his own beingness. So his own beingness is other-determinism and he himself runs on a more or less stimulus-response activity.
This is the behavior of an automatic machine.
An ENIAC, a UNIVAC, an electronic brain is built to receive stimuli and to codify responses based on the stimuli received. Other-determinism is apparent throughout. The machine has no self-determinism.
It was built by something else, on somebody else's design, and it gives answers for somebody else. The data is supplied by others. This is a machine.
When you say "machine" you could as well say "a stimulus-response mechanism created, operating and running on other-determinism than its own." In other words, no self-determinism. That would be a machine.
All right. Let's take a preclear. If he's able to make a postulate and say that it's true, he's running on his own determinism.
If he has to find out what factors that postulate has to agree with, in order for him to have a postulate which is true, he is to that degree running on other-determinism. You know, he makes a postulate. He said, "All eggs are green." Now he thinks, "Well, let me see—uh... um... I don't know all eggs are green... I—I don't know—never saw a green egg... hm." So he says to somebody just as a test, "You know all eggs are green."
The fellow says, "You're crazy."
"Well," he says, "okay, eggs aren't green,"
Been talked out of his own statement. There's no reason why all eggs shouldn't be green. Of course, if he's talking about eggs which he isn't determining and if he expects agreement with these eggs and if he expects these eggs to feed machines which feed machines which go back and run on other-determinism, they'd better not be green eggs. But that's merely because he is operating machines which have a dependency on other-determinism. So he has to feed them other-determinism. He has to find other-determinisms, then feed them to the machine in order to have an operating machine.
Now, people quite commonly in auditing tell you that various body machinery has a tendency to break down or something of the sort and they talk to you about this.
Well, by golly, they're certainly having a wonderful time feeding other machinery—feeding machinery of one kind or another.
Now, a fellow can set up his own machine to run on his own determinism. This is a different kind of machine. But it is still running on other-determinism. He set up the machine, the determinism it's running on is his, but as far as the machine is concerned, it's running on other-determinism. So whether the machine is made by and serves the thetan himself, or whether the machine is created in stimulus-response and is serving the body or the environment—as far as the machine is concerned, from its own viewpoint it has none other than other-determinism. Has no other determinism than other-determinism; has no self-determinism.
Well, the highest common denominator of self-determinism is originating ideas. You can look around and look in vain for machines which originate ideas.
The one big difference, the biggest difference you will see between the physical universe and the individual is the physical universe does not get ideas, but life does. That's the very observable difference between life and the physical universe as such.
Now, an individual who is deeply astudiated in physics and chemistry and engineering and so forth, begins to run, after a while, on the postulate that there are no original ideas, that all the ideas there are have already been thought up and that an individual got them from somewhere else. This because he has become, himself, the servant of machines. And as a servant of machines, he, of course, has agreed with the fact that there is no determinism but other-determinism. And that is where he passed in his checks as a thetan—when he made that postulate and tried to force it through.
You can, of course, trace through the physical universe and find it so terrifically interlocked, as far as its ideas are concerned, that the introduction of an original idea into the MEST universe is a perilous undertaking.
"All eggs are green." Well, there you go, that's an original idea: "All eggs are green." An engineer, of course, would sit around and wonder whether or not somebody had said, before, that all eggs were green or not, and he would have a large discussion on this. And he would come to the conclusion that at some time in some place, actuarially, it was undoubtedly true that somebody had said that eggs were green. He would even reduce this one down to the fact of "it's been done before." You see, he's sold on particles to such a degree that everything must be plotted against time.
All right. He has agreed, then, that there is no determinism but other-determinism the moment he says that there is no original idea. But he's got "original idea" mixed up with "source of impulse." Source of impulse. You can say that all cats have permanent-waved whiskers although Mr. Doakes said all cats have permanent-waved whiskers. And your statement that all cats have permanent-waved whiskers can be a totally original idea. The source is you. You don't say that because Doakes said that. You could even know that Doakes has said that, and still say that and say, too, "Well, this was my idea," see. And this would not reduce the self-determinism of that idea one iota. Its source is you. You have said this, now.
But if you think you're saying it just to agree with Doakes, why, then of course it's Doakes' determinism. We get a question of "source of" versus "originality of." So, let's separate these two things out. You don't have to be original to be a source, not even vaguely.
You could put together all of the laws of motion and say, "I'm the source of all these laws of motion, and I've said all these laws of motion now," and just because a whole universe is built on these laws of motion, these laws of motion then do not have to be other-determinism, do they? See how it is? So we're just talking about source now, aren't we?
What's the source of the impulse? Does the impulse have to be a new original impulse? No, it doesn't have. But an individual becomes uncertain after a while, surrounded by all this machinery, as to whose idea it is or was, and he gets into this terrific tangle. So in order to make absolutely sure, he will get nothing but original ideas. This guarantees it.
And individuals occasionally will get an idea, and then to guarantee that it's an original idea, they'll go out on years and years and years of research and investigation to discover whether or not somebody has said it before. So what, somebody has said it before! That doesn't make it his source. This is the patent office, rampant, which deals totally with automaticities. It's interested in nothing but machines. And it is just so sold on the idea of source, as confused with original idea. These two things are so interlocked that it's almost impossible to get the patent office to make any sense. It never has made any sense, it never will make any sense.
Inventors—the lot of the usual inventor is eventually insanity and poverty. It isn't the ideas he got and the machines he built that drove him crazy, it was the patent office. It's the litigation he got into as to whose idea it was. It's all these various things.
Now, we get into this curious thing called ownership. Ownership is sort of a low-grade insistence and proof that one is source.
You can take all the ideas of Scientology and say, "These are my ideas and that's that. I don't have to agree with Hubbard, he's wrong." And take everything I say verbatim and say, "Well, these are my ideas and Hubbard is wrong." It's just postulate. And you find yourself being much happier, possibly. I know there's some people have occasionally written me and said, "Well, I have always accepted all of your ideas as counter-effort and counter-thought." Boy, that would be a rough boat for somebody to put himself in. To take an analysis of the physical universe in thought as counter-thought.
You should differentiate here a little bit. What's happened is—made a trace of the agreement chain which goes into automaticities. I've just looked over and inspected and put together and communicated those things on which people have consistently agreed, and looked above that point to find out what was there.
Somebody comes along and says, "Your ideas, so-and-so, and so-and-so." Well, boy, the guy is usually pretty spinny who starts talking to me about "my ideas." He has just got through accusing me of having invented the MEST universe, you see. All I did was observe it—observe the chain of agreement which led to a person being here and not being happy about it. And having looked over this chain of agreement and so forth, well, one can unchain him. And this, however, is not an original project. Life's been trying to do this for an awful long time. And it just took a time when somebody had the interest and leisure to look. And so one looked.
And instead of looking into all the machines and just doing automatically what the machines did, why, it was only necessary to sort of stand back and watch the wheels spin and say, "Isn't that cute. Look where that goes and look where that goes," and simply remark on this to one's fellows and say, "Hey, look where your wheels are going there. What do you know?" And the fellow says, "No wonder I don't feel so free, all those wheels going there." Well, they're his wheels he's looking at.
Now, in essence what you want somebody to do is to get up to a point of where he can make a postulate and have that as perfect truth. Let's take truth, the operation which makes you tell the truth. According to the standards of the culture and everything around you—a "wonderful" operation. It stands off there, the culture does, and you say, "Well, yesterday I had lunch with the Nabob of Kiwash." And if you were to say this, if you were to go up in a corner and say this—had lunch with the Nabob of Kiwash—you would see that the bulk of the people you will be talking to, the bulk of the aberrees you'll be talking to would look at you fixedly, and particularly if you said it in a serious voice, they'd say, "There isn't such a fellow. Uhm—where does he live? Uh... uh . now, I think that you, all day yesterday, were someplace where we could account for. Uh—I know I saw you having lunch over at the Greek's. You weren't having lunch with the Nabob of Kiwash." Very seriously. And then they'll try to break you down. If you keep insisting on it, they'll get violent about it after a while. They'll say you're the awfullest liar that ever lived—epithets, bang, fight and so forth. They're hounding you back into the corral Of agreement: The, "What happened, happened. And the only thing that happened was what happened in the physical universe."
Well, that isn't the only thing that happened. All this agreement with the past adds up to, in the common definition, "truth." Truth is defined in the common definition as agreeing with the past—of saying only what happened in the physical universe as what happened, that you limit happenings to those things which happen in the physical universe. That's what truth is, in the common parlance.
Now, this truth has another side. The greatest truth for you is what you say is true. That's the greatest truth you'll ever have, as far as truth is concerned.
You say, "I am the Nabob of Kiwash." No matter how shakily you say this, no matter how many machines immediately leap up and say, "Oh, no you're not! You're Joe Glutz from Cushwash." No matter how many cross-references occur in the microcosm which is approximating the macrocosm, you're better off simply to say you are the Nabob of Kiwash, as long as you know you're saying "the Nabob of Kiwash." Delusion, hallucination, untruths of great size can only damage you when they are coming out of machines which are supposed to be in agreement with a certain pattern of circumstance.
Pattern of circumstance—what happened last week? Well, one of these machines suddenly up and says you had lunch on Wednesday with the Nabob of Kiwash. You say, "Oh, my God, I'm going crazy. I know I didn't have lunch with the Nabob of Kiwash."
The machine says, "Oh, yes you did—ha, ha!"
Once in a while a UNIVAC or an ENIAC will get neurotic. Those are the big electronic brains. They get neurotic. You feed them a certain flock of data and they cross-circuit and cross-connect and next thing you know, why, they're saying "1 equals 1" or some other mathematical nonsensicality. And they will actually get neurotic.
Now, what's neurosis and psychosis? It is a machine which is supposed to be running on the truth of the MEST universe and supposed to be checking it and telling nothing but the truth, slipping a cog. You're dependent upon that machine, it slips a cog and tells you something else is true. See that?
In order to go neurotic or psychotic or normal or some other state, you would have to have a machine out of whack on which you were entirely dependent for your data and agreements. You'd have to be depending on the machine and then the machine would have to go by the boards, and that could produce neurosis.
You believed the machine and then the machine told you a lie and then there you are. You've been lied to and yet you know the lie is the truth. And you go around and you tell everybody as an absolute uncontrovertible fact that you have lunch every day with the Nabob of Kiwash. Well, you're actually just a machine by that time. It's all right to be a machine, but it's not all right to be a broken-down machine which says you have lunch with the Nabob of Kiwash every day.
Now, I ran into, on a preclear not too long ago, a little machine of circumstance that was taking care of a chain of incidents in complete error. He was utterly dependent upon this machine and yet it told him nothing but the truth. It told him nothing but the truth—absolutely, nothing but the truth—it said. But the fact of the case was that it was altering circumstances; something had skidded in the machine.
It had to do with circumstances around a construction job. The machine had gone daffy. It was saying that this had been built and that had been knocked down and something else had occurred and so-and-so had put up something else. And it said all these with pictures and none of these things were true. And yet the fellow had an utter reliance upon it and he thought he was going mad simply because he sort of knew—he had a sneaky hunch— that this wasn't what was happening on the job, and yet his mind told him that something else was happening on the job, and this was not in agreement with what anybody else thought was happening on the job. So this machine had gone out of gear after being thoroughly depended upon and so the fellow thought he was slipping a cog.
I asked him to be the machine and run everything wrong on the job. He did. In about five minutes it blew to glory! And as far as remembering what had gone on on the job, the only person who could really remember what had gone on on the job anyhow was himself. And so now he knew what was going on on the job. In other words, he depended upon some kind of an automaticity to check up everything that went on on the job for him, and then the next thing you know it's telling him lies and therefore he thinks he's going mad.
Well, other-determinism had to enter in before neurosis and psychosis could enter in. You see that? Other-determinism had to enter in. What was the other-determinism? It's the other-determinism of a machine had to be entered in as a total dependency before neurosis and psychosis could take place.
Now, people get this confused. They get this condition of the machine, the memory, something like that starts telling him lies after he's depending upon it. They get that completely interlocked with and associated with somebody saying that such and so happened. He "knows" what happened, you see. He says what happened. He says, "Now I know what happened. The George Washington Bridge moved down to San Francisco and completely replaced the Golden Gate Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge went to San Diego. And that's what happened on the construction job yesterday." He just says this.
Well, you know people are so frightened of their machines blowing up that if you were to say this in casual conversation to your fellow construction workers, they would figure you were either joking—but if you just said it with a serious face they would know you weren't joking—or that you'd gone crazy.
Usually they're so far gone that it never enters their mind that they can make an independent statement concerning the past. As little children they might run into the house and say, "Mother, there's a battleship in the backyard." And Mother would look at them—of course, in this ratio, it's Mother who's nuts—look at them and say, "Well, Johnnie, you know there's no battleship in the backyard. Now, say you know there's no battleship in the backyard." This goes on, see. "Please, please tell me that there is no battleship in the duck pond." And the kid finally says, "This old dame's nuts."
"Okay. There's no battleship in the backyard. Hm! What kind of truth is she agreeing with? What is she—what's the matter with her? There must be some great danger in my saying there's a battleship in the backyard. She is so upset by it."
So the old-timers, the adults who are very upset at the very idea of a machine giving them wrong dope and who have entirely lost touch with the ability to make a postulate—you know, just make an independent postulate—say, "This morning, I feel like the Queen of the May." "This morning, I am the Nabob of Kiwash." You know, they've just lost the ability to do this, to make any kind of a statement and have it stick. Their body doesn't follow their orders anymore. They say, "I'm hungry" and feel full. They say, "I don't know what I am going to have for supper" and then immediately start to prepare it. They say, "I don't know what I'm going to wear" and then put it on. Just backwards and forwards. And they just walk through life, "What wall? What fog? What does it tell me to do now? Oh, there's a little voice up here in the upper right-hand corner and it says that would be bad luck. I'd better not do that." Yeah. Consult, consult, consult. "This will tell me, that will tell me, something else will tell me, please somebody tell me."
And this person comes down on a fellow who has had the bank at least disconnected for the moment and who's been reborn and so forth, and he's walking around and now he's totally able to say "There's a battleship in the backyard" or "I'm the Nabob of Kiwash" or "I feel like the Queen of the May this morning so I am the Queen of the May this morning." He can say any one of these things with perfect freedom. And he runs into an adult who holds the power of life and death over his fondest possession—his body—he thinks, and this person takes it as very, very serious and upsetting that he is saying this. So he figures there's a great danger in saying this—in doing this.
He eventually becomes convinced that it is wrong for him to make a statement at variance with the agreement on all hands as to occurrences and identities. He mustn't vary occurrences and identities—mustn't vary them. He must find out who agrees with them and then only agree with them after he's found out that they will be agreed with.
He has to remember exactly what everybody knows would have happened, in order to say what happened, and he gets this as "sane." In other words, to totally run on machinery is "sane." That's not sane, that's real loopy.
His imagination is dependent upon his ability to make a postulate. That is imagination. Make an independent postulate completely free of "truth" —"truth" as represented by machinery, truth as represented by agreement. So there's other-determinism truth by agreement of observation, and then for any individual there's the higher level of truth: any postulate he damn well cares to make. Any postulate is truer. Anything he says is truer than what he agrees with.
Now, you'll recognize the first inversion on a case going south. It's when he accepts as "truth" only that which is other-determined and agreed upon. All the "truth" there is is what is other-determined and agreed upon. He, himself, has no truth.
You should be able to make a postulate with much greater certainty than you can get a memory. When you get a better certainty on something that happened yesterday because you remembered it, why, you're skidding, you're already on the road—too bad.
Now, just as an experiment on this, just make this little experiment right now. Just dream up an identity—entirely independent identity. Doesn't have to be original, you understand, don't get originality mixed up with it, but just that you're the source of saying that you're this identity. And just say you're that identity.
That's a greater truth than that your name is what your name is.
Your name was given to you by a lot of other people without asking your permission. It is an other-determined thing. Now, the person you just said you were is actually more the person you are than the person other people said you were. It's a healthier state to say you're this other person. Because you see, you know you're not being crazy by saying you're this other person.
You could go around and insist on it and throw it into conflict with all the other agreements and get into a fight and resist all the other agreements and get all upset by this. But again, you'd be seeking agreement and would be depending on other people to say, "Yes," at last, "yes, you're a ballet dancer. [sigh]" You see? You would be waiting on their agreement before you accepted your own postulate. How'd they get on your communication line?
Now, you look down the communication line you just had there when you said you were whoever you said you were, or whatever you said you were, and just see if you can find any mob or horde of people who had to be asked first before you could say that.
Okay. Now who, immediately after he said he was this person, had a strange feeling of doubt and upset?
Good.
Do you know in normal experience Joe Glutz walking down the street out here starts to say something like that to himself and all the machinery there is will go into a clatter-clatter and a whir-clank. It'll practically throw his whole bank into reverse gear or stop. He'll be in the darnedest mental upset, because he says, "Well, this morning I'm the best salesman in the world." You know, just before he goes up to sell this vacuum cleaner on the front door, he says, "Now," •he says, "I'm the best salesman in the world—here I go!" He starts walking up the steps—you know, he thinks this would help him sell this vacuum cleaner—he gets to the second step up and a little voice says, "Oh I don't know, George, you'll never amount to anything." And he gets halfway to the front door and another one says, "Well, women are so unsympathetic and they'd probably just slam the door in your face anyway." And he gets up a little bit further and somebody says, in sudden recall, "Bill Kirtswitz held the record last week and I only sold one machine and he sold two hundred and eighty. Huh! I'm sure no/ the best salesman in the world—look at that record. That proves it." And so hc looks at the doorbell and turns around and walks down the steps. He's been argued out of his postulate.
Now, you'll find that all of life will dramatize this. Any time you try to make a postulate and argue on it the whole MEST universe actually will just kind of try to set its teeth in your face and say, "No, you're not—mm-mm— that isn't true." The whole thing. You see this?
Well, you go around all the time asking lampposts, city halls, where you are, "Where am I? I'm three blocks from the city hall. I'm standing alongside of this lamppost." What's happened here?
Well, you say, "But that's normal!" That's of course where you are. You're three blocks from the city hall and standing—that isn't where you are. That's where your body is. That's on its determinism and its agreements and so forth—that's where it is. Well, the MEST universe can tell you to put it there.
I tell you, as long as you even accept for the body that that's where it is, you'll never dematerialize one. You never will. Because you can't make an independent postulate. Because you're dependent upon the postulate "lamppost" and the postulate "city hall" in order to tell you where the body is, what chance do you think you've got of suddenly dematerializing there and having it appear at Las Vegas? What chance have you got?
All right. That's what blocks an individual from totally self-determined action including magic, necromancy and demonology. It's just total evaluation, continuous evaluation. He's going through life saying, "The lamppost says I'm here and the city hall says I'm here and everything says I'm here... Rrrr— must be here! Everybody agrees with it." Might occur to you sometime to sit down and forcefully say, "I am standing in front of a gambling table at Las Vegas." Now, you don't have to insist upon it, because insisting upon it betokens the fact that it must be resisted. If you have to insist, something has the idea of resist. You don't have to insist on anything. There isn't anything can resist it unless you ask it to.
This is what's known as "complete faith," "complete belief." People booby-trap any kind of an action you can say, simply by saying, "Now, all you have to have is complete faith. Now, you can make all the silver you want to if you go up to the top of the hill at midnight on the 21st of August and throw these ingredients together. And silver will result out of these baser metals, providing you don't think of the word 'hippopotamus.' " Well, actually, it isn't thinking of the word "hippopotamus" that is the hook there. Somebody else gave you the prescription. That's what's the hooker. See that?
Now, the funny part of it is, is the main prescription that I can give you on such a line simply has a dependency itself upon a communication system, and what is weird and strange here is that it actually will— it'll communicate. This is quite interesting that we can go along this track of agreement and all of a sudden communicate on this basis. We can communicate on it. We can say "an independent postulate," you know what I mean. I can give you drills that establish this, which they do. But that's only because they're the kind of drills that you would decide on if you had started from a completely self-determined basis, yourself, in order to work out your self-determinism. Now, we can see this in operation and so Scientology can be communicated.
But sometimes you have a lot of difficulty communicating it. And when you do have a lot of difficulty communicating it to somebody, you're talking into some kind of an end-receipt of a machine of some sort which is turning around and evaluating for the individual. And the machine has dominance or precedence over his own postulates to such a degree that the machine says, "Postulate. Postulate." Like you say to somebody,
"What can you be?" in Group Processing, he's going to vary it, alter it—he's running totally machine—and he says, "Bee, bee, bee, bzz, bzz, bzz." That's the extent of the communication. That's where it lands—lands in the lap of a machine.
Therefore, we have the problem of communication in processing. But we really don't get up against that problem seriously—so good is the thetan at assuming things, and so on—we really don't get up against that till we get into raving psychosis. It doesn't really block us until we get into raving psychosis. If somebody will just look at you and assimilate the words you're saying and do a few of the things you ask him to do and get shepherded through a few steps, all of a sudden he'll start to take off.
8-C is very fast. One of the reasons 8-C is very fast is it operates almost totally in postulates. You say, "Give me three places where you're not" in running 8-C. That guy has to make three postulates. At first, he starts consulting. Consulting, consulting, consulting. "Let's see if I can be told, now, where I am not." And after a while he does it often enough so he's saying where he's not. Well, this is truth, because he's not anyplace. You see that? So you just make him repeat a truth over and over and over and he'll gradually fish himself up the line.
If he isn't doing that, why, then he isn't doing the process, somehow or another or he's continued to consult and he's running on some basis of consulting everything before he believes it.
Now, it's something like—what would you think of a little kid that every time you said something to this little kid, he ran and asked his mother if this was true or not? Supposing you just fed the child lunch and fed him some—a good, wholesome lunch like bananas and peanut butter and whipped cream and some jelly and jam and some candy and some soda pop, something on that order—he'd really enjoyed this lunch. Nutritious, so forth. And here he went, he got up from the table and you said, "Well, how did you enjoy your lunch?" and he looked at you kind of blankly. And you said, "Well, you've just eaten lunch." And he said, "Just a minute." And he ran home and he came back and he said, "Well, yes, I—I—I—I just had lunch, I guess." And you say, "Well, did you enjoy it?" and he ran home and he came back in a few minutes and he said, "Yes, I liked it."
You might get suspicious. You'd wonder what you were talking to, there. Well, you were talking to somebody who had to go home and ask Mother to find out if he'd had lunch and to find out whether or not he'd enjoyed lunch. Well, that's a very extreme state.
Well, what would you think of somebody that every time you told him something, he had to go over and ask a machine. Wouldn't that be cute? You said, "Well, there you are sitting in that chair."
"Yes, so I am," he says.
"And..." Well, you're obviously talking to the thetan, aren't you? "The E-Meter says that your tone is coming up a bit."
"Yeah, so it does. Yeah."
"Well, do you feel any better?"
"Yeah, I'm feeling quite a bit better."
You see, his physical body isn't running out and asking Mama, but as a thetan, he's popping over and asking the machine. He's popping over and asking, actually, some evaluating machinery.
You say, "How do you feel today?" You ask people who are in good shape this, you say courteously, "How do you feel today?"
They say, "Oh, I feel fine" or "I feel terrible" or "I feel in wonderful condition" or "I feel very nervous and I think I ought to take off and go on a vacation," something like this. You'd get a quick response on the thing and so on; it isn't necessarily a pressing matter, but he just tells you.
All right, let's ask the next fellow—the fellow that we're really gunning for with processing—and it'll take a little time coming up the line and the only reason it'll take time is because this is happening: You say, "Well, how are you today?"
"Well, [sigh] shoulder, uh... shoulder hurts a little bit."
You know, he didn't even consult his shoulder to find out how it felt? He went over and asked a machine to find out how he was. And the machine instantly went into action and asked the shoulder how it was, because it was the plugged-in communication line. And the shoulder had a response on the thing where the line could go through on Boolean algebra and it came back and went in. The funny part of it is, this case can get so bad off that you say, "How are you?" —this is going straight into the machine, the machine asks the shoulder, it comes back and so forth—this fellow has a sort of an absent look in his eye. If you were to suddenly shake this guy a little bit and say, "How are you?" he'd say, "[sigh] I don't know. Feel pretty good." You're getting a flock of machine responses, you see that?
So there's where communication lag tells you so much. A perception, by the way, is just as bright as it comes through directly to the thetan. So when somebody's perception starts brightening up on a process, you know that you're jamming lines through and he's jamming lines through and you're coming closer to connecting.
But where a case doesn't brighten up, he doesn't get a shorter communication lag, you're not bypassing any machines. Well, in view of the fact that a preclear normally has thousands of consulting machines, just thousands of them—oh, it's fabulous—it sometimes takes a little while, quite a bit of auditing, to keep bypassing machines and short-circuiting.
It's quite remarkable. You may have been asking—you thought you were asking Mr. Glutz how he was, but the funny part of it is, is you never asked Mr. Glutz how he was. You asked a decemvir in the fifth century on the Roman frontier, Eastern Empire—you asked him how he was. And boy, he had to go all over hell's half acre through an awful lot of machinery to find out how somebody was in present time and then tell you.
This is communication relay systems. A direct system is desirable. All you're trying to do is string up a straight line with the thetan at C and the body at E. And the more bypass lines and whirligigs and so forth that you run into, the worse off the thetan is. The more times he has to shunt things from here to here and run through this and that and so forth and come back to someplace or another, the worse off he is. You're trying to string a straight line. That's all you're trying to do. In other words, you're trying to put him at C and have him be, if he wishes, at E. And it's a simple problem.
But you run into all these "consultations" and things like that. Well, an individual who thinks he is only where the body says he is, is not doing much postulating. And if he thinks he is implicitly only where the body says he is, then you will be processing the body.
You find this condition uniform in preclears you're having a hard time with—uniform. They are so fixated on a body that they only monkey around with the body machines. They don't even work with their own machinery. You see, the thetan can have a whole flock of machinery and the body has a whole flock of machinery. They're so fixated on the body that they're only fooling around with the body's machinery. They only say whether they get well or feel better or don't feel better according to what the body says.
They know they're better off because they don't have or do have some different feeling in their leg. They have a pain in their leg, so they're worse off; so they don't have a pain in their leg, so they're better off. A thetan never got well yet by healing the body of anything!
Now, this case shows up immediately in your sight when this occurs: when you see the individual working into strange physical states continually because of processing. When you see him going over and shifting nothing but physical states in processing, he's fooling around with a body machine. He has his attention so thoroughly upon that body and upon its machinery, that you couldn't get him off to process him for a minute.
Actually what's wrong with his body is he's got so doggone much attention on it he's got it wrapped up and squirreled up and pulled this way and pulled that way and activated this way and that way. He's mad at it or he's apathetic about it or he's trying to make it move. In other words, his idea is "control the body" or "stop controlling the body" or "change the body somehow." He has no other concept.
Now, what are you going to do? You going to get this body so it'll eventually make postulates? Well, maybe you could. But that isn't processing the preclear that's sitting right in front of you.
Now, some people, you'll give them a little bit of processing, you'll ask them a few simple questions in processing and something weird will happen. They'll start to get heart flutters—brrrrrrrr! "Oh," you'd say, "this is quite alarming." Yeah, it's alarming in that your target for the day is the wrong target. You must be processing a thetan who is so involved with the body machinery that he's totally identified with it. You get this neat little picture, here, of somebody sitting there being evaluated for, thirty-six hours a day—or ninety-nine hours a day—being evaluated for and not knowing it for a second! You talk about not-know—there it is. He's being evaluated for, morning, noon and night, and he doesn't know it. He thinks he's looking because his eyes are open and fixed on something. No, he's not looking. The body is looking for him. The body is telling him where he is. He thinks he's feeling. But the body is telling him what he's feeling. And it's quite amazing.
In other words, an individual who gets a great many physical reactions because of processing is slamming, banging, chewing around with the body machinery. He's banging around inside the body machinery, or something of the sort, and the body is just running on a stimulus-response proposition and he at best may be just a vague spectator. You see that? You're not processing the preclear. You'll have a rough time communicating with him, because your communications are going into one side of the body machinery and they're coming out the other side of the body machinery. He quite incidentally is in that mix-up someplace. But he has a conviction—he has a tremendous conviction—that he is being something, very solidly, that he is that thing and so forth. And it may not even be a body. He may be a body being something else. You've gone way upscale with him when you've eventually found a lot of things he could be, and then all of a sudden one time he says with great certainty "You know, I can be a body." Big revelation—he can be a body.
Well, this isn't the normal course, fortunately. This is a small percentage of your preclears who continue on and on and on to be evaluated for by the body and never suspect it. It will work out in Beingness Processing. If you just keep at it long enough, it'll eventually work out in Beingness Processing. But somebody complains to you that because of your processing he suddenly contracted some hives. You were processing the body, you weren't processing the thetan. Where's the thetan? Well, he's where the body says he is.
Well, let's take this again. Let's take this little boy and you ask this little boy, "Where are you?"
And he says, "Just a minute." And he runs home, comes back. He says, "I'm in your house." You say, "Well, why did you run out the door?"
"Oh, I had to ask Mama."
So if you were to say to this thetan, "Where are you?" he runs over, he says to this set of gears, to that set of gears, so on, so on, "Where's this cross-reference to what?" so forth. And the body machinery summates and hands him, "You are such and such a place." "You're at 9th and Chester."
He says, "I am at 9th and Chester." He says this with great conviction and he thinks this is a level of certainty. He thinks he's being certain when he's been given this data. Actually it's a IOS/ feeling. He doesn't know how certain certainty can be. See, he's got this lost feeling about it. Actually it's a lost feeling, but that's the best certainty he can reach.
Well, what's his reality, then? His reality is—he thinks—is all right, maybe. But you know, things aren't quite real to him, things really don't taste too good to him, things are this, things are that and so on and he's getting along all right, he'd tell you, kind of in a haphazard sort of way.
The point is, his level of certainty is an evaluated-for certainty. How certain are you when the Weather Bureau tells you what the weather is going to be tomorrow? Actually, the Weather Bureau doesn't know too much about what the weather is going to be. This rain today has actually been predicted by the Weather Bureau for some time. They've been saying it's going to happen tomorrow for the last month—only there were dry, hot days. Well, you can do a 50 percent accurate job of weather prediction simply by saying, "Tomorrow, fair and warmer." If you just say that every day of the year, you'll be 50 percent right, more or less. That's a better average than the Weather Bureau has. Their average is only around 30 percent. Sudden storms come up they haven't predicted sudden windstorms—people would love to know about these things in advance. All the movie studios in Hollywood employ a meteorologist who is up there on—slope of Mount Wilson, I think he is. And he just sits up there and predicts the devil out of weather. They have to know about weather, they can't fool around with the government. And they have to know about it, because they have enormous investment in sending trucks and things out. So they have to consult a man who consults the weather who gives them—who tells them whether they can go or not.
But this is the MEST universe in operation. There isn't anything wrong with the MEST universe consulting the MEST universe. There isn't anything wrong with the preclear consulting the body's machinery that says how the body feels in order to find out what the body is all about. But there's everything wrong with an individual getting down to such a level that he only believes that this type of evaluation is truth and reality. When he gets down to the point of what the MEST universe is saying what the MEST universe is and what the body says that it is—accepting evaluation continually about where he is and what he is and so on—if he gets down to that point where this is all the certainty there is, when this is all there is, he's a lost dog.
The first symptom is he doesn't have any imagination, not worth a nickel. Second symptom is he won't be able to work. Why won't he be able to work? Huh! The person who furnishes the effort is the thetan. Body doesn't furnish any effort. This transfer of attention into so-and-so—nah. I mean, eating, so forth, yeah, you can feed a guy up and feed him down and all that sort of thing. Thetan can also build himself up and build himself down, more rapidly than he can be fed up and down.
But the MEST universe—saying how the MEST universe is—there's nothing wrong with that whole system. It's a delightful system, it's a nice game, it's cute—machines that run machines that run machines. But that isn't all there is. Your total source of information as to the condition of the body does not happen to be the body machinery which evaluates for you. That is not your total source of information.
Your best source of information is saying how the body is, in order to know how the body is. Believe me, then you really know! When you can do that, you'll always know how the body is. You say, "Today, the body feels terrible." Well, funny part of it is that you as an individual thetan have far, far more impact than the conglomerate mass of all the machines you ever heard of—as an individual. When you say the body feels terrible and you're in real good shape—by the way, you don't say this in such an automaticity that then, of course, if you dared say, "The body feels terrible," it will, of course, immediately feel terrible. If you say it with the intention of making the body feel terrible —ha-ha! it will. And you could say, "Now the body feels real good," with the intention of making the body feel real good—it does.
But you don't even have to look at the body and ask it, "Now, do you feel terrible?" "The body will now feel terrible. Now, do you feel terrible? Oh, you don't. Well, I failed." Body might be an awful liar. It might actually feel terrible, but its sensory machines tell you that it feels good.
There's many a guy walking around who is actually feeling terrible, who says he feels wonderful all the time and believes it. The test of this is the fact he's getting old, isn't he? He's caving in, isn't he? He's not doing much work, is he? He's not enjoying his food, is he? His body must feel awful. And yet he says, "Well, I feel fine. I feel fine. I feel fine." The sickest guy I ever knew in my life would only reply one thing to you when you asked him how he was: "I feel fine."
This guy was falling to pieces. He couldn't have been feeling fine. In other words, his body machinery wasn't even telling his body what kind of a state his body was in, because his body was in horrible shape. The proof of that was that a short time after that, he was in a hospital. And I dropped by the hospital to see him and he was lying there gasping with a tube into his lungs in order to feed him some oxygen or something of the sort and he was caved in in all directions. I said, "How do you feel?" and he mutters, "Fine. I feel fine."
He did. And you say, "Well, this is a happy state to be in." Yeah, but he wasn't in any state. He was in a no-state and your question triggered a machine that said "Fine." That's all there was to it, there wasn't any feeling in it.
Well, let's get the difference between a self-stated truth—a self-stated truth does not have to agree with anything and it doesn't have to consult anything in order to be true. It's true because it says it's true and that's all there is to it. It's true by postulate and that is truth. And with such a chain of postulates, once you got them into an agreement level, you could make any kind of a universe you wanted to.
Why, you could go out and make a universe out of something. You said, "Hereinafter stated, all rocks will be the consistency of green cheese and…" Just putting it into terms so that it can communicate, but you could have all the rocks soft and all the planets out of glass and the planets actually cubes which were illuminated from the center of the cube, underlit—very cute—anything you wanted to. It's an agglomerate chain of mixed-up agreements and so forth, made just like that, you know? "It's true and therefore it's true" plus "and you've got to agree with it so that we can stay in communication," which made the MEST universe and made the basic laws of the MEST universe. It's as close as we can get to it. We might as well assume that's the case because it works out so handsomely the other way. When you just backtrack the fact that the MEST universe is a series of agreements which resulted in a real bogged-down agreement, a good solid agreement—when you trace that back with a preclear, why, he gets to be operating pretty well. He gets more self-determined and more self-determined and more self-determined and more self-determined—he's feeling fine. But he's self-determined to the degree that he can make a postulate and not make the—you see, it isn't a test of whether or not he can make the postulate stick. You say, "Well, he can't make the postulate and then have this postulate immediately alter and shift the entire chain of agreement of the MEST universe. So therefore he can't make a postulate," Oh hell, you've just thrown the definition all overboard, you see, immediately. You've said, "Well, he couldn't make a postulate because the MEST universe didn't agree that he made a postulate." See?
When an individual gets out of hunting around to find out if something will agree with him after he has said, "The moon is made out of Swiss cheese." Then he says, "Let's see if it is. Let's see, did I change it?" Nah. What's he looking for?
It's only when he doesn't have to look anymore that the moon suddenly, agglomerately, "agglomerates" into Swiss cheese. And everybody says, "My God!"
That's faith. Making a postulate with sufficient certainty so that you don't have to have anything prove it or agree to it or anything else. And the other kind of truth is the truth that you're told is true. The kind of truth which gives rise to such maxims as "That which I tell you three times is true." Actually, it works about like this. You can tell the public three times that any product is good, one right after the other, and tell them with enough emphasis, and they'll have a little sneaking agreement that it's good. Well, let's tell them a hundred million times that General Foods is a boon to humanity. They'd believe it. They eat the food, they find it tasty. They find processed cheeses that are made in slop vats—they find these things tasty. They just go around, "I've been told it a lot by advertising, so it's true." Maybe if they stopped advertising Chevrolets, they'd stop running, who knows?
But the main point is, we don't have to go into speculation of that character. What's wrong with a preclear that's hanging up? He's continuing to be evaluated for by a body. That means he's being evaluated for. He has to be told before he knows it's true. What kind of a state are you trying to get him into? Where he can make a totally independent postulate and then not even look for any agreement with it. By the way, when he can do that, he can see everything and do everything and so forth.
So your road up is to get him out of being evaluated for consistently and continually and make him evaluate for himself.
Now, this works out naturally in the processes which we have, but of course works out very much more rapidly if you know what you're doing.
Okay.
PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT 600 26 MARCH 1954
EVALUATION PAGE 2 4ACC-49 - 17.03.54