How to Crack Any and All Cases (4ACC 540323)
Series: 4th Advanced Clinical Course (4ACC)
Date: 23 March 1954
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
Okay. And this is the 23rd of March 1954, morning lecture.
We've covered here, yesterday, some of the most basic fundamentals that we could cover. State over again what I just stated. Let's see how far we have gone in the resolution of the problems of the mind.
Now, let's take the problems of the mind and let's find out how many problems of the mind there are. The main problem of the mind is that it's a problem. The mind is ostensibly a problem-solving machine, by definition—ostensibly—but it really isn't. It's a knowingness machine which breaks down from knowingness and then has to rig up something so it can figure. And when you remove that to "figure to the nth power," you have Homo sapiens. And when you figure it to the nth plus nth power—a figure so great that if it were laid end to end between here and the North Pole, you would have no room left—you've got a scientist.
Now, that's not a dirty crack. That's a statement of how tough it can get, where you have to go over and look at the MEST universe to find out whether you know anything or not. Oh, no! See, the fellow doesn't even look at his own universe to find out whether he knows anything. That's bad enough. You know, the fellow thinks of pomegranates so he immediately gets a bunch of pictures of pomegranates and he says, "Well, they grow on trees and they get your vest dirty," and other interesting data as appears in pictures. That's bad enough. That's already got the guy going whir and clank, you see. That's in his own universe.
And it'd be bad enough if you had the body knowing everything, you know. I mean, anything you wanted to know you sort of consulted the brain. You know, there isn't anything there to consult unless you put something in there. It'd be like—you might as well go down here and ask a rock or ask a jellyfish a bunch of questions. Jellyfish would probably answer them faster.
Anyway, you've got this on a basis, there, of the fellow solving it either in the body's universe or his own universe. Well, that'd be pretty rough. Think what's happened to somebody who has to solve everything by asking the physical universe first. Oh, he's a gone dog. And this is the aberration.
Now, the trick that everybody pulls on everybody is, "You've got to prove it by the physical universe. Otherwise, well, we won't believe it."
"So you won't believe it—so what? That's tough. You're just one of the lost dogs that we put an ad in the paper not to have returned."
Now, this is mighty cruel, but I hope by saying that, that it jars you out just a little bit, out of paying any attention to people who walk up to you and say, "Well, it may be so, but how does it agree with 'Pohm's law?' Uh... Does this agree with the Frankenstein theory of psychiatry?"
You look at these people and laugh —laugh in their teeth, because they're saying to you, in so many words, "I ain't got no universe of my own. My body's universe is all collapsed and all we depend on these days is the physical universe, exclusively—preferably somebody else saying it's there."
You know, there are people around who won't see anything unless you point it out to them in terms of an object? Actually, you can go down the street and there are lots of people, though, they pass for sane every day: they're bank presidents and everything else. You go down the street walking with a fellow and he's just walking down the street and you see a car stopped, there, alongside the curb, with a dead man in it. You know, he'd walk right on down the street, he'd look right straight at the car: he didn't read it in the paper. And you'd have to point it out to him and you'd say, "Say, look—look at that car, there. Gallons of blood running out into the gutter and a dead man sitting there at the wheel. What do you know?" And he'd look at it, but do you know he wouldn't believe it until he read it in the paper that night? Then he'd believe it: "Oscar Zilch was found murdered at Wumph and Wumph Street."
And you think I'm just kidding you and overdrawing the situation. No, you could take this kind of a gradient scale in terms of the mind: you'd get the lowest rung—the lowest rung would be somebody who depended on somebody else's universe to tell him about the physical universe. That would be about as bad off as you could get, see.
By the way, that first fellow is in a sanitarium. He just wouldn't know anything. He'd be in a total hypnotic state. You could tell him about anything about the physical universe, by the way, and he'd believe you. You could say, "They use giraffes for lampposts all over town. Haven't you seen them?" And he would immediately see them.
All right. Now, we come up to the fellow who has to depend utterly and completely on the physical universe jumping up and saying, on a mass of data, "This is the inevitable conclusion." Well, they have him in cages known as "colleges." And he generally wears sporn-rimmed hectacles an inch thick. Very funny—I imagine there are a lot of psychology professors around: they get up in the morning, the toast is slammed on the table, the coffee is too weak and spilled, the eggs are burned to a crisp and the newspaper is torn in five pieces. And they go down to work and they sit down and they start reading and it just happens that sometime during their morning's perusal of material they happen to run across "rage states in women." And it suddenly occurs to them that their wife was mad that morning about something.
You see, here we have, then, at a little earlier reach, the fellow has to ask his eyes and ears and what machinery he has set up to think for the body—you know, let the body evaluate whether or not he would know something is present. That is to say, he's got his eyes closed, he can't see a tree, see. But he opens his eyes and he sees a tree. So he says, "All right, there's a tree there." But he closes his eyes, he doesn't see a tree. He sees no tree and let's say he's got his eyes closed and somebody says to him, "Now, that car there... " And he thinks he sees a car for a moment, but he opens his eyes to check whether or not there's a car there. You see that, now? He's using the body's perceptions and thinkingness, you might say, and knowingness and location, in order to tell him and confirm for him whether data exists or is true or observable. You see that?
Now, that fellow, by the way, isn't very bad off. That's a routine manifestation. You'll see preclears doing this all the time. Get them well upscale and they will do this, They'll say, "Well, let's see"—they're three feet back of the head—"and there's a lamp over there and there's the floor—no…" And then they'd look, see? "Oh, the ceiling." See, they're using the body and its anchor points as check-reference. Well, that's because they've got to have something to look at something, see. They can't look at something as nothing, they think.
Well, you see now, that isn't a bad state. That isn't a bad state.
And then there would be the fellow (let's come upscale a little bit higher) who, as a thetan, in order to remember anything or look at anything, would take a facsimile and look at the facsimile instead of the object. In other words, he's got his own universe rigged so that it's kind of automatic, you know. He wants to look at that bookcase. Well, instead of looking at the bookcase, he looks at it—he takes a picture of the bookcase and looks at the picture of the bookcase. This is just a little lag time which would give him warning in case it's dangerous to look at the bookcase. Just a little lag time he puts in there. Now, when he wants to remember something, he remembers it in terms of pictures. It isn't bad. This guy is so much saner than there's ever been a sane man on the face of earth, there's hardly any comparison. This guy is real sane.
All right. And now let's go up again in terms of knowingness and thinkingness and so on and we get the fellow and he has a thought. He asks himself a question, he says, "I wonder how many people there are in this town?" And then he just sort of looks, mass-wise, and he says, "Why, there are three hundred thousand." You see, he's not even looking. He just gets the idea of people and he knows. Now, we could say in vain, "How does he do this?" You see. There isn't any "How does he do this?" That's the way he ought to operate, you know. We get so fixed on having a machine do something for us that we neglect the fact that there might be a condition where no machine was necessary in terms of knowingness.
All right. Now, those are the various conditions of knowingness as apportioned against universes. And that would say, "knowingness by universes" and that categorized very simply: There's knowingness by other universes which tell you about physical universe, and knowingness by other universes, by the way, which tell you about your own universe. There's knowingness by the physical universe. There's knowingness by the body's universe. Knowingness by your own universe and then there's just plain knowingness which you do yourself. Now, that's our goal.
Now, what's IQ? IQ was used in psychology to determine intelligence quotient. They made the mistake of comparing it to ages of children. They would have found that, as far as ability to resolve problems and to observe was concerned, that the younger the child, actually, the brighter the child, with this one exception: attention span. A very young child hasn't got any great attention span, but they're really quite—a lot brighter.
So IQ, as long as it were numerical in terms of some test like the old Army Alpha, which probably has never been exceeded as a test—they can yap-yap a lot about their later tests and that sort of thing, but actually the Army Alpha doesn't pretend to do any more than what it does. It's just a comparison and recall system that merely measures how much a fellow knows directly from past observation or present observation. And it's a very simple test.
All right, if you racked up IQ in terms of the Army Alpha, you said somebody had 212 on the Army Alpha, this would just be fantastic. I mean, maybe there's been five of them since the test was invented. 180: fabulous, utterly fabulous. This guy is a genius—super. 135: well, there was one college in the United States which averaged 135, once. It was GW —George Washington University. Quite interesting that they would hit that high a batting average and I wonder who jostled the figures. Anyway, they probably didn't take in a lot of classes. Probably they didn't test the psychology class and the engineering school. They probably left those out. Anyway, 135: that's pretty darned high.
If you were to go down the street, here, and test people around, you'd find out that the successful places of business and so forth would probably be managed by somebody batting at least 135.
All right. Now, we slide on down the line and we get World War I average. Army Alpha was a really—came into prominence during World War I. World War I average on the Army Alpha test: 70. That was for the men enlisted in the Army, World War I. Seventy was its average. This is fantastic, that's moron—level of moron.
Male voice: Made MPs out of them.
Yeah, that's what they did all right: they must have made MPs out of them. These boys, however, were getting a bad grade for another reason—which shows you the frailty of such testing. They were getting a bad grade because an enormous percentage of the troops which came in during World War I could neither read nor write. And the Army had an enormously arduous program there, going for quite some time, to teach their troops to read and write. And they did do this and they spread "book learnin"' for the first time out through certain sections: Kentucky, Oklahoma, West Virginia, where it was practically unheard of. People like Sergeant York, going home, carried this reading, writing, arithmetic program into their own areas and began to insist on very highly generalized education. So it didn't have any real bearing on how bright were the troops, it was how bright were those people who could read and write, see.
Now, it also has the frailty that many people, just for no reason at all, have an allergy to being examined. They just don't like to be examined. Any time you say "examination" to them they get so stupid—probably you throw them into an object valence. An object is something you examine. And they get real stupid the moment that you ask them to take an examination.
All right. All we can say about intelligence quotient would be that, at its optimum, it would be some method by which you could come somewhere near measuring an individual's ability to know. Now, not to solve problems—let's get the problems out of this—just his ability to know. And the second we say ability to know, and divorce that from solving problems, we get a more interesting concept. We take Man out of the corn-grinder machine era, see, he doesn't have to be a machine in order to know.
All right. We also cost a lot of educational institutions an awful lot of money, because if there's another method of knowing than being educated arduously for many, many years, why, naturally an individual would favor this other method, of course. Then the only excuse you'd have for teaching Scientology would just be to get the data so grouped that the individual could backtrack it and then separate it out himself and then all of a sudden know the rest of it. And to have put it into a lingual state whereby it could be communicated by language, so that one individual could pick up another individual's level of knowingness and so forth. It would have to be in a language state or it couldn't be a social science.
All right. And you wonder where we're going with all this? Well, we're going straight into this: that the problem of IQ has been the most deviling problem of Man. This fellow is smart, that fellow is dumb. This fellow used to be smart but, boy, is he stupid now. This fellow was a very brilliant scientist up to the age of twenty-one, and invented the Millikan. But this fellow at the age of twenty-five suddenly became one of the most stupid fellows you ever saw. What is this phenomena that's traveling through, here?
Well, let's compare it to this: Space is very stupid. It doesn't know a thing, just as a piece of something. A solid object such as an ashtray or something like that, that is very stupid. It doesn't know a thing.
All right, let's take somebody who is totally a piece of space. He's just totally unknowing, isn't he? Now, let's take somebody who's totally an ashtray. He's totally unknowing.
Now, the first shutdown on knowingness is space. This, then, is a greater shocker to the preclear when you run it than the object. Actually the object is—it cuts it down to the point where he is. But it's the space that upsets him. He runs into this space and he finds out this: that the first moment you make space you cut down your knowingness. There is the only way you can have any randomity, surprises, anything of that character. You create space and you don't know.
Why—why is this? The second that you impose distance and say, "I am at one end of this distance and something else at the other end of this distance," you also impose the fact that you have to be at the other end of the distance in order to know about the other thing or you have to have some beams travel from you to this object and back again. You've imposed, briefly, a system. A piece of space is in itself a system and you have imposed a system of knowingness by imposing space.
You see, that's a system of knowingness then. Space is a system of knowingness. You're at this point of space and there's something else at another point in space and to know about that, you would have to observe it or you would have to go over there, see.
Now, therefore—thereby—just by that, if the fellow created a piece of space around himself and put an object in it, he would cut down his knowingness. If he became the space, the space itself can't think and so he's very stupid. But he's liable to do this just for kicks and then forget he's done it and then be worried about it afterwards.
Well, it tells you, then, that while there may be a sensitivity of knowingness inherent in any thetan different from the knowingness of another thetan—whereas it tells you that there may be this basic difference, thetan to thetan—we can neglect that to this degree: We certainly know that a thetan, regardless of what his basic potential of knowingness was, has had it reduced every time he was a piece of space thoroughly (not permanently, you understand, it was only being reduced while he 'was being that piece of space). And every time he was being some energy or an object, his knowingness, then, became to some degree the knowingness of the object or the space which he was being. You see that? Now, in other words, he has graded down his knowingness in terms of having been things which didn't know.
Now, let's say he had one of the world's most stupid arithmetic teachers. I don't care when—let's say in ancient Greece. It doesn't matter when. But he had this—oh boy! And this teacher was just after him, hammer and tongs, day and night and so forth and she was real stupid. Well, that was her idea and his idea. Well, supposing somewhere along the line, because of her abuse of him and the interchange and so on, he skidded into her valence. She was the winning valence. Just like he could become a piece of space or an object, he could also become another person and approximate the universe of that other person. Well, supposing she was real stupid? Where does his knowingness go?
Now, you know that you could do this with a preclear? You could take somebody who worked unsuspectingly (you know, he didn't know anything about this) and you could sort of Straightwire him a little bit and bring him up to present time, put him in good condition and then give him some kind of a test like an Otis. And then find out who is the dumbest person in the whole family, swing him into the valence of that person and give him the test again. You see, he wouldn't even know he was in the valence of that person, You would have just jockeyed him around until he had swapped ends on the communication line. You know, some person he was real upset about in life and that he had been in a lot of communication with and that was very stupid. Well, we would just get him reversing the communication line. In other words, taking the valence of the other person. We could do this quite artificially. We would just tell him to turn the communication line around and then give him the test again and we would get a very surprising result. We would have changed his IQ.
Now, that's something that "can't be done." Every psychologist in the business will tell you this can't be done.
Now, you can brighten a person up. You know how a fellow gets real bright under stress? If you give a guy an awful lot of stress he gets real bright. Well, we actually ran these tests some time ago—this series of three experiments in the first Foundation on that, and that was very well run. And that was, "Did a person get brighter or dumber when he was thrown into an engram?" See? Just that. And you know, he gets lots brighter. Boy, does he get bright. You throw him into an engram and turn on a somatic.
You give him a test, give him a test—one of the Otis sheets—and throw him into an engram and give him a second test. In other words, you test him without throwing him anyplace and then you throw him into an engram and you test him again. His necessity level has come way up. You've turned on a somatic, he's struggling to get out of the thing. The next thing you present him with is a piece of paper and he just wants to run like mad. Well, kind of, running like mad is thinking like mad. So he could just go to town on this thing. He had become more himself through the jar or shock of not being some object, see. You throw him into an engram and, boy, he isn't going to be that operating chair and he isn't going to be the dentist's forceps and he isn't going to be the dentist and he isn't going to be anything. He's going to get out of there somehow or another and hold on to his own valence viciously.
Well, if you threw him into that kind of an engram, his IQ went up. Real curious, huh? You threw him into the engram, restimulated it and left him in the engram and gave him the examination. His IQ rose. Necessity level—that's a direct test.
The other way to, if you throw him into the winning valence, why, it'll go down.
So let's take a look, here, at these two mechanisms. One is the mechanism of throwing him into a winning valence, swapping the ends of the communication line. And the other is simply hitting him with a facsimile. Of course, the facsimile contains energy. He will benefit to some degree by the fact that he's been hit by a piece of energy—just that. But when we swing him on a winning valence, it doesn't so much, then, become a question of energy. Working with facsimiles, then, is a question of energy. Working with valences is much more a question of ideas. So if we were going to process the two things, we'd certainly better process that thing which is more peculiarly a thetan. Well, a facsimile isn't necessarily very intimate with a thetan. A facsimile is actually closer to a motion picture or a chair or a window curtain. I mean, that's its class of beingness: it's a piece of energy.
All right. If that's the case, then what class of thing comes closer to life—that is to say, a thetan? Well, it'd be beingness, because that's idea. The idea of being. Well, now he can mock-up or even grab a facsimile to prove that he's being this thing. You know, he can be a train going down the track or something like that. He'll mock himself up like this.
Well, that's all very well just to mock himself up like this, but it actually starts out with the idea. He has the ideas of the train.
By hitting him with a facsimile we don't necessarily give him the ideas of the facsimile or the image picture. But by hitting him into a winning valence we certainly give him the ideas of the winning valence. But either way we can alter his intelligence—either way. Curious business, isn't it?
Now, imagination is a secondary product of knowingness. And you will find that there's a direct relationship between the imagination of an individual and his ability to produce, to work, to survive, create, destroy. In other words, his activity or value and a lot of other things would depend upon the greatness of his imagination.
Now, let's take somebody who would be real bad off. We would say his imagination was zero. Somebody who was real, real, real, real bad off—psychotic—is subject to other-determined imaginings. See, in other words we've got a reverse imagination and that is delusion. That's just other-determinism on imaginings.
All right. Now let's get somebody who is not quite so bad off as the person who has zero imagination and we find out he has a little bit of imagination.
And now, let's get somebody who is in pretty good shape, well, he's got a pretty active imagination.
And when we get somebody who is in excellent condition he can be total imagination at will.
The curve of imagination, the curve of brilliance and the curve of sanity are identical curves or at least similar curves. See that? The more imagination a person has, why, the more intelligence, the more knowingness he has and the saner he's going to be. But remember, that's self-determined imagining as differentiated from other-determined imaginings.
Now, let's get a universe that just everybody agreed on. Everybody says, "Well, there it is, and we've all agreed on it." Gee, you know, that's other-imagining. Do you see that? Could you conceive of the MEST universe as being an other-determined imagination?
One of the world's greatest and most consistent delusions is the world. And yet, that's no reason for you to say, "Well, all is illusion, all is illusion, all is illusion." If you keep saying this without differentiating whether it's other-determined illusion or self-determined illusion, you're in for a bad spin. Unless that differentiation is made, you just get everybody lost. And they just bog They'd go out and blow their brains out. They'll go out and just go mad right in their tracks.
Why? They say, "Now look, I mustn't get any delusions or illusions. I mustn't do that. And I must realize that everything that is presented to me is illusion." Well, boy, they've neglected that field of agreement which gives you reality. They've neglected self-determined conviction and they've wiped out imagination as an allowable activity and said, "We must all agree with truth, truth, truth, truth, and the truth is what's written down here in this little paragraph. That's all that's true."
Oooh. In other words, you just take a guy's mind and throw it in on itself and scramble it up with an eggbeater and present him back with a hatful and you've got it. It'd be real wicked to convince somebody that all was illusion without any further differentiation. You've convinced him, now, that he is unreal and everything is unreal without ever defining out what's real. You see, you said, "Everything is unreal," and then never qualified what's unreal. What do you mean by unreal?
You would play the same trick that was played in psychology. They said, "What you want to do is face reality. Now, we finally discovered this key to everything is people aren't facing reality." You read that in psychology texts. I think James said that, I don't know—I read the comic strips, myself.
Anyway, the point I'm making here is that they keep using this word very loosely. You know, "Here. Have a word. That word, it's a symbol."
What is this symbol? What's it mean? What's it qualify? Do you experience this symbol?
"No," they say, "Well, you don't have to experience it. Really, the trouble with you, Mr. Jones, is you can't face reality."
"Oh," the fellow says, "I can't? Well, let's see. Well, gosh, I guess I need an electric shock or something then, don't I?"
I mean, that was about the only answer you could give him. You could send him over to psychiatry then, because he couldn't face reality, and give him a prefrontal lobotomy.
But this is the most unreal of unrealities is you keep defining everything in terms of an "unreal" or a "real" and then there's no dichotomy, really, since you've never determined what's real and never determined what's unreal. What brings about a reality? Can we create something? Can we make somebody believe something is real, or make them unbelieve something is real? If we could do that, then, we'd have a license to go around telling people "You know, the trouble with you is, is you're not facing reality."
Fellow wouldn't know what to face. He's supposed to face bulletin boards or newspapers or is he supposed to face his mirror or his wife? What's he supposed to face? What is reality?
And of course, this left the whole field of psychotherapy up in the air. But that was the kingpin of the field. You know, you had to face reality and then you were all right. Yeah, but nobody ever said where it was.
Well, reality, in essence, in terms of the physical universe is what you agreed is real. Well, if you can agree something is real you can certainly postulate something is real, can't you? So I guess your ability to know would, to a large degree, modify your ability to have a reality. Now, if you could know real good, boy, could you have realities. See? If you could know real good, you could have realities.
That is to say, you could simply say, "clear," "convincing," "ugly," "pretty," you know? "Here's a clear mock-up and it has certain actions," and so forth. You just know that that's the case and you've got it. Well, and you could say, "Well, that's reality, then."
Of course, if you could put up a bright enough mock-up, you'd be able to get other people to say, "My God, that's real." That would only be because they could perceive it and say, "It is clear, it is distinguishable, it's marked in its characteristics, it..." You see how this is?
All right. So what were the big problems? The big problems of psychotherapy ended, actually, with illusion and reality. That was the far-flung red line of investigation. That's way back there. We passed that several hours ago. It's that little way station there that was sitting just on the edge of town. On one side of the track there was illusion, the other side reality and we've been going ever since. But we'd better run the connecting track for you.
Now, what were their goals? Their goals were: try to establish how bright people were, to examine and to test people in order to discover—well, just in order to discover—they never said anything what. Oh, you think I'm being smart now, but that's the case. They just never really stated what they were trying to discover.
So we had illusion as opposed to reality, and the solution was to make everybody face reality. And the counter-solution of an entirely different school of thought was to make everybody realize it was all illusion.
This is squirrel-cage stuff. Those two little stations, if you look just behind them there's a big sanitarium. But nevertheless they were little guideposts on the line. Can't neglect that.
Now, look where we sit. This is just to give you some kind of an idea of orientation. We established that knowingness—the ability to know, the ability to know many things and the ability to simply have the capability of knowing—are establishable and desirable. TWO, we have established definitions for reality. We know that knowingness is dependent upon certainty. And we know that reality and certainty lock together. And we have a road through for the preclear so that he can establish these things. What more do you want?
Now, in addition to that we find out that we weren't examining one universe, we were examining a multitude of universes which were coincident in a rather balled-up state. Anytime you looked at a human being, you looked at several universes in coincidence.
What do I mean by a universe? I mean something that's got space and energy and locations in the space. Points of location in the space. Now, that's a good enough universe. It's got—you know, there it is. It doesn't matter whether it's there by postulate or anything of the sort. It's there, you've got it, okay. Now, it's there by space, in terms of space. It's there in terms of locations in the space. It's there in terms of energies or objects, patterns, forms, aesthetics. These things compose a universe.
And we find out that we are not studying in a preclear just one universe, so naturally we're not studying just one knowingness, are we? We would be studying a composite of knowingnesses—composite of degrees of knowingness. And somewhere in this line, somewhere, we would find the preclear, himself, and when we found him, why, we would find out that he knew. And this is a good agreement because you kind of know, basically, that you know—if you could just kind of put your finger into the right pocket or say the right magic word, all of a sudden, bing! you would know.
Everybody has this funny feeling about knowing. He kind of knows he knows, but he doesn't quite know what he knows or how much he knows or how to reach what he knows. You see that? He's got an uncertainty about knowingness, is what that boils down to.
Well, we've got a goal in therapy and a way to achieve it. The goal in therapy is to attain for the preclear his highest possible level—this would be the all-out goal—the highest possible level of his native capability of knowing. Highest level of knowing.
This would immediately find him certain. It would find him capable of postulating a reality, and it would occur for him and maybe for others. It would find him in a position where just the recognition of any aberrative factor or any problem would mean its immediate solution. And we would find him in a position where he could self-determinedly cut down his knowingness well enough to have some action and still be awfully bright and still be able to get back the knowingness which he cut down. See all this?
All right, that stems out from knowingness. Well, that actually would be our top goal. Now, our goal is as good as our preclear advances along the line of knowingness. Now, he could advance along this line several ways. Actually, it's not detrimental—if you are studying something which leads toward the actual goal of knowingness, it's not detrimental to pick up other data.
You'll find every once in a while a preclear is fighting you like mad because he's afraid you're going to tell him something. Well, okay, but you see, if by telling him something you then made it possible for him to extricate a couple of these universes and get them separated out; if by telling him a few commands and a few things to do you got him untangled; or if by giving him some data, you suddenly demonstrated several important problems and the unimportance of several of the things he's worrying about—if by any of these ways you could straighten him up a little bit more, you would take him on up toward knowingness.
It's when you do this too much, when you never give him a chance to find out for himself, when you never tell him, "Now look, I'll just give you this and you can test along on it if you want to and operate on it until you've got something better or you have a greater certainty on it. But we'll just work up toward this direction and then you, yourself, will know." If you never told him anything like that, if you just hammered and pounded, if you never processed him so he never discovered any of the phenomena and you just kept telling him that this is the way things were—no processes, no way for him to establish a subjective reality on your material—you'd cave him in. I don't care how good your data is, sooner or later you'd drive him mad.
Why? You just collapse his own universe and his own knowingness and he'd have to transfer all of his knowingness to you. See, you'd be what knew around there and you have, in essence, the role of a priest, the role of an advisor, the role of a consultant. He's the fellow who knows. It's quite interesting, an interesting position which is very easily abused. Obviously such a position can exist and it can exist without detriment to people, but boy, can that be abused.
I remember a shaman I knew once, a few thousand years ago, with a tom-tom and so forth and he knew he didn't know. But he never let on. He was one of the smarter individuals. He knew he didn't know and he just went on pretending he knew, forecasting the future for people. And their great faith in shamans was such that when he forecast the future, it stuck. He said, "I see in the bat's blood, now, I see you riding your horse up to the edge of the cliff and I see the horse stopping suddenly and you going on off the cliff. Ah yes, I see weeping and wailing in the lodge. Yes, yes, you shouldn't take that ride." Of course, the fellow has to go. It's got him nice and scared of cliff fronts, now. The shaman is the boy who knows and he said he knew this fellow was going to fall over a cliff and that's that. He's going to arrange it one way or the other so he falls over a cliff.
You have to assume a condition before it'll occur. There are several little pat ones like this that scatter around through processing and one of them is: to take over a machine or to nullify a machine operation on the part of a preclear, you just have him do what the machine is doing. See, there's your pat formula. There are other ways of doing it, but there's just the pat formula and that'll always undo a machine in greater or lesser time. All right. There's this other one: is you have to assume a condition before it'll occur. In other words, you have to assume that electricity flows before it'll do any flowing.
Now, out here in the MEST universe there's so many people keeping things going and agreements and so forth that you suddenly disagree, or maybe a half a dozen of you disagree on the subject, I'm afraid it'd keep on flowing. You've been outvoted. But, in your own universe this becomes very marked. You agree that you've got beams that travel around at a certain rate of speed. Well, you have to assume they will before they do.
All right, now let's take the fellow who's stuck in his head. He has to assume he's stuck in his head before he can get stuck in his head.
Now, the fellow who's been exteriorized and worked on time after time after time after time with auditors trying to fish him out of his head and he doesn't exteriorize—of course, has assumed time after time after time after time that he's stuck in his head. So he becomes harder to process.
Now, here we have the auditor who has worked on this preclear trying to turn on his perception. And he keeps failing, you see, to turn on perception. He runs this and he wants to turn on the preclear's perception and he runs that—well, two assumptions are liable to take place. One, on the part of the preclear, he'll have to assume, finally, that his perceptions are very solidly shut off. He has to assume this before they stay shut off forevermore. Otherwise, somewhere along the line, they'll shake loose. And the auditor is liable to assume that he can't turn a preclear's perceptions on. And after that he'll avoid running the techniques which turn them on.
I've watched it happen. He'll kind of hit those lightly. You know, he doesn't get him to duplicate anything or be things that can't see, any one of these little tricks that you have for turning on perception. He'll just avoid those and he'll say, "Well, who was blind in your family? Well okay, okay. When did you decide to be blind?" He could go on this line, you see.
"I never decided to be blind," see.
"Oh, you must have decided to be blind."
Ha-ha, here we go. Let's really shut this preclear down. Theoretically, well enough done, that process would do it. But you see, the auditor very often assumes that he merely can't turn a preclear's perceptions on mechanically so he decides to be very clever about it or decides to use some light technique, somehow or other. He's merely assumed that he can't turn the preclear's perceptions on. He has to assume the condition exists.
In other words, you had to assume that a disease was running all over the place before it ran very far. But remember, a disease is alive, too, and it can outvote. Every once in a while you get some big epidemic, the black plague or something, walking in on a people that never postulated it. But, funny thing: it's not a total sweep. There's always a certain percentage of the populace stay alive. Well, what's this? Well, could it be that those people just hadn't assumed, somewhere along the line, that they could be sick easily? It might be. Might be the only ones the plague hit were those people who had assumed this. They assumed they could be sick, so they got sick.
Well now, this is very dangerous ground. Many a preclear who is particularly bad off is so darned scared of his postulates. He'll go on bragging to you about how powerful his postulates are and how unpowerful they are. I'm sure in his own universe his postulates are very powerful, but until he can put a fire-eating dragon twelve feet tall in the middle of the street that gobbles up a couple of pedestrians, don't you believe him. He isn't capable of impressing this much beef on the physical universe, that's all. Physical universe is a matter of agreement and he's agreed that it's a matter of agreement and he's agreed upon this proposition that the majority rules. He's agreed on all these things or he wouldn't see the physical universe at all. So naturally, he has eight hundred billion people in the immediate vicinity of the Sun, he's got all kinds of people and he's just one guy and he's going to outvote everybody without further communicating.
Well, theoretically he could do it if he could blanket, you might say—parallel—all their universes simultaneously. If he was perfectly capable of doing this, something like that, he could. He'd probably change the Sun into shining with bright pink spots. But this is going a long way. He'd also have to be willing to fix an impression on each individual universe. He'd have to be willing to do that. You understand the great liability of doing that: you're liable to wind up God and then God help you.
But a lot of preclears get spooky about their postulates. They're afraid to make postulates, they're afraid they'll come true and so forth. Well, one of the processes that takes a lot of load off of a case sometimes is go ahead and make the preclear make postulates. Say, "Make the postulate now that your car is never going to start again."
"Well, yeah, but I can't quite believe it."
"Oh! Now, let's get it real good. Let's get it so you really believe your car is never going to start again."
All right. Now your role is really not to break him down and show him how powerless he is in relationship to postulates. You at least should invert him out of an obsessed, other-determined conviction that he'd better not make certain postulates.
See, he's known witches and he's known witch doctors, like I just told you about. You know, they say, "I see in the bat's blood that you're going to fall off your horse and fall off the cliff." Well, they've gotten to the point of where they believe that these predictions of the future—they also realize that the future doesn't materialize unless you plan it. They've gotten into a state of where that other-determinism is: they're just scared stiff. And it's with great relief after they've made this postulate and believed it thoroughly, they go out and turn on their ignition key and start the car and the car starts. "Ha! [sigh]" And a lot of weight comes off of their life.
In other words, if you really got a person really scared, what would be the ultimate definition of fear? It would be afraid to make a postulate. That would be the ultimate: afraid to make a postulate of any kind. Ooh. That's so far south that you've never seen it. Even the cactus out here can still make a postulate.
But I'll bet, though, that in the religious sense that vegetables get into... That's quite interesting, that they have a very religious background. I ran into a situation where I am sure everything was very significant. A cactus had fallen over and hit a little tiny rabbit. It was a huge cactus, and it had fallen over and hit the little rabbit and it had knocked him deader than a doornail. And he was lying there underneath the cactus, big barrel cactus. Well, I pushed the cactus aside and took a closer look at this situation, because it was a poetic situation. I'm sure that everything around there had great significance in it. The little rabbit had been chewing on the rather tense roots of the cactus, see. And then it had fallen over on him. But he didn't bite them in half, he'd obviously just weakened them. And then he was over on the other side of the cactus starting in on another set of roots, something of the sort, and the cactus fell over and hit him.
I'm sure that there were a lot of great considerations about the poetry of it all and so forth. Actually, I believe so—on the part of the rabbit, on the part of the cactus and the few rocks around there probably did some thinking, too. There's thinkingness around in some of the darnedest things, but we won't go into that. That's Para-Scientology.
Anyway, but here we have a type of consideration where we say, "Well, look at the cause and the effect and the poetic justice of..." And gee, can we get involved in this sort of thing. Well, any thetan gets himself involved this way when he starts talking about or thinking about existence at large, because existence at large is very complex and its fundamentals have long since escaped him.
Well, what's the route? Let's be very brief here. If we've come this long way from the city to the little way stop which said, "You must face reality," if we've come past that and gotten out here into the sticks and the roaring jungle, let's find out if we're out in any cleared space where we can see anything and where the air is a little better.
Well, in order to be in such a cleared space, we would have to be able to rehabilitate the knowingness of a person. In order to rehabilitate his knowingness, we would have to know what his knowingness really consists of. His knowingness is as great as he can be himself, naturally, and is diminished to the degree that he is obsessively being other beingnesses. He can be a piece of space anytime he wants to and retain his knowingness. All he has to do is postulate it. But he is obsessively being spaces, being objects, being other people. His universes are all snarled up one way or the other and his knowingness is diminished to the degree that he is stuck at the moment in one of these beingnesses.
You see, then, that a fellow's curve of knowingness could go up and down all day long. He could be stuck in a barrel and he could be being a barrel, you see, and his knowingness would just be practically zero. And a little while later he'd get stuck in being Papa, and Papa's a fairly smart guy, and so he just runs at the level of beingness, knowingness of Papa, for a little while. And then he, himself, isn't too dumb and he gets out with his friends where he can relax a little bit and he isn't obsessively being anything. He's sort of relaxed and he's a real bright cookie.
And so we get the multi-valenced aspect of not just personality—let's throw that word "personality" overboard. Personality could be defined as a bundle of eccentricities. It could be defined as a type of training. It could be defined as nyrr or rhyrr. All it says is there are people, you see, "personality." It said this person has the characteristics of being a person. It's a blunt, rather meaningless statement. Can be defined too many ways.
They worry writers to death. They say, "You have to give your characters more personality." And that's just a dead-end statement. All right. And so they just give them—they carefully in the next story describe their hair and eyes.
Anyway, let's see this, then, as a knowingness which can be rehabilitated. All right. Now let's see our preclear, or our life form, as a bundle of his own universe and other universes which are co-imposed and co-entangled. In other words, a tangled mass of universes which aren't straight at all, they're just all wound up.
Now, what's tangled about them? Points in the spaces—that's what's tangled. The objects are not tangled. There's where you'll fall down every time in processing if you don't get this clear. It's not the objects. It isn't the objects in Papa's universe and the objects in the preclear's universe which are entangled, it's the points of space.
The only way you could get these two universes to coincide would be to safety-pin the spaces together. And then you'd have to consider one of the universes was greater. Well, if their spaces exactly match and one is greater, then the other one still matching the other one is going to give a very confused picture. It's going to be smaller but its spaces are still going to match the other one.
In other words, let's take a preclear, now, who has exactly matched the MEST universe. All right, he's exactly matched the MEST universe. All right, the MEST universe has now gotten very big. Well, it means that Arcturus, in his own universe, is one inch away: See, but that actual coincident point is the physical universe and Arcturus is several light-years away. These two universes do not compare in size, but they had to, once. And so they collapse on each other, one way or the other, and get all mixed up.
Well now, this bundle of universes classifies as the person's own universe; usually, if he's stuck in a body, the body's universe or if he's handling a body, the body's universe is a factor; the physical universe and other people's universes. Then you could also have a synthetic type of universe which would be the universe of knowledge. That is, what has he studied? It makes a synthetic universe and he might put this universe into anything. See, he might make this universe part of the universe which he is holding mocked-up, which is actually Papa's universe. He might put his bin of knowledge into Papa's because Papa, you see, was the one who wanted to be a chemist. And he busily got Papa's universe all educated as a chemist, but it was his own universe. You see the tangle.
Now, after he finishes up chemistry somehow or other—he gets married or something, he changes valence and he somehow or other doesn't know chemistry anymore. He can't get back his chemical knowledge. Well, he never trained himself in chemistry. He trained another universe in chemistry, but it was his own universe. You see how involved this gets?
Well, all right, then the basic sanity, the basic imagination, the basic knowingness of the preclear would be simply that: his greatest possible level of knowingness. And it would be cut down to the degree that he was being spaces, being objects—and incidentally and very juniorly, to the extent that he was being other people.
All right. Then, if we could see this, and if we could see that his intelligence is cut down by this—that his experience, that his machinery, that his clutter-up—we can see the dwindling spiral would merely be denser and denser compactions of universes, more and more tangled and more and more involved, until you got practically a solid mass. You see that? This would eventually be the result if you just kept on tangling universes and tangling them and tangling them and tangling them and tangling them, see.
All right. If we had the answer to this, then we would be able to rehabilitate his beingness, wouldn't we, and his knowingness. And his knowingness would be his beingness.
Well, we have a definition for reality, a definition for communication, we have something-nothing, we have certainty, we have ways of handling this one way or the other. We have several pat processes which handle this and which actually do do this. But do you know what the test of a process would be? If we were to take one of these very tangled universes—this guy is strictly "What fog?" you know? You can still be in communication with him. You can take one of these real tangled universes where he's got an awful lot of black and his location is very poor and he doesn't exteriorize and so forth. And if we could run a process which simply started from scratch and disentangled all these universes (and that might take a little while, but just disentangled them all in a very routine fashion) and brought him out at last with his own universe completely disentangled, with his knowingness in excellent condition and with his memory of past lives entirely rehabilitated so he knew who he's been on the whole track, every place—we'd be there, wouldn't we? There actually wouldn't be anyplace else to go. I mean, I'm unfortunately pointing out a dead end to you. Well, there is a finite end in processing. There's not only a finite end in processing, there's a finite end in investigation.
Well, I never had a Unit processed up before to the extent where I really, really thought they could handle this without going by the boards with it. But there is a process, a relatively simple process, which does just this. But it's a lengthy process and you have been working on it right straight along. You have been getting into practice on this and you have been looking at people. You've been running Beingness Processing with some therapeutic value. You've been running some machines. You know what to expect and so we can turn loose with the rest of the process. There was a rest of it. And we'll talk about that in the next hour.
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