Lecture on Beingness (4ACC 540316)
Series: 4th Advanced Clinical Course (4ACC)
Date: 16 March 1954
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
And this is March the 16th, 1954, first morning lecture. Now, you haven't been unsuccessful with Beingness Processing. Process is very simple. However, occasionally in Beingness Processing, you run into the two sides of the process, one to the other quite rapidly, and you might be confused as an auditor if you didn't realize that you were dealing with compulsive or obsessiveness versus self-determinism in the field of beingness.
Now, there's two sides to the problem of beingness. One side is a compulsive, obsessive beingness. That's the winning valence sort of beingness. And we will call it simply "winning-valence beingness." Long name, but it sums up everything that happens. Guy runs into a wall, the wall has won, so now he's got to be a wall. See that? In order to win he has to be a wall.
All right. Let's take his state of mind before he ran into a wall. Let's not just unreasonably assume that all these impacts handle him as a stimulus-response machine and that everybody is sort of wound up with a key in the back of his spine and goes around like the angels do in one of the between-lives implants—you know, very jerky, and the Devil comes out and the angels come out and they back up and turn around and Christ bows very jerkily to the preclear and so forth. Anyway, he isn't this kind of a wind-up doll. He can get into the valence of one. And those people who have been operating in the field of elementary demonology—which is, I think, the basic study of psychiatry—have so consistently operated out of the theta trap valence that a mechanical attitude toward individuals has ensued. It's a very aberrated attitude.
We have a problem when we are dealing with this, in distinguishing between what is aberrated and what is desirable. You see that? Well, what is an aberrated action?
Now the Freudian goes so far—as a matter of fact he doesn't go anyplace, there isn't such a thing practically today—went so far as to say that every artistic creative impulse stemmed from, was based upon, neurosis. In order to be an artist a fellow had to be a neurotic. Oh, no. Oh, no. Because the real competent artists on the track were some of the toughest, sanest boys you ever ran into. They were real tough. There was nothing horribly delicate about them. They just went in and slugged. They were quite forthright individuals. They were very, very self-determined and when they did work in the arts, they did work in the arts. And when you look at the amount of work which they were willing to go to, you see immediately that the common denominator of neurosis is exceeded.
The common denominator of all neurosis and psychosis is an unwillingness or an inability to expend effort. So we just can't credit, for instance, Michelangelo with neurosis. Just take a look at some of his statuary and just take a look at some of the painting. And the way that boy was overriding the protest of the body is something marvelous to behold. The ability of such an artist to handle effort does not compare with our observation—the first time a good uniform denominator could be found in the field of insanity, neurosis, compulsion, obsession and so forth. The artist who is capable of doing all this work, he just doesn't compare with people who are neurotic—who are in bad shape mentally, physically. Because the common denominator of these people—. Bear this up, for heaven's sakes, go out sometime and look or talk to some of these people and immediately you will blow up any slightest shadow of feeling that neurosis is behind any artistic work and that common denominator in neurosis and psychosis is inability to work, inability to expend effort.
And the mechanics of this are simply this: An individual has as the common denominator of all the things he's fighting in his facsimile bank—energy. Is that right? Energy is the common denominator of all these pictures and things that are pressing against him and compelling him. There's energy involved in pain. There's energy involved in all these things. So—energy, energy particles. When an individual has chosen all these things out for his randomity, look where it gets him. He all of a sudden has the whole bank against him.
So the moment that an individual says, "I don't want anything more to do with effort and effort is no good and what I want to do is work for eighty-nine years and then retire on the government and social security and that's my goal." Oh, why, let's just—instead of letting him carry on with such a goal, why don't we just give them a few electric shocks, couple of prefrontal lobotomies (one of them on himself and one of them on his schiz self) and just cave him in and collapse him and forget about him. Wind him up in a small black ball and put him on a shelf. What's going to happen to him?
Look at the horror of this: he's chosen all of effort, all of force as his randomity, as his enemy. Of course he's going to resist anything that has any force in it. So boom— the second you say something is "my enemy," you can't handle it. So in comes the bank—boom. And therefore you have a perfectly observable mechanical aspect of neurosis and psychosis. And it shows up primarily in the inability to expend effort, the inability to work. That's the first casual observation you would make if somebody was rather bad off.
Now let's say, well, was Cervantes, for instance, was he mad and so on? You mean a guy could be mad and apply the amount of actual physical effort necessary to write such a tome as Don Quixote? I don't know whether you're familiar with the work in its original form, but it's thick. You figure out the number of ergs of energy necessary to make one pen stroke and you'll find out that there's at least six or seven million tons worth of pen pushing in it.
The man who could paint all the pictures of—what's the name of the cathedral in the Vatican? Saint Paul's or Saint something-or-other?
Female voice: Saint Peter's.
It should be Saint Michelangelo, but Michelangelo, that's a good enough name for it. Anyway the whole ceiling, if you figure the number of acres of paint there and if you take a look at the amount of stonework and so forth in his statuary you see there, you're not looking at somebody who can't work. Not even vaguely.
All right. Effort, then, when it becomes a randomity produces through its counter-effort an inability to handle effort. Let's see, then, somebody is surrounded by particles of energy and he considers all these particles of energy as something he's against—he can't handle, he can't have, he doesn't want, he can't be—and of course, well, it's just nothing to it, they just simply move in on him because they don't have any will. He's the only one that has the will. He will even go so far as to pull them in on himself just to prove to himself that he can't handle them.
Now, when you're looking over this universe, you're actually looking at space and particles. Even an anchor point is a particle, which itself is the limiting of space. Now, space can be limited, by the way, just as a concept, but that still would be an anchor point out there.
All right. Let's look over, then, the problem of handling this universe and one's at-homeness in this universe and find out that one is as well off in this universe as he can handle the component parts which make up this universe. And if he is self-determined about the component parts of this universe, he's all right. And if he's obsessively upset about parts of this universe, then he's all wrong.
Why? You have space. Now, space could be your enemy. If space were your enemy, then you couldn't handle space. You couldn't handle distance—nothing at all handleable about this. And you would then have a tendency to lose all your space.
If you couldn't handle energy or effort, then you also couldn't handle mass because mass is composed simply of compounded, compressed energy particles and that is matter.
So an individual who says "effort is no good" is bound for trouble. He's bound for trouble, that's certainty. Because, one way or the other, he'll manage to get himself trapped in it. It's his enemy. Anything that is his enemy, he can't be. Anything he can't be will fight him. Anything he can't duplicate, he will fight or it will fight him.
So when we find somebody who says "Force is bad, force is bad, force is bad. Oh, we mustn't have force, we mustn't have violence. Nobody must raise his voice. We mustn't have energy made up into anger particles and we mustn't have force, we mustn't have violence, we mustn't have anger, yak, yak, yak, yak, yak." Don't get upset with him. Just pat him on the head and say, "Poor little fellow. A little further along youse gonna be a rock, only you gonna be at the center of this rock and you not gonna be able to get out." The fellow who comes along and tries to convince you that all fighting is bad, well, he's just telling you that all randomity is bad, then. Well, you have two choices. If you're going to have no randomity at all, then there's two ways you can have no randomity: One is to be at 40.0 or up on the Tone Scale and just sit there in a vast serenity, which is perfectly all right. And the other one, just sit there in the middle of a compressed particle which is very, very dense and just sit there. Of course, I don't believe that the second one is possible. It doesn't matter how small a person can get, he can still find forces which will oppose him. So the other isn't any solution.
Now, one would only get from that 40.0 down by supposing continually that the use of force, fighting and types of energy were bad—that it was bad. How bad it is, that's how can't-have it is. You say how bad something is, you're saying how can't-have it is.
Well, gee, what's the road out then? The road out is not to simply accept passively the fact that fighting goes on and be apathetic about it all. The road out isn't necessarily to get in there and fight like mad. No, the road out simply consists of being able to handle large, dense masses or nebulous masses but, in any event, energy particles and space. What do you mean handle it? Well, you can be it.
When you graduate any preclear from several compulsive beingnesses into an ability to be anything, that's the road out—compulsive beingnesses to being anything. He found energy masses desirable. This isn't because he was super convinced and argued into it. It just happens that they are desirable to him. Let's not look for any deeper significance in it than that. A thetan likes mass. He loves mass. Nothing like some good, hard, solid mass to really get himself in good condition. Well, if you don't believe this, just start an avalanche on somebody sometime who is feeling rather poorly and let it run for a while and keep it rolling. And then you'll find his perceptions have brightened up, his engrams have keyed-out and he begins to feel very good indeed.
What have you done? You gave him something. Do you know you could walk up to a lot of fellows and give them a nice present, something dense. You give them a nice present (it doesn't matter whether it's valuable or not), hand it to them and they would look at you and, socially, they think they're supposed to accept this so they won't say anything to you and so on. But you've really just raised the hair on the back of their necks. You've really upset them.
Let's walk around in this society and try to give people something. They know they can't have. Well, gee, they're not in good shape. A person who is in this state is not in good shape. A person who is so afraid of having that he has to outflow or pour out or fight away from him anything which is liable to come in is dramatizing a can't-have.
An ideal state for a thetan is to be able to have anything. Well, the test of having something, for a thetan, is to be able to be it. You see that? You see that the test of having it is being it.
Now, beingness, essentially, is space. So he has to be the space of it. And where he can't have something which is a mass, why, of course he can't have that space, so that space becomes mysterious to him—unthinkably detestable in some cases, any mass becomes.
Well, this is because of compulsive or obsessive havingness. He's trying to inhibit himself from obsessively having something—which is to say, he's trying to inhibit himself from running down the street and running into a brick wall. He's trying to keep from having brick walls by running into them. Well, this is a different problem than having brick walls. You see this as a distinctly different problem.
Now, this establishes acceptance level. Acceptance level of an individual of mass works in here too. You'll find an individual can have a wrecked car but couldn't have a good car. Well, that's obsessive havingness. He's just stuck in too many wrecked cars. So he believes, after a while, "Well, all I can have is a wrecked car." He believes this, therefore he will accept wrecked cars. He gets stuck in sick bodies, dying bodies, convulsing bodies and so forth. So after a while he says, "Well, all I can have is dying bodies."
You'll find out at the same time when you say acceptance level, you're running Beingness Processing in a different way. Acceptance Level Processing, Beingness Processing—both tie together on this. Anything an individual can have, an individual can be. Therefore you can simply ask him to be it and you'll get the same result.
Well, as you process a preclear you ask him to be this and be that and be something else and so on and you notice all of a sudden that he's not doing too well. He can be several heavy masses with certainty and they're quite interesting to him. Oh yes, they're very interesting. He can be the Capitol or something on that order at Washington. He can be, so on. And let's say we run into it and find he can be a small sun, you know, radiating heat and so on. And all of a sudden our preclear is starting to go neeeeaaaaaah.
Well, by asking him to be a lot of heavy things, you took him beyond the critical mass point. A thetan has a critical mass—he should have—he should have a certain amount of ability to be. And when he no longer has what he considers to be his necessary amount of beingness towards a necessary amount of objects and so on, he becomes critical of his mass. He gets groggy, foggy, his memory goes bad and his perception goes down.
Why? It's because if he can't be an awful lot of things, he can't communicate with a lot of things and he can't duplicate a lot of things. So the things he can't be, he can't duplicate, he can't communicate with, he can't perceive. Also, his awareness is as good as he can occupy enormous spaces.
Lookingness is all very cute—that he rigged up lookingness of light reflecting off of something and arriving where the individual is and he sees it. But actually his ability to do that depends upon his ability to occupy the whole area and be the thing which he's looking at. See, he has to be able to slightly be the thing he's looking at.
You'll occasionally catch your body—I mean just that—you'll occasionally sort of catch your body duplicating something with enormous obsessive thoroughness. Before you get your body in real good shape, you'll wonder where on earth that funny somatic is coming from on your chin. Well, if you look, you will find something very interesting about that somatic on your chin. You will find out that it may be the inkwell which you were facing. Only your body has duplicated it with such thoroughness, such obsessive thoroughness, that it has actually the mass and roughness of the inkwell up against it. You'll find this in some preclears. They are not aware of the fact that it's present time duplication which is causing their chronic somatics—not facsimiles. Facsimiles cause a different kind of somatic. But there is a kind of somatic which is caused by the body obsessively duplicating portions of the environment which, because they contain pressure, naturally bring about a pressure and a painful point or mass in the body.
The body is looking at a car and if you were to ask this fellow, whose body was obsessively doing this, where the headlamps were, he would just sort of on a flash-answer basis—he wouldn't be thinking about what I'm talking about here—he's looking at this car and you know that he can do this, you'd say, "Where are the headlamps?" He wouldn't point over there and there to those two headlamps on the front of the car, he would point here and here to his shoulders. See? The body is doing this obsessively. There's many a fellow walking around whose body actually is slightly out of kilter or he's a little stoop-shouldered or something like that, who is simply up against all the ceilings. See, he happens to be under a ceiling and his body obsessively duplicates the mass and weight of that ceiling. And its mass and weight of the ceiling is right here on top of his head, you see, and he has a tendency to kind of duck to relieve this pressure. It's the body obsessively duplicating it.
It's very amusing, but occasionally all you have to do when you find a body doing this is just say to the body, as though it were somebody else, say to the body, "You don't have to duplicate that anymore" and Ping, the somatic goes. It's real cute.
Well, for the purpose of Beingness Processing, what are the two kinds of beingness in which the auditor gets involved, far as his preclear is concerned? For the purposes of the auditor, there's only two kinds. They're distinctly different kinds, however—both beingness. At first glance they would seem to be the same thing and that's where the confusion comes in.
There is the ability to be things in a self-determined, certain fashion. That's one kind of beingness. Anybody can benefit by running this processing solely on a self-determined basis. He gets great certainty he can be this, he can be that, he can be something else. The next thing you know he's freer and freer and freer to observe the environment, to be in the environment, he has less and less things which he has to fight. It doesn't matter that he can be these things with certainty. He still may have some residual feeling that they are challenging him or he's against them or they're his enemies or something of this sort. All right. He can be these things one after the other. His perception will rise. But he's being all of these things self-determinedly, he's not stuck in any of them—doesn't have to be stuck.
Now, the other kind, distinctly different kind, is obsessive beingness, compulsive beingness. The fellow is being a lot of things without his consent. Now, this is winning-valence beingness.
So we have these two classes: One is self-determined beingness. The other one is winning-valence beingness. We probably ought to have much neater names, but those names describe these two kinds of things. You can call them compulsive beingness, self-determined beingness, if you want to shorten it up.
Winning-valence beingness would be describing the whole cycle. Now, you say, "Now, let's find some things you can be." And he checks off this and he checks off that.
Now, remember that any compulsive beingness is backed up by the actual fact that the thetan wants to be things. So his own desire underscores all of the compulsions. I mean, back of it is the natural desire. So this natural desire is enforced by this compulsive, obsessive beingness—winning-valence beingness.
All right. We have this preclear and we're going along and you say, "Now, what can you be?" and he flounders around and after we've processed him for a little while, we notice that he has missed being any kind of a barrier. He can be a cat, he can be an automobile, he can be a this, he can be a that and everything about it is mobile. He can be mobile symbols, in other words. Mobile. Mobile masses. Masses which move. Cats, dogs, people, chairs—these things all are capable of being moved.
And we find out he isn't being any distances and he isn't being any fixed barriers, like walls. Well, he's probably been avoiding it. We won't give him a shove into it, we'll just have him run more symbols so that he can be anything he can be. The next thing you know, he's going to run into one of these barriers. See, we would notice at first he was kind of avoiding them and after we've run a lot of other kinds of beingness and so forth, why, he just closes terminals sort of naturally with some kind of a barrier.
And at this moment, he is being a wall. He can be a wall. Well, every time you had him on self-determined beingness, you know, he was choosing this and that, he could be this and he could be that and he was doing this, he was getting more and more cheerful and more and more cheerful and all of a sudden we find on him, "Well," he says in the same degree of cheerfulness, "well, you know I—that's a very funny thing but I can be a wall." Yes, it seems very strange to him. Well, that's fine. He's a wall. "Well, what else can you be?" And he'll say, "Well, I can be, maybe, a few more symbols—mobile symbols, automobiles, airplanes, things that move around. You know, it's not safe to be things that are fixed because they're liable to get hit." He can move.
And he says, "And I can be this wall." And you say, "Well, all right, be the wall." And he says, "Let's see if I can be any other kind of wall. [sigh] Oooh... " And he starts looking very unhappy and he starts feeling more unhappy and he starts feeling very groggy and so forth. You've hit this other kind of beingness: compulsive beingness, winning-valence beingness. He's being a wall because it won and you have hit a major stop point in all of his thinking machinery, something that stands in front of his goals, something that is an enemy, actually, to him. He's actually chosen walls out as his enemy, then he ran into one and now he's being one. All right. Here's his problem lying right out before you.
Now, you would wonder whether or not you just couldn't bull your way through and run just beingnesses. Yeah, you can bull your way through. But there's a certain percentage of preclears you'd get into that would get real unhappy after a while.
Male voice: You'd run just walls?
Well, you don't run just walls.
Male voice: You'd just run just beingnesses…
Just beingnesses. You just run any kind of a beingness he can be and then find some other kind of a beingness he can be and find some other kind of a beingness he can be. You can just run it just like that. But let's not overlook this sudden phenomenon which appears, of being some sort of a barrier or a very fixed object with a resultant semi-cave-in on the case. He just sort of goes downhill. He doesn't feel well. He feels apathetic. He feels sad. He feels this. He feels that. He gets groggy. His memory starts to slide on him. He starts into a dope-off or a boil-off of some sort or another. Well, you don't look for this behavior as optimum behavior. It is a symptom of having run into a compulsive beingness, a winning-valence beingness. He has taken this thing compulsively. It has been forced upon him, it is obsessive with him to be it. The significance of it is so thoroughly identified in the rest of the bank that to find any significance at all would be almost impossible. Beyond the significance of it, he's being it so thoroughly that it's identified with all kinds-of things and there's no logic to it. He's just stuck right there.
Well, there would be a dozen ways to get him out of this. At least a dozen ways to get him out of this. You'll find out that there's scarcity back of it. He's hit walls, so he can't have them. So he hit this wall, so he is it. This sounds rather strange to you perhaps, but you see there's a scarcity of walls. Walls are something you're liable to hit and that's liable to damage other havingnesses. So you avoid walls. And then one day you hit a wall real hard and you obsessively be it. You don't want to be it and you don't want to be it JO hard that you become it. And then how do you remedy this? It is remedied in terms of remedying havingness, at its most optimum, the most optimum auditing on it would simply—. This fellow is running along and all of a sudden he's a wall. Well, he's been very happy about other things he's being—or unhappy, it didn't matter—but he was getting along all right. And he, all of a sudden, becomes this wall and everything starts to sort of cave in and look very solemn and horrible to him and life is not good.
And there is a way to handle this without further inquiring into it or without swapping him around and making him be something else that would have run into the wall. You can solve that that way, you understand, but there isn't any particular reason to solve it that way. This other—that requires some thought. You have to figure for a while and fool around with it and so on. There isn't any reason to go at it that way, since this other is so easy. All you do, the second that he starts running into this, is just have him mock-up a few more walls. He'll find out that although his mock-ups usually are no good at all, he can get some walls at that point.
Nothing he can get like a wall—right there. He can get another wall like this wall. He can get some other walls around him. And what do these walls do? Their behavior is to snap in. He doesn't have to move them in, they snap in. Ping, ping, ping, ping. He puts up a wall, in it comes. He puts up another wall.
Let's say he went along just fine and all of a sudden found himself being a stove—fixed object, dangerous object—he's a stove. Well, he was getting along fine up to the moment when he became a stove and then he sort of goes neeeoooom Well, you don't have to inquire into the number of incidents associated with stoves. They'd probably number 8,675,000 per lifetime. They're just too many to count. But he's obsessively being a stove. This is obvious because he's boiling-off, because he doesn't feel well, because it upsets him. How do you solve this?
The answer to this is you have him mock-up some more stoves while he's being a stove. You'll find out these new stoves that he mocks-up while he's still being this stove will snap in on him. And all of a sudden he'll feel brighter and brighter and perceptions turn up and turn up and turn up. You just have him mock-up stoves.
Now, if he's not in very good condition, you'll find out he can only mock-up a few dozen of these stoves and all of a sudden he can't mock any more up. This phenomenon doesn't take place anymore. He doesn't snap in. He can't mock-up any more stoves and so on. All you've done in that is run him up to a null point. You've run out some of the obsessiveness of being a stove, being a wall, whatever it was. You've run out some of this, now let's get into a little bit more beingness. Let him be some other things he can be with certainty. Sooner or later he's going to be a stove again. This will turn up inevitably. When he does, ask him to make a dozen more stoves and pull them in. At that time he'll be able to.
Now, if everything he was being was compulsive and obsessive, in other words, if he had nothing but winning-valence beingnesses—this would be an impossible thing— but let's say, let's just assume, let's be very mechanical and say, "All life runs on is the fact that it has run into things and then it has become convinced that it must then have these things because it's run into—there's no actual desire." We're saying, at the same time, "There is no volition to life. Life is a sort of a mechanical machine which runs itself one way or the other and a thetan has no choice and he has no thinking power and he can't consider, he can't postulate, but he just sort of runs along chug, chug, chug." You know, Communist Party propaganda. That is the "woiker," the great "woiker" that everybody should idealize.
If a thetan was just this machine, why, you couldn't process him anyhow. The thing to do would be to make some more nuts and bolts and screw them into him. That's what they try to do. The communist aspect of psychiatry is quite interesting. They say, "Well, this fellow is just a machine and therefore if we throw in some extra energy and if we oil up the timing gears and..."—that's medicine— . we oil up the timing gears and so on, why, it will keep on running." Chug, chug, chug, chug, chug. How they would love to have everybody being a machine. These fellows were robot masters early on the track, robot repairmen, so forth. You could see them now in their greasy overalls, fixing up the nuts and bolts on a robot. And the Freudian philosophy dramatizes this quite markedly.
Anyway, they say if you got enough energy out of the robot, if you let it obsessively outflow long enough, why, it would sort of empty the banks that are making it in bad shape. It is sort of—you drain the crankcase oil, it will get well. That's a statement of it. It doesn't happen to work out. Just as any time you try to strip everything a thetan has away from him, he gets unhappy.
Now, a thetan can also run into the idea that as he's being these things, that they're wearing out or something. You're not enlarging his beingness. Therefore you're running a whole bunch of winning-valence beingnesses which are quite light, see? This fellow is dramatizing the fact that he couldn't have anything unless he were given it or it were forced upon him. See, he's running the idea. That's winning-valence beingness again. He can only have something if it's forced on him. He could only have a car if it got wrecked around him, see. And he sort of starts running out on this idea. Well, he'll come around to the other idea. But his havingness is scarce.
This is the thing on the track which the auditor is liable to miss! Because there's so many people who resent havingness. There are so many people who can't have. People shy off so violently from these compulsive beingnesses. You know, they don't want that wall and "You mustn't fall in the stove, Junior" and all of that is so thorough on the thing that an auditor is liable to overlook the fact that a stove is a mighty good thing to have. A wall is a fine thing to have. The good, dense mass of a whole bunch of uranium is a wonderful thing to have. Total significance of having a whole mass of uranium is that it's nice to have. It's good stuff. Yeah, good, nice, dense.
Now, you get space opera, for instance. And you're bucketing along at umpteen light-years and so forth and all of a sudden—it wasn't emanating, so you didn't see it—it was a great big black star sitting there. And it comes into the ship so fast that you hardly knew you hit it. Well, that's quite an impact.
This star is so heavy in gravity that you couldn't escape it with a ship anyhow and so on—black, broiling. You know those black stars are not just sitting there dead. The reason they're black is because electrons can no longer get out of the field, so they look black. But you get down on the surface, the electrons are trying to leave and the gravity of the thing is pulling them right back into it again. So you get a problem there of black, boiling furiosity which is quite amazing.
Well, a fellow hits this thing—crunch! And after that, you try to run this and that, he's compulsively and obsessively being a blackness or something. You can't quite figure out what he's being, but he's obsessively being a blackness. And suddenly, well, we find out that he can be a black star. Well, knowing something about space opera, we say immediately, "Well, gee whiz, this is very good. I mean we finally found the place where he's stuck." Well, he isn't stuck there because he hit it. That's a funny one. He isn't stuck there because he hit it. He's stuck there because hitting it made it scarce thereafter. It's the last one he could have. After that he mustn't have them. So they got real scarce. So he'll go back to the first one he could have. And there it is, And he's got this great big black star and he's just holding on to it. But the mechanics of it say mechanically, why, of course it was forced upon him so he has to keep on having it. And he'll be very happy to explain it this way to you: "This was the horrible sadness of having lost the ship and the crew and the cargo and the cargo of white slaves, everything. And it's very bad." He'll explain all this to you and want you to be very sympathetic about it. But don't you believe it.
The point is that that's the last black star he could have because after that he knew that he mustn't hit them. So of course, he couldn't have them anymore. And he'll go back and pick up this last black star and he will hold on to it for dear life and he will use all the energy of hitting it to hold on to it. So you get the facsimile in action.
But let's not go on a basis of "everything is bad" and "he can't have anything" and "the native state of a thetan is to have nothing," you know. "Have nothing—that is his goal, so..." That's not his goal. He wants things, see. He'll just go on wanting them for a long time, I'm afraid.
He makes an awful lot of fuss and stew and makes it terribly dramatic. But the point is he wants to have things, he wants to be things, he wants to be able to be things. Well, what do we do if we suddenly run into this fellow and he's being a black star and he all of a sudden starts to cave in and starts to dope-off and get very unhappy and so on?
Well, obviously—obviously he's run into other black stars. There's a lot of incidents of this character there. If we started to run incidents, we'd get in trouble. There's just too many incidents.
Well, let's pick the lock on the positive side of the ledger. It's obvious the thetan wants black stars—he's got one. You know, individuals are really very self-determined. If they've got something, they want it. And they may explain to you that they've got it because they don't want it. But the truth of the matter is—they can prove this by the mechanics that work out, by the way, they can prove this to you absolutely, that they've got it because they don't want it and it's been forced upon them. But the point is it's scarce.
Now, one of the boys—one of the boys that you would find very, very stuck would be, for instance, the poor boy. Poor, ragged boy that everybody is sorry for. You're liable to find him stuck very thoroughly on the track particularly if there had been a very great scarcity of it for a long time—a very great scarcity of poor boys. There can be a scarcity of any item, but there we're adding in significance.
Let's get as least significant as we can, because the thetan will trip us up every time. Our preclear will just roll us into a knot of logic anytime he possibly can. He'll say, well, this was horrible and he was all "agin" it and he will feel this strongly and so forth. What he's really protesting against is his beingness has been upset. He's been barred from having certain things. He's been barred from being certain things.
Havingness as you can tell, now, is a sort of a detached remote beingness. To have something, to have to have something, of course, comes about as a covert beingness.
Now, you can have a car rather than be a car, see. Therefore ownership enters in between beingness and havingness and that's what makes these two things slightly different. If you can be something, you sure don't have to own it, do you? So the cleanest, clearest way to go about it is simply to be everything and be anything you want to be. Now, anything you could be, naturally you could have. I mean, that's awfully easy. You can have a body if you can be it. Now, a person can't have a body and the body goes out of his control when he stops being able to be bodies.
In auditing this black star—we find our preclear, we ask him to be this and be that. And so, all of a sudden, he says, "I can be a black star." Zooooooomw, bong, thud.
The thing to do is to have him mock-up a few dozen of these things and pull them in on himself. He can do it and he'll brighten right up. And having done that he says, "You know, I can't get any more of these things." Oh, well, you've just hit another star that was awfully scarce too. He's more convinced of the scarcity of another star. Now don't bother with it. Just let's not get more significant about this at all. Let's simply chase off and find some more things he can be. Sooner or later he'll be a black star again. Tell you something: it's not the same black star.
Now, you have him mock-up a few dozen of these and pull them in and you'll find out that he can mock-up more of these and then all of a sudden he runs out of them. He just can't mock-up any more or bring any more in or it doesn't seem real to him and a few things like that. Something like that is liable to happen—not necessarily. He may be able to bring in billions of them, with equal density. That's fine. But if you run into this other condition, you just have him bring in as many as he can bring in or as many as seem to remedy his situation—which may be a lot of them. And if he can't bring them in, just have him be something else. See that? This is awful simple, isn't it? That's a very simple solution to this. The more significant you get about it, the worse off you're going to be.
Now, you only miss the boat if you miss the boat on this idea and concept: If you are auditing from the viewpoint that a thetan is totally obsessive, compulsive, inhibitive; that he got that way totally because of a mechanical give and take; that he has no choice, no selection and no real or actual desire—if you're auditing him from the standpoint that you're auditing a sort of a puppet—you'll miss. Because you'll conceive that the things he has, have been forced upon him. The things he has to be, he's been forced to be and so forth. If you audit from that basis, you'll miss the boat because you will forget to lift him up to a basis of where he can again consider beingness as a pleasant activity. So you'll only audit him up out of the compulsive and obsessive beingnesses. And you will neglect the other side of it, which is self-determined beingness, which is to just be able to be anything.
You will succeed, you will succeed in auditing if you audit from this point of view: that a thetan can actively postulate, choose, desire to be anything or nothing. And that he's got what a bunch of misconcepts and postulates told him he wanted. That what he's actually wound himself into is a state of unknowingness imposed on himself, to a large degree. But he's gotten into confusions which have exceeded his ability to solve. But because he's gotten into them, it doesn't follow that he is something without choice and without actual native desire to have and be and do!
He can be as different from other thetans as there are postulates. You talk about postulates. Now, what's the basic woof and warp of a thetan? Well, even this seems to have variety. There isn't a stuff called theta which you take a square yard of and then have a thetan.
Yeah, it's an individuality which is basically an individuality, not enforced eccentricity of some sort. Now, his desire to be is very great and he'll be as well off as he can widely be.
Now, you wonder why your preclear suddenly runs out of goals, why he's stuck in time, why all of these things are happening to him one after the other. Well, he's sort of short-circuited. He really doesn't connect up with this and that, he's kind of given up and so forth.
If you audit him in the direction which he would declare he wants to be audited, you would boost him out into a condition where he wouldn't have anything to do with the MEST universe under any circumstances whatsoever. He wouldn't have anything to do with any object or any person, he would just separate himself and put distance between—that's that.
According to his statement, as he sits there, this would probably be his goal: is just to sort of disappear and get rid of everybody and anything and not be anything anymore and so on. And if you took him at his face value and audited him in the direction just to make him get rid of things, boy, you'd sure plow him in. Oh, you'd plow him in but thoroughly.
Now, why does he want to be plowed in? Well, I don't know that an unconscious state for the next eighteen billion years is undesirable. He just decided this was fairly desirable as far as he's concerned. He's tired of surviving. He got himself so snarled up and he's made so many postulates that cross up so many of his postulates which counter other things, back and forth, and finally he says, "To hell with it," he says, "I'll just take a snooze for the next eighteen billion years" and wonder what the hell is going to happen then. See, that's easy.
He says, "Sooner or later somebody is going to come along and blow up this galaxy and make complete dust out of it and even though I'm unconscious right down there at the corner of Yap and Yump Street, it doesn't matter." Because the truth of the matter is, it doesn't!
But you have it, within your power, the ability to rehabilitate his interest in these things. He's lost track of the circuits and so forth and he knows sooner or later they would blow up or wear out or something would happen to them, so his method is just to go unconscious. I swear some thetan or other—I know this to be a fact—a thetan will occasionally know where a theta trap is and simply go over and walk in. Particularly a trap that makes complete unconsciousness. It's like some criminal will all of a sudden go down and surrender to the cops and say, "Well, yeah, I killed him."
Well, you'd be surprised how many "criminals" (quote, unquote), walk in to police forces and surrender their beingness to the cops for crimes they didn't commit. It's enough, you know, to publish the fact that "Gertie Bumstein was killed in an outrageous and horribly malignant fashion by an unknown slayer," to immediately get a whole parade of confessions. People keep walking in and say, "Well, I killed Gertie."
"How'd you do it?" Cops are very cagey about this. They suddenly say, "Well, all right.
If you did, where did you put the penknife?"
"Well," they say, "I threw it in the river."
They say, "Next case—there wasn't a penknife used." They have to protect the public from confessing, in other words. Every once in a while, the movies are dramatizing the fact that some prosecuting attorney has to get a number of convictions and that sort of thing. From what I've seen of people, it's easier to get conviction than it is to get innocence. It's only the attorneys who keep people from going to the big house in parades.
An individual gets down to a certain point where he doesn't see an immediate solution, so he guesses he'll sleep it out. He'll just snore it through, kick it over, let it skid.
Now, this is quite normal when an individual believes himself no longer to be presentable. Therefore he can't get sensation or joy in life with the body he's carrying around. So he decides, "Well," he says, "I don't know—I'll sort of kick off and sooner or later by happenstance or mischance or something like that, I'll run into a body which is serviceable in that direction. And who knows?" In other words, he's considered that he isn't going to get any fun out of it, so why worry about it?
Well now, what he misses—what he misses is the fact that he's tangled up and he isn't thinking straight, but he mainly misses the fact that it's fun to be. Because he's made a postulate against all of his desires and actualities and that is: he said it's no fun to be. See, he said, "It's no fun anymore, so therefore I'm not going to be." Well, trying to get somebody to unmake this postulate is sometimes very much of a trial on an auditor. Auditor gets very upset. This fellow, he works on him and he works on him and he works on him and if he inquired closely into the case, he'd find out this fellow was trying to go down the spout, but quick, and if the auditor could just work a little tougher techniques that made him just a little more unconscious, this would be real great.
One of the things that is very hard to get a thetan to face is awareness. You start giving him broader and broader and broader awareness and he all of a sudden starts to Straightwire with great clarity back into the life before this one. "Oh no, you don't" —clonk! Off will go the perception of it. He's working against it, mostly because he doesn't believe he can be and he knows he can't have. So audit it from the basis that the fellow can go up or down or either way, but he's going to go there on pretty much his own self-determinism, Now, you can slant him in favor of the Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh Dynamics. You can slant him up or down. If you want to slant him uniformly and consistently down and pour him down out of the spout, you're in the wrong profession. You should profess yourself to be a psychiatrist and hang up your shingle and have some magazine articles written (the medical method of advertising) which mention your name copiously and you're in. And there's just—people walk in and you knock them out, and they walk in and you knock them out, they walk in and you knock them out. They're the same sort of a profession as they have up at the slaughterhouses. There's a fellow in some old-time slaughterhouse that stands there with a baseball bat and the cows walk up the ramp and they hit them over the head and the cows drop dead and the next cow steps up and knock that cow dead and so forth. I mean, same profession, practically.
It's a method of making life—making life less livable. But remember that no matter what happens to the individual, he still has the feeling, well, he could snore it out for another eighteen billion years, sleep it through. Like the mouse in the jaws of the cat—"gulp"—and he hears that last gulp and he says, "Well, I got another chance, what the hell." That time it's desperate. It's only desperate as long as a guy thinks he has a chance.
Now, you'd be surprised what people will do when they don't have a chance—when they know they don't have a further chance. You can suppress a populace to a point of where it knows it doesn't have a further chance, and it will then engage in some of the weirdest and doggonedest activities. It just goes beyond regulation and control.
It's very amusing that these great dictators have a tendency occasionally, when they're real rough, to do this. They police and control and police and control and knock a society around and all of a sudden people look around and say, "You know, there isn't any sense in trying to be orderly. You can't win." They look in this direction, they say, "Look-a-here, at this day and time period, you can't win. Well, no matter what you do, the cops are going to get you. Doesn't matter which law you obey, you're going to be disobeying some other law. Skip it!"
After that they stop paying their taxes—everything. You could send squads of police down the street and yank them out of their shops and stand every fourth shopkeeper up and shoot him for not paying the duty and so forth. And the rest of the shopkeepers go right on not paying the duty and just trust to luck that the cops are not going to come down that street the next day. You see that? It's not really an apathy, it's a resurgence from apathy.
You can police and control an individual or a populace down to the point where they become utterly lawless and that in itself is what we conceive to be the definition—or actually this fulfills the requirements of a definition—for "criminality." See that?
Well, if they can't have, if they can't be, they decide to sleep it through and they'll get unaware on you. You're auditing them, they suddenly can see that auditing is not going to do them a great deal of good. Why? Well, can't. They can't have. They get too many failures. They'll just sit back and start to pass out of the picture. And they'll audit in the direction of getting more and more unconscious and beating themselves up more and more and fading more and more instead of getting brighter and brighter.
You see, it's only a special kind of machine that tells you you've got to be more perfect and better and more acceptable to your fellow man. Many people don't run on this machine. That machine breaks down and they start running on another machine which says if you're ugly enough, everybody will keep their distance. That's a good machine, too. I mean, it's perfectly capable of producing action, interest and randomity.
All right. We get down to beingness, then, we find out there's two kinds of beingness. And when an individual gets too much compulsive and obsessive beingness, he decides to sort of pass out of the picture. He does so, too. And the way to get him out of that is to remedy it, because any compulsive beingness is based primarily upon a scarcity. And being based upon a scarcity, it is really necessary to mock-up many more beingnesses like the beingness which he is there—you know, a winning-valence beingness he's in—mock-up a lot more of them, snap them in. He brightens up, ask him to be something else.
If you just let him sit there and bog, yeah, you'd get through somehow or another, but you know you're liable to have a boy on your hands that for a few days is going to feel like he's just flown the coop, that his rockers are missing and that the cogs and valve wheels have been turned the other way.
I've had a fellow sit down into one of these winning-valence beingnesses and simply—evidently perfectly sane guy—just go psychotic. Just go goofy, right there and right then.
All right. When do you handle havingness and remedy it while running Beingness Processing? When do you run a Remedy of Havingness? What is a Remedy of Havingness? "Mock-up several more like it and snap it in. And several more like it and snap them in on you" while being the scarce object—being the stuck object.
What's the symptom of it? The fellow starts to dope-off and feel bad while he's being this thing. You'll find some preclears that every beingness they pick up is a compulsive beingness for quite a while. So you just remedy them. They can have what they can be. Obviously, being something is senior to having it, so it's no trick at all to have something if you can be it. The fellow who goes to jail compulsively and obsessively is somebody who can be walls. So sure, he can have them. See that?
So on this dope-off and so forth, let's just consider that the thetan needs some more of them—of whatever he's being that caused the dope-off. Snap them in, you got it.
You could plow through somehow or another probably just on Beingness Processing by never paying any attention to a remedy of havingness. But your preclear would have some awfully bad times of it. So let's remedy it as we go.
All right.
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