Present Time, Self Analysis (cont.) (3ACC 540115)
Series: 3rd Advanced Clinical Course (3ACC)
Date: 15 January 1954
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
A lecture given by L. Ron Hubbard on the 15 January 1954
And it makes one feel rather strange sometimes about processing to realize that the effective process is not the most brilliant process. These two aren't there together. The most brilliant process is not necessarily the most effective process. The most effective process is the one which works, that's all.
Now, you'll find various processes working on various cases. And the one thing that you must be cautioned against is working a limited technique too long on a case merely because it's apparently working on the case. You might be taking the long road to China. You just might be.
For instance, I can solve things today with Effort Processing that would appear to be damn miraculous – the effort within the effort, within the effort, within the effort, in terms of brackets. The effort not to within the effort not to, within the effort not to, within the effort not to, in terms of brackets, I can get more perception changes on a lot of preclears, but what's the trouble here?
Well, the trouble is that it tends to validate the effort band. And this is confusing to the preclear and he buries himself away from present time, slightly, although it has great effectiveness for quite awhile and it can be run for quite awhile. There's always a time not to run it because, in the first place, it's a GE technique normally. It'll cure up all sorts of things, but it's a GE technique.
When I discovered thought, emotion and effort and put them together in 1951 and so on we had reached the limit of auditing the GE. If you're going to audit the GE, you just look at the techniques from '51 back, plus Creative Processing and you've pretty well got it, nothing much else about it.
All right. Let me tell you now about something that happens to a preclear and dig you out of this a little bit. Nothing has ever exceeded this, nothing we've ever said or anything I've ever done and so forth has ever exceeded this or thrown it into question in any way whatsoever. Therefore, it must be a rather simple, central portion of auditing and it is the problem and question of present time. Nothing has ever thrown this idea of present time into question.
There is nothing wrong with bringing a preclear to present time. The whole computation involving present time is still the most centralized computation which you have, because of course the most aberrative factor is time because it's the most hidden and strange barrier. The MEST universe is a game composed of barriers. Well, the most hidden and strange barrier is that barrier called time. And the person is in present time or he thinks he is someplace else.
Well, in view of the fact that a thetan can evidently create time itself, it is very easy for a thetan, of course, not to be here and yet, appear to be here.
Now, I've run into people sixty and eighty hours in advance of present time. This probably wouldn't occur to you that that was the case, but it's true! They're way up. This isn't particularly good, it's that they thought they had to crawl that far ahead of present time in order to be cause. This might be what you would call an "emergency margin." They need that much time for a margin. You know, they've got to think all their problems out today – day after tomorrow. And then maybe they'll be able to get far enough ahead of their problems today in order to have – it's a silly picture and it is not an accurate one. They just act as though they were two and three days ahead of themselves.
You'll find the little child has his greatest objection to his family on these grounds: they're not interested in now. The live up-and-coming adults are terribly interested in day after tomorrow, awfully interested in the future. And the dead ones are all interested in gone and buried yesterdays. Grandpop, and Aunt Belle, at one time or another, was the "Queen of the Mississippi" – they just don't seem to have any connection with anything except "that time when." And this is interesting, like a storybook, but it's not even vaguely interesting to the kid, because he's living right there in present time and you can run this on a preclear just as such. You could say, "All right, now get various members of your family not liking present time." And gee, this guy will just check off the whole list if you give him enough auditing time.
All right. What's this thing about present time, then? What's it got to do with Theta Clearing? Well, I very seriously doubt, very seriously doubt this, that you can exteriorize an individual who is not in present time – at least most of him. And I would go so far as to say that a very simple statement of non-exteriorization could be made by this alone: He isn't exteriorizing – synonym – he's not in present time. He's in the future or he's in the past. He's not here.
He has to be able to exteriorize into now in order to have a certainty and perception of now. It seems reasonable, doesn't it? Well, remember that a thetan can make time. He can make particles move, so he obviously can make time, he can make space.
Well, if he can do these things, why, then it's very easy for him to make a time to be in. It isn't that something is making a terrible effect out of him, it may very well be that he's simply manufacturing a time to be in. It might not have any reality with regard to the past either.
See, he just might have just made the time to be in, maybe the time is day after tomorrow. Of course it's right now, but it's day after tomorrow that he's made to live in. So let's not take this in the aberrated band now. Let's stop talking about aberration and just start talking about time. And we find out that to get an individual outside and with some perception, there is a good chance of getting him out if he's well in present time and if he isn't, why, he won't exteriorize into present time. And let's just look at it like that.
Let's take the GE, way out of present time, and the thetan is agreeing with the GE and the thetan tries to exteriorize and of course he's can't exteriorize, because he's got this horrible problem; if he exteriorized, he'd have to exteriorize in 1870 and it's not there. And so he says, of course, "I can't exteriorize,"
Now, I'm not giving you the whole of the problem here when we talk about present time and so forth – you know, the other elements of the problem.
The problem has many elements. It has cause and communication and duplication. And it has these other factors, such as his ability to create: which is the loss of the ability to create or wonderment about creation, adding up to an anxiety about the future and about loss, is a better statement, really, of what's wrong with the thetan.
But let's just make this crude analogy about time. See, the person can't lose the body, because he can't create a body and so on. Well, let's look at this present time problem and let's find out several things about it. Is this person so much in danger or in trouble, according to him, right in the present environment, that he can't exteriorize into it? And that would be what would be interrupting Theta Clearing into present time. See that? And therefore, you could handle some sort of a present time problem he has. Handle it by Creative Processing, handle it by…
Oh heck, one time I was trying to work a preclear and all this preclear could worry about was her husband being faithful to her, because the husband had recently hired a very nice-looking secretary. This was really all that was wrong. She had no other evidence, she was going around trying to manufacture evidence. And I Match Terminaled the secretary for five minutes, the problem blew up and we went on with auditing and exteriorized her and the session went right on off the line. There was no difficulty whatsoever with the case and all it required was just this. But while that five minutes was going on, first she was apathetic and then she was mad and then she was this and then she was that. Wonderful. What fireworks!
Well, being a limited technique, if we'd gone on with this for the rest of the day, we'd have probably had her bogged down like mad at the end of the day. But for five, ten minutes, an hour, that was fine.
Well, she wasn't in present time. Sec, she was worrying about what all the evidences were, pro and con, and those evidences had all occurred in the last few days. And the funny part of it was, they didn't occur – they hadn't occurred but she thought they might have occurred. So she was living in day before yesterday and last week and so on, all mixed up, and it didn't have anything to do – she wasn't in the room.
Well now, if you could look at a preclear and say, "Be three feet back of your head" – he's not. If you make the next statement. "Well look-a-here, he's not here," you will be, for workable purposes, right. He's not here.
Now, the reasons why he's not here is what we go into when we say duplication and communication and creation and all the rest of it – the reason he's not here. And we add this up, we find out that there is a powerful button, oh, a powerhouse of a button! And that button is "resentment of present time."
Now, let's sec why that's a powerhouse. A person who doesn't exteriorize well has gotten into flows. The way you get into flows is the way you get into this universe. You decide to resist it. You know it can't decide to resist you? You have to decide to resist it. And so you start matching flows. And this matching of flows is itself what causes ridges. Continuous and anxious perception will pile up effort flows, very heavy flows.
And so we get the manufacture of ridges and agreement with the MEST universe being the same thing, which is just this: matching flows. It starts flowing at you and you're just getting along fine, you're not flowing back at it, it's just going right on its way, just as happily as can be, but it'd love for you to team up and match and resist.
So all of a sudden, why, you decide one day that you'll match those flows and you'll resist them in some fashion or another and, the next thing you know, you're slightly stuck in that time period, see, just a tiny little bit. And as these things compound more and more and more and you agree more and more and more that you ought to resist more and more and more and so on, more and more and more, and then, the next thing you know – bog. Well, that's the mechanical – without any deeper significance – mechanical proposition behind non-exteriorization. That's the mechanics of it. It's just matching flows. You agree with the wavelength of the MEST universe.
Now, look what a neat job it is: here comes light at such and such a centimeter of wavelength (point several zeros or something like that) and in comes this light. Boy, what a tricky character you are to be able to match the wavelength of that light and so pile it up. Boy, that's really tricky. In other words, you have to just exactly hit on exactly that if we're using these flows. And it's very tricky to match it up. It's very easy to unsettle it. One of the easiest things I know of to unsettle is a matched flow from the MEST universe – it is tenuous, it is thin. It's very hard to match one of these flows and it's awfully easy to unbalance them.
Now if you'll run "resenting present time" in brackets and "desiring present time" in brackets and this little technique I gave you the other day, "the ideal person," and having the universe – all kinds of objects in it – accusing the preclear that it didn't create it, you know? Mountains say to him "you didn't create me." The ground says to him "you didn't create me," so forth. The sky is saying to him "you can't create, you didn't create me" – round and round and round and round and round.
Now, that's a little package there, which I have used – there are many of these little combination packages, you might say, of auditing – but I have used just exactly that one to exteriorize one of the toughest, meanest cases I ever ran into. And I have used that several times on preclears with considerable success. I never turned it over to another auditor before, obviously, in its component parts, because these component parts work in other combinations with other things, they certainly work together. As I say, I've used this, I haven't handed it out. All right.
It's just a routine: "resentment of present time." Well, that merely tells him resentment, antagonism – you'll run into apathy about present time. You'll be very happily running the bracket and, all of a sudden, you'll find out these two people he's put out in front of him – he can make one of them make the other one resent present time but, by golly, this one who is making the other one resent present time is himself in apathy.
So you want to watch this one because there are various emotions on ridges. Resentment is a flow and so it drops, of course, into ridges and the ridges are apathy, anger, boredom and these are your ridge levels. So these three things turn up: apathy, anger and boredom, when you run resentment. What you're trying to do is get the live flows out of the way – they're all that bother him. And then added to this technique is anything you can think of in the line of granting beingness and being sorry for it.
"Well, I granted the MEST universe beingness and now I'm sorry for it. I granted that mountain beingness and I'm sorry for it."
The fellow said, "Wait a minute, I never did grant that mountain beingness."
"You did now!"
"All right. Let's grant that mountain beingness and now be real sorry you did it." "Now be glad you did it." "Now be sorry you did it." (Just pursuing our lecture of yesterday on that.) That one added in there is very efficacious.
Actually, there's so many ways today to crack cases it's just – I could keep going on here for an awful long time trying to give you new combinations and so forth. But that combination I have used with great success.
Now, why do we run this ideal person in there? It's because the guy had an ideal somewhere, in some past life, and he's stuck in it. And he's trying to make the body he's in right now compare with the body he had before and he's not satisfied with the body he's got now. He's trying to live in the year ten hundred and five, he's got an ideal person. You can do that one with mirrors or you can just do it with a mock-up. Have him stand there and grant beingness to this ideal person, have the ideal person grant beingness to him and you'll get the kind of character he has misfittingly been trying to be.
It's very funny to see a very good-looking guy, for instance, who's nice and muscular, he's got a lot on the ball and so forth, trying hard to be a – well, to be a girl. This is weird. Well, why? Why would he be doing this? His ideal person, the best body he ever had… Now, these things don't get wiped out, I mean, they might as well have been yesterday. The body you had in the year minus-five thousand on Arcturus might as well have been at eight o'clock this morning. I'm not trying to jam your track on you, just don't get this old idea that "it all wears out because time goes by." You granted something beingness on Arcturus and you're still sorry for it, well, you're still sorry for it, that's all.
It's all very well for you to mock-up the fact that you've forgotten all about that life and that life isn't in there anymore and all that, but it just isn't going to be effective.
Well, the damnedest one I ever ran into was the fellow who was holding on to a beautiful blind girl. Boy, was she pathetic. Case occluded, couldn't see. Why not?
"Well, when did it go off?"
Well, when he lost his wife. Ha! Oh!
"Now wait a minute. Perceptions before that were good?"
"Oh, yes."
"Yeah, oh fine."
What the hell is this all about then? Nothing else was cracking through. Guy perfectly sane, everything was fine – couldn't see, though.
And I broke through on this kind of a process: the ideal person was really parked on the track. And the ideal person was a gorgeous blind empress. This was a long time ago I ran into this process – even wrote a story about it once.
But my golly, I never had the processes which would have undone it swiftly until fairly recently. I undid it at the time I ran into it, but the total significance of the fact is this business about the ideal person. This was the ideal person. My God, a gorgeous blind empress. Talk about havingness – whole planet. You talk about appeal, everybody was very sad for this empress, oh, just terrifically sad. It was a very gorgeous piece of stuff.
And here was this guy being a blind empress, but he couldn't be a blind empress, but he had terrific potentialities and possibilities in exactly what he was doing. He was an airline pilot. An airline pilot – think of it, surrounded by all these gorgeous hostesses and subservient crews and with all of Earth swishing by underneath you and, oh, terrific things to do and be and so forth. He was a blind empress, he wasn't an airline pilot.
Well, when his wife left him, this was a key-in of the loss of that body and he just stuck in its death. The truth of the matter was he didn't give a damn for this wife at all. She was a little girl that was very pathetic all the time. But of course, she keyed him in and there he was, so when he lost her that keyed-in the past death.
Well now, the funny part of it was, is he knew all about it. After a little bit of Straightwire – I was straightwiring him to "people his wife reminded him of." And I was beating it around and it was really no mystery. The bird had it, he knew about it! He knew he knew about it all the time, but he couldn't think about it any of the time.
Now, have you ever had the funny feeling in auditing like – well, you just hit this lock, you knew that all the time. You knew you were trying to mimic your dog. That was why you kept trying to scratch yourself behind the left ear with your right foot and figured that was the only really satisfactory way to scratch your ear. You knew it was the dog, but you didn't know it, you see?
In other words, this terrific panorama is sitting right there in front of the preclear and he's never looking at it Well, that's the way these things come up and that's the ideal person.
And you'll run that on an "integration of character" and if we could call this integration of character, and be very technical about it, why, we would be far off because we would be more technical than it deserves, which is the guy wants to be something else than what he is and he can't be anything but what he is. See? Can't be anything but what he is. So life has him trapped. He's resenting present time, lots of reasons why.
There's a process that's run on that that is questionable but is – on a case that is too far down – is butchery, but you always have to run this on a thetan exteriorized: "Be the past." "Be the present." "Be the future." "Be the past." "Be the present." "Be the future." "Be the present." "Be the past." "Be the future." Actually, Change of Space Processing, because he's got space mixed up with the past because, of course, the past is in some other piece of space.
And you'll find out he has the past to the right of him and the present above him or, oh, some damned foolishness. It's usually that, by the way: the present is in front of him, let's see, the future is to the right and the past is to the left. That's because of the way people read.
He also has prediction machines in the future, telling him he shouldn't know the future, and he has machines in the past, telling him not to know anything about the – or not to model it. "Don't be a model of me," the past is saying. You don't care what the past is saying, the past is saying what it says.
Well, there's another ramification of that, is your probabilities are that he's got a duplication – mustn't duplicate cross. You know, he's got to duplicate and mustn't duplicate.
Well, that is – I say, the probabilities are that is basic in any case and it's usually applied to time. He mustn't duplicate time, he must duplicate time. He must duplicate the time he was the blind empress. He mustn't or can't duplicate the time he was the blind empress and so he hangs up on a maybe, "Can I duplicate or can't I duplicate?" And this goes off into the Second Dynamic or the Third Dynamic or God knows where. That's basic on any case. That's the most fundamental one we've got, by the way: must duplicate – can't duplicate.
Male voice: Knowing that he knew already and wouldn't look or wouldn't think – any more on that button down there?
Oh yeah, well there's all of that – there's a whole battery of buttons from Know down to Sex.
Male voice: Finding real covert ones, you can get a resisting being you would.
Well, I gave you one there one day in just resisting knowing, resisting being, resisting looking, resisting emoting and that would run out the whole darned band. That works in terms of flows. You've got somebody in the auditing room there, all you do is want him in present time. He's usually not in present time, because he'd hate to be in a point of the past, but he'd love to be in a point of the past and between these two things, why, he's hung up in two pasts which he's trying to dramatize in his present. And you think you're looking at somebody who simply is right there and who will exteriorize and you know they should be there but they're not and that's the whole problem with them.
I ran a preclear, one time, who had been a very successful gunman – brother! A space opera gunner, but a gunman. A lot of space opera – what they were dramatizing here out in the Old West was just space opera, evidently. Fast on the draw and that sort of thing. Boy, there's lots of that in space opera.
Man, this guy's reputation – he was not on the side of the law – but his reputation was so tough, from one end of the system to the other, that the police were terribly polite to him and, boy, was that successful. And he hit the Old West back in the '80s and, boy, was he successful, but this was just a lock on it. And we try to give this boy anything – no, he was regretting this past dangerousness. You know, he wanted that past dangerousness again and he had no dangerousness where he was. And between these two things – in the past he was dangerous, so he was in the past, he was not in the present.
You mustn't continue to go – and just as a parting word on this, by the way – you mustn't continue to go forward on the idea that it is normal and usual for a thetan to be in present time. It is not normal or usual. Staying in present time is like walking a tightrope. Because present time is going by pockela-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa – each one of them is present time. Any moment of the past has been at sometime present time, of course.
And it's quite a trick staying in present time, quite a trick. What's the automatic machine that keeps him in present time? Well, when he depended upon an automatic machine to keep him in present time, it ordinarily broke down some time or another and skidded him out of present time.
That's why holding the two back anchor points of the room is very beneficial. It takes ahold of this old machine that kept him in front of present time, you see, and it just runs it out. He's keeping himself in present time now. See how that is? He's just taking over that machine and the actual benefit of "Hold the two back anchor points of the room" is putting out of the automatic category, staying in present time, and the fellow gets it on to the other category.
If you ever want to see a preclear really stopped… Preclears every once in a while tell you "they're reaching for the bottom of the bucket," you know, they just reach and they can't go any further south. Yes, they can. I'll tell you how far south is, computationally. And that is, the preclear sits there and at each instant – there are techniques, very simple ones, designed on this, by the way – any instant is lost and he's at a dead stop. Every instance that goes by is lost, utterly. No new instant gives him something new. He doesn't look at it like that. The motorcycle is really taking this guy down the road.
Every instant finds him stopped. And he goes through a consecutive period of stops: stop-stop-stop-stop-stop-stop-stop-stop-stop-stop-stop-stop, that's the way he feels. And it's all unreal and the havingness of present time – all of it is exceeding him and the fact that it has arrived is simultaneous with the fact that it is irreparably and forever lost.
He isn't necessarily psycho, which is the oddity of it, psycho isn't the bottom of the bucket. Psycho is just a lockup on must-reach and can't-reach, must-withdraw and can't-withdraw. That is an emotion. Psychotic attitude is – it is an emotion, it's a feeling. This other is the real bottom of the bucket. The fellow can be perfectly sane and be in this bottom spot, but that is the bottom spot; is every moment as it goes by is a lost moment and he counts them as lost moments, pong-pong-pong-pong-pong. But he is at a dead stop and he's sort of jerkily going from stop to stop to stop to stops to stops to stop to stop. It's the most fantastic sensation.
I got into a pc's head that was going through it once, just for kicks (a very strange remark to make, but that's the truth), and examined exactly what was happening and that was what was happening.
For about a year now, the reason I haven't ever – I didn't used to ordinarily, but I did once in a while – pay attention to (quote) "my own case" in order to give you data. Well, for about a year, it hasn't been very necessary to do this. All you had to do was, you know, pop into somebody's head and match wavelength and feel how he felt, look over his facsimiles. That's mainly why we've made a tremendous amount of progress. It wouldn't have anything to do with basic knowingness or anything like that. Well anyhow, we must investigate.
Where your preclear is concerned, let's just go over this again. He may be an emergency situation and when the emergency situation occurs, the thing for you to do is to be very efficient.
Now, some time or other in your life, you may have run into somebody who was terribly efficient when you wanted to be terribly nervous about the emergency and there was no more maddening person than that. And you may be unwilling to be that very maddening person, so let's get that one remedied and you don't have to be that person. That person was merely expressing a manifestation which you can express too.
And the other one is, if a preclear isn't exteriorizing, he's not in present time (we've been talking about this for a long time). There are many methods of remedying this. One of them is simply "Come up to present time. Be three feet back of your head." Rather fantastic technique, isn't it? Happens to be workable. It'll work, oh, maybe every fifteen or twenty preclears. The guy is an awful tough preclear and you know that, so you say, "Come up to present time and be three feet back of your head." And he is, perfectly stable, very certainly.
You go into an insane asylum and you go down the aisles of the insane asylum, you tag every patient that goes by and every few patients is simply "Come up to present time" and they're sane and they stay that way. Interesting, isn't it?
Well now, let's not go getting too bogged down about case state or what you are or aren't doing or whether your auditor is simpático with you or not. We're not trying to make twins, we're trying to make Theta Clears.
When you get your best innings in, is when you are being the most efficient, not when you're being the most brilliant.
And when you look over the things that can be wrong with a preclear, why, they all add up to basically this "must duplicate – can't duplicate" cross-up and that's all over the track. That's all over existence. You see the sunlight coming in through that window there? Well, it's telling you, you must duplicate it and you're saying, "Well, I can't duplicate that, I got something else to do." That's existence in this universe.
And we go down the line from that, we find out the biggest barrier and why the MEST universe is a game of barriers. And the biggest barrier, of course, is the most mysterious one and that's, of course, time. And the tightrope walk which the preclear is doing to try to stay in present time is an interesting walk, even when he's the sanest. And we find that that's very easy to handle if we handle it from the basis of people exteriorizing in present time.
As far as communication is concerned, your communication lag is your direct index of Tone Scale and it's actually a very simple problem. And I hate to keep telling you, "It's so simple, it's so simple, it's so simple." It must be quite maddening to somebody who is trying to latch on to some corner of it, knowing all the time that it's very difficult! But it isn't.
Now, certainty, of course – knowingness, certainty – certainty is merely a synonym for knowingness, but it's where you can get knowingness to change over into human experience. See, that's the bridge, certainty is the bridge there. Several bridges around which are tremendously interesting bridges.
You're using tools. Now, you very often will add to a tool to its detriment. For instance, somebody was giving an assessment the other day of "What could a person create and destroy?" You know the old-time Create and Destroy Assessment on the eight dynamics, which is a very good assessment. He was giving this assessment and he was only doing one thing wrong about it: he was finding out what the preclear could create, what the preclear was willing to create and what the preclear was willing to destroy, but the auditor continuously asked the preclear "Why?" And this had gotten the preclear bogged to a point where the preclear was upset about an assessment. That was easy to remedy – just adding too much.
And so there's a little rule of the thumb goes along with all of it: The less significance you get into, the better. And if you have a question about significance, delete it. That is to say, if you want to know whether you should go deeper into this and find greater significance concerning it or not – if you got a "maybe" on that, see, then you answer the "maybe" by not going in.
That isn't saying you should never plow into a significance. It's just saying that if you have a maybe as to whether or not you should proceed into a significance, don't. It's better to err toward nothing than toward something. Your preclear is really better off to be run wholly and entirely on nothingnesses, if we were just going to do an arbitrary, stupid division of things, he would be better off to be run totally on nothingnesses than upon somethingnesses, if we had a choice between these two techniques.
And you will find nearly every auditor, early in the game, will run a great deal of somethingnesses and damn little nothingnesses.
Now, for instance, the most horrible person he doesn't want to be is the nothingness person. See? "Look in the mirror now and see nothing, absolutely nothing." Try it someday. "Now, look in that mirror and see nothing. Don't see a face. Don't see anything – the walls or anything. Just look in that mirror with your MEST eyes wide-open and see nothing." You can make a preclear – more preclears will go into the bathroom and vomit on that one. That's the horrible thing you mustn't be, that's what you feared you must become. You know, mustn't become nothing, so you become nothing.
Okay. Let's take a break.