SOP 8-D - Orientation-Points (7ACC 540715)
Series: 7th Advanced Clinical Course (7ACC)
Date: 15 July 1954
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
All right. Continuing this dissertation of July 15, 1954, on 8-D. Now that you have a complete comprehension of the subject, know all of its definitions perfectly, all I have to do is to tell you some specific modern applications of it.
The lost feeling of the preclear stems from having lost – always, entirely, forever and completely stems – unmodified, an absolute statement (junior to the consideration that loss can occur) – stems from having misplaced, set aside, forgotten, occluded, an orientation-point. Period.
Anybody who is confused or who cannot predict is suffering from a misplacement, occlusion, forgettingness, lostness of an orientation-point.
Everything is in motion except the orientation-point. Your preclear is always running on at least one. The boy who is sitting in his head and can't get out is in the rather unhappy state of having to do it all himself now. He's an inverted, inverted, inverted, inverted orientation-point.
See, he knows he can't be and he's not there because he is lost. But he has to do it all himself anyhow, because he hasn't got any. And although he knows he's in motion, he is still his own orientation-point. This very clear?
Female voice: Yes.
Why, it's just about as clear as he is on the subject. But he's just lost one too many orientation-points and that's all there is to that.
So, a technique immediately presents itself in running orientation-points which would have a great simplicity. Well, just have him find a spot and occupy it. And then change his mind about it and say that he made it And then have him look out in all directions realizing he was making all the space there was anyplace and that everything else was in motion but himself. And have him turn around in a circle to demonstrate to him that although he stood still, the room moved.
And return to him the viewpoint of the fact that when the room moves, it's because the room is moving, not because he's moving – to return to him the point that roads run under him, he doesn't run down roads.
In other words, just make him dramatize it as a process. Walk along and see how the walk walks under you. You see this very clearly, how the walk walks under you. Turn around and see that the room is spinning. Make him be his own orientation-point.
Theoretically, if you did this long enough, he would come into the ownership of every moving object in the entire physical universe. Because by definition, the only objects which could be perceived by an individual would be those objects which were moving in relationship to him as his symbols.
Now, there is this little game that everybody plays, is whose symbol are you? Symbol, symbol – who isn't a symbol? Everybody is in motion and they must be in motion from someplace, so we get this obsession of, "Where do you come from?"
Now that, as itself, is a process. We simply sit down and say to a preclear, "All right. Where do you come from?"
And he tells you, Punkin Center or New York or Miami or something.
And you say, "Yes. Well, where do you come from?"
And he answers it again.
And you say, "Well, where do you come from?"
And he answers it again.
And he thinks you're fishing for something very, very significant. But the point that he finally will get to, if you carried it on long enough, is that he comes from where he says he comes from.
Because he doesn't come from anyplace. Places have come from him. The last time he left Chicago, actually, what happened was Chicago left him.
Well, here is one of the more interesting facts. Being an orientation-point, of course, is coincident with this fact: One sits down on the source-point of the Communication Formula and thereafter, doesn't occupy any receipt-point. So he becomes the cause of all of the effects there are.
And he becomes the effect of all the causes there are. And then he becomes the cause of his own effect and then becomes a cause whenever he becomes an effect – the final inversion. Something happens to him and then, therefore, he was instantly the cause of it.
He gets shot by a bullet and he wonders how he came to be over there shooting himself with a bullet. And this would be the immediate reaction.
He inverts on this formula. But setting up an absolute orientation-point as an individual, brings down this type of reasoning. He's occupying something, therefore he is being something, so therefore everything is emanating from him and so forth. And you just make him do that.
Of course, that isn't processing toward truth. Because the truth of the matter is, he isn't anyplace. But you could just beat him around until he realized that.
All right. Here's another process on the same thing – is "Where are you?" And we just start in on the poor guy and we say, "Where are you?"
And the fellow says, "I'm here."
"Oh? Where's here?"
"Well, right here."
"Yeah, but where are you?"
"I'm here."
And you just keep asking him, "Where are you?" in other words. "Where are you?" "Where are you?" "Where are you?" "Where are you?" "Where are you?" "Where are you?"
I asked somebody not too long ago a derivative of this process, which is, "Where's your face?"
He stood there and talked to me for the longest while, telling me that his face was there on the front of his body. He was a well-exteriorized thetan. Longest time went by – many, many repetitions of the question – when he finally said, "I don't have a face!" which is the truth of the matter.
But he sure had his identity identified with that face, didn't he? Well, he was too much identified with a symbol. All right.
"Where are you?"
"I'm here."
"Yeah, but where are you?"
"Well, I'm here!"
"Well, where are you?"
"I'm here."
"Well, where's here?" "Right here."
"Well, where's that?"
"Well, here."
"Well, yes, but where are you?"
"I'm here."
And mrrroww. All kinds of locational machinery and other things will start to crack up on the individual and he has to replot his existence and so forth. And he has to consider for the first time one of his most basic automaticities. Where is here?
The MEST universe locates him in "heres" from "theres" all the time, continually. But H he has to make up his mind this time and you're asking him repetitively to make up his mind where here is. And you want to know where here is.
And you can do that, by the way, if you start in on that process. If you start in on that process, what do you do? You run all of its changes flat. Isn't that right? Start in on the process, you run all of its changes flat. That's how long you run the process.
Well, oddly enough, that process may take you three hours. Doesn't sound like it could, but it would if you ran it on somebody who is having trouble with location.
What's wrong with somebody who can't exteriorize? Location, that's all. He has been located by orientation-points, forever. He is a symbol, it looks to him. He just drifts around. He's waiting for something to place him someplace. He walks into a room – he knows he's in the room simply because the front wall, the back wall, the ceiling, the floor and the side walls of the room tell him he's in the room.
He expects the clock always to tell him what time it is. He expects to be informed. In other words, he expects to be evaluated for 100 percent on the subject of location – 100 percent. A person's imagination cracks up and goes to bed forever at the moment that the individual depends utterly on everything else to locate him. That's a 100 percent result.
There goes his imagination. Because his imagination requires that he merely suppose where he is. He has to be able to suppose where he is in time and space. And if he can't do that, why, he's going to have difficulty.
Well now, 8-D has just two positive commands – 8-D in its formal form. And one is, "Where would (blank) be safe?" You run those – the Opening Procedure and the first three steps and then, "Where would (blank) be safe?"
And you keep on running that until it's flat. And then having run that until it's flat, no communication lags left in it, then you start in, "Give me something that (blank) does not own."
Now, that's quite a question. "Give me something that (blank) doesn't own." He'll – tremendous communication lags on it. Well, the reason we get these tremendous communication lags is it's lost.
So therefore, his memory of self, he thinks of as something which is locational. He does his remembering with energy which is located in certain directions and distances. He has presented his memories with a machine and so forth. He expects to be located not only by his environment but by his own memory. Now, that's a very curious state of affairs. All this stems out from the fact that he is owned, he doesn't own anything. Because that's the one thing that an orientation-point does. It owns a symbol.
What are symbols? Symbols are those items which are run by orientation-points. See? He, himself, is not – he's definitely, he's definitely not an orientation-point. He's a symbol. He's being run and it would be the orientation-point which told him where he was. So he'd be dependent, utterly dependent upon this orientation-point to continue him in a located situation.
Well, supposing this orientation-point has been blown up or destroyed and the people in it are all dead or something like that. Boy, your individual looks awful lost. He's real lost.
Now, anybody who consistently and continually evaluates for somebody all the time, you know, like your mother. You remembered, all of a sudden, the time when you were three when something or other happened. Your mother said, "Oh, no. It was quite different than that." In other words, corrects your memory – evaluation as it is prohibited in the Auditor's Code.
This person, if looked to for other types of location and so forth, would become an awfully set orientation-point. Therefore, this would be the universe in which the preclear was lost. This is the universe to which the preclear is a symbol.
You see, the preclear just isn't in somebody else's universe occupying its orientation-point. More than that – he is a symbol in that universe. It isn't he who tells him where to go. No. He is told where to go by the orientation-point. He is told where he is by the orientation-point.
If you were to walk up to somebody and inform him very forthrightly that he was at 42nd and Broadway – I don't care if he was on the Utah prairie – and if you were to inform him bluntly and forcefully enough and particularly just as his father might have said it, he would have a moment or two there, he'd have a tough time throwing this off.
This is peculiarly true of people in the armed services and so on. They're ordered around all the time by the Pentagon Building. The orientation-point of the armed services is the Pentagon Building, Washington.
If it ever got knocked out, boy, you would see one silly-looking military. They would have an awful time. By the way, I have seen the military out of communication with the Pentagon Building. I have seen them out of communication with it. And if you ever saw a frantic piece of confusion in your life, you should have looked at that. It wasn't that they couldn't get messages back to the Pentagon Building, but for some reason or other there was a line cut in the building. I'm sure of that. Although the messages were being sent eight thousand miles back to the Pentagon Building, I know they were arriving. I found out so afterwards. But they were not being answered, although the wire was open, because, you see, they might have been tapped. They might have been tapped, you see, in such a way that messages of orders and things like that could have been returned, too, and the codes were all shot. This was a rather typical time for such a thing to happen, right at the beginning of World War II.
And the Pentagon Building was very suspicious and actually wouldn't own the symbols – wasn't communicating with officers and everything was being done on a sort of an autonomous Lord-knows-what-we-do-next basis.
And if you ever saw a people incapable of coordinating and confused, you should have looked at that military. It was gorgeous! Just fantastic! Because they were confused in their upper story, not just on the subject of militarism or what they were supposed to do next. And they got more and more and more confused because they were not in any longer a nice, orderly setup of orders.
The very enemy of all organization is chaos. And military organizations are organized to be organized. But then they get into the chaos called war, which is the enemy of organization. And then they wonder why they keep losing troops.
There isn't any reason to lose troops when you fight a war. I mean, the effective and efficient way that we were taught up to – well, I won't go on with that – but is simply to win the war. That's the point of it, not to lose troops. I wish somebody would include that in the basic training of generals and admirals. They seem to be a bit confused on the subject.
But it is chaos walking into organization. And when the chaos walks into the organization, if the organization is rigid and is not designed to meet or work in chaos, we get real chaos.
If each and every part of the military would be entirely dependent, as it is today in this fast era of communication, upon the Pentagon Building, why, the second the Pentagon Building is gone, then nobody will have any space, you see, promptly and instantly. Your various command areas of the United States would be very confused and you'd find each one of them operating autonomously. There wouldn't be any such a thing as trying to cooperate. Each one would have to set up some kind – after a confused period – have to set itself up as the only orientation-point. And so we would get this confusion and we wouldn't get any space.
All this just to give you an idea of what your preclear is facing so as to point out some of these things with processes. If he's this confused, it's because some other-determinism has continuously given him the location where he is.
Well, we want him to get into some kind of a state of mind whereby he can locate himself and say, "I am here. And I'm here because I say I'm here and that is the only reason why I'm here. And that is all that here is."
And when he can recognize this with great certainty, you will know it because he'll be able to throw a lightning bolt about a thousand yards.
Now, there in itself is power, faith, belief, security, force, self-confidence, let's see – anybody got a copy of Dale Carnegie so I can read off his advertisement?
There's where these things lie. They lie in this security of knowing that here is here because I say it is here and that is why it is here. That would be the only here there is.
And in such a wise we can process a preclear. We can just have him elect locations. We could have him walk around and out loud inform the walls where they were as a very crude process – but an extremely workable process.
And keep on evaluating for things, telling them where they are. And the least that will happen to him, his mock-ups will come back nice and bright and brilliant.
Look, how can a symbol have any symbols? Well, the human race manages it to the degree that they are still individually orientation-points. A person can have and handle symbols to the degree that he is an orientation-point.
So actually, how good can you get? It's not how bad they are but how good can you get that we ought to be considering, because you see hardly anybody (if anybody) who is capable of actually stating and postulating and saying where here is. And so your individuals, one after the other, still have some little feeling of hereness. They have a feeling of being able to postulate this to some degree, and as such, they are able to produce mock-ups.
They are able to mock-up mock-ups just as such. They are able to speak. They are able to communicate in general. They are able to produce babies – that's one method of putting out a symbol – and able to do many interesting things to a very, very limited degree.
And now you're looking at Homo sapiens. But he is as well off as he can say where here is.
Now, 8-D was designed to strip out at once this locational difficulty by moving things around, you know. We took something which was really an orientation-point or the personnel of it and we wanted to know where it would be safe. And we just kept asking this until the comm lag was flat and sometimes it took twenty-five hours to flatten that one (the comm lag), just to flatten it out real good.
Some interesting phenomena takes place. Very often the individual snaps back into his proper exact location and the universe clarifies and so on.
It has been discovered, however, that 8-D is very, very tough to run on a case that is very bad off. But that would be a case that should have 8-C Opening Procedure run on it. This person would find that 8-D was a shade too tough.
Well, the very specific use of this process today that must be included in an auditor's kit is that part of it which cancels out the recruiting capabilities of bodies. Now, I haven't left you or lost you. But the fact of the matter is, bodies recruit thetans.
And the thetans go downhill under this and eventually start to make parts of bodies. An interesting fate, when you come to think about it, isn't it?
Let's say that an individual has had several severe accidents with arms. And in this lifetime he has a very, very severe accident with an arm. First thing you know, he's protecting arms. First he had to own them, and then he had to protect them, and then he had to hide them. And now he is totally devoted to the idea of arms.
You know where he'd wind up? He'd wind up making arms. That would be his level of creativeness and replacement. He would at least serve in that capacity, sooner or later, as he went on down the track, life after life.
He would become devoted to that particular portion of the body. Now, I say that, not advisedly. I say merely – the only reason I'm saying it is because it's true. The fact of this is liable to stand somebody's hair on end to recognize that – the route he was routed upon as a thetan.
Well, when you realize that very few people realize that they're a thetan even vaguely until you exteriorize them – it isn't any wonder that he was on the skids.
Some part of the body has a senior survival value to the thetan. This is – the body as a whole does this, but there's some part of a body which is more guilty of this than the whole.
And the thetan is continually and consistently anxious about – is protecting this part from injury – is anxious about it to such a degree that he will become it. It has command value. It has senior survival value.
So, let's find out what part of the body it is that an individual is most worried about. What part of the body could be injured, could be hurt? Somewhere along in his set of answers for this, the one with the longest comm lag or the one that he just knows – most positive about – will be the target for 8-D.
Might be his teeth. It might be his eyes. It might be his right hand. It might be his genitals. But there's some portion of the body which, more than any other portion of the body, has concentrated and fixated the attention of this thetan.
Now, this is only used where you have an individual who, after quite a bit of processing, doesn't exteriorize. You can assume, reasonably or unreasonably, truly or untruly, that this individual is recruited. And you could call this case a "recruited case." He's already slid down the line to a point where he's terribly concentrated on one part of the body more than another part.
He is pretty foggy about exactly what he's supposed to be doing and so forth. But he unfogs in an awful hurry when that part of the body is run with the formula of 8-D. "Spot some places where (blank), where ears would be safe." "Spot some places where teeth would be safe." Whatever that part was. And you'll get this interesting fact that it'll pass through all kinds of manifestations. His emotions toward this particular part will – oh, he-just love this part. It's so valuable.
And it starts out with, "It's safe anyplace," because what do you know? That part has become his orientation-point in existence. That is the orientation-point. It's that body part. See that?
That's the orientation-point. This case has gone by the boards to a point where he can be perfectly sane, he can answer, he can do well in life and so forth, and still be non-exteriorizable.
It'll be that body part which is the orientation-point of this case. Let's say it's stomachs. The center of the universe and that which makes all the space of the universe is a stomach. The thing that's really safe is the stomach. The thing you really worship is the stomach. The thing you really do things for is the stomach.
Now, of course, there's a reverse command comprising the only two commands that are ever used on this. "Where would stomachs be safe?" "Spot the spots." "More spots." "More, more and more," taking up his comm lag each time. And when that gets a little bit flat – not particularly, a little bit flat but sort of stalls off one way or the other – then you ask him, "All right. Where would stomachs find you safe?" Just the reverse and have him spot a few spots that way. And then have him give you some more places where he would find stomachs safe. Just have him run them out, point to them, actually indicate them in the physical universe.
Does it matter whether or not he can indicate them accurately? No, it doesn't matter – not a darn. But he has to be certain that it would be safe there and he has to indicate the spot.
And this breaks the entire phenomenon of "Body Recruitment." It just breaks it to flinders. The main reason why your preclear can't find himself is he's in some outrageous location in the body, ordinarily. If he were really truthful, he would look around and he would see some part of the body. He might not be able to identify it, but he is locatable and he can see while he is in that location.
It's just that he wouldn't expect to see what he would see if he did look. See, he hasn't predicted, you see, what he would see if he did look. And so therefore, he doesn't see it because it would be totally unreasonable to see anything like that.
One thetan I found out one time was riding along very happy in the cornea – the right eye. There he was. He was running the whole body from there, actually, to the degree that he was running a body, but he had an anxiety about eyes the like of which you never saw. And he was learning to build eyes.
Now, every once in a while you hear a story about somebody who died during an operation and went to heaven or some such place and came back eight or nine minutes later and knew the secret of the universe – you ever hear of this?
Audience: Yes. Mm-hm.
You've heard of this weird one? You know where he goes?
Male voice: Yes.
Know where he goes?
He just goes into the area which controls that body part. That's all. And they convince him how wonderful it would be to build that kind of a body and that it must survive and so forth. This is actually the way he feels about it, because the part which is being attacked while he is under operation is itself, of course, senior to him. It's surviving, he is under an operation because of it. He's taking care of it. He goes into the valence of it.
And he actually sort of gets an education about it and he comes back later and he doesn't remember what he knows. But he knows for sure that he knows something. Well, what he knows is actually this as a certainty: that, in a dental operation, that teeth are the thing. And if you're ever going to do anything, what you want to do is build some teeth. Well, 8-D breaks all that up and breaks it thoroughly. So, if you ever run into anything like that or if your preclear simply isn't getting along well in processing, remember, that is one of the tools you should employ.
SOP 8-D: ORIENTATION-POINTS PAGE 2 7ACC-22 - 15.07.54