View source for Anchor Points and Space (1ACC 531103)

'''Series:''' 1ACC

'''Date:''' 3 November 1953

'''Speaker:''' L. Ron Hubbard

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10 51 26A 50 3 Nov 53 Anchor Points and Space

Transcript of lecture by L. Ron Hubbard AICL-51 renumbered 26A and again renumbered 50 for the "Exteriorization and the Phenomena of Space" cassette series.

ANCHOR POINTS AND SPACE

[Based on the clearsound version only.]

Okay, just wrapping this up here, the second part of the November the 3rd morning lecture, very briefly.

Here we have, then, our primary problem Here we have our primary problem with the - with the thetan. And the fellow starts thinking of himself as low-scale and so forth - he shouldn't have been there and he was there, and he tried to be someplace else and he couldn't be anyplace else, and he tried to be someplace else and he couldn't be anyplace else to a remarkable degree. And finally he says, "To hell with it! I'm not anyplace, anywhere and I don't ever want to be anyplace, anywhere and I know I'm not here and if I stay here it's dangerous." It doesn't matter where he goes, he gets this: "If I stay here, I'm dangerous. If I stay here, I'm dangerous to myself. If I stay here, the environment is dangerous to me; because if I stayed here, I might be fixed here, because - and if I got fixed here then I would be here forever and I don't dare be here forever because I'm not dangerous; I know I'm not dangerous; I can't affect everything, but everything can affect me." This is a kind of a squirrel cage that goes on in his head all the time. "I'm not here."

He walks into a grocery store; there are all these things to eat. Eatingness reminds him of the fact that he shouldn't be in front of things which are eating him. But these things are eating. Well, he knows he can't eat, they're not for him; therefore, it's - the first thing that occurs to him, may be, "I'm not - I don't belong here. I'm not supposed to be here."

And anybody could come along - a little kid - a little kid being pushed around in one of those wagons could suddenly look at him very sternly and say - you know, those - the way they have the little kid seats on some of those baskets in the Safeways? A little kid just barely learning to talk can suddenly look at this fellow and say, "Get out of here; you don't belong here!" and he'd run. He would. He'd leave. At best he'd be very upset. He wouldn't run out because this would betray the fact that he really didn't belong here.

He - "It all belongs to somebody else," too, comes into this. It's not his. He's not the sole proprietor. He thinks he has - and he gets the other combination as he comes up scale - he thinks he has to be the sole proprietor and the only way he could ever have anything is to be the sole proprietor.

Matter of fact, "sole proprietor" is something that's dramatized immediately here in this United States the like of which I never heard of. Only the US - the US is self-conscious about being someplace else in the world.

Do you know that the entire remainder of Earth is lying at the moment without borders, without adequate organization, without adequate communication, without adequate transport, starved for technical assistance. And the only two countries on Earth which would really be alertly able to do something about the rest of the world are both playing this game of sole proprietor inside their own borders only. One of them is England and the other is the United States. England has got the technicians and the technical skill necessary to do a tremendous number of things throughout the world; so has the United States.

This is very, very silly, seeing United States troops, for instance, today in France. The United States is playing so firmly "France is the sole proprietor of France" that it thinks somebody owns France right now. And here's this big, wide plain that goes from Flanders on down south to the Alps unowned. Nobody owns it. Germans tried to take it with such ferocity that they - all they did, however, was manage to convince the French that the French didn't own it. And ifs very silly seeing American supply depots and things like that around and see an occasional American truck or something. These boys are, by orders, acting as though they were - they were from a foreign country; see, they're from America, and America is another place.

America is playing sole proprietor to such a degree on this that they also think other people are playing sole proprietor, too, and the other people aren't.

Now, you get into this in case computation: "I am the only one." Well, that's just before the guy is nowhere. If you were to run him down the scale through an engram or a scan or something of this sort, you would pick up the moment when he decided he was the only one. It's actually an effort to throw out a tremendous amount of force and people get stuck in that moment. And then that's a very insecure moment, believe me. Because immediately after it it's succeeded by, "Huh, naturally I can't be the only one; look at all these people and they're more real than me, because I can see - they can see me and I can't see me, because I'm inside of me and I'm not looking at me, and therefore I'm - I don't exist as much as they exist, and their certainty is greater than my certainty because they all sound that way, and yet I'm still the only one." Well, this is very confusing.

All it boils down to is just simply location in space.

Now, when we take up - when we take up location of space then we've taken up certainty. An impact is an other-determinism location with certainty. "Well, they said I'm here, so I guess I'm here." It could get as bad as, "They said I am here and I know I am here, then. They said so, I'm here."

And you'll find good soldiers, for instance, who have been put on a sentry post by a sergeant - by a good sergeant; they're there. Why are they there? Well, the sergeant put them there. "Yeah, but why are you here?"

"Oh, that's something else; that has to do with something else."

Point is they're there and they'll be there until a certain amount of time goes by - assignment of space.

So how do we crack this off of a case? What is the easiest way? Really, when I told you certainty of an anchor point, you've got one route; actually, you've got lots of routes to do this - to recapture certainty.

The wrong way to do it is other-determinism - to give the fellow enough other-determinism so he knows where he is. He'll know where he is all right, but he won't be much good unless the other-determinism continues to operate. And this, then, makes him afraid of all the randomity - well, it makes him afraid of all the automaticity which he has set up. He's immediately the victim of all the automaticity. If other-determination was locating him, then other automaticity can locate him: and if this is the case, then the way to really get lost is to be located automatically by something.

The Loran navigational system in the north Pacific which was established up there was very handy, I'm sure. Funny part of it is, I - it lost more people than it ever found. The ships didn't have to have good navigators now, you see, because they had Loran and you turned a little switch and that gave you the latitude and longitude of your position.

Well, the handiest and niftiest part of navigation doesn't happen to have anything to do with latitude and longitude. It has to do with looking. And you get college boys and make navigators out of them and we might as well get moles and try to make navigators out of them. They'll just do fine; they can figure up all their sights, they can figure up all the shots, they can figure it all and figure it all and figure it all and figure it all; they can't look.

Put a sextant in their hands and they toss it up to their eye and take a sight and it's only ten minutes in error and that's all right. And then they can figure from there. They will never consider that taking a shot with a sextant is the most important operation of a navigator.

Similarly your Loran - the establishment of Loran at vast cost, was probably just fine in an area where nobody could look anyway, but you try to establish Loran anyplace else and it'll wreck more ships than it'll save. Man, that's obvious that it'll do this because it's an automaticity. There isn't anybody in the ship who knows for sure; the knowingness is external to the ship and it's an electronic machine sitting on a couple of islands someplace or another, and they're just saying where they are. So it's other-determinism entirely and people will get a lost feeling on the ship.

Radar is a form of looking and that's very good. A fellow who can navigate with radar is way ahead of the fellow who's navigating with Loran (long range navigation), other-determined navigation.

Now, the most important part of navigation is looking and a fellow who knows how to look knows where he is. He's just willing to look. A navigator will go out and take a look; doesn't look right to him. What doesn't look right? Oh, I don't know, position of the stars, something like that. "Doesn't look right. Let's see." And so-and-so and so-and-so. A good navigator can tell you whether or not he's ten miles off course or not just with a glance at the stars. Not because the stars are saying anything significant or adding anything up. He knows where they're supposed to be and so you've got another type - you've extended, actually, other-determinism on his position.

But in view of the fact that impact can occur, MEST against MEST, then one pays attention to other objects for determining his position.

A high level of knowingness would merely consist of knowing where you were. Anchor points? No. Nothing - he just knows where he is. Where is he? Noplace, of course, that's - he knows he is. So the right to be nowhere is quite a right to have, isn't it? You can run that as a concept. "I have a right to be nowhere." The most hectic feelings will start to come off the fellow. All of a sudden, "All right, I can be nowhere."

Now, you as an auditor are trying to make this fellow be somewhere. And boy, he's going to start resisting you like mad.

So you better be covert about it and give him the right to be nowhere; you can just run that. Run it in Matched Terminals and masses like Viewpoint Processing, just vast numbers of things, giving him the right to be nowhere, and he can give him - things the right to be nowhere in brackets and so forth. Everybody's got a right to be noplace. And he'll find he doesn't like this and he's determined that he needs something else for stimulus and sensation and so forth. Well, it doesn't have the right to be nowhere, he does, but it doesn't have! Now, that's what he comes up with. He's trying to enforce the fact on everything else that it must be somewhere at all times, which is to say, it must be attainable. And he himself must have the right to be nowhere at all times but able to attain the other locations. And this, of course, becomes the maybe.

Everybody wants to be nowhere and wants everything to be somewhere, so you get every - nowhere-somewhere and nothing-something. And actually somewhere-nowhere is a better maybe than nothing-something. All right.

What's time? Just the effort to withdraw. Is - when the effort to withdraw is restimulated in a person and he finds he can't withdraw and he fails, he starts to have trouble with time. This stuff is withdrawing all the time; it's reaching, withdrawing, reaching, withdrawing, reaching, withdrawing. But that doesn't interpolate well on a case, reaching and withdrawing, as an action. So let's just take the stuff as it's there and it's not there. It's there and it's not there, and it's there and it's not there; it's got to be someplace else. It's saying all the time "I can't be here; I have to be someplace else. I can't be here; I have to be someplace else." That's what MEST is saying continually, so you're getting shifting forms of space. Time is shifting forms of space.

Now, a fellow who can't get consecutive pieces of space, consecutive shifts of space, is having a rough time, so we get into another technique immediately: Have people shift anchor points around so as to make consecutive shifts of space. And that, in itself, is logic.

Choreography is simply the matter of consecutively shifting space with a body. See. If they use the anchor point - the body and anchor points - and you consecutively shift those anchor points. And if that is done with sufficient smoothness so that it's almost undetectable, one place to another, you have aesthetics. It continues to happen and is practically undetectable, why, it gives people a very delicious feeling and that's aesthetics. Now you've tied aesthetics immediately into time when you've done that.

Control is this. If this person is worried about control - and anybody who's having trouble and can't see his body is worried about control of his body, then his exercises indicated are consecutive patterns of space. But you're not going to get him to get consecutive patterns of space with any certainty unless you discover for him that he can have at least one anchor point.

Now, you find out he can't easily have one anchor point; what do you do for him then? Let's get where he isn't. Now, let's just knock out every place under the sun, moon and stars where he isn't; and let's just keep this up as a drill until he is ready to perish from boredom.

All right? It's all right to say to the fellow, "Where are you?" Well, he doesn't want to be located because if he's located, he can be impacted. The game he's playing is he must be nowhere and everything else must be located.

Now, if you ask, "Where are you? Now, let's establish where you are directly," he's not going to buy this if he's leery. If he's in pretty good shape, he'll buy this, but if he's not in very good shape, he isn't going to buy this at all. He won't even buy it to the point of locating so he'll know, because somebody might read his mind.

So let's just get the places where he isn't. And he'll play this game for a long time. He'll also - there's a little bit of terror on playing this game.

And where do we find he isn't? "Well, let's get a place where you re sure you're not."

"I don't know" he'll say.

"Well now, let's get a place where you re sure you're not."

"Oh, I'm not..."

"Well, are you in the middle of the sun?"

"Oh. Huh. No! No!" He's not there. So how do you really get him to make certainties on where he's not? Dangerous places; and you reverse Step I. The fellow is inverted, so let's just reverse Step I, and let's take dangerous and unpleasant places, one after the other, and he's going to be sure every time he's not there. Let him choose them, but every once in a while throw one in.

You say, "All right, now that's where you are. All right. Are you in the Camden sewer system?"

"No!" No, he's not in the Camden sewer system.

"Are you - are you in a bottle of sulfuric acid in there sitting on the shelf?"

"No!"

See, you can get very abrupt certainties on the thing. As a matter of fact, you get a withdrawal when you do that; he'll actually pull back from being it.

And if you were to merely say, "Well now, are you down in the street?"

"I - I don't think I am."

"Are you on Saturn?"

"No, not Saturn. Well, maybe I was on Saturn once. I don't think I am now."

You'll actually get this reaction from very, very good functional guys. Because - and then you start pinning him down and you can just halve up or quarter up the universe. "Are you in that quarter of the universe? Are you in that quarter? In that quarter? In that quarter?" He'll tell you, if he's on an inverted 8, that he's all through the universe, unless you go on a reverse problem - dangerous places, unpleasant places, unthinkably bad places.

"Now, are you where your father is?"

"No! No, I'm not there."

Now, don't play this game on unpleasant places too long, merely because you'll restimulate him all over the track. So let's play it alternately: where he is, where he isn't. I mean, let's don't - not keep suggesting places to him, let's find - let him find as much as possible where he isn't. And if he's fogging up and getting too doubtful and so forth, well, just suggest a little place where he wouldn't dare be and he'll snap in. But do that seldom - you get the idea that that is not a good practice. It just starts it going.

Well, after he's found that he isn't in a lot of places he'll start to localize and then he'll centralize and he will at least admit to himself he is someplace. Probably, on this type of run, he won't tell you where he is. This is - that's hide. That's how you solve an inverted dynamic. Okay?

All right, there are other ways to handle the material I have just given you.

Now, the way to get control reestablished with an individual is to get him certain of some anchor points and then get him to shift patterns of anchor points. Of course, you kind of rattle him if you give him solid geometry names for every new pattern you have. So let's not go off into solid geometry. Let's go into the shapes of familiar things.

"Now, let's get it in the shape of a clock, in the shape of a ball, in the shape of a bat, in the shape of a ball, in the shape of a bat."

Now, you say, "Are you using the same anchor points to do this with?" No. No, he isn't.

"All right. Let's take a triangle made with three anchor points. Now let's make it into a piece of space with four anchor points. Now into a triangle, Now into that piece of space. To a triangle. That piece of space. To a triangle. That piece of space. To a triangle. That piece of space. Now make it into a pyramid. Now make it into a cube. Now make it into a sphere."

This exercise is the exercise of control: position of anchor points to make new consecutive spaces - logic. Logic - that very much cherished thing - is simply the ability to handle consecutive shifts of anchor points. But logic shifts them so slightly, so minutely, one to another, that one can very easily get confused with this universe and think that all of his logic is dependent upon this universe.

So here we go with a problem: Is the preclear in the MEST universe? If it all belongs to him - yep; if it doesn't belong to him - no.

He is doing the trick - his best location is with his own anchor points, so give him anchor points of his own, and then he can take possession of MEST anchor points. Not being able to have something is not being able to have anchor points, which is not being able to have space, and that's not being able to be in it. So you want him to be something, he'll have to have an anchor point.

Now, most people are dependent upon two kinds of anchor points in this society: one is a body and the other is a piece of money. Money is the mutual exchanging, turning, shifting anchor point in this society. And you'll find, you always get a - by running Step IV on the subject of money and on the subject of work and on the subject of pain and on the subject of healthy bodies, you'll always get some kind of a lift from your preclear.

Now, if your pre clear hangs up on the track as you're coming forward, by the way, remember that he's probably hung up in motion. Getting able to get sexual sensation out of things, putting sexual sensation into things, getting them out of things, and so forth, is very good.

But being able to feel affection is one of his greatest difficulties. To receive and give affection is a lost art. And that's a very interesting thing what happens on some preclear that you have him exteriorized and then they continue to go along on a sort of a plane. Their lookingness is jammed up on affection. Little babies - they sure don't like what grown-ups call affection, so forth - fellow's denial of affection, which is very bad. Which means what? Which winds up in, eventually, his inability to accept with others the same anchor points.

In other words, me and Joe and Bill and Pete can't own this rifle. Me and Joe and Bill and Pete can't own the city hall. I own the city hall, and Bill and Joe and Pete don't own the city hall is what it amounts to. Why? Affection.

Affinity is a line; it's made up out of particles, admiration particles, and these are expressed to the preclear as affection. So he has to have lines to communicate and centralize and locate, and he's afraid to let go of things because he's liable to lose his anchor points forever and he's not able to have this space anymore and so on. Sort of gets to be an interesting fact.

But is his space - the space of his own - is it coincident with the MEST universe? No. Agreement with the MEST universe is only bad where it leads the person to believe that his own space is coincident with the MEST universe space. That's why agreeing with the MEST universe is bad, you might say, aberrative. Agreeing with its processes is bad, and processing which suddenly just turns the disagreement around - you have gravity being disobeyed. And things which defy the MEST universe and can't he built on the laws of the MEST universe are very good - these processes.

Did you ever finally get somebody to make a ball fall upward and all of a sudden they feel better? Make them get water run uphill? And they feel better. Get them to have two burned out matches light? That just doesn't happen, you see, in the MEST universe and so it makes them feel good, makes them feel smart; they're able to control things.

In other words, their patterns - the patterns in which they're fixing spaces - with which they're fixing spaces are being determined by themselves, not being determined by the MEST universe.

When the MEST universe determines one's anchor points, the allowable patterns and all the rest of it, a person gets into bad condition, because that's other-determinism; his self-determinism goes down. In order to rehabilitate him, turn him around. Let him establish patterns.

Now, you can take a number of cubes or dice or marbles or something of the sort and make different patterns in front of a fellow; you could just - he could just change these things into different consecutive patterns; find out how gradually he could change these patterns. That's therapeutic, oddly enough. Most terribly elementary therapy, but it would be about the most elementary therapy you could get.

One of the most elementary therapies you can have the preclear do is "Take this ashtray. All right, now move it over to the center of the desk - center back of the desk. Now move it into the middle of the desk. Now move it over to this side of the desk."

And after he's done that for a while, ask him who's changing the place of the ashtray and he'll say - possibly he may say, "You are." So you just say, "All right, now why don't you determine some new places into which you should place the ashtray?"

And you know on a person who's real bad oft they'll think about this and they'll think about it and think about it and think about it and almost crack their brains trying to shake loose and be self-determined about an ashtray. Then they'll say, "Well, if it's right here I can put my ashes in it easily."

This is a question of how far south do you have to go. Well, it's how much reason does a person have to have to ask. That is, how much is he - does he have significance. There is no significance; there is no reason; the thing is the thing; that's all there is to it.

All right, I'm going to recommend to you, today, the game of "Where aren't you?" and let you play it to death till all of you, and I mean all of you, are absolutely sure that there's at least one place in the universe where you aren't.

Have you got that now? I'm serious about that because there's a lot of people sailing around and trying to be agreeable about where they are and they'll give you a very sudden funny look if you suddenly ask them, "Where aren't you?" Now, try and play the game, then, more or less as we were processing yesterday on certainty.

There's an extensional drill from that - is "Where don't you have an anchor point?" That's another part of the same drill: "Where don't you have an anchor point?" And you ask the fellow to be sure of that and he really starts to wobble, because he has left anchor points all over the universe and he's sure they're still there because he said - told them to be there every time he said so and he never unmade the postulate.

Male voice: Well, does he not put one at any point where - it's - you ask him where does he not have an anchor point and he says, "Okay, I don't have one in Nome, Alaska"; doesn't he put one in Nome, Alaska as he says it?

If he's - if he's undetermined about anchor points, he does. So you see, it's a very good drill. I'll let you solve exactly how you do that one.

Certainty of location is, then, a consideration of where one is on the basis that he's certain where a viewpoint is. If he's certain where a viewpoint is, he's certain where he can view from, and we've got a consideration of "I can view from." So, positiveness in being able to consider is, again, a very interesting level of certainty and is the level of certainty, which is consideration. To be able to consider something positively, in other words, to look at something positively. See? Look at something positive, consider something positively, you've got your significance and your no-significance.

All right, let's take a look then at Change of Space Processing and we find out that those cases which have advanced markedly on Change of Space Processing (being in this space and that space), are those people who have made sure and who are certain they are in a new space.

Now, it could be done many ways to increase that certainty; but if you were to increase that certainty one way or the other, one of the ways to do it is simply to do Change of Space Processing, and their certainty gets greater and greater and greater.

Now, you get a gradient scale of certainty, then. So it isn't that you have to suddenly knock the guy over with a club and say, "You have to be certain and then we can process you so that you can be certain." He'll see this as an endless chain. What you want to do is have him change space until he's certain he's in present time in a new space.

Well, one of the ways of doing this is to get him to look all around himself, but he's liable to collapse God knows how many automatic machines and so forth on himself if you ask him to look around unless he's pretty up - high tone. But you can hint to him once in a while, "Well, look a little bit further."

When he's doing it too fast and you know he's not certain yet, you say, "Look a little bit further in that area." See, a little tip-off. "Just spread your vision a little bit in that area until you get a 360-degree sphere of vision in the area."

Actually, the area is only clear when you're getting a 360-degree sphere of vision. But you could go on just a gradient scale of "Be here. Be there. Be there."

By the way, there's another little point I'd like to make, is this business about, he's - doesn't know he's there because he can't see himself As I said yesterday - he can't take a look at his body, so he's less certain of how he's mocking up his body, you see, than other people are certain. This makes other people far more certain than he is because they can see his body and he can't.

Well, a fellow is surrounded by mirrors and bric-a-brac and junk and you can actually tell a preclear, "All right, take that," just tell him, "just take that mirror out in front of you. Now, take a look at yourself" And he looks around the room, he doesn't see any mirror, and you say, "Well, just take the mirror that you've got out there in front of you."

"How did you know I have that?"

"And then just look at yourself in that. Now look over to the side and see if you've got some mirrors over there and you can see yourself in those," and so on.

And he'll get all sorts of topsy-turvy views of his body. And if you keep this up, he does get a view of his body. The reason he mainly - the reason he isn't anyplace when he's in a body is merely because he doesn't see the exterior of the body and he won't look at the interior. Guts and brains and so forth are pretty nasty to look at if you've ever seen them spattered over a fence.

[End of lecture.]

1st ACC (3rd November 1953) ANCHOR POINTS AND SPACE PAGE 9/ NUMPAGES 10

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