View source for A Talk on Beingness Processing (4ACC 540315)

'''Series:''' 4th Advanced Clinical Course (4ACC)

'''Date:''' 15 March 1954

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

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And this is March 15th, a talk on Beingness Processing, some examples and odds and ends concerning it.

Let's take up the problem of a preclear who is unable to arrive. Now, how do we know whether a preclear can arrive or not? We ask him to hold the two back corners of the room. We say to him, "Are you holding the two back corners of the room?"

He said, "Yes, well, as near as I can."

And you say, "What do you mean by that?"

And he says, "Well, you know," he says, "I—as I try to hold on to these two corners, I just don't quite reach them."

Well, you ask somebody, "Hold on to the two back corners of the room," he doesn't, he's confused about it, tell him to get the idea of putting a beam out to them. Now, ask him, "Does the beam close with the corners?"

"No. No, not quite. Almost, but not quite."

This means he can't arrive. It has a significance. It's a very basic significance. It means, simply, that he can't reach to that point. So we get it in Reach and Withdraw. He can't quite reach something. He can't quite be something is what this says. And if he can't be anything, his space is going to be snarled up, which means he's more condensed than he should be. And if he's more condensed than he should be, the entire command perimeter in which he operates has markedly narrowed.

Now, it can be so markedly narrow to the fact that his environment actually is sitting on his nose. And he will feel, in this case, a heavy weight against his forehead and his nose, occasionally, when he's processed. These are all symptoms of "not able to be." There's things he can't be. There's so many things he can't be that he's completely lost track of what he can be.

Now, as an individual has gone through life, he has occasionally walked up against things which won. He didn't win; they won. Now, when we say "he" didn't win, what do we mean by the pronoun? We mean whatever the thetan plus energy conceived himself to be at that moment. It's thetan plus energy. A thetan does not have to have a piece of energy to be himself. So, make no mistake about this: anything that he is must therefore be either the Postulate that he is it, or must be a mass of some sort or another. Actually he could be something simply by being a space and that is the basic beingness.

Now, if an individual can't be a space, he cannot be an object. An object, if it does anything, certainly occupies space. But in shuddering away from space and in trying to find no space in objects, he just gets smaller and smaller in his command perimeter. Now, you would find somebody who is in relatively poor condition, who doesn't work well, who doesn't get mock-ups, whose locks don't blow and so forth. And we ask him how far could he actually reach. Have him close his eyes—how far out from where he is could he actually reach? And he will say, "Well, I can reach out to my fingertips." Immediately tells you that this individual is evaluated for by a body. As long as he continues to be evaluated for by a body, why, he's going to be in bad condition. Because, of course, he isn't himself.

Well, what's his command perimeter? It goes out about three feet. It barely covers the body. To be in fairly good condition, a thetan would have to operate—well, it'd be pretty good if he could operate at three light-years and he'd be in fair condition. Grant beingness at three light-years, that would be pretty good.

Now, you'll find out that an individual who could only reach out to his own fingertips, who can only command the zone—you know, command zone you might say, goes out here only to his fingertips—would then have to have somebody within that command zone before he could command that person. Well, there's one condition fulfills it, happens to be sex. Another condition fulfills it, happens to be fights. So, to express himself, the individual is liable to go off into fights, antagonisms, so forth. In order to control somebody, he'd have to have somebody within that fingertip control perimeter. Well, this, in the case of a man, Would be a fight before the person This guy, by the way, is not in really bad shape, he'd want to fight this guy. If he could get somebody inside that zone, why, then he could really control this individual. See, he's got to be inside that zone.

In the case of a woman, of course, in order to control the woman—although he might not experience any real pleasure from the sexual act—he would, of course, have a tremendous obsession to commit the sexual act. Why? To control the woman. Pleasure has nothing to do with it, it's a matter of control. Why? He wants to bring the woman inside this command zone. Where is the command zone in this case? Well, it goes out to the fellow's fingertips. This, by the way, is quite common.

You ask a fellow to close his eyes and ask how far he could see. Well, he really can see a little distance. And by having him rack around, you'll find out whether or not it's the end of his nose or closer than the end of his nose or just where. It's how much the individual can command.

Now, a person who is in pretty darn good shape, who'd exteriorize rather easily, has a command zone which is at least a hundred feet. You know, he could grant beingness to something a hundred feet away and feel great certainty that the beingness had been granted to it. Things could operate freely within that zone—no occlusion, he'd get mock-ups, sort of thing.

Occlusion, of course, is another effort to control, which is an effort to blank something out so that it then doesn't control by communication or example. When he can't make the mock-up disappear, then he drags a black sheet over it. And having dragged a black sheet over it, it of course can't communicate with him and he doesn't have to duplicate it. So this is a solution of sorts.

Now, when you ask a person to give up his occlusion before you have solved his zone of command—no. No, because there's things inside the zone of command which command him. And he is holding these in abeyance simply and solely by covering them with blackness. Now you ask him to dispense with his blackness without at the same time increasing his perimeter of command and it would be something on the order of asking a fellow who is facing a great number of chained dogs—he has them chained, there are perfectly good chains on these dogs and these dogs are right there and under control—they're there. Now you say, "Now, the way for you to be well, fellow, is to snap those chains on these savage dogs." He's going to look at you askance. He's going to wonder whether or not you know your business.

And now you run this process on him and that process on him, all of which is merely coaxing him to snap the chains on these dogs. If he knows anything, he knows the dogs are there, you see. If he knows anything, it's that the dogs will eat him up the second they're unchained. And you coax him in various ways to let go of the dogs and once in a while you succeed. You know, you're dealing with pretty high-powered processes and you sort of slam-bang and chop through the bank and you succeed in catching him in an unguarded moment and snapping the chains on the dogs. Of course, he's instantly attacked by the dogs; he blames you. It only happens once, he's not easily audited a second time, mostly because you were going at the case by freeing things which he could not command. You freed things which controlled him. Sudden voices and actions and machinery and so forth started to turn on which were not within his control and he knows very well, if he knows anything, that this is very bad.

Now, it's all very well to know that none of these things can actually harm the individual. That's all very well to know that. But if we consider the individual a thetan plus something he's protecting... Definition of thetan plus body can be translated immediately into "thetan plus something he's protecting" or "thetan plus something he's hiding" or "thetan plus something he has protected in the past and now wants to do God-knows-what with" and "thetan plus something he hid in the past and now hasn't any idea what to do with it." This—thetan plus body: thetan plus a protected object or a once-protected object. Well, this gives you the span of the track, by the way, when you say a once-protected object, you may mean something fifty trillion years ago. He protected an object back there once. Now he doesn't know what to do with it, but it's still sitting around. He's still got the energy which represents it.

He's no longer able to protect it and having been unable to protect it, he has followed this curve—he has become angry with it. What is the curve of an individual who tries to help something or protect something which refuses to be helped or protected? Generally, it's anger or despair and he will turn eventually on the thing which he has tried to help unsuccessfully. There is no wrath compared to the wrath of a doctor who has failed to heal his patient. See? You see this quite often.

This is the cycle-of-action: He chooses out for his randomity anything which he cannot himself control. And that's the basic law on this: An individual chooses for his randomity anything which he cannot himself control. Any automaticity—that is to say, anything that runs without his consent, which is running automatically or by itself. Anything which is running automatically is then, of course, outside his zone of control, which then, of course, makes up his randomity. And he will start to attack that which is now outside of his zone of control. Things which have been within his zone of control and then fall without his zone of control, fall without his zone of control simply because he can't any longer start, stop and change them. This means they started to run autonomously. And now that they're running autonomously, he doesn't like it.

This is a very great problem. This is a problem, by the way, in every teacher, every thinker, every teacher on the whole track—he's had an awful time with this. He has trained his students up to a certain level and then they start running automatic and he'll choose them out for his randomity. See? See, because they become unpredicted motion. The definition of randomity is the ratio of unpredicted to predicted motion. You're supposed to know that. It's the ratio of unpredicted to predicted motion.

You're driving an automobile down the road. You can predict the motion of that automobile, but you can't predict the motion of the automobiles immediately around it. Therefore, it's the ratio of your automobile to other automobiles. When this ratio gets too high—which is to say, when you get in a traffic jam or when the highway (a four-pass highway) is jammed, all lanes, with cars—you're liable to feel that the situation is not as much under control as it was before. That's because you have raised the unpredicted cars and you still have only one predicted car.

Now you get somebody who finally would drive only if the streets were empty. What's his ratio of predicted to unpredicted motion? He can't take any unpredicted motion on the part of the car. Cars are so dangerous that he must be able to predict their motion at all times and he can predict the motion of the car he's immediately driving, so this leaves him free to drive only on an empty road. Now, we compare this to somebody who loves to get out in traffic—who just loves traffic. Well, of course, he has an appetite for unpredicted motion. He isn't predicting any of the other cars, he just gets a kick out of the fact they're banging around. As a matter of fact, it's a considerable treat to drive with competence in fast-moving traffic. And it's something which an individual can (quote) "learn," that it isn't necessary for him to predict all of those particles at once or simultaneously. He finally finds out how many particles he can predict at once. And he'll become very relaxed, even about driving in a tremendous amount of traffic.

If you've been living out in the country for a while and going down to a country store—you've been going back and forth to this country store and there's been maybe one truck, one milk wagon on the road, that's about all you'd ever meet. One day, after months of this, you go into a big city—oooh! You even go into a small town, you'll find the traffic is very heavy. There were three cars on the street, all of them stopped, but the traffic looks heavy to you.

Now we all of a sudden take this fellow after he's been out in the sticks for months and we throw him in the middle... Well, let's make an absurd example, an impossible example, let's take the traffic of Los Angeles. I mean, this is an absurdity, to classify this as traffic! We throw him down in the middle of this and honest, he'll have the feeling he has suddenly gone mad. He's just gone psychotic. Traffic is just going in all directions and it's coming behind him and in front of him, and sure enough, many a driver goes just that, temporarily—psychotic!

What is the psychosis in this case? His ratio of predicted motion—which is to say, the motion of one automobile is being violated by too many unpredicted units in his vicinity, so that, at length, the thing which he's postulating all the time that he is controlling is not really, at length, under his control. So we get down to a total unpredicted motion. If he starts to feel that he is running on a total unpredicted motion, but motion continues to take place, he will experience a psychotic feeling. He's liable to do anything. He's liable to run his car into an abutment just to stop it, in anger. He's liable to stop it right in the middle of a freeway. He's liable to make it speed. He's liable to sideswipe another car—just steer over and sideswipe the other car. He isn't doing this on what you would call a calculated basis. You see, because he's not calculating, he's just reacting. But his sudden confusion of the area he's in—the area becomes so confused that he has no motive for anything he's doing. (He doesn't think he has a motive, nobody would attribute this motive to him, certainly.) And the next thing you know he'll just run head-on into a truck or do most anything—run up and over an embankment and so on.

You could actually take a wobble meter, a type of meter invented by Doctor Fred Moss down at GW and used, I think, today to test the fatigue of pilots. It's a platform that stands on a knife edge and it has an indicator up in front of it and the individual puts one foot on one side of the platform, the other foot on the other side of the platform and merely stands there. The amount of tremble the needle registers is a direct index to fatigue. And when this is codified against many, many cases, of course you get an index of fatigue. Well, index of fatigue be damned. We don't need an index of fatigue. If you're going to measure fatigue, you're measuring a secondary manifestation of predicted and unpredicted motion. Fatigue is a secondary manifestation. Fatigue is a restimulation of great confusion. It's a restimulation of incidents where an individual has been unable to predict any motion and it all looks like chaos to him.

If you want to know somebody—somebody who gets very tired, you've got this fellow, his name is Bilowsky and he gets very tired. You know this. But he drives, so forth. It may be a long time before he's involved in anything like this, but one day he will go into a mass of heavy traffic, there will be something totally unpredicted in the environment that he is shockingly aware of and he at that moment will nonchalantly turn the wheels of the car to go off into a ditch and over the hills and far away or turn over and run head-on into a truck. He will just do something to stop something. Because he can certainly predict something if he hit it head-on: it would be stopped. See, that's the last ditch.

There you have tiredness mixed up with the accident-prone. It's a direct index: tiredness-accident-prone. Sooner or later he's going to run into enough unpredicted motion so that he's going to have to control something by stopping—suddenly, violently and usually with some authority. Or he'll just slump at the wheel: If he's pretty low in tone, he'll just slump at the wheel in an apathy. And there may be fifteen schoolkids on that school crossing—he will just sit there behind the wheel and the car just runs right straight on and runs through all the kids. He just never touches the brake. Something happens, you see, to upset his ratio which we call randomity. It'd be the ratio of random motion to the ratio of unrandom motion. Well, we get unrandom motion would be motion which he was predicting or which was regulated or controlled or understood. And random motion would just be motion that's around. Now, individuals have different indexes of this and this is the index of their own weariness, their own tiredness, their own fatigue.

Now, a thinking machine is built up by experiencing a great number of stops. That's how you build a thinking machine. If an individual had enough effort to plow through anything... Let's say he was going down the road in a—what's the last kind of tank? The General Eisenhower? Or did they run out of generals, finally, and go into admirals for tanks? The General Eisenhower or some such tank, which was solid armor plate from beginning to end and so forth—if he were driving down the road which had very light cars, in one of these General Eisenhowers, you know, he'd just never get very excited. You know, he'd just keep piling the light cars up in front of him and running over them. He could predict this, see? There was enough effort, there was enough force there, so he never had to worry about the random particles, because the random particles did not in themselves have sufficient force to overcome the particle which he had direction of and control of.

The cockiness of somebody delivering an atom bomb must be wonderful. Nobody is going to throw one at him. He has an enormous amount of force at his disposal. As a consequence, he doesn't do much thinking about it. It's quite direct.

But let's take somebody who is driving down the road which is filled with General Eisenhower tanks and this fellow is driving a British MG. It's very little and very frail. You know, that fellow would do more thinking about driving than he would driving, any day of the week. He'd just think about driving and think about driving, he'd drive all night in his sleep and so forth and he'd drive all day.

He'd finally get quite cocky about it. He would develop another type of thinkingness about it. He would get the idea that mobility was the thing—he was very fast, he could move and change his course very quickly. And in changing his course very quickly, therefore he could thwart these hostile forces which were going to stop him.

So you get the philosophy of a child. He's little—and it isn't necessarily true that a child is so nervous he has to move all the time. This is not, you might say, "a natural consequence of the nature of the beast." It is a consequence of his environment. His environment is simply this: he has these horribly large, forceful objects in his vicinity. And he develops two things: one, he figure-figure-figures to get around them. And the other thing he does is slide rapidly around and so forth. He starts to count upon his agility, his smallness of mass. He capitalizes on this. And he makes himself such a random particle that they begin to be afraid of him. He's liable to turn up anywhere, under anything. If he can only convince them that he's a totally random particle, then he's in. He's all set. They'll back off. He's dangerous. He gets them worried and upset all the time. He gets their attention continually fixed upon him by being a very random particle.

Don't think for a moment that a little child doesn't know when he's lying down on some broken glass. Or don't think he doesn't know what he's doing when he pulls the coffee pot over on his head. If you watch them all by themselves in a room and they don't expect any adult to come back in the room or something of the sort, they won't even be interested in doing anything with the objects around. They understand what these objects arc and the danger in them. But it's all right for them to hurt themselves if they can gain, by this, some immunity against these General Eisenhower tanks that walk around all the time. Why, then, an MG darts hither and yon, you see, and cows these bigger objects simply by being so damn random.

There is a fly's philosophy. A fly can bother anything. If he darts and dives fast enough, he survives for a long time. You see this? By being random, then, a particle can exert some control over larger particles and so we get an inverted method. But he's got to figure.

Now, figure-figure-figure: Thinking comes in when effort goes out. This is invariable. An individual does not begin to think, ponder, figure-figure-figure, so forth, until he himself has become convinced that he has insufficient effort to hide, protect anything he cares to. Somebody playing guardian of the wood—King of the Wood, Golden Bough—a thetan playing King of the Wood wouldn't think a single thought about protecting the wood, wouldn't stop to figure-figure-figure or anything of the sort, would mostly observe and act, until such time as he became disabused of his ability to protect the wood. One day something shows up which can exert a superior force, he believes, and the second it does that he sits around and figures.

There's a story written by Ernest Thompson Seton about a grizzly bear who was an enormous grizzly bear. And he was in a hunting preserve and—really a very good story. This grizzly bear, as grizzly bears always do, had a marking tree. Now, bears go through a wood and they reach way up on the tree as high as they can reach, you see, and scratch with their claws. Other bears come around and they start to scratch and they say, "Uh-oh, uh-oh," and leave. And they leave the hunting preserve alone. Well, the grizzly was doing all right, he had a hot sulfur bath that he used to soak his aching bones in and he went around and killed his game and all the other bears left him alone. But one day he came back to his marking tree and about two feet above where he marked is another set of scratches.

Well, he worried and worried and worried. And he finally worried himself into an early grave, just because of tricks like this. A very clever small bear had come into the area and would roll up a stump to a marking tree, stand on it, scrape, and then kick the stump away. Well, you might say the big bear got himself outfigured. But look at the amount of cleverness and wiliness which it took on the part of the small bear to do this. The big bear didn't do any thinking at all as long as he believed that his effort was sufficient to any emergency. And when he found out there was a bigger bear, then he found out his effort was not sufficient to the emergency and his total answer, in the absence—never saw the other bear, could never find this other bear—the only thing he could do was worry about it. So he sits there on this terrific maybe: "There is something random, unpredicted, in my area, which is bigger than I am, obviously." The only thing to do is worry yourself to death, which the bear proceeded to do.

Most people are going around through life outfiguring and being outfigured. And it gets to be quite a contest one way or the other. Funny part of it is, is figuring really never supplants knowingness. The big bear worried. What the big bear should have done in this case was simply to have knnpn the size of the smaller bear, not to pick it up from clues around the marking tree or even pick it up from marks. He was already dependent upon something at the time he started to worry—he was dependent upon a marking tree to tell him the size of bears that came around. This dependency, of course, marks a point of unknowingness. Now he's got a method of knowing. The second that he runs into this as a method of knowing, depends on it utterly, then his own knowingness level can relax and away he goes.

Now, the only excuse we have for teaching Dianetics or Scientology is that it will backtrack out of a much deeper morass. The data and facts of Dianetics and Scientology could be regarded as a morass—carelessly studied, half-understood and so forth—it could be a heck of a morass to get into, believe me. But it's less of a morass than the morass the guy is in. So we can back him up onto, if muddy, a little bit higher ground, in order to back him up onto perfectly plain, clear ground. And that would be carried on where he is made to unagree sufficiently and get himself untangled sufficiently so as to be able to step out of the mix-up in which he finds himself.

Well now, the mix-up he finds himself, of course, in—after he has been trained—is actually a slight mix-up of data and how it coincides and so forth. Now, he could stay in that mix-up for a long time and just concentrate on it, in the absence of processing. But he'd still be better off. Don't think for a moment he wouldn't be. He'd still be better off in that slight morass than the much deeper one he was. He's much better off with a Tone Scale as a system of knowingness than just a "Well, I guess that's the way people are. God knows what they'll do next." Tone Scale permits a prediction. The Tone Scale, however, does not supplant the fact and get a total knockdown on the subject of the fellow's own knowingness. Yes, after he's found out that there was a method of predicting, now there are other things of knowingness and finally, all of a sudden, he comes out into a higher level. Well, the processing does that for him. You get him to get out of these systems of communication into just a purity of knowingness and you've got it.

How do you describe that? Well, if you described that, you could have some dependency upon that description. So, of course, it can't be described. Now, I say "can't be described," yes, as a matter of fact, I just described it, but the point is that it isn't a state which is delivered to somebody in a little wound-up package. You don't make a package of it and tie a ribbon around it and give it to the fellow and say, "Now, if you just keep this magic amulet—amulet or something—in your pocket for the next eighty-two years, you'll be all right. Now, if you just take this love philter twice a day…” See, we're just into witchcraft.

Now, in an effort to make people regain their knowingness, you of course have to feed them a certain amount of data so as to show them that there was a clear path through a great deal of the thinkingness and supercleverness and all of the data mass which they thought they had to have. Now what happens if we don't put a stop—another stop, you see, on top of the stops and give the individual pause long enough for him to look around and wonder whether or not all this data-data-data-data-data-data-data is actually terrifically vital. See? We've got to give him a pause there someplace and ask him to look around and let's just stop the thinking for a moment and start looking. And let's just see if this doesn't progress us a little bit.

So, he's got this figure-figure-figure. You know, let's say at the time you pick him up, he goes down the street, he's figuring, " and then I'll say so-and-so and then they'll say so-and-so and then I'll say so-and-so and that will explain it and I'll say so-and-so . . oh, okay, that's fine, I'll say so-and-so and they'll say so-and-so " What's he doing? Oh, he's an hour late for something and he's figuring it all out in advance so that he will have the explanation all pat and laid down at the time he has to explain. And he was walking down the street, he isn't looking at the street, he isn't happy, he isn't relaxed or anything of the sort—he's worry-worry-worry. When he gets to that place, if he's fairly bad off—after he arrives and he's all set to deliver the explanation—he delivers an entirely different explanation.

What was all this figure-figure-figure about? It's the same thing of the figure-figure-figure you do after you've been stopped by a traffic cop—all the things you should have said to him. And of course you never said those things, but—going on, "I should have said... and he should have said…" And I've seen fellows who were just lying all night long practically, every night, refiguring the past day. What the hell good does it do to figure out the day that's just passed if you've already lived it? But you're not going to get a chance at that day again. And if we live it all the way through again, figure-figure-figure-figure-figure,

“…I should have said... and he should have said… and I should have said …and that's what I should have done and if I just had delivered that at that moment, why, by golly, that sure would have stopped him and I should have delivered that at that moment and I didn't deliver that at that moment, but I should have." And his eventual step is, is "I delivered it at that moment," and he thinks this is true.

See, I mean compulsive hallucination, as differentiated from—you should be able to say, "You know what happened yesterday? Yesterday I went on a picnic with the governor of Guam and we had hard-boiled Polynesian wahines for lunch and they were very good" and get this with perfect recall. You see, if you could do that, this would necessitate that you would have to have come to a point where you wouldn't have any fear whatsoever of the delusion getting the better of you. See, you wouldn't have any fear of that. If you had a fear of that, you wouldn't be able to believe that.

See, there's nothing wrong with stating something happened that didn't happen. Nothing at all wrong with it. But what is wrong is having something that didn't happen, that you believe exactly and accurately and forcefully and convincedly did happen. But what's worse than that is you believing something happened and everybody else believing something else happened, but you have reasons why you don't know what happened. That's, of course, worse.

Well, all this is figure-figure-figure from the standpoint of data. How does one of these thinking machines get built? Let's look at the anatomy of a thinking machine. It actually is a sort of a vacuum sitting in the middle of an enormous amount of energy which continues to compress. The direction of a thinking machine is inward. And the density is toward increased density. It never lightens in density; it always increases in density. In other words, a fellow could figure himself into a hard ball, see. He just could gmm-mph!

Well, what's coming into the ball? Well, it's just accumulated energy and facsimiles which he keeps restimulating. Now, why does it lay out in the pattern it lays out? If you wanted to look at it, it'd look sort of like a lace curtain, if you could configure a lace curtain as being three-dimensional. It's little tiny comm lines. And these little comm lines are to other comm lines, to other comm lines—they're very, very interesting. It's a map of all of the places he's gone and been stopped.

Now, an individual eventually gets to a point where he's been stopped enough times so that any thought he thinks runs into a stop. Because his thoughts are trying to course their way through areas where he won't be stopped. He figures that by knowing where he has been stopped in the past, he can then know where he will be stopped in the future. So he depends upon this machine as a graph. It's a graph of where he's been stopped in the past. Now, anyplace he can put a thought through this machine without picking up a stop association, he has a clear track for the future. Now, this is a thinking machine. You could actually build one that would operate this way.

In other words, he's never been stopped playing marbles. So he gets the idea of playing marbles and this cheers him up. He can take up playing marbles, of course. He's never been stopped while playing marbles. He's been stopped while playing baseball. So you'd say, "How about a baseball game?"

"Well, I don't know… hmm… [sigh]"

Now, the other part of a thinking machine is "thinking up the explanation for, so as to appear reasonable." And that machine is hooked onto the other machine. It's an after-the-fact machine. It thinks up the explanation after the decision has been arrived at. It thinks up the logic after the decision is reached. The machine is backwards, there's no argument with this. I mean, it is backwards. This fellow who has all—enormous numbers of explanation for his actions always has the explanations after the actions occur. You know, he doesn't have them before the actions. They're after.

So he's got, to this thinking machine, an "explainer" fixed up. And the explainer simply works on this basis: "These are statements which have been found to be acceptable. Anyplace a statement goes through //9is machine (the second machine), I'm safe and socially acceptable, but if a statement stops in this machine, obviously that is not socially acceptable." It's a hunt-and-punch system that runs like this: A thought channel is clear as long as it doesn't associate itself with stops. But if anything associates itself with a stop, then it's at least a thought which is slowed down. The slowed-down thought then, is, "Well, I don't know."

But what happens to the fellow that's always been stopped playing baseball? As a matter of fact, he's been beaten. He's been beaten with baseball clubs by his father for playing baseball. He's been beaten for busting windows with base—he's in real apathy on the subject of baseball. And you say to him, "How about a game of baseball?"

"Oh, no," he'll say. "No, no, I... No sir, I don't like to play baseball."

Now, he has a clear channel on marbles. So you'd say, "Well, if you don't like to play baseball, how about a game of marbles?" Now as silly as this might sound to you, there are an awful lot of men around of twenty, thirty, forty, who would simply sit down and play a game of marbles, just like that, boom! if it were a clear channel in the thinking machine.

Unless they've been stopped in being a kid. Now, being stopped often enough when you're a kid would make any childish action stop, then, wouldn't it? If you had enough stops in the thinking machine, then we would get a disdain for childish actions. Well, this is horrible; children are happy. How do we solve this? If we get a disdain for every happy action, game and activity a person can be engaged upon, why, of course the individual doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of being happy—so long as he continues to use a thinking machine. That's the reservation. So long as he continues to use a thinking machine, then he really doesn't have a snowball's chance in Hades of ever being happy.

He might try to figure himself out to be happy, but all he's looking for are clear channels which won't be stopped. Now, an individual starts to play baseball and he's hit in the face with a baseball. This experience sits into the thinking machine on this basis: "When you play baseball, you get hit in the face with baseballs. Therefore, you'll be stopped when you start to play baseball. Therefore, we will not play baseball." In other words, we will stop before we play baseball. And this is the way the machine operates.

All right. Individuals, by the way, can see, sometimes, these machines at work. They think, "Now, I'll do so-and-so in the future" and they will see a white line going into the future. And they will consider that this is a clear channel and will operate upon it. What have they done? They've put a line through a mocked-up piece of machinery and gotten a visual answer. Now they say, "Now, I'll do so-and-so in the future," and boy, it's just blacker than an ace of spades. They won't do it. They've got a black-and-white flash-answer mechanism thinking machine which predicts activity in the future. Well, of course, any white line is where the energy would go through—naturally, it'd turn the bank white. Where the energy won't go through, it'd turn it black. So it's a fairly good mechanism from their standpoint.

But they're—total dependency on a thinking machine. They're totally depending upon their experience in order to have the future. This universe is not gauged to have any experience occur again. Therefore a thinking machine has that faultiness in it. And an individual, sooner or later, will start to fight this fault in a thinking machine. That is to say, in the MEST universe you don't get an incident happening twice. You get a class of incident happening twice, but not the identical incident. So it's mismatched, so a person recognizes that this is an error in the machine. It doesn't plot against time exactly. He will resist this one fact hard enough so that he becomes the "only one."

That sounds non sequitur. Well it's not. There's only one experience. He has resisted the fact that there's only one experience at a time and there's only one experience of a kind. And so he's resisted this fact—he's said there must be many experiences like this, just exactly like it—until a point where he becomes an experience itself. And the second he becomes an experience itself, totally (in other words, sticks in a thinking machine—sticks in one), he becomes, then, an "only one." Then he's the "only one." And he will think of the universe as existing in this line: There's "everybody else" and "himself." There are just two classes of beings. There's "everybody else" and "himself."

This is a great oddity. Everybody else gets merged and pushed together so that all of existence looks like an enormous blur to him. You get then, the concept, the Hindu concept of Nirvana, for instance, as it's interpreted. You get other Western misinterpretations. You get such a thing as "cosmic consciousness." Cosmic consciousness is the realization that everyone else is motivated by hidden influences individually and an individual gets so blurred on this, there's "them" and "me." You see, this is the philosophy. "All right," he says, "therefore there are all of these hidden consciousnesses which are averse to me and those hidden consciousnesses are one" and you get down to the only-one theory of God. See, it's the "only one." All right, that's just the recognition that everybody else has a hidden influence and if everybody else gets blurred or smashed together and there are no individuals anymore—everybody is this—why, then you've got cosmic consciousness and you've got God.

You've got only one God. This is an impossibility, by the way, to have one terminal without having another terminal, so you have to invent, of course, the "only one" on the other side, which is of course the Devil. So we get Good-Evil; it's a very interesting tangle. But that in itself is a thinking machine at work—something trying to avoid stops. A thinking machine, then, tries to avoid stops. And its goal is an effort to avoid stops.

And the effort to avoid stops, of course, eventually winds up in being stopped.

Every time one admits that something can stop him, he admits that something is more powerful than he is. So saying, "That will stop me" is a statement, a postulate, "I have less power." So after we've made this statement eighty or ninety billion times, it's no wonder that a thetan considers himself an energy converter rather than an energy creator. He has to take spinach and convert it into muscle. You know, that's his way of working—you know, spinach to muscle. You say, "Why don't you just mock-up some muscles and shove them into your arm?" He can't do that. After he's run for a little while, he will tell you, "I'm just draining the bank of this energy." You have to make him waste a lot of that type of energy that he thinks—you know, like courage. You say to some fellow, "Well, let's mock-up some courage and more courage and some more courage and more courage," and all of a sudden he says to you, "You know, I don't—I'm just draining the whole bank of any courage that I have stored up and so forth and there isn't anything in this." Well, you just have him waste enough courage, finally, to a point of where he realizes, well, to waste that much courage he sure must be creating it. And he gets down to changing his mind in this fashion.

Well now, if you're running somebody who is sitting right in the middle of a thinking machine and who is very confirmed in this and you're working with him very arduously, you're going to find that he won't go in most of the directions you propose. Matter of fact, your effort to lead him in various directions will meet with an immediate resistance. Why?

Because if he's real bad off, he knows whatever direction he's led in, he'll be stopped. So he'd better not be led in any direction.

Now, this case deteriorates even further to "no place to flinch to." You can get a guy down to a point of where there not only is no road further through this thinking machine, no actions one really can do, but there isn't a road out either. He couldn't even back out of it. There's no place to flinch to.

Now, this is a pretty sad case because, you see, what have you got there? You've got an approximation of the MEST universe's chaos. It must be that every particle in this thinking machine that the fellow is dramatizing—every particle in it—must be an unpredicted particle which has command value over the preclear. He must be, then, smaller than any particle in it. And it's made out of microscopic particles, so he feels pretty poor. Whatever he does, he's going to be stopped. This he knows. This he could get a great certainty on if you asked him to get it. But for God's sakes don't ask him to get that certainty, because you'll just shoot the whole machine and stick him at every point on the machine. Of course, because that's all the machine is composed of, is stops. So you just throw the total machine into restimulation. He really will start "thinking" then.

I guess you could say that thinking as an operation reached its final culmination when a fellow merely sat as a piece of MEST. This would be the total end of it. You see, a total stop, which utterly depended on some exterior force in order to move it at all. That would be the natural consequence of a thinking machine. If you get down to where it'd be more and more stops, more and more stops, he'd have less and less choice of courses, less and less choice of courses. The more experience he gains, why, the more stops he knows about.

Well, the essential error in all this is the fact that he started to accumulate data about the things that could stop him. He started to concentrate and put all of his attention upon things that stopped him, rather than things he could keep rolling—things that be could keep rolling and stop. If he'd gone on keeping his attention on what he was doing and so forth and didn't refuse to be stopped, but just ignored the fact that he could be stopped by an exterior force, he'd be going yet. He wouldn't have any thinking machine. But as soon as he starts to say, "Well, I—that will stop me and this will stop me," and he gets convinced, why, he gets in bad shape. Well, when does this take place? It takes place the first time that he says, "I am an object" and the object hits a wall. Now he's convinced. He could be convinced, before, that objects can hit walls, but he wasn't convinced he was the object. Now he says, "I am the object and the object can hit a wall."

All right, after he hits a few dozen walls, what's he do? He discovers that a wall is the thing to be. So he switches into the winning valence—obviously, walls win. Walls are the things that do the stopping. In order to stop things instead of being stopped oneself, one is then a wall.

If Papa continually and consistently stopped this preclear... Everything the preclear tried to do—Papa. Preclear lifts his head and says, "I think I want a drink of water."

And Papa says, "No, you don't want a drink of water."

And the preclear says, "Well, I'm hungry."

"No, you're not hungry."

Little boy says, "Well, I think I'll go outdoors." Papa reaches out and stops him physically.

"Well, I think I'll come inside now." Papa locks the screen door on him.

"Well, I think I'll go to bed."

"No, it's too early for you to go to bed."

"Well, I think I'll stay up, then."

"You go to bed!"

This kind of an operation would put what? It would put Papa at every point in the thinking machine which was a stop point of childhood. See, here'd be Papa, Papa, Papa sitting all over the place. The individual then has to fight Papa in everything he thinks or tries to act on the rest of his life, if he's still using the thinking machine. He's convinced that he can be stopped by Papa. His mobility did not exceed Papa's stoppingness.

And here we have the problem, then, of somebody stuck in Papa's valence. Obviously, if Papa was the stopper, then the solution is to be Papa. See that?

Well, you start to take one of these machines apart as an auditor. Why do you have to take one apart in the first place? You don't care whether you take it apart or not, by the way. You'd be just as happy as a clam if the fellow could suddenly just throw the machine away and let you get on to having him be other things than just a thinker. But he gets to be what you might call a spectator. He just sits back and inspects and looks. He just looks. He just watches the machine operating. And you say, "Run this and run that and run something else and run something else" and he just sits back and he watches the machine operating. He's not a partner to this action at all.

You might and he might think he is—you might think he's alive and he might think he was alive and so forth, but actually the only point that has any energy that's flowing is through one of these thinking machines. You might as well audit an ENIAC or a UNIVAC. Funny part of it is the techniques are powerful enough so you actually can chew up—I don't know how long it would take, but you actually could chew up the guts out of one of these thinking machines and make it finally collapse. I don't know how long it'd take, though. That'd be a long route. By hitting its common denominators and so forth.

All right. You have, then, two courses in auditing. And one would be to chew up all the fellow's stops and convince him he could get going. But supposing you energized or granted beingness only to the stops in cases. Supposing you only granted beingness to all the times he'd been sick. This is the same as throwing him into engrams continually. Supposing you just threw him into engrams and threw him into engrams and threw him into engrams. He would eventually get the idea that he had been thrown into an engram. He would be convinced, then, that he had been stopped. Most of the engrams which stay in suspension are stopped. So there they sit.

What happens, then, when you start to ask somebody to be something? He starts to hit the stop points. If you keep the case moving and if you're very alert, he will simply pop to various parts of the machine. He will eventually find that he is being some kind of a thinking machine, he's being enough objects, he's gotten out of enough valences to where you can get a free flow around him.

What is this occlusion, this network, whatever color it is? What is this network of facsimiles which even a Step I occasionally puts up against his environment so he can't see his environment at all? What is this network? This network is simply a record of the times the environment has stopped him. A person who does not perceive well is unwilling and unable to stop any light. You have to stop light in order to see. See, you've just got to stop it, that's all, to get an image; or simply know what it looks like and tailor an image of it. One or the other. But if you're not—if you know you can't stop light, but light can stop you, then you're—compulsively and obsessively look at certain things. But you wouldn't do the reverse. That is to say, you wouldn't be able to take your attention off of the things with great ease. This would be a stimulus-response mechanism.

All right. We see, then, that as a person goes through lives, he is stopped and stopped. He naturally starts keeping a record of stops. Why? Well, that's so he won't be stopped there again. What does he do with these? Well, he just starts racking them up around there, here and there, and so forth, so that—it's sort of like a fellow would set up a whole flock of pictures so that he would be reminded of this and that and would be able to avoid things.

Now, you set up a bunch of pictures of something so that you can avoid them. Oh? That doesn't sound like a good solution. And yet it's what the people do. They set up these facsimiles around, just as though you were sitting in the middle of the room and you set up a whole flock of pictures. And you set up pictures of auto accidents and you set up pictures of this and pictures of that and you neglected to ever set up any pictures of anything else. Well, originally he set up pictures of the auto accidents and the pretty girls and anything else that he could think of—he set up all kinds of pictures. But then he less and less paid any attention to the other pictures and only started to look at the "stop" pictures. Soon as he did that, he wants to know what he can do that won't be stopped.

A man is as alive as he has hopes and dreams. He's alive as that. And he's as dead as he can't have any hopes and dreams. What is a dream? Here you're into goals. What's the definition of a goal? A goal is just a postulated future condition.

Now, if he can't arrive at any postulated future condition, he won't have any goals. He won't have any dreams. He can't dream about these things—they go into these thinking machines and bog. Now he starts to think about this beautiful girl. He just starts to daydream about this beautiful girl. And then he says, "Well, she probably wouldn't like me and her parents wouldn't like me and if we did have an affair, why, probably somebody would find out about it and that would ruin it. Well... " Holy cats, this girl was totally fictitious. See, he puts up a totally fictitious girl and now he just can't even think about this totally fictitious girl because he knows all of the horrible consequences that would occur with this totally fictitious girl. How can there be any consequences with a fictitious character? There can't be! And yet he's convinced. And he'll stop thinking about her, very sadly.

Now, he thinks of himself as being the best drum major in the county—in the state. Just—oh, just terrific. He's just going to be this terrific drum major, see. And he goes on and he practices and so forth and he works along at this and, by golly, he gets to be a pretty doggone good drum major. Well, the day he is acknowledged as the greatest drum major that ever drum-majored, to hell with drum major—he's arrived.

Well, he's arrived where? He's arrived at his postulated future. So now he doesn't have a postulated future. Ha-ha! Get that point very closely. He doesn't have a postulated future. If he doesn't have a postulated future, he hasn't got a future: Because the only way he can have a future is by postulating one. So his time track jams. And about the day he's acknowledged and given the prize as the greatest drum major in the entire county, he has one of two choices which will be successful. One is just drop the mock-up right there on the bandstand, complete with medals. And the other one is the moment he walks off the grandstand, make sure that he throws out his chest and feels real good about it, but before anybody else can confirm it or take it down or discuss it any further, postulate a new future. And say, "You know what I'm going to be? I'm going to be the best wheelwright in the whole county." Good! That's fine.

Somebody walks up and says, "My, it's certainly a pleasure to shake the hand of the best drum major in the... "

"You realize that you are shaking the hand of the future best wheelwright in this county? We don't know what you're talking about—drum-majoring and so forth. Who can drum-major? Don't know anything about it."

Happiness is the overcoming of obstacles toward a not unknowable goal. But much more important than that, which is a philosophic observation, let's look at this: If you don't postulate a future, you haven't got one. You've got as much future as you've postulated. And it's as long as you've postulated. And you can of course run on your automatic machinery and just sort of coast through time as it measures time for you and eventually you'll arrive. And this is what convinces everybody that you don't have to postulate a future. Because they see everybody coasting along and arriving here and arriving there and so forth. They see this happening continually.

Last night I was processing somebody and I said, "All right, now. Now, be your superior's opinion of you."

"I wouldn't do that. That'd interfere with his self-determinism."

And I said, "Well, be his self-determinism."

And all of a sudden he broke into a gale of laughter. He says, "What self-determinism?" See? He just walked into a robot. Well, the fellow didn't have any.

So everybody watches this robot activity drifting along the track and arriving and being and so forth and they say, "Well, look, everybody else is, so we don't have to postulate any future or have any goals, we'll just wind up automatically... And happiness is something that comes out of a jukebox or it's something of the sort. It's nothing I have to mock-up or have anything to do with. And I wonder why I can't be happy? Why can't I be relaxed and relieved and happy and successful and so forth? I just can't be" and so forth and so on.

Well, the fellow has just run through enough stops so that he can automatically be. Well, you beware of somebody who is automatically being, because one day he will be going down the street and there will be four more automobiles than is customary, he will suddenly scream and turn sideways and run square into you. Don't think that he won't. He will. There's no reason for it, you understand.

Now, you get somebody—people, as they get older, have a higher accident rate. And yet they drive slower. You want to look for the high accident rate, look in the slow-driving traffic, not the fast traffic. There are more accident rates after the hours when the working stiffs of the country are using the roads. Do you know that there are few accidents during the heavy traffic hours? You know the working stiffs drive down the road and they go like mad and they drive to work and they Start and they stop and they get their cars in place and they go out and so on. You're dealing with, actually, the competent part of the public. And they don't bump into anything. But one morning, about an hour and a half after your usual time, you drive to work. Rrrrr! You say, "Oh, no. This couldn't possibly be the same road. This couldn't happen to me!"

There so-and-so is driving along, and so on, and the traffic is stacked up here and there. And all of a sudden you put out your hand very nicely to stop, you see, just the way you're supposed to stop and the guy back of you runs up alongside of you, almost cuts your arm off, goes through the stoplight. You say, "Where did this driving public come from?" This is the driving public that has nothing to do with the working level of the country.

Now, the main point I'm trying to make is, is you're working somebody out of his "must-stops" so that he can postulate a future, so that he can have a goal and so that he can be happy. And the only way you'll make him these things is by getting him out of his stopped beingnesses where he's being forever the success where he arrived.

[Note: The recording ends abruptly.]

PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT 600 26 MARCH 1954

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