View source for Knowingness and Certainty (2ACC 531221)

'''Series:''' 2nd Advanced Clinical Course (2ACC)

'''Date:''' 21 December 1953

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

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This is December the 21st, a second lecture of the day.

And this evening we are going to cover something that you may have heard of before: We're going to cover knowingness and certainty. And we are going to cover this so that you can orient what you know about this material in terms of where you're going with the material.

Now, if you will look into Issue 16-G... If you haven't got a copy of 16-G, why, we've got plenty of them at the HAS. You can get any quantity of them. I mean, the little book is very—was printed up in that fashion so it could get very wide distribution. They're only fifty cents. And actually, in trying to convince people what this is all about and so forth, well, that's a very handy one to have.

Now, Issue 16-G has in it a lot about somethingness and it has a lot about nothingness and it has a lot about certainty and so forth. Now, certainty as itself and added to somethingness and nothingness makes quite a process—just as it is there in 16-G, it makes quite a process.

But let's go a little further right now, and take that same material and see where we get by taking the material in the Doctorate level tapes, 8-8008—and I believe that's mentioned in that book, too—convincingness. Convincingness. And you'll find that proof and convincingness and certainty are very often on an impact, inflow basis. And the individual that you're auditing wants desperately— I couldn't make this too strong to you—he wants desperately a convincingness, but he is interpreting it in terms of being hit. So he is overjoyed to get a somatic.

And you're trying to fix him up so he doesn't have to have all those somatics, and he wants a somatic. So you're going one way, and the preclear's going the other way. Well, never the twain shall meet if this keeps up. Because the certainty you want to give him has nothing whatsoever to do with reaching over and hitting him a poke in the nose.

Now, by the way, there is a lot of things like a friendly poke in the nose. Men are always wrastling around and shoving each other and so forth. Actually, they're handing certainty out, in their own fashion; and that is, by the way, their method of reassuring each other. I've seen a couple of guys go a long way with this. They have gotten to a point of always poking each other. That's just saying, "I'm here, you're there," and so on. And in a good humor, a person will take a lot of punishment.

Did you ever notice a little kid on a change of mood? On this—the change of mood: You're playing with a little kid, and you rough him up and you drop him and you push him around, and he falls down and he bumps himself and he's all perfectly happy because you're playing with him. You know, you're just horsing around, the way men call it, and the next thing you know, you decide you've had enough of this, and you say, "No, no. Go away." And you give him the lightest, lightest push imaginable, which immediately becomes agony to him, and he breaks into tears. But he's just got through almost having his brains knocked out. Now, what is this? What's the difference between these two things?

Well, the basic difference between them is, of course, the intention of the inflow. And you have run on him the usual curve of DEI. First he wanted this inflow because it was perfectly cheerful, and now you're enforcing a slight inflow on him. So you and he were cooperating. You were cooperating. Your beingness, your other-determinism and so forth was—your determinism and his determinism, both self-determinisms were aligned in the direction of having a little action and having a little motion. And your little push toward him was in the direction—that hurt his feelings, as he says—your little push was with the intention of stopping motion and stopping the fun. Now, you see the difference between those two things?

Now, actually, that's the only difference between harmful or contrasurvival or bad other-determinism, and other-determinism at large.

Now, a person can stand up to an awful lot of beating and punishment in life as long as he doesn't begin to interpret it that life is trying to stop him. And when life starts to stop him, he feels that life is playing against him. And in a severe state of this, you will find somebody with a paranoia, they call it. By the way, that's—that simply has engrams at the bottom of it, mostly. There are other ways to work it out, but it's just too much inflow and the engrams at the bottom of it are uniformly "against me." Now, "Everything is against me," the fellow says.

Well, of course, if everything is against him, all the obstacles are against him. This is pretty tough.

You know, they—I can usually tell a person who is in this condition merely by looking at his chest. A person who has everything against him has a very, very flatly formed chest—very, very flat. And there isn't anybody present that has this kind of a chest so just stop worrying about it. And those people who will hear this tape later—they haven't got flat chests like that either. (audience laughter)

But here we have a problem in, "Is life stopping me or is it helping me go?" That's all. You see that? Life stopping me or is it helping me go? And you know, you can help a guy go so fast that it stops him. Put him in front of a blast of dynamite and turn his back to it and set it off and he'll go all right—but that's a different kind of goingness.

Now, as long as life helps him go, life assists his livingness, and it's all a fine game and so forth—punishment? Good heavens, you can run into the sides of mountains and plow into planets and have all sorts of things happen, you see, and you say, "Ha-ha," and dust yourself off and that's—just nothing to it. But then somebody gives you the idea that this wasn't in fun, that it was really meant for you personally and that it was really an effort that was going to stop you, and that you should be stopped and so forth and that is why all this is happening to you, and after that, you completely reevaluate intention on the part of the MEST universe. You don't treat the MEST universe, then, as something you made, or an ally, you treat it as your randomity. And it's your randomity. It's the other team. You start to fight it.

It's about as sensible to start fighting the MEST universe as it is for a football player in the middle of the game to go over and start kicking the goal posts. That's just as sensible. And—or to go rushing out and scuffing up the white lines. It's an improper randomity in terms of the laws of games. He's gone out and found the barriers, you see, and he's decided to do something dreadful to the barriers, merely because he can't win.

Well, a preclear who's having a difficult time of it has chosen the MEST universe for his randomity, which is to say, he considers that all these little taps and pokes which he's received are now personally intended to stop him. And it's mostly a matter of mood, and that's about all it is—a matter of mood.

The basis of all that sort of thing is a postulate. A fellow says, "I'm against you and you're against me and let's have a game—and you're the enemy. Bang, bang, you're dead."

And the other fellow says, "No, I'm not dead." Little kids do this all the time when they wrastle around.

They do it in college—the university today, for instance, has managed to make a fine go of it. They couldn't make education pay and they've made football pay. And they don't have to educate anybody anymore. They just get that big stadium there that is surrounded by ... A college—what is that? A college is a—a university is a small number of decrepit buildings surrounded by a million-dollar stadium.

Well, anyway, the point is that the serious part of life (now, you know, serious—that means nobody's your friend and so on) starts in on this basis: "Well, you lost, and your team lost and there was something very wrong and unbeautiful about that. There's something very wrong with you having lost."

And you say, "You mean there's something wrong about the losing side of win/lose?" Well, this, by the way—sometime on the track—boy, that was a new idea to you. I bet you went and you just thought this over and thought this over. So—you didn't quite believe this, so he proved it to you, and then you were convinced.

Now, the only convictions that are bad convictions, then, are convictions on the basis that losing is wrong. And that Wrongness is an untenable place to be. Wrongness is something you can't have and you must avoid it and you must fight being wrong and you must fight losing. Now, the main thing about a game is to fight losing.

The devil with fighting losing! There's plenty of opposing players— fight them.

"Well," you say, "well now, wait a minute, wait a minute. Win and lose. You see, the score is up on the Scoreboard, and when they have more points than you have, why, you lose. And that's disgraceful and nobody will look up to you. Because you aren't as big, because you must have lost because you aren't as big."

That'd be a brand-new idea to you early on the track. The only way he could prove it to you—the only way they could prove it to you that losing was disgraceful was not afterwards to talk to you or notice you. You were nothing then, you see? So you're liable to become nothing if you lose. And people proved this and proved this until you were convinced of it and that became a certainty.

There's nothing wrong with losing. Do you know that the finest part of strategy is in pretended loses? Hm.

You take somebody like George Washington and put him up against the dame-hungry generals that they sent over here to fight the Revolution—this fellow was so high-toned he had to get a parachute to go down to strike high C. And—he was quite a fellow.

And his reputation, by the way, as a militarist is fabulous in Europe. In European military academies and so forth, they teach all about George Washington; teach all about Robert E. Lee—these are the tacticians and the strategists. Because a man without much of an army and without a popular support from the people and with practically nothing of the sort, kept a war going against one of the greatest, if not the greatest, military power on Earth. And without a navy and without anything at all, kept a war going and won it, for years—by going on and losing.

Now, he lost often enough so that the British, who were already sold on this, thought they had to win, you see. And they couldn't win—they couldn't really win—they were kind of fighting against nothing, and they'd keep striking at this.

And when it was obvious that Washington had lost, just obvious—I mean, if he'd gone in and talked to Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne or if he'd gone down there and talked to Howe, Howe could have shown him on tactical maps, by textbooks, he could have shown him—he could have had numerous aides-de-camp around to prove to him, completely, that he had lost.

And unfortunately, Washington never went down and had the conference. And he just kept on losing. He lost with perfectly good spirit. And he lost with enough good spirit that nobody could prove to him this was disgraceful, so he eventually won. He just wore the heart out of the attacking and occupying troops. He was known as, and is known today in military textbooks in Europe, as the great Fabian of modern times. He just melted away.

Now, that's all due respect to the British—the British are very good fighters. But they had difficulty here with this war because it wasn't popular at home either, and they kept sending over troops.

And as I say, these generals could have proven adequately to all these Colonials and to Washington they'd lost the war. And it was—they'd go out, you know, and they'd knock off half an army and they'd raid all sorts of country and they occupied the principal seaports and they'd tie up all the shipping and they cut all the communication lines and so forth, and the Revolution was still in progress. See, they couldn't reach deep enough to convince. Took them years and years and years to fight that war out. But you see how that is?

I don't think Washington had the word in his vocabulary, as far as lose is concerned, because he wasn't insisting on winning all the time. Now, if he'd listened to the Continental Congress, why, he would have gone in there and fought pitched battles and tried to win all the time, and he would have been fixed on winning or fixed on losing to a point where the American Revolution never would have finished up the way it finished up.

Now, you'll get some football player, and you just convince him he's got to go in and you give him a big sales talk: He's got to win, he's got to win, he's got to win. And this apparently is something that'll give him an enormous amount of verve, see, and it'll make him hit that line real hard. And it'll make him resist, you know, and use force and use a lot of effort. And it never occurs to anybody in the football world that these games are lost or won in terms of lightness and lightheartedness. When these teams start to get real grim, why, they start to lose. Because they think the goal posts—they get—after a while they'll think the goal posts are against them and luck's against them and so on. It's a game. And they forget they're playing a game and it becomes very, very serious and so they get very, very tired and other things happen to them—a lot of things happen to them.

And what is this seriousness and tiredness and so forth? These are the mechanisms of convincing people that they can lose. Now if you can just convince somebody that he can lose, he can lose. And until you convince him he can lose, he can't lose. This may be a little bit hard to grasp offhand, but it happens to be the living truth.

Here we have conviction, proof, convinced. Now, I saw this operation played once on an industrial leader of some magnitude. And this industrial leader had no concept of losing. It just never occurred to him to fight or do anything else in terms of win or lose. And he married a girl who started to get very sympathetic about how tired and overworked he was, because she didn't like him down at the office all the time. She liked to go out to Sun Valley and up to the Canadian Rockies and meet some young fellows and so forth, and so she wanted him to— pull him around the country, so this was the operation. And this is the way it went: "Oh dear, you're so tired, and you look so upset. Now, you must be very careful of yourself. And why don't you go down to the doctor's office and get yourself a physical checkup and so forth."

And, of course, the doctor tipped off in advance to say, "Oh yes, you need a rest. You do, you need a rest. And I'd say that you should go to the Sun Valley and the Canadian Rockies." This man became a ruin, he became a walking ruin.

Well how, then, do you convince somebody he can lose? You say, "You poor fellow, you've lost. See? Look how slow I am at the thought that you have not triumphed. So, because you have not triumphed, then I am sympathizing with you, and therefore, you're slow." See how hard you'd have to work there? You see? Poor fellow. He's lost. "Well, even if your friends won't talk to you anymore because you've lost—even if your friends won't talk to you Anymore, I will. I'll stand by you loyally to the bitter end—even through this."

How's it done? It's done on the basis of sympathy.

And you want to start taking apart a case, you take it apart at the—at sympathy. If you really want to take apart a GE or take apart almost anything, you just get that sympathy out of there. Because you get all sorts of things and combinations of just this: "So sorry you've lost." "I'm so afraid for you now, you've worked so hard. Are you sure you're not going to have a nervous breakdown?" This has never occurred to the fellow.

By the way, I know about this industrialist for the good reason that I processed him. That was the end of a beautiful marriage. I—as I was processing him—I didn't know what was wrong with him, I was just processing him along using relatively routine techniques and so on, and life was going along, and nothing to it. And finally, when he suddenly—I realized he was coming in, there was something about his wife, and more and more and more, and he was starting to damn and fume, and he was coming uptone like mad. And we were just springing him loose on various combinations of co-action.

Now, you understand that duplication itself, with a certain intention, is sympathy. And the more we'd run this sort of thing and the more we'd duplicate forms and so forth, the sorer he got; because he was just artificially and temporarily suppressed into that band—very, very artificially and very temporarily. And I tried to persuade him, now, to be a good chap and send his wife around for a bit of auditing.

"Hm-hm-hm! In the gutter first!"

She didn't, of course, go into the gutter, she married one of the nice young fellows that had been hanging around, and I think now is working as a waitress someplace supporting him. But anyway ... So she had a happy ending. (audience laughter)

Now, the point I'm making is, is here we have—here we have operation number one, which remains the most disguised as an operation and that's just this: Co-motion brings about enough commotion to eventually cave somebody in. He, at length, doesn't know which direction he is going.

I watched this happen to a little child not too long ago. I'd seen this little baby around, and it had been wonderful to me that the baby had—was evidently made out of India rubber or something, you know? Baby come tumbling down the steps, crash, you know, and pick up—"Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!"—very funny. And go out and bump into something and get a big gash on his head and "Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!" See? It was going along all right.

Well, that was because the person closest to the baby didn't ever pick the baby up. Never said anything about it. Didn't say, "Oh, you poor thing. Oh, it just must be terrible and oh, does it hurt urns? And here, I'll kiss it all and make it so well," and so on. And—this sort of thing had never gone on in this baby's life, so the baby could practically have cut the top of its head off and probably grown another one.

And the baby wasn't doing much falling, by the way; but when the baby fell, it didn't know what it was to be upset about this, because it never interpreted falling in a term of loss. It merely accepted falling and so forth as an inevitable consequence of trying to learn how to run a mock-up. And just inevitably, that's what would happen—fall. All right. Well, that's good sense isn't it? If you don't learn how to run the mock-up right away, of course, you're going to drop it a few times. And it's not destructible, you can always get another one—sort of the baby's attitude about the whole thing—and just doing marvelously. And then they got a nurse.

Well, I knew they'd gotten the nurse a day after they'd gotten the nurse— just the day after—without being told they'd gotten a nurse, simply because I saw the baby crying and being very upset about having tripped. Sure enough, the baby tripped, started to cry and I said, "Oh-oh, some of the relatives have moved in, or the personnel of the house has changed—oh, they've got a nurse." And here she came and she swooped down the steps and she swooped the poor little baby up and said, "Oh, you poor little thing. Oh, did it hurt ums?"

And the baby wasn't hurt. And the baby was going, "Waaaaaa!" Had been taught to lose, see?

Havingness. Sympathy is good to eat, if you've had so much of it forced upon you with force that you have to have it and have entered the lower DEI cycle. But get that—a person has to have entered the lower DEI cycle before he wants sympathy. He's had to have enough sympathy forced upon him so that he wants sympathy.

Any person present basically has no desire whatsoever for MEST or sympathy or physical sensation, so on—basically none of them. But if any of these things were of—in the past… You can strip these off, by the way, in processing. But if any of these—any of you, in the past, hadn't had sympathy thrust upon you so suddenly that you couldn't withdraw from it quickly—if you hadn't had this happen, you never would have desired sympathy at all. See?

A duplication of you or a duplication of what you were doing, in terms of energy, was thrust on you so suddenly and so quickly that you couldn't very well escape from it. And you, overt act-motivator, have thrust upon either— other people, so suddenly and so quickly this, that of course, you implanted a desire to go have more.

Now, this works out in terms of accidents. You know, there's some fellows around that just drool at the thought of having a nice, juicy accident. And that's because they've had enough—they've had accidents pounded into them so often. They become accident-prones. You meet some of these boys—they become very, very bad stuntmen and so forth. You run into them in Hollywood sometimes, and they—they're practically always out of employment because all they're out to do is kill themselves.

You see, they've been banged around so often that it becomes desirable to be ruined. You know? Well, that's the desire for it. They're in a hectic state.

And another thing, up the band, the stuntmen they do have ordinarily— these fellows are marvelous. One fellow, for instance, I ran into one time, had to run through a burning building. And he stood there and he looked over the sets and he showed them where he wanted this and that and so forth, and they were getting all set to film it and he turned around and he said, "Is that all the fire you're going to have? Well, that isn't going to make much of a show. Go on, turn up the fire." And they looked at him, because it was roaring so hot then it was practically melting the celluloid on the film, you see? And he says, "Put some coal on it." And he walked over and got a coal oil can and heaved it into the fire.

Well, you know this Christmas tree and curtain liquid that they use that makes things noninflammable? You know, they spray curtains and Christmas trees and things like that so they won't burn? Well, of course, he was saturated with this stuff and—just saturated, his hair and everything else. And he took this big can of fuel, see, and gave it a yo-heave so he'd really get some flames. As a matter of fact, he walked into the beginning of the fire before the take, and just threw it onto the fire. And of course it burst and roared and so forth.

And he ran through the fire and caught on fire in a couple of places, and walked over and put out his hair and—because he'd burned a little bit, and put out his—a couple of spots in his clothes and so forth, and dusted himself off, and in general, he was not hurt! He had gone through practically everything you could think of in terms of stunts.

Now, a few days later he was supposed to dive off the top of a high building and fall for a considerable distance. Well, they had a net down there. He didn't like the net. He thought the net was constrictive or something of the sort. And so he just got them to move the site of the set over to where he could fall into water—you know, fall off a cliff into a river. Shallow river, but he said, "That's easy to fall into." Down he goes—zoom, crash, see? Nobody expects to see him alive again. They picked him up, he wasn't hurt. Nothing wrong with him.

Now, another fellow trying the same stunt knows so well, you see, that he can't do it or he can't live through it and he knows he'll lose—he's convinced that he can lose and so he manages to lose. Well, this is a certainty. But it's not really a certainty that a fellow's going to lose. What it is, is a certainty that one has a certainty.

What kind of a certainty is it, though, that he has? He's been convinced. He's been convinced with sympathy that this is the way the game is played. He's in terms of agreement. It takes this sympathy itself in order to bring about one of these hectic, heavy states of agreement through a large mass of people.

You call it sympathy. I don't care what you call it. Being sorry, now, is a form of sympathy—and we get into shame, blame and regret. Regret runs the time track backwards. It holds the fellow up on the time track, then. He's trying to withdraw from an incident. Shame, blame and regret.

"Sorry" is the first entrance into shame, blame and regret. A fellow walks up to somebody and hits him, then he sees he hurts the other person. Now he doesn't want to duplicate that communication and so he says, "I'm sorry" instead of duplicating it, you see? He doesn't want to duplicate it, so he tries to substitute there a duplication and he says, "I'm sorry." Well, what happens? He's sorry he used force. Oh-oh.

If a man is sorry he uses force, we get into the most fascinating problem in the world, which is he's going to run a shorter and shorter cycle. Any time he applies effort to any problem, he's going to feel sorry. And so we get an inability to use force leading to the feeling of degradation: shame, blame and regret.

What are shame, blame and regret? What's guilt? Guilt is "I'm sorry I used the force." See? Now, that can't come about—and this will become very clear to you right now—that can't come about unless a fellow sees something wrong in being the effect of force. And if he is convinced that there's something wrong about being the effect of force, he thereafter can't use it. And his only salvation lies, as I told you a week or so ago—the only salvation he'll ever run into, really, is to be strong. And so he's sorry about his own force.

Well now, you can recognize that. You can see—well, there's something wrong with being a dead body. I am sure that early on the track any of you could have run into this experience.

Fellow walks up to you and shoots you. And you sit there and you say, "Huh!"

And you reached around, or your friends took care of him or something, and then your friends said, "Oh, you poor fellow, you're wounded."

You said, "I am?"

And they said, "Yes. Why, look at that! You're bleeding."

And you said, "I am? Well, so I am. Well, well! Well, as I was saying …"

And he'd say, "Wait a minute, you're supposed to be—you're wounded too badly, you've got to be dead. You're dead. I mean, you can't go around that way again, your mock-up's only got one arm." And he said, "It's bleeding to death," and so forth.

And you say, "What are you talking about?"

And, "Well, you're dead."

"Well, what's being dead?"

"Well, you can't use that mock-up anymore and you don't know anything about the mock-up anymore and you know, it's—you're dead. You're dead."

"I am?"

"Well—uh, yeah, it's part of the game. And we won't speak to you anymore, we won't play with you anymore, because you're dead."

And you probably said, "Well, all right, I'm dead. Let's see, where can I find another mock-up?"

And that was the way it went. You wanted to be friendly about the whole thing. But that couldn't happen unless you wanted to be friendly about the whole thing, or you thought that there was a scarcity of games and you thought you had to stay in that one.

So now, after a while, why, you came up against a fellow and he'd had half his leg shot off or something of the sort, and you said, "Hey, I just shot you and you're dead."

And he says, "Yeah?" Meantime reaching for his VM pistol or something of the sort.

You said, "But you're dead." And you—so you shot him again and you said, "Now, you see? You're dead."

And he said, "I am not. I am not dead."

And you said, "Yes you are!" And so you started to shoot him again, at which time he drilled you between the eyes. And you already knew you could be dead, you see, and you'd failed to make him dead, so you realized you'd been betrayed. And having been betrayed, you pulled back in your anchor points on this whole subject of being dead and that made you dead, you see? This whole mock-up going on in that fashion.

Well, this would all be very difficult to attain—an understanding of this— if one didn't recognize that communication setup. We got A at one end of a communication line and B at the other end of the communication line. Now, let's just change the A and the B to cause at one end of the communication line and effect at the other end of the communication line. A person who wants to be cause must be willing to be the effect of what he's causing.

A person is unable to be cause and get away with it, to the degree that he is unable to contemplate being the effect. And if he can't be the effect, he can't be the cause. So he winds up in the middle of the line; he doesn't want to be the effect, he doesn't want to be the cause. He doesn't want to reach for anything and he doesn't want anything to reach for him, just because it's all so confusing, and it all started in because somebody wanted a friendly atmosphere and so on.

Well, now it'd be a little bit difficult there—you see, whatever he puts in at cause, has to duplicate at effect. And if he can't duplicate it at effect or if he's unwilling to duplicate it—what it is, he's unwilling to duplicate it at effect. He wonders after a while, "You know, I keep saying a new body will now appear out in front of me." And you know, no new body appears out in front of him. Why? Well, he can't be cause. What is cause? Cause of everything.

He can't be cause of a new body appearing out in front of him. He has to go steal one. Why does he have to go steal one? Because he can't cause one. Why can't he cause one? Because he's unwilling to be an effect.

A person who is unwilling to be an effect will then be unable—not just has a difficulty, but he'll be—if he's unwilling to be an effect, he'll be unable to be a cause. So he says—if a person's perfectly willing to be the effect of a dead body and bodies being shot and hanged and chased and so forth, why, he can say, "New body will now appear"—boom, it'll appear.

In other words, you have as much abundance as you are willing to be cause. And you are as willing to be cause as you are willing to be an effect. Because this always happens on a cause-effect line: The fellow says, "Boom, you're dead." And he's unwilling to be around at the other end of the line and get dead.

So he says, "Boom, you're dead"—hold back from being dead! So his cycle of action is: "All right, boom, you're dead. Now I've got to hold myself back from being dead. Now I finally killed him, didn't I? I sure did. He's dead, he's no good. But he's just kind of pathetic lying there." What'd he do? He pulled in a part of the mass of energy of this fellow who was so sorry at being killed. So it's by contagion.

It's tricks that thetans enter in. So the second he pulled back, right after he was cause—he pulled back, actually, and narrowed his space—but he actually pulled back, regret at being killed. Cause in killing amounts to, then, regret at being killed—boom.

So the next time he starts to shoot somebody, his draw is a little slower. He's unwilling to be cause. He has to think it over. He thinks maybe he'll go down and talk it over with the boys before he does this, and the next thing you know, why, he sends for the sheriff. And the next thing you know, why, I don't know—he's a dishwasher in a restaurant or something. I mean, he thinks life's all agin him. See, he's unwilling to be an effect, and boy, is he. He gets to be the effect of every moment of the clock. Just because he can't be an effect, you see, he has to be an effect. He has to resist being an effect.

Well, that which you resist will inevitably overreach you. So if you resist being an effect, you become an effect. You got to be able to be willing to duplicate what you cause. And if you're willing to duplicate what you cause, then you, of course, are willing to be an effect.

Now, a lot of people will say, "Well, now look, pain is very undesirable and that isn't anything we want anything to do with at all. Nuh-uh, pain's—pain's not desirable. No. Work is not desirable. Effort is not desirable. These are very many undesirable things. These things are bad." Well, we get right back to the Factors and we take a look and we say it's evaluation—consideration only.

Evaluation is consideration. Consideration is what says something is bad and something is good. And if a person agrees with a consideration that a lot of things are bad, they wind up bad.

What do you know? You start running on an individual just this one and no other thing—you just start running this one thing on him: wasting pain in brackets. And if you work at it hard enough, you'll discover that pain is desirable. And if you run wasting work in brackets, you'll discover on your preclear— he'll discover that work is valuable. It's something you want.

And if you run it a little bit further, you'll find out it's kind of inhibited again because it's going to run back up the DEI cycle, which is a repetitive cycle, so it'll go IED. And work, then, is not desirable, but it's less onerous. And you'll get him up to a point where he's perfectly willing to work like mad. There's nothing wrong with work. Why—work? Why, the—you don't work to retire, you work to work. That's why you work. You work in order to handle effort. Because the handling of effort, is itself, the essence of motion.

Therefore, if we can't have work, we can't have motion. If we can't have pain, we can't be an effect. What's it amount to, then? Pain is so scarce, we can't have pain.

You'd be surprised how hard you tried as a little kid to get some pain. Everybody kept yanking you away from hot stoves and yanking you out of radiators and yanking you out from underneath the wheels of cars. Oh, you wouldn't have gotten run over very often! But the point is, you're valuable.

Now, there is a cruelty—there is a cruelty; it's "make them live." Which is "make them realize that pain is"—this is a simultaneous statement— "make them realize that pain is awful stuff. That's real bad. That makes you lose, pain does." See? "Because you can't develop spontaneously enough effort to win, you poor fellow, and we feel so sorry for you." See how that works out?

So if you can make pain scarce and make effort scarce, you've made energy scarce so a fellow can't get big mock-ups and he can't replace everything.

Some people, by contagion, you see, get hectically engrossed in winning. It's an insanity. "Let somebody else win once in a while," some guy fairly high-toned says, "I'm tired of watching the same deal." Even a fight crowd is high enough toned every once in a while to start booing the champion. They're tired of seeing him win. Let somebody else win for a change.

Well, the point is that this fellow goes on and he wins and wins and wins. He thinks the end-all of existence is winning. It isn't. It's living.

And you take an—then you get to some fellow—some kid, he won't do anything. He doesn't dare do anything. You say, "Why don't you dare do anything?"

He says, "I might lose."

And you say, "What's wrong with losing?"

"What's wrong? I mean, that's bad."

You say, "What's wrong with being wrong? I mean, what's this business about being wrong? Is something going to happen to you if you're wrong?"

By the way, writers and athletes alike, musicians, get to a very interesting— an interesting state. They fight being wrong. They fight making that error. They're afraid they'll make that mistake. They're afraid they'll make that error. They must say the right word. They mustn't say the wrong word. They mustn't say the wrong word. That just spins them right on in.

They mustn't pitch that ball a little bit too far. They've got to pitch that ball exactly where they pitch it. They'll be wrong if they pitch it a little short. This is what eventually caves them in. Their competence goes to pieces. Why? Because they're fighting being wrong. Is there anything wrong with being wrong?

A writer every once in a while can sit down and start forcing himself to write gibberish. Just gibberish—I mean, being wrong as wrong could be. I sat down one time and made myself write some gibberish—this never happened to me, by the way, but I heard of—I ran into a couple writers who did have it happen to them. I straightened them out on the line and I thought, "Gee, you know, I bet I've got a lot of verbal accumulations whereby I'm afraid to be wrong. Lot of verbal accumulations on the line, a lot of symbolical errors that are liable to pop up. I just wonder if I shouldn't wash those out. Let's see, how will I go about it? Well, let's do it from action."

So I sat down and I started to write gibberish, you know? I was going to be as wrong as you could get, see? And boy, I sure got wrong, you know? I mean, real wrong—I wrote the wrong words and spelled them wrong and I hung the sentences together wrong and I made the villain the wrong villain for the wrong story and made the hero the right villain and got them all snarled up one way or the other and then disrelated paragraphs and so forth and sent it in. And I'll be damned if they didn't print it.

[At this point there is a gap in the original recording.]

Well, you've got a problem any time you get an individual fixed on an idea and unable to change the idea. You get him fixed on the idea that he can lose, and the one thing he mustn't do is lose—he'll lose. See how—what the trick is? Merely because you can overreach him by so many inflows.

So let's get back to this certainty: If an individual has to be certain, if he has to know—why does he have to be certain? Why does he have to know? Well, because he can be uncertain, of course.

Well, how could he be uncertain? Well certainty is composed of somethingness and certainty is composed of nothingness. And these two things together compose a maybe. And that maybe is a certainty. So the fellow doesn't know whether there's nothing there or something there, so it must mean that it was, at some time, terribly important whether there was a somethingness or a nothingness present—terribly important, somewhere.

Because he's gotten into the addled state now, when he says there's something will appear, nothing appears. He says nothing will appear, something appears. That's an inversion.

Or he gets into the addled state of, "All right. Now, let's put a mock-up out there"—the auditor says, "Let's put a mock-up out there of your father."

And he says, "I get it, it was very flickery and wavery—boy, and I think it's one of my mother, I'm not sure."

Well, he's just fought being wrong and fought losing and he's just fought being bad and fought being inaccurate and so forth. Well, when you get him up the line, if you get him up the line to a good, high point, he'll be so relaxed that it won't occur to him that there would be anything wrong with misplacing a paving brick, if he were laying paving bricks. That wouldn't—there's nothing wrong with that. If he were driving a car, it wouldn't give him a great deal of concern that he'd throw the thing into the ditch. And what do you know, he'd never throw the car into the ditch. See?

It's what you must not do. "These are the effects which you must resist." Society tells you all the time, "These are the effects you must resist. You mustn't at any time have these effects. These effects are very bad, and you mustn't have these effects. You've got to resist these effects, and you've got to fight these effects. And the more you fight these effects, why, the better off all of us will be—because you'll be dead, sucker!" They might as well just add the words, just like that, because that's the way they were basically intended on the track.

Now, somebody comes along and he finds himself capable of being much more capable than he ever was before. He finds himself extremely capable. And he finds out he has a right to be nothing as well as a right to be something. He has a right to lose as well as to win. He has a perfect right not to know, as well as a right to know.

What have you done there? Other-determinism. So the intention of other-determinism gets up to a point of "we must have a game." He's perfectly willing, then, to engage in a game. If people consider the game that they're playing terribly serious and awfully onerous and very upsetting and full of lots of liabilities and traps that he may fall into, well… You say, "Gee, what do you know, a bunch of broken pieces."

By the way, have you ever stepped on a blade of grass? You know that you probably hurt it? Now, just think of that for a moment, now. You hurt it. Mm-hm.

What if you were floating so high above life that when you stepped upon somebody's tender feelings it was like stepping on a blade of grass? Now, you've never considered that hurting grass was very, very dangerous or very damaging to existence. You're perfectly willing to go out and hurt grass. And I bet none of you have gotten down and clawed a lawn and stripped it all down and tore up all the grass and thrown it all away.

Well, I'll tell you—if you got—you could do this as an experiment. You could just get ahold of somebody and convince him how horrible it was to hurt grass. That grass is composed of little cells which themselves are very, very vital little cells and they feel pain and they work hard. All these years, they work hard to make this little blade of grass. And they fight there through snow and through rain and so on. And they're out there exposed in the weather all the time, see? And if you have a—you don't even have to have a violin playing in the background "Hearts and Flowers." You just don't have to have anybody doing that, because eventually it'd get him.

And he'd think, "Gee, isn't that something," and he'd be walking down a walk, you know, and he'd very carefully stay on the walk, you know? He'd be— very carefully stay on the walk. But now he's got a reason why he's staying on the walk. Up to this time, he stayed on the walk simply because one walks on walks. But now he has a big, deep significance about staying on walks. He stays on walks so that he won't hurt little blades of grass.

And if you went on harping on this with him—it might not even be necessary to even mention it again, but the next thing you know, this individual would be saying, "Grass. Grass—it's keeping me on walks. It's restricting me." Stamp! Kind of covertly. And he might have been wearing white shoes that day and the grass got them a little bit green when he stamped—chlorophyll in them, you know—motivator. Here we go.

This man will eventually wind up—he'll wind up going around the world getting new kinds of lawn mowers that chew grass up very painfully. And after a while, he'll get down to a point of where if anybody wanted to really get him in line, anybody really wanted to get him in line, they'd just have to say to him—you know he's being very overt at the moment, he's saying, "I want some too, and I can play in this game and I'm not dead," and so forth—that's all somebody'd have to say to him is, "Grass." At that moment he'd fold up and go into apathy and you'd win, you see? Real cute trick.

Well, that's the cycle of how it would go. Well, now just look at it in terms of bodies. Now let's just put a body there instead of a blade of grass and see how this works. See that? And you've got the same story. Except you aren't quite likely to look at it in terms of bodies, because you got a supereducation on the subject of bodies.

Well, the reason men go around hacking them to pieces, the reason men go around distributing them in wars and chewing them up and being insane on the subject; the reason they throw them onto operating tables when all that's wrong with them is they need a bean taken out of their ear or something like that—they chew up a couple of ribs, and cut their throats and then tell the relatives they bled to death—I mean, almost anything can happen, see? You get a big drama going on here, all on the subject of trying to crush blades of grass.

Why? The basic entrance on it is, "Those poor little bodies. You know, there they are. They work, and they work hard and they try to get along in life and so on. And there you are, you big bully, you—you thetan, you. You big bully. You went along and that body—do you realize that that body had to be raised for about fifteen or twenty years before it got up to the point where it had that much sexual sensation in it and so forth? And you went along and bow! you hit it and there it is, and you killed it. Do you realize it will never be beautiful again? You realize you've spoiled something that you can't replace?"

You say, "What do you mean I can't replace? I can replace it. A body will now appear." One does, but it's kind of shaky. See? You got no confidence now in the fact—you've destroyed something that's irreplaceable.

That's the biggest argument that can be leveled to anybody—against anybody, is that he destroys things that can't be replaced. Many a conqueror has gone down in history simply because he's destroyed things that can't be replaced. Attila the Hun, I think, guaranteed his position in history just by this operation.

Well, that may be or may not be—we're not interested in whether or not— what the moral values are of bodies, but we're interested in the thetan. And we find out the individual is the thetan, and that he has been sold a bill of goods which has to do with "it has been proven to him that he should feel bad about his force and power, so that he will not harm bodies because they're kind of sacred and he can't replace them." And he's—it's been proven to him. He is convinced that this is the case and he feels sympathetic to it.

Now, you notice when I exteriorize somebody, I always have them pat somebody on the head and say, "Poor body. Poor body." That's just to get rid of some of that sympathy. You do this sometimes, by the way, and quite usually— I think you've seen it here in a couple of demonstrations—individuals say, 'Yes, I had a somatic." Well, that somatic will immediately follow. Because in order to get a thetan really sold on this, you'd have had to—you've set up a booby trap like a body—it'd have implants in it which would cause people to feel this way.

So the thetan sees the body behaving on a stimulus-response mechanism in a certain way, and he thinks he caused the behavior. Never occurs to a thetan that he wouldn't cause something, till after a while, he looks at all the things he causes, he notes they're all wrong. His values are all backwards, as far as he's concerned. He's got to preserve things which he can't replace. You see, he knew he could replace them, so why preserve them? And he gets into a dreadful state and he gets stuck in the body and you have a hard time getting him out of the body and so forth.

Well, "sorry to be so convincing" is an entering wedge on this sort of thing. There's a—we were talking about it the other day—there's an implant I discovered a long time ago, whereby a fellow has a dome and it's got lightning in it and a black sky and thunderbolts and so forth. Well, it's fitted over him and turns on more or less at his wavelength, or it simply forces at him long enough to be his wavelength, and the energy in it is terribly forceful but not necessarily unpleasant. And the feeling that goes with it is "sorry to be so convincing," that's the way it adds up in English—the implant, of course, is not in English. It's not words that are in it, it's just that: A fellow is overcome by something which is an unpleasant sensation to him, probably, just because it's somebody or something else's sensation; but it's not unpleasant, really, and it just keeps—pushed in on him until he himself has a desire for it, and that is sympathy.

And the basic implant on sympathy in the GE is probably this "sorry to be so convincing," you know? "Here I'm using all this force on you, and I'm awfully sorry for it." Now, there we go.

Now that gives an individual a certainty about force, that he'll get sympathy for it. And Homo sapiens has agreed that when force has been applied beyond one's ability to resist, that one will then get sympathy for it. And so Homo sapiens goes around trying to get force applied hard enough so that he'll get sympathy for it. And we call that motivator hunger.

Many a preclear is holding on to engrams because he doesn't have enough motivators. Well, that's just because he's been cause, cause, cause and he's been unwilling to be the effect and unwilling to be the effect, till he's left vacuums on the other end of the comm line. And he'll flip the comm line someday, and he'll become the vacuum. He could become the effect. He's fought it and fought it and fought it; and he didn't want to be in there and he didn't want to be in there—and he's in there.

So that's in terms of flow. And as long as one plays around with flows, he gets into these odd and various manifestations. What has this to do with certainty?

Well, it's what has one been taught he must have, in terms of impact, to have certainty. Certainty is not an impact, certainty is knowingness. So one must have sold out his own certainty and knowingness in return for a system of impacts which themselves pretended to be certainty.

Why'd he do this?

Well, so he could win. See, if you win you lose, in this universe. If you worry about winning, you're going to lose. And if you worry about losing, you're going to win. What you should be thinking about—"Is it an interesting game I'm engaged in?" you should be thinking to yourself. "Is this interesting?"

"Gee, what do you know—real interesting game we were playing and so on, and we were—just terrific action. We were out there in a storm and we all got killed and drowned."

"Well, what are you doing with that body?"

"Oh, I mocked it up. It isn't very experienced yet and so on—it really isn't."

Well, that's lots of fun, that's lots of randomity. And from down the line, somebody gets an idea that he'd better be much more convincing than anybody else, and that's part of the game, too. But the entering wedge of that game is, is you get so convincing that you actually convince people.

You convince them what? That things are bad. That certain things are bad. And that it's bad over there, and you'd better not go over there because it'll be hurt, and pain is bad. You'll be hurt, you'll hurt something. Pain is bad. Work is bad.

You take a whole culture which is sold on the idea of retiring—they're sold on the idea of no motion and no action. You see that? Because work, in essence, is simply the handling of effort. The use of effort. And if using effort is bad, why then, of course, one goes toward a time when he won't have to use any effort. Well, that's sure backwards. Because the only fun there is, is using effort or action or so forth, and moving around in space and so forth. That's fun. And when it becomes a goal not to do that, of course you've got everything backwards. Because the goal is then not to have any fun.

'Well, if I work hard and save all of my money, in the future, I will be in a point where I won't have any fun." That doesn't sound logical. And yet, the fellow's saying the same thing when he's saying, "Well I'll work till I'm fifty-five and then I can retire, and I can go have my orange grove and then I can have some fun."

Did you ever run into these fellows who had bought an orange grove at sixty-five or seventy or something of the sort, and they'd retired and so on and they didn't work anymore? Did you ever run into any? I mean, it's real grim, real grim. They blow their brains out every once in a while. They die quick, too. Their wives generally outlive them.

Unless the fellow was doing this—now, this is a different goal: "I'm going to work for a while here until I accumulate enough money so that I can invest it and get an orange grove that I can really work on. You know, I'll just raise more oranges than anybody else, and that's what I'm going to do, see? I'm going to work at this job until I get all that money and then I'm going to buy this orange grove and then we'll really get to work. And we'll raise all these oranges and we'll do this"—he keeps going toward the goal of effort. As long as he goes toward a goal of effort he's okay. As long as he goes toward a goal of "loaf," why, he's not okay, in terms of motion.

And when I say effort, I don't mean so much "effort" on the motion—I mean, on the looking band, and so on. He's perfectly willing to handle objects and handle energy and so forth. He sees nothing wrong with this—boy, he's in real good shape. You can tell the tone of the culture to the degree that an individual can work.

And you can tell something else: You can tell whether or not a person is neurotic and potentially psychotic on the basis of whether or not they can work. And if they can't work, why, you're going to have a rough case. You're going to have to ride them right on up through.

Now, way above this, there's another one. "Sorry to be so beautiful, look what it has done." Because the first conviction is the conviction of beauty. And so you go way up above the line of force and reach for that one.

Now, it's seldom you can run it straight out of a preclear because you'll hit force first—"sorry to be so convincing." But "Sorry to be so beautiful. Look what I have done by being so beautiful. I convinced them to a point where they're all slaves."

Okay.

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