View source for Labels and Beingness (3ACC 540114)

'''Series:''' 3rd Advanced Clinical Course (3ACC)

'''Date:''' 14 January 1954

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

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A lecture given by L. Ron Hubbard on the 14 January 1954

This thing we're talking about, about unwillingness to be an effect, would be unwillingness to grant beingness, also.

As long as you think that there's a finite quantity of beingness that you can grant, then of course, you can't spare any to be the other thing which you want to create. Because the only thing it's ever going to be created of is your beingness. (Just using that "beingness" kind of loosely as a term, it's the best thing that describes it.) Do you see that adequately?

You materialize things with your own beingness. You see this MEST universe out here well enough if you are willing to have enough beingness to grant it beingness. You will be heard as easily in an auditorium as you are willing to put beingness out into the auditorium. You won't be heard any better. I don't care if you have the loudest voice in the world going through the loudest air horns.

All right. Intention to materialize something, intention to have something, intention to do this means also "willingness to be something." And also, it means that you must have some kind of an idea of the unlimited quantity of beingness there is of you to dispose of.

Now, right as you sit there this moment, you have a feeling of being alive, don't you?

Audience: Mm-hm.

Hm? You have some feeling of being alive?

Audience: Mm-hm.

Well, what is that feeling, huh?

Well, let's examine that feeling. Let's fee! it. Well, do you know that you're totally sold on the damnedest thing? And this, by the way, I've told a couple of people about back down the track one way or the other and they all of a sudden turned on like you'd panned. So, it's just this: you know that feeling you've got there in your body? That's a feeling which you once had in the walls of rooms in which you were. And you felt much better than that.

When you talk to somebody for quite a while sometimes, do you have a feeling like they are "aliver"? Well, what do you think you've done?

You're kind of living in them too. Do you see that? This granting of beingness. This mysterious quantity. It's almost as mysterious as the ether the boys used to talk about.

Well now, examine your chair. Just kind of get a feeling of the (quote) "personality" or "personability" or "beingness" or "aliveness" or "awareness" or whatever else you want to, of your chair, or its lack of it. Is it alive or dead?

Audience: [various responses]

Mm-hm? Well, are you unwilling to be a chair or willing to be a chair? If you're perfectly willing to be a chair, the chair will come to life.

Let's take the front wall of this room now. Does that feel alive or dead to you? Now, be willing to be the front wall of the room. Just be willing to be it and just stand there forever. I didn't say exclusively. Be willing to be it and stand there forever. Quite like that?

Audience: [various responses]

Now, let's just be willing to be it. Kind of experimentally, be it now. Now, look at it and tell me whether or not it's alive or dead. Does it look brighter or dimmer to you?

Audience: [various responses]

Well now, you don't grant beingness by granting something energy. And when they start to buck around on the preclear and jump up and down and do strange and weird things, why, you've granted them energy rather than beingness. The funny thing is that energy materializes out of beingness, but beingness itself is not energy. It's just this feeling of aliveness with which you are actually entirely conversant. You look at a dead man and if he's sprawled around bad enough, you'll get a feeling of complete emptiness to him. You know, he's really dead.

Well, the first time I read about that and so on, I thought, "My, that's a very descriptive phrase." And so I put it in a lot of stories and so forth. And this was all very well until I found out that dead men were supposed to be dead because we've agreed they feel dead. See, we know how they feel because we've also felt dead and so forth. And they bother people to the degree that people feel they have to feel dead. That's the amount they bother people.

Now, if a person feels entirely dead himself, he doesn't mind dead men. You know, they feel like he feels, so it doesn't matter. He just doesn't have a perception of a dead man. But a person can be tremendously alive and he looks at dead men – and there's the dead men, dead, you know – and they don't feel dead to him. And although the bones are busted up and there's some holes in them and that sort of thing, they just wouldn't fed dead to him, that's all. Why? Because they're part of the MEST scenery. MEST scenery is kind of alive, it's perfectly vibrant and alive to him. So why should a dead man feel dead?

Well, when you remove that up one more step, you bring the dead to life, not by putting the same thetan back in them, but by being them. By also being them. And when I say also being them, you probably will understand a great deal more than just by saying "being them." Nearly everybody gets hung up on this and the center of the puzzle is simply this: being something exclusively, which is the psychosis called the "only one," from which most… If the thetan is suffering from any kind of a wingding, it's that one. And that is a scarcity of beingness. It goes down deeper, then, into a scarcity of attention. After he has spread his beingness around, he feels he doesn't have enough attention, so he couldn't possibly concentrate from several viewpoints simultaneously and manage several living objects well.

And as long as he feels he couldn't do this – you see, then he'd have to give attention from these objects and that would confuse him with what he's doing, because "everybody knows you can only do one thing at a time" – and so we'd get into this kind of a situation, you see? We'd have a problem of the scarcity of beingness. And as soon as we got into this "only one" problem (label – any other way you want to call it, but "only one") – soon as the fellow gets the "only one" problem, why, he feels that he can't grant beingness. He restrains himself because if he did, it would kind of come to life and he'd have to have some attention from it. Now, I'll give you an idea of that.

Now, let's look at the room from this forward wall. Let's be the forward wall and look at the room.

Now be where you are and look at the forward wall while the forward wall is being there looking at you.

You get an idea that this would be too much attention you'd have to spread and that it's liable to be confused. Possibly. Or possibly, you've suddenly mastered the knack, which I hope you have.

Actually, it's much easier to sit around in about eighteen or twenty objects, each one with an independent viewpoint, and look at something, because boy, you sure get an all-side view of it. And you sure get a lot of understandings of it. Now, that is what is meant by multiple looking – multiple viewpoints.

Now, a person docs this one: he puts out remote viewpoints. That's different than multiple viewpoints. A remote viewpoint is something he puts out someplace so that he can look at something. He's not willing to be what he's looking from, he is still himself where he is sitting, but he's just unwilling to put out any more than the viewpoint. Let him put out some beingness, he the object and look from it, as it, and you don't get a remote viewpoint.

Now most people – most thetans have this business about remote viewpoints. Instead of exteriorizing, they throw out some remote viewpoints. That's a way of hiding. If people find the viewpoint, they can't then find you. That's real cute, isn't it? So that's a method of dodging and you have to watch for that one, because this fellow is, again – he's in a worse condition than simply looking from one viewpoint. That's what you call a deteriorated condition – remote viewpoints.

Now, there's no reason to get confused about it, because this is a confusing subject. You just find out that every time somebody is handling remote viewpoints, that if you'll just ask him to practice being a few things – I don't care if he's interiorized or exteriorized – you just practice being a few things, why, you'll find this remote viewpoint condition having a tendency to clear up. Mostly because you're making him willing to look from and actually give attention from several objects. Not at once. The way you'd do this is to start him in being single objects and then multiple, have him be two objects at once.

For instance, you have to be, actually, two eyes at once in order to see with two eyes. That isn't just one you, you see, standing there and looking through two eyes. If you're going to use two eyes, you would essentially have to be the beingness of two viewpoints. But a person doesn't get upset about this, because that's normal and agreed upon and so forth. Well, every once in a while, a fellow is so thoroughly agreed upon this – he's stuck in being two of himself – you exteriorize him and he feels like he's going to pull apart. And this is very upsetting to him because he knows he can't be more than just that spot he's in.

Well, that's why there's no ceiling on an Operating Thetan. There isn't any ceiling on it. The world is as alive to a child as he can see it from many viewpoints. If you were to ask a little kid – three, four, five years of age, who was in pretty good condition – to take a look at the yard from the fence while he was looking at the yard from his body, he would do so, and probably not get the two even vaguely entangled. Why? Because he can compartment his own beingness.

Well now, this is condemned and feared, because it gets fixed sometimes and becomes a psychosis. It becomes used, as anything else will become used, as a forced, enforced method of escape.

What's the best way of surviving? Well, you'll survive better as five people than you will one person. So that computation, when added up to a prevention of being killed, leads to disaster. What's the intention? The intention is to dodge, not to live.

And we get back behind the scenes and we find out that if a fellow wants to live more and live wider, he has to be less afraid of being dead. It's actually just a matter of viewpoint and intention whether you take the motorcycle down the road or the motorcycle takes you down the road. Or whether your automatic bank runs you or you run your automatic bank.

Now it's very amazing to you and you very often consider that it's a very terrible thing that all these automatic machines are sitting around, because they appear to have beingness. They're alive! Let's take the entity problem. They're alive! Oooh! You know, they think, they do all sorts of things.

Well, how do you think they got that way, huh? You put them up at a time you were willing to be you and a machine. And then you were only willing to be you. But you're still out operating the machine. You see that? Lots of you is scattered all over the shop, no longer used by you, but is used by you against you.

Now let's just take granting of beingness and transpose it into willingness to be and willingness to feel life from things and we've got the problem pretty well solved. See that?

I'll give you an example. There was a fellow who had a rather persistent cough and a lot of these covert techniques wouldn't turn it off. So, I spotted the fact that Papa coughed almost incessantly and Papa was always giving him orders. This fellow was already exteriorized, but he still had a cough – which is an oddity, by the way. But it's just because he was holding one type of beingness in suspense. Papa was so obviously the person who assigned beingness that it never occurred to him he could be the beingness of Papa. So he had to resent Papa, he couldn't duplicate Papa. Papa duplicated him, but he couldn't duplicate Papa.

So I took him way up somewhere a few thousand miles up, where we could get real good mock-ups, and had him mock-up Papa twice, both mock-ups facing the same direction on a same line, you see? Just like you had a communication line with Papa at C facing E and Papa at E again, facing away from C. Just have Papa repeat it. Because that would be the way the image would come in. You see, it would be – Papa would be reversed at E. And then had him be Papa and give the E an order. And then be the E and repeat the order. The only thing that bothered him after a while was he couldn't think of any other orders. But we just had him be at C, you see, and give an order like "You do so-and-so" and then be the image at E and say, "You do so-and-so."

Well, his cough evaporated. Cough, obviously, was some method to resist a communication. Must have been a communication from in front and, in view of the fact that it was the body and the fellow could exteriorize so easily, the GE itself had been granted – the front of it had been granted-beingness by Papa. There was kind of a reverse image of Papa standing on the front of the fellow's body, you see? And he was unwilling to be this beingness. As long as he was unwilling to be the beingness of Papa, he was unwilling to be the exact front of his body. So if he was unwilling to be the exact front of his body, of course, he'd just keep on coughing. Why? It was Papa's cough.

Now, let's add this up to the same thing as automatic machinery. The machinery – you've set yourself up. You know, one day you just move over and you're a machine, see, and you're going to run the body and now you move back into the thing that's going to be run. And this makes it all nice and smooth and even. The only trouble is, it's in reverse. But you apparently have – eventually, you have somebody who has a lot of demons standing around giving him orders.

Who are the demons? Who are the entities? Who are these things? Who are these automatic machines? They're him. They're him, with a fixed idea.

Well, a wonderful way for a thetan exteriorized to set up an automatic machine is just be in one place and say, "This place is in relationship, now, to the other me. And now I have the fixed idea that I must at all times remember to brush my teeth and I will tell myself to brush my teeth. I will tell that other being to brush my teeth, at all times. And now this will resist all effects and go on forever and I'm here." Then he flips back into his other beingness and cuts the line. He's made another chess player. Except this isn't a chess player, this is a tooth-brusher. And after that, he feels nagged if he doesn't brush his teeth.

Well, of course, you can say, "Well, that's his mother or that's his father or that's somebody else brushing his teeth." Well, if he didn't have such a machine himself and if he hadn't agreed to it and set it up himself, it wouldn't be there. Wouldn't be any tooth-brushing machine in the bank.

Now, when you insist, always, that you are talking to another being, somebody else – when you always insist you're talking to another being, that this person is another beingness – people start to get kind of hateful to you. Gets kind of to be an ornery problem. Why? Because they're kind of occupying your space and all that sort of thing.

Well, one thetan can't occupy another thetan's space worth a nickel as far as the two thetans are concerned, because they don't have any mass. You have to have mass to occupy space. You could put five thousand thetans on the head of the pin and they'd all be individuals. Just as you could put five thousand automatic machines all the way around a guy and he could still occupy a cube of space one millimeter by one millimeter by one millimeter. He could still be five thousand machines.

This is not very imponderable if you just consider the idea of a static not having quantity connected with it and a thetan not having quantity connected with it. One of the best ways to disabuse a thetan of having quantity is to make him pass through a force screen of some sort – move through it. The heck with it, he can't move through this force screen as long as he's carrying a lot of mass along with him. Because force screens can only act upon mass. And if he thinks he is being mass instead of granting the beingness to the mass – you know, he is the mass, you know, fixed, no further ramifications on it at all, he's fixedly the mass – why, force screens, then, can affect him. It's the only way they could affect him.

But actually, his individuality depends upon his not having any mass but granting beingness all over the place. You don't have to become that thing to which you grant beingness. But you have to be willing to be it, also, as well as you.

Now, if you're willing to be the whole MEST universe and you, too, you're an individual adrift in a very live, very large playing field. But if the rest of the MEST universe is just something else and you're "agin it" and that sort of thing, well, the end product is a very grim one. You simply become smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and less willing to grant beingness to anything.

Now, how did – let's just provide that somebody d id – how did Lazarus pick up his bed and walk?

Female: He brought his bed, his own bed.

Worse than that. The fellow that treated him was Lazarus. We don't know whether Lazarus, the thetan, having shoved off – we don't know whether he was still Lazarus the thetan, but we know this body picked up a bed and walked, see?

Now, once in a great while back down through the Middle Ages, some saint's statue or something of the sort has stepped off the pedestal or spoken. There's no doubt that this has happened, you sec, because it's too easy to make it happen. If you're just completely willing to be the saint and then completely willing to alter the basic material of the statue till it can be mobile, of course, any quantity of statues will walk and talk. See? This is not a difficult problem.

This problem is really as difficult as you make it difficult so that other people won't give you continuous surprises, such as making houses greet you and say, "Good morning." The world can get readily and rapidly a bit too random for a lot of people. And that's the way to get random. You've been going to church for a long time and one day you go to church and the altar yawns. And the congregation screams! Merely because it's unexpected.

Now, these people who go around trying to "feel the atmospheres" of places, are trying to be the effect of places. And if you go – this is horrible – this is terrible that I have to tell you this, because it probably will hit awfully close to home in several places – but the fellow who goes around and tries to feel the atmosphere all the time without putting any there, of course, winds up by not feeling any atmosphere. And the world gets to be very drab and very dull and very unexciting after a while, because all things kind of seem the same to him and there's no interest in it and so on. The dark night full of sage – he remembers this as something very wonderful that he has experienced when he's young. And he gets back into the same area again and he tries to feel the dark night full of sage. Of course, he winds up by feeling an engram, you might say, a facsimile of what he felt before. Because he's willing to get back there and be the effect of what he was in the past. Well, if you want to be the effect of the past, go ahead, But the only time you'll ever live in is the present.

Now he could just artificially do this all over again simply by being the night, being the sage, being the smell of the sage, then being himself. And believe me, he'd get a good, beautiful, romantic scene. In other words, put it there and then get it back.

Now, fellows build in automatic forgetters. They are the night, are the sage, are themselves, so that they can experience the night and the only conscious experience which they permit to the surface is: "Doesn't the night smell wonderful!" Well, there has to be two forgetters in there before the night feels wonderful. You see, they have to be the night and then forget that they were the night and then they have to be the sage and forget that they are the sage, then they have to be themselves and experience it, See? Get how tricky this is.

Fellows are putting forgetters into themselves all the time. They don't know what their left hand, right hand is doing. Problem. Because they're sold on the idea that it's better to be an effect than to be at cause. So they're trying all the time to be a good effect, trying not to be a bad effect, trying to be a good cause, trying not to be a bad cause. And they're getting highly selective, on what? A basic consideration. And that consideration is only this: that there is badness and goodness. See? Badness and goodness don't exist unless you can consider they exist. Beauty does not exist unless you can consider that it exists. Beauty and ugliness are agreed-upon concepts.

And by the way, they are probably the most thoroughly complexly codified agreements which you have in the bank. They're aberrative mostly because of that, not because beauty is the all and everything. Do you see that? They're terrifically codified. And then you have to forget about them so that you can experience them. The one thing that you think you have to do is experience beauty. Of course, that makes you the effect of beauty all the time. Well, if you don't make any beauty, you can't experience it.

Well, getting back to what I was talking about at first, if you let the society grant you a beingness and then you agree to be fixed in that beingness, as a label, the whole thing caves in on you and eventually you die as that identity. Because that is the road to death: accepting a label and then being only that label. That's the road to death.

The road to life is to make everything live. You couldn't be simpler than this. Make everything live. Little kids go around, houses actually tip their caps to them.

One of the happiest fisherman I ever met, by the way, used to make a run up through some very narrow fjords and so on and he knew every rock on the way. But he didn't put it that way. He says, "You know," he says, "every rock all the way up there, every one of them knows me. Every bird knows me. Every rock, every bird." He obviously was consciously the whole time granting them beingness, he knew he was granting them beingness, this had never slipped the cogs. It was just a big joke with him – good fun.

So we get down to the fact that if you can't create, really, to some degree, you can't live. And a fellow who has made up his mind he can't create in certain departments and that certain things are wrong with him so he can't create certain things, of course, goes off in terms of beingness, just incidentally goes off in terms of beingness, because that's one of the things he can't create. He can't create selectively.

And you would be amazed that nearly every human being has agreed with himself many times over that he can't create this item, that he can't create that item, that he can't create something else. When he can't create enough, he gets onto the second part of the curve, which is survival – which he must make everything persist. When he has to make everything persist, then his mock-ups come back after he's banished them and the blackness persists and all sorts of things happen. Then he slides over on the curve and he starts unmocking everything because he's made unmocking itself – by validating survival, he has made unmocking his randomity. So every unmocking machine in the bank will eventually turn around and start to unmock everything he's got, merely because he is them, still, and he is then his own enemy. You see how that would work? And you've got your occluded case, actually, just on that cycle.

Okay? Well, I won't belabor this any further. I'll leave you utterly adrift probably. No, I think there's a guy or two knows what I'm talking about.

One of the most interesting exercises that you can pull is to have the environment, selectively one point and then another point of the environment, telling an individual there's something wrong with him. And then having various selected parts of the environment telling the individual that he mustn't be. Mustn't be – nothing in specific, just "mustn't be, mustn't be this, mustn't be that."

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

So this makes him grant beingness out very broadly and gets him into practice on granting beingness. So you have these various accusations.

And there's this specialized case in Scientology in which you might be very interested, is: "You aren't Clear." See, you have mountains and valleys and people in far places and so forth looking at the fellow and sneering and saying, "You aren't Clear. Something wrong with you."

Now, on a black case, by the way, wasting the machinery that makes blackness and getting him to know that he's wasting it, in brackets, is tremendously effective. It's very effective. Wasting machinery in brackets.

Now, I gave you this process about the communication line, the inverted flinch, so forth, yesterday on this case. I want to give you the idea and a notation on that. That's a long technique, that's not a short technique. You just do it in brackets. I gave it to you there. The fellow receives a communication and flinches. And the essence of the technique is to have the individual himself, after he has flinched – you know, he receives this piece of paper or bullet or something in the face – just have him determine what he's going to receive, then have him point the direction he ought to go. Select a new direction each time that he ought to go. He'll also have directions where he's supposed to go straight at the individual who hit him.

Female voice: Can you say that again, please?

This is the inverted flinch – the double flinch. The communication line technique I gave you for a black case. He receives a communication – this is done in brackets – and then he flinches, knowingly… He selects what kind of a communication it is, he receives it, he flinches (you know, inverted flinch or back flinch) and then points out the direction he's supposed to go. Kind of mocks himself up going in that direction, you see – but points out the selective direction. He selects the direction he's supposed to go. And this gets him to be the automatic machinery which sends him places.

Another technique is – on this same line – is being the thing which tells him what the future holds and being the thing which is being told what the future holds and being the past which is helping the thing in the future tell him what the future holds or being the past and being neglected or being the past, being the present, being the future.

Now, do you rig this up necessarily exteriorized or interiorized? No, you don't. It just doesn't matter. You don't tell the fellow not to go outside and look and you don't tell

him to stay inside and do this. You just tell him to be these various things. "Now be the future telling you in the present – be you, the future, telling you, the present, what the future holds."

Guy's parents turn up on the various warnings and forebodings and so forth, All this stuff starts spilling off. But it's spilling off the automatic machine, which he laid in the first place to tell him what the future held. First he laid in a machine, though, that would tell him what – to refuse to know what the future held. The first machine that's laid in there is the machine that tells him he doesn't know the future. That's to add randomity. But you peel it on down that way.

On a guy who is exteriorized, you have him be the future and refuse to let him, the present, know what's going to happen. And then be him, the present, being refused knowledge about the future. And then have him be the past, burying bad material about him, the present. And back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

Or you be the past, being the adventures that he can live again when he's old or something like that. Being the adventures he'll have to have when he gets bored – lots of variations on this.

It's a little guiding rule, however, that the less significance you put onto a basic concept, the more rapid the technique – the less significance is added into the idea. You just said to the fellow, "Be the future. Be the present. And be the past" and if he did this for a little while, if he's in fair condition, he'll all of a sudden pick all this stuff up himself. And you just push it along a little bit faster by telling him to be the future and do so-and-so and be the past and do so-and-so. But if you were to just tell him, "Be the past. Be the present. Be the future. Now be the future looking at you in the present" and back and forth this way, you would work out the very information which I'm giving you. And this information would turn up. But it might take you so much longer as an auditor in some cases that it wouldn't be worth your while.

Very often, the fellow you're asking to exteriorize is being the past. He isn't going to exteriorize into the present if he's being the past. And some of the others that you've run into are being the future. And you try to exteriorize them and, of course, they can't exteriorize because they're in the future. Fellow has to be in present time pretty well in order to exteriorize. Okay?

By the way, some people get a terrific fear on this, the second you start to make them make something alive. Well, you handle that with kid gloves.

And by the way, the worst cases you'll run into will be those cases which will tell you… You say, "Now put a concept in that pillow over there."

And they say, "That pillow can't think!"

You say, "Uh-oh!" – to yourself – "Gee, this guy doesn't have beingness out to the distance of that pillow and it's only seven feet." Tisn't so much size, but you know – the one thing he knows is that he has to be an effect of the MEST. That's what tells you that. He'll argue with you and say it isn't alive and so on.

And also, you run brackets on this, remember. He has to be the MEST being alive for other people too, you know, not just for him.

Well, if I can't tell you anything else, let's take a break and get to work.

Note: The recording starts with the lecture already in progress.

[[Category:Lectures 3ACC]]