View source for Perception and Ownership (3ACC 540104)

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

'''Date:''' 4 January 1954

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

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A lecture given by L. Ron Hubbard on the 4 January 1954

And this is the second lecture of the first Monday of the Third Unit.

Now, we have in this Unit a fair parity of training. You may doubt that as soon as we get into our examination – because I'm going to correct this examination and (I'm sorry) post it. And these things will happen quite regularly, just to make it a bit of a two-way flow. Now, we're not doing this to penalize you, we're just doing this to show you how well you're getting along.

And the first thing we've got to go into in any of this is the language with which we're operating. And we're operating with a language which is English. And don't make a mistake about it, we are operating with English.

There's an auditor, I think, around who says to his preclears, "Now, just take it as though I were a five-year-old child telling you." He says this to his preclears so they'll get the idea of what he's saying.

Now, I'm not trying to hit you at that level but we're hitting the meaning of the words practically at that level. What is a cow? A cow is an animal with horns, ears, that gives milk and moos. It eats hay. We all know that. You'll find the language of this particular subject has now boiled down to almost that strata. And the only place you're going to err and you will err in this direction, is you will try to read too much significance into what we're doing.

We're going in a slightly opposite direction to most instruction. We're trying to read less significance into things and give it a clarity rather than more deeper and more arduous and onerous mysteries.

You understand that you, as its Instructor instructing auditors, could go ahead and plow through with a magic wand that would wind everybody up in such a consistent and continuous mystery, they would all practically spin in. You understand that? I mean, you could wind them up in a big mystery. But we're not trying to wind you up in a mystery. You see that? We're not interested in a mystery. We're interested in a clarity.

The thing wrong with your preclear is hidden influence. When he really gets wrong, everything is a big mystery. You see, his knowingness is down.

Now, what is the definition of no-knowingness? Mystery. See? No-knowingness.

Your preclear is as well as he knows. He's no more well than he knows – your index.

Now, is that a knowingness of data? No. It is a potential knowingness of condition. You get the difference between "it is the knowingness of data" or "the potential knowingness of condition"? You see that as an essential difference?

Let's take a datum. A datum – and this, by the way, is a slightly incorrect datum, but it'll do for us. The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second. (That's not quite the right speed. It's a slight error, but that figure serves the physicist.) And so now we tell you the speed of light is 186,000 miles per second. And we sit back handsomely, fold our arms and think we've said something.

We haven't said a damn thing! "Second? What is a second?" That's the first thing we'd have to say. "Mile? What's a mile?" That's the next thing we'd have to say. And the third thing we'd have to say is, "What universe?" All universes? MEST universe? And then we'd have to say, "It is constant – for what universe?" And that is the speed of light.

And that would be – supposedly would be intelligible, however, and they say that in the physics class all the time: the speed of light is 186,000 miles a second. And then sit back proudly and fold their arms and think they've said something. Well, they haven't said anything. It's a relative datum and that's all it is. That is, it simply depends on what we have agreed to call a distance and what we have agreed to call a changing interval of spaces. And we've agreed on these two things, why, then we've got sense out of it.

But if it was something that we put down and hung to and clung to and embraced to our bosom desperately, why, oh, that would be real interesting, because it wouldn't get us anyplace. We would be able, then, to compute other relative data. And datum after datum, we would have a huge pile of data with which we could arduously construct something which you ought to be able to construct by saying, "It exists."

Now, if you're in a state of mind where you're perfectly willing to say, "All right, it exists…" And then you're even willing beyond that to have your student say, "Well, he said it exists. Okay, now let's see… uh, let's see, this applies now to the field of so-and-so. Yes. And this means that space travel, so-and-so… And Einstein said so-and-so and that means that when you exceed the speed of light, why, everything foreshortens. And that means, significantly, that Man can't exceed the speed of light and if he did, why, then he would get infinitely big. And all of that turns into the fact that, gee, Man can only go, then, at… gee, he can only go about 185,000 miles a second, because time would approach zero if you did that. .

Oh boy! Where are we going? Where are we going when we take that datum and start to read it out and out and out? We're not comfortably willing to say, "All right. It exists. It's a datum." But we have to get significant and more significant and relate it and relate it and relate it and relate it and relate it in order to make something more out of it and so on. We've got a concatenation known as logic, which, in itself, is merely a dramatization of this fact in this universe: this universe is made up of consecutive spaces – consecutive spaces. All spaces are adjacent to all other spaces in this universe, which means that all parts of this universe are in communication with all other parts of this universe.

Now, I'm telling you this datum although it will spin people if they completely examine it. It will actually spin people if they try to read down into this because it is the single trap of this universe. All spaces are consecutive to all other spaces, so everything is adjacent to everything and, therefore, everything in this universe, at any instant, is consecutive to everything else in this universe at any instant. So therefore, everything in this universe is in communication with everything else in this universe at any given instant. And that, in itself, is identification and that is insanity.

And if you can't throw some imagination in to break up the confluence of the conflecutors and if you can't break it down and shift time a little bit, you are caught inescapably in that barrier. So therefore, the MEST universe is a wonderful universe, but it doesn't make a single diet. And if you try to make a single diet out of the MEST universe, you're going to get indigestion. And that indigestion is known as psychosis.

So we've got two other universes, fortunately. And one of them is yours and the other fellow's is the other fellow's – the other universe is the other fellow's.

So we've got three universes: we've got your universe, we've got the MEST universe and we've got the other fellow's universe, which shows you immediately there must be an infinity of other universes. But they all come under one classification: the other fellow's. Because the MEST universe is yours, it isn't yours and the other fellow's. This is hard for a student to wrap around sometimes, because it's too obvious. It's yours. It isn't yours and his.

Now, we talk about it to people and you will even find yourself talking to students about this in order to avoid the argument. You'll find yourself teaching students, "Well, the MEST universe is an agreed-upon universe. And it's your universe and the other fellow's universe and it's where we get together. And therefore, it's half his and half yours."

And that's a very happy frame and it's a very close, quick statement of it and it involves no further conflecutors of the configuroogenots, see? So we just say, "Well, it's a compromise universe wherein all is made of agreement" and that's a terribly easy statement – And it's also not true. But it's an awfully easy statement.

The reason it's not true is because it doesn't work and that's the only reason why. Because the second we start to use this universe as an agreed-upon universe, we do it with ARC and agreement upon universe, we find out people's perceptions, as long as they run masses of people agreeing with masses of people that the universe is here and so forth, we find out their perceptics go up, tkk-tkk-tkk-tick-tkk, brighten, brighten, brighten and we think we're on a terrific track. And we think, "Oh boy, now we've really proven ARC. Now we're right there. No wonder ARC is so terribly effective." And then all of a sudden, his perceptics stop improving and take a dive and he starts to get sick.

What's the matter? Why, this thing was a beautiful theory: the MEST universe is 50 percent yours and 50 percent the other fellow's. No it isn't, it's yours. Now, we're not off into a mystery or metaphysics. I told you we were going to talk about awful plain things and then I've thrown you this thing. Isn't that a dirty trick? Isn't that a horribly dirty trick?

Well, the proof of the matter is, how good are your mock-ups? Your mock-ups are as good as you own them. And the MEST universe is as visible to you as you own it. And the test of it is, try duplicating things you own and then try duplicating things you don't own.

And so, we will go about this right now and demonstrate this and it will demonstrate limitedly, to this.

Now let's pick up some possession of yours, such as your pocketbook – your pocketbook, your coat, a pin, anything like that, anything you've got, that's right, anything you've got that's very personal.

All right, now let's duplicate it.

Did you get a good duplicate?

All right. Now, did you do that? Do you see that, that you got a good duplicate of it? All right.

Okay. See that package of cigarettes? That's mine. This is my package of cigarettes. This is mine. I bought them down at the store. I've smoked two-thirds of them – more than that. It's mine. I paid my money for it. Mine. Duplicate it. Is it as good as yours?

Well, it's a funny thing, it'll work in crowds of thousands. I mean, you can take guy after guy after guy and you can show him this.

All right. Now, this is a sheet which holds your schedule. This is your schedule, this is yours. Belongs to you as a class unit. Belongs to you, it's yours personally. All right. Duplicate it. Little bit better than the cigarette pack?

Now, of course, there's some people that are running an inversion on the thing, that will get something, actually, duplicated which is enforced upon them better than something which is not. And that is called sort of a delusive duplication. And their mock-ups will behave crazily and do other weird things when they do that.

Now, that's a very, very brief test, isn't it? There's nothing much to that test. But you did get a better duplicate, didn't you, of the cigarette package? And when I told you this was yours, you got a better duplicate of it.

I have some of you looking at me kind of wonderingly – there's two or three in the Unit – what happened? Let's find out what the other side of it was. Did you get a better duplicate of it? You got no duplicate of any of them. That's what the answer is on that.

Now, what did you choose of your own? Yeah, you.

Female voice: My purse . . ,

Your purse. Is your purse yours?

Female voice: I thought it was.

Well, is it yours?

Female voice: Yes.

It is?

Female voice: Mm-hm.

Well, I'm not going to argue with you or evaluate a case. Now, is it yours or is it yours as much as that light fixture is yours? Which is most yours, your purse or the light fixture?

Female voice: My purse.

Your purse is. And let's examine it just a little bit further. Have you a more personal possession than the purse?

No, no more personal possession than the purse? How about your glasses?

Female voice: Yes.

All right. Let's duplicate them.

Did you get a duplicate that time?

Female voice: No. I'm not sure that I know what you mean by a duplicate of it. Do you mean, in fact did I see them ? No. I can put something up and say that my glasses are there.

All right.

Here we have, more than anything else, a language breakdown. What do you mean by a duplicate? What you mean, is an image. Not a mental image, by the way, because it's

an actual image. You can put a wire into it and get juice off of it, so we can hardly call it what we normally classify as imaginary. "Imaginary" is something, by definition, which doesn't exist but which we merely think it does. Well, what exists is, by classification, something could be tested on a meter or measured.

The physicist's definition of what exists is something that can be measured, weighed, scouted, looked over, felt, sensed, experienced. That is a physicist's definition.

Well, a mock-up has mass and so goes out of the field of the imaginary. All right.

Now, we got our point across here – most everybody on this. Now, we've got a universe which, actually, is running on a mock-up at the speed of light. When we say the speed of light, we have said one of the emptiest things we could say – except in relative speeds. How fast do you mock-up and unmock? Well, you mock-up and unmock, obviously, at the speed of light or you would not have a MEST universe around you.

Now, light makes, as a particle travels, consecutive new spaces, because space is a viewpoint of dimension. And so every time – every time we have a particle in a new position, we have a new piece of space.

What's the definition of space? It's the viewpoint of dimension.

And so, every time a particle changes in position, we have a new space. And we can ask, right at that minute, does a particle change position? Or do we have a new particle?

Well, if you've got new particles every time, your perception is fantastically beautiful. And if you are changing particles in position, without going through the something-nothing line and you're sort of leaving it all up to the superautomaticity of your automaticities to keep something moving there, and all of this, and you're just leaning on this with great weight and heaviness and saying "That's it," it behaves just like automaticity behaves.

In other words, we're up against the problem of fading reality. This is a fading reality – greater and greater reliance upon an automatic machine. You know? It's not my responsibility, it's somebody else's responsibility.

The one thing that'll kick a black case in the head and really make it sit there and squawk is to start running cause and effect or responsibility. He's running other cause and self effect – other responsibility and less responsibility for himself. In other words, he isn't owning.

Now, when you own everything there is in sight, you get a brilliant clarity of perception, which, as you sit there, would be incredible to you. I mean you couldn't see things this bright, that's all, I mean they're too bright. Everything gets – it gets up to the point finally where you start to look at the walls and you're expecting an effect, you see?

You look at something and you expect particles to come back to you (it says in the physics textbook). And you look at the wall and the particles are reflected back to you. And there you sit looking at the particles as they come back to you and mirroring this image of the particles as they come back to you and so you see the wall. Well, that would mean there would be a consecutive flow of wall pictures coming back to you, from the wall to you, at gradients of one over c. I'm sorry to get so technical, but it's just every time there's a particle shift, it's coming back to you at a nothing-something, nothing-something, nothing-something, nothing-something, zzrrrrrrrrttt, bang! We get the picture of the wall. That's the way it would work theoretically.

Does it work that way? Does it actually work that way? Well, we've set it up automatically to work that way, so we can say it works that way. But after we've relied on it for a while, it doesn't work that way anymore and it starts to fade out and our perception goes by the boards.

But if we turn around and do this trick now: now, I want you to look at the front wall of the room and just take a look at it now.

Now move the image of it right in on your chest.

All right. Now let's take a look at that front wall and move the image on your chest again.

Now let's look at the front wall and move the image on your chest again.

just the front wall and then the image on your chest. You don't have to move it by gradients as it comes to you, just put it there on the front wall and then push it against your chest. The chest of your body now. Now look at the front wall and now let's put the front wall against your chest. In other words, the picture of it against your chest.

Now let's look at it up here. Now put a picture of it against your body, your chest, again.

Now the front wall and against your chest again. Don't turn it around or anything, just pull it in on you.

All right. Now let's do worse than that. Let's take this cigarette package and let's put it in an exact area.

Now pick out an exact area of your chest, an exact spot. All right. Now look at the cigarette package here. Now put the cigarette package at that spot on your chest.

Now here. Now at the spot on your chest. Now here. Now at the spot on your chest. Now here. Now at the spot on your chest. Doing that? Are you getting a picture there on your chest?

Now here. Now at the spot on your chest. Now here. Now at the spot on your chest. Now here. Now at the spot on your chest.

Ping, ping. One-two. One-two. One-two, One-two. One-two. You starting to get the pressure of this against your chest? Hm?

Sure. Because you're putting a duplicate of it, a real duplicate of it. And do you know, if you kept that up and you were good enough, you would have this cigarette package here and against your chest too? And it'd be just as real to you in both places. Well, that wouldn't be delusion.

Man has steered men off of truth by giving him a deeper significance to everything. What is simpler than this? You see a picture, you feel its weight, you can do all these things with this picture in the universe around you. You have been trained and you are, by experience, continuing along in that training to expect everything to appear exactly where they appear. And you expect to perceive them by some automaticity which, somehow or other, transfers this wall or this tree to some sort of a screen or something which is you so that you then perceive them. Well, this becomes a superincredibility. I mean, somewhere, you have to look at the picture. You see this? All right. This is one of these idiotic simplicities: somewhere you have to look at the picture.

Now, let's take the idea that you've got eyes, and this image up here comes through the lenses of the eyes and is channeled through an optic nerve and then registers on a screen. And therefore, by biological and medical definition, we have perception of what we have seen.

Now, do you see that as perception? You know, that's the definition of medical perception, biological perception. Here is the image, now here is the image here, now we have the image coming through entering the eyes, being focused dually and then focusing upon a screen and this screen then takes the image and so we see the eye… Oh, there's something very wrong about this somewhere. Somewhere, there's something quite haywire, something very silly about it. Because they haven't put in where we inspect the picture. Somewhere, you've got to look at it, otherwise it's all very fine. See, it's a wonderful explanation, except it doesn't explain anything.

And this again is another (as I started to talk to you about early in this) data. So I can give you this big consecutive datum – a big consecutive data about – you see this wall and it goes in your two eyes and it comes back and it impresses itself on two screens at the back of the heads. And then these two screens are coordinated onto one screen and so we have a perception so that we know the wall is up here, because we have seen it back there in the back of the head. And they even go to the point where the image is inverted and then they give all these parts names. And this is all very cute. But do you know that the entire mechanism could have gone by the boards and the fellow can still see?

There's a child right now, down south someplace, that the doctors are very, very worried about, because the child has no sight because he has no pupil in his right eye. He was born that way. And he still keeps seeing out of his right eye. And nobody has told him he shouldn't do that yet, but they'll manage it in two or three years so that he won't see out of it anymore.

See, but he obviously can't see out of it because there's no pupil there. In other words, the physical universe isn't agreeing with the datum, so therefore, let's throw away the physical universe. See, that's the wrong way to go about it: just take a bunch of data and then everything that doesn't agree with our package of data, let's just throw it away. See, that's the wrong way to instruct, it's the wrong way to study. That's reverse end to, because the datum is simply a conclusion. And when you have finally finished processing your preclear out of all the conclusions he has ever concluded, you've got a blank screen – total blank as far as aberration is concerned – and you'd have terrific imaginative ability.

What's wrong with your preclear? Conclusions. What are conclusions? Data. Datum, datum, datum, another datum, another datum, another datum, another datum, which relates, which relates, which relates, which makes a terrific woof and warp of logic, which in itself is very impressive but which all boils down to the fact that it's a dramatization of the consecutive spaces of the MEST universe. Everything is next to everything. Saturn is next to Earth by reason of consecutive spaces between Saturn and Earth. You see that? Therefore, a particle leaving Saturn in this direction would, someday or other, arrive on Earth, no matter what speed it was leaving, theoretically.

That's the way this universe is put together. This universe is supposed to perceive itself within itself, to perceive itself to be in communication within itself and so forth. Well, it couldn't be any other way and it's idiotically simple that way, because that's how the thetan is perceiving it and putting it there so that he can perceive it.

The easiest thing to agree upon is an identification. So if everybody is going to get into complete agreement about something, he'd better have an identification to start with. I'm not trying to overreach you in any way, but let's all conceive the easiest thing to agree upon.

Now let's agree on the easiest thing in this room to agree upon – let's say this package of cigarettes – and we'll agree that this package of cigarettes is up here. Well, how do we possibly ever come to an agreement so we can see it? So that I see a package of cigarettes and I can tell you via sound waves that you can see the package of cigarettes?

We have identified. We even have an English word, which is a cross up and in itself, an explanation of this phenomenon. It's a package of cigarettes, isn't it? Well, as long as we simply say, "Object, here." "Object." We all get object, see? But there is the object.

Now, let's go at it a little more obliquely and put the package of cigarettes in my pocket. And I say, "All right. Now, there's a package of cigarettes out in front of me and so on." And I agree that it's out in front of me. And everybody can say at that moment, "Well, he's really not holding one out in front of him, so, of course there isn't really one out in front of him." So we have entered the first hidden influence and the first symbolical explanation of an actual object into the subject of the conversation.

Now, all right. Now it leaves up to your decision what kind of a package of cigarettes to put out in front of me, doesn't it? So we get a nonidentification. For instance, the package of cigarettes you put there is not the package of cigarettes which you put there. Is that right? I mean, one of you puts – they fold it one way and it looks the other way and so forth.

So, in order to get a good identification on anything, we'd have to have a consecutive-space-identified sort of thing about every object there was. In other words, we have to agree on the simplest, most obvious point to get a complete agreement. Now, you know that by experience, don't you? You know this by experience, that the best way to continue a conversation is to find the most obvious point of agreement you can find with the other person and continue from that point. And that is the soul of conversation as long as it's going to be conversation. And when it ceases to be the soul of the conversation, we get into that thing called disagreement or argument. And then we don't see the same thing eye to eye anymore.

This thing is woven through the language. It's woven through experience. It's one of those terribly obvious things. It's this enormous iron block sitting there that everybody looks through and overlooks, because it is an iron block, because it is sitting there, because everybody knows it's sitting there – only nobody knows it anymore. Because we're all into a deeper significance about this iron block or this package of cigarettes or somewhat.

So we begin to disqualify the one thing which is putting the package of cigarettes there, which is your ability to put a package of cigarettes there. And believe me, when you can no longer put a package of cigarettes up here, you can't see a package of cigarettes. And that's the test of it with a preclear and that's how you resolve perceptions on a case. When the individual is no longer able to put a package of cigarettes up here and reimpress that package of cigarettes upon his own chest or in his own head, he can no longer see a package of cigarettes.

And that's the only thing that's wrong with a thetan: he expects to have a backboard to drop the perceptic against in order to perceive the perceptic. So he would rather look at a facsimile. He takes a picture of the perceptic and then brings the picture up and looks at it. And he's perfectly happy to do that, except it doesn't happen to agree with anybody else's picture. And the reason it doesn't agree with other people's picture is a very simple one itself: because he's not looking at the picture to begin with. He's not perceiving, because he can run at a different rate of time. He isn't having to run at time, he hasn't got a body to meter. He hasn't got a body to put there which he has agreed runs at a certain speed.

In other words, his agreements are broken at the point when he is exteriorized, because he can now freely make his own space or unmake it. And you've got to drill him up, actually, to a point where he is willing or unwilling, at will, to reassume the MEST universe. He conceives it dangerous, he conceives it this way and he conceives it that way.

Why? Because it's in such a terribly rote agreement. He has more imagination, he has more pliability, he has more beingness than is required. He can always improve on the universe. He's got this, that and the other thing that he can do about the universe, see? We've put flexibility back into it again.

Why? Because he's now not being something. You see? If you're being something, then you'd better perceive something and be perceived, because if you don't perceive as something,

then you aren't anything. This get you? How do you know you're there? Well, because you see you're there, of course. But above that level, you could know you were there.

And you'd come along to somebody else and you'd say to him, "Now, do you know I'm here?"

If the other fellow was a real high grade, up the line, he'd say, "Yeah. I know you're there."

Okay. So we don't have to look. But after we know less, we have to look. more. So we get knowingness, lookingness and, when we can't look so much, then we've got to feel about it. And then when we can't feel about it so much because feeling is, you know, not agreed-upon and we've got to go into effort about it. And we go into effort about it and we can't face effort anymore and we can't work and we can't face effort and we can't push things around and things don't move just because we make a postulate. Well, let's get down into thinkingness and now let's compute, you know, that it must be there.

"Well, it must be there because… Well, it follows as a logical conclusion that if there were two doors, then these two doors must have been cut in something, so naturally if there were two doors there, then there must be a wall there. Ha-ha! Now, this concludes that there probably is a wall there, because there are two doors there, because we've assumed that there were two doors there because somebody said so. So this means there's a barrier, so we better not go in that direction." That's thinking about it, see?

Now, looking about it would be to simply look up there and see what was the agreed-upon particle thought procedure of fixed ideas with relationship to the door and the window or the door and the wall. In other words, you just look at it – you'd know, perceive, put, mock-up there to be no problem. You see. So, you see as well as you know and you see as poorly as you think. And when you really get poor, thinking becomes symbolization.

Condensed thinking is a symbol. A symbol is condensed thinking. Thinking is condensed effort, effort is condensed emotion, emotion is condensed looking and looking is condensed knowing. And so we got it, we got our scale of experience.

Now, our problem here is not as great as you think it is. It's really not anywhere near as great as you think it is. It's a remarkably easy problem. And I have to tell you that every once in a while, because one of these days you're going to have to agree with me that it's an easy problem.

And it simply hinges, then, on this: a person's ability to construct something, like a wall, is dependent upon his feeling that he has a right to construct the wall. So the way you'd (quote) "keep somebody from constructing a wall" (unquote) would be to make walls private. And make building permits necessary. And the person who doesn't perceive well has to go around getting building permits all the time, to look. He buys them from the optician, he gets them from the government.

Now, this is very funny, but if you don't own something, at least to some degree or other, you don't perceive it worth a nickel. And that's why moving a person around from one part of the country to another when he's very young will bring him down, eventually, in perception. And it may push him way up in thinkingness, but it sure doesn't push him up into lookingness or feelingness – it cuts those bands out.

Do you see what we're doing there? He owns the country. He was raised in Keokuk. And by golly, it wouldn't matter if the mayor came down and said, "Young man, the city owns that mountain and you are not supposed to look at that mountain anymore." He would say something very ungraceful, I'm sure. Because he's known since he was old enough to open his eyes that that was his mountain. And the mayor never can come down and issue a revocation. He owns it. It's his mountain. It's his town. They're his people.

And a great comfort of mind results from this, because he doesn't question his own ownership. He just goes on, he lives in Keokuk to the end of his days. His perception is terrific, he exteriorizes. You walk up to him and say, "Be three feet back of your head," pang, he is. Not much to this, it's very easy to do.

But you shift him all over the country now. And every time he goes to a new town, everybody rushes up to him and says, "This is our town. It's nice, isn't it? Why don't you look it over?" But they tell him that awful quick.

The war, or any war, carries with it a wonderful manifestation: the troops that got there a half an hour ago are the old-timers. And you come in as new troops, see? And they say, "Well, over that way, that was where the action was fought and you can look over our battlefield or this is – you can look over our barracks, it's down this far." And they disenfranchise everybody that shows up – rapidly. They've only been there a half an hour and they're old-timers.

I was aware of this during the last war and very often reversed it utterly. I would go around and find the oldest settler and I would say, "Have you found my canteen?" Or "Have you found my baggage?" You talk about respect, I was immediately the oldest settler.

I landed, one time, on an island very, very early in the war and did this trick, in terms of the oldest company. There had been a small landing force in there right away and they were being cocky and overbearing to the point of taking everything that showed up and nailing everything down and getting the best of everything. And I didn't intend that this condition should continue, because my rate of havingness was very low at the moment. So I went around and said, "Well, thank God you boys got here. And what have you done with the crashed pieces of the plane I was in here yesterday?"

And they said, "My golly, is that so? Where is it?"

And, "Oh," I said, "my God, you've bulldozed it over. You dunderheads!" See? And the Seabees is what had been in there and they're intolerable, the Seabees are. They take ownership of everything and issue the islands and things to people piecemeal thereafter.

Well, do you know that it's an actual problem in perception? Incoming troops expect to be directed, but the first troops in know there's nobody to direct them. And the difference

between the pride and the cockiness of the first troops in and the last troops in is not battle seasoning, it's a problem in ownership, that's all.

And the difference between the boy who has had to leave his hometown at an early age and has been in hometowns consecutively ever since and the fellow who's stayed there forevermore, is that the boy who had to leave has ever since been trying to hide the fact that he has been degraded in terms of ownership and that his havingness is less. And he has to measure up to it, so he goes to the big city to "make good." He goes here and he goes there and he docs this and he does that "to make good."

Make good for what? They always have to make good, though. Well, it'll follow with them having some slight loss in their own hometown. And if you want to trace back the first loss of havingness on the part of an individual, you will trace back to his first degradation, which is, of course, his first loss of power or pride and his first break of perception, which is, of course, his first break of ownership. The young man does not go to the big city to make good until he's already been disenfranchised in his own town.

This doesn't say that he won't become a tough, adventurous, mean, ornery fellow. This doesn't say that he won't be tremendously successful, as success is measured. This won't say that he doesn't survive at a high, constant rate. See, it doesn't say any of those things. It merely says his perception is less. And it says his sense of ownership of the world around him is kind of forced and, sooner or later, will cave in slightly. It doesn't say the fellow isn't able or isn't strong or isn't proud. But it does say that he won't exteriorize worth a nickel. See? We close terminals with that right away, quick.

Why? Because exteriorization is in itself a disenfranchisement which is performed by the auditor. And when performed on an individual who is very alert to being disenfranchised, results in an immediate state of degradation, which is so sharp and so marked that often the individual is not aware of an exteriorization having taken place at all. His knowingness just goes out, king, He maybe exteriorizes for a minute or thirty seconds. He's actually exteriorized!

And for a split instant as he was going out, he recognizes the fact that he is about to leave and then he doesn't know anything about it. And ten or fifteen seconds later, you ask him, "Did you get outside?" And he says no, he didn't exteriorize. He did! He exteriorized. A person never fails to exteriorize. But a person often fails to be certain that he did.

And in the worst cases – in the cases that are roughest, at first, to handle them, but not very rough, now – he doesn't know anything about it. It's a sort of an unconsciousness. Why? Can't perceive. Why? The last thing he owns is the area he's in: his havingness is immediately adjacent to his body. His havingness is so close in that the moment his ownership is exceeded in terms of boundary, he feels a degradation.

You, by the way, you could do this to this person. I have had auditors in training try this as a little experiment: walk up to a perfect stranger in a store and say, "Get out." The people leave.

If you know the physiological type to say "get out" to, you'll get an immediate response. The guy will just leave, that's all. And he'll get outside and he'll feel very degraded and he'll feel very upset and he won't quite know what's happened to him. But he's sure that he did right by getting out, but he knows he doesn't belong in there. Well, that guy doesn't own the store and it's a piece of mass that he doesn't have any right in.

And so we get right of ownership immediately adjacent to Theta Clearing. And the worse a person is off about this, the more he's worried about owning.

Now, we're in a problem, here, which isn't the problem of "is he a good guy or is he a bad guy or is he hard to live with or isn't he hard to live with?" The funnier part of it is, the cagier boy, the fellow who's more likely to survive on a good, hard, tough ratio, is actually the fellow who has a tremendous awareness and knowingness which has been built up by defenses.

Now, let's get the difference between the country boob who has owned all of his life and the fellow who had to get out and went to the big town and is now a sharpie. The country fellow, he's just a boob, he figures, he's a simpleton. You can come along and sell him walnuts any time you want to.

Why? He owns the walnuts you're trying to sell him, already. He's very comfortable about existence, he is easy to fool. Why? Because he doesn't look for anybody to fool him. Will he get very bad off from having been fooled? Very doubtful, very doubtful. Unless you fooled him so bad that you moved him right out of his neighborhood – moved him out of his entire area into a strange world – then that would be bad.

But the other fellow has "learned how to get along." Now, a fellow who can learn how to get along and still not get hard-boiled about it all and still not be terribly calloused or dishonest, who can still have problems of ownership within himself and yet, at the same time, go on owning or not owning and carrying forward, you're just looking at a difference of degree of individual. You're looking at a difference, what you might call, of "native horsepower." And we get another factor in there which is unpalatable to people who are raised in a tradition of "everybody is so equal – except some are more equal than others." And this tradition is not very good, it's kind of a nutty one because it's a dramatization of the constancy of space, consecutive spaces of the MEST universe – you know, total agreement! You know, everybody is equal, that's the same as total agreement. We all agree. We all agree. And you'll find many a person raised in that tradition is kind of having a rough time of it.

All right. What's our problem, then, between thetan and thetan and thetan and thetan? It's, what's the ratio, the potential of the individual, how much can he have gone through and still maintain and hold up his head in terms of ownership? In other words, how much can he be disenfranchised of and still be? It's a ratio of how much can he lose? Which, you're also saying, is "What is his native horsepower?"

Now, you knew this in your neighborhood. All these little kids, they're all raised in the same town. Only, there was little Johnny down the street and you went down and if you ever threatened to take a stick of candy – even an old secondhand piece of candy – away from little Johnny, he immediately broke down and cried. And he was going home and tell everybody and he was going to get the cops after you and he was going to – he got in a desperate state.

And then there was Bill. And Bill would be standing there eating a piece of candy and although Bill was smaller and slenderer and not, evidently, nearly as physically powerful as Johnny, you walked over to take this piece of candy away from Bill. And you took the piece of candy away from Bill – you did not! You got it maybe, but Bill got it back. It was kind of soiled, but he didn't get disenfranchised easily. He went on owning the piece of candy, even though you had taken it away from him. See?

Well, do you know, an individual could actually be a citizen of the entire world? He could be sort of raised owning the entire Earth. Even though he was in one spot. And he could be moved around all over the place, you see? And although it would kind of dim on him a little bit, because he'd be moved away from his possessions and things would happen to him that he wouldn't like and he'd get puzzled about ethics and morals and whether he should trust people and he'd get into all sorts of conundrums, but he'd still go on to some degree owning all of Earth. His perception would stay good, his strength would be up, his power would be up and his doingness would stay high.

And then there's the other fellow, although he was born in the same place, who was born up with the tradition of owning his front yard but not the front yard next door, see? Well, perhaps this could be counted for a difference on the point of spiral. Maybe the fellow born owning all of Earth, maybe he's on an earlier spiral. Maybe he isn't quite as old and hasn't been kicked in as much.

But this would admit something very unusual: it would merely say the longer you've stayed in the MEST universe, the worse off you've gotten, there's no salvation for it of any kind whatsoever. And that was the kind of an absolute that nearly every preclear enters into his case sooner or later and which isn't true.

And you know, there are actually preclears that can tell you that ten years ago they were so damn bad off they didn't know whether they were going or coming? They had lost everything, they had gone by the boards in all directions. And then all of a sudden, they got up one morning and they said, "To hell with it." And they've been going on living ever since. Maybe they're tougher or more determined or less happy than they should be, but they're living!

And then there's some fellow who went out one morning and lost a straw out of his hand and caved in and perished. And he comes to you a crawling psycho and you don't know what the heck is wrong with him. He's perished, he's dead. He's gone.

Well, we don't care what the difference between individuals is, we are looking at the difference you're going to find showing up. And it all centers around two things, which are both the same thing, which is: the potential ownership of the individual is how much can he potentially or natively own and, two, how much does he now know he owns? What's the ratio between his potential ownership and his actual ownership? And that's all we're looking at in the preclear.

When we say "perception," yeah, he'll perceive as much as he really owns. He won't perceive any more than that.

Be wary of processing a blind man. The guy doesn't own anything. He owns a piece of blackness. Nobody wants the night, he can own that. Tisn't his. Nothing is his. There's the darnedest things happen with blindness. And you'll find a blind case, sometimes, remarkably easy to process. Eyes all shot to hell, you know? I mean, he's had a shotgun blast in the eyes or he's gone blind from some horrible disease or something terrible has happened. And you exteriorize him or you just pep him up a little bit and his sight seems to come right on back. Well, there is a big potential ownership, you see, which has been suddenly upset and which you have recovered easily.

And then there's the other fellow who is also blind who has a small potential ownership, you see? And then he went blind and got disenfranchised of that and you're working with no power to turn on. You're trying to tinker around with a crystal set.

Now, this is a damning thing and a big escape valve for an auditor and a wonderful source of alibis. But remember, as an Instructor, don't kick out all the alibis. That's a dirty trick. Always let a guy have an explanation for why he failed. Let him be able to say, "Well, the guy… the guy just didn't want to see. He's a crystal set, you know?" Don't throw them all away. Because how do you know that there aren't a few outs like that, see? If we're not positive and absolute that there are no – if we could say, "There are no outs of any kind and no excuses, there are no alibis, we will not tolerate failure of any kind whatsoever" and if we say this – we can say it all right but we'd sure be better – awfully sure that there isn't. See? It's a kind of an absolute you'd be chary of announcing. And it'd also be very tough on your auditor. Very tough on him, all the way along the line.

You keep telling him, "Well, there's no excuse for your failure. You're responsible, nobody else is. You're cause. All right, go on, be cause. And the preclear had nothing whatsoever to do with it, you must have processed him wrong."

You know, the preclear will tell him that all the time? Leave it to the preclear, the preclear will keep him in line. The preclear will tell him at the end of every session, "No. I'm no better." Preclear, by the way, by this time, you know, his nose is straightened up and his two front teeth – he didn't have front teeth at the beginning of the session, he's got them now. [laughter]

Preclear will say, "Nothing happened. And besides, I have a bad somatic and you're a bad cause." Preclear will tell him that all the time, so why cap it over? The truth of the matter is that this is what preclears do: they try to maintain their self-determinism by failing to admit that somebody else helped them. If they think they can say, "Nobody helped me, I did it myself," why, they feel that they have captured and held on to a shred of their determinism. Well, they're – just a determinism, saving grace.

The auditor, then, has got to be able to look at actual conditions. And the actual conditions are these – the case is never complex, it is never difficult outside this framework: the person perceives as much as he can own, he is trying for a change in survival status. And the auditor will turn up his perception and give him a change in survival status to the degree that he can give him back or make him take back some part of the three universes – his own universe, the MEST universe and the other person's universe.

That's about all an auditor is doing. And it's a very simple statement that one can make of it. How much will he take back? Well, you can explain it variously. You can say, "How much is he willing to take responsibility for?"

But that's a bad way to explain it, because all of his life everybody has been hammering and pounding him and saying, "The trouble with you is you won't take responsibility for your own guilt. And you know you're guilty. You know you're guilty. You know it, you know it and you know it. You'd better repent, repent, repent." See? I mean, hammer-hammer-hammer-hammer-hammer, in an effort to keep him from owning. Because if the society had just left him alone, he would go on owning the whole society and this is an intolerable thing, isn't it? For a fellow to own the whole society and to own the whole of Earth and to own the entire firmament and to be perfectly comfortable about it – wouldn't that be horrible? It would not!

Do you know that a fellow, when he's in that condition, doesn't have to have a deed of title or kick anybody else out? Think of that one for a minute. Where's all your trouble come from? All your trouble tomes from a contest of "who owns it?"

All games resolve down to "how much of the playing field are we going to gain?" Well, then a game must start with the assumption that somebody else owns some of the playing field. So essentially, any argument is a serious game. See that? I mean, any contest and so forth, as it gets more and more serious, develops into arguments, it develops into war, it develops into serious brutalities, cruelties, criminalities. I mean, you've got a gradient scale of contest.

And when you have a look over this gradient scale of contest, we find our first instance of it between the: (1) the Instructor and the student, (2) between the student and preclear. Those are contests in the first analysis. They're sort of an argument. The Instructor is arguing against the student's background, The student has certain conceptions and preconceptions which make him to believe that the problem is terribly complex and that he can't know it all and that the Instructor can't know it all either, because that would fix him up, see? That would put the Instructor in the form of owning everything and the student in the form of owning nothing, so we've got to counterbalance this out.

And then, we get into the term of auditing and the auditor versus the preclear. Well, the auditor is trying to return to the preclear some self-determinism. And the auditor very often starts doing this by sacrificing some of his own determinism so that he can return to the preclear some self-determinism. And then, this kind of winds up in a reduced auditor, so the auditor thinks he needs auditing.

So we have, in an Instructor in a class, he's the fellow who stands up there and he insists he knows everything, see? I mean, he sounds that way, he sounds certain. There's no positiveness greater than the positiveness of an Instructor. He just knows everything there is to know. And this leaves the student nothing to do but either fall into that bin of knowing everything there is to know… You get that? I mean a student has no other choice, he has to know nothing.

Well, this leaves the whole class sitting there trying to understand, which is one of the meanest buttons I know of, because it's a directly downscale button. Here's a whole class sitting there trying to understand, trying to understand, trying to understand, which puts knowingness out at an immediate point in front of them, which, in itself, is how you hypnotize people.

You put knowingness out in front of a preclear and hold it there and insist that it's knowingness and the preclear must concentrate on this point. And the first thing you know, why, he's willing to grant other-determinism to his knowingness. So we've got a problem there, don't we? Got a problem there.

Well, maybe the Instructor – been more places than a student, maybe he's seen more. There's nothing wrong with experience, experience isn't necessarily data and it's certainly not necessarily bad. Experience hung up as a facsimile and remembered as a facsimile, which is pulled in against the chest so nothing else will happen, that's bad. But experience is a knowingness of how the particles change. What are the conditions and changes of particles? What are the conditions and changes of knowingness? And that, in itself, is knowingness, in terms of experience. It's not bad for an Instructor to be experienced. You'd listen any day to a – if you were going to learn how to drive a car, you'd listen any day to a fellow that had been driving a car for about fifty years and knew a heck of a lot about driving cars fast and knew conditions of roads and things like that.

Well, why would you listen to him? Well, you would listen to him, in the first place, because he'd met an awful lot of conditions, hadn't he? And you kind of want to get a leg up and after a while, you'll get your own experience. But while you're going forward getting your own experience, it's awful nice to have a couple in the bank there and to be shoved off, you know, to be given the torch, you might say, for a little while until you know, by experience, your drivingness.

And do you know, life, in its construction and evolution – even a thetan in terms of his knowingness… You might wonder sometimes why a little baby acts so much like a little baby. He's just a thetan, you understand. He has been disenfranchised of all former knowingness and so he comes down to a no-knowingness until somebody gives him a leg up, nicely, gives him a little torch to carry along, gives him a hand, tells him where to walk and how to walk. And after a while, he revolts against this and he decides he'll walk where he pleases. But he wouldn't be ever able to walk where he pleases unless somebody had helped him to take a few steps, first place.

And that's the way life and livingness continues. And that is how it rises to higher states of beingness. And that is how we have, today, achieved Scientology. It's not because, in a terrific burst of brilliance, one LRH "thunk himself some thunkingness" and looked himself some lookingness and, in this terrific burst of this and that, codified everything and dropped it in your laps. Life and livingness itself has been building up to this on this planet for about eighty-two hundred years. And it's gone out of sight and fragments of it have reappeared and it's gone out of sight again and it's reappeared and it's gone out of sight again.

The only thing that I did, which was probably peculiar, is I probably went further, in terms of actual distances. You know, I don't mean I just carried the proposition further or thought further. I mean, actually traveled a little further and bumbled into a little bit more and got into, probably, a little more hot water and got out of it with a little more luck. And was able to pick up, fortunately, enough leads from enough fellows and was able to be humped over enough humps, to a point where all of a sudden I was on a high road, see? And being on that high road, could continue at a fairly fast velocity. Because I brought together, for the first time, the Eastern and Western Hemispheres, in terms of knowingness.

And if you just think of it for a moment, the West, you see, with all mechanic, all mechanics, all mechanics, inevitably, when combined against the nothingness of nirvana and no-materialism of the East, certainly something is going to bang someplace. If you get a good understanding of both these halves of the same problem, you get an understanding of both halves, why, you've got yourself a really gorgeous setup to either go mad or solve something.

Well, the results which I get and which you get and have gotten, actually, on preclears, demonstrates that I probably didn't go very mad, because we did get some results and we got someplace.

All right. Now, let's take a look at this. Is it a greater sensitivity of knowingness or a greater stamina or anything? Well, those factors don't matter. The factor which matters is, is when you learned how to walk, you got yourself a little hand along the floor and, after a while, you began to walk very expertly indeed. And you didn't need anybody helping you out and, as a matter of fact, you'd get real antagonistic toward somebody helping you out.

Well, life has been doing this to life and livingness has been doing this with livingness and thetans have been doing this with thetans, up to the point of an enormous accumulation of potential. And right now, the truth of the matter is, life has enough leisure to do something like this.

It didn't have, a few years ago. There wasn't enough food being provided. You and I and so forth, we wouldn't be thinking about thought. Ha! We sure wouldn't. We'd be out here scouting across this plain with a carbine looking for an antelope so we could eat. That's right. But we can buy it at the market right now. See, they can make more antelopes. You see that? So everything sort of combines fortuitously to a leg up.

Life gave me a bit of a leg up all the way along the line. And I can give you one. And, sure enough, just like one of the best auditors we had there in the First Unit: by the time he had gotten two weeks out of the First Unit, believe me, this fellow was walking on that floor by himself and you certainly better not put a finger in his direction. As a matter of fact, I have scars at this moment on my second knuckle down, of my left hand, from being "bitten" by this fellow, [laughter] Having tried rather gracefully, I assure you, to tell him that he would get real good results by using SOP 8 after he got somebody exteriorized – after I'd seen him stall on a case a little bit.

Boy, his level of knowingness, as far as he was concerned – his level of walkingness – was way above needing any help. As a matter of fact, he was going along on a pair of rather rickety crutches. But he had reached that point of where he must throw away all assistance and travel on his own.

Well, life does that every time. That's one of the natural phenomena. You see kids in their teens, no matter how their parents have been to them, they'll find all manner of things wrong with their parents so that they'll have the right to be themselves. That's the way life divorces itself from its past track and carries on its own determinism. And that's the way the preclear will do to you and that's the way the student will do to you.

So let's look at this actual phenomena and soften it a bit if we can, but thoroughly expect it to happen. And then we won't be so surprised. Nothing hurts us, actually nothing can hurt us that we can predict. Nothing can hurt us that we can predict. So we'd just better learn how to be wingdingers about prediction.

And we get real good in terms of knowingness about the future, there's no pain. You've solved it right there. When your knowingness is so good about the future that you can predict anything, nothing will surprise you. This is not necessarily undesirable.

All right. What's our problem then, Mr. Anthony, along all this line? I've tried to show you here, in vignette, very briefly, terribly briefly, all too shortly – confuse you a little bit in the process – that we are going along a line which is going to assume a simplicity. That is, the state of survival of the individual. We're going to change this. We're going to change this in terms of bringing him up to a level of knowingness and let him walk by himself. And toward the end, this terrific thing called nuclear physics (all this mystery, all this sort of thing) more and more and more of it will be – drop away, drop away, drop away until you'll be saying, "For heaven's sakes, for heaven's sakes, what are we trying to monkey with that for?"

This thing is a terrific simplicity sitting out here in front of us and we've been overreaching it in all directions. And it was our overreachingness which was accounting for our inability to understand it. And we'll get down to the end run of where you yourself can walk as an Instructor, as well of course as an auditor.

It's something more to be an Instructor than an auditor, believe me. That may not be true of biology, but it's certainly true of Scientology.

Okay.

[[Category:Lectures 3ACC]]