View source for Prediction (4ACC 540324)

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

'''Date:''' 24 March 1954

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

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And this is March 24th, 1954, the second lecture of the day.

Our main concern in auditing is not limited to just the preclear. Our main concern is to make as wide an effect as possible by our auditing. I think you'll agree that it's to make as large a show as possible, as wide a show as possible, per amount of time and effort invested. Well this, of course, if agreed with and used, gives us some sort of an idea by which we can evaluate what we're going to do with a preclear. What preclear? How many preclears? That sort of thing.

If you have a little rule of thumb sitting by, why, of course, that gives you something to gauge whether or not your preclears are going to get processed or not processed. For instance, before I would spend fifty hours on somebody who was staggering around in a fog, who had no useful future except for themselves, I would think several times just on one basis only: My own time.

I used to in Hollywood confound people on the matter of pay and work and so forth by saying, "Well alright, I'll do the job for seven hundred plus." And they'd say, "What do you mean, seven hundred plus?" "Well, I'll do the job at seven hundred plus, I mean by that my own leisure time is worth seven hundred to me and anything beyond that is pay." And they'd say, "What do you mean?" "Well, my leisure time is worth seven hundred dollars to me a week, and now we go from there." They'd say, "This is, this is idiotic, I mean you can't figure anything on…" "Well, I do."

Well, the funny part of it is, that when you neglect your first dynamic as having any value whatsoever, you just neglect the rest of the dynamics just like that. And you've got to assume that your first dynamic has some value before you can actually accomplish very much on the rest of the dynamics. That doesn't mean to say that you have to charge for your auditing. But let's supposing that you started auditing some wild boy who kept your house upset, and you had no leisure time and you were up to your ears in commotion, and no appreciation or anything like that, and supposing you did that for a couple of weeks. Actually, you would have lost ground. Instead of doing the public at large, yourself, your own perimeter of activity any good, you would have done it some bad, wouldn't you, just by auditing somebody. In other words, you could take on a case and go negative, even though you made the person brand spanking sparkling well, you would've, in terms of the rest of the dynamics, gone negative. See that? Well, how effective can you be?

Well, at first, you can be effective by doing things that you lay out rather than things which just happen. That's the best way to be effective, is to do things which you plan rather than doing things which just happen, just keep on smacking you all the time. Business executive lays down a plan and then is told by all and sundry that the plan cannot be carried forward. They spend all of their time telling him the plan can't be carried forward, and he spends all of his time trying to lay down a plan, and you get the deadlock which is known as modern business.

Well, when you start in auditing you lay down a plan and you'll find out that most of the environment that you run into is going on an opposite vector which is, "Let's all succumb, succumb, succumb, let's all succumb," and so, you'll find an awful lot of things trying to roll your plans up and stop them just like a business executive does. That's inevitable. Let's be sensible, in other words, just carrying on what we were talking about before, let's predict what is going to happen, practically. Let's predict the practical rather than the ideal or rather than the apathetic.

See, there's three ways you could predict. You could, you could predict sort of, "Well, nothing can happen anyhow and nothing's going forward, so there's no reason I should do anything about anything." And the next level is, "Would I predict practically" and the upper level would be, "I'm going to predict the ideal is going to occur." Well, the trouble - you see, the middle band there predicting the practical is actually the only practical part of it. You're going to predict what's going to happen, that's the best way to do it. You see?

You predict what's going to happen, that'll keep you nice and sane and comfortable and easy in existence. But you go to those other two bands as exclusive activity, and you start predicting the ideal all the time, it naturally keeps running into the environment and the environment is going to modify it, and but thoroughly. So you say, "The ideal state for man is for everybody, a la Rousseau, to live in a shepherd's skin and play pipes out on the meadow."

I don't know, his idea of society was somewhere along there. And that wasn't ideal, mostly because it isn't any fun. But he predicted this and of course he becomes heartbroken after a while, because his ideal never materializes. Well, that's silly to become heartbroken because his ideal doesn't materialize. He obviously was going to predict and enforce and control things up to such a point as they took the form of the ideal. Well, it's all right to make an effort in that direction and to always reserve some of that, but you don't get very far if you do that. You keep getting stopped in your tracks, but thoroughly, because you're never confronting the actual coincidences of particles and spots and areas.

What you're doing is saying, "Now, they're going to be," don't really consult anything, you just get a beautiful dream and you say, "Well now, let's see. Everybody in my neighborhood is going to become twenty-nine years of age tomorrow morning." Beautiful dream, very nice, they'd all be young and friendly then, and that's very sweet and kind. And tomorrow morning you find out this hasn't taken place, and tomorrow afternoon you're heartbroken and disillusioned. Well, that's just as, that's just as silly for you to say everybody's going to be twenty-nine as for a fellow to come along and sell a philosophy to central Europe that everybody should be in sheepskins playing panpipes. I mean, there's nothing sillier than that one.

And the other one, the apathetic, you equally get nothing done but, more than ever, are liable to go backwards. You know, in Alice in Wonderland, there's somebody in there saying you have to run like the devil just to keep up. No, I think you have to run to keep up and you have to run like everything to get anywhere. In other words, that just on a normal dead flat out run, you can hold your own ground. Well, you start doing nothing and you wonder why that scenery keeps passing you in the reverse direction so fast you can't quite distinguish what it is.

In other words, you stop, you stop any progress in this universe, you stop planning, you start to sit back in an ivory tower or something in this universe and the next thing you know, why, you aren't any longer sitting in the ivory tower. You're sitting in a pigpen. And you say, "Well, it's gotten as bad as it can get now, here I am sitting in this pigpen," and then you find yourself sitting in a pigpen with pigs in it, too. Then you say, "Well, it's gotten as bad as it can get possibly," and you look around and you're a pig.

And you say, "Well, it's got at least a pig, it's gotten as bad as it can get so I can relax," and what do you know? You're a dead pig. And you say, "Well, this is as bad as it can get," and you relax a little bit and you're a pebble. And you say, "Well, this is as bad as it can get, now, I'll just sit here and I won't try to, try to get anyplace and they'll go away and leave me alone," and you've been ground up for the gravel pit. Here we go. And then the next thing you know, you're really, really relaxed by this time and somebody blows you up as part of an atom bomb.

Anyway, that would be about the way it would be if you just said nnnuhh, you just quit, you know, uhh. That's what happens to anybody that quits. Well, so you could, you could, however, go out on a wild campaign to make all the Indians of Arizona, as of now, stop using Winchesters. They haven't got any, but you go out on a wild campaign and you exert all of your efforts and energy trying to get people interested in taking the Winchesters away from the Apaches of Arizona. Nobody's interested. People keep trying to tell you, "Hey, they're not, they don't have any Winchesters and they're all on reservations these days." Well, you sure could wear yourself out. If you got delusioned after, disillusioned after that campaign, you have only yourself to thank.

There is a practical course. This practical course isn't even necessarily determined by experience. You can actually just know what's going to happen if you'll relax and then, if you don't stay so relaxed that you don't keep up with it, you can know what particles are going to coincide with what particles. Sometimes you'll find yourself running two or three weeks ahead of present time. If you're in a rather commotional present time, this can get uncomfortable. Well, there's no reason to abandon it just because it's uncomfortable. It's twice as uncomfortable in present time. And there's no reason to go back into the past, it's eight times as uncomfortable in the past. See this?

So let's take prediction now as a sensible way of life. You know what's going to happen. Let's take whether or not you become a good group auditor, whether or not you keep up your morale in general as an auditor, and whether or not you do anything with your skill and what you know and the fact that you're alive, now, let's just take that as a pattern.

It actually depends upon your continuous ability to predict what is going to happen, so you had better find out what you are trying to change, how much you're trying to change it, how much you're willing to let remain unchanged, and look at the course of prediction. Look at the particles that are going to coincide, come apart, and the spots and space and changes that are going to take place as a result of your work. Only, look at THEM instead of looking at a terrifically hopeful proposition that goes like this, "Well, I'm going to go to this town, this town known as Bethlehem, and right away I'm going to set up, I'm going to set up an office, and I'll immediately get eighty-five preclears and I will clear all those, and they'll bring in some other people and I'll go on from there, and everything is going to be sweetness and light, and everybody in Bethlehem will love me. And I'll get around the doctors simply by giving a few public lectures and so forth, and I'll get that all straightened out."

And you go out on this program but you can't find an office that's decent, so you finally get one that's in the back of a store or something of the sort. And that didn't quite come up to expectations, but you decide you'll ride over that and you're going to go out and get all these preclears and, by simply standing out in the street. Well, there just doesn't happen to be any preclears on the street and nobody comes in and you say, "Gee, that's horrible." So you sit there for a few weeks in apathy and no preclears turn up, and you say, "Well, I've got to get busy with a group and I'll get this group formed," and so on. And you put out a little advertising and you find out nobody's very interested. And then you find out all of a sudden the city comes down on you with a crunch for not having a license in order to cure doctors, or whatever the city wants to issue you. Hm. And you find out that the medical doctors are real mad at you, like the one up the block who is inferring that you have illicit relations with all of your patients, not knowing you have no patients. And then you sit down and feel disillusioned.

You see, it's real silly, I mean, there isn't any reason you should feel disillusioned except that you didn't predict what was going to happen. Well, because you didn't predict what was going to happen, then you didn't change anything that was going to happen. Now, you've got to predict change and re-predict. So, certainly, what you predict, you have to be able to predict what's actually going to happen, and then how much of that you'll want to change and then change that for a re-prediction. And if you do that, you'll be the most comfortable, calm individual anybody ever wanted to, and you'll get all kinds of things done.

You know, it's not how hard you grit your teeth that gets things done - has no relationship to it at all. It's not the tenseness of your face muscles that makes the auditing session come out. It's whether or not you can predict the session. That's all. Now, there's no reason to be happily super-enthusiastic and then lose all of your enthusiasm, because when you've done this, it simply says that you didn't predict what was going to happen. So, your enthusiasm must have been on the highly impractical side of the picture. Well, let's predict what's going to happen. If you do, you'll never have any big shocks occurring, no big unpredicted spots turn up on the track.

Now let's just take, let's take your ability to predict and your ability as a group auditor. We'll find out that your ability of a group auditor is as good as you can make the people understand what you are trying to do, point out a goal for them to reach toward, as you can space and generalize your commands enough to fit that particular group, and as you can produce an effect upon the group - and first and foremost before that, your ability to collect a group. Now those, those things are all, of course, a prediction.

Now, if you go into it well knowing that it's rough trying to get a bunch of people together, that it's rough trying to hold them together but certainly, it doesn't exceed your ability, and if you go into the collection of a group on the idea that you're going to get all saints and no sinners and all the sweetness and light, you just deleted from all of your prediction the fact you were dealing with homo-saps. Well, that would be real smart wouldn't it, to take out of all your prediction the fact that you were dealing with, after all, homo sapiens.

Your percentages in your group will include certainly ten or fifteen percent who are going to fight you all the way down the line, who aren't going to do your commands and the group auditing, who are going to tell other people in the group that what you are doing is no good and not worthwhile, and they're going to cause commotion and upset people. You're certainly going to have that segment, whatever you do you're going to have that segment, unless you cleared everybody first. Well, they're there to be cleared, so you're going to have that segment.

Then we're going to have that section of the group, a very small percentage of the group is going to be almost totally hypnotic, and both of these groups, that is to say the people who are going to cause all the upset and the people in a total hypnotic state, actually should have had, in the first place, individual auditing before they can come up to the level of the group. Alright. It isn't up to you to give it to them before they're there in the group. So what are you going to do about it? You're going to change this?

You might as well postulate at the beginning that the people who are in hypnotic trance are probably going to get worse because of the group processing. And the people who are going to cause a ruckus, if you process them long enough, are going to pick up enough random things that they can't quite get away from doing, that they'll improve slightly. And that of the middle ground of the group, there's going to be one or two people there because you've made a slip, because you've given double commands, because they had their mother die that morning or some other reason at all, are actually going to get worse because of your auditing of the group.

And we're still going to find fifty-five, sixty, seventy percent of that group, however, improving and benefitting. But as they improve and benefit, they are not the people who snap terminals with you as the group auditor, so you're probably never going to hear a single word from them. You just have to know that these people exist and that they're getting well, otherwise you're going to be absolutely sure that your group is doing a rolly coaster and going over the coals, and that everything is going to hell in a balloon.

You only hear bad news in the MEST universe. You have to predict the good news and know it's there. So, here's you as a group auditor. Unless you predict something like this, you're going to close terminals with the group on this basis, you're going to start auditing that part of the group that you hear from instead of the group. And that's a serious error. Any auditor who addresses his auditing at the group on a conversational basis, monitoring it by the vocal response he gets from the group, is not going to succeed as a group auditor, just as a person isn't going to succeed as an instructor who continuously, continually addresses all of his instructions monitored against the one or two people he hears of in the class. He isn't going to hear of the other strata. Do you see that he wouldn't? He's just going to hear from people who either object to his instruction or people who are manically enthusiastic about it.

A group auditor has to keep his feet under him to this degree, then. He can't be monitoring everything he does against a whole lot of, he can't be monitoring everything he does against about twenty percent of the group. Otherwise, he's going to miss eighty percent of the group. And if he misses eighty percent of the group, he might as well not have group processed anybody because the twenty percent, he's not going to do anybody any good with group processing. See that? That's a method of wiping himself out clear across the boards.

Now, he starts to do group processing and he notices that three people in a group of twenty-five have doped off. So, now he's going to change his rate of processing, he's going to suddenly process unconsciousness. He is in what you'd call "conversation" with the group. See? Instead of handing out processes to the majority of the group, he's handing them out to two or three people in the group. And the rest of the people in the group aren't having this trouble but, because they're not in trouble, he doesn't notice them. So three people in the group have just doped off. So what? See, the rest of the group haven't. There's twenty-two people in there who haven't doped off.

Well, so, he's going to do this, too. He's going to find as a group auditor that when he starts addressing individualized auditing to members of the group, monitoring their condition, he's auditing against their observable poor condition, saying, "Well, we mustn't let any sheep escape from the pasture at all," you know, going on the same down-scale dwindling-spiral base as religion, which says, "And if you have ninety-nine sheep in the pasture, you certainly mustn't let that one black sheep get away, because it returned is all of salvation." Bull.

You've got ninety-nine sheep. Eat them. So, the wolf got three. So, he got three. Well, if you're not willing to engage combat with wolves as part of your randomity, next month the wolf will get three, too. Well, is it worth three sheep for you to go in and spend all of your time shooting wolves and taking no care of the rest of the sheep? Now, just what are the real values involved here? And we find out that we can adjudicate them on quantity as well as anything else. Alright.

The auditor then will get results with his group, will be able to instruct a group to the degree that he keeps on predicting the group, and not waiting for the group to predict him. A very little bit of group auditing will demonstrate what's going to happen in a group. Well, you can make it better. Just because you're predicting it, doesn't mean you can't change it. But let's, for godsakes, predict it first. Well, let's know what's going to happen, just by knowing that we are processing homo sapiens.

Now, as far as your reputation in the community is concerned, just because you have suddenly started to process groups and so forth, you expect this reputation to soar, it isn't going to soar. You suddenly start changing an enormous number of lives, you'd better hang out your sign as practicing witch doctor. People are going to be upset and jealous of you. And you've made a hundred and ninety-five people well, and one of them attending your group processes had a fit one night. Everybody in the neighborhood is going to hear about the fit, and nobody's going to hear about the hundred and ninety-five who got well. Why?

The communication level of homo sapiens happens to be in the band of people who have fits. So what's your reputation? Well, if you care very much about this, it means that you care and you are processing the group in want of public approbation. And if you're going to work for public approbation, I can tell you that it's much less arduous for you to simply sit down in an ivory tower or sit down in a pigsty. I mean, you'll wind up much faster, seeking public approbation, you'll wind up much faster in the ash can than if you just let everything drift, because that's an accelerated backwards run.

I am not just quoting Chaucer in "Ye Ballade of Goode Counselle." That's true. If you're looking for public approbation continually, you're simply admitting that you can't mock up enough admiration particles yourself to throw your bank into solvency any time you want to. That means you're unclever. And it happens to be a lot of fun to alter the expectancy, it's a lot of fun. You know?

The expected course of existence is that Miss White is going to turn green by Tuesday. Well, all the doctors in town have agreed with this, see? They've all agreed that Tuesday, she's going to turn green. And you go in on Monday, and on Tuesday she is still Miss White and in beautiful condition. You're total… If you expect, "I'm doing this just so the whole family will be nice to me," you're out of prediction immediately because papa's probably going to be mad at you. Why? Well, he had the power of life and death over Miss White, you didn't.

I've never seen anybody as full of rage as some of the relatives of preclears I've made well. Well, so let's just predict it. That's the way things are. So what? Let's look at present time. Alright. You should be in the frame of mind whether the good joke… The good joke is still a good joke, even though it's only between you and you. You made Miss White stay white on Tuesday in spite of all of the predictions of everybody else, and she didn't go to the graveyard. Now, that's a good joke between you and you. That was worth doing, merely because you did it.

And it comes down to this, that the only reward of any effort - ah, this is a bitter pill to swallow because everybody has reverse-vectored on this - the only reward there is for effort is the enjoyment of exerting the effort. The reward for effort is not pay, it is not to be permitted to retire, it is not a completed product. Those are very aberrated rewards for efforts. You say "Well, I'd like to build a bookcase because when I get through I'll have a nice…" Oh yeah? When you get, you'd like to build a bookcase because you'd like to build a bookcase, and any time you fall away from building bookcases because you like to build bookcases, and go in for building bookcases because you want finished bookcases, watch out; because the effort is no longer the reward for exerting the effort.

The way to stay strong, the way to stay sane and the way, actually, to go through to success like a skyrocket, is simply to let the effort reward the effort, as far as you're concerned. You then won't give a doggone how much effort you exert. You won't go around all the time trying to figure out "How can I save a lot of effort?" You start saving effort, it's gone, believe me, it has just disappeared. There wasn't anything there to save.

You say, the way to get there, you say, "Alright. So, exerting that effort will be fun." If exerting the effort itself at the moment you're exerting it is not fun, if you can't enjoy that, if it is the finished product, if it is the reward, the paycheck, anything like that that you're sweating and slaving there towards, the next thing you know, you're going to be flatter than a flounder because you haven't properly predicted the facts. The fact of the case is that the finished product is never worth having, unless there is more enjoyment than in blowing it up. You see that?

Don't work toward a goal, then. You'll… Honest, honest, you're contemplation of a finished product will give you joy for thirty seconds, a minute, maybe, if you're lucky, a whole forenoon. And then what? You're a guy out of work. See that? So let's figure a new sphere to operate in or let's go over the same pattern again. It doesn't matter. If you can duplicate well, you can go over the same pattern again.

This is frightening to people who have patterned their lives against reward. Anybody who walks up to you and starts offering you huge and enormous awards because you can make them well, if you make them well… Like a fellow walked up to me one day and he said, "I have about twenty psychosomatic symptoms and I will give you four hundred dollars for every one of them that you relieve." Well, that's quite a little bit of cash there, hey chief? And I said, "Would you be prepared to spend eight thousand dollars?" "Oh yes, yes, yes." I said, "Well, that's quite a bargain, that's quite a bargain. Here's a list of auditors." "Well, aren't you interested?" I said, "No, I'm not interested." He said, "Why not?" I said, "Well, I've researched your type of case." He said, "But, eight thousand dollars," he said, "That's money, that buys things and…" so forth. I said, "Yeah, I guess it does." Ruined him, ruined him. I might as well have audited him into the ground right on the spot. Truth of the matter was, I wasn't interested.

In the first place, I wasn't interested in this type of case for two reasons. I knew what ailed him. He was an easy case, wouldn't have furnished me any new information. But I didn't care to listen to the kind of engram he had to hand out, which all had to do with rewards. He had so thoroughly bought this horrible package, "If you work hard and sacrifice everything and if you're a good boy or a good girl and keep your nose clean, and if everybody continues to like you, someday you will be a success and you'll be right there." Right where? "Right there." I don't want to be right there, trees are right there, I'm mobile.

This is, this is what the society hands out in the form of all kinds of guises. They say, if you, "Now, if you're a good sailor and you never never never get into any court martials or scrapes, and never sass back your petty officer and always do what you're told, in sixteen years you can be retired on good conduct and so forth, you can be retired." And the guy says, "That's wonderful." Ran a guy one time who was retired, damndest case you ever saw in your life, only it had been five, six lifetimes before when he'd been retired. He was still retired. How do you retire? You pull everything in with you. So this guy was supposed to give up all the fun of these sixteen early years of his life in order to drag something down sixteen years later at a time when he was a little bit gimped up and the women didn't look anywhere near as good.

Then they say, "Well, if you got court martialed and you got in trouble and docked and thrown out, it would affect your whole life." Oh, that's too bad. It's too bad to shoot to pieces such fairy tales, these are the fondest legends of a culture. It doesn't happen to be true. It isn't true that if you work hard and mind your own business, that you will really get there. That is not necessarily true. Conversely, it isn't true that if you're a bad boy, you'll fail.

I ran into a fellow one time that had more havingness than any one of us could have assayed and, over in India, and I was very very interested in this guy, he was a tremendous guy. He was quite a hunter, he was quite a rider and so forth. He'd poisoned his brother when he was ten. That gave him the throne. And his life sort of went off on that kind of a cycle. One of his favorite indoor sports was spread-eagling some native, who might not have even committed a crime, out on the palace wall, just so it would be a good example to the rest of the people. It always was, too. He's the one guy I know of over in India who still hasn't been revolted against and is having no government trouble. He's mean, he's vicious, he does everything wrong, he does it all bad, it's all upset, he doesn't have a kind motive in his heart, nothing has punished him to date. The divine fire keeps descending on the head of his most obedient subjects, but not on his. Oh, that's awful, isn't it?

Well, all of this kind of logic and the only reason I can talk about this type is because they are preset goals. They're set for you by the culture, they're set for you by mama, by papa, by something or other. It isn't there's anything bad about being moral or anything good about being immoral, it's simply that these evaluations are handed to you and you are thereby led to buy somebody else's prediction. And you buy somebody else's prediction, you're dead. They say if you do so-and-so, this is going to happen, in terms of conduct. If you're a good boy and do this and do that, then when you get to be such-and-such an age, and so on, and you buy this just whole-heartedly. You say, "Well, when you get to be such-and-such, I get to be such-and- such an age then I'll be a success and I'll be retired."

These are patterned cultural goals. And until you can get these out of your mind as being the thing to have as goals, you yourself will never have any future. You only have as much future as you predict. See, you haven't got any more future than you predict.

Now, there's an old process that runs this way: You have the preclear look around and look at all the objects in present time and say, "Well, I'm going to lose all these things now," and have him close his eyes and say, "I've lost them now." Then have him decide, with his eyes closed, that he's going to get a lot of havingness. Have him open his eyes and look around with everything new. Then have him decide he's going to lose all that now and close his eyes, and he'll lose it. You know, you'll bring him up to present time that way because it is the mechanic of time anyhow, except you're permitting him to put wide spaces between the changing particles instead of little tiny narrow spaces of one over three. Alright. That's a process, it's a workable process.

It's worse, it's worse than this in terms of goals. A person doesn't even decide himself that he's going to lose this position of the particles and that the particles are going to change. These particles are changing all the time, whether you decide to or not. Unless you can accept the fact that part of your environment, you're willing to leave alone, let it run, let it change, then you're going to fixate in some fashion or another. You've got to decide, you've got to decide that, in order to have any randomity at all, there's got to be some kind of motion of particles you're not controlling. Otherwise, you're just controlling everything and that would be no fun at all. So, randomity pays off to some degree.

But all time for you stops at the moment when you decide that the future is going to get put there by somebody else some other way. Honest, time stops. And you get a hold of a preclear, you can talk about stopping the time track, you can talk about protection, you can talk about all these other things and he might not be able to grasp this because he's too enmeshed one way or the other in his own engrams, but the point is that he's only got as many futures as he has goals. He's only got as much tomorrow as he has something to do tomorrow. He hasn't any tomorrow if he doesn't have anything to do tomorrow. He just doesn't sit there as a blank with no tomorrow. See? I mean, if he sits there as a blank, it's not NO tomorrow, it becomes a dreadful tomorrow. See? He sits there with nothing to do tomorrow, tomorrow will get dreadful. Why does it get dreadful? Because it becomes totally other-determined. He hasn't got anything to do with it and he's sensible to the fact that all these particles are moving on other-determinism than his own, he hasn't anything to do with any of those particles, so he adds none of his self-determinism to tomorrow. He has no self- determinism tomorrow, he doesn't own tomorrow, so he doesn't have any future. So he won't have any tomorrow and his time track will just stop moving right at the point where he stops working, the moment when he decides that he doesn't want to handle particles anymore, the moment when he decides it's not fun to handle particles.

If you as an auditor decided there was no fun, "No point to making anybody well, they'll just go along anyhow and everything will work out the way it works out and everybody's immortal anyhow…" - which isn't true by the way, they go downhill and they get buried in this stuff called MEST - if you were to decide, however, there's no fun in processing anybody, there was no reward, there was just nothing to it and so forth, and you were to quit, and you were to lay all the information aside which you have and lay aside all of your skills, decide to do absolutely nothing, god help you. You just might as well cave the whole future time track in on yourself. Tomorrow will become dreadful, if you continue to live in the physical universe. It couldn't help but, do you see? You see why it couldn't help but? It isn't that anything is really terrible going to happen tomorrow, it's just the fact that you're permitting tomorrow to be totally other-determined. You have added none of your self- determinism to tomorrow, so you don't have any tomorrow. And that, in its final dregs, is neurosis. Neurosis is somebody who has no future, a neurotic is somebody who has no future.

Every once in a while, you have a preclear bleating to you, "Baaaa, I'm not happy. The reason I want to be processed is so I can be happy." Yawn, will you? Nobody's going to walk up to him with a quart pail with the word happiness on it and pour it into the top of his head. Nobody. The only person who's going to make him happy is himself. Now, you can achieve this end by processing, simply by giving him a freer periphery of action. You give him greater freedom of motion, greater tolerance of motion, greater ability to make particles, to regulate them, so forth. And as soon as you've done this, he'll make his own happiness, because his happiness consists in his actions, in his motions, in his tomorrows, in his future. That's what his happiness consists of. It's just handling, acting, moving, doing, so on. His happiness, if he predicts it so, could even consist of simply sitting still, if he predicted that this was a kind of a sort of a contest, and he's going to see if he couldn't sit still 'til tomorrow afternoon at five. If he was really able to predict, he probably could be happy clear 'til five o'clock. And then from five to five-0-one, he would be happy because he had managed to sit still that long, but at five-0-one he'll discover something very strange. He has no future. His future's gone. I mean, this is grim. It's a hard thing to get across sometimes but you've got as much future as you put there, and if you don't have any future, you go into the past so that you can have some future. Now, it's all a matter of postulate, mainly.

Here's a fellow by the name of Gibbons, Edward Gibbons, he's a great writer. The man should have written a tremendous quantity of things, but he set out to write something called "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." Wonderful piece of work, a real masterpiece. It's such a masterpiece that practically nobody has ever read it. Nobody's read it since it was written about 1790. I see it in every man's library, everybody acknowledges it's a masterpiece, but you run into somebody that says, "Oh, that's a great masterpiece, the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." And you say, "Yes, and so-and-so, and particularly that part where he talks about…" and the person starts to look kind of embarrassed. You say, "What's the matter?" "Well, I never read it. Read a review of it when I was taking literature in college, but I haven't read it myself." Well, but he acknowledged it was a masterpiece and somebody'll have to… The fact of the matter is, the thing has got more excitement in it than a western story, any day of the week.

For instance, in one paragraph there are seventy thousand virgins slaughtered. Oh, it's real sensational. But he set this thing up, this great writer, they're afraid to read it, it's too thick, it'll take them too long and they just haven't got that much future. This fellow laid out to write the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and he said he was going to complete it, and he said that was going to be his life's work, and he said it in just that many words. And I'll be a son of a gun, in perfect health Edward Gibbons writes the last paragraph of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, puts his papers together, gets on the available transportation, returns to England and dies, bing. It was his life's work. Naturally, he had no future. It was all there, it was gone, see, he had no future. So, he didn't have any future, so he died.

How many times do you find this in history? Well, boy, it gets kind of dizzy after a while, this fellow finished his life's work and within six months he was dead. And this fellow finished his life work and within six months he was dead. Now, opposed to these is one artist who stands as a very, very bright contradiction, is a fellow by the name of Michelangelo. And this fellow, Mike, had an awful hard time because he believed in handling particles, and nothing gave him more fun than fun.

And, you know, I think they practically had to hit him in the head with an axe to get him out of the road. He handled that mock-up so badly that he practically bent it double painting the dome of St. Peters. He, you never saw so much work of art. Nobody ever got him slowed down. But the Catholic church tried to make him do it under duress. He went back and did it, but he didn't do it under duress. This was an unconquerable guy. He lived practically forever. He never did finish his life's work because he never stated it so, see?

A sure way to kill yourself off would be to say, "I'm going to retire when I'm fifty and six months." Or a sure way to kill yourself off is say, "Now, let's see. I am going to dedicate my existence to women's suffrage." What happened to Carrie Nation? She got woman's suffrage didn't she? I don't know what happened to her. I could predict that she promptly kicked the bucket. These people who go around with a life's work are very dangerous to themselves on the first dynamic, and an awful lot of attention has been wasted.

If their life work is toward a finite goal, they're going to - I'm just using this as an illustration of predicted futures. You predict that your future is going to end, let's say, let's say, "My life work is going to be this way," your future is going to end at an exact moment in time, believe me, because all you're doing is running on postulates. It does, it ends right there, it does just exactly what you said it'd do. The most appalling thing about life is that it is under such thorough control that it does practically anything you say it will. That's really the appalling thing about life. It isn't that life's agin' ya, it's that it's too helpful. Alright.

Remember this with your preclear. It's the basis of processing. You get him to predicting the coincidence of particles, predicting thoughts, space and so forth, this fellow right up to then has had the goal of being processed - not processed TO anything and so forth, you have the goal of "being processed." Well, that's fine. So, you try to finish up his game. He knows better than to arrive. The moment he'll arrive, he's got no future. He's got a future as long as you're processing him because his goal is to be processed. It's interesting isn't it?

He will process up above a level and to a level where he has freedom of choice, and at that time he'll get himself a new future. There is a time in any case where a preclear leaves you almost spontaneously. He extroverts. You've seen it happen in a session, he suddenly extroverts and gets interested in the environment, you can't get him back into processing again very easily, but you'll call him back. But you're really starting a brand new cycle when you do. He's extroverted. Alright.

One day, why, your boy is so well off that he suddenly extroverts. You say, "But I haven't got an operating thetan on my hands here. I haven't even got a good theta clear. This boy's gone." You try to get him back, so on and so on, he's so busy, he's writing sheet music, you know, madly, madly writing, doing something, he's busy, busy. He's organizing service stations now or he's back training pilots or he's doing something. You talk to him, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." He doesn't want to talk to you about what you're doing. He isn't avoiding you, he's just extroverted. He got into the serious run of life, he's having fun handling particles. You say, "Well, that's too bad because if I don't clear this boy up all the way, he's going to go along this way for five, six, seven years maybe, so forth, he'll never cave in too badly again but he'll go back inside and bog down and we'll lose track of him. Too bad."

There isn't any reason to worry about it, let's add that to your little package of predictions. Every so often, you say to yourself, "Well, I'm going to process this preclear up to a time when he's a theta clear, because he works very very easily and so forth." And you process him for three hours and you never see him again. You know you did a good job. Sure you did. You threw him back into the strain. He didn't know anything about your racket - Scientology is your racket, the way he'd describe it - and your authority in that field has nothing to do with him, to do with him. What he is, he's a darn good communications man, he's right back at it again, and he's getting real interested.

Well, I'll give you an example of what happened one time with this. Writers interest me because they're so terrific when they begin and their ability is so short. That is to say, the time span, the life of a writer is, on the average, quite short. The life of a popular writer in terms of production, his productive life and so forth, goes for a very short space of time, maybe three years on the average. There's some old boys that you have to kill off with machine guns the way you had to Max Brand. And he's been going a million words a year for twenty-five years, and he had to get over to Italy and what was it, malaria, or machine guns, one or the other. Oh, they had to do something to him to get rid of him. He kept everybody off in the field. He wrote under seven names. And anyway, he's a terrific exception.

Well, I get interested in these production boys because they write something like what was that, Thomas Wolfe, the angel something or other?

Voice from audience: homeward angel.

Look Homeward Angel?

Well, he done it and everybody patted him on the head and said he'd done it. By the way, somebody tells me I've done it, boy, do I wince. I want to know what I've done, stick my tail between my legs. Anyway, he done it and everybody patted him on the head and told he'd done it and his productive life was very, very short, very short because he up and died on them. He was being a social celebrity in Seattle and two hostesses were having such a fight over whose house he was going to stay at, that he laid in the maid's quarters in one of the houses, contracted pneumonia and nobody even sent for a doctor. And when they had settled whose house he was going to stay at, he was dead. That's what happened to that boy. That's, he'd reached the end of his cycle, too.

Well, alright. Here we have a writer under process. I get a lot of sotto voce celebrities. They hang around, they slide into town very quietly wearing dark glasses, and they slide into my office and they slide on out again. And you see them on TV a couple of days later and notice they're giving a terrifically better performance. And they write you a letter one time and send you a book, but you don't use names like this in, you know, you just don't talk about it. That's why they come to you.

It isn't there's anything wrong with what you're doing to them, but the, their public would not appreciate their being treated for something in some way. You'd reduce their earning capacity. Well, anyway, I treated this writer and I used the process I've been giving you. This was a very short time ago. And we were old buddy buddies from way back. And I found a writer, I found him as a woman about five lives ago married to a writer. Now, he natively was a good writer. He wouldn't have written - you see, a fellow can't write just because he's, just because he's known some psycho who could write, see? I mean, his ability to write does not depend upon some other universe. His ability to write depends upon the fact that he has an ability to write. Now, anything else dilutes it. We went into that in Book One kind of thoroughly, remember? Skill. Well, it's still holding true. Alright. So, I find him five years ago, he had eventually, by being associated with writers and being pounded in the face continually by a typewriter, he'd eventually gotten this other universe in complete restimulation. And this other writer that he'd known about five lives ago - you know, James, the court of St. James, black knee breeches and the puffed shirts they wore quite a while back? Well, this was the costume. This boy, this other writer, was a hypochondriac, oh, but thoroughly, and a great poseur. "Oh, I've given my all for my art. Yes, it's made me a sick man. But it is worth it, the sacrifice of it all." You know, this was standard conversational practice for this character.

And it'd gone into restimulation, he'd moved into this other universe and stopped writing, boom. Just like that, boom, he's got a best seller on the stands right this minute, he's got Hollywood contracts to fulfill and he can't touch a typewriter. He says, "For godsakes, what do I do now?" And he talks to somebody out at Warner's and he says, "What do I do now?" And they said, "Well, you're going to go over to Phoenix and see Ron." So he did. Anyway, I just pinged it here and there and so forth, and I wasn't even looking for writing particularly, but this was of course where he was fixated, and his fixation upon writing was holding the universe moving in on him this way on the subject of writing. And as soon as we tried to find some places where this writer - he just turned up out of the blue, boom - before we'd been processing about ten minutes, we started to find some places where this writer in knee breeches showed up, some places where this guy was safe, and a torrent of counter-effort of all of this guy's, this former writer's, conversations, plus all of the motion of the typewriters, quill pens, anything he'd ever written with, words of praise, criticisms, rejection slips, letters, all that sort of thing. Every time we'd find a new place where this old writer was safe, he'd get another hurricane of these things which were exerting about ten or fifteen pounds of pressure against the front of his face. Rrr-rr-rrr. Aah, this was an exhausting session.

How'd I run into it? Well, I'd just run into it just by asking him about one, two, three, hoping I would pick up whether or not his mother or father had the ambition of being a writer and had then failed, and thinking he would probably maybe follow the similar cycle of failure. He hadn't. The first thing we picked up, the second we wondered whether or not mother or father was a writer, is he gets a three dimensional mock-up solid, the only one he could get - by the way, he was a black case - the only one he could get was a three dimensional solid mock-up of a guy in knee breeches leaning affectedly against the mantelpiece being just too too tired to go on.

You'll always find the mock-up of the other universe he's stuck in, solidly in three dimensions and earlier than that, this, almost the same kind of a mock-up that the guy can be with great thoroughness. See, he's almost being this. See, there's a beingness below and the three dimensional mock-up. You get this terrific mock-up of the universe he's really stuck in, if it's another person's universe. Well, just earlier than he can see this three dimensional mock-up, he's really stuck in a universe. So, we go back and we find the earlier one when he was exerting his skill as a poet, and jolly well starving to death on the whole deal. He had lived a life as a poet. As far as he was concerned, it's his own universe. We had to clean his body's universe out of his life as a poet because his body was what was objecting all the time. It was starving to death. We cleaned up these lines just almost indifferently. I mean, we didn't clean them up well or thoroughly or anything of the sort. And the fellow said he'd be back to see me the next morning, and all that came the next morning was a taxi cab had been handed a twenty dollar bill and a note for me and had driven out to the house, and had simply handed it over. And it said, "Sorry, I'm off for Hollywood. I got this big plot during the middle of the night and I've got to go," and he's gone.

Never had a chance to finish up the chain. I don't know whether it'll be stable or not. We certainly got enough hurricane off. We got it down to the point where, when he thought about where this guy, these guys were safe and where the poet's body was safe earlier, where we suddenly didn't get snowstorms and hurricanes and quill pens and ink pots and so forth hitting him in the face. We got it down to a point where it was all quiet and tranquil. In other words, we got the kick off of these things. Well, whether or not there's any more kick left on it, or maybe a life, you see, as a Greek writer, you know, who knows? I didn't even get a chance to finish off the E-meter on him, he shoved off. Well, I felt upset. Why'd I feel upset? Because I was actually quite, quite pleased to have triggered this case so suddenly and so hard, and I was looking forward to seeing a writer in the field who was a good, stable theta clear. Wrong prediction, so I just got upset no end.

Now, there's no liability to making a wrong prediction beyond the time it takes for you to knock out the spot you made it in and the postulate you made. By golly, you better not make wrong predictions up to the time when spots and the prediction itself will blow - just at the moment you recognize they're wrong, they blow. If you're not in that kind of condition, you handle your prediction against the actuality you're going to face. OK? That's all.

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