View source for Problems and Games (UC 541231)

'''Series:''' UC

'''Date:''' 31 December 1954

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

----

← [[Lecture_Index_UC|Back to Series]]

The material which I have to give you at this time of course should be received with reverence, with seriousness, with a realization that life is not play, (laughter) that it is a grim game.

We look over life, we understand very, very completely and conclusively without any slightest quibble along the line, that here and there, somebody at least to some slight degree, gets done in. This is fairly easy to behold, and we restrain ourselves from looking at the grimness of this sort of thing.

For instance, when you sit down to a steak dinner, do you realize that some poor, innocent cow had to die so that you could have that dinner? You realize that? And yet you hold that fact away from you. You try not to look at that fact, (laughter)

Do you realize that when you pick up a piece of celery and start eating on it, that it too was trying to live? And the injustice of it, it was doing good, it was doing well, it was obedient, it was trying to do exactly what it was supposed to do and you up and ate it. We don't even know whether or not a piece of celery feels any pain when you chew upon it.

This is all very grim and very terrible, but I am afraid that studying in the field of Dianetics and Scientology has shown me a couple of factors involved in this, and I would feel very badly about it, if it weren't for these couple of factors.

Now, in SOP 5, in Scientology, we had a very interesting system called GITA, Give and Take Processing. And that became, by the time we got to SOP 8—Standard Operating Procedure 8—Step IV, Expanded GITA. Bears no relationship to the Indian practice Gita, or books. It just does the work they're supposed to do.

And this process said that you could have the preclear waste, accept and desire various commodities. And in that list is the word pain. And entirely as an experiment today, but a workable process, you could take a preclear and have him waste pain—waste pain for himself, waste pain for somebody else and have somebody else waste pain for somebody else, in other words, in a bracket. And at the end of this time of processing, an hour or two, this individual will say, "There's the strangest thing, but you know pain is terribly valuable? Do you know I have actually been covertly sitting here trying to make this body hurt a little bit, here and there?"

And do you know that to see a body writhing in pain is almost sufficient to make the thetan go down and say, "Slurp!" And the reason for this is, is a thetan can't really hurt, unless he says he hurts, and it's much better if something else says he hurts. Then it's easier to believe.

So, life would be very grim if it weren't for the fact that the life-energy production unit is actually thirsty for suffering. It's a good game. It's hard for somebody to realize this unless he's had this process run on him. And in want of having the process run on you, you just have to take my word for it for a moment, that it's not quite as grim as life makes it out to be. The grimness is part of a game, too.

I remember when I first tumbled to this fact. I was sitting in a car parked alongside the road. I'd been pulled over to the side of the road by a traffic cop, not to be given a ticket but to get the highway clear. And I pulled over obediently and I sat there not knowing quite what was going on, and all of a sudden, why, I saw the first funeral car and then the second funeral car and then the third funeral car and then the fourth funeral car, and looked at all these people, you know, and they were puddling up the upholstery most horribly, you know? And, "Poor old Joe. Poor old Joe," you know.

And the fifth funeral car and the sixth funeral car and the seventh funeral car and the eighth funeral car and the ninth funeral car and the tenth funeral car, and boy, that upholstery was taking a beating, you know—"Poor old Joe."

And I started to feel a little bit bad about it for a moment. I said, "Gee, you know, that fellow had an awful lot of friends."

And then all of a sudden, an individual that I had known in a Maryland backwoods town came to mind. This was a man that attended every funeral—he attended every funeral. He had a big car, and he'd go to the funeral and he'd pick up people, and he'd go along in the funeral procession.

He was a deacon in the church. He was also the local bank manager. And this individual had the very interesting habit of weeping copiously for the departed husband and foreclosing swiftly upon the left widow.

And this gentleman seemed to me—I just got to thinking about this fellow—it seemed to me he had a sort of a thirst for this sort of thing. And it suddenly occurred to me that his foreclosure upon the widow was just an effort to get more weep. That's another opportunity to cry, you know? Inflict a little more pain, death and suffering around about the place. This fellow had an appetite!

And the twelfth funeral car and the thirteenth and the fourteenth and the fifteenth were going by, by this time and then the hearse.

And we saw this hearse, you know, it was just jammed full of flowers. And it suddenly occurred to me that probably nobody had ever sent this poor guy any flowers while he was alive. But here he is dead, you see, and he's got all these flowers. It seemed to me to be very peculiar.

A very short time before this—a very short time before this I had been successfully completing the exteriorization of a preclear from an endless number of deaths. Now, this wasn't exteriorization from the body, I was merely picking him out of engrams—the process which I had been working with, way back in middle 51, late 51—picking him out of these engrams one after the other, and they were all death engrams. And the individual would be worry, worry, writhe, writhe, agony, agony, dead—way up here, "Well, what am I worried about that for?" Get the idea? And each cycle was that way.

And I hadn't really applied this to life yet. And I suddenly recognized that this corpse riding along there had gone about seventy-five or eighty feet up in the air and had taken a look at the clay that was still lying there, you know, and said, "Why am I interested about that?"

And here were all these people weeping, you know? And I thought, "Well, this is a very strange puzzle. I wonder why they are paying so much attention to this fellow when he's dead, when they didn't pay very much attention to him when he was alive?" The answer finally occurred to me: He was no good to them alive. Dead, there was a wonderful opportunity of experiencing a lot of pain, which was as high on the Tone Scale as they could come—pain and sadness. And so we had this wonderful funeral. But it didn't have anything to do with the departed or deceased, nothing whatsoever.

It's a curious thing. So, life is involved in playing some of the more interesting games.

What Freud called "the subconscious" or "the reconscious"—we have developed by the way a new subconscious called "the resubconscious," and this is just two cellars below the subconscious which is below the reconscious. And this interesting stairway of unconsciousnesses was developed in direct controversion to the "controversial theory," a well-known theory that's used by science. And the reconscious apparently is engaged in being the opponent that you don't know about—while you know all about it.

One of the most damaging experiences to somebody's aplomb about his sadness and sorrow and the grimness of life, is to run one of the Route 2 steps from The Creation of Human Ability, that book which contains all the Route 1, and all the Route 2 steps and all the Axioms.

The Route 2 step is, "Ask the fellow for some problems he could be." And if he runs that very long, he discovers something very horrible, he discovers something excessively terrible: He's making up problems so he can be a problem to himself without knowing that he is being the problem to himself but so that he can retain an interest in existence and in life. And this is one of the neatest tricks anybody ever did.

And you run, "Give me some problems you could be." "Some more problems you could be." "Some more problems you could be." And this datum will inevitably, sooner or later, fall out in the individual's lap—bang. And he'll say, "Huh! My golly! You know what? I'm just making up these problems, so I can be these problems to myself and then not know that I'm being the problem to myself. That's what I'm doing." And he will stay in a state of levity or cheerfulness about this fact for many minutes before he suddenly grabs this as a problem and buries it real quick and gets it out of sight. He almost inevitably will do that.

All life can do, then, is pretend that it's serious. All life can do then, is to make up problems of such magnitude that even it can be interested in its own problem.

And if you come along as an auditor and solve too many of a preclear's problems, you have taken away from him too many games. And having taken away from him too many games, he'll invent a new one. And it will probably be one that has more pain and more suffering in it than the other game you took away. He will now insist that the game is a serious game, all the while knowing that it is just a mockery. All right.

That is the woof and warp of existence. But it has a dependency upon games. Did you ever see anybody paying much attention to psychosomatic aches and pains during a moment of high emergency? What we use as high emergency—all we use for high emergency—is simply some exterior combination of factors which makes a problem in present time, which we can say demands so much attention that we are forced to deal with that problem over a priority of all others.

So, therefore you see what we have as "necessity level" about which we spoke in the first book. Remember "necessity level"? Well "necessity level" is simply this: It is recognition of a bigger problem. And when you give a fellow a problem out here, he pulls his attention at least temporarily off of problems in here. He extroverts. And the way he extroverts is because he's got a bigger problem.

Now, during the bombings of London, during the bombings of Berlin and of Japanese cities, it was recognized that the incidence of psychosis and neurosis dropped, and that the incidence of suicide dropped to zero. And it's fantastic.

I mean, you'd think these people would feel real bad about having all these eggs laid on their heads, you know. And instead of that, they just 100 percent extroverted on the emergency of the situation and went around and fought the fires, and picked up the wounded and dying, and cleaned up the rubble and squared things around.

In other words, there was enough of an exterior problem there so that nobody kept his attention on his own terminals. The war is over, there is no further exterior problem of this magnitude, then we would immediately expect a greater incidence of psychosis, neurosis, suicide, psychosomatic illness than prior to the war, and certainly than during the war when it became zero. Fascinating, hm?

So, here we have life set up as a problem or a series of problems, all of which are calculated to obtain the interest of, and invite action in life. And all these problems can be categorized as games. We have then, games.

Let's go way upstairs on such a theory of games and discover that the first thing you need, to play a game, is an opponent. And let's see that as we bring preclears up Tone Scale, that they very often look around and find all kinds of strange opponents. They will look around their environment and find an opponent. If the person is quite psychotic, the first person he recognizes as an opponent is his auditor, and he should fight this auditor. He's liable to do this anyway—the auditor is liable to make him feel a little bit better, he's liable to go out and tell all the neighbors that this auditor is the most horrible fellow that ever lived.

One needs an opponent in order to play a game. Well, that's fine. One needs a lot of other things in order to play a game. But, the first thing you need to play a game is an opponent. You couldn't really have a satisfactory game without an opponent.

Now, let's look at the communication formula and discover that in the lack of somebody at the receipt-point, life quite ably puts somebody at the receipt-point. We don't care whether there was just one thetan and then he went ahead and invented or created all the other thetans. Or whether or not there were other thetans who got in communication with each other. We don't care which way this worked out because it will all amount to the same thing. But it's a necessity, if you're going to have a communication, to have a receipt-point—isn't it?

And the funny part of it is, is nothing short of a live receipt-point is satisfactory. If you could always have had a live receipt-point on communication, you wouldn't have gotten into very many barriers.

But the first thing that you would say about the receipt-point that you have mocked up or which appeared there, was that it was a different person across a distance, and that distance is the first barrier even though you're in good communication.

Take a look at this on chart 6: we have here cause, distance, effect. Now, when we play this back on the same communication, we have here cause prime, effect prime. And then to have a full communication here, we would have to have this same thing in reverse: cause, effect, cause prime, effect prime.

Chart 6

And this is the same two-loop cycle as before, where we had Bill, Joe, Joe prime, Bill prime. And over here originating the communication this time we have Joe, receiving it we have Bill, answering it we have Bill prime, and then receiving or acknowledging we have Joe prime. That's the same thing, see?

This, by cause and effect, is how we graph two-way communication. This would be the first opening gun of a game. (tapping chart) You'd have some distance, you'd have some space, and you would have some acknowledgment and you'd have some answer.

Now, in order to even start a game, you've got to have some communication. But after people get a little bit anxious about this game called communication (which by the way is quite adequate as a game—quite adequate), people get a little bit anxious about it as we see here on chart 7, this kind of thing starts happening: we get this first cause, distance, effect, and the individual at effect says—just to make a game, you understand, not for any other reason—says, "I mustn't be an effect of that particular cause." And although there recognizably is space in between, this individual barriers it in some way and puts up some sort of a barrier.

Chart 7

Well, that's all right. But, by duplication here, if he won't—this fellow, at cause 1 here, sees that his effect isn't going through, then he becomes completely unwilling to be an effect, too. He says, "Well, let's make a real game out of this." So, here we are at effect prime.

We have your cause prime now, just to make this a two-way cycle. You know, you understand that this is the curve that we've been drawing all along. He says, "I don't want to be an effect either." And he puts up a barrier. Space wasn't enough of a barrier. Now you get a more serious game. You get a game with secrets in it, with elements, with mysteries and more particularly with particles, and you have descended immediately from space into energy.

And the second you get into energy with a game, you're in trouble. All that's wrong with any preclear—is he doing something by energy that he ought to be doing by postulate? You find that—he's saying, "Muscle" when he ought to be saying, "See?"

And by the way, you've seen preclears play games like this—one kind or another. They sit there and grit their teeth. They say, "Rrruuh, well, rrarragh I'll get this concept run out here in just… ffroik!" forceful, you see. And one of the greatest surprises and reliefs they get is when all of a sudden they find out they don't have to try that hard. They can just do it by a postulate.

People handle their bodies by energy lines. They put big communication lines on bodies. It isn't that this is bad, it's simply that it makes barriers. All right.

You ever see the strongman in the circus? I remember there was a very, very upset strongman one time. He was strongman in a sideshow, and he had been pulled on out front, you know, to lift dumbbells and so on. And there was a farmer kid that was along with me, and he got real curious because boy, those dumbbells looked heavy and this kid kept looking at these dumbbells, you know, and the strongman was picking up these dumbbells, you know, and straining every muscle, "Rrurrrrh," was going to ... "ererrruhh" wham! See? And then he'd drop them, bang! "Whew!" Wipe off his hands.

And this farm boy, after the strongman went off—and this farm boy pushed one of these dumbbells. Barker was gone, so he climbed up on the side of the platform, and he was not very restrained or bashful, he'd been keeping company with me for a while. Anyhow ... I was, by the way, at the time barnstorming out through the Middle West with a Waco 10, having a lot of fun.

But, anyhow, this kid fell to this thing, found out it rolled quite easily and picked it up and started examining it. And he was reading the balls on the end of it and it said, "200 pounds" on the end of each one of these. And he was looking at it and smiling, and there was quite a crowd around there and they thought that was very funny. They laughed.

But the essential of the act was for the strongman to demonstrate that there was energy, that there was difficulty, that there was a seriousness to all this weight and gravity. And the truth of the matter was, these things were featherweights. All right.

The first time that strongman was ever in a circus, he probably found out the crowd was not at all impressed when he picked up this elephant. He walked over and grabbed the elephant by the loose skin and picked him up and set him down again, you know, and walked off, and nobody was impressed. So, he went around and he says, "Well, it's hard to pick up elephants. It's difficult, and I'm a great guy because I can pick up an elephant, see? You see, it's hard to pick up an elephant—ahh!" And so we got gravity.

And here we have this barrier erected between these two fellows, and we get a body in evolution. A body doesn't come about simply on the communication formula alone. The body comes about by somebody putting up a ridge.

Now, there could be another reason for this ridge. These individuals could say, "Well, although I know perfectly well that Joe is over there, I am going to tell Joe that I don't know he's over there so that then Joe will have to put up an energy mass in order to show me that he is over there. And I will claim that I see the energy mass and can feel it, and that will convince Joe. And after that, he'll have to pack around this energy mass all the time before I'll recognize him." See what kind of a game this could be?

And so, we get a couple of terminals (drawing on chart) which gradually grow arms and legs. And people carry these energy masses around and put clothes on them and so forth, which is not a bad game.

But when it comes down to these two bodies, having to have bodies in order to converse, that is not true. That is a lie. They don't have to have vocal cords, mouths, teeth, vocabularies or anything else to converse. But to make a game, they insist they have to have.

Even speaks, by the way, of "the tongues of angels," in the Bible. There is one, I think it's Corinthians I, Chapter Thirteen, line one, yeah, paragraph one. "If I speak with the tongues of men or of angels and if I have no charity, I am as sounding brass and the tinkling of a temple bell." Well, "tongues of angels"—what would be "the tongue of an angel"? It would be communicating without vocabulary or masses; that would be that. But that would be "the tongue of an angel."

Well, the further back on the track—if people keep going on a dwindling spiral, we could see that further back on the track you're liable to have a clearer state of being here or there or a greater state of awareness on the part of some people that they are exteriorized or can do certain things.

So, these things aren't necessary. All we need here is just C and E, and C prime, E prime. Not even the line is necessary—not even the line—not even the space; but the space makes a good game and it makes the difference between thee and me. But the essential difference between thee and me is simply a space—that's all. Energy masses be damned.

Mamie Glutz might conceive that she is better than the other girls at the factory because she has acquired a necklace and they haven't; but they say she's no good because of how she acquired it. And this makes a good game too. But, it isn't the necklace that makes Mamie Glutz. An awful lot of people forget this. (laughter) All right—puns aside.

Well, here we have cause, distance, effect. Cause, distance, effect. And the game, there, is the distance. And when we want to make the game more serious, more complicated or less workable, want to create more problems, we start throwing in these barriers, such as barrier 1 up here and barrier 2. And we get these barriers working up to masses of energy and forms and things like that.

Well, the funny part of it is there's nothing sillier than a barrier when it comes to a solid-mass barrier. This is a silly barrier because no barrier could possibly restrain a thetan. We say to somebody, "Be three feet back of your head." Now, I'm reminded of something in connection with this one.

A British auditor who was not himself exteriorized, and he did one of the more remarkable things. He got ahold of a preclear that didn't know anything about Scientology—just a preclear—no instruction at all. And he sat this person down in the chair, and he says to this person—because it was routine at the time to do so—and he said, "Be three feet back of your head."

And the fellow didn't say anything, so the auditor said, "Well, I wonder, let's see now, Ron has said that if we have a little picture—sometimes they have a little picture of where they are on the track or something like that. So, he said, "Well, I'll ask him what he sees." All right.

So he says to the preclear, "What do you see?"

And the fellow says, "I see a train."

And, auditor says, "Oh, okay. Now what do you see?"

"Oh, I still see a train."

And he said, "Well, all right." Now, he says, "Look around, what else do you see? Do you still see a train?"

And the preclear says, "No."

So the auditor said, "Well, huh, that's good. See, I've cleared up this facsimile. See? Pretty cute." And he says, "Now," he says, "I want you …"

"Oh," the preclear says, "Oh, wait a minute, here comes another train."

And the auditor said, "Ron didn't say anything about repeating facsimiles at all."

And so he very, very carefully and quietly with a horrible suspicion asked the preclear, "Where are you?"

And the preclear said, "Why, I'm sitting here alongside of one of the tracks," he said, "here on the railroad station."

And the auditor says, "Let's see .. ." and then suddenly remembered that he had also done other things to this preclear, and the preclear had obviously been outside with full ability to experience the entire physical universe. And had been sitting there waiting for himself to get run over with the train, and had been doing all sorts of interesting things, but had been passing in and out through walls with great ease.

It was this thing, which amongst others mostly struck the auditor as astonishing, as startling, as very fascinating, that the auditor suddenly woke up to the fact that a barrier did not restrain or contain a thetan unless he really insisted on it. So you see, it's really impossible, unless he wills it strongly, for an individual to sit over here (tapping chart) at this first E on the chart, behind a barrier, and get out and keep out this individual, by reason of a barrier. And he's not able to do it at all unless this individual at E prime here (tapping chart) in the first graph, has decided to carry around the mass of energy.

Because the thing that won't go through energy is energy. Energy won't go through energy easily—it does things to the other energy it's going through. But a life unit can simply go through energy—zip! It means nothing. Any barrier—Fort Knox, walls, Chateau d'If—wouldn't even vaguely restrain anybody who was not packing around energy.

So, in order to get restrained at all, this individual here has to believe himself to be the energy. He has to say, "I am the energy." Mamie Glutz has to say, "I am the necklace." See? "I am. And the necklace which I am, cannot pass through this wall. Therefore, I can be contained inside these walls. And therefore walls are barriers."

And if we could just get everybody to grab hold of a bunch of energy and say that he had to hold on to it, and that it was precious and that it was valuable—and if we could sell everybody on this utterly—then we could mock up walls which nobody would pass through, and then we could have forts and fortresses and armor and bullets and governments and games of all kinds and descriptions. But there is your entrance point of games, right here. (tapping chart) All right.

If that's the case, and if an individual becomes shy of games, then it's indicated that we have a scarcity of games as well as a scarcity of communication which we should remedy. And you will discover that after you've processed somebody just so long on straight Communication Processing as contained in Dianetics 1955!, you will discover that this individual is getting a scarcity of games.

But the funny part of it is, is that Communication Processing doesn't bring about the scarcity of games which yanking energy away from him does. If you were to make him get rid of every piece of energy he was holding on to (Let's say we made him join a monastery, that's a good way to make an individual get rid of everything. You know, throw it all away, give it to the church, endow the bishop with it, live a holy life thereafter. We could make somebody do this.), he would have a pretty bad scarcity. His havingness would have been injured.

But you can take Communication Processing and by running it on a preclear, you can do the most fantastic thing you ever heard of. You can start taking energy away from him—making energy actually vanish—without influencing his feeling that he has to have. Now this is a little bit interesting, isn't it? It stands separate from the havingness.

But the havingness actually goes to pieces. The masses of energy which he has posted there—these masses right here and here—(taps chart) these masses of energy actually go to pieces. And if you ran Communication Processing long enough, down here, in the second section of this chart, we wouldn't even have a line left.

In other words, we'd start to run Communication Processing, we'd do just this trick—just this trick and no other trick—we'd have this fellow, this preclear say, "Hello." Have a spot out here in front of him say, "Hello." Then have the preclear say, "Hello," and the spot say, "Hello," and the preclear say, "Hello," and the spot say, "Hello," see. And we'd do that bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang.

Up to this time this fellow had a sensation that he had a sort of a mask on. He had energy masses around his face, he had energy around his eyes, various weird things like this, you see? And we'd run this for a while, and he would tell us that he feels these energy masses moving.

But with any other process it would be necessary for you to have him mock up energy masses and pull them in, in order to remedy this havingness which he was losing. He would get sick at his stomach. He'd get real sick at his stomach if you didn't remedy his havingness which is one of the basic and elementary steps of Scientology and Dianetics today.

But we could do this: Have him say, "Hello," and something out there say, "Hello," and him say, "Hello," and something out there say, "Hello," and him say, "Hello," and something out there say, "Hello,"—back and forth, back and forth, bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang. And this area up here which we've labeled "area 1" would become this area at the bottom of this Chart 7, (tapping on chart) Now, what do you think of that?

You've still given him a game. The game is communication. So, therefore he doesn't too seriously object to losing all these masses which we had up here as barrier 1 and barrier 2.

Let's give this a more simple look, a much more simple look, and we will find ourselves comprehending it, perhaps a lot better.

Let's make here on Chart 8, (writing on chart) let's make here a nice big barrier. And let's put Bill on this side of it and Joe over here, and let's have Bill start saying, "Hello," and Joe here start saying, "Hello," as an answer in reply, and as an originated communication.

Chart 8

And we have these two fellows say, "Hello, Hello, Hello, Hello." You know, one says, "Hello," the other says, "Hello," one fellow says, "Hello," the other fellow says, "Hello." And we will eventually get this—when I say, "eventually we get this," why, it's very simple. We get Bill and we get Joe and we don't have anything between them, see, here in this second section.

Given enough communication, an individual recognizes with great clarity that he is not dependent upon his ridges, his barriers, masses or individualities or eccentricities. Because communication itself is a game—fantastic.

What I'm showing you here actually works in processing. It's not just a demonstration process. I mean this would occur—actually would occur.

Now, we've already covered the fact that when we remedy C, A and R also remedy. Isn't that interesting? A and R also remedy, these various eccentricities remedy. Well, look-a-here: I want to show you something here before anybody gets scared over this situation too badly.

Chart 9—this chart will go in reverse. Let's start down here at the bottom. And we have here Homo sap. And there we have the ARC triangle. Now, they're really there, I really wrote them there—they're microscopic. That's Homo sap.

Chart 9

Now, remember that a person's understanding is as good as that triangle is big! So, this fellow walks down the street and he sees that an electric light is out. And he says—if he's in pretty good shape he says, "Look, there's an electric light out." His understanding of the situation is good.

Now, somebody else, not quite so good, who's got a pretty good communication lag, also has a reason lag, and they say, "Umm, I wonder why that light is out? What do you suppose we—uh—let me see …" Deep significances—do you understand? And, "Somebody had a motive of some kind or another in turning out that light. That's probably—you know, do you suppose that the police department has gone into collusion with the criminal element in order to ..." In other words, his understanding is poor—understanding of the situation is real poor—this electric light.

And now let's get some fellow that's completely spun in, and he comes around and he says, "Let's see ..." (pause) (laughter) He just dimly senses there must be something wrong in the environment but he doesn't know why. And one step below that, he's dead!

Now, there's his understanding. His A, R, C comprise his understanding. Let's look at that real clearly. ARC comprises understanding. The fact of the matter is that you can work out all mathematics just on the basis of ARC. The interrelationship of symbols, factors, figures, relationships, quantities, qualities and so forth can all be worked out of ARC.

We just take this triangle and we get the relative affinity of this commodity to that commodity, we get the agreement of this commodity or that commodity, you know, whether or not they have a likeness for each other, and we get in the equation itself a communication. But as we look over mathematics, we can actually evolve these.

I'm very, very sorry that in 1950 when I first ran across that—it was in September, I think, that I had a paper, the notes of a paper on this—demonstrated the conversion of the ARC triangle into logic or mathematics. I didn't finish the paper. There was a lot of wild things going on of one kind or another and I had to give them too much attention, and I didn't finish this paper. And when I didn't finish that paper by the way, I turned my back on organizations, the first and foremost thing that had to be attended to. So, right now I would love to have that paper. I could work it all out again, but it was quite lengthy.

And it was quite conclusive that if you don't have these three things present in a mathematical equation, if you haven't measured them to some degree, the reality of the equation is very poor. Whatever is missing in the equation, it would be missing out of the ARC triangle. Reason itself derives from ARC.

But the test of the matter, of course, is understanding in a preclear. Does a preclear's understanding come up as his communication lag goes out? You said it. As his communication lag goes out, does his acceptability to and his acceptance of the environment go up? You said it. And does his affinity for life and those around him increase? You said it.

But more important, does he measure up differently on intelligence? You said it!

So, here we find this man down here who's being an individual; he is a rugged individual. He's straight out of Dickens. He is an eccentricity compounded with a couple of more eccentricities. And we find that as he goes along, his understanding of the life—his life around him is real bad, it's real poor, he just doesn't grasp things easily.

We've got to speed up—we've got to increase his ability to communicate, before we start increasing his ability in the fields of affinity and in reality, and more importantly, understanding. We've got to speed up his communication. We do all this simply by speeding up his communication and furnishing enough communication in there to be speeded up. All right.

We start way down here in state 1. All right.

Now let's go upstairs, and after we've run Communication Processing for a short time, we get state 2. All right.

Now, after we've run Communication Processing—let's be real elementary—after we've run the exact process which I told you about there, you know, we just put a couple of guys together and say, "Say, 'Hello' to each other."

Now, this can be done on a preclear, and done very effectively by having him mock up a "Hello" out here in front of him—something alive out in front of him saying, "Hello" to him. And then where he is, saying, "Hello" to it. And then it says, "Hello" to him, and he says, "Hello" to it, and it says, "Hello" to him, and he says, "Hello" to it, back and forth, bang-bang-bang-bang-bang!

This is the process, the one I am giving you right this minute, that this was tested on. This was tested with IQ tests, intelligence quotients, everything else you could think of, every kind of a monitor there could be and particularly, skill with mechanical objects—speed in taking apart puzzles. There was a lot of little incidental psychometery run—you know, you got a half a dozen Chinese puzzles and see how fast the guy could take one apart.

Well, the preclear this was being worked on looked at it and said—the first time he saw one of these puzzles—he said, "What is that?"

It was explained to him, "It's a puzzle."

"Yeah, well what kind of a puzzle?"

"Well, it's a Chinese puzzle."

"Well, what are you supposed to do with it?"

And this was all being clocked on the amount of time it was supposed to—he was being measured on how long it would take him, see, to work this puzzle. Up to a point—and we're getting to that point now—where he was handling them rather well. So, we'd work it a while longer and we would get this triangle, see? (writing on chart)

And 4 here, we would start to get this triangle, (writing on chart) And then 5, we're off the paper. And at this state 5, this preclear who had now exteriorized on this same process—just in one shot, see? He exteriorized on this process and we gave him the last puzzle which was really, if anything, a little more difficult than anything else—or I gave it to him—and I said, "Well, okay."

And he says, "What are you giving me that thing for?" he said, "All you do is punch the center of it and it falls apart."

In other words, the understanding of the individual had increased. His ability had increased—his ability to reach and withdraw and to do everything else. By doing what? By having a spot out in front of his face say, "Hello" to him. And by him saying, "Hello" to the spot out in front of his face—hour in, hour out, with the only other thing being interposed was, "Find the floor," or "Take a break." Curious, huh?

Now, I conducted that experiment myself for this good and excellent reason: that there might have been a temptation on the part of somebody else to have gone off onto Route 1 or to have done something else or to have just enough broken communication with the preclear to have damped it. It wasn't that I didn't trust anybody else; I merely wanted, myself, an intimate look at this thing evolving.

And so we had the phenomenon of the expanding triangle. And this is the phenomenon of the expanding triangle, and you can watch that phenomenon increase. You can watch that triangle increase, you can watch understanding come up, and you can see incidence of accident and other things falling down, and you can see reaction time increasing.

Now, we're certainly not paying any attention to memory, are we? Well, I ask you, are we paying any attention to memory?

Audience: No.

Well, then the clue of psychotherapy was not memory. The basic undoing of psychotherapy was not memory. And therapies solely based upon memory, and the functions and systems of recall are therapies which depend upon the automaticity of memory machines. Because when I got this boy to this final top step (tapping on chart) after about twenty-eight hours of processing, something like that, his face started to fall apart, so we had to do it behind his back for the last few hours of processing. I would have ruined him; he would have disappeared right in my parlor.

This fifth state up here, (tapping on chart) this fifth state produced this kind of a response on memory: "Where were you on July the 17th, 1947?"

"Oh," he says, "I was in the living room."

"What were you doing?"

"I was reading page 27 of a book called Gone With the Wind."

"You were reading it awfully late, weren't you?"

"Yes, I waited until the servants had stopped talking about it." Pang! Pang! Pang!

Now, these cases, as we will have here in chart 10, these cases that you're looking at with a communication lag are fabulously interesting cases, they're fabulous. Let's go on upstairs again on the same graph system as we had before. One: Where you had your little A, R, C down here, see? All right.

Chart 10

We ask this boy a question. We say, "How many chairs are there in this room?" This boy does not start to count these chairs, this boy begins to wonder why you want to know how many chairs there are in this room. Now, that's a fairly average response. That is not, by the way, a high-toned response; it's just the average response that you would get.

If somebody walked in that door at this moment, and I asked him, "How many chairs are there in this room?" This guy would enter into the communication as why did I want to know how many chairs are in this room? Couldn't I count myself? He was not part of this particular congress. You know, yap-yap-yap-yap-yap-yap-yap. But no communication.

So, we take state 1 here, and let's take a look at this person's bank and let's find that he has (drawing on chart) C, E, C, E, C, E, C, E, C, E, C, E, C, E, C. C, C, C, but out here with no C leading to it, EE, and then CE, CE, CE, CE, CE, CE, CE, CE. And that adds up to no C.

And the actual behavior of a communication lag is something like this: We enter at the first C, and through all of those CEs I traced, this lag tries to go, see … (drawing on chart) and comes out here, "What wall?"

And when this man looks at anything, he looks at a bundle, and he says, "There's nothing there." Yet something looked at the wall, and then got lost in this morass here, under 1—just got lost.

And those are the masses that start to fall apart when you say—have the preclear say, "Hello" and then have him have a spot in front of his face say, "Hello" to him, and then, he says, "Hello" and so forth. What happens here?

This thing starts to fall apart and with a slightly expanded triangle here, we get the communication line of "Hello," "Hello" at least only going through a minor amount of ballup here. See?

All these old C's and E's are dropping out. Because we put enough C's and E's in there to resolve this thing here. And we get up here to—well, let's just skip to 5. Where do you think that line has to travel for the individual to know anything, huh?

Male voice: What line?

Yeah, what line? He knows there's a wall there without looking. He doesn't have to look to find out if there is a wall there. He has perfect certainty there's a wall there, but if he wants to look at it, he can also look at it. If he wants to run into it, he'd have to do something else and say, "Now I'm going to run into it" and so run into it.

But when you ask him a question, "How many chairs are there in this room?" he would tell you the exact number—bang! And now it might suit his game to find out why you wanted to know that number of chairs in the room.

But there is what happens under these processes. This ball, this mask—sometimes somebody feels like he's wearing a mask all over the front of his face. And you say, "Give me some things you're not trying to create at this moment," that being a stickier sort of a Straightwire question—stickier sort of a question.

He's supposed to point these things out, and he'll go, gong! And he will dope off and so forth. He gets right into the middle of that number 1 ball, and what do you think it contains? Hmm? What do you think is at all those C and E lines and so forth? What are these masses and so forth that are preventing other masses from occurring? Facsimiles. Engrams. And of course he goes into restimulation on those lines and he becomes a very interesting piece of dope-off, he does. But that's his life—dope-off.

Now, as he gets on up to state 5, you'd say, "Well, this individual then would care less about existence." Oh, no, he can feel sympathetic quicker and get over sympathy faster than anybody you've ever seen. But you'd say this individual is not persistent, this individual has no great integrity. No, he has something better than that, he has ethics and honesty.

When we get into the problems of communication, we can find a hundred billion catalogable phenomena and we can put these phenomena under the most interesting microscopes.

We can make ourselves some of the most fascinating combinations and puzzles you ever saw in your life. And we do that simply to have a game, to have something to shoot at.

But, every once in a while we get so immersed in hiding the game and in hiding the terminal of the game, we start playing the game of: We don't know it's a game. And we very rapidly and quickly get lost in all directions.

And the funny part of it is, a fellow can stay lost. Now that's the only slightest liability there is to playing the general game called life. The fellow can get lost; he can stay lost.

What do you think a tree out here is doing? It was a life form once. But it still has something vibrating around it, it still is doing something, it still has a game, doesn't it? So, it looks like having a game is more important than getting lost. A person will even get lost and go utterly unconscious and unknowing and stupid—still, to have a game.

So, along with Communication Processing, we use the processes which increase the number of games an individual can have. And that process is simply—as I have run on you earlier—Invent a Game: "Have somebody invent a game for you." And, "Have you invent games for somebody else," and then, "You say, 'Okay.' " Well, this of course does communication too. And some of the weightier, heavier somatics start to fly off when you run that particular process.

But, here we find whatever we want to know in life revealed simply by running these Communication Processes from the standpoint that life is a game, and getting the individual to remedy his havingness of games. That is to say, make him realize that he can invent so many games that he doesn't have to hold on to these old games. And if he realizes that, then he'll let go of some of these things and he becomes far, far more able.

Thank you.

PROBLEMS AND GAMES PAGE 2 UC-14 - 31.12.54

[[Category:Lectures]]
[[Category:Lectures UC]]
[[Category:Lectures 1954]]