View source for SOP- Spacation Step III, Flow Processing (PDC 521216)

= SOP/ Spacation Step III, Flow Processing =

'''Date:''' 16 December 1952
'''Series:''' PDC
'''Speaker:''' L. Ron Hubbard

← [[Lecture_Index_PDC|Back to Series]]

This is December the 16th, first hour of the afternoon lectures.

Now in your textbook, Scientology 8-8008, you will not find the complete steps of uh… Spacation – that is to say Spacation is broken down into six very precise steps. It’s done like you empty water from a pitcher into a glass and back again. It’s about that simple. I gave you these yesterday. I’m going to have that mimeographed and probably as you hear this as a tape it will be in your hands as a mimeographed item.

I’ll read those, however, just to make sure that they’re on the tape.

One. Spacation. One: Establish an anchor point and hold it, exaggerating the automaticity of it and slowing it down until the point can be made to persist easily without attention from the pc – without any effort.

Two: Establish two-dimensional space, hook it to two big toes and elbows of pc, exaggerate and bring under control its automaticities – stabilize.

Step Three: Make two-dimensional planes, solid and unresisting at will. Make pc penetrate it or not as he chooses. Make it resist or not resist, heavy forces thrown at it.

Four: It’s all right. You’ve got this. Four: Establish and find empty a large box which also encloses the pc in the couch. Unmock the latter two. Inspect it from all sides, stabilize, make’ solid or empty at will.

Five: Locate home universe in center. Bring it under control with exaggeration of size and so forth. Banish it at last.

Six: Make mock-ups and destroy them in this space.

And that is the length and breadth of the technique called ”Spacation” which is Step Three of the Standard Operating Procedure.

And that’s very simple because that can be remembered in this fashion.

A point. Two: Dimensions. Then, Three: Dimensions. Then you find what’s in the center of it. And then you do mock-ups and destroy them in that space. Very simple: One, Two, Three-dimensions.

And the second technique which is not in that book is Flow Balancing, which has a colloquial name ”Give and Take Processing.” That’s going to re… cover quite a bit of ground here today. In fact, I’m practically going to talk about nothing else all afternoon.

And the material, then, in your text, Scientology 8-8008, is not in any way contradicted and matches up these lectures.

In these lectures you have a lot more of it. The material which is in there very briefly and very staccato as given its proper breadth and evaluation in this lecture series.

That textbook, actually, is not a textbook which is supposed to be… just handed to somebody and he reads it. He uh… the… the point of the matter is it was not written for that purpose, and although that textbook is being translated into German and Spanish and just released, uh… it’s almost an overt act. Because it’ll make very good sense to you, measured back up against these lectures and a man would practically have to make or unmake or re-evaluate the universe backwards and upside-down in order to fit what he knows of experience into that book.

The lectures and other material which has gone before and which you’ve already studied form a bridge between the experience of man as he walks around and pretends to be active and so forth, and the level at which we’re operating.

If you looked at all of the consecutive techniques which have been developed, you would find that they composed a gradient scale, a relatively smooth gradient scale with only one or two items out of line on that scale. These items are not so much out of line as they are just more heavily evaluated than they should be. One, are words in engrams. That’s still more important, really, if you’re just going to process an engram, than it is to process the mechanics because the mechanics of the engram agree with the material universe, and words, at least, are still partly theta.

And so, we have in our techniques as they reach forward from 1950 straight on through now, a bridge which covers the evaluation of the commonest, most ordinary level of experience in any culture on earth here, straight on through, step by step. It goes from what ordinarily can be found to aberrate people and if alleviated will bring them up into a better state of rationality. That is the running of engrams and locks, and grief charges.

And that goes from there into the mechanics of what aberration are and those are introduced, more or less, in SCIENCE OF SURVIVAL.

And then we go forward to a better appreciation of language as contained, no matter how briefly, in SELF ANALYSIS, 1951, and then go on to ADVANCED PROCEDURES AND AXIOMS with the establishment of the goal of self-determinism as the most valuable of these goals; and we go straight on from there through 1952, taking the GE, discovering and resolving the problems relating to the GE, discovering that that is NOT the road and finding that one has to process, if he processes the pc, the pc – and who is and where is the pc. And we find him. He’s very accurately locatable.

And from those studies and experimental and temporary techniques we came right on through to Standard Operating Procedure, Issue One. And from there, as more results and more studies have been conducted by myself and as I’ve seen these techniques in the hands of auditors, we come up, straight away, to Standard Operating Procedure Three which, if you’ll notice, has, as its main deletion, the – from Operating Procedure Issue One – the removal of any agreement with the MEST universe.

We don’t… Issue One said DED-DEDEX running for a Step Five. You don’t find this in Step Three. And now we go straight on forward to… Issue Five of Standard Operating Procedure and that has simply done this: It has taken up the whole problem and in putting it out in Standard Operating Procedure Issue Five, we have included all the steps which are necessary to clear a thetan and make an Operating Thetan.

And actually, it is not just the Step One. Step Two and then we do something else. It is what we do. And no matter where we find him in the case, we process him at that point, get him up to a Case Level One. Then we do everything else there is there.

Of course, you’ll find it unnecessary in the main to do Six and Seven as Steps on most preclears. But you would be completely amazed how often you will have to do them to somebody who is apparently quite sane and still operating.

And so, Standard Operating Procedure Issue Five, then, is the direct and immediate result of two and a half years of application of various principles, aligned and organized, as they were found to operate in the society and in the hands of auditors.

And… but we have this as a package which contains in it the basic techniques that you use to head somebody up toward an operating thetan so that he can really get there.

Now the odd part of this is that it misses one big point, but it hits this point in Step Three. It doesn’t do one thing. In other words, if you had this list and you did just these things you would get an operating thetan, except for one thing. You would not have rehabilitated his primary desire in the MEST universe, and if you can’t rehabilitate that he will be unwilling to quit a body and operate, and I’ll… I’ll cover that.

He, in other words, will stay as a stable theta clear, but he will stay in immediate and intimate contact with bodies. And he will continue to do so until this point is resolved. And in view of the fact that continuous action straight up against bodies and this terrible dependency on bodies exists, you’ll find that your, quote ‘stable’ theta clear will have to sit down and work himself every few weeks to be stable unless this point is resolved. He will flicker, and uh… he will get involved.

Now because you as a thetan are educated into the principles you need to know in order to remain stable, it’d be perfectly legitimate to call an educated thetan who had been treated just to a point where he didn’t enter the body if the body was hurt, to treat him as a theta clear – stable.

But you… you just spring somebody and you don’t do anything else about it, they’re going to be back in their heads. That’s why it’s cruelty to do it, because one point won’t have been solved. And that point is sensation, need for.

And if you haven’t got that in beautiful shape, why, uh… your pc is going to find such a need to hang around bodies and such a disgust of himself because he is hanging around bodies continually and is dependent upon them, that he’ll fluctuate, up and down the scale, up and down the scale, back and forth. And he becomes unstable, you might say, emotionally. Because he on the one hand knows he shouldn’t be associating with such company, and on the other hand he has to. And so he’s still subject to flows.

Flow balancing is part of this answer. But a good and adequate understanding of the principles underlying this are the better part of the answer and a technique which is not flow balancing at all, but which is in addition to all those given and which you’ve already heard about, must be noted as the extra technique to make an operating thetan. There are many other things you can do with a thetan, but let’s get this little extra one in there. It’s not one of the steps.

The reason it isn’t one of the steps is because it is an education. It is not really a process. It’s a return to what he once could do and prepares him to do that again. And that is, it demonstrates to him that, one, he as a thetan can contact directly from the environment much better any sensation that environment might possibly deliver to a body. And if he can contact directly any sensation immediately from the environment – you see, he’s not in the body, he’s not connected with bodies, he’s not using a body in any way and he can still contact from his environment and experience any sensation that a body can contact and experience or can be gained from bodies – he of course, at that moment is willing to give up the idea of the body. And until he has realized that, until he knows that, until he’s completely assured this in the case, he will not leave a body alone but will keep hanging back and hanging around and diving down scale and going back into the head and out of the head and around and around and around and around about the whole thing.

And that is done by rehabilitating his own ability to perceive. This is not too difficult because the only ability to perceive there is, what do you know? – the thetan has the only ability to perceive. And he’s… thinks he has to do it through the body and he’s so accustomed to this and he’s so certain of this that what you have to do is demonstrate that the thetan’s ability to perceive directly in the environment and to capture and experience, create sensations, must be possible – can be possible to him.

So this becomes very simple, really. What do we do? You get him up scale to a point where he can feel that wall. And he can feel that wall much better with his own contact with the wall than he can with his fingers of a body – as a body. In other words, he can feel the wall straight and he doesn’t need any fingers to contact that wall. He can feel the size of, shape of and weight of objects without any interposition of a MEST body’s fingers or muscular reflexes. He can see anything that he can see with a body and be as certain that he is seeing it, as with a body.

But that follows. That is a very… well, that’s very tertiary. It’s uh… it’s below secondary. It’s secondary, for instance, that he… be able to contact ordinary things. What you want him to be able to contact are things which are strong, exciting, interesting and complex sensations. And he must know that it’s possible for him to, one, contact them in the MEST environment and, two, create them and contact them himself – both without a body.

Now that sounds like quite a trick. But the reason it sounds like quite a trick is that is a trick. You… you have to be able to do that. If you could realize how completely the thetan is dependent upon sensation for a conviction in this universe that he yet is alive, you would realize that what you are rehabilitating there is the only reward he has for living – the beautiful sights, the beautiful sounds, the beautiful tactiles and, what do you know? A thetan has thousands of perceptions – thousands of different perceptions. I don’t think you could get down and list all these perceptions. It would just go on and on and on and on and on.

I added them up one time to a great degree and I got about 55. And that is almost 40 more than are commonly listed in textbooks which have, laughingly, dealt with this subject. They haven’t dealt with it laughingly; they’ve dealt with it absurdly. I don’t know why they didn’t just sit down and categorize the number of things of the environment there were to contact and then go and ask somebody if he could sense ‘em. I… they didn’t do that. They… they uh… made up a theory – never tested it.

All right, therefore the rehabilitation of sensation is very necessary, because need for, desire for sensation is the only thing which keeps him in the vicinity of a body. And the continued belief confirmed by what is apparently quite real experience, if not actual experience, what’s apparently quite real experience that only the body can deliver unto him, these sensations. Why, he hasn’t got a chance. He… he doesn’t dis… doesn’t believe that he could survive, he wouldn’t know he was alive or anything of the sort.

As a result when he is a theta clear he has to go up to level of operating thetan, and that consists primarily of the rehabilitation of sensation, perception of. It also depends on two or three other little things that you might miss in passing.

So before I go Into a much lenghthier dissertation on this, I’m just going to mention these things. And I might mention them again and I might not.

But uh… I’ll mention them right there because they’re quite important. And that is, your theta clear is in a state where his memory does not immediately confirm to him any duration of beingness as a thetan. And so he is in a state which does not evaluate himself as a personality. He sees himself as an identity with the body; everybody who comes along has given the body credit for everything, has given the body a name, has designated with relationship to the body so consistently that it really… it’s… it’s… this is… this will be amazing to you but it’s something I’ve run into several times and just ran into again. The thetan moves out and leaves the personality in the body.

And you’ve got a fellow who is… thinks… he’s quite convinced he’s a thetan clear. And for what does he use these skills and talents and this freedom? Well, experiment with or… or to fool around with or see how curious it is. He doesn’t use that state as a state of being alive, as a state which has a personality and which has, indeed, the only personality he will ever have.

And so he leaves the personality behind. He thinks he has to be in some peculiar frame of mind or that he’s sort of an automaton. Now he just hasn’t come up to the point where he’s grasped this. But grasping that simple detail is quite important.

And you as an auditor can save yourself an enormous amount of rehabilitation of this preclear. Outside his head he’s a mechanical object, he thinks, or something like this. Or he’s a spark. And he re… kind of regards himself as… as the body has regarded fire – useful, it uh… not very uh… and so on. And as a result he has no evaluation of his own capabilities and much more important than e… just evaluation, he has no appreciation of himself just directly as himself. He uh… doesn’t say, ”Now I have moved out of this body. I can be happy. I can be sad. I can sing, I can dance, I can do all of these things.” No, no! He says, ”The body can be happy. The body can be sad. The body can sing. The body can dance. And I can sit back and look at it.”

He is sort of like… like… that uh… the apex, the… the… the highest peak of all educational goals – a spectator in the stadium. And he sort of sits there and he… he thinks that… and it really doesn’t occur to him that the BODY sing and dance! Indeed! The body can’t sing and dance unless he handles it like a puppet, but he’s set it up on automaticities so it will sing and dance.

Why does the body sing and dance? Why does the body express joy or anything else? It’s because the thetan likes to sing and dance and express joy, I mean, this is very simple.

So he’s done a differentiation sub-zero when he should have done an identification. He should have picked up his own capabilities right with him at the moment he moved out.

You know, you can do a very, very graceful dance between the moon and Venus. There’s a lot of space. It’s a big ballroom. If you can’t make a space, the whole MEST universe is full of it. Even, quote, ”solid matter,” unquote, is about, I would say, a hundred and two percent space.

Now, where you have a theta clear, then, who has no appreciation of himself, it just doesn’t naturally, mechanically follow, you see? I mean, this is just something that occurs to him or doesn’t occur to him. Hi… he goes around and ”Yeah, I’m a theta clear.” And he looks around at all these bodies, ”Haven’t they got interesting personalities. That’s fine. I… I’ll watch them,” and so forth. And he goes around and sometimes he’s sort of sad and s… kind of goofy, or something of this sort. He can go around and he can experiment – stick his… a beam in a electric light switches or something and wonder if it shocks him.

That’s right. He hasn’t any concept of the fact that he IS joy; he is a higher level of aesthetic than a body could ever be. And that he can, in his own interest – what do you know? – take a larger and more effective role in the affairs of being alive, I won’t say ”human affairs,” but in the affairs and concerns of being alive than a body could ever do.

What does he do for randomity in a body? He goes to the office, he goes home. Or if he has money and so on, he would go out on the polo field or the flying field or something of this sort and amuse himself in a plane. And in order to account to himself and… settle his own accounts that he was worth something, what would he do? Why, he’d join the local philanthropy society or the charity or… he’d make sure that the Boy Scout troop was running all right and so on.

And when we were young we were quite enthused about helping out groups and helping people out. And then we found out that they could just turn around and slough you, so to speak, that you had to be pretty strong to help anybody out. And… and we kind of thought that was bad, then we thought it was good. And then we found out we didn’t have any time to do it because we had to work too hard to eat and all these other affairs came into the line. And we… we found out that really the only thing we could do for them was give them some advice once in a while which they didn’t need, and some money which WE needed. And uh… it… it was sort of sad.

But that’s what a homo sapiens does for randomity, and this thetan as homo sapiens, operating as this level. What? You… you mean this person has no purpose or goal of beingness?

Here… here he’s capable of stepping outside the economic concerns of the world. Here is he capable by his own actions of becoming partisan in causes much broader than he would ever be able to touch. Man, for instance, gets… gets enormous randomity out of who’s going to be secretary for the local Lion’s Club.

A thetan can participate… well, he could go out and have a fine time campaigning for some congressman. You would be amazed! He would just sort of appoint himself guardian angel to this or that… an… and uh… this or that cause. Well, what’s the difference? I mean, are we suffering from some… some strange malfunction here? When all of a sudden this homo sapiens, he was Interested in helping and participating and being interested and doing all these things, and don’t forget this one, collecting MEST.

He was interested in all these things. And now… now all of a sudden as a thetan he moves out and leaves his personality and all his interests and goals in that body, because they were all postulated for the body. And your thetan is too much of a – to be very technical – goofball to recognize that his beingness is himself. All he has to do is suddenly wake up to the fact ”What do you know? I’m me!”

I was a body I was something or other, and when I’m in a body everybody says, ‘Hello, Joe.’ What do you know? Nobody says anything to me” – mostly because his communication level is poor.

Why is his communication level poor? He doesn’t think anybody will talk to him. There wouldn’t be any goal for anybody to talk to him about, in the first place. He wouldn’t have any conversation on that level. He comes back into the body and he goes around and he looks up some other theta clear who is also in his body and commu… they communicate. It’s very silly.

A theta clear with his memory rehabilitated – and that, by the way, is the other point – his memory has to be rehabilitated. He’s really a walking zombie. He’s forgotten everything.

He doesn’t have any more memory than a homo sapiens, and that’s practically blank. ”What telephone number? What address? Uh… where did I put my hat?” – some of those big…

You know, homo sapiens, by the way, doesn’t even have to ask those questions. Homo sapiens can simply pervade an area as homo sapiens and be maybe 25 percent of the time right. Then he can’t count on it 75 percent of the time so after that he would rather ransack the house for his hat, than suddenly look around his house and then go pick it up and say, ”I wonder how that hat ever got underneath the kitchen range.” But uh… he can do that.

Now, therefore we’re talking, when we talk about sensation, self- appreciation and the rehabilitation of memory, we’re talking about – and by the way, possessions – we’re talking about ‘will haves’. And a person without ‘will have’ is quite dead. He… he’s in fact, it… somebody really ought to bury a ‘will have’ because he actually becomes odorous. Do you know that he dies – a ‘will not have’, a ‘can’t have’ and so on?

The guy whose case – a ‘will have’ case, who is cut off completely and can’t ever have any more. A guy who has lost his hopes. You cost somebody about 80 percent of his hopes and you walk around and he even smells bad. He won’t even have a body. He’s sure of this by this time, you see. That’s very interesting.

So you’re up against a case of ‘won’t have’ because he hasn’t thought about what’s valuable to have. So, you’re up against the common denominator of all goals: ”What am I going to be? What am I going to do? And what am I going to have?” And your thetan has never asked this for himself. He keeps asking it for the body. ”What’s the body going to have? What’s the body going to be? What’s the…” What the hell with that body! Tha… that’s not important.

But it is important what is a thetan going to be? what is a thetan going to do? and what is a thetan going to have?

Now it… it’s a very silly thing, but all the literature which is published and which this individual has read is slanted toward the life and death of a homo sap. ”The hero and the heroine, huh, uh… they… they… they get together, you know, and then… then the villain comes along, and he’s in a body too, and he has all these sub-villains and they’re all in a body too, and then they… they… the hero and heroine they… they get in trouble and they have a fight with each other and some misunderstanding and then the hero, somehow or another, gets all fixed up with the villain. And then the hero’s and heroine’s parents, you see, they’re in bodies too. And they have names. And they’re all – they… they… they get married, and this is a happy ending.”

The Saturday Evening Post – blow your brain out! They… they – I mean, the… the Post, the… the… the Gazette, the… bodies, bodies, bodies, bodies. Limited sphere of action. Bodies walk to a corner; they don’t transfer across half of the planet. They go carefully to the corner to get a package of cigarettes. ”Sigh! Well, we got… the cigarettes. Now… we’re going home again. Now that we’re home… we have to go out… and work… to make some money… to buy some more… cigarettes. Now… we’ll go to the corner…” Oh, no!

You know what you’re facing? You’re… you’re facing an appalling lack of literature. Do you realize homo sap has had built for him by generations and generations of artists, sculptors, musicians – not so much the musicians – and particularly the writers and dramatists, the cultural background of how wonderful it is to be a homo sapiens and how cruel the gods are. ”Mary had a little lamb.” But it’s been going on for thousands of years! And every time you got this… this thetan comes out, what’s his orientation? ”Little Jack Horner sat in the corner, eating his curd and hay.” Saturday Evening Post – ugh! Time magazine – ugh! Uh… the… the works of Thomas Hardy.

Uh… the closest… the closest piece of work to a thetan is Alice in Wonderland. And the person who can appreciate Alice in Wonderland at least has some small goal as a theta clear. It’s sort of a idiotic goal, but it… it’s better than none. He can… he can play this game, only he doesn’t have to eat the cake, you see? He can play this game of get terribly small and the tables terribly big, and he can mock up white rabbits and caterpillars and Mad Hatters and they’ll mad hat, too. He can go through this game. But he’s actually uh… quite accustomed, if he’s got that orientation. He’ll find himself right in his element.

That famous German mathematician was not doing anything, if not writing straight out of a… the child’s and some few adults’ self-knowledge of what their real capabilities are.

So you’re walking into a dearth of culture for the thetan. The culture is designed for homo sapiens.

You’ll notice in a movie or in a novel, or even what is called, in the Twentieth Century, a novel, that the writer is doing the same trick, doing it much more crudely. And Hollywood is, and the rest of the studios around are really being even cruder than that. They’ve gone down to where they play Ivanhoe, and so on, with… with absolutely none of the subtleties of even Ivanhoe. Ivanhoe does have a few, you know. It… it’s… it’s not what you might call the most subtle story in the world, but, it isn’t all going around with hairy chests because of the… of the dame, sort of a thing. But they just lost… they just lost all this.

And they – clear back, and all the way along the line the modern writer, the writer of the Middle Ages, right straight on back, all doing the same thing.

The Greek chorus, everybody stands around. And originally the Greek chorus, you know, said, ”Maaa-maaa-maaa.” That is… was a Greek chorus. I’m not exaggerating. That’s exactly what a Greek chorus was. And after a while they said, ”What do you know?! We can wear various masks. We don’t have to all wear goat masks and go ‘maaa-maaa-maaa’ on all the holidays, so we’ll talk after this.” And thus was born modern drama.

I know all about that. I’m an authority on it because I wrote a play one time in college which took a prize of some enormous scope or other for the prize winning one-act… it was a hot Sunday afternoon when I wrote the thing. It took almost 20 minutes.

I read it. So I’m an authority on the theater. I have at least read a book on the subject, which puts me a little bit ahead of some of the other boys. I also talked to Heywood Broun once. As a matter of fact, he and I were very good friends.

But… oh, you… the… you… you don’t quite see where I’m heading here. Your faces look a little blank.

The Greek chorus moves on to the stage and turns verbal spotlights on the hero, and they might as well all stand there with big signs, ”This is a hero.” And the other part of the chorus stands there with big signs on, practically, and they say, ”This is the heroine.” And then it depends on what mask is sitting up there, if it’s the mask with a grin, it’s comedy, which means man decides man’s fate; and if the mask is a scowl that… or sad or tears or whatever that other mask is, that… that means that’s a tragedy because God decides man’s fate. And difference between these two things, comedy and tragedy, is whether man decides his fate or gods decide his fate.

This is all mapped out – clear back there in Ancient Greece they had a beautiful map drawn of it – and it’s all a theta trap, all the way along the line. And don’t regard it any other way. It’s just a theta trap.

If an artist knew what he was selling out, he wouldn’t have done it. But it depends upon the skill of the artist to keep people interested enough to walk this treadmill called the MEST universe.

And from the early Greeks who put their gods into anthropomorphic shapes, and from their Greek choruses which pointed out that everyone is attracted only by the heroism of a body, or the heroine-ism of a body, either way, the artist with his paint brush, the writer with his typewriter, have been selling out: The glories of being a body – it’s frailty, it’s tragedies, it’s comedies. And your thetan has been indoctrinated in this (You hadn’t thought about this until I mentioned it, had you?) – your thetan’s been indoctrinated in this for 74 trillion years.

So you want to know why he moves out of the body without a personality? He knows nobody’s got a personality but a body. Everybody from Somerset Maugham back to Euripides said so. And they said so – and this is what’s criminal with aesthetics. It has never entered anybody’s mind to be a god. That would not be permitted, anywhere in any literature except somebody being insane and completely monomanic and paranoid and all of the nasty words you could heap on it, because the gods are too far above us for us to ever contact. And they fly around in the air. Except in the Arabian Nights where we find the afreets as gods of a sort – but they’re ugly and they’re mean and they’re horrible and they’re vicious and they do terrible things to man.

So we couldn’t touch the gods of the Greek hierarchy. They’re above touch. And one would be insane if he thought of himself as one. We could not touch the so-called spirits of the early Arabic literature and Persian literature, Hindu literature because they’re evil and abandoned and eschewed by every man. And we couldn’t possibly touch ghosts, could we? From Charles Brockden Brown, the first American novelist, who called the attention of the literi of Europe to America – the literary people of Europe were quite amazed at the end of the 18th Century to find out there was an American who could write. That American was Charles Brockton Brown and he wrote ghost stories. And they are ghost stories of such a nature as to make Edgar Allen Poe get kinda pale and green. They’re really wild.

And that was something you mustn’t be. The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow – the most horrible thing in that was a ghost. Uh… they make a movie that has a ghost in it, and the ghost is either sad and disappointed, or he has to haunt someplace. And the ghost is always sad and he doesn’t have a body and he’s always this that he doesn’t have a body. And a body is so important and so on and so on and so on.

They boobytrapped the literature. This thing start to sum up as to why your thetan is apt to move out into a vacuum of ideas for himself? Well, they have been writing about bodies as attainable and desirable, and as the hero and heroine of the piece, and the gods as untouchable and only the insane ever believe they are anything like gods or spirits. And as the spirits as either evil or utterly lost.

And this has been said with the finest brushes, with the best words and with the most thrilling music and the finest statuary in all this whole line called the MEST universe. The best skilled minds of this whole universe have devoted themselves exclusively toward keeping people interested in bodies. They’ve sold you out.

That’s right. You should have about the same level of regard for that sort of an operation as you have for Benedict Arnold.

The only way anybody could ever be made to do anything in the MEST universe at all was to interest him, in some fashion or another that would keep him on the treadmill. And even the slave in the presence of some big, vague, thin promise of an aesthetic such as a play, such as a circus that he might go to, such as being permitted to assist in some pageantry, even a slave would go on living in a body in the hope that he could obtain some aesthetic sensation. And so a collar could be placed upon him.

He didn’t do what was obvious that he should do, which is simply lie down and die – just back out of the head and give this thing a stiff push.

Now have you got some idea about goals? The picture has been painted that the body has a goal, and to be a ghost or a spirit is a horrible fate. And ghosts or spirits, you noticed, are all avoided by everybody. Nobody ever talks to them, nobody’s ever nice to them, nobody ever does anything for them except scream and run away from ‘em. That’s… that’s the spirit – that’s his lot.

So nobody’d have anything to do with him, either.

Well, even the gods were only happy when sitting in their stone idols, sculpted by some sculptor, bejewelled by some gem-cutter and written about by some poet. Only the god who did that was fit company for humans. We found big, tough, mean, erratic gods as things that you didn’t have much to do with – Baal, Moloch – bad, bad business.

All right, what’s lead this to then? Boy, it leads to a problem for you. You’re sitting there thinking this is all very interesting, and he’s being very rhetorical and that’s fine and it’s all very pretty and he’s stressing that point awfully hard. Of course, that’s interesting. It’s the first hour of the afternoon and he probably hasn’t warmed up yet.

But you know, you know that moves your thetan back in the body? Unless you can supplement that literature and actually fly into the teeth of Michelangelo, Euripides, Praxiteles and all the rest of the boys on the whole track – unless you want to fly into their teeth, you’re not going to get anyplace.

You see, the aesthetic scarcity in this universe has been played upon very heavily, and it’s the aesthetic alone, as you’ve read in 8-80 if you’ve studied that, which really pins this thing down but gorgeously. And that aesthetic, if it is very strong in one direction, will incline the person in that direction. And if the aesthetic is only in the direction of a body, it will incline the individual in a body.

Fortunately animals are fairly aesthetic. They’re nice to look at and they’re quite exciting, they’re quite interesting. Once in a while they have interesting personalities – we’re going to get into bodies. And so you, every once in a while, found the thetan playing about the highest game that was permitted to a thetan as himself. And you can read all you want to about that, as it is completely misrepresented and miswritten in Frazer’s Golden Bough, The King of the Wood or The God of the Wood. That is a completely reverse interpretation in an effort to be terribly deep and subtle about the easiest thing in the world.

There was this wood, see, and this thetan didn’t want anything more to do with those umph! umph! bodies. But there were a lot of wolves and rabbits and deers and other things in this preserve, and once in a while some little kid’d come to this preserve and… and gather hazelnuts or something of the sort. And this thetan would reach out and he’d pick up all these nice trees, that is to say, he’d just spread himself all the way through this wood. He would BE the wood – that was his identity.

And he became the patron saint, you might say, of the animals and the birds, and the guardian of that place.

And if you think that some of the hunting accidents you read about were accidents, you’re badly mistaken, because that goes on today. There are thetans… if there are thetans who are still active to any great degree on this planet, they would be active in that capacity and area.

I think we have somebody right here. A couple hundred… few hundred years ago – not… in very, very recent times, spent about 200 years in an English wood. Just… just came out of space and said, ”The dickens with all that! I got ray burns on me enough” he says. And became the patron saint of a British wood. Is that right?

So when we got… we had that. And your thetan could do that. He interested himself in the affairs of animals. And Brer Bear would walk through one day and would find himself incline’. to be just a little bit nosy about something that was none of his business and he would get the severest cuff that a bear ever received – Bap! ”Just another one of them lightning storms! Humph! Humph!” and walk on down the line.

Now there are tribes in the world which today still carry forward the superstition that there are such things as guardian angels and spirits.

But the civilized world which has agreed thoroughly with the MEST universe and has made enormous progress, is very certain, extremely certain, that that is merely superstition and backing them up is the fact that spiritualism itself is about the dizziest thing anyone could get himself into.

Just go out and sit on a carrousel and speed it up to about, oh, I’d say, 80 rpm and that’s a real nice straight course compared to following spiritualism as ritualized; because it’s ritualized so that if anybody ever did contact a spirit, he would just be some spirit that would really try to knock him off like mad. It would be some spirit that was kind of trying to get a body…

I mean, these thetans are in good shape. But it’s this idiotic thetan that can’t have a body any more. He’s done too many overt acts. So if they did contact anybody so he would come around, and they say, ”Now, tell me – tell me. What will be the fate of wab-yab, so on – in case she marries the Duke of Porkpie? Uh… tell us the future.”

Well, listen: Next time you move a preclear out, you ask him, ”Tell me the future.” And he’ll give you all… he’ll give you more future, and more variety of future than you have any use for. Because he has all possible combinations of track at his disposal if he wanted to examine all of them.

But the track of the future is simply the course in history of the havingness of the present. And it’s what you do and what he does with the havingness now which makes a future.

And so you can shuffle these factors any way you want to.

The thing to do is to get down and have a paw-wow with this theta clear on the subject of ”How many havingness would we have to shift to bring about this result?” and that is logic, isn’t it?

In other words, would we send the Duke of Porkpie a new hat uh… with arsenic in the brim? And, let’s see, that disposes of that havingness. Now that makes – I’m not saying you would – go on such line, but if you were trying to decide futures, it would be on very orderly, well-understood lines. Except your latitude to dispose of that future grows as your ability to control MEST grows. When I say ”control MEST,” it’s ”How much MEST can you control?”

Well, you can control as much future as you can control MEST. And you can control as much past as you’re willing to shatter future. You can control as much past as you’re willing to take the responsibility for ruining the present.

Yes, you can control all kinds of future, but let’s not go down and ask madam Zogey or Zog-Zog or somebody of the sort to conjure up her favourite spirit and ask her what’s going to happen, because you can get better dope from your theta clear. He’s higher in tone and he knows more, and he has more abilities than any spirit that we’ll wander into Madam Zog-Zog’s academy.

You can look around all you want to. I’ve talked with some of these medium thetans, and they’re really stupid. You throw them a terrible, terrible curve. You… you just…

Isn’t that a good one? He… he developed a whole lot of… he talked about these things as entities. He hasn’t realized yet they they’re thetans that have really gone to pieces in a big way. And they’re… they’re so sold on religion and that sort of thing that you, in order to… that they consider themselves good. You show them black mass symbols, upside-down crosses, uh… daggers through the Bible uh… and all of these various odds and ends. And you just show ‘em one of these things, just throw that illusion up in front of them good and strong. Their capability to produce for instance, even illusion is pretty good. And you just throw that up good and strong and they go ”Eeeeeaaaaaowwwwww!” – they get out of there.

And the bad ones, you show them a crucifix, uh… a Bible, the proper religious symbols, make the proper words and signs and that sort of thing, and they all of a sudden look around to see where these are coming from and they see a bright spot of light, which is you, and they say ”Oh, my God! The voice of God!” and zing! Or they explode, or something. It’s fascinating! Fascinating!

You’re straight into the practical realm of spiritualism. Now think… think of it… think i… of the amount of future which you want to forecast. You’re always shoving around pieces of MEST in the hope that it’ll change a future. You want to make things easier for yourself. But primarily, you’d be much more interested in making things easier for others and squaring things around for others, and so on.

Well, if you’re willing to assume some responsibility on the line, you can always shift a little bit of MEST or get… incline somebody else to shift some, and you’ve changed the future.

You don’t do it by going around and hooking yourself on to the left ear of a fortune teller and letting her interpret what you say. No, you get up to speed, and you just do it, that’s all. So that the Prince of Monaco or something of this sort reports a big robbery of the casino and then finds all the money in his desk. The police… after he’s collected the insurance policy, of course, or something like that. And then, of course, Monaco gets up for sale and… and uh… and you’ve got somebody on hand to be bidding the highest bid – a very simple business.

You’ve got a kingdom established and then you incline a couple of… a couple of fellows to… to go around and spread the word, messianically, that uh… here’s a better kind of freedom, or something of this sort. Or… or there’s more women per square inch in this kingdom than any other place. Or… or it’s wide open…

Think of… think if you did this: If you just went around and forced open, in some fashion or another, gently – not disturbing very much – but forced upon an area of the world in which a man did not have to have a passport properly certified, properly visaed. You wouldn’t collect criminals. You’d collect a lot of revolutionaries from time to time, but mostly you’d collect people who were just terribly victimized by the incredible stupidity of bureaucracy. You think the State Department of the United States is bad, or… or that other such stateships and so forth are bad…

When the war steamrolled the nations of Europe, they shifted the boundaries of everything in all directions. And there are many, many luckless individuals who had no citizenship, actually, in their own land, were transported across the border without moving. And found themselves citizens of something else of which they had no cognizance and which, because of defeat and chaos, never did become capable of issuing them a passport.

You know that there are men walking earth today furtively, in earth’s alleyways. Why, because nobody’ll grant them an identity. They… they… they aren’t French, they aren’t German, they aren’t Russian anymore.

Some pilot, all of sudden, decides that 14 million slaves are too many, he’s in the Russian Air Force – he lands. You’d think that he’d be greeted just with wide open arms by the allies or something of the sort. They greet him all right, and they treat him nice. They, of course, want to show him the place and then send him home with some propaganda or something of the sort. And he isn’t interested in that. He’s got some sort of an idea he’d like to get out of there and get to be an airlines pilot on some of these fabulous airlines he’s heard about that fly oceans, and so forth – big ambition. He’s not interested in, and there isn’t any reason why he should be interested in, monomanically, the Russian Central Government. He’s a human being. He is potentially able and free.

God help him if he ever landed outside that border. The Russian Government’d never issue him an identity. Neither would the French. Or anybody else. And he just wanders around then in rather a fog.

Now what do you do… what would you do… what would happen if you should suddenly establish a hospital area? You know once upon a time there were shrines upon this earth run by thetans who did instantaneous healing? Nobody ever recognized it, right down to this minute, that that’s what was happening. There is one down in Ecuador. I’ve mentioned it several times and I’ve mentioned it cautiously because before we had existing techniques, the less said about this sort of things, the better.

I said there were such things as miracles. There’s one place down in South America high in the Andes which has the tremendous mountain of crutches – a mountain of crutches thrown away there by people who came there and worshipped at the shrine and went away whole. What do you think was doing that? Ginger beer?

Well, let’s be practical about these things and… and… and get our… get our sights here into a level of orientation.

There are goals and abilities to which a thetan can ascend. There are futures worth having, there are havingness worth having, things worth doing and identities worth being. These have not been supported by the artists or writers of the MEST universe.

But you don’t need a thousand poets to pave the way. They’re very bad trail blazers and they’re very good slaves.

But they’re your competion. And you’ve got to give this thetan goals and better goals than he could have had as a MEST body, because he won’t accept a wicked or… bad goal. He really won’t. He won’t be interested in it.

Well, so it’s got to be a pretty good goal. Well, there’s lots of goals; and did you ever stop and think what’s going to happen to all the thetans who get theta cleared who aren’t auditors? Well, somebody had better establish a sanctuary.

And what about all the thetans that have not been able to pick up bodies and who are completely lost and wandering around in a daze? They’re your brother and your sister, and that’s no kidding. That’s a fact. And their disability is such, and so on, as to make them uh… completely beyond our reach – unless somebody takes an interest in ‘em.

And there’s a level that’s completely outside of MEST bodies, working with more important beings, actually, than you’ll find in MEST bodies. And you say, ”What happened to Napoleon? What happened to Charles of Sweden? Where is Hannibal after he crossed the Alps?” Where are these guys? You’ll find them leaning up against a tombstone someplace wondering where they go next. Well, you can always tell them. I do every once in a while. Okay, let’s take a break.

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