View source for SOP 8-C Step V (2ACC 531215)

'''Series:''' 2nd Advanced Clinical Course (2ACC)

'''Date:''' 15 December 1953

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

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And this is December the 15th, first lecture of the day. And we are going to go over Step V, SOP 8 - C, independent of any earlier data you've gotten on the thing. I just want to give you this one, because this is not the case necessarily that you'll have a lot of trouble with, it just happens to be the case which at first glance appears to be the most resistive. And people can get sold very easily on a case being unmovable and so on, including the case itself, and so it'll just sort of putter along and putter along, putter along.

You should get fast results on a case early in the case, so it—the case never has time to make up its mind that it can't move. Because it makes up its mind "can't move," and after that, why, you have difficulty with the thing. It's a good thing to run on a case—"I'm not going to get Clear." And have him dropping dead because he's Clear, and End of Cycle and that sort of thing. Remedy it in various ways, if you find this case isn't moving.

If you don't get a perception change in any ten minutes of processing, you're up against some kind of a decision which you better find out about. I mean, if you process somebody for about ten to fifteen minutes and you don't get a—no matter how minute, some tiny perception change or something with SOP 8-C, why, then you're just running into something where the fellow isn't either communicating with you, or he isn't doing what you want him to do or— you know, there's various things here which are occurring which are outside the immediate realm of what you're doing.

Now, you could go on and beat at the case with SOP 8 - C and you would get there eventually, but what I'm talking about is that a smart auditor, when he starts auditing this case, he realizes—when he gets some faith of technique in there—he realizes that this case is probably held up for some very, very obvious reason which he isn't looking at.

I'd say, if I didn't get a communication change or a change of aspect in a case after about fifteen minutes of SOP 8-C, my first assumption would be that the case was not doing what I asked him to do. That would be my first assumption, and being suspicious of that, would immediately go into—that's a certain type of case, you see, that is a certain type of case—I would go into manual contact or something on that order.

A case that does this is not well off—just put that down. So if something doesn't happen, ten or fifteen minutes, you—the most obvious answer is that you're running, immediately and bluntly, into a communication problem between you and the preclear, and a preclear performance problem.

Unfortunately, we enter all cases at the hardest end. That's an unfortunate fact. We take the fellow in the worst condition that he will be in and go from there. And it gets easier as you go on. But if it isn't getting easier as you go on, you'd better do something about it. It's probably, as I said, some kind of a communication setup whereby the case doesn't trust you enough to permit performance.

And you say, "Give me three places where you aren't in present time."

And he says, "Okay." He got no places.

"Give me three more." And you say, "Well, that wasn't working too well because he—it isn't checking against it. Give me three places where your condition isn't in present time. Give me three places where your body isn't being responsible"—something to intrigue him a little bit rather than to be therapeutic, because believe me, the less significance you have in a process the better the process is.

And he still says, "Yep," and he'll go on that way. And he's sitting there dead calm—I mean, there's nothing happening, nothing happening.

Well, after that goes on a little bit, why, I realize that we're up against a communication problem, so I take the most obvious (my old pal Bob Heinlein coined a beautiful pronunciation—"supervisory") —I take a "supervisory" type of process whereby you or me can see the guy perform. Now, there's lots of these, see.

And you don't have to look at his bank to see that he isn't performing. It wouldn't do you any good to look at his bank. Because if you were to tell him that you could see his facsimiles and see what he was doing, he would become very suspicious of you and very upset.

If you in a Group Process, for instance, were to take somebody up in the front of the room and have him do something, and then let the other people imitate what he did in some fashion or other; even that level—he said what he mocked up, and then you have everybody else mock this up—even that level comes close to copying or seeing or duplicating, that a person cannot permit, and the case will break down. So you do something that he won't be upset because it's observed. You get the idea. I mean, you get a—one of these techniques that you can supervise.

Well, now there's a lot of these. And the most acute one for such a case— although the case will very often be insulted if he knows Scientology—is you say, "All right. Let's feel that wall. Let's feel that wall." I'll only fool with a case for a very few minutes before I'll just go right on into that. Either the case— something's happening on the case obviously and so forth, that I can observe bankwise and otherwise, or I just say, "All right, let's start in with the chair. Let's start in with the wall. Let's start in with the floor."

And once in a while, you'll hit the break point on a case. You'll just keep insisting that he gets certain there's something in the room. He's perfectly certain, he knows that, that there's something in the room. He isn't complying with any of your commands, he's doing it wrong if possible, he's checking himself at every turn so that he won't do anything, and yet he thinks that he is not too bad off. And he'll become very insulted if he qualifies Contact as a psychotic technique. It isn't. You're asking him to be certain of something.

And the best way to make him certain of something is to pick up things and put them down. In other words, reach and withdraw from MEST itself. And you walk over to the wall and tap it and say, "Come over here and feel this now. Is it there?"

And he—just sit right where he is, and he'll look … Generally a—cases perform like this, they say, "Sure it's there. I know it's there!"

You say, "Well, come over here and make sure you know it's here."

"Huhhh! No, no." And then finally he'll break down and go over and feel the wall and hit it and, "Sure, I know it's there."

You say, "All right. Now let's feel the floor there on the other side of the room." Stamp! You show him—you stamp, see? You walk around.

And he stamps on the floor. "I know it's there," he says. "What's the matter with you?"

And you say, "All right. Now let's look around the room, find the realest object in the room."

And he says, "Well, any of it—the whole room is real!"

"Well, find one that's a little more real than the other."

"All right, anything. The doorknob."

"Well, go over and grab ahold of the doorknob and rattle it, make a noise with it."

So he does this, see. (sigh) "When are we going to get down to processing?" is all he's asking himself, see? He rattles the doorknob, and then he walks over to the other side of the room and does something else that you tell him to do.

What are you doing with him? You're moving him in space. And when you have moved him in space enough, he will break down enough to permit you to evaluate for him and will then perform the techniques you ask him to do. You have beat a communication line through with a hammer and an awl. Now, you get how covert that is? That's real covert.

Well now, the funny part of it is, is very often a secondary aspect occurs. He finds out that he didn't know it was real. Yeah, he finds out all of a sudden. Walls—certain. He's kicked the wall, and he's beat the chairs around, and he's done this and he's done that in the room, and all this time he's been kind of sore at you, and—or just sullen or apathetically compliant and so on. All of a sudden he gets interested— "There's a wall here!"

You keep asking him, "You sure that's there?"

"Hm! Sure I'm sure it's there!" Then he's getting a little more interested. "There is a wall here and I, a thetan, can feel it."

Up to this time, he's been looking at everything with his MEST eyes and he—believing what the body tells him only. And now, as he gets a sufficient impact against MEST, he's getting a more or less direct contact with the MEST as a thetan, and there's where you're driving the communication line through.

Now, a case that's terribly occluded will go on and sleep away a lot of hours of processing simply because the case says, "Yes, I know the wall is there."

Now, a person doesn't have a certainty with which to compare a certainty. You see, he is as certain as he thinks certainty is; and therefore, it's very surprising to him when he finds out that there are higher certainties which he can attain. But he doesn't know he can attain these higher certainties until it's demonstrated to him, and it's demonstrated to him with all the techniques of SOP 8-C. But the case that is hanging up with you is a case which is occluded and is out of contact and is simply relying upon MEST vision and relying upon MEST touch to tell it anything is present.

In other words, you have a thetan, in this case, that is out of contact and is running total responsibility as far as the body is concerned. The body has total responsibility, total evaluation, and he's willing to accept the idea that all these techniques are valid—but you're processing a body, and the body isn't being processed. He's sitting back controlling the body, actually, and you're processing the thing that he's controlling. When you give him a command, then he makes the body perform the command, if he makes anything happen. See, you're not getting a direct process. You are not processing a thetan. You're processing a body and the thetan's in contact with the body and the body evaluates. There's a middleman in there, in the processing session, which you're not immediately cognizant of and—ten or fifteen minutes nothing happens, well, the middleman is too big and so let's just take the middleman apart.

Let's make him move his body under your command. And make him move it around visibly and so on, so that he can't get away with it in any way, shape or form. He's just got to move around. You tell him to and he does. And you've eventually evaluated for him to move the body around, and he will start to give you some attention, rather than take the attention you're giving the body.

See, you've gotten on a different circuit—you're from you the auditor to him a thetan; rather from you an auditor, to him a body, to a thetan.

Now, he's taking in the whole MEST universe on this one basis of here he is—here he is, a body, you see. And he's willing to accept the reason and logic of your argument that he is not really a body, but he knows what he sees with— he sees with his eyes; and he knows what he hears with—he hears with his ears; and he feels with his hands and so on.

Well, if you work him around for a little while, you'll break right through this, simply by giving him a direct contact of one sort or another. And you should actually work till you get such a contact. I don't care what technique you use.

A person can be very, very sane indeed, and very reasonable indeed, and yet not have an immediate and direct contact with the MEST universe. Everything is via the body and via the body communication lines. He is not convinced that he is a thetan, even though he may have been out once and popped back in. See, he just holds on to that moment for his certainty. And then he doesn't move off of that moment, by the way, and something might have frightened him half out of his wits, so one of the things to do is to handle that moment.

Well, how do you handle that moment? Well, he didn't know what happened. Well, "Where isn't that moment in present time?" is a wonderful way to do it. "Where isn't it?" That's a slow way, but a very positive way. "Where isn't this moment of shock and surprise as a thetan? Where isn't it in present time?"

And he'll start in usually on Arcturus. I mean, it's that far out. And then he'll finally come down and he'll all of a sudden say, "It isn't in present time at all!" And when he has made this decision, that thing is keyed out.

But your problem is to establish a communication system between you the auditor and the preclear, a thetan; not to establish a communication system between you, an auditor, and a body to the other person as a thetan. Therefore, using MEST symbols as communication actually does slow down your process to some degree, and it is something like a considerable triumph to be able to use MEST language and MEST symbols and achieve results on a case.

Well, there's one type of case and one level of case in SOP 8, which is Case Level V, where this is rather acute. Now, the name of that whole step is "Terminals" in SOP 8, and just because we have 8-C doesn't mean that these step numbers change process. They don't any longer mean, particularly, evaluation of a case in SOP 8-C—see, they aren't evaluating a case—but that doesn't mean that we've thrown things out.

Now, if there's a Step VIII in SOP 8, it is Duplication. Now, the—SOP 8 has—at level V, has terminals as its keynote. And this, of course, goes right over into SOP 8 - C and at 8 - C, we have Step V, exercises of the thetan on the subject of terminals.

Now, we'll find an individual unable to see anchor points inside his body. This is because he long since has decided that any anchor point is better than no anchor point, and that other bodies than his own were anchor points in the past; and he has used these bodies as anchor points in the past to such a degree that he does not believe himself capable of creating anchor points. And when he's lost these anchor points in the past, nothing takes their place. And the anchor points of his own body are not visible to him—he doesn't consider these anchor points anymore. His anchor points are ambulant: they're other bodies, they walk around, and they're here and they're there.

So what do we have here? We have a problem in relationship to anchor points, when we have terminals. Now, an electric motor has a positive and a negative terminal. Actually, positive terminal is both positive and negative, and the negative terminal is both negative and positive in order to produce a crosscurrent. The problem has not even vaguely been studied. The field of electronics is an almost virgin field; it's hardly scratched. And we have this imposition of space between these two terminals as a necessity.

Now, why is this? It's the matter that in order to have energy, you first must have space. We must have an imposition of distance between two terminals. A person must be able, then, to maintain or impose a distance between two anchor points in order to build up what you consider energy. Now, he's bought the idea of the MEST universe on a two-terminal basis.

A thetan actually doesn't have to think about it at all. He can simply say, "There is energy," and there is energy. He can say, "There is a beam going out from here," and there is a beam going out from here. He doesn't go into a large mathematical wingding just to get himself a couple of anchor points or to have himself some space. He doesn't think about it, in other words. This is not necessarily built in—he can do this in numerous ways. But what he can do is mistake the MEST universe anchor points which he has run into, for anchor points he has created or owns actually.

Now, you know, he's got anchor points. So he's done a change there. This girl, for instance, has said, "My husband. My husband. My husband." Now, she might as well have been saying all this time, "My anchor point. My anchor point. My anchor point." She gets lost when the husband is too far away. That's her anchor point. And a man—"My wife," you see. "My anchor point. My anchor point. My anchor point."

"My mother, my father"—these are anchor points. And these people are actually used in the same way as one would use anchor points to create space. A person creates space with Mother and Father. He hasn't any home, except where Mother and Father have made a home. And if he's too sold on Mother and Father as anchor points—as vitally necessary anchor points—then ever afterwards in his life, he will not feel capable of making a home.

You've heard of the girl who was always going home to Mother. The boy— that's what they do today. Today, the boys cut their hair in a sort of a duck part in the back, and, I think, wear little ribbons on it and they're real cute— they're real cute. The teenage boys you see around don't look—they don't wear their shirts open because there's no hair on their chests. But they have bought "momism," Philip Wylie's "momism," to a markable extent.

A hot country, by the way, which kicks in a number of prenatals, will "effeminate"—to coin a word—the male sex quite rapidly. And you'll see that they become quite feminine in their characteristics. And the women will reverse the other way to. For instance, the only real mean, vicious warriors that you read about or hear about in Arabian countries are women. That's a complete reversal. By the way, the kingdom of Semiramis was in the Middle East, the area—that's a semimythical kingdom, it actually existed. The Amazons, the women warriors and so forth— that's hot-country stuff, see? Kicked around in valence.

Well, to be very practical about this, it's the boy today who goes home to Mother. There isn't the girl so much anymore—the girls are getting a little tougher.

But here you have this pathetic picture of a couple—they get married, and their fathers and mothers are to such a degree anchor points for them that they themselves are incapable of making a home. In other words, they can't have any space. Why? Because the anchor points are elsewhere. And they sort of get the idea, "Well, we ought to live—ought to live with Papa and Mama and so forth." This is—the only way they could have a home, you see, would be to have it with anchor points. That's how they build space. Because they've made the prime error of saying that an anchor point is a person. And what do you know, a person who has done this can't see the anchor points in his own body; they're not visible to him, that's all. He's in a very bad way in this respect.

Well, let's say he loses somebody that he's been very close to for a long time but has fought with considerably, and he loses this person. Well, we have a situation there where he feels that one of the terminals of the GE vanishes. We're still talking about Step V, you see. The terminal vanishes and he's missing some anchor points out of his body which were never in his body. That's interesting, isn't it? He'll be missing the whole anchor-point terminal, you might say—the whole front terminal of the body is missing.

Well, he knows he can't create any energy, and that's the thing that makes a fellow level V—he knows he can't create energy. He has to depend upon the stomach to create energy. He has to depend upon other animals to chew up MEST and by some necromancy turn this into energy which life can use. Although life—the amount of actual energy which life burns is quite slight indeed. You see this? He's—must depend upon the body having the proper number of terminals, for him to have any energy.

He doesn't know just "I can't create energy," by the way—his motto is, "I can't create." Fellow gets down along V, that's the big sorrow of his life; that's his own shame and so on. It's just this motto, and it says, "I can't create"— that's what it says, right there.

So he thinks he has to have a proper number of terminals to interchange one to the other, like an electric motor or something, in order to have sufficient energy in order to make something. And he must get that energy from his stomach—he's running on a backwards system, in other words. He's—his stomach is much more important than his head; having enough to eat is more important than having some space and so on. He's—this is a tremendous dependency. So that his entire economic problem is one of food, and is—that's the way he goes, he—"Well, you have to eat" would be one of the first things that he would assure you. "You have to eat."

Only, do you? Well, it's pretty hard for—to take somebody at Step level V, and say, "You know you actually are competent to furnish enough energy for the body to go on functioning for some time." He's—"Well, that's theoretically possible," he says and so forth, "but personally, I'm not going to try it."

Of course, this universe is—can only exist as long as you don't create. Its motto is, "If you start creating, why, I'm done, so you better not create." And therefore, you get people who have agreed with it very thoroughly saying that they're incapable of creation, that nobody ever gets a new idea. They even get down to this point: "There are no new ideas, they're just remade ideas that one learns from the MEST universe. And we can find all these ideas actually, natively, in nature and we can trace back every idea there is. And this proves conclusively that you're mud, you're mud, you're mud, and no mud ever made energy, so you can't make energy." And you have these boys, you could call them the "priests of fear," giving forth in practically every educational institution in any civilization on Earth today, teaching people that they can't create.

Well, there's also this one: teaching them special methods of creation. You know, if they do so-and-so and if they paint with their left hand and hold their brushes between the big toe and the little toe and so forth, they will be able to create someday.

Well, all you have to undo is this chain of agreement on the subject of "cannot create," and you will have resolved the havingness of a V. It sometimes can be rather arduous for you, but there are many techniques by which this is possible. Simply this technique: "Certainty I can create; certainty I can't create" in matched terminals.

Now, if you could only get him to work it long enough, you would bring him out of the bushes with old Self Analysis, but it's a long, long, long road. Why is it a long road? Well, it's because you're getting—at V, you see, it is a long road—other step levels it isn't. But we get him up there to a point of where we're putting—he's putting up terminals, and all of a sudden he says, "You know, this energy which I seem to be employing here and putting terminals together with … You know, it's not coming from anyplace else. This is very peculiar. You know I must be putting it there?" And he eventually learns that.

He learns that all he's got to do is say, "There is a man there and there's that many watts of energy contained in that image," and he's got it. Now, he's proven it to himself. So what Self Analysis does really is prove to somebody they can create.

Well, what about a V? Because he's got an unmocker that unmocks the terminal before he can see the terminal. And he gets to a point in working Self Analysis where he sees the mock-up for a—oh, the tiniest instant, and then he gets to see it longer, and he gets to see it longer and longer and longer. If he just keeps at it, he'll eventually get an image. And this image, of course, to him is a terminal, because he has made an anchor point. The moment he has relearned or realized that he himself can make an anchor point, then this tremendous dependence upon MEST universe anchor points and their scarcities, dependence upon other bodies to be these images, devaluates. And when that devaluates, he comes up to a realization that he himself can put up terminals.

And if he's still sold on the idea that he has to put up two terminals and they've got to interchange in some weird fashion like an electric motor does for him to have some energy, why, that's still a very marked and remarkable gain.

Now, you wonder why people, as they drift down in havingness, have this Assumption engram in front of their faces—this Assumption body. Why do they have this Assumption body in front of their faces? Hanging on to their mouth and hanging on to the throat—a black body. Many preclears have this. You can run it, it turns on considerable heat.

Well, one of the fastest ways I know to run the Assumption body is just have a fellow get the idea of being—all of a sudden losing the front terminal of the body and quickly grabbing the first thing he can lay his hands on, and putting something in its place. You see that? So, of course, the first thing he grabs hold of is his own Assumption body, which is a black body, which will sit there and operate as a terminal.

And then you as an auditor come along and try to plow away these black curtains. Well, you're not going to plow away the black curtains—it's one of these circular problems—so long as he has to have a front terminal. Because if he doesn't have a front terminal, then he knows he won't live, because he has to have energy to live, and so he isn't going to get rid of this. So, the shortest route through this problem on such a case is just the exercise I said. Get the idea of his body standing there, and all of a sudden, no front terminal; and quickly grabbing and putting in the place of this newly missing front terminal, the Assumption body. He'll throw the Assumption away after a very short time, because he realizes in the first place that he didn't ever have that many Assumption bodies.

You'll get him to do this fifteen or twenty times—you're putting up black bodies, and he can get those, you see, with ease, and he says, "Where the dickens are all these black bodies coming from? Well, I must be making them!" And you've made him take over the automaticity which does create them for him.

Well, he has an automaticity which uncreates his ability to create energy. This is the "Frankenstein effect." During his life, he has created things which kept on going but of which he had no further control. He created something and then ceased to control it. But that's kind of how this universe gets there, you know? Everybody sets everything up automatic, and at length, the whole universe is automatic.

So we have this problem with such a case: the fear of his own force. Not just fear of force, it's fear of his own force.

We have with this case, along with create, we have beauty. He can't create something beautiful. This is what is upsetting to him, and is the most upsetting condition which you could mention to such a case—the creation of something beautiful. So you'll ordinarily find that the front terminal which turned up missing some time in his life and made everything go black, was something which was to him beautiful. It was possibly her mother or his mother. It was a loved one, something on that order, or a beautiful animal, or could be a lot of things, but it will be in—connected in there with beauty. And he has replaced that with ugliness. That's sort of to teach himself a lesson, you know.

To ferret out exactly what the individual is doing in this is quite a trick, because he doesn't invite you into his confidence because he isn't in his own confidence. He doesn't trust himself enough to inform himself. You want to know why he's so blank on what he's actually doing, well, he doesn't trust himself with that much information. That sounds awfully silly, but it's true. Self-trust is gone. He feels that if he suddenly started creating a great deal of energy, he would in a very, very short time destroy his whole beingness.

Now, as you run almost any technique on him, after a while he will become suspicious—I mean any technique directed toward the rehabilitation of his creation of energy. And he's liable to become a little bit suspicious and shy off and turn it all off again after you've worked so hard. Because, you see, if he generated the energy of which he was natively capable while he is still inside the body, he would blow its brains out. So we get the limiting factor, and again we get this little circular effect. I mean, one factor leading to another factor, leading to another problem and back to the first problem again, as though they're all tied in very neatly.

Well, where can we enter this neat little circle of problems and find a point which is vulnerable to auditing? Well, there are fortunately a great many of them. An easy one is just the straight remedy of the idea of terminals. You know, this exercise I mentioned to you there. He gets an idea of his body standing there—I don't care where it is, you'll find he's always got a missing face. He's got a missing front to his body. That's a peculiarity with this case. When he starts to get bodies, the fronts of them are gone. Furthermore, he has very little feeling in the front of his body—his nose is usually anesthesed and so on.

Well, you see, he had a collapsed terminal with some other body, and then what he got was this effect of this other body leaving him. An anchor point must be predictable, and this other person proved unpredictable. This person proved unpredictable and left him and so forth, and now he doesn't have an anchor point there.

Well, the first action that he did on the loss or the threat of loss of this person, was to pick up the nearest body he could lay his hands on—which was the this-lifetime Assumption body with which he joined the infant—and he slams that in place of the terminal. Now, he was pretty bad off by the time he got to that baby, in order for him to do this trick. In effect, you're running an engram. It's the engram of the loss of a body which he considered a necessary terminal. You could just treat it like that and run it as an engram, because it is an engram which will run on the V. It'll run as an engram because he's stuck in it. He stuck himself in it.

Now, you could make him make black curtains, you could make him do all sorts of things, but a very much more effective method of handling it—I point out to you again, I pointed out very early in this course—is you get spheres of blackness, one after the other, new spheres of blackness. We'll take—around his occlusion we will put and drop one sphere. And we'll call that sphere 1. Now outside of that, we will drop another black sphere. (He can do this, by the way, it's quite interesting.) And you drop this second black sphere, and now he looks through sphere 1 at sphere 2, and by numbering them, your auditing clarity is much increased—you don't get too involved with it.

Now you have him put sphere 3 around his head and shoulders and have that outside sphere 2, and now have him look through sphere 2 at sphere 3. Now have him put sphere 4 out there, and so on. You're expanding his space, of course. More important than that, you're setting up and making barriers disappear.

Now, when a person has gotten into an automaticity or has had this technique worked upon him, you may have to handle it as an automaticity. In other words, he got into grief charges or something of the sort—you should look those over as possible hang-ups. And a slow but very thorough method of getting rid of something like that is "Where isn't that condition in present time?"—three places. Until he finally achieves the complete certainty that it is not in present time.

Another method of handling it is to handle it with Step VIII, SOP 8-C, which is Duplication. How do you handle it with that? Well, the least significance, the better. You merely handle duplication by putting out space to this degree: You have him locate places in his environment, and put in those places the thought that the place or structure or whatever is there, or the body, can duplicate or must duplicate, cannot duplicate or must not duplicate. And you do this monotonously, just one after the other.

By the time you've solved "can't" or "cannot duplicate," you've solved creation, because creation itself is nullified by the continuous carping criticism of people that what has been created is just like somebody else's or something else's. And that is the first and foremost insidious level of criticism. It is the mission of the critic to keep everybody original. And if everybody can be kept original, you'll get a declining race of artists; and the one thing a critic cannot be is an artist.

It's like people say—what is an editor? An editor is a failed writer. What is a critic? A critic is a failed artist. And it's the mission of the critic to keep others from being arty. And the way he does it is to explain to everybody that it's been done before—and make duplication a condemnation.

They say of some old master, "Well, it's just a copy." This flabbergasted me one time when I was a boy. I saw this nice painting which was a copy of a Rembrandt, and it had been done very well, and it wasn't all filthy dirty and cracked the way the original Rembrandt was. And it looked very good, and it was bright and fresh, and it—you couldn't tell the difference between it and the original as far as the line and color was concerned, except the color was better. And it was a copy. It was very well done. And the guide in this museum (he had a bad time with me, I think I was about eight or nine) he said, "This is the Rembrandt, and this is a copy of it as the original must have looked in its original coloring," and so forth.

And I looked at this copy and I said, "Gee! That's a good picture."

And he said, "Yes, but it's only a copy"—squelchingly.

"Well, it's a better picture than the other one!"

And the other people who were in that museum at that time got interested in this argument, because I did not care who I argued with when I was very young; I argued very loudly, too. And I won—if by winning, the other fellow simply shuts up and walks away with a sort of beaten, confused look. Because the truth of the matter was, the copy was better than the Rembrandt.

"Well," one says then, "but the fellow who did the copy of the Rembrandt didn't conceive the original idea, the composition, the thought, the mood and so forth, which went into it." Well, that's true—did Rembrandt? Well, you don't know that one.

But they say this fellow Shakespeare—you know, they tried to damn him down the ages by saying, you know, "Why, he just took this old Dutch play— he took this play from the Netherlands, and he took this and that, and he stole from everybody," and so on. But you know, the guy could write too well. He is too good! And his wealth and flow and rhythm is such, and—honest, he just could have just copied ideas line for line and word for word, and nobody ever would have been able to have made anything stick. So, you see how invalid— or maybe you don't—how invalid criticism is, that something is a duplication. They've tried to damn even Shakespeare, in that he duplicated old plots.

They teach, by the way, these poor devils that go to the university to learn how to write—a big survey demonstrates that practically the last way to become a writer is to go to a university. It is the last way. That's the way you become an editor and starve to death. So the main trouble with all creation, according to these people, is that you can only duplicate. And then they make duplication a condemnation.

Well, let's now assume that you can only duplicate—just for the word— and just, you know, let's just assume that you can only duplicate; that someplace there is the prime idea and you can only duplicate that basic idea. Well, would this mean immediately that there would be no art anyplace? No. It wouldn't mean that. It might be true, you see, that you can only duplicate. But why all the condemnation about it? Why do people come around and they say, "Well, it was a very good movie, but it was an old plot," and so on. The only good movies I've seen lately had very old plots.

They teach in the modern university—huh! teach!—they drive down people's throats, the idea that there are only eight basic dramatic situations and fifty-seven plots. I've said this several times, and I purposely scramble the numbers, because this is the most idiotic thing you ever heard of.

Several of us sat down one time and wrote down about eighty-five dramatic situations. And we demonstrated to a professor who was in our midst—he was a literary agent, and he was sort of scum, he kind of hung around New York. He had PhDs and GDQs and he'd been the Professor of Literature at Princeton and Harvard and Yale and so forth—oh, he was just a tramp. So anyhow, this fellow had dared open this argument. So a bunch of us sat around half—I'm afraid in my artistic days, that I rather followed the fashion of the Village— half-drunk. The others were—myself, of course, I never drank—used a fire hose. Anyway … (audience laughter)

The whole problem, all of a sudden, revolved on this fact: Well, we had played it unfair! There were only thirty-six dramatic situations, but the fact that we had made up eighty-five merely proved that we had originated the remainder! And what was meant by the only basic dramatic situations there were which an author could possibly have, were these thirty-six dramatic situations and so on. And just because we had gone and added some new dramatic situations did not make the statement that there were only thirty-six dramatic—basic dramatic situations incorrect!

After we had unraveled this and thrown him out, why, we had an insight into why people go through universities and give up writing as a career promptly. Yes, it's marvelous. But there is the same logic.

Now, you may think I'm just telling you an interesting story, but I'm trying to tell you something about a preclear, believe me. Trying to tell you something about life. You see, they use some kind of a specious or spurious logic to prove to you that you cannot be source. And they get "you can't be source" mixed up with "you can't be original." Just like you don't dare own anything if you didn't create it—that's unreasonable too. You can own anything. It doesn't matter what you own. You could have created it or not have created it, you could still own it. You can still have things you didn't create. There's no great liability in this.

But again, let's untangle this with a preclear—he'll untangle it, by the way, as his processes continue, but the—that being original is not duplicating. You see, he's got the idea that you can't duplicate and be original. Oh yes, you can! You can duplicate van Gogh in 1936 and be the person in 1936 who did a duplicate of van Gogh, and you therefore have been original. You're the "only one." And that's what everybody wants the artist to play: the "only one" game.

And that's how you get people to play this game, the "only one," you see? Is demonstrate to them that they can only duplicate, and this challenges them into being original. And as soon as they are sufficiently challenged into being original, they become the "only one" with all of its liabilities and fall off on about three-quarters of the dynamics right at that point—pam! They can't have friends, they can't associate with people, they have to be careful, they don't dare duplicate the people they're talking to.

Another thing runs through the society—it's just the same equation, but it's on a different level—and that is, "Well, he's very weak, he just takes on the characteristics of whoever he's talking to." Oh boy, there's a dangerous man; there's a dangerous man. Real dangerous. He talks to a tramp, he talks to a race driver, he talks to a business executive, and immediately afterwards, any one of these people could just swear that this fellow was a business executive or a tramp or a race driver. There's a dangerous man. Be careful of him, because he doesn't care what he does. He's willing to duplicate anybody.

Now, how much knowledge does it take to do this? None, if you're good. If you're real good, all you have to do is read the other fellow's bank. You can be yourself and everybody else too, and that's a very happy frame of mind. No slightest lack of action in that.

Then there's the fellow who's perfectly willing to be his own attack. There's also a dangerous man. He's willing to be the source of entheta as well as the source of theta concerning his own activities.

There's one famous director out in Hollywood (I won't mention his name, but—because I promised him I wouldn't give him away) who is terribly interesting.

He goes down—he puts on an old, decayed-looking, almost Shakespearean outfit, you know, a suit of clothes kind of black and moldy—obviously an actor out of work. And goes down into the bars of Hollywood and spreads all the bad rumors about himself. The most vile and violent rumors he will put into motion. And the reason he does this is because nobody is good enough to dream them up. He just has lost all confidence in the ability of this society to properly keep his name in abhorrence, so he does it himself. And you'll go up to see him some night and he'll say, "I'm sorry, I'm busy tonight." Now, he's one of these fellows that changes around easily, and one of these fellows who is actually a terrific individualist.

You see him on a set—see him on a set directing actors, something like that. He goes through this action, and he walks through the action. And you wonder why in the name of common sense he doesn't play the part, because he's got the exact nuances, everything—all the meaning and intelligibilities of the entire part is right there. He's showing some girl how she should walk in and offer a flower to this soldier, you see, and he walks in and offers a flower to the soldier.

Now, society condemns such a person because he's dangerous. But they condemn him this way: They condemn him by saying that that is weak. It is weak. That's wishy-washy. It's sort of condemned. They've dropped the gate on that.

The only way to be safe from a burglar is to be able to be—bang!—the burglar. Have him put his gun in his pocket and walk out the door. Be out on the sidewalk and then have him—just leave him at that point, and he wonders what he's doing outside the house. That's the time for him to do some thinking.

Now, it's not weak to do that, because every person I know who does that extremely well backs it all up with an enormous individuality and a great deal of originality. In other words, there is a direct line between the ability to duplicate completely anything and everything, and to originate. And if one can duplicate anything and everything, one, by the experience I have—all the observations of such people, I know many such people—they originate; they originate ideas. Furthermore, they don't run reliably a cycle of action. They're not reliable on the cycle of action line to this end: They can't be forced to complete an unsuccessful action. It doesn't bother them a bit, when the action is unsuccessful, to abandon it.

All they've got to see is that the motion picture is just not getting box office. It's been out, they reviewed it in the little theater out at Sand Point, and the audience sat there, and some of them were seen to hold their noses. And the fellow would take a look at this, he'll watch it through fifteen frames of this sort of thing, he'll take a look at that audience reaction, doesn't even wait for the cards. He doesn't sneak out the back door, he simply walks up the aisle and gets into his car and goes home and sits down with his notes, trying to figure out what this next picture is going to be—not having learned a thing, except that audiences are unreliable. That's all they learn, by the way—they learn that MEST is not always reliable. It—MEST is reliable when it does what they say it should and it is unreliable otherwise.

Now, contrast this state of mind with a fellow who's being terribly careful and very afraid that he will duplicate somebody, who is very careful that he has authority for everything he says. Contrast that man, and contrast their cases. You'll find the first one—back out of his head rather easily. He may not be as careful of his condition as somebody else, but he sure can mend it in a hurry. He can change it rapidly.

Now we'll take this in comparison to somebody who depends upon an authority on agreement, who would sit in that theater after that box office fiasco, see—he would sit there and carefully look over the reaction of the audience to discover what it was in the play that they did not like so that he would not repeat the same thing the second time. That's what that fellow would do. And that fellow will fail. Because MEST is very unreliable; it doesn't agree with one a lot of the time. But this is just so much the worst for MEST, according to the first person I was telling you about. And the other person says, "Well, you know, I just don't seem to be able to agree with MEST anymore—I'm failing." Get the difference? And he doesn't get out of his head.

Now, the case you're looking at can't create, but if he did create he would care desperately about what he had created. He would nourish it, he would work with it, he would pet it. And he wouldn't bother to create anything else—he'd just make that one thing endure, endure, endure, endure, endure.

It is completely tolerable to the first kind of person I mentioned, who is liable to be most anybody, it's completely tolerable to him that something he's doing—he goes on doing, he goes on duplicating doing it and that it survives. This is completely tolerable. I mean, there's nothing wrong with this, he doesn't have to destroy it just because it's going on surviving. And it doesn't become particularly boring, it has its moments and it has its points, but it doesn't stop him from being something else at the same time elsewhere. I mean, he doesn't have to then slavishly follow, and he doesn't have to depart into some other field just for randomity. In other words, he doesn't have to. And there we get the main difference.

The fellow who doesn't have to can accomplish more things in less time in more fields—see, just because he doesn't have to. He also has the idea that it isn't important. But he is the fellow who, although things are not important to him, he actually gets things done—mostly because he can't quite help getting things done. That's probably the only thing that's wrong with him. He starts to set up something, it gets done.

Well, now let's take the other fellow who has to do something. He's under a compulsion that if he starts a course of action he's got to finish it. He's got to carry everything through to its inevitable end. Therefore, cycle of action is something that does wonders for his state of mind. You can remedy anything that's wrong with his mind, if you're just remedying that, with just cycle of action. Just sit there and get imaginative on how many kinds of actions could this person have engaged upon in his lifetime.

Now, we remedy his stomach trouble by having things eat his stomach. We have wolves and babies and fathers and so forth, eat his stomach. We get it et up in quantity, too. And after we've had his stomach eaten enough, we've solved the overt act-motivator situation on eating. That's generally the trouble, down-on-the-havingness cases. They have, in addition to everything else, some trouble with their stomach, some trouble with eating. Why do they have this? It's because they're already into overt act-motivator sequence, and the stomach commits an overt act every time it growls. Every time it digests a new piece of food, it's committed an overt act against some animal or some life form someplace, so it's terribly overburdened on the subject. And the fellow— stomach is actually motivator-hungry. I don't care what shape he's in, if his case level is that, he's motivator-hungry on the subject of stomachs.

Well, the one way to solve this which is the simplest, stupidest way to solve it, is just have him—just getting the idea of—he says, "Well, I can only get a black mock-up."

"Okay, get a black stomach sitting there in the blackness. Now have a black wolf eat it."

He can get some perception of this happening, by the way. And we just go on and have his stomach eaten, and his stomach eaten, and his stomach eaten, on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on. And what do you know? He'll get off the overt act-motivator sequence enough to get less compulsive about eating. And when he's less compulsive about eating, he's less compulsive about having to have energy from the world around him, and becomes a little more capable of giving the energy out himself.

Now, this is an inflow universe. Everything flows in on the thetan. To be source, as I've demonstrated to you before—I gave you a trick question on an examination, "What's the source of sunlight?" And the answer to that is the sun. It's nothing else but sun, merely because it's the start of the photon. Source—start. Don't look deeper into significance.

Now, the thetan has to be able to outflow energy to be convinced that he can create energy. Because if he creates energy, he's going to outflow it. So this outflow of energy, as it goes out, of course can furnish energy to other things. So he gets into an interchange of energy problem rather than total absorption of energy.

And a thetan is in as good a shape as he can outflow, and is in as bad a shape as he is being inflowed on. And that's very, very crude—it isn't—doesn't hold true all the way up the line. But as far as a person here on this universe, the thetan—this level, Homo sapiens and so forth—a person is as well off as he can outflow, and as bad off as he's inflowed on. I mean, it's just a rough rule; doesn't particularly mean anything.

Well, the thing that you've got to convince this case level of, is that he can create. There are many ways to do that—I've given you a lot of them.

One of them is Certainty Processing by changing postulates around. You have him put the postulate up "I can create," and move it all around, but stop it each time and fix it. You know, move it to three new positions and stop it and fix it each time in those positions before he moves it on. That'll give him double exercise on it. And he moves "I can create" around, "I can create"—even though he knows he can't. And then you have him put this postulate up, with great certainty in it, "I can't create," and you have him move that around. And you have him push that around all over the place—starting it, moving it to a new place, and then making it stick there for a moment; and then moving it to a new place and then making it stick there for a moment; and moving it to a new place and making it stick there for a moment; and back again, over the same course or on a different course. "I can create. I can't create."

"I can manufacture energy" and "I must have energy manufactured for me," and "I need energy" and "I don't need energy." These are all ideas that are moved around in this fashion.

Now, they make a fellow kind of sick. Why—why do such techniques like duplicate, duplicate, duplicate, "I can't duplicate" put into the walls round and round and round, make a fellow sick at his stomach?

Well, a fellow depends upon his stomach for his energy. If a fellow is dependent upon the stomach for energy, why, then of course, techniques which rehabilitate his energy will first off—bing!—make his stomach, which is motivator-hungry as well as food-hungry, sick.

So he, of course—duplication goes straight into the stomach.

The second dynamic, sex, is secondary to eating. The wisdom of the great circles of thinking of this world has been a very great wonder to me ever since I was a little boy, and for a long time before that.

It was just this idea that Sigmund Freud was right or wrong because he said, "Sex was all," and others said he should have said that eating had something to do with it too. And in the biggest psychiatric centers of the world, they would demonstrate that sex—that Freud was wrong, because they would say, "Now here is a man who is sex-hungry, but he is also hungry for food, and you put a beautiful naked woman alongside of him and you put a plate of food in front of him, why, you'll find out that he will eat the food first. And so by this, we have determined whether or not Freud is right or wrong."

Well, from such great wisdom from such little tiny kernels of action, perhaps something can grow. But I rather doubt that it will. But when you're using these postulates which I just gave you, remember to put them into buildings, walls and so forth, so that your preclear is permitted to make space with those very postulates.

Okay.

SOP 8-C: STEP V PAGE 15 2ACC-23B - 15.12.53

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