View source for SOP Assessment (cont.) (PDC 521213)

'''Series:''' PDC

'''Date:''' 13 December 1952

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

----

← [[Lecture_Index_PDC|Back to Series]]

Now continuing the third lecture, December the 13th, continuing assessment and the use of Standard Operating Procedure, you’ll notice that an assessment, just at the beginning of the case, will not show up as much as an assessment taken a little bit later in the case. Run the case a few hours, and take another assessment.

The reason for this is, is you’ve shifted the values of the preclear and as we saw once before, you take off an effort band of some sort or another, and an emotional band will show up and so forth.

Now, you are assessing against a cycle of action. As you well know, a cycle of action is from 40 to 0.0 on the tone scale, but is… any area of it can be a small cycle with the same names. Whether you’ve got the broad cycle, the grand scale… Well, you’re really just assessing against the grand scale, so you don’t have to worry anything more about that.

In your textbook you’ll find the cycle of actions… the cycles of action are listed. There’s Start, Change, Stop. Creation, Alteration, Destruction. Be, Do, Have. Space, Energy, Time.

These are some of them. And you could really carry forward an assessment using each point of each cycle of action, if you wanted to. You could take all the cycles of action and then take every noun of which you had any possible knowledge. You could feed these things through and it would… you see, you could expand this assessment out. It isn’t a finitely small or a finitely large thing.

I gave the preclear the first day here – you take this relatively simple assessment, you just keep going over that assessment.

Or you can take a great big assessment, that’d be every point of our cycle of action, and every cycle of action, against every noun that you could collect anyplace. Be interesting, wouldn’t it?

That… that… oh, boy! You could probably take up – if you gave these things fast, you could plot this all out, you would have quite an assessment on your hands.

Now it’s probable that I will get down and build you a chart for assessment. Build you a big chart for assessment, so that your… your chart could be worked rather automatically and it’d give you the obvious mock-ups which you had to care for. But you could build that chart yourself without any trouble by simply taking cycles of action played against all available objects and nouns.

Now to go any further than this walks one into abstraction. You really needn’t go much further than this to get a good assessment of your preclear. Once you’ve gotten the assessment, find out what he can do.

For instance, we didn’t have an assessment on a preclear here and so a preclear’s hands started to disappear on an E-Meter.

The preclear’s sitting there and he’s changing postulates or something of the sort, and all of a sudden he says, „My hands are starting to go cold.“ Well, you find out what postulates he just got through changing. Just go back over this and find out what postulates he’s changing.

I don’t have to die,“ and his hands started to turn cold on him. Oh, boy! What do you do? You just run the living daylights out of dying. You have him dying and his relatives dying and so forth.

Well, if you were doing an assessment at the time, or if you just had him on an E-Meter, you could just mention – let’s see, „Mother dying; Father dying; Grandfather dying; Grandmother dying; women dying; men dying; children dying.“ All of sudden, you hit ‘children dying’ and maybe the machine goes Booooooom’. Well, you’d save yourself a few minutes of time there by just selecting out and having children die. Do you see how that would work?

By working with assessments – whether they’re done formally, or you stop in the middle of a session, sort of, and just ask him a few odds and ends of this and that – why, you find lots of material.

Well, this preclear’s hands went cold on him. Nothing was done about them, because no check was made on the… no check was made on what postulate he had just been working with. And if that hadn’t been immediately discovered… Of course, the obvious thing is just start him handling ‘hands’.

Now anywhere in any mock-up that you can possibly slide it in, slide in electricity, ribbons of energy, sparks and beams. Any place you can slide these in, on a mock-up.

You’re working ‘hands’, well, let’s put sparks on the toes. You’re working ‘bodies in coffins’, let’s put some blue light and some red sparks and things like that, top and bottom of the coffin. Let’s go ahead with this, in other words, and uh… and uh… work it out – IN TERMS OF FORCE. And that, to a thetan, is force, flow, electronics, and so on.

Now if you’ve run into very heavy flows of course, you can run hoses or firehoses or something. Or you can simply go on working with objects. You’ll be surprised. You see, I’m having… it’s a little bit difficult communicating… communicating a simplicity to you. I get questions which tell me that you want a… you want a highly regimented uh… ‘I don’t have to think’ variety of thing. And to tell you the truth, you can’t process somebody without thinking. Uh… of course, you can just be an E-Meter and just sit there and be an E-Meter. But I’ve never seen an E-Meter make anybody well yet, unless there’s somebody reading the meter. It’s a very necessary piece of equipment to an auditor, but uh… unless he’s willing to look at the needle and find out what it’s doing and why it’s doing it…

I said, we… we suddenly start to get drops on everything across the boards. Well, the best can be said for this preclear is this preclear drops on everything. And some other preclear, we get nothing but indecision, indecision, indecision. Well, for heaven’s sakes! Know something about the anatomy of ‘maybe’. Of course your preclear is going to be very indecisive about creation and destruction and everything else if this preclear’s sitting in a lot of big ‘maybes’.

So let’s get an object here and then an object there. And let’s work until we can tell if an object is one place or if it’s another place.

The first thing about a ‘maybe’ is that it’s confusion of location. It’s a confusion of beingness, a confusion of doingness, a confusion of havingness. And it’s too badly balanced to resolve itself. In other words, it’s all balancing everything, balancing everything else, and the fellow just can’t make up his mind about it.

Well, the way to do that is to differentiate. And the way you differentiate is to put things… one thing in one location and then a thing in another location and then another thing in some other location. Simple, simple – nothing to it.

Take the first Q, Q-l. If one can do that, one can differentiate. If he can do that, he can start and stop at will. See, all those cycles of action proceed out of Q-1 – very intimate. And it’s much more important in processing to make something change in location or to unmock some real universe thing than it is to indulge in a lot of speculation about it.

This is action processing if there ever was one. Keep things moving, if you possibly can.

And in an assessment, you don’t have to be very particular, because the points necessary to be gotten on the case will show up with exclamation points with great ease. You won’t have any trouble locating something on this case. You’re going to get a drop. And if you just ran over all eight dynamics on „Are you willing to create?“ And the fellow says, „Under what circumstances?“ Or „When would I create it?“ Or „What am I going to do about it?“ He’s nervous about creating it, that you can bet your bottom dollar. He doesn’t want to take the responsibility for creating, so he’ll create it for somebody else. Get the idea?

So, we’ve got an upset about creation. And what’ll solve that upset about creating things? Just creating mock-ups, that’s all. Just let him go ahead and create ‘em. Then take another assessment and find out what specific things are standing in the road.

This person says, „Destroy. Well, why would I destroy it? Why shouldn’t I destroy it? I don’t know whether I want to destroy it.“ He’s nervous about destroying it, isn’t he? He doesn’t want to take the responsibility for destroying it. Therefore he can’t handle the force of destruction concerning it, and it becomes a very, very simple thing, then, to process him or to assess him. You just get him to a point where he can at least make something disappear. You’ll find out that he’s most willing to destroy a worthless object. Get some object he’s utterly certain is completely worthless to everybody and everything, including himself, and then he’ll get a clean destruction on it, Let’s take a chewing gum wrapper, or let’s take some chewing gum, let’s go find some chewing gum under a theater seat somewhere. And then let’s very carefully take this chewing gum and make it get smaller or bigger. Or drop it someplace else, so that it will never be in the ken of man again. Well, that is next door to destruction, see? And by this gradient scale work it on up.

I say, you could do the Grand Scale assessment, or you could do just a little assessment. But you certainly better ask him about these things: the lists of relatives and associates as contained in the HANDBOOK FOR PRECLEARS and the list of body parts contained in the HANDBOOK FOR PRECLEARS. I’ll get around to writing all these things up for you.

You should ask him about these things. You should ask him about the dynamics, his body and peoples, that are at the trouble, more or less, with everybody. And you’ll run slam bang into the computation of this case immediately. „Would you create Grandma?“ Wham! „Oh, you mean you wouldn’t create Grandma?“

I felt bad ever since Grandma…“

I felt bad ever since Grandma departed this life.“

What do you do? You didn’t have to go any further than that. We’ve got him stuck right away in an assessment on Grandma. You can go the rest of the way, if you want to assess the rest of the case, but you discovered a HECK of a DROP! That’s all you’re looking for is a WHALE OF A DROP! And all you see is little, tiny drops.’ And you want that thing going off the pin!

And by the way, I’ll… I’ll give an assessment just as long as the machine is still in working order. But when it starts to be threatened as to its working capabilities, why I’ll drop the thing and start processing. That’s a good rule to follow. Just don’t… don’t be… don’t think you have to snoop in with a magnifying glass into the preclear’s life. What you’re looking for is probably as obvious as this MEST universe.

Now how do you fix Grandma? Gradient scale of Grandma. We finally get to a point where we got the… a sidewalk that Grandma once walked on. He doesn’t know she walked on this sidewalk, but he supposes she might have. And what do we do to it? We mark it all up or we do something to it or other. And then we get something else that Grandma might have had something to do with, and we vaguely walk in until we’ve finally got an old, very used, third-rate shoelace that is all worn out. And Grandma’s thrown away, and we’ve got something to do that to. And uh… we can start it and stop it and change it.

And what do you do with these items? You put them in front of the preclear, behind the preclear, above the preclear, to the sides of the preclear and below the preclear and put them at a distance and put them up close. That’s what you do with ‘em. And you change them in color. And you change them in size. And of course you change the object from one object to another object. You change the sidewalk to a cow path. And you change the cow path to a boulevard. And you change the boulevard to an eight pass, super- duper highway which you change back to a cow path which you change back to a sidewalk. Just keep altering this, changing it around, shifting it around. This is really too easy to worry about it.

But you’re going to say, „Well now, look: In postulates there are various abstract computations.“ And actually, everything above the level of action would be in terms of… everything above the level of action would be in terms of abstracts. And so your abstracts are very, very much to the point. And objects, to shift around, aren’t abstracts. You shift balls and horses and cows and chewing gum and so on. But what about things this preclear says he can’t remember, he can’t forget, he can’t do this, he can’t do that? And this is all abstract.

The only thing wrong with this preclear is the MEST universe; let’s not forget that. You find him here and he’s agreeing with it.

Your first level of abstraction immediately above… this isn’t the highest level of abstraction. This is the one that’s a merger between objects and thoughts. That’s the first level of abstraction. Up to this moment you’ve got cows and horses and chewing gum and ice cream sodas. Well, what is the first thing you move into, into the field of language, is an abstraction? It’s ‘forget’ and ‘remember’.

If you were a deaf-mute trying to teach a child, how would you teach the child the meaning of the word FORGET and the meaning of the word REMEMBER? All language is based on objects. Language is symbolized object or condition or state of being. That’s… that’s all language is. Of course, its condition could be an action condition or a static condition.

There’s quite a dissertation on this in SELF ANALYSIS. It’s in one of the later acts; it talks about uh… the… the fish in Lake Tanganyika. It’s almost the middle of the book. It’s not in the test itself; it’s in descriptive, I think, of Act 11 – not Act 11, but list 11 – something like that or List 9. It’s quite late in there, but it talks about language and what language is and what the first level of abstraction would be. We had this nailed down for a long time.

‘Forget’ and ‘remember’. How do you make somebody forget? How would a deaf mute make a little kid remember. He doesn’t know the word REMEMBER. Every time the kid tries to throw something away, the deaf-mute would give it back to him. Every time the kid leaves something behind, the deaf-mute would give it to him again. And finally, the kid would go into apathy about it and have the object.

And every time the kid wanted something or had something and was trying to hold on to it you would teach him to forget, simply by taking it away from him and not letting him have it.

So ‘forget’ is ‘not let have’ and ‘remember’ is ‘must have’. Now these reverse on each other low on the tone scale and cause a very bad mental confusion. The guy has been given something, he’s got to remember it and he’s got to remember it and he’s got to remember it. In other words, he’s got to have it, he’s got to have it, he’s got to have it, he’s got to have it. Until, at length, he just goes into apathy about having anything. He really won’t have it and he won’t take care of it, and he really doesn’t remember either. He’s just fading out into MEST. Same way with ‘forget’. He can have things ‘forget, forget, forget’ drilled into him until he gets daffy.

Now here’s something very funny. If you just demonstrate this to a preclear, very often a large sphere of his thinking will suddenly open up and become very clear to him for the first time, because he’s been taught on the level of abstraction, and never on the level of action.

Now you must forget that.“

He didn’t know what ‘forget’ meant. And he says, „What’s ‘forget’ mean, Mama?“

And she says, „Not remember, of course.“ And she goes on washing the dishes. Smart, she is. He doesn’t know what ‘remember’ is either, see.

So he digests this and he thinks this over and he’s got this figured. And he worries about it – probably for days. All of a sudden he comes up with a clarification: „Ha! This is worrying me because I don’t know what ‘remember’ is! I wonder what that funny other word is.“ He says, „What’d you say ‘forget’ was, Mama?“ „Well, it’s ‘not remembering’ of course.“ „What’s ‘remember’, Mama?“

„Well, Willy! How stupid you are. Why that’s… that’s ‘not forgetting’, of course!“

Nyeeowwww! And he stays in that spin from there on.

The essence of handling memory is ‘forget’. and ‘remember’ at will. That’s the essence of thinking processes, is have or not-have, and that’s why thinking processes seem to get plotted up against time. And why the great – author George Q. Swishbottom uh… takes 180 years to write this book, and therefore it’s a great book. But when you read it, you won’t be able to find anything in it. That’s because he’s so lashed down on the time track on ‘forget’ and ‘remember’ that he thinks words are objects. And the reason he thinks they’re objects is because he’s so fixed and so squirreled on the subject of forgetting and remembering.

Boy, he’s really had to remember and he’s really had to forget. This boy has been subjected to more force per cubic inch than anybody else you want to hear of. So it takes a long time, therefore it was a valuable thought. There’s no relationship. A thought is of a wave length and above a wave length. And it can be as instantaneous as the dickens. You get some of these people start thinking when they’re outside and all of a sudden, and they think themselves four or five years worth. Back out the back of their heads and think for the next two three years and then move back in again. They’ve been gone that long and worked out very complicated problems. All right.

Now then, forget and remember is your lowest level of abstraction. If that’s the lowest level of abstraction, what is the highest level of abstraction? You could straighten that out with a preclear. It’s just on the basis of having him handed things and having him had things taken away from him. That’s your first mock-up sequence.

Just mock up two bodies out there and have one give one something, and have that one that’s been given something, give it back. And if the guy can’t mock up, of course you go into black and white processing. If he wants to straighten out language, straighten out that first level.

Now there’s an upper level of abstraction. Your top level of abstraction is Interest. Now when I say ‘top level of abstraction’, I’m talking about thought impinging on the MEST universe. And your first border of impingement is Interest-Desire… You can write that down, if you want to, but I told you all about this yesterday. Desire, Enforce, Inhibit. So it’s way up there – Desire. Gotta have.

Well, what are we studying then? We’re studying forget is inhibited having, remember is enforced having, and your highest level of abstraction is a created desire to obtain.

And of course, no thetan who even got vaguely – go ahead and write it down, it’s all right – uh… no… no thetan ever needed, for his interest or anything else, anything in this universe.

So the top level of abstraction carries with it some other factors of abstraction – the dynamic level is Desire and the other levels of abstraction, in the order of their importance in processing, are Conviction. And conviction, and conviction. Because the modifying and qualifying word for each item is, for any desire, the fellow WANTS, he has to be convinced of an EXISTENCE. In order to want a thing, he has to first be convinced there is a thing. So your conviction is right there next door to desire, all the way around. That’s uh…

I were going to give a lecture, somebody said, „Uh… what is the entire anatomy of thought in this universe?“ I would say, „Conviction – thinking processes.“

You know, one of the neater techniques… one of the neater techniques, by the way, is uh… trying to convince people is the same as trying to move them around. Trying to convince them they’re solid or not solid, is making things solid and not making things solid, or making them unsolid. And conviction is a demonstration of existence and a person who is convinced, has been convinced, of course, in this universe, of a trickery. Because the universe doesn’t have any existence except the capability of a thetan.

And the capability of the individual thetan to perceive, to do, to create space and to handle energy and objects in that space. And uh… he probably wants to convince others that the space exists. But that’s the big trick – it doesn’t.

So you go fishing around all you want to for creating an actual space, you can do all you want in that line, you won’t find any ‘actual space’.

There’s an agreement on the actuality of space, and that agreement took place out of desire to be convinced. So a very neat process comes out of that. Well, it’s moving people around. That’s your level of… highest level of abstraction is Q-l.

Of course, the joke is that nothing exists to move them around in, and they don’t exist to be moved around, except as you mock up something to move them around in and to move them around. That’s why the process works.

Lowest level of abstraction then, is Inhibit and Enforce. And then up at the top we get Desire, and of course we get people convinced they desire. Well, how do you handle that? Well, you handle that by moving objects around.

One of the neatest mock-ups you can run on a preclear – this really will stagger him – is make him make a piece of space and then make it solid.

„Get a sheet of space – now make it solid. Now get a cube of space. Now pack it down into a solid object. Now you got a solid object? Make it into a cube of space.“ Neat. Why? Because that’s conviction.

And he… if you were to run this in. flows, which you’re not going to run it in, you’d just run ‘trying to convince people’ and ‘people trying to convince him’, and ‘others trying to convince others’. Now that is… is a terrific process. And the reason why it’s a terrific process is very obvious. It’s because it has such tremendous abstraction in its content. It takes in Q, but if you didn’t understand what Q-1 was, you’d get upset about it.

But uh… the guy exists, he’s got to convince people he exists. Existence is, if nothing… if not force, force making objects, so if he does not have force, people are not convinced he exists. And if he does have force, people are convinced he exists. So when he tries to convince people that he exists, one of his later answers is to smash hell out of him. They find out he exists.

Now when he can’t use force, that answer is denied to him, so his inability to use force is a demonstration he doesn’t exist.

I do exist,“ or „You do exist,“ or „They do exist.“ And it’s best done by force.

I swear to Pete, if you were to go out here on the sidewalk and you were to take the first guy that came along and simply back him up against the wall and batter him until he finally admitted he saw a green toad – (I… the green toad doesn’t bear any resemblance to Purcell, I mean – that was not a dirty crack) – uh… a green toad, the guy would eventually, even if he were practically dying, probably come through and tell you, „Yes, I see a green toad.“ He’s convinced!

And what do they… what do they finally pull – this language is wonderful stuff – what do they finally do to someone who thinks he is outside law? They convict him, don’t they. And when he goes to jail, he gets a ‘conviction’, and he is a ‘convict’. He’s been convinced. That’s their method of conviction, is to contract time and space. They’re trying to make an object. And object is all that is convincing.

Now when you walk up to this wall and hit your hea… hand against it like this, you see? You’re convinced it’s there because you can feel the solidity of it. And if you didn’t feel the solidity of it you wouldn’t be convinced it’s there. So when you start doing unmocking, hold your hat, because mock-ups of one’s own universe and unmocking the real universe, laughingly called, produce some singular results.

An auditor telling me last night, he… he’d had a guy unmock… unmock a part of a pinhole in the back of his head, and move this pinhole back and forth – a hole back there. And make it a little bit bigger and a little bit bigger and the guy was finally sitting there looking at the chair back. I heard this story a little earlier. The fellow said uh… „I seemed to be in this forest, and then the forest turned out to be the green back of the chair.“ He was looking out through the back of his head at the back of the chair.

That’s unmocking the back of a head. Well, the second you start to unmock, ALL of a preclear’s experience on the track tells him, „No, no, no! It exists! It exists! Look – be convinced! Please be convinced! We’ll do anything if you’ll just be convinced!“ And he really gets scared that if he unmocks, thoroughly unmocks a table or unmocks a chair – you don’t have to educate him as to what to think about this. He’ll… he’ll say, „Maybe I better not do it.“ And you say, „Why not?“ „Well, I don’t know, I just got a feeling maybe I’d better not do it.“

And the next thing you know, don’t be surprised if hard, solid objects and all sorts of things seem to sort of hail in on him. That’s all the times when somebody backed him up against the wall and said, „There’s a green toad there, isn’t there?“ He finally became convinced.

Now his immediate and foremost desire, of course, centered on the home universe. And the home universe might have merged over into this one. So his active desire was directed toward the home universe, and then became crossed over into this universe. And many people have never discovered that there was any transition. They still think this is their universe.

They… every once in a while they’ll gun around and they’ll talk about everybody being their puppets and everybody looks like… they haven’t discovered yet that it’s a group action. They… they think they made everybody here. And that’s just uh… an inability to differentiate between universes. Their own universe and somebody else’s. Well, they can start to unmock this universe and rebuild their own; they get cured of this very fast.

But uh… they will start breaking convictions they have had in the past. And when they start breaking these convictions, one after the other, why these convictions are mostly driven in and upheld by force and they themselves have tried to drive in and make… make other people convinced by using force.

Oh, this gets to be gorgeous after a while. A preclear… a preclear is a… you start to unmock and mock things up after a while – umocking particularly – he’ll run head-on sooner or later into a feeling like he’d better not do it. It’s… it’s uh… „What if it all – umm-umm,“ because it’s on the thinnest of gradient scales of agreement.

One of the things you do is to make him go through the action of convincing somebody that something’s solid. Make him pick up some empty space and convince somebody that something is solid about it. And he’ll get the weirdest sensations. See, the joke is, he’s done just that. He gets the essence of making a… a gimmickahoojit. You… you… you’re going to have a game and you… you have to agree with somebody and so on. After a while, if you’ve got a lot of solid objects on which somebody’s agreed, you can pick up one of them and hit him over the head with it.

So behind every conviction lies a little pool of treachery. And don’t be surprised then if you, as you unmock and mock things up in your preclear, or if you look on the assessment, you will find that there’s a big charge on treachery, trickery – being stabbed in the back, and so forth. This table is treachery, trickery and being stabbed in the back in some… in some category. And is desire in another category. And it’s all at once, desire, trickery, treachery. Because there’s nothing there to be desired. But he wants something there so that he can desire it. And it’s trickery and treachery. And boy, has he got an educated perception level! And you start to break through that educated perception level and he just does wonderful things.

Then you’ll run… run this for a little while and you’ll start getting charges on the E-Meter on ‘It wasn’t there’. He’ll start going down… don’t worry about this, just keep up the process. He’s walked downstairs and he started to walk out through the front door. And got his hand through the door… before he remembered he’d better take the doorknob. That’s upsetting! That’s upsetting, for instance, to come over here and pick up this coke bottle, and really have to make a little postulate about it. „Well, it’s going to be solid and I can pick it up.“ Otherwise your fingers close on each other. Fascinating.

Well, don’t let your preclear get into that state. ‘Cause we want this universe in good shape, because you’re going to run slam-bang into these manifestations.

Now what’s… what’s wrong with your preclear is as a little kid he tried to convince people of this and that. In school everybody tried to convince him of this and that. And he’s been trying to convince other people of this, and they’ve been trying to convince him of this. If you were just to run ‘conviction’ and just tear it off…

Now if you start running around trying to convince people Scientology works, you’re walking into the biggest trap of all. Of course, Scientology works. It doesn’t have to convince them. The… the reason it works…

Oh, by the way. I didn’t make a gag very clear last night. I said I’d pop anybody if he kept talking about my ideas on this subject. Because what we’re talking about is the anatomy of the physical universe. And I’m damned if this physical universe was my idea.

So if you were a little bit shocked or missed the point on that, I hope I made that very clear. What you’re doing is accusing me, you see, of being the author of all this universe, and that’s no good.

Now… you can do a better job any day in the week. I mean this… this… this… look at that reverse flow as a trap, „I agree, therefore I’ve got to have. But if I agree – I mean – If I agree to have, then I run into ‘can’t have’.“ „That on which I work hardest, I will have.“ Energy devoted to, becomes havingness.

So Lord help somebody who insists on working only on the insane. Obviously he’d go nuts! It’s inevitable. What he devotes energy to, he will have. That’s one of the most fundamental rules there is. In order to have, you have to devote energy to something too. This universe has got that all nailed down.

That, by the way, doesn’t happen to be entirely true. You can just upset the agreement level and do that.

Now to tell you the truth, before I did very much about this convincing and conviction and all that sort of thing, I was very careful about it. I was, I was quite careful about it, because I… actually you start working with this and you just feel these walls kind of go ‘creak’. You say, „Now, wait a minute.“ And it wasn’t until very recently that I was thoroughly enough convinced that it would take more than two or three people working hard in this direction to cave it all in suddenly.

Now let’s put out anchor points while you’re lying on the couch and let’s unmock the couch. In other words, put out anchor points and put something of your own creation below the couch – but inside your own space. Put out anchor points out here – you’re lying on the couch and put a… a mock-up of your own down there. And then unmock everything else but the beingness of you, the anchor points and that mock-up.

In other words, unmock the real universe.

What’s the… what’s the cure if your preclear suddenly… all of a sudden decides his head is going to be blown off, or… This is liable to happen if you do that, you see.

Oh, you just unmock some more things. Just unmock some more.

You see, the essence of unmocking is that if he’s really practiced at unmocking things, even if he’s still in his head, one day he unmocks his body. And for him… you see, his unmocking is done carefully within his own frame of reference. He doesn’t unmock for other people. He’s kind of careful about that at first, and then he gets a little less careful. And uh… so, of course, unmocking leads to a fellow just sitting there and no body. He doesn’t feel any body. Naturally then he can move around, and he actually will move around on that unmocking. He’s quite unwilling to do this.

But what’s he run into? He runs into having to be convinced there is a body there. And he thinks of all the hard times that he’s had trying to convince himself of the existence of something or other. He’s been up to – woof! – way back some time… havingness. He’s tried to convince himself something doesn’t exist, and something does exist. And he’s tried to convince himself and get himself SOLD on the idea that there IS a universe there. And he thinks of the times when his WANT has been stirred up, his INTEREST has been commanded to this degree that he wants the object which has been described. And then he sits there and his desire makes him want the solidity and he gets space to come in together and he thinks of all the trouble he’s been through to go to all this sort of thing and to convince himself. And the thankfulness he felt when somebody walked up to him and handed him a real object. Handed him a piece of the MEST universe. He didn’t know the rules by which you made something, but yet this other was real because he could be convinced by it. And how could he be convinced? Because it could hurt him. And because it could give him interest and pleasure and because it had color in it and all that sort of thing.

So as your preclear starts on this track, he’s liable to put on the brakes. But that is very aberrated, because, you see, at any moment you can re-mock up it.

So all that becomes very simple.

So there… there is a level of abstraction which is at the upper spectrum of all abstractions. You… when the mathematician says, „A equals alpha“ or something, he does it with a conviction. He has decided that there is a convincing actuality in that relationship. And the reason he can say that is preceded by, not mathematics, but a conviction or a convincing of the existence of a beingness.

And before beingness there must be a convinced… convincedness about beingness. And your lowest level of abstraction, of course, is easily solved because that’s ‘forget’ and ‘remember’. Now, don’t forget those two because the preclear’s memory is as good as he can receive and retain objects; and it is as useful as and as workable as he can give away and let go of objects. And between these two things, then, you get the whole range of what is laughingly called ‘the abstract’.

Now, objects, then, positioned in space, increased, decreased, made to disappear, made to appear again and so on, are handling from a level of Q-1 the entire span of abstraction as it applies to this universe. And let no one kid you otherwise.

Mathematics are symbolical manifestations of number, quantity and quality, and… applied to this universe.

You go outside the universe and make up a mathematics ‘1 equals 8’ and then don’t ever worry about proving it. Because that’s the next thing that people ask you to knock you down scale and make you buy things, or make you give up things – you’ve got to prove it. And of course you can’t prove something that isn’t there. So a man goes into the doggonedest, most long-winded dissertations and most idiotically, logical, wholly absurd – well, just get this: Now do you see, the reason why you work is so that you can eat. Nothing more logical than that, is there? That’s real hard-rock stuff.

Now just a minute. If you didn’t… weren’t so convinced it was work, you would probably eat better. All right, we’ve knocked that out just a little bit. Now let’s go up the line. Whatcha eating for? Well, you’re eating for the sensation. Well, if you could mock up flavors which were better than you could buy, you certainly wouldn’t bother with what was called ‘real’ stuff, would you? So therefore you wouldn’t be eating for the sensation.

Let’s go over into some better reason for this. Now let’s see. A fellow’s in a body so he can be identified. Oh, you mean you can’t make an identification of yourself show up so that people can see this? It’s coming down to an inability of some sort, here.

Come on, let’s… let’s prove why you have to work. Well, I have to work, I have to – well…

And that is the way with any proof there is for anything – proof or ‘pruff’ – in this universe. It just goes around in a squirrel cage. It’s just… it’s just nonsense.

I mean, they had space, energy and time – each one evaluated in the terms of the other two, and nobody outside this rat race. So if we could never get outside of this rat race, we could never find anything that would solve time. We move over here to Be, Do and Have and we move back there to look at… „Well,“ we say, „to heck with that. We’re out of that rat race.“ Well, we’ve just consistently moved up the line and moved the product of Be, Have and Do is space, energy and time. All right, Be, Have and Do are conditions which can be set up by postulates which then, if everyone is convinced thoroughly enough, exist as space, energy and time. And you work from this upper abstraction of Be, Do and Have, and you get space, energy and time.

But you get something else, too. You don’t just get space, energy and time. You find out that postulates can be made about almost anything.

Now the first time these postulates begin to get very set and matter begins to be unmovable and people become to be very unhappy and the game stops being a game and becomes very, very hard work, is when everybody has to prove it all the time. They’re proving something that isn’t true, no matter what they’re trying to prove.

Now we’ve taken apart an anatomy here, an anatomy of many levels of conviction which have resulted in many levels of desires and enforcements and inhibitions, resulted in many levels of conviction, many levels then of affinity and agreement and communications. And what we’ve done is, in the – language of this, backtracked right on up the line until we had reconstructed this. And we followed the track back and all of a sudden we test it and now go up track or down that track again or get off that track and go over on some other track and do something about that.

And uh… it’s up to you to establish a reality along this level. It is awfully tight as a level of application. I mean, you’re not very far off any grooves. You… you’ve got postulates… you’ve got Q-1 and then you’ve got postulates. And then you’ve got Be, Do and Have and that gives you Start, Change and Stop, Space, Energy, Time. Therefore it can give you any kind of an abstraction, so-called. It can give any kind of an object or any kind of a condition.

And you’ve just got all of that, just nearly fitted together in sort of a little telescope. And you can pull it out and look at it lengthily and drag it out endlessly or simply snap it together real close and start asking about the highest level of abstractions you can. You do an assessment on this E-Meter here and look that over and you find out what he can’t do. Well, the essential things that he can’t do is can’t unconvince himself once he’s convinced. And you might say that would be one of the rougher aberrations. He can’t convince himself that he can be unconvinced, because he thinks he has to convince himself to be unconvinced. And, of course, every time he convinces himself that he has to be unconvinced, he becomes more convinced and lower on the scale, because of your reverse vectors and other things.

So I want to see… I want to see assessments done, but certainly not… not with… You know that before you start work on the preclear, fill up, oh, maybe ten notebooks, exhausting all this out carefully.

Now if you continue to run a preclear on the machine while you do this, you will see whenever he’s run up against one of these blocked convictions, he’s uh… hit a point where he feels he has to be convinced. And you run up against one of those, and it’ll give you quite a shock on the preclear. That is to say, he’s… he’s run up against where… a point where he feels – oh boy! You just run dials down on that – where if he gives this one up, the whole universe will go ‘poom!’ and he’ll get quite upset about it.

But uh… I’ll read you a couple of little laws about conviction, by the way. „Trying to convince is the same as trying to move people around – people or objects around; that they are solid or not solid; that they have space; that they don’t have space; that they act; that they don’t act; that they are perceived; that they are not perceived; that they can perceive; that they can’t perceive.“

That’s all. Total level of line-ups. And one of the rougher things is that empty space is solid. Try… try to convince somebody that empty space is solid. You get the big relief of somebody… let’s say you’re dropping somebody out of a sixteen story window or something like that. Think of the big relief he would feel if he had a solid thing put immediately under him – I mean, right under him so that he would just drop a couple of feet and touch this solid thing. Boy, he’d feel so relieved. Well, that’s… that’s pay for being convinced that a solid thing can keep you from falling. It doesn’t happen to mean that a solid object can keep you from falling or it doesn’t happen to mean that gravity can necessarily act on you.

This gets very, very interesting after a while. Uh… you could throw, quote ‘solid objects’ around at quite a… quite a rate if you wanted to. It’s up to you to recover that. It’s not up to you to be shown. And also when you’ve recovered it, it isn’t up to you to show anybody that. It isn’t, it isn’t up to anybody to… you don’t have to demonstrate anything to anybody. As a matter of fact, I make a very set rule against it. To hell with it.

Somebody comes up to me and says, „Can you prove that so-and-so and so-and-so?“ It’s just… that’s been going on in this track for 74 trillion years: „Would you please prove to me that so-and-so and so-and-so? Would you prove it to me? Well, I can’t see the reason in it.“ Both of those things are just as haywire as hell. There is no reason in it. And as far as proving it is concerned, they want to be convinced and the fastest way to convince anybody would be to shoot them or something. And that’s real conviction.

Yeah. What’s also amusing is trying to convince people that particles have various qualities and that they are visible or invisible. It becomes very fascinating, trying to demonstrate to somebody, really prove it to him, that a particle exists.

You can imagine yourself early on the track, going into heated discussions about this thing, until the guy finally would groggily say, „Okay, that’s a particle. I’m convinced.“

After a while we’d get all these particles together and we’d say,

„You see that table? That’s something solid. Now look, I’m going to prove to you that that table’s solid. Now take your fist…“

I haven’t got a fist.“

„You haven’t got a fist?! Well, now look. Let’s take a particle there – now hold on to the particle. You’ve got the particle? Now hit it against this table, see?“

And the guy goes… „Yeah! There’s something there – not… not really too solid yet though.“

And you say, „Well, just a minute, just a minute. Whap! Bam! It’s solid. Okay, now you hit it with that.“

„Yeah-yeah. Nice and solid now.“

I mean, it’s just as idiotic as that. The guy isn’t convinced so you convince him. He’s already been convinced there’s such a thing as energy so he can be bapped, zapped. He’s convinced of that and uh… now that he’s convinced that there can be energy you can convince – there’s such a thing as a particle, and the energy’s got to have space to be in, isn’t there? Of course, energy’s got to have space to be in – naturally. How could there be any energy if there wasn’t any space for it to be in? So that’s space, isn’t it? Okay. Guess that’s proved.

All right. Now, if there’s space and there’s energy in it, you don’t want that space and that energy in motion all the time. That’s silly to postulate that it keeps changing position in space. You haven’t proved to him yet that it is changing position in space, see?

Now you just move it over there in the corner. Now, when it gets over there in the corner it gets solid, doesn’t it? It’s not moving.“

The fellow says, „What do you know! It’s not moving.“

„Well, when it’s not moving, it gets solid. There it is: Solid – solid object. That will be a dollar.“

Somebody’s already worked the magic on you that a dollar or a pound – are worth having, that you can buy things with it that you can’t manufacture.

The only thing valuable about the whole thing was a piece of knowledge. If you know a modus operandi and can put it into effect without excessive labor or cost, you sure don’t need the object from somebody else, do you?

So it was knowledge, actually, in essence, that was above all the levels.

Now you will find that knowledge is something that most of your preclears will just shudder about destroying. They don’t want to, unless it’s knowledge about themselves. So, you give them… have them mock up police dossiers that tell about all their affairs and everything else, and you get that blown up and so on. Because they’ve got to take the terrible value level that they have off knowledge. Because if they had translated the word ‘knowledge’ as meaning ‘a fact’, then they have to hold on to their facsimiles. So they feel they can’t destroy their facsimiles because their facsimiles are knowledge and this is not true. Their facsimiles as records are of no great value. Present time action is of greater value.

The knowledge of how to get it accomplished or how to accomplish present time action is valuable, not the file in which the knowledge is contained. The invaluableness of a file does not consist of the quality of its file cards. And if the file could exist without file cards, throw it away. Keep the knowledge, get rid of the file cards.

Knowledge can exist if we have a very easy, good method of reworking it at any time. You don’t need it. And you’ll see that happening the moment that you suddenly realize that you are sitting with the… a formula which produces knowledge at will. And the guy will say, „Well, I know. The hell with these facsimiles.“

He’s convinced, too, that facsimiles are used in lieu of force. This is a horrible trap. He thinks that knowledge will always serve in lieu of force. Well, it will if you can get there with enough of it quick enough. But don’t try levels of esoteric communication when there’s a soldier on the battle field and he’s got the rifle trained square on you and the finger is closing on the trigger. That is exactly the wrong moment to try to inform him that you know more about rifles than he does, so therefore you should be able to… Oh, no. No. You’re going to lose your havingness right there.

Another thing is… is overevaluation of havingness. A person who overevaluates havingness consistently and continually, then he will begin to protect things that .he’s better off without. He will have things he doesn’t need because he feels he can’t ever replace them. And you get your ‘packrat’ nature of Man.

And he goes below that level, he feels that other people want to damage him solely because he has things; therefore he’ll start to abandon, abandon, abandon, abandon. He has no proper evaluation of the importance of havingness.

Which means automatically then he’d have no proper evaluation of time. And so he doesn’t have.

But it all starts out with a desire and a conviction and goes on down the line. And after a person’s been convicted and sentenced to 74 years… 74 trillion years in the MEST universe, that much havingness of the MEST universe, it’s time some of you bail him out. I’ll talk to you later this evening. (TAPE ENDS)

[[Category:Lectures]]
[[Category:Lectures PDC]]
[[Category:Lectures 1952]]