View source for Space, Perception, Knowingness, Part I (2ACC 531130)

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

'''Date:''' 30 November 1953

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

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This is November the 30th, morning lecture.

This morning, going to try to give you some behavior application of what you have been getting here the past couple of weeks.

Want to repeat first, because this is Monday morning, the highest level of operation of what is humorously referred to as life. And that is, it knows; that's its highest level. Doesn't know anything, you understand—it knows. That's its potentiality of anything. It's a high potential.

And the highest level of what you're into—the game called MEST universe is a game requiring barriers and limitations. This isn't the only kind of game there is, but I won't befuddle your wits by trying to use, in MEST language, how many other kinds of games there are.

There are other kinds of games that have nothing to do with distance, they have nothing to do with barriers, as you see them.

But this game with which you are concerned right now, in this universe, is a game which has to do with barriers. And this is the only game which you have to solve in the pc.

Of course, there are first these barriers to knowingness, and then barriers to perception. And both of these barriers constitute eventually a barrier of space. So the highest of the operation is space itself. This of course would be the one, then, which you would—most likely to find befuddled in the individual, because it is the highest and most common of all these barriers.

Any time when you depart from this formula—which is to say, MEST universe, a game of barriers—you are adrift in processing, in this universe. Barriers becoming very frequent and considerable, form and re-form; and in any group which is in agreement amongst itself, form at a uniform rate, and unform at a uniform rate. Particles shift and move at an agreed-upon rate. And this agreed-upon rate is time, and there isn't any other time to refer this time to, which of course, makes it a single-terminal proposition and makes it aberrative.

Now, when we look, then, at any confusion in an individual, it'll be a confusion on the subject of time, because it doesn't have a second time. If there were two times, there would be no confusion about time, because you could always compare time to time of some other kind. Whereas if you do any comparison in time in this universe, you compare time to itself.

And this is something like saying: "Joe is a nice fellow, he's like Joe." "Joe is a long fellow, he's like Joe." "Joe is too short because he's like Joe." And we don't have any Bill.

Well, you say, "Joe is shorter than Bill," the second we have Bill. So if we just have Joe, well, we say, "Well, you know he's just as big as Joe and he's as small as Joe and as short as Joe and as long as Joe and as stupid as Joe and as Bill as Joe." You get the idea?

So this single—single-terminal proposition puts all sorts of stress and strain on the problem. And it isn't a terminal, you see, it's just a singleness of comparison. So that singleness of comparison all by itself constitutes a barrier.

Why? Because the fellow can't find out what time it is. The only way he can find out what time it is, is finding out what time it is. And therefore, it's just as easy for it to be 76 trillion years ago in a guy's mind as it is tomorrow.

Fact of the matter is, theta needn't be concerned with time at all. The trick is that you ought to be concerned about time; that's the trick. And you shouldn't be concerned about time, because you don't have much to do with time.

You are, as far as time is concerned, a motionless viewpoint. You endure forever, God help you. And this endurance is engaged in viewing a shift of particles; the particles are shifting, you aren't. You shift the particles, and you shift the part of the particles which you view—and in doing this, you can become very befuddled, you can think you're a particle and you can play lots of games within yourself; but the point is, is you can see the whole universe simultaneously. It isn't much to look at, it's a whole flock of particles.

If you see it simultaneously, you'll see all the particles stopped. And then if you see it simultaneously, tickita-tickita-tickita-tickita-tickita, you'll see the particles shifting. There are a lot of particles in the universe, quite a few.

So instantaneousness is more desirable than something involving time. It's quite remarkable—you're very remarkable, extremely so. You can take something which is agreed upon in terms of the MEST universe and find in that thing—you can find in it a method of communication, and you can even string this communication to past time, and you can even understand this. Very, very remarkable.

It isn't odd or phenomenal, it's just remarkable because you don't realize you're remarkable. In any society, you're supposed not to, you see—particularly this one. You're not supposed to realize you're remarkable, yet you are.

And this remarkableness, unexpressed and inhibited and so on, is simply an inhibition or a barrier, as it is inhibited, to knowingness. You see, that you're alive and ticking at all, is what's strange. Because the enormous force which is leveled against you, and the enormous amount of confusion to which the individual is being subjected, the considerable amount of randomity—you see, if you even stop to think about it, the whole area around you is an automaticity. I've been waiting for somebody to suddenly realize this; suddenly realize this and sort of fall back in a dead faint with the recognition that as far as automaticity is concerned, he has it—ne plus ultra—right in present time.

Cars go in the wrong directions, and you've got stuff bonging off you all the time in terms of particles, and going away from you and hitting you again. And the predictability of the environment is quite poor, very poor, as long as you insist on being a single point of viewpoint.

You see, you can predict anything you want to, actually, but it's become important that you predict the particles, merely because you're trying to safeguard somebody else's problems, you know, and hold them down. And as long as you have somebody else's problems to safeguard, why, it becomes very important that you predict these things.

Any one of you right now, actually—you're not held by anything, or trapped by a darn thing. You—it's just your own interest—it's your own interest in your body, and interest in, oh, "how bad TV is" and "how horrible the movies are these days" and "what the next murder is going to be." It's just your interest. You hang around, and now you've accepted an awful lot of problems. And you've accepted these problems from Mama—she had lots of problems, and Papa—he had lots of problems. And all these people had problems, and now you got problems. And you try to worry yourself along about these problems.

And yet, if you think you detest worry, why do you go to the motion-picture show? All the motion-picture show is, is a whole concatenation of worry. You're supposed to be interested in the couple of people that everybody else seem to be interested in, and you are supposed to go on from moment to moment not knowing what's going to happen next. You don't want to cheat—all you'd have to do, actually, is just contact that reel of film or the remaining films in the cans, and you would know the whole plot.

More understandably, if you had a book in your hands, and this book lies there in your hands, all you've got to do is look at the last page and you'll find out who killed him. That's all you've got to do. And yet you sit there with all those pages unturned, not cheating, and going through, so that you can do this. A book in essence is a worry machine. No matter how fine the story is, it's just a worry machine. That's all there is to it. It's—you're supposed to get interested in these people and then worry about them, you see, and not know what's going to happen to them, and be surprised, and go on through to the end, and be very satisfied that you've worried so much.

In a super-fictionized society such as the United States of America or Great Britain, these worries, fictionized, amount to a dramatization on the part of people of heroic parts. And then the contest of the society is not to permit anybody to fill any heroic part. This again makes randomity.

And as you look at these shifting particles, these shifting barriers, and the barriers of knowingness—you see, you're perfectly willing to have a barrier of knowingness, otherwise you'd never bother to read a fiction book. That shows you immediately what you're—how willing you are.

Now, your problem gets down to a point where you've set up everything automatic and then you're not happy about it. And the main reason you're not happy about it is because you can't solve these problems which are being posted at you all the time. Because there are many echelons of these problems, and amongst those echelons is what they call "real life." And real life as defined, just by definition, is grim and serious and terrible, and so you have to take this thing which by definition is grim and serious and terrible, and you have to solve that. It's not grim and it's not serious and it's not terrible.

The funny part of it is, there's nothing like a boa constrictor or a lion jumping out of a—from behind a rock, or a panther down from a tree, to bring a man up to present time. He comes up to present time with great speed.

In the past, many philosophers have attempted to solve this problem, and a philosopher never could have solved this problem because it's a problem essentially in terms of knowingness and action. And as long as he just was trying to dwell in the realm of knowingness, and not in a realm of action, he could sit there like Buddha in his palace and worry-worry-worry-worry-worry, and finally let his coachman fast-talk him into going out into the world to alleviate the woes of all these poor people.

He'd been sitting in a palace—no panthers had been jumping on his neck, and no boss had been coming along threatening to fire him all the time—so of course he could be a philosopher. He never did get into any understanding of the situation, the—that's a different proposition.

If you want understanding, you'd better go out and set this body up as a target sometime and pitch it off a high cliff into a deep part of the sea and try to swim amongst a few sharks and, you know, make life a little bit interesting.

And you find out you never feel better than after you've bested a forty-eight-hour or seventy-two-hour hurricane with the ship going to pieces under you and all the sails blown away and everybody in a frame of mind of mutiny and you're standing there with what little splinter of wood is left for a tiller. And it blows clear, and you say, "Well, what do you know?" Boy, are you in present time.

And the only trouble is, you get a surfeit of this sort of thing with one particular body, and you keep hanging on to all the effort which you have gone to in order to solve immediate problems and worries. And then you get into various situations where the other universe which you are facing is itself too puzzling for words, and is capable of setting off in you—because of the stored effort and emotion in a body—is capable of setting off in you, somewhat on the order of an atomic bomb, sudden and surprising emotional releases. Attacks, you might say, rather than releases, due to the connotation of the word releases—but these sudden emotional attacks; sudden, dismaying, almost indescribable rushes of emotional kickback which you didn't intend to have, and which your body, actually, is not quite strong enough to withstand.

Now, as long as you think you're a body, you don't then think you can withstand much, because you gauge what you can stand with regard to what the body can stand. And the body can't stand very much. You wave a baseball bat at it and you can kill it. I mean, it's very interesting. This is true, the body can't stand up under this.

Well, these sudden rushes and waves of emotion which hit you under stress—particularly in such fields of randomity as the opposite sex or parents—are brought home to you as very, very serious and grim indeed, because you see that your body can't stand these things. Well, you see, you're to a large degree protecting your body, and so you assume, unreasonably, of course—for more randomity—that you can't stand them. And you wait, after such a surge of emotion, to be surged at again unexpectedly.

A man learns after a while that his life is not going to continue as one long afternoon song. There's going to be things happen which are quite bombastic.

Take this thing called love. Somebody is going along very happily and cheerfully—oh, dabbles with the second dynamic this way and that way. And then one day he mistakenly gets a voracity or a voraciousness about eating, you see, and that is, he can't survive if he eats or he—so on. He gets this terrific emotion and it keys in all the times the body has been eaten and so forth, and he's in love!

You think I'm now running down the whole idea of being in love. I'm not running down the idea of being in love. That's just one of the more—it's one of the more interesting things to do. If you want to commit suicide that way, it's as good as any other way—bullets are quicker. But here's this emotion, and this emotion was a strange and overpowering thing which an individual found he could not control. Oh-oh! An emotion he couldn't control. And it swept in with great speed and great suddenness and there it was. It was all very nice, and it was a quiet afternoon, and then this girl showed up, or this fellow showed up, and—it didn't have to be sudden, it probably grew over a period of months. And one, one day, woke up to the fact that he was very deep inside some sort of a trap he couldn't quite figure out.

His concentration on the opposite sex was so intense that he couldn't easily release it, and he recognizes this. Then, of course, in the usual course of events with love and so forth, although it says in the storybooks "they lived happily ever after," they don't explain that "ever after" is from three years, two years—something like this, see? They don't explain their definition of the time. So you'll have time creeping in, you see, undefined.

And you have, probably, some beautiful sadness—which is a little bit too strong for even cast iron to bear—crop up, and you feel like you don't want to eat anymore and you don't want to sleep anymore and you can't get along anymore. And in short, you're up against the problem of you can't knock this body off, because it isn't worth having anymore. It's just—obviously it's no—was unable to serve the purpose of keeping that other body in line, and so therefore, if you've got to keep bodies in line with other bodies (which in itself is a piece of nonsense), you won't be able to go on with this body any longer. Such love affairs very often end in suicide, and as a matter of fact suicide attempts are quite often immediately traced to such a situation.

Well, we look this over, and we find out that this is not scarce, this is not rare, this happens quite often. As a matter of fact, it very often happens to somebody before he's five. And he's fallen desperately in love with his mother, and he breaks that one up, and later love affairs lie on top of that one.

Of course, Freud picked this up, and said (of course, searching for deep significance), "This is the only thing that we're shooting for."

The point here is that one is hit by an overwhelming surge of emotion and afterwards he doesn't want any. You couldn't sell him any emotion, actually, if you tried very hard. He's very leery of the whole subject. He is afraid, for one thing, that the loved one who has departed may show up again. He doesn't even know what his emotional reaction would be if this person returned into his immediate vicinity. That's very, very puzzling to him.

He may go on for years till someday he gets a letter to somebody else, or she gets a letter written to her or something, in some way, shape or form, that mentions the name of this other person, or does something about her, or some intimate touch is thrown in there, and they sit there in a state of shock! But what they're shocked about is the fact they didn't perish just because of the recontact. They very often say, "Well, for God's sakes!"

Well, they're like somebody—somebody who's been living, expecting this trap to fly open in his face any moment, and putting most of the energy which he can develop against the lid of it so that it won't fly open and so he won't fall in; then some son of a gun leaves it open and he almost slides in, and he takes a look and there's no trap there. This is an interesting experience.

Now, as we look over this, we find out that these sudden, terrific and unexpected surges of pain, these surges of emotion, sudden unconsciousnesses—this is an inexplicable thing to an individual—unconsciousness. He isn't there at all, which is the very antithesis of knowingness. And he looks over the problem, and the problem is to him too much for him to bear, so now he has something to worry about.

There's these inexplicable things which come in on him, and which he has to hold back, and then he forgets what he's holding back and so he's afraid to take his finger off anything, and he starts living a life which is about as carefully plotted as any surveyor ever made a cow path. It just—it goes to here, and it goes to there, and then it goes someplace else, and it goes someplace else. He's measuring his whole life out with a transit, you might say. And his problems have compounded to a point where he can't even find the cow path anymore but he knows there is one, and he knows that it has its exact position somewhere, so he just doesn't touch anything. He goes into a complete withdrawal mechanism.

Any moment, these emotions may hit, you see. Any moment Gertie or somebody may suddenly show up in the vicinity, or Bill might suddenly appear, you know, and so on.

A little boy, a little girl very often won't come close to a certain street corner anymore where they've had a fight. They couldn't stand up to that one. And so they begin to avoid the universe geographically, and they begin to avoid these barriers. What are these barriers? These—the barriers—the worst barriers are the ones that jump at you, or jump away from you suddenly.

But in common experience, you find that these things actually go back to a very few and very simple basics. For instance, we find out that duplication is a very, very fine part of processing. Why? Where does duplication show up in (quote) "real life" (unquote)? Well, the dramatization of the facsimile is what we used to call it.

Now, in order to put anything there, it has to be made and unmade, and made and unmade, practically at the speed of light. And for something to be solid, one has to be able to make and unmake things. Life begins to be very unreal when one no longer can make things do one of, and all of, three things: which is create—he can't create them, or make them persist, or destroy them. And there are your three conditions, are that he creates something, he makes it persist and he destroys it.

And he gets to a point, finally, where he can't do one or another of these things, or—and he does the others less well, and what he'd have to do to rehabilitate this is (he knows this, he operates on it instinctively) is to duplicate it—duplicate it somehow.

And so we get such things as the overt act-motivator sequence: something is done to him, he should duplicate it. And if he duplicates it, however, if he doesn't duplicate it often enough in real life, he naturally just throws what he's trying to duplicate into restimulation, as any preclear will. So it wasn't that working out one's motivators was bad, it was just that one couldn't find enough victims. And the—he then starts to get what you call motivator-hungry. He's done an awful lot of things, and these things haven't been duplicated on him. In other words, nothing runs out; everything stays in on this sort of balance.

What is the effort of somebody going down the street and giving somebody else a lot of bad news, trying to give him worries? He's just trying to duplicate these worries.

What happens—remember Hippocrates, I think it was, one of the old race of doctors—used to say that a patient was never well until he'd told about his operation five times. I think that was supposed to be Hippocrates, but that's in medical science—and they weren't operating on people in those days, but that's all right, we'll let it go by. We won't question these people too closely, they have their own little world.

Now, we have this problem of trying to duplicate. You know if you can just duplicate it often enough, you'll be able to handle it. If you have enough kids, you'll be able to handle it. See how that adds up? If you could make enough people into bums, then you can handle it. If you can be made into a bum often enough, then you can handle it, you see? Duplication.

But when one begins to depend upon the universe or the chance—which is randomity itself—to do his duplicating for him, he of course gets into trouble because this is handing over one of the most essential portions of self-determinism. Which is to say, that if you have something and you lose it, you should be able to duplicate it.

And the way you make up something, is just to duplicate it and make it vanish and so on, up until the point where it begins to persist. So we get the whole problem of life actually on this business of duplication.

It's very funny, you start getting somebody wasting teeth in brackets, and if he wastes teeth long enough—and just waste teeth—he will find out that the body gets so relieved, that they get up to a tone level where they say, "Whee! Let's make everything and everybody into teeth." And you get—that's their big ambition, you see.

Now they've gotten up to a point where they think they can duplicate enough to be out of the duress of limited space in which they're placed. And that is the one reason a person tries to duplicate. He wants to get out of the duress of limited space or he wants to get into a limited space and out of the duress of too much space—either way—and he does it by duplication.

Now, duplication is the flow of creation, and duplication is the process by which one—a thing persists. So we get into creation—just once is good enough. See, that's creation. It doesn't matter—creation has nothing to do with endurance or duration.

Now we go over into persistence, which is the center part of the curve, and we find out that one must duplicate and then unduplicate, and duplicate and unduplicate. So if you actually got the whole curve in action, when you're making something endure, you're having create and destroy. And if you get a repetitive create-destroy, create-destroy, create-destroy, create-destroy, you will eventually set up an automatic create-destroy. You see, you take your finger off of it so that you don't have to worry about it anymore. Or you can at least bring it back into a complete self-determinism.

It all depends on whether you want to take the motorcycle down the road, or the motorcycle—you want the motorcycle to take you down the road. And your intention is what regulates this, it isn't something that happens automatically. Things don't just automatically fly out of your own orbit, no matter what you do. They don't fly out until you say, "Beat it"—the truth of the matter.

Male voice: Intention.

Intention, that's right. What's your intention? Is your intention to go on being self-determined, or is your intention to go on being and start to be other-determined? See, which is your intention? And that's about all that establishes the difference.

By the way, intention itself doesn't establish any high order of action. Intention is just choice of two determinisms, which is self-determinism and other-determinism. We find out when people have given away too much self-determinism, made it other-determinism, if their intention was to continually do that, that they suffer from it. We find that.

And you'll also, because we not looking—we're not looking at the higher end of the band, it's equally amusing that if anybody gives away too much things into his own control, he also becomes unhappy. Once in a while, we see this in processing, an immediate line. A fellow—an auditor will knock too much automaticity out of somebody, and make him too self-determined for his environment, and the fellow is miserable—he knows too much.

And every once in a while, I've fixed up some preclear with vast enthusiasm, preclear just went on operating, just went on doing what I asked him to do, and after a while—of course, it's for his environment. Actually, you would have to be about one thousand times as self-determined as anybody in this environment to have too little self-determinism in other and faster societies. But in this one, he gets up to a level of where, gee, he knows what's going to happen and he can predict anything, his speed, his competence comes up. And gosh, he gets real unhappy. Because he's just stepped out of pace with what he's considering, at the moment, livingness. So it goes either way.

And there is a balance, a neat balance between self-determinism and other-determinism, which balance itself is determined by the cultural level in which the individual is trying to live. You get very self-determined, you get so competent, for instance, that your accuracy with a sword or your accuracy with a lightning bolt or your accuracy with something else would be sufficiently great to wipe out all opponents—you immediately come up against "why wipe out any opponents?" Becomes silly.

So you wipe out all the opponents. They don't happen to be any enemy of yours; they can't be. Your competence has come up to a point where you can no longer play with them. You've just left all the kids in your neighborhood, in other words. You've gone up and sit on top of a hill. And you'll notice that kids don't like to leave all the kids in their neighborhood and go and sit on top of a hill, even though they're mad at all the kids in the neighborhood!

They only go sit up on top of the hill just long enough, you see, to get their temper back and figure something mean to do within the realm of agreement. And if they figured out something really mean, like the—supposing they rolled back into the childhood play with a French 75 loaded with shrapnel and chain shot, you know? It just—there wouldn't be any game.

Well, these are the various problems, the problems of creation. One can go in for unlimited creation, one can go in for unlimited persistence, one can go in for unlimited destruction, but when he goes in for any one of these things, he unbalances everything he's trying to do.

You'll find people who have dropped away from an ability to create become very miserable. And there is nothing more sour than somebody who can only destroy; he's a real sour apple. And God help the fellow who can only endure or persist—he can't create, he can't destroy, he can only endure or persist. Ooh, what a dogged fate to hand anybody! You could give him mobs of people agreeing with mobs of people that it will never end, you practically knock him flat—because that's what "persist" is.

So we were operating all this time, really—the "what life is doing"—you see, in Dianetics, what life was doing was surviving. That's right, it's enduring, that is the explanation of life. That's the only thing wrong with it: My God, does it endure. Its forms endure.

You set up a group or something in this society and it'll endure. Everything combines to make it endure. You can get so confoundedly sick of your own constructions standing up, that you wish to Pete there was a French 75 that would knock down some of the ideas you've set up for yourself—they're all enduring. You wonder what's wrong with your postulates, why they don't wipe out easily, why your locks don't release, why you can't run an engram and get an erasure on the thing. Well, you're enduring—boy, you sure are. You're out there for a goal which is without end.

Now, this is a very tricky goal indeed, as soon as we recognize this, because it doesn't run on an end of cycle. You see that? You've seen the efficacy of end of cycle—"Well, I finally finished that," you say. That's the efficiency of it, the beauty of it, and it produces a considerable relief. But what about these things—how do you run an end of cycle of something which starts out on the postulate it will endure forever? You see? It makes a very amusing thing. Well, the thing for it—because, you see, if it is destroyed then, why, it's a losing cycle.

Well, there is a way to lick it. You just bust it down by creating the thing—just endlessly create it. Let it go on and endure, do anything it pleases, but just go on and create it and create it and create it and create it and create it and create it and you've—all of a sudden, it breaks down on the sheer weight of "too much." You see that?

So that something which is set up with a basic postulate it must endure is in essence running backwards. It's running until creation. If it's set up to endure and you let it—you try to run end of cycle on destruction, of course you—you've failed. So that brings in the failure cycle. So you let it run until creation. Just run it backwards, that's all. See that?

Now, back of that lies another mechanism, is that which is not admired persists. So if you just keep on creating—let's take real life, this is humorously referred to—let's take your endurance of things that aren't admired. And you'll find that people are actually trying, here and there, to end that cycle just naturally. You know, they kind of know this—it's one of the working operations of life, and so they try to create this thing which isn't admired.

So they go on creating things that they know won't be admired, and they feel if they create enough of them often enough in real life, why, they will eventually be able to whip this thing which is enduring. It's like the fox without his tail—he goes around and tries to sell all the foxes on the idea that no fox should have a tail. If he can just create the condition widely enough and often enough, he feels it will cease, you see. Well, that's not good processing, not good at all. Because he runs into the other complexities—overt—motivator mechanisms and so on.

He's setting up new solutions—I mean, new problems to be solved, which is to say the unhappiness about him of all other foxes and so on. Well, why he just doesn't go back of a tree someplace and sit down quietly, and create mock-ups of foxes without tails until he either grows one or he's no longer worried about them, one doesn't quite recognize.

Well, a thing endures until it's created, if it's a bad thing. And it endures until it's destroyed, if it's a good thing. Now, you can run end of cycle on an awful lot of people simply by running Assumptions. Do you get that? I mean, you run this undesirable thing of having to pick up somebody else's baby, and you run this for a while, and you keep running Assumptions as end of cycle. Or you just create the Assumption over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and create it here and there, and ye god, you fill the Atlantic and the Pacific and all the distance between here and the moon with them, and you just keep on, and eventually it becomes funny, even to the preclear. He finally lets one go.

This is the mechanisms of scarcity. People try to create a scarcity so that they can fix some attention. If a person has a billion of something, why, attention sure is scattered amongst them. And in view of the fact that the thetan is not a thing, he is much more likely to dream up something of which there is only one. And he himself gets into the "only one" category.

Now, we see this—these mechanisms operating in life. You can go over them and so on, but I want to call your attention to these things as important. And basically there is knowingness. And then, step down from that, you—stepping down from, basically, we have space, which of course immediately is a barrier. It's the barrier called distance, which is a trick barrier. And we have other limiting barriers. People then try to fight, you see, the barrier called distance, and they fight that by putting up walls, limitations and so forth, so there won't be distances, and they run out of space. So they're caught between the Devil and space. And the Devil is no space, and God is all space, if you want the difference between these concepts. All right.

They work with that. And I call your attention to that and tell you very bluntly that any time you exceed that in processing—that is to say, if you don't realize that that is what you're working with to solve the problem of this universe: knowingness, barriers, in which distance itself is a barrier, and the impositions of barriers—and anytime you exceed that, you're going to bog your preclear down because you're going to be validating new barriers. You're just going to give him more barriers than you're going to take away.

And anytime you start reaching into the significance of things, you put a new strain on his knowingness. Now, you start worrying like psychotherapy has always worried about the "deep significance of," and you're just catering to the fact that his words betray him, and that life is liable to confront him with problems which in solving them he will betray himself, and he'll do something to ridicule himself. In other words, you just sell him complete on the idea that he's some kind of a piece of machinery—you validate this endlessly, you see—you sell him on the idea he's a kind of a piece of machinery that's going to deliver himself into the hands of the Devil, come hell or high water. And you just sell him on this, and you've got him really sold, and he really gets squirrelly.

What is the deep significance of the fact that he uses 2.1 pieces of sugar? What is the significance of the fact that atoms when they rah-rah go rah-rah and rah-rah, and formulas when poured into formulas make formulas, and test tubes when not washed, as they rarely are, often stink. And you get these terrific technical significances.

You could set it up on a little higher basis where it's rather out in the clear and it becomes very silly. You get the professor walking around in the laboratory wondering why it is, and plotting and giving and devoting his whole life to the fact that when test tubes aren't washed, when they've had odoriferous chemicals in them, they have odor. And he could devote his whole life to this problem with great ease, and usually does.

Then we get some fellow who is—we get some fellow who is looking on the other side and … You could—by the way, you could probably prove mathematically that nobody has ever seen the other side of an electron, and give somebody this terrible problem of what is the deep significance of the fact that all electrons are apparently cup-shaped like those little wind cones on anemometers, and that they actually don't have any backside or middle, you know, that they're a little shell. And just set this up and say, "Why is this?" You'd undoubtedly have an awful lot of people start working on it.

All you've got to do is take any unreasonable assumption and then look for some deep significance and you have science. Take an unreasonable assumption and look for a deep significance.

The unreasonable assumption in this universe is that there is one. You have to go immediately to that assumption any time you try to solve any problems in this universe. Everybody is driven there sooner or later. The greatest physicists of all time have spent their lives sorting out endless bric-a-brac and lying in apathy at last upon their deathbed. They have dictated to their amanuensis the fact that as near as they can figure out, God made it; or as near as they can figure out, it was all caused by the explosion of an atom; or as near as they can figure out, it's an entire illusion; or as near as they can figure out, it will never be solved—anything like this.

That's because they've gone on to this, and they've picked up immediately and they've entered the problem, always at a more complicated level than it deserved. They assumed there was a universe and then started to solve it. This is as—about as backwards as you could get. You see, you can't assume there is something that you're trying to solve.

Be self—it should be very evident to you why atomic physics, all it can do right now is go boom! They have to assume the solution in order to solve the problem. Pardon me—they have to assume the solution in order to pose the problem. Do you see that? And as soon as you say, "All right, now here's this universe. Here is this universe …"

It's like geometry. Somebody comes along every once in a while and shoves geometry under some kid's nose, and the kid doesn't have enough sense to run. And they—says all this stuff like "side angle side" and "angle side angle" and "triangles are triangles is a rose is a rose is a rose, when I was a little girl," as Gertrude Stein would have said.

But the point is, of course, side angle side equals side angle side because you've already assumed that side angle side equals side angle side. If you've already assumed something, there's no trick at all to proving it. No trick.

And yet, you can sure be mysterious about it, as any geometry professor has long since demonstrated. So we have the problem of the universe. And they say, "Now we're going to solve this universe. Now, let's see, here is the universe. Ha-ha! And here we go, and now we're going to solve this universe." Well, you've just assumed the solution so that you could pose a problem to come up with a solution.

Aristotle was a singularly gifted man. I can't bring myself to believe that anybody who was smart enough to keep Alexander from slitting his throat—because Alexander had a specialty on this—if he was smart enough to keep Alexander in line, he sure was too smart to believe his own syllogism. And the fact that he put it forth merely bespeaks a rather diabolical nature. Probably he was poorly—as Freud would have said—"poorly toilet trained" or something. This probably would have been the vast significance Freud would have assigned to it. Anyway … (audience laughter)

Anyway, you as auditors have to understand some of this basic of: "Here is the universe. Now we pose a problem and now we've got to solve the universe."

Now let's take it in terms of auditing: We have—here is a preclear—here's this preclear, he's thinking, he's moving, he's acting, he sees things and does things. And now we have him, you see. Now we've got to pose him as a problem in order to solve him. That won't work. You've got him, you see. That means you've got to look for hidden significance in the preclear.

That means in terms of physicists, they've got to look for a hidden significance in the atom. There isn't any hidden significance in an atom. They would have made them explode a long time ago if they hadn't assumed they couldn't. It wasn't a matter of make—their making postulates about it, it was just a matter of them putting a complete barricade, a barrier, across their own knowingness. They took the railroad track, or whatever they were traveling on, or the oxcart trail or the mountain ledge or the clear blue nothingness that they were traveling on, and they just lowered this enormous gate right straight across where they were going. And they said, "All right, now, here is the universe. Now let's have a problem. Now, let's see, what is it composed of?" Well, they've already said, "Here it is." Now, all you had to do from there on was simply look at it.

If you've said, "Here it is, and this is the way it is; here it is"—you've said, "Here it is"—then the only remaining thing there is to do is to look at it. You can't possibly go backwards on this problem all the time and say, "Now here is something; now it has a hidden significance." This is weird beyond weird. "The hidden significance of" could be put on every tombstone in any part of the universe that was ever erected. "What is the significance of?" That's the game. That's automaticity, that's the game.

Only reason you have to know about automaticity is a very simple reason: You have to know it so that you can solve remarkable and strange things which the preclear has accidentally started to duplicate and hasn't completed. Not to validate the barrier of the automaticity or randomity. Because a preclear every once in a while will be so confoundedly fixated on something like a twitching right ear, upon the fact that you have—that he has nothing but a pinwheel which goes on and on and on before his gaze, in order to get an entrance to the case, you have to know how to handle an automaticity. And you really have to know this.

That's the other—next thing you have to know, see. Is although here's the preclear—yes, here is the preclear—this preclear is a body, a thetan, and a twitching right ear. This is what is presented right there at the moment. And the only thing he's interested in is his twitching right ear. It's an automaticity which he can't control. And that's all he's interested in, are these automaticities that he cannot control. He's not otherwise interested. He is interested in what's going to slug him so suddenly and so swiftly that nothing is going to be able to stand him up to it. This is upsetting to him.

So you have to know how to solve this because you've got to be able to get his attention up to a point of where you can break him into his component parts. So he again will say, "Gee! Here I am." You've boosted him up suddenly into a big piece of knowingness, and with drills and so forth, why, he is hitting another plane entirely. You're just making more preclear; you're not saying, "What is the significance of this preclear so we can make less of him."

And the only reason you handle an automaticity, is just to get his attention off something long enough so that you can break him into his component parts: which is to say a body, an engram bank, a MEST universe, and the thetan, and then his own universe and the other fellow's universe; and these are the component parts.

But as long as he's jammed up too tight together—he's jammed himself in, and with—had some help doing it, into a situation where he can't any longer solve the problem.

Now, the reason why he's—can't solve the problem, is because he's solving problems. I'm—this is horrible to say something like that, because it sounds like I'm making a joke with you or something. But the reason he can't solve the problem is because he can't solve the problem. I just—MEST language has a tendency to sort of break down here. I mean, the problem can't be solved, because there isn't any problem.

The big joke of this universe is that there's no secret.

Now, let me give you the first unsolved problem that the preclear has. It has to do with the eighth dynamic. The biggest chunk of other-determinism which he's ever handed out was to a fellow named God. Shouldn't strike you at all peculiar that the word God, Gott and so forth, in all these languages, runs a very few—that it's almost the same word. It's dios, in the Latin tongues, and in the Germanic, it's Gott or God and so on. This is not really peculiar. Because it's simply a key-in—it's a key-in phrase, it's a restimulator phrase. And you, right away, probably shudder a little bit at my suddenly saying that the name of this august and great being is simply the key phrase on an engram, but it happens to be more or less true. And this is not sacrilegious on my part, I'm just telling you that God—the word God gets into engrams. And it gets in there so much that a person's other-determinism says that "all the space there is, was God's."

Now, what's the first problem he was ever posed by this subject? What's the first one? He made a mock-up and it disappeared. And then there was somebody there in the flesh to say, "You poor fellow, God has smitten you." And he made another mock-up, and it disappeared. And this fellow came back and he said, "You poor guy, what's happening to you?"

Well, you see what happened there: Two thetans got together and one of them was kind of a little more innocent than the other one, or less so, and the first big gag was, you made somebody's mock-up disappear and then you said somebody else did it. See? And in view of the fact that—that's why you want identity so badly, is identity relieves you of this game called "God did it."

And he came around, and everybody was using this, and it got into an agreement finally that the reason mock-ups disappeared like this—that was God, see. And like the World War—they had "gremlins" that did things to their planes. Gremlins didn't exist.

These thetans—if you took the composite of all thetans, you would have what man has attempted to describe in the word God. See, you just took a composite of all life impulse—now, this you would say would be the prime mover unmoved. Well, that composite, everybody wants to solve that now in terms of "What is the terrific significance of this?" Well, it is. That's—you can't—you have to really just start beating this out. It is. It observably is. It isn't observably from eight other angles or something of the sort, and you don't have to get down on your knees and look through a hole in the fence to observe it, it hits you in the face every time you turn around.

Life is quite different from MEST because it gets ideas; it has imagination and ideas. And this stuff MEST, whether built into machines or put on motion-picture screens or anything else, does not have ideas or imagination. It will, in a UNIVAC or ENIAC or a music-making machine, turn out quite faithfully various patterns of knowingness, providing it is monitored by a machine set up by life.

In other words—in other words, you have always—ahead of everything you have this causative thing, and this causative thing most causes ideas. And that's the single real, observable, big difference between a solid object and a living thing.

So we have this tremendous difference, and we look down the line at the activities of life, and we can conclude it is. And we can also conclude that it sure is fooling itself one way or the other, and it sure is hiding its left hand from its right hand, and it certainly is trying to play several games of chess as several different players, in any unit you discover.

I think even a butterfly goes around trying to play chess with himself, as low a monitored unit—and a butterfly is a monitored unit, he's not a life unit. All right.

What's the point here? In trying to solve this preclear, in trying to solve his problems and his troubles and so forth, you want to get him out of significances. Please, get him out of significances. Because life, in trying to fool itself, played this first trick consistently, and said, "Only God can make nothing." After a while, the fellow had assigned—after this trick had been played on him enough, he said, "Only God could make nothing, therefore God is all space."

And to this moment, you take any preclear and you have him put up a mock-up—this preclear has been having the most dreadful time trying to get something to disappear—and you have him put up this mock-up, you say, "Time, disappear." Well, it will, but the great reliability that you will have is when he puts up a mock-up, tell him to have God make it disappear—and boy, it will, right now.

Now, there's a process that goes along with nothingness which demonstrates to you quite easily that people are afraid of nothingness, which makes them afraid of space, which makes them pull in toward a somethingness. And the nothingness has been made so mysterious—just because of the ideas which float around about these nothingnesses—that hardly anyone is able to expand very far without running into it.

One of the exercises which can best be utilized in this, is to have the preclear put out, at various angles and directions from him—put out, you understand, or just find there and say he put it out and created it—a nothingness.

One would do that in this fashion, in the latter—give you an example of the latter phase of that first. One would say, "Now, let's find an empty spot somewhere around you."

The fellow says, "All right."

And the auditor then says, "All right. Now say that you put it there."

"Well, I don't know … Okay."

And we start round and round on this technique, putting these in various directions, the six directions from the individual, and he gets quite triumphant, he gets quite excited about this in a very short space of time.

And then we can quickly get too much significance into this technique by saying that—have these nothingnesses and say, "God put them there." And start to work them in terms of brackets and so forth.

And the latter part of the technique—this is such a high, high level of process, it'll make the preclear sick—he'll get sick; that's a certainty. But also, who knows, in getting sick, if he's processed ably, you might process him right straight through and right on up the line at a heck of a rate.

That's sort of—this technique is a sort of a process by which you would go for broke in somebody who's pretty good shape. You'd have God put these nothingnesses there, and then you'd have him make nothing of God, and have him demolish churches, and have churches and God demolish him, and spirits demolish him, and him demolish others. And we find out that the thetans have gotten into a monomanic contest of make nothing while they themselves try to be something, and thus they go on a dwindling spiral.

The most mysterious thing you could have would be a nothing that people say something is in. And that of course is the deepest significance of all, and is the answer to all: a nothingness in which there is something. And they believe implicitly and utterly that there are somethings, because they can believe that there is a nothing in which something exists.

That's all.

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