View source for The Granting of Beingness (2ACC 531218)

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

'''Date:''' 18 December 1953

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

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Alternate title: Beingness

This is December the 18th, second lecture of the day.

Tonight, I'm not going to tell you that this talk is epochal or monumental or something like that, but what I am going to cover in it is fairly important to you. And this talk is on the subject of beingness. You wouldn't think there was too much to talk about on this subject of beingness, but I hope you have digested a great deal of the material which we have had to date. Because you're going to find it, to some degree, dropping into its proper categories and much of the theory dropping into a second echelon as you begin to look at life and understand it from this framework that we have here.

And this framework is the Factors. Somebody, typically Californians, published, republished the factors without my yes or no and they said we can’t quite make this out but evidently there’s something because Hubbard seems to attach a great deal of importance to it. And, uh, this is quite Californian. Uhh, California has the hot sun and it pounds in on these people and makes them smaller and smaller and they get to playing the only one, work and work, harder and harder, they get crammed down there into Los Angeles, mind you, California has more space in more direction than you can think of and, uh, they’re getting closer and closer together and they, they don’t believe in anybody finding himself either, you get on one of those freeways in Los Angeles now and get off of it two or three months later…and, uh, they have the most efficient police force in the world, according to the program Dragnet, but, uh, the truth of the matter is that it has the most corrupt police force in the world. The vice squad, uh…there, uh, uniformly they get vice squad if people don’t pay off the vice squad, why the vice squad charges them with vice and the vice is not paying off the vice squad. “Just stay calm”, that’s Los Angeles so forth. San Francisco, people are a little more cheerful, they’re not so bad and uh. San Diego however, being all the way south, and pounded in much harder by the sun and so on, these people down there have a rough time of it and Long Beach you know is the capitol of Iowa. And uh all good farmers in Iowa who have finally managed to get enough money from the government for not producing or something, finally go down to Long Beach. Now actually though, because of that infusion of new blood continually, Long Beach, sunny, live place, you go down there and you see checker games going forward…so on. Uh, don’t get me wrong, it’s, it’s not all all what you might say ridden with vice and corruption and so forth. There was a movie producer there one time whose wife was faithful to him, of course he was driven out of the film colony but uh best leave of it. Now uh the, the, the Factors, getting back off the direction and diversion, the fact is, a lot of times you get the idea I picked it out for randomity, I have and I picked it out to be some day, I have decided that town is going to wake up some day and come to life and going to sweep the corpses off the sidewalk ‘cause that gorgeous climate, and that gorgeous California air, certainly could say the sand, a public education system instead of UCLA uh a police corps uh, a police force instead of Dragnet uh and uh they, they really, they really could be a wonderful country, there’s no doubt about it. But anyway, anything that comes out uh that makes good sense, almost anything comes out that makes good sense, gets mauled around and hammed around and beaten up out in California. It’s like most of the rumors, that you hear about the HAS or something, uh most of them start in California, they would start there. They don’t get any reporting in California, somebody just sits down and thinks up a news item. And it doesn’t matter where the HAS is operating or where I am, why you always get new ones out of the area. Uh, but at the same time, you can’t communicate with them very well. Well anyway, the Factors came out and California had a good time with it.

Truth of the matter is that the Factors contain, actually, just about all you need to know. But at first glance over, it doesn't add up into processes. And I myself can read it over every once in a while and suddenly find out what's wrong with some case that's hanging fire.

Well, the trouble with simplicity is it's too simple to be understood easily; that's the main trouble with it. That’s probably why California had such a hard time, it’s too simple.

When we have the Factors in action, and where we're able to go over the Factors and put them into action, I don't think there's any problem or any case that can stand up very well before such an onslaught. And so I'm inviting you to evaluate what you have now in terms of the Factors.

We've talked here – just the last few talks have been on the subject of cause and effect, which is the first line in the Factors. And now we're on the second line in the Factors. The first decision: to be.

Well, there's a lot more to that than just "to be." One of the factors that would be the most important to anyone, would be beingness.

Now here today, shortly after the first talk of the day, I gave you a short demonstration on the subject of beingness. Had somebody put a dot of light out in back of him and give it beingness. And he said right away, why, he had kind of – he was out there and snapped back in. And this should have seemed very strange that a person could move around that easily on the subject of beingness. It's just a word – be. It's a two-letter word.

And yet, in essence, all other things – all other things, including cause and effect, are symptoms of beingness. And life itself, in all of its randomities, consists of whether or not one wants other things to be or other things want him to be, and that itself establishes the randomity. That itself establishes the game.

And all the things – all the things of life have some bearing on beingness.

Everything has a bearing on beingness. And this beingness is the stuff of life itself.

A thing that is alive is below the level of a thetan. You see that – a thing that is alive. A thetan is something that grants beingness.

Now, let's take the ant kingdom. The ants have been granted beingness. The ants themselves are not a beingness – that is, an independent beingness, such as a thetan. And here we get an oddity; we get an oddity in behavior in terms of ants. You go around and trifle with an ant. As a thetan, you go around and you start pushing around an ant: put a beam through his head, short-circuit out some of the working parts, make him walk in small circles, and you immediately start getting this – the idea that there's something someplace that is getting awfully mad at you. Funny, isn't it?

Now, you go down in the sea – it seldom occurs to an auditor to send a thetan into the sea. And yet there you have more life and otherwise… An auditor is so sold, ordinarily, on the fact that this person is a body that's sitting in front of him, he momentarily forgets that he is exercising a thetan, and that a thetan doesn't have to breathe.

And a thetan can go all sorts of places. One of the more interesting places I have sent thetans has been into the volcanic lava, the boiling lava of Kilauea. It's a very interesting place to go. You'd be surprised what's going on there about five or six miles down.

And you go out into the Philippine deep and there's some of the most interesting fish that you ever ran into. And there are coral snakes – deadly poison to a human being, but of course completely ineffective against a thetan – and they are very colorful, they're very pretty. And there – the reefs of the coral islands of the Pacific are really gorgeous under the interplays of sunlight when seen from below. And there are some of the most mysterious beasts that roam the ocean, a mile or two down – very mysterious beasts. They've never seen light. And you get into a world of – way down, you get into a world of phosphorescent, you might say, life. Everybody's carrying his own flashlight. And they are – they're swimming around carrying flashlights. And they eat each other up just as thoroughly down there as anyplace else.

Well, anyway, all this leads up to is that this type of life has a granted beingness. Something has granted beingness to it. And you start to trifle with it, and something starts to get mad. Well, you can go right on trifling with it – nothing's going to happen. But you'll get this kickback emotion, because you're actually operating up against a comm line of whatever it is that monitors things like fish and coral snakes and so on. And you hook into that beast or being and you start to disturb his beingness, and you upset the general beingness of that class of merchandise. Quite interesting; it's well worth your study.

More important than that, you as a thetan have walked in on genetic entities which are not as low in order as ants and not as low in order as fish, but are definitely hooked up and dedicated in a certain direction.

Now, there isn't any statement here that the body is a degraded thetan. I have never said that; I don't say it now. It's one of these things as a possibility – a body is a degraded thetan. Personally I don't think this is true. I think it's a different class of beingness entirely from what I have, but – it's a higher class than ants and fish and so forth, but is nevertheless something that has been granted beingness. It is, in other words, a second-stage somethingness about this.

And we don't know all there is to know about this anatomy of life forms in this universe. We don't know that. Mostly because we don't have to know that.

But now, there's a great deal of speculation can go on about this and a great deal of lookingness. The way to settle a speculation is to start looking. That's always a good idea.

And if you start looking at mest, you will find that mest itself seems to have a beingness about it. There seems to be a certain determination in an electron, and that's – it's quite interesting. As a matter of fact, you had a theory advanced here the other night about electrons and so on, so that you had doubly opposed forces in the intention of an electron. Well, we needn't go into that.

You know, it's one thing to do something and another thing to inspect what is being done by life. Now, life can do anything until it becomes completely dedicated to a single communication line. Any being can do anything until he becomes dedicated to a single communication line which he then considers invariable. The only excuse for the communication lines of Scientology are that they undo communication lines and restore the ability to create communication lines, forms and randomity.

Now, automaticity – automaticity takes place by granted beingness. One grants beingness to – oh, an area of space or something, and thereafter says that this beingness will now act in such a fashion.

Now, that is a second order of beingness to the thetan, or the third order of beingness. So in essence, he has set up an ant or something or other that doesn't have the same concrete form, you see? He has fixed an idea. When one fixes an idea, he has granted a beingness to a space – you see, a fixed idea.

So what is this idea? Now, we get around to what the – what life does that is quite different than mest. And we get immediately up to this point: that MEST doesn't get ideas and life does. Life can get ideas. Well, getting an idea is something like granting beingness. And by granting beingness to something, one has to that degree given it life. And now when one starts to tear down his automaticities, he is in effect destroying life. You see that? But he's destroying life that he put there.

It's like the entities of the body. You can do a lot of speculation about the entities of the body, but in essence they are fixed ideas – at least they've degenerated down to fixed ideas. Now, they measure up, answer up, talk and do a lot of other things, but the point is that they're just fixed ideas. Who put them there? Well, that's unimportant.

You get the most weird and fantastic story, by the way, off the entities themselves, just with an E-Meter and its responses. You get this story rather invariably. Once upon a time, a thetan was in command of a crew. This is the story you get: A thetan was in command of a crew, and he let the crew get more and more out of hand, and more and more out of hand, and more and more out of hand, and controlled them less and less and got less and less done; and became at last completely sloppy, and so was packaged up with all the entities and shipped down here. And that's the story you'll get off the entities themselves. But they will tell you anything, of course, because being fixed ideas, you can fix almost any idea in them that sounds likely. But you do get that as a response on the E-Meters: that the thetan finally doped off to the point where he let everything go wild and so he was shipped to Earth.

Well, the deterioration of the thetan is on this cycle: He grants beingness and then is sorry he did so. And so, having granted beingness, saws connections off with that beingness and believes that he himself has – and he wouldn't do a thing if he didn't believe this too – he believes he has cut down his own beingness. So he believes that every time he grants beingness – the person who gets on the idea of quantity, such as we discussed today, you see, on the terminals and so on – the person who gets this idea on quantity, believes that when he gives some beingness to something he cuts himself down. This isn't true. A person becomes more and more and more and wider and wider and wider. He has an unlimited supply of grantable beingness. And so he gets bigger and bigger and bigger, you could say.

Now, he can grant beingness; a thetan can do this. And he can take it away – as long as he does not insist on resisting what he has already set up.

Now, the way not to go about it is to grant some beingness to something and then decide to fight it. But this is one of the first things that a thetan does in order to produce some randomity: He makes the other chess player. And having made the other chess player, he then plays a game with the other chess player. But if he goes on with this as his pattern of operation, he will eventually wind up with having created all of his own enemies. And they will be – these ideas that he has created can be real living beings, or they are simply sailing around in the air, or as – fixed in the space or his space, as things which he has refused to take any further responsibility for. And so we have this problem of the man and his ideas. We could say, "the man and his subordinates." We could say, "the thing that grants being and those things to which beingness has been granted."

Now, a thetan has granted being to the body. And where that beingness is granted, the thetan will do it to such a degree that he believes the body, after that, has a beingness of its own which is quite like his own. And so you get the thetan matching the ridges of the body. Of course those are his ridges, those are his ideas, his automaticities, and so he thinks he is the body.

Well, a thing which grants beingness and can grant beingness endlessly, can bring to life and animate anything, that comes to believe at length that something has granted him life and beingness, gets into very bad shape. Because the finest thing that a thetan can do is to grant life and beingness. That's the finest thing he can do. And the worst thing he can do is to set it up as otherness and combat it. Because then that's the story of man fighting himself.

Any preclear you have is simply a drama of a being that can grant beingness, fighting the beingness he has granted. And that is the story of your preclear. Now, he is surrounded on every side by things to which he will not grant beingness, things he is convinced won't do any good if he grants them beingness. He thinks he has to go through some communication system in order to grant beingness, and this kind of beingness is secondary. Why? It's because it had to go through a communication system to grant beingness.

Let's take a carpenter: he's going to grant beingness to wood by taking a saw and a hammer and a chisel and put together a chest. Now he has made a chest; he has created a chest. Now, that's granting beingness via a communication system. Now, what is the kind of beingness he would grant to something if he simply sat down and granted beingness to it? He probably could create in that fashion a chest of wood – probably. But he doesn't believe that he can, and so he goes through the reliable, he thinks, communication system and creates it with a hammer and a chisel and a saw.

Now, granting beingness – for instance, you can look around you immediately and see two or three items to which you would not readily grant beingness, or which you believe you couldn't grant beingness to. You take a piece of paper or a clock – you say, "Well, it's silly for me to grant beingness to that clock because it runs. It runs if whoever owns it turns it on or turns it off." Well, you see, beingness has already been granted to the clock by a communication system. And a thetan comes along late in the game to something which is already dedicated on another beingness line and starts to grant beingness to it and it doesn't respond. Because the one thing it mustn't do – that's right in the clock: It must resist all effects.

The factory in Connecticut that makes such clocks makes them with that postulate in them. And the fellow who planned and designed them made them with that postulate in them: resist all effects. And that was the first thing we took up when you came here, was "resist all effects."

So the thetan thinks, then, that he cannot get into adequate competition with the mest universe because he appears on a scene, the beingness of the scene is already granted. And there, too, is where an individual has a very difficult time of it in a new community – all the beingness is granted, he thinks.

See, it isn't true that it actually is, he just thinks it is. And he goes into this new community, and the courthouse and the residences and so on are all strange, and they've already had beingness granted to them, and everybody is telling him continually, "Well, now that's Judge Morton's house and that's Bill Suds's bar. And that's the county courthouse, and we built that back there shortly after the fire." And he sees everyone around him has granted the beingness to this town, but he hasn't.

Well, he realizes this very, very sharply because everybody in town is very, very anxious to keep him informed that they granted beingness to the town – he didn't. He's a stranger.

Now, you take a young child – the child's born in this town, the child's been raised in this town, the child's gone out exploring. He's sort of left his mark on the old oak tree, and he has broken windowpanes in that house and he's been chased by the old lady in some other house. And some other house – that was the one he always bedeviled in Halloween. And he has more or less left his claw marks all around the town. And from the earliest youth, he had his own ideas about this town; and he had them, fortunately, two or three years before anybody thought he had any ideas about it and began to educate him.

Or by this time he knows they're wrong. He knows that house up on the hill is haunted – it's always been haunted, it always will be haunted. And even if they take it down, he knows there's where the haunted house used to stand. He has granted beingness to it. In other words, he's identified it, he's classified it and he has haunted it.

And in such a way, an individual inhabits the entire community where he is raised. So that people who are moved around too much early in life get to a point where they believe they cannot inhabit the community. Here's a question of being space – but there is more to being space than just being space. There's granting space beingness.

It is a very funny thing, you know – some fellow comes over the top of a hill and he sees a town lying out in front of him and he says, "What a horrible, ramshackle, mean, ugly, vicious place that is." And the next fellow comes over the top of the hill, and he takes a look at this town and he invests it with beingness and then he says, "There's a town there."

Well now, the first fellow goes down into the town and nobody does anything for him, and if they shoe his horse or fix his car or do something to him, they'll put the shoe on backwards or patch the tire up in some outlandish fashion that won't last very far and things just kind of go that way – and he'll be overcharged for it.

And the next fellow comes through, that's granted beingness to the town – well, there's probably nothing wrong with his equipment anyhow, but he goes down there and he finds everybody's real nice to him and he gets a good room in the hotel and the chow's good and everybody's happy and cheerful about the whole thing. That's what he runs into continually through life.

Well, it isn't that one has manufactured his own future to this degree simply by considering things are bad. It's because he doesn't manufacture it at that long range, he manufactures it in terms of split seconds. From moment to moment he manufactures his own future. And if he won't grant it any beingness, his future isn't live. It has no life in it at all. A split second after he utters the postulate, no life occurs. That's because this individual is unwilling to grant beingness or is afraid to.

We have run into here, the "Frankenstein effect." He is afraid to grant beingness to anything, he's afraid to grant life to things. The "Frankenstein effect" – because he has granted life to things and then they've become too live, and instead of just taking the beingness out of them or putting the beingness elsewhere or doing something intelligent like that, he started to fight Frankenstein's monster and so it fought back. And in view of the fact that he built it and put "resist all effects" into it, the one that it will fight hardest is himself.

So, the "Frankenstein effect": One is unwilling to be cause because the effect is that he won't be able to stop what he has started. So he gets afraid to grant beingness to things. He says, "Well, I don't know, I loaned my car to those kids last week and they did this and that and so forth. And so I won't loan my car to anybody this week because they'll do the same with it." Of course they will, but he shouldn't be afraid of it. What's the idea, only having one car? You know, I mean, that shows a certain pauperishness right there – I mean, in creative ability.

The fellow's probably trying to play the "only one." I noticed a well-known motor company in the United States recently started advising everybody to sell their big car and buy two of these little cars, and that was better off for all hands, and they were running it – advertising to show that then the wife could go out too. They don't realize that men buy one car so she can't.

They didn't look back into – vastly into the past and find out in the caves that men very commonly broke the woman's leg just to make very sure that she didn't leave. As a matter of fact, women are still resentful about it – it crops up every once in a while. And this fight between the sexes is mainly a refusal to grant beingness to the opposite sex, rather than an actual war which has to do with dissimilar parts.

Now, it has two sources. Once removed from beingness, it has the mechanical source of two different terminals which are necessary for the creation of a certain type of sensation. And a person believes he is two and then he's lost the other part of him and he goes on through life this way.

Well, riding above this, there is a senior part of the computation, and that is beingness. If one is unwilling to grant beingness to those people to whom he talks – he's always trying to keep from granting beingness to those with whom he talks, and in trying to keep from granting beingness to them and yet talking to them – oh, no! You see what's going to happen? He is beginning to fight his granting of beingness. You see that? He talks to somebody and he grants them beingness; he does this at the same time. Now, we're talking about something that's very, very necromantic and demonological right now. We're not talking "practically" at all. We're not talking, in other words, about an engineer's mest or a Western Union telegraph operator's communication system. We're talking about what life does best: It waves its magic wand and says, "be" or "live" or "exist" and things do. And that's what life does.

Now, here you have an individual who's made several things exist and he's no longer willing to make anything exist. So everything he has ever made attacks him. And the things right around in his vicinity will attack him. They refuse to grant him beingness. When a person has too often been refused beingness by the environment around him, he himself will begin to refuse the environment beingness.

All mechanics aside – viewpoint of space and everything else aside; opinions, considerations, mechanical communication systems, mest, double terminals, postulates, processes, SOP 8-C and everything else aside – by one means or another, this beingness will manifest itself to the disqualification of the individual who will not grant beingness. Disqualifies him, sooner or later. In this universe, it disqualifies him in terms of less and less space. He has to have less and less space, you see, because he can't extend himself over any further space because he can't grant beingness to those things there.

Now, you'll see this mirrored on the bodies of the people you process. You will see to what degree people have refused to grant them beingness, and as they are processed you will see to what degree they refuse to grant beingness.

One of the first questions that you will ask them – quite often if a case is in terrible condition you'll get this: One of the first things you might ask is, "All right. Put some life in that pillow over there on the couch."

And a person would look at you, and they would say, "Put some life in the pillow? Well, it has no life! You know, it's not alive." Hm-hm! You're looking at somebody you're going to process for a long time if you keep on processing.

Another symptom is, is when you start to run a bracket on them "others for others," they will tell you immediately, "That doesn't concern me." You see, you run the bracket. Now you say, "Now, waste a machine for yourself. And waste some blackness for yourself. And get somebody else wasting some blackness for himself. Now get somebody else wasting some blackness for somebody else."

Well, they'll waste it those first two steps, and on that third one, somebody for somebody else: "That doesn't concern me. I haven't any concern with that." Why? They refuse to grant beingness to it, that's all. Or they have rigged up some kind of a system – a super, super, super, super system – for the granting of beingness.

In European countries people have rigged up a method of granting beingness to beggars without letting beggars live. They give them alms. They give them coins. That is a method of granting beingness. It's a communication system. It's a present of money, it's a tip. And thereby they don't have to look and actually do anything about this beggar or notice him otherwise. They pay him to go way – and he goes way.

All such systems of pushing people off or doing something with them are based upon this: that people don't want other people to exist or be – an unwillingness to let other things be, let them exist. You see, I have just tripped over here – there's a cliche in English of "let it be." You know, in other words, "leave it alone." That's an interesting twist, isn't it? Yeah, that's a very direct foul-up on a phrase – very aberrative.

Anyway, these people have invented the most remarkable systems by which they won't have to grant beingness. They have this wonderful system rigged up. There's the social system – of course, that has deteriorated in the world today almost unbelievably. It's gotten down into Willy Randolph – the late William Randolph Hearst's – papers to a society column. And what he defines as society is anybody who has a larger bank account than anybody else. And the last part of the society that has anything to do with society there is just in that – in those columns, believe me, that's all. And I think there's a club in New York called "The Baby Club" (I won't give it any advertising) where people can go in and pay enormous checks for no service. And these people, of course, can be classified this way.

Well, that's the last surviving remnants of a system for not granting beingness – the last surviving remnants. That really is the last dregs of a system which tyrannized man for thousands of years. Systems which fell upon "who was your father" – they all ran it on the GE line.

They were so used to breeding horses that they followed men with the same pattern. They knew every famous horse, and they knew who his sire and dam was, so they thought, "Well, men are horses, and bodies are bodies," so they were sort of driving these bodies around as though they were horses. And they – his father was so-and-so, and his mother was so-and-so, and they might as well have said, "Well, he was out of Trotting Bess by King Henry the VIII" or something of the sort. I mean, same deal.

Well, this is a system of beingness. Now, they've tracked – genealogy is the system of tracking beingness that has been granted down the genetic entity line. It's not important. Not for a thetan, it isn't even vaguely important. It's what pedigree has the horse got that you're walking around – what is the pedigree of your Seeing Eye dog – is genealogy.

And when they go fully upon this – this basis of granting beingness – a society becomes very fixed. Birth and death themselves become communication systems far more important than the ability of the individual to grant beingness to something.

So, the canaille, the masses, the beggars, the Communist cells… The way the Communists do it today, they become party members and after that they don't have to grant beingness to the workers, they just parasite off of them; and that's the Communist system of aristocracy which is built up. And they don't have to grant beingness. They say, "You're all alike and you're a mass of ants."

Well, this is all right except the people they're doing this to don't happen to be ants, they happen to be independently capable of granting beingness. And man, realizing this sporadically, continually revolts against these systems which artificialize and make it unnecessary for people to grant beingness.

This would evidently be quite a crime – granting of beingness. It would be seen as quite a crime because it's invented, in the number of penalties – it has invented in these penalties some of the greatest cruelties man has. In other words, "somebody has talked to a commoner." Oh well, a fellow could be tried by his peers sometimes for crimes of that character, at one period or another of the human race.

He has, very recently in the United States Navy, a type of aristocracy. There is a crime known as "association with enlisted men" which is – for which an officer can be tried. And I think the maximum penalty on that – I might be wrong, but I think it's seven years in Portsmouth and reduced to apprentice seaman or seaman second class and – they don't call it "and extras," it has some legal term, but it means loss of citizenship and everything else. For what? For associating with enlisted men and you see, they granted some beingness to an enlisted man, and this is the penalty for it. Well, maybe that's necessary to keep things in line – if you need a military force, it's probably a good idea. But you see, the existing military force exists because one country is unwilling to grant beingness to another country.

You get into any argument, then, and you'll find that this argument merely – usually stems around something that one or the other party will not grant beingness to, or – and the two parties will wind up eventually by refusing to grant beingness to each other. And that's what's known as the deterioration of an argument. These two people won't any longer grant beingness to each other.

But they start out by one of them saying, "Well, Fords are no good."

And the other one says, "Oh, yes they are some good."

And the other says, "No, Fords are no good."

Well, one of them is trying to grant beingness to something, the other's trying to keep from granting beingness to something. And if they keep this up very long they will immediately stop granting beingness to each other, at which moment they become insulting, and they go right on down Tone Scale.

The Tone Scale is a scale of life. It is also the scale of the amount of beingness a person thinks he has. Each level of the Tone Scale – 4.0,1.5, 0.5 – is the amount of beingness a person thinks he has, and it reflects by the amount of motion which he thinks he can control. It's – reflects in a lot of things. So you find anybody who's having difficulty getting out of his head, difficulty with terminals, difficulty with this, regardless of the mechanical lines, somebody has refused to grant him beingness – oh, on a major scale. And he has insisted on granting himself beingness, since that's been contested. And he has refused to grant somebody else beingness.

Now, what is this "granting of beingness"? It's just a set of words. It wears out in a hurry. They're symbols, they go to pieces in a hurry. But the actual operation does not.

And you start running this on somebody who is having trouble with it, and the words just kind of wear out before he really gets the idea. If you were to run it abruptly on mest, why, you might have a very rough time of it. One of the better ways to run it would be with regard to people. You can take somebody something like him, and just have him get the idea of him granting beingness. Take him over to the window and show him the street and get him the idea of granting beingness to somebody down on the street. And he'll have to look around for a long time and do an awful lot of this, but he will actually be doing it.

It is a describable and nonerasable ability. And it increases as the individual begins to contact it and understand it. It also develops terribly heavy somatics – very heavy somatics. Refusal to let you have beingness, on the part of somebody who is in front of you, is liable to result in all sorts of tractor beams which are pulling your body to pieces, practically, these body – these beams will. And a person quite often will run "people refusing to grant him beingness" or something like this (this is a technique – a valid technique and quite usable), will get tremendous suction or pressure on his face or chest. And where somebody has desired sensation a great deal, they have had to say that "The thing I want sensation from has greater beingness than I have, since I want the energy which it creates." And so we get beingness standing above energy as a postulate.

Well, these people, when you start to run granting… Let's just take – let's take a man, and you get "granting beingness to women," and the next thing you know, he starts coughing. Well, you've put into effect the demand for energy from the woman – demand for sensation, you see.

Anytime any being grants beingness in order to get sensation back, he's liable to get a misalignment of energy and create a seniority above himself which doesn't exist, but he only thinks it does.

The granting of beingness and the refusal to have beingness: All the words of man, and all of the things which an individual runs into in life are summable under that. That's it.

Now, the first decision – decision is "to be." Well, where life is concerned in this universe, one has decided to be. But above that level is the granting of beingness, and that is an exercisable function.

Now, a fellow has to decide to be, and if he decides to be and decides at the same time not to grant further beingness, he runs immediately into the "only one." And so we get the earlier lecture today being more intelligible. He has run into this, he's decided to be something, and not to let other things be.

Now, he can be something and grant beingness to other things. But where a person has lost his ability to grant beingness, he has lost his ability as well to create. And so in the rehabilitation of creation, this is the first place we look in the preclear: the willingness to grant beingness.

Any artistic work must live. Now, there's no effort here to hedge over into the field of mysticism or necromancy or skulduggery or algebra with this. But you'll have this experience from time to time, and don't consider that it is a peculiar experience. You may do this sometime while you're processing a preclear.

You tell him, "All right, now put that postulate, whatever it is – put that postulate in the front wall of the room," and then you put the same postulate into the front wall of the room. Do you know that you'll get the wording of his postulate? You'll put your postulate in, but you're in communication with him. And that is a senior communication system.

This business of reading minds can be a very indefinite thing and a very upsetting thing. But where you have a meeting of beingness directly in this way… You know, you've made – put an idea into the wall, you see, and – after the preclear has put his idea in the wall, immediately afterwards, see. I mean, the preclear's still got his idea in the wall and you put up an idea in the wall right along with it, you'll get his wording. There's nothing wrong with this, but it's very unpositive. The less able the case is to exteriorize, the less positive this gets. But you're immediately into a thetan-to-thetan communication system and such a system exists independent of words.

The only trouble is, people are out of that communication band. More or less fortunately, because it'd be a – amongst man, it'd be a terrific chatter and hubbub communicationally, for everybody's ideas to be intelligible to everybody's ideas. People shudder away from this. They consider this is too much of a good thing. But they only shudder away from it when they are unable to adjust their own wavelengths. And when they can't adjust their own wavelengths, they'll get thoughts coming out of people and all sorts of strange things happening, and they say, "I don't want to read minds. I don't want to do anything more about this, people's minds. I just don't want this ability."

Well, what they shouldn't want is an inability – they shouldn't want this inability to be so fixed on beingness – I mean, this inability to shift beingness. They shouldn't want to be so fixed on one level of receipt.

Because there's a terrific band. This is the widest band there is – it exceeds all known bands. Goes into the black band, it goes in… Oh, you talk about light – light is the tiniest, tiniest part of the band of energy wavelengths of which a thetan is capable of emanating. And you look at the plotted band in terms of centimeters and it gets very interesting that a thetan exceeds it so far and is so variable in it.

Now, you can take two things on the same band and you can so mix their wavelength – that is to say, you can so meet the wavelengths, one to another – that neither one is hitting. You can dovetail them into each other like a couple of sine waves, one riding slightly above the other wave and so on. So – it's pretty hard; you have to be really exact to get it in there.

Well, when somebody is completely stuck on being human, and he is stuck on being nothing but the wavelength of those immediately around him who are human and he's really fixed there, he has had trouble with granting beingness to anything else but humans, and so therefore he's sort of closed his band in.

But the artist who can paint without granting to his artwork its life, is – he's a pretty bad artist. He's just throwing paint around on a design.

When Michelangelo painted something or sculpted something, it was quite perfect in its form. But if it was just form that we were going on today, just form alone – see, we're right up there on the border of not quite able to talk about this. mest language sort of goes by the boards. The form and line of the painting and of the statue is good. It's good enough so that you see a photograph of it and you think that's fine. And it isn't until you confront an original Michelangelo, vis-a-vis, that you realize that the fellow who painted this thing really meant it. The amount of life in the statue itself, which is being controlled and held down in some fashion or another – the thing is just about to become a nova or something. It's – the amount of vitality. Now we are into, practically, necromancy. In other words, that thing is alive, and its life is quite apparent even to a street urchin.

Now, I saw one time a very beautiful white statue by an artist, or by a sculptor, whose name I haven't any inkling of at all; and it was in a perfectly strange and peculiar part of the world that you wouldn't expect an artist to have lived in; and it was so simple as to form that it was hardly guilty of being a statue at all – which yet had impressed into it so much vitality, of a sort of a calm and pervading nature, that it was actually filling up a whole patio full of calmness.

The thing was alive. There was no doubt about that at all. And this was not something which a gifted few would perceive. Those people who are completely dedicated to the plow might not have seen it very easily, but every beggar and peddler and maid and person and gentleman and clerk on that street would come over by that patio and sit down and look at the statue for a short time almost every evening. There were many better places to sit. But they would come in and they'd look at the statue, see? It was alive, there was no doubt about that. And of course, one could even say that they themselves by looking at it and granting it further being, it kept up the tradition of its existence. And so you had a living something.

Have you ever seen a house that nobody lived in go to pieces and lose its beingness? Have you ever seen a town lose its beingness? Or have you ever felt directly the beingness of a town? People keep up this beingness.

Now, an artist can come in – a writer, a poet, something of this sort – and grant a new beingness to a town. Sort of out of whole cloth, he just looks around and he says, "Why, you have a beautiful town here," and so forth, and he tells the people all about it. And they've never granted any beingness at all. They're so busy trying to keep each other from eating each other up, they've never noticed this; but this is something they can agree upon, this town. And the town comes to life, just to that degree. It is alive then.

It's rather remarkable, by the way, to do this in a town. It is a capability which any human being has. And I have often been delighted with the immediate results of, for instance, being in a rural community which had a weekly newspaper and writing – oh, considerable doggerel, considerable verse or something like that, about its town or writing descriptive essays or giving them quotes from the leading magazines concerning their towns – which I wrote, you see. And gave them – no idea of how famous their town was until they read it in their local paper. And then go back through the area a year or two later and find the town was noted for being something or other.

Man discourages this. He believes this is a swindle or something. It's not. An artist has very – very, very little to do with the facts. The more he has to do with the facts, the more of a hack he is. What he has to do with is direct beingness. And if he can breathe the breath of truth into anything, he's an artist. And if he can't, he's not an artist. And I don't care how many degrees he has or who he studied under.

Now, it's easy to release this. It's not a God-given, untapped talent, one that an individual is unable to assume. You are here, you are alive. When you were small, you granted beingness to your dog, your wagon – in other words you brought this to life – a doll, these things came alive. And to this day you grant beingness to a car, a favorite book, possessions. And you – sometimes you have perhaps even run into this: You have been wearing certain clothes when an unpleasant experience occurred and the next day, and maybe for three or four days afterwards, you didn't care to wear that suit or you didn't care to wear that dress – you put that aside. That's because you imbued it with a certain beingness.

Now, this beingness is more than simply time, space and energy. It is a livingness; and it rather exceeds inspection until a person inspects it. I talk about it, you know what I'm talking about.

Now, it's – one is alive to the degree that individuals have granted him beingness, and that he has granted others beingness. He is alive as a group to that degree. But he is really as alive as he himself is perfectly willing to grant beingness, can grant beingness and is willing to have others grant beingness. That's how alive he is. He's no more alive than that. I don't care what moods come over him or how drunk he can get or how much heroin he might take down; he'll never get any more alive. And no artificial stimulant or love affair or anything else can present to an individual this level and characteristic of existence. Because that is life itself.

A preclear, very often, when he is processed, is completely unintelligible about what he wants. You ask him, "What do you want?" And he'll say, "I want to be happy." Well, that is the biggest – the biggest swindle in this universe. That is the great swindle: that one can live in this universe and twenty-four hours a day, twelve months of a year, or a hundred units of galactic time, be happy. He can't. It's impossible. Because he'd be miserable if he were.

He himself is seeking drama, strain. I have never seen anyone enjoying life so well as some girl playing the beautiful sadness of having been jilted. It's only when she can't play the beautiful sadness of having been jilted that the beautiful sadness overcomes her and you have to start processing it.

As an auditor you run into this in a case – this case has had the most remarkable love affairs and it's done this and that, and is perfectly happy to tell you about them, rather proudly. But always watch for that glint of pride under this; this is not aberrative material. It's the time when they couldn't put out any kind of beingness and so stopped and dammed it in its flow that they got into trouble. People then were working to refuse them the ability to be some specific thing. They were refusing beingness.

This person – they'd say, "Well, that's all phony. That's that emotion that you're exhibiting, and you're just story-acting and you don't really mean it. And those tears don't mean anything and you're just trying to get away with it. You're just trying to get something." And you know – refusal to let an individual exist, in other words.

Existence, actually, is that entire range on that chart and a great deal more. That Chart of Evaluation – existence is that entire range. Where one can do this freely, however, where one has volume, where one can live, where one can express his emotions, where one can express the drama and engage it in it – all of these things are the woof and warp and the breath of life.

But above all those things is an individual's ability to grant beingness to the moment. Grant beingness to the past, to the future, grant beingness to others, grant beingness to his own objects. And grant beingness and then not be afraid of it. And having granted beingness, why, go right on granting more beingness, rather than stop granting beingness simply because some of it bit him.

The main beingness that bites him is that which he granted, but that's no reason not to grant beingness. So? That merely makes it so that one has a lot of drama. There's no drama like the drama you get into having granted beingness to something which then bites back.

One cannot become able in life by fearing to live it. Never. And he can't be himself without being willing to grant beingness, because he's the only one that can grant beingness to himself.

And so we get to a level of processing which, in itself, tells us a great deal and which in its own theory, is its own process. Any technique or communication system we have uses and applies to this system of beingness. They all do. You can use it anywhere.

You can ask – start asking somebody, "All right, what in this room aren't you willing to be?" And you ask a person who's very bad off, and you'll just get the whole room. And you will ask somebody who's in pretty good condition and so forth, and he'll pick out an item or two and – oh, he's perfectly willing to be that.

And then, contra this, you get the apathy case and he'll pick out three or four things in the room that he says, "Well – well, I'll just say I'm not willing to be those. It doesn't matter, but…" Of course, he doesn't know whether he wants to be or not to be and that's all that's wrong with him.

Now, you take Shakespeare's quotation in Hamlet: "To be or not to be." That's what man is fixed on – "To be or not to be." That isn't the question. That isn't the question. To grant beingness or not grant beingness is the question he is hung up on all the days of his years.

Okay.

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