View source for The Problems of Attention (2ACC 531125)

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

'''Date:''' 25 November 1953

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

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Alternate title: SOP 8-C, Summary of

This is the first afternoon lecture, November the 25th, 1953 A.D. We have been covering here during the first—this is the seventh actual study day of this unit. We've been covering here a great deal of material. Actually, you'll find the material itself has become relatively easily stated. See, you could put lots of significance in it, you understand, but it's relatively easily stated.

Our job from here on out is to clear and get cleared. And you've got specific case responsibilities. You looked at your responsibility this morning. Quite in addition to that, no matter how hopeless it was; no matter how horrible the shock was; no matter how, if you were the preclear, you almost fainted to see who was auditing you—that comes pretty close to being it. So let's just—let's go. I'm looking for people who are going to do it. To get Clear. The material here makes it very simple, really. I would be very ashamed of myself to flub the dub on anybody present, in a relatively few hours.

But on the other side, I want to teach you how to audit. Either—if you are interested in going on auditing, that's your own affair, but certainly to the extent where you can handle yourself as a being, and handle beings around you. If you're going to concentrate on just learning how to be an auditor, you're liable to fail. Because we're dealing with the root stuff of how you and others live. And you will be able, from the information which you have, to integrate a lot of questions which you may have about existence. You may be able to do that.

But being here as a group—some of you ask questions of me, you ask questions of others, so on. The information begins to get better and better and better understood because you talk it over amongst yourselves and exchange it, you see it in operation and so forth.

We're here to handle this information and to sort it down to its barest essentials and to its greatest potential use—why we're here. If we fail to get that data, if we fail to reduce it down for ourselves and our own understanding of existence, integrate it from your—our own viewpoint so that you can use it freely, and make the data itself yours, then I will have failed. And I don't like to fail, that's all.

In the first place, there isn't a single person here who can't be made into almost anything you want to be—from a first class necromancer to a grade-A politico, to a cast-iron general, it doesn't matter. Just doesn't matter, that's all. There isn't any limitation. Your first limitation would be, "I am learning this information in order to:" (colon), paragraph.

Now we say, "Audit other people." Well, that's fine. You'll find yourself auditing other people whether you like that or not. But your goal can be a lot broader than that.

Do you know that one of you, fully cleared, could change the course of Earth? Now, that's not an extravagant statement. I didn't say MEST universe, see. That wouldn't be an extravagant statement either. But it'd be an extravagant statement to say one of you, cleared, could change the course of every universe there is. That would be slightly on the side of an overstatement. But we deal with little, tiny, itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny jobs like completely changing the course of Earth's culture—little ten-minute job (snap) like that—yeah, any one of you could. But you run into a problem if you do that, and the problem is this: Attention.

You know, you have to have some sort of parity with that which gives you attention—some sort of parity—in order to feel that you're getting any attention, and feel there's any randomity in action. You understand that? So you could go out all on your own, and draw your sword of fire and declare randomity against everything existing and so forth; but it's—pretty hard job to stay interested in it. After you've knocked off your eight billionth human being or something of the sort—I don't know, there are only two billion of them, but they multiply—you might get the idea that it was boring.

I recall, for instance, a fellow in China many centuries ago, he was known as "the butcher." And he knocked apart, I think, a province. He killed every man, woman and child in the province. He ordered it done, and went ahead executing the plan. And this became a fascinating project. It took the longest darn time to kill a million and half human beings. They had swords, you know, and they just kept chopping and hacking and the bodies kept piling up—but boy, a million and a half human beings is an awful lot of human beings!

Now, in modern times, with the most modern weapons known, with machine guns, with lime pits, blast furnaces, political leaflets and his own speeches—with these tremendous weapons of annihilation (the last, annihilating people in boredom, you see), Stalin only managed ten million people in—how many years was he king of Russia?

It's interesting, you know, to look at Earth's history and get it straight, and straighten it up for yourself a little bit. Because people say so much about it, it's very hard to plot. And I finally found out who this fellow Stalin was. He was king of Russia and he was the world's greatest capitalist. He owned everything in Russia.

And I found out that in all the—I think it was 285 years or something (years being eight winters long in Russia), that he took all this time, and even then, he only got rid of—with the entire Red Army, with everything else, with the OGPU, the Gestapo, the O-Gay-Pay-Oo, the ugpoo, the poougs and everything else, he only got rid of ten million peasants. It wasn't worthwhile. It wasn't worthwhile. He finally realized that and kicked the bucket. I'm sure that's why he did. I was reading in a history book the other day that he had died of a broken heart, I think it was. I don't know quite what happened. It was probably some romantic tale behind it.

But there's destruction. There is destruction. He was the great boy who came in and ended the aristocracy and found himself with an aristocracy on his hands. Today, it's impossible to tell a Russian civil official from a Russian official of the aristocracy about thirty-five years before the Revolution. There's no difference. They pass the same pieces of paper. This time they're run through more machines, that's about all. And that course leads to nothing.

The lonesomest man in the world was sitting there in Russia because he had to turn around the opposite direction and prevent himself from getting attention. And attention's very interesting stuff. And when you have to prevent yourself from getting attention, you're defeating your own ends, and you've turned what? You've turned every machine you've got backwards. Because all your early machines were gauged to get attention; and all your later machines are gauged to prevent attention. There's the lock-up.

Well now, if you don't learn some common sense along with some technical accuracies about all this, why, again, I will have failed. And I don't like to fail. And there is a position on the Tone Scale known as 20.0. There is that position. And one has a great deal of action latitude there. He also has 50 percent he's not predicting, and he's in a fairly optimum condition to go on. And you start shooting preclears up above this to serenity, and they all sit around regarding their navels complacently—well, that's all right if you want to start a game that way, just for a game—realize for God's sakes that it's a game. It's no goal to get preclears to 40.0. You'll find yourself completely out of action if you destroy the playing field. Oh, I just give you that as an interesting thought.

But it's one thing to learn information, quite another thing to apply it. It's one thing to be able to do a process and quite something else to understand it. And it's one thing to listen to a technique and quite something else to have it yourself. And I expect you to own all this material—it isn't mine; it's yours. You've struggled a long time, you've set enough booby traps for yourself; and if I'm doing anything for you, it's just tripping the lock the reverse way on a few of your own booby traps. We could be very dramatic about this, you see—I could make a terribly dramatic game out of this. The only trouble is, I don't even happen to be very hard up for dramatic games just now.

I suppose if this were a couple of hundred years ago, why, we would have a different story to tell here. Be going out in another direction, because I was real short of games a couple of hundred years ago. Gee! Ran into somebody in class here the other day that was bored for eighteen billion years. And he didn't like that. Makes him very chary of getting cleared. Might happen again!

Well, a large part of your ability to proceed is your ability to proceed as a unit. Therefore, these groups are being organized on a basis of contact units. That is to say, there is one contact unit. People going through this group become part of that group. It at least keeps you into agreement with people that are doing more or less what you are. And this makes it possible for, someday or other, maybe the club to break in half, and half of it fight the other half—if you get too bored and too desperate, this is always possible. But it's a good thing to remain in contact of people who are talking your own language. And your biggest danger is boredom. All right.

With that thought in mind, I hope you can integrate what you're getting here, and regard it in that light and do something interesting with it—interesting to yourself and interesting to others. Because if anything appears right now to be going by the boards, it's the game called Earth. It's so dull! It is getting duller and duller and duller, because we're running on a "stop motion to save all lives" to a level I've never heard of before.

Now, it's not necessary to butcher everybody the way they do here on Earth in order to have a game. It's not necessary. I mean games—there are all kinds of games. Here on Earth they think that some general who gets elected to the charge of the army or something—the way they do in one of the more interesting countries on Earth—he gets elected and that makes him in charge of the army. He was in charge of the army before he was elected. You kind of wonder why he got elected. But anyway, he's been commander in chief now for years—but in different office buildings.

He was entertaining the other day the boys who, by the way, who designed and manufactured the airplanes that shot down all the US pilots during the war. They were entertained as guests of honor at the White House. I think that was very amusing. Willy Messerschmitt and so forth was over there dining royally and being congratulated. Did you know that, by the way, that that happened here the other day? Yeah, the three top Nazi officials who had orders out—these orders were signed by Dwight D. Eisenhower—to arrest them, and shoot on sight, and they were dined at the White House. The difference is, a different state of psychosis now exists. (audience laughter)

Well anyway, we haven't any interest in revolutionary activities. We have a definite interest in evolutionary activities. As long as you let automatic machinery run on and on and evolute as it will, and evolute as it will, it eventually stops itself. Nothing is—comes more plain to a pc being processed than this. If you go on letting everything run automatic, eventually all the automaticity stops all the automaticity. And then you haven't got enough left to start anything again. All right.

Now, let's be a little more specific about this. You as an auditor, in auditing the preclear assigned to you, may believe that your responsibility for this preclear begins at the moment the session begins and ends the moment the session ends. In a unit such as this, that can't exist. That can't hold true.

In the first place, he's going to get coffee shop auditing. This is a method which has been invented in rather recent years to louse up pcs. You get somebody exteriorized and then drop three platters of steak, you know? (audience laughter) He comes back to the next session and you start—you say, "Be three feet back of your head," and you look at the fellow, and he asks you kind of—he says, "What head?"

And you say, "Your own head, of course."

And he says, "A body or a chair? And—or a bed?" And it's very confusing.

And if you don't recognize what's happening to your pc—this character isn't looking at something, you know? And it's just your job—you could just say, "Now look at all your aberrations. You got it all? Now look through them. Okay. You're Clear." See? Ping! It's just as easy as that.

But if he doesn't do this the first time you tell him to, there's the slight chance—there's the slight chance that for some days, at least until you get him in pretty good shape, you'll be picking him up in the hall, and off the wall, and looking rather dazed or upset or something of the sort. He's done a lot of auditing and this keyed him in all across the boards, you see. And he isn't quite sure which is which and what's what.

Well now, actual auditing … You can do this actual auditing weekends to pick up this condition. Oh, pick it up in the regular session, but it's up to you to look for it and pick it up. You're the auditor as far as this person's concerned. I repeat, you're the auditor.

Now, there's two auditors on this case. Now, it's very easy for the one to say to the other, "Well, you take all the responsibility," and the other to say to one, "Well, you take all the responsibility." Well, that won't work either. That won't work either, worth a darn. So we'll just have to hang any two auditors when any pc is loused up. I mean, that's simple.

So you just remember this: That if there's any midnight auditing going to be done by anybody, it will be done by both members of the team on the person, regardless of whether that—those auditors did that to the person or not. This person is loused up, you see, so the two auditors responsible for him are going to audit him, and both of them will be there. You understand that? That's real clear-cut. We've got this list posted and available and in the hands of the Camden police and … (audience laughter)

Oh yes, I keep getting asked by officials around in town what we are doing. I wish I could tell them. (audience laughter) I wish I had a definition that would define into their frame of reference what we were doing. What we're talking about here and what we're doing: We're trying to make able people more able to handle more randomity. And if we can do that, why, we will see a considerable cultural change on an evolutionary pattern. And we will see a lot less "boom-boom," and we'll see a lot less criminality, and we will see actually, a great deal less delinquency and disease and all the rest of it—all these other interesting things. If we do this job, why, we'll see more actual randomity. Disease is very poor randomity: You lie still and let the bugs eat. Not exciting at all.

Now, here we have in progress, then, a number of cases. Now, when you're studying, you're auditors; you're not cases. And you just shift your frame of reference when you start thinking about something I'm saying applying to anybody, then you figure it must apply to that pc that you got. See? Doesn't apply to you. You're not human. You don't even need to eat meat—you eat hay or something. You're not human at all. And if you get terribly restimulated, something like that, why, that's just rough. That's just rough. But as restimulated as you are, you have to think about the pc. Now, I know all of you will do all this, and I know that this is—automatically would be followed through, and it was completely unnecessary for me to mention this. But I just wanted to show you that I understood too. All right.

Well let's take up now, again, V, VI and VII. Gave you a lecture this morning, which—and we had a rundown there on 8-C as far as we've gone. Now, let's go just a little bit further. What the devil do you suppose is the basic purpose of all this machinery? What is the basic purpose of all this aberration, this sickness, all this reversal, these inversions and so forth? What the dickens is all this about and can we state it "pang!"

Yes, "cause to produce an effect," that's one, with a modus operandi which sits between "you can't have an effect; you can't be cause—you can be cause, but you can't have an effect without attention." So let's state it in a breath. Yeah, that's the first paragraph we can state. And on this business of attention, what do you suppose these machines, equipment, defenses, offensive weapons, politeness, psychosomatic ills, stomach trouble, glasses, eyesight, brilliantine, ice-cream sodas, kings, household slippers, coal heavers, panthers, eatingness—what are all these things? These things are under one heading—one heading as far as machines are concerned. These are operations which create, make persist, and get rid of—that's create or pull in, make persist or not persist and stay in a not-persisted state (if you get what I mean), and shy off from or get rid of attention.

Now, you can say this about your preclear: anytime your preclear sits down and he's got—now you're thinking about your preclear, you're not thinking about yourself—you're not a preclear, see? You're somebody who has preclears. Anytime this person says to himself, "Ow!" he is examining a machine which is designed to basically attract attention, and probably more basically to push it away. And in the middle, it makes attention persist one way or the other. He says, "Ow!"—he puts his hand on his stomach and says, "Ow!" What's he replying to? All right, he's got a body—he's got a body. Now, what's he replying to in the body?

Well, what's he got a body for? Why is his attention so thoroughly on this body, he can't get out of it—obviously. What's the mechanism behind there, or what's he got a body for? He's got a body to attract attention.

He has erected a barrier, or has acquired a barrier which he can impose across other people's perception, and which they have agreed to stop their perception on. And this gets him attention.

Now, that's what—that's what it's about. Now, why does the body have to have food? Food is condensed attention. And if you can just envision a bunch of tigers and monkeys and giraffes and things like that around in Africa, running and eating grass and running away from and running toward and being pounced on and not being able to pounce anymore and pouncing and so forth—what are these characters doing? They're just getting attention one way or the other. It's the most gorgeous network of idiocy you ever saw in your life: having to eat something in order to have some energy. What an alibi! See, big alibi. But it's very workable because it's worked out that this is the agreed-upon level of attention. And if you don't think it makes a terrific game, be beside a water hole some night in Africa. It's real noisy. There's a lot of things demanding and getting attention—crunch, scamper, scream! All right.

That gets pretty bloody. I mean, people are much too serious when they're at that level. And there's where seriousness goes. There is a definite parallel between seriousness and having to have or having not to have attention. "No attention" is completely different than "having to have no attention." Do you understand that? You see, "no attention," just plain no attention, is nobody looking, nobody threatening to look, nobody trying to look away, nothing. Just no attention. All right.

Now we get up to a point where people have looked, and are looking wrong. You know, they're looking with appetite or something, you know? And they're looking wrong. Well, that's having to have no attention. A rabbit very often gets this as he stares at the wolf. He just gets a definite feeling that he shouldn't have that attention; and this goes right along with the fact that the wolf mustn't have this attention either—meaning one rabbit in one wolf stomach. That's attention to a wolf. He knows he's got attention. He's certain. But get what the basic uncertainty of this animal is.

Homo sap isn't in really anywhere near as bad a condition as he might be. He's come up through some fantastic and incredible periods. He's come up through these periods of destruction and so forth, but not with the present crew running him. People running him were pretty civilized. They had a much higher state of being. The level of reality of a wolf is so poor, he's so psycho, that an examination of the beast discloses some interesting psychoses that you wouldn't ever have suspected any being could step into. And yet he manages to live and thrive and be that crazy.

But the worst of all of these, I would say offhand, would be the hyena. He is admittedly and very, very insane. He has the cravings—he can't even have attention fresh; he's got to wait for it to be carrion. And all carrion eaters, by the way, have the most terrible, gnawing hunger with them all the time, and it's just—no matter how much carrion they eat, they're just hungry. They go on that way. Well, all right.

What's wrong with a pc that's occluded? All right. He's got to have attention; he can't have attention. And if he doesn't exteriorize easily, he's afraid this will happen—he's caught up in this one: "If you take your attention off of it, it'll vanish." And you get somebody setting up an anchor point someday, and you say, "All right, take your attention off the anchor point."

"Mmmm … Huh-uh."

Now we have an automatic machine running, in some character, known as acting, you know? He goes in front of the camera or something and he goes click, click, whir, whir. And he sets-self-up-and-he-goes-on-and-he-acts. You see? He acts. He knows exactly the gesture and the posture and the inflection and he knows how to say, "My god, not that!" and all these things, you see? And then you ask him—you say to him suddenly, you say, "How do you do that? How do you know what to do when you do it?"

Oh boy. Oh, boy. This is real funny. He does—almost does a flip if he's running on an automaticity for his acting, because he puts a couple more attention units on it than he ordinarily has on it. Now he is bypassing—to get an automaticity, he's pretending the attention never goes to it, to keep the machine running. So he goes to it on a bypass circuit, so that he can't know that he's running on the machine, and the machine is running him, so then he becomes unconscious of his acting, so therefore it's a built-in mechanism, and is apparently—all of his acting then is unconscious. See, and you've asked him to put directly on it a couple of attention units. Well, it'll start the machine running out of gear. That's how easy it is to blow up, to wreck, stop, an automaticity.

What's this actor doing with an automatic acting machine? What's he doing with one? If he has one—if a writer has an automatic writing machine, if a speaker has an automatic speaking machine, if we have any of these things, we are looking at somebody who's going to fail as an actor, a writer, musician. They're going to fail, just like that.

The first thing you know, they're—they've got more and more, further and further away bypass circuits until at long, long last we have a situation where they don't even know they have a machine, and the machine isn't running, and they are the machine, but they used to be able to—because they're not creating. They have done the horrible thing of delegating creativeness to a machine.

Now, when it comes to a brain to figure out the future, a person has put knowingness into a machine. The machine knows and he doesn't know; which means he's going be cut down, all the way on down. Now any prediction machine has the postulate in it: it knows, and the pc as a thetan doesn't know. You see how that could be? You start running one of these machines.

Now, you've got it that the future machine—it's got to have attention, but the pc isn't supposed to get attention about that. Let's just integrate this, and we find out that the pc has to fix his attention on this machine more and more and more and heavier and heavier and heavier because it builds up stronger and stronger and stronger until it, at last, is overpowering as far as he's concerned. It has gimmicks and gadgets which dominate his entire existence.

On some people it turns things white when you're going to have good luck, and black when you're going to have bad luck. It turns things a kind of a rosy color when it's going to be a good day or a dull gray color when it's going to be a bad day. In other words, it's a symbolical shift which is going on continuously, on and on and on and on, telling a person and evaluating for a person and telling him where to go and where to be and that's basically what it is.

Now, that's a prediction machine. You get a pc with that, he has delegated creativeness in one direction and knowingness in another direction. He's in horrible condition. His creativeness of the future is his best creativeness—if he's going to depend upon time. Well, when he has shoved creativeness of the future off into a machine which knows and he doesn't—oh boy, does he get in the dark! And literally that. He eventually goes black as a field. All right.

We find this person now in another category. This person comes along—here's just automaticity at work. We find this person afraid to take his attention off something because he knows it'll vanish. You know, there's all kinds of adages in the language about "you got to keep your eye on the ball," and so forth and so on. As a matter of fact, that's all really a game is—keep your eye on some gadget.

In Hollywood they make movies—and by the way, they always have in a movie something called a "weenie." A "weenie" is movie slang—or used to be, a long time ago—movie slang for the treasure chest, the fortune, the bag full of jewels. It's something everybody is after, is its definition. That's the "weenie," and it passes along, and the villain gets it, and the hero has to rescue it from the villain, and so on. It's that thing which is put there for the audience to put their attention on, which will then connect consecutively all the action of the picture. That is the motive and that is the reason.

Now, very early in life a person decided to be something and that becomes the weenie. He is just chasing through life to become this object or to acquire this object.

Other people may start in, very early, just trying not to be some object, such as Mother. That's an entirely different type of weenie. Simple, But it's the thing which tracks the thread of attention through an entire lifetime. There are very many varieties of these, and there's very many ramifications to these. One set of values relating to this same thing we call the service facsimile. It's "What does he use to get sympathy?" is the way it's defined in AP&A. Let's just redefine the service facsimile: It's that which the preclear uses to get attention. Attention is valuable.

Now, we could go further on this, and say the inverse service facsimile which is, "that set of mechanical abilities or inabilities which somebody uses to fend off attention." What do people use? Beauty they use rather uniformly—that which is agreed to be beautiful—to attract attention; and they use ugliness to fend it off. And they get to a point where they will use ugliness to be able to eat. A spider does that. They just so horrify anything that sees them, that it then becomes edible. In other words, they get attention by being horrible.

So, here we go from beauty, you see, demanding attention, into ugliness to fend attention off, into extreme ugliness in order to demand attention, and I don't know where you'd go from there to fend attention off. But I know there's many a spider, just before you stepped on him, that wished he had something that would fend off your attention. And probably in his next incarnation he decides he'd better grow a little bit better grade of poison—one that'll go through shoe leather. I'm sure they die with that postulate—I mean, the entity that makes them.

You know, they're run by entities here and there. And every time you start to fool around with an insect or something like that, generally there's something starts pitching at you, right now. People don't like that. These entities that run insects and types of birds and things like that—you're fooling with somebody's property. They own that property; they know that. It's curious.

Well, anyway, attention is your key. Eatingness, sex—sex and the second dynamic in general, is something to make attention—a certain type of attention—and then to make it persist. Interesting, but very easy to figure out how it is. Eating, of course, is just a demand for attention. Inability to eat is trying to fend off the attention which one has been demanding. Anybody with ulcers has now turned the point of where he's trying to fend off all this attention which once he was so hungry for.

Well, let's look at the anatomy on this fellow with ulcers. Curious anatomy. He had a tremendous vacuum of attention. He began by believing he had to have attention from elsewhere. He began by believing that other people's energy was senior to his own. And his own was not edible to him. That's his first blunder. And from there on, it gets worse and worse. And it keeps running this inverted cycle. He sets up activities, so on, to demand attention. And then he gets too much. Every time, you see, he gets too little, he just sets up more machinery to get more. Until he gets it built up. And then the machinery nearly always, sooner or later, one life or another, will operate far too well. And operating far too well, it then practically falls in on him.

He's just got lots of attention. So he has to set up machinery now in order to keep people from seeing him. In order to keep people from eating him, if you please. He's collected an awful lot of money or real estate or something like that, and people are just pawing at him continually to take it away from him and so on. He wants to fend off this attention.

And there we get, in terms of just thetans operating, we get force screens, shields of one kind or another, booby traps—when you look at them, they explode, you know, somebody else's booby trap—you get all this type of thing. And on Earth, it goes to the level of police. Companies, people, organizations which have an awful lot of MEST—an organization—have actually conjured up a protective screen in the flesh to keep people from giving them attention on the one hand, and taking attention away from them on the other hand. And these two are always locked together in the machinery of the preclear.

And we talk about automaticity—it's all very well to just sail out—little light automaticities, up higher in the bank, it's very, very good just to sail out and solve them one mechanism after another mechanism, one after the other, until we've got this case in a pretty good balanced condition, and get a thetan exteriorized and we deal with some of this machinery one way or the other. And machinery keeps showing up of one kind or another. And you know, basically, what the category of the machinery is.

But it's all right to deal with in its lightest forms in Step IV—machines which create, make persist and destroy—work, pain, so on. That's the way you handle that with IV—machines which make blackness. Specific machines. It's all right to handle that. But never be puzzled about what you're handling. You're handling a series of machines which are first set up to get attention. And then are backed by another set of machines which make the attention persist. And these are backed by a set of machines which tend to make the attention desist. Then by another set of machines which seek, by all that's holy, to make it stop. And then the fellow hasn't any attention, so he's got to set up a set of machines which get him attention. And you're drawing the picture of his time track.

Now, this set of machines maybe is not adequate, so he's got to set up more machines to get attention. And then, finally, he's got to make it—now he's got the attention, he's got to make it persist. Now, making it persist, he's got too much. So he has to make it desist a little bit, and now he's got to stop it. And here we go. Over and over and over and over. And this is the tale of any life, any spiral, any universe. This is the story of it. Round and round, over and over. Machines set up to cancel machines. And the V has done this a couple of times too often.

For instance, a V does not like … Anybody has happened—had this happen to him. He's had a body, and after it was dead, believe me, it was supposed to be dead! You know? He didn't like anything which he had had in his possessions being manhandled and pawed around at and so on, after he'd left it.

Do you know how people don't like to be touched? Well, that isn't the body reacting against being touched. You go up to somebody and give him a hearty slap on the back, you know, bong! or something like that, he doesn't like that. Some people go out to the point where you can't even touch their sleeve or something like that—just the lightest touch and they shrink away and shudder and so on. Well, look at how far out that thetan has backed—where he can't have a direct contact against his body. Well, they get to this point, and they get to this point rather early in this universe—they got to it; and then after that, any body that couldn't be killed outright or something like that, he just felt he wanted to hide it or—under the leaves or—anything that was dead, you know. He wanted it to be good and dead and then not there. People have this badly.

They talk about cremation and so on. They want to get rid of a mock-up, you see, very thoroughly. Now, there's some interesting cases I have run: Their bodies have been used for other purposes, you see? One case I ran one time had a—his brain was in a medical library and—for a number of centuries or something of the sort, or a century or so, sitting in alcohol. And this guy was just suffering, you see? Still—some of his attention was still on this damn brain. He couldn't burn it up or do anything about it and so on. And just processed it out, and he took his attention off of it and realized it was silly. It was just something he had associated as being his to the extent of being himself, which he therefore didn't want—now, another fellow I—he didn't want it manhandled by somebody else.

Another fellow I processed had the hor , I'd say this has happened

several times: He had the horrible adventure of leaving this body—this happens to most anybody—they leave a body and then nobody buries the body. You know, it just sits out there in the open, exposed, everybody can see it and zuuuh! they don't like that. So they'll stick around until the body gets buried.

Whenever you hit a theta bop, you know, that's—somebody's doing that. If a theta bop has a sort of a little quiver on each end, a very—a funny characteristic added to the theta bop, why, you're on the right subject, but you haven't got the right time. See, the body is actually an earlier body or a later body or something that he's standing by. But everybody that gets that theta bop, when you hit that, it's just the needle of the E-Meter rocking back and forth—he's standing by a body someplace. And he frees up like mad the second you run End of Cycle on the body. Just have it turn into dust a few times, and the dust all blow away in such a way as to be never found again, and he frees right up on the theta bop. All right.

Some people haven't been just that unlucky to have a body left on top of the ground or mummified on a plateau or something like that—somebody's picked up their skull. And somebody has the skull, and they're doing something with this skull. And one fellow's skull had been picked up and was being used in a carnival. And it had a mobile set of wires, so it made the jaw mobile, and a light was flashing to make the eyes flash off red and so on. And it was being used in a carnival as an attraction outside of the sideshow. And it was there for years. And this guy was really sensitive about exteriorization. And we finally found out that it was all tied up with this damned skull. He actually didn't have enough attention in present time to worry about it. He was all fogged up. He still had viewpoints on this skull. And he'd every once in a while get pictures of a skull, its jaws flapping, and a record—a record playing behind the skull, so the skull was evidently talking.

The other fellow I ran into one time had died (he'd been rich) and just as he was dying, the surgeon, witty fellow, probably in the pay of one of the relatives, slid a talking tube up through the fellow's—back of his neck, made a slit in the back of the neck, and slid this tube up into the fellow's mouth, you see? And then just went back of another set of curtains and talked through the tube, and bequeathed everything the fellow owned to the wrong characters, as his dying breath. And all the relatives were standing around and heard the last words, you see? And this thetan was frantic!

The body had been made to talk after it was dead. And after that, life after life, this thetan would just simply stand by until it was dust. And he had actively taken bodies which were getting slightly old or something like that and dump them off cliffs and get them caught in riding accidents or anything where they were going to be way out in the wilds and never found. See? Oh, real good. That's one for the book. I hope that doesn't get to be a custom, that sort of thing.

By the way, come to think about it, that's a terrifically good plot for a story—have to write a story on it someday. I was always engrossed with the idea because of the—the pc was so dreadfully upset. He just kept telling me over and over—I couldn't get a word in edgewise in processing—he just kept telling me, "And he put the tube up the back of my neck, see? And made the jaws, you see, agitated by pushing the tube back and forth, a little thing. And I didn't leave the money to the damn nephew!"

And I'd say, "Come on. Let's see if we can't go over this a little bit."

"But I—you don't seem to take this seriously!"

Well, there's our—the problem we're involved with there is the problem of attention. There is a continued attention. People are continuing to give the body attention after they shouldn't.

Now, when people are dying, they're very often—feel quite guilty because they're going to make so many other people feel sad. Early on the track, you'll find most anybody at the moment of death, no matter how violent it was, his last thought is, "Gee, a lot of people are going to lose a good friend"—boom! Just like that. This is his final, sort of final thought. It is not for himself at all, you see. It doesn't matter about him. But the only reason he was around—all these people had a good friend and they kind of depended on him. And here he was—boom, gone! This is very bad from his viewpoint. Well, this still hangs around people when they're young, in this society at this time. And they don't like the idea of a continued attention, because it's a continued insistence on their going on surviving.

We get around to what we were talking about earlier. It's an insistence that one survive, and continue to survive, and go right on and on and on surviving, regardless of what shape the body's in or what pain it's in or how ugly it's gotten to be or anything else. This is—this is the problem. What are we going to do about this body, you see? Just going to knock it off or something? Well, we can't do that because it'd make too many people feel bad. We are responsible to too many people, and so on. And the fellow just—he'll just go into apathy on the thing. Actually, he gets out and gets a new body and gets going, why, he's a roaring streak of fire! I mean, there's nothing wrong with the way he acts. But he's just conditioned down to the fact, he realizes he's part of a chain gang now. He's part of the chain gang of "let's all feel sympathetic."

Now, you're going to have preclears, people come to you, people talk to you simply because they want to get rid of the body. The funny part of it is, if you simply make them free as a thetan, the urgency of getting rid of this particular body and their feeling that it must not be violated in some fashion or other after death or so on, the idea of making it persist and other people's other-determinism making it persist and so on—this all gets very pale. Now, I just handled such a case and I'm talking in fact. If you don't make the thetan able while exteriorized, he is not going to carry through.

Now, we have an auditor here who is processing somebody, who, if this auditor had not concentrated on ability while exteriorized—ability while exteriorized, you understand—if he'd concentrated on the body and insisted on the body being patched up all the time, he just would have compounded the felony. But by just making the thetan able, why, the person is still alive. The case was so bad off, that the first impulse of a thetan, if the thetan had gotten free, was simply to kill the body—bang—and shoved off. But the thetan didn't do so. The thetan went on and got free and cruised around and so forth. And so the body he happens to have there is not in very good shape; well, he's not playing the role of superownership all the time. He hasn't got to protect this body, he hasn't got to be stuck there on the zero Tone Scale all the time—subzero Tone Scale—and gets away with it.

What basically, what fundamentally, is wrong with any case that has anything wrong with it? It isn't the body. But if the person doesn't exteriorize easily, they're on a lock-up and a maybe of this character: "If I take my attention off of the body, it'll disappear." Just like, "If I take my attention off that anchor point, the anchor point will vanish." You see, they pretty well believe that that body's got to be kept running by their direct attention on it. See, that's not true. The body will go on functioning without that direct attention. And "I don't dare let other people take their attention off of this body. Because, of course, it'll just disappear and perish. Because it depends exclusively on other people's attention to survive."

Now you ask this character to pull his attention off of this body, and to pull other people's attention off of this body, and be outside the body? Oh no—no you don't! He's going to be right there.

He's got a lock-up of machinery which starts in and says, "Got to have attention." See? This is machinery to get attention. You could have seen him when very young, probably—or when she was very young—doing various things, and acquiring various parlor tricks of various kinds, you know, and peculiar expressions and methods of speech, and doing odd things, any one of which, you see, would get attention. And then later on, these things, one after the other, each one, would get the wrong kind of attention. You know, Papa, Mama, others, decide this was bad, and so they'd have to set up machinery to prevent that attention from occurring. So they've set up machinery to prevent attention occurring because they've developed these parlor tricks and methods of speech and so forth. Now, there's machinery to cancel machinery.

Now they found out they didn't have enough attention, so they had to go out and do something else and something new in the line of more attention of some other kind, and then they got too much attention for this—this being this society, after all—and they had to set up immediately, reverse machinery.

And eventually, when they've done this just so often—if they've run into this when they've got a body, it half-dies, they leave it, they decide they've got to come back and revive it—oh no! See, all this machinery just goes into a supertangle—"Do I want attention? No, that's painful. I'm liable to be hit. I've got to have attention because they insist I survive. They're trying to give me attention, I don't want it. I want attention basically if I'm going to live at all, but this body is nothing to get attention with. After all, the body is frail, and if I try to take my attention off the body, it'll perish and that'll let everybody down because I'm responsible to all these people, and they're the ones that are making it live, I'm not. To hell with them." And they go through this uhh-rowr-rawr-rowr—and they're going through this continually.

So they have other people's attention on them—they know they can't break this off because their machinery to do that has gone into apathy. And their own attention set up to the body—to keep their own attention on the body—first they had machinery to keep attention on the body, and then they set up various machinery, you see, to keep their attention from being totally on the body. You see, an automatic driving machine, for instance, or an automatic piano-playing machine is just some machine so you won't have to put attention on the body. But right away, you had—you started to play the piano in order to have attention put on the body and put your own attention on the body. Then you make it—as soon as you get it automatic, you see, you get it automatic in order to cancel earlier types of attention. And it just goes on in this endless cycle.

Well, this guy gets into this tremendous jam-up. He's just nyarrr! He doesn't know quite which way to go and what attention to relieve first. And the result is, he acts like everything is locked up by everything else. He's a logjam. Now, theoretically, all you have to do is wiggle one log and out he'll go. See, the dam will go. Well, he doesn't dare let that dam go, because if you lose the attention on the body—or attention will swing in on the body so sharp that he won't be able to withstand it. And there's his problem, Mr. Anthony, right there.

What does the logjam consist of? Basically, it consists of an automaticity which, in its prior section, is demanding attention; in its middle section, demanding that attention persist; and later in the middle section, that the attention desist; and then, finally, machinery and automaticity which just downright demands that attention stop. All the while, he's going along self-determinedly over the top of all this machinery which he keeps setting up, trying to live something vaguely resembling a life with some equilibrium. Meantime, all of his personal attention is just being eaten up by these relay systems which feed attention into all the banks and keep everything going full automatic.

Blackness is one of his methods of just… He can't unmock the stuff because it's there not to be destroyed, it must persist and so on. So he just starts painting everything black. He starts painting everything black. He's got more automatic machinery to paint things black with than you can count. He only has to take over parts of this machinery.

But basically, what would be the basic machine that you could run on any case that'd resolve the case? You can just run those three machines—wasting them in brackets, saving them in brackets, accepting them, desiring them, being curious about, in brackets each time—machines which cause one to receive attention, which cause one to give attention to others, which causes attention to persist, which causes attention to desist, and which causes attention from others to stop, which causes one's own attention towards others to stop. And this is the basic machinery to end all machinery.

And when he first starts to waste one of these machines, by the way, you can fully expect that your preclear, after a few minutes, will be able to waste one eye-bolt hole on one piece of equipment, which he cuts off delicately with a hacksaw so as not to destroy the rest of the machinery. Because attention is real scarce and real precious and any machine that'll help anybody make it, boy, that's right there. That's the machine we got to have. That's it. All right.

You could say this is the basic solution of any case: An analysis and handling of its problems of attention.

What is it using to get attention? What is it using to prevent attention? And then solving it on the basis that it has set up equipment to get this attention and to refuse this attention automatically, without any further glance.

But one word of warning about this process: It should be run, it has to be run, on a thetan exteriorized. One word of warning about it: You start pushing a thetan to get rid of all the machinery he's got that'll get attention, and you are running into a thetan who's going to either start lying like hell to you or resisting like mad. So take it easy. It's like pulling toys away from a little kid. It may seem aberrated to you, but it's attention to him or it prevents one from getting attention he doesn't want.

Now do you understand this better?

Okay.

THE PROBLEMS OF ATTENTION PAGE 2 2ACC-09B - 25.11.53

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