View source for The Valence, How It Works (CHC 620101)

'''Series:''' CHC

'''Date:''' 1 January 1962

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

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Thank you. Oh, you like me better today. All right. All right. Okay.

I want to drink to you. Happy AD 12. They didn't think we'd make it, but we did. We did. AD 12. In case we drink another toast, there it is.

I was just telling Reg and Bonnie in a moment of fun – I was just telling them in a moment of fun that psychology has attained its quota, its nadir, and so forth. After a great deal of expenditure of funds lasting over a period of many, many decades and so forth – after tremendous expenditure of funds – billions, you see – psychology finally discovered that if you boot a pig in its posterior, it squeals. This is stimulus-response mechanisms – and there we will leave them. I'm very fond of… You realize that it was an effort to suppress psychology that caused Roosevelt to plow in all those pigs. Did you realize that? The far-reaching consequences of that particular program have never ceased to reverberate and we will keep them reverberating.

But I can warn you against making a similar experiment because the work has been done. Use a psychologist instead. The price of pork is far too high just now.

Now, I like to begin a new year with a serious mien and lofty thoughts. I'm very happy to be able to contribute this to 1962, in order to set a tone for psychotherapy, psychology and psychiatry throughout this year. We wish them very good luck. We wish them very good luck. Poor chaps. Their boots are almost worn out.

Now that we have disposed of that, I haven't anything to talk to you about today because you see, I planned a two-day congress and I arrived to find we had a three-day congress. And I hadn't made up any notes and lectures, you see, for the third day. So it's all just random, you see, from there on. And the end lecture of the congress actually was havingness. See? I was supposed to give you lots of havingness and then you could go home very happily and have havingness, and so forth. And now there's no telling what will happen. You'll have to come to the party and get processed at the HGC and so forth, in order to pick up your havingness. I intended to give it to you because today will probably as-is the lot.

The difficulties of trying to maintain one's havingness in this particular universe at this particular time are of course considerable.

One of the reasons you have difficulty maintaining your havingness is probably you haven't got the havingness to which you were accustomed. I can see a very pretty girl out in the audience out there and she says, "That's true. That's true, you know. That's true." Sleek sport car, you know. Furs. Lovely apartment, you know, with the potted palms as you see them through the glass bricks, nice maid, full wardrobe, total income and no husband. Havingness. Yep. Yep. Probably a good thing she hasn't attained them though. I'll tell you that confidentially. I won't tell her that but I'll tell the rest of you. It's a good thing she probably hasn't attained them because the young men in Los Angeles have enough trouble. They have enough trouble – being pestered on the streets all the time.

Anyhow, now nobody said a word about Los Angeles, but we now in Scientology have a – an overt on Los Angeles. Hitherto, we've had nothing but motivators but now we have an overt. Williams was down there the other day and he made it his business – this is probably a paraphrase – to drive all over town and say, wherever a Californian can hear him, "Nice village you have here." That was actually done so that we could have an overt on Los Angeles. It's been a hard time getting one. Because the motivators are flying so thick and fast that you haven't any time to look up and cook yourself up a very good overt.

And I want to recommend to you the therapeutic values of a good overt – a nice, good overt. That is actually – do you realize… You realize, of course, that your withholds are mostly composed of not having a good, satisfactory overt. You realize that? It's probably why you were withholding. You recognize that?

In case you get any ideas, why, of course you immediately afterwards have a tendency to withhold twice as much, but that's beside the point. In that split instant there, when you're remedying your havingness of overts, you see – in that split instant there – it is very enjoyable no matter how much you pay for it afterwards.

I had a pal one time, back about 1930, when I was trying to keep from going to college. We went on a barnstorming trip out of Washington here and we were flying an old – I think it was an airplane, I think. It had an engine; had wheels. Personally, I believe he picked it off the ground and carried it around in the air. I don't think it had anything to do with the aerodynamics of flight, because looking over the aerodynamics of that aircraft since, I haven't been able to find any flying characteristics in it of any kind whatsoever.

This was almost as bad as the type of aircraft just a little earlier than that. The way they test whether or not a flying wire was gone between the two wings, they'd turn a pigeon loose, and if it escaped, why, there was a wire gone.

Yeah. These were the days. I remember sitting out here at Congressional Airport in a soaring plane about to take off on a stunting exhibition where they were having an air show. I used to stunt soaring planes. You almost didn't have me here. I don't think anybody else has ever dared do it since.

And I was sitting there and I was feeling very proud and very manly, you know. I was sort of flexing my biceps. I had a white helmet on and some nice, shiny man's field boots and I was feeling really the stuff, you know. Really feeling the stuff. Masculine, manly, brave, you know and so forth. And a newspaper photographer came up and he said, "Do you mind if I take your picture, miss?" White flying helmet. How could he tell, you know? I've still got that picture. I'll have to show it to you someday.

But anyway, this old pal of mine who used to fly around a lot – he used to have a philosophy. It had a lot to do with overts and withholds. He'd get so tired of withholding from having an accident that when he saw that it was inevitable, absolutely inevitable that he was going to have an accident with a car or something of the sort, he'd immediately make a postulate to make it a good one. Well, you always crabbed afterwards that it was hard on the fuselage and so forth, but I'm sure he found it was enjoyable at that split instant of time. A good overt.

The reason man is having so much trouble is factually he can't have action without overts today. Well, it's an awful overt against you. You get in an automobile and you put it on the highway – overt against your body. And it's on the highway and you start wheeling it up and revving it up. I don't know. They're rather low speeds on this particular planet. You get it up to about 120, 130 miles an hour and you're going down the highway. You put it in the ditch. Meat body – meat bodies are softer than windshields. Meat bodies are softer than steering columns, and so forth.

Overt. Start moving fast. It's an overt. You get up in an aircraft and the pilot can't quite make up his mind 150 feet above the runway, just as he's taking off, and decides to go back. And they scrape the passengers and the pilot, you see, off the runway. What's left of the charred embers has the benefit of selling more newspapers – about the only benefit that crash had.

One mustn't go fast on this planet. One mustn't make any speed because if he does, he'll get an impact greater than the body he has is capable of withstanding. That true?

How did you rig yourself up so that you could hurt that bad? That's what's interesting. How did you do that? Pretty good trick.

Checking speed. Checking against speed. Mustn't go fast. Mustn't make any speed because the velocity, of course, brings about an impact which is far greater than anything you would really care to experience. And you get taught to go slow. And as you get taught to go slow, your cycle of life gets less. The slower you go, the shorter you live. Not reversewise. Till you get short cycles of action. Till you get a lifetime you can't get anything done in. A lot of people around – you ask them, they'll say, well, they're not going to live until they're thirty or they're going to die when they're twenty-five. Did you ever hear anybody say anything like that? Well, they've sort of surrendered to this short cycle of action. How long does it take to really get educated, get going and have some fun in a society? I'd say a good life's span was four or five thousand years. You might be able to find your feet. You might be able to find your way around if you had a proper life span.

Look at the franticness that anybody who's trying to make money or straighten anything out is put up against. Look at this tremendous frantic-ness. Awful franticness. He's got to make it within what? Well, he can't start making it till he's about at least eighteen, nineteen, twenty – something like that. And his – the speed with which he can travel probably starts slowing down at the time he's about sixty, which gives him a total span there of something in the neighborhood of about forty years.

Forty years he's got to build it all up, get it all in place and then enjoy it. He's got to do all this in forty years. And you never saw some men working so hard to enjoy what they have worked so hard to put together in your life. And you go down to Miami right now – I imagine there's older chaps going up and down the street there, wiping the sweat off their brows – no, it's ice cold down there just now. I just had a personal report on the matter. But they're going up and down, breath in front of their faces, beating their arms against their parkas, hurrying around trying to have a good time while there's still some time in which to have a good time in, you see, before it all evaporates and they drop the mock-up.

And this gets to a sort of a franticness after a while. And this frantic-ness gets to the point of where, well, you'd better drop the mock-up because you can't win anyhow. There you get short cycle longevity.

But isn't it interesting that the valences that you're wearing may or may not have anything to do with the body or life span which you are in at this particular moment. Isn't that interesting?

Your valence. You will hear a great deal about this sometime up in the future here, not too long. Your valence. Of course, your valence merely means that thing which you attacked enough to become. That's all that – that's all that is.

And the opposition terminal, that's something which you also hoped would overcome it. Very interesting thing, this Goals Problem Mass, because it's composed of identities. Full packaged identities. They think and walk and talk and key out and key in. As your havingness goes down, in comes the valence. Havingness goes up a little bit and the valence may or may not go out.

A valence. Now, formerly you thought perhaps we were talking about a thought or an idea of beingness. We're not talking about a thought or an idea of beingness. When you corral one of these valences and look at it and adjust your ability to see, the thing is usually a black mass and very often, by the way, has arms and legs. What do you know? Huh! Or antenna. It all depends on what you've been up to with that valence, you see.

No. It'll be a full-packaged identity. It's quite amazing. Quite amazing. Now you yourself have collided with these things in your nightmares. You've been tired or had too many drinks of – I think it's Calvert is what gives you dt's. That's the best thing to drink to have dt's. It used to be. I don't know about now. I don't drink now – stopped having any effect on me and it's a "so what" now, you know. But Calvert used to be the stuff that'd give you delirium tremens in an awful hurry. And you drink some of that and all of a sudden you're talking to a black ghost out in front of you or something like this, you know. There are people around that lie up half the night processing the black thetans up in the corner. You ever hear of anybody doing anything like that? Well, they do. This is true. This is the world as it is, not as we hope it will remain. Some fellow has an emotional shock and he suddenly feels like something has walked into his face. Not quite sure what it is. He's lying down. All of a sudden, he has a pain in the center of his head but it isn't his head that's hurting.

We take somebody up to the hospital and turn him over to medical treatment. The medical boys will know what to do at this particular time and age. They haven't started putting on too many artificial limbs at this time. They cut off his leg. He has hangnails or frozen toenails or something and they cut off his leg. They generally cut it off two or three times, ankle, thigh, neck, you see? They want to make sure and also get a double – triple fee. So much easier, you know, to collect a fee from an estate rather than from a person. Did you recognize this as one of the economics of medicine? Estate always pays up because it's got all the insurance money now. You never recognized that, did you?

Chinese don't work it this way. They pay their doctor as long as they stay well. The second they get sick, they stop the bill. That's it. But anyway, the individual all of a sudden has his leg cut off. Everything's fine now except his toes itch. Before, he at least could scratch his toes. Now he can't scratch his toes. That's been the total gain of having his leg sawed off. No. He's still got a leg. It's a valence leg. It isn't a ghost leg or what they think it is. Or it's – it isn't the nerves playing tricks on the mind. There is still a mass down there sufficiently thin that it doesn't reflect light. That's all that amounts to. And this thinness, of course, makes the thing invisible. But it's still a mass and it still has the sensory perceptions of a leg. Have you ever heard of this sort of thing?

Male voice: Yeah.

Well, all of this is valence phenomena. All of this is valence phenomena. You get an idea of – oh, there's odd things. Somebody's mother died one time and all of a sudden he had hundreds of voices were – just started yapping all over his body and all around him, and so forth. Just yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap. Everybody talking at once and so forth. Like to drive him around the bend. Couldn't make head or tail out of it. He figured he was haunted. He was. He was. Absolutely. The most accurate estimate he has ever made of anything – probably the only time he's ever made an accurate estimate of anything. He was haunted. Had an emotional shock and everything starts talking.

I refer you to Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health and its discussion of circuits. Well, let's take another look at circuits and recognize that they are whole package beingnesses. And you might as well call them valences because they are identities, and they have name, ranks and serial numbers. An experiment one time – I had an ache in my back and an ache in my skull and an ache in my knee, and I was down in Phoenix, Arizona and there were enough things going on to make almost anything ache.

And I said – this was pretty rough, everything cutting up in the way of somatics. Too busy to have a session, so I said, "Shut up." And they did. That was it. They weren't talking. They were simply hurting, you know. Shut up. They did. Stayed off for fifteen minutes. Never felt better in my life for about fifteen minutes. And then one of them got brave. Very easy to personalize or personificate in that particular way but you are discouraged from doing this. You believe that any – if anybody has voices or beingnesses or identities in him that he's nuts, as a definition of being crazy.

I'll give you another definition for being crazy. A person who cannot perceive his own valences is slightly off. And that includes all of us. Now these are packaged beingnesses. They are just as though you'd built them up out of jelly beans and electric light cords and so forth, except they are too thin to reflect light.

And when you exteriorize, why, you very often exteriorize in a valence. Sometimes you don't exteriorize in a valence, however. Now the mystic has collided with this down through the millennia and he has called them astral self – the astral body. The mystic has always known what we were talking about when we were talking about exteriorization. Always has known and known all about it – so much so that they've never been able to find out what we mean by exteriorization because they're thinking and talking about the exit of a valence.

Back in London many years ago, about 1953 I guess it was – something like that – I used to get somebody to exteriorize as an astral self, you see? You know, as a valence. And then get him, the thetan, to exteriorize from the valence – 1, 2, you see. Well, it wasn't successful in very many cases because I didn't know at that time you'd had to have him exteriorize as a valence and then exteriorize from valence 1, valence 2, valence 3, valence 4, valence 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and you would run out of adding machines, slide rules and computers before you finally got through with the number of valences he'd have to exteriorize out of.

You is populated! Some of the most – best populated people in the world pass through these doors, you know. Oddly enough, it's an easy method of beingness – is what these things amount to. At one time they would have considerable use no matter how they were built up, so a thetan has wanted them at some time or another.

You got into a certain situation, why, cling-bang! You got into a cage full of lions, you just picked up one of your old valences as a lion tamer, and bang! You had it made, you see.

But one by one these things failed and then you didn't throw them away because there was no way to throw them away and you never as-ised them and they built up one way or the other and you lived lives as this and lives as that. Well, what do you think happened to all the lives you've lived as something else?

You realize you go out in the sun now and the photons hit you in the face and you resist and you cry and you weep and you eat and you have overts and you have withholds and all of these various things. And your body has a form and shape and you put clothes over it and you stick pins in your fingers and get operated on and psychotherapized and so forth; and all kinds of disasters occur to you.

Well, what exactly is happening? Well, you are actually building a body all the time you are doing this. You're constructing a body within or a body over a body. Naturally, you get an engram – have you ever seen an engram hang up an injury? Well, when the engram was run out, the injury disappeared. Well, let's have an analogy between a body and an injury. You haven't ever run the body out that you've lived with before. Well, where is it? Well, there were a whole bunch of facsimiles and all kinds of various bric-a-brac of one kind or another there. I mean, there's… Well, let's take your life now as a citizen of this continent. Well, let's be extravagant. Let's make it… You could be fairly unreal; between the years 1920 and 1962. See? Take some far flown example like this. Some imaginative example. Let's say you'd lived a life on this particular continent during 1920 and 1962, you know, past life of some kind or another or future life.

All right. Now, it's real enough while you're living it, isn't it?

Audience: Yes.

Real enough while you're living it.

What you going to do with this life? You realize it's got facsimiles, it's got thinkingnesses. It's got education. It's got habit patterns. It's got all of this, that, and the other thing. What are you going to do with this life? What are you going to do with it? Because it's going to be residual as a body. Certainly, it's a body. We used to run engrams, just to tell somebody, "Get into your own valence." We were very gentle about it in those days. Never persuaded anybody. Never persuaded anybody when we could force them to do it. Get into your own valence, you know. Guy would and the engram would run out, of course.

But when he started running past track things and we told him to get into his own valence, you know, he sometimes couldn't. And that's more or less what defeats engram running.

Well, what is this thing, valence? Well, the valence is what's got the pictures. The valence has got the pictures. Ho-ho. It's the valence that's got the ideas. It's the valence that's got the "now-I'm-supposed-to's." Valence that's got the interpersonal relationships. You, by your name, right this moment, have certain interpersonal relationships, don't you? When you pass in your chips in a very relatively short space of time, in the next hundred years, you're a Scientologist, two hundred years, three hundred years – some short period of life, you pass in your chips and so forth, what you going to do with all these relationships? Possibly some of you were in Egypt, but – I had a little bit of an overt. It wasn't really an overt in Egypt. Dreamed up an idea back in Egypt that secured personal property. It said when any official of the court or man – any man of repute or renown in the area, died, when he came back, he could have his property back. That was pretty good. That worked pretty good. Remember that gimmick?

That fortuitous circumstance doesn't always exist on the track. You kick the bucket, you lose your friends, you lose your property and you've had it. As a matter of fact, the courts are rigged right now. You could go as far as to say that the courts are agin thetans. Agin 'em. When they declare a thetan legally dead, they want him to stay dead. And that's it.

It's almost a high crime to come back after you're dead. Some of the most fantastic catastrophes have occurred because somebody who has been carefully pronounced legally dead by decree has turned up. Of course, it makes a lot of legal problems. A girl is married, the family's drifted off, it's all been split up by the will. Everything has been disposed of and he comes back and he says, "Where's my Jaguar?" "Oh well, dear, we gave that to the ashman, after all…" He has no legal recourse of any kind whatsoever. He has been pronounced dead and of course that is as dead as anybody ever gets.

But because the person loses all of his havingness, he gets even with it all by forgetting it. That is the last thing a thetan can do to get revenge.

I don't know if you've ever heard a little kid – they're quite realistic sometimes, little kids are. They aren't bowed down with all the responsibilities and "now-I'm-supposed-to's" of the adult. A little freer, you know. You were too, for a while. Also perhaps a little bit spookier. You know, after you've just kicked the bucket, you're kind of nervous for the next few years. You know, it kind of makes you nervous. People expect you to sleep in the dark. And you open your eyes in the dark and you don't know where you are. And you think maybe you're back in Korea or something of the sort. You're not quite sure where you have wound up at.

I don't know why many adults think it is a high crime to leave a light on in a child's room, but it saves more nightmares. See a child floundering around with a little dim light in his room and he'll open his eye, you know, and he'll look around – oh well, you know – go back to sleep again. That was just yesterday. That was just another year, another life, another nightmare. But a lot of adults say, "Well, a child should learn to sleep in the dark." I don't know. I never have. I've never learned to sleep in the dark with a total disorientation. Unless I couldn't put out any light. That seems to be a bit of a dull thing.

You know what a dream is, don't you? A dream is merely an effort to orient oneself. A thetan is so disoriented he doesn't know where he is and he all of a sudden starts mocking things up in an effort to find out where he is – trying to duplicate the environment and his effort to duplicate the environment, is liable to mock up almost anything under the sun, moon and stars. You get the Capitol at Washington sitting on St. Paul's Cathedral, you know, all located on Marcab. And your effort to locate yourself is such a frantic affair, you find yourself running down Pennsylvania Avenue with no clothes on. The significance of a dream, however, is simply the effort to locate and it's nothing else.

And you open one eye and look around and find out where you are and you go back to sleep because you might still be in that confounded tomb. You know the exteriorization from a body that's been embalmed is usually fairly easy. But sometimes you can't find the exit. Something like that happens.

Well, all this, of course, is very wild conversation and would be classified as metaphysical and so forth by the more insane, learned members of our society, because they have gotten so even with everybody that they have forgotten everything. That's about all it amounts to. Sometimes a little kid hasn't forgotten all the tricks and he's liable to look at you. He can't beat you up. You're nine times as tall as he is, something like that. So he gets even with you. He looks at you piercingly and he says, "I'll forget you."

That's pretty near the thetan's last revenge. "I will forget you." Can't do much less than that. But you can actually – you think you do this to spare yourself the pain of remembering all of these past and uncomfortable things. You think that is why you were forgetting everything. That is not true at all. I can prove to you with a bingety-bang. You are simply getting even. You are a vengeful cuss. You is real revengeful. That's all right. I'm still a friend of yours, but I know that about you. And when you can't get even any other way, you forget things.

This is so much true that if a person has a bad somatic, you can ask him any kind of a combination of questions. Has something to do with this. "Who would be upset if you forgot about that?" And you're liable to run out not only that somatic but a bunch more he didn't even know he had. You know, make us go bzzzzzzzt. You know, brrrrrrrr. Something like that.

"Whom have you forgotten about to get even with?" is the stylized question, see. "Who would be upset if you forgot?" And "Who would you get even with if you forgot?" and so forth. That actually is the shut-off on the whole track. Let's not put it on the fact of "us poor thetans," which we have been doing, you see – having been deprived of all of our property, friends and relatives, having been grossly maligned and laid in the grave with only second-grade embalming fluid, not the good stuff, now we're unable to remember because we've been done in. And that's why we have occlusions on the past. I'm afraid that is not the way it is. The thing you do is – having been laid in the grave and having knocked off the body, one can now get even with all those people further by forgetting all of them.

You see, forgetting people is an effort to unmock people. It's an effort to reduce them. It's an effort to make them disappear. You forget them, they disappear.

Well, I'll give you an idea. What is the end product of swordplay? It's the destruction of a person. What is the end product of bullets? It's the obstruction or blowing up or obliteration of an individual, see? What is the end product of all weapons? What is the end product of all suits? Well, a suit is an effort to make somebody disappear by making his fortune disappear. See? Make a fortune disappear. You can't make him disappear, but you can make his bank account disappear. See? And by making his bank account disappear, who knows, you might be able to make him disappear, too. See how that works?

But when you can't finally do anything else – you can't turn loose with a 67-gauge blast pistol, disintegrator setting, 1,006. That's pretty good, you know. You just turn it up – phewww! Not even a pale pink mist. You're not embarrassed by blood or anything. If you can't do that, why, of course, you can stab him and let him rot. And that'll make him disappear. Destruction of beingness or valences or identities is almost a professional activity on the part of thetans.

And when they can't destroy them anymore, physically, they can always make a last final effort. They can forget them and sort of tell themselves that they've done it. See how that is? You see, if you forget somebody, he's disappeared, at least for you. Well, and who knows, we might be able to tell ourselves and console ourselves that he disappeared for him, too.

There is nothing more disheartening than some fellow who has divorced a wife and forgotten her and she's gone out of his life and that is it. Once in a while he has a little twinge of conscience. He remembers her and he realizes that she is probably living in poverty, you know – in dire circumstances, you see – probably down by the railroad tracks in an old hovel made of tin cans and boxes, see. And down on Main Street one day, she drives past in her new Lincoln driven by a chauffeur. It's hard on him, because he's forgotten her. And it – suddenly realizes it didn't work. "Failed forgetting" then becomes a live button on his case.

"What forgettingness has failed to accomplish a make nothing out of?" That's what the disintegration of a valence and a being is. The odd part of it is, is having fooled oneself into the fact that it is gone and convinced oneself that it is gone, one continues to have ulcers, pains in the back of the neck, bad eyesight, staggers around. He's not quite sure what he's doing and an auditor comes along. He says, "I'll run those out. You're simply trying to get even with your mother, mother-in-law, your husband or something of the sort, and I'll just get this off and everything will be fine." And he runs some off and it diminishes. It diminishes. Doesn't disappear. These things must be located someplace else than in the here and now. They must be located someplace else.

And they are. They're a past beingness he has unsuccessfully made nothing out of because he hasn't made nothing out of any beingness he has ever had in the last two hundred trillion years. He's got them all. And those things with their problems and because they are in play and counterplay and identity against one another in the most complicated series of games anybody ever heard of – jammed together into a total black mass, and you call – this is the Goals Problems Mass.

When you start taking it apart, you find it's composed of nothing but identities. And each identity in it has its own thoughts. It has its own supposed-to's. It has its own goals. It has its own methodology of destruction. It has its own training patterns. It has its own habits, and so forth – the most marvelous potpourri you ever saw. If this were of any possible use to anybody at this particular time, we would say, "Well, by all means, let's go on using it." But it is no use to anybody. At this stage of the game, he's completely lost the map. He reaches over to put on the lion tamer, you see, and he gets a mouse. He starts teaching school. There he is teaching school, standing up in front of the children, and he knows exactly how to do this. All he has to do is reach into the old bag of tricks and pull out of this coal-black, agglutinous piece of asphalt, just a nice valence as a schoolteacher, you see.

So he pulls it out and he puts it on. Only when he got it, it was a general. Has trouble with the school board – always in trouble with the school board. Funny part of it is he doesn't even know that he's wearing a valence of a general. He's still convinced that he is wearing the valence of a school-teacher, even at that moment when he picks up the kid's toy pistols, you see, and as they've been playing in the schoolyard… It all fits very well, you see, and it all works very well, and so forth, and – but he just keeps saying to himself all the time – because it's hung up; he can't express it, you see – "Sir, take this man to the firing squad."

You see, this keeps going through his head all the time. And he – little Johnny comes up and says, "nyaa, nyaa" and his nose is running, he's been making a lot of noise and he's been teasing one of the girls and so forth. And he walks up there and he opens his mouth to say some automatic phrase that requires no effort of any kind whatsoever. You see, he knows. He's a school-teacher. Therefore, he'll say exactly the right thing with the greatest of ease. It's all on automatic. And he said, "Sir, you are hereby condemned to death under articles of war and so-and-so and so-and-so on," you know?

After he's done this a couple of times, he checks it. Little Johnny comes up to him again and he's been trying to say, "I'm going to spank you if you do that again, you know," so he says, "Ah, go back to your seat."

Now, wrong game, wrong body, wrong training pattern. Put a guy down at the filling station. He's busy filling up trucks, and so forth. Works out all right. Kind of gets on his boss's nerve occasionally. The only thing you could get out of the ragbag in the way of a valence and the only thing he could do in the way of a valence and so forth, and the only thing he could get, was a dog. He keeps going up sniffing at the cars as they come in. He knows it's wrong. He knows he ought to act right, you know? He knows he's supposed to test the oil and water, you know. Can't get along.

The odd part of it is nobody is more baffled than the person who has grabbed the wrong hat. Nobody's more baffled than he is. He'll come around and tell you, too, and he is – he says, "The funniest thing…" He doesn't let most people in on that, "but every time I take off a radiator cap, you see, every time – I unscrew the radiator cap, you know, you always have a little trouble with them because your claw – I mean your finger – and sniff, sniff…"

He says, "But my worst trouble is when I pass the air pressure post."

He thinks he's crazy. He isn't crazy. As a matter of fact, he's acting perfectly. He's acting at the exact dictates and is the exact effect of a perfectly complex, perfectly adequate training pattern, thinkingness pattern, everything else. All perfectly adequate for another place, another day, another dollar, another dog, but not for a filling station. Not for a filling station. Fellows pick up lives and they're very successful lives and they don't want to get out of them. Fellow will pick up lives. They're very unsuccessful lives and they can't get out of them, see.

And although they were pronounced dead, Lord knows how long ago, they're still living that life someplace in their beingness. And the only trouble is they can't even count on living that life. They've lived enough others that sometimes it's a hurdy-gurdy. Every time they talk to a woman they feel like a man. Every time they talk to a man, they feel like a woman. See, it isn't a matter of a one-valence proposition. See, they shift during the day under climatic conditions.

Get into a car. You're an airplane pilot. Get into an airplane, you're at the dog races. Okay? It's a mix-up, you know. There's just no telling what a guy's going to be next. That's most thetans' motto on this particular planet.

Somebody gets very distracted, you know, and they're tearing their hair – very distracted. They're absolutely ripping themselves apart. They feel life has really ganged up on them. They always say, "I don't know what's going to happen next. I don't know what I'm going to do next." Well, they ought to modify the statement a little bit. "I can't tell what I'm going to be next."

It's very, very astonishing. A thetan is getting along fine. She's being a housewife. Husband is coming home. Going to cook a nice dinner, so forth. It's all – it's all taped, see. Everything is fine. And she's got everything on the table and in the stove and so forth. And she even rehearses and says, "I'll go up to the door and I'll kiss him on the cheek and I'll say, 'Hello, honey, have you had a good day?' That's what I'll say. 'Hello, honey, have you had a good day?' See? It's all set and so forth. I'll take him in and I'll set him down and I'll really make him happy."

She goes and she – zero hour approaches, see. She rushes up to the front door just the moment she hears him coming up the steps and she opens the front door. And she says, "You big baboon, I'm going back to Mother." And spends the rest of the evening trying to patch it up. She can't do it so she knows how to patch it up. She used to be a cop.

He can be especially lucky if she has never been Lucrezia Borgia, you see. As far as wives are concerned – I'll tell you guys, you gentlemen in the audience – as far as wives are concerned, boy, you really take a chance. You think you're marrying one girl, you see. I'd say at an absolute minimum, she had something on the neighborhood of well, let's be conservative – hundreds of billions of beingnesses that she could be. She's been hundreds of billions of people and she isn't anybody just now. It's sort of like playing roulette. Only she's liable to be three different people in the same day.

I'll tell you girls something. Boy, that's nothing. Man, that's nothing. Boy, what you married. He's got just as many valences as you have, with a slight difficulty that he has a little more physical strength probably in this particular lifetime, and it's geared up economically so he can abreact his hostilities a bit better depending on which valence is coming up.

You ask him for some money to run the house or something like that. The miser valence comes on. That's his terminal at that minute. He's upset. He's more upset than you are. He's wondering why he's saying this, you know. "Well, how come I'm saying this?" You know. He's sorry inside there. "What did I say, you know?" "And I so detest cliches; to have actually said, 'Do you think money grows on trees?' " You know? It's no wonder people stammer.

The thought goes through and then they have to say the right thing, you see? But life barreling along any old way, no telling what might happen. But it's a bit of randomity that doesn't make anybody happy. If it made anybody happy, well, all right, leave it alone. Funny part of it is, you reactivate some of these valences and you'll find something very interesting. Fellow who has a miser valence can't even be a good miser. He's a lousy miser. That's all I object to. It's bad acting, bad stagecraft, bad livingness. Shakespeare said all the world is a stage. Well, this guy – the performance he puts on as a miser-let me tell you – I mean, bad show, very bad show. It's not up to The Merchant of Venice. Let me tell you. Nothing like that. No, his performance of a miser has watered down to this "Oh, you want some money to run the house. Is that it, dear?" He's almost broke at the bank, you see. "Would a thousand dollars be enough?" See, he can't be a good miser, you know. He's got to fight the valence.

All right. This fellow's got a valence as a cop. Criminal walks up to him. He walks up to a criminal. He knows what he's supposed to say. "I arrest you in the King's name" or something of the sort. You know? Depends on whether or not he's in Washington or New York. "I must warn you that everything you say will be used against you," you see. He's got himself all beefed up to this. He sat up, you know, in the night, and he said, "I'm going to arrest this guy tomorrow, and so on, and I'm going to say, 'I arrest you in the King's name.' Yes, I've got to, you know. 'I must warn you that anything you say will be used against you.' I'll go over that again." He steps in front of the mirror and he looks sour, you know, and he looks mean, you know, "… used against you, and so forth. Got you now." Got it taped, see. He knows how to arrest somebody. He's all set.

Next day he walks up to the criminal. He says, "You got a match, buddy?"

The sergeant says, "We sent you out to get Black Bill, the upper town mobster. Where is he?"

And he says, "Well, he wasn't home." He says, "You know, I must be yellow."

No, he isn't yellow. He's got a valence as a cop and he mustn't be it. And that is the common denominator of all valences. If you've got one, you mustn't be it. And if you be it, you feel guilty. You just mustn't really be the valence which you are. So these packages are totally useless. They're totally wasted. Anybody could be a better cop than a fellow who has a lot of past lives as a cop. Quite amazing. Anybody could be a better miser than a fellow who has a long, successful career as a miser and is now in valence form. Anybody could be better than anybody with a valence.

I'll give you an idea. I had a valence kicking around. First time I ever realized that this valence had any real suppressive characteristics with regard to me, is after it had been run pretty flat. I was sitting down at my desk and I all of a sudden did an operation with a pencil and fixed it up and suddenly realized that I hadn't been – ever been able to do sketching. And I all of a sudden – I mean engineering drawing, you know. I was educated in that field and I could never do this. You know, sketch drawing and perspective. And I sketched a drawing and handed it over to somebody and told them to build it, and everything was fine, you know. And I said, "Well, what the hell happened? I've never been able to do that before." And I suddenly realized I had run out the guy who was able to do that. Spooky, huh? In other words, I had run out the thing and had been able to do it. God help anybody who has a terminal as a racetrack driver that gets his hands on a racing car.

We had an example of that at Saint Hill. She was afraid to get in cars; afraid to drive a car and the car always broke down. Terminal: racetrack driver. You'd think she'd drive like mad. Actually, she was driving at about ten miles an hour when she couldn't go slower.

No. A thetan fights his valences and he can't be them. And they limit his skill and ability and they are the primary limiters of ability. If you can't be what you want to be, you probably are "it" in a valence. Then you won't ever accomplish being what you want to be until you got loosened up enough and recognized enough that you don't have to be it and then you can do it and be it. Isn't that interesting? What an interestingly complicated piece of nonsense.

But the Goals Problem Mass is composed totally of all of these beingnesses which have accumulated all of these eons and ages on down the line. You'll find them in anybody. Now I'm not talking through my hat. It's very easy to do. You should see the look come over a pc's face when you've assessed it all the way down, and he was working at it, you know. And he – you worked at it and you assessed it, you know, running a Routine 3D or something, and you get it down the line. And you get it there and you finally get the item. And the moment you get the item, he of course has been kind of afraid that was it all along, you know.

He is instantly alert. He is very happy to have the item and nobody is more pleased to get this item in the world. Valence: skunk. See? You say, "Well, that's what came out of it: skunk."

And he said, "Well, I'll be damned. So that's why I've had to use perfume all my lifetime. Yeah, that's right. That's right. I got a black fur coat and I insisted on having a white mink stripe put in the back of it, you know."

And he starts to check it up. All the habit patterns that's made him worry about him are all contained in this silly package which is the central package. All these things are completely interwoven. They explain all of his actions to him. He knows now what he has been doing and why he has been doing it.

Then you find his opposition terminal and of course he knows what he's been fighting all the time. There is what he has been fighting. "Well, of course!" he always says, you know? It would be so much easier, however, if seventy-five hours before he had walked up to you, and he had said, "Well, I'm a skunk and my opposition terminal is a perfume factory." It'd have been so much simpler. He always acts like he knew it all the time, you see. But he – I haven't had any of them yet really tell me until I found out because, you see, he has to find out, too. He hasn't known either. Well, so much for Goals Problem Masses and 3Ds.

I wish you very, very good hunting when you find yours.

Thank you.

THE VALENCE, HOW IT WORKS PAGE 13 CHC-07 – 1.01.61

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