View source for Thinking Action, Machines (1ACC 531014)

'''Series:''' 1ACC

'''Date:''' 14 October 1953

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

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This is October the 15th, first morning hour.

This morning we are going to continue, as we will all this week, on subjective processes. I am doing it - this to you with malice aforethought. We have some lovely cases here. There's no reason to chew into these cases and bust them all up, you know. It would just ruin everything because what we want here is to give you a good reality on subjective processes - "processes" for Great Britain if these tapes are ever played there. [pronounced in the British manner the second time. - Ed.]

Now, you see what we're doing here? We're doing a very - really a very careful approach. We are walking forward through all of this in an effort to give you a reality on both subjective and objective techniques. Next week you're not going to get a chance to run a subjective technique, so let's get some reality on it this week. Next week we're going to run objective techniques - very, very few and very, very little subjective techniques.

So we've got now, just today, tomorrow, Saturday to finish off subjective techniques. Now, when you realize that subjective techniques cover everything that has to do with a person's own thinkingness, you realize that we're finishing off quite a piece of stuff here.

Right here let's get a good solid definition on what is a subjective technique. It's pertinent.

What is a subjective technique? It is a technique where its highest reality will be a subjective reality. It will be the reality for the person himself and for no other. And if we call it subjective technique, then, we realize what reality we are trying to achieve. The reality we're trying to achieve here is a very simple one and it's simply this reality: Can we do something subjectively to an individual to bring about a change in his thinkingness? And do we find this a relatively long and arduous process or are some of these techniques easy, simple and quick?

The only thing wrong with the mind would be in the mind itself Isn't that true? The only thing wrong with thinking would be thinking. Is that so? Q and A. All right.

When we talk about thinking we are talking, then, in a subjective technique, on the lowest level of line collapse. It's thinking and then there's effort and then there's emotion, which is feeling, and we go out beyond that and we get looking.

Well now, a subjective technique, again, by definition as we're using it here, is one which deals with the most close-in part of it and which causes thinking. Now, we're covering the subject of thinking. Now, do you see that there is a difference here? That there's a very marked difference?

Subjective technique would be that technique which went up to and did not exceed the boundary of; certainly, feeling about it. It would be thinking about it. There's subjectiveness.

Now, we're already - we're exceeding that boundary slightly. And the reason we're examining this field - it's the closest one in to the individual and it's the easiest one at which we can look, right at the present moment; we're looking at thinking. I mean, you better find out what you can about thinkingness and get some sort of a subjective reality on this, then, because we're dealing with the activity of the person within his body - again, a subjective technique.

Furthermore, the results of subjective techniques are most markedly boundaried by this: The person knows he is better but nobody else does. All right, that's a remarkable and miserable thing, if you come to think about it.

In this country, this country here - I think this is the United States this morning - the fact of personal relationships is probably poorer than any other part of the globe. The United States today is much more able with MEST - much more able with MEST - than other nations. It's just at a wonderful inverted 6; real good at inverted 6. This country sneers at other nations for not being so inverted at 6.

America today believes it has reached its highest level of aesthetic with metal. Is this anything peculiar to this society? I just happened to remember that it hasn't changed since 1621. An artist was permitted to work with wrought iron in the seventeenth century, but if he worked with anything else they burned him or something, excommunicated him, shot him. Because it was wicked and vicious and vile to fiddle around with paint and other folderol.

We find Paul Revere, a remarkable artist, working in copper and silver. And we find other people in the American scene working with metal. America can make metal very beautiful. It's always, then, in its culture itself; had a stick at an inverted 6.

When we got the Hessians - when they disbanded those Hessian regiments after they were captured at Saratoga and were put in barracks in Boston, it was much easier just to forget about them than to pay the king for them that lent them to the British. These men were wheelwrights, blacksmiths; they were tradesmen. Remarkable country over there that had sold its artisans and tradesmen into the military.

Almost as remarkable as modern day whereby we sell all the youth and brains of the country into the army. "Yuh-huh! Well, huh-huh, we got a president, for a -he was a general and it's all very sensible. The thing to do to get everybody up high-toned, you know, so we'll have a good civilization is take everybody when he's eighteen years of age, you know, and put him in the army so he gets well drilled."

If the country doesn't fall on its face because of this idiocy, it won't be Truman's and Eisenhower's fault, believe me.

I tell you frankly, speaking strictly as a scientist, which I can speak as, and as a pretty good sailor - I can speak that way, too - I can tell you, confidently, that modern methods of warfare don't happen to require manpower. You don't want anything to do with manpower; they get in your road. You don't want the enemy to mobilize either because that makes some of his populace safe; it puts them in front-line trenches. If you were today to hire five thousand scientists and about five thousand hot rod kids for applicators, you could practically wipe out life on Earth, which I think is the end goal of war. You could. You just give them their head and say, "Well, let's go boys; let's figure it out," and away you'd go. The problem is not a problem of manpower.

Yet, America today is striving madly with its educational programs, with every other government program, to depress the thought level to thought only. Well, let's just kind of make everybody into an automaton who thinks.

One of our great universities - they made them take the red lights off the girls' dormitory recently; and the faculty finally got rid of seven or eight of the communist professors they had there and they - they've got it pretty well straightened out - they've cut down the number of class in class there from 400 to 398; real progress - the University of California. This great educational institution has signs - down in the Los Angeles branch of it - has signs all over the place: "You're here to learn how to think."

I can show them how to fix up kids so they think. I can show them real easy how to fix up kids so they think. Just give them a lot of psychiatric electric shocks. They'll think; they won't be able to do anything but look [think] when they do that to them. Or just simply take brickbats and start hitting them. And if you hit them enough and shot at them enough and gave them enough shocks, they'd really think. It's the slow method to educate them into it. Unfortunately, I've had to do with some of the graduates of this great institution during this late slight riffle in international affairs. I found each one of them was very capable of thinking but he sure couldn't act! He couldn't even vaguely act. He couldn't get into motion; he couldn't complete a cycle of action. You'd say, "Go down and get a can of paint," and he would come back three hours later by saying he had signed in the wrong line of the requisition place or something and he was very confused and he didn't have...

[Please note: At this point in the lecture a gap exists in the original recording. We now rejoin the class where the lecture resumes.]

Continuing this morning lecture.

The toleration of motion of a nation is very poor indeed where thinkingness is its largest goal. Everybody is supposed to be thoughtful in this country and believe me, they really get thoughtful.

A test of this: You will find that if you put in charge of an organization as its hiring and firing agent a person who is afraid to hurt other people, he will wind up by murdering not only them but the organization itself. In other words, this is intensely impractical as a solution - but intensely impractical!

In the first place, conclusions are not reached by thinking as it is fondly believed to be thought by the public at large. People do not reach conclusions by sitting down and saying, "Now I am going to think." If they do they're going to be wrong.

We even have a national penchant here not to think - not to act, rather, impulsively - to think first and act later. I know of a large secret organization in this country which has as one of its mottoes: "Think twice before acting once." Well, that's a way to slow everybody down, isn't it?

Well, what are we going to do one of these days for executives? What are we going to do one of these days for somebody to build a bridge? Everybody's in the little red schoolhouse now. What the hell is going to happen with this metal down here when we no longer have somebody sufficiently - sufficiently screwball to push around one of those big trucks, like the one that just walked away out there - ten tons worth of truck!

We have a need in this country for people of action. Every success you ever ran into anyplace was good at action and very, very poor at sitting still.

Now, it is true that education can be effective when you are dealing with essentials as how to become active though educated. As long as you are dealing with that, you're all right. As long as you're on that line, nothing bad with it.

But to sit down and become cultured by memorizing the names of 875 paintings, 662 symphonies, and to know whether to say "Oh!" or "Aw!" when looking at a famous painting... Well, you see, that method of becoming cultured will wind up in no art.

This country right now has a chance of pulling upstairs but it's doing everything it can to go downstairs. It has a wonderful opportunity because of its food supply, not because of its culture, to start pushing out across the world - a wonderful opportunity. But is it? All right.

Subjective reality is the last one you want because it's the computation, the "only one."

In America people can live in apartment houses for years and never know who lives next door. That is a result of pulled-in anchor points. Be pretty hard to figure out how anybody could manage this but they sure do.

People drive down highways here at a mad rate of speed. Somebody gets a flat tire, "Hell with him; he's in the road." That's not high-toned; that's real low-toned.

So, what do we find here as a change? We find a change in the people themselves. Not too long ago, it was actually possible for the people of this country to get a flat tire and be assisted bounteously. That's only about thirty years ago. Gee, you passed a car someplace, something like that, and you were just as like as not to stop, and say, "Hello. How are you? What are you going? What are you driving?" Never been introduced to this fellow.

Move into a new neighborhood; people came over and asked how you were getting along. They didn't look through drawn blinds to see what furniture was being unloaded from the van. Now they don't even do that; they don't even try to find out what your furniture is like before it's moved in. This is just simply the "only one" computation keying in, keying in, keying in further and further and further and further and further.

Thinkingness - resist with your anchor points; fight the MEST universe. Well, all that winds up with is thinking. And by golly, when you complement that with education and when you complement it with psychotherapy and when you get the entire goal of psychology concentrated on nothing but thinking, you've got trouble. You've got trouble in science; you've got trouble in thinking in general throughout the country. The most astonishing things occur.

Some fellow comes across with some kind of a something or other; boy, everybody is told what to think about it. You have a fellow by the name of Gabriel Hotrod who tells everybody what to think about it, and so everybody thinks that. You go down on the corner and after a program like that, you want to know about this situation, why, you can find out about it; you'll find the same opinion you've heard over the air fifteen minutes before. This is real good. This is exterior determination but thorough.

Is this thinking a method of reaching a usable conclusion? No! Because what they're calling "thinking" is circuitry, and it is not a good method of reaching a usable conclusion.

I put a car once - there had been a terrific storm and a tree blew down across the road and there was electric-light lines lying all through the wet foliage of this tree and several thousand volts crackling through there. And I was going along at a fairly low speed, although the wind was still high and the street was still wet. And there was a little knoll just on the other side, a little roll in the road, a little crest there just on the other side of this big tree and a truck came booming up over that rise. I was going pretty slow, about twenty-five miles an hour. Well, there was a spot underneath this tree which was free of all the light wires, which was just the height of the car hood and so I simply inserted the car's hood underneath the tree. Didn't scratch anything. It stopped the car very thoroughly and got it out of the road of the truck.

And that was the first time I ever found out that you didn't think about anything. It suddenly occurred to me later - I went over the thing very carefully, thinking it over - and I said that's very remarkable. There wasn't a single thought that crossed my mind the whole operation. Golly, that's a relief; I said to myself. Not a single thought.

You'll find in any spontaneous action where you've done exactly the right thing, you didn't sit around and think about it, you just acted.

Well, what's this? It means that when you get time into thought you have injected MEST into thought and all that MEST is going to do for you is just lie down and be apathetic. When you put time into thought you inject MEST into thought.

Now, there's no sense in trying to take MEST out of thought when we're dealing with circuitry because that's the trouble with it; there isn't any MEST in it to a sufficient quantity. It had MEST in it and now it hasn't got the MEST in it anymore, so it's on an inverted 6. It had MEST in it and now it hasn't got any MEST in it and after that it goes onto thinking.

Now, someday when you're flying around the universe amusing yourself; you'll probably want to amuse yourself with a thinking machine. I'll tell you how to make one.

You take a little piece of space with nothing in it and then start building around it shells of energy; you build actual shells of energy around this little space. And now get on the outside of about fifteen or twenty shells, which are concentric (all of them concentric in spheres, you see, around this little, tiny space), and shove like hell from all sides simultaneously, at a tremendous crush - pam. And because you put the energy there and because there is an aliveness to it every time it's addressed - I mean, because there is an aliveness potential to it, every time it's addressed by a piece of live energy, the live energy will behave in a certain fashion. It will behave to give back a computation. This is a thinking machine. That's all there is to it - crush! That's it.

Now after that anytime energy tries to get in through those crushed spots, it'll find itself running through hollow spots and vacuums which are distorted. And this distortion will make the energy behave so that you can feed any kind of a thought in there and it'll come out the other side with some other kind of a thought; and that's thinking.

Thinking is the conversion of a postulate into a reason. And this is simply done by distorting it. And when you get a distortion pattern parallel to another distortion pattern you get an agreement in thinkingness. And if everybody accepts this as reasonable, why, then you've really got it; you've really got everything you went for - the worst parts. Okay?

Subjective reality is the reality one gets on a change occurring in such a compression sphere. If he can change the center of the compression sphere, he now has a subjective reality on thinkingness - a change in thinkingness. And that's what you do when you run a button; you distort or change the center of compressed space in a thinking machine.

It's kind of a game. If you had this desk up here covered with little ENIACs and UNIVACs and the game you'd be playing is "Let's see if we can put a powerful enough thought and hold it long enough in each one of these UNIVACs or ENIACs to cause the thought to alter." Now, we put enough pressure on these machines and enough voltage in them so we will actually get an alteration of the thinkingness - you've got subjective processing.

And the end goal of subjective processing is the reduction, removal and discarding of these UNIVACs and ENIACs. That's what you're trying to do, see? You want to change those to a higher level, so you want to change each one. Well, the reductio ad absurdum is you put enough juice through them so that they distort more and more and then distort less and less. And you will get your UNIVACs and ENIACs and so forth eventually melting and running away. And then you have, not only a cleared desk, but you have cleared up thinkingness.

When a person is running postulates on himself; on somebody else, he can achieve an effect anytime he wants, so long as he isn't running one of these compression balls of energy. If he's running one of these things, he's trying to change the characteristic of distortion. And his end goal and the finish of the cycle on changing it, is simply its disappearance. You see that?

So taking apart a thinking machine merely depends upon just taking it apart. That's all. That's all you do; you just take it apart. But the more shocks you put into it, the harder it's compressed, the more it thinks. So electric shock is not the answer in how to remove a thinking machine.

Can a person think with a thinking machine? Well, no. You see, actually what they do is they say, "I have a thinking machine out here in front of me and what I'm going to do is run a thought in one end and get an answer out the other end. Now, let's see; if I put the answer out this end I'll be sure and get a right answer. Now I'll forget I did that. And now I'll run the thought through," and the thought comes out to the other end and you get an answer. A thinking machine - MEST thinking.

Do you know... You ever see one of these fellows who could look at this tremendous column of figures everybody has written down and then write down the answer? There is some - used to have Japanese in vaudeville, and so on, that did this. They'd write upside up and upside down with their left hand and right hand simultaneously, and then they'd do mathematical problems. They'd have six columns of figures and they would have fifty of them in the same column and the second that was presented to them, they would write down the answer. Well, you can do that. There isn't any sense in adding them up because - mostly because there's no sense in arithmetic.

Arithmetic is just a method of slowing down thinking process. And if you want to slow down your thinking a trifle you can get any arithmetical answer, but if you think you have to speed up and work with and inject time into your arithmetic, you're in a hell of a spot.

Okay. Let's envision the picture of this machine. It's got a hollow spot in the center. It's got a lot of shells around it composed of old facsimiles and impacts and so forth. They'll distort, see. They'll distort a channel. And sphere after sphere after sphere, more or less, is on the outside of it. And then it's been pushed like hell and you've got a thinking machine. And let's - let's really take a look at what we're running because that's what it looks like when you get outside and take a look at it.

Now, you feed it - a little current into it, a little life energy, a little life current here into one side of it with a little postulate and it'll go around and around - zoom! zung! zung! zum! And some of these are real tricky.

The slowest one I ever saw was nine years! The answer turned up nine years after the question. But your Q and A on such a thing ought to be instantaneous and every time you introduce MEST into it, it gets less instantaneous. This is just a problem in Q and A; a thinking machine is something that keeps the answer from being the thing. See? We take a coin and we face the coin up one side as the question. The answer to it, of course, is that it's a coin; there isn't any further answer to it.

But now we address a thinking machine to this problem, and it says, "Let's see now, a coin? A coin is a unit of exchange. And it goes all through the society and it does this and it does that. It's made by the US Government. The government is empowered to issue money, and so on and so on”. Well, about - oh, God. If you wanted to read something about - just get the word coin down at the local library and you'll see there's a lot of books on the subject. Those are just thinkingnesses.

Well, that's all very fascinating. But the point is, is it's an activity on the part of some other group than yourself or part of your own group to get you to use mutual anchor points; that's all a coin is. You just use these mutual anchor points. And if you're using mutual anchor points, of course, you consider that you're equal; and democracy has succeeded.

There have been very few military aristocracies which have ever used coins - very few. Military aristocracy is different than a military dictatorship - military aristocracy.

Some of the old castles on the knolls in France tell you this story very well. The minute the guy would sit down - good old forte main, you know - and he'd say, "Well, we're protecting all the peasants around here and that's why you are bringing up all your produce to us." The peasants wouldn't and they'd get a little revolt or something of the sort, so he'd just put on a few more recalcitrants as men-at-arms and the provisions would roll up to the top of the hill, and the wine would roll up to the top of the hill. And it was defying gravity but certainly the military aristocracy was seldom defied, except by another military aristocracy. Here was the use of force in the extraction of gain. They didn't have coins.

Somebody invented coins about the time of the Crusades and said you had to have gold to take a passage across the Mediterranean; you had to have gold to pay ransoms. It ruined all the military aristocracies of Europe. They found out that it didn't matter how many moneylenders you shot, hacked, burned, killed, hung, people still went on with this stuff; because the peasants fell for it. They had - all had mutual anchor points already - all kinds of mutual anchor points. Communal state: everybody owned the pig - a mutual anchor point - so it was very easy to say to them, "Well now, you see that little, little, tiny piece of copper; well, that's a pig. Huh." Interesting, but it's also a bushel of wheat. Well, that's very interesting but it is also a new suit. Peasants were confused. They'd fall for this. Obviously, to them everything was A A A A anyhow so a coin could buy anything, see? You'd say a new - a new suit made out of silk is two of these things. Well, they could make a mistake between quantity and quality, and so on.

You look at this stuff - there is nothing but a bundle of errors. If you start - because all the reason under God's green earth has been applied to this. If you want to know about reason, look at money.

You go down here to the local library and you'll find Alexander Hamilton on the subject of banking. This is the most idiotic thing you ever heard of. The United States Government in its Constitution was very well authorized and extremely well authorized and very pleasantly authorized to issue its own currency. And this joker by the name of Hamilton, up to the day of his "regretted" demise, kept explaining to the government how the government couldn't have any credit unless it was in debt and why all his buddies up around New York ought to be the fellows that held the debt. And that this was much better and so they defied the Constitution and continue to do so until today by the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States which has no connection with the government; it is a private bank. Everybody thinks it's a government bank; it's not. Your money has got Federal Reserve Bank all over it. That's not money; that's a private issue. But there are silver certificates and stamps, so on; these are money as far as the government issuing and obeying the law which everybody agreed on.

The rest of this stuff is spewed out of the printing presses and sent up to New York to the Federal Reserve Bank with their name on it, and so forth, and it becomes legal currency. How they managed that in the first place is nothing but the most marvelous piece of insanity you ever heard of.

All right, up there at the Federal Reserve Bank, how do they get the government to issue money? Well, it runs something like this: They have a big ledger, see, and they write down one billion dollars in the ledger and then they write down to the government, "We've just written one billion dollars down in our ledger," so the government sends them up a billion dollars' worth of bonds. Then they buy these bonds off the government and then the Federal Reserve Bank, having gotten these bonds off the government, you see, can then issue a billion dollars' worth of currency. So they issue the billion dollars' worth of currency and there it goes and it's all printed by the government and the government sends it a small printing bill.

I think the only interchange in it is the five or six hundred dollars it takes to print a billion dollars' worth of currency. I don't know who puts that up but it's probably put up by putting it down in the ledger too. You look in vain to find this money represent anything but a figure in a ledger put down by some clerk.

But here we're getting - people are getting shot for this stuff! People will sweat their guts out building this and that and something else just to get ahold of this stuff! A woman will sell her virtue for this stuff! Wonderful! Just wonderful stuff and yet we can't find it coming from anyplace except somebody writing down a figure in a ledger and saying to the government, "Well, you've now got to issue us bonds."

Well, how this outfit could write it down in the ledger and tell the government to issue it bonds, I don't know, because this outfit doesn't have any hoods, or any gunmen or any soldiers. So, it must be that the government must be running by a bunch of people who have an agreement with these people up there which is kind of behind the scenes. "Look, every time you write that billion bucks down, why, slide a few dollars sideways this direction and we'll be all set. Ah-ha!"

We've disenfranchised the American people from the right of making money. So, this puts the control of the country someplace where it's not supposed to be but this is very valuable stuff. But when - you get how all this reason - it's not reasonable. If you really look at the backbone of money, you won't find anything reasonable about it.

The only thing about deflation and inflation, they discovered during the war, is when a country has too many goods and too little money it has deflation. When a country has too few goods and too much money you have inflation.

Sounds awful simple to me. A country which has inflated currency just better make some more goods or it better take some money out of circulation. That's easy to do. If it was created by writing a figure in a ledger sheet, it is sure easy to take it out of circulation; you just erase it.

And as far as deflation is concerned, all the government has to do with deflation throughout the whole thing, all the government has to do with a deflate is simply print some more money. Of course, if then - if somebody had to put it down in the ledger in the first place before they could print it that would leave the government deeply in d--

I see I'm looking at a fellow here by the name of Franklin Delano Roosevelt; he was a great man. By the way, I'll have to tell you about cripples someday. Anyway.

When they really got going, they got the economics so fouled up that nobody can untangle them. Why can't anybody untangle them? Well, that's because they've all gone through a process of reason or evolution. Well, nobody can untangle all of this, because it's all in the past.

Let me ask you something: Did it ever exist? Did it ever exist? No, not actually. Masses of energy filtering through various reasons and giving parts and changes of form. Well, it's all right. You can do that to a certain degree and you'll get a certain amount of randomity. But when you push it too hard, its falsity shows up and you start getting minus randomity, immediately.

You start depending on this thing called reason and it just doesn't give you randomity. Up to a certain point, introducing reasons into something is simply injecting arbitrary stops in games. That's all. That's what reason is. It's just a method of limiting play so that there can be two or more sides to a play; and that's what the first entrance into reason is.

Now, the next entrance into reason is forgetting some of the rules that have been injected in the game. Now, if you can substitute for this with superstition, you can take the phases of the moon and say whether or not they're going to do the future for you or something; but it gets kind of unreasonable from there on down.

It's marvelous that anybody can proceed at all using what is called logic or reasons; it's just marvelous that anybody can proceed doing that. It certainly does speak well for a man's ability to postulate and unpostulate that he can make thinking machines work. He's got to keep putting that answer on one side of the machine and feeding the question to the other side of the machine, and so on. And why he wants that arbitrary machine sitting there, we're not quite sure because he doesn't use it, except to play with.

The scientist looking at this stuff and taking it apart and putting it back together again is just playing a game. Everybody teaches this game as something very serious and threatens you with mayhem, and so forth, if you flunk some science course.

The truth of the matter is, I had to unlearn everything I ever knew about science in order to get going on the subject of science - to find out something about it. Because science is a search for data.

Data is the substance of a thinking machine. Data has no existence except a flock of postulates. Now, you get this data all massed up in one lump and shoved together and crushed down - now, somebody starts to do some research with his mind and oh, boy!

There's a central postulate sitting in there. One of the rules of the game is you mustn't fool around with the rules of the game or the thinking machine. You mustn't fool around with this because just like if you yanked the curtains back on any altar, you'd find there was nothing on its platform. Really, there's nothing on its platform; there's a piece of MEST but it doesn't have any life.

The mystery: The most mysterious thing about any mystery is that there's no mystery. The secret - the secret of the MEST universe is that there is no secret. The secret of the preclear is that he has no secret.

You start to run this concept and he gets this awful foolish feeling of very - poof! - very intense!

"Now, let's run the fact that you have no secrets. Now that you have secrets; that you have no secrets." And boy he can really thrash up some there for a little while and all of a sudden the machine he has been fooling himself with starts to fold up on him. And the second this machine starts to fold up, he gets in very bad order. And he starts to feel embarrassed and he'll start to squirm. He didn't have any sex guilt peccadilloes when he was a small boy at all.

Now, psychotherapy in the past has followed this through slavishly. And you, whether you like it or not, have inherited from the field of psychotherapy, whether you ever studied psychotherapy formally or not, you inherit this from the society and the stories. During the last twenty, twenty-five years, writing has more or less gone down into apathy and Freudian psychoanalysis is the keynote used by authors for characterization of characters; the libido theory is carrying through. Well, it makes good plotting because people are interested in it - sensation.

But as far as psychotherapy is concerned, in the past it dealt with subjective material. Once in a while somebody dashed up and got something like psychodrama going. That's all right; it's all right; it was at least an effort. But then, by God, he had to work out the reason why with psychodrama. See, psychodrama would've worked if they'd just omitted the reason why.

People don't talk now, very well, in this society really because they're afraid their words will betray them; they have been taught by their literature, by movies, by examples on every hand, that their words may betray them.

Psychology and Freud's associative word plays have reduced this - general semantics: done the same thing - that if you utter a word it means that you're masking another word. You know? If you use a certain concatenation of words, you will find out that this concatenation of words may betray the fact that when you were a little boy or a little girl - well, really.

Well, we ran this on John yesterday; I was just saying, "A word will betray you." And he just suddenly decided, "Well, no. It won't betray me." Of course, that's the easiest thing in the world to decide because it's the blunt truth.

But the society at large gets people worried about this. The first thing wrong with your preclear: He's afraid his words, appearance and action will betray him; he's afraid of this.

Fear of fear is your primary setup. A man is afraid of being afraid. He is not afraid. Get the difference. A man is never afraid. Nobody is ever afraid from one corner of the universe to the other. A man is afraid of being afraid.

The only thing wrong with thinking is that it is about thinking.

You actually, back on the track, have, with malice aforethought, designed thinking machines. And your preclears have actually built thinking machines to which they are now the effect. They've created the thinking machine and they are now the effect of the thing they created. And that is the second law of magic: Don't get hoist by your own petard; do not become the effect of your own cause.

Now, as a result, your preclear, subjectively, is floundering around in the midst of a thinking machine.

How do you build a thinking machine? You take a little space and you take some shells of energy, and you go crush! And when you get it real compact, you've got a thinking machine. And when you put a little energy in one side of it, it'll wander through and it'll hit this and it'll hit that and it'll come out. Now, these are very complex. The whole universe will do this.

When you take a picture of the universe around you and get a facsimile, you are actually complementing part of this thinking process because all the objects you see are designed from some effort to distort truth so as to get a form.

There is such a thing as beauty; there is. But where facsimiles are taken of the environment so as to prevent something in the future, you get each facsimile based upon a falsity of reason. And the answer to the facsimile is the facsimile; it's not the words in the facsimile. It's not the perceptions or the colors; it's just the facsimile, that's all.

You take a picture of an aberrated environment, you've got a picture that is an aberrated picture - naturally - you couldn't do otherwise. So when you take a bunch of these aberrated pictures and start piling them up on top of the thinking machine, why, for heaven's sakes, everything starts going yap-yap and yow-yow and you get people's - people's heads full of talking voices and you get - oh, you get the most marvelous - well I think that a thetan standing outside of one of these things early on the track must have been utterly fascinated!

You know, people who buy gramophones - they take these gramophones and they turn them on and the cylinders go round and round, and the machine says wack! wack! rham-gah-rum-wobble-wobble - it would be indistinguishable against modern music - one of these old-time cylindrical gramo---. Once upon a time people were utterly delighted with them. And so a thetan has been tremendously delighted in the past with a thinking machine. He's put one in his hip pocket and he's put one that will furnish him - each one of them has got one little trigger in it.

The factor of surprise - a fellow is always trying to surprise himself with what he'll find out. But one of the best ways to do this... You know, you don't have any future unless it surprises you. If you can predict your future, you're on what I was talking about yesterday; you're on a total predict and that's no fun at all.

It's when the fellow falls off of this level of total predict and goes down toward a no-predict that he starts getting into trouble. He goes too far toward no-predict, now he's into plus randomity.

Okay.

What are you trying to take apart with subjective stuff? I've been talking a lot here about that. Remember, we've been talking about subjective processing; you're processing a thinking machine.

Now, if you could just envision it as a box which has been pushed together so as to make it very compressed, so it won't have very much space, so there will be strange pressure areas and so on, and so it itself; when restimulated with a little energy, will then distort the energy; you realize that that is a thinking machine. And if you want to test out whether or not that's a thinking machine, you'll find out that you will understand about everything there is to know about subjective processing.

What the hell is the idea of standing in the middle of the machine thinking? All right, what's the idea of going on running a machine? The only trouble with a preclear is he has run these machines until he's slavishly dependent upon the machine and he thinks he's in the center of the machine.

He isn't in the center of the machine. Everybody told him to be thoughtful, that he must think, he must think twice before speaking once. He's been told that he must figure everything out; he has no choice but to figure everything out and so he remains in the center of the machine.

And with that, this morning, I am going to give you the most vicious process I know on subjective processing. I want you to run it on cases, particularly the cases that have more occlusion than brightness.

I hope, by the way, that some of you made the test of the emanation of the rays and stopping them. Did you make that test yesterday?

Male voice: Yes.

Did you find it amusing?

Male voice: Yeah. Amusing.

You didn't like it?

Male voice: I ran it on somebody else.

Yeah. And did they find it amusing?

Male voice: Yeah.

You just want to get some guy aware of the fact that that's what he's doing. He's sending out mock-ups all the time, he thinks, because the MEST universe makes up mock-ups all the time by reflecting, that's all.

All right, let's take this subjective process. It's called Perimeter Processing and its keynote is: You can't take a machine apart by sitting in the middle of it.

Do you notice that a man trapped in a cave has to be rescued by picks and shovels from the outside? I give you that as the very, very observable: Fellow trapped in a cave has to be dug out. And this process digs the preclear out.

Let's say the preclear is in a cave, or in a cage, which is the center of the thinking machine. Now, the thinking machine is a sort of a mountain and this shows the preclear how he can take down the mountain and walk out of the machine. He really isn't in the machine but he's so convinced!

All right. Yesterday, we talked about the inverted dynamics. Let's look at these inverted dynamics and see them for what they are: It's the extension in terms of distance into the environment. That is the dynamics; the dynamics are extension in terms of distance into the environment.

Eight is furthest away. Now, let's take a series of concentric shells. And these concentric shells go from the outside shell to the inside shell and you can consider that there are eight shells. And the biggest shell outside (this is just for description only) would be called the eighth dynamic. And the next shell inside that would be the seventh dynamic. And the next shell inside that would be the sixth, fifth, fourth, third, two, one. We'll just consider that.

A person goes as far into the environment as he is well-off on the dynamics. It is a problem of distance; it is not a problem of subjective reason. A fellow doesn't inhabit the rest of the universe because he's worried about God. He can't inhabit parts of the universe because God occupies all space.

Now, we get down to seven: Spirits occupy some space.

Now, we get down to six: Well, there's anchor points out there that don't belong to us. See, they're somebody else's anchor points that's put up in some fashion that's very strange and peculiar.

And then you get down to the fifth dynamic and you've got the computation, "Well, actually all these bodies all over the universe are just animals," and so on and they're something else, something else.

Now, let's get down to the fourth and you say, "Well, man is a certain kind of an animal on this planet, and so on, and he's sort of spiritual and he's this way and he's that..." Lots of reason in it.

Now we get down to the third: "I belong to a group who is part of man, but I can't take part in the activities of man; I can only take part in the activities of the group."

Second dynamic: "I have to go into the future. I can't stay here in the present."

And the first dynamic - we're talking about inversions, you see - it's -he's all the way in.

Now, that was going down the cone from the top. See? "God occupies an awful lot of the universe, so I can't occupy it." He loses his eighth, then he loses his seventh, then he loses his sixth, fifth, fourth, three, two, one. Now we start the opposite direction.

"Well, I have to go up into the future with sex. I'm being forced to, but inhibited from, going into this sensation called sex and I really can't have it."

And then we drop into the third dynamic.

And what are we getting here? We're getting the fellow being forced to be bigger than he is. Now he has a form and this form is now being blown up and expanded like somebody shoved an air hose down his throat. And now he's finally forced - he's forced to be number one, then he's inhibited from being number one, now he's forced - as we go down the inverted cones - forced to be two. He has just got to have sex, see, rrrh-rrrh!

And then all of a sudden somebody comes along and says, "Sex is evil."

"It is?"

"Yes. It is so evil that you dare not engage upon it. People who engage on sex very often go to hell if not always. And in hell you burn. We've already shown you what fire is and that's really sex."

It doesn't sound logical. Well, who said everything - anything was. So he's inhibited from being the second dynamic.

Now we've got the second dynamic and we've got the inhibition of the second dynamic. And now we've got an enforcement on the third dynamic: "Well, if I can't have sex, I'll have to live as a group. Think I'll join the Communist Party or get a job at Boeing's." Same deal.

Now he's inhibited as a group. "You can't be a part of this group because the group won't survive and you won't survive and nobody likes you in the group, and so forth."

Well, the guy says, "I'll be - I'll be part of man." And then he realizes man can't last either; wars and things like that disabuse him and inhibits him from being man.

So he says, "Well, there's always animals; they're always your friend. Dogs are loyal." You'll have a lot of preclears come in and tell you very fixedly, "Well, people are no good, but dogs - dogs are loyal. Dogs - dogs know how you feel. Cats are sympathetic, too, sometimes. Except I do envy their independence. Ha-ha!" Now, we've got number - number - number five. And all of a sudden one day the dog bites him or shoots him or something and we get down to number six.

And the fellow says, "Well, there's always objects. Money is an object. And there's - I can have an object. I - here's this stamp. Did I ever show you my stamp collection?" he says. "Did I ever show you my coin collection?" Well, this starts to get inhibited and he starts to collect the damnedest things. He'll collect - as this thing dwindles out - he will collect the most foul and loathsome things as a tremendous idea. Well, he's collecting things; he s in objects.

Now he goes down into seven and he has decided he has lived a life of evil and he should pay for all this because Christ's spirit is calling to him. And finally he gets inhibited from being Christ; somebody walks up to him someday and points out the fact that he hasn't healed anybody by looking at them for some time. And having pointed this out is a great shock to him and he realizes this is true and so he can't be Christ because at that level of the Tone Scale all somebody has to say is "You're not succeeding," and he doesn't. Other people's postulates are stronger than one's own postulates any day of the week.

Then he gets down into God and he's in a spinbin someplace in a sanitarium; that's that.

They're inverted dynamics. Well, what is this? This is a problem of really having the whole condemned environment from one corner to the other and having your postulates work in it and then that inverts and goes down to nothing and then is pushed out again to where it's all uninhabitable, but you have to be there anyway.

And you'll find out that your people who are on the lower inversions have to be spread all over the place but they can't be. And they are at some dynamic or other.

Perimeter Processing simply takes the outside sphere and runs four consecutive things on it by the preclear who is in the center.

Let's consider this is the preclear in the middle of the sphere and you have him run at a distance as far as he can think. This is awfully easy because he can do this.

"Get as far as you can think, now, in every direction, the thought that explosions are sparking out there; now that there's nothing out there; now that there are black explosions out there; now that there's ...." You intervene nothing there - nothing out there as far as he can think in 360 degrees. And then that you have vacuums out there as far as he can think in all directions. You operate the outside of the shells from the inside. It's as far as he can think in all directions; and that's 360-degree spheres. Now, you make sure, patiently and carefully, that he covers a 360-degree sphere with each one of these.

I'll give them to you again. It's very simple, they're the most elementary things we have: (1) Explosions. Make sure that he gets a ring of explosions - just the idea that he's getting explosions - as far out as he could possibly get in 360 degrees from where he is. Preferably as many at a time as possible. You don't run this very long - thirty seconds.

Now you get nothing out there. Just get the idea that there's nothing out there as far as he can think. There's a spot of nothing; not that there is nothing between where he is and it, see, but he thinks that there's a spot of nothing way out there. See?

Male voice: A spot in that shell?

Well, he's - at the outside of the rim of the furthest shell there's a spot of nothing; there's a spot there and a spot there and a spot there. Not that it's nothing all the way around - he can't embrace this. See? It's just like you've got these little, tiny explosions on the outside of the big shell; well, now you get spots of nothing all over there.

Now you get black explosions all over the most exterior shell and then get nothing, same way, 360 degrees.

And then you get nothing 360 degrees and then follow that up with vacuums. You got the idea; there are little, tiny vacuums - here-here-here-here - all the way around.

And you just keep that up. Do you talk about dynamics? Do you talk about God? No, no! You don't talk about any dynamics or any God or anything else; you encompass the whole condemned works. Because you're just working with areas and distances. And if your preclear is someplace else but inside his body, he'll sure find it out.

This is not a short process; it is a brutal process. And it should be run. You can bring a person out of it rather easily but he will get somatics. You make him neglect the center of the sphere.

Don't let him run the center of the sphere; he has always been chewing on this! And it's like the miner trying to dig himself out of a cave-in: The second he pulls down a little block of stone the rest of the cave starts falling in on him. And he pulls out another little piece of sand and the rest of it falls in on him again. He can't chew himself out of the middle of it, but he can chew himself out from the outside in. And the joke is, is he's not in there, you see. So if he's not in there, it's very easy for him. And he will eventually go around and start chewing on this shell from the outside. Soon as he does that he says to hell with it.

The end product of this is simply to rid the guy of the idea that he's in the middle of a whole bunch of pressure ridges or vacuums. Get him out of the center of the thinking machine, that's all. That's all you have to do with him; just get him out of the middle of the thinking machine.

And this is called Perimeter Processing - explosions, nothing, black explosions, nothing, vacuums. And if you want to go all the way around, you'd run nothing again and explosions and nothing and black explosions and nothing and vacuums and nothing and explosions and nothing.

Now, how long do you run each one of them? Thirty seconds, fifteen seconds. Just keep him rolling till he's got that 360-degree arc. Now, you make sure that he isn't missing some arc because they'll miss in back of them. They're usually up against the thinking machine. They're this way on it; they're kind of outside of it.

And you'll notice that there's some wicked somatics turn up with this process and that this process is intensely damaging. Now, I want you to run it therefore. I want you - to show you what these subjective processes do to a pc but I also want to show you the anatomy of a thinking machine. Nobody will spin on this, but if anybody gets in trouble in this process, why - if an auditor gets in trouble on this process or something weird or strange or terrible starts to happen, just grab a couple of back corners of the room, let the guy hold on. Very satisfying sort of a thing. If he gets too wobbly then give him a little Self Analysis. If he gets too bad off get ahold of me.

Now, this is no process to run on a psycho. But that's all right. As far as we are concerned anybody in this class can run this process. As far as that's concerned, anybody who has been exteriorized can run this process. As far as that's concerned, anybody who's still pinned inside can run this process.

Male voice: Do you tell them to be on the outside at the beginning?

Oh, no. No ...

Male voice: You don't say that?

.. No, let's not get original; that might help them. You're supposed to run Perimeter Processing from the inside.

Now, as far as your boy who's exteriorized is concerned, the guy who gets out of the body easily, you run this process slightly different. You do the same process but you just get him to hell and gone away from the body while he runs it. And get him to run it on the body. We don't care where he is; get him to run it on the body, see. You got a thinking machine sitting in front of you in the body.

And then, when he's exteriorized, get him to run it around himself as a thetan. Get him to get a quick once-over to the body on this; then get him exteriorized and run it as a thetan. Okay? You run the same process. If he can be exteriorized, tell him to get out, run it around himself

Now, I didn't tell you that this is a helpful process, I merely told you that this is a painful process. Well, I told you also that it ought to be run, not just as a demonstration on you; you're going to have to run it someday, anyway. Because there are sleepers all over a case.

You get somebody and boy they're just coming up the line terrifically, and you go in and you all of a sudden take a look at this case, and you say, "What the hell is the matter with the auditor?" because, my God, this case has a glob of energy sitting about one inch from the nose. Do you have to see the glob of energy to know that it's one inch from the nose? No, you don't. Just look at the condition of the nose. And you say this case is horribly messed up with some kind of a glob of energy.

Well, if you've done the thinking machine (which should possibly be the name of it; Perimeter Processing is the best name), if you've done the thinking machine, why, you would have caught this on the way in. See?

Now, do you at any time tell him how far to put the explosion from him? Not beyond this: "Just as far away from you as you can think; think a spot as far away from you as you can think the spot."

He does this weird one: sometimes he starts thinking of these spots at some distance from him; when he finishes up with the thinking machine, he has been operating the whole time within a sphere that has no more than a cubic inch in it; and he has been going out there miles!

The zone of occlusion is what you're trying to run here, too. You can find out that a person has a zone of occlusion. He'll find it out for himself - arbitrary zone - goes out anywheres up to fifteen, twenty feet - sometimes no longer than three or four feet; sometimes no longer than a couple of inches - there's a zone of occlusion. He can always put a mock-up on the other side of a zone of occlusion and get it beautiful. This is real silly, by the way. He keeps putting them inside the zone of occlusion, though.

Thinking machines are distorting machines. The only way to get rid of them is to run the various kinds of energy performances - space performances -there are. Which is nothing, vacuums, black explosions and white explosions. So let's find out how to chew on them.

There any questions about this?

Male voice: Yeah. When you have an exterior run this around the body, what do you have him do? Have him take a look at the body and have him. put out as far as the body can think, or what?

When you have them exteriorized? Have them think around the spot where they find themselves when they're exteriorized.

Male voice: Well, you mentioned something before that about having them run it on the body

Oh. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Run the body as a sphere.

Male voice: Oh.

Just run the body as a sphere and put it all around the outside of the body and let it smooth on in toward the body, and so forth. They've got a thinking machine - if they've got any thinking machines around they're parked in the body.

Okay.

[End of lecture.]

1st ACC (15 October 1953) THINKING ACTION, MACHINES PAGE 19/ NUMPAGES 19

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[[Category:Lectures 1ACC]]
[[Category:Lectures 1953]]