Duplication and Orders (4ACC 540318)
Series: 4th Advanced Clinical Course (4ACC)
Date: 18 March 1954
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
Okay, and this is the afternoon lecture of the 18th of March, 1954. Some of the processes which are used in remedying the ability to follow orders—remedying the necessity to follow orders, one should say, and remedying the inability to follow orders.
This is systems used for handling communication in the MEST universe, remedying difficulties of handling in the MEST universe.
There isn't anybody alive on Earth who is duplicating perfectly, because that's impossible. It's an impossibility to duplicate perfectly in the MEST universe. But if one is willing to duplicate perfectly, one can communicate perfectly.
To duplicate perfectly—that's impossible. An obsession to duplicate perfectly will wind up a preclear in an awful lot of trouble. But he has to be perfectly Willing to duplicate perfectly and if he's willing to duplicate perfectly, then he will be able to go about his business and perceive properly and so on.
One of the mechanisms used is to throw out a whole flock of energy—big mass of energy— throw it out against a wall and then bring it back in and look at it after it has reversed. Or just throw a flock of energy out and bring it back in and look at the other side of it. Only trouble is, the other side of it's black.
Another method of doing this is you have a mirror and you take this mirror and you look at the mirror rather than to look at the universe. Now, you say, "Well, where's the thetan get a mirror?" Look around you. Just look around you—particularly around your feet, to the right and left of the body, in front and back of the body. Find any mirrors?
If you want to make a preclear very unhappy sometime, ask him to pick up one of these things and break it. And he can, he will. Then he'll be very unhappy about it, because that's one of the mechanisms he's using so as to get things straightened out so that when he looks at them he's straight. In other words, it's a perfect duplication. If he tries this as a perfect duplication, why, he can make it—if he uses a bunch of periscopes and gimcracks and reverses and so forth.
Somebody suggested a little earlier that why didn't we take a reversing telescope. Wouldn't that blow the bank? No, it wouldn't blow the bank. But it would certainly confuse the thetan to have everything re-inversed when he's already inversed it once.
Now, it's all right to reverse it once, but you only get into trouble when you try to reverse it twice. People keep telling you to look straight at things, to look at things—"please, look at things." Always, always. You know?
"Give it your attention. Give your attention to this directly. Don't get anything backwards. Let's go all straightforwardly all-out and continue along the same line and let's never get balled up or confused. Let's just look at it straight now. Now, let's look this problem straight in the eye. Let's not avoid the issue." This type of insistence going on all the time—it's an operation. You can't look the problem straight in the eye. If you were looking at anything and duplicating it, why, you're at least storing it backwards to you, if you can see that you have a direction which you face.
A thetan doesn't have any direction he faces, so he has far less problem than a body—which of course has a direction to face. But everybody telling this to a body, that it's got to look the problem straight in the eye and that sort of thing and so on is —look at people, give their attention to people, put your attention on something—a continual hammer, hammer, pound, pound, pound to put your attention on individuals, will of course wind the body up backwards.
A fellow will have the sensation actually that he has a face on the back of his head or a face sunk into his head or a face standing right in front of his face that he won't let sink in or a face sunk into some part of the body or a body sunk into his body—and perhaps you've never looked there, but a body on the other side of his body. It's gone on through. He's stopping the images two and three feet behind him or two and three miles behind him. See, here's some of the activities there. Therefore a body gets very badly snarled up. It's a wonder that a body hangs together at all. It's a great tribute to a body that it docs stand up under a universe which insists on communicating and then covertly makes all communication reversed for a body.
If you have a director on a playing field who is giving Swedish calisthenics to a large number of people, who knows his business, this individual will do the things in reverse to the people he's facing—completely in reverse and they follow him quite ably. But if he doesn't know what he's doing, he will do the things right way to. And the amount of confusion and ballup which occurs on the part of the people standing on that playing field is mirrored in the tremendous number of inaccuracies which show up on the playing field. He just doesn't put any strain on the line, in other words—he simply goes through motions and they duplicate these motions. You follow that? He just does—what they're supposed to do with their right hand, he does with his left hand.
All right. Does this go into other forms of training so that we don't go through a whole flock of machinery to train somebody, for instance, to use a rifle? Well, I trained some men one time to use a pistol. (I used to have a couple of brass pie plates on the subject of pistols—you know, "Best Pistol Shot at the County Fairgrounds Doll Booth," you know, that sort of pistol award.) And trying to train some officers who had been trained in using the pistol—they couldn't use a pistol. They thought the .45 was the most violently dangerous item in the world. And of course anybody handling a .45 and carrying it around all the time in battle quarters, and that sort of thing, who thinks it's a dangerous weapon and doesn't know how to use it, it of course at that time becomes a very dangerous weapon. And I didn't want to lose any seamen, so—we could afford ensigns, I mean they were expendable. Says right on them, their card that comes around their necks when they report aboard, "Title C, expendable." But seamen second class, they're not expendable, they're Title A. And so you don't want to lose any Title A just because of this Title C stuff.
So anyway, I took occasion to try to train these fellows and I was struck with the fact that their instructors had always faced them and tried to train them from in front of them. You can't train anybody manually facing in front of them. He'll duplicate it, then he'll have to reverse every piece of training he thereafter gets—he has to reverse it to use it. So you get slow motion.
He either trains himself by figuring it out and doing it or he's trained in the same direction he's facing. But he isn't trained well or ably or anything else by somebody facing him.
A lot of police forces could utilize information of that character very easily. You don't stand up in front of a whole line of men, facing them, and show them how to load and fire and stand and so forth, for the good reason that they can't duplicate it. They've got to hold the pistol in their right hand, you're holding the pistol in your right hand. This is going to make impulses to be left-handed about the pistol, but you can't be left-handed about the pistol.
Well, quite incidentally, back on the track, nearly everybody was left-handed. They handled all their side arms left-handed and so on, back on the track. This life, everybody's right-handedness is an effort to avoid—is an effort to avoid being lethal and dangerous and able—reverse.
One of the practices that used to be pulled off when they'd really discredit somebody and throw him out or something like that, why, they'd paralyze his left arm. You get a little kid in school who starts in as a southpaw imitating the teacher and then suddenly come down on him with a crush and say, "You're not supposed to write left-handedly." Huh! You have the kid ready to blow his brains out.
Because in the first place, you've probably restimulated his incapacity with the left hand. You know, you've told him he mustn't use his left hand which is "mustn't use his weapons"—all weapons were left-handed. You've moved him over onto the right side and now you've made him cross-duplicate the teacher. You just might as well have told him, "Do not duplicate the teacher. If she can write, you can't write. If she can read, you can't read. If she knows arithmetic, you can't know arithmetic, because you mustn't duplicate the teacher. See, you've got to be reverse to the teacher." It's just as elementary as that.
And then we wonder why this fellow becomes a bad student. A tremendous number of tomes—not books, but tomes (tomes are something you bury information in, not get it out of), and tremendous numbers have been written concerning the perils attendant to changing the "handedness" of a child.
You find a southpaw kid and you make him a right-hander, very bad mental problems may result. This has been observed and observed and observed. Well, it must have been observed almost totally in print or totally as a thinking fact, because all he had to do was look up at the front of the room and see that the teacher was reverse to every child, as long as she was in the front of the room. See that?
I can teach you with great ease from the front of the room because what I'm telling you has no form. There isn't any form connected with Scientology. Pieces of paper—but a piece of paper can be reverse-ended, too. Don't give you very much written material. All right.
Training these officers, I stood behind the officer and regulated his arm in motion in drawing, handling the safeties and firing the pistol, simply by closing my hand over his.
I trained those guys in an hour, just about. They knew all the safeties, fieldstripped the gun, so forth. It straightened out the direction reversal for them. This is though their first instructor had said to them, "Look, you mustn't handle the pistol" and as though I'd suddenly said to them, this little bit of training, "Look, you have permission to handle a pistol."
See, just the fact that I was training them from behind, faced in the same direction they were, was enough to grant them permission to use a pistol. They all became very reliable with pistols. Much to my relief, because we didn't have very many seamen second class—lots of ensigns.
You may think that's just a joke, but it's a fact that I have probably had to turn down the transfer of—well, I've almost uniformly had to try and turn down the transfer of junior officers to a ship and uniformly have to beg to get a seaman second class transferred to it. Just shows you what's the comparable value. You'll have them sleeping all over the wardroom and everything else if you don't wait. You drive up in front of a commandant's building or something like that, the aide is liable to rush out and say to you, "Do you want fifteen ensigns?" you know.
You say, "No."
Well, it's very odd. Why was everybody so hard on these ensigns? They were being trained on materiel, very harshly trained on materiel, on a sort of a hit-or-miss basis. They go to school for thirty days, sixty days, ninety days—cram, cram, cram, cram, cram on a lot of instruments with their instructors all facing them. They never get a chance to handle those instruments. Now they're supposed to go aboard ship and command men handling those instruments and so forth.
Seaman second class—different proposition entirely. When they taught him to fire a gun, they threw him on top of a pointer's ledge of a gun and they'd fire a few rounds, so forth, so on. You get this?
Let's just take it up as training. Well, now supposing a man has been trained with people facing him all the time into the handling, let us say, of a sextant. Well, you get the idea. "Now look, you take this sextant and you hold it in your hand this way, see? And you take its limb and you let off its screw here, you see? And you put your eye to the eyepiece over here, you see? And you swing the limb down here till you get a coincidence of the mirrors, see? Then you take the vernier and you set it on exactly, then you set it and read. Now, that's the way you handle a sextant. Now let's see you boys handle a sextant." Immediately you get a, "Let's see..." The only thing you can teach a man to handle easily is a pair of binoculars. Can't teach him to use a telescope.
All right. Now we take a bunch of men who have been trained in this example and we start giving them orders. Of course, the person who was training them was always a senior. He was a person who was giving continual orders—"Right shoulder arms, left shoulder arms, to the rear hup, to the rear hup, to the rear hup"—standing in front of them, normally, showing them close-order drill and that sort of thing. He was always in reverse to them, never otherwise. And the orders go in the same way. And these men start fighting orders. And they fight the orders harder and harder. Eventually they get so they can't follow an order, they won'/ follow an order. Defend me from a sixteen-year man! He'll bust all the equipment laid in his hands and everything else. He knows all the dodges.
If you've ever had the experience of serving with a chief petty officer that was a chief petty officer with Admiral Dewey or something of this sort, you'll know what I mean. His idea is you have a big alibi and then go off and hit the bunk. You leave somebody else to do it. You don't take any of the responsibilities, you step sideways every way which. And then give a big appearance to your officers that you're right on the ball and then give a big appearance to the men that they have the inside track with their officers and if it weren't for them, why, the men would be butchered piecemeal and—just routine squirrel-up. There's no reason why a military service has to run that poorly.
All right. Answer, solution, is not very important, really, from a standpoint of training, unless you're in the field of training—and then it becomes very important to you, believe me.
If you want to stand in front of a group of men (this would be kind of silly to stand in front of a group of men and teach them to—the positions of a rifle), you would have to do order arms over on the left side of the body, right shoulder arms on the left side of the body, left shoulder arms on the right side of the body, port arms in reverse. See, and they'd get it. They'd be right on the ball. They'd be a well-drilled company if you could do that—if you did do that consistently.
But that's still kind of silly because you're facing the wrong way. Now if you're setting an example for men and you're standing in front of them all the time and the example you're setting for them is to teach them how to charge the enemy—the whole thing gets silly, doesn't it?
All right. That's communication in the MEST universe. Find somebody who's been put under heavy training and duress like this, he normally makes a poor preclear. Because he's got direction reversals all over the place.
Now, some of the systems used to overcome this by the thetan, I've already mentioned the mirror, using a facsimile, and not only that, but actually facing backwards. The thetan, quite ordinarily... you're trying to tell him, "Be three feet back of the head," and he starts to go—what he considers should be out the back of the head, but actually it will be moving out of his face and he winds up in front of his face. This is quite unnerving to him. He's been real wrong.
Well, he was facing backwards in order to get communications straight. He'd let them go by him and then look at them. Well, that's a good way to do it—you let them go by and then look. But of course, if you're being a mass of energy and you let communications go by, some day or another you're standing there and a bullet or something goes through you and disturbs your energy pattern, why, after that you're saying, "Hey, you know, I should put the direction—I should receive the communication before it passes me. Therefore, I'll turn around and face the communicating source." Dzzz! Now you can't get a perfect duplicate.
What's a thetan doing being worried about things going through him anyhow? Well, in such a way, the MEST universe is cursed and hammered because it's backwards. The actual truth of the matter is if you had anything connected with space and a couple of thetans trying to communicate, facing each other, or in relationship to each other, why, they would normally get upset unless they used some sort of a mechanism on it. They would get upset if they were obsessed with the idea of a perfect communication.
Almost any kind of a universe consisting of space that you tailored up would consist, then, of a thetan being upset about communicating with thetans. Because it'd look backwards to him.
Can your preclear follow your orders? Supposing you just took 8-C and put it all in reverse on the positive side of the ledger? Let's get your real bad-off case and let's try to run him on 8-C on the positive side of the ledger: "Give me three places where you are," "Give me three people you are being." He would get the astonishing reaction of some little relief for a little while. Then he'd get snarled up again because the words—the meaning of the words themselves—not having any form, can be received straight way to.
So the meaning of the words would start snarling up with what was happening and his direction reversal would get him even further confused.
Let's take the history of a process which was Negative Exteriorization: "Try not to be three feet back of your head." Bing! An awful lot of people will be there. "Try not to be" and there they go. Direction reversal.
How long does it last, though? How long does the technique last and how long is it going to be effective for? Well, you just get the individual trained into trying to be three feet not back of his head. This will key-out and he will try not to be three feet back of his head and what do you know? He's in his head! "You said, 'Try not to be'—I'm in my head." You only have to tell a person to "Try not to be three feet back of your head," about two dozen times at the outside and the command "Try not to be three feet back of your head" will find him simply trying not to be three feet back of his head. These machines blow quickly if they're addressed. These direction reversals—the whole subject blows quickly if immediately addressed. That's a demonstration of it. If you wanted to make yourself a test of this, take somebody who—having a little difficulty, not very much (a Step II or III, SOP 8 Step II or III) and you would ask him to be—"Try not to be three feet back of your head." Well, just tell him that several times. You're exteriorizing him each time and you'll find all of a sudden that your command "Try not to be three feet back of your head" resulted in his ability to obey that command. He would immediately try not to be "three feet back of your head."
What you did—blow the reversal machinery. He set up machinery to reverse things in the first place and then it got reversed again is really what happened to most people. So they don't quite know where they are. This is a basic confusion with people. They don't know quite where they are because they don't know which direction anything is.
If you want to get somebody lost in a hailstorm that's blowing in all directions, such as they have in Kansas (hail comes up from the ground there, by the way—hell is in heaven), you want to get them in the middle of one of these things where the hail blows in all directions and so on and just say to them, "Which way is the storm coming from?" Well, it isn't coming from any particular direction. It is probably moving in some direction or another. They wouldn't be able to trace where the direction was if they were just simply perceiving it. And they would then become quite confused.
In remedying this, then, we address machinery. A person has set up machinery in order to reverse things so that he can look at them properly. So it's his own machinery that we're working with.
What he's actually got to do is knock it out and set it up again, because that machinery which he set up became automatic. And having become very automatic with no attention being paid to it, it turned out to be some randomity for him—it's unpredicted. Anything which is automatic can then become unpredicted. And so becoming unpredicted, becomes randomity. So you start to audit this fellow and what's he got for his randomity? The basic order machine—direction reversal. See that?
But what machine are you talking about? You're talking about the first one he set up. See, no directions could reverse, actually, on him at any time, unless he'd decided to reverse directions on himself. Well, he reversed directions on himself, so he could see directions straight, so he could duplicate communication. For instance, a mountain, you might say—he looks at a mountain, therefore a duplicate of the mountain has to come back to him. Well, that's quite easy, because it's a nothingness facing a mass like that, that would be fairly easy to duplicate.
But let's say he's facing a man. He looks at the man, the man comes back to him. But he's a man looking at a man, why, when it comes back to him it does not match or fit over the form that is doing the looking. It matches over it backwards. So he says, "To hell with this. There's something annoying about bodies. Don't know what it is, it's probably their moral caliber." It's just that they're always fitting over him backwards. So he's—"People are perverse, they never do what you tell them to do" and so forth. Just on the basis that he couldn't match the bodies face to face—they just don't fit over each other—on that basis alone, he would (1) get mad at people and (2) set up machinery to reverse the image so when it's coming in, why, he's looking at it straight way to, as far as he's concerned.
It's very hard, you see. You're talking to a person all the time. You're not paying any attention to your own body. You're looking at the person you're talking to. Therefore, this is a kind of a silly looking thing—you are kind of used to talking to a mass, just in giving your body orders. You give your body orders, of course you're talking straight to a mass.
Well now, when you think you're a body and don't realize that you've graduated downscale—you think you're a body, therefore every body you're talking to is kind of your body, backwards.
People wind up sometimes three feet in front of their faces. They think the way to give orders to a body is to be out in front of it—elementary. Naturally, this should follow.
Take somebody that's been in the army for a long time, not only naturally this follows—that follows. So in talking to other people, forgetting one's own body, one says do this or do that, he can become very used to talking to other people—you know, not paying any attention to his own body or what's duplicating or not duplicating or anything about it—he just keeps talking to other people. He has difficulty making them do what he wants. He says, go—this is incident to anything, he's an exterior voice to them—he says, "All right, go up and check in your belongings. And why don't you go down to the restaurant and have something to eat and come back here again." "Go over the invoices, Sally, and do an audit on the..." this sort of thing. I mean, he goes on and they don't go to the restaurant or Sally doesn't find the books or the invoices or something of the sort. An executive is in the perilous position of never intimately handling the bodies he's directing. He's depending upon words and an economic system in order to force his orders. As a thetan operating on his own body, he would simply depend on being able to shoot a beam of energy at it when it didn't—he could make it hurt like hell if it didn't obey him. I mean, he has a grip on the body itself. He's holding it one way or the other. And—this is talking about an executive not exteriorized or anything—he's holding on to the body, he has no difficulty running this body, but all of a sudden he starts to get difficulty with those bodies out in front of him. They don't work right!
You know, he tells them to go to the right and they go to the left. And they just don't work right. Anyway... And it breaks down. And eventually he suddenly—he starts having trouble with his own body, is what happens. He starts having trouble with the agility of his own body. And unless he were to take his body out on a playing field, an athletic field, take it out with some golf clubs, at least—if it's gotten so old and decrepit that all it can do is play billiards with a little white pill like that on the green, why, at least do that—he would get into active motion of control and handling and so on, and he would feel a lot better. There is, by the way, where exercise fits in. Exercise permits you to straighten out and handle a body fairly evenly and easily and gives you a renewed confidence in the fact that it will obey your orders. I don't know how much the sweat does, but they claim that if a fellow sweats three or four quarts while doing something or other, that this is very healthy. I really don't know anything about that. I've never had any intimate analysis made of somebody's sweat and I've never found any engrams in it, although I've never had any analysis made of it.
He's again in control of his own body. But after a while, thinking he's a body; if he keeps on facing people and giving them orders and they fail, the first thing you know, he thinks he fails in handling himself. This is the first thing he thinks. "I'm failing in handling myself." Well, he means, "I'm failing in handling myself physically." He's finding out he's getting squirreled-up handling himself physically, merely because the people he orders around are so squirreled-up. They go the opposite direction, you see, all the time. Now he starts handling his own body the way he handles other people, he reverses its directions entirely. Now the next thing you know he thinks there's something wrong with his thinking. And this is an impossibility. How can you get a thought in reverse? You can't. That's all there is to it. You can't get a thought in reverse. You can get a word in reverse, but a word isn't a thought.
So what's our problem here? This individual has the physical universe reversed, so he thinks his thoughts are reversed and therefore he wants them (quote) "straightened out" (unquote), which is what he always says. "Got to get them straightened out."
Well, you get the left-hand thoughts over on the right-hand side and the right-hand thoughts over on the left-hand side, this is very helpful. You shift control centers on somebody and, boy, he's liable to hold on to that as a tremendous experience. He actually felt things shift from the right to the left. Gee, this must have straightened him out because he knows basically that his trouble with a body is a direction-reversal trouble. Shifting control centers—more people would be pleased with us, come back a week or so later a little upset, but it's quite an operation. It "straightens things out."
Well, you see, you're not thinking any thoughts over on the right side of your head or on the left side of your head, either one particularly—I mean, not selectively. Your thoughts are not reversed and so they can't be balled up at all. But an individual believes they can be and so he has a good time getting all snarled up.
Therefore, you'd certainly better take care of direction reversals in auditing. You wouldn't have to pay a great deal of attention to it really—you should know about it. You wouldn't have to pay a great deal of attention to it with a preclear who was doing pretty well. But with a preclear who persistently bogs, you just better get in and slug right straight at that. It's unfortunate, too, because he's in no shape to have anything slugged at hard. He'll get nervous, he'll get upset. But boy, he's fighting a direction-reversal impulse which makes him put tremendous wrath, force and resistance into everything he tries to do. And if he's honestly, as a thetan, trying to follow your orders as an auditor, he has to fight a machine which he believes to be much bigger than himself every time he follows one of your directions.
You say, "Be three feet back of your head."
He might have a feeling of moving forward in his head, if he had any feeling at all. But he will tell you, "Well no, I… I didn't." It isn't that he can'/ be three feet back of his head. The impulse to be three feet back of his head moved him into his head.
Why did it do this? It's because you said so. If he said so, it'd be the same thing, because he's a stranger in town, too. So, we have Beingness Processing, and if you will notice, after you've gone over these various things which you found you could be—you see, there's no "right or leftness" about this sort of thing. Your auditor simply says, "Something you can be," well, it isn't a direction or something like that, and the fellow will fish around and he'll eventually find something he can be.
Well, you graduate him up and we get into machines. And when I say machines, I mean machines. I mean, they practically whir and clank. Machinery is machinery and that's all there are to it. Machinery is machinery.
Mental machinery has wheels. Sounds quite daffy—has wheels and tubes. The thetan has got them mocked-up that way. You see, he's just duplicating machines he's seen around the MEST universe—so he has something that's supposed to tell him to brush his teeth, he'll mock it up as a machine. I hate to think of what our younger generation has mocked-up to run their mental machinery. It's probably more workable, because the machinery they're duplicating works better.
I suppose the reason why we had World War II was because the gas engines wouldn't run in 1898—that's why we had World War I, 1914, because the gas engines wouldn't run in 1898. World War II was, of course, fought solely on the basis that during the Depression we had a lot of poor machinery. That was what brought on the crash, probably—no machines would work.
Did you ever hear how to use any of the machinery built during that period? It wasn't good yet— 1927, 1926, 1928. Nothing quite worked. We had a daffy generation. Might be, might be some connection between these things. Who cares?
Now, being machinery—now, he might be able to be MEST universe machinery. There's certain types of machines he could be, certain types of engines, certain types of this, that. You could graduate him up fairly rapidly into being machines that reversed things for him—reversed images for him, did this and did that. He would find some of these that he could be, if you fished around.
Well, failing to do that, your next best bet in trying to get a direction straightened out on a case so that it won't fight every order which you issue—see, it's a process that won't do the case any good if the process is being countered by some kind of a machine that says do the opposite. In other words, if the preclear can't follow your directions, if his effort to follow the directions is thwarted at every turn by his own automatic machinery, why, he of course isn't going to get very far—unless your directions immediately go to the root of the problem, which is automatic machinery which direction-reversals him.
So the thing to do is to find out what gives him a direction reversal? Well, it's this machinery. And he's set it up at one time or another and it's made to reverse images and it reverses orders and it gets to a point of where it reverses words and reverses meanings and everything else. He'll begin to believe that the future is the past and all kinds of things as a result of such machinery. So our problem in auditing could go from being machines and taking awfully good care that you got him to be the machine (that he was certain of it and all this sort of thing)—from being machines—if that failed, which it shouldn't, your next step on the thing would be to set him an example while standing in front of him,
Here's an idea. You say, "Now, raise your right hand."
And, "All right, raise your right hand again. Now raise your left hand."
Just straighten him out on mimicking you. Deadly process. But use reversed-direction statements. Make him throw the action and the statement apart, in other words.
You could say, "All right, what you want to do is to move your right foot," while you moved your left foot. "Now move your left foot," while you moved your right foot.
Now you can tell him in reverse, "Move your right foot." You move your right foot and he has to move his left foot. Well, if he can master that, he can then follow your orders. Try it out.
I mean, all right. Now, let's see you do this. Let's see you do this. Now I want you—now, think of this carefully now—"l want you to move now, want you to move now, your left hand." Now, you, of course, have the order as being much more significant than the actual direction, don't you?
All right, now let's try this again. Now follow the action and to hell with the words. Move your left hand. All right.
Let's just get a mirror-image duplication of what I'm doing now and to hell with the words. All right. Now move your left hand.
Silly drill, isn't it? Well, you get this straightened out between you and your preclear and you're liable to find out all of a sudden he can execute some of your orders. Now, this sounds silly.
You take the pressure off the words and actions. You give him a physical motion to follow. It doesn't matter which way you do it, as long as you and the preclear are doing something to coordinate directions. You get that point? Coordinate word directions and motion directions. You just get something to coordinate them and you're all happy. He comes to an understanding of something. It feels good after a while if he can do this with positiveness.
Now, another way to do it is to point south and say, "All right, north is south," and have him point north for south. Call south, north; north, south; east, west and west, east. And have him point this out and get this very fixedly that these directions are inversed. Do anything you want to in this particular department and you'll find that the machinery will all of a sudden start staring you in the eye, unless you simply set out to confuse him terribly. If you just set out with a motive of confusing him, it's all right, you'll wind up with a confused preclear.
What you're trying to do is play with a machine which reverses everything. All right, you could say, "All right. Now get the thought that you must touch the top of your head. Got that? Now touch your feet. Now get the thought you must touch your feet and touch the top of your head. Now get the thought that you must touch your right shoulder and touch your left shoulder. Now get the thought you must touch your left shoulder and touch your right shoulder."
All of a sudden, this horrible riddle of direction reversals will fall apart. But the best thing to do is, of course, the first process I gave you, to bc machines with some kind of certainty. Have him being machines.
"What kind of a machine can you be?" one way or the other. And now have him be this machine and you actually could have him be a direction-reversal machine and perform its functions. Now how would you do that? You'd tell him this way•. You'd say, "All right now, be a machine which changes all the orders around. Now I'm going to give you the order to stand up and you tell the body to sit down. See? Have the body receive the order and then you modify it."
Well, the patter of this would be, "All right. Now when I tell the body to stand up, you let the body receive that order, but you tell the body to sit down and enforce it.
All right. "Now let's—I'll tell the body to move its head and you make sure that the body holds its head still.
"Now I will tell the body"—and you as an auditor, you say, "I will tell the body, 'Lift your chin.' And you correct the order and make the body drop its chin." See that? In other words, have him perform the function of the machine.
"Now I'm going to tell you to get Clear and you reverse the order." Any bells ring?
Audience: Mm-hm.
Okay. There's where the rub is. The poor guy—actually the thetan is saying, "I want to get out of this and square this around. I know there's something here, there's truth to what's going on. But by golly, the very thought—every time the auditor says, 'Get Clear,' why, or something that I know is supposed to make me Clear, I just get worse." Natural consequence. What is meant for the better goes worse. The harder they try to be good, the "badder" they are. The harder they try to be bad, the "gooder" they are.
Did you ever see a couple of fellows who were in kind of rough shape, out trying to be bad? Well, they wind up listening to the Salvation Army band down on the corner. But don't start a couple of guys out trying to be good.
"Now, you be good all evening," wifey says, "when you go out now to that poker party. And you be good and you don't look around, don't wander around and don't drink too much and don't lose too much money."
What do you think happens? Guy comes home dead drunk and dead broke—practically dead. And he's, "How—how's this? She's hexed me. She gave me bad luck, that's what she did. Now that's her fault."
They're looking for what's doing the direction reversing and it's actually a basic machine which they themselves have. They've got this one nestled to their bosom.
If you were to tell the fellow—try to use this reverse now, let's reverse it the other way. Let's say to the fellow, "Now, be sure and be horrible and be awfully bad and lose all of your money and get as drunk as you please and roll in the gutter and come home late and be sick tomorrow morning." He will.
Why does he do that?
Well, the weight of making—you see, the weight of this communication system of A, B, C, D—the weight of it is to make the body into nothing. The greater insistence is by the thetan who is the source of impulse. And the thetan, of course, to make the body duplicate him obsessively has got to make the body into nothing. So if you divided orders up into percentages—and these would not be the proper percentages, but just to give you an idea—we would say, if we issued fifty orders to improve the body and fifty orders to deteriorate the body, we would probably find that forty-five of the orders to deteriorate the body had been effective and two of the orders to improve the body had been effective.
The impulse, then, to make the body into nothing is translated as "Degenerate it." And that's how degenerate you can get—nothing. Well, that's how exalted you can get—nothing. That's what you are—nothing. Well, this is a dreadful riddle, isn't it?
If you can make being nothing, then, synonymous with being degraded, then an individual will degrade himself or his body.
Another method of handling this machinery is simply to duplicate it. "Throw up something that you'd call a direction-reversal machine and duplicate it many times." "Throw up something you'd call a direction-reversal machine, duplicate it many times."
That's just an elementary process. It might trigger the bill and might be something you use right along with anything else you're using.
Now we have another one. There's compliance with orders. "I am complying with all orders" is the name of the mock-up. And you get a body with a nothingness behind it. See, a somethingness and a nothingness. Complying with the orders of the physical universe. Now put that up to show you're complying with orders—somethingness and nothingness, see. Put up a body with a thetan behind it—you're complying with orders. "Put up a body with a thetan behind it, now, with the thought that you're complying with orders." That's the straight command.
"Now duplicate that many times, each time with the thought that you're complying with orders."
You're liable to get some funny somatics if you do that. Holes will kind of sort of appear in the mock-up.
Now, those people who can't get any mock-up of their own body or perception of their own body are just being a little more insistent on the body being nothing. They’re just a little more obsessed with a complete duplicate on the communication system.
The direction south is a continuous duplication insistence. The more one insists that the communication be exact, be correct, that it be answered properly—that this, that and so forth—further south he goes.
A willingness to duplicate anything results in a very even, quiet disposition or a very roaringly exciting one. The organizations which go toward nothingness succeed better than organizations which go toward somethingness. This is a general rule.
You could get anybody, you could get—let's say you've got a little boy. It would find that if there was a gang of kids that went to Sunday school and a gang of hoodlums around, the chances are far better that he'd join the gang of hoodlums than the kids who went to Sunday school, although these two things are not actually incomparable—they're in comparison because both of them are going toward nothing somewhat. One is reaching out for a superior nothingness and the other is bound and determined they're going to make a nothingness out of it. Which is the most self-determined group? Well unfortunately, in this society, the gang of hoodlums.
You have an imbalance, very bad imbalance at work and societies as they go downhill pass through these imbalances. There'll be periods when everybody rushes around saying, "We've got to make something, make something, make something, make something, make something" and the other periods when everybody's rushing around with equal or even—well, actually much greater ecstasy saying, "We've got to make nothing out of everything." And you recognize this as the hysteria of war.
You can organize a whole society under the Four Horsemen. And the Four Horsemen arc the best allies in the world to make nothing out of things.
And you get a society organized and running fine, running all-out and doing beautifully in time of war. And then you get it in time of peace, somebody says, "All these worthwhile projects and so forth that we should be engaged on"—everybody sits around and argues about politics or chews around this or goes to the new play so they can criticize how bad it is. We have ebb and flow there. But because the nothingness is a habitable and a more desirable state for a thetan, actually it increases his mobility. The difference between a thetan being nothing and a thetan being something is the difference between somebody who is able to travel all over the place without even a razor or an extra shirt and the fellow who has to take ten trunks full of clothes—great deal of mobility.
Well, it's a wider mobility than that, because a thetan who isn't being a mass obsessively, of course, can appear anyplace he wants to be in the whole darn universe.
So our problem with our rough case is a problem of direction reversal primarily, basically, which is a problem of duplication. When I say "case," of course, you know, I mean our problem as auditors. The tough case. I'm not saying that we have carried over and embraced all the problems of the whole universe—no, we're embracing those factors which become confused in the universe. And these become very marked in auditing. The preclear quite often will sit there and run something entirely different than the auditor says. Oh, he has lots of reasons for this. Maybe some of his reasons have reason, maybe they're very just and so forth, but they are based upon the fact that something in the preclear is reversing and escaping the orders, And his main attention actually in being audited is absorbed in trying—even when he's cooperating, his main attention is absorbed in trying to resist and hold nullified some mysterious force around him someplace that makes him go in opposites, or even opposites to opposites. Or opposites to opposites to opposites.
And he's got this mysterious force—he knows he's fighting something. Well, let's see what he's basically fighting. He's fighting a communication system wherein in himself as a nothingness transmits through a relay point which is a somethingness, ordinarily just to other somethingnesses and never back to another nothingness.
The ecstasy of the saint and the call of religion are all based upon efforts to move closer to a communication system where nothing is duplicating nothing. "God, hear my prayers." If God can hear your prayers, God has to duplicate you. If you mock-up yourself as God in the sky, you may even then achieve just as much elation as the person who is pleading with God. That's not sacrilegious, that happens to be a fact.
So the release of barriers, bonds, restrictions inevitably leads to a certain elation, a certain feeling of freedom. You let a fellow out of prison who hasn't been in prison too long and he will feel quite elated. If you've kept him in prison too long, however, without any processing or other addresses to his problems, he's liable to come out of prison and be very sad with all this freedom. Remember you'll also get this effect with the preclear.
You move him out of his body, you've given him freedom. He moves out with the shape of a body. He feels very sad because he has lost that much mass and he's just been in jail too long that's all. So having been in jail for a long time, the fellow is quite unhappy about being exteriorized. And he's liable to tell you, "Well, that's all right. That stuff is good enough for you and good enough for somebody else, but not good enough for me. What I really want to do is to stay inside that body and carry on. And I'm not interested in these other things—they don't seem possible or believable to me."
You'd get the same reaction from any prisoner that you had in jail too long and you can recognize this. If you take a steel spring and compress it tightly enough, long enough, it will no longer spring back to its original shape. Finest steel in the world, if you compressed it tightly enough, long enough, it would not any longer return to its original shape as a spring. It's one of the big contests of the metal companies to try to get springs which always will return to shape.
Well, a thetan doesn't have any shape. So you give him freedom, he thinks he ought to have a shape and this upsets him. Remedy of Havingness, of course, drives right in down the line. This only goes so far as a process and then it runs into a dead stop.
Why does it run into a stop? Well, the thetan, of course, is a somethingness, according to a havingness. What you're really doing is running out all of his failures.
Those things which he's failed to make into nothing can generally be depended to fly in at him.
I ran into a pc one time, a long time ago, we were running for the highest moment of joy and elation and everything on the whole track. We were looking for it and we found it—he blew up a galaxy.
He said, "There's tremendous grief on this."
And I said to myself, you know, "Well, I could imagine so, All those overt acts simultaneously."
And he started to weep a little bit and I asked him what he was weeping about and he says, "Well, I'll never get a chance to do it again!" [laughter] That was where his grief lay. Boy, he sure made nothing out of a lot of stuff with a vengeance, didn't he?
Well, in order to make nothing out of space, you've got to take out its positional significance. If space has to you the significance of a bunch of points in it where something happened—you know, these fixed spaces, unalterable points—why, you really can't make nothing out of that space. Why? It's got all these significances in it. Becomes more confusing due to the fact that space is moving by with such speed. You say this is moving fast—well, why worry about this moving fast. Let's have the space move fast.
Why don't you look around the room right now—you'll realize that the various components of speed add up to terrific velocity. You see, the Earth is moving at a thousand miles an hour, so obviously the space in this room is moving at a thousand miles an hour. Why, just from that, if it's static space—I mean, it's just staying there—it's moving at a thousand miles an hour.
Also, in quite another direction it is moving very rapidly. But if you will simply look—you see, the component forces of motion would result finally in one motion of space. It wouldn't make the space complicated, it'd just resolve into a certain direction—the space was moving through this room.
Get that as a different concept. Let's not get the room moving through space. Make space senior. Let's get the idea of the space moving through this room. See if you can take a look at it and see it moving through the room.
'Tain't going slow.
You ask some preclears to do this, they'll get sick on you. I wasn't trying to make you sick, you're about to go to your auditing sessions. But there is this concept of actual motion of space. Of course, you can (quote) "see" space move, because anything you know, you really can see. So if you know that space is moving, why, of course you can see it move.
Now, what's the principal machine your preclear is fighting? Even if he's being a good preclear—if he's being a bad one, he's still fighting the same machine. What's the principal machine that is standing between his path and getting a lot of benefit out of your auditing? Female voice: Direction reversal.
Mm-hm. A direction-reversal machine that simply cancels out orders and reverses them. Cancels out the actual order and puts a new order in its place which is in reverse, is altered in some way and so forth. That's the primary machine.
Fellow who is all in blackness has gotten so damn confused he no longer cares to look—that's about it. See, you can find him—I ask him to put up a couple of anchor points and locate himself by them. That's the most direction he's ever going to have anyhow.
Did you notice that it was very easy in auditing, under "places you can be." Did you notice it was very, very easy to find places you could be in the past, even though you felt insecure about places you could be in the present? Some cases will get that with great ease. Remember that's a higher level.
"Things which are not giving you orders at this time" is often resolved—fellow can't get anything that really isn't giving him orders now—there's a nothingness of things. You have him mock-up or get the idea of a nothingness, for instance, of a desk, a chair, a couch, a picture on the wall, and get whether or not it's giving him orders. And that nothingness is not giving him orders. It's a vast relief with which he will do this.
Some of the preclears have been asked that question countless times, have yet—if the guy is in good shape—has yet to find something that isn't really giving him orders. But what's the deep significance of all this? We've got the preclear fighting a direction-reversal machine and we've got the auditor trying to get the preclear to follow directions—the preclear, caught in the middle of this conflict between the machine and the auditor, has a rough time of it—machine is quite portentous.
There are many other remedies for this sort of thing, but these remedies I've given you are the basic remedies which we're using at this time. Very possibly as time goes on we'll have better remedies for this, but the problem is right there in the open. The problem has been there since 1951. First recognized it on the codification of the Theta-MEST Theory. It was there much more certainly and an answer to it was much better in 1953.
You'll find this in the early PABs. It's mentioned considerably. It isn't laid out with this simplicity and at this length, because it'd be almost impossible to broadly communicate this. Put a piece of paper under somebody's nose and then tell him all about direction reversals. That'd be real cute, wouldn't it?
Well, we know some of the answers. So let's apply them.
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