Control (7ACC 540730)
Series: 7th Advanced Clinical Course (7ACC)
Date: 30 July 1954
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
Morning I want to talk to you about a very important subject – subject has been with us for quite a while. It's called control. This subject goes clear back 1950-51. And the anatomy of control is a very important thing to us. We had, in those days, what we called control cases – people were exerting an enormous amount of control over themselves and their body. But in those days we called a control case somebody who was simply trying to control the environment, control others, control the auditor.
We still know this case, but it became much more significant when exteriorization came into view. And as soon as we got exteriorization, our control case began to take on a new color and significance to us because this case would not exteriorize.
Why wouldn't he exteriorize? He wouldn't exteriorize because he was using energy. And that's all there is to it. He's just using energy.
The anatomy of control is start, stop and change. You should know that. That is very old in Dianetics and Scientology. But processes to process it actually did not exist as themselves since one did not understand the complete story about control.
Now, what I'm going to tell you now is quite important. It is the reason why yogi fails. It is the reason why man could not escape his body. It is the reason why cases are interiorized, continue to be so and then re-interiorize. So, sharpen up your ears. This is a very, very important part of what we are doing.
We first have to take up a very important thing known as space. And we discover space is a viewpoint of dimension. We discover that if we have only one point to view, we have linear space; we have two points to view, we have two-dimensional space; we have three points to view, we have, for the first time, three-dimensional space. All right.
If the orientation-point – which we call that viewing point – is viewing things, it can also move them. It can start, stop and change them. Do you see that?
Now, get this as the activity of a thetan handling mock-ups. This thetan is making things appear and he's changing them and he's starting them and he's stopping them and he is making them disappear.
Well now, we apparently have added a couple of new things to that when we say we've made them appear and disappear. But this is the action of an orientation-point and that is the activity of a symbol: being moved, being started, stopped and changed, being made to appear and being made to disappear. And that is a symbol. A symbol is something you make appear and disappear – which you start, stop and change. An orientation-point is that point which makes symbols appear, disappear – which starts them, stops them and changes them. And therefore we get the action and meaning of a symbol.
What is a symbol? A symbol is something which has mass, meaning and mobility – mass, meaning and mobility – three Ms. You mustn't forget those three Ms because they characterize the symbol.
Now, let's characterize the orientation-point. An actual viewpoint of dimension can be mistaken for a physical universe location. But an actual orientation-point is what makes the space. Your hometown only appears to be an orientation-point. We get many complexities of this. An individual running down from an orientation-point himself – that is to say, he is the point which is doing the viewing – begins to attach this attribute to his hometown and then if he loses his hometown, begins to attach this attribute to another person.
And now, we have a symbol using another symbol for an orientation-point. And this gets very confused. And this is a confused point in various personal relations, and so forth. One person is using another person for an orientation-point.
What is, then, the definition of an orientation-point? A perfect orientation-point has no mass, of course, you see? It has no meaning beyond the fact that we can describe its characteristics. It has no mobility because it, of course, is what makes space. So does it then have mobility in the space it makes? No, couldn't have, could it? And, in addition to that, it has no mass, it has no wavelength, has no position, then, in space or location, actually. It has no mass. It has no significance. It has no wavelength. It's not an energy manifestation. It is a static. And what have we just described? A thetan.
Well, huh, it looks to me like this is the difference, then – when we say orientation-point and symbol – between somebody who can exteriorize and somebody who can't exteriorize. A person who is a symbol, very thoroughly a symbol, very convinced of it, would not be able to exteriorize easily. And why? Because he has mass, meaning and mobility.
Well, if somehow or another, you could take the mass, meaning and mobility out of this symbol to some degree, you would have yourself an Operating Thetan, wouldn't you? Now, his body might still have – his body might still have mass, meaning and mobility, but if the person who was handling that body did not have mass, meaning and mobility, we, of course, would maintain the state of exteriorization.
But as soon as the thetan confused himself with the body and said, "Look, I am the body," he would then have, as a thetan, mass, meaning and mobility. And where is he as a static?
Well, he's a piece of energy, that's what he is – mass. He's a name – meaning. And he moves around and is moved around by the body – mobility. Well, all this would be completely hopeless, actually, if we didn't know the basic anatomy of how something turns from an orientation-point to a symbol. I've never told you this before. It is the secret back of the secret back of the secret. Man is terrified of being immobile. Why? Because immobile mass is painful. And because when anybody wanted to make him into a symbol, they made him terrified of immobility.
They said death is a very bad thing. Look how still dead people are. Rocks are very bad things. Look at how still that rock is just sitting there with that same point to view all the time – forever. What a horrible thing that rock is.
And so, of course, individuals in general are made to move around because they are afraid of being immobile. Man does not have an adequate word and never, never in all of his track, had an adequate definition for a state of motionlessness.
What would be complete motionlessness? Well, he doesn't even have words to describe this state of motionlessness. It's motion without motion, you see. A stillness is something at rest in relationship to other things, of course.
It might have a potentiality of moving around, but it is at a state of rest. And we have a temporariness assigned to all of these words which mean motionlessness.
Let's define a static again. A thetan is a static. Theta is a static. And we find that it is something without energy, without wavelength, without mass. It is something without location and it is, in effect, an absolute zero. It can do things. It can consider. But in order to consider, it is not necessary to have wavelength, mass, meaning. You can consider anything you please about anything without yourself becoming meaningful.
Now, this terror of immobility is best seen in something like death. They say, "Oh, death is terrible," you see. "Look – look at how motionless it is – I mean, it's still." How about you having to wait in a doctor's office? You're motionless. O-o-o-h. You don't like that.
How about you being pinned in one place, in a closet, locked up to – for being a bad child, or something of the sort, for a few hours – made to be motionless? How about your early days of school? Motionless.
Man practices taking motion away from something which does not initially have any motion. He makes motionlessness into a penalty. And having made it into a penalty, he says, "People mustn't be motionless." And you can take any preclear who's having any difficulty at all exteriorizing and you can stand that preclear up and tell them to stand still and they'll almost go mad before you finish with them.
Well, this is a strange activity for a thetan, to almost flip simply because he has to be a thetan, isn't it? In other words, stand still? But this person who is being made to stand still has location. Remember that, he has location. And when a thetan has been given location and is then made to be motionless in this location, he doesn't like it. But he doesn't like the motionlessness. The motionlessness isn't it, it's the location.
You get people trying to hide. Well, why should this worry anybody that he has location? Well, you figure they must be trying to hide from something. No, they're not. They're just objecting to having a location as such. Now, you tell some preclear after you've exteriorized him – you couldn't see him at all – but you tell him after you have exteriorized him that you can see him there three feet back of his head. Hm. Boom!
You haven't told him that he's about to be exposed to something or hurt in some fashion or another. You have told him, very bluntly, that he had location. And if he has location, he therefore must be the moving thing. And he therefore must be moved from some other point in the space of somebody else – from some other point in the space of somebody else. So therefore, he is a symbol. So therefore he has mass.
Now, exteriorization techniques have been relatively clumsy in view of this fact. That is to say, you tell somebody to be three feet back of his head, you tell him to locate himself in space, he doesn't like it. But he can do it. It's just been the lesser of several evils.
But there are easier ways to go about this. Every time a thetan has been immobile – any time during this life he has considered himself at once to be in pain or incapacitated or hurt, he has associated motionlessness with being injured, hurt, upset.
Well, the fact of the matter is he doesn't have any location at all. He can locate himself for the purposes of perception. He can do this. But he actually has no location.
Now, let's take a look at the mockery end of the Tone Scale. The lower part of the Tone Scale always has a mockery band. Anything that's high on the Tone Scale you will find in mockery on the lower part of the Tone Scale. And we discover that a solid object has very little vibration in it.
I told you, now, that time was change, didn't I? And as long as we had change, then, we had an awareness of time. So the vibration level of a solid object which is being motionless is very slight – very slight indeed. And we get energy itself able to be sufficiently hard or solid or we get a ridge – a thetan's ridge, an energy mass someplace around his body being sufficiently hard and solid so that it apparently is not moving. It is a no-change item, see. There's no observable change in it.
Well, when a person has an operation – let's take an engram now. Why were we shooting at engrams, way back when? This situation is simply this: the individual was in a period of no change – in other words, motionlessness – while he was losing some good characteristic, as he estimated it, of some symbol in which he was interested.
But at that moment, he could then associate the symbol with himself because it was the lower harmonic of motionlessness. And this was a timeless moment because there was no change in it, you see. The individual given an anesthetic and laid out on an operating table, see – no change. See, the time just vanishes in the middle of the operation. There's no change observable. And the energy mass which later on represents that, the facsimiles which were made by the body or the thetan, after that contain a very – very much so, a strata of no change. In other words, timelessness – just that it is not timed, that little strata becomes timeless.
Now, if in the middle of an operation, the individual receives an impact, such as the resetting of a broken bone or something like that, if he receives an impact, he is given a large energy mass of a solidity which has no change and now we have compounded the felony. These two things will now hang up to a motionlessness which is solid, which contains quite a bit of motion, however, the second that you begin to touch it as an incident. But it is apparently solid. And therefore we get engrams floating. And because a thetan knows that a motionless thing has no location in time and space, we get him unable to place this piece of energy anywhere and it just floats around on the time track and so we get such incidents capable of being restimulated. You see that? All right.
What would, then, be some indicated process with regard to this? You could give an individual a sort of a Straightwire process which would be, by the way, a rather violent process, but a perfectly valid process and a useful one. That process would be "Let's recall some times when you were motionless." Just as overtly and bluntly as that. "Recall some times when you were motionless." Followed by – and this is a valid process, if a crude one, this level – followed by "Give me some places where a change took place in your life."
It is change of a sudden and abrupt sort which produces the greatest awareness of time, of course, you see. And this could be softened down by simply asking him to "Give me some times when you were moving." And you know, he'll begin to believe that the most harmful thing he could possibly do with a body would be to make it walk around, because of the number of somatics which turn on when you ask him to recall some times when he was moving. Yes, he remembers some times when he was moving and he immediately – his feet, his legs, his body in general are just in very bad condition indeed, immediately. All right.
Then we have, actually, not run times when you were starting, times when you were stopping, times when you were changing. We've run something else. We've run times when things changed.
And that, by the way, would be a sudden and abrupt change – usually what he'll pick up. He was going along all right and, all of a sudden, there he was lying in the ditch. These changes that he minds so much are different positions in space between which lie one of these motionless periods.
And there is the anatomy of an engram, of a facsimile, of a recall and what makes it aberrative. You see, it's a change, a motionlessness, a change – or rather a position, a motionlessness, an entirely different position. So much so, that if you were to completely reverse a decision suddenly on somebody (the decision being very meaningful to them), that they would get, afterwards in recall, the feeling that they had shifted to another part of the room when you said the second – when you finish your sentence.
This is quite curious. This is a little phenomenon that shows up confirmatory to the exactness of this anatomy. For instance, this fellow comes in and he's all set. He knows he is going to be acquitted and he comes in and he stands there in front of the bench, and the judge says to him, "And hang him by the neck until he is dead, dead, dead."
If you were to run this incident out of somebody, as you very well could do, you would find that he was apparently standing in front of the bench at the moment that the judge started to speak, that a period of motionlessness – just say shock, stillness – occurred in the middle of the thing regardless of the words involved, you see. And that he apparently received the sentence itself and understood it from some great distance or at least another part of the courtroom. And for a little while, you would not be able to convince this preclear that he had simply stood still. He stood still and heard the sentence. He knows that he must have moved back suddenly to the back end of the room and received the last of the sentence or he moved up and sat alongside the judge or he did something – he moved elsewhere.
So when you get location, a point of location, followed immediately by a motionlessness, a stopped motionlessness – you see, stop implies potential motion before and after. We're not interested in that one. We're just interested in motionlessness of an entirely different category.
Man didn't even have a definition for zero, you see. And zero has no location in space. It has no location in time. It has no location – that's no past, present or future for a zero. It has no wavelength. It has no mass. And, of course, it has no meaning except zero. Now, a thetan is all these things with one exception: he can consider. All right.
So, whenever we get a situation where an individual is pointed and located in space, preferably against his will, see – I mean, he doesn't want to be there – and then we suddenly impose a motionlessness on him, he would be certain that he was elsewhere, completely elsewhere, when he again recovered location.
So that if we were to take somebody and set him down in a chair, position him very carefully, hit him very hard in the jaw, knock him out, then pick him up and carry him out on the street and put him down out on the street and let him wake up out there, he actually would be really no more confused than if he were simply hit in the jaw and permitted to wake up.
He'd really not be any more confused. You see, he'd expect to be in a different position afterwards anyhow. That you'd put him in a different position, and so forth, would probably just confirm this phenomenon. It would have no more aberrative effect, contrary to former theory, because he'd expect himself to be in a different position after a motionlessness.
Now motionlessness, to Man, who is very, very badly inverted, you see – he's inverted – motionlessness, to Man, is therefore something very harmful, something very detrimental. One becomes motionless only when one is dead. One becomes motionless only when one is under a state of shock or being operated on or when he's being talked to and scolded, and so forth.
Here we have determinism cropping in. He's suddenly made aware of the fact that there is another determinism than himself which is imposing motionlessness upon him. You see, it's making him stand still.
Now, if you were to ask a preclear to just recall, more or less, Straightwire – just Straightwire – ask him to recall times in his life when he was motionless, you would find a very funny manifestation taking place. He would remember an operation and the operation would fly in on him or fly around the room or do something. See? There's a period in there which is timeless.
And that part of the operation which is timeless will float. And, of course, it's liable to bring along with it, the changes. The changes are liable to come along with it. So you ask an individual times when he was motionless. You could also ask him, of course, following out a bracket in a limited fashion, times when other people were motionless. You could ask him for this and then you could ask him for times when he had changes.
And then because – it's apparently non sequitur, it's not. The next thing that you would have on the thing would be times when he was in motion. Now, he begins to conceive early – begins to conceive motion for himself rather bad because it's continuous and consecutive location of himself in space, isn't it? All right.
If he has this consecutive location in space and locating yourself in space is bad, you see – I mean, you get harmed, you lose your symbol, you lose your mock-ups, various things occur if you're located in space. Therefore, he will conceive that motion is bad.
And he will, at the bottom of the scale, when he's really just about out the bottom, he will start to specialize in motionlessness. He's trying desperately to approximate this condition of motionlessness because he knows there's something about its anatomy – there is something about the anatomy of motionlessness. And he will do all sorts of things. He will sit still, he will sit still in his room, he will not go outside, he will not talk to people, he will not move around, and so on. And the final bottom rung on this sort of thing is, of course, that he will simply sit there and die or go crazy or do something of the sort. Now, here is your bottom, bottom manifestation. And it is an individual trying to approach motionlessness.
Wherever you get into meditation – now, now, here, here, let me – let me bring you up very sharp there on this one and make you get a very clear definitive understanding of the destructiveness of certain practices. They might have been founded on the right theory, they might have had a lot of truth in them, but whenever they went into any practice which imposed motionlessness upon a human being, when their practices included the necessity to sit motionless, for instance, and meditate – sit very, very, very motionless and pray, and so forth, when these practices included that, all they would do is key-in deaths, destruction, injury and change.
Now, these people are running change compulsively. Motionlessnesses float into restimulation from some other location and a motionlessness has, on either side of it, what? Compulsive change.
And so we get these people: they've got to change, they've got to change, they've got to change, they've got to change. But they've got no time, but they're motionless.
Now, that could be a very baffling situation to an auditor if he didn't know that all he had to do was ask them Straightwire for times when they were motionless, times when other people were motionless.
The auditor understands now, you understand, that he is not asking for times when they were motionless and times when they were moving as part of the same question. It apparently is: times when they were moving and times when they were motionless; they're apparently brothers. You see, they're just – dichotomy. Well, that isn't a dichotomy. You see what that is? Times when they were in motion already had the location imposed upon it. And times when their motionless was imposed location. They're brothers all right, but they are not a dichotomy. They're the same thing, practically.
A thetan does not move around. And so, if a thetan has been made to feel that not moving around is bad, he will continue to be a symbol and will not be an orientation-point. And therefore and thereby, he will not exteriorize, and if exteriorized, he will not stay exteriorized.
You can ask them times when they had changes in their life, times when they were motionless in their life and times when they were moving – just Straightwire. And you'll get an enormous change on a case.
But remember this: The person has to be gotten into some motion – 8-C, Opening Procedure by Duplication – before such a process could possibly be used on him. It would otherwise practically kill him because it's a violent process – very violent.
Okay.
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