Rundown of Essentials (7ACC 540630)
Series: 7th Advanced Clinical Course (7ACC)
Date: 30 June 1954
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
All right. Let's give you a very fast rundown not particularly of data, but let's give you a fast rundown now on the information which you need to run the cases you are running.
The first information you need to know how to run a case that you're running is the fact there is one thing that runs a case and that's communication. When you say "when a fellow is certain," we mean are we certain he is communicating. That's about all there is to that.
So we'll go on to the next subject. Oh, you think that one needs a little elucidation. When you say "certainty," you mean "Is the communication certain?" See, is he certainly making a contact? Is he certain that the contact exists? That's what you want there with certainty. So it's all well to use this word certainty, but don't go get it lost out in the brush someplace. It's a dichotomy with unpredictability.
What am I communicating with, where and when? Somebody just a few minutes ago said, "Well, I don't know. I'm outside and all these strange things . . Well, what's that? She's just not certain what she's communicating with. If you just had her sit and give them all a label, why, she'd be more certain of it, of course, wouldn't she? She'd say, "Well, I'm communicating with beer mugs and... " and so on. It wouldn't matter much what she said she was communicating with. Just build up the certainty that she had names, labels and classifications for those things which she found herself confronted with when exteriorized.
This in itself would be increasing certainty, wouldn't it? Certainty of what? Certainty of communication, that's what. Am I communicating with it? Those cases which are missed by -C are very few. But believe me, when they are missed, the auditor has not made the preclear certain that he was communicating. When we say "certainty," we mean "communication." When we say "communication," we mean "certainty." A fellow who is communicating uncertainly isn't communicating. This is quite easy to recognize.
Now, there is such a thing as pace: survival pace. What is the present time rate of action? At what speed does a person come into present time? That's his "emergency threshold." Oh boy, could we get classical here. I mean, we could probably invent more words to get this phenomenon.
Some fellow, he's always introverted and thinking about himself until he gets up to 80 miles ae hour. And at 80 miles an hour he, all of a sudden, is totally in present time. He is very alert about the whole environment. He knows he is communicating with it, but thoroughly. Well, that's his emergency level—his necessity level, we used to call it.
And this person requires an exterior duress to raise his necessity level. A kick in the pants, in other words—that type of necessity—kick-in-the-pants type of necessity. He himself isn't furnishing the necessity. He's introverted, introverted, introverted. Speedometer up 10 miles an hour more—introverted; 10 miles an hour more—still introverted; 10 miles an hour more up, and he sort of has an idea he's sitting in the car. Ten miles an hour up—he is starting to get the idea that road is going under him. And 10 miles an hour up and he's now hit 80, and what do you know? He knows that there is a countryside there and that he is driving through it. He might not be aware of very much in the environment, but he's certainly aware of the throttle, the steering wheel, other cars and the road.
Now, some people are so bad off they don't have any kind of a present time level south of 110. If you took any psychotic, any catatonic schiz, any one of them, you could some place or another on the speedometer find their present time on an other-determined basis. That's necessity level. In other words, there's enough duress in the environment so as to kick them into present time.
Here we have the story of the soldier who was in a state of what they called in World War I, "shell shock"; World War Il, "combat fatigue" and later on "exhaustion" and later on, "My God, what is it?" and later on, "apathy." I mean, no—it wasn't that they called it apathy, they just stopped calling it. The more wars you run through, why, the more words you run out of, evidently, in the viewpoint of the military to describe this state.
So this young fellow was lying totally motionless in a hospital over in the north of Italy and there was quite a—World War I—there was quite a German push on at the time and the doctor came in, told the nurse, said, "Well, we have to move the hospital and evacuate; there is no sense in carrying along any useless or excess baggage." Reached into his pocket, pulled out a revolver, cocked it. And the young fellow, who had not moved for some months, leaped immediately out of bed and say—"No, Doc, don't shoot!" The doctor had found his necessity level. This is an elementary mechanism.
If you could get any psychotic driving a piece of machinery or something of the sort, I mean, like they ordinarily do —the type of people licensed by the Highway Department—you would find that they had a present time threshold someplace up the line. Any psychotic in an institution would be found to have a present time threshold somewhere, someplace.
Necessity level: it's when does it cease to be a time and place for playing "problem and solution"? When does it cease to be a time and place for playing this? And that's their emergency level, their necessity level, their present time threshold, whatever else you want to call it on an exteriorized basis—an other-determined basis in the environment. All right.
Theoretically, that would lead to a present time threshold and menace which would bring him up to his exteriorized threshold on a necessity basis, see that?
I mean, if this fellow was in present time at 80, he would probably exteriorize at 150. See that? He would be driving fast enough in a car or a plane, under enough duress, with enough emergency around him and first he would come into present time. And then as his speed and the violence of his surroundings increased, he would, theoretically, get to his exteriorization level.
Now, it's all right for an individual just to drop off into apathy, but supposing the environment wouldn't have any of it, you know? He found out dropping off into apathy was far, far too painful at that moment and he didn't want anything of it. Well, that's what death is. Let's get down to death as a mechanism.
Death is where the physical organism has received enough duress internally or externally to bring about an exteriorization of the thetan to a complete abandonment of the physical organism. This is just another way of looking at death: see it as an emergency threshold. Not only is the environment too hot to stay in, but so is the body; it's gone, Therefore, you get a shock of impact.
Now, the study of the shock of impact demonstrates that lower levels of impact have to maim ore in order to kill. We have to have, if we've got a level of impact of 50 miles an hour— let's say a shell is traveling at the rate of 50 miles an hour—it would practically be rolling. It would be quite visible. That's—a Civil War cannonball, by the way, went about 60 And a few years before that, in the Mexican War and so forth, it was about 48 or something like that. It was real slow. I mean, you could watch them roll down the street, you might say.
And every once in a while, somebody would make the rather strange and peculiar error of reaching out with his foot to stop one and it would take his foot away. Well, that's because it had mass, that's all. It had to have mass. A smaller pellet rolling at that speed of course would not have caused any such impact. Mass and velocity is our problem here. It's a problem of inertia of missiles.
Yes, during the various wars back when they had very, very slow cannon that was a very high source of casualty. You'd see orders issued, posted around on the barrack walls and so forth, that: "Don't stop any cannonballs with your feet." "Don't try to catch any." A perfectly serious order because they were traveling so slow, of course, that it would be their mass alone which did anything about it.
Now, you take a big Holland Express rifle; it packs an awful slug. Well, more in your level of your experience, a Browning .50 caliber, such as used in the war, a slug there—.50 caliber, that's half an inch in diameter. And this lead slug, a half an inch in diameter, was traveling something on the order of—I don't remember the exact figure, but it was probably somewhere around 2,500 feet per second, muzzle velocity, something like that. A Springfield boat-tailed ammunition is 2,875 if I remember rightly. That's a smaller bullet. But here we have this Browning .50 caliber. Well believe me, when that hit somebody, he hardly knew it at all, but it took mass, you see?
Now, a Springfield with a little higher velocity and a Garand—this level is a matter again of velocity and mass. Only, we didn't have to have as big a bullet to give that much shock.
All right. Now, let's go right on upstairs and find a German weapon, a German sporting weapon. It's an over-and-under type weapon. It has a .410 gauge shotgun and a .22 caliber rifle barrel—these two barrels together. There are several of these type of weapons. They are loaded with special ammunition of one kind and another and this particular weapon has a muzzle velocity of 4,400 feet per second. Now, 60 miles an hour is 88 feet per second. (That's the old cannonball we were talking about, see, 88 feet per second.) And this thing travels at 4,400 feet per second. That means it's really getting up there and flat trajectoring.
Now, why are we bringing this into auditing? Well, you know that a .22 caliber bullet is not terribly dangerous, you know this. I mean, you could kill a man with it if you hit him in the right place. But you certainly wouldn't think of using a .22 caliber bullet, would you, on big game? You wouldn't go out and hunt moose with a .22, would you? Or would you? Forty-four hundred feet per second. That little tiny .22 caliber bullet will strike a black bear, who is almost unkillable, in the paw and kill him dead. Hit him in the paw and he dies right on the spot, bang! Real peculiar, isn't it? As a matter of fact, the authority for this is no less an authority than Crossman, who made some tests of these high-velocity weapons and wrote a paper on it for the American Rifle Association.
Now, that's very peculiar, isn't it? Here you have this little tiny bullet going at this high rate of speed and producing sufficient shock power that even on the thick neurons of a bear would bring about a exteriorization threshold known as death. This is real cute.
Well, I'll tell you where this lands. This means that your mass factor—mass and velocity together make an other-determined factor to a human being which varies from case to case which would be, first, the amount of present time they had, and second, where they would exteriorize, under what circumstances. It is almost a constant with any case—any one given case is a constant—and that is his tone level.
Now I could—we could be awfully technical about this and puzzle you no end. But where it takes shock value on an other-determined basis to bring about an exteriorization such as death—takes the shock of death itself to bring about an exteriorization—we have somebody who must be running rather exclusively on other-determinism, hm? He must be a pretty stimulus-response organism here that if it takes an other-determined activity before he can simply move in and out of a mock-up. This is quite an interesting thing.
Well, there are many other factors in here that you could explore and there's a tremendous amount of data that you could give forth and become very theoretical on, but the point is that that preclear who doesn't exteriorize readily is depending on the mass-velocity factor of the environment rather than changing his own mind. The mass-velocity factor of the environment has a tremendous effect upon him. And until you have altered it to a point where he has some self-determined action on the subject of mass and velocity, you're going to have a hard time exteriorizing him, aren't you?
Now, let's look at this. This fellow had to be in a tremendous necessity-level situation before he'd come into present time completely, and then a tremendously greater necessity-level situation... A mass velocity would be a way of measuring, very mechanistically measuring the necessity level of an individual. How much mass, at what velocity, would alert him to a point of where his attention would extrovert? That's what we are getting around to.
How much mass and velocity would it take to get his mind off himself, in other words.
Well, how much would it take for him to look at it? That's all we're into here.
And we find that this varies from individual to individual, but where it needs mass and velocity to extrovert an individual's attention and make him look, you've got a rough case on your hands. What's the matter with him? Well, his attention is introverted, it's looking in on him.
I was in a chap's house the other day—nice fellow, nothing wrong with him, kind of crazy; he's had a lot of difficulty in existence. He's been in show business quite a long time. And the walls of his house are plastered from one end to the other with pictures of himself. There are a few pictures there of a woman he was married to once—the act pictures and so forth. But he mourns over her because he made her what she is today and now she doesn't recognize him anymore. That's his theme song on there. But here we have the inside of his house plastered with pictures of himself—nobody else.
Now, this individual has a fairly wide acquaintance amongst performers and actors in the United States. And I am sure they have, because they do from time to time, hand out pictures to him of themselves. There are none of them on the walls. And this boy is about as spinny as you would care to meet, really, just to be factual about it.
He has an awful time. Mostly he has a hard time communicating. He goes on talking long after he's said it. And he can't be communicated to. He never even goes so far as to ask you What you said. See, he doesn't even go up to that level of saying, "What did you say?" Nub-uh. No, he just keeps on fogging around. And you tell him, "Now, here is a five-hundred-dollar check," and he just keeps on fogging around.
Well, somewhere or other there's a velocity or a command level which would extrovert him. Now, jet's suppose that, totally on a nonpersonal basis, he were to discover the house next door bursting into flames. He would probably extrovert. That is to say, he would get interested in the house and he would not be thinking about himself. But it might be that three houses around there would have to burst into flames before his attention came entirely off of himself and the whole town would have to be one large bonfire before he could get up to a point of where he would draw away from the body, even an inch.
What's this tell you? It tells you that somebody's attention has gotten introverted and to that degree he (1) isn't in present time and (2) doesn't exteriorize. See that? His attention isn't under his control anymore. That's all that's about.
Now, people who attract attention to themselves and then fail at it generally get into this condition. But here we have a mechanistic thing. It's an inexplicable, completely confounding and baffling problem, the whole problem of present time and exteriorization, until you recognize this factor: that the body is an object, it's just another object to put your attention on. And when we say "introverted," we mean that the thetan is occupying the same space as the body and then has his attention flowing in upon this object which he is in. you see that now? All we're talking about is another object when we are talking about a body. See? It could be a doll.
If you go down the street, around you're liable to see some young fellows hanging around outside the bookie joint or something of the sort. A pretty girl passes by. Up to that moment they were standing there realizing how proud and beautiful they looked, you see, how tough they looked, how much they impressed the pedestrians (the pedestrians haven't noticed they were there, but they're sure of this) and they're attracting attention to themselves. And all of a sudden this twist-and-twirl goes on down the street and they extrovert, see? Their attention goes on her body, boom! See, they say, "Gee, that's pretty nice," and so forth and so forth and so forth.
Well, if a naked girl mounted on a flying green horse were to go by, let me assure you, those boys would exteriorize.
Now, the funny part of it is that appetite for this shock-mass factor increases. You might as well call it appetite. Appetite is just your DEI cycle going down the line. I mean, the fellow develops an appetite for that which has been socked into his teeth long enough.
If you were to take somebody and beat him with a whip long enough, why, he'd eventually fall in love with the whip. "Long enough," I said, mostly because he has to evaluate at first a whip is bad. Beat him with love affairs and he eventually develops a feeling that he ought to have lots of them. Anything a person is pounded with he will sooner or later develop an appetite for.
So therefore we get an increasing necessity level. Our preclear at the age of twenty-two had a present time of, let us say, in an automobile, had a present time of 20 miles an hour. When an automobile was going 20 miles an hour he really knew things were moving and he was in good present time and he was interested in the surroundings and everything and he was real happy. And actually, when a car went about 30 he would start to hold on real hard and he'd just sort of give it all up if a car were ever to have gone 35. You know, I mean, he'd hold on hard, but the exhilaration and the look of the surroundings and so forth would be such, he probably would have exteriorized. All right.
And we find him then a few years later with a present time threshold of 40. He comes into present time when he's going 40. We find him in a few years—now maybe he has gotten to be 50 himself—and we find that his present time threshold has dropped on a curve, perhaps, you see. He is just worried. You'll see him every time any velocity is started, he might worry about the surroundings, you know, and protest against going that fast and do a lot of other interesting things. But the point of the matter is, his attention is very desperately on himself. You know, he's just worried about the environment.
But the present time threshold here would, of course, be even further up. It'd probably be up around 80. You got up 80 miles an hour, 85 miles an hour, believe me, this person had expressed some very interesting things. They went into a sort of a trance, they were upset, they (might have been afraid and that sort of thing, but the emergency mass-velocity ratio is just above that point when their attention is totally on present time.
You see, because we're talking—when we talk about that velocity going up, we're talking about an inverting case, which is what I'm trying to bring home to you. As he got older, he requires more stimulus in the environment to be in present time. This is all this says.
Well, you're trying to do the interesting trick and you are doing the interesting trick of picking up a case's self-determinism. Well, this means that the case is led to be in present time at lower and lower speeds. And finally you've got a case that it will be in present time at zero speed. And then the case becomes very self-determined, and can be in present time and cause motion. People who cause motion usually go out of present time. That is so inverted compared to the way necessity level works.
See what inversion is? Inversion is the person who has to have more and more challenge in the environment in order to look at it, more and more challenge in order to look at it and, of course, this is an increasing ratio. Now, you start to decrease the amount of challenge in the environment necessary to make him look at it until he can look at a perfectly quiet, still, unchanged environment. He can look at a quiet, still, unchanged environment, you see. When he can do that, then he can come into present time at any time. And when he does that very well, he can also cause some motion—in other words, exteriorize.
If your preclear is counting on an exterior commotion to bring him into present time, well, that's a dependency of interesting character. And this preclear is liable to call for—oh, he's liable to think in terms of "What I really need is some CO2."
The psychiatrist dramatized this. He thinks that he'll get somebody into present time if he gives them electric shock. He's never yet found out that if he gives his patients electric shocks of a mild variety every week, in a few months, in order to keep them in present time or even vaguely approximate it, he's going to have to give them an electric shock every three days and then in a very short space of time he's going to have to give them every day. Oh boy! And then to get the fellow into present time, he'd just have to give them a continuous electric shock.
What is the present time threshold of your preclear? A preclear can cause motion or handle motion as well as he is self-determined. He has to be dependent upon necessity levels in the environment around him to the degree that he himself is unable to cause motion. When a preclear can't cause motion, he has to depend on the environment to do something about it. Therefore, the case who isn't exteriorizing easily drops his case immediately and abruptly into the lap of the auditor and sits there and waits for motion to take place. If enough motion took place, he would, of course, exteriorize. That's obvious. If the auditor did enough or went through enough rotes or activities of various kinds or another, why, he would then get into a state he knows where he would be in present time; otherwise he's not in present time. He's dependent upon a mass-velocity factor in his auditing environment.
You'll find this person, then, consulting ridges around him as to how well he is getting. You'll find him doing all sorts of things. The solution to the case is simply to return to the preclear his ability to decide, to move and place objects, or attention. That's all there is to it.
Most of what I have been talking to you about has to do with behavior and the manifestation. But the solution of it is just returning to the preclear self-determinism on his moving and placing objects and attention. He knows he's making up his mind to change his attention. He knows he's making up his mind to change the object. He himself is establishing his own mass-velocity factor. And when he can do that, he will get into present time. And then the next thing you know, he'll be able to exteriorize.
First, he depended on the environment to demand and move his attention, demand and move him around. He was dependent upon the environment to move his attention, to move objects, to move mass, to get him into present time. Now, he himself has to come up to a point of where he can move things around himself. And when he knows he can do this on his own determinism and that he is doing it, why, he of course will come into present time and then exteriorize. That's really, in terms of mechanistic mass-velocity, practically all there is to not only processing, but living.
CERTIFICATES OF DIANETICS AND SCIENTOLOGY
RUNDOWN OF ESSENTIALS PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT 2 7ACC-07 - 30.06.54