Definition of Technique 80, Emotional Wavelengths (T80 520519)
Series: T80
Date: 19 May 1952
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
(Original title: "Definition of Technique 80, Emotional Wavelengths" T80-1B. This transcript might (?) also include "Tone and Ability" T80-C or that tape might have been omitted from the Route to Infinity edition. If anyone has the original reels, could they check this?)
Now, there are actually two new ways of running things. One of those is Technique 80 and the other is Technique 88.
Technique 88 probably will not be covered until the release of these publications, which I am writing because of Technique 88.
The difference is type of incident, between the two techniques, more than principle, although there is a distinct difference in the way you run an incident with either one.
Now, actually, if you were rather high on tone scale, you would use Technique 80, not 88, to blow the bank, because these techniques - both of them - are aimed at getting up as high as possible on the scale of beingness, getting up from zero to the highest possible attainment toward infinity. They have different ends: Technique 80 gets you there in this body, and Technique 88 takes the body away. So there are two different end products there. One takes you up as high as possible in a body, you see, and the other takes you up without a body.
I know that sounds very outrageous to you, the idea of going around without a body. As a matter of fact, if you stop and think of the number of mechanisms which have been installed in this society concerning the declasse' sort of a thing of not having a body, it's not done. "They are gauche, you know, and they're frightening. And these poor shades that have to roam the worlds. Yes, that's bad! That's bad."
As a matter of fact, everywhere you look you find some injunction about not getting rid of your body, and some propaganda - pure and simple propaganda - about the horrors of not having one. So if you just look at these two factors in the society in which Homo sapiens lives, that the body is valuable. You must take care of it. Yap, yap, yap, yap, yap. You look at that one all by itself, you'd say, "Whaaah, there's something wrong here!"
Because as it evolves in processing and as one begins to study techniques, he finds out that to free a person it is necessary to process out all the control factors over the person. That's a principle. Let's process out the super controls with which a person is kept (quote) "in the groove": a good boy, a nice girl, a this, a that, grind, grind, grind, grind. And if you can just find all of the things that have been installed to create that end and relieve them, you get a sane person.
Now, that is an empirical observation; it is just observed that this takes place. You get off the super control of Mama and Papa off of a preclear. And as soon as you get that off, wham! they're in better shape. So just extrapolate from there and then examine it a little further. And you find out you take off the super control of this and the super control of that and the control of this and the control of that, and they get saner and they get more able.
You say, "Hey, what's this?" So you go and get the best control books you can get: How to Control Your Child, a publication of the American Medical Association. That's its proper name, American Medical Association; it's an organization, up somewhere or other, having a lot of trouble with the chiropractors. Chiropractors are trying to put them out of business, and they're fighting it, however. (If you haven't heard of the organization, why, just take my word for it.)
Anyway, this organization puts out this book, the control of a child. Now, if you reverse the vectors and you process everything they say to do, your child gets healthy. You can practically take anything that is published by Homo sapiens before May 15th, 1950 - just take anything-and look it over and then process it out of your preclear and he'll get better.
Let's take various things. College examinations: If you processed all the college examinations out of a college student, he would be more able and he'd be happier. Examinations install an anxiety state and so forth; they do various things. They're very upsetting. Just process out that and he'll be in better shape.
If your preclear can't use any of his schooling (and I don't know any preclear who can), all you have to do is just process out all of his schooling and he learns something; he knows something then. That's very weird, but horribly true. They say, "You know, he's a successful man even though he only went to the third grade." That's sure a backwards statement.
I know. I've suffered in classrooms long enough. I went to school once. Processed it out about a year or so ago, managed to get rid of the last of it.
Anyway, you go around and you take rules and regulations about this or about that or something of the sort. You find out that one of the reasons people have bad teeth in this society is they've been enjoined all the time about the care of the teeth: "Got to take care of your teeth, you got to take care of your teeth, you got to take care of your teeth." If you process out all these times they've been made to take care of their teeth, their teeth will get better. Weird, isn't it?
As a matter of fact, if you turn around and process out everything that made him take care of his body, he'd suddenly start taking care of it. Process out all the times that he was forced to bathe and he'll start bathing. Wonderful! So, you just work on that basis of everything that is a force control mechanism on an individual is bad, you can therefore count on putting together a technique - a processing technique - of knocking out any of these out of your preclear. It gives you thousands of new techniques, just that sentence. You just reach out in any direction.
All right, let's take traffic regulations. There we go, traffic regulations. You see, there's only-start, stop and change are the only three possible actions in the MEST universe. Start, stop and change. Traffic regulations. Traffic lights. Here's the guy, he's going down to the office, he's all excited, he wants to get down there, he wants to go to work, he's got a new secretary and everything. And he gets out in the car and he starts tearing down the road and all of a sudden, why, there's this "Brring, bop!" red light, so he stops. He didn't decide to stop, so it interrupts his self-determinism. So there he sits, stopped. He waits for the light to change, and he waits for it to change, and he waits for it to change, and then finally it changes and it says he can go. So he starts to roar across the intersection and so forth, and he goes halfway through the next block: A sign there says Children: 15 Miles per Hour. Nnnrrh - slow. He says - "Now," he says, "I'll drive up the block here and get to the office quicker," but it says Detour.
Now, there's everything you can think of, and if he goes over a certain speed ... You see, police don't like motion. Police are at 1.5 and they got to stop things. And you can count on this fact (it doesn't have to be rational): If it's motion, it should be stopped. I mean, it's a good, sound-that is to say, at least a completely consistent philosophy. There's nothing inconsistent about it; it's the most consistent thing I know of. If there is motion, stop it.
It so happens, you know, that the fast drivers are the ones who don't have accidents. The slow drivers, the careful drivers, are the ones who have accidents. You start adding it up in the accident records and you'll find the careful drivers.
One of the carefulest drivers I ever met was a lady who always kept her left wheels on the white line, squarely on the white line, so that she wouldn't go over the edge. She caused several accidents, but never at any one time were the accidents happening to her. She was a roadblock all by herself. But she was legal. Nobody ever arrested her. She was legal. She was agreeing with the fact that motion should be very slow, if at all.
So we have stopped motion all through these traffic regulations, and actually, a person who is living in a city, you've got a whole technique with traffic regulations. You just start processing out traffic. Just process it out, that's all. You could work on it for maybe twenty, thirty hours just on that technique, and when you get through you'll probably have a well preclear. His arthritis will probably go away, everything. Because what is it? It's just continual stopped motion, one right after the other: stopped motion, stop, stop, stop, stop. Or change existing motion, and if he starts, stop him again; if he stops, starting him again. That's particularly true.
By the way, go to any town and stand on the corner for twenty minutes - just stand there. The chances are very good that a cop will come along and tap you on the shoulder and say, "Move along, bud." You see, in this case you are stopped. The cops do operate not so much in stop but in change, in that respect. But they're not anywhere near as insistent about starting as they are about stopping.
Now, this is an interesting manifestation that almost anything that has been prohibited must have a beingness value. It's a totally outrageous sort of a guess to make. I mean, you say just automatically that anything which is prohibited probably has a beingness value. And you look it over for a while and you'll find out that's more or less true. And so we get back to ghosts. Ghosts are bad; they frighten people, they do this, they do that.
What would happen to you if you didn't have a body? Well, that would be pretty bad. Supposing you had full, 100 percent awareness - you don't have that now - but supposing you had the full awareness of beingness to yourself and so forth, and you didn't have a body.
Economic system: That hasn't got any haul on you; you don't have to make any money.
Food: You don't have to procure any food.
Work: You wouldn't have to work. Look at all the labor involved in keeping yourself. Well, you wouldn't have any of that. And if you have added to it the fact that you could produce an illusion of any kind that you want to, you can walk around looking any way you want to look. You could even look very solid.
Think of it: If you walk into this bridge party and this fellow is there telling you all about his business: "I was down in the stock market today and I made - I made twenty-five thousand bucks. But Joe was down there too, and he didn't make twenty-five thousand bucks. But I made twenty-five thousand bucks, and I said, 'Well, Joe, it's too bad you didn't make twenty-five thousand bucks.' And he said, 'Well, I guess I didn't. You're just lucky, Bo.' "You know, I mean, it goes on like that and that's the same conversation you hear for about two hours, and you're sitting there … You just wouldn't be sitting there anymore. You wouldn't have to get up and say, "I am sorry but I have to go home now because I left a babysitter with little Junior." You don't have Junior and you don't have a babysitter, but you make this excuse just so you can get out of there. You wouldn't have to do that. You'd just go … You just wouldn't be there.
But look at what this does to the police! They haven't got a body they can lay their hands on. And that's bad, that's very bad! It's difficult! A body is very valuable for other people, very valuable. They can come in and tap it on the shoulder and put leg irons on it and do other things to it, put it in electric chairs and do all sorts of things with it-amuse themselves with it, in other words.
Now, as far as emotions are concerned, the whole emotional range is very, very free without body, but it's very frozen with a body. The body starts to hurt here. What's your emotional range? It's set by the body.
So you see, it's not necessarily an asset-not necessarily. In fact, quite the contrary, is a distinct liability. I don't know of any advantage for you; I know a lot of advantages, though, for other people.
In the first place, evidently, a human being can look at an object and move it if he is high on the tone scale. He can look at an object and move it. Poltergeist, you call it. All you do is put a few more ergs of energy on one side of it than you put on the other side of it and it'll move. Like an airfoil, it goes up, because it has got less air on the top than the bottom. That's the way you move things when you don't have a body.
Of course, there's one horrible thing about not having a body. There would be one horrible thing about not having a body - utterly grim - and that is the fact that you could probably take over and use any body around. So, naturally, this is very illegal, and this is something you mustn't do. And in order to have a well-controlled society we mustn't do that, because you can't put your hands on the people after they go up on 88.
On 80, that's different; 80, the person has still got a body, still inhabiting a body, he's still a body, and so forth, but he can extend his attention and beingness over into the other dynamics and be them too.
So you see the two orders of the techniques: One, you are your body, in your body and merely extending your attention and beingness into other dynamics. And 88 is you have or haven't got one, and if you haven't you can actually be the other dynamics anywhere you want them.
Don't suppose that I am trying to sell you out of having a body. I'm not. You want a body, that's your business. I wouldn't upset your - I couldn't call it self-determinism. You've been sold for a long time on the value of a body. I'm not even advising you to do this.
But let me point out this strange fact: Your body is composed of facsimiles, composed of thoughts: effort, counter-effort; emotion, counter-emotion; thought and counter-thought.
And if you've ever run a real, heavy engram, you know how much like matter it was. Well, that's your body. Only trouble with this body you got here is somebody else thought it up, so you're reducing somebody else's engram. So that's 88; 80 has to do mainly with reducing your facsimiles.
When you reduce a heavy experience, a painful experience, or an experience where-some light experience where a truck has fallen on you or something like that - you will notice that getting it up is sort of like actually throwing matter away. I mean, it's that heavy. And the odd part of it is that an electropsychometer measures just this: How dense are you? As it takes a dive on the falling side ... You know, you ask somebody a question, "Were you out with a girl last night?" and it dives. He says, "No?' He was, and it dives. What has happened there is the facsimile of the experience called for has moved into beingness in him and so it impedes the current which is running through him and makes him more dense. And that's the way a psychometer works, and that's all it does; it measures the relative density of the body. There's a little trickle of electricity, goes through the body, and it's hooked up to a meter. And this little trickle of electricity, of course, runs into heavy facsimiles or light facsimiles or no facsimiles. And that's what it's saying; that's what it tells you to do.
And as your tone goes up, you are less and less and less and less dense. And the way you get people's tone up is to run facsimiles, erase facsimiles; makes them less and less dense.
The denser they are, the worse they feel; and the less dense they are, the better they feel. It just follows, then, that the extrapolation all the way out to reductio ad absurdum, or something of the sort, would be "no body equals wonderful."
But, of course, the number of implantations which coax you to possess a body are so many and so hard and so furious and so violent that when you do ease out of a body, part of those implants is that you go into amnesia, so you don't remember getting out. You don't remember the times after you died.
Of course, the most horrible trick that was ever played on anybody was to convince him that he only lived one lifetime. Oh, think of the apathy of it: "You will never be able to do it again." "You will never be young again." "You will never have a chance to be married again." "You will never be young and lovely or in love or anything again ever, anymore." "It's serious, it's awfully serious. Life is terribly serious. If you flunk this course, you'll never be able to take it again." "You're just done for, fellow; you only live once. And when they bury you, you're dead and you're dead for a long time. In fact, fellow, you really aren't you at all; you're some flesh. And you've seen flesh rot and so you know that you are perishable. But of course, for a small consideration we're going to sell you the slight possibility of going to heaven!" (Oh, I beg your pardon. That's another line. I got off of there just for a minute.)
Never at any one moment would I ever upset anybody else's magic, nobody else's illusions. I wouldn't want to upset or bust through the various cordons of barriers which have been put up before you. I wouldn't want to tear these things down and throw them away, because it might hurt somebody and I need their approval so I can survive!
In other words, when you do have an immortality, it's something you won't know about and somebody else has a control over it. When you are bad in your body, they can get you forever by letting you burn forever, which is sort of a dull thing if you come to think about it.
Now, all of this adds up to the fact, there have been a lot of operations back on the track, been a lot of engrams, a lot of stunts done to convince you that you are what you are instead of what you want to be. And as a net result, it's pretty hard to get up to the first dynamic.
Now, getting rid of a body is not Technique 80. And I merely threw this other one in to show you one thing: The lower you are on the tone scale, the more concerned you become about a body. If you've ever seen anybody very low on the tone scale, they get the slightest cut and it just worries them. And as a matter of fact, as they go down on the tone scale, things hurt more and more and more and more, until some little tiny incident, some pebble in the path of life, trips them and they fall headlong. They just can't stand this; it's too painful. It's gotten to a point where the thoughts themselves seem to be as heavy as material objects. And if you've ever processed anybody who is very low on the tone scale, you know that words are things to them, thoughts are things.
You can see a psychotic, practically, when he's "thinking" (quote, unquote); he takes this piece of matter out and he looks at it, and he puts it back in very carefully. They have tapes that they read off of, because thoughts aren't volatile. They do all sort of things. But the lower they are on the tone scale, the more they have to do with material objects.
Now, this just demonstrates to you, then, that to get up the tone scale it's necessary to get out of materialism, get out of the range of materialism. What's materialism? Materialism is concern with m-e-s-t. Concern with MEST, that's all; that's materialism.
In India's sunny clime when I was in my prime, I used to talk to some of these boys. They're good lads. They're all sick, but they're good lads. They are very wise, they are so wise that they know not what they know. They have gotten up to a point of observation, not action, and they sit endlessly and observe - very remarkable.
The number of things which they can do are quite interesting, but they don't compare with the number of things that a human being fully cleared up the line could do. It is nothing! It's just nothing to take a few matches in a bowl of water and make them run this way and that way with poltergeist just by looking at them. It's really nothing to be able to take a television screen, turn it off so that you got the afterglow on the thing and then stop it from glowing at will - whh! whh! whh! Just block it out and then let it turn on again; block it out just by looking at it and so on.
You can control the material universe, but you can control it a lot more than that. And I'm not now talking about mysticism. Mysticism is the hidden, the secret, so forth.
I happen to be talking much more closely in the realm of physics - much more closely.
Now, these chaps in India are doing the exact reverse of Technique 80. And if you want a good, broad description of Technique 80, Technique 80 is best described by being the exact opposite of everything everybody in India is doing in order to become holy and to take off for nirvana. Now, if you just look all that up and find out what all that is and then reverse it all, you've got Technique 80. Because you can't arrive by going out the top; by trying to go out the top you go out the bottom.
Because what are they trying to do? They're trying to say "Oh, the material universe is no good!" They're trying to say "The body is no good." They're trying to say "I won't have anything to do with it. I detest it. I am not going to touch it. I'm going to abstain from everything material. I am not going to kill anything. I won't even kill a cockroach if it runs across my slipper. We are short of meat but we're going to let a dozen cows walk through the temple courtyard." Anything, in short, of these practices is a detestation of life, of living, of the material universe. It's saying, "I don't want any part of it."
And sure enough, you can go up that line and become quite interesting. You can become quite interesting, but you sure don't become Clear! It is the surest, fastest way to get sick that I know of! The Ibis: You learn to stand that way for eight hours. The Something-or-otherness: You cross your legs and let the flanks lie down flat, and eventually you can get to a point where you could lie spraddle like that, and the total achievement when you've finished that is to have your legs able to lie down flat.
You can make a person sit still long enough and he will get the counter-effort of every effort he ever received. That is to say, you make a person just sit still, make him sit real still, make him concentrate on sitting still, and all of a sudden he'll get help! He'll feel one of these old half-suspended counter-efforts suddenly drill him. Maybe it's way back down the track. It's very amusing. Concentrate on sitting still - that's yogi [yoga].
You know what I would do if I really wanted somebody to be completely blind on how you got out of this universe? I'd teach him yoga, if I really wanted to blind him. If I really wanted to wipe out his knowingness and his beingness, I would teach him these techniques with care, with great care; tell him how he had to practice and how careful he had to be.
There is only one way, really, to get into a state of living, and that's live! There is no substitute for an all-out, over-the-ramparts, howling charge against life. That's living. Living does not consist of sitting in a temple in the shadows and getting rheumatism from the cold stones. Living is hot, it's fast, it's often brutal! It has a terrific gamut of emotional reactions.
If you are really willing to live, you first have to be willing to do anything that consists of living. Weird. But it's one of those awfully true things that you wonder why one has to say it. And yet it has to be said. Because people who are trying to become holy, trying to go to nirvana, trying to go to heaven, trying to become the eighth dynamic, trying to become very savvy on the seventh dynamic, trying to be able to do poltergeist and these other phenomena, are backing up from doing all of them by getting stiller and stiller and less and less, until finally they hit zero.
Well, you can say that zero is in nirvana too. But I like to have guys in zero if they're fighting me; they won't fight me if they go down to zero.
DEFINITION OF TECHNIQUE 80, PAGE 2 T80-01B - 19.05.52
EMOTIONAL WAVELENGTHS