Man is a duplicity. He is at once a body and a spirit. The personality which we know as the individual is a spirit by its contagion with the body. The body, as a very small amount of processing will demonstrate, is not the personality or the being, but a used thing.
The body is a very craven and degraded thing in an unprocessed state and rather rapidly debases its spirit, so that when one first begins this process of Acceptance Level, it would seem to him that he, as the spirit, is actually at the level where he finds himself. True enough, he conducts his affairs at the level of the body, not at the level of the spirit. But the spirit can be freed, decontaminated, and the body itself, by this process, can be healed of its depraved thirsts and hungers so that it becomes almost fit company for a spirit.
Acceptance Level Processing is that process which discovers the lowest level of acceptance of the individual and discovers there the prevailing hunger and feeds that hunger by means of mock-ups until it is satiated. The process is not a separate process itself, but is actually a version of Expanded Gita. It is, however, Expanded Gita used in a very particular way, and because one has successfully applied Expanded Gita, he should not think as well that he has a command of Acceptance Level Processing.
The process is done in brackets. A bracket is very simply done. The pattern of the bracket is for the preclear, via the preclear for others, and via the preclear others for others. One has the preclear mock up, no matter how blackly or how crudely, items for himself to accept, then have others in his mock-ups mock up things for them to accept, and others to mock up things for others to accept. In Acceptance Level Processing this bracket, which is the technical name of this pattern, extends to having the preclear also mock up things for others to accept and others to mock up things for him to accept. Thus there are five stages in the bracket.
Acceptance Level is what the preclear himself accepts, what the people around him in mock-up form accept, and what others will accept from others, and included as well what others have wanted him to accept and what he has wanted others to accept. Be very alert to this difference and to this particular phase of Acceptance Level: that people have wanted him to accept something does not mean that he accepted it, but it does mean that he will gain an insight into their motives.
Acceptance Level is a voyage of discovery. It is the method of making a MEST clear. It is the method of clearing the genetic entity. There is no other method of which I know which will accomplish this. The running of concepts, the running of engrams, straight Creative Processing, will not any of them accomplish this clearing of a thoroughly degraded MEST body; and, so long as the body remains thoroughly degraded, the task of rehabilitating the spirit connected with it is difficult at best.
The process of Acceptance Level can be combined with Expanded Gita, in which case wasting good things in brackets in the five steps (which is: what did people waste, what do people waste, what did the preclear want others to waste and what did others want him to waste) resolves the occasional stalls which occur; for it often happens that the preclear must waste something good for a short time to discharge an accumulated charge in the bank brought about by a continuance of “feeding by mock- ups.”
Nowhere in Acceptance Level Processing, except in the form of wasting, does one seek to eradicate an engram, a thought, an emotion or a circuit.
The entire process is built upon feeding the apparent cravings of the body. These have come about because of the mechanism of resistance. The MEST universe is built upon the theory that one must resist. When one starts resisting something, he engages upon it until it finally breaks down his resistance and he then goes into the cycle of actually craving it. A hunger is therefore created for various things which would not be suspected in the absence of this process. It is the object of this process to feed these hungers until they are satiated and until they depart.
A very thorough and strong warning must be injected here by calling your attention to this apparent law. ACTION IN THE MEST UNIVERSE DOES NOT RUN OUT ACTIONS WHICH HAVE OCCURRED IN THE MEST UNIVERSE. THE ONLY THERAPEUTIC FACTOR POSSESSED BY MAN IS HIS OWN SPIRIT. ACTIONS WHICH HAVE OCCURRED IN THE MEST UNIVERSE ARE ALTERED OR ERADICATED ONLY BY ADDRESSING THE MATTER IN ONE’S OWN UNIVERSE IN THE FORM OF MOCK-UPS DONE BY THE PRECLEAR.
By living a life of debauchery, in other words, one does not heal the debaucheries he has committed. By feeding his hungers in terms of the MEST universe, whether these be liquor or much baser things, one accomplishes only a further degradation and a further thirst. Such things are healed by the only process of healing which we have, which is the spirit itself. The spirit accomplishes this by direct address of energy as in the case of a Step I reaching in and patching up parts of the body or by mock-ups which themselves alter the condition of the body. More whisky can only make a worse drunkard out of a drunkard. A constant and continuous stream of mock-ups of bad whisky can satiate the craving and restore to him his ability to drink when he wants to drink or not at all.
Basically this process is a learning process. It brings to the individual an understanding of the motives of himself and others who have been around him. These enter as sudden flashes of insight as the process is continued. They are not given to the preclear as evaluation.
This matter of Acceptance Level is of far more use in understanding one’s past than one would immediately suspect, for one sees immediately that if something is being healed by the process, the hunger must have existed.
Acceptance Level is also extremely useful in the MEST universe in evaluating and understanding the why of the actions of those around him. One can understand at last why cheap and dirty hotels are patronized, why in some cities garbage is not collected, why a person dresses as he does and acts as he does; and, indeed, an understanding of Acceptance Level gives one an enormous command of his fellow beings.
There is one thing you should know about ARC. The most ARC there can be is a complete identification: the person is the person with whom he has the ARC. One sees this in valence shifting. This goes down a dwindling spiral until the most complete ARC there is exists in the form of eight anchor points enclosing no space: in other words, a particle. Thus, trying to understand, purely as such, from data offered is in itself a perilous undertaking, for the end of the road is zero space, and that in itself is the opposite end of the tone scale. That is the end where MEST is. “Trying to understand” run as a concept — even that is quite startling. Knowingness has to do with certainty, and understanding which advances along the lines of certainty creates more space, not less space. Thus there is the low funnel end of ARC as well as an upper end of ARC. Trying to understand by reason of data before one looks brings about the vanishing point of existence. The psychotic often confuses his terrific stress on circuit-prompted thought as telepathy and thinking itself. Thus in running this process we are not trying to understand anything, but simply going through with the process to satiate hungers. One can very easily go off and plot the entire evolution of everything by running this process, but one should move along rapidly, gaining only his insights as they seem to apply to him. Only the preclear knows when these insights have taken place.
The process is best run on an E-Meter, for as long as the E-Meter rises slowly and gradually, further mock-ups are necessary; when the E-Meter sticks or stutters, a change in bracket is necessary or, in some cases, something good on the same subject has to be wasted before the process can continue.
The process works best on severely occluded cases — the case we have called a Resistive V. It works least on a Step I, and is, indeed, not needed in the running of a Step I save only to clear up his MEST body, in which case it is run while he is exteriorized.
One can take the list in Issue 16-G of the Journal of Scientology of Step IV, Expanded Gita — that being the most complete list published — and pick out the most revolting items as they occur or the most dangerous items as they occur and have the preclear accept them, have him have others accept them, and others have others accept them until the subject does not have charge. One can take any of the good items of this list and, by prefacing them with no, attain an additional source of acceptable objects.
As soon as one starts to run this process (and it can be self-audited) he will wonder at first when he starts to mock the thing up for others what other person than himself could possibly have had such a hunger for the thing. After it has been fed into the space before him as destined for others, the personnel will come to view who had the acceptance level of the object; and when others run for others these mockups (via the preclear, of course), various groups and ideas will display themselves.
In various instances, as in the matter of running blame, the process may stop moving, at which moment it is up to the auditor, or, if the process is being self-audited, to oneself, to begin to waste praise. One will occasionally be astonished when praise is wasted in the form of brackets how violent the wasting can be.
In Expanded Gita, by the way, all the wasting and forcing upon and desiring, giving and taking, is done in brackets.
The reason you had Viewpoint Processing in an earlier PAB was so that you could understand the source of evaluation and why evaluation was important and so that, even more, you would get the idea of mocking things up in masses. Just, then, as in the practice you got in Viewpoint Processing, you mock up in Acceptance Level vast hordes of things: for oneself, for others, and others for others. Large masses of others for large masses of others mocking up large masses of the desired thing is very good processing.