We have talked and written a great deal on the subject of havingness ever since the days of the research in 1952 and 1953 which led up to the codification of SCIENTOLOGY: 8-8008, which was the anatomy of universes. It would seem that this point could be overstressed. Perhaps we could say more than needs to be said about havingness. Yet no matter how many reams we have written and how many hours we have talked about this thing, we probably haven’t even scratched, not even scratched the subject of havingness.

Everything that has ever been said about Creative Processing and about problems and solutions and about perception and spacation and about the “Black Five” has been on this subject.

First and foremost, HAVINGNESS IS THE POSTULATE THAT ONE MUST COMMUNICATE versus THE POSTULATE THAT ONE MUST COMMUNICATE TO SOMETHING.

You can see at once that this poses a cross-postulate. These two musts are not the same must. They are cross-purposes.

If one has nothing to communicate TO, all he can do is communicate THROUGH. He would have the condition of endless space with nothing stopping the communication all the way.

Now I want to call your attention to a little sport that is carried on in one part of the world. It used to be a Greek sport, then was transferred to Spain and Mexico. They got a bull, who was crazy enough to pick up a mock-up in that general neighborhood, and they get him in there and have him run at a cape. He runs at the cape, he goes through the cape and he runs at the cape and he goes through the cape. And you just watch this bull’s MORALE deteriorate!

Then they take some old horse that is padded with blankets (the padding is never thick enough — Spanish thirst for blood) and they let the bull finally charge and push at the horse. Usually the bull gets the horse and the picador over between the fence and himself. The fence is nice and solid. The bull starts to really go to town.

You can see his morale go up, up, up, up, up, up.

In fact he would practically be a well bull if he could find that horse and that fence solid enough. Well, as gory as the spectacle may or may not be, the point of the matter is that while the bull is working on this the picador leans on him very heavily into the hump with a big fork and discourages him from finding something solid and from pushing that hard. And by the time they get him out there again charging at this cape (never a man — he never hits a man, he never hits a horse — he just hits this red cape) and he finds again nothing there, he’s done. Without being really hurt (he’s just sore and he’s lost a small amount of blood) he just loses his nerve. He finally stands there in terror, and then he sinks into apathy, and he gets to such a point that the matador can walk over and fixate him. A good matador (once in a blue moon you see a good matador) will simply fix the bull into any position. He could probably stand him up in the air if he wanted to, because the bull is in a state of shock. He is hypnotized. He believes that there is nothing solid anywhere, and that no matter how hard he charges he will hit nothing. He’s gone. If they simply kept him pushing at the red cape a little longer he would probably fall over dead anyhow. They wouldn’t have to use a sword.

Now, the physical aspect of a bullfight and the aspect of a thetan in the physical universe are not too wide apart, not too different, since the trick in both is to get them to charge at nothing: To get a bull to charge at a cape where he thinks there is something and to have him find out that there is nothing behind the red of the cape; to get a thetan, a living being, to move toward or put out a communication toward something and to then convince him that there is nothing there after all.

And then the trick is to convince them that there is nothing they can charge, until at last they do not believe that they can touch or lean on anything. A thetan then has a feeling that if he did utter a communication he would only spend what mass he had, because the communication would just go on out there forever and endlessly.

No longer to be able to touch anything, no longer anything real.

Now, these two counter-postulates. If an individual supposes that he should communicate and if his joy and game and desire is communication (and it has to have that game postulate) and if at the same time there is nothing with which he can communicate — no terminal — he has the vista of endless space.

HIS COMMUNICATION ITSELF IS MAKING THE SPACE AND THEN THERE IS NOTHING TO STOP HIS COMMUNICATION, so there is no end to it, and it makes him feel very weak indeed. He just shoots the roll, you might say, any time he says anything, because it never arrives anywhere. No termination and no terminal.

So he eventually does this interesting thing — he says something into a mass which HE HIMSELF PUTS THERE in order to have something to say something to.

Now — however we want to classify this — whatever conditions or significances we wish to place upon this action — it nevertheless follows that this aspect of man fighting himself is man merely trying to reassure himself that there will be something there to hit with his communication.

Whenever you could say to someone that the only trouble he is having with himself is his fighting himself and putting up barriers to himself, you can also understand that this is what he is doing and why he is doing it. You don’t have to classify any further.

An individual goes along putting up barriers and masses and pictures, so that, in case there is nothing there to receive his communication, he can reassure himself that there is something there after all, because he put it there and then found it. He runs into his own barriers, his own terminals.

A thetan doesn’t like the idea (and this not liking is again only a consideration) of speaking into a vast and endless nothingness, so what he does is to accumulate his own terminals.

And so we get the phenomenon here of an individual constructing a universe perforce because he cannot have the universe in which he finds himself — the physical universe.

Now a thetan IS capable of constructing totally a universe himself. The cycle is something like this: He builds a universe of one kind or another himself. Then he by agreement finds himself involved in a larger universe. To a marked degree he simply invests the universe, which he has himself created, into this larger universe. Sometimes he doesn’t like it, sometimes he does. But he then finds himself cojoining and existing with and in the physical universe.

And now, the physical universe does not offer him a sufficient number of terminals, terminals sufficient in number and magnitude to the potential volume of communication of which he is capable.

He then begins to manufacture his private universe all over again.

Now, it is very important for you to understand that the “universes” that people are packing around with them when they come in to you as a preclear are usually SECONDARY UNIVERSES. They have come into being because the individual has found an insufficiency of universe in the physical universe.

It IS quite interesting that anybody could find an insufficiency of universe in a universe that is so capable of solidity as the physical universe. That is one of the madder things that do happen.

It is done by disenfranchising the individual. He is told and persuaded that he cannot address, cannot touch, cannot reach (and we interpret it as cannot have) a terminal. Reach, touch, address, have, whatever you want to call it. The terminal cannot exist for him. That’s all it means.

And so he stops talking to it, because it doesn’t exist. An interesting opinion that someone could get into — that the wall doesn’t exist — because it happens to be the truth of the matter. It’s very easy, then, for him to fall into that one, because the wall is considerated.

The wall exists and is there only because someone considered it was there. When one no longer considers a wall to be there it is not there. Thus if one is FORCED into having no wall (or disenfranchised of the wall), he can nevertheless have the opinion that there is no wall, and it will be true.

We find him forced into truth. I’ve said before that the probable summary of aberration all up and down the track is that an individual is forced into truth and AWAY from a game. As long as one can ably create EVEN AS LOW A LEVEL AS LIE, or slightly less low level, a problem, he can still have a game.

But when he’s no longer able to create, no longer able to put anything there, there isn’t anything there.

He comes upon the truth of the matter.

There are at least several routes for coming upon the truth of something, and of these routes the least practicable for the individual is through subjection by force to a truth. Nevertheless, the truth of something, even when arrived at by the route of subjection and force, will as-is the something and cause its vanishment, and thus it is no longer had. This is called by auditors the depletion of havingness. One is made to admit that what he conceives to be there is what is there and it vanishes for him. This is not such a great oddity, since the individual never intended himself to be the receipt point for what he has caused, and when his intention is overthrown in this matter, and he does become receipt point, or termination point, for this, the thing is terminated, and so, of course, it vanishes.

And so you get a destruction of the terminals which you normally would have or utilize or a destruction of the spaces which you would utilize.

Mothers work on this rather hard — fathers, schoolteachers and so forth. “You must tell the truth.” And then, they wonder whether there is anything anywhere around that will explain the fact that a child ceases to be creative and imaginative after he’s been around for a while.

They must conceive that there is something dreadfully, dreadfully destructive in this child’s lying. A person who would conceive the imaginative impulses of a child to be lies and therefore bad is in an interesting condition himself. He is in the interesting state of conviction that there isn’t anything there anyhow, and there had better not be anything there anyway.

Let me call to your attention again the manifestation of a child who goes to his parent and asks for a nickel. He goes through the various levels of the tone scale and he slides on down and finally tells his Pa, when he hits bottom, even if his Pa holds out the nickel to him that he doesn’t want the nickel and he just wanders off in apathy.

That child could get into the position where he HAS TO make nothing of every nickel that he comes across. Take a rich father denying a child pennies. It’s an interesting and well-known fact that the rich man’s son is usually more aberrated on the subject of havingness than the other kids. He is continually told that he can have everything, and all kinds of things are actually forced on him in some fashion. But his power of choice, especially where money is concerned, is overthrown and overridden, and he finally comes into the conviction that there isn’t any money anyway. And the old man’s fortune falls finally into his hands and SWISH — it’s gone.

You take just about any rich man’s son and audit him and you will normally discover that he cannot have money. Money is something that if it came into his vision he’d have to make nothing of it at once. The various enforcements that have been put upon him because of the importance of the amount of money in his family have at last turned him around into an inhibition of having money. This is a fascinating thing.

Now let us leave such a relatively interesting subject as money for the relatively uninteresting subject of a wall, and we find that the same thing applies to a wall. A wall or an object or anything that is solid. A child says, “I just shot a giraffe out in the yard, Mama.” His mother is in pretty good condition, and she says, “You did? Well now you make sure you bury it.”

Or, Mama’s not in so very good shape, and is pretty well done in on the subject of havingness, and she knows there’s no giraffe in the backyard, of course not. “Johnny,” she says, “you really didn’t see a giraffe in the backyard now did you. Now tell me. You realize you break my heart with these lies.”

This is a standard happenstance to mock-ups in children.

I have had as a writer some of the damedest things told to me about purely imaginative sequences in stories of mine. I have had people turn around to me and tell me from time to time, about something in a story, “That didn’t really happen, you know.” Well, of course it didn’t. There wasn’t a word of truth in the whole sequence. They get very upset about it. They cannot differentiate quickly and accurately enough between the creative and the truth of the matter. And so they are on such an interestingly unbalanced pivot with regards to walls, etc., that if you started to create a new wall, you see, with a lie or something of the sort, they would know not only that THIS wall doesn’t really exist (it would be a pretty thin thing to them) but they know also that YOUR wall had better NOT exist! And you’re trying to give them a wall!

I wrote a story one time called “Beyond The Black Nebula.” Well, I don’t know whether there’s anything on the other side of the black nebula — I never looked — but WOW! People got upset about that story. I posed the fact that there is in Orion a tremendous barrier — a black barrier across this particular galaxy. And I made people look at this fact and then dreamed up some causations behind it and so forth.

Probably this barrier, as they read the story, was threatening to get actual and thick. And they were saying, “Well, maybe there is this barrier.”

“You shouldn’t do this to us, Ron.” That kind of a reaction.

Well here is a point. The person who COULD have a wall didn’t care how many black barriers were manufactured. The person who could have something accepted a new manufactured wall in the spirit in which it was given. The spirit of game. But when a person could no longer have, he could no longer accept anything offered to him. A very interesting thing. I imagine there are a great many girls who, if you walked up to them and handed them a pearl necklace, would have to assure themselves that it was a phoney or something of the sort, or that it was worthless for some reason. They’d probably take it down at once to have it assayed just to be sure, and if they were told that it was a real pearl necklace they’d be quite upset about it. You could probably spin them in and ruin their whole lives by giving them a pearl necklace.

One of the ways people make nothing of things is to misintend them. So that, you could come back the next week, perhaps, and find that she’s using the necklace to decorate a cake.

You find this among savage tribes particularly. On a high-toned basis people would be doing this to make something persist. On a low-toned basis they would be simply trying to get rid of it by saying it doesn’t exist or isn’t the way it is. So you get one manifestation meaning two different things, relative to where the person is situated as to havingness. Can have and can’t have.

This whole subject of havingness, while it embraces all of existence and all of experience, boils down to two things: communication and terminals.

And there is a great oddity about the whole thing. Any time you as an auditor had difficulty with the problem of havingness with a preclear, or had any difficulty with the problem of the preclear, that’s because you departed from this rather strange maxim: THERE CAN’T BE ENOUGH HAVINGNESS.

You see? You never get a superabundance of terminals. The other day I saw Helen of Troy (the movie!). You hear the Greeks outside the walls. Now, you’d say they would be resenting those walls badly. In other words, they were trying to NOT HAVE those walls, so that they COULD have the spoils of Troy. Fine. There’s a certain greed there. They want the spoils inside the walls. They can’t have those. The walls say they can’t have the spoils.

The funny part of the whole thing is that the reason they couldn’t have them is: they couldn’t have the walls!

You can develop almost any situation in life and resolve it on that basis.

If you’re trying to get over a barrier to gain something else, then it’s a cinch you can’t have the barrier.

If you can come into possession of the barrier you come into possession also of what it is a barrier to.

The only reason a person can get trapped is that he can’t have traps. And the only reason he goes out and GETS himself trapped is because he CANNOT BE TRAPPED. It’s really quite interesting.

Now, if you really have all the walls and barriers of the physical universe, they pose no problem to you. Here is the situation in which we get the total vanishment of things — you start owning something properly (addressing the truth of the ownership) and it doesn’t exist any more. There is a difference here between the two kinds of operations you can undertake about having and owning. You find that HAVE is maybe a MISOWNERSHIP. So here are two systems: own and have, or own and misown.

In order to have a problem, in order to have a game, we have to select out some of the walls and barriers as unhavable. And then you can have a problem in connection with some OTHER havingness.

If you do not have methods of acquisition, there is really no acquisition possible. There would be a total acquisition. If you had a total acquisition you would own everything there is. The way to own everything there is is simply to own everything there is without any system of owning everything there is.

The trouble with owning everything without using any system for owning everything is that it is much too true, and being true, does not make a persistence, so that, by owning everything there is you end up having nothing.

The two postulates which when counterposed bring about havingness are: communicate and communicate to something. This brings about some problems which are very odd: “I must communicate and there must be a barrier to communicate to, but of course a barrier is antipathetic to communication. No, a barrier is necessary to communication, no, a barrier is antipathetic to communication. No, a barrier is necessary to communication because a communication must stop somewhere.”

Well, therefore, life well played would be a game of commenting in the proper direction toward the right barriers, and not trying to go through the wrong ones. But you could get into some interesting problems if you tried to leave this room through that wall and take your body with you. That would be an interesting problem. That would throw someone into apathy.

But the funny part of it is that it wouldn’t throw him into apathy anywhere as fast as simply being able to go through that wall and take his body with him. That would upset him. I guarantee you, that would upset him.

No barriers. Nothing stops anything anywhere.

Now, let us have a look at the remedy of havingness in the light of STOPS.

In Dianetics we have the “command phrase.” Command phrases come down to just three things: start, change or stop.

But the whole subject of the engram is the subject of “can’t have.” A moment of pain or unconsciousness is a moment of can’t have. If, at a certain moment, an individual couldn’t have the environment, couldn’t have the circumstances he was undergoing, violently couldn’t have these things, then it is a certainty that he’ll pile up an engram right at that spot in time. That’s what he’ll have — an engram.

Let’s see how that would be. He resists the environment to such a degree and considers it so foreign, so solid and so dangerous, that he makes something very much like a plaster cast of that moment, a kind of energy plaster cast of the environment. Thus a facsimile. This thing is far more durable than any cast of stone or plaster.

This tells us something very important. The VISIBLE engrams were those of LOSS. Those things in the environment that the individual couldn’t have, he resisted.

There is a very peculiar thing about these facsimiles, these can’t-have pictures. They’re backwards. They are usually black backed. The energy pushed upon these things is black energy. It’s just as if one had a lot of pictures turned face to the wall. That’s the blackness of lots of cases, and the reason why blackness succeeds a lot of pictures.

Handling the environment with energy and then with heavy energy goes down a certain road. There is a thing called a tensor beam. A thetan can do something that a physicist has not yet learned to do with energy. He can make a beam grab something. That’s a tractor beam.

Have you been talked to lately by someone who didn’t really have anything to say, but kept on talking? It seems sometimes as though he had a tensor beam around your neck and he’s holding you there, and you can’t leave.

The electronic structure of a pretty girl who’s just walked down the street is a very interesting thing to behold. Every guy she’s passed has put a tensor beam over her head.

Well, that’s “MUSTN’T LET THAT TERMINAL GO ANY FURTHER AWAY.” That’s the motto of that beam.

So the individual can have and then he can lose. He decides he can lose, and if he feels he is going to lose any part of his environment, he will hook a beam over it and he’ll hold it there in front of him. If you take a facsimile apart very carefully, aside from simply mocked-up or copied facsimiles, you’ll see that it is cross-sectionalized as a tractor beam. He’s trying to hold something from leaving him.

He is unable to retain to him the actual object. He makes a picture of the object that he can look at straight. He’ll say, “Oh, I don’t like these pictures. They bother me. Take a few away from me,” etc.

Below that level he goes into blackness, which is simply pressing on things to push them away. He’s in that frame of mind about things. Anyone’s got some blackness. It isn’t true that some cases are black and some are not.

When it turns up on a preclear you are auditing on remedy of havingness, you can have him mock up some blackness and shove it in.

So we get engrams of resistance and the engrams of resistance are black.

And we get engrams of Mustn’t Go Away, and they’re pictures.

And an individual who can’t have the physical universe can’t have anything leaving him because he can’t have anything else, you see. He at least retains a picture. And there is how he builds up his secondary universe. It isn’t really his universe. It’s pictures of the physical universe which he retains in lieu of.

Now, an individual only gets into a frantic frame of mind about things leaving him if he can’t have anything else.

He’s talking to his friend, and they have been very good friends for a long time, and his friend says, “I’m going to Galway now, and I’ll be up there for a couple of years.” And he feels terrible about it. He tries to persuade him not to go. He can’t tolerate all that distance between himself and his friend. Friends are scarce.

Another fellow has lots of friends. One of them says, “I’m going to Galway.” He says, “O. K. , fine. I’ll be up to see you sometime pretty soon.”

That says he can tolerate that distance and this Galway business doesn’t much reduce his havingness. He’d be in good shape — easy to get along with.

It’s not so easy to get along with someone that you are the only one to.

All right now, as we look over the general situation in regard to havingness, we find that the scale declines from having one’s own universe exclusively, to: cooperating with a universe, which is the physical universe, and then we run out of havingness of the physical universe and we get into a point of a little anxiety. We might lose parts of it. And from that we pass into: we’re liable to acquire some of it. We get a flip from must have to resist parts of the physical universe and from there we go on to: total not have.

That is a disenfranchisement of the individual. The story of processing in Scientology is the story of the reversal of that disenfranchisement.

If all the people in the world were suddenly to have no use for any pay, goods or commodities, there would not be the game. They would not be regulatable in any way. If they decided that everything was theirs anyway, and that they didn’t need anything, there would not be this game. That would be too high a level of game for a game to be in progress.

Now, nobody pretends that anybody is going to get up to that level of game. The funny part of it is, however, that as they get up toward that level of game, they go back toward not-action on the game, only they play the game now efficiently and they play it as a game, not as a dead-serious horror that they have to face somehow. That’s the difference.

All right, now — you ask this question — are you enjoying life? In other words — is life a game to you? You would ask at the same time, “By any chance, are you in the band of havingness below owning everything there is, and above having to make nothing of everything there is?” Are you by any chance in that band? Or, are you enjoying life? These are the same questions. No difference, except that one fellow wouldn’t be in the universe. He wouldn’t be there so hypothetically to ask. But the guy who can’t have anything is there to get. He is certainly there. He’s stuck.

Now, let’s look at this thing called stuck. The old engram. We used to have holders, groupers, denyers, etc. These are embryonic barriers. These are barriers aborning, you might say. The statement or postulate to stop. And the individual who gets an anxiety about havingness begins to accumulate out of his manufactured bank all of the stops and begins to hold them near him so that he will have barriers that can receive something and he won’t get into the condition of the bull. Almost unknowingly he does this. So that there will be something there with which a game can be played. And thereby and therefore he forms a false wall in a secondary universe.

The primary universe is the physical universe, as far as he’s concerned in the state he is in. There is an earlier universe, which is his own universe, and which has walls and barriers, too. But, for our processing purposes, we’re talking about this primary universe, the physical universe. We’re talking of the reactive mind, the facsimiles, engrams, energy pictures, as a secondary universe which is formed by reason of not being able to have the physical universe. And that’s how the reactive mind gets born and where it comes from.

Very often you have to get the preclear over the hump on the subject of havingness on his reactive mind. These secondary universes could just as well be called reactive universes. With creative processes, mock-up processes, we can handle this reactive bank havingness. You understand that this is not the preclear’s Own Universe.

These extend at once to a higher echelon — the physical universe. So then, you remedy his havingness totally on the physical universe and get him to have everything in the physical universe — no longer with mock-ups. You just have him look around at things and find out what he can have. When you have him totally remedy this subject, he is then in a position to create a home universe — a universe of his own.

There you have the graduated scale — it goes from REACTIVE to PHYSICAL to HOME UNIVERSE.

How far can you go with havingness? You could separate somebody out of this universe simply on havingness alone.

First, he’d have to be able to have his reactive bank. Then he’d have to be able to have the physical universe. Then he’d have to know that he could create something else.

This game of havingness is absolutely necessary to auditing.

Apparently, to many people, havingness means barriers and barriers mean lack of freedom. But to you, an auditor, barriers should mean a game. And you should know that an absence of barriers is the trouble with a preclear when a preclear is having trouble. HE JUST DOESN’T HAVE ENOUGH BARRIERS.

Now, when a preclear’s got a cold, that doesn’t mean that you are going to tell him he hasn’t got enough colds. It somehow wouldn’t communicate. But there it is-the preclear HASN’T got enough colds. Preclear has migraine headaches — hasn’t got enough migraine headaches. Whatever it is, whatever the condition is, something has gotten scarce, and the next step after getting scarce is, for it to get valuable. The mechanism of something getting valuable — it first must get scarce.

After becoming scarce a thing becomes very, very valuable; and then it becomes so valuable