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ENGLISH DOCS FOR THIS DATE- Ability to Accept Direction (2ACC-63) - L531221A
- Knowingness and Certainty (2ACC-64) - L531221B

CONTENTS Ability to Accept Direction

Ability to Accept Direction

A lecture given on 21 December 1953

December 21st, the first lecture of the day. Today we are going to go into some material here with regard to auditing and the use of SOP 8 -C.

First thing we're going to examine is directional matters, such as accepting direction. Now, accepting direction is, of course, receiving orders; which is, of course, having postulates which must be obeyed or having postulates which one might or might not obey.

A preclear is as good as he can make a postulate and execute it or have it come about. Now, he's as good as he can make a postulate come true and he's no better than that, and he never will be any better than that. He says, "It's going to be green," and it turns green. Now, that's that.

Now, a preclear who can't put a mock-up out there and say, "It's now going to be green," and have it turn green, is having difficulty with directional control from this standpoint: He starts to resist orders. And from resisting orders, he of course deteriorates into resisting his own orders. His self-determinism, then, is put up, as such, to resist the self-determinism of others — which is other-determinism — and to keep it from encroaching upon him.

If you could envision a preclear as standing there with his own self-determinism as an arrow which he is ready to shoot in any particular direction, and he has a free choice of directions, and then if you will envision another person coming up with an arrow with which he's going to shoot the preclear, we'll find both arrows classify — one for one person, one for the other person — both arrows classify as self-determinism.

But now supposing our first person there is going to use his arrow to prevent the second person who came up from shooting. Now, it doesn't matter whether this arrow is going to be shot at the first person or shot at game the first person was going to shoot or simply shot away and wasted, if the arrow or the threat of the arrow is going to be used to deter the flight of the second person's arrow, and if we're calling these arrows self-determinism, we'll see that a person is employing his self-determinism to interfere with or resist the use of somebody else's self-determinism.

Now let's put this in terms of flow. Here's an individual, he has some flow, which we will call self-determinism. Another individual comes up and he has some flow which for him is self-determinism. Well, for each one of these individuals, the other's flow is other-determinism. And so they decide to use their flows cooperatively and so overcome some obstacle — no conflict. Actually, they can take orders from each other with great ease and without being even slightly aberrated.

But now they turn around and begin to use these flows against, each, the other flow, and of course you'll find out that it will lock up and fix. The main thing that will fix is that there will be an exact point of meeting of the two flows. And if one is concentrating all of his self-determinism in one direction only and fixing it in that direction only, he is then unwilling to unfix it since he feels he would be overcome by the other-determinism he's holding back, and so does not free his own self-determinism at that spot. And not having freed it at this spot is, of course, to some degree, left without the benefit of this flow we were calling self-determinism. Now, this doesn't happen until he begins to use his self-determinism to overcome somebody else's self-determinism.

Now let's take the mest universe as a unit which overcomes self-determinism. We find out the individual. . . Let's see self-determinism in terms of a flow again — a stream of water or something on the sort — if the individual turns a fire hose against a building, he fully intends that fire hose, however, to go right on through the building and out the other side. And lo and behold, it doesn't — it hits the front of the building and stops right there; so we have a limited distance.

Now, the next thing that happens is that he is liable to decide that the best thing to do is to turn on more water with the fire hose, so as to blow down this barricade which is facing him with this fire hose. And he dedicates his action to ridding himself of the wall which is stopping him from using his fire hose as he wanted. The fire he was trying to put out or something of this sort, was eight blocks away, but the stream of water had to go through a building before it got there. So he just stands there and tries to go through the wall. Now, that would be stupid. You'd say the best thing to do is just go over to where the fire is, eight blocks away, and put it out. But individuals don't do that. They find a wall interposing between themselves and their goal and they decide they'll devote all their time to the wall.

This is a failure in terms of End of Cycle and is in itself End of Cycle. The individual does not accomplish with his self-determinism what he has intended to accomplish with it, and so fails to reach a goal.

Now, there's a first goal on the track that an individual turned aside from. And that first goal, of course — that's the most aberrative cycle on the track. It's the first unfinished cycle on the track. And it was at that time when the individual set out to do something, decided to use energy, power or space — whatever he was going to use — and discovered there was an obstacle in his path, and out of his own self-determinism simply stopped going toward the goal he had first chosen and without altering that postulate or without saying he wasn't going toward that goal anymore, turned aside to batter down an obstacle he thought was interfering with his attainment of that goal. And then devoted all of his time to the obstacle, and the obstacle itself became the end-all of existence. See, then he spent all of his time on the obstacle. And his life from that point there on, all down through the spirals, is a consistency in terms of that.

He decides he's going to go toward a certain goal and then he discovers there are a lot of interposing obstacles. He takes his self-determinism and crunches it in against the first obstacle and tries to get rid of it so that he can get to his goal. And maybe he succeeds, that's all right. And he goes to the next one, and crunches against it.

An individual going — the shortest line is that line between two points, so the individual who decides he's just going to go through these obstacles will occasionally find himself standing up in front of an obstacle and just chewing away at it endlessly until he forgets where he's going; and after that, he just chews away at the obstacle. Any preclear who sits down in an auditing chair is chewing away against an obstacle he at one time or another decided to clear away so that he could reach a goal. Hence the efficacy of End of Cycle Processing.

In End of Cycle Processing you merely keep mocking up a finished, completed task — a goal. You mock him up dead, life completed, and so on, up to a point where he's attained that goal. Life in itself is a sort of a battering ram against obstacles. It's only when the individual drops away from his original and basic purpose and begins to fight those things which were merely interposed, and then makes it an end of all existence simply to fight that obstacle or those obstacles, that we get an aberrated condition.

Now, here is an individual who is using his directional control, his own self-determinism, his commands, you might say, his ability to make postulates (these are all the same thing, you understand — directional control, ability to make postulates, self-determinism), he's using that now to clear away an obstacle from a path which he has forgotten.

Always, in any track, you will find this taking place: that the individual is not fighting the goal toward which he is originally dedicated; he's fighting some sub-sub-subobstacle. Well, he's fighting these obstacles to a point where he thinks he has mental obstacles. And, of course, the only kind of an obstacle there would be, really, would be a mental obstacle, but he has his mind confused with a system of walls, and he begins to believe himself entirely hemmed in.

That's because he's used his self-determinism to batter against obstacles that he might well have passed around or just gone through. It's very amazing. You get some preclear out of his head and you send him up around the Moon — there are about thirty thousand meteorites a day land on the Moon up there, so there's always a plentiful supply of them flying through the air — and you tell him to find a meteorite and get in front of it and move along in front of it so that it won't hit him. And oh, even his body in the chair and even his beingness — you could just feel the awful strain of trying to keep ahead of this meteorite.

And well, that's fine up to the point where you tell him — he goes on a strain right up to the point where you tell him — "All right, now just pass through it and be behind it." And he smiles or giggles, he feels silly. And, of course, there is no obstacle there for him. There's an obstacle there. Anybody could find that as an obstacle, but it's no obstacle for him. He just passes through it and he's on the other side of it. And you tell him to follow the meteorite for a while and he's very amused about this. He can do this with great ease, but it's something that doesn't occur to him in a moment of stress.

What I'm showing you there — you say, "Be in front of that meteor now." He's in front of the meteor and he's scared stiff of it. The thing starts coming in — he's got to ride just a few feet ahead of this plunging thing through space, and he knows that he'd just be knocked to pieces if he ever let up. Why does he know this? Well, let's look at communication. It's because when he forced self-determinism against walls and barriers, they blew up, didn't they? Very often they blew up. Well, on a communication line, if he has done this many times, of course, he expects it to happen to him. And yet you have him out of his head and, of course, he doesn't have any mass, and so you just tell him to pass through it.

Well, the first thing he learns from that is that he doesn't have any mass. But the point that is most important is it shows him that he doesn't have to worry any further about those overt act — motivator sequences against the mest universe and against a lot of things, because he can be the effect. He is not damageable.

Well, an individual forgets this and he begins to fight these obstacles, like the preclear fights the front of the meteor. And he fights obstacles, and he puts sweat and strain into it — he, a thetan, actually starts putting sweat and strain into stopping an obstacle and — or battering one down that's in his path and so on. And he forgets — let's say he went out to rescue a beautiful damsel who was in the upper part of a castle. And he got down to the lower door of the castle and he found out that door was really battened down; he couldn't anywhere enter that door. And instead of just flipping out of whatever he was using for a body and flipping up into the upper category of the castle, up — part of the keep — and simply making the girl walk down the stairs and open the door (which is locked from within, probably), why, instead of doing that, he stands there and hammers and pounds at the door, you see, and bang, bang.

And you know, he'll do that — this is a real silly one but it's true, a thetan will do that — he will do that until he forgets that he was doing it in order to rescue a girl. He can't get in and he'll get to a point where he considers that doors are to be battered. That's finally what he has learned. In other words, the mest universe has taught him this. Well, he's permitted himself to be taught. It's only because he forgot the end goal.

Well, I have just made that terribly exaggerated. I doubt very many thetans would for — would turn aside from rescuing a beautiful damsel. But they very often will turn aside from something which doesn't have the same aesthetic drive, and they don't have quite the same lure at the goal line. And they'll just stand there and batter obstacles, and after that the end-all of existence is to batter obstacles. And then finally, because they've battered enough obstacles — on communication, you see, a fellow slips around and becomes the effect of his own communication — they think the end-all of existence is to resist being battered. That's the best they can do — resist being battered.

Now, you say to the fellow, "Be two feet back of your head." He can't do that. Why? He is something which must resist being battered. Well, how did he get that way? Well, he got that way by overt acts against the mest universe and he has no motivators unless he himself is something that has to resist being battered. mest universe resists being battered if you decide that you're going to go on the wavelength which will be able to batter it.

Well, there's the way — that's the way a thetan gets into this situation of self-determinism-other-determinism. Well, battering a wall is about the same as resisting other-direction.

Now, here's the wall standing there and the wall says, "You go elsewhere."

Well, the guy says, "No! I'm going to go through you."

And the wall says, "You go elsewhere." Any wall is just saying that to you: "I'm not — I'm going to resist all effects. You're not going to have any effect on me, effect on me, effect on me."

That's what the wall's for. That's what it was built for. I mean, that's — everything in its beingness has to do with just that. It's going to resist all effects and the fellow has to go elsewhere. And it's telling him that. It's saying, "Beat it. Use the door. Do anything, but don't try to batter me."

And the fellow after a while — overt act-motivator — he goes away, and he didn't go through the wall, you see. He decided to batter his way through the wall instead of move through the wall. And he goes away someplace and he says, "Well, don't you try to batter your way through me. 'This great rock from its base shall fly as soon as I.' " (Lady of the Lake)

We have a situation where a fellow's going to "hold this line in spite of anything that happens." What's he holding the line for? Well, probably there's some havingness behind him which he is trying to protect. He — there's a havingness there. Well, he thinks he can't duplicate the havingness and he knows he can't have any more, and it's all scarce, and the drama is real good, so he stands there and holds this line. Well, to a point where it drives a person into an aberration where he thereafter will hold all the time, this thing is idiocy — strictly idiocy.

Well, let's take — you know there was a very single-minded general once. Probably the only single-minded general who ever had a mind that you really could call a mind, was a fellow by the name of Alexander — Iskander of the Two Horns. In India today they still frighten their babies to sleep by saying Iskander of the Two Horns will get them. And they still remember him, and that's 300-and-something b.c. that he took a slight excursion over into India.

Well, it wasn't because he was so horrible, it was just because — he was a very beautiful young man — and it was just because he was so single-minded. And the laws of war of that time insisted that you put up two lines of men who then resisted each other. This did not fit with Alexander's frame of reference. The Germans say, "Alexander was no strategist." They frown on this whole thing. He just kept winning every battle he was ever in, you see. We find lots of strategy, but they don't call it strategy unless there's two lines of men resisting each other, and that is the definition of war and "we must fight by the definitions."

Iskander had his single-mindedness crop up many times, and he had the idea that the war was being fought between the opposing ruler and himself — this he had figured out. And he had a group of cavalry known as the companion cavalry and these people had the greatest mortality rate of anybody in the army. But Alexander would look around and he'd line his men up and he'd go through all this nonsense and rigamaroles, and he had a lot of good generals and so he had them all line up the men and get them resisting other men and so on.

All he was interested in is where's that king? "Where — where is he? Where is he? Where is he? Oh, there he is! Let's go!" See? And he'd swam-bam, lance-point straight through the enemy line, straight through the bodyguards of the king, and straight through to the king. And that was, of course, the end of the war. You see? He was a single-minded young man. He didn't believe in this barrier problem. But he's been condemned ever since by military strategists because he was never a strategist, you see; he didn't — just didn't fight by the rules of war.

Well, let's get these two solutions. It's an interesting fairy tale, but there's also something there for a thetan to look at: The place to be when you're engaged with a directed force is behind the directing force of the obstacles which confront you, and have him move them! This is very simple.

You know, if Alexander had really been smart, he simply would have flipped out of his head and flipped behind the head of Darius and said, "Sound retreat," and he would have had Darius's body say to the trumpeters, "Sound retreat and surrender." Then he wouldn't even have had to have bothered to clean up the battlefield. But of course that would have meant his men wouldn't have gotten the baggage and so forth, so he didn't have them do that, I guess.

But the point is that there — there's almost a perfect solution. See? I mean, it — obstacles just all melt away. Well, in any problem any individual has ever confronted, the obstacles themselves would melt away. There are no obstacles. But there's an awful lot wrong with his modus operandi in overcoming them. There's no obstacle that cannot be overcome. There are obstacles — but there is no obstacle that cannot be overcome. What is wrong there is that the individual doesn't go about overcoming them properly.

This even goes down to the point of the fellow — he has ten thousand pounds of gunpowder and all he has to do is get rid of this wall and it doesn't matter how he gets rid of it. And he's got the gunpowder there and he can blow up the wall anytime he wants to blow up the wall, but he decides the best way to do it is to train an ant army and give them a terrible appetite for the type of stone in the wall and have them chew it away.

Well, really, that's three times as sensible as most of the solutions that you'll run across in people. If you asked them what they were trying to do, they probably couldn't tell you. That's the first thing they wouldn't be able to tell you.

The first four Acts, by the way, of the Handbook for Preclears are still very good. They take up a point which this later — later techniques haven't repeated. And in the Handbook for Preclears there, you have some Acts there with regard to goals.

And I saw a preclear one time that had been audited for quite a while, and I gave her the Handbook for Preclears  — very resistive case, very resistive case — I gave her the Handbook for Preclears and told her to work out the earliest Acts. Well, actually, it's Act Two and Three that are important there. And she sat there with a pencil, and she just went into a fog. This was the first time she'd ever been confronted with the subject of what are your goals. "Three things in the past that you meant to do and didn't do" and so forth — words to that effect. It just asked her, searchingly, what she was trying to do, you know? And it asked her in such a way that she could understand this.

And she wrote there, and she got more and more dazed and then all of a sudden, the brightest lights of comprehension began to appear in her face. (I wasn't talking to her, I was sitting over at the desk writing some papers while she just sat there and did this.) And she — all of a sudden, she just started to brighten up and, why, she just remembered what she was trying to do in life. And she was spending all of her time battering away against the obstacles.

Well, in auditing, if you please, she spent all of her time simply battering away against the obstacles. But what did she pick as an obstacle in auditing?

Now, a thetan after a while gets terribly shortsighted. He should have, very early in processing, some very strong glasses — I would say about eight feet thick at least — because is he lost in terms of shortsightedness!

The first thing such a person picks up in auditing, no matter how they react, is the auditor, as an obstacle. The auditor is other-direction. And such a case sets himself simply on this basis: He makes it the end-all of existence to try not to be directed by the auditor, but to try not to be directed by the auditor to the extent that the auditor doesn't find this out. That's usual state of case. That's covert overcoming of obstacles.

Well, they overcome the obstacle of an auditor's direction either by not doing it or by doing something else or by doing it wrong, and in such a wise, getting themselves beautifully messed up.

Well, what's getting messed up there? Basically, it's the system of postulates. This person's forgotten where he's going, he doesn't know what he's doing, he doesn't have any purpose in life. The obstacles he's been confronted with are too great for him — they are unsolvable. And he figures that they were so important — they're unsolvable and he computes that they're so important that he, of course, just has to stand there on an unsolved obstacle. And that's where you'll find him on the track — on all of the unsolved obstacles.

And you'll find him as a preclear, very usually and very standardly, not doing what you're doing as an auditor. Because the first and primary barrier has to be crossed before the preclear will (quote) "work." And if that first barrier on the case is crossed by the auditor immediately at the beginning of the case — right away — you won't have any further trouble with it.

Now, we're trying to restore self-determinism, and life itself is a process of self-determinism, and low on the Tone Scale it's self-determinism — you know, rrrrrrr-rrrh! And up on the Tone Scale, it's really self-determinism.

Now, you're going to run into a lot of fellows that say, "All I — oh, all I have to do is be self-determined to be Clear? Rrrrr, rrrhh! All right, let's see, you're in my road and I'll have to knock you off, and you're in my road and I'll have to knock you — I'm self-determined! Oh, you're going to accuse me of not being self-determined, I'll show you!" Self-determinism operating amongst Homo sap. He gets up to that point very easily. He gets up to a fine 1.5 which is total obstacle. The definition of 1.5 would be just that — total obstacle.

All right, what are you trying to do with this preclear? Well, you're trying to get this preclear self-determined. You're trying to get him to a point where he'll follow his own direction, hm? He could make a postulate and make it come true. Well, he — at the time you pick him up he can't get mock-ups, he can't do this, he can't do that. He's unable to make things go away and come in and he's not able to put space amongst terminals and he can't take space out and he can't duplicate nothingness and ordinarily he's having some difficulty of some kind or another all the way along the line. And furthermore, he's in competition with the mest universe and he's losing. Well, that's because, you see, he's chosen these obstacles as things he has to resist instead of things to admire or play with or so on.

So you've got this character, he's on your hands, and the first thing he can't do is follow your direction. Why? Because any other-determinism either swamps him and just becomes his determinism in an apathy case . . . That, by the way, is the state of hypnosis — that is hypnosis: it's swamped by other-determinism so that anything the other-determinism does, says, is of course — becomes the person's own postulate.

If you want to put somebody into a deep trance, you would just make them resist to a point where anything the resistance did, stuck. And that is an engram and that is hypnosis, that's electric treatments and so on: They merely overcome all the self-determinism and plow through, so thereafter anything that anybody does or says is the self-determinism of the preclear.

Now let's look at that in terms of the dwindling spiral of self-determinism. The dwindling spiral of self-determinism is the introduction of other-determinisms. So a person is more and more other-determined up to a point of where he looks at a wall and he feels like a wall, he looks at a tree and he feels like a tree, he looks at a dog and he feels like a dog. A preclear runs an engram and he's restimulated. See? I mean this same breed of cat, all along. This "everything is an obstacle," but these obstacles are something which he doesn't resist anymore — these obstacles are something he obeys. He is a case of obedience to obstacles. Well, that's apathy.

Now, we go up there a little further along the line, in grief, and any obstacle is — has to be held against, weepily. And it's all obstacles, but they all have to be held against weepily, you know. Grief is a hold. Grief is a lower harmonic of anger, 1.5.

Now we go up just a little bit higher on the thing and we find out that obstacle is something we run away from. As soon as we see an obstacle, we flee. That's because we know we can't overcome an obstacle, you see. We have to withdraw.

Now let's take it in terms of reach and withdraw. Down in an apathy case, the fellow's been reached to a point where he's convinced he can be reached at any time. And if you ask this apathy case, "Now, look-a-here, eighteen years ago you were a member of a gang of kids. Now, today if they wanted to, could they look you up and find you just by thinking about it and ruin you?" He's liable to say yes. Why? He can be reached.

Now there's, by the way, the way you define the integrity of an individual. You — it's whether or not he can be reached. It's a colloquialism. So any obstacle reaches him, anything reaches him, and space collapses on him with great ease. I mean, he looks around and space all collapses; nothing to that. Down comes the space, crash. The second he sees an obstacle, he's it. All obstacles reach him. Well, that's apathy and in that vicinity of the band. All right.

Now, fear — the thought of an obstacle makes him weak and frightened. He is in a constant state of precipitate withdrawal. He's almost withdrawing all the time, you see? Almost. But lookit there, that's way up on the Tone Scale. The fellow actually thinks he can withdraw before he can be reached. He still has a little hope there. So there's a little hope introduced into reach and withdraw. You see, he does withdrawing — he doesn't do any reaching.

A person is covert in all of his reaching at the fear band. And I mean just reaching. When I say reaching, I mean reaching with a hand, reaching with a letter, reaching with a vehicle. He's covert about reaching. He'll start in to go to Kokokomo, you see, and he'll find a real good reason why he should stop in, in Bayville. And then that night, surreptitiously, he'll catch himself driving down to Kokokomo, you see. He tells everybody he was going to Bayville and he winds up in Kokokomo, but he really intended to go to Kokokomo. You'd be surprised! I mean, this isn't for any reason at all, rather than the tone level of the case; this is just the way he behaves. Says he's going to Bayville so that he can get to Kokokomo. And he'll play all sorts of tricks on himself this way.

Now we start up the line a little bit further and we find out that 1.5 is the fellow that can't reach and he can't withdraw and he's darn sure nobody else is going to with — reach or withdraw either. That's 1.5. Hold!

And we go up a little higher than that, we get antagonism. So we get reaching with anger because the fellow knows it's an obstacle. He knows it's an obstacle. He doesn't have to be convinced, he doesn't have to be told.

You say to this person, "Good morning."

"What's good about it!"

Why does he say this to you? Well, it's very simple; nothing to it. He just knows you're an obstacle, he knows the morning's an obstacle, he knows he'll have to reach these things. He might as well slap at them a little bit, preparatory of pushing them over.

And then we go up a little higher and we get to boredom at 2.5. And boredom is, "Well, I — what's the use of reaching it? I know it's an obstacle and it'll probably reach back," and it eddies around a little bit and they're not quite stable. And "There's not much point in trying to go toward any particular goal because, heck, there's just more of these obstacles and I can reach them all right. But you know, there's no point in it because they're just there and there's nothing much you can do about it but they're — there they are, and — why be interested?" I mean, you see, if you demonstrate that you care, somebody's going to shove another obstacle in front.

And then they run on a computation of "I don't care." You'll run into this on a case: "Well," case says, "yes, I could do this, I can do that, I can do something." And all this — they're just happy, no communication changes and so forth. And you'll find out what they're into: they don't care.

They'll do anything you say, really, and they're quite cheerful and they're in fairly good shape. They don't care. They're sort of a dish towel or something that's being pushed around or a New York society debutante or an old mop or something. They — just anyplace you sort of put them around, they stay.

Well, it's not an apathy case because they constantly communicate and chatter and reach and withdraw and so forth. There's action there, there's motion there, but it's all meaningless. And if you crowded them just a little bit, you'd know immediately they had no goal.

And that problem's first entrance, really, is in terms of goals. They come up scale — you make them recover a few goals they once had and they come up scale. End of Cycle and so forth will get them out of that real fast. Or Handbook for Preclears  — just open it up, the first few Acts of the thing, and let them do it.

That, by the way, is merely a searching investigation of this life's goals, the early steps there. And they'll all of a sudden — you've made them confront a fact. You've made them look at something, and that is the one thing which they mustn't look at. And that is that they're not going anyplace anymore. They can reach, they can withdraw — obstacles reach and other things reach and other people reach and withdraw and so forth. And all this time there's — underneath all of this "don't care" is a terrible sorrow. They don't care because they know they're in the same room all the time or they're in the same cube of space all the time; they're never going to get out of it. And they hide that from themselves by saying, "Well, I don't care. Doesn't matter if I don't get out of it. Oh, well, here today and gone tomorrow. Well, nothing to it. Might as well. What a bore. Ho-hum."

They're not bored, they're frantic. And the first thing you'll meet up with in that case, by the way, is you'll hit a higher harmonic of fear. It's not the lower harmonic of fear, it's a — there's a higher harmonic of fear. And that higher harmonic is somewhere up there — they'll sag from 2.5, which is just riding above it, to 2.2, which is the upper harmonic of fear — 2.2. And they'll just sag there, down there to 2.2.

That antagonism rises up into a higher-grade fear, and the boredom case will sink down to 2.2 before he rises up any, and he will go up there above enthusiasm. Just above enthusiasm there's another much higher harmonic of fear. The fellow says, "If we try hard, if we get in there, if we make it good, if we get these obstacles just right and if we go through, why, gee, we can have everything just fine!" And you get him up just a little bit higher than that and he realizes that there are obstacles, see? And he figures out, well, it's — momentarily, if he just gets up enough speed and enough steam, why, he's all right; but he's liable to have to withdraw, you see? But he's perfectly prepared to do that and charge again, but he — you know? That's enthusiasm. It lies just above enthusiasm. All right.

Here we go in terms of reach and withdraw, in terms of obstacles, in terms of determinism — we have to get clear up out of those bands before we get anything like freedom. And those are the basic harmonics and emotions of man. And they are listed from 0.0 to 4.0 not because they exist only from 0.0 to 4.0, but those are the compulsive levels. And from 0.0 to 4.0 what you see listed there is Homo sapiens, and he is at these points compulsively and without an understanding of why or where. He doesn't direct those emotions; he is the result. He is being an effect in that band, and that's Homo sapiens. All right.

Now, where does this lead us as an auditor? Well, we've got the problem, immediately, of the self-determinism of the preclear. He has to be able to get up to the point where his postulates stick. In other words, he has to decide, "I feel fine today," you see, and then feel fine. He has to be able to decide, "Well, let's see, I think this afternoon we'll go down and cut a record and make it real good and so forth — enjoy ourselves down at the studio. Yeah," and that afternoon be down at the studio enjoying themselves. He's got to be able to say, "Well, I guess I'd better make it all right over there in Keokuk and square that around over in Keokuk," with some assurance that he's going to go over to Keokuk and straighten it out, whatever is all wrong.

That's making a postulate stick, and that's represented with an individual when you say, "Put up a mock-up out there. Now turn it green." He puts a mock-up out and it's green. He may want to know how green, and you say, "Very green." He'll get a very green mock-up. Not because you said so, though.

But do you know that there's a level of case where you can run the mock-ups? I hate to have to throw you that one, because you're going to be sure you're looking at it much more often than you are. That's a real low case. It is a hypnotized subject. You can make him see mock-ups because you tell him to see them. And that's your hypnotized subject — mock-ups.

You say, "All right, now see the kangaroo," he'll have a kangaroo. He's just a spectator; total effect. But that fellow's in a deep hypnotic trance and that's unmistakable — his eyes are dilated and so forth. But you'll see him walk in as a case. Once in a while, you'll see him in as a case, but he's unmistakable.

What would you do? How would you detect this case? This case, you see, will (quote) "work" (unquote). He'll do everything you say — he'll do it all — with no communication changes. That's your first cue. If you were stone-blind to everything else, that would be your first cue: He never gets a communication change. He just goes on doing exactly what you say.

"All right, now," you say, "get a pink rabbit. Now turn it purple."

Well, the constant repetition of the command phrases in there would jar him sooner or later into the realization, "You know, I might be turning this purple myself." But he'd be at a level where he's — he'd be there looking at the pink rabbit that you just put in front of him and turned purple. You did it, he didn't do it. No responsibility, no responsibility, no responsibility. Well, this case is in a trance. And I'll tell you what other shapes this case is in so you won't think you're looking at him more often than you are.

He walks into the office and he stands there and waits to be told where to go in the room. And then, if he goes there and he sits down and so on, if you were to stand up and take off your coat, he would stand up probably and fumble with his. And if you were then to sit down and cross your legs, he would then probably sit down and cross his legs. Or he would be in such a stupor that he would merely sit there with his eyelids fluttering and if you were to say, "You are now a dog — bark!" he would go, "Woof, woof." And that's how bad-off that case is. Because you're going to be sure you're looking at this case when you're not. But there is that case.

Now, you can put a person into that trance artificially with drugs, you can put him into it with hypnosis itself and so forth. You can make almost anybody do that by monotonously making him combat you as an other-determinism. If you can make him consistently and continually combat you as a self-determinism, eventually everything you say to him will come true for him.

There's why commanding officers have to be beasts. They make the crew fight them, fight them, fight them, fight them, fight them. The guy's tough — fight him. After a while he said, "The sea is red today." It's red. I've even heard sailors on ships and boys in companies of men make such statements about it: "He says it's green, so it's green." Corporals are very fond of making this remark. And what he's saying to them all the time is, "You're in a state of trance, don't forget it." Now we wonder why when people come out of military services they're not quite in good condition. They had a four-year dope-off. Anyway . . . There's nothing wrong — nothing wrong with the militarism that demobilization and disbandment won't cure.

When we're looking at any command system, we're essentially looking at cause-effect. Now, what's really good condition? Is good condition resisting all effects? No, because that would result — a person who was resisting other-determinisms would of course, you see, eventually get his other — his own overcome. If he set up his own determinism as its resistance to all the deter­minisms around him, he would eventually lose his own determinism. Because he's fighting other-determinism, he will become other-determinism. And that is an inversion — call that an inversion. He's become another determinism. All right.

Is it optimum for an individual just to simply obediently and slavishly do everything he is told? No. Because he's already become other-determinism.

Well, is it optimum for an individual to obey any order? Shouldn't he just go on being completely independent and just neglect everything that's said to him and everything around and so forth, and just throw it all aside and so on? Wouldn't that be the best way? Nope.

Because he would have moved to that perilously tenable, if at all, goal — antisocial. He would have moved out. He would therefore, in order to exist on the same plane with the rest of the society, have to engage in entirely different and separate pursuits, which of course means that he would be avoiding many areas. He would be avoiding many, many, many areas, and in such a wise, would be entirely constricted, restrained — so that's not self-determinism either. You know, he goes around concentrating all the time on, "Well, we'll neglect all these orders and we'll just — so on, and we'll just leave that alone and we won't fight that, we'll look over this way and smile, all the way knowing it's over there on the right side." No, that keeps him from looking over on the right side. No.

What's an individual in real good shape? An individual in real good shape is able to take orders, give orders, work cooperatively with orders, see where they're going — even perform unreasonable orders, give unreasonable orders, watch other people perform them, so forth — as a complete interchange of self-determinism. He's perfectly willing to work in the lines or he's willing to work at a command post. He can just work anyplace. And when an individual is really free, he is able to be anything.

One of the basic drills is: "Be your body, be the space back of your body, be the room." All right.

A fellow has a somatic. You want to know how to turn a somatic off? The fastest way I know of to turn a somatic off with the least after-repercussion is simply to say to the individual, "All right, now be your body." See, he's in a body — I mean, he doesn't know anything about this — techniques or anything else. And you say, "Be your body. Now be the pain. Now be the body, be the pain. Be the body, be the pain. Be the body, be the pain." Say it slowly enough so that he can be both of them.

If he's seeing a picture and this picture's bothering him, say, "Now be yourself, now be the picture. Be yourself, now be the picture. Be yourself."

And he says, "Oh, the heck with it."

Because this is the basic of randomity. Randomity is the ratio of predicted motion to unpredicted motion; that's all randomity is. And how does this unpredicted motion come about? Well, it can be bad to have randomity or good to have randomity; that would be all in whether or not the individual was resisting these incoming motions or not, whether he could go with them or not.

Below on the Tone Scale, in the tone of apathy, you'll get the individual being entirely wishy-washy — entirely wishy-washy. He just (mumble). He can't play the role he's in. He just — other-determinisms hit him and he just goes this way and he goes that way and he goes the other way.

Well! Well, on the — up on the Tone Scale we get somebody who can play any role and continues to know he is playing a role, even though he is playing it with complete sincerity. He knows it's a game and he can enjoy the game. He can be a real good private; he can be a real good king. When he's playing the role of a private, he plays the role of a private. And when he plays the role of a king, he can play the role of a king. And if as a private, he feels that his rights are being encroached on as a private and he should do so-and-so about them, he should be able to do that with verve. And when he is a king and feels that he ought to execute — that the state expects him to execute the umpteen-bumpteen prisoners who have just been delivered, he should say, "Off with their heads! I'll have a cup of tea now."

It's when an individual takes it upon himself to be the "only one" with this postulate with it, "Ever afterwards, I'll never be anything else but the one I am." He doesn't see life as a continuing script. You see, he feels sometime or other . . . There's a great author someplace, he figures, and this great author is writing a script of which he is the effect and he can even faintly hear the patter of typewriter keys in the sky, you might say, and he's kind of scared of the script. And he knows that he'll be cast in one role and he will never be in another role. So in view of the fact that he succeeds or fails in a role, will have to do with the judgment which elects him to the new role.

Honest, really, there isn't anybody that interested in him. Where did he get this conceited? His — the total reward, his entire pay, will be the ability to play any role with verve. To be the most convincing private in the regiment — as far as dramatics — with no strain. And be perfectly willing to unbecome a private when that role seems to be running out. And with great calmness, become a general. And as a general, hate privates like mad; and as a private, hate generals like mad — and never pile up a single ridge.

Now, there you would think, "Well, gee! There's — life is not serious now. And you don't take life seriously, then you can't. . ."And the fellow won't be able to finish it because of just that: If you don't take life seriously — um-bumph. Well, if he understands that you can't unsurvive, he hasn't the brass to go on with it.

Now, is it more fun to be in a play — a production on a stage — or to work in a meat market sweeping up the floor? Now which is the most fun? Huh?

Now, would it be more fun to play the part of the disreputable janitor in the meat market on the stage or to play it down at the meat market? Now, which place would you enjoy most? Now, down in the meat market, you know, you have to make it survive and keep it standing by and go through the same motions and so on and so on and so on, and on the stage, why, the — you have an audience.

But let's just forget the audience and throw the audience out. Did you ever see a group of actors put on a play without any audience? Have you ever seen a group of actors in a rehearsal? Of course, that's the hope and expectation of audience to some degree. But do you know I have seen more darned actors sitting around enjoying themselves hugely — and by the way, these are great actors, I mean, as far as — not great in terms of total track, but certainly great here, within this little breath of the moment and the various mediums of the theater which we have.

And one of those would amaze you, because most of the people who are really good, who have their name in lights — they're really good. I mean, there isn't anything that helps success like being a success. This just is wonderful. And there's nothing helps being a success but just doing what you can do about eight times better than anybody else. That really just helps out. Not necessarily because you're in competition with other people, but just to do a good job. There's a terrific satisfaction in doing a good job — terrific. Most people get distracted from it.

But here's your individual, here is your individual — three or four actors and this one guy who is real good. They're sitting down — I've seen them do this — they're sitting down and they're reading Shakespeare. My goodness! You know, the ability to read straight off a script which you don't ever know and speak it with perfect expression, and to speak something like Shakespeare in a totally natural voice, is fantastic! It takes quite a trick to do this. An artist has to work a long time to do something like that — or he does it right away quick because he knows how — either way. And these boys — just enjoying themselves hugely.

One day this was happening and I went into the room where they'd been, and it was about ten o'clock at night. And I said, "Isn't it about time Hamlet had some coffee?" And they woke up, you know, and they said, "It's ten o'clock! Boy, we'd better get out of here. We have to be on the set tomorrow morning." Do you know, they weren't even rehearsing a part. They had no reason whatsoever — they weren't practicing, they weren't trying to make themselves any better — nothing. They were just enjoying doing exactly what they were doing. And the people that were there are big names, they're big names in lights — they're good. Well, of course, they had no great worry and pressure on them, you can say. Oh, yes they did. There's nothing quite as onerous and horrible as having your name in lights in terms of people pawing and clawing.

But here these people could do a superlative role and enjoy just being the role without any audience at all. When you can be your own best audience and when your applause is the best applause you know of, you're in good shape. And when you can play a real good role — when you can go down here and be the mule or be the general with equal verve, in the total spirit of play, and do it with terrific sincerity — you're living!

Now, here on Earth, everybody knows they can't have it, so they make it expensive and you pay for watching people to do it on the stage. But that's life. That's existence. It isn't a serious grind that we all have to take very seriously and be very, very careful about and be very careful of the obstacles and resist everything that comes up — that's existence. All right.

Your preclear will never get up there so long as he thinks he has a serious vested interest in resisting everything which happens around him. The guy doesn't even have enough presence to play the role of preclear. Now, when you've got a guy who hasn't even enough presence to play the role of preclear, after he's elected to be a preclear, or after you've started processing him, you've got a problem on your hands. But you've got the problem of all existence sitting right there in the chair. That is the problem of existence: This person is unwilling to play a role — not the role of preclear — he's unwilling to play a role.

Why? Because he has to resist all exterior direction. He has to do something else, because his life, which he has to protect, is in great danger because he accepts another order. If you were to say to him, "Put out your cigarette," he'd probably be offended and leave. You know, you've insulted him. You've given him an other-direction. Well now, that's what you're going to run into preclear after preclear after preclear after preclear.

Now, you can run into it in another fashion: This preclear is bored and doesn't care. Well, you've got Handbook for Preclears to solve that, to some degree. I would just go into it if the fellow obviously didn't care whether he could do these things or didn't do them, otherwise, and kept laughing at you and chatter­ing and, "Oh, well, it's kind of pointless anyway, and so forth. Yes, I can do that. Why am I doing this? It wouldn't do me any good. I mean, you know, it doesn't do any good."

You're dealing there with somebody who is eddying around in the middle of the most horrible obstacles they ever heard of. And they don't know it. They've even forgotten what obstacles they were fighting. Well, you better show them a few goals toward which they were headed and it'll level them out enough so that they can at least play a role.

But your first job as an auditor, whether it is by — in terms of overcoming the goals, or in terms of making it possible for this individual to do this: to discover that by following the order of another, he doesn't cave in — discovering that it is safe, that it is perfectly all right, to follow the direction of another person. And when the individual discovers this, you as an auditor can then go on and push him the rest of the way up and give him back to himself. And until he's discovered that, you won't be able to do it.

If he's just sort of onerously doing these drills because he hopes they'll make him better, you see; and if he does the drills, then he'll get better and he won't have to go on resisting all of life around him. And he's willing to just not resist quite so hard while he's sitting there in the chair just for the sake of your commands coming through, he'll tolerate your telling him to do these things — that's just about all he will tolerate — you're just going over against a problem of other-direction.

The fellow is a problem of obstacles. When you say other-direction, you mean problem in obstacles. See? Other-direction is obstacles. Anything that is an other-direction is an obstacle to him; he has to fight it or back away from it or do something about it. That's why your preclear doesn't follow your auditing commands and why they refuse to get well for you, when they refuse to get well.

Well, we're very close to a level of technique where you can just keep slugging away and the fellow will get well anyhow — he'll come out of that. Because we give him space, we show him there's no obstacles there, we demonstrate to him that he can look around, he can find places he's not. He locates himself as not facing that wall at Antietam or something of the sort — he's not there yet — he's not still there, that was a hundred years ago. And he isn't being run into by a fire truck, and a lot of things aren't happening to him we find — he finds, as he goes through this, so he gets less and less obstacles, so he gets better and better on the subject of direction. But your first job is to get him to take direction.

Now, in the past we have erroneously simplified this by calling it "in and out of communication.""The person is somewhat out of communication with the auditor. How do we get into communication with this very, very, very bad-off case?" and so forth. We've made it a problem of communication instead of a problem of postulates. So let's put it into the field of postulates and we find out it's a problem of other-direction. The individual can understand every word you say, he just simply cannot bring himself to follow through. See? He can't obey your direction. It's a problem of other-direction.

So your first problem in that case is to do just this: Make it understood to him, by directing him to various places in the room, to precise, exact spots in the room, making it very, very clear to him that he can go to those spots, that he can arrive, that he can reach those spots — you see, this is all being done at once — that he can move himself around, but most of all, that you can move him around. And when you have taught him that you can move him around without any great damage occurring to him, then you can teach him that with your direction senior, he can move himself around by sending himself places. And you can even show him that he can decide to go places and then change his mind about where he's going and go to an entirely new place, without falling apart.

You've finally shown him not only can he follow direction, but he can follow directions even wrongly and still arrive and not be damaged. He can follow directions wrongly and still not be damaged.

He's fighting madly not being wrong. He mustn't be wrong, he has to be right. And as long as he has to be right, he's fighting being wrong. So he's afraid of being wrong. So you can even solve that for him, to some degree.

And when you've done this for a case for a while, you have — well, sometimes you do this for somebody, though, that's — call that Opening Procedure. And you'd just do that, one way and the other, drill him around — have him move around the room, actually move around the room, and then have him move himself around the room under your direction — tell himself to go places and then decide to go there and arrive there. You just do that for an hour, and in an awful lot of cases, you'd find they'd start falling apart in your hands.

You've got a problem of other-direction on any case you process, and the end goal is a return to the individual of his self-determinism. Well, self-determinism means the ability to direct himself, so therefore his postulates must be rendered out of danger.

Okay.