There is hardly anybody here, if you didn't ask him to shut his eyes — just do this for a moment, I'll show you what a mirror is — shut your eyes and look around you, in front of you or down on the floor or someplace or another and see if you find a picture of your body being reflected some way or the other.

Male voice: Mm.

Find one? I asked a pc one time to break one of these things, and for about three days he was in the doldrums. I've never asked anybody to break one since. They're very hard to find — they're hard centers of explosions and things like that, made up. Guys pack them around and pack them around and pack them around. Isn't that — those mirrors curious? Find any of them? Sometimes the one on the left side is reflecting the one on the right side — the right side of the body — and the one in front of the body is reflecting the back of the body. It's a mirror maze. You expect a thetan to get into that mirror maze and go boom, see. He'll never arrive, and there's all kinds of purposes on these mirror schemes.

Like the fellow one time was moaning the fact that he'd had to run a certain facsimile and the auditor kept insisting on it. And this was a long time ago, and I wondered why he was so upset about it.

And I found out about a year later. I was chewing up some energy — trying to use a technique to chew up some energy. And I was outside and making a couple of auxiliary beams chew it up to see how it was, and finally found out as I got down to it — I suddenly remembered the piece of energy I was chewing up, I had gone around and looked for. I had looked all over the place for that facsimile. It was complete minus affinity, that piece of energy was, you see? It was about the hardest piece of energy you could possibly run into. And I'd looked for it for a long time, and I'd finally found it. And you'd say, "What would a person want of a piece of energy of that hardness, of that thickness and so forth?" Well, you use it as a wedge; you drop it on people.

You know what a guillotine blade is?

Male voice: Mm-hm.

Well, gee-whiz. A guy's gone around and gone to all this trouble, see, to get this beautiful solid piece of energy which, when sliced down on something or something, will cut it. And then you just thoughtlessly chew it all up. I all of a sudden knew what he was talking about. Not that I had ever used such a wedge on anybody, but you just keep these things around — like sometimes you look in your trunk, you'll find the .45 you had in the war or something like this — it's a sentimental attachment, totally. And some guys will collect black­jacks, and so on.

Of course, a hard energy wedge of that character has many, many uses besides that. But when you've looked all around to find the worst possible facsimile you could steal off of anybody, see, rather than go through all of the work of pumping affinity out of something for a half a dozen years or something of the sort to get a hard block of energy, and then you blow it up with Admiration Processing, just to find out if Admiration Processing works. You find out Admiration Processing works, but then you say, "Gee-whiz, where's that hard piece of energy I used to have around here?" and you suddenly realize that was it.

Of course it blew up into a big facsimile — soft, mushy and softer and mushier and softer and mushier and poom! there it went. And I'd been keeping that around in the war bag for a long time.

And I was very amused at myself for worrying about this, because I mocked one up the next day that worked just as effectively — I dropped it on a cat just to test it out, and promptly had to patch up a cat. Worked very well, very well.

This is very — an awful lot of stuff of this character that you guys will run into one way or the other in slamming around the universe and being here and being there and visiting this planet and talking with that one and chin-chinning one day with the wind gods, and you'll find this and you'll find that, and you collect this and you collect that. And my God, by the time you ask somebody to move out of his body, he gets the thought of leaving all this beautiful furniture behind and he says, "No, no. I can't get out of my head." See, his havingness would be almost destroyed.

By the way, a person gets into this kind of a situation about controlling bodies through this process — through this process. He's lost another body than his own, see? She couldn't get some man to stay or do something, or he couldn't get some girl or woman to stay with him or do something. So therefore, a marital breakup or something like that very often brings about a condition where a person begins to be anxious about controlling the body and so clamps down on it very hard, and then he's afraid of losing it because it's very scarce, because he's just been taught a lesson: He can lose a body.

And by the way, just because you have weapons — just on weapons and things like that — just because you have weapons is no reason you use weapons. And they — you don't need them, but they, again, furnish randomity. And just because a thetan has certain things he's collected — like some old Fac One suit, you know? And he'll be kicking around one day, and . . . Somebody, just for randomity under processing very often will run into some blackness or something and say, "Oh, I'm in terrible shape." They've got this old Fac One suit, and he's got this and he's got that and so on — oh, it's just bric-a-brac and stuff that he's collected for a long time and he's sort of fond of it, it's his identity to some degree, it's stuff he has. He always feels that maybe someday he'd be on a mountaintop somewhere and he'll have absolutely nothing to do — and he's really afraid that this might happen to him, that he'll get bored, and he'd better have something to amuse himself with.

So you ask him to get rid of too many things, and he starts going into doldrums. He starts getting sad on you and he starts getting upset. You have ruined his havingness, so you got to give him something. You have him snap anchor points in on himself until he makes solid pieces of energy — that's one of the brightest ways to do it. Just have him put up eight gold anchor points and snap them in on himself — not hard enough to explode, you understand — and snap eight more in, snap eight more in, eight more, eight more, eight more.

You think you — guy was making a terrific mass around himself. He isn't — he collects them. And it's a piece of energy, and he becomes happier. Right away, he becomes happier. And by the time you've processed an awful lot of things out of somebody, if you haven't put anything back in, and haven't let him create some energy, and haven't added to his havingness, he'll get upset.

So don't go on the basis that having no energy is the goal toward which you're going — that's not true. Any energy is better than no energy. Therefore, he will keep aberrative energy around rather than no energy. But he can keep straight energy and he can keep energy in various aesthetic forms. And he's always got an awful big flock of mock-ups stuck around someplace that are good and hard and solid and pretty and wild and so forth, and he isn't going to tell you about them. You'd steal them, he feels. Or the Engram Police in Universe C are still looking for him. One of those was the king's favorite mock-up. (audience laughter)

Yes, thetans have had their adventures. Very amusing. Of course, the most amusing thing at all is the game he plays with himself that he can't remember what he's been doing. That's the silliest game of all. He specializes in forgetter machines and memory machines. And by the time he's got enough forgetter machines and memory machines and prediction machines set up, why, he's bound, then, to start specializing in hiding machines. And he gets this whole bunch going and then you say, "Where were you five hundred years ago?" and the fellow draws a blank.

If you ask him real quick — that's what the flash answer was, see — you ask him real quick, you say, "All right, where were you five hundred years ago?" (snap)

Male voice: I always get "no."

Yeah, but what did you get just before you got "no"? (pause) Let's try that again. Where were you five hundred years ago?

Second male voice: I got Spain, Morocco.

Huh?

Second male voice: When you ran that on him, I got Spain.

You got Spain. Yeah, see, it'll come through before the machines can go into operation, and that's what the file clerk is. File clerk wasn't special little man, it was the guy himself saying it before he wiped himself out automatically. And that's — that was the file clerk.

[to another student] Now where were you eighty years ago? (snap)

Male voice: I got "dead."

All right. That was dead.

Where were you two hundred years ago? (snap)

Male voice: I didn't get anything.

You got nothing. Where were you two days ago? (snap)

Male voice: Here.

Right answer — he knew it, though. (audience laughter)

Okay guys.