Now, you may think I have something to talk to you about today, but this does not happen to be the case. Actually, anything I have to tell you today is completely idle chatter. Actually, there's no real reason why we should have a tape on this — but we will have one — because nothing I am saying is of any importance at all. However, I'm supposed to give a lecture between 2:00 and 3:00, and so I will stand here, give you a lecture of some sort or another. The application of the Axioms to auditing is all I'm going to talk to you about.

As you know, we have fifty Axioms in Scientology. You should know them all by heart, one to fifty. Jack said he'd much rather have people putting Axioms into effect than to have them just memorized. I am a little bit at variance with that policy. I believe that a person, in order to put them into effect, would have to have them memorized. I discover this is the case in physics, and have had the experience of having many, many advanced students in engineering school — seniors, postgrads — stumbling around with some cockeyed problem like the steam transference of something or other in a locomotive. And I've asked the guy rather sharply, "What is the conversion formula for BTU — mechanical energy of foot-pounds?"

"Well, I have a book. I can always look it up." Well, that happens to be one of the key things that underlies all conversions of energy, from mechanical energy, over. It takes so many units of mechanical energy to make so many units of heat energy, and so many units of heat energy to make so many units of mechanical energy. And the only difference between them is, is the loss of efficiency in between the two, and that is a factor.

Now, if that engineer had had his nose pushed into the book, and rubbed into the book good and hard in his freshman year or his second year of high school — is when he should have learned it — he would never have been fogging over his drawing board wondering what you did there. In the first place, any science breaks into very essential elements, and these essential elements have been isolated by experience as the common denominators of the experience to be encountered by and with that science.

The science which you are studying right now is the experience to be encountered by and with life in its action upon any universe. That's in Scientology. That's the broad scope of Scientology: It's the experience to be encountered by any life in any universe. And those are the fifty Axioms. They're quite important Axioms, and you should go over them very carefully.

Now, how about the fellow who has a communication lag when he touches the wall? Does this reduce to an Axiom?

There are four conditions of existence. I can tell you, anybody that's encountering a communication lag is doing alter-isness. There's an altering machine going on someplace because the communication was, "How are you?" or "How many chairs are in this room?" And hrmn, hrmn, he altered the question this way and he altered it that way, and if he's real bad off, what'll he do? He'll give you the answer to a different question, won't he? And he could say, "All the chairs in this room are green." Hmmmm, there's a mechanical alteration going in, isn't there? A mechanical alteration. Or he may go over into the condition of not-isness, and simply remain silent and give you no answer. He completely obliterated your question by saying it didn't exist. You follow me?

Communication lags, then, are totally made up of alter-isness and notisness. And these two conditions of existence cover anything even vaguely resembling a communication lag. Anytime somebody is experiencing a bad communication lag he's trying to say that the communication didn't exist, he's trying to press it out of existence — which is, of course, an alter-isness — or he is simply trying to alter the communication in some fashion.

If you'll examine the Chart of Human Evaluation, you will discover that people at certain positions on the Tone Scale reverse the communication or they avoid the communication, but there is some type of perversion going on with the communication line. Well, let's interpret perversion (as stated in 1950) — let's just take that word and call it alter-isness. He isn't accepting the communication as it is. If he accepted the communication as it was, it couldn't possibly bother him because it would have no persistence.

What is this fellow that you can walk up to and you can say, "The whole family thinks you're a bum. Everybody I know thinks you're a bum," and he goes away feeling like a bum? How come this could impress him? There's only one way it could at all come into his mind and make him worry. That would be by persisting after it was stated. Right? Hm?

So, your communication to him might be an invitation to alter. But his receipt of the communication is not a receipt, but an alteration of the incoming communication. He tries to hear it that there's at least some people that don't think he's a bum, you see. He tries to hear it, "He is saying this because he is mad at me." You understand that. He's giving another intention or he's doing something with the communication, and he doesn't simply receive it as a set of words. He tries to alter the communication. And his reply will probably be an alteration reply. He'll say this isn't true. He tries to alter the statement. Therefore, the statement persists. If the statement persists, it has been altered.

If there is any survival going on at all anywhere in this universe at this time, if this universe is surviving at this time, then we would know, exactly and completely, that this universe was undergoing the two conditions of alteration which are represented in isness and not-isness. Both isness and not-isness are, alike, conditions of alteration, aren't they? They express an effort to alter. You follow me?

There can be no persistence or survival, as such, when we think of a form, unless there is some kind of an effort to alter it. Time itself is simply a parade of alterations. It's the alteration of when. Snap my fingers here. Now I snap my fingers again. Now I snap my fingers again. We have three "whens," don't we? Your memory spans these things and says three finger snaps occurred. Now, if you're trying to alter the position, even vaguely, of any one of those finger snaps, you can make it occur again with no trouble.

Now, I'll give you the idea: Get the first finger snap that I snapped now, and say that I really didn't snap my fingers, I snapped my toes.

Now say there weren't three, there were five. What happened as you did that? Did you get the finger snaps?

Now just say there were three finger snaps — short time ago, one after the other.

Worry, anxiety and everything else is totally composited out of an alteration. Nobody ever worried for a moment about the facts. They only could worry if they were trying to alter the facts. And that's the first lesson you will learn out of auditing. You're Advanced Clinical Course people, and there-fore we won't expect you to be puzzled even vaguely why somebody's chronic somatic is persisting. And using this principle, we will not even ask you to inquire for a moment why you mustn't try to alter that somatic.

What'll happen if you try to alter that somatic? What'll it do? The least it'll do is persist. Right? Now, of course you can beat it to pieces one way or the other. Just because you alter the position of that chair or alter the position of a cog in a motor is no reason everything becomes unworkable.

Now, you can alter the position of a cog in a motor to destroy it or you can alter the position of a chair and make somebody fall over it and injure the chair. You can do these things, because what alteration you're performing is so junior to the tremendous alteration which is going on amongst atoms and molecules, that it becomes very overlooked. It is very minor. You are simply shifting a form, aren't you? So you could add to or subtract from the persistence of a form with fair ease, couldn't you? You could add to or subtract from the persistence of a form without upsetting the universe.

But what are these forms? These forms are already undergoing such terrific, rapid alteration, that what you do to them does not touch or hurt or detract from or add to the basic atomic and molecular structure of the form. And even though you burst that motor to pieces with a sledgehammer, you would not have altered the atomic structure of the actual elements of which the motor was composed. This right?

So therefore, changing a form is something you can get away with. You can change a form any way you want to. But where it comes to eradicating a mass of energy, there is a specific method by which it would have to be done: You'd have to as-is it — which means you'd have to make a perfect duplicate of it in its point of origin, with its mass, in the original space it occupied. And you'd get a vanishment of that form, but that's as-isness. Now, here's some-thing very tricky. We have learned something that life has never learned be-fore.

We can actually alter something by as-ising it. All you have to do is do it twice. Make a perfect duplicate of it where it is, and then make a perfect duplicate of making a perfect duplicate of it. There is, however, some tiny, tiny residue which will remain. You can see that. There's … You know, you've still got the incident of making a perfect duplicate of what you perfectly duplicated, see. And you can go on this way, cutting it down. Like going halfway to Chicago: you never get to Chicago. And you walk halfway to Chicago and then walk half of the remaining distance, then walk half of the remaining distance, and you'd never get to the Loop. You'd probably go loopy.

But we can do this weird thing. We can alter, actually, with impunity by as-ising. You follow me? You know, here we have a great big mass sitting in the middle of the floor. We merely discover the origin points of each atom and molecule in that mass and the mass isn't there anymore. Then if we as-is doing it, why, even having done it, as a mass action, would be gone.

All right. That's a peculiar, peculiar thing — that we are doing something that life hasn't ever done. See, this is something new. It really is some-thing new. It's something new to life. Because I don't know of it's doing this consciously anywhere down the track. It's a piece of know-how which is superior to the thetan.

Now, in view of the fact that a thetan, to get something to make a perfect duplicate of him, of course has to look at a piece of complete nothingness. A somethingness is always liable to be an insult or an accusation to a thetan. It is a somethingness. But a thetan is something which can conceive both something and nothing. So it is no great liability that a thetan sees objects or spaces. So what? So he sees objects and spaces. He can duplicate those, too. When he loses his ability to duplicate objects, however; when he loses ability to duplicate spaces; and particularly if he's lost his ability to make perfect duplicates; then every object he sees is an insult. It's a nonduplication of him as far as he's concerned. It's completely insulting. That's something that is in his road. That's something that is an assault. See? He's a nothingness and this thing is still there.

Actually, the only crime you ever pulled on anybody was simply being there. Somebody got very accusative of you; you only really pulled one crime: being there. You'll notice all police work, by the way, is built down on this in a very, very refined basis. If the criminal isn't there at the scene of the crime or he can prove he is elsewhere, why, of course this solves the whole thing. So the crime obviously is being there.

Your parents, when they hammered you and said, "Why don't you stop moving?" and "Johnny, why don't you sit still?" and all of that sort of thing, they were basically objecting to only one thing — your being there. Because they had lost their ability to make perfect duplicates and they knew they couldn't make you vanish. See, so therefore your continued existence was something of an insult to their ability as a thetan.

Well, this is an oddity — that we can get away with auditing at all. Now, let me tell you the auditing we can't get away with: the auditing which alters. We can't get away with that. That we cannot get away with. If the alteration is in the form of space and energy; if we try to alter by reason of auditing, space and energy, we can't get away with it.

There's one thing you can change with impunity: a thetan's ideas. This you can change with impunity. Now, his ideas are not composed of mass. It's not composed of space; not composed of energy.

Alter-isness, then, is solely devoted to space, energy and mechanics in general — devoted to form, to energy, flows, masses, particles, spaces, combinations thereof, see? So that's all alter-isness would apply to — so that the basic therapy is to get somebody to change his mind. And if somebody can change his mind, then he can change everything else.

If you could change your mind at will, you would be able to change everything else. The reason you can't change your mind at will is when you start to change your mind, you change an energy form. When you change the energy form, you're dead. See, it'll start persisting.

Why don't you process in the direction toward processing a chronic somatic, huh? Why not? All it'll do is hang your preclear up on the track eventually.

N o w , in the old days, we started auditing out engrams. W e were successful as long as … You see, the individual could have any intention he wanted to for his handling of the energy. This would not really affect the energy at all. He could have the intention of changing the energy, but this does not affect the energy. The only thing that affects the energy is being altered. The only thing that affects the space is being altered. All you have to do is alter the space a couple of times and it'll start doing weird things. You know? It'll start persisting in the altered form, or it'll persist in the basic form that you were trying to alter. And the more you try to alter it, the more doggedly it'll hang on to its former form. All kinds of oddities, you know, will ensue by reason of, you want the thing to exist or not to exist. And you're trying to fix it up so it'll proceed on down the track.

Actually, it's perfectly all right for us, you see, to fix up a car so it'll last five or six years. See, that's perfectly all right. But how much time is that in terms of eternity? See, I mean it's time — finite time. We've actually cut our-selves back on lifespan trying to find a lifespan that is short enough so as to permit our alteration to appear permanent. See? I mean, so we don't have to run into this factor. We alter this automobile to persist and we alter it to persist and we alter it to persist, and crash. And then it goes to pieces.

Well, we say, "Well, we kept it in good repair, and we did this with it and we did that with it, and we kept it in good repair. And we ran it for a long time and ran out the whole life of the car." It lasted for five years. What actually is the cause of its demise? It's being run; that's the cause of its demise.

There's another oddity enters in here: the misuse of a tool or a form. The very funny thing about tools, forms, weapons: You use any of them for purposes for which they were not designed and they go to pieces in an awful hurry. A crude example would be to take a beautiful, double-bitted ax with a perfect Swedish-steel blade designed to cut down big trees, and we start digging in a gravel pit with it. You can see, then, there's the misuse of a tool. The odd part of it is, it'll even go to pieces if you start using it merely to cut kindling or something like that. You know, it's being swept away from its purpose and intention.

Well, as something can survive along its purpose and intention, you will see it surviving rather evenly, you know. But it's when you alter its basic purpose and intention that it really starts getting into trouble.

Well, this is true of a man. He has certain goals. You understand, he doesn't escape this law of alter-isness just because he's pursuing this goal — to alter things in one fashion or another. But as long as he goes along with that basic plan, he's all right. See, that's fine. Nothing wrong with this. He goes along with this basic plan, and he succeeds. He lives to threescore and ten, and at the end of that time, why, he's convinced all the stamp collectors in the world that they should keep their stamps in blue books, not red books. Or he's done some big goal. And something like this has happened, you see. But remember, he did kick the bucket at seventy. He did die at seventy.

Metchnikoff is an interesting example of that. Metchnikoff, the famous Russian scientist — to whom this society, by the way, is quite indebted. He discovered that compound calomel will absolutely prevent syphilis. Compound calomel rubbed on an open, exposed wound into which spirochetes have been introduced — live, swarming spirochetes — compound calomel is put on it within twenty-four hours afterwards and, bang! no syphilis, you see. And this was a terrific little jump in the field of medicine, so forth.

Well, you probably don't know some of the other things this man did. He did a lot of other things, but one of the interesting things that he did was to discover (he said) that certain ingredients in milk — sour milk — would prolong life. So he researched this madly in all directions and he had his whole basement completely full of this derivative of sour milk, and he and a friend of his were taking it every morning for breakfast and going to bed on it every night — his whole cellar full of this stuff and he was running around selling everybody on this idea. And how old is he when he died? He was seventy. Sure did prolong life. See, he could get away with it on a minor scale like this.

But his basic intent all through life was simply research and investigation to the betterment of mankind, and nobody ever discouraged him from this idea. Now, what would have happened to this boy — in spite of some of the things he did or didn't do — what would have happened to him if at the age of forty-six he had run into somebody who convinced him that he should not interest or better mankind in any way? Or that he should turn from the field of medical research and go into the field of geology? What would have happened with this boy? His basic intent would have been very badly altered, wouldn't it? He would have kicked the bucket a long time before seventy. In other words, his goals get shot.

All right, this young man, he's going to be a tap dancer — at sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, he's going to be a tap dancer, and so on. He becomes a tap dancer by a little bit of study, and then he's convinced that the thing for him really to be is a college professor. So he goes to the university and he fools around and so on. His basic intentions, which he himself delineated — without erasing or wiping out the original intention — the intention itself is altered and the final course of existence of an altered intention is to have intentions go on altering. You follow me?

They go on altering, so that he gets this goal of a tap dancer, then a college professor. He won't stick with being a college professor. He'll become something else and he'll become something else. And you'll see these new intentions, and they go kind of by the inverse square. He'll get them more and more rapidly until eventually you will see him — every morning he'll have a new idea of what he's going to do with life or a new intention with life. You'll see people who have been through many lives in the past and have had this sort of thing happen to them in past lives — all of a sudden in this life you will meet them at the age of fifteen, or something like that, and they are doing this continually. They have no intention for life. They're simply altering their intention continually.

All this month they just study to be a good embroiderer. You know, they're going to be terrific at embroidery, and without ever making that goal at all they flop over, and the next thing you know, they're going to be a swimming coach. What's this got to do with embroidery? Nothing whatsoever. And they're going to be this swimming coach for twenty-nine days, and that's fine. At the end of this twenty-nine days they've decided the best thing in the world that they could possibly be would be a professional photographer. So for twenty-eight days they're very enthusiastic on being a professional photographer, but at the end of this time — their father having bought them lots of equipment or something like this — they suddenly decide that the very best thing they could possibly do would be to go west and become a cattle rancher. They don't get any further than reading two books on the subject of how to become a cattle rancher, and they're off to something else. What's happening to this person? Swerved off the basic intentional line. Their lives shorten; they become very, very upset.

Now, people who have failures for parents — parents who have failed in many fields — of course are doing something quite interesting: They're doing what their parents do. It is safe to do what your parents do. If your parents fail, it's safe to fail, of course. And so the felony is compounded all the way along the line. They're not only failing on their own intentional shifts — their own alterations of intention — their parental alterations of intention are being dramatized at the same time; an individual finally gets into a complete apathy. He doesn't know which way he's going or what he wants to become, or anything else.

There's many a person who has studied auditing who has gone out and maybe never even gotten a single case to audit. He's finished all up with auditing, see. And he goes out and within two or three months of having gotten out of school, why, you will find this fellow terribly interested in some other activity. And this would happen, not necessarily as a result of processing, but just because this person really never got started on a career as an auditor, you see. He got some training and didn't quite get there at all. We make that almost impossible today. Somebody comes in, we'll straighten out his intentional line for him. That's a nasty thing to do, isn't it?

That doesn't mean he's going to go on with auditing, necessarily. But we do straighten out this intentional factor. How do we straighten it out? Opening Procedure of 8-C will straighten it out, won't it? Why? He just stops worrying, that's all, and takes a look at the environment.

There's one about electing cause which is a fascinating one, a gorgeous one — electing cause. Cause, cause, cause, cause, cause, and the next thing you know his worry machines start turning on and off. There's all kinds of processes that do this.

What is this process of electing cause, however? You might have the intention, you see, of making a change take place. But if you have the intention of making a change take place and then change it with as-isness, you're safe. See, you're perfectly safe — nothing to it. This is a breeze.

That's a nasty little trick, isn't it? That's a new trick. You should know that you know that trick. You can actually alter with impunity. You can alter anything with impunity — as long as you alter it by as-ising it. If you simply do want something to continue to survive, however, just go out willy-nilly and alter it. Or if you want it to go over on the destruction side of the curve or something, just alter it; just start changing it around, you see — not as-ising anything, not looking for the basic error.

I want to call your attention to a very wonderful essay on the subject written by John Masefield, commenting upon Hamlet. You would hardly think John Masefield, a sailor, would be very sentient in the field of commentary on Shakespearian plays and tragedies. However, he is probably the only good one I have ever read. Christopher Morley is not bad, but he's nothing compared to this boy Masefield. This Masefield is absolutely fantastic when he gets into the field of Shakespeare. He knows Shakespeare inside out — probably because he never studied it.

And we find Masefield, poet laureate of England (I think he's still alive, isn't he? He ought to be), writing this essay of commentary and description on Hamlet, actually talking very closely to what we are talking about. He's talking about it in a very poetical way. He traces back all dramatic situations to an initial departure or error. There is an initial error on the thing. And tracing it, something starts to go wrong. And instead of putting this wrongness right, we simply start compounding the wrongness and trying to change it back onto its track again and it won't work.

It never goes back on track. It just gets further and further and further and further from truth, until finally we find Hamlet lying in the midst of a bunch of dead men with a lot of steel in his gullet. This is a departure from a basic and original error, whatever that basic error was.

So he says that Shakespeare's plays and plotting, and so forth, is to find an introduced … He introduces this error, you see-a mistake somebody makes. Somebody makes some kind of a slight mistake in some way or other, and then this mistake, in trying to be rectified and changed again, will magnify and magnify and magnify. And he says, more or less, that that is Shakespearian plotting.

Well, that's not just Shakespearian plotting, that's life plotting. A little thing happens, you know. You'll go out and you'll see you got a bolt off of your wheel. And you don't pay any attention to it — nothing. Doesn't amount to anything. You don't put the bolt back. You say, "Well, one bolt. It'll still run on the remaining four." You overlook the fact they might have been loose, or that there's some reason why that bolt came off of there; there isn't anything here connected with it. And you're going down the highway out here at ninety miles an hour, and all of a sudden your wheel comes off.

Now, that's a short thing, you see; because one bolt is gone, the rest of them start to work. It's weakened just that much, you see. And this, working wrong, you see, begins to strip. And the next thing you know, the whole car goes.

Well, this makes people rather spooky. They get bird-dogged on this, and they go around looking for things that are wrong all the time, you know, in hopes they will find that initial error before they get wiped out. Actually, it is not that important.

But where life is concerned, an initial error enters in and then somebody tries to alter, you see, to push it back on the track. See, they … You put the wrong bolt on, or you decide you'd better change the whole wheel and you put on a different-sized wheel, or you start compounding this. And then more and more things go wrong from the central thing, simply because you didn't remedy the first thing.

Well, if you were to as-is the condition of a missing bolt — you say, "It isn't a lot of hidden menaces here. It's just a missing nut on that … and bolt on that hub"; and if you were to simply as-is that condition, you would just see it as a missing nut. Now, that might or might not mean that it should be replaced, see. That might or might not mean it should be replaced, but certainly the condition had better be remedied and put in its original condition if you're going to return the situation to normal. See, there is an error in the situation.

Now if you totally as-ised the wheel, what would happen? It would disappear, wouldn't it? Well, that's not optimum at all — running a car on three wheels. But then you should have as-ised the whole car. Well, all right, we'll as-is the whole car and there won't be any car there at all. That leaves us walking with legs. What are you doing using legs to walk? Let's as-is the body. The next thing you know, you would be as-ising earth and this system and so forth, and you sure would be back to the initial error, wouldn't you? It would lead you right straight on back to the initial error.

And if there's any error involved at all, your initial error would have been in making a piece of space. That's the initial error; there is no earlier error. But of course, you made the space, and because time was going to be set by the particle, for all intents and purposes you actually made a piece of energy or a particle at the same time you made the space.

You've got to have a couple of particles to move around in relationship to each other in a piece of space before you have then and now and future, you see; you've got to have this action of a couple of particles before you've got any time. So it would have appeared to be a simultaneous action. And that's the last thing you would find yourself as-ising, would be this piece of space. Where would you be? Well, you'd be in the position of somebody that could do it all over again. That's where you would be.

A departure from a static, of course, is an error, if you want to look at errors. But that doesn't mean it might not be fun. If you want to have adventure on an expedition, why, lose all your water or something. You'll have quite a lot of adventure. All fun starts with an error. So does all action and so does all tragedy. And error, as far as a thetan is concerned, is a somethingness — the existence of a somethingness.

Let's say this thetan makes this piece of space and he makes these pieces of energy, you know, and then he says, "What are those pieces of energy doing here?" see, and throws them away. And then some more energy is there, and he throws that away, and some more is there, and he throws that away. He gets hectic. This piece of energy keeps appearing and he keeps throwing it away. What'll happen eventually? Because he threw it away and moved it in the space from the point where it was created, it becomes permanent tenant. Doesn't it? Real permanent.

So your boy, who is having difficulty in the case, starts running Straightwire. You want a real incident; you want one incident. And of course these incidents will just ping out and straighten up, and his case will start straightening up like mad. You're simply demonstrating to him just one thing: You can spot the place and location of origin of the particular energy mass about which you are worried. Well, the particular energy mass about which he is worried, if he's in an anxiety state, is any energy mass or any form or any space. That's what he's worried about.

You want to know why these people get into an anxiety state? It's all very well for Sigmund Freud to come along and say it was because their sister did something sexual to them when they were two years old. But I'm afraid that sisters have been doing this for an awful long time without driving the whole race batty. It's all right for Freud to look for this single button in finite terms on the second dynamic. I mean, he's perfectly at liberty to walk around the universe. Nobody's holding him down in the field of logic. And whether it's workable or not is something else.

You've simply demonstrated to this individual — if he did remember this incident — that he could locate things which had happened. In other words, you've told him — you've given him sort of a little promise — "Look, you can as-is these things," Straightwire, see? "You can remember where they occurred." Memory is only important if you want to knock out the whole universe and get rid of all this thereness. It's very important then, isn't it? — memory. You have to remember where all the particles and incidents happened so that you could as-is them.

All right. Let's go a little bit closer back, in view of I'm not talking to you about very much today. Let's look a little more intimate at the field of auditing, and let's discover that everybody who has a communication lag is doing as much alteration of condition as he has communication lag. Just discover this as a little law — quite a workable law. He's doing as much alteration as he is having difficulty with his communication lag.

Well, I got ahold of an auditor that had a lot of trouble with eyesight; had an awful lot of trouble with these glasses, and he'd taken them off and put them on, worried them, and changed the prescription and so forth. And one day, that person was sitting in a cafe, and I said, "Take a look at the door latch." And the person said, "Yes, I see it," turning his head away.

And I said, "No." I said, "Let's take a look at the door latch. Now, just look at it steadily."

"Oh," he said, "that's very easy, you know — I mean, very easy to look at it steadily." And I said, "Now, look. Look at the door latch."

"Oh, yeah. I can see what you are talking about," yap, yap.

I said, "Did you hear anything about or read anything about alter-isness?"

"Oh, yes, yes, yes. Of course, of course, of course."

"Well now, is there any effort on your part at all to alter that door latch as you're looking at it?"

"Hmmm umm, well, umm, no. No, I don't think so."

"You look at that door latch."

"Ohhhhhhhh," he said, "I see what you mean! Yeah! Yeah, there's effort — effort connected with the door latch. I'm trying to do something with the door latch. As I'm looking at it I'm trying to change it in position or make it open or make it close or do something with it. I'm not content — I see exactly what you mean — I am not content to sit here and look at a door latch right where it is, being no more than a door latch!" I said, "Well, let's try this out." (It's very revelatory. This case was not in bad condition.) And he looks at the lane and he looks at the chandelier and he looks at the booth and looks at people, and he found out he absolutely could not look at a person without obsessively trying to change his looks, appearance or clothes. And he just sort of stepped back of all of this effort and alteration, you see, and sort of watched himself doing it. And he stepped back a little bit further and he was out of his head. First time he'd ever exteriorized.

What was keeping him in his head? Only one thing: the persistence of the condition, because he was trying to alter it by getting out of his head. Now, let's get that. Why was he in his head? He was in his head because he was trying to alter the conditions of being in his head — not because he was trying to get out. No, that is not the statement. He was in his head because he was trying to alter the condition of being in his head. And he never once had accepted even vaguely the idea that he was really in his head. His whole idea was to fight around somehow or another so that he could get back out of his head.

Compulsive, obsessive alteration is taking place any time you have a persistent condition. Consistent, continual, obsessive alteration is taking place every time you have a persistence of condition. That means that chair couldn't sit there as rigidly as it's sitting there unless it were persistently, continuously, obsessively altering its condition — or something was altering its condition.

Yes, something is altering its condition. An electron orbit, for instance, is obsessively continuing. It's altering its position all the time — bam, bam, ham, bam, bam, bam, bam. It is the motion of the electron alone which causes it to persist. See? There's nothing relaxed about an electron — nothing.

That chair is being hit by all kinds of various waves, rays. And in addition to that, it has eight motions just incident to the effect of being right here on earth — eight separate motions just because it's part of earth, going in eight different directions, all at the same time.

Give you an example: earth is turning around its orbit, isn't it? That's one. That's your day and night — you know, it turns around its orbit twenty-four hours. That's one. Now, it's shifting in position with relationship to the sun, isn't it, on a yearly basis. Now, do you know that its orbit is doing a slight tip at the same time it is doing this? Completely incidental of anything else, its orbit does a rock, it does a slight tip up and down. It is not always in the exact plane as it goes around the sun. There is something else acting upon it: the motion of the solar system itself in relationship to the rest of this galaxy. There is another one: there is a precession on the part of earth which is evidently, probably, a twenty-four- to twenty-five-thousand year period which runs its North Pole from Vega up to Polaris, to Vega to Polaris, to Vega to Polaris. Just now we very happily have Polaris as a North Star. Twelve-and-a-half-thousand years from now, I think it is, we will have Vega as our North Star. What happens six thousand years from now? There won't be any North Star. Now, this is speculative on the part of astronomy. I have never watched this. But look at all these motions. Well, this galaxy has a motion in relationship to the other galaxies.

And that chair is influenced by every single one of those motions. It is being shifted in space continuously. And we wonder how this persists. How could it do otherwise than persist? Look at all these motions taking place. There's the internal motions and the external motions, and so forth. And that chair is going to go on and on and on, unless somebody comes along and puts an attention unit alongside of every electron in the chair and traces back to the point of origin and says, "Perfect duplicate" — at which moment you'll get a shadowy presence of a chair right here, see, and then he'll do it in present time, doing the same thing that he did and, whooh! you'd have no chair.

You'd have to put an attention unit alongside of every one of those electrons in that chair, and have the attention unit simply track back to the point of origin of each one of those electrons, and at that point make a perfect duplicate of each electron in the chair, and there'd be no chair there. But as long as these obsessive motions are going to continue, you're going to get, by this alteration, a persistency of that chair. We follow this?

Well, let's start changing the somatics of a preclear. What's going to happen, huh? Well, I'll tell you what happens to a boy who has been in Dianetics and Scientology, and who has been audited in absence of such principles or good auditing. He has had his somatics worked on so thoroughly by so many processes, and everybody validating the somatic and trying to change it so often, that it's practically become concrete.

Where somebody is worse off for having been audited … Nobody asked him what his basic intention was. His basic intention was simply to alter the thing right where it was. He's practicing alteration. By the way, he would not even have had a goal in which direction he was trying to audit this somatic, see. He's just trying to alter it, that's all — alter it, alter it, alter it. That's the obsession. Follow me? This person is now worse off. His total intention with regard to a somatic is actually not to knock it out, not to make himself well — none of these things. He simply entered Dianetics and Scientology, way back when, with the intention of altering his physical condition, altering his body condition, doing something on this order. And of course, various engrams and things run on him would alter, alter, alter, alter, alter, alter, alter, and here he is now, and boy, is that in concrete. See, he's just altered it into a terrific persistency.

We understand this case now? Understand a little bit more about alter-isness? Hm? All you've got to do is change, change, change, change, change, change, change, change, change — permanent. See, it'll be permanent then, because what happens is it kind of goes by the square. It's change, change, change, change, change, change — if you are looking at this on an eightmillion-year span or eight-billion-year span — change-change-change-change-sssrrsss, solid. See how that would be done? See, we change, change, change, change, change, change. Now, why is it doing that? Well, it is doing that be-cause it is changing. There's nothing more … nothing plainer there to be recognized in the whole problem. It is changing because it is changing. This is a Q-and-A universe, of course. But it's changing on a shorter time span all the time, so finally — brrrrrrrrr.

Did you ever see a stroboscopic light hit an electric fan, and as they come into phase the fan is suddenly standing there completely motionless? Well, you sure better not put your finger through it, because it's going at the same rate of speed it was before, but it's apparently completely stopped. It is motionless. But as you looked at it while it was spinning, you see, it was completely visible. Anything on the other side was completely visible straight through it. You'd have to put a stroboscopic light on it, you see, to go in phase with the turning of the fan blade.

Once in a while you'll see these big ceiling fans. You've got a sixty-cycle electric light bulb burning in the room and you'll suddenly notice that the electric fan looks like it's doing something very peculiar (or a big electric fan on the ceiling) and so forth — the blades sort of have a stop. Well, that's because they've gotten in phase with the sixty cycles, you see. And the phase there makes part of that fan blade permanent. It's apparently solid. It's changing so fast it's apparently solid. But it is in phase with the MEST you are looking through to look at it, so you can see it.

We could get awfully particular about perceptics. You could learn an awful lot about this. And I don't know what you'd do with the information after you learned it, but you sure could learn a lot. The main thing I'm trying to teach you is the fact that it's there because it's changing.

Persistence, and all other things — continuation, anything like that, survival itself — comes about because of alteration. If forms never altered, if they stayed the same, they'd perish. Life even dramatizes this by building a dinosaur whose form never altered, you see. And there it was, and it just got a little bit bigger — it really didn't alter — and all of a sudden we had no dinosaurs at all. Of course, we could go through the mechanics of saying, "Well, they all died off," and lots of reasons why and explanation. But the point is, there was a form which became so set, so unchanged, that it didn't even survive.

Now, you could theoretically get to that level if you audited a preclear with enough alteration. You could say, "Let's change the somatic." Change, change, change, change, change, change, change, change — solid, see? Solid. Absolutely solid. Keep on changing it. Change, change, change, change; re-ally solid now. And then all of a sudden it wouldn't be there. That's theoretical, highly theoretical — although I have seen something that could easily be explained by that phenomenon. The fellow just gets so darn tense and so tight and so solid, in whatever ridge he seemed to be wrapped up in, that he was simply in concrete — and then all of a sudden have this thing evaporate. But it almost killed the preclear every time I did it, so I didn't research any further along those lines.

All right, how about you going out now and auditing a preclear's chronic somatic? You know he has the intention of changing this chronic somatic. Don't ever bother to ask him what his intention is with regard to this somatic. Don't bother. It's unimportant. Audit straight at the somatic. Validate it good and heavily. Change it. Alter it a little bit. You'll have a permanent preclear on your hands. You're putting his somatic in concrete, aren't you?

All right. A little less backwards here, and let's look at what we might do about it. We might just straightwire him until we got the moment when he was bound and determined he was going to change the condition of his legs. You know, he has a chronic somatic in the leg. And you're liable at that moment to see the leg somatic go up in smoke. He might have gotten the idea from somebody else or had it originally, or something. Do you see that? By the way, that's 1950 Straightwire. You want to know who else had bad legs. Well, he got the idea that he had to change somebody else's legs. So he had the idea of changing legs. He couldn't change their legs, so he started changing his legs. Of course, there went the persistency of his somatic.

You knocked it out. What did you do? You at least as-ised in present time, the existing fact that there was a prior condition. Now, maybe it'll come in again and maybe it won't, who cares. You could actually ask him when he decided to change his legs. This is as close as you could possibly come to validating the somatic. You wouldn't dare come an inch closer to it without giving him a chronic somatic that's really chronic. But you could ask him, "Do you remember a time when you decided to change some legs?" Straightwire, straightwire, straightwire, straightwire, straightwire, straightwire, straightwire — "Yes. Yeah, yeah, I do." At that moment you're liable to see his leg condition go up in smoke — I mean, that condition of leg blow clear. That's punching out a held-down-five.

But is that safe or dangerous? As a matter of fact, it is a little bit dangerous. Because, as an auditor, you don't always know if you're running this as an engram with the guy right on in it or if you really are straightwiring him. If you were sure you were straightwiring him from present time .. . Straightwire is from present time to the past, preclear in present time remembering the past.

Running an engram is in the past, with the incident in the past. It is trying to as-is the thing — and successfully can do so, except it's a long process. It as-ises a condition at an instant when it occurred. And if you're as-ising the eighty-fifth engram on the chain, you're of course not as-ising the original position, and so it won't erase. This is just as simple as primer stuff. You have to have basic on the chain; you have to have basic-basic on the chain; you have to run it and reduce it, and knock it flat.

The only thing that gets in the road of making a present-lifetime Clear is the fact that the fellow and his body have lived before. The second that I discovered this, validated it, got it on enough E-Meters, got it on cross-checks, called up enough eastern universities, and checked the graduating classes of enough graduating classes in the nineteenth century in the Naval Academy and West Point (both of which keep very long and exhaustive records), and ran down and researched the police files of several major cities, such as Chicago, to discover if I actually did have the author of the bank robbery in 1904, and if that really was the solution to the case — as soon as I'd cross-checked this and found out that these individuals uniformly had lived before, and that this was straight dope (I wasn't getting any fantasy; this was the straight dope), I recognized completely that to find basic-basic would simply require a great deal more work and care on the part of an auditor than any-body was willing to invest.

So this blew us out of basic-basic. Basic-basic for this lifetime is too easily confused with the same type of incident in a former life. That's all I'm saying to you. So an auditor could get confused. So this isn't sure-fire therapy, see. Of course, if you were real hot on this, it is sure-fire therapy. But, oh boy, you have to be hot. And another thing is you have to be sure you've got him back into present time again. What happens to these boys that walk around and can't find the walls? They're simply out of present time. You can park a guy in an engram and put him in that kind of a condition if you want to, by Dianetics.

All right. Let's look at this thing very practically now, and let's look at this practice of alter-isness, and we find out that you can safely alter any-thing without getting a persistence, as long as you as-is the condition. You can safely alter only when you as-is the condition. And you think this might be into the teeth of the Remedy of Havingness, or something like that. Actually, this is another factor. The thetan, actually, is hungry for conditions. This is another factor. But he doesn't like this particular condition, so he tries to alter it, and the next thing you know, we have it permanent. But we can alter it by as-ising.

So, in view of all this, we would say that the best processes were simply processes which had a tendency to blow out the fellow. He's walking around here at the walls, and incidents kind of get in his road, and various things get in his road, and he just kind of glances at them and he is intent on the wall. Actually, what you're doing in this case — what you're doing in the case of 8-C — is stringing a straight communication line between himself and the wall. And the very fact that MEST exists ceases to be dangerous to him, that's all. You're as-ising the dangerousness of the very stuff he is avoiding.

He's stuck on the track and so forth because he's avoided this stuff, and he finds out he doesn't have to avoid it. He can look at it, and you're giving him a lick and a promise on this basis: You say, "Hey, fella, you know you really can see this, and someday you might be able to as-is it." And he begins to realize this. "Oh, well, I could probably take care of this stuff." And so he gets along better. Not a perfect computation along in this line, but it works. That's the main thing. You've got him in present time, you'll pull him out of the past.

All these things are basically considerations. Everything is basically a consideration. It so happens that all energy has this kind of a consideration mapped up in it. And you could get the preclear to get rid of it, and then he'd go over and sit down in the chair and he'd get the same consideration again — that altering things makes them persist.

So we'd get a very, very hot, senior process out of many of these things — there is a hot process. Let's say this fellow is still in his body. You can't get him out of his body. He just seems to be stuck. There is a process that would eventually get him out of his body. It's a very simple process. You wouldn't dare run it on a fellow who couldn't obey your commands, because it's a subjective process. He's got a chance to wander. You know, he's got a chance to alter without your view, and so forth. So you'd have to have him up through a lot of 8-C and Opening Procedure by Duplication in order to blow him out of his head. But this one follows just exactly along the rules of alter-isness and, by the way, is a very workable process and is an extremely valuable process.

And this process is, "What about your body can you accept?" You could say, "What part of the environment can you accept?" You might as well say, "What part of the environment can you as-is?" See, "What part of the environment can you accept?" and "What part of the environment can you reject?" Flattening the comm lag on "What part of the environment can you accept?" Flattening the comm lag on "What part of the environment can you reject?" Flattening the comm lag on "What part of the environment can you accept?" "What part of your body can you accept? What part of your body can you reject? What part of your body can you accept? What part of your body can you reject?" In other words, you are telling him "Accept it, fella. Let's take a look at the actual condition instead of the condition which you're altering. Let's even take a look at the fact that you're trying to alter things all the time." We don't even care whether he stumbles into this or not, but the next thing you know, you'll have this astonishing thing occur with such a process: the chronic somatic is suddenly acceptable to him, and at that moment it vanishes.

Why? He naturally only tries to alter things which he thinks he himself cannot as-is. And that is the final lesson I'd like to teach you. People only try to alter things which they can't accept as they are. Once they can accept things as they are, they have stopped trying to alter them, and these bad conditions stop having any persistence of any kind whatsoever. You follow me?

Okay.