[Start of Lecture]

Thank you.

February 1, 1957, lecture twenty-two of the 16th ACC. And we are pursuing our leisurely way through processes, and continuing on this series having to do with processing, processes in general, by which I mean of course, technically, techniques.

Now, the technical definition of a technique is anything an auditor can get away with — that is a technique; that's for sure — which doesn't fall outside the Auditor's Code. Anything you can get away with that doesn't fall outside the Auditor's Code.

Now, the Auditor's Code doesn't say anything about game condition or no-game condition, but it does say „a case improvement.“ So a technique would have further limitations in whether it did or did not improve.

Now, there are a great many limited techniques which, run a few times or an hour or two or sometimes more, will still produce case gain. Don't be fooled by this into believing that you, therefore and thereby, have jumped over the basic rules of game condition and no-game condition in a process. Just because you get away with running the preclear at the effect point for a while on a certain process is no reason why that process is an unlimited process or will work on every preclear or will work if you continue to use it. It's very possible that on a thing which is really a no-game condition, you can ask the fellow for it once; twice, maybe; three times, well… There on it gets unsafe, but you may get away with it for an hour or so. It's a no-game- condition situation. That is why it is called a limited process: It works for a limited number of commands.

Now, there is hardly anything in Dianetics or Scientology that doesn't work at least on a limited basis. And separating the sheep from the goats (the unlimited from the limited processes) took place, and a rule of establishing which was which — we knew that some processes were limited and some were unlimited, but there was no rule of thumb by which you could judge this — and we got games conditions and no-games conditions. We got the whole theory of games, and the theory of games at once sorted these out.

And all you have to do is look up no-game conditions, look up game conditions. If your process violates those things on the no- game-condition scale, and it is a no-game-condition process, why, it's limited, that's all. So we say a limited process is a no- game-condition process.

Now, this sort of a circumstance could occur in using a process, which is quite amusing — but not to the preclear. You solve all of his problems, and he goes out and involves himself in an automobile wreck, perjury, rape, arrest, something. You can ran him so short on games that he gets obsessive. Get the idea? All you've got to do is take problems away from people, games away from people, enough, and they become obsessive. See, a process which processes a game condition is good. A case condition which is an unknowing games condition is bad. Got that? See, they're not both good.

We say this person is in a high games condition. Well, we'd have to say he was in a high unknowing games condition to make any real sense. But that means he obsessively plays a game. Then what is he doing obsessively? Well, just read your list of game conditions, and he's doing all of those things obsessively. And believe me, that's no picnic to live around. There's no effect on him; there's total effect on everybody else. Got the idea? He is solid, you know? And we just go down the list, see? He's got to have; nobody else can have. But he's living this. This is his life, his pattern of his life.

Someday you're going to tumble to this, I mean, just across the boards. And you'll say, „Zzzuh! No kidding. That's right,“ you know, „Gosh!“ But you'll have to look around for a while.

Look at some of these people with whom you've had a bad time and then read your games-condition list, and you'll find out that they are doing, obsessively, all the things on that list. But if you look over the full list of games conditions and simply look at what an obsessive condition would be for each one of those levels, you'll have an idea of a complete loop. Just look over each item on the games-condition list and get the idea of somebody doing it unknowingly, obsessively and all the time. Oh, wow! See, this would be a completely unworkable situation.

A belief goes back of the process, which is an old consideration that games are necessary. Now, back of all processes, back of all mental conditions today, this postulate of „games are necessary“ exists. You want to realize that. That games exist comes as a prior consideration. Got it? „Games exist“ comes as a prior consideration, then, to any aberrated condition.

You say, „Well then, why don't we just take apart this postulate and somebody will get sane?“ Oh, yeah? With all the tremendous number of agreements which this person has on the games he is playing, the responsibilities he has, his important roles, all of these things, and we're just going to tear these things up — zzzzt? No, we're not.

This is a rough condition! This has been dramatized so often by the preclear that his entire track and bank is a totality of games condition. And when you say, „Well, you undo that one, you'll undo everything“ — yes, you'd undo the entire bank, just like that. I mean, boom! Be gone. Wouldn't be anything left of it. You think that's good, huh?

The fellow, without learning anything about his past, without learning anything new, without being aware of anything, is suddenly asked to confront everything he has always flinched from confronting. You're not going to run that process. Ha! I tried!

I tried to do a consideration-ectomy and I almost did a preclear- ectomy. Almost cut him out whole cloth and threw him away. All confusions seem to be held together with that as a master stable datum. You run it out and all the confusions collapse on him.

Many, many times, quite independently of the original thing, in order to tolerate something, he said, „Oh well, it's just a game.“ See? He'd repostulate it and repostulate it and repostulate it: „It's just a game. It's not serious. It's just… you know? It's light, nothing,“ so forth. So we get this thing just sown all over the place. It is one of these omnipresent considerations.

Well, the anatomy of games is purpose-counter-purpose, postulate- counter-postulate; and that's true all up and down the track. There have to be two or more purposes, or two or more postulates in order for a game to take place. Thus we get the dual nature of this universe.

No datum has any evaluation that you can think about or talk about unless there is a datum of comparable magnitude. And if somebody hands you a datum for which there is no datum of comparable magnitude, it then becomes an „only one“ — is a no- game condition, thus sticks.

Your no-game conditions tend to stick. Why do they tend to stick? Because they're harmonics on the native state of a thetan. So we have this completely wild idea „we must play games,“ which puts him over into a third-dynamic situation over here. And he keeps running into all of these circumstances of games, which begin with postulate-counter-postulate — postulate versus postulate, which eventually becomes agreement versus agreement, which eventually becomes terminal versus terminal, which eventually becomes invisibility versus invisibility with a connecting line, which eventually becomes invisibility versus invisibility across a whole mass of invisibilities.

Now, the same scale is the Scale of Awareness, and awareness ties in at once into this. Awareness itself is a games condition. So just making somebody a little more aware of something puts him to some degree in a games condition. Thus the workability of all of your locational processes: „Notice the wall.“ „Look at me.“ „Where's the chair?“ Get the idea? Well, these are just locational, but they are awareness.

It isn't that he is locating them; it's that he is made more aware of them. Thus he gets more space, thus he gets more ability to confront them, and thus he has more. Locationalness is way downstairs in importance to all this now. We've bypassed that. We've rocket-shipped past location and locationalness at a remarkable rate, into the postulates of games. But don't think that location itself is too far lost, because without the idea of location you cannot have terminals. Terminals are located.

It could be said, as was suggested to me, that that part of a terminal a person cannot locate is the only part of a terminal which leaks. In other words, you've got to have some unlocated somethingness about a terminal before there's some escapement involved with it. Very well.

We look at this postulate-counter-postulate, just an idea versus an idea, and we at once get indecision. Obsessive indecision on the part of a person is simply an obsession on the highest echelon of a games condition. He's got a yea and a nay, and they are counter-opposed, and he cannot disentangle them at once or decide on either one. He is obsessively pan-determined. He's taking the part of both yea and nay, because he couldn't take the part of either. He's an irresponsible, indecision case. Now, this is worry. This is anxiety. It is irresponsibility. All these other things tend to lump up in this. He can't make a decision, which says he can't take sides.

Now, if you think there's something wrong with somebody taking sides, I want you to look over, actually, as a person, some people who represented themselves as being totally tolerant. I mean the guy would never take anybody's side on any subject at all. That is extreme irresponsibility, which is our definition for insanity. You'll understand, when you run much more of these solids, that all insanity is, is an extreme irresponsibility plus the special consideration that one is crazy. But here's an extreme irresponsibility. So an extreme irresponsibility is where a person gets this indecisiveness.

How come he's indecisive? This is inverted pan-determinism: He's being on both sides of the postulate-counter-postulate, and not really responsible for either side. But he's not responsible for either side, and so he can't make up his mind. He's incapable of taking the responsibility for that.

And these people who go around worrying, worrying, worrying, sound like, look like, people who are being responsible for things, and they really aren't being responsible for things. They're being responsible only to the degree that they can't get off of it. Somehow or another they've come off of it, they have forced themselves back on to it again (the DEI cycle), but they are still not being responsible. They won't take the responsibility for yes; they won't take the responsibility for no. And you can look at it just clearly that way with no further explanation or ramification, and you know, then, that you are looking at somebody who is not capable of siding in a game. On that particular game he can't take sides, so therefore he can't make up his mind.

These people who go around and say it doesn't matter who's elected president, of course, are to some slight degree justified by the fact that there haven't been any candidates offered for generations. But to have no opinion on the subject at all — to say, „Well, it doesn't matter whether I vote, or just tell anybody anything or not. And it'll take care, somehow. Somebody knows what's going on. And 'they've' got it all taken care of, and 'they've' got it all figured out, and so forth“ — is an insanity. The person is insane on that dynamic. Only he doesn't dramatize and he doesn't bust up psychiatrists and he doesn't apparently need a padded cell. If we'd looked at the course of his life, he probably would need a padded cell. But he has never faced any part of this, and he just goes lluuagh. And we say, „This person is a very tolerant person.“ Oh yeah? He's weak! He is irresponsible.

You know, a guy has to come way upscale to be able to fight, because to fight you have to take sides. Now, you have to be able to take sides in order to be able to play both sides, and that is pan-determinism. When you can take either side and be totally responsible for either side, you are then pandetermined about the situation. But that's quite different than somebody who is incapable of taking either side.

Real, knowing pan-determinism, then, is the ability and willingness to take either side. And you very often find people scattered around the universe who are real high-toned characters, and they don't care who they fight for or which side they fight on. The moment they make up their minds that they're going to fight on that side, all the causes on that side are right, all the causes on the other side are wrong, see — boom! See, that's that.

Some soldiers of fortune are quite amusing in that degree. Many of them were terrific soldiers. Some of them were just drunken bums, but the bulk of them were terrific soldiers. And good Lord, they'd turn up on the other side and they'd just change it all over again, you see? And President Obregon was all wrong now, you see, and so on. Just either side, but it made a game. They were willing to play that game.

Their luck, their ability to plow through things, the state of health which normally they attained in countries which were very unsanitary, all testify to the fact that they were actually capable of assuming either side.

Now, when we get partisan on one side and somebody is able to do this, we become critical of him. Supposing we were all Northerners, and we were dead against all Southerners. And a fellow comes along who fights on our side for a while, and then accidentally gets lost in the woods and turns up in the Southern lines. He thinks it over for a while, and picks himself up a butternut jacket, you see, and starts fighting the North. We'd say „This man is a turncoat.“ Well, he could be, on the low scale, crazy as a coot. See? He just could be in a very mad strata, but if he were, he really wouldn't have the ability to fight. A lot of other character determinisms would be necessary.

But then we, because we are one-sided in the game, say that that man is a traitor and a bum and he's a bad man right straight across the boards because he did this. And we say, „He's a man of no principles.“ On the contrary, he's got twice as many principles as we have! And if we were all Southerners and something came up like this — the Dixiecrats in these elections, and so on — why, we would have the same violent opinions. But remember, this is a biased opinion.

One of the amusing things about history is that histories are usually written on such a monosided basis that one seldom gets a clear picture of what went on. And times change and men change. And if a history is being written for the exclusive digestion of a bunch of people who are all obsessively on one side of the cause, why, we get a very interesting view.

It's quite amusing that the histories of Timur-i-leng, and Genghis Khan before him, were written, in the main, by the Chinese and the Persians. Any portraits we have, for instance, of these two are Persian portraits, and show them with slant eyes, which they didn't have. Now, this was the opinion of the enemy; this was the enemy's opinion of the person.

The Khan's people were relatively illiterate and didn't have much of a tradition of writing, and so we get an entirely biased view of what this was all about, you see? But oddly enough, the Persian respected his enemy, and there's nobody less responsible than a Persian poet.

Now, where do we find a picture, then, of Genghis Khan which gives us a picture of Ghengis Khan? I don't know. The only existing picture is that of an enemy who was a rather low-toned enemy and who himself didn't much care, had no real national spirit.

Now, what happened here? Well, we get a whole bunch of fragments which are all counter-opposed and so forth. So we could say that the terminals involved have counter-exchanged to some degree, and we are reading terminal A from terminal B, and we run into this in auditing all the time. We never get a picture of terminal A at all. We get terminal B's reaction to the fragments coming off of terminal A. Have you got that?

So that history or an engram bank or anything else becomes a „Mississippi of lies,“ as Voltaire called history. That was his blunt definition of history. He said that if anybody had ever found any truth in history, they would have killed it at once as being too dangerous to utter.

Where? Where do you get a proper opinion of anybody? Well, you do get opinions of everybody. Got the idea? You get opinions of everybody; but are these opinions the people? They sure aren't.

Now, another complicative factor is that we stand behind the eyes of any given person and take his viewpoint of any given situation, modified by his inability to see or be aware, by his own blindnesses, prejudices and aberrations, and we find he's always right. He's never anything but right. Not for one instant in his total past is he wrong — not for an instant.

A confirmatory process on this is an interesting one: „Think it over now, and see if you can't find something in your life that you did right.“ It's an absolutely fascinating process; it's one of these quickies. „Think of something in your life that you've done right.“

And at first the guy says, just like you're saying at this moment, „Just darned little,“ you know? And after a while he comes clean, and he can't find out anything he did wrong; it just flips the other way. Because his opinions of himself are not based upon his opinions of himself, but on the views of the opponent all up and down the track. And this cumulative opinion of the opponent — the counter-postulate opinion; you got the idea? — eventually forms up to his opinion of himself.

In that there is no right conduct or wrong conduct, in the final analysis — as proven by the fact that there is no sexual good practice or taboo anywhere in the world that is constant anywhere else in the world, from race to race — we see that good practice and bad practice are again matters of opinion. Good and bad can be cursorily defined in a very amusing way: „Bad is what he did; good is what I did.“ Got the idea? And the other person's bad and good gets defined the same way: „Bad is what he did; good is what I did.“

What is good and evil? „Evil is what he did; good is what I did.“ This is definition? No, this is viewpoint; this is viewpoint at work. This is covered, by the way, in Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health in its earliest chapters.

But here we have postulate-counter-postulate - postulate-counter- postulate, agreement-counter-agreement, terminal-counter — terminal. And way down below, it goes from down there into incomprehensibles.

And if you as an auditor try to sort out right from wrong, you will eventually simply sort out the person from the other valences. It's one of these horribly elementary solutions.

One of the blunt ways of going about it is just to ask somebody for something in his life that he did right; that's all you ask him. Just keep asking him that. Of course, it as-ises the bank, chews everything up, and you'll probably have to remedy havingness every fifteen minutes with the Trio or something like that; but it becomes a remarkable process. All the time he becomes more of himself.

But what if you ran this process? What if you really did run this process beyond its limitation? The fellow would run out of problems; he'd run out of games. He wouldn't have enough games, and games to him are a quantitative affair.

And the only thing which puts a person out of a game… And boy, write this down in letters of fire, right on the inside of your brow — letters of fire — because it's the clue and key to any opinion the preclear has after he leaves games and goes into tolerances; and that is just this: Not enough of it.

You want a clue to his conduct. We'll notice now (and I've told you) it's postulate-counter-postulate, and that is a game; and the opinions swap, and the individual becomes extremely irresponsible on both terminals or both opinions — backs off from that, and so on.

Time alone is probably monitored by irresponsibility, you know. I mean, the only reason you continue to go through a time track is you're probably unwilling to be responsible for the moment which just passed, and so you move off of it. There is some truth in that, by the way; because a person's feeling of responsibility comes up and his time sense come up almost parallel.

This whole problem of „unable to encounter smashed children“ (get that, see?) has only to do with this: He hasn't seen enough of them. Got that? So he's shocked by them. That's the way he looks at it and that's his solution to the situation. You see that? This is horrible, see? The only reason he doesn't like pain is he wants more of it than he has, and it is so scarce that he doesn't want it. It's the old CDEI Scale.

The reason he hates women is because there aren't enough of them. The reason she hates men is there aren't enough of them. The reason he hates men is they're awfully scarce.

There is a point of value, then, which is crossed from too many to not enough, and that point determines the level of general acceptance of that thing at that time. We only are concerned with those things, in the final essence, of which there are not too extremely too many, and not too extremely too few. See, they still exist.

The existence of an item in any given society depends upon the opinions of that society as to the „too many“ or „too little.“ Do you follow me? Then that society is aware about these things, talks about these things, passes laws about these things and does things about these things. You got that? And that makes a culture. It is the mean between the „too manys“ and „too fews,“ and you got a culture. What lies in that mean is the culture. It's not any more esoteric than that.

You can say, „Well, I don't know. Doesn't seem to me to be an establishment of a bunch of people who live together in a community, and what their opinions would be…“ Oh, in Scientology we go way, way, way, way, way, way upstairs above a bunch of people. At this time there are not too many and not too few people, so we've got people composing a culture! You follow that? But this is a peculiar thing! All you'd have to do is get a few more people, and you'd have something else composing the culture. That would be the important thing in the culture, see?

We get too many people. India: Do you think that Indians really consider that people compose their culture? Well, the people kind of enter into it a little bit, but really it's all these other things, and they're much better. Get the idea?

Some tribe of which there are four members in a vast continent — do you think that that many people would compose a culture? No, to them the culture is probably composed of trees or animals or something of which there are not too few or too many. Do you understand that?

So at any time, you are actually subject to this monitoring, quantitative thing you might call „the monitoring standard.“ At any given moment the number of people (too many, too few), the number of coins (too many, too few), the amount of food (too much, too little), the number of cars or vehicles of any kind, number of spaceships or vehicles (too many, too few), form the culture.

Now, somebody comes along and changes the quantitative idea; in some quarter or another he monitors this quantitative idea. See, he gives too many or too few of something else, and so makes a signal change in a culture. That's the way this thing works on the third dynamic.

It's a hell of a thing, because you're looking at this culture right now, and you think that this culture is „the culture,“ see? And everybody has thought that at any given period of history. He's thought the culture he lived in was a culture. But some of them that have been on the backtrack have been mighty peculiar and strange, and quite different than this one. Even the culture of 125 years ago was entirely different than this one, not only mechanically, but in the way people conducted themselves, and the stilted methods with which they conversed, and the rather exaggerated ideas they had concerning men and women. You were looking at a fewer-human-being culture with much more land, There was much more time involved. See? Made an entirely different culture.

You take the books written in 1870. They are quite strongly different than books written today. They are quite amazingly different. You would not consider any of them literature, by the way, yet such books still exist. You can go down on the library shelves and find books that were written during that period which have not survived. They've just stayed on the library shelves. Nobody reads them, but there are still some copies around. You got the idea?

And it's quite amusing that any given period assigns, in its historical romances or its future forecasts, the values of the culture at that moment to any past culture that it discusses. So, writing today, we have the Minutemen of 1776 being quite offhand and unpatriotic, and giving it the kid, you know, and taking it rather unseriously and slacking off and having the same attitude toward sergeants and so forth, that somebody did in the Korean War. And nothing could be further from the truth. Their ideas were much different.

You cannot take a soldier of any given war and find a soldier for any other given war. But if you write for any given culture or you paint for them or you talk to them or process them or do anything else, you are in, to some degree, agreement with them. And in order to communicate to them, you have to accept these idiocies as a culture. It's almost accidental monitoring between too many and too few, and that's a culture. And anybody, as he comes up the track, goes consecutively in agreement with this all the way up the line, which is quite amazing.

After a while he doesn't know what to make of it. It begins to look like no culture, because the quantitative ideas which he picks up in the past may persist into the present, and thus persisting, give him strange notions as to what's going on now. He hasn't noticed the quantitative ideas have shifted.

But you go around and you show him some walls and some havingness and the amount of stuff, and you take him down and show him some people, and you bring his quantitative ideas in to some order with the existing culture, then he can be in better agreement with the existing culture, and so can pursue life along with it.

Now, you take somebody who is stuck in 1776, with the ideas of a soldier in 1776, trying to fit himself into the Korean War, and by golly he couldn't have meshed! He just would have been completely out of place. In addition, he would've been rather phenomenal! Nobody would have understood him. He would have been talking about getting the war over. He would've been talking about shooting the enemy. He would've been talking about getting supplies. And he would've been talking about action. And he would've been talking about a lot of things, see? And everybody would have stood around and said „What is this man talking about?“

I had something of this character happen to me one time. I had the officers of six other ships in my squadron come aboard, and only one of them stood alongside of me, and the other five were trying to convince me that if I kept this up I was going to get everybody killed. I said, „Kept what up?“

„You keep attacking these submarines.“

I said, „What are we supposed to be doing, gentlemen?“

And they said, „Well, every time a submarine shows up, you needn't signal attack! It's stupid! You're going to get somebody hurt!“

I proved to them tactically that if you did not suddenly attack a submarine and if you did retire behind the convoy every time one showed up, you're going to get yourself killed for sure — for sure! This was not in their level of agreement. They never did get it.

Well, there was a singular difference: All my seafaring experience had to do with expeditions: damn few men; you saved them. See? You tried to get in there and pitch one way or the other, you see. That's few people. That's lots of land, few people.

So you got an entirely different idea of the sea than somebody would have who's had people all over the place, and they're not important. You see, there's too many of those. You see? Just the idea of killing some of them would be rather nonsensical: You couldn't kill enough of them to make any difference. They're running on a „too many.“

These ideas are neither bad nor good; these ideas are merely different.

And the reason I am talking to you about this is because that's what you are adjusting with processes. And if you use the right processes, you get these ideas adjusted; and if you use the wrong ones, you don't. And if you get these ideas adjusted, the person can go on living and feeling very free and able about the thing; and if you don't adjust these things, he doesn't. And if you're trying to adjust his ideas to 1776 or World War II, which is already totally passé, why, you're just going to be upset about the preclear.

You don't even have to agree with the preclear. That isn't necessary. You can say, „Uh-huh.“ You don't have to be in total agreement with the preclear's cultural ideas. Only thing you have to be in agreement with is his desire to get along in life, his desire as a thetan to keep going. And that's the only thing you have to agree with.

Now, if you agree with his ideas on the subject of succumbing, you are actually agreeing with the second postulate or other terminal. That's the other terminal. So you are then in a game condition with relationship to him. So that if you let him succumb, even though he wants to succumb, you are then electing yourself to the opposite side to this case because of this interchange of opinion that I was discussing.

That's all processes change, I'm afraid. They do not change ability. They actually don't change possession. They change the quantitative idea (too many, too few), and by adjusting these quantitative ideas, free the person of an enslavement to some cultural pattern, which is no more factual than „this culture is based upon the fact that there are too many and too few of this, and too many of that and too few of something else, and therefore we react in the mean of ‘this is.’”

You see, something that's too scarce or too numerous — actually it's not much possessible. It's not a possessible thing. You can't have it, you can't really use it. And if it's too few, after a while it isn't.

It's quite amusing that diamonds have to a marked degree gone this — the gamut. Whereas the diamond market still expresses itself high in the marts of trade and very many other things occur with regard to diamonds, somebody has come along today and built substitutes for diamonds. And people are really quite happy with zircons, and they're happy with substitutes. People will buy substitutes, see? Tells you there were too few, too long.

That'll get to a point someday, somebody will say, „Well, now, you see this twenty-karat stone here? That's a diamond!“

And the other fellow will say, „A what?“

„It's a diamond!“

The fellow will say, „Oh, I thought it was a piece of broken glass. What do they use it for?“

„Oh, they don't.“

„Well, what good is it?“

„I don't know. Well, it's a curiosity. I've got it. It's twenty karats, see? It's got a glitter in it.“

Somebody says, „Well, titanium glitters about twice as good as that.“

You just have a big argument, see? You'd have to, all over again, take something from a too-scarce variety and move it up into an ownable variety. It becomes useless or valueless. There are things in this society at this time which are terribly rare, so rare that they have no value at all.

For instance, suddenly a whole bunch of sea otters appeared. They'd been extinct for a century or two. All these sea otters suddenly appeared up off the coast of California and Alaska — a whole bunch of them. Nobody knows anything to do about them. And they don't even make effectual methods to safeguard them, and if you shot one and acquired his pelt, or did something like that, it'd be totally meaningless.

See, some other woman would have to say, „Sea otter. I tried to get my man to buy me one, but he wouldn't.“ She'd have to recognize it, in other words, to have any commercial value on the thing. They wouldn't know what it was today. See, they've been too rare, too long.

And yet once that was so valuable and so costly that it was relegated to a certain class of nobleman and so on, but everybody knew what they were. Gorgeous, long-haired pelt. Tremendous fur. Superior to any fur any woman wears today. Hasn't occurred to anybody to go get a couple of these sea otters and mate them up and start making some more of this fur. Yet they do it with minks and spinks, and all sorts of things.

You get the idea here? There's — things get too scarce and aren't. Then, theoretically, you could get a something that had gone into „isn't“ that now gets tremendously multiplied, you know. I mean it just — wham! Not like the sea otters with one small group of them returning. But you all of a sudden got millions of quadrillions of the doggone things, and you get this odd phenomenon: nobody'd see them. They would not be viewable. People would just say… They'd have no opinion on it.

You'll find things in this society today on which there's no opinion. You don't hear anybody saying anything much about rats or mice in Maryland. That was almost never in a „too few,“ but it's in a „too-many“ apathy. Got the idea? They killed off all of their hawks. First they didn't have many, and then, evidently, incoming ships brought quite a few in, and then the hawks started to keep them in line. And all of a sudden the farmers passed, up in Annapolis, a bill granting a bounty on hawks! For what reason, Lord only knows, they brought in wagonloads of hawks.

And today, right up here across the district line, you can sit out in any barnyard with a small .22 pistol (something like that) and just shoot the barrel hot all day long. I mean, you talk about rats and mice! Wow! I don't know how anybody can raise anything in Montgomery County; I really don't. Lots of them, you know, exclamation point!

Now, I was up there many years ago. This condition obtained then. And so I said, „Hey! Let's cut this down, you know?“ You couldn't keep any corn.

You couldn't keep any flowers. They'd gnaw everything up; they'd chew everything up — just waiting for a Pied Piper. And I proposed that we do something about it on one particular farm, and I could get zero cooperation. It was „Why?“

„Well, they're eating up all the corn and they're drinking up all the milk and they're chewing up all the babies. What else?“ You know?

They said, „Well, you couldn't do anything about it… Why? I mean, you know?“

„Why? Well, there's mice all over the place!“

„Oh?“

There you're into a „too many“ and it's no longer part of the culture, see? Part of running a farm in Maryland today does not include mice and rat control. You get the oddity here?

All kinds of things occur on this quantitative basis, and all kinds of things have occurred. The basic quantitative matters in which you are interested will at first be forms, solid forms, with significance. A form with significance is a man; man is a form with significance. Woman — that's a form with another significance. Chair — that's a form with another significance. Car — that's a form with another significance. You get the idea? So you've got a common denominator of all the things in which your preclear is interested: forms with significance.

He, to begin with, is totally unaware of a generalized concept called solids. It's a form with a significance, which in America always has a use. Everything is used here in America, everything has a use of which anybody is aware. Those things for which there is no use, nobody is aware of, see? That even goes to painting. Goes to all sorts of things.

You can go down to a museum, and you'll listen to people drifting by, and they'll kind of wonder, „What's the use of all those paintings?“ And somebody — I've brightly stood up to people like this at a big exhibition or two in New York and said, „Oh, you know, that's been used in Saturday Evening Post advertising, you know?“

The guy says, „Oh, yeah, look at it!“ and he gets real interested in it, see? It had some use. Up to that time it didn't have any use at all. He couldn't conceive of the use of an aesthetic item which decorated. See, that was beyond his concept; that was not part of his cultural pattern.

Now, use introduces the idea of purpose, which is the third leg of games. When you reduce the number of games, you reduce the number of barriers, the number of freedoms and the number of purposes at once — instantly! Do you follow this?

A game is composed of freedom, barriers and purposes. And we've got one of these trick triangles, like the ARC triangle: You increase any corner of it, you increase the other two corners; increase two and you certainly increase the third. That's a highly selective triangle, and it works — whammity-bam!

Oddly enough, in games there is a singular triangle: it's freedom, barriers and purposes. You increase somebody's freedom, you increase his barriers and purposes. You increase his barriers, you increase his freedom and purposes. You increase his purposes, and you increase his freedom and barriers. And that's the wildest-looking thing you ever studied.

And I'm going to have to ask you to look that over and find enough examples to satisfy yourself that interrelationship does exist, because it looks absolutely mad that if we put a nine- o'clock curfew on the streets of this city that people would have more freedom. See, you'll just have to walk your way through the morass of it, because it's true. It's the wildest thing you ever saw.

Now, it's only when somebody unbalances this triangle violently that we have trouble, exclamation point! Real trouble.

An individual has no purpose. There he goes! He won't have freedom or barriers. No purpose: no freedom, no barriers.

A person without purpose is a person who cannot be regulated by law in any way. He won't stop at stop lights. It's as interesting as this, you see? He won't hold his hand at shooting somebody. See? No purpose. He's got an irresponsibility going here. But barriers don't work on him. And you come along and you say, „Son, we're going to make you free!“ He wouldn't get you. That he wouldn't dig.

And we get an entire teenage strata from whom we have removed all purpose — if only as lightly as by a draft, saying that any young man who manages to attain the age of eighteen is going to go into the army and therefore he must not plan in any other direction. And we are nonmilitary people, and we don't like the army as a career. Give him a no-purpose situation, and then we wonder why these fellows idle. They sort of mill.

They get in a car with a pal and they drive around the block. They'll just drive around the block till they run out of gas. We'll say, „Wait a minute, here. What kind of a youth is this?“ Yet they do it. Go ask them. They're not up to anything vicious. They stand outside of drugstores and so forth, and they stand outside of drugstores. They have no reason to stand outside of a drugstore. They stand outside of drugstores; that's what they do!

Now, you come up to these boys and say, „Well, we're going to make you free of all this,“ and they say, „Of what?“ Come up to them, we're going to say, „We're going to pass a law about you,“ and they say, „So what?“ You get the idea? They can't understand either one, because both are relative to each other. Do you see that?

Now, wherever we look through life we find these three points interdependent to some degree. And you're going to change your preclear's case by changing one leg of this freedom-barriers-and- purposes triangle? No, you're not.

But you can change any one leg of it, but I'm afraid you just have to change the problem, the game… You see, a problem is just purpose-counter-purpose, person-counter-person. This person has a bunch of intentions and this person has a bunch of intentions, and they go crunch, and we've got a problem.

I knew a married couple once that had a terrible problem. Their marriage was just breaking up; they just fought all the time. And I finally sorted it out with them. (I don't counsel marriage. I wasn't doing this in a professional capacity at all; it was something that fell on the back of my neck unawares.)

So I started to ask them what they were doing! And I found out that the outright intention of each was to make the other happy. But being made happy was something they didn't think they needed. And it became an unworkable marriage. They both cognited on this thing and laughed like hell.

But what we have here in a games condition is summed up in the word „game,“ but this doesn't answer up very well because it's not within the field of reality.

There are very few games going on in this society, where older men, even a half-century ago, gathered together on a Sunday would have — or even a quarter of a century ago — probably would have played horseshoes, see? They wouldn't have sat in the house or talked, or anything like that; they would have gone out and played horseshoes. Or they would have done something. A half a century ago or a century ago they would have played what we called „kid games“ in our lifetime. They would have played Run Sheep Run, tag, and so forth. Quite amazing. You sometimes read a century-old book, and you find all of the guests came over, and they played tag for an hour or two, and everybody had a lot of fun. You say, „Oh, are these kids?“ No, they weren't kids — grown-ups.

All games tend to fall downstairs in the next age group. The loafingness of the older generation, a generation ago, is now being dramatized, of course, today.

What solution is there to this? Well, it's an odd thing that there is a solution which isn't limited by the law of solution. That there's a solution outside the law of solution is an oddity which exists only in Scientology. If we've done anything, it is accomplished that little oddity — a solution outside the laws of solutions — because our solution is not governed by any other solution.

You can actually solve problems — which is the wildest thing you ever heard of — without a liability for having solved it. And that's the first time that ever happened.

You lift the whole triangle simultaneously. You say, „Give me a problem of comparable magnitude.“ „Give me a datum of comparable magnitude.“ You just ask for more game, you see?

There are other ways to do this, very subordinate ways, such as „Invent an opponent,“ „Invent an individuality that could cope with that.“ These are quite amusing processes.

The whole kit and caboodle, though, is answered under Problem of Comparable Magnitude: „Give us a problem of comparable magnitude. Another problem of comparable magnitude.“ If you can't get a problem of comparable magnitude, get a problem of incomparable magnitude, and then get a problem of comparable magnitude.

„What's a problem?“ the fellow says. All right, he said it — „Give me a word of incomparable magnitude to the word problem.“ You see, you can do almost anything with this. It's so shifty, merely because it's outside the actual triangle of freedom, purposes and barriers.

Now, you can assign purpose to life, and if you don't, nobody will. Purpose has to be assigned to life, because it is purposeless. There isn't any purpose to life at all.

When you can swallow that bitter pill, you can live. But to swallow it requires that you conceive a static. Thetan native state — no purpose. But it is a solvable thing. It's solvable. Just invent a problem of comparable magnitude to anything; invent some games. Raise the whole trio here — raise those three corners at once: freedom, barriers and purposes.

Now, you can take children and, in the basis of living, install one of these or another, and you will get a rise in games or games ability. You'll get a rise of interest in life. You have to create games in present time and undo their scarcity or too- manyness in the past. But in present time you have to create games to keep them going at all, because that's what life is composed of.

So it's enough purpose to just inspect a kid's hands every day at ten o'clock. He's idle; he hasn't anything to do; he's upset. The main thing wrong with childhood, by the way, is its purposelessness. And people get quite upset about children because they can't Q-and-A with that much purposelessness. Kids haven't any purpose to amount to anything; they're just kind of growing, and they aren't even really aware of that. And that much purposelessness is sometimes quite upsetting to an adult. They just aren't going in any direction; they don't have anything to do.

Well, you can change the behavior pattern of a child simply by, as I say, inspecting his hands at ten o'clock every day. You know, that's a very odd little purpose to add in; that's no purpose at all, is it? Nothing has happened, but he does have the purpose of having clean hands at ten o'clock. You got that? And he'll be happier; he'll be happier.

The psychologist with his idea of „You let the child do anything he wants to, express himself in any way,“ doesn't work. Why? Because there's no barriers, so the child is not free. You've made him totally trapped by giving him totally no barriers. And he's trapped then, and he's very unhappy with himself. This doesn't fit with his framework at all.

Well, one of the ways you can raise both of these is not by disciplining them, but just by inspecting their hands every day at ten o'clock. Without saying anything, you know, you just look at their hands, you see. You do this for several days and the child figures it out: „I wonder if I'm supposed to have clean hands or dirty hands?“ But you have given him a purpose in life which is „being inspected,“ which is the total purpose in peacetime of the U.S. Army and the Navy, so it must be a good one.

Now, purposes are very easily aligned, they're very easily handed out, but they can't be neglected. And right now I've given you this talk about games conditions for one purpose only — one purpose only — and that is because you're going to have to use this before your intensive in this ACC is finished on your preclear.

You're going to have to have problems of comparable magnitude to something. You're going to have to pick up his games condition. Otherwise, he will be left without purposes, without freedom, because he's been left without barriers.

Thank you.

[End of Lecture]