[Start of Lecture]

Thank you.

This is January the 31st, 1957, lecture twenty-one of the 16th ACC.

And the name of this lecture is „Solid, Jackson.“

Solids!

I've been threatening for two lectures to tell you all about solids, and I have in my oblique way tried to tell you the undercurrents and undergrounds and bases of solids.

Now, I have in earlier lectures explained to you, I hope understandably, about reactivity.

Reactivity: starting with Newton's laws (which I worked hard and finally got sufficiently misquoted to even please me) on through to overt act-motivator sequences, DED-DEDEXes, and even to „When I make an outward motion, and use energy already in the bank with which to do that outward motion, of course, some other energy flows in, trying to fill up the hole I made by pushing some energy out.“

Reactivity. This is the decline of reaching; it's the decline of lots of things. But all of it is dependent upon this one interestingly sordid fact: The person is no longer creating that energy which he is employing. He is using secondhand energy.

Now, when you were in a universe where you were expected to use secondhand energy all the time, you can then envision the fact that that universe might be slightly aberrative. In other words, if you use secondhand energy from the bank — that is to say, you've got a store of energy and you put some of this energy out — a little energy then flows in to replace it. From where? From the bank. So eventually, as you have handed out energy and not added to the stockpile, you of course, then, ball the whole bank up and get it in your teeth. Do you see how this would occur?

You remove a piece of rock from the gravel pile, and this is a magic kind of gravel pile that instantly takes some other piece of gravel and tries to fill up the hole. Do you see that? So, in other words, we reach out and the substance present tries to equalize or square up the missing piece that we have expended.

Energy is expended by heat, and this is one of the common manifestations which you see on a preclear who is using energy very thoroughly. He gets hot. He gets hot. He develops heat. Why? Simply, he is using energy, and heat is a manifestation of expended energy. It's converting in some fashion; one of the ways it converts is to heat.

Oddly enough, if you think that it's very strange that this universe and a thetan's energy obey the same laws — if you think this is very strange — then you are not cognizant of the fact that thetans built this universe. This is constructed stuff. Got it?

All right. Now, this universe consists of three manifestations: One of those manifestations is particles, one is objects, and one is spaces. I've already talked to you about the object, the form, the terminal — in other words, the mass object.

Now, what about particles? Particles are giving the human race at this moment a great deal of trouble. One of the ways it gives trouble is in electronics. You have to live with electronics these days. You get things like stoplights and so forth. In other words, a tremendous amount of randomity and automaticity is coming out of particles.

Now, that's not the least of it. The government, with wild abandon, is blowing off atom bombs from platforms below balloons and doing other things. It's strictly governmental. And particles are then being shed from these explosions which shower down in all directions, and so on. In other words, the world is having a lot of trouble with particles. Then why am I not talking to you about and teaching you about and giving you processes which will handle particles? See? Why haven't we had a lot to do with particles?

Well, that's because, really, although any thetan could have come along and mocked up a particle, all a particle is, in essence, is a leaky terminal. It's the symptom of a terminal's having leaked. It's somebody wasn't quite powerful enough to hold a terminal totally together, or somebody wanted the terminal to leak in order to create a game. In other words, the mock-ups were actually masses, evidently.

Now, why can I make this wide a statement and say, „Well, nobody ever really mocked up particles,“ because it's just as easy for a thetan to mock up particles as not. How do we come to this conclusion? Well, we come to this conclusion because the manifestation and phenomena of particles is handled by running objects. That's silly, isn't it? But it's true.

We run objects: A person runs into spaces; he doesn't run into particles. When you try to do spaces, the person tries to patch up the particles in the space, perhaps. But if you pull him off of that and say, „Uh-uh“ — you just say, „You just make the space more spacious,“ or something of the sort — he all of a sudden gets off the kick, finally, on the subject of particles. In other words, he doesn't pay much attention to particles.

Now, this isn't trying to tell you that particles don't exist in a native state. This isn't trying to tell you that air is actually the product of some more-solid terminal. I'm not trying to tell you those things because I don't have to. All we're talking about is auditing.

I've talked to you quite a bit about physics, and you obviously believe, of course, that physics is a very, very complicated subject and it's very learned and it has all sorts of interesting laws. Now, I hope you've gotten the impression by this time that it's something that you at least might have some grasp of that is not necessarily contained in textbooks on the subject of physics. You live with it all the time. Why do you want to make the additional complexity of a subject out of it?

A challenging statement, because you breathe particles in terms of air, and you are always walking on masses and through spaces. Well, therefore we would say this whole subject of physics is much more intimate to you than you would believe. You, actually, to the degree that you agree with them as a thetan, are bound by these physical laws. And one of the older tricks (ACC number 1) was you just make people disobey the physical laws. You start exercising a thetan as a thetan and make him disobey physical laws. You have him make things fall straight up and things of this character. And he says, „Well, I don't have to follow along in that line, you know?“ And he exteriorizes better and his perception gets better.

In other words, there are evidently these basic physical principles of space and objects. Now, their behavior is another subject. The particles which leak off these terminals through those spaces become another subject of even greater complexity. And as we add complexity to complexity to complexity to complexity, we finally arrive, with nuclear physics, that nobody knows where he is at now. Definition of a lost person: atomic physicist. He's lost.

Why is he lost? Well, there was no place for him to go in the first place. Get the idea? He found quite by accident that some particles leaked suddenly off some terminals, and he stupidly wrote the government and told them they could make a bomb out of this, and now he's got nuclear physics. But nuclear physics is just about as well understood as that. This is a fact in nuclear physics: that a subject — object known as plutonium — leaks rapidly. See? That's known. All the rest of it's guesswork. You know that for sure.

Now, why do we have to go on down the line and follow all the way through and get all the complexities and add a whole bunch of mathematics into and get it infiltrated and defiltrated and bogged? Hm? Undoubtedly all of you, to some degree or another on the backtrack, have been slugged with the heavy complexities of the physical universe, its properties and elements. See? Any of you have been slugged with this to some degree.

And when I tell you that the physical universe consists of spaces and objects, and that's all you need to know about it in order to process somebody, it's probably too confoundedly simple. Because you know these objects take on significances. You know they have different characteristics. You know they leak different elements. You know that certain things leak nitrogen and certain things leak oxygen. You know that walls are built out of plaster and floors get built out of planks. You get the idea? Streets get built out of bricks. Oh, I don't know, you could probably build streets out of plaster and walls out of planks and get nitrogen out of bricks. It's just a series of agreements of what do we see when a certain thing proceeds.

You needn't worry about any of that line of agreement in auditing. It's fortunate. We're very lucky. We need to know about spaces and we need to know about objects, and that's all we need to know. „Are objects objects?“ Yes, objects are objects. You've answered the question. That's as good as that. „Are spaces spaces?“ Yes, spaces are spaces. That's it.

Now, we did know years ago the definition of space, which is viewpoint of dimension. And oddly enough, very recently, this came through and became quite easily proven. In confrontingness, an individual who will not confront something has no space between him and it. It's the wildest thing you ever saw. I mean, you ask for an open-and-shut proof of that little statement, „Space is the viewpoint of dimension,“ and you've got it right there. Bang!

What is this „problem closure“? The more a person cannot confront a problem, the closer it gets to him. You can run a test on this, by the way. You can say, „Give me a problem of comparable magnitude to your present-time situation,“ something like this. And you say, „By the way, where is that problem, that present- time situation? Where is that?“

And the fellow will say, „It's here.“ See? Now, that is a crazy thing for him to say in the first place: „It's here.“ The problem isn't here. The present-time situation has to do with the divorce court or something, see? Way over there, and there are terminals associated with it, but he says it's here.

Now, you give him a problem of comparable magnitude and you say, „Where is that thing now?“

And he says, „It's a little further away. See? Here.“ Now a problem of comparable magnitude to that present-time situation again, and it's out here. And eventually it gets to be about fifty, sixty yards from him out in front. And he cares less about it. What happened? It moved out every time he created less necessity for problems. Is that the way it was? Well, that was the way it was explained at first.

Actually, he's put up problems and confronted them, which were of comparable magnitude, and he found out he could confront these problems. So he busily confronts the problem; there is space between himself and those problems.

All right. Now, here's an interesting thing. You must know the other part of this test. You get it out there fifty yards away and then you say, „All right, now give me a solution to it. Good. Give me another solution to it. Good. Give me another solution to it. Good. Give me another solution to it.“ You say, „Where's that problem now?“

He says, „It's here.“ If you keep on solving it, it eventually moves into his skull.

Solving something actually could be said to be (doesn't have to be, but to most men it is) an inability to confront it. We solve those things which we cannot confront. And when we solve them, we get less space between ourselves and them. Now, this is one of the wildest things you ever saw, this demonstration. It's something you ought to do someday just to say, „Hey, what do you know!“ But what do we prove by this? Space is the viewpoint of dimension.

In other words, there isn't any space unless you are looking across it to a limitation in it; that's space. If you've agreed this universe has no boundaries of any kind or character, it, of course, is an unlimited view. You look up that way and you look forever; that's your agreement. You don't even have to look at something. All that takes is the definition „It's an infinite universe.“

In other words, any time you look out, and don't look at an object or through an object, you will look infinitely far. That's all the agreement it takes to make this universe infinitely large.

Now, you can vary the size of this universe for somebody by just getting him to get a datum of comparable magnitude to the infinity of the physical universe. He eventually will come up with some answer to this, as complicated as it is, and the next thing you know it isn't that big at all. What have you varied? You've varied his consideration of the viewpoint of dimension, is what you've really done.

Now, you get a datum of comparable magnitude to „Space is the viewpoint of dimension.“ Well, because it's unanswerable you usually have to enter it in „an incomparable magnitude.“

I didn't realize that we could take any datum in Scientology — all of which, of course, describe fixed data on the track by which games have been made or cured or ended or started — and we could take anything, and we could say to the person, „Give me a datum of incomparable magnitude.“ He always can. The next thing you know, he winds up with a dozen data of comparable magnitude to such a thing as space. It's quite wild. It'll also vary his ability to perceive. These data are „only one“ data. There's no comparable magnitude. There's no datum as important to a person who hasn't dreamed one up, as „Space is the viewpoint of dimension.“ This is a terribly important datum. It gives him a universe.

You ask him for a datum of incomparable magnitude to, and he does find other ways to get a universe even though he isn't using those ways at this time. You got that now?

So your primary concern — to get back to this — is simply masses and spaces. And when masses leak, from our standpoint, into the spaces, we have bits and pieces or particles. And whether they're visible or invisible or small or large we do not care.

Now, this is from the auditor's standpoint, you understand. This makes an awful lot less game for the physical scientist. But oddly enough this, described to an electronics man, just two or three days ago, permitted him to solve and resolve several problems in electronics which have never been tackled before. He's building all sorts of gimmick and guhadgets now.

As you have to restrain something from leaking means that it must have been set up to leak in the first place… You see, if your electronic flow is going to come from a terminal, it must have been set up in the understanding that it couldn't endure forever, that something might happen to it, that it would deteriorate, and the train of electrons coming from it simply is a symptom of its deterioration. All right.

Now, you need to know, then, that space is space and that a mass or an object is a mass or an object, and that you can neglect particles to a very marked degree. Why? Because the running of particles parallels — get this now — the running of particles parallels disintegration and is the end of the cycle of action. You're running a second-postulate situation. And of course, it just sticks.

Now, there might be such a thing as destruction, but we couldn't care less, since if all we do is run creation, we can achieve the rest of the cycle of action with great ease. But if we try to really destroy something without running its createdness, its bits and pieces remain around. You get a universe full of bits and pieces then. Of what? Of everything that has gone before.

And an engram bank is just a manifestation of this and nothing more. An engram bank represents the bits and pieces of all those things which have gone before. It's the last little shadow of energy which came off the objects before the flick of time turned over. And the fellow holds on to this rather than the other, and an engram bank actually is not a mass but a collection of particles.

Therefore, to run it as particles becomes an impossibility in the long look. You cannot run an engram as though it were a collection of particles.

This I am giving you is very recent work, by the way. Had to be done. I thought this problem was an unsolvable problem, or as close to it as you could get, last February. I suppose my state of mind with regard to this problem had something to do with the thing. State of mind was rendered rather bad as having been bitten by the problem. I almost knocked myself off with radiation.

All right. Now, radiation is a 1957-type problem, and it is here with magnitude. I don't say that we have a magnitude of radiative particles around, so much as the problem itself has great magnitude, in that to realize that men could be so suicidal or so foolish they could go on playing with a weapon which is not a weapon and which is not useful in war. And they still go on playing with it. To realize that men can get into that condition is to realize that they go further south and still walk than we realize.

Do you know that no police force in the world would arm itself, by the way — no police force would arm itself — with fifty- caliber machine guns. You realize that? No civic police force. You could make them a present of fifty-caliber machine guns, and they would do nothing with them. A fifty-caliber machine gun fires a slug, you see, as big as my thumbnail. It is a huge slug with an enormous charge of powder. And the guns are big and they're unwieldy, and they are not good antipersonnel weapons. See? They're not good weapons; they just aren't functional.

And if you can imagine that the weapon a cop would have as he walked down the street would be a fifty-caliber machine gun (which is easily picked up by two men!) strapped on to his side, you'll get the reason why. But the main reason is not its portability, but the fact that the thing is not a good antipersonnel weapon and is not useful on citizens. It's too big a weapon to use on citizens. It would not keep citizens in line. It would actually inhibit law enforcement to such a degree that no law enforcement could take place. Nobody ever dared use a fifty-caliber machine gun in a city street. You see? It's just not something that you could set up and fire after a speeder. You know, the way they pull out their popguns and shoot at a speeder. You know? They do that — and kill innocent bystanders. But they still do that.

But they know that a weapon can be so large as to be useless. This is a principle which is well known. It has been with man since way before catapults. Even in the days of the broadsword and so forth, why, a gentleman wanted to be armed. And he was going to carry one of these two-handed, armor-piercing broadswords, you know, that was half as tall as his horse, you know? A great big, doggone thing — try to wield one in a drawing room. It just doesn't work, see? You get it tangled in the draperies and so forth. And so we had to have a short weapon in company with it. And after a while, shorter and smaller and more agile weapons entirely took its place. It isn't even around anymore. It was an awful lot of weapon.

On a battlefield, against an armored knight, in the hands of a strong man, a broadsword had some use. It would cut through a casque and a helm and a skull and a breastplate as far as that's concerned — clank! But as I say, it just didn't work as, for instance, a weapon for the Praetorian Guard or a weapon for the Queen's Own, or something of the sort. Just what would they be doing with that? I suppose they could lock broadswords point-to- hilt, or something like that, and press back the populace — if their arms didn't drop off trying to hold it up that long. But it'd be an extreme and stupid use.

And here they've developed a weapon which is too much weapon, which is not useful either in keeping the peace or in waging war. And why they want to test it, I wouldn't know. I am not an unqualified authority on this subject, I assure you. I've studied war, and it's something that you just wouldn't use. What would you use it for? You mean you're going to set up the whole area so your troops can't penetrate it? You mean you're going to pollute the atmosphere to such a degree that your own people are going to be knocked off if you ever dared wage war? Well, why is anybody testing it?

Now, that's merely a comment on sanity for only this reason (I'm not giving you a propaganda series because everything I'm saying to you, you undoubtedly have more or less added up yourselves, watching this program): People become obsessed with these particles. Got it? They become obsessed with the particles, and they lose the idea of terminals.

Now, your Scale of Reality tells you that a particle probably is a disintegrated — not so much terminal as — communication line. [See the Reality Scale in the Appendix of this volume.] See, that's what a particle is. It goes down that low. In other words, it's a disintegrated manifestation, and the more people handle it, the more disintegrated they get.

Now, I am perfectly prepared to change my mind on this subject if facts in auditing in the future do not bear me out. Because we are just at the entrance gate of this, but we apparently, at this time, have some sort of counter to the liability radiation, and other particles, pose against a body. We evidently have some idea here of how to bypass this problem. And I can tell you flatly that I know of no way to process particles with safety and security as an unlimited process.

Yes, you can process flows. Yes, you can monkey around with these things. But in the final analysis, you'll come down and process the ridge. Don't process the flow from the ridge; process the ridge. Got the idea?

In other words, any time in the past that we were processing particles, we were actually processing on a losing game. See, that was the losing side of it. It was disintegration. It was destruction. It was downscale. It was a second postulate. And it was a second postulate to such a degree that when we processed it, you had difficulties with it.

Now, I'm perfectly content if this turns out otherwise and somebody finds some way to directly process particles. I'm not closing the door on that entirely; that's just the way it looks to me here, after more than a year of very hard work on the subject of trying to proof up bodies and people against radiation and trying to make radiation less of a menace in this world. And it's been a long look. It's been a long search, but I don't say the search is over. I'm telling you that evidence at this time demonstrates that the processing of terminals or masses themselves, and the processing of spaces afterward, seems to take care of particles without any further worry.

Now, if the particle pursued the creation of the mass — you see, if the creation of the mass was first and the particle was second — all you'd have to do is handle the mass and the second postulate of disintegration would run out. You got that? So it does fit with several corners of theory; hence the processing of solids.

Now, does the processing of solids make a little more sense to you here?

All right. Now, I've already talked with you about game conditions: preclear is at cause, something else is at effect.

Do you realize that when a fellow reads a signpost that tells him „This way to Valhalla“ and „That way to St. Elizabeth's“ — he reads this signpost — do you realize he's being an effect of a solid? There's really nothing wrong with his being effect of a solid. But do you go further than this? Do you realize he's being an effect of a solid twenty-four hours a day, even if it's a featherbed? Do you see that? Twenty-four hours a day, being the effect of solids, effect of solids, effect of solids.

Now, you wonder why he goes downscale? Why is the universe a downscale proposition? The lowest rung of reach for most of your preclears is just this: that he's surrounded by solids of which he is the effect and which are never the effect of him.

It's quite interesting. Ken and I were looking over the feasibility of tearing down a couple of partitions upstairs. We were going to tear these partitions down. And we've stalled around and looked that over for two or three days, wondering how many scars it would make and how much damage it would do and how much difficulty it would be. Why? What are we stalling around for?

Suddenly realized what we were stalling around about at these two partitions. We were going to have a direct effect upon some solids. Bang! And we were impressed by only one fact: that the fireplace back of these partitions is terribly solid. It shouldn't be, but it is. There is no opening. It's evidently been bricked up and plastered up, and when you knock on the seal piece of it, you knock against hard rock. And so for a couple of days, without realizing what we were doing, we've been arguing about tearing this thing down. Actually, it's very flimsy and it's very easy to tear down, but what — we normally don't do that sort of thing, you see? We don't have that much effect on solids normally. The second I realized what it was all about, I said finally, „Hell, take it out. Nothing to it. I mean, rip it out.“ That's that.

The only problem it was posing is the problem that is posed every day: We were reversing the flow against the physical universe. But we were doing it this time in terms of action, and we were going to use some people in the operation to actually attack the operation and destroy, evidently, some tiny piece of it. Boom! We were going to have a big effect on solids, and therefore we argued about it for a while. Otherwise, there shouldn't have been any argument connected with it. But you see how the argument could pursue? Do you see that?

We wouldn't ordinarily argue about this much work or action at all. It was the fact that the work or action was leveled directly at a solid. See that? All right.

It isn't particularly aberrative to destroy a solid or to make a bunch of particles or something of the sort, but it is aberrative to go around all the time being the total effect of solids and you yourself never having any effect whatsoever on those solids. That's quite interesting! That makes a total effect.

Now, as I say, a thetan can't easily duplicate a solid, which rather makes it a sort of an enemy. So he wants to pull it down to particles of smaller sizes. Why does he want to do that? Well, he can better duplicate those, he thinks.

Listen, no thetan ever duplicated a particle either. But there's a lot of thetans running around saying, „I'm a particle.“ They even get so they're particles on communications lines: „I'm a message.“ Yeah, that's right — particles on a communication line.

They can become this and that. One of the reasons why the body picks up radiation is not because the body can even stop it. That's one of the funnier things, you know? Radiation will go through sixteen feet of concrete sometimes without stopping, and it certainly goes through a foot or two. And you think it's going to be stopped by a few inches of body.? It's not. I don't know that there's any radiation ever stops in the body. I don't know that there is such a thing as an exploding atom, like strontium- 90, that sits in the bones and blows up all the other atoms and all sorts of gruesome fairy tales people have been bringing up lately. I don't know that these things take place really, factually, at all, even in the framework of the agreements of bodies.

But I do know that a person sure worries about it. I know that the body worries about it. And I know that one of the reasons of this is that a person rather thinks of himself as an exploding atom sometimes.

You'll find that these people who have been at work for a long time in nuclear physics, they think of themselves as an exploding piece of energy. It's quite interesting. You try to exteriorize them and they try to lift themselves out with their thetan hands. It's quite remarkable. Quite remarkable.

Exteriorized some fellow one time that was way immersed in chemistry. And he was so sold on particles and tiny bits and things that just as I got him out, he reached back of his head to catch himself

When a person will do this, something like that, he must be totally sold on the idea that he's a particle. But he's not a particle. So a thetan can get awfully duplicated, he thinks, on the subject of particles, because he's got more of a chance, he thinks, of duplicating a particle than he has of duplicating a big solid, see? I don't know why he can't duplicate a solid just as easily as he can duplicate a particle. If he's going to get dizzy enough to think of himself as a sparkling, radioactive bit of radiation — if he can duplicate that — well, he certainly can achieve being a duplicate of a house!

But for some reason or other he falls for the tiny one, but doesn't fall for the large mass easily. But you don't have to solve his falling for the tiny one, and that's very lucky for you. Because it doesn't audit. It's a second-postulate condition.

You might say all particles can be looked upon by an auditor, not a physicist — we don't care about whether it's true or false in physics. It's probably very true in physics but we won't hang physics. We'll just simply say that to an auditor all particles are the product of a solid. You put down that as an auditing rule and you've got it; that's for an auditor. All particles, of whatever size, shape, behavior or visibility or invisibility, are the product of solids. At once you can do all sorts of things with this. I'll give you an example.

Here's a very direct use of „Make it a little more solid“ as a process. George believes that his father is a beast. He knows all sorts of things about his father. Tremendous number of things he knows about his father. But none of them are true. Or if true, he never discovered them by observation. Consider these words as symbols, particles of a terminal. All you have to do is find the person who had that opinion of Father, and without auditing the phrases, descriptions or moments, have the preclear make that person who was the author of these remarks „a little more solid“ and his opinion of Papa (opinion of these symbols, particles and the opinions created by them) blow up! He changes his mind about the whole subject. Why?

You located the terminal which disintegrated to the degree of throwing out some particles. You got it? It doesn't say that he can't tolerate these particles, doesn't say that he can't have these kind of weird opinions of Papa, but it does say that if you wanted to erase or change this idea of Papa, all you'd have to do is find the terminal.

Now, if you process the particles, you get into something like repeater technique. And we remember what happened when we ran repeater technique: We thought, well, it pulled a fellow down into it, and it did this and it did that. Well, it did a lot of mechanical things, but basically what it did was to directly process a particle which was from a solid. This person was a solid and his words were particles. Got the idea? And the person resisted these words or tried to change them or resented them, you see, in some fashion — in other words, they made a misemotional situation with the person — or these things cut his own ability to flow or stay in communication with his environment (i.e., Papa), and so he got upset about them.

Well, his upset is necessary to lock those particles in place and stop them, just as an upset about radiation particles is necessary in order to be hurt by radiation particles. You got it? And the remedy was simply to find the terminal which leaked, and make it a little more solid. You got that?

„Synthetic valence“ is what you call that valence. The valence of Papa doesn't clear, no matter how much we mock up Papa. Well, the source of the opinions of Papa wasn't Papa, and yet the person is in Papa's valence. Only he's not in Papa's valence; he's in a synthetic valence of Papa. Who's the author of that valence? Grandma? Grandpa? Great-aunt? Great-uncle? Mother? Wife? Who?

You can locate that rather easily on an electropsychometer, because to be bothered by that synthetic valence certainly means there is some proximity or closure with that actual terminal, which is now no longer apparently solid to the preclear. Have him mock up that terminal and make it a little more solid. And mock it up and make it a little more solid. Mock it up and make it a little more solid. And the synthetic valence will vanish, because it's merely composed of particles.

All right, we take somebody who feels degraded. „Who'd you live with that made you feel degraded?“

He says, „Oh, I don't know. I… I… I… I… I've never felt any other way. Ever since I got out of prep school, I've just always felt that way, you know?“ What are you going to do, clear up a whole bunch of degradation and soup and flows, and mess around and change his opinion and all that sort of thing? See?

You understand, words are particles, but a thetan is capable of independent thought. You get the idea? And he has to frame up the thought in order to make it a particle. Got that? Then it flows. The symbol is a particle.

All right, so we take this boy who has felt degraded ever since he has been to prep school. I had such a case, by the way. It was very interesting. He had been in a bad state of affairs ever since a bunch of boys had grabbed him and, as part of his initiation, had turned a urinal (full urinal) over his head and held his head in it for about an hour or so. And it really laid an engram in. Of course, they were beating and kicking him and knocking him around while this happened. And this was pretty wild.

It made a person who was almost a perfect Freudian case. You get why it would be: the connotations that he had, of one kind or another. And he had all this interlinked and associated and carefully plotted out in the wrong directions with a bunch of figure-figure over here. And then he'd read a whole bunch of Freud, which of course — he had added those particles on top of the other particles. He was having a time.

This was way back in the days when the solution to the case, by the way, consisted of running the engram. And I ran the engram with all perceptions all the way through, which was as close as we got to what we're doing right this minute, see? And it was effective to do this. He kind of had to put the engram there to run it again. You get the idea? And evidently an engram ran out at that moment when the preclear was cognizant that he was having to put it there in order to have it there some more. Got the idea? So then we called an engram „run out“ at that time. All we did was reverse the same situation I'm talking to you about now. Well, it desensitized and he changed his pattern of life completely. Fortunately, he could run an engram.

What about the preclear who can't? Well, this preclear might possibly be able to get a picture of the prep school. You got the idea? Might be able to get a picture of the prep school. Now, it all depends on the preclear, what he considers the terminal. It could be the prep school, it could be Earth, it could be this universe, it could be one particular boy, it could be some of the objects involved, or it could be his own body. We don't care what he considered it. We would pick up anything that he could get and make it a little more solid until he could mock it up well. And take any other associated terminal and have him mock it up and make it a little more solid, and any other associated terminal and make it a little more solid, until he finally could handle and manage these things and had reversed the flow, and he would change his mind about the whole situation.

Or we could just simply have him take the picture, or any part of the picture, and make it a little more solid, and we would've achieved, more or less, the same result.

Why? Because we're converting the terminals back into being terminals without leakage — if you want to put it that way. We're putting them back in a pure state. And he eventually gets to a point of where he has to create the whole terminal. And when he creates the whole terminal and realizes he doesn't have to create the terminal, and then doesn't create the terminal from there on, you see, he's totally recovered from that terminal.

So how about this fellow; how about this fellow who is Joe Preclear, who is total effect of the walls, total effect of the floor, total effect of the space of this universe all the time and, himself, never makes any motion toward it, against it or tries to complement it in any way? Well, he's trapped, of course. He actually gets a feeling of being trapped. If he's so impressed by spaces — now get this — if he is so impressed by spaces, upset about them, he's already inverted below solids. Now, your great tendency would be to have him make some space or something like that. No, the answer is still solids in some way. We've got the case there that causes us trouble.

But if this fellow is simply superimpressed by solids, and he's just always impressed by solids, and the solids are coming in on him — we'll take up this inverted case in a moment — if the solids always make him an effect, you see, this total effect in terms of solids then adds up to a feeling of pressure all over his body, and actually will distort his physical form. It's to that degree, to that degree.

What do we do? If we merely had him look around the room and find an object and then make it a little more solid, and that's all we had him do “-- Find an object and make it a little more solid,“ and he could do it, which most preclears can; „Look around the room and find an object,“ „Make it a little more solid“ — this pressure would relax. Because what is the pressure? The pressure is the total effect of solids restimulating old, damaging effects of solids, and the common denominator of the whole thing is solids.

Now, of course, the odd opinions he gets, naturally, are very easily traced. Anything that's a particle could have an effect upon him. So of course he has odd opinions. Circuits, all kinds of things are going full blast. Because if he's this overwhelmped by solids, then he is living in the reality of particles. And we get this very interesting state whereby all of his opinions are secondhand and he has engram bank and he's got this and he's got that. In other words, he's overwhelmed on this basis.

Now, the very inverted case requires some special treatment to graduate upstairs to a point where it can conceive a solid, and this is done by running any one of a number of entrance processes which would start out with, perhaps, „Look at me. Who am I?“ It'd start out with communication processes.

They go through various control processes. You eventually get him to „Keep things from going away,“ „Hold things still“ and Connectedness. According to our experience so far, you would move him up into a band of making things more solid. And then you would run him on „Make it more solid.“ He has now conceived a solid, and so on. He's in, actually, inverted space. You see? So everything is space. But once you start handling the space, you'd find out you were running him on a process too high, because he's not in space; he's in inverted space. He's not in space; he's in solids. He's in invisible solids which are so invisible that he doesn't even know they're there, see? And they look like spaces.

It's very astonishing to a preclear to find himself completely massed in with ten tons of concrete when he thought he was free of all this. A mystic quite commonly is in this kind of a situation. That's for true. That's what's wrong with a mystic. He's having a bad time with solids and he wants to escape, so people tell him to look at space. That finishes him. That isn't the thing to look at. The thing to look at is a solid. Got it?

All right. Now let's take up some other very, very interesting data with regard to this. What in the name of common sense is this universe doing being this solid and spacious? And if that is the case, what's it doing drifting on a time stratum? If it is. If it is drifting on a time stratum. What's this universe doing being this solid and this spacious as viewed by a thetan?

It is either a triumph of hallucination or a totally stuck track. Here's the weirdy: You can produce the same solidity as you perceive around you — as you look around at this moment at the room — by making backtrack engrams more solid. In other words, you can get good enough at making things more solid so that you can turn a backtrack engram…

I did this two or three times on preclears with other approaches, all of which are just cousins to what we're doing now. And I didn't quite know what the devil this was all about. Ownership Processing, by the way — things misowned thoroughly enough, would tend to get solid. And you could reach over and practically wrap your knuckles against the walls of the engram that the preclear would erect by misownership. It's quite an amazing phenomena. But the whole thing would blow up and not continue all the way through. We didn't yet know about solids. It happens directly on solids that a preclear can get good enough so that he looks at a picture of 1776, and the line of redcoats is a very solid, sweaty line, and the bullets coming from them are real real. You get the idea? And the ground is there and the sun is shining and everything is just exactly as you see it here in this moment. Isn't this fascinating?

Now, just so you'll have a complete grip on what this universe is, I hope someday that you will either run a preclear into this or run into it yourself to that degree. Now, the process which you're running right this minute could do so, but I don't say that it would. You understand?

In other words, on the backtrack you can get the illusion of total solidity, total space all over again on an experience which has occurred in the past. And once you have done that, you then get a much better grasp on what this universe is, in which we are all sitting at this moment. It's kind of a spooky thing. But how come it's moving in a time stratum at such regularity? How did this instant in time get this stuck and this loose? In other words, how did it get so stuck with all of us, and how is it so loose on the time track that it actually seems to float in time?

Well, the fact of the matter is, it probably doesn't float in time at all. And if life stopped pulling at it and mauling at it, in agreement with one another, and so on, it probably wouldn't move forward. It basically is a stuck moment in time. Down underneath all the stuff that's laid over the top of it is a stuck moment in time, and that's evidently what it is. And it's no more serious than that, and actually no more interesting. A rather fabulous thing, then, turned up. Right?

Now, if you can take an engram and blow it up solid, or a moment in a person's track and get him, finally, to blow it up that solid, you only have to add the ingredient of control to have him move things around any way they're supposed to move. But that would also include making some of the spaces connected with that incident, you see, so they'd have some space to move through. You got something that looks just like this. If you can do that with a past engram, you, then, should be able to do that out of whole cloth. And I can demonstrate to you that you can, rather more easily than by making things solid, but much more transiently, since the ability is something that a thetan, before he wants to change his mind about games, doesn't want to have. A thetan doesn't want this ability.

And I've already told you about the process. You say, „Now get the idea of making a picture the size of that wall. Now get the idea that would spoil the game and decide not to do it.“ You do that a few times, the next thing you know, why, the fellow is getting big 3-D pictures and scenes, and he might become a little afraid of going into them. But, oddly enough, you can do that with almost any preclear, except one who can't make things more solid. Now, he takes some coaxing.

Now, it was the discovery that several preclears couldn't do this and didn't have that reaction, but that the bulk of preclears did, which made me go on looking for some other material in connection with this. And sure enough, we find Solids permits him to change his mind about all sorts of things. He can change his mind about everything under the sun, moon and stars after a while. It returns to him an ability which he didn't know he had. Now, he's unknowingly making things solid, usually, when he's creating all this scenery.

Now, there's another test that a preclear — before he's been run adequately on Solids and Problems (another needful thing) — usually breaks down and refuses to complete. And that's the same technique run in this fashion.

„All right. Now decide to put a mock-up in the middle of the room that everybody can see. Realize that would spoil the game and decide not to.“ Those are the commands. „All right. Now decide to put a mock-up in the middle of the room that everybody can see. Now realize that would spoil the game and decide not to.“ And you would just ask the preclear to do those three things. All of a sudden he will say, „It's going to ruin everything.“ Of course, that's just what you've been telling him to repeat, but the oddity is, is he has already gotten something that is far, far too real for him.

Well, why is it far too real for him, and why does he cut this off, and why does he cut and run from the session? Because this he will do. He will find some plea to get away from this activity. He'll find something; he'll fall down and break his neck if he had to go that far. It's because he can't tolerate a solid or a space. You've tricked him. You've turned on for him and showed that he had an ability to create a solid that everybody could see. So there's nothing esoteric about this, otherwise your preclear wouldn't cut and run so hard.

I have on actual test built one up to a shimmer. That is to say, run a preclear until we had a shimmer in the room that everybody could see, and people coming in later commented and wanted to know what it was. It was a shimmer. I don't know what the preclear was mocking up, but it shimmered. Now, how far would he have gone? I suppose if I'd put him in a dead fit, or something of the sort, and threatened to knock his brains in or done something with him, I possibly could have made him go on beyond that point. But when I finally said „Ah, you're doing it,“ that was the end of that.

The mechanism of a universe is therefore not difficult to accomplish, is far too simple to be understood, by nearly everybody, and is much easier to reach than somebody's complex about mothers or something. Much harder to reach, this complex. Much harder to mess up, you know, and find the exact reason why dog panting always makes him go out and ruin a hat. You know? That's a difficult course. See?

To get somebody over some particular ill — specialized, particular ill — is much more difficult, evidently, than to build a whole confounded universe! Now, that sounds wild. But that's because when you're looking for a particular ill, you're looking for particles. You're looking for the shadows of the substance; you are not looking at the substance. And any day that you can make a shadow change its position out in the broad sunlight, without moving the object or the sun, let me know. Do you see that?

It's real tough to shift the shadow around. In fact, it's impossible, unless you take the object which is casting the shadow or the source of illumination, and either wait for something to happen to either one, or do something to either one. Then you can shift the shadow.

Psychosomatic illnesses, complexes, inhibitions, disabilities, particularized phobias, are shadows. All you really have to find is the mass which exuded them. But you don't have to do that if your preclear can make all masses more solid. He, of course, takes it for granted he could have made that more solid and refuses to have any further such heavy effect from that small amount of terminal.

Our problem at this time probably doesn't have anything to do with making anybody better. Our problem, probably from here on out, is a problem of another hue and color. It is probably „Now having cracked the confounded thing, how do we keep this universe here?“ That's probably a much more interesting problem.

Now, all such solutions must be run with some attention to problems; because solids, and later the making of spaces, has the potentiality of kicking out, wholesale, so many problems.

Remember that invention of problems sooner or later will have to play some role in the auditing. Otherwise, the person will get himself into complications just to reassure himself that he still has a game left. And people do this. Why they do this possibly stems from many reasons, but they do this. That's all you need to know.

So that when you make — have your preclear make — things more solid, sooner or later you had better have him dream up a few problems. Got the idea? Problems of Comparable Magnitude, anything of that character. All right.

Now, how about the fellow who can't make things a little more solid right at the beginning? Well, I've given you this. There are several lead-ins. One of the basic lead-ins is simply to start and continue a very good session in terms of communication and control of the preclear. This also is a lead-in, since stop is one of the clues to solids. Since a solid and making things solid is possibly only another mechanism of making things still or motionless. There are many ways you could go about making things still or motionless, or making locations motionless and so on, but Solids happens to be an intensely specialized one. And as a result, you'd undoubtedly handle this preclear with a number of other processes before you ran into Solids, if the preclear could not at once begin to make things a little more solid. Do you understand that?

In other words, you'd run him with some communication, you'd run him with some control, and then you've got this little battery of processes (and we'll undoubtedly discover more of them as time goes on) which would graduate him up to the ability to make things more solid. Those processes are Connectedness, „Keep it from going away,“ „Hold it still,“ and Stop — any Stop process. These graduate up into Solids, one way or the other.

Now, you should be able to associate in your mind that solids come about because of stops or stills and keeping things from going away. But keeping things from going away also brings about stops, stills and solids. Solids brings about stops and stills. Stops and stills and keeping things from going away bring about solids.

I mean, it's quite interesting, but you have an interactive trio here: keeping things from going away, and so on.

Now, Connectedness also influences the ability to make things solid. Of course, you have to run all those on a game condition and run them properly.

And as soon as your preclear is able to make anything a little more solid, you've got it made, and made thoroughly, because you can take him, from there, the rest of the way on out. Now, that's a warning to anybody who doesn't want to go out, never to succeed in making something more solid.

Thank you.

[End of Lecture]