[Start of Lecture]

Thank you.

All right. And this is the 30th of January, 1957, lecture number twenty of the 16th ACC. And we are carrying forward now on techniques, completing this series on techniques.

We have a number of techniques, all of which are terribly important, all of which could be memorized by you, all of which could be run on preclears — all more or less without any judgment on your part — and you would drop cases. That's an interesting and cheerful fact, isn't it?

There is no series of commands that I could teach you — so that you could sit up like a little robot, you know, and give them all out — that would make anybody well. You understand that?

Every human being is composed of the same basics as every other human being. But every human being has led a different experience pattern than every other human being. And there are no two human beings at the same case level, just as there are no two apples which are exactly alike. There'll be some difference.

Judgment is demanded on your part to observe, adjudicate, and understand what you are looking at. And this depends on you and your aliveness. And that, first and foremost — your ability to look, to observe and know what you're looking at, understand what you have confronted — goes before any procedure or technique. Do you understand that?

Now, we have another way of saying that: „An auditor has to be at a good case level before he should audit.“ I disagree with this; I have always disagreed with this. Very odd, but I have. For this reason: Too many auditors with one foot in the engram bank and the other in a grave have pulled too many people out of too many bowls of soup. In other words, experience runs counter to this.

Now, it is true that an auditor who has a very low case level will make more blunders and permit more automaticities on his part to enter into the auditing session, so as to upset more preclears, than auditors who are high on the scale. But it is not true that an auditor pegs the preclear at his own tone level. (Somebody said it in the field someplace and it's gotten around. It was back, way back when, '52, something like that.) Has never proven to be the case. It's not the case.

Why? You audit anybody with Dianetics or Scientology and you will make them more aware, and if they become more aware they get better. They become more capable of confronting life, their bank, the body.

Somebody says that auditing can be bad. Well, in a class where everybody is trying to do good auditing and do better and learn something, and so on, I have to admit that auditing can occasionally look bad, because we are measuring it directly against a very, very tough standard. Do you get the idea?

But the funny part of it is, there is a saw which throws out this fact that an auditor tends to peg the preclear at his own tone level. There is one that throws this out, which is much more useful: „Bad auditing is better than no auditing.“ Now, if that upsets your way of looking at it, I'm sorry; but perhaps it'll make you more tolerant of a book auditor, who has not been trained, who does not know very much about it, who makes fantastic blunders. It's an interesting thing that this book auditor's auditing, on a preclear who doesn't know any better, is better than no auditing.

There's another old saw: they say, „You know how restimulative the data of Dianetics and Scientology is.“ I've heard that, you know: „You know how restimulative this is.“ Any time you restimulate anything in a preclear, what do you get? You get a higher awareness. When you get a higher awareness you get a higher IQ.

Sure, maybe it hurt to find that out, but these things usually key out in three to eight days. The longest I ever heard anything stay on was one time I ran into a somatic that had been turned on and it had been going full blast for about three and a half months. But I found out something quite interesting. The person who had that somatic had been getting auditing for just that somatic, of an alter-is kind of auditing, see? We were going to „change the somatic, change the somatic.“ In other words, the three-day rule still applied, except every three days it was thrown back into full restimulation. Get the idea? Made a difference.

If somebody is going downscale in an HCA class, it is because there is bad instruction. I have never found any single incident which threw out that datum. It didn't matter how much data was thrown at them from tapes or by Instructors or by their fellow students. It didn't matter how much guff was thrown around, how much restimulative material, how many times in the coffee shop they were pitched into birth and left there. This didn't matter.

But very bad, oppressive instruction which was simply a break of ARC, and they were being chopped up, and they were being corrected when they shouldn't be, and they were being made to fail-fail-fail — something of this character had to be present in order to suppress the case.

Any time I find anybody going down in an HCA Course, I never look at the case, I never look at the auditor, I always look at the Instructor: „So, what've you been doing?“ The Instructor says, „How did you know?“ Inevitable result.

So in instructing people you have the same material applying. In other words, you can tell a person anything. You can teach a person anything. If you start to completely chop him up and make him fail by telling him he's wrong when he's right, and overwhelm-overwhelm-overwhelm-overwhelm-overwhelm… You get the idea?

Oh, an Instructor is allowed one gross injustice per student per course. You realize that, don't you? That's allowed the Instructor: one gross injustice per student per course. But not two.

The Instructor so much complements the desire of the student to learn and to be, merely by telling him right from wrong and what's best and so on, that in an absence of good communication and control on the part of the Instructor, the student also doesn't suffer, but doesn't get any better. You see? When the Instructor omits good communication and very good control, heavy control on students, then the case goes along and he doesn't learn anything, you know.

But the Instructor really has to work awful hard and really has to be very remiss, and every time the auditor gets the preclear into session, has to tell him that the preclear isn't in session. Do you get the idea? Has to just keep him — chop! chop! chop! chop! Has to just work on it, heavily, hard, you know? Tell him he'll never make an auditor. Why doesn't he quit? You know? This kind of invalidation — very heavy — will show up eventually in a case level.

But what does it take? It takes a terminal versus a terminal in present time, out of ARC. See? Takes a present-time misemotion, present-time bad ARC — thoroughly bad — in order to get a retrogression of a case. Actually, it doesn't matter how many things that Instructor keys in. This is an oddity, but it just doesn't matter.

Horribly enough, there is only one direction for the data of Dianetics and Scientology, in being fed to anybody with any kind of communication at all, and that's up. We've taken units and we've done nothing but instruct them, we've done nothing but feed them data, done nothing but give them lectures, and had them all improve. That's an oddity, isn't it? Because the data they were being given would make strong men blanch and strong women take to whiskey.

Tell them all about thought control on the whole track, you know? Tell them about „Well, in a lot of societies on the backtrack things got so bad that they'd have 'thought towers' in the middle of town and when a person thought a disloyal thought, he would at once realize that it'd been picked up on the thought tower and go turn himself in to the police and get electric-shocked.“

You tell somebody this, lay it on heavy, describe it completely and so forth, and describe it in such a way that it'll restimulate it, it's liable to give him a headache. But he also knows there's been thought police. He'll say, „Oh, yes, yes, yes. I have some recollection of this,“ you know? And what do you know, his awareness is increased, so his IQ and ability increases. This is quite remarkable, quite remarkable.

Now, it isn't true that if you keep dumping new, strange wildcats in a person's bedroom, that he'll go up in scale. It's not true, see? If you keep dumping new, strange, didactic Instructors into the student auditor's auditing room, he does not go up in scale. You got that? See? Same thing; same order of magnitude.

But if you restimulate his own experience which he has already had — you got that? — he only goes up in scale. Because he's been through it, and you have demonstrated to him something of which he could be aware without dying in his tracks. Soon as he finds out he has some vague awareness of it, he also recovers some vague ability to confront it.

All right. Therefore, one of the first things you should understand about techniques is techniques are neither bad nor good; they are merely workable, not very workable and unworkable. Got it?

Now, you can run a fellow downhill by running him in a no-games condition. But what do you know, you can get away with a no-games condition for sometimes as many as fifty commands without the preclear suffering.

There are some techniques which work wonderfully for ten commands, five commands — just gorgeously. „Look around the room and find something you wouldn't mind getting an effect from.“ Works about twice. Got it? It's that narrow. Third time, something happens. Fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth — nuh- uuuhh!

Now, this is then true of Straightwire processes. Straightwire processes are limited processes. You can get away with them and almost make a guy recover from a lifetime of misery by asking him one Straightwire question which clicks. You ask him ten, and you'll find out that you have undone all the rightness that you have accomplished with one. Why? You're asking him to be the effect of his past directly as an auditing technique.

„What was done to you?“ is that type of Straightwire question to which I refer — „What did they do to you, you poor victim?“ In the first place, it's accusative. It says „Look, you are being the effect of your father.“ See? You say to him, „Who used to pick his teeth with his thumbnail day and night?“

He thinks for a while, and he says, „My father!“ And what do you know, if you ask him, „Now, can you remember an exact instant when you saw your father do that?“ very possibly you'll key out the habit.

Just ask him about three more questions along the same line, you've wiped it out and he's got the habit back again. Why? Because the type of question you're asking him is based on the fact that you have noticed that he is the effect of something, and all your further questioning tends to confirm his having been an effect of Father. Do you see? You are pursuing this now straight down the line as having been the effect of Father. „Can you tell me something else your father used to do that you do now?“ Huh-huh! Well, that's in essence what you've asked him the first time, wasn't it? You noticed he was picking his teeth with his thumbnail and you said, „Who used to do that?“ And he said Father. And you said, „Remember an instant when you saw Father doing that?“ And he says, „Yes, I can!“ — bang! There goes the habit, see?

But any further punch along this line is apt to push him right back into not only that habit but a half a dozen more. Why? You're saying „You're the effect of your father. You are the effect of your father.“ Now, I'm not saying that the individual particularly suffers from this or will have any long-lasting benefit, but you have wiped out your own gain, and that is just about all a Scientologist can do. He wipes out his own gains.

In other words, he marches the preclear three inches upscale and drops the preclear back three inches. Now, if he apparently drops the preclear back twenty-two inches, I am afraid he is just dropping the preclear back to some other auditor's gain. In other words, you could override some other auditor's gain too. You could chop up some other auditor's auditing one way or another. Do you see this?

But asking him questions of this type and even auditing him badly does not affect, you might say, the personality level or IQ with which he came into Dianetics and Scientology. Evidently, about all that can be wiped out is his gain. And you could actually, possibly wipe somebody else's gain on him out too. But that's stretching it a bit.

You can with certainty wipe out your own gain. By doing what? Just running a no-game-condition-type process which caps the games-condition-type processes you have been running. You got that?

I'll give an example of that: Some of you right here in this unit promoted upscale some of your preclears in the first few days of the course. See, you were running some games-condition process and you were doing all right. All right, you went into learning processes of one kind or another, and down they went. How far? They went down to where they'd been before you started auditing them in the first place. You get the idea? A learning process actually wipes out a fellow's own gains.

Well now, what if you just sat down and ran a no-games condition on the preclear, and a no-games condition on the preclear, and a no-games condition on the preclear, and a no-games condition on the preclear? Wouldn't you shove him out of the bottom eventually? You'd knock him flat for maybe two or three days, but he'd be right back up to where he was before.

It's almost impossible to depress a man without actively acting against him in present time — you know, taking a club to him, kicking him, torturing him, beating him around. It has to be an overt, pretty nearly physical, hammer and pound in present time to reduce a profile.

Therefore, auditing procedure and techniques come broadly under a class of action which improves. See, it broadly comes under this class of action, „improves.“ And then you don't have to say, „Well, good auditing improves, but bad auditing, well, we're not so sure of.“ Nah! You don't have to classify it like this. You really don't.

Bad auditing is better than no auditing. Now, we compare this — we have to compare this — with two other things: One is the normal environmental confusion of the preclear, which may be throwing him downscale because it does contain repeated confusions and violences. And then we compare it with physical violence. But the normal environmental confusion of the preclear has been depressing him at the regular, routine rate that he has been depressed over the last twenty years. You get the idea? So it's just one of these retrogressive factors; he's just going downhill at about that rate. So that is life itself, and we would say life itself, then, has a tendency to age people, or something of the sort. Well, why compare auditing to that? Because that's not what we would normally consider an action, but a series of co-operative conditions.

So, we have to compare auditing on the light-dark comparison, you know, the good-evil… What would be the evil terminal? Well, the evil terminal, actually, would have to be outright physical brutality. As bad as that, you know? Preclear tries to get up off the couch, and you give him a knee in the jaw, you know? This kind of thing, see? Have to beat him, fill him full of drugs, soporifics of one kind or another, and then lay in some hypnotic- type engrams, you know. Get a bunch of dry-ice cubes and shove them in his mouth. See, you'd have to do something wild, you see. It'd have to be pretty doggone wild.

Well, then anything you would do short of physical violence that you would call auditing, either doesn't do anything to the preclear or improves him. See that?

Now, when we look at procedures, we are just looking at that procedure which produces the best result in the least time. That's the only reason we're being tough on procedure. We want results of a higher order in less time, and we know of old that this takes place in the presence of very good procedure. This is for sure. And we know somebody using very bad procedure brings his preclear upscales three inches and drops him back two-and-a- half inches and brings him upscales three inches and drops him back two-and-a-half inches.

He does such things as the preclear says, „Hey!“ And the auditor, you know — he knows he's got to repeat the command. He's learned that, you know? The preclear said, „Hey!“ and the auditor just doesn't pay any attention to it at all, gives him the command again. And the preclear says, „But wait a minute.“ And the auditor says, „That's right, you just do the command.“ Preclear's trying to tell him he just exteriorized and he's heading north for Arcturus. See? He never permits the preclear to say anything because he didn't notice anything happened.

It's almost impossible to not see something happen with a preclear. They run up semaphores and signals and flashing lights and everything else, and you should at least acknowledge and say „Well, what happened?“ You know? You actually, to convince him you're interested in him, should say „What happened?“ at the moment he went this way, see? You don't wait for him to tell you; that's a comm lag on your part.

Now, if you didn't call it to his attention that something had happened, he wouldn't have noticed it. So you, of course, are doing procedure at a fast rate. You're observing the case, you are following through two-way comm, and you're not waiting for the preclear to find something out before you find it out. And you are not waiting for the preclear to tell you what's going on, because if you don't know what's going on just by watching the session, you ought to be in the preclear's chair. Got the idea?

So procedure has to be heavily this way. Well, all right, now let's take it a little bit further. That's good two-way comm. That's good ARC. You know, you noticed what happened, you commented on it, you acknowledged the fact when he told you something.

All right, now let's take this other one: The preclear goes jolt, like this. And you say, „Well, what happened?“

And he says, „Well, I just kind of jumped out of the body and jumped back in.“

You say, „Gee, is that right? You feel all right?“

And he says, „Okay.“

And you give him the same auditing command over again, you see? And he jumps again, and so on. And you go through, and you say, „What happened?“ and so on. You give him the same auditing command over again, and he jumps once more. And you've gone off in some direction of technique, or there's some way you're wording the technique or something; you've given this guy a shove down, you see, or he wouldn't have gotten into a jumpy band of this character. And he's apparently jumping more and more.

Well, there's where technique comes in. See? That he jumped is the business of procedure. Why he jumped is the business of the technique. You got the idea?

Admitted that your procedure is perfect, then the only other variable with which we're dealing is technique. So about the third jump certainly, you would look over what you are running on the preclear, to change it or not to change it as the case may be.

But nobody tells you today, unless you are an HCA-level auditor, that you've got to run the same technique on and on and on, with never any shift or change, see? This'd be a very unobserving thing to do.

You've dreamed up something. You fed it to this preclear. This preclear has been doing it and has been going downscale ever since you started it: Something is going wrong here, and the preclear is going out of control. And because the preclear is going out of control, you shouldn't just suspect your control. What you should suspect also is the technique.

Therefore, it isn't enough to tell you „If you say woggy-woggy to the preclear, and every time he says yes, you say woggy-woggy again; well, he'll eventually get well.“ That's not right. You've got to have an understanding of what you're running on the preclear.

To hell with it. If this subject ever gets down to magic chants and quotations and spells, it'll also get down to witch pots. And what is the exactly-worded technique but a spell? Get the idea?

Give you an exactly-worded technique and then you try to run it on the preclear, but he doesn't understand those words. Hm. In order for you to clarify it with the preclear, then you better understand what that technique is about! In other words, no wording is going to supplant your ability to understand the technique.

Number one: you must understand that if you intend to use this technique more than about five or ten commands, it's got to be a game condition: preclear at cause.

I'll give you a wrong-way-to technique: „Give yourself a somatic. Good.“ Well, you say, „Well, he's at cause.“ „Give yourself a somatic. Give yourself…“ How the hell can a thetan have a somatic, huh? This is not a possibility, and yet such commands have been run. See? You're asking him to be the effect of his own cause in such a narrow border that while it's not really a no- game condition, it's certainly not a game condition. So you would know that command is, you know, kind of for the birds.

But how about this one? „Give your body a somatic. Give your body a somatic.“ Is that a workable process? Yeah, it's a two-terminal process, and all techniques that work involve two terminals. Auditing is a third-dynamic operation. Techniques are, therefore, all third-dynamic techniques. There are no first-dynamic techniques. Maybe there are fourth or second or fifth or sixth, but there just aren't any one-terminal techniques. There is no reaction on one terminal; there couldn't be.

What's wrong with your preclear? He's had first-dynamic living. He's had so much first-dynamic living, and he's accepted it to such a degree, he's become an „only one.“ But what is a no-game condition but an only-one condition?

A preclear is a thetan who is only one! Now, you audit these thetan characteristics directly and you're auditing no-game conditions from top to bottom. The only thing that ever gets wrong with a thetan, oddly enough, is what's wrong with a thetan, which is what a thetan is. The only thing that ever gets wrong with a thetan is being himself You understand that?

It's so observably true, that a guy is liable to get overwhumped by it. He's liable to be a bit staggered by this. The only time you ever got into trouble was by being yourself; that's obvious. The one thing you don't seem to like is a native state, which consists of what?

I don't say why this is. This is so wildly high in the theory of speculation, it's hardly even in the subject of techniques. But it has to be understood because it tells you what techniques won't work. They won't ruin anybody, but they certainly won't work on him or make him any better.

Any technique which involves a condition or harmonic of native state doesn't work, because he is that already! Have you got that? He is that.

If you could imagine that a girl is really a girl, then the explanation that she is a girl would not be therapeutic. See, somebody is trying to be a girl, and you come along and you question why she's being a girl. But she is a girl. Now, if you could imagine that, just take in 1945, man's know-how is that „A man is a man is a man is a rose,“ you know? „A man is a man. He is not anything else but a man. He is an automatic brain which is turning over,“ you know? You know, „It's all automatic, and little girls are little girls are little girls, and there's nothing else, and there's no explanation for it,“ and so on.

If that were the case, then actually, getting a little girl to explain and justify her being a little girl would actually not be therapeutic, if she were a little girl. Actually, it is a therapeutic process because she isn't.

Now, if you asked somebody „Now, just why are you a thetan?“ he'd get no place, see?

You ask somebody to conceive a static; you're asking him more or less the same thing. And we know that when we ask somebody to conceive a static, they usually go by the boards.

All right, what's this all about? Well, I can only tell you the results of tests and try to give you some sort of a theory to match it. But the result of tests is that a condition that a thetan already is, as himself, is not auditable, and that anything wrong with a thetan is being a thetan. And he's got to be able to be something else before he can be anything. You see that?

Now actually, run somebody on „no time.“ Well, run somebody on „no time.“ Just say, „No time, no time, no time…“ „Get an idea of there being no time.“ See? „Get an idea of there being no time. Get an idea of there being no time.“ And then, „Get an idea of a part of the world where there is no time.“ Something like that. After a while your preclear will go thdahh. Why? Well, that's what a thetan is; he's no time. He actually has to make it up to have it. Got the idea?

All right, you'd say, „Get an idea of something with no wavelength“ — same result. „Get an idea of something with no mass“ — same result. „Get an idea of a universe with no space in it“ — same result. Why? All of these things are thetan characteristics: no time, no wavelength, no mass or space.

All right, „Get an idea of something without any location at all.“ Obviously this would be therapeutic, and you're liable to be trapped with that one. Because the omnipresence of a personality is established by this fact: You ride along with Joe in the car on the seat beside you. And you're not looking at Joe, but you know Joe is present. Got the idea? And years go by and you have a fight with Joe, and Joe and you part, and so on. And one fine day you've got a mock-up of Joe standing in front of you, and you can't understand where that came from, but you successfully put that aside. But you have a feeling like Joe is around someplace. „Where's Joe?“ You know, you got an idea. You say, „Well, it's probably an engram or something. Probably some old picture I have of him.“ Now, you start running out all the pictures you have of Joe.

It isn't the trouble. The pictures aren't the trouble. It's the fact that Joe was so often present, and you knew it, when you weren't looking at him. And that gives us an omnipresence of Joe. He wasn't located in time or space. He called us over the telephone and didn't say where he was. He sat alongside in the seat. He was in the bedroom asleep while we were in another bedroom, but maybe he was there and maybe he wasn't there.

And one day we run into the fact that somebody believes Joe is around. This is why a spiritualist can live — the omnipresence of Joe or Mother or anybody else. See, they knew they were there but didn't have any mass to fill the position. So we get a massless condition of uncertain location, and we've got something that looks very like a thetan — doesn't audit.

Just try and audit on a preclear sometime — „All right, just close your eyes and, without getting a picture of Joe, get the idea that Joe is somewhere, but not anywhere in particular.“ And your preclear after a while starts going „Dahhh…“ Do you see this?

This is an oddity. I tell you it is an oddity, and I don't really wish to give you any explanation for it; because I wish much more that you would accept it as an oddity. I could give you a very acceptable explanation for it, but I could not tell you that that is the explanation or the final explanation or everything there is to do about it. I merely give you this oddity which stands at the top of each and every technique.

The techniques which directly address the condition of a thetan as such or any harmonic thereon, which we add up as the no-games conditions in Scientology: Fundamentals of Thought and in some later papers — those are no-games conditions — are not auditable, and if audited produce no gain or deteriorate an existing gain achieved by Dianetics or Scientology. [See the list of games conditions and no-games conditions in the Appendix of this volume.] That's that important, that important.

You say, „Conceive a static. All right. Conceive a static. Okay. Conceive a static. All right.“

„Don't feel well,“ you say. Why?

Well, actually, the only explanation that I would attempt is not to tell you that a thetan cannot tolerate himself. That would be nonsense. He obviously wants a game of some sort or another, and he can't be himself and have a game. I'm not going to go into this any further than this one point: The trouble with him is he has told too many lies and done too many things and gone into too many agreements for him to back out now. And the fact of his backing out makes him feel degraded. And that's a workable explanation.

So therefore, you've got to run him in the direction of having made many agreements to be many things on all the dynamics. You have to assume he is a man and audit him as a man who is allergic to women, or audit him as a man who is allergic to work. You get the idea? You're auditing him as a person, as a being, as an identity, in the direction of having more identities and more things. Your evident assumption that he's picked up every identity he's contacted in this lifetime: assumption pleases him to pieces.

You say, „You know, you're in your mother's valence, father's valence, great-uncle, great-aunt, and so on. You're a mess.“

He says, „Yeah, I guess I am.“

Is this a real condition? No, but he assumes it's so. One time or another he said to himself, „Gee, I'd like to be my aunt.“ And then he said, „But of course, I'm not.“ First, second postulate, right there in a package, and that gives him his wife's valence. Why? Because his aunt looks like his wife. What a disassociation. Yet he did it!

He's got all kinds of nonsense hanging around him one way or the other, but it's all game-condition nonsense. And we look over the list of game conditions and we want to know what's wrong with a fellow: it's all these game conditions. But that's what's wrong with him are the game conditions, and that's what you audit are the games conditions, and that happens to be the only thing you can audit with any security. You can audit games conditions.

The trouble with the preclear is he's at cause. So you audit him at cause. You say, „But creation is very therapeutic. You know, that's a native-state characteristic: a thetan creates.“ The devil he does! He doesn't either. He starts obsessively creating only when he considers there isn't enough around and he'll have to do it and take it upon himself

Up to a certain point he considered that some agreements of some sort or another were enough, but maybe on some other, earlier harmonic he did create. But the harmonic you're going to pick him up on is that creation is merely a substitute for an absence of isness in the past. He didn't have enough, therefore he himself has got to create it.

The fellow who is writing all too often (particularly a writer who's having a hard time) is discovered to be the writer who couldn't find enough stories to read. He read the library shelves bare and that was that, so he went and wrote some. Got the idea?

A fellow who drives a fast car or enters into races very well could be a person who simply couldn't go to enough races. There weren't enough races, so he decided that was a place where he could help and pitch in. That was an empty spot in the game, and so he jumped into the cockpit and there he went. Got the idea? But it made a game.

It's rather pathetic to conceive that it is a rather selfless action on the part of the preclear. It is rather interesting to conceive this: that a man can actually become a bad man merely because the cops are having a hard time finding some. You get the idea? He's filling slots, missingnesses in life. He sees, to make this pattern of life more complete, „This is what we got the least of“ (he thinks), „therefore I'll be it, or I'll make it, or I'll create it, or I will do it.“ And this is really the basic explanation behind any activity of any preclear you've got.

A person who is crazy probably was impressed with the emptiness of insane asylums. He found out, for instance, that there was a certain amount of sadism existent in the treatment of the insane, and a lot of poor people were getting this treatment and it was being done to them, and if he occupied a spot in the line, why, at least while it was being done to him it wouldn't be done to somebody else. So therefore, he too can serve.

Now, the cycle of a thetan is he serves and then he withdraws — drdrdrdrt! Unfortunately, he's hung with having served. The engram is his record of having served too well, too thoroughly, and then having backed out.

Do you realize the only reason that an engram having to do with death perseveres…? Death doesn't persevere. When you're killed, you're killed, see? I mean, it only happens once. What's an engram of death going on persevering? What is this thing? Like an ally, Grandma's death, and Grandpa's death, and Mama's death, and Father's death — you find these on the preclear all wrapped up and persevering. Why? Well, there aren't enough deaths. See? There aren't enough deaths, so he keeps those around.

But why didn't he stay dead? Why didn't he stay dead? Well, someday he'll try to, because there aren't enough deaths. See, we get the scarcity of deaths.

A thetan tends to fill up the scarcities and occupy the scarce roles. It isn't true that he has to be the star or the only one, and so forth, unless he conceives there aren't enough stars and only ones. He says, „This is what's the matter with this game. It hasn't got enough stars. Good, I'll be a star.“ I'm afraid that it's no more sensible than that.

And if you can get the sensibility of this fairly straight, then techniques have a tendency to wind up rather easily in your hands. You just say, „Well, that's a technique; that isn't a technique.“

What determines it? Well, the one that isn't a technique is over here on the no-games-condition list. For instance, „effect on self, cause at another point“ — no-game condition. „Total motionlessness of self“ — that's a thetan, but it isn't a game condition; it's a no-game condition. Get the idea?

But get the idea of making somebody else totally motionless. Ah! Boy! He's off to the races — bang!

Had the most fiendish idea the other day. I'm going to write a science-fiction story (I still do, you know). I got a wonderful idea of writing about a government scientist who goes mad, you see, and the security is so terrific that nobody can find out what he's doing, see? Not even his own boss, because the security is so terrific, you know? And when he orders materials he can't tell anybody in the materiel department what it's for because, of course, it's so secret. You see, his security is very great.

And he goes ahead and he builds up this thing which makes space solid. See, space becomes totally solid. See? And then puts it over the light lines to all the government offices everywhere. And of course, all the space in all government offices, complete with personnel, gets totally solid.

And the last person that's left is J. Edgar Spoofer. And he tries to explain it to this guy, that this guy doesn't have the right to go ahead and do this in any direction and that he's going to arrest him. But the guy tells J. Edgar Spoofer, „But look, you're supposed to safeguard security in the government. And it says right here that my work is under total security and all actions I perform are under total security, so therefore, you're violating your own order.“ So J. Edgar Spoofer steps back and lets the entirety of the Department of Justice and his office get totally solid. And everybody lived happily ever after.

Well, wherever you see no-communication, don't audit it, see? But that's the thetan in a native state: no-communication. He isn't communicating with anybody. What you have to audit is communication. Communication isn't what's wrong with him. But no- communication isn't possible to run on him.

You want to dish somebody sometime, run this technique, which is one of the loveliest techniques you ever tried to run on anybody. Sounds so good! It's a perfect technique! You've heard it before: „Find somebody that you don't have to communicate with. Find something with which you don't have to agree.“ You'd be surprised how many preclears will buy this.

Native state: no agreement, no communication, no reality, nothing — zero.

If you were to run on a preclear: „Look around and find something with which you don't have to agree,“ you could probably get away with it one way or the other, because he'd be communicating all the time; but he wouldn't move an inch on the Tone Scale. It's that bad a process, and yet it sounds very logical.

It sounds sufficiently logical so that if you sat down and processed some old Dianeticist on „All right, now tell me something with which you don't have to agree at this moment.“ And you just ran that and ran that and ran that, with what happiness, with what glee he would probably run this technique! And he'd go right into complete wog. And for about three days he would really be a wog, too. Then he would snap out of his hop and rebalance. An impossible process, but it is a condition of native state.

Native state only includes a potentiality of total agreement. It doesn't include any agreement at all, and it certainly is a no- agreement circumstance. It is not in agreement with anything. And yet you just ran that. What's wrong with it? It's a native state.

What's wrong with a thetan is being a thetan, and he gets as right as you let him be something else. You increase his ability to be other things, to do, to have, to move, to compete, to participate, you've got it.

Now, if you have a law-enforcement agency around which is always telling people they're not supposed to do, not supposed to act, not supposed to look, not supposed to do this, not supposed to do that, must go out of communication with this, mustn't touch that — what's the difference between „mustn't touch“ and „go out of communication with“? — and you go on with this, you know, you got this element in the society. And they say — if they just said that, everybody would ignore them. But if they put you in jail and beat you up and did all sorts of things to you if you touched certain things, they would inevitably react as a deteriorating factor in the society, because they are saying „Get out of the game. Get out of the game. Get out of the game.“ And that is the common denominator of anything that's wrong with a preclear.

Therefore, the best techniques are those techniques which improve his ability to enter the game. As simple as that. What's wrong with him basically is not having entered the game, but having been kicked out. Oddly enough, if you run his entering the game, „being kicked out,“ being a second postulate, runs off without too much further attention from you. But you'd better not audit it. „Give me a game you're not part of.“ That's a lousy technique; see, that's a terrible technique. „Tell me a game you're not playing at this moment,“ see — drr-rr-rrt. Several things wrong with it: One, it's the second postulate. Depends for its strength upon the first postulate, which is a game he was playing. Get the idea?

If you sat and asked a preclear, „Tell me a game you could play right now,“ you might run down his bank, decrease his havingness, because you're making him figure-figure in his head.

You know, making a preclear figure-figure in his head has a tendency to pull the bank in on him. You know, thinkingness processes are not very therapeutic. He thinks holes in his head. That's for sure. The electronic phenomena which surrounds him has a tendency to eat up and change and collapse, the more he figure- figures.

You get somebody who's figure-figuring, if he keeps figure- figuring and goes to a figure-figure-figure-figure and harder and harder and harder figure-figure, and he's thinking harder and harder and harder and harder and harder, you're going to spin him in.

The only reason brainwashing works the way the commies do it is because they make people do self-criticism. Well, we don't care whether they're criticizing themselves or anything else — that could be a game too, I suppose — but they make them think-think- think-think-think in their heads, see? Figure-figure harder, figure-figure harder, and they just keep reducing their havingness, reducing their havingness, reducing their havingness.

And then the degree of security that they utilize is „You mustn't touch. You mustn't get out. You mustn't walk. You mustn't do this. And you can't play the game.“ All of these things combine to make a person worse off, with the physical brutality that accompanies it, and so we have (quote) „the workability of brainwashing“ (unquote).

All right. Figure-figure, then, has a tendency to collapse the bank on somebody. You got that?

Now, if you want somebody to think, have him put thoughts in the ashtray, if you please. In other words, don't have him put thoughts in his head, have him put thoughts in the ashtray, have him put it in a desk, have him put it in walls. Got the idea? And then it doesn't chop up his havingness too much.

But if he suddenly exteriorizes into the ashtray through having put a thought in the ashtray, don't be surprised, because he's very likely to consider that he is a thought — which he is not, either.

He isn't even a thought, you know. A thetan is not a thought. A lot of people think he is. A thetan is something which thinks; a thetan is not a thought. That's just total identification. Somebody who's got this total identification in putting thoughts in the walls or the ashtray is all of a sudden likely to go kerwhump! and go into the ashtray or the walls, much to his surprise — and let's hope not yours.

All right. So he thinks thoughts exterior to his own head, thinks thoughts exterior to his own being, and he thinks thoughts in a direction that lets him get into more games. He runs out at once the first postulate, and then of course the second postulate has nothing to hold it and it goes too.

It's the games he's been kicked out of, not the games he's getting into. Now, you say, „Of course, anybody has been kicked out of the game they played.“ That's a total identification, you see? It's not true. Because you were a checker player and are not now a checker player is not aberrative. See, that you entered a game and played checkers and that you are not now playing checkers — in other words, you are no longer a checker player; you've left the game of playing checkers — we don't discover any aberrative quality in this.

You had to be kicked out, booted out forcibly, before leaving the game (or entering it in the first place) has any marked effect. But being kicked out of it, oddly enough, runs out by running the entrance of the game which you were kicked out of. You got the idea?

Now, in other words, the violence has a tendency to strip away. Why? The individual regrets — turns time back on. (Regret is simply „I wish that time had not existed. I will live it backwards and I will turn it upside down, and we will collapse the track on that point”.) „I regret having entered that game in the first place“ is the usual remark. „I regret marrying her,“ „If I just hadn't married her,“ or „If I just hadn't married him,“ you see. You hear this around.

Somebody has been divorced after five beatings and a kick-out, you know, and it's all messed up, and they went broke and got disgraced and spent five years in the clink or something, you know — some normal consequence of having gotten married. They will sit around then and not tell you about the beatings, usually; but they'll tell you, usually, that they regret having married the person in the first place. They regret having joined the army. They regret having taken the job. You get the idea? They regret having gotten into the airplane that time that it crashed.

This regret is interestingly expressed. An individual very often tells you that he almost took the plane that crashed. He doesn't tell you that he almost crashed; he says he almost took the plane that crashed. You hear this quite often. It may or may not be true, but it's the entrance into the airplane which concerns him, not the crashing of the airplane. That the airplane crashed makes him go back and try to live it over again, you see?

So you just run a person on the subject of entering airplanes, and crashes of airplanes run out. You got it? Now, this is a trick in technique, is to run the entrance, run the forward motion, run the reach, and to a large degree skip the withdrawal, skip the brutality, skip the crash.

We have to take shortcuts like this because the thetan has been so adventurous in the last seventy-six trillion years, the number of incidents he's accumulated are almost countless. Now, he's gotten up to a point where he considers he has too many incidents. Why does he think he has too many incidents? Because he hasn't got enough!

He developed an appetite. Anybody that's been through a war develops an appetite for a war which is not then assuaged. An individual who is actually experiencing battle finds it tough going because he hasn't been in many. After he's been through a few he finds it really no less there and no less a battle, but he doesn't go at it the same way he did on his first battle, by a long ways.

Why did he go at it in a strange way in his first battle? Well, he went at it in a strange way because he didn't have enough battles. The same reason an actor or actress has stage fright. They haven't had an audience and they haven't had a play for several months. They were rehearsing and so forth, and they just hadn't had anything. And the first night, then, they have stage fright. Why? Because they don't have enough play and enough audience, and there isn't enough stage. They've had a scarcity of stage which results in stage fright.

Why do people shudder at what they encounter? They shudder at what they encounter because they haven't encountered enough of it.

Now, oddly enough, they don't shudder at every first thing they encounter. They have to have some understanding that it's bad. So that means the first — real first encounter of the whole thing - - must have been evaluative of some character or another.

We get a very interesting view of life here.

Now, techniques run in the direction of tolerances, and run well — increasing the quantity of; changing mind because of an increased quantity of. Those tolerances are devoted to the Scale of Havingness. [See the Scale of Havingness in the Appendix of this volume.]

But havingness is the first rung of the subject of solids. Particles, invisible particles, small particles, fragments and this sort of thing are, each and every one, byproducts of solids.

Spaces exist, I suppose, so that you can have solids in them. And the entrance to all of these things has a tendency to give the thetan the most extreme thing that he must have but can't duplicate. And that extreme thing — as I said, what's wrong with a thetan is being a thetan. You'd say what makes it right? Well, then you'd better take the extremities of this thing. And the most extreme extreme that you can instantly contact with a case or that you can graduate up to with certain processes is a solid. A thetan cannot confront a solid totally because he can't duplicate it. He cannot be a solid; he can merely pretend that he is. He has to make numberless assumptions in order to look at a solid and see it, because duplication is an intimate part of the communication formula.

Now, what could be more extreme than a solid (unless it's a space) in the consideration of native state? You've gone just about as far from native state as you can get when you say a solid. That's way over! Now, we don't care whether it's in motion or not in motion.

But a solid is also a positioned stillness. And that's — boy, that's just about as far as you can get from native state too: a positioned stillness — positioned and still.

Well now, a thetan can be positioned and he is still, so he can, by position and stillness — both of them off-groove from native state — achieve the idea of a solid, and he can get the idea of a solid. But his total trouble is this extremity of the game: solids and spaces. And the first one of these you run into is a solid.

Therefore, we run this individual over here on the games condition, of which the most of is a solid — hence havingness. There's nothing further from a thetan than a space or a solid. These things are just not duplicatable. You get the idea?

That's why he has them around; that's why he likes them. Lots of trouble with these things. Man, can he have games! Do you see that? I don't say that a thetan cannot see a solid; he can. He makes it up so he can; he changes his mind in every direction so that he can. But that's just about the mostest game condition that you can immediately and directly run on a preclear if you can get him to run it.

And if you can't get him to run solids, handling of, one way or the other, then you had certainly better exert all of your activity into graduating him up to an ability to actually handle solids. You got that? And if you can graduate him up to the ability to handle solids, and then he can handle solids, you are from that point on running the only point that has really given him a tremendous lot of trouble all the way up and down the track.

All right.

Thank you.

[End of Lecture]