It is quite remarkable the results you can get in Self-determinism Processing without obviously hitting any effort. As a result, I think an auditor can probably get much better results with just plain ordinary Self-determinism Straightwire than he could get with earlier techniques. I have seen people’s reality come up so fast on Self-determinism Straightwire that the amount of daylight that they would suddenly begin to take in would practically blind them.

Perception is a direct index of the amount of ability and alertness of the mind — that is just perception, not necessarily the recall of perception. If anybody is operating on a shut-off recall basis, however, his perception is certainly down from what it could be.

Now, as we go through the Axioms, you may find that as these early points are clarified the later axioms as far as you are concerned get to be pretty humdrum, because you have seen the phenomena of the engram, unconsciousness and so forth. What we are covering on these early ones, though, is a higher level of simplification.

Axiom 33: Conclusions are directed toward the inhibition, maintenance or acceleration of efforts.

That shows up in self-determinism very markedly. Self-determinism could be said to be a mechanism which postulates the conclusions and puts them into action. Therefore, when you start to hit conclusions, a separating out of?” What are your conclusions?” and?” What were somebody else’s?” seems to be best accomplished mostly by finding out which ones were yours and not worrying too much about somebody else’s conclusions.

You find that theta facsimiles could be seen to be combined. Theta facsimiles are actually just pictures of the MEST universe and so. forth, and they combine by similarities and differences and so on. You get various conclusions out of them by just more or less a yea/nay index system. And after you have summed up a lot of these, a conclusion jumps out.

Every conclusion is a static. The theta facsimiles are action, but the conclusion is a static in each case. It is quite important to recognize the difference between a datum and a conclusion, because a datum probably tends more over into the action level. But when a datum is held up to be a separate datum, hidden right behind it is the statement?” I have come to the conclusion that this is a separate datum?” So that too is a conclusion.

But data by itself in an unconcluded form is in motion. Theta facsimiles themselves, containing motion, are in motion.

When a conclusion is postulated by the individual, he postulates a static, and he thereafter receives the effect of that static. Whatever that static is, his future motion is moderated by that static. That is because he is traveling along a time track.

Earlier statements have more force than later statements — we know this from hypnotism. We give somebody a hypnotic command — we tell him that he is now never going to be ableto spit, or something sensible like hypnotists use — and we find that if we hypnotise him the next day and tell him?” Now you will find that you are doing nothing but spitting twenty- four hours a day?” that second command will be inoperative. It is held in suspension by the first conclusion. Therefore, first things first.

In theta perceptions or perceptics or facsimiles, the earlier perceptic takes precedence. This is not true of effort, it is only true of facsimiles.

As a consequence, the exhausting of facsimiles out of engrams is possible without hitting any of the efforts. But to exhaust those facsimiles, you have to go to the earliest part of the track and start exhausting the perceptics there, because these perceptics are really just theta facsimiles; you have to exhaust the earliest ones that yoll find on the track. Then you come later and later, and if you get too late on the time track you will find that an individual’s perceptics are actually stet, they are fixed. These perceptions all by themselves are tending to become conclusions, and they are set. And unless you have hit the earlier perceptics, the later ones are not reducible or erasable. If you hit the early perceptics they will erase.

That is in the field of perception. However, perception is wrapped up in effort. And it doesn’t matter how late or how early an effort is, it apparently will reduce anywhere on the track; it is a physical motion. It is actually on a very, very early basic and it is very easily changed. I wouldn’t make this experiment offhand, just to be making it, but I dare say that you could take hold of somebody and run out his last operation in terms of Effort Processing. You could get all the effort out of it and he would feel fine. I am just postulating that is true; I have not taken late effort engrams and run them. This would be very fortunate if it were true. One could then handle such a thing as a delivery; he could take a series of deliveries of children on a woman. He could take five, in some cases, including her own birth, and just determine that that is what should be run and go run it as a package of effort. It wouldn’t matter much whether he hit the last one or the first one — her own birth and her four children, or the fourth child and then her birth — whatever would be attainable.

But the perceptic filing is filed very definitely according to time. You can see why this is: Perceptions have, much more intimately contained in them, time. Perceptions have time in them because every perception includes time. This is really very simple when you look at it. Perceptions, which contain time, are apt to obey the laws of time, whereas effort as such is not necessarily dependent upon perception. It is dependent upon actual basic motion. In other words, because an automobile went backwards today is no reason it won’t go forward tomorrow. Muscular effort is just as mechanical as that, just as mechanical as any MEST, because it is almost pure MEST; there is very little theta in it. It wraps up theta, though.

You can take a lot of effort and you will find the perceptics spilling out of the effort. There are several tricks you can do.

Take somebody who has an anxiety stomach. You can go through with a very heroic type of processing if you want to. You just tell him to lie down on the couch and ask him, “What position do you think the middle of your body is in?”

The fellow says, “Well, I’m lying right here on the couch?” No, what position was it in then? Can you get a then imagination of where it was?” He gets some vague idea that it may be over a little bit, so you just say, “All right now, move it back. Move the then perception back?” He will start to move the then perception back into place, and it will make him wriggle around and he will lose contact with it. So you get the then perception of his feet and the then perception of his hands, and then you get the then perception on his stomach again. If you keep this up you will gradually knock the effort out of an engram which hasn’t even been perceived. But you can very naturally expect, right in the middle of all of this, to have something very interesting happen: the perceptions will fall out of the effort and he will have recall.

This is particularly true if the individual is in a state of obedience where his stomach is, as he normally would be. Of course, it is a static or he wouldn’t be stopped there.

I did this to a salesman who foolishly came and knocked at my door, and he looked down and in a very puzzled tone of voice said, “A Confederate belt buckle?” We went ahead and exhausted the Confederate belt buckle and he felt much better, and his stomach hasn’t kicked back on him since.

He had no idea of what was happening to him, but it was just that process. He went away and wondered where that Confederate belt buckle had come from, but he didn’t have as much question about it as you would have thought. Something sort of clicked through and said, “It’s all right?” I don’t imagine, though, he is going around telling his fellow salesmen?” You know, the other day I called at a house . . “

A fixed muscular position, then, is like a conclusion. The muscles did this and this and this and then got to this state and stopped. And there are stops on the track with these. The same thing happens with theta perceptics — they get stopped — because they are dependent upon motion but they are not intimately connected with motion; that is to say, they can be handled regardless of the motion that is actually in them.

For instance, you can think about a train running down the track and you don’t at the same time have to carry the track under your arm and so forth while you watch it. In other words, the perception will operate independent of the effort. But the effort always is in existence preceding a perception. There must be an effort to have a perception.

Axiom 33A: The common denominator of all life organisms is motion.

You will find that to be true of grass or trees or even the bum on the park bench. Here we have a common denominator. Therefore, if you want a common denominator to all illness — psychosomatic illness and so forth — that common denominator is motion. And if you want to hook it up to the mind, it becomes effort.

Motion can exist without being hooked up to a mind. It can exist. A volcano blows up — that is motion. A fellow dies and the undertaker comes along, puts him on the marble slab and wiggles his arms and legs around; there is motion, but it is not connected to that person’s mind. You can take any living organism and move it around without the consent or the disagreement of the mind, too; you can render it unconscious or something of the sort and you can reposition the limbs and so on. So motion is possible without a mind, but the kind of motion that we are interested in is motion which is connected to a mind — and that is effort. Effort is sort of a measured motion — a measured, monitored motion.

Axiom 33B: The effort of an organism toward survive or succumb is physical motion of a life organism at a given moment in time through space.

That is not very obscure. It just means that an effort has, as part of its theta facsimile, a moment in time and a position in space. If a fellow is operated upon, hooked up in that operation someplace are all the tabs of position and time. This theta facsimile, however, can be so wrapped up in effort that the perceptions of it are missing, including the time and space perception. Therefore it can drift and float around and it can get into present time and so on. He can lift it into present time without knowing what it is and go on fighting it for years.

But it belongs back on the time track someplace, and the second you can assign it time and space, it really ceases to be very aberrative. The fellow recognizes where it is, he sees that that is where it is, he has proven it to himself that that is where it belongs, and after that it is just not very aberrative.

Actually, the whole process of erasure may only be getting enough effort out of one of these engram facsimiles so that the individual can no longer hold it out of position, and having it then sort of snap back into position. That may be what the phenomena of erasure and reduction are, although I believe that there is more to it than that. That is part of it. I think you are actually taking apart the whole theta facsimile when you really get an erasure. It doesn’t matter too much what happens; as long as you can get rid of them they never turn up again.

Definition: Motion is any change in orientation in space.

Something has to go through a motion in order to make a transit from one position to another.

All motion contains time. That is the trouble with it. Time is an arbitrary, and therefore every time somebody comes along and tackles motion he is bumping his nose into an arbitrary.

Now, a person can handle the space all right; he can move things around in space. So he conceives that because he can move things in space, he can also move things in time. Maybe high on the tone scale it is possible to move things in time, but low on the tone scale it is not. As a consequence, somebody who comes along and tries to shove something someplace else is shoving right straight against time. And it may very well be that an individual is determining the span of his own life by the action which he undertakes during it, because he is absorbing time into his facsimiles — time and more time — and he puts physical effort into those facsimiles.

Swedish calisthenics, army close-order drill and other?” therapeutic measure?” are very interesting in their real activity. You take a college athlete: The poor fellow gets in there and he trains and he trains and he trains. Then when he is thirty-two or something like that, he is going around selling bonds and he gets what they call an enlarged heart or something of the sort; he gets to be in bad shape. If you start checking up on athletes who have ceased to be athletes, looking them over, you will find they are a relatively unhealthy crew much too early in life.

These fellows have introduced a lack of randomity into their motions, they have routinized their motions, which is a static. They have gone through training motions which were on the order of picking up the dumbbell here and putting it down there, and then picking it up there and putting it down there, and then swinging on the rings, and they go through just exactly this same evolution many times.

A fellow keeps that up too long and it becomes a static. As a result, because he was under strain and tension during that moment of exercise, the strain and tension of the static then stays with him right straight on through. You see how this could be? He goes through routine motions, routine motions, and he gets tired after a while and he still goes through routine motions. The coach (a fellow with a big paunch, smoking a thick cigar and so on) says, “Now get in there?” He says, “I’ll show those fellows — they’re not going to intimidate me?” and so on, and he urges them on. The boys get tireder and tireder, and he just says, “Keep right on going; you’re not going to let me get licked on the situation?”

That is the sort of an action they go through. I am giving you this for a very good reason: You will find this in a very large number of men and women who have been highly athletic, who have trained up in this line. For heaven’s sakes, exhaust the effort out of that. Don’t avoid it because it is supposed to be healthy. Sure enough, it probably is healthy. It has a shorttime value. The healthiest part of it, though, is the full belief of the individual engaging in these activities that they will make him healthy. But after he gets away from this postulate for a while, the actual real basic starts to turn up and he starts to get an enlarged heart or something.

What is an enlarged heart? You start working with barbells long enough and the next thing you know, your heart is pumping hard; it is hard work, and the action in the heart will build it up to what it thinks is a necessary capacity. And then it has too much capacity.

Interesting things can be done physiologically. During the war, I saw a young man taken into a hospital who had an enlarged heart, and the doctor made him build up an athletic schedule to the point where it had been when he was in college. It was a lot of work. This took about three years, by the way. I heard a final report on it about 1947. I liked this boy a lot; he was a nice fellow. I got in there and talked to him for a while; I said “What are you doing?” “Well, every morning I have to go out on a two-mile walk, and in the afternoon I run around the track six times. Then I take a turn in the gym and then I swim for a quarter of a mile?”

That was finally what he had worked his routine up to. He had built his physical strength back to the enlarged heart. He was of course going to be all right because he got into balance. The only trouble was that after three years of this sort of thing he had quit it, and he was in another static! And he was declining some more.

This should be of interest to you, because you will note this to be wrong with people. Remember that a static can be formed by routine action. You take somebody who has had to do sentry gol in the cold — back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, day in and day out. Maybe he was at this for two years. And if he was up in some place like Argentia or someplace like that, doing this kind of sentry go, you will find that he has gotten himself in a little bit of bad shape. He has chills. He has gotten a static, a static which he has fallen into through repeating the same motion over and over. As a result, he has overdeveloped on all fronts. He has overdeveloped, also, a static, so that he tries to go on down the time track and his body carries right along with it the chill, the aching feet, the hollow in his shoulder for the musket and everything. He will carry this right on down the track with him. When you pick him up as an auditor he will say, “Well, I guess it’s because I took to drink when I was twelve?” or something. You just knock out that effort of sentry go.

Definition: Force is random effort.

Force does not have, according to physics, direction, unless you have applied force which has direction. Physicists can argue around about this, but this is the definition which we can take: Force is random effort.

Definition: Effort is directed force.

In our definition of effort, we have the fellow postulating a direction and amount of force, and in that we have effort. And that is what we mean exactly by effort.

Axiom 34: An organism’s effort can be to remain at rest or persist in a given motion.

Here again you have statics and motion on a reduced scale. You will find that injuries are incurred by organisms when they are at rest and resist moving, or when they are moving and get stopped. Either one violates the self-determinism of the organism. A fellow says, “I am going to stand here?” and somebody comes along and gives him a shove. The individual’s effort was to remain in a state of rest and then somebody came along and tried to interrupt his self-determinism. Or a fellow is walking along and somebody stops him. This other person has interrupted the fellow’s self-determinism.

This is a very important axiom, though it doesn’t appear so. You had better put a couple of stars after it because it is very important. It is something that you might overlook.

This is actually the basis of self-determinism. It is whether a person is going to remain at a state of rest in face of all hostile forces or whether he is going to be able to remain in a state of motion despite all hostile forces. And when counter-efforts interrupt his effort to remain at rest or his effort to remain in motion, his self-determinism is undermined just to that extent. So long as he does not succumb to being stopped and started and stopped and started — in other words, as long as he does not say to himself?” Well, I mustn’t move in that direction because I’ll be stopped?” as long as he does not say to himself?” I must not stand still because I will not be permitted to stand still?” and agree to that — he will be all right. But when he agrees, that is too bad.

Theta, therefore, has its own force; it isn’t just all stimulus-response. It postulates something; it says, “I must continue and persevere in life, regardless of any of this?” A man can be knocked around most alarmingly and be all right until he all of a sudden agrees that he is being knocked around. Then he agrees on which direction he is being knocked around, and then he agrees on what he mustn’t do to get knocked around. When he has gone all through this gamut he is practically done for.

You as an auditor pick him up on the basis of when he agreed that he would get stopped every time he moved or when he agreed that he would be moved every time he tried to come to a state of rest. You can work from that point and then you can work to the minor points of the matter, which are when he felt that he would be if he did. That is about all you need to get.

If a man is really pretty daffy about it, you of course get in there and exhaust the effort. You just exhaust a few of these times when he was stopped. Get an earlier period when he made an effort to stand still and he made an effort to remain in motion, and get the efforts to stand still and be in motion and exhaust those as such, and you will find perceptics flying out of this fellow’s track just like fireworks on the Fourth of July, if you start working on those two efforts.

All obedience must have as its forerunner physical action — a countereffort against the individual — which will not permit him to stand still when he wants to or will not permit him to move when he wants to. Obedience cannot be achieved without that. That is all you have to do to an individual to get him into a state of blind obedience.

That is the reason for close-order drill in the services. The formations of close-order drill went out shortly after the War of 1812 as the usual thing — where you stood up in a column and drilled on a battlefield and wheeled around and fired by volley and so forth. Guns and rifles got better and they didn’t have to use men in this fashion. But armies have still continued the use of close-order drill.

The way to really get a company of men under control so that you will have blind instantaneous obedience, you would think offhand, would be to do it on an ARC basis. No, that isn’t it, because you have to handle all kinds of men. You take the esprit and let that be handled on an ARC basis; that is another echelon. You, as the sergeant or the officer, stand aside from that ARC. That is the service, that is the flag, those are symbols and that sort of thing.?” You are my MEST as far as I am concerned, and you hate me, but you love that fla?” is the way they do it.

Unfortunately, war and the activities of war do not have enough time element in them to permit anything like ARC. And what is a static? It is something with no time in it. So, in order to work in a field where there is no time, you have to create statics. You tell a bunch of men, “Jump up on that parapet and charge!” and they jump up on the parapet and charge. This is a foolish thing to do; there are machine guns over on the other side and so on, but these men will still jump up on the parapet and charge. That is the mystery. They use no self-determinism with regard to those machine guns at all. A regiment, a division, will pour itself into a slaughterhouse action where their casualties will be 80 or 90 percent, even though every man there and every officer there knows the general has given them the wrong order!

So this is how the army handles urgency actions, actions in a very brief time span. And the briefer the time span demanded, the greater the tendency toward a static. This is why accidents and so forth have so many holders in them right before the accident. It is an emergency, so the fellow takes all the time out of it and tries to act, and he will stick himself on the track.

There is something else that should be remarked here: The delivery of bad news, the delivery of bad tidings or the delivery of a blow (these are all the same thing; the bad tidings are just symbols of a blow), delivered in the shortest possible time span, will produce the maximum drop on the tone scale.

When you shorten the time span of the delivery of bad news or a blow, you increase the amount of drop on the tone scale to the individual to whom it is delivered. That is an important axiom; it is not even in the book, though. One of the reasons it is not in there is that it tells you how to knock a man, an organisation or a country into apathy with the greatest amount of dispatch.

Don’t deliver five bombs, one a day — deliver five bombs on five cities in the same five minutes and you will produce apathy. If you drop a bomb today on one city and tomorrow on another city and so on, you may still produce something like apathy. But if you drop a bomb today and you drop a bomb next week and you drop a bomb the week after that and you spread it out to five weeks, at the end of five weeks you will have the country fighting mad. They haven’t dropped on the tone scale. So, to create a static, what you do is create an emergency situation. Maximal destruction in minimal time produces the maximum drop on the tone scale.

This is something a sergeant uses. He goes in and gets a couple of men out of bed — they were sassy to him at retreat or something of the sort — and he says, “Go dig a ditch?”

And they say, “What?” “Go dig a ditch?” “It’s two o’clock in the morning?” Bow! Bow! “Dig a ditch?”

This is completely out of order; it has nothing to do with reason. It is utterly unreasonable! They go dig their ditch and they come back swearing, and the whole company begins to buzz and boil about it and so forth.

One man gets pretty uppity, but he oddly enough has a dirty rifle. So the sergeant takes the rifle, looks it over carefully, puts it in his tent and gives the fellow a deck court-martial or something like that for having lost his rifle. This is completely arbitrary; it doesn’t have any sense. Any way you can assault reason with force produces a static. Just assault reason with force and you will produce a static.

Now, the speed and savageness and suddenness of the production of that static measures the amount of reduction on the tone scale. In the same way, good news or something which lifts or exalts the individual produces the maximum rise on the tone scale by being given in the minimum time. It is again a static. So you see, the static is the thing. Somebody says, “Armistice has been signed?” Whistles go off all over town and everybody takes off like a rocket. That formed a static — sudden news in the minimum time of delivery — and everybody will go on up to the stars. But if you tell them tomorrow?” That wasn’t the static, this is now the static?” you will get a little response. That isn’t just invalidation at work, that is the mechanism of invalidation.

The next day you come along and you tell somebody something good and you try to tell them quickly and so forth, but you have spread all sorts of stuff across a time span and as a consequence the amount they will ga up the tone scale is very small.

You can take good news or something like that and unload it on people’s heads suddenly, and they will just sit there stunned for an instant. You have formed a static. They will proceed on their time tracks from that moment on with this static in mind. That is how to rabble-rouse. (I have never tried it very much!)

Now, there are really two kinds of statics (these are the statics of attention). One is motion of attention, unfixed — unfixed but sweeping attention. You can get a fellow to where he will sweep his attention like that and it becomes a static. Why? Because it doesn’t fix on anything, it doesn’t mark anything happening, it doesn’t mark anything going by. You will find psychotics doing this, or fixing their attention on one object and not sweeping.

Motion, then, for the mind, depends upon the attention not being too widely unfixed or too sharply fixed.

That is of use in such things as radar. You get a fellow sitting down looking at a radarscope, and this thing swings, swings, swings monotonously. That is a static because it is repeated motion, and his attention on that radar is unvarying. His watching of this thing has an unvarying attention and he is keeping a fixed watch on it. He himself is put in the position of a static, he is told to keep his attention static, and he watches something which by its cyclic repetition of sweep is itself static. And he becomes static. I have seen men lag on the report of a pip on radar quite a long time; they sit there and they just won’t register it. The man doing this is in a static, he isn’t in motion. All you would have to do to remedy this is make the sweep of the radar random and occasionally make it fix on something. Then the fellow could sit there and watch it and he wouldn’t go out like a light. This would be very simple. By the way, they have been trying to solve this in Washington. Axiom 35: The ultimate goal of lambda is infinite survival.

That is rather obvious.

Axiom 36: Death is the abandonment by theta of a life organism or race or species where these can no longer serve theta in its goal of infinite survival.

You will find, oddly enough, that death is self-determined. A person looks at his body and says, “Boy, I’m sure chopped up; this motor can’t run?” so he shuts off the whole machine.

Now, a fellow thinks he is going to stop this motion when he is injured — he tries to stop the motion of pain and so forth — and he will hang himself up on the track.

If you get some poor luckless devil who sits around and has somebody in his environment that he is trying to stop with words, when he finds out he can’t stop them he will stop himself. That is something very important for you to remember in therapy. Where an individual has been unable to control the motions of someone in his environment that he thought he ought to control — he begins to try to stop that person or start that person vocally or by action, one way or the other — he will wind up in postulating these motions. The recognition that he can’t effect them will cause him to go into a static. And the reason, of course, is that he is starting to start and stop motion and it comes right back in, so he winds up by starting and stopping motion in himself. He will get into a static.

You will find that people group in the vicinity of people whom they cannot control.

Take that advisedly on control; an individual who is in good ARC with another person won’t try to control him. But let him go out of ARC with somebody else who is still in his environment and he will try to start and stop this person in some fashion. The effort to start and stop this individual cannot be physically applied — it is against the law in this society.

This society is a great society; it is really set up for statics. You can’t go poke anybody in the nose. As a result, your efforts to stop them or start them in some particular direction result in you stopping yourself, because you are the closest physical contact you have. Just the postulation off “he must stop” stops you to that degree.

Check this over with preclears; you will find this fascinating — trying to stop and start Mama, trying to stop and start pets. The fellow just goes into a spin on it finally, and he gets a static right there. Then he says, “Well, I’m no good. I can’t control myself, obviously, because I can’t control Mama?” He loses control of himself because he can’t control the other, because when he tried to control the other he was trying to control himself. He didn’t notice, at the moment, that he was also trying to start and stop himself when he was trying to start and stop Mama.

Did you ever see anybody trying to feed a little baby? They take the spoon and try to put it in the baby’s mouth and the baby closes its mouth. So they open their mouth wide.

I was in a restaurant one day and there was a little baby being fed at the center table. The manager had put this baby right in the center of the whole dining room and Mama was trying to feed this baby with a spoon. And Mama was opening her mouth, trying to get the baby to open its mouth. Unconsciously, Papa was doing the same thing. I looked around the other tables and about a third of the people in there were doing the same thing. You see the mechanism: they try to get the baby to open its mouth and they open theirs. Try to stop somebody, you stop yourself.

Axiom 37: The reward of an organism engaging upon survival activity is pleasure.

Pleasure is actually a sufficient randomity of motion to not produce a static. That is to say, there would be completely monotonous motion — repeated motion — and that is a static, and no-motion is a static. Therefore, pleasure must lie between a monotonous motion and the static of no motion. In other words, it lies between two statics. You can see immediately that that has to contain randomity, which I will go into a bit later.

Pleasure is obtainable, then, in overcoming minor uncertainties, in facing various forces and so forth, and in a continuance of effort in the direction of survival. If a person goes along in a nonstatic way, he could be said to be experiencing pleasure.

Axiom 38: The penalty of an organism failing to engage upon survival activity or engaging on nonsurgical activity is pain.

Pain is an interesting mechanism. Some engineers were trying to study what pain was and they finally found out that if you gave a person an electric shock he would get over his pain.

I imagine the auditor who came along afterwards, after he had run out the shock, could get at the original pain in order to run that out.

Pain is a randomity of peculiar characteristics; it is maximal motion in minimal time causing a misalignment of the atoms and molecules in the organism. It introduces a forceful, authoritative wave which goes counter to all of the body’s motions and actions, and it cancels out motion on the part of the body in too short a span of time. That we call pain.

Pain is actual and physical at the moment of receipt, and is then a theta facsimile. The fact that a theta facsimile was made of it had been overlooked.

It is not even widely known that people can recall pain. People out in the society don’t realize that. That should give you some kind of an idea how far we are ahead.

I was talking to a fellow the other day who needed Dianetics — he needed it the worst way. Of course, I would never give it into the hands of some people I know, but he could have used processing. He said, “What is this Dianetics all about?”

And I told him, “Well, I found out that life is an energy which gets stored as pain and so forth — the moments of impacts. When you have experienced pain once, it is stored and then later on it is exerted on the body.” His ears went up like a mule’s and they waved and I almost got cool in the breeze! He was very interested; this was a brand-new concept as far as he was concerned.

As a matter of fact, that is an incorrect statement: pain is not stored as an energy; it can’t be. But that sounds logical to them, so you don’t have to tell them about theta and theta facsimiles and this and that.

Axiom 39: The cell and/or virus are the primary building blocks of life organisms.

This is true, unless you want to consider theta facsimiles as the primary building blocks. It is all the same to me.

Axiom 40: The virus and cell are matter and energy animated and motivated in space and time by theta.

That is something that you as an auditor should take cognizance of. It is very interesting that you can start running back the theta facsimiles of individual cells.

If some fellow is having a lot of trouble with a particular portion of his body, you can process that portion of his body and run it on the time track to find the cell-injury facsimiles rather than the organism-injury facsimiles. You will find some of the most interesting things. That is a fact, though; there are cell facsimiles.

There is a nervous system in a monocell. A monocell is a very advanced animal, actually; although it procreates by division and so forth, it has a complex anatomy. It is pretty well developed already. If you were to think of a monocell as being a basic building block of life, you would have started already at much too high an echelon of complexity, because a monocell is a very complex animal. It has a nervous system and it thinks; it obviously thinks. You can run tests on monocells and you will find that you can train them to avoid pain sources and so on. This is fascinating work. The field of biology has never done any of this work to amount to anything.

But once in a while somebody will come along and make some comment on the behavior of growth. It never seems to have occurred to anybody that you can take monocells and train them. Of course, it is a little bit more of an artistic job than that done by the owner of a flea circus, but it is much on the same order of magnitude — training a monocell to jump, to go to the other side. You take germ cells of various diseases, and if they are mobile they can be conditioned to run away from green water. You tint the water green with something which is an irritant and they will go away from it. Then you put a green in the water which is not an irritant and they will go away from it.

This is very interesting, but the work is so delicate, so difficult to do, that the results are obtained only after many, many experiments. In the first place, your own credulity is fighting you — that something so small could actually perceive to this degree so that it could take survival courses of its own. But your reason should tell you immediately that something which is a live organism which can’t take survival actions would of course be a dead organism.

Axiom 41: Theta mobilises the virus and cell in the colonial aggregations to increase potential motion and accomplish effort. You can see that the body cells building themselves together are a colonial effort.

People were looking at the reverse side of this thing. They said that to avoid pain or to fight its enemies or to get away from something and so on (you can just see where the people who were inventing these theories were on the tone scale), the cells got together into colonial aggregations and developed teeth or something.

There is a dynamic goal there that you don’t see if you don’t look at the other side of it and see that the cells are getting together in order to handle more physical universe; without that you have no forward motion — nothing. That other idea postulates a static, and it must have been postulated by people who were pretty static.

Axiom 42: The goal of the virus and cell is survival in space through time. That is the same as the organism’s goal.

Axiom 43: The total mission of higher organisms, viruses and cells is the same as that of the virus and cell.

In other words, any type of life, no matter what form it is in, is doing pretty much the same thing.

It is very interesting that those two axioms, Axiom 42 and Axiom 43, were the earliest axioms in Dianetics. They go back to 1933, and they sat there for a long time without anything else happening, more or less stated in just those words: The goal of the virus and cell is survival in space through time. The total mission of higher organisms, viruses and cells is the same as that of the virus and cell.

Axiom 44: Colonial aggregations of viruses and cells can be imbued with more theta than they inherently contained.

That is new, but those two earlier ones I have a sentimental attachment for.

Axiom 44 is very important in that the one thing you must know in Group Dianetics or in examining personality is that there seems to be more theta attracted to the aggregation.

This could also be seen to be a static forming new facsimiles of action. You have a full body at work and you get facsimiles of what the full body is doing, therefore the body has an identity because there is a full facsimile of it. And because this is a facsimile which is common to every cell facsimile in the body, every cell could be coaxed to accept or would accept this major facsimile. As a result, you would have facsimiles of the organism as a personality.

The same thing would happen in a group. You would get a theta facsimile of the group which everybody would begin to accept. This is not a matter of quantity, it is a matter of overall facsimiles. Once those facsimiles accumulate it is almost impossible to do anything about them. There is a new static. In the formation of groups, then, great attention has to be paid to the formation of an organism along the lines of the rules of organisms. You can’t form a group out of individuals and then treat them continually from there on as individuals, each one with separate goals.

The organism itself has to have its own goals. As long as it has its own goals it is an organism.

It also has to have nerve lines. It also has to have standard memory banks. In other words, if you are going to make a group successfully, you are going to have to obey the rules of an organism. This is the axiom that takes care of that.

Axiom 45: Effort can be accomplished by lambda only through the coordination of its parts toward goals.

This is rather obvious.

Axiom 46: An organism is equipped to be governed and controlled by a mind.

The evolution of the mind is a subject which is just barely mentioned in the first book on Dianetics. It talks about the impact system and it is really talking about counter-efforts.

The effort of the body to absorb, channel and use counter-efforts resulted in a nervous system, a brain, a shock-cushion arrangement for the body. Actually, what happened was that theta facsimiles of this and all combined theta facsimiles were going together, forming up the memory banks and the active mind of the organism. This hooks in, evidently, to the nervous and control system. I don’t think it would be too hard to solve exactly where it hooks in.

Axiom 47: The purpose of the mind is to pose and resolve problems relating to survival and to direct the effort of the organism according to these solutions.

We are back on familiar ground with that one.

Axiom 48: All problems are posed and resolved through estimations of effort.

That is important to an auditor, because how can an organism estimate effort unless it itself has experienced effort? Back of every calculation of effort is actual physical effort. And if there is a calculation of effort in the organism that you consider to be aberrated, all you have to do is get the earlier physical effort out of it and that aberrated calculation will fold up. It is no longer able to operate as such because you have knocked out part of the facsimile; you have disconnected the facsimile.

Axiom 49: The mind can confuse position in space with position in time.

If you just look at words which people use to describe time, you will find out how confused this language is: “It’s a ‘long’ time” — time isn’t long? “It’s a ‘short’ time?” and so on. There are no descriptive words for time, which is an indicator. We just use space words to describe time, and as a result you can tell somebody to go “down” the time track. You can’t go “down” a time track. You travel through time along a time track, but you can’t go “along” time. You get the idea?

The only way you can really contact time is through motion. As long as you address motion you are on safe ground, because motion has time in it. When a person gets frozen up in a motion as a static — he is trying to do something about the motion — he then can’t move in time, because what is frozen in there, what the arbitrary is, is the time. So this individual tries to move up and down his time track, but he cannot handle motion so he can’t move on his time track. The reason he can’t move on his time track is that he can’t handle motion. The reason he can’t handle motion is that he is stuck in a static about motion.

If you take somebody who has been punching a drill press with the same motion day after day, week after week, year after year, and you all of a sudden get him for processing — if there is anything left of him to process — you will find that this fellow is in a static, a very bad static. The reason is that he has lost, in his job, the ability to differentiate time, because all the motions are the same.

So, the estimation of time depends upon the ability to observe changes in space. You observe changes in space and so you estimate time. You know that it has been some time since you left your home town because you go back and look. You know where you have been; the home town looks exactly the same only it is all different. It is those differences by which you measure that home town: the people, what has been built, what has been burned, what has been torn down. These changes permit you to observe what has happened to time in the interim.

Thus, time as an arbitrary is traced by the individual through changes in space or through motion. But you can’t get any changes in space without getting motion, so you are on safe ground as long as you keep an individual all cleaned up on the subject of motion. The easiest way to do it, of course, is by the estimations of effort.