Now here is the most fundamental fundamental that there can be fundamental below the level of consideration. I haven’t written very much about considerations. There really isn’t very much to say about the subject of consideration. If anyone is confused on the subject it is because consideration is consideration and all things are a consideration of the consideration so that if you consider something which is considerable, why - you have considered it.

Phenomena such as space and energy, time, matter and so forth are produced on the basis of consideration.

Consideration of A is senior to A. Consideration of R is senior to R and consideration of any and all parts of C are of course senior to any and all parts of C.

When you’re dealing with A, R and C (Affinity, Reality and Communication) you have entered into a very early level of anatomy as far as the business of life is concerned, but you are not into the first and immediate level of anatomy as far as mechanics are concerned.

There is a level lying between considerations and A, R and C and this is Is-ness. It’s the consideration of Is-ness. Things are because you consider that they are and therefore something that is, is considered is. If you don’t consider that it is, it of course can be considered to be something else. But if you recognize that it is a consideration you only have to recognize that it is. And if you recognize that something is, then you have recognized merely that it is a consideration. As soon as you have recognized that something is, IS, you have reduced it to a consideration, and that’s that. One has affinity because he considers he has affinity. One has reality because he considers he has reality. One has agreement because he considers he has agreement. One has disagreement because he considers he has disagreement. One has a Dynamic (A Dynamic: any one of the eight subdivisions of the Dynamic Principle of Existence - SURVIVE - which are: The urge to survive as, or to the survival of, (1) Self, (2) Sex and family, (3) One’s group, (4) Mankind, (5) Any life forms, (6) MEST: Matter, Energy, Space, Time - the physical universe, (7) Theta, spirit; the Thetan, a spiritual being, thought, etc., (8) Supreme Being - the “Infinity Dynamic”) - one has a Dynamic because one considers he has a Dynamic.

Any of the eight parts of the Dynamic Principle of Existence, any part of the Cycle of Action, of Create-Survive-Destroy, of Affinity-Reality- Communication (The ARC Triangle), the Chart of Attitudes top and bottom - (Chart of Attitudes: a chart on which in 1951 L. Ron Hubbard plotted with the numerical values of the Emotional Tone Scale the gradient of attitudes which fall between the highest and lowest states of consideration about life. Example : top - CAUSE; bottom - FULL EFFECT.) the entire scale of emotions (The Emotional Tone Scale), the Know- to-Mystery Scale (Know-to-Mystery Scale: the scale of Affinity from Knowingness down through Lookingness, Emotingness, Effortingness, Thinkingness, Symbolizingness, Eatingness, Sexingness, and so through to not-Knowingness - Mystery. The Know-to-Sex scale was the earlier version of this scale) - all these are preceded by a consideration. In other words they are postulated into existence. But right with consideration we have the most native and intimate mechanic which precedes all other mechanics and that mechanic is Is-ness. We have to consider that we can consider before we can consider an Is-ness. One considers that one considers and therefore what one considers is, IS!! Anything that is, is considered as being. What is, is, as it is considered to be.

Now the moment you recognize, then, the Is-ness of anything, it will disappear. To have something, to have anything over a long period of time particularly, you have to beware of recognizing what it is. Because if you look at it with a recognition of what it is, simply its Is- ness, this simple recognition will of course vanish it. So you have to be careful, if you wantsomething, not to recognize what it is. Now one of the best ways to have something for a long time is to put something in your pocket and then forget that it is there and you’ll have something in your pocket. You’ll have something in your pocket even though you’ve forgotten it’s there. And that’s the safest method of possession, to forget that you have it, because if you remember that you have it you won’t have it.

Now this would all be hopeless if there weren’t another factor way above consideration, and that is Knowingness. You know anything you want to know and you know anything that has gone on.

Now let’s take the person who is using facsimiles (Facsimile: A mental image picture) in order tell him what has happened. He looks at the facsimile, the facsimile has certain pictures and symbols in it, so then he knows what took place. Well, he had to know what took place in order for a facsimile of that incident to be created. Now, he did know what took place, so he could create a facsimile of the incident, and he does this on an unknowingness level. And above this level he can then look at the picture and know what took place. But he had to know what took place before he made the picture.

Now if the picture was gone utterly and completely he would still know what took place, unless he had the consideration that he has to have a picture in order to prove to himself what took place.

Anybody would know anything that was going on if he didn’t have to prove it. Proof, conviction, is itself a very early level of aberration. As soon as you have to start proving things and convincing people of things, why then you have to get into agreement with them and in order to do this - you have to Alter-is. You have to have something persist long enough for them to see it, so that they can then understand what it is. So in order for them to really understand what it is you can’t possibly put up something that they understand what is, because if they saw completely what it was it would disappear, so you would not have been able to have proven it.

I hope you follow this very closely! Because actually what I am talking about here makes sense easily if strung together and looked at in a rational way. But if you try to Alter-is it, if you try to change it around, then you’ll be able to remember it perfectly, but if you merely accept exactly what I am saying at each and every point, you know this already, so it won’t exist. Now this is a very bad thing, I realize, so the best thing for me to do would be to color, if I really wanted this material to be remembered, to color the material so that it appeared to be something else than what it was. I could do that, for instance, by talking about your egg libidol, and your re- conscious. I could quote authorities who didn’t exist. That’s always best, you know. That’s really a curve, you see. Nobody could ever see those, so they can’t ever disappear. And I could quote these authorities which didn’t exist but which you couldn’t disprove and we could go on about the counter-reflex of the seratopol palsy and the og libidol, the bog libidol, the sog libidol and the mog libidol and how we would categorize these things as explanatory to the behavior of a feeshee preservation on the part of young alligators, and this nonsense of course would then be utterly comprehensible because it could be so remembered in every detail particularly if it were altered from what I was really talking about - in trying to talk to you about turbo-electric systems, for example, with that amount of data injected into it.

We could go that far afield and you would find that you would start hanging up on these non sequitur facts. You have experienced this sort of thing.

As a person becomes unable to recognize the Is-ness of things he can’t get jokes any more. Every datum that comes in must have a significance. It never occurrs to him that it doesn’t have a significance, and he is sure there must be a deeper significance so that something will remain. This accounts for the badly jammed facsimile bank (Facsimile bank: mental image pictures; the contents of the reactive mind; colloquially, “bank”) of an individual, particularly when that facsimile bank of the individual is badly jammed.

He will add significance to everything and he will certainly achieve a preservation of data. He, in adding all that significance to things, is Alter-is-ing. So he gets: preservation of facsimile bank.

Now let’s look at the various categories of Is-ness. We find that each one has a gradient scale and first there is As-is-ness. This is the first level that we encounter and is actually the disappearance level.

As we are content with and can accept things as they are, they won’t exist. That is absolute.

Why? The simple recognition of their existence would blow them into a consideration. A wall. What wall? When we really know what a wall is, there isn’t going to be a wall. That’s As-is- ness, and we can see that mechanically. We have a lower, mechanical strata on that which is a perfect duplicate. If we make a perfect duplicate of a wall - boom - no wall. All right, that may be just for the thetan but it’s certainly no wall. Anyway, I at least will lead you down the track to believing that you are not about to destroy the physical universe.

I wouldn’t want you to shy off from the processes which come from this data just because they knocked out the physical universe.

The next stage down the line from As-is-ness is Alter-is-ness, the effort to preserve something by altering its characteristics. We make it as a simple consideration and then we alter the method by which we made it. In other words “Let’s dodge on it.” Having mocked it up we will now dodge and say Joe mocked it up. Well this is just as far from truth as is necessary, to get something to exist, but you have altered an As-is-ness slightly in order to keep it from being perfectly duplicated in its own time, its own space, with its own energy and mass, thus ceasing to exist.

So we enter into the field of Alter-is-ness as a method of preservation. And one seeks, when he makes an object or a space, to get it to exist simply by saying somebody else did it, or it is a different kind of space, or its method of construction was different. The consideration is altered just enough so that one will get a continuation of it.

We say “God made it”, or anything that would throw somebody off this track. Well, supposing God did make it, that would be all right. It would then cease persisting if you looked at it recognizing that God made it.

People get in to Alter-is-ness - simply by the experience of having had too many things disappear.

So we see a person who has lost many things then trying to change everything. He’s trying to shift the As-is-ness of everything. He’s trying to shift from As-is-ness to Alter-is-ness and he’s got to change the significances and structure and background and everything around him so that then these things will continue to exist, and that is his first impulse.

For example, we build a brick house and then cover it up with shingles, and then insist that it is built out of lumber. You would get into enough of an argument with people trying to buy the house who could observably see that it was not totally a lumber house for them to get upset and worried about it, and that house is likely to persist in one’s ownership for some time, if he just did that sort of thing. So we see Alter-is-ness then, totally mechanically, as a method of getting things to continue their existence, and that’s an important fact.

Although the nomenclature here is simply chosen at random it’s a pretty good nomenclature because it says exactly what it means.

The control case, the person obsessively controlling things, and himself, is an Alter-ist. He’s got to change, change. Well he’s lost too much. Now he’s got to change everything but he’s not satisfied with anything. If he were walking down the street in a limber and loose fashion he would think he had to walk in a tight fashion, etc. He’s become anxious about things disappearing so he of course has to alter everything he sees in order to keep these things from disappearing.

Now let’s get to the next category - Not-is-ness. Here is someone who has altered things up to the point where they are beginning to persist. In fact he’s upset about their continuous persistence. He doesn’t think this is a good thing, to have a black box staring him in the face all the time, or to have the walls of the room appear to be 180 feet tall although they’re only nine feet tall. It’s not a good thing, that Alter-is-ness, he has concluded. He has changed too many things and lost track. He isn’t quite secure about what the things were in the first place, he’s shifted them so often. He’s like the small boy who’s told so many lies that he can no longer remember what lies he has told and so he’s stuck with the lies - and so becomes a human being. Now the next step along that line, Not-is-ness, is manifested as and is in itself the mechanism we know as unreality.

There is a category of just plain Is-ness. This of course is not a bad thing. This, in its highest level, is what we call reality. But we could spell this with bigger and bigger caps. We could keep spelling “IS” there with bigger caps and bigger caps and finally give it an exclamation point - which would represent a psycho. There is a dragon in the middle of the room, and he knows this. There are many other things which he doesn’t know, but he knows this. If you ask him to mock up an anchor point to define a space he makes a pyramid out of solid iron. And when he is asked to move one of his own mock-ups, a knowingly created object or space, he knows he doesn’t have that much strength. The world is too real.

Once in a while when somebody’s just about to kill you or cut your throat or eat you up or arrest you or do something of this sort you get an enormous flash of Is-ness, a recognition of the situation. Boy, this is it is real - GULP! A moment after that you’re likely to get or postulate an immediate reaction of Not-is-ness. “It’s not real”. A fellow will flare up and daze from Is- ness to Not-is-ness very swiftly in a sudden emergency.

Now Alter-is-ness, Not-is-ness and Is-ness would be then the categories which can be aberrated but remember these are not basically aberration. They become aberration only when they go entirely beyond the ability of the person to re-recognize As-is-ness. When a person has lost his ability entirely to recognize As-is-ness, he’s gone. He’s stuck with and has only Alter-is-ness, Not-is-ness and Is-ness - all three, or one or two of the three - some such combination - with no As-is-ness left. Therefore he gets everything persisting around him. He gets everything less and less changeable, and he goes into a dwindling spiral, because he has lost his quality of As-is- ness. That is all he has lost.

Have him touch a few walls. You just have him go around and touch walls for a little while and all of a sudden he’ll say, “It’s a wall!” And right then he feels much better.

He knows he’s in communication. Well, he has a case of Not-is-ness - “There are no walls” - or Is-ness - “There are walls all through the room and all through my mind and I have barriers everywhere, everywhere, everywhere”, or “There are no barriers anywhere, anywhere, anywhere”. Just variations of Not-is-ness and Is-ness. And you’ve now shown him that there were walls and these were agreed upon walls and of course that’s way up scale because you have demonstrated to him something closer to an As-is-ness. Now each one of these is a gradient scale and you know that you can recognize poorly enough the actual As- is-ness of something. You just draw back just a tiny bit from the As-is-ness of something, in other words indulge in just a little bit of Alter-is-ness or just a little bit of Not-is-ness or just a little bit of Is-ness - making it a little bit more - and it’ll persist with great satisfactoryness. Of course if you walk up to it and simply hit it with As-is-ness it’s not there any more.

Follow this very carefully, because it’s quite important, and the technology which we’re using is elementary, and you discover that many philosophies could be adjudicated out of these four categories. And believe me, any philosophy there is has been adjudicated from these four categories. This is the make-route of all philosophy as well as all existence and you’re standing right there at the tiniest co-point between mechanics and considerations that we have so far attained.

You could then develop many philosophies out of this and the first and most dangerous of them would simply be this one: “Well, I just have to accept everything as it is and therefore what we’re really supposed to produce out of this is an apathy, because if I had to accept everything as is there would be nothing left but apathy because if I can’t…or…something or other…, but I’ll go into apathy. Yeah, I know what the auditor wants, he wants me to be apathetic about the whole thing.” This is too easy a philosophy. This is the philosophy of Zeno. You can’t do anything about it so you might as well accept it and everybody go into apathy and cut his throat anyhow.

We have an enormous number of things which we could say, list or categorize in terms of the philosophy of this and this is only one of those which will hit your preclear. You see he has to be able to accept his own restlessness before he can be restless. He has to accept his own dislike of things before he can dislike things. He has to accept something before he can have it, because he has to get back some As-is-ness before he can have any As-is-ness. He has to get back some As-is-ness before he can become fluid in his practice of As-is-ness, Alter-is ness, Not-is-ness and Is-ness.

The business of life requires that he be quite able in all four categories, not just As-is-ness.

You’re not particularly specializing in this. But when it comes to this universe you will discover that as you return your preclear to As-is-ness things disappear. That may be regrettable, it may be interesting, it may be this and that but those things too, just like opinions of art are merely considerations.

Now the first step that we would adventure upon in this would be a step which would be immediately addressed to such a thing as exteriorization. Recovering the thetan’s ability to be, outside the body. You would merely in auditing find what part of the body was acceptable to the preclear. What part of the body was he able to accept as is. And we would go on asking this question and asking this question and asking this question.

We could vary it by asking what part of the body would he be at liberty to alter as to its position or shape.

Or what part of the body would be acceptable to him on an absent basis. What part of the body would be acceptable to him on a much more present basis - for instance, just a hand walking around all by itself.

Indicated processes. Actually this processing is so good that you can almost take any part of it and just work with that. An indicated process on As-is-ness is simply done with that command, “What part of your body is acceptable to you?” or, “What part of the environment would be acceptable to you?” And you merely have him improve his considerations, and if he hangs up too long you could say, “Can you accept your dislike of…” and of course it just involutes. He could just watch it. It just sort of goes away. It’s terrible! The first thing he can recognize is the fact that he disliked the environment? All right. Well can he accept his dislike of the environment? The second he does this he has recognized the As-is-ness of his dislike, at which moment it will blow. You can get him tp recognize the existence of anything as such and it’ll disappear. Just getting him to accept parts of the body on this simple auditing command, “What part of the body could you accept? Give me another part of the body you could accept”

- there are tremendous comm lags on this. You could say, “How would it have to be altered for you to accept it?” or “What would it be fine to have absent about this body?” Then we can turn around and say, “What’s the acceptance level (Acceptance level: the degree of a person’s actual willingness to accept people or things, monitored and determined by his consideration of the state or condition that those people or things must be in for him to be able to do so) of your body about a thetan?” He doesn’t do this by mock-ups, you understand. That’s the trick. Get him to concentrate on the actual body. Does it accept the thetan this way or that way or how? “What distance could your face tolerate to a thetan?”

What distance could your face tolerate to a thetan?” We already have this on exteriorization processing, but without this one fact stressed, which in this case makes the difference between a workable technique and a non-workable technique. What distance is acceptable? What distance would be comfortable from your face to the thetan? Where would your face accept a thetan? And the first thing you know you have spotted the preclear (the face seems to have spotted him) then he spots himself. But the whole thing would run out without any such complexity of command at all. You would merely complexity of command at all. You would merely ask him, “What is acceptable to you in the environment?” Look around, and simply go over it one item after another item and his considerations will improve, which is the modus operandi behind 8C Opening Procedure. Do this long enough on a preclear and he would find the entire environment, even working in it, certainly very, very acceptable to him. We could just continue to run this as “What part of the environment is acceptable to you?” and he would begin to check them off and he would eventually get down to his body and having gotten down to that and taken care of the space around the body - we’d take it by parts of the body - what parts of the body are acceptable to you, and just on and on and on - and he’d be out there standing in back of his head. Now that’s the easiest method of exteriorization I know and the method which I commonly use when I am balked by a preclear. It’s an easy and certain process. It’s a rather short process, really. You just ask him to pick up the As-is-ness of his environment and body and if he really recognizes it believe me he will be outside. Once in a while he says, “Well, I really dislike” this and that. Run “Can you accept your dislike of it?” This’ll involute it, which is the only additional command I have ever used. So we have As-is-ness, Alter-is-ness, Not-is- ness and Is-ness. All cases fall into these categories.