This is November the 20th, afternoon lecture, and we are going to talk today about the — all these lectures today are going to be on the subject of Creative Processing.

This afternoon, it doesn't much matter what sequence I give you this data because it's all — it's all more or less the same data.

But what you must know — what you must know are the component parts of the material universe and the component parts of any universe and all the dynamics and all possible breakdowns on all dynamics, and you should know those just by rote. You should be able to quote those in your sleep.

And you should be able also to know the interrelationship of manifestations, such as time, space, energy and the manifestation of experience that fits with this, which is be, do and have, and that interrelationship with start, change and stop, and that interrelationship with creation, growth, decay and destruction.

Now, all of these things interrelate. The component parts of a universe would be, you might say, items. And those items make up what we have in this subject now as structure. And structure, then, has a certain function and behavior. And the function and behavior is time, space, energy; have, do and be; and start, stop, change; and so forth. These are functional to us. And when we say "functional," that means that there's a pattern of operation. And that is applied to what? That is applied to structure. And the structure that we have to do with consists of the eight dynamics, all manifestations of energy, all possible breakdowns of any universe.

Now, don't let me hear any of you coming to me and telling me some case that's in relatively bad shape can create and destroy anything until you know what that word "anything" covers. And don't say "create" and "destroy" until you know what completely that covers as a cycle. You see, the reason we say "create" and "destroy" is we are naming the two ends of start, change and stop.

And it's all very well to take someone who would be at a certain band on the Tone Scale and say, "Yes, he can create," that is to say, mock up this and then knock it out. And he can make it appear, and then make it disappear. And he can make it appear, and then he can make it disappear. And you say, "That's fine — then that person can create and destroy anything." Well, on a certain point of the tone band, yes.

A 1.1, for instance, will create simply by having something slip in on him. It sort of slides in. He gets it out of the stimulus-response bank, and it slides in sideways, and then he slides away from it. And he's created and destroyed it — he thinks.

A 1.5 makes something appear, holds it, and — crash — condenses it. Very interesting.

A 2.0 simply gets on a sort of a General Sherman tank sort of affair and mocks up something or other in an antagonistic sort of a way and then rolls forward over it and sort of leaves it in the past someplace or leaves it someplace else.

So, what are you talking about when you're talking about create and destroy? You're talking about the gradient scale of the Tone Scale, aren't you? So, when you speak of create and destroy, you must understand that there happen to be as many gradients of create as there are points on the affinity part of the Tone Scale. That is emotion. And there happen to be methods of destroying things which match each part of the Tone Scale. So our Tone Scale becomes quite important to us.

Now, this Tone Scale actually is a cycle of creation and destruction itself And it starts in with creation, not of energy, but of space. And from this space we go forward in terms of manifestation, and it spins on down to a point where there's just an object, and any space that's there is sort of congealed in and messed in with the object. So look at that. It tells you that somebody who is in apathy wouldn't create any space. Somebody in apathy wouldn't create space; they would simply create the object. And that was as much space as there would be.

Now, it's kind of hard for somebody quite low on the Tone Scale to conceive that an object might have space around it. But if you were to get inside the head of some preclear and look around very carefully — if you were to get inside this person's head and take a look at what he was mocking up, or if you were to step alongside of him thetawise and actually take a look at his facsimiles (and by the way, you can do this) — you would see … This is not a necessary part of processing, I don't advise it at all. When you tune up to his ridge and his ridge blows up, you get it — when you do that. So that's not good processing.

One of the best functions of an E-Meter, by the way, is to keep your vision off of the preclear and keep it on the meter. And it then permits the preclear to emote and groan and moan and do anything he wants to do, and all you're interested in is swing of the needle. You can be very, very detached and dispassionate because you're really not in communication with him. The meter's in communication with him and you're in communication with the meter. So you put — you've put a fuse in between you and the preclear. And that's quite nice to have. All right.

If you were — you get inside this facsimile and take a look at what he was mocking up, you would find, low on the Tone Scale, you'd find just an object. He'd have an object. And you would find that object running him or running at its own volition to the degree that it's low on the Tone Scale. That is to say, he isn't moving it; he isn't telling it to move and not move. He just puts it there and it moves. I mean, let's differentiate this as a very important point in processing.

He puts it out there and it goes into motion and he mocks up a little girl and this little girl is skipping rope, the next thing you know she's riding in a car, and the next thing you know she's on a rolly coaster. And he'll go — and he'll say, "Yeah, I mocked up a little girl, yeah, there she is. And she's rushing down the street and she is eating candy bars, and she's doing this and she's doing that and so forth," and "Yeah, I got a little girl here."

And you say, "All right. Now, knock it out. Knock it out as a process."

"Okay, we'll knock it out as a process." Sure! He just discontinues the facsimile. He doesn't destroy the little girl, he just discontinues the facsimile. He's got about as much control over this facsimile — he's got this control over the facsimile: "I can concentrate on an object known as a little girl. What it does after that, I have no responsibility for it whatsoever."

Now, you'll notice as your preclear gets better — if you wanted to check this, you would find that the preclear got less and less and less random motion. It's controlled motion. The object moves only when he says, "Move." The object stops only when he says, "Stop." The object turns around only when he says, "Turn around." And pretty low on the Tone Scale, a person considers this pretty arduous. This is an awful hardship on him. This is a terrible hardship on him to have to actually tell these things to work — they just don't work automatically. It's the way they go — back and forth.

Well sir, when you look up the Tone Scale, then, you'll find the object is first — the lowest manifestation of it is concept of an object. That's all he gets. Now, what you've got to do is work up a perception of an object. If you work up the perception of an object, you will have eventually an object that goes into random motion. That is to say, he says, "Yeah, I've got a concept of a horse." Now, as he gets better on the line, he will one day say, "Yeah, I've got a horse." He's got a horse. He can see, feel, hear, do something with this horse. And you'll find, however, the horse is trotting, galloping, going over hedges, pole-vaulting, somersaulting, whinnying — doing all sorts of uncontrollable things. And he'll tell you, perhaps — because he's ashamed of this, he may even tell you as an auditor, "Oh, yes, I have this horse. Yeah, I got this horse."

"Now, make him trot."

"Oh, he's trotting." And that's what you want to watch for. And he suddenly says, "No, he's not trotting, he's pole-vaulting." All he's doing is he's describing a motion picture which he's looking at or he's describing a still picture which is giving manifestations that might be conceptions of. You see?

So now you get up the Tone Scale a little bit — you get up the Tone Scale to grief, if the person is at grief on the Tone Scale, he gets this object and he may tell you, "Yes, it's gone." He made it go by having had it. See, that'd be grief. Grief runs consistently "I had it, but I don't have it." So it's easy for him to get the object — very easy for him to get the object — and then he makes it disappear by having had it. The object really is still there. It's just in his yesterday, because that is the primary dramatization of grief. Grief is saying all the time, "I had it. I had it and now it's gone. It's lost," and so on — but it exists somewhere.

All right. Let's go up the Tone Scale a little bit higher on this, and we come up to fear. This person on fear isn't standing up to — about this time he . . . It actually just works right on up the Tone Scale on objects. He's not standing his ground on any object whatsoever. They'll come in — flip, flip — out, flip, in, flip, so on.

"Have you got a horse?"

He'll say, "Yes, I got a horse."

The head of the horse appears, the tail of the horse appears — flip, and then he gets a saddle — flip. He — sure, he's got a horse — in sections, occasionally.

And it'd be interesting if you told him to chase this horse away, because this horse — he wouldn't be able to do that. He could get horses running away — preferably after he has been severely hurt or something, but . . . You get horses running away. But chase a horse away? No, he would not be able to chase a horse away because that's what's wrong with him. He can't chase things away, they chase him away.

You say, "Destroy it now." All right, he runs away. That's the best thing he does. So, you know, "I haven't got a horse anymore. No more horse." The heck he hasn't. That horse is down over that hill and in that gully about eight miles away and getting further at every moment. But he doesn't immediately perceive the horse so he says, "Well, I don't got the horse." But he knows very well he's got a horse. He knows there's a horse over there someplace — in sections. Tail appearing, and hoof appearing, and horseshoe appearing, so on — flick-flick-flick-flick.

Now, at 1.5 you say, "All right, now get this object." And there's only one thing he's interested in with regard to this object. He can get the object, but will it stand still? And he won't tell you he's got the object well or anything of the sort, unless he's got a still object. That's what he really prefers.

But if he's got the idea that the object should be in motion and so forth, then he will be working on something else than what you ask him about. See, he's working on start, stop and change already. He isn't working on the object. He isn't working to get a better object. He's working on start, stop and change of this object. In other words, he's very concentrated on his exact point on the Tone Scale. He's tremendously concentrated on this one thing. It's an obsession with him. It's motion. It worries him. So any object you've got would worry him if it were moving contrary to what he thought. And he wouldn't tell you he had the object.

Now, your process, and you as an auditor, are there to put the thing in properly controlled motion. All you want is an object which you can then work with. And all he is trying to do is say, "Well, I got the object; that's incidental. But let's just work — work — work with this thing, and just stop it. No, it isn't stopping properly, it keeps rushing — it goes — no. Rrrh!" Well, he's got the object, and you just watch this fellow.

By the way, your 1.5 is tensing against the motions. And if you were to put a "wobble meter" or a muscular reaction meter on his body here and there, you would actually find that his muscles were jumping, they were tensing, going hard, this way and that. Very tiny little tremors that you possibly wouldn't be able to detect as he sits there with his clothes on. But you possibly might be able to detect the can motion if you had him on an E-Meter. I mean, his fingers possibly gripping the cans slightly, some of his motion will be due to that. The thing will be primarily stuck, but the stuckness of it, any motion that it has, is coming from a tiny vibration of his hand on the grips of the can. What's he trying to do? He's trying to control its motion. He's way over on the stop side of the line.

You see, you can kill something that is supposed to be still by making it move, and you can kill something that is supposed to be in motion by making it stop. You'll just make it — you just twist its purpose. You go counter to its intention to make it die. Now, what's he do when he destroys it? He just goes counter to its intention and it sort of dribbles away. But he's got a solid block of the energy it was. He normally just drags a curtain over the face of it. He just hides it from view. He takes a big black curtain, it doesn't even have asbestos or anything marked on it; he's just got a curtain and he drops a curtain over it.

And you say, "Is it destroyed?"

"Sure. Yeah. It's gone. It's gone."

If you were to ask him very searchingly now, "How did you make it go?" And that is what I am trying to plead with you to ask. "How did you get it?" and "How did you make it go?" "What did you do to make it disappear?" "What did you do to make it appear?"

Now, go into communication with your preclear. Ask him what is happening. Ask him what is taking place, and once you find out what is taking place, see if you just can't add this up against the Tone Scale. What is he doing? And what are these things doing to him? Very important. All right.

Now, to ask somebody at 1.1 to create something — he's trying to make it appear instantaneously, which is perfectly all right. But if he got it instantaneously, then to hold it in any kind of a steady condition whereby it could be made to grow, whereby it could be made to operate, and then get it into a condition whereby it'll gradually fall apart and disappear is an orderly process of which a 1.1 is completely incapable, and that's why he's a 1.1.

He'd want to kind of turn his head so that the extra arm would appear on it. He'd sort of want to back up and see it again sometime or other when it was in the coffin or something or — he's doing a duck and a dodge. But just to get him to get an object — just as you were seeing a Walt Disney film up here now, if you were to see this . . . All right. Blank screen, scenery, an object, object gets bigger and bigger, makes it grow, possibly gets more and more complete, object goes into certain regular and controlled actions which he could — any moment could predict, because he's making it do it.

And you, by the way, get into a tremendously wide theory here of "sanity is the ability to predict motion." If you can predict motion, one is fairly sane. If he can't predict motion, he's not sane. And if he's in an environment where he cannot predict the motion, the environment really is a bit batty. The environment is bad for him. The insane person, just before the lights go out, is very accustomed to say, "I don't know what they're going to do next," or "I don't know what's going to happen next." All right.

And now you would get this on this screen up here, you'd get a — next would be a gradual diminution of power. And then you would get a gradual decay of the object, and then it would go through into its logical cessation of all motion. And would be very orderly, and your preclear would not be sitting there gripping at the cans and shifting his feet and looking around and dodging. And the thing wouldn't be coming on and off like a flock of neon signs, and he wouldn't be ducking away from it and so forth. This would be an orderly progress.

Now, it would also be reasonable or unreasonable as he desired it to be. It would either agree with what happens in the physical universe or disagree with it, as he desired it to happen. Now, there then is the picture you're trying to get, and you're trying to get it in full color, with full motion, with complete three-dimensional body in space. Not flat cardboards — you want a three-, full-dimensional space, you want its progress to be completely predictable, and you want to get it by all perceptions.

Now, let me tell you a condition which doesn't exist but which you theoretically . . . All energy has a habit of maintaining itself in perceptions like all other energy. In other words, if a fellow is doing one thing with one perceptic, he's doing it with another perceptic. There'll be one little perceptic a little stronger on. That's the one that you should train up, by the way. One is just a little bit more on than the others ordinarily. But let's have the — let's exaggerate this condition, and let's say that this fellow is a 1.5 with his tactile, a 1.1 with his visio, in apathy with his thermal — that's heat and cold. He is at 2.0 with effort — the impact or weight, motion. You see — you understand that as I list this over that a perception can be in a different condition. Now, you wouldn't find that in one preclear because the perceptions would be across the band pretty well, one just a little bit more on than the others. But all the others, if the preclear is at 1.5, his perception is at 1.5 all the way across the boards. Now, that's got big ridges; ridges set up against incoming perceptions, and all perceptions being translated and transmitted through a hard ridge — that's a 1.5.

1.1 — all perceptions stirred up and mixed up by the presence of an explosion or a dispersal. A 1.1 always has the explosion or dispersal in his vicinity.

And in grief we have, then, another ridge of sorts — and there must be an emotion, by the way, between grief and apathy, because they're two ridges, and there should be a dispersal and a flow in between those two. And I think everybody down at that end of the Tone Scale is just so completely fouled up that nobody's ever bothered to invent words. But if you watched them you would see lower band emotions. There's a gradient — tiny gradient scale between grief and apathy. There must be two changes in between there. One would be a straight flow of some sort, and — very minute — and the other one would be a dispersal of some sort. But your apathy, of course, would be kind of solid.

All right, let's take a look then. Let's take a look at this picture of perception. You've got a gradient scale of ridges, flows and dispersals as they go up the line, and your perceptions are matching up with it.

Now, what are mock-ups? Mock-ups will follow this line of perception, and the mock-ups will behave according to that gradient scale of perception. How do you know a preclear is getting better? All right, his mock-ups were always in random motion. All of a sudden, one day he can control the motion of his mock-up. He'll say, "You know — you know, every time I see a lorry, the driver isn't singing or screaming or something of the sort, he's just sitting there driving." Well, you wouldn't think that was much of a triumph, but believe me, that's quite a jump on the Tone Scale. You're trying to get this preclear to be able to handle energy, and perceptions are an integral portion of energy. And he's handling one or another tone band — one or another tone band of energy itself in its wavelengths. And perception, as we've covered, is just these various tone bands.

Well, now, all this is very interesting, but unless you are willing to take the key perceptions, the various perceptions of a preclear; unless you're willing to sort of stay in communication with this preclear and find out what he really is doing, make him explain this minutely without invalidating him; unless you're willing to vary this against the various functions so that you get all functions; unless you're willing to apply it to all the component parts of structure itself; you're not going to be able to handle Creative Processing. Because it's an awfully simple process — it's an awfully simple process. It's very easy to look at and it's very easy to understand but it's got a lot of parts, and unless you are willing to go over and sort out and handle these various parts and see that they're applied in certain ways, why, you're not going to get very good results with Creative Processing.

That's true of anything. If you were — if you were going to drive an automobile down the road, but you were not willing to take the responsibility for its steering wheel or its brake, you would not be driving an automobile down the road. Well, I want to see you in the same relationship with Creative Processing. Unless you're willing to take responsibility with the fact there are two sides to this — there's a functional side and there's a structural side — and it has all these various component parts, and that you've got to play these things one against another, why, you're just not going to be taking responsibility for Creative Processing, that's all.

Now, one of the things that could restrain an auditor from taking full responsibility for Creative Processing would be that he isn't able to do these things himself. He wouldn't be able to conceive that anything else could happen to these gimmigahoogits and thingamabums, simply because he can't do them, so they don't have any reality to him. All right.

What then should we do, really, to start and do a good job with Creative Processing? Well, we ought to clear the auditor — what do you know! And everybody has known this for two and a half years. Fortunately, fortunately we're at a state of affairs where even those people we were going to bury two months ago (not mentioning any names) — people that we were ready to send flowers to and say, "Poor fellow. Well, of course, he will free all these others, and he himself will be left there, probably in no good state of preservation. He'll probably be in a bad state of decay, actually. But they make a little statue of him and there that statue will be and it will have a little sign on it saying, 'He done all he could.' " And we used to have very happy little — very happy little ceremonies about this. Used to encourage these people, saying, "Well, we'll send you flowers, and after we've left the MEST universe and everything else, we'll write occasionally and find out how you're getting along." And what do you know, even those people are getting better, and some of them are — have been exteriorized and so on.

Now, even some of the cases — some of the lovely cases that were saying, "Yes, I'm out. Yes, I'm able to do all these things. Yes, I'm able to do all these things" — here and there this person found out they weren't. And they found out they were just being very agreeable about the whole thing, and they — kind of kidding themselves and saying, "Well, it isn't any violent process. It's just the fact you consider you're out, you see, and you're out. And you just change your location, and you change your location." And these people, too, have suddenly found that it's a process somewhat akin to, you either — if it's a question of lorries, there is either a lorry there or there isn't any lorry there. There wasn't any gradient scale of this. And it wasn't an astral body sort of an affair, where you sort of just sat there and said, "All right, thetan, now you go here. And you look there. And you wander around someplace else," and so on, and it was all good fun. "Now, let's see, I'll get a mock-up of this room. And with this mock-up of this room, I will then perceive everything in this room from various angles, and that, of course, means I'm exteriorized. Now, that's fine. That's very gradual."

I mean, no — that even those people have learned to their great incredulity that the confoundedest things happen when they're really outside.

Fellow says, "My — I — I — I can't get down!"

And you say, "What from?"

And, "Well, I'm plastered on the ceiling!" And he — the person may have been telling you this for a long time — he was all Clear, and everything was going along fine. And then one day you ran a handy little jim-dandy method of filling in the vacant spaces with what he thought might be there, which was why he couldn't look at them. And that's quite a technique, by the way. You find out where he can't see or where he can't feel, and then you say, "Well, all right, if you can't feel in that quarter, what's there? What might be there?"

Well, he'll say, "My Uncle Jimsonweed is probably there."

And you say, "Well, all right, see him there. Now, let's have him eat a cup of coffee. Now let's put two Uncle Jimsonweeds there. And let's go through the rest of the cycle of start, change and stop." All of a sudden he can see in that quarter now. In other words, we're taking these pieces of space that have been traditionally for him filled with something dangerous, and we're handling the danger in that sector. We're just cleaning up MEST universe space.

After we've done that for a while, we're liable to get some kind of a reaction like a 16-inch gun going off.

It's kaboom! — "Where am I? Where — I — well, I can't see anything! I'm all of a sudden unable to perceive anything, anyplace."

"Well, why don't you look behind you?"

"Well, there's a light behind me."

"Well, what's the light?"

"Well, I — it's Earth!"

Now, continuing this dissertation on the subject of component parts of Creative Processing, I'm going to give you rapidly a list of the component parts of the structure — of the structure — of that which we are doing.

Any universe can have in it, but does not have to have in it (and I stress the last), the component parts of the MEST universe. These, being stemmed directly, evidently, from theta and its potentials, are not too difficult to handle and are not too difficult to list.

But just because we have this series of component parts, which we best know because we best know this universe, is no reason that another universe wouldn't have a completely different set of arrangements. That you could have anything. Because you're so accustomed to think in terms of space, energy and objects in order to give you beingness, doingness and havingness, that it seems incomprehensible to most that there might be some other ones — like blitheringness. A whole universe might be built on the subject of blitheringness. And what's blitheringness? Well, blitheringness is — has to do with the fact that — of condensed wump. And if you can condense wump, you're all set. Now, you can live in that universe. It might be a very unsatisfactory universe, when inspected by somebody here on Earth, but nevertheless if this is this fellow's universe, it's his universe — that's his business.

So let's not make the mistake of checking the originality of a preclear.

And the component parts which I'm giving you are very simple. Boy, they are simple. About as much excuse not to use all these component parts as there is to be aberrated — which is no excuse. All right.

We have — in this universe, space has a peculiarity. And there are three kinds of space. Three kinds of space: there's "was space," "is space" and "will be space." There are three kinds of space.

And how is this space formed? By postulating it exists. Very tough mechanistically. I mean, you're either going to worry over this and worry over this — but how does space get there? It's because you say it's there. And the fellow can't admit that he has this much power, because if he admitted he had this much power then he could change the future. And his mind, running on a stimulus-response mechanism, and not under control and can't be trusted, might destroy his future. So he can't permit anything to be postulated in the present, so he says, "I couldn't possibly postulate space. Space must have an actual entity — must be in existence."

There's one point of improbability — high improbability. If there wasn't space — if there wasn't space, then how did anybody get you to agree to play the game of space? Now, that's an interesting one. And if there is a secret now which needs its door opened, it's that one. If there wasn't space, how could there be some space in which somebody could get you to agree to play the game of space? Well, it must have been in his space. But how could you possibly have gotten in his space? You'd have to postulate that his space existed. But how did he communicate on this line? Well, I throw that to you as though it's an unsolved problem — it isn't an unsolved problem. But it would seem so to you, perhaps, until you looked at it a little tighter.

And you would see right away that "you must communicate by force" can be run as an engram — the concept "you must communicate by force." And it produces such strange results in the preclear and has such peculiar somatics every few preclears that "you must communicate by force" (means that you must use energy in order to communicate) must have been some effort on the part of somebody to get a much broader agreement so that we wouldn't get this fellow communicating instantaneously in no space. Because, you see, he could keep lousing everything up. He could just keep ruining everything. Because he would — he might do his creations in "will be space." And if he created in — only in a "will be space," his thought would be a pervasion, and if he said that this — and could make it stick — that this was in advance of somebody else's space, their space would go along da-da-dum-da-da-dum, everything's going fine on this space, da-da-dum-dum, all of a sudden, crash! He's run into the "will be space," and too much randomity. Somebody was serious. And I think the whole — the title of this whole play "MEST universe" could be on that line: "Somebody Was Serious."

And the title of Dianetics could be "One Was Stubborn." All right.

That's space. Now, that's a structural entity only when it becomes postulated as such — structural entity, space.

Now, we have your structural entity — and don't ever figure this as anything else but a structural entity — called motion.

Now, it's very nice in this universe. It's very orderly. There is only "in motion" — present time motion. We have gotten ruled out of existence "was in motion" and "will be in motion" as actual operations. But you see, you could make something operate in the past, but boy, is that upsetting.

We get the history books written and somebody goes back and gives Benedict Arnold a better horse or . . . This gets very upsetting.

We are all set now, we're all agreed to the fact that King Henry had eight wives or seven wives or something of the sort, and we just shift it around and we make the motions occur so that his first wife was just wonderful.. And he never has the other six or seven. That's ruinous. It spoils the British Museum, it ruins all the textbooks, and think of this Encyclopaedia Britannica — think of that. What would happen on the pages of it. You'd have just staffs and staffs of people of the "serious department" would have to be shifting that book continually. They'd have to be running around to your house all the time and saying, "Well, what was it like? Oh, that was what it was. You've decided that. Now, you sure you've decided that and you're not going to change your mind about that?"

"Well, all right, I'm not going to change my mind about that."

"Okay. Well, we'll write that down as that — what happened."

Well, the horrors of this game come under the heading "If everybody could." If everybody could, then nothing is possible, because there's so much randomity that everything just goes out to zero. So we have to limit everybody on what they could do, in order to have anything happen on a broad, general line.

So, actually for terms of this universe, we get current motion — current motion as the only motion. Current change in current space as the only possible.

But in Creative Processing, we have "was in motion," "is in," and "will be again."

And this is one of the primary things that's been knocked out of your preclear — his inability to conceive that something will be in motion or not in motion. He's conceiving that something would be not in motion, and if he conceived thoroughly enough a future motion, you would get a present time kickback of real future motion. You'd get a present time kickback. It would change "is in motion." It would change "is in motion." And you get this "was in motion." Past, present and future, you see, are only conditions. It's a negative line. You're saying, "I have this motion. I don't want it this way. One of the ways of varying it is to stop it where it started — yesterday!" See, "All right, yesterday we stop it. It stopped yesterday."

Now, processing this structurally is quite interesting. You have the fellow drive a car up, for instance, and have the car destroyed simply by not having been manufactured. Yeah, you stop things by not starting them. Another way you can stop things is by having a nonexistence occur, a nonexistence which wipes out the back motion line. To get a good, thorough agreement in the MEST universe you can only have "is in motion."

Now, all this is very interesting. You find your preclears hung up on this stuff.

And then we get item, objects. Object can be anything. And, again, we get your shift in terms of an object. You can have various structural variations. You can have an object in "was space." You can have an "object now" in a nonexisting future, you could have all sorts of strange hook-togethers of this that would not agree with this universe, but that doesn't mean they can't be done.

Now, in this universe, we have, horribly enough, "object now," and oh, is that limiting! We have "object now." We just have a "now object" and we have a "now motion." Well, that is what would normally ensue if you had agreement all over the place. Everybody was agreeing, agreeing, agreeing — you'd eventually get it broken down till we had an "object now." You don't have an "object then." That's so, I guess, people can tell you, "Well, if you don't take care of it, you won't have it" — and then eventually you won't have it. How if you do this and do that, this other condition will result and so on. But that's a very narrow band, an "object now."

For instance, there's no reason why you should have a small Buddha on your mantelpiece which you found came out of some old temple and at one time had a valuable ruby in its brow, and there it sits all battered and scarred up and so on. Why not just put some "then space" and a "then object" there? Why not put the Buddha there as it was? Not have it exist there, but have it there as it existed. Be quite pretty — all you'd have to do is just shift your postulate a little bit if you wanted to see the Buddha on the mantelpiece. Very simple. Effective, postulatewise. But you would have a Buddha who was in beautiful condition and who would have a gorgeous stone in his head, even though the stone was now set in Mrs. Gotbucks's bracelet or something. That would be beside the point. You would have a "then object."

But, gee, you'd certainly knock out this whole rule of scarcity. Scarcity is the main thing in the MEST universe, and you'd have then — nobody would have had to have found the planet and mined a mine and gotten a lot of Indians killed in the process and worked and slaved and had this emerald taken over the mountains by muleback and fallen down cliffs and … See the randomity you knock out? And it wouldn't be stolen here and parked there and it wouldn't have any value at all if you had a "then object." What do you mean, value? It wouldn't have the power of increasing wantingness — that's value. It wouldn't have the power of increasing wantingness if everybody could have all these things they wanted to.

So we set an arbitrary value simply by imposing a scarcity and a oneness on a something.

This oneness is a great postulate. I imagine the boy who thought this up was much more proud than I am in undoing it. I imagine he went around for days and weeks, and probably had everybody cheering and huzzahing — he'd finally worked this thing out, and he got it down to a point where objects could have value.

And the way you got an object to have value — see, it was twice as hard to work this thing out as it is to solve it. The way you'd have a — put value on an object would be to have only objects in present time, and this would be an enormously valu.... . Then you'd have to have a police force to go around and enforce it in all directions, and anybody who was found to be getting a superfluity of objects which had no past . . . "Any object must have a past. An object must have a past and exist only in the present." I can see these as proclamations and posters on the sides of buildings and things like that. People being arrested and so forth for wearing a "then object."

And another fellow, he's taken up smoking and he hasn't got a match, so he lights his pipe with a "then motion." And he says, "Well let's see, I had a match last Tuesday. Okay, which, pooh!" And you can just see what the police would do. They would say, "This fellow lit a pipe with a match he had last Tuesday and therefore the fine he's fined twenty postulates," or something of the sort.

It must have been terrible trying to work this universe in, because somebody was serious.

All right. So we have, then, these objects. But what do you know? What do you know — there's another problem that comes up in that. There wasn't any time with regard to objects as long as there was a superfluity of objects. So you actually didn't get much in terms of "then motion" and there was no real reason at all for "then space" or "was space" or "will be space" unless you had a scarcity of objects. So there wasn't any time. Nobody was aware of any time as existing as an arbitrary factor at all, until the object was suddenly declared to be outlawed — I mean, the "then object" and the "will be object" were — became outlawed objects.

Well, everybody had to go around and really work and figure and figure and figure to find out how do you make an object a "then object," so that they could then and only then — naturally, you see — not have one.

That's the general trick of all these postulates is you had to figure out something that wasn't, and then prove to people it was, in order to get something in, to have it ruled out.

You see, you have to have drunken driving before you have a law against drunken driving. You couldn't go down here and pass a law in any town council or anything else of the sort against drunken driving if there had never been a case of drunken driving.

You had to prove — you'd have to prove to the town council that drunken driving was done; it was done, and that it shouldn't be done, then rule it out.

Well now, some fellow very shifty-footed would not be above going out and hiring a few people to do some drunken driving to put his point through.

He would invent illusions which would be dangerous illusions in order to have them avoided. You see? Now that is the operation which has taken place more than anything else.

A fellow dreamed up something and, in order to increase his own worth or his own value of his own objects and fight around with those, then he would discover why it was that these objects were more valuable and why somebody else's objects were less valuable, and he would invent something like "There is a 'now object.' Well, all of your objects are just beautiful and we like your objects and everything of the sort, but a lot of them are 'then objects.'"

And the fellow would pick up this little Buddha and he'd say, "Well, you know, what do you mean it's a 'then'?"

"Well," the fellow would say, "look. I'll prove it to you. It existed. Didn't it?" The fellow would say, "It what?"

And you'd say, "Well, you had it. You had it and you don't have it now." And the fellow looks in his hand and it's gone!

And he says, "You see? It was a 'then object.' "

This is another method of stealing. See, you can steal that way. You can say, "Well, the reason why — the reason why you just suddenly lost those twenty Buddhas and so forth, the reason why — and have none now, is they were all 'then Buddhas.' "

And the fellow says, "They were what?"

And he says, "Well, you had them, didn't you?"

And the fellow says, "Well, yes."

"Well, you don't have them now, do you?"

"No."

"Well, they were 'then Buddhas.' It's all very simple, and there you are."

It's no wonder businessmen go daffy in their old age, because they're actually jumping around on an agreed-upon logical plan with regard to objects which really doesn't have any actuality in existence. They go around proving to somebody that something is scarce and therefore has a greater value. And they dramatize, dramatize, dramatize, dramatize on that same line — dramatize, dramatize. And it gets them. They'll begin to think after a while that … You finally get this businessman and he started out in his youth, the best thing to do was you took this warehouse of stuff, and you got it for a penny apiece and you sold it for a penny and a farthing. And you moved it all out, and you got another warehouse full of stuff and you moved that all out, and you moved other things out.

And as he goes on in life, he doesn't do that anymore. He gets warehouses full of stuff. Period. Period. He gets warehouses full of stuff. There is no motion to this and he just accumulates, accumulates.

Now he's got to figure all sorts of ways to accumulate, so the way he accumulates is to devaluate stuff so that he can pick it up and put it in the warehouse and then consider it valuable. But by this time he's said, "It's not valuable. It's not valuable. It's not valuable." And yet when he gets it himself he says, "Now it is valuable, now it is valuable, now it is valuable." And he'll go screwy on that one too. He'll eventually realize that nothing in the warehouse is worth anything. Why? Because he labeled it so before it went into the warehouse.

And you could take a businessman to pieces this way, and you'd find out that he was — he had been driving himself very daffy. And his concept of values had been in a continuous state of flux. And he's got an identification, now, of values, so that he doesn't know whether his wife's fur coat is more important than the factory or what. Anything can happen to him.

Well, now, that actually is your basic structure — your basic structure.

In this universe, you've got a "now object," but you'll have to use in Creative Processing "will be objects" and "had objects."

You see, you would have to say, "Now get something you had." And the fellow said, "You mean I don't have it now?"

"That's right. Get something you had."

"All right. I had a Rolls-Royce yesterday."

"That's fine. That's fine. Now, roll it up here into the present. All right, now let's have a Rolls-Royce twenty years ago. Now let's not have it exist until tomorrow."

Most of your preclears will — their wits start to sort of — they feel kind of like they're caving in right at that point. They moan, "How can I possibly do this?"

And all of a sudden they learn a tremendous lesson. "All I've got to do is say so, and it is so." And at that moment they will break agreement tremendously with the heavy agreement line they're on. They just break agreement all over the place. They can handily say, all of a sudden, and with perfect calm and without any doubt about the ethics of the thing — saying, "Well, yesterday I had a million dollars. I had a million dollars and didn't lose it, but it was a 'then million dollars.' I had a million dollars and didn't lose it, and I don't have it now, but it didn't disappear."

It's impossible. Well, if he can just work around with that you'll find all sorts of things blowing into view.

You're breaking up his logical line which has gotten him into a state of identifying. It's no longer in a state of similarity; it's in a state of identification all along the line. Now you just have to break it up to bits with Creative Processing until you get differences. And that's what our next step is here.

Now, this isn't all structure. I'm going to come back to structure in a moment.

You've got differences, similarities and identities.

And as you teach a guy to handle this, as with Creative Processing, he gets to a point where he can make postulates and that is the seniorest type of thinking there is: Postulate Processing.

There's no sense in undoing postulates which he made on this time track, because there is no reason why he has to undo his postulate which exists today by undoing the postulate he made yesterday, because he didn't make it yesterday, he made it now.

A postulate is not senior, actually, just because it occurred yesterday. It's just because of this object mess-up, with "then objects" and "will be objects" being ruled out, that postulates become very valuable.

Because most of your preclears (mark this down) treat thought as an object. They are so bad off.

Now, if you want to see an extreme case of this, try and process a psychotic. And you say, "All right. Give me the postulate." And they'll actually sort of start fishing in their pockets or something.

And you say, "All right, now, what's the value of the word?" And they'll think it over for a little while — you can just see them. Get them to give you something. Get them to part with an object. They can't part with an object, and they can't part with a word and they can't part with an aberration. They're all the same to them. A postulate is an object, a thought is an object, a word is an object.

Did you ever tell a joke to somebody and have him sit there for ten or fifteen minutes and keep coming back to it all the time, and puzzled as to what exactly your words meant? Well, he can't part with it. He's got to hold it, and that's his excuse, to hold — he's got an object. Words are objects; words are objects to the very aberrated.

And as a person becomes less and less aberrated, words are less and less objects. But they are to some slight degree a symbol and an object way up the Tone Scale.

So you have, with a postulate, a "then object." And if a "then object" ever existed, it exists now, or an incident of its destruction exists between then and now. You get the idea?

Then, it must — if there was a "then object," it exists today or it was destroyed. This is the agreement of the universe. To have a "then object" which was not destroyed, not existing today, is something a person can't accept.

So, if a postulate is an object, they have a "then object" — they didn't destroy it, so it must be in full force today. And what is "then" is senior, then, to what is "now." So their postulates are all over the track and every one of them in full force.

And he has a postulate — he says, "Black is bad." And he's got a postulate, "White is bad." Now, he tries to make a postulate — he sees a film and it has a black heroine. And he says, "Gee, she was a nice girl. Now, let's see — well, black — black just as a color isn't so bad …" Now he can't make it stick. He is very well aware of the fact that he has made a postulate that "black is bad." Now he's got to make a postulate "black is good." He can't make a postulate "black is good" because the senior postulate has already been made merely because it was an earlier postulate and it's an object.

So when you give him processing, he is willing to admit, then, the postulate was destroyed, because the ritual of processing destroys the postulate that he made before. Now he can make a new postulate. It's actually just pure balderdash changing a postulate in yesterday. There isn't any reason why a "then object" can't exist then and not exist now without having been destroyed. It assaults one's logic. One keeps saying, "What happened to it?" and so forth. And you say, "Well, nothing happened to it. It just doesn't exist." And the fellow — "But that's impossible," and so on. He's trying to connect himself with the past with this chain of similarities I've explained to you as logic. He's trying to connect himself all the way through with this similar stream of consciousness — and that's a stimulus-response mechanism. He's asking things to be automatic. He wants the environment to run him. And so he gets all connected up to the past.

You could just work with him a little while and get a flexibility of mind to where he could say, "Oh, all right, a 'then object' can exist without existing now, without an interim destruction." You're liable to get — boom! — all the postulates on the track are invalid. The second that he realizes there have been all kinds of postulates made about this and that, and they don't necessarily have to exist now because objects don't have to exist now — why then, theoretically, you could get a disconnection from one's past. And what you're trying to do is disconnect your preclear from the liabilities of his own past. Well, that's the way to do it.

So, we have this cycle, an enforced cycle of action.

Now, the anatomy of the cycle of action is the next thing here. He believes that things have to go from here, "creation," over to here, "destruction." And that anything that starts in on the cycle has to finish the cycle, and you get that compulsion. That compulsion is a command. It says, "Survive!" It says everything has to survive and go through this cycle in order to be valid, and nothing is valid unless it has gone through this cycle. So you get the cycle of action not as a necessary part of a universe of the preclear's, not as a necessary part of his thinking process, but something he continually witnesses, something which he knows is an integral part of his beingness. And he thinks this is logical, and actually logic is this cycle of action.

Now, a cell goes into that cycle of action. A car goes into that cycle of action. A body goes into that cycle of action. And that is the unit cycle of action of the organism: create, growth, conserve, decay, death. And that, of course, he thinks then, has to be the cycle of the object. .

Well, you could give him a mock-up having an old man live backwards and die because he was born, and disappear because he was born. There's no reason why he can't run this cycle backwards.

Merlin, by the way, is supposed to be living backwards. Merlin is probably alive today and if it's running the way Merlin said it was going to run, he is getting younger and younger. And there isn't any reason why this couldn't take place, you see?

Actually, you could start your whole life cycle backwards if you wanted to. You could take yourself as you are now, and you could start running yourself earlier as time goes later, but look at the command value you'd have to take out of time.

Well, to take a command value out of time, all you have to do is take a command value out of objects. And if you take the command value out of objects, you can have yourself "un-age" with great ease.

You could say, "Now, let's see. Let's see. According to the dates in the MEST universe, I am ninety-seven. Now, let's see. I think I'll un-age till forty and that will take fifty-seven years. And fifty-seven years — because of the ratio of desire and objects and so forth — will be at two o'clock this afternoon. Fifty-seven years will have elapsed at two o'clock this afternoon, that will make me forty. At two o'clock this afternoon I'll be forty. Good." And actually make it stick.

Now, there's no reason why you can't do that.

There isn't any reason, too, why you have to have everything manufactured for you, because that makes time manufactured for you.