[applause]

▼ We'll take a better look at 'em afterwards, we just got 'em in down here. They're for a salon exhibit up in Gwendon(?). Encyclopedia Brittanica exhibit.

▼ You've been complaining - several complaints - they're all about photography, you just never seen any of my pictures. [laughter]

▼ I thought it might be good today (?). Reg did. Its all his fault.

▼ How are you today?

▼ Audience: Fine.

▼ I just got a good compliment. The photofinishers that finish off this color work just said they've never seen any pictures like this before and they finish for professionals. The guy was just on the phone giving me a big rave about this thing one way or the other. Of course he doesn't know the trick - he doesn't know the trick about it. You see "I" [emphasized] take the pictures. [laughter]

What's the date?

Audience: 13th of October.

13th of October. Well, that's a good day. You're very lucky. The 13th fell on Tuesday this week, didn't fall on Friday.

▼ First here lets have a little introduction. Some people stand up and take a bow please. New students: Don Richardson. And Wilbur Hubbard. And Frank Bannister. And Crad Lipsitz. And Les Verity. And somebody who came back after wandering across the broad world - a retread - stand up and take a bow - Joselyn Hansen.

All right. Today's lecture is ▼ not about pictures. It's about cycles of action. Cycles of action. And you'll find this very fundamental material. And it's quite good for man and beast. You can put it in tea or coffee, take it without taste; doesn't leave any aftereffects in an auditing session, can be rubbed on horses, dogs, is only sixpence the bottle. And you ought to buy some. I think it'd be a terribly good idea.

It's not that I am particularly cross on this particular subject of cycles of action. Nobody has been throwing their hands up in horror over the idea of completing one. And it's a relaxed moment when it doesn't happen to be a crisis. So this is one lecture which is given when there is no crisis to prompt it. That makes it peculiar in the field of lectures.

The crisis, by the way, is getting your auditing question answered. And then some of the — some of the wildest goofs I've heard in a long time.

"Well, how are you today?"

"Uh … I just got my car back."

"Thank you."

But this, of course, does too apply to some degree to a cycle of action. A cycle of action cannot go on unless all the elements of the cycle of action being used are common to the cycle of action. Do you follow me?

In other words, you can't have a cycle of action that goes from white to black, you see, to gray to black. Do you get the idea? A cycle of action would rather have to go from, let us say, black to gray to less gray, to less gray, to less gray, to less gray, to more white, to more white, to more white, to white, don't you see? Then, possibly, if you wanted a complete cycle of action, less white, less white, less white, less white, slightly gray, grayer, grayer, grayer, black.

Now, what do we mean by a cycle of action? This is probably one of the things that would be the most puzzling word here to collide with: cycle. Because cycle is applied in many different directions. There is one you ride. Also, there's types that have motors in them. There are wheels that go round so that the cycle of a wheel is the point that the point of a wheel returns to.

In other words, you've got a wheel and you've got a point at the top; the wheel goes all the way around, and when it has returned to the top, why, it has completed a cycle. Do you see? I'm just showing you there's various confusions about this word. You didn't laugh at the right joke, so that's all right … But the upshot of this cycle of action is that it has many odd and peculiar connotations and is therefore rather difficult to understand or collide with. You follow that? You could have a wheel that turns all the way around and comes back to the same place, see?

Now, a story cycle of action that began in the field of modern story writing, and so on, would be a story something like this (this is a very modern story, you see): And there's a bum standing on a corner and he is totally degraded and he has just lost his job, you see? And his wife that he wasn't married to has run off with another man, you see? And he's standing there and he gets an idea that he might be able to pick himself up out of it and go have a cup of coffee, you see?

So he goes and has the cup of coffee, and it's cold and it's very bad coffee. And he reaches in his pocket and he finds out there's a hole in his pocket and the nickel he had, you see, has - lost. And so he is ejected from the place, but not even dramatically. He's simply told to go with considerable contempt, don't you see?

And we find him back on the same corner, in the same position, in the same mood, worrying about the same thing. That is modern story writing.

If anybody wants to steal that plot and sell it with their writing, they're perfectly welcome to do so.

Now, I remember when this modern school first started up. By the way, the modern school has now become very antique. It's so old now that a lot of people have heard about it. When it first started up, they had a story, "Big Brother," and it wasn't even in English.

But they had a tremendous fixation on the idea that a story had to start and end at the same place in the same situation. And they were trying to give an appearance of no change. So that was what they understood by a cycle that nothing changed. And you'll find now and then, you go to some arty movie made by somebody down in France who didn't have any money and didn't have any film either. (And frankly, they'd have been much better off if they'd shot it with an empty camera!) But you'll occasionally see these things; you'll pick them up at foreign theater stands, you know, and it'll be something like this. And it'll always begin and end at the exact same place.

So cycle has gotten into the field of art. And cycle is in the field of mechanics - as different from engineering - as a completed revolution. Cycle in the field of art, meaning no change of time, or everything came back the same way, don't you see? And in mechanics, it is a total revolution.

Now, in engineering and physics, it means something else again. It means the motion between the ending of one wave and the beginning of the new wave. And I think you'll find out that that is probably a better expressed definition than the usual engineering definition, but that is it. You take the end of the last wave, which is the beginning of the next wave, and it goes on through then to the end of that wave, which is the beginning of the next wave. And that would be a cycle.

And you have that expressed in radio, you see? Radio. All discussions of wavelengths. You have it in discussions of color, and so on. And that's really what they're talking about; they're talking about a sweep.

Now, there is an old, old, old, old definition on this which, by the way, we are indebted to in Scientology, because there's a philosophic aspect to the word cycle. And they didn't directly call it a cycle, and pardon me if I seem to be a bit lyrical on the subject, but it is in the Hymn to the Dawn Child, in the unwritten Veda (which has been written and then, therefore, called a type of Veda). But it's in the oral tradition, you might say (to borrow a musical term), of India.

And it's the Hymn to the Dawn Child. I've forgotten whether it's the fourth or the tenth Vedic hymn. But it expresses that there is a nothingness, and then there is a form gradually takes place, and then this grows and this ages and then this decays; and then this goes into a nebulosity and winds up in a new nothingness. Now, that is not a quote; it's just an effort to interpret that particular action for you. It's a very short hymn, by the way, and it's quite interesting. And it is really part of your technology in Scientology.

You see, there have been billions of statements by philosophers and more of them are wrong than right, but in sorting out the field of philosophy - this is sometimes what confuses people.

I remember explaining Krishnamurti to somebody or other, a very dear old friend, who said, "But - but Krishnamurti said many of the things that you're saying in Scientology." I said, "Give me a book by Krishnamurti."

So she handed me a book by Krishnamurti and I went down the line and there, there was one about time that was a direct statement, that same statement that we use in Scientology. See, it was right there, and she showed me that, and she says, "Look it there; Krishnamurti said that." I said, "Well, where is the bold face?"

And she said, "What?"

"The bold, the italics, the underscore."

And she said, "Well, there isn't any."

And I said, "All right. Let's count the number of statements on this page, also about time, which aren't true - none of which have any emphasis, any different emphasis than this one." And we counted them up, and there were 132 incorrect statements about time and one correct statement about time. So I don't think Krishnamurti said anything we said.

See? And I taught her the lesson of the evaluation of importance: Importance assigned to a datum is as important as the datum. And you'll find that in our Logic's. In other words, there can be many truths.

Not comparing poor old Krishnamurti. Krishnamurti is mad at us; by the way, because one of our boys went out to India one time or another and next confounded thing you know, he had all of Krishnamurti's group out in India studying Scientology, and I don't think Krishnamurti has ever forgiven us. But that's - happens to be the truth.

▼ The boy is Johan Kemblehoff (?), you ought to talk to him some day.

Anyway, you get the evaluation of importance here, see? The evaluation of importance of a datum can be as important as the datum, and sometimes more important.

You could have fifty thousand monkeys writing on fifty thousand typewriters for a long time, and sooner or later one of them is going to write E = MC2, see? And then somebody could come along and point out, "Look, those monkeys are as smart as Einstein." No, they couldn't be as smart as Einstein, for the excellent reason that when this was written, it was not assigned a relative importance to anything, you see? So its value was not estimated, so therefore it wasn't peaked up.

And although there are a great many truths in Scientology, some of these are peaked, you see? They're in bold face, you know, and they've got big underscores underneath them. Cycle of action is one of them. And it goes back to the early Vedic hymns.

Now, out of this - out of this we get a great deal of workable, or applied, or applicable wisdom. In other words, we can get very, very full application out of this thing. This thing will work all day and all night. And the cycle of action is, of course, a plot of incident against time - if you wanted to get a definition here - the way we are using it, you see? It's a plot of consecutive incident against time, a plot against time.

Now, of course we're in the advantageous position of knowing the source of time, and knowing what time is. Since we got R6, we have known a lot more things than we knew before. And we know that time is a commonly held consideration which is a great, big, cracking, enormous, GPM which has got a lot of root words with an end word connected to it called time.

Therefore, it's an agreed-upon progress and we're all making this time and moving it forward.

And as a result, from person to person, although the incidents plot against time, you see, at - I better say, plot against time: at zero seconds, the door is opened, see; at zero plus two seconds, the door stands open; at zero plus three seconds, somebody enters the door; at zero plus five seconds, somebody is walking; at zero plus six seconds, somebody sees a chair; at zero plus seven seconds, a motion is made toward the chair; at zero plus eight seconds, the person sits down. Do you understand, now, when I say plotting incident against time? You see? In view of the fact that we're all in a present time - see, of course, couldn't be anyplace else, because there isn't any. You see? Everybody wonders "How do we move along forward in time?" Puzzled me for a long time. Well, of course, it's very simple to move along forward in time, because nobody is going anyplace, you see? That's the whole trick back of time, see? But the incident, don't you see, which is plotted forward appears to be a plot against time. And it's the incident, or consideration of the incident, which plots the time.

And you'll find that old people (that is, old humanoids) very often have their days go by whiz, whiz, whiz, you know? They just no more than get up in the morning and they go to bed at night, you know? And it's just bzz, bzz, bzz, bzz, bzz!

This is a commonly held consideration. You go around and talk to some of them and they will tell you, "Well, you know, there used to be a lot of time in a day, but there isn't anymore, you know?"

In other words, the incident, or interest, or future, you see, is gone to lead them forward in time - so therefore, you see, they have no consideration of time. The incident plots very bang! you see? Well, there's only a couple of things happen in the day, you know? All right. Now, we take a little kid, maybe five, six years old, and the day to him is absolutely interminable! Like little Arthur, the other day, was telling me he didn't have anything to do and that he wasn't doing anything. And this was just for fun (I think it was the other evening), I rattled off to him what he was doing, and what had happened in the last five minutes in his life.

And he didn't consider this very much. You see, his tolerance of incident was very high. But he sort of laughed about it, and then he still complained that he just didn't have anything to do; I didn't make much of an impression on him.

But he had run in and out of the room three times, the dog had taken off one of his shoes and he'd put it back on again, he'd stolen the dog's bone, the dog had gotten the bone back, he had found one of his toys and thrown it down, and then he'd gone in the other room and inspected his rocks, and … In other words, it was all this incident. My Lord, man, the incident which had taken place, you see, in those last few minutes. And he still didn't think he was doing anything; he was doing nothing, you see?

What he meant to say was he was doing nothing in which he was interested in doing, so therefore time was passing interminably to him. you see, under a very heavy incident impact.

You could be more philosophic about it and reduce it down to tolerance of incident - not tolerance of motion but just tolerance of incident. How much incident does somebody want? You find out after the war - World War II, amongst my friends and so forth - I found out that life was suddenly moving very slowly for all of them. Life was very dull, see? They couldn't pick themselves up at all, and so forth. Change of pace was so fantastic, you see? From hurry-scurry, hurry-scurry, bang, thud, crash, bing, gop, bow, dzz, zrrp, woo, bee, theet, tha, out bung, bang, incident, rut, row, boom, bow, crash, all of a sudden, why, they settled down to what had been, just before the war, a normal existence to them, you see? And this normal existence of just this short span of years, regardless of their own considerations, seemed awfully slow. See, it just seemed like nothing was happening at all.

And therefore, what had happened? Well, their tolerance of incident had increased. Even though it was bad for them in numerous cases, they still had gotten up to confronting r-r-r-r-r-r-r type of incident, don't you see? And then all of a sudden, they don't have that much incident. So time, oddly enough, started to do funny things for them. It either went terribly slowly or it went by very rapidly. You see, because if you'd learned to plot your incident and time together, in other words, if you measured your time by the amount of incident occurring, and then you didn't have any incident - see, figure it out - why, you obviously wouldn't have any time. You follow that?

That's really what happens to old people. They had the house full of people, and they're this and that, and their responsibility to so-and-so; and there was Jackie coming back from school, and there was this and that and then the other thing; and all of a sudden, everybody goes off and gets married or does something, and there isn't enough incident, you see? So therefore the day is going whsht, whsht, whsht, whsht! You got the idea? Amount of incident.

You can't say, you see, that the more incident there is - you see, it doesn't come down to an engineering proposition of the more incident there is, the more time there is, or the less incident there is, the less time there is; nor can you say in reverse, you see, that the more incident there is, the less time there is. You see, these things don't add up.

Well, why don't they just exactly add up and equate? Well, you're dealing with a false commodity in the first place, see, so it's never going to add up. But it's the consideration of it; it's a consideration.

Now, we did a lot of this with randomity and that sort of thing, but that is not as full an explanation as I'm giving you here today. But it's the consideration: Does a lot of incident make a lot of time or does a lot of incident make no time?

Now, you're going to have somebody around with a lot of incident happening in his vicinity, and he just suddenly starts saying - like I do occasionally, you know - "There isn't enough time for this incident to happen in," see? I start getting an emergency on five or six fronts simultaneously while I am doing my research, while somebody is calling on me for a new bulletin, don't you see? And this is too much incident. So I say, "Well, there isn't enough time." You got the idea?

So I grab myself by the scruff of the neck, you see, and - you could get the consideration you are manufacturing the time. All you have to do is "Well, I could confront being that busy." That's all you actually have to do. My consideration for this: "Well, all right. I can do something about it," see? And instantly, you've suddenly got enough time! If you say, "No, I can't do anything about these incidents because of the time," of course you haven't got enough time. You got the idea?

And you can actually practically monitor the amount of time you had by simply changing any consideration you have about how busy you want to be, or how much you can handle.

Sometimes you can play tricks on yourself this way, see? You can say, "Well, I wanted to be busy, busier than I was, and I sure got my wish!" And the next thing you know, why, you've got enough time, you see?

So it's the consideration of how much incident makes how much time that gives or subtracts time from one's existence. And that's pretty deep and pretty profound, and I'm afraid that nobody has ever said it before in the field of philosophy, but it's quite shaking, if you really take a look at it. It's how much you decide you can tolerate, see? How much you decide you can confront, or whether or not you are deciding the other way to.

Now, this is all compounded by, also, the very difficult situation that you can get up to a point of where you can consider time long or short without measuring it against incident. Then, you see, by gradient, higher tone, you could get up to a point and you say, "Well, this is going to be a long day," and it'll be a long day, see? "Well, night will be here in no time," and it'll be there in no time. You practically just turn around and blink and somebody is calling you to supper. But we're now talking of - in a fairly high-toned action.

Normally, you're in a position where incident is, to a marked degree, monitoring your consideration of time. But actually, it's quite the reverse; as you get up, it's your consideration of incident which is monitoring time. And then as you get up above that, it's simply a consideration of how much time there is or isn't.

I don't know, I think you could get high enough toned as a thetan to consider that a million years was no time, and find yourself a million years up the line. You follow this, see? Or consider that evening was a couple of years away and just sort of almost live a couple of years before evening. You get the idea, see?

So there are three points here that we could consider, three different attitudes: Where the person is the total effect of time and he's habituated to the incident monitoring his time. But it's a certain speed of incident monitoring his time, don't you see, that he's just gotten used to - just habit, you know? He's always led a busy life and therefore his time is - he's the effect of that much time. He's always led an easy and rather wasteful life, so that's his consideration of time, don't you see? And when that pace changes, and so forth, he'll get a reverse consideration of the situation, see? But that's all in the field of being the effect of time, you see? One is just total effect: one never does anything about the incidents, one never lessens or increases the amount of incident, one never changes his opinion about the incident, one doesn't even know that incident has anything to do with time, don't you see? You got Homo sap; there he is.

All right. Now, let's go upstairs a little bit, and let's get into a level of release, or something like this, and one recognizes in some way or another that - well, two different considerations take place. One, "If I get busy, time will go by faster." And the other, reverse consideration can also be held, "Well, if I don't do anything, why, time will go by faster." You can also hold that reverse consideration just as easily as the other, but the first one I mentioned is the commonest.

And you sort of get the idea that you could monitor the amount of doingness, and you can get into a point of how much incident you can confront. And you can monitor your time by willingness to confront incident, willingness to confront the amount of action in your vicinity.

You've been living in South Peoria amongst the growing sycamores, or whatever they have in Peoria, and life has been drifting by at an 1890 horse-and-carriage pace, and you all of a sudden get on a train or a plane; you go to New York City. The taxicab drivers alone are sufficient to change your ideas of time, you see? Well, you see, that's a change of pace.

Now, Homo sap would regard that, you see, as simply shocking. You know, he'd just probably voice the fact that he had been affected. That would be his total handling of the situation, you see?

Somebody who's upscale a bit higher could make the consideration, you see, well, he's willing to confront New York. And when he goes back to Peoria, well, he's willing to confront Peoria, see? (South Peoria. I won't malign Peoria itself.) You see? He's willing to confront that amount of incident. Well, I'm back home again here, and this is the space in which I live," and so forth. And he'd find his time would stay in much better balance.

Now let's take him upstairs above - the state I just mentioned would be someplace between Release and Clear. Now, let's take him up someplace to where he's moving into R6 or something like that, and he'll start getting the spooky notion that he doesn't have to depend upon the exterior incident to measure his consideration of time, see? So he's simply up into a point where he's saying, "There's lots of time," see, or "There isn't any time," see? He's waiting for a train: no time, see? No time is elapsing, so of course the train arrives almost at once, you see? And … as far as his consideration is concerned, you see?

And he's at a big party and everybody is having a marvelous time and he's having a marvelous time, and so forth, so he just changes his consideration to the fact that it's a long party. And it is. Do you see?

So there are actually these three stages of reaction. Of course, there is a reaction below that I should mention, which is just unconscious. But of course, unconsciousness is not a reaction; it's an isn't.

Now we could probably go above that and we get up into OT and so forth, and we probably could get a pan-determined attitude toward time, which would monitor the time of others. Now we're talking pretty - we're talking pretty, pretty swami. See, I mean, this is a little bit out of the range of reality, so forth. But it would be by - instead of self-determinism, we're moving over into pan-determinism, and moving over to separately other-determining, see? Doing an other-determinism, see? And you get up into that zone, why, no telling what you could do, see?

You have an example of it in fairy tales, of the bloke that comes along and waves the magic wand over the sleeping princess, and everybody sleeps for a hundred years. No little child ever thinks to ask, "What happened to the armor and so forth of the guards and the other people around in the castle?" Don't you see? That one, Sleeping Beauty, is almost a perfect example of pan-determined time, see?

He said, "There's going to be no incident in this joint for a hundred years," see? There wasn't.

When you get up that high, you don't even have to give your postulates in correct English, you know?

So then there is a zone above that, but of course that's done on the basis of communication.

And I don't care whether the communication has much distance in it or not; you're now speaking in the realms of telepathy. And you're speaking in the realms of a telepathy powerful enough so that your consideration is able to induce a reality in the other person, and that's pretty high voltage telepathy.

You can see this, however; you can see this in lower experimental phenomena in the field of hypnotism, in the field of mesmerism, early stuff back there when they were still experimenting with it, a hundred years or more ago. They knew more about it than they do now; they've forgotten most of that technology.

But you could tell somebody, you see, you can tell an hypnotized subject that this has been the span of time, don't you see, or not been the span of time. Although I don't know that these blokes ever thought of doing that, particularly. But they'll get a lot of incident, and they will think a lot of incident has happened and a lot of things have gone by, and that they've been out a long time, and their considerations with regard to this would be entirely shifted, don't you see?

But that, of course, is making somebody the total effect of a direct communication; it isn't pan-determined up on the upper stages. I'm just showing you that it can be represented experimentally down in the very, very low gutters of the scale.

You can cause incident to occur on a projected basis, in ways that the modern hypnotist has entirely forgotten. I was quite appalled to find out how little is known in the West, really, about hypnotism. I think Charcot must have studied in India, and Mesmer, and so forth.

But this experiment is a fascinating experiment: You put another being into a rapport, which is a total bing-bang, you see, with regard to it. And it isn't just a physical rapport, because that other being feels and thinks the thought and feeling of the body of the person who has him mesmerized.

Mesmerism is quite different than hypnotism. Later boys have mixed these two terms, you see? You can do this fantastic thing. Somebody can be put into a mesmerized state, and then put your hand behind your back (when you really get out the bottom, why, people will say, "Well, do you believe in hypnotism?" you know? It isn't anything you believe in - I mean, it's just an experimental activity) and you can pinch yourself in the back, and the person who's mesmerized, even though their eyes are closed and so forth, will leap convulsively. And if their back is examined, your fingernail marks will appear on their back. Quite interesting.

In other words, you can produce a physical pan-determinism, you see? See, you've determined their determinism. And that is also in an experimental zone.

This, of course, is quite unethical to play around with amongst the poor bloke Homo sap, walking already up to his neck in muck and trouble, don't you see? And somebody mesmerizes him or hypnotizes him and upsets what little sense of value he has left, because the only thing the poor bloke has got is his own self-determinism, don't you see? The only thing he's got left is that tiny, tiny spark of power of choice, don't you see? Well, when you overcome that, you just throw him into a total effect; then that mud just goes down right up over his head, see? But I'm just giving you an example, just to communicate the idea that that is a low harmonic on an upper state with regard to the telepathy of time and incident, see?

So at a very, very high level - at a very, very high level, not making anybody pushed into the mud or something like this, you get somebody thinking it's a long day, and everybody in the city begins to agree that it's a long day, you see? You get the idea?

You could also have this sort of thing going on; it doesn't even have to do totally with time.

It'd be "the actions we're engaged in are happiness producing actions," see? That consideration could be added to the cycle of action, you see; it's a happiness-producing action. And everybody working around there, they'd think they were doing time, you see? Well, you could produce the opposite effect of "the actions in which we are engaged are misery-producing actions," you see, and everybody would feel miserable and feel like they were forming overts by doing any action at all. And we've got a lot of that in this society in which we live, which is changing people's attitude toward time.

And the prime criminal in this is the newspaper - the press of Fleet Street. It's all scandal and it's all bad and all the employers are bad, and everybody is bad, and there is nobody good, and nothing happy has happened at all, and your actions are not producing any happiness, and the worker is totally walked on and stepped on and ought to shoot everybody in his tracks, don't you see, because he's being made to work, you see? You get the idea?

You're spreading, then, on a pan-determinism basis - but on very finite, low-grade communication lines, you see, the idea of a worthless series of incidents. So therefore, this will do something to people's time. And the amount of doingness of a society is tremendously dependent on whether or not they are being told that their cycle of action - or whether they believe or agree - that their cycle of action should proceed or shouldn't proceed.

And so we move over into the field of the word action, now. Action. We've got cycle of action. All right. We got cycle. You know what that is - all right, let's take up action.

So an action is simply a motion through space having a certain speed. Its speed could be fast or it could be slow, it could move across a lot of space, it could move across a sixteen-millionth of a millimeter, see? But it would be an action.

Now, there's a lot of bad connotation to the word action in the field of literature. Action stories are supposed to be bad stories, you see? This word in the field of psychology has gotten to be a nasty, spit-in-the-spittoon sort of word.

All these civil-defense blokes in the United States are carefully trained that if anybody gets active during an atomic bombing, they should instantly be incarcerated. I know that sounds psychotic; and it is.

And the psychological (ha!) assistance of civil defense (ha!) which has been organized in the United States at this particular time has been carefully trained to take any individual who is in action and put him out of action fast, with a cop or a straitjacket or something, see? And that's what he's trained to do.

I asked the embarrassing question, "Well, what if the fellow was engaged in trying to put out a fire?"

"Well," they say, "that would all be done by the local authorities, so that doesn't come into the problem."

And I found out that a local authority, a local authority (you'll have to cut that off the tape) - a local authority is not a being, which was quite interesting to me. But a being is anybody who isn't a local authority. And if a person isn't a local authority and he is active, or in action or is proposing action, or any of these other things, then the job of the psychological assistant, of which they're breeding lots of them, and the psychiatrist and anybody else (and the cop on the beat is supposed to turn over this person, also) - he's supposed to be instantly gotten out of the way and strapped down and bang! See, there must be no action.

It's sort of interesting to me that this word action, which is primarily and purely simply something which denotes motion and could be said to be, perhaps, volitional motion or intended motion, could become a bad thing, you see? So there's all sorts of conflict going on about this. Of course, if a fellow, you know, on a soccer team, or something like that, who is supposed to stop the ball from going in some particular direction, just stood there and didn't move over in front of the ball, why, he'd be terribly booed, don't you see? But in some other part of the society, you see that's inaction; inaction, there, is bad, you see? But in some other part of the society, action is bad, you know?

And psychiatry has this so bad that they think a person is cured when they become inactive, and that's one thing which you, as a Scientologist, have never been able to understand about psychiatry. You think I'm kidding you, or something like that, you know? But that's merely a misalignment of their intention; there's something wrong there, see?

If this fellow is active and he's got something wrong with him - he's had a label hung on his chest or something like that, and he's active - then he is unwell and must be restrained, and that is the real action behind an electric shock and a prefrontal lobotomy. It's the action in which the person is engaged which is the criteria of what treatment he gets. So a well person is then a catatonic schizophrenic (a very fancy word which means somebody just lies still, stiff, and never moves).

So in the field - in the mental field, this word action is a very bad word; very, very bad word.

It fits along with agitated, frenzied, disturbed, see? These are all the same - same thing. See? So, we've gotten this word pulled down here amongst a bunch of brothers it doesn't go with.

And this has thrown the whole field of mental healing, so-called, in the Western world at this particular time, for a loop. You get the idea? It's not whether or not he went back to his job and did his job. It's whether or not he was active. And you, talking to a psychiatrist, wouldn't make any sense at all, because he'd say "active," meaning crazy, and you'd say "active," meaning constructive. See, so you wouldn't be talking the same vocabulary, because of their abuse of this word action, see?

So, you must realize - you must realize - that the prevention of motion is fairly prevalent, particularly in mental-healing circles. The prevention of motion. And therefore, there is something marvelous about the state of inaction.

Now, we are not the only people to comment on the subject of action or inaction, but certainly - although we follow far more traditional areas, such as "man is a spirit, he's not a dog," that sort of thing - realize that in the field of mysticism, one of your main complaints about mysticism and one of the bad bugs that there is in mysticism is the image of the wise or totally elevated individual or the finely refined individual as a totally inactive one. See? That's your little point of argument. You say, "Hey, wait a minute."

You see, a fireman putting out a fire could be totally calm and collected. He could go about it with a completely apparent effortless efficiency, you see? Well, that's very high toned. But a fireman who would sit and regard his navel would be crazy! You see the difference? So, you as Scientologists have seen this for a long time. Now, you've even coined a word; I didn't coin this word. You've coined quite a lot of words, you know? Amongst you, I hear you say them, I see them in auditors' reports; they become prevalent, and so forth. So very often, I start to use them. And you've got one called a mystic mystic, you know? A mystical mystic. I've heard this word bang around inside organizations and so forth, the mystical mystic. And it's a case; it's a case type. It's a commonly Scientology agreed-upon case type.

"This person is a mystical mystic."

And they'll process that person in accordance. And by that they mean that the person will be totally reasonable about anything that happens in their vicinity, but not do anything about it; and see nothing but good in anything, including murdering babies. You see? It's this unreasonableness which you're protesting - the mystical mystic.

But that's borne out of the fact that running alongside of a great deal of wise wisdom, some awfully bad wisdom has been carrying forward on the basis that all you would do, if you were really elevated, is you would sit on a mountain top and regard your navel and not look at the world, or not look at anything, engage in nothing, participate nowhere, be effective nowhere at all, engage in no action of any kind, be totally detached, nothing to do with you, be completely aloof, and so forth. And you ask a lot of people what an OT is and they'll describe that. See? An OT is much more likely to be a ball of fire.

But, of course, this is a self-protective mechanism. People would like to believe this. We have somebody in England who is absolutely frantic every time you mention the idea of OT, and has even come up to me and said, "Please, Ron, don't release these techniques. Please, please, please don't go in that direction. My God, it'd be worse than the invention of the atom bomb. You realize what is liable to happen if you set these people loose!" and so forth. And he's really worried! Or he was; maybe somebody got to him, because it's been a few months ago and there have been a lot of Scientologists around. You can't ever tell what will happen to somebody's character in that case. But they probably got him talked out of it.

But there, his fear is that somebody would become powerful or strong, which is fear of somebody causing a lot of action, or somebody getting very active, see, which almost fits back against the psychiatrist's definition. His fear of action.

"Well, what's somebody liable to do? Uhh-uhh-uh!" Of course, your best answer to that was "Well, the best solution to that is for you to become OT, too." There's no reasoning with such a person; just give them … "If everybody's gonna become wolves, you better not remain a rabbit!" It's a very good sales campaign.

But it has very little to do with the facts of the case, because the level of responsibility rises and rises and rises, don't you see, along with it. They lose sight of this sort of thing.

Now, the idea of action, then, is all sullied up and messed up: whether or not things should go forward or not go forward, you see; whether or not time should advance or not advance; whether or not incidents should take place or not take place - just as a general principle, not "should some incidents take place and some incidents not take place?" Well, that's a sane consideration. But you get this insane attitude toward it which is simply "no incidents should take place" or "all kinds of incidents should take place."

And then a person eventually pulls out of that into a lower grade of "Well, it's all going on and it has nothing to do with me." And I'm afraid Homo Sapiens is walking into that particular category right now at a very, very fast rate of speed. "It's all going on and it has nothing to do with me. I can do nothing about it," and so forth. You see a declining society normally holds this. And a society which has a bit of zip left in it, a society which is still rising and so forth, well, everything has to do with everybody. You know, they'll say, "Ho, ho, ho," and they take a lot of responsibility for that sort of thing.

Well, you take early nineteenth-century America. I imagine somebody would have walked miles to convince Joe down at Dog Hollow that he was dead wrong to vote for President Fillmore. You know, just really work at it, you know? It had to do with him and it had to do with them. Well, the modern think "Well, what can I do about it?" don't you see? "It's life, can't do very much about it."

You get a hot, roaring campaign issue whereby a people really does feel challenged or attacked and so forth, they'll get up and start saying, "Well, it does have something to do with me." They have to be pushed pretty far back before they begin to say that. Something like that is occurring right at the present moment in the United States.

And a lot of people are just going to go along with the tide; a lot of people are starting to fight.

The end product of that, Lord knows what that will be. It might not be in 1964, but certainly you will see the end product of it by 1968. Driven too far, see? So even the fellow who says "It has nothing to do with me" at last has to admit that it has something to do with him.

I remember, I was trying to convince somebody that the atomic bomb had something to do with him. I think I've told you this joke before, but I finally moved it on down, I got on down to his wallet and his social security card. And all of a sudden, realized that that would be affected if a bomb went off in his vicinity, and he became very concerned about atomic fission, see? I just kept cutting the gradients doves, getting closer and closer to him, until he finally got associated with it.

But even killing his children didn't have anything to do with him. "Well, your children are liable to be killed off, don't you see?"

"Oh, I don't …" Nothing to do with him!

So, you can approach a person closely enough with action, and he'll retreat, retreat, retreat; and when he can't retreat any further, you get the cornered-rat effect, you know? He'll turn around and go the other way.

Politicians are always making this mistake; they always misestimate the moment. And they'll see this supine population that is taking everything that is shoveled out to it. It's being charged 110 percent of all of its income; it's being made to stand and bow every time a policeman goes by, you see? All this. And they see this totally docile population, and they say, "Well, we can do anything we please," you see? And they do the "anything you please." And all of a sudden they do one too many "anything's," you see, and all of a sudden they get the cornered-rat effect, see?

All of a sudden it does have something to do with the population, and then there's no controlling it at all, because these people are rather irresponsible, and their control of action is so foreign to them - they've forgotten how to control action, don't you see? - that their actions just go brow! It's like a barroom brawl. You really, in a barroom brawl, you never really can identify who started the fight or who's against you or who's for you, don't you see? Just everybody starts slugging everybody.

It's very interesting to be in the middle of a barroom brawl. I have been, in some of the less seemly places of the world, and emerged with a whole skin. But it's very interesting to see one blow up. Well, this is amidst a bunch of drunks, and they're all happy and cheerful, "Who'd care less" and "Have another drink, Bill," you see?

And all of a sudden one says, "There's two heads on a dime," or something.

And the other one says, "There ain't two heads on a dime."

And "Yes, there is two heads on a dime; I'll show you, you see?"

"Well, you can't show me," and all of a sudden, wham! See?

All these people that have been sitting there supine, and so forth - bottles are flying through the air. These two fellows start to fight, these two, these, these, these fellows fight those - you'd never know who's friends of whose, or anything of the sort.

You'd say the best thing to do in a case like that is to back up into a corner and barricade yourself with a table, but let me assure you that that is very unsafe tactics, because somebody else will have the same idea, and he'll fight with you for the table.

So action also gets the bad connotation, and a thoroughly bad connotation it can get, because it can produce pain! It can produce destructiveness, pain and so forth. So when somebody is overly concerned about being hurt, they're pretty nuts, you know; they think you only live once and they think they've got to preserve the body to the ultimate degree. They think pain is something that nobody can confront, and they certainly can't confront it because they got so many overts on it, something like that.

When people cannot confront pain of any kind, and so forth, you will find that they also are refusing to confront action. And when they cease to confront action they cease to confront incident and they won't advance a cycle of action, and their sense of time goes completely bad.

I didn't say that psychiatry and psychology and so forth had backed themselves - and medicine - had backed themselves into this exact position, because I didn't have to. I think you could understand that clearly. The only thing a doctor can ever tell you is "Be quiet," you know, "Take it easy." Don't you see? It's rather bad advice! He's given the patient a longer time of illness; whether the patient is in bed more weeks or not, illness is now going to move along longer for the patient, don't you see? What if he said "Well, you can lie there in bed if you want to, but let's get some things that interest you and let's get some of this and that, and so forth, and you better have some people come in to see you and so forth and so on. The guy would have an idea that time is passing very quickly, and this has a remarkable effect upon healing. See? It takes so long to heal, and if you've got a lot of time passed, then you'd heal quickly, wouldn't you? You get the various considerations, how they entangle here.

So there's these various upsets, then, on the subject of action, the avoidance of action, and then there is, of course, a pugnacity will set in where it's all got to be action, or it's got to be destructive action. For instance, Hitler should have had some processing. He had it all won up to the point where he had to have more action. We're not quite sure why he had to have more action, but of course he went into a faster level of action than he could confront or anybody else could confront, and that was destruction.

So when you get more action than you can confront, you normally get destruction. And this also gives the cycle of action a bad name, because people think that a cycle of action inevitably ends in decay and death. And it's at that point that we depart from the Vedic hymn of the Dawn Child. They assumed that it was all going to decay and die. Do you see how that doesn't necessarily represent a cycle of action at all - that it's all going to go on newly, newly, newly and then peel off and then die, don't you see?

But we're taught this on every hand. Every flower apparently is designed this way; buildings are designed this way, and so forth. And you have so many examples of a cycle of action ending in disaster and the completeness of disaster being the total end of the cycle of action, that it makes people quite unwilling to complete a cycle of action.

They say, "Well, if I completed a cycle …" I'll show .. give you a very direct application of this: "If I completed a cycle of action on the preclear why he'd be an old, decayed corpse." Do you see what he's cross-associated here? See?

So a cycle of action, philosophically, and in the physical universe, is very often looked on as something which goes from birth through growth to a momentary stability, through decay to death. And that is so built into the physical universe that it is a barrier to people completing a cycle of action.

And somebody is worried about this sort of thing when they never seem to be able to complete a cycle of action on a PC. Never flatten a process, never really go through the auditing cycle and so forth. They are up against something there which prevents their arrival; they mustn't arrive; they mustn't get to that final point. They're afraid to get to that final point, so they will go bzoodle!

So something could be wrong with their concept of the idea of a cycle and something could be wrong with their concept of the idea of action. But certainly, the cycle of action is not being completed with regard to what they are trying to do. And you, in supervising the case or in trying to handle this situation and so forth, can actually beat your brain to a fine feathered froth, trying desperately to figure out "How do I get this guy to complete this cycle of action?" You call in Joe and you say, "Now, look. On auditing this PC - auditing this PC - get your auditing question answered! Your auditing question answered! I mean, you got that now? Now, what have I just said to you?"

"Auditing question answered. Oh, yes, of course. I know that. Yes, yes. Uh-huh-uh." Of course he also is saying back there, "It has nothing to do with me," see? Oh, yes. So you see this session the next time and you see, "Well, Pete, how have you been today?" "Uh … the trees are pretty, aren't they?"

"Thank you very much."

You say, "Look, look, even on two-way comm, for God's sakes, get the PC to answer something that has some relation …"

"No, ha … Oh, of course. Yes, I know that. Yes, I know that."

But you see this cycle of action: cycle out maybe, action out maybe, destruction and death being the end of all cycles of action - we mustn't arrive. So the best way not to arrive is never follow a cycle of action. See? Always just follow a random action that has nothing to do with completing any cycle of action.

And when you run into that too much, those are the things which you will find wrong with the Auditor: something wrong with cycle, something wrong with action, and the other thing which I mentioned earlier, that the individual - confrontation of incident.

Well, for instance, you know, an easy-running PC can very often upset some auditors because they change so rapidly, and the auditor, he no more than gets grooved down into auditing whatever the command was, and the process goes and gets flat, and here's a new incident, see? You've got two conditions, then: either the tone arm action has been run out of a process and it is continued, see, because one can't confront the incident, see, of a change in the PC to this degree; or on the other hand, one stops running the process when there is still a lot of tone arm action going on, because "We know what'll happen if we complete the cycle of action: we'll kill the PC. Obviously, so we better not kill any PCs. Ron says not to kill PCs, so …"

Anyway, you see that very often you are trying, in trying to get auditing accomplished, and so forth, you very often are trying to get it accomplished against this thing called a cycle of action; and we mustn't have a cycle of action on the part of the person, and yet auditing depends on the cycle of action.

So it's all this rather long series of considerations which I have been giving you which complicate the auditing cycle. And it can be avoided by not getting the auditing question answered; it can be avoided by not acknowledging the PC, see? It can be avoided by, well, not asking any question at all - that's also a solution, you see? It can be avoided by never really getting the PC in session so that you start auditing the PC, don't you see? One could go to the extreme and decide that it's all over anyway, so that it doesn't matter what one does now. You see? A whole bunch of considerations can occur around it using these various elements of which I've been talking to you: considerations of cycle, considerations of action and considerations of the whole cycle of action, which is the fact that it's liable to end up in death and destruction. So, all of these things will compound and will show up in an auditing session.

Now, where you've got somebody with these points very astray and adrift, and who either has got to have too much motion from the PC, or has got to have too little motion for the PC, because his confrontation of the amount of incident, see, is off - when these things are awry, then you have trouble with this thing called the auditing cycle. And the auditing cycle is simply nothing but the broad auditing cycle of a session: we sit down and we start a session and you get the PC in session, and we run the session, and then we run it on through and we end the session. And we continue a series of sessions until we finally have the process that we're running flat, don't you see?

Or this PC has come to us to be audited for his lumbosis and we cure his lumbosis, and that's the end of the situation. See, that's the broad - the big one.

But that really isn't an auditing cycle, technically; that's a session cycle, or an intensive cycle, don't you see? That's the cycle of the case, and so forth. What we mean, very precisely, when we say auditing cycle, is simply your TR O to 4. That is very severely, precisely, an auditing cycle, in the finest, purest meaning of the word. It is simply the Pete-Bill, "Hello," "Okay," you know? I mean, he says, "Do birds fly?"

"No."

"Thank you." See?

And the auditing cycle which goes on the bigger perimeter of "Do birds fly?" "Uh … hm! You know, I used to watch flying birds when I was a boy. Tsh! Yeah, I used to have a lot of fun watching flying birds … a boy."

"Oh, yeah? All right, all right. Now, do birds fly?"

"Uh … yeah. Yeah, they sure do."

"Thank you."

See? See, that's really all there is to it. But when you get to throw in the number of cognitions a PC can get, the number of changes a PC can experience, the complexities of various processes right up to R6 - what you've got to do in order to do this - this auditing cycle is still very dominant. But it is so overwhelmed and surrounded by the tremendous complications of the auditor's action that if he hasn't got it down right he can't audit. Do you see that? He just going to be all thumbs!

What's missing is the auditing cycle. And if he hasn't gotten an auditing cycle in by the time he's studied up the line pretty fair, well, there's just something wrong with these points I've taken up with you today in this lecture. He's got some wild considerations with regard to this.

He can't confront incidents, or he's got to confront too much incident, or, you know, his concept of time is out, or his cycle is out, or his concept of the death and destruction of the situation is out; he's got the wrong idea of action, you see? It'll lie somewhere in that direction.

And if you then cleaned that up with the individual, you'd find all of a sudden that he found these other processes very easy.

He's always having trouble, let us say, with a complicated process: He's saying he has trouble with a complicated process, whereas he's not having trouble with a complicated process at all.

I've seen you use the most complicated processes anybody ever dreamed of, don't you see? And the only thing I've ever seen you have any trouble with is the cycle of action. See, that is the cornerstone on which all such actions take place. It'll be those various elements, and it'll be those various things.

Now, I haven't answered one question in this lecture - is, although cycle means various things in various departments and so forth, what does it mean in Scientology? And I haven't said what it meant in Scientology. And it just means "from the beginning to the conclusion of an intentional action"; that's what cycle means, in Scientology. As far as we're concerned, it's the beginning to the conclusion of an intended action. Intended, see?

Has to be a higher-toned definition than your other definitions. And you can consider it in these other departments, too, at the same time. You see, it's perfectly all right. But it has something to do with the tone of the person who is using the definition.

"A cycle of action is the moment when my mother looks at me to the moment she whips me." See? That's an other-determined definition, see? As we move the definition on up. it's from the beginning to the end of the intended action. That's a very loose, wide definition, but it could be that.

The only other thing I'd leave up in the air is how could possibly one go about straightening up these various things with somebody? Well, I'll give you a very complicated process, and so forth, that I would thoroughly recommend, to take care of this, and that's just itsa on these subjects. And you'll find out that, within the limits of all levels, would be the most embracive of these.

Okay?

Audience: Mm-hm.

Thank you very much.