Third night's lecture here on the — what we will call the first-line Professional Course.

Tonight we're going to cover the elements again but this time we're going to combine them to demonstrate, possibly, what would be sanity and what would be aberration and to give particular stress to exactly how you run Matched Terminals and how you run Matched Terminals. That will be in these next two hours here.

We can see rather clearly, as we look over the workability of techniques, that there were certain integrative factors which made a psychotherapy possible. Also, there were integrative factors which made life possible and it was possible to discover what is basically referred to as "the riddle of existence."

Well now, we have solved this riddle up to the point of this universe. Now, we know solving it outside this universe would be a very, very difficult thing since we don't have any data. And now, all due respect to the field of psychology, we don't want to follow in the tracks of former investigators and keep on drawing up theories without any data. So we'll leave that portion of life aside. If we don't have any data about it we probably wouldn't find out any more about it than psychology has ever found about this universe.

Because this universe had to be studied from the basis of what? It had to be studied from the basis of MEST. What's MEST? And how does it get mixed up with life? Now it, in other words, had to be hit from the level of everything we knew in the physical sciences. And until we had a good, solid subject called physics, until the boys in the laboratories had scared up an enormous amount of data concerning the identity of MEST, what it was basically — matter, energy, space — we couldn't solve that experience known as time or what life was doing in this universe.

So it took first things first. All due respect to Sigmund Freud, he had no more chance of solving the problem of life than he had of jumping off the top of the Empire State Building and landing unscathed. No chance whatsoever.

Neither could Plato nor Aristotle have done more than have built upon the foundation of what was known at that time about the MEST universe. Therefore, it's not any too great a compliment — it's rather indicative of some-thing or other — it's not even too great a compliment to me that this problem is solved.

As a matter of fact, I was one of the first nuclear physicists in the United

States. Now, people in the United States today, they refer to me as a science fiction writer and all that sort of thing. They said about nuclear physicists twenty years ago in the same tone, they said, "Huh. One of the Buck Rogers boys. Talking about atomic fission. Imagine! Talking about atom bombs! These guys are crazy!"

No, the world didn't have any room in it for nuclear physicists and so there wasn't anything to do in nuclear physics because nobody had written a three-billion-dollar check yet. And it took a lot of equipment to monkey around with nuclear physics but it didn't take any equipment to monkey around with the human mind, so having all that background in the MEST universe I went ahead and solved the human mind. Hasn't been much of a problem, really.

Because what did it consist of? The only thing you had to add to mathematics to solve it was the definition of a static. You had to define a static. Never been defined before. Today, people coming into the Professional Course who have a background in the physical sciences may very well say, "A static? Of course, we've always had a static." And then they go ahead and give the basic physics definition of a static which is "Something in a state of rest. Equilibrium of forces creates a static."

I almost said a dirty word there. There's no such thing. That is not a static. And that is the basic error that the boys have been making since way before Aristotle. Anything that was in a state of equilibrium was a static. That was a static force. No, no. You had to define zero and in mathematics they hadn't yet defined zero. Nowhere in the old mathematics texts will you find an accurate definition of zero.

They say, "Zero! Aw, it's nothing." Then they go on to something more important. And then if you look in quantum mechanics you'll find they keep dividing by zero and multiplying by zero and wondering why they don't have a mathematics.

One of the most interesting things they were working with in quantum mechanics was zero and they never knew it. So, we've done a double complementation; that is to say, we've come over here into the field of the mind and beingness and experience and all of a sudden found there were a couple of missing definitions: What's the definition of a static? That's one of them. And the other definition was: What's life trying to do in this universe? It's just as simple as that.

Nobody ever asked the question. There's a fellow at MIT they call "99 Percent Johnson." He's always standing up on his platform saying, "Well, if you'll ask the right question, it's 99 percent solved."

That's right. Any time you can ask of the preclear the right question his case is 99 percent solved at that instant. So that's 99 Percent Johnson and here we are again, we ask the right question: "What's life doing here?" And you look and you look and you try to figure and you try to figure and you integrate all these factors and you finally say, "Well, it must be surviving. It's enduring through span of time. That's survival. It's maintaining an existence; it's maintaining a state of beingness over a period of time. That's survival. Well, that's good."

Now, we start looking at it and we find out this characteristic doesn't hold in common with many other things because it's trying to do something else. It's trying to organize MEST.

Well, that's interesting. What's — why is it trying to organize MEST? Is it doing anything else besides these two things? I'm afraid it isn't. I can answer that with some confidence. I spent five years trying to find out some other answer than "survive." Because it was a terribly unsatisfactory answer. It was the sort of answer you blow your brains out over.

Just "Why are we here?"

"Well, we're surviving. Well, we're organizing MEST."

"Why? What reason?"

"Well, we're just organizing MEST, that's all."

"I know. But what goal?"

"No goal."

Hideous, isn't it? So I — that's the sort of thing that a guy blows his brains about. He just gets awfully discouraged after a while when he finds out he's been doing all this work to no goal.

Well, that was a terrible teaser. Well, how on earth and why and et cetera did we get out of this horrible circular logic?

"What's life trying to do?"

"It's organizing MEST and it's surviving so that it can organize MEST, evidently, and so it organizes MEST and . . ." No goal.

"Well, organized MEST. That's a goal."

Didn't sound very good. We had to know some more about it. So I kept on working and finally got the definition of a static. What is a static?

It was very astonishing, by the way, to get the definition of a static and all of a sudden just sit there looking at what a static is and how a static is defined and find out that the boys in the physical sciences have been playing around with these statics continually, you see. Just playing around with them continually and never opening their face on what a definition was. Fantastic!

They kept dealing, then, evidently they dealt at all times with motion and only with motion. At all times. They must have been dealing with motion even when they were dealing with what they considered a static. So nobody had ever dealt with zero before.

Well, that was quite an adventure dealing with zero. And we find out the one thing, as I could tell you tonight, that life mustn't be is life. It's one of these crazy riddles that goes that way. How do you get to want things? Well, you don't want them and you'll get them. I mean, that sort of thing.

They're all kinds of backward answers — 180-degree-reverse-vector universe. All is exactly as it seems as long as you throw a 180-degree vector on it. Then everything is really as it seems.

The light seems to come down from the sun. Well, you can just take that datum and know that the light isn't coming down from the sun. That's kind of obvious. Because everything else is backwards, that one would be back-wards too. Therefore, do you need light with which to see? And the answer to that is no. No, you make your own light with which to see.

But the light comes from the sun. Now, that's — you think so. Well, who's you? Well, that is your body. Your body's completely convinced.

Now, the way you get anything started out of nothing in order to make something is you convince nothing that something can exist and that it mustn't be nothing. And you're all set.

If you want to have a preclear go practically flat spin on you, just say, "All right. Now, let's sit there and let's put an area of absolutely nothing in front of you. Now, let's look at it for a while. And don't let it become anything. Just be absolutely nothing. Just sit there and hold that. Absolutely nothing."

All of a sudden he — hmmmm — he doesn't like that.

"Well," you say, "you don't like that? You don't like that? Now, you mean, engrams keep flying through and people's faces keep popping in and all that sort of thing?"

"No, no, no, no, no."

"All right. I tell you what. I tell you what. Be nothing."

Nyyoww! He can't be nothing because nothing is a hidden influence. Oh, it'd be terrible to be nothing. There might be something in the nothing. And you can run this experiment, by the way, on a preclear. And you'll get more or less those actions and those reactions. The thing he mustn't be is nothing. And the thing he can never become is a thing. So it's one of those crazy riddles that all starts in from nothing and it goes to nothing, and we — all we have left in the middle of all this thing is your confidence and belief, that's all. And that's so easy to say we should be able merely to say that and every-body would be Clear and happy, and all that sort of thing.

Well, they could, except the nothing is now meshed down in a something called energy and the energy runs 180 degrees different than it should run. Energy obviously runs one way but it runs the other way.

Now, we'll go into that just a little bit more — the reverse angle. Philadelphia tapes have quite a bit on that. But let's be very interested right now in why one is incapable of suddenly reestablishing his belief in beingness.

And the first place is data. He is data happy. Nearly everybody has gotten data happy. Well, what is data? Very simple. It's the something that's in the nothing. And everybody knows you got to have data.

Well, if a fellow has to have this much data, why, he is going to be in dreadful circumstances in a very short while.

Why? Because that's all the something consists of is a flock of data. And if you accumulate enough data and you make a pile of data that's big enough and tall enough and high enough, you're going to be lost from here on, because all the data there is to know about really is MEST.

So we get an agreement. We get an agreement that there is data and the fellow agrees there is data. Then he agrees this and he agrees that.

In order to keep from being nothing he has to agree with — that some-thing exists so that he can be something. Now, in order to be something one merely has to approximate the movements, motions, postures and forms of this something and one is something. But one, of course, never really becomes that something. One is only agreeing that he is that something and is approximating it.

In other words, there is no reason why you couldn't be this bottle here. Be no reason under the sun why you couldn't be this bottle and this chlorophyll.

All right, just be there. Take a look at the room and so forth and be a bottle of chlorophyll. You wouldn't like that. But there's just as much sense in that and there's just as much knowingness as a bottle of chlorophyll as sitting there in your body. With this difference: your body can communicate and this chlorophyll can only absorb smells. You see? It's not a good communications medium.

So you tend to go to the best communications medium because you know that to be something you have to communicate and keep convinced that you are something.

Now, you get this preclear to run this — well, just have him run two completely empty holes. Just have him put a hole here and a hole here. All sorts of things will start to go through those holes.

You tell him, "No, no, no. Don't let that go through. Just hold those two things there."

And if you make this experiment yourself you will find something quite remarkable. You will find that you would rather be anything than nothing. And by anything I mean dead or in pain or in agony or in a state of amnesia. You'll have preclears who will want engrams run just so they can experience some pain. It's very convincing stuff, pain. It says, "I'm alive!"

When a fellow starts going down Tone Scale he gets down to the point where he's almost as insentient as MEST, he'll specialize in hurting himself just to say, "I'm alive. I'm alive. I'm alive."

Pain is much preferable to nothing. Why does a person who is in slavery, wearing chains under the lash of an overseer, continue to live? Why does he continue to live? It's the most onerous, horrible existence — he's being starved, he's diseased, he has no hope of the future, nothing. That's preferable to being nothing.

So you see how desperate a person is about being nothing. If you want to get something very interesting out of a preclear, just run back to all the people who were — used to use just that phrase: "You're nothing. You're nobody. You're not anybody. You won't ever be anybody."

Well, that's horrible because it's the truth. So a fellow says, "No, no, no, no, no, no. That one truth we don't want anything to do with! We'll take any pretense, any lie, anything. We will take up the practice of hypnotism, we will become Bali dancers, we will do anything. We will go and high-dive off 175-foot towers into an ink pot rather than be nothing."

So, a fellow by the name of Mark Antony once said something to the effect that Caesar was ambitious. This was bad, huh? Well, compulsive ambition would be, really, your first level on the track of aberration, if you wanted to consider it an aberration. But if you did, then you'd have to consider all life an aberration. Because has — a person has an ambition to be something. And he tries to finish the cycle continually by saying, "I have now attained my goal and I am something."

Well, of course, he might as well cut his throat when he does that because the second he does that he is nothing. Because his total substance of beingness is trying to be.

Well, as long as he realizes that he can go on very happily trying to be — and trying to be itself is a happy state of affairs and real being isn't. If you ever want to see anybody miserable, see a successful man. He is now. He can sit at his desk and sign letters for the next forty years.

All you'd have to do is go in and talk to him about how long he'd sit at that desk and sign those letters, and after you left he'd reach in and pick out the .45 and blow his brains out.

The thought, then, of being a static enters in again because a static, the absolute static would have a shadow of something just going through the same motion — ptock!

Now, a person can't tell if there's any motion taking place or not. You can actually move back and forth with the same set of motions. If you went through day by day exactly the same routine and took the same steps and so forth, in a very short space of time you couldn't tell which day it was. You've been doing that every day for so long that all the days would suddenly run together. That is a static. In other words, there can be a monotony of motion which becomes a static. All right.

Being something, then, which is a routine thing — being something means a no-change. And when you get a no-change you get a new static. So the person goes from being nothing to being nothing. And when you said he went from being to being, you might as well say he went from being nothing to being nothing. Because all the being there is is nothing.

And the only time he ever had any fun was when he was trying to be something. He knew he wasn't yet but he was going to be.

Happiness is the overcoming of obstacles toward a known goal.

All right. Every successful man discovers this, by the way. He discovers it with horror — that the day he becomes something he knows that those years of struggle which he cursed were themselves the adventure. The struggle was the adventure. The becoming something was not the adventure.

Most of the preclears who come to you will arrive in the state of mind that they've become something. And they don't want to be in that state of affairs. What they want is change.

There is such a thing as desirable change and undesirable change. An undesirable change is that which nullifies and drives one toward nothing and a desirable change is that which increases motion. That's a desirable change.

So, what your preclear desires is change. Now, if you've got any pen there that writes fire you might write these words down in fire because they're very important: You are trying to effect a change in the communication level of your preclear. You're trying to effect a change in the communication level of your preclear. Because that's the only way he ever finds out he's being something — is with communication.

So, then basically — not very runnable, except in one technique — you're trying to change beingness. And when you say "auditing," you can run right in with it "change beingness."

Now, how do you change beingness? The only way you can really change beingness is to change the level of communication of the individual. Because his beingness — awareness, his awareness of being or his awareness of trying to be depends utterly upon his ability to communicate.

And unless he can change his communication level, he does not think any change has occurred. You want to know why a preclear who has — you've fixed up his leg, and you've got him so that his hair doesn't part athwart-ships, and you've got a lot of other things all patched up about this fellow, and he'll claim that he has not been improved.

Then one thing that you didn't do was change his level of communication. You left his levels of communication just as they were. Which tells him, then, that his level of beingness is not changed. His basic goal and desire is to change his level of beingness. The only way he can tell is by changing his communication potential.

What are you trying to do when you're auditing? Change beingness. That's it. I really shouldn't have to say any more.

And I wouldn't have to say any more except for this thing: Your preclear is in the MEST universe. And so we have to know something about the MEST universe so as to know what is the category of beingnesses.

Now, we know what we're trying to do. We're trying to change beingness. We know that we're trying to do that — change beingness. And we know we're going to change beingness by changing the communication level of the individual. And we know that technique is valid which best changes the communication level of the individual. That's a test of a technique, by the way: Does the technique change the communication level of the individual?

Therefore, admiring the imperfections of mock-ups is a whale of a technique. Why? It changes his perception of them.

All right. The next thing you have to know, then, is potentialities of beingness for this universe.

You know the most you can know about auditing with just those few sentences which I've just told you. And the only other thing that you could know about those sentences are that they are the sentences. Do you see? I mean, that would be the difference. You could guess that they might be or you could experience around and think it over a lot and all of a sudden know that those are the levels.

Now, if you know that, you'll never afterwards get confused about what you're trying to do to a preclear yourself or what man's trying to do out here across the face of this earth. He's trying to be something. He'd rather be a monkey in a tree than nothing. He'll be anything rather than nothing.

What's he trying to be? Well, he's trying to tell you how much he is by telling you, "Oh, how I have suffered." Of course, it's convincing. He must have been something if he suffered.

What's this gradient scale of beingness? Well, you're just looking at the Tone Scale. He'll tell you first, "Boy, I was the happiest cannibal, or the happiest something, and …" — hasn't made any impression on you.

So he says — he didn't get any attention, you see; no two terminals, you see — happiest something . . . "Well, I was a very conservative fellow once. I uh . . ." No impression on you.

"Yeah, I used to be real antagonistic." No impression.

You can be all those things, too. You're not interested. That's no new experience. There aren't any new experiences upward, he thinks. He starts going downwards because the universe starts dwindling down.

So the next one he tells you is, "Well, I used to get so mad," and maybe you'll listen to him for a few minutes and then you get bored with that.

And he said, "Well, I was scared once." And then he tells you about losing his father. This is really tough. You can't get that low so he's got you.

So why do you hear all of this? Why do you hear all of this "It's so bad over thisaway and thataway," and so forth?

Convincing, that's why. People don't listen to good things. You see, if people listened to good things you'd get something like a newspaper. I think the magazine Scientology, published now in Philadelphia, is probably the only newspaper in the world that has an editorial policy of good news. That almost guarantees its eventual failure.

Now, you — you just look at these newspapers and if you'll read the head-line and then read the story you will see how bad they're trying to make it over that way. The story almost never is as tough as the headline. And if they're short on news that day, oh brother, those headlines, are they beautiful, but the stories just don't match them. There's some slight ingredient in the story that matches up to the fact that a thirteen-year-old girl was slugged, raped and thrown in the river. You'll read that sort of in the head-line. You'll sort of read that out of the headline and then you'll find out that she was on her way to school and she lost her ruler.

You know, it's so bad over thataway, you see. That's what that's got to say. Because that attracts attention. So that anything that attracts attention will do that.

Now, if you gave somebody the modus operandi for attracting attention and he really could attract attention without going into bad news he would very happily leave the bad news alone from there on out. See? Only it's got to be spectacular enough to get attention.

Well, when you're dealing with MEST, MEST is very hard to work and is very scarce. Therefore, it's hard to go upscale because you can't get that glittery. But you can get that bad. People would dress more brightly and talk more brightly, and so on, if it weren't so scarce to do so.

You go down, for instance the — oh, I think enough silk to put in a tie here in Great Britain costs about (I mean, real silk, and so forth, about enough to put in a tie) costs four or five pounds. Something fabulous like that. That's nonsense. Nobody paid those worms that much.

All right. Here we have, then, a decline downscale toward a desire for attention. A person has beingness in order to get attention. That's right. You can't be nothing, and so on. Now there's a rule that goes in there. That thing . . . This is a silly rule, but you'll find yourself applying this rule. This rule is so idiotic it would, of course, have been overlooked: That thing which can't be observed doesn't get attention. I mean, isn't that a silly rule? You know that's an awfully important natural law? Terribly important? That thing which can't be observed doesn't get attention.

It's like saying the way you spell cat: c-a-t. Naturally. But let's look down the category. You'll find anytime the individual can't look up from what he's doing to find out if he's getting attention or not, then what he is doing in that state becomes aberrative. In other words, work which requires attention on the point of a drill press is very bad work to have because you never know whether anybody is looking at you or not.

And the auditor in running this will have to run a drill press out of his preclear. Very solid things, drill presses, too.

All right. Now, that condition where a person can't notice the attention he's getting then becomes an aberrative condition. Material, then, accomplished at that level never runs out because there's no admiration on it, so it tends to persist.

Well, naturally, a person who is hiding never gets any attention. Now, maybe if the fellow spent one one-thousandth of one percent of his time hiding — well, when he was hiding he never got any attention, so it persists so eventually he hides. Isn't that an insidious simplicity? What's aberrative to the preclear? It's those things which really got no attention. Now, that sounds odd to you. You'd think it was those things that got attention was aberrative.

But I told you that something was better than nothing, no matter what the something was. So Papa damning, swearing, scolding, beating one with a baseball club — very preferable to being around the corner all by yourself with nobody looking at you.

That's right. And you start running your preclear and you'll find out — if you E-Meter him — you'll find out that there's something very aberrative. Oh, it's terrible. He gets awfully upset every time he sees a small black hole or something of the sort. He gets upset. Why? Well, he was in one once for quite a while. And we start finding back — let's clear him on one lifetime, you see. And we go back and we find out one time he had a job shoveling coal and he was in a coal pit and he shoveled coal and he never saw anybody all day long. And nobody ever saw him. And he had this job for two months and he's been crazy ever since. Of course, this gives him kind of a fixation on the thing. He's shoveling coal in a coal pit. He's still there, shoveling that coal. Never had a chance to run it out. It persists.

Sounds kind of weird, doesn't it? Well, that's man all by himself up against the MEST universe. And when you get man all by himself up against the MEST universe without any way to get a cross flow with other beings you get trouble. Because the MEST universe doesn't give you a bit of attention.

If you think that fireplace is paying you any attention, now, you're pretty bad off. Your Negro gets around this; he does a mock-up. He's fabulous, I mean, the Negro people are very, very interesting. And does mock-ups in terms of MEST. Every piece of MEST around him has a complete personality and it mentions things to him and it looks at him and so on. That's a way around it. You could stay awful sane if you got that. He is. He's pretty sane.

He talks about things. And so the gradient scale, the saner people will personify things — happier people, rather, will personify things.

Next level up, people not so happy, they talk all the time about people. And the people up above that level, that've — boy, have they been alone. Have they been alone! They talk about abstracts.

You start cutting back on the track and mapping this thing out and you'll find out that your preclear roughly falls somewhere on that gradient scale. He's a pretty happy guy if he goes around and he says, "You know, my car, it's got the meanest disposition of any car you ever saw." His car is a mock-up. He knows it's a mock-up. He doesn't believe the car has a disposition. Then he says, "You know, I don't dare say a single flattering word about the car within its hearing because it immediately breaks down." That's right. You — in other words, personification of things is a way of mocking up MEST so that you can live with it.

"That old mountain over there, he just sits there all the time." It's a mountain. It gives people attention. Woodsmen, very often — your better woodsmen will walk through the woods, and so on, and it's not "Woodsman spare that tree" or something of the sort. But you take a woodsman who's really interested in the woods and who's quite alert, and so forth, why, he'll tell you the moods and attitudes of various kinds of trees. And what they think about, and so forth. They give him attention. In other words, he can extract attention out of anything. He can sort of mock it up so that he gets attention from it.

But unless he could do very good mock-ups, the individual doesn't live that could be out in the middle of space, far removed from stars or anything of the sort, all by himself, and even vaguely feel anything was giving him attention.

And sure enough, if you really want to map your track you look over a little space opera and you'll find out a fellow has a horror of being out in space all by himself. That's horrible. No attention there, you see?

Therefore, when attention is not recorded or unnoticed or absent we get an aberrative period. And if the person happens to be doing any heavy effort during that period the heavy effort locks up in that area. And that's real bad.

And you'll find, then, that one of your fastest methods of bailing out a workman or bailing out a man who works hard in any way whatsoever is by occupational therapy.

Now, how do you do this occupational therapy? We've got a brand-new occupational therapy. You just take his tools, mock them up as matched terminals and skip it. Isn't that interesting? Simple. Simple therapy.

He'll tell you all of a sudden, "You know, I have the funniest feeling — the whole front of my face feels like steel."

And you say, "That's very interesting. Go on. Mock them up there," and so on.

He said, "There's a sort of a drill running in my throat. You know, I do have a bad cough. Ahem-hem."

Sure. He's been looking at a type of machinery or he's been working with a machine without any further attention along any line. His attention riveted on the machine and he's gotten into a one-way flow and he's got a no-terminal proposition. You see, he doesn't even consider himself a terminal on the thing and he isn't thinking in terms of attention, so all this terminal stuff goes on beneath his notice. And he is — he's getting a tremendous effort down toward a machine or something like that or he's getting a big effort up above his head or back toward him again.

As a consequence, you get occupational therapy for people and you'll find out that that's highly beneficial. Well, how do you work a preclear, then? Well, you just look for these areas of no attention. You'll find promptly where he's bogged because he will be bogged there. But he'll be bogged lots of other places, too. I'm just telling you what's the worst about it.

Now let's look at the rest of it. What is this condition, then? Something better than nothing. But a person doesn't dare be everything. Whoa. Why not? Why can't he be things selectively? Well, you see, it's all scarce.

It's like this. The whole universe is scarce. You see, there's only 8 billion 685 thousand tons per mile of earth and if a few boys got about it you could only turn one car off an assembly line every second. All you'd have to do is just make the assembly lines — you'd have to make fifteen more assembly lines than exist at the Ford plant at Dearborn to make one come off a minute. There's that many workmen out of work in the vicinity of the plant. I — we got to keep it scarce, for some cockeyed reason.

The steel pits and everything else — there isn't any scarcity of anything but we all know it's scarce. Space is scarce, too. I hate to have to tell you that but it's really scarce. It's only two light-years from here to the next star or something like that. It's awfully scarce stuff, space. So you want to be awfully careful about space; you want to utilize it carefully because there's only .. . It's pure idiocy, see?

This is the MEST universe. It's scarce. And if you started to get the number of cubic miles of space that sit between here and ,the nearest satellite, the Moon, and if you just took the orbit of the Moon around the Earth and got that sphere of space, you would find more space than can be utilized practically by anybody in this solar system, any God's quantity of people. Except it hasn't got any air in it.

Well, that's all right. It's still space. And it isn't space with air in it that's scarce; it's space that's scarce. Boy, how anybody can figure space is scarce in this universe is just pure — this is just pure genius the way they've worked this out. I mean, you'd have to just sit — get down and pound your skull hour on end with a hammer to finally come up with an idea as brilliant as that: space is scarce. But that is typically the MEST universe.

They make space scarce by telling you how bad space is. But the only way that you can bail out of anything and be anything is to get some space. That's a heck of a note, isn't it? That is really remarkable, isn't it?

The only way you can be anything else than what you are — the only way you can be what you are or try to be what you are is to assume it has some space. So if there isn't any space you can't be anything so the whole universe has a tendency, then, to force you back to nothing if space is scarce.

But you know how scarce space is. Go and try to rent a room around here someplace. From Cape Horn right up here to London there is enough empty space to feed and house man over and over and over and over but it's all scarce. Pure idiocy. That's that 180-degree vector.

The fact that — the fact that something looks like it's going one way in this universe is the best guarantee that it must be going the other way. It's just that crossed. You learn this in physics and you get used to it, so you allow for it.

Then somebody comes along on observational — purely observational and they think that something else exists. But if you've already agreed with it that it all runs in reverse in physics then you'll start running your life in reverse and oh, boy!

MEST and life don't mix worth a nickel. Not worth a nickel. Witness the dwindling spiral. Witness that a cycle of action is always down. You say, "Well, a cycle of action should always go up. The fellow's born, he doesn't have any money and at the age of forty he has a lot of money." Is that up? Mm-mm. Not so.

All right. Now, we'll take this reverse vector and the fact that there's all kinds of space is the best guarantee that a fellow would wind up feeling there was no space. That there's lots of energy would make him wind up eventually feeling there wasn't much energy. Why?

Because he's trying to be something, he's trying to make something valuable. And if he keeps on trying hard enough to make something valuable he will eventually wind up making it scarce.

He's trying to get attention, so therefore, he can only get attention for that which is valuable. If he can only get attention for that which is valuable he has to demonstrate that they can't look other places and get that attention — get that same commodity. They've got to give attention to this space. This is the trick every one of us plays.

All right. Now, let's see how that would work out. We'd have to make, then, valuable items scarce in order to get attention for them. And so, all life seems to be in a conspiracy against life to take itself down the Tone Scale.

Any thinker in any age, any one of the great teachers has recognized this very clearly: That man's only smallest chance of bailing himself out of the — what he was in — the only chance he had of bailing himself out had to do with man respecting man and letting people get up off their knees. And the six great teachers have each — has each one of them tried to make this point clear to man.

Then a bunch of mad hatters rush in and they get down — you see, there can be one level at 40.0 where you really do get the universal solvent: admiration, affinity. And for every point on the upper scale there is an "echo" mockery point on the lower scale.

For instance, true friendship could only exist from about, oh, maybe 2.8 up. And yet your friends at that level never say, "I am your friend." That's left for the fellows around 1.1.

You know, I always jump and kind of quiver when somebody walks up to me and says to me, "I am your friend, Ron."

I say, "Well, ahem, we won't get our throats cut today, at least!"

Now, that's a fact. People who are my friends just don't ever happen to mention it. So that's very interesting.

Now that's funny, then. People come along and they say, "love." What are they talking about? There is a wonderful word that's been a football for thou-sands of years. What is this stuff called love?

Everybody knows it's valuable. Everybody knows that men and women are in love with each other. Oh, yeah? I know they have a compulsive drive toward each other that's very emotionally upsetting but I wonder if they have any acquaintance with love? Well, maybe every once in a while they do. And when they do, do you see a tremendous, successful marriage, and do you see this other compulsive things. You don't see anything successful at all, you just see ruin.

And you as an auditor are going to be confronted with this time after time after time after time because you're going to say, "Well, that's odd. This fellow was in love with this girl, and then this happened, and . . ." Get that first word that he used: "I was in love." Right at that moment take your choice. It's down here below 2.0 on the Tone Scale or it was way up. And if it was way up he wouldn't be sitting there talking to you. You get that? With what clarity you should get that.

He wouldn't be there if it was up, so what did he — what's he talking to you about? He's talking to you about something which exists below 2.0 on the Tone Scale. Just take it from there. Because there's always something below 2.0 on the Tone Scale which is a mockery and a mimicry and a pretended agreement with something actual, high on the Tone Scale.

For instance, there — fear is a sort of a reversed enthusiasm. You can watch somebody exhibiting enthusiasm and he's coming out thataway, you see? Well, a person with — doing fear is really doing some sort of a level like that and you can very easily get a person who is continually in fear mixed up with a person who is enthusiastic. You are dealing with somebody who's about 1.0 on the Tone Scale and you think you're dealing with a person who has a tremendous amount of enthusiasm.

Only all this person's trying to do that has all this enthusiasm, he's just trying to hold everything off of him. With what? By being afraid of it, see? Push out that outflow, push out that outflow, and that will hold them all off. And you'll — this person very often will mistake this for enthusiasm.

And it's merely this: It's if he can put it out fast enough and hard enough and acceptably enough he drives them off hard enough. So sometimes he's more scared than others. Okay.

Now what's, then — what then is this thing called love? Well, it'd be very interesting if I would just answer this for you sweepingly, generally and settle the problem for all time and nobody would ever have to worry about it again, and so forth, so I will.

Love is a compound emotion. It isn't a single emotion, which is the first thing that renders it wide-open to misinterpretation. You can make this test, if you will. If you want the preclear to turn on the emotion called love, get him to turn on sympathy and admiration in sequence. Get him to turn on sympathy for something, then admiration for something, then sympathy for something, then admiration for something. And if he gets that going, all of a sudden the sympathy and admiration will merge as an emotion and you'll get what's known as love.

And he will feel that and he'll say, "My God, I haven't felt that since I was fifteen." That's real love.

All right. It's just a compound of these two things. It's an interesting test you could make on that, by the way. Of course, most people are so scared of this commodity that you probably wouldn't be able to get them to admit it if they did feel it. If you get somebody, when you got him up Tone Scale a little bit, and try that test.

And what people misinterpret as love below 2.0 on the Tone Scale is a very low-toned agreement with. It's actually a sort of a pity, feel sorry for, sympathize with. In other words, it's just sympathy. It is the sympathy element of love. And so you get it way down at the bottom of the scale.

And you feel that all by itself; it's quite powerful. It doesn't have the other ingredient in it: admiration. And as a net result the thing is going to go haywire because anybody is going to get tired of being below 2.0 on the Tone Scale just so that he can feel sympathy. So this thing's going to blow up. Why? It just didn't have any of the upper end.

So what is this thing called affinity? We talk about ARC and we're always talking about affinity. What's affinity? Affinity is co-beingness — co-beingness. And co-beingness is only possible in the presence of admiration and sympathy. Admiration and sympathy. Where they exist in unbounded quantities you can have co-beingness. And when you've done that you have described the force of life or the pool of nirvana, or anything else you want to call it, for this universe. It would be co-beingness.

Now it has to fall away from perfect co-beingness in order to pick up individual characteristics. The universal solvent is this affinity. It's wrong, technically, to call it love because love, even in the dictionary, means a lot of things. But affinity is the — a word used by ancient magicians. It's an old word and it isn't much in this society. So it's perfectly all right to use it and give it this definition and say affinity is co-beingness and it is composed emotionally, its factors are admiration and sympathy. And when these things are combined, you, of course, have co-beingness.

And where's it lie? Well, it could lie all over the Tone Scale, actually, in a gradient scale. But the lower you go on the Tone Scale, the more identified it is as an individual lump of something, the more isolated it is. Why? The less "co-" it is. The lower it is on the scale, the less co-beingness is possible.

So how do you get a preclear out of his body and able to be a lorry and able to be a soapbox and able to be anything he wants to be? Well, boy, he'd better have affinity in unbounded quantities. That also tells you that space — there is a clue to what space is right there in what affinity is. It's beingness.

A man cannot be alive without affinity. People way low on the scale are dead before they're dead when they start running out of affinity. When they have no love or affection for themselves or anything else on the dynamics they're dead. That isn't as bad off as being nothing, but it's dead.

All right. Let's look at that, then, and find out that affinity has much in common with space. And that an enormous amount of separate space would be necessary to shift around in if you wanted to get away from everything and have affinity with nothing.

But if affinity was co-beingness you wouldn't need much space. You really wouldn't if you had affinity. You wouldn't have to be able to make very much space. It wouldn't be very important.

So we've got these two things in contradistinction. We don't have affinity creating a boundless quantity of space, but we have no-affinity with a tremendous insistence on lots of space.

And when a person says, "I don't like," he means, "I want to put space between me and it." And he isn't going to belong to any clubs, either. He isn't going to belong to any groups, he isn't going to get along in life and you'll find out after he's been inhabiting a body for a little while his left ear is not on speaking terms with his right molar. Just isn't on speaking terms anymore. Now, he can't be those two things simultaneously.

Well, this tells you something else then. This tells you we're right into communications. What's communications? Communication will be the ability to translate sympathy or some component of sympathy from one terminal to another terminal. That would be communication. And the most perfect communication would be communication. That would be the most perfect communication, you see. You'd be in the same space as the other person thinking the same thought and that's as perfect as communication can get.

And the most perfect affinity you could possibly be with anybody was to be the body. Be them. That would be perfect affinity, you see? But you'd really have to have perfect affinity in order to have perfect communication, and the .. .

All right. And then we've got reality. What's perfect reality? We'd have perfect reality as agreement just like we've said all along, because the most perfect agreement would be to be in the same space with, thinking the same thought as, and feeling the same emotion as somebody else. And then you and somebody else would be actually, basically, the same person.

But is there a position on the Tone Scale where you and somebody else could be the same person and then simply on determinism be different people? You know, be the same person, then be other people? And then be the same person and then be two people? In other words, sliding in and out of this space and that space and so forth? Could you do this?

Yup. Way up. Way up on the scale. That's the way you do it. That's why your old witch saying, "Heh-heh," over the soup pot with her hexing doll never hexed anybody. She'd never be anybody. So how can she affect them?

Well, there's the thing called the hidden influence. If she's ugly and horrible and mean enough and has a terrible enough reputation in the neighborhood and she goes around and tells somebody that will tell somebody else that she has hexed somebody, they may oblige her by getting sick. But it certainly isn't by a very hidden communication line.

It's, "Aggie, I hexed Joe the other day. Will you tell Joe?"

"Joe, Aggie hexed you." Hidden line.

And yet, she depends upon Joe's fear of a hidden communication to be affected by it. So the most thing hidden about a hidden communication is that it's not hidden. So way up on the Tone Scale there is no such thing as a hidden communication or a hidden influence. You have co-beingness, co-communication, co-agreement, winding up in a reality with a tremendous flexibility of beingness and determinism, tremendous loose flexibility. A person is as happy as he can be his entire environment! You know that.

The second he starts drawing back from pieces of the environment saying, "I'm not going to be that, I'm not going to be that," you've got the stimulus-response mechanism which, to know more about, you should study Book One.

What is the restimulator in the vicinity? He's getting these hidden influences all around his environment so he is not being this and he's not being that and first thing you know he's sitting back over in the corner and he's not even being himself, he's being a body. So what is he? He's a lost dog. What's he backing away from? What's he making space because of?

Well, he's making space because there's such a thing as a hidden influence.

So what causes ARC to fall apart into its component parts as you come down Tone Scale so that you have to have as you get way down Tone Scale, logic, MEST communication lines, symbolism in terms of words and all this sort of thing? What causes this to fall apart?

It is the belief entered into the top of the Tone Scale that a hidden influence can exist which nobody can define or explain. And the most hidden thing there is about it is the fact that it isn't hidden.

And again, we get the fear to be zero, because that would mean one wouldn't be anything anymore and he is part of something already. He is part of a sort of a divine allness. And he might be only four guys in one pool of allness, you understand, there might be four guys in another pool of allness, but it's — still he has an ability to be.

So that ability to be dwindles, falls away and he begins to set more and more space between himself and others because he knows there's such things as hidden influences. Eventually he gets to a point where he won't even string a communication line; he'll send a letter. And he gets down to that level. No communication, cut off, and so forth.

What's his aberration when he gets to that level? It's the aberration you're going to run out of every V you're going to run into. You're going to run it out with Matched Terminals and that aberration is "keep them apart." Easily stated, isn't it?

That's what you run. He just runs two terminals and depending on keeping them apart. And you'll find every V, VI and VII has dramatized this. What happens? The harder he crowds in against something to fight it and drive it off, the closer it is to him, because there isn't any space there.

And the harder he fights something the more it is and the harder he tries to hold things apart, the tighter they get! So he moves into areas which he cannot hold apart from other areas. And he will dramatize, then, from certainty to fighting the hidden influence to being the hidden influence to being very honest and logical and truthful, but boy, is he lost. And he's still got to hold them apart, hold them apart, hold them apart.

And you'll find out the major calamities of his existence have occurred and his entire worry will be centered around holding them apart. And yet at the same time, logically, he is apparently on an analytical level trying to get together organization.

I'll give you a definition of organization right here just in passing: An organization is the attempt to establish terminals and flows so as to bring about an orderly flow of energy or matter. it!