The new data which is coming out in these lectures is the resolution of the life-continuum phenomenon. How do you resolve it and what is it? This is new data and it is very workable.

If you are ever going to produce very many miracles, you are going to have to resolve the life continuum, because these people who are in terrible condition — even little children — have gratuitously and pleasantly taken upon themselves somebody else’s existence and have sought thus to resolve a failure on the part of somebody else. And a failure, of course, is simply a loss of one sort or another, whether by departure or loss of potential of some individual.

You take some little child and find them sick of something or other, and when you try to do something for them what do you find is the source of it? You find that they got sympathetic toward Gracie Ann. Gracie Ann was very ill and they were told a terrible sob story about Gracie Ann; maybe Gracie Ann was very sick and got in very bad condition. So the child went into sympathy and has stayed in bed, sick, for a year.

It sounds odd that anyone would do this. You have to work a few cases and maybe look at your own case a couple of times to find this. You will find that the incidents which do not easily give up are those incidents which are occasioned by this life-continuum phenomenon.

Valence shifting is actually no more and no less than this sort of a proposition. But valence shifting is not just into somebody else’s valence and then going on from there. A person can be in a multiple or complex valence situation. They can be holding on to many valences or they can be in no valence or they can be in a synthetic valence.

In the past you have been trying to shift people into their own valence by just telling them to shift into their own valence. The funny part of it is, they will, and then they can run the thing out. But if you shifted the preclear into his own valence and then you didn’t run it all the way out, he was in for trouble. So we will stop worrying about what the preclear is doing with regard to valence and start worrying about what the preclear is doing with regard to life continuum.

If you run into some situation which is revealed to you by Effort Processing whereby the individual seems to be in some kind of a death, regardless of when or where or how, he is probably doing a life continuum for himself. Or if he is in a severe operation where he thinks he died, he will then do a life continuum for himself. But what is “himself”? It is a person being operated on. You can see how this would work.

So let’s use valence only as an estimate of the case. Stop working with it as a valence and start working with it in terms of life continuum.

If an individual is out of valence — if he is seeing himself, viewing himself, when he is returned to an incident, in other words — he is doing a life continuum for somebody. And very often when he is solidly inside himself, he may very well be doing a life continuum for himself. If everything is foggy and occluded and upset and so forth and yet he is still in his own valence, he is probably continuing his own life from some point which is in restimulation.

Theoretically, a person starts out in life with a free, clear control center. It starts getting aberrated relatively soon.

There is material on record which you don’t have to bring up to your preclears or really even mention in public, merely because if you want to prove it you have to throw somebody down on the couch, and that is too much work. They don’t believe it. Just don’t incite people’s incredulity by throwing a lot of odds and ends of strange phenomena at them. You can throw some very interesting phenomena at them without doing that. Just show them themselves — that is a shocker to most people. Their present-time self is enough phenomena to rock them, because they aren’t looking at the present-time self. They are not solving their problems in any way, shape or form, usually, in present time. They are trying to solve them in the future or the past. Their lives are built of straw, and from straw to straw there is a large bridge of “if.”

This life continuum can actually begin with conception. Something bad happens during conception or the first mitosis, and the person begins to continue his life from there. So you can get a life continuum from an engram. That is the easy case. You run it out and he is in fine shape.

That happens every once in a while — in fact, very frequently. Just a little bit of straight processing with the auditor doing no thinking, and all of a sudden this case is back to battery and doing beautifully. What the auditor has done is resolve the preclear’s life continuum of himself, where his life was interrupted by some major incident, regardless of where that incident was on the track. It can even be that the individual is hung up in one of his own past lives. But the usual thing is that a person does a life continuum and becomes aberrated thereby.

Now, you can process this person, you can make him happier, you can make him more successful and everything else, but it is something like doing a dance with the real aberration unless the life continuum is resolved. It wouldn’t matter how long you processed him; you would still be doing a dance with the real aberration. It would still be there. What you would have done is shape him up to a point where he could suffer it or bear it. Of course, he would come up to a point where he could suffer it or bear it almost immediately if you could resolve it. That thing — the real aberration — is the life continuum.

You start by running all the sympathy on a case. There are going to be failures and deaths on the part of other people which show up. You just start running sympathy. Start scanning the feeling of sympathy in general, and the person will all of a sudden start pinning it down here and pinning it down there and he will begin to remember a lot of things in his life that he didn’t remember before. Then you run regret, or you take up approval — the desire for approval or giving approval.

An individual often has a visio that keeps popping up. Sometimes he gets them while he is asleep and sometimes while he is awake. But if he has some sort of a visio that keeps appearing — any visio (usually it is a still visio or it is too small or something of the sort) — just run regret on it.

He gets a visio of a girl dancing: she is in a dancing position, only she is stopped or something like that, or she might even be moving a little bit; it doesn’t matter. You say, “Well, scan some regret off of it.”

He says, “Why? This is obviously a ballet I attended — Swan Lake — and it’s a very pretty ballet and I enjoyed it.” “Scan regret off of it.” So he says, “All right,” and he scans. Then all of a sudden he sobs, “I killed my older sister!” “Well, how did you get there?” He remembers his older sister as having studied ballet. Does this make you a smart auditor!

Now, if he can’t get a visio on somebody he knows he knew, scan regret — just that: regret, regret, regret. If he gets a visio, scan regret. All of a sudden the computation of the case will fall into your lap. This is a very interesting, easy technique.

The next thing, after you start getting regret, is you will find that there is blame to be found on it. That is the second step: there is blame. So you say, “All right, let’s scan some blame off this.” “Well, I don’t blame myself for anything about this.” “Just scan some blame.” “But I don’t blame myself! I know I don’t blame myself!” “Please scan blame on this; just scan the feeling of blame off of this.”

“Oh, yes. If I hadn’t taken the car that night, why, they would have been able to have gotten to the doctor and my little brother wouldn’t have died.”

That is a lot of horsefeathers, by the way. A person will find some cockeyed rationalization and then afterwards hold himself responsible for this life not having been continued, and he will promptly take over the aberrations and conclude the life. That is to say, he will keep it alive.

When he starts blaming himself, that is in the last stages because “himself” is somebody different than “I.” When he starts blaming himself for it you will find him in the last stages of dropping down the tone scale.

You can actually pick up the point in any person’s life where for the first time he really actively blamed himself. It was at that moment he broke from being fairly sane to being not too well off. That was the instant, and it happens all in an instant in any man’s life. It can get progressively worse with future blames, but you can find the first time he blamed himself as a sort of a break in a person’s life from a free, happy existence.

Now, you will think you have found the time; maybe it was ten years ago. And then you will think you have found the time again; maybe that was fifteen years ago. Then you will get another time when he blamed himself, and that was twenty-three years ago. But this preclear is only twenty-six, and you say, “What goes on here?” Then all of a sudden it turns out that the little dog who ran across the street while he was sitting in his baby buggy got killed, and it was his fault because he should have yelled! He didn’t yell and therefore the dog died — something weird like this.

He is already in pretty bad shape if he really starts blaming himself that early. He has had a rough prenatal and a lot of other things.

What is this thing we are monkeyihg with here, life continuum? You can see that it exists. You can put your hands on almost any preclear and you will find some semblance of it. You can look into your own case and find that there is something in your own case that demonstrates you to be continuing the goals, fears and identity of somebody else. How come? And particularly, how would you be able to undo this thing?

The technique I have given you — run regret and run blame — does remarkably well. If you just do that you will be all right. But there is a better one — a much better one. It has to do with the emotional curve, the use of the emotional curve.

I spoke earlier about having decided to look for a solution of interpersonal relationships and how I found this sudden drop of the emotional curve.

Pain can be associated with your little trick of making somebody else do a dive from happiness down to sadness or something of the sort, and you can get blame for a somatic or something mixed up in making a person get that drop. You say, “You know that person you were trying to help — that person who had that bad stomach somatic, the anxiety-stomach somatic, you were trying to help? And you know, he felt so well, he felt fine?” The fellow says, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.”

You say, “Well, he’s got it back and it’s all occluded now and nobody can get to it.” Do that and you will give the fellow the stomach somatic. If you want to experiment with this, you can see it. He will actually pick up a counter-effort of his own and substitute it.

How does he do this? By doing this he evidently thinks that he can alleviate this other person. The whole field of faith healing was based on this premise.

Let me tell you how to do faith healing; there is no trick to it — but it doesn’t work. You take some fellow who has epiglutis of the esophagus or something. The best way to do it, if you really want to do it well, is you put your hand on him and hypnotize him — tactilecommunication hypnosis or something of the sort — and then you say, “Now, you can feel that pain coming off into my hand. The area is getting warmer and warmer and warmer and the pain is coming off into my hand,” and so on. He will actually feel this area getting warmer and warmer, and then you say, “All right, (snap!) it’s gone.” You have given him a somatic shutoff; that is what you have done. The funny part of it is, they are sometimes happier and so on.

Of course, the real way you do faith healing is to be up over top static and into some other field or someplace, and you come along and see somebody lying there in horrible shape and you say, “Whhhsskt!” and — pop! — they are in beautiful shape. That would be the technical and theoretical way of doing it. We aren’t quite up to that point. But when we get up there, I’ll tell you.

Anyway, this mechanism of life continuum is easily explained out of the phenomena of survival and full responsibility.

Now, if you look in Advanced Procedure and Axioms, you will find that every individual potentially considers himself responsible or is responsible for everything on every dynamic that exists in the whole universe, including Alpha Centauri and your glasses. And as he comes down the tone scale, he is electing out more and more and more things for which he is not responsible, until he gets to the bottom of the tone scale when he is not responsible for anything, including himself, at which moment he is dead. Do you see what that gradient scale is? He actually starts in with this tremendous view and then he starts losing parts of it.

That is full responsibility. The chart in the first book showed infinite survival as being hightoned. How right can you be? You know that if you were completely, ultimately, absolutely right, the universe would survive forever. And if any person were completely, utterly, entirely wrong, probably we would all vanish. This is the ridiculousness, the reductio ad absurdum, of the gradient scale. It says that absolute right means infinite survival clear across the boards for everything. That is how right a person would have to be to be absolutely right. The moment anybody reached that point, the whole thing would go into a static state. Let’s hope they don’t.

And then down at the wrong end, if a person were completely wrong, theoretically everything would collapse. Those are the two unattainable, opposite poles.

Up at the top of infinite survival, it says if you are going to survive infinitely then you have to take the responsibility for everything. There is no question about that, simply because of this: Your survival is interdependent with all other survivals, and if you start knocking out everything here and there broadly and telling it not to survive and telling something else not to survive and so on, you keep cutting down your own survival. Do not send to find for whom the bell tolls — it’s ringing for you, bud!

So, we have this infinite scale, and as a person comes down this scale from complete survival he is starting to drop down also from complete responsibility. Complete responsibility includes complete cause also — he considers himself the cause of these things.

Now, the dignity of a small baby is interesting to observe. People come along and they say “Coochy-coo” and so forth, and the baby looks at them and he doesn’t like it. If you have been back there on the time track you might have noticed the feeling of dignity — way up the tone scale — of a little baby.

People maul them around and the babies giggle and they laugh — that is to be obliging. After a while they become human.

But the funny part of it is, the trouble a baby has is simply that he is having a little bit of difficulty with his motor-control panel. He is like somebody who has suddenly been put into a big bomber with eight engines, each one with separate throttles, and there are fuel-mixture controls and buttons, wheels, meters and gauge-s all over the place. It is terrific stuff. If anybody suddenly put you out in one of these B-47s and said “Well, take it out and land it again,” you would be in about the same fix as a baby. It is not that the baby is incapable; it is just that the baby is not articulating and he is not in control of the engine yet to any marked degree.

But he does have this tremendous dignity. And if you take a look at a little child of three or four who is running around the neighborhood and all of a sudden he sees a black wreath on a door, you will find him wondering what he did to cause this. It isn’t that his parents have beaten his head in and given him an aberration on the fact that he is to blame for everything ; don ‘t try to answer it that way, because it doesn’t answer that way. He wonders who it was, what he did or what it was all about, and if this happens to be a relative of a playfellow. If it is, he will try to pick up something to support this playfellow — in other words, an indirect method of bringing that relative back to life. It is a fascinating business. You will find some very basic aberrations on the track through having done this.

This is full responsibility; here is full survival. What is regret? Regret is simply an effort to take something out of the time stream — “I’m sorry it happened. I wish it hadn’t happened.” That is all it is. “I’m sorry it happened. I wish it hadn’t occurred.” Very heavy regret, of course, moves the incident out of contact, and the more you regret it, the more it goes out of contact.

Regret is a mechanism of abdication of the post of great responsibility. “I wish it hadn’t happened.” Why do you wish it hadn’t happened? Because that cuts down your full responsibility. You weren’t able to control, you think, that particular little segment of existence, so you regret it and it goes out of existence. That is the emotion of regret.

Now, let’s look at survival and let’s look at approval. What is approval? Way up on top of the tone scale a person doesn’t hand out approval and doesn’t receive approval. But as you get down into action, you will find that an individual, still very high on the tone scale, is handing out approval to people. He is approving of this one and he is approving of that one and so forth. He doesn’t expect anything back or have any back channel on it or anything of the sort. But after a while, he gets into a co-approval basis. We used to call them “mutual admiration societies.” By this time the person is getting down the tone scale pretty far. After a while he has to have approval from others. And then he loses approval from somebody and he starts out the bottom.

What is approval? We could print up a license to survive: “You, John Jones, this umpteenth date of something or other, are hereby granted a license to survive. Signed, Foundation.” And it would be very amazing, but if we put those in the window of the Foundation and said that anybody could have one merely by coming in, I am afraid we would not be able to keep up supplying them. I am afraid we couldn’t.

People wouldn’t quite know why they wanted this; they would think it would be a good gag and everything else. They would show it around to their friends as a joke, and their friends would say, “Ho-ho. (Don’t quite see what’s funny about it — I haven’t got one.)”

Approval is a license to survive. And you are either not caring whether you have a license or not, which is way up on top; or you are issuing licenses to survive, which is as you come down the tone scale; or you have to exchange licenses, or you have to receive licenses to survive. When you are way down the tone scale you have to have licenses from various people to survive.

You have possibly wondered why it is that some poor little child is so snarled up about having been such a pain and terror to his mother when he was born. There is regret on this and there is sympathy and there is blame, self-blame and everything else. This is a rough deal. The little child caused his mother all this trouble — she tells him about it every day — and we wonder why he is so snarled up.

Mama is insisting on something that isn’t really true: she was the sole cause of his survival; therefore she licensed him to survive! This is not true. So he has to pay attention to his licenser as a licensee. Only he is running on a very, very limited ticket. “You can’t go here, you can’t do this, you must do that, you can’t eat this, you must wear that, you must get up, you must go to bed” — he has a very limited ticket. It says “180-degree turns around front yard only.” That is its outermost limit. And some of these tickets say “Limited to 360-degree turns in living room and bedroom — no passengers.”

Right to survive — that is approval. If you think you have to have approval from anybody under the sun, then you think you have to be granted a right to survive by somebody. The funny part of it is, you are the only licensee and the only licenser to you.

Look this thing over and you will find out that these situations come up along the line, and the way a person gets into this situation is not by being told or hammered into believing that he has to have this. There must be something actual and real for which the individual blames himself prior to being challenged on it. In other words, he has to elect to blame himself or blame something else first, before he starts asking for a license to survive.

After a person has done something wrong to another individual he will slide off into sympathy. He has hurt another individual in some way, and if he does it and fails — that is to say, if he hurts somebody and then he looks at them and sees they are hurt (he realizes he has failed in some degree at that moment) — he feels sympathy.

You want to know what is behind sympathy? You go all the way back down the track and you will find an overt actl against that dynamic — somebody just being mean as the devil. You find somebody who is very sympathetic about dogs, who has a big grief charge about dogs, and you go back and you will find this person at five, six, seven years of age kicking their slats in, teasing them — beating up dogs.

Then one day he actually hurt a dog and the dog suddenly looked pathetic to him and he felt a great deal of sympathy for this dog. After that he was fond of dogs, he protected dogs, he worked with dogs; he became very quiet about the whole deal. And then one day a dog died on him. He did a life continuum for dogs after that. He will have some habit or some activity in his actions which will be a dog’s.

A person is perfectly free to do all the overt acts in the world, so long as he doesn’t fail. If he fails, he has extended an actiue sphere of responsibility.

Now, I want you to get the difference between full responsibility and active responsibility. Full responsibility is all the way up at the top of the tone scale. You have to step down from it to go into action; you have to select something out. “I am responsible; I’m going to do something about it.” That is down the tone scale but it is not an undesirable level. You have to do that to get into the 20.0 band. You have to come down the scale because you are too static when you just say “I’m responsible.” Trucks are colliding with little children and typhoid is sweeping through the land and the Democrats are about to get into office again — all of these cataclysms are going on and the person just benignly says, “Yes, I am responsible.”

He has to come down the tone scale before he wants to get in there and stop these epidemics and straighten out the children and so forth. As a matter of fact, the world wouldn’t run at all if everybody insisted on being up at the top static of full responsibility. That is just ideal, not practical.

Now, you come down from that level and you go into action with your responsibility. The second you go into your action on your responsibility, you start cutting out segments for which you are responsible and you start blaming these things. “I’m not responsible for it — you are the cause of it, I’m not,” “I’m to blame. It was nobody’s fault but my own” — all this kind of stuff.

That is cause and effect in action. A person is assigning cause to other things besides himself. The second he does this he is not responsible for these things and he gets badly off.

Now, when a person has sinned against the human race in some fashion or other, he will go into sympathy with the people he feels he has hurt.

By the way, that is a wonderful word — sinned — isn’t it? There actually is a sin: the sin is failing. Just don’t fail. Go out and chop up bodies and stuff them in trunks, but don’t fail! And if you do fail, run it out!

An individual riding at 20.0 is not fully responsible because he has elected things out so that he can have action.

I want to show you something about randomity and action. It ties in with this tone scale. Some people may have had a little difficulty with the Axioms in telling what randomity is. So I will ask you to imagine a rubber ball and to set this rubber ball very neatly on a table, and you can look at that rubber ball. Go ahead, look at the rubber ball.

The second that you are asked to look at something which is apparently static, you start up your own randomity, don’t you? There is no motion in that rubber ball. It is just sitting there. You become bored with it; that is the emotion that goes along with it. You could sit and contemplate one rubber ball or something of the sort for just so long without saying “Tsk! So what?”

Then we take this same rubber ball and I start bouncing it and I say, “Now, watch this rubber ball bouncing.” I just start bouncing it very regularly. You watch that rubber ball bouncing just so long before you say “So what?” That is a different kind of a static; that is repetitive motion which becomes monotonous.

Now, if I were to bounce the rubber ball a little more erratically, or if I were to take three rubber balls and bounce them around, you would say “Very interesting.” That is randomity — erratic motion.

The optimum level of erratic motion has on its near side minus motion and it has on its other side plus motion.

For instance, I could hit this rubber ball and have it shoot off across the room and I would have to go over and pick up the rubber ball and bring it back. Then I could hit the rubber ball again and it would fly out in another direction. That would be too much randomity; it would be too erratic. So it wouldn’t be under control.

Supposing I put the rubber ball down and just left it: there is not enough motion. That is minus randomity. Do you see the emotional reaction? There has to be some controlled, eccentric action in motion — relatively controlled — in order to hold your attention. That is what you desire from life.

Monotony is, to you, death. It is a static, and a static is either something still or just a repetitive motion — so repetitive that it becomes, in that regard, utterly inane.

A person who goes to work from nine to five, nine to five, nine to five, nine to five, off on Saturday, off on Sunday, nine to five, nine to five, nine to five, nine to five, nine to five, off on Saturday, off on Sunday — the same thing week after week, particularly if every Sunday afternoon he goes to the same theater to see a movie — after a while becomes bored.

Now, the oddity of it is that individuals have different tolerances for randomity. This nine-tofive deal, to many people, appears to be even adventurous. You may have stood and watched something like a subwaytrain or bus driver and said, “How can that man go to the other end of the run and turn around and come back, and then turn around and go back, and keep it up for sixty years or thirty years or something like that?” You know you couldn’t do it.

You say, “Well, therefore, there’s something wrong with me.” Yes, there is something “wrong” with you: you desire a little more randomity than he does.

You talk to one of these boys and you say, “Gee, doesn’t that just about drive you daffy?” He says, “What?” “Running that bus! Running that bus.”

“How do you mean? Do you realize I have to get up every morning at six o’clock, come down here, start the bus, get in there, get my change in order . . .” And he starts going through this routine, and you can see that it is just the dullest routine in the world. The only difference on change is sometimes he drops a dime when he is loading his coins. And sometimes it is Mrs. Snodgrass, not Mrs. Smith, who gets on the bus first at the first stop to get to her job, and there is whether Mrs. Snide up the street is going to go downtown today. This is randomity to that individual.

Your wild adventurer demands as randomity the cataclysm and crash of nations, societies. Hitler, for instance, was down on the tone scale in his desire for randomity, but I don’t believe he was even satisfied when he was blowing himself up. There were millions dead and armies ruined and continents changed and shifted all over the place and people suffering in all directions but he was still going strong. This was a 1.5’s idea of good randomity. His appetite for randomity was too high and his idea of randomity was all plus — too much.

Now, on a constructive level there can also be too much randomity for an individual. Any of you who have been bewildered from time to time at sudden advances in technique were getting just a little bit too much randomity. You didn’t want quite that much randomity, in spite of the fact that the techniques are an advance for your preclears. That is to say, perhaps you took the first techniques offered and you were still working them a couple or three hours a week on a preclear and so forth; techniques then came along that could produce this result and they caught up with you.

In other words, we are doing with a new technique a speedup every time on the case. But what you are liable to start watching is this flood of new techniques. They are actually upsetting your randomity of snapping the fingers or something; they are altering this.

There is something else you should look at: you should be very pleased this is happening. I don’t know anything, really, more boring than snapping the fingers at a preclear six hours a day, six days a week. That is pretty grim. So we are working a technique up by which an auditor will have a lot of randomity.

Now, when a person comes down scale from full responsibility, he is moving into 20.0 for him when he gets to optimum. He will be optimumly busy, but don’t think he won’t be busy. The fellow that says “I’m going to buy an orange grove and sit there” has a goal and it is pretty, but when he gets there and he sits down he is liable to get right back up again.

Look what happens to the man who is advised that he had better retire for his health and take it easy, control himself, take it quiet: all of a sudden they bury him. They say, “Well, that’s the way it goes with these fellows. They just work themselves all their lives too hard and it gets them. It’s a good thing he laid off and started to rest when he did.”

An individual who is running at more or less optimum motion for him is up above all of his past counter-efforts. Do you get the idea? As he sinks down from his optimum motion or goes up from his optimum motion, he will run into bands of lower speed for himself and he will start getting clipped by counter-efforts .

This is all very sequitur. This may sound to you for a moment as if it is not making a complete package, but let me show you something. We have a scale from 40.0 through 20.0 down to 0.0, and at 20.0 is optimum motion for an individual. Some fellow will go out to a race track and watch these racing cars go round and round, and he will go out on the next Sunday and watch the racing cars go round and round. What produces randomity there is the fact that these cars are going too fast, which fascinates him. The other thing which produces it is the fact that every once in a while there is a big crash.

How a race driver can stand up to his own fans, I don’t know. Out at Indianapolis one day a race driver went over the wall, rolled and so forth, and people went down on the grounds. The first thing one of them said was “Oh, gee! Look what I got! “ He had picked up a handkerchief that had fallen out of the driver’s chest, and it was saturated with blood, still dripping. That was his idea of randomity.

Anyway, each individual has a potential capacity or a potential action level. That is just theoretical. Everybody, if brought to 20.0, would be not to a 20.0 but to his 20.0. A happy, healthy, exuberant, long-lived bus driver is at 20.0. He gets on in the morning and he counts his change and he checks out and goes to this end of the run, then he goes to that end of the run and so on.

Now, look at an emotional curve: A person is way up in enthusiasm; he comes in and tells everybody about this bright idea he has and then somebody says, “No, it won’t work, because . . .” and convinces him, and this fellow in enthusiasm goes shooting down the tone scale. The shift in tone is quite marked.

What happens here? Up in enthusiasm he is running along so that his motion — the amount of randomity which he is encompassing and which he is engage d in and so forth — is up above the moti on or sp ee d of t he counter efforts which might threaten him. Do you understand that? The only way a counter-effort can threaten a person is by being faster than he is. Then he gets it.

This is proven by the fact that if you sit a fellow down very quietly and have him concentrate on a state of not-beingness, he will get his counterefforts — bang! You can demonstrate this on individuals.

It means, then, that when an individual is dropped suddenly in what we will call speed — this internal governor or whatever it is — he drops emotionally as well, and that is the emotional curve.

Up at the top he is not suffering from any counter-efforts; he doesn’t have anything. And then somebody says, “Well, that girl you worked on last night, you know, that had a terrible anxiety stomach and so forth and so on? Well, she’s in the hospital.”

He had decided to handle this anxiety stomach, this counter-effort. He was all enthusiastic. He thought he had fixed her up and then suddenly he is informed that he didn’t handle it. His first reaction is to handle it, but he has been dropped down the tone scale to a point where he can’t, suddenly. He will get an anxiety stomach.

You can run this test on individuals. You can give them a big buildup and a sudden drop. And if you give them a big buildup and a sudden drop about an injury, they will get the injury. It is fascinating.

Let’s say you are working on a preclear; you work on him, you know you have the cause of it, you are running the thing out, you are in good shape on it and you can see his tone come up, then all of a sudden he sits up and says very apathetically, “Well, I’ve still got my sore leg.” You go sliding down the scale.

How many auditors have unwittingly picked up a sore leg or some somatic and didn’t realize what its source was? You just check back over your cases, you check back over your auditing, and you will find that sooner or later something happened on it.

It doesn’t happen right away. The reason why is that the auditor who is running up above 4.0 is not doing too badly till one day he gets carved down this way. But his next curve is going to be a deeper drop. And each time it happens he will drop, but he won’t come back quite as far. Eventually it could be a flat line and then he has come all the way down to where he can’t handle this motion. At that moment one of these things he missed on consistently in the past cuts in as a chronic somatic.

His resilience at first is such that when this gag is pulled on him he bounces. That is all right; he bounces. If he had really looked at himself, he would have gotten a momentary twitch out of it and then bounced back up again. But when he really gets smashed down along to that flat line he gets a chronic somatic, and he is not going to get rid of it until it is processed out on the lifecontinuum factor. What has he done? He suddenly took over the responsibility of that somatic he failed on by wearing it himself.

This is, by the way, not very esoteric. If you think this over for a while you will see that we are talking in terms of weights and balances.

An individual, as “I,” can handle motion. You are handling motion right now: the beat of your heart, the coursing of your blood, the various activities of the human body and its actions. You are bracing against gravity; you are doing all sorts of these motions. There is lots of motion.

Have you ever watched a person as he comes down the tone scale? He gets to anger and he will have a violent flair of relatively poorly directed motion, and then it is like the sudden flash of a lamp bulb just before it goes out. He will finally come down to where he just sits, and he gets quieter and quieter and quieter. I told you about motion, about resistance and reaction to motion in comparison to this tone scale: He isn’t handling left-over counterefforts.

Let’s say that when you were a kid, a baseball hit you in the eye. You were just fine. Years go by and you don’t think about this baseball hitting you in the eye at all, but then you hear about some friend of yours or something of the sort who got hit in the eye with a baseball. An immediate sort of sympathy computation goes in. You drop on the tone scale because this is bad news.

Did you ever stop and think of why it was bad news to you that he got hit in the eye with a baseball? So what? So he got hit in the eye with a baseball — does this hurt your food supply line? You can always find another canasta player. But you are fully responsible, inherently; so you say, “Well, that’s fine — my responsibility, I must be to blame. I didn’t keep the baseball from hitting him in the eye.”

You can work with people for a while and they will finally come up with some dopey explanation of how it was their fault — he intended to call the fellow on Saturday and see whether or not he could play a game of golf that day, and by not calling him . . . “Therefore, there he was out playing baseball with the boys and that is how he got hit in the eye with a baseball, and that’s why it’s my fault.”

But the reason you haven’t seen very many of these rationalizations is that they are tied up in emotional curves.

A little boy is out playing and life is going along all right; suddenly his mother comes out and she looks very, very sad and sorrowful. He says, “What’s the matter, Mommy? What’s the matter, Mommy?”

She says, “Nothing (sniff).” This increases his tension terrifically. She gets him built up to a tremendous level of anxiety and then pops it — “Grandpa just died.”

This little boy knows Grandpa. He has sat around Grandpa occasionally on a little footstool and said, “Gee, I wish Grandpa’s rheumatizl didn’t hurt. I wish I could see for Grandpa a little better. Gosh, he sure has a lot of trouble getting the car started; I think I’ll invent a self-starter for him or something. Yeah, I think I’ll get rich. I think I’ll get rich and I’ll have a big castle and I’ll store one whole room with chewing tobacco so he’ll never be out of chewing tobacco, because he always seems to run out of it when he wants some.” This little boy knows Grandpa. So, subject: Grandpa; habits, somatics of Grandpa, counter-efforts — these must be duplicated, because the first reaction of the little boy is to say “It’s not so. I do not believe it. It can’t be true.” That is an effort of invalidation, and this effort of invalidation comes down with a crash afterwards. That goes down too, which just drives this loss home further.

When he says “I can’t believe this and I don’t want to believe this, and this isn’t true” and all that sort of thing, people then very quietly and solemnly convince him it is true. “Let’s not have any fast music around the dead. Let’s not do anything very exciting. I don’t think you ought to go to the show this afternoon, Johnny. After all, it’s only been two weeks since your grandfather died.” This keeps him running slow, and he will keep picking these somatics up. They are not Grandpa’s, they are his. But you can run this emotional curve.

Now, you know there are occluded deaths on cases. There probably isn’t a case around that doesn’t have two or three deaths that they aren’t consciously aware of having happened in their vicinity. But how do you make the individual aware that they did happen? Not by trying to sell him on the idea and going and getting the family Bible — let’s not be psychoanalysts. Let’s not go get the Bible and show him in there, “Look, your grandpapa died at such and such a date because it says right there in the front of the Bible, so therefore it’s true. All right, you’re well now. Next customer.” That is the wrong approach.

If there were an automatic process which would immediately reveal to the individual these incidents, which would reveal to him the times when he blamed himself for the death and would reveal to him the times when he had tried to defend the dead person and bring to view his thoughts with regard to his desire for approval from that person or his desire to give approval to the person in order to go on living, wouldn’t that be a very valuable technique? It really would — particularly in view of the fact that you can see Grandpa’s glasses on this preclear and Grandpa’s habits on this preclear and Grandpa’s everything on this preclear, including Grandpa’s consistent business failure. People will go on failing in businesses just for Grandpa. They will go on being professionally something else, just for Grandpa. More important than that, they will go on walking like a horse or something of the sort for dear old Bessie that died when they were two years old back in the middle-west farmhouse.

How would you like a technique that did that? It is a very simple technique. You just run the emotional curve — that is all. You just insist on running the emotional curve. The regret comes out and the blame comes out and the thought behind it comes out, and it all falls out of this darn curve:

“Can you remember the time your grandfather died?”

“No.”

“Well, how would you have felt just before you found out he died?”

“Oh, all right, I guess.”

“How would you have felt just afterwards?”

“Oh, terrible.”

“Well, how do you feel when you’re all right?”

“Oh, I feel all right.”

“How do you feel when you feel terrible?”

“Well, just terrible.”

“Well, can you get the drop between those two? Can you feel all right and then feel terrible, feel all right and feel terrible?”

“Yeah. Yeah, oh, here’s that time I hit that boy over the head with a club, knocked him out. I didn’t mean to.”

And you start picking up incidents of that magnitude (which is minor magnitude) and you pick up more incidents and more incidents and more incidents of greater and greater magnitude till all of a sudden you are picking up deaths on the case the person didn’t know anything about, much less the deaths he knew about. But if you find one of these occluded deaths, you start running it and you will find out just where he blamed himself for that death. And they all do!

That is what is rough on soldiers. They are out there on the field of battle and they go charging over the top into a flock of machine-gun bullets or something of the sort and guys fall here and guys fall there and guys fall someplace else. The soldier is responsible for all those deaths — each one of them is, really. Then he gets over into the enemy trench and he kills another human being, and he is responsible for that one, too. So he can’t win.

War is a game by which you keep people down the tone scale so that you can govern them very well. I don’t think a national government could actually exist without the threat of war — if there weren’t an aggressor around. There are aggressors around and you do have to have something to prevent their actions, because everybody is working on this same circle. But you see what happens.

Now, this soldier finally hardens himself into it and he sells himself this bill of goods: “Well, I’m me; I don’t care who else I am.” And then he gives himself a snide satisfaction for having eaten the lunch of the guy in the next bed in the hospital where they both were — the guy was his buddy and he got his buddy’s lunch. Food was kind of scarce there and his buddy died at eleven-thirty, so he got his lunch.

You will get this fellow actually holding such incidents in, saying, “I am tough. I am hard. I can stand up to all of this. Nothing of this can shake me.” He keeps telling himself this and the next thing you know, nothing can, not even life. He doesn’t enjoy anything anymore, by the way, but he sure is tough!

You will run into this case every once in a while. You try to run an emotional curve on one and it is like trying to open up brick pavement with a toothpick, until all of a sudden you start triggering approval or regret. This case is never closed down so tight that you can’t find some regret or something on it, and you just start running that off a little bit and the first thing you know, the rest of the case starts to open up.

I will give you just a momentary review of this thing: What is survival? Survival is a right to survive which an individual gives himself automatically. When he is his own right to survive, he is very fully responsible. And this right to survive operates in the society as approval.

When some other thing on some other dynamic fails to survive, an individual holds himself responsible for that failure. When he actually can demonstrate to himself that he definitely was responsible for it, you don’t get it just as an esoteric mechanism, you get it as an actual fact, and he goes into sympathy on that dynamic. He will stay sympathetic toward that dynamic and he will stay down the tone scale with regard to that dynamic, and he will keep on asking that part of that dynamic for his own survival.

At this point in the lecture, a gap exists in the available recordings. We have been unable to locate any recording or transcript for the missing section.