It is very possible that I have shocked your sensibilities a little bit with the epicenter theory concerning one thing. And that one thing resolves down to a simplicity: Does the body employ facsimiles of death in its construction of the organism? This is the only question in the epicenter theory. Does the body employ facsimiles of death?

This theory is just as valid, really, on the employment of the genetic line only. You can work it out if you want to on simply the employment of genetic-line facsimiles.

I mentioned earlier that these behavior patterns which you find in cats and men and so forth are inherited characteristics. And we know that theta facsimiles exist.

Theta facsimile is a nice, highly generalised term for a static we know very little of, except that it is a static. It could be said to be the highest static with which we are dealing in the science of Dianetics as it exists at this moment. The next advance is possibly on the other side of that static.

However, the ultimate static is “Survive?” as a command. That is a static. “Survive in the physical universe by interplays of motion” actually would be the full command, and that is a static.

On the other side of that static, we don’t know what exists. Nobody does at the moment completely, so we are not in any argument or contest about what might lie beyond that static. At the moment it is as if we have reached the Azores and we are about to take a jump off for the West Indies, time permitting. But we have reached the Azores and it is a very useful cruise.

The existence of a facsimile which jumps off from a death and follows a theta line on through into the next generation — the jump of the individual personality in this fashion — is not in question in the epicenter theory. I wish to impress you with that. I am not trying to hang that on you. I am trying only to show you that there are phenomena of past deaths, which are too easily recoverable in preclears to be ignored. But I am not telling you that Dianetics embraces the theory of past death. I am telling you that Dianetics stays with the incredibility that this theory need never be used. As far as Dianetic theory to be released to the American universities is concerned, there will never be a word spoken of this.

The point I am trying to make is that you do not have to admit the existence of death facsimiles in order to look over the theory of epicenters. If you just take it on the basis of genetic-line facsimiles, it agrees with classical biology and other subjects. It agrees very well. It agrees with Darwin’s theory of evolution and so on. All it is saying — although it puts it in different, more workable phrases — is that the theta facsimiles exist all the way back down the line to the first jump-off.

In cytology they say there is an unending stream of protoplasm going through space and time, and this forms life forms. They put the emphasis on the protoplasm; anthropology and other subjects put it on the organism produced out of that protoplasm. But the point is that a blueprint is being carried.We are not even faintly in disagreement with scientific thought of this year 1951 when we say theta facsimiles exist on the evolutionary chain; we are not in any disagreement. They put it much more sloppily: they say there are inherited characteristics. Just how you inherit a characteristic without a blueprint, they have never bothered to explain. We know that people remember things — at least some people do — and we call this “photograph” of the object which is remembered a theta facsimile. These things obviously exist, otherwise there wouldn’t be any blueprint. Men would be born and they would look like cows or horses or professors or something. There would be no constancy to this unending line of protoplasm unless there were a blueprint of some sort.

Now, you could envision a theta facsimile as traveling through the gaps by genes and chromosomes. You could say that genes and chromosomes contain these facsimiles and you would still have the theory of epicenters.

It has been observed, for instance, that life keeps improving on the organism and complicating the organism without ever undoing what it did. It has also been observed that ontogeny is a recapitulation of phylogeny: the human organism in the process of growth in the womb, from sperm and ovum on up to infant, follows a cyclic pattern which approximates the pattern of evolution. On the mind side of the thing, we notice there are behavior patterns in animals and men which go back along the line. Men have very definite, positive behavior patterns, built-in reflexes and responses and so forth which they recover one way or the other. They are a little bit slower to recover them: a baby fools with its toes a lot longer before it gets one of these things keyed in than any other animal does.

Have you ever seen a baby trying to use its hands and feet? It finds its hands, looks at them, finally keys in the theta facsimiles of the hands and finds their use. Then it looks at a foot and one day it is very surprised to find out it has another foot. I ran a grief charge out of a fellow who had gone through this whole sequence and suddenly realized that he had never recognised or seen his ears, actually.

The theory of epicenters merely states that there is an evolution of command posts, and that those command posts remain structurally visible in the organism. They can be found in the organism and they still behave as lower-echelon command posts — control centers, in other words.

There is a nerve, for instance, that at one time or other went straight across in a fish, and then as man evolved and the body started to grow lungs, instead of taking that nerve and parting it in one generation and putting it back together again, it kept dragging further and further down, and it now passes from one part of the brain around and under the lungs and back up again. It does a big circle round Robin Hood’s barns in order to get a couple of inches, because in evolution the theta facsimiles — the blueprints — kept taking pictures of this nerve in an extended state, and so it finally wound up with an error. There isn’t any other reason for this nerve to be where it is.

The same thing has occurred with these mind centers. There is a law concerning this: At the origin of each new organism (say, conception, forward on through to maturity), it is postulated that the new control venter is in complete control of the organism and environment and will be obeyed by all the sub-control centers of the organism. In a new organism, it is postulated that its new control center is going to be in command of the organism in this generation. It is going to be obeyed by all old subcenters. That law is very workable, very useful.

A person sinks on the tone scale in direct ratio to the amount of control lost by this new venter.

The only thing necessary to regain good equilibrium in an organism is to rehabilitate the command value of the postulated control center of that generation. The only thing necessary, in operation, to rehabilitate it is to rehabilitate its belief in its self-determinism.

I want to show you what happens on this epicenter proposition.

There are three therapies you can embark upon. The first of these is to deintensify nonsurvival conclusions by knocking out self-determined postulates — rehabilitate a person from his nonsurvival conclusions just by knocking out the moments when the conclusions were taken. You can state it either way. We call that Self-determinism Straightwire, and it is done by simply knocking out all the old postulates so the fellow is now free of his own postulated statics. That is all — you just knock out the statics.

You understand that when an individual says to himself “I am a schnook” and he goes down the time track ten minutes, he is a schnook. He says to himself, “I’m not very good at music, I guess?” Then he goes down the time track fifteen years and starts to learn how to play the jew’s-harp and he can’t play it.

He tells somebody, just out of social consciousness, “I can’t sing” Later he is out with a beautiful girl in the moonlight, and she loves singing. He knows he could sing once, so he starts to sing but a frog croak comes up. She marries the other fellow. Maybe this is lucky for him, but the point is that he has become subject to his own statements.

It is not very peculiar how this comes about. You have a control center which is in command of the organism. What is command? Command is a static, no matter how thought seems to ebb and flow. If this organism is to be healthy, its command center has to be in command. Just like a naval vessel or an army, it will go down in defeat the moment that its command center is invalidated and made unworkable, because this new central control system is commanding a numerical army much greater than any army alive on the face of the earth today. You as an individual command an army in terms of numbers and earn command of complexities which no military organization or government can compare with. It is something to think about.

The laws of good command activities — as worked out and written down but seldom obeyed or viewed — happen to be the laws of good conduct on the part of a control center toward its own organism. It does nobody any good for somebody to come along and tell you, “In order for you to command yourself, you must first learn to obey” This is an arbitrary any way you want to look at it.” To learn to command yourself, you must first learn to obey yourself” — it doesn’t work.” You must first learn to obey other people” — no.

When the baby is born, he is already fully prepared to do his best on this line. He will do almost anything to stay in control of his own organism. This is the same as a general fighting against a hostile army that is trying to upset his outfit: he will try to do the very best he can for his army. Until that general is invalidated, he does very well. But he gets invalidated to the troops eventually. Somebody comes along and says he is a paranoid schizophrenic or something.

The point is, self-determinism is just that. It is one’s recognition of one’s command of the body and the body’s recognition of the command value of the control center — just that. It is an interplay.

No general gets very far with a great deal of punishment of his troops, but, by golly, he doesn’t get very far unless he has the right to. That is something to think about.

ARC is just fine. But what kind of a command is this? Peacetime command or wartime command? Peacetime command is naturally sloppy. Senators come aboard and you give them ruffles and drums; you say, “Yes, everything is fine”; you go down to the wardroom and drink coffee and so on — because there is nothing happening. But a wartime command is actually what any individual is on. He has got to be able to operate on an emergency status at any instant.

Driving an automobile, for instance, is a nice, peaceful operation, apparently. Peaceful? There are more people killed on the highways of America in any one year than were killed in all the U.S. forces during World War I. It doesn’t look to me like that is a very peaceful operation. This life is not precarious, particularly, but you have certainly got to be tough and well coordinated to do well in it.

You are driving an automobile down the road when all of a sudden some youngster in a hot rod swerves around the corner — this is an emergency. The command center observes?” Automobile coming around corne?” and commands, “Coordinate hands; steering wheel, turn right; feet, stamp on clutch and brake pedals” But it kind of seems like lately there have been a couple of companies that have been rather dissatisfied; they didn’t get their rations on time and they have been getting some enemy propaganda to the effect that the command center isn’t so good. The command center has been getting some enemy propaganda to the effect that those two companies down there in the right foot aren’t so good. So when the command center says, “Emergency — foot, hit brake?” nothing happens. Crash! Dead organism.

Although we do not lead hour-by-hour and minute-by-minute dangerous lives, there is hardly a twenty-four-hour period that goes by in which we do not encounter at least one emergency. But man is living in a society which is too safe for him — much too safe for him. He is getting something like a peacetime army: “All sergeants will act toward soldiers like big brothers. You do not have to salute your officers” This sort of an arrangement comes into being.

The human body is made to meet sudden death and overcome it two or three times a day. For eons, boa constrictors and saber-toothed tigers and so forth have been jumping out of trees and from behind rocks. And there is nothing like a boa constrictor missing you by half an inch to bring you up to present time! Without this stimulus, man sort of becomes introverted. He goes slipping off down the track and wandering here and there.

You will find that men in relatively dangerous professions remain fairly healthy.

All this has to do with the central, top, this-generation control center being in command of the organism. When it says command of the organism, it means command of the organism. It wants a fast reaction time, everything in good condition, everything shipshape; the organism well covered, well housed — food, clothing and shelter taken care of — various parts of the body cared for, all old control centers cared for, and no mutinies. With the command center in command like that, everything gets along just sweepingly beautifully and the person is well.

This business about learning to command oneself is simply an old-time injunction to get squared away on the first dynamic before we try the second, third, fourth and fifth.

The reason for this is very simple: An individual will start to treat himself like others have treated him. And you can put that down as a law. He will treat himself as others have treated him, and he will also treat others as he treats himself. It works both ways.

You see someone who is going around mad all the time at everybody and you are looking at someone who is mad at himself. But he is mad at himself because people have been mad at him, and they have been mad at him up to the point where he has decided he should be mad at himself.

So when you have a command center estranged from and in argument with the troops, you get all sorts of odds and ends of discoordination, and very importantly, you get unhealthiness and unhappiness as a result. An army which is badly commanded will be straggling out across the field, its equipment will be in horrible condition, it will be poorly fed, disease will be rampant, and it will lose its battles. That is what happens in one human being.

Every time the command center goes into sympathy with another organism and says “Well, that body — I don’t think it’s very good or very beautiful?” what it actually is saying is “I know I shouldn’t brag; I know I have nothing to brag about?” or “I know I’m stupid?” and so on. When a person says that to himself — when he says “Well, I know that the cells in the fingernails, the toenails, the hands, nerves, sinews, are stupid, not beautiful, don’t function well” — he is putting a postulate down, just as though he had posted a division order: “From this moment hence forward, no troops will conduct themselves with pride. From this moment henceforward, all troops are skunks” Now he expects to get obedience from the troops. He won’t.

That is what a command center does and that is what happens in the individual. I am giving you an example from the third dynamic for you to apply to the first dynamic. People have a tendency, long before they become one, to behave as a unit, as an individual.

What is an individual, a real individual? It is somebody who is operating in coordination with himself twenty-four hours a day. That is an individual. An organism which is sick, unhappy or aberrated is an organism which is working at cross-purposes with itself twenty-four hours a day. It is in dissension — mutiny.

There is almost nothing, short of being hit head-on by a Sherman tank, l that a human body which is operating in good coordination with itself cannot overcome or cannot accomplish or cannot heal — almost nothing. Yet people go around saying, “Well, I can’t do this?” and “I’m not much good” and “I have to wear this” and “I’m bad off” and “I have to travel slowly” and “The doctor says . . ?” and so on and so on. It is a very strange thing, when you get into the center push button and do an analysis on this thing, how awfully simple it is — how terribly simple, how appallingly simple — to be so long overlooked.

But there is a natural reason why it was long overlooked. Maybe nobody just plain had enough guts to come out and say, “The second I state that an individual should be in free and complete command of himself, the second I say that an individual should be given back into his own command and thereafter operate on the lines of his own experience, I am postulating that I will now have to live in a world of individuals who cannot be bludgeoned or beaten into instantaneous blank obedience. And also I am abdicating from any throne over the tops of individuals?”

That is what an individual says at the same time he says this other thing. And you as individuals, when you look around at the people in your immediate vicinity, will see that this is actually what you are doing. You are saying, “I don’t want this fellow as MEST. I don’t want this human being as property” And you are also saying, “I’ve got to have enough nerve and enough confidence in my own ability to live with individuals who are strong, powerful and self-determined”

If you think it over, it is quite a decision you have to make, because that is what you are doing. You are giving up all the push buttons the second you put a man back to battery; you are saying, “I’m not going to use these anymore” It is important to recognize that, since here and there some individual may find in himself a feeling that maybe he shouldn’t be quite so anxious to have Mr. Doakes be an entirely self-determined, coordinated individual. It might make Mr. Doakes a little bit tougher to get along with sometimes. Maybe it will. Let’s not try to sing a paean of pastoral glory and contentment and go along with Rousseau and so on all the way. Maybe we are making a world full of wolves. So what? I certainly am sick of looking at a world full of rabbits.

Now, when it comes to your ability to do this, the first moment of your ability starts when you think the problem over carefully, look at it from all sides and figure out whether or not you want to do it to people, because it is a decision which has to do with you.

Here is the liability on knocking an army or a nation apart: You knock a nation apart and you have to feed it, care for it and baby it, and it is dangerous to have around. The United States went over and knocked apart the early Russian government. The old government had been no good; the new government may have offered some slight hope for the people. We sent troops into Siberia — so did England and France — and tried to knock the new Bolshevik government into smithereens. Now we sit around and say, “Here we are. We’re not aggressors. We’re just trying to make the world safe for democracy”

But the communist sits over there in Russia and he knows something happened to him from here or there; he knows something is happening to him and he is going to fight. He is not very bright or very far advanced, actually. He is fighting for a kind of freedom for the people in Russia which we earned so long ago we have almost forgotten it and almost thrown it away. He is very sincere about all of this and he is dangerous to have around.

But nobody ever gave him a helping hand. On the contrary, he was attacked. This is not bad or good — just the facts. And so instead of trying to give Russia back any kind of self- determinism we are trying to cut her down and make her a little weaker and a little weaker, and we are going to make her so weak someday that San Francisco, St. Louis, New York City, Chicago, Wichita, and points east, north, south and west will probably be blown off the map. And that Russia gets wiped out simultaneously does not excuse it as a thoroughly rotten method of proceeding. That is true on a human-being level.

Russia hasn’t been very smart about this country either. They get a lot of people running around that ought to be in kindergarten or something saying, “I’m a big shot now; I belong to the Party” and making asses out of themselves. They come tearing around and start carving up the society, and the next thing you know, somebody starts to get “red headed” about the thing. He says, “Well, let’s see. What will we do to the Communist Party” That’s bad too.

Russia introduces, in other words, a disruptive force in an effort to nullify the United States and bring it down the tone scale. We introduce disruptive efforts into Russia and bring her down the tone scale. Both countries fail to prosper, and a lot of little people on the face of the earth who don’t give a darn about it are going to get killed. Interesting, isn’t it, how error concatenates?

So you look at it the other way and you say, “Well, shoot the works — what would happen on real self-determinism” You try it out and start giving a fellow back his ability to be self- determined and you get some very interesting results. He starts to get well and he starts to think, because the statics have been taken out and he can get his theta facsimiles into motion, and as soon as he can get them into motion you can reach, to some degree, his understanding.

ARC is the only possible way up the tone scale. The only things possible in the lower brackets of the tone scale are death and destruction. Domination and nullification are not fitting weapons for a human being to use on another human being.

So, you have to solve, within yourself, whether you want to do that to people or not. And if you think it over very carefully, you will probably get quite a few little chills out of it — whether you want to take everybody in your vicinity and suddenly turn them loose, take the push buttons out of them. This is rehabilitation of self-determinism. But it brings them up the tone scale and, importantly, it takes away the imagined fears.

Any body of troops which has been disrupted badly is rife with rumor and will believe anything. And any human being who is down the tone scale will accept lies and will postulate, for himself and those around him, destructive actions which have nothing to do with reason. He is beyond the reach of reason.

Reason is your best weapon always — not force. But sometimes in a moment of emergency force is necessary. How do you solve that? You solve it by the agreement that sometimes in a moment of emergency force is necessary. One of the necessities for success of a self- determined individual is a coordination with the human beings around him of what his goals are. What is the method of agreeing upon approaching those goals? It is rather simple, all in all. This is something we have to think about because right now we are not just on the verge of, we are very well into the progress of, creating individuals who are very self-determined.

You are going to start watching preclears coming up the tone scale. You may never have realized that they were mostly in 0.5, but they start coming up the tone scale and they get angry and they start to use their selfdeterminism in the most cockeyed fashions.

It became risky to an auditor without his realizing it in the past, because the fellow hung up at levels on the tone scale one after the other. He would hang there so long that the society would see him hanging at the wrong place on the tone scale and bat him down again. So it took a fast method, and we have got speed in this method. It is swift — just this method all by itself!

All you do is take MEST Processing as represented in Self Analysis, under the formula contained in the Axioms that I had you mark with a number of stars, and apply it to the individual. Locate moments when he concluded to do these things to himself. You can do it on the validation side or on the entheta side.

When did he decide not to maintain himself? When did he decide to do this, not to do that? And, basically, down at the center of the formula is when he decided to stop himself or start himself.

What you are doing is taking a full review of the general orders issued by the command center on a static and arbitrary level. You are taking a full review of that entire file of orders for the person’s whole life. It doesn’t take very long, oddly enough.

You just start using MEST Processing — not on the environment, but on the individual himself — and you start going down the lists of MEST Processing. The question says object, so take the preclear’s hand: “When did you realize that you had burned your hand?”

Or take sight: ask, “When did you agree that you couldn’t see?” Or you can ask, “When did you have a hard time disagreeing that you couldn’t see?” because disagreement will keep him down on the scale, too.

You will start rehabilitating the person because you are rehabilitating the dynamic which should be rehabilitated first, and that is the first dynamic. You can’t expect a fellow to operate very much on the third dynamic until you have done something for the first. Now, how specific you need to get depends on how much you want to be specific. You will have some cases which you have to pilot through very carefully on this, and others who will just start to get the idea and start to roll it on up.

You are not worrying about the effort with this. You are not worrying about the physical effort to make these conclusions. That is the second process.

You are familiar with this band from an earlier Standard Procedure, where you were knocking out the material, just on a gunshot basis, which an individual used to postulate his new conclusions. Now we find out that an individual’s power of choice is so great that the only way those items could.be revived would be by the individual himself pulling them into action.

What does this have to do with the theory of epicenters?

Every successive command post in the body in every successive direction has at one time or another had full command of that organism — what organism there was. It had full command. Once upon a time it was the general. And the counter-effort permitted a new command post to be formed each time. Each time a new command post was formed the organism appointed a new officer and the old command post had to be knocked into apathy to get it under the thumb, quick!

That, by the way, is true from the first to the last of these command posts. It is just successive. In the course of life, you will find some fellow saying, “Well, I have to go get operated on?”

Christian Science goes to such a degree that it says nobody ever needs to be operated on. This is rather an extreme thing, but it very well may be attainable. It may be attainable through science, MEST and working the thing over, but it is an extreme. Without the bridge built to that fact, it is foolish.

Let’s say an individual makes a mistake. The command post made a mistake: it said, “Run down that slope?” and the organism ran down the slope and fell and broke its leg. The fellow realizes he was wrong; one of the first things he will say is “I was wrong” That is one of the last things he should say. If he were not badly enturbulated, if his command post were not already at odds with the rest of the body, he wouldn’t say “Run down the slope and break your leg” he wouldn’t say “Go ahead and ride with Charlie even though he’s drunk” He just wouldn’t do these things.

So there is a terrific amount of misguided social activity that goes on which is terrifically inhibitive to the society itself and to the people it is done to. It is unnecessary. If you started living on a more honest basis than the existing social code, you would find it would work out much more kindly.

But in this case, with Effort Processing, what you do is knock out the effort of the command post which is holding the engrams in present time. This is exactly the same operation as the general who is continually ordering field punishment for his troops. The command post says, “So, you’re going to hurt”; it goes down, picks up an engram and says, “Now you can really hurt” A general who does too much of that always gets a mutiny. But it is a weapon. It is the use of the death facsimile, if you want to be plain about it. It is the use of the pain facsimile to procure the obedience of the organism.

There is no quicker method of subduing an old command post which has suddenly become active than by dropping a pain facsimile on it, reminding it of the time it failed.” You used to be a general, but you’re just a lieutenant now. You don’t believe it? Well, here’s the last time you fell over the kitchen stove?” Simple and effective.

However, if you rehabilitate equanimity amongst the troops, there isn’t any reason to empty the locker box of all the old whips — no particular reason. And as a matter of fact, I don’t believe you can; there are that many whips. But you can get the self-determinism on the first time the fellow ever agreed to use pain facsimiles on himself or others. The first time he agreed upon or decided to use pain facsimiles on himself or others — get that effort out of the case. You will find yourself sailing a long way back on the time track.

Very interesting results accrue from finding that. But it is the button within the button within the button within the button. It is the first time of agreement, and it is a long way back.

So it is not necessary to clean up every pain facsimile, but it is necessary to clean up the times one decided to use them.

We have reached a stage in the evolution of the organism where it is possible, at least as a test, to trust the computing power of the human mind and to trust its use of ARC within itself. The test would be reached at a level and would thereafter possibly continue by leaps, fits and starts through the race for a little while, and then would eventually settle down to be the usual thing — if the organism has arrived at a point where it doesn’t need to evolve any further, because we are sticking a log straight across evolution itself when we do this.

According to the epicenter theory, the way a new form and a new command post is evolved is by picking the common denominator of all the centers of all the counter-efforts of a generation, and this makes a new command post for the new generation. That is the way it is done. But now, all of a sudden, in one generation you are going to pick up all these counterefforts and you are going to interrupt the organism in its evolution. Man never will get to a point where he has two heads.

Fortunately, there isn’t even much chance of picking up all those counter-efforts. But there is a definite chance of picking up the determination to use them and the physical effort to use them. You pick up these things and you will find the race getting so much better that the race can start to operate itself as an enormous organism in cooperation with itself, to the consequent conquest of the entire physical universe.

Now, the third therapy method is to reduce all entheta facsimiles — all there are on the track, all that can be found, from successive command center to command center. Anybody who wants to start on this had better start right now and work constantly for the next couple of years, because that is about how long it would take, just to get the efforts out.

We can reduce a tonsillectomy now in probably twenty minutes. We can reduce a birth in fifteen minutes or half an hour or something like that. But at this rate of reduction, going right straight down the track, getting full reality, doing a nice job of efficient auditing and everything else, if you were to take that back to the beginning of time and get the first photon and proceed on forward from there, reducing all of them, you would really have a job on your hands.

What we have is a shortcut way to do this. What we were trying to do in earlier methods of processing was exhaust all the entheta facsimiles in one lifetime, and we could succeed in doing this fairly well as long as we only addressed one lifetime. But on Effort Processing if you can keep the preclear in one lifetime you are pretty good. Write me a letter and tell me how you did it if you succeeded, because you would be pretty good. Preclears run on this go flying off down the track like they were shot from guns.

Now, these old epicenters will give trouble, and it may be necessary sometimes for you to run all the engrams out of one particular epicenter. That is not too hard on just one epicenter, such as the epicenter in the middle of the tongue, or maybe the epicenter in the middle of the middle of the middle of the middle of the tongue, or something like that. It isn’t too hard to run out just one lifetime out of one epicenter, or maybe ten lifetimes out of one epicenter. You might have to do this to deintensify the thing sufficiently, because it might have gotten whipped around to a point in this life where the basic on all of its engram chains, way back in the old epicenter, got keyed in. The doctor carved around on the fellow or he has too many automobile accidents that hit him in one place too often, and the next thing you know, he has a whole series of engrams right on that epicenter in restimulation.

In fact, the loss of authority of the central command post in the body is attended by the usurpation of authority by old control centers — old epicenters. That is one of the ways the command post loses its authority. All of a sudden an old epicenter gets hurt too bad, you get hurt too much, and the command post tries to impose an engram upon it to get it into line. That just restimulates it more and it kicks back against the command post more, and the command post says, “Get into line?” and restimulates another engram on it, until all of a sudden there is a terrific ball-up and about the only thing you can do is clean up the old epicenter. This is quite important to processing if you are going on a long-term basis.

There are people walking around who are thinking with old epicenters instead of their command posts. If you know any preclear who has, for instance, a?” hollow head?” it isn’t because somebody hollowed his head out, it is because he has drifted down the line on epicenters until he is probably thinking with the epicenter on top of the roof of his mouth or he is thinking with the epicenter at the hinge of his jaw. It is very common for the epicenters back there to be active; they are fairly late on the track in evolution.

You can watch people’s behavior and personalities and behavior patterns, and you can practically call your shots on what epicenter they are working on. That is interesting.

Every time you have a command post which is not in command of the organism you have trouble with the individual and the organism. It is very interesting that an individual’s command post projects its activity to control the organism into an effort to control the environment. Instead of turning to the organism and facing down the mutiny, it tries to control the environment instead before it controls its own organism.

Therefore, a command post which is having a lot of trouble with the troops is being destructive to its environment because the environment has been destructive to it, and it completely misses the first dynamic, mostly because it is so very fashionable in this society to be all cockeyed on the first dynamic — to be crazy: “Oh, I do the craziest things, I’m so proud of me?”

The amount of dignity available in the society, if collected all together and put in a thimble, would be easily and quickly lost. There is a lot of pomposity, but very little dignity. We don’t think much of an Indian, for instance, who walks around and says, “Me very great man. Big, big hunter” He tells you all about it.

People look at this healthy, strapping, sunburnt fellow and say, “Conceited ass?”

This code of conduct that we cling to is one of the most destructive things we could possibly have: self-negation. Do you know where the bottom rung of this code of conduct is? In a sick, lame, halt and blind society like China: “This unworthy person says to your magnificent and wonderful self . . ?”

Japan, one of the politest societies on earth, is full of people who can’t see; “What chart? What wall?” is the general rule. They did find a lot of men to be pilots. We didn’t think they could before the war, but they did.

Go around Nagasaki, and practically everybody in Nagasaki is wearing a filthy rag gauze across the front of his nose in order to keep off the germs. Of course, the rag contains more germs than there are in the air, but that is beside the point. He wears this thing to keep off the germs. The people are sick with eye infections, rickets, disease and more disease. They are sick people. And one of their most common social expressions means “I withhold my foul breath from your face”

Self-negation results in illness because one continues to postulate his nonexistence, and he keeps getting caught in these postulates — these conclusions of nonexistence — day after day, week after week, and he gets sicker and sicker and crazier and crazier. This happened in Japan, and one day they all jumped up and said, “Now, we’ve thought this over carefully, and we have a wonderful idea — a good idea. Let’s all go over and attack Pearl Harbor” And look at them now. It just wasn’t smart.

You get somebody around in an operation that you are connected with who is doing a lot of self-negation — he probably looks pretty sick — and one day he will say, “Let me see. I’ve thought this over carefully” (probably with the epicenter on the tip of his ear), “and I’ve come to the conclusion that I should write the local newspaper and tell them everything that’s wrong with this operation” The next thing you know, everybody is saying, “It’s tough the way your organisation is in such horrible shape” when it is actually running like a well-oiled clock.

It is just not safe, that’s all, to have that person around. But it is a choice between that sort of thing and restoring a person’s self-determinism.

Now, sometimes characters aren’t available; you can’t lay your paws on them so that you can return their self-determinism to them, and say, “Now listen, we’re going to cure you up of several of these items” and so on. You might do it under duress at first, as you will do with most psychotics, but the fellow could snap out of it — he actually could.

Sometimes it takes an exterior force to straighten up an army. Belisariusl arrived one time when Justinian was besieged in Constantinople by his own people. Belisarius arrived with a couple of hundred sailors, and there was nothing like a couple of hundred well- organized, policed sailors to restore order to that city.

It is possible, then, for psychosis to be treated, in your initial step, as an emergency proposition, just exactly as you would treat an army which had turned into a mutinous rabble. But this doesn’t say that you should keep the army in the status of mutiny, or that you should kill off 50 percent of the troops, or that you should shoot the general in command of it. These are unwarranted assumptions.

But an emergency action is sometimes possible, and you auditors in treatment of psychosis know to your sorrow that a psychotic is pretty hard to handle. There are a lot of people walking around, by the way, who are hard to handle too, who aren’t carrying the label. And you will find out that they can raise mischief with you and your preclears

For instance, some girl has a husband who says to her every time she comes home from a session, “Yeah, that stuff’s a lot of bunk. You don’t look any better. Yeah, so you thought it did you some good last time” That was the main reason a fast technique was necessary — so you could jump your preclear’s self-determinism up the tone scale fairly rapidly, so that he could go home and when somebody said, “My, you look terrible” he would say, “What cat drug you in, bud?”

Now, the first formula which you use to put together Straightwire on self-determinism is on the basis of start and stop, a simple motion formula.”When have you tried to start yourself and stop yourself?” — not doing anything — you just ask, “When have you tried to start yourself and stop yourself?”

Then you can start assigning various odds and ends of actions to it — eating and sleeping and so on, all the common actions: “When have you tried to start and stop . . . ?”

This is Straightwire, you understand, or kind of running on the track a little bit, picking up this and that, with “Feel your agreement about it” occasionally, and “Feel this or that?” You are running start and stop on the first dynamic.

Then, go over into this other formula, the one in Axiom 20: Lambda creates, conserves, maintains, acquires, destroys, changes, occupies, groups and disperses MEST. You can apply all those things and say “The command post creates, conserves, maintains, acquires, destroys, changes, occupies, groups and disperses its own organism” That is a formula about the organism itself.

You want to know the conclusions. If you want to pick up reality here or there on the case, a little higher or a little faster, get the moments when he is being forced toward a static and is still disagreeing with it — those instants — and you will blow him up into ARC on the subject. For instance, somebody is telling him, “You shouldn’t eat candy” “Why not?” “Well, it is bad for you; it’ll rot your teeth?” “Well, why? I like candy?” “Well, you can’t have any more candy?” And you just get a sort of a sullen disagreement on the thing.

That has approached a static, but the person hasn’t accepted it. Sometimes you will discover a static by getting one of those lighter moments where the person is still disagreeing, and making him feel that disagreement. He will come up the tone scale on that one subject and get a little more free theta on the case; he frees up another facsimile and the next thing you know, you can get the more basic moments.

You will find moments when the organism is disobeying itself to be occluded, ordinarily — pretty well occluded. When it is trying to start and stop itself, you will find an enormous number of postulates.

You call those things postulates — what the command post said. You could call them general orders or orders of the day or anything else, but call them a postulate just for a good code word; they are start and stop. You will find the fellow has stopped himself on the time track and started himself elsewhere on the time track and changed himself on the time track and so forth, and this basically is all there was to it.

So when you have gotten the first dynamic out of the road, and when you are thoroughly convinced that you have accomplished tone 40.0 — when you have gotten that all squared away with this one individual and he is all straightened up on the first dynamic (“You mustn’t think about yourself in this society” ; that is mainly what is wrong with it) — then you start in on the opposite sex, sex and children, the second dynamic. When you have gotten that all swamped up with this same formula, you start on the third dynamic and you start handling other people in the environment.

Occasionally as you are processing the individual on the first dynamic you will find that he has a tendency to pick up stuff on the other dynamics. Don’t stop him from picking this up, but get him back on that first dynamic.

Let’s get the army in shape, in good shape, all battalions marshaled, logistics cared for and supply lines open, perceptions good, signal corps operating in beautiful condition, armor repaired and ready to roar, and then. declare war along the lines of the dynamics.

The whole human race, as individuals today, has done the same thing as the Rough Riders did. The Rough Riders were in beautiful shape. They went down to Cuba without any horses — they were trained to ride horses, but that was beside the point — and they were given orders to attack and take San Juan Hill. In the process, they posted orders that said, “At 4:30 A.M. we jump off for the crest on San Juan Hill” The Rough Riders got up at 3:00 A.M. and grabbed some hardtack or bully beef or something of the sort, but they hadn’t taken the point from which they were to jump off. The name of that hill was El Caney. And nearly all the casualties suffered in the famous “Attack on San Juan Hill” were suffered in the attack on El Caney, trying to get a point from which to jump off to attack San Juan Hill.

I have always kept that rather interestedly in mind as about the primary error a fellow can make when he is trying to take an objective: to say you are going to jump off from someplace and not be there yet.

It looks to me, in Dianetics and in the human race, as if people do an awful lot of jumping off for the third and fourth and fifth dynamics without taking the first one, because only when you have taken the first one can you jump off for any place else. You are right there. You don’t have to go afield to find trouble.

Now, it should not take us as a crew very long to clean up the first dynamic. We have the tools now. If you manage to misunderstand them you are pretty badly off. It shouldn’t take you very long to take the first dynamic, and then we can go out on an all-out cavalry charge for the second, and on down the line.