Okay, this is December the 13th, second afternoon lecture. I want to talk about the — about knowingness.

Knowingness is, of course, a remarkable thing when one considers that in English, its synonym [homonym] is "no-ing-ness." Of course, no one would ever try to fool people by making these two words the same word!

But do you know that that single fact alone is the biggest hurdle on the track as far as a preclear is concerned. He has all of his life been taught that he mustn't "no"; he must "yes." I mean, "noingness and yesingness" there. There — that's the dichotomy he's running.

Now, when we try to instruct anybody, we are going up against his lookingness. Because he's going to try to run back the track, thinkingness in terms of circuits, going up into effort and going up into feeling, going up again into lookingness, and then finally, going into knowingness.

Now, you take somebody who is bogged down, you might say, in energy. He considers that he needs energy to fix an idea. An idea must be a thing — in other words, a symbol. An idea which is cloaked in energy of any kind is actually a symbol. That is the definition of a symbol: it's any idea which is fixed in any space, with energy. An idea which is not fixed in space in energy, but is merely fixed in space — understand, it's not fixed in space and energy, but is simply fixed in space — is simply an idea; it is not a symbol. And it is essentially very fluid. It is easily shifted and changed.

An individual who has cloaked his postulates in a great deal of energy has made them, to some degree, immobile. And if he himself has thereafter chosen out energy for his randomity, then his postulates do not release; because all of his postulates are cloaked in something which he dare not touch, which is energy.

Now let's take up the problem of perception. Just completely aside from taking up responsibility and the other things which go along with this, because they all go along with the same thing, let's take up this thing called perception.

Perception as you understand it, and as done by the mest body, and perception as it is in this universe, uniformly is a flow of particles and is done by a flow of particles.

Thus, if an individual is avoiding force, if an individual is afraid of force, if an individual has eschewed effort, he of course has eschewed at the same time lookingness. He has become afraid of a particle. He's afraid of being hit.

He sets up many things as fixed ideas in space. And then to make sure they stay there and something else doesn't bother them, he begins to cloak them in energy to make other things unable to touch them. And he himself becomes able — unable to touch them by becoming afraid of particles. And thus we get the first entrance into "resist all effects," which we covered very, very early in this course.

"Resisting effects" and "being afraid of energy" would thereby be rather synonymous: "being afraid of force" and "resisting all effects."

Now, you actually can, after a preclear has been exteriorized, bring him up with SOP 8 - C rather rapidly into a point where he will handle force, and then get to a point where he doesn't have to handle force — where he can know without perceiving.

But you'd have to take him up through perception. And if you take him up through perception without trying at once to take him up through force, you're liable to fail. Because he is not going to go up against any particles, because he's too afraid of being hit. All right.

Trying to get an individual to take responsibility, trying to get him up to a point where he does — where he can be ethical, is trying to make an individual go over a track which leads through force, energy. Now, that's a very sad thing. Because you try to teach somebody the whole span of Scientology, and it's actually an enforced sort of lookingness to teach him about it.

The easy and kindest way to go about it would simply be to clear him, just like that, you see, and then train him. That would be the easiest way to do it. That way is not practical.

It is better if individuals, as a group, can go through the data on the way up, because they will never, never, never understand anybody afterwards who is bogged down. And you've just created somebody who is up there without any experience of getting there.

You'll do that with preclears. And those preclears will, because they don't understand the universe . . . You've cleared them up, they're in fine shape, they'll remain stable and all of that. They're not sick. You've taught them a few tricks like fixing up their body and about this and about that, but they have no basic understanding of it. They don't know what space is, they don't know what an evolution on the track is, they don't know anything about what we've called the "God trick" (you know, you tell somebody his mock-up disappeared "because God's against him" and so forth), and you've merely set up for him to fall into, again, all of the mysteries which he's already fallen into.

Of course, you've probably put him on the track and made him good for the next five or six million years, and that's good enough. But the point I'm making is, to get an enduring state, you've got to get a state which goes up there with knowingness.

So therefore, it's actually not kind to do it fast. Although it's harder to take an individual up and instruct him on where he's going — although it's harder to do that, although it takes longer for the individual to get there than you just as an auditor sitting down, and somebody who knows nothing about it will therefore put up no barriers to you, you just simply put him through the paces and he is stable. It's not kind. And the chances are, after he's up there, he won't listen. That's right, he's perfectly relaxed about things. You can't get an Operating Thetan worried about straightening out the affairs of this world or anything like it. He — merely amused. You take individuals up there who — show them how far south people are and so forth, after that they'll be able to do something for people.

So if you were to just make somebody happy, it'd be a very simple thing. All you'd do would just be to clear him, and that would be that.

If you're going to start any kind of a spreading, like a — rings, like a rock dropped in a pool that's going to go out, out, out, out, out, you're going to have to take people through the works. And those who have been through the works on it, they'll know where they've gotten to.

But in the first moments of training, one should give out very basic terminology, and should define these things very closely.

Every once in a while, there's somebody out in the field sounds off, says I change my mind all the time, I change my data all the time. You know, I often ask myself, how would they know? How would they know?

Since, if you were to get people saying that and ask them specifically what some of these things were that have been asked of you the last day or so, they wouldn't be able to answer anywhere near as well as you were. They wouldn't — not even vaguely.

You'd say, "What's the definition of this and the definition of that?" They'd just be standing there — they wouldn't know anything about it. So how would they be qualified to say that I was changing my mind? You see, they wouldn't know whether I was or not. And actually, there hasn't been any large change of mind throughout these three years. What there's been is a consistent and steady plow forward on this problem called existence.

The only considerations which have shifted, in the main, have been redefinitions of things — several things have been more clearly understood and have become refined. Amongst those is the word good. "Man is basically good." Yes, he's basically good. How much do we have to say about that, though, to make it a comprehensible statement? We have to realize that a man has to be unafraid to be good. Well, how does a man have to be unafraid? Well, he has to be up to a point where he can know without using space, to be totally unafraid — know without using space or particles — and that would be a serenity and an absence of fear which is unimaginably high. It's not necessarily true that man has to have action to be interested, for instance.

But if you were to — merely to get an individual up above the level where he could handle particles and create space, if you'll just get him just that little notch above that, you would find that your individual had the patience and tolerance to be just.

I'd recommend to you a very, very simple but a very great book which has been completely overlooked by this society, and that's Hendrik Van Loon's book Tolerance. A marvelous book. It just sort of appeared and perished on the stands. It's still available. It's been out many, many, many years. But his Story of Mankind became famous, and other things became famous, and this little book Tolerance was sort of lost. But it is a great book. If Van Loon ever wrote anything that was great — he's dead now — it was this book Tolerance. And the rest of it is rather childish compared to it, to tell you the truth. And his bestseller of all of these books, his last bestseller on the arts, was amongst the poorer books written, and yet it just sold madly in all directions.

This book Tolerance is well worth reading — well worth reading to you as an auditor. It has a greater sensitivity on the subject than any other similar work in English.

Now, to be tolerant — he doesn't say in that book what a man would really have to be, to be tolerant. The truth of the matter is that tolerance is mainly, by men, confused with apathy: "They don't care what is going to happen," that would be tolerance. No, tolerance would be something else. A great tolerance would depend also upon a great courage — one had the patience to be tolerant because he did not think that he himself or his works or beingness was going to be destroyed any moment.

You take any being and convince him that he, at any moment, cannot predict what is going to happen in the next moment, and he then will become so afraid, that he will be tolerant of nothing. He will become a rabid fiend on many subjects.

Way, way, way up above this, we get individuals choosing sides so that they can have a game. That's quite a remarkable difference between people being rabid on subjects.

Man, for instance, is suspicious with some reason, against people who wish to reform him. Because ordinarily these people who wish to reform him are merely trying to protect themselves against him — from him.

The early West, for instance, was a very, very bold, big society — they had an awful lot of space. Of course, a lot of the people who came into the early West were themselves incapable of survival in the society they had left. But many of them went west simply to get some more space and get a place they could breathe.

People of the frame of mind of somebody who moves into Texas and establishes a homestead and there — moves because somebody had moved so close to him that he could see the smoke from the fellow's chimney on clear days. That was too close. Neighborhood getting too crowded, so he went west.

Well now, these men had a form of justice of their own which was brought into being later on, and when I say "later on" in Western periods, I'm talking about 1835, 1845 on. You see, there was an awful lot of "West" in the United States that nobody ever really looks at, and that includes all of the seventeenth and all of the eighteenth century, and half of the nineteenth century. All that is overlooked as "West." It's always been West. Two hundred and fifty years of it, before we first got Samuel Colt's little equalizer.

Now, at this stage — the equalizer, called by various names at various periods when different models came out — men could deal out their own justice. And we have this appeal so strong that the movies today play practically nothing, if they want box office, but Western stories. They're dealing in self-administered justice — the fellow who was fastest on the draw and so on.

Well, the West went by the boards, according to the old-timers, in the day when the reformers came. And the reformers came only for one reason, and that was to feast on the West. They came in and stopped all gunplay and made everybody hang up his gun belts in each successive area approached, so that they could set up an orderly method of extracting the taxes. And that's what it amounted to.

The society degraded, actually degraded very, very markedly, because the men who were there at the beginning didn't care much about their own personal survival. They had no real thought about surviving; they merely were going to go as long and as fast and as colorfully as possible, and then hope that they died quick when the end came, and they did.

And then the reformer came, and after that and ever since, they've been dying slow with their boots off with everybody standing around being beautifully sad. And that is a fate I could hardly wish on anyone. But the reformer and the decay of the West were synonymous.

Men who reform ordinarily try to bring about this reformation solely and only out of their own fear.

An auditor who audits preclears merely because he is afraid of people and afraid of what people will do, will consistently fail and will continually be restimulated. He cannot go forward in life being afraid of people and trying to change them so that they are less fearsome to him, and audit; for the good reason that a good job of auditing done by him makes those people more fearsome. They become more ferocious. They go through periods of — go on up, they get way up Tone Scale to 1.5. They snap and snarl, they become antagonistic, they start to push around. And an auditor watching this who is afraid, of course cannot help but make a slight mistake. Give them a few things that they can't do, upset them one way or the other.

For instance, I took one preclear I had not too long ago, I didn't do him any real harm, but he was doing this — he didn't know this, but he was doing this to preclears. I never told him that he was doing this to preclears, but he would bring them up so long and he'd stop them. So I took him and snapped him out of his head and gave him a completely impossible task — just without any gradient scale, with nothing. Left him in a bog for about a week and at the end of that time, picked him up and sailed him right on up through it. I really didn't do it as an object lesson. I really didn't do it as a test. But the fact was thereafter reflected in his auditing. He didn't suddenly give people things they couldn't do, because he had enough experience with it to know that he could bog a case.

Now, this didn't necessarily make him a better auditor — it's just thrown in there as an example of what you can do to somebody. You can just give him something that's impossible, you can bog him and so forth.

Well, you as an auditor, with any command of the subject at all, can actually send people down as fast as you can send them up. It's no difficulty to make some preclear dive or spin. Just sit there and say, "All right. Now, get the idea of reaching for something. All right. Get the idea of reaching for something. Okay. Now get the idea that you must withdraw from it, but can't. You got that firmly? Fine. End of session." (audience laughter)

Now, when an auditor is doing this totally consciously, this is one thing, but auditors will do this unconsciously. In other words, they will do it because they're — they get afraid, and men who are afraid don't think. Deliver me from men who are afraid, because they don't think — they merely react. And there's the first entrance into stimulus-response.

Now, an auditor who really knows what he's doing and really knows his subject, won't make this kind of a mistake.

Now, an individual who's using a — some kind of a rote process that's just going "one, two, three," you know, down the line, so on, who yet has no founding or experience in the rest of the line, can have an interesting thing occur to him. He can find this preclear getting savager and more savage and more disputive and so forth, and he can say, "Well, this isn't doing him any good at all!" And turn him around and make him run a good, solid, big electronic — "That's probably what we ought to be doing, running an electronic."

And that's why once I had taught people how to run engrams out of people, I couldn't make an awful lot of people stop. Because you can run those things in such a way as to really make somebody calm — you can throw them right into apathy.

You run it through once, and then get at the start of it again, with it nicely in restimulation, and then dust your hands. Run it through twice — take a good heavy one like Fac One, you see, and run it through twice — and then go on off to adjusting some locks about their mother or something, see? Oh, boy. Wow, you can ruin people. You can really fix up people so you don't have to be afraid of them anymore. They won't move.

Now, there are other ways to do it, too. You can do it with a club. That's the way the police do. The police are afraid. If you don't think cops are afraid, I invite you sometime to go into a detective bureau sometime on some pretext or another — they are afraid.

They get afraid to a point where their eyes are rather — well, your eyes express this "must withdraw from but I'm going to beat them up anyway" sort of an expression. They go around wondering about what they should put into their black gloves in the way of lead reinforcers and so forth. You see, I know cops, I'm not giving you the television version of a police officer. But of course, these people have a perfect right to be afraid because they're dealing with criminals, and the criminal in this insanity-ridden society is normally insane. You walk up to one (see, this is just a question of prediction) — you walk up to one of these boys and you're going to merely tell him to move along — he draws a gun and drops you, just like that.

The mayor's car is parked at the curb, and one of them gets in it and starts to drive off madly through traffic and runs across two traffic patrolmen en route to the nearest final wreck. These men are dealing all the time with insanity, with no understanding of insanity. And there, the prediction factor is so great in its disfavor — that is, the unprediction factor is so great — that they just go around, finally, in a state of "Well, anything can happen." Only, "We've got to do something about it," is the compulsion.

Now, a lot of other people get into a condition of "Well, anything can happen," but we — they don't think they have to do something about it. But you take a police officer, he's being paid to do something about a situation wherein anything can happen all the time — and he goes down scale.

Now, how do you make somebody afraid? You make somebody afraid by unprediction. This is the whole subject of it. This is the way you make him get away from force, this is the way you make him throw away responsibility — because in essence, this is the only way you can make him wrong.

He's figured out the situation one way, and it comes out another. He can't predict. And you show him consistently he can't predict.

Now, a man is a terribly hard brute to best or beat down. You would be amazed how tough he is! It takes sixteen years of school and family, it takes sometimes military unit training, and sometimes add to that fifteen or twenty years of prison, and just then the fellow starts to show some slightest signs of being amenable to society.

Now, people have watched this continually. They don't realize that the fellow starts out in a fine state of unresponsibility, and then he gets all of these other unresponsibilities on top of it, and the next thing you know, he just keyed in across the boards.

The last thing — the best way in the world to key in anybody is to put him in jail. That's a wonderful way: Fix him in space as an idea that he is no good. Then you've fixed him in space, you see — the idea he's no good.

And, I mean — what would you do to ruin society? You would invent a thing called jail, so that no man would take any responsibility for the society — no man would.

A criminal is only criminal because he has no responsibility for the rest of the society and has been thrown out of it. Any preclear has to some degree this same feeling. He feels he's been sort of cast out from the rest of society, mostly because he doesn't feel he can be effective in it, that he's of no great benefit to anybody and so on. But that's all significance.

Now, let's get into the basic cause behind the significance, and we find out the individual has been made incapable of using force. If he is made incapable of using force, then he — first, he can't have space; second, he can't perceive.

He can't have space because he can't keep two terminals apart. He can't perceive because he can't tolerate the contact of a photon.

His postulates won't blow. If he says, "I'm no good," then he's no good. His postulates won't blow, won't explode, won't release, nothing will happen to them because everything that he sets up is immediately attacked from all sides by the energy which has been set up prior to that.

He is an endless mass of these automaticities, which counterattack one to another until he's so confused he doesn't know what he is doing. And this total of confusion is unconfused only — now get this — only by using things which make it possible for him to achieve greater force, greater effort. And if you neglect greater force and greater effort, and wonder at the same time why your preclear's perceptions aren't turning on, then you're being very foolish — because perception is essentially force.

Now, where do we enter a case to remedy some of these situations? Well, you'll find out Step I, as light as it is — Step Ia, as light as it is — doesn't bring any great amount of certainty to some preclears.

Now, let's just — just look what I've been saying here about force and about effort and so on. This man is so afraid of force that every time he puts up, in any direction, saying "over there," he gets a tremendous uncertainty. He doesn't have any space.

If you ask him to do this with his eyes shut — his tremendous dependence upon his body, you see — you ask him to do this with his eyes shut, he gets an entirely different reaction than with his eyes open. If you drill him with his eyes open on these steps, he doesn't get better very much faster. The effectiveness of the technique is very slow, because you're validating the body — he's using body perception. You ask him to close his eyes and look around and see what he sees. He doesn't exteriorize, you see; however, if he does exteriorize without perception, same thing.

Now, what he really knows at that point, of course, is in excess to what he's perceiving, otherwise he would not even vaguely be sane. He doesn't only know what he can perceive.

But, he closes his eyes and it's all black or it's drifty white or something of the sort, and you say, "All right, tell me three places where you are not." He'll tell you, glibly enough, "Boston; Washington, DC; Savannah." He's not in these places. Why is he not? He can look around the room and see that he is in a room which he has been told is in your town as an auditor. He doesn't know this for certain. He doesn't even vaguely know it for certain that he's not in Washington.

Now, you're trying to fish up some certainty, and as I've said many times, his certainty is dependent upon this singular fact: that he has less — he has no way to gauge how certain he is, because he is only one pole, the way he's operating. So if he's only one pole and he's trying to get how certain he is, then it's in ratio to how certain he is, you see. Now, this is pretty weak.

And you say, "Yes, are you certain?" Well, that's just a symbol and it carries no great weight of meaning. He's as certain of that as he is of anything else, but he isn't certain of anything. If you asked him real closely, he wouldn't be certain of a darn thing.

So he says, "Yeah — no, no, I'm not in Washington. I'm not here, I'm not there."

And you say, "Well, now close your eyes — close your eyes. Now tell me the same thing — tell me where you aren't."

You get an entirely different reaction. He'll say, "Mmmm."

You've given him a new certainty — a reverse certainty. In many of these cases, he'll close his eyes, and when you really start plowing him toward certainty of location, he can't tell you for sure what room he's in. There is nothing to tell him. You see, there's nothing in the body that will tell him. And yet this person can be perfectly sane. You understand? You're not looking at somebody who's crazy. You just tell him to close his eyes, and he's lost in this blackness. And here's this blackness, and now you say, "Well, give me three towns that you're not in." Well, that blackness is engrams that have gotten restimulated in Washington, in Boston, in Savannah — it — part of them say "this is Savannah"; part of them say "this is Boston."

Another thing may happen: You say — he says, "I'm not in Boston," and he's got a picture of himself in Boston. That's funny. You see, he says, "I'm not in Louisiana"; he's got a picture of himself in Louisiana. So right after he said this to you with such certainty, an enormous doubt came over him. He never told you about the doubt. He just told you a certainty remark, and you — but you'll notice him gradually getting more bogged down. He'll get less and less certain of things in general.

Well, you want to inquire for those — for automaticities. That's just an automaticity. Now, how do you handle that? You put him across the room, and then quick before anything else can, have him put his body there. Or if anything else puts his body there, have him put his body there too. You understand this? All these sudden perceptions and so forth, all they boil down to is how to handle an automaticity, and we've covered that.

And the way you handle one is, anything that occurs, you make him do it, and then duplicate it and duplicate it and duplicate it, and this phenomenon will kick out.

Well, that's one of the things that happens when you ask him to do this. But if a person's going to do this, actually you're entering the case too high. This case has to have a lower level of entrance.

Now, a lower level of entrance is "Where isn't your body at this moment?" That's a lower level of entrance.

But what do you know, you'll run into a lot of preclears who put on a very, very good presence to you who won't be certain of that either. They'll say, "Well, it's not across the room." To themselves privately they say, "I guess."

Now, so there again, you've entered the case too high. Now, let's get lower than this. And believe me, we can go way deep on this one. We have to start getting into significance in order to reach this fellow at all, because everything has a reason and everything is significant. So we get this low on it — this isn't as low as you can get either, but — "All right. Where isn't your body?" And this is really a wonderful button to run on a case that has black perception or unwieldy perception, is "Where isn't your body being responsible at this moment?"

Now, this is very weird. Because this case wouldn't get out of his body, because then he wouldn't be able to have something to blame, which is the body. If he's got black perception and you start to run Step I on him, and you would — the guy's got black perception, you see, and you just go right ahead and run Step Ia — doesn't matter. But you have to use this judgment on it: You have to enter it at the level where he's actually certain. And you'll get this certainty because his face will suddenly become relaxed and he will be wreathed in smiles before he's done very much of this. You'll hit it at a laugh. You'll line charge it when you hit this level where you should be hitting it. And so we'll go down into that one. That's the first entrance into significance that you should have anything to do with.

"Where isn't your body being responsible at this moment?" That's the first thing you would ask him. After you've asked him a couple of these other things, or you simply asked him — you've said, "Be three feet back of your head," he wasn't; you say, "Well, take a look around — shut your eyes and take a look around."

And he says, "I can't see anything." They'll always say this. You could kick a preclear every time he says it. "I can't see anything," he says.

Yes, he can. He's looking at blackness or whiteness or something, but he's just overlooking that too, you see. And you make him look just to the degree of just insisting that he can see something while he has his eyes shut, and he'll eventually break down and give you, "Well, I see this shifting pattern of dots."

Well, don't do anything more about it than that. You can handle it as an automaticity, but it'll take an awful lot of your time. Because his basic problem is, is that he doesn't dare be responsible; he can't handle or face energy, and therefore he can't look. And if he can't look, therefore, he can't know. So, let's just enter it in at the level which you can enter it in.

Now, a lot of fellows, you just keep on hitting it, "Three places where you aren't in present time," he'll hit some terrific outspread area — "I'm not on Saturn. I'm not in the next galaxy," see — I mean, he'll come in. This'll work out. You could work it out either way, but it's slower. Now, let's get a faster way to do it.

And this fellow says, "I. . ." He can't be three feet back of his head. You just ask him, "What can't you — what are you looking at?" and you finally get out of him the fact he's looking at blackness or something.

He very often, by the way, can't get out of his head, and you say, "Close your eyes and tell me what you see."

He'll sit there for a moment, "Only see you."

Well, this is all right. I mean, the fellow's looking around the room. Then you just go right ahead and run the technique just as stated, see?

But he's got this peculiar problem of blackness or something — he can't see, and this is his main trouble. If you were to go immediately and skip all further nuances into this one, you'd be playing it safe: "Where isn't your body being responsible at this moment?" And you just connect those two things. "Give me three places where your body isn't being responsible now." Oh, he can tell you that. That's got some significance to it — it's less than position.

Now, there's something else that comes in there: He says, as he looks — he finally tells you, "I have this continuous pressure across my eyes." You say, "Give me three places where you don't have that pressure. Three places somewhere in this universe where that pressure isn't at this moment."

You could expect, by the way, to go on for quite a while with that. You could have to ask him this in present time and past, and then in future, and it might take you about five hours of auditing, but you would get rid of his chronic somatic. You could say, "Where isn't the chronic somatic?" — present, past, and future — and it'd take you about five hours, but you'd sure as the devil be rid of the bulk of it by the end of that time. You'd run through all kinds of things in the case too.

That's a — by the way, a side method of relieving a chronic somatic — a very good one, rather than try to run it out or something of the sort, to take the pressure off the case, to change the case around. Or this case that has this automaticity that he keeps talking to you about, and after hours and hours of auditing, he's still got this automaticity. Well, you could have gotten by that simply by recognizing the case was low on force, and all you had to ask him was, "Well, give me three places in the universe where that automaticity isn't. Three more. Three more. Three more. Three more." He'll eventually encounter this interesting one: He'll find out that if he looks straight ahead at these places, he puts the automaticity in them, and then can give you the place on either side where it is not. That, too, is a point of certainty. You get this?

He's actually creating it. Any direction he looks, it's there. This you should recognize as a rather interesting condition. It's just an automaticity. So you've got another method of getting rid of one of these superpowerful automaticities that just has the fellow swamped all the time. Just "Give me three places in the universe where it isn't." You use Step Ia on the automaticity. You got that?

There's a case level entrance which is lower than "Where isn't your body being responsible?" See, how far south can we go here? "Where isn't your body being responsible?" He gives you that and he gives you that and he gives you that and he gives you that and he gives you that and he gives you that, and there's — doesn't seem to be very much happening in this case. Don't follow it down.

Let's find out what he's looking at, let's find out what's worrying him. There's something sitting on his mind, something visible, something he can feel — "Give me three places in the universe where it isn't." Because there's where his attention is fixed.

Now do you see what we're doing with Step Ia?

Male voice: Mm-hm.

His attention's fixed on something; he can't get his attention off of it because it's going to bite him. Well, the final resort for you as an auditor, in handling it, is getting his attention off of it. But what's his attention on?

Well, maybe his attention is merely being dispersed all over the universe as far as you can tell. He can't fix his attention on anything. This is the main thing that you're worried with and so on. Same thing, only you don't give it a tricky, "Where is your attention dispersed? Give me three places in the universe where your attention is dispersed." You can get that case on "Three places where you aren't thinking," is one of the lighter ways of going it. "Give me three places where you aren't thinking." That actually is in that step just so it'll never be overlooked by an auditor, because that is a very light case entrance — is "Where aren't you thinking? Give me three places in present time where you aren't thinking."

Now, an auditor before he's been too cleared himself, is liable to say present time, and then past time, and skip the future. He's just liable never to ask about it.

What's the lightest case entrance into the future? Well, the lightest case entrance into the future is getting the fellow real certain about something not being in the past. And what's the lightest entrance into something not being in the past? Something in the present. And the very lightest one I know, off-hand at the moment — that I have used, rather, on a preclear effectively — has been "Where isn't your body being handsome at this moment?"

Now, this has a difficulty — it keeps making him make the postulate that he's not handsome. But it sure makes him feel better. That's true to a girl, too — just where she isn't being handsome. And you'll find out they aren't being handsome all over the place — past, present, future, noplace.

Now, there's a bog spot here that I'd better mention to you. There is a theoretical technique — a theoretical technique which an auditor could get real smart and figure out and start to use, is "Where don't you know something in this universe?" Now, that of course, he would gunshot as knowingness, you see, and that would be very, very . . . He — if he's in present time only in the place he's in, and all other places are in past time, and he doesn't know about any of these other places, by theory he puts up space so that he can limit his own knowingness, so there's something beyond which he doesn't know. An auditor could figure out, "Now, look-a-here, we could just run this on the basis, let's see, 'where he doesn't know.' "An auditor can get really smart on that. "Where doesn't he know in present time?"

It's a killer! I mean, it's a wonderful theory. The only trouble is, it's total significance because it adds a datum in on knowingness. It's trying to loca-tionalize knowingness, and to such a degree is validating for knowingness, space — which makes him "unknow" faster than he will know. And regardless of whether that is plain to you or not, just take it from me that the technique has a level of workability in terms of scores of hours. I don't say it isn't workable, I merely say it's one of the most arduously long, confusing and upsetting techniques which you would ever care to go in for, and will bog a preclear before it will pick him up. Because it makes him make continually this postulate, "I don't know something. I don't know something. I don't know something. I don't know some­thing." See?

"Give me three places where you don't know something in the present." Oh, boy, he can get good certainty on that. And you give him three more and three more and three more and three more, every time he's making the postulate that he doesn't know something. And he will bog before he picks up. So it is — it's a beautiful theory, see, I mean, it's just gorgeous. The only trouble with it is, it depends upon the symbol "know something" rather than the positional location, which doesn't have to be a datum.

So, let's look at that and realize that one could get too smart for himself on this technique. I know, because I already have gotten too smart on the technique, and as a net result, beat a preclear around wondering how long this would continue, because theoretically the thing was perfect. I mean, how do you get a person to know all over the universe? Well, get all the facts where he doesn't know anything in the universe, and it would all add up to the fact that he would eventually know something in the universe — only it doesn't. That's the difference between a tested and a theoretical technique.

So the lightest level that I have entered a case — not the lightest level you could enter a case — is "Where isn't he being handsome at this time?" and just got that enough so that he'd say, "Gee, there is something out there," and then knocked off of it real quick and went on to something much more important — "Where isn't his body being responsible?"

And that one does what it's supposed to do, rather than lay in new postulates. It demonstrates to him he's being carried around by the body, and it has the effect of kind of moving the idea of a body and responsibility all over the universe. And so he's kind of, to some degree, moving this and it does a lot for the case. He snaps right out of — to a marked degree — whatever he's gotten into.

So what level of certainty are you trying to get on this question? Now, remember, you could just start in and ask the fellow brightly, "Be three feet back of your head." He isn't. But you just go on and say, "Well, give me three places where you aren't, present time." He'll give you three. "Three more." Give you three more. "Three more." Give you three more. You haven't got any little yardstick, because there aren't two preclears sitting there, one measuring his certainty against the other one's — you haven't got any yardsticks which will tell you how certain he is except this one: After you've asked the question six or seven times, you don't get a smile and you don't get any relief and you don't get any change in the case — you're just in there too strong, that's all. So let's lighten it up, let's lighten it up.

Where isn't his body? Three places where his body isn't. No sense in adding significance into the thing if you don't have to. Let's get three places in present time where his body isn't. And he gives you three places. And three more. And he gives you three places. And three more. And he gives you three more. And he — you give him, "Three more, three more, three more in present time." And all of a sudden — (sigh) — definite signs of relief.

But if you've given him that many and there's no definite signs of relief, you're just in there too strong. "Well, give me three places in the present time where your body isn't being responsible." And he'll give you three, and he'll give you three more, and he'll give you three more, and he'll give you three more. About that time, he'd say, "Yeah, that's sure true. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah." He's getting in there strong now, so on. That's okay, and then you just go on from there. And then you'd work it back to three places in the past where his body isn't being responsible and three places in the future where it isn't being responsible. Then you'd go around again to three places where his body wasn't in the present, his body wasn't in the past, his body wasn't in the — wouldn't be in the future. And then we work it around to where he isn't in the present, he isn't in the past, he isn't in the future, see. We just have to backtrack the same course that we sunk in on.

But let's make sure that we have a case entrance at this point. Well, we've got to get a change and relief from the case before we consider we have an entrance.

Well, supposing we asked, "Three places, and three places, and three places where the body wasn't being responsible," and we still didn't get any kind of a reaction on the part of the preclear? Well, let's find three places where his body isn't being handsome.

Now, that's a very tricky one, because hardly anybody is here on Earth who thinks he's handsome or pretty. That's — it's a very, very unpopular thought. If anyone does think this very bluntly and continually and consistently, and dwells on it all the time, it's just a manic. He's just running a manic on the thing — it isn't because he thinks so. Because that's the main reason he got here: he didn't think he was beautiful anymore. He thought he'd better go hide, so Earth was as good a place as any, so here he came. And a body is a good thing to hide in.

You know, there was a dog one time, a beautiful chow dog. He was a — oh, a lovely dog, and he lived in the neighborhood. And the summer was coming on, so somebody got ahold of an electric pair of clippers, you know, being humane about the chow, and they clipped his hair off. And that chow went and crawled under a bed in the upstairs bedroom of that house, and he would sneak out at night to get a little water, but otherwise, that dog didn't show his face outside that house — didn't show his face, until his hair had grown again — and boy, that was months! It broke his heart. He knew he was a pretty dog, and then he wasn't a pretty dog anymore, and that was the end of that. And he was much more sedate around other dogs after that, he was much more reserved.

That's all that happened to him. Nobody beat him — I mean, they just cut his hair off. Much more horrible thing to do to some person, to make them ugly, than to simply kill them or beat them. Anybody can understand killing or beating, but beauty is something everybody has considerations about.

So where — three places where he isn't being handsome. Three places where she isn't being handsome at the moment. If you don't watch that one, he's liable to want to beat it to death. He's liable to just chew that one up from one end of the track to the other end of the track.

Well, it's all right if it seems to be doing him a lot of good and he's going in there with enthusiasm in it, why just keep it roaring, if he got noplace on the earlier ones.

Well, you'll have a case that's just busted up for goodness' sakes, because he'll say, "You know . . ." Finally this will leak through his head, see, "Do you know, it might be possible that somebody someplace with his opinion of my handsomeness, might have been in error." That somebody who didn't consider him handsome might have been wrong. And when he hits that place — actually, if you've beaten it to death, when he hits that place, he will just sort of sit and think about it for a while and puzzle over it for a while. You've hit the first level of recognition on this case where somebody else might not have been completely certain. Because he's swamped by the supercertainty of all and the noncertainty of self, which means total other-determinism and practically no self-determinism. And the first place the case may break is at the point where he figures somebody else might have been wrong.

Let's say you were running Viewpoint Processing — just mobs of people being right. Let's take mobs of his mother being right, or mobs of his ex-wife being right, or mobs of her ex-husband being right. And you know, the case will sit there and run it sometimes for two or three hours? I — it's fabulous; I've watched this. They think other people are that right, and they're that wrong. They'll take somebody who has just butchered them, somebody who was utterly no good to them, somebody who ate them up and spitted them out about three times a day and so on, and they will just run thousands of those — that one person, you see, just thousands of mock-ups facing thousands of mock-ups of them — them thinking about each mock-up "how right they are," "how right they are," "how right they are," "how right they are." And it'll just run on and on and on and on and on.

And all of a sudden, they'll come out the other end of that: "Well, you know, there were times when my mother might possibly have been — well, not wrong, you know, but misinformed." So you go on running it from there — "how right they are."

That's right and wrong on Viewpoint Processing; it's quite a technique. The only place where I would use Viewpoint Processing is on questions of rightness or Wrongness of somebody, or on straight-out sweetness and light. And if I did that, I would do it with dots of light — the opinions of other thetans. In other words, I'd run it that far back on the track. "Everybody is so nice and lovable. Everything is so sweet. Everybody must love everybody." Just run that "dots of light," each one with that thought in mind, just mobs of them. And then run this in brackets — mobs and mobs and mobs of thetans thinking this — "The universe is only good, it's only sweet, it's only wonderful. Nobody means anybody any harm."

You know, that's a typical statement on the part of a tiger. I can just imagine some very large and hungry tiger saying to this little deer, "You know, I don't mean you any harm, it's only that I'm hungry." Chomp!

Now, your preclear who is bogging in any way, is bogging on a feeling of force. And he's only bogging on a feeling about force — now get this, because probably won't ever say it again — he's only bogging on force because he believes that everything is sweetness and beauty and light in the part of everybody else's intentions but his, see. That everybody's got to love everybody, and there's got to be a friendly atmosphere — and there's a lot of these, see. But he doesn't dare use force against those factors. And he's so convinced that these are the factors which exist, that he doesn't dare use force. Now, the truth of the matter is, that the best armor in the world is love. That's the truth of the matter. But it's equally true that no weapon has been as thoroughly suborned to the evils of man as this weapon called "love."

And there's hardly anybody in the societies of man today — hardly anybody — who sufficiently understands this word love to do other than use it as a trap. Love is either something a person has been convinced of compulsively by other-determinism, or it's something being used — love and friendship — being used one way or the other as a utility tool.

And now there are levels that are way on up from that and then there is no armor more shining and less dentable than an armor of beauty, faith, trust, love — but boy, you've got to be able to back them up with force! Rrrrowrrh!

Any time when you think that you're perfectly free to use all things or that these things can exist and only these things, in an absence of force, you just might as well go cut your throat quick. Because the end product of that postulate is a strictly cut throat, and complete blindness. Blindness follows. Perception shut off because one can't face force anymore.

You'll find you will never love your neighbors quite so much as the day when you can throw out a hundred-thousand-watt lightning bolt. And you'll think, "Gee, they're nice people." You won't do anything to them. "They're nice people. Everybody's wonderful," so forth. Go down the street picking your teeth with a lightning bolt.

Nothing — there is nothing actually in beauty which can exist without force. There is no painting, no statue in all of man's creations, which exists independently of force. And the most beautiful of them all are those which deal directly with force or above. That's an interesting fact.

Now, if you as a preclear are having a little trouble, you just look it over as a problem of your own, you can undoubtedly put your finger exactly on the moment when you bought entirely, completely, very, very early in your life, how you had to be good because everybody else was so good, and their intentions for you were so good, and you had been wrong about them all. Your mother really did love you, she didn't intend to cut your throat, in spite of the fact that twenty years later she ruined your marriage and did this and did that and did something else to you, and at your death would probably be the first one in there to row over who got your best suit.

People are people. And when you say, "I have blinded myself to reality," then you have blinded yourself to the inevitable consequence of a society which sets itself up on the pretense that it is good, while wholly and fully intending to be nothing but evil. And when you get that one twisted, brother, that twists you up on force, it twists you up on justice, it twists you up on perception, on thinking, and nothing becomes predictable. After that anything can happen. And that's the other key that is run as viewpoints.

You just get large masses of these postulates sitting out there in front and let them discharge "anything can happen." Then get the preclear to move them a little bit from the right to the left and then get him so that he can move them around. He'll get sick on that one — "anything can happen" — but that's only when he's been so completely upset by his predictions. And that's lower than "nothing must happen," you see — way, way lower than "nothing must happen." "Anything can happen."

So your case entrance — your case entrance is balked on many cases, on a level of a twist of knowingness. They know the world is good, but there are so many evil things in it. They know the world is good, but 80 percent of all they've met is evil. So therefore their knowingness is twisted. And that knowingness inhibits them from employing any of the tools which would set them free, such as force. And your case will just stay bogged pretty well right there, in spite of all the mechanical techniques that you use — it'll just stay bogged because the fellow's knowingness is upset. He's been convinced that all men are good, and therefore, he should be good, even though their actions have been consistently and continually directed toward evil for him. And he'll get real bogged on you. He'll get real bogged, you'll get real bogged if you ever buy that one.

The time for you to be good and be just and so forth, is not while you have numbers of wolves pawing over your somewhat animate body. That's not the time to decide that. The thing to decide right at that moment is that you better have bigger teeth. The time for you to decide that all is sweetness and light is when you can be very nonchalant about a couple of billion watts; that's the time to be decided. And that's not because you have to protect yourself, it's because you have to be that big to grasp the concept of it.

Below that level, a man is afraid. And a man who is afraid and who is yet trying to believe in love and goodness, is trying to believe in them so they'll protect him. And it's like trying to put up a piece of tissue paper in front of a bullet. And just remember to yourself — if you ever want an example of how this works, just remember yourself that no wolf who is eating somebody up is going to be deterred for one moment by all the good deeds that person has done, or all the good, right thoughts he has thunk, or by all of the wonderful intentions that person had. That wolf is just going to chomp. And that wolf, in essence, is this universe the way it's running today.

Okay.