This morning — November the 23rd, first morning lecture — this morning we're going to take up a formula. And if you were going to write this formula, it would be "Formula Phi" — circle with a slant across the circle, which would just simply stand for physical universe — "Formula Physical Universe."
What is the basic formula of this universe?
When you start to make a cake, it's always good to know something about the recipe of the cake. You don't have to know the formula to eat the cake. But to replace the cake, or if you drop the cake off the table on the floor, or if somebody else ate the cake, why, you might like to know how to make the cake again. And that would be necessary for you to have a recipe. And on these homely terms, let me give you just this: Formula Phi.
Formula Phi is a game consisting of limitations by barriers and non-total destruction of barriers. That's it. Sounds too simple, doesn't it? And yet that's all that a game consists of. This is a game, and the point where this game cuts in, of course, is immediately below your Factors. And when played this way — barriers and non-total destruction of barriers — why, you get the mest universe. Formula Phi is how to make a mest universe, and it consists of limitations, of barriers which will not succumb to total destruction.
The game requires that attention be placed on others, others on self, and others on others. And attention can interchange only by barriers, and this of course requires a coordination of place and time, which is the remainder of the formula. Coordination of place and time. Time being reconstruction and replacement of barriers.
Now, in this way we would consider how do you make a barrier? Barriers are made by placing particles in juxtaposition. People are engaged in trying to make particles coincide at a point, and trying to make particles fail to coincide at a point, and that's that.
Competence consists of that. It's the ability one has to prevent particles from coinciding at a point, and causing particles to coincide at points. This is — sounds, right at first glance, like it might not lead immediately to some kind of a solution to the problem, but it is a solution to anybody's problem. Because he's dealing with this rather silly game — it's just a game. And you're dealing with this game, and after a while he starts to lose his cake — he thinks he can eat it or something.
Editor's note: The procedures LRH covers in these lectures were published in Journal of Scientology Issue 16-G, 'This is Scientology, The Science of Certainty" and Journal of Scientology Issue 24-G, "SOP 8-C, The Rehabilitation of the Human Spirit." Both of these articles have been reproduced for your reference in the appendix of this transcript booklet.
And the moment he stops creating the cake, he no longer has cake. And then he sits around and says, "I'm in bad shape." That's real interesting, isn't it?
Now, how do you get, in this universe, something to move from one — how does one get a form or barrier, see — form, barrier. I mean, what is a barrier? A barrier is anything from particle to a Maginot line; anything from a wall down to a (quote) "electron" (unquote). I mean, a wall is just as unreal as an electron, and it's just as real as an electron. An electron is just as real as a wall, because here we are in knowingness, that's all. You know it's there, it's there. If you don't know it's there, it's not there.
We get an immediate problem here when we try to move one of these barriers. That is — moving a barrier; that's real cute. Now, every once in a while you get a pc and he can just put up something — if he could put up something, it'll just stay right where he put it up. So simple. It stays right there. He can't move it. You say, "Get a mock-up of a dog now, and let's move this mock-up of the dog from one corner of the room to the other corner of the room," and very often he doesn't move any dog anyplace. The dog just persists in staying right where he is. Well, this is where the barrier — he's gotten his barriers too mixed up. He thinks barriers are permanent. That mock-up is a barrier. See, it's — what is a barrier? It's something that stops perception. What's space? That's something that extends perception, see? So in dealing with barriers, we're immediately dealing with perception. All right.
He gets this dog, and he doesn't see through the dog, he looks at the dog and the dog won't move. And what would he have to do to move that dog? Well, he has to unmock the dog, and mock him up again in a new place. And unmock the dog and mock him up again in a new place, and unmock the dog and mock him up in a new place, and unmock the dog and mock him up in a new place. And if he does this at the rate of one over c, he can make the mock-up move from one corner of the room to the other corner of the room. And people who could still do it simply do it automatically, or in a condition of complete knowingness. They've either got a good automatic machine that's doing it, or they are doing it themselves. You can always do it yourself.
Now, the fellow whose dog stays in one place has a bunch of automatic machinery which is building the MEST universe, and he's put so much dependence on it that he says, "I have no further responsibility for putting up this dog. I was told to put up this dog, so the dog is there. Yes, I can see a dog, but he doesn't move."
Well, when somebody says, "Move the dog," why, he waits for the dog to move. How can he possibly wait for the dog to move? Only if his automaticity is in excellent condition. Then the dog will move if he says, "Move." His automaticity moves the dog, then the dog would move across rather erratically and maybe jump against the ceiling a couple of times and fly through the chandelier, and — but he'd get on the other side of the room one way or another. Or the fellow simply would know that the dog was there and know that the dog was moving, and know that his perception was stopped. First, he'd have to know that he had perception. Then he'd have to know that he was — his perception was being stopped by a dog, and then know that it was being consecutively stopped by a dog, all in the new positions all the way across.
Now, if we do this on the mest universe level, we have to mock and unmock the dog in new positions, like you do an animated cartoon. You know how animated cartoons are made? Well everybody sort of does that in order to get something to move.
Now, if he has to do it by a formula of mocking and unmocking it and mocking and unmocking it — if he does this by a formula, he's actually doing it on a little piece of automaticity. The best way to have a dog there is just know the dog is there and then know you're seeing him, and know it so well that you see him — so simple. And then just know that he's moving.
But if you did it in mest universe fashion, you have to unmock the dog and then mock him up and unmock him and mock him up and unmock him and mock him up and unmock him and mock him up, each time in a new, slightly different position, and you make all of these frames and they go across, and you've got a dog that's moving. But that's according to formula. And so that in itself is a limitation, to do it by formula. If you just know the dog's there, and know the dog's moving, you're all set.
Well, people who know, absolutely know, that this mest universe is one, terribly real; and two, not very visible; and three, that something else, such as God, put it there a long time ago and it's still there — given these three ingredients, you get rotten perception, just horrible perception. Why? Because there isn't anything else to look but you, there isn't anything else to put anything there but you, and nothing is from a long time ago — it's all right now.
And you keep putting this stuff up and putting this stuff up and putting this stuff up, and that's a real trick — you'd know you're here, you see? How do you know? Well, you could bring two pieces of what you know is here, and make them collide, and you see that they collided — obvious. And everybody agrees that they collided, and there's the other point.
Now, there is what's known as the parasitic individual — the 100 percent parasitic individual — the parasite. If you know anything about disease, you know that there's — the optimum germ is one that does not kill his host. And then you get your bad germ, who does kill his host. And your bad germ also merely fails to survive itself — that'd be a bad germ. All right.
We have these things which are parasitic. Now, get what happens here — get the evolution. An individual comes along and he says, "There is a universe here," and there is one. See, just like that — bang, bang. He says, "There's a universe here," — boom, and he's got one. And he says, "Now I'm believing in it," so he believes in it. And he says, "Now I'll continue to see it," so he sees it. He does these things, that's all — he's all set. That's all he has to do.
And then what's he do? He does this incredible stunt. He comes along and somebody else says, "There isn't any universe there. I know there's no universe there. I can't see one."
And the other fellow says, "Well, now," he says, "do you see an absence of one?"
And the fellow looks around and says, "Yes, complete absence of one."
He says, "Well then, you're seeing something, aren't you? You see a complete absence of my universe, so you know that my universe is hidden from you. Now, if you're good enough, heh! you'll be able to see it. Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh!"
And on this speciousness, and on this complete lie, we go forward into agreement. We know it's there because we all see it. That's the next point — that's mass agreement. See, we know it's there because we all see it. And the way we got into seeing it was just on that basis of, "Well, you know, you don't see it, do you? Well, that sure shows you you're stupid. What's wrong with your perception that you can't see this?" Then they have various methods and trickery by which one convinces the other that this is that way, and this is the other way. And this becomes very treacherous, this sort of a proposition, because one can't ever be sure of what he's seeing unless somebody else tells him. And if people tell him often enough and so on, he then finds himself in agreement with all kinds of people all around the place.
Well, he's satisfied now. He's still seeing what he saw before, but he gets afraid, finally, that that isn't quite right, because — the communication factor which can enter into it. He's now agreed on communication systems, and he agrees on other things. And he starts depending on other people keeping the universe there, and himself agreeing with them that it is there, and this is how he sees it — he thinks.
See, his dependency is that the universe is there because they say it is, not because he put it there. So as long as he's in agreement with them, why, he has a universe. So he's dependent upon their agreement amongst themselves to continue to have a universe. Now he's in a parasitic condition: he is parasitic on other people's agreement about the universe.
Now, this parasitic quality then begins to pervade everything he does. He starts to depend on the actions of others to do this and that, he starts to depend on them going through this and that. And somehow or other he'll make it one way or the other — if he agrees, stays in close enough agreement, why, he's all set — he thinks. So he wears the same kind of hat and he wears the same kind of shoes — he just suffers at the idea of getting out of agreement with somebody, you see?
And you take somebody who is depending upon the anatomy of this knowingness — the anatomy of this knowingness, you know, the anatomy of this universe — somebody who depends upon this anatomy for his daily bread, such as engineering. You know, he depends on taking it apart or routing its currents in some direction and so on. He has become parasitic upon the postulate. So he's secondary to the postulate, so of course you can't ask him to make postulates anymore, because he depends upon the consistent and continuous agreement postulate. And so you find (quote) "scientific" (unquote) fields going around saying, "Well, according to Professor Wumpfcuddle, we believe that the writings which were made at that time were written according to the best authority available then. And, whereas this institution cannot make a forthright opinion at this time, we have the feeling that when more investigation is done, it may indicate that somebody at some time or another will also fail to know the answer."
Now, what's very satisfactory to somebody for a while, is this thing called electronics. Electronics get very satisfactory to somebody because he can put up a couple of terminals and he can see something go between them and measure it up, and all the time he — if he just keeps overlooking it — he's always overlooking the fact that he's using electronics to measure electronics.
And — but it's very satisfactory for a while because he can produce a consistent effect. And he takes old Ohm's law and holds it to his bosom, and he says, "My," he says, "I at least have one thing that won't go wrong on me." Well, he'd better not move out of the exact universe and position he's in with that Ohm's law, because it'll cave in on him. Ohm's law is all very well. And then you go out into space. And you just go out into 273 degrees minus centigrade with Ohm's law — trrhh! Impossible!
Good old Ohm's law goes by the boards, and comes into immediate collision with Boyle's law and a few other laws go by the boards, the second that you start to pour current from one terminal to another in minus 273 degrees C. This factor, by the way, makes space opera possible. You hear of somebody walking up with this little jim-dandy disintegrator, and he pulls the trigger on the disintegrator and the castle falls down. Well, of course there is your basic agreement. He's dealing with more basic agreements than anybody else — there isn't anything.
And naturally, you take anything — any current which was generated in minus 273 is earlier agreement than current which was generated in other pressures, and your engineering becomes very interesting. Now, you can make a bomb — the Russians are rumored to be doing this — they're making bombs in minus 271 degrees C or something like that, where you have almost zero resistance. Into one small condenser — one tiny little condenser of no size at all which here on Earth would hold a volt before it went zap! — well, you can pour about eight billion volts at five hundred amperes into it, in minus 273, and you just pack that thing full, see, and then you warm it up. And believe me, it goes bang! right away.
But Ohm's law looks kind of silly, the second you start — Ohm's law holds good for the area of agreement in which Ohm's law is good. And it's pretty hard to convince an engineer of this until you just insist that he go up track on his science far enough so that he all of a sudden falls in. He runs into the absence of "prime post unposted," and he's done. And he can do anything within the realm of this agreement. Of course, he is just recovering some small shadow of what's been agreed upon about the behavior of energy. Everybody agrees on this, they'll all see it. My God, they've been on the track long enough, they'll see it.
Now, somebody who starts to attempt with people who are entirely agreed upon something else, any kind of a re-perception of vanishment, or re-creation of something — boy, it gets real poor. I mean, he tries to make them perceive time as time is. Time is the proposition of, "I have no more space right here around me to put anything in, so we will just say that space was yesterday. Now we have some new space. Now we'll fill it all full, and then we'll say this new space is yesterday. Okay, it's yesterday. All right. And now we'll have . . ." The guy is sitting there in no space, you see — only except as he is saying that he's sitting in space.
Of this illusory stuff, is all of this stuff made. But it's pretty hard for somebody dependent upon that agreement to recognize that it is, because he's gotten into a situation where he depends upon the fact that other people see it in order for him to have it. Well, that's bad.
Now, there's this: Knowingness — a state of knowingness — your primary state of knowingness is the primary state of creativeness.
These two things are immediately and violently opposed to each other: knowingness and space. They're but violently opposed to each other.
Space is your first barrier. That is your first not-know. See, a fellow just knows, you know? There he is, he just knows. Now he puts something there to know which has a barrier. So he says, "Now I know this." What is the barrier? It's the eight anchor points of his first piece of space — those are barriers.
Now he says, "I know this." What's he know? He knows this space now, and he knows up to those anchor points, he says. That's real cute.
Now he says, "I know this space." Now he makes another space, and he says, "Now I know that space, which is a new set of barriers, so now I know more!" That — real good.
We've got now quantity of knowingness — and the second you have a quantity of knowingness, you've got a quantity of trouble. Because the first, the greatest knowingness there is, consists of no quantity. It has no dimension and no quantity, see? And the second you put a quantity in it — you say, "I have a quart of knowingness" — boy, the fellow has come down to one quart. See, he has infinity until he has a barrier.
And the moment he imposes his first barrier — which, by the way, makes space — he has a decline of knowingness. Now he says, "I know distance." Now, just get how this works out way on down the track: If you're in Hoboken, it's pretty hard to tell what's going on in San Francisco. See that? So your knowingness is immediately a foe, and space is a foe of knowingness. See, if you're in Hoboken, it's pretty hard to know what's going on in San Francisco — as long as you think there's a difference of space between Hoboken and San Francisco. As soon as you know there's no difference of space between Hoboken and San Francisco, you can "know" without going to either one. See, you could know everything that's going on.
Now, you run into this in Change of Space Processing. Some of the damnedest things happen. By the way, if this — these conclusions were not backed up by immediate processes, I wouldn't be telling them to you. And all I'm trying to do right now is not teach you theory — this is a process I am teaching you right this minute. I'm not even vaguely interested in teaching you the grand theory, or making a book covered with human skin, or something, and cryptic cabalagrams which will then impute by symbolic function some other necromancy. I'm not even vaguely interested. This is — comes to a very direct process, and the only reason I'm telling it to you is because it lands in the lap of a process, boom. And I want you to be doing this process today, so I want you to figure this one, and know what we're doing.
Barrier. The first barrier is an imposition on knowingness. So we have such things as "mental blocks." See, the barrier gets into the shadow of mind, you know? In addition to making a barrier up there, you make a mental block — isn't that cute?
Now, you — some guy going down the street here, you say, "By the way, what did you want to be when you were eighteen?"
"Oh," the fellow says, "I wanted to be a writer. I can remember it just like it were yesterday. Tsk. Here I am 58, but. . ." so on.
You say, "Well what happened?"
"Well, you know, you get old, and you lose your pep, and . . ."
"Do you?" you say.
"Oh, yes," he'll tell you very — very hastily.
You say, "Well, where'd you get such an idea?"
"Oh, I don't know, my mother used to talk about being old," he says, "I don't know — doesn't have anything to do with writing."
"Where was she, when she told you about being so old and so forth?"
"Oh that was my old home, over here in Haversham, that was my old home. You know, that's a funny thing, doesn't have any connection with it at all."
And you say, "Well, what else is wrong?"
"Well I never got a university education," he says, "and of course you have to have a university education in order to write." By the way, which is just completely reverse. If you ever want a — anybody to be a writer, why, don't even let him get into grade school. And — because that's the imposition of space, which is exactly opposed to creativeness. Fixed space — space fixed for him, see, is a direct opposition to creativeness. All right.
We talk to him a while about this, and the next thing you know, if we've just expertly flicked out the things which he's imagined lay across his track, he'll find himself chewing on the end of a pencil that night, wondering why he doesn't write something, see? Because he — all of a sudden you've made him look around, and darned if he can see any barriers! But as he was walking down the street just before you got hold of him, why, boy, he could see more darned barriers there. It seemed like everything he was trying to do and so forth, was something that he would just bump into, you know. And then there is the barrier called the future — that's real cute. A fellow permits the society and meters and all kinds of things to predict the future for them. Well, that's him saying, "The future has gimmicks in it which know." You see, the future knows, or these gimmicks know the future.
Well, let's get the two ends of a communication line, A and B — let's go into this again. One end, A, is "know" and the other end, B — effect — is "not-know," see? So we got a communication line. Now, ordinarily in life, we get that sort of thing swapping — they start swapping ends. A is "know," and that goes to B. Now we get the second line, B, now knows something and starts to communicate and we go to A', see, and we get back at the target, B'. And B' is now receiving something. And that's a uniform communication line.
But a person potentially knows. This is real easy. He potentially knows, which means he has a potential creativeness. Because the only thing to know is something which you would create so that it could be known. So knowing a communications system — huh! — it's real silly, see? Knowing somebody else's communication system — this is real silly. Do you see why it's silly? From a standpoint of knowingness. Well, it's putting in some barriers so that you can gain some data. And a communication is only really valid if it's knocking out barriers for people. Then it can be a valid communication which will lead up scale toward greater knowingness.
If the communication is putting in more barriers for people, it'll go down scale toward less knowingness. Did you ever see a fellow who had just been shot, or had just run into a brick wall, or had just hit his head on a — the lower part of the cupboard or something of the sort, and did you ever find him in a particularly brilliant state of mind? You never did.
Well, that's the kind of communication like they do in war — a fellow comes up, to whom you've never even been introduced, and shoots you. Well, now, he in essence on a particle level is "know," and boy, he sure puts you into a state of not-know quick, see? So we've got "create" and "created for," as the two ends of a communication line.
So you're getting into agreement with this and that, and I'll tell you how to make a preclear good and sick. This isn't a process. This distance, you see, is the first foe of knowingness, and the second foe is energy. But to think that energy could ever deliver into anybody's hands more knowledge — see, that's not right, it doesn't. A person knows as much as he knows.
Now, if you can knock down a few barriers for him and clip his own concepts of limitations and knock out his agreement with people who have agreed upon these limitations, he'll go right back up Tone Scale like a rocket ship, see — real fast. That's because you're knocking out these various facts.
It isn't that communication is bad or that automaticity is bad or any of these other things are bad, that's not what we're talking about. It's that they impose new barriers. And you can evaluate with great ease as to whether or not something is very handy and easy to handle, just on this basis, is: Does this system introduce a great many new barriers, which exceed in quality and quantity the barriers which it is essaying to reduce? See? Anytime you have to make more barriers than you're trying to destroy in order to effect something, the system is going to collapse.
Now we'll take the penal system of modern culture. Here they're imposing more barriers than existed before, and wonder why they have increasing crime. The system of handling criminals is to impose new barriers on the criminals, you see? And then, of course, they wonder why they have more and more crime, and why they've never solved a single criminal from the beginning of the society.
That system, by the way, was invented and condemned and thrown out as completely unworkable in the city of Philadelphia in the United States in 1835. The modern penitentiary system of the US was reported on, worked with, and condemned in 1835 — which is, of course, why they're using it in 1953, '54, see? It's real sensible. You put in new barriers, new barriers, new barriers, and then wonder why everybody gets worse and worse and worse. Well, the barriers are new automaticities of some sort or another, and they let "not know" in on the scene.
We realize that the uneducated, the unknowingness — the people who are not informed, who haven't been around and looked at the thing — are most liable to be criminals, according to modern law. That is, people who have no opportunities for havingness then get to a point where they can't have, and where they can only steal to have. People have many times observed this to be the case. Well, of course, there is an opposite one in there. If you drive somebody down completely into apathy, he won't be a criminal either.
Well, that's the course which police try to take. They try to drive the whole populace into complete apathy in the hope that this is a solution to crime. And in the process the whole populace passes through a criminal band. See, the whole populace — populace wouldn't go into this criminal band in the first place unless people were dropping new barriers in front of them. So we handle this thing of barriers as a social problem, we find out this little law (and this is a specific law): The validation of barriers is the source of aberration as well as the source of a game. And it gets into aberration only when the barriers exceed the number necessary for a freely moving game.
Yes?
Female voice: We have a wonderful example of that in South Carolina. We have the chain gang with the bars on the suits, and we have the third greatest delinquency in the United States — juvenile.
Mm-hm. Sure. Work out every time.
So you have a test, then, for any process: Any process which imposes more barriers and limitations than it destroys, is an unworkable process or a deteriorating process. If you remember that, you have a little guide rule which, in itself, will evaluate systems such as those used by psychiatry, such as those used by surgery.
Now, of course there is another way of removing a barrier. There is this method of removing a barrier which is practiced, which doesn't remove the barrier, as you can see immediately. We'll take sacrifice as an effort to remove a barrier. The whole theory of sacrifice is in itself the theory of surgery. They cut out people's appendix, they cut off people's right ears, left ears, throats — they have a good time with this "sacrificed." Now they've gotten to a point where every time a woman reports with a stomachache, they give her a hysterectomy. Take out the ovaries, womb, so forth, and then they wonder why her endocrine system goes to pieces, having removed it. There is this way of handling barriers — and this is a real interesting way of handling barriers — is handling them in such a way that they're unremovable.
Now, this is one way of handling barriers. You take an automobile to an intersection that's very busy, and fix it so it won't run. That is a method of setting barriers by destroying parts of barriers. That's interruption of flow. Any way you could interrupt the flow would erect, then, a new barrier. And this is an artificial method — they apparently, you see, are picking up barriers. Somebody come along, and they'll say something is a barrier — they'll say, "Well, the appendix is the barrier and the tonsils. So therefore, if we take out the appendix and the tonsils of everybody in the United States, we of course will have no sickness and we will have removed this barrier." Yeah, that's real good, but we have spoiled the mobility of everybody who has undergone the operation. We've hindered their mobility. So all we've done was just fix these barriers so they're less movable, by pointing to something specious. See, we were going to remedy all this sickness, you know, and there wasn't that much sickness to be remedied. So now we create more sickness, you see? And this is the MEST universe at work in the dwindling spiral. There's how it sets up a dwindling spiral.
It pretends to remove a barrier, and fixes it up so it's unremovable — see, so a bigger barrier is unremovable. So you see that little law operating there. That system which imposes more barriers than it removes is an unworkable system — up to this point: up to 20.0 on the Tone Scale. And then after a while, the loss of barriers becomes important to a person. They want to be able to make barriers. If they can't make enough barriers, they get unhappy. Why? Well, they know everything that is going on, and the only thing — the only way you can produce randomity, and the first way and the only way, really, you can produce randomity — is to claim you don't know.
First is knowingness, and then there's this cycle: create, persist, destroy. Knowingness, and then the cycle of create, persist, destroy. The only thing there is to create is a barrier. That's the only thing you could actually create. You could create the fluidity of this and that, but your inner systems of creation are not themselves tremendously workable.
Now, you can get barriers to release other barriers. There's a bulldozer, you see, plowing down the line and knocking off the top of a hill so you can build a house on it. There's a barrier removing a barrier. And work is the process of using barriers to remove barriers. It's not anything bad about this — let's just see the scope of this. All right.
What's the process that comes out of this? I'm afraid that this is terribly, terribly easy. I'll give it to you — just this: The law behind it is the material which I've just been giving you here about limitation by barriers. And the other material we had last week, such as there's automaticity, and there's two kinds of automatic operations: one is automatic creation, and the other is automatic destruction. Mock and unmock, in other words.
Now, there's several methods of unmocking. These people who have occlusions are using a funny method of unmocking. They're doing just that, they're putting up new barriers to take out old barriers, and they're putting up more new barriers than they're taking out old barriers. And that is, this blackness works in this fashion: instead of unmocking something, they've found out — they've agreed so thoroughly that nothing can be destroyed, they don't destroy anything; what they do is paint it with blackness. And that's the way they destroy something — cute, huh?
And you start to knock out the automaticity on some of these cases of painting with blackness — which is putting up black screens — you just have them put up black screens till they take over command of the machine, and you find out that they've got… If you've gotten to the point where you're going to really break the case, they've got about eight skillion, billion facsimiles that suddenly decide they're going to rush in on them or do something to them. And they've got them stacked up all around, about eighty-five billion deep. They start to pull the blackness off, and they just look at these things, ulaarrh! Tremendous pictures — very dangerous things, pictures.
So — however, by using directly treating the automaticity, we to some degree validate black barriers. By making somebody hold on to the two back corners of the room, we to some degree validate the room. So, validation of barriers only works up to the point where one removes a few of the major automaticities of the case.
But there is one process which shotguns throughout the entire bank. He of course has depended upon other people to create this universe for him for a long time — he's forgotten he's creating it. And so he's turned over most of his machinery and responsibility for this thing to others and other places and so forth — he thinks. Now, he's still running it. His energy is actually being completely sapped. What energy he can create immediately goes into the banks with a crash, and activates some more of this stuff. So the more energy he puts out, why, the more of a trap he's in. All right.
We'll take that extreme case and we find out that this process works very well. Now, let's take a little case that's much, much less worse off — pretty good shape — they're just in agreement on the communication system, on how you put it together, and the world looks pretty bright to them, you know, and all that. Well, the process works on this case. And we come to the high case on the matter, who is trying to put a universe there, and this process has to be reversed for this case — in other words, the person who is running on a negative number of barriers. And so, we'll just go in for the process, and this process is very simple:
You have the person see through an existing MEST barrier, to another MEST barrier beyond it. And then have him see through the mest barrier beyond that, to another mest barrier beyond that. And then have him see through that mest barrier to find nothingness, and then to find — from finding nothingness, relapse to merely having knowledge. You see how that is? We just get him to postulate at that moment that now he knows.
Now, it's just an automatic process, really, and this permits him to take over the machinery which he now has inherited, which is trying to unmock the universe and himself. Or it takes into his control the machinery which has in the past tried to unmake the universe. And we get the third case, the fellow who doesn't have enough barriers — now we just have to reverse the process. We have him look at a mest universe barrier — and by the way you can do all of these on the one run, and you just do this in the same sequence.
You just take the mest universe barrier which he sees, and have him put another one closer to him. And then have him put a mest universe barrier just beyond the one which exists there, and then push all three of them together. You'll get some real rare barriers. They'd be good and heavy, I guarantee — good and heavy.
Now, there's another part of this process. Let's say we take those two windows — now, we see those windows a little further away from us and then a little closer to us. And that's all there is to the process. We just take a couple of mest objects and we see them a little further away and a little closer. Why?
We're just throwing them out of line in place, because of their fixity in place. We've relied so heavily on those things telling us where they are, that they have gotten us completely discombobulated.
This is our first attack, now, in SOP 8-C, on the third step — the third step being space. Well, a fellow can't create space or have space if he thinks everything has barriers in front of it. If he's running on such an automaticity of barriers that he cannot see barriers adequately anymore, he's gone inverted.
In other words, he's — he saw barriers and he believed in barriers so hard, and depended upon them so hard, that now they're beginning to disappear. Well, you start to run the third step on this person, and you'll come an immediate cropper. This person will not be able to make space. The test of that is just: can he hold up eight anchor points and know it's his own space.
Well we won't worry about whether he can do this or not, and we'll just remove this step from the realm of a pat, formulated procedure of making space. Let's not worry about that, because that in essence is fairly slow. Let's just take the space which he's now afraid is liable to vanish, and let's go about it first in this other fact: Let's first make him see through these barriers, one right after the other, until he can get that real good and get any barrier at any depth from him in any direction — till he can get that real good. And then he can take existing barriers and have them be closer and be further away, which unfixes them, as part of the same process. And then have him put in entirely different barriers — which is your three steps that you'll have to follow — entirely different barriers. And you would actually, in the process, just do this, one right after the other, one right after the other. First, he'd see through in all directions. By the way, there's these directions you use this on: straight out in front of him, straight out behind him, straight out to the right, straight out to the left, straight up and straight down. And those six directions are the directions which you would employ.
Now, remember that this can be done also in a bracket. You have other people looking through barriers — a very disturbing thought! And other people looking through other people's barriers. What do you use for barriers in that case, mock-ups? No, just use the mest universe, sixth dynamic. Just get the idea of your father being outside that wall, looking straight through the wall and not seeing the wall — the wall will disappear for you, too — at something in this room. Now get him looking through the wall to see Mother — wall will disappear. That's just others for others on the subject of barriers. And we work out the mest universe, then, in terms of a bracket.
But that's nowhere near as important, to work it out in terms of a bracket, as it is simply to run the first part of the drill. You'd be amused at how far these brackets go, and how — what dependency there was on them. And now there's the next one: People who have been trying to make something out of nothing, just endlessly, and on and on and on, who are trying to make something out of nothing. Oh! You see, there's nothing there to make anything out of. They have to go on a basis of knowingness, knowingness, knowingness, and they've strained their knowingness to the complete limit. Then they finally find out they have to know something before they can make something out of nothing anymore.
What do you know? Every piece of machinery they have which is super-automatic, is either making something out of nothing or nothing out of something. So with this banishment of barriers in this universe, we run the second part of a technique. There's a second lineup: We just simply make nothing out of nothing. All right.
Now, let's just turn on, and just make nothing right here where I have my hand. Let's do that arduously, please. Let's just make nothing out of that spot.
Get the fact that there's just nothing in that spot there, and now let's just make nothing out of it.
Now let's make something out of it with nothing appearing. Let's just arduously make something out of that spot, and don't have anything appear there.
Let's just arduously make something out of that spot.
Now let's make nothing out of that spot.
Now let's get somebody else making nothing out of that spot.
And somebody making nothing out of that spot for somebody else.
That's the other part of the process.
Why does this process work? The process is that every automatic machine that you have has . . . The most automatic machinery which you as a group have here right now, of course, is machinery which is gauged to make nothing out of nothing. Because that's practically anybody's in America. You're trying to make nothing . . . You people are trying to succeed one way or the other (this would not necessarily apply to preclears) — you're trying to succeed one way or the other, you're trying to get out of the traps of your own makings and so forth, and so it's a natural thing — your automatic machinery which makes nothing out of things turns on. But nothing — a machine set up to make nothing out of generals, a machine set up to make nothing out of garbage, a machine set up to make nothing out of food. Of course, by the way, stomach somatics turn on, on this, like mad. These machines, of course, are making nothing out of what is essentially nothing.
Now, just look at it sensibly enough from the standpoint of nuclear physics and you'll find out that they just keep trying to find space, see. Pardon me, they try to find matter, and all they find is space. And they just go on doing this. And they just keep finding space. Well, it's wonderful that they can find space. This is a great attestation to their complete phobia on space, that they can find space there — that's wonderful. It's — the boys however, oddly enough, are using up their own space to find it there. Because these boys are the shortest people on space you ever saw. They've got ridges — boy!
Now, the formula one has used, of agreement, is to take nothing out of nothing, and that condenses nothing so that you eventually get something. There's all kinds of these "explanations," you see — wonderful explanations. They've come down the line, with the concatenation of agreements, down through the ages. And, you see, if you — it winds up to the fact that if you take nothing out of nothing, you eventually will wind up with matter.
In other words, you take space out of widely dispersed particles — none of which can be found — you take the space out of these widely dispersed particles, you'll get a condensation of these widely dispersed particles which gives you solidity. But nobody can find the particles themselves, so this means, essentially, that you've taken nothing out of nothing to produce something. Real cute, huh? All right.
You just start setting up, then, machinery which makes nothing out of spots behind the preclear, above the preclear, below the preclear, to the right of the preclear, to the left of the preclear, in front of him, behind him, and so forth — if you have him start working on this, you'll find out that he'll start running into two things: He'll start running into solidity and complete emptiness. Because the machine to make nothing and the machine to make something are both the same machine. And this will appear very silly to him after a while, will appear real silly.
Now, prediction machinery is giving to automatic machinery the right to know. And brother, any system that is set up that is called the human mind — we're not dealing with the human mind — we don't give a damn about the human mind. Let it go on and run around and be stimulus-response and stand on its hands, and fill chairs at universities — we don't care about the human mind. It's simply this: it is a prediction machine, set up in such a way that the future knows and will tell you. There's only one way you will ever have a future — make one. There's only one way you'll ever have one. Nobody could tell you about the future. Your future is into constant state of manufacture, and it works out in certain ways because people are solidly in agreement on this fact, and that's the future. But when you set it up so that the machine knows and you don't — nyarroww, how horrible can we get? That's "Let's go round and read all the meters so we can tell whether or not the meters are hot. Let's have the meters tell us that the motor is running all right."
And, "Go ahead, little pyrometer, you just sit there," that old boy told me. "Go ahead, little pyrometer, you just sit there and say anything you please, this motor's running okay."
Now, it's very difficult to get agreement on anything that isn't in agreement in terms of mest, which is in itself a solid pattern of agreement. So, if a bunch of engineers can stand around and they all see that the meter reads so-and-so, they know that they have something within the composite of agreement which is agreeing with them. And they now know that they are in agreement one with another, because the thing which they most agree upon — mest — is telling each one of them the same story. And this is a terrible dependency, believe me. The reason they can't blow up barriers — and they can't blow up barriers, they can blow up the form of barriers, but they still get residue. The reason they can't is because they didn't blow up their own agreements first.
Now, all you have to do to blow up your own agreements, is to just get masses of people agreeing with masses of people there's a barrier there. And you know what you do and what happens to your own ridges? What happens to your own body if you go and run that technique endlessly, and on and on and on? Well, I'll tell you — it just plain melts, that's all. These heavy, heavy ridges that are so thick, they just get gooey and soggy and floppy and start disappearing and falling to pieces, and boy, you have to get real hateful toward them to make them form up good. All right.
What's the technique we're going to run, then? We're going to run this technique of — which is called "an invalidation of barriers." And it consists of seeing through, consecutively, various mest barriers in the six different directions of back, front, top, bottom, right and left. Seeing through consecutive barriers, each time seeing the next barrier. You know, we'd look through the floor, and see the floor of the room below. And we do this — with the mest eyes or just with the mest eyes closed, it doesn't matter which. And we just do this and we just do this and we just do this, and every once in a while we run a bracket in on it.
We get somebody else looking through barriers in six different directions. And we get others looking through barriers for others — every once in a while a bracket. And then we run this handy jim-dandy little machine, which — you're just going to make nothing out of a spot of nothing for a while. We're not going to run that one very hard, because that is a demonstration, not a therapy technique. The other — invalidation of barriers — is therapy; that's good. And the other one is a demonstration technique — making nothing out of this spot up here. Because a guy gets sicker than a pup after a little while. If he gets too sick on it, why, have him mock up dogs eating his stomach, and Papa and Mama eating his stomach, and it'll disappear — the sickness will — because his stomach, of course, is motivator-hungry.
Anybody with ulcers for instance, has eaten more than he has been eaten, so the stomach is superguilty. He's thrown agreement out of balance, in other words. All right.
There is the process, and there is the formula, and there is the game. You understand this: perception of something is an effort to get the sight stopped. And so if you keep on trying to stop your sight all the time, after a while you can't see. See how simple that is?
Okay.