I want to talk to you about extremely elementary processes.

In view of the various factors in Scientology, we can discover that some extremely elementary processes could be designed if we would look at these upper-echelon factors.

Now, let's look, first and foremost, at this thing called isness — reality. How much in the way of processing could you get just out of this concept: that there is such a thing as isness — an existence? How many processes could you possibly do? Well, actually, you could do a very great many.

But let me call your attention, very quickly and abruptly and immediately, to a very singular fact — if I have not mentioned it before — and that fact is simply this: that to give a thetan exercise in getting ideas is minimal. A thetan can always shift around his considerations one way or the other, but it depends upon the scope he is willing to shift them around on.

Now, an individual on one point — that is to say, a receipt point of the communications formula — an individual standing on this receipt point would feel himself limited to the degree that he had to be on receipt point. So he would then feel that the consideration that he was on receipt point, or was being the effect of existence, would monitor his ability to make considerations. That is to say, he would not feel, then, that he was free to make any other consideration above the level of the fact that he was on receipt point. Now, all of his other considerations, then, would fall below this level.

Now, let's take somebody who considers himself to be on cause point and solely and entirely and completely on source point — source point, cause point; receipt point, effect point. (Formula of communication: cause, distance, effect — the most elementary statement of it — involving attention and duplication.) And we would discover that if an individual was monitoring himself with one basic consideration, his consideration would then fall below, and his ability to change his mind would then fall below, that basic consideration.

Basic consideration could be "I am on an effect point"; that is, "I am being the effect of many flows and messages and that sort of thing, and this is very bad." Now his considerations are various.

Let's take this most basic consideration: "I must get off this point." You see, "I am on this effect point and I do not like this." Therefore, he makes the consideration that he must get off of this point.

Well, what is monitoring the consideration that he must get off the point? The fact that he's on it, of course. You see?

All right. Now let's take it reverse-end-to, and let's get an individual who finds himself on source point. This individual is on source point and there he sits on source point and he's being cause: he's being the source of the impulses or particles which are going across the distance and hitting effect points. Well, this individual is saying, "Now I mustn't cause anything bad. I must cause only good things. And I must do this and that for people," or "I must do this and that for this or for that," or something of this sort, you see?

And what is this host of considerations being monitored by? Of course, that he is on a cause point; he's on a source point of a communication — synonymous here: cause and source, effect and receipt — naturally.

All right. Now, if he discovers himself suddenly on the receipt point of something, this fellow is really dismayed. You get the dismay? His basic consideration is that he's being cause point, and yet all of a sudden he receives something — oooh! Now, that would be a breakdown — basically and primarily — would be a breakdown of his isness; his reality, a breakdown of his isness.

He can then have a break of reality only to the degree that other-determinism brings into question the postulate on which he is operating. See, he can have a break of reality only to the degree that other-determined hammer-pound brings about an invalidation of the postulate on which he's basically running. He says, "I'm cause and I'm being a good fellow and I'm doing this and doing that," and all of a sudden he gets jailed. My, this is upsetting! But what is his basic consideration? That he is occupying a cause point.

Now, let's take this in a very minor fashion and let's take somebody who has superparalysis of the medulla oblongata or some very, very serious ill, such as entire closure of the pocketbook. And we find him trying to change this condition. Now we've entered into another field. See? We've entered into not-isness and then we've entered into alter-isness, you see? Now, he has this terrible ill. He has this mental difficulty. He has some other difficulty or other and he now says, "It mustn't exist." That's his statement there. "It mustn't exist." And his next statement after that: he said, "All right, don't exist!" Grrrr.

Well, what do you know? It keeps on existing. Well, "All right," he says, "I'll change it on a gradient scale. I'll chip away at the corners of it," and so forth. Well, he'll at length decide he can't do anything about it.

One of the actions that he would finally do would be to draw a black curtain over the thing — that's one of the basic actions on this. He says," Now, look. I can't change it at all." He's trying to affect not-isness by using alter-isness. See? Not-isness would not take place by a postulate, he discovered — or thought he discovered — so the basic thing he must do immediately then is to start changing it on a gradient scale, which is to say, alter-isness. And it just stays right there. And he is already running on a failed postulate of not-isness.

So what's his activity of change?

His activity of change is then proceeding from the basic postulate that it must not be, which is proceeding from another basic postulate that it is, which is proceeding from the basic postulate that he's there in the first place (you see that?), which is proceeding from the basic postulate that there must be a "there" for him to be at.

So we trace back these basic postulates and we discover a little rule here. And this little rule is that an individual has a condition and the condition continues to exist as long as the individual has a condition.

Now, that sounds like an idiotic little rule, but it's a very, very true little rule. It'll continue as long as he has a condition.

Well, why does he have a condition? He must have a postulate about the condition before he has the condition. Right? So there's a more basic postulate every time you find such a condition.

In order to get over something, you have to have postulated that you have it. In order to recover, you must postulate that you have something from which to recover. In order to go through the actions of emptying a pocketbook, you must have had to have postulated that it was full and that it should be emptied.

Now, you're all too prone to look at existence and say," Well, there's existence there, and now we'll make some postulates." No, this is not quite the direction that we're drifting. You'd have to make the postulates to have existence there so that you could make some postulates to recover from having the existence there.

Let's get back to this isness. A condition has to be postulated before it can be unpostulated. That's right, isn't it? Well, so that any condition to have any existence or persistence must be based on time of some sort. Well, therefore, there must be a time postulate. And we find out that an individual doesn't have any time unless he continues to postulate it. An individual ceases to have time to the degree that he ceases to postulate it.

Now, when I say "cease to postulate time," I don't want you for a moment to get the idea that there's any witchcraft involved, that you have to go out with spider webs and mix them up with four quarts of morning sunlight and stir them all up with a whisper. There's no witchcraft involved in making this postulate. It's simply this kind of a postulate: "Continue." Just get the notion of continuing something and you will have a time continuum.

Now, you could get that notion right now. Just sort of get an idea of a little piece of space out in front of you there and you have the notion "Continue" about this little piece of space. All right. That's making time. You've made time. That's all the postulate there is. There isn't even the words "Now I am going to make some time and I am going to cause the time to persist and continue." No, it's just urn-mmm. You see, you can do anything.

All right. Now this time continuum is a tremendously interesting thing, particularly in view of the fact that so many people have agreed upon it. But their apparent agreement with it leads them to depend upon other people finally to carry on the agreement while they just sit there. And what do you know? Eventually they just sit there!

Now, you'll find many a boy who's having a bad time simply sitting at home in his bedroom — just sitting there. What's he stopped doing? Well, he couldn't have any motion, he says.

Well, motion consists of this: consecutive positions in a space. Now, he'd have to conceive that he had some space and that he'd have to have some consecutive motions in it.

If you could just ask such a person to go out and trim the hedge — just no more, no less — just tell him to go out and trim the hedge; if you ask him to go out and put a piece of chalk on the sidewalk all the way around the block, every five feet, you would see considerable recovery in his case.

Why? Well, he knows that he'd have to go all the way around the block or he knows that he would have to finish trimming the hedge. See? Or he would have to come around to his door again, you see, on the block, or come around to the other side of the yard. In other words, he can continue to postulate a time continuum against the objects which are already there.

Now, you could just say to this fellow, "All right. Now get the idea of moving this dish. Now move it." Now get the idea of moving this dish again. Get the position you're going to move it to, now. Now move it." "Now get the idea of moving this dish. Now get the place you're going to move it to, and move it."

Hard as it might seem for some people to conceive, an individual can be made violently ill with this. Why? What's kicking back there? The thetan can't get that sick, certainly. Well, this individual's agreement with the body — he is the body, the body is himself, therefore, everything that happens to the body is what happens to himself and everything that happens to himself is what happens to the body. In other words, he's in a superidentification.

What postulate is this individual already riding with?

Now, let's take a look at isness. He has to conceive that he has a body before he can recover from one.

Let's get this salient and horrible fact, that this whole thing is monitored by isness, no matter how much not-isness. You see, not-isness is always pursuant to isness. No matter how much alter-isness that takes place… You see, you've got an as-isness, then alter-isness has to take place to get an isness. Well, if you have any isness persisting on a continuum — and that is our basic definition of isness. Isness is something that is persisting. As-isness is something that is just postulated or just being duplicated, you see?

As-isness, that's just no alteration taking place, and as-isness contains no life continuum, no time continuum, nothing! See? It'll just go anytime you postulate a perfect duplicate for anything — same space, same object, same time-boom! If you postulated it all the way through without any limiter postulate hanging around at all, it would just be gone, and that's all there is to it. It'd be gone for everybody else too.

This isness is your monitoring postulate.

An individual couldn't possibly get into trouble with as-isness, except if you consider losing everything trouble. But it would be things that he was losing which he either didn't want or had just postulated into existence. In other words, as-isness is an exact duplication or an exact creation. All as-isness is doing is merely accepting the responsibility for having created it, and anybody can accept the responsibility for anything. That's all as-isness is when it operates as a perfect duplicate.

There's two kinds of as-isness: there's the as-isness, you postulate it in the space and time; you know, you postulate it right there where it exists. And the other one is, the as-isness where you re-postulate it; you see, you just postulate it again. The object already exists. There is an isness being approximated as an as-isness and it becomes an "as-is-that-isn't"; it becomes, then, a not-isness.

If you just created it as an as-isness, unless you altered it rapidly, you would get a notisness. And if you exactly approximated an isness as an as-isness, you would again get the same result. You got the same result both times — not-isness.

As-isness, perfectly done, if not followed by alter-isness becomes a not-isness, quickly and immediately — but right now.

Now, you've had that experience in knocking out engrams, facsimiles and so forth. It hasn't occurred to anybody yet, fortunately, to simply exactly approximate the body. Treat the body as an as-isness and go your way. Well, you say, well, it's got a lot of facsimiles and so forth. All right. Treat them as the same as-isness, all in one operation — boom.

But of course you had to assume you had a body before you could possibly treat it with an as-isness.

Now, existence goes this way: there is an isness. And then the individual — and this is the only error you could make, and this is another method, slightly, of getting a continuation, because it is an alter-isness. You see? There is an alter-isness right there between isness and not-isness. The second you say, "There it is. Now I don't want it and it doesn't exist," you see, you've postulated that you're changing it. But it is a very abrupt and particular kind of isness, is not-isness.

And instead of following isnesses with not-isnesses, we followed them with asisnesses, nobody could ever possibly get into any trouble. The way you get into trouble is to follow an isness with a blunt, thud, not-isness. You say," There it is. I don't want it. It isn't." Oh-oh. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh!

Now, what's the difference between these two operations? Very interesting difference. You've got an isness. Here's an ashtray. You don't want the ashtray anymore. One operation — a correct one, as far as you're concerned, if you just really didn't want it anymore — would be simply do an as-isness. You know, as-isness, perfect duplicate. Boom! — gone. See, you haven't got an ashtray anymore. Certainly you haven't got one.

This baffles people when you're running perfect duplication on Opening Procedure by Duplication, and you include in it the step "Make a perfect duplicate of it." The thing disappears if they're going real good. Then they're asked to come back to it and pick it up, and this seems to be an invalidation. It isn't invalidation, because they're in agreement with the auditor and the auditor has repostulated it into existence. So they actually, by just saying, "All right" and walking back to it again, they have to postulate it into existence to pick it back up again, and they miss that step.

So in running Opening Procedure by Duplication, you would have to say, "All right. Now, consider a book is over there." "Now walk over to it." "Now pick it up," and so forth — weight, color and get a description. "All right. Now make a perfect duplicate of it" or "Put it down. Make a perfect duplicate of it." "Now walk away from it."

Well, you tell an individual to walk away from it, he's just as-isness'd it. See? It's gone.

You'd say instead, "Walk over to the other book." Now, when he finished that, when it comes to this first book, "Now consider there is a book over there." "Now walk over to it and pick it up and make a perfect duplicate." Of course, it's gone again.

This invalidative factor of agreement is that for you it's gone and for somebody else it's still there, finds agreement. Your willingness to be a good fellow, which postulate you are also running on, lets the other fellow put it back there again. So an individual can get upset about as-isness. Now, this just isn't auditing, this is in living. You say that car isn't there anymore and then your wife keeps bawling you out because that car is still sitting out there — mass of junk. Well, you've decided it wasn't there anymore. To heck with it. And she wants it moved! Well, you listen to this for awhile and you finally come off the postulate, and postulate that there is an isness out there and go do something about it, you see? Then you have to use action. Well, if you could just ask her to just look at it, make a perfect duplicate of it, then you'd both be happy. Then maybe the neighbors would complain. Well, instead of going into terrific agreement with these neighbors, and so forth, you just have them come over and make an as-isness of the thing. They wouldn't see the car anymore either.

In other words, we would keep this up until anybody who had a basic vested interest in agreeing with the car had finally seen — and actually this would be the long way around. These individuals that are doing this, by the way, all consider themselves to be occupying a finite point of individuality and existence, you see? And they won't take the responsibility for every other person's consideration. To make a thing really disappear, you just have to take the responsibility for every viewpoint in the whole universe and say "As-is" — different operation.

But to follow an isness with an as-isness brings you into an actual not-isness — thing doesn't exist; an actual not-isness. But if you just postulate against this thing that it doesn't exist — and you've said a not-isness right here, you know; you didn't do an as-isness — you've done what? You have refused the responsibility for having created it and you have said, "Somebody else creates it and I don't want it." You've said "somebody else." You've postulated the existence of somebody else with regard to this thing, and you've said, "Another determinism is placing this thing before me and therefore I don't want it, so therefore I'm going to say that it isn't but it really belongs to somebody else."

We have to postulate another determinism, which is to say, refute the responsibility for having created the object, before you can get such an appearance as a not-isness.

Now, an individual can fail utterly. There's the Empire State Building, and he says," It isn't architecturally sound. It doesn't exist as far as I'm concerned." He's trying to postulate a not-isness; he's trying to make it unreal. He has to postulate right along with this that somebody else created the Empire State Building to get what we consider unreality or the manifestation of unreality. See? And the case which gets these unrealities is handling life on this basis: "Everybody else put it there and created it, and I really don't dare interfere with any determinism on their part, so I'll just kind of dim it down a little bit. I'll say it's not there."

He goes rushing down a mountainside in a car that has the brakes burned out on [it], and there's a big boulder right down at the bottom of the hill, and he runs right straight into this big boulder — crash! — and just before he hits, you can always find him postulating this: "It's not there and I'm not here." Crush!

Only, you see, he doesn't do an as-isness. He doesn't say "I'm in a car rushing down the mountainside. I have the responsibility…" — you know, just this feeling; you wouldn't say all these words: "In a car rushing down a mountainside and all these people are in this car, and I'm in this car too; and there's a boulder there and the car is going to hit the boulder." Asis! — bing! No car, no boulder, no mountainside, no people. It would happen, even before he hit the boulder. See? Something would happen at this point.

This is a very curious lot of phenomena that we're fooling around with here, and of course, we have no serious intent with this phenomena, which is a fortunate thing. Otherwise, somebody realizing exactly how this is done would sooner or later, maybe, unmock the Republican Party or Russia — leave a hole. And of course to do that you would have to accept the viewpoint of two hundred million Russians or something like that. You see? And you could unmock Russia if you did that. But you'd have to take full responsibility.

Now, what's this full responsibility? Full responsibility merely says this: "I created it." When you ask somebody to make a perfect duplicate of it, he's going through the mechanics of creating it. Therefore, it disappears. He knows, unless he throws some other-determinism in on the thing — in other words, practices some alter-ism on its creator — that it's not going to exist at all.

Now, the physical universe, as we look at it right around us here, is an isness for one reason only: we all agree that somebody else created it. Whether that is God or Mubjub or Bill, we agree that somebody else brought these conditions into existence. And as long as we are totally agreed upon this, boy, have we got everything solid. And the moment when we agree otherwise and we say, "Well, we made it," then it starts to get thin. Now, this will worry a preclear. It's just as if he feels he could never make another one. It'll get thin for him.

In the processing of reality, if you just handled isness all by itself, you would just have an individual start to look at what he considers to exist. And we would take the most solid manifestation of that and that would be the space in the vicinity, the walls in the vicinity, so on. That would be the most elementary process that we could do. We just start spotting spaces and walls — just that, no more. And we just keep spotting them and spotting them and spotting them. And let what happens happen. That's all — just let what happens happen. Just ask the individual to keep on spotting things. Very permissive, you see?

Now, supposing he kept on looking at them with his physical vision. We find out that he would get up to a certain level and then he'd start to have body somatics. Because making the body do this continually and so forth is actually processing a reality vaguely in the direction of an as-isness. See, it's not bluntly or sharply in the direction of as-isness, it's just asking him to process it a little bit in that direction. "Let's just take these walls as you find them." You know? "Let's take the spaces around here just as you see them." In other words, "Let's look at another spot and let's look at another spot and let's look at another spot. Let's just take these things as you see them." And of course after a while the walls are going to get brighter and brighter and brighter and brighter and brighter and brighter and bri… and duller and duller and duller and duller and duller and then gone.

Well, when they get bright, bright, bright, bright, bright, that's all right: the body will still feel pretty good. But when it starts getting dull, dull, dull, du… thin, thin, thin, the body doesn't like this; it does not think this is the best thing to do. It would not recommend this as subject matter for an article in Bernarr MacFadden's magazines. Because it knows it'll fall if it stands in space.

So therefore this very, very simple process would not necessarily have to be completed simply by remedying havingness, but just by getting the fellow to close his eyes and spot anything he could see, no matter how vaguely, as a thetan. Just spot anything he sees. If he sees a nothingness, okay; if he sees a somethingness, okay. Just get him to spot it. We don't care what he sees. We might indicate various directions, but we would make a very bad mistake if we indicated them as body directions — on your right, on your left, above your head. Oh, no. No, no. We just ask him to look around, and what he sees, "Spot a couple of spots on it." "Now, did you do that? "Now, something else: "Spot a couple of more spots on that."

Well, we know already, if we've run it permissively in the environment, he's had to point them out and walk around to them, he will obey orders. Now that we've got him to a point where he will obey orders on this subject, we can trust him to close his eyes and spot spots or spot spaces or spot anything he wants to spot with his eyes closed. And we just simply keep on spotting them.

And that would be the most elementary process there is in Scientology.