We have — we have — now that we've put aside a few of these minor details, we have something that might be of interest to you.
We have some material — material concerning Scientology which is the difference between a workable process and an unworkable process. This material is just a little bit technical. I hope those of you who are not fully acquainted with earlier material in Scientology won't find this too abstruse.
We will start in by saying at once that life is a game. What is life? Life is a game. "Yes, I know. But what are people doing?"
They're playing a game.
"Well, yeah but what kind of games are they playing?"
Well, they're playing games they know they're playing and games they don't know they're playing.
"Well, there must be more to life than that."
Yes there is, there's no games.
"Well, do you mean to tell me that there's only — only one item, then, do you — really concerned with games? That's impossible because there wouldn't be just one thing going on."
Well, it isn't just one thing. All life in its various involvements is involved in games. That's all there is to it.
It works out that way. It processes that way and the whole problem and difficulty solves that way. Do you see this? No matter what, and no matter how we try to analyze and reanalyze existence, there doesn't seem to be any method at this time which is better than calling it a game.
A game has many factors and these factors are all very nicely answered so that we have four types of games — that is four game conditions you might say. There is a game condition "knowing." A man knows he is playing a game and therefore he is living. A man thinks he is playing a game of living but is actually playing five or six other games he doesn't know he's playing. Well, that's an aberrated condition.
What is the aberration? The aberration is totally concerned with a unknowing game condition in which he is involved. If he doesn't know he's playing these games, why, then they are aberrative to him.
Well, how about no-game conditions? Well, actually no-game conditions are quite interesting since they are the stuff of which a thetan is made.
For many millennia man, able to write, has sought for truth. Able to write, able to talk, able to think, observe — he's sought for truth. Scientology might have been called at one time or another just another search for truth. It's a hideous thing to realize that man's search for truth was bound to failure. It could not have been possible for man to discover truth since the totality of the barriers which lie between him and truth consist of games, lies, difficulties, and unless he goes in a game condition, unless he goes into a condition of nonfactuality, he never arrives in a condition of truth.
It was almost more likely that some gambler, some drunken gambler on a Mississippi River steamboat, would have discovered more about living than a swami sitting on the highest mountain in the Himalayas. It was almost certain that such a condition would have benefited in its chances the gambler. Why? The gambler is in a game condition. Not because he plays games with cards — because he's living. He is in contact with life. He is living life and therefore he has to estimate the elements of life. And estimating the elements of life, he is then and there capable of coming up with some truth.
The road to truth, for a man who has been living, lies through lies. By examining and processing the lies that are told, he achieves truth. If he tries to achieve truth directly, he perishes on the road. And thus we've had a narrow squeak.
We were seeking for truth and if these factors had not been discovered, it is very, very likely that our search would have dead-ended since a man cannot handle truth alone and come up with answers to anything.
This is the most hideous little booby trap that was ever rigged. Life is a game. You have to address the games the man is playing and has played in order to restore him to a condition where he is able to sit serenely or play a game at will.
The road out led through the path of lies. Pilgrim's Progress is a terribly interesting thing. I've run it out of enough preclears. But they talk about the primrose path, and it goes this way and that way and winds up in thises and thatas and it's a — it's pretty tough, you know. It's a pretty tough path. So what you want to do is stay on that straight and narrow path, brother. That straight and narrow path that just goes on and on and on and is — fades into the far distance — straight and narrow. And that would be a method of dying slowly by inches or millennia.
The primrose path which you were supposed to avoid is the trouble with truth. This is for sure. One goes through the dark and thorny ground and over and under and around and above and below and he says, "Sooner or later, I'll come out on the highroad." Well, I'll tell you, it's a funny thing. He does, providing he's willing to walk the primrose path.
But if all he's interested in is just walking down that straight and narrow road, I wouldn't give you that for his chances of survival, for his ability or for anything else. In other words, the road to truth detoured through games, through aberrative conditions, through stress and strife; games is the common denominator of it. And those games contain freedom, barriers and purposes.
And the road back is the same road. And to sit with a nice turban on and contemplate your navel or whatever they do in the upper, snowy regions of India (pronounced Indjuh) might benefit other people whom you would not trouble but is not likely to do anything for you.
Life comes apart at the seams and is understood and restores itself to any condition you care to have, only so long as — only so long as it follows through games.
You haven't got much choice about it. We would love to say to somebody, "Be three feet back of your head. You're Clear." I hate to confess to you that there were numbers of processes that we had, that violated these conditions. They were no-game conditions.
We didn't have the information, so we can't say that we were right or wrong, but there were a number of them that violated these principles I'm talking to you about. In other words, a process which was a game condition process — you process straight at games — was workable and I don't care when that was. But a process which was not a games condition process, which was a no-game condition process, just dead-ended, thud!
Now, where you have a great deal of difficulty — where you have a great deal of difficulty with a case, where somebody's being aberrated, where some-body's doing something that is incomprehensible to you and the rest of the world and is damaging to those around him; it all seems to sum down to just this alone. And this is the one thing it summates to — he is in this sort of a condition: He's played a game; he was hurt while playing that game; the game itself is now a sort of an engram. He doesn't even know he's playing it and he is still playing that game.
The game itself is actually a no-game condition because it's lost and gone and back on the track, but it was a game. There was some sort of a game that he was playing at some time or another. Now he's forgotten he was playing that game and there he goes. You take an old football player — take an old football player. All right, he doesn't play football anymore. To some slight degree he still plays football, but that's not aberrative. His football was not aberrative. He could have been chewed up and walked over with, however they do it at Notre Dame with their cleats on guys' faces and chests. He could have just been stamped on. He could have lost his girl because he played football. He could have had his career ruined. He — I mean, you know, I mean you can just pile this on. You say, "Well, obviously, what's wrong with this man is he was playing football and he no longer has a game," and so forth. Boy, that would be about the shallowest look at it you ever saw. Why? He knows he was once a football player. So, at once it takes it out of the aberrative category.
Yes, he is suffering to some degree from a game condition but that is not what is wrong with the case. The unknown games condition — the games condition he does not know about — is the condition from which he is suffering. All aberration must contain the element of unknowingness. When it becomes known fully, it will no longer be aberrative, which makes people ransack their pasts. But there are many ways to make these things become known — very, very many ways to make these things become known.
We have processes today that do it much more rapidly than preclears like. The force and velocity of processes is of great interest to us today because their force and velocity and effectiveness depends entirely upon the rock foundation of games condition and no-games condition.
This isn't just something that I thought up. This is something that was gradually being borne in upon me, that there was a category here that was one thing and a category that was another thing, and these things didn't agree with each other, and there was something wrong here. We — I tried in vain really to discover fully why some processes worked and some didn't work. Some were limited processes. That is to say they'd only process, but maybe even very effectively, for two or three auditing commands or two or three hours or in the case of running engrams, probably maximally about five hundred hours. Those processes were all limited. They dead-ended somewhere. Why did they dead-end? And what were these other processes which were, you might call, unlimited processes?
Well, they were elements here for which there was no accounting. Now, I'll give you an example: We have a fellow who is having trouble with the fact that his mother has been rather mean to him. So we say something on the order of this, we say, "Look around the room and tell me something your mother can have." Now, we can say, "Look around the room and tell me some-thing you can have." And the fellow gets well. We tell him, "Look around the room and tell me something your mother can have," and he gets sick.
What is going on here? It's practically the same auditing command. Well, you say, "His self-determinism, or his basic greed or this and that, something else was being violated here." Yes, something else was being violated but I'm afraid it was nothing that you could brush off with a word like greed.
There was something going on; some great difficulty probably sufficiently complex as to make it escape attention entirely. Why wouldn't the auditing command run on Mother as well as the preclear? It just wouldn't though.
Well, we say, "This is very easy. This is easy. Look around the room and tell me something your body can have," undoubtedly would work because most preclears are their bodies. So, we tell him "Look around and tell me something that you could have." It's just a process. "Look around the room and tell me something your body could have." We already know "you could have" works and makes him feel better; why not "body"? "Look around the room and tell me something your body could have" does not work. He runs it an hour or so, he's got a headache. Why? Now that is the goofiest little puzzle that I ever got mixed up with.
I won't give you a blow-by-blow account of the — of the oddities and the peculiarities which were fought through and the number of staff auditors which all but blew their brains out auditing little slips of paper which would be passed to them on preclears, you know. They'd audit something on a pre-clear and they'd say, "Well, Ron says this was a good process so, heh, go ahead." And all of a sudden the preclear goes . . . They say so and Ron checks off another one. Ptock!
Some long time ago I made up a list of about five hundred different reasons why. They were the reasons why life was living. What was it living about or for? There were five hundred possible motives, more or less. Life was being lived on the basis that one — give you sort of an idea, what is the motive of life — so that one could love one's neighbor. That's why. Dzzzzt! You audit this on a person, they go tzzrrruuuu boom.
All right, so we had all these various types of things. You see, philosophers, from the beginning of time practically have been saying, "Why, it's allwhyness," and Skip-skop Schopenhauer, a German that had more bad temperthan good grammar … He — pardon me — Schopenhauer does write impeccably good grammar. The only trouble is you can't understand it even inGerman. A sample of Schopenhauerian wit is "Stubbornness is the state ofthe will taking the place of the intellect." It's nicely involved, isn't it? Itdoesn't go anyplace. Well, anyway, he said that, "Life was living in order todie." Oh, so I put that down on the list, too, you know. "Life was living inorder to die." All this sort of thing about death wish. The only thing youcould really do about life was really get even with it and just kill everything.Well, such things as this, scraps and bits and pieces from the Greek, theGerman, from the various barbaric philosophies and so on that one runs across; put all these things down and almost accidentally, along about 205, why I remember they use — people used to say all the time that writing was a game and business was a game and this was a game, so I put down "life is a game." And went on, you know, happily on down the rest of the list, putting down very deep philosophic things, you see, that had good substance and solidity and had been respected for generations.
And then I went back and started this, tested this one, tested this one precomputation, you see; all possible types of reasons why. I got down and almost, oh, about a 150 down the line, I found games again before I came across it on the list.
"Can-have" on self works. "Can't-have" on body does work. You see, "can-have" on body doesn't work. "Can-have" on Mother doesn't. Why? Because everybody alive is engaged with playing a game and is capable, particularly as he falls down through the dynamics, of taking on any item as an opponent and he is very, very scarce on opponents. And to let your opponent have some-thing is defeat. And this works out so fantastically. You just put a preclear in the chair and you smile like a crocodile, you know, on the Nile and you say — you say to him very, very cheerfully and very happily, you say, "All right now, look around the room and find something that your mother can have." Just keep it up and obviously it's a generous, good, self-sacrificing impulse that no child should be without. And your preclear goes "Duuuuhhhh, duuuuhhhh, duuuuhhhh," and finally says, "You know, something is wrong with my head." And you say, "Well, that's all right. Just look around the room and tell me something else that Mother could have." And he eventually just sort of drops out the bottom and you sweep him over to one side and make another experiment. Anyhow .. .
What — what on earth though, if this were a game condition, then there would be only one command that would run about Mother as far as Havingness is concerned.
We'll take up Havingness in a little while. I'll give you just a fast pass at it. You know that yesterday I told you about solids lie below effort. Well, that's Havingness. Anyhow, tolerance of solids is first approached by this process called "What can he have."
Now, we take this next person and we process this ungenerous, mean, vicious thing that nobody would subscribe to, particularly parents. And we start running this fellow on "Now, look around the room and tell me some-thing your mother can't have."
"She can't have? She can have everything." No-no-no.
And it just runs by the hour and he gets better, and he gets better, and he gets better and better. But it sounds so outrageous that only somebody as monomanic as myself on finding the end of track on Scientology would ever have let it be run that many hours because obviously it's not right. It isn't. Goes against the Ten Commandments, the Bureau of Ordinance, even goes against the apparency of the case that every time you really ask that: "What could your mother have?" You walk up to somebody on the street and say, "What could your mother have?" He'd say, "Oh, I would buy her the world if I could."
See, people don't even — people — people don't even cognite on this one. Now, another funny thing — if you ask an individual what a jail could have. Ask him "What can a jail have?"
Did you ever run into anything quite so greedy? And a preclear will tell you at once, "A jail can have anything. Everything! You, him, us, we, every-body. Yes! It can have that pillar and that clock and that ceiling and the roof and so forth." He can't find enough things that a jail can have.
And we say, "Now, look-a-here, look-a-here. We obviously had an aberration there, and it was that the jail could have things and if we simply fill up the jail vacuum . . ." See the reasoning that is all wrong? "If we just fill up the jail vacuum, he'll get over being afraid of jails."
Ah, another phenomenon occurs that escaped all of us. And I'll show you what was fouling up our research from beginning to end as well as games. Did you ever hear of this small matter of a below zero Tone Scale? Audience: Yes.
Did you ever hear of that? Boy, I tell you, I looked back at myself with absolute awe here the other day. I said, "You know, that's three years old?" I said, "Gee, boy," I said, "are you bright. Think of that. Three years ago you wrote this thing." And I said, "You dumb (blank). Why didn't you ever use it?" That's the question "Why didn't we ever really use it?" We had it right there. We've had it for years. And it tells us something that we even knew in 1950. We used to say, "You know arthritis, you can always process the fellow into apathy so he'll lose his arthritis." You know, we know that's the case.
Well, what's this below zero thing? Preclears on at least one or more items are below apathy and have to be processed like mad before they ever get into apathy. And the processes which were being functional were bringing preclears up to apathy and I thought it was driving them down to apathy.
I'm afraid that my first reaction of "Gee, Ronnie, you're smart," has never been able to counteract the feeling of stupidness which I've had since. Whew!
I'll give you — I'll give you the pat example that sets this. How could anyone guess that on one or more subjects anybody would be so far below apathy that he didn't even know he was in trouble. And he could process in that band and evidently feel all right and feel better about it and never get over it. Most fabulous thing you ever saw.
And that some cases across the boards were below apathy — body plus thetan. The body would have had to have gotten well to die.
Now, up here — up here we have our — our Tone Scale just as I was showing you yesterday. It contains know, not-know, on down the line. Perceive, emote, all the various categories of emotions in their proper light, and then effort and then solids and then think and then on down through symbols, eat, sex and mystery. Well, we could get all the way down there. Where are these things called think and mystery? Where are these things? Well, I'm afraid — I'm afraid that they're down here at 0.0 and that's mystery. And then we go south.
The preclear's problem is clear down there, so far below zero, it's in a band where he cannot think about it particularly. But he can think about it, but it doesn't worry him, but there's no emotional content to it but it's all right; he doesn't care, it doesn't make any difference to him, it isn't worrying him a bit. And you process him on it for about three hours and he all of a sudden says, "I feel like I'm dying." And you say — obviously, under old research, we would have said, "You know this process isn't working. This process isn't working because he's getting worse." And that was not right because we processed him another three hours on the same problem and he came right up the Tone Scale. He got to a point of where he could be apathetic about his problem. And from being apathetic, he could move up and he'd cry about it and he'd be afraid of it and he'd be angry about it and antagonistic and bored and then he'd be enthusiastic about having such a lovely problem.
We used to think, you see, that your preclear went down scale when we processed the wrong process on him. Because he would start to feel some-thing. We'd run a process for a little while and he'd feel bad. And we'd say, "Well, that's not a good process; it doesn't make the preclear any better at all."
And this was the observational factor which was messing up our test processes. It's unthinkable that somebody could be processed for a couple, three hours on a very heavy biting process with no reaction at all before they reached apathy. But having reached apathy, be processed two or three more hours up scale gradually until they are over the hump on the problem and feel very, very good about the whole thing.
In other words, the processes that were really good processes were then disguised and hidden under the fact that when they were used on the difficulties the case was really having — when they were used for a little while — the case felt worse. I'll give you one. Let's take separateness. Do you know that separateness runs easily, runs well. People feel better with it. You don't even run into havingness problems particularly if you're a very gentle auditor. You say, "Look around the room and find something you wouldn't mind being separate from." And he gets to feeling a little bit better, and so forth, and it just processes on and on and on and on and then all of a sudden he gets jittery. He gets — you say it's a loss of havingness or — something is wrong.
But he is incapable, usually, on such a line of expressing any emotion for the excellent reason that he is below the tone in which he can feel. He can't feel, emote or react. He's below that tone in which he can actually experience.
That's a fantastic thing. So we run the other one. Now, the reason why this is important is we made a basic test and this was the deciding test as to whether or not a thetan was going into things or coming out. And the test went this way: "Look around and find something you wouldn't mind being connected with." And that run for about twenty minutes practically plows a guy in. He starts feeling bad; he doesn't want to have all these things happening to him. He gets upset; he is — he feels miserable. So, we said his ambition is to be separate.
Separateness is the truth. Connectedness is the lie. And you have to process the lie in order to reach the truth. And if you process connectedness, he gets to feeling worse and worse and worse and worse and we always thought feeling worse was going down scale. In this case, it's going up scale. And he keeps feeling worse and worse and finally gets to be apathetic about it.
We ran a preclear who had had no results on his case at all for about two or three years. He'd not been audited by anybody very significant or they probably would have done something to him. But he had never seen an engram, never done this or done that. And he finally was running a problem and — problem came up to apathy and he says, "I'm bored with it." And the next day he came back to the auditor and said, "You know, I've made a fantastic discovery. You know that apathy and boredom are different." And he says, "I wasn't being bored, I was being apathetic about it and that's what I've always mistaken for boredom."
Now there — there was a case that was functioning, evidently doing all right, and so on. But we had to know the games condition of it even to process that much. We had to know that. Connectedness. People are always getting into games. A game condition is to get into it. So you process "get into it." A no-game condition is "get out of it." So we don't process "get out of it." The only way he could get out of his old unknowing game condition would be for you as an auditor to shove him into it. And there's where we get "the way out is the way through." And that has always been true.
So, this thing untangles. Starts to make very, very interesting sense. And it becomes remarkably easy. Now, quite by accident, we had the exactly correct game condition formula.
A long time ago when we had our first rudimentary communication formula, it says, "Cause, distance, effect." Cause, distance, effect, with the preclear at cause. And that is the way you have to process. You have to get the preclear to do it and the preclear to create an effect. And that is the proper formula: cause, distance, effect.
With the preclear at effect, a process that's supposed to put him at effect is a process which will spin the preclear in, because it's a no-game condition. Did you ever see a dead man playing a game? Well, death's a no-game condition. Follow me?
Now, here in this Scientology: The Fundamentals of Thought, in the printed edition which was the Translator's Edition, we have in here at the back a partial list of game conditions. And these game conditions are, and I'll read them very rapidly: Attention. Now, part of attention is interest. Attention is a heavy button. Interest is a light button. These are all parts of games. You see, games are basically — basically freedom, barriers and purposes. That's basically a game. But none of those things process. Which was — what was remarkable to make this discovery of games — and at first, by the way, in research this would have knocked your brains out if you had been doing it; it's — was horrible — that although I knew it was games conditions, none of the elements I could isolate as a games condition worked on a preclear.
Games consist of freedom, purposes and barriers. Now, you tell a pre-clear to, "Mock up a wall so that you can't go through it. All right, that's fine. Mock up a wall so that you can't go through it." You know it's not a good process? "Figure out some way to restrict somebody else's freedom." It's not a good process? "Invent some purposes for life." It's not a good process?
And so if a game was what life was doing, why didn't its three basic elements process? Well, that's because a thetan is a tricky little fellow. He's tricky. He's much worse than that. He's devious. He only plays games that have specialized conditions. He's a snob. And you get these games conditions, then, arduously arrived at by just trial and error. Because once we had games condition — that wasn't enough because freedoms, purposes and barriers wasn't — it describes a game perfectly. And you can write things and talk to people and they'll agree with you, but they don't process.
So, games had to be all broken to pieces — just broken flat down into pieces in order to make the full conditions — all of the conditions — valid — that were valid processing conditions. And my golly, here was another list of about a thousand possible game conditions. And out of these, only these seemed to work in processing. There are undoubtably some others. I'm sure of it. But in a couple of months, I haven't been able to find any. I'm sure there are some others.
And these are the processable buttons, game conditions:
You can just add that into your notes. Control: start, change and stop. And it was actually Control, which has to be added to that list, that was the most significant of these buttons.
But regardless of all that, what on earth were we doing fooling around with somebody who had to do something or be processed in a direction which was something more than desperate. You have to process him in the direction of "How would you kill everybody?" "How would you stop everything from going?" "How would you knock off your mother?" "How would you cut your own throat?" in order to get any recovery, because his former action on these things so badly violated truth that he himself was unable to return to truth thereafter. You see that?
By entering an untruthful circumstance to the degree that your preclear has entered it on life's track, his recovery of truth lies through the eradication of the untruthful condition.
Now we get — we get no-game conditions and we get knowing all; being able to not-know everything; serenity. These are no-game conditions. I said it about — I think it was the 8th ACC, Phoenix — just the last one. You know, it's a funny thing, but everything that seems to be wrong with a thetan is a — is a — evidently some lower harmonic on what he is.
It's an odd fact. A thetan is motionless and dead bodies are motionless and therefore a dead body is a harmonic on a thetan. You see? And that's true, too. Listen to this list. These don't process. You just don't dare pay any attention to these at all. These take place if you process games conditions. "Serenity," "namelessness," "having no identity at all" — doesn't process. "No effect on opponent," "effect on self or team," "have everything," "can't have nothing," "solutions." If you ask a guy for a solution and solution and solution and solution and solution — a little mistake that was made on a Release at one time, he just spins right in.
You have to ask him for a problem and don't let him solve it, and a problem and don't let him solve it, and a problem — don't let him solve that one. And all of a sudden he says, "You know I can have a problem. I don't have to solve it."
Now, we get this thing called "pan-determinism" — doesn't process. Self-determinism process: "How could you be more of an individual than you are?" That processes like mad. "Invent some additional names for yourself." That processes. "Invent some more names for yourself." "Invent some more faces you could wear."
But, "Pan-determinism of being able to run both sides of it" doesn't work."Friendship for everybody" doesn't work. "Understanding everything and every‑body" doesn't work. "Total communication; being in communication with every‑thing." "No communication whatsoever; being in communication with nothing."Win and lose are no-game conditions. The dirtiest thing you can do tosome athlete — he's been in there fighting you know and he's getting all setand he wins the championship and they put him up or whatever they do to him and hang him up with belts and give him a cup, and so forth. And there he stands. You come along and process him. There he stands. But the funny part of it is, you can't process it. It's a win or a lose. He got knocked flat; he lost the championship and never boxed thereafter. There he lies on the canvas. You say, "Obviously, that is the engram to run on the case, obviously, now." Boy, you'd sure better leave that alone. Leave a win or a lose alone.
Having no universe whatsoever, having no playing field, arriving any-where and dying — these are all no-game conditions. Now, that's a fabulous state of affairs, isn't it. Those are all the things where the thetan should arrive. They're the things a thetan should be. An able man should be able to have and assume those things. Those are the truths of life. These are the precious jewels of life. Hah. You try to process them directly and he flips his lid, and hence the enigma.
Now, we're not talking about the enigma of Scientology. We're talking about the enigma of about fifty thousand years of figure-figure on this same subject. Why didn't anybody crack it? That was because this: Obviously, if a person was in good shape, he'd know an awful lot.
Obviously if he's in good shape, he'd be able to forget or not-know anything — obviously. He'd be serene. He wouldn't have to have a name or fame or identity. He'd have to be willing to have no effect on anybody; let them do as they please. "God bless you, my son, go and sin some more."
It should be possible for him to have everything there is. He should be pan-determined about everything. It should be able — he should be able to solve things. Obviously these things should be able to take place. He should be able to be anybody's friend. He should be able to be — to understand any-thing. He should be able to communicate or not communicate. He should be able to take wins and loses. He should be able to have no universe or a universe. He should be able to have a playing field or no playing field. He certainly ought to be able to arrive. And he ought to be able to die comfortably — after all, it's pretty things, these funerals.
Although Scientologists, I notice, are getting more and more perfunctory. They say, "My mother died this afternoon, would you like to come down to the funeral? Well, I know you're busy." Then they say, "That's besides the point," and then they tell you how she's got some mock-up picked out in Portugal. That's right. I mean it's real wild. They tell you some mock-up that they got — baby being born in Portugal tomorrow morning at eight o'clock so she died this afternoon.
You hear these wild things. I'm not — I'm not responsible for them. I mean, people just come around and tell you and they happen to be true. I'm not trying to put anything off on you.
Now, if you can't process any of these truths, then how could you ever attain them, since they are desirable. Because unless you can have some part of those truths, you can't enter games knowingly, willingly or play them well. Now, you take somebody who is really in a good, high level of truth in a no-game condition — if he's in a good level of truth, he should be able to turn around and play almost any game that he ever confronted. Any game — he ought to be able to think one up, play one, have a good time, enjoy it and knock it off when he wanted to knock it off. He should be able to do this. Very interesting, isn't it, that by processing him straight at that condition, of a no-game condition, he never arrives. You have to run out, you might say, the old games. You have to run him through games conditions.
All right, "Now, let's figure out a way where you could be a lying — a lying, thieving cheat. That's good, that's good. Oh, invent a better lying, thieving cheat." "Mock up an identity for yourself which would actually cope with it. Oh, get stronger, get bigger." Now, "How — how — how could you get to be taller than that?" "Invent a way to use more strength on your wife."
You see the — you see the type of process that you run? Well, now it's very odd that he runs this stuff, he gets straightened out and all of a sudden, "Gee, that's a funny thing. I feel — I feel much better. We've been doing all this and all of a sudden I feel . . . By the way I was going to go into business a couple of years ago and I just never got up to do it. I think I'll do it now, and I don't think I can finish the intensive, because I have an appointment with the fellow who was going to finance me." And swish! It's awfully hard to hold on to preclears. I told you this before, that they get into action. Now, why do they get into action? They come up so high and they're able to enter the game of life again and you don't get a chance, really, to process them all the way to zenith, unless you have an agreement that you are going to continue the intensive until you say "quit."
Now, what is wrong with a man? He's been playing a game. What's right with him? That he can recover. All games are aberrative.
You play a game — a game of marriage. You go out, you find a man. You tell him a whole bunch of stuff. You get married, you have a bad time, you fight, you separate, you get back together, and so on — zzz-www-boof — the game of marriage. And you patch it all up and that's good. And it works out or it doesn't work out, and so on. Somebody comes along and he wants to process out your marriage so that you'll feel better. Your remark would simply be, "You know, I know I've been married." Well, the actual fact is it couldn't possibly be aberrative. If you know you've done it, if you know you've been married, if you know you've played football, nothing can ensue. But when you come along and play football for years and then all of a sudden switch your identity and say, "I've never played football in my life," and you yourself don't remember ever having played football, and so on, boy, are you in for it. That's a tough one.
So as hard as it is for people to take, I hate to mention this thing called past lives — they've been outlawed! In the minute books of the — of the Hub-bard Dianetic Research Foundation, Elizabeth, New Jersey, you will see a motion discussed there to just make Ron shut up on this subject because it's unpopular. Well look, if it's so unpopular, somebody must have some kind of a resistance to it of some kind or another. I don't think anything aberrative happened to you during your whole current lifetime. Your mother beat you, fed you through a sausage grinder. Your father was mean to you. You were dropped on your head when you were one. You had fifteen AAs and you were boiled in oil and you were captured by the Japanese and shot regularly every morning. So what. See? You know all about it.
You can sit there — now, the auditor sits there and he says to a preclear, he says, "Well, now, let's see. What's happened to you?" Nuts! Why should we ask such a question? If he knew, it wouldn't be wrong. You get the colossal joke about the whole thing? If he knew, it wouldn't be wrong! And the funniest thing happens to a case when he's processed these days. He starts arguing with the auditor. They always do. They say, "But there's nothing on this! There's nothing on the subject of books!" You know, he's going, "Daaa," some kind or another. "There's nothing on books. I have never had any difficulty with books! I've never been hit with a book. As a matter of fact, don't even read when I'm sick."
And the auditor somehow or another, by making him spot objects, has all of a sudden found that he couldn't spot a book. He said something outrageous like, "Well, I don't spot books because they're angry at me," or something like that, and just passed it along, you know — perfectly normal. And the auditor says, "Well, all right. Let's spot that book over there."
And he says, "Well, I — there's nothing wrong with books. What's the matter with you? You're nuts!"
He'll say, "I know what's wrong with me, it was my mother. That's what was wrong with me. And the fact that I was in boarding school and every day, why, there were three older boys who beat me. That's — that's what's wrong with me, and so on. That's what you're supposed to be auditing."
You say, "Spot another book."
"But there's nothing wrong with books. I don't see what you're talking about. You're just not making sense. You're not a good auditor. They told me you were a good auditor, but I don't believe it now."
And all of a sudden, why, books start looking so funny to him. They start leaping up in the air and doing peculiar things. Figures start walking out of them. I mean, with his naked eyes. Books lying on the table and a figure suddenly walks out of it and says, "You jerk," and drops off the table. He's liable to tell the auditor, "Well, I've had it now. I didn't know I could ever have a delusion."
And the next thing you know, why — say, "Good golly. You know, I believe I've had some connection or another with a publishing firm somewhere. But I don't know what that's all about." Oh, you've gone about twenty past lives back when he was the — when he was the — you understand, it had to be a games condition — he was cause. We're not looking for the victim now. You can tell your preclears we are, if you want to, but don't process them in that direction. We're not looking for victims. We're looking for villains.
And we find out that during the Spanish Inquisition he had sole charge of burning all heretical books and heretical authors. And then what really loused it up in the next life, he was an heretic!
And that's — that's — that's just the way it goes.
It really isn't the old overt act — motivator phenomena. This is a later sequence. Now, you understand that way up high, here, are these games conditions and no-games conditions. That's a very high theory. Proceeding from those are all sorts of theories and phenomena that we've been studying; thou-sands of them. The overt act — motivator sequence — that is explained by game phenomena but it isn't at the same level. It's actually a new and different phenomena. It is a planned or agreed-upon phenomena which can bite only because a games condition has existed.
Now, we've studied the ways and means of effort on how people resist being shot and we run Effort Processing one way or the other to get them "unshot." Well, it has some workability. But the funny part of it is, is what are they doing getting shot? Now, what explains that? Why can they get shot? You understand? And it's a silly question for anybody to ask, but how is it that you could walk out and get in front of a bullet which would enter your body and shoot you? Boy, that takes some doing. You figure that out. It takes some doing. What are you doing in a position where this can happen? How did you get there? "Well — " you say, "well, I — I was mean to bodies and finally they all fell in on me."
Well, this is overt act — motivator sequence. It's a very low reason. No, there was a game sometime or another way back on the track that sort of ran like this: You saw a body walking along and you said, "Isn't that cute. Ha-ha. Very interesting — walking around and so on. Ha-ha. Well, what do you know.
What do you know." And then you said — decided it — liable to fall over some-thing, so you tried to get it to work in another direction, and it didn't obey you worth a nickel. You said, "Walk to the right." You know, "Better move over that way." And it didn't. And you said, "Why, the disobedient little something-or-other. Psssst." Well, that was the end of that body. You forgot all about that. Time went on. You had — did a lot of other things and there was another body one day and you saw that body — psssew. And you killed that one for some reason or another.
And then you get way down the time track someplace and there's a body walking along and you feel a little bit suspicious of this body somehow or another. And you reach over to feel of its head or something with a beam and chooomp, in you go. And you say, "Now, look what happened to me. Look what happened to me. I touched a body and it pulled me in. Bodies are vacuums. I am a victim."
How did you get into a position to be a victim? And that is what you audit out of the preclear. Just how did you make it possible for you to be a victim since being a victim is one of the doggonedest positions for a thetan to get into? It is almost impossible for a thetan, which has no mass, no motion, so on, to be a victim. You see with what pride an individual would display the fact that he was stuck in a paraplegic body, see? Proud. "Look at how much of a victim I got to be." And somebody else's sympathy is really probably more or less awe. Boy! And that — that's — that's kind of the way it is.
And then you come along and you audit out his being a victim. Won't work. Doesn't work. He doesn't know how he got to be a victim. He really is a victim. He's upset about life. He can't cope with it. It's out from beyond his control. But you come along as an auditor — you have to find the game he was playing wherein he was cause which precedes all these other games where he got adroit enough to be a victim. Do you follow me?
Well, there — there we had this weird, weird riddle of life. A thetan was truth. A spirit was totally capable and it fell from grace and it doesn't regrace itself until you run out the "fell from grace" by giving him enough "falls from grace" to make it worth his while.
You have to increase the number of falls from grace on the track before he'll unfall. That's an interesting thing.
So, to say offhand that an individual must get in and must play vigorously and must play life desperately, is not true. That's not true.
To say that because a man plays life desperately, he suffers from it, isn't true either.
To say he must be calm, isn't true. To say he must be active, isn't true. What is true?
That if you've played a game, admit it.
Well, I had a little something to tell you there about game conditions and I hope they've made a little sense to you. There's much more material on this and some of these processes that stem from this are too violent to audit unless you have a perfect and thorough command of modern procedure. It's for true. I mean, a preclear just doesn't stay under control. They just go psewww and blow. Neurons all over the ceiling, so to speak.
But, there are processes along this level which are very auditable. It tells an auditor at once what he can audit and what he had better not. And it tells us also, more important to us, how man got into this mess and gives us ways and means to get him out of it.
Thank you.