I uh… understand you want to hear some more about these games. That right? Okay. I’ll just give you then a breakdown on the list, which I gave you at the end of the last hour, and explain this thing just a little bit further, so that you’ll have a good grasp of what we’re doing here.

You see, the first thing that should be sorted out on any operation is the intention or the goal. This was a practice of the ancient magician. He would become an effect if he had not stated what he was trying to cause. If he’d just cause, cause, cause, at random, without ever analysing what he was trying to DO, he was doing at random and heading toward chaos.

The difference between thought and matter is that thought aligns in its highest echelon, and matter is chaos. Now, the chaos of matter is quite in addition a chaos which came about from thought hitting the particles too often and misaligning them. So let’s… let’s look this thing over, from this standpoint: To have a goal in processing, and a stated intention in processing is itself tremendously important in processing. And it’s very very important for the auditor doing the processing to know what he is trying to do and for what he is aiming. He doesn’t have to make a terribly full statement of this, but he had better have something so that he can make a full round statement of his overall, unlimited goal.

I don’t care if he is… if… if he… it’s an indifferent goal, or a not terribly desirable goal, or this is the effect toward which he is heading. He wants to achieve this effect. Now oddly enough uh… you can run this in a circle if you want to. You can say, „I am trying to cause this result. I am trying to get the preclear up to a point where he can be cause.“ Well now, that’s all right. But it’s kind of nebulous. It’s part of the ingredients of the intention, but it wouldn’t be all of the intention. Uh… were you ever part of a group that just went on acting and acting and acting and acting, and never got down to saying what they were trying to do?

Now if you get into any group, political, social, anything like that, it doesn’t matter, and you find out there’s a terrible lot of random motion going on — there’s nothing happening, but there’s an awful lot of motion, but nothing happening, you’ve sat down in a piece of MEST. You haven’t sat down in theta; you’re sitting in a MEST. Random vectors.

The difference between a piece of chaotic matter and thought is that the chaotic matter is without goals beyond those goals which somebody else impresses upon it. An orange is a living thing. It knows what it’s trying to do. It has been persuaded that it should produce itself so that it will be eaten. And it has found this actually is a good way to plant orange seeds, and get them well fertilized so it’ll grow, make itself quite edible. But it’s trying to produce new oranges. It has a goal. Very well aligned.

And one of the things in which you’re in awe, in the process of life creation, is not so much the complexity of steps and alkaloids and chemicals used in life creation. But there’s that goal. That single, clear, starry goal. And it is simply the goal of „produce another thing like myself, and lots of ‘em!“ And what you look at there, you… you’re not looking at MEST, or the process of complexity, but boy, there isn’t another goal that compares to that, to direct beeline intention. And so a fellow, the human race has sort of bowed down to that, and they sort of take a look around them and see this enormous obsession going on. This… this… this fixity on a goal of reproduction of self. And they say life is a wonderful and mysterious process. It is so wonderful and so mysterious, that you when you get upscale and so forth will be able to embue something with life.

That’s really not what life is doing at all. It’s just using an existing impulse. It’s not making new lives. It’s setting up these channel lines. And… so that things can travel down them. It’s sort of like a road-building crew.

But get the interest people get in a well-aligned and fixed goal. Now if you just have the preclear there, and you nebulously say, „I’m going to make this person well“ and then… then you don’t even bother to define what ‘well’ is, and you don’t know what… what is ‘well’? Well you don’t have much of a goal for your preclear. So you could merely state, and always should state, what you are trying to do for the preclear. Not leave it understood, or half thought-out, or say, „That was part of a lecture sometime and I’m sure that somebody else knows about it but I don’t.“ You’re being an effect when you’re saying that, and you’re not going to cause, not worth a nickel.

To cause things one must be cause, and the primary requisite of cause is a statement of intention and goal. Primary requisite to be cause, is a clear statement of what you’re trying to do. And only when you clearly state it can you avoid being yourself an eventual effect. „What am I trying to do?“ If you can’t answer that, you’ll foul up.

Well, let’s put it to this limited degree. A preclear comes in, sits down, says, „I uh… so-and-so and so-and-so… I want uh… so-and-so… and I’ve always had this bum lock of hair and I want it to be trained flat.“ That’s his goal. Who was it that had a goal, he got this, oh… tremendous amount of processing on something just so he could grow a couple of hairs, or something like that. Or we ask this preclear, theta cleared, and everything else, and what was this preclear trying to do? Well, this preclear was trying to uh… make it so she wouldn’t mind it if her husband scolded her. I mean, merely… really limp! But that’s better than not having any goal! Most preclears come in, they say, „Well, I…“ — they’re not happy, and so on. „I want to be happy.“ Oh, boy! That’s nice and nebulous too. Beautiful.

So let’s have action goals, huh? For our preclears. All right, one preclear comes in and he sits down and you see this preclear is loused up like a fire drill and he doesn’t know how loused up he is, and he says, „I want to fix it up so ties fit me better.“ You don’t care what he says! The second you accept his goal for him, you are an effect of him. The hell with what he wants! Oh, that’s strange! The guy’s in a very aberrated condition. And he isn’t going to want what he says he wants after an hour’s processing. He isn’t in any state to make any goal, or any decision about a goal. He really isn’t!

You take a look at him, and say, „Now, let’s see…“ You don’t have to tell him. Make a statement. Write it down. Keep… keep one of these ten-cent store ledgers, like I’m always threatening to do when people steal. I’ll keep a few cases in… in a ledger and make a few notes and the next thing I know I look around and I say, „Where’s my ledger?“ Uh-uh! There’s more of those things parked around the country! People looking for some magic secret or something, I… what do they find in it? They find, „Effort Processing. Lecture so-and-so…“ so on. Just routine processes. Routine as the devil!

All right. Every once in a while they find some experimental data, like we… we uh… worked with this preclear on action goals. We had him go down to the dime store, and uh… buy uh… fifty sets of glasses. And then come back and break them in a number of different ways. Something like that, to see if this improved their vision any. Just… but what’s the cause? So you have this little ledger book, and you write down, „Jones, Mrs.“ And you put at the top, age, rank, serial number? Nuh-uh! You don’t show this case book to Mrs. Jones. The dickens with what she thinks about it. After you’ve talked to her for a couple of moments, you put down the hour she reported in; that’ll be of value to you later on. Tells you how much time you spent on her, in case you want to add up your ledgers. It’s quite important. Tell her how long you’ve processed her. Also you can have that in the book, so that’s quite important too.

But uh… how long s… length or… or amount of havingness of Mrs. Jones, this could be a list of. That’s really what you’re marking down. Uh… now, Mrs. Jones doesn’t have you, you understand. That’s… that’s the way to be a terrible bad auditor. How’re you going to have any effect upon a preclear, if you’re asking the preclear all the time for a license to survive? You don’t get many preclears either, by the way. They… they sort of notice this. You can give them sympathy, but you can only… their… your sympathy’s only valuable if you give it from an altitude. And the only way you gain altitude is simply to be cause. And you’re cause by locating them in time and space. You tell them when they’re supposed to be there and when they leave.

Make a practice sometime of telling ‘em to leave. You ought to drill yourself on it. „All right, you leave now.“ And by the way, if I were… if I were really… had the thumbs down around here on processing good and solid, you could get little assignments like that. But I’ve had to be on deck to straighten them back and forth.

I gave a fellow an assignment one time, „Now, I’m giving you five hours of effort processing,“ and uh… so forth, and his trouble was a tremendous uh… physical infirmity which demonstrated enormous embarrassment. I gave him the assignment of making everybody he met, or knew, demonstrate that infirmity. Tough assignment! He knew he couldn’t do it. He knew he couldn’t. So what do you know! A week later, he’d gone around and put it into action. Instead of being embarrassed himself, he had managed to make everybody embarrassed that he knew. This guy was a cock of the walk. He was in most wonderful condition! In just gorgeous condition!

For instance uh… he knew that he would never have the right to talk to a woman. Much less embarrass a woman! So I made him go around and selectively embarrass women. By remarks to them. Not… not bad remarks, you understand. But just tell them something or other and… that would make them nervous. Just a little bit. That guy came back and he was feeling benign toward the feminine part of the race, patting them all on the head, and they enjoyed him a great deal like that; he was fun. He had been able to command these objects.

All right, when you’re trying to command objects, be cause. And always be cause, and everything else but cause, and when you put down that ‘Mrs., Jones, 2:15’, why, you also put down after you’ve talked to her for a short time what goal you intend to achieve with Mrs. Jones.

And then she says, „Well, I can only spend a certain amount of time. I can only spend a certain amount of time,“ she says, „on this and I only have five hours that I can be processed,“ and so forth.

It’s always a good thing to tell them in no uncertain terms uh… „You have as many hours as you need. And if you only need three, you only need three.“

And so we have a condition resulting here of a preclear who is going to get well. Not a preclear who’s going to come in and burn up some time and pay you a fee and go out again and monkey around.

Let’s get down to some of the niceties of how you handle people. I may not follow my own rules, but I sure know the rules! And to a large degree when I am extremely successful with somebody or other, I have followed the rules — I look back over it.

He says, „I only have enough time, I’m going home… Here is… I’ve got a hundred guineas,“ or, „I’ve got five hundred bucks,“ or… or whatever it is, and, „I want so many hours of processing for this,“ and so forth.

You say, „Well, the processing fee happens to be 250 dollars an hour, and you have as many hours of processing as you need, and if you only need a half an hour, that’s all you’re going to get.“

And they say, „The man must know what he’s talking about! He must be able to do things!“

You think that’s offensive language — no, no! Don’t bother to be offensive about it. But it is better to be offensive, that way, real mean offensive that way.

„I don’t care whether you’ve come over here or not; it’s nothing to me whatsoever whether or not you come over here to get processed. That’s… that’s… all you can possibly pay me is money. And that isn’t worth a damn, and you know it, and you probably aren’t worth saving anyhow!“

You could go to that limit, and it would be better, and you would get more preclears, and you would do more for the preclears, than if they came over and you said, „Well, yes, that’s right,“ and, „We’ll see if we can do that…“ and, „That’s right…“ and everything is all very calm, and uh… and uh… so on. And uh… „Well, if that’s what you want, why, we’ll give it to you.“

No, no, no. Don’t be so damned agreeable. ‘Cause that’s inflow. Be disagreeable; that’s outflow, and they’ll want you! Say, „Yes, you come over here at 2:15, you be over here at 2:15, and we’ll give you enough hours… as many hours of processing as we can.“

They say, „Well, I only have two hours, and I want to spend it…“ and so on.

Uh… „Well, I’m sorry. I can’t say how long you’ll be. You’ll maybe only be here an hour, and maybe I might keep you six. Who cares?“

Give them no margin of placing themselves in time. Because you are much better off in control of the preclear than the preclear is in control of himself during the period of processing him. And the way you do that is place him in space and time. And never let him get the idea he’s placing himself in space and time.

Once in a while suddenly call the guy up and say, „Drop over here at eight o’clock before you go to work.“ Rattle him on the subject, if you’re having trouble with a preclear. And you’ll find out he’ll respond better to processing! This is how you build altitude.

But under the name ‘Mrs. Jones’ you put down the goal. „This squirrely old dame ought to be fixed up so that she could possibly live with her husband.“ And you just work, right straight toward that goal.

And she says, „…and my lumbago, and my arth… arthipedics, are uh… are all sparthlicated…“

You don’t care. That… if that has to do with her getting along with her husband, and that’s what you’ve decided she’d better do, that’s what’s going to happen to her! And what do you know! You’ve decided what’s going to happen to her, she’ll never gonna… he… she won’t affect you. She can sit there and rattle off aberrations and exude glee of insanity and… and feed out engrams that would ordinarily be terribly restimulative, and… and all that sort of thing, and that won’t have any effect on you at all. You know what you’re doing with her. It doesn’t matter how limited your goals is, or how extended your goal is, just go ahead and do it. Don’t even be practical about it. And don’t mind changing it.

The next day she comes in, you’ve changed your mind. Don’t shift the goal! But know that YOU changed YOUR mind, on receipt of more data. You’ve decided she ought to be able to live with her son. That she’d probably be happier doing so.

Now that sounds very funny, making peoples self-determined by dominating them and controlling them. That’s telling you you’d better be responsible for your preclear, and you couldn’t be responsible for this preclear at all unless you were willing to control and dominate him during the session. See? If you aren’t willing to do that, you… you’re not willing to handle the force of a preclear. ‘Cause we’re not trying to handle that preclear for bad cause. You’re not trying to be bad cause.

But maybe you are bad cause. Maybe you move her out of her body and she does a bunk and they bury her. Well you know that you did your best along the line. You know what you were trying to do. And you know what you were trying to accomplish. Things like this can happen. Probably never will happen, but they could happen. Be willing to take the consequence of it. If you are, if you go around propitiating, and say, „Give me a license to survive,“ to everybody you meet; every time a preclear walks in you say, „Have you got your license to… the license you’ve got for me? Oh, please, sign me a license to survive,“ and you won’t make ‘em well. Steel yourself up. Just on the basis of being cause. And most of being cause is stating the goal.

You’re willing to state a goal on something.

Now to give you here a goal, we’re going to make a theta clear. A person who is going to be stable outside of his body, and who does not have to come hack in because the body is injured. That is a highly specific, but very broad goal. That’s what you’re trying to make. There is no ‘why’ you are making a theta clear, you see. You know that in the process of doing this an awful lot of a guy’s upsets and viewpoints and educational malfunctions and all kinds of things will spring. Matter of fact you can sometimes take somebody and move him out two feet back of his head, takes a look at himself, drill him a little bit, orient him in space. You don’t even stabilize him outside of the body. He comes back in like mad. He wouldn’t hardly know the guy from the beginning to the end of the session. He’s so much better, he’s so much more alert, and so forth. That’s just the theta exterior.

All right, you make a good theta clear, you could kick him in the shins, or an automobile could run over that body, or anything could happen to that body, he would stand there and be outside, not trapped. What you’re doing is making a thetan trap-proof, as far as a body is concerned. And pea… I love these… these short-gap no-synapsis characters that go around saying, „A theta clear is uh… just a theta clear, and that’s nothing, why, anybody could be that, or do that uh… because uh… the astral walkers have been uh… been skidding around on their feet uh… for a long time on this subject, and everybody knows that they’re theta clears, and anybody can…“ Oh, piddle! It isn’t even vaguely connected!

You’ve got the individual EXISTS, and IS without a body, and no dependence on one, beyond his contact and communication lines, as long as he wants to stay in contact with the bodies. But the body doesn’t command him, he commands it. That’s a terrific goal, right there! You’ve got a human being, made into a new kind of human being. It’s a body being monitored by a trap-proof thetan. And that makes quite a guy! Quite a guy. There’s a big difference between that guy and homo sapiens. An enormous guy! This goal is so far beyond the goals of the first Book that I don’t think you could measure ‘em with light wave… meters… light-year meters. It’s just… be… way beyond anything. Because the bird’s immortal!

Maybe you hadn’t… probably… many of you taken even that into consideration. That you’ve just made a god! What is the definition of a god? It’s an immortal. Since time immemorial in this language, the gods are immortal. The immortals are gods. This guy can be… body can be bashed in, so forth, all he’s got to do is pick up another one. Knowingly, full knowingly.

You’ve given him his identity, his own identification inside himself as much as he needs it, and his own state of beingness and stepped him sideways off the track, completely, of having to flick back through between-lives areas, and be this effect of God knows what-all. The body got killed, it’d be a sad thing because he would not be able to collect his social security as himself. That’d be real tough, wouldn’t it? So don’t… don’t sell this goal short. You’ve just made an immortal. So that… that’s a good enough goal! All by itself.

Well, if you make your intention of a person… you say we’re going to make a theta clear out of a person, that’s what you intend to do with that person. Just by definition. But if you don’t intend to do that much, let’s do something short of that. Let’s still state what it is. „I’m going to fix up her left hind leg. Work till her left hind leg is fixed up and then drop it. That’s the end of that.“

Or if you were to put down you’re going to make a cleared theta clear out of somebody, oh no! How can you state you are going to do something of which you do not know the scope and dimensions? With an individual you’re going to say, „I am going to research the business of being a cleared theta clear, with this pc, and find out some more about it.“ Well, that’d be all right. But, „I’m going to make a cleared theta clear out of somebody,“ you might as well write down, „I am going to make a Thee-X-Epsilon“ with no idea of what a Thee-X-Epsilon could possibly be. It is not a goal. Because it has no scope or meaning.

What can a thetan do? Now, we’ll say cleared theta clear. You couldn’t put down such a goal. Because that’s the postulated outer line unattainable absolute. Probably anything we understand it to be is probably attainable already, but what is the outermost limit of it, Lord knows! Haven’t got any idea and you haven’t either. You won’t have for a long time!

But what… what do we get then, when we look at this? We say, „This is… we’ve got a theta clear, and we’re going to do something more. We’re going to process him some more.“ So you put down as your goal, „I am going to process him some more.“ Sure, you can go process him some more. You can just process him and process him, and… to do what? „Well, I don’t know, make a better thetan out of him, or…“

No, you could say, „I’ll process him some more to get rid of’ these ‘can’ts’ I found on the E-Meter as follows…“ All right, you got those ‘can’ts’ out, end of track! Otherwise you don’t get any… any end cycles on anything. You just keep going on forever, and your whole life gets dragged out to an interminable piece of endurance.

So when you say, „I’m going to…“ here, you’ve got a… got a cleared thetan, „Now what’s my next goal for him?“ You could put down what the next goal is: „I’m going to fix it up so he can lift his body.“ See, you make a statement, to yourself. I don’t care if you write it down. Make the statement to yourself at a clear moment. „What am I going to do for Doaks, now that he’s a cleared thetan? I’m going to fix him up so he can lift his body.“ And that’s a specific drill, and you fix him up so he can lift his body.

Then maybe the next time… next time you process him, a few weeks later, you give him a few hours of processing, and he gets a what? You’re going to get him up to a point where he can lift up a taxi cab. Now, a taxi cab would be an entirely different project than lifting his body, but they’re consecutive on the same line. You get the idea? Specific statement of goals.

Now let’s look at the overall in… statement of why we are doing this. Why? Well, the reason why we’re doing this would and should be codified before we could adhese, or cohese, as an operating group to the extent we would like to be one. Because that would be what the group goal is. What are we trying to do?

Well, the group goal to a large degree depends upon the group. I don’t happen to be uh… either inclined to or in a position to tell you what the group goal should be. But I can sure give you the data so you can work it out. And if you all put your heads together and decide that’s what you’re trying to do, all of a sudden a lot of spirit and spark could come in on this.

I told a preclear one time… he said, „Well, I can’t understand why I’ve got to originate all this energy.“

And I said, „Hey, did you ever stop and think of this one thing? You could probably attract waiters in restaurants much more easily simply by reaching over and taking them sharply by the ear, or the shoulder, and turning them around and pulling them forcefully into the table.“

He said, „I could?“

And he worked and he worked and he worked and he worked and he worked. And he came back to see me one day, and he says, „What do you know!“ he said, „I not only dragged one clear across the restaurant, but I also dragged the head waiter over to the table, and I made them stand there, and then I convinced them that I hadn’t done it. And that they were mistaken, that I didn’t want anything, and I wouldn’t let them go away!“

I told another preclear, „Do you realize that you could reach over with a couple of energy beams like this and make any girl smile at you, you wanted to smile?“

He said, „You could? No!“

So he worked, and worked, worked. Force, see? Energy, energy. Had a big goal. Force, force, work, work work work work work, work.

And he finally goes out and pssww! „Yes! What do you know!“ he says. „It’s an awful artificial smile, though. You can make any girl smile at you,“ he says, „It makes them feel so silly. They walk down the street and they look at you and they wonder why they’re smiling at you!“

So, I said, „Well, you know, if it makes them feel silly, all you’ve got to do is put those same two things on their motor controls, and say, ‘Feel pleasant toward me.’„

He says, „You couldn’t do that!“ I said, „Well, try it! Try it!“ „Feel pleasant toward me. I don’t… don’t…“

I said, „Try to get back up the line, how pleasant it is to touch them. Skip that. Just ‘Feel pleasant toward me.’„

And he says, „You know, they do. They exude an awful lot of enthusiasm in my direction all of a sudden.“

He’s been going around this all… for some time. He hasn’t got any goal of his own. You just have to keep giving him these little piece goals, and so forth, and uh… figure out things that’d be interesting to do, that he all of a sudden says, „You know, that’s awful interesting!“ And he’ll find out his process will just skim forward. Just take a terrific rush! You’ve given him a goal.

Now a group goal is a very necessary thing if your group is going to get interested and go forward. A person’s cause is motivated by future. Motivation’s in the future. It’s, ‘What I want’. ‘What do we want’. That’s cause. And if it’s interesting it sort of pulls us forward to it. You’re making the cause be motivated by something you want to have. And so when you postulate the goal for Mrs. Jones, make it something you want to have. Something that’d be interesting to you.

I don’t care what you do to Mrs. Jones. I don’t care if you drop her off the top of the wall… Woolworth State Building. That’s your preclear. ‘Course, if you drop too many of them, why then as a group we have to take a hand. Not to punish you, but to placate the police! And somebody’d have to drill up on how you pick the locks on cells or something in order to get your body back out, because there you are, trying to whisper in all your fellow auditors’ ears, „Hey! The body’s down in the clink!“ And, „I… I’m so rattled, I… I can’t zap any of these cops!“

So, what’s your… what’s your goal level as a group? Well now, it frames around this pretty well, truth be told. There’s games to make and games to unmake. And there’s one thing to play a game, and all games have umpires, and it’s quite another thing to be an umpire to a game, and it’s quite another thing to unmake games. You say that sounds like a very destructive goal. Oh no it’s not! ‘Cause what you do when you unmake a game is you get the players together, and you say, „Hey, what kind of a game would you like to play now?“ You haven’t busted their game up willy-nilly; they were perfectly willing at the time you unmade the game for it to be unmade. Actually you could play the game of unmaking games.

Or you could play the game of umpiring a game. As a group, do you realize you could set up umpires to the group called MEST universe? It’s very strange, isn’t it? It sounds, it just sounds so flamboyant that you probably don’t think it’s completely attainable. But this is an easier one. You could actually set yourself up so that you just simply say, „Well, we’re the… the umpire squad, and uh… we decided this Earth-Venus-Mars triangular game here… gotta know more… something more about this, so that it could be played a little more equitably and so on, and with a little more interest. And uh… let’s find out what rules you’re playing by so that we can enforce them.“

Or there’s the game called U.S. and Russia. And you simply set up a nice, conservative quiet 22.0 tone scale association, that simply starts monitoring the situation between the U.S. and Russia. And you say, „Well it’s all very well for you boys to have conferences, and uh… that’s all very well, but uh… unfortunately you… not… don’t realize it completely, but you’ve got to have an umpire present. And you’ve got to have more conferences, and these conferences have got to be wide open to the people of both places.“ And they’d say, „Well, why? What do you mean?“ „Well,“ you’d say, „It’s like this.“

And then… then Stalin and a couple of other generals, and things’d be finding themselves meeting in a small swamp in the middle of Korea. Yeah! I mean that literally! Pick ‘em up by the nape of the neck and slam them into the middle of Korea. And you say, „Okay, boys. Now we said there’s going to be umpires in this game!“ All right, it doesn’t appear immediately attainable to you. So it’s not within your framework of workability. But it’ll get there soon enough. And if it gets there and you want to do such a thing, go ahead!

Or, you can suddenly turn this way: You can just walk around and pick up teams, or set-ups, who’d gone all to pieces. Or they’ve dwindled down to nothing, where you have no game. Do you realize the cruelest thing that can happen is for a game to deteriorate to a no-game state? Where there isn’t any game possible, and everybody’s stuck in it? And they’ve forgotten their rules, and they don’t know anything about it, and so on. You could as a small association simply go around… (I’m going to petition to the city of Philadelphia to take the wheels off their street cars, and use some gravity bolts or something. Every wheel on those street cars is flat as the motorman’s head!)

Anyway uh… you’ve got a makingness of games inherent in ending games. You have a responsibility for doing something about broken pieces, pieces and players, if you decide to end games. Well, you could suddenly put your heads together and say, „What do you know! What we’re going to do here is we’ll set up and just for practice monitor a few of the games going on on Earth and find out if their games are going according to our Hoyle. Whose Hoyle? Our Hoyle. Well, we’d have to have Hoyle. We’d have to write Hoyle on the subject of games, or Sudrow on the subject of games, or something of the sort.

And uh… you decide that uh… this or that was happening, or people weren’t interested in this game, this game could be pepped up and become more interested. So you’ve just become game catalysts. You should pick up… (You see? I ran regret on that streetcar and it backed up all that distance!) Uh… there is a goal, which is an attainable goal. If you were to take, in the United States, and set yourself up as game umpires, that’s just what it’d amount to. Is… is the game called business and industry, is the game called militarism vs. politicianism, are these games running so that they’re interesting? Sole consideration! Is the game interesting? No! Well, let’s take and adjust a few factors that make it possible for the game to be interesting.

Okay. Now. The limitation in the rules of games, the limitations on self and others, is necessary for there to be an interplay. There’s got to be a limitation. There’s got to be some frame of reference. That limitation can only be as light as an ethical understanding. We’re going to operate within ethics. And the reason why there has to be a limitation is not terribly obvious to you now, but it’s obvious to you from the theory which you have studied for some time.

And that theory is simply this: Our whole activity tends to make an individual completely independent of any limitation. That’s right. You can get so much bigger than anything you are, and so disconnected from anything you’re in contact with, and so completely careless of the fact that this is what’s happening. If… you can go straight on out, and one person is capable of himself being a universe, hence you could do the whole thing yourself. You’re that big. But the second that you are that big, you would be imposing limitations on yourself, in order to scale down to a size which made you able to play against yourself. And then you’d impose limitations on the two sides of yourself. And you’ve gone into the same spiral of limitation.

You see, limitation is necessary to that degree because there is no limitation, basically, and the limitation itself is an idea of limitation. And when you have an unlimited thing, in order to produce any action or randomity you’ve got to limit it to some degree. See, it’s not fair. Any one of you people could go ahead and rule the whole confounded shooting match all by yourself. So you’d make up a team, and say these are the limitations in which we’re operating and they’re so-and-so and so-and-so, and such and such, and change it around as you will. Do you follow me?

Old Alistair Crowley had some interesting things to say about this. He wrote a book of the law. He was a mad old boy! I mean, he… you’d… you’d be surprised though, that Crowley, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Aristotle, all the boys, practically, along the line, except the real screwballs like Kant (He was insane! That’s why people bought him) — they all talked about the same thing. And actually you can find all these ideas we’re talking about, someplace in the writings of practically any philosopher who ever thought things over. He couldn’t fail to fall headlong across the most salient facts in the case. He never organized them or was able to evaluate or use them. But he had ‘em.

Schopenhauer, THE WILL AND IDEA. Try attempted breakdowns of this and that. You read this fellow now and „By God,“ you’ll say, „this guy really made sense.“ Don’t… don’t forget, you’re talking from an aligned viewpoint of knowingness. And you can make anything make sense now. You could even make Congress make sense!

Now, if you’re going to have rules, if you’re going to have a game, you’ve got to have rules. And if you’ve got rules, they must be obeyed. An… a rule which is not obeyed, or is obeyed just some of the time, or is so bad that it can’t be obeyed all of the time, it shouldn’t be there at all! And a game which has no rules has no game. It’s chaos. No alignment. Nobody to agree on anything or… so on. After you’d won something you’d never want it, you see; there couldn’t be a goal in it. So it has to be some sort of an agreement.

It’s only when the agreements become compulsions on individuals that the game gets very upsetting. And a piece then degenerates into a broken piece, and it… nothing is making any sense to him. He knows it’s no fun. He isn’t a participant, really, he’s just kind of used. And nobody really wants him or needs him. One of the things your broken piece asks continually, he asks to be needed. He wants to be wanted. He gets way down scale, and he hits that bad. That’s sub-zero on the tone scale. Imagine having to be needed!

And uh… so your obedience to the rules of course makes it, the rule, possible. But if they were bad rules they couldn’t be obeyed. What’s a good rule? It’s a rule which aligns action, and permits compliance. That’s all. It uh… you can’t have a rule that doesn’t permit compliance, although we’ve got a lot of ‘em on the statute books. There are a heck of a lot of rules you can’t comply with, by the way. There’s a rule in South Carolina says you have to beat your wife with a stick one inch in diameter. Just try and find a stick that’s exactly one inch in diameter! Furthermore you’ve got to have a wife to obey that rule. Furthermore a rule that doesn’t apply to all hands isn’t much of a rule. Then you’ve got a specialized caste system going which is too complex.

Now unconsciousness of rules to add reality. And after you’ve got the rules, if they’re real good rules you can duck ‘em. You say, „Well, everybody obeys these author, statically.“

„Oh, you’re here in this area? Itchy, of course, in this area we do so-and-so and so-and-so. Naturally! Nobody’d think of doing anything else.“

„Well,“ the fellow says, „you mean you got a law about this thing or something?“

„Yes,“ they say, „natural law, yeah. God gave it to us.“

They just left the conference yesterday where they formulated it. „God gave it to us.“ That’s it.

Now you’ve got to have ARC with others to play, and reverse ARC with others to play. There’s got to be another team. And you have to have teammates. But you could go up to a level where your need for ARC didn’t exist at all. But you’re making a game now.

Now pain is penalty which will be obeyed. You’ve got to have the rules obeyed. How do you enforce the rules? You put an automatic enforcement around that everybody desires to use. The second everybody desires to use the enforcement, they will obey it too. They obey it to set an example. Pain is the enforcer in this universe. But don’t think that’s the only one. It could be: You disobey the rules… you disobey the rules, you are immediately surrounded by smoke. And the smoke continues till you’re able to obey the rule. Just like that. I mean, you’d have no pain to bother with, but it’d certainly be annoying!

Now, agreement to rules and penalties is necessary to continue a game. Fellow has to agree to a game before he can participate in it. And the reason why things have gone bad here on Earth, and in the MEST universe at large is simply that… that people didn’t agree to this game. They thought — they did. This game started out in a very strange way. And uh… of course went off its rockers sooner or later.

It started out in an effort to never be unmade. Its goal was eternity. Its dream was forever. Can’t have anything. The guy that made it up didn’t know anything about the necessity to have rules to have a game.

Deterioration of game until no game is inevitability in any game. All games come to an end. This game tried to set up for an eternity. Like he’d yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, ‘Eternal, eternal’, boy, every time you turn around in this universe you see ‘Eternity’, ‘forever’, ‘infinity of time’. They don’t exist.

All right, when a guy is unable to play, it’s because he has never agreed to play the game, and somebody’s lied to him and said it isn’t a game. And how you do that? You convince a guy he has to work by creating a scarcity. And then d… making his existence, his continued existence, completey dependent upon it. And that’s work!

Now, the game of complexity and levels — of course you’ve got to have complexity in a game, otherwise it becomes monotonous. Okay, we’ll run that on down the line.

Now, necessity to have a new game coded, before one ends the old game, otherwise everyone else becomes a maker of games with no game. Every guy’s trying to make his own game. And you just get a general wild scramble. Well, you start ending a game, you kill something without putting something in its place. And the darn thing won’t die. Not worth a nickel. It just won’t die. What exists has a persistency in its existence. If you’ve ever tried to knock a group off you would recognize how unwilling that group is to die.

I swear to Pete you could take every member of a military company and stand them up against the wall and shoot ‘em down, and you’d still have a military company! Proof: The massacre of the Seventh Cavalry. We’ve still got a Seventh Cavalry! How could you have a Seventh Cavalry? The Seventh Cavalry was massacred by the Sioux Indians, at the… Little Big Horn, in 1876. Still got one! Persistence of existence.

Well the way you do that, you have to get a more interesting game, before you end an old game. Now you want to know why your preclear stays around his body, and hangs around and doesn’t do anything and doesn’t go anyplace? Two things happen. He hasn’t found, one, that his mock-ups are more interesting than reality, laughingly called. And the other thing he hasn’t found is communication in the state which he is in with others. So he feels there couldn’t be any ARC and he’s liable to cut himself off completely. These things then have to re… be rehabilitated. See?

And he’ll go on, and he’ll hold himself kind of static because he doesn’t see any… any upper goal. He doesn’t see himself going anyplace. Therefore it really… really is of considerable interest that he sees that he can go someplace. Well if he’s just going to the stage of theta clear, that’s fine; let him go to the state of theta clear. That’s pretty good. He can still operate as a mortal, and be immortal. And boy, that’s sure having your cake and eating it too!

So, we have then uh… as far as the group is concerned, quite a wide variety of choices. What does a group do which has in its hands the capability of making games? Ending games? Umpiring games? You found the rules, you see? I mean, here you sit, you’ve got a good group, and what do you do? Well if you want this to be a group, you want to cohese, you kind of have to get together and put your heads together and get some kind of agreement on what you’re doing. And then — and only then — can the group be cause. If you just idly spin, this way and that, and not think about it any further than that, the group will not become cause over any large area, but is apt to become an effect of a lot of things. So even though it’s a poor goal, it’s better than none.

And you can put that down as a beautiful maxim, that sounds like one of these horrible truisms, but boy it’ll fish you out of more holes than you could possibly imagine you could get yourself into. A poor goal is better than none. You’ll find yourself very often squirreling around, and spinning around, and you won’t know which way you’re going or which end is up, because you’ve decided all the goals you could put your eyes on were too vague or too poor, or too unwanted to try to attain. And that itself is a bad aberration, and it shows a misdirection on your own part, and a misestimation on your own part, and a lack of understanding on your own part of what you’re doing.

There is no goal vast enough to absorb your total capabilities. Because your total capabilities are so vast that they make goals. You are, yourself, cause. So how on earth can you set it up so cause can have anything else but cause? Unless you come downscale a little bit.

A goal, any kind of a goal, is better than none. You say, „What am I going to do?“ Oh, worry about it. You… you squirrel on it and squirrel on it: „What am I going to do? Oh, how am I going to handle myself? What are going to be my goals?“ and so forth.

Set one up! Any damn thing! Say, „I’m going to become…“ or „I’m going to be…“ or „I’m going to have…“ And goals set up in the capacities of Be, Do and Have. And the start of a goal is beingness, and the end of the goal is havingness, in this universe. But you don’t have to set them up like that.

You can set yourself up a cycle of action in any direction you want to. Supposing you are… you just don’t know what to be. Well, just think about it for a while, and think about it, and then think about the strangest thing you could be, or something like that. And all of a sudden you’ll say, „Say, you know what? I’ll bet I could be the doggonedest minister of a Baptist church you ever heard of!“ Well, silly, but it’s better than just sit around and mope! It’d be silly for you, ‘cause it’d be a relatively insincere goal. Or would it?

Uh… they… they have a formula on how you become the minister of the Baptist church. And I’m afraid that you’ve gotten just a little bit above the standard formulas. One of the ways you do it is go around and find the Deacons, is to have them elect you. Sounds strange, but that’s all. Another way you can do it is pick up some poor divinity student who’s better off dead anyhow, he’s practically dying, hang him up, and make him up… patch him up a little bit, and parade him on down like a doll and put him on the pulpit. It’d be interesting. You could run him part-time.

You know, a guy came in one day who had a lot of… had… oh, he’d just been ennuied, just so bored with existence, all of his existence. Very conservative and so on. I saw him a few days later, and this guy looked like he was a… he looks like a… a quarterhorse, or a… or a short-distance runner. Panting, big bright terrific look in his eye and so forth, and he was… I said, „What’s happened to you?

He said, „Well, there wasn’t anything worth doing, so I made up something to be worth doing.“ „All right, well what was that?“ „I won’t tell you what it is, because…“ It’s very amusing!

And he’d thought up that one and then thought he could do something else simultaneously, so he was working on each one part-time. And boy, keeping those two straight was more than he could possibly keep track of, and he was really going all out. He was going to bring about the confederation of two completely impossible opposite polarities. And merge them. And he was proceeding to do so. And then one of these days you’ll see a very strange circumstance happen in some department or other. You’ll see a lot of ‘em happening.

Now you call this interfering with peoples lives. Piffle! What lives? Now you’ll find out there’s a certain number of people that go for broke. And there’s a s… lot of them say, „Oh, boy! Gee! These beautiful, beautiful slave chains! Gee! Oh, now nice! Nice, nice, big chains around my neck and my ankles,“ and so forth.

The hardest thing for any liberator to face is the fact that a large percentage of the people he was trying to free wanted desperately to be slaves. And it’s broken the heart of every liberator to date. To date! Hardly any exception. A man’d have to be awfully stupid not to see that. But he would be pretty dull if he didn’t see this too: Sure, sure, but. the guys he didn’t liberate were worth liberating.

Why… why try to get these allnesses? That’s typical MEST universe. „We have to do it a hundred percent — I used to fall into those traps too. Uh… „We have to do it all, we have to do it a hundred percent.“

The Christian goes about it in the opposite direction. He says, „The one that goes away from the flock and we had to bring back was worth all the rest.“ Flow he’s just obeying the laws of flows, don’t you see? The guy walks away, so he’s got to be had back. That’s not clever! Uh… as an insane thing. But sure!

Uh… another fellow’d take a refuge in this… if he sees this happen, all of a sudden says, „Well, maybe fate decided it. Maybe it was all for the best, and maybe fate decided it.“

Your fate! There is no other fate but thou! That’s true! And so you say, „I’m going to free all and every…“ No you’re not! Unless you were willing to become all and every, and then be yourself free. That’s the way to do it. Why bother? No randomity!

So pick up what you can get as freedom, and then if the other thing is too much in the road still, it’s still got all them thar slaves in it, and those fellows that are saying, „Oh, boy, gimme… gimme that MEST, gimme those chains. Let me haul on the bottom of this tombstone so I get it good and heavy so I’ll never be able to crawl again out from under it.“ Let ‘em stay there! The hell with them! That’s their hard luck! And the other thing is… the other thing is, there’s the guys that go for broke and the slave who wants his chains. You can always use a slave. Gives randomity. They never do anything for you, they always pull you down. Gives you randomity.

You know, in every Roman triumph they had a slave drifting along, trotting along back of the… the… the great victor’s chariot. He came home in triumph, he’d just conquered the Basques, or the Lion’s Club, or something of the sort, and they always had somebody, a slave, standing there telling him he was just mortal after all. He was just mortal after all. You can’t control everything. That’s right. In every one of those triumphs they had that guy behind the victor.

Well, that’s fine, that’s fine, uh… that’s what a slave does, essentially. He’s saying, „Look! You can’t make god out of everybody. You can’t do it. I’m proving it. Look at me!“ Uh… and he gives you randomity as a result. So why worry about those things? Why worry about those things? It is a game. It is not serious!

But what is serious is unmaking a game and NOT HAVING a game. That’s kind of serious. Unless you are just willing to go clear on up, shoot the works, straight or, up to the top, into the beautiful serenity, and just be above beingness there. Straight on through.

There might be spheres and areas on theta that you could then move across into that would be different than game areas. If they are, I do not know about then. And I know many areas in which theta’s operating, and whether they know it or not they’re operating on the laws of games. One way or the other they’re operating within these laws which I’ve read to you. And they don’t know these exist, which is the beautiful joke on the whole work. There are universes which know every law you’ve got in the MEST universe. And don’t know the rules of games. So you could set yourself up to be an inter- universal empire… umpire team. You could. And get away with it.

But what do you want to do? If you have these rules of games, you can tell yourself that there are all kinds of things to do. But the first thing you’ve got to do is because a good, solid theta clear. Let’s take a break.