I'd like to talk to you today about games theory. The theory of games.

Just why it is that games, as a theory, explains life and a very, very large number of very fancy and very simple theories do not explain life, I refuse to be responsible for.

The idea of "games and nothing but games" and "it never was anything but a game" and so on evidently fills the bill. But the idea that "all is love" simply seems to fill somebody's coffers.

The idea that "it is a world of tooth and claw" doesn't work, it doesn't work. It isn't a world of tooth and claw, it's a world of games. And when games get so serious that everybody becomes entirely introverted into the game, he ceases to realize that it is a game but, nevertheless, he is still mixed up in a game.

We find a great deal of despair in a preclear over the fact that (occasionally we find this) it's all pointless, you know, life is really pointless. All he needs to do is have some purposes invented, but he will tell you this, "Life is pointless."

Well, he's telling you that somebody should come along and hand him a game all tailor-made, done up properly, delivered across the counter of the toy store with no difficulties for himself.

Life becomes pointless when an individual loses his ability or lays aside his ability to think up purposes. And that's about all there is to it. Then life of course is pointless, because purposes are part of games theory.

The parts of a game are very interesting, but the parts of the game are very quickly and briefly stated. And the first part of a game is of course freedom and the next part of a game is barriers and the next part of the game is purposes. And out from these three things we actually get all parts of games.

Well, there could be a thousand reasons why life is being lived. There could be a thousand patterns on which life is being constantly redesigned. But the one which delivers to us the best results, the one which stands the test, passes through the caldron is games theory. And none of the others do.

Therefore, we have to know a great deal more about games than freedom, bathers and purposes. We could say very happily to somebody, "Well, freedom, barriers, purposes, that's all there is to know about games. Well, it's very simple. Scientology is a very simple thing — games theory."

Well, it looked very simple to me the first day that I stumbled across this in calculations. It was merely put down in a list with five hundred other possibilities of patterns. And they all had to be selected out and I didn't like that one. I said as I put it down, I said, "That's too simple," and went on to the next one and paid no further attention to it. That's why — that's why it was examined as number five hundred. All the rest of them got tested first because they sounded so much better.

Well, it's simple, all right. Very, very simple. So are the works and metallurgy of Big Ben. So is the instruction manual on how to keep legislation from becoming legislation after it's legislated. Because freedom, barriers and purposes explains life. This is for certain, explains life. But none of the three will audit.

You can't just say to somebody, "Well, get the idea of freedom. That's fine. That's fine. Now, get the idea of barriers. That's fine. Can you build barriers? You can? Oh, that's fine. All right. Now, do you have a purpose in life?"

And the fellow says, "Oh yes. That's fine."

And you say, "All right. You're a Clear." (laughter)

It would be very, very lovely if you could. It'd be wonderful if you could. But you can't.

Games Processing runs into every game that our preclear has been tossed out of and runs into every activity he has ever engaged in. It runs into every purpose and thing he has ever dedicated himself to. And when you start to process it, you're just processing head-on as far as the case is concerned — crash!

There are processes in Games Processing which I well imagine, if run inexpertly, would simply pick up the preclear and, well, you'd dust him off afterwards and maybe find enough pieces to put in the coffin, but even that has its doubts.

There is one process in Games Processing which is sufficiently rugged as to turn on the feeling of insanity in the preclear. If it's run on the right valence, no matter how expertly audited, it would still turn on the "Nyaow, I'm going mad." And that is simply "Invent a way to get attention from (valence)."

Now, that sounds like such an innocent process, doesn't it? It sounds like such a sweet, innocent process. There's obviously — obviously nothing under the sun could be more pleasant. (Obviously, getting attention from somebody is nothing.) But let us take somebody like Father, "Invent a way to get attention from Father." Nyaow. Now. If Father is the person in the family who was most out of communication, although apparently most in it — you know, Father might have been the person who was dramatizing sanity all the time, you know — and this process were run on him, why, we are likely to discover our preclear just spinning quietly in in the chair.

No, you have to lighten that process up: "Invent something that would get Father's interest." And that runs. A little bit rough but it runs. And only after that was flat could you run "Invent a way of getting Father's attention."

So a preclear differentiates very, very closely between attention and interest. What a semantic difference. What a light difference to cause with one process a feeling of insanity and the other a feeling of relief. And so are all the buttons of games very precise buttons, very precise buttons.

We have be, do and have. And those, obviously, are three conditions of existence. Nothing more obvious than this. A fourth condition would, of course, be attention. And as I've just told you, Games Processes run a very, very fine line, a thin thread, because you're processing straight on into the complete background and life of your preclear, and so we take this little thing of attention, be, do and have and what do you know? None of them are processable directly on a preclear without considerable ramification.

In other words, there is no process of which I am familiar which has in it "do" just as such. Like "What could you do?" "Invent something to do," so on. It just doesn't run. It doesn't run.

Now, Beingness Processing we are well acquainted with, but we know that Beingness Processing has its limitations, definitely has its limitations.

And as far as Havingness is concerned, you can have the preclear have something, but do you know that to let anybody else have anything, the process becomes limited.

You can have other things "can't have": "Look around the room and tell me something your mother can't have." But "Look around the room and tell me something your mother could have" is liable to produce an apathy on the part of the preclear. Now, this is a very peculiar thing, isn't it?

So you have all of these terribly precise, these terribly microscopic differentiations occurring in Games Processing. And having selected it out of a precomputation of five hundred, there were eighty-five, then, possible elements of games. And these were selected out to find which of them were processable, and it was discovered that a bare twenty were processable although the others were quite easy to understand how they fitted in games, but one couldn't process them. It's quite remarkable when one begins to think of this.

So, the best that we can do, the best that we can do is to clarify every command with the preclear before we use it on the preclear. In other words, use that communication bridge. It's a terribly important thing, that communication bridge, and in no process, or no set of processes, is it more important than processing games.

A communication bridge has three elements, actually. You actually come off of a bridge when you start processing. You haven't ended a process, but you're beginning one, so you make a contract with the preclear as to what command to run. Well, actually, there's a center to the bridge and you have that one too. You come right off the center of the bridge of "You're here and I'm here and we're auditing." And then we make the contract, we say, "Now, is it all right with you if we run Abracadabra Bowwow?"

And then the preclear says, "Well, yes. I think that would be all right." "Now, you're sure that you know what's meant by Abracadabra Bowwow?" And he says, "Yes, yes, yes."

And, by the way, a very, very amusing story concerning this: I had an auditor testing, just puppy to the root, a technique, you know. It was after he understood he was testing techniques. And he ran a case for fifty hours on "What your theta body can't have."

And he started in on the first day of processing and he ran the preclear all morning on "Look around and tell me something your theta body can't have." And he did a wonderful job of it, very smooth and half the afternoon and — "What your theta body can't have," just that one command, you see. And middle of the afternoon, the preclear looked at him and says, "What is a theta body?"

Well, that merely tells us that the auditor omitted a communication bridge, you see?

And here right at the beginning of the communication bridge, of course, we have the bridge between the two processes. We bring him off the process we have been running and bring it to a stop on agreement: "Is it all right with you if after a few more times we conclude this process of 'What wouldn't you mind bashing your mother with?'" (laughter)

And he says, "All right. Yes, that's all right with me."

If you omit that, by the way, it's very, very unpleasant sometimes. You all of a sudden say, "Well," — he's in the middle of the dope-off or something, and you say, 'Well, end of session." Thud! In other words, you give him warning.

And then, having ended this, then you say to him, "Chitter-chat, chitter-chat." What you're really saying is "You're here and I'm here and the room is here and we got that one flat."

And now we go on and say, "Now, I — you know, I'd really like to run this process on you." And you give him the process and you sort it out that he knows what you mean by this process and he does and so you carry on from there.

Well, this becomes very necessary, you see, in Games Processing because words can mean different things to different people. Actually not to the degree that a general semanticist would love to have you believe, but certainly individuals have aberrated importances for certain words. And I have seen a preclear going up through the roof because somebody continued to use the word can't instead of can't. You know? I mean, they're just — they're touchy.

You get somebody in the scientific line just imagine if you ever processed a nuclear physicist or if you processed a Doctor of Literature or something of this sort, you'd probably spend 50 percent of your time on the communication bridge and arguing about what this word meant and that word meant and so forth.

You shouldn't pay too much attention to it if he starts to argue with you, you shouldn't do it. You should just run some more SCS and get that out of the road.

If you ask him to look out there in the street and tell you what was important out there in the street he would look at the signs on the trucks and on the shops and he would tell you those were terribly important — the words, you see. And he would not see the trucks or the shops or the street; he would merely see the words.

So, nevertheless, even on a preclear who is not in this fixed condition on the subject of semantics, we have to be very careful in Games Processing. These words in Games Processing mean exactly what they mean. They are the dictionary definitions of these words. They are also words which are in common usage and they are very commonly understood. And it's amazing, and it really shouldn't be since we're on the exact center of aberration, the agreement on exactly what these words mean is much better than on any other words in the English language. Nevertheless, we must be careful that we and the preclear and the auditor understand exactly what is going forward.

Now, be, do and have become in Games Processing three other things: They become individuality — not even identity; they become individuality — that's be. Do becomes problems and have as far as processable processes are concerned in the majority of cases becomes can't have. So much for your conditions of existence. And I've already pointed out to you that attention, which could be the fourth condition, becomes interest.

Isn't this amazing? Now, therefore, the processes which are given must be given in a complete understanding of the lists of games conditions. What are the elements of games to the auditor?

Now, they might be one thing to the cricketer and they might be one thing to the football coach, they might be another thing to somebody who is going out to do and die for dear old Mugwump U.

But a very, very strange thing is, is they don't mean anything else in Scientology but what they mean. And that meaning is exactly which of these processes work on cases and which doesn't.

We are fanatics — I have been told we're fanatics. Do you realize that? We have a terrible fixation. I have been told this. We insist on working with things that work. Psychoanalyst told me that. He said we're absolute fanatics. We insist on using things that improve people or that do things to people.

I began to understand after a while that he was a fanatic on something else: he was a fanatic on things that didn't do anything for people.

This fanaticism, however, we get from a long whole track background of engineering. And when we go out and step in a car or aboard a horse, we expect the thing to run, you know?

This actually is one of the things that limits the population of Scientologia is it collects those people in the society which are capable of solving problems.

There aren't many of them. Most people simply want the problems, obsessively, and they want no solutions to the problems. So these are the workable buttons.

Now I'm going to read you rapidly this list without any further ado. The first is under games condition, knowing or unknowing — is Not-know. That is a games condition — Not-know.

There is some knowingness mixed up, of course, in any game but it is a fleeting knowingness for the duration of the game.

A thetan is in the total knowingness band, you see, but unless he limits his knowingness, very markedly, he can't play a game. And he has to limit his knowingness down to a point of where he is not-knowing the better part of what he knows and the universe in order to play a game at all.

And Not-know, therefore, is dominant in games over Know by a ratio of about eight billion to one. There is some knowingness, you see, but not much. So the best football players I've ever known have been the most stupid oafs you ever saw. True of government too.

Now, a shadow of that has some limited, oh, but very limited workability — is Forget. The important thing is Not-know; its harmonic and shadow is Forget. You don't process Forget much more, but if you do have to run a recall process, for heaven's sakes, run a forgetting process. "What wouldn't you mind forgetting?" You know? That, by the way, will stump more cases than you would really care to classify.

Now, its opposite, which is a no-games condition, knowingly and unknowingly, is of course Know with its little harmonic, Remember. Knowing isn't a games condition. The proof of that is simply you ask some preclear, "What wouldn't you mind knowing?" and he spins in very quietly.

Now, remembering all the way up and down the track is also a reversal on a games condition and will soon put him over on motionless spots on the track, and he will feel very sad indeed.

Now, a man who is in too much turmoil can be asked, "What wouldn't you mind remembering?" or "Remember something that is really real to you." And he's liable to move over from a commotion to a null spot, and this is a great relief to him.

It works once. Oh, and the moment he answers this thing and says, "Oh, boy, that really feels better," lay off the process. Because you ask it two more times and you've undone your own magic — you throw him into a death or something. In other words, it's terribly limited. But that's true of all of these no-games conditions — they are very limited. There is only one technique that works on them uniformly and even that has some unworkabilities and that's running consequences. Consequence is the continuance of the problem.

So just to go over the rest of the list here, we discover the games conditions, knowing and unknowing are:

Not-know

Forget

Interest

Disinterest

Attention

Self-determinism

Identity

Individuality (It runs as individuality.)

Problems

Can't have. (Games do have some havingness. The individual himself, a thetan, can have in the game. And that is a games condition.)

Alive

Opponents

Facsimiles

Continued solidity

Continued adherence

Loyalty, Disloyalty, Betrayal and Help (These are all buttons that work.)

Motion

Emotion

Continued action

Hot, cold

Thinking

Hate (some love)

Continued doubt of result (Which, by the way, has a very amusing harmonic: it's "expecting a revelation." It's a continued doubt of result as a game.)

Now, somebody will sit there all the way through an intensive expecting a revelation and it actually just sums his case entirely. And you find him back doing a vigil over armor in a chapel or something.

Now, by far the most violent of the processes here is a fascinating condition: No effect on self and effect on others. That's fantastic. But it means a games condition is "no effect on self and effect on others"; you reverse it, it goes into a no-games condition.

We always think of games as some little effect on us and effect on the opponent, you know. That is not a games condition. It works out to be No effect on self and Effect on others.

Stop communication

Change communication

Into it (As opposed to Out of it. Into it is a games condition. Out of it is a no-game condition, although you can run some Out of it, as long as you don't get out of the game.)

Agitation

Noise (And, of course, some silence. That's very spooky having a game of silences.)

Control

Start, Change and Stop (Change is the most important of these.) And Responsibility

Those are all games condition. The oddity is Responsibility obviously belongs there, but it doesn't process.

Now, the no-games condition are, with great rapidity:

Know

Remember

No attention

Pan-determinism

Namelessness

Solutions

Have

Neither alive nor dead

Friends — alone

No pictures or universes

No spaces or solids

No enemies or friends

No motion

Serenity

Motionlessness

No temperature

Knowing (as opposed to thinking)

Win–Lose (No-game conditions, win and lose)

Effect on self

No effect on others

No ARC

No no-ARC

ARC

Out of it

Calm

Silence

No control, and

No responsibility

And those are the no-game conditions. And none of them process except on one button only and that's Consequences; you can run the consequences of those conditions.

Now, there is games theory. Life is a game and there are certain basic elements that are more important than others. And an auditor tries to run out of the case the games he has been in because all games are aberrative. Also, if you want to get bored to death, engage in no-games.

You will notice that a no-game condition list is the truth. If you try to process the truth out of a thetan, you get him nowhere, because he is truth. And all those conditions which are under no-games conditions are truth.

Therefore, what you process on a case are lies. Games conditions are all lies and when you run these you raise an individual's tolerance for these things, you run out the agitation of old games and you win as a consequence.

But when you run him on truths, you simply stick him all over the track because a harmonic on truth is what is wrong with the thetan.

You can say ably that anything wrong with a person is because he didn't tell enough lies when he was young. (laughter)

And so, we have games conditions and no-games conditions. And so we have games theory.