I want to talk to you now about four conditions of consideration.

We start out at the beginning, or anywhere along the road, with this as the highest truth: We are dealing with a static which can consider.

That it can consider and then perceive what it considers makes it a space-energy-masstime production unit. That it can perceive what it considers makes this static into a space-energy-mass-and-time production unit.

You see, don't ever get hung up on whether or not the actuality that is made is an actuality. This is the wrong way to approach this problem. It's the way people have been approaching this problem for so long that the problem has remained, up to this time, pretty darned abstruse.

That you can perceive something, and that you can perceive that somebody else also perceives something, qualifies only one of these conditions of existence. It qualifies only one of the conditions. That's isness. And that is reality — isness.

Now, that you simply say something is there and then perceive that it is there means, simply, that you have put something there and perceived that it is there; that's what it means. But that is no less an isness. That nobody is there to agree with you at the time you do this does not reduce the fact that you have created an isness. It is an isness. It exists. It exists. Not just for you. I mean, it just exists, you see?

Now, if you were to now desire that that persisted, you would then have to go through a certain mechanical step: you would have to make sure that you did not perfectly duplicate it. That is, create it again in the same time, in the same space, with the same mass and the same energy, because it would no longer be there.

But what have you done, really, when you have done that? You've just taken a thorough look. And what you create will vanish if you simply look at it, unless you pull this trick: unless you pull the trick that it is alterable and that you have altered it.

Now, if you say you have altered it and now that you have forgotten the exact instant it was made and the character of it, it of course, then, can persist. Because you can look at it all you please with your first look, you might say, and it won't vanish. Don't look at it, however, with your second look, because it'll be gone. Again, you will have duplicated it — a perfect duplicate.

The definition of a perfect duplicate is creating a thing again in its same time, in its same space, with its same energy, mass, motion or continuance. Now, that's a perfect duplicate. For instance, if we looked here at the front of the room, saw an object, we would simply have to look at it and conceive ourselves to have made its exact duplicate or counterpart, which is to say, conceive ourselves to have made it. Just conceive ourselves as creating it, in other words — just no more and no less than that. And, of course, it would get rather thin. But to some who are having a rough time with conditions of existence, it will get brighter and brighter and brighter and then get thinner and thinner and thinner. And it'll disappear for one. This is a curious thing, but it is immediately subjected to and can be subjected to a very exacting proof.

All right. Now, let's look at this very carefully and let's look at what reality is. Reality is a postulated reality. Reality does not have to persist to be a reality. The condition of reality is simply isness. That is the total condition of reality.

Now we get a more complex reality when we enter into the formula of communication. Because this takes somebody else. We have to say we are somebody else, now, viewing this and that we don't know when it was made or where it was made to get a persistence of the object for that somebody else.

But let us say we just, more or less accidentally, go into communication with somebody else, and we have an argument — that is to say, chitter-chatter back and forth — about what this thing is. If that other person perfectly duplicates exactly what we have created, it will again disappear. It doesn't matter, really, who created it; he only has to assume that he created it for it to disappear for him. In other words, he has to duplicate it in its same space, same energy, same mass, at the same instant it was created and it'll disappear for him.

So you and he had better alter this thing which you made so that you both can perceive it. And then we get what is known as an agreed-upon reality, and that is an isness with agreement.

Now actually, the word reality itself is commonly accepted to mean "that which we perceive." Now, this, then, is the real definition for a reality — the one that is commonly used — and that would be an agreed-upon isness. An agreed-upon isness — that would be reality.

All right. So much for that.

We have another condition. A not-isness is a protest. The common practice of existence, of course, is to try to banish an isness by using it to destroy itself. They take a mock-up of some kind or another, such as a building or something of the sort, and they try to destroy it by blowing it down with dynamite or doing something like that. (I mean, it's a very practical application, this material I'm giving you. It isn't esoteric; it doesn't particularly apply to the engram bank. This is just existence.)

All right. Is can be translated quite generally as "existence."

All right. We get a not-isness being enforced upon an isness by the quality of the isness itself or by a new postulate by which the individual is saying "It's not there."

Now, this new postulate does not pattern the mechanics of the creation of the isness. See, the new postulate by which you simply say, "It's not there," doesn't pattern itself with the exact time of creation, the exact space, the exact continuance — same mass, same space, same time — and as a consequence, we say, "All right. It's not there." It will probably dim down for you, but you have to do something else: you have to put a black screen up or push it away or chew it up or do something to it here rather than giving it a perfect duplicate (which we'll get to in a moment). But we do something else here. We say," It's not there." And that's notisness. We say something doesn't exist which we know darn well does exist. See?

Now, you have to know something darn well does exist before you can try to postulate it out of existence and thus create a not-isness.

Now, the definition of not-isness would be, simply, a definition of "trying to create out of existence, by postulate or force, something which one knows priorly exists." One is trying to talk against his own agreements and postulates with his new postulate or is trying to spray down something with the force of other isnesses in order to cause a cessation of the isness he objects to. And this is the handling of mass to handle mass, of force to handle force and is definitely and positively wrong if you ever want to destroy anything. That is not the way to go about destroying something; that is the way to destroy yourself, which is why nations engage in it. Force versus force.

We see a very badly misunderstood rendition of this in early Christian times with the introduction of the idea that if you were hit you should turn the other cheek. Well, that's a very, very bad thing to do. Now, the truth of the matter is, if it were rendered this wise, it would have made much more sense: When you encountered force, don't apply more and new force to conquer the force which has been exerted, because if you do, you will then be left with a chaos of force. And pretty soon you won't be able to trace anything through this chaos of force, you see? So "turn the other cheek" is actually a very workable situation if it's simply translated to mean force must not be used to combat force.

Now, the way to properly handle such a situation is just to duplicate it perfectly.

All right. Now let's go into this business of a perfect duplicate. A perfect duplicate, again, is, you might say, creating the thing once more in the same time, in the same space, with the same energy and the same mass. A perfect duplicate is not made by mocking the thing up alongside of itself. That is a copy or, more technically, a facsimile, a made facsimile.

Copy and facsimile, by the way, are the same words. But a facsimile we conceive to be a picture which was taken of the physical universe. And a copy would be something that a thetan, on his own volition, simply made of an object in the physical universe with full knowingness. In other words, he copied it — he knows he's copying it. A facsimile can be made without one's knowledge by a machine or the body or something of that character.

All right. This is a perfect duplicate, mechanically. But it is more important to recognize it in the terms of our four categories of existence. It's as-isness. If we can recognize the total as-isness of anything, it will vanish. Sometimes if it had many component parts, we would have to recognize the total as-isness as including the as-isness of each component part of it.

Now, in that lies the secret of destroying actual matter. And actual matter can be destroyed by a thetan if he is willing to include in the as-isness — which he is now postulating toward any object which exists (toward any isness) — the as-isness of each component part.

Now, let's look at that very rapidly and recognize here that a thetan created a mock-up and this mock-up was agreed upon very widely, and another process, alter-ism, which we'll go into in a moment, was addressed to it and it became more and more solid and more and more solid.

And then one day somebody cut it in half and dragged part of it up the hill to make somebody's doorstep. And that's already, you see, out of location. Same place is part of this mock-up — same space, same place. So it's already been removed from the place it was mocked up, you see, and it's been moved up to the top of the hill. Now it's making somebody's doorstep. Now, those people themselves don't quite remember where the doorstep came from, if asked suddenly, but after a while these houses up there — and, by the way, just mock-ups like everything else — are torn down or something, and somebody picks up this doorstep and chews it up for road ballast; throws it out in the road to be used for road. And they make a road with it and it just runs just fine. Well, this is alongside of some wharves, and one day, why, the road is no longer being used — they now have a big, long steel pier or something that comes out there. And somebody uses a steam shovel to pick up a whole bunch of rocks and gravel and dump them into the hold of a ship which is going to South Africa or something of the sort, and it takes it down there. And they unload this ballast, and the natives use it to gravel the garden or something, and at length, why, there's a volcanic explosion; it's buried under twelve feet of lava.

And time marches on, in other words. And this thing is getting more and more remote from its agreed-upon original position, much less its postulated moment — the moment it was postulated as related to the time span of the people who were agreeing upon it. You see, they've agreed upon a time span, so this thing is aging. And they agreed upon this space too, and it's getting moved around in this space. And here, atom by atom, as the aeons roll along, this object, which was part of an original mock-up, is now distributed all over the place.

It'd be fairly hard to trace unless you suddenly took a good look at it and sort of ask it, or located it easily.

Now, conservation of energy blows up if anything is created in the same time and space. In view of the fact that the time itself is a postulate, it's very easy to reassume the first time of anything. Just like you ask a person in Dianetics to go back to the moment when. Well, he could reassume the time. And if you would also ask him to go to the moment when and the place where — if we had just added that — and then said, "Okay. Now, duplicate it with its own energy," why, it would have blown up. And this, by the way, runs out engrams and it blows up engrams like mad. It is not a process that we would use today, particularly, but it's a process that you should know about.

So a person, to create an as-isness, would have to create the as-isness of the object itself and all of its parts. And only at that moment would he escape the law of conservation of energy.

Conservation of energy depends upon the chaos of all parts of all things being mixed up with all the parts of all the things. In other words, we couldn't have any conservation of energy unless we were all completely uncertain as to where this atom or that atom originated. And if we were totally uncertain as to the original creation spot in the space of the atom, molecule, proton, whatever, if we were to remain totally ignorant we, of course, could not destroy it, because force will not destroy it. Force will not destroy anything made of force.

And in view of the fact that you'd have to make as many as-isnesses as there are the atoms in the object, why, it looks awfully complex, unless you could span your attention that wide and that fast. And of course, at that moment, why, it would blow up.

Therefore, conservation of energy is exceeded. It itself is a consideration.

Now, we've taken care of as-isness by this mechanics of a perfect duplicate. As-isness would be the condition created again in the same time, in the same space (same place), with the same energy and the same mass, the same motion, in the same time continuum.

The same time continuum is only incidentally important. It comes up as importance when you're crossing between universes. And particles do not cross between universes. A particle is only as good as it is riding on its own time continuum. You destroy the time continuum and, of course, no activity can take place from that moment forward. That's completely aside from this. I mean, here's group A and they made a set of postulates which gives them certain energy and mass, and over here is group B and they make a certain set of postulates. Unless group A and group B get together and mutually agree to accept each other's masses, why, you just would never get to a point where the mass created by group A and the mass created by group B would interchange. Somebody has to be around, always, who was part and parcel of the creation of the mass looked at, at least by agreement. See, he has to be around, at least by agreement. And we get a time continuum. We get a continuous consciousness.

Now, it's this thing that they talk about when they talk about cosmic consciousness, which is a very, very fancy word for saying "Well, we've all been here for a long time." We could translate it much more intelligibly that way.

All right. Now, let's take this as-isness and let's discover that if a thing will disappear, if a mock-up will disappear — and that too can be subjected to proof very easily — if a mock-up can disappear simply by creating it in the same time, in the same space, with the same energy and same mass (in other words, just repeat the postulate, you might say), if it'd disappear the second you applied as-isness, then people start avoiding as-isness in order to have an isness. And that is done by alter-isness.

We have to change the character of something; we have to lie about it for it to exist. And so we get any universe being a universe of lies. Then when this universe of lies compels you to tell its truth, we can get very confused. We go back in history, we find people on every hand telling us "Well, maybe there was such a person as Christ and maybe there wasn't, and maybe he wrote this and maybe he didn't, and maybe the material came from there and it came from there" and boy, are they giving him survival.

Why? Survival itself is dependent upon alter-isness — a-1-t-e-r. Alter-isness. In order to get an as-isness to persist, it is absolutely necessary, then, that its moment of creation be masked. Its moment, space, mass and energy, if duplicated, would cause that to cease to exist. The recognition of as-isness will bring about a noneness — bring about a disappearance. In other words, a return to basic postulate. See? You'd have to make the postulate all over again, and then to get it to exist any further, why, you would then have to go forward and change it in such a way that people would not actually be able to recognize its source at all. You'd just have to obscure the devil out of the source in order to get a persistence. You see that? You'd have to say it came from somewhere else, by somebody else.

Now, you see, people have done this with such things as Dianetics. The last rave I read on this subject claimed that it was really invented in the late part of the eighteenth century by a guy by the name of Hickelhauser or Persilhozer or something. This is a fact. I mean, here we had something which could be un-mocked very easily because it was set up to be unmocked — see, just set up to unmock. Very, very easy to simply say that its as-isness was such-and-so and so-and-so, and it would have practically disappeared if you'd continued to assert that its as-isness was what its as-isness was.

In order to get a persistence of it, of any kind, we would have had to have done something very strange and peculiar: we would have had to have altered it, we would have had to have entered the practice of alter-isness. Now, we begin alter-isness and we have the thing persisting. Something will persist, then, only so long as it is not perfectly duplicated — which is to say, its as-isness isn't recognized. You see that? So that if we try to alter something bad, we'll make it persist, one way or the other.

But don't think that if you're going to alter something just as-is we will get an isness. Anytime we practice alter-isness on anything, what do you know? We will get an isness, whether it's bad or good, beautiful or ugly. Whenever we practice alter-isness, we are going to, then, get a persistence of the condition.

Now, this is about the highest common denominator that you could talk about this on. So that if you knew this data you could, however, practice alter-isness. Oh ho! If we just took an ax and took a long, sharp heave and blew the whole thing up in smoke — bang! Ax blade went all the way through.

If you know that life is basically a consideration of a static which is not located in time, space, which has no mass, energy or wavelength, then, if you know also that as-isness is a condition which will unmock or disappear; that you have to practice alter-isness in order to get an isness; that after an isness has occurred, the mechanism of handling it is to postulate a not-isness, or use force to bring about a not-isness, and that any further alter-isness practiced on it will only continue to create an isness of this new condition, and that every new isness is going to be met by the postulated or force-handled not-isness, and that every not-isness is going to be followed by an alter-isness which is going to result in a persistence of what we now have — we begin to see, after a while, that there was no way out of this giddy little maze of mirrors except this recognition that we have a static that can consider, and the pattern by which we arrived at what we call reality, solidity and so forth is contained in these four conditions.

The cycle of existence is, then, for a static to consider an isness as an as-isness. See? It just says "There is." That's as-isness. And then to alter the as-isness, even to his own recognition, and obscure his knowingness as to that as-isness to procure an isness. That having procured an isness, he usually can be counted upon, sooner or later, to practice a not-isness. And not liking the results, since what he — the isness he was contesting, you see, doesn't disappear. It simply hangs up and he gets unhappy about it, you see? He now would practice a new alterisness — which would get a confirmation of the not-isness he now has — which would then persist. And we find out that life can enter itself upon a very, very dizzy cycle. The new isness is treated with an alter-isness, is followed by a not-isness and is followed again by a new condition, which is persisting — a new isness. And so we get this back and forth and seesawing around.

Now, this depends upon a basic postulate that we agree that things proceed in a fairly orderly fashion or a uniform rate of spacing or at speed or at tolerance or something of the sort. Time has to be entered in there. And we must have had a postulate right in there ahead of all of these isnesses that would determine whens. And in the absence of that one, you'd got no time continuum, so there'd never been any such thing as a persistence. So time fits right in there.

Now, do you see this progress of these various conditions?

I think that the problem of existence now narrows down just to this: an examination of the actual agreements of time to blow all the conditions of isnesses. But the agreements as to time itself are conditional upon what was created in the time stream, and we get basic postulates in there, resistant to all effects, as being time itself. Resistance to all effects.

Well, anyway, these are the four conditions of isnesses and the various definitions which accompany them and will explain any manifestation of life, human behavior, matter, space or time.