On this second hour of the night lecture December the 16th, I want to talk a little more about various things.

And amongst them is Memory and Automaticity. Did you ever see a memory system? The way to remember people’s names is you see the person’s name, you see, across his chest and as you’re meeting him, and you’re very careful to get it right that time and then you write it across his chest. And then if the name was ‘Gorse’, then you point out to yourself the fact that he actually looks like a horse and this reminds you of ‘Gorse.’ So the next time you see him you reach your hand out and say „How are you, Mr. Horse?“

Man is internally evolved in trying to solve problems the wrong way to on the tone scale. More and more complexity reaches down as you go down the tone scale. More and more complexity exists in this so-called pyramid of knowledge. And you could call this pyramid, of combinations or complexities.

Here we have this pyramid of knowledge — a cone. Let’s draw it as a cone and not be quite as mystic as some people have. And uh… let’s look at it here as a cone sitting there. And here is a datum — or two data — a dichotomy of some sort from which all other data can be extrapolated. Uh… and so we get these two data combined and then get an interplay of viewpoint on these two data and we get our second level of complexity.

It’s all very simple, you see; there’s two data up there in Figure One here. And now we take all this data and take different viewpoints on it and we get a complexity of data which would be at Stage B.

Now we take all of the various viewpoints in Stage B and we take these and put them all together and evolve new information and application and other things and we get Stage C.

And from Stage C we get Stage D — more and more complex. D, E, and we get down here, then, to this lower scale line, and that would be F. And this cone, by the way, actually just keeps on going.

Now… now let’s assume that this is the subject of mathematics. And without finding any of the common denominators, let’s pick up a datum or rule in level E out here — an X of some sort in E. And which way do you think mankind customarily goes to know more? Well, don’t all answer at once. The laws of flows tells you that he proceeds that-a-way down — with X. And of course, it gets awfully complex. It just gets grim.

So that we start off with a subject at college with the valuable data that ferric oxide uh… ferric oxide when mixed with sulfuric acid — H2S04 isn’t it? — combined uh… boy, it sure stinks.

Now we’ll go from there, and we will now evolve why it is… why it is that iron oxides are so subject to infiltration by sulfur. And which way will we go? We’ll go from ‘X’ down to the lower level, and to lower levels. And it gets more complex and more complex.

And the first thing you know, a society specializes; it has to specialize. Nobody could know the same generality that everybody else knew so they have to specialize. Each one becomes a specialist and the reductio ad absurdum on this is for there to be a person in a whole science which is operating from this datum ferric oxide which when combined with H2S04 smells bad. But what do you know? That’s not the whole science. The whole science is ferric oxide. And there’s another companion science called H2S04. And we get specialists on these two lines.

We picked up somebody two generations or two thousand years earlier on the time track and we found out he was a chemist. We would find out he had to know the philosophy of alchemy, he had to know all the pharmaceutical preparations, medical chemistry, he had to know how to make iron. He had to know all of these various things, and he figured that all out because he had the highest common denominator that he could obtain on this and that was what? That was the fact that there’s earth, air, fire and water and when you combine them you get the most interesting things.

Well, that would… that would be up there along about C, you see. And it’s not a high level.

Now supposing we wanted to really know more about chemistry? Some other science would have to come along with a higher level and suddenly tramp, or we could proceed on chemistry with — chemistry became so complex that an individual could study data for four years and not. even have a working knowledge of chemistry. And the way we would do that would be to start from an X and go down. Find an isolated datum in X, relate it to nothing in D — relate it to nothing in C and just say, „Oh, that’s beyond the realm of human experience.“ „All hands man the diving stations, stand by for a crash dive. Here we go for more knowledge!“ Now they should say, „Here we go for more data“ — more data — collection of data. Obsession!

Now the reason why Scientology got built is because this basic pattern was appreciated and, willy-nilly, it was postulated that the place to go for the data was the simplifying datum. What data knocked out a whole compartment of former knowledge?

So Book One, ADVANCED PROCEDURES AND AXIOMS, Theta Clearing. That’s… that’s all. I mean, here we have Theta Clearing — it’s a simpler level but still embraces all the lower levels. And this area here was self-determinism as the highest level. And this was here — examining what? Automaticity: The automatic interdependencies of survival as they work out and affect genus homo sapiens.

And I won’t say we’re at Two data — yet — or anywhere near it. But we’re sure working hard. Now we’re getting there just fine and it’s producing results like mad.

But from any one of these levels D is explainable — anything in D is explainable, anything in E, anything in F — or any lower level is explainable from a good broad datum in C. Anything is explainable, then, in terms of human behaviour from C down if you have a datum in C. Anything is determinable in C if you have a good broad datum in B. Anything that is determinable in A, of course, would evaluate B, C, D, E, F — and so on. All right, that’s very simple, isn’t it?

Uh… remember I showed you early in this series, this gadget. And here was one datum known and over here was ALL data known. Looked like a circle, this thing here in Figure Two. And we went this way for inductive logic, and we went that way for deductive logic. We took lots of data… lots of data and brought it to the inevitable conclusion. Which was also: If we took all the data in the plane E and we assembled it all and we put it all together and everything else, why then, by George! what would we find? Well, you might find F but boy, you’d never find D. That method, then, requires a two-action. You’ve got to have inductive and deductive logic.

You’ve got to reach for an inductive, almost intuitive datum, and grab it. And then dive — hit the deductive level, take all this data around here and see how it… how it works: Does it fit? Does it fit? Does it fit? Yeah-yeah! Fits? Okay. Fits? That’s good. Uh… and uh… deduce, then, from this that, hey! three pieces here don’t fit. Well, I’ll be a son-of-a-gun! We say C is too complex a level for operation, because we’re got three data in C.

And after that, we’ve only one choice and that’s to at least try and find out if there’s a B level which will include everything in D and the three data. See, everything in the B level to include everything in D and the three data. And so we’re very, very happy about the whole thing and we say, „Eureka! We’ve found it! We have solved the riddle!“ Wait a minute. Ahhhh — C. There is a level of C. Oh, no! Well, all right. Let’s look through all the data of C very happily now and let’s find out if there’s any data in C that isn’t evaluated by this beautiful new datum which we have in D. Oh, no! There’s 12!

So you say, „Well, all right. There can only be, then, working on this theory, a level called A. Now let’s find out if everything in A resolves everything in C because we’re now interested in C, you see? Oh, boy! Does it! Oh, it just cuts it down to shreds.“ And we look at B and we say, „Just look at B… Oh, no! Two data in B aren’t explained by A. Don’t tell me that there is another level above this. Well, there’s gotta be. Why the hell does a postulate produce so much effect. The preclear simply says, ‘Wog’ — and it’s wog. Why? Why? What’s this potentially about locating things?“ So we wobble along with that; actually it’s… it’s such a slight wobble that you don’t quite perceive that it’s wobble. You… you say, „Look, uh… we’re just solving everything in sight and everything’s fine and we… we’re solving homo sapiens. And he’s going along real good.“

And every once in a while somebody brings up flows and then say, „Flows uh… yeah. Anchor points? Fine.“ One gets a sort of a spooky feeling: Theta has the ability to locate terminals — postulate and then locate terminals in space and have them flowed between. And every once in a while you say very grandly — you have to get up above the level of energy to work — or. are you just working in a much finer level of energy than anyone is capable of perceiving? And is there an upper strata above a postulate? I don’t know. But there’s that weird datum. We’re using that datum. We’re working like mad with it. It’s just wonderful. We’re just getting there lickety-split. Poof, we have a… then we haven’t got two data at the top.

Now I’m very adventurous to label these ‘A, B, C, D, E, F’ nuhh-uhh. Where I have „F“ should be called „A“ and that’s probably, where we should be operating from right at this moment. But ego prohibits that. And so we are here, we’re working with this apple that’s supposed to be a circle here. Uh… and up toward two data. We know that two data form the MEST universe. Why do we know it? The doggonest way of knowing that ever turned up. From the weirdest field — no field. A completely original geometry called dimaxian geometry by Buckminster Fuller — little old Bucky Fuller one day said, „How do you fill three-dimensional space?“ and he worked and he worked and he worked and he found that it was filled by… it starts with two. The basic unit of three-dimensional space must be, therefore, two. Why? Because we’re talking about s… filling a solid of space.

How do you fill that space up? What’s its pattern? Well, three first has to be two: There’s an outside and there’s an inside. Because it can’t be a point because a point doesn’t have any dimensions. And we have to have a dimension to start filling space. We can’t say, „This is a point,“ when it… a point is designed and defined as something which doesn’t fill space. So we have to have an outside and an inside to the point. It doesn’t matter what… There’s got to be an outside and inside to that point and it’s got to be of some tiny dimension in order to do the next thing. Stack it with tetrahedrons. And you go all around that point and you’ll find yourself fitting in tetrahedrons.

And then what do you find? You find this fits in with octahedrons. And then what do you find? It fits in with tetrahedrons. And what do you find? That fits in with octahedrons. And what do you find? Tetrahedrons-octahedrons- tetrahedrons-octahedrons. Whew! Triangles, triangles, triangles. And that’s how you fill space.

A-R-C. Cycle of action. Four sides: M-E-S-T. Fascinating, isn’t it?

I just suddenly, one day… I’ve been working along this line and all of a sudden Bucky Fuller had invented out of whole cloth a geometry on this silly line.

So of course as long as you adhese to energy and particles you are going to have this dichotomy: triangle, four-side, eight-side octahedron system. I mean, you’re going to have flows, in other words, positive, negative, and so on, as long as you deal along with only three-dimensional space. As long as you fool with space that’s what’s going to happen.

But does something exist above space? What is this… this thing that doesn’t fill space but makes space? We have to say ‘thing’ because we’re communicating in the MEST universe. What is it? We don’t know quite where the top is. What’s the roof? Well, we’ve got the roof on the MEST universe. Ho-ho, that thing went by hours ago, days ago, years and years of havingness ago, actually. It really went by the boards rapidly with Step Four, Standard Operating Procedure Issue Five. Because that licks flows, because it starts out by the basic thing that gives trouble with flows which is an object which is the product of flows. And if you can handle the objects, the next step is to handle the energy that makes objects. And you can handle the energy. It’s very easy to handle the space in which to make energy — there it went — BOOM!

But we’re out of that, but where are we? Well, a fellow can make his own universe, and there’s lots of ways to go about making it. And a lot of guys can get together and do this and there’s tremendous aesthetic appreciation; there’s t… tremendous goals, enormous sensations, that you’ve never even vaguely experienced. Really you wouldn’t dream they existed.

Once in a blue moon you might have had a dream about some beautiful music and then awakened to wonder what it was — something way back on the track some place — haunting thing — you can’t quite recall it. You recall that you REALLY appreciated that. You had a dream where you really appreciated some aesthetic of some sort. That’s a vague shadow of how heavy and how high and how heady an aesthetic is.

So, what have we got? We have… We’re not up to Two data. There’s a big adventure above this level. But it’s safe this far — completely safe.

Now you have two purposes: One is, we solve this on the operational schedule, all is simplicity. We assumed that all was simplicity. The answer was basically simple so where did you go to find the answer? Not into further complexity. And whenever you, in doing research, start to grab up a datum that isn’t explanatory of any large field of action, and then dive into further complexities as the only direction to be taken — beware. And any time you see somebody adding up to solve some vast riddle, this business of a complex theorem to evolve complex theorems, just by test here and experience so far, there’s something wrong with it. If it’s complex, it’s wrong.

And the MEST universe proves that completely, because the random data at level F is horrible. What’s down here? We’re working as in Figure Three, perhaps, between a ‘NO wave length’ as an interaction with ‘ALL motion’. And that could be that there is an understood and not yet contactable, existing all motion thing which is as remote from the MEST universe as the ‘no motion’ thing of theta. The MEST universe produces a mockery of all motion in pretending that these cross entangled vectors of chaos are a complexity and all the complexity there can be of motion.

The MEST universe is not very dense and it’s not very fast. So that we’d have all possible vectors; we would have a complete density.

So theoretically we would proceed from the angriness of space to the relative density of a heavy object made out of gold. And we would have run the MEST universe equivalent of ‘no motion’ to ‘all motion’. And that would be the dichotomy that we are operating with. Something that doesn’t move operating with something that does move. And that would be the dichotomy.

Well, perhaps there’s a much bigger dichotomy, and that is the complete zero, ‘no wave length’ thing which is interacting against an all motion’ thing which would be inconceivably more complex and yet well ordered, than theta. And maybe the MEST universe was trying to proceed toward this ‘all motion’ level.

I’m telling you this for two reasons. I want to explain automaticity to you; and I want you, in operating with preclears or in research data, to give some credence to this theory that the direction to go is toward basic simplicity unless you think you have discovered the identity of an ‘all motion’ thing. And the next big advance on this line probably would be in the identification and better description of an ‘all motion’ thing — possibly would be. Lord knows what it would be.

But we have ‘motion’ against ‘no motion’. The gradient scale of ‘motion’ against ‘no motion’ makes up our tone scale, it makes flows, it makes all sorts of things. Actually over here we get, in Figure Four, we get a potential uh… terminal A operating against a lower terminal B, and they don’t have to be very much apart to produce a current — there’ll be a current between those two things. You can measure it.

And yet those in Figure Four are maybe a tiny little bit apart. So your dichotomies can be unbelievably small and still produce results. There’s… anxious communication and not quite so anxious communication would make a dichotomy and would create a randomity in a communication line.

Somebody would say, „My God! Get the ship off the rocks!“

And the other fellow is saying, „Well, we have two seconds to get the ship off the rocks!“ You’ve got an argument.

All right. Now you want to watch that. And the second part… the second thing I mentioned is the preclear. The preclear — his answer is basically simple. It is not multiply complicated. And any time that you err in the direction of complication of symptoms you are going to err into a long time of auditing. If you pay any attention to complex and changing symptoms, you can just be sure that you’re operating at F or E or D on this preclear. So at no time let Mrs. Smythe come in and tell you how badly smitten she is, because… because you’ll learn this sort of thing.

The first day she comes in… the first day she comes in it’s because her children are such a trial to her and if she could just get along with her children it would be all right. And the next time she comes in, she’s written you a long note and explained how it was all her husband and it came to her in a flash that her husband compared unfavorably or favorably with her father who was a splendid man and so on. And you’ll decide, „Well, I guess I’ll work on that a little bit and get this case straightened out before we start it rolling.“ But the next time she comes in she will have a nice long dissertation on the subject that it really was food. It didn’t have anything to do at all with her father, but her father bought food and… but it might have had something to do with it. But that wasn’t really it. It was food. It was the fact that she was forbidden food when she was a child and that’s what really aberrated her. And you’d say, „Well, we’ll do something with that.“

And she comes in, now, the next time with 18 typewritten pages, a young manuscript, and she tells you how it wasn’t food, it wasn’t food really. Uh… the whole thing had to do with a memory which just came back to her in a flash and that memory consisted of having… actually having attended a funeral when she was about one year old and she remembered it ever since, and it frightened her so, and that’s what colored her life and she’s got it all figured out. And how she figured it out? She’s actually built a little cone for you every time. She’s tried to find the highest common denominator, instinctively, of her case and tried to blow it to pieces by showing you all the places this thing interacted and was complicated.

And when you look at this, you’re looking at, one: something which has to a large extent broadened our knowledge considerably; and we’re also looking at any preclear we ever looked at. Because what is essentially true in a thetan would be essentially true as a pattern for the universe or universes in which he dwelt.

All right, now you start operating with E and F — eeeooow! Just follow the Auditor’s Code, be courteous, cut off her chatter, put her in… on the meter, get an assessment according to Create-Destroy. Let her talk once in a while if it seems to make her feel a little bit better, but just for social reasons. Get that assessment, get her two inches, two feet, two yards, two miles back of her head. She can’t get there? Okay. Have her put out a beam and push that forward. Fo… she can’t do that? Have her hold up a point. „Oh, well. All right, now let’s see. Let’s uh… let’s mock up the first home you ever lived in. Okay. You got that? Oh, well fine. Now let’s take that and turn it green, let’s put it behind your back, put it under your feet, let’s put it over your head. Now let’s put a new turret on it and let’s put it over to the right. You got that? Good. Let’s put it over to the left.“ You say, „How are you getting these things?“ „Oh,“ she says, „just thoughts.“ You say, „Did you get a picture?“

„No-no. I used to imagine pictures a lot when I was a little child but… I don’t any more.“

So you say, „All right. Now can you get a picture? Let’s see if you can really get a picture uh… a picture of the old homestead or the old cow barn of whatever it was you were raised. And let’s get that old… old thing and… and let’s turn it upside down — you… you’ve got it? You got it?“

„Yes,“ she says, „I’ve got s… some kinda grey dim, dull-looking shape out there.“ You say, „Is that the house?“ „Yeah-yeah-yeah, it kinda looks like it is.“

Take it from there. Unless they can’t move it after they see it; unless they are just so terribly incapable of the tiniest point of the gradient scale you get to. Nothing happens. But try to take it from there, because you have hit the lower level of automaticity, for this case. And by handling this case with the whole process of Four, you can then get back to a stable point. And with a stable point you can then get back to something resembling uh… space, and when they got that, why, you might have to go back and do some more Four. Don’t be surprised at that, but at least try to clip them out of the head. Now there… there’s your process.

What are you doing? Then, you’re coming down the tone scale with those steps. You’ve thought perhaps… but if you call this a tone scale — it’s really not a tone scale. There isn’t any reason why ‘F’ couldn’t be at ‘20’. That’s playing very fast, and very horribly fast — a very fast game. It’s very complicated. That’s Indians gambling with uh… these knuckle bones, and they pass them from hand to hand and then they turn up to be in the buffalo hide outside the tent, and so forth; a complicated game. That’s somebody who’s playing at it being a very simple game like blackjack and beating you all the time for some reason or other. That’s uh… that could be all sorts of complexities, played with rapidity.

Your tone scale is essentially a gauge of speed per scope, and this isn’t. This is a gauge of complexity of knowingness. So, this is not ‘40,0’ really. It doesn’t have to be at all. There could be at one of these levels, you see, that existed all the way along.

All right, let’s take a look at this, then, as Standard Operating Procedure. And you’re just simply getting the simplest way you can hit it, and then a little more complicated way to hit it, and then a little more complicated way to hit it, and then a little more complicated way to hit it, and then a little more complicated way to hit it, and a little more complicated way to hit… you have A, B, C, D, E, F, G.

Because brother, that fellow there at the bottom is really complicated. He’s so complicated he isn’t going to let go of anything. Or he’ll give you anything: You can’t make him hold anything. This… this character’s maybe in a hospital or something and has chronic — as unlovely as it may seem — chronic vomiting or chronic diarrhea — colonic trouble and so on. Just got to give everything. Boom! Boom! Out! Bang! in all directions, you see? Could be.

Or this character is the other kind of a character — if you get them to put their purse on the chair instead of grip it solidly to their stomach, you’ll advance the case. You’ve got one present time object to leave them, and they’re holding everything else, and objects and words themselves are lower level. There are tests as to how well a person’ll do this. How much is an object… how much of an object is a symbol?

You’re say… you’re singing, „Yankee Doodle went to town, riding on a horsefly.“

He stops you and he says, „Oh, no, no, no-no! It was a pony.“

And you say, „Well, okay. Uh… and he stuck the feather in his hat and called it Macaroni.“

And he’ll say, „Well, macaroni, you know, was uh… a… a… an English slang word at the time which meant ‘a dandy’, a swell, and uh… that’s why he used the word.“

You’re not doing anything. You’re singing a song. This guy is so troubled with those things. You know what he’s doing with these things? When you let… when you let them drift out and you let them go, he’ll pick them up. It’s a fact! He… he does that. He picks them up.

So, as you get down here, you have more and more objects, that’s true. But along about this level in here of C, you’ve got automaticity setting in, but very heavily. And it gets wusser and wusser and wusser. And you want to make sure what that preclear’s doing.

Now I’ll ask you a nasty, dirty question that is somewhat in the vicinity of how do you hold your tennis racket? Where do those buttons come from that your people are wearing in those mock-ups? Where do those buttons come from that they’ve got on their clothes? You get a person and they’ve got clothes on, and the coat’s buttoned — where’s the button come from?

„Oh, he just got it.“

„Oh, yeah?“ That’s automaticity. „Now you… you mock up this dog. Where does his hair come from?“

„Well, he’s just got hair!“

„No, no! He didn’t ‘just got hair’.“ Where does his barker come from, if he barks? Woof-woof! Did you make him a throat? No, you didn’t. So you haven’t made a dog. You’ve made an automatic picture of a dog that was behaving because you have automatic circuits which have trained you to mock up in such a way that a dog looks and acts like that. And so you just mock up the MEST universe equivalent and you’ve taken the MEST universe for your automaticity.

Now even if you put pink bows on this dog, green ribbons, purple hair, anything else — sure, he becomes your dog. But he doesn’t become a wumperjump! No, sir! You’ve got to build a wumperjump! And you’ve got to have practically all the automaticity out of the bank to get a good wumperjump. And you want to know what a wumperjump is — well, build one. They’re very complicated to build. It isn’t that they take lots of time to build, but the difference in automaticity is not ‘save time’. It actually takes longer. A person is operating much more slowly on automaticity. It’s taking him longer to mock up this mock-up, really, compared to how fast he can think. He’s thinking so slowly that it’s taking him longer than he could if he built the thing. And there’s no reason why he has to use the MEST universe for a pattern.

It’s all right to use the MEST universe for a pattern. You can do it for a long time. But one of these fine days, you’ll say… you’ll… you’ll say, „Oh, ~ could put a lot of chartreuse people with green bows and… and orange-colored sidewalks and so forth, and this is the Universe, and… Oh, what am I building this universe for?“ You’re building an automatic universe. Your mock-ups might be very good — there’s nothing wrong with that. You’re on the way up, but you’re not out of the level of automatic mock-ups yet.

Unless you can put together, piece by piece, a wumperjump which is a totally original idea. It has nothing to do with the MEST universe at all. It isn’t just a scrambled MEST universe: He doesn’t bark with his tail or… or… uh… pant with his ears, or something of this sort. He would be an operating, functional beast of some sort, who you probably had a purpose for.

Do you know… did you ever see… did you ever see an engineer get engrossed in a plan? Drives their wives mad! I mean, their wives come in and it’s eleven o’clock and he’s got to go to work in the morning and there’s paper spread all over the dining room table, and it’s twelve o’clock and she’s lying there in a cold bed in the dark and… and it’s one o’clock and it’s two o’clock and papers still flying around. And she comes out and says, „Dear, it’s two o’clock.“ And he says, „Huh?“ „It’s two o’clock in the morning!“ „Oh, yeah! Thank you very much. I will have some.“

He isn’t doing automaticity. He’s working like mad. He’s thinking every minute of the time — brrrrrrrrr! — and he’s carving himself out a piece of plan of some sort or another, and he… he occasionally will throw into it pieces of the MEST universe electronics, because they’re handy and other people build them. Or he’s working it out on the basis of he has to follow gravity because there is gravity and… and his isness — he’s building in the world of the real instead of the actual, and so he has to make these compromises.

But if you were to take that boy on a full inspiration to build the trinnerbugs that go on a yumperjump! — zing! You’ve not seen anything like that much interest. Yet he’s just all super-concentrated burn up the highway. No… it’s really, it’s really fascinating.

Now it’s been so long since anything like that was ever called — I mean, any person was called upon to do anything like that, he says, „Oh, no! I couldn’t possibly be original. After all, there isn’t an original thought anyplace — originality and imagination, even at its best is just a reformation of things which have been thought before. We know, over in the English Department where we teach our short story writers that it’s all been written before. And there are eight dramatic situations and there are 36 ways to use paper. And all of them apply to stories except some of them, and uh… we’ve got it all formalized and all the way you get a plot is to get a plot genie. Because everybody knows that all plots are basically similar and they’ve all been done before.“

You run into one of these automaticity characters and he’s liable to throw that at you, if you happen to be in the field of the arts — yeah. That is like Rubicon’s uh… famous portrait of the Stixburger. You just… just painted a picture of the town hall. It’s always ‘like’ something. He thinks in associations, not in aesthetics. It always has a comparison, and it’s always been done before — creative imagination.

If you’ve ever walked upstairs and into the high tower of creation out of practically whole cloth, not in contest with the MEST universe, but just absorbedly in creation of something of your own and something new, you don’t throw the hair on it — zoom! No, you put it on, hair by hair. And you do it so rapidly and so swiftly that actually it goes on — zoom! but you didn’t put it on, zoom! You didn’t say, „Alacabam-hair!“ No, you didn’t. You took hair and you put it on hair by hair and it went brrrrrrrrr — all the hair’s on. You get the idea?

So, it becomes very interesting. If you want to know how far your preclear’s down tone scale on automaticity, ask him rather snidely to think of something completely original. And he’ll say, „Oh, no!“ He’ll think it over for a moment and he’ll say, „Now, let’s see: I’ll think of a road that goes in corkscrews. Yeah, completely original.“

You say, „It’s a road, isn’t it?“

And then he’ll finally think up this terrific, horrendous thing and he’s just… just worked on it and he’s thought about it and thought about it. And when he comes over, you say, „You know why that isn’t original? You could tell me about it in MEST language, couldn’t you? And you had a name for every part. You wouldn’t be able to tell me about something completely original.“

„Oh,“ the guy’d say, „I’m going to have you shot!“

What’s automaticity? What’d be a gauge of automaticity? People have been in the MEST universe using energy of the MEST universe’s, using objects made by the MEST universe and space made by the MEST universe so long that they think they have to copy only the pattern of the MEST universe — three- dimensional space, things with wheels. How did the Aztec get along? Everybody knows the Aztec didn’t have a wheel. What did he have? He did have a wheel, by the way. All the child’s toys you find down there uh… in the old ruins, and that sort of thing, have wheels on the little carts and that sort of things. And then somebody comes along and says they didn’t have a wheel in the civilization. Every kid in the Aztec society was dragging a… a go-cart behind him with uh… wheels.

Anyway, uh… they didn’t have horses, though. That we’re very sure of. I guess it was that Cortez that was on it.

So when we look over the scale of automaticity, we’re looking over, as we look over automaticity, Step — as far as you’re concerned — peaks — 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Every single step contains enormous automaticity. Well, what are you shooting for? You want to know how far you’re shooting? Well, I hate to do this on this graph, because it would be puzzling if it slipped back afterwards, but up here at the top are some dotted lines and these dotted lines have to do with… these dotted lines have to do with a s… a coincidence. And where these two dotted lines marked uh… ‘Edgar’ and ‘Joe’ coincide, above the chart is the level from A to that point above the chart, which is B.

All right, you’ve got room for improvement on your preclear. The main trouble that’s happened, is people have a paucity of imagination. And this is going to outrage you about your preclear: You’re going to say, „What happened to his imagination?“

They’ll tell you something very interesting one day. They’ll say, „You know, I had an adventure.“

And you’ll say, „Yeah, yeah.“ This person’s operating pretty well. They can lift their arms outside their body and so forth.

„I had a big adventure and I… I tell you, I was… I was down at the grocery store…“

„Yeah“ — you wait.

They feel very coy about this whole thing. And they say, „… and the lady who was putting apples in a sack, and I took one of the apples and I just kept it rolling a little further away from her. Oh.“

This would be on the order of taking Dan Patch and putting him to an old ramshackle — not even a steel, but a crooked stick plow. This would be somewhat on the order of grooming up a potential Hispano-Suisa with solid gold wheels, body, brakes, all chromed over on an aluminum frame or something, that looks in the sun enough to blind you utterly, and somebody uses it… somebody uses it to smooth out the brims of hats in a hat shop. And that’s going to appall you. Here… here’s this whole universe staring this thetan in the face, just begging… just begging him to „let’s do something interesting.“ They roll an apple a little bit further.

Now if you’ve done that, your preclear… here’s the trouble with your preclear. His level of automaticity at ‘A’ is so far from that desirable end of what we will mark ‘B’ and put an arrow on it way up, that they can only copy ‘X’ and if you get them up a little bit, then they’re ashamed to copy ‘X’ but they can’t feel that they can do new ones. So that’s automaticity.

And you see that in somebody who gets… oh, very rapid. I mean, he mocks up a little man — „Get a little man. Got a little man? That’s good. Get another little man. Fine. Got another little man?“ Brrrrrr! „Oh, yeah! I got a lot of little men.“ „What are they wearing?“

„Oh, they’re all wearing little green jackets.“ I’ll bet you something: I’ll bet you they’re not wearing ‘em behind their backs. It isn’t just the omission, it’s where did he get the pearl buttons. Where did he get the admirals’ epaullets that he mocks up. He takes a pattern from the MEST universe, so much experience, and then he covets this pattern and when he makes the mock-up he just recombines all these patterns — bong! — and he’s got the thing.

Is it his? Well, he’ll feel it’s enough his to be completely shocked by the fact that he actually owns something. He’s made this admiral stand on his head and he’s got the admiral wearing garlands of flowers in his belt buckle, or something — anything — his admiral. He’s as proud as punch of his admiral! He isn’t going to really take any pride in that admiral at all- or any real interest in that admiral at all. There’s too much automaticity in the admiral.

So interest and automaticity are to a large degree similar. And when Hollywood begins to grind out motion pictures with the same plot… They used to be, just in the cheap westerns that you always had the baddies and the goodies. And the goodies chased the baddies and sometimes the baddies chased the goodies, and there was always the weenie, and it always wound up in the end with the guy getting the girl. They used to be corny enough to ride off into the sunset like they do in modern A pictures. And you wonder why the public stays away from ‘em in droves. There’s not enough randomity — it’s too much of a complete grind pattern, pattern, pattern, pattern, pattern. Too much entertainment being made and not enough originality. Somebody tries to make a, quote, ‘different’ picture, and everybody says, „Well, probably won’t box office.“

I made a serial one time that… that’s… that’s… that’s uh… made history. It made history because it only cost two hundred thousand dollars to make and it made one million, seven hundred fifty thousand dollars at the box office, and it was the worst serial ever made. But it didn’t lack in randomity, because after I put the plot together, it was… it had a lot of randomity in it. They decided that the last half of each of the reels, or something like that, ought to be rewritten by somebody else who needed a screen credit, and without reading my script, he rewrote it. It was really random. And then they had a couple of extra stunt men they didn’t know what to do with, so they just threw these stunt men into various places in the picture. To this day, if I walk into Hollywood, I could walk into so-and-so’s office down there, an agent, and they’d look at me blankly for a little while — I have worked on fairly decent things, once in a while — look blankly for a while and so on. And then, „Yeah — that’s right. Yeah. Um-hmm. I know, yeah-yeah! 1,750,000 dollars box office. That’s right! Yeah, that’s it! Yeah, sure! We can put you to work! Let’s go over to Paramount and see what they’ve got to say!“ Humph! That’s a fact! Just the box office. They — never looked at the film. Nobody’s ever analyzed that film to find out why it did that. It defies analysis. It’s… it has no plot! It doesn’t even end with the same characters it begins with. Its confusion was so wonderful people had to keep coming back to the theater to see it time after time because they couldn’t believe it.

And yet to this day, if I made… Jimmy Fiddler… Jimmy Fiddler is kind of behind the times. He said I was working in Hollywood in a column a short time ago. But if I went down there tomorrow, that would be the only thing that I would possibly work with — o… on that basis. It’s got nothing — just nothing.

Uh… that tells you quite a bit on something like that. And they wonder why they’re staying away in droves from the box office. They think they’ve got to be a this and a that.

I imagine the Greek theater was finally just ready to fall in. The entrepreneurs and the promoters and the theater managers were having a bad time and their shoes were getting pretty thin, and I imagine the actors were fishing out of garbage cans before the Greek theater was finally finished. I’m sure that’s true, because they departed from randomity and went on a pattern. And you never saw anything as stylized in your life as Greek theater in the last days of Greek theater, and the public stayed away in droves.

Interest alone carries a person down the track of the MEST universe. So interest alone is all that carries your preclear up the scale as a thetan.

And just in case we missed that, interest alone is the only thing that carries your preclear up the track toward a higher level of beingness. He has to h… be interested in what he is doing and he has to be interested in a potential will-be, will-do, or will-have, in order to improve himself even vaguely. And if you step him outside, he hasn’t got any personality; he left the personality in the body. He doesn’t feel like he has any identity, he… he feels all this, he’s very upset about it, and you wonder why he won’t improve and why he isn’t improving? He’s got no reason to improve.

Fortunately, there’s enough automaticity in these techniques, and a little ra… very little randomity in your Standard Operating Procedure, and he won’t understand what’s happening to him until it’s too late, and he will run right up the line here in a very few hours of auditing to be a Step One. You don’t have any trouble till you get to Step One and get Step One finished and get him lifting fairly well. If you really get him lifting real good, your trouble start to be over. But he will go into a static. He is now a crane — he can lift things.

Now, therefore, to get an operating thetan requires something of an aesthetic. How do you restore this aesthetic? Do you recommend to him spectator sports? That’s just more automaticity. He sits there and it’s all fed to him. Umm-umm. That isn’t the way to establish it. You just keep working him to work out automaticity out of his case, and the other restores itself automatically — negative gain.

So your enemy in keeping the preclear coming, is a thing called automaticity. Any time you find your preclear stalling, he’s satisfied. And he will be satisfied sometime at a level on the tone scale where if he were walking down the street as a thetan and he’s maybe doing something very constructive like counting the lamp posts, and he’s walking down it — and by the way, little kids will do this. So do thetans. They go down the street slowly, a thousand miles an hour and count all the lamp posts and idle at the corner. Uh… and uh… he’ll be going by something like that and he’ll get himself uh… a horse sneezes — cop’s horse at the curb sneezes — and he’s a horse. He isn’t just… he’s just interested. He just quit. He… he’s just quit. He hasn’t any… any further level to go. And he didn’t quit at a point where he was stable. He’s still afraid, he’s still dispersing, if he hit a trolly line or something like that he would get a shock badly. He runs into a ridge outside of his head, or something like that, and he gets an electrical punch instead of an energy punch — electricity being much lower on the scale. And this is quite beefy to him and it’s very upsetting to him. And he says, „Oh, no! I don’t want to be outside that head. I’d better be inside the head.“

And you say to him, „Well, now all right. Let’s put a couple of thousand watts across the top of your head and a couple more thousand across it. Now get between them.“ The guy says, „What?“ And you say, „Well, get between these two bands of energy.“ „I just strung one…“ „Well,“ you say, „string two hundred.“

„Okay“ — he’ll string two hundred. A band from one temple to the other temple of flowing energy. Actually, he can do that. It’s very high wave stuff — very high wave length, visible on an E-Meter but on nothing else practically. And visible to a thetan, of course — another thetan too. String another one out there and then get between them and blow it up. Oh, no!

First one will practically blow him all over his skull and blow him down through his feet. And then he’ll say, „Oh, I’m not hurt“ and with a little coaxing, he does it again, and he does it again and he does it again. And he starts to beef the thing up. Next thing you know, he’ll go over to find a lightswitch — bzzzzzt! Bzzzzzt! Bzzzzzt! Bzzzzzzt! What do you know? He just burned the lamp out or something. He’ll say, „What do you know?“ while you grope around in the dark, or you have to get out of your head or come in from sitting out there two thousand miles square up where you weren’t really auditing him at all, and you have to come in and grope around in order to get a new light.

All right, what keeps him coming? Your interest of him can help. Your interest in him can help, and some knowledge of what he’s facing can help.

But one of the sorriest jobs you’re going to have to do is trying to coax him ahead, giving him a will-have enough to keep him going when he doesn’t have any interest in anything. Because he’s in a state of amnesia, his memory is shot, he hasn’t any real recollection or potentiality, he has very little energy compared to the amount of energy he’d have. And out of sheer boredom he’ll slide back into his head. So it’s going to be a continual contest on your part to establish some interest level which your preclear can lead toward and appreciate.

And don’t give him the whole package the way I’m giving you. It flattens people. I mean they sit in their seats and gawp at you sometimes. I’m giving you information. I’m not trying to lead you off into the blue or play Pied Piper with you. I could, believe me. It used to be my profession.

And when we look this over then, we find out that the course from ‘A’ to ‘B’ pursues and follows and has a lag behind INTEREST. And interest has nothing to do with flows and is above the level of space. Conviction and interest are both above the level of space, but you never would have gotten the preclear to have gone into motion of any kind that led finally to the MEST universe, unless you gave him something in which to be interested.

Somebody came along one day and he was sitting there perfectly content, and they sold him something in which to be interested. And so he came over down along the line and the interest path which was demonstrated to him was guess where? In Figure 1, from Two data down to G. That’s the way that interest level led him. That isn’t necessarily bad. He just got less and less powerful, and less and less powerful and he could do less and less. And finally departs from really being terribly interested in anything, and he says everything is dull, and the next thing you know, he’s down there along about ‘G’ — homo sapiens. And he’s having a rough time. Life is arduous, he has to work hard. He’s got all these reasons why and so forth.

What have you got to do? What’s your job? In theta clearing, you’re reversing track. And I repeat, the best way to reverse track is to get the devil away from automaticity. Just drill him, then, in the steps which constitute Standard Operating Procedure, more and more, until he becomes perfect and positive and less and less automatic in mock-ups and in the making of space — less and less automatic. When he makes a piece of space, he doesn’t say ‘space’. He is fast enough so that he actually picks up that space, puts it together and it’s real space and he… he’s got it tested and so forth, and he does it all, bang! that fast, see? He’s got a piece of space.

Somebody else walks in and says, „Ahhhh! A vacuum!“ It can be that bad. I mean, then he’s doing something.

Now a lot of the automatic mock-ups that you get and a lot of these responses that you get he can actually control are too automatic to serve. They might be brilliant in coloring, they might be everything else. They’re definitely your preclear’s, he’s definitely making… I’m just showing you that first he can get brilliant mock-ups and then it is above there — it’s automaticity. He’s got lots of automaticity in them.

You don’t try to weed the automaticity out. You just increase the control of mock-ups in general, until he can do the darnedest things with sensations and colors — things like that. And you get that positive.

One pc we’ve got here who is doing a very fine job of… of mock-ups. It’s not that these are automatic and they are being done for him, they come out of some circuit. No, he’s just using patterns that he’s running automatically out and he feeds them into the mock-ups. They’re his — there’s nothing wrong with this. I’m telling you, that’s fortunate. Because if you don’t have that to reduce, you wouldn’t be taking him any place.

So, he… with all these got a black spot… he got a black spot that was really his. He could… kind of grey but he got a black spot. He could turn it on, he could turn it off, he could turn it on, he could put it any place. And boy, it was a real black spot! And probably if he’d enlarged that black spot and thrown it across some radio writer’s script — well, I wouldn’t mention any names uh… you… if he’d really worked on getting a black spot, he would have gotten to the point where this other reader would have said, „I must be going blind. My script has just turned the color of ink!“ — you see? Get that. Get a real black spot. And yet this preclear is getting very good mock-ups.

Now this doesn’t mean that you have to get a black spot of that magnitude and that commanding reality and that commanding beingness and „I own it and it’s mine“ in order to have a mock-up or in order to have some certainty on a mock-up. He’d just come up scale, up scale, up scale; a little bit higher certainty, and all of a sudden he’d hit a level of certainty, that’s all. And that’s a level of certainty. This is a very high level of certainty. Because, that’s a gradient scale of knowingness. The more he can do that and the better he can do that, the more he will be interested. Why? Because interest is native to the thetan. It’s above the level — just above the level of interest and interesting — he’s nothing — he’s nothing.

So, it is of the utmost that he is led by interest. And any time he stagnates and it isn’t interesting, what is that a diagnosis of? You see that he’s not being interested, all of a sudden. It’s a diagnosis of the fact that he has hit an automaticity which needs resolving. That’s all. And the way you resolve it is just make him drill much more arduously and precisely with mock-ups. And particularly favor conserving mock-ups, making them persist, making them more complex and putting more perceptions in them.

Now in the field of sensation, you don’t think you’ve even vaguely entered the field of sensation with homo sapiens, do you? He’s only got 55 emotions or — uh… pardon me — uh… perceptions. (He hasn’t anywhere near that emotions — he’s only got five or six good emotions, maybe eight at the outside. They’re real heavy predominant, that can be felt easily.) Sensation is a wide subject and sensation is the parallel subject of interest and enters higher wave bands along the aesthetics than are entered by any other type of flow. And sensation itself can be, evidently, above the level of flow.

So you rehabilitate sensation and you continue to rehabilitate sensation and you hit very early in the case and get out of this automaticity of using the MEST body to prepare all sensation for us. And how do you do that? You make him feel emotions from mock-ups. I gave you that drill early in these lectures — emotions from mock-ups. And you ge… ge… take the emotions from low scale up scale until he can vary the emotions at will in any mock-up and re-perceive it. Until he can vary any… feel the thing he perceives in the whole area around him. And then you get mock-ups which get the highest and most powerful sensations in them. First you discover to him that he can pick up directly sensations from the MEST universe better than he can pick them up from himself — from the body — himself; he can do it directly. And in doing it directly, you will find that he suddenly really sparks up. He doesn’t really need this body. He isn’t dependent anymore.

Because sensation and interest are levels, and if he can’t get sensation, he can’t get interest. The two interlock. And they follow all the way up the scale.

And that’s how you lead a fellow into an operating thetan, is you just make sure that he can feel all these emotions and sensations, first from the MEST universe itself, and to make an operating thetan from mock-ups which are MORE real, which are QUITE ACTUAL and have a GREATER DEGREE OF ACTUALITY than guess what? MEST universe things. And that includes any sensation you can name, including the taste of pepper. And if you can do that, then your preclear is led right on UP the scale and he can always make things more complex.

But things get simpler and more beautiful and more interesting and more intense and more concentrated and more able, the higher and higher he goes toward an operating thetan, and he’s led by interest and the keynote of that interest is sensation.

That does not mean that you’re trying to make just a sensation — hungry thing from him, because without some sensation, one doesn’t even know he’s alive. And for this thetan to know he’s alive, he’s got to be able to go down the street and he smells all the fruit in the fruit stand as he goes by the fruits and…

Did you ever see a dog… did you ever see a dog out on a trip, and the dog’s got his nose out the window and the dog’s going „sniff-sniff-sniff — sniff-sniff, aha, aha, aha, aha — gee! Cows!“ He’s saying, „Cows and… and… and gosh, look at that barn! Barn full of… And there’s been a cat passed here and…“ Boy, he is interested.

Well, you know that man has practically lost that? Not that he should pattern himself on a dog either, but a thetan can go past a fruit stand and he can get the sensation of every fruit there. And there’s more to a fruit than the sensation of smell, of taste — there’s just dozens of them.

And then there’s sensations of going into the library and feeling what all the people have been doing with the books and what they thought of when they read them — much more interesting than reading the books — there’s nothing in the books.

So you’ve got all sorts of tricks and I hope you understand that. The road toward sensation, the road toward interest, is away from automaticity and toward being able to perceive from things one has made — all the sensation and more sensation than he was ever able to obtain in the MEST universe. And at one level of the tone scale, when you first start into this, when your preclear first starts into it, he’s pretty blind about it. He doesn’t know how bright even this MEST universe can be, how interesting. And he has just gone… drawn back from it.

He gets up into a level of interest that makes a little kid’s most intense moment look very pale.

Now, I’ve talked often about regaining the feeling of the morning when you woke up early and the sun was bright and just coming up and there was dew all over the ground, and you were a little kid and you looked out and it was a new day, and you certainly want to be able to gain that, because you can gain that now, quite easily. Just use Standard Operating Procedure Issue Five, and remembering that we mustn’t let our preclear lag or sag at any time, because he’s getting things too automatic. Jar him out of it and push him on up the scale further.

You think there’s a satiation to it? No, it’s only when he gets back in the rut of automaticity that there is insufficient interest to command his continuing attention.