The word MAYBE is in this case being semantically allied to indecision. It could be just as well allied to turbulent action. If a fellow decides the answer is just plain “No”, it doesn’t produce any conflict or enturbulence as long as he sticks by it. But, if he decides, “No, well maybe it should be Yes, but I’ll say No anyhow”, creates a little bit of enturbulence. Then the fellow says, “No, I guess Yes, No, I’m pretty sure, No, I guess I wont.” There is just a little bit more enturbulence. All the way out along the line to: ”Well, No, of course we ought to, but Yes, but No, but well, if you did, but I’d better not.” In other words, a normal state of mind. That is indecision. You go out from that considering decision as a wave, and you find that he decides, Yes (with reservations), then a little bit further he says, “Yes, and I’m going to make it stick”, and then he says, “YES”, and no enturbulence. So, from No to Yes through Maybe could be said to he from Zero to Infinity. There is no enturbulence on either end. Yes and No are both clean decisions; To Be, or Not To Be, and between them you have enturbulence. This shows up if you graphed it, as vectors of force: (see Diagram below)

The outcome of (e) above is unpredictable. They might all come together, cancel each other out, and there would be no reason to make a decision. You do that all the time. In (b) you say

“I’ve got to go down to the post office to meet Mamie”, and the other datum is, “Mamie is not going to be at the post office”. No purpose in making the decision, for the 2 data are opposing each other. Another might be, “I am hungry” and “I am broke”. Well, there is a solution there, you just go on being hungry. The two data generally, don’t make a problem. It’s when you get much data (as in (e) for example) that you get real indecision.

The subject of “attention” can be graphed. The subject of “Decision” can also be graphed. Attention and decision have something in common.

All of the above are possible; all of those are possible decisions. There was a body of attention units (a) which in this case was a mans’ mind. They were hit by a datum (b), and they immediately do something about the datum. Keep this in mind, this datum (it may be just someone coming up and saying you have lost your car keys) is resting on some prior existing effort. When he says, “You have lost your car keys” he is just giving you symbols of some past effort that you know about. And in order to understand those symbols completely, you put past effort into action, analyze it, and re-symbolize your reply. Now, get this. All these thoughts in the MEST universe, when you are talking, communicating, etc. are preceded by an effort. You can’t explain to somebody about “Knocking a fist through a wall”, unless he knows- “wall, fist, knocking, and through”. He gets to know a wall probably the first time he ran into one. Fist may not mean much to him unless he has been hit in the jaw with a fist. So, the statement, “Knocking a fist through a wall” becomes to you a rather forceful action. You may have felt there was a lot of force and action in such a situation. How did you know that? You scanned back, and picked up the efforts for those symbols. Understand this: that when we use language, at all times we are relating symbols to past efforts.

So, when I say a datum hits a mans’ mind........... Here are his attention units /////////////, and these attention units actually align themselves on a pattern of past facsimiles. You can manufacture attention units that you have in your facsimiles. Those which are giving you pain are actually being manufactured by you, and being exerted against you, because they keep running through the grooves and patterns of some old facsimiles.

That isn’t too tough: you have a facsimile about a wall, and in order to make it active in present time you take the old facsimile, and you run some attention units up against it, and that is a wall. Don’t try to make this complicated. It is simple. When I say running attention units across an old facsimile, it is as sensory and actual as putting your fingers out, and actually running them against the wall. The attention units are that real, and the facsimile feels that real to those attention units. We aren’t dealing here with anything very nebulous. The facsimile has solidity. Its solidity is given to it by you, by your attention units. That’s why you are so willing to accept, and why your P.C.s accept, and get well rather rapidly when this proposition is offered to them: “You are making yourself sick.” Of course, he has a facsimile there that somebody else pounded his head in with, that permits him to do so. His attention units are actually running up against this old facsimile, and it is his attention units that are turning around and exerting the pain. See, you wouldn’t have a headache just because there was a facsimile there. The facsimile is a picture; now you run your attention units at this facsimile, and you do a mock-up (remember I told you there were other ways of thinking) well, this is a heavy energy form of approximation. What you do is, you take your attention units and approximate this facsimile, and you say, “Yup, here it is. I sure have got a migraine headache.” What you are doing it with, is with your own attention units. Now, if you are holding in place a few facsimiles which stand ahead, or just in front of your ability to create energy waves or attention units; everytime you consciously create a flow of attention units, they will hit these facsimiles you are carefully holding in place from some other source. The attention units you are trying to put out are being stopped almost as they are formed, by the wall of attention units that are mocking up the old facsimile, which of course is also being done by you.

Suppose you decided to glare at the wall, and burn the paint off of it. You create the attention units to do it, and they run smack into the attention units of all of the mock-ups of all the facsimiles that say you can’t do it. So, you run into the mass of your own attention units, with your attention units. This is awfully simple, and you should understand it. This does not immediately state that you are “aware’ with your attention units, because you aren’t aware with your attention units, you “ACT” with your attention units. You can consciously direct, and contact attention units, and that’s where the theta body comes in. The theta body has a mechanism which becomes aware of the flow of attention units, and becomes capable of directing the flow of attention units. Then of course, you are aware of them when you direct them.

It actually could be set up in this fashion, you would have a flow of attention units going out this way continuously, and then a flow going this way that says, “You don’t know about the other flow, then a flow coming in saying, “You don’t have any business knowing about these other two flows”. Then, that is all canceled out by a whole fountain of attention units coming this way, which are doing a mock-up of a black facsimile or something of the sort, which says, “It would be bad to know about these others”. Then, just on the other side of this, is a dim awareness that you ought to know. So, you have a flow telling you not to know about these two, that tell you not to know about this, and about this and this, etc., and there you get a picture of the mental process of an aberee.

This is telling him (with probably hundreds of millions of individual flows directing the thought processes) that you are incapable of sending forward a pure stream of directed attention units. So, instead of the orderly set-up like this: /////////////, you get this balled up Enturbulated Mess.

I started out telling you these were vectors. You start graphing a balled up mess of vectors like that on graph paper, and you will find that they cancel one another out. There is not any force coming out of such a mess. If it did, it would be quite by accident, like a fellow suddenly getting a bright idea, but if you were able to take the potential of all these vectors and align them like so ////////////, and pack them together into one direction, and one purpose, look out! Early on the track you will find your P.C.s discouraging other people from doing just that. Later on the track you will find papa occluded. The little boy isn’t very aberrated, but all of a sudden papa will glare at him, and papa’s attention is caught for that instant, to the degree that papa is putting out a couple of ergs of actual energy. They are hitting Reginald, and they will blank papa out in Reginald’s bank, because every time he tries to examine a facsimile of papa he does a mock-up of papa’s past energy flows, and they block papa out. There was an actual flow involved, and if you don’t believe this, just pick out some individual who was occluded for a preclear. Do nothing but pick up that persons glares to the P.C. All of a sudden the facsimile starts to clean up, and you start getting earlier facsimiles.

We know about counter-emotion. You might as well say counter-energy, because it is an energy flow, and it has a wave length. There is a wave length, and wave characteristic for that energy flow all up and down the tone scale. The center of the emotional band is very gross, and is about .024 cm. in wavelength. That is a long wave; light is very minute, about .000000124 cm., so that may give you some idea. When you are operating with human beings you aren’t operating with anything way up on some high esoteric level. Oh no, you are in a pretty gross wave area, relatively easy to measure. But, nobody is putting out enough, due to this terrific complexity and randomity, for you to get much of a bead on it. If you try to have someone look at the terminals on an oscilloscope you don’t get much registry, but you do get a disturbance on it. At M.I.T. they carried out some experiments that showed that the human glance killed yeast. They were very upset about this (this was in 1937 or 38) and they found by taking micro-photographs of yeast being glared at and not being glared at, a very large difference in those photographs. Of course data of this character was of no value, since every one knows M.I.T. is involved in engineering, and not the human mind.

There is an energy output, and as you start bringing a P.C. up the tone scale there is a direct relationship between the amount of cause he can be, and the energy output which you see in his actual attention. The human race is pretty squirreled up about this. An earlier group than us thought there was an energy flow out of the forehead, and it came from a third eye. It is just a somatic. I can wipe out third eyes as fast as you can turn them on. Later on, people thought there was a energy flow out of the eye. The hypnotist uses this, but actually it is just the subject seeing a shiny, glassy surface- which is hypnotic. The old hypnotist had a pretty good line, because he always showed them his left eye, which is the sinister side of the body. That, by the way, is a facsimile; one that splits the body in half, and make the sinister side, and the good side. (The house divided against itself - divide and rule - I guess that will keep you in line.) Is long as you can keep a persons’ attention units spinning, and enturbulating, as in the sketch on the previous page - Boy! Can he be controlled. Hypnotism is an example of this. The hypnotist works on nothing but confusion. He will have some small boy stand in a narrow door-way pressing out, with his hands held down at his sides, and pressing out on the door frame. Then he will have the boy step away, and into the room, and he will say, “Your hands will now rise.” Of course the residual muscular tension that has built up will cause his hands to float up in the air willy - nilly. The child thinks, “What happened to me I no longer control myself.” The hypnotist can then implant (into this now completely unresistive child) any suggestion he desires … “You are now a dog.” And the boy will bark. That is what hypnotism is, a confusion done through some sensory channel. It is nothing but a confusion through which another individual can implant a flow of attention units. This flow can be directed right to the motor control centers. You can mesmerize a person, take over the motor control centers, and you move - he moves. That, by the way, is a psychoses. You will find people like that in institutions, you raise your hand, and they will respond by raising their same side hand. There was a country, not to long ago, that got to doing this. It is a wonderful way to control.

Incidentally, the attention unit theory is the only theory ever advanced that explain the phenomena to be found in mesmerism. To compare the enturbulation of the average mind, and the effect when confronted with a new datum, take the typical, excited non-directive, stupid action of the individual at a big fire. Everyone is rushing about doing non-directed irrational activities. Then a fireman with a loud voice comes alone and says, “Everybody over this way,” and if he hits the contact, they move as if in a trance. A firm, sudden, forceful command will set a panic stricken group of me up like a flock of robots. They will sometimes be panicked to the point where the are completely out of communication, and there, you have to have a loud enough, and directive enough, command to reach through that confusion.

The person whose attention units are all scattered about, is going to have a hard time lining them up on any problem or subject. Say a person has his attention units really fixed on one object, and you make a sharp noise, well, some of his attention units try to swing to the source of that noise. He gets nervous, and he will jump. His attention units can be fixed. Have him stare at a bright light or shiny coin in a silent room, and then shoot off a gun by his right ear. You have fixed his attention units, and then suddenly you invalidate him. You cancel off the force of his attention units on the object, and you say, “It should not be deserted over there, here it is over here,” and that makes him wrong. He may go immediately into a hypnotic trance because his attention units won’t go over to the gun; they just draw out.

If you don’t believe this, I’ll give you a little technique on the side. A couple of years ago it would have been sensational, now it is just another little gimmick. It is the running of the fixing and unfixing of attention units. You can take a P.C. and merely run that, “the fixing and unfixing of attention units.” Just have him run the times his attention units are fixed, and something unfixes them. The sensation of them being fixed, and then suddenly becoming confused. The first thing you know, the darndest incidents will come into view. Why? You are just taking the screens down from a lot of old facsimiles. Then you can do it in reverse. When his attention was not fixed, and then something suddenly fixed it. You can say, “Get the feeling of your attention being scattered, and then suddenly something goes “BING”, and fixes your attention.”

All of a sudden he will pick up all the news he was told too fast, the moments of shock, and the magnitude of the shock is dependent upon the speed with which the attention units are fixed or unfixed. This is a technique all by itself. Just use it, and you will get better results than you have been getting. That is very interesting and it will become more so when I show you the rest of: The Behavior of Attention Units. There are just so many ways that attention units behave, and they come up the tone scale. Remember the first book, D.M.S.M.H.? It said the methods of action were: attack, avoid, neglect, retreat, and withdraw. I introduced a tone scale of motion at the Calif. series of lectures Nov. 1950. That motion was above, and below 2.0 and it has to do with attacking, holding, retreating, and neglecting. That was the tone scale of motion. How important is this to you? Very important indeed, because the weird and odd somatics that you haven’t been able to touch on some of your P.C.s are held up on some pattern of attention units.