[Start of Lecture]

Thank you.

This is January 9th, 1957, the sixth lecture of the 16th ACC.

I want to talk to you today about the obvious. Going to talk to you specifically about obnosis. Obnosis is a coined, facetious term. The whole thing is the heart, soul and basis of what we're doing in this course.

We have communication. The obvious thing is that you are there, and there is something there to be controlled. That's obvious, isn't it? So „obnosis“ would apply there as observing the obvious: -nosis means „know,“ and ob- means „out“; observe the obvious.

Communication requires that you observe the obvious fact that there is something there to be communicated with. Awfully obvious, isn't it? Happens to be the heart and soul of communication.

If you don't know there's something there to be communicated with, you miscommunicate. All miscommunication is based on the fact that the person who is doing the communication does not know there is something there to be communicated with! In other words, he doesn't observe the obvious.

This fantastic process, „Look at me. Who am I?“ is, of course, getting the preclear to observe the obvious. And on what fantastic vias they miscall who is talking to them!

„Look at me. Who am I?“

„Oh, I know who you are! I know who you are. You're… you're a classmate. Huh-huh.“

„Pretty good. All right. Look at me. Who am I?“ See? Here we go.

You've asked him to observe the obvious. Why can't he? Because he's a case of „complinosis“: Observe the complicated at all times. Don't ever observe the obvious.

Cases, you will discover, the worse they are off, the more complicated they are.

Now let us take „science!“ „Science“ has to be said in another frame of voice than English, because it's certainly departed from the English language.

You get a mathematician. A good mathematician tries to find some simplicities and work with them. But the average, routine, run- of-the-mill mathematician does not do this at all. He takes something that is perfectly simple and then assigns symbols to it, and then puts the symbols in a complicated formula, and then finds out how he can make it more and more complicated — until at length he has a formula which runs all over the blackboard, from the top to the bottom of the blackboard, which, by the end, has proved that zero is zero. Proved it conclusively.

The whole subject of mathematics has gone on from one complexity to another complexity. It is running downstream in terms of complexities. It came from a simple source, that one could substitute — get that „substitute“; that's an important technical consideration for you. One can substitute — shows you where mathematics started — substitute a symbol (Know to Mystery Scale, look where it sits). He can substitute a symbol for an isness. That's where it started.

And now he's discovered that he can substitute a symbol for an abstract. Oh, no! You already got an abstract. It doesn't exist, and they're going to substitute for it with a symbol! And then to make their equation come out, they have to throw in all sorts of random factors that there's no explanation for, except „it doesn't work unless you throw them in.“ Oh, this is getting gorgeous.

So a man goes to school about six years and he becomes a mathematician.

Mathematics is essentially philosophy; basically philosophy. It's basically reason and a way to think. But if we substitute enough substitutions for enough abstracts, we at length obtain a completely unreal complication which, of course, winds everybody up in trouble one way or the other.

There are complicated subjects in mathematics — such as how do you plot a fender for a car? That's complicated. Because you're going to take a flat piece of tin, and you're going to press it into a new shape. And that new shape is going to be a very smooth fender. It's going to have lots of subtle curves in it.

What is the flat shape that you have to have to press into that other shape? A flat piece of material; you're going to make a curve out of it. How do you do that? There's a whole subject devoted to this: it's descriptive geometry. Fascinating subject. It's very simple. All it does is let you lay out, in three- dimensional terms, something that exists in a two-dimensional plane; and it just translates two dimensions to three dimensions almost directly, and isn't done with a single symbol. It's one of the most useful mathematics we have today. You couldn't have a car sitting out here on the street without descriptive geometry. No symbols. Fenders are fenders! Get the idea?

You simply drop from a two-dimensional plot into a three- dimensional plot, this shape, and it tells you what is the shape of the flat piece of metal which is going to become something as complicated as a fender. There are no formulas. There's nothing; it's just a graph.

See, it didn't substitute. The only substitution there is that you are doing a substitute solution for the actual metal, but you're not doing it by very many symbols. All right.

One time I was on a bridge. I had an ensign there. An ensign is what they issued you in the war when they thought you weren't worried enough. And he ran up to the pelorus to take a couple of shots on points, because he was the assistant-assistant-assistant navigator to a seaman second class. And he went up there to take these shots on a point — anything yachtsmen have to do all the time. Except, usually, yachtsmen just glance across the top of the compass and get the bearings of the points, and then draw a couple of lines on a chart and say, „That's where I am, I guess.“ You know? They say, „Well, I'm right here.“ Brings his hand down on a great big area.

A big joke goes along with that. An experienced navigator never says, „It's there,“ see? He always says, „Well, I'm right about there.“

Anyway, I sent this ensign up there and, by golly, he was the most educated mathematician I'd ever heard of, which is why he was assigned to navigation.

The son of a gun takes shots on two points, plots them on the compass, comes back in and does them mathematically for the latitude and longitude. He does them mathematically; he substitutes values for the readings; he substitutes into formulas. In other words, he did, actually, the basic formula that appears in Bowditch. The most fascinating thing I ever saw! I mean, this is gorgeous. He took these compass readings, and took the latitude and longitude of the two lights that he read compasses to, and then he took the trigonometric cosine. It's a gorgeous computation. I mean, it covered about a page and a half of paper.

The way you do that, you see, is you just take the chart with the two lights on it, and the compass direction to that chart, and you just draw a line. You draw another compass-direction line. You draw another line, and where that crosses, you're all set. Most wonderful computation.

Well, I kept wondering what was detaining him in the chart room. I, meantime, had passed these two points. Any need for this answer had long since ceased to exist. I finally decided I'd better go dig him up. And we'd gotten out of the estuary. Lights had disappeared long since. I said, „What you doing?“ He had it all figured out; it was gorgeous — the most gorgeous thing you ever saw. And he got the latitude and longitude, and he was ten miles south of the North Pole.

Well, I was glad he was there, because he didn't mind going below until he knew better.

The point is, you get into these supercomplexities, you lose your way obviously — because it's necessary for you to keep check on substitutions for substitutions for substitutions for substitutions, you see?

Now, if you substitute enough substitutes for enough substitutes, you have a concatenation of values, all of which are artificial, and you eventually lose what the first substitution was for; and you get into abstract mathematics which are merely addressed to substitutions for substitutions, and not for anything.

And then somebody can teach you as a child that one plus one equals two, which is a lie. They have lost what the one was for. That's the truth of arithmetic, see? One apple plus one apple do not make a generality called two apples, because there is no generality anywhere in the world called two apples.

What are we talking about? The weight of one apple plus the weight of one apple equals the weight of two apples? Two what apples? According to the formula, it's two any-apples equal the weight of one apple plus one apple. That's not true. You get a pair of gold balances and start measuring apples. If you can find two apples that weigh the same, you're doing a wonderful piece of work there, because individuality is the keynote of the universe; and identity is the keynote of mathematics. See? Interesting. Fascinating!

Well now, you can always look at a symbol, which is a generalized substitute for a reality, if you don't want to look at the reality. Got that? You can always look at a symbol. There sits a man. Let's not look at the man. Let's look at a symbol called man: rn-a-n. The Chinese do better. They have a character which has a head, two arms and a couple of legs. See, that symbol is closer to truth. We have m-a-n. And you just write down m-a-n and see if you can see anything in that that looks like a man.

It is our understanding that m-a-n is pronounced man, and it's our understanding that by that we mean a man. There's two substitutions right there: m-a-n; man. We've already assumed that these black squiggles on a white page have sound. They don't. Write them down! They won't talk. We've assumed they have sound. Now, we've then assumed that the sound has meaning, and we have then assumed that that meaning is a mass.

Oh, I'm telling you that that m-a-n and the sound man are not really the same things at all; couldn't be, you see, just couldn't be, except by our general agreement that we will get this wild.

And there's many a case, and I'm afraid many an auditor, who sits there and looks and listens to m-a-n and man, and never looks at that object in front of him. He does a „one plus one equals two.“

No one man plus any one man equal two men, unless they're exactly the same two men you are talking about. That amount of narrowness would have to be imposed upon that arithmetical formula; yet we all believe this arithmetical formula, don't we? We believe one plus one equals two. Ha-ha. One man plus one man, well, you've got two men. That's obvious; there's nothing to that.

Well, there's certainly nothing to it; there's no exactness of any character to it. If we have one man, Joe, and one man, Bill, we then have Joe-Bill, which we can express as two men with accuracy only so long as we have a parenthesis there (Joe and Bill); and one plus one can only be expressed as one, parenthesis (Joe), plus two, parenthesis (Bill), equals two men (Joe plus Bill) — same people. Now we have stated something which is close to reality. Otherwise, we're in such a floundering generality that we never do see the existing mass. We have not observed the obvious.

One plus one equal two, never, at any time, is obvious: it is very abstract, and it is not true.

Therefore, if you can concede that figure-figure and mathematical abstraction have anything in common, which they do have, you will see that there is many a person who is confronting an abstract without confronting an object. They are stuck in this figure- figure.

And this preclear sits there and figures out what you mean, and he figures out what you mean, and he works over what you mean, and he figures and he figures and he figures and he figures. And all he is doing is putting in new substitutions for abstracts. He started with an abstract, now he substitutes for the abstract, and he substitutes for the abstract, and we don't know where we go, but after a long period of time he's still substituting for abstracts.

Well, we don't run significances anymore because people are too likely to do this. And they do it with such thoroughness that a case that will do this does not recover. This does not mean that a person in good shape does not gain by running some significances. They do.

You can ask people directly to change their minds, if they are pretty high on the scale, and have them change their minds. You can take a person who is in terrific shape, and you can say, „Get the idea you're a woman.“

„Yeah, I can do that.“

„Well, change your mind.“ He can. He can pretend he's a woman.

Now you say, „Change your mind again. Get the idea you're a man.“ All right, he can do that. And he can carry through all agreed- upon responses for either sex. Quite interesting. That, by the way, makes a great actor — of which there are practically none today. Because it requires a beingness that is really beingness. He can change his mind, and by changing his mind he can make a postulate stick; therefore, he's above the level of agreement.

People don't have to agree that he's a great actor to have him be able to act. Do you know that almost every actor there is around believes that his ability to act has a great deal to do with whether or not the audience believes in him? You'll find young actors, they will tell you this: „Well, if I had that much fame, I could act well too.“ You see?

I've had people tell me, „Well, if I was as famous as Stewart Edward White,“ or something like that, „I could write good action stories too.“ See, they depend upon the agreement of the society to make them something.

All right, they're not very bad off when they're doing this, they're just stuck somewhere in the agreement band. They can't postulate themselves into being anything. They can't postulate themselves into being able to do something. They cannot change a condition by changing a postulate. A person should be able to do that. But the preclears you process can't do that, so why try.

When they start doing it, they do something else. They're way below the level of agreement and below the level of mass. They're down into symbols. So you ask them to „Change your mind.“ You say, „Change your mind,“ you say, „and get the idea you're a woman.“

The guy: „Oh, I couldn't do that.“

„Why couldn't you do that?“

„Well, after all! Must we go into anatomy?“ You're right away in an argument, see? And he'll figure and he'll figure and he'll figure.

I'm sure all of you have had one of these figure-figure cases of an extreme character. They used to be the bane of my existence because they never went anyplace. See, they just figure out some new substitute for an old substitute and there was nothing real anyway. And they used to be the bane of my existence. But I got after a while so they became funny. And I have found some championship figure-figure cases.

We had one — we unfortunately ruined his case. He was the most wonderful example. He came down to Phoenix. And, let's see, it was providing he could be guaranteed that at a certain period of time, such-and-so and so-and — so would notice any difference or change in him, then he would be willing to pay a certain amount… You get the idea? I mean, it was a big deal, see? Well, that is a symptom of the figure-figure case. He always wants to make a big deal; there's this big deal has got to go out in all directions.

Well, this case started running on a figure-figure. I audited this fellow. I got a two-hour comm lag out of one question: „Something you wouldn't mind forgetting.“

And he started figure-figuring on everything which he shouldn't forget. But this immediately went into what did „forget“ mean? You got this now? What did „mind“ mean? — that he shouldn't „mind“ forgetting.? What was the implication of my tone of voice while I asked the question? Did I mean… and so on.

Big pauses between each one of these figure-figures, but there was nothing but figure-figure. He just never responded to the question. „Can you tell me some incident which has occurred in your life that you would not mind forgetting, laying away, and not at this instant being aware of?“ -- finally what it came down to. Just figure-figure. „What do you mean by 'aware'?“

In other words, every time we asked him this auditing question, he gave us a substitute abstract for the question. He never answered the question. He just gave us an abstract and a substitute for the question — just obsessively, over and over.

Well, we did quite a bit for him. We got him out of the slough of despond. But he wasn't aware enough to realize that his wife and his business partner both were insisting that he get more auditing because he had changed so much. He was not aware of the fact that they believed he had now changed. Get the complication here; that's getting real complicated.

He'd already said they had to be aware of this. We didn't make this bet with him, by the way. We simply said, „You pays your money and you takes your chance.“ That's the way you handle such people.

All right. His awareness, then, was not up to being aware of the fact that they were quite pleased with some changes in him, because he wasn't aware of having changed in any direction.

One fine day, he called up here in Washington. When we got to Washington, he called up and he was willing to make a big debt and a big deal and a big figure-figure, and it was all going to be substituted this way and that — nothing straightforward about it at all.

I was sitting there at the time he made the phone call. So I said, „You tell him to get on a plane and come in here. He needs seventy-five hours of processing, and he will pay for it in advance.“ And he did. He came in and paid for it in advance and got his seventy-five hours.

He finally found out that there were people alive around him. Went around shaking them by the hand in the street — much to his auditor's embarrassment — and started feeling very nice about everything. Recovered from a couple of chronic illnesses which he had; snapped back to battery and got in very good condition. Went home and found out that people around him weren't so bad and that life was livable, and kept going.

This is one of those cases. This is one of those cases. Two things are true about the case: He cannot make up his mind, because all things are substitutes for all things. He can't make up his mind, because there is nothing to make up his mind about. You have to tell him what to do.

He works like a robot. And you, on your social conditioning and responses, do not realize that somebody who lies below effort on the Tone Scale will „roboticate“ with the greatest of ease. Only you, in auditing them, daren't put them on a total robot aspect. You have to return to them gradually, little by little, power of choice.

Another manifestation which this person has, many people have. I must comment on that. A person thinks he makes a postulate before he does something. This is not true. He makes the postulate and then drinks the coffee. It's not true. The postulate can be the action.

Give you how bad this can get: We changed Instructors in London and caught this boy before he was very far gone on this, but he had changed 8-C around to where he was running some shadow of Part C, and had skipped Part A of 8-C entirely. Part A, of course, merely tells somebody to look at the wall and go over to it and touch it and let go of it. That's all.

And he had gotten this down into decision levels, some way or another, by saying „Now, intend to touch the wall. Good. Now touch the wall. Now, did you really intend to touch the wall?“

What has this got to do with 8-C, Part A, see? Nothing! In other words, he wiped out the most efficacious process on a training level that there is. And he actually was having his students, for a few days, do this. This was a fabulous thing to have happen.

That man had never learned that there is such a thing as an action postulate. You don't say, „Now, I will drink the cup of coffee,“ and pick up the cup of coffee and lift it to your lips. Your postulate is taking hold of the cup of coffee and drinking it. See, that is the postulate. It's just directly.

People don't say, „Now I intend to drink this cup of coffee. All right, I'll drink this cup of coffee.“

You can do that if you want to. It's an interesting way to install a comm lag in action. You make a verbal or symbolical decision.

Now, such a person has substituted for a postulate, a symbolic phrase. A postulate is not a symbolic phrase! Do you see this clearly? A postulate is not a symbolic phrase.

Every once in a while you'll get people and they figure out, „How on earth could you think of something without using words?“ Almost everybody alive today would respond in that fashion if you suddenly said, „Now, think a thought without thinking words.“ Dzzzzzzz.

It's very easy, very easy. It's easiest in the framework of action. You've got your hands on a steering wheel; you want to turn the car to the right. You observe that it's necessary to turn the car to the right, you turn the car to the right. That's a postulate. Got it?

You don't say, „Now I am going to turn the car to the right,“ and turn the car to the right, or you'd be dead in more cases than you could shake a stick at. You haven't got that many bodies.

You take somebody who is in the figure-figure band and try to make an aircraft pilot out of him. Well, you bury him. He says, „Now I am going to shift the joystick.“

Trying to ride a glider (soaring plane) on the nose of a storm cloud does not admit, in keeping it level in a hurricane of air… And they only weigh a couple of hundred pounds; a sixty- foot wingspread built out of balsa and silk. Keeping one of those things just ahead of a hurricane of air and keeping it aloft without a motor is quite a trick. A person has to be in fantastically good condition to do that.

Show you what bad condition most pilots are in: there are very few of them can do that. They stand around with awe at soaring meets. Sometimes the dumber ones are just cocky, you know, and they say, „Well, I can do that. I mean, after all, every day I'm up there with TWA, and I'm pulling this plane all over the sky, and nothing to it. Give me a ride in one of those things.“

Well, you pick out an old heap that you hope will get wrecked before the meet is over anyhow, and you put him in it, and you give him a yank into the sky. And just the process of such an abrupt takeoff and such sensitive controls utterly unsettles them! And they get down.

And I have seen one of those boys take his hat off when he talked to me. Just take his hat off. I mean, it wasn't something he was doing as a gag. He said, „How do you really keep one of those aloft?“ He was one of these five-star American Airlines pilots.

Why? Well, he had lost the facility of making anything outside of patterned postulates. In other words, he had lost the facility of making new and original postulates under new and original situations.

A stick is all over a cockpit in a soaring plane. And the number of times you move a great big Connie's… (Controls are very few. Juggle it a little bit, something like a steering wheel of a car… A little bit like this — gives you lots of warning. Turns slowly, rocks slowly. Lots of warning.) But you get something that's like a straw in a hurricane, your postulates have to be perfect. In other words, the position that stick has to be in is something you would learn fairly rapidly — just to find out how stiff these controls were or something — but your hand in such a condition is just all over the cockpit. Just a speed-of-light sort of a situation. It's way over here, it's way over here, and it's way back here, and it's here and here and here and here and here. You haven't got any time to think this over.

You don't even really have any time to feel it on the seat of your pants. I've heard some guys lie in soaring and say, „I fly by the seat of my pants.“ I've asked them rather interestedly, „You do? Can you get the idea of a soaring plane tilting, so that it puts more pressure on one side of your seat than the other, and then you responding by moving the stick in some other way'? Can you get that idea?“

„Yeah, yeah, yeah.“

No, I don't fly that way. It's too slow. Too slow.

You sort of have to be all around the airplane and the horizon too, you see? And you just keep it level with the horizon and the compass. Has nothing to do with your sensing anything. Has to do with your observing the position of the plane, not the seat of the pants.

What are you doing? You're flying an airplane. Well, sloppily they say, „I fly by the seat of my pants.“ That's fine. That's an old, old-time pilot's phrase, by the way, but it still goes on today in soaring. And it's not true.

The obvious thing that happens is that one observes the position of the airplane. How does he observe it? Well, he has to observe it in relationship to Earth. What's that got to do with the seat of his pants? Nothing. And people who fly by the seat of their pants, fly in. There's not that much time.

A person doesn't say, „Now I'm going to drink a cup of coffee,“ and then drink a cup of coffee. But he can go nutty and do it. This is an extreme case of nuttiness, when a person does nothing but this.

Now, I actually picked up a psycho on the AKA-54, the U.S.S. Algol. The sailors on that ship when I went aboard were very horrified to find out (because I did not omit telling them) that they were sailing on a ship called, in Arabic, The Evil Eye. That's right.

Algol, the star, is an occulting binary which puts itself out every three days, and this mystery seemed to the Arabs to be a very evil thing. So they gave the ship the name of The Evil Eye or sickness.

So I told the boys about this just to give them some randomity. Before that time they thought they were in for a tame cruise, and they weren't interested. And they were interested after that.

Now, why anybody in the Navy Bureau of Ships didn't know any better than to leave that name off of ships, I don't know. But it was an interestingly confused ship. All right.

Anyplace, in the amphibious forces toward the end of the war, was developing quite a few psychos. Particularly on monotonous duties. Action really doesn't develop psychos, but monotony and inability to act does. An inability to act develops a psycho or a neurotic tendency.

You want to find where these things generate — you want to find out where psychotic and neurotic tendencies generate — all you have to do is look at points where a person was unable to act, not where a person acted. Quite amazing. These are the generation points. I don't say that's something to audit, because it doesn't take apart that way, because it is a noncommunication process. But that nevertheless is the generation point, and that comes apart in modern auditing. You should notice it come apart. A person was unable to act. He was unable to confront. He was unable to face. And as a result, that restraint all by itself served to fold up his abilities on that particular object.

We had a lot of interesting psychos on there. One day one boy went mad and chased the executive officer (who was in the shower) all around the officers' country and back into the shower, and stood in the shower with a drawn knife with the executive officer, menacing him.

He wanted some liberty. And we were quite some distance at sea, and the executive officer didn't see fit to give him any liberty. Some of those boys were pretty wild. They had gone mad in the process of amphibious warfare, just lying off islands, you see, and doing nothing.

Another thing amphibious warfare does is that very often such a ship ducks a few shells — sometimes gets a few — but it never really directly addresses the enemy, and it carries troops that do. So the troops are in action, and the ship itself is not quite in action. And this restraint all by itself makes a terrible mess out of somebody's willingness to fight. All right.

I found a notebook one day, and it says, „Now I am going aft.“ Next entry: „Now, I am going forward.“ Next entry: „Now I am going topside.“ Next entry: „Now I am in the engine room, and I am going aft.“ Next entry: „I am on the after companionway. I am going below.“ Diary!

Well, I had this boy fished up. Interesting case. And he was strictly out of the clock, you know? Gone dog. He was a real gone dog. He had to write down what his intention was before he performed it. And his total intention was to move the body somewhere, and he'd forgotten where. And so he was moving the body over the ship after writing down the orders to himself on a piece of paper.

If you said to yourself, „Now I intend to walk,“ and then walked, you actually have this interesting state of affairs taking place: You are considering yourself to be totally individuated from that which is walking, and that all you have to do is give some verbalized orders and something will happen — a holdover from the time that you were King of Sparta or Queen of Thebes. „I say it to that person, and then that person acts.“ See? And when you get this totally collapsed, you have totally confused your identity. So you say, „Now I am going to walk,“ you think of „I“ as somebody else. You wouldn't say, „Now, I am going to walk“; something would occur to you, probably nonverbal. „I should go down to the corner,“ see, „and get a pack of cigarettes.“ See? This should occur to you — nonverbal thought. You know? „Well, what do you know, no cigarettes. Hm“ — go down to the corner and get some cigarettes. Except you never say that, see?

When you start out and do that, you just walk down to the corner and you get some cigarettes, and so forth. You never postulate at any given instant that you do.

Now, you shouldn't feel that you are doing something wrong because you work without postulates. Because you're making postulates all the time.

If you walked yourself down to the corner and then wondered why you were there or who had sent you there, that's another thing entirely! But a person doesn't plot it all into Aryan script or something and give himself the order and then do it, unless he is dramatizing a dual personality of some sort.

It's very funny — I don't care whether you're in your body or outside your body — if you just look at the body, whether inside or out, and say, „Go ahead now, nod your head. Nod your head. Nod your head. Nod your head.“

Go ahead. Try it. Does the body nod its head? It's pretty good if it does. You must have it set up on a nice automaticity. Get the idea?

No, the way you make a postulate and a command „Nod your head“ to the body is to nod your head. See? There's no more verbalization about it than that; you nod your head. At length you become chary of exerting effort. Somebody convinces you, like in Arslycus, that you mustn't exert any further effort. Well, in a case like that, you rather fall off into giving orders without doing anything and hope something happens.

Now, you fall into this very easily. You tell an old lady standing on a curb, „You mustn't step down into the traffic.“ See, you've communicated this to her. Now she's supposed to obey you and not step down into the traffic.

The reason why you feel curtailed in the control of human beings is that you so often use verbal command as a control substitute. You so often do this that you have a tendency to confuse the verbal command with the actual command.

You sort of do it this way — with this old lady, really, if she is not fast, you kind of do it this way: You say, „I believe you shouldn't walk into the traffic. Now, don't walk into the traffic,“ you see? And then on the dynamic situation, which I was telling you about yesterday, you don't assume the responsibility for what you then do: you take over the body and move it back out of the traffic. You do!

When you're real good at controlling people, when you're a very hot auditor, some day you will see somebody start to step off a curb, and you will step back up on the curb, leaving them on the curb. Got it? You don't say „Well, now I think they should step back on the cur — I'm going to concentrate. We will do this by telepathy.“ See?

That's why all these experiments of Mr. Rhine… We've never given him a degree; he's Mr. Rhine still. You know, there are no degrees in psychology; it's never become an established subject. There are in Scientology.

Mr. Rhine is trying to figure out what something is without looking, which is one of the more fascinating actions I ever saw anybody undertake. In fact, it is the one completely aberrated game in the universe. How do you find out about something without looking? In other words, „How do I keep from confronting it?“

Well, let's not confront the future; let's guess what the next series of cards will be. Let's not be in this guy's head that is looking at the cards; let's consult his privacy, and let's look at the back of the cards and concentrate on what's on the face of the cards. Well, I'm assuring you that if you concentrate on the backs of cards, you don't see the faces of cards. So much for telepathy.

Telepathy is as valid as „somebody peeks.“ That is really the total that you have to know about telepathy. You should just abandon the subject as an interesting subject which, sometime when you feel you're too sane, you should get into.

I've utterly ruined a telepathic series. I did this out in California — ruined a telepathic series of fifty-two cards. Called them off in sequence. Somebody was calling them off and they were looking at them, you know? „Yeah, that's right, put it down, put that number down.“ And I was calling them off: ace of spades, deuce of diamonds, and so forth — fifty-two cards in sequence, just to show them what my telepathic average was, see, and laughing like hell all the time.

I was looking at the cards; I was standing right here looking at the cards, you know? Body was sitting over there facing the person.

You see the complete idiocy of sort of straining your brains around, you know? Now, let's see, I'm sitting here and the cards are facing in that direction. How do I read a book upside down held the wrong-way-to? Well, you can get, I suppose, into a total knowingness that knows what all the books in the world say, but I'm afraid that you would read all the books at once. Your selectivity gets poor without locations. You would know, but you wouldn't know what you knew.

If you're going to do mystic stunts, do mystic stunts.

I get somebody, anytime, to concentrate on a set of cards. I used to have a wonderful lot of fun as a mystic. I haven't done this for years.

Had an FBI man down here one time ready to blow his brains out, just down the street. I used to live down the street here, '49. FBI man was at this party, and there was a lot of embassy people, and so forth, at the party — very nice party and everybody was very pleasant, and so on. And I decided I'd tell some fortunes. Things were going rather dull in one quarter of the party, so I went out and I got a big bath towel wrapped around my head and sat down cross-legged with a pack of ordinary cards and began to tell people's fortunes, which is rather easy — standard gypsy fortune-telling.

If you can get people to concentrate on cards, and then give them leading questions and statements, you restimulate their facsimiles and they become visible to you. You see? That's all there is to it. You look at their facsimile and you see where they've been, you know? And you say, „Now, 1933…“

I at one time just did this; I didn't have any articulate understanding of it at all. I knew it was easy and that other people didn't know it was easy. That was about all I knew about it.

„1933. Let's see, 1933. You um…“ The somatic strip, of course, throws the 1933 facsimiles out in front of their face, and you take a look at them and tell them. That's about all there is to it, see?

And oddly enough, you can read their concept of their future better, usually, than they can. So you start talking about the future and their concept of the future, and some automaticity will furnish you a set of pictures. Nothing to this.

This FBI man wanted his fortune told. So I waxed up my mustaches and readjusted the bath towel, said, „I see you working on a case.“ A very intelligent remark to an FBI man. Said, „A case which is very, very confidential.“ „Case number 132678.“ I said, „The man you want isn't there.“ I said, „That's all. Next.“

This guy goes off, and he starts figuring this out. And you could see this, you know; trying to clear this up. How did I know the number of a confidential case? Because it was the right number. Naturally it was the right number; he had the case card right in front of his face in a facsimile, and all you did was read the numbers in the upper left-hand corner. All right.

Now, that's all very well, but to show you how people then become completely non sequitur in the face of the obvious. See, this is an obvious manifestation; he's never noticed that he does this; he doesn't feel that it's possible; he thinks everything he does is private, simply because he is educated to believe that he is a private individual who is very private and nobody must ever inquire in upon except the FBI.

So, next action on his part was to get me — after I had finished the last fortune and everybody was having a good time finishing off the champagne — and he got ahold of me at the shoulder and he said, „How'd you do that?“

I said, „How'd I do what?“

He said, „Well, that's a confidential case.“ He said, „How did you do that?“

I pulled a perfectly ordinary deck of playing cards out of my pocket, with perfectly plain backs, and I said, „You see, these are readers. These are readers. These cards have marked backs, you see?“

And he said, „Ho-ho-ho-ho! Ho-hee-ha, I get it!“

I suppose he woke up to it eventually, but not while he was at the party. Totally satisfied. Gave him a substitute for a substitute for a substitute, and he was happy.

You do this with little kids all the time. If you take something away from a little kid without giving him something in return, you've cost him havingness.

Actually, you play the trick of substitution on him. He's playing with your watch, and you think this is very bad for the watch, and you give him a cartwheel off a broken-down cart that he got a week or two ago, and you give him the cartwheel and take away the watch. And he examines the cartwheel, and he's fairly happy about it and doesn't scream.

If you just directly took the watch away from him, you'd reduce his havingness; and if you did this consistently, you would wind him up in the soup before much more time had gone by. But he is perfectly happy with a substitute. And he doesn't care enough about the significances, or he is not aware enough of the significances of the substitute, to realize that the character of the mass has changed, or to care.

Children are not necessarily in good condition, by the way. Don't ever fall for this psychological nonsense that a child is a Clear and gets aberrated afterwards.

A very careful survey of this demonstrates that a child is probably stark staring mad right after the Assumption, and gradually gets well. By the time he's seven, eight, nine, is getting fairly stable; and by the time he's seventeen, eighteen, is starting to smooth down; maybe the time he gets to be about twenty-five, is going along in beautiful shape. He has finally gotten enough mass. Satisfactory mass to him is a body of such and such a size. Until that mass is remedied, the thetan believes that he cannot perform.

This is proved, by the way, by the fact that a child's IQ utterly skyrockets under very elementary processing. And a child will respond because he hasn't got the mass to push around. You see, the mass-nuttiness ratio works this way: He isn't so fixed in his habits that he can't be made to change his mind by changing a very little bit of mass, see? That doesn't mean he's in good shape; it merely means he hasn't got much mass in his road. See, he's not in good shape, because he thinks he has to have more mass, but he hasn't got much mass, and so therefore he's very easy to change around.

Tinny Tin was bitten one day by a dog in the cheek. The dog must have mauled him around something fierce. It wasn't worrying Tinny Tin very much, but he was still in a state of shock a little bit.

And the scars — I didn't want the thing to scar. I gave him about fifteen seconds of Mimicry, just fifteen seconds of Mimicry — Hand Mimicry, just like you're running, you know? He was out of it; he was out of the engram.

In other words, he gave it up easily because he'd lost everything anyhow. Got the idea? But he snapped up into present time at once. See, that's not much time to get somebody out of an engram; the dog mauled him around something fierce, see?

See, this speed just has to do with how easily he will give something up. And you see, he could give something up awfully easily, and this would be very deceptive. He could give it up for two reasons: (1) he didn't need more mass, and (2) he had so little it wasn't worth holding on to anyway. One is fairly high scale, the first, and the second is apathetic. A child usually operates from the second; he does not operate from the first. See, they give things up because they haven't got anything.

I've actually made a test of this. I've built up the vested interest of a child to a point where they wouldn't give up anything. Very carefully built up the ownership of a toy to a child. Made the toy completely real, backed it up with another dozen toys. And this child, instead of apathetically throwing the toys all over the ground and throwing them away, and let other kids come up and take them away and play with them, and so forth, all of a sudden acted in an entirely different fashion; had come upscale, actually, to a point where to have another child approach one of those toys was a threat of death. And having built it up to that level, built it all the way up to where the child could be generous with a toy.

With what proprietary air, however, the child would then permit another child to play with that particular toy and would then get it back. „That's enough now, Johnny.“

This is an interesting study. An interesting study. It's one of the things which you should understand about children, because you face plenty of them. And if you assume that a child is in good shape that you normally find in the society, simply because he is young… Well, the difference between your age and his is so slight, compared to seventy-six trillion years, as to be negligible. But there is a difference in mass and there is a difference in privilege. There are these differences. When you change those two differences, you change the child and kick his IQ practically on up to an adult IQ. Very interesting thing. Then somebody mawkishly comes along and says, „Well, look what you've done to this poor child: you've made him old before his time.“ Old before his time, huh?

This takes a lot of looking at, but it's an obvious thing. Children are in commotion, make confusion, and so forth. It's very obvious, isn't it, that a child is not bad, is not well off. Just look at them operate, look at them act; and they're not well off. They're having trouble. They're upset. They have nightmares. They have all sorts of things. They're haunted by odd, peculiar things that usually don't occur except in spinbins.

Well, a child requires a lot of security, a lot of loving, a lot of protection. That adds up to the same thing, doesn't it? But the difference is that the child has something to look forward to.

I don't see how a parent could really be a successful parent without being a good Scientologist. I really don't. It's become increasingly obvious to me. I see mothers having the awfullest time with children.

Suzie doesn't have any trouble with children; doesn't have any trouble at all. She doesn't process them either. But she goes on a very forthright assumption that they're fully old and responsible enough to take care of themselves. And they pick this up at once. They get the news fast. They're crazy about her. They think she's just wonderful. She never does anything for them to amount to anything. It's quite an interesting relationship. It's the sort of a relationship that most mothers think they ought to have with their children, then work like mad for it. And here's somebody that has this relationship and doesn't work at it at all. See, it's an oddity.

But what's the oddity is, without any coaching, she has the situation taped. See, she can handle the situation. She does know what it is. She's very fond of her kids, but she doesn't require them to be more than they are or to respond better than they do. She's not impatient with them; she isn't all the time demanding a process that they can't run, you see?

And if they get too upset, she just turns around and runs 8-C on them. Now, she doesn't care what. „Give me that mop.“ That's right. She'll say to little Two-zette (five year old), „Give me the mop.“ They look around, „What is a mop? What is a mop? A mop? A mop?“

„You know what a mop is.“

Two-zette drags the mop over. That's 8-C, a form of it.

That is, then, a controllable situation because one observes the obvious, see? One doesn't try to observe some substitute for the observation.

She doesn't sit around and read books on child psychology. She looks straight at the kids. This is all I've had to teach her. You look at the kid; what's he doing? See, just straight — thud. Observation.

When you get your preclear over looking at substitutes for the thing he should be looking at, he's Clear. The intensive is over.

The totality of auditing merely consists of coaxing him to confront what is there to be confronted, not a bunch of substitutes for what is there to be confronted.

For instance, you'd only have to establish the existence of the auditor, the existence of the preclear and the existence of the auditing environment totally established — to have an OT.

People keep asking me for the upper-scale processes. Yeah, there they are. They happen to be the rudiments. Just, thud! That's it, if you just totally established rudiments.

Well now, how do you totally establish rudiments? Well, if you just went out and tried to totally establish rudiments, and you went at it too forthrightly and directly and above the level of the preclear to act, then you would find that you would not have rudiments established; you would have somatics established and other things established. But if you went at it on a gradient scale, which did wind up finally with the total establishment of the rudiments, you would have an OT.

Processes become that gradient scale which you go on to establish the rudiments. An auditing session consists of an activity which winds up eventually in the total establishment of the rudiments. That's a successful session.

This is confronting the obvious. When you can confront the obvious, you can confront. That's all there is to it. When you can confront you can confront. When you can do that, you've got space. Space is a viewpoint of dimension, and if you can confront, you've got space.

Naturally you have exteriorization. Space consists of being able to look at a body. Exteriorization consists of being able to look at a body. Space between a thetan and a body consists of the ability to look at a body. That's all. Space is the viewpoint of dimension. It isn't something somebody hung up here for us to be trapped in. It's what we collectively are looking through, at.

So the whole subject of confrontingness is the whole subject of space. So therefore, unless you can confront what is there, you can't have anything. There's no space; there isn't going to be „no mass,“ there's going to be no universe. The fellow is going to be all messed up in a ball, and he won't know whether he's going or coming. He'll just have a bad time. You see that?

So the whole subject of obnosis becomes the subject of OT. How obvious can you confront? What obviousness can you confront? That's the total contest.

So you see, we aren't taking up something peculiar when we're taking up obnosis. We're taking up the thing — it. That's about all there is to it.

Havingness itself is simply coaxing a fellow upstairs to where he can have and still look at, and then to where he's totally satisfied just to look at.

You understand it?

Know more than you did?

Audience: Yes.

Well, thank you. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

[End of Lecture]