And this is ACC number seventeen, lecture number nine, the seventh of March, 1957. And today we are going to talk very definitely about "Ought to Be." I was reminded by HGC staff auditor a few minutes ago that in a telephone staff conference of August the fifteenth, 1956, I told them that asking a preclear how he should be for a while was likely to produce fantastic results and I suppose we consider this the first opening gun on this new and very very fantastically workable process 'ought to be,' how something should be.

Now, here we have a culmination of these lectures on the subject of alter-isness and so on. Now, to get the original material on alter-isness and so forth, I refer you to the Creation of Human Ability, the axioms of Scientology and the lectures of I think July of l954, HCA-HPA lectures, July l954. And in addition, to a lesser degree, the HPA-HCA lectures of '56.

Now, there are also some other lectures on the subject of isness, alter-isness, not-isness, so on, but actually the material shouldn't be too backed-up from. All we need is an example such as this. We have a chair, it is. It is a mass, it exists in a space, it is located, in other words it is. That is isness. It is.

Now, the method used by a thetan, but not the only method, since a direct postulate that should continue to be would be quite adequate, but because of a lowered level of trust by himself of another thetan who might conceive it as it exactly is, we introduce alter-isness. That which is altered tends to persist. And that again is merely a postulate. But in view of the fact that we cannot tell exactly how it was altered, we can therefore baffle our fellow thetans into less swiftly as-ising things.

Now, to as-is something is to make it disappear just by looking at it and conceiving exactly what it is. Now, one's search for the button amongst all buttons, the button to end all buttons, is certainly no more than this: Discovering exactly what something is because at that moment one realizes full well it will disappear.

And when he tries to see it exactly as it is, all of these interposed alter-isnesses which have been erected around it to protect and continue its existence, restimulate and one goes off sideways. And this we know is figure-figure. The alter-isness attached to the chair which we just used as an example, is diverted or is diverting the possibility of as-is. It was there's the chair. All that we would have to do to make that chair disappear would be to conceive it as it is.

In other words, a perfect duplicate. Its mass, space, position. In other words, we just have to conceive that it is and to the degree that we conceive that it is, if we were to also conceive everything connected with it, which doesn't mean every significance added onto it, but only its mass, its mobility, its fixedness, anything else connected with it, we look at it and we see it as it is. This would include its authorship. It isn't absolutely necessary to get the precise authorship of a chair to make it disappear, but it certainly helps. Alright.

It would disappear. You understand? That is as-is, we just conceive it as it is. Actually there is no need for it to disappear because the moment we conceived it as it is, we would only have to say, "Well, that is as it is and so shall it persist." And thus add the postulate to it necessary to continue its existence, put it back in the time stream again, put it back in endurance.

Now therefore, there is no real liability to conceiving anything as it is. To conceive the isness of something utterly does not really carry with it a tremendous liability, but thetans think it does or like to play that it does, or believe that this game is much better if we conceive there is a tremendous liability in this matter of conceiving the isness of things. And they put this thing alter-isness, the second postulate, the lie, so they say there is something about it and they put this alteration into its isness. They say, "That is a chair designed exactly after Chippendale." Now we have a previous chair.

Now, we know that somebody was banging plugs into planks back down the track someplace named Chippendale and he's connected with furniture, so that it's logical, there's some logic to it. But Swinburn is a poet, alright, and we say, "Now, that is a chair and that is conceived exactly after the patterns evolved by Swinburn." Well now, Swinburn never designed any chairs that I know of, or that anybody else knows of. And you've got somebody chasing now, trying to find a chair by Swinburn so that he can as-is this chair.

You get this as a dramatization in "it's all been done before." Science dramatized this. If you have anybody around who is mired down in science, it gives to belly laugh the continuance of their one phrase, "It's been done before." The repetition of this "it's all been done before" in its many guises, should cause a Scientologist to laugh very hard because the fellow is simply attempting on us an alter-isness of our own ideas. He's trying to stick us with our own ideas. See?

We say, "Well, we're going to build a heat device that causes this ashtray to light a cigarette whenever the cigarette is put near the ashtray." And science, "Well, it's all been done before." And you should say, "Ha ha ha," because he does it obsessively. He doesn't even know that's ever having been done before. When a writer or an artist gets around somebody from the field of science, you have a cat fight at once, yeow, because the painter paints some design.

Now, look. It's a new design, even if it is exactly like an old design because it was a design created in another time and place. It isn't a copy even if the painter says it is. Somebody goes down and makes a copy of Mona Lisa and says, "Now, this is a copy of Mona Lisa." The hell it is. It is a painting.

Now, we can add a whole bunch of more significances onto it and say it was copied off Mona Lisa, but none of the paint in it, none of the mass connected with it as a portrait, was ever used by our old pal and inventor back on the track who combined both of these characteristics rather easily.

Now, this is not a copy of Mona Lisa, it is a painting. It was painted in a certain time and a certain place by a certain person using certain materials and they were assembled at a certain place with those things. And that is the origin of that painting. Now, somebody says it's a copy of Mona Lisa, at once we have removed the possibility of as-ising that painting. If you want your works to persist forever, just say that they were written by an ancient Greek poet.

And because I have never done this dodge with Scientology, people have occasionally been very critical of me. They have said, "Well, you really ought to say that this comes out of someplace down the track." And if it didn't, I won't say so because I don't have any anxiety about making any part of this thing called Scientology persist because I don't have to have. This is the easiest one in the world, you see?

We are looking at exactly what the things are when they are that and where they were that. And we are dealing entirely with the direct observation of life itself. And a lot of people have looked at life and some have looked very truly at life and some have uttered phrases and resounding statements that were far more aesthetic and far more involved than I have ever uttered. And people come along and they say, "Well, you realize that somebody or other, Didaro the second, wrote a complete treatise on the fact that if thou dost not do as thou wilt to thy neighbor, thy neighbor will not do as thou wilt with thine, you know?" And you say, "Yes, that's very interesting," and you say, "Well now, we're speaking of the overt act/motivator sequence and it's so-and-so." "But you realize that Didaro the second has done all this."

Now, what is that person trying to do? We don't care to make overt act/motivator sequences persist. But if I discovered by direct observation the overt act/motivator sequence, certainly it must have been observed before. But my observation of it would be made to stick on the track forever if I said that it was a copy of Didero the second when it wasn't. No, I looked at the thing and I saw it and therefore I had at least the re-observation of this fact, which was evolved by thetans and is carried along in the line, was done in a certain time and place, and it isn't important that it was re-observed again unless you re-observe it again.

And all I can do is call your attention to the fact that it exists to be observed. And so you observe it again and then you observe it in a time and a place which is entirely different than I. And then you make a mistake when you say, "Well, I am observing what Ron said," and damned if you are! You're observing what is. Now, don't try to make it stick on the track. You look at what you look at.

I call your attention to the fact that it is there to be observed, that there are eight thousand seven hundred and sixty-two trillion X to the Nth power number of other things to be observed, but this one happens to have a certain level of importance superior to all of those other things. Therefore I tell you this is an important one to observe.

The only part of a communication that's valuable is the segregation of importances, that's all, that's all a part of that. And the selection of importances is the job I have done rather than quoting Dideroe the second. You might as well understand that very thoroughly, because you can read an awful lot of people, a lot of contemporary people, very fine people such as Krishna Merti and he says an awful lot of things too, you know, but he doesn't select out the importances. And therefore he leaves you with the necessity of studying the whole track all over again and the possibility is, is you're not going to notice anything as you go by. Why? Because you have not made any particular study of the importances of this thing.

There's probably just one axiom in the logics of Dianetics which is more important than all other axioms. And that is that axiom concerning comparable magnitude, or those axioms which devote themselves to comparable magnitude. Something is as important as it can be evaluated. A datum can only be evaluated by data of comparable magnitude. And of all the things we know, that must take priority because that is pretty darn new, although "everybody knew that" too. Only he knew it so well that he didn't know it at all. He lived it rather than saw it. Now, you understand that?

Now, if I were to cook up a lot of new non-extant material and attributed it to life when it didn't attribute to life, or if I dreamed up a whole bunch of non-extant material and attributed it to some forbearer who had never existed, then we would have done the malicious act of entering upon the complications of the studies of Man, some lies which would have tremendous persistence. And we would have psychology. And I don't mean to be hard about it and I'm not just being smart. These people study the books written by other people.

America had a tremendous, tremendous writer in Washington Irving. I doubt that America has ever begun to appreciate Washington Irving. His books on Christopher Columbus, his book on George Washington, are a couple of towers of literature in this country. They are very very fine books. And yet we know him for having written the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, which I think is very amusing. At least we know him for having written a fairy tale.

But it's quite interesting that practically everybody who reads or writes George Washington, is reading indirectly Washington Irving's four volume history of George Washington. It's a very very fine book. Well, he wrote some other very interesting things and amongst these was an essay on people who went to the libraries to make new books out of old books. And this is one of the most amusing essays I think I've ever read. They all go in there and they take the old books and they make new books out of the old books and they just have a time for themselves.

And you could develop a full quote science unquote just by doing this. Let's take the sleep curve. The sleep curve is one of the more interesting things which appears in a psychology text. Does it exist? Well, there was some rebel, some compatriot of ours who went into full blown raw red revolt and wrote a thesis for his doctorate degree in philosophy, having studied psychology.

You know, people are not degreed in psychology, something that might be interesting to you, they're degreed in philosophy with a major in psychology. There is no, there is no recognized degree called Doctor of Psychology, like there is in Scientology. There is a degree called, there is a legal degree called Doctor of Scientology, but there is none called Doctor of Psychology. That's because of all the quack psychologists, you know?

And so anyhow, this fellow went into raw red revolt and he wrote up his entire doctorate paper on this sleep curve and he tried to trace it back. And you know that he found that the original curve was not even about the averages of sleep. Now, I would love to have a copy of this essay, this thesis, but unfortunately it's been pulled off the market and I do not know of a copy. I only know of a review of the copy. But he found out that somebody had taken this and put it into a text book, and when he put it into the textbook, he made it represent something which the original experimenter had not intended it to represent.

Now, starting out from this interesting point, it was then copied from this textbook into other textbooks with minor revisions and alterations with the former textbook credited, and it went from textbook to textbook, each textbook only crediting the earlier textbook. And it became the interesting duty, he felt, of this man writing the thesis, to take and run back the credits on it until he could find the original curve. And he ran it clear on back to about 1910 or '08 or somewhere in that period, and then ran it back to when it was actually done.

And it was not a sleep curve at that time, had not been true at that time, and has never been true since. So he developed then a sleep curve, or tried to, and he found out that depth of sleep, which is what this curve pretended to tell, at what hour of the night do you sleep more deeply than what other hours of the night, and what is the average depth of sleep during the night, and he got a completely random curve. It was random from person to person and he developed the machinery and so forth to make it, and he found out there was no sleep curve.

And yet psychology students since 1910 have been studying a non-existent sleep curve and have been flunked on their examinations for not knowing it by heart. Now, let's hope we never sin in this direction. Now, I'm always the first to yell when I find something is not observable in life. I find something that's going along and so on. For instance I have made two or three very gross errors, none of which are persisting. I made sure they didn't.

One of those was how do you run problems of comparable magnitude. You have him get a problem and then imagine solutions to it. Ndzzz. Every time you get a solution, the problem closes terminals with the preclear closer. And I've found a test and this test is quite an interesting test. A problem of comparable magnitude to the present time problem, run consistently time after time after time, can, if you ask the preclear you will be informed that the problem is at a certain distance from him and each new problem he gets, the old problem moves a little bit further away from him.

Every time he gets another problem of comparable magnitude to the existing problem, the existing problem evidently had meaning and location and it moved out from his face and it went further and further in front of him. And if you're really running a problem of comparable magnitude, on an actual present time problem, you will get an increasing distance between the preclear and it.

But every time you ask for a solution to the problem, the problem moves in on him and you can ask him for a problem of comparable magnitude, problem of comparable magnitude, and it moves out first two feet, four feet, twelve feet, twenty feet, seventy-five feet. And before it gets completely away, ask him what it is we don't bother to inquire but something is moving out in front of him, we ask him to solve it. "Give me a solution for it. Give me a solution for it. Give me a solution for it. Give me a solution for it." We walk it right straight back to the preclear and when it gets very close to him, it assumes tremendous importance all over again.

In other words, we can run problems of comparable magnitude backwards or forwards. And the first time that I announced it, not very broadly, I said that you could get solutions to it. And I had just not observed this other mechanism. But as soon as I did observe the other mechanism, I promptly corrected it. Alright.

What, what state of mind does it require? What, what has to be your mental make-up to be able to correct something that you find that you have done wrong? So what does that demand of a person? Well, the truth of the matter, it doesn't demand anything of anybody who's in good shape. But it seems to demand laying one's head on a chopping block to an awful lot of the human race. And they will actually turn around and become insistent upon the error.

You listen to an argument. Some fellow says, "Well, the Hessians took Trenton, I read it in a history book, the Hessians took Trenton in 1774, that's right." He doesn't even remember it but he's made this error. Now, it would just go by the boards, nothing else would happen if somebody else didn't challenge him. Somebody challenges him now and says, "It wasn't 1774, it was much later." And this causes an argument by which the original utterer of the datum is now stuck with his datum and he will do nothing but stand there and support that erroneous datum, although he himself suspects it's wrong. And he'll stand there and he'll support it and he'll support it and he'll support it, and he's working at it, working at it, and he brings up false proofs and he racks it up in all directions.

And this is dramatization. We get the persistence of error then as being one of the major manifestations, which becomes quite interesting. It goes in with "those things which are least admired tend to persist." There is a tendency in that direction. It's not they do persist, you see, they tend to persist. Alright.

Take this chair. This preclear, you say, "What is that?" and he says, "It's got two slats out of it." This, this is about the maddest statement if you examine it and yet it would pass for an answer in the bulk of society. The other person would look at it and say, "So it does." He's asking, see, the question "what is this" and the other fellow tells him it's got a couple of slats missing in it.

In other words, it isn't a chair that is sitting there but a wrongness. And people get fixed on these wrongnesses. They have wrongnesses driven down their throats to a point to where they dramatize wrongnesses. And whenever a preclear sits down in front of you, you can be sure that the alter-isness has been on the basis of wrongness because he's got so many things wrong with him. So somebody must have alter-ised the wrongnesses. Somebody must have insisted on the wrongnesses, not the rightnesses. And that's where alter-isness goes and that is the dwindling spiral.

And that's why your preclear thinks there's something wrong with him and why you have the devil's own time as an auditor getting him over this. We have things like "invent a wrongness, invent a problem," we have many things that have some degree of workability. Now, "invent a wrongness" is a slow, long, tremendously heavy process. It barely comes under the wire as workable. It's better than nothing, about the best you can say about "invent a wrongness." It was truly a brilliant inspiration when first uttered because it was uttered straight out of the material I'm giving you about isness, as-isness and alter-isness. Alright.

The next one, "invent a problem," merely means that somebody has caused so much problem to the preclear that he himself has become the problem. He's had problems thrown at him and problems thrown at him and problems thrown at him, until he himself is the problem and there he sits in the auditing chair as a problem. And now you're supposed to solve him. Oh no, you're not supposed to solve him, because the solution to a problem is the problem. That is the solution to a problem, the problem.

And once in a while when somebody in this organization gets riding me too close on the subject of making me solve everything under the sun, moon and stars, I will simply start handing him his own problems. He seldom knows what is happening to him, but they seem to be less important. I restate them to him, "Exactly what did you say the problem was?" Then I say, "Oh yes. It is so-and-so and so-and-so." Then without solving it, he sometimes will simply walk away.

Well, his problem isn't very important. Merely by restating the problem we get the unimportance of the problem. Well, what happened here? We simply cause the problem to answer the problem. The solution to a problem is the problem. To a Scientologist, that is right. But you can solve problems by as-ising them. But every time you solve problems by alteration of the factors of the problem, you have a persistence.

Now, this is not necessarily bad, it's not necessarily bad. But it certainly happens. About the only thing surviving on the track are the solutions. The problems for which they were solutions are apparently no longer there, but every once in a while they jump out from behind that cloud of golden glow or something like that, and kick your lousy teeth in. Bang! You say, "Where did that come from?"

Preclear was running perfectly alright and all of a sudden, crash, he exploded. Yeah, what happened? You ran out the solution and made the problem present itself. The second the problem presented itself, he had no solution to it and he couldn't face the problem or even admit that it was a problem, and he instantly had a problem on his hands. So what? A problem is only a method of alter-ising. Solving a problem is only a method of alter-ising. And all these various mental gymnastics come under the heading of alter-ising.

Logic and its chains and so on is a concatenation of substitutions on a gradient scale, any one of which alter-is the last. Logic can get to be awfully permanent things. The writings which have survived from the days of Montaigne are Montaigne's, very very logical. Actually a thetan loves to look at these things, he thinks it's grand and there's nothing wrong with it, it is rather fantastic, the gymnastic of a concatenation of gradient scale of data. Substituting, substituting, substituting. That's what logic is.

It's what mathematics is, only if you ever tried to explain this to a mathematician he'd plunge at once into his upper level theoretical equations. And he would say, "Well this doesn't fit, it doesn't fit." No, of course it doesn't fit. You're just as-ising mathematics, that's all you're doing, you nasty auditor you. You're just reaching out and cutting their whole foundation from underneath a very complicated and rather unnecessary structure. And it's a dirty trick and you shouldn't do it, except of course where mathematics get in your road.

All you have to do to knock out any apparently surviving persisting concatenation of logic, whether mathematics or reason or anything else, is question the premise or the authorship of the premise. And if you consistently question the premise from which it all sprang, or the authorship of the premise from which it all sprang, you are from that point on in a very unfair position with regard to the other fellow because he can't argue with the beautiful concatenation which looks so lovely, these beautiful substitutes all laid out on a gradient scale, one to the next, alteration, alteration, alteration.

What you keep doing is knocking the bottom out from underneath the whole top-heavy structure. You're saying to him time after time, "Well now, on what do you base that assumption?" "Oh, who was it, who was it that, who was it that originated Boyle's law?"

Now, maybe a vacuum tube, maybe a vacuum tube can be argued with. You can connect things with it and disconnect things with it, and take things off of it and hang things on it, and make it do this and make it do that, and fool around with it quite considerably because you've entered into the middle of a concatenation of substitutes. And it has so many basics and it has so many premises from which it sprang, that there's no slightest chance of your arguing it out of existence.

See, it's a mass, it's a vacuum tube, it has significance. You can do all sorts of things with it. You can pick up a rock and handle it quite safely. It won't disappear on you for the excellent reason that it has so many fundamentals, so many basics, so many premises from which it sprang. There are so many alter-isnesses which have proceeded along the line, that it's not really likely to as-is in your hands.

But if you start plowing around about the original rock or the source of all rocks, or you start questioning the source of all rocks, if you did it expertly enough I'm afraid you would feel the rock tremble, because if you did it completely successfully, it's liable to be gone.

A thetan knows this. So in his effort to make things disappear, he goes back down the time track. He gets obsessed about making everything disappear, he's upset about havingness and he'll start back down the time track trying to find the original premise from which all these objects sprang. He knows that he can't go poof in present time and not have them anymore. He knows he can't do this. He knows that the surer method is to go back in time to get the original premise on which it is based.

And yet some auditor running expertly "not-know on the environment" can knock out whole sections of the environment for the preclear. Quite interesting. In other words, it isn't necessary to go down the track to make it disappear at all. That again is an alteration. You can make hats, rocks and everything else disappear for the preclear.

Now, he isn't interested in it just disappearing from him, he'd like to see it disappear for everybody. He's mean. Well, you would have to do some other things to do that. Alteration, alteration. No matter whether he's going back on the track or up into the future or fooling with things in present time, he is doing an alteration on those things. Why is he doing an alteration on these things?

Well, this is what you're expected to know here as Scientologists. Why is he doing an alteration? Very simple. He is trying to continue an isness about which he has become anxious. He is afraid that some things in life which he no longer can quite spot will not persist, and he has an anxiety about survival, he has an anxiety about persistence, and this anxiety expresses itself in alteration, alter-isness.

Now, he goes further than this and he says, "We will not-is. I know it's there but I'll say it isn't there. I will crush it to a pulp, I will smash it back against the wall, I will do something with it." But actually not-isness is an effort to use alteration as a mechanism of disappearance. And you have the perfect picture of a preclear's bank. He never as-ised anything in it at all, he just not-ised it. He's alter-ising his bank by saying it is not there while he knows darn well it is there.

Now, I said some dirty names about psychology. Actually there are many people who are studying the mind and having no better word for it in universities, call themselves psychologists, who are quite smart boys. These fellows however do not identify themselves with European psychology but attempt to see things and understand things. When you run across one of these boys you are very fortunate. He doesn't ever really quite know what he's doing there, he's a bit adrift because if he starts to look at things as they are, he finds at once that he is out of his depth. There are such people.

But this fellow is searching for what you know, he's searching for what you know. And one of the liabilities to which he is subjected and the one thing which is blinding him to the road out is his past not-ising of his bank. He's got his bank so not-ised that he doesn't know it's there although it is there. And it is biting him just as surely as though he has a wolf standing on his chest with great long teeth and he's saying, "It's my sexual experiences when I was a little child, perhaps," as Freud says, "Or maybe it is merely Man's bestial characteristics," as the geneticist says, "Or maybe it's a cellular conflict," as the cytologist says.

And every time he tries to tackle the problem of not-isness, he restimulates into and dramatizes not-isness. In other words, he dramatizes alter-isness. He goes in on not-isness, he restimulates not-isness, and he gets further alter-isness. In other words, every effort he makes to solve the problem in front of him is followed by a further alteration. As he just barely tries to run out not-isness, he gets over into alter-isness. He never does look at the thing.

He's written books on eidetic recall. Children and morons have eidetic recall. Where does he think his lumbago came from? "Oh well," he says, "Freud said such things as psychic trauma…" Wait a minute. You're talking about a mental image picture and he brought up Freud. What's this got to do with it? He's thrown a symbol in which is an alter-is. Where does he thing the damn thing is stored, huh? In Freud's desk? Where is this thing called a trauma?

Well, they don't even go so far into obnosis as to realize that a fellow with a trauma of a fractured skull is wearing it on his skull. And you can talk to them by the hour without ever getting them to admit that it is the skull which is traumaed and the trauma is there and the record of the trauma is there. Now, that would be just a little distance. Actually it is the full picture of the accident which caused the trauma, as an incident, which is the trauma and it is there and it is recorded, and it is fastened on his skull at the exact point of impact and boy, is that an isness.

See, you're saying it is a picture, it contains all perceptions, it is fastened exactly in that place which is his head, you could put your finger on it, and if the person could look up or see, and wasn't' so resisting quite so hard, he would see the picture of his fractured skull. It happened on a baseball diamond, the fellow has basically all obscured and knocked apart and not-ised, and altered and altered and altered, but the fellow has basically underneath all of this alter-is, a full perception picture of the baseball diamond on which it occurred and anything else his eyes were fastened on the moment he was hit in the head. You got the idea now? Alright.

So the psychologist makes this terrible error of saying it is a symbol, a word, a classification, even the best of them struggling to do this, are missing the beat on this one thing contained in the axioms of Scientology. I'm not telling you this to damn psychologists, I couldn't care less. But I'm trying to point out to you that a whole field of study in the mind runs up against alter-isness and not-isness and therefore defeats itself. And doggone you if you do the same thing, I'll wring your necks.

We have this gorgeous objective example, this beautiful example, for over half a century it's been flagrantly present. It was present in 1879 in Leipzig, Germany when professor Wundt invented the subject. And that defeats the whole thing and that is what is defeating your preclear if you please. It isn't just defeating psychology, it is defeating anybody trying to understand himself.

He starts to look at what's wrong with him and he does a not-is, he makes it disappear some more, he shoves against it in some fashion. But the moment he restimulates it he does an alter-is, and from day to day he'll change his mind on what's wrong with his head. Year by year he has a new remedy for it, it's from another source. He goes and sees the medicos, the pill rollers and they tell him, "Well, that is actually a restriction of the neuronic sumbulus. That is a cerebellumization of the lower midriff."

Fashions change in medicine with great rapidity, actually much faster than techniques in Scientology if you can credit that, and that's pretty fast. But they're merely changing a fashion and we're coming closer to the heart of the problem, and that's the single difference.

One year a fellow's bad teeth are attributed to his sinuses, another year they're attributed to his failure to eat clover. You never know from one year to the next what causes bad teeth, except the blows and thuds, and the mental image pictures of those blows and thuds impinged upon the teeth, and they cause bad teeth.

Now, don't think eating causes bad teeth, because there's something wrong with a preclear who eats just as there's something wrong with him if he doesn't eat. He's between the devil and the deep blue sea. There's nothing right about eating, there's nothing right about a preclear who won't. Eating is an obsessive inflow of MEST, demanded by the body on popular agreement. Only how anybody gets any energy from death I'd certainly like to know. Individuals consume death in order to get life. Oh this is, that's for the birds.

How do you manage that? You eat a dead steer in order to feel more lively. Well, the day I eat a dead steer and feel more lively, why, I will agree there's something to it. But usually I feel much lunkier. A well fed person is a bit better off than a hungry one, but not much. There's one in the … there about "the people got so bad that they eventually began to eat" I think very funny.

The mental image picture impinged upon the teeth, the mental image picture impinged upon the stomach, caused the stomach to eat. Quite interesting. It's interesting machinery, this machinery put-out of pictures, the machinery that makes pictures made by pictures which make machinery, which makes pictures which makes machinery, which creates from the original postulate and the cooperation with it that machinery should be. And it gets to be a very fascinating mass of alteration.

And you start following any of these alterations down the line and you get back to the sleep curve no matter what you're doing, you get back to the same thing. You find out that one textbook copied it from another textbook copied it from another textbook, and you eventually got back and found out that it didn't represent that in the first place at all. And that is what you do when you begin to run back these alterations. You go from one copy to another copy to another copy to another copy, just endlessly and you run it way back, you get this idea of running it way back. And you find out that the "way back" is right here all the time anyhow.

It's very interesting mental exercise to go through all the alter-isnesses which exist on any given subject anywhere in the universe. This is very good mental exercise, but if you ever classify it as anything else, I'll be disappointed in you. It's good exercise, it's a lot of fun to look at the number of alter-isnesses which have occurred by reason of a fur coat. That's a very specialized exercise. We look at the fur coat.

Now, the alter-isness which first occurs to our mind is that it wasn't a coat but had to be made into a coat. That's a simple one. Well, we seldom get gruesome enough to go back to what happened between its becoming a fur and being worn as a hide. Well, something kicked the bucket about that point and lost it's shirt. But we go back that far and we would usually cease and desist and say, "Well, that's where a fur coat comes from."

That isn't where a fur coat comes from. Well, you can go back and if you want to get exact on the number of alter-isnesses which occurred to have that fur grown in the first place, why, you've really got a study on your hands and it's quite an amusing study. It goes into genetics and every other darn thing. You all of a sudden wound up and had to study life and the axioms of Scientology. And I don't care where you enter this picture, you go all the way back on these alterations.

We see this girl, she is lying in a juvenile delinquency court dead drunk, she's been dragged in, she looks like she might at one time or another been a very good-looking girl but now she's a horrible wreck. She's drunk, starved, diseased, bruised and so on. Now, we trace this horrible wreck back a certain distance, and happily with the society's agreement at this time, we say, "Well, she had a shattered home, a broken home, and that's where this girl came from." Oh, is it?

We don't know how many lives she was a camp follower to how many Roman legions or any other legion or area, or how many times she was a virtuous woman, or how many times she was a nun. There's no tracking how many roles that this character has played, but to say that we traced her drunkenness back to a broken home is merely a social platitude which appeases various sociologists. And if we wish to be happy, we will let it appease us. Otherwise we go right straight back down the line and we run into the axioms of Scientology, which is to say we run right straight back to the postulates that thetans made and the postulates which they caused to persist.

Now, if you invent lots of games and lots of alterations and if you get very very good at altering things, consciously and knowingly, you will certainly have a lot of games. And you're liable to have a lot more universes and lots of other things are liable to occur of tremendous interest. But a person really has to be a bit upscale to take just a blunt look at just what I'm telling you right now. It's nothing you can look at without getting a little bit pale if you're having a bad time with games and so forth and having a bad time in life.

You know where your sore head came from. It came from a mental image picture of a baseball diamond. Well, if you know that as a Dianeticist then you know more than anybody's known about the mind to date. But don't consider that that was a stopping point. How come you have a mental image picture? What are you doing making mental image pictures when you're all knocked out? What's something doing making mental image pictures at the least propitious times? And then what's keeping them around? What's regenerating them? Figure-figure figure-figure.

And that is the awful squirrel cage that every Dianeticist got into. There's hardly one of them didn't finally say, "You know, something's making these things. What is it? And if I could only pull its brakes on, why, I'd at least have a clear track from here on out." Whereas a couple of them got together one time and they figured out if they ran everything out just as it happened and audited it all out just as it happened, they could just barely keep ahead of life.

Truth of the matter is, a picture is the result of an introversion, that's what causes pictures. Just in passing, this comment. The reason you have problems is someone didn't want you to have the environment so they gave you a problem which introverted you. The reason they shot you that life a few lives ago is because they wanted your attention inside, not outside. And for that period wherein you died and didn't heal yourself, you were not looking at the environment, you were looking inward at yourself. And the loss of that havingness was sufficient to undo, by your own considerations, your ability to put it all back together again.

So we have the whole introversion/extroversion, or the whole idea of space or location, as sitting back of the violence or influence of pictures. When one has to pay too much attention to his pictures, the pictures must have been crushed in on him in some fashion or another, and his attention must have been called to them far, far too strongly too many times. Not in this life with Dianetics, no, you're better off for having called to attention. But somebody called these to attention a long way back.

I remember a universe where a fellow said as you got shoved in there, the fellow said, "We only use pictures here. We don't create things because that causes trouble. Go over to that pile over there and pick yourself up some pictures." They used pictures in that universe. All kinds of curiosities come up on the subject of pictures. But what is this universe but a rather solid scene?

Now, you can turn any picture you've got into a universe. Therefore they have great value, really. But those things which are least admired tend to persist when they are altered obsessively. And if you're going to alter a picture instead of examine its isness, you can run a picture out, you know, that doesn't alter the picture. It alters you. But if you're going to change the picture, change the picture around, change the picture around, and then fail to have that cure anything, for sure the failure at the end of it will persist.

Now, you can change a lot of things around without much liability. But when you have to do it and obsessively do it, and you can't do it and you don't do it, then you get a persistence because you get a can't reach/can't withdraw, must reach/must withdraw situation. You're carrying the thing right along the track and these are the pictures that are worrying people. They must change them, they can't change them; they must reach them, they can't reach them; the picture must not reach them, the picture must reach them; zzzzzzzz, and they're in the middle of a big bunch of alterations. Naturally they get stuck on the track.

That's about all there is to it except what do you do about it? Well, look. You've got about seventy-six trillion years according to what you register on E-meters and things like that, you've got about seventy-six trillion years, most of it in pictures. And you've got all of that and any part of it you could make as solid as the whole universe, as it was at that given instant. And I don't care whether you're aware of them or not, you've got them.

And I would say that's several thousand hours of Dianetic auditing you've got ahead of you in order to really erase the influence of every single one of these pictures from then 'til now. I'd say several thousand hours, conservative estimate, providing you didn't pick up any new ones while you were being audited, of course. Well, that'd be very nice because you'd go back to the beginning of pictures and you would as-is the exact starting moment of all pictures and so forth. Isn't this a nice idea?

Well by golly, you'd think listening to the Hindus, to have a bunch of Hindus knowing, knowing what they know about Buddhism and so forth, if you tell that to a bunch of Hindus, they're liable to agree with you. Make nothing out of everything, that'd be good. But there isn't, unfortunately it's not totally possible if only because of time involved. There is something else you can do. Change the willingness of the preclear, change his tolerance for and change his ability to change, and you've done it.

It's only that he no longer has change under his control that makes him the victim of these alterations. He himself has abandoned control of change. He himself is not any longer cause on the subject of change. He is changed always, but nothing that he can spot can be changed by him. He's being changed from hidden sources is the first entrance point. You start changing him as a known source and he comes out of it, plus you get the therapeutic value of control. He's at least being changed from a known source. You.

You're changing him from A to B and start, stop and change, and changing his position since this is much more important than changing his mind at first, change his position. And up the line he comes because he's being changed by a known source. But you were apparently consulting his power of choice and at least showing that you weren't doing it really because you were mad at him. You were acknowledging the fact that he had done so, and you continued to communicate with him, so he again has no other choice but to assume that he is not an object but alive, because you are talking to him.

And so he comes upscale and at last he can have and when he can have, only then can he begin to see things as they are. And seeing things as they are, he does not then see a great many alterations. He doesn't believe that every orange tree sheds nothing but molten feathers. There's no telling what a preclear thinks what does, he doesn't know himself. The whole world is a not-have situation. To move him up you have to move him through change. Well, what about this change?

Well, there is a postulate that goes along with control and reaches pretty far down. And that postulate seems to go all the way to the bottom and that postulate now under a very thorough test is proving to be extremely good in auditing. And that postulate is "ought to be." You run objective ought to be. You have somebody look around and tell you how that chair ought to be.

You say, "See that chair? Alright. Tell me how it ought to be." And that is a very very, very fine process. And it moves right in the same society with change, physical change. And this one apparently goes all the way to the bottom. As long as a fellow can know anything, he knows that, ought to be. A fellow's unconscious, the second he begins to know something, he knows he ought to be awake or he knows he ought to be asleep again. It's the one thing that he knows in connection with all other things, is ought to be. It's way below "now I'm supposed to."

When a person can no longer say "now I'm supposed to" as Dick Halpern figured out, when he can no longer say, "Now I'm supposed to," he can say, "Well, now I ought to. Well, it ought to be this way but I can't do anything about it." It even goes down in, even goes down into the lower ranges of apathy. So you ask somebody to look around, you say, "See that chair? Alright. Tell me how it ought to be."

And what's he do? He starts to take over alter-isness since it wasn't the condition of the thing, it was what one did with the thing, the alteration. The unknowing alteration being practiced with all these things was what got the preclear all chopped up and why his bank's all messed up and why he's all snarled up. So you put alteration directly under his control, and you of course put the whole universe under his control eventually.

Alteration is simply in life the motion of A to B, the change of space or condition, or the change of time. But ought to be runs future and runs time. And although we've had other future processes; such as mock up a future, and goals is the first one in the Handbook for Preclears, and then it went on to mock up something in the future; and now ought to be and a future process is what it turns out to be eventually. He can handle something of the future and we find out it's more important to handle a future than a past.

After all, you've lived through the past, it's safe to look at that. You haven't lived through the future yet so the biggest question mark is up in the future. This is a very important process and it should be understood by you that the process is the process which couples up with alteration or alter-isness as given in the axioms, and therefore of course is an important process. The process itself is subordinate to isness, but when an individual cannot conceive an isness, it is because he is saying it ought to be something else.

Now, I hope you understand this very well, and I hope you make very very good use out of the process because you're going to use it in this unit.

Thank you.