There are two kinds of processing with which we are now involved for cases which are not spun in. One is light processing, which we call Postulate Processing. The other is deep processing, which we call Effort Processing.
Postulate Processing can be co-auditing or self-auditing. Effort Processing — deep processing — at this time should take a co-auditor or an auditor. There is some slight idea that perhaps deep processing, in the not-too distant future, might be self-administered by somebody who is well up the tone scale already.
You should understand that self-processing techniques which have to do with the undoing of engrams can be exclusively relegated to valence shifts which permit the individual to take a valence in the engram which is hurting him. He then operates from this valence which hurts him, and he just goes on hurting himself. That is the mechanism of self-administered deep processing.
The fellow goes out of valence and starts butchering himself, because in the engrams he is in he is out of valence. He shifts, he turns around. For instance, he will go into a dental engram or something like that; when he gets into that he will go into the valence of the dentist. What is the dentist doing to him? Ruining his teeth. This valence sitting there in the engram will just keep on butchering this fellow’s teeth — and butcher them all over the track, by the way, picking up from other engrams and so on. It is a very interesting manifestation.
There is one case I know about who has been doing one of these selfprocessing techniques for two and a half years, with the result that he is now lower on the tone scale and in worse shape than when he started. I know of several like this. So self-auditing is not something to monkey with Certainly, even if one did any self-processing on a deep-therapy basis, he would have to know a lot more about Dianetics than anybody who is advertising any of these other therapies. He would have to know his stuff personally, and even then he would be in severe danger of going on a skid.
Now, what you do in deep processing is recover the earliest available epicenter that you can reach, bring it into valence and up the tone scale, then recover an earlier one and bring it into valence and up the tone scale, and keep on doing that till you have the preclear back to the earliest one you can possibly find, and you bring it up the tone scale. When you have stability in this, you bring him on forward through all epicenters, knocking each one into shape till you get him to present time.
Don’t think for a moment that this is not putting a person back on the track or something like that. That is a very superficial judgment of Effort Processing. Effort Processing very definitely takes people back on the track. The only thing is, they are sitting there already, so you never bother to say “Go back to . . ?” That is just nonsense. The fellow is there! Why tell him to go back to anything?
And you never leave an engram — particularly if you have gotten an earlier one — until you have turned on full reality in the thing. You will find the preclear more or less in apathy inthat engram and you want to bring that engram up the tone scale by finally running out the apathy, which is motionlessness, being hit by the somatics. You get the moments when he is starting and stopping time by his own postulates, his efforts to change locale, to go someplace else — you get these things out and you turn the engram on full. Then you get his refusals to communicate, his refusals to have affinity, his refusals to agree and so on, until you have brought that epicenter up the tone scale.
What you do is knock the pain facsimiles out of that epicenter, using effort. You get them all in terms of physical effort.
I want to caution you that the complex organisms on the line are very capable of posing complex postulates, and that these postulates have much simpler postulates behind them.
It is perfectly all right for you to find your preclear sitting in some severely painful incident somewhere on the past line and go on back from there without turning that engram up until you get something in a simplerorganism line. That is, let’s get as simple an organism as we can hit without wrecking him.
Any time he can’t move or can’t get back any earlier, we will just sit there and beef that engram up until we have the reality turned on, and then move back from there. But the trick is to move back rapidly, as early as possible. Get back, if you possibly can, to monocells or something like that and exhaust one of those, because that is fairly simple to do. The postulates will simply be “I’ve got to hold myself in” or “I’ve got to expand” or something like that, whereas postulates up the track in a more highly complex organism are more on the order of “Well, I wish I weren’t here” “Actually, I should be back in my mother’s arms” “All these people are elsewhere” “I am no place” “I want to stop time, change time, do this and do that” And of course, there are enormous numbers of efforts behind each one of these postulates.
Do you know what I mean by a postulate in Effort Processing? It is what the person says to himself in the middle of pain — what he tells himself to do. That is what is effective. It isn’t the pain, it is the fact that the postulate is all wrapped up. This was relatively unsuspected before. It was reached by extrapolation. That is to say, we took the Axioms and figured out that that was it. And then we looked and people’s postulates started to jump forward out of the middle of all this effort.
It is what they think they should do, what they postulate should happen, their conclusion about the situation, which causes their action.
This is self-determinism. The organism is self-determined straight on through every generation. It takes every counter-effort — every environmental effort against it — and composites these into a new command post, and this new command post is self- determined. It never thinks of itself as doing otherwise than acting on its own initiative, and it obeys, really, only itself.
That is the hooker in human behavior. You may think that somebody is obeying you, but first he must be brought around to the point where he will obey. You have to cut a person’s initiative down to nothing if you want complete obedience out of him. (I will go over the tone scale on this very shortly.)
So, this is, in essence, Effort Processing as it now exists.
Now, Postulate Processing refers to this life only and touches only the individual’s analytical conclusions or decisions in this life on any dynamic.
I said in the first book that a human being can be aberrated only with his own consent. Everything that lay behind that statement wasn’t understood. But that is so true that as you look over a case you will find without exception that a steer through Postulate Processing will clean up the last control center admirably. You can achieve with Postulate Processing alone — Straightwire, the individual in present time — in a very short period of time, results far superior to any co-auditing of the past. Don’t underestimate this tool; it is a terrific tool.
This doesn’t clean the individual up to a point where he will not make future postulates which will upset him, but it certainly removes the individual from the category of an aberree as we understand him. In Postulate Processing, we have attainable what is considered to be the goal of Clear. A person who has been swamped up with Postulate Processing, done by a good auditor, should be way up the tone scale and in excellent condition physically. The only difference between this and deep processing is that I don’t think you will get structural modifications with this, because you are not going to get some of the postulates which are in the middle of engrams. But you will at least get their key-ins.
Here are the jewels of Ophir, in Postulate Processing. It won’t take very long to do this. It is easy work and it is a nice game. An auditor could alrfiost sit there and just snore through this one. It is not as difficult as earlier forms of Straightwire, and it runs by formula. The formula is simply this: The individual becomes the effect of his own postulated causes. He postulates a conclusion, he moves forward in time, and he becomes affected by his own conclusion.
There is another one that goes with it: The earlier postulate is valid despite a later postulate. In other words, a fellow can say, “Well, I think I’ll act like a monkey” Two months from then he says, “I think I’ll act like a human being” and he will slightly modify his monkey shines but he will go on acting like a monkey. Four or five months from then he says, “Well, I’m not doing so good as a human being; I think I will act more like a hog” but he still acts like a monkey. That is ridiculing it a little bit, but it is just about that serious.
Take a little child lying in his crib: His mother comes along and acts kind of ornery to him, so all of a sudden he says, “All get even with her — I won’t drink my milk”
Then about twenty years later his wife says to hith, “Now, dear, it’s time you had a glass of milk”
He feels a little bit ornery at the moment, so he says, “No. No, milk makes me sick. I have an allergy to milk” So he has!
When one realizes what one is capable of doing to oneself, it is rather awe-inspiring.
Just when these postulates start, and just how early you can reach by Straightwire, I am not prepared to say at this time.
You get a child going to sleep because he is told to go to sleep. This is a handy place to have a baby — asleep. They don’t make noise and they are no bother, so they are encouraged to go to sleep. Finally they decide to go to sleep. But even when they are five, six or sevens they are still coming downstairs saying, “Can I have a drink of water?” “No, you must go to bed now?”
They finally go down into apathy and say, “All right” Then they grow up still going to bed! That is interesting, isn’t it? It is ridiculous that everybody goes to bed every night.
Every time a serious postulate is made, you can expect to find the individual a little bit down the tone scale — even to the point of no perception. You can take a case which is apparently a wide-open case and you will find that you can run all up and down the track and just seem to get along fine. The holes in the track — the black spots in the track — you possibly won’t find, because they are the deep agreement postulates; they are the postulates where the child was all beaten up and said finally, “All right, I agree. I will go to school” Of course, you will find the whole school period of this person blank because he went to school on a bottom-level agreement basis, on an obedience basis. And because he went to school on an obedience basis, he lost all the data, or it may have become a little bit compulsive to him.
But you go back and all you have to do is really unburden his decision to obey, his decision that other people know best, his decision that the best thing to do when you are sick is go to sleep, his first decision to be sick. Unburden these things and, lo and behold, you will find great sections of a preclear’s life just blowing open — all of his school period is present all of a sudden.
But don’t think that you can do this in a very few minutes. There is a lag factor in the mind on the recovery of data, and sometimes it takes a day or two for the datum for which you have asked to come back up. Your asking for the datum has a tendency to put enough ARC into it to make it appear. And so your auditing, as Postulate Processing, may have to be done for weeks, with a couple or three periods a week or something like that — but certainly no longer than weeks.
You will find basic computations falling out of the case. All of a sudden the fellow will just look like a rose springing up on the garbage pile! He will go up the tone scale and he won’t be very worried about things, he will have a good high level of ARC for his environment and so forth.
This is the kind of thing that psychoanalysis hoped and hoped and hoped for sixty years it would be able to do: sit and talk to somebody and ask him some questions and all of a sudden put their finger on a button. But what they do is say, “Now, if you’ll just admit that you realized all these years that you were a dog, you will now get well. Now, you’ve got to admit this. Now, you’ve got to admit that you realized you were a dog. Now, do you admit this?” And as long as the fellow says no, he keeps on getting psychoanalysis. Finally, he goes down into apathy and says, “Yes, I’m well” at which moment there is a great resurgence on the part of the analyst — it does the analyst a lot of good!
They were working exactly in the opposite direction. They were trying to give the fellow new conclusions, or just trying to let him talk.
This was Breuer’s technique of vocal catharsis: You let the patient sit down in the chair and say “Yak, yak, yak, yak, yak” long enough and the patient all of a sudden gets well. This is observable in a few cases (maybe one out of ten thousand cases will do this), “enough, of course, to continue its use as a therapy. This amply justifies it” That was high-level stuff.
The only alternative is electric shock and prefrontal lobotomy, or being chained to the wall and beaten unless he gets well. There is not much difference between prefrontal lobotomy or electric shock and the old treatments of Bedlam whereby they simply poured water into the patient’s mouth until he guaranteed he would get well. They “cure” a lot of people that way.
Bedlam, by the way, interestingly enough, is now the most modern, permissive, quiet sanitarium in England. (And psychiatry has taken its place! )
The point involved here is simply that you are giving the individual back to himself, and your first few questions will probably result in a lot of recovery. You don’t have to orient him very much. He will suddenly discover for himself — you don’t force it on him — that he was making up his own mind about these things. And this gives him a new respect for himself.
This is something like thinking that the general lived back in a tent and never wrote anybody anything and never communicated, that he didn’t have any authority and had been superseded by a worker’s committee; then all of a sudden it is found that this isn’t the case.
It is the quickest method I know of validating a control center. “All right. When did you make up your mind that you were going to be sick?”
Your preclear will say, “Oh, I never made up my mind to be sick. Nonsense?” “Well, when might you have done so? Is there somebody around whom you were sicker than you were around other people?” “Well, yes, as a matter of fact, my wife. Every time I go home I seem to get sick. That’s a funny thing. I never realized that completely before. Wonder why that is?” “Did you ever decide — just actually, analytically decide — to be sick around her?” “Oh, no. I’m sorry, but . . . yeah, yeah. Yeah, we had a quarrel one day and — yes, I remember. I told her I had a headache and I didn’t want to fight anymore. You know, that’s a funny thing. I decided it! Oh, that couldn’t be; that couldn’t be?”
So then you say, “All right. Now, is there any other time in your life when you decided to be ill?” “No, no. No! Nonsense?” “How about school?” “Oh! Well, school — that’s different! Yes, yes. Well, as a matter of fact, yes, I remember — that’s funny, I don’t quite place it right now, but I know there must have been a time . . . Oh, yes, in college! In college I said I was sick so I couldn’t take the final examinations. Yeah, that’s right. And as a matter of fact I went around for about two or three weeks telling all of my friends how sick I was. That’s a funny thing that I would do that. Hmmm?”
“Now, what about grammar school?” “Well, I don’t know about grammar school, but I remember one time I was supposed to turn out for lacrosse and I didn’t like the coach and I told him I had sick spells occasionally. Yeah, I remember that one. Yeah, I get a good memory on that one.”
You are unburdening him. He starts to think to himself, “Am I doing this stuff to myself? Why, this is incredible! Why should I butcher myself this way?” And all of a sudden he will turn up and say, “Oh yes, my first day in kindergarten! Yeah, I remember — I threw up. They had to take me home. I decided I wasn’t going to stay there. I’ll be a son of a gun. You know, I’ve had nausea spells ever since. Why, I do do this sort of thing to myself?”
Now you are off to the races. You have just started with this one, because he will turn up 969 more times when he concluded it was better to be ill than otherwise. He will start turning up these postulates. Out of moments when he was not even faintly aware that he was making up his mind to that effect, he will turn up this computation (and this is the basic computation of Postulate Processing): An individual conceives himself to have failed, he concludes to himself that he has failed and then he advances a conclusion as to the explanation for his failure. He rationalizes his failure “I failed because I . . ?” and so on.
I used to get this all the time. People would tell me, “The reason I don’t write is I don’t have a college education.” There were all these reasons why.
If I had gone back on the track with them, I would just ask them Straightwire, “When did you first make up your mind you had to have an education?” First we would have discovered a conclusion saying “You know, I’ve got to have an education before I can get anyplace in this world.” If we looked right behind that we would find the girl turning him down or his failure to get higher pay on his job or something of the sort, and we would find, sitting right there, the conclusion “I muffed it; I failed.”
So the time track ends up with these things all lined up: First is the failure, then the failure conclusion, and after that is the postulate of the reason. And the track is just solid with these — on and on and on.
By the time a fellow gets to be twenty or thirty or something like that, this sequence is appallingly automatic. He sits down at a table and bites down on a piece of chicken, the chicken hurts a tooth a little bit, and you find him within two or three days going to the dentist. He considers this a natural course of human affairs.
If you sorted this thing out carefully in his thinking processes, in the vicinity of that one bite on that piece of chicken, you could actually recover: bite, pain (which is protest from the anatomy; it is like an argument going on with the old epicenters), protest, conclusion “I’ve failed” — quickly masked over, and the person saying, “Well, my teeth are bad” He blames it on the teeth. He reaches back in the bank, picks up an entheta facsimile of a past pain incident and says to the body, “You see? Bad teeth. It was your fault, not mine. Now I’ve got to go to the dentist because you let me down and had bad teeth. Now I’ll go down to the dentist.” And he will go through almost anything. We get this same cycle of rationalisation in hypnotism. This is manifested everywhere, but you get it basically in hypnotism. You hypnotize somebody and tell him, “When you wake up, you will take off your left shoe and put it on the mantel.” The fellow wakes up, gets unrestimulated enough to groggily look at you, and then he takes off his shoe, walks over and puts it on the mantel.
You say, “Why did you do that?”
He looks at you defensively and he says, “Well, it’s hot. The floor is very hot.” And he will look outside and then say, “Well, the last few days it’s been raining and my shoe has been damp all this time; it’s drier up there on the mantel, and that’s why.” or he will say, “I’m afraid of your cat — afraid he’ll come around and chew up my shoe, and I just got it shined” — the doggonedest reasons. He may start to get a little bit angry if you question him very much, because actually it was your reality he accepted, not his.
You ask him bluntly, “Well, why? Why did you do this?” and he will get sort of upset.
You can do this on a trigger basis. You take over the fellow’s motor controls one way or the other, and then you tell him he is going to take off his shoe whenever you touch your tie. So you touch your tie after he wakes up and he takes off the shoe. If you also tell him “Every time I take my hand off my tie, you will put your shoe back on.” When you touch your tie, off goes his shoe, and when you take your hand away, the shoe goes on again, and so on.
He will look at you and say, “You know, I never did like that suit you’re wearing.” He knows there is something wrong, but his explanation for it will be “Yak, yak, yak, yak, yak. It’s probably a Hart, Shafner & Marx. And I had an uncle who worked for Hart, Shafner & Marx and that is why, that is why, that is . . .” and so on.
What we have neglected to realize is that the control center of the body, when it got out of ARC with the rest of the body, considered the rest of the body more or less another individual and so blamed everything on this other individual. These manifestations are just the control center reaching back on the track, picking up a theta facsimile of pain, saying “That’s it” and actively throwing it into restimulation. The decision to have it precedes the restimulation in every case.
Now, a person may be in the middle of an engram and suddenly postulate that he wishes he were elsewhere or something of the sort. The funny part of it is that he will analytically remember the important part of the engram. For instance, a fellow remembers one thing out of a tonsillectomy: he remembers the nurse saying “I’ll get you some ice cream” That is all he remembers out of the engram. But that is all you need, because you will find out there was then a terrific contest for a long time to get ice cream from a girl.
You are not trying to hang his own sins on him, you are not being punitive with him. All you want him to do is recognize that he made the decisions which gave him these engrams, that these engrams are selectively his. You don’t even have to educate him to that effect; you just get him to get these decisions.
Now, a postulate may not desensitise on the first recall, but we have a technique for that: Repetitive Straightwire. You get him to recall it again and again and again and again and again, without taking him back to it. Just get Straightwire on it. Or you try to get an earlier one and an earlier one and an earlier one. But if he doesn’t obviously experience relief on such a postulate, or experience a recovery, there is an earlier one. And if you can’t find the earlier one, get him to remember the later one again and then try the earlier ones, because the later ones are lying as a sort of a burden on the earlier postulates.
You look for these postulates just like you look for engrams, but using Straightwire. When you find somebody stuck on the time track, for instance, you can handle him with flash answers; you can actually get postulates on a flash-answer basis. It is really not necessary to do so, but if the case is extremely reluctant to give you the hot dope, ask him, “What postulate do we need to resolve the case? (snap!) What is the age? (snap!) In the house? (snap!) Hospital? (snap!) Where were you? (snap!)” and so on.
All of a sudden he will remember, “Gee whiz, it was my grandparents, and they used to try to take me away from my parents’ home. And I hated to go home with my grandparent” (or vice versa), “and I was wishing all the time that I could stay home and I didn’t have to go over to my grandparents, because they had antimacassars on all the chairs and it was just miserable; I didn’t dare move while I was in the house and so forth, and I never liked to go there so I didn’t want to go there.”
All of a sudden you get this postulate, he ceases to be hung up on the track there, and the grandparents’ house will open up. If the grandparents’ area does not open up, you just ask him for the first time he decided he didn’t like to go to his grandparents’ house.
Don’t be surprised, if you do Postulate Processing correctly, to find the individual’s life opening up back into childhood, early childhood, infancy. And if it is done very, very well (I haven’t done this yet, but I am sure it would work), it unburdens so swiftly you may pick up postulates immediately after birth. Maybe he didn’t like the idea of being put in with all the other babies that were squalling. He said, “I hate all this. I don’t like this” You pick up this sort of a “felt” statement; it is not articulated in any way. It was just his postulate to himself as a sort of a feeling “I don’t like these other kids” And he has always been annoyed ever since with children quarreling.
Now, with earlier methods of processing we used to go over periods like that ad infinitum and take the sensitivity off them. But there isn’t any reason to do that if you can just get the charge off the postulate itself.
It doesn’t matter too much how the postulate came into existence. It doesn’t matter that his mother and his father used to beat him and the teachers in school were mean and that he had every reason in the world to have this postulate. If he keeps telling you all the reasons he had to have this postulate, you just haven’t got anything like a central computation on this case yet, because he is still rationalising: “The reason I made this postulate was because . .
?” He is blaming it on somebody else. You will find that he does this over and over in life.
You can get rid of postulates by taking off engrams and locks — ARC locks and so forth. The postulate sort of flies out by accident. And very often after you have run an engram out the preclear will tell you what he thought about it, and he will knock the postulate out. Knocking the postulate out does twice as much good as taking out the engram. The fellow can be beaten up, knocked down, shot up, sent up in a balloon and dropped from ten thousand feet, mangled, mauled, join the Communist Party — he can do anything destructive in his life — and it won’t do him any slightest harm until he says, himself, “That’s the way it is.” The second he says that is the way it is, that’s it!
Now, you know how we used to hang people with phrases? A preclear would come up and say, “Well, I don’t want to stay in this engram” and you would say, “Get the command ‘Stay there’” This was very bad, because it upset his morale. It kept showing him that it was other things, not his own self-determinism, one right after the other — all these other things. But you can feed a person’s postulates back at him and all it does is keep proving to him that he is in command of himself. So you can take his comments about situations and then look for the postulates which caused him to make the comment.
He says to you, “Well, I never did like other people.” “Well, when did you decide you didn’t like other people?” He tries to tell you he hasn’t decided this at all, he is just trying to explain to you why. So you say, “When did you decide?”
He thinks again, “Gee, I did decide one time. I forget when it was. Oh yeah, in the army. Oh yeah, the army! Sure. And that was because I hated to cook.” “When did you make up your mind you hated to cook?” You keep hanging him with his own conclusions.
He will go back and suddenly realize something, and he will tell you, “Well, it was because my mother made so much fuss and so much noise and so forth, and I finally concluded I didn’t like to cook. I wouldn’t go near a cook stove; I wouldn’t have anything to do with a cook stove because my mother . . ?” “When did you first decide not to like your mother?” “Oh, I never decided that?” “When did you decide that you had to honor your father and your mother?” “Oh, why, that’s one of the Ten Commandments, isn’t it?” Off you go. You get him agreeing in Sunday school when he was three years of age to obey the Ten Commandments. Great!
I know of no faster way to get a preclear early on the track. But if you don’t get into an early period on the track, don’t worry about it. Look at the preclear and figure out what is obviously wrong with him and then try to unburden the case up to the point where he will tell you what is wrong with him. Don’t evaluate him. Don’t give him a lot of stuff and evaluation, but just make an estimate of the case and kind of steer it just a little bit.
But he will tell you, if you keep unburdening light things. You will get postulates like “I decided I didn’t like myself.” “What did you decide after your mama whipped you?” “Well, I decided I didn’t like myself.”
Of course, right behind that is the statement “Now, you don’t like yourself, do you, when you do things like that?” As long as he keeps saying “So what! Scram, babe.” he is all right, he is healthy. But one day he will say, “Well, I don’t like myself, that’s right.” Thud! He has hit the bottom of the tone scale and he is dead. He is in a new static — because every one of these failure postulates and new conclusions is a static. So you get the static and then you get the fellow moving out of this static — you get motion until he makes another static. A man’s life is thus compartmented into many, many statics, and what you are doing is picking up all the statics in the line, and of course you will get more motion in the individual the second you get the statics out of the road. It is very simple.
Now, you can ask a person when he made a decision to survive. The thing may be sitting on a manic or something of the sort, and it will desensitize when he gets it. You want all his postulates.
Don’t worry about a postulate doing anybody any good, because he can make a postulate right here in present time that is as valid as the old postulate you just threw away. You get the idea? There isn’t any point in worrying about his having to rebuild his life. If he figures his life ought to be rebuilt, he can just sit there and make all these postulates all over again. He can handle this; he will just create all the statics at one time if he wants to. You can even tell him this: “It doesn’t change your life unless you want it to?”
So, here is a list of things you can look for; these are postulates to find in Validation Postulate Processing, or you can run them preceded by not:
Or his postulates or conclusions
You find these on all dynamics.
For instance, you say, “Do you remember a time when you didn’t want to see? Do you remember a time when you just decided you couldn’t see?”
The fellow will say, “Oh, no. My eyes have been bad ever since I was about fifteen, and I would never have said anything like that to myself. As a matter of fact, I was never able to see.” and so on. He will tell you all about this and go on and on, and then all of a sudden he will say, “Well, yeah. Yeah, I remember I used to sit in this prep school, and they had all these lights in front of me. I didn’t like to sit in the study hall every night, so the reason I was sitting in the study hall. . . I finally told them that the lights were hurting my eyes and I complained to my parents the lights were hurting my eyes. I didn’t want to sit in the study hall.” “What happened?” “Well, I laid in bed the next morning and the headmaster came in and he said to me, ‘What’s the matter with you?’ I told him, ‘My eyes are bad.’ So they took me up and had me fitted with glasses. You know, I’d forgotten all this until just now?”
You will find there are many of them. There are earlier conclusions about that. Don’t think it is enough to get up just one postulate and then blow the case, because there are dozens of them. What you want to get is the earliest postulate. You will find that the postulates which are holding the individual may be prenatal.
If you walk up to a little child of five years of age, three years of age or four years of age and say “What is about the first thing you can remember?” the child is liable to tell you quite bluntly, “Being in Mama’s tummy.” That is a fact! We just never thought to make the test. “What was Mama saying?” “Well, I don’t know what the words mean, but she was bawling the maid out. Her name was Bridget.”
Mama says, “No! That was the name of the maid, and she was fired before the child was born. The child has never seen Bridget. He must have heard me talking about it — didn’t you, dear?”
This is the broad category of what you want in Postulate Processing. You can actually sit down with this list yourself and find out all the times you concluded to do all these things and try to get all the times when you concluded not to do all these things. You can do it yourself, if you want to. You keep going over it and over it, and all of a sudden the basic computation or louse-up on your case will suddenly fall out.
For instance, there is a very central aspect of any case: the individual’s desire to experience. Life has to experience to maintain itself in motion; therefore, it has to desire to experience. When an individual’s desire to experience fades away, that is tough; the individual starts to seek a static. You will find individuals going around saying “I want security” Security is a static; position is a static. They want to attain a static before they want to experience; they cannot attain the static unless they experience. So they are hung on the horns of this dichotomy. This is a paradox.
A person has got to have position and security in order to experience, he thinks, and so what he should do during his life is climb up to a point where he reaches a static. He doesn’t realize that he is climbing toward a static. When he gets to this static, it is the same as dying, even though it means five million dollars in the bank and eight yachts and nine Packard cars, because it is a static. He is hung with this stuff now, and he thinks from there he will be able to experience. Oh, no, he won’t! He will spend all of his time trying to maintain and defend his position, if he gets into a static state where he is attacked by other individuals trying to experience.
The way an individual can experience best is with empty pockets. If you don’t believe it, empty your pockets sometime and decide you are going to San Francisco or someplace on nothing. You will experience.
You can almost position an individual on the tone scale by discovering whether this individual is still seeking experience or seeking a static of position and security.
All security and all such statics are illusions. Experience is quite a bit more real than the illusion, because it is motion. And position and security are an illusion of a static and they are only achieved, actually, by going through static cycles. Go through repetitive motions often enough and you generally wind up on top of the pile. One way or the other, you achieve a static.
So you work for sixty years for the telephone company and you finally get the retirement pay of seventy-five dollars, and then you are “secure.” Secure to do what? You have been working all this time and you feel you have security. You shouldn’t change your job because you have security and this is wonderful security, and you are getting along well — you get along with the boss, you get along with the girls in the office, you get along fine, you know your job, you know everything there is to know about it — and one of these days you will be the assistant executive vice-president to the teller’s cage. You figure all this out and you work along and you tell everybody how you are well situated in life, then you walk in one day and there is a pink slip in your envelope — boom! You say, “What! This can’t be, this can’t be.”
Of course it can’t be, because we can’t conceive lack of motion very much and that is sure lack of motion. You say, “This can’t be because I was perfectly satisfactory in the position.” And you go in and find out why; the funny part of it is that your friend Oscar Zilch married the boss’s daughter, and now he has to have a job and only so many can be on the payroll, so you are gone.
That is “security” People will shadowbox all their lives for this security; they never change, never try to better themselves, never try to do anything, because they are looking for security. It is just about as secure as putting cellophane down on a piece of water and then saying?” Well, now I can walk on water?”
There is only one security, and when you have lost that security, you have lost everything you have. And that is the security of confidence in yourself — to be, to create, to make any position you want to make for yourself. When you lose that confidence, you have lost the only security you can have. Yet a man, as he lives through life, postulates away to himself that self-confidence. Self-confidence is self-determinism — one’s belief in one’s ability to determine his own course. As long as one has that he has the universe in his pocket. And when he hasn’t got that, not all the pearls in China nor all the grain and corn in Iowa can give him security, because that is the only security there is.
You have a very definite goal, then, in light processing: You are trying to give the preclear back to himself by letting him find all the times when he decided not to have himself. He will come on up the tone scale in exact ratio to how much he takes himself back under his own cognizance.
The individual’s wish to have somebody else create his security for him is a wish to abnegate his own post of command, abdicate from that and go away and let somebody else take the responsibility. This is very fine for evolution, but not very fine in living one’s own life.
Now, there is another tone scale. Down around 0.0 we have “I am not” Just above that at 0.5 is “I’m not because they won’t let me”
At 1.1 we have “I would be if I could get around them”
At 1.5 the fellow thinks, “I’ll be if I destroy them” At 2.0 we have “I’ll be despite them”
Somewhere up around 2.5 is “I’m even with them and I don’t like it”
At 3.5 to 4.0 we have “I’m working with them”
Then, up in the upper band of enthusiasm, around tone 10.0 or 11.0, is “I am and they need me”
And way above that level we have “I am” Also well above that level, we have the “I-they-” series: “To some degree, I am them because I don’t have to worry about it. I take good care of them” This is moving up into a theta-motivated sort of thing.
This is interesting, because it is the evolution of an epicenter into a center. And it is the fall of a command center, or control center, to an epicenter.
Down at the bottom, from “I am not” up to 1.5, the fellow is out of valence. Then, up at 2.5, he is more or less in valence, with poor perceptics. Up at 4.0, he is in valence with all perception And in the upper reaches, he has a high command/control level on the environment.
So when you are processing somebody, you are taking him up the tone scale from all the “I am not” to the “I am’s” And you do that by restoring his self-determinism.
Somewhere along the line they are going to get the idea that their mission is to eat people. It is along about 2.3 or something like that, and it says, “I am, and I exist solely to control other people.”
Down at the bottom we get an epicenter; “I am not” is an epicenter under the command of a control center. The epicenter knows it is not in command and it knows it is MEST and it knows its place and so forth.
At the next step up, we get an epicenter which is almost accepting this role but not rebelling.
Up above that, along about 1.1, we have an epicenter which is trying to resurge and regain some tiny bit of control.
Next up, at 1.5, we have an epicenter which is making a flat fight of it against the new control center or the control environment. It makes a fight of it.
Then up at 2.0 we have an individual who is about 50 percent epicenter and 50 percent control center; he argues with himself and with the environment, and sometimes the epicenter is in control and sometimes the control center is in control, and it gets very interesting.
Up above that level we may have a new control eenter forming in the environment; the epicenter actually is in operation, but only at the level of “Sorry, I don’t amount to much. I’ve been beaten a lot of times, but I’m as good as they are; I can stay in there and pitch. I may be just a cog in this here machine, but I’m a cog anyhow and I’ll be a cog. I don’t like it, but here I am and I’m not going down any lower on the tone scale. And I’m bored.”
Next up is an epicenter which is actually the old control center. It is still the control center and it works on the basis of “Well, I’m in control of the organism pretty well, and I’m working with the environment. And I can control the organism pretty well; I’m working with the environment. I’m not too happy but I’m there.”
Above that level, the control center is being very active. It is now starting to assure its own control of its own organism. It is fairly secure in command. Here is the general who, when he rides down the camp line in a jeep, doesn’t get spat at from all the tents. In other words, he issues a statement to the effect that there will be pleasure Saturday night, and there is! The control center in that position is still paying a lot of attention to its own organism. Its attention is directed to its own organism to a large degree, as well as to the environment.
And then up around 4.0, you have the control center capable of directing the organism so ably, with its authority so little questioned, in such good command of the situation, that it is extroverted almost entirely and the body acts almost as an automatic response mechanism toward the environment.
Above that level, you have a control center so very nicely in command of the environment and so far ahead of the environment, really, so well in control of the body, that it is not at all introverted. The organism is pretty well off; it is not only handling the environment but speculating and reaching out in addition to that and doing a lot of extra creative work and so on into the future.
So, down near the bottom, the epicenter is stepped on, barely able to hold its head above water. Further up, the epicenter has become a center, although there may be a new center forming. And up at the top the epicenter is back in command again.
A happy individual is one who is in full control of himself automatically, so that he doesn’t even have to think about himself, ever. And that is the way he gets at the top of the scale.
The way you get there is by picking up the old epicenters and running them on up to the top of the tone scale. When you have run them all up, I don’t know what you get — maybe an angel or something. But on light processing you certainly will get something very superior.
You can take this business of asking the individual about his future plans, what factors there are in the present that inhibit his future plans and so on, and you can gradually straighten him out. That is right in there as a part of Postulate Processing.
Now I want to give you a little statement on the subject of anatomy that I would like you to look for and see if you find.
I was talking about the evolution of the mouth back down the track. I want to tell you how to handle a toothache. The basic engrams are, evidently, on the chain of the mouth — the teeth. The fifth cranial nerve is one of the biggest nerve conduits in the body. Why? Certainly persons getting their teeth knocked out a few times would not account for this, because they get their arms and legs chopped off too; they get all bruised up. So why is it that the fifth nerve, which runs around the jaws, is so big? Furthermore, why are teeth armor-plated the way they are? Why do they die a couple of times in one generation of the organism? They must have been a lot of trouble.
That nerve conduit got there because it had a lot of pain to conduit. But it certainly isn’t just the ordinary pain of getting your teeth knocked out. That isn’t enough. Have you ever seen a person with a toothache? I don’t know any pain in the body that can get up to this magnitude and stay there. It is very interesting stuff.
I told you earlier about development of the cells, the tongue, and so on. Along about the time this orgahism migrates onto the beach in good, solid, Darwinian evolutionary tradition, it will detach some of its own cells and mount them in the lip of the shellfish. Did you ever see a barnacle? This would be a very small edition of a barnacle, mounted in the lip of the shellfish.
Then one day the organism has an emergency and claps its shell shut. The organism does not bother to look around and say?” Well, let’s see if all the sand is out of this are?” before it snaps shut — the shell just goes bang! But there is a nice, little, beautifully sharp piece of sand, and this microscopic spore gets caught. The piece of sand comes up edgewise and goes bang! These are some of the most beautiful engrams you ever ran into — the preclear probably will just scream faintly and faint if you get him up to this point.
And out of that spore comes the stomach and various parts of the anatomy. Somebody worrying about an obscure chest pain has possibly not hit that spore, but it is out of one of these, and this is just about the basic on that chain. It is probably something of about that magnitude — something tiny.
People talk about theta facsimiles being stored electrically. Bury that idea: it smells bad. The point is that the theta facsimiles which collect around something that you could barely see in a microscope are enough to turn the human organism into a writhing wreck. If you don’t believe it, go down and look in the dentist’s office and listen outside the door for a few minutes. That is very educational.
And why do people get so upset with a toothache and why do they have this big nerve? The reason is that this happened again and again and again, and every time this happened, the theta facsimile would be used for new design. The things that appeared around the lips of these shells evidently appeared on the top side first, because there was more shelter, and then they appeared on the bottom lip. Every time these things would get disrupted they would say, “Next time we have got to have a tougher outer skin!” And the next time they would make one, but in the meantime they got this sand — engram after engram after engram.
Somewhere along the line you occasionally find a worm boring in there. (Dentists are actually in the valence of these worms!)
If you want somatics for your preclear. just coax him into finding these spores and then start running them out. This fifth nerve has never had any explanation; it never has had. Why is it so big and why can it carry such magnitude of pain? (I haven’t told you the worst of it yet.) The magnitude of pain which it carries is incredible.
And why is it that when you get a sore tooth the whole fifth nerve starts in, so that if you get a toothache on one front tooth, the toothache ends up going through your whole jaw and you sort of feel like you are just going to blow to pieces? People tie up their jaw, traditionally, and they go down and say to the dentist, “Oh-h-h! I’ve got a toothache?” And they say, “Oh, I hate to go to see the dentist; it’s so dreadfully painfull.”
I would like to know what is really painful about a dental operation. There is nothing really painful about a dental operation. You sit down in the chair, he takes a pliers or a drill, and pulls the tooth or drills it out — nothing much happens. Actually, you could probably suffer that a lot easier than losing a finger or something like that; that would be something to worry about. But people don’t worry nearly as much about losing a digit as they do about losing a tooth. I have seen this and it has been a great mystery to me.
There is another point: Why do some people like night but not daytime? Why does the sun make some people sick? I can tell you that. After this shellfish gets pried loose from the bottom in a storm or something like that, it goes tumbling up on the beach. (We had beachheads during the war, and I always used to notice we had a high incidence of toothache, headaches, sickness and so on during these, and I just always assigned them to combat. No, it was the beach!) This poor spore is in a shell which is torn loose off the bottom and goes rolling into the surf and gets tumbled over and over and over, and it hits dozens more shells and so on. It is a living organism in the middle of a dead organism. The main organism is deader than a mackerel.
Then the tide goes out. There it sits on the beach and the sun comes down. The first thing you notice about this little shell is that you will have to run the engrams out of the cells inside. These are mostly sand, though occasionally there are splits and so forth. Each one of the cells inside will have a separate engram.
By the way, you get hold of one of these little tiny cells inside of this spore, and your preclear has located it and he is all set, then he suddenly recognises this thing and he gets the somatic on it and he goes “Ox” Why? You are running just tiny little cells, but you are getting these terrific somatics out of it. Fortunately, they go out very quickly. I have never seen anything reduce as fast as these things do.
Now what happens? These little cells die. The shell lies out in the hot sunlight and these dead cells generate gas, and they generate more gas and more gas and more gas. The shell itself is still alive because it is very hardy; it has been built that way. That shell has been built to withstand sand and so forth. And the gas pressure gets tougher and tougher and tougher and tougher and then bang! It explodes.
Have you ever seen an icicle fall and splinter? It sounds like all the crockery busting in the china closet. You can get sonic on this stuff; you can also get sonic on surf and so forth.
Unfortunately the end of this lecture has been lost. All recordings that we have been able to locate end abruptly at this point. However, similar material is covered in the lecture entitled “The Evolution of Man According to Theta Facsimile?” in this volume, and in the book “A History of Man” by L. Ron Hubbard, chapter 4, under the subtitle “The Clam”