And this is the second lecture of the 22nd of December, 1953.

Tonight I want to tell you a fairy tale. And a fairy tale which I'm sure you will find very touching, and which even might make you weep. Only you won't be weeping for the characters in the fairy tale, you'll be weeping for you.

I always save, on such occasions as this, as you know, thirty thousand or forty thousand processes and eighteen or twenty million shortcuts, but this time we're going to have something that is usable, very usable. And it starts out with this fairy tale, and how it ends, I myself am not too sure. That's mostly up to you.

You see, once upon a time, there was a very, very bad fairy — and a very, very wicked fairy, a very vicious fairy. And this fairy came over and saw a fellow, and sat down — he was minding his own business, he was in a park — and the fairy said to him, "Would you like to have three wishes?"

And the fellow says, "Go away." He says, "You're just an illusion." He said, "You're something out of Scientology."

And she says, "No, no. Seriously, would you like to have three wishes? Just three, that's all."

And so, he thought it over for a moment, and he thought, "Gee. You know, that'd be real nice of you."

She says, "They'll all come true. Every one of them will come true."

And he says, "Well, now, let me see . . . You mean they really will come true?"

"Yes, sir. Yes, sir."

So he got his three wishes, and he's still in the mest universe. His wishes all came true.

That's all that's the matter with a postulate: It's got with it the desire that it must come true.

And when you were little children they came in and pulled this gag on you too, you know?

They came in and said, "Now, here's a nice fairy tale. And it's all about these nice little fairies. And they asked this little boy if he wouldn't like to have three wishes, and he said yes, so he used up two of them getting the first one cancelled. Well, you still were left with the impression that it might be very desirable to have a wish which would then come true.

I point that out to you: It would then come true, after you had wished it. It immediately supposed that time would involve itself with the wish.

So, the wish, therefore, could appertain and apply to nothing but havingness. See — time, come true, havingness, and there we are.

So, when we look over the problem of a postulate, we find out that everybody is interested in postulates simply and solely for this reason: They want something to come true.

Competence is the estimation of effort. Effort is making two things coincide at one point or stop coinciding at a point or change coincidence at a point. In the final analysis, that's the basic.

Now, that's why it's a "two" universe. There can't be a "one" effort. Now, every time you start to make a "one" effort, you start reaching out and fighting nothing. Therefore, you don't like nothing.

So, if you estimate an effort into space and nothing is there — you have walked down the stairs and you've decided there's another step at the bottom of the stairs, and you take that extra step. Well, all right. That's fine, but jars you up some.

Now we walk downstairs and we get to the next-to-the-last step and decide there are no more steps; and immediately one gets shaken up rather badly. Those are misestimations of effort: making two points coincide in the wrong place. In the MEST universe that's being wrong, really — it's failing to make two points coincide. So, estimation of effort.

Now, when one looks at two particles which are going to coincide, he in essence has to make a wish. You see? But at first he says they're going to coincide and that's all, and they just coincide.

And after that he says, "Well, they're going to coincide."

And after a while he says, "They'd better coincide." And he gives a lot of other particles to shepherd them around and push them together or pull them apart, and just make just exactly happen there what he wants to; he's really got it protected and estimated.

And after a while, he just wishes he could.

So a fellow is only trapped in this universe at the point he starts wishing and stops doing. And when an individual wants his postulates to come true, he eventually gets bogged down in what is known as "truth" in a scientific textbook. And this "truth" only has to do, really, with one thing — and that's to fix an idea, to make it endure. And this idea, then, must endure one way or the other until it comes true. And then you've got the entire cycle of this universe, because then wishes never come true. When you start wishing and you stop acting, why, nothing's going to come true after that.

So a fellow hits that bridge point, and beyond that point he has nothing to offer but hope. He wants from others reassurance. He helps, and has to help, because he's in a coincidence whereby all by himself he can't cause something to happen. He's got to be very determined about it happening, and he's got to do this and that.

Well that, in essence, is the degeneration of a thetan. If you want to know how to do SOP 8-O, why, it's along that line. You put him into a position where he can do, not just hope he can do. Where he can fail and not give a darn that he fails. Where he can lose and just finds losingness the part of a game. And when an individual can do that, he is in wonderful condition. He's also happy, which might have some bearing on the situation.

That's because he's free. But what's he free of? He's free of a cycle of action. He doesn't have to have a cycle of action. First, because when he starts a cycle of action, he brings one off. He doesn't have to worry about it. And next, he doesn't have to worry about a cycle of action because if he doesn't complete one, why, it doesn't mean his wreck and ruin forevermore.

And below that bridge point, which you might call the break point, way back on the track, the individual has this as a very, very important thing: effort — estimation of effort to make two points coincide. He wants to make one point be at one place in coincidence or in relationship to another point in another place, or two points come together at one place, or any combinations that you could make out by taking a couple of cubes of sugar and pushing them around in a piece of space. Any combination, then, of those two cubes would be what he's trying to do. You can pull them apart, and you can push them against each other, and you can change them, you can start them toward each other and then make them swerve off, and — in other words, all these patterns of motion.

Now, let's look at this cycle of action. What happened to him? What happened to him? He just got into a longer and longer cycle of action. And he'd start on a cycle, and the break point was when he got down to a point of where he hoped it'd happen. And he doesn't know the end, he never knows the end of the story; that is lack of confidence — complete lack of confidence. Of course, it spoils an awful lot of amusement for you to know the end of every story that you happen to look at. Well, you can bar out some of that knowledge and still not cave in.

But it is not a sad and sorry and horrible thing to know the end of the story. That's not a sad thing. There's nothing wrong with knowing the end of the story. Because you don't know that you are entirely dependent upon amusement. You don't know that you have to have this stretched-out time factor of "What is the end of the cycle?" Since you're in a perfectly wonderful frame of mind as long as you can make two particles coincide.

You ever make a hole-in-one in golf? I imagine you were kind of pleased about that time. Well, you've made two particles in essence coincide. You made a ball go into a cup and you completed your end of cycle.

Now, way, way back on the track, a fellow didn't complete his first cycle and somebody sympathized with him, and somebody told him how sad this was, and somebody told him that they were very sorry that he couldn't reach the end of cycles, and etc., etc., etc., and he sort of got paid for not reaching the end of a cycle. In other words, he got some sensation, he got some effort of his own — not of his own production. And so he began a dwindling spiral.

The end of cycle, then, becomes the most important single curve which we can draw. It starts, it changes, it stops. It goes there. And in the mest universe, it's create, survive, destroy. It gets that long.

Well, what happens to a fellow who reaches for a doorknob to open the door? He estimates the effort, he reaches for the doorknob, he turns it, he pulls the door. All the way along the line he is estimating effort. He's estimating coincidence.

When he feels he can no longer properly estimate effort, he can't see. He doesn't see anymore. Why? Well, seeing is in essence a matter of particles. It's a matter of motion, it's a matter of energy, and therefore a person who cannot estimate effort is unable to handle energy and so he can't perceive. He can't reach and withdraw the way he should in order to make a coincidence of himself and a scene so that he can perceive it. He can't stop a pattern in midair, you might say, and look at it. Lots of things he can't do. But they all boil down to: He can't predict the position of particles. And if he can't predict the position of particles, he develops anxiety. He develops all sorts of interesting dodges.

We have this condensed curve — look, and when that's condensed we get into emotion, and when that's condensed we get into effort, and when that's condensed we get into thinking of a computive variety.

A fellow who is thinking hard about the future is a fellow who has already admitted that he cannot control the future. He has to think about it. He needs to compute and use Boolean algebra or something, in order to predict the future. That's because the particles that he is trying to make coincide or part or change, he's trying — the particles he's trying to start, stop and change — these particles are not within his control, because he can't reach that far. They have a time, because they move away. And he feels he doesn't have the power to predict them all the way.

So he just says, "Well, I wish they'd be over there." And of course that requires, then, future. And that stretches longer and longer until at last he's getting born, and hoping he'll get through with it somehow. And if he hopes hard enough and he wishes hard enough and he makes everything come true and he says everything with sufficient determination, why, eventually he'll get to die. And that's his reward for wishing so hard.

All his wishes come true. That's what — in essence, what a thetan starts to do very early on the track, and that's one of the things he starts wishing. And that's one of the things he hangs on himself, and it's about the most vicious thing he could hang on himself: that his postulates will take place.

A careful analysis of any case will demonstrate that he has wished on himself everything that has happened to him. You don't think so offhand, but this isn't trying to shove into somebody's lap an entire responsibility for the entire universe all of a sudden.

But the truth of the matter is, as you backtrack it, you will find that the sickness which he is now fighting, he once wished for.

An individual will say, "No, no, no! This never happened. I never wished for this sickness. No, no!"

And you say, "Well, did you ever wish you were sick?"

"No, no! Not me. I want to be well. I mean, I never wished for a sickness."

And you say, "Well, now let's take school. Did you ever try not to go to school? Or did you ever get sick so you wouldn't have to go to school?"

And the fellow says, "You just whipped me, fellow."

Because anybody that's sick today hoped he'd be sick some day in the past.

But earlier than that is "all of his postulates must come true." He's going to prove that he's right to everybody by making his postulates come true. Any way you look at this, he's going to make his postulates come true.

And he makes them all come true. He says to himself one fine day, he said, "Gee, everything I do is wrong." That isn't very much. Wouldn't be anything. See, he's not a bear that's about to eat himself up. He just sits behind all this "postulates must come true" and he keeps trying to operate with that one on the track.

"What I say goes!" is a colloquial phrase. "What I say must go!"

And so if the fellow says, "Well, everything I do is wrong, and I never do anything right, and I hate myself," and so on and you start processing him as an auditor, you could actually by — just strip his track down to a point where he first said that and look it over and they'd blow. And you could do that if this wasn't basically effort. Because the effort he has made to make the idea stick, to fix the idea in space, or to keep it moving in space — the idea itself is cloaked in such heavy determination that it itself is a lump of effort, and your preclear can't handle effort anymore. So what are we going to do about this fellow? He can't handle effort anymore and he doesn't dare handle it because he can't predict. All right, if he can't predict he can't handle effort. Well, if he can't handle effort, well, you see, he doesn't dare tamper around much with fixed ideas, because if he tampers around too much with fixed ideas, they'll just collapse on him and there he'll be! Upsetting, isn't it? I mean, he's caught there in a trap.

He won't be well unless he can regain his force. All right, if he can't regain his force then he won't be well, will he? And if — all that's wrong with him is he can't regain his force. Well, that's simple then — all you do is make him regain his force. But he can't regain his force because he can't touch any part of his force. And you can't find a gradient scale, you think maybe sometimes, to give him a sufficient entrance into it so that he can possibly come up the line on force.

If you were able to turn on a few thousand watts in your preclear rather rapidly, let me assure you, he wouldn't have any trouble with creation. The only thing he does with creation that's troublesome to him is run out of material. He'd be very happy to construct a body — lump! bang! crash! — mold its head together and put it all up and make it operate. He'd be very happy to do that. A body you could see and a body I could see — a body everybody could see.

But you see, that unfortunately requires a very heavy mass of force, see? See, a very heavy mass of particles. Particles in essence are force.

What is force? Random motion of particles. What's energy? Energy is particles. And if he doesn't have any force, why, he can't handle these particles.

Well, the horrible part of it is, if he doesn't have any space, he can't handle particles either. And so you say, "Well, the best way to do is let's go into this problem and let's rehabilitate his space and then he can have some particles." But we find out by rehabilitating his space, it tears to pieces the particles which he has and you upset his havingness. You know, we do — make too much space with a fellow, and it starts blowing holes in the hard energy which he has around. And blowing these holes in this hard energy is very hard on him, believe me. Because, the next thing you know, why, all of his energy's kind of gooey.

Hate is all right in its place. Take out in space where there's very little energy — you go into good old space opera, and what do we find in space opera? We find an awful lot of hate. That's because nobody's got any barriers. If they hate hard enough, why, they'll make some. That's about all there is to that.

Then you get down on a planet and everybody is trying to love each other like mad so they'll dissolve some of these barriers because they've got too many. The two never get together. When spacemen hit planets and when the planet people hit spacemen, why, they just don't mix very well — between the two you get religion. Well, anyway . . .

Love and hate — love melts everything down, hate makes it all solid. Well, you say, "Well, let's handle it in love and hate, then, and that's the best way to go about this problem. We'll handle it in love and handle it in hate and so forth, and we'll get him over having to hate everything, and we'll get him over to — so he doesn't have to love everything but he can. And we'll give him freedom in these two emotions, and it'll all straighten out" — and they've been doing that for a couple of thousand years, and that failed too. They haven't even been doing it with our processes, but at the same time, it hasn't been successful. And with our present processes it isn't successful.

So all right, well, that's tough, that just leaves us in a horrible spot, because — by this time we get kind of lost, because if we try to get this individual to handle a couple of particles and that sort of thing, the progress he makes is so slow. We start to remedy his havingness by making him pull eight anchor points in — we have to remedy the havingness of any case because he hasn't got enough mass — and we find out that that will go just so far, and he keeps on after a while. And then the GE — if he's still in the body, God help him — if he's still in the body and he keeps remedying his havingness while being stuck in the body, after a while the body itself will develop its own appetite for the energy thus being generated and he just winds up sort of feeding the body. So that isn't too good either.

Furthermore, he starts up flows that almost knock his head off and he does other things that are rather difficult; and so they — all these techniques have a successfulness, they have a — you can go up the line, only they travel a little too slowly. Because what are you trying to do all this time? You're trying to rehabilitate somebody's ability to make two points meet or part or change, and — in other words, you're trying to make him predict. And there is your prediction cycle. If you can't make him predict, why, you can't make him make two points coincide, because he knows better than to handle energy. He knows better than to look at anything. He can't predict what's going to happen to it.

Now, you stand up talking to somebody, and you try to predict what they're going to say back. And if you've been around somebody who said a lot of nasty things to you — lots, and suddenly, and kind of took your head off, bang! and you weren't looking for it at all — why, after a while, you get very fixed and very alert on what people are going to say to you, because it's very, very violent. Because there's an emotional impact behind it.

Some people have ridges just back of their faces which are as solid as can be and the whole face is gone, simply trying to predict what people are going to say. You know, they're sort of holding back while they push forward. They are reach and withdrawing at the same time because of what people liable to say to them, what people liable to feel, the emotion they're liable to have hitting them all of a sudden. It isn't nice to have all that emotion hitting you suddenly — boom! So, people might shove it at you, so you have to be careful of what you say, and you have to be careful of what you do and so forth.

Why? Because you can't predict.

You go down and talk to a lion, and you go — walk up to the lion, you put your hand in his mouth, he's going to bite. Particularly if you laid a problem out like this: You're going to put your arm in a live lion's mouth and then you're going to kick him in the chin, you would certainly get a tooth scratch. Well now, you could predict that that was going to happen. But all of a sudden one day you're walking down — you know, you're walking down the path and it's a beautiful spring day and there's nothing at all occurring, and you just feel happy as can be with life, and somebody tugs you on the sleeve and says, "Your house just burned down and everybody's dead," you know? What's commonly known as a tone drop. You know, runs a curve on you — sudden curve.

You're walking along and minding your own business and you cross a street and halfway across the street, why, a car hits you, and you're in the hospital for six months. You sure didn't predict that — the coincidence of that car and your body — you didn't predict that at all.

So a person's prediction becomes shorter and shorter and shorter and so time appears to be longer and longer and longer because his prediction is getting shorter and shorter and shorter. He can only predict a sure thing.

You ask a preclear, "How far can you predict into the future?"

And he'll say, "What do you think I got? A crystal ball?" You just said future — that stuck him. He immediately assumed the future was when? You say, "Well, what is the future? How far away is the future?"

Somebody got the answer here, "A couple of minutes."

Well, that's about it. Future's two minutes away. Two minutes from now, I could, without too many qualms, predict that I would be standing here — two minutes from now, without too many qualms. Two minutes from now you could predict that you'll be sitting there — two minutes from now. Two minutes from now we can predict that the world will still be here — we hope.

But the longer this goes and the harder it is to predict, the less and less confidence a person has in an existence continuing. So a continuation of existence becomes his entire fixation, and this in itself is survival. And so he fixes on survival. He doesn't fix on creating; he doesn't fix on destroying, really, he merely fixes on surviving. Why? Because his anxiety is such that he doesn't know for sure if Earth is going to be here a minute from now. He can't tell you for sure if this house is going to be here a minute from now.

You just pin a fellow down and start really pounding him with the — you want the answer to that question. And he'll have to confess that he really actually can't tell you. It's just a slight probability.

So, what's he predicting now? He's able to predict in a small particle line. He can say, "If the universe is here, and if the house is here, and if this room is still here, and if I am still here, why then, a moment or so from now, I will be able to pick up this match and put it at this corner of the desk. And if the universe is still here, and if the house is still here, and if I am still here, and this desk is still here, then in a moment from now, I can pick up the match on this corner of the desk and move it other — to the other corner of the desk. And that is a lead-pipe certainty!"

He's — right there he's dealing with certainty. And so we move into that very thing: certainty. What is certainty? Certainty of the coincidence of particles, certainty of their coming apart. In other words, certainty of a start, stop, change of at least two particles. And that's certainty. That's prediction.

Well, as long as he's ahead of that and he says, "These two particles are going to meet," he could also say, "These two suns are going to meet at a little — some little time in the future."

And that's essentially the only difference between you and a planet builder who is still working. He can say with some certainty, "When I take this mass of particles here the size of Jupiter, and throw it into that mass of not-yet-condensed particles, I will then have a sun here and it will glow."

Now, he can say that with the same certainty as you can say that the match will be at that corner of the desk. Now, it's a big certainty, but it's a certainty of prediction.

Well, how long does it take to move that much mass? A planet the size of Jupiter into a sun — of course, I'm just stating a hypothetical, rather interestingly fantastic idea that anybody ever built these planets. Everybody knows that they just sort of happened. They "aggloomerated." I think that's the latest scientific theory — the "aggloomeration" of planets. They call it that because it's so black out there. Anyway, when we have . . .

It's very scientific, this whole thing. And the truth of the matter is, they were just built. How's a fellow build a house? Well, he gets some material together and knocks it together. And that's the way you build something. You don't have to be as technically exact building a planet as you do building a house. You have to — don't have to know about mortises and jointises. Ah, no.

But again, we're into prediction of particles. How much presence do you have? How much basic presence do you have? You have as much basic presence as you can occupy space. You have as much space as you can span time and predict it.

Well, is there any solution to this? I mean, here you are — here you are only able to control a matchbox full of space or something like that, and stuck inexorably, and completely incapable of doing anything about it. You can't predict whether your preclear is going to be out of his head in the next couple of minutes, and there's two particles you're trying to predict and — the particles that the preclear is still holding on to, and the particle of the body. And you want those two things to uncoincide in space, and prediction of that happening and so forth.

Well, we get into a matter here of an endless cycle, obviously. I mean, here we are. I mean, everything has gone on to a point of anxiety where it has to survive. It becomes an obsession: survival, survival — that's the obsession. It's terrible, but we must survive. Mustn't destroy bodies, mustn't die and so forth. And mustn't create something! That's kind of a shaky thing for an individual to do. If he creates something, why, it might turn out bad and it might cause somebody not to survive or something, and so he'd better not create because he can't predict what's going to happen.

We get into what we call the "Frankenstein effect." The Frankenstein effect: You create this thing — perfect innocence — you create it, it walks down the road, and then you say, "Stop!" you know? It's just about to pick up a small child or something and break it in half.

That was a wonderful picture I've run out of preclears several times, of Frankenstein walking down a stream bed, and he finds a little girl on the bank of the stream and — but just before that he's seen somebody, if I remember rightly, picking the petals off of a daisy and throwing them away. And he sees this little child, so he plucks its limbs off — of the child, you see — and throws them away. It was a very charming picture. It was a great contribution to psychotherapy. (audience laughter) They got the Menninger award for it.

Anyway, when we have a problem in a preclear — we're saying we have a problem, then there is an answer to the problem. He is offering us a problem.

Well, what's a problem? A problem is ways and means of predicting an answer. The way you work a problem is you use certain symbols and you combine them, or you use certain past experiences and combine them, and it all winds up to the same thing: You want to have the answer. That's the first thing you'd say. But you wouldn't have any problem if you merely said, "I want to have the answer. There's the answer." See? I mean that wouldn't be any problem.

So it works out this way: "I want to have the answer. And here is the experience of the past. And if I can associate together the experiences of the past and be warned about certain conditions which may take place in the future, then I will be able to have the answer to the problem."

You've gone down into symbolisms, you've also gone into mathematics, you've also gone into what man considers knowledge in the form of data — data knowledge. Now, that's data knowledge.

Data knowledge is there merely so one can predict a result. And when he says "predict a result," he is saying he wants a couple of things to coincide or uncoincide in space; and that's a result.

So somebody wants to predict a result, and that means future. Future coincidence of particles or uncoincidence of particles.

The reason a fellow learns how to drive is so that he can predict the moment when his car will swerve and hit the truck. The reason why they teach little children safety in crossing streets and so forth, is they'll know what crosswalk to be on to be hit. That isn't exactly the reason why, but they're trying to teach them how to make two particles uncoincide. See? Safety.

They're trying to make them not be on the crosswalk when they're not supposed to be on the crosswalk, and be on the crosswalk when they're supposed to be on it and so forth. In other words, coincidence of particles.

Time has no other bearing or relationship or existence than this: coincidence of particles. And that, of course, adds up immediately into havingness. Because you get a lot of particles coinciding, you get a big particle; and that, in itself, is matter made out of energy. So we get time. We get time, and time is composed of the past, the present and the future.

We use the past for a data bin. We use the present for something to perceive immediately in front of us, and we use the future in order to have something to predict for.

And, well, all it amounts to — it's a game of the coincidence and uncoincidence of particles, and it's a very easy game so long as one can predict.

Well, what's predict? It's how wide a piece of time can one occupy.

Now, an individual is in his best state when he's slightly in advance of present time. In other words, he can know the future; he is slightly in advance of present time. He knows the future simply by being in the future and regulating the behavior of particles in the present. That's as far into the future as he's going to get. He can do that any time, however, simply by being a little bit in advance of present time. A thetan works in advance of present time. When he gets back of present time, he isn't working; present time is working on him, then.

That which is effect is after that which is cause. That's the primary definition of cause and effect: That which is effect is after that which caused it. And so cause always precedes effect. And therefore cause is in the future of the effect.

If you look that over carefully, it's very clear. There's nothing difficult about it.

But what do we mean as an effect? Well, we mean the coincidence of particles, of course.

So, when it all boils down, we're talking about the estimation of effort all over again. And we're talking about the prediction of the future, and we find out that an individual is trying to survive simply because he has an obsession about knowing the end of the story. He's got to keep these things all coincided or all uncoincided, and we find this individual in a strongman stunt all down through the ages: He's trying to keep particles apart and he's trying to keep particles together and he's trying to keep particles moving and he's trying to keep particles stopped.

And by the time the preclear sits down in your auditing chair, he's done a lot of this. And he is parked, variously, at any point of the cycle of motion that you could name. The cycle of motion in terms of the universe is create, survive, destroy; and the cycle of motion in terms of motion itself is simply start, change and stop. This is very, very interesting. I mean, hardly anything to that.

For instance, I take this, and it's in a stopped condition right now. And so we start it, we change its motion, and stop it. Start it, change its motion, stop it. That's what you mean by a curve. That's why a curve has always got a curve on it, not a straight line. That's a "curve of motion." It is changed in the middle. Its direction is changed in the middle. And people study curves because nearly all directions change in the middle. There's hardly anything like a straight line anywhere to be found, anywhere. Well, you could also — there's various other things about curves, but they all add up to that: start, change, and stop.

When you think about reach and withdraw, it is a condition where a centralized point is trying to attain and then reach away from another particle; so in essence, we have reach and withdraw as a part of that motion curve of start, change and stop.

Your preclear who can't arrive: He simply knows by this time he can only hope. That's what many a preclear is doing who is just sitting in your auditing chair, and that's practically all you're trying to do, is keep up his hope. Hope that what? Hope that he'll arrive, of course.

What's wrong with him? He can't arrive. See, it's elementary. The fellow can't arrive, that's why he can't get out of his head. You tell him be three feet back of his head, that's a finite point, and he can't arrive there. Why? Because he can't arrive. Why? Because that's the end of a cycle of motion. Why? Because he can't predict being three feet back of his head, so he can't be there, of course. Why? Because he can't arrive.

And so we get circular logic. Nearly all logic is circular in the end. But fortunately, it has its own uses. All right. So much for that.

I hope you understand the problem. And I hope you understand it very well. And I hope you understand that the fellow who is sitting there hoping is a person who is sitting there not predicting.

It was a very wicked fairy indeed who made man want wishes to come true. He's sitting there wishing; he isn't doing. And if you sit there and wish too, as an auditor, why, he can go on wishing and you can go on wishing, and you after a while, why, you'll both wind up in the — as members of the same sympathy club and that's about as far as it'll go. You'd probably have fun, I mean, so on — both hoping, both wishing.

That's essentially what praying is. People can't predict at all and so they say, "Well, something else must be able to predict by this time. There's certainly something predicting something around here. The sun is still shining, and the particles of light are still hitting Earth, so something's predicting."

And so they get together — they get together and wish. Only you call it "prayer." They just wish something won't hit them. And they wish that something else won't happen. And they wish that something good will happen and so on.

A horrible pun could be put in there — I've been associating with the wrong people here lately — a person gets "wishy-washy." (audience laughter) Isn't that terrible? You see what you've done to me in this unit? That's really dreadful!

Well, anyway, you see there's no escape. I mean, just — you might as well quit. Just no reason even to hope — Hubbard's even destroyed hope now.

It's like the fellow — saw a cartoon one time, fellow had a great big black­board, huge blackboard, and it had a long column of figures, and equal sign and then zero. And it had a long equation, and then an equal sign and a zero. And it had another long equation and a longer equation and a longer equation, and they all added up to zero. And there's two professors sitting there looking at the blackboard, and he says, "Well, you've got to hand it to him. He really wrapped it up this time!" Yes, sir!

So everything equals nothing, and there you are. I mean, that's science. And no better description could be made of it: Everything equals nothing, or nothing equals everything. You get — have to get halfway between that to have anything.

So, well, I hope you fully appreciate, then — and I hope you fully appreciate that the problem is hopeless. I hope you appreciate that your cases are hopeless. I hope you appreciate that you can't wish yourself out of your heads. I hope you appreciate that you're done for. There's nothing you can do. I hope you appreciate the human race is lost, and that you'll never be able to do a thing for it. I hope you appreciate that.

Because you've been appreciating it for a long time. And it's about time you stopped!

Well now, every once in a while, I have a process I hold back to process auditors with. Well, I'm leaving here now. I don't have to do any sudden emer­gency processing. You can always count on me having a half a dozen ahead of what you got, simply because you get into trouble, see, and then I have to bail you out; and if I don't use something surprising and startling on you, why, you just don't bail, you see. So that's the only reason I keep inventing new processes — it isn't that they work any better, you see? (audience laughter)

Actually, it's — "He just changes his mind. All this stuff — all of his stuff is contradictory anyway, and it all contradicts everything. I mean, after all we're not solving anything now. I mean, first lecture of the day here today, we were just merely solving Book One, and this stuff's all changed; changes all the time anyhow. You can't predict it. No prediction — let's all pray." (audience laughter)

Well, essentially that's the only reason why we can have a church now is because we can do the only effective praying there can be done, which is predict the coincidence of two particles — pam! Yeah. Sure. All right.

So there must be and might be a technique that'd bail a preclear out of this and wouldn't bog him down, wasn't hard to use, that you could use on yourself and that you just take that and it'd kind of clean a case up all the way up along the line and that would be that. There might be such a technique, you know.

And, of course, if I had it and I didn't pass it along to you, why, that would be upsetting, wouldn't it? So I've decided not to tell you about this one, I've decided to hold this one back. Because some of you might get high enough up the Tone Scale so that I wouldn't know more than you know, and then that would be fatal, you see. And if I held back this piece of information, then of course I'd always know more than you know and so on, and then that would be — that would — well, let's see, what would it do? Just a minute, I'll have to figure out something it'll do. Must be something that it would do! Well, anyhow, there it is.

Well, such a process isn't, however, sufficient into itself. Sometimes you neglect to realize how much you do know about Scientology — quizzes aside. You neglect to know how much you know; and you think, "Well, gee-whiz, why didn't I have that some time ago? And if he'd just come out in the first place a few years ago and said that, why, then you'd know all about it and I wouldn't have had to worry about it, and I wouldn't have fussed and stewed and my case wouldn't have bogged down, and I wouldn't have gone through all this agony," and that sort of thing.

By the way, it isn't true. It isn't necessarily true at all that you could get away with knowing a single line of data — just one thing. Let's take an extreme case. Let's take you, and we're going to invent the culture of Upglotta. It doesn't live on a planet. It doesn't have any kind of language that is detectable. It doesn't use symbols. And however, the people there are so crazy they think the people of Earth are going to kill them; and you're all of a sudden there, and you're going to process them. And you do have a little line that you realize that all you have to say to them is, "Upglolla, upglolla, upglolla," and that will promptly clear them, and they will be in good shape and they won't attack Earth.

Well, you could do that, theoretically; but you see, you don't know the language and you don't know what their behavior might be, you don't know what their customs are, and you don't know what the inner workings are. And so you sit there with about 99 percent of your attention on what might happen, and you forget to say, "Upglolla, upglolla, upglolla," because after all, there's no telling what they're doing. Now, that would be that sort of a problem, you know?

You just take an auditor and you put this "Upglolla" in his hands, and he goes out and he says to a bunch of people, any — expect anything to happen, merely because he doesn't have the other fundamentals to back it up. If he doesn't have these fundamentals, why, he's in horribly deranged condition with regard to an individual.

Supposing you didn't know anything about an engram. And you go up to this fellow and you say, "Well, all right" — and supposing you just didn't know a thing about an engram; you thought a fellow — you know, that brains were born in cabbage patches or something. And you didn't know anything about this, and you went up to some fellow and used this technique and — "gs-gmm-gugy" and he all of a sudden started to have a slight convulsion and then passed out. You knew nothing about havingness; you knew nothing about convulsions that might occur; you knew nothing about a facsimile. What would you do?

Well, he obviously can't go on running this technique because if he — it'd just ruin him, you'd think maybe. Or maybe there's something new and wrong and terrible and strange which has just occurred and somebody's changed all the laws of the universe.

Well, you could always think somebody was about to change the laws of the universe if you didn't know them. If you didn't have any inkling of what the laws of the universe were, why, you could think day to day they'd been repealed and shifted.

People could come along and tell you, "Well, people have changed their mind today, and the laws of the universe are all changed." And you'd just simply have to say yes, because you don't know what they were yesterday. And when they don't even tell you what they are today, why, you'd sure have to agree. Wouldn't you?

Well now, you'll get some character walking around, and you all of a sudden find out that this person can't even vaguely keep his mind on your processing for two minutes; he just can't do it.

You give him a little technique and he just is incapable of it. He keeps flying off the handle, and all of a sudden he'll break down and cry, and he'll do this and he'll do that. There's no consistency, and you don't seem to be able to get any control over him. No control. I mean, just — you keep saying things to him and other things keep happening, and you're not predicting that particle worth a nickel.

Well, that's because you wouldn't know that this individual might have a name, for instance, which caused him to bounce all over the track, or he might have a very deteriorated condition. He might have a deteriorated condition in the terms of arrival, to a point where he couldn't actually walk to a point in the room. You don't have any means or know why he isn't obeying you; you don't have any means of making him obey you just enough. You don't know anything about exterior direction. You're just lost about all these things.

And yet you'd have this little line. Just because you get something new that's a little bit faster, why, don't promptly forget what I've been teaching you here the last few weeks, because you're going to need it; you're going to need all of it. Sooner or later you'll run into it — crunch! And it isn't that you have to carry it around with you in your pocket, but you take a look at this data and you know what it is. All right.

What's this technique? This technique is Step Ia, first line. You almost sprung it out here the other day. It's quite obvious; it sits right in the material.

It's Straightwire on unfinished cycles of action. Now, isn't that a terrible thing? You've been learning all about cycles of action, and you've been doing it in Mock-up Processing and so forth, and yet didn't occur to you that you could do that by Straightwire. That's tough, isn't it?

And yet it's the most effective process there is. That's right, that's the seniorest process there is. That's why it's the first line of Step Ia.

And I've known for a long time — known for a very long time — that prediction, Straightwire on prediction, was very good. And I all of a sudden got it into line today on a tested basis and so forth, so I can give it to you; and it's just at the time when you need it.

You get the fellow to name three cycles of action he hasn't completed.

And then get him to name three cycles of action somebody else hasn't completed.

And then get him to name three cycles of action that somebody else hasn't completed for somebody else.

And you don't have to have in that three cycles of action for himself. Or himself having three cycles of action for somebody else. You don't have to do it that way.

Just three cycles of action for himself — uncompleted cycles of action for himself; three uncompleted cycles of action that somebody else has; three uncompleted cycles of action that somebody has for somebody else. And you go round and round and round and round.

Well, that's not very intelligible, is it? I mean, you ask this — you sit down, this preclear sit down there, you know, and he says, "Say," he says, "what are you talking about?"

You say, "Now, give me another uncompleted cycle of action."

And he says, "What? What are you talking about?"

And you say, "Well, it's very simple. The basic curve of the universe is start, change and stop." You could go on and on there, not be able to do that at all.

So the next one you have to run into is some kind of nomenclature that'll put this across to your preclear. Well, there's a lot of things — the way you can say that. Well, that's the basic way you can say that.

Now, one of it is, "Give me three things which you meant to complete which you never did." That's your patter.

And "Give me three things somebody else meant to complete but never did." That could be your patter too, couldn't it?

"Now give me three people you wanted to reach you — three people you didn't want to reach you," you could put it that way, too.

Well, there's a simpler way of putting all of it, see, a much simpler way. You could say, "Give me three goals which you never achieved; three goals you never accomplished. Somebody else, three goals you never accomplished. Three goals that somebody else had for somebody else that were never accomplished." Round and round and round and round and round and round.

Well, we're ready for that right now, because we've been talking enough about havingness so that you won't do the horrible trick of breaking up somebody's little red wagon. Because this technique would break up somebody's little red wagon rather fast. He'll start to run out engrams on it, because you're rearranging his havingness.

What's his havingness hung up on all over the track? Incomplete cycles of action. Well, if you have incomplete cycles of action, there you are — hung up.

What's "stuck on the track"? An uncompleted cycle of action. You know all this — I was talking to you about this a long time ago.

Well, the patter that best serves on something like this would be almost anything that would fit the frame of reference of the preclear, but it'd be just Straightwire.

And many a preclear can get this who would not be able to tell you where he is not. So that's why it's first on the line. He couldn't give you three places where he's not. But he can give you three things he meant to do that he never did.

See, you can use any kind of patter: "Now, give me three things you meant to do and never did. Somebody else, three things they meant to do and never did. Now somebody else, three things they meant to do for somebody else and never did," and so on. And you go round and round and round and round and round and round.

Now, you can Straightwire yourself on this, because you know what you're reaching for. You know what you're reaching for. Basically you only want this: incomplete stops, incomplete changes and incomplete starts; incomplete creations, incomplete survivals, incomplete destructions; incomplete reachings and incomplete withdrawings; incomplete duplications. And that's the "woiks" as they say in Brooklyn.

So your formula for that runs into all of that.

Now, it'll sort of run out and evaluate for the preclear automatically. But you would be surprised, if — that is to say, if he's a fairly bright preclear you could kind of start him running on this, you know, and he'd find out a lot of this in the course of the next fifteen or twenty or thirty hours of processing. But if he's steered just a little bit, you'll steer him right out of the engram he's in.

Why? What's an engram? It's normally in suspense because it failed to complete a cycle of action. He had an operation; he had an operation for "blugwug." And he had this horrible disease "blugwug," and after the operation he still had "blugwug." You'll find that in suspense; you'll find that engram sitting there, just waiting. You find it right there. All right.

We'll get into this one: He had, for instance, sinus trouble. He was operated on for sinus trouble; didn't end his sinus trouble. He was well for many months after the operation, and then all of a sudden got the same old sinus trouble again. Incomplete cycle of action. And that, in essence, is a failure.

A failure is a cycle of action which one thinks he has completed, which suddenly is demonstrated not to have been completed. That's a big failure — big, big failure. Because that's got a sort of a double-barreled effect on it. And those are the ones you find the individual stuck in — the double-barrel failures — because there's such a terrific tone drop.

You remember the emotional curve and emotional curve processing? Now, you have it in Advanced Procedures and Axioms and you have it in the Handbook for Preclears  — you got material on this — emotional curves. There's a lot about it in there. That's very early material and quite vital.

Because this is the cue: it's how much difference of havingness per unit of time, is the formula of the emotional curve. Rate of change of havingness. When it's real fast, a fellow can get awfully upset by it.

Now, let's take the fellow who receives eight million dollars. He's poor, he's very poor, he knows he'll never have any money, and somebody walks in and dumps eight million dollars on him and it's all in cash. You know where you'd find that fellow? You'd find him in a hospital. You'd find him in an insane asylum. That's just as bad as the fellow sitting there with eight million dollars and his secretary walks in rather casually and says, "Well, the bank just failed and you're completely broke." Honest, he'll just keep sitting there. You've stopped time for him. Because the rate of change of havingness is too great.

I was telling you a little earlier about this fellow and the — throwing away all this mass of radioactive material. His rate of change of havingness — he did it, but his rate of change of havingness was so great that he got a tone drop from high exaltation down to annoyance (slight annoyance, but way up scale annoyance) and then all of a sudden he gets rid of that huge mass, and he went from strong, able, everything, to complete degradation — lower than a tramp or a bum. And he stayed that way for some thousands of years, which gives you some kind of an idea of what the rate of change of havingness will do to somebody. It will park him, but quick. Because it's too much mass, and no prediction with relationship to it.

Now, some fellow has just lost his father, and you've got the horrible job of telling him so. So you walk around and you catch him when he's sitting there — you sort of cheer him up, you get him to a point where he's being very cheerful about life, he's built up pretty good, he's real happy, and then you look at him and you shout at him suddenly, "Your father just died." Well, you'd probably kill him. That's probably what would happen to him.

The way to tell him would be to tell him slow. Let him find out there was something wrong. And then get him thinking about that, and stir it in a little bit more, and then tell him slow and tell him low and don't tell him all at once, because if you can stretch it across a little time, he won't get any emotional shock from it; he won't get a shock. If you let his tone come down a little bit, a little more concerned, a little more concerned, he can hit rock bottom and come back up again. That's because you haven't robbed him, in terms of rate of change of havingness.

Now, he has a father, you see, that's a mass. And you all of a sudden tell him this huge, powerful mass — this thing that carried him around when he was a little baby and supported him most of his life and so forth — you told him this huge, powerful mass is suddenly missing. And you tell him that quick and it's just liable to jar him completely out of orbit; he's never liable to get back into orbit. Preclear comes in, sits down in the chair, and never gets back into orbit.

You can say, "Three uncomplete goals. Give me three uncompleted goals. Give me three goals somebody else failed to complete," and you'll get into the same thing. But know its basic mechanic before you start running into it. But you can just run it and run it and run it.

What kind of cycles of action do we specialize in? Well, I've already covered that: start, change, stop, reach, withdraw are the most important ones offhand. You don't have to run emotion, you don't have to do much of anything with it. You permit him, then, to have unhavingness and havingness.

Now, incomplete cycles of action — a very important level of this is incom-pleted cycles of action on havingness and unhavingness. And you'll track right straight back to the basic curve on the case. And that basic curve is the service facsimile. The fellow has been running over this for ages. And you can Straightwire with this incompleted cycles of action on havingness, incompleted cycles of action on not-havingness, or unhavingness. And you can go right straight back through the emotional range of the individual down through the ages. And you get, in essence, a stripped case.

And this is why the fellow's upset — why he has ridges and why he doesn't have ridges. Now, I covered havingness a little earlier today, and I covered the ridge problem many times, and I told you something was wrong with the fellow's havingness.

Well, when a fellow gets down to the strata of being a Homo sapiens, his rate of change of havingness has all been unhavingness. In other words, it's unhavingness; and so he can't have hardly anything. So it's just at this level in Homo sapiens and a little bit higher that you find it's always a problem in havingness, never a problem in unhavingness.

But his basic cycle is liable to be a curve on unhavingness.

Okay.