Thank you.

Level Two of SLP 8 concerns itself with problems and consequences, and here we are at once at grips with the reality of games theory.

When we are running, as a practice audit on individuals in a class, 8-C, we see the precision of control, we see many other things. Actually, we're running freedom and barriers without many purposes, except we've agreed upon and understood a purpose; the purpose is to get better or to get well or something of the sort.

Now, the — in Start, Change and Stop we have another motive, actually, which is the hidden motive in 8-C which is simply control, and you wouldn't see offhand how these immediately fit under games. But if you tried to play a game with somebody who controlled things very poorly, you will see that control actually is the heart and center of the expertness with which one plays games and is right there in with games.

But we don't see games on parade in Level One of SLP 8, we see it on parade at Level Two, Problems and Consequences.

Now, problems and consequences are run at Level Two with the understanding — with the understanding that the preclear has already been brought well under control, and there are many other little processes under Level One than simply SCS. SCS has some accompanying processes because it has to be an extroversion matched with an introversion, you see, and SCS is introvertive so therefore we have to have some extrovertive processes, and we have those at that level.

But now, at Level Two we are handling — we are handling games really in the rough, in the raw, and we're handling problems and penalties.

Now, penalties, of course, are part and parcel of any game. Some chap tats over the border or something of that sort, why, he's fined six stitches. I mean, it doesn't matter what part of games or what game we enter, we will find some penalties mixed up in it one way or the other and we call those, however, in processing consequences — consequences of. And over here under problems we of course have intention–counter-intention.

Now, the basic definition of a problem is postulate–counter-postulate. That is a problem.

You say, "I am."

And the other — he says, "You're not." And you've got a problem. He says, "Dog."

You say, "Fish." And you have a problem, don't you see?

The machine apparently wants to go up when it must go down and of course you have a problem — postulate–counter-postulate.

Now, we go a little bit further than that and we get intention–counter­intention. There we've gotten action into it, we've gotten some MEST into it. The doingness angle has entered the thing when we say intention versus intention. "They're going to go thataway and we're going to go thisaway and splash." You see? Two intentions got in the road. A freight train is going south, a passenger train is going north on the same track, they have two different intentions and they pick the bits off the track. You see how this is?

An immovable object meets an unimpressible mass and we of course get a win, you see, but an immovable object meeting an unimpressible mass would be a nice long continuing game. That is the ideal problem because it has continuance and the idea of continuance is woven all the way through problems.

There is very much I could tell you, by the way, about problems but in essence no matter how worried he is or no matter how many elements seem to be contained in the problem is one or more postulates opposed. And to put it into mechanics, a problem is one or more intentions opposed and you get a problem. And when you get enough intentions opposed you get a confusion. And you get the biggest problem of all, which is a confusion.

All right, so we have this thing of intention–counter-intention actually being the background of team versus team, don't we? Player versus player. One player versus fifty players. Fifty players versus one player — police style.

We have then these various matchups and mismatches, you see, of thrust versus thrust or thrusts versus thrust or thrust versus thrusts and we have the various conflicts which make life interesting.

Well, now, if we have two intentions present, of course, we have two elements of counter-purpose of one kind or another. So purposes run on a case tend to solve problems in the case, right?

If we run purposes directly, we'll run out one or more of these intentions and, therefore, he will get one less problem. This is liable to make him very unhappy, because he knows he must have a game. This is all he knows, which tells him he must have problems. And if he solves anything there must be a consequence. If he runs any no-game condition, he will tell you, too long — he will invent or tell you a consequence.

You see, if he runs into a no-game condition there must be consequences. That continues the game. And that's the basic method of continuing a game is having consequences and penalties. You play football on Sunday, why, you sit in the village stocks on Monday.

Now, where we have — where we have a case, we have what is obviously a problem. This man is fighting himself to some degree. The bank is fighting the body, the thetan is fighting the bank and the body, and he sits down there quietly and we start to audit him and we say, "Now, I'm going to solve all of your problems for you."

Oh no, you're not! If you told him this and told him you were going to solve all of your [his] problems, he would probably take wings and fly away in a hurry if he actually understood what you meant, because you are saying in essence, "I am going to take this man's games away from him. And then he's not going to have a game and there will be no purposes and nothing for him to do," and so forth.

He would rather be in this silly condition that he's in than to be actually in a game. Now, he's in the sorriest shadow of a game you ever heard of. But a person will only rise to games on which they have some reality. In other words, they won't play a game unless they're sure that it's real, you see, and it's a game and it exists.

So we take somebody who is gimping along and he's playing the game of invalid, one way or the other, and he's playing this and we come along and we're going to say, "We'll solve this leg for you. We're going to solve this glandular trouble. We're going to do this and that." No, no. No, you're not. Because no other game may be real to him at this time than just that. Furthermore, he may have mocked up an individuality that he considers quite adequate to meet the world with. Who ever heard of anybody kicking an invalid?

Many a person has come into my office on crutches looking the sorriest thing you ever saw and found himself without a game. I don't take the crutches away from them, ease them into the chair with little clucks of sympathy, you know. I say, "Well, sit down. Let's get to work."

And they clatter in the chair, crutches fall down and they stumble over the chair and so forth.

"Come on. Sit up straighter than that. Now, let's see — now, let's see. Oh, what's your trouble?"

I dare say that this rather interestingly, you might even say coldblooded, attitude — I know that if I validate their condition, you see, they'll keep it, so they can — I can keep on admiring it. Then I'd be stuck with having to admire it out of existence.

Now, this person then is basically a set of problems, right? Hm? So, well, let's go at it — you could say, 'Well, give me a problem of comparable magnitude to your case." This would shift his attention off of his case onto a problem of comparable magnitude, wouldn't it? And you'd think that would be a runnable process — "A problem of comparable magnitude to your case," something like that.

Funny part of it is it works every now and then but it's just a little steep, you know? You're saying in essence, "Now, give me 76 trillion years of difficulties problem of comparable magnitude." There isn't a detectable or an easily detectable gradient on the process.

So instead of that we ask him what he's worrying about and he tells us, and so we ask him for a problem of comparable magnitude to it. In other words, the first problem that we handle on the case really is — and this, by the way, would not be handled at SCS, but you might go from Level One to Level Two and back to Level One again if he had a present time problem, you see. You wouldn't audit him very much without putting him under control, you see? In fact, you wouldn't audit him at all without giving him some Start, Change and Stop. No matter how much he seemed to be worried, you'd kind of try to get it under control a little bit.

Now, of course, you can walk up at a coffee shop to somebody that's worrying, and over the clatter of cups, and just about the time somebody is going to back into his chair and a few other things, you can ask him for a problem of comparable magnitude, probably get him over it. But the point is that he gets over problems by inventing problems. Get that very clearly.

He gives up games by inventing games. But in view of the fact that he cannot envision a game at first hand as being anything equivalent to the horrible condition he's in — you see, he does not see it as a game, he actually has transposed the word problem and the word game. The individual who comes up to you and says, "Life is a problem" is simply saying to you, "Life is a game" on a lower harmonic. Do you see? That's what he's doing.

So, that we can do a great deal with the techniques surrounding problems. This is why problems work. Problems, you know, we've known about problems for years but — we've known about problems of comparable magnitude for years, but I didn't know where it sat with regard to other things and had to get it oriented.

You know there's one — a drop of water could be a very important thing, but the most important drop of water in the world would be just another drop of water dropped in the ocean, wouldn't it? It's true of data. I had some instinct to believe that problems were important on cases but there was no way to evaluate the relative importance of problems.

So, you will hear some old-time auditor tell you, "Oh, well, years ago we used to audit that." No, he didn't. No, he didn't. He used to audit "Invent a problem," and ask what a problem that could be to you and so forth, but he wasn't running it as a part of games. He wouldn't know quite what he was doing, you see? And as such, the process would not have a total workability.

Now, he would have to bring a person, with Problems of Comparable Magnitude, to the problem a person has — from a real problem the person conceives to have — up to an ability to have other problems. You see this?

In other words, you go from a certainty that "I have a problem" to a certainty that "I could have a similar problem" and that's when you end that process on any given sector. You don't just deintensify the problem he has. Don't you see? Because there again, if you stopped at the midway point you would have taken a game away from him. And he'll be unhappy and he'll go out of there and somehow or another he'll stick his head underneath a car tracks or he'll burn his finger or he'll do something in order to get another problem of comparable magnitude, see.

In other words, what you haven't cared for is the urge toward having a problem in that particular category. And when that urge is dead, the thetan is dead. All he has to understand is that he can have bigger games and better games than this.

Now, you always audit a games condition — don't audit no-games condition unless with consequences. You audit toward a games condition. And what is a games condition? You could call it a compulsive games condition or an unknowing games condition and I've been calling it a UGC in shorthand. And this person, a UGC — in other words, he was in an unknowing games condition — individual is trying to sit still and all the time going shiver, shiver, shiver, see? Yeah. What's this shiver, shiver, shiver? Well, basically you could say it's lack of havingness, but that's too low a look. It's too low a look because it'll repair and straighten out on Havingness. Actually the Havingness simply gets him over to a quiet point on the track. This shiver, shiver, shiver and jitter, jitter, jitter, jitter and "Dd-daa — I'm-uh — well, how — how — I think I — what was I talking — uh — you know, ha."

All of this kind of nonconsecutive interrupted agitation, and so on is just a dramatization of having been in a game that was awfully, drivingly swift and hard, which he can no longer tolerate. So the motion of the game becomes the master of the preclear. And when that occurs you have an unknowing games condition. He doesn't even know he's ever been in such a game, and there he sits jitter, jitter, jitter, jitter, jitter.

Now, you actually can run out a little havingness, you can move him a little bit on the track and he'll go into this agitated state. Now, if we were to say to him at this time, "Fight the wall — put up a mock-up up there and have it fight the wall," something like that. Another process, a terrifically effective process: "Put up a mock-up out there in front of you and have it flip-flop." And the fellow does. He puts a mock-up out there and the mock-up flip-flops. You say, "Oh, have it bang against the ceiling and the walls and the floor and just flop all over the place."

He does, all of a sudden he calms down. Why? You've taken the compulsive motion out of the middle of some old game. You don't care what game it was. The motion was aberrative, the stillness wasn't.

Now, when an individual is lying awfully quiet in a bed, he is a motion sandwich — he's the meat in a motion sandwich. There's an awful lot of motion over here and there's an awful lot of motion over here, and if he lies quiet enough, he can be still. Hence, we get our coffin case. We ramp in on this case and we say, "Oh well. Oh, obviously he's in a past death, let's run out a past death." Oh, ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah — ah. Now, just like problems, you see, this individual has found a null place.

When a person comes to you with a problem, he's found what he considers to be a tolerable problem. When he's stuck on the track, he's found a place he considers comfortable, and we can see that he's just lying there between motions.

Now, if you were to ask him, "Turn on an insane motion over on the right of you. Turn on an insane motion over on the left of you. Turn one down here on the feet" — you know, just something going in an insane motion. The individual will feel like he himself is going insane. See, that's what we mean by a compulsive sanity.

All of these "very dignified" cases that are being so quiet and careful, particularly with their somatics, heh, if they moved a quarter of an inch on the time track would go instantly screaming mad, you see. That's the way they feel.

So therefore they see a child jump over here and they say, "Oh no, no, no, no! No. No. Ha-ha, ha-ha, ha. Be quiet." Ha-ha, ha-ha. They see a car come galloping down the street weaving just a little bit or something like that, they "Huuuhhhhhhh!"

What's happening? In other words they're threatened with a displacement on the track out of one of these quiet spots into an old game, the motion of which is now considered to be — only considered to be, all things are basically a consideration — only considered to be too much for them.

You can even ask preclears what games are too much for them and receive some sort of relief on the case. "Ohhhhh, what games are too much for me. I tell you, I just can't stand the idea of …" It's really quite wonderful. I mean, they — the fact of the agitation.

So both the still spot — you see, the person being very still and the person being in a very obsessed motion are alike games conditions. When he's in no motion at all, apparently he is simply hiding from some motion that was a games condition.

Now, there's two inversions occur. They go from a games condition knowing, you see, to a games condition unknowing you know, they get so they get playing the game automatically. And then they go over into a no-game condition to get away from the motion of the game condition, you see. And then they stick somewhere on the time track. Whenever you find anybody stuck on the time track, he's on a rest point from motion that he doesn't like. "Too much motion" — that's his motto.

Now, he goes from there into the unhappy condition of not even being able to find a rest point, and that is an unknowing games condition compulsive — very obsessed. The game — he can't even tell you what game, he can't even tell you where, why, when, what, nothing about it at all, and yet there he's jittering. Now, do you see those three conditions, hm? All right.

We'll move through these things when we run problems and you can see him move from them, one to another. We're trying to make him reach out and realize that he can tolerate a problem. So we have to make sure at all times that the individual is lying about or inventing problems. And we have to make very, very sure that as he lies about and invents these problems, he actually conceives them to be problems and not deadlocks, otherwise we'll never really change his condition at all.

Now, I'll give you this very rapidly. There are three things here that are concerned: circumstances, finalities and problems. And the auditor who can't distinguish one of these from another had better get the process run on himself.

All right. We say, "Give me a problem" — you can run valences this way — you can say, "Give me a problem of comparable magnitude to your mother."

And he says, "A bonfire."

And you say, 'That's fine. Now give me a problem of comparable magnitude …" Oh, shoot the auditor, see? He missed! Why? The preclear gave him a circumstance, gave him a single-terminal circumstance and we want this preclear to move from self-determinism to pan-determinism. Now, we're trying to move from these games conditions over to a no-games condition which yet possesses the potentiality of having and enjoying a game — that's our goal, you see.

So when we say to him, "Give me a problem of comparable magnitude to your mother" don't let him get away by giving a circumstance. So you say, "Well, that's fine, a problem of comparable magnitude to your mother."

"Bonfire."

The proper way to audit it: You'd say, "Bonfire. All right, that's good. Now, how could that be a problem to you?"

And he'd say, "Well, it just — it just would go on burning."

Now, that's a finality. That's already in apathy, you see. First he gave you a circumstance, and then he gave you something that was a finality and now the next thing that he's going to give you, we hope, is a problem; but he may give you several more finalities before he catches on to this. And he finally gives you a problem of comparable magnitude.

"Well, how to put it out without any water."

You see? So he would move from "A bonfire" to "It would just keep on burning" to "Well, how would you put it out without any water?" That is a problem.

Now, you could even ask him at that point and coach him along a little bit, you'd say, "Well, can you just see how — can you feel how that would be a problem?" And some of the mystery goes by the boards in his case. He starts to as-is the hang-ups and the mystery. Stupidity is actually sitting in the middle of a problem, that's all stupidity is. It's an extreme obsessed not-know.

So we ask this individual for a problem of comparable magnitude, "Can you give me a problem of comparable magnitude to" (we don't care what it is) "to the row you had with your wife this morning?" to this, to that, to anything, even to your case, which is kind of wild.

And we give him — this is a question — and then we sort him out, he will give us a comparable circumstance. We don't want it. We say, "Fine, that's fine, that's fine. Now, how could that be a problem to you?"

And he probably gives us a finality and we throw that one away and we say, "Well, how could that be a problem to you?"

And he finally does give us the problem of comparable magnitude to whatever it was we're addressing. And he says, "Well, I — how to get away from her without leaving the house. That would be a problem."

And you say, "That's good. Good. Nothing wrong with that."

Now we get another problem of comparable magnitude and yet another one and yet another one and another and another and another until finally we not only have nulled the current circumstance of the individual on that one subject but — you see, we'd only be halfway through if we did that. Actually, in auditing time we'd be nine-tenths of the way through. But we have to ask him for some more until he's — comes up Tone Scale on it. And you'll see him come right up Tone Scale.

He runs from apathy to grief to fear to anger to boredom and then to enthusiasm. You go and leave in — processes in a state of boredom, you just haven't flattened them. Enthusiasm — conservatism and enthusiasm are just above boredom. It's just a point on the Tone Scale that a person goes up, that's all. And so you would run Problems of Comparable Magnitude to it until he came all the way uptone on the subject of.

Now, there may be other elements and he may be far too serious to get much of a line charge out of, early in the case, but after a while you should be able to run him up into practically a line charge on the fact that he considered it a problem. He will only, though, conceive it to be funny and discardable if he feels he could have another problem of one kind or another.

Now, consequences run very simply. It's very easy to run a consequence but you have to remember that the preclear may strip his bank of old penalties, and that's very bad. All processes are additive to the bank, not subtractive from, don't you see.

What we're working on is tolerance and change of mind. We're not working on draining buckets. You see that? A lot of auditors get the idea that auditing is something that just makes nothing out of everything everywhere, and that's just a compulsive make nothing out of. That's a very hard thing to come up against.

You're not draining a case, you're not doing something of the sort, you're simply getting the case to tolerate this sort of thing and to change his mind. So when you run consequences, why, you could make fairly sure that he's giving you things that he dreamed up. So he could lie about consequences or you could have him make — invent consequences.

To what? Anything on the no-games list. But I give you a little caution about running consequences prematurely when a case still has awful problems and that sort of thing. The consequences of knowing, the consequences of unconsciousness — these are tough processes, see, they are mad processes. So pick out something light. Pick out something light on the list, more or less something that the preclear is sort of fixed on, has been talking about and you've gotten tired looking at it, so decide that you'll get the penalties on that particular subject.

Consequences continues the game, and it gets continuance there. Because a consequence is a penalty because of. See, consequence means — so it means the game will go on. Very simple; it simply says the game will continue.

What are the consequences of a solution? Well, that sort of promises the fellow that he solves something, he'll still have a game, you see.

Its workability is not as broad as we'd like to have it and it is not an end-all process, but it certainly belongs there and it certainly should be part of an auditor's repertoire because it's very valuable. Problems are far more valuable than consequences, but remember to get him actually to invent the problem.

Now, problems and consequences and the various things that go along with that are the second level of SLP 8.