The first talk today is entitled „Processing and Its Goals.“ You possibly know quite a bit about this already. But possibly new light can be shed upon it because it actually has been codified much more closely than ever before.

Every now and then, perhaps, an auditor has said to himself, „Well, what am I trying to do with this fellow?“ He’s had qualms about it. „Supposing I free up the mind of this man? This man’s a criminal, he has criminal potentiality. Supposing I free up his mind, and then we just find that he goes out and shoots more people dead than before?“ There’s always this question. Perhaps until a person sees this dearly, there always will be the question: Is there any use in setting somebody free?

That many auditors seem incapable of really letting a preclear go-many of them, many of them will bring him up to a certain point and then immediately start to run techniques which won’t send him any further. They get up to a point where they’re free, and then they think that setting him just a little bit more free than that will make a superior wolf.

I’ve seen this. It’s not a very happy fact I don’t expect you to accept it unless you yourself observed it.

But in processing — in processing, our goal is freedom. The only thing wrong with individuals is their restriction. But actually, what happens if you go to the complete limit of freedom? Freedom would be restriction. And we’d have to define what was restricting life. Well, life is actually being restricted by MEST, and it believes that it’s being restricted by life. And life, dramatizing the restrictions of MEST, turns around and restricts life — which is antipathetic to the survival of all life. That’s not good.

But life, to learn about MEST, approximates and imitates MEST. MEST is quite restrictive, it’s quite forceful, it’s made out of force. And so we get this imitation, and this imitation comes back into life, and then life restricts life.

It would only be in such a way that parents desiring the very best they could for their children would do the things to their children that they do. They do these things in the belief that they are preparing the child for life, preparing the child for better living. This is not true. None of these things that a parent does prepares the child for any better living.

Life itself, which is to say existence in the MEST universe — when you say life itself in this universe, that’s just what you mean: existence in this universe — has a heavy enough hand on a human being without adding and complementing that heavy hand with a parental hand. And when the parent steps in to compound the injury that the MEST universe can do, it makes an individual stand alone: He feels himself defied now on all fronts with no refuge.

The moment he does this he starts downscale. And he becomes what is essential in MEST, which is the „only one.“ And he runs this computation, the only one, deeper and deeper and deeper and worse and worse and worse, until he practically is the „none one.“ The „only one.“ Now, we’ll cover that a little bit later in these series. But that is mainly what’s wrong with your preclear. It is not enough to say he is alone. If he were alone he’d be happy about it, but he’s the only one who can do it, the only one who can’t do it He is the single identity, which itself must face up to the entire existence.

And most people go around carrying the idea of „I“ and „they.“ And sometimes his „I“ will include the two or three people present with him. But it is „I“ against „they.“ And the „I“ considers that all „they“ are collective and unified and working together and that the „I“ itself is separate. So to each individual you get these two pools: you get — [marking on blackboard] here he is, see, and he’s capable of just this little tiny bit of force. And here they are. See? That’s a sad frame of mind. Yet if he looked around and wished to examine it, he’d find something remarkable: He’d find out that all the people of a downscale culture think the same thing. This presents a rather funny picture, doesn’t it? It presents every fragment supposing itself to be the only fragment and that all other fragments are collected and unified.

And out of this sad picture we get anxiety. Because „I“ does not consider that he will be permitted to be happy. He can’t be permitted to be happy, because „they“ aren’t happy and he has to agree with them, and their collective mass is much greater than his individual mass, so he naturally feels that he is succumbing. It’s very elementary when you look at it this way.

Truth of the matter is there is no body of „theys.“ You can go down here and take, one by one, each policeman on the Philadelphia police force aside and talk to him quietly by himself, and if you did that for two or three weeks you would probably finish off the personnel of the Philadelphia police force. You’ll find every one of them is hoping that the rest of the police force will go on accepting him as a policeman. And each one of them is convinced, you see, that if „they“ really knew, why, they wouldn’t be able to accept him as part of the police force. The police force to him is a large force, you see. It’s a large group. And this large group is built up of units and these units are not unified, not worth a nickel.

Infiltrative sources, agitators and so on work upon this instinctively. They will go to workers and they will tell each worker how alone he is in the world, unless he unifies and unites. And they’ll get this big mock-up of a big unification called a union just so the agitator can act as a parasite on the worker.

Now, this would be rather the wrong way to go about it to convince each man that he was offended — which is the standard operation. They convince each individual that he is offended and put upon, and the only way he can resist this hidden source of force is by unifying against that source of force. And therefore, the whole group is depressed in tone because all of them feel like they are resisting, that they have to stay together, and there’s enormous force available here. Now, to expect such a group to be happy or successful is almost impossible.

Here, the worker is convinced that there are two bodies: here is the worker with himself here, see, and then here’s the rest of the workers here, and then here’s management up here as a separate body. And he looks at this as three groups now and he becomes antagonistic, as this group, toward this group and hopes both groups will assume that he’s a part of this group. And if he’s a member of management, he hopes that this group will assume he’s part of that group, although he’s really here too.

Now, there’s a rule of thumb used in the MEST universe which tells you at once what a facsimile is: If you want to trap him, make him resist it Make him resist it and you’ve got him.

A thetan, a life unit, starts resisting something — a thing — and that, if it is a MEST object, of course will resist back, because it is following the laws of MEST which are Newton’s laws: inertia, interaction, acceleration. Life doesn’t have to follow those laws at all, but it starts fighting MEST and it resists MEST and then MEST resists it. And then MEST, being inanimate and unthoughtful, can resist much harder than the individual can resist, and the next thing you know, the individual has accepted what he has resisted. Insidious.

Now, if you can get anybody to put up a battle at something, he will eventually become the thing which he battled. That’s a facsimile. Here you have a number of units of energy being shot at an environment Makes a picture. It takes it just as surely as though you had made a plaster cast of the environment. Just as though you’d taken a picture of a footprint The plaster particles in this case would be the units of energy shot by the being.

Show you how that is. This is a facsimile. Here is the individual here, and here is another person here, and the individual puts out units of energy in this direction; and these units of energy are energy and they are capable of becoming compact and becoming matter. And these go out here. And now we have the person go away and we have „I“ here, and T has this picture.

This is the most astonishing thing to a preclear when he finds this out that his facsimiles don’t have guts or backs. They don’t, you see. They’re casts of the surface. And so he gets the idea he has to look behind everything to really find out about it, because he hasn’t got any of the behind anything. He only has the surface.

And these beautiful facsimiles which are put up, you take them and crush them together, you see, and they’re very light pieces of energy. But they represent patterns of very forceful energy sometimes, and so the preclear has the idea that he must be facing the thing when he is only facing a shell of the thing. A facsimile is a light — you might say — energy cast It is the imprint rather than the shoe. Fools one very much.

But why does he start to take pictures in the first place? Well, in the first place he could make pictures; he made them all solid. They were very solid, very compact pictures. And then he started to make them of things. This mechanism is still with him, you see, and he starts to make pictures of things, and he duplicates the force of them.

Why does he duplicate them? Just because he’s resisting them or because he wants them. But he doesn’t start out wanting them, he starts out resisting them. And then he resists and resists, and then he finally gets the idea that this thing is resisting him, and the vectors turn around and the facsimile starts to collapse upon him. And the next thing you know, this facsimile will accept a duplicate of this facsimile, so he feels he wants things just like the facsimile, mostly because the facsimile is an impression of something which is resisted. And the second you turn resistance around, you get pull. That shouldn’t be unclear to you. You just turn a resistance around and it’ll pull.

Now, you can take a preclear and have him look at Grandpa in a facsimile, and then just turn the facsimile around and you’ll get various combinations. But he’ll find that there’s a communication line there, there’s an energy line. He thinks it’s a communication line, and really I guess that’s what you could call it, but actually it’s just lines of force, resistance. And he’s looked at Grandfather and resisted Grandfather often enough so these lines of resistance have become very heavy, and you get this strange picture of the child who just has to have the ally that he hates.

And you run some preclear along, and you try to run off the grief charge of Great-aunt Bessie. And you start in at the beginning of this grief charge and you start on through the grief charge and as you go on through… All of a sudden, „I really hated her!“ he says.

„Well, all right. Let’s finish it off anyway.“

„No, dickens with her. I don’t care about her, I hate her! I’m not worried about her!“

So you run out how much he hated his great-aunt Bessie — and all of a sudden said, „Well, you know, she wasn’t a bad old girl, after all.“ And then if you don’t — if you returned into it a little bit deeper, you would find out a great love for Aunt Bessie, and here’s all this complexity.

It’s just the matter of whether or not the facsimile is a collapsed line or still an extended line. See how that could be? He’s resisted and resisted and resisted. All right, he gets to the point of complete resistance and the point of complete resistance is an utter breakdown of all resistance, which results, then, in an energy deposit, which itself has attractive force just like gravity. And he’s got an energy deposit called Aunt Bessie, and now this will pick up other things like it and you get associative reasoning. It’s built on resistance: things resist him, he resists those things. And that thing which has resisted him harder than he has resisted it — but he’s doing all the resisting, you understand — but his picture is something resisting harder than he resisted it and he thinks it’s still there, only it’s resisted so hard that he is it Therefore, he has to accept what it wanted simply because of the lines of force involved therein.

This shouldn’t be very difficult to see. If you stand up and lean your hand against a wall for a few minutes — you just stiffen your hand against the wall, then you take your hand away. Even if you put your arm in your pocket, you’ll still feel your hand against the wall. I mean, this isn’t a matter of running the effort of it, all you’ve got to do is just lean on that wall for a little while and then stand back and try not to lean on the wall. Well, you can run it that the wall is leaning just that hard against you. And if you’re trying to push the wall away that hard, the wall is trying to push you away that hard, you now have an energy picture of the push of the wall. And that energy picture of the push of the wall would become a desire for the wall if it so happened that your pushing against the wall collapsed you against the wall. This is obvious, then, that you couldn’t resist the wall. So if you can’t resist it you have to have it. See how that is? There’s just nothing to this at all. If you can’t resist it, you have to have it.

And so the MEST universe gets them going and coming. And you start running Acceptance Level Processing and you find out that some fellow has been taught very carefully that he must detest flatirons. His whole family told him to stay away from flatirons; Mama told him and Papa told him, and his grandparents told him that flatirons were bad and that he mustn’t touch flatirons and he must stay away from them. (Maybe Mother worked in a laundry or something.) And he went on about flatirons and he knows he has to detest flatirons; that’s the whole point of existence. When he sees a flatiron, he has to resist it See, they got him fighting flatirons by warning him about flatirons, and so he starts resisting these flatirons. And then you find him at the age of thirty-two with a passionate desire for flatirons, he loves them; he keeps small gold ones around.

Well, this happened immediately after the first time he was really seriously burned after having been very well indoctrinated about flatirons. A flatiron was senior to him now, so he wanted flatirons — it wanted him, he is a flatiron.

How many preclears have you ever found who wanted to be bedposts or who were trying to be plates or platters or the Sun or MEST objects? Well, if you’ve never looked for it, it’s possibly because you haven’t encountered it. But if you look for it, you’ll encounter it every time. You’ll find preclears are trying to be MEST objects. They’re not analytically trying to be anything; it’s just this matter of resisting something and the thing collapsing on them and then wanting it. It won. (And reference Book One, the winning valence.) And there’s the mechanism back of the winning valence.

A person resists and resists until he can no longer resist and his resistance is overcome, which immediately results in „a need for.“ Well, the only way he can now go on resisting is probably to turn the facsimile around. (He does many things with it.) But if he turns the facsimile around to resist the other way to because it’s senior to him, you see that you could run this in such a way that if he resisted the flatirons long enough, that all the force of resistance for flatirons would be the flatiron resisting.

A person would thus get very mixed up about it all. He isn’t carrying anything in his bank except his own energy and his own energy is a picture of those things which have happened to him. There isn’t any foreign energy in the bank. It’s all his own energy. Therefore somebody comes along, namely Mama, and says to him, „Well, it’s all your own fault. You know that you’re responsible for it“ He knows he is because it’s his picture made out of his energy. You see, he can’t say anything else, see, sure it’s his fault. You see how that is? Because everything that happened he now has in a package, which is made exclusively out of his own energy. So therefore he must have done it because he did the facsimile. And the facsimile is his. And if people keep caving in this and saying, „Well, you’re just pretending to be hurt You know that you aren’t hurt,“ he’ll get this funny idea of pretending that — well, he knows he can really help these things.

And I swear there are people going around with fractured skulls and all sorts of things that aren’t even vaguely healed up, knowing they have to have them because they’re their fault and they did it, and that they had nothing to do with. It’s not somebody’s fault that he happened to be sleeping in a bed when the wall fell in on him. And yet he’ll be convinced these things are his fault.

Then an ally will die that he has resisted and fought with a great deal, and when the ally dies his immediate assumption is that he killed him. Have you run across that manifestation? „Well, if I just had called earlier on the telephone, I would have stopped him from leaving the house and therefore he wouldn’t have stepped under the truck.“ You get the idea This silly line of logic, making oneself cause across the boards for bad things.

Well, it’s not sensible, not even vaguely, because it isn’t true. But the facsimile pattern: They resisted the ally so there are overt acts; and the ally resisted them, so there are overt acts. And now every picture of the ally is being made to substitute for the ally that is missing. And the pictures are their own pictures, so the ally is now their person but the ally is now dead; so, of course, it follows out that if the ally was only theirs, only they could have killed the ally and that’s that, so the ally is dead. Here you get a confliction of the two universes. Here you have guilt, so on.

This is not difficult to understand in action. It is, perhaps, a little bit difficult to understand in words. But if you’ll just sit down and start to resist the wall with energy beams from yourself for a while, you’ll all of a sudden see the whole mechanism start to show up. You’ll find out that eventually you will feel, „Well, it’s kind of a nice wall.“

Now the funny part of it is, is you have to be very calculatingly precise to resist the wall. It’s quite a trick. It’s a much easier thing not to resist the wall. This stuff is so much space that if you weren’t very careful when you leaned on it you’d probably stick your arm through it It’s a very nice calculation of wavelengths and matched lengths and matched space areas and matched facsimiles and whoo!

You start running a preclear, by the way, as some of these Resistive Vs, you swear that if you moved one hair of his head onto the other side of his head he’d die from his conduct He isn’t going to move anything, he isn’t going to change anything, he isn’t going to let anything happen if he can possibly help it That’s his behavior towards you.

Well, that’s just this sort of thing. It’s such a nice, neat calculation to start resisting the MEST universe at just the right wavelength and get just the right facsimiles, that after a while, if a person were to think of it, he would realize that he’s doing something like walking a tightrope across Niagara Falls. But instead of that, he says, „It’s all I can do. I can’t do anything else, I am trapped.“ You see, he’s just done it so often, he’s so used to this wavelength. But if you just shift your perception a little bit…

One of the ways to shift your perception is just get the concept for a moment And by the way, do this, all of you, just for a moment here. Look at that wall back there and say to yourself very forcefully, get that concept very forcefully: „It’s an actual wall. It’s real and actual.“ (pause)

Do you note anything happening?

Audience: (various responses)

What happens? What happens to that wall?

You’re running half of the energy flow on it, and of course, during that moment the wall would tend to fade or disappear. And if you will hold that concept for just a little while, the wall will disappear. And if you hold it with your MEST eyes for a little while and if you run that for a while with MEST eyes, your MEST eyes won’t see it That’s MEST eyes. That’s very interesting.

You want to run the opposite just to get yourself out of it, which is: „The wall is not there.“ And so I want you to run now — look straight at that wall and say, „It’s not there.“ (pause)

All right, now what happens to that wall?

Audience: (various responses)

Get more solid?

Audience: (various responses)

Move up to you?

Audience: (various responses)

It’s dangerous to run those two things for a little while because MEST starts to disappear and you have to fumble. And if you had a few dollars on you, you wouldn’t want that to happen. So you don’t want yourself getting upset, so don’t run that concept too much because…

But it’s really just like walking a tightrope trying to keep check on time, motion, and so forth, and these particles. And a person, to assist himself, can’t do anything else but make pictures, but he then says he’s doing it to assist himself. He starts to have reasons, you see.

Once he sees it, somebody points it out to him and says, „That is MEST.“ A little child, you say, „That is a rock.“ I swear little kids very often say, „Where? Where? Where? Oh, there. Oh, sure.“ Next day he falls over it and busts his shin. He goes through this cycle of resistance.

Now, MEST is rigged with a gravitic pull when it’s in solid mass. There is such a thing as gravity — it is blood brother to magnetism — and the gravity of Earth keeps one down on Earth. But twenty-four hours a day there is a current of gravity going through your body. Does that stay with you? No. You can set that up on equipment such as a physics lab and you’ll find out that that gravity does not stay there. The gravity does not stay there, but a picture of the gravity stays there in you. It doesn’t stay there on MEST equipment; it doesn’t keep reading on a scales.

A butcher’s scale is a gravity meter. And when you take the meat off that scale it ceases to weigh the meat right away. And when you take a man off the gravity level or move him on the gravity level, what do you know, he keeps on weighing the meat He’s got pictures, you see, and those pictures are pictures of the flow of gravity.

One of the weirdest things you can do to a preclear is to get the idea, in terms of effort and thrust and so on, that he is standing up and then that he is not standing up when he is lying down. And he will get some interesting flows in his body. He’ll find out that when he tries to put a force down or to hold down, he’ll start feeling like he’s going up. Well, this is because he’s carrying pictures. We can explain it that way: he’s carrying these pictures around of gravity, and the pictures, because they are consecutive pictures taken through time, when they run off, they start to run off consecutively through time. But it isn’t the time that is here, it’s the time that is in the bank. And all the force is there, everything he’s resisted is still there. Now, that’s a very provoking fact to most people, very upsetting.

Now, there are tremendous numbers of conclusions that could be drawn from this, but life itself is not dependent for its ability to think upon force; it thinks it’s dependent upon it.

You know, you yourselves have probably taught somebody to think it over by giving him a solid slap in the jaw. You probably taught somebody „a lesson.“ (That’s what it’s called.) And you’ve probably been taught a few lessons by MEST when it fell on you or you ran it into something. And this is essentially education as it is understood in the modern school system. You get an impact and the impact is a piece of solidity, and the solidity then has a certain gravitic component, and it will compare and match itself to other pieces of solidity in the bank; and so you get currents flowing, more or less automatically, and this is thought per impact And that’s stimulus-response thought impacts.

Life, all by itself, is evidently quite capable of thought independent of MEST. But it doesn’t think about MEST: it can think about anything. But you take somebody and bang them around and they will become thoughtful. They will every time, if not unconscious.

And you have immediately, then, the gradient scale of unconsciousness, which ends at the bottom with a theoretical, absolute unconsciousness, very theoretical because it has no duration that you can determine. Upscale a little bit to very, very thoughtful conduct and philosophic reasoning, upscale a little bit to some practical reasoning, and upscale a little bit to doing something.

The Indian, the Iroquois Indian, I think it was, had an illness. He called it „the sickness of long thinking.“ And this never was truer than somebody who has been seriously abused.

Now, very often this has operated to our benefit. We have H. G. Wells, for instance, talking his first departure from action after, I think, he had a broken arm. And he said the broken arm gave him an opportunity to read, and he read a great deal of things and he became interested in thinking and he started writing. He was just a little boy when this happened to him.

But you’ll find this history going rather thoroughly through the race: that illness is followed by thinking, and that a person learns from a number of injuries. This is stimulus-response at work, but this is one of the behavior patterns of life.

It doesn’t follow, then, that a person gets sane because he has an impact. We’ve found this quite the reverse. But it does follow — something does follow there: that a person who has resisted and then begun to want things finds out that he should have energy.

Now, you wouldn’t think, that sitting there today, you wouldn’t suppose that people think they have scarcities of energy in themselves. You wouldn’t realize it, unless you really looked, that in national magazines of a great country on the face of the Earth today there are ads which are calculated to save energy or to create energy from exterior sources. And you would hardly suppose that a great civilization has mechanized itself solely because it knows it doesn’t have enough energy to do it itself. No, you wouldn’t think that this had happened, because this is really insane. But that is the case. Energy, it must be saved. There are labor-saving devices. It’s wonderful.

A man who has a labor-saving device would automatically — you’d say, to be sane about it — would have to, perforce, have such an urgent scheduling of all available energy that he bad to have something like that. It wasn’t that it was desirable, because having something to do gives one an opportunity to create and use and direct effort And in this universe that’s about all there is to do. And that is action and motion and enjoyment and sensation, and all the rest of them are in that same category: the creation and direction of effort And when you get a labor-saving device, it is something which creates or saves or directs effort for you — automaticity.

So, let’s take a look at a society for a moment and just wonder what’s going on in a society which has, as its prime motive, the acquisition of labor-saving devices and the acquirement of money so that it doesn’t have to work. The goal of the society is retirement and the end of the society is obtaining equipment which saves it from putting out effort.

We’d say, if we looked around real quick under the roofs of some of the state institutions, we’d find quite a few loops. I won’t say this is the case. But the common denominator of neurosis and psychosis is one common denominator that is so obvious, whether you talk to the person or not it’s „can’t work.“ That is the common denominator of neurosis, psychosis, straight across the boards: „can’t work.“ Because when a person no longer creates, uses or directs energy, he is no longer able to keep his facsimiles at bay! And so, they collapse upon him. And they go into restimulation and he only wants the bad things which he himself has formerly resisted And the common denominator of neurosis and psychosis is „no effort,“ which is to say, „can’t work.“

And if you want to know whether or not somebody was crazy in your family, just think it over for a moment and find out who it was that couldn’t work. And you start processing on that person, more things will turn up than you ever dreamed that were there.

The people who worked, maybe they were mean and explosive and ornery and said terrible things and so forth, but if they worked they were not very aberrative. It was the person who didn’t work that did you in. Simple.

Very often these people go completely unspotted in a family. Well, that was dear old Aunt whatever-her-name-was — Abanapaca — and she never did anything around the house, she was a lady. „Oh, she never did anything to me when I was a child.“

„No?“

„No.“

Put him on the E-Meter. That’s where your preclear got religion! That’s where he got scared of ghosts and things that go boomp in the night and why he can’t sleep now without a light on in his bedroom. That was dear old Aunt Abacanapoo. She was the one in the family that didn’t work.

Because, you see, it just follows through: the person who is no longer able to put out effort is the person who has resisted so much with effort and has fought so hard with effort that the effort has at last caved in on them completely, and now they know they can’t create or use effort And such a person uses, for his own energy, impacts, past impacts. They’re energy-hungry. They get starvation on the subject of energy. No matter what kind of energy, any kind of energy, they’re starved for it and they can’t get enough of it. And so they try to eat themselves out of it in the MEST universe. But they can’t cure this in MEST, because what’s wrong with them is in their own bank, and their own bank isn’t the MEST universe. So they can’t just cure it up out here in the MEST universe and they’ll go through all sorts of gyrations of trying to get more energy. They don’t care how it’s evaluated, what kind it is, where it came from, whose it is, anything. More energy — that’s their whole plea. Kleptomania, sexual perversion, all of these things are just — no matter how bad they sound, they’re simply that trying to get a piece of energy, trying to get this chunk of energy.

These people will actually argue with tractors and things and fall under them and surreptitiously try to acquire sufficient injury in order to have energy. „Now,“ you say, „why is it that these preclears can’t — some of these preclears can’t think of anything good. They always think of things that are bad; all their facsimiles are bad. Why is this?“ Well, it’s very simple. You see, the bad things are the ones that have the impact and they’re only bad because everybody said it was bad to get injured and he couldn’t have pain. But there are blocks of energy, and the preclear is starved for energy. And being starved, tries to pull in every piece of energy in the whole bank on himself, because it’s just the reverse of what I just explained to you at first you see: he doesn’t want that energy at all But he resisted having to have exterior energy until that caved in and he felt he had to have energy from an exterior source. You see? So he winds up trying to grab all the heavy pieces of energy he has in the whole bank, which means all the heavy facsimiles, packs them around himself very solid and drains all of the white out of them. And you have black. And your preclear gets resistive — Resistive V — to processing.

Well, what does this tell you, then, about processing and its goals? It tells you that today we are handling two things: we are handling geographical location of the individual (much more of that later), and we are handling a problem of the purest mechanics in the world, just energy, scarcity of. It isn’t even kinds of energy; just any kind of energy will do most of these preclears, anything.

You wonder why this girl yelled and screamed at her brother, day and night, until her brother beat her up. And she didn’t learn anything about that She went right back and yelled and screamed at her brother until he beat her up. And instead of learning some more about it, she went right back again and yelled and screamed at her brother. And you say there is just something wrong between brother and sister. „Well, it’s because of the brother’s vicious temper that made him beat up the sister and this made her very upset about life.“ Oh no. You’re looking at the wrong side of it He’s in good shape; he’s the guy that’s delivering the impact See, he’s in real good shape. And she keeps asking for impacts. And the only reason she starts a fight in the first place, probably, is because she’s got to have some more impacts.

You go down the highway here and when you find a wrecked car, if you find the driver and you give him a quick check on the E-Meter, you’ll find out he’s energy-scarce. You’ll find out that when he goes home, ordinarily in the evening he takes some pills he’s got — they’re gelatin tablets, they’re put out by Doctor Wolfits — and these gelatin tablets, he takes three of these gelatin tablets and he takes just so much vitamins and he takes this and that and he takes it in warm milk, and then he has supper and he eats just so many calories of this and that, and so on. He may be very careful about his food or he may be very careful about how many hours he works and careful he doesn’t get tired.

That’s the most remarkable thing of all: a person just really has to go through an enormous lot of stuff to figure out „being tired.“ This is the end-all of silliness. They have to sleep and they have to have a rest and they have to save their energy, save their energy and conserve and save and conserve; that’s the MEST universe: save it and conserve it. It says we can’t be destroyed, so you have to save and conserve. All right.

What’s this tell you about the goals of processing? You want to get your preclear into good shape. But that’s too indefinite. What is good shape? Is it better moral conduct? Is it „Does he pay his quarter regularly into the poor box?“ It could be a number of things, you see. You could adjudicate this in all ways, shapes and forms. People have been doing this since the beginning of man. They’ve been saying, „I know you’re a good man, because you…“ and then they add their pitch.

The Indian, by the way, used to have a very strenuous code of training for children. The whole tribe would praise this child for a certain action. And they’d just continue to do it. Everybody would gang up on this kid, and this kid was really in the groove. (The Indians lost out in the face of the white man, by the way.)

Now, where do we have or how can we observe whether or not we’ve done anything for a preclear? Well, it would just be have we gotten him into more motion that he himself is controlling? (Many, many people are in motion that they aren’t controlling. It’s what you call a manic state or a frantic state or something of this sort) But is he in better motion that he himself controls? Is he capable of putting out more work? Does he work? Is he interested in handling effort? Now, let’s not use that definition of work the way it is used all the time, which is a crushing, boring, repetitive activity in which must — one must engage in order to eat That is not the definition of work. Work is foot-pounds of energy; creation and direction of energy and effort.

Well, will he create and direct more effort? Have we done anything for him if we haven’t made it possible for him to create and direct more effort? Obviously we’ve not done anything for him that we really could do. We’ve made his life a little less boring or we’ve made his life more interesting or we’ve made it flatter or less interesting or something, but if we haven’t increased his ability to create and direct foot-pounds of energy, we’ve done nothing for him.

And what is the best representation of that? The best one — talking now about Homo sapiens in particular — the best one is changing his communication condition. If you see an alteration in his communication, you have done something for the preclear. And if you don’t change his communications, you have done nothing for the preclear.

Now, the truth of the matter is you very often will process a preclear who is on a hectic, frantic level of communication which appears, at first glance, upscale. And you start processing him and the next thing you know, he doesn’t anymore talk like this, he’s starting to talk like this. You changed his communications. That’s all you were trying to do. And because they slowed down did not mean that you worsened the case. They might have slowed down, you see, and gone under his control. That would be the test.

Now, it would take more processing to speed them up under his control. But there’s the test of whether or not you’ve done something for a case. Not because communications are sacred, but because communications are the best representation of the handling and direction of foot-pounds of energy. That’s the number one index right there, because it includes perception and it includes force.

So all of a sudden your preclear says, „You know, I’m seeing better!“

„End of session.“ You’ve changed his communication level.

Next time you see him it may have slumped. Very often, a case goes over a sort of an up-down curve; it improves and then sags a little bit and then improves a lot and then sags quite a bit and then improves some more. And it’s always on a higher high. That’s quite normal in processing. It isn’t a smooth, upward curve, it’s a jumpy one. But processing should occasion a communication change.

Now, how do we tell, then, whether or not a person’s going to work? All right, let’s say you’re hiring a janitor and you want to know whether or not this janitor is going to keep the building clean. It’s very easy for you to establish whether or not he’s going to keep the building dean. You say to the janitor, „How long have you been working?“

He says, „Well — uh — I first — uh…“

Fire him. Don’t hire him. Fire him first Reverse the cycle, because he’s not going to keep the building clean the way he should. And you say, „Well, how long have you been working?“

And he says, „About ten years,“ hire him. He’ll keep the building clean.

It’s just one of those jackleg tests. What’s his communication lag?

Now you’re going to hire a secretary, and you say to this secretary — you could say — you could look her over and take micrometer calipers and find out the bicepulary distances and all sorts of things, but it isn’t necessary to do that. You just sit her down to a typewriter and you put some copy up in front of her and you start a stopwatch and she does sixty-five, seventy words a minute, hire her right away, quick Does it accurately, sixty-five, seventy words a minute accurately, bang. Because the accuracy shows control. If she does it inaccurately, very inaccurately, she’s just in a hectic state of motion. Sixty-five words a minute for a secretary is phenomenal. A really good secretary would do about eighty accurately on a typewriter, consistently.

Would there be any sense at all in hiring somebody who made thirty-five words a minute? You don’t want them in the office. It would be one less person, you say, so that would be one less person doing the work. No. She’ll take the people around her down at least two persons apiece.

And yet, in business colleges they turn people out like that People just can’t go any faster than that and they turn them out like that and they go out and they go into offices and they lose the papers and they fumble and they lose the mail and they hold it up and they get that big order that — they hold it up long enough so that it is cancelled and so on. And you can’t quite spot where all this is happening in the office unless you know something about the mind.

If you wanted to know what was wrong with an office you would simply walk through and give everybody a communications-lag test and fire all the people who had a lag and the office would straighten up. That would be all there was to business efficiency if you used this point Now, this is a horrible fact.

But in treating preclears, this is of the greatest importance to you. Because if you haven’t changed the communication lag, you haven’t done anything for the case.

Now, why is their communication lag going to stay slow? Is it just willful perfidiousness on the part of the preclear? No. Is it just the orneriness and meanness of the MEST universe that would make a person into this condition? No. What is it? It’s a scarcity of energy: they can’t put out any space because any energy that comes into the space is immediately drawn up into the bank at such a rate that the space collapses. And so they don’t have any space. And out in front of them, if you ask somebody real quick, you’d say, „Whose space is it in front of your nose?“ — flash, and they’d say, „Other’s, somebody else’s.“ They’d say, „George’s“ or „Bill’s.“ Yet a person ought to own at least a foot in front of him. Very few people do. A great many people don’t even own their noses. And a great, great many more don’t own anything in front of their ears, nothing forward of the ear. They haven’t even got this space; this space belongs to somebody else.

Why is that? It’s energy starvation. Now, a person has gotten a lot of impacts at some time or another in his life, and these impacts act as a sponge for further impacts. And the person has begun to believe that he himself cannot create energy.

There’s only one thing for which the whole universe punishes, there’s only one punishment, one crime and that, in its fullest sense, is communicating. That’s the one crime. Putting out an anchor point. (That’s essentially communicating.) Putting out an anchor point is the one thing for which a person could get punished, which tells you why the people that get to the rank of general and admiral get there. It’s traditional in every army and navy of a conservative country that a person is advanced in the ratio that he doesn’t do anything. If he commits no crimes, he gets there. And this isn’t a criticism of it, it’s just the way things operate. It’s just the way things operate. It just happens that that’s the way it is and they don’t want to get well, and so we can’t do anything about it, can we?

Well anyway, the only thing that is punishable is putting out an anchor point. And so, you can tell how often this person has been slugged, slapped, hit by the reluctance he has in putting out an anchor point But there is another thing here at work: it is the remaining, the residual potential a person has in creation of energy. Some people have a tremendous energy-creation capacity. And these people can take an enormous slugging around without altering their communication level. That’s because they’re still up above that break on the Tone Scale. Although the energy-creation potential might be different — isn’t necessarily, but might be different — for every individual on Earth, there is this similarity amongst all individuals: There is a point above which they create, manufacture and direct their own energy, and below which they depend upon energy from exterior sources before they can operate. That would be the make-break line.

On our Tone Scale I would hazard that this is well above 2.0. Because it is above eating. If you want to run shame out of your preclear, just run „the shame of eating,“ „the shame of having to eat“ Because a being in a very cocky state of mind knows very well he can create enough energy to run this motor. And it’s only when he goes down Tone Scale that he has to start eating. And he gets hectic.

You see, eating is getting the mock-up of somebody else and crowding it into close confines so as to drain the energy out of it That’s eating, that’s stealing somebody else’s mock-ups in order to go on living, and it’s exterior energy. So there’s a theoretical line above that — theoretical line above that by which a body would create enough energy to keep on going without eating. And I think the stomach feels the main shame about that, because this is where shame on eating shows up very remarkably. And I have run into little children that as soon as I processed out their general parental behavior around them — the behavior of the parents — particularly parents forcing them to eat, why, the child ceased to have any stomach trouble and also ceased to eat to amount to anything at all. You’d say, „What a tremendous efficiency rise this body has had. This child is now getting along on two glasses of milk and a couple of pieces of bread a day.“ Well, you figure it out chemically and you say, „Well, there’s that many calories and there’s this and if it were all drained down — there must be a lot more energy in milk than we thought there was, so that proves he’s still getting…“ But you see, there is a theoretical point where eating doesn’t exist Well, a person would be very high-toned, he wouldn’t be desiring somebody else’s mock-up.

All right Now, the make-break point is actually the point where the person begins to eat And anybody who is eating is then, to some degree, subject to the liabilities of having to receive energy exterior, rather than energy created, in order to develop and direct energy. You see? He’s dependent upon exterior energy if he’s eating.

Now, we get to the second break point below that. It’d be where he is no longer capable of producing independent and dear thought but had to depend for the generation of thought upon former impacts, which themselves were storages of energy. Their impact was a certainty, and so he relies on the certainty impacts in order to get his data. And a person in that shape will only look for data, they will never look for truth.

Now, some of you might have thought that I meant psychology, but I don’t. Psychologists have their own troubles. That’s why they’re in psychology: they hoped they’d be solved. All right.

The goals of processing, then, should become very manifest to you. They should be the restoration of the ability to create and direct energy. Now, to direct energy, one must have a good sense of location. And so the rehabilitation of location, as well as the rehabilitation of the ability to make space, as well as the rehabilitation of being able to create particles in that space all come under the same heading.

How do you know if the preclear is in better shape? He’s in better communication.

Now, don’t think he gets into better communication because he starts to read people’s minds. It’s very possible, it’s very easy to read people’s minds. I wonder why people try. But — there’s hardly anything there.

It’s very simple to go over the plan of creation and see that theta — mathematical symbol, not a mystic one — must impact with something and withdraw from it in cycles to operate with and know anything about the interior material with which it’s dealing. So the cycle of life would be impact-withdraw, impact-withdraw.

With what we know today and what I’m talking about today, we can turn a cycle of theta, where it has gone in just a little bit deep, and bring it back up again with what it knows. Just because it disentangles itself from MEST does not mean that it becomes, then, blank and ignorant of MEST. So what you’re trying to do is turn that cycle: You’re trying to kind of pull the preclear out of it.

Now, if your preclear, immediately after you process him, goes out and buys a lot of heavy MEST, you may have processed him so far that he’s quite willing to enter a brand-new cycle. Or you may have simply deepened his thirst for chunks of energy. Don’t cure every preclear’s thirst for chunks of energy or people like Ford Motors and so forth will go broke. I won’t go so far as to say that that is the only reason people have cars, is they just have this energy hunger and there’s a big chunk of heavy MEST and they sort of acquire it — or it acquires them, low on the scale.

You’re trying to bring the preclear up past these break points, in short, where he is no longer compulsive, obsessive about masses of energy. And you know that he is no longer compulsive and obsessive about it at the moment when he is able to communicate better. You see?

So what’s the goal of processing? You could say immediately „Restore and better the communication of your preclear.“ And you would have said, shallowly, the whole thing.

How do you do this? By remedying, mechanically, the scarcity of energy. One does that with contacting the MEST universe, showing he is not dependent upon the body, or by simply feeding the body, with mock-ups by the preclear, enough chunks of energy so the energy is no longer obsessively absent. You have to cure his scarcity of energy either way by showing him there’s an awful lot there or an awful lot here.

And that’s the goal of processing.

Let’s take a break.