[Start of Lecture]

Thank you.

Well, I'd like to talk to you now about something that is a little more pleasant than aberration. But I don't know what it is.

It's very difficult to generalize, you know, on the subject of aberration, because preclears, you know, are really all different. Now, I've told you they were all the same this evening. I told you they were all the same. Now, I just might as well tell you they're all different.

Every preclear is different than every other preclear. They aren't the same at all. They don't respond the same way. Why? Because they'd have different tolerances for randomity.

Now, this is an old word, an old word. There's plus and minus randomity. Fascinating stuff, this randomity. Because out of randomity you get a game. And what makes all the preclears different? Well, it's a very interesting thing: they're all playing a slightly different game with this plus or minus randomity.

Now, "randomity" is a formidable word. When it first came out they called it "rondamity." There's "randomity" and "automaticity." These are two very formidable words. But yet they're very, very easy to understand.

One of those words rondamity, excuse me, randomity, is a simple statement of too much or too little confusion — if you just look at it that way. Random: It means a non-set pattern. How random is it? Well, it could be not random enough, or it could be too random. Well, who's to judge that? The preclear. And that's what makes them all different.

"What game are they playing?" is modified by "What speed?" Now, this fellow goes to this small, sleepy town and there's nothing at all happening at all in the town. And there's a dog asleep in front of the general store, and there's one horse, walks down the street of the town at a slow pace. And this fellow, if he's from New York, says, "Oh, my God. How can anybody stand this sa-a-oo- oo! It's going to drive me mad listening to all this silence all night." See?

Another fellow happens to be from a farm over at Hoot-n-holler. And he comes in and he sees that dog asleep there, and he sees that one horse start walking down the street. He has a nervous breakdown. Goes to see a psychiatrist. Too much motion for him.

Now, this would merely be a difference of what they thought motion should consist of. So you'd have the identical situation being plus to the fellow from Hoot-n-holler and minus to the fellow from New York. So we got plus and minus randomity — all in the same situation.

So it comes down to consideration. What is the person's consideration of what is too fast? What is the person's consideration of what is too slow? When you establish these two things, you then have established his optimum randomity, but that is only established for him.

Now, it can vaguely be established for a class of people. A motorcycle club, for instance, has an interesting reaction to spills. They're all tearing down the highway, one after the other, and they're somewhat mixed up: they're only hitting eighty, and some guy goes off the curve at eighty miles an hour. "Imagine it!" And he breaks his leg, and they drag him out and untangle him from the machine, and so forth, and set his leg and shove him in to a doctor. And he's out next Saturday with a stader splint, riding his motorcycle, see? Hardly anybody yiekle- yackled about this at all, see? Nothing. Nothing to it.

Well, somebody driving a Cadillac — driving it mainly to hold up traffic, is why I think most of these people drive Cadillacs. You always find these big vehicles capable of doing Lord-knows-what miles per hour, always doing some other miles per hour. And you get this Cadillac, and it's driving down the street, and the fellow driving it stops just a little bit rapidly. He stamps on its power brake, you see. He almost rushes the light. And the lady in the back seat of the Cadillac goes forward just a slight little bit and her handbag drops on her toe. See? Cadillac stops. Chauffeur gets fired. Goes to see the doctor to have X-rays taken. Is in the hospital for a week, you know. Goes to see a psychiatrist to see if it had deranged her mentally. Get the idea?

Totally different ideas obtained. Now, you consider that ridiculous. Actually I saw that happen.

So you want to watch these Cadillacs, by the way. You want to watch them. They're the dangerous cars on the road. Driving at fifteen miles an hour or twenty-five miles an hour, when everybody else is doing fifty, you know? They get in your road, and it's an obstacle. And obstacles, when run into, are damaging to wheel alignments and things.

Anyway, here is a different viewpoint. So we can assign just this nebulousness to class: there is a slight tendency in these classes to follow a certain pattern. Just as there was one person in the motorcycle club who thought that must have hurt Joe a little bit when he went off the curve, so there might be somebody riding Cadillacs who would think that it was just a little extraordinary for her to have gone to a hospital for a week because her handbag dropped on her toe. You get the idea? There would be variations within the class, even. And because there are these variations we can make this remark: "All preclears are different."

What is their optimum randomity? When we say "optimum randomity," we're saying "game" in a complicated fashion. But game has more in it than motion. A game has purpose and a game has the idea of freedom and barriers. But the speed of the game would be what we consider random. A game must be to some degree random — in other words, slightly unpredictable.

What is a random particle? It is a particle that we cannot quite determine the future course of. That would be a random particle.

All right. If everybody knew that the navy was always going to beat the army in football; and it was always going to be a score of fourteen to nothing; and the plays were all going to be run off in a one, two, three, four; and in the second quarter, first play they're going to use a T formation, you know — nobody would go to those football games. They'd go down here to a high school in northern Virginia and watch some real football. Because there you can't even predict that they're going to play football.

Now, as we look over the entirety of games, we ourselves find it rather difficult sometimes to believe that somebody who is in a remarkable state of disrepair — psychosomatically — is actually playing a game. That is his level of game, and the motion which he tolerates to a marked degree matches his level of game.

He has a psychosomatic ill: Every time he smells wet paint he becomes violently sick at his stomach. You know? You say, "Well, it's not reasonable." No, it's not reasonable! It's psychosomatic. But it is part of some sort of a game he is playing. This is his defenses to some degree. This is the way he becomes a formidable object.

If you were to pass a law saying that all people who were suffering from an illness known as "woofosis," whereas they walked down the street and barked every few paces like a dog (woofosis, very deadly disease), and all those people were no longer subject to taxation or some such thing, you in a very short space of time, I'm sure, would see people walking down the street a few paces and barking, and walking down the street a few paces and barking. They would go on doing this. You got the idea?

Why? They have a game mock-up. They're in a game condition. That is to say, they can almost play this game. But they have a mock- up which doesn't play a game they can't tolerate. See, the mock- up won't be able to play that game, but the people in that game won't play against them either. See? "Taxation will be canceled if…"

Well, there are lots of citizens around who'll still play this game called taxation. You know, government issues the money and takes it back and issues it and takes it back and so forth. Called the ebb and flow of nonsense.

Anyway, this thing called taxation is a game and lots of people play it. I know there are millionaires around. They have whole teams, rooms full of accountants. You have to get a Mount Palomar scope to look down the lengths of the desks. And what are all these guys for? Well, their aggregate payroll is, let us say, $8,622 a week. To keep from doing what? From paying $1,260 worth of taxes. See? It's just a game. Just a game. Nothing more and nothing less than a game. It isn't even important to the fellow whether he pays these taxes or doesn't pay these taxes, but he spends all of his time sitting around figuring, figuring, figuring, trying to get some way whereby he can beat somebody out of some taxes, see. He's just mad.

Another fellow takes an entirely different approach. He just reaches down and pulls a hold of the corner of the rug called "government" and gives it a jerk. Somebody else plays that game in a different fashion. But it's a game. Don't think that it isn't a game.

Of course, it's not a game to an Internal Revenue employee. So we don't know who it's a game to on that side.

Way back down the line, sometime in the past, somebody didn't like millionaires and he passed a law. And we're probably still playing the game with that person. See? Karl Marx — somebody like that. We're still playing the game with him even though we apparently have a bunch more players out here. Well, those fellows aren't players, they're pieces. Get the idea? On a chessboard you have pieces, not players.

Now, in life, an individual is apt to be used as a piece one way or the other and be shoved around without any slightest determinism on his own part. And sometimes he makes a game out of thinking he is a piece. He's being shoved around against his own desire.

Funny part of it is, if a fellow ever suspects he's a piece, he isn't one. That's the cute one. If he ever gets the idea, "You know, I'm just being shoved around here," he isn't a piece. Pieces don't think. They never find out. So although he may be involved in some game called "soldier" in which he is a piece that never suspects he's a piece even vaguely, the game he knows he's playing and the game he's being used in are usually two different things.

So we have a condition whereby this individual who is a soldier — obviously just a piece, in what game he doesn't know. Somebody says, "Attack the citizens of Clinton, Kentucky," you know? And he goes and attacks them. He doesn't know what game he's in. He didn't realize he was winning a presidential election reverse- wise or… He didn't know what he was doing.

But his game would be, perhaps, in obfuscating the sergeant. You know? He's got some game going with the sergeant and he is really a player in this game, see, a terrific player in this game. The sergeant rolls them out in the morning, you know, and he's got it all fixed up so that somebody sings out, "yere" to his name, see.

Sergeant says, "Smith," and one of his buddies says, "Yo," you know. And the sergeant never looks up from the roll call, see. He's still in bed, see? He gets blackmail on his partners in the company — his other soldiers and so forth — to make them do this, you know. He wins at cards. He amasses large debts to himself and so forth, so that when his name appears up there for a digging detail, it's Jones that goes out, not Smith.

It isn't because he's lazy at all. He's playing a game with the sergeant. He knows he's playing it. With what glee he lies there in his bunk and listens to the calisthenics going on outside the tents, you see. He knows he's playing that game.

Well, because this condition can exist, many of us become suspicious that we are in some sort of a game that we know not what of. We're being used in some fashion, and we start looking around to find some game we're being used as a piece in.

Well, the funny part of it is, there's a role lower than "piece." It's "broken piece." Nobody's using it. And many a time we begin to look around and worry about what game we might be being used as a piece in and we find out we're not being utilized. Well, because this would be too much of a blow to us, we normally can be expected to cook up something.

Now, an example of that is a fellow talks about the between-lives area. Now, he himself has no real concept of the between-lives area. But he says, "The last time they sent me down here…" see? He's heard of somebody running this engram or something like that. He's trying to get into a game condition even to the extent of being a piece, you see. He considers that a little more game. And he'll talk about this. As a matter of fact, there's a grave possibility that many are used in this category. There's a grave possibility that people around are shot from hither to yon for this purpose or that, in some game they know not what of at all. There's a definite possibility.

One of the oldest whole track gags was to take somebody, knock him out, and tell him he had to go over to some other place and do something or other that would louse up the enemy in some fashion. And the fellow does it, by the way. I mean, he'll go ahead and be a piece in a game to this degree.

Well, a few thousand years later he's not in any particular big game. He's completely lost from this old game and he runs short of games, so he goes around telling people that he has a mission. See, he dreamed it up, and the Archangel Mike or somebody is sitting two feet back of his right shoulder sending him telepathic or teletype messages, and he has a mission.

Well, you want to look at this with some askance, because the truth of the matter is that I happen to know Mike, and he's not careless with who he picks out. And he doesn't pick out guys that blab, you see? If anybody was executing a mission for the Archangel Mike, you can make a very sound investment in a bet that he wouldn't know anything about it at all. Otherwise he wouldn't be a piece.

Now, therefore, when people begin to suspect that they're being used in games of one character or another, the usual thing that one suspects in return is that they have lost their last game and they're dragging an old one into view.

Funny thing how a thetan can actually play a game and not play a game at the same time, how he can play a game that he doesn't know anything about, how he can be multivalenced on this whole subject. It's quite amazing.

But this comes about because every now and then there is only himself. Now, those things which are the least admired tend to persist. And being all by yourself is not much admired. So people eventually drift into an "only one" category, and they begin to believe they're all by themselves in some fashion. But they will dream up some multivalence situation whereby they are playing chess with themselves. And they go from the idea that they're the "only one" — in other words, they run out of games and opponents and roles to play — into playing a game with some mysterious opponent. And boy, this guy's really mysterious.

"Every time I go to bed at night something whispers in my ear." Get the idea? This is a mysterious opponent. "Something tells me that I had better not go down that road." Look! If it said it that well, you're the only one who articulates that expertly.

And you've got the phenomenon of the fellow playing chess with himself. He sits on one side of the chessboard and he says, "Now, let's see. I'm Joe now. Let's see. Uh… well, let's see. I move my knight to king's pawn five, there. I think that's very good." He says, "I'm not Joe now. Get over here." Bill now, you know. "Look at that dog! He moved his knight to… Well, I'll have to counter that one way or the other."

Eventually, if he keeps this up and keeps himself from knowing he's playing both sides of the board and swapping roles all the time, he merely winds up in the center of the board stalemated. But he's run almost completely out of game.

But this is very hard for a thetan to do. He's always got a couple of games on tap. The game might be called "headache." The game might be called "distraught wife." The game might be called "caved-in worker." It's played in Russia a great deal: caved-in worker. Or "betrayed commissar."

"Here I was, deeply sincere, tried to give my all for the people, and look at me now. Here I am sitting here in this office that's a hundred square yards on the side, and I have to keep all those guards with the machine guns outside the door because everybody is after me." As a matter of fact, in a well-run communism, nobody would find out he was commissar, see — I mean, really well run.

His game condition develops from the conditions he finds himself in. But all of these things are established, in the main, with what he himself has come to consider as too much or too little motion. Got that?

I should have suspected something about myself one time. I was on an expedition up in Alaska. And I was lying in my bunk, and everything was going along very smoothly, and we were homeward bound and everything had been done. The ship wasn't leaking a drop. The stores were all dry. I mean, everything was going along. The people on deck were totally competent. There was exactly nothing to do, and I realized there was nothing to do. And I had this stray thought. I said, "You know, I'm practically out of a job. No emergencies at all. There's nothing going on. You know, that's an awful situation to be in," I said to myself. And forgot all about it quite promptly, walked up to the chart table, looked up the tables for tides going through inlets and narrows, read the Canadian tide table — which some days before I had noted was an hour and a half different than the American tide table for the same waters — established the route through Dodd Narrows at full flood spring tide with a survey vessel.

Now, that's a fantastic thing for a guy to do to himself, because it meant that all of a sudden the ship was in a millrace. And we got through it all right — got out the other side. I didn't think we could make it, but I happened to remember that… Get the idea? I mean…

One sailor we had that was terribly brave, terribly brave, had the helm just come loose and just start to spin idly in his hands, because both tiller lines had become unmoored from the rudder. And there was an auxiliary bar back there and a couple of us jumped back and put the bar in place and steered her on through. But that randomity wasn't necessary either.

I thought about it afterwards very carefully. Thought over the whole thing and tried not to remember that about eight or nine days before I had noticed that the tiller lines were almost through. Fantastic. But you sometimes catch yourself playing a game. Beware of sliding into a condition whereby you are going to get some rest or relax, or you're going to do something else now that's quieter or better.

Medical doctor plays on this all the time. Matter of fact if he didn't, he probably wouldn't ever have anybody in the hospital. He says, "Now," he says, "Uh… Mr. Smith, uh… Mr. Smith, uh… you're in very bad shape. Your heart, you know. So you've got take it easy. You've got to be quiet. You gotta take it easy here one way or the other. And uh… you mustn't overexert yourself. And don't worry. Above all, don't worry. Yes…"

Of course, Mr. Smith's wife hears this and makes sure that this is carried out. And then Smith all of a sudden is back in there in a bankruptcy or something of this sort. Or incipient bankruptcy, working twenty-four hours a day in order to keep things… How the devil did a bankruptcy happen?

Well don't look at that too carefully. The guy was run down, you see, into minus randomity — not enough motion. So he omitted a couple of very obvious, logical steps somewhere along the line or antagonized the very people that he should have stayed friends with, and the next thing you know he's got a plus randomity on his hands. He's trying to adjust that minus randomity. Got it?

Every preclear, then, is as different as he runs at different speeds. He is as different as he will not tolerate no-motion and not tolerate excess motion. See, his intolerances determine his optimum speed.

Now, he likes a certain amount of action or motion, and he will work things until he gets somewhere in its vicinity. And he is only really unhappy — regardless of the expression he wears on his face — he is only really unhappy when he is missing it too widely.

How fast should he drive? How fast should he walk? You got the idea? How fast should he eat? How slowly should he read?

I saw a fellow almost go to pieces one time on these read-it- faster classes. You know, every once in a while the whole country goes into a spree that it should be able to read faster. I don't know why this is. They'll just eat up the existing reading matter. A book costs three dollars. All right. Now, it takes a fellow twenty hours to read the book. Well, you divide twenty into three hundred, and you get the price per hour of the entertainment. Don't you see? Or the three into the twenty.

You get the idea? Now, if he reads faster, his entertainment costs him more money. So I don't see what it's all about, myself.

But you see people around with "Reading Faster Self-Taught", you know. You'll see people avidly reading this in subways. "How To Read Faster". I don't know why they want to read faster. But they claim they can absorb more the faster they read. It doesn't work that way with me.

I was on a train once doing 105 on a test run and I didn't see any scenery at all. I knew I was going 105 though. So I guess that's what these people do. How to become aware of less, more quickly.

So anyhow, you'll see people speeding up on this. And in one such class where… Obviously these chaps were much too slow. They couldn't read all of the homework assigned, and so forth, and were given this class. And they were all supposed to speed up. And I saw this guy just start to crack up. He would read, you know, "I see the cat," or something simple like this, you know? And you could just see, just as he got about to "cat," why, his teeth…

They were forcing him to pass his attention across more in less time, you see. But he had something on the order of "I see the cat," and he couldn't get "I see" through faster, and he'd just go all to pieces. And all of a sudden you'd see him start to jerk. Well, I know what was happening to him now. His optimum speed of reading — the safe speed of reading — was what he was reading at. He felt comfortable at this.

Well, there's typists — very often you think there are slow typists and fast typists. No, there are typists who are comfortable typing slowly and typists who are comfortable typing swiftly.

I knew, one time, a court reporter. And this person just couldn't type slowly. It was just a physical impossibility. Didn't feel like she was typing at all unless the typewriter was going brrrrrrum! jumping, you know, off of its stand, and brrrrr! and so on. She'd be sitting there quite happy, you know, chewing gum and everything was fine.

Another person comes along and he's being pushed to type, one finger, you know. Peck. Peck. Why didn't he relax and write at the rate of one letter per minute — the right, optimum speed?

Now, you could say, then, life would be livable at the speed a person had decided it was livable at. Got that? Life is livable at a safe speed, or life is livable at an optimum randomity, or life is livable so long as one's randomity did not become less than or greater than what he thought was comfortable.

It isn't really safe. "Safe" isn't really good, because this assumes that everybody considers it necessary to protect himself — which, if you look at these drivers out here and so forth, you realize that it's an incorrect premise. Because those fellows aren't — they're not only not protecting themselves; they're not even protecting police. It's really bad, because I think the society should protect police. It shouldn't be open season all the time.

Anyway, where we have, then, one slowed down or speeded up, we get maladjustment. What is maladjustment? It's being slowed down or speeded up.

Now, here's an awful trick you can play on somebody. You want to throw somebody way down Tone Scale? You can throw him down in one of two ways.

This individual walks at a certain rate of speed. Well, you walk along and carefully accustom your speed to the individual, see. Carefully walk just as fast as he's walking, you know. And because you're so well adjusted, you can take hold of his arm, and he feels very comfortable at this. And then slow down imperceptibly, see, pulling him back just a little bit. Meantime talk about something innocuous — politics or something else unimportant, you know — and you'll just observe the fellow… He never notices exactly what's happening if you're very adroit, but he goes right on down Tone Scale on the subject he's talking about.

Now, you can do the same thing the other way: You match your speed to his, and now you make him walk just a little bit faster — not much — than the speed which he set and which he evidently finds comfortable. And again talk about politics. And what do you know, he'll go right on down the Tone Scale again.

But he will hit it in a different fashion. It'll be hectic. You know? He'll feel a little hectic about it, and then he'll slide on down. He'll get just as apathetic being speeded up as he was slowed down.

In other words, what we're looking at here is a comfortable speed of walking. A comfortable speed of working. How much is too much chorus girl? See? How much is too much chorus girl? How much is too little chorus girl. Somebody goes and sees the Rockettes. And I don't know, they've gotten it up to a thousand girls, haven't they now, in regimental front? And he sees these Rockettes, and you can take him away, and you bring him away from the music hall and you say, "Well now, how'd you like the show?"

He says, "Well, the movie was good."

"Well, what did you think about the Rockettes?"

"Oh, oh yeah," he says, "there was some dancing. You know, that movie was pretty good."

Interesting. Fascinating. There were too many of them. They were moving too fast. They spread out in all directions, and so forth.

You take the same guy down to a burley-burley show and there's just one chorus girl, you know. And he sits there and drools, drools, drools.

Well, that was evidently enough chorus girls, you see, in one direction. Well, how much is too little chorus girls? Well, you can't get him out of the theater. You've at once seen too many and too few — optimum in between — in just one striptease artist. You get the idea? See? Less than that — he doesn't like that, so he won't leave. More than that — well, he resents the "in between the acts." See? It would be right on the button.

Well, most people have this, and that is what we know as taste.

Somebody walks into a room and… Park Avenue. Park Avenue: they have one color — one color carpet, one color on the bedspread, one color on the wall, one color in the vase, one color in the drapes, so forth, and… Gray, see. And it's perfect. Perfect, you see. And a decorator comes in and puts one willow sprig with a slightly different gray, you see. Person says, "Pretty wild. That's a pretty violent thing!" They say, "It's bad taste, garish!"

Now we go down in the village, and a girl's got this half of the door painted chartreuse, the other half Chinese orange, see? But in the middle of the wall, from there to the floor, it's brilliant purple. You know? And we go on from there, see.

She herself is wearing scarlet pajamas with a bright green turban, you know? Somebody walks in and says, "You must lead an awfully dull, quiet life." It would just be the amount of randomity in the color spectrum. This establishes taste.

I don't know what good taste is in general, but I could say what good taste was for anybody who was tasting. That could be established.

So when we try to be too sweeping in our generalities concerning preclears — below the level of stable data, disorderly data, stable mass, disorderly particles, and this formula of randomity — when we drop down below that and get into other material, we can't really tell exactly how the hat fits until we have looked it over. Because this individual says he has a terrible intolerance for women.

You say, "Well, all right. What's so bad about women?" you would say — you would not say as an auditor, but if you said, "Now, what's so bad about women?"

He'd say, "Well, hair."

"What about their hair?"

"Well, they wear it long."

Because you have a different idea you would say, "Now, just a minute. Now, just how does he add this up? There must be some deep significance back of this." No, it's just a matter of too much hair. I'm sorry, it's just there is no more significance in it than that. He doesn't like women because women wear long hair. He knows that long hair shouldn't be worn. When the wind hits it, it makes a motion. Get the idea?

Same fellow. Doesn't like Roman troops. Why not? Well, they have short hair. When the wind hits it there's no motion at all, don't you see?

Well, what is the proper length of hair? Well, it's obviously somewhere between a crew cut and a pageboy. You're liable to come up with some coif of one kind or another and say, "Well, is that it?"

"That's fine."

Then he'd go tell his wife, "Listen, honey, this guy's got peculiar ideas. Get your hair cut just slightly above the lower lobe of the ear, you know? Just about there."

And he says, "My God, you're gorgeous, dear." He's happy with her for the rest of his life, see?

This is a completely wild, wild thing because you say it couldn't possibly make that much difference. Well, we don't have to inquire into the deeper significance of it. A person finds life as livable as it matches his idea of an optimum randomity. What is an optimum motion? What is an optimum abundance?

You take somebody who's been living in a palace all his life and set him down before a turkey dinner served in a middle-class home, and he'd wonder, "These poor people. How could they possibly get along?" because they were always starving to death. There wasn't enough food on the table.

Conversely, you take some guy who's used to eating out of tin cans and show him the same dinner and he'd get sick at his stomach. He can't understand how people gorge themselves so. And he begins to be very upset about people gorging themselves.

Well, mainly people miss in understanding other people and begin to look for many more hidden things than this simple consideration: How much is too much? How much is too little? How little is too little? Well then, what's just right?

Well, if you could get this fellow to get his "just rights" on every consideration, and if life was modeled in that fashion to match his consideration perfectly, you would see a great relaxation. He'd really be relaxed.

I saw an example of this one time. There were a bunch of promoters. Real high-pressure, high-speed — oh, man, they were really promoters. They worked in oil stocks and things like that up in New York. Whee, you know? They didn't think they were doing a good day's work unless they'd taken some widow's last ten thousand before breakfast, you know? They were real fast, positive con men. They were playing cards. And they were playing cards at a rather stiff rate of speed, see? The place was absolutely blue-green with cigar smoke, you know. The chips were scattered all over the place. They had a radio turned on, and it was loud enough to make the people three floors above keep calling the police, who kept knocking on the door.

Now, these guys were all talking and the radio was going and they were playing cards and it was all totally disrelated, and a guy walked in. And he was just back from the Midwest where he had gone for his health. And he walked in and heaved a sigh of relief and he sat down to the table, sailing his hat into the corner, picked up a drink out of a dirty glass, grabbed a cigar, sat back, unbuttoned his shirt, you know, and he says, "Boy," he says, "It's good to be home to a restful place."

That was home. That was calm. I could get the idea as far as I was concerned, you see, of a complete desert stretching out in all directions and not a sound on it anyplace, you know, and just nothing but rest. No pressure. That was home. That was the way it ought to feel.

Well, sometimes you talk to a preclear and he doesn't seem to think you're a good auditor. Well, this is just What does he consider the optimum amount of sympathy?

I have occasionally surprised the living daylights out of some preclear by giving him too much just on purpose. Make him wake up to the fact that all he was doing — he wasn't running at all — he was just sitting there begging for sympathy. Oh, I've done such things as get up and throw myself weepingly upon the couch, you know, and just sob and say, "My God, how it breaks me up for you to have been treated in this fashion. How could they have done it!" You know.

The guy would look at me…

That's too much, so he questions it. But imagine my surprise one day for it to have been just enough for one preclear. Just exactly right. The person never had confidence in me before. From there on, boy, I was something. I knew people.

I've known people, their idea of the proper amount of sympathy was actually a curled lip of contempt. Only you never would have interpreted this as sympathy at all, but they did. That was enough minus randomity on the subject of sympathy, you see. That was enough minus sympathy — nonsympathetic.

You'll see troops exercising this. And it becomes immediately familiar to men when I say this. Some guy just gets smashed up in some fashion and the cracks that are made at him, he interprets as sympathy. And, actually, to some degree they're intended as sympathy.

Now, this then opens up a new field, a new view to anyone that people could all run on the same rules actually, but at different speeds. People could all stem from the same component parts, from the same sources of aberration, the same mechanical components going into their makeup, with a different consideration as to what was enough.

Now, you get the young Thor draining the horn of the giants, and that was enough to drink, you know. It wasn't enough to drink for the giants, though. They considered that was pretty bad "he thought." In other words, he had one idea of how much was enough drinking. They had another idea of how much was enough drinking.

Here we have the alcoholic. Now, let's really cut in on this one on a real tight curve here. We've got the alcoholic. The alcoholic once upon a time had an idea of how much was enough to drink. Somebody has disturbed that. They have forced it north or south, so he has a violent reaction to drink in certain quantities, don't you see?

Now, at one time, then, he had a tolerance for a certain quantity of liquor. But this, having been violated thoroughly, leaves him without a tolerance and with no consideration on the subject. In other words, he has been overwhelmed on his consideration of how much was enough to drink. He's overwhelmed.

How much is too little? Well, a man can have some appalling ideas on this subject of how much is enough to drink. I've been out with "Scandihoovian" sailors, you know. And they think a pint's a drink. You hand them a pint and they drain it, and say, "Thanks," walk on down the street without the faintest reel. That was enough to drink, for one drink.

Now, when we look it over, it doesn't explain on the basis of tissue absorption. How the medicos would love to explain it all on the basis of "Enzymes go around the gemzynes, and little bacrobics do this and that, and that manufactures the cross- paralytics," or whatever — you know, some nonsense — "It does something medically."

No, it doesn't do anything medically unless you're tuned up to that wavelength, you might say.

They throw these data away, by the way, rapidly. They don't look at these data. They throw them about, because they're too random; they can't be confronted. Obviously, opium is an opiate. It is an opiate because opiate is a derivative of the word opium. They would explain this to you carefully. Then we get technical on the subject and they say, "In it's effect it is soporific. It produces a lethargic reduction of consciousness, you see."

And you'd say, "Oh, you mean it knocks you out."

Well, he would be amazed. He would be amazed. Now, he's got it all in his pharmacopoeia that so many milligrumps of opium knock out somebody. That's what he's got. It says right there.

All right. He takes somebody and he gives them this many milligrumps. The fellow sits there, swallows them — nothing happens. Takes another couple of them, throws them in — nothing happens. Takes some more, throws them in, and he says, "Look, it'll happen all at once" — nothing happens.

This guy doesn't happen to have the consideration that opium is an opiate. He hasn't read the dictionary derivation. He hasn't been overwhelmed by the idea that it's a soporific. It doesn't overcome him. It is simply some pills.

If it's explained to him carefully how he has just consumed enough to kill him, and show him statistically — statistically demonstrate to him — that that much opium poured into a small dog would have turned him a bottlegreen purple, fellow's liable to say, "Well, I guess I'm wrong." Bloo! And out he'd go.

This is an amazing reaction. You take somebody who is nonhypnotic and then explain to them that being nonhypnotic is a manifestation of being insane. People who are nonhypnotic are insane. Prove it to him conclusively. The next time you say "abracadabra" or something, he goes "Daaa." Get the idea?

In other words, you have to actually overwhelm that basic consideration before you get a violent or non-normal reaction. Have you got it?

He's got the idea that so much is all right; so little is all right. Now, that has to be overwhelmed before he himself gets overwhelmed. Do you get the idea? You've got to really shove in his own considerations. But as you do shove his own considerations, his considerations narrow — and narrow and narrow and narrow and narrow — until it becomes very critical how much is too much and how much is too little. Got the idea? He gets critical about this.

You'll find the fellow measuring out arsenic with suspicion, you know. You'll find him taking a pair of gold-balance scales that'll measure a gnat's sneeze and being very careful about the arsenic content of a drink, or something like that. The fellow, in other words, narrows his tolerance to the extent that his tolerance itself is overwhelmed. Now, can you enlarge it after that basis?

In other words, you've got to disturb a person's basic considerations on any given subject before you can overwhelm them with that subject.

He considered that being able to read a book every week, being able to take a walk — that was an exciting life. Somebody has to come along and convince him it's a boring life before he begins to suffer from it. In other words, there's got to be an opposite and contrary opinion. That has to be shoved around. That has to be moved around. And when his ideas of tolerances are altered, then you get him into what we call an aberrated condition. Up to that time you can't consider it aberrated.

So aberration is a third-dynamic phenomenon. It is taken apart with a third-dynamic activity called auditing. It's not a first- dynamic phenomenon. Aberration never has been, never will be. When the individual faces too much or too little motion within his consideration and something bad happens to him as a result, then that bad thing that happened to him as a result is actually narrowly based on somebody having sold him the idea that his considerations were in error.

He had to be made wrong before he could be wrong with regard to his considerations. And the more he is made wrong, the more narrow his tolerance of any given speed, motion, action, thought, belief, custom or moral becomes.

I get a very big kick out of some old fellow that comes along and, boy, he's moral. Wow! You know? Oh, man, is he moral! I mean, it just hurts, you know, to listen to this fellow. What a beating he must take from the daily paper. What a beating he would take from the Christian Science Monitor. And he's pretty moral. He's very strait-laced. He knows what's right and he knows what's wrong. And man, he's got it measured with a micrometer caliper. Hey, has he got a past! Mm, wow! Whew!

You start auditing this boy and you start increasing his tolerances on what is and what isn't moral, and he's liable to take a wild dive on you with regard to his reactions to any given question. You find out, well, he wasn't really bad off. He wasn't really bad off until he strangled his younger brother. And then it sort of settled in on him, as his mother explained to him that this was wrong… You got the idea?

Somebody, then, who was intolerant, or you might say has a very narrow tolerance in life — "People must all run at an exact speed, neither too fast nor too slow," you know. "Things must be done not too good or too bad but just uyu-vhuh. And things must be done in just exactly…" "The way you set the table is to put the knife there with it's handle touching the edge of the table (not in any), you know, with its blade pointing over toward the right. The spoon sets in with its handle exactly level with the bottom of the knife." This is the way you set a table, see.

Somebody explains this to you. It's all right. A guy in terrifically good shape would simply practically toss the silverware down and it'd wind up in an aligned fashion. You got the idea? But this person goes over and moves it into this and explains how it must be that way and practically screams every time it is some other way: You can assume that there's been a lot of adjustment of opinion on the whole subject of eating. Got the idea? We must have had a big adjustment of opinion, because the tolerances are very poor. Got that?

So, the consideration itself, broadly then, at first, must be viewed as something that was pretty doggone wide. In other words, anything in driving between twenty and eighty could be considered as a nice, comfortable speed. After a while, you will find that it doesn't necessarily have to be fifteen. A person doesn't slow down that way. A person slows down to thirty-five and slows up to thirty-five. You got the idea?

The eighty became thirty-five. The twenty became thirty-five. They become a fixed speed. Riding at that speed they say, "Oh well, that's a comfortable speed." You're driving. You're driving. You watch their toes. You go thirty-eight miles an hour. You see those feet start down there, hitting the imaginary brakes, you know. Broad four-pass highway, no traffic. You go thirty-eight and their foot goes up there to find the imaginary brake. "Well," you say, "well, I'm going too fast for them." Slow down to thirty-two. They get restless.

You'd say here was somebody that had really been mauled around and had really mauled around other people on the subject of cars — and you would be right. The narrowness of the tolerance is measured by the amount of violation of randomity. All speeds are bad but thirty-five. Got the idea? Thirty-two is too slow. Thirty-eight is too fast. Thirty-five is just exactly the right speed.

Now, other people can go just as silly on an upper band, because it's just a matter of consideration. It doesn't necessarily settle in a mean at all. Somebody who at one time considered between twenty and eighty just fine, has been overwhelmed to the point where only 118 is a proper speed. It's a new consideration. But it's 118. You go 105 and they get nervous. And you say, "I'm going too fast." So you go ninety-five. They almost die!

I had a fire-engine driver one time: He was a very, very fine driver, but unfortunately fire engines are evidently supposed to travel at exactly sixty-two miles an hour around town. I don't know why, but it must be, because that's the only speed this guy could drive.

Well, I had a car that did well at ninety. And it was a broad, straight, unbending, unfrequented highway. He drove sixty-two. So I said, "Well, he's being conservative." And we came to a country town which had narrow streets which turned like pretzels. It was full of wagons, carts, strange vehicles. We went through it at sixty-two.

Now, this is also expressed in terms of heat. Heat expresses itself this way, too. Originally a person has a very wide heat tolerance. Doesn't bother him, particularly, thirty degrees above. Wouldn't worry him too much with no jacket. It wouldn't worry him too much with a jacket on at 100. See? But, gradually, heat becomes associated with wrongness. Various low degrees and various high degrees become associated with wrongness. He associates these things so that he moves off any consideration of his own and only adopts some other consideration on the subject. Because he's misowning the consideration, it, of course, persists. He eventually decides, as most of the human race has decided, that about seventy or seventy-two is pretty good.

But America, oddly enough, has decided something new. And that's that seventy-eight is all right inside with a coat off, you know, but seventy outside is all right with a slight fur parka over your head. I'm fascinated. I see people going around all wound up and so forth outside. And I go into their homes you know and you wonder what the hell is this, Death Valley? It's hot! You know, and the thermometer is way up there and the place is smoking and so forth.

Now, this could, then, become specialized. After it's being generalized that exactly seventy-three is the right temperature everywhere, then you could break this down and it'd become individuated again, and temperature could become: inside one temperature is correct, outside another temperature is correct. Well, that's kind of a silly thing, but you get an individuation of the generality and a further complexity thereof.

Well, what is this thing called randomity?

The optimum randomity of a person is what he thinks it is. But any fixed, superfixed randomity is apt to be the result of his own considerations having been overcome. And if motion produces a marked, violent effect upon him, depresses him or pushes him into some different state of mind that is quite marked and quite violent, then you must assume that his own opinions on the subject have been overwhelmed and that the level of wrongness of these nonoptimum motions is fantastic.

Now, why a thetan couldn't tolerate -273 degrees centigrade or +1600 centigrade with equal calm is a mystery. But they get into a body and it varies ten degrees either way and they start to scream and call the waiter and leave the place and buy fur coats and… You know? It's crazy.

But you get a phenomenon of a person's own considerations being overwhelmed, and then you get what we call aberration and so forth.

Well, let's look at this in terms of merely a disorderly set of ideas. They considered this set of ideas all right. Too hot, too cold — didn't matter particularly; didn't worry them. Now we get a disorderly datum into this lineup, and it says that too cold is too cold, and too hot is too hot, that there is such a thing as too hot, that there is such a thing as too cold, there is such a thing as too fast, there is such a thing as too slow with regard to any given object.

And they try to straighten that datum out because it is not particularly an optimum datum. But they may borrow it because it makes a game. And they begin to hold on to a set of ideas that they specialize in. And they will eventually find all ideas on the subject of heat and cold random or confused or disorderly except one: seventy-eight. See? And then seventy-eight — it has to be just exactly seventy-eight or they're miserable. Hotter, colder, they're miserable.

Well, all ideas on the subject of heat and cold are disorderly, or they came from disorderly sources and so are themselves disorderly. So therefore, it must obtain here that only one idea of temperature is correct. And of course, that's obviously nonsense.

Well, as we look over this whole subject of randomity we discover then that all preclears are different, but they're only different in terms of their considerations of too fast, too slow, too disorderly, too orderly.

Thank you.

[End of Lecture]