I want to talk to you tonight about the resolution of effort and counter-effort.

The only reason an engram will not run, and the only reason a moment of pain, the only reason a moment of unconsciousness will not reduce properly or erase properly is in the matter of effort and counter-effort. Effort and counter-effort form a heavy enough block on some engrams, they become very difficult to work out.

Of course, you understand there's another item, and that is one's own intention or one's own self-determinism with regard to it. It matters much more what the individual says than what is said to him. So one's own self-determinism can be a large factor in auditing out an engram.

But the effort and counter-effort are actually what hold it down, because they sort of wrap up the self-determinism, they sort of lie around it. Self-determinism can get swallowed up by effort and counter-effort. Such a situation as this: An individual comes out of a door and somebody else comes in the door and they collide. Well now, each one has the intention and postulate of progressing forward in the direction he's going, and they collide. And they stop for a moment. And to A who is coming out of the door, B is a sudden counter-effort. And to B going in the door, A is a sudden counter-effort. The two of them meet, maybe bump their heads together, both of them would go unconscious. You see, unconsciousness is actually a manifestation of one's self-determinism being upset by a countereffort; that is what unconsciousness is.

The equation one works on, actually, is "If I can't make my selfdeterminism count, then I must be dead," and he goes down curve rapidly toward death. Unconsciousness is just a - light or deep - is merely a slide in toward death.

Now, effort and counter-effort, then, contain a very large part of the answer of auditing out an engram. Your preclear can get so bogged down in some postulate, in some statement he makes himself, underneath this effort and counter-effort - that he's made when he received it or made just before he received it - that he will concentrate in such a way on this effort and counter-effort that he does not pick it up. Now, that may seem to you rather odd that you could concentrate on a counter-effort and be then unable to contact it. The trick is to concentrate on another point than the point of impact, and only then will the counter-effort come in.

The reason for this is very simply expressed. One's own effort is always to some slight degree directed toward the receipt and expulsion of counter-efforts. Now, the receipt and expulsion of counter-efforts requires that one fix his attention upon the counter-effort. And one's attention, therefore, is fixed on the effort in order to expel it. What is actualy happening is you are no more and no less than a complete bundle of counter-efforts. Thought picked up its first counter-effort way back at the beginning of time, turned it around, and used it to overcome the physical universe. And this sequence: picking up a counter-effort and then using it, picking up a counter-effort and then using it, picking up a counter-effort and using it, should demonstrate to you that every effort which you exert has at one time or another been a counter-effort. A physical-force effort, then, has at one time or another, always - in every case - has been a counter-effort.

The only reason a counter-effort in a facsimile becomes troublesome is because an individual's self-determinism depends to a large degree upon his right to use any counter-effort he receives and turn it around and send it the other way. Now, he thinks of himself as having this as an inherent right. Therefore, when he receives a counter-effort and is then inhibited in using it, the counter-effort will eventually come back against him because he will go back to the point where he realizes the counter-effort is dangerous, he'll start examining it and he'll throw himself back into the first facsimile of its receipt. This is highly mechanical - very, very mechanical.

Now, a counter-effort, then, let us say, of being hit hard by a truck, to use a very standardized thing (hitting by a truck is quite ordinary these days, drivers being what they are, particularly in Kansas) - so your counter-effort comes in - bam!

Now, actually, in order to use this, the individual would have to hit somebody with a truck. Well, he knows he'd better not hit somebody with a truck because this would be in violation of the dynamics as well as city ordinances. At least most cities have ordinances against this sort of thing; I'm not sure about this particular city.

The point is that one has received a counter-effort which he cannot employ, and so it's worrisome. Well, there are two things to do about it: one is not to get hit by a truck, and the other one is, if hit, be in a high enough tone so that that facsimile, being in the counter-effort band, won't ever be contacted by you anymore - or audit it out. Now, these are several courses that you can take. All right.

Here is the matter of receiving a counter-effort and not being able to use it. An individual is killed, let us say. I hope that doesn't sound particularly amusing to you - he's killed and later on can't use the counter-effort, but that's exactly what happens. The individual is killed - let's say he's strangled - and later on somebody does something to him, and his response is to take his lily-white hands and strangle the other person.

Now, he may do this several times. He may do it very successfully several times, and one day, after he gets through strangling somebody, maybe back in the Stone Age or something of the sort, he takes another look and it's a girl, and that was the wrong use of this counter-effort. Or it was a baby - wrong use of the counter-effort. He's trying to use this counter-effort and here he's used it wrongly. What happens to him? Instantaneously and immediately he gets the somatic of being strangled - because he tries to regret this matter, he tries to figure it out. He says to himself, "My goodness, how could I possibly have strangled this woman?" "How could I possibly have strangled this baby'" - whatever he did. "Well, how could I have done this?"

Well, when he says to himself, "How could I have done this?" he starts picking up the facsimiles which gave him the counter-effort which permitted him to do it. And, of course, he hangs up with the first time it was done to him. And we call this first inciaent, when it was done to him, the motivator.

The motivator is then employed, and may be employed relatively successfully: He can go around choking animals, choking horses, choking anything - it doesn't matter, choking men. They're all on a parity with him - it just doesn't matter. He doesn't regret these fellows, And then one fine day he chokes the wrong person, which is to say, he chokes somebody that is not a legitimate target - which is to say, he has no justification for the act. Insufficient justification creates, then, what we call the overt act. An overt act is the misemployment of a counter- effort - the misemployment of a counter-effort. And the counter-effort thus employed against a target that is not a legitimate target, backfires on the individual. He'll go back down the time track and get into the motivator. He gets into the motivator immediately. He gets the somatics, plainly and simply, that were administered to him. He gets those somatics himself.

Thus, you find on the track, a person begins to accumulate overt acts - many of them. He maybe has one big motivator, one incident that he can't do anything about. He has received a counter-effort and every time he tries to use this counter-effort, which is his perfect right (he thinks), he finds out that it is such a large offense against the other dynamics that he pulls back and resigns his right, and he cannot then be self-determined. So his self-determinism sinks because he can't use this counter-effort.

As a result, the accumulated overt acts can get up to a point where the individual will suffer no matter what he does to anybody. He begins to believe that he cannot use a single counter-effort. This is a condition we know as apathy: All counter-efforts go through, and one puts up no effort to resist them. That is apathy. That is also refusing to use one's right to utilize counter-efforts. That's the bottom of self-determinism, then. One can't use a counter-effort, therefore one has no self-determinism, therefore one is in apathy because all efforts go through him - all counterefforts go through him.

The whole Tone Scale can be derived on these emotions to this degree: How much overt action has the individual suffered from? That is to say, how many times has he failed when he tried to employ a countereffort? The degree to which he is unable to employ counter-efforts is the degree or the band he lies in on the Tone Scale. Should be very simple, very easy to understand.

If a man can't use any counter-efforts at all, he cannot resent anything that's said to him, he cannot strike hack at anybody that does anything to him, he is incapable, then, of defending himself or the other dynamics and as a result, more or less ceases to exist. That's apathy. The bottom of apathy is death. One then won't even resist the counter-effort of sunlight or anything of the sort.

Now, way up the band one is so extensional against counter-efforts that they really don't even arrive. They don't arrive. He not only is capable of employing all counter-efforts, he doesn't need to; he's way up above. Now, when a person, let us say, is well up the band, let us say that he begins to use, for some reason or other, counter-efforts - he uses some old counter-effort against one of the dynamics. He comes down the band a little bit. He uses another counter-effort against one of the dynamics You see, it's nonsurvival to go out against the dynamics; it's not good sense.

So, he uses these counter-efforts and he uses them and he uses them. And he uses these motivators, one after the other, and gradually uses them wrong this time and wrong that time and comes, eventually, down to the bottom of the Tone Scale.

In order to audit him back up again, one could, actually, merely pick up his overt acts. You can locate them on a psychometer,' His overt acts: What has he killed and when? When has he misemployed counterefforts? Against what? Against himself, against children, against women, against groups, against man, against animals, against the MEST universe and so forth, right straight on up the line.

Particularly interesting is the counter-effort against seven, theta - the seventh dynamic. The overt act against seven is very interesting because it results in an individual believing he has offended to such a degree that he has to get into the valence of something which is offended. Now, that unsnarls very easily.

Christ bore the burdens of all man and the world, didn't he? So, if a person keeps on offending, offending, offending against the seventh dynamic, he will eventually offend so wrongly and so widely and broadly that his only solution to it is to wind up as Christ.

& This isn't saying that's the route that Christ went, although some of the lost books of the bible tell you how he spent his early youth using his powers to destroy those around him. You may not be aware of these early accounts. There's one story, in these lost books of the bible, about his blinding a playmate mearly by telling him to go blind.

Now, as we go up the scale, then, a person commits, actually, less and less counter-efforts but is capable of committing more and more. The bottom of the scale, in apathy, is when a person has committed so many counter-efforts, so many overt acts - he's done so much without good justification that he must now do nothing but justify whatever he's doing. Well, what does he do to justify? He starts wearing the somatics, starts wearing the pains and infirmities of his motivator. It has turned on him at last, and you'll have this …

You can run, by the way, a great many people through the Crucifixion. You can actually run them through the Crucifixion. They'll get it very nicely. They'll take enough facsimiles and put them together to have one wonderful crucifixion. They'll get themselves really crucified. Why? Well, any time you find anybody running a Crucifixion, you start looking around to find out when they started offending against the seventh dynamic, and you'll find plenty of offenses. And instead of running the Crucifixion, which is, after all, merely satisfying this person, find their overt acts against it and run those out and the tone of the individual will come up quite markedly.

That's a symbolical performance in this society, this society being what it is - running the Crucifixion. You'll find that as an incident in many people. Don't bother to run it.

Find out when they cut the throat of the priest, when they set fire to the nun and other little pastimes in which they have engaged during a dull day and an idle moment.

Evidently, the volume of overt act against the seventh dynamic necessary to really aberrate the seventh dynamic is quite high - it's quite high. I have never run the Crucifixion, and yet one time I evidently looted the dickens out of the nicest, prettiest church you ever saw. Melted down all of its altar plate too. And - well, as far as the nuns and priests were concerned and so forth, it took a minimum time - only a few hours on the rack - to get them to say where it was. (laughter) And I've never run through this incident. I have no experience with this, except objectively, in running preclears into it. So I've never quite plumbed the well of how overt a preclear can be on the seventh dynamic. There may be some dread, dark and awful secrets …

That's why you need a psychometer. They'll never tell you about an overt act. They just won't tell you about them. They'll tell you about all the things done to them, but what they've done to others they won't say.

Now, the overt act is a very important piece of information for you. The overt act, all by itself, will break cases and throw them up the Tone Scale with considerable ease. Furthermore, a case which has never wept, has never been angry - if you find the overt act, you'll spill tears out of them by the bucket; you will spill rage and fear and all the rest of it on an overt act. Whose tears? The person they've harmed. Whose rage? The person they've hurt. Whose somatics?

Now, there's a lot of people walking around, by the way, lots of people walking around that… Well, let's say somebody has got a bad eye or something of the sort, and you walk up to him and you say, "Did you ever poke anybody in the eye?" And he says, "Oh, no!" "Well, what have you got a bad eye for?" "Well, I just got it, that's all. I just got it."

"Go through the action of poking somebody in the eye. How would you poke somebody in the eye?"

And the fellow will say, "Well, I'11 use the right index finger, I guess." You say, "Well all right, take your right index finger and poke somebody in the eye. Now, let's poke them again. All right, let's poke them again. Let's poke them again. Let's poke them again." And it's very dangerous for you to try to demonstrate this, by the way, right this minute, because there's hardly anybody present who hasn't poked somebody in the eye.

And you make him go through this physical motion a few times, and he doesn't even know where it is on the track - it might be back in the Crusades or a thousand years BC, it doesn't matter. All of a sudden, bong! he has a very bad eye. And as a matter of fact, you can keep it up until he's got a black eye. If the incident is not going to be identified - you're not going to identify the incident in any way, he's not going to identify it - you can keep him making an overt act (that is to say, repeating some overt act he's done) until he gets the somatic very thoroughly.

Now, the only reason anybody is carrying around an aberration or a somatic, by the way, according to theory, is that he has used some counter-effort he received sometime to destroy along one or more of the dynamics. That's one for you to note in auditing.

The phenomenon of the overt act is very important. You hit Bill - you hit him, and a few days or weeks later your eye isn't so good and you can't find out why. It's because you hit Bill; you regretted hitting Bill.

Now, if you'll take an overt act and run it backwards, you'll get the regret off of it. Because what is a person trying to do with an overt act? He's trying to get it undone. He doesn't want to go forward through it again. He wants to undo it; he wants to un-enact it. He hit this fellow - he was in a terrific, tearing rage and he hit this fellow and the fellow fell down, and the second that fellow fell, all of a sudden he said, "I've just hit my brother. Huhhh? No, I didn't do it. That wasn't I," He then invalidates it all over the place. "I didn't do it, I had …" Then he says, "I had ample justification," He knows he doesn't have ample justification. He can't quite untangle this thing because there that fellow lies on the ground in bad shape - that's just hitting somebody in the eye.

You'll find in any man's childhood, he has hit another child. you can find that. And you will find that hitting this other child has been an additive factor, just one of the many factors, which holding in suspension the somatic which that man in his adulthood is carrying.

Now, that's just hitting a little child in a childish quarrel. How do you get rid of this? Run through it, identify it. Put him on a psychometer and find it is the best way to do, because you can fish around for a long time on overt acts by just guessing. You can spend a lot of time, but a psychometer will tell you immediately where they are.

Run this incident backwards. Have him withdraw the blow, withdraw the blow, withdraw the blow, and all of a sudden he'll find he's - impossible to keep withdrawing this blow, and the film will start to run the other way. And then it'll run the other way for a few times, and then he starts withdrawing it again. And in such a way, you work the time out of the act. Because, you see, the reason it gets into restimulation is very simple - very simple, the reason the overt act gets into restimulation. The person has jammed time on it - he doesn't want it to happen - so having jammed time on it, time becomes timeless, and so the overt act can float with him from there on, He has put himself before the incident happened; therefore, any time he moves forward, the incident occurs. There, maybe, is one of the reasons he has sinusitis and so forth.

Any time a person has performed an overt act, he has suffered from it to some degree or other.

Now, you take - once upon a time, man evidently had fairly large teeth. You can just make somebody start biting - just make him start biting, biting anything - and the first thing you know, he's got a somatic in his mouth. But more important, he's probably got one in his stomach; he bit somebody's stomach one time or other. And you make him bite and bite and bite and the stomach somatic will turn on.

Whose somatic is it? Well, initially it was his; initially he got bitten in the stomach. But that isn't - he could be bitten in the stomach forever, practically; every year he could be bitten in the stomach and not become aberrated from it until he turned around and bit somebody else in the stomach.

In other words, the organism, the individual is so situated, so constructed that at any time it can receive and take an enormous amount of punishment. It is a sponge for punishment. And the only reason it holds up a somatic and says, "I hurt, I hurt" is when it says, "I am apologizing for having hit Sir Lady Custabula in the boudoir." It's holding up this somatic as evidence, as propitiation to the rest of the world. "I'm sorry I did it. I'm sorry I did it," it's saying.

Now, the counter-effort-effort phenomena is very important to the auditor. And just because we have a Facsimile One, just because we have a lot of other things, is no reason why we should neglect this strange phenomenon of Bill hits Joe, and Bill gets the hit. You can work that out. You can take any preclear and start making him punch somebody, somehow, in the stomach, and you'll get the somatic on that preclear that is supposedly doing the action.

Now, overt acts, by the way, have become less and less digestible to man during the last many thousands of years. He's gotten less and less capable of exerting them, so that he extends himself. At first he committed overt acts with his teeth, and then he started overt acts with his fists and his fingers - choking, hitting. And then he resorted to daggers - stone daggers and then stone axes and then short metal daggers - not too short, about the length of a stone ax, out to a rapier, and then a broadsword. Until now he's gone from the short-range musket to the long-range rifle, to the artillery shell (75 millimeter, 155 millimeter, 16-inch railway gun), to the atom bomb delivered by a human individual, to an atom bomb delivered by a pilotless plane. You get the idea of how far he's backing off from his overt acts. And he's just backing off just like that; he's crawfishing on overt acts.

So do not forget that overt acts may suspend a whole case, may keep an entire case from running. The overt act may be the entire well of grief on the case. Therefore, do not neglect this type of incident, and consider it and evaluate it at all times as being much more valuable to run than any incident the individual himself received.

[At this point there is a gap in the original recording.]

An auditor has only - to verify this himself, get a good subjective experience on it - has only to ask himself what he would do to create the somatic which he is wearing, create the pain which he's wearing. Just ask him what he would have to do to somebody else to create this pain. All right.

As a matter of fact, there's a huge lot of data that is unnecessary to you on how you identify the overt act without a psychometer. It's quite a trick; you have to almost be a swami to do it. But you can actually look at a person and say, "Why, yes, this person's overt act is killing a woman." Why? Well, just look at him, that's all; he'll have some womanly characteristic.

Now, regret that one has killed or maimed or injured results in another phenomenon: the phenomenon of life continuum. An auditor must know this phenomenon - life continuum. When a person has done an overt act to another, he conceives that he has taken on the responsibility and responsibilities of this other person, including this other person's responsibilities in life - his goals, his physiology, his infirmities, his computations, his methods of doing business. All of these things, every single one of them, can form up into the lifecontinuum pattern.

Now, you'll find that this phenomenon also exists: Grandma dies, and after that Grandma is to be found - in terms of mannerisms - in the grandchild. This is almost as though Grandma's soul has transmigrated or reincarnated into the child, on Grandma's death.

Not so. All this child has done, has looked at the fact: "Grandma is dead. I don't want Grandma to be dead because this is nonsurvival on the dynamics. Therefore, how can I 'undead' Grandma? All right, the way I 'undead' Grandma is to figure out what was done to Grandma and undo that. And then I can 'undead' Grandma." It's a rather strange computation but it exists, and it exists just in that order.

So he says to himself, "Let's start with me." Always - "What have I done to kill Grandma?" He does the trick, then, of going into Grandma's valence.

Valence is a very interesting manifestation. An individual will suddenly turn around and become like another individual and stay that way. An individual has himself and then he has valences, and he can go into dozens of valences. There's all sorts of valences: there's synthetic valences, there's bedpost valences, there's … Yeah, that's right; you'll find people in insane asylums in the valence of a bedpost or in the valence of a brick wall or something of the sort.

And then there's composite valences. Then there is imaginary people valences, like practically every girl in America at one time or another has gone into the valence of a movie actress. Sat there, and … One of the reasons why people go to see picture shows is to steal the valences of the actors and use them - go into those valences.

The whole subject of acting is actually bound up in the subject of valences. An actor only must be able to go into the valence of his character - see his character well and then step into that valence - and thereafter he will act almost automatically.

Now, therefore, this manifestation of valences is something with which an auditor will have to deal. In addition to that, he can actually predict the behavior of those around him by knowing whose valence they're in - if he knew the characteristics of the other valence.

For instance, they say, "Like father, like son." The chances are fair that the son is to some degree in father's valence or to some degree completely out of father's valence and on opposite polarity. Like "I'm never going to be like my father if it's the last thing I ever do, I - rorr-rorr-rorrrorr!" And so he becomes opposite to everything Father can do. Father happens to be a good businessman, so the son, of course, becomes a terrible businessman.

Therefore, a person can stay out of valences perforce and stay away from everything that is a characteristic of that valence, or he can be in the valence or he can just leave it alone.

Best thing to do is for an individual to be in his own being. That's pretty hard for an individual to do. Most of the complaints you will get from preclears, as a fact, is, "I cannot be myself." And the people they hate most are the people who inhibited them from being themselves - people who interfered with them being themselves. There is their principal hatred.

Now, this valence manifestation becomes confirmed - and actually goes into action and becomes confirmed - by an overt act. Dear, dear Grandma would never be imitated under any circumstances by the child unless the child was guilty of action - punishment or otherwise - against Grandma. That child has done things to Grandma. Maybe kicked Grandma in the shins, maybe squalled and hollered and raised the dickens when Grandma tried to get them dressed - anything. But don't worry about running the death, so much, of Grandma - it'll do a lot of good if you can run the death and get all the tears of it off, but most of the time you can't. No, if you find a preclear in somebody's valence (this is his grandma - he's being his grandma, he's being his aunt, he's being his uncle, something of the sort), find the time when he offended against prior to the death, and that time will exist.

Now, oddly enough, an individual will continue the life of individuals for many lifetimes. So if you want to find out why the husband keeps going into his wife's valence, you may not find the key to that in this lifetime. The psychometer will find it for you. You can go back century by century until you pick up the time he injured or killed the woman who happened to have been a duplicate of his present or deceased wife. You'll find an overt act lying ahead of every life continuum.

Do not neglect the life continuum as a phenomenon, because here the overt act goes into restimulation by the complete recognition that the individual has suffered, the individual is dead. And maybe this overt act was very minor and maybe it occurred in some much earlier lifetime,

All of a sudden Junior walks into the bedroom and there the undertakers, with paint and powder, have laid out Grandpa. Walks in, there's Grandpa dead. And he isn't saying, "Oh, I am going to die, I guess, because Grandpa's dead and I'm like Grandpa." That's very simple. He wouldn't say that. He does say to himself, "I'm sorry Grandpa is dead." But more importantly, much more importantly, he says to himself… Let's say Junior is only five years of age; he never did anything to Grandpa, really, to amount to anything. The first thing he says to himself is, "My God, what did I do to kill him?" because you're all packing guilty consciences on overt acts. "What did I do to kill Grandpa?"

You'll find the bulk of the people you question on the street and in the drawing room have had the sensation, some time or other in this lifetime, that they've murdered somebody. This is one of the commonest manifestations discussed in old-time psychotherapy. Old-time psychetherapy ran into the post and stubbed its nose very badly simply because the person obviously, by record, by police blotter, had not killed anybody in this lifetime - hadn't killed anybody. Therefore, it was irrational for the person to suppose that he had killed somebody, and thinking in this wise and not knowing anything about the continuation of life through the generations and the continuation of the individual personality, they assigned it immediately to delusion. And from this they began to assign the word delusion, to everything that an individual could think or do. And that, you see, is mainly - and really only - thing wrong with the mind. It becomes unable to differentiate between actuality and delusion. And when it is hammered and pounded and told that it is'"hallucinating," it becomes much more unsure, and there we go - there goes sanity.

It is not a delusion that a young child or an adult remembering back into his childhood believes he's killed somebody. I well recall, at the age of two, of lying in bed in the dark and shuddering with horror over the thought of killing a man. "That is one thing I just must never do." I just kept telling myself this over and over and over. "I just mustn't kill anybody; I mustn't take anybody's life from him; I just mustn't do this, that's all." I just killed one too many fellows down past - through the years, as any of you have.

Man used to be a lot wilder than he is now. That's a strange thing - a little, innocent, sweet child of two is not sitting around worrying about his teddy bear or something of this sort; he's worrying about "I must not cut anybody's throat this life." If you think back for a moment, you'll recall this yourself - some sensation that - wondering one time or another, "I wonder if I ever killed anybody in this lifetime." Spooky notion that sort of haunts you.

We put somebody on a psychometer and you say, "Did you ever kill anybody?" "Nope, nope." Machine is still, dead, unanswering.

"Hmm," you say. "Well, now, that's this lifetime. Let's take an earlier lifetime: Did you ever kill anybody?" And the machine trembles a little bit. "Well, how about the last lifetime?" No action. "How about the life before that?" No action. "Let's take order of magnitude: let's say five hundred years ago did you kill somebody? a thousand years ago?" the machine is kind of dancing so you say "Let's take it a little shorter. A hundred years ago did you kill anybody?" Bang!

"Let's see, was it a man?" No action. "Was it a woman?" No action. "Was it a child?" Soong! Well, so the fellow was driving down the road in a hay wagon going too fast, and a little boy ran out from underneath the fence and he ran over him - bang.

When you've lived as long as you've lived, you're apt to accumulate an awful lot of experiences, and amongst these is the overt act, and it stands like a beacon.

Now, you take anybody back a few thousand years, or tens of thousands of years, and you're going to get a bop on them killing women and everything else because at one time or another you were cannibals. Sure, otherwise why would you have such a revulsion against the idea of eating human flesh? You sit down at any table, any company, and say in a conversational tone of voice, "Have you ever eaten a roast thigh?"

And they say, "Mm, well, what do you mean, roast - you mean roast - a haunch of beef, don't you?"

And you say, "No, no. Human thigh - fileted." You can look up and down that table, you'll see people getting green. Well, why do they get green? Human meat is quite edible. Well, it is. You haven't eaten anybody for an awful long time, but there's hardly anybody present who hasn't dined upon what they call in the South Pacific "long pig" - very long pig. And this revulsion and so on runs through the race. You can run out one of those incidents, but those incidents, by the way, are not very severe-they're not severe. It is only when an overt act has hung up in a big maybe that it becomes very severe.

You know, the human mind thinks in terms of yes or no. These are decisions. A man decides in terms of yes or no. So long as he can resolve problems in terms of "yes greater than no" or "no greater than yes," he's quite sane. But let him run into a problem which won't resolve either way, which hangs in the middle as maybe: Is it yes? Is it no? Is it yes? Is it no? No, it's not yes; yes, it's not no. Yes, no? No, yes?

You could dream up an entire therapy just asking a person to resolve all their problems this way, and keep knocking out a little bit of this facsimile and a little bit of that facsimile until a person comes off all of his maybes. You can find the maybes on a psychometer.

"Have you got any maybes about women?" Bang! Or in a case of a girl: "Do you have any maybes about men?" Bang! You always get a reaction. "Are men good?" Needle tips just a little bit. "Are men bad?" Needle tips just a little bit. That's a maybe. "Are men good or bad?" "Maybe."

So, of course, this person could not make up his mind concerning men - or she couldn't make up her mind completely concerning men, so she would never be able to go on a conclusive, decisive course.

A person who has decided thoroughly what to do and is capable of deciding what to do can accomplish action. A person who has not decided what he can do cannot accomplish action. Inaction is maybe. You hang a person up with 50 percent of the factors in yes, and 50 percent of the factors in no, bring him dead center on an important issue and he becomes inconclusive and indecisive, his self-confidence vanishes, his self-determinism goes euay down.

If you take a little kid, and every time the little kid says yes you make him say no, every time he says no you make him say yes - standard training - you get him to a point finally where you've hung up all of his decisions with a maybe. He says, "I'm going down to the corner and buy a comic book." "Oh no, dear, you don't want to go down to the corner and buy a comic book, now do you?"

"Yeah, well, all right, I'm not going down then."

"Well, on the other hand, perhaps it'd do you good to get a little air."

Mama can get into a big argument with him concerning why one should buy comic books or why one shouldn't buy comic books. All he knew in the first place was that he wanted to buy a comic book, and he winds up with a lot of facsimiles but no data resolved - lots of facsimiles without any one of them resolved.

A whole education could be put into a person's head on a maybe. "Maybe?… Maybe?…"

You go into arithmetic: they say, "Now, you have to know arithmetic."

The kid says, "Maybe." So he studies all arithmetic, and all he's figuring after that - every time, he says, "Two plus two equals four, maybe?"

Anybody who goes into Scientology feeling that nothing can be done for the human mind will receive his initial training with a maybe. "Does this phenomena exist? Doesn't it exist? Well, I don't know, It's all maybe. Maybe - maybe it does; maybe it doesn't. I don't know I don't know. I don't know. I don't know," When he gets through to the end, what you do is let him practice a little bit, find out for himself, resolve a few of these things, and then make sure that he's just scanned through all of the instruction, and his decision on auditing comes straight on up and he becomes a better auditor, because nearly everybody has a maybe kicking around on this stuff.

"Is it true that if I hit John Doakes in the eye I will get a black eye?" Mm-hm. But until you've hit John Doakes in the eye, it's a little bit of a maybe.

So decision is very important - it's important mechanically. Facsimiles are made to be resolved and be put in good order; conclusions are to be drawn on them. Every time an individual is trying to think, all he is doing is picking up new facsimiles - in other words, data - and combining them with old facsimiles to get new conclusions. And he's just combining and recombining and recombining. And this combination process - smooth thinking - goes on very nicely and very prettily, straight on through to the end, until a person suddenly hits a big maybe. He can't resolve this problem.

"Should I have killed Agnes or shouldn't I have? Let's see, Agnes was awfully mean to me and she went out with those other two boys, and I caught her twice putting poison in my orange juice. But on the other hand, she was a dear, sweet girl. And she was very nice and she was very desirable in a lot of ways. And she was economical and she took care of the kids, and the kids miss her. Now, should I have killed Agnes? Well, yes. Should I have killed Agnes? No. Yes. No. Yes. No. Yes. No."

Well, what's that do? It's an unsolved problem is what it is, and so it stays in present time and it starts accumulating facsimiles to it "Should I have done this? Shouldn't I have done this? Should I have done it? Shouldn't I have done this?" And finally killing Agnes goes off into "Should I have eaten cereal this morning for breakfast or shouldn't I have eaten cereal this morning for breakfast?"

You see, that connects up very easily, very simply because breakfast means a table and Agnes often sat at a table. So that's a big maybe. So the person is indecisive, so then he gets indecisive about whether or not he has a sick stomach. And then he decides this is because of some indecision he's making in business, so he decides that he can't make decisions about his business.

In other words, obviously he should never have killed Agnes, but he doesn't decide this. He just hangs it up and he gets a maybe.

You can take a preclear and process him… - Of course, I'm using the death of Agnes as an exaggeration. Hardly 100 percent of men have ever killed Agnes. (laughter) If you don't believe this, go up and down the psychometer life by life, year by year, thousands of years by thousands of years, and you'll pick up the girl. People get somewhat angry in their passion and they get upset sometimes on infidelity or the wrong baby or something of the sort, and they fly into a rage and cut somebody's throat, or bite somebody's throat out as they did back in the days when they had bigger teeth than they have now. In other words, here is this strange manifestation: Maybe. Maybe.

Every time one offends against the dynamic, he cannot admit to himself that he has offended against the dynamic, so he has to say to himself, "I had good reason." But he knows he didn't have good reason, but he has to say he doesn't [does] have good reason, so he can't resolve it yes/no. He has to resolve it on maybe, maybe, maybe.

Then afterwards he will go around and he will try to get people to commit overt acts against him. He will go around and he will say, "Hit me~" "Make me fail," "Shoot me," "Do something to me." You can't understand why he's doing this.

He's not saying it, by the way. He's knocking you around until you do - covertly getting on your nerves, breaking things you have, busting up anything you start. And he just keeps at this and keeps at it and keeps at it, and sooner or 1ater you take a Luger out and drill him, And then he's satisfied, because now he has received an overt act against himself which demonstrates clearly and conclusively that he is justified.

But this doesn't solve either, because the justification came after the time - as he wakes up in the next life and realizes - it comes after the time that he committed the act against Agnes. In other words, it just doesn't resolve it. As long as time stays there, it doesn't resolve. Time is the great unresolver.

The second that a person commits an overt act, he says, "I've got to get back ahead of it." And so he is - back ahead of it. And then he starts to say, "The reason I'm back ahead of it is some other reason." Regret is just turning back time, that's all. It's as mechanical as running a motion-picture film backwards. All right.

When you work on any preclear, you will find life continuum pursuing out from overt acts. He took something that happened to him - now that's his motivator, and he used it to harm somebody or something on one of the dynamics. That was the overt act. These two together and all of their locks and all incidents appended thereto comprise the service facsimile. The motivator and the overt plus all of the incidents and locks equals the service facsimile.

The service facsimile is Facsimile One, plus overt act one, plus all locks. And it's as easy as that.

This service facsimile is used. It's called a service facsimile because it was made to serve somebody else - it was made up to serve somebody else, but you use it yourself. When you don't want to do something you say, "I am sick," When people are angry at you, you say, "I want to be sympathized with," so you turn on this service facsimile. You use it in countless ways.

You don't think very fast one day, you aren't right there with the answer, and so you say, "Well, I forget," and of course that's part of the service facsimile. Actually, you don't forget, but it has its uses. You realize, after you get the service facsimile knocked out, you remember everything.

And this, by the way, might be slightly frightening to some people. You put them on a psychometer and ask them, "How would you like, to know?" And the psychometer goes - bong! Wrong side. No, they don't want to know. But, up to you as an auditor to make them know. If you need a reason to do it, is: "It serves them right!"

Now, the effort and counter-effort situation, then, are quite important in the reduction of incidents. Completely aside from the fine little ways of undoing engrams - just straight application. A person uses an old counter-effort to commit an effort himself. And when he uses a counter-effort, he gets wrong if it injures widely on the other dynamics. A very simple equation to work with.

Strangely enough, a person will hold down and pin down his effort and counter-efforts to a point where they can't even be reached by an auditor or anybody else if he has an overt act lying on top of them. The reason for this is, is he's bound up time - he's turned time backwards - to an extent that he won't march ahead and he won't run through the incident.

Why won't he run through the incident? Because he's committed an overt act and the overt act is on that.

So that you've got motivator: here's the counter-effort being received - that's what's done to him. Then he uses the counter-effort as his own effort, he commits an overt act, and then he has to back up from having committed the overt act and say he didn't commit it and say, "I'm innocent." So the only way he can do this is to get back of - ahead of - the first motivator. So you can't get him to run through the motivator unless you run him through the overt act first because this effort-counter-effort proposition.

First, he owned the counter-effort. You see, it was done to him and he owned it. He says, "This is mine to do with as 1 like regardless of what was done to me." He owned it. Then he used the fact that he owned it to harm a dynamic. And this is against survival. It's not good survival. So he recognized that it wasn't and he regretted it. So he says, "I regret this; therefore, I didn't have any right to do it." Actually, the fact that it was done to him gives him every right in the world to do it, but the fact that he used it wrong tells him that he has no right to do it; he didn't have a right to do it, obviously, because it harmed this.

So there is your principal and biggest and only real maybe on a case: "I had the right to do it but I didn't have the right to do it. I had the right to do it and I did it and then I didn't have the right to do it." So this person then says, "I don't own these somatics I don't own these counter-efforts; therefore they can hit me at will, they can punch me around, they can do anything they want to me because I don't own them. I couldn't possibly own them because then I'd also have to admit that I used them. So I just haven't got anything to do with this, and that's why I have sinusitis, asthma, lung fever, hangnails, why I limp, am paralyzed in the left side and am generally normal."

So in entering any case it is very, very wise for you to use a psychometer and to use it very, very well and look for the individual's overt acts. And you may have to take several overt acts off the case before you can get down to the overt act of Facsimile One and then get down to running Facsimile One itself as a motivator,

You should know this subject very well and be very, very wise in your diagnosis.

Thank you.