One of the most interesting things that we have run into at times is the fact that probably all of us, with the knowledge which has been accumulated and the push buttons’ which were suddenly summed up not very long ago and which we now have to hand, could put on black cowls, look grim and mysterious about the whole thing, button up all communication lines about Dianetics — that is to say, not let on about any axioms or anything like that — and just start practicing what apparently would be black magic.

We could bring people in off the streets and have them walk down the hall and stop in Office 1 where a little sign says, “Glasses removed here.” We wouldn’t have any couches or anything cluttering the place up like that, and we could just walk them around the hall and at each station there would be another auditor and he would just ask standard questions. The people coming in would walk all the way around and then out on the street again. Of course, they would stop at the desk before they went out and write out a check for the equivalent amount of medical treatment, which would come to $8,687,962.05!

There is some slight possibility that we may be at that stage. I don’t want to over evaluate anything, however.

I sort of feel like a man who has been pretty sure all the way along the line that there was a button someplace and that if one pushed the button something horrendous would happen. The trouble was, there were enormous numbers of buttons that one could push.

We finally got rather tired of just pushing single buttons some time ago because we didn’t hit the right button, and we started playing chords. This tune we have now is played with one finger. We extrapolated our way out to what must be the button and punched it, without very much ceremony, and what happened made Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the first atom bomb explosion down in New Mexico and the one at Bikini seem like cap pistols.

It is interesting to me that the button was there so ready to hand. It is also interesting to me that the button was in use once but was neglected.

It is very fortuitous that we had to make the circuit that we made in Dianetics — very, very fortuitous. It has been nip and tuck, now, for eighteen or twenty months, trying to codify what I was doing for myself so that it could be communicated with the proper symbols to others in order that they could do it.

At first, I didn’t know that I didn’t know what I was doing, which made for an interesting situation: There stands the fellow with tar all over him and he doesn’t know that he is dirty. My whole perimeter was completely snarled up with a lot of odds and ends. It was like the way a witch doctor makes up a prescription. He takes a half an ounce of powdered bat wings, a quarter of a gill of frog’s breath, some sharply powdered XX-fine tiger claws, four sunbeams from the sunrise, two leaves of digitalis and an incantation to the great god Woof and then feeds this concoction to the patient and finds out that invariably the patient gets well from heart trouble.

Then everybody says, “Was it the incantation?”“Well, obviously,” says the fellow who is religiously inclined.

“Was it the sunbeams taken from a sunrise?” “Obviously,” say the very aesthetic.

Of course, the tiger’s claws are obviously not therapeutic so people more or less discard that, except those who are fond of tiger’s claws and they hold on that it was that one. As far as the frog’s breath and so forth is concerned, people can say, “Well, it’s probably needed as filler.” And they say, “Now, this dirty old leaf stuff — that’s to give it a nice green color so the patient will take it.”

They could go on arguing for a long time unless they set out on a program of separation and identification of exactly what they were doing.

If they could do this, they would find out that it was not even the whole leaf, it was just the drug digitalis, and that you can get digitalis by the pound. It saves an awful lot of lung and throat power — you don’t have to make the incantations anymore — and furthermore it saves getting up so early in the morning to collect those sunbeams.

The aesthetic, however, are liable to say at this moment, “Ah, well, those sunbeams that made the world so beautiful . . .”

We are about in that situation.

As had been remarked for some time, there were obviously personal factors involved in my processing of preclears. It was not only personal factors though; it had to do with a deep- seated personal belief. That the belief happens to be right is fortuitous; it just happens to be coincidental. Nothing much else is germane to the problem. Probably I would have arrived at it anyway by extrapolation.

But it wasn’t until I suddenly realized how I used to talk to naval crews that I realized that I talked to preclears the same way when I was auditing them. It was sort of the way a football coach starts talking to the team during the half-time break: “Get in there and pitch for dear old Down-and-Out U.!” and so forth. It was about that tone, and it was mostly on this subject: “Well, it’s up to you whether you pay any attention to these engrams or not. I’m not telling you they’re aberrative or unaberrative or otherwise. Come on, you can either find the nerve to kick that thing out and desensitize it or you can’t; I’ll just sit here and wait for it. That’s up to you. You can make up your mind concerning the thing. You can stay aberrated if you want to; it’s all right with me. It’s your life — go ahead and live it. And if you want to live it with a broken leg and arthritis, that’s all right with me.” I used to talk to preclears this way.

I would get somebody who was slopping around on the track, l who was an occluded case and all of this sort of thing. He would say, “Well, I just don’t see anything.”

And I would say, “Well, do you want to?”

He would think this over for a minute. “Well, I don’t see anything wrong with seeing something.”

“All right. Now, let’s take a look at something on the track,” and there would be his vision

I never considered this peculiar until I saw a medical doctor, one of the first “auditors,” processing somebody. He would have his preclear on the couch and he would say, “All right, now go back to birth.”

The preclear would go back to birth and start to say something or other, and this doctor would say, “All right. Now, where’s your tonsillectomy? Is this connected to birth? You know it’s connected to birth.”

And the fellow would say, “Ugh, glub, glub, glub — glub.”

“All right, let’s get the other throat infections that you’ve had now.” And then he would say, “Come on up to present time. All right, now we’re prepared to locate an engram.”

I would tell this doctor, “Don’t do this! This is not right. There are two things that are not right: The first one is that you keep running him in various places on the track where he shouldn’t be, and the other one is that you keep telling him what to think about it, you keep beating at him and so forth, and it makes preclears nervous or something when you do this.” (That is not the correct explanation. “It undermines self-determinism” is the right one.) “It makes them nervous, and they don’t get well fast when you do this.”

And the doctor would say, “Well, all right, I’ll reform,” and so forth.

But if I went into his auditing room the next day he would be saying, “All right, go back to birth . . .” and so on.

I would say, “Come here. Don’t do that to preclears, because . . .” “How else are you going to get them restimulated enough to find an engram in them?”

That was in 1949. In September of 1951 I had a report on this man’s auditing and he was auditing the same way! He has vast complaints about Dianetics not having progressed any, and he lists all the improvements it should make. But these improvements were listed in “Notes on a Series of Ten Lectures,” November 1950, as being standard processing — not even a new development.

A lot of people have gotten stuck on the time track about Dianetics. That is almost fatal. I know people who are stuck on the time track in 1949, stuck on the time track in June of 1950 and so on, as far as the technique is concerned. They follow this through vigorously and go through all the proper motions.

You get situations like this: The preclear is lying on the couch and the auditor is sitting there with a pencil and paper. The preclear says, “Well, that’s something my mother always used to say: ‘You won’t never be nothin’ nohow.”’

The auditor sits there furiously writing.

The preclear says, “And my father used to beat me and tell me that I was no good.”

And the auditor sits there writing it down, hour after hour, while the preclear is lying on the couch self-auditing.

I would say, “That’s not the way to do it! You put a little beef into it. You get in there and pitch. You show the guy you’re interested.”

What I should have said is “You had better give this guy back all the self-determinism he’s got, and if you give it back to him, then he’ll have it.” That would have been about dead center on the truth of the matter.

The next time I would look in on this particular auditor I would find out he had made an improvement. His technique had become more aggressive: he would say yes between the preclear’s sentences!

Then people started to find odds and ends, scraps of this and that — more phenomena than they knew what to do with. And it was very interesting that they followed it along. You would find one fellow doing nothing but running phrases out of preclears and letting them boil off, and you would find this and that and a lot of terrifically interesting things — all of them mostly odd and peculiar.

But I heap all the coals of fire on my head. I didn’t know which was the push button. Now, it is terrifically fortuitous that it happened this way. The first book is a book about how L. Ron Hubbard thinks he audits. All the phenomena it mentions are there and they are all locatable. Communication, which is the most important, is not there, however; it wasn’t known. But it was still present in the auditing!

That makes a very dizzy sort of a picture. You sit down and start throwing your weight around with a preclear — zing, zing, zing — and all of a sudden the preclear says, “Yes, I think this is basic-basic (That is what you are trying to find out.)

You say, “All right, what’s your feeling about it? What do you think about it?” He says, “Mother says so-and-so, and . . .”

“Yeah. Well, what do you think about this?” “Well, there’s this pain coming down here.”

“What do you think about it now? All right. Now, how do you feel about that area? Can you still find some of it?”

“No. Something has happened to it.”

“All right. Let’s get all the similar experiences of this character now. What do you think about those? Where are they?”

You get down to the bottom of the chain, get a line charge started, and all of a sudden the preclear starts knocking things out and he comes up to present time. The case is running like wildfire!

Evidently it takes two things to make a case run like wildfire in that fashion when you don’t completely know what you are doing: Put lots of belief in the preclear. with the result that he can then put a lot of belief in himself — in other words, validate the devil out of the preclear — and be a powerhouse of ARC yourself. And the preclear will practically explode on a fission principle. The next thing you know, you can’t find any engrams in the fellow and you say, “All right, next!”

Then auditor number one comes along and you say, “Now look, it’s awfully easy. There is a time track and there is this phenomenon, there’s that phenomenon, and all you do is say so-and-so and such-and-such, the preclear does this and that, and then he is through with the engram. You keep this up for fifty hours or something like that and this guy feels like a million bucks.”

But the auditor goes off and does something else, and he audits his preclears for some incredible number of hours. They lose psychosomatics and various other things happen to them, but nothing very spectacular — and they don’t go Clear.

Let me ask you a pertinent question: Did you ever see a person who was authoritarianly inclined who was anxious to have another human being have self-determinism? The answer to that has to do with the tone scale levels. A person who is too low on the tone scale doing auditing doesn’t want the other person to have any self-determinism. He wants to own the other person — the preclear is MEST — and that auditor’s process is toward ownership rather than toward cutting the preclear loose. So naturally he can run him and run him and run him. He will find all the phenomena and he will do wonderful things as far as handling an occasional psychosomatic illness is concerned; every few hundred hours of auditing the preclear is minus one more cough. This is very slow. Why? He isn’t rehabilitating the one thing which is absolutely vital in a well human being.

So, time marched on, and the first really significant jump in Dianetic processing was Validation Processing. Following it came MEST Processing and then Validation MEST Processing — vital steps. Those are educational steps rather than auditing steps; it is necessary to know them. And now we have Self-determined Effort Processing. There was one filler in between there — Effort Processing — and from that we now have Self- determined Effort Processing.

We have our finger on the button now, and for God’s sake don’t push when you aren’t looking because the whole place is liable to explode.

It is wonderful that present technique compares, philosophically, line for line, with the 1938 text on the physiological aspects and the philosophical postulates of problems connected with life and human behavior. Those postulates were not tied down to the physical universe. They existed as good guesses, extrapolated out from certain basic observations. They were unproven, but there they were as guesses.

Now Dianetic processing has gone through the whole cycle. From 1938 it has come on forward with all the phenomena, and what we have now, suddenly, is a bridge built to the philosophical postulates of 1938. Those postulates were not very useful unless one could see that they were invariably true and unless we had the proof and the comparison to the real universe. So we have come back in a circle.

There is one little germ of possibility in the 1938 principles and postulates which we have not fulfilled, but there is only one. This merely postulates a spontaneous remission of all aberration on the single basis of suddenly assuming control through thought. That is just put in there as a postulate. It says this might happen — that one could suddenly assume control, by thought, of matter, energy, space and time. If one could straighten out all of the various force vectors which exist in a human being and channel these all in one direction, one might even be able, by will alone, to influence time. We have not fulfilled that. But it doesn’t have to be fulfilled.

As a matter of fact, “Excalibur,” written back in 1938, has been much more neglected than it should have been. But with what reward to us? There is a tremendous quantity of data that has been accumulated which would otherwise never have been looked at. We know now that certain phenomena exist, and when we run into them they will not alarm us. We know their proper alignment and importance. We know how a preclear can be expected to behave in response to these phenomena.

For instance, we know the literalness of language in engrams, we know the randomness of engrams, we know the various things which are contained in engrams and we know how we could lay them in. We have at least twenty-five ways to extrapolate a tone scale, and they all come out with the same tone scale. We know the basic interrelationships of these phenomena. We have this experience.

All the time we were doing this we were about a hundred times better than any psychotherapy that existed, but we weren’t up to the par that we should have been up to, to have a science of mind which contains push buttons A, B and C.

So, all this work, if it had not been done, would be lying up on the track of the future someplace, waiting to drop on the heads of poor unsuspecting investigators who would not then be able to orient it or line it up.

It is a very simple statement to say “It’s only your self-determinism, boys and girls. That’s all,” and smile politely.

People are likely to say, “Yeah. Well, we always knew that anyhow. Why don’t we get on to some scientific data?”

The point is that the datum “Self-determinism is important” has been a blue piece with orange polka dots; it hasn’t belonged to the big white puzzle. It has been way up someplace away from all the other data, and it was necessary for that datum to be evaluated, to have a bridge built between it and reality.

I can tell you eight hundred reasons why self-determinism is the button; I can tell you several techniques by which it can be rehabilitated — several techniques. And we can extrapolate this now through observed phenomena; we can figure it out, deduce it, induce it — anything we want. We can prove it from the right to the left, the left to the right, from top to bottom and crosswise and diagonally. (We could probably even prove it by the Congressional Record — somebody has to find a use for that some time or other!)

In short, back in 1938 this datum hung there rather unevaluated. Now, in 1951, it is there with an enormous amount of technology, with an enormous amount of observed phenomena, and in addition to that, with the approximately 180 Axioms of Dianetics — which are now complete. There is real beef in those axioms. For instance, there is one axiom which is a rather brief line, but it is provable, demonstrable and demonstrably invariable, which you could take out into biochemistry or something of the sort and start to do tricks with. In other words, we have side-panel application for these things and we have a science.

This can be written up in its final book form; it is going to look something like a geometry. (Of course, if you have something that looks like a geometry you obviously have a science!)

But if we hadn’t been through the throes and agonies of the last couple of years, we would never have had these axioms and extrapolations or the enormous amount of data we now have. So I am glad it happened.

In addition to that, we would still have hanging on to Dianetics a lot of undesirables. Of course, we can probably cure them.

Now, the second book, Science of Survival, oddly enough, is still valid. So is the first book still valid. Self Analysis is still quite valid, too; it does what it is supposed to do. Here is all this enormous amount of technology that has passed through the hands of the Foundation: we have it here in books. The funny part of it is that, although I can give you everything you need to know on the subject of auditing, to be a Dianeticist any man — if he really wanted to know this subject and be able to do all that he could with it — would have to go through this same track again. In other words, he would have to study Book 1. He would have to study Science of Survival. He would have to go over these various techniques and he would have to demonstrate to himself all these phenomena, and in addition to that, when he got all through, he would have to tie into the Axioms and study all of those. He would come out at the other end of all this and he would be able to tell you exactly what I am telling you here. This is weird, but it is evidently a sort of a natural cycle built into the science.

Here is all this phenomena; it is all equally true — but not equally evaluated. Some of it is tremendously important and some of it is not important at all, and an auditor had better find this out. He also had better know what he could run into. In order to understand human behavior you would have to understand all of the phenomena which could be connected with human behavior. That is simple.

You could make what you might call a quickie auditor — a very quick auditor — by just giving him a little list which he sits and reads to preclears He would be quite successful; he would do just fine.

Of course, about his fifth or sixth preclear to come in would have a circuit. The auditor would sit there talking to the preclear and he would think, “You know, that’s interesting — this guy doesn’t seem to be communicating with me somehow or other. I keep asking him this rote question here.” And this poor auditor wouldn’t know what a circuit was or what he could do to knock it out of a case.

But an auditor who knows all existing phenomena and techniques would say, “Well, give this circuit a little bit of Straightwire and it will probably collapse. If it doesn’t, just do a little bit of Validation MEST Processing or something of the sort. We’ll snap this one out without much trouble.” He would know that it could be there.

He would know, additionally, what you were talking about if you said “a computing psychotic.” He would know what a person was talking about when he came walking in and said, “My parents think I’m-peculiar and there’s nothing I’m doing that’s particularly wrong.” This other fellow would probably sit down immediately and write a long and exhaustive paper and send it to the Foundation and say, “I have just discovered something new.” An auditor who knows his business would know it was probably an engram phrase (the fact that we discovered this other button doesn’t invalidate the phenomena) that said something to the effect that there are no flies on Annie or they are all on Josephine, or something of this character. And all this fellow would really have to do would be to snap it out of the guy with maybe even a little repeater techniques — something even that crude. He would even know that after you had used repeater technique you could probably scan out the bad results. In other words, he has a big box full of tools.

It happens that the field of medicine is strangely like this. There are literally thousands of things you can do wrong which a doctor knows; that is his chief value. He walks in and he sees somebody has scarlet fever and not measles. What is the difference? It is something or other and he will give you why it is something or other. This doesn’t promote any cure but it at least tells you what to treat the person for (even though you can’t treat him).

Right now, the doctor’s whole profession merely breaks down, as far as the ramifications of it are concerned, to doing these things: delivering babies, setting bones, doing plastic surgery — these are the useful things he can do — and applying whatever the biochemist gives him, exactly according to the directions of the biochemist. That is what he is doing. Any practitioner who is worth his salt in the field of medicine is doing just those things. If he is doing anything else he is wasting his patients’ money and time and maybe wrecking their health for them, because those are all the valid techniques there are — obstetrics, orthopedics, plastic surgery and skin grafting techniques. Of course, when I say orthopedics I include in that emergency surgery — how to tie up an artery, elementary first aid and other odds and ends.

But when it gets down to the final line, if he is going to really be effective in the treatment of disease, it is going to depend on whether or not the biochemist has first furnished him with a specific for that disease.

A doctor’s ability comes in when he says to himself, “Does this person have that disease?” and he satisfies himself that the patient has some vague approximation of the disease and it won’t hurt to give him the medicine anyhow. So the doctor shoots him with the medicine, the patient gets well and people say, “Isn’t medical science wonderful.”

Where was the medical science connected in it? It was connected mainly in diagnosis. If there were any medical science it would be somewhere in the field of diagnosis and knowing all the things you could do wrong.

An auditor, then, who does not know all the phenomena we worked so hard to dig up would not be able to do a good job, because I am afraid that the concern of the auditor is for the neurotic and the psychotic; his concern is for those brackets. His activity and so forth as far as the first dynamic is concerned would probably be devoted to that level — the person who can’t help himself — because we can button up even a normal case fairly fast.

This at once closes a certain portion of Dianetics to some degree and opens a very vast panorama to view. We can now say, “Well, we have number one buttoned up to some degree” (if it keeps on holding forth as it has lately). “Something more can be done in it, undoubtedly. But Dianetics is applicable to every field of human behavior. Now, as a Dianeticist I have to be able to show people how this is applicable and train them in its use. I’ve got to be able to train the staff of the Wumphgullah Hospital so that they will stop bashing in the sanity of every patient who is pushed into the emergency entrance. I’ve got to be able to tell them why, and so forth.”

We have an assignment from the U.S. Army to speed up the reaction time of all jet pilots by one half. What auditor is going to take it over? This only needs two or three, but who is going to do it?

This is the kind of work that an auditor should be doing, not sitting alongside of a couch saying, “Next phrase, next phrase.” To the devil with the next phrases!

I don’t know where this “next phrase” came from, except from this spot: You will find that a person who is pretty badly aberrated starts taking language very literally. The more aberrated he is and the further down the tone scale he is, the greater will be his literal regard for language. You can spot a person like this when you make a mistake in your speech before him. You substitute a word or split an infinitive or do something of the sort and this person will correct you quickly. He will forget all the sense and continuity of your idea and be led immediately astray over into the pastures of “Was it the right word?” He will practically shiver at the thought of “Maybe it wasn’t the right word that was used.” Maybe you were trying to tell him that you were about to give him a thousand dollars; he wasn’t listening to any of this. He wants to know whether or not you said “It is my intention” or “I intended to give you.” Which was it that was said? What were the words? Then, when he is sure he has got the words, he is all right.

This is a psychosis. Brutally, to that degree, it is a psychosis in one little sphere. It is generally laid in by school teachers, parents and so on. They establish a tremendous anxiety on the subject of the language. Now, what happens to Dianetics when it drops into the hands of a person who has this horrible malady? He says, “It’s obvious there’s only one thing that’s important — it’s just words. All right, let’s get all the words out of this preclear and then he’ll be well, obviously, because if I got all the words out of me I know I’d be well. We won’t worry about little things like kinesthesia or whether or not he has any perceptics, or whether or not there’s any reality on his case or any of these little minor factors. We won’t bother with those. But let’s get out those words — they’re what’s dangerous.”

You will find that auditors who are way down the tone scale will always process out of the preclear what should be processed out of them. Only they don’t process what really should be processed out of them, they process out the manifestation of what should be processed out of them. And I think you could go on processing manifestations and delusions for a thousand years without getting even a good release.

So, we now have all the texts and phenomena necessary to make a Dianeticist’s acquaintance with the subject. And we have the push button for dynamic one, evidently, if it keeps on holding, as it should. If we are not exactly on it, we are so close to it that it would be hard to measure the distance with a micrometer caliper.

I say that because before this lecture I was quite tired; I hadn’t had any sleep since Saturday night and I was feeling the wear and tear a little bit because I wrote about ten thousand words over the weekend. Then this afternoon I went home and lay down and got a good solid hour and a half of sleep, and I had just gotten to the point where you should never wake up any human being (it is much kinder to shoot them) when I was called to dinner so I could come down and lecture.

I finally staggered up and I got some clothes on, had my dinner and went out and sat down in the car. I said, “My God! I don’t dare drive, feeling like this.”

Then I said to myself, “Let me see, wait a minute now. Abracadabra,” and I asked myself the proper question in Self-determined Effort Processing. I had a slight sensation — probably a sensation not even as strong as just barely touching the edge of a table — and that was the effort which it took to hold the tiredness there.

So I straightened up, bright and wide awake, and drove out in the street. Just as I got over into the more heavily lighted part of town I said to myself, “I wonder if there is any effort connected with keeping lights dull so that they aren’t as bright red and so forth as they might be.” And as I was driving, all of a sudden I felt this proper sensation in the proper place, and boom!

Did you know that traffic lights have purple in them and the green is a bit on the emerald side? And some of these neon signs they have would really put your eyes out. I would have sworn that this street had on it not more than fifty or sixty lights and signs, but immediately that this effort went by the boards it was nothing but solid, jam-packed lights like Christmas trees from one end to the other. I have never had such a blaze of light turn on since I was caught in a set of magnesium flares during the war. It scared me!

You can evidently work that fast with preclears.

Now, isn’t it strange that this push button could be there, at least in a lot of cases? I can recall times when I have stood on a lecture platform and given it these exact ramifications, its whole plot and another aspect of it. I said, “Now, that’s important,” and went on to something else. I never said “Just jettison the rest of this stuff — this is all that is important.” I didn’t know it myself. I was blind to it because to some degree it was sort of a built-in part of my philosophy of existence that people ought to make up their own minds what they ought to be doing.

Now, when it comes to evaluation of a technique, the only evaluation which is any good at all is how many relieved, pleased, happy, sane people it gives you how fast. Right now, the question with Effort Processing is how fast.

I can give you fifty explanations, at least, of why Effort Processing works. They all come on and they cross at the center. It is interesting that when the Axioms were written and the extrapolation made, it was very carefully reviewed that here would be the push button and that the push button would be Effort Processing. And a re extrapolation of it said the push button is Self-determined Effort Processing.

It was all by deduction and induction that we arrived at this point. The plot said it was there. It said it was there several weeks ago and I didn’t believe it, really. I said, “That’s too neat, that’s too pat.” And I had to deal with phenomena which had never been available before. In other words, we could bring in more cross bearings on the same point. A lot of phenomena and a lot of proofs had shown up. The theta-MEST theory and all these other things had come along and shown it up beautifully and brightly.

At first it didn’t work very well, but that was because I thought it ought to be a little bit harder than it was. I had gotten so tired of looking for the push button that I worked too hard on the preclear.

Yet just a few weeks ago I was saying that the trouble with the preclear is that the environment backs up into his motor switchboards and that when it gets into the motor switchboard too strongly, “I” gets kicked out. Then when “I” gets relocated, it tries to pick up the motor control points and can’t pick them up. “I” can’t pick up these old motor control points but has to sort of build new ones, and a tremendous amount of data goes out of existence.

That is the basis of it, with this slight change of emphasis: Any and all restimulation is done by “I.”

You ought to be pretty mad at yourself. Look what you have been doing to yourself!

First there is pain, and “I” gets knocked out of alignment. Then “I” comes back into alignment again and says, “Let’s see, where is the organism? The right hand is over there. No it’s not, it’s here. Must be over there.” It wasn’t until I lay down upon my couch and knocked out a molar that I discovered this.

I ought to go find the dentist and have him fish that molar out of the waste basket or his collection of elephant tusks or wherever he put it, and have it framed over a plaque saying, “This was sacrificed for the good of the cause.”

The point is that as I lay on the couch two things happened: (1) I found out how you could turn a somatic on full — 100 percent restimulation — and (2) I found out that the original force is not in the cells but outside the cells.

We have been doing the interesting thing of backing up into zero — something that has no wavelength, no space, no weight or anything, so it must be nothing. We have been getting an awful lot of data from this nothing. Actually, what the nothing is, probably, is one over infinity. And we have been backing up into infinity, and a lot of these little odds and ends sort of got laid by the boards.

But there is a theta-MEST converter unit in the head, evidently, just like we said there was.

So I went to the dentist and he went through the usual routine: He got the forceps and pushed down and put his foot against the side of my jaw and pulled. And I saw something very fascinating and interesting. As out of it as I was at that moment, I saw “I” go out of position. Now, I have noticed people being occluded. I came off the dentist chair and there was this much disarrangement, and I said, “Isn’t that curious and interesting?”

I got the operation run out afterwards, but I sat right there and I knocked the shock off the operation fast. It is amusing: They have a radio that plays in the dentist’s office all the time people are there, and all the basins in the place are enamel and all the tools and things steel, so there is a lot of crash, clatter, bang — and, boy, do they have fun with the radio going full blast and all of this!

There is nothing like comparing something with the real universe. I knocked the shock off the thing and it was so curious — I realized that preclears had mentioned this to me before; I realized that in moments of accident I had seen it before: I got a transposition of the motor control unit.

In other words, there were a lot of leads coming from the motors up to this theta-MEST converter, and then all of a sudden the theta went out of contact with the MEST and the leads got misaligned, then something else happened and it all got scrambled.

I spoke once before about driving a dog psychotic. All you have to do to drive a dog psychotic is fill him full of sedatives and so on (treat him like doctors treat psychotics) and then take him, from where he has been lying very calmly on the table, downstairs and into a back room. You dump him on his head and let him wake up that way. His transfer in space and time is fantastic; he won’t be able to figure it out.

After you have done this to him a few times, you would have a dog, I am sure, who would be very psychotic. They have been trying to drive dogs crazy for a long time in the field of psychology; I think this would drive a dog crazy with great ease.

Now, I had gone through this operation and I had seen it. So I went home and I said to some preclears I work with, “Do you want to give your all for dear old Dianetics?” I started processing counter-effort out of them, nothing but the counter-effort — the effort exerted against the individual. It didn’t do much. It was a good advanced technique, about a thousand times advanced over ordinary psychotherapy, but pale — not a push button.

I got to looking it over and the boys here at the Foundation were doing some work on it with a few more people, and then all of a sudden I sat down and carefully worked out all the Axioms of Dianetics, one right after the other — assembled them, aligned them and put them in order, really, for the first time.

I looked at them and when I got all through, the conclusion was “Self-determinism is it.”

A person cannot become aberrated unless he consents to it. An individual cannot be aberrated without his own consent. No locks can be formed unless the self-determinism of the person himself forms them.

It is not mechanistic from the motor side of the ledger; that is medicine and psychiatry. By treating the structure you cannot alter the function to improve it, but by treating the theta side of the converter you can alter the structure. This we have proven lots of times.

It is very interesting that this business about a man cannot become aberrated without his consent appears in the first book. You will find it in there. A person cannot be aberrated without his own consent. How do you evaluate it? It is floating in just thousands and thousands of words on both sides of it and I think it is even printed in caps or something of the sort; maybe it was in the manuscript that way.

This is how it was figured out the first time it was written: The person likes the ally so he does what the ally says, but this makes it the ally’s consent. That is immediately a violation of the law.

You just think for a moment, when did you consent to be ill?

You didn’t get one right away? What about school? Did you ever fake one up so you could stay home from school? stay home from work?

One night I was sitting twiddling my thumbs and being idle and feeling sorry for myself because over the past couple of years it has been very, very difficult for me to whip myself up to a point where I will step up to production, where I will sit down to a typewriter and start knocking out copy. As a matter of fact, I am ashamed of the small amount of copy which I have knocked out in the last few years.

But in the early days during my university years and through the depression and so forth, the only way a fellow could support himself was by making his own way. There was no money available for research or anything. So I used to sit down at night and pound my typewriter. I would write about five thousand words a day and I did everything else too. That is a lot of hard work to put out. I think I published about eight million words of fiction.

I had this factor, however: I had it figured out during the last year that the reason I had slowed down in production — it was very obvious why I had — was that it was enforced communication. I was being forced to communicate by the editors. I was being inhibited by occasional rejection slips, by never really getting any applause on this sort of thing, by not being permitted to contribute the way I thought I should, by thinking that maybe my stuff wasn’t as good as it might have been and that some of its markets were poorer than I cared for. I thought it might have stemmed from the fact that I would occasionally knock off writing a play that I knew I would love to write so that I could write some commercial fiction.

I figured out all these various things, and I was sitting there in the chair and I said to myself, “I’d certainly like to be able — with the enthusiasm that I had when I was about sixteen — to go in and sit down to that typewriter and make that keyboard jump and the paper fly and have blood and sand and nostalgia and everything all over the place here in just no time. Boy, that would really be terrific. I sure got a bang out of it once.”

And then I thought of this terrific and awful task of going back and processing out all of these enforced communication lines. There were hundreds and hundreds of times when I had to write — didn’t want to and didn’t care to, but had to. And I thought, “Gee, that’s really tough. It’s certainly going to take me just hundreds of hours of processing to get all that stuff.”

Then I thought to myself, “Wait a minute! There’s something here that doesn’t meet the eye. Did you ever consent to this?

“No, I’d never consent to anything like this.

“Did you ever consent to be hagridden on the subject of writing?”

I suddenly remembered living on a farm. My first wife was a dear girl from Warrenton, Virginia. She was a socialite and she- loved horses. And we maintained a very nice farm with white horse-fences (and a debit in my bank account continually).

I would be working till about three o’clock in the morning just like a dog and I would come down about noon after working all night. (If I got up in the morning everybody would be yammering and quarreling.) And the farmer and hired hands, sitting down around the kitchen, would say, “Well, good afternoon. “

And I would sort of growl back.

Another one would say, “You know, I’ve been up since five o’clock.”

One morning I was up at five o’clock and I looked out to see what these men did. The farmer was up at five o’clock all right but at five-thirty, after having had a cup of coffee, he was sitting out on the back fence chewing a straw — and he was still sitting there at nine. But he had sure been up early.

Nobody would believe that I was working. Nobody believed I worked hard. Another thing that they started to do to me was say, “Well, you don’t do much work. Why can’t you take a little run down to Poolsville, Bellsville, Warrenton, Richmond? There’s a nice cocktail party going over at the Hunt Club tonight. Don’t see why we can’t go over,” and that sort of thing.

And I would say, “I have to work.” I didn’t want to do this.

Ten minutes later I ran this concatenation of the times I had consented to believe, by telling somebody else, how hard-worked I was on the subject of writing. I didn’t really, until afterwards, connect these two acts — I was too engrossed, ten minutes afterwards, in the fact that I had to get out “Black Dianetics”.

I got up out of the chair and I went in the other room and threw the typewriter cover off and put some paper in, and I sat down and wrote four thousand words on the subject of Black Dianetics, tracing the use oft phenomena for the enslavement of mankind forward from early Chaldea. I read this stuff and it was real drama. I haven’t written anything like it for years!

What did I do? All I did was recover maybe one hundredth of the residual effort that I exerted to make myself believe that I worked hard at the subject of writing so that other people would believe it.

I didn’t even get a specific incident. I just got this concept and all of a sudden the typewriter keys were pounding away. I stopped myself about four o’clock in the morning and said, “Whoa! You had better get some sleep.

“Why?”

So I reached over and started dictating the Axioms; I did half a platter of axioms and went to bed.

I used to work like this when I was twenty-two or twenty-three; I hadn’t worked like this since. What a dirty trick to play on yourself! Why? Self-determinism, naturally! We have it in postulates all the-way through Dianetics; we couldn’t miss on any part of this. All we had to do was look it squarely in the face. Any time that it was looked at squarely there it was. Week by week, month by month, we have been using this principle.

What is “I”? “I” is a concentration of theta. What is theta? Theta is affinity, reality and communication. So “I” has affinity, reality and communication. Therefore, self- determinism is divisible into affinity, reality and communication. Very interesting, isn’t it?

What is reality? Reality is agreement — we know this. So every time that self-determinism goes on a contra survival level it has postulated a new non survival reality. Every time it agrees with non survivalness, it has postulated a non survival reality. That is how tough and strong “I” is.

Throughout your life you have been playing with this terrific dynamite, because the affinity, communication and reality is centered in awareness of awareness, or self- determinism, and every time somebody forced you to agree with a non survival course or you agreed with the course, to that degree you postulated a new reality for yourself. So those who had sympathy computations, when the first book came out all they had to do was read the book and they would find a brand-new reason why they should postulate a new reality for themselves: This means they have engrams, so they would get ten times as many engrams as anybody else. All they had to do was agree with the first book and they had immediately postulated a new reality, and in this reality they had engrams.

How simple can we get? A person postulates a bad reality for himself. How about the times you postulated good realities for yourself? Those are probably why you are still alive — you occasionally postulated a good reality for yourself.

Self-determinism is of a magnitude whereby you could probably say “Well, I postulate a beautiful future reality” and it would just happen. “I postulate that I am strong, handsome, beautiful and look like I’m twenty-one.” There is the latent power in self-determinism. How much power is in it? I can’t over exaggerate it.

I have been struggling to get my eyes up from a bomb blast that knocked them flat in early 1942, which shot my eyesight down to a level where the doctor says, “Take a look at the chart,” and you say, “What chart?” He says, “On the wall,” and you say, “What wall?”

I finally got rid of colored glasses and just had a prescription. Then I got rid of prescription glasses — all this with earlier methods of processing. These methods were effective.

So I have been struggling up along the line. But tonight, with Self determinism Effort Processing, I suddenly clicked the trigger. I located the exact trigger somehow, in a strange way (what is the eyesight trigger?), and then everything went bang — on bright! It is still on; I could probably see a gnat at a thousand yards.

I used to be a distinguished marksman and it made me feel bad for a while because I couldn’t shoot anymore. I couldn’t see an eight-inch bull at a thousand yards. But now I think I could see one at two thousand; it is fantastic. It is a cinch that it is more fun than Christmas.

But what about the phrases and what about all these other things? How does restimulation take place?

I will give you the mechanism of restimulation. It is a very simple and very interesting mechanism. We will go into this much more broadly later on, but the mechanics of this are fascinating because they are so simple. But you have to know them in Dianetics if you are really going to keep up with the rest of it, because we will probably have something out of this whereby we could say, “I think everything west of the Ural Mountains should suddenly declare for the Republic of Alaska,” and it would all declare and the Russian empire would dissolve. (God help some of the politicians in Washington!)

Anyway, “I” makes an effort; the person is making an effort into his environment of one sort or another, and a counter-effort comes along and hits him — engram. Everybody stands around going yak, yak, yak, and when the guy comes to he is in bad shape. Somebody said, “I am a little hoarse,” so he develops the habit of saying “neigh” instead of “no” all the time. This is observed phenomena; it happens. So now he has an engram, but it isn’t an engram until it keys in.

What is key-in? I am afraid that we borrowed out of the physical sciences too broadly when we said it was entirely and wholly mechanistic, that it keys in for the single and only reason that “it just mechanically keys in.”

In the theta-MEST theory we found out that it didn’t mechanically do anything of the sort; it couldn’t. It couldn’t be that mechanical in the field of structure because of the composition of theta; it just wouldn’t work that way. So there was something lost there. All that was lost was simply that when a person has a latent, unrestimulated engram and he walks into a new environment and sees an approximation of the perceptics of this old engram, he takes a look at his bank and sees if he has one that matches, and he brings it up into present time and holds it there. That is what he does. And that is the only way, evidently, an engram can get restimulated: by being held in present time by the person himself.

Now, what the devil do you want to eraser engrams for? They are nothing. If you fixed an engram so that it would never restimulate, you would have done just as well as if you had erased it. So all you have to get is the fellow’s effort to bring it into present time and hold it there.

That is one axiom. The other one is that in self-determinism an individual has a full election around his environment, other people in his environment, all of these things — he has an enormous control area which continues to be invalidated for him. It is invalidated this way: He postulates that time is going to stop, and time doesn’t.

His self-determinism, because of individuation and other- reasons,- is already evidently carved down to the spot where time won’t stop — if it ever will.

What is the visio on your last accident?

All right. Come up to present time. Put the accident back now.

Was it the visio of a moment just before the crash? There you postulated that time had better stop, but you didn’t make it. That is an invalidation of self-determinism .

What is a sonic shut-off? It is a person trying to stop the energy wave of sound. He postulates that he stops it, so it stops. Then he has a sonic shut-off. In order to turn on sonic all you have to do is pick up the times he wanted to stop sound — you don’t even have to pick very many of them up — and all you have to get out of them, really, is what was the effort to stop sound? You get it out of the switchboards and it goes click and then sonic goes on.

It is a good thing we don’t have to worry about how much we get per hour from preclears, because the effort of theta to contract or expand, shorten or lengthen time, to contract or expand space, to increase or decrease matter and energy, is a postulate — a self-determinism postulate. You postulate that time has been this way or that way and you are stuck with those postulates. That is all!

You don’t have to run any one of these things out of the body. You evidently just run them out of the switchboard and then the engrams drop back down the track to where they belong and you never bother with them again.

It is horrible how hard we have worked! You can just take a look at your finger and thumb and realize how closely to the bone they are worn from all the finger snapping! l We have really had to sweat on this whole thing, but I am very glad that we did, because we really know the anatomy of all these phenomena.

I have great confidence in any auditor who has been through the last many months of Dianetics, for two reasons: (1) he has all that tremendous amount of experience and (2) he will probably be cleared in a short time.

The mechanism that we are working on, then, is the ARC join-up at the motor switchboard. Evidently it is just the reconnection of old control circuits, and it is evidently not even very much of that — because of the latent horsepower which is contained in the self-determinism of the individual.

In view of the fact that there is self-determinism along all the dynamics, in view of the fact that theta is that embracive, I think that theta gets snarled up so that it can’t postulate great, grand and wonderful things more or less because it gets snarled up right in its own switchboard in the individual. You probably have to free it there before you get the rest of them. The general aberration will be a concentration on a rising scale. If you free the first dynamic you can get a lot more of the second dynamic; if you free two you can get a lot more three; if you free three you can get four and five, and so on. Naturally most people will hang up fairly low; they are not even good for groups. This is just a progressive proposition.

What you would clean up is the motor switchboard, and the rest of it would probably follow.

So, the missing link on the whole thing is the fact that I believe natively that people ought to have good self-determinism. And I pour the ARC to them and say, “Get in there and pitch. And of course that isn’t what you thought about it, or is it what you thought about it? I don’t care whether you’re alive or dead, as far as that’s concerned. If you want to get well I’ll help you and so on, even though you don’t need any help,” and give them this kind of a line of patter continually and then use these other technical points.

We went on this long line from May of 1950, when I was talking to a flock of doctors and I said, “Somewhere or other in the mind there is a push button; some day we’re going to find it. I don’t know where it is right now. But we sure have a lot of phenomena and we can produce some remarkable, wonderful and apparently very lasting results with what we have right this minute.” And so we could.

This is not a question of bringing Dianetics up to the par of something that has existed in the past. It is something like trying to get the speed of light up to infinity — it is that kind of a proposition. We have something that, anywhere along the line, has been workable.

You can take a preclear and you can process him and make him feel good; you can do various things for him and it is very interesting. In all of this material there was one central button. I really didn’t have any idea there was a central button except a continual nagging suspicion there was one. Just like it takes a man sitting on the T-bar to give it a shove to explode one of those atom bombs out at Bikini, there is a plunger around someplace, and all you have to do is find the plunger and push it and it will blow up the whole engram bank.