Today, I'd like to take up with you in a little more detail the whole problem of "have" with relationship to time; with ARC with relationship to space, time and energy. And we're going to go into a bit of a flight of fancy with regard to the composition of the material universe.

Now, you're going to find something very peculiar here. You're studying something — you're studying something in order to be able to defeat it, not to be able to use it. You should be able to know — you should be able to know so well what happens to a perception recorded by the MEST body, you should be able to know so thoroughly the various activities of the energy after it has been recorded, and you should know so well the various types of aberrative incidents which have occurred on the whole track, that you need no notes. And you should take notes so that you can study your notes on this, but you should need no notes when you're auditing.

And the time for you to learn this information, the time for you to learn this data, is right now. Just make up your mind, postulate that you need this information. Because you are not going to use this information except to defeat it. That's quite important. You are employing this data in a brand-new way, brand-new way in Scientology. You have all of the terrible liabilities of the MEST universe. You should have them at your fingertips and know how you can defeat them with Creative Processing, because you don't address them directly. You no longer address engrams, secondaries, facsimiles of any kind, including locks, or the ridges and flows, directly.

You address them indirectly, and actually, you should never have to specifically address and reduce, from here on, an engram or a secondary, except in this instance: the assist. A preclear very often becomes injured, and by directly addressing and running out that injury, he gets well. He's been injured, that's a specific type of recent injury.

Now, actually, any one of you, expert in this line, could actually stand outside the receiving ward of a big emergency hospital, and you could raise the recovery rate by some undetermined percentage, but it would be raised possibly even 80 percent. It's just way up, what you could do. And that is the value of the assist: somebody burns his hand; somebody has been thrown out of a car, he has a concussion; somebody has just been operated on; there has just been a delivery, you want the mother to recover, you want her not to have the various liabilities (the postpartum liabilities, physiological or psychological) which attend a delivery — many of these things.

Or this fellow has just been through a shocking experience, let us say, in the line of business, which has reduced him to practically nothing. Anything which is fresh — fresh, new. And that term fresh or new is quite relative, but I would say that it would come within the span of thirty days, and anything older than thirty days — that's quite an arbitrary figure there — anything older than thirty days, hit it with Creative Processing and Creative Processing only, no matter what your temptation is to hit it directly.

Now, let me emphasize that. There is a terrific tendency, an enormous tendency on the part of every mortal alive to address these things directly — address them directly. "Let's rush back in and conquer the physical universe!" That's just exactly how the preclear got into trouble: the conquest of MEST. That axiom that has to do with the conquest of MEST was never more valid. And he has to be restrained in the conquest of MEST until his ability to conquer MEST is, I would say offhand, maybe a hundred thousand times better than it is, or maybe a hundred million times better.

He will get to a point where he can — he knows that an electric light is on, and he can see the electric light on, outside of his body or inside of his body, and he will say, "Fine. My perceptics are in wonderful condition. Let's go out and conquer some more MEST!" And then you'll get ahold of your preclear the next session and he can't get out of his body.

And you'll say, "My goodness. What's the matter with this preclear?" or "What's the matter with my processing?" And you set him down and you coax him this way and you work with him that way and you work with him, and he's getting harder to get out of his body than he was the first time.

What's he done? He's gone out and he's hit the physical universe one way or the other, and he has said, "Oh, my! I failed." Now he's failed with magnitude, because he's being invalidated on the most invalidatable line, which is as a thetan directly. He can't blame it on the body; this is he that's failing.

And so, don't worry about it. Your preclear is going to be able to perceive the MEST universe. He's going to be able to perceive it and find it and know what he is looking at and have horsepower to handle it, and all the rest of this. He's going to do very, very well, but not for quite a while, not for quite a while.

This person is so startled to find himself out of his body and find out he's actually free and that his activities are not censurable by Earth police, that he's perfectly willing to go in and change empires. Oh, he feels about 185 yards tall. And then about — oh, usually in less than an hour, he is about a millimeter tall — maybe a milli-millimeter. Does he feel small. He feels very tiny. And the reason for this is very simple: He's invalidated himself and by that invalidation he has keyed in the exact incidents which tell him he can't. Now he's keyed them in directly.

In the first place, flying around outside the body he immediately keys in all the reasons why he shouldn't fly around outside the body. Just that, you see? It also keys in all the conditions in which he's found himself outside before — namely, dead. He is dead. That's when he found himself out before, he's very dead.

Furthermore, he's going up against possibly his last set of instructions, which were "When you get out, you report back here. You report back right here! Not an inch either side, you report right to this spot. And this is the spot where we relieve you of all your woe and burdens, you poor fellow. And we're going to fix you up veeeery nicely and make you forget eeeeverything and even forget to remeeeember, and we're all so nice …"

Well, he knows by the time you've processed him a short time this is a lot of bunk, but he's flying in the teeth of tremendous horsepower. And so he gets out and what he discovers is not only that he is invalidated but that he is evidently liable for all of the monkey business which he's gotten in the past. He's liable for all this again, and it keys him in.

Now, therefore, the goal is — as outlined in Scientology 8-8008 — is the attainment of a theoretical (unattainable) infinity by the reduction of the apparent power of the MEST universe from infinity to a zero of apparent power. That doesn't mean you make the MEST universe disappear, you see? I mean, you just reduce its authority from infinity to zero. And you increase the power of the thetan as a thetan from zero to his infinity. It's a very simple statement, actually. It doesn't have anything in it that is quibbling. The reason I say theoretical, it's obviously not the goal of 8008 to actually smash all the planets together and blow them up. That's not its goal. But that is not what is meant by the infinity of the MEST universe. An infinity of the power, an infinity of the conviction the MEST universe carries. It is, right now, carrying an infinity of conviction. Now, as long as it carries that infinity of conviction, your preclear is going to try to hasten to agree with it again, and that's how he got bad off.

He's going to get in there in an awful hurry and try to agree with it all over again, and he's in no condition to agree with the MEST universe — no condition at all to agree with it. He's not even in a condition to disagree with it. And we have found the bypassed circuit. Now, there was a method of bypassing the circuit.

Now, you'll just have to take my word for it. Or if you care to lay out, yourself, a two- or three-months' research program and work on it for twelve or fifteen hours a day, you can get this data. But you will find out that maybe a minute's worth of Creative Processing is worth dozens and dozens of hours of direct processing.

Now, we'll call any process we have had in the past up to Standard Operating Procedure Issue 1, Theta Clearing — we will call those "direct processing." That whole span is direct processing.

And starting with Scientology 8-8008, we approach — not indirect processing — we approach Creative Processing. And it is an indirect approach, however, and attains the same thing as though it were indirect processing. But its goal is not indirection; its goal is actually what it says its goal is, and that is simply the increase of the thetan from a zero of his own universe to an infinity of his own universe. That's the goal of it.

Now, it doesn't do that in order to get back at the MEST universe again! It is aimed toward the same goal, the identical goal of Advanced Procedure and Axioms. We have not changed our goal but we just know more about this goal. And naturally, when we knew a great deal about this goal, we had to change the modus operandi to get to that goal better, and what is that? To rehabilitate the self-determinism of the preclear. The duty of the auditor is the rehabilitation of the self-determinism of the preclear.

And what do we find the self-determinism of the preclear is? We find that it is the location of matter and energy in space and time, and the creation, conservation, alteration and destruction of time, space, matter and energy. And that is his self-determinism.

And a person's self-determinism is as good as he can create, conserve, alter or destroy energy, matter, space and time. Get that: destroy time, alter time, conserve time, start time; conserve space, alter space, destroy space, create space. That's self-determinism. And that consists also of, of course: destroy energy, create energy, alter energy, conserve energy; create matter, conserve matter, alter matter, destroy matter. There's his self-determinism.

Now, what's the broad definition of self-determinism? Now, it's just that, that I've been saying: create, conserve, alter or destroy matter, energy, space and time of any universe. And that matter, energy, space and time — do not even for an instant get it into your heads that the only matter, energy, space and time there is, is MEST. When we've used the word MEST it is a coined word: it means matter, energy, space and time — the material universe. It says so in all the texts; we can't alter it at this time.

So, now, let's say that there are other mests, but each one of these we will write parenthesis (mest) unparenthesis, designation letter. Whose mest? Whose universe? So when we just say capital M, capital E, capital S, capital T, we mean the material universe in which we are sitting at this moment. And when we talk about somebody else's universe — well, let's say we talk about Joe's universe — all right, we'll have parenthesis (small m-e-s-t) unparenthesis, Joe. That means that.

Now, we have to have this as a communications method, so in the future you'll occasionally hear me saying "(mest) self." That would mean your own universe. But when it's just MEST that means the material universe, because you're meeting on a common ground of the material universe. All right.

Now, get this business about space — the creation of space. If a man cannot create space, he cannot be. And a man isn't to the direct degree that he cannot create space.

Identity has to do with beingness, and that has to do with space. Now, that is sideslipped over into havingness, which is time, and also into doingness — doingness has to do with energy.

That can be written, by the way, in several ways: you can start at the top of this thing and you can say beingness, that's space. And then you come down the Tone Scale until you get to doingness, and that has some energy in it. And the second you get some energy of doingness, you start sliding on down to the solidification and timelessness of the energy. And when you get down to actual time spans, you're into heavy energy and "have." And that, of course, is MEST. So, you've got a vertical parallel which is exactly the same as the Tone Scale which you have been looking at for so long. That is a parallel Tone Scale.

So at 40.0, let's say we get beingness. And then at 20.0 we get optimum doingness, but optimum doingness results in subzero acquisitions as far as solidification is concerned, and that's the MEST universe and that also would be your own universe.

All right. Let's see how this thing adds up. Let's see how this adds up, and if there are two routes — if there are two routes here. Now, I talked about this a long time ago, and this makes it possible for people to accuse me of saying, "Well, he knew it all the time." Maybe I did, and maybe I didn't, because I used to talk about the parabolic Tone Scale.

The Tone Scale was a curve; it wasn't the way it looked. You look at it flatwise, and you find up here 40.0 and you find down here 0.0 and you find in the middle 20.0. All right. That's all very nice, but we're just looking on a plot against time and up this way, potential of survival.

So, we're looking at time. Time goes that way on the Tone Scale, it goes over here to the right, and vertically it's just the survival potential in the individual. Up here at 40.0 you have immortality. Well, you look on it flatwise and that's all very well, but the second you turn this thing around on edge, you see something else.

You turn this thing around on edge now, and you'll find out that it has a front and a back. And up here at 40.0 you have 40.0. And here you would have the two points, looking at them edgewise, which would be 20.0. And down here you would have 0.0 on both points.

And what do you know? What do you know? We can look at this thing sideways, and we see something else is occurring. And what's occurring? Well, let's say we take this right-hand parabola over here, and we take a look at this right-hand parabola and we have M-E-S-T, the MEST universe is the right hand of this parabola. And over here on the left-hand side of this parabola, we have what? (M-e-s-t) self.

Now, we could start at that 40.0 and take the left-hand parabola and get into a complete doingness in one's own universe, and ease it on down to 0.0 and we would have a solid universe. And one wouldn't be at that position on the Tone Scale. As you see by the dichotomies, one is always monitoring a lower point on the Tone Scale from a higher point on the Tone Scale. That is why, for instance, in arts, the artist tends down toward reason from aesthetics. The arts are higher on the Tone Scale than reason.

You'll find out that people who are doing a lot of reasoning are always combating and trying to monitor emotion. They say, "That's the trouble with that fellow, is he's emotional. He doesn't think; he just emotes, that's all."

Now, you take some fellow who is very volatile, very emotional and so on, he'll say, "Those people are no good because they just sit around like a bunch of rocks. They don't emote." And what your emotional fellow is trying to do is trying to get an apathy case up to the point of where it'll be emotional; what your reasoning case is trying to do is to stop people from emoting and get them up to a level of reason, and what your artistic individual is trying to do is saying, "Why in the name of common sense do you have to sit around reasoning all the time? The best thing for you to do is to appreciate the beauties of life."

All right. We watch this happening on the Tone Scale. In the same way, one has to be a point or two above.

Now, let us say that one was in one's own universe and he was at 20.0, which would be a level of optimum action and so forth. He would naturally — if he were going to do any optimum action — he would have to have a lot of MEST in his own universe. That's his own MEST. He made it.

Now, he's operating from the top-level beingness and immortality point of 40.0, actually, but he has had to descend from that point of just "be" toward "have" in order to get time.

Now, this is your ultimate in "have." The ultimate in "have" is 0.0, and boy, is there lots of time in 0.0. Ah, that stuff in 0.0, it is just hard-packed and it just goes on forever. Does it last! The dream of Egypt was eternity. Very nice line which a writer writing in I think "The Mummy's Foot" uses — a French writer — "The dream of Egypt was eternity." And sure enough, everything Egypt did was great, big, massive, enduring piles of MEST. You look at their pyramids and look at the Sphinx and look at the statues and look what they did to mummies and so on. They had an — what they did to bodies. It's fantastic how they wanted MEST and how solid that MEST was supposed to be.

Well, you take a more volatile civilization today — let's take the civilization of England and the United States (more or less the same civilization, just as far as its goals and activities are concerned) and you don't find any construction man building anything to last. No. Skyscrapers, big modern buildings are going up and that sort of thing. They build those things to last twenty-five years in an optimum condition, and then deteriorate for another twenty-five and then come down.

That's volatile, isn't it? "This material," they say, "is going to change, everything is subject to change and we're going to have to tear this down." That's right at the moment they're building this great big structure, they're saying, "Well, now, let's see. Now when we go to tear this down . . ." Well, now, that shows that they're pretty much higher on the Tone Scale than the Ethiopian when, for instance, he was governing Egypt. The Ethiopian said, "This is going to endure forever, and we're never going to tear this down." And you look at his customs, you look at the other things and the limit of his understanding and so on, and boy, it was right there on the Tone Scale; it was just above 0.0, just above 0.0. But he built forever. The only way he could attain eternity was through MEST. He had no concept of individual immortality beyond MEST. That's why he made mummies. That's why he made such a mess out of his civilization.

That civilization, by the way, under study, is one of the grimmer things to study. All right. Superstition — oh, all of the mugwalla-yap-yap that went on in dear old Egypt. Very low-toned, but it built forever. All right.

Now, Egypt, of course, was not on this left-hand parabola even faintly. Egypt was over on the right-hand parabola and so is every individual over on the right-hand parabola, and the primary identification — which would be to say the primary confusion, the primary upset, the number one crossroads, the number one bundle of twine which a person is asked to take apart — is this one: which is the right-hand side of the parabola and which is the left-hand side of the parabola in the individual? Because this individual has been going on in the MEST universe creating space, creating time and then saying this was the MEST universe space and time. He's been gilding all of these things in the MEST universe with his own ambitions, his own dreams and his own goals. And he's been saying, "That's me. That's I. That's little me. I am just over here and I'm making a whole universe of my own."

Alexander the Great goes rushing out toward India and conquers the whole world for himself, and at thirty-three had conquered Alexander the Great. And the cycle is that people go out on this primary piece of nonsense, which is "All this matter, energy, space and time is mine. That's really my universe. And the lorries passing up and down the street are really my lorries, and I have an influence over all this." And they throw the pall of illusion — because it's a pall; it's a pallbearer's shroud for oneself — go out and keep gilding this material and saying, "Here I am and this is really I." And laying himself all over the MEST universe. And then he wonders one day why, with a dull thud, he doesn't have any more universe or any more body or any more anything. Because the MEST universe isn't a very good operating field, that's all; it's not rigged to be one. It's the — sort of the inevitable average of all illusion or something of the sort, and it's full of more booby traps.

And one says then, "This is mine." Of course, what is he going to go toward? Horrible. He says, "This is mine." Of course that doesn't happen to be true. It's not his. And the second that he makes this confusion, he's all set.

Now, it has that liability, then, in that it destroys to the extent one extends into it. One gives it permission to destroy him by extending into it.

Now, what's wrong with this left-hand side of the parabola over here? Yeah, there's something wrong with it. No audience. That's an awful mess. I mean, after you've got through building the most fantastically beautiful cathedrals, no matter how solid they were to . . . They might be terribly solid, by the way; you might be able to walk in and out of their front doors. You might have a complete population that was totally devoted to going to this cathedral and bowing down to the great god Joe. You might have all of that, but you would have a sneaking little idea in the back of your head all this time, "Well, of course, I made it." There isn't any dichotomy there operating. So quite normally, people will team up, and feel very bad when they don't team up, to make that left-hand parabola. And you'll find out home universe was usually accomplished by several people; several beings got together and made a home universe. And then you could have randomity, and one was a little bit left to chance.

Did you ever try to play chess with yourself? Now, that's a silly proposition there, because you know what you're thinking and you know what your next move will be. And what's your trick? You start pretending, "Well, now, let's see. I don't know what I am thinking about when I am the white side. Now, I don't know what I am thinking about when I am the black side." And so you keep fooling yourself all the time. Well, actually, that is a way you get randomity.

All right. Now, let's take a look here and see if there's any remedy. Is there any remedy for this — at all? Well, frankly, as long as one goes toward action and as long as one goes toward acquiring matter and so on, there isn't much remedy. You're subject on either side to these liabilities, and if you weren't subject on either side to these liabilities there wouldn't be any point in it.

Now, you would never have driven over onto the right-hand side if the left-hand side had been completely satisfactory. And the main thing wrong with the left-hand side is it's not defensible.

One of these fine days somebody gets ahold of the wavelength of your universe, and you look out and you wonder what on earth is happening, and your stars all fall down. And that is this big, bungling truck of a thing, the MEST universe — somebody has bridged over into your universe, and that's very sad.

As a matter of fact, if you want a grief charge off of most preclears — if you want to process the real universe, you want a grief charge, there is a crossroads of grief. It's when the universe which they and maybe a few others built and so on, suddenly comes to pieces. And the MEST universe is an expanding universe, and their universe became part of the MEST universe. Just run the incident. You could even call this incident "When the stars all fell down." And they feel very bad about it, believe me. You'll find they're still stuck in it, most of them.

Now, when you see — continuing on this left- and right-hand side of the parabola, own universe and MEST universe — when you see this parabola before you here, looking at it edgewise, it should be — mean something to you that there's no connecting line between 0.0 of the right-hand parabola and 0.0 of the left-hand parabola. There's no connecting line between 20.0 of the right-hand parabola and 20.0 of the left-hand parabola, and that the only place they connect is at 40.0.

From 40.0, as one descends down the right-hand side of the parabola, one's own space becomes less and less and less and less and diminishes completely when one arrives at the MEST universe 0.0. One has no more space. He has just run fresh out of space; which is to say, he has no more identity, he has no more beingness for that particular cycle. Of course, he actually never goes — as a thetan, he never disappears at 0.0, but he disappears as an individual at 0.0.

And this is why you have such a tremendous mask over one's whole track past, is the beingness of an individual in the right-hand side gets tied to an identity. And this identity, whenever it disappears, one no longer has. And if one no longer has, then one's identity is gone. And the ballup on the whole track is simply that one is still trying, still has impulses toward his whole track identities, with absolutely nothing with which to prove it. So he has no time on the whole track once he's dead. But he has time as long as he's in close proximity to some MEST object or some MEST of one sort or another, such as a body.

Just a minor example, a body. A body is nowhere near as important as you think it is in connecting a person up to an identity. A person could just as easily connect himself up to an identity in the Nelson Monument down here. A person could say, "Well, let's see, I'm the Nelson Monument. That's who I am." And he could be possibly very satisfied with being the Nelson Monument, except that — only trouble is the Nelson Monument can't produce very much action: it can't sign any checks, it can't flirt with anybody, or something of the sort.

And now, he might try to work this problem out until Nelson could tip his hat or something, but he'd want action, and that's the trouble with being the Nelson Monument — it's immobile.

This is solved most easily by becoming the god of a wood. Hence we find Frazer's Golden Bough stressing and talking about and belaboring and mauling around and falling over and going back and forth over endlessly this whole project of a god in a wood. That's actually what The Golden Bough is all about, just ad nauseam for God knows how long. And a lot of it's very pretty, but the trouble with it is it's got an orientation point which is a limited orientation point. If he'd taken just a little bit wider orientation point, he'd have been better off.

Now, I'm not talking about sections of The Golden Bough, I'm talking about the overall work called The Golden Bough would have oriented much better if it hadn't been so limited in scope.

And the limitation of its scope is simply the King of the Wood at Numa, that's — it's actually its total scope. He keeps trying to trace around, and why is it that you have somebody going out and being the priest-king of this little stretch of wood, and he's priest-king until somebody comes along and slays him, and so on.

Well, now, that's a MEST body version of it, but what is his stress? He starts talking about that just as though he were going to talk about people, and then spends the rest of the time talking about gods. And he's talking about gods of the wood, gods of the wood. And that's the easiest thing to become, is to become a patron saint of a small area of MEST universe space as a thetan, and that is very easy to become.

And one could fly around, then, and people would come into this wood. And the animals in the wood would be inviolate. One could protect this wood. Various people came into the woods, would see strange things and have strange sensations and dreams when they slept under the trees, and that sort of thing. And actually, that provides considerable randomity, as well as — well, it bucks one up, more or less, to have people coming for hundreds of miles just to light a lamp on one's altar. That is pleasant — good business.

Now, of course, one can be a god of a small place just as long as he isn't interfered with too much by somebody else who wants to be god of that same small place. And then we could get into a dreadful fuss and too much randomity enters immediately.

So, this is Frazer's Golden Bough, and its fixation upon this one point.

Frazer provides, oddly enough — writing just on and on and on — provides you, if you want to read it, an abridged or a total edition, with enormous data, which he's writing about with no understanding at all. He does a fabulous job of misunderstanding his own data. But his data is good and the man is very able as a writer. He keeps orienting it around MEST bodies, and what it is is the only really easy solution a thetan ever had here on Earth: to be Diana, Artemis, or something of the sort, go around and spread legends about oneself, and so on. Actually interfere with, or fool around with, MEST bodies, and it's . . . You see, it's no joke, no joke.

You take the legend that has to do with a mad bull. All right. They say, "All of a sudden, this bull was sent by Poseidon, and here went Poseidon, and here went the bull. And the bull specifically chose out of the crowd one individual and gored him, and this was the individual who had said that Poseidon was no good." Why sure, how easy. Why not?

All you have to do is take an animal, and an animal is very easy to direct, and you just keep him running around and getting irritated and upset until he finally gores the person you're trying to get even with. I mean, we're dealing with factual material when we're dealing with the mythologies. It's very factual. And it's the troubles thetans get into.

Now, they get into this trouble for one reason only, is they insist on playing around with the real universe. And they keep playing around with the real universe and playing around with the real universe until eventually they come into a bad state known as Homo sapiens. Or maybe in some other planet we have people like crocodiles, or maybe we have this or we have that.

And oddly enough, if you want to fool around with the whole track, you will find in some earlier spirals and so on, your preclear has been all sorts of strange beings. Oh, they're really strange beings. He has, to this day, an aversion for those beings.

Why does he have an aversion for the being which he's been? Because the being he has been has trapped him. And he has been degraded. He has instantly lost caste the moment he was trapped.

You could probably take an E-Meter and go down the list with an E-Meter and very nicely find, as you went down the line, all the animals or types of animal forms — including man, who is after all, an animal. Boy, don't for a moment mess up on that one, don't miss on it. Man is an animal! Homo sapiens, as we understand him, is a specialized animal that seems to be more capable — probably because of manual dexterity — of trapping thetans than the other animals on this planet only. He's nothing very special as far as an animal form is concerned. He is to some slight degree decorative, more decorative, perhaps, than some other animal forms, such as a beetle, which is an insect form. But there's not much difference.

Now, on other planets, other animal forms possibly possess this same potential of trapping the thetan as otherwise. But man without a thetan is pretty stupid. All he is, is a genetic entity that's collected enough ridges to be solid in time. That's all he is. And boy, if you want to know how bad off the genetic entity is, how bad off do you think a being would be that had enough ridges surrounding him, enough multiplying, self-perpetuating ridges surrounding him, to be solid matter?

Now, you know how bad off a fellow is who has a thick ridge in front of his face as a thetan. He's bad off, see? How bad off is one of these fellows that has one of these ethereal back ridges that keeps appearing all the time and so forth? He's pretty bad off. He gets caught in these terrific currents.

Well then, how bad off do you think a being would be who is solid matter all around him? Well, that's how bad off a genetic entity is — pretty bad.

Now, your tendency of your thetan is to get into the body and then start solidifying with these ridges; because he's in one place, one time-space location, he has no space of his own.

As I was going to say, if you took all of these animal forms of which you could think, you'd start getting bops on them, of one kind or another, and you would all of a sudden discover that your thetan had been other forms. It's very, very amusing sometimes. It does not assault one's credulity. What assaults one's credulity is that a thetan would have too much to do with this sort of thing — that assaults one's credulity.

But what he has become, here and there, is very, very idiotic. And it sounds very strange to you. This thetan, in this particular strata which is made up of these beings with long tails, which they encase in silk, and they all wear golden horns and so on. He jumps on his unicycle and goes putt-putting off down the big forty-pass, cloverleaf-type highway. I mean, you find some funny things, very funny things.

Male voice: Do you mean thetawise or genetic?-

Oh, geneticwise. This fellow's gotten trapped by this being. He thinks he's one of these beings, and this being, let us say, is — most resembles the Earth animal of a flying crocodile! And here you have this flying crocodile wearing golden horns, which are artificial, and his tail beautifully encased on silk, jumping on a monocycle and going off down this forty-pass highway. I mean, it's just . . . Oh, no! You look at this sort of thing and you say, "No wonder this guy is just a little bit disoriented." Yeah, it stretches the limits in all directions as to what kind of a body he can become.

But it is not important what kind of a body he can become; what is important is that he can become a body! And the mechanism of how he becomes a body is important. And once you solve the mechanism of how he becomes a body, you solve his becoming a body and he gets out of that.

Now, the superstition — you take a tremendous electronic society, you wouldn't expect to find it all full of superstition. And yet you find psychiatric — the psychiatric treatment of that society is something like electric shock or the prefrontal lobotomy, and that there's all sorts of things that you have to observe.

Supposing the engineer running this enormous machine is expected to shut off the machine at 10:01 A.M. every day and spread his prayer rug and bow five times to the south by north. Yeah, that would be ridiculous, wouldn't it? And yet that is the level of superstition on the line — it's very heavy. .They didn't know how they got there. They didn't know what was happening to them, and the resultant and consequential confusion is fantastic.

If you want to know how fantastic it is, a small sample of it is Greek mythology. That's a very small sample of the adventures of the gods and goddesses, and where are those Greek gods today? Where are they today? Well, one of them is probably busy going down a line of wolves, and another one is probably down at Woolworth's. Athena is probably selling crockery at the five-and-dime, and so on. How did they get that way, and how would you spring them? Well, you wouldn't spring them by doing anything about the right-hand track, because the right-hand part of this parabola has a saturation point. I don't know what that saturation point of processing is, but it's high — but you will reach the saturation point.

The theoretical end of processing out the right-hand track is given in Advanced Procedures and Axioms, I think, and is certainly part of the lectures of that period, back in the dark ages. And it says that if — you mustn't process out all of the efforts and counter-efforts which you find in the preclear. I think it says that in the book itself, because this has as its reductio ad absurdum, is the preclear will go poof! Now, you would free the genetic entity if you did that. But actually — mind this, mind this — it's not impossible. It's not impossible, but it would take some very close work on your part to keep the body running long enough to become processed out of existence. But that's what it is. You would process the thetan free by processing the genetic entity free, and the body would disappear. That's the reductio ad absurdum of processing the right-hand track.

So, there's a saturation point.

Now, somewhere up the line you get out enough efforts and counter-efforts so that your being is in pretty good shape. He's in wonderful shape for a MEST being, just gorgeous. But you've gotten up to a point where if you process him from there on, he's going to get into worse shape. And the reason he's going to get into worse shape is because essential parts of him is going to start disappearing. And I don't mean that that is just theoretical! That has been done on the couch! That has occurred. The saturation point lies somewhere between five hundred and two thousand hours. That's a pretty close bracket, by the way, that's a fairly accurate statement. I mean, you could say — when you take in terms of the number of lives a person has lived, you say you reach a saturation point somewhere between five thousand — five hundred and two thousand hours, that's an interesting datum for you.

Why? Because it has been tested. That datum isn't just a guess. I know when they start reaching the saturation point. Of course, five hundred hours is a ghastly number of hours of processing. That is terrific.

I don't know, there was some joker … There's always a lunatic fringe hanging around Dianetics or Scientology, around any field. There's a lunatic fringe around physics, for instance; there's one around chemistry.

Now, one of this lunatic fringe wrote in a book, a great authoritative book, which he . . . He was modifying everything. I think his big change for the whole subject was you didn't say "Come up to present time." You said, "Be aware of your environment," which, by the way, was standard procedure that he had nothing to do about whatsoever at the time he left the Foundation. So that he had invented this, and this was his claim to fame. He's really a crackpot, this guy. I won't mention any names, but gee, he's nuts.

Anyway, he says he has had eighteen hundred hours of processing and he's going on being processed. Well, you add it up, by the way, and between the time he heard of Dianetics and the time he wrote the book and the book was published, and if you added this up, you'd have found out that he would have been on the couch something like eight hours a day, seven days a week, to have gotten eighteen hundred hours of processing. That's an awful lot of hours of processing. It's just too many, by an awful long ways.

And he doesn't bother to say what kind of processing, but it happened to his … He had a girl who was very weak in the wits. And this girl would sit there and say, "Well, what do you want to run, dear?"

And he would say, "Oh, I think I will run so-and-so."

And she would say, "Well, all right, dear. Go ahead and run it."

And he would lie there and philosophize and think about it for a while and so forth, and a few hours later, why, he would say, "Well, I've finally run that." And she would say, "Well, that's fine, dear."

And this was "processing."

Well, if he'd only keep this up, if he'd only keep this up, if he would really process efforts and counter-efforts for that length of time — not just a few engrams, but if he'd process efforts and counter-efforts for eighteen hundred hours — he wouldn't be able to function, probably, as a body. Now, that is the liability which is up the line.

This data is quite new, simply because it takes such a tremendous number of hours — it's a tremendous number of months and years to run up a total of processing that high — that it is not data that is readily available.

We find here and there that enough results are in to show that there's an optimum point of processing, and at that point you stop — when you're using effort or facsimile direct processing. So there's a finite limit, and that is why — completely aside from the invention of the technique itself and a further understanding of it — that is why we're junking direct processing, except in use in an assist. That's why we're junking it. It's not that you would ever process anybody two or three hundred hours!

Once in a while around here in England there is somebody that's had two hundred hours on the couch, some of them had two-fifty, some of them had three hundred in the last couple of years. And that's not very many hours of processing, and they're not even close up to the danger zone. There is no danger zone there, really, because there isn't any danger zone, really, for the thetan just because he's gotten killed off or something. It's whether or not this individual is better off and has a clearer understanding.

All right. Now, let's look at this, then, as a process and find out what we're doing. We're trying to cross the time-honored, well-known abyss. You know the abyss? Well, the abyss is something that people have been talking about for an awful long time, and everybody is very well aware of the fact that there's an abyss.

Actually, the abyss can fit almost any analogy of accomplishment. It's very nice, it's a very neat thing, and it refers specifically to a whole track incident. There is a whole track incident known as the Abyss. If you throw the people into the darkness — you invent yourself a chasm or you have a chasm or something of the sort, and people you don't like, you pitch them in. That's on the whole track. You'll find that with an E-Meter. Preclears get very upset. There's probably more overt acts performed in the Abyss than in anything else. There's masses of them. Real volume! Two, three thousand beings have been pitched over into a dark chasm someplace or another; it was the favorite method of getting rid of one's enemies. Well, that's way back, way back on the track. All right.

But we'll use again the analogy of the abyss. We find out that people are trying to get from a — one state to another state, a better state, and we find out that intervening between the two is a black abyss. All right.

Gee, it'd be dreadful, it would just be gruesomely dreadful if we had to actually cross this abyss. But I'll give you a technique — I'll give you a technique for directly crossing the abyss.

Where is the abyss in the first place? The abyss is at 40.0. The only connecting point, really. The only real connecting point between MEST universe and mest universe self is at 40.0. The matter which you would make and the matter which the MEST universe would make — entirely different.

Now, somebody somewhere along the line got the wavelength of any universe you might have had and blew it. You collided, in other words, with the MEST universe, but that doesn't say there was a bridge between those two points. It said there's some kind of an artificial step up or conduit or something of the sort was done there in order to make a clash between these two universes.

Well, the point of that clash is chaos and confusion. And if you want to take it apart vector by vector, you've got lots of time. There is no end to the amount of time you would have if you started taking it apart erg by erg of energy, taking that smash apart, because you've laid locks on it ever since.

Every time you've had a dream or a hope or a desire or a plan in the MEST universe, you've laid a lock on the smash of your own universe. Horrible, huh? And every time the MEST universe has kicked you in the teeth and has smashed your dreams, hopes and plans, and hasn't done exactly what you thought it should do, it laid a lock on this one. So, is that a tangled mess!

Well, there's no real bridge between those two points so far as processing is concerned. There's a collision between the two points and it's way down about 0.0. And you could say that there is a connector across on the 0.0 circuit, but it's not a bridge; it can't be crossed there. I say "it can't be crossed there" — that's a very forthright statement and I shouldn't make a forthright statement because there's only been a couple, three attempts to cross there at that point.

And of course, it's something like somebody trying to discover — to sail to Asia, and we could pull a Columbus and keep writing everybody and say, "We're in Asia. We're in Asia. We're in Asia," meantime with two of the doggonedest biggest continents and the golblamedest biggest ocean standing between us and Asia. We could go on saying that and pretending that that 0.0 to 0.0 bridge here — pretending it wasn't there and that it was crossable. But it's a mess of confusion. It's an awful mess of confusion. Until we get a MEST cutter and maybe a couple of MEST torches invented or something of the sort, it's not crossable at that point.

But it is crossable at 40.0. But again at 40.0, and nearabouts to 40.0, you have a terrific liability. They're both the same thing at 40.0. That says, "What is all space for the MEST universe and what is all space for your own universe is an all-space thing." And you try to go through that and you try to shift over to be sure of what is all-space MEST, all-space self mest, and rrrrrr! Because space is space. And if there is nothing in it to identify it, you have an awful time.

Now, if you do this little process, you'll see what I'm talking about. Cook up your own black space that is empty and has no sensation in it, and be sure it's your own space.

Now, very possibly there is a way to solve that, but it's making space identify itself by space without any havingness and without any doingness. It's just space. And you will get the doggonedest sensation of beingness. For a little while, boy, you'll just be like mad, and then you'll say, "Well, is this really my space?" And then, of course, you'll not-be like mad, because you'll say, "Here I am, lost in MEST universe space." And then you'll say, "Well, this is my space," and that gives you a tremendous power of beingness and untouchableness, and you can feel very detached and very nice and so on, and then that "Well, is it my space?" The whole truth of the matter is, it's nonidentifiable space. And the fact that it fluctuates from one to the other should tell you something: It is your space only by definition.

And if you define it and simply say, "Now, this is my space" — you rig up this space which has no light in it, no matter in it, no perception in it, and by definition you say, "This is my space" — why, you're all set. I mean, you did it by definition, you see? It's not very satisfactory though.

So, it's the theoretical bridge. But it's by definition. You see, your space can exist concurrently with MEST universe space, and you're so tuned up to the MEST universe that naturally the space you'd create would be, again, concurrent against the space.

Now, there'll be more to say about this in times to come, as more is known about it, but there is one of the big question marks, is just exactly how you can identify that bridge and tell the difference between an all-MEST universe space and an all-self space. Of course, you can tell the difference by definition.

Well, the best way to do this is by identification — by doingness and havingness. And that is Creative Processing. You say, by definition — you say, "This is my space," and then you know it's your space simply because of the doingness and havingness in it are not MEST universe doingnesses and havingnesses. You know you have never reigned as a dragon; you know that never happened in the MEST universe. You never reigned as a dragon with the best possible attendants, and so forth. And the way you are sure of this is you have the people change in appearance; and you find out you can change their appearance around with great ease — why, all of a sudden, they become yours.

And you move over directly at 20.0. There is no bridge between there; you're actually going all the way over the top and down, back down to 20.0 again, but you do it instantaneously. You mock up. You mock up doingness and havingness and it's your own space by definition, and you have Creative Processing. And you are immediately on the left side of the parabola.

And the more certain you are that this could only be the left side of the parabola, only be your own universe, the better the processing.

And where you have had Creative Processing even vaguely break down — it doesn't, but where you've had it taking a long time, it takes a long time in direct ratio to the amount of MEST universe (not self, but the right-hand parabola) form that you eject into it — inject into it.

Now, let's process oneself as one's own MEST universe body. See? Let's mock up one's own MEST universe body and put it out there. Now, you'll get results in ten, twelve, fifteen hours; you'll see things happening in ten or twelve or fifteen hours of this kind of processing. It is much, much better to put something out there that you know is not MEST universe — a MEST universe body.

For instance, even a thing like a pumpkin on a stick. That's at least somebody else's universe adapted to your own, and you say, "That's my body." And you say, "All right. Now these two sticks that go down there — these two sticks that go down there, those are my legs. Now, I'm going to process the right-hand stick because something is wrong with my right-hand leg." Okay, and you process that stick and you're going to get along a lot better than if you processed a MEST universe leg. Isn't that strange? You master that stick of your own universe. Fabulous, isn't it? Well, it's a direct route.

So, the more and the better you can depart from the MEST universe and make it the universe of self, the better Creative Processing is. But this doesn't say even then, that you have to attain an enormously high original level of creation in order to make it effective. Because it is effective regardless of what level of creation you use, as long as it is a level of creation.