All right.

Forms are made to survive. Now, if you know that, why then, you know a very great deal.

Survival is on the middle of a curve. And the beginning of that curve is create. The center of it is persist or survive. And the end of that curve is destroy.

When there is no creation entered into survival, it of course drifts rap-idly over toward destruction. Do you see this? When you unmoor it from the front part of the curve, it drifts to the end of the curve, naturally. Is that right?

Shakespeare wrote a poem about this one time. I believe it's his Eleventh Sonnet: "Nothing 'gainst time's scythe can make defense save breed to brave him when he takes thee hence." Untangle it from its Elizabethan English, it's a very savvy statement. "Nothing 'gainst time's scythe can make defense save breed to brave him when he takes thee hence." And thus we get a tremendous emphasis, by such people as Sigmund Freud, upon the second dynamic. Life, incapable it appears, of consistently remaining moored to the early part of the curve of create-survive-destroy, then involves itself in the creation of new forms so as to have an existence into the future. And this existence into the future is, however, not germane only to sex. It is germane to every activity in which man engages.

A greater and greater insistence upon survival is seen in any advancing civilization. The dream of Egypt was eternity. And it definitely was eternity. It built pyramids. There is an Egyptian tomb to Cleopatra's sister down on the north coast of Africa which has driven psychotic practically every ruler who has ruled in the area, since it will not lend itself to destruction. It has been shot at, battered, pummelled; they have even moved up huge machines to try to pull down this image, and they can do nothing to it. The dream of Egypt was eternity; it made the grade. But the funny part of it is, it isn't here anymore, is it?

Now, there is the biggest riddle in life.

After you've tried and tried and tried to make something survive, then it isn't here anymore. And the harder you try, the more solid you get. And the end product of insistence upon survival is mass.

Early on the curve you wouldn't care about survival at all. You don't care at all because you can create. If you can create something, what's the difference if it's destroyed? If you can create, what's the difference if it's destroyed?

Here's a musician. He blows a few notes into a trumpet and they echo around the room and are gone forever. If he gets into a despair on the subject of the survival of his music, if he notices how fragile in its survival his music is, then he will start to struggle into some situation whereby he becomes very famous, so his music will be put on platters, where it'll be put on recording mechanisms of one kind or another, and where his name will be known throughout a people imperishably, and so that when they bury a huge shell, or something of the sort, to be opened up in the year 2500, or something of that sort, why, certainly one of his records will be in it.

What if he fails in his course toward fame? Well, he perishes. That's what happens to him. And all memory of his music perishes. And he himself forgets that he ever tried to engage in music, because music has failed.

You'll many times run a preclear who cannot play a note, who is antipathetic toward music, who is upset by music, who can't stand other people's singing. And we start to run him and we discover, at one time or another down the track, a few lives ago, that he was very, very thoroughly dedicated to music.

We have him start wasting grand pianos. And, boy, can he waste grand pianos. Only they suddenly turn into clavichords! You get the idea? And he gets this revengeful feeling against all audiences. If you ask him "Where would an audience be safe?" he would say, "At the bottom of a vat full of arsenic." That's because his music did not survive.

Why should it survive? That is the challenging question which one can enter into this whole computation. Why should it survive?

The only reason it should survive is the feeling that one can't create it. If one cannot create music anew, then of course music has to survive. And one only enters into the dwindling spiral of importance, survival, all the mechanisms of life form, importances, masses, energy, conservation of energy — any one of these factors stems from just this one factor: "I can't create it anymore." "I can't create it anymore" also says "I won't be able to duplicate a former creation." Therefore, Opening Procedure by Duplication does some weird and strange things to people. Why? It moves them earlier on the curve, is what it does.

Now, here you have a body that is aging. Certainly this body is aging. It's going to age, and age and age. First it started in grow, grow, grow, and you were very enthusiastic about life because you thought you could win — the body could win, you know. And your body got bigger and bigger and bigger, and finally du-zzu-zuh-zzu, shrunk, shrunk, shrunk, shrunk, shrunk, shrunk, dead!

Why should it run that course?

It runs that course because it is mass. That's why it runs that course. No other reason. It runs the course because it is mass!

Now, the thetan becomes the body because nobody is impressed. No audience is responding to the fact that a thetan is present. He loses his ability to communicate with his environment directly, so he has to have some mass and enter into this game called MEST. And then he's more and more massive. And then one day you say, "Be three feet back of your head," and he's stuck!

Why is he stuck? Because he insisted on survival. He insisted on survival because he couldn't create anymore. He was sure of this.

The moment that an individual becomes certain that he can no longer create on any dynamic, he is doomed to a marriage with mass. He dooms himself. He says, "Now, look. I've got to hold on to this. I have to be careful of my hat because there are no other hats. Nobody will ever be able to create a hat. And so therefore, when I put my hat down, I must remember where I put it down because I just won't be able ever to have another hat." Your parents train you into this. They take your shoes. They say, "Don't drag your feet on the ground, Johnny. Don't walk in the mud." And "Those nice slippers that you have there, Betty, why, you just better be awfully careful with those slippers because I'm not going to buy you any more." Your line of procurement is shut, so therefore your slippers have to survive. Your clothes have to survive. And you'll get to a point, after a while, where they have to survive so thoroughly that you can't use them. So you outgrow them.

The horrible fact is there's nothing in this universe or any other universe ever invented that is going to survive to a complete eternity. The dream of Egypt will never be realized. The huge tombs which stand right now in the Valley of the Kings are prey to the erosion of sun and wind. And they're also prey to people who are not dedicated to the same goals of Egypt itself.

These people ran out to the Valley of Kings; the second they started there was big boom of some sort or another — grain boom or land boom or something of the sort, a new race, new conquest. And in came a new populace, new interest, new hope. And the people went out to the Valley of the Kings, and they took off the huge slabs which actually protected the pyramids and they built doorsteps of them — something practical. And they took these slabs off the pyramids. The pyramids had a slick, smooth, protecting coat of stone at one time, which indeed was survival. Erosion could do very, very little to it. And this new people with new goals and new ideas — not quite so set on eternity and survival — went out and tore the coating off those tombs. And so those tombs are going by the boards. They're going quite rap-idly. But they would have gone in any case.

So new goals can interrupt the survival of old goals.

And here we have a whole civilization at this time which is coming up with the idea that you can still create. The American civilization today has the idea you can still create. They don't build a car that will last more than five or six years; they expect it to be falling all over the road in a hundred thousand miles.

That's not true of Europe. Europe is building so we have survival. Try and wear out a Daimler. You won't be able to wear out a Daimler. It just goes on and on and on. Its body style is also stuck on the track at about 1919. And this is true, then, of design and so forth. They don't say, "This is a 1954 Daimler." Oh, nothing like that. Or the old Duesenbergs; they don't say, "This is a 1950 Duesenberg." They say, "This is a Duesenberg Series 18." You see? That means probably built in 1933; and they expect it to go on running.

When you start expecting things to survive and demanding that thingsgo on surviving, and so on, you're entered into a difficult situation. And thatis the most difficult situation which is faced by healing. Anyone engaging inhealing already is dedicated to the goal that "the form must survive." That'sa horrible fact. But, believe me, it's eighty grades above that of the military.The goal of a general: he's over to "destroy." He sees a town; in hismind's eye it falls to pieces because it is a shelter for enemy troops. Kill! Kill!

Knock it apart. Destroy, destroy, destroy. That is over on the far end of the curve. Way below the center of the curve.

Now, when you get interested in healing, you are faced with the fact that you're going to insist that the individuals in your immediate vicinity survive. And if you are dedicated solely to the survival of the body, and if you keep addressing the body with processes and treatments and therapies, and if it's the body which has to survive and you're not thinking of the individual, you are defeated.

In Scientology we only are trying to get the individual to assume his native state, which happens to be completely immortal.

Dianetics, then, is much more liable to aberration on the part of a practitioner than Scientology. In Scientology you say, "Well, let's skip this non-sense and get to the beginning of the curve. Be three feet back of your head." That's understood, you see, right from that command "Be three feet back of your head." "Let's get to the beginning of this curve. To hell with it; you don't need a body. Nothing has to survive, really. You will. It's just a matter of fact and a matter of course: you are going to survive. And there's nothing any-body can do about this. But we'll just put you into a better state so you can have more fun circulating around and going down the time track." If a Scientologist finds himself getting exceedingly hectic about the fact that his preclear as a body must survive, that the preclear's actions, machinations, creations, and so forth, have to have great endurance, then the practitioner is on his way out.

The medical doctor could not help but go down Tone Scale unless he were so consistently successful at it that he had no other choice but to assume that he controlled this curve of survival. If he were consistently successful with patients, of course, he wouldn't go downhill. He'd say, "I can successfully make these things survive, if I want to." And he'll get less hectic about it; he'll get less insistent about it, you know. And he will make them survive. He has successes, and so on.

So the other liability to an auditor is lack of success.

The medical doctor, missing on one patient in three — pardon me, three patients in one — is, of course, doomed on this track. He has to get inhuman. He has to get down to a point after a while where he will say, "Operate!" even when he knows the operation will probably be fatal and the patient will recover if not operated upon. He gets into a destructive band.

The next thing you know, he's going to destroy on the first dynamic. And medicine is going to destroy itself, having enjoyed a prominence and a social acceptability for almost a century — not much more than that, probably less — having enjoyed it, you see, now, the public beginning to flare back in the face of medicine.

Well, medicine actually designs itself to be brushed away. It designs it-self to be knocked aside by charging too great a fee, by permitting no new effort to enter into the field of medicine unless it is in the field of matter. New matter can enter the field of medicine — a new drug, a new compound, something like that — but no new idea can enter the field of medicine.

And if this is the case, then, of course they are fairly well gone from the creative band.

Because you can look at this curve as a pyramid. We were just talking about pyramids, we can look at this curve as a pyramid. We see, at the creative top of the pyramid, no mass. We could see a pyramid that had very little density at the top, you see, and then it became more and more dense, and more and more area, more and more cubic space occupied, and greater and greater density per cubic unit. We'd finally find the base of the pyramid very, very massive and very, very dense. And if it kept on going that way — as the nuclear physicist would hope that it would — it would get to the bottom and become plutonium and go boom!

But the fact behind this survival curve is that you could draw the curve with create at the top of the pyramid, survive down into the pyramid where it's dense enough to continue its shape and mass, and destruction as the bottom. See, boom! You get things just so dense and they go boom! You make things get just so big and they go boom!

I remind you that our old friend the dinosaur went boom! He got just so big and — he survived; he sure survived for a long time. You don't have big animals here on earth anymore because earth will not support big animals.

But this tremendous goal of survival, and so forth, is still registered by certain forms. Frogs, reptiles, and so forth, go on to some terrific level of survival. A snake's idea of gravity is about the densest thing you ever got mixed up with. A frog — they found frogs in pieces of coal and all sorts of weird things. They've gotten themselves rigged up so they can survive.

But who wants to be a frog? Who wants to be a snake? Insufficient mobility — and that is the other penalty for survival: immobility.

If you really want something to survive, you will move it in from some mysterious source, alter it and alter it and alter it, and fix it in place, and it will survive. It will continue as a piece of mass.

Well, the liability of practice, then, is repair. And repair actually is something which follows in on a second cycle. There's repair on a second cycle. The first cycle would be create-survive-destroy. The second cycle would be create-survive-destroy, but already we have experienced destruction. The third cycle would be create-survive-destroy, too, but we have very well experienced destruction now; we've experienced it twice.

Somewhere along the line a fellow gets the idea, "You know, we better repair. That will assist survival." Well, repair of the body is such a goal.

Now, many an auditor has never gotten this point: When we validate a somatic, we make it in concrete. If we address and alter a somatic directly, we'll put it in concrete. Follow me?

If we start addressing the body directly as a goal in processing, we'll put it in concrete. We'll really fix the guy in his head.

If we go on dramatizing this curve of create-survive-destroy by making it get heavier and heavier and more and more solid — in other words, validate, validate, move, change, move, change, alter-ism, alter-ism, alter-ism, crunch, bigger, mass, more mass, more mass — why, you will have this situation of nailing somebody into his head. You'll nail him down.

Many an auditor will sit there and feel very badly over somebody's "epiglutis," or something of this sort, and would audit directly in that direction. It's the most fatal thing you can do.

As I mentioned to you the other day, an Instructor came in and he said, "I have a chronic somatic. I mean, it's been with me for some time now, and it's right here in my throat. What would you do about it if you were auditing a chronic somatic? — of course, if we did audit chronic somatics, of course, which we really don't do." He was being very nebulous about this, wasn't he? Because he knew exactly what the real answer was, and that is leave the thing alone; it'll go away. All right?

But he walks in and he says, "What process would you use?" I helped him out and altered it for him. Of course, the second that I altered it for him it became more massive and more acute. Now, maybe it would have gone away too, if I'd altered it enough, but I carefully was using a process which would simply alter it a little bit; in other words, fix it.

It was all right as far as he was concerned, you see, for a preclear to go around with this chronic somatic and you know, never have it touched. But where he was concerned, that chronic somatic was important. You bet it was important. "Important" and "survive" are almost synonyms. "Mass" and "importance" are synonyms. "Mass," "importance," "survive": these things are quite synonymous.

When you want to make something important, the first impulse is to make it dense or big — either one. A diamond, I call to your attention, is dense. Gold is about the most dense stable metal. Valuable. Scarce. All of these things, you see. Make it massive.

All right. So, the very theory of survival itself and the create-survive-destroy curve should tell you that you shouldn't go addressing the body with a process. You should tell the fellow as soon as you can, "Be three feet back of your head," simply by getting him to change his mind about the situation.

Now, we are not going as far as our old friend Gautama Buddha. He says, "You mustn't think in terms of . . ." He's got twelve categories — I mentioned them in a PAB — and all of these categories are the categories of the mechanics of space and so on. And if you don't think of any of these things, well, you will exteriorize. That is the idea behind this.

Well, we have an approximate process like that. We tell a fellow to hold on to the two back corners of the room and not think.

But here's an oddity. If we just tell the fellow to sit still and not think — unworkable. Unworkable process. He practically caves in. It's a very, very crude, rugged thing to do to anybody. And yet I've occasionally had a "Step XVIII" preclear come around and say, "I have a new process. You have this 'Sit still and hold on to the two back corners of the room and don't think.' Well, as a matter of fact, the essence of it is just 'Sit still and don't think.' " And he says, "And that's the process: you just sit there and don't think." That is a process of yoga: you sit still and don't think. That's meditation. Of course, they let you figure-figure a little bit. But if you just sat still and didn't think, why, something alarming is supposed to occur. Well, maybe it will occur. But what you're asking is a body, which actually dare not be still without being dead, to be still. And so these boys start taking on the aspect of death. They get rather dehydrated, and other interesting things happen to them. It catalyzes them on the curve.

Well, now holding the two back corners of the room and sitting still and not thinking does something else. It puts them at the beginning of the curve. The beginning of the curve is space. The middle of the curve is space and energy. At the end of the curve is no space, all energy solidified — and that is destroyed. See that? No motion.

Anytime you get no motion you get nothing. And when you've asked this pyramid to condense so dense that it cannot move at all, it of course will explode — which is all you need to know about plutonium to know why it works. You've asked it to sit, actually, completely still; you've asked it to have no electronic motion. And the moment that occurs you get a disintegration.

So you ask this person to sit absolutely still and not think, you're going to get a disintegration.

I've known some of these boys who sat still for fifteen years, or some-thing like that, and meditated, and they didn't get there. In the first place, they didn't get there because they didn't have an auditor.

All books on Tibetan processes, by the way, carry many warnings about the fact that you should have an instructor. But nobody ever gets an instructor. They read the book and they sit still and self-process.

Processing is a third-dynamic problem. And as such, why, of course it doesn't self-process anymore than Scientology self-processes. Just because we're doing this Scientology over here in the Occident is no reason that bodies are not bodies, and minds minds, and thetans thetans in the Orient. You see? Orient or Occident, whatever process you use, whatever you call it, it doesn't matter, you're still dealing with the same materiel. So things haven't changed since the days of Gautama Buddha except they're a little further downhill for his particular race.

Here we have the stumbling block, then, of the auditor: He gets dedicated to survival and insistent upon it to the degree that mass must occur. Mass must occur, you see. He then decides his preclear is better off in his head, which is not true.

And the best way to handle a case, of course, is to get the fellow cognizant of the surroundings — cognizant of his surroundings and exteriorize him.

Route 1, Route 2 — up to R2-22 — actually, is quite adequate to exteriorize anybody. If you just kept working at it you'd exteriorize him.

When you get him into an exteriorized state, what do you have? You have no mass.

So you have something that is closer to the beginning of the curve. Now you've got to work him a little bit further to get him into a frame of mind where he actually can assume the beginning of the curve, where he can create. But you're going toward the ability to create.

And you'll find many of your preclears so fixed on the idea of destroy, that they can't leave mass and energy alone. They've just got to knock it out. You know? So the body's got a ridge. Well, they've got to make it disappear. See? Well, that is destroy. That's the destroy end of the curve. And, believe me, these people aren't even back up as high on the hump as survive. You see, they're in there, "Let's see, we've got to make a perfect duplicate of all these engrams, a perfect duplicate of all these engrams." Now, why did Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health have as wide an appeal as it did?

It just says, "Here's something you can destroy, boys, with no liability." And it hit a lot of people who were right there on that part of the curve create-survive-destroy. They were past survival and they were over into destroying. There was something they could destroy, or even a way they could destroy themselves.

Used with a slightly different intention, it was a direction that would make them survive or it'd put them into a creative frame of mind.

Now we have Creative Processing. It's a direct attempt. And it is covered by Self Analysis in Scientology, and all it does, page after page after page after page, is tell the fellow "Mock it up. Mock it up. Mock it up." It doesn't even tell him to do anything with it. It says that he mocks it up in front of him and behind him and above him, below him — he's making space while he's doing this — and it says, "Mock it up." Well, if a fellow does this for a couple, three months, at a rate of an hour or so a day … This sounds like an awful arduous line, doesn't it? — a couple, three months, an hour or so a day, doing nothing but running through Self Analysis; nothing else. But what do you know, he recovers his ability to create. Eventually he recovers his ability to create. He just keeps at it and at it and at it, and because he's postulating theta, creativeness, mock-ups — theta, creativeness, mock-ups; you know he's postulating, postulating, postulating, postulating — all of a sudden all the masses around, and so forth, start to get altered and changed and go into place because he's convinced now, once more, that he can create. And so, he can be three feet in back of his head.

One of the roughest cases I ever saw in my life (I haven't seen any other cases really rougher than this case) was kept on Self Analysis for about three months, just doing it, I think, about two hours a day. And he eventually was sitting there minding his own business and an auditor who was in the same class he had been in walked up to him and said, "Hey! You're looking good. Be three feet back of your head." Bang! He was. That was all there was to it. See how this was?

In other words, Self Analysis in Scientology rehabilitates, directly, the ability to create. It's quite a process all by itself.

If you had a preclear that you got tired of auditing, or couldn't afford it or something like that, you'd just tell him bluntly, "Now, listen, you want to attain all the goals here in Scientology? Huh? You want to attain these goals that you've been reading about and so on? Well, I'm not going to audit you this long. But you can get some real good auditing. Ron will audit you right through the pages of that book." A three-dimensional proposition is what you want, not the two-dimensional or one-dimensional preclear that you've been trying to bail out, see. You want him to be able to get those mock-ups out there and put them up. And you say, "Well, if you'll just spend a couple of hours a day at this for three months — of course, I don't think you have the nerve, you haven't got the guts, but . . ." You know, doubt him a little bit. "And sure, if you do this a couple of hours a day for about three months, I'll absolutely guarantee that you'll be exteriorized." And you can.

Of course, you can't guarantee that he will stay at it that long.

But this is a clinical fact not a theoretical fact, that a person working Self Analysis over this length of time — that's Self Analysis in Scientology, creative mock-ups … By the way, Self Analysis is the original book. Self Analysis in Dianetics, is one that was published in England and it has mock-ups in it.

Self Analysis in Scientology is the same as the British book, but it has just the title difference.

Now, you can take this Self Analysis — it's not Self Analysis "in" any-thing, see, it's just Self Analysis — and you'll find out it actually asks you to "recall" and then it gives you a long list of scenes, you see; "recall" and a long list of scenes.

Now, everywhere you find recall in that book, if you will just simply substitute the word create, you are all set. The book is converted, then, to the most modern book you could have on the subject. It simply converts by every time you have the word recall in there you say, create, and you've got a modern book. This just asks him to create over and over and over and over and over, and eventually he'll fly out of his head.

Now, this situation with preclears of an insistence upon survival has normally come about through sympathy or shame, blame and regret. Let's just speak of the anatomy of how this came about. Somebody walks up to him and says, "You've been working too hard. You shouldn't work that hard. You ought to take a rest. You ought to get some sleep. You should take a vacation." Let's literally, liberally, but more exactly translate that remark to "You are not surviving. There's a possibility that you won't survive, Joe. Why don't you take a vacation? Why don't you have a little bit of rest. Well, you've got to slow down, you know. In the future when you get old and feeble and so forth — the way you are, you know." (Medical doctors' standard prescription.) "You've just got to learn how to control yourself and slow down, you know, uhh!" And when he gets them all slowed down nicely, of course, they're dead. How motionless can you get? Dead — that's all. Well, of course, I guess the American Medical Association is also the American Undertaking Association and so they have a working contract.

But anyhow, what does this mean? — "Oh, you poor fellow! Oh, did you hurt your foot? Are your eyes tired? Here, let me." It means "You can't survive, bud." And that's what any of those remarks add up to.

"You need help. You must depend upon. You poor fellow. You must get some sleep. You must be careful of your diet," yap, yap, yap all along the line — just freely translate all of those remarks into an exact meaning. And that exact, precision meaning (I'm not being just funny here; it is an exact, precision meaning) is an inference that you can't survive. The person spoken to can't survive.

All right. We take some fellow named Joe, and he's walking down the street. And it's never occurred to him — never occurred to him at all … He's brand-new on the track, you know, and it never occurred to him that he could do other than survive. Because that's the truth! He's immortal! In-destructible! The one thing he can lose — if he wants to lose it — is his personal memory. And he can't lose that unless he wants to lose it.

So he's walking down the street and he's feeling perfectly all right and he's feeling fine. And it's never, never, never occurred to him that he could do other than survive. A fellow walks up to him and says, "Well, Joe, you poor fellow, you're kind of looking done in. I guess you've been working too hard over at the plant." Joe would look at him and say, "What's the matter with you!"

"Well, you're just working too hard over to the plant. You ought to take it easy. You ought to take a' rest. You ought to take these pills. You ought to duth-thua-thu-thau. And the liabilities of old age and survival and so forth and so on." Honest. Honest, Joe will just stand there and say, "You're nuts!" That's all. You would never under God's green earth be able to convince him that

(1) he could get tired,

(2) that he was perishable,

(3) that there was any possibility of such a thing as overwork,

(4) that anybody ever had to let up with effort, in addition

(5) that you did something in order to get something for it.

These factors would not be comprehensible to Joe.

Why?

He's never done the basic unmotivated act.

But Joe's walking down the street one day and he decides to do in Charlie. Now, he's got a basic idea here. And he says, "You know, this guy — he's taking all the work in the plant and so forth. He comes in and he sweeps up around my machine. I could sweep up around the machine! And then the . . . so forth. I'll just tell him … Huh! I've got a good idea here: 'Well, gee-whiz, you're pretty tired there, Charlie, aren't you? I mean, doesn't it wear you out there sweeping up? — a heavy broom like that and all that sort of thing, Charlie?' "

(Charlie's already done this to several guys, see?) And there comes the motivator, see, and — slurp! "Yes, I'm tired." All right. Let's put this into terms of survival.

Joe's walking down the street, somebody walks up to him and says, "Gee, you know, Joe, you can't survive." It's a lie, isn't it? Joe knows it's a lie. You can't sell Joe on this idea.

But Joe walks down the street, and it's about the only thing he could convince a form of, or do to a form, would be to say, basically — the most centralized thing he could do or say to this form would be "You can't survive." So there's a snowman standing there and he bangs it on the head. Unmotivated act! There was a form, it doesn't survive; he fixed it so it didn't survive.

Somebody else puts up a mock-up of some kind or another: he bats it on the head! What's he doing? He's giving the action of nonsurvival. See? Destruction of form. He'll go around, destroy form, destroy form, destroy form, and one day somebody walks up to him and says, "You can't survive, Joe."

"That's true, isn't it?" What's he failed to do, really, to fall for the gag?

The individual has become indistinguishable from the form. When an individual identifies himself as the form, then he falls for this truth that a form can perish — but an individual cannot perish. So he begins to believe he is the form. And when he is the form, then he knows that he, as a form, can perish.

But as himself he can't perish. And that's the truth of the matter.

Now, to make a game, he will often make himself perishable. You'll pick up incidents on the whole track which are quite curious: A fellow in a big fight of one kind or another. Somebody comes up to him and says, "You ought to be dead!" And he: "Why should I be dead?"

"Well, you're shot!"

"I am?"

"Yeah. Look at that hole right through your chest. You're shot. So you're dead."

"Well, for heaven's sakes, so I am." So he lies down and dies.

See? Being, there, is far superior to the form. Only when you have identified yourself with a perishable object can you yourself be perishable. But you could only identify yourself with a perishable object when you have done unmotivated acts against perishable objects. True enough?

All right. Let's take this gag. "You poor fellow, how hard you work, how tough it all is, how desperate the economic situation is," and so forth. There's an old line in the Bible: "And the lilies of the field, they do not reap and neither do they spin." Is that right? — or something of that sort. I probably mixed up five or six paragraphs at once there.

Anyway, the reference is offbeat because it's being spoken about a form. The truth of the matter is that it's impossible for a person to fail to survive simply because he's not eating. I mean, he can't die simply because he can't eat. See, these things don't really equate at all. His eatingness does not make him survive.

Quite on the contrary, his eatingness makes him perish. See? Overt act. Unmotivated act. Unmotivated act.

If you were to mock yourself up — this is just this one process here; just a little illustrative process, not a particularly good process — but if you were to, by mock-ups, mock yourself up being eaten as many times, or more, as you have eaten, you would for sure exteriorize.

A fellow had always had ulcers. He was complaining. He says, "You've never audited me, Ron." He was a student. "You've never audited me." This seemed to be weighing upon him somehow or another because I had never audited him. I hadn't audited anybody else either, but this weighed upon him. So I sat down, found out that he had stomach trouble and ulcers. Had him mock up his mother eating his stomach and did this several times; and his father eating his stomach several times, and cows eating his body, and horses eating his body, and oysters gobbling him up, and two or three other items just to reverse this flow. And all of a sudden — pow! — he hasn't had any stomach trouble to this day. Oh, that's interesting, isn't it?

And I suppose he wondered for some little time exactly how this worked. He actually didn't divine exactly how this worked. He didn't add this up for his own case. (He would have added it up for somebody else.) But he wasn't facing the fact that he himself was guilty of this unmotivated act of destruction of form, destruction of form, and that he himself was entirely associated with being a form.

Well, here you have in all the shame-blame-regret sequences, and any-thing else along this line — these all reduce down to the phrase, "You won't survive." Therefore, there'd be two processes — which are processes; they're good processes — whereby you take a fellow and have him walk around the environment and have him point out things that are surviving, and then have him find some things that aren't surviving.

You'll find he'll have a lot of difficulty with the second one. But you should make him do it anyhow; he'll learn some things about life.

But you have him point out things that are surviving far more often than you have him point out things that are not surviving. Because you're validating, you see; it's what you validate comes true.

And that's quite a process. Isn't that an awfully simple process? Here I've given you several lectures on survival, and so forth; well, isn't that a real simple process? It'll do strange and queer things. Their eyesight will blur up and they won't have any real effect on anything or something of the sort.

You get somebody who has a terrifically black field. What's he troubled with except the persistence of something, you see? Boy, is this stuff persisting! But it isn't down to the explosion point yet, it's simply just persist, persist, persist, persist, you see. He gets a cold and he has it for five weeks. Everybody had this cold, but everybody else got rid of theirs in a day.

Or you give him some candy to eat. And you will discover this candy — at least part of this candy — hidden or parked up someplace. Or you give him a box of candy and a considerable time later it hasn't ever been offered to any-body, but, gee, there's still a lot of candy there. You see, he's just making that candy persist. Makes everything persist.

So you want him to get rid of a lock. Ha! It's got to persist!

Now, throughout auditing you will run into this manifestation — throughout auditing: Some people are able to blow locks at sight (light locks, you know; just able to blow them at sight) and bog a little bit on a grief charge or something like that; they don't blow it. You could run it and run it and run it, if you were running it by old Dianetic technique, and it'd just stick, stick, stick, stick, stick. See? But they could blow a light lock.

All right. And then there are others that could run a secondary action and spill a little grief, but if you made them run an engram with some physical pain and unconsciousness in it, they'd just bog, see. Engrams underlie these secondaries — grief charges, fear charges and things like that. They'd just bog, see. They would not be able to run the engram; it'd just be like wading through glue!

Somebody the other day was telling me that he made a very interesting test. I've forgotten the exact figures he told me. I think it was 180 times they ran through an incident where he'd been told that he had fallen as a child. Well, it was a tremendous number of times to go through one incident, hm? Well, he didn't have any concept at the beginning of it at all, except being told about it. And he just ran this incident and ran it and ran it. And, by golly, along about up toward the last times they ran it, all of a sudden the complete shock of the fall turned on, bang! A somatic turned on, wham! Get the idea? Real heavy. I don't know how many more times they ran it, but they would have run it out; they were just getting someplace.

But now you take a preclear that audited relatively well, he probably would have looked at that fall and just more or less just looked at the fac-simile, you see, and — pshew! — gone.

What's the difference?

It's just the difference of preclears on this position on the scale.

I'm not saying he is a long way down, down this scale. But he just picked an arbitrary incident and audited it this long, you see, just as a test. "Can you pick up any engram?" — the way I used to tell them. See? "Can you pick up any engram on the track?" You sure can, if you audit at it and you stick with it long enough, regard-less of the case level.

See, what he had to do was as-is all the unknownness about it — you know, all the incomprehensibility, the unknownness, and so forth, had to be as-ised off of it until he got something known out of it.

A lot of people will simply take the surface of it off and then will never take the unknownness about it off. A reverse situation.

Form is composed of unknownness and knownness. The knownness is the form itself, and the unknownness is the material of which it is made. If this stuff were comprehensible over here, for instance — this stuff in the wall were comprehensible — you would as-is it because you are understanding. See, you are understanding, therefore, it can only survive, as you face it, simply by being incomprehensible. Now, the forms of it can be comprehensible. Its atomic structure and various structures in connection with it can be comprehensible, see? But the actual matter of the stuff would not be there; it would simply be as-ised.

The natural progression of this stuff, by the way, is to have everything as-ised off of it that is understandable, leaving only the incomprehensible. And you, being understanding, naturally come along and see the stuff and it sticks, it survives, it stays there — that is, this is the mechanism by which energy does begin to survive.

All right. Life is understanding and ARC. And MEST is just there.

All right. Some people, then, read a book on the subject of Dianetics, something like that, and say, "Gee! That's life!" Boom! They're Clear! You know, recognition. Get the idea?

And other people read a book and get audited for a few hours and they're in beautiful condition.

And other people read the book and get audited for an awful lot of hours and they're hopeful that if they persist they will get more good out of it. And there are other people, unfortunately, who go all the way through the thing without change. These people can be plotted by space, and they can be plotted on that create-survive-destroy curve — by space. The amount of space which the person can conceive is the direct index of where he is on the curve.

Just an interesting phenomenon rather than a terrifically useful thing to an auditor. You could use it, but then there's thousands of such phenomena.

Here we have this boy, then, who blows the locks instantly. He has high cognition, doesn't he? Recognition is very high. And as you go along the curve, then, from create over to destroy, we find a reduction of cognition. The recognition factor is dwindling as we advance along this curve. Right? And recognition factor is only understanding. That's all it is! And so, we find understanding dwindling as we go along this curve. And understanding has as its component parts affinity, reality and communication. Doesn't it? So therefore, on the create end of the curve we had very high ARC. And at the destroy end of the curve we have very, very low ARC. And that's your Tone Scale, Chart of Human Evaluation, and all the rest of it.

Understanding is up there at that create side of it. A fellow can under-stand and he has tremendous understanding. Understanding, life force, aliveness, beingness, ability to grant beingness: these are all synonymous; all descriptions of the same manifestation. He is alive. He can make other things alive. He can create and so forth. And he goes right on down, then, to a point of where he is alive and he might be able to make something very close to him feel a little bit more alive. And then he goes down to the level of where other things are making him alive. And he has crossed the barrier of survive. See, that's the make — break point. Now other things are making him alive.

The second he does that he's departed from the ability to create for him-self. When he can no longer create for himself he's going to have difficulty.

This curve is not something which compulsively and automatically advances. This curve does not automatically advance for an individual. It has to be advanced by the individual. He has to actually get in there and reduce his own survival; he has to reduce his own ability to create. See? He has to actually postulate it.

Nearly everybody who has any trouble with stupidity can actually pick up times on the track when he postulated that he was going to be stupid, you know, so he could converse with somebody. Or he was going to play real bad music so people could understand it, or write real bad books, or do his work sloppy enough so that people would get along with him, or be cowardly enough to get along with the rest of the troops in the war. You know, he'd cut down his life force so as to be in communication.

Of course, if you really cut your life force down to zero, why, you would be in communication all right; theoretically forever with another piece of MEST — same piece of MEST.

Now, cognition and understanding and all these other factors, then, dwindle as we go from create down to destroy.

You will find many a preclear who is able, simply by understanding his problem, you see, to as-is it. His ability to as-is is also demarked on this curve, you see. His ability to understand the problem — that's enough to make it go boom!

All right. If we have this kind of a condition then we could discover rather easily that some preclears are going to keep their engrams practically forever, and some preclears are going to blow them at a glance. But we could locate and predict exactly where these people are. They'd be on that create-survive-destroy curve, wouldn't they?

All right. Now, that's the ARC Chart of Human Evaluation, the Tone Scale. Those … It has positions on it. It goes from minus 8.0, as given in Scientology 8-80; up through 0.0, as you walk into in Science of Survival; and then it goes on up through, of course, the various emotions and carries on up to tone 40, which is as high as we adventure to recognize, although we say it probably goes to 1000.

And this ability, then, to erase is the ability to understand, is the cognition of an individual, is his position on the create-survive-destroy curve. At first he can make anything persist, and then other things make him persist. You see? He involutes or he reverses about the center of this curve. Other things are making him survive, he is not making other things survive. That sort of thing goes on.

All right. As we look over the problem of life, we find, then, life can stand up to, be recognized by, and understood by means of this graph. It can be understood well enough by means of this graph so a person's cognition is raised and, therefore, his understanding.

Now, it should not immediately follow that an individual, simply because he has studied Scientology, would be harder to audit. It shouldn't follow at all. So we must assume, then, that people who have studied Scientology who are harder to audit have not understood Scientology. How about that, hm? It seem very likely?

Well, it sure is. And you look at these cases, that because they've done some study on the subject they're now a much tougher case, and you find out that they were an unbelievably tough case in the first place. They're much better now than they were before but, boy, can they persist — do their aberrations persist! At first it's just the guy himself that persists, and later on his aberrations do the persisting, thank you.

And you try to erase them, and these energy masses and these ridges and so forth are sticky, and no cognition. What they have in them, by the way, is incomprehensibility. You have to be willing to understand that some-thing can be incomprehensible before you can as-is it.

And of course, that's a terrible challenge to you. It says, "Hey, wait a minute! In order to get on in life I have to go around and say, 'I know, I know, I know. I understand this, I understand this.' " No, no, no, no. That's not the way you get along in life. You have to be smart enough to know what's incomprehensible. You start looking around and see something that really is in-comprehensible, and then you know that it's incomprehensible, it'll gopshew! That's the end of it.

The nuclear physicist, using mathematics and other abstruse methods of understanding the matter from which this material universe is partially made, is, of course, doing the most stupid thing he could ever possibly do. He is understanding an incomprehensibility by means of a very, very covert mathematical, symbolical system. Arrgg! This is a dreadful thing to have happen to anyone. Dreadful.

The form is what he's understanding. He's understanding the form of the matter, the form of the lead, the form of the electron, the form of the atom, of the molecule, of the compound. Forms are always understandable.

But the stuff that lies below the form is always incomprehensible, or any thetan looking at it would simply erase it! It has to be basically an incomprehensibility, doesn't it?

Now, when people get awfully stupid, you occasionally feel like knocking them in the head. This is simply a stimulus-response mechanism. The most stupid thing there is, is over on destroy. That's how stupid the person can get — destroyed. You see that?

All right. How wrong can you be? Dead.

How stupid can you get? Dead. Destroyed.

And, therefore, people take the fact of being dead as the fact that they must be awfully stupid. So they simply forget their past life. And it's no more abstruse than this.

Only they really don't forget it at all. It keeps cropping up and interfering, and they keep worrying about the kids they left behind them, and all kinds of weird things happen.

Anyhow, let's look over this again, and let's find that the basic principle of survival is used as the woof and warp and measure of understanding of cases (it is the woof and warp of cases), and that derogatory statements are promises to an individual that he won't survive, or sympathetic threats — you know, sort of "You're not going to survive," and that sort of thing — and that's what caves an individual down.

A thetan becomes sympathetic toward forms.

Forms can be understood. Forms can be destroyed. The form, the shape, the meaning — that can always be understood.

But what about the thing that's just meaningless? Of course, that would — unless one were a very clever thetan indeed — completely evade a thetan forever. He is understanding. That's the one thing he is. He is understanding. So, of course, an un-understandable thing, of course, cannot enter his sphere of existence at all.

That's why a nuclear physicist or scientist, so-called today, will not admit ghosts. You see, they couldn't possibly admit ghosts. There they are in a demon body, hanging on to the front of their faces, usually; they can't admit a ghost. So they don't know who they are. But they wouldn't say this. They say, "They don't exist!" The smarter remark would be, "Well, from my standpoint, it's totally incomprehensible!" There's liable to be a small explosion of a ridge right in front of them.

Life keeps as-ising, then, comprehensibilities, and leaves the incomprehensible. And the incomprehensible is total survival, total destruction.

Total survival is total destruction. They're very close over there on the same part of the curve.

Okay. Can we use this in auditing? Hm? Use any part of this in auditing? The process which I just gave you is you have the preclear look around the environment and find things which are surviving, find things which are not surviving.

You'll find out such things as blowing a few notes from a trumpet, at one time or another, it eventually struck him that those notes were not surviving. He'd have to blow them louder, or make them bigger, or get a bigger horn, or play a sousaphone.

Okay.