Well, I want to talk to you tonight about a nasty problem that we've cracked here lately. Very interesting problem and we've cracked it. And although we don't know all there is to know about it yet, it looks to me, looks to me as though we have made a further advance on this particular subject than has ever been made before at one fell swoop, so I just want to tell you about it.

And the subject of this is the sixth dynamic, the physical universe, the MEST universe - matter, energy, space and time and its relationship to life. It's become a very interesting subject in the last few years.

They used to teach something called natural philosophy, and that included the birds and the bees and almost anything you could think of, including a few poems by Anaxagoras. But of later times it merely includes - it has included various physical sciences and we began to understand it was chemistry and physics and things like that.

And then time went along and we found something else, we found something else of great concern, and today it seems to be totally a fixation for just one subject - atomic fizzle. And the nuclear physicist has become very engrossed with matter, energy, space and time on the idea that he can make it explode in some fashion and so blow it all up.

Now, we have a different theory. We have a different theory about it. And a lot of old-time Dianeticists that spent most of their time making nothing out of everything, these fellows think they can erase it. You know, if we could just run that wall long enough, it'd disappear.

Well, many years ago - three years ago - we did an analysis of life in its relationship to matter, energy, space and time, and what all this meant to us and we came up with what we called the Prelogics.

And these Prelogics were of considerable use because we discover that the life unit, a thetan, the awareness of awareness unit (which has been called the soul and the spirit and lord knows what all), but this awareness of awareness unit is actually capable, demonstrably capable in the production of space and it's capable in the production of mass and it's capable in the production of energy. It's quite interesting.

It can measurably produce energy. You ask an individual - I know this flies in the teeth of physics and chemistry - we're used to this now, those of us that have done quite a bit of processing and so forth - but the basic stumbling block of physics and chemistry might interest you.

They start - all sciences start with the basic assumption, and that basic assumption usually is wrong, and therefore they don't progress beyond a certain point. And then somebody comes along and he gets a more basic assumption and he can, of course, work out further problems along this line. And the basic assumption of physics and chemistry (the physical sciences) is the conservation of energy.

That's a fascinating subject. It says, "Energy is there and even though you burn a piece of paper, all of the mass of the piece of paper and all its component parts are still there and it's not destroyed." And the physical scientist is saying most of the time, "It's not destructible, it's not destructible, it's not destructible - conservation of energy."

In other words, you put in so much heat and you get out so much heat and it goes somewhere. And no matter what you do with energy or matter, you get the same energy or matter. And then it seems like kind of a pointless argument, but this is the basis of the physical sciences.

And now they ran along just so far on this assumption and then with the works of an Italian and a British mathematician, both of some renown, the American nuclear physicist, with the help and the calculations of several Britishers, upset the whole thing with boom - atomic fizzle.

And they haven't had a good opportunity to exactly measure how much conservation of energy has been knocked over, but in the last year - and I don't think now I'm letting anything leak because it's mostly in the textbooks in the library, even though this is in confidential government publications. I love the way - I love the way governments leave on library shelves complete textbooks of what they call top-secret. But they are doing that today with nuclear physics. This work is to be found in Halley, Dirac, all kinds of guys have gone over this and their work is all available. And we read in a bulletin "top-secret," and then we read something that can be found in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Anyway, where this work is concerned they have, more or less, proven to their own satisfaction that the conservation of energy is, to be very technical, for the birds. And they have discovered this interesting thing. The worksDirac discovered this and then they proved it up at MIT and then the government made it top-secret. Anyway, they would send two alpha particles at a lead - pardon me, one alpha particle at a lead plate and get out two. And they kept doing this and this was very upsetting. And they looked for some trick, they looked around to see if there were any George Wichelows or something in the vicinity of the thing, and they couldn't find any trick. None. No trick at all. They'd throw alpha particle, they'd get two. Wasn't coming from anywhere, so they had to assume a hole in space.

Anybody might start regarding this with a little aplomb because they could not yet bring themselves to desert their basic datum of the whole science of physics - conservation of energy. Energy cannot be created, it cannot be destroyed.

And as a result, when they started to create alpha particles, in this fashion, by radiation, this upset the science of physics. And during the past year, practically in - the entire science of nuclear physics has gone completely adrift.

I talked to a couple of them in Washington, they didn't have them in a cage yet, but it just is a matter of time. And these two chaps - these two chaps were telling me in a rather strained tone of voice, "We don't know where we are. Even you might be right."

And so - and so our stable datum, of course, of physics has blown up and left a confusion. And in Scientology we can understand what's happened to them but they don't understand it in physics. They're just running around writing new formulas and hoping that somebody someplace may come up with enough answers so that they can look at a tremendous bulk of answers and say, "Well, it's in there somewhere," and walk off and leave it. That is evidently the hope.

Well, anyway, the fact of the matter is that we have another experiment that can be conducted along this line. We can ask an individual to mock up, create a mental image of an energy mass in a space of his own creation and shove it into his body. Well, we all know that process, it's a very simple process.

We keep this up, and we put a fellow on a good scale, and then we run him on this for about six weeks, and he'll go up thirty pounds. It's very fine measurement, you know, you have to have on this. That's a fact. The first time the experiment was conducted it was on a two-hundred-pound man and we ran him up to two hundred and thirty pounds, and then we had him throw away havingness until he went down to two hundred pounds again. Interesting isn't it?

Because it wasn't his food that we were varying, it wasn't anything else we were varying, it was simply we were asking him to mock up energy and shove it into his body. And he did until he really had gotten to a point of where he was a little bit afraid to sit down in chairs. He could hear the legs kind of creak, you know. We were adding to his mass, we were increasing his density.

And if we'd had something there that increased - measured the increase of his density, could have done it. Well, we did this many times and it became apparent - two things. What we were trying to prove was not what the physicist would have been interested in. We were trying to prove something entirely different. We were trying to prove that mental energy actually had a relationship with physical universe energy.

Because the old-time mystic, God bless him, back in India and so forth, he always told you, you know, "Well, mental energy is one thing and the physical universe is something else. And the physical universe is the work of the devil and mental energy that's something else; it's the work of the imagination."

And he kept telling people this till people thought their imagination was incapable of creation or production, and science could at last fall into the hole that there is such a thing as a conservation of energy. It cannot be created.

Well, I would like to know what was interacting on that scale if it wasn't physical universe energy, and where it came from if it wasn't mocked up and created by the individual. All right.

Now, as we look this problem over, we discover that we have, at once, encountered what we sought to prove, and continued to prove, the relationship between mental energy and physical universe energy.

When an individual looks at light, he can actually resist the photons. If he is asked to resist these photons, he can actually pile them up on his eyeballs.

This sounds very, very wild and very strange, but the truth of the matter is, you can drive a man almost blind this way. He'll finally build up a little ridge over his eyeballs. And it'll stay there for a few minutes and he'll get dazzle of one kind or another so that he looks - it isn't the eye pupil contracting, because you conduct the experiment two ways.

You say, "Just accept that light from that light," you know. "Just accept it." He's happy about it, everything is fine. He looks away, he's got a little image of the light, doesn't bother him any.

You say, "Now, all right, resist those photons." And he sits there and he catches them as they come in.

The next thing you know he's got dazzle. He's got things going clickety-click in some fashion out in front of his face. He has flashes of reflective vision.

Sometime a preclear has complained to you about this, I'm sure. He's said,

"I - I've got spots in front of my eyes," or "I've got a sort of a dazzle that's going on out here, all the time, all the time, all the time, and it's very upsetting to me."

Well, he's just had to resist light too often. Now, if you ask him to have some light or throw some light away or increase the energy coming from the light or decrease it and handle it and control it for a moment, these spots will go away in front of his eyes. There's - that's something we have to know in our business.

But over in the field of the sixth dynamic it tells us that there must be something wrong in the science of physics if the science of physics itself at length went into chaos, which it did. Must be something wrong there someplace and if we find chaos, we Scientologists, we would look at once to see who had disturbed the stable datum. And the stable datum, certainly enough, was disturbed, and that was the conservation of energy. All right.

Not to get too technical or long-winded about this sort of thing, we are about as modern in this and in the physical sciences as the year 2500. I mean we're pretty darn modern. It may be that - it may be everything I'm saying now one of these days will become top-secret.

Now, I had a chap tell me once that looked over the Axioms of Scientology that they all ought to be top-secret. I've had students tell me they were certainly top-secret to them, they couldn't understand anything about them. All right.

As we look over the field of Scientology, though, we go back two and a half years and we find the old Prelogics, and these Prelogics are quite fascinating.

Prelogic one (I'll just read them rapidly), Self-determinism is the common denominator of all life impulses.. Today we're saying the same thing only we're saying, "power of choice," because self-determinism was too widely misunderstood. Then we used another term later. We said, "pan-determinism," meaning self-determinism along all eight dynamics. Well, that isn't quite sharp, so today we'll say, "power of choice." And power of choice could exist along all eight dynamics. So, if we get power of choice along the eight dynamics of self, sex, group, man, animals and the physical universe (one that we're talking about tonight, the sixth dynamic, the MEST universe), spirits and God - if we talk about a determinism all the way along that line, we'd say there is a certain power of choice connected with each one. You can see at once that one does not have to be God to have a power of choice concerning God. One can have a power of choice concerning God. The atheist, for instance, has exercised his with great thoroughness. He says, "There ain't no such being." And so, that's still exercising a power of choice.

However, if an individual is being forced into some choice by some energy mass like a ridge, an engram, some other energy mass contained in his thinkingness, he is not exercising power of choice. Something else is doing the choosing and he is accepting the choice.

So, we have power of choice as opposed to acceptance - no matter under what duress - acceptance of some sort, of a choice. A man who is dramatizing an engram is simply accepting the choosing of some energy mass which has this inscribed on it. This is a simplicity. Well, so that still holds good that old one, doesn't it? Okay.

On the Prelogics number two we have the definition of self-determinism is: the ability to locate in space and time, energy and matter, also the ability to create space and time in which to create and locate energy and matter. Wow. See? Choice, power of choice. Very interesting.

Now, today we know a little bit better than this. We know that power of choice has to do with the origin or choosing to receive, on a knowingness basis, postulates. We know we're basically working from considerations, and that these considerations stem simply from the ability to consider and to postulate. And one postulates that he can make energy and postulates that he can perceive energy (we have answered up both conditions) but we have, in energy, just a specialized thing on power of choice.

So, the totality of self-determinism is not merely embraced by space, energy, matter and time. Power of choice would be demonstrable in any field of thought or endeavor. But on this one particular one, the physical universe, what an interesting thing that it occupies so much of our time that two and a half years ago we would write an axiom that would define self-determinism as power of choice in terms of matter, energy, space and time, and would neglect a consideration.

Well, that's just about where we were with our research on the Tone Scale at that time. We were still struggling with some considerations about considerations which were eventually resolved.

Actually, it wasn't until about fourteen months ago that we came up with the actuality very, very clearly demonstrated, the actuality that a consideration was senior to any space, any matter, any energy or any time. And we were led further along that line in running not-knowingness and discovering that it itself was a basic consideration underlying time. So that time started to do odd things when we started to know and not-know at intervals, and we found out time was simply knowing and not-knowing, knowing and not-knowing, knowing and notknowing, and so we got the flick in and out of the time track.

Well, all this is very cut and dried - you know this material. But what's interesting is that we had such a concentration on it at that time, and at the same time, earlier than that, we clearly said that the physical universe - matter, energy, space and time - only occupied one-eighth of the total urges of existence and we called it simply dynamic six. Dynamic six: the urge to survive along with and about matter, energy, space and time. That was the total importance of it, and really has been the total importance of it throughout. So, considerations, postulates, the ability to consider, the ability to make statements and have them come true, these things are still superior to this.

Just going over the rest of these Prelogics, three is: The identification of the source of that which places matter and energy and originates space and time is not necessary to the resolution of this problem at this time, See, "The identification of the source," nice dodge isn't it? "Let's not worry," it says, "about thetans. Let's just skip it and get on with our processing."

In the next Prelogic, however, having thrown everybody off the track with the red herring of number three, we say, Theta creates space, energy and objects by postulates, which you find as the first and second Axioms of Scientology. This is the background history of those first and second Axioms.

Now, five: Universes are created by the application of self-determinism on eight dynamics. Interesting. So, you could have all kinds of universes being created, besides a matter, energy, space and time universe.

We could have a universe simply created by the thought that there's a universe over there. We just look over at the wall and we say, "Well, lookit, there's a whole universe over on the wall." We've located it to some slight degree, but the rest of it we've just let slide. We've not put any space into it, no energy, no matter, no time, it's now gone, you see, just like that. So, by consideration alone, one considers that he can do this.

Now, six: Self-determinism applied will create, alter, conserve and possibly destroy universes. That was a long time ago, and many a preclear since has been looking holes through walls.

So, obviously an as-ising of matter is feasible in our own little simple way. We don't have to have atomic piles in order to have a preclear as-is a wall. The nuclear physicists are going about it in a rather crude way.

And the oddity is, is because he's stuck on his conservation of energy thing, he has become very hectic and he is trying to make nothing out of things any way that he can. So, he's saying, "Look, it won't possibly disappear. So, the only thing I can do about it then, is to blow it down." And that's where he's been led on his track.

Well, it happens that there is another truth involved here. And the other truth is, that you mock up something and do certain things with it and it will disappear. If you do certain other things with it, it will persist.

If you mock up something and then say that Joe mocked it up, and get the fact that Joe owns it and that you're facing it, it'll have a persistence. You have let go of and negated your self-determinism or operation of that mock-up. You've said, "I have no choice or control over it," when you've said, "I have misowned it." So it stays. So there it is. It's quite persistent.

You take somebody who regularly has nightmares, who, as an awareness of awareness unit, is simply mocking up dreams and dream sequences to get himself oriented when the body no longer furnishes him with tactile, which is the real source of dreams. He's trying to orient himself. The body is asleep and he simply dreams, dreams, dreams, dreams and that gives him a few anchor points. And he said, "Well, at least I'm not lost in nothingness, I am in some sort of space. And just to convince myself that it's real, I'll make it as horrible as possible and then I will say that something else did it."

And you get this chap who has just had a nightmare and you say, "Get the idea that somebody else created this nightmare."

Oh, he'll do that easily. He'll say, "Yes I had a very bad dream," he will say.

You say, "It really bothered you, eh? Well, all right now. Just get the idea what really happened there, you understand, is that your psyche originated it to worry you."

"Yes, I can get that idea. That's true too."

"All right. That's fine. Now, just get the idea that it was a force other than yourself that created this dream." And, boy, he's going right back into it again. These horrible faces and flame-eating dragons are getting bigger and thicker and thicker and bigger, and you can talk him right down into the total atmosphere of the dream just by getting him to misown that dream.

Now, you can soften your heart a little bit and turn around and process him the other way. And you say, "Well, get the idea you mocked it up." Psst, gone. He did mock it up, and so, when he declares this proper determinism over it, he says at the same time, "I mocked it up so I can control it." He's saying at the same time, "I mocked it up and there it is." He's gotten the proper ownership on it and it's gone.

One shouldn't get the idea, however, that everything is done by you. Many people get this idea. They grip this to their bosom and they say, "Oh my, if I just say about life that I am the cause and fault of it all, I will be all right." And 50 percent of their nightmares disappear, 75 percent disappear, and then eight or nine horrible engrams start to get more solid. And then a lot of the body's bank starts to get solid and a lot of mock-ups that have been shoved at them start to get solid, and instead of solving the problem they have simply as-ised about 50-75 percent of their immediate havingness and then acquired other havingness which they don't control at all.

As far as your life is concerned, you have done some portion of the things which you consider yourself possessed of And if you still have those things, and you consider you did them, I can assure you, somebody else did. It's interesting isn't it?

But the other proportion of those things which you consider other people did, if you consider other people did them and they are still persisting and you're still worried about them, you did them. Just get the opposite ownership.

But nobody by saying, "Mea culpa, magna culpa," something like this, "It's all my fault," and, etc. That, by the way, is taken from the Druid services, I think. Isn't it? Mea culpa, magna - it isn't from the Druid services. I don't know where I got it. Anyway …

By just getting a guy to repeat this time after time after time, you would drive him mad in a very short space of time because all of the things which he didn't do, that he was now saying he did do, would become overpoweringly huge to him, and solid and factual.

But if you let this chap go at it this way, you'd have something very interesting. You say, "It's all their fault. It's all their fault. It's all their fault. It's all their fault." You would accomplish the same goal because the proportion is distributed between the two. See, he did some of these things, and again we would have at least 50 percent of his bank thoroughly misowned. All right.

Now, as we look over this problem we see, then, that the ownership of an actuality, such as a wall or an engram or a mock-up, an ownership of an idea or an obsession, is quite important. Quite important. Because it's only persisting if it's misowned. Well, that's a fascinating thing.

There is something, however, militating against your immediate solution of all of your difficulties in that the difficulties themselves have a value. Problems have a value. And havingness, itself, just plain mass, has a value. People have an idea they should have so much mass; when they have less than that, they're unhappy; when they have more than that, they're unhappy.

Have you ever tried to give a tramp a tuxedo and a top hat? You would understand at once that he was not very happy about it. You see him a half an hour later and he'd be back in his old clothes. You've given him too much. Well, too much or too little actually depends upon the consideration of the individual. There isn't any exact formula you write. He thinks he has to have this much, well, that's the amount of havingness which he would consider his balance. When he gets less than that he feels bad, when he gets more than that he feels bad. So, if you suddenly started to own everything properly you would lose, one, these cherished problems which make life interesting and a game; and, two, the havingness, which by misowning, you were continuing in a state of mass.

Well, that's simple. So, actually processing comes down to havingness, freedom, problems and, of course, an unpredictability. And it's the game of life. And these factors have to be balanced one against the other in processing, and if they are not, then an individual's havingness upsets and so on, and he pulls in other problems to replace the problems you've gotten rid of, and you just get into an awful spinning mess. But you balance these factors one against the other, and a person is, then, capable of accomplishing greater and greater freedom. All right.

But all the time, on the sixth dynamic, we have a factor working on the subject of power of choice, the like of which has no overbalancing or counterbalancing factor. If we work in a world that we assume we cannot destroy, if we've given it this much power, then it, once having been created, will go on and on forever, making our decisions for us. And it makes these decisions for us as to where to place what - get those Prelogics - a thetan creates energy, space, and places and locates objects and energies in that space or takes them out of it.

In other words, he is a locating, orienting, causative unit. Well, supposing that he now takes nothing but solid orders from the energy, the space, the mass; and this energy, space and mass order him continually where to be, where to go - they will eventually have overwhelmed his power of choice. His basic self-determinism or power of choice, as you might call it, depends upon his location of things and even his creation of space in which to locate things depends on that to a very marked degree. So that if we get a constant otherdeterminism of location, we get difficulties.

Now, we know this, this is old material; this is real old. If you were to take a puppy dog and give him an anesthetic while he was in one room, and then take him in another room and turn him upside down on his head in the corner and make him wake up, he would be a very puzzled, upset and rather neurotic dog. Why? He won't be able to account for the change for one thing, and he will have been placed while entirely helpless, so thoroughly, that his power of choice would be upset.

Now, even when you call him and you say, "Come here Rover. Come on," he still can choose to come or not to come. Of course, you may have fixed him up with training so that he kind of feels guilty if he doesn't come and we can overcome his power of choice one way or the other. But he still has some little tiny bit of choice about it, he thinks. If he didn't think he had, he would go mad and he would be neurotic as a dog. By the way, dogs do go neurotic and it's quite amazing how well they fit these specifications.

Now, the location in space is the one thing that is upsetting. It's really not - this was the first thing that scouted this into view - it's really not the energy or the flow or the mass; it's the location where it happened that is the senior engramic or upsetting factor. That's the place, the place it happened. Individuals will avoid places where things happened.

Some chap will even go this far: He's eating salad in a restaurant and he all of a sudden bites down and there's a bunch of sand in it, and it chips his enamel and upsets him no end, and he's so - so forth. And while busily eating salad in another restaurant he tells us he'll never go back to that first restaurant again. Well, he can even drag some logic between these two things, you see.

But the fellow who has been shot on the corner of Wumph and Wumph Streets, oddly enough doesn't react in any different fashion. Thereafter, he'll handle guns, bullets, he'll talk about fellows being shot, but darned if you can get him without a tremor, to walk past the corner of Wumph and Wumph Street. It's the where he was shot that's important.

Now, this of course applies more natively and understandably to the fact that a fellow doesn't much maybe object to having been cut with a knife. See, I mean in general, cutting things with knives. He gets cut with a knife. He hurts where it was cut. Now, that sounds, if you reduce it that way - a little more sense. He hurts where it was cut. Well, you say, "Well, naturally the wound is still there." Why does it stay there?

The oddity is if you move him in time, it isn't there, to that degree. But much more rapidly, you tell him to come up to present time, he isn't quite so cut. You can stop a cut bleeding simply by changing a person on the time track. We've done that. All right.

Now, an individual who has been cut and is still bleeding will stop bleeding much faster if you say, "Where were you cut?"

And he'd say, "Oh, I was cut over there."

"Oh yes. Well, where are you now?"

"I'm here."

"Well, where were you cut?"

"Over there."

"Well, where are you now?"

"I'm here."

"Well, where were you cut?"

"Over there."

"Well, where are you now?"

"I'm here."

And you can watch the bleeding dwindle right on down.

The most notable cases of this sort of thing is the stopping of hemorrhages. Hemorrhages begin, it seems that almost nothing could stop some of these things. And I have seen one that was - that bade fair to kill the patient, stopped in a matter of two or three minutes by a visiting auditor in a hospital, much to the amazement of people. This person was not expected to live, and they're not bleeding now - something's wrong. And they think it was the drug they gave him or something of the sort, because it's unthinkable to stop bleeding or do something like that.

But the odd part of it is, the sensation of the cut will turn on much faster if you spot where it was done and then where he is, than almost any other process you use, save one: mocking up cut arms and shoving them into the cut arm. He obviously doesn't have enough cut arms; this is what this sort of says, you see. Well, if he didn't - if he had enough, he wouldn't have cut himself. Now, this oddity is, is he mocks up the cut arms and stuffs them into his cut arm and you'll get, to some degree, the same thing.

So, we have the two opposite ends here. We have space. That's not as fast, by the way, that's a slower process than spotting it, if he has enough energy to carry out the operation. You start spotting space and you start losing energy like mad. All right.

Where are we going with this? This is all old stuff to you, you know all this material. There's nothing much to this. We've seen this at work, we've seen it happening; it's facts that we live with, they're not terribly engrossing. But what if I told you that this overbalance of power of choice on the sixth dynamic had been solved? Supposing there was a process that existed - a process actually did exist, which, when applied, did resolve this power of choice.

One's power of choice goes to the degree that he's pushed around and moved around by the physical universe. Let's say he's pushed around and moved around all the time. Did you ever see a fellow that just got out of the Army? Interesting, very interesting. His power of choice is pretty bad. He's been moved around, moved around, moved around, moved around, moved around, moved around, without his choice, until he feels kind of apathetic about the whole thing. That's interesting. But he considers himself more MEST than he does life. It's an odd frame of mind.

Now, an individual who is pushed around (against his power of choice, remember - has to be resisted, something on that order), individual who is moved around to that degree, against his power of choice, eventually gets into a rather apathetic state of mind.

In order to be alive, he himself would have to do some locating, wouldn't he? Well, an auditor does this by giving him an order and then having the individual locate things with the order. You get the idea? And this is a very, very low gradient of this thing, power of choice. And we gradually bring him back up on power of choice and he begins to feel better. All right. So much for that. We do feel that the physical universe does, to some slight degree, overcome our decisions.

Now, power of choice is one thing, but postulates and decisions are far higher and do much more. Remember, they're quite senior to this.

If you can make a postulate, you can have an energy mass appear out in front of you that you can see. If you can make another postulate, you can unpostulate it and make it disappear. The ability to make postulates - nothing to that. But that depends on decision, just above power of choice, and above the decision we, of course, have the postulate itself without any choosing. So between power of choice and postulate, we have this interim grade that we call decision.

Now, maybe you've talked to government employees - maybe you - maybe you have. And you've asked them for a decision. And they've comm lagged and comm lagged and comm lagged and comm lagged and muttered and given you something out of the files. There wasn't any reason why they couldn't make the decision, nobody would shoot them if they made a decision. And yet they didn't seem capable of making a decision.

The wife runs into this all the time when she asks her husband about something her husband never moves around in space-cooking pots and pans and groceries. The husband moves stuff off the plate into his mouth and into his GE, that's that. But he doesn't move food around. He moves paychecks around or maybe bales of hay or something, but as far as the food he eats is concerned he doesn't shove it around. And she says to him, "Dear, what do you want for supper tonight?"

And he says, "I don't know, uh - any old thing."

"Now dear, please tell me." She's doing this with malice aforethought. She's trying to get a contract with him that no matter what she serves him he won't have the right to complain because …

Now, where we get this kind of a chitchat going we actually have power of choice being least exercised about those things which the person has least moved around in space. And you can count on that as a rule. If you want an individual to regain power of choice on any object, you get him to move that around specifically from spot to specific spot in space for a while, and he'll regain his power of choice on it.

The very simple example of this for a fellow to have control of a car, we have him drive the car around, start and stop it. He regains his power of choice over the car first by deciding he wants to drive a car. And then he recovers his power of decision (something else) by simply positioning the car here and there. Quite interesting - fascinating, nice, neat, easy operation.

It's a little less easy to see this in some other measures of life. We look at somebody who is supposed to make decisions all the time about things which he never really sees. Let's take an executive and he's asked time after time where he should lay down this bale or that bundle or this delivery or that package or something of the sort. He's just asked to make decisions about this. He never touches these things, he just says, "Put them here, put them there, put them someplace else," and eventually he becomes an old man with ulcers.

He is making decisions all the time but he never knows if he's right, he doesn't even know if the location exists. He's subjectively ordering things all over the place. He's not himself positioning them. That's still better though than having to make a decision about something you have never even made a decision about, you know. All right.

I want you to decide right now at what moment Earth is going to start turning the opposite direction. Interesting question, isn't it? You know that's beyond your power of decision. Why is it beyond your power of decision? It's just because you've never decided it. You've never positioned Earth.

I doubt very few of you have been out there with a little pinky giving Earth another twist so that it'll turn faster or slowing it down or something like this. And I haven't seen any one of us, at least in the last week, putting Earth a little closer to the Sun or a little nearer spring.

So, we make a decision on the subject of the position of Earth and we say, "That's just idle." If we can't make a postulate on the subject, it becomes very difficult to make a powerful decision about the subject, and one loses his power of choice. All right.

Immediately, I have not seen anybody in this room tonight sitting four feet (with his body) sitting four feet off of a chair, in the air, unsupported. I just have not seen anybody sitting in that position in this room tonight.

In other words, gravity has some effect upon your body. Now, why does it have an effect upon your body? Here you could will your body to be four feet in the air, and maybe if you had a lot of processing, you'd accomplish it.

But ordinarily in human concourse if we ask the bank manager downstairs or some of these chaps to sit four feet above his chair, he might have some doubts about okaying our loan. But what is it that makes it impossible for him to sit four feet above his chair?

Well, for one thing he hasn't made a postulate about Earth for a long, long time. He certainly has made no decisions concerning Earth. He said - he hasn't said to himself, "Oh, I'm bored with this place, I think I'll go live on Venus for a while. I've heard about the girls up there." He hasn't said this, hasn't remarked any part of it, and as a result his power of choice about moving away from or close to Earth totally depends on Earth. And Earth says to him, "You're right here fella, sitting right in this chair and that's where you are." That's all there is to it. Now, mentally, that's all there is to gravity.

That thing which has totally overthrown one's power of choice, of course, is something about which he has made no decisions, and which he knows definitely he could not affect with his postulates.

Now, the number of postulates we've thrown at Earth lately have been very few. We haven't said, "the Sun will now travel apparently - because Earth is going to move differently - north much faster and get rid of this winter weather." We just have not said that, any of us. Well, except myself, I tell - ask people why they haven't done it. That's one of the things that throws people (if you ever saw embarrassment), but they're always flattered. Say, "What are you doing turning on weather like this?"

And the fellow says, "Oh, I . . ." And they fall right into it, "Well, I really didn't mean to turn it on this bad," or something like that.

In other words, he can accept into his realm of action the actual factor of postulating weather. He can imagine this. He, himself, wouldn't seriously postulate it; he can merely imagine postulating it.

But his power of choice about the weather is horrible. He hasn't said, "Tomorrow - tomorrow it will be seventy-two degrees, and the Sun will come up at 5:32 and there will be nice white fleecy clouds all day long." He hasn't said this for a long time. He's hoped that it would be, maybe, but that's as close as he's come to it.

Well, then he goes outside and it's cold, and the weather makes him cold, or it's hot, and the weather makes him hot. In other words, he's subject to these decisions called weather because he hasn't decided any weather. And it's been a long time since he's made any postulates about weather. You follow me?

So, in every line of endeavor we get those duresses to which the individual is subject, and over which he has no determinism to be those duresses, about which he has made no decision, and earlier than that, about which he has made no postulates. And there's gravity, and there's why a guy stays on Earth. There's all sorts of odds and ends of mechanisms. A fellow who has been positioned continually by his body, and has not done any positioning of the body, has no chance of exteriorizing, he's dead in his head. You follow me?

So, that in order to pick up horsepower you certainly have to - pardon me, thetan-power, I didn't mean to be insulting. Centaur will be politer - centaurpower. A thetan would have to regain to some degree his power of decision.

Now, what do we mean by power? Naturally, it's a figurative term used by people working in the field of the mind because they don't have another word for it. They talk about "willpower," "personal power"; they talk about "magnetism," talk about all kinds of things, you see, with this word power mixed up in it somehow. Well, they've never forgotten the tradition, but that's about as thin as it is these days.

When we talk about "power of choice" we are using the word very advisedly. We mean amperes, volts, terminals and bolts. We actually mean energy traveling through space having measurable current. How can we possibly generate such an energy? Well, we already know we can generate it. We can mock up mock-ups can't we? We can stuff them into this fellow and make him weigh thirty more pounds. You ought to conduct that experiment sometime, that's a ball - I mean, the preclear gets so uncomfortable. You have to do it for weeks to get him up thirty pounds. But you can actually stuff enough mass into a good preclear in an afternoon to make him sink if he looks at a dishpan. And here - here, however, we are talking about energy in space. And if we're talking about energy in space, and we're talking about a thetan creating energy or uncreating energy we certainly must be talking about watts and volts and amperes and all the rest of it. We are talking about power of choice.

Now, how about this fellow that everything eaves in on? How about this preclear? You say, "All right. Now, let's go back two years in time and look at your engrams. Now, come up to present time."

And he says, "Gawww." Can't do it. Well, the energy has sort of caved in on him. The energy finds him to be a sort of a vacuum. He's not putting out anything to resist that energy, he's incapable of it. The energy wiggles, he wobbles. That's the end of that.

He's got an engram of his mother bawling him out. He's walking down the street, it also has a telegraph pole or something in it and a mailbox, in the engram. And he's walking down the street and he sees a telegraph pole and a mailbox, and he all of a sudden feels sheepish like a little boy. And he kind of asks himself, "Well, I certainly feel young today," something like this, and never questions it any further than that. What happened?

He had a mental energy picture of the telephone, the mailbox and his mother bawling him out. He saw the telephone, the mailbox, that called the mental energy picture into view on a sort of a copy or duplication basis and it got into restimulation and he reacted to it.

Why does he react to it? Because his power of choice is gone. The amount of horsepower or thetan-power or centaur-power that he has, to tell that energy, "Get back in the spot in time where you belong," is gone.

We go into an insane asylum, we tell some insane person, "Move that bench." And he's just as likely to dump a wastebasket on our heads. He can no longer differentiate from object to object much less do anything effective. More importantly, we ask the bulk of them to come up to present time and they stick right where they are. They cannot handle energy masses; this is the one common denominator. Their spaces are off and they cannot handle energy masses. This we know about them. Well, then a sane person must be able to handle space and energy masses; I mean we can draw that conclusion and we look it over and we find it to be true.

Where does this go? It's the rehabilitation of the power of decision, that's about all there is to it; rehabilitation of the power of decision.

Well, where is decision missing, if an energy bank like the reactive bank can cave in? Where? How can an individual get these mental image pictures caving in on him or not caving in on him, simply by power of decision? It must be that there are some energy masses in the individual's ken, or knowledge, continually, which overcome his power of choice. He must be continually overcome and handled by mass, energy, in predetermined space and time. And he's being totally positioned all the time, totally positioned all the time. He never has any choice about it.

If you want to go to a restaurant, you walk down to where the restaurant is. The last time you picked the restaurant up where it was and sat it where you were was a long time back, and I bet the proprietor was mad too.

Now, in other words - in other words, wherever you look, wherever we go into this problem, we find that the individual has to walk to the postbox to mail a letter. The postbox never walks to the individual. Interesting. Observable too. The postbox says, "You've got to walk over here." It's decided where the preclear's going to go, hasn't it? It's sitting down there. It's decided the whole neighborhood's going to come over here and mail their letters. "Hah, I guess I've got you guys trained."

But it's just an energy mass isn't it? There's no livingness there to amount to anything; it's just an energy mass. But everybody comes over there. You say, "That's all right."

Well, it's all right maybe for the first billion years, but after that a guy sort of starts to be worn away by it. He notices one day as he's sailing through the blue that the lightning bolt he just threw didn't even stink. The ozone content of it was poor. So, he goes over, you know, and kind of tests it out, he says, "Zap, zap, zap." Thin. And he says, "I must be running down, I will have to get some lightning someplace else." Later on you'll find him eating.

What does he do? He's depending on other sources now for his power of choice and for his decisions mainly, and so he starts to depend on them for his energy and he stops making any more energy. And after a while he makes the idiotic statement like, "Conservation of energy: no energy can be mocked up or destroyed." Wow. That's way down track, isn't it? Boy, is that down Tone Scale.

But all the time, what's happening? The investigator particularly is drawn into this and made to feel the weakness of his position. He says, "I wonder what is wrong with this? I think maybe it is so-and-so and so-and-so," he says, about this piece of apparatus. "I will hook this up to this and see if the MEST universe decides to work that way." And it doesn't, so he hooks it up some other way and sees whether or not - you know, he finds out whether or not something happens, you see.

But look at it this other way: "Finds out whether or not the MEST universe decides to work that way." Is that the decision of the MEST universe? Is it terminal one to two or is it two to one? Which is it? Well, the MEST universe is going to decide, it's going to be energy and mass in space that's going to decide how it works.

So, a fellow works and works and works and he gets a terrific, oh, an awful lot of stuff here, laws and rules, he makes all these postulates and so forth. And when he gets all through, what's the first question we ask of him? We say, "Does it work?" In other words what we ask is, is "Does the MEST universe decide this to be a fact?" And we wait before we draw our conclusion to discover whether or not the MEST universe agrees with the decision, at least. That's the least we would do.

But people in general simply let the MEST universe decide. And they let it decide and they let it decide. They let it decide that its postboxes will be here, and its stores will be there, and you have to take an airplane to go to where, and you have to walk in order to get someplace else, and you will move in order to be around in it. And that's what it decides. It decides how far you've got to go, it decides how long you've got to be on the way; this is all decided by energy masses operating in space. Fantastic! You mean to say somebody can stand up to this?

Well, not only can somebody stand up to it, but they can also whip it. They can also look it over and say, "There's something funny here." A fellow who doesn't have good control of energy then must be making himself accept at all times the decisions of the energy. In other words, he must be accepting energy decisions from the physical universe of the sixth dynamic.

Now, what does he do here? What does he do? He runs a rather simple process. The process is, is have the MEST universe invent some decisions about havingness. That's the process; that's all it is. Have the MEST universe invent some decisions about havingness. It belongs up in Decisional Processing and is the key factor that has made it possible to turn out SLP, Issue 8 with considerable assurance that now things are really going to work around here.

Because it, at once, places a person back into possession of control of energy so that energy can be away or near at his decision. If energy always decides for him, his engrams will be in restimulation. So, we have him invent decisions for the energy to make. And oddly enough, by a trick of mind and mass, we discover ridges going this way and blowing up that way and coming under somebody's better control at a rather heady rate.

Now, you understand that's just one step of what you'd have to do to get back to lightning-bolt voltage, you know. Lightning-bolt voltage is very interesting stuff. Uncomfortable, uncomfortable. I knew a thetan one time … Well, that's a long story.

Anyway, what - what else would you do? Well, actually it's not really necessary to factually do anything else, because if one required his ability to handle energy, he would come into possession of a power of choice over energy.

Now, this is a very interesting thing, but it is this process and researches centering around this process which makes it possible to cure radiation burns. One starts to handle an energy of which he is usually deathly afraid, because he can become contemptuous of it.

Now, it's - becomes a fascinating factor here then that by his own mental action he can actually invent decisions for the MEST universe about havingness. And, of course, he starts to have the MEST universe invent new positions for everything under the sun and then invents new things for the MEST universe to have positions about.

And he goes on up and the next step that would be indicated would be of course doingness. Have the MEST universe invent decisions about doingness, and that would be the second stage.

And then here's this fellow walking down the street, he knows he's a bum. An auditor gets ahold of him, tries to process him, processes him for several hours, makes him feel better, look better. The fellow goes off still, privately maybe, thinking a little bit he's a bum. Why? Because he's a bum. I mean it's just as - like that. Why is he a bum? It's because he does not have enough force or power to disturb the degraded masses around him which are his beingness.

In other words, energy has given him an identity in a certain space. His name is John Jones, he's never been a success. You know, we've got a whole lot of energy identification tags. His beingness is all cataloged and it's unchangeable. Why is it unchangeable? Simply because the MEST universe and the society at large has continued to assign this identity to him. So, he's lost the power of beingness. So, the next auditing command on the line is have the MEST universe (or any dynamic this time) invent a beingness or an identity if the preclear isescape.

You know girls are pretty high-toned ordinarily. You can never quite tell about a girl. You're liable to meet her on Wednesday and her name is Elizabeth, and you're liable to meet her on Monday and her name is Jessie, see. She changes her name very easily. Not only that, they get married and change their names. They do change their names. We do know that. Girl, up to the time she's seventeen, has been very, very well - nicely known as Clarissa, you see, and she didn't like that and you meet - next time you meet her she's twenty-two and she calls herself Butch. There's no telling what's going to happen on it. Women do this, probably which accounts for their ability to hold on to a better-looking mock-up than men, because men become factually themselves. At whose assignment?

Well, they get a poor little innocent baby just after he's been born; he's completely defenseless. They fix him up by dumping stuff in his eyes that'll make him a little more anaten, and then they say, "Your name is Joe, ha-ha-ha-ha." He's stuck with it, he didn't have any choice in it at all. His power of choice has been overcome by his own name, in other words. Well, therefore his beingness gets frozen.

Now, conversely this is how you would freeze somebody's beingness or identity, his doingness or his havingness. You can use the same system, just keep overcoming his power of choice on the whole thing and you could freeze it into almost any state you wanted to freeze it into. You're performing the same action as the physical universe.

Many people have fought the physical universe so hard and so consistently that they themselves have assumed the valence or the identity of the physical universe. They think of themselves as the Earth or physical universe. Genghis Punk and so forth, began to think of himself that way.

Anyway, we get the universe to invent decisions and we run out the automaticity of the decisions it's made. Actually the odd part of it is, it hardly upsets havingness at all.

There are a couple of other processes which you'll see in the finished version, but this is the basic route to power of choice. And by that we mean electricity that snaps. A fascinating process, it's a long time in the making, you might say, it culminates those early Prelogics and it makes use out of them. And if you run this on a preclear, his engrams will start to stay away or come near, as he wants. He will cease to be the victim of all of his environment, in other words, and can, to some degree, command the environment around him.

Thank you very much.