This is the first evening lecture of January the seventeenth, isn't it? Sixteenth? Wasn't Monday the twelfth? And isn't this Friday? Five? So, right you are. Arithmetic and I don't get along worth a nickel. That's correct. Arithmetic is an artificial mathematics to end all artificial mathematics.

Anyway, tonight I would like to cover some more material on Standard Operating Procedure Issue 5. And the material which I'm giving you is in itself rather self-sufficient, but is in addition to the Philadelphia Lectures and is, if anything, a closer rundown of this material and gives some wider applications to the same steps.

As one uses material, it becomes more and more pliable in his hands and he understands more and more about this. To be very orderly, I should give you Standard Operating Procedure Issue 5 Step II, and so I shall do so at this time. And I'll give you this Step II very briefly indeed.

Step II is now called Orientation, on Issue 5, and you can just lump under Step II anything you know about orientation. Now here we have Q 1 moving in with a vengeance into operating procedure.

The mission, goal, activity of theta: location in space of particles and energy.

But what is theta? Well, theta is no wavelength, no MEST-universe location, no mass, no size, no measurements of any kind, no particles moving or not moving. It's a much more complete zero than any zero which has ever been described. Now you wouldn't think that describing zero was an activity of very great moment, but believe me that the description of zero for the first time is a terrifically significant thing in the field of mathematics, and in the field of electronics.

What's zero? Well, that's — zero's a static. Are there any other statics besides this static? No. This is the only kind of a static that could be.

Physics up to this time has made a very basic error, and that error has shown up by confusing the whole field of nuclear physics. And it said that a static was something which was in a state of rest, and then they didn't describe a state of rest. Andso when they moved into nuclear physics everything went appetite over tin cup and they had to throw elementary physics away, they thought. So that nuclear physics was one thing and elementary physics that you learn in high school or something of the sort, that must be quite something else. Well, this doesn't happen to be even vaguely true.

Elementary physics has not been thrown away. Everything in elementary physics actually applies in atomic and molecular phenomena, but there was a basic error surrounding one single item and that item was zero or a static. Nobody had said a static is a zero. Nobody had said a zero is a thisa and a thata or how much zero there was in a zero.

Do you know that there's a bomb today which has more velocity and destructive activity than the atom bomb? It's the electronic bomb, and some country or other has this in its hip pocket at this time trying to do something with it.

The conductivity and resistance of a Kelvin zero or a near-zero item (that's -273 or something like that on the centigrade scale), no motion and so forth, there's no resistance; and you can keep on pumping electricity into it and into it and into it and into it and into it, and because it has no resistance it has infinite capacity. If you get something at -273 or nearly so, you can keep pumping electricity into it and into it and into it and into it and into it and into it, until you have billions and billions and billions of megavolts in it.

Now you keep that item near -273 degrees and when you want to explode it, what do you do? You simply heat it up. And is it very much of a job to heat it up? No sir. And the second it gets hot, what does it do? It releases almost instantaneously these billions and billions of megavolts of electricity.

Have you ever gotten in processing an electronic flash in the face? They're quite common. Have you ever been near a switchboard that blew up? Well, it gives you some sort of an idea of how much impact there can be in a single bolt of electricity. And here you have multiplied this and multiplied it over and over, over and over, over and over, until you finally have an enormously powerful force which is releasable in a very short space of time and which is containable in a very, very tiny cubic spaceage.

What they do is take a piece of space, then, and reduce it down toward -273. And they take this piece of space, and they pump it full of electricity. And it doesn't matter how much they pump into it; they can just keep pumping electricity into it practically forever. And that's the electronic bomb.

An atom bomb requires uranium. This thing doesn't require any more equipment than a liquefying machine (any gas machine) and requires no more serious activity to pump it up than, well, your common light-power station down here. It's got a big stationary engine. Doesn't matter whether it takes six months to pump this thing up or not. Almost infinite capacity, so it — you can just hook up the electrical power unit to it and let it run. And you'll get more and more juice, more and more juice. It goes round and round and round and round.

For instance, aluminum is almost in a powder form, if it didn't have a crust. Any one of our metals when brought down to this terrifically low level gets into one of these characteristics where it has an infinite capacity. That's an interesting thing, isn't it?

Yet they stumbled onto this, and they haven't oriented it against elementary physics.

This tells you something else: that an engram received in space, if you try to run it here in the air it becomes a (pardon my colloquialism) — it becomes a bitch kitty. And tells you that in space you have a near -273 degrees. And if you hit somebody with an electronic beam and he was down there at a temperature of around a -273, there's no motion, he's got almost infinite capacity; he can absorb an enormous amount of this stuff and not know he's carrying it around in his hip pocket.

So don't be confused if your preclear all of a sudden says, "I don't dare go any further with this!"

And you say, "What's the matter?"

"Well, I don't know. You've just — this — I — it's just that there's a charge, a bolt of lightning or something right around my vicinity."

That's right; there is. He probably received it at a very, very low, low, low temperature, and now it's going to be released in air at a high temperature. That's what he thinks.

Well, actually this could tell you that a preclear could carry electricity as such, as part of a bank. It would have the actual capability of blowing him off the face of the map. The best way to run such an incident is to go out into space. Theta-clear him and boot him out into space, and then if he's got to run the charge off, let him run it.

This also tells you something else. The ability of a thetan to create electricity in space is great. The ability of a thetan to create electricity here in air is poor.

It tells you that electronics flow much more easily at very, very low temperatures than they do at very, relatively high temperatures, such as here (I don't know what it is: several degrees centigrade, plus). And this then all of a sudden becomes very unmysterious. It's not mysterious.

You're working toward the static, and this is the very same static that we're talking about when we talk about a thetan.

You see, a thetan doesn't have to be a complete zero. He can be packing quite a bit of residual electricity, which he lets off from one time to another. He could. Now, he doesn't happen to be that, however, but this could get him very confused.

I'm not trying to get you confused. I'm just trying to tell you that elementary physics With the identification of zero is all true, quite true. And there's nothing mysterious or hocus-pocus about nuclear physics. They tie in right together the second that you define a static and define zero.

You say a thetan's zero. That means no space; no havingness in that of course, so there's no time; there's no wavelength; there are no particles. There's the ability to think and make a postulate, which should be very interesting to you.

And what's the most optimum condition to be in? Making a postulate.

And the second that we differentiate that and make that statement, then we should be able to grasp everything else there is in Step II.

The mission of Step II and the goal of Step II is to get the preclear as a thetan or as a preclear to stop using flows — emotion or effort or aesthetic or anything else — stop him using a flow as a modus operandi, and to make him use thought only; is to disabuse him of the idea of moving from place A to place B and encourage him to change his location simply by being in place A and then being in place B. And that is the basic mission of Step II. And that mission is applied to a thetan, Step I, or to any of the later steps, but it is done within the limits of Step II.

You'll find the preclear who can do anything with energy at all can be sprung or cleared out of his head with a Step II. Now this, then, would now include any use of beams as a method operation of clearing. It would use Ridge Running as an operation to get him out, and so forth. And the second you get him out, or before you get him out if you can't get him out by using beams, you start in this education.

The education of how to use beams? Hm-mm. The education of minimal use of beams and electricity and energy of any kind and the maximal use of thought to accomplish transfer of position from place to place in space, and to transfer objects from place to place in space (such as a body), and to accomplish everything that he ever should be able to accomplish simply on the basis of thought alone and without the application of energy. And that's Step II.

Now, Step II might start out this way:

You say to the fellow, "Be two feet behind your head." He says, "I can't."

You say, "All right. Now put a beam against the front of your forehead."

"Now push yourself out the back of the head."

And he does, and there he is out there at the back of his head. And he's pushed himself out, and there he sits.

What's your next step? Orientation.

Tell him to move himself a little bit to the right, a little bit to the left, move himself a little bit up, a little bit down. You know this one, it's right on the books. We've gotten this one right straight along. Backwards, forwards, around and around, All right.

But our next step: clean up ridges? No.

To hell with flows! Bluntly and colloquially and technically, to hell with flows! The devil with ridges! Let them go by the boards! We're not even vaguely interested in handling anything with energy.

Energy is a trap. The only advantage in energy is that it will deliver sensation. Well, that's great because you can deliver twice as much sensation, a thousand times as much sensation, to yourself with a postulate.

And what are you trying to deliver the sensation to? You're trying to deliver it to something which is operating in the area of a postulate. How can you possibly deliver any energy to a postulate-making thing which exists in a zero of space? You can't. And that's all there is to that.

So it must be a terrible illusion on his part that he gets his sensation via energy. And if he thinks he needs this and that and the other thing to get sensation, he thinks then that sensation is only transmittable to himself via waves — wave patterns. He thinks he has to get sensation via wavelengths, and that's of course nonsense. He does not have to do so, because there's nothing will bridge the gap in the zero but a zero, and that's a postulate.

So he's up above the level of zero — I mean he's no space, no wavelength, no particle or anything of the sort. And this is your preclear; this is your thetan. He's not an energy unit, he's not a ball of fire or a sun or something like that. He's something there that exists in zero space, that can accumulate electricity and make electricity and change it in time and space, and increase and decrease size, and handle space, energy and that sort of thing. That's what he can handle; but just because he can handle it, does not mean that he is it.

Saying that the thetan must therefore be an electrical unit if he can handle electricity in space, and saying he must be located in space, is kind of silly.

It has the same logic as "A lorry driver must be made out of tin." Why? Well, he handles a lorry, doesn't he? A lorry is made out of iron and so forth, isn't it? Well, therefore your lorry driver has to be made out of… You show me any place in the material universe where something made out of iron can only be handled by something made out of iron. You won't find it.

These — as a matter of fact, it's a big joke with me. Some of the — some of the boys up at Ma Bell, they have one of the most favorite fallacies that you ever heard. They say, "You know, the ENIAC and the UNIVAC and these big computing machines, now they're really reliable. They're not like the human brain, unlike human, that's inaccurate. These things are really valuable.

They're really accurate. You feed them a number, you get the right answer every time. And they're great! Compared to the human mind — phooey!"

Oh, no. What made the UNIVAC? What made the ENIAC? What interprets it? What feeds the material into it? What takes the material out of it? A human mind. Now it's that same kind of thinking, you see, of saying the electronic brain is much greater than the human brain: that would be this line of thinking, that anything which handles or creates energy must therefore — in space must therefore be made out of energy and exist in space.

Those things which are made out of energy and exist in space are only partially capable of handling energy. And yet you will find an awful lot of your preclears, you spring them out, they will tell you they're an energy unit and they'll tell you they're one inch tall, or they're this way or they're that. You look at them and don't invalidate them and so forth, just go through Step II; because they're not one inch tall or a quarter of an inch tall or a centimeter tall, and they're not composed of energy, and they're not located in space.

They can concentrate their attention on any part of space they want to concentrate their attention on, and be there. The principal reason they can be there is because the space isn't there. And the principal reason why they can concentrate their attention any place in space is they aren't there.

And the funny part of it is any time they believe completely that they're in one spot in space, they're no longer able to concentrate their attention on other spots in space; but the second that they are able to be any place in space, they can concentrate their attention on any place in space. These things just follow through.

You're handling space and energy with a unit which is itself not composed of space and energy, which is itself a complete static. Therefore, how much energy could a thetan absorb?

Let's take the electric bomb and realize that the thetan could probably absorb a multimultimultimultibillion electrical volts. He just could — just infinite capacity.

How much juice could you pump into a thetan? And then what would he — what would he have to do with it? He's full of it, isn't he? That's a confusion he's in. He's had this pumped into him, hasn't he?

The people with electronic incidents are very amusing. They think they've got all this electricity. Well, they aren't even attached to it. They're not even connected to it. They've got it there.

What have they got it there with? A postulate. How do you get rid of it? Turn the postulate over. Oh, that's really rough, isn't it?

Every once in a while you'll blow out an E-meter or something doing that trick, by the way. You tell somebody to drop one of these ridges or something like that. First time I saw this to a marked degree was I saw a ridge dropped on a cat. And you talk about a screaming cat, believe me, that cat really screamed. All right. Sure, he had an electrical bomb dropped on him.

Now, a thetan then can believe he's handling all this voltage and want to handle all this voltage and think of the beauties of being able to use force and, oh, so on and so on and so on and so on. But the funny part of it is that there isn't anything can be done with force the way things can be done with postulates.

If you want to tell me that it's easier to take the Queen Mary across the Atlantic under steam and horsepower and with all that crew and with everything going and all the oil being consumed, and that that's the easiest way to do it — that's all using force, you understand. Wouldn't it be easier to merely say the Queen Mary is now in New York Harbor, and there it is?

Well, the funny part of it is that that sounds incredible, but that happens to be the highest level of operation. You aren't likely to get there right away. You'd sure upset the schedules of the line that runs the Queen Mary.

You see, it becomes rather unnecessary to do anything the second you're that far disassociated from survival. So a person has a tendency to keep one foot on home plate all the time. And then they say, "Well now, let's see. To keep an interested audience and to keep myself interested in life, it's better that I don't say the Queen Mary is now in New York Harbor. The thing to do is just to have the Queen Mary sail and just lay it around in a deck chair," and so on. It's just in a matter of interest. Interest to what you do with an illusion.

But to then tell somebody, "Now you have to get sick and die and be sorrowful and be very upset and be reduced to the size of a green pea in order to carry the rest of this illusion out" — that becomes idiotic indeed, indeed, indeed. And yet people get that far mired down until they believe all that's going on.

You tell them these things, you tell them this situation — if you were to tell them this bluntly and show them absolute proof of this situation, they'd still just sit and took at you, "Huh?"

They know that death is real. They know that walls are real. They know that bodies are real. They know all these things are there.

And that's their level of knowingness, because they have to cling on to a certainty of one kind or another, and that has become their certainty. Well, when that's their certainty, it's the reverse side of certainty.

There is a higher level of certainty. What is the higher level of certainty? It's something he himself creates. That's a mock-up.

You'll find mock-ups are created of energy quite often. But do they have to be created of energy? No. The best mock-up is created of nothing. It's merely a postulate that says it's there. And the postulate is made tough enough and strong enough — strong enough? That implies the use of force, doesn't it? No, no: It has to be made forceless enough so that it will pervade enough in order to occasion the existence of something right there.

Would that thing obey the laws of energy of the MEST universe? Nope, it wouldn't. And right away you would — you would be off the stream.

People would get awfully interested in it, though, if you had a pool running out in the middle of the street that appeared there immediately and that was running backwards into the fountain and was running pure whiskey, and it just kept running; there wasn't any connections to it, there wasn't anything of the sort to it.

Well, people in the past have tried to fake that sort of thing up. They have called themselves liars by doing those things in the form of magic which agreed with the MEST universe. That, by the way, is a bad louse-up. Somebody who has been doing that for a while on the track somewhere will find himself very upset about reality. He'll find himself, "Well, sure, it's very easy to make this thing appear here and disappear there and then appear over here again. Sure, that can be done by agreeing with the MEST universe. Yes." Yes: only it can also be done without agreeing with the MEST universe.

He could stand up and have an elephant appear on one side of the stage and then turn into a donkey and then disappear and have an elephant appear on the other side of the stage. All without what? Without moving a single black curtain, changing a mirror or going into any other agreement; because it's a very complicated series of agreement that a magician gets himself into.

By the way, I'm not talking about anybody in particular. I'm talking about probably half of the people here have been — on some part of the track or another, have found themselves all messed up with illusions or trying to create illusions one way or the other. You see, you try to create an illusion when you're a little child. You try like mad, and you fail like mad, too. You go in and you say, "Mama, the battleship which is in the lake at the back of the lot…"

And they say, "Oh, Junior."

They won't go look! Furthermore, if they did took, they would insist upon seeing the back of the lot. In such a way they deny the child the ability to mock up the jewels of the Indies for them.

The fact of the matter is you could probably go all around in a circle on this sort of thing, and if you didn't have such heavy, forced agreement upon the necessity to agree that one had to move and that objects had to be moved and all that sort of thing, why, the postulates would become much more workable.

How do you then remove from temptation any road of escape from a game which you want to run with pieces which become broken pieces? How do you do that? Well, you just block the only road out. Everybody knows you'll go mad if you imagine things. Everybody knows that. Everybody knows all kinds of things. Only all these kinds of things they know don't happen to be true. What they know doesn't happen to be true.

Sure, we have studied the pattern of agreement which step by step went into the construction of a universe. And of course it's true. True, modified by what? It's a true analysis of the chain of agreements which became an actuality to an awful lot of people. It's true, and therefore is a broadly workable set of facts to an awful lot of people all over the universe. There it's very, very workable. Well, that's very interesting. And that doesn't reduce the workability of these facts — not even vaguely — that they're based on a chain of agreement.

But when we start to deal with the mind, we all of a sudden — in order to get off of this and out of that trap, we have to find out what is the actual capability of a mind. Very interesting. The actual capability of the mind is the capability of producing any chain of agreement which will wind up into any kind of a setup.

Well, so Step II gives us a method of recovering that relatively swiftly. And how do we recover it? Even though we move him out with energy, even though we have him handling things with energy, even though he's doing all right using energy, we don't want him handling energy. We want him to be convinced he can handle it and then knock off.

And the road out for the thetan is to know he can handle all this energy and then just back off into the upper scale.

How does he do that, and what's the drill that you use? The drill is a very simple drill. You do this whether he's inside or outside, by the way. You have him be here, and be there, and be somewhere else, and be elsewhere, and be elsewhere, and be on one side of the door, and then be on the other side of the door.

And he'll say, "You know, I didn't go through the door."

Well, restrain yourself. Your actual reaction ought to be to pick up a club. Well, you don't want him moving through the door. You want him to know he's on the far side of the door and then know he's on the inside of the door. And you want him to know he got from there to there and also know that he didn't move through the door, and still be very comfortable in his mind about it. You get the difference, now?

Now, you can always mock up the illusion of moving. You can have a fellow move through the door at millimeter gradients. That is to say, he'll be in new positions at millimeter gradients. He's on one side of a door and you have him start through the door simply by being — all right, he's here. Now he's a millimeter closer to the" door. Now he's at a point a millimeter closer to the door. Now he's at a point a millimeter closer to the door, and as such we get the illusion of him passing through the door.

And what do you know? That complicated method is what he has tagged as reality.

That is agreement. We agree that one can move but one can't appear. Well, what the devil is the difference between appearing at millimeter gradients and appearing at ten-yard gradients? No difference whatsoever. These cars that are running up and down the street out here are appearing at about hundredth of a millimeter gradient. They're doing a fascinating job and if you don't believe that, take a spectroscope and a few other scopes and so forth, and measure the distance between the particles in ultraviolet waves and in other types of energy units.

Now, how fast does your eye photograph? Well, a trained recognition officer, who was trained in the war to glance at a fighter plane and know whether it was friend or foe, was supposed to be a seventy-fifth of a second.

But when you took a bunch of deck officers in who weren't trained up to this and you showed them a picture for a seventy-fifth of a second, they said, "What picture?"

And you'd say, "The picture that was flashed on the wall." And "You — you didn't flash a picture on the wall." "Well, all right. I'll do it again now. There it is."

"Oh," the fellow says, "there was some light. No picture, though."

Now you slow that down — you slow that down to a twenty-fifth of a second. You flash the picture on the wall, and the duration of the picture on the wall now is going to be a twenty-fifth of a second. Flick!

"See it?"

"Sure, it was some kind of an airplane."

Well, that's interesting that he could only tell it was some kind.

Now let's take it down to a tenth of a second, and it goes onto the wall, flash!

And the fellow says, "Mm-hm, some sort of a bomber or something, maybe, or transport plane maybe."

Now let's take it down — this is the average deck officer. Now let's take it down to a half a second. Flaaash, it would look to a recognition officer, you see?

"Some sort of a… yeah, some sort of a transport plane, I don't know, Jap or German or U.S. or British, I don't know."

All right, let's take it down to this span: flash… off. Two seconds.

And he says, "It's a PBY." You take a trained recognition officer who's been at this for about nine months, and you flash a PBY in an unknown and unpredicted position. And he doesn't know it's a PBY, he doesn't know it's going to be anything at all; it might be a Ford automobile. And you just flash it up there for a seventy-fifth of a second and he says, "It's a PBY."

How did he know? Well, he knows in a lot of ways. And by the way, we know some fancier ways to know than any of this. Why don't you just pick up the thought of the pilot? What's he flying? And if it's a bombing plane have him get the idea he's got to go back to base. That's easy. Of course, that's too simple. You wouldn't make generals with that kind of a war, and we must have generals.

Anyway, there we have recognition — an example of recognition in terms of motion. So how fast is a person's eye shuttering out here as he sees a car drive down the street? It's actually a lens arrangement much like a motion-picture arrangement. He's just — he's just clickety-clickety-clickety-clickety-clickety-clickety, he sees this car going along. And if you were to take the pictures that he has taken of that car going down the street, from person to person the variation would be enormous.

You would get one person who would be getting the car every five feet. And you would get another person who saw it coming, saw it when it immediately passed by and saw it when he couldn't see it anymore. And you'd only have three pictures. Now you say, "See it in motion." Well, he'll dub in some motion for you. He'll see it in less gradients. Makes you wonder whether or not there's anything recorded at all. And the truth of the matter is, there isn't.

But you never saw — a person, by the way, for our purposes if we go on and treat this as energy (which we're not in Step II) is holding on to his impression in the form of what he has assigned the word energy to, and he is holding on to that impression, and he holds on to it to the ratio that he's stuck on the track.

Your person who is badly stuck on the track will only get still pictures to see afterwards if he gets any picture at all. And another person may only take three pictures to hold on to. And somebody else who's very lively and who's not stuck on the track worth a nickel, who's just getting all kinds of recordings, will have taken a picture of it every twenty-fifth of a second.

A twenty-fifth of a second is the speed of one of these box cameras you buy — cheap box camera. And you want to know how fast it is, turn it around and take a look at the lens of it and flash it at a twenty-fifth of a second. You just pull the shutter open on a cheap box camera and you've got a fifteenth to a twenty-fifth of a second (they vary). And you can see the lens for a moment behind the shutter.

To anybody with a trained eye, it opens up slow. And to anybody with a very fast — I mean, who's no trained eye at all, things look very fast to him and so forth, why, it's a little — he can have detected there was some motion went on. Yet that's the same speed measured on a clock. That's the same speed, one to the next.

Now we take up to a four-hundredth of a second on a very fancy, fast shutter. You won't find very many people who will detect that the shutter has changed except for the sound of the click.

But you will find a lot of people who will have seen the lens in that four-hundredth of a second — not a lot, a very small percentage, but you will find some people who have. It was from such people that they chose their recognition officers. I don't know, I guess those people just have a superior method of making a postulate, that's all, what it boils down to. And then they're able to foot themselves about motion in smaller gradients.

Because after a person has agreed with energy just so long, he also agrees that the energy stuck him someplace and he agrees that it exists. And that's about the end of him.

Step II, then, is to disabuse him of the existence of energy. And this is simply done by make him move at the widest possible gradients. And you make him move at the widest possible gradients by making him be at point A and then making him be someplace else, with no travel between. Make him be on the near side of the moon and then the far side of the moon. Yes, indeed, use planets to drill him because earth doesn't have small enough spaces, really.

Have him be on one side of earth and then on the other side of earth, and then put him around earth in terms of quarters. Have him be at the North Pole, then have him be at the equator, and then have him be at the South Pole, and then have him be at the other equator, and then have him back at the North Pole again. That's in quadrants.

Have him be at the North Pole, then be at the South Pole, then be at the North Pole. Then you can have him be at the North Pole twice, and have him know fully that he moved around earth instantaneously. Of course, you see, there's no earth to move around and no space in which to move around earth in, and — from a standpoint of thought, except as a person has determined that that existed.

Now, people will get spooky sometimes. A person who is still using energy, for instance, would no more think of passing through the sun — this would really give him the wows, the idea of passing through the sun. One of the tests of this, you ask somebody, is — when he's a thetan — you say, "All right. Now go over and wrap a beam around that electric fire."

And he'll say, "No!"

"Oh, go on. Stick a couple of beams into the light plug."

If he's very heavily bogged into energy he'll actually feel the jolt of it, kind of bad. And he might not trust you if he's in too bad a condition about it. He might not trust you afterwards.

Well, a person who is very high, you ask him, "Be on this side of the sun. All right.

"Now be in the core of the sun." "Now be at the other side of the sun."

"What do you know?" he'll say. "I did! Do you know that thing has a corona that sticks out there about 240 thousand miles and is plain, god-awful, radioactive swash? Wheee!" But there isn't any reason why he couldn't go up and sit on the surface of the sun and admire the corona all he wanted to.

Why? There's only as much corona there as he's convinced is there, and if he wants to convince himself it's there so he can look at it, he's all right. He can do so. But if he's convinced that it's there, if he's the sort of a fellow that'll come around here to you and say, "You say this stuff isn't real? Well, just look! " and pounds his fist against the wall or against the table and bruises the table and bruises his fist and demonstrates to you conclusively that it is there and it's real and won't even listen to you when you say, "Yeah, but you've already agreed your fist is there and that your fist obeys certain rational laws and natural laws about motion and impact and friction and — that this MEST has. And you're just bringing one surface against another surface, both of which are MEST universe, and now you're trying to prove to me that there's something there? Oh, balderdash."

Yes, it's very handy — it's very handy when you're walking down the sidewalk, not to get absent-minded and walk down the sidewalk with the concrete at the level of your waist. But it'd be very amusing if you started going down the street six feet above the pavement, with your feet close together, and just sail along with a rather saintly look on your face, rather preoccupied, not noticing anything.

Well, the Step II, then, has for its goal the disabusing of the existence of energy: not by argument, not by a sales talk, but just by drill.

Now some preclears will be able to go around the moon, from one side to the other of the moon, with great ease and not be able to pass through a door with any ease. Why is this? That's because they feel — they're audience-happy. They can be perfectly relaxed as long as there's no audience present. They could go into a room and imitate Charlie Chaplin and Maurice Chevalier and almost anybody with great aplomb and put on a very good rendition of the whole thing, but don't ask them to do it in front of the cat. It would embarrass them.

And they're perfectly well off as long as they don't have other people observing them. So they feel when they're doing something with a door that you might be observing them, whereas if they do it with the moon, why, that's easy. They know you're not up there.

All right. So remember that this kind of a condition exists and right here, then, they have a higher-level fear which is suppressing them into energy: They're afraid of what people will think; they're afraid of the postulate level. And if anything drives a person deep into energy and MEST, it is that. And boy, that's an illusion above all illusions.

There isn't any reason why anybody has to be influenced by anything anybody thinks about anything. And the only way he can be influenced by what people think is to be in terms of energy and use energy and force. And then, what do you know? He's influenced by everything everybody thinks.

You've never seen anybody quite as worried as the fellow who is deeply immersed in force. He really worries about what people think. Postulates have become very powerful to him. But at the day he's able and capable of using postulates, he recognizes at once the forcelessness of a postulate and recognizes that he can handle one in a way to create occurrences superior to those he can create by using force. He recognizes at once these two things. He'll realize that anybody immersed in energy is fair game for a postulate, because the darned energy will obey postulates.

This person's all mocked up one way or the other. They've got demon circuits and they got other thetans hanging around them, and you make a postulate in their direction and say, "You are now looking at a horse race." All you do is make this postulate. You don't say to "communicate to this person the illusion that they are now looking at a horse race so as to impress upon them that as they face that way the horses will run by and have a…"

No, no. No, you don't do that. You just say, "You are now looking at a horse race." If you're completely relaxed about it, with absolutely no concern about it whatsoever, boy, every thetan they've got around them, every cell they've got around them that can reecho will be saying, "Hey, hey, horses, horses, horses! "

And he'll say, "Yeah, I guess they are there. Yeah. Look at the horses. Ha-ha!"

That's why Joe Doakes, standing at the drill press, stands at the drill press. He's all dug down into energy, and he's surrounded by things which echo back to him all sorts of conclusions. He's in the middle of obedience, and he obeys. He certainly doesn't make postulates. It's a very funny thing. In Joe Doakes you have somebody who would take a plate of steel that is up at the other end of the room and he would suddenly say, "Full of holes an inch and a quarter apart, each hole three-eighths of an inch in diameter." And make it tough enough so that those particles thereafter as aforesaid, they just believed that thoroughly, and so they gave off an emanation of being that way.

It sounds completely mad, doesn't it? But actually energy is full of things called atoms, and I'm not prepared to tell you anything about an atom at all. The difference between myself and the greatest authority on nuclear physics in the world today is simply this: is I know I don't know what I'm talking about when I talk about atoms! Heh-heh!

Now, what would be the ideal state of the thetan as he starts dragging in anchor points and putting out anchor points and dragging them in, and always pushing them out just a little bit further than he dragged them in — I mean pushing them out just a little less further, always dragging them in just a little bit further, always putting them out just a little less, always dragging them in just a little closer? Ha-ha! Very, very interesting. What would he finally wind up as? I'm not telling you that this is a theory or even an existing theory. It's just sort of an analogy, and it's an amusing thought. We can put it under that heading, as an amusing thought. He'd sure wind up safe.

Do you know you practically can't do anything to an atom? Until a fellow by the name of Planck came along and started swapping energy from one ring to another on an atom, which transfer of energy releases one quantum and which gives us the potentiality of atomic explosions.

I'm awfully glad they mocked that up and found out about that. Gee, I'm sure glad about that. It's so useful. I wouldn't know how to start my car in the morning if it weren't for the invention of the atomic bomb! I just wouldn't be able to do it. You know, I don't know of a more useless invention? I really don't.

But where would a thetan go finally to be completely safe? He would get down so his spacings between himself and other thetans would be as big as solar-system spacing between itself and the nearest star. He'd really get down there isolated. Wouldn't matter much what happened to him afterwards. But boy, he could just be happy and sit there in isolation like mad.

I don't tell you this is what an atom is. But I'll tell you, when you get down real small and start looking at these darn things (they're very interesting) they look just like thetans do on a big scale. You've got a galaxy is a pattern of rings, and a solar system's a pattern of rings, and a human being as you see him is a rather complex pattern of rings. And you go down a little bit lower on the line and the next thing you see is an atom, and it's a pattern of rings. Fascinating. They're all on the — built on the same structure. I don't tell you that this is necessarily connected; it's just an amusing idea.

It could be very amusing, you see, because you could impress upon a whole lot of little tiny thetans a big postulate. You could say, "You are now a cheese sandwich." And they'd all think they were a cheese sandwich and that they were located in space, and the fellow who came along wouldn't even have to consult anybody to find out if that was a cheese sandwich. It would simply be communicated to him it was a cheese sandwich.

I don't know anything about it. I know how to get preclears loose, though, and get them squared around, and that's all we're interested in.

So our main concern, then, in Step II is to dig them out of energy and space and put them into the realm of postulates. That's what you do in Step II. And there is a technique which hasn't been mentioned before with regard to Step II, and that is some more Creative Processing.

What we're doing now is we're dishing into the various parts of Standard Operating Procedure 5 the kind of mock-up that belongs with each step. Isn't that handy? You lucky people. I don't know why I go on thinking up things like this. Every time I think up something like this, everybody complains and says, "You've changed something." And then they go out and crack cases three times as fast. They never come back and tell me, though.

Anyway, the very amusing thing about the Mockup — Creative Processing is there's tremendous things that can be done with it, and if it isn't spread out in some fashion, with various sections of Creative Processing assigned to various steps, you're liable to either neglect Creative Processing or just kind of gunshot it around about the place.

So let's take up two things in Step II that evidently do more to facilitate this use of postulates instead of using energy, and anything else I know in the way of creative mock-ups.

I had a preclear crying over this yesterday. Very sad technique.

Now, I want to — is there anybody here who hasn't experienced stage fright? I don't ask the reverse. Is there anybody here who has never experienced stage fright? You never experienced stage fright? You probably wore it off about eighteen generations ago!

But here's a funny thing. By the way, I experienced stage fright a couple of times. You give me an audience over 2500 people and I'll be nervous for the first three or four minutes before I go on — as a cat. Go on, I'm all right. But there's something about the mass of counterthought or something that — I feel it just before I walk on the stage. You take an audience that starts running into the thousands, oh, wow! That's bad. I finally figured out one day, it was the unpredictability of an audience of that size. You couldn't quite predict an audience of that size. That was the main thing wrong with it. And so I decided that I would merely predict them before I went in. I did, they did, everything was happy after that. By the way, I don't ever bother to predict an audience of this size, so don't think that you're under any spells.

You know that people are really quite afraid of this? You look at somebody intently sometime, whether you can or not, and just simply tell them, "I wish you would think pleasanter thoughts."

And the fellow says, "What do you mean?"

And you say, "Well, it is unpleasant living close to you and thoughts."

And the fellow says, "What about thoughts?"

And you say, "Well, no, I mean it's, it's… it's, uh… well, that's all right, don't — forget I mentioned it. I can cut it off all right. I don't have to read your thoughts."

This guy will go Nyeooww! Although he might suspect that you were just pulling his leg, he'd be quite upset.

People are afraid of postulates. Well, naturally if you wanted people to function as laborers or slaves or something of the sort, and get trapped, what would you scare them off from? Postulates. So therefore, what would you give them? One of the things that you would give them would be something like stage fright.

That is to say, "You cannot make a postulate now or do anything that will affect a large number of people without their consent."

That's one of the first things you'd give them, and of course that would manifest itself as stage fright. We get a person to walk on and he's going to tell all these people that they should think or do or be or believe something or the other, and he would be going against this big, big preventer on the track.

So let's just look at that, and let's take that as one of the first — that as the first mock-up that you give a Step II.

It's a gradient scale of mock-ups which cure him utterly, absolutely, forever unto the end of time of anything even vaguely resembling stage fright. Your preclear knows what you're talking about, so you might as well just dish it out in that fashion. It isn't just stage fright you're trying to cure, but you cure this and you'll generally get the rest of it. So how do you do this?

Well, you might find with some preclears that you could mock up an auditorium and you have him mocked up as sitting on the stage of an auditorium and so on, and they can go right straight through an act. But that, I'm afraid, will be the rarity. More likely you will start it out like this: "All right, now have a mouse sitting in the chair and mock yourself up as walking in the room."

Or "Have a doll sitting in the chair, and you walk in the room and you give the doll a big act: You say hello."

And you know, you're going to find preclears that can't do that? This is astonishing to me. When we put our finger on this button, we put our finger on a button that's really, really horrible!

Now, you want to carry them through by gradient scales, adding one or two, and get them so that they could say a speech which begins with "Twinkle, twinkle little star" to an audience of mice or to an audience of dolls, and get them totally relaxed before the first audience you've elected to put them before.

And the first audience you've elected to put them before should not be a live audience, not even vaguely a live audience. It should be some sort of a — I mean in mock-ups. It should be some sort of an animal audience, or some sort of a doll audience or something. Shouldn't look like a theater. Shouldn't look like anything approaching stagecraft.

Now when you get them totally relaxed in front of that audience, you give them just a little bit more of an audience. You go through the whole procedure again and you get them to say something completely banal to this audience, like "What time is it?" or "Hello" or something like that. And then you run through the next stage.

You see, you wouldn't think this, offhand, had a lot to do with energy, but believe me, it does. It's a button that drives somebody down from this level of postulates, see? They're driven into energy then. And the technique of driving them into it is embarrassment.

Now, you just keep increasing this, and you give them more and more formal audiences — but I'm giving you the list:

Something banal.

And then you have them say something like two or three lines of a poem; something very common, no strain.

And then you have them sing a song to that audience. (All in mock-up, you understand. They're not doing anything with their body, they're just mocking their body up doing this.)

And the next one, of course, is to do a dance.

Now, we just run this sort of thing through, each time through a more complicated audience; that is to say, more of an audience than before. And we finally get it up to a point where we could have them do anything, such as appear before an audience of fifteen thousand people that they've got spotted and so forth, without any pants on, or something of the sort, and carry off a completely uninteresting act without turning a hair.

There's quite a few mock-ups between those two points of saying "Twinkle, twinkle little star" to a doll and appearing without any pants on before an audience of fifteen thousand people and making a complete fool out of himself with utter relaxation.

Now, there is your system of mock-ups. By the way, just as an aside, there's also your system of making stars. You could go down to Hollywood someplace and get some of these little starlets and just give them series of mock-ups that let them appear in front of cameras and be utterly and completely relaxed in front of cameras and directors. And don't ever under any circumstances omit this step: the counteremotion of the audience — counteremotion. Get them to feel the counteremotion of that audience. Get the audience booing and the audience cheering and the audience throwing dead cats and the audience — work it up to a point of where the audience is finally — finally has rows of cops come in and turn submachine guns loose on the performer. Just work it out anyway you can, any can't that you find left on the subject of stage fright.

And what's your next step after that? The next series of mock-ups is making them command people to do things. Now, that's interpersonal relationships. And have them do all the impolite things that they mustn't do, because that keeps them bogged down into energy, you see? Have them mock themselves up and have the mayor of London and so forth get up at the desk and greet them, and have them suddenly pick up the ink pot and throw it in the mayor's face. Anything. And have them command people completely and utterly. And then have them be willing to command people to their deaths and detriment.

Those are your gradient scales of mock-ups. And you'll find this fellow's getting up into the postulate level here. He'll go through a period of being impolite to people and then, by the way, he'll start handling people like mad.

Now, there's one other exercise pertaining to this that is not necessarily related to those two I just gave you.

The solution of interpersonal relationships, then, comes under the heading of Step II doesn't it? Interpersonal relations comes under the heading of Step II. Stage fright, embarrassment, afraid to do, lack of poise — you're solving all of these things, then, with just those two steps: stage fright and commanding people.

You don't run willingness to be commanded. Nobody's willing to be commanded. There is no such thing. All right. People will cooperate, though, in getting a job done; but as far as willingness to be commanded, they're not.

This whole of Step II contains, as one of its parts, this exercise for the preclear who can't get out of his head. So you'll have to do this as you come back up the line to get at Step I. You'll have to remember that this is part of Step II and you want to get the guy to do this.

You want to have him mock up himself as a thetan and his body and have him be in and out of his body — not move in and move out, but be in and be out — and be at all locations with relationship to the body, and drill him with mock-ups until he can be anyplace around any body or anyplace around any piece of electronic machinery or any piece [sic] around any kind of an explosion. He can be here, be in the explosion, be outside of the explosion.

And now, be of one form, be of another form, be of another form, be of another shape — as a thetan. And run cycles of action of getting in and getting out of bodies.

Get into a body and it gets killed, and then get out Of it.

Get into a body and it gets buried, and then you get out of the coffin.

Now get the coffin sheathed in metal and everything else, and get the corpse saturated with formaldehyde, and now just be outside the coffin.

Now be inside the coffin. Now be outside the coffin. Now be inside the coffin. All this in mock-ups.

And you do this step on people who can't get out of their heads or people who can get out of their heads. If they can get out of their heads, you do it while they're outside, in the form of mock-ups.

And now when you've finally got the person outside on a Step II — you see, you'll be doing Step II and then you'll be coming back and doing some more of Step II. When you've finally got him outside, how do you drill him? As a thetan, what's the finishing touch? You put him into any kind of a situation you can find. In mock-ups? Uh-uh — real.

You put him in the middle of an electric fire, as a thetan. On a gradient scale, you'll get him greater and greater tolerance of being in worse and worse places as a thetan. Until you've got him to such a degree that he can actually go down to the city light plant and sit in the middle of its dynamo with no effect whatsoever upon him, and know he's there and know that the electricity is screaming and roweling and roaring around him. And you have him go out and sit in the corona of the sun, feeling nothing.

We're going on up for — that step is not really a Theta Clearing step. That's a Cleared Theta Clear step. But you want to know one of these Cleared Theta Clear steps, you might as well do it to your preclear.

Now, part of this step is be at various sizes. Be various sizes, and that's everything from no size to enormous size, and from enormous size down the gradient scale to no size: back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

So how many parts are there to this Step II? It's all these techniques I have given you to disabuse the idea that a person must use energy, and to get him to use postulates and do things by postulates.