SOP 8. The reason why I’m giving this time to SOP 8 is I find that SOP 8 is relatively simple and, therefore, very difficult of course. And so, we have here lecture five — SOP 8 — and we start in of course with Step VII and go back to Step I.

And the reason why I’m explaining it at this backwards level is because we want to take the most difficult case first, and then they’ll get easier and easier, and you can tell more and more about it. I see so many faces suddenly look up with a sharp expectancy when I say, „The most difficult case.“

So I’ll say right here at the beginning that many auditors, myself included, quite commonly run a couple of concepts in brackets before they go very far with a preclear. They run „There is no remedy,“ „There is a remedy,“ with certainty. Don’t, by the way, go into „There is no solution“ because, of course, that just jogs into the middle of the reactive bank. It’s like a train at full throttle hitting its bumpers on the track. Because that is, of course, why the reactive mind got built is there is no solution to a being’s survival who can’t do anything but survive. There’s no solution, he has to survive. And so he has to convince himself that he can’t survive so that he can survive. I hope you followed me closely with that I don’t see many faces brighten up when I say that because if you have a life which is immortal, it goes right on, and if life, being immortal, is now forced to do what it can’t help but do, it’s going to assume that force is necessary to make it do this, and therefore, without force, that it would do something else. You follow that? It immediately draws this conclusion that there must be something else about it that it’s necessary to have force to make it do, you see? This is not solvable; that’s why you don’t understand it.

You see, it has to assume, then, that it can do something else except survive if somebody uses force on it to make it survive. And it assumes that it can do something else except survive, and this, of course, is an imponderable, because it can’t do anything else but survive. The answer is the answer. And we get a very silly situation of an entire computing machine devoted to solving a problem which is solved, but it can’t permit itself to know that the problem is solved without exposing the fact that it has no solution.

If you were to take a UNIVAC, an ENIVAC or an ESKIMO or some other kind of electronic brain that was built to multiply five times five, and then start to force it with all sorts of super currents and batteries and resistances and voltages to make sure that it always said five times five, you’d start blowing circuits someplace in the machine. You just overload the machine. It knows very relaxedly that five times… is five; it knows that And now you start piling up on its circuits, „Now, you’ve got to say five times five.“ It would immediately turn up a conclusion, naturally, a negative solution on five times five if you started to jolt its circuits too heavily, because something would start sort of giving way.

And the next thing you know, if you kept insisting that five times five was five times five, it would blow enough circuits so that it would no longer give you the answer „five times five.“ So it cannot now answer the problem which it’s been set up to answer. It’s just as silly as taking an ax to the machine.

Now, you have inhibited it from giving the right answer. You’ve overloaded all of its circuits so that it can’t give any answer, and so it can’t give the right answer, naturally.

Maybe you’ve still left islands of operation in this machine that will give answers of some sort or another, but these won’t be connected. Everything will seem different and disrelated, and the machine will sort of putter along and break down and be patched up again and break down some more. Because the one thing it can’t admit is just exactly why you look at me with blank faces. It can’t admit this: it’s doing exactly what it is doing.

I gave you, a little earlier, Q and A. Now, just in this exact connection I want to make another comment on Q and A. Q and A is interesting simply because the thing is it. There is no problem connected with it until a problem is introduced into it.

Now, you can run concepts on Mama and concepts on Papa and concepts on self, on and on and on, when we’re dealing with the same thing as the Coca-Cola sign. Not that Mama and Papa are inanimate objects, but for all intents and purposes, really, all that’s ever been contacted about Papa and Mama was the physical beingness and existence and the space surrounding Papa and Mama, And the answer to running out Papa and Mama is simply Papa and Mama; not their emotional relationships, but just their physical beingness in terms of energy.

Now, you see how far wide something like Self Analysis could shoot a person if he started in running concepts and stories — connected stories. Several people have come to me and said why, for children, don’t we put up the story of Little Hood Redding Ride, I mean Ride Hedding Rood — “Why don’t we put up this story consecutively with the big, bad wallop and so forth?“ And I say, „No, because the mind doesn’t happen to operate consecutively, unless it’s rather bad off.“ You don’t want consecutiveness, you want differentiation, because the mind is adding up on a gradient scale fact plus fact plus fact plus fact, and all these gradient scales of facts add together and connect and go together, and therefore, we reach an inevitable conclusion because of the identification of all of these — we’re trying to differentiate with Self Analysis, we’re not trying to identify. And each mock-up, then, is itself. And what is the answer to each mock-up?

Now, out of all the material that we have had, only one book is misleading and that is a book called A Key to the Unconscious. It is an interesting book, and was written in effort to demonstrate to the psychoanalyst or the child psychologist that if he wanted to plumb the depths of the mind, he could do it symbolically with great ease. You will not find many psychologists will buy anything closer to reality than an abstract symbol. And they wanted to think about the symbols, and that book was released for that purpose. The fact of the matter is it’s a bad book simply because it permits the thing to be computed upon. One sets up this dot, „Complete the picture.“ All right.

The fellow says, „Well, I see a railroad locomotive.“

At this moment the psychologist, the psychoanalyst can say, „Aha! What adventure on board a train are you trying to hide?“ He’s not trying to hide any adventure. He sees a train, reminds him of a train.

Well, the funny part of it is, is the mind, the reactive mind wonderfully enough can always come up with the most gorgeous reason as to why it made a dot into the headlight of a locomotive. Always has a reason, never without one. „Never be without a reason“ is its motto, because there isn’t any reason, you see, and so it has to have a reason, because it’s got its circuits overloaded in an effort to force it to have a reason, because it’s got a reason. So if you force it to have a reason, it’ll blow enough circuits so that it doesn’t have a reason. If it doesn’t have a reason then you can evaluate for it And if it can be evaluated for, then it can be enslaved. See how that works out then? You couldn’t make a slave out of a human being who said, simply, „Five times five,“ and then kept on saying, „Well, yes, that’s the answer. Five times five. Survive is the answer.“

You’ve got to convince somebody one way or the other that he can’t survive in order to make him survive. And if you can’t survive and you make him survive, then you can say, „Well, the only reason you are surviving is because you are doing so-and-so and such and such in exactly this way or that way,“ and so the mind can become enslaved, and this is its trick mechanism. All right.

Q and A, The answer to any object is the object. The answer to a lake is not how much it costs; the answer to the lake is a lake. „What is a lake?“

„It is a lake.“

Now, this is the type of identification which brings about matter itself. If there weren’t this type of identification, if a person weren’t all smashed together with the idea of force, there wouldn’t be any physical objects, nor would there be a wall here, nor would you have a body.

This trick also works to give us objects. We take a great deal of space with its anchor points and condense it, and we keep condensing it and condensing it until we get matter. And you make matter that way. It’s very interesting matter; if you condense it enough, it really explodes.

All plutonium in the atom bomb is, is too many spaces too condensed, and it can’t tolerate it and it’s just pushed past the point of tolerance. And you just add this little item of plutonium to this little item of plutonium and you put them together and now you’ve really got too much mass for that amount of space, and so it explodes. That’s all you make — there’s other ways of making explosions, but that is the most extreme one which we now have.

Just apropos of nothing, it’s quite amusing that an enormous amount of talk was given to whether or not the Russians had the secret of the atomic bomb’s trigger. That’s very amusing, because the trigger of the atomic bomb could be as simple as having a piece of plutonium at one end of a rod and a piece of plutonium at the other end of the rod, and then you just drop the rod vertically so the two ends collapse, and that is the trigger. I guess the Russians never would have figured that out. You’re just adding mass to mass beyond the tolerance of mass, and you get an explosion.

Now, possibly life hopes for this as its final release. It can do this, you see. And if it can just get solid enough and a person can just get impacted enough, he eventually figures out he’ll go boom, and then he’ll be free. I swear some preclears are doing this.

So you have all of this methodology wound around this obvious identification. And the identification of an object with an object is the question and answer concerning an object.

Now, your mother came in and she said, „Why is your face dirty?“ Well, this is a silly question. She wants to put you into the past immediately. It’s a little method of control all of itself. The face is dirty because the face is dirty, not because one was playing in dirt. This is obvious. The answer to a dirty face is a dirty face. It isn’t even that a dirty face is something to be terribly resisted. There’s a fellow by the name of Al Jolson made a fortune out of it.

Now, identification of object of [with] object goes down in thinking to the extremity of the identification of similarities, and when you start to get an identification of similarities, you are already entering into a fringe of thought on the lowest scale, practically psychotic or a Case VII.

That microphone is that microphone. You see, two microphones, you say one microphone is the other microphone. They have different serial numbers on them and as far as MEST universe is concerned, they are occupying different spaces so they are not the same microphone, but they are similar. But if you really identified the two of them, you would see only one microphone. You would just simply refuse to see the other microphone if you said, „All microphones are the same microphone.“ But still, there’s an answer to this microphone on the left, and that is the microphone on the left The entire problems connected with this microphone, as far as that microphone is concerned, is this microphone. You get the idea.

Now, when it gets to a point with a person where this microphone on the left is the microphone on the right, and then when that microphone looks like it might have a head and this reminds one of Uncle Bill so that Uncle Bill is this microphone, and when we think of Uncle Bill we think of microphones, and we think of microphones we think of Uncle Bill, we have the reactive mind: A=A=A=A And it’s very simple, isn’t it? We got that in the first book.

He rowed a horse, r-o-w-e-d as in a boat, and he r-o-d-e a horse are the same remark to the reactive mind; it wouldn’t make any differentiation between these two things.

The reactive mind states, „Mama is the wife. And everything that Mama did wrong, the wife is doing wrong,“ and doesn’t consult any further — A=A The actual identification is that Mama is Mama, and the wife is the wife, and actually, there is no relationship between. There’s no such thing as a similarity. A similarity is a pretended identification, so that we get two identities, and they pretend to be similarities. And what you straighten out with Question and Answer Processing is simply that.

This is so obvious to the analytical mind, to the thetan, that the second you run this he begins to see this. „There’s something very pleasing,“ a preclear will tell you, „about this. It’s very charming about this technique, I don’t quite know what it is, but it’s certainly pleasant“ It’s recognition of truth, and it does it instinctively. So Q and A is an interesting process.

Now, in all of the work which has gone before, we have been trying to solve identification. That’s the truth of the matter. Things which are not similar become identified, one with the other, and this creates a thinkingness problem which is unresolvable because it’s not a solvable problem. Two similarities become an identity: „An apple is an orange.“ It’s not an orange, an apple is not even another apple.

There is nothing as big a lie as arithmetic. „One plus one equals two.“

Oh no. „One what?“

„Well, all right, a symbol one plus a symbol one equals two.“

‘Two what?“

„Well, symbol two, of course.“

„His ones certainly don’t look like twos. Well, and that one is not the other one; they don’t combine, they’re two separate slabs of ink.“

Oh, you have to really beat a kid up to get arithmetic in his skull He understands perfectly with his mind that you can say, „Well, I’ve got two apples.“

„How do you know you’ve got two apples?“

„Well, there’s an apple and there’s an apple, and that’s two apples.“

And this conveys the idea of two apples to somebody else, but mind you, it doesn’t convey an identification of those two apples. That is psychosis. When you say, ‘Two apples: one apple plus one apple, and they are the same apple“ — psychosis.

Now, a preclear who has already left the world of the sane in trying to solve this problem that he can’t survive when all he can do is survive… You see, the answer to survival is to survive, and there’s no nonsurvival to make a dichotomy, so you have to pretend there is one. It’s a very interesting problem. You’ve got this identification sitting right there in the middle of the problem. And any way you go out from this to solve it, you are solving an identification. Grim.

Your preclear comes along, and if he’s in terribly bad shape, he will have gotten to a point of identification where he’s crushing everything into a mass. You give him a symbol, it is a thing. You say „dog,“ this has no relationship to something that runs around with four legs and has fur and a tail. It is a thing that is „dog“ — that is what it is — and this „dog“ is an object And you try to plow the word dog out of his reactive mind, and you’d think you’d have to take an ice ax to it.

If you’ve ever noticed this, if you’ve ever run a preclear who was very, very bad off, these words are heavy, they have weight; you can’t take them away from him. Well, try and take this preclear’s pocketbook away from him, try and take their shoe away from diem, try and take anything away from this preclear. Uh-uh.

You say, „Now, would you please put your purse down over on the chair while we are processing?“

Uh-uh. Right here, see.

„Purse is self,“ is what they are running. Well, we know this is not so; purse is not self. And yet that preclear, if investigated a little further, would inform you possibly that the purse was herself.

Now, you’ll find around a sanitarium that people are being the bedposts, literally. I guess nobody ever thought to ask people in sanitariums what they were being before.

Here’s a rigid catatonic and you go up to this rigid catatonic, and you say, „By the way, what are you being?“

This rigid catatonic never talked to anybody before. And the rigid catatonic looks at you rather disdainfully and says, „I’m being a bedpost, of course,“ and goes back to being a bedpost. Why? Well, a bedpost just seems to be a good thing to be. They got conquered by a bedpost or something. It doesn’t matter how it came about, the fact is that this body is identified with a bedpost and the body can’t be a bedpost, and that’s insanity. All right.

So we got — immediately we see in Q and A that sanity lies in Mama being Mama and Papa being Papa and roads being roads and microphones being microphones, and we see that insanity lies in microphones being Papa. And it’s just a little bit of a rising scale of insanity to have a bunch of gradient similarities whereby you can work up and prove absolutely the microphone is Papa by a series of concatenations which have plus and minus signs and which are taught in universities and called mathematics. It’s not quite sane because not any one of those symbols is anything in itself, and the second you start to break it out into the real world and hook it up here with MEST, you’ll find out it doesn’t work.

As long as mathematics compare exactly with the MEST universe or with some universe, as long as there is an actuality to it, as long as there’s space and as long as there’s action, mathematics is true. But mathematics is not true the second you add a symbol.

Now we use words because they are convenient, but the translation is from a sheet of paper. That’s one class of words, it’s actually one style; from somebody’s speech, another type of word entirely conveyed by a sound wave. This restimulates a picture, one knows what the other person’s talking about.

You go to the university, they tell you nobody can exactly proximate what anybody else means, because words mean different things to everybody. Well, the next time somebody says that in a university and you hear about it, why, you just look at him with a deep sigh because he’ll be making the gate sooner or later for the little white men in coats. Because nobody has any quarrel about this. The mind in a good state of beingness doesn’t have any trouble when it says the word dog.

Well, of course we mean different kinds of dogs, unless we’re very specific about it, and when we say, „A Pomeranian,“ a fellow can say, „What’s a Pomeranian?“

And you say, „Well, it’s a horrible little beast. And people carry it in the lap, and it’s somewhat like a Pekingese, but it’s not a Pekingese.“ Well, you’re still not being very definite, because he doesn’t quite know what a Pomeranian is, but that’s merely because he has no pictures of Pomeranians.

And you take people who have been raised more or less in the same area. When they say, „The town pump,“ they mean the town pump. They don’t even have to have a picture of the town pump to identify what you’re talking about They say, „Town pump“ and that’s a series of syllables that means the town pump.

For instance, the whole communications system of Philadelphia came perilously close to ruin when they took up a station down here in the center of town, because everybody could refer to this station. It had horrible boards in it, and you walked across the boards if you ever went through it And somebody tore it down, I’m told, and made a parking lot or something out of it the other day. And nobody could ever refer to this anymore, and so a communications landmark was destroyed. You could always describe Philadelphia to somebody as a town which had this thing in it Now there’s nothing left except a statue of William Perm, which has its hilarious aspects.

Now, when we are talking a language, we are talking about common experience. As long as we’re talking about common experience, we know all about what we’re talking about, and there’s no difficulty whatsoever in this communication. But when we begin to insist on an identification of the word with the object, we enter into the first stages of neurosis, and there you will find the first stages of neurosis entered by people who say to you, „Exactly what do you mean by that word?“

And you say, „Well, I meant — I said, ‘Pekingese’!“

„Well, exactly what do you mean by ‘Pekingese’?“

„Well,“ you say, „a little dog, a lap dog. It has long floppy ears and pop eyes and it comes from China. And they evidently were big once in China but they’re small over here, and you see them every once in a while riding around in Cadillacs being driven by chauffeurs.“

And they said, „Oh, you meant to say a Pekingese dog, didn’t you?“

Now, you’re a very foolish person if you go on trying to communicate with that person, because it’s something like you sending International Morse to somebody who can only receive American Morse Code. His level of experience tells him that words are so dangerous — they’re so dangerous you have to be very, very careful of them. Well, that means his experience is such that he can’t put out anchor points or communicate. And there we have the answer to it he can’t put out anchor points.

Let’s just go right back to this: We find out that everything is getting identified with everything. The objects are getting closer and closer together, and they are more and more matter, and we’re getting everything solider and solider. This is only because a person has his anchor points in closer and closer and closer and closer and closer, and he can’t put out anchor points. So a person can’t communicate when he doesn’t dare put a word out there three or four feet. When he can no longer put a word out there, there goes his space.

Well, how do we get somebody over this? Because that’s the first thing you’re going to find in a lot of preclears. You’re going to say, „Well, how do you feel today?“ (pause) Going to say, „Did you have a good night?“ (pause) „Well, let’s get to work, (pause) Now, we were talking about your mother last time, or rather, I was.“ And so you finally say, „Are you running that concept?“ (pause) The conversation is one-sided.

Now, there is a way you can make this preclear communicate; you can force him to communicate if you want to: Toss him a red-hot poker, (laughter) This has been done. It’s with great surprise every once in a while that you hear somebody telling this story about the fellow who was in fear paralysis in a hospital, and at the last moment the doctor comes in and he’s buckled on his gun, and the doctor says to him, „Well, the place is about to be captured, and we just don’t dare leave these poor devils behind in the hands of the enemy,“ and pulls out the gun, cocks it, points it at the guy, and the fellow jumps out of bed and says, „Don’t shoot.“ We put him into a state of communication, with duress.

Now, this is simply anchor points and it’s simply making space. Any time you can get someone to claim an anchor point, you are still getting him to make space one way or the other, or at least recognize the existence of space. Just let him claim an anchor point.

Now how do we do this? The whole problem is to get him to put out an anchor point. He won’t talk to you very much, he won’t do this, he won’t move around very much. He wants to stay in one room or, if he gets out, his motions are completely uncontrolled. How do we go about this where it’s Level VII?

Very, very simple. We get him to reach out and touch something. That’s one of the most effective techniques. Every once in a while somebody writes me with great surprise and says, „You know, that Step VII technique that you say applies to psychotics shouldn’t be listed as applying to psychotics, because most of my preclears have gotten better with it.“ And these people obviously aren’t psychotic because they have some responsibility for their own actions.

Well, certainly, this is a real good technique and it just happens that this one will follow all the way through, and so we can apply it to a psychotic. It’s also a very good technique. You’d ask somebody to find something real. „What is the most real object in this room,“ you ask him, „to you?“

And he looks around, finally says, „The light switch.“

And you say, „Well, go over and touch the light switch.“ It seems kind of silly to the fellow; he knows it isn’t there. So he gets up and moves over and reaches out, showing you that he is still able to take the shock of finding it’s nonexistent, so to speak, and he reaches out and touches the light switch. It’s there. Now, you say, „Withdraw from the light switch,“ and he does.

And sometimes somebody will say, „Well, the sugar bowl.“ (One case, to quote one exactly.) And the preclear goes over, touches the sugar bowl. This one case touched the sugar bowl, touched the sugar bowl again, touched it again and suddenly clutched it to her and said it was probably the first time she had ever felt anything that was really real to her. That’s the way it goes. She’d — made her claim an anchor point, you see. So that is the essence of any processing is getting people to put out their anchor points so they’ll make some space.

And if they refuse to do this completely and utterly, you can be assured that they are completely and utterly out of communication.

Now, you can get them into communication, possibly, by the use of a stimulant. And while they’re under a stimulant or something of the sort, you can ask them again to reach something, and you actually can pick them up this way. But now we’re talking about sanitarium cases. And you shouldn’t have anything to do with them.

One of the fastest techniques on Step VII is something I shouldn’t have to stress at all. One of the fastest techniques when it works, and it works every now and then, is you walk up to the psychotic in the sanitarium and you say, „Come up to present time,“ and he does, and he’s sane and gets discharged. You would be amazed. This works. Every once in a while you can go down the corridor of a sanitarium, and just as the patients — you see them around, just tell them one by one as you see them, tell them in a pleasant voice, „Come up to present time.“ It’s an anchor point. They’ve been lost someplace and nobody has ever told them this, and they come up to present time. I see on your faces you don’t quite believe me; it’s too simple.

Female voice: We think Ron could do it.

But the percentage on this is not good, so we have to have a technique which has a very good percentage.

Now, if a person won’t put out an anchor point, then let’s let the person accept an anchor point. This person might possibly get enough blocks or something piled up that they’d throw one block away. This is processing straight in the MEST universe, which is about the only place you can reach a psycho, so just start giving him blocks. „Do you want this block?“

„Yes.“

And you’ll find out they will probably accept an awful lot of blocks until you’ll finally get one thrown away. The second you’ve got one thrown away, he’s got an anchor point out there. You started to open up his space and you’ve started to put him back into communication.

This sounds idiotically simple and it is, but sometimes it requires an enormous amount of persuasiveness on the part of an auditor foolish enough to fool around with a psychiatrist’s MEST. Nevertheless, it’ll work.

As a matter of fact, if all of us sort of as a crew suddenly waded in with what we know into the biggest spinbin they’ve got here in Philadelphia, we’d probably be able to clean it up in a couple of days. But that’s how sad it is that we don’t do that work I’ve been working on some mechanical aids, because it’s doubtful if psychiatry will ever adapt itself to anything but a mechanical aid and so I’ve said, „Well, we shouldn’t worry too much about the psychotics. Let’s see if we can’t work it out with a mechanical aid problem which will at least bring them up to a point of communication so that we can process them rather easily.“

But nothing will wear an auditor out faster than a psychotic, because the psychotic is what? What did we cover earlier? What is the single manifestation, as far as this psychotic is concerned, that makes him psycho?

First male voice: Dispersing all over the place.

Second male voice: Energy starvation.

Energy starvation, regardless of whether he’s dispersing or not He’s obeying energy if he’s dispersing, implicitly obeying energy, if he has an energy starvation.

And he will sit there and he will actually create a sort of a vacuum in front of you. I don’t know what he does to MEST air or something of the sort, but he does something to it. And he actually has some kind of an effect on it, there’s a sort of a vacuum sitting in front of you. If you don’t watch it, you’ll start to do mock-ups that fill in the vacuum. The next thing you know, you’ve got the psychotic there in front of you solid in your bank. It’s real fascinating. He’s just like sitting in front of a vacuum cleaner. This is where they got the idea of vampirism.

Anybody that wants to fool around with a psychotic is quite welcome to fool around with one, but he shouldn’t use techniques which have anything to do with thinkingness. Let me repeat that A person processing a psychotic shouldn’t have anything to do with thinkingness. He should keep himself right there with techniques which are tremendously simple and very obvious, because he might ask this psychotic just one little simple question and have the psychotic spin again, all over. He might ask the psychotic to run this concept. He knows the psychotic is better now; now is the time to run a concept on the psychotic. So you run the concept, „I have to be crazy.“ It’s too much for him, that’s all.

Now, any such statement has to be qualified. I make that statement, so if you want to be on the safe side, never run a thought concept on a psychotic if you want to really play it safe.

If you want to be a little less cautious (don’t ever get as adventurous as I get; I get in more trouble), you’ll find that the psychotic is locked in one exact concept He must reach but can’t reach, or its reverse, which is the same concept: He must withdraw but can’t withdraw. And those two locked together just right produce a thing called the glee of insanity, but they have to lock together just right. And if you can get into communication enough to get this psychotic to run that concept just for a moment or two, his psychosis will sometimes stretch apart to a point where you can then follow forward with great ease on mechanical techniques. That’s touch and go, because he might be just on the other side of it, you see. It isn’t quite as bad as it might be. And you get him „Must reach but can’t reach,“ and he runs just this and locks up on the heavier side of the incident And he’s, of course, got the glee of insanity even more. It’s a compulsion operating with an inhibition simultaneously, and these two things together give you an emotion. And this emotion is the emotion expressed by the insane, and it’s a gradient scale of it.

At one time or another in any preclear, you could find every manifestation of insanity that had ever been cataloged anyplace, just for a moment or two in some cases and sometimes for a couple of hours and sometimes for a few days. You just trip into something, and on it goes. And he’s obsessive or compulsive or something of the sort, because you’re handling the stuff of which this is made.

And so, you can run almost any preclear awhile on „must reach but can’t reach.“ And if you run yourself on it for a little while, you will understand psychosis and exactly how a psychotic feels, because it’s that glee, that horrible feeling, that awful indecision of a maybe lockup on the two things that theta does best. And that produces this emotion called insanity.

The best technique for this, however, is simply one way or the other to get the person to put out his anchor points. Now, with this technique you can process a cat, a dog. You could probably even process a psychiatrist, and that would be a hard trick for you to do, by the way — process a psychiatrist. You couldn’t get him to listen long enough. He’d want to argue about it and think about it, but he wouldn’t test it because he’d have to look at it. A psychiatrist hardly dares realize what he’s doing, because he hasn’t got a solution. And if you walk down the sanitarium walls, you will find a lot of ex-psychiatrists inside. That’s not a very unhappy thing. It actually would seem to make these people very courageous to go into this work at all, but they don’t even dare admit to themselves that there’s any such danger.

You, with techniques, don’t run up against this, but they do. And this is this technique. It’s essentially getting him to put out an anchor point or receive an anchor point gracefully. You base it on a man’s health is proportional to his belief in his own dangerousness to his environment A man’s health is proportional to his own belief in his dangerousness to his environment.

And one does it this way: Here’s this cat, see, and this cat’s a real timid cat, let us say, or just a plain cat You know, people don’t have to be crazy to be processed, and cats don’t have to be crazy to come upscale. So you go into this cat, and you put your fingers down near the cat’s paw. And the cat just simply can’t resist sooner or later reaching out and touching your fingers. If it’s a very timid cat, it will just touch your fingers. And at that moment you withdraw your fingers an inch or two. Not too suddenly, because you’ll frighten the cat, but just withdraw your fingers. A cat will look at that hand and touch it again. And withdraw four or five inches that time, and then the cat says, „This is too good to be true,“ probably and quits. So you put your fingers back near the cat’s paw again, and the cat says, „Well, I drove that hand away once. Probably I couldn’t do it again. Well, I might as well try.“ And so he touches the fingers again. Immediately you withdraw four inches and say, „Ow.“

He didn’t claw you. The cat looks at you kind of startled. „That hurt you?“ he says. Well, you just keep this up for a little while, and all of a sudden the cat will be sitting there looking very, very proud.

I had a little kitten about early 1950 that had a very beaten spirit, and I worked it up to a point where it would claw an editor. And this editor used to come down to the house — gee, his ankles were in horrible shape always.

I tried this technique on a dog that was quite neurotic. The dog would jump up on people, and people would slap the dog, so I simply got the dog to put out anchor points just on the basis of inviting the dog to walk forward. And the dog finally would walk forward and snarl. Gee, that got to be a cocky dog, „Gosh, rrrff! Bring on your lions. I can drive anything away.“

Now, this is a mechanical approach, and you should know this because it is the only technique I know of which is very, very effective on very small children. A child with whom you cannot easily communicate, yet may be brought to reach out and touch your fingers or touch something which you are holding. You reach down with a bright toy — you will assume immediately because you have been educated that way that a child always wants toys. It’s not the case, they throw them away faster than they accept them. So you’ll reach down there with a very bright toy or a bright ribbon and the child reaches for it, and not aggravatingly, you just bring the ribbon back with a little jerk, and the child reaches for it again, touches it (remember, let the child touch, let the cat touch, let the dog touch) and you pull it away again.

And the child may either decide that it wants that ribbon, at which time they’ll rip it out of your fingers, or that they’re very tough and are driving the ribbon away, particularly if about the third time you do it, you say, „Ow!“ But don’t take a little child that is very timid and say, „Ow“ too loudly or too painfully, because the child will be quite dismayed and look at you and say, „Did I hurt you?“ You know, that sort of a look. „Gosh, I didn’t mean to hurt you. Don’t beat me, don’t shoot me, don’t eat me.“ You just keep that up day after day and all of a sudden, why, you walk in and this poor neurotic little kid that you first ran into says, „Hmmm!“ Mama, by the way, is feeling the effects of this, too.

And so it is with a psychotic. Your psychotic doesn’t have to be made to talk in order to be processed. You reach for the psychotic’s fingers and wait till the psychotic touches your fingers and then withdraw them a tiny bit, the same way you process a cat And the first thing you know, the fellow will start to exhibit some signs of sanity, unless you are going to be very, very clever, and the moment he says, „Gee“ or „Gosh“ to you or something, you’re going to immediately run out birth. You just, with a psycho, leave thinkingness severely alone, to be on the safe side. Don’t run out birth, don’t run out any anything, don’t ask him about anything.

This psychotic, you will find, is usually in contest with spirits, even though he doesn’t say so. That’s because he’s gotten down to the last ditch as a thetan and is trying to waste Christ or waste God so as to save himself. We’ll get into wasting when we talk about Expanded GITA, but there at Step VII, you will most commonly find them trying to waste in the material universe. They always try to waste in the material universe what they have to waste in their own mind in order to get well. As an immediate diagnosis, they have to waste in the material universe what they should be wasting in mock-ups in their own mind in brackets to get well.

And so, you will find people around worshiping Christ, madly worshiping God, madly going around with voices of angels and God and so forth talking to them and having a dreadful time about all this. And they’re being terribly respectful toward God and respectful toward Christ and so on.

This is not a talk on religion at all; I’m merely telling you an actual observation. And that’s because the last thing they can be, you see, the collapsing environment has finally gotten down to them as a thetan. And to save themselves as a thetan, they have to waste admiration of Christ and God. And therefore, you find these things in an insane asylum all the time. All right.

When we’re dealing, then, with Step VII, we are dealing with a problem which is basically anchor points, and which will manifest itself either by an inability to accept a single anchor point of any kind from anybody, or be unable to put out an anchor point of any kind or borrow or recognize an anchor point of any kind for what it is. And all this is so clouded with thinkingness and misidentification that these two things must be left severely alone. And you must remember that all you’re trying to do is get them to accept a little anchor point, put out an anchor point; that’s all you’re trying to do. If you can get them to do that, you’ve got them on the way, unless you turn around and wreck them by running a complex thought therapy upon them, because that’s what’s wrong with them: the Iroquois Indians’ sickness-of-long-thinking.

Now, they’re below the level of scarcity of energy which anybody can bear, and they’re really starved. They won’t eat, they have to waste food. They have to waste motion so they don’t move, or they move too erratically, so they have to waste controlled motion. And in this way, they’re cut out of the strata of communication with their fellow man, and that is really what a psychotic is, he’s a fellow that’s out of communication with his fellow man, or out of communication with the MEST universe. And remember, is unable — and this definition follows — is unable to resume of his own volition communication with his fellow man or with the MEST universe. Remember, of his own volition.

In other words, you could be above communicating and still not be psychotic if you could resume of your own volition, with great ease, communication. That’s obvious, isn’t it? All right.

So from Step VII we go immediately into Step VI. We run this technique, you understand, from I to VII in that order; I’m explaining it here from VII back to I to give you the strata of cases.

In Step VI, you have an acute state, very acute state of energy starvation. And it is a starvation which is so bad that you would find the running of concepts upon Step VI almost fatal. In other words, here you have the neurotic who is at the critical point, and who can be very easily tipped over into a Step VII by much more abuse by life. (Not by you as an auditor; you’re not going to tip these people over.) Preclears are quite resistant, they just talk a lot and complain a lot.

Step VII is waiting for Step VI, and that’s the definition of a Step VT case. This person doesn’t think dearly about a lot of things, and is barely able to keep up with the more evil aspects of present time. This is the way they’re identifiable. This person is able to keep up barely with the more evil aspects of present time and doesn’t go into the future at all about anything. And they show emotion about present time only when confronted with something horrible. Or they merely consider everything in present time is horrible.

Well, this is the neurotic, this is the person who is nervous. You can tell this person. When this person holds a coffee cup, the cup chatters against the saucer. This is the person who, when he has a drink, has a hangover for three days. Or when he has a drink, has to have another drink and has to have another drink and has to have another drink, because, you see, the drink runs him out of energy. And the only way he can get to the state he was in before he had to drink was to have a full glass in front of him. So he’s trying to run back on the track to the time before he had the first drink, and he can’t get there.

So, here is the person who, given any sedative really or given any stimulant, will carry it through to its final addiction if given any chance at all. The problem of dope, drugs, which results in the regimen of prescription, does not lie in the dope and the drugs; it lies in the neurotic or psychotic inability to restrain oneself from continuing with anything which will deliver a sensation, because these poor people are completely out of sensation. And then the government comes along and says, „You can’t even have the sensation of opium. What you’ve got to drink is alcohol.“

The last survey I read on this subject, by the way, alcohol was much more harmful than opium, but I don’t think they can workably collect adequate taxes from opium.

Anybody who is going to become an addict would become an addict of soda pop just as fast It isn’t so much, then, a study of the drug as it is the study of the mind. And this is adequately demonstrated if you’ve studied anything about alcoholics.

Well then, what do we do with the alcoholic? He’s right on the borderline of a psychotic; he starts something, and we get into our Q and A. What do we do with this alcoholic? What kind of a frame of mind is he in? Well, let’s look at Q and A. The answer to being drunk is, of course, being drunk. That’s what he thinks. The answer to raising the dickens and stealing money from the family is raising the dickens and stealing money from the family. The answer to being nasty to Papa is being nasty to Papa.

Children play this, by the way. A little child gets into some bad frame of mind about life and he decides that this is it and he’s acting that way and the answer to being that way is then to be that way. And so you get a continuous persistence of this condition. It’s only interrupted when you vary the energy pattern, and you only vary the energy pattern when you vary the admiration available in the bank. In other words, you vary the energy pattern when you vary the energy, and the only thing that will dissolve energy is another kind of energy. All right.

Therefore, we need a consistent and continual technique which will resolve for this person, very easily — not extreme, not Explosion Processing, that’s too tough for number VI — but very easily and very pleasantly will resolve the scarcity of energy in the bank and mind itself, and that is best answered by something like Self Analysis. And there isn’t any better technique for it.

What do you do for the alcoholic? You give him Self Analysis in large quantities. Preferably make him make two of them out there. You’ll find out he’d be making them here first, and he eventually gets so he can get those mock-ups out there pretty far, preferably two mock-ups at a distance from him.

How many hours does it take, then, to get that bank up to a condition where — well, it’ll take more hours than you as an auditor would care to associate with a psychotic or a neurotic. But at the same time, with all of your skill and with all of your knowledge, and however easy it may look to you, to reach in and touch that button and cure that fellow, and just zing. You’re dealing with quantity of energy which he himself and he himself alone can furnish and replenish! It can’t be shot to him with a needle; we’ve tried it.

The answer to an alcoholic, a drug addict, a sexual pervert is a very easy answer: it’s lots of Self Analysis. So you get somebody to work with him on the subject You get somebody to work with him to help you out Or you just make up your mind to sit there and slug it through. How many hours is it going to take to bring him up out of that state? Well, that depends upon the deficiency of energy in the bank, as he conceives it to be deficient.

Of course, he first had to get the idea it was deficient before he could get a deficiency of energy, but unfortunately, having gotten the idea the energy is deficient, it now becomes actually deficient And just by flipping that postulate out, you have not remedied the deficiency of energy. The postulate will turn up in the process, but only when you’ve given enough so the postulate can be given up. So what do you do? Self Analysis, Self Analysis and more Self Analysis.

How long? Eighty hours, two hundred hours, if you can get volunteers. How soon will the case break down and show improvement? Maybe fifteen minutes. Is that good enough to prevent a relapse? No, it’s not.

And the main trick that you have is to discipline yourself to give him enough so that they’ve got enough energy replenished into the bank in order to stay where you want them to be in a stable state, and the only mistake you’re going to make about this is being superambitious about these very low-toned cases, and you say, „I’m just going to spring this case, and he’s going to go on his way happily, because it’s been done before.“ Yes sir, it’s been done before, in a minority of cases by a lucky thrust And I’ll tell you something dreadful that my reports show: They didn’t stay stable. I know the ground I’m walking on when I talk to you about Self Analysis. It’s good solid ground. It’s so idiotically simple that you as an auditor are very liable to say that it’s beneath your dignity. Don’t, because it is the remedy for the neurotic.

Let’s take a break.