Let's start in here with a very fast review of the important data which we have to have at our command in order to accomplish Theta Clearing of Steps I to VII inclusive on Standard Operating Procedure Number 5.

Now, Standard Operating Procedure Number 5 holds more or less as it holds, except where the modus operandi for Level V, Level VI and Level VII is changed. These changes, of course, influence the Level of a I, II, III, IV. You can't change the more aberrated conditions without improving the upper strata of conditions.

So now, what we're talking about now is, we're going to talk right straight across the boards about Case Levels V to VII in general and you will understand that we are applying these techniques as they apply also to the IV, III, II and I. Because, don't miss it, you'll very often have a I who can't make a particle of admiration. He can't make any.

You'll very often have a person step out of his body and not be able to leave the room and not have the body go out into the hall! And you say, "This is obviously a Step I case." Well, its behavior operates like Step I, that's all. Its behavior is the behavior of Step I, with the thetan mad as a hatter.

And these techniques then apply because we're dealing with two things — three things: We're dealing with what we call a thetan, which is the beingness of an individual; and we are dealing with a body and its experience in one lifetime; and the third thing we're dealing with is the thetan plus the body. We're dealing with these three things.

We have a technique for Level VII, let us say. This means that we would also, then, have a technique or an understanding of Level VI. If we have a technique for Level VI, we also have an understanding of Level V.

Anybody can dream up a psychotherapy for a Step I unless the psycho-therapy is a crazy thetan — addresses a crazy thetan, you see? Anybody could dream up a psychotherapy for a Case Level I. This is no problem. Don't try it on Case Level II though; it's — probably won't work. And it certainly isn't even going to vaguely work on IV, much less V.

So what we've been doing here is going deeper and deeper and deeper into the problem of what makes the human mind miscompute. And every time it had to be a simpler, deeper datum until now we, of course, are dealing with techniques very close to what? Insanity itself. And it takes a simple, easy technique to handle it and we have those and that technique to handle it.

You're going to see action in a preclear though.

By using this technique on a I, of course, you are going to see action on the I although this technique is designed for a VII.

Of course, then, anybody could dream up something to handle a I, but it is highly doubtful if anybody has ever been able to touch in the past or do anything in the past before Dianetics for a Case Level II, as thin as that. It's very interesting because you can have an insane I, you see?

And this just about accounts for the cures of witch doctors and so on. Because strangely enough the percentage of cures obtained by witch doctors — this isn't said as a sad crack; it's just said as — it just happens to be a fact. The level of cure obtained by witch doctors and the level of cure (percentage, you know, of successes) obtained by a Freudian psychoanalyst happen to be the same percentage.

I looked at that when I first ran into that and I — it made me hold my breath. I said, "What the heck, here?" I didn't make capital out of it by saying, "You know, they were probably better off with the witch doctors" — there were more witch doctors per unit of populace than there are psychoanalysts per unit of populace, many more, it ran about one to fifty witch doctors.

All right, now let's — why did this figure come in so close? It means not that just interest in somebody will cure so much a percentage of people. You could say that and not pay attention to the whole problem and thus dismiss it. That isn't the case. You've got — what is the percentage of Case Level I's you have at your disposal? And it happens that it's about the same in primitive culture as it is in Western culture — voila. Of course, the figure of cure, then, would be the same. And that's about the case.

I know probably more about primitive cultures than I do about Western culture. I've always kind of avoided Western culture, much as I could. Of course, avoiding it like mad, here I am stuck in it, anyway.

So, you can say that right now we're going for broke on the subject of insanity; go for broke.

And before I scare you to death about this, let me let you in on this little secret. The only thing which permits a communication line to open once it's closed is admiration. So we speak of old "Jim-Jam the Witch," with her boiling pot, her herbs, her incantations and her little doll in which she stuck pins saying, "Now, we'll stick another pin in and this will be right through his heart. Now, we go over with a nice incantation that's horrible beyond . . ." And you think this is going to work? Oh, no, this isn't going to work.

The only place this is going to work is on Jim-Jam Jenny. Is she ever going to make any effect upon the fellow she's trying to hex? She could only make an effect upon him if she admired him, and she's harming him because she doesn't admire him. There you go.

That's the works. Can you use them? Is black magic workable? And the answer is "No!" — not unless you want to stick yourself with it.

So the clue of how to be something, if you wanted to be it permanently or get stuck in being it, would simply to be it and then not admire it because that would close your communication lines on it; that would collapse your bank on it.

Say, "Isn't that beautiful," and you've got a line to it; now you've got a very secure line on it, and you say, "What a hateful, ugly mess this is," and clap, you've got it. You wonder why men damn machinery. Well, they damn it because they want to get rid of it, but by damning it, they acquire it forever. It's very interesting. All right.

We have, now, certain positive definite things with which we're working and they're very simple things, and the first one is survive. This has suddenly come forward as being the most important thing we happen to know, once more.

All right, we've got survive. Now, we have eight dynamics — eight dynamics. And those dynamics are from one to eight, and the first dynamic is self, and the second dynamic is sex. Sex divides into the act of sex and children. The third dynamic is that of groups, whether a small or a large group. The fourth dynamic is mankind. The fifth dynamic is the animal king-dom. The sixth dynamic is the MEST universe. The seventh dynamic is the world of theta, your thetans and so forth, and the eighth dynamic is infinity, right side up; this could be called God. But if you call it God remember that by classification you're talking about the supreme beings because there doesn't happen to . . . All right, we're not going to engage in an argument on that point. I should make my position very clear.

For instance, Christ and the great teachers back through — there have been six or eight of them in the past. Boy, they came into this earth here so loaded down with truth, they could hardly walk. Now, I'm very definitely in there pitching where these boys are concerned, very definitely. And with the fellows that came along and did something with those teachings and messed them up and used them for control mechanisms, and that sort of thing, I'm afraid I'm not on good speaking terms with that second classification. So that's my position on religion in case anybody gets into an argument on it.

The eighth dynamic would have to include perforce God and the Devil in order to be infinity. If somebody comes along and tells you, "God is all," boy, he means God is also that jail down there. He means God is also that automobile accident that just happened down the road. And God's the Republican Party, and God's the Conservatives! It's interesting.

"God's all" so therefore he must be God — Devil. It's one of the oldest maxims of magic that all angels have two faces, a good face and a bad face. In order to be a thoroughgoing angel they have to have a good face and a bad face. So those are your dynamics.

Anything fall outside these dynamics? Not in this universe. Now, is there a ninth dynamic? Yes, very probably. Is there a tenth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth? Sure, sure, probably, but not here in this universe!

We might have some kind of a shadow or something of the sort here that we get into in the field of aesthetics. And then we get into this big question which isn't a question of logic, but a question of experience. Beauty, what is beauty?

Well, beauty is something you experience. "Well, what is beautiful?" Any-time the fellow asks that, you know you're talking to a critic. An evaluation on the level of aesthetics is not possible. You see, evaluation would take place on the level of logic. And therefore you can't get logical about art. And if there's any truth to that we would find some echo of that truth in the MEST universe, wouldn't we? And we do find it. We find out that every poor dog that's had to go to school to learn art has been practically finished. They don't do it!

There's hundreds of thousands of poor gullible young fools going to universities to study writing. What an awful swindle. They're being logical about art. You can't be logical about art. And it's with great bewilderment that these young fellows suddenly turn up one day in the lap of a professional writer and they say, "Oh, you're Mr. Jones, huh? Gosh, I'm glad. What school did you attend?" "I didn't go to school." "Well, now, now you must have gone to some — you must have learned how to …" "Oh, I learned how to read when I was three. And that's why I got the Pulitzer Prize this year and the Nobel prize and the rest of these …"

Oh, it's terrible; nobody quite makes this data go together. Why is it — why is it that all of the famous writers never went to school? And here's one for you. You've had a great many famous philosophers here in Great Britain. You've had Herbert Spencer amongst others. And you could go down this list one after the other — Francis Bacon and all the rest of them — but all due respect to the great universities, don't inquire what the old school tie was in each case.

Bacon went down and stayed a couple, three months and says, "To hell with this!" and went home. That's fascinating.

Now here, then, when we move out of the level of logic, we get into a level of art, or below logic we get into a level of insanity. What's art? Well, when somebody said, "What is beautiful?" he is saying, "Please evaluate for me, beauty."

Beauty is an experience. It would have to do with a sensation and sensations are as good as they give you sensation.

Then what is sensation? Does it have anything to do with evaluation? No. Evaluation doesn't happen to have anything to do with the MEST universe either to amount to anything beyond this: it made it!

Now, if you can just evaluate enough, you can cut things all to pieces and just ruin them. That's what's wrong with a V. He's busy evaluating all the time, as you'll learn in a moment.

All right, now what, what then, are we covering here? Are we trying to answer what is beauty? No, we're not because I wouldn't tell you what was beautiful and I hope you wouldn't try to tell me what was beautiful. I hope you might instead tell me, if you were talking to me about it, tell me an experience that you had which you thought was beautiful. All right, that's fine. Don't hold a gun on me if I don't think so, too.

You see, that's just a matter of viewpoint. Hm, beauty has something to do with beingness, then, doesn't it? It's way up there; it doesn't have much else to do .. .

But do you know, at the same time, that the fellow says, "I'm no artist." He says, "I'm not an artist." He means by that, "I don't paint; I don't write; I don't compose music." What is he doing that might throw this into question?

He might be living a very beautiful life. Because the biggest and widest canvas that you could paint would be the canvas of a life. A man could actually achieve the level of being a professionally beautiful liver. He could. There are some people you are glad to know simply because they seem to lead a beautiful life. It's interesting, isn't it?

So people say we have to go hungering after art through painting, writing and so forth, and what are these people doing? They're writing about, they're painting about, composing about life. You're sitting there with this enormous canvas and all the raw materials to put together into what is actually a piece of art. How would you combine these things to make them interesting? And that would be art, for you. But art, again, is not something that you would describe or even get that didactic on but you could do that. You're overlooking, then, the primary field of art which would be to live beautifully.

What's beautiful? I don't know, some bum walking down the street with lice may think he's living beautifully. That's art to him. All right.

So we know, then, the eight dynamics but we aren't saying that there isn't another universe which runs by different rules and laws. We aren't saying that and we aren't trying to cancel out that factor.

But it isn't one which impinges suddenly, strangely upon this one so that you put this eraser down and if you look quick under the eraser you would see the other universe. There is no fourth dimension! The man who invented it is undoubtedly a great mathematician but logically he's a fool. There is no fourth dimension. The fourth dimension is not time.

There isn't any consecutive coexisting superplane strata of universe which is running conversely with this one and strangely influencing it. I can tell you that for a fact. "Yeah, that's odd," you say, "Well, how the hell would you know whether that's a fact or not?" All right, how the hell do I know? I just know it's a fact.

Now, there is a before and after this time strata because this time span is an interaction on a — on a three-dimensional basis but it's an interaction in three dimensions. It's very interesting. It isn't inexplicable. Time is not even vaguely inexplicable. It's just co-action. And if you could suddenly halt that co-action, you would drop back or ahead of time. With the techniques which we have right now, you can take a preclear's concept of time and you can make it go wheeeew. He's ticking off seconds — pock-keta-pock. You've just taken him that far out of the time stream. Or you can give him a head-on shove into it — you might say — the co-action, and boy, the seconds are starting to go by rrrrrrrrr. It's quite an experience to have time shift.

And time isn't just a concept. Time is co-motion of beingness. You've got anchor points out, something else's got anchor points out and they go this way. That's time. Now, it's as mechanical as sucking a lollipop. Let's not get into any balderdash about the fourth dimension and plutons suddenly going to walk out of the deep earth caves and wave magic flags over the mystic Rosicrucians. We've had too much hidden influence already on this subject. The second we've said that, we've said Case Level VII — the hidden influence.

People get so they won't look at this MEST universe. They're in its time strata stuck and they won't look at it. Why won't they look at it? They won't look at it because there's a hidden influence that's very, very dangerous. Only they don't know what it is. Well, we know what it is. It's — the hidden influence is that there is something bad about it.

All one has to do is think there's something bad about it and there'll be something bad about it and something will become an influence, and then if you hide it, it's a hidden influence. We'll go into that in just a moment or two.

So, therefore, you have to avoid that. So after a while you won't perceive and you won't have anything to do with any perceptions and you use MEST universe perception instead of anchor points to perceive because you're afraid of the hidden influence and you won't put your anchor points out. All right.

Now it doesn't — it's very simple, then. The hidden influence is the modus operandi by which you make somebody drag in his anchor points. "It might bite you." And the hidden influence may exist in present time to such a degree that present time might bite you so you go into the future to go into the past and then go into the past to go into the future and both trips miss present time.

Where's reality and where's the MEST universe? In present time. Step I is vaguely noticing present time. By the time you get to Step VII, present time is a gone duck. It's — every moment, you see, has the label "present time" on it. And if a fellow starts taking this from memory in terms of facsimiles and uses his memory alone to experience, he gets into the very hideous situation, the very trying and horrible situation, of having this: At no time is he able to perceive comfortably anything.

He never can do this then. There are reasons why he does this and they're very simple reasons why.

So what are we trying to find? Are we trying to find the future? No. Are we trying to find the past? No. We're trying to find present time. We've been trying to do that for a long time. We were trying to do that in the good book — the first book that came along I mean — a good technique in there said, "Come up to present time."

Do you know, if you walked through a sanitarium today, and suddenly say to each patient as you pass them, "Come up to present time," do you know that a certain small percentage of them will suddenly turn sane, just like that — pang?

One girl, for instance, had a terrible case of acne, been out of present time, no communication with anybody for just ages and ages and ages, and they're out and auditor said to her "Come up to . . ." You know, he said to the psychiatrist, "You know, this stuff really works. Now here's a patient, for instance, 'Now come up to present time,' " he says to this girl.

And she shook her head for a moment and looked at him and gave a big speech that night; she hadn't talked to the — the staff had a party that night and she gave a big speech how glad she was to be there.

Acne went away in three days; she stayed sane. Two years later, she's still sane. Interesting isn't it? Very important stuff — present time.

Well, then, people must be avoiding present time because there must be something bad about present time.

How can anybody communicate not in present time? Hm? Do you want to communicate to the Roman era? No. Well, there's a lot of people stuck in the Roman era that are trying to communicate to you!

The communication lag index, then, is the test of whether or not the preclear's in present time. Therefore, the communication lag index is the test of present time of the preclear. And you can get his sanity as fast as you can snap your fingers by estimating the communication lag index.

Now, you can deal a fancy table on this; you can be very mathematical; you can sit around with stopwatches and probably some of you ought to. The next thing you know, we would have more data than they ever had in psychology. But we could sit around with stopwatches and actually measure the average communication lag index and then the rest of the conditions of the preclear, and we'd have the most fantastic thing.

Do you know that your — you would say, "Hello!" to your preclear and press a stopwatch, and your preclear would say, "Hello," and you press the stopwatch and you look at it and you would say "Case Level VII, let's see here now . . ." That's all there is to that! Because it's that accurate.

For the first time you have accurate, completely accurate stopwatch mensuration of sanity — communication lag index. And what establishes it? How close is he to present time! That's all. Because he has to come from where he is to present time to you. Only he isn't anyplace but present time. He's just trying to be someplace else.

In other words, what is the length of time it takes a message to get through his circuits to an answer platform and back out through the circuits to the voice box, and so forth, and that is the measure of the number of circuits he has which are interposing between himself and present time. That's so simple.

You want to know how sane some preclear is? Well, now develop this as a knack. You don't need a stopwatch. How sane is a preclear? He is as sane as he answers rapidly with this exception: he must answer sequitur. Remember that one.

Because some preclears will answer you very rapidly not sequitur; it doesn't follow in logical sequence to what you said. Now you want to watch that, you see.

So the communications lag index is the length of time it takes to get a logical answer. If you get a completely illogical answer or one that does not fit into present time at all, even if you get it very rapidly, that doesn't count.

Now, what do you do with this case? Well, it's just how non sequitur it is, because he's automatically your last lag case. He's not there at all. He must be spun in. This is your disassociating case — insane.

You say — if you walk through the halls of a sanitarium, you say to some-body, "Good morning, good morning" and this person says to you, "Beautiful coach, isn't it?" You could say, "Good morning," and they'd say, "Coach." That's a very short lag index except for one thing: it doesn't follow in logical sequence. So there's your only place where your communication lag index requires any judgment. Is this preclear logical in what he says if he answers rapidly? Does it — does that logicalness hold up a judgment on the whole line? No, no it doesn't, because the person who answers with very, very rapid response is very easy to spot. If he answers rapidly, he will also be rather well-mannered, well-dressed, he will be interested in life; he will be getting something done and he probably won't be a preclear. Do you get the idea? All right.

So this other person that just suddenly snaps back would be the occasional specialized case. And there's only one of these specialized case: it would be a manic-depressive in a manic state. And that would be the one case which might fall out of line on you.

And how many of those cases would you find over a review, an application of the communications lag index? Well, you might find two of them out of a hundred. Terrifically fast, hysterically fast response, with no sense about it at all, and that would be your exception. But you understand that that again would be a completely closed line. They're not in present time. They're hysteria cases.

So that leaves you forty-eight [ninety-eight] that you can measure with complete accuracy.

You say to somebody, "How are you, Bill?" And he says, "Well, um — ummmmmmmm," he hasn't answered you yet, see, that "well" is a stall, "Ummmmmmmm — I don't know my — my — my corns uh …" He's answered you. What's your lag index? Up to the time he gets up to the subject of the conversation. That's a test of sanity.

Now, if you go around a sanitarium, you'll find out — it's very interesting — that you will always eventually get an answer, but it might not be given to you and it might not be in the same day. And hardly anybody has patience enough to stand around and measure this fact or not because it might be next month.

I knew a patient one time — I said "Hello" to him once, and as I was there about two weeks later and he looked at me very fixedly and he says, "Hello." He sighed this deep sigh. I'd probably kept him on the thin edge of nothing all that time trying to give him a chance to give me back this hello. All right.

The communications lag index is the next thing we want to know any-thing about, and that is an immediate index of whether or not the preclear is in present time. Where are we trying to get the preclear? We're trying to get him into present time. What techniques are we using? We're using the fastest techniques to get him into present time. Okay. And then we're using techniques immediately after that which stabilize him in present time.

Now, do you think that your thetan is in present time necessarily? Oh, no, he's not. Not necessarily at all. And furthermore, do you think that this thetan is going to get out of a body yesterday? No, he's not. A thetan is never going to get out of the body anyplace but in present time. So get your pre-clear in present time and then tell him step out, and that's all there is to it. All right.

We have to know, then, something about communication. And, of course, if we enter the field of communications, we have to then go into affinity; we have to go into reality. And we get ARC. This is the same old ARC we've been studying all along except all of a sudden communications has just suddenly loomed up and smacked us in the face as about 89,000 times as important as reality!

Reality is an offshoot from communications. Reality is composed of agreement or disagreement. Reality is then made up of sympathy or no sympathy. You agree with something, you mimic it. You disagree with it, you don't mimic it; you want it to mimic you. And so we get the contest for admiration evolves out of a disagreement.

All right, so we've got that fairly well solved. And this is the whole emotional scale here — affinity — this is everything from apathy all the way on up the line.

And what do we finally wind up having? We have a very, very simple package there.

Now, we're dealing with life on all of the eight dynamics except one. We're dealing with — on the sixth dynamic, the MEST universe, and that is M-E-S-T, and that's the sixth dynamic, and that's the one you fall over, because you can't reason with it, you see? It's evidently unreasonable.

Now, you may think that it's interpersonal relations that are causing all of your trouble. Well, you can always get a man shot. In other words, you can always get killed or commit suicide as the final solution to a personal problem.

But do you know that you can get so tangled up with MEST there is no solution at all? No other place can you really get as tangled up as you can get tangled up with MEST. MEST is very uncompromising. You're standing under a cliff and it decides it's going to fall on you and it falls on you. Well, it didn't even decide to fall on you before it fell on you. Therefore, MEST is relatively unpredictable.

And as we look along all of these eight dynamics we find that the major aberration which we have to fight would have to do with the sixth dynamic — not the second dynamic.

We've got, we've got the second dynamic all worked out with Admiration Processing and eating and — oh, it's fine, it's beautiful. We've got beautiful techniques there and it's twice as good as anything we ever had before and we're throwing that away. Okay.

Let's just look at this, then. The mission of processing, mission as an auditor, is not to try to find the future for somebody or knock out the past or anything else. It's just to put him stably in present time; and that's the goal of the auditor. The goal of the auditor: pc to PT. That's all.

Now, what — it so happens that this does restore a person's self-determinism. Because if he's exactly, precisely in present time, then he could move, step completely out of the MEST universe, if he wanted to. The door out is always there. It's facing you immediately in present time. But you're never facing present time! See, I mean, you've always got to figure out what's going to happen for the future. That's logic.

Person's logical enough, he'll be here forever. All right.

The goal of the auditor, then, is pc to PT.

How do we do this? We do this by taking M-E-S-T as being the most probable reason why he is out of present time, and M-E-S-T is of course present time, so let's just take the sixth dynamic and as we worked with pain and unconsciousness in the first book, let's not worry too much about what we work with in the second book, because in terms of pain and unconsciousness we've got something better than that to work with, but let's work at the same time, with something as concrete as the MEST universe and sort of let inter-personal relationships go to hell. That's a sensational sort of a development, isn't it? Let's turn around and face the MEST universe.

Well, you couldn't — you wouldn't dare face the MEST universe. You'd get mired down, for God's sakes, if you didn't know some of these things about the MEST universe. All right. All right.

We're going to get, then, the sixth dynamic. And that's composed of matter, energy, space and time.

Scientology 8-8008 stresses these definitions:

Matter is havingness.

Energy is doingness.

Space is beingness.

And the co-action of havingness in space is, of course, time.

Nothing much to that. Havingness is time, you might as well say.

So you're going to study here beingness as more important than the other two because that's the first thing you have to have before you can have anything else. So we're going to hit our stress on beingness. Is that simple?

Sixth dynamic — MEST universe — and then we're going to take out of that, we're going to select space as being the thing, and we find out space is beingness so we're interested, then, in beingness which is space.

Now, we have to know that the MEST universe is double-terminaled. You never got an electric current under the sun, moon or stars, you never will get an electric current anyplace under the sun, unless you've got at least two terminals. You can probably get an electric current out of three, six, ninety; but you at least — you must have two terminals to get an electric current.

But don't you try to put up those two terminals without putting a base under them. Because the first moment that you start to get a current between the two of them, the two terminals will snap together, and you — won't be any current flow.

Now if you don't believe this, go home and take your electric fan to pieces and take the case of the fan off and take the magnets inside the fan and lay them side by side and run some current into them to get them to turn some-thing, and they won't do it. They'll just flop around the floor a little bit and then they'll stick together and that will be nothing, then you won't have any motion — stop! And that would be two terminals collapsed.

Or you could get more adventurous. You could go down here to the local power plant and you could insist that they dismantle one of their large generators and take its two huge electrodes — two fields — and slap them together just to find out if they'd operate without a base, and again you'd find out that you needed a base.

Well, we're drawing all roads going to Rome here. Self-determinism is ARC. ARC is self-determinism. A person gets a complete freedom of determinism, he gets a complete freedom of ARC.

Simultaneously — oh, I covered this in much earlier lectures and material, the material's around — it should be rather obvious, by the way: energy is composed of ARC and emotion is composed — I mean just the general emotional reaction is composed of ARC. And you go right on up and you draw it: every effort within the effort within the effort within the effort within the effort and you're still hitting ARC, ARC, ARC, so you go right on up to the top of the Tone Scale and you look at the top of the Tone Scale and you find out here's self — complete self-determinism. So complete ARC would be self-determinism.

And as you come down the Tone Scale, self-determinism decreases in the same ratio that ARC becomes nonfunctional.

All right, so we go down Tone Scale on this and we find out that self-determinism ceases to exist. We go up Tone Scale and we find out it does.

Now, what's ARC combine into otherwise? Do you know that you could figure out the whole of mathematics just taking ARC, and you could work — actually work them together, because the three things combine into what we know as understanding.

Well, it's all very well to have self-determinism, but what would you do for juice? Well, evidently you could just say it's there, but there's a specialized way of making it in this universe.

Therefore, that person would have self-determined energy if he could himself make energy. How would he go about making energy? He'd have to have two terminals to make any energy that would apply to anything in this universe, and that has to be on a base, so self-determinism is the ability to hold two terminals apart.

The first thing you have to know about auditing: the ability to hold two terminals apart.

In other words, the housing of the motor, or its base plate, in holding apart the two terminals which give you current in the motor or generator — they're held apart by a determinism and if they're not held apart, they snap together and you get no juice.

So, we look and find that the motor is fastened to a concrete floor which is determining the distance between the two terminals, and holding them in place so they have to discharge one against the other, and the concrete floor is sunk into a planet and the planet, by centrifugal, centripetal and gravitic force, is held in orbit around a sun which is on course and held in orbit by the gravitic influences of other suns in its vicinity, which is all held together into a galaxy which is part of the island universes of galaxies which is in juxtaposition to other island universes of galaxies and where do we go? And throughout this whole thing, we find that the sun and Earth are two terminals. That this sun and another sun form two terminals, and in the absence of terminals, you get no space. So, in the absence of self-determinism, you would get no space and no energy.

And we find a person very low on the Tone Scale has his space collapsed on him and he doesn't have much energy. Well, what's the trouble with him? Well, his self-determinism is poor.

Well, how would you remedy his self-determinism? Well, you'd better remedy his self-determinism first by teaching him to hold, one way or the other, or make it possible for him to hold two terminals apart, and hold them fixed in position. And if he can do that, why, he'll go right straight on from there because that's the first step in the creation of space, is two terminals. So we have to know about these two terminals.

Now, between the two terminals we have a communication line. The first and most basic line is a communication line between the two terminals. Well, that would be energy. That's the first step into energy, would be the first communication line between two terminals. But before energy there is this between the two terminals: One terminal gives the other terminal attention. They have to give each other attention even if only a split instant before the first current is transferred. So therefore, attention is senior to current. Attention is senior to flows and so it can be handled.

You have, then, perception having as its first condition, attention. And a person who is having trouble perceiving as a thetan, then, must basically be having trouble with fixing the attention of other people, other beings, other terminals in general and he, in turn, cannot handle terminals which he puts out, so he doesn't perceive. And that's all there is to that.

The whole subject of communication is the subject of perception. The first and basic communication, speech, is a symbolized package of perception. Words, you have learned, mean certain things in terms of perception, and so you use words instead of referring them all and boiling them all down to this and that.

For instance, I say, "boiling them all down," gives you the idea of stuff reducing, you get the idea you see … It's fantastic. You go through some-body's mind and just get them — get the rush of pictures which accompany a word. All right.

So we have, then, conditional to communication, two terminals. Conditional to self-determinism we have two terminals. So we have conditional to good perception, two terminals in communication, don't we? In other words, these are just all working out one against the other, and we're at crossroads here and that crossroads has to do with perception!

But if you can't hold two terminals apart, you can't conceive — perceive, and you couldn't conceive of space in which to perceive. Because what's space?

Let's go right into that immediately; what's space? Space is a viewpoint of dimension and that's all space is, too, by golly. Let's not embroider it any further. Let's just — it's right there — space is a viewpoint of dimension. You should be able to work this out for yourself from that.

It's a viewpoint of dimension and it takes two terminals. How do you know there's space in here? Well, you — this — this room has got fixed anchor points. So we better know that space is a viewpoint of dimension and that anchor points make up the boundary points which a person puts out to say, "That's space." We call those anchor points. He anchors some space down by putting out points.

And every time he puts out a point from his viewpoint, he's putting out what? He's putting out a terminal. So with the first act of space, we've already made a preparatory act to get energy, to get communication, to get perception — with the first action of space! Isn't that interesting? We're right there, here. You make space, anchor points. What's an anchor point? An anchor point is a terminal. Well, what's a terminal? A terminal is what you need in order to get a perception. So what's the first condition necessary to anchor points? What's the first condition necessary to perception? What's the first condition necessary to self-determinism? What's the first condition necessary to survival? Being able to hold some space marked out.

You have to be able to do that and then you could perceive.

Well, we go right from that and how does an individual perceive?

Well, he looks out there, and he takes a look. That's all. How does he take a look? Well, he puts out some anchor points, and would you say pulls in a picture which exists there? No, he doesn't. Because there isn't any picture there. What he does is put out some anchor points and he takes the picture with his anchor points, and then he pulls the anchor points into himself, and then by a new current of anchor points, he inspects the picture which he made with the anchor points. Do you get the idea?

And he says, "Oh, I don't want this one, so the devil with it." He's got anchor points out here someplace else. When he pulls those anchor points in, the actuality is that the anchor point is the impression. The anchor point becomes, then, obviously the thing which it perceives. Quite important because that tells you the first fatal identification on the track.

An individual identifies MEST universe objects with his own anchor points. He gets the idea they're the same thing. He thinks something he sees out there and his anchor points out there are the same thing, and that is his first identification and it's a sudden and it's a fatal identification and it's the first mistake he makes on the track! From there on, he's gone.

He can suppose after that, that this is really all his own universe or he can suppose it's none of his own universe, and he can do all sorts of things with this, but the fact of the matter is, he's never going to perceive again as a thetan until he disabuses himself of this identification and learns once more to handle independently his anchor points for their proper purpose of perception!

When he learns to use his anchor points for their proper purpose of perception once more, he will see. And your V's main difficulty is he can't see as a thetan. And the whole category of steps is really upset because it can't see. And it won't be able to see until it gets itself in a situation where it can throw out some anchor points. And it can only find present time when it's able to throw out anchor points.

Now, you would be completely amazed what people do in lieu of anchor points. There are more systems being used for trying not to communicate than there are trying to communicate.

When a person is using anchor points for perception, a person is directly perceiving present time. When a person does not use anchor points for perception, they find out they have to adjudicate what is happening in present time by what has happened in the past. Therefore, they need (and only then need) experience; which requires what? Which requires facsimiles. So they have to hoard facsimiles, so they have to depend upon facsimiles, and so they use facsimiles.

And if they were able to put out all the anchor points they needed to put out in present time, they would not need facsimiles and so we get the overuse of facsimiles and the dependence upon the past to adjudicate the future.

One only needs to really predict the future if he's trying like mad to protect something. He's worried about what happens to something. In other words, he's afraid he's going to lose something, so he has to keep figuring the future, figuring the future, figuring the future. And what's a V do, what's a VI do, and what a VII does? A VII has quit, by the way. But a V is thinking, "What am I going to do about the future now, what am I going to do about the future, now? Let's see a ba-da-ba-ba-ba-hum-hum-hum-ba-da logic-logic-now-that-that-that's a-so on-so on-and I figure-figure-figure-figure-figure."

You get him on the couch, and you say, "All right, now go to the beginning of the incident," and so forth. And he'll say, "Well, this reminds me of the time, and I wonder if I run this what will happen."

He's so busy running what he's thinking about running, he's so busy thinking about "thinking-abouting," that he never gets a chance to run any-thing out of the bank! And he's very logical. He's terribly logical.

The basis of logic is to get two anchor points facing each other and get them in disagreement but in agreement. See, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang; that's a fixity of anchor points.

What's Fac One? Well, they turned two — two sluiceways of sound through a camera and, of course, it makes a fixation of terminals, and boy, there that sits. And that's an argument, a big argument, only the victim loses, but he sure knows he's been in an argument. All right.

Now, out of that comes logic.

Now, there is another reason why all this takes place. Now, I'll go into this because we're following down the mechanical operation right now. We're not following down the ideas behind this.

And we find out that one has to have anchor points in order to perceive and that the minimum number of anchor points a person could have to perceive would be two. He'd have to have something to perceive the something or other with. In other words, to perceive you would have to look at something. Well, there has to be something to look at the something which is being perceived, you see? So we've got to have two.

And — and you've got to have two. So what did we find is the first thing wrong with the V, VI and VIIs? There is only one of them! They can't see; of course, they can't see, the damn fools! There's just one of them. How can they see? I mean, this doesn't appear idiotic to you yet; it ought to!

It takes two terminals to see, doesn't it? And the V knows he's one, and he's got some MEST eyes and these MEST eyes reach out and make some facsimiles for him to inspect. Well, there he's got two terminals. He's got what the MEST body made and what he is to perceive with. But when you ask him to look out of his head or look around or use his own perceptions, he sees only blackness. Why can he see only blackness? Because there isn't a second terminal there!

How could there be a second terminal there? By his putting out an anchor point. And as soon as he put out an anchor point, there'd be a second terminal there and what do you know, he could see! But he doesn't do this. There's only one of him, and so we've got to study in all of this, scarcity.

Scarcity versus abundance — all dynamics. One of the first things you should probably do to a V is get him to mock himself up and bury himself as a matched terminal. It would probably cheer him up no end. He'd say, "What do you know." He'd say, "I can really face the idea of my dying and being buried."

He's so accustomed to there being only one of him, you see, that he's in hot water continually.

There's just one, and there will only ever be one because there is a scar-city of him.

And there is a scarcity of everything else.

Why does he know there's a scarcity of everything else? Because he's lost it all, and that's why you get loss as occlusion, see. He loses the second terminal which makes everything go black. See, I mean, how idiotically simple can we get here.

I mean, it takes two terminals to perceive. This terminal has to have something to perceive, so it perceives that terminal, you see? Now, that's the only light there is, to be very simple about it. That's all the light there is.

Now, what do you think you've got? You've got no perception. I mean, this — this was too difficult, this problem. You've got no perception here, you see. He goes around complaining that everything is black and, of course, everything is black, he's got nothing out there to perceive.

In order to see that wall, you have to put some of your own anchor points out in the wall and then forget that you've put them out and then you say, "That's a wall." Isn't that simple? You mock up this whole wall just beautifully and you get this whole wall and there it is; you've got a terminal and you're looking at it. But the V has got himself kidded that these are not his anchor points because he has a complete dependency on all the eight dynamics and that's the other factor we have to know.

Dependency versus self-determinism.

And there's the conflict of a V in terms of thought. It's the conflict of the little child; there is the conflict of the adult; the conflict of the student; the conflict of the soldier; the conflict of the president; the conflict of the king, and I dare say, if he's in this universe as solidly as he appears to be, the conflict of God himself.

Let's take a break.