This is the fifth evening and the first lecture of this last evening of this series.

I'm going to talk to you tonight very swiftly. In two hours I'm going to cover the technique which we will call Standard Operating Procedure Utility and give you the basic modus operandi of how you become things and what the most general fear is with regard to living.

In other words, in these last two lectures, this last two hours, I'm going to try to cover with you what man has been trying to find out for an awful long time.

When you know you know this material, you'll know that you know. It's very simple material.

We have here, first and foremost, how you become and why people don't become.

All right, what is the modus operandi of becoming? How do you become something?

Well, you know how you become something. You study. You apply your-self. You get some influential friends. You inherit some money. You do other things. And if you do all these things well and if you have a good honest face and your service record is good and your fingerprints aren't on file in too many places you will become something.

Well, that's — that would be nice if it were true. It would be very nice if it were true, because you have two billion Homo sapiens currently engaged in following that modus operandi. You also have an enormous number of insane asylums and prisons. I wonder if there's any coordination between those two facts?

Unfortunately, for Homo sapiens, his modus operandi of becoming is just about as reverse-vectored as you could get. He's mired down in the MEST universe, and he thinks he has to follow the course which led MEST into being MEST.

Now, you understand that we have scouted and plotted, and in the work which has preceded this work, we have a very complete map, really, of how MEST became MEST. We know the basic thing: the thought, then some space, then some terminals and lines and particles and then we get counter-action between two terminals and they get driven tighter and tighter together. And then they know they mustn't be each other; and then the next thing you know, they are tighter and tighter, and it goes right on down the line. That's the dwindling spiral.

Well, that winds up, evidently, in conservation of energy. Winds up in the laws of physics: interaction, laws of motion, all that — inertia, so on. These things all evolved from that upper line.

And if you want to have some fun sometime, why, take a week off, and just plot for your own satisfaction from that, on your own initiative, just how it came about from these basic principles and you will see that it is really quite simple.

Having evolved this, it is going to take me probably the next twenty years to write enough material on various subjects in order to cover behavior aspects in man and in the physical universe. It's probably going to take me that long to do that because there's a terrific amount of complexity comes out of this little simplicity. And the background data which I have accumulated makes it necessary that I go ahead and do that just as part of the responsibility.

But as far as the overall look is concerned, it's very simple.

Now you see, then, that the track of evolution from space, terminals, "Let there be light," and so on, right on down along the line to hard matter and no space and great value and everything scarce, you see that agreeing with this modus operandi will of course take you right straight on down the line on a dwindling spiral until for all intents and purposes, you aren't.

You see how that would be?

If you agree with the MEST universe, you're agreeing with this modus operandi. And if you agree with this modus operandi, then you can become the MEST universe under compulsion of agreement. Do you see that?

By agreeing with the MEST universe continually, you also pick up the compulsion to hold off anchor points, to defend, to protect, to get in there and fight, to keep terminals apart, to criticize, evaluate and flounder around like mad, and never find any peace of mind, but find less and less and less peace of mind, until you find your entire environment is falling in on you!

You can't hold those anchor points out there anymore. The horrible joke is there were no anchor points to hold out there.

But this is — this by the way, as a highly generalized solution, has been tried many times. There are many people who have come up in the last few thousand years and said, "All is illusion, all is illusion, all is illusion, God is good." And they buried them, too.

The agreement with the MEST universe — well, you had to know what you were agreeing with before you knew whether or not you were agreeing with it! Well, that's why we've got a map. We've got a good map. And therefore, it really isn't dangerous for you to approximate the MEST universe. Not if you know how the MEST universe works. Not if you know what human behavior is and what energy behavior is in relating to it, then it doesn't become dangerous even vaguely, to play along with any part of this. You can do anything you want with it.

Just because you have a bottle of milk sitting in front of you is no reason why you mustn't drink the milk, you see? If you have a bottle with "contents unknown" sitting in front of you and you say, "Well, am I going to take a swig of this or am I not?" you're in the same frame of mind as most people are with regard to MEST: "Should I own it or shouldn't I? If I do, what'll it do to me?" You know, big doubt, uncertainty.

But if you know it's a bottle of milk, you can go ahead and drink it. And if you know it's a bottle of poison, you can throw it in the garbage. That's about all there would be to it in the line of thought.

But if you thought that there was always going to be something unknown about it then you would always be in the position of a man sitting at a table, looking at a bottle, "contents unknown," and you'd be trying to look into that bottle to find out what was in that bottle. Should you drink it? Should you throw it in the garbage?

And that is what is known as a maybe. And a maybe is a double flow, or a controversion, to such a degree that an individual is hung up on it. And the anatomy of maybe is the anatomy of procrastination and suspense and duration, and all the rest of these things. Maybes dissolve because energy dissolves under the impact of admiration. You can admire anything that is enduring and it'll fall apart. Stop admiring my car out there!

Now, here we have then — we see this anatomy of maybe. "Should I drink it or shouldn't I drink it?" Now, what state do you find — well, let's be real blunt — what state do you find all of your preclears in? You find one in one peculiarity and another one in another one, but there's one thing that is common to every preclear, and that is he's sitting on the middle of a maybe. He has an uncertainty.

Now, you could flounder around and you could resolve several uncertain-ties out of his life, and what do you know, he becomes more certain. And when he becomes more certain, he is more able to act. And as soon as he is able to act, then he is well. Now there, as far as you're concerned is — ever since we had Technique 80 (we have tapes of that here) we've known this is the case.

If you could resolve a maybe, why, you were in good shape; or if you could just make him ram through some communication lines to some doubts. The second he'd run his communication lines out to his injured knee or some-thing of the sort, he was in communication with it, why, pow! he didn't have any injured knee anymore. You should test this sometimes just as a basic peg on which so many of these discoveries are founded. If you throw a communication line into some part of the body which is ailing and just insist that the line go there and the line come back from that part of the body to you — just insist upon it — you'll see pain blow up. It just — it just disappears at an awful rate of speed. And this is communication. So communication was important. I found out empirically that communication was more important than anything else.

Actually, communication is more important than the maybe because the maybe would merely say, "Do I dare communicate with it or not?" That's all a maybe is.

So the fellow is in the halfs-twilight, the twilight of "maybe he'll communicate and maybe he won't communicate, and maybe he should and maybe he can't, and maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe," and there he sits.

And if his mock-ups are bad and he can't see them, he's sitting on a maybe, but he's also sitting on "Do I dare communicate with it or not?"

Now, we know basically that space — and you can test this so easily — space is compounded from just a viewpoint of dimension. So if you don't have a viewpoint of dimension you'd kind of automatically be everything, wouldn't you? Unless you were holding down an arbitrary dimension that you said nothing else dare occupy. The second you were doing that you were saying, "Something can hurt me." Now, you see the difference there?

A fellow, he just doesn't bother to take a viewpoint of dimension. If he did that, he'd get this funny feeling of "Gee, you know, I'm just everything. I'm a whole universe," if he just didn't take any viewpoint of dimension at all. It's a strange state of mind. Well, people won't let themselves get into that state of mind because this is dangerous. They know that the second they did that, everything would move in on them right now! They never make the test.

There is an odd technique of simply letting go of what you're holding on to. You'll find the individual is holding on with great force on to various things in his body, and he knows that there's pressure there. Well, instead of letting him try to rub out this pressure, let him just let go of what the pressure is pressing against. You just sort of — it's just sort of a letting-go technique. It just sort of sorts it out. Well, you just stop his guarding, you stop his protecting. And what do you know, the second that he does this the pains go away. He just lets go of whatever is facing whatever is pressing, you see, because he's creating the pressure both ways. And when he discovers this, he thinks that something alien is pressing against him. Now, he doesn't even know that he's holding the thing which is being pressed against, and he doesn't realize that he's also the alien thing doing the pressing! And as a net result, he can get into a fine state of divided terminals.

He says, "This is not me, this is me and I have to hold that off," and then he doesn't know that he is pushing that other terminal, pushing it in, and he's creating the pressure.

Fellow says, "I've got a terrible migraine headache and it just entur--serve me all — ." Why, he's the fellow who is holding the head in such a way that this pressure can come in and press against it. He's doing the pressing and he's holding the line so that it gets pressed against; he's doing both. And if you just simply ask him, "Will you please let go of the press-in?"

"Oh, I can't do that," he'll say.

"Well, why don't you let go of what it's pressing against?" This is a brand-new thought to him. Yeah, this is a hidden one. He didn't realize he was holding on to that, so he lets go of that, and there will be a sharp flip as the motion moves on through. He's let go.

What's he done? He's increased his beingness by taking responsibility for the terminals! That's all. He said, "I'm these two terminals." He hasn't really let go, you see? He says, "I don't want to be the two terminals." But he reacts best if you just sort of ask him, "Well, just let go of them." In other words, you're asking him, "Don't worry about them," and sure enough, that blows up. Now, that's just a test technique, but an interesting technique because it demonstrates so forcefully the basic truth of what we're working with here.

Now, here the fellow, he's under terrible pressure all the time in the area of his chest, and he's not only doing the pressing, but he's holding the thing which it's pressing against. And he's doing both of these actions so he's having a terrific battle with himself! That's real cute. He's having a terrific battle with himself.

Ran into a preclear one day, he said a thetan was attacking him. Well, that's fine, a thetan was attacking him, and it turns out to be that what was attacking him was the facsimile of their assumption of the body. They didn't want to be that thetan anymore, that's why they became a body, you see? So they didn't take responsibility for that area anymore, so they said, "It must be somebody else." And they were fighting themselves like mad.

In other words, they're just — this reminds you of — you've seen comedies, comedies where the lights go out and everybody goes sock, sock, sock and then when the lights go on again, all the villains are beating each other up, and the comedian has gone up on deck someplace, something like that, you know. Well, the comedian in this case is the hidden influence. The hidden influence has always gone up on deck somewhere and left you in there fighting you. Actually, there isn't a flatter statement could be made. That's just what's happening.

Somebody came along and said, "You better fight you," and gave you a good reason why, but he didn't tell you he was there telling you. And then he kind of slid away and you've gone on fighting you ever since, and you don't know that it's a comedy. It's rather a tragic, grim comedy when you see how far down the line an individual could go on fighting himself.

But if you were to mock up the preclear punching himself in the nose time after time, he would eventually begin to laugh, because the truth of the matter is that's what he's been doing for just ages. He's been punching him-self in the nose continually. That's all he's been doing and that's all the pain and travail he has.

It's very interesting, by the way, to get a preclear to look back over his track and see the number of things which have hurt him in life. You don't ever use a technique that evaluates and points out to somebody for some-thing. The hell with that! That's just phooey. That's going at it the hard way and the long way around and so forth. That's just no good.

You just sit there and you keep asking him if this means anything to him or how does he figure on that or what does something else mean to him, and if you do that long enough, he'll go blow his brains out. So it's not that it's bad it's just going to take you a long time. It's just not a workable technique.

So where we have, then, a good technique — where we have a good technique is where the preclear fights it out himself and you just pitch in the suggestions of various things for him to sort of fight out himself. That would be a nondirective technique. That would be a — what's known as a permissive therapy. And the least directive, of course, a technique is, the better it restores the individual's self-determinism.

Now, the only thing that's been injured is his idea of his self-determinism, and if that's all that's been injured, then you'd certainly better not introduce anything that cuts him back down again. He's just fighting himself, that's all.

And you ask this fellow, all right, all these points in his life when he got into real trouble, and if he were going over this meticulously and you had all the data, you'd find out that he started each one of them. He has become in each case the effect of his own cause.

You say, "Well, who else had something to do with this?" And the truth of the matter is nobody else! And it's the weirdest thing why this works out this way, but it works out this way with mathematical precision! It is a ghastly thing for a man to suddenly notice this! He just wasn't enough of things in order to keep the ball rolling. He limited his beingness for one reason or another, and when he limited his beingness for one reason or another, he was in the soup! He was no longer willing to be something!

Well now, he might have had good reasons why he was no longer to be something. The — actually, he could have worked it out and said, "Look, I'm evaluating. I'm going to concentrate what I am doing over here, and I'm going to let that go." He can certainly expect to be kicked in the teeth by what he let go, because he simply said, "I'm no longer willing to be it" and it's going to kick him in the teeth. He's going to be in bad shape because of that.

Well, sometimes, even when he knows this, he says, "Well, I'll let go of this thing anyhow and take the consequences and go along the line and finish this up."

Actually, that's the story of most any man. He has abandoned something because he felt he should in order to give time and beingness to something else. And the society is pretty well rigged, the chips have been stacked, the cards have been cold-decked against him, so that actually the society itself was forcing him to make such evaluations and abandonments.

But it was he who made the first choice to be the thing which he is now going to abandon. And it's only because he made a choice to be it that he later abandons it. You see, he couldn't abandon something he never wanted to be. Nobody ever forced anybody to be anything. They just think they did.

Well, what's this — what's this that's sort of going along, and making these people so confused then? They really cause their own grief. And you, by the way, you could set up an entire school of processing and so forth which would — simply said, "Man is the cause of his own woes," and when the pre-clear comes in, why, you say, "All right. Now you did that. All right. Now weren't you willing to suffer for it?"

And the fellow would say, "Well, let's see . . ." And you could point this out and the next thing you know, why, you could have some terrifically successful thing going, because it would be a sort of a nasty, mean way to operate and your preclears would feel you must amount to something if you had that much right to insult them, and you'd probably be terribly successful. But anyway, anyway — the . . . You know, get them to confess. Anyway, when you — slow fuse.

When you have — when you have a preclear before you, you are certain, then, of this: He's fought himself to a standstill. He — you can put that down as — when that guy, no matter what, you see, you're liable occasionally to get tipped over a little bit about a preclear. You're liable to get passionately enmeshed in his existence. The horrible things that have happened to him and the awful betrayals from which he has suffered are such that your sympathy gets elicited, particularly if you're sitting in the same kind of a chair in the same position as he is.

And you're liable to kind of forget where the roof is and so forth, and that's one — that little phrase — you put it down on your desk blotter or some-thing of the sort and take a look at it when you look at the preclear.

Anything that's wrong with him, he caused it. Any fight that he's engaged in, he's fighting himself.

You can write it down as a horrible condemnation that this preclear's worst enemy is himself. And what do you know, people throw that as an insult at people. It happens to be the truth! No one has any real enemy except himself when it comes down to this.

The more you work on this, the more the macrocosm appears to be the microcosm — the more you work on it. So where we have a preclear who is in a sad state of affairs, he's fighting himself. What's that mean? That means that he has (1) been something which he now does not want to be. See, he's had to — assumed a terminal and then abandoned a terminal for something bad to have occurred. You know that, as the first — just one glance, that he's a man, isn't he? He's alive, isn't he? Well, that's — follows as truth; he's abandoned a terminal which he's had now — which he once assumed. And that he is fighting himself.

And that applies to a psychosomatic. He's holding on to what is pushing him. And by the way, all you have to do is get him into communication with the area, and he finds out he's holding on to it, he'll let go.

Now, these are not terribly workable techniques, though. Why? Well, it's a funny thing about techniques, very funny. I have, well, I have a rather critical eye toward techniques. I generally look over what I dream up and label a technique. I generally test it. I know this is not customary amongst men but I have that peculiarity. Waste my time maybe, but I do that.

And I have found that in techniques, I have found, that there are techniques which you would think were just wonderful. I mean, you could sit down and you would be scribbling along and you'd be thinking about something, maybe working on a preclear, and you'd all of a sudden think of this gorgeous technique! Theoretically, it can't miss. It is the most marvelous technique!

Well, of course, it would be kind of embarrassing if you tried it on a preclear, because you might find it wouldn't work, so the best thing to do is not try it on the preclear. The best thing to do is write it up in a book and get it published by the Fairhope Herald, or something.

And there are lots of these techniques. And just — I, by the way, I probably know five or six hundred of them; they don't work. That's all that's wrong with them.

But, for instance, I'll give you a technique right now which is the most beautiful technique you've ever heard of. You'd just — you could just swear, I could tell you tonight, I could tell you, "Now, this is the highest echelon technique you will achieve. And this is the highest echelon. This happens to be true, this is the highest echelon technique. And this is what you'd better know and what you'd better practice."

And you'll all go out of here and you'd get a lot of preclears, and you'd try to run this and you'd try to run this, and you'd try to run this, and you'd say, "Well, damn it, it's obvious that's the technique. Why doesn't it work? It's so obvious that it's the technique!" You all — you're all going to agree with me in a second.

This technique is you process out and concentrate on this fact: The one postulate that is back of the trouble with all postulates is the only one you process out of the preclear, and that is, "Postulates must endure!"

And you think that over for a moment, you'll get the idea there, "Of course that must be the only technique, the only thing wrong must be that: postulates must have duration." Now, you could come up bright and smiling, you know, and hand out this technique to some poor guy. And he could go over here, and he'd just beat his brains out! There's nothing going to happen, just nothing. It's the awfulest blank you ever wanted to look into.

I know hundreds of techniques like this. For instance, somebody came out and he said, "Well, the trouble with everybody is," he says, "they haven't seen the light. So what we've got to do is just make them see the light." Well, of course, if they make them see the light hard enough, they'll get them into an electronic. But it's a — but it's a beautiful technique. It sure puts people into apathy and you really can control them. Anyway!

The next — another technique there — there are lots of these things. You'd think that this technique would come right in on two terminals, and so forth. You feel that all you had to do is process out all the loneliness an individual had, with two terminals, and all you had to do was process out all the loneliness and he'd be all set. Phooey! Nothing happens!

So, it's not — it's not good enough to be theoretically perfect. That's not good enough. You can be theoretically perfect, your mathematics can be utterly without flaw, and you can be so far off home base that you'll want to go find Newton and the rest of the boys that invented these mathematics and shoot them dead.

For instance, I just gave you that example, postulates must endure. That's obviously — out of that, then, must come terminals and space and energy, and that's why the MEST universe goes on and on and on, and obviously this is all there is wrong with a preclear is postulates endure. You'll find him worried about this, too, by the way. You'll go up to somebody and you'd said, "You know, I tell myself something and it comes true, and I do it. And I do it days later sometimes, and I don't dare say anything to myself because I take myself literally and I do it." Well, it's obviously number one psychosis. Only it won't process.

All right, once in a while, by the way, you might — you might high-pressure some preclear into springing himself just by giving him that one. You can high-pressure him too into springing himself if you tell him "Now look, all that's wrong with you is — all that's wrong with you is you read advertisements and you believe them."

And he would say, "You know, that's true." Oh, he'd feel very reverent about that time. You'd say the — "You read advertisements, and when you were young you read advertisements and these advertisements worried you. And we just process out of you all your advertisements that you've ever read, and you'll be well." And if you told him hard enough, he'd get into a state of hypnotically believing he was well. That's kind of different, you know, from really being up there. All right.

Let's get back to this other now. What — what then establishes this technique? What establishes whether it's true or false? Well, it's whether or not it works on a lot of preclears. That's what establishes it.

And do you know that there's techniques right above "mock-up beingness," and techniques right below "mock-up beingness," both of which appear to be more workable. But it was because of empirical tests of this whole range of techniques, see? There could be techniques of the echelon of lines, techniques of the echelon of terminals, techniques that had to do a little higher up with postulates. "Why did you have to have ideas in the first place? What are your originality," for instance, and so on. And "What about putting out anchor points and bringing them in again?" And the — "Where did you get the idea to do that?" You could go over this thing, you see, and you'd get lots of techniques that would lay out each one along this line, and then you could do something about solving it.

Well, where did it work?

Well, the fact that it worked right there at the point of beingness showed up the fact that beingness and communication were the same thing! It was just this fluke that it showed up right there where it did, and it processes right there. It doesn't process any higher and it doesn't process any lower.

Isn't that sad? Completely cut the throats of all future investigators. But they're going to come around and give you these techniques. You're going to hear about — all about these techniques just below that level, and all above these techni — . I've got them threadbare, looking for something.

Because look-a-here, it's obvious that everybody has to have lines. How does he get anything? Then it's very obvious, then, that if he has to have lines, the MEST universe is making him use sound, and that's not a — that's not a thetan communication line. So if the MEST universe makes him use sound, and he's really supposed to have an anchor-point communication line, obviously this error, then, would be the error you would process. And what happens when you do that? You'll find your preclear wound up in the grave of every ancestor he's got! You haven't got time.

Well now, you've got Admiration Processing. You've got admiration/ sympathy, and we can give admiration/sympathy to this fellow for being so dead in so many places, and so forth, and what do you know, we just find him in more graves. And he gets sadder and sadder, and there's more and more psychosomatics turning on.

What's happening? These darn communication lines are popping open. He was smart, he had them shut down, and you're going to be awful dumb; you're going to come along and open them all up. Don't stand below a lake of ink and open the flood gates!

Now you'll say, "Well, all this preclear has to do is to get rid of all of his blackness and teach him how to handle blackness and naturally his occlusion will go away." Well, obviously, obviously that would happen. Only it doesn't happen. He takes all the blackness that he had stacked up in the room and he puts it out in the front yard or something like that and then the next day, why, he's going to blow his brains out. Why? "Well, the blackness is now in the wrong place." So you put it back in the room and he's happier. So you see, that wasn't a technique.

It's — well, we're right on the groove, right on the line when we say that beingness is communication and that one can communicate only with those things which he's willing to be. And one fights or is afraid of only those things which he is not willing to be. And therefore, one will not communicate with those things which he is not willing to be. He will simply fight them. But this collapses his lines on them and he finds himself becoming them. That person becomes those things of which he is most afraid. Isn't that grim.

You'll find anybody — you'll look over the cells in teeth and that sort of thing. And they've really got postulates in them; it's kind of spooky. You'll find out the one thing that they're just frightened to death of, why they got those anchor points way in, just one thing: They're afraid of being a mouth.

It is a universe which is driven together by terror; an emotion of terror of the like of which one has never really seen, unless he's got really down there and looked at it. You can say, "What in the name of Christ could every-thing have been so afraid of to have pulled in its anchor points this hard?" Your immediate assumption would be, "Gee, there's something really terrifying!"

Yes, there is. There is the terrification of being afraid of being afraid. They're afraid they'll be afraid.

You go around to little boys and you ask them what are they mostly afraid of and they will tell you a lot of objects, but if you really want to get down there and ask them real quick, they're afraid of being afraid. Now, if you're afraid of being afraid of something, then you'll become afraid of some-thing and can get into a state of terror about nothing.

And what have they gotten into a state of terror about? What was there to be afraid of? Well, afraid of the idea that you might be afraid. And if you're afraid enough of being afraid then you'll become afraid, and if you become afraid then you'll — can be afraid of becoming more afraid; and then you'll become more afraid, and you'll get yourself up into a full state of terror and pull in the anchor points real tight; and you'll get smaller and smaller and hold on to what MEST you've got. And you'll organize it and you'll work harder and harder and get more and more logical and more and more logical and more and more logical and then you'll do nothing but work, work, work, work, work with no admiration whatsoever. And that's the cycle.

It's not a very, very difficult thing to understand how this would come to pass. So, we have then .. .

By the way — by the way, that's another one of these techniques, you say, "Gee, you know, that's a good technique! You just process out the fellow's fear of being afraid. Yeah, it gets the whole line."

No, it doesn't. I'm sorry. It's another one of those dead alleys that is probably going to appear in some doctorate thesis someday. Anyway We have this, then, "afraid of being afraid" as observable, but not reach-able because that's the reason techniques don't work. It obviously could be there, but it isn't reachable.

Try and process a postulate sometime directly as a postulate and you're not going to reach it by flows, you're not going to reach it in any way, shape or form. It's buried in ridges. The second you start to get the thing, you start to work at it, ridges start to flow in all directions and so forth, darnedest things start to happen when you start to dig up by force some of these things like "afraid of being afraid." You know, it's sort of booby-trapped. What's the right way, then, to go into this hall? Well, you get this. This is quite obvious, then. You get "fear of being is fear of communicating." A fellow's perceptions are bad, so therefore his fear of being is bad. Why is his fear of being this bad? Hah, let's take it backwards.

Why is his fear of being bad? Because his perception is just terrible. His perception is so bad that he doesn't know what it is he's trying not to be. And we get into this dizzy spin of the fear of the hidden influence.

The hidden influence! "We all know there are hidden influences." Now, here's another one you can say about any preclear who comes in and sits down in the chair and gets processed. You can say this about him: He knows there is a hidden influence someplace.

When this gets terribly bad, you get your advanced states of paranoia. But you don't have to look for the advanced states of paranoia. Just stop this fellow driving this bus out here and say, "Do you think there are any hidden influences in your life?" He'll look around, "Well, I don't like to mention it but as a matter of fact, the manager of this line has had his eye on this job for his son-in-law for a long time. Ahem! Of course, I haven't any evidence of this, you understand."

Well, you'll get one of the reasons why he's holding that job down so hard. Somebody is liable to occupy it. And yet — yet he's never checked it up, but it so happens that the manager doesn't have a son-in-law.

There's always something like this wrong with the hidden influence.

Now, you'll find other people; you'll wonder why they are so successful in life and yet why they're so hated. Be running a bank someplace, something like that. They've always got a hatful of hidden influences to hand out to people — always got a hatful of them. They say, "Well, I was talking to the board of directors the other day, and the board, well, that matter of the divorce you had, they wondered whether or not that . . . Of course, they didn't say anything personal about this you know. (People don't say anything personal about this really. They don't mention it very loud, they mention it quietly once in a while and — but always behind your back.) But they decided that they weren't going to renew your loan. However, however, out of my influence, well, I was able to prevail upon them to give you a ten-day extension and so forth."

Of course, the funny part of it is, there has never even been a board meeting, you see? It's just complete, complete balderdash. This person has always got a hatful of hidden influences. That is the single, worst, solidest, best method of making people go down to a flyspeck in this universe, is the hidden influence.

Now, then what would be the worst hidden influence? If beingness and communications are so important and if they interlock, then the worst hidden influence would be a hidden communication, wouldn't it? Now oh, if you could convince everybody that there was a hidden communication someplace, they would go mad! And so they do. Try it sometime. Try it sometime.

Tell somebody that is perfectly sane, well-balanced and so forth, and say, "Well, I got a letter this afternoon, mentions your name," and then shut up. Don't say another word! They're sunk!

Sometimes people try this with me in organizations. They start sending through to me a very selected line of letters, you see? They say, "We received two hundred letters today, we're sending along one of them to you." It's a terrible letter, it's just horrible. So that leaves you wondering, "What's the other hundred and ninety-nine say?" Well, they would never send those to you for this reason: the other hundred and ninety-nine are good letters. Anyway, that's driving in a person's anchor points.

One of the best ways that this can be accomplished is to infer hidden influences.

Now, as I told you earlier, there is the black cloud and the white cloud and the vacuum. The vacuum is always a hidden influence.

What is there about this confounded thing called a vacuum? If some-thing has nothing in it, then it is more powerful than it has something in it, and you're just talking about a vacuum, that's all you're talking about.

You get near that thing, and it will pull away from you any MEST you've got your hands on. It's a vacuum. Nature abhors a vacuum, they used to say.

Actually, what do you know, the physical scientist found this out a long time ago, but it wasn't applied to anything else: If you were standing in front of a vacuum and it were pulling the packages out of your hands, why could it pull the packages out of your hands? Because there was pressure behind you where there was something. Get that misdirection? Why is it that a vacuum works at all? You have a vacuum in a thermometer tube, and the tube obviously pulls, mysteriously, all this stuff right up into the tube, and it's a vacuum. Why, heck, that's the way all thermometers work.

You say, "That's terrible. I wonder how on earth this comes to pass?"

Well, it comes to pass not because the vacuum is pulling up anything into the tube, but because there is no pressure in the tube, but there's pressure outside the tube which pushes.

Now remember that about the hidden influence: It is not any pull that nothingness has. It is always a push of something, always a push of some-thing. And that something is not invisible to the preclear; he's right there with it. It — he knows all about it.

You just say, "Well, why don't you just let go of the thing?"

"Oh, I couldn't do that."

"Well, why not?"

"Well, I'd never get any more." You 'see, scarcity. Scarcity. "I'd never get any more of this." He's in a bad way.

But he's afraid of becoming a hidden influence. What's a hidden influence? A hidden influence is nothing. The hidden influence in this universe is nothing.

You'll find out readily enough when you start processing beingness out of a preclear, you'll find out all of a sudden, by the process which I will give you, he will recognize something. He'll say, "You know, there's really not — there's really not an object which is I." This will come to him as a little bit of a surprise. He'll tell you this; you don't have to even give him a clue. "There really isn't anything that is I. I don't have a form. I don't exist, really, except as I … Gee, I'm only trying to be things; I am not anything." And he gets real upset right about that point.

Oh, I'm sorry, he is something, he is something. He is a capacity to create. And if you want to know whether or not a capacity to create is worth being, look at the pure joy there is in the field of creating arts. If you've ever seen anybody absorbed in anything, it's a painter with a brush or a kid in a kindergarten with a crayon. Oh, boy. So that's not a little thing to be at all. And that's what he is. He is a potentiality of creating something. He is the directive, creative urge and instinct. He's nothing in terms of matter but he can create any quantity of it.

So he all of a sudden tells you with horrible feeling that "I can't — I'm not really anything!"

He's looking for the reason why. I mentioned to you a little earlier people all come along and they want to know the "reason why," and the reason I got bogged down originally in this whole work was I knew there was no reason why for all this. Couldn't find any reason why.

Well, to hell with the reason why. When you say, "reason why," this says logic, you see? And what's wrong with your preclear is he gets logical. See? Your "reason why" is based upon the fact that there is prior cause which makes me an effect, and the fellow is always pushing himself up the time track from cause and is never being cause.

So the highest thing a thetan can be is cause of creation, cause of creative instincts, cause of creative beingness, cause of motivation.

He is motivation! But when he says, "I am not anything," he is saying, "Nothing existed before I exist, which gives me a form I don't have any further responsibility for." In other words, he's in the optimum condition, There is no more condition more optimum than "I am what I create myself to be at any instant." That is really optimum. That is too juicy. That's too wonderful. Nobody could be that! And yet, that's what every thetan is!

And he said, "And there's no reason why." He said, "Nobody came along," he suddenly realized, "nobody came along and gave me a top hat and said, 'You are now a top hat.' And that's what I'm complaining about." The fellow's complaining — the fellow is complaining because he is not permitted to be an effect!

He's complaining because he's being permitted to be unlimited cause. That's a heck of a thing to complain about, isn't it?

So there is a goal on the line. What do you want? What do you want to make? What do you want to create? What effect do you want to create? It's just yours — wham! There isn't any more than that.

I mean, you've said the most superlative superlative you could say when you say somebody — somebody is the potentiality of directed creation.

He doesn't need facsimiles to remember anything. He doesn't need energy. He doesn't need terminals. He doesn't even have to communicate with anything if he doesn't want to. He's cause.

And look at cause up there at the top of the Chart of Attitudes and you will find that cause goes along with a lot of other desirable things. They're all about at the same band, and all those things exist up there at that band. All right, enough for that.

What keeps him from being that?

"Oh, there might be a hidden influence."

"Oh, what kind of a hidden influence?"

"Well, there might be."

In fact, he might run into a vacuum. And everybody knows a vacuum pulls in. That's really the truth. "He might be a vacuum." It doesn't ever occur to him that he could mock the whole thing up again afterwards.

So the state of your preclear is — actually can be graphed on a curve of the amount of ability to create which he has retained. The amount of action he can initiate is also an index. How much action does he initiate? How much is he willing to do with his hands? All of these various things are indexes.

But the primary index is how much does he wish to independently create? What is his creational desire? Now, it gets better the better he gets. That is one index that is just as solid as the Rock of Gibraltar. That is one like the communication lag index. The creative instinct of the individual: What is this creative instinct? Your preclear gets as well as that is restored, and it is a beautiful little thing to work with.

Because one day your preclear comes in — he doesn't think you know he's doing anything particularly — and one day he comes in and he says to you, he says, "You know, I always wanted to paint, and I bought a brush yesterday." Here he goes. You don't care whether he ever paints or not. That's a silly thing to do anyhow, paint. You get it on you, and so forth.

But you have restored his creative instinct. Now, it is being directed toward MEST, you see, handling MEST and meshing the MEST around, and so on. Well, he'll even unfix from that and he'll get to a much higher level of creation. He wants creation with duration. That is the level of the painter and that level is way higher than any level there is out in the society, it's up there in the stars.

It's so incomprehensibly high to Homo sapiens that he'll stand around and look at a painter with his jaw dropped. And the painter, had a picture exhibited and thought well of and so on, this is way up in the stars, this is dwelling on the Olympian heights with the gods. And it's about I would say — I would say, oh, about a hundredth of the way up the Tone Scale you're trying to bring the pre-clear up; it's on its way, you see, we've really got it pegged. All right.

Now, let's tell you some more about this hidden influence. How is a person pushed down scale? By being restrained from being. If he's restrained from being, he goes down scale. Then why and how do you possibly convince anything that could create or be anything that it should be restrained from being?

Well, I tell you how you do this. This is … You just tell him anything he's trying to be has gotten something hidden and it's bad. Something bad about it and it's hidden. And he gets convinced of this and so he doesn't want to be these things. And so he thinks he is hanging in on his privacy of him-self and he thinks that he'll violate everything if he ever steps out of his own head or steps out of his own nose or steps out of his own right ear or wherever he's saddled down to at the moment you start processing him. And he thinks that he mustn't do this and the reason he mustn't do this is because if he moved out any further he'd run into a hidden influence.

You can actually measure your preclear's case level with his belief in a hidden influence. "What do you think is in this room that you don't want to walk out into it?"

He thinks over it for a while and he says, "I don't know, there's some-thing in the corner." He doesn't say right away what's in the corner. He said, "There's something in the corner."

"What do you think might be in the corner?" Well, tell him to mock some things up in the corner, and he suddenly realizes there's nothing in the corner.

He's restrained by that shadow. In Self Analysis, this story about the fish in Lake Tanganyika and the shadows that go down to the bottom and — of the lake. The shadows are used as the bars which trap the fish, and the shadows could be called hidden influences.

Now, darkness and nothingness are quite interesting. You can never quite trust something which has nothing in it because it might have some-thing in it. Same way with blackness; blackness may not be just blackness. It may be blackness and something else. That is why blackness closes in on so many preclears. It might be blackness and something else. But remember, he's as willing to use blackness as anybody else. He's as willing to use this modus operandi as somebody else.

Once in a while, some fellow without very good sense gets going on the subject of "Well, I intend good and I'm going to use these things for good." I — some goof ball like myself. He'll run himself down scale at an awful rate of speed if he doesn't watch himself. Because he's suddenly abandoned 50 per-cent of things, just abandoned them, because he says, "I want to be the other 50 percent." He's immediately said, "There's 50 percent good and 50 percent evil and I'm going to be one of the 50 percent good." Now, he's down 50 per-cent. He's — he goes on down from there, see? He says, "What's good?" Then anything that's evaluated as good, he will become. Horrible state of affairs.

Now, you won't perceive what you won't be. That's obvious, isn't it? We've gone over this, over and over, and being is communicating. You won't be what you won't perceive and you won't perceive what you won't be.

So, of course, if you don't perceive what you won't be, you're wide-open to believe that there is a hidden influence in it. And the way you won't be it is because it has subjected you to that horrible thing known as betrayal!

And the track of any thetan is the track of betrayal. They have been betrayed!

There are two mechanisms you should know; one is the mechanism of betrayal, which is the knock-in of anchor points. One's anchor points are pulled out and then they are suddenly knocked in. That operation, when done exteriorly by somebody else is betrayal. And it gets so bad that the individual won't put out his own anchor points and pull them in himself because he's been betrayed.

And the other is being ridiculed. And ridicule is pushing the anchor points in and then pulling them out and holding them out. You can get out of any preclear the feeling he is being ridiculed by just saying, "All right, now get the idea you put your anchor points way out. Now they are being held out." He doesn't like that. He gets the feeling, the sensation of being ridiculed.

So these two things happen with the out-and-in workout of anchor points. In other words, out-and-in beingness, see, ridicule and betrayal. These are the two horrible things that happen, and that is their operation in terms of anchor points.

So if a person has been betrayed, then he won't look! One of the reasons he won't look is he wants somebody else to feel ashamed.

Now, I'll give you this little technique in passing. You double-terminal up all the people the preclear has had trouble with, just match them and just have them say, "We're sorry we hurt (whatever your preclear's name is)." And my gosh, what do you know, they just start disappearing into the limbo. Zongzong-zong! They just keep diving out of sight and disappearing and you get Mama and Papa. You get Papa mocked up double facing Papa, you know, Papa facing Papa and saying, "Oh, we're so sorry," or looking slightly toward the preclear, "We're — I'm so sorry what I did to poor Algernon." You know, the preclear begins to feel better and better.

He mocks up Mama doing this and he mocks up — you mock up family doing this and the dog's doing this and the car doing this and inanimate objects doing this and so forth, and gee, he feels better and better and better.

He's been holding on to these things to make people ashamed. So you just mock them up that people are ashamed and say, "Okay, Bud, you can let go of them."

Oh, he'll — he glories in this. By the way, he'll do this by the hour. This is wonderful.

You also mock himself up being ashamed of what he's done to others, double-terminal himself, you see? Only you'll find out he doesn't do that very much or very often.

And you can put that down as one of the techniques which you'll find yourself using. That is the technique of apology; that's matching terminals with apology. "We're so sorry." You could call the technique "We're so sorry." And you can just put that down; you just match these terminals, one facing the other, and you just have them fall away.

By the way, they do that, you see, and the terminals behave that way automatically. They start falling away from the preclear. You can match up Papa facing Papa and they'll — he'll be quite big at first, and you — the pre-clear will have a hard time getting rid of him. And all of a sudden all quite automatically, why Papa will be facing Papa saying, "I'm so sorry, what we did to poor Algernon" and swish. You mock it up again, "So sorry what we did to poor Al — " swoosh. "So sorry — " swashoosh! And he says, "Gee, this is fun." Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. Well, let him do it.

And he'll find that some of it's fantastic, some of the things you can get. Very often a person will want to mock himself up doing that, and he'll just continue that for a long time and then he feels very happy and you say that's that. Makes him feel lots better.

What this is, is just running out shame, you see, the overt act. It's just — he's been holding on to these things to make somebody apologize, so you just let somebody apologize.

Well, the reason why he's — because he is not going to put out his anchor points again, he's going to shame somebody else by holding his anchor points in, because what do you know about betrayal. The fellow says, "Look what they did to me." Well, if he's saying, "Look what they did to me," he's not going to be something else. He's going to sit there and say, "Look what they did to me." And these fellows are going around with these little purple flags and little facsimiles, saying, "Look what they did to me. Look what they did to me."

You see, it's better to be something than nothing, and people who have been betrayed are interesting, because everybody gets interested in an occluded case. They've been betrayed. All right.

Let's take a look at it. That — it's very, very amusing to you once you start running this.

Now, ridicule is something they don't brag about so you don't run this in very much. But they're still holding on to ridicule, but they'll generally be holding on to it because they ridiculed somebody else and they don't want to be in that category.

You see, in each case they were really ridiculing themselves. "Do not send to find for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." Nothing to that. The reason why the fellow is saying, "I have been betrayed, look at me," is because he did it to me and he — you see? And "he" and "me," in this case, are the same thing. So he's saying, "me," it's better for me to be here as "me" as the betrayed party than to be this character over here that everybody despises, and so forth, that did the act.

Furthermore — this is totally mechanical — there is no admiration really connected with being betrayed or being ridiculed so nothing came along and admired it out of existence. That which is not admired endures. So betrayal endures. Nobody admires betrayal, much less the person who was betrayed, and he's the person who should admire it out of existence.

So you snap somebody's anchor points out and then shove them in real hard, that's betrayal. If you pull them out and hold them, that's ridicule.

If you put somebody on the stage, force them to be on the stage in a ridiculous situation, won't let them come off the stage they feel they have been ridiculed. Forcing people to exhibit, in other words, or be seen.

So, when we look this over, then, all control is effected by hidden influences and the hidden influence is always nothingness. The thetan is under compulsion to be something, and thus is afraid of being nothing because he believes it to be a hidden influence.

You keep a thetan from being — from what he is — by convincing him that what he is, nothingness, is a hidden influence.

Practical jokers are dramatizing the hidden influence. There are many other such instances.

Now, the only fear is the fear of becoming something. And what you've got to rehabilitate, then, is you've got to rehabilitate the ability to be, which automatically rehabilitates the ability to perceive.