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ENGLISH DOCS FOR THIS DATE- Start, Change and Stop (GOL-08) - L560808

CONTENTS Start, Change and Stop
Game of Life, Lecture 8

Start, Change and Stop

A lecture given in August 1956

Thank you.

The subject of this lecture is the entrance of rough cases. What is the lowest entrance point which we have today? That lowest point is pretty low. And, oddly enough, it is the same for a low case as it is for a high case. And we have achieved that optimum whereby using the technique does not criticize the preclear.

Once upon a time we had a technique that we used on psychos. We'd say, "Look around the room and find something real." And the psycho would. He would eventually discover something real, clutch it to his bosom and so on. It would just work once, there would just be one or two items that he would find quite real and he would be very pleased, be very pleased. So that — people knew this. And the preclear would come in, sit down, auditor would say, "All right. Now, look around the room and find something real. Ha-ha."

Preclear would say, "Oh, you think I'm crazy, huh?"

Now, that won't happen today for the excellent reason that I wouldn't care if somebody walked in and said he was an Operating Thetan or if somebody walked in on somebody else's steam or was carried in with a stretcher, straight from the local spinbin, I'd run him pretty closely on the same processes.

Only one procedure that would be lower than the procedures I am talking about, would be a highly specialized procedure having to do with an individual who had lost the use of his voice, his sight or his hearing or his capability of moving his hand. Such a preclear has to be processed with some rather interesting flights of fancy on the part of the auditor.

The communication on somebody who is lying in an apparently comatose state is very difficult to establish, and it is quite often established by tactile. And you press their wrist and you just tell them, "I'm going to press your wrist here and see if you're in good communication with me." And you've noticed occasionally he flicked his eye or something like that, and you say, "Now, when I press your wrist, I want you to flick your eye if you felt that touch." And the fellow will flick his eye.

In other words, he's been lying there ostensibly in a comatose state, whereas in actuality he has been quite alert, he is still there, he is simply unable to move very much of his body. Most of the people who are in comas in hospitals are actually in this state.

So there is a level where the establishment of communication is quite difficult. And it becomes quite necessary for the auditor to become extremely inventive in order to establish communication in the first place. But as nearly as he could, he would still follow these procedures, as nearly as he could.

The lowest process which would be addressed to any case would simply be the first process of SLP 8, which is not as we were saying before "Find the preclear. Find the auditor. Find the walls," but the process which leads the preclear to find the preclear, find the auditor and find the walls. See, we've got one lower than that and this is an interesting, interesting process since it is in itself such a simplicity that an auditor will undoubtedly believe there must be much more to it. And so believing, will probably try to complicate it. But it in itself is capable of producing a full result. And that process we are calling SCS to keep our tongues from being tired out in saying Start, Change and Stop.

Now, start, change and stop, of course, is the anatomy of control. Control consists of start, change and stop. This is a cycle of action.

There are other little midpoints on a large cycle of action, but one, I suppose, could get very fancy and play these little midpoints down. There are actually two change points and a null point in the middle of the curve. It actually goes: start, change, continue, change, stop. There's a continue there on the middle of the curve that is survival itself.

But I don't know how we would run continue unless we would ask the individual to simply get out — and someday somebody may find this is therapeutic, but I myself am not an athletic type; when I go for walks, I take a motorcycle. And it would have to be somewhat on this basis: You would tell somebody that he had to keep walking as long as he could keep walking. Now, I have seen that one process, by the way, break a psychosis, so it obviously has some workability.

But in the auditing room, as far as we're concerned, we're going to run Start, Change and Stop. And these three things are run, not one after the other, but each one flat and then another one is picked up.

In other words, we run, let us say, change first. And we run it until the individual is — not for any particular reason, unless most preclears are in an obsessive change — we run change pretty flat. You know, so that he's no longer commenting on it.

And then we pick up start, and we run this start fairly flat. We do it many, many times, and then we're satisfied that this isn't producing an immediate change on the case, so we run stop. And we do this many, many times and that's apparently flat.

And it would be a vast mistake at that point to say, "This process is flat; it is finished. This individual is under the auditor's control," for the excellent reason that if you ran change again, you would find further considerations shifting in the preclear. And then if you ran start, which a little while ago was flat, you would discover once more that it was not flat, that it had unflattened somehow in running stop and change again. And so you would run start some more and that would flatten once more. And then you would run stop and flatten stop again.

Now, it would not be possible to say, since we're taking this for any level of case, it would not at all be possible for us to say how long you'd have to run the process.

I can tell you that one of the rougher processes would be this one run on somebody who was total machinery and who had never been in session. This would really be standing his hair on end. It would be quite a process. He would consider this brrr! And on a case that was in a very, very good condition, was well upscale and so on, he would consider it interesting and he would exteriorize much better. The end result of the process, if continued long enough, is exteriorization.

If a person is obsessively exteriorized, or you say inverted, it is probable that his inversion would suddenly be noticeable to him — you know, a person who can't get in his head, a person who is compulsively out of his head. And we would get a condition there where he would become aware of being outside of his head and not able to get into it and as we went along, he would probably slide back into his head and he might complain because it's now gone all black. Thetans become very puzzled as to why they can't see out of heads, you know? They think all brains should be transparent.

And the whole science of psychology (if you want to call it a science) is devoted to proving that not only are brains not transparent, but they are totally opaque. And that's why we call it the "science of opacity."

The one study of psychology is the brain, by the way. It's a physiological study, so don't ever get it mixed up with some other field. It belongs there. Somebody should study the brain. They have enough of them in cases and things like that, so it'd be a shame if somebody didn't study them. Now, although what it has to do with making a body move, I have not quite been able to discover.

But anyway, we have the person going inside his head and then coming out again, only this time he can get out if he wants to.

See, so there are three conditions which you meet, which is buttered all over the universe — "My god, where am I at now?" That's the type of case, that's the technical name for it: the "My god, where am I at?" case. He isn't in his body, he isn't out of his body, he doesn't have a body, there isn't any body because there are no walls because there's no universe, but he's being calm about it.

And this case run on SCS would gradually accumulate to himself a considerable ability, you see, to collect himself. And the first thing he's liable to find out after he'd been totally collected — and, by the way, this might not occur until you've done about five, six, eight, ten, maybe even more hours of auditing than that on him with this process — you would find that he would get collected somewhere and he would find out that he was away from that horrible thing there. "Thank heavens! What you have done for me. What you've done for me. You have assured me that I am no longer near that hateful, detestable, horrible thing — a body."

Of course, if you at this time took his gratitude as meaningful and didn't do anything more about it, he would then merely be obsessively exterior.

But if you went on he would probably not thank you, but he would slide in closer and closer to this body and the next thing you know be in its head and then be in its head for a while complaining bitterly and then the complaint would wear off, either by going into apathy or improving in tone. And he would come up and then he'd begin to tell you, "Well, it's not so bad really. I don't feel any bugs crawling on me while I'm in here." And it gradually would improve his tone and then be able to exteriorize.

But this time we wouldn't expect him to exteriorize and discover that he was exteriorized nearly so much as we would expect him to inform the auditor that he was directing the change or the start or the stop of the body from an exterior point in the room.

And if we continued the process even further, we would find he was doing it by postulate and not by beams or energy manifestations. He'd look at the body and he'd tell it to move, you know, and it'd move. Like an animal trainer putting something through whips, you know. We would have an interesting state there whereby somebody could do that.

Such a person is a dangerous person. They are social. They do not start fights at the drop of a hat always. They are very seldom found in jails, they do not contribute to the payrolls of large institutions because they don't occupy them. They probably are let — willing to let somebody else play the game too. In other words, they're undesirable people. They do not enter into the spirit of the thing here on Earth, which is chop everybody up because they are so choppable, because if I don't, they'll chop me.

That's usually the game that's being played. And they might see a larger game. They might see a third dynamic game or even a fourth dynamic game going on. And they might even get the idea someday that man ought to get together and fight the enemies of man, not the enemies that man thinks men are. You might even get them up to this point, you understand?

Now, they unfortunately get unserious about the conditions of existence if you bring them that far. You cannot convince them that they ought to do something about it right this minute. That's a very difficult thing for people to understand. They come to you and they say, "Somebody who is a Theta Clear, and why doesn't he do this and that, if he can do things so wonderfully?"

So, you send him over to Russia to bump off Khrushnev or Bulgie or something, and you say, "All right. That's fine."

And he says, "Sure. Sure. I'll do that for you."

"Good. Good, good."

And you see him the next day (and you haven't read any headlines at all) and you say, 'What happened?"

"Say, you know, it's a funny thing. I was over there and there was a lady washing clothes. And you know how they wash clothes in Russia?"

And you say, "Come on now. Didn't you do anything on this project at all?" And he'll say, "Oh yes. Yes. Yes. I looked the situation over."

"But didn't you knock them off?"

And he says, "Why?" He said, "Isn't there a nice game going on between England and Russia? I mean, you want to stop the whole thing? I mean, it isn't very dangerous. Well, what's the most that could happen? Come on now, tell me. What's the most that could happen?"

"That the countries would both get wiped out," you'd say.

"Oh, well," he said, "if it ever came to that," he said, "we could fix that up. But I don't see anybody with enough sense to push the right button if they did, you know? If they did get mad at each other."

He's very hard to convince. His level of trust is up, which is one of the best arguments I know of, by the way, in the direction of believing that God isn't always going to give you that six-shooter you think you need in order to settle your affairs.

I mean, I see people down here in the church praying and I often ask them what they're praying about — I have in the past and so forth and you know, I have a grave suspicion that an Operating Thetan like the eighth dynamic just wouldn't be really intrigued with it, if he heard it at all. Because it's in the light of "You must play this petty, two-bit, little game," you know, "You must give me great strength in order to smite mine enemy the cloth seller who gyps me on my commission." You know, I mean, you just couldn't get somebody like God interested in this sort of thing, that's all.

Of course, it'd be a very vicious thing for us to unsell the world on this idea because think of the income we would lose to the Catholic Church. Anyway. And they do need income, they do. People like that can't generate energy and enthusiasm, they have to buy it. Anyway …

Here — now, you think that's a dirty crack about Catholicism and I'm mad at Catholicism. I'm not mad at Catholicism, it doesn't exist anymore, it's just called Catholicism.

When we get a technique which with this and sufficient variation of course to keep the preclear from being bored stiff, which will run all the way up on an exteriorization, we're really pretty well there on a technique. Well, why wouldn't it go all the way up? Why would you have to do any other technique but this technique?

Well, the main thing is attention span. A preclear who is in pretty bad condition has a very poor attention span, very poor. He actually comes off of a process after a few minutes. And it's just a contest of getting him into session and he slides out of session, he gets into session, he slides out of session, and you really should vary the randomity just a little bit in order to keep him interested, although you would be surprised how absorbedly interested a preclear can be very often in this process. All right.

His response is not particularly important. His response, his actual response, is not terribly important to the technique, just get him to do it. Get him to do it. Discuss with him what is happening.

But what is happening? He has had control itself as a grouped thing. The word control is an abstract, don't you see? It's an abstract. We had to find the composite points of the abstract which were solidly contactable in order to have the abstract. So, somebody says to him, "Why don't you control yourself?" Well, he can't; it's an abstract. It doesn't have much sense. It really doesn't have much sense, you know? It has so little sense that people have begun to believe that there's very bad control extant in the world.

Well, there is no such a thing as bad control. But there is such a thing as unpositive control. See, that would be bad control. Like we tell the preclear, "Let's walk over toward the door. I didn't say that, I meant the window. I said walk, I didn't say run. Why aren't you running? Why don't you say something? Shut up."

See, this is what we used to call bad 8-C. He isn't giving the preclear a chance or the person a chance to execute a command before he interjects another command, and that is the definition of confusion.

Good control is not bad. Good control is simply positive control within the tolerance of the individual being controlled. See? He has to know he's being controlled and he has to be able to tolerate the level of control. For instance, if you picked up a body and threw it across the street against the wall, you would find out that it would be slightly secondhand. Now, it's very positive, your picking up the body and throwing it across the street, but it was damaging to the body, so therefore that could also come under the heading of bad control because it's not within the tolerance of the body. You understand?

And remember, when a person has been ill, that to walk back and forth across the floor may also be outside the tolerance of the body. So, we get a lower — slightly lower-level technique here in moving an object. And we let them sit down comfortably, so they won't fall down and we let them shift an object.

Now, it's always safest, if you just have a complete stranger on your hands as far as a case is concerned, to shift the object. And it's always a safe thing to do, in any case, if you're sounding out the case at large. If the individual is oblivious of the body and the body is not at all real to him and an object is real to him, you of course, would use the object. You see that?

But a blind man would have greater reality on the body than he would have on the object, so which is the lower technique there? The body is the lower technique, of course.

And this is a very plain, ordinary, usual, run-of-the-mill sort of a process. You would have to — it's almost unbelievable in its simplicity. It's one of these where both the auditor and the preclear should be standing, because this is better mimicry. The auditor should guide the preclear around slightly — not by touching him very much, but occasionally attracting his attention with a tap on the elbow. This gives you reality. See, there's a reality there. And we would run it on this basis: We would say to the preclear standing in here, you'd say, "You see that spot there? We'll call that Spot A. All right. And now you stand there. Now, you see that other spot over there? We call that Spot B. Now, you see that spot?"

And he says, "Yes."

And you say, "Good. All right. Now, when I tell you to change the body's position, I want you to move from Spot A to Spot B."

He understands that. And you say, "All right. Change the body's position." And he moves it from A over to B.

And you say, "Good. That's fine. That's fine."

Now, at first — if the case were having a rough time, you wouldn't ask him this, but normally it would be usual for you to say, "Did you change the body's position?"

And he'll have to think this over for a moment and he will give you his answer and regardless of what it is, you say, "Fine. That's good. And now do you see that spot over there? Now, we call that Spot C." We've got three spots so that we won't run a duplicative process on him, you see? C. All right.

"Now, when I tell you to change the body's position, I want you to move the body from Spot B to Spot C. Now, you understand that?"

And the preclear says, "Yes."

And you say, "All right. Change the body's position."

And he changes the body's position from B to C.

And you say, 'Well, did you change the body's position?"

He says, "Yes."

You say, "All right. Now, do you see this spot over here which we will call Spot A?"

Now, you understand we're not dragging any process into the past, each time we make a contract with the preclear. We're not depending on any former understanding with this process, each moment in time is new. We make each level of time a new level of time so that he doesn't have to depend on his memory. After a while, he'll just relax. He doesn't have to remember. He's not running a skill here, you see; it's not a new thing he's learning to do. So you unconfuse him from that and the best way to do it is to say, "You see this Spot A, which we will call A here? All right. Now, when I ask you to change the position of the body, I wish you to move it over there to that spot, which we will call B. Now, you see that spot over there? That's B. All right. Now, you got that?"

And he says, "Yes."

And you say, "All right. Change the body's position."

And he moves it over there to B.

You understand this? Now, that's the way you do it. That's all there is to it, on the change basis.

Now, on start, we simply emphasize start. There's the preclear standing there and we say, "Now, you see the wall over there?"

And he says, "Yes."

"Now, when I give you this command, I want you to move the body in that direction. Now when I say start" — in other words, we just head him — "and when I say start, why, I want you to start the body."

And he says, "All right. All right, that's fine."

You say, "All right. Start."

And he starts moving the body, see?

And you say, "That's fine."

Now, he's liable to tell you something daffy like, "You know, I — I had to stop it and change it too."

And you say, "Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes, I know that. Well, that's fine. You did start the body, though, didn't you?"

And he says, "Yes. Yes. I did start the body but I also stopped it," and so forth.

What's happening here? You're watching the word control ungroup; you're getting these separate motions apart. And as you get them apart and get them distinct one from another, of course, an individual's ability to control the body increases and he can then get more confidence in being able to control it from a greater and greater distance, you see?

He doesn't have to be smashed into it or buttered all over in the places where it might go and meeting it coming and going, you might say. All right.

So the next command is — you just would say to him then, "All right" — you'd face him around and you'd say, "All right. Now, when I tell you to start the body, start the body."

And he would say, "All right."

And you say, "All right. Start the body."

And he moves away from wherever he's standing there and you say, "That's fine." Now, you don't stop the body, you don't tell him to stop. Get that point. All right.

And the next — third command on the thing is you ask the preclear to — you tell him, "I'm going to ask you to get your body moving over there toward that wall, you see, and as I — when we get it moving over there toward that wall, somewhere along the line I'm going to say stop. And when I say stop, I want you to stop the body. Is that all right?"

And he says, "That's right. That's all right with me."

You say, "All right. Now, get it moving." (You don't use start, stop and change there. You say, "Get it moving.") And he moves it over there, and you say, "Stop."

And the preclear stops.

And you say, "Good. Did you stop the body?"

And he says, "Yes."

You turn him around, head him in the other direction, point to the door, say, "We'll have the body move in that direction this time. All right. And when I tell you — I'm going to tell you to start the body moving and then I'm going to tell you to stop." See, a brand-new contract every time.

And he says, "All right." And then he moves off and stops. All right.

The final thing is here that the preclear will flatten each one of these things in turn. You may have to do it sixty times on change and a hundred and twenty times on start and fifty times on stop, at which time you would run change again, don't you see?

And you walk around with him and help him out and he will feel the mimicry context of this. If you simply sit there and do it, he will eventually feel uncomfortable.

And that is Start, Change and Stop.