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ENGLISH DOCS FOR THIS DATE- Black Mock-ups, Persistence, MEST (2ACC-6) - L531118B
- Step I of 8-C - Orientation (2ACC-5) - L531118A
- Step II - Automaticities (2ACC-7) - L531118C
- Waste a Machine (2ACC-8) - L531118D

CONTENTS Step II: Automaticities

Step II: Automaticities

A lecture given on 18 November 1953

And this is November the 18th, the first afternoon lecture.

The first thing I want to tell you is that while I appreciate the fact that sooner or later you may feel you're going to instruct in this subject, I hope I'm not teaching your notebook. I hope I'm not auditing your notebook. That's a fact. That's right, I hope you're not auditing on that basis.

When you sit down in front of a pc, you want this stuff in your head. And I'm trying to cover it over and over, backwards and forwards over the same ground and so forth, to put it in your head. Savvy? I want you to have this material so when you sit down and the preclear starts to scream, scream, scream and jump up and jump out the window and so forth, and go through the normal American evolution of being processed, that you got the data, pang! right there — verbally. And if you've got the data right there verbally, by that time, you'll be having no trouble with your case either.

Now don't get self-conscious. If you still want to put down notes in your notebook, that's all right with me. I'm not telling you not to put notes down in a notebook. Go ahead. But make sure that I'm putting it in your head and not your notebook. A lot of people have a beautiful circuit, and some people have gone all the way through a university teaching a notebook. When they get all the way through a course, sometimes some goofball professor says, "Now, let me see your notebooks and make sure that they're thoroughly taught." (audience laughter) That's right.

I know one professor, used to grade solely on the notebook. So we had a system: We just handed him in the same notebooks at the end of every course. He took them. Nobody ever bothered to appear in class, he never noticed. He'd gotten it — teaching — down to an automaticity the like of which we'd never heard of before.

But this morning, by George, while I was processing you, we had some of the processing going down in a notebook. Well now, by golly, I didn't like auditing that notebook because the person doing it needed processing. All right.

Now, let's understand the purpose of these lectures I'm giving you. They aren't actually what you would put under the label of "I'm trying to teach you something." The truth of the matter is, I'm trying to unteach you. If I'm doing anything, it's that. And if I can succeed in unteaching you a lot of automaticities and preconceptions and so forth, we'll be successful.

You wonder why I said we ought to have something called "American procedure." We ought to have something called American procedure very, very neatly, because this is the most automatic country on the face of the earth today.

Talking about space opera. Space opera used to be a lot of fun, you know. You'd spend two hours getting into your suit, and you get all this equipment and you get it all here and there and you stuff it and fill up your pockets, and then you climb up with this two hundred pounds of stuff, up a ladder that's about thirty feet tall, to get into some kind of an airport. And you get inside this ship, you see, and then you regulate about five hundred switches and you have to pair — repair four or five electronic circuits and you patch some things together with chewing gum and you strap yourself down in a seat and take off. And then you navigate like mad, going three times the speed of light, trying to navigate by stars that are invisible for some days. And then you land someplace for the skin of your teeth, and boy, you really knew you did something. That's right. You really knew you did something. All right.

Space opera toward the end of that time got into this kind of a circumstance. (You did this over and over and over again.) A fellow went down and he climbed aboard a little trolley and he got in this trolley and it took him on up and he landed in the ship, see. And he'd sit down in the chair, and the chair strapped him in and adjusted his oxygen and so forth. And he — finally it just — the chair decided that he was well enough seated and well enough strapped in, and the ship took off on a prearranged course to a prearranged destination, at a prearranged speed. The chair and instruments and so forth took very good care of him, fed him and breathed him until he got there, and landed him safely at the spaceport. He got out. Nobody'd knew he'd done a thing because he hadn't done anything — it was all automatic. The people who had done it was the technicians. All right.

Let's compare that with what we're doing with a preclear. And we find out that in those areas where an individual is accustomed to having everything done for him — you push a button and so on and that happens — we're going to get rough cases. And we're going to get the roughest cases out of the person who's pushed the most buttons. Just like that. He — his life is running on a push-button basis. It means that the society itself is busy keying in all of his automaticity. And one of the first things it keys in is occlusion. Pang! There he goes, see? It's all automatic. He knows he didn't do anything.

Now, if you could just get a preclear to go out — just get him to go out and take an axe and knock a fence to pieces, all the way down the fence — the end of that time he'd know he'd done something. Wasn't any fence there anymore, there's just a bunch of splinters. See? He'd know that he'd done something. You get that?

Now, this automaticity goes further than that. It goes viciously further than that. It goes to the point where they expect the auditor to do it all. They think somehow or other if they punch a button on the auditor, the auditor will run for a certain number of hours and they will be Clear. The hell they will! They won't, and that's the end of it.

So it's up to you as an auditor to knock out the second stage. And it comes under Step II of SOP 8-C, which is automaticity. And the way you do this … You see, the earliest shadow of this is, "Mock up the body." You have him mock up a body — mock up the body several times, till he's used to having the body outside him and he doesn't collapse a terminal on it the second he stands outside. And then he's outside.

Why are we doing that to a body? Been doing that to a body in areas where I've been around for about eight months. The reason why is, he's setting up the most automatic thing he's got. It talks for him, it squawks for him, it speaks and sees and hears and it even has gotten to a point where it combs its own hair, and it drives properly without direction and so on. Cause level of the body may be pretty good on a number of subjects. But a person stops causing them.

Having a hobby is simply being cause level over some kind of an automaticity. It's being a supercontrol over the top of something that is supercontrolled. You see that? Somebody takes up the hobby of postage stamps; well, that's not very automatic. But the fellow that takes up the hobby of ham radio is at least being cause level over a terrific amount of automaticity. And you know, he keeps on being cause as long as he keeps building and rebuilding equipment.

If you go into a ham radio shop or if you go into a ham radio shack, you'll find equipment and machinery and everything lying around all the time, and it's — "he's going to build" and "he has just fixed." If you'd happened to clip the switch and listen to a couple of hams talking, what are they talking about? Are they talking about their wives or children? No. Those poor people, the wives and children, have been forgotten long since — except when Irma comes in, is permitted to say, "Hello Joe. Yes, I'm glad that you installed the 6018 like you did. Mm-hm. Well, goodbye, Joe." The wife's permitted to step into the thing to that degree. (She's kind of automatic too by that time.) And when we have a conversation, it is a highly technical conversation about what they did to make something else more automatic. And a ham radio quits — he just quits cold — one of these boys stops when he can't build it any better. I swear, some of them, if they really thought they were reaching that goal, would at least plug in something on the wrong power line and blow it out. And you can trace back most of the accidents and so forth they have to just this anxiety "not to have it work too well."

Now, some people run bodies that way. The body starts to work all right and then they get afraid that it's going to get too doggone automatic and they start clipping off the various things it can do and making it tough for themselves. They wreck it in order to repair it. Nearly every case you have coming in has been pushed into this category. (Except somebody who has been directly PDHed. And he's had an automaticity set up for him that is simply dependent upon an earlier automaticity that he'd like to be unconscious. That would be fun too.)

All right. What's this amount to in auditing? It means that you, as an auditor, have got to be prepared to be cause.

How can you be cause? Well, the best way to be cause is to use the most basic mechanisms that you can possibly use to resolve a case. If you want to resolve a case of occlusion, the best thing to do is to take the very mechanism which takes occlusion and makes occlusion and continues occlusion. And what is that? It's an automatic machine that makes conclusions and occlusions and it makes exclusions and it's got all of these various things and it keeps jamming them in on the pc. He was happily using this machine on other people and other people and other people and other people, and this was all swell; except one day the darn thing got busted and wouldn't go, and worked all of a sudden on him! The machine's working on an "other person" target when it's working on his body.

When he thinks he has lost somebody that he needs — get this — he then has lost somebody he needs. Is that so? So the machine which is set up to run on "lost," clicks in. That's real simple, isn't it? The relay switches on these — basic machinery is Q and A. It's — "Lost?" The machine goes, "Lost!" see? "Crunch, crunch, crunch." So it loses him. See? And it makes him invisible.

Now, he's got other machinery that'll set up the same way. He drives somebody insane, so forth, he's got a machine there that he's going to use to drive somebody crazy. He keeps using it, keeps using it, and he keeps using it. And then all of a sudden, he suddenly realizes he has driven somebody a little bit off, he has reduced somebody's sanity, and the machine goes to work — on him.

He goes to college and decides the best way to do and get through college real hard is to concentrate like mad. And he concentrates and concentrates and concentrates until he gets cross-eyed. You can always tell this boy because when you tell him to look at the space around an object, his attention immediately snaps to a point beyond the object, slightly beyond the object. It doesn't even converge on the object. It's no space in the object, is what he gets. See, a scarcity of space — concentration. Too concentrated an attention. So he sets up this machine so that he can study. He sets it up so he can go into a lecture room and sort of push a little button, sit there, and he'll come out and at examination time he expects this machine to unreel for him three and three-quarters meters of chemistry. School system sets it up so he'll do that too. They keep telling him: "A student has to learn how to study. And the most part of that is concentration." So he sets up machines that do this.

And then one day he has to concentrate too hard on life. How does he do that? Well, he gets into an automobile accident and just before the accident, a glaring headlamp is right between his two headlamps, and he's looking right straight at that glaring headlamp, and then there's a sudden crash. He's convinced by now, but it turned the machine on. What machine? Thorough concentration turns on the machine which thoroughly concentrates. This is an actual machine. Does it have nuts and bolts? No, it doesn't. It has just as much nuts and bolts as that microphone has nuts and bolts. In other words, it's just the real universe and so it is something he put there with postulates. This is all there is to that machine. But he recognizes it in terms of automaticity and machinery.

Why does he want automaticity in the first place? This is very simple. He wants automaticity because of the subject of randomity.

What is randomity? Randomity is the amount of predicted and unpredicted motion which a person has. That's all. It's a ratio. The amount of predicted motion in ratio to the amount of unpredicted motion which the individual has. And he likes to have about 50 percent predicted motion and about 50 percent unpredicted motion, and that's his idea of tolerance level on randomity. What is randomity? Unpredicted motion.

You go down the street. You go down the same street every day. Nothing ever happens on the street. You walk into the same gates. You ring the same doorbell. You go into the same house. You eat the same dinner. And so forth and so on, and, boy, there's nothing unpredicted there. And you go down that street every day, so forth. And after a while, you're driving around, and you suddenly decide you'll drive down that street and have a wreck; at least put something on that street that is an unpredicted motion. So you've got to pretend you didn't predict the motion in order to have an unpredicted motion.

That's the tombstone which sits over the head of every unaware thetan: "I've got to pretend that the motion is unpredicted in order to have an unpredicted motion." And that is the basis on automaticity. The basic problem is he wants to be surprised. Now you get a thetan to take — mock up a box: "Now put something in the box that you don't know is there, so that when you lift the lid you won't know it's there and you'll be surprised." So he'll do that. And then he lifts the lid and it goes pang! And he's very happy about it. That's unpre­dicted motion.

Now, when you give a person all unpredicted motion, or nearly all unpredicted motion, boy, he gets real frantic — he hasn't enough predicted motion to stabilize him. So he doesn't know where he is, he gets lost. Why? He has to be able to predict where the eight corners of this room will be tomorrow morning to know there's a room here. Right?

All right. Supposing you fixed it up, or fixed him up, by processing machinery till the eight corners of this room started appearing all over the universe. Now, he wouldn't know where this room was going to be, so he didn't know where he was supposed to be the next morning. Rrrrrr! But that is super-unprediction. Now, that is too much randomity.

Now, as far as automaticity is concerned, it immediately springs out of this: You have to say, "I pretend I don't know anything about it," so that a certain effect will occur. In other words, a person wants to be partially an effect as well as partially cause.

Well, he starts out with a chessboard. He mocks up a chessboard. And he decides to play chess with himself. So he sits on one side of the board, and then he moves around to the other side of the board and then he moves back to the first side of the board and moves a knight. And he moves to the second side of the board and moves a bishop to counter the move of the knight. And he moves back to the first side of the board and he moves out a pawn in order to guard the knight. And then he moves over to the other side of the board and puts a knight up in place in order to check the bishop and so on. And he looks at this and he knows, each time, what the motion's going to be. Of course, chess is a very unrandom game.

You can forecast chess practically with the first — given the first three moves of the game and two average players, you can always predict the end of the game, poom! That's a very unrandom sort of a game. It's a very interesting game, I guess. But they had lots of time in India. So, anyway, even with a game like this, a person says, "Lookit, somebody else has got to be on the other side of that board." All right.

So he goes over on the other side of the board, and he sits down on the other side of the board and he says, "I am somebody else." That's the first stage. Then he comes back to the first side of the board.

Little kids do this. You can observe this. And they sit down the first side of the board and say, "Now my name is Bill and I'm making this move. And I go around to the other side of the board, now my name is Joe and I'll make this move. Now I'll go around here," and he'll — pretty soon you'll hear — you'd hear the person saying, as he was being Joe, "Bill, that was too clever for me."

Well, the next real stage of this is a very simple one. He sits on one side of this board and he says, "Now there is a person on the other side of the board." And if he's a real able thetan, he simply mocks one up, endows it with life and then occludes its identity. But gives it an identity and occludes its actual origin. And its actual origin is that he made it.

Occlusion of actual origin is the first break over into an automaticity. An automaticity is something that will be done that something doesn't want to know anything about. The heck of it is, that there is not a thetan who can still make a body twitch, who himself is not capable of doing everything one hundred times better than some cockeyed apparatus that he set up that would trigger when he thought a random thought. He could always do it better. And yet he's got machines that make his mock-ups, he's got machines that unmock things, he's got machines that unmock the mest universe, he's got things that occlude the mest universe, he's got things that unocclude it, he's got things that make it solid, he's got things that put up barriers where barriers are not supposed to be. He's done these things all the way down the track and he's still got all his machinery. And he wonders why he's in a dwindling spiral.

And the final end product of all of this is a body. And now you ask somebody to get out of the body! The body has been eating for him, thinking for him, spitting for him and doing everything for him — giving him all of his sensations, so forth. As far as he's concerned, this thing called a body is the most automatic gadget he ever heard of. It's learned how to play bridge, it's learned how to play chess, it's learned how to play the piano.

And you get some boy in his last stages, he will simply tell you, as he sits down to the piano, "Well, I don't pay much attention to it — my hands do all that." Sure, and he's got a sheet of music in front of him where Brahms is doing all the music. What's he doing sitting at the piano? (Probably is nobody listening to him either.) I mean, so it goes from "all ability to do everything," such as look at a piano and say, "Let's see, the way you play the piano is so and so, and probably melodies could come out of the — and let's see those strings. Those strings are — ah! very interesting, those strings are various wavelengths and they probably chord in this fashion, and that's probably going — goes on a cycle of eight, doesn't it? That's very fine. All right." Crash! Something twice as good as the "Moonlight Sonata." You think so? You think not.

Probably this looks very horrifying to you: the thought of looking at the doggonedest biggest truck with thirty-two speeds forward — and maybe you couldn't even drive a car, and you look at this thing and you say, "Let's see, now, the motor and so forth burns some kind of fuel or something. Yep. It's got wheels — they could probably go round. And let's see, the steering wheel goes this way, and now all you've got to do is slide it in. There must be some way to make it go forward and there must be some way to make it go backwards. The connections are so and so. Oh, those make it go forward and (mumble) backwards. Ah, that's all we need. Okay. Now that goes down there and there's some kind of a storage — there's juice down there someplace. Yeah, that connects up with a little, and one of them starts circling in, and there's got to be a flow of fuel over here so it comes out. Now, push the button there, throttle her here, push it in," and go off down the road. Doing a far better job than a truck driver.

You see how foreign that philosophy is to the current philosophy that if you just study real hard, and if you drive one to get the experience, about fifteen years, you will eventually know something about a truck — at least to the degree of being an assistant driver on a transcontinental run.

And of course we all know that an airplane pilot has to have four thousand hours in the air on all types of multiengine aircraft before anybody would trust him to sit in the passenger seat, practically. We know that.

All right. Contrast that with a fellow who goes out and he says, "Hm. Hm. Hm. Yeah, there's (mumble) — mm-hm, mm-hm. Gee, this thing must take a nice line of balance. Well, all right, let's take it into the sky and find out." And then he'll say, "What the hell am I driving it from here for anyway," and go outside and put a beam on it and lug it across, the same system. Super-super-superautomaticity.

The more automatic things get, the less the individual. There's a definite law. The less automatic things are, the greater the feeling of accomplishment and the greater the knowingness. The more automaticity, the less the knowingness. The more automaticity, the less the certainty. The less automaticity, the more the certainty. The less the automaticity, the less the impacts. The more the automaticity, the more the impacts. Savvy? It's a very simple problem.

So we're taking Step II. And Step II consists of knocking out the machinery.

And let's just knock it out and to hell with it — you can always put it back! This is one machine that if you take it apart even vaguely in an orderly fashion … If you at least pull the balance wheels out of this watch on the order of the first balance wheel that shows itself, one after the other — if you'll just go about it in that orderly a fashion and so on, it'll come out to the smoothest, slickest, cleanest job you ever saw in your life. Well, you'll be able to do anything. This doesn't mean you have to be permissive and let the preclear do anything he wants to do; because his favorite machine is the one you're gunning for.

What do we get at the end of all machinery gone? We get somebody who can do anything. Just literally anything.

Somebody was talking to me the other day that — who has no bearing on this, particularly, but this shows you what, on a relatively low level, a person can do. As a kid I used to have a lot of fun picking up the know-how on something else to do. And I'd pick up the know-how and then I'd be bitterly criticized by somebody — oh, but bitterly! You'd have thought I'd robbed the mint or something, you see? Because I could then do what I had picked up to do, but insisted that I could do it. And of all the arguments! Brother! They knew it took experience and so forth, and that fact I never found out.

And nobody was ever able to teach me this until sometime during the war I was running a corvette, and I had been called one time too many on an attack in the dark of night.

The favorite time for the subs to attack was around twelve, one o'clock, when it was nice and dark, you know. A little bit later in the war they were getting even worse. They used to attack at twelve or one o'clock after the captain of the sub had finished breakfast — after a late breakfast, you know, they'd attack the convoys — when he had good light, you know, and could see them. But early in the war they were still being foolishly cautious. I've never found out why they were being cautious early in the war, because there was certainly nothing attacking them!

Why, I'd just been called one too many times at one o'clock in the morning. You know, when you're called — you've been up all day and then you're called first at eleven o'clock, but that was a log that your sound operator picked up; and then you were called at 11:22 (you'd just gotten back to sleep), and this time it was an empty lifeboat. And no fight in it, so you'd go back to bed and at 12:01 (oh, you were really asleep that time, you see), ring! and up you would go again to find out, of course, that it was merely a message which had come in on the battle channel that there was a battle going on just to the south of you. You didn't have anything to do with that, so you went back to bed again.

Well, the only trouble with this, and the way that the automaticity got laid in was, of course, I wanted it to be laid in, but I remember this sequence very vividly: at first, I merely had one call buzzer. You know, they hit it twice and I would hit the bridge. That's all, I mean, it was very simple. They hit it twice, I'd hit the bridge and then I'd hit the general alarm gong — if there was anything wrong. But war was speeding up a little bit, so we finally got up to two bops on this buzzer, which would simply go bzz-bzz rather calmly up above my bed, and they would hit the general alarm simultaneously.

Well, it was quite interesting because the general alarm gongs which they were issuing in World War I were merely automo, World War II, were merely automobile horns. They weren't general alarm gongs at all. They were stuff that they'd taken out of Buicks and Packards and automobiles, yo see, and they'd just park them all the way around the ship and these horns would suddenly open up.

Somebody'd throw a big lever on the bridge and that'd switch on all these horns all through the ship. And one, of course, would sit just outside my cabin. Bong! see? On would go the horn, and then two buzzers. Well, it was getting difficult to get out even with that, you see? That's — you get really staggery after a while and kind of sleepy. You know, your body isn't hitting too well, and you're supposed to be in the state of beautiful sadness of exhaustion because it is a war, and you're supposed to be doing something.

So a telephone was run in. So the telephone bell, the buzzer, and the general alarm gong were hitting then, see? Well, that was quite adequate and got along for a while — until I missed one. So we put in another one. We put back into operation the old whistle tube. So another lookout would — on the upper bridge — would get on this whistle tube; and it screamed in my ear, right there, and I'd be out on the bridge with the whistle tube. Well, that was all right. But I got through all of those, and one time didn't turn out for GQ and neither did the executive officer. It was, I think, our fifth GQ of the same night, and so they — after that they sent a messenger down too.

In other words, we were actually building an automatic system. I was trying not to be there, you see, and the war was saying "be there." And my God, I never realized that an automatic system had been worked up until about 1946. About the spring of 1946, I was walking down the street, and a Buick pulled up to the curb, right near me, and blew its horn. And it set off this machinery. It set off the whole cockeyed works. And I got sleepy and I — I got sleepy and I got groggy and I got a sort of a frantic feeling, and I looked around and couldn't find what I was looking for, which was, of course, the bridge steps, and they were not in Los Angeles. And we got this thing, and it just got worse and worse. Every time I'd hear an automobile horn after that and so forth, I'd get nervous. It's a — upset. I knew I was supposed to go someplace, and I couldn't quite locate where I was supposed to go or what was supposed to happen. So I'd take it out on the automobile. And I'd say, "Well, that goddamn fool, what's he doing sitting there honking his horn!"

All right. I've only told you this for one reason. I want to show you that Los Angeles is not in the North Atlantic. Nor yet, is it in the North Pacific — even though in the Pribilofs some gay soul, during the war, planted the sign: "Los Angeles City Limits." They really aren't out there, they're actually just before you reach Hollywood. But they had it in the Pribilofs. Los Angeles is a small village which is located very close to the Salton Sea. They have some interesting press relations with the rest of the world, but that's about all.

Anyway. Here we have, all across the line, automaticity. It's the right signal in the wrong place, making you reach for and try to attain a goal which geographically is not present. And when an automatic machine starts doing that, we get anxiety, demand for motion, feeling of danger in the environment. All of these things come right on in: tiredness, semiunconsciousness — all of these things. What are they coming out of? They're coming out of one of these darn pieces of machinery. That's all there is to it.

But the only machine on that whole channel that would count even vaguely is probably back there, for this body, a couple of hundred thousand or a couple of hundred million years someplace, where it's all indoctrinated, see? It's supposed to answer to a certain stimulus-response.

Very early on the genetic line — even an anthropologist, a Darwinian, has long been recognizing this — that there's a sudden screech at night, and a fellow turns around and starts to go into action with his teeth or something. Very often he will roar.

By the way, did you ever do that? Be startled at night and turn around and yell? Roar like an animal? Something like that. I've seen people do it. They are jumped suddenly, or startled. Well, an automaticity goes on in the body which tries to repel things away from it with sound.

Well, I imagine that you'd see that the fingernails tried to shoot out a little bit longer and get a little sharper right about the same time. Certainly this action happens: the palm of the hand develops sufficient sweat to permit a person to hold on easily to rock. And the soles of the feet develop sufficient moisture to be able to stick to what they're on, so that a person can get traction.

And you find anybody who has moist hands, he's in a state of perpetual signal saying, "Danger. Danger." And the equipment for him to put the automatic machine into action isn't present. There's no bridge ladder. See, something like the automobile horn is saying, "GQ-GQ-GQ," and he isn't able to find the bridge ladder. So he's half-unconscious, he's stumbling around, he's in a state of what they laughingly call "nervous anxiety." It's just "unable to finish a cycle of motion." Not nervous anxiety, that's one of these complicated definitions — doesn't mean a thing. It's just this thing: He can't finish the started cycle of motion. This machine is set to start running at any time "signal X" happens in the environment, see? When signal X occurs from the individual or the environment, the machine starts running.

Yeah, but the environment's shifted! And what do you know, man has progressed as well, in this society, as he has been able to continue to be cause over a changing environment. He's never adjusted to the environment. He's adjusted ahead of the environment, where he has survived. And so we have a continually changing environment, so the bridge steps are never present. The fellow is not in that locale all the time. The situation is never the same the second time.

So you get your overt act-motivator sequences. The situation: He's got a machine set up to whereby he's learned how to box. So when somebody takes a poke at his jaw, even though he's unconscious, why, he hits the other fellow in the solar plexus. See? That's an overt act. Now the other fellow goes down.

So someday, somebody comes along and hits him in the brisket, and he of course knows what he's supposed to do now. What? Go down. See, the other — it's — the machine's rigged so that's the way it happens, you see?

But somebody, fellow — some fellow comes along someday and hits him like that, where's he supposed to fall? He's supposed to fall in the exact geographical location where the first time he dropped a guy. That's where he's supposed to fall. So ever since, he's trying to fall down on "spot X," which is a thousand miles away from where he is. He's never going to fall down on spot X, that's all. So an overt act-motivator sequence stays in suspension.

The machinery of attack and offense, defense and getaway, and apology, is in continual restimulation. Just continual. So a fellow goes along the time track saying, "What time track? Where am I? Just — if I could just get my feet down someplace and say, 'This is X.' Ha-ha-ha! Maybe I'm supposed to pass out when I reach X. But that doesn't matter as long as I've at least got X." Because it takes X to get the machinery running again, see? Then he feels it'll all come out all right.

But it's never going to. An automaticity never answers a second occasion. And the prime mistake that a thetan makes when he sets up all these beautiful gimmicks and gadgets, is that no matter how wonderful it was, it will never act for the second occasion.

He puts machines away and forgets them so that they will act for a second occasion. But they never act for the second occasion. Some modified version — contradicted how many times, checked and counterbalanced — make it poorly workable the second time. And it goes on in this purely workable fashion.

You sit down at the wheel of a racing car, and if you've got lots of experience as a race driver — tremendous experience as a race driver — and you drive that car automatically, some kid is going to come along who's sixteen or seventeen and this is his second race, and although every veteran driver on the track is going to say, "My God, who let that goddamn fool on this track! He ought to be shot, outlawed, the three A's ought to throw him on his ear," and everything else, the kid still wins the race! Why?

Now, people go through this second stage — they realize that they have become too unalert. It's all too automatic. And they all of a sudden give the machinery a kick and step back and take a look at what they're doing. And just by the process of consciously doing it.

Here's a guy, he becomes a veteran driver. All of a sudden he realizes he just lost his fifth consecutive race. Something's wrong. Well sure, it's wrong. So he looks this thing over carefully and decides to drive in another fashion. And this time he decides to drive the car, not to rely on the training that old Bill Wheelwright slipped him when he was a kid, because that seems passe. He's now going to drive the car.

So he drives the next race and he's a little better. And then he consciously drives the next race, and he's a little better. And then he real consciously drives that next race, and the quivery feelings he was having by changing over style and things like that — these things are going by the boards. He isn't laying in another pattern. He's becoming more and more in command of the automaticity, simply by doing it in the mest universe.

If you can just coax somebody to climb up the side of the Empire State Building — outside it — he would lose, I assure you, about the fifth trip up, all fear of height. By doing what? He's just taking command of and keying out all of his machinery.

So, you see, we have this truth, sitting back of this, about training. But people think that this is training. That's not what's happened. The person sets up a machine to do something, then depends upon the machine, then the machine lets him down. Then he decides to hell with this automaticity and he simply decides from there on to be cause.

For instance, I was taking your pictures there a short time ago. I had some of the most beautiful, beautiful photography machines you ever saw. I mean, I just — it was just gorgeous. I mean, they checked over everything automatically and saw that it was all right and it's all wrong and that the time was proper and the bulbs were set. It just checked it over beautifully. And then as time went on, why, the flashbulb wasn't in, the shutter was set at the wrong speed, and — I mean, what was happening? The machine was breaking down. Because the machine is only as good as the person is conscious of it, and no better. And as he becomes less and less conscious of the machine, he becomes worse and worse.

So all of a sudden I just decided to take pictures again. I go around and each time I look at the camera, I say, "How the hell does this thing work," see? Ss-ss, boom. "Well, and this is — slides, so on, that's right." Why? It's obvious how the mechanism works. You can look at it. You go around the front and you look in the lens to see if the shutter is open or closed. Not is the thing on "T" or a fiftieth of a second.

I would have royally loused up the picture I was taking of you this morning because the camera — this beautiful piece of automaticity — was jammed on wide-open, no matter where you turned the shutter. Well, immediately that you looked at the camera, you could see that the shutter blades were wide-open. This is immediately apparent. But if you looked at the dials that were supposed to tell you about some other dials, which are supposed to tell you about some other dials . . .

Reminds me of a fellow that taught me something about diesel engines one time. Yeah, we all had to learn something about diesel engines because diesel engines they made during the war didn't run. And they were stationary — they'd take big, huge, stationary, light-plant engines, you know, and strip all of the iron off them, supplant it all with aluminum, and then put them on a derrick and put them into a ship, and we run them at variable speeds. Ha-ha! Real cute trick. So you had engines 50 percent of the time. And sometimes even during an attack on submarines or something, your engines would keep going long enough for you to get away from the depth charges you just dropped. And the few times that engines would stop, well, ships were expendable because the navy yard and shipyard workers have to work, you see? So it all worked out for the best in this best of all possible worlds.

But it is embarrassing when engines keep stopping like that. So they decided that anybody going aboard this new type of corvette was going to have to — to skipper one — was going to have to learn its engines too. This is an insult to — of any bridge man, you see?

But I got to listening to this guy. He was an enlisted man and he knew what he was talking about — almost synonymous. And this fellow had worked with these engines a long time. And he says, "Now," he says, "I want to teach you about gauges. I want to teach you all about these little 'pyrometers.' The name of the gauge is a pyrometer. It tells you hot — how hot the engine is. Now, you know that a diesel engine has to run at a certain heat level in order to produce enough combustion on the injection." So he says, "Now, you — this pyrometer, you put it up there — you can put up this pyrometer and," he says, "you pay close attention to the pyrometer." And he said, "And after you've carefully read the pyrometer, which tells you how hot the water is and so forth, and after you've gone around and read all the rest of the meters," he says, "then you go around and take a look at the engine." And he says, "You put your hand on the water intake pipe and find out how hot it is. Now," he says, "you should have a big tub sitting somewhere near the engine so that you can throw the valve open and fill the tub halfway in order to see how clean or how dirty the water is that's pouring through that thing, and whether or not you can put your hands in it. Then," he says, "you go around to the other end of the engine and you look at the bearings on it to see whether or not they have oil on them because this glints in the light." He says, "But be sure and read those meters!" (audience laughter)

As a consequence of just that piece of instruction, we were all broken down outside of a harbor one day, and I kept yelling down at the engine room — trying to use words to effect something in this society, heh-heh! — and kept yelling at the engine room and finally said, "Oh, to hell with it," and went down there.

"Camshaft on the starboard engine won't budge. No oil. Must be bent. Must be warped."

Just looked at it — nothing, nothing. "Nothing wrong — getting oil."

"Must be warped. That must be what's wrong with her."

I said, "No. There's probably something dry on it, if it's not turning. It's probably frozen someplace along the line. Probably frozen."

"Well, if you did get it unfrozen, you couldn't do anything about it because this gauge over here that says it's getting oil. . ."

I just remembered this guy just in time, see? And I took a look at this gauge, and sure enough, the engine was not running, and the oil pressure pump was not running — which the engineer has neglected to note — and the oil pressure gauge was reading sufficient pressure. Wasn't that cute! The pump wasn't running that gave it the pressure!

So I sent for a couple of big pipe clippers and cut the pipes of it off and jammed the two ends together on a piece of rubber hose so that no oil went through the gauge. And got a piece of crocus cloth and held it on the shaft, while somebody rotated the shaft down at the other end, took an oilcan and squirted it full of oil, we started the engine and it ran.

You know, after that I suddenly realized that everybody that went aboard one of those ships that wasn't willing to go down in the engine room every once in a while, would have trouble with his engines; and I never had trouble with another one of those engines. Never did have any more trouble with them.

Why? Because every once in a while I'd go down in the engine room and take a look at them. And they'd sit there and they'd run. Furthermore, I'd often go along the side of the ship and take a look at their exhaust ports, and if they started pouring out vast clouds of black or green or white smoke or something like that, why, I'd get on the phone and say, "What the hell is happening down there now?"

"Oh, sir, we — we just — we just turned on the — the air injector too quick. That's all. We won't do it again."

On the ball, see? Well, as long as a skipper was willing to let his engine room run automatically, his engine room didn't run. Why? Because you didn't have very many people that could run engines. Tells you any ship in which anybody's not interested goes to hell.

And it tells you any body — body, now — in which the fellow isn't being cause twenty-four hours of the day, goes to hell. And I don't care whether you're talking about its eyesight or its liver or anything else, it goes to hell just like a ship because it's just a complex organism which is set up automatically.

Now, that doesn't mean that you should do all of your breathing. But it's a good thing, once in a while — what do you know — to stop your breathing and start it again. It'll make you live for a while, you know? Breathing machine is never going to go to pieces if you do it.

I'll show you what I mean. If you — here's a beautiful example of automaticity.

Now, take a breath.

Mm-hm. Now let it out.

Now just take the normal kind of a breath that you take.

Now let it go a little quicker than you ordinarily do.

Now take another normal breath.

Now let it go.

Now take another normal breath.

Now let it go.

Another normal breath.

Now let it go.

Normal breath.

Now let it go.

Now take a normal breath and hold it a little longer.

Now refuse to let it go.

And let it go. (pause)

What's happened to your breathing now? Did you go on having to breathe? Huh? Did it really lapse back into automaticity or just go on breathing? Or did you have to go on breathing?

I'm very unwilling that upsets your breathing for the rest of the day. But do you see that I very well could, with that process? It could just set it up for the next month — you'd have to remember to take every breath. Boy, you'd consider this a real hardship. And you'd say, "Well, gosh, all of my attention would be occupied, then, with breathing."

Oh, would it? You mean you'd have that much more attention, is what it means. Anytime you can find something to put your attention on that you're regulating, you have that much more attention. And nobody ever realized that — they think it's the reverse. They think attention is a finite quantity. They think a fellow is born with two and a half quarts of attention.

You can get, finally, so that you can go clear across the boards with this. You can make the heart beat. You can make the blood flow. You can do all of these things.

Mystics in — not mystics, but the lads over in the mountains over in India used to do this. Well, they did it wrong way to, and to the opposite ends of the poles, as far as I could see, when I was a kid. They would take over these functions, one by one. Yogi is the process of trying to take over these functions. They try to make this the end-all and regainment of. And then they write a book saying, "The various centers of awareness of the body are . . ." And then they name seven of them, and one is the serpent and one is the dog, and it's very interesting and very complex.

But one's the "corona" and I don't know whether they thought the corona was the thetan or not, but I know there is a ball of fire in where they say the corona is, that used to be an old eye. And here we have the — how to actually liberate these centers. You start at the furthest one from the thetan, and they bog you down with the problem of can you exteriorize an entity? Urrrr! By the time anybody has worked on one and two and three and four — you see, he's number seven — why, he's got himself so doggone thoroughly out of control and in restimulation that he'll never get out of his body.

It's very simple. I know, because I worked this. I just — with malice afore­thought. I saw the book of the chakra and looked it over and — oh, gosh, I must have been about fifteen — I got real curious about it, I started asking people about this darn book. And I ran across it not too long ago — gorgeous pictures and so forth — ran across it and I said, "I wonder … Now, that's very interesting. It's very funny that a person answers up on the meter to the names given to these areas. And the meter bongs every time you answer him up on one. It's very curious."

And so I started to exteriorize somebody in that band — they didn't talk about exteriorization, they merely talked about the rehabilitation of that center. Well, I thought, "Well, the best rehabilitation that center could have is give it a boot. So let's just exteriorize it one right after the other on up the line." And I got to center number three and the whole case fell in on me. I was doing it very nicely too, very carefully, well within the Auditor's Code and everything else. Real grim. In other words, it really pinned the fellow down.

It's like Bishop Sheen the other night. (He doesn't have very much sheen, so don't hold it against him.) He was talking about everybody had to have a hard head and a soft heart. The brain had to become solid. That was it. And what God really wanted people to have was a completely solid brain and a completely soft heart. Now, this is great. I mean, this is wonderful allegory. The only trouble is, that seems to be straight into the teeth of clearing, isn't it? And, of course, no tradition has ever come down the line that people mustn't be free! There mustn't be such a — never would be, naturally. I mean, nobody of that character who was trying to sell saints would ever try to unconvince other people that they weren't. So, you see, naturally, that supposition is very libelous against the Church.

That's an inverted seventh dynamic. Very often you don't get anyplace with an inverted seventh dynamic unless you waste ghosts. Somebody's been into spiritualism, something, well, you waste ghosts in brackets. All right.

Now, we're not off the subject two inches when we're talking about this. Because we're talking about Step II and we're talking about automaticity. When this fellow — you ask this fellow to get out of his body, he — who has gone into very deep automaticities, and he's actually down below III or IV or V, you wouldn't ordinarily do very much to this case but just go on down the line. Except with Clinical Procedure. And you have to know all this about all the case levels on a Step II basis.

In other words, what is Step II to all cases? Well, Step II to all steps is the automaticity of that step. And somebody who cannot bring himself to discard this much automaticity — one body — is going to require a little more work before he exteriorizes. And that's what Step II tells you, and that's why: "Mock up the person's body. Mock up his body. Mock up his body."

Normally, if you just kept on mocking up his body for five or ten minutes, he'd exteriorize. If you just kept this up — unless he's in the effort band. You got to put lots of effort into things, you got to just get him so he's real good on effort and thinkingness into everything under the sun. And when he's real good at that, he'll be able to exteriorize. Because why? He can't work, because the body does all the work.

And the one common denominator of all cases difficult to exteriorize; the one common denominator, difficult to exteriorize — and below that level, what they have called neurotic, psychotic personalities — they have one common denominator that goes clear across the boards is, is they can't put out much effort. And the less effort a case can put out, the worse communication the case is in — communication state the case is in — and the less he will exteriorize. Can you follow this? He can't put out effort if he can't handle effort. So when you get a case there, he is either fixed on the idea that he's got to handle effort — in other — he's got to work, he's got to put out effort, or he's in a position where he can't anymore. So you fall into the two categories of work, which immediately mean effort. And there is your index. There is a beautiful index.

You ask this person to discard a piece of automaticity. What automaticity are you asking him to park off of there for just three minutes or two minutes or one minute? You're asking him to park that piece of automaticity called a body off there. If he can't put it away from him four or five feet for a minute or so, believe me, he thinks he has to have it to do practically everything for him. It has to think for him and work for him and sweat for him and do the emoting for him. And he gets convinced on this one way or the other, and the thing for you to do is simply to bust the conviction.

Now, we can actually actively bust a case and run a case with just Steps I and II. But we can't take one of these steps and carry it along independently of the other step because we keep running into the machinery. We ask this fellow, "Now, all right. Now, where aren't you in the room?" and all that sort of thing, and all of a sudden he's outside of his head.

And he says, "I'm looking — I must be looking at a facsimile of the body, but I — I know the body is out there someplace. I'm certain I'm outside, but I just can't really see the body very well and I don't quite know several things about the body," you know? He's just in a situation there where he has a failure because of a machine that hands him facsimiles rather than hand him the real McCoy.

Now, you can go complete reverse and say there's a reason for it. Anytime you say, though, that there's a reason first and an action second, you're trying to reverse and invert this "Looking-as-condensed-feeling Scale." See? You're saying the thinkingness down here is senior to the effort which is immediately above it. See? So the reason for: this fellow doesn't want to get out of his body, so he does so-and-so. Oh, that's a fallacy, it's a fallacy. You're making a mistake when you do that.

He doesn't have any reason why he wants to get out of his body — he's lost all of his reasons. He's got lots of reasons now, and he'll tell you lots of reasons, but these are justifications and they're merely after the fact. And the fact is, one, he starts to lose himself geographically by setting up automaticities. In other words, he keeps looking around for the bridge ladders and the bridge ladders aren't there. See that? He's nowhere there is a bridge ladder anymore.

There are people all over here who are thoroughly trained for space opera. Oh, just gorgeously trained for space opera. They're gorgeously trained to be couriers on another planet. They're just wonderfully trained and their bodies are wonderfully trained to be hunters. And the only thing they can hunt is something in a hat and silk stockings now. Nothing to hunt, see? Here are all these mislocated beings: They're mislocated in place and they're mislocated in time, and the culture is not the kind of a culture they're trained to be located in, and so they're completely lost. And they've been saying for thousands of years, "Where the hell am I?"

That's the first thing anybody says when he's been knocked over his head. You could drive a little dog insane simply by banging him on the head, and while he was unconscious, moving him into the next room and standing him on his head in the corner and letting him come to in that fashion. The little dog, the rest of his life, would go around saying, "You know, I didn't go — I — I just know I didn't go out with my head down in that corner in that room." So the two places are trying to be collapsed by these two dogs. He's here, while he's here, but this first room must be then this second room.

The dirtiest thing you could do to a guy is slip an anesthetic mask over his face in one room, operate on him in another room and let him wake up in a ward. Why not just shoot him? Unless he gets processing he's going to be lost for the rest of time. Where? Just where you found him stuck on the time track — in an operation or something of the sort or in an accident. All right.

The fellow hits with a terrific impact, goes unconscious, and the plane or the car bounces and goes someplace else, and then somebody drags him out of the thing while he's unconscious, and they put him in a car and they drive him to some town. No wonder when people have been knocked out, the first question they ask is, "Where am I?" First question they can think of when they come back. Because they've got a machine — all their machinery is set to go on geographical locations and positions; and as soon as they're transferred suddenly from one geographical location to another geographical location, they lose their sequence of positions. And when their sequence of positions are gone, they can no longer get from one stage of the machinery to another stage of the machinery, and the automaticity is lost and so they must be somebody else. They're living another life.

Death to another life is just that mechanism and no other mechanism. Now, this person — you ask this person, "Well now, if people have lived before, why, they of course know their name and so forth." Well, no, they don't even know where they went to school in the former life. I mean, they're bad off.

Here they've got all this automatic education which goes into fine furor and fury every time they try to study something. You know, it just blasts them. Now all of a sudden this person, they just can't study arithmetic. They — no accounting for this, see, and can't study arithmetic. Well, if you went back down the track or something or other, they were one of the most well-known authorities on Newton or something of this sort at some other university in some other time.

Arithmetic be damned, they were mathematicians. You start them up now with new stimulus-response mechanisms, new automaticity; the second he starts to make arithmetic automatic — he's all right as long as he's still cause where the arithmetic is concerned — he starts to make it automatic so that he knows the multiplication table automatically and pang! he loses his geographical positions because he's already lost them on the subject of mathematics. These geographical positions mix. He thinks he's, after that, someplace else with regard to arithmetic. He can't study arithmetic. He goes mad. You say, "One plus one equals what?"

And he says, "Six, I guess. Is that right?"

See what happens on automaticity and mixture of geographical positions. You can't take the subject of automaticity and throw away the subject of geo­graphy. And the only place you lose an automaticity, become really unconscious of one, is when you set one up in position A and start using it from position B. And your preclear that's holding on to some part of the track, is trying to hold on to the connective sequence between his automaticities, so he doesn't lose his sequences of geographical positions.

If you restore to him his sequences of geographical positions, they can fall into line. Then the time track unravels, and all of his machinery stretches out into time where it belongs.

I don't know how long it would take to do this, but it's plenty long.

(Recording ends abruptly)