[Start of Lecture]

Thank you.

This is February the 7th, 1957, the 16th ACC, lecture number twenty-six. Title of the lecture is „Summation.“

We have covered a considerable amount of ground here on the subject of techniques. I have talked to you about games and about games conditions. There's an awful lot of data which lies on the backtrack, any part of which could be found to be important to you today. Oddly enough, it wasn't important at all two, three months ago, but is important to you today.

A great many phenomena have been displayed here in seven years, have walked forth and bowed their way into our awareness. As a matter of fact, as many phenomena as are known to the entire subject of psychology has been covered in any one month of Dianetics and Scientology in the last seven years. In other words, in any month we have found out about, known about and delineated more phenomena that is totally known over — well, it's getting up on to eighty years now of psychology.

In other words, this is a very rapid look. There is this tremendous flood of phenomena. If you're phenomena-happy, I swear that the subjects of Dianetics and Scientology can let you wallow longer.

It's quite fascinating that there was this much phenomena. We must assume, then, that there is an unlimited number of phenomena in the field of the mind. It is not a finite number; it is probably an infinite number. It's closer to infinite than finite, certainly.

Why is this? It's because a thetan is basically capable of consideration. If he considers a thing is so, it is so.

Now, a consideration is different than a postulate. A consideration includes the acceptance of, or agreement with, an idea. In other words, somebody postulates something and then you consider that this is so — you agree with it. You then have a consideration which you did not postulate. Therefore, a consideration has some slight difference from a postulate.

All a consideration is, is a continuing idea, which you might say more aptly, „a fixed idea,“ since all continuance is in itself an illusion.

A consideration, then, is a fixed or continuing (less aptly said) idea or opinion.

A postulate can be of very finite or almost infinite duration.

The whole subject of considerations is contained within the subject „postulate“, so that consideration is a specialized behavior of a postulate. Got that? It's a specialized sort of postulate. Therefore, we say „postulates and considerations.“ That's because we do not at once assume that you would give a postulate as much force or duration as you would give a consideration, because a consideration is permanent and sort of fixed in most cases. It can be, of course, quite brief and quite passing.

But we think, „Well, that which you consider to be so is so.“ We say, „This universe is a consideration. We consider that it is here, so it is here,“ and so on. We don't — this is not apt, then, to say just „postulate,“ and then let you define postulate as also consideration, as this and that and the other thing, and get a whole bunch of categories here which are just postulates in various forms. Because a postulate can be so brief that it is just a breath.

A postulate is something that is originated. A consideration could also be originated by a postulate, but could also be the agreement with a postulate. Thus we have a slight difference between these two items, which must be understood.

It's understood rather easily if you notice that a body holds or retains a certain form. That is a consideration of form, and that consideration of form is continuing and is a rather complex consideration, since it is a cycle of form which itself cycles. In other words, the body doesn't only live in this generation, it lives in continuing generations. It goes through these various cycles. And we have the sperm-ovum generation into the body through various forms while still in the womb. And then afterwards it goes through various differences and additions, and so on. It's all very complex. But it is simply a cycle of considerations which is in itself a consideration that at a certain period of its growth it should have certain characteristics. And these considerations are continuing and cyclic. So we have a new kind of consideration. We have a consideration, and then we have a complexity or sequence of considerations which are repetitive. In other words, we have a cycle of considerations. You see that?

Now, we get this best, and it's best demonstrated in a process known as „Now I'm supposed to,“ which is not a therapeutic process, but it's one of the more amusing processes to run. Because this is what a person does: He runs a cycle of considerations. His workaday world actually is largely made up of these cyclic considerations.

When he eats lunch, he is now supposed to do something else. When he does that something else, „Now I'm supposed to answer the mail. Now I'm supposed to… Now I'm supposed to… Now I'm supposed to…“ Those are, of course, all considerations with which he is in agreement, more or less, and he goes through these now-I'm-supposed-tos.

So therefore, we have behavior pattern. And behavior pattern is simply a cycle of considerations. It is no more than that. And the motif — the basic motif — behind any behavior pattern at all is „Now I'm supposed to.“ That actually rather wraps up behavior, since it doesn't give us a limitation of behavior. It would take care of the behavior of eels, or it would take care of the behavior of an IBM Comptometer, or it could take care of the behavior of a teenager, or almost anything. He's running on a cycle of behavior.

You see that clearly, I'm sure. That's very easy, although I think very possibly this is the first time that's ever been articulated with clarity.

Now, we have a new thing, a new kind of now-I'm-supposed-tos, which is a different and, heretofore — or prior to Dianetics — was an entirely hidden cycle of behavior: the now-I'm-supposed-to cycle as contained in an engram.

An engram runs off, and the individual is so much the effect of an engram that he behaves according to the dictates of the engram. And the engram will run off just endlessly. It doesn't seem to care how many times it runs through, because it's basically just an idea or a sequence of ideas. This sequence of ideas we could call a pattern of behavior considerations.

Now, he has been so thoroughly impressed over any sequence of event, such as an operation, that these various things are supposed to follow these various things, that any time one of these various things happens to him, the next in line follows. Got this as stimulus-response behavior.

Now-I'm-supposed-to cuts in on a good, solid restimulation of an engram. Because one of these things has occurred, his whole cycle is now apt to run off. Do you see that?

So you could start an engram almost anywhere by restimulating it almost anywhere, and then have a sequence of now-I'm-supposed-tos happen. The individual believes he is now supposed to do so-and- so because such and such has just happened.

Well, I'll give you a very broad example of this.

By the way, I want you to beware of something. Beware of following through with the idea of conditioning. Just beware of this. There is, in essence, no such thing as a reactive conditioning, the way it's been thought of over in Leipzig, Germany, and other European quarters. They think of this conditioning quite amusingly. They think that if you make a dog walk through a room without any further duress — you simply make the dog walk through a room often enough — then the dog will obsessively walk through the room. See? This is not true. This is not true at all. Because you have driven down many boulevards, and because you've driven down a boulevard many times is no reason why you will again drive down that boulevard, as long as you are at all analytical. As long as you can inspect what you are doing, and start, change and stop it, why, you don't do these things.

So that only conditioning which is done by duress and beyond the level of awareness is effective, and that's not conditioning as it's understood in European circles. That is not conditioning. The European believed this because he was dealing with such a terrific amount of reactivity in his own population, and so he began to believe that you could condition.

A man would have to be half hypnotized or rather unconscious, rather in an interesting state of being, that if you took him by the arm and walked him though a room, he would then and thereafter continue to walk through the room. Well, now what is this? This would be a now-I'm-supposed-to which depended for its force on earlier now-I'm-supposed-tos. Don't you see? And all of these would have to be reactive and very obsessive in order to restimulate, so that any small action that you performed on the individual — any small sequence of actions — would then be repeated by the individual without further analytical inspection. And to believe this is the case would be to believe that man is a totally reactive creature.

First moment that we think of man as a totally reactive creature, we then ring in a necessity for slavery, we then ring in a necessity for police-police-police and laws-laws-laws and regulation and punishment and punishment and „Let's beat everybody“ and „We're all dogs,“ and everything falls to pieces.

You start to depend upon conditioning without any real understanding of what it is and, of course, the whole society goes to pieces, because there aren't any now-I'm-supposed-tos. A person has to do all these things by present-time analytical inspection if they are to be at all sentient. You lay in a training pattern into somebody, you may think that you have started a reactive action. If you train a person reactively, he will continue to respond reactively — in other words, without inspection.

Therefore, all stop signs become one stop sign. All signals become one signal. One signal becomes all signals, and he no longer is then able to act with analytical inspection, but acts only with reactivity and so is incapable of judgment.

The more punishment that is used in a society, the less capable people are of exercising independent judgment. This is pretty interesting. It tells you which way a social trend should go if it's to be a successful trend.

You actually would have to remedy an individual's ability to inspect. In other words, you'd have to remedy his awareness to make him capable of responding to any given situation as that situation, without recourse to any earlier situation for comparison.

It isn't necessarily true that an individual — since an individual is capable of knowing everything that goes on anyhow - - that an individual needs any experience to do anything. But when an individual is slightly afraid, he likes to find out that a gun won't bite, on the target range. And so we let him find out that guns don't bite. In other words, we give him familiarity with guns. We let him handle the gun. We let him become aware of the exact tool. And this awareness will bring him up to being a crack shot if we merely let him handle the weapon in that environment. He'll become a crack shot.

This is the type of training which is employed, however, and is supposed to reach the goal. And it doesn't reach the goal at all, because bad marksmen usually continue to be bad marksmen. You do find that any benefit that is derived from this training is the benefit of permitted inspection. They can permit inspection and get this. That is to say, they put the man through the cycle of loading and firing, and they put him through the cycle of loading and firing, and they put him through the cycle of loading and firing, and they put him through the cycle of loading and firing, and they put him through the cycle of… What are they doing? They're trying to install a reactive machine which loads and fires a gun. In other words, they inhibit analytical inspection of the action of targeting. You see that?

Now, a wrestler is a bad wrestler if he's running on machinery about wrestling. The only thing that you can give him is an awareness of bodies. And if you can make a wrestler aware of the weights and aspects of a body — in other words, almost on an inspection basis — and his relationships to a body, you will eventually make him a good wrestler, don't you see? You'll retain his ability to inspect, to be aware of.

Very few wrestlers are trained that way. They're usually trained on the basis of „When you get this hold, why, that reaction makes you go in this direction.“ And because man is not aware of the fact of how fast a reaction time can be, a really good wrestler - - a thoroughly good wrestler — is usually overlooked on this level. He did not become a thoroughly good wrestler because of tremendous quantities of training. That didn't happen. It's a man with a tremendous reaction time. Somebody taps him on the shoulder, he inspects this situation, he throws the guy the length of the ring, see? Bang! Wham! You know? And you say, „Look at the reaction. Look at that man's reaction. Look at his ability to react.“ And then we think that any time we touch him on the shoulder, even out in the street, he will eventually throw us down the street.

Well, when a fellow gets into that level of low inspection, he ought to quit. See? That's a bad point for him. He actually is not on the ball. It means he's nervous, he's upset, when he does things like that. He's upset about wrestling. He's already begun to lose his grip slightly, because his ability to inspect at that moment is not good.

Now, people don't believe this because this other thing takes place: The reaction time, the length of time it takes an individual to inspect a situation and act, can be so tiny and so short that it appears that the individual is doing it without thought. But who said you had to think about anything?

Somebody hits him; he inspects the situation and reacts so quickly that it appears that a machine cut in — even to him! He even thinks he himself must have cut in this machine in some unknowing fashion. He thinks of himself as being a machine to some degree. No, it's his familiarity, his awareness, his willingness to inspect, his willingness to look, his willingness to observe and exert force which makes him capable of doing so.

Now then, there's two directions we can go: One is to increase awareness of any given situation, or the other one is to install these reactive strips, like you try to run an IBM Comptometer, that run through and are a sequence of now-I'm-supposed-tos.

Well, those strips and all such machinery tends to break down. And if that machinery breaks down, the individual is not able to act. Thus we can train troops too thoroughly. The Germans, by the way, occasionally have done this. They trained troops so thoroughly that given any slight unfamiliarity in the situation, the troops cannot act because they are incapable of inspection.

When people say „a good individual soldier“ they mean only that the individual is capable of independent action after due inspection. That's all they mean.

All right. As we go upscale, we get into higher and higher levels of awareness, which we mean higher and higher levels of ability to inspect and consider. And thereby, we get faster and faster action. We can demonstrate this rather easily.

But training by which we grind-grind-grind on the fellow, and punish and threaten and threaten and punish, is simply an effort to install an engram, or to restimulate an old engram, which will now run off on a now-I'm-supposed-to.

It is true that an individual who has done an action several times is better able to do the action. This is true.

You go out and get in a new car that you've never seen before and drive it down the street. You do that several times. You think that maybe you have installed a machine which drives this new car in this machine age. A psychologist from Vienna, or someplace, would think of this as having taken place: He had driven the car often enough, so now the car was driving itself. And some machine he had, and some series of reactions he had, drove the car. And he'll be the first one to run it into the wall. See, because he now considers he doesn't have responsibility for it; „conditioning“ is driving the car for him.

Oh no, that's not right. The reason you are able to drive a car better is because you have touched the car and withdrawn from the car, and you have handled the car, and you've turned the car, and you've stopped the car, and you've changed the car, and you've started the car, and you've become familiar with the car. In other words, you are aware of the current action to be expected from this automobile.

But all experience taught you was that you had a capability in the handling of the car. That's all you can learn from experience: that you are capable. If experience teaches you anything else, it is then reactive experience and would depend on pain, duress, punishment and unconsciousness in order to make itself stick.

So it's an unfortunate thing that there are only two directions, because it gives us a great deal of minus randomity. You could figure out many other ways to go at this thing, and tear things apart and train and untrain, and do all sorts of things.

But when you have trouble doing something new, after for a long time doing something old (you know, somebody comes along and gives you a change), your training pattern is stuck to duress. It is appended to an engram or secondary. It has a connection with this „If you cannot change, something is sticking the gears.“ You're running into a now-I'm-supposed-to.

In other words, you inspect the environment, and as a result of having inspected it with analytical cognizance and awareness — even if with great speed — you act. That is not a slow way to go about it; that's a fast way to go about it. That is the fast way to go about it.

Or you're stuck in the mud. Well, that mud is quite interesting, because it's long, tangled sequences of now-I'm-supposed-tos. An individual becomes weary of exerting effort, and so drops back into an irresponsibility. What he was doing, when he dropped out of being responsible for it, continues. And that we call machinery.

The individual at some finite moment in time and space was doing something. And as he does it he becomes tired of it or he changes his mind — and the actuality is he merely becomes unwilling to do it any longer — and while still doing it, he falls back and is no longer responsible for it. And that is a machine.

The point which he occupied where he was doing it himself, fallen back from, is out there as a machine. Now it has a certain ability to exert itself against him. Why? Because the actions themselves were exerting themselves against the individual. In view of the fact there is no such thing as time or space beyond consideration, the individual can, of course, be influenced by these now-I'm-supposed-tos. He became tired of doing it, in other words, and therefore became irresponsible for the consequences of it.

Machinery is some of the most marvelous stuff to inspect from the standpoint of its incapabilities. All machinery breaks down on insistence on a duplication. Duplication breaks down machinery. Machinery apparently can duplicate, but it never quite does. The moment that a machine is called upon to duplicate, it breaks down.

Now, you as an auditor use this continually. The fellow has a habit of wincing. So what do you do? You make him wince. Just make him wince, make him wince, make him wince, make him wince, make him wince, make him wince.

Why does this break things down? Well, two reasons. One, you are asking him to inspect the machinery of wincing. You're asking him to at least look at it. You're asking him to at least become consciously associated with the action of wincing. He learns in this that it's within his capabilities to wince, and he wonders why he has a wincing machine around. And the machinery itself breaks down.

That's one reason — he merely becomes aware and familiar with the apparatus that is wincing — and the other one is this factor of duplication. Just the fact of duplication breaks up any machine.

Now, a machine will go on and almost duplicate. It is so close to a duplication that sometimes it is almost impossible to differentiate the difference between one action of a machine and the next. But, of course, we can say broadly they are different, if only because they occur in different moments of time. But that is rather scouting it. You know, I mean that's one of these obvious things and depends on some other philosophic considerations.

But let's be worse than that. Let's take for granted that they're in different moments of time, and then I tell you flatly with no further qualifications that there is not a complete duplication for any two actions undertaken by a machine. I don't care if it's an internal-combustion engine turning at 3800 rpm. There won't be a single revolution of that internal-combustion engine which will be the exact action undertaken by the preceding revolution. You got that? Each action is going to be minutely different — if only because the bore of the engine is wearing a sixteenth of a molecule at a time. You get the idea? It's not quite the same action.

The course of life of an engine is a series of „almost“ duplications, which run from good shape to busted. Now, we say, „This engine is going to last two years without repair or anything. It's going to last two years. And the first day we started it out, it was not broken in,“ we said, „but it ran. It ran. It ran rather well. It had a minimum of vibration. It didn't upset anybody to listen to it. It was even. It was smooth, you know, when we started it off, even though it was tight.“ Now, two years later we start the machine up and it goes cough- cough-cough-cough-cough-pshhhew! And we say, „Well, it's nonfunctional.“ Now, any fool can plainly see the difference between one revolution there, at the beginning of this two-year sequence of revolutions, and one revolution at the end of it. See? Any fool can plainly see these two things as being not duplications, one of the other.

Well, how much difference do you need to detect? How much difference do you actually need to detect something? Well, you might need two years. It's running now, and now it's busted. See? It's not duplicating, because it now doesn't run at all, and it did run. See? That would be about the crudest look.

Well, some people are not up to this high level of awareness; they don't notice whether things are or are not running. I'm sorry to have to tell you that, but that is the case. That is the case. I hear cars going down the street all the time that aren't running. They're a series of clanks following in sequence to a few crunches. It's quite remarkable; it's quite remarkable. The person that's driving that car — he probably has not detected any difference from the first time he drove the car to this time he drove the car. And I've actually had somebody argue with me, when a starter or something was seized or frozen in a car, telling me there was nothing wrong with the car — this wild difference. Now, that's pretty low awareness, pretty low awareness.

Now, let's go to an extreme of awareness — the extremity. This is almost impossible to understand how anybody could do this. The difference between two consecutive firings of one piston in that internal-combustion engine: Now, man, you really have to be aware, to be aware of that difference. See, that's pretty sharp. The bore did not wear observably, by any known means of measurement. Nothing physical happened to it in just two revolutions to change it that you could detect, but a difference does occur, because you can observe it over a period of two years from run to no-run, see? So there must be a difference on that tiny gradient. Do you understand that?

At no time does any revolution of a motor duplicate any other revolution of a motor.

Mental machinery is machinery. Some people think we are simply assigning some fancy word and being funny. But I wouldn't know anything to call a machine except „machine“! It is something which is doing something. Having been given an impetus, it continues a sequence of actions. That's the definition of a machine. A machine is something which, when given an impetus, continues a sequence of actions. And machinery cannot duplicate.

By the way, machinery doesn't have to have any purpose, which is one of the baffling things about mental machinery. It quite often has no observable purpose or use. It's simply running off, and it drives us half mad trying to find a reason why. If we've got to have a reason why this thing is running off, why, we're baffled at once because it was erected, maybe, to be a reasonless machine, you see? It was a machine that furnished no reasons — ran like mad, you know?

Now, machinery is machinery, and every now in a blue moon somebody looks up, while he's being audited, into the depths of his bank and says, „Daoh! What is that? There is something out here that has some pistons and wiggle-gugs on it. And it's got a funnel in one end, and it's got something out the other end. And there it is! And its wheels are going on like mad. And every time I think something, it does something. And this is about the weirdest thing I ever saw in my life. And it is an engine; it is a machine of some kind or another.“

Now, the beingnesses of a thetan have not been relegated to body form, or formal bodies, or anything of the sort. They have thought of themselves as machinery many times. A robot thinks of itself probably… I doubt any robot could exist, by the way, without being a „live“ robot, if you get the idea. But you could build a body out of machinery that would be run by a thetan which would certainly look, sound and clank just like a robot. That's probably what robots are.

Now, all right. So this fellow has been a robot. He got tired of being a robot. It's too much effort. He's no longer willing to be a robot. That's the only thing that occurs there, really, is willingness to be a robot deteriorates. There isn't enough game as a robot. He is totally defensible, or the actions he undertakes he doesn't like, or something of the sort. So he gets off the idea of being a robot. And he leaves the total facsimiles and shape and form of this robot parked in the bank, withdraws from it, abandons it, and this picture someday goes into restimulation — he starts acting like a robot.

In other words, the habit patterns of the robot can be repeated in his bank once more. And he goes around acting like a robot. I mean, it's the wildest thing you ever saw.

What's he doing? He's going over the series of now-I'm-supposed- tos. The behavior pattern is composed of considerations: „When a red light goes dong! up that way, I am supposed to go dong! this way.“ See? And we see some guy, and every now and then the fellow will go.... Well, that's all right, but next time he apparently does the same thing, you see?

And if you ask him to be aware of this and simply do this …, see, and you ask him to do this, he becomes aware there's something else happening.

This curiosity occurs, in other words. Just by doing the action on his own, he becomes more aware of the action, and becoming more aware of the action, some of the now-I'm-supposed-tos start to get out of line. The considerations start to fly out.

In other words, the sequence of events here, the sequence of considerations, becomes interrupted in some fashion. A horrible thing happens to a person who is acting or painting or running on machinery. You just ask him someday, look at him and say „How do you run? How do you act, huh? Just how do you impersonate old men?“ This kicks him.

I would never wrestle with somebody without asking him at first to explain to me all about his awareness of wrestling, you see? „How do you wrestle? What system do you use?“ And „Just how do you get that stance? How do you get that? Just how do you do that?“

If you'd ever walked up to Joe Louis and asked Joe Louis „Just how do you get in there with that big thud?“ see, you'd have had to ask him many times to get through really, that you were examining this thing this simple, see, because it's an awful simple mechanism. But if you'd asked him to explain to you just how he rendered that punch, and had fought with him at once, why, he probably would have been baffled as could be why he couldn't really hit you.

Now, why is this? By adding some significance to machinery, you have a tendency to reduce its havingness, and explaining it is thinking about it, isn't it? And the machine is only a series of considerations, so you have a tendency to take some of these now- I'm-supposed-tos out of the machine, which leaves it inoperative.

It's a great liability to be running on machinery. But machinery is a good substitute if you're not willing to live. Some unwillingness to fight, to act, to be, to live, must be present before machine action occurs. Therefore, the clue to undoing all machine action is totally stated in „improve a person's willingness.“ All you have to do is improve his willingness.

At first his irresponsibilities, and all that sort of thing, will start hitting him from every direction. And you just keep him plowing through his willingness, changing his willingness to do this or that. And he eventually will crawl right on upstairs to an ability to do it — which he never lost, but he did lose his willingness to exert it. And you give him back his willingness, and the ability returns to him at once.

Joe Louis, for instance, became unwilling to hit men that hard, and so didn't hit men that hard. Old men are young men who are unwilling to be young. Young men are probably much younger men who are unwilling to get any older. All sorts of odd things.

Willingness. Willingness. Willingness to be, to do, to have. Willingness to occupy certain roles. But principally willingness to exert effort. And there is where the greatest willingness breaks down. The greatest stumbling block of anybody is, in this time and space, his willingness to exert effort. And that has been reduced to almost nothing. He is not willing to exert that much effort, so he is irresponsible for the effort, so that work becomes a hardship.

A person who is unwilling to work is simply unwilling to exert effort, which means he is almost totally irresponsible for any action that takes place, which puts him on almost total machine. And he becomes obsessive, and all sorts of things.

By the way, modern police have copied us in Scientology, in some more recent handbooks. They describe, today, a criminal as a person who is incapable of working. It's quite interesting, isn't it, to put one little definition like that. It was obviously so apt, and it was so observable to them, that every time they heard it they picked it up and just incorporated it in all of their action, without even being aware of where it came from, or anything like that. All right.

Now, this willingness to operate, willingness to exert effort, willingness to emote, willingness to see, willingness to be aware — this is the monitoring factor in all these sequential now-I'm- supposed-tos.

Well, some individuals run just like ticker tape. They have a series of considerations, a cycle of considerations, and they go this way: They say, „When so-and-so happens, now I'm supposed to do so-and-so. And then if I do so-and-so, then I'm supposed to do so-and-so, and then I'm supposed to do that, and then I'm supposed to do that, and then I'm supposed to do that, and then I'm supposed to do that, and then I'm supposed to do that. Then I'm supposed to run like hell!“ or something like this.

It's very funny, looking at somebody's fright pattern: „Now I'm supposed to stop. Now I'm supposed to listen. Now I'm supposed to shake. Now I'm supposed to consider myself as wishing myself elsewhere. Now I'm supposed to discover my limbs leaden. Now I'm supposed to start running. Now I'm supposed to have the feeling that I'm being held back. Now I'm supposed to be able to run.“ See? See?

But any one of these actions or motions which an individual undertakes as the „normal reaction“ -- get that bog! Get that horrible trap! That is a hole in the middle of understanding which is ten light-years deep and full of mud all the way down: the „normal“ reaction. See? That's a swindle.

There is no such thing as a normal reaction. There could be the sequential actions of an individual on an automatic basis.

Now, individuals get these patterns sometimes from their parents. Eating patterns quite often come from parents. Quite amusing. Kids quite sensibly become aware that that food is edible which their parents eat. You see, they eat food, then, which was safe to eat. It's just like explorers go through the woods down in Brazil or someplace, and they'll notice what the monkeys eat, and they'll notice this very carefully, because they know that that is edible for them. Well, so do children watch their parents. What their parents eat is an edible item. In other words, it's an observable or vicarious experience.

So they sit there and watch their parents eat, and then they know what is safe to eat. And having done this, why, they're all set now. And they pick up food phobias from their parents, and they pick up all sorts of patterns, but oddly enough pick them up from so many other sources that each child arises with a brand-new pattern of food likes and dislikes, all of which he considers totally automatic.

Now, you could trace them all down, however. He doesn't have a „normal“ reaction to food; he doesn't have his reaction to food. His reaction is always, you might say, a composite of other reactions reevaluated by him and added to by his own considerations. And by that time you have a highly individual pattern, like fingerprints vary from person to person.

And although this is a very wonderful thing that fingerprints vary from person to person, that bodies vary from person to person, while yet being bodies, I want you to notice something very carefully: that bodies are bodies and fingerprints are fingerprints. They are, see? They might be different, but everybody has fingerprints.

They say, „There's nothing in common in fingerprints.“ See? „All fingerprints are different.“

And I almost ruined the lecture machinery of a fellow one time — when I was in the ONI — who was explaining to us about fingerprints and how they were all different, you could always identify anything, and nobody had anything in common with anybody else's fingerprints. And he made this very dangerous remark. And I was sitting in the front row, and he was asking for questions about this lecture on fingerprints, and I asked him if everybody had fingerprints.

And I didn't mean to be smart, but he was so much on a „Now I'm supposed to believe that nothing is in common about fingerprints, no fingerprints are in common with anybody else's fingerprints“ that the obvious, horrible truth of the matter that everybody had fingerprints was enough to louse up his machinery. You get what a simple thing it would take, then, to make him stutter and look kind of flushed and be upset about the whole thing, and try to flunk me in that particular class, you know? He ran off on a new I'm-supposed-to because the old I'm-supposed-to has been interrupted.

So we get routes, to routes, to routes, to crossroads, to X crossroads, to Y crossroads, to more routes, to interlaces. And you get shunts — just like a child's food pattern would be developed from many observations, dominated, perhaps, by what his parents ate, but still added to on available food and his own experiences with ice cream, and you know, all this sort of thing. All of these things coming together would add up to an individual pattern for that individual.

So his engram bank, you might say, is at war with his own awareness. And his awareness fights the engram bank; the engram bank fights his awareness. He adds his own observations and considerations to these laid-in patterns. What has happened to him, if left alone, would simply run right through on a „Now I'm supposed to, now I'm supposed to, and because I've done that, why, now I'm supposed to do something else,“ you see? One associate restimulator in the environment shows up, and it sets off in an engram a whole chain of now-I'm-supposed-tos. And this can be a wild parade.

But he is himself aware, capable of awareness, capable of consideration, capable of doing all this himself, and as a result he monitors and varies his engramic pattern, and by starting, changing and stopping it, and warping it around and turning it upside down and doing other wild things to it, forms a new channel of now-I'm-supposed-tos which might look entirely different than the original engram on which it was impinged.

That's quite amusing, then, for you to run a preclear and to find his own considerations coming out of engrams which happened otherwise. You see? He was not in a state where he was considering at all. The engram happened to him. He considered nothing throughout its length except „Duh, I'm gone,“ and to have his own considerations pouring out of this thing… Every time he runs a big energy mass, and a bunch of ridges and so forth, why, he gets a lot of his own considerations back. Well, he's monitored and fought against this and tried to control it and interrupt the now-I'm-supposed-tos, and he's been at war with it one way or the other. So his engram bank becomes a potpourri between his owns efforts to monitor it, his considerations regarding it, his own responses and actions in obeying it. And this interchange in itself forms a new pattern.

Now, people could become aware of that pattern, and so, aware of human behavior. But they were only becoming aware of this middle- ground pattern, and they were not aware of the causation at the bottom of it. Therefore, it became almost impossible to change anybody's behavior pattern. You actually had to handle the real basis. You had to handle the now-I'm-supposed-to sequential tracks. You had to handle the basic patterns which contained unconsciousness and pain, which were duress, which brought the preclear himself at the effect point so thoroughly that he had no choice where this came along.

The pattern runs off, the first consideration is the pattern „Oh, that has happened. Now I have no choice!“ See? And that runs through every engram pattern there is — that's the basis of it. „Oh, that's happened.“ The next now-I'm-supposed-to: „Now I have no choice but to… Now I'm supposed to… Now I'm supposed to… Now I'm supposed to…“ See?

So lack of choice becomes another common denominator, and an important one, from the standpoint of the auditor to all these other things. It says, „I have no choice but to…“ See? „I have no choice but to do this. Now that I've done that, I have no choice but to do this.“ And I'm sure any of us have had the feeling of being forced into a line of action from which we could not and dared not vary, although apparently there was nothing else influencing our staying on that line of action than our simple feeling that „We just mustn't do anything else. We just feel that we must go right straight through on this line.“

In other words, we've entered in upon „Now I have no choice,“ and so we have no choice from there on out. By simply denying people the power of choice sufficiently, you can then restimulate an engram bank. All you've got to do is be didactic to somebody, and you restimulate his lack of power of choice.

„The way you do this is so-and-so. And if I catch you doing it any other way, you will be beat down, run over by wild horses, or something equally dramatic.“ You see? I mean, this duress, force. „Now you have no choice. You have no choice but to.“ It's a cliché in the language, by the way, which is a rather interesting effort to deny people power of choice. All right.

Now, these considerations come into a sequential chain which begins to record itself as solid and, on the basis of „Now I am supposed to duplicate the solid example which exists in the bank of which some part of me is aware,“ becomes the modus operandi.

Now, at first he would only have to obey considerations, you see: „Now I consider this and consider that.“ Now he can get into a physiological rapport with an engram which has a terrific solidity. In other words, it's so solid that it sets the example so strongly that he has no other choice but to obey it physiologically.

Now, if you simply made him consciously obey it, you would get somewhere, because any consciousness added into any part of this has a tendency to destroy the effectiveness of the system.

And we actually have people that, when a figure in their bank goes like this, like a little mannequin, they have a tendency to go like this with the body. Quite amusing. You see this in running sperm sequences and things like this. The individual all of a sudden pulls his legs together — lying on a couch, something like that — and his feet begin to swing at an impossible angle. Bodies don't turn that way, you know? Well, there's been a force or effort. There is an example, a physical example, going on in the bank which he has no choice but to follow. And he must go through that physical evolution.

So we have mental, emotional action — reactions to the engram bank. Duplication, obsessive duplication, all these other factors enter in.

Now, out of all this you can manufacture so much phenomena that it's a wonder to me we haven't discovered about eight hundred thousand times more phenomena than we already have. Tremendous numbers of phenomena are possible, because what? Because there can be an infinity of considerations.

Anybody can make up his mind about anything. Anybody can make a continuing consideration or a fixed consideration on any subject, and very often has. He can victimize himself to the degree that he is willing to deny having said it or having agreed to it.

He says, „I haven't ever agreed to it,“ when he has: He of course is being irresponsible for the moment of agreement. Therefore, that irresponsibility, of course, may make him the effect of its responsibility, and he becomes the effect.

And so we have an infinity of possible considerations. And out of this infinity of possible considerations, we get an impossible number of phenomena. Anything can happen from there on out.

The only things you know about a preclear, then, are the basic agreed-upon mechanics or considerations which he considers common to the race and to his life.

The most fixed of these, of course, would be rather a logical target.

Now, considerations which enforce too great an association make him associate things too fixedly with things. Considerations which overcome his power of choice thoroughly and give him no further chance to inspect anything analytically, and so on, if undone, therefore change the individual markedly. But of all of these things, we find that being trapped or caught — horror of, dislike of — is the combination of any safe you're trying to unlock on this planet at this time.

They hold that in common, that it is possible to be trapped. And of course, this is idiotic, because the thetan couldn't possibly be trapped, but he can be trapped. It's gorgeous how he manages this. And he manages it so gorgeously, and he's so terrifically unaware of it, that your effort to set him loose in any way at all would be almost — and a few years ago was — totally impossible. There was absolutely nothing that could have been done for him. He was trapped.

Now, he has to have a consideration of entrapment. He has to consider that he can be trapped before he can be trapped. He has to consider that a certain sequence of things have to take place in order for a trap to engulf him and hold him.

A thetan cannot be trapped. But a thetan considering that he can be trapped can be trapped. He's held there by his own agreement, his own postulate, his own desire, his fear of loss of game or loss of association if he were to go away from this trap. All of these things add up to this central phobia.

Now, it isn't my phobia, because I've never particularly considered myself trapped. And therefore, it took me a little longer to find this one. I could have told you that people with red hair get mad more often and have more fights than other people. I could have told you all sorts of common phenomena that were common to me. But this horror of being trapped, or something like that, was not really in my experience because I never worried too much about it. It's too easy to slide out of something.

Matter of fact, I have more worry staying in something than getting out of something. That is a problem. „How am I going to stay here long enough in order to do something? I'm liable to take my mind off of it,“ you get the idea, „and skid out sideways and be standing over there.”

„Let's dream up some nice gluey substance that I can dream up that I am stuck in, and then I'll stick the substance to something and postulate that it's stuck too. And then I can stick into this substance, because it's the kind of substance that I stick to, and there I am. And I can suddenly relax and don't have to keep myself balanced.“

However, this does not seem to be the happy state of affairs as one looks around. One finds an anxiety about staying in things right next door to an anxiety about being trapped and having to stay in them. And everybody seems to have these ideas about position, positioning, being caught up in something.

So much so, that any time you want to make an E-Meter bang and knock itself off the pin, just say the word „arrest“ to the preclear who is holding the cans. They all shudder at this one: the idea of being arrested.

What do cops do to you? Actually, it's simply the scarcity of police and jails which makes people terrified of them. They're still aware that they exist, but there are not enough of them to be inspected, see? Out of that we get a now-I'm-supposed-to, which means „When things are that scarce, now I'm supposed to be afraid of them.“ See, that's just another now-I'm-supposed-to. There are no normal reactions.

All right. We say, „Arrest, arrest“ to somebody and he shudders. Why does he shudder? Well, this is the whole idea of being trapped, forced to stay in, not being permitted to get out, and all that sort of thing.

Yet, if you threaten to throw him out he becomes very upset. Now, that's one of these goofy ones. You take somebody who considers himself totally trapped (talks to you obsessively and continually about how trapped he is by marriage, by life, by his job, by social service, by anything) and you say, „Well, fine. Get out!” — meaning the door, you know; open the door. „Get out!” you'll say. And he'll become upset — oh, my! Just shake him to pieces, because you've turned on another now-I'm-supposed-to: „When I hear the word 'get out,' now I'm supposed to get mad as hell and hold on with grim death“ — which is, of course, why he is trapped. It's the goofiest mechanism in the world.

But „trappedness,“ you might say, is a common denominator to any case. They get trapped opposite, in or mixed up with these various sequential engrams or ridges — bodies of consideration of one kind or another. They get stuck on the track, in other words. They get stuck opposite these behavior tapes of which they're total effect. They can't move from this spot or area. And as a result, they therefore have to obey these things. That's another consideration. So they have phobias about being trapped.

Now, how do you separate somebody out of a trap? Well, the odd part of it is, evidently, all terminals are the source of unsolids, the source of particles. Particles come from terminals. There isn't any reason why we couldn't have a bunch of considerations — and I'm perfectly willing to grant this, that some preclear may have this some day or another — that there's a series of very sound considerations that have this and say this: „All particles are mocked up, see? Particles are not dependent upon terminals. Particles are mocked up and are separate from and have no dependence on terminals.“ Well, in this case Solids wouldn't work; got a different consideration.

But anybody that got this stuck in this universe at this time and space, however, didn't come in by that route. They evidently came in by another route entirely, which is „All particles stem from terminals.“ Therefore, if words and phrases worry somebody in an engram bank, if postulates or various other particles (get the way he thinks of them: phrases, particles, words, so forth, now- I-am-supposed-tos) — if these things occur in an engram, they can shed out of or come out of or exert themselves out of this piece of energy to his detriment.

Now, if he's lost his ability to hold a mass together, then these things will talk to him. He looks at an engram bank; the first thing he thinks of is that it's going to come apart. The earliest process we had in Dianetics — simply composed of taking apart engrams. It's successful.

But putting an engram up which won't leak is much more therapeutic, because that's what a thetan is trying to do, and it complements the effort of the mind. You're just helping the mind do what the mind is trying to do, and the mind is trying to put up something that won't leak.

The mind is trying to put up a solid so well that it has no further ability to affect the thing that put it up. And when you get a thetan into that willingness and get him squared around on that frame of mind, why, you've pretty well got it licked. Because what happens? His bank doesn't talk to him anymore, and the now-I'm-supposed-tos don't come out and jump at him like little jack-in-the-boxes, or the man and the woman in the weather vane. See, they don't do that anymore. Why? Because all he has to do is stop them and they don't flow. Even if they were there, they would remain solid. They would not leak at him. You get the idea? Now, that's evidently the type of considerations, foolish or bright, that a thetan has of this whole circumstance. And therefore, his ability to get out of things is totally dependent upon his ability to hold them in place. Actually, we get stillness as the common denominator of all solids, but stillness still doesn't embrace the entirety of the picture. We want all spots on all solids as being totally still, which of course holds them totally solid.

Now, an individual, then, is as capable of awareness as he is capable of keeping analytical considerations from caving him in.

Thank you.

[End of Lecture]