This is the afternoon lecture of November the 27th. We are going to ask a question and we're going to take up Step VI today.

Now, the question which is going to be asked here is a very, very simple question. How do you fix a thetan up so he's disabled? Come on, how do you disable a thetan?

Male voice: Get him mixed up in energy.

Second male voice: Get him to agree on barriers.

Third male voice: Make him think he's his anchor points.

Fourth male voice: Make him resist.

Hm?

Fourth male voice: Make him resist.

Fifth male voice: Get him to agree to something.

Sixth male voice: You could put him in a body.

Seventh male voice: Invalidate him.

Female voice: Collapse his space when you get a chance.

Third male voice: Make his anchor points somebody else's or make him think so.

Gee, you guys are inventive. You know, I've asked general questions — I've asked general questions about how you made people well here several times, and everybody sits there silent. Now I ask you one about how to louse somebody up … (audience laughter) Very interesting!

Female voice: Can't finish them, can you?

Very interesting, isn't it?

Female voice: Can't finish them.

You can come awful close.

I asked you a while ago about that, John, and what did you tell me?

Male voice: Fix him up so he can't look.

And how else did you tell me?

Male voice: Hm?

You told me another method.

Male voice: Yeah I did, but what the devil was it?

Just as you walked out of the door of the office there, you told me a method.

Male voice: Make him uncertain.

Yeah. Well, how do you do this?

Male voice: I told you something else?

Well, that's more or less what you told me.

Male voice: Well, I told you that the way to fix up a thetan is …

This is very interesting . . .

Male voice:. . . was fix him so he couldn't look . . .

. . . because I just played the same trick on him.

Male voice:. . . so he couldn't look and then . . .

I played the identical trick on him that he told me was the right trick, and now we're reaping the harvest of this. I told him that it was you fixed him up so he could look. And I said it very seriously, expecting to pick him up a little bit later on it today.

Male voice: I told you to fix him up so he couldn't look, but I didn't know that of my own knowledge. I knew . . .

You didn't know that of your own knowledge. That's right. You didn't know that, but I told you that, and now the first answer you gave me, which happens to be the right one, has done what? It's evaporated.

Male voice: No, it hasn't.

All right. What is it?

Second male voice: Well, he can't know.

Third male voice: Forgotten.

Male voice: No, that wasn't it. I remember telling you something else, but what the devil was it?

"Make him so that he's wrong," you said to me.

Male voice: That's right! That's right.

And I came right back and gave you the same trick. I told you, "No, no." I said I wanted you to tell me about that later because it was actually "fix him up so he couldn't look," which is terrifically reasonable. It's the second echelon of how you fix him up. The first way you fix him up is how?

Male voice: Make him wrong.

That's right. You reduce his knowingness by making him wrong.

Because — we covered this very early in the course — the first echelon is knowingness, the second echelon is space.

Male voice: All right.

Right. You've got it laid out right in front of you there, and yet in spite of this, I could play the same trick on John back here and he'd fall for it. You get that? I said, just in so many words, "No. No," I said, "that's not right."

This is just a little case, a test case I'm showing you on it. See, this is perfect, the memory on exactly what he said — because he gave me exactly the right answer, right off the bat, bang! I said, "What's wrong with a thetan? What can you do to a thetan? What's the only thing you can really do to a thetan to foul him up?"

And he gave me the right answer immediately (snap). "Well," he says, "you could make him wrong. Make him believe he's wrong. That's all you can do to him. As far as I'm concerned," he says, "that's all you could do to him."

And I said, "No, no." I said, "You give me that answer later and you tell me about that later. Now, you think about that, and you tell me some other way now. The only way that you can really .. ."And here we had the trick. Now, he's just waking up to it, right now. You see that?

Male voice: Sure.

You get that mechanism? That's been drifting all the way down the track.

Now we're dealing with symbols. We're in the level of symbols and we have hit, at Step VI, the break point of the case. When a person believes that he has lost his ability to a large degree, to a very large degree, to recover his own Tightness — you know, he's lost his ability to recover his own Tightness one way or the other — we get all these other mechanisms cutting in. And any time other tricks have been played on him, such as occluding his vision, and anchor points, space, anything about energy, making him believe he's energy, making him think he's a barrier — you can do anything to him, but easily, after he comes across a certain break point.

You can come across that early break point when he becomes a body. That is a break point. Earlier on the track, when he became a doll. You see? That also is a higher break point. And there's a lower break point in a body. It is the point where he believes that his capabilities of being right are such that anything he does will meet with an opposite result. See, he's always going to be wrong. No matter how right he may think he is, he's going to be somehow or other wrong.

And this amounts to not just an automaticity, this amounts to a way of life. And his wrongness begins to show up more and more, and it first shows up on a single subject that is so serious that when he gets to a point where he — you give him a mock-up of this subject, it always turns out to be some other mock-up on some other subject, you would have something he can't look at.

See, we've got Tightness and wrongness now entering into looking. And we give him a mock-up, let's say, of a piano. And he gets a mock-up, consistently, of an elephant. Or inconsistently — the next time he gets a mock-up, it's a zebra. The next time he gets a mock-up, it's a baby's milk bottle. And each time he's trying to mock up the piano.

Well, it would take an auditor to force the guy to think about mocking up with a piano. See, that'd just — it'd take an auditor to make him do that. He'd never, of his own volition, think of mocking up a piano or having anything to do with a piano. And he wouldn't, in the mest universe, see a piano. You could walk him through the room and he wouldn't see the piano.

Now, at that state (that's a rough estimate because we're dealing with an arbitrary number and — but we're not dealing with an arbitrary state), we can call that a VI. The object is missing. See, it's disappeared in a mock-up, and he gets something else every time he gets this mock-up, if an auditor forces him to try to mock it up. But the actual part of it is, is the object is missing in the whole universe. There just isn't any. But when he gets that, he is Step VI, at least about that subject.

Now, when he gets Step VI pretty broadly, why, everything starts turning up missing. I mean, if he was a Step VI on the subject of clocks, he would simply never see a clock. He'd just never see one. Somebody would have to — a la the auditor making him get the mock-up — walk up and take a clock, and put the clock in his hands and say, "This is a clock. Look at it." And the fellow would hazily see a dim outline.

Another characteristic of the step is, when the fellow isn't occluded on mock-ups, you — actually, in the room, at the moment he's sitting there, with his mest eyes (and he doesn't know about auditing, doesn't know about Scientology or anything of the sort) a black frame may start to appear around an object, or something just vanishes. It vanishes so thoroughly he doesn't quite know what's vanished. But a black frame will, with his MEST eyes, start to appear around a specialized object like a piano. He'll notice there's a terrific black frame of some sort or another, and he won't quite see what's in the black frame.

It works out on people like this: There's somebody continually calling himself to this person's attention. And he's gotten to a point, and the strain is so great on this — and believe me, this is terrific duress; this person must have been a terrific duress to produce this effect — the individual who has been the great strain on this person will, in the eyes of this person, be suddenly surrounded or slowly surrounded by a black frame or a white field, or things will turn blue in the person's vicinity or something like that, and then the person will disappear. See that? That manifestation is quite common. But there are numbers of them like this.

It's where the — it's the first point where, selectively, lots — actually at Step VI, lots of symbols shift and alter. He tries to get a picture of one thing, he gets an entirely different picture. That's rather chronic with a VI. He — it's just chronic, what we'd call a VI, you see. Where — that's where we get interested in this manifestation is not when it amounts to an automaticity, anybody has those, it's when just everything starts to blur out.

And there are several objects at Step VI which have vanished or which have black hoods over them or something — they're gone, they're just gone. I mean, the person would be utterly incapable — it's hard for you to imagine this, you could say, "Clock," see, and you say, "Clock. Clock." Put it in his hands, make him feel the clock and so forth, he would then get a dim outline of a clock. He would not see a clock, you understand, he'd just get a dim outline of one. That's VI. And every VI has at least one of these objects.

Now, when we get down to VII, we have achieved the broad view of the whole universe. Just broadly. Things all over the place of all kinds and varieties and so forth are doing this trick. Walls do them — they fall in. And every time he looks at a cigarette it turns into a beetle. Or there's — he sees something else, and everything else starts to disappear and then turn into another object in this physical universe. So you see the gradient scale of what parallel we have between mock-ups and so forth.

Now, we have that with knowingness. Knowingness goes down scale, of course, senior to and accompanying all this. Knowingness is just it. And then as soon as it begins to be considered, breaks into rightness and wrongness, and this in itself is consideration. And on its highest echelon, this is solely on the subject of aesthetics. A way backtrack thetan who — way long time ago — I mean, guys of good condition, so forth, their total rightness and wrongness had to do with aesthetics. The only way they'd really get into arguments with each other and so forth would be on aesthetics.

An aesthetic what? An aesthetic thought. See, it wasn't even an aesthetic mock-up yet, it was just an aesthetic thought. They became critical of each other about their aesthetic thoughts. This was the only way you could get a big line of individuality: The fellow didn't think of something correctly. It's thought games. This is quite early.

Well, this is very easily disturbed, and it's easily disturbed in almost anybody. People have exact Tone Scale parallels on their reactions to being wrong. That is to say, motion, and being accused of being wrong, produce the same reaction in these various case levels on the Tone Scale.

In other words, you get a 1.1 — you accuse a 1.1 of being wrong. Well, in terms of motion, he will let the motion go by, you see, and he'll move his hand and then put his hand back, very covertly when you aren't looking, in place. You see? Well, a 1.1 will do this — when this is a chronic 1.1 — he'll say, "Yes, yes." He'll eventually surrender to your logic, and surrender this point and that point, and then when you have walked away, why, he will very covertly explain to anybody else there and to himself, that he has now put his hand back. See, he believes the first thing that he believed before. He has not altered one hair, see, really, on the belief on the situation. He's still combating on the thing.

What happens to him, though, as he's pounded and hammered with this is he goes down into grief, and when made too wrong will cry. Just that — just will cry. And then he gives up, and finally grief itself becomes the chronic tone.

Now, when people try to push him out of grief — which is a sort of a soppy, solid, holding proposition and so on — he simply goes into apathy. When people try to drive people in grief to do something, they produce inaction. See? I mean, they really start to produce more grief, and then they produce inaction.

And it's quite interesting. You wouldn't think of an army being in grief and going into inaction, but there's an historical event that — where one did. And it's only important to us because north Africa is still an arid waste. But the army of people who had been the Vandals and who had swept down and conquered north Africa — and who had been big enough and tough enough to loot all Rome and bring back, actually, the gold roofs of a temple or two back to the African coast — these people who were Carthage, and who in the long run won after all; these people there, under attack by Belisarius who was sent by Justinian to take care of this, recognized that they were under attack.

Well, they'd been in a southern climate long enough to key in clear across the boards and they were in foul shape by this time because that hot African climate, and lots of slaves and soft living and so on; and they weren't in any hilarity now, they were in grief. And the — one of the principal guard companies, cavalry unit, came galloping up a hill toward Belisarius' vanguard and were slaughtered to a man.

This news reached the capital, which is quite near Tunis, and when the news reached the capital, the other troops simply stood around and put their arms around each other's shoulders and wept. And that was true of an enormous army. That was an enormous army. It was much bigger by eight or ten times than Belisarius' army. It was as well equipped; it was better drilled.

And these men stood on the field of battle and wept for a while until they were hit by Belisarius' charges, and having been hit by those charges two or three times, they simply laid down and let themselves be slaughtered. And Belisarius' troops did do just that: They killed them all. And then the women, the widows — to show you grief again in operation — came out and sold themselves, in terms of how much property they were holding, to Belisarius' troops before the battle was even dry on the ground.

This is real interesting, isn't it? I mean, you get a — you can get a whole strata, a whole organism like an army, so forth, will go into that. So will a country go into that.

Now, here's the level of knowingness. What the devil had disturbed the Vandal knowingness? That's the question you would ask. What had disturbed that? That's the primary factor. Let's not look for significances under the energy, and significances this way and that way. I tell you all their prenatals had keyed in; this is a manifestation of something else — it's a hot climate, they were already down in energy. But what had disturbed their knowingness? History is completely blank on that point.

One can only surmise what disturbed their knowingness. They were in north Africa and their own tribal gods had sort of fallen by the wayside. These people had inherited enormous property, and with that property they had inherited the religions of north Africa. And they had just gotten through raiding all of Rome a few decades earlier. They'd wiped out Rome, really — they smashed it flat and loaded it on ships and took it back over to north Africa again, and imported with it enormous quantities of slaves.

Mm, what was the Roman slave doing in those days? He was drinking the blood of the Lamb and eating the bread of the Lord at a mad rate. North Africa was a churning madhouse of this Christian sect raiding that Christian sect. In all the Christian purges of the Roman Empire, in all those purges I don't think fifty — anywhere near … The first one, for instance, thirty Christians were knocked off — that famous purge that we hear so much about that Nero did — well, that included thirty Christians.

And I don't think there were more than about fifty of these purges all told; I think there were ten or twelve major ones, but there were about fifty of them. And in all these purges, there probably weren't more than five or six or eight thousand Christians killed by Empire troops.

But in one year alone in Alexandria, one sect of Christians fighting another sect of Christians wiped out and killed one hundred thousand Christians. In one year alone! This is real madness, isn't it? And their chronic emotion was grief. And here we had what amounts to Anglo-Saxon troops holding all of the north of Africa and giving a manifestation like this in the battlefield. What had disturbed their knowingness?

We can surmise what had disturbed their knowingness. They were no longer dealing with their own woods gods and so forth from northern Europe, that place from which they'd come. Their basic knowingness, which is to say that thing in which they had invested belief — they'd already gone astray by investing belief in something; now that had been redisturbed and they had become, to a large degree, "Christianized." And so that belief had been redisturbed — that is to say, their tribal gods redisturbed into Christianity — and now in Christianity, we had these huge masses of Christians attacking these huge masses of Christians. And just because two churches sat one across the street from the other, why, there'd be riots in the street every morning. And nobody raised any vegetables, they went around selling tracts.

And this was the social order in which such a strange thing could occur. You'd almost think any body of troops under drill and so on, would at least put up a — some kind of battle formation, not just lie down and say, "Kill me." But there is what made — we could surmise this, I don't say this is what happened, but I'm just trying to give you an idea of an — of shifts, shifts of belief.

You see, they had to admit they were wrong about their tribal gods, now they had to admit that they were wrong about some sect of Christians, now they had to admit they were wrong about something else, you see. And then they had to admit they were wrong again about something else, and we've just got a falling leaf effect, a dwindling spiral. One after the other, the fellow was pulled this way and that.

Now, you take anybody in the field of magic. The books of magic — magic being a process which is the materialization of spirits, and handling spirits — of course, these boys accumulated more information about the behavior of thetans, without knowing what they were doing, during the last fifteen hundred years than anybody else did.

Spiritualists didn't. A spiritualist normally considered himself to be junior to the spirits he monkeyed with. Period. I mean, I'm saying that colloquially because this about characterizes this activity of spiritualism — he monkeys with spirits. They don't know anything about them.

But magic is something else. Magic existed, and a magician was trained, to materialize and control and send off on errands, spirits — bad ones and good ones. They made no differentiation between bad spirits and good spirits as far as their own habits and activities were concerned. See? They'd just as soon handle a good one as a bad one. So these boys were fairly up Tone Scale. They faded out fairly fast, but they were very active about 800 A.D. here on Earth — very active.

And you'll find in their books this repeated line: That if one is educated in the field of magic, he should not then and therefore, merely because he reads it in some book, suddenly desert all his past beliefs and teachings. This was one of their tenets. One mustn't desert these beliefs. Just because he was dealing with magic did not mean that he should cease to be a Christian magician. They stressed this very heavily. Why? Because by changing his belief, if he's given these beliefs and he believed he had to believe (you see, that's the first thing that you'd get — the first aberration — he believed he had to believe, and then after that he believed he had to be convinced), why, he went down the line on this, and eventually he was being a slave to the very spirits which he was supposed to control.

A very interesting chapter on Earth's history which has been almost completely masked. For instance, groups of these people — they're just not known in the history textbooks, that's all. They've just been erased. They operated in the field of biochemistry, amongst other things. In 1213 we find them operating with successfully — operating successfully with artificial insemination. They also were operating successfully in the induction of hormones into the human body in order to rejuvenate it. They were doing all these things.

They got wiped out but good. The Catholic Church wiped them out. And that, by the way, was what started Freemasonry. So here we go. We've got them right up here in present time with us. They sit down the line, and I don't know whether they know the lines they're chanting mean the lines they're chanting or not. But a lot of their lower rating rituals and so forth are definitely right straight up from the magician of 800.

The Great Seal of the United States is, on its obverse side one of these recurring symbols. You go down to Washington, you start looking around the architecture and the buildings and the symbols and the seals of the government and so forth, and you're just falling into magic every way you look. You see, you're falling into one set of symbols — these are Masonic symbols. That's because George Washington and all the rest of the boys who amounted to anything, that formed this country — that occupied any office, that is, at the country's beginning — were all Freemasons. And these people were Freemasons from Scotland, to which the people, on the breakup of Freemasonry, and the magicians of north Africa, fled. They fled to Scotland. They had a few of their lower ratings — up to about 7th degree — they fled to Scotland, formed their chapters and then from there spread out across the rest of the world. The 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th degree material never arrived in Scotland and the — Freemasonry operates up to that level now.

I'm not letting any secrets out of the bag because I've talked a few times to Masons and so forth, and managed to cross them up no end by simply knowing some of their 7th degree work. Just extrapolating it out of books of magic which are still in existence but in Amharic, another language which isn't often read. And this is very puzzling to find this — all this symbolism turning up.

You're living on top of that symbolism right now. You've got it in your pocket. You got it right in your pocket, you spent it for lunch and so on. You're still dealing with the strongest cult of the Middle Age, and actually that cult is the dominant cult of the Western Hemisphere today — still is. Even at this distance, those boys are still knowing why they're assuming command of something rather than — at early days, they didn't "believe in" near so much as they "made things believe in them" and that was one of their bywords. They did this. They also had a lot to say about cause and effect.

It's very odd that what — by the way, Scientology doesn't owe them anything very much except for this: where Scientology has turned up hot once in a while, it's crossed tracks with that school of thought. It's crossed tracks back and forth, which is a different thing than taking that school of thought, you see. There just happens to be agreement between these two things as you go along.

And we take cause and effect. They talked an awful lot about cause and effect; they talked widely and they talked considerably about it and they wrote a great deal about it and so on. Now, their ideas of cause and effect are a little more complex than the ideas that we have been using about cause and effect. But they used this idea, you see. Only when they said "cause," they meant it in this limited state: they were creating an effect. See, they were causing an effect and they meant that in terms of a ritual, a system of communication, and that's what they were talking about. They weren't talking about the basic fundamentals of existence. They were just talking about what they did. Well, we get a difference then.

The only reason I'm talking about this at all is just to show you that a knowingness goes flip-flop, back and forth, and every time somebody says, "Well, I was wrong," and so on, we have a little bit of a jam on the track. Well, you'd better clear this up with a preclear. Because a preclear has very often known and had full and complete belief in something, and all of a sudden you throw Scientology at him and you do what? You make him wrong.

Now, you take somebody who is very expert in the field of medicine. You take some good surgeon: He has seen results out of surgery, he knows what he can do with surgery. He can take out bones and stretch bones and hack up bones and he can cut out appendices and he can do all sorts of tricks with textbooks and otherwise. He's very good. And he's very expert, his hands are very nimble, he has a fine concept of every facet of anatomy. And true, he doesn't make much of a practice of investigating or examining any side effects of surgery. He says he's not interested in anything else, he sort of puts blinders on himself like that. And now one day he gets sick, and there's nothing to cut out, you know? He gets sick from something that doesn't offer itself up to a knife. This is very embar­rassing, because you've immediately gone outside of his field of knowingness.

Now, surgeons have, by the way, in the past, even taken out their own appendix. They have. I mean, they've done all sorts of things. I mean, that's in their field of knowingness — they can maul a body around. They know they can do this. And — fascinatingly true.

And these boys, however, suddenly come to you, and you start off, not with the basis that surgery's all wrong but you just start telling them about the thetan repairing the body. Of course, you're let out somewhat on this by: you're in a basic agreement. They've already agreed to this way back on the track. So it's not too hard to do, because you're prior to their belief and knowingness, you see. So you're not really up against it.

But you'll find the fellow has a tendency — the second he gets a good effect, he's liable to do a terrible sag. You know, you've done just the thing you were supposed to do, and then you see this boy sag, boom. Hm! What have you done? You must have invalidated the former knowingness of the person.

Well, I don't care how skilled you are at this, on knocking out his former knowingnesses and so forth — it's terribly unimportant. If you just went on and cleared him and made him up into the bracket of Operating Thetan, it wouldn't matter what he'd known before. You see, you just went right on up the line. He thinks, for a while, that he's being asked to change churches or change beliefs or desert surgery or to do something of the sort. We're not even vaguely involved with whether or not he stays on with surgery or psychology or anything else. We're "prior art" any day of the week, you see.

But we're not asking him to believe in something else. Every — somebody comes along, wrote a pamphlet the other day — I received a copy of it. Quite well written, except that every few lines it says, "Scientology believes in .. ." Now, here we go! I mean, this is an incomprehensible slant, because we don't happen to believe in anything. I have, very often — show a somewhat sarcas­tic attitude toward the gods that be and so on, and I'm apt to make a little bit of fun or tease around about the cultural level which is supposed to exist today and so on. But I'm sure I'm not demanding that you believe in these things. I'm trying — what I'm trying to do is show you an illustration of what I'm talking about or where it leads and so on.

And I swear to God I can't take this society seriously anymore. I mean, the strain of doing it for a long time was just too much for me, and I finally piled up enough effort on it to blow a couple of ridges. And I haven't been able to make the grade very hard on this. I mean, I'm just as interested in doing, in fact more interested than I was in the past in trying to do something in the society, but to take it very seriously and consider that these problems are problems that are going to break the back of all existence down to the end of time, I'm afraid I can't do that anymore. And hence my general attitude when I talk about jails and criminals and so forth.

It's very funny to see people following out the exact procedure — in fact, it's a comedy — they follow out this exact procedure of producing a bad effect, such as a child delinquent. They do the exact thing they're supposed to do to produce the child delinquent. They just do it slavishly. And then they stand around and are very surprised, you see, because they produced a child delinquent. This is very silly. It's like watching monkeys having found a picnic basket, trying to eat an orderly picnic, like men do, you know, and use cups and things. It's very silly. And this just hits my risibilities.

But as far as believing is concerned, if you want to go on and believe in this and believe in that and believe in something else, you're each time selecting up a new randomity whether you know it or not. That person who gives all his faith to God can be counted, sooner or later, this generation or that, to show his teeth to God, long and sharp and lashing.

This is interesting that all of these "belief in" will turn in eventually, in man, to a "fighting against." And "fighting against" will turn, in a few generations, to "belief in." At first he believed in demons you see, and then he fought against demons, and then he became a demon. See, he thinks of himself, as a thetan, as a demon.

Now, we have some sort of an idea of what our problem is with this preclear. He's gone through this falling-leaf idea of knowingness all the way down. If there were some fine method of installing knowingness in an individual, that would be all right. But the method which we have to use at the moment, actually, is subtraction. We have to subtract from him what he really didn't know, until we find something that he actually can know. And when he starts hitting certainties, he starts hitting things he actually can know.

Now, one of the lower knowingnesses that I ran into one day in a preclear was — the biggest certainty, the only certainty he'd ever gotten — he'd never gotten a certainty on mock-up, he'd never gotten a certainty on anything. He put the mock-up up and I told him to have time make it disappear. And boy, that was the one thing he was certain of: that time would eventually make anything disappear.

And you know, he wouldn't take any more processing. He was so certain, and this put him so high up and so happy about the whole thing that he wanted to end the session, and we did, and he went away and he was just happy for days. The first time he'd ever been happy in this — he could remember in this life. He was certain of something. He knew this. Of course, that's a fairly high level of knowingness, you come to think about it. He knew time would take it away. He didn't know anything else. He didn't know whether he could make it disappear or whether he was in Christmas. This was just exactly what his concept of it was. All right.

We have, in rebuilding a VI, just a little more trouble than the others, because we have to hit the thing first on a locational attitude preferably, and then on some sort of an attitude which brings it up to a knowingness. And his case advances in little clicks, you might say. These little clicks are more and more and more pronounced. But his case does little jumps, little flashes, sort of, up the line — click, click — and he knows this and he knows that and so on. These certainties come in on him.

And if you work directly toward the production of these certainties without informing him, if you work directly toward this, this is a covert method of subtracting enough of the balderdash which he has digested to right his knowingness. He's righting it himself, you see, all the time. But you just give him an opportunity to right his knowingness about this and that. And you can lead him too fast and press him too hard and be far too informative — that's the only direction you'll err. Well, we have these various methods of doing this.

Now, oddly enough, everybody sounds so certain, and every individual knows he's not certain, that he never adds up the fact that he always sounds certain too. This doesn't seem to occur to anybody unless they examine this. Everybody is so certain and he knows he's not, and that's all he does know. He never adds it up — boy, how certain he himself sounds. So we give him drills about the rightness of other people. We don't even worry about whether or not they're there or not there because this person's got more people present than he even vaguely suspects.

And we start giving this person drills that run somewhat in this fashion. All right, you will — you might — you guys might as well take this drill and you'll see what I'm talking about. Now the people that are more or less on the side of the room here to my left, pick out people on the side of the room to my right. And people on the right side of the room just kind of glance over and find somebody to the left. Now just stare at each other. It's all right, there's no penalty for looking, here in Scientology. Just stare at each other.

And now I want you to put these emotions into each other:

How right this person is.

Now pick out another person. How right he is.

Now put the feeling of rightness into another person.

Now put the feeling of rightness into another person.

Now put the feeling of rightness into somebody else.

Now the feeling of rightness into somebody else.

Now the feeling of complete certainty into somebody else. Not for their sake, but just as you regard them. Get the idea of just the complete certainty that's coming from that person.

Now get the complete rightness that's coming from yet another person.

Now get the complete certainty that's coming from another person — just put the certainty into them so you can feel it back.

Now put the complete rightness in somebody.

Now put utter wrongness into somebody. (audience laughter)

Now put complete wrongness into somebody else. (audience laughter)

Now put complete wrongness into somebody else.

Now put complete rightness into that person.

And rightness into somebody else.

And get your own feeling of how certain you feel they are.

And again, your own feeling of how certain they feel they are.

All right, just get that. That gives you some sort of an idea about this.

Now, an exercise based on this is a very simple one. You get the preclear to walk down the street — this at least gets him into motion. And this is a VI I'm talking about, and this can also apply to a VII. And you just get him putting how certain this person is and how certain that person is and how right some other person is and how wrong some other person is, until he's putting the feeling of rightness and wrongness into other people and he knows he's putting it there. Because he's got a feeling to go with it — what do you know?

He's got knowingness reduced into a feelingness. It's actually life itself. But he will differentiate it in various ways until he finally decides that it is — it's just they're alive. They've got a right to be right or wrong, they're alive. This is a big decision. If you've come up to that level with a VI, believe me, you've got him well on the way! And if you get a psycho up to that person [level] — oh brother, you've done it, you really have. You could get into communication enough with one.

But a good way to process a VI, as I say, is to walk him around and drive him around. And actually, it's a very interesting way to process yourself. Because you're surrounded all the time by people whose primary motivation, as far as communication is concerned — to demonstrate how right they are, how much in agreement they are with you, how wrong they are, and how much they're in agreement with other people about how wrong you are, and how wrong you are. And they say this in various ways, such as, "Well, that may be true, but I — don't you think it is vaguely possible . . ."

This is the way Benjamin Franklin oriented it, to give you some idea of the Tone Scale of Philadelphia. Benjamin Franklin wrote a whole paper on this. A very fine paper. It's "How to be a 1.1" (the name of the paper). No, come to think about it, that wasn't the name of the paper, but it was something like that.

Anyway, he gave a dissertation on how you should present a thing to a council of men, you see, and said that you must say that: "Well now, it has occurred to me, and it might possibly — occurred to you, whereas I agree with most of your views and so forth, there is some slight possibility that there's some tiny modification, you see, could take place in the opinion which you so ably stated." You know — 1.1, strictly. It never gets anything done, by the way.

The only way to handle a crew of men, if you know what you're doing and they even vaguely look like they don't know what they're doing, if they're just foggy on this subject or if they're going the wrong direction, just know harder than they do and know longer than they can endure it. You win. That's all — just know harder than them and endure longer than they do about the same level of knowingness.

It also helps to be right. If you've got both of those together, you can run anything. I don't care whether it's the United States or the South African police or a corporation or anything, is — and you can do that as long as you're around.

Don't do this consistently though for several months to a group of men and then take an overnight trip. You've got them backed up and they will revert to Tone Scale. Sometimes they'll only revert to Tone Scale after a couple of months of absence, and sometimes they'll revert to Tone Scale only after six months of absence, but they'll revert. And after that their total passion will be making you wrong. They feel they have to do this in order to be right. That's real interesting. When people get into that slipslop of (quote) "thinking" (unquote), life becomes very confused, to say the least.

If the primary mission of somebody is to make you wrong, believe me, he can make you wrong — anytime. Anytime. Because you have based rightness on agreement. So you're trying to make him agree.

If you made him right all the time, you'd ruin him. You'd just ruin him, because you'd put him into consistent and continual agreement with the entire MEST universe. Do you see how that would be? Make him — not right according to a set of laws or axioms; not right, you see, according to the way life operates. But if you just made him consistently correct in his neighborhood — you know, you just make him consistently correct in his neighborhood — well, you'll murder him.

If you make him consistently wrong in his neighborhood, you may drive him down Tone Scale and you may cause him some unhappy moments, but you might also cause him to invent a new, cheaper electric light. He's going to prove that he's right, one way or the other, someplace. And you've given him the overt act-motivator sequence that he needs in order to complete a cycle. You see how that works?

It's very silly. You see, a person — there is such a thing as a truth. It doesn't happen to be a datum, though. There is such a thing; it's not very communicable. That's the certainty which you keep touching and tapping when these cases do these little jumps up the line.

Now, the VI does come up the line in a jump. A VII breaks to be a VI. Don't ever overlook that one. After you've processed somebody who was spinny — badly spinning and they seem to be better, you've only broken them up to about VI, you see. And after that you have to get down and process.

It's no great trick to break a person out of a psychosis. Almost any kind of a certainty is better than the no-certainty state, or the reverse or destructive-certainty state in which they're operating. You see, it's — the only psychotic that gives anybody any trouble is one that's working on a reverse certainty. He's certain that he'll be happy if everybody else is dead. Well, that might characterize the general part of the populace, perhaps, in certain societies and locales. But it — when people begin to act on that basis, you see, why, they are considered to be insane. And actually as far as the society is concerned, they sure are.

And the society likes to perform surgery, if possible. They don't ever realize that the prefrontal lobotomy is just Q and A. They're trying to run a patientectomy on society, and as far as they can go is just cut out his thinkingness a little bit — they want to slow that down. Actually, I think on most of those cases the thetan just shoves off, skips it. The bodies behave that way.

Well anyway, getting down here to knowingness: to what do they assign knowingness? Well now, I was talking a little while ago about these symbols which you're carrying around in your pocket. Well, Step VI, for our purposes, has ceased to be an SOP 8-C neurotic case as its sole thing; it is that step which includes the solution of problems posed by symbolism. "The solutions which resolve symbolism" is the definition of Step VI. Now I'll show you a technique for running this.

Get a word out in front of you.

Now have the word know.

Get another word in front of you.

Now have that word know.

Put a word behind you.

Have it be so right.

Put a word over to your right.

Have it know.

Put the Great Seal of the United States out in front of you. (It's that pyramid with an eye on top of it.) Have it know.

Get the money in your purse or pocket knowing.

Get that again.

Get the amount of knowingness in that money in your pocket.

Now get the dimes knowing.

Now there, of course, you're processing an energy unit, because there is mass to it, and the symbol. All right.

Let's get a textbook out in front of you and get it being very knowing.

Now get that textbook being very certain.

And get it finding you very uncertain.

Get a book of formulas behind your back and get it being very certain of just one thing — that you're not certain.

All right, throw those away.

Now get a word under your chair, and get it knowing.

And get a word up above your head, and get it knowing.

And get the idea or the actual sound of a peanut whistle going skeeeeeee! Get it knowing.

Because what are we doing here? We're just backing up the inversion. You know by symbols, until symbols know.

Now, remember I told you earlier the fellow who fought — believed in demons and then fought demons became a demon. And so it is that people at VI and VII — people at VI depend wholly for their knowingness upon symbols — entirely. Entirely. That's it. They don't depend on anything else but symbols. And when that sinks down the line, their symbols become solid. A mock-up is more solid than a real chair to a psycho.

I had a comment on this from somebody once and — they kept telling me, these other auditors kept telling me this girl was all right. But I went over to see her and I had her put up a couple of anchor points and I sure didn't think she was. Guess what she put up? Two pyramids. See, real heavy See, the symbol was a real heavy object. You just said to put up a couple of anchor points and you got pyramids. Next session — I mean, pardon me, the next command on it — she put up two cast-iron blocks. You see, that's — I mean, we dealt with nothing but very heavy symbols.

Now, this person's purse weighed God knows how much. Now, trying to take something away from this person is quite interesting. They're trying to become mest, you might say. They're trying to become solid matter if they possibly can, they're trying to be energy and all the rest of it. But the point is, they're out of contact with actual energy. They're not even making actual energy. They're under the control of symbols which are solid and which know far more than they do.

Now, you'll get people who'll flip the Bible open to a passage at random to get the answer to a question. (audience laughter) Well now actually, that's not bad necromancy, and almost anybody's liable to indulge in this once in a while because the future's a pretty hard thing to predict if you have admitted that you don't make it. And somebody will take all kinds of methods of prediction. But how about the fellow who doesn't dare eat without doing it? See, then only the book knows — only the book knows.

Now, you assault this person's reality — which is the reality of symbols — anytime you make a grammatical error or a definitional error at the higher levels of VI. And when he's VII, he'll just cave in and almost faint if you misdefine something. This — you can watch his sense of humor going by the boards. This is the one thing that's very noticeable about them. You pick up this ashtray, you say, "Well, have a camel." You'll just ruin somebody, that's no kidding. You've involved him in an endless row with you and a night of doubt. (audience laughter)

He'll vary from "Did he really think it was a camel?" to "I know it wasn't a camel anyway." The symbol, you see, is so important — the misuse of a symbol. You use some word in a backwards fashion and they're very upset.

These people, by the way, will, when they become editors — they very often do. It's not because I used to be a writer, it's because I've known a lot of editors. And editors are failed writers. I'm always in favor of editors; I'm very much in favor of editors, I think they ought to exist and — that's more than a lot of people think. And so — I always stand up for them too. People say they're pigs and I say they aren't. And in fact I got into a big argument one time in front of two editors with another writer on the specious — I said, what I was saying was, in effect, that the other writer had said they were pigs; I just inferred this, you see. And I waited until these boys both had attention, then I came down with my fist resoundingly and began a very serious argument: "They're not pigs. Editors aren't pigs. I won't stand for that," see?

And I got — just got this guy going and coming on this, because he wasn't in an argument to begin with. And these two editors began to look at him and one of them began to think of all the stories he'd bought from him. And their opinion of that fellow certainly went down — certainly went down. I was dealing with three people who were all symbol-happy. Completely symbol-happy. They took this whole thing completely seriously. They never cracked a smile during the whole thing and actually could be heard to talk about it for couple of hours afterwards, from time to time mention it, so forth, saying that it was very bad.

This fellow thought it was very bad of me, rather reproachfully, to do that to him in front of a couple of editors. Never occurred to the fellow — here's where creativeness goes — to immediately come up with a rebuttal which would have been completely vanquishing. See, he could have very well — could have very well just completely ruined me. His creativeness of symbols was deficient, which accounted for the fact that he was writing comic books. He was doing nothing but turning out a pattern and so on.

Creation and imagination and so forth all lie above that band, well above the band of symbols. And when you ask somebody to create too long solely in terms of symbols, then he gets the idea that the symbols are creating him.

Now, let's take the automatic machinery by which somebody measures the future. When he has assigned knowingness to the future, he sends himself like a rocket, jet plane, straight back into the past. 'The future knows." One of the commonest phrases: 'The future will tell." And he finally sets up an enormous amount of bric-a-brac.

We had one case here not too long ago, that made no headway for a number of hours of student auditing until somebody wasted, in brackets, some machines which predicted the future. And as soon as this was done, we had a marked alteration in the case. Right up to the moment when that took place, this case was varying between V and VI, V and VI, V and VI and not doing any consistency.

Because he had assigned all his knowingness to the future. You see, in the future, not he would know, but actually the future would deliver enough knowingness in terms of data so that he, then, would be able to act. See, we weren't on a level of, he'd get the data in the future and then he'd know what he was doing; you see, the data in the future would determine his action. Now get that — that's not subtle, that's a big wide differentiation between two things.

Everybody does this other trick: they wait for some data — if they're going to wait around at all — and they wait for some data to fall into line so that they see a consecutive pattern which then they add to and use as a creational pattern for further motion. They do this all the time. This is the modus operandi of movement itself, and of planning and of delivering effort and competence and all these other things. That's the thing.

But that goes to a level where they don't wait for the data so that they can do something, they wait for the data so the data will do something. In other words, the symbol will act. They get down to that level after a while — the symbol itself acts. I swear, somebody like that would draw a symbol on a piece of paper in front of them and wait for it to blow their nose. This — it could get that far.

Now, I hope you understand something about this case. I've given you some of the processes that work on this case. These processes are around in anybody who consistently uses language. He eventually assigns some knowingness to language. But someday you're going to find a case where "only the words know." And you know, they don't exist at all — only the words know. You know, not the fellow who's giving the words, not the communication of the words, not the whole communication, but the — each separate individual word is itself the knowingness. Just because words are the servants of knowingness is no reason that they become knowingness; and yet people think that the words themselves do. And this is the incantation.

Ran across the funniest engram I think I ever processed out of anybody — it was a prenatal AA, and Mama was saying, "Tic-a-tac-a-little-baby. Now you're going down the drain. That's the way that goes. Now I'm supposed to say it this way: Tic-a-tac-a-little-baby . ..' You know, I think it's the medicine that does it. I don't think that the words have, really, anything to do with it."

This person was sitting in the middle of that engram and they were — had taken up general semantics. It was the key engram of the case. We had this fellow line-charging all over the beach and the front lawn and the third floor of the house. I mean, he was just having a hell of a time after he broke that. All right. Here we had the symbol, by command, taking prominence.

How do you process symbols? You use them for anchor points. Simple, isn't it? You put up sheets of them and have him look through them to sheets more of them. You get it up to a point where he's got symbols differentiated from energy. And this in itself opens a whole category of processes, because number VI is, of course, the processing of symbols and getting the thetan to use direct rather than indirect communication. You understand that?

You have to process any thetan exteriorized on Step VI. Get him out of this idea of symbols.

Because his postulates are all locked up and nailed down in symbols. And these are nailed down in energy. And the energy is lost in condensed space. And the space is lost because he couldn't be it anyhow. Get the idea?

Well, any thetan has Step VI run, and it's just run so as to remedy sym­bols, however you want to do it. And I've given you some methods of doing it.

Okay.