And, - You wasting looking.

And, - Somebody else wasting looking. And, - You wasting knowing.

And, - somebody else wasting knowing.

Okay - Let’s grab the two back anchor points of the room. Okay - You got it there?

Which is the most effective - running a direct concept or wasting and so forth. - Come on, which is it?

(Inaudible audience reply)

Concept is more effective than wasting it on a - Audience person: They do different things?

They both do different things. What did it do to ya? Something. Well, all right. Come on, which do you find the most effective? Now let’s make up your mind.

(Audience response but not audible)

Well, that’s a nice refined narrow use of it. That you feel better when you wasted them. Well, that you’ll find that to be the case. That’s why I ran you on a concept first. But I evidently didn’t make my point too well. Do you feel better now?

Audience voices - “yes”.

Did you feel better when you finished running those concepts?

Audience: - “yes”.

You felt better. It’s pretty hard to make it unworkable.

But the living crux of the matter is, is most of your preclears that come up won’t be able to get even a concept of something except in a symbolical form until they’ve wasted it. Wasting is … wasting better is the case and running the concept has a tendency to bog him you’ll find by experience. Don’t evaluate a technique by how deeply it flux your preclear out since he’ll just eventually just run out of havingness, you know. He’ll just run out of havingness and then we won’t know quite what we’re doing one way or the other. But wasting, saving, and so forth is better.

LRH: That’s right, that’s right. Well, I tell you it’s a remarkable thing but people talk a lot about, “well, if other people didn’t mess me up, and so forth, why, I’d get along all right”. The truth of the matter is, they’re really not very dangerous to each other. But …They’re really not - as people they’re dangerous to each other, but you’re not people. You get what I mean? It’s a little abstruse maybe but you get what I mean?

Voice from audience: “No”

It’s a little abstruse. I’m not insulting your intelligence. I mean … it’s just that there is a point there. If our purpose is to preserve a bunch of bodies and if we’re sort of here on a mission of putting them all on ice, well, yeah, yeah, people can be very harmful to people. See that? But if we’re here for the business of livingness which is not necessarily the business of preserving a body at all. Let me assure you, it’s something very dramatic in throwing one away with great elan. Why, we find out that people are very far from dangerous to people but are necessary to complete livingness, and so we get pulled between these two things. Life’s insistence upon survival, preserve, and repair and patch up and the static, theta, a thetan desire to live and an individual is caught between these two, these two points.

Of course he’s gotten lots of points but the main thing it is, is GEs sure like to live and golly, he sure has to preserve this body. Well now, when they start resisting, they get worried about preserving and that is about the only big major trap there is. It’s resistance - resistance - if you can get somebody to resist something, why you’ll just fix him all up. There is no truer truism than - that which you resist, you become.

All right now, what’s a symbol?

(Audience replies but most not audible - the following are answers LRH honed in on.)

Audience: A form of an idea?

LRH: That’s very close.

Audience: Something that represents something else? LRH: That’s very close.

Audience: Something you deify?

LRH: Yeah.- That’s an ideal, that’s not a symbol. That’s all right, it’s one of it’s variable meanings.

Well look, we have a lot of divergent ideas on what a symbol is. It happens that for our purposes in Scientology this thing called a symbol can be given a finite definition which will clarify a great deal of the work which we are doing. It’s a very precise definition - very, very, very precise.

That is: A symbol is an idea which is fixed in energy which is mobile. Which is mobile. Mob-i- le (pronouncing with long i ) in English.

(Someone in audience speaks - inaudible on tape - but LRH answers.) Oh, the difference between a symbol and a postulate. Ah yes - we’ll get to that in a minute.

A symbol is a postulate which has already been fixed. A postulate is something which an individual makes. When he has made a postulate he thereafter may fix it in a mass and give it mobility. Now let’s … Yes …

Woman in audience speaks: Would a symbol be a way of describing automaticity while processing?

LRH: Yes, yes - that’s where we’re going. You’re a very, very bright girl this morning. Did the processing do it or a night’s sleep?

Audience woman: I was in apathy all night and now I’m coming up again. LRH: Why were you in apathy?

Woman: Idon’t know (laughing). Don’t blame the auditor - she’s a very good auditor.

LRH: I would never have thought of it, unless you mentioned it. Who’s the auditor? (Jokingly) Let’s chastise her (laughing).

All right now, let’s take a look at this thing called a symbol and let’s look at that definition. And now let’s take another definition - let’s take the definition of work in physics. We all know what work is - don’t we? But in physics, work is a very finite definition. Now, when you say work in the science of physics, you mean what pounds of energy - you mean the distance mass gravity factor. You’re talking about something terrifically finite. You understand that?

So, let’s understand right here, the difference between a, you might say, a type of definition which amounts to a law and a definition out of a dictionary on a word. You see, they can vary slightly. Now, if we take this thing called symbol - and we give it the definition we have just given it - and if we use that definition, we are thereafter able to understand and codify a great deal of livingness and see what is taking place in this livingness. It broadens somewhat the definition of symbol.

A postulate is something that you can give or take, or pull, or hand out, or do almost anything with. But when you make a postulate into a symbol, you have surrounded the symbol with mass, energy of one kind or another, and you have granted it mobility. You have fixed it in energy and granted it a mobility. It’s a neat trick - isn’t it?

Now let’s take a symbol - the letter, A, the article “a” in the English language and you see, that the moment we put it into the airwaves, we have given it some mass and handed it some mobility. Well, this makes it very difficult to locate. The theta, according to the prelogics, creates space and time and energy in which to locate things. It is very happy when it is fixing things accurately in space and your preclear will get as well as he can fix things accurately in time and in space and he’s very happy about that, you see.

Now, let’s take this thing he does with this thing we call a symbol. Aha, boy, hah! A wonderful thing - we wrap it up in energy and then we give it mobility and after that it’s lost but it’s still there, so it compounds into invisible barriers and into the most confounding and incomprehensible of puzzles. Take the letter “A” in the English language. Let’s garb it in printer’s ink, put it in a book, and then the book moves out of the library and on to laps and back on to shelves and back on to laps, and here it goes, and it’s got this letter “a”, this article “a” and it’s a symbol, and it just keeps on moving and you never keep track of it afterwards.

The only thing which can pierce sixteen inch armor plate is a symbol. A bullet is not, accurately speaking, a symbol. All a bullet is, is some mass. Now, it can be mass with meaning. It could be a silver bullet, but just a bullet is just a mass. You could set it up and say, now this is a symbol of war and discuss it and give meaning to it. As long you use it actively and expend it, create it and expend it and locate it and fix it, it’s not a symbol. It’s just mass. See that? It’s a piece of energy.

But now let’s take the letters “a” and put it in printers ink. All right now, let’s take another symbol, we’ll call it police. It’s a word isn’t it? That’s all it is, a word. All right, we take this word and we garb it in energy, we give it an ideal, we make it mobile and we get it lost and then we don’t know where it is, and the next thing you know, it’s after us. You see that about police?

You don’t for a moment … now, let’s take, let’s take somebody who’s present here. This person has been trained in judo. He is really an expert in judo. He is very good with a Colt pistol, extremely good with a Colt pistol. His alertness is good and his reaction time is much better than normal. All right! Will you please tell me why this person should be afraid of a police officer? A police officer is seldom a good shot, is poorly, if at all, trained in judo and has reaction time which is mostly fat. And yet if a police officer walked in the door and said, come down to the jail with me and lose two days, this fellow would probably go along with him.

Why? Why? It’s nonsensical. Well, it’s because the individual here has a symbol called police. Well now let’s suppose this individual didn’t have a symbol called police and didn’t know the meaning of police, and had no further significance to police and some character in a uniform walked in the door and flourished a gun on him - hah, he’d just bury the guy that walked in at the door, that’s all. You see that?

Life would be awfully simple, wouldn’t it, if we didn’t have a symbol. It would be simple, direct and without a long time lag because the only real trouble with police is, if he killed this fellow, then some more police would come tomorrow, he thinks, according to the symbol. Actually they might not, they might say, we better not arrest that fellow.

You see whither we are going with this thing called symbol. It’s an embrasive idea and it gets fixed in mass and because it’s mass and a thetan is often hungry for energy, he will pick up one of these things and because he objects to their confounded mobility, he will try to hold one still and after that, having resisted it, he will become it.

A body could be said to be a symbol. It’s mobile, it’s an idea, it’s fixed in mass, and we find, strangely enough, that a thetan who believes he’s a body has already adopted a great number of ethics, ideals, and otherwise, and fixations and arbitraries, and when we start to process him, we exteriorize him and he says, “I’m not a body.” Hah! And what do you know, you shed at that moment an enormous number of the arbitraries which have been holding him into a persistence in life and denying him livingness. He hasn’t any action or anything else as long as this takes place. He’s fluidity.

So, the effort of the individual to fix and unfix ideas in matter, in energy, shows up immediately and intimately on the business of the symbol. Right!

So, these dam things float around and people try to nail them down. A bibliophile is actually trying to nail down a bunch of symbols. He thinks they’re valuable and desirable. He didn’t start that way. That which a person resists, he will eventually find very valuable and very necessary. He wants it, he knows he wants it.

Symbols - It’s a fantastic thing if an entity shows up, or something like that, if you’re exteriorized someplace and you all of a sudden see this character. By the way, I don’t know that a thetan is the only livingness - I just happen to know that you’re a thetan, you see. But, I also don’t know if there’s such a thing as an evil demon that exceeds the value and power of a thetan and as a matter of fact, I know quite the contrary. Those things which show up in that form succumb with such speed that they appear to be more symbols than anything else.

All right.... Yes (to someone in audience)

Woman asks: “Would you say a symbol was an enforced idea directed at man?”

LRH: Nope, nope - you’ve already limited it It might be an invited idea. It might be a very pleasant idea. It might be a hidden idea. Don’t add intention to the symbol. Intention is entirely separate from this definition. There’s symbols and then can add all sorts of intentions to all kinds of symbols.

Let’s take the symbol called - freedom. Let’s print it up on a poster, that puts it in mass and then the poster can appear almost any place. And then somebody comes along, some politician, and starts screaming freedom. Well, what’s this politician want to do? He wants to do some slavery. So, what’s his intention with regard to the symbol? The symbol is a weak and will-less thing which is a tool in the hands of anyone and depends for it’s existence, as do all things except the static itself, on agreement. And when you have grasped this principle entirely and completely, you will understand - not only what an engram is, what an aberration is, and what your preclear is frantic about.

A thetan fixes and unfixes ideas in energy. When he builds something, he fixes it in energy. Rather simple, isn’t it? When he takes something down, he unfixes an idea out of energy. Now he’s got all these floating ideas in energy. They’re mobile - they go all around. He can’t locate them, they’re here today, and gone tomorrow. Will-o-the-wisp. It’s a Fabian warfare he fights. So he gets a passion for having everything nailed down and this passion sticks him on the time track - fixes him in energy - masses such as engrams - gives him automaticities - makes him do all the damnedest foolest things you can think of.

A symbol has a greater liability than it has a value. But it has a great value. If we continued to talk or converse directly as a fluid flow of ideas, our beingness would at once be very perceivable but by avoiding, by hiding, we can put our ideas into symbols and then transmit them, and the symbols so transmitted then do not disclose what we may wish to hold back as our basic intention. And so we get everybody looking through the symbol to find the meaning behind it, and this is a constant dramatization on the part of a thetan.

He looks through the symbol to find what’s behind it. In such words, to him, are invisible barriers. They’re barriers because they’re made out of mass. They actually have mass. You can cut some out of a book sometime and weigh them if you want to. Spoken words actually have mass. You can put up a kinecotometer and talk at its gas flame and you will see immediately that something is vibrating that gas flame. Something which is not just wind but a vibration is activating the particles of air and so we have a fluid flow of ideas which are yet floating along in an energy mass.

Now we start to process an engram out of somebody and we find out that we’re running one of the most complex symbols you ever looked at. It’s got, lord knows how many perceptics in it, and it’s got all kinds of things. Wonderful gimmick - an engram. Now you start to process this engram today and you think you’ll finish it off tomorrow but it’s gone and then it recurs six months from now. In other words, it has mobility.

When you are pursuing exclusively the course of searching for and eradicating the symbol you are just dramatizing whole track because a thetan has really never done anything else in terms of worry, or anxiety, or upset, and so forth. As long as he can get in there and shoot, he’s all right. As long as he can get in there and build a house and tear it down, he’s all right. As long as he can put up a great big beautiful mock up that’s just pretty or blow one up, he’s all right. As long as he can engage in a game which has an actual finite football and chase that football up and down the field and knock people flat and do all sorts of things, he’s all right.

But the second he begins this endless task, this endless chase of the symbol that the findingness of the hidden meaningness behind thee, he’s a lost dog because the symbol is lost, and so the thetan who tries to locate them himself, gets lost And the lost feeling which an individual has is the pursuit of the symbol, not the pursuit of a great big oak tree. Not the pursuit of this and not the pursuit of finite things, solid things, and not even the pursuit of thought.

Thought itself is not necessarily a flock of symbols. Now, you understand that? Thought is postulates. Now a thetan in his ideal state can make a postulate and make it stick and make it act and take it up and throw it out. Now he can, in his ideal state, make a symbol and tear one up. He can explode one that comes in to him, he can blow it, he can release it, he can change his mind.

But once he has become so engrossed in this search for the meaning behind symbols that he has accumulated, lord knows how many, in packed masses, when he is no longer able to face up to them, when he believes that symbols are more powerful than he - he the creator of symbols, you see, is now being bludgeoned by the symbols - that’s an engram in restimulation - the creator of engrams, you might say, suddenly finds himself being hit by engrams. He believes that he, himself, must be of a lower order of symbol, so therefore he must have mass, so therefore he can’t make postulates, so therefore he can’t undo postulates, so therefore when he makes up his mind wrongly, it stays made up wrongly. Why? Well, because he can’t undo this.

And so, out of fixing and unfixing ideas and the floating and mobile character of symbols, we actually get the mechanical, the mechanical side of sanity and aberration. We also get the mechanical side of exteriorization. The deeper an individual gets into symbols, the harder he is to exteriorize because he believes he is a symbol, he thinks he has mass. So, he thinks he has mass, why he holds the mass he thinks he is, in close to him, and it doubles terminals on him, it matched terminals on him. And he starts to get out of the body and he can’t even pull space between two terminal adequately and so, he having mass, can’t stay out of the body. The other thing is, is when he leaves a large mass he has a feeling of degradation. So he doesn’t think he’s anything, so he goes back in his head again.

Now, when you have a good command of what a symbol is, and the chasing of symbols this way, and when you get an understanding of what a thetan is, and that he is a static, he is a static which can place itself or perceive from himself at any point over any set of particles, at will and instantaneously, why we see that we are trying to remove a preclear up the scale from the point of being a mass, or a symbol, or an answer, up toward a point where he is creative and where he can make postulates, and so on. The second he can do this, he can impose space on terminals and he can exteriorize very easily. He has no difficulty in retaining his identity but he has his identity all mixed up with symbols.

Now, let’s take this thing called a “name”. An awful lot of preclears are in terrible shape simply because of their name. You take the fellow’s name and you move it around as a symbol and moving postulates and all of a sudden the case begins to free up. Silly name. There was a case, a notable case that had been audited by practically every auditor in the … in greater New York - and was audited by a member of the first unit and this case’s name added up to water. And all this case ever did for an auditor was blow grief charge and got no better. This case was being the symbol - being water - and would just dramatize this, and continue to dramatize this, and continue to dramatize it until all of a sudden why the auditor would say, “Well, we blew that big beautiful grief charge and so the case would be better”, but the case was no better. So this became an enormous mystery.

So a thetan becomes something and sells himself on the idea he is IT, merely because he is so exhausted in this combat with symbols, freedoms, ethics, ideals, evils. These things become symbols and he avoids them one way or the other and then he doesn’t know what to avoid because they’re mobile and he never knows where they’ll turn up or anything else. His identity is something that is quite treacherous. Identity is a very treacherous thing. It turns up in police stations. Most of the boys having trouble exteriorizing, by the way, have a record a light year long. That’s right, they have a record a light year long. That doesn’t mean they’re criminal on earth or in this lifetime but they’ve had their days. Put them on an E-meter and you keep knockin’ it off the pin. They’re wanted in this Galaxy and that Galaxy - that sounds like a space opera but it happens to be very true.

Now … now, they’re dodging. They’re dodging the symbol called “Law and Order”. Well, can’t they create law and order? Well, they sure can. Well, what are they dodging law and order for? That’s because they know they have an identity. But do they?

An identity is forced upon one until he believes he’ll desire it. He’ll begin to resist an identity until he is an identity. The one thing, I can tell you, in common, every thetan has in common, is a terrible background of resistance to bodies. Oh but …(Garble) the last thing in the world a thetan would be, would be a body. So here you are. That’s resistance to a symbol in essence because that symbol is an identity and as an identity it fixes the individual instead of him fixing it. Now we have a problem with any symbol. Is the individual fixing the symbol or is the symbol fixing him. And the way you keep symbols from fixing the individual that are pinning him down is very easy. You just mock it up, and move it around, until he realizes he’s moving it, it’s not moving him.

Let him find it, in other words, it’s an end of cycle processing to mock up symbols. Here, he’s been looking for a symbol. All right, have him mock up a symbol called freedom. Whole populaces have gone to their death, whole civilizations have been destroyed simply by people looking for freedom. The greatest slaveries ever established on earth were established in the name of freedom. Why? Because everybody is trying to close terminals and locate it and find it, and so forth, and they were trying to find freedom by avoiding slavery. So they closed terminals with slavery and there they were. Freedom was the opposite to slavery so they had to fight slavery in order to have freedom and that made slaves out of them.

This is the most elementary of problems. It is not even difficult but it lies in this exact field: A thetan conceives that he has mass if he conceives that he is a symbol. If he is an identity why then he feels he has mass so he becomes to that degree, hard to exteriorize. There are several ways to solve this. He believes his entire dependency … his entire beingness depends on his having a name. If that’s what his entire beingness depends upon, why good heavens, of course, then he’s going to be nailed down. How else could he be nailed down but by resisting a symbol

- a name. He didn’t want a name at first, that’s why he thinks he has to have one. And we get this - what you resist you become. An individual resists having an identity and eventually becomes an identity.

Well then, this is the problem in exteriorization, it’s that intimate. Anybody who’s difficult to exteriorize is simply … be three feet in back of your head, be three feet in back of your head - is a symbol. He’s not a being without mass and there are many symbols which are greater than he. One of the ways of doing it is simply, let’s take a look over the numbers of symbols which are greater than himself in terms of an E-meter. Just ask him that on the eight dynamics. What symbols, what words are bigger than you are. You’ll get the most interesting responses on the needle. Then you simply have him mock these up and move them through space from point to point, back and forth, up, down and around until he’s moving them, they’re not moving him. He says, “Well I’m not … I’m bigger than that.” Next thing you know, you say, “Be three feet in back of your head”, and he is.

Your problem with exteriorization then, departs from an understanding of this: That a thetan in a creative state does not himself have mass - and an understanding of how he gets mass. He gets mass by becoming himself, a symbol. Of course, the last thing in the world he is, is a symbol.

It’s like a fellow who makes drums all his life and eventually sits down in the corner curled up like a drum and expects somebody to beat on him. This fellow hates drums, so he becomes a drum. See that? Now why is this? Why does a fellow become what he resists? Well he just sweeps down on it in this fashion. He starts fighting it with energy and he gets more loses than he gets wins and so he gets to be it.

Now, let’s get that much more simply. Let’s get the problem of a stuck flow. The fellow talks in one direction too long, he’ll get a stuck flow. Now, the way you unstick this flow is to reverse it or to turn it and get some mock ups and get it bunched out of line, get it squared around and knock it off. Now when he starts resisting something, very arduously starts resisting something, you know - crush, crush, crunch, crunch - he gets a stuck flow. Similarly, when he starts giving postulates towards something. In other words, commands are orders in one direction and it never gives any back - he gets on a stuck flow. He eventually gets to the point where he can’t force anything along that line and the line itself will collapse and that is the end product of a stuck flow. It collapses into a mass.

All communication lines eventually wind up to be one terminal, both ends. Anytime they stick too hard on a flow, why they’ll eventually do that.

So, your thetan stood outside the body for a long time giving it orders. telling it to destroy itself or something. Eventually, eventually why the very mass of material that she put out in one direction became a stuck flow and we got a collapsed terminal proposition. Now, what’s a collapsed terminal? That’s something that should have two ends, which now has both ends in coincidence. Both ends in the same place. Now, that’s a collapsed terminal. You’re going to hear this phrase an awful lot - collapsed terminal. Better get used to it. You’ll notice many preclears have collapsed terminals.

Well, right next door to a collapsed terminal is becoming the thing you’re collapsed with. You’re right there, so you must be it. That’s the immediate assumption. Now thought is very agile but when it gets fixed in the terms of a symbol, it becomes much less agile. It loses its creativeness. Let’s take the plight of the writer, who writes, writes, writes, writes, writes western stories. He will eventually start wearing western clothes, even though he lives in the middle of Brooklyn. It’s inevitable. He becomes the mass of symbols which he puts out.

A method of whipping this, for a writer, a method of whipping this is a very simple one. Just write in that many lines that you can embrace. Never bother about names, identities, things like that, assigning yourself Henry Pillbaum and … I used to write western stories many, many years ago and my name was W. R. Colt. You will still find me in the library. And the funny part of it was, was all the time I was writing western stories, I was really interested in yachting. I never had anything much to do with the west and, and as a matter of fact, tried not to close terminals with it because of my early boyhood misadventures with mustangs, which I do not consider very romantic.

They are very bad transportation but they work if you hit them hard enough in the head with a leaded quirt. The SPCA and I have never seen eye to eye (laughing) on the subject of horses which would buck you off and tromp on you. I always … I asked … when I was six, by the way, I remembered this the other day when I was talking about this to Congress. I had an argument with the SPCA when I was six. I had managed to bring to curb by running him into a brick wall, a 1200 pound Kentucky saddler and somebody had placed it off as a riding horse and I couldn’t stop him. And, he was going places and he wasn’t bright enough to climb the wall or do anything imaginative like that so he merely ran into it. Of course he fell down so I sat on him waiting for him to more or less come to and shake himself out of it. This lady came up, and lo and behold, it was the SPCA because this happened within half a block of the capitol of Helena, Montana and they had quarters right in that vicinity in those days. And she started to sound off about cruelty to horses and I don’t know where she got off bawling out a six year old boy who had just almost lost to a 1200 pound horse but we had quite an argument which almost put me in police court. Which was to the effect, I said rather profanely, that she ought to engage herself in forming a society for the prevention of cruelty to children by horses (laughing). And that she belonged to the wrong gang. She didn’t appreciate this. She went and told some of my relatives and they of course told me off. She was a very influential person. I think her husband was the Treasurer of the state of Montana, or something you know, I mean something influential. They had money, had the state’s money anyway.

Now when it come to any of your stuck flows, what happens, what happens on the management of a horse. You just manage enough horses and you lose a few times and you got a continuous flow of commands going to this horse, and going to this horse, and just go down to Virginia some time and find out what happened to some of those fine old families. You go in and knock on the door and they say, - whihihin.

Here you have a, here you have a problem, you have a problem and symbols. The horse is a fixed idea. He doesn’t want to do what you want to do. It’s one fixed idea, so you fix a lot of ideas into him that he does want to do it. You fix them in, in various ways. With sugar, with leaded quirts, with spurs, with petting. It’s all done and nearly every rider does it with all those - unless of course he’s smart enough to simply be the horse because that’s where he’ll wind up anyhow. So, the problem is however, if you’re unwilling to be a horse and insist on using a horse, then you will of course, become the horse against your wishes on an inversion. Which makes you a compulsive symbol. You know, you’re compelled to be a symbol.

That individual who can fluidly BE something and then BE something else, is a very dangerous fellow indeed. He’s not fighting. That’s not fair. He’s happy though. So anyway, as a writer I used to solve this rather uniformly. I wrote stories in rotation. I would write a western story and then a sea story, and then I’d write a detective story, and then I’d write a flying story, and then I would write an article for somebody or other, and then I would write for one of those super slicks, which by the way, paid me much less than the cheapest pulp. And yes, I wrote in one time to the American Mercury, and asked them why didn’t they bring their rates up to what they were, a pulp paper because they were published on pulp. And shortly afterwards, after I’d gotten busy on this and made jokes out of it and talked in front of the American Fiction Guild on the subject of the pulps and kept describing the articles in the Mercury, and so on, why they began to frown on this sort of thing and my name became non persona grata with them. So, I had to sell them under two other names. Now as long as one was willing to do that, that was fine -that was just beautiful. But then one day why you up and you write yourself something and you’re silly enough to use your own name on it and you get fixed with an identity of having done something. So there you are. And actually anybody’s career, whether as a writer or as a Homo sapiens, or a street car conductor, or any other darn thing, winds up the same way. He starts out playing a game of street car conductor and then he knows he doesn’t want to be this street car conductor, he resists being this street car conductor and then he becomes the street car conductor - a symbol. So you only become a symbol by resisting something.

Being something is quite something else than being a symbol. You understand that? You can Be a man, you can BE John Jones but if you can BE John Jones, then you want to be free to unBE John Jones. And the freedom of beingness should be equaled, in every case, by the freedom of unbeingness. And if you can parallel your freedoms so that you have the freedom to BE and the freedom to unBe as well as the freedom of not to Be, why of course you exteriorize beautifully and you’re very happy and all things work out wonderfully and also all the problems of auditing are solved for the auditor before he gets there.

When the auditor gets there, if he takes what we’ve been talking about this morning, and uses this, why he’ll find out that he finds processing very simple because obviously the fellow is sitting there in front of him, the preclear, is being John Jones, a body. Earth - Galaxy 61 - 1954. There he is. The fellow isn’t happy or he wouldn’t be there. Well what’s he unhappy about? Well he must be unhappy about being a symbol. Well let’s take the biggest symbol that he is and just have him BE it, and then unBE it, and then BE it and then unBE it on some sort of a gradient scale which will eventually rescue, to the individual, his freedom to BE or not to BE, no longer a question. And that, in essence, is your highest echelon of processing. You can develop any God’s quantity of techniques out of that.

The only thing adults should need to know about that would be a little bit more about the theory of communication because communication, cause and effect, and duplication are all tied in very tightly. We covered enough of them all morning. It’s not a very big subject. I mean, the subject of communication is idiotically simple. The trouble with it is, it’s so simple everybody misses it.

It’s like this business of symbols - you use that definition for a symbol and you will win. It isn’t whether or not that definition is good in the field of English or in the field of medicine or in the field of writing. We’re not interested in whether or not this is true or .. . All we’re interested in is, does it serve our purposes in Scientology and to that limited degree, it serves our purposes admirably. We, during the whole first book, spent all of our time chasing the symbol known as an engram. Which is to say, an idea or a series of ideas known as perceptions fixed in a mass which was mobile and we were trying to solve this mass of energy which had these fixed ideas in it because this mass of energy, with its fixed ideas in it, was bigger than the preclear and so could victimize him and make him sick. Well, we had means of eradicating it one way or the other with greater or lesser success. And so as we could knock out that mass called a symbol we could make our individual relatively well as a Homo sapiens. We were still processing the bigger symbol. See, we were processing minor symbols to alleviate a bigger symbol - a body.

Now the technique’s sort of thin on those gradient scale of what we’re going in to. Well all right, we have then, in all the processing we’re doing, the problem of identification and differentiation, as we always have had. We can sum that up now in terms of communication, we can sum it up in numerous ways, but the simplest statement that we can make of any of this is, the right to BE and the right to unBE and if a person has fought being something for a long time then he is it compulsively. He has no more determinism about it. But if he simply merely became it, you know, he just decided he’d become that and then he decided he doesn’t become it. Nothing is ever simpler.

No thetan ever snapped into a body unless he laid his hand on it in anger. You just don’t walk up to a body and put a beam on him and snap in. You don’t even walk up to a body and put a beam on it and have it be hurt badly and snap in. You have to walk up to the body with the intention of anger in order to snap into one suddenly and unexplicably. You have to have conceived that bodies are evil and therefore something to be resisted in order to be trapped in one. You have to conceive that theta traps are very bad in order to get trapped in a theta trap. It’s almost impossible for a thetan to get trapped but there is the one modus operandi of his getting trapped - being afraid of getting trapped, of course, and he postulates that he’s afraid of getting trapped in order to set an example so other thetans will be afraid of getting trapped. And they will get trapped, so he does too.

Fellows go down to the Gold Coast and the Ivory Coast and the slavery coast of Africa and spread Christianity in order to buy slaves. Boy, they’ve got to be the most psalm singin’ prayin’ people you ever heard of. And Christianity, at the time they were using it, was no more than a tool, an effort to get some slaves trapped. You know, make the tribes docile enough so they wouldn’t fight against being bought. And they wound up as devout Christians - the people who were doing this. Fascinating, isn’t it?

So, that to be caught in a trap, you must have set the trap yourself. So in any case, as you go along and run any case, you want to know what’s wrong with the case, you could be, very self righteously, accusative of the case and say, “When did you do it?” “Because everybody’s mean to me”, “When were you mean to everybody?” Unfortunately, this individual’s recall is not adequate to tell you this because it goes over too many millennia.

So, does processing get a little simpler to you, right there? All right, now let’s just look at what else we were doing there this morning. This condensed scale of energy - it’s this … it’s … of lookingness and … when you go into energy you go down from knowingness into the rest of the band and that band is knowingness, lookingness, emotingness, effortness, effortingness, thinkingness - (to audience) You know where it goes there?

(Answer from audience which is inaudible)

That’s right, thinkingness. Thinking condenses and becomes a symbol. A symbol is condensed thinking. You know where it goes then?

(Audience answer not audible)

Not that directly. It goes into eating. It enters the applause scale at that point and that drops down to eating - and you know what condensed eating is? Sex. So you see what a terrific band of understanding we’re looking at here in terms of human experiences. It’s a big band. Actually condensed eating is sex.

But you go on up there, you go into the applause scale, then you get up into symbolisms, and then you get up into thinkingness, and then you get up into effort. Effort is pretty high. But you get this thing repeating over and over and over and when it’s repeated and repeated and repeated, why as it goes down the scale, why it evidently becomes mest. We cannot justify that in just one, two, three, you know. I mean, we can’t say absolutely this is the case. It just happens to be an existing theory.

The rest of this is not existing theory. The rest of this happens to be a lot closer to fact than the acceleration of gravity is 32.2 feet per second. When we get down to sex, you know, eatingness and then sex and above that symbols and above that thinking and effort, and so on, when we’re dealing with these things, we’re dealing with a fact that is better and more useful than 32.2 feet per second. The definition of a symbol is actually a little more valuable to you than any of the definitions of physics because it was in desperation of chasing symbols that man located physics.

Okay! Now you remember the other day I told you we were shifting a little bit. I said we had an extra period. I didn’t say we were changing anything. I said the schedule that was drawn up in Camden, and so forth, had a fifth period in it. I was trying to mark out your fifth period for you. That’s because we occasionally shift the first period into the fifth period as far as the auditing assignments are concerned. Now isn’t that mean? A lot of days you get the best possible time of the day to be audited and a lot of times the lousiest.