What is matter? Horribly enough, it is evidently a very solid thought which is chaotic enough in its arrangement of attention units that you can’t do too much about it. That is an interesting thought. Take a look at it for a moment. You are so used to seeing that floor be here in now all the time; it gets dirty, it gets; clean, it gets this and that, and you say, “That is just the same floor on a time continuum from here on out, and it is just that floor, and it is nothing else. That is all it is, just that floor, and it’s solid, and we know it’s there because when you walk on it you can feel it.” Oh yes? I can give you a somatic you can feel too.

Now if enough people got together and thought chaotically enough, and drove enough people down into apathy and below apathy, you would eventually get planets and everything. You can carry this theory on and actually work out the creation of the MEST universe or the creation of any universe. As you run a preclear way back on the time track, you get an area he is fond of calling The Home Universe. “This is the home universe,” he says. And what does he do in the home universe? Ask him, and you get a description or him making illusions, and a lot of people sitting around making illusions, and the whole pattern I gave you above. You will discover various odd mechanisms that they invented at that time.

A common one is the thought pool. This is still unsolved on the track I still don’t know what the thought pool is all about. There is a pool of thought, and all of a sudden one day a black spot appears in the middle of it, and the fellow can’t move. That incident you will find on most time tracks. Here was the pool of illusion, and if you ever want to see grief pour off a case, it is the individuals loss of his home universe. They will tell you in various ways. You can take the most hard bitten preclear and run him back to a point of the track where all of a sudden the stars are falling down in his universe. He will cry and cry. He had a universe, he was probably one of several who invented this universe, and it was a perfectly good universe, and one day all of the stars fell down. Why? Somebody else got a universe invented, and it sort of overlapped and ate it all up. And that is what our MEST universe is doing, evidently. It is an expanding universe, and it just keeps on eating into everybody’s time and space.

You see, here is your preclear one day, and everything is going along just fine, and all of a sudden there is 6 inches of mold on everything. Some black spiders come up from somewhere, and everybody runs away and leaves him or something. You will find this incident on the track. It’s a rough one to run, for it is really solid. Because, what happens to the guy? He all of a sudden starts getting rigid, and he can’t move. He is a part, all of a sudden, of the MEST universe. That is how people get into this MEST universe.

The incidents which I am describing to you are Technique 88 incidents, and I use them to describe to you the length and breadth of the time track by giving you these incidents on it. It is a rather frightening thought, that all this is just a thought, sit down, and get the feeling that what you are feeling just exists in now, and wasn’t there, and won’t be there, but is just going along with you. Can you feel that, just the shell, the insecurity of the universe? That is the truth, and that is about what it is. It is attention units held in the spring of facsimilies. It’s facsimiles, but just facsimiles that are below the border. When we get this area in here, (tone 28 on up) this becomes the THETA Universe or THETA Q, and the area below 28 becomes the MEST Universe Q. The man on the street isn’t going to believe you if you walk up to him, and tell him that the street is just thought. All I am giving you is a theory of origin, which is substantiated by the E-meter, and the fact that preclears can run these incidents and feel so very much better. About the only grief charge you will get on some preclears is when all of a sudden the stars are falling.

So, here is the zero on the thought line. I don’t know what zero on this thought scale would be unless it meant “No Universe”. Zero time is no time; zero space is no space and no time,no thought .... zero, no universe. The way you go out is for one of these zero’s to jump up the tone scale and postulate something; the decision To be. And this is followed by the decision to create something, which is probably followed by the decision to keep it, and somehow followed by the decision to dispose of it. The method of disposition which is most workable is TIME; as a method of disposition of old used facsimiles. The best method to dispose of facsimiles is time.

This system, although pretty good, is not very workable.

The theories on which this MEST universe is predicted are not perfect. I’m not talking now about my theory that I just gave you; whether it is imperfect or not isn’t very important, it just happens to work fairly well. It isn’t as good as the clear cut Theta-Mest Theory, because it takes you a little further into theory. It’s got a bug in it, this confounded MEST universe of ours. It is a lousy universe. In order to agree with anybody, and have any matter, people had to sacrifice part of their power of illusion or creation (illusion and creation being the same thing). So, they have to sacrifice part of their of illusion and creation, and therefore sacrifice part of their power of cause. Immediately, they have got to have some unknowns, and assume that they don’t know, because if they were cause they would know. So, they start coming down this tone scale, and come into this band. This is a very narrow tolerance band, and the band we are working with Dianetics. It is the band from zero to forty.

This tolerance band is nearer to being Zero to twenty eight or twenty five. There is no existence below that you would call life. But, there is matter below zero, and it is a gradient scale of matter. It gets heavier and heavier and heavier until it becomes what you call solid. The physicist is the first person to admit this, that no solids are solid. So, let’s call this band in here from zero to twenty eight, the life band. The lowest zero (absolute zero) is impossible to obtain, and these tone scale numbers are entirely arbitrary, except that the numbers do express harmonics At 28 the preclear is up near infinity, and at zero he is pretty close to matter.

But, from here on up ( 28 up ) are impossible heights of beingness, which are higher and higher in their illusory or creative value. You get much above this, and you don’t have any interest in this universe that we are in, in any degree. You don’t have any interest in anyone else’s universe as you go up from that point, and up at the top you are making your own universe, and you aren’t even in that one, and that’s the end of that. So, for all intents and purposes the only band we can study is from 0 to 28. Above 28 there is nothing of him to study; he is gone. From here, (zero) on down, you can find him at any funeral parlor. Did you ever see a fossil, a mummy?

A MEST body is a pretty solid affair, and yet it is alive, at least a little. The matter in this MEST body is in the MEST band, and hence below zero. The life in it is above zero, and these component parts make your location on the tone scale.

So, here we have a theory. You can do with it what you wish. You don’t have to have the theory to make these techniques work. I could, but I won’t, say that it is the ultimate theory, and since I worked it out you had better accept it or get flunked. No, if you just are aware that the theory exists, you know at least that this cycle exists, you will be able to spot a lot of these basic incidents which you will find very interesting to run on the theta line.

It also gives you a background for the rest of this work. Anything from 0 to 28 in the line of reason is really a maybe of greater or lesser magnitude. There is no absolute knowledge from 0 to 28. What man contacts as man is only relatively workable. Why? Because there is your band of truth, and it is just relative truth. When you go up above this you get your infinite truths, and when you go down below this you get your negative truths. So, anytime you work with active reason (by which I mean - thought impinging on a universe, or on bodies, or on energy) you are dealing with relative truths, and not absolutes. In past lectures I have talked about 3 bins: Bin One - of absolutes that has everything in it, Bin Two- which is all paths to knowledge or to the absolutes, and Bin Three - which is what you and I know. The stuff in

Bin Three changes continuously, and there is nothing true in Bin Three at all, for everything in there is relative to everything else in one way or another. Some of it is just downright lies, but that is what man knows. But, he goes up through Bin Two, captures some knowledge from Bin One, and when he brings it down from Bin One it goes over the bridge of Bin Two, and it changes into a workability, and it becomes relatively untrue. We keep up that cycle from absolute truth, and we try to bring down through mysticism, scientology, physics, what have you, into Bin Three, knowledge as man knows it. That knowledge is from 0 to 28. There is knowledge and absence of knowledge below that band, and plus knowledge above it, until you strike up in the impossible category of “I KNOW”. You get a fellow up into the “I KNOW” category all the way across the board, and his “I KNOW” is so nebulous that all that he knows is what he knows for him. He does not translate it into Bin Three, so it does not become known to you. He knows for him- you’ve seen them, they go around spinning all the time.

Last November (1951) I made a lecture on postulating the condition of beingness. Three quarters of the lecture is devoted to proving absolutely that there is no reason under the sun that you couldn’t say, “I’m going to be..” and immediately be - no processing required. The last quarter of the lecture is why it isn’t practical, and can’t be done. Here and there people pick up the first three quarters of this lecture and they go, “Wow!” “Gee, what am I doing way up here?” And they forget the last quarter entirely. He walks around rather dazedly, and in trying to talk to people he finds out he is out of communication with everybody, and has no language to tell people what he knows. He can’t translate anything he has got, so he takes a dive way down, bounces a couple of times, and settles out. You can depend on a person to go through that cycle if he postulates a state of being or knowing, and goes outside the tolerance band. So, here is the tolerance band we are studying - from this relative zero of not being up to 28. From there (0 ) down to the bottom Absolute Zero (00) the MEST is dead, for THETA when it gets that enturbulated, can’t support life in a MEST body.

Wait until you get into an incident called, The Glare Fights. If you want to see the whole process taking place.. Well, once upon a time you could put out energy. You put out energy, and just pile it up on somebody and drive them into apathy, down to where he is practically a lump of matter. You run your preclear into one of these, and he says, “Hah! .... Zing,” and he is giving it to this other guy.

And then, Bam, he is getting it back, and he loses and goes down into apathy. Then you find a real interesting somatic; he tries to go “crunch”. If you ever saw life trying to act like matter, that is it. It takes a long time to run. Why? Because it is down toward zero time. Time runs from Zero to Infinity. Up towards infinity of time you can have an enormous amount of motion per unit of time. The thought particularly, becomes almost unlimited per unit of time. As time becomes infinity thought becomes infinity. Remember this one, it is important. Down here in this MEST area, the MEST is so solid that it has a zero of time, so of course it has continuum. This galaxy of ours has been going on about 3.4 billion years according to the physicists. Well, it has such a long duration merely because it is so low on the time scale, being low on the matter scale. Watch your preclear as he runs down into an apathy or MEST like somatic where he is practically a chunk of matter. You watch him start to sail into this, and he will be going along fine until he hits the apathy. You will say, “Well, what’s happening? .. Answer me … what’s occurring, what do you get now? ..What do you get now?”

He will say, “WHAT DID YOU SAY?”

Actually from the first moment you spoke until the moment he speaks, he conceives that a very short period of time. To him it was quite a normal question and answer, but he is so low on the time band .hat his seconds are like your minutes. He thinks he made an instantaneous reply. Boil off is probably nothing more than this. Remember how everything seems timeless in a boil off? It’s really worse than that when you are aware that you are running apathy. Time goes on and on and on.

The motion the preclear sees in the engram would appear motionless to you as an observer to it. It is moving to the preclear, but at a rate of speed which appears stopped to you, you being a little bit higher on the tone scale. The only reason that matter has duration, and thought has a slight duration is the difference in their position on the zero infinity line. So, you can expect to take hours with your preclear running the first few apathy incidents. The preclear will think he ran right through them, but you sure know differently.

This is very important, because the material that you are going to run has a preponderance of this in it. When what you are running has somatics in it, that are way down on the time band, they become timeless on the time track, and can appear to be with the preclear forever. Any incident which is chronic with the preclear in present time has an apathy level timelessness to it, and is held in place not by grief, not by anger, but by apathy and apathy alone. Apathy, which is nothing but thought that is just about matter. If you notice somebody with a swelling on the face, you know there is an area of that face which is in apathy. If that swelling continues on and on and on like goiter; it won’t do anything if you run phrases out of it, this out of it, that out of it. You can get him higher and higher on the tone scale, and make him happier, and he will come out of the incident ultimately. But, the way to get rid of that thing is to plow into the apathy part of it, and ride him on through that apathy. When you get the apathy off that incident, it has ceased to be timeless.

Therefore, here is an answer to one of the most serious problems in processing. What makes an incident chronic? What makes it ride on the time track? What makes a preclear stick on the track? The answer is right here: zero time, which means he has an incident that is so motionless that he has it in a timeless stretch. The incident itself has so much “no time” that it rides with him on and on and on. Later on, after somebody has acquired such an incident, he can get a verbal holder. It will tie on the feeling of apathy or timelessness on the track, and the verbal holder will hold the incident as a lock. Basic on it will be that original apathy incident. These things you should know about the mechanics of thought, and that last one is very, very important. That is the mechanical holder, the mechanical chronic somatic, the mechanical chronic aberration, they are planted in a thought which is very close to matter.

Many of you at this stage are wondering how much of the old data is valid, how many of the old books are valid. I want to bring you up to date. It is all valid. The “Handbook For Preclears” was something I went by as if it was a whistle stop, and then suddenly realized it was Chicago. “The Handbook For Preclears” was way ahead of itself. The Chart of Attitudes was, and is a very valuable piece of workable tech. for you. The only thing you have to do with the “Handbook For Preclears” to bring it up to date, is run it with the idea of the Overt Act and the Ded, which I will describe to you during these lectures.

You can work the same way with “Advanced Procedures and Axioms”, by knowing just the principle of the Motivator, the Overt Act, and the Ded. You can shift the text around to suit yourself.

One of your primary targets is the reduction of that which is almost matter, and that is apathy. If you ever have run any apathy out of yourself or out of a preclear, you know that it grinds awfully slow. That’s because it has a lot of time mixed up in it; an enormous amount of time in a little space. Here, low on the scale, we have approached time zero. Don’t make the mistake of thinking you have ever been anywhere near the Absolute Zero line at the bottom. You have a great margin between a zero of theta (Absolute Zero) and zero on our tone scale.

Something else you should know, is that the whole band has wavelength. All emotion and thoughts have their wavelengths and wave characteristics. You don’t have to know all about waves and characteristics to use these techniques, but you must recognize this point; that anger is a wave characteristic and a wave length, that aesthetics are a wave characteristic and a wave length, that sexual excitement is a wave characteristic and a wave length, and these wave lengths vary from zero to infinity - CAUSE. Cause is capable of producing a wavelength. There is no reason why up here, as a clear, you shouldn’t suddenly be able to look at an object, and just have it vanish. That’s why you are fascinated by a magician; rabbit - hat - no rabbit. You say, “Gee, he is cause.” Way back on the time track you have seen this, and done it. You disintegrated rabbits or erased them. There isn’t any difference between erasing a somatic, erasing a facsimile, and erasing a rabbit, except in the order of magnitude. The rabbit consists of some very well ordered, well patterned thoughts, but that doesn’t matter, it isn’t much different than one of these Time-Zero Engrams. You are going to run into them; your preclears are going to run into them and grind to a scrunching halt. The usual comment is, “It’s like walking into a stone wall.” It isn’t that solid really, it is more like walking into a very resistive gauze wall, but you can erase it.

Your observation has already told you that the higher on the tone scale a person is, the better and faster he is at erasing incidents and blowing locks. Your experience has shown you that. You have watched preclears go up the tone scale, and get better and better at blowing whole chains of incidents and heavy engrams just by taking a look at them. What you were watching was the persons’ capability of generating “a disintegrating wave” increase. You weren’t watching incidents get lighter.

They are the same incidents; it’s just the preclear is getting more power as he goes up in tone, and can turn more horsepower loose on facsimiles. Facsimiles are the first cousin to matter itself. They are the gradient scale of matter. Disintegrating matter, and disintegrating facsimiles are about the same thing. You get someone way up, and he can turn loose his horsepower and erase matter. The ability of a preclear to erase depends on where he is on the tone scale. He can erase at the tolerance band around, and below his position. An angry person can very often erase apathy. A person antagonistic can handle grief, anger, and maybe some apathy. One in boredom- if you can get them to do anything, has quite a bit of horsepower. Get someone around 3.0 and 4.0, and they really start chewing up the track. One at 5.0 or better, and you say, “How about running this kind of incident?” one with apathy in it, and the apathy just goes out - swoooooosh. Gone! But try to get a person in apathy to run apathy! They are stuck. So, you run the lightest lock on the case; walking in the door. That’s as big as he can handle; just walking in the door, and you run it and run it and run it, and eventually you get a reduction. You take someone up the tone scale and put him on the E-meter and watch the needle. Send him through an annoying day, and watch each little incident just blow, pfst, pfst. If he seems a little upset at the beginning of a session you ask him, “What’s the matter?” He will tell you, and it blows. With a person low on the tone scale you say, “All right, go through it” And he will say, “Why?” A person way up there can blow up matter; that’s where the legends of India came from. You may say it was hocus pocus, but No, it was done with a Buck Rogers disintegrator ray that is 60 trillion years old. This may seem rather odd to you, but can you think of any other reason why you get reduction and erasure of incidents?

When you take this theory and start applying it, all of a sudden our techniques become very workable to us. We know we have to get someone pretty well up the tone scale before we can run some stuff that’s way down the tone scale. So we use light techniques on a case before we use heavy techniques. Don’t run him into an apathy incident if he can’t erase anything lower than fear. You can’t take a person in fear, and do very much with apathy. So, it says you have to work him on up the tone scale with light techniques untangling his life to where he knows more and more, until he is up the tone scale to where you can push him through this apathy incident. But, don’t take him through apathy incident I (almost erased), apathy incident 2 (half erased), apathy incident 3 (one quarter erased), apathy incident 4 (one sixteenth erased), apathy incident 5 ..You say, “Get up off the couch.” So, he says, “O.K.”, but he can’t move. You put your hand under his head, and he is like putty. You will find them like that in an insane asylum. I hope that with these explanations you will understand a little bit more about what you are doing with processing.

Now, get this one. Time has to be somewhere around the band Zero to 28 for a person to stick around in this universe. Space has to be along this band (0-28) to stay in this universe. It is necessary then for your preclear to have some feeling of freedom, of knowingness, and of expansiveness for him to do very much in processing. That knowingness, and all the rest of it add up to sanity, and that’s what sanity is. So, the more he knows, the better he knows it, the better he operates, the saner he is. Your whole job is just get him up to the level of sanity; not to run every engram in his bank. Therefore, processing can consist of just a shift of environment; give the guy more space- that’s all, or give him more time, and he will get saner; or education, fix it up so that he knows more, knows that what he knows has some truth, and is demonstrable to him. And by processing, which is removing from his track what he doesn’t know, and knocking this and that out until the first thing you know, he, of his own volition, will re-arrange all the incidents on the track. His track in other words, will become well spaced. When you are working on an occluded case you are working on a jammed track; you are working straight up against a forgetter. What’s a forgetter? What is forget and remember? Here at Zero is ultimate forget, and at infinity is ultimate remember. Ultimate forget is solid matter. In a big city where there are lots of crowds, it is harder to remember than in a small town where the population is sparse. If you live in a big house, it’s easier to remember that if you live in a small house. That’s a fact. Look at the clocks in Times Square; they are almost beyond count. People rush into subways, people rush up the steps, looking at clocks and clocks. You go out to a rural section and ask, “What time is it?” The guy looks at the sun and says, “Tain’t three yet.” He’s not interested in clocks. That is the difference. Nobody would call that rural group intellectuals, but they can reason better because they have more time and more space, which is more freedom, so there is more knowingness.

How do you make somebody forget? Hit him! Simple, fast, and effective. What did you do when you hit him? You denied him space in too little time. He goes- Bong! Unconscious. What’s the difference in that, and your running up to Mrs. Jones and saying to her standing there in the store, “Mrs. Jones, your baby girl was in the second floor of your house, and it just burned down and she is dead.” Out goes Mrs. Jones. You have given her too much MEST motion in too little a space of time. You should break bad news slowly. That is called, “Dropping a Curve” on someone. The speed with which this curve is dropped has a lot to do with the physiological reaction of the person. Did you ever see anybody turn white when they were fed bad news? The way to fix a guy up so that he would forget everything would be to stand him up, and throw every kind of force at him imaginable; throw it heavily one after another, force, force, force; and each time that he tries to corn hat this force; throw him some heavier force. When he tries to combat that, throw him some heavier force. You know what will happen to him? He will forget. You can do this to him thoroughly enough with an electrical field so he will forget his identity his being, his knowingness, everything. He will die as identity, because his facsimile will all be piled up by this force. In other words, out of his memory banks you make, an apparent MEST unit. Instead of memories that can be handled, you have put in his mind a pile of MEST. That’s the way you do it. What’s the best forgetter - just take away the persons’ time and space.

Now, when you pick up this wave after wave of force and run it, he is able to stretch them out. Because when the incidents are poured in on him he is saying to himself, “I’m not cause, I can’t be cause, because here I am, and something out there has got all this time and space, I haven’t got any time or space, so therefore I’m not cause, and it is.” So, he goes down tone scale. That’s how you make then forget. The ultimate in forgetting is dying. You actually don’t want to die, but you would just as soon forget. The only mechanism that you can get, that is a good solid forgetter, is a good solid death. Furthermore, if you want someone to start down the tone scale, you give him an “identilessness” a confusion about who he is. If you want to get him really low on the tone scale you fix it up so that he doesn’t know anymore, which is the same as forgetting. All these mechanisms have to do with space, time, and thought. So, an operation (for instance) can tell you that you aren’t you, you are that MEST body, and you have a lot of incidents like this. You say, “Gee! Is that me? Well, a MEST body only lives one lifetime, I guess that is me all- right. Gee, I feel rather stupid about the whole thing.” And that is exactly what the mechanism is. A person who thinks he is his MEST body is way below the tone level of when he has isolated himself as his theta body. The second you isolate a persons’ theta body he goes right on up the tone scale. Why? Because he knows he has a span of time.

When you start picking up these forgetter incidents, you give him more space and time, and his identity and beingness recovers. The most intimate individuality that you can get is a person who is all 8 dynamics. He would really know, “I AM ME.” He doesn’t say or think, “I am you.” You auditors are often running into the situation where you put somebody on the couch and run this and run that, and finally you - the auditor, get a headache. You get restimulated. What is restimulation? It is obviously a mis-identification between yourself and the preclear. One of the reasons is that auditing is an overt act from where you are on the tone scale It is, because it is a dramatization of an incident. What is dying except forgetting. What are you doing as an auditor? You are trying to erase the preclears facsimiles. You automatically add it up that you are trying to kill the preclear, because you are taking his facsimiles away from him, therefore, to some degree, that much of it is dramatizing dying. What we consider an identity in the MEST universe is a composite of all your experiences. That is incorrect, but that is what we say, so we get the idea that we must be killing this preclear by helping him out, and everyone you have killed on the track (and that is a considerable number) goes into restimulation. Also there is a between lives experience that you think you are dramatizing, because is has to do with erasing someones’ facsimiles. All it is actually, is piling them up in one place. That goes into restimulation, and the auditors’ perceptics turn off, because he hits this incident. Process out that incident, and the auditors’ perceptics turn on again. This is simple; once you know the answers all these things become simple. That has been a big worry to a lot of auditors, why they identified themselves with the preclear, and why they became more and more occluded. A lot of auditors have done this, and there is your solution.