Tonight I would like to give you the therapy that goes along with Technique 80. So far in these lectures I've talked to you about theory. Well, this technique combines understanding with actual mechanical running. You can just take a preclear and start him with this technique, but he won't get too much out of it. He has to understand what his goal is.

Now, if you take any individual or any group of people and you start to work with them and you don't tell them what you're trying to do, they don't do very well; you know, like the government does. Of course, the government doesn't know what it's trying to do. But you as the auditor should know what you're trying to do with Technique 80.

You're trying to make it possible for this person to be cause on all dynamics. How high you get him up is up to you. Believe me, if you got him up to two, the second dynamic — one and two — you'd have Superman. If you got him to one, two and three and nobody else was using Technique 80, why, you very probably have — oh, I don't know — governor of the state or the president or somebody. I mean, somebody who would just sort of automatically step into that position.

Don't think you're starting out here with anything light; it's not light. But oddly enough, the technique itself is almost like light processing. There isn't any heavy running of engrams, there isn't any heavy running of secondaries. You should know the techniques of thought, emotion and effort, but it's not necessary for you to get into the beginning of a heavy incident and run it through, because that's not what you're aiming for.

What you're trying to do is locate the points of unresolved incident that impede a person from being, and on the other hand, impede him from not being. And, by the way, it might be a new thought to you that somebody could be impeded from not being. Well, it's quite a thought. You ever a little kid and have to brush your teeth, and so on? Well, the little kid wants to be dirty, and he is impeded from being dirty. Well, that's a perfectly good ambition; he wants to be dirty. So?

All right. Here's somebody who knows very well that if he becomes a sergeant in the army he's going to lose all his friends who are privates. And so he is trying to not be a sergeant — goes up on the bulletin board anyway. Well, that's upsetting to him — very upsetting. Of course, that type of incident of which I am speaking now is very light, it's very mild, but it's almost funny, the mildness of this-lifetime incidents which impede not-beingness and beingness. It's almost funny; they're just nothing, really.

If you take some preclear, he's been run over by trucks and thrown off buildings and so forth — terrific casualties have occurred to him. And incidents, heavy physical-pain incidents — they're not what's wrong with him. But here he is, he's got a bad leg and, oh, his eyesight is all bad and he feels horrible and so forth.

And you say, "Well, gee, we'll have to run out all those incidents in order to make him capable of being — we'll have to run all those heavy incidents."

No. This technique doesn't care about heavy incidents at all. It wants to know why these incidents are hung up in maybes, and that's all this technique wants to know.

It's going to resolve those maybes. And you will find that the real maybes — the real maybes — are very light. There isn't anything very heavy about them. But the fellow has come up against something which has made him halt in a decision between two heavy incidents.

Now, you take the "Handbook for Preclears". There's a Chart of Attitudes in there. Across the top of the Chart of Attitudes you have such things as "I am," "I know," "cause," "everyone," "owns everything"; and there should be two additional columns on it — "freedom" and — forgotten what the other column is.

Female voice: "Win and lose."

Yes, that's right: "win and lose." Very silly, I was trying to read the Chart of Attitudes and it isn't printed on there.

Well, anyway, you take those top bands. Now, you take these bottom bands. If a fellow has decided finally — "I don't know," he says; "I just know not, that's all, I'm …" or if he's decided "Well, I'm dead," that's not very aberrative. But don't get him between "I know" and "I know not."

Fellow says, "I know. No, I don't, I know not. Oh, well, I think I know, but I'm not sure I know not," and he goes this way, bing, bing, bing — rrrrrr.

And, you'll find one, two, three or four circumstances in the present lifetime which are sufficient to aberrate the case very thoroughly and inhibit very strongly a state of beingness for the individual. One, two, three or four or five; hardly more than that, usually just one. And it has to do with the fact he received a motion and then he tried to use the motion and then he said, "I won't use this motion." And that's the indecision. You see, that's basically the only indecision there is. "I've received a motion. Now, shall I or shall — I'm going to … No, I won't use that motion." It's that cycle of action. "Something has happened to me here and I'm going to do something, but I'm not going to do it." And he promptly goes into a maybe.

And you may think you have to take the whole case to pieces to find one of these things. The weird part of it is, is the preclear will give you everything necessary to resolve his case, usually in this technique, in the first session certainly, and certainly within three or four sessions. They'll tell you everything you need to know.

The incidents are right there; they'll tell you all about them. They will no more than sit down and they'll tell you this incident. And you say to yourself, "This can't possibly be what's wrong with this case because this is too simple." And so, you take this incident and you put it aside and you say, "Well, we'll park that over here and we'll go in for something — we'll go in for blood over here."

No, no. They tell you about it. But the reason you haven't picked up this incident the first moment it showed up is a very simple reason: You didn't pick up the combination of incidents. He gave you one end of the incident, and it was up to you to guess the other end of the incident. But once you know how to guess the other end of the incident, it ceases to be a riddle and becomes a very scientific problem.

The preclear will always give you the wrong side. And he'll give you the side that's in view as far as he's concerned. He says, "You see this? Well, this is what's wrong with me." He'll tell you, and that isn't what's wrong with him. There's an incident down here which matches this incident, which actually is locked together solid, and it won't let this incident resolve. And here's this incident over here. And why won't it resolve? Because there's a maybe right here.

Now, here's incident one. All right, this is an early incident. Now, the first thing that happens on this first incident — it's injurious, the preclear recovers from it. There was some impulse in this incident to use force or do something. There's a little unresolved decision right in that incident.

Now, the next thing that happens to him that is aberrative regarding this incident may happen to him any time during the next lifetime. It can be five minutes from then, five years from then or fifty years from then. This incident could coast in just sort of a little annoying little spin sort of a thing. Every once in a while he'd kind of think about it; it wouldn't amount to anything. He'd go on being effective in life, until one day something happens.

One day he says, "Here is a motion," and something confronts him about this motion. And the second he's confronted with something that requires him to use this motion, he says, "Well, here I …" There it is — maybe.

So, what's happened is he comes along here, along the track, and way up here — all of a sudden here's another incident. There's force involved in this incident one way or the other. And he says right there, "I'm wrong. I … Maybe I'm right, maybe I'm wrong. I. . . maybe I. . . But it couldn't because it didn't; I mean, it — but, on the other hand, if I had have …" What happens is, is this incident moves over — this one moves over — and we get them locked together.

What is computation? Computation is the resolution of problems. Computation is taking the maybes out of existence. So long as you can remove maybes by the process of comparing data and get a situation which balances out yes or no, you are thinking smoothly. But the second that you get a proposition where "maybe it's yes, maybe it's no" — zong.

Well, now, you see this in thought all the time. I mean, people do this with a thought — well, a person has a thought and then he has another thought and then the two thoughts are in conflict. Or he goes up and somebody tells him one thing, and then he goes over here and somebody tells him another thing. And then he gets hung up on a big maybe here in the middle, so he starts thinking about it all the time and he can't think about it all the time, so he eventually kind of goes into apathy about the whole subject.

Well, that would be different. What I'm talking to you about here is force, effort — good heavy effort. There's effort in both of these incidents, effort in both of them, so that it is a maybe which is hung up with effort in it.

Now, oddly enough, you will find that this effort here has a lot of locks in it; they're little locks. It's all wound up. There are a lot of maybes, maybes, maybes. In other words, this thing can wind into the whole life pattern; it could just pervade all computation. It can become compulsive, obsessive, inhibitive, all sorts of strange things. It gets to be a mess.

If a man has this sort of a situation happen to him (as everyone has), he eventually — if you took a look at his brains — mind, rather — and had all of his facsimiles, it would look like an alarm clock some kid had taken apart. It's just all snarled up.

Now, there's the computational view. I'll give you a — give you an example. A little kid, he's two years old. Somebody comes in and steps on him — bang. Didn't hurt him very bad, but stepped on him. He's lying on the floor. When he's twenty, the person who stepped on him jostles him a little bit and he hauls off and hits him. Two incidents, both containing physical force.

It just won't work out. He shouldn't hit this other person; he knows he shouldn't hit this other person. The other person didn't do anything, they just jostled him. Well, now, from twenty on, you'll find this man worrying about this. Down in a substratum he's thinking about it all the time.

But what's he tell you when you ask him as an auditor "What happened to you in your life?" Supposing this was his uncle George. And he says, "Oh, I'm a wreck because my uncle George did so many bad things to me. All he did was do bad things to me. You know, when I was a little kid I remember going into the store and I had ten cents. And he said I couldn't buy any candy. And another time I wanted to go for a ride in the car, and so on, and he kept my — he kept telling my mother that she ought to punish me. And the whole trouble with my life is George and the horrible way which he acted toward me. And I understand that when I was a little baby, why, he was awful mean and brutal to me.

You start to run him, and the first incident he'll present you is Uncle George stepping on him. Is that the incident you want? No! He's not going to tell you this other incident. And the other incident is his hauling off and hitting George. And George — he's a young man of twenty by this time and his uncle George is pretty old. And yet here he is, Uncle George jostles him a little bit, restimulates this thing, and he hauls off and hits Uncle George — bang! See? "I shouldn't be hitting Uncle George, I …" Well, Uncle George never worried him much up to that time. But to hear him talk afterwards, you'd think that Uncle George was the — well, he was the devil incarnate.

This is what is known as justification — justification. He's justifying, and he justifies by presenting you with motions like this, so that he won't have to face this one. He don't want to face that one. No, that was hitting Uncle George. Oh no, no, no!

Well, you ask him about it, he'll tell you about it. Maybe he's forgotten it, by the way, and maybe not. But if you ask him about it, he'll say, "Yes, well, I did. I hit Uncle George once. I hit him and I felt kind of bad about it, but that hasn't got anything to do with it." Oh, yeah?

You say, "Well, it hasn't got anything to do with it, but let's run it anyway — hmm? Shall we just go through this? Just scan this, very … ?"

"Well, it hasn't got anything to do about it."

"Well, how about just scanning through it just once?"

"Well, I tell you, it's got nothing to do with it!" He'll get frantic after a while. And you'll finally take him by the scruff of the neck and you shove him into the front end of the incident and you run him through a few times. And finally he says, "You know, that's funny. My back hurts."

"Well, what are you doing now?" you say.

"Well, it's this incident. I tell you what the incident that's really wrong with me — I'm lying on the floor and Uncle George comes in and steps on me.

You say, "Run hitting Uncle George." You see? You see the complete mechanical justification? He's giving you this one all the time, and all he's really trying to say to himself, and he's never even able to say this, is "I had a perfect right to hit Uncle George, because look what he did to me.

The first thing that you get into when you try to stop a fight between two little kids is this: "He hit me first."

Well, actually, it's as simple as that; simple as that.

If you find somebody hating, snarling and writhing about somebody else, find out what they did to that person. If you find a preclear who wants to do nothing but run engrams about how horrible some member of his family is, how much he was abused by his mother and all he'll do is run these engrams about his mother: his mother did this to him, his mother did that to him, his mother did something else to him, his mother did . . . You know, you could waste a long, long time without resolving that case — lot of time you could waste. Because the fact that he's presenting you with all of these incidents and so forth — just look at that in interpersonal relationships, around in life or on the therapy couch, look at it either way, simply that he's saying, "I was justified, I was justified, I was justified, I was justified." It doesn't matter whether he says "So this teacher grabbed me by the back of the neck and slapped my face and so forth. And I was expelled from school. And this and that happened to me, and — and, boy … Just boil it all down to this: "I'm justified, I'm justified, I'm justified."

And it's your job as an auditor to find out just this datum as your opening wedge in 80, just this datum: justified in doing what?

Now, it may take an E-Meter to find it. Actually, they have a tendency to sort of look at an E-Meter and they say, "All right, I'll take hold of the cans" — sort of like "Let's make a little pact here, that you don't ask me any of these questions that are really hot."

And you say, "Well, now, let's see. What happened to you?" and so forth.

And he says, "Well, so, my younger brother kept hitting me over the head with a brickbat and he hit me over the head with a hammer and did this and he did that and did this and did that."

"Come on," you say, "now what did you do to your younger brother?"

"Nothing." The needle will go wheww!

And you say, "Well, now, you're sure you never did anything to him?"

"Oh no, no, no, no." Whewww!

You say, "Well now, what about it? Can't you just give us just a little inkling, maybe?"

"No. Hah. Well, of course, there was that business about the kiddie car, but that — that was nothing, that was nothing."

"Well, what did happen?"

"Well, I … Well, I don't know. You see, I was never sure — my mother said I was, but I — I was never sure that I did knock him off of the kiddie car."

"Knocked him off of what kiddie car?"

"Well, little kiddie car down the street that I brought in. And, of course, it fractured his skull and he was in the hospital for about six months, and he's never been quite right since. But …

Now, you'll get this type of interplay in any case and it follows some very, very definite rules. It follows some very definite rules.

Any time a person is protesting about a motion having happened to him — and this is a hard and fast rule, by the way: Any time a person is protesting about a motion that has happened to him, you can be assured that he has tried to use this motion and has hung himself up in a maybe, or he is merely telling you about a lock on that situation. One or the other.

Now, any time he gets one of these computational things that won't resolve, his mind is neither peaceful nor clear and his beingness is impeded on all fronts. You can be sure that if he's protesting about any motion of any kind — that something that's happened to him, if he's protesting about that motion — or actually if he's protesting about any motion on any dynamic violently, you know very well that he's guilty as sin of having tried to use that motion and found out it was the wrong motion to use.

In processing a case, if you will follow that thing through, you will see a case start to fall apart in front of you.

I dare say there are people who have run for a couple of hundred hours — as much as that, maybe; maybe many more. Nearly all the auditing was merely their justification. They were just running justification, justification, justification.

And they're not going to run out of justification — as long as you leave untapped — the incident that they are trying to justify. So, "What are you trying to justify?"

You know the religious world tells you "Repent, ye sinners." They tell you, "You're all sinners." And everybody says, "Yup, yup, we're sinners all right. It's a good thing the fellow up there on the altar doesn't just know how much." But what's sin?

Well, they seldom bother to explain that; they make a big plaque or something of the sort and they say, "Sin is one, two (not putting a dollar in the collection plate), sin," down the line, they give you a nice long list of sins. Well, there's no reason to list it. A sin is misusing a counter-effort you have received. That's all a sin is. Because every time you do, badly, it'll wind you up in this squirrel-up.

It makes computation, then, very difficult, very difficult, because everything a person is thinking goes over and under and around this and so forth.

You remember the cartoons of Rube Goldberg about the little man takes off his hat which knocks lever which throws basketball and so forth? Well, that's the kind of diagram you'd have to draw to get somebody's thinking apparatus if he's got one of these things badly in view.

Now, that's the first thing for you to remember on this. Actually, it's an overt-act proposition, and you know about overt acts.

If you refuse to commit an overt act, or if you commit one and are very sorry for it, you will then be unable to remain yourself, but will do, to some degree, a life continuum for the thing you hit.

You say, "Bang! I regret it." That means that you go right around here, and that is not beingness on other dynamics; that is being an effect, not a cause.

There's two ways that this sort of overt act happens to you. One, you're cause and you go along and you're just fine. And you receive a motion of some sort or other, and you've got that back here, and you've never worried about this motion before. But you're being cause. And one day you decide to be cause with violence, so you pick up this motion and you go wham! with it. But just as it's going, you say, "Snnnff!" but it's too late. And you spend the next thirty, fifty or five thousand years trying to pull back this instant of time, which keeps you there on the time track.

Well, therefore, the first entrance into a case with Technique 80 is simply to find out what the fellow is protesting about. And then, of course, "methinks the preclear doth protest too much." And what you get is a justification and you turn that around and find the overt act. Then run the overt act out and you'll find out you don't have to exhaust this thing very much; you just run it just a little bit and it'll unbalance.

He'll try to run the earlier one, then try to run the later one and so on; they're all snarled up. You've got a perfect picture of a person trying to run an incident. He's going around and around, first in one, then in the other, first in one, then in the other. They're usually almost to the character of locks. It'll blow; it'll blow.

Now, there's another reason why a person will protest: if somebody has tried one way or the other to make him an effect, and this person has worked on him to make him an effect, make him an effect, make him an effect — by being nice to him. And they've practically taken over his whole anatomy just by being nice to him. And eventually he'll get to the point where he'll realize that he no longer owns himself. The ownership of self has moved out from underneath him, and so at this time he says, "I'm just tired of this," so he'll begin to say that this person who is doing nice things for him is doing bad things for him. And there's a big maybe. He's gotten to the point where he realizes that all of these nice things, these nice things, these nice things, for him and his hands and his stomach and his clothes and his time and so on — somebody is being so nice to him. You can't protest against that; I mean, it's just something you can't protest against.

And the guy will finally, if he's ever going to save himself, he suddenly — he suddenly hauls off and says, "Oh, you're hurting me, you're injuring me," and he'll try to do something to the person or do something to himself. And he'll get hung up in that maybe. And that is another kind of a maybe: the protest against nice things.

There's the fellow's protest against himself of having slugged, hurt, injured, with thought, emotion or effort — some other being (you know, overt act), which hangs him up in a maybe. But you're only interested in the maybe characteristic of that, you see. He's hung up in a maybe by doing this overt act or his thought of doing it or an emotion that is overt, or a real effort that's overt. He's hung up in that line or he's hung up over here on a dependency line. He's been made very dependent, very dependent.

Continually in this society, you'll find a sixteen, seventeen, eighteen year — old kid is in a high state of revolt. "Papa, Mama — they're no good anymore; they're old-fashioned. They can't understand. They wouldn't be able to understand a woman of the world" (or a man of the world, as the case may be). "They don't have a person's best interests …"

All they're — all the kid is trying to do there in his teens is simply break this: "You're helping me, you're helping me, you're helping me. I've got to do something about it because I'm getting owned, owned, owned. And I don't own myself anymore. And I'm getting worried about it, so I've got to protest, and I'll find anything to protest against." And the kid, at that stage, will have the doggonedest things wrong with his parents. Oh, he just has terrific numbers of things. The parents have done this and done that, and done this and that to him. And actually, what he can't face is the fact that his mother fed him every day.

One preclear had a very bad set of teeth, and the bad set of teeth was just in protest of having been fed very well, very long. He knew his mother was tired. His mother would cook special things for him. He'd plead with his mother not to. And his mother would cook special things for him and so forth, and he'd eat them and so forth. And he finally got down to a point where he didn't want to have anything more to do with this, so he got bad teeth. And all of his toothaches went by the boards the second this computation was clipped.

Interesting, isn't it?

In other words, you can have suffered any quantity of damage. Actually, personally, you can have suffered any quantity of damage without having anything very bad take place — just damage, as far as damage is concerned. The engram that hangs up is the engram you tried to use and couldn't use and restrained yourself from using; you hung yourself up with it — or somebody was too nice to you too long.

And by the way, if any of you have ever had the experience of trying to help somebody else, you know that it invariably backfires. Sooner or later, sooner or later in trying to help somebody you'll wind up with a backfire.

Hm?

Female voice: I don't agree with you.

Oh, it'll work out in the long run.

Well, I tell you, whenever you find a preclear whose mom and pop are "no good," suspect then one of two things: They've been very nice to him or he's done an overt act against them. Those are the two things you suspect.

Now, isn't that strange? Doesn't it sound to you, as I tell you that, irrational? It's perfectly rational, but doesn't it sound to you irrational that a person would get to a point of where he will tell you "My father beat me every day" (his father never laid a hand on him)? "My father beat me every day, and this happened and that happened and other things happened," and so on. Not a word of truth in it. What did happen: his father was too nice to him too long. Because, you see, there's a way of being nice to people which actually is a very insidious way of taking them over. You know, you just interrupt their initiative enough so that they keep getting grooved along your will.

It actually is a nice impulse; there isn't anything mean about it really, but it ruins the self-determination of the person to whom it is done. And that is what they're protesting against. They no longer are owned by themselves but owned by somebody else.

In either case, a person will become owned by somebody else — in either case. In other words, if you injure a dynamic badly, you have a definite commitment with yourself to continue the existence of that dynamic. That's the overt act, that's life continuum, of which we already know.

All right, life continuum, the overt act, is simply your moving out of yourself, your disownment of yourself. And you go over and try to be this dynamic and say, "I'm awful sorry, dynamic, I didn't mean to do that. I will be you." "You bum over there," — that's you, see that? You just change it completely. And that's a very bad situation. Or the fellow just works so that people are nice to him and nice to him and nice to him; he'll finally blow up in their faces. And then he says, "I'm awful ashamed for having blown up and I realize I don't have any cause to blow up, and, gee, you've been nice to me all this time so there must be some reason why I'm mad." And what he doesn't realize is that he is being owned, little piece by little piece, first his left finger and his right finger and his left foot and his right ear, until he's all owned over here. And he doesn't like that, and that's what he's blowing up against. His lack of comprehension of it winds up in a computational snarl like that. All right.

Now, the reason why it is very, very nice to resolve this very early in the case in Technique 80 is because the case will play all sorts of tricks on you with the additional technique, unless you resolve the overt act and the protest against dependency.

You could say, then, that there's an overt act and a dependency — those two things. If you resolve those (very easy to resolve, they're right there in sight; it doesn't take long), you're then free to get on the road, because for the first time you're processing the preclear's first dynamic. Unless you get these overt acts and these dependencies out of the road, what you're trying to process with Technique 80 will be somebody else.

And that's very disappointing; you've got a preclear there on the couch and you're processing this preclear and you want this preclear to own himself and then finally get out along the line of the rest of the dynamics. And this is all going to be fine, except you worked for fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety, a hundred hours and all this time you've been processing Grandma. Well, all you've done is rehabilitate the valence of Grandma's ownership of the preclear. Well, that isn't getting anyplace.

So it's up to you to resolve the overt act and the dependency problems on the case. And then, for the first time, you've got him enough inside one so that he can carry on from there. And having gotten him that far inside one, you go on to give him possession of the actual physical facts of his own organism.

The end in view, of course, actually is continually interrupted by new overt acts and new dependencies showing up every time you go out to the new dynamic — the next dynamic, see? So here you are with your preclear and you just get along fine. You get his overt acts and his dependencies very beautifully resolved, and you've got that all nicely resolved, and now we're going into the second dynamic.

Now you'll find out that there's new overt acts and new dependencies on the second dynamic. And now you've got to resolve those again, but they again are very easy to resolve.

Why doesn't he like children? Why is he terribly over-anxiously concerned about children? — whichever way it is. There'll be an overt act or a dependency involving this "maybe" computation. And you find out he doesn't like children. All right, he doesn't like children. (By the way, an E-Meter really speeds this thing up.) You say, "Do you like boys?"

"No."

"You don't like boys?"

"No, I don't like boys, no. No, particularly little boys. They … they're bad, they're bad."

"All right, what did you do to one?"

"Oh, I didn't do anything to one. Oh no, no, no, no, no. Of course, except that … Well, I … I like children."

And you say, "Come on, what did you do?"

"Oh, well, it wasn't anything really. It was at this tea party. I mean, this little girl was having this tea party, and — yeah, I was invited over there and it was a hot — well, anyway, I dumped his head in the punch bowl, and he got a bad cut in the head."

All right, run it out. I mean, it's one of these "big, major incidents." And all of a sudden, you'll find out that he — little boys are little boys. And just carry it along like that.

You'll sometimes find a dependency on a children level. He feels utterly dependent on children. This is a great one, but it's a very simple one. It's usually, a child — as a child, this preclear was taken care of by older children and he's never noted the fact that those children are no longer children now but have grown up. So he's sort of hung there as dependent upon all these kids taking care of him.

And they tuck him in, you see, and they help him to walk and they show him how to run a tricycle, and they do this and they do that and eventually he says, "I'm not going to be owned like this anymore!" And he flares up and says, "You're hurting me." And you'll sometimes resolve the dependency one by finding that it lead into an overt act.

He went in and said to Mama, "She hit me." No, she didn't, but he said so. He'll go in and make up all sorts of stories to protest. So let's get the protest off, then, on the second dynamic.

Now, we take — of course, women for men and men for women come in on the second dynamic. Well, you get a very special kind of interpersonal relation and a very special kind of overt act — very special, highly specialized — when it comes between a man and a woman who are sexual partners. Procreation in this society is practically an overt act in itself. Boy, that's bad. So you just resolve a few overt acts along that line.

By the way, you find out that very often they're not very violent, what you're running into, so that you can clear up this dynamic so that you can practice the second part of the technique on that dynamic. Because this is just the half of the technique I'm telling you about here — that's clearing up overt acts and dependencies. You'll find out that they're quite simple to resolve. Something happened to him and he tried to make it happen to somebody else and then he stopped himself from making it happen to somebody else, and he said, "Bang!"

So he's hung up with that, and on the second dynamic those can be very interesting.

On the third dynamic, of course, we have the same sort of a situation. Very often his first concepts of a group are in childhood. Why Freud had to stress childhood to the degree that he stressed, I do not know, unless he was hung up there on the track. But he did completely overstress it, because when you think of all the childhoods that you can have, all the adulthoods you've had and all the other experiences you've had, this little section — childhood — isn't very bad.

But you know something about childhood? It's occluded on most people; it disappears from view. And man has an instinctive curiosity, that when something gets buried or hidden from view, he's like a hound dog, he's got to root down there and find it. Whatever it is, he thinks it's there. Well, very often it is there, but quite as often it isn't.

The reason childhood gets barred from view, by the way, is a very simple one: everybody owned you and you didn't own yourself, so therefore you don't own your memories. And these memories just sort of disappear along with the rest of you. And your childhood is full of overt acts and full of dependencies, both ways.

Very often you can spring a whole childhood into view by merely solving a couple of little minor overt acts that happened in childhood.

I remark one of about a five-year-old girl. She kicked her mother in the stomach, gave her mother a bad stomach ache, and there went childhood. Gone, right there. She just — "Poor Mama," and so on, and she just buried all that. Big overt act. Blew this one into view, and so forth, there came childhood. There it was, all lying out perfectly arranged in order.

Gives you just exactly the mechanism of how things get buried from view — just exactly. And that is the mechanism of how they get buried from view, too.

All right. You go out to the third dynamic, you'll find out that in a gang of kids, in a classroom, something or other, this preclear of yours has done a betrayal — an outright betrayal — one way or the other, of a group, or has hurt the group or has been very villainous on the subject one way or the other, or later on has become so entirely dependent upon the group that he hates the group.

And you realize with that, that we've moved right straight into the modern economic system?

Why do people hate people? As far as the third dynamic is concerned it seems inevitable that they would, because the dependency of each on the group has been magnified to be so great. Oh, everybody teaches the kids this, they teach you this, they tell you this all the time: "You're dependent on the group, you're dependent on this social culture, you're dependent on this economic system, you're dependent on it." And then they never bother to tell you that this economic system, without you as individuals, wouldn't mote… — it just wouldn't function.

At this tone level of the society, they have a little sign they like to hang up in stores: "If you think you're so necessary to existence, go on down to the cemetery and take a look; they thought they were too." You know, cute. In other words, they say, "Here's this group, this mighty group here; it's all — important and you're not important in it."

If you don't believe this is what happens, look at the number of votes that get turned in, in a presidential election. Probably very few people here tonight believe that their vote is very important in a presidential election. You say, "Well, that's just one little vote, and it doesn't amount to anything." Oh yes, it does.

Far as the fourth dynamic is concerned, you get some very, very interesting overt acts and some very, very interesting dependencies.

A man fares better because he's a man, because the rest of man helps him. But every degradation of man, as a form, actually lies on the fourth dynamic.

Every time a person himself acts badly, unethically, degrading himself in some fashion, or is degraded, he has immediately the sensation that he is degrading the whole race.

Think of what war does, by the way, on that. Here are the bodies — because the fourth dynamic, as far as we're concerned as we go up these dynamics (we're on Technique 80, which has to do with bodies) — and on the fourth dynamic, out on the battlefield, they throw the corpses around with a wild abandon. Anybody who has been through a war comes out the other end feeling a little bit degraded.

Natural. In the first place, he's lived like a dog; in the second place, he's committed overt acts against other groups, which are antipathetic to the fourth; but most important of all this, he has acted, himself, disgracefully so as to degrade the form and the physical being of man. And that, all by itself, is probably your strongest level. You would say automatically that, well, you don't think very many people would have offenses against the fourth dynamic. Oh yes, every single time you've not acted with a high level of ethic and pride of race and have yourself deteriorated in any degree or become less, you recognize that you were offending on the fourth dynamic. Because you have a certain face to keep as far as the fourth dynamic is concerned, and you consider it a very sacred trust. So look for those degradation points. They are what are important on the fourth dynamic.

Far as the fifth dynamic is concerned, that's very easy. Again you get the overt act and the dependency. There's a lot of dependency on animals but we don't seem to mind it. We don't seem to mind it too much. Where we get it is the overt act.

Now, a person can get so bad — a person can get so bad, so wicked, so… so … just mean — that they eventually come to a point where they are utterly, mawkishly, stupidly saccharine about animals. But that's the cycle.

You see somebody who is super saccharine on the subject of animals or a type of animal and so on: "What did you do, fellow? What did you do?" Because his sympathy for all those animals, and this and that and so forth, is his protest that he hasn't done anything to them. "Here's this nice kitty. I haven't done anything to cats; look how nice I treat this cat here. I haven't done anything to cats. You see, the cat likes me. Well, I haven't done anything to cats. You know, men are no good, but cats are all right."

Well, the truth of the matter is, every time you get this pushed way over — the sympathy on the line — find out what he did to a cat.

And it's a little act, it won't amount to much, it'll blow rather rapidly. But, boy, will you have trouble getting him to run it.

Now, the thing he did to the cat unfortunately has to be preceded by something a cat did to him to really be a bad louse-up. But usually what the cat did to him was somewhat accidental — didn't amount to much — and he took it out on a cat but that was wrong to take it out on the cat, so he hangs up in a big maybe.

As far as the sixth dynamic is concerned, our concepts of MEST (matter, energy, space and time) do not allow us to recognize what a good, solid overt act against MEST can be.

We build cars that are guaranteed to last upwards to two years. We build houses — well, they'll be all right in fifteen. Oddly enough, we build skyscrapers — fine, proud, sweeping skyscrapers — and they're designed on the engineering blueprints to last twenty-five years.

We're really temporary. Maybe you didn't know that.

What fools them is the Flatiron Building is still there and so is the Woolworth Building. They were built to last a little bit longer. But the Chrysler Building — in another fifteen years, watch out. Somebody will have to go in there with skyhooks and pick that thing up, because it's not — you know, the marble facing on it is about that thick. They got a real thin saw and made real thin slabs, and they glued them on it. Great stuff.

Well, this temporariness permits a deterioration of MEST. Actually, have you ever noticed how a Negro, in particular, down south, where they're pretty close to the soil, personifies MEST? The gatepost and the wagon and the whip and anything around there-a hat. They talk to them, you know? "What'sa mattuh wi' you, hat?" They imbue them with personality. Well, you don't do that very much anymore, because as you go down tone scale you don't do this. Because, actually, all that MEST is, really-you might consider it in the same range and the same band as solid thought. But it's, by aesthetics and other things, molded up by man into being what it is.

And an overt act against MEST: you're going to find that people will treat their MEST very, very badly — very often treat their MEST very, very badly. Car: Well, they go on driving it and driving it and driving it. It knocks and it spits and it snarls and sniffs and jumps, and they just go on driving it, although they really know that if they don't get a little thing fixed on that car that the next thing you know the car is going to start getting a pyramid of things happening to it.

Well, this again will give you an oddity; they have a dependency incident or an overt-act incident — one, two, three, four, five incidents — on the subject of MEST when they do that. And they've got this one on the sixth dynamic.

Now, you say, how would you possibly make an overt act against MEST?

Nothing easier. You could have them way back or just recent and so forth. You know that wrecking a car is a heck of an overt act against a car.

And you say, "Well, I shouldn't have done that," and so forth. But you say very often, "Well, it wasn't a very good car anyway and the insurance will pay for it. I don't want to look at this car. Yeah, well, it's just a car. Doesn't matter." Well, a boy has to get pretty bad off if he gets to a point where he says "Well, this car …" Little while before that, he liked it. But now he's got to demonstrate that, well, it didn't amount to much, so the overt act can't be very much.

Compare that with your feeling of possessions when you were maybe three, four or five years of age.

What we should have used childhood for, in researching in the field of psychotherapy, was to find out how good things could be, not how bad they can be. And if you find a child: a possession, an object, a piece of MEST — they personify it, they take care of it. Of course, they are very forgetful; they leave the doll out in the rain and so forth once in a while, but actually they don't do it on purpose until they're taught to — until somebody takes their MEST away from them.

The little kid, at first, he doesn't pay too much attention to MEST, he's not very careful about it, but when he has it he likes it. Well, you're not supposed to be too careful about it, but when you have it you like it. And if you like it a lot, well, you kind of take care of it and you keep taking the rag doll to bed, and you take this and that and so on.

Then all of a sudden somebody comes along and says, "Dear, put your doll away."

"Don't wanna."

"Go on, put your doll away."

"Why?"

"Well, if you don't, I'll beat the hell out of you!" (They don't say that.) Well, after that has happened a few times, you see, the child has the idea that it no longer owns this doll, and has moved away from beingness as a doll. So it won't take care of the doll.

And at first, a little kid is delighted with clothes. "Oh gee, clothes." Gets them dirty, not too careful of them, but clothes, gee. Nice frills, ribbons — little girl, you know? Little boy, you give him a Confederate hat, put it on his head, something like that — boy, that's really something. He really likes that.

All right, what happens to him later on? Why does he sort of get a strange idea about hats and frills?

"Dear, why don't you brush your shoes? Take care of your shoes." "Don't walk through the mud puddle." "Don't get anything on your pants." "When you're eating at the table, don't spill things upon your shirt. Mother has to work and slave and wash and wash and work her fingers to the bone so that you can stay clean."

And after a while — and after a while the kid's convinced that he doesn't own any of these clothes. They're not his, so he moves out of the beingness of clothes.

Of course, before he's very old in this aberrated society, he will have moved out of the beingness all the way down the dynamics including his clothes and his own skin. Now, you see, there's the reverse process. Now we're trying to take him and put him back in his own skin and then give him back these things. Well, you go on up the line.

Overt acts against the seventh dynamic are much easier than you suppose — much easier than you suppose. Because, actually, it's an overt act against aesthetics, which is the key on the seventh dynamic. There's where it shows up mainly, because aesthetics are mainly manifested on the seventh dynamic. And so you get this way up the line there, aesthetics.

You've all had your aesthetic values and interests and so on pushed around pretty badly. But there's a dependency and there's an overt act on the seventh dynamic — aesthetics — that you should hit. There's nearly always one there. If the beauty of the world has disappeared for somebody, and he keeps saying so and he keeps saying so, find out where he killed it for somebody else.

And you find that lock and his beauty will turn on again. And I don't know anything else that will turn it on. In other words, if the world is not beautiful to him anymore, find out where he killed it for somebody else.

That is a very, very nice way to get into the seventh dynamic. There are other things on the seventh dynamic if you've been fooling around with mysticism.

And then we get to God. Well, now, I haven't had any conversations lately in that department. I always more or less ran on the theory that you couldn't do much injury to something that was that big and that vast, but you sure can injure yourself in doing something to it. And here again we have the two facets: overt act and dependency. That person who has gone on being dependent on the subject of the eighth dynamic, of course, he gets to a point where he finally says, "There is none! I'm not going to have anything more to do with it. No. No, no. Anything that would own me that thoroughly must be bad; therefore, I'm not going to have anything to do with it, and I'm going to throw it overboard, nearest possible line." And he becomes a professional atheist or any number of things. And oh, he goes through a lot of mad gyrations. But, you see, there's actual overt acts against that dynamic.

Processing an entity one day that had come from the deep, dark vastnesses of Siberia, and had been a perfectly valid being up to the moment when this entity had foolishly robbed a church.

That was an overt act many centuries ago of such great magnitude that it had taken this thing down from any status at all to just zero — sheww! Hit that one — bang! Came right back up again. This, by the way, is in Entity Processing.

Now, there's an overt act of a highly specialized kind, but you start asking the preclear and you'll find out that there are many overt acts against the eighth dynamic- many of them, many of them, many of them.

It depends on what the individual believes the eighth dynamic is. He's told what the eighth dynamic is: "God is everywhere, God is everything, God is in everything, God is outside of everything, and it's in everything, and it watches you, and the watchbirds are watching you, and God is watching you and everybody's keeping his finger on you ...." And the first thing you know, the fellow is going to say to himself, "Hm-mm, there's something wrong with this. I wish I had a little privacy." And this is hard on him.

So if he's accepted this — this concept or this description — which is perfectly true; I mean, God is everywhere; he isn't watching you, you are it. Anyhow, perfectly true, maybe, to him, that God is everywhere and he'll do something which he knows would be very offensive to what his concept of God is. And he knew that God was watching him, so therefore this is an overt act against God.

And do you know you can pick that up out of almost anybody that has ever been infected — I mean, ever studied Christianity.

Now, that is so deeply buried, by the way, that it takes considerable digging sometimes to make your preclear find this one.

The dependency one is easy; everybody knows you depend, depend, depend, depend. But on the other side, that is not as easy to find. When did he do something that was an overt act to God? But it's one that you have to solve on the case or you'll never get him up here where he'll play God. And by the way, that's a terribly hard thing to do — terribly hard thing to do — unless you happen to be completely, ravingly insane and merely are playing God and nothing else, which doesn't count.

Well, as I've shown you this, you go on up the dynamics one right after the other until you have found your overt act and dependencies in the preclear on each one of these dynamics, all up the line. And you don't find very many of them on each dynamic — one, two, three, something like that. You don't have to run them very much, just sweep them a few times, take the charge off of them. All of a sudden he'll recognize them and suddenly begin to compute on the subject.

And there, every time you start this process of 80, your first step is to clear up the dependency and the overt act on the dynamic you're working on. And then you use the second part of the technique.