Want to talk to you a little more about the theta line, the MEST body line, perhaps give you a little insight, which, no matter how fantastic it may appear to you at first, is probably necessary to resolve some of the cases which you will be processing and will give you some insight, perhaps, into what may occasionally happen to you or to a preclear.

Any subject which is attempting to codify knowledge wants as little as possible to do with loose ends — with exceptions. I love these so-called laws which begin "Now, the following theory so-and-so and so-and-so is absolutely true." And then it lists exceptions and it lists practically everything that should have been covered by the law, and then it lists doubtfuls — everything else, We don't want any loose ends hanging out on this at all. As a consequence, I have to go into this subject to keep it in the MEST universe and to handle it in the second echelon, the MEST universe. I am not talking to you now, particularly, in the third echelon.

You see, now there are three echelons: The first is simply considering the organism. First echelon, which was Dianetics, is considering the organism as it. It is just it, that's all. It's an organism. It is a body and it is a mind and it is a brain and it's all one. And it's a unit and it's an individual, and it gets conceived and is born and it dies and that's that. And it considers it as very much a part of the MEST universe. Now, considering it from that angle, you can still produce very good results.

The second echelon considers the identity or the description of — an accurate and demonstrable description of — thought itself as something which is not of the MEST universe.

Now, the third echelon is a study of why did it all come about in the first place and why is it happening.

We are still very much in "how" when I start talking to you about the MEST line, the MEST body line — that is to say, the genetic line — its offshoots of the dead body line, and the theta body line.

You will find cases to which you will have to apply the knowledge I am about to give you in order to resolve those cases.

It will sound, perhaps, mad and wild to you, but that's nothing compared to how it will sound to the preclear. And that is nothing compared to the confusion in which you will find the preclear because of this.

Now, anything which tends to reduce the amount of confusion and upset in a preclear, in other words, to advance him further up the track toward knowingness, is legitimate processing — anything. Education, anything. You can teach a person Scientology and find them coming up in tone, just because it's closer to the truth than they have ordinarily been progressing.

In all of the fields of knowledge, a unification of knowables is desirable.

And when I start talking to you about the individual and individuality, I have to take in factors which, when you look at preclears, you will find to be very, very much in evidence. These factors consist of the fact that one theta body can take care of several individuals and ordinarily does.

What happens on the theta body line is very interesting. You find the theta body line starting out as an individuality. It progresses a little way through the MEST universe and may unite with another theta body line or two more, and then spread out from that and become several lines again.

In short, here you have your original theta body line, it comes along, it goes along fine, and this lifetime, it's one. And then it hits a lifetime strata and it becomes three or four. And then these three or four come in again to just one individuality again.

The only conflict here is the fact that you're accustomed in the MEST universe to arithmetic. And of course when you're dealing with something which is out beyond the MEST universe, you are not dealing with arithmetic. Arithmetic is based on the MEST universe. Mathematics apply to this universe and nothing else.

Now, here you have this operation: this body line then, may go out as two bodies. You could actually track somebody back and find him living twice through the same age period. You can find him living twice in the past, through the same years. But more importantly, more important to you as an auditor, you can find a preclear living in four or six or ten entities right here on this universe at this moment. And you can demonstrate it in any way you want to demonstrate it, and even write letters to the other identities, if you want to go that far, and tell them what they had for breakfast.

Now, up above the line of knowingness — this knowingness is a sort of individuality; it's a sort of a manifestation in front of a curtain. Here, let us say, [marking on blackboard] is a curtain, and here is "I" over here, but back of "I" there's a lot of knowledge can be concentrated, and "I" sort of shuts that off and says, "Well, that doesn't apply to me." Well, very often it applies to him so strenuously that if he doesn't know about it, he's going to be a sick man. Now, that's no good.

So, we'll go down the line here, and we'll find this "I," let us say, in this life. That was one "I". Now, we take this span here with four lives, and we've got "I" here, and we've got "I" here [blackboard]. That's not back of each other, you understand; these are just curtains. And there's an "I" in front of each curtain, but actually back of this is the same theta line. Actually, back of this you have just this theta line going along; it's the same line. It just depends on how many individuals come off of it this time.

You'll find a situation back through the evolutionary stretch where the "I" is dividing ∑, as in the Helper, And you'll find this division, division, division, division, then you'll find all the divisions sort of coming back in together, and then going all out and being different entities again and coming back in and — it's wonderful.

It could be very confusing if you permitted it to confuse you. The only reason you could be confused about it is you're fairly low on the Tone Scale and you said, "I'm going to be me, and that's all there is to that," and "There's nobody else is going to share any part of anything I'm doing," and "I can't be anybody else but me."

Well, that would be very nice if it would work out like that; however, it doesn't. If you notice on the column on the Chart of Attitudes, up at the top of the column, at some unimaginable number height way above 40 — you've got "everyone." You would have everyone; you really would have. It'd come back to the main theta body, the BIG theta body. And if you could back up the Tone Scale far enough or high enough, theoretically you could be everyone, theoretically. As it is, you only back up far enough usually to be a few. And very few people have backed up into "knowing" far enough to be more than a rather aberrated "me." So you see, it's just how many, how far you want to go up the line.

Now, in the old days there used to be this sort of an arrangement: The mystic considered this would be a master. [marking on blackboard] You see, there would be a master, and this master had in charge this many individuals, and this master monitored those individuals.

The second you start to clear up a preclear any distance at all, he will come up the line just about so far, and then he'll get to a point where he'll start short-circuiting.

Now, you notice these are closer and closer together. Now, theoretically this master is a master line. It's very "knowable" — I mean, it knows a great deal; it's quite high up the Tone Scale. That's sort of like — it isn't a master. What you've run into there is your consecutive whole theta body as applies to the individuation.

You know, there originally, I drew this circle of theta, and showed you how this little bit broke off here and started down the line. Well, this is the little bit, really, and little bits of it are off here. And those little bits are "I."

Now, it'd be all very well if it worked out that smoothly, but it doesn't work out that smoothly. What happens is that they're at different degrees — they're different proximities, you might say, to this single master thing.

So here's one that is very close in and here's one that's just a little bit out. And here's a line which is a spur line and has two. In other words, there's these various patterns.

Now, this one which has the two down here at the bottom, you clear up this preclear and you'll get him there. And as soon as he gets there, he can sense the fact that he's somebody else, too, somewhere else. And he'll become quite confused. And then he'll say, "I'm me, and that other person can go to blazes."

He may do that and as soon as he does that, you get a sort of a jealousy factor entering in between these two individuals who are the same individual. They won't admit their similar individuality. You can put a preclear on a machine and you can demonstrate to him how he actually has several personalities. Actually, he's in contact with several personalities which aren't aware of one another's existence at all. You make them aware of one another's existence and they'll start to demonstrate some jealousy, one to the other. One is going to be more powerful than another and so forth. Fascinating.

So here you have this fellow, and you're going to back this fellow up here until he lies across that line. Well, the next thing you know, he's going to start to run this person's engrams. Just like that. Well now, you're fairly all right if you go well back on the track to run engrams for this person, because then you'll run engrams which are mutual to each. What you do is run engrams that are sitting around in this, and it'll influence both of these and they'll come out to parity. They'll also come out into awareness of each other. They'll go through a symptom of worrying about "Let's see, Now, if I am me, and I am thee, too, then will I have to be aware of thee 100 percent or me 100 percent!" and "What are we going to do?" and "Supposing we're going to get all our thoughts tangled up." Well, actually, their thoughts were most gorgeously tangled up. They were really tangled, up to the time you started to process this person, because this person was being influenced from quarters he had no idea of at all.

For instance, every once in a while you'll find a preclear who will sit around and listen to advice from somebody. He will. He'll sit around and he'll get inspirations or he'll get something from somebody else or something else, and what he's doing there is about the same equivalent, but much different — a mind-reading act, sort of. He's over on the other side taking tips from what somebody else knows. And he says, "This is inspiration. This is my intuition at work."

And here's some other fellow sitting over someplace, working like mad, working something out and figuring something out. Well, that's where he's getting the data. Now, for instance, you take Kelly and Bessemer. This is a notable example — Kelly and Bessemer. One sat in England and one sat in Kentucky, and they invented — within two days of each other, completed the invention of — a process of making steel. And they call it today the Bessemer process. They might as well call it the Kelly process, because it was invented simultaneously in both places. Same guy.

There's nothing much to this. Alexander Graham Bell busily invented the telephone here; it was simultaneously invented all over the world. There was practically every country in the world had some facsimile of Alexander Graham Bell — wonderful transfer.

What's quite remarkable about all of the research in which I have been engaged is it hasn't flashed up anyplace else. And that's remarkable! It has not come up anyplace else on earth. On earth. (laughter)

But this jealousy of identities was such, actually, that in the early days when I was working on this I was experiencing a terrific anxiety. I knew the next five minutes somebody was going to appear on the stands with this first book I wrote on the subject. You see, I knew somebody else knew. I knew somebody else was working on it too. And they were. But not here on earth. Anyway … (laughter)

Well now, what I'm talking to you about, you'll find applicable. There are preclears right here in this audience that are sort of vaguely "not me." And it's kind of "not me" a little bit. And they think to themselves, "Well, any moment now I'll be me." But you start them up the line, you get them going a little bit further and evidently something kind of bats them down again. You can't figure out what's batting them down. They start up Tone Scale and BAT — they'll go down again. Put them on the machine and simply ask them this question: "Is there somebody else holding your aberrations in place?"

It says "Yes" — bang, machine operates.

"Where is this person?" and there'll be a little twitch, and you'll ask him — well, according to continents, Earth, anyplace else, stars, so on.

All of a sudden, BOW, you'll get something. Maybe the fellow is in Birmingham or something of the sort, and you've got across on the line. Well, the second you get this awareness, two things may start to happen. You may start to pick up the fellow's engrams from Birmingham. And if you do, go ahead and run them. They're common engrams on the line. But all you're doing is running locks off of common engrams. You see, it's theta, it's facsimiles, and they've got, actually, banks in common.

Well, your preclear has never had, really, this feeling of "I am." He never quite had this feeling, "I am." He always has this feeling, "Well, I might be if …" Well, that "I might be if," is he's just a little bit off the line back to the main individual. He's just a little bit off the line.

You can put him back on the line again. You'll have to jockey him around a little bit, and the next thing you know, why, he'll be responding up as an individual. Nothing much to it. He will go through a period of worry.

Anyway, here we have — here we have here an individual going down Tone Scale. Now, actually an individual could go down Tone Scale simply by having more and more things happen to him, and he becomes more and more individuated. And he becomes so individual that he doesn't even exist in the theta body at all; he's dead. And that's very individual, to be dead. It means simply that as long as you consider the MEST organism as the only identity a person can be or have, you get into terrific complexities, because how individual can it be? Well, when it's gone 100 percent MEST, of course.

Now, watching this, then, you'll find there are complexities in auditing for which you will be, sometimes, at a little bit of a loss to account for. And by the way, this is quite remarkable: There is a mystic practice of concentrating until you get a visio. And you'll get visios in far cities, in far places, without doing any teleportation of yourself or your soul or anything of the sort. You just lie down and concentrate and get a visio. And you'll get a visio of your — of doing something. Some of this is accounted for simply by, all of a sudden, being the other you — being the other you.

There are probably as many as four or five fellows on earth that are almost my duplicate, for instance, physiologically. Almost — poor fellows. Now, one of these fellows used to get me in trouble all the time.

I walked up the steps of the Cuban Embassy one day and — in Washington, DC, and there was a Spaniard coming down the steps and he said, "Ay, Pedrito, como esta?" And I said, "I'm very sorry, I'm afraid I don't know you."

And "Oh, that's all right, Pedrito. I won't tell anybody you're here." (laughter)

And I said, "Well, that's fine"

He said, "Well, you can even pretend you don't remember me. It's still all right, Pedrito, I'm your friend" and so forth and "I hope everything. comes out all right."

And I said, "Well, thank you," and went on into the embassy.

I forgot about it until one time I was in Puerto Rico, and I was trotting down a trail and three Brazilians — Brazilian engineers — were coming up the trail on horses. They took one look at me and they said, "Ay, Pedrito, como esta?" and threw their horses across my path. And they wouldn't let me go anyplace. And then this stuff — "You can tell us. We won't write anybody. We won't let anybody know we saw you" — a big routine. And they finally had me cornered so tightly that nothing would do but what I went over and drank brandy with them and played chess; and they sure figured out I was putting on a good act. (laughter)

To this day, none of those fellows would do anything but claim that I was putting on a good act.

Well, a little more time went by — in another place down in Latin America, and a fellow walked up to me. I was sitting in a bar. He reached in his hip pocket, and if I hadn't kicked hard at his shins, I probably would have been a dead man.

They threw him out promptly, and I scratched my head and I said, "I'm not in trouble with anybody down here that I can think of," Till all of a sudden I remembered, "By golly! I bet that fellow would have jumped if I had said I was Pedrito.

Well, fine, fine. Until, one time in Panama — one time in Panama, a girl took one look at me (the most scathing, scorching look you ever saw) in the street, sniffed, put her nose very high in the air and crossed the street diagonally. So I said, "Pedro's been here." (laughter)

I finally found out who Pedro was. He'd undoubtedly run into me, too. I finally found out who he was. He was the son of a rich Brazilian family and he had the wrong political color. And he had gone bad in an awful hurry down in Brazil, and he was being looked for by the police of about five or six countries, as well as the parents of several girl.

And during the war — during the war, I got a report that I had reported in at a place where I hadn't been. And my ears went up like a foxhound's, ha-ha-ha-ha, because Pedrito was a Nazi. And my picture was on file with the Federation Aeronautique Internationale as an international pilot, and those were in France. And full records of me were captured when the Germans took Paris. And, of course, all they had done was backtrack me, look me up, take ahold of Pedrito and cross orders.

I don't know what happened to Pedrito. I often wondered what would have happened if I'd ever met Pedrito in the line of duty during the war.

I am sure, though, to this day — to this day, that there is more there than just a physiological resemblance.

Now, possibly many of you have had this experience. You've probably seen people who looked like you or who acted like you or something of the sort.

Oddly enough, when you meet them you are apt to be a little bit cross about it. It is almost a byword that people who have the same name will be hostile to each other. People who have the same looks may be hostile to each other if they meet themselves accidentally. And it is just in that wise that — it's just in that wise that people who have or are operating from the same theta line become jealous of each other. They will actually flick across and louse each other up.

I am sorry to have to report that, because all should be sweetness and light. But you, every once in a while, will run into somebody on the theta line through the preclear. And if I didn't tell you this could happen, then I would not be doing well by you at all. I would be hiding something which you might need to have.

And when you do, you or the preclear may think you have run into some manifestation similar to the guardian angel manifestation, which is entirely different again. And you will be apt to believe that the other individual is far smarter and knowledgeable than your preclear. Not so. They're both aberrees. And you will find that it's just as difficult to convince this other person to do something.

Now, I don't know how successful you can be in running out somebody else's engrams while he's walking around, eating, sleeping and so forth. I don't know how this can be done at all, but I do know this: Your preclear can go back before the point of separation and run out engrams in common which will unburden the track. And that, as near as I know, is about as far as it can go.

We have conducted an experiment of trying to run out all the engrams for the human race. That's right. We've actually sat down, with far greater thoroughness than would ordinarily be demonstrated in a laboratory, and tried to run out all the engrams of all the race.

Interesting experiment. And the only trouble is, after we had reduced these engrams which theoretically should have been in common to everyone, we still had aberrees.

And the point is there, do we all come from a common source and is this common source, at its first impingement upon the MEST universe, subject to an aberration which if run out would then loosen up the tracks for everybody?

Nope. It's not a common source to that degree. You can't find the first engram in common to everybody, as far as I can find out at this time.

Now, this may all sound very peculiar to you, but when you're exploring with new, efficient tools you're apt to find and come across data which is unknown.

People are quite ordinarily afraid of the unknown. They would rather have a religion than a mysticism. That's right. They would rather have — by and large, broadly, they'd rather have it all codified and presented as being very finite and down to earth, and there's one God (except there's twelve). "There's one God, and we worship twelve idols and one God. And you bat yourself this way and that and that straightens you all out. And there's somebody that you tell all this to and that squares the rap."

Now, that's good and simple, but it unfortunately does not make well people. So we have to look a little bit further for this line. And in all of this research, a very cold eye has been kept on fact — a very cold eye.

What I've just told you about branch lines and so on may be something you may never run into in an auditor. Don't go asking for trouble. But you will have preclears come to you who will not be able to run their own engrams. They will start right out running somebody else's engrams. And then those engrams will promptly look, to them, highly unreal — something that couldn't have happened. And they will practically spin on it unless they know that they can run somebody else's engrams. Now, there may be a half a dozen people in the world whose engrams they can run.

And it may be that you can get your preclear so far up the Tone Scale — way, way up the Tone Scale in all manifestations, registering very high on the machine and so forth — that you could bat around and pry into almost anybody's engram bank if you wanted to.

That would be something else entirely. But boy, a fellow would really have to be high to do that.

All right. What you are interested in doing is returning to an individual all the knowledge of which he is capable as an individual. Where you want to stop his being an individual and start his being a saint, or something of the sort, is pretty well up to you and to him.

But I can tell you that the borderline is something that can be overstepped. It can be passed, and it will be passed with considerable upset and confusion unless you do have some inkling of what you can meet.

Now, all of our work is directed toward knowing more about more. There is a history, a complete history, to this theta line, as pertains to the inhabitants of the planet Earth.

This line is very much in common, it has a certain history; its theta background is in common. Its genetic background is to some degree in common, but not to the degree of the theta line. The constant line is the theta line. The constant line is the theta line, and by the theta line I mean that line where the individual uses the genetic line to make one or many bodies that pass through time.

And the theta body inhabits the other body from just before conception until slightly after death. And this theta line is subject to several individual bodies, and it passes very happily through time.

Now, that body we have in common pretty well — I mean, its history. The history of your theta body and the history of my theta body has terrific, terrific differences, but it has its principal incidents in common. That doesn't mean that the incident happened to you and happened to me too, but it means that an incident happened to me like the incident happened to you.

& And I'm now going to give you a talk on what these incidents are &