The basic definition of Dianetics has been very happily furnished us by Funk & Wagnalls New Standard Dictionary, Supplement No. 5:

Dianetics, noun: A system for the analysis, control and development of human thought evolved from a set of coordinated axioms which also provide techniques for the treatment of a wide range of mental disorders and organic diseases: term and doctrines introduced by L. Ron Hubbard, American engineer. (Greek dianoetikos — dia. through, plus noos, mind) — Dianetic, adjective.

Dianetics is a thoroughly validated method of increasing sanity. If you think of it in those terms you are not liable to go very far wrong. It is a method of increasing sanity and it is the only validated method in existence for increasing sanity, except for going out and having a really good time.

It happens that there are many ways to describe Dianetics to somebody who walks up to you suddenly and asks, “Dianetics? What is that?” Don’t fumble for a definition, because it makes you look unsure. You should have a good, fast definition ready — for instance, “Dianetics? Dianetics is a method of erasing all the pain out of a person’s lifetime. If a person had no pain in his lifetime, he would be a fairly happy person, wouldn’t he?” And they agree, so you say, “In Dianetics you just erase all the pain out of his lifetime and he is well.”

That is a very convincing definition. It is actually what you are doing, although I prefer to think of it in the very simple terms of converting the pain of a lifetime to happiness and sanity. Now, that may sound a little bit too Pollyannaish as a definition, but it is actually what you are doing, after all. If you start converting the pain and anguish of a person’s life to useful, forceful thought, you are doing a great deal for him.

The methods which have been used up to this time have all been called Standard Procedure. It is very interesting to hear somebody out in the field say, “This new method I have of standing the preclear on his head in the corner and auditing him through a megaphone replaces Standard Procedure.” Believe me, if there is any way at all of increasing the efficacy of processing by standing a preclear on his head in the corner and auditing him through a megaphone, that will become part of Standard Procedure!

Standard Procedure is an extremely varying affair. It would probably be better called Proven Procedure. It changes about every sixty days, at least; it changes in the direction of less work and thought on the part of the auditor and faster processing for the preclear.

In the income tax bureau they have the optimum of one income tax employee for every taxpayer. We are working toward a reductio ad absurdum about like that with Standard Procedure. In Standard Procedure we want an empty chair to be the auditor and thirty seconds to be the entire duration of processing, so that all Dianetics can do for a person will have been done at the end of thirty seconds with no auditor sitting there. This would be the reductio ad absurdum.

Better results in less time, with less intelligence or less application or less understanding necessary on the part of the auditor, is the goal we are working toward. Each time we make an advance we come closer to that goal, which is really a very desirable one.Unless we can produce a good release in twenty hours, I don’t think we will be able to walk into the federal government, for instance, and say, “The contract for returning sanity to all the criminals in all the prisons and to all the psychotics in all of your institutions, and of bringing all of your government workers up into the band of sanity, will be so much a head,” and have the government be very anxious to pick up this contract. But if we can get it to that level, to a point where we can forecast the result in a certain number of hours, even the federal income tax bureau could understand it! We can forecast the result now, but it is true that auditor skill is enormously variable and the state of the preclear when you first get your hands on him is enormously variable. As a result, the length of time processing is going to take is extremely variable.

Also, it is actually possible, evidently, for a person to go on being processed for a long time by patty-cake processing and other processes — just having the person lie on a couch, with the auditor talking to him or something — and to remain almost static on the tone scale. The auditing that does this has to be so thoroughly incompetent that the Board of Certification would probably faint dead away if they even heard five words of it; it would have to be that bad. But auditors are around doing things that are that bad.

Now, Science of Survival was written in the interest of communicating a very simple technique which will then make it possible for the auditor to achieve results on the simplest level, for a better auditor to do more for the case and for a professional auditor to do a great deal more for the case. We have a gradient scale of auditing that can be taken out of this present work.

There is a basic theory that underlies this; it is called the Theta-MEST theory. Some people may have trouble trying to figure out what the Theta-MEST theory is, but if you have any trouble it is simply because you are trying to make it too complicated. It is too simple; that is the trouble with the Theta-MEST theory.

Theta stands for thought. Once upon a time man talked about his soul; philosophers have talked about “life energy” and “cosmic consciousness.” All of these things could be called Theta. In other words, Theta is just the Greek word which comes the closest to saying “thought.” So let’s take thought as a separate energy, as something we don’t know a great deal about, and we will just compartment it out of the physical universe.

We know the physical universe. The physical universe is this desk and that chair and that light and the electricity running through that light; it is very simple. We have all had our tiffs and bumps from the physical universe. We know about the physical universe. We call that MEST. It is called MEST because it is made up of matter, energy, space and time; we take the first letter of each one of those words and put them all together and we have MEST.

So we have matter, which is energy formed into solids. Then there is energy itself, which could be heat, electricity, or any type or any manifestation of energy of which we know in the physical universe. And there is space; we all know what space is — space is this empty stuff. And then there is time, which is what very few of us have enough of. This is the physical universe, and MEST is just another way of saying “the physical universe.”

We could also get very erudite and call it phi — another Greek syllable — and that would stand for “physical universe.” But this starts to sound too much like “having to have a label because we don’t understand what we are talking about,” so let’s just call it MEST and let it go at that. And by MEST we mean the physical universe.

Now, evidently the theory of “mud to man” has not worked out too well. The biologist says, “Spontaneously arising from the ammonia seas of the world was a form of life which became more and more complicated, and it evolved and evolved and all of a sudden there was a man. And that is all there is to it.”

You look at him fixedly and say, “Yes, but what about this basic unit of life?” He says, “Well, that was probably a virus or a monocell or something.” “But how did it come into being?”

“Well, it just fortuitously came into being. It just happened at that moment there were enough factors present so that they combined and this happened.”

This is just exactly like that mountain of iron that fell over sideways upon the oil well and somehow or other fortuitously happened to produce a new Cadillac! The odds against the mud- to-man theory, to anyone who wants to figure this out actuarially, are so great that when you add to them the odds of this organism going on and getting more and more complex, you get into an imponderable.

Men in the past have solved this imponderable by saying “God made man and that’s all there is to it. And shut up!”

We find this to be a far more acceptable theory, if we want to call it a theory, because we would say this “cosmic consciousness,” or whatever it is called, is a determination to do something to the physical universe. We find out our first axiom is simply in the line of “Theta has as its mission, or one of its missions, the changing of MEST.” That is not very complicated. Theta changes MEST.

Electricity as it runs through the wires lights a light. Similarly, life energy changes MEST. A little bit of Theta gets into the physical universe and somehow organizes it to turn the laws of the physical universe into a conquest of the physical universe. Theta keeps on doing this and it builds up a greater and greater control of MEST.

The first goal is an organism; Theta makes an organism and then this organism eventually has mobility. Then through its mobility the organism itself begins to handle MEST and change it.

You could say, even offhand, that Theta did not necessarily want to change MEST creatively; it might also change MEST destructively. Whether creatively or destructively, this energy of thought — which could be likened to God, God’s will, spirit, soul, anything you want to classify it with (except that we know a few more laws than were ever known before about this stuff) — works on the basis of “How can Theta change the most MEST?” When you work this problem out you will find that Theta can change the most MEST by making a creative organism which can then go on creating things which change MEST. And if we work it out this way, we will see that man has gotten up to a point where he changes MEST.

Man has gotten to a point where he potentially could blow up planets. No other organism can go this high. And we potentially, actually, could build planets; we have gotten up to that point.

Now, Theta forms with MEST a union out of turbulence. Evidently, the first step in any Theta- MEST combination is a heavy impact of Theta against MEST with a resulting enturbulence. They don’t go together smoothly the first time. The Theta comes back out of this, or disenturbulates to some degree, and then, and only then, begins a harmonious conquest of this MEST which it has contacted. The Theta gets into the MEST, learns something about the laws of the MEST and, pulling back, is then able to change more MEST. Then there is another enturbulence and so forth, Theta learns some more and pulls back and then comes in and changes more MEST.

Whether this is in a single lifetime or in the sequences of lifetimes which go to make up a racial generation of many lifetimes — either way — it is the same cycle that is going on. Each time this is the same thing.

It has been said that hard knocks are the best teacher. This would simply be the process of an organism’s Theta going up against MEST with an impact, getting enturbulated and learning something. For instance, a fellow gets into a deal and gets swindled. He pulls back out of this deal and now he knows how to keep from getting swindled. But if he is completely hopeless, life uses natural selection on him and lets him get swindled until he is no more.

Now, there is a very familiar cycle of Theta-MEST: The organism is conceived, goes through the cycle of growth, coasts off into a decay and dies. That is one single cycle of Theta tackling MEST in one single life span.

Death is a necessary thing, unfortunately. This world would look awfully funny if all of the trees of the giant-fern era were still with us. The only way that Theta can go on and progressively change more and more MEST is to let the organisms evolve themselves. Those fern trees that grew back in the Devonian or Carboniferous area were useful up to a point, but then more modern tree forms could evolve. That much MEST had been conquered and so a more modern tree form could be evolved.

To make soil you have to have lichen and moss; these life forms make soil out of rock and sand. Unless they have been in there together working, you don’t have soil which can grow a better tree. Now, these ferns were growing in swamps and so forth, but they were making more soil. They were making, also, coal. All sorts of things were taking place there; life forms evolved into higher and higher organisms and eventually into great bodies of fish. The sea evolved about as far as it could go and then the land started to evolve. You could see this cycle working.

But there is another cycle at work right here in present time. What did you have to eat for supper? There wasn’t a single thing you had to eat, except perhaps the chemical condiments, which was not gained immediately from lower forms of life — in other words, more basic conversion units. You and I can’t go out and eat rock, and unlike Nebuchadnezzar, grass stains my teeth.

So there is a necessity for lower forms, which live on lower forms, which in turn live on lower forms. In other words, in present time we have an evolution cycle right with us. The lesser animals are performing certain functions and there is a balance of nature and so on. This is a sort of a staff of life.

Man at this moment happens to be clear out to the end of this staff of life, and we have gotten so far beyond the line that seldom does anything eat us anymore. Man has pretty well proofed himself outside of this cycle but it is always waiting for him; he can still be an edible. Man will probably keep on evolving further. But how did all this life evolve in the first place? Theta made a better organism which could change more MEST. In order to do this, the Theta and MEST had to come together solidly and then separate — disenturbulate, in other words — and then go in for an orderly conquest, then get enturbulated again, and then disenturbulate and go back for an orderly conquest.

For instance, the Theta during a lifetime learns certain things and then dies — except the Theta itself evidently doesn’t die. It evidently comes back for another attack with another organism.

An organism is nothing but Theta plus MEST: organism equals Theta plus MEST. That is a life form — Theta plus MEST — but the Theta is dynamically trying to change that MEST.

Now, as long as an organism is progressing it is following the line and rules and orders of Theta, and when it stops progressing it is because it has been overtaken by MEST. This is another way of stating the fact that after a person has gotten 8,622 engrams he is pretty well done for, or that when he has gotten all of his free life force completely enturbulated he is pretty well done for, such as when he has been hit so solidly by some form of MEST as to separate the Theta and MEST in him. When these factors enter in we have death.

It is interesting that this material slightly violates the biological concepts of the last 150 years. Those are radical. They were brought in as radical and they are still regarded as radical. We are working with factors that man seems to have recognized for the last five thousand years. We in Dianetics at the present moment, with the Theta-MEST theory, are on the most conservative line of thought that we could possibly be on. Of course, we have evaluated this line, and that is the main improvement on the thing.

It was a wild thought that man came from mud; that was a wild one. But that man came from God or a universe of life which impinged upon this universe is an old thought. Man has been playing with this thought for five thousand years that I know of, and if we can make it work well for the first time, we will be doing very well. Because at this time, with processing, we don’t need death! The death cycle is not necessary if a person’s Theta can be disenturbulated from all the MEST in which it has become enturbulated, and if we can artificially pull it back out and keep the organism going, the usefulness of the mechanism of death to us as individuals has in some measure ceased. But it has not wholly ceased. We will, of course, follow along an evolutionary line even further. Probably man’s body will evolve a great deal further. Certainly the generations will go along.

We say very little in Dianetics about geriatrics; that is a very fancy name for the study of old age and what causes it. We almost leave this alone, and that is very peculiar because I was a member of the United States Public Health Service Gerontological Society and they are supposed to be experts on this. But I have left it alone because it is hard to prove anything in geriatrics. You have to have had somebody live another hundred years before you can prove much.

But if you take an individual and process this individual very long, you begin to watch, actually, rejuvenation — I don’t think there is much denying this — or you watch aging toward some optimum point of life. What that optimum point of life would be, I don’t know — perhaps twenty-one or twenty-two. You process somebody who has been hung up on the time tracks at five or ten and who still bears some physiological resemblance to the five- or ten-year-old, or a person who is stuck in birth and bears that rotund shape of somebody who is stuck in birth, and you are bringing him on up somewhere in the vicinity of his optimum age, unless he has passed the point of no return. Physiologically the body can go to such a point that no matter how much processing you do, the person is unable to recover. That point is pretty advanced. A doctor would give this person up, usually, and say that nothing could be done for him.

Sometimes you can take a person who is thirty and looks forty-five, and when you have processed this person thoroughly and well — in the absence of bad physical deformation — you will have somebody who looks thirty or twenty-eight or twenty-five or something in that range.

I have in mind one girl I saw in Kansas City when I was up there lecturing. Her husband had just died. The first time I saw this lady she looked like an old woman. Of course, she was wearing black and that didn’t help much, but when you looked at her face you saw a woman who looked well along. I asked an auditor to do something for her because I knew that she must have a heavy grief charge lying right there ready to be blown. So he audited her for nine hours.

I saw her one day after he had audited her. Her clothes had changed, which of course helped the illusion a little bit; she was wearing a red dress. But she was a young woman! She looked like a woman of about twenty-six.

This type of thing can happen very easily with processing. We very definitely impinge into the field of geriatrics, but we don’t dare say very much about rejuvenation and old age; these are very unpopular subjects. Nevertheless, the auditor can watch people get younger or grow up as he processes them, and as a matter of fact, very few auditors have practiced very long without having this experience.

I am not trying to sell Dianetics like you would sell these little pink pills that you are supposed to write for. That is just a by-product. We are not trying to make everybody live forever. This is just an illustration of the Theta-MEST theory.

In one generation, then, we have an opportunity of undoing the mistakes of the organism during that generation, recovering into a free state the Theta which is entangled with the MEST through bruises, wounds, collisions and so forth.

The primary break of affinity, of reality and of communication is between Theta and MEST. The little boy who goes out to play and knocks his shins against a rock is a classic example: he has broken affinity with that rock. If he hits his shin against enough rocks he will get to a point where MEST starts to look unreal to him. This has nothing to do with the word content of engrams. He will not want to have so much to do with MEST; he won’t want to own so much of MEST. In other words, he has withdrawn a little bit his reach into MEST, and if he is hurt sufficiently he will pull his command all the way from MEST. And what do you get when you get that level? That is propitiation. That is 1.1 on the tone scale. In order to go on living this person feels they have to give up MEST, so they start handing you things. They start saying to people that they will give them things. They start bribing. They start giving away their MEST; it has gotten dangerous! They have had too many breaks with MEST — engrams.

This is basic theory. We know, when we have experimented a little bit with Dianetics, that we can take a person down the time track and run them into a physical-pain moment and they will re-experience the pain, and that if we can go through it enough times and do a good enough job of it, that pain will reduce or erase. That is an observed manifestation, but what is the theory behind this?

This organism has collided with MEST; that is a primary break of affinity, communication and reality between that MEST and the Theta. The Theta and MEST of the organism, then, are enturbulated within one another and they have changed their character slightly in the vicinity of that enturbulence. They have been jammed together so hard that their polarity has shifted — you might say the wavelength of the Theta and the wavelength of the MEST have shifted — so that the two of them (although they are still very tightly enwrapped) are now enturbulated Theta and enturbulated MEST. We call that, for short, entheta and enMEST.

Now, I am asking you to acquire a vocabulary, here, of Theta, which is the energy of thought, from wherever it comes and whatever it is; MEST — matter, energy, space and time; and enturbulated Theta and enturbulated MEST, which we call entheta and enMEST for short. That is very simple.

That engram, then, is a potential point of turbulence because entheta starts to behave in a peculiar way: it starts to enturbulate Theta in its vicinity. In reverse, Theta will disenturbulate entheta. They are the same thing but with opposite polarities, so they kick against each other.

If a person has a great deal of pain, then that person will pass the pain along to other Theta. For instance, look at two people who are together, and one is very unhappy and the other one is very happy. The person who is very unhappy could be said to have a preponderance of entheta, or enturbulated Theta; he has been hurt a great deal in his lifetime. And the person who is happy has not been hurt a great deal, and he is not enturbulated. The first thing you know, the happy person is not quite so happy; he has become enturbulated a little bit by this person who is unhappy. But in reverse, you will find that the person who is unhappy has become a little happier through associating with the person who is happy. That is Theta operating to disenturbulate entheta.

So, the entheta tries to make everything entheta; that is its operation. And the Theta tries to make everything Theta; that is its operation.

What are you trying to do as auditors? All you are trying to do is take all available Theta in the case and turn as much entheta as you can back to Theta again. That is all.

Naturally, if you start throwing entheta at this case you will increase the entheta on the case. If you enturbulate this case more, what little Theta the preclear has may become converted into entheta and then you will have somebody in a psychotic break.

Here is a very good example of the operation of Theta: There was a fellow who was operating in Asia Minor a number of years ago, up around Galilee, and about all he had to do was tell somebody to take up his bed and walk and this person would come out of almost any illness he was in. It was certainly no myth that that happened.

We are not trying to explain Christ “scientifically”; we don’t want to get off on that byroad of “scientific” explanations and observations and so forth. All we know is what we compare with the real universe, and if that is scientific, that is fine — but if it works, that is better.

There is a little chapel down in South America that has a mountain of crutches outside of it. People walk into this place on their crutches, usually helped along in some way, and kneel down before the altar, and then they walk outside again and throw their crutches up on the pile and walk off! There is a mountain of crutches there.

This is very interesting. You could say that here was an area of such concentrated Theta that any entheta — such as a psychosomatic illness or an aberration — which came in its vicinity became disenturbulated. I imagine those people who are using crutches because of some psychosomatic disorder heal up rather quickly, but those people who are using crutches because they have had their right leg sawed off don’t throw away their crutches.

Here you have a case, then, of a tremendous amount of Theta automatically disenturbulating a little entheta.

Now, theoretically, you could actually form a group of people who would be sufficiently Theta that a newcomer walking into their midst would disenturbulate just through association with these people.

Have you ever walked into a happy home and realized that it was a happy home before you ever talked to anyone? Or have you ever walked into a room and had the strange feeling that there had been a quarrel there just a moment before? Or worse, have you ever walked into a room and realized that the people there had been talking about you, and not particularly complimentarily, before you showed up? You don’t have to read the expression on their faces; you can actually sense an atmosphere. This Theta is not something intangible — we can feel it!

Have you ever looked at a girl (or you ladies, have you ever looked at a young man) and suddenly realized that you felt a great deal for this person? There is a sort of an interchange. I know I was very young one time and it was spring, and I swear that between a girl and myself there was enough Theta flowing that it was a wonder it didn’t crackle like sheet lightning! I never felt so healthy in my life, by the way.

These are simple, homely examples of this basic theory at work. You have sensed it and you know about it.

The component parts of Theta may be many, but we know three of them and these are affinity, communication and reality. If you take affinity, communication and reality and put them all together, you get every manifestation of thought that you can think of.

As a matter of fact, you can even derive all the mathematics there are from these three things — and that is not a wild statement. I sat down one day and tried to figure out how tensor calculus was evolved and how topology was evolved and how symbolic logic was evolved, each time using only ARC — affinity, communication, reality — and I found out that to have a mathematics you have to have each one of these. If you have all three of these you have an understanding or an evaluation or a computation, but if you drop one of them out you do not have a mathematics. You drop one of them out and you don’t have a life either!

These three things are interdependent and one could say that they are the component characteristics of Theta. The second that we began to consider it this way, processing and an understanding of processing began to advance at a much more rapid pace.

It had to be considered this way because a study of Group Dianetics — a study of the third dynamic — revealed to me not too awfully long ago that something had not been codified. I had been going along in the complete belief that the third dynamic was nailed down and all taken care of. Then one day I stood up on a platform in California to give a talk on Political Dianetics and I opened my mouth and I said, “Well, now . . .” and for the first time I realized that Political Dianetics had not been codified well enough to communicate. And if it had not been codified well enough to communicate, then I could count upon the fact that it was not codified well enough. And I tried to talk for two and a half hours on Political Dianetics!

I went home and tried to figure out some way to codify it and communicate it and I found out that not only did I not have it codified or communicated, but in addition to that I didn’t know what it was! This was a great surprise and shock to me.

I went back through the original work, the original notes, to find out why, and I found out that concentration upon the first dynamic in order to produce processing had thrown aside some of the codification’s of the third dynamic. And I found some notes (they are in the first book, by the way) to the effect that the group is actually an organism independent of its individuals. It itself is an organism.

If you think it over for a moment you will realize that a group is an organism. You don’t really know this till you try to kill a group. For instance, you could take individuals out of it. Of course, if you killed all the individuals with regard to it, the group would probably still exist in somebody’s memory or it would probably exist on paper someplace or something; there would still be something there! The body of the group is not contained in its individuals; it is contained as the group. And until you have tried to kill off a group as a group, you don’t particularly appreciate this.

For instance, we have been very involved in trying to shut down the California and Elizabeth and Chicago organizations, and they won’t die! People have been detached from these things, there is nothing coming into them and their goals are all knocked aside, but there is a body of Theta in existence there which refuses to perish. The only way we are going to handle these groups is by giving them licenses, and they will go on very happily.

A group is an organism. But what is the organism of the group? I tried to figure it out in terms of individuals and it just did not work. All of a sudden, looking it over, I realized that there is a thought energy. That is also in the first book; it says “Emotion is a Theta quantity.” But the thinking had not gone to the point where it could be codified.

So I had to go clear back to when I was studying atomic and molecular phenomena in 1930 and begin to wonder again about thought as an energy and life as an energy. I recodified everything through and got it together, and I then had Theta as an energy which had, as three of its components, affinity, communication and reality. And all of a sudden we had Group Dianetics.

I started to test out Group Dianetics in California and it got out of my hands so fast! It was over the hills and far away and it was running itself and there was no stopping it. I tried to say “Wait a minute! The way you form a group is. . . “ but it had formed. I started to say “A true group is really formed as . . .” — it had formed. The group had congealed; it was an organism.

All of this was just waiting to happen, and the first moment that it was explained to these people what they were trying to do — just the first few rules — they became so solidly cohesive as a group that in spite of all kinds of punishment — firings, everything — trying to disperse the California organization, it is still sort of holding together. This is in spite of the fact that they don’t even have the names Hubbard and Dianetics anymore; they don’t have the right to use the processes or anything, and that group is still trying to hold together. It is fantastic.

A group is so live and it is so imbued with survival that if one considers a political organization merely a collection of individuals he will fail completely to understand it, and he certainly would not be able to do much management of it.

A business organization is actually a group, and that is Theta. The Theta as an energy exists still in a fluid state, but the culture of a group begins to build up with Theta as matter. Theta as an energy could form into ideas and patterns and technologies, and this would be a culture; this would be the body of the group. It is wonderful when you start watching Theta and MEST work out on the third dynamic.

The only reason I’m talking about the third dynamic is the fact that the Theta-MEST theory is so demonstrably accurate in the third dynamic. You have to fish a little bit before you quite see how it applies in the first dynamic, but once you get it and take a look at it in the individual and see how it functions in the individual you can process people much more easily.

Having codified the third dynamic, an understanding of the first dynamic, then, became much plainer. What were we trying to do? Were we trying to erase engrams? No. We were converting entheta to Theta. And what did an engram do? An engram was an area of entheta and every time any Theta came in its vicinity, a little bit of that Theta got turned into and trapped as entheta. And a person’s available supply of Theta became smaller and smaller but his supply of entheta became larger and larger.

The engram acted as a trap. If a person didn’t have any engrams he could be hit by a lot of entheta and enturbulated but he would just disenturbulate. There would be no trap to hold on to this entheta and keep it as entheta, as there is when an engram is present.

So it takes an engram to form a secondary. A tremendous amount of grief or a tremendous amount of fear or even apathy could be experienced by an individual, but unless there is a physical pain engram, a solid entrapment below this to hold it in place, it would simply go off. It requires an engram to hold it down.

Given enough engrams, the individual can accumulate locks and secondaries. The bulk of the entheta on the case is not trapped in engrams, it is trapped in secondaries — moments when the individual has been terrifically enturbulated and has been, in present time, very heavily entheta, temporarily. The engram has come up into restimulation, and it has just picked off a lot of this entheta and sealed it up. That is a secondary and these are the largest deposits of entheta on a case.

But day by day, as a person runs into the unhappiness and upsets in his vicinity, he accumulates locks. The engrams become restimulated as the person runs into a little bit of entheta, and a little bit of his endowment of Theta, turned into entheta, will be trapped as a lock. So, during a lifetime an individual gets more and more entheta and less and less Theta.

There are some very heavily endowed individuals who have the happy faculty of being able to compartment off their entheta. You get one of these heavily occluded cases, for instance — no sonic, no visio, no tactile, no present time, nothing — and this fellow is still functioning. Through some ability, structurally or otherwise, he has been able to compartment off his entheta. He has erected walls — valence walls, circuit walls, whatever you want to call them — and he has left a portion of the analyzer, his thinking apparatus, sufficiently clear that what free Theta he has can function there.

Now, if you as an auditor came along all of a sudden and tried to tear down those walls, all it would succeed in doing would be to enturbulate him — enturbulate the existing Theta on the case — and this person probably would practically spin. He wouldn’t let you do it; he would resist its happening. But if you started to pick up a little bit of entheta here and turn it into Theta — a little lock here and a little secondary there and a little something there — the first thing you know, you would have enough Theta for it to automatically knock down one of these valence walls.

So this is the angle of processing now. The idea is to get as much Theta as you possibly can in the preclear It is too bad we can’t put it in with a funnel, because I think actually one of these fine days we may be able to conduit or measure Theta. We may know the source. And that is not one of these ideas of “anything is possible.” It is too easy to observe.

Here is your individual, then, and he has 10 percent Theta and 90 percent entheta. In other words, he has so many engrams which have trapped so many secondaries which have so many locks on top of them that, regardless of his sonic and visio (he might be able to get all the way back with sonic and visio, because entheta alone doesn’t shut off sonic and visio), he has gone all the way down the tone scale.

If we were to give this fellow some terrifically bad news we would get him all enturbulated, and the 10 percent remaining Theta would be hit by the 90 percent entheta and he would spin in. We could do that to him. Or the same thing could happen if we were to give him some terribly authoritarian “auditing”: “You know this is your Theta! You know this is because you were beaten when you were two years of age! You know this is because you love your mother — now you’ve got to admit this — isn’t it? And it’s all delusion, isn’t it?” The poor fellow would probably go home and blow his brains out.

But suppose we said, “Let me see, 10 percent Theta and 90 percent entheta — we certainly had better not drive very hard because we have only got 10 percent in this case to work with. We are reinforcing the case a bit so the case can do something, but we had better handle it very lightly. Let’s see if we can get 11 percent Theta.” The first thing you know, we make this fellow perceive something in present time and perceive it accurately, and maybe we have our 1 percent gain. Then we knock out this “terribly heavy” lock of somebody dropping a piece of paper, and we have 11.0001 percent Theta. And we creep up on it this way and get just a little more of this and a little more of that off the case, and we convert the lightest and tiniest deposits of entheta that we can convert on this case to Theta.

Fortunately, it seems to go by a power — just as a person spins in by a power. For instance, the person may be half Theta and half entheta and he gets a terrible piece of bad news and goes crazy. In other words, he spins in, or goes into a complete apathy, which is the same thing.

People can be crazy for ten minutes — ragingly angry or completely apathetic for only ten minutes — and then come back again. They were crazy for that ten minutes, according to definition. But if they went all entheta suddenly and if the entheta were held there — it triggered enough engrams to trap the existing Theta — that person would then stay insane until some auditor came along and started working it out on the basis of “How can I obtain 1 percent Theta on this case?” He does that merely by getting into communication with the fellow or mimicking him or anything — getting him to contact present time, just that much. If he does that, he has gotten his 1 percent Theta and then he can start to work. And it sort of goes by a power: if he gets it up to 10 percent he will get it to 20 percent; if he gets it up to 20 percent he can go to 40 percent. And then he starts to work on it a little bit harder because by this time he is having to attack, probably, engrams themselves.

The engram is what traps things. The auditor goes into the engram and he gets the physical pain off; but he has invested a lot of Theta as a heavy lock on the line, and there are other engrams on this case that permit that Theta to be retained. So, what entheta he got off the case, he could be putting back in again as entheta. This is how you could go on erasing engrams in a case without moving the preclear on the tone scale. He would not come up the tone scale. You are just taking the Theta you have and using it to take the entheta out of the engram, but it costs you as much Theta to take that entheta out, and you could just seesaw back and forth without accomplishing a great deal. However, if you were doing that, you probably should not have been reducing engrams.

That is what happens to a case when it is too static. The preclear is around 2.0 or 1.5 or something like that, and the auditor keeps insisting on erasing engrams. Maybe he can actually get erasure on engrams, but he is keeping this case enturbulated continually and the preclear is not coming up the tone scale! So we are not getting the heavy automatic reaction of disenturbulation of entheta by having Theta up near it.

The thing to do would be to get this person all the way up to the top of the tone scale, if you possibly could, and then let this very high Theta volume, or Theta clarity, suddenly kick back against the entheta on the case and disenturbulate him.

We are talking about mechanics, we are not talking about phrases. You are very well acquainted, undoubtedly, with what phrases can do in engrams. All we are talking about is basic theory now, and you see that the basic theory is relatively simple.