This is October the 15th, first morning hour.

This morning we are going to continue, as we will all this week, on subjective processes. I am doing it - this to you with malice aforethought. We have some lovely cases here. There's no reason to chew into these cases and bust them all up, you know. It would just ruin everything because what we want here is to give you a good reality on subjective processes - "processes" for Great Britain if these tapes are ever played there. [pronounced in the British manner the second time. - Ed.]

Now, you see what we're doing here? We're doing a very - really a very careful approach. We are walking forward through all of this in an effort to give you a reality on both subjective and objective techniques. Next week you're not going to get a chance to run a subjective technique, so let's get some reality on it this week. Next week we're going to run objective techniques - very, very few and very, very little subjective techniques.

So we've got now, just today, tomorrow, Saturday to finish off subjective techniques. Now, when you realize that subjective techniques cover everything that has to do with a person's own thinkingness, you realize that we're finishing off quite a piece of stuff here.

Right here let's get a good solid definition on what is a subjective technique. It's pertinent.

What is a subjective technique? It is a technique where its highest reality will be a subjective reality. It will be the reality for the person himself and for no other. And if we call it subjective technique, then, we realize what reality we are trying to achieve. The reality we're trying to achieve here is a very simple one and it's simply this reality: Can we do something subjectively to an individual to bring about a change in his thinkingness? And do we find this a relatively long and arduous process or are some of these techniques easy, simple and quick?

The only thing wrong with the mind would be in the mind itself Isn't that true? The only thing wrong with thinking would be thinking. Is that so? Q and A. All right.

When we talk about thinking we are talking, then, in a subjective technique, on the lowest level of line collapse. It's thinking and then there's effort and then there's emotion, which is feeling, and we go out beyond that and we get looking.

Well now, a subjective technique, again, by definition as we're using it here, is one which deals with the most close-in part of it and which causes thinking. Now, we're covering the subject of thinking. Now, do you see that there is a difference here? That there's a very marked difference?

Subjective technique would be that technique which went up to and did not exceed the boundary of; certainly, feeling about it. It would be thinking about it. There's subjectiveness.

Now, we're already - we're exceeding that boundary slightly. And the reason we're examining this field - it's the closest one in to the individual and it's the easiest one at which we can look, right at the present moment; we're looking at thinking. I mean, you better find out what you can about thinkingness and get some sort of a subjective reality on this, then, because we're dealing with the activity of the person within his body - again, a subjective technique.

Furthermore, the results of subjective techniques are most markedly boundaried by this: The person knows he is better but nobody else does. All right, that's a remarkable and miserable thing, if you come to think about it.

In this country, this country here - I think this is the United States this morning - the fact of personal relationships is probably poorer than any other part of the globe. The United States today is much more able with MEST - much more able with MEST - than other nations. It's just at a wonderful inverted 6; real good at inverted 6. This country sneers at other nations for not being so inverted at 6.

America today believes it has reached its highest level of aesthetic with metal. Is this anything peculiar to this society? I just happened to remember that it hasn't changed since 1621. An artist was permitted to work with wrought iron in the seventeenth century, but if he worked with anything else they burned him or something, excommunicated him, shot him. Because it was wicked and vicious and vile to fiddle around with paint and other folderol.

We find Paul Revere, a remarkable artist, working in copper and silver. And we find other people in the American scene working with metal. America can make metal very beautiful. It's always, then, in its culture itself; had a stick at an inverted 6.

When we got the Hessians - when they disbanded those Hessian regiments after they were captured at Saratoga and were put in barracks in Boston, it was much easier just to forget about them than to pay the king for them that lent them to the British. These men were wheelwrights, blacksmiths; they were tradesmen. Remarkable country over there that had sold its artisans and tradesmen into the military.

Almost as remarkable as modern day whereby we sell all the youth and brains of the country into the army. "Yuh-huh! Well, huh-huh, we got a president, for a -he was a general and it's all very sensible. The thing to do to get everybody up high-toned, you know, so we'll have a good civilization is take everybody when he's eighteen years of age, you know, and put him in the army so he gets well drilled."

If the country doesn't fall on its face because of this idiocy, it won't be Truman's and Eisenhower's fault, believe me.

I tell you frankly, speaking strictly as a scientist, which I can speak as, and as a pretty good sailor - I can speak that way, too - I can tell you, confidently, that modern methods of warfare don't happen to require manpower. You don't want anything to do with manpower; they get in your road. You don't want the enemy to mobilize either because that makes some of his populace safe; it puts them in front-line trenches. If you were today to hire five thousand scientists and about five thousand hot rod kids for applicators, you could practically wipe out life on Earth, which I think is the end goal of war. You could. You just give them their head and say, "Well, let's go boys; let's figure it out," and away you'd go. The problem is not a problem of manpower.

Yet, America today is striving madly with its educational programs, with every other government program, to depress the thought level to thought only. Well, let's just kind of make everybody into an automaton who thinks.

One of our great universities - they made them take the red lights off the girls' dormitory recently; and the faculty finally got rid of seven or eight of the communist professors they had there and they - they've got it pretty well straightened out - they've cut down the number of class in class there from 400 to 398; real progress - the University of California. This great educational institution has signs - down in the Los Angeles branch of it - has signs all over the place: "You're here to learn how to think."

I can show them how to fix up kids so they think. I can show them real easy how to fix up kids so they think. Just give them a lot of psychiatric electric shocks. They'll think; they won't be able to do anything but look [think] when they do that to them. Or just simply take brickbats and start hitting them. And if you hit them enough and shot at them enough and gave them enough shocks, they'd really think. It's the slow method to educate them into it. Unfortunately, I've had to do with some of the graduates of this great institution during this late slight riffle in international affairs. I found each one of them was very capable of thinking but he sure couldn't act! He couldn't even vaguely act. He couldn't get into motion; he couldn't complete a cycle of action. You'd say, "Go down and get a can of paint," and he would come back three hours later by saying he had signed in the wrong line of the requisition place or something and he was very confused and he didn't have…

[Please note: At this point in the lecture a gap exists in the original recording. We now rejoin the class where the lecture resumes.]

Continuing this morning lecture.

The toleration of motion of a nation is very poor indeed where thinkingness is its largest goal. Everybody is supposed to be thoughtful in this country and believe me, they really get thoughtful.

A test of this: You will find that if you put in charge of an organization as its hiring and firing agent a person who is afraid to hurt other people, he will wind up by murdering not only them but the organization itself. In other words, this is intensely impractical as a solution - but intensely impractical!

In the first place, conclusions are not reached by thinking as it is fondly believed to be thought by the public at large. People do not reach conclusions by sitting down and saying, "Now I am going to think." If they do they're going to be wrong.

We even have a national penchant here not to think - not to act, rather, impulsively - to think first and act later. I know of a large secret organization in this country which has as one of its mottoes: "Think twice before acting once." Well, that's a way to slow everybody down, isn't it?

Well, what are we going to do one of these days for executives? What are we going to do one of these days for somebody to build a bridge? Everybody's in the little red schoolhouse now. What the hell is going to happen with this metal down here when we no longer have somebody sufficiently - sufficiently screwball to push around one of those big trucks, like the one that just walked away out there - ten tons worth of truck!

We have a need in this country for people of action. Every success you ever ran into anyplace was good at action and very, very poor at sitting still.

Now, it is true that education can be effective when you are dealing with essentials as how to become active though educated. As long as you are dealing with that, you're all right. As long as you're on that line, nothing bad with it.

But to sit down and become cultured by memorizing the names of 875 paintings, 662 symphonies, and to know whether to say "Oh!" or "Aw!" when looking at a famous painting… Well, you see, that method of becoming cultured will wind up in no art.

This country right now has a chance of pulling upstairs but it's doing everything it can to go downstairs. It has a wonderful opportunity because of its food supply, not because of its culture, to start pushing out across the world - a wonderful opportunity. But is it? All right.

Subjective reality is the last one you want because it's the computation, the "only one."

In America people can live in apartment houses for years and never know who lives next door. That is a result of pulled-in anchor points. Be pretty hard to figure out how anybody could manage this but they sure do.

People drive down highways here at a mad rate of speed. Somebody gets a flat tire, "Hell with him; he's in the road." That's not high-toned; that's real low-toned.

So, what do we find here as a change? We find a change in the people themselves. Not too long ago, it was actually possible for the people of this country to get a flat tire and be assisted bounteously. That's only about thirty years ago. Gee, you passed a car someplace, something like that, and you were just as like as not to stop, and say, "Hello. How are you? What are you going? What are you driving?" Never been introduced to this fellow.

Move into a new neighborhood; people came over and asked how you were getting along. They didn't look through drawn blinds to see what furniture was being unloaded from the van. Now they don't even do that; they don't even try to find out what your furniture is like before it's moved in. This is just simply the "only one" computation keying in, keying in, keying in further and further and further and further and further.

Thinkingness - resist with your anchor points; fight the MEST universe. Well, all that winds up with is thinking. And by golly, when you complement that with education and when you complement it with psychotherapy and when you get the entire goal of psychology concentrated on nothing but thinking, you've got trouble. You've got trouble in science; you've got trouble in thinking in general throughout the country. The most astonishing things occur.

Some fellow comes across with some kind of a something or other; boy, everybody is told what to think about it. You have a fellow by the name of Gabriel Hotrod who tells everybody what to think about it, and so everybody thinks that. You go down on the corner and after a program like that, you want to know about this situation, why, you can find out about it; you'll find the same opinion you've heard over the air fifteen minutes before. This is real good. This is exterior determination but thorough.

Is this thinking a method of reaching a usable conclusion? No! Because what they're calling "thinking" is circuitry, and it is not a good method of reaching a usable conclusion.

I put a car once - there had been a terrific storm and a tree blew down across the road and there was electric-light lines lying all through the wet foliage of this tree and several thousand volts crackling through there. And I was going along at a fairly low speed, although the wind was still high and the street was still wet. And there was a little knoll just on the other side, a little roll in the road, a little crest there just on the other side of this big tree and a truck came booming up over that rise. I was going pretty slow, about twenty-five miles an hour. Well, there was a spot underneath this tree which was free of all the light wires, which was just the height of the car hood and so I simply inserted the car's hood underneath the tree. Didn't scratch anything. It stopped the car very thoroughly and got it out of the road of the truck.

And that was the first time I ever found out that you didn't think about anything. It suddenly occurred to me later - I went over the thing very carefully, thinking it over - and I said that's very remarkable. There wasn't a single thought that crossed my mind the whole operation. Golly, that's a relief; I said to myself. Not a single thought.

You'll find in any spontaneous action where you've done exactly the right thing, you didn't sit around and think about it, you just acted.

Well, what's this? It means that when you get time into thought you have injected MEST into thought and all that MEST is going to do for you is just lie down and be apathetic. When you put time into thought you inject MEST into thought.

Now, there's no sense in trying to take MEST out of thought when we're dealing with circuitry because that's the trouble with it; there isn't any MEST in it to a sufficient quantity. It had MEST in it and now it hasn't got the MEST in it anymore, so it's on an inverted 6. It had MEST in it and now it hasn't got any MEST in it and after that it goes onto thinking.

Now, someday when you're flying around the universe amusing yourself; you'll probably want to amuse yourself with a thinking machine. I'll tell you how to make one.

You take a little piece of space with nothing in it and then start building around it shells of energy; you build actual shells of energy around this little space. And now get on the outside of about fifteen or twenty shells, which are concentric (all of them concentric in spheres, you see, around this little, tiny space), and shove like hell from all sides simultaneously, at a tremendous crush - pam. And because you put the energy there and because there is an aliveness to it every time it's addressed - I mean, because there is an aliveness potential to it, every time it's addressed by a piece of live energy, the live energy will behave in a certain fashion. It will behave to give back a computation. This is a thinking machine. That's all there is to it - crush! That's it.

Now after that anytime energy tries to get in through those crushed spots, it'll find itself running through hollow spots and vacuums which are distorted. And this distortion will make the energy behave so that you can feed any kind of a thought in there and it'll come out the other side with some other kind of a thought; and that's thinking.

Thinking is the conversion of a postulate into a reason. And this is simply done by distorting it. And when you get a distortion pattern parallel to another distortion pattern you get an agreement in thinkingness. And if everybody accepts this as reasonable, why, then you've really got it; you've really got everything you went for - the worst parts. Okay?

Subjective reality is the reality one gets on a change occurring in such a compression sphere. If he can change the center of the compression sphere, he now has a subjective reality on thinkingness - a change in thinkingness. And that's what you do when you run a button; you distort or change the center of compressed space in a thinking machine.

It's kind of a game. If you had this desk up here covered with little ENIACs and UNIVACs and the game you'd be playing is "Let's see if we can put a powerful enough thought and hold it long enough in each one of these UNIVACs or ENIACs to cause the thought to alter." Now, we put enough pressure on these machines and enough voltage in them so we will actually get an alteration of the thinkingness - you've got subjective processing.

And the end goal of subjective processing is the reduction, removal and discarding of these UNIVACs and ENIACs. That's what you're trying to do, see? You want to change those to a higher level, so you want to change each one. Well, the reductio ad absurdum is you put enough juice through them so that they distort more and more and then distort less and less. And you will get your UNIVACs and ENIACs and so forth eventually melting and running away. And then you have, not only a cleared desk, but you have cleared up thinkingness.

When a person is running postulates on himself; on somebody else, he can achieve an effect anytime he wants, so long as he isn't running one of these compression balls of energy. If he's running one of these things, he's trying to change the characteristic of distortion. And his end goal and the finish of the cycle on changing it, is simply its disappearance. You see that?

So taking apart a thinking machine merely depends upon just taking it apart. That's all. That's all you do; you just take it apart. But the more shocks you put into it, the harder it's compressed, the more it thinks. So electric shock is not the answer in how to remove a thinking machine.

Can a person think with a thinking machine? Well, no. You see, actually what they do is they say, "I have a thinking machine out here in front of me and what I'm going to do is run a thought in one end and get an answer out the other end. Now, let's see; if I put the answer out this end I'll be sure and get a right answer. Now I'll forget I did that. And now I'll run the thought through," and the thought comes out to the other end and you get an answer. A thinking machine - MEST thinking.

Do you know… You ever see one of these fellows who could look at this tremendous column of figures everybody has written down and then write down the answer? There is some - used to have Japanese in vaudeville, and so on, that did this. They'd write upside up and upside down with their left hand and right hand simultaneously, and then they'd do mathematical problems. They'd have six columns of figures and they would have fifty of them in the same column and the second that was presented to them, they would write down the answer. Well, you can do that. There isn't any sense in adding them up because - mostly because there's no sense in arithmetic.

Arithmetic is just a method of slowing down thinking process. And if you want to slow down your thinking a trifle you can get any arithmetical answer, but if you think you have to speed up and work with and inject time into your arithmetic, you're in a hell of a spot.

Okay. Let's envision the picture of this machine. It's got a hollow spot in the center. It's got a lot of shells around it composed of old facsimiles and impacts and so forth. They'll distort, see. They'll distort a channel. And sphere after sphere after sphere, more or less, is on the outside of it. And then it's been pushed like hell and you've got a thinking machine. And let's - let's really take a look at what we're running because that's what it looks like when you get outside and take a look at it.

Now, you feed it - a little current into it, a little life energy, a little life current here into one side of it with a little postulate and it'll go around and around - zoom! zung! zung! zum! And some of these are real tricky.

The slowest one I ever saw was nine years! The answer turned up nine years after the question. But your Q and A on such a thing ought to be instantaneous and every time you introduce MEST into it, it gets less instantaneous. This is just a problem in Q and A; a thinking machine is something that keeps the answer from being the thing. See? We take a coin and we face the coin up one side as the question. The answer to it, of course, is that it's a coin; there isn't any further answer to it.

But now we address a thinking machine to this problem, and it says, "Let's see now, a coin? A coin is a unit of exchange. And it goes all through the society and it does this and it does that. It's made by the US Government. The government is empowered to issue money, and so on and so on”. Well, about - oh, God. If you wanted to read something about - just get the word coin down at the local library and you'll see there's a lot of books on the subject. Those are just thinkingnesses.

Well, that's all very fascinating. But the point is, is it's an activity on the part of some other group than yourself or part of your own group to get you to use mutual anchor points; that's all a coin is. You just use these mutual anchor points. And if you're using mutual anchor points, of course, you consider that you're equal; and democracy has succeeded.

There have been very few military aristocracies which have ever used coins - very few. Military aristocracy is different than a military dictatorship - military aristocracy.

Some of the old castles on the knolls in France tell you this story very well. The minute the guy would sit down - good old forte main, you know - and he'd say, "Well, we're protecting all the peasants around here and that's why you are bringing up all your produce to us." The peasants wouldn't and they'd get a little revolt or something of the sort, so he'd just put on a few more recalcitrants as men-at-arms and the provisions would roll up to the top of the hill, and the wine would roll up to the top of the hill. And it was defying gravity but certainly the military aristocracy was seldom defied, except by another military aristocracy. Here was the use of force in the extraction of gain. They didn't have coins.

Somebody invented coins about the time of the Crusades and said you had to have gold to take a passage across the Mediterranean; you had to have gold to pay ransoms. It ruined all the military aristocracies of Europe. They found out that it didn't matter how many moneylenders you shot, hacked, burned, killed, hung, people still went on with this stuff; because the peasants fell for it. They had - all had mutual anchor points already - all kinds of mutual anchor points. Communal state: everybody owned the pig - a mutual anchor point - so it was very easy to say to them, "Well now, you see that little, little, tiny piece of copper; well, that's a pig. Huh." Interesting, but it's also a bushel of wheat. Well, that's very interesting but it is also a new suit. Peasants were confused. They'd fall for this. Obviously, to them everything was A A A A anyhow so a coin could buy anything, see? You'd say a new - a new suit made out of silk is two of these things. Well, they could make a mistake between quantity and quality, and so on.

You look at this stuff - there is nothing but a bundle of errors. If you start - because all the reason under God's green earth has been applied to this. If you want to know about reason, look at money.

You go down here to the local library and you'll find Alexander Hamilton on the subject of banking. This is the most idiotic thing you ever heard of. The United States Government in its Constitution was very well authorized and extremely well authorized and very pleasantly authorized to issue its own currency. And this joker by the name of Hamilton, up to the day of his "regretted" demise, kept explaining to the government how the government couldn't have any credit unless it was in debt and why all his buddies up around New York ought to be the fellows that held the debt. And that this was much better and so they defied the Constitution and continue to do so until today by the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States which has no connection with the government; it is a private bank. Everybody thinks it's a government bank; it's not. Your money has got Federal Reserve Bank all over it. That's not money; that's a private issue. But there are silver certificates and stamps, so on; these are money as far as the government issuing and obeying the law which everybody agreed on.

The rest of this stuff is spewed out of the printing presses and sent up to New York to the Federal Reserve Bank with their name on it, and so forth, and it becomes legal currency. How they managed that in the first place is nothing but the most marvelous piece of insanity you ever heard of.

All right, up there at the Federal Reserve Bank, how do they get the government to issue money? Well, it runs something like this: They have a big ledger, see, and they write down one billion dollars in the ledger and then they write down to the government, "We've just written one billion dollars down in our ledger," so the government sends them up a billion dollars' worth of bonds. Then they buy these bonds off the government and then the Federal Reserve Bank, having gotten these bonds off the government, you see, can then issue a billion dollars' worth of currency. So they issue the billion dollars' worth of currency and there it goes and it's all printed by the government and the government sends it a small printing bill.

I think the only interchange in it is the five or six hundred dollars it takes to print a billion dollars' worth of currency. I don't know who puts that up but it's probably put up by putting it down in the ledger too. You look in vain to find this money represent anything but a figure in a ledger put down by some clerk.

But here we're getting - people are getting shot for this stuff! People will sweat their guts out building this and that and something else just to get ahold of this stuff! A woman will sell her virtue for this stuff! Wonderful! Just wonderful stuff and yet we can't find it coming from anyplace except somebody writing down a figure in a ledger and saying to the government, "Well, you've now got to issue us bonds."

Well, how this outfit could write it down in the ledger and tell the government to issue it bonds, I don't know, because this outfit doesn't have any hoods, or any gunmen or any soldiers. So, it must be that the government must be running by a bunch of people who have an agreement with these people up there which is kind of behind the scenes. "Look, every time you write that billion bucks down, why, slide a few dollars sideways this direction and we'll be all set. Ah-ha!"

We've disenfranchised the American people from the right of making money. So, this puts the control of the country someplace where it's not supposed to be but this is very valuable stuff. But when - you get how all this reason - it's not reasonable. If you really look at the backbone of money, you won't find anything reasonable about it.

The only thing about deflation and inflation, they discovered during the war, is when a country has too many goods and too little money it has deflation. When a country has too few goods and too much money you have inflation.

Sounds awful simple to me. A country which has inflated currency just better make some more goods or it better take some money out of circulation. That's easy to do. If it was created by writing a figure in a ledger sheet, it is sure easy to take it out of circulation; you just erase it.

And as far as deflation is concerned, all the government has to do with deflation throughout the whole thing, all the government has to do with a deflate is simply print some more money. Of course, if then - if somebody had to put it down in the ledger in the first place before they could print it that would leave the government deeply in d..

I see I'm looking at a fellow here by the name of Franklin Delano Roosevelt; he was a great man. By the way, I'll have to tell you about cripples someday. Anyway.

When they really got going, they got the economics so fouled up that nobody can untangle them. Why can't anybody untangle them? Well, that's because they've all gone through a process of reason or evolution. Well, nobody can untangle all of this, because it's all in the past.

Let me ask you something: Did it ever exist? Did it ever exist? No, not actually. Masses of energy filtering through various reasons and giving parts and changes of form. Well, it's all right. You can do that to a certain degree and you'll get a certain amount of randomity. But when you push it too hard, its falsity shows up and you start getting minus randomity, immediately.

You start depending on this thing called reason and it just doesn't give you randomity. Up to a certain point, introducing reasons into something is simply injecting arbitrary stops in games. That's all. That's what reason is. It's just a method of limiting play so that there can be two or more sides to a play; and that's what the first entrance into reason is.

Now, the next entrance into reason is forgetting some of the rules that have been injected in the game. Now, if you can substitute for this with superstition, you can take the phases of the moon and say whether or not they're going to do the future for you or something; but it gets kind of unreasonable from there on down.

It's marvelous that anybody can proceed at all using what is called logic or reasons; it's just marvelous that anybody can proceed doing that. It certainly does speak well for a man's ability to postulate and unpostulate that he can make thinking machines work. He's got to keep putting that answer on one side of the machine and feeding the question to the other side of the machine, and so on. And why he wants that arbitrary machine sitting there, we're not quite sure because he doesn't use it, except to play with.

The scientist looking at this stuff and taking it apart and putting it back together again is just playing a game. Everybody teaches this game as something very serious and threatens you with mayhem, and so forth, if you flunk some science course.

The truth of the matter is, I had to unlearn everything I ever knew about science in order to get going on the subject of science - to find out something about it. Because science is a search for data.

Data is the substance of a thinking machine. Data has no existence except a flock of postulates. Now, you get this data all massed up in one lump and shoved together and crushed down - now, somebody starts to do some research with his mind and oh, boy!

There's a central postulate sitting in there. One of the rules of the game is you mustn't fool around with the rules of the game or the thinking machine. You mustn't fool around with this because just like if you yanked the curtains back on any altar, you'd find there was nothing on its platform. Really, there's nothing on its platform; there's a piece of MEST but it doesn't have any life.

The mystery: The most mysterious thing about any mystery is that there's no mystery. The secret - the secret of the MEST universe is that there is no secret. The secret of the preclear is that he has no secret.

You start to run this concept and he gets this awful foolish feeling of very - poof! - very intense!

"Now, let's run the fact that you have no secrets. Now that you have secrets; that you have no secrets." And boy he can really thrash up some there for a little while and all of a sudden the machine he has been fooling himself with starts to fold up on him. And the second this machine starts to fold up, he gets in very bad order. And he starts to feel embarrassed and he'll start to squirm. He didn't have any sex guilt peccadilloes when he was a small boy at all.

Now, psychotherapy in the past has followed this through slavishly. And you, whether you like it or not, have inherited from the field of psychotherapy, whether you ever studied psychotherapy formally or not, you inherit this from the society and the stories. During the last twenty, twenty-five years, writing has more or less gone down into apathy and Freudian psychoanalysis is the keynote used by authors for characterization of characters; the libido theory is carrying through. Well, it makes good plotting because people are interested in it - sensation.

But as far as psychotherapy is concerned, in the past it dealt with subjective material. Once in a while somebody dashed up and got something like psychodrama going. That's all right; it's all right; it was at least an effort. But then, by God, he had to work out the reason why with psychodrama. See, psychodrama would've worked if they'd just omitted the reason why.

People don't talk now, very well, in this society really because they're afraid their words will betray them; they have been taught by their literature, by movies, by examples on every hand, that their words may betray them.

Psychology and Freud's associative word plays have reduced this - general semantics: done the same thing - that if you utter a word it means that you're masking another word. You know? If you use a certain concatenation of words, you will find out that this concatenation of words may betray the fact that when you were a little boy or a little girl - well, really.

Well, we ran this on John yesterday; I was just saying, "A word will betray you." And he just suddenly decided, "Well, no. It won't betray me." Of course, that's the easiest thing in the world to decide because it's the blunt truth.

But the society at large gets people worried about this. The first thing wrong with your preclear: He's afraid his words, appearance and action will betray him; he's afraid of this.

Fear of fear is your primary setup. A man is afraid of being afraid. He is not afraid. Get the difference. A man is never afraid. Nobody is ever afraid from one corner of the universe to the other. A man is afraid of being afraid.

The only thing wrong with thinking is that it is about thinking.

You actually, back on the track, have, with malice aforethought, designed thinking machines. And your preclears have actually built thinking machines to which they are now the effect. They've created the thinking machine and they are now the effect of the thing they created. And that is the second law of magic: Don't get hoist by your own petard; do not become the effect of your own cause.

Now, as a result, your preclear, subjectively, is floundering around in the midst of a thinking machine.

How do you build a thinking machine? You take a little space and you take some shells of energy, and you go crush! And when you get it real compact, you've got a thinking machine. And when you put a little energy in one side of it, it'll wander through and it'll hit this and it'll hit that and it'll come out. Now, these are very complex. The whole universe will do this.

When you take a picture of the universe around you and get a facsimile, you are actually complementing part of this thinking process because all the objects you see are designed from some effort to distort truth so as to get a form.

There is such a thing as beauty; there is. But where facsimiles are taken of the environment so as to prevent something in the future, you get each facsimile based upon a falsity of reason. And the answer to the facsimile is the facsimile; it's not the words in the facsimile. It's not the perceptions or the colors; it's just the facsimile, that's all.

You take a picture of an aberrated environment, you've got a picture that is an aberrated picture - naturally - you couldn't do otherwise. So when you take a bunch of these aberrated pictures and start piling them up on top of the thinking machine, why, for heaven's sakes, everything starts going yap-yap and yow-yow and you get people's - people's heads full of talking voices and you get - oh, you get the most marvelous - well I think that a thetan standing outside of one of these things early on the track must have been utterly fascinated!