The actual running of an incident is accomplished by using a relatively few factors of what you know. And these factors are thought, emotion and effort. And, of course, if there's thought, emotion and effort, there must of necessity be counter-thought, counter-emotion and counter-effort.

Now, we know about counter-effort. Counter-effort's very simple. One individual hits another; the individual who is doing the striking is putting out the effort, the individual who is receiving it receives that blow as a counter-effort.

Counter-emotion is a little less tangible, but nonetheless real. You have many times walked into a room where you knew people had been talking about you, where you knew something was not well, where a quarrel had been occurring. You know the emotion or atmosphere of a sickroom, for instance, or of a sick person. You receive these things as counter-emotion.

Counter-emotion is relatively indefinite. Actually counter-emotion to some degree contains perceptics - counter-perceptics. You pick up somebody getting counter-emotion, and the first thing you know, he's also picking up the perceptions of things.

If you ask anyone who is rather apathetic who around him was angry, and then try to persuade him to feel that anger as a counter-emotion, this person will tell you immediately the anger doesn't exist - the counter-anger does not exist. They're doing a terrific dive. But if you persuade them a little bit, they'll be able to find out the counter-emotion of somebody who is enduring - that's close to their tone band. And if you persuade them to do this, then they can find out what the feeling is of counter-emotion of fear. They can find incidents in their lives when people have been afraid, and they feel that fear themselves It is the fear of the other person against them, like a wave. And then you can build them up to the anger. And they will find that the anger, as a counter-emotion, sort of hangs against them rather heavily like a dark cloud.

In such a wise, people who are very happy emanate, and people around them feel this emanation. That's counter-emdtion in action.

Now, counter-emotion is, of course, accompanied by a counter-emotional curve. You can feel the emotional curve of another person.

If you've ever walked up to anyone and told him some bad news, you have felt his emotion drop. A pc should be aware of this fact, and the auditor particularly should know it, so that this drop can be picked up from other people by the preclear.

Counter-thought is very nebulous, but is nevertheless there. If you just start to pick up the concepts of those around you - not their words, not expressed thoughts, not pictures or anything - you go back through your life and pick up the concepts of others around you, you'll find where they were in conflict with your concepts And there you will find a cross-up which tends to hang these facsimiles up and make them less usable to you.

For instance, you've come in and you've said - expressed, more or less, the fact that you would like to do something, and somebody else has said to you that you shouldn't do this. Well now, the perceptics would be one thing; they're very physical universe, and as a matter of fact belong in the counter-effort category because they are nothing more nor less than physical-universe forces. They are efforts, perceptions are. But because they have an emotional connotation, they go up a little bit into the counter-emotion band.

But here are your efforts. Sound, for instance, is a wave. Sight is a sight wave. Sound travels through air. If there were no air, there'd be no sound. Light can travel through a vacuum, but is nevertheless - is a wave action; it's a particle flow.

And you take thermal: thermal is a vibration of material - air, so on. If one material is vibrating fast, we say it's hot, and if another one is vibrating slowly - more slowly, we say it's cold. If the air around you is vibrating at a certain - molecules are flying or flowing at a certain speed, you say that it is warm, and if they're flying around you much more slowly, you say that it's cold,

Actually, the reason a gas expands a balloon is because its molecules are traveling fast - faster than the air around it - and therefore expanding the bag more. All you have to do, actually, is merely heat up air and put it in a balloon - as long as the air is hot, that balloon will rise.

In other words, motion decreases the mass and increases the thermal agitation and so on.

Actually, the reason you get warm and the reason you feel thermal, inside and outside, is a faster rate of strike on the part of molecules of gases and solids - a faster rate of strike, that's all. They hit you. Molecules in this air are hitting you at a terrific rate right now and it keeps you warm. That's aliveness. It isn't that anything else happens in the molecules at all, They don't expand or contract particularly, they just travel faster. Well, all that is something for a physicist, but I'm just demonstrating to you that all these categories of perceptions are counter-efforts. Now, a noise: a noise can hit you so violently that it is painful - physically painful. If you have ever been in a New York subway, you know why people in New York are all crazy. I don't say they're all crazy, there are some people who aren't … (laughter) But - physically painful noise. Actually, a person's eardrums hurt; actually he can feel the noise against his skin. And there's no reason why he shouldn't, because he's being hit with a wave action. Were you ever down at the beach and walked into the water and had some big, towering wave come along and hit you in the face, knock you appetite over tin cup and wash you up on the sand? Well, it's exactly really, the same kind of a wave that sound has. It transfers itself from particle to particle in the air and hits you with the transferred force.

For instance, if you take up and line up five billiard balls, put them close together, and you hit the first billiard ball, the fifth billiard ball will fly off. Well now, if those were five air molecules, motion hits number one and the others vibrate, transmit the motion and number five hits you. So it's an actual physical blow. Sound is a blow.

And people who have their sonic off, who are occluded, have simply been hit by too much sound. People who have their visio off have been hit by too much light. They've gotten to a point where they're afraid to look, that's all. Now, it didn't matter whether that was in one incident or in a dozen incidents, or whether or not they're confused about what is sound and what is light and what is actual physical blows - they can be confused about these things - the point is, their recalls go off.

Now, one can recall visually, recall in sound, recall in thermal and so on.

If a person has been roasted a few times too many, you'll find him reluctant to pick up thermal out of facsimiles - understandably. The Spanish have a proverb: they say, "Un gate escaldado de agua fria huye" - a scalded cat from cold water flees. And most preclears have been scalded cats And you ask them to remember a sunny day and they refuse to remember the sunny day for the good reason that they had a day that was red-, white-hot. And they're afraid they'll remember this other day, so they flee from the actually cool water of a bright spring day. So you ask them, "Recall a pleasure moment," They're afraid to.

There's a whole technique can be built around this. Merely by coaxing the individual to feel the perceptics lightly, to feel pleasant perceptics, perceptics that haven't hurt him, you will gradually get him up to the point where he'll not only feel perceptics but he will feel efforts. And if you wanted to work on this hard, for a long period of time, you could artificially turn on somebody's perceptions.

I used to do this early in this research. That was the only way I used to turn on perceptions. I would just make people first get their big toe wet, and then get their foot wet and then get it up to the knee and then get it up to the hips and then all of a sudden throw them in. And they would receive full perception on some engram or other and they would run it. They'd come out at the other end with a heightened feeling of confidence. They would say, "Gee, I can feel them." They would say, "I actually can feel a vibration without dying."

This is encouragement of differentiation, Encouragement of differentiation as a technique is something which can be played into many lines of processing.

For instance, you take straight memory. Somebody comes up to you and he says - this is in the field of thought - he says to you, "Oh, I just can't remember anything. I can't remember people." You say to him, "What's my name?" And he says, "Well, George."

"Well," you say, "there's one person. Now, let's see if we can't remember another one."

The reason why he can't remember people is there are some people there that he doesn't dare remember. And if you persuade him to remember a few people, all of a sudden he becomes differentiative. The only basic difference between aberration and sanity is the difference between identification and differentiation. If a person identifies everything with everything, of course he's quite mad. And if a person differentiates rather easily, he can have terrific experiences and yet not go mad.

The difference between identification and differentiation is simply a difference of time. Everything filed nicely according to time makes good differentiation. Everything filed on one moment or everything with one moment assigned to it, such as "Grandpa is dead. Grandpa is a man. All men are liable to die. I daren't make friends with a man because he's liable to die because Grandpa is dead" - this is the sort of thing that'll drive people off from human relationship.

This identification runs on an equation. It says, "A equals A equals A equals A: everything is everything is everything is everything." It does not differentiate. This differentiation can go into language, can go into perception. You can get people who cannot tell the difference between sight and sound. And actually, there are veterans around in hospitals who have been shot up in the war to such an extent that they hear sight and see sound.

So these things can not only be crossed up, but they can be completely identified. A person who has identified everything with everything, of course, is completely insane.

What has a dead man done? Actually he's identified everything with everything. How wrong can you get? Dead. How identified can you get? Dead. Works the same way, That's not too hard to assimilate when you realize that the complete MEST form of a being would be a dead body - no mind attached to it at all, everything physical force.

And actually, the reason identification between everything takes place is wholly in the field of physical force. There's too much force; it packs things up too tightly. There's too much motion packed too tightly. That means that nothing can be differentiated in terms of time. You're all set People could be said to be aberrated in direct ratio to how much they weigh. That's right - because gravity itself is a physical force. It's a very simple problem.

Now, we take - in the field of emotion, the same thing obtains. You ask your preclear to feel a counter-emotion or to feel an emotion on his own part, and he's unwilling to feel this emotion himself, he's unwilling to feel the counter-emotion, so on.

Pick some light, easy emotion. If he's in apathy, you'll find he's most likely to feel himself the emotion of apathy and he is most likely to feel the counter-emotion of either apathy or grief - something close to his own Tone Scale.

If he is in anger, if he's a 1,5, if he's chunky, beefy, holds on to everything and won't let go of anything, why, you can be fairly sure that this individual will not feel much of anything but anger.

Anger, by the way, is simply the process of trying to hold everything still. TEiat's all anger is in its essence. If you can make a man hold something still long enough and struggle to hold it still long enough, he'll get angry. You could make, some sort of a little box that he was supposed hold the lid down on. And you could make this box so that the lid kept popping up and it took a lot of physical force to hold it down. And then you made it so forceful that he couldn't quite overcome it, and you just make him hold that box shut.

Now, he'll hold that box shut just about so long and then he'll get angry. It's mechanical, very mechanical. If he succeeds in holding the box shut but has to keep an eye on it to keep it shut, he'll merely feel resentment.

But if he can't hold the box shut at all and it plays numerous random tricks on him - for instance, not only the top comes up, but the sides start to fall out and the bottom falls off and the table sort of goes to pieces and then it reassembles itself a few times - he will feel fear. He can't quite overcome it, but he's got to keep an eye on it and so on.

And if the box just flies all to pieces, he'll feel grief. He's lost it. It's gone - supposing it disintegrated.

And if every time that box came apart, he felt the tremor all the way through him, and he couldn't resist feeling this tremor all the way through him, and even though he walked across the room and found the door locked, he could still feel this box going to pieces, and if the box insisted on going to pieces and then the floor started going to pieces and then the columns in the ceiling started going to pieces - believe me, he'd go right down the Tone Scale and he'd hit apathy. He'd finally give up. He'd also say, "I'm not here." He would negate against himself and so on.

Each one of these emotions has its own attitude. But you enter it lightly. Don't ask somebody who is in apathy to feel the counter-emotion of happiness. Not likely to - too high on the band.

All right. As far as thought is concerned, when you audit somebody just on concepts alone (you can audit them on concepts all by themselves; that is, thoughts or computations) you will find out that the only time thought has become aberrative is when it has been contradicted, that's all. A person has data that tells him he's 50 percent right and data that tells him he's 50 percent wrong, and the data on the right side and the data on the wrong side will add up to a datum, "maybe." And it's only euhen this is hung up.

A person can live with the fact that he's really wrong and he knows he's wrong. He could actually live with it, but he will seldom try. He tries to figure it out so that he's right. That's why you get these vast arguments.

You ask any little kid, "Why did you do that?" And he's obviously done it and he knew he did it. He put - picked the jam pot off and he threw it on the floor. And there it is on the floor. And you ask him, "Why did you throw the jam pot on the floor? Look-a-there, they've got jam all over the floor and it's all full of broken glass and so forth, and now you can't have any jam." And he said, "I didn't do it. It fell off the table." But yOu said, "But I - I saw you!" "But it fell right off the table." "But I saw you throw it on the floor!" "Yeah, but that was the dog, Well, the dog came in the door and so forth and he brushed against me and that's why it fell off. It was the dog's fault, it isn't my fault. I couldn't possibly be wrong." How wrong can you get? Dead. And so he avoids dying in this fashion.

Cross-computation winding up in a maybe is all that is wrong in the field of thought, You can think anything without getting upset so long as it doesn't wind up with a maybe.

Now, you can take a preclear and you can just start what we call Straightwire and you can start asking him questions: "When did you fail to make a decision?" "When were you unable to decide something in the past?" "What aren't you able to decide in the present?" and "What aren't you able to figure out about the future or decide about the future?" And you'll find out each time that he has overweighting data which prevents him from throwing it away. The problems are not serious. What happens to be serious is the fact that he's got a maybe.

A psychotic is only trying to solve a maybe in the past, a neurotic is trying to solve a maybe in the present and somebody who is merely slightly worried, but carrying on, is trying to solve something about the future. A person who thinks only about the past is, really psychotic. A person who thinks only about the present and cannot think into the future is neurotic. A person who thinks about the future and plans for the future and acts to make the future work out is sane. This is a very simple classification. Now, you can handle preclears just on this classification.

You can handle thought and counter-thought, Ask them for a time when they made up their mind to do something and somebody had - made them change their mind. Ask them when they decided to do something and found out it was impossible to do it. And you'll eventually find things which they are still trying to resolve back in the past - they're still trying to figure out. Something they've forgotten all about that's completely covered up will lie there underneath one of these computations - one of these curtains, so to speak.

Here the fellow - somebody walks in and asks him if he wants to buy stock in a company which builds tables - very good stock, very affluent company, a very good buy; nothing wrong with this at all, And he'll say, "No!" and he'll become very angry. Why is he becoming very angry? Somebody just added a new maybe about tables.

When he was ten years of age he had a manual training teacher, and every time he started to build this table the manual training teacher came around and told him to do it some other way. And he, at first, believed that he could build a table, but after a while he wondered whether or not he could build a table, and then he decided he couldn't build a table, but he knew he could build a table, but he didn't want to build a table, but he wanted to build a table …

In other words, if he'd simply quit and said, "All right, I can't build a table" and made up his mind like that, he wouldn't get later reactions. But as it is, he's got "maybe I could, maybe I couldn't." He's still back there - ten years old, trying to build a table.

He's got this data about tables. You walk in and you talk to him about buying stock in a company that has to do with tables, and he's going to get mad. Why is he going to get mad? He's got a big maybe. And tables all up the line, including the dinner table every night, is sitting on top of this maybe, until it is an enormous globe of miscomputations. If you were to solve this for him, he would get much better very swiftly.

Take the business of death. Here was a big maybe. "Do I live after death? Don't I live after death? All right, they tell me to have faith. What would happen if I didn't have faith? Well, if I have faith, then I will live after death; but if I don't have faith, then I can't live after death. Well now, what do I have to do? 1 have to be good in order to live after death, I am told, and live comfortably after death. But if I am not good, I won't. What is good? Well, good is following out this particular code. But I can't follow out that code."

The second that a fellow gets on this maybe, he'll float with this maybe for just years and years and years. And he actually begins to believe that he's worrying continually about death, whereas the maybe may be somewhere else or on something else. He worries and he worries and he worries and he worries about death, about death, about death, about death.

And one of the biggest releases you can get on an individual is to prove to him, in himself, subjectively and on a meter, that he just goes on and on and on and on and on. Not because it's particularly beneticial to him for any other reason that - it takes him off of a big maybe. Now he knows He knows he lives.

For anybody who gets this subjectively, you take him down to a funeral and he's liable to stand there very bored - very puzzled, as a matter of fact.

First time this ever hit me I saw a funeral going up the road and here was a great big herse and flowers all over the place and people in the cars and so on and I said to myself "Boy what a spot for a Dianetic auditor. He could go out there to the cemetery and run out all these grief charges and he could probably do a lot of good, do a lot of good." And then all of a sudden I realized this corpse is probably - Oh, was all duded up" probably and in a casket and so on and they were taking it out and burying it in a nice - so on, and all these people crying and so on. Well, what a bunch of materialistic unbelievers they were! And that was the first thought that struck me. And then the next thought that struck me - what a big joke on them: this fellow was probably right now going through the sperm-ovum sequence!

Well anyway, it seemed to me … And all of a sudden, boom! And nobody's been able to worry me about dying since. Nobody. I wasn't particularly worried about it before, but I used to - used to once in a while think that - failure as being very tough. Failure was something rough; failure was something horrible,

Failure is merely the gradient scale of death. If a person fails too many times, he's going to die, that's certain - because this society will deny him food, clothing and shelter. If he fails too many times, he will die. It's all right to cut your finger, but don't cut your throat, Cutting the finger is a little bit of dying. If you cut your finger too hard and too solidly, you could kill yourself. In other words, this is the way people look at this. That's their gradient scale of failure, the gradient scale of defeat. And they regard life seriously just to the degree that they regard death seriously and they regard failure and defeat seriously just to the degree that they will regard the whole computation of survival.

How serious is it that you live? Well, if you're going to die, it becomes very serious that you live - becomes serious business. And a person, actually, is situated on the Tone Scale to the degree that they are serious about living. They are also effective in inverse ratio to their seriousness. You can show me any person who is taking it very, very, very seriously and I'll show you a long chain of failures. A person gets most serious about living when he is dying.

Now, an index of sanity is not only a future index but a "serious" index - the serious button.

Now, on an overt act problem - and here we get back into thought, the handling of thought - the people who have tried to convince you of this and that have to some degree aberrated you, if the convictions were cross-grained to what your convictions were. But, you see, because of prior overt acts, it was what you did to others that was much more aberrative.

So, in thought and counter-thought, let's not worry so much about what was countered to you or countered to the preclear, as what the preclear countered to others.

Now, we have a whole Chart of Attitudes. This is an - a chart of concepts, and if you take this Chart of Attitudes and run the preclear in this one life on those attitudes, finding every time when he tried to foist off this attitude on somebody else against their wishes, or just tried to foist this attitude off on somebody else, we will find an aberration stronger than what was done to the preclear,

It was when he countered his thoughts. And particularly when he countered the thought of another and then failed to counter the thought of another, he got himself into a bad state, because then he had to be hung with the thought/counter-thought. He tried to palm this thought off on somebody else - this attitude off on somebody else: "You've got to obey me!" And he keeps trying to tell people this and trying to tell people this, "You've got to obey me, you've got to obey me." And he will eventually get into the serious state where he is obeying himself implicitly. Oh, that can be grim. One takes one's postulates, one's conclusions, one's predictions terrifically seriously. One starts driving oneself with an iron rod and a brass-knobbed whip. Yeah, because he's tried to make others obey him. He's tried to make others obey. "They've got to obey. They've got to obey." And eventually he handles himself Like he handles others and that's what you're up to there on the Chart of Attitudes. That is a little equation there - you want to call it an equation or a formula - of: an individual tends to handle himself as others have handled him; an individual tends to handle himself as he has tried to handle others.

You want to know what a person thinks of himself, why, look at what he thinks of others. And that's what he'll think of himself, too, because, after all, he's just one of the eight dynamics.

So, you take this Chart of Attitudes … And by the way, this is in advance of the Handbook of Preclears, and the Handbook of Preclears is made valuable to you to this additional degree: you as an auditor can take the chart all by itself and, with a technique known as Lock Scanning, make your preclear go over - for each line on that chart, including the emotion column - the time when he tried to foist off this attitude on others. In other words, you've got his thought concept as he tries to direct them to others - to children, to women, to men, to the family, to groups, or to all mankind, or to animals, or to the MEST universe, or into the spiritual realm, or actually against God.

And you take that as a chart of overt attitudes. And you could call it that: a chart of overt attitudes. And you just run the preclear - every time he's had this attitude toward those around him. And you'll find out the case will swamp up very swiftly - uery swiftly, because that is the hottest Straightwire there is on the bank. it's lying right on top of the chain of overt acts. Every one of those attitudes lies on the top of overt acts.

Now, I give you this as an optimum Straightwire - an optimum Straightwire. And let me not only recommend it to you, but ask you to make this your main Straightwire, because the person will start coming off of his maybes. And you let him come off of his maybes.

He gives this attitude, he gives this attitude, he gives this attitude, and all of a sudden he'll tell you a computation. You don't even have to ask him for a computation. He'll say, "Well, all my life I have been worried about …" And then he'll tell you what he's been worried about, and you go back, and then is when you chime in. You say, "Well, did you ever feel indecisive about this?" and he'll say, "Yes." Actually, if you could get the indecision or what was made indecisive by any incident or engram, that incident or engram would blow, because the only reason any incident stays in present time is because it has a maybe on it. It has not been decided.

Computation is keeping facsimiles in present time to think with them. So all maybes - undecides - are still being thought with. Therefore, your preclear can't be sane.

[At this point there is a gap in the original recording.]

Now, you are using, then, the Chart of Attitudes as contained in the Handbook for Preclears, as counter-thought, The preclear is being counter-thought to somebody else's thoughts to some degree. In other words, he is interfering with their self-determinism, But more about that in a moment.

You've got the preclear, then, as counter-thought to other people's thoughts. And you will find out that this influenced his aberration more than when he was thought to somebody else's counter-thought. Now, you understand that?

When his own thoughts and self-determinism were interrupted, the only reason he could take this was because he had been counter-thought to somebody else's thoughts. In other words, you've got a play both ways! And you actually can take the Chart of Attitudes and run it as the preclear's thoughts being interrupted by counter-thoughts.

In other words, you take the preclear as the thought and you run him up and down throughout his life, picking up the times when Mama, Papa, Grandma, the family, schoolteachers and others countered his thoughts and ambitions. He can be made to feel very sorry for himself when you do this, but you'll blow quite a bit of locks and do quite a bit of things.

Now, you turn around and you pose him as counter-thought to other people's tkoughts. You can work it both ways~ What I'm trying to show you is there's thought and counter-thought. The preclear, however, interrupts his own self-determinism faster by countering the thoughts of others. Now, we'd run this into emotion. The preclear, in countering the emotions of others, shuts himself down much more thoroughly than when his own emotions are countered.

Let's say - let's take all the times he came romping into the house and said, "Here's something very pretty and I'm very happy," and somebody said to him, "Nyaevevr. Go away. Go along and play" - something of that sort. "Don't bother Mama now. Mama's busy." These are really not as important as the times when somebody romped up to him saying, "I'm happy and here is something beautiful," and he said "Errrarreu." Because you see what he's done? He's done a very detestable thing. He has made himself like a person he detested. The second he counters a thought, the second he counters an emotion, he has likened himself to the person who did it to him. And here is where you have valence difficulties.

If a person does this enough to somebody else, he will go into their valence. If he counters their thought and emotion enough, he will go over into their valence. It's a very simple mechanism. He will become them rather than stay himself.

And the reason he won't stay himself is because he's likened himself to too many detestable people and he can't be himself anymore because he says, "Myself is like too many people I dislike. And therefore I will be like somebody I have hurt, and this will do a life continuum for them and will repay with repentance, sackcloth and ashes, for all the horrible things I have done."

The second that he uses the mechanism which has been used on him, he therefore pronounces judgment upon himself that he is like the person who used it on him.

If a man acts enough like his father, he will eventually not only do a life continuum on his father but start doing life continuums on those to whom he is acting like his father. If he didn't like his father, he then becomes detestable to himself. That's very simple.

It's the same way with counter-effort and effort. You take the times that an individual has acted as counter-effort - these times are much more aberrative than the times when the individual was acted upon by counter-effort.

In other words, here is a person making an effort to survive and your individual comes along - your preclear has come along and said, "Bow! Don't survive!" Now, here again you get the life-continuum mechanism and you get it because the preclear dramatizes or uses the counter-efforts which were used against him. You get this mechanism - this is a very important mechanism. He has used the counter-efforts which were used against him, against somebody else or against another dynamic.

Naturally when your preclear was hit in the jaw, he did not like the person who hit him in the jaw. And yet he has received a motion, a counter-effort of a hit in the jaw. Now, to be fully self-determined, he feels he ought to be able to hit somebody in the jaw. So he goes and he hits somebody in the jaw. The second he does this, he recognizes that he has done an act which was done to him by a person he doesn't like. So the moment he does this, he likens himself, then, to the person who hit him first that he doesn't like. So therefore, he can't go on being himself. So he'll switch over to some degree into the valence of the person he's just hit, and he'll wear the somatic himself as a life continuum or as an effort to arrest that somatic and keep himself from being like somebody he doesn't like.

This is not very complicated. It's something that you should sort of lay down on a piece of paper and look at it until you see it very thoroughly, because it's quite important.

Now, in the field of emotion … This covers overt acts, it covers life continuum, it covers all of the buttons that you find in the handbook - all of them - explains it very well. And if you look over any preclear, you can ask him this question and get the central computation or the central snarl in his memory bank or his thought - his computer. You ask him what he would defend above all things. Just ask him that, and he will say - think for a moment and he would say "my family" or he will say "oh, babies" or he will say "cats" or he will say "governments" or "God" or something of the sort.

Well, you've got him in a bear trap right that moment, Why? Why would he defend this above all other things? He has to defend this or become the thing that attacks it! Why does he have to do this? He has to defend these things because he has offended against them and is doing a life continuum for them. Very simple. He has - is doing a life continuum for cats or babies or something of the sort, and at one time or another he injured the entity he is defending. He has done an overt act against this thing.

You'll get some preclear, and you'll find this preclear says, "Oh, these horrible brutal men - these brutal men that torture these poor little cats!" And you just stick your tongue a little bit in your cheek and say, "All right, now let's go back down the time track and let's find the time - let's find a time, now, when you killed a cat."

"Oh! I'd never do such a thing! Poor little pussycats I - I love pussycats and they're much better than men," and so on. "I'd ne~er do such a thing; I just never would."

So, the poor little pussycat we find at the age of four, being most wonderfully strangled by our pussycat defender.

One case, for instance, had dressed a kitty up in baby clothes and had put it innocently in a box and had come back and the cat was dead, having strangled to death on the baby clothes. And this person ever afterwards starts to defend cats, but then sees somebody punishing a cat - namely, some men punishing a cat one way or the other or doing something to a cat - so she hates the men. She has to hate the men and defend the cat or she becomes the men because she killed a pussycat too, you see. This is very simple. Very simple. You can draw that. You can draw that with ease. And, as a matter of fact, I had better draw it for you. Now, here, [marking on blackboard] here we have a time track. We will just take one life. We'll take a very, very microscopic view of a person's existence and take one life.

And, by the way, has anybody present got any doubts in themselves that you - by now in Scientology - that you live only once? Do you think you live only once? Who around here chinks you live only once? (pause) Ah, you're scared - there's somebody around here thinks you live only once. (laughter)

Male uoice: Sure, you never stop living; you're only living once. (laughter)

Ha-ha-ha-ha! Very good, you never stop living; you're only living once. That's correct, that's correct. Okay, I was just hoping for somebody to bite on that. I have a lot of very interesting experiments I like to perform, because I love to see somebody's jaw drop.

I'm going up to the organization that makes most of the lie detectors for police departments in the United States and I'm going to feed them this, and on Hubbard College stationery have them interchange some correspondence with me about it - after I've proven it to them. So that they can write to all the police departments, showing this letter, which says "Hubbard College," and advise all their machine operators everywhere as to what's happening, having proved it conclusively in that institute, you see? And so then all police departments will be apprised of past lives, and they have to know about past lives, and after that we've got the ball rolling.

All right, [marking on blackboard] here's conception and here's present time and here's birth. Now, let me show you the mechanism of a standard overt act which really isn't an overt act.

The overt act of birth. Very, very many people believe that their being born was an overt act. That's nothing, by the way; some people believe simply that their being alive is an overt act against the society. And not only that, very many people being alive is an overt act against the society! (laughter)

Now, here you have birth, and this child was unaware of birth being an overt act for some years. About the age of four, why, there's a lot of old ladies sitting around with Mama, and Mama's saying, "Oh, what a horrible time I had," and "Oh, it was terrible. The labor pains lasted for eight weeks, and I was under constant sedation for about three months afterwards, and they had to operate seven times, and they had to transplant the whole Mayo Clinic down here, and I couldn't even be moved and the doctor said it was the most difficult birth he had ever attended," she says very proudly.

Well, the little kid listens to all of this and finds out how much trouble he was. And being soft-hearted and sympathetic and not keyed in badly yet, and not yet being human, the little kid says, "Poor Mama. Poor Mama," and begins to feel sorry for Mama and realizes what he did to Mama. Now, that - just that can be an overt act. He can conceive, then, that he's done an overt act.

But most of the time it happens much more flagrantly. The child is born and about the first words he hears is "How I have suffered for you. What I have gone through for you. How much I have suffered," and "All I have done for you, and then you do this to me."

And this can go on and on and on. It could go on - I've seen men and women, forty, fifty years of age, that still had live mamas who were pulling this one.

I don't know what Mama did to the kid they have to pay for in this regard, but it must have been horrendous. Probably AAs or probably the child was illegitimate or there's something there. Mother, in order to pull this thing, feels she has done something which she has to justify. Well, we'll just leave it up in the air what that something is, but the second you find a child on whom this is being pulled, you have found immediately a mother who is justifying some bad intention toward the child. Invariably, you have found the other thing. Because you - here you see she's declaring that an overt act. Now, this is a medium stage. This is the stage of justifying.

All right, birth is an overt act. Now, [marking on blackboard] we find here at the age of twenty-eight, this individual does nothing but defend clubs. He is very, very defensive about the Royal Order of Meese (that's the plural of moose). And the Royal Order of Meese has to be defended - has to be defended at all costs.

You say, "That's - that's fine, that's fine." You got this preclear, you've asked him this "What do you defend above all costs?" and he tells you "The Royal Order of Meese." Now, when did he try to destroy this or another organization? And you'll find right away, one of his favorite indoor sports was trying to break up a club of boys or a sewing society of girls or something of the sort, earlier. He has actually been responsible for breakups of groups in this life, in his youth. He has knocked them apart one way or the other, and now he comes around and starts to defend them.

Well, if you put him on the machine, you will find a real overt act against groups in some earlier life. Big one. Like he took thirty pieces of silver from somebody or other and says, "You know that crowd of people over there, hm? They're getting ready to overthrow the whole state and here's state's evidence." And he gets them all turned in or beheaded or something of the sort.

I ran into these one day - I ran into one of the government agents who had had to do with the Guy Fawkes plot. It sounds weird, but the machine just started flashing all over the place on governments. So I thought of all the revolutionaries that had failed or been turned in or been informed on, and I found out that Guy Fawkes… This boy, by the way, by this time was a violent revolutionary. This fellow - this preclear - in this present life, was violently revolutionary against governments. In other words, he'd changed valence,

[R&D Note - Guy Fawkes: (1570-1606) one of the conspirators who, in November 1605, tried to avenge the persecution of Roman Catholics in England by blowing up the king and the Parliament. Barrels of gunpowder had been hidden under the Houses of Parliament, and the plan, called the Gunpowder Plot, was to set off an explosion at the opening of Parliament on 5 November. Guy Fawkes was to execute the plan and light the gunpowder. One of the conspirators, however, warned a relative ahead of time, who revealed the plot to the authorities, leading to the arrest and execution of most of the members of the group, including Fawkes.]

In the time when he committed this overt act, he was violently in favor of governments, you see? Nobody should overthrow a government. But he turned in some of the plotters on the Gunpowder Plot and they were accordingly jailed, tortured, hanged, drawn, quartered - whatever was done to them - and this sat on there as an overt act with exclamation points. So I ran it out. And - tears and mopes and groans and so forth about it all - lots of regret. And got a change of attitude to something a little saner.

Now, this works out - you say, "This person is being very defensive of women - very, very defensive of women. What's he done to women?" See, it just works just like that.

Well now, oddly enough, what he's done to women was also done to him - earlier, much earlier, Because you have to have a motivator in order to get an overt act. So it's a sort of a dizzy little circle.

And so, your plot here [marking on blackboard] looks like this. Let's take a number of lives, now. These are lives - births and deaths. Here we have A defending the second dynamic - oh, violently defensive. Now, back here, maybe two lives ago, we find A offending against the second dynamic violently - A offending, [marking on blackboard] second dynamic.

And now we go back here and we find, numbers of lives ago (let's put another life - we'll say a thousand lives intervened here), and we find a second dynamic offense against A. And before that moment, we find no aberration. Somebody did a second dynamic offense against A. Somebody offended A on the second dynamic. A didn't dramatize it for an awful long time, but one day really dramatized it, felt sorry for it, regretted it, tried to turn it back, got the aberration, actually picked up this first facsimile down here on the second dynamic, wore its somatics, and is now busily defending the second dynamic.

Now, that is the map, And that map applies to every dynamic, every emotion, every effort, every thought or attitude of thought, because, you see, there is overt effort, overt emotion and overt thought.

Now, for instance, you find somebody feeling badly after a short period of time - yes, you could scan the whole thing out of them, you could pick up all the locks of what had happened to them at this moment. But it's much better to find the overt thought and their inhibition of it. Because they'll think the overt thought and then they say, "I can't do it," or something of the sort. And it'll restimulate them.

They go in to this basketball game, and they come out of the basketball game and they just don't feel well. They're sick at their stomach or something of the sort. You ask them what player they had an urge to kick in the stomach or to hit in the stomach. And the fellow will look at you like you're a mystic or something of the sort, because he was clear out there on the floor and, yes, he did have that urge. He had an urge to drive an elbow into one of the boys' stomachs that was getting in his road. And he didn't do it? Why didn't he do it? It's because he's already done that overt act one time too many and felt too much regret on it. So he checks himself from doing it. And the second he checks himself from going through the action, it's merely an overt thought, then, isn't it? And it's an overt thought, and the overt thought is what backfires on him. So he walks out of the basketball game with a sick stomach.

If you merely scan out the moment he thought this and why he thought this (and by the way, "why" is always important on these things because it's an evaluation) - if you ask him why he thought it and when he thought it, and to get the sensation of checking it, you get the emotion of holding back the thought, you see? Thought is translated into effort by emotion or inhibited from going into effort by emotion. Ask him - get the emotion change as he didn't do it, and you'll get the moment he got the sick stomach. And the sick stomach will go away - boom! Now, knowing this makes it very easy to pick up these things.

I was quite amused one day - an auditor said, "I will never again process anybody who has not been indoctrinated a little bit in overt acts, because this girl next door had been having a bad stomach for a long time and I finally got her to recall a time when she postulated she would like to kick another girl in the stomach, and immediately her stomachache went away. She just got this time - she remembered it - but she came immediately to present time and she said, 'And if she was here I'd love to do it again!' and got her sick stomach back immediately." That's overt thought.

Now, you should know all of this when you look at the whole problem of self-determinism, Self-determinism is modified by what happens to the individual and what the individual does with what happens to him.

& Actually, determination is …

Male voice: On that particular case you just explained, she converted the overt thought through emotion into effort against herself. Is that correct?

You could say that she did, yes. It'd be a circular problem.

You see, an individual is a portion of the MEST universe. And when they start to strike out against the MEST universe - they start an action going - if the environment cannot receive the action, then they do, because they are part of the MEST universe. Their body is part of the MEST universe; their mind is not. But their body is part of the MEST universe and so they receive the action back - thud!

Now, self-determinism is thus modified. And self-determinism can be measured directly by how many dynamics a person is willing to take responsibility for - or in other words, the size of the person's sphere of influence. What sphere of influence is a person willing to take over? That will tell you immediately where he is on the Tone Scale. It will tell you immediately how many overt acts he's performed and it'll give you some sort of an estimate on what has been done to him. The sphere of influence is a modification of self-determinism. Sounds complicated, but it isn't.

If a person has injured the galaxy at large, you might say, believe me, he will have no thought of being able to control that galaxy. If he has injured something - now, this is just analogy - if he's injured something the area of the solar system, he's no longer willing to take responsibility for his act, he is also no longer able to take responsibility for the solar system. If he's injured earth - his sphere of influence as earth - he's willing to take responsibility less than that, but if he's injured earth, he won't take responsibility for earth because he has to take responsibility for his own act.

In each case, the individual sees that he has offended against the dynamics, and if he took that responsibility he would have to declare himself wrong. If he declared himself wrong, he would also be declaring himself dead. And so what he does is just pull back his sphere of influence.

Now, let's say he has offended against the United States widely, and he doesn't have a sphere of influence against this part of the continent. He won't include that.

And let's pull it in - and I'm just putting it in in terms of space and time right now - it gets much more complicated, but just showing you a contracting sphere.

Now, the individual, let us say, has offended against groups - he doesn't want to take responsibility for those groups anymore - and so the dynamic of groups is something he is not going to touch.

And let's say he's offended against children, so he's not willing to take responsibility for children, and he's missing on that dynamic. He's offended against women - he's not willing to be responsible for women, therefore his second dynamic is all the way out. This leaves him dynamic one. He still owns his body pretty well as long as he's alive. And so his sphere of influence could then be his body or the first dynamic only. And when he has offended against this often enough, he won't even take responsibility for the first dynamic.

And so he contracts his sphere of responsibility. And when he has contracted his sphere of responsibility to this regard, then all the dynamics, all the counter-efforts, all the counter-emotions, all the counter-thoughts of all the dynamics can hit him. And most people, by the way, are riding on this very little, thin margin between not quite being able to stop all these efforts and barely being able to sidestep them enough to keep alive in their own body. This is just a concept that they have.

Your body is not your mind. Your facsimiles are not your body, even though those facsimiles contain that blueprint. The size of your mind is not the size of your brain. The size of your mind is not the size of your body. Your mind is as big as the galaxies or as big as the island universes or as big as all the universes there ever are - it doesn't matter how big it is, but it will be as big as, and will influence as much as, you want it to influence. That's very blunt. You could conceive your mind - it could be withdrawn in its periphery to something the size of a head of a pin, as in politicians. (laughter) Or you could expand it out so that you were able to command your own body, as will do an athlete: he is at least in command of his own body. Or you could expand it out to the size of a group where you are trying to handle or manage a group. You can expand your mind that far.

And by the way, you won't handle that group unless you do conceive your mind to be as big as that group.

You've got to be able to conceive your mind to be as big as whatever you're trying to influence, because it means that you've got to take the responsibility of whatever you are trying to influence. So therefore, you've got to conceive yourself that size.

You see, the trick in this is the mind doesn't have any size. It doesn't have space or time. It merely has recordings of space or time.

Most people looking at themselves in the mirror, looking at space and time around them, looking at themselves, conceive their mind to be merely as big as themselves. Now, most people do not believe that they handle much of a periphery of influence. Most people are actually having trouble with themselves. They have trouble with themselves.

If you can't sit down to a typewriter and learn how to type on it in fifteen or twenty minutes, you're having trouble with yourself. If you can't grow a better-looking nose, you're having trouble with yourself. That's really blunt! That's compared to an optimum - an optimum situation.

Therefore, in order to secure any freedom, or to call yourself to any degree self-determined, you have to have a concept of yourself to the size, to the sphere of influence that you are trying to determine. What's self-determinism? "Self-determinism" could be called something much better, but most people couldn't take the bridge that fast. It should be called something like "pan-determinism" - pan meaning all the way across or around or over. Pan-determinism: determinism on all dynamics. And if you were in 100 percent possession of your mind, of your actions and so on, you would have 100 percent sphere of influence over all the dynamics.

Pan-determinism. You're just as responsible for Russia going to war at this moment, or trying to threaten the rest of civilization with war, as Russia is. And in view of the fact that Russia is not even vaguely responsible for what it does, having contracted in each and every mind within it to bare-necessity control of self, and having to think in terms of "We're collectively something, but individually nothing" - pretty badly off. If you knoeu - if you know that you can be determined all the way across the line, just potentially determined across all the dynamics - then, you see, you have to accept the responsibility for Russia being in the state of mind that it's in, as well as the United States being in the state of mind it's in.

And if you were to just broadly accept responsibility for the atomic situation in the world today, you would, of course, do a great deal about it. But as long as your concept is that you can barely take care of yourself, you'll not be able to do anything about the war.

Okay.