This is December the 3rd, morning lecture. This morning we're going to talk about time as a barrier.

Must be aware of the fact that if we have the mest universe, a game which consists of a system of barriers, and games require barriers, that there must be an awful lot of fancy barriers in this universe because people have a tendency to get very inventive.

The mind of man is pretty stimulus-response. But all that a thetan can conceive hasn't been dreamed of yet. The thetan ability to invent, extrapolate far exceeds the mest universe. The mest universe is a pitiful attempt at getting agreement. People get pegged down to it and their originality has a tendency to suffer, because they are in agreement with about the most unoriginal sort of a thing. It's one of the easy problems. It's one of the terribly simple, prekindergarten problems that any little child can get along with — even a physicist can get along in this universe. Mainly because it consists of that: a system of barriers in order to make a game.

Well, how many kinds of barriers are there? Well, this is just the same number that you're trying to solve in your preclear.

We have the sixth dynamic as the single most important dynamic simply because every preclear you run across is in complete agreement on the sixth dynamic. But his agreement is bad or good on the sixth dynamic. And this, in essence, is the single greatest difference amongst cases — whether his agreement is good or his agreement is bad on the sixth dynamic. You can analyze a case on this basis: You can say this thetan is in wild protest against this universe.

Now, religion has long used the factor of evil in order to create a situation of resistance. This system of resistance brings about, of course, an overwhelming of the protest of the individual which, in itself, reverses the vector and desire of the individual.

Now, we take somebody, for instance, who desires sensation. And if we make him resist sensation — let's talk now about the second dynamic in relationship to the sixth dynamic. And we find out that if he desires sensation, the sensation will be made scarce in this universe. See, what he desires will be, perforce, made scarce.

All right, he desires sensation. Very well. The next step which he will confront will be not a desire for sensation but an abhorrence of it. How does that come about? He feels that he must first pull in sensation. This starts an inflow. A thetan is best off when he is cause. Maximal cause; minimal effect.

And if we can get him bombarded from every side, one way or the other, we can reduce him to an effect. This is the way you make a slave, is reduce somebody to an effect. All right.

He desires sensation. This lets him assist the mest universe in overwhelming him. You see? This lets him assist getting in all his inflow. It gets him to help himself being swamped.

Well, what's the exact process by which this is done? First, he desires sensation of his own creation, and then it is taken away from him. And if the black space, which is a vacuum, does anything, it certainly takes away everything you've got. It's the most disenfranchising mechanism that was ever invented: the vacuum — minus 273 degrees centigrade. All right.

Here we have, then, a sudden outflow of his own sensation. So he decides, "Well, look at that, there goes that sensation. Now where's my sensation?" So the next piece of sensation he runs across — having no idea that anybody else is making sensation, the next idea that he — sensation that he runs across, he says, "That's mine." So he pulls it in. But somebody else starts saying, "Where is my sensation?" So he pulls it back again. So we have an interchange, and the beginning of agreement. All right.

The next step on this is "resist stealing somebody else's sensation," of course, because they get interlocked on this basis of pull and haul on sensation, so the evil is "stealing sensation." Well, of course, they started to steal sensation because they didn't know it wasn't theirs.

And that, by the way, is the history throughout the universe: "Didn't know it wasn't mine. And what's mine anyway?" See? That's just — this is based on the think, "If I create it, it's mine." It's not necessarily true at all.

Take Scientology. I work out Scientology. That doesn't make it mine. If anything, it makes it yours. That is, working on a fairly high echelon, that's just the case of it. Yet you'll find people around who will suddenly grab on to Scientology and say, "This is mine," you see, "and it now must not belong to anybody else." And they'll stop its communication lines, and they will say how horrible auditors are and then they'll give big reasons why "Hubbard didn't. . ." or something. And then they get bigger reasons why — they're just starting to run the whole cycle on one little subject. But that's nothing — it's just the way this universe runs. All right.

People get the idea as an argument: "Look, if I created this, it belongs to me. You understand that." That's not true. If it were true, why, things would be in a much more horrible state than they are. It's not true, fortunately. Because you can be just as free with somebody else's anchor point, and feel just as free with somebody else's anchor points, as you can with those you created. If it were not this way, then there'd be no hope for any of you. Just no hope at all. We just might as well throw in the sponge and skip the whole thing.

The only reason anybody gets better is because of the fact that their own anchor points can have been created by almost anybody anywhere. And they recognize this slowly and they say, "Well, this business of agreement isn't so bad. What I don't have, I can create or borrow or use or purloin. There is acquisition possible."

But now let's take this thing called sensation. Here he goes making sensation and it gets taken away from him, making sensation, it gets taken away from him, making sensation, it gets taken away from him; and he resists taking away sensation as an evil. So therefore, he starts pulling in sensation as good. Therefore, if he's being good, he's pulling in sensation. Well, this starts the inflow, and he'll get more and more inflow. In other words, pushing away sensation is evil.

Well see, after he has done that for a while, he's so packed in with sensation — he's just got too much of this stuff, that's all, it's a surplus commodity. So he decides about that time, you see, that all this sensation, this isn't so good. So he tries to sell it. You know, "Let's have a — set up a shop for sensation." There is such a thing as "the world's oldest profession," you know. Somebody the other day was trying to say that — I don't know what they were listing as the world's oldest profession, but I think they were setting up medicine as the world's oldest profession. Boy, are they misinformed! But on second thought, not too misinformed.

So we get this — he tries to give it away. Nobody wants it. If he wants to get rid of something, must be something wrong with it.

This is sort of the mutual reaction. Because if everybody were doing this at the same time, you would have this as a suppression, eventually, of sensation. So we wouldn't have any sensation. Everybody'd be trying to give this sensation away, and then everybody'd decide it was worthless, so nobody'd bother to generate any of this stuff and it'd sort of go into a sump and we would forget about it somewhat, until all of a sudden one day it was scarce. Well, the last time we had any sensation was when we procured it from somebody else — never occurs to the fellow to create it himself. So he starts pulling in sensation again.

Well, he'll pull in sensation just so long, and again, we get another: "pulling in sensation is evil." Then we get: "giving out sensation is evil." This is what's inversion. It isn't just push and take, because each time the fellow forgets a little bit more about his own creativeness of sensation. He gets badly immersed in a whole series of agreements concerning how one must acquire sensation, and he gets no agreement that he ought to create some. And people are apt to tell him, "Well, that's no good — you made it yourself."

They do that with money, if you notice. And that's one thing that's on road to — that. . . Money goes in this same line. Guys make it themselves for a while, and — that's right, you know. And nobody has any real trouble with that — everybody's making money himself. He makes his own money. There is no such thing as state money early in any civilization. And it's very unworkable because nobody quite agrees on how much money a fellow ought to make, so finally they put a restriction on how much money he can make. They do this in the way — line of wampum and credits and favors and so on. It's a whole series of promises to pay, you see.

And then they start restricting each other because there's too much of this stuff around — somebody else wants to be boss, somebody gets more powerful. And we get cities making money. And then we get, from cities making money, counties, states and then whole races have agreed that only one thing in the race can make money. This is the silliest thing in the world, you know.

I mean, you take today with photoengraving — this is no invitation to counterfeiting, but today, with photoengraving, and the great ease with which you could make paper, the United States Government is in a very, very bad spot. It's only because criminals are bad workmen — criminals uniformly can't work — and all counterfeiting is accounted to be criminal, so only criminals really counterfeit. You get how this works out, you see. And we get to a point, finally, where the only self-made money in the community is kind of bad.

But the truth of the matter is that all of the machinery necessary to make bills just exactly as good as the US government — maybe a little bit better — can be procured for a few hundred dollars without any questions being asked.

Because it's simply photoengraving and photolithograph and plain letterpress. And it has to do with money — paper, and money paper simply has some red, white and blue threads in it. And you just take some paper pulp and mix it up and run it through a little paper mill and get the same thickness of paper on the thing and you can make this money. There's no trouble. Actually, you shouldn't have to go to all the work — all the work of earning this money. (audience laughter) But that's the thing you're supposed to do. And because you're supposed to do it, why, you're getting along all right, and you are not particularly aberrated on it — it's not too hard to do, so you go ahead and do it.

Well, let's add this up on the subject of sensation. And we get the exact parallel that we're trying to draw: The fellow desires it and then he doesn't desire it. And we find the same thing happening to money. People desire money and then they find out they can't have it, so they start to waste it. And then they can't have it at all and they decide that they will pull it in, and they become criminal about it, and oh boy! Oh boy, the inventions that can take place about this one thing — money.

Inflow, outflow. And we get this cycle then. The DEI cycle comes out of this. We get — first it comes in — well, that's bad, see, and then it goes out, and then the fellow has got too much going out, and he hasn't got enough coming in to put it out again, and we're right into making facsimiles.

See how we get into making facsimiles? Fellow stops creating. This is all on the basis of belief and agreement. It hasn't any other basis. Cause, effect, belief, agreement. These things come into creation because people know they're in existence. And then if they've agreed they're in existence, why, they're all set. System of barriers.

Now, let's look that over again, and we find that — we'll find that a person assists the mest universe in pouring in on him by resisting what he considers evil. He can only get into agreement with that thing which he matches wavelength with. You can get into agreement only when you match wavelengths with some­thing. So we match wavelengths, and we get a situation where that wavelength can then overpower an individual. If a person never matched wavelengths with bullets, he'd never get shot. So we have this resistance to evil.

Somebody comes around and he says, "Now listen, let me tell you some­thing that's evil: ice-cream sodas are evil." And he sells a good story on this. And he shows how ice-cream sodas take the money of little children, and the money ought to go in a collection plate. He shows how capitalism becomes fat through owning these big ice-cream plants. He demonstrates that this is hard on the worker — never explains to you that ice-cream sodas provide work and people want it — but it's hard on the worker and creates social injustices. And therefore, the whole subject of ice-cream sodas is in — detestable and intolerable, and you should fight ice-cream sodas. So he finally gets you to go around carrying this little placard that says, "Down with Ice-Cream Sodas." Gets you to go into places and smash places, you see, and — mobs of you — to prevent them from ice-cream sodas. And there will ensue, when that takes place, the biggest wave of ice-cream soda drinking you can imagine.

Why? Because everybody's matched wavelengths with ice-cream sodas, and they finally mistakenly smash one too many ice-cream soda parlors and the law gets after them and other people get after them and other people argue about it and finally the instigators of the motion are overpowered by force. And their — the society, by the way, takes peculiar delight in forcing them to have ice-cream sodas in some fashion or another, because they insist then that ice-cream sodas aren't so bad, and they want to prove it to them. All sorts of ways. The next thing you know, the resistance of the people resisting ice-cream sodas caves in, and we then have a situation whereby there's a terrible thirst for ice-cream sodas comes up.

Now, there's another little step in there: by creating a scarcity of something, you've created a slight vacuum. The only thing that'll fill the vacuum of ice-cream sodas, is ice-cream sodas. That's in this universe. Very mechanical.

If you think I'm being too far afield, just consider the campaigns of Carry Nation and the period of drunkenness which came in coincidental with Prohibition. The United States has never known drunkenness such as that which occurred during the Prohibition era. You could prohibit almost anything and get the same result. You would get it being accepted more widely because it was prohibited. This is a method of getting randomity. But it's not a method which departs from our basic principle: outflow, inflow.

Now, you could see that — you can understand that your preclear who starts to fight the mest universe is having a wonderful time for himself. In the first place, he's fighting a barrier which is there as long as he believes it's there. So if he starts fighting the barriers — boy, does he get barriers. Oh! Oh! You see, nobody would ever realize that it was a long, mile-and-a-half walk down to the store unless an auto salesman came along and explained it to them. That wouldn't seem very bad. As a matter of fact, it's kind of refreshing. You know, you get out in the morning, get a little exercise and see how the neighborhood's making out and look at the flower gardens and come back and feel good about the thing. No, he wants you to get into a small, closed, steel cubicle and imbibe carbon monoxide gas for a mile and a half. It's not quite clear why he wants you to do this, but he says it's for the sake of business and profit.

I don't know what profit is. I've long gotten over trying to examine the problem. Because what a thetan can adorn a fact with is glorious to behold, but impossible to work out. Because that's why he puts it on top of the fact: so it won't work out, you see. It has to survive and endure, and when that comes into facts, why, facts are facts; but, if you can obfuscate them enough, why, they'll endure forever.

Well, so we get this maximal agreement on barriers, and people get barriers, and they more and more agree with barriers.

Now, you'll find that they have most agreed with that barrier which is to them the most forbidding. That barrier which is most forbidding, you see, they must have most agreed on. This is — everybody's got this.

So we look at m-e-s-t — which we use to call the mest universe, the physical universe — and we find out it is composed of matter, energy, space and time. And we have, when we've said that, merely a system of barriers.

Now, what are these barriers? Matter, of course, is a spaceless collection of energy which stands or moves according to a set of laws upon which we have agreed. Now, that's that kind of barrier.

Now, energy is a barrier which has a little more space and a little more motion — a little higher potential of motion. And it's, again, that which has been agreed upon.

And now we go into space, and we find that space is a terrific barrier. We find space the biggest barrier of it all. If you wanted to really put a criminal in jail, you would go find . .. Go — well, take the Sahara desert, see. If you didn't want him to escape from this jail, you put the Sahara desert around him — at least. You wouldn't take his space away from him, you would just give him — see how it's another type of barrier — you would just give him complete space.

And he would never get anyplace, no matter how many light-years he walked in any direction.

Now, if you consider the space between this galaxy and the first galaxy nearest to us, which I think is the galaxy in Andromeda — we see through our constellation, Andromeda — there's an awful lot of space between these two galaxies.

There's quite a bit of space between even Sirius and Earth. But when you consider that this distance between Sirius and Earth is a very slight distance in — compared to the galactic distances of this galaxy (this galaxy being rep­resented by the Milky Way and this splatter of stars which sits more or less in this place), what an enormous piece of distance there is between here, relatively speaking, and the next galaxy out. Well, that's quite a piece of distance.

Well, if you were to put a criminal down in the middle of it and told him to escape, why, he'd have a rough time of it unless he had something that could at least travel a couple of light-years, and then he'd be an old, old man by the time he got here!

Well, it's all right if you don't tell him to escape. You can put him out there. You give him the idea he has to escape from it, he gets upset. Mostly because that's what he was basically trying to do so many times up and down the track — he was trying to escape.

And we come up against the thetan's prime abhorrence: He is something which isn't anyplace. You see? He isn't anyplace except amongst the barriers on which he has agreed. But this is barriers on which he has agreed — this doesn't put him anyplace. And he can make things move and he can make barriers move — he himself doesn't move. Although he moves around through the barriers, apparently, he never moves around through the barriers — he moves the barriers around through where he is.

He takes up his various situations. He can take up any situation. And in view of this fact, he, of course, would develop as one of his prime allergies, being in one place. This is horror to him — this is stark horror. The idea of being in one place forever. In other words, just what he is, and just what he is doing is horrible. And this, of course, is his effort — his strenuous effort — to provide himself with randomity. Because if he accepted what he was — just accepted what he was, why, he would be then — what an interesting setup!

I mean, here he is — here he is, fixed in one place, able to observe anything but not going anyplace. But he could make barriers, and he can agree that barriers are moving and going places and distances exist and so forth. But here he is doing this, you see, and if he just made up his mind that's what he was doing, this would be quite interesting, wouldn't it, the result that you would get, because you would immediately drop out of him his randomity — total.

And the next step is, he thinks he has to work to survive. He can't do anything else but survive. So he has an abhorrence of nonsurvival. Good joke, isn't it? He can't possibly do anything but survive, so he has an abhorrence for nonsurvival. He can't move around places — there isn't anyplace to move to unless he makes one. So his chief horror is staying in one place.

You get somebody to run "worry" long enough, and he will eventually find out what he's really worrying about, which is being fixed in one place. This really worries him. The idea of being fixed in one place, as of a tree, would — just supposing the fellow were a tree for the next few thousand years, just standing there with nothing more to look at than those barriers around.

Well, of course, his abhorrence is to be fixed amongst barriers. That is dull. To be fixed and be able to change and view barriers is not dull. To survive forever in a state of complete consciousness, with a great ability to create is not dull, but to survive forever with no ability to create would be too ghastly to contemplate. And so we have — the paradox actually works itself out, if we look into it a little more deeply. All right.

Let's take up our problem here again of barriers, and we'll see then that a great space is a barrier. That energy — you could, by the way, pour sheets of energy and random sheets of energy across an area and actually make a barrier out of the area. Let's take any field under bombardment — you see, there isn't a wall there, there's a great deal of energy occurring in the place. And to get a guy to cross it would face him with too much randomity, right away. So that's a barrier.

A barrier would be that thing which causes you to lose something if you trespass it. You call this wall a barrier because you can't take your body through it — you think. (You see, that's nonsense too, but we won't go into those upper echelons.) Yeah, this is a barrier, if you can't pass your wallet through it. See, if you could pass your wallet through it, it wouldn't be a barrier — nobody'd agree on that at all.

Well, the reason you can't pass your wallet through it is your wallet is the same order of barrier. You see, this is a barrier to your wallet. So long as you want one single tiny atom in this universe, so long as you want one tiny little cubic millimeter of space in this universe, all these things are and can continue to be barriers.

That's because this universe is built out of space which mustn't go through space. See, the two things mustn't exist in the same space. That's one of the laws of space, and that's what makes it space.

And the other one is, is that energy barriers built out of atoms and molecules must not pass through energy barriers built out of atoms and molecules. You follow that? Unless destruction and change is scheduled to occur. I mean, you can pass a wallet through there very easily by cramming it down the muzzle of a sixteen-inch gun and pulling the lanyard. But the trouble is that you probably wouldn't have much wallet, and you certainly wouldn't have any wall. So as long as you're trying to preserve matter, particularly, you will have barriers. So these are the clues to that.

Now let's look at what takes things away from you more consistently and continually than anything else. And that's time. And time as a barrier is an interesting barrier. Where is 1770? Where is the year 82,000 A.D.? Where?

People ask where because they think time should be someplace. Well, let's put it another way: Where's the wallet you were carrying in 1770? Now we could be very poetic and say, "It's all withered away into the dust of yesterday," and et cetera and "And it's gone where the kudu mourneth and the ivy pineth," or something. Fascinating things you can say about it, but I'm afraid they're all emotional, they have nothing to do with the wallet. Just try and spend one of those pfennigs that you — that, by the way, a small coin that today you wouldn't be able to find hardly with a microscope, would buy a pig in 1700. So your wallet wouldn't do you any good, anyhow.

But the point is — the point is that time is the most ethereal sort of barrier that any preclear ever tried to contemplate. And when people in the past have contemplated time, they have simply gone all to pieces. Believe me, I'm not exaggerating it. They just go to pieces — they do all sorts of things. They blow their brains out, they take up physics, they resign themselves to their fate.

Physics runs along on no definition for space or time. They always are defining things by themselves. They say, "Time is an interval of lapse. Space is a distance."

It's like picking up a textbook which says very sonorously — and will flunk you if you don't say so too — it starts out grandly and it says, "What is a dog?" No pictures, nothing, you know, there's just this word d-o-g. You don't know what this d-o-g is. And it says sonorously — with what English, with what parsing, with what commaclature — that a dog is a dog. And you look in vain through the rest of the textbook to find what a d-o-g is. Is it something you eat? Something you wear?

And then if you go around and complain to the professor and you say, "Look, bud" — taking him on face value, not on title — "look, bud, what is this thing, this d-o-g?"

"Oh, well," he said, "it's right there. Why don't you study your lesson?"

And you look on the third page and — where he said to look, and it said, "A d-o-g is the antithesis of a g-o-d." And you look that up in the dictionary, and you get an entirely erroneous idea and think you're studying religion. And nearly everybody — almost everyone in the field of physics has come to this belief finally. So I don't know but what they don't try to put that in there.

Now, this is wonderful, and it's very, very puzzling and very paradoxical, but it doesn't get you anywhere unless it gets you somewhere by realizing that some­body hasn't said anything. Now, if you can realize that about an awful lot of things in life, you have learned your biggest lesson. Because that's the most difficult lesson there is to learn because everybody is so certain — they sound so certain.

You can ask your preclear, "Mock up your mother sounding certain. Your father sounding certain. And everybody sounding certain. Parents, teachers — everybody. Everybody knowing the answers. Knowing the answers. Sounding certain. Sounding certain."

And all of a sudden the preclear will say, "You know, I sound the same way when I'm talking, heh-heh. And I don't know what the hell I'm talking about!" You've learned your biggest lesson when you've learned that everybody is being terribly convincing. Not reasonable — they're being convincing. That's entirely different.

And so we take down the line, as we look at time, we find the same story has been occurring: "Time is a change of energy particles in space. Space is — well, space is energy — space is a particle area, which is monitored by time. No, it's not quite that. No, we'll write, now, the Einstein formula of relativity and befuddle everybody for twenty years. And then when we can't explain it that way, we'll write another formula. And that'll explain the first formula. Only nobody knew the first formula, and the second formula won't be released for another twenty years. So we won't know. And we can conclude from all this, that boy, is that convincing!"

Now, fact of the matter is, time is not a difficult thing to understand if you can understand that a thetan is handling barriers, and is working with automatic machinery which constructs continuous barriers. They don't have to be constructed and unconstructed really continuously, since only that action itself creates time. So it's the speed with which he sets up his machinery. But again, speed is nothing. So it's just what he knows he's doing that he doesn't know he's doing that makes time.

You see that? It's something he knows he's doing. He knows there's time because he's set up time to be time, and then forgotten that he set it up to be time, so now he knows there's time. He knows a reduced fact. It just boils down in knowingness to that. He knows a reduced fact. And when he picks up a datum, he always knows a reduced fact from his basic knowingness.

Now, let's be a little more factual about time and a little less far out. That's really what time is. And let's take these two ashtrays here: We put them here, and now we put them here, a little closer together. Mmm! We changed two particles in space, and we observed that they changed. See that? Now, you observed they changed and I observed they changed, simultaneously, because we agree that we observe the same things. All right. Here we have — we move them again. Now you agree that you observed them. Now, we'll move them again. And you agree again, that you observed them. And we move them again.

Now we agree that they're going to do this. [sound of ashtrays moving on table] Do you agree that you observe them doing this? Well, I observe them doing this. Now let's speed this up, which is to say, let's "not know" about how fast this is going. You got that? Let's all agree we don't know how fast this is going, but that we know how fast this is going. (audience laughter)

What we're doing is making and banishing pieces of space. See, we're banishing new pieces of space all the time. We have to make a piece of space and banish a piece of space, and make a piece of space and banish a piece of space. And if we keep making and banishing pieces of space, we naturally have a sensation that something has happened. And we know something has happened because we know things happen, and we've agreed on that, so we're all set.

Takes a long time for a fellow to work all this out and then forget about it and then play stupid about it, and it's kind of weird sitting here telling people this just as though they didn't know it. So if you feel somewhat confabulated, "confabulified" and conglomerated by all this, why, just blame it on yourself. I'm not responsible at all. Because you're the people that see cars go by — I never look at the darn things. All right.

So we have these particles in motion one after the other — particles in motion. Well, the only way a particle will be in motion is to make new space and say the old space doesn't exist. How do you do this? You're depending upon your ability to make things disappear. Make pieces of space disappear. This is fabulous. You're depending on your ability to make pieces of space disappear to have new things. And you can't have new things if you can't make pieces of space disappear. And the person who's having the most trouble with time and the most trouble with his case and the most trouble with exteriorization is the person who has the most trouble with making things — with things disappearing.

Everything is either going all the time automatically — everything's just vanishing — or, once he gets something, he just worries himself stiff. He's afraid to get something because he knows he can't make it disappear. And he's having trouble with time. He also has trouble with reality. See? He looks at a door, and he's liable to get the image of the door alongside of the door unless he's real careful not to look at the door. And his solution to this problem is "don't look." First, "don't create," and next, "don't look." And then he can go on knowing that all this time is going on, and isn't that happy.

Now, what's the first thing he did? The first thing he did was to agree that he wanted time, and then he agreed he didn't want it anymore because it was taking too much away from him — it was too big a barrier. So he tried to turn time back and recover your agreement on the fact that they existed again. But he depended upon your agreement to reassure him that they existed again, and so he knows he can't have them because you didn't agree they existed. You're all in a hectic agreement that this stuff's gone. "When it's gone, it's gone. It goes at this rate, see, fellow? I mean, it goes at this rate and it's gone, and it's really gone, you understand? And you can't have 1770 back again."

The hell you can't. You can create 1770. When you get hot enough, you could create 1770 a lot solider than you saw it in 1770. The only trouble is, it'll be your 1770, you won't be sharing it with anybody. So you're liable to put the Revolutionary War seventy-six years earlier or something. Because what you want again is a pattern of particles. You've said these things have disappeared. And your continuous postulate is, "It's disappeared." Only the postulate is being made automatically.

Now, you want to know why somebody makes something disappear before he creates it — is because he's already said he didn't create it. And then he said afterwards he didn't make it disappear either. First, he didn't — stopped creating it because he could always get it; and then it was scarce and he couldn't create it then, he had to steal it (he'd forgotten he could create it); now he's forgotten he's creating; now the next point on the line is to forget it disappears.

Now, all of this is terrific theory, isn't it? Very interesting theory, and it's something that you can bat your brains out over. The only trouble with it is it happens to work. It draws its curve right straight along with the DEI cycle, which we've long — known about for a long time. It draws a curve right along with the difficulty of case and exactly what cases are doing, when they are difficult to handle. And it also draws the same curve on what you do to make cases recover, and it presses us rather inevitably toward this theoretical conclusion.

This isn't something I dreamed up in order to edify you. I'm not beyond doing that, but I will tell you very, very bluntly that if anything under the sun has been pointing in toward an inevitable point of knowingness, it is this creation, persistence, and disappear curve with relationship to cases. The answer to it is that cases are solving on this. They are solving on it.

Now, we'll take the "wasting the machine." What is this waste? That's the "have" and "not-have." That's possession of particles, or no-possession of particles. You're saying, when you look at mest — mest is so valuable because it's not only just a particle in itself, it's something which everybody else is convinced is a particle too. You're not just convinced, everybody's convinced. It's a particle. So, it's a particle — wonderful! We got a particle. This particle is as valuable as everybody is convinced.

And things are as real to a person as he does not need agreement from others to be convinced of the existence of. That person to whom things, theo­retically, would be the most real, would be that person who neither resisted or desired or knew about or cared about any agreement as to what he had.

He says, "All right. I've got a pile of gold here. It weighs two tons, and — beautiful gold. There it is and I'm piling it up, and here it is." See? Now he can be perfectly happy with this pile of gold if he doesn't feel the need of agreeing. The second he feels the need of agreeing too desperately with others, he's going to say, "Say, Joe, do you think this is gold?" or anything.

You can trace back in your own lifetime when you have disbelieved something so that you could invite somebody else's opinion on it. When you have put aside a solution which you knew was a good solution in order to have a conference about it. It is the pleasure of mutual concourse in life that keeps taking away our reality from us.

Now, let's not say this is an error. Let's merely conclude that the pleasure of co-operation must be very great indeed to entirely supplant single operation. But the reason for that is, is because co-operation utterly assures the fellow that he hasn't made you so he could have a chess player. It assures him completely of interest and randomity. He hasn't got the least idea, he says, what your next opinion's going to be and he's so happy about it. All right.

Let's look at this time as a barrier. Do you know the difference between a bad case and a good case may very well be less than a fraction of a second? Less than a second — certainly a fraction of a second. Of what? Of particle control. We might be dealing here with as little as a third of a second between a Step I and a Step V. Time is a barrier. Well, it's obvious you can't have 1700 and 2080 unless you just sit down and create them — because it's what you're doing with present time anyway.

But what mechanism is keeping you in present time? It's the agreement that everybody's in present time. It's no accident that going out into the wilderness for fourteen days and simply sitting down, not talking to anybody, will either drive you mad or clear you. Because you shake out all the agreement — you key out. Do you see? No agreement. You're not asking anybody if the sun rises. The world starts looking entirely different when you do this. I did it when I was a kid. I was very, very fascinated — to the fantastic effect that it produced.

Now, here's the difference between cause and effect. All right, I haven't touched this ashtray yet and I say, "I am now going to move this ashtray." [sound of ashtray being moved] Now, was my statement before or after the shift of the ashtray?

Now, I'm going to say, "Gee, you know, that ashtray is about to fall over. I'd better [sound of ashtray being moved] move it." Was my decision before or after the ashtray?

Well, we'll go through this again. Is this effect, which is to say, after the fact? "I'm going to move the ashtray." All right, is this cause? The ashtray is liable to fall over — it is falling [sound of ashtray being moved] — I've moved it in time." Which is cause and which is effect?

Female voice: Cause is in the future.

That's right. Cause is in the future. Cause leads. And as long as a preclear is squirreled up about this — and a lot of them are — in fact, any preclear who's having any difficulty at all is. He thinks that because — "I will now move the ashtray" [sound of ashtray being moved] — he thinks he's being an effect because he said, "I will move the ashtray," before he moved the ashtray. And before moving the ashtray, of course, puts his action prior to the motion of the ashtray, which, of course, makes him look like he lagged behind the motion of the ashtray. He did no such thing.

The clear way to — happened here, is that in the future of the motion of the ashtray, he decided to move the ashtray. And in the past of his decision, the ashtray moved. Fac One had as its almost entire purpose the reversal of this concept: it turned the past into the future and the future into the past. All right.

So what's cause? Cause is your own decision, command or postulate of action. And as long as this precedes action, a person is self-determined. But as soon as one's postulate begins to succeed action, he is other-determined; because his postulate is being caused by other determinism than his.

He reaches out here spontaneously and he shifts the ashtray, then he looks at it and wonders why he shifted the ashtray and he says, "It's a good thing I moved the ashtray." That's automaticity. What's the prime key to all automaticity? Why is automaticity strange and peculiar? It's only strange and peculiar because it interferes with the barrier "time." Or it is the barrier "time." Time is the one single aberration, as far as that's concerned. You can, with ease, pass through any other kind of a barrier.

But by pulling on yourself the trick that we will all agree on the appearance and disappearance, with regularity, of space; and then we will depend upon some symbol which we put up which is spelled t-i-m-e to symbolize this appearance and disappearance of new particle positions; and when we will agree that these particles do not move except in this pattern (you know, of our agreement) according to certain laws; and when we all hook into the same regulator on the same subject and then depend utterly upon time; and then make all of our havingness this stuff which is so created — we, of course, can't have the past again. Nor can we have the future again. Nor can we have the future in advance.

So it becomes a horrible, hectic contest on the part of the individual, where he pantingly is keeping himself somewhere in the vicinity of these particles — present time. He's trying to coordinate with their motion consistently and continually, and that is the strain which he's undergoing.

Now, make no mistake. That is the strain which he is undergoing. We're not going out any further than this and say that is the strain because of this significance and that significance.

Worry. What's worry? Worry is being slightly back of causative instant. Not quite being in causative instant. And one tells himself all the time that he's worrying about something that's going to happen in the next eight or nine days. But the truth of the matter is even if he inspects this just a little bit, he will find that it's an instant thing — it's an immediate thing.

He expects — if you go in with an E-Meter you'll find out the preclear is momentarily expecting something to happen. What's he expecting to happen? He's expecting to coast back of this agreement just far enough to click out of it. Well, that's a real worry. So he's making a big effort to stay up with that thing which he is creating. That's — it's a grimmest joke of all that one is playing on oneself.

One is in good shape, exteriorizes easily and everything goes along swimmingly and nothing keys in — what a gorgeous time he has — because he's in advance of all his automaticity when he's in what we will call "causative instant." And causative instant is being just a split second ahead of the actual change of the particle because you're actually assisting their change. And what is being the "effect instant"? That's being always, with postulates, a split second after the shift.

What is the difference between an analytical process or an observational process — we ought to call it the observational mind — and the stimulus-response process? What's the difference, then, between these two minds? What's the difference between the thetan and the stimulus-response bank?

The stimulus-response bank is a fraction of an instant back of the shift of these particles called MEST. And the observational, analytical mind is in the causative instant just a fraction of a second before the change. And I mean it's a fraction of a second! This thing could be figured down to as small as a billionth of a second as the difference between being able to get out of your head and not being able to get out of your head.

Now, what are the processes which remedy this? Well, I'll frankly tell you I haven't invented them all yet. Because every time I think about this problem, and cave my brains in somewhat or another, in trying to figure out how to put it across, I always find a new one. And most of them are pretty faint, because the gain that you're working for is very slight.

But I've found this process rather uniformly effective — if carried out long enough on the preclear. And he finds himself fighting time so much, and so impatiently, that he'll drop back into stimulus-response several times. And on a preclear who's having a lot of difficulty, you as the auditor would be utterly flabbergasted how long you have to do this before he begins to know what he's doing without your telling him. It's fabulous getting this point across to a preclear who can't exteriorize.

What's the process? There's two processes — there's actually three, but I'll only tell you about two of them that are immediate on this. I can give you others and so forth, because this is one of those wide-open doors. I mean, we've got the basic fact, and it's just what gets dreamed up on that that's important. And that is, you simply seat your preclear in the midst of a bunch of mest objects — you know, dolls, toy cats, hats and so forth. And now you give him the steer, you know, the first time or two, and then you more or less deliver it into his own hands what he's doing. And you start it out this way: you say, "All right. Now you decide to move that hat to a new position. Okay, now you decide it."

And he does. And he says, "All right."

And you say, "Now do it." He moves it to a new position.

Well, of course, his automaticity is being junior to your automaticity throughout, anytime, so you've got to get this up to a point where he is doing the whole thing and you just leave him there doing it.

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

And what's our next step? We say, "All right. Now get the idea that you're going to move the ashtray to a new position.

"Okay." He gets the idea.

And you say, "Now do something else."

And his wheels will kind of go screeeee, skid, and he will do something else. But he will get wise to this, to be colloquial. After a little while he'll realize that he did something else on a "disgust" stimulus-response. So the desirability of existence, as it reduces, is what brings about stimulus-response. See? All right.

Now, the next step. You say, "All right" — there's some other things you can do in this same channel — we won't bother with them. The next step is, you say, "All right. Now decide to move that ashtray to a new position." (Or that hat or that dog — preferably some other object.) "Now do so." And he does so. You say, "All right. Now decide to move the ashtray to a new position. Now do so." He does.

You'll notice at about that time that he has started to go automatic as far as you're concerned. Because your preclear is as bad off as he is apt to go automatic on anything. So you tell him at this time, "Now you yourself decide to move this ashtray, or move some object there to a new position. You decide it, and decide when to do it."

"Okay." And then he'll sit there and he'll do it.

About that time he'll — he may start to protest — or a little bit later, he'll start to protest. He'll tell you this is silly, that it's not getting anyplace, that "you don't know why you're doing that," and he's liable to have all kinds and varieties of protest. Why? Because you're making him actually push up that fraction of a second and he feels like he's being speeded up beyond a point he can tolerate it.

Well, actually, that intolerance of pace will not take place. It's not upsetting. There's nothing to that. You just get him to push on through it. You say, "Decide to move something else." He seems reluctant to. You say, "Well, all right. Now decide to move that pencil. All right. Now move it to the new position. Now pick out the new position it's going to move into."

Oh, you see, he's — probably didn't do that before. He just knew he was going to move it. But you decided this new position he's going to move it into.

He does. Now you say, "Now decide to move the ashtray again to a new position." And he actually will this time select the new position. And you say, "All right. Now, having decided, get the idea that you suddenly have to move the ashtray over on your right." He will.

What you're working there with is interference and interruption of action. And what you're working with is basically automaticity and interference with the cycle of action, so that we can't finish cycles of action. And what we're working with, right straight along as we go, is trying to return into his mind the idea that he makes up his mind to do something and then does it. And that'll key out all of his machinery.

How many hours does it take? It's perfectly idiotic. It'll almost drive a man mad. You're only trying to move him ahead maybe a billionth of a second. He'll get the idea that he should think of all these things and do them instantaneously. This is upsetting to him that he doesn't do all these things instantaneously. He's just trying to make a postulate work. This is his own laziness showing up with him.

Now, instead of that, what we force him to do is to take it carefully, maddeningly, and make up his mind to do something and put it to a new position and then not do it; make up his mind to do something and change it to a new position and then have the idea that he's got to change it and move something else instead without moving that object; and merely make up his mind and change it to a new position and do it. And the last is the best.

You say, "All right. Now make up your mind you're going to move the pencil to a new position." He selects the new position. And you say, "Now, don't do it." Dzzzzzz!

This is not all the factors of existence at work in time. But this is directly handling that barrier called time and will overcome it. Putting a person in present time is probably moving him not more than a billionth of a second. Changing him from effect, which is why he can't get out of his head and is waiting for something to happen, to cause is probably no more than that. So I recommend to you for your use, on cases which don't exteriorize easily, this process.

Okay.