A lecture given on 3 December 1954

When we say thetan we’re talking about an emanation point. We’re talking about a person. He writes letters, he greets you in a silly fashion, he does this, he does that.

Let’s examine, for a change, the Cause end of this line. All too often one examines only the Effect end of the line, because that’s where interest gets centered. When we examine the Cause end of the line we discover something of tremendous interest about it: Cause, if it desires to get anything like an ARC effect at the Effect point, must take into consideration the fact that the Effect point is often quite incapable of mocking itself up as Cause.

Here is CAUSE - DISTANCE - EFFECT. Now, to get perfect duplication it is necessary that Effect mock itself up in some fashion or other in order to get in the duplication of this Cause - in order to receive the communication at all.

To give you an example of that: you’re an American in France. Now a Frenchman comes up and he says, “Blotheree zomberfiel, ello blfthblorerup.”

And you say, “Huh.” You weren’t an effect at all, really, not the kind of effect he intended. He wanted you to put your baggage on the van or something. And you sure get a kind of an only-one feeling when you wander around doing this a lot, and people come up to you who don’t speak English, don’t speak deaf and dumb, don’t speak Boy Scout Semaphore. But they throw a lot of verbalization in your face which is supposed to mean something, and you don’t comprehend it.

Furthermore, you are acutely aware of the fact that their customs are probably unfathomably strange.

For instance, in France, if you’re an American, your idea of plumbing and the French idea of plumbing are two entirely different things. Two entirely different things.

The whole problem of trying to walk into any civilization is actually the problem of being able to mock yourself up. You don’t willingly mock yourself up as a Frenchman. You don’t willingly mock yourself up as part and parcel of all these strange and outrageous customs. You could understand this quite easily on the Effect point, but how about the Cause point? The Cause point has, much more so than the Effect point, to mock itself up, because the Effect point mockup is being assisted by Cause, but the Cause point mockup is not being assisted, and it’s this fact - that it’s not being assisted - which causes people to think they need help.

They get used to being on the Effect side, and when they get over on the Cause side they say, “Where’s all the help?” So they invent an analyzer and a computer and a Reactive Bank and all kinds of things in order to be over here at Cause point, because the Cause point has to mock itself up just like the Effect point or subordinate Effect points which are not really capable of any great change, which are not capable of mocking themselves up, and will never be communicated to, unless Cause mocks itself up.

So in order to deliver an effect, Cause has to be able to mock himself up on a much higher self determinism than Effect because Effect is assisted in the mockup by Cause.

The ability to be at Cause point is necessary for good communication. You have to be able to be. In other words you have to be able to mock yourself up. If you, instantly, addressed by this Frenchman, were to mock yourself up as a French official, were you able to do this, you see, you would find suddenly that it was “all on the house”. Actually something would come out of an interchange of this character - you say suddenly, “What are you doing without your identification papers?” or something of the sort, and he would say, “Oui, Oui, merci, thank you very much, no checkee…uh…adios…” or whatever. You have to mock yourself up as something he recognizes as Cause, but what kind of a second sight would this take? What does this Effect recognize as Cause? You mock yourself up as what this Effect point normally recognizes as Cause, and that puts you on the Cause end of the line. It is therefore the Cause end of the line which you should examine, because that’s where, as an auditor, you’re trying to put thepreclear. You’re not really trying to put the preclear at the Effect end of the line. Now if you understand that thoroughly - you’re getting what is meant by the increase of self determinism. We mean we’re increasing this preclear’s ability to be at the Cause end of the line.

If the preclear came into the auditing room, and all he said was “Hehehehehe”, why, you would recognize that he is not quite at the Cause end of the line. In fact, he’s probably not at the Effect end either, he’s probably half way between the two points, being a communication particle.

An individual can drift away from Cause point, get on the line itself, and become a particle on the line. If you walked up to him on the street and wrote an address on his chest and put a stamp on his forehead and put him into a mail box he’d be perfectly happy about it. Such cases have become communication particles. They are a message. They don’t even have a message, they are one. The exhausted messenger throwing himself off his horse and dying at the king’s feet as he announces the defeat is being his message. There isn’t any reason why anybody should kill horses or messengers just to tell some king that he lost a couple of chunks of real estate, but they used to do it all the time. In other words these people could very easily be communication particles. Not cause or effect at all.

The decline is simply from able Cause to fixed Cause - and then they start riding out on the line. From an Effect which can receive, to an Effect which has to receive, to an Effect which won’t receive. Desire, enforce, inhibit. Eventually somebody would be found avoiding all causes, avoiding being Cause, avoiding anything else which was Cause. Whatever they’d do they’d finally get on the line as a particle or symbol. They go from Cause into the state of Symbol, they go from Effect into the state of No Symbol, but they get on the line, they slide around, and they get mass, meaning, mobility. Now there’s nothing totally bad about this. But let’s restore this preclear’s ability.

When you encounter a person who is incapable of addressing you physically or verbally in any acceptable way that makes an easy communication it is because he cannot change. He is fixed. If you, or the warden of a prison, or the soda jerk down at the corner drugstore, or the President of the United States walked in, he would be found in the same fixed state of address.

Well, if he can’t change he is expecting continually that he’s going to be the Effect. So we have a preclear sitting there and it’s: “Well, you go on and audit. I’ll be effect.” They sit there in “can’t change”, unwilling to be Cause. So it’s up to you to get the preclear to the point where he is at least conscious that he is moving something, that he is not being moved. That’s why you get him to go around touching walls and objects.

But the essence of this is contained in duplication. This person cannot duplicate blitherarerup, therefore he can’t talk with you, but that’s true of him and all life. He recognizes his inability to duplicate life and he recognizes that he can’t get on a two-way communication basis with it in such a way that it then is assisted in its receipt. Life will receive your messages, if it recognizes that you are a communication source. How does it do that? Well you have to be like it. You have to assist its duplication.

This does not mean that an auditor has to get down on the floor and grovel and duplicate all possible weird and bizarre things that a case could do, because actually all you’re duplicating there is the circuit (Circuit: a part of an individual’s bank that behaves as though it were someone or something separate from him and either dictates or takes over his actions. Circuits are the result of engramic commands.) but certainly an auditor could be called upon to duplicate any average motion. The person folds his hands, the auditor folds his hands. He sees then a physical gesture being duplicated.

The common denominator of this inability is the duplication factor. In all this communication difficulty, there is basically this inability to duplicate - so much so that reality could be called and rephrased and redefined as: the degree of duplication. Affinity is actually the distance and the particle size. Communication of course is Cause-Distance-Effect. And the degree of duplication is what makes reality. You are as real to those around you as they can receive you.

Did you ever get some kind of an inkling around your family that they weren’t receiving what you were talking about? Well, that’s because they fixed in their minds a long time ago the fact that they were duplicating you little. You were different in size. This all by itself would be sufficient to make the family incapable of receiving information from you. Grandpop’s a fairly successful manufacturer, and he’s seen this grandson who’s been running around while grandpop was in his middle years, and the kid goes off and studies sales promotion, with all the verve of youth and a good background and a good inheritance on this whole line and boy he could give Grandpop cards and spades on the subject of promotion. He moves into Grandpop’s sphere of activity and he’s on the job. He puts a suggestion memo on Grandpop’s desk. Do you think it ever gets read? Ha ha, that’s just from Jimmy. And Jimmy goes out and starts to work for another company, and it starts selling the whole field and wipes out Grandpop. “He didn’t know what he was talking about.” Grandpop has already conceived the idea, you see, that the smallness of Jimmy is not a duplication. And that being his primary idea connected with this individual, he then knows that all he can receive really from this individual is “Ga-ga-ga-ga”, “Gimme a lolly pop” and “Gimme a nickel”. Something on this order would be within his basic communication line with this child, so afterwards he could not then take the child’s communication line seriously. But the child changes, grows up. The main impatience that you ever had with parents or anybody like that around you is their fixed idea that you are small. Then you come around later and your parents are getting on in years and they’re ailing and you say, “Why don’t you” - and give them some sensible suggestion - you’re going to help them. And you find out that almost anything you suggest is unacceptable, because they know they can’t duplicate someone your size. They know, if they know anything, that you’re about a foot tall, or two feet tall - wherever they’re stuck on the track as far as you’re concerned. Mama very often gets stuck on the track at birth with the child, the first view of the child, and after that the child just doesn’t ever have a sensible solution to anything. But the child is actually better adapted to the modern environment than Mama is.

Thus an odd thing could happen, if an auditor were not fully aware of this duplication factor in the beingness of the preclear. He could be under the delusion that the preclear is improving - when the preclear is actually simply getting more like the auditor. Well, that is what the entire field of psycho-analysis is built upon: if we could just get the patient to be just like the analyst, why then we’d be all set. They apparently go through some magic rites, as I was taught - in order to accomplish what? - the patient’s shifting into the valence of the analyst. Well, the assumption by the preclear of a beingness other than his own - a valence - is not the goal of an auditor. The goal of an auditor is to return to the preclear more and more self-determinism. It is to make him capable of being at Cause point and at Effect point by his own self-determined choice.

How many dozen ways could you run Duplication? You could run it the basic way. Highly stylized, very pure technique and simply run it like that. That is the most effective of all processes we know on duplication.

If an auditor failed with this process it would be because he didn’t maintain two-way communication. He lets the preclear go on to an automatic endurance run without actually finding out what the preclear really feels, really experiences, what it’s all about, what the sensations are. This doesn’t mean that the auditor even vaguely varies his auditing commands. The auditing commands are always the same. They’re given in the exact order in which they’re given in R2-17: Opening Procedure by Duplication. But let the preclear talk to you! That is the difference. If you don’t get him at the Cause point of the communication line, you’ve failed. So we make the preclear talk.

How do we do this? We give the exact command. This is one thing an auditor must learn - to keep continually in two-way communication while you’re running any process without actually varying the process or coming an inch off the process, while you throw in on the communication line what is known as “dunnage”, the stuff you put around the cargo to keep it straight in a ship.

The preclear goes over woozily and picks up the book. You say, “Look at it.” You ask him to describe it.

He says, “Book?” Something’s wrong with this bloke’s communication! No, there’s nothing wrong at all. You see you’ve got to get those commands in there just exactly in the order in which they are given. You’ve got to get him to the book, to the bottle, to the book, to the bottle, to the book, to the bottle. Just exactly. And then if you failed to demand to be answered, by failing to insist that the action be knowingly accomplished, and by failing to listen when the preclear says something - you would lose. He’s picked up the book for the 565th time and all of a sudden the whole room goes purple, and he says, “My God!”

And you say “What is its weight?” Well, cut your throat - you’ve just cut the preclear’s! Then, when he says “Ooohhhh,” and you say “What happened?” it’s not going to do any good. You’ve missed it.

When you see something happen to him, find out what it is. If you see that he’s really going through it like an automaton, for heaven’s sake pick him out of it. He’s told you for the 55th time, “It’s cool.” I’m not above putting some two-way communication in there, getting him to say something. For fifty-five times, automatically, he was saying “Cool”, “Cool”, “Cool”. He wasn’t feeling it any more. He was still running the command you gave fifty-five times ago. Now if you don’t make him communicate, if you don’t make him describe, and if you don’t listen to him, it all goes on an automaticity. It just goes on, and on, and on…and I swear if he ran it on a total automaticity, you could run it for 250 hours with no change in the preclear except that he’d get tired legs.

Now the key to this thing is that each moment must be a new moment. Each action must be a new action. And gradually he peels apart these actions so they are different actions so that each moment is new, and that is the primary manifestation of Opening Procedure by Duplication. The newness of each moment.

So when he just gets repetitive, repetitive, you get suspicious. You say “What color is that book?” I’ve even gone so far as to say to a preclear who has been describing the object as “a book”, “a book”, etc., - “Will you please describe it as an object.” New frame of reference. “Well…it’s a…it’s…it’s a…rectangular …it’s a rectangular object…made out of paper…cloth…cloth on the outside. How about that! You know, books, they’re cloth on the outside.” He’s back into an interest in the process. I’ve seen this process run, by the way, with two typewriters!

That’s incorrect. They have to be two dissimilar objects. The preclear did get a lot stronger.

You could even get that on automatic. But the second these responses become monotonous you’ll know that your preclear has simply settled down to being an Effect. You’re trying to get your preclear to be Cause. So let’s make him originate communications to you concerning the object. That doesn’t mean that each new communication has got to be new and original, but it does have to tell you that he is experiencing that instant and not some other instant.

Opening Procedure by Duplication pulls apart all the moments of a time track. It pulls them apart because of the duplication. Unless each moment is a new moment you don’t have that occurrring. Book, bottle, book, bottle, book bottle, boooo - it’s a book! It’s not a word! Very difficult realizations come through to a preclear.

You’ve got to know that your preclear can talk, and he must talk, and he must describe what is happening to him. When something happens he’s expected to call it to your attention, you’re expected then to pay some attention to it.

That doesn’t mean you go off the process. But let him tell you about it.

A preclear will exteriorize on Opening Procedure by Duplication. And when he’s just about ready to exteriorize and wants to tell the auditor about the fact that he’s just about to do this - that is not the time to give the next auditing command or not be interested. The moment the auditor’s not interested there is no auditing going on. I’ve seen preclears who’ve just gone “dead in their heads” through not being permitted to communicate.

The auditor is not there to suppress communication on the part of the preclear.

Remember that an obsessive overflow is not a communication. You have to know that. But actual communication on the part of the preclear must not be suppressed by the auditor. So there’s the trick, and it shows up in Opening Procedure by Duplication because you do have to keep to the exact process commands. He does have to go repetitively through these exact motions. But you have to make sure that he’s experiencing these things. You do that by communicating and you’ll find Opening Procedure by Duplication working for you much more speedily than it ever has before. You are not looking out the window when a preclear has an enormous piece of news to impart. You don’t sit there looking out of the window, auditing on a sort of prank basis - “Go over to the book, now touch that wall,” or something of this sort, and without letting the preclear communicate, because the preclear gets a very sudden tone drop as a result of this. It’ll actually stick him in his head. It has turned off perception. It will do all kinds of things.

Letting the preclear talk, demanding the thing really be described, keeping it out of the automatic machine category, making each moment new and fresh in Opening Procedure by Duplication, and never varying its auditing commands - that’s how you win on this process. You can say other things than the auditing commands, but that doesn’t give you any license to vary the process.

You just make sure that a communication is going on.