This is March the 30th, 1954. I'd like to talk to you about some of the simpler techniques, some of the real simple ones. The first one of those we covered yesterday, which is Self Analysis, next-to-the-last list; and mock-ups, which is Self Analysis. Keynote of that, of course, is that you give a bunch of non sequitur mock-ups. Which is to say, something has to do with a railroad station and something that has to do with your hat and something that has to do with your cousin Amy. And this in itself, by injecting differentiated thoughts, widely differentiated thoughts, breaks up the identification which is taking place in somebody's mind and is causing them to think obsessively.

Now, let's get the difference between identification and differentiation. Now, we can get the differences in any of these things according to postulates. You mustn't at any time ever believe that a thetan cannot postulate more things and think of more things than exist in this or any other universe.

You understand, he could postulate more and state that more exists than the limitations, let us say, of m-e-s-t. Then apparently, you see, he gets so mired down in m-e-s-t, that he thinks that matter, energy, space and time are themselves the causative agent of his thinkingness. Actually, he can think of far more things than matter, energy, space and time would ever occasion him to think of.

Let's get the reverse picture on this now and see science here - science deeply immersed in the study of the physical universe. And with that immersion it then relates all thinkingness to matter, energy, space and time, and thinks that all thinkingness would, of necessity then, exist only below the meaningfulness of matter, energy, space and time. This is not true. The matter, energy, space and time exist well below, tremendously low below, the ability of a thetan to think. You see, he can get thoughts, postulates, figure things out way, way senior to matter, energy, space and time.

But because matter, energy, space and time do have a certain set of laws and because they can be agreed with and because they evaluate for one and so forth, why, one then conceives, you see, that these things - when a person gets to be bad off - he conceives that these things, are necessity, junior… I mean, thinkingness is junior to matter, energy, space and time. He just says, "Well, the only reason I'm thinking anything is because matter does this and matter does that."

So let me warn you right here at the outset that anytime you pick up a universe and say this universe is the cause of a thetan's ability to think, you are imposing shackles and chains to such an extent that the individual involved will not get well.

Now, I myself, because I border lined along on physics… You see, a study of physics is rather conducive to falling in line with the opinion of physicists on the subject of the mind. Physicists do not respect the mind. They think of the mind as some very junior output of energy and so on. It's kind of a gimcrack machine that got built and has lots of errors in it. That's the popular, you might say, opinion in terms of the physicist.

Well, he gets into that state because he can extrapolate; he can figure out, from all the laws and rules of physics, human behavior. Naturally, he can figure it out. But if he figured just a little bit further he would find out there was more behavior than that explained by matter, energy, space and time.

Let's take Newton's laws of interaction: Every action has an equal and contrary reaction. All right, that's interaction. Now, if you hit this object here, it hits back to the extent that you hit the object at the moment of impact. You see that? Every force has an opposite force. If you hit the earth, the earth hits you, see that? That's interaction.

Now, let's take acceleration. That if you keep on pushing on something it'll keep going faster. Everybody dramatizes this in terms of police-force action. They think if they just push a little bit harder and shove a little bit faster then everything will go just a lot faster.

Life however, all of a sudden, doesn't react to that one. It exceeds that after a very short space of time. It says, "We're being pushed too hard," and it turns around and stands dead still, you know? And says, "Go ahead and push a little bit harder."

Well, you could say, "Well, that's really interaction taking place - shift over there." It isn't.

Now, we have lots of words, like inertia. There's the laws of inertia. The tendency of an object to persist in a state of motion or persist in a state of immobility, despite exterior forces, and something that continues to persist in a state of motion until acted upon by an exterior force, so forth. Theoretically then, an individual would keep right on doing everything he was doing until he was acted upon by an exterior force.

You would, for instance - if you sat down to shell some corn - you would go on shelling corn until somebody came along and gave you a push which stopped you from shelling corn. You see that? I mean, that would be inertia applied to the human mind.

And yet, even (quote) "pastoral psychology" has today fallen into the entire error of figuring everything out this way. They look at the mechanical laws of stimulus-response and they say, "Well, now look, that's how human beings act."

This is not justified. It's not justified. Human beings don't act that way - unless they're so mired down in the material universe that they are completely obeying the laws of the material universe, which of course, then makes them obey the laws of matter, energy, space and time, so stimulus-response behavior is the only result.

So a person who is very bad off - now, we'll, just tie this right in with book one - a person who is very, very bad off; then, can be expected to follow the laws of the physical universe in terms of his own behavior. He will keep on doing something until stopped by an exterior force. He will keep on moving faster and faster unless acted upon by an exterior force. Every time something pushes him he will immediately shove back, see that?

And what have we got there? We've got Newton's three laws of motion in terms of human behavior and we have described the reactive mind. Well then, the reactive mind would apparently be then that portion of thinkingness which was so thoroughly entrapped in the physical universe, and so thoroughly agreed with the physical universe, that it behaved only as the physical universe behaved. See that?

Now, here we have a distinct problem. It says that that person who has thoroughly agreed with the physical universe begins to follow the laws of the physical universe. And this results in this stimulus-response type of thinking which is a matter of engram restimulation and you know, some stimulus acts upon something and that gives a response which gives another stimulus which gives another response which gives another stimulus. He starts to go through life that way. There isn't an independent thought along the track. He doesn't, of his own volition, start doing something else without cause, without reason.

See, he couldn't suddenly say, "Well, I'm tired of shelling corn." He wasn't tired at all, he just says, "I'm tired of shelling corn. I'm going to sit here and do nothing for a while." Nothing happened. He wasn't tired. He had been shelling corn for a few minutes, now he's going to sit there.

Now, the physical universe would ask this of him. That in order to get tired of shelling corn, an energy of exhaustion or an exhaustion of energy, should have entered in so as to impede his forward progress in the shelling of corn. And at that moment he would then have the reason required to stop shelling corn and rest.

Now, stimulus-response reaction - stimulus-response action, activity, thinkingness - is of course not self-determined; it's other-determined. The C's of the communication lines are always elsewhere. Let's just look at somebody operating in life on a stimulus-response basis entirely and we'll find that the C's are all over the environment and that none of them are where he is.

The physical universe, then, demands that if it's agreed with, that C be everywhere else but not with the person. A person is not to be cause. Agreement, total agreement, in terms of energy, behavior, thought, thinkingness and everything else with Newton's three laws of motions would bring about a condition whereby an individual was inhibited from being cause at any time. He could never be cause; he would always be effect.

And so, to supplement this and supplant it and get rid of the liability involved, they say, "Well, there must be a cause someplace," so they invent a God. And they say the God must therefore stand out there and be cause all the time because it's so obvious that we can never be cause because we just run on Newton's three laws of motions without even knowing about Newton.

I don't know, you see, that Newton didn't invent these three laws of motion and then and thereafter, gravity and other things started to act upon the human race. Gravity isn't one of them; he also invented gravity. And we notice right afterwards there was a tremendous incidence in insanity - a rise.

Now, we could go ahead and be very foolish this way and say all these things simply result from postulates. So somebody like Newton comes along and invents gravity, so people then and thereafter stick to earth.

But you know that's not very far from the truth. A bunch of thetans had to be fooling around and trying to figure out how to stay in concourse with each other. They had to invent present time. Well, they had to, otherwise they couldn't communicate with each other, you see? But they didn't have to invent present time because there wasn't any time going on. So they were always in communication with each other and maybe this got to be boring so they invented time, which meant spaces disappear and new spaces appear. Particles go this way and particles go that way, so now we've got time, so we don't have to be bored with somebody talking to us all the time, because we can be in this kind of time.

Actually there are universes in which time is so lightly held and so poorly agreed upon that an individual is liable to run into some situation where the fellow finds himself in a house and he says it burned down yesterday. And of course, there is no house around him the moment he makes this postulate. You see, it burned down yesterday so therefore it's not there, so therefore he's not in it.

Well, you could get just this foolish about time, but there's greater truth in that than there is that time, that the progress of forces and so forth, is orderly and is coordinated simply because it is senior to life. It is not senior to life; it is junior to life.

Now, nearly everything that you can see, smell, experience in terms of coordinated or cooperative behavior and so forth, is junior to self-determined behavior. As an individual agrees more and more, his flexibility of action gets less and less.

So if we go out here. .. Well, let's go out here and play a game of baseball. We play according to the standard rules of baseball. Then we say, "Well, let's put another arbitrary in here. Let's agree that the batter there should have a much bigger bat”. We have immediately altered the game of baseball and made it much harder for the team that is pitching, to win. But recognizing this, we say, "Well, let's remedy that. Let's have it that although the batter can have a much larger bat, he also must be blindfolded."

Well, that's fine. That's a little change in the rules of baseball. And now, we'll change it further. We will say that the team which is pitching should have extra men on it. Instead of nine men, when the team goes… one of the teams goes to bat, why, the other team immediately has eighteen men, the team that goes to bat only has nine men. And therefore we will put on extra first basemen and extra fielders and extra short stops and so forth. Well, you find out the game slows down a little bit so you decide that you'll have a much lighter, bouncier ball that can be hit further. you see where you're going?

Next thing you know that game is going to be dead still and stopped. Sure, we have this lighter, bouncier ball, so now we increase the team that is pitching even further. Make it impossible for the ball to drop anyplace on the field without being caught. And so then we'd have to turn around then and try to make it possible for the ball to be hit harder or hit further or something. And then we'd have to add more people to field. And we're just working down into further complexity. And we're actually working toward a field completely packed with men. And everything sheltered in such a way that really the ball can't be hit at all. We'd finally have to outlaw any pitching. You see that what we'd do is work down toward motionlessness.

Any time we take a set of rules and add in more arbitraries and more arbitraries and more arbitraries we eventually get to a halt.

Now, let's say a bunch of thetans got together and says, "Well, now let's have some time here. Let's have particles acting in one direction or another." And some other thetans came along and said, "Well, that's all right, we'll subscribe to this, but there ought to be a little more complexity here." They added some more and then they added some more and then they said finally that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. That's an arbitrary, Okay. All right, that's all right.

Now, let's have the fact that energy is more dense when it's condensed. You might as well say, you know, energy becomes… disappears when you condense it. You might as well have said that. But they didn't; they said it becomes more dense.

They would eventually have done what? They would eventually have gotten down to postulating all of these laws of motion, and agreeing upon them thoroughly. All the laws of space, motion, energy, atoms, molecules, fission, objects - they would have eventually evolved all these things, all the time getting down closer to stop. They're making the game more and more complicated by agreeing harder and harder upon these rules.

Now, the break-point of it would be somewhere along the line they would have conceived that the game was greater than themselves. That's the only fatal postulate that anybody can make: "The game is greater than I."

And yet we see writers, we see all sorts of people trying to put this over all the time. "You only really live when you have sacrificed all." You know. And… oh, it's … it's terrific. They give medals to guys and so forth because they have considered the game greater than they were. Actually these wars they fight out there, these … During the last few lifetimes I got to know pretty well about war. It's an interesting game. But they become obsessed. That's the only thing wrong with war. The… Mainly the thing wrong with war is that everybody… it's very certain that they should hurry up and wait. It isn't the fighting that's really wrong about war, it's standing around doing nothing. It's the motionlessness of war. Well, how did the motionlessness get there? It got there because the war was always greater than the soldier.

And armies dramatize this in peace time. They're just a buck private; they're just a sailor; "You're only an officer," "You're subject to orders," "You must whaf-whra-rhaa-frr-hrra." And if you ever ran into a bunch of people that were having a hard time with their minds, it's people in the military. They have a real hard time with their heads. They do assume thoroughly that their minds are in their heads.

Well, with everybody assuming the subject of everybody above me is superior and everybody below me is a junior and the game is greater than all of us, an inanimate thing over there called the book of regulations, that's much greater than anyone of us; you of course go into a dwindling spiral on the subject of sanity. And when this is pushed home a little bit too hard you get a ship about the… Oh, I don't know, let's take a ship like I was on during the last part of the war. I wasn't skippering her. They were getting out of a crew of about 550 men, they were getting two psychos a week. Two guys were going crazy every week, out of 550 men.

The fellow who was in command of that ship - chosen in the hurry-scurry of files and so forth - he shouldn't have been permitted to run a pig, much less a ship. And he for instance, caused a mutiny; he did various things. Wonderful that his whole philosophy was the enlisted man is no good, is just a dog who ought to be stepped on and so on and that the ship and so forth was much more important than any life aboard her - this sort of thing - that this philosophy went along with two psychotics a week, but it did.

Now, anytime then the game is greater than the individual, why, you can expect trouble. You can expect that the motion will practically stop. If you invent a game where the game is much greater than the guy, you'll find the game slowing down, slowing down, slowing down and eventually becoming about as mobile as a rock.

Well, what's this course? What's this dwindling spiral? It is just that we agree upon these rules and then we introduce more arbitraries to limit us further and we restrict and restrict and restrict and restrict. And the end product of all restriction is stop.

Now, that is the history of any game. And the MEST universe is a game consisting of barriers. This game is peculiarly a game which specializes almost entirely… or does - pardon me; "almost" - it specializes in barriers. It is a game of barriers. Let's get that in two parts now.

(1) It is a game. It is not senior to any individual. It is junior to any one of us. That's (1).

And (2) Consisting of barriers. And we find out that the barriers are these: They are the barriers of space. Distance itself is a barrier. If you're here and the nearest glass of beer is New York, you're certainly not going to have a glass of beer. You see that? Across the barrier of distance.

Now, let's take just a plain barrier, that we conceive to be the barrier that the word means more specifically; that's a wall or an object. And you see of course those exist around in profusion - lots of walls, lots of objects which keep you from moving a piece of energy through them. They don't keep you from moving through them, you just get so you think that. But they keep energy from moving through them. And then there's actual barriers of energy, live energy.

Let's take a single strand fence going around a very large property. Well, that single strand isn't barbed, anything that ran up against it very hard would certainly break the strand. But that single strand has in it about a thousand volts of electricity. That is an energy barrier. Now… So there can be a barrier of energy too.

Now, what other kinds of barriers are there? There's one more kind, the most important kind of barrier. Time. That's right, time. The great barrier. You've got just about as much chance of getting back to 1760 as you have getting to 2008 in the next couple of seconds. Simply because time itself is an arbitrary of motion. You have two particles moving in coordination with each other: every time they move they form a new space.

The definition of space is a viewpoint of dimension. And if you change the dimensions you would have new space. Because the only reason the space is there is because the dimension is there, the points are there. So if you change the points they would obviously be new points. If you moved any point a quarter of an inch, it could be considered to be a new point. Why? Because it's in a new position. And that's the definition of the point anyway. It is simply a viewpoint of dimension, and it's something that just demarks a dimension. I don't care where the particle is - a cigarette butt, a mote of dust - each and every one of them are demarking some limitation of some space somewhere. If you consider it in this fashion, time itself becomes very comprehensible because it's merely the co-motion of particles, the co-action of particles, uniform rate of action of particles. Well, if we say the uniform rate of action of particles, we would say the uniform formation of new spaces or the consecutive formation of new spaces.

Let's take a photon traveling here from the sun. It is traveling into a lot of new positions. So every photon coming from the sun is describing new spaces. Maybe there isn't a single photon which arrives here from the sun, as a matter of fact there isn't. There would be no one photon which left the sun and arrived here. But there would be an impulse which gave us a sequence of positions which, when you've described them or graphed them, could look like one photon arriving here.

You could say, you know, that this is a problem in physics or quantum mechanics or some vast thing like that. No, this is a problem in agreements. That's all it's a problem in.

If you and I got together in making a universe and we agreed that new spaces would immediately become fixed and appear five feet to the right of the old space, yeah, we could have a universe where it did just that.

Well, what kind of time would this make? Horrors. Lord knows what would occur. But let's say that we had just one space - now, let's get more. more sensible about this - let's say we just had one space - no particles; we just had one space. Now, we're going to go on a different postulate about particles. We're going to say, "Particles are fixed and invariable and do not necessarily describe spaces. But these particles can be created and we can - any one of us can create a particle and we've got this one space here."

All right, we'd start creating things and we'd create more things and more things and more things and the first thing you know that one space that we had, which going… it would be so full of junk that we would be so sick of looking at - you know, we've just got that - we would have gotten the game to a stop, wouldn't we have? It would be the game of creating masses or forms. One space and the game of creating masses or forms would get to a stop when that space was full.

So we'd have to enter in first, destruction. We'd have to be able to destroy forms. We'd keep this one space and we would destroy all these forms. We would make a form and then we'd make it against the law to create a new form unless you destroyed your old form. We'd make that a law. You'd have to destroy an old form before you could create a new form.

Then you would get this curve of "a form will persist or survive after it's been created until it is destroyed." We would get the curve of create, survive, destroy. That is the curve of this universe.

Now, either way we would wind up here with an undesirable situation. We have a terrific limitation in this one space.

Let's say we filled this one space up. What might be our… another choice? We could say after this is all filled up it will then disappear and everything in it will disappear and a new space - clean, open and with nothing in it - will appear. We could just say that, see. This space … we've got this space, we fill it all up, as soon as it's chock-a-block, completely full, it will disappear and a new space, clean and so forth will appear. And we've agreed upon that. And we'll get into a habit of saying the new spaces will appear every time they are, to our satisfaction, full. But we'll get into the habit of having a new space appear every so often, so that we don't have to get into an argument about how full it is. Well, then… you see, the space didn't… full of stuff didn't go anyplace, it didn't have to. One merely said, "It's gone," and it's gone.

You'll find a lot of people messed up on time, you'll say, "Now, where's yesterday?"

And they'll say, "It's over here on the right," or something.

I mean there's remarkable things. Time is directional. It's not directional. And you straighten him out on time; when the… You say, "Put it in yesterday." You know?

And fellow says, "Okay." You say, "Where did you put it?" And he'll say, "Why, I put it over here on the right," or "I put it just below me." The way you get the reaction is to say, "Now, can you still see it?" And the fellow says, "Yes." "I told you to put it in yesterday." "Well, I did." "And yet you can still see it, huh? Oh? Well, are you looking at the breakfast you ate yesterday?" "Well, no." "Well, where did it go?" "Well, it's just gone." "Well, all right. Let's just have that thing you're putting in yesterday, gone."

And that is the essence of time. It's the… What's here that you put in yesterday is simply gone. Not gone anyplace, you see. It's just gone. Gone by what necromancy? The necromancy of agreeing it's gone. That's all there is to that. It's one of these idiotic problems. I mean, you could have philosophers and sages sitting around for ages writing pages and pages without ever recognizing the idiocy of this thing. You know, if a fellow says it's there, it's there, and if a fellow says it's gone, it's gone.

Well now, an individual then can handle and create time actually. Handle it, make it disappear and so forth, as long as he's capable of making a free postulate. If he's incapable of making a free postulate, he of course cannot handle time. You'll find out that there's a direct index to the ability of an individual to handle, experience and use time, and his ability to make a postulate. Individual can make a free postulate which is not modified in any way, then he has no trouble with time.

An individual who's gotten down to a stimulus-response basis whereby everything is handling him, he is not able any longer to make a free postulate - you'll find out the main barrier he's suffering from is time.

Time, time, time. He'll talk all the time about time. He'll spend all of his time telling you that he doesn't have any time. At 1.5 on the Tone Scale this is terrifically manifest. This is just routine. A person will sit still with folded arms doing nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. And you say, "Why don't you… why don't you do something?”

And they'll say, "Oh, I haven't got the time." Well, they're sitting there doing nothing, but "I haven't got time."

Another one just a little bit higher than that on the Tone Scale, they haven't got time to start anything. You know, they haven't got time to do it so they can't start it, don't dare start it. Down low on the Tone Scale they know it's always too late. Now, you get somebody at grief and that is his common statement. Anything you ask him will be found in regard to time - it will be found to be too late. If a person were totally in grief and you pointed to a clock his first reaction on observing the clock would be it's much too late. Too late for what? He wouldn't know. It's just too late.

He also would have the rather interesting behavior of not going to dinner. The dinner is at 7:00, it's now 6:30. He would not go to dinner. Why? Because he can't go to dinner because he doesn't have… It's too late. At 6:00 o'clock even, a dinner at 7:00 would already have been eaten.

This is… sounds a little scrambled to you, but that's what's wrong - it's scrambled. The individual can't make a free postulate. And believe me, the rules and regulations of the physical universe are not adequate to provide enough for the thetan to do. They are just not adequate. They are not even vaguely adequate.

They inhibit motion to a tremendous degree. They force him into various types of agreements without any consent and it's just gone on too long and it's gotten too thick and heavy, you might say. Just too many things have entered into the game. So, it… you could put… For your own purposes in criticizing a society or something, you could put a little question mark after the game part of the… MEST universe is a game consisting of barriers - you put a little question mark there, and say, "It once was a game consisting of barriers." It's now an ardour consisting of barriers.

Now, the whole universe, theoretically being made out of agreements, could disappear on the breaking of the agreements. And this would be true if there was only one universe involved. But the MEST universe is protected by the fact that every thetan in it is in at least a million universes.

He's in lots of universes; he's not just in the physical universe. In the first place, he's in his own universe. He had his own universe before he collided with the physical universe. He made his own universe approximate the physical universe and then his own universe became smaller and junior, and so he… there's two universes. His own universe approximated the physical universe and is now a map of the physical universe - very small map, too. It shows every impact he ever had in the physical universe. You could call this a sort of an electronic gel usually found to surround the individual. In an occluded case, it's totally black and pulled way in and subject to some of the darnedest manifestations. But if that were just those two universes, that would be very simple too. We could simply say poof and the MEST universe would disappear.

Well, it isn't that simple, in terms of universes. There's another universe. The thetan is in his own universe which has gotten into the physical universe which is junior to - it's now… his own universe junior to the physical universe. And he is in a body which has a separate and independent universe but he's interlocked with the body's universe. So he's got these two universes interlocked with the body's universe. Well, this wouldn't be too hard to take apart. But this body and he and this system of universes - they have been in collusion with and collision with an awful lot of universes on the track. This body has had other thetans running it in earlier lives. A different… this GE, you see, when he was a different body, had another thetan running it and this thetan had a universe which influenced the physical universe and the body, too. So we… this is. this body is a mass of interconnected, interlocked universes.

All right. And the thetan has been in connection with many bodies, so therefore in the terms of lives, he of course, has this all knotted up. Well, that means that he's been in connection with a lot of bodies, which bodies were in this kind of a state. So his universe has been influenced by each universe of a body he's been connected with. Every body he's been connected with had its own universe and he's still packing some sort of an imprint of all these universes.

Now, let's just get into the current lifetime. And we find out that the body, if it's convinced of anything, is liable to be convinced of the fact that it's in Mama's universe. Actually it existed in Mama's body, it was regulated and changed around by Mama, and Mama certainly had a lot to do with the formation of this body.

So of course, then, we have Mama… Mama's universe - physically, the body was inside Mama, so therefore this fact that it's inside Mama's universe is too easy to assume. So we get the body being totally dependent upon Mama. Mama is changing it around in space all the time and the body is certainly, at least slightly, living in Mama's universe.

So therefore our preclear… our preclear would have - the most perfect state you'd find him in; you'd find this boy in just fabulous condition. This would be the interlock of universes. (1) He'd be in his own universe, which was in the physical universe, which had gotten smaller than the physical universe which was intermingled with his body's universe which was crossed over in Mama's universe. That's the least pattern that you would discover.

Now, you're trying to bail this boy out, which is to say you're trying to get him up to a point where he can make freedom of postulates. Well, there's a law governing universes that seems to be a basic agreement and that is… And this law, by the way, you wouldn't like to do without. If you're in your own universe then your postulate should stick in your universe, shouldn't it? I mean, when you make a postulate in your universe that would be the postulate that goes. Now, let's suppose there's somebody else in your universe visiting or something, and his name is Henry and he makes a postulate. His postulate wouldn't go would it? It'd have to be your postulate that went in your universe. That right? Otherwise it wouldn't be your universe. So by definition, if you're going to have a universe of your own, your postulate will have to go in it, over and senior to anybody else.

So any universe is subject chiefly to the postulates of the god of that universe. And this is practically a law. Any universe is subject chiefly to the postulates of the god of that universe. That's why we get this in the physical universe. How easy. Everybody says, "Well, there's a God and this God has made certain postulates and we're subject to his postulates. We live by them every day." By the way, every time that we engage in any activity, we're engaging in some morality which is ostensibly laid down by the God of the physical universe.

Well, if you're in Mama's universe, you're subject to the god of that universe's postulates and that's Mama's postulates. In other words, that universe which you are in is subject to Mama's postulates.

Now, you're going to unmake all the postulates that are in a preclear's bank? Think of that for a moment. He's in another universe. And if we could just say, "All we have to do now is change our postulates and all be Clear," you see, that would be the simplest thing in the world, unless this other law existed. If this other law existed, why, we wouldn't be able to do that and we can't do that. We know by experience that we can't say to a preclear, "All right. Just make up your mind to be Clear. All right. Now you're Clear. Next."

So what is the bug that stands in the line? Postulates are the most senior thing there are. No set of agreements are senior to postulates. Individual postulates are always senior to any pattern of agreements. Any mechanical pattern is always junior. So therefore, we say all you'd have to do is just get somebody to change his mind and he'd be all right.

And you get in there and you slug and you run this and you run that, trying to get somebody to change his mind, change his mind, change his mind. The poor guy can't change his mind because he's living under the reign of postulates of the other god. In other words, if he's in somebody's universe… He understands this, he's agreed to this; this too is an agreement, you see? He's agreed that the god of a universe is the one who makes the postulates for that universe and he's living, let us say, in Mama's universe or Papa's universe or his wife's universe or his - even this - his dog's universe, and those universes are subject to the postulates of the gods of those universes.

And you're not trying to change the preclear's postulates. You're trying to change the postulate of a dog who departed this life forty years ago. You're trying to change the postulates of Mama, who actually isn't even vaguely sitting in that auditing chair. She's clear over by Keokuk someplace - maybe dead and gone. Who knows?

More serious than that, you're trying to change the postulates of gods of universes who have long since evaporated into dust and the preclear doesn't even remember who they are.

And this interlock of postulates itself is how postulates get so thoroughly agreed upon. Nobody can pick his postulate out of the mess. Not being able to, of course, he becomes junior to any agreed upon postulate. Somebody, if he is in terribly bad shape, somebody can come along and say, "Well, the city council has just agreed that all men have to shave their heads." He could be in bad shape. If he believed this, he'd have to go home and shave his head.

All right. Then it becomes a problem of taking universes apart in order to take postulates apart. Be two theoretical channels. If an individual owned everything - here's where ownership cuts in, you see - if an individual owned everything, why, it would be the simplest thing in the world. He'd just suddenly say, "Well, I own everything and therefore they're all my postulates. I'm Clear."

There's that theoretical channel. Processes which lead him up toward the conviction of ownership of all and which desensitise his feelings about "It's his, it's mine," and so forth. Well, that course is open and the other course - there are two other courses - another course that is open on the thing, of course, is again just sorting out postulates until he becomes no longer afraid of them or resisting them or mixed up with them in such a way that he can make an independent postulate.

You know, just drills, but which would lead him eventually to making independent postulates. You can do these. That's a long course but it'll work. You can just drill him into making independent postulates and postulating things on and on and on and on and on until he will discover that he can be cause regardless of where he is or what he is. And at that moment he escapes into some freedom.

All right. The last one would be taking the universes apart. Now, this is not a fast process, but it's an intensely workable process. Let's just take these universes apart. Well, we're going to take something apart; what's holding them together? Well, you say agreements. And agreements were originally born out of postulates.

All right. Fine. Is there anything mechanical about it that's agreed upon? Yes. Let's take two globes identically the same size - that is, two spheres that contain space and so forth - and let's take these two spheres and let's call one of them A and one of them B. And we'll take sphere A and set it up on a table, and sphere B and set it up alongside of it. And we'll find out that these two globes do not influence each other until struck together. They each are based upon the postulate that something exists, that something being space. Then there must be an additional postulate that the somethingnesses have collided. So we have A and B not influencing each other until they're banged together.

Now, the point where they are banged together is liable to bear a scar. And where B hit A we have a point which is an impression from A. And when A hit B we retain then a point on A which tells us that B's been there.

All right. All right. Let's smash them together in such a way that they coincide with each other. And let's hit them lots of times. Do you know - this is a fact: you could take a hammer and beat those two globes so thoroughly that you would not any longer be able to distinguish which was A and which was B.

And this is done by impacts. And if you're going to go into the mechanics of universes at all, it had better be either on the basis of where they can't be destroyed or the basis of where they can be. And you're dealing in any case with the mechanism which interlocks universes. Identical points in the two universes, when struck, bring about the illusion that those two points are the same point. So we have a certain point in universe A, which when struck in coincidence with universe B, those two points struck, that make it indistinguishable whether A or B were struck. Which was struck? A or B? They were both struck. Well, which is A? And which is B? They become indistinguishable. There's two universes enmeshed.

Well, this could be a very weighty subject, couldn't it? I'll tell you a little story. A dog got hit by a car. He passed that point many times afterwards. But the first day he passed that point where he'd been hit by a car, he went at least a hundred yards out of his way to avoid the space. The car was no longer there. The person who was driving the car was no longer there. But that point in space was there. And that dog avoided the point in space and went straight up to the top of the hill where the car was that had hit him - still had some of his fur on the front bumper - and paid no attention to it. And the person who was driving the car and had hit him had come out immediately afterwards, spoke to the dog, and the dog paid no attention. Didn't worry him a bit. But thereafter, every time the dog passed that spot on the road, the dog avoided that spot.

How would you possibly unoccupy a universe? It's easy to occupy one. But how would you unoccupy one without your consent? It would be by the process of avoiding every spot in it, wouldn't it? If you totally, against your will, unoccupied a universe, got out of one, it would be by the process of avoiding every single spot, one after the other, until there was no spot left in it, because all the spots in it had to be avoided. Do you see that? Now, that is other-determined disoccupancy of the universe. See that?

What do you think happened when your universe was in collision with the physical universe? Let's say you could approximate your universe and the physical universe perfectly - same size. And then there were blows. You ran this into that. Planets ran into this and that and you stumbled over rocks. Each time anything like this occurred, any time one of those impacts occurred, you had a spot there to be avoided.

This is experience. This is knowing how to learn. This is learning. You move off of spots. You know what to avoid. You get things that mustn't happen again, and so forth. You'd gradually, if you had a billion, billion, billion of these spots to the billionth power, you'd practically get the whole darn physical universe filled with spots which mustn't be occupied anymore. And your effort to move through the universe would be very impeded. And you would pull your universe down to a very small size so as to protect it. But you couldn't touch it either, could you, because it was all full of spots that mustn't be touched again.

Sad and dreary picture isn't it? Horrible picture, as a matter of fact. It would bring about the almost total withdrawal of you from the physical universe while still remaining in it and with no place to go.

And when you get a case that's bad off, you ask him to get out of his head or do something and now flinch. He's liable to look at you very puzzledly and say, "But I haven't got any place to flinch to." Now, when that occurs, why, you simply have the fellow who has just run out of spots to go to that are safe. Safe spots don't exist anymore.

The unalterable points in the universes are not the objects in the universes but the spots where something happened. And if you go on the basis that it's just one space - which it isn't - but if you go on the basis that it's just one space then you have an unalterable arbitrary. You have spots you must avoid.

Now, let's see if this holds true in life. Yes, it does. You find out that an individual who's had bad luck in a town tends not to go back to that town. An individual who has had an accident is liable not to go back to the scene of the accident or is liable obsessively to go back to the scene of the accident.

There we get the other factor. When you get two objects colliding… If you've gotten to this point, you see, you're in agreement with Newton's three laws of motion. For every action there's an equal and contrary reaction. So that a fellow gets so that he wants because he's been hit by it. He wants it because he's been hit by it.

Theoretically you could punish a body into a tremendous amount of desire. You could make a body… by pounding a body with a club, you could make the body crave the club. By taking a slave and beating him with chains for a long time you could give him an insatiable craving for chains - as long as you beat him just the right length of time so that you weren't going over the point of where he was kicking back. You see, first he's rejecting the chain and then he wants the chain and then he rejects it and then he wants it and he doesn't want it, then he does want it, he doesn't want it and doesn't… Why? It's just a matter of collisions, that's all.

So a fellow could have the terrible feeling that he wanted all of this space, you see, and he wanted to be on these spots. Well, this would stick him, it would stick him all over these spots. "I want these spots." He wants them because they've hit him. No other sensibility to it than that.

And yet, sensibly, he knows that because he's been hit there, he'd better not be on these spots, so he doesn't want anything to do with them. So he's trying to get rid of them and trying to have them at the same time. In other words, he gets confused.

Totally a matter of consideration whether your universe is bigger than the MEST universe or the MEST universe is bigger than your universe. This is just whether you consider it is or not. You can run a little drill on a preclear. Say, "Get the idea now of your universe being much bigger than the physical universe; the physical universe inside your universe.”

"Okay." he says.

"Now get it so that your universe is much smaller and the physical universe is much bigger." Oh yeah, he can get this, just consideration, back and forth.

Well, the uniform consideration is that the physical universe is very big and very powerful and is very dangerous. And people walk around and bump into rocks and bump their shins on stair steps and fall out of trees and hit the ground and drive cars and hit walls and fall out of airplanes and get blown up in spaceships and get shot and shoot people and it's impact, impact, impact, impact, impact.

Well, what is sickness? Sickness is the exhaustion of no longer wanting anything to do with the force. It's the wave of "I don't want anything to do with the force." If you ask an individual to lay aside all the force he had, he of course would have his whole engram bank, his whole universe collapse on him. Couldn't do otherwise than collapse, because it's only force that holds it there.

Force itself derives from the ability to hold two fixed points in space. Force derives from the ability to hold two fixed points - hold them apart, keep them separated, impose distance on them. The ability to have space is the ability to impose dimension. Space is the viewpoint of dimension.

This is done by postulate. As long as you can say "That is eight thousand miles from me," and it is, conceptually, you can impose space. But when you get somebody who says, "This mock-up is now eight thousand… going to be eight thousand miles from me. It's now eight thousand miles from me" and pang, it hits him in the face. He is no longer able to impose points. So force is a junior thing to the ability to impose distance. If you can impose distance you can certainly impose force.

Well, an individual gets hit on lots of spots, so he doesn't want anything to do with spots, so he doesn't have any force anymore. He doesn't want to have anything to do with distances anymore. Distance is something that is horrible to him. Distance is a barrier he can't surmount. Impacts are awaiting him everywhere. If impacts are awaiting him everywhere he doesn't want to have anything to do with anywhere. Well, if he doesn't want to have anything to do with anywhere, the whole bank will collapse in on him.

And whether or not you call it moral courage or bravery or physical courage or strength or the ability to develop volts and electrons or what you call it - it doesn't matter what you call it; it all boils down to a couple of points in space. And if you've got these two points in space, and you can keep them apart, why, that's good. If you can keep them apart or pull them together at will, that's good. If they're staying apart or going together on another determinism, that's not good. That means you've got no force. See that?

So it boils down in essence to a problem of agreements. But what are these agreements? They are the agreements which have wound up in a complexity of universes, which are all interlocked by having incidents in common. They have points of collision in common. Your universe has points of collision in common with the physical universe, so that you hardly recognize it as your universe at all anymore. It's sort of a map of the physical universe - a map of collisions, impacts. Your body is disturbed continually by restimulated impacts. Its thinkingness, if it thinks at all, is monitored by the memory of having been hit by a certain action. A man is as well off as his goals and dreams are intact. If a man can dream, if a man can have goals, he can be happy and he can be alive. If he has no goals he doesn't even have a future.

A person believes, when running into a game called MEST universe, consisting of barriers, when he believes that all of his own actions are dependent upon the MEST universe, he thinks that any action he takes is going to be barriered. He thinks he's going to be stopped in everything he does. If he were to say, "Well, I think I'm going to be a painter" - If he just thought that he would probably get the idea of some kind of a wall sitting right straight in front of his face. It's a direction. "To be a painter" is a direction to go. He so thoroughly agreed with the universe that he believes that to gain any objective he has to cross a distance. If he can't cross that distance he can't have these objectives. So he gets the idea that he can't be anything. He can't arrive. Why "he can't arrive"? Because anything he thinks of doing in life is going to be stopped. Barriers are going to be erected across his path.

He thinks, "I'm going to be a painter," immediately after that his stimulus-response mechanism says, instantly, "Well, you know you couldn't be a painter. Your mother always said…" You know, instantly.

He knows he can't be the best driver in the world. He just knows this. He knows this and he knows that. What's he know? Well, that's another kind of knowingness. It's the knowingness by impact. Certainty by impact as opposed to certainty by self-confidence. Now, you're trying to take an individual away from certainty by impact and certainty that he's going to be hurt; that points in space are going to impede his way; that he is in a game that is all barriers, barriers, barriers. You're trying to take him away from that kind of an idea, separate him out and bring him over here to a point where he can make a postulate and make the postulate stick.

And you do that by separating him out of universes, making him make his own postulates good and making him capable of determining an action and then bringing the action off. And any therapy there is, is involved with the problem of getting a person away from being one of these… Well, practically an automaton being run by Newton's three laws of motion and this entanglement of universes. Getting him away from being subject to the Gods of all the universes he has inhabited - such as Mama's, Papa's, the physical universe, doesn't matter - and getting him to a point of where he can get over here and make up his own mind. That's all. All he has to do is make up his own mind.

The wrong way to do it is simply say to him, "All you have to do is make up your own mind." The right way to do it is to disentangle him and give him a lot of wins. And he'll win in the end.