BASIC PROCESSING

A lecture given on 23 July 1951

Science of Perceptics

In this lecture we are going to cover a subject which practically nobody is very well acquainted with. The name of this subject is Dianetics.

I want to take this thing from the bottom up and show you some whereases and wherefores, and I hope to get by this some instances of "Oh my God, I’ve missed that."

To show you that what I am telling you is not exactly new, it is from a text written in the fall of 1948 which was never fully transcribed and never published, but which was merely consolidated notes to date.

Actually, in Dianetics we have moved in with a crash in the line of education to the science of perceptics, which is a sub science of Dianetics. Dianetics has been there all along, but the educational line has not been. It has been very badly overlooked.

There are two ways we could approach this subject; I will approach it both ways.

Let’s start with a time track— we will begin with the visible objects (at least visible to most of us; a few of us, I understand, don’t have a time track visible). We start in with conception or a little while before— or maybe a few hundred thousand years before, I am not quite sure about this— and we find a time track. We can draw this track vertically. A lot of people see their tracks horizontally and some see them on a forty- five degree bias and so forth, but that is all very silly, this up, down, back and forth and sideways for a time track.

A time track is composed of time, not of space. Therefore it is a little bit difficult for some people to grasp exactly how this time track can operate, since it is composed of time and not space. If it were also composed of space, when you ran somebody back to the age of two he would be at the age of two and would be able to reach out and grab and finish the bottle which he half- emptied then. So there is no space connected with the time track.

We have this time track starting out a few days before conception or at conception or whenever, and it goes on up the line, gets up to birth and comes on up to present time. This is actually a plot against time of all the perceptics of which the organism is capable. It is a file system in which time is the main file. File systems operate in two ways: one is by subject and the other is by time. The one that is indexed by subject would have, for instance, under horses, "big horses," "little horses," "horses I fell off," "horses I stayed on," "horses I have seen pictures of," "horses they write super emotional bunk about in the movies," and so on. (By the way, I was raised on a ranch out west, and horses and I have no love lost between us.) All these horses are right there. They are quite incidentally filed by time.

The other index file is a very simple one. It files everything by time: "22 January 1922, 2: 01, 15 seconds," then "2: 01, 20 seconds; 2: 01, 25 seconds; 2: 01, 30 seconds." Your time track is that well filed. But as you and I know if we have ever had anything to do with files, it is very hard to take a time file and do anything with it. It is a difficult file to handle. It is not by subject, it is by time, and unless you know the subject and pretty much what you are doing with it before you go into the file, you can’t find anything. Everything is pretty stirred up.

These are just elementary filing systems. You start looking over file systems and you will find these difficulties with a time file. An index file is much better. We want to know why this man is afraid of horses, so we would go into the index file and find H . . . H- O . . . H- O- R . . . horses, right there after horror. We look up horses, and he is afraid of big horses, so we look up horses- big. And we look there and it says, "A horse named Blue Terror galloped across the compound one day and upset the baby carriage." And you say, "That is very interesting. Let’s knock that one out because we have that one in memory now.... Now let’s see if there is anything more about horses here." That would be the end of that.

But that isn’t true of the time file. This fellow is afraid of horses, but all we have is a file which is filed by time. We look kind of generally and say, "Was this man in the vicinity of any place there were any horses in 1951?" No, not so far. "1949?" No. "1948?" No. "1947?" No. "Let’s see if we can take it in bigger increments, because this fellow is forty- eight years of age and we would have to go clear back . . . There were lots of horses back then around 1903, ‘04, ‘05; there were quite a few horses around at that time, as a matter of fact. Henry Ford hadn’t done anything for his country yet, and horses pulled beer trucks and all sorts of things. It must have been back then. Let’s look this over very carefully, and take . . ."

Do you have any idea how many cards it would take to file a full perceptic listing for every minute of one month? I will give you some kind of an idea of that. This month is composed of thirty days and there are twenty- four hours in a day, so there are seven hundred and twenty hours. There are sixty minutes in each one of those hours, so we would have 43,200 cards in one month, the month between 1 January 1903 and 30 January 1903. It would take this many cards for one to be filed every minute.

Only the mind doesn’t file them every minute. It would take 2,592,000 cards to file one every second. But the mind records much faster than that; it records in milliseconds. So, filed by time, it would take 2,592,000,000 file cards to file thirty days’ worth of time. That gives you some kind of an idea of the rapidity of the filing.

Now, if somebody stood on the shores of the Sea of Galilee and every minute threw a dollar into the Sea of Galilee, and if he had been doing it since the year zero up through the nearly two thousand years till now, he would have disposed of just over one billion dollars. That gives you some idea of the quantity of filing.

Only this isn’t all there is to it, because there would have to be a card for each perception. And there really are twenty- six; it says so in Dorland’s American Pocket Medical Dictionary. l And who would I be to say the medical profession ever made an error? I tried to count them up one day, and I got up there around twenty- six. These include such things as saline content, heartbeat perception, on and on and on; there are a lot of minor ones.

This gives you some sort of an idea of what you are up against with a fairly occluded case when you are trying to find a horse in forty- eight years of living. All you want is one horse. This incident took, at the most, probably three minutes. You want to find all the perceptions relating to this horse.

In addition to that, we have something else working against us, and that is a very simple thing: The organism is so rigged that it stays away from things which are painful. You have a double- drive system working here. The organism is attracted to things which are pleasant and pleasurable, and the organism repels itself from things which are painful or unpleasant. Those two things are at work so that the survival arrow is heading away from pain by a double vector. This is why, when you have an occluded case, there is almost certainly a great deal of punishment on the case. We know automatically that there are a great many engrams, but completely aside from and in addition to those, there is a lot of punishment. This person has been made to forget whole sections of his life because it is painful to remember, and he handles his thoughts just as he has been trained to handle MEST. He handles his thoughts just as he has been trained to handle MEST; that is an axiom and a very useful one.

So if he has been forced by MEST itself— by training, by getting his hands slapped, by this and by that— to leave an awful lot of MEST alone, he will wind up not only leaving a lot of MEST alone but he will park his thoughts off the track. They get occluded because he is perceiving things that he is supposed to leave alone. So these perceptions get filed over in the blank file and his thoughts say, "We are not supposed to look at this file. This file is painful; we are supposed to stay away from those things."

Now, he counts upon all of this being handled by an automatic mechanism, so that when one of these perceptions restimulates in the presence of a painful object— painful MEST— it will tell him to get out of there, and his normal reaction is to feel uncomfortable in a certain environment and to move out of that environment. That is evidently the automatic mechanism on which he is operating. And if this stuff is buried out of sight in his mind it will still, by the modus operandi of the reactive mind, restimulate and drive him out of the painful environments.

He is already moving out of those environments in his thoughts, and that is forgetting— leave alone, forget.

You have the time track, then, and everything is filed on this time track. There is no space associated with this; this is a time file we are into. To travel on the time track, however, requires a fairly intact perception of time. If the preclear has had time confused for him he won’t find it possible to travel on a time track, because all there is on a time track is time. He will find it very difficult to move on the track, completely aside from holders, bouncers and all the rest of this stuff. This is elementary.

That is what the basic grouper essentially is— a lack of time. That is the basic grouper. The first thing that you would do to handle a really grouped up case, then, is try to rehabilitate this person’s concept of time. Otherwise he won’t have a time track, and not only could you not get into his file system but you probably couldn’t even get him into present time because that would be lost too. In other words, you have a file system you are trying to examine which is filed by time. If you can’t get the preclear to look over a time file— that is to say, if he has no concept of what time is— how can he look into the time file for you? So you have to rehabilitate his sense of time. Missing time— that is the most effective grouper there is.

There is actually never such a thing as a collapsed time track. That term originated with one of the research auditors, who kept talking about a collapsed time track because he had hit a grouper and the preclear went into a terrific spin. What had been lost was this preclear’s concept of where all these things were on the track, and "I" couldn’t keep poised looking over all these things but suddenly stood looking at all of them at once, having lost his ability to differentiate time. Nothing had suddenly disappeared off this case; no ability had suddenly been lost. The span of the track had not collapsed into a ball or anything like that; nothing had happened to the time track. In every individual that track is there. It is still there, stretched out to its full length, and the second that you rehabilitate his concept of time he can move on it.

This is very elementary stuff.

Now, if you put a magnifying glass at any point on this track, you would find that it is not a single track at all, but a bundle of all the perceptics. It is a bundle of perceptics, a whole lot of perceptics. Sight, sound and smell are the important ones. Kinesthesia— motion— is very important. A fellow who has lost his sense of motion, who doesn’t feel motion, who can’t experience motion, whose pictures do not move, whose visio does not move but is only still pictures, is a fellow who is in bad shape. It isn’t that every holder holds him; he won’t be able to get out of the holders he gets into because he has no concept of motion with which to move out of them. We have put the cart before the horse here, I think. We have had the idea that a holder is something that holds. What the holder does is knock out kinesthesia, or motion.

I am trying to get you right down to fundamentals here so you will really take a look at this subject. People have been saying the reason a person stops on the time track is that somebody says "Stay here." That is bunk; that is not why he stops on the time track. The reason he stops on the time track is that he has lost his concept of motion.

This is quite a gag, this idea of twenty- six perceptics, and the reason I keep this idea around is I am just waiting to rub the medical profession’s nose in it. I don’t know how many perceptics there are, and I don’t think the medical profession does either.

What we should do is put up something on the bulletin board so that every time somebody thinks of a new perception or something that might be perceived, whether it’s recognized or not, he could just go in and write that on the bulletin board. We would probably wind up with thirty- two, nineteen, or a hundred and sixty perceptics; we would probably arrive at the accurate number or somewhere close to it.

We have already discovered a new one in the perception of motion on the time track. That is a perceptic, and if you don’t think that will file right along with the others, you ought to look over somebody who has really been slugged up and down and around on the time track and has been confused about it. He will have overlying perceptics of motion on the time track.

Another one of these is perception by "I" of the endocrine situation.

By the way, it is not even defined, medically, what they are trying to perceive with. It is just stated that there are all these perceptions. But it is not carefully stated, as it should be before you start delineating perception. What is the "I" of the case? It is the center of awareness of awareness. What does "I" perceive? You start getting a lot of perceptics as soon as you start looking at it from that viewpoint, and that is the only viewpoint we are interested in. We want to know what is recorded on the time track.

The center of awareness notices the emotional state of the individual (the endocrine setup, in other words)— anger or whatever it is. This endocrine setup is very interesting, because it is fed in by "I." But then "I" can recognize what it is. The reactive mind will take over the monitoring of it on low- tone- scale cases. It is not easily monitored even by high- tone- scale cases, but it can be monitored. There is a little gland called the pituitary gland that sits back of the frontal lobes (this thing the psychiatrists carve up— I think they think that’s the only use it has). This gland sits back in there pretty well protected. It must be fairly important or there would not be so much bone around it (and the psychiatrist wouldn’t be trying to carve it out all the time). But the pituitary gland has been rather well investigated in England. The British Medical Journal has carried some very remarkable pieces of research with regard to it. I won’t try to give you any of the nomenclature of this thing because they really hung some nomenclature on it that would stop anybody from trying to understand it, but it has a trigger system for the endocrine glands. For instance, let’s take the release of testosterone: there is a pseudo testosterone in the pituitary which triggers the testosterone release in the body. There is evidently some kind of a mental setup and it uses this switchboard. You could call the pituitary, if you want to look at it that way, a sort of a switchboard.

Or take adrenaline: the mind triggers the adrenal system by triggering the adrenal substance in the pituitary. There are three adrenaline triggers in the mind. That is a very interesting, complex switchboard operation.

But nothing goes into operation in the body effectively unless this switchboard setup triggers it and the fluid which is used by this switchboard arrangement is sent into the bloodstream. Testosterone is not effective unless the bloodstream has first been alerted by this pituitary catalyst. It is a neat little system of operation.

Now, how the mind busily records all these other things, we don’t know; somebody should study it someday. Nobody knows now. But what we do know is function, and in Dianetics we are studying function. Every time you find somebody getting too far over into structure, basing it on what is now known about structure, you know he is talking through his hat. They go around talking about "basal cortex massal bones" and so forth, and they say, "This is the primary reason why the diddlewidders don’t," and they are very learned. I have seen texts several inches thick which proved absolutely and conclusively that "a nerve line cannot possibly carry a nerve message unless it is completely covered by myelin sheathing."

You ask, "How do you know? Did you ever take a nerve and stretch it out and try to get anything through it with myelin sheathing, then try to get anything through it without myelin sheathing?"

"Well, how idiotic!" is what they will answer.

A telephone line doesn’t have to be insulated in order to carry a telephone message. The first telephone lines, by the way, were hung on fence posts without any insulators, and they were just common haywire. That was the first telephone wire that was used. It was very interesting: it worked but it didn’t need any insulation. Now they use lots of insulation.

In other words, practically nothing is known these days about structure. But we know quite a bit about function. How these things are recorded, we don’t know, because you can start figuring it all out down the line mathematically, and you find out that, with the most extravagant system devised by the field of biology, it is utterly impossible for the mind to retain memory for more than three months. They figured out that the number of neurons is ten to the twenty- first power. That is an awfully big number. And they looked at the protein molecule and said the protein molecule has a lot of holes in it. That is really getting small. They said that there are ten shots of memory storage for each one of these holes in each one of these protein molecules. Now, you take the largest estimated number for that and figure all this out, and you will find out that the mind can’t store its memory for three months even if it is only storing major perceptions, much less the real number that we know it is storing. There is not enough storage potential for three months.

So when they are that far afield with structure, we had just better not pay any attention to structure for a while, and try to figure it out functionally. Then maybe somebody can come along and figure it out structurally.

Somebody brought forth the interesting concept one day that perhaps memory was not stored at all in the body, but was stored on the track through time. This immediately postulates that all you have in your mind as far as a memory system is concerned is a little radio receiving- and- sending set, so to speak, and when you want to remember something, this hooks up with a general time span which drifts somewhere else.

This can get pretty weird after a while, but that is just as valid as, and as far as I am concerned, a more valid concept than, the structural concept of storage in protein molecules. The idea that memory is stored on time and is actually recorded on time in some mysterious fashion is just as valid.

That is what you are trying to recover when you are processing, and the way you can recover it best is by restoring the individual’s sense of time, sense of differentiation and ability to perceive. If you can restore these things you can get everything there is on the track. If you can’t restore these things you can have him going around chanting bouncers, denyers, groupers, you can run all kinds of wildcat processes and so forth, and he still won’t get anywhere.

Let’s be extremely basic about it. What you are trying to do is first make him aware of the fact that he has a file system— time, in other words— then restore to him the ability to look things up in the file system, and then restore to him the total contents of the file system. You are making him saner and saner, and the main reason you are making him sane is you are moving various things that he has to sheer off of in his life out of the occlusions and out of the hidden areas where they are in a stimulus- response status or where they are merely walled up.

A fellow gets to a point, when this file system is denied him, when everything is denied him, where life is just walking the most tricky tightrope in the highest tent imaginable. He gets into a state where he can’t decide: "Should I? I don’t know whether I should put my foot there or not. Well, I have to go on in life somehow, so I will put my foot there and there." He is just not

sure what is the matter here, but there are probably devils, demons and everything else waiting out and beyond this immediate situation. And he is very sure that this glass he is going to pick up is a very dangerous glass that has to be forgotten, and so forth. Furthermore, somebody said to him one time that such- and- such took place spiritually and that there was an imbued spirit that got into matter from everybody that handled it, and somehow or other after a while matter gets dangerous.

Have you ever come across this concept? They think that people can come along and imbue their spirit into inanimate objects, and therefore the inanimate objects themselves become dangerous as themselves. That is a lack of differentiation between the object they have and the object which was dangerous.

If you could go into a case and restore this case in an orderly fashion, you would be restoring, first, his ability to perceive time, then his ability to perceive space, his ability to perceive energy— which would include motion and so forth— and his ability to perceive matter— material objects and so on. You would be trying to show this fellow, first off, that there is an environment.

It is received with something of a shock to individuals sometimes when they suddenly clip off a flat visio in present time and begin to see in three dimensions. It is very surprising to them. A fellow, in some weird fashion, can even pass depth- perception tests and still have a two- dimensional present time visio. There is no depth to it. He gets into an accident once in a while and he is not a very good risk in an airplane. But depth- perception tests as used by the U. S. Government do not show it up.

In the depth- perception test they put a couple of lines in the patient’s hands and the patient uses these to adjust two sticks until they are exactly even, although he is looking at them flatly. If he is right within a certain limit he passes the depth- perception test. He has two eyes and they are looking on both sides of the object; they "obviously" give it the proper stereopticon effect. But the fellow has taught himself to judge by relative sizes in a two- dimensional visio whether or not one stick is further away from him than the other stick— very tricky.

I had a pilot one day on the couch, and all of a sudden we turned on three- dimensional visio— not for a couple of minutes, we turned it on for good— and you never saw such a startled man in your life. The world up to this moment had been just as flat as a wall to him. In other words, this man’s concept of space was shot— length, breadth, depth, distance, and so forth. He was clever; he had a very smart mind, and it had figured out depths by practice, obviously, to such an extent that he could more or less accurately judge distances and so on, certainly up to the point where he could fly an airplane through them. But he was the last man you wanted piloting an airplane; his concept of space was gone. The auditor who is late for an appointment or who doesn’t get there at all or who doesn’t know the date and so on is shot on the time level.

It is very interesting that just as an individual who sees two- dimensional space educates himself into making it three- dimensional, so does a person with a shot time concept figure out time intellectually. He figures it out as a computation and he figures time as a computation. He puts a circuit in to furnish the blank spot that has been knocked out for him. Maybe this is a new idea to you. But there are things wrong with this fellow’s track and so forth.

We carefully take children in this society and we educate them to (1) see flat space, and (2) forget all about time. In other words, we make time painful to them and we make space painful to them so that time and space then have to be kicked out into the fringes of the outer darkness where other dangerous things must go, and somehow or other they say, "Time and space don’t exist, but there is something in existence, so I will compute depths, I will compute hours, I will depend on my watch."

Hardly anybody has good time sense, but buried underneath all of this education and training is about the most marvelous chronometer you ever wanted to see. Once you get people cleared up on time, you can say to the fellow, "Sit there for seventeen minutes," and he will sit there for

seventeen minutes— not sixteen and three quarters— with no watch. You tell this person to go to 21 October 1942, 2: 00 in the morning, and his somatic strip will go right there.

How do you suppose it can select it that sharply? It can. This person’s sense of time has to be pretty good. Once you get a sense of time rehabilitated, the somatic strip will start operating. But how can a somatic strip operate unless there’s a sense of time involved?

Now, when you start fishing around and asking him whether or not his somatic strip has gone to 21 October 1942 at 2: 00 in the morning, you are invalidating his time sense. All his life people have invalidated his time sense anyhow. The watch you are wearing is an invalidation of your time sense. You don’t need a watch. So if you as the auditor suddenly become unsure of where his somatic strip went, he says, "Oh, my God, did it go there or didn’t it?" And he will have a hard time, then, trying to settle down on it. He will go all over the shop.

The most precious thing you have with this preclear is his time sense, because without it he can’t get into his main file for processing. We are not talking about the file for data. He can get into the file for horses only so long as horses are not in the painful category. The beauty of the time file is that he can get into places on the time file which are dangerous. He can’t get into those things in the index file. That is the difference between those two files. The time file is such a shotgun file that you can send him in there and he will go to things which are labeled as dangerous in the index file. But he won’t go to things that are dangerous in the index file because these things have labels on them, and every time one of them got too dangerous it dropped out. There actually are, evidently, two filing systems in the mind. Therefore you can get a fellow with an excellent memory who has no time track. This fellow has an excellent memory until you start to ask him something that is dangerous, or you start to select the memories that you want him to remember. Then he all of a sudden doesn’t have this excellent memory. But he has an excellent memory on everything he really needs in his workaday world, and if it isn’t there, if it has been removed by being dangerous, he has put something else in its place. There are people who have become very sure they were remembering various things who weren’t remembering them at all, but who still have a good enough memory to get along fine.

When we are dealing with perception, then, what would be the basic perceptions you would want? One of them is perception of time. That is a perceptic. You would want a perception of space, then, too. If a fellow didn’t have a perception of space, everything would be so crowded on his time track he couldn’t get into it. He couldn’t locate spaces or things which had spaces in them. It wouldn’t be properly filed; it would be an occluded file.

So let’s go into this case sensibly and rehabilitate time and rehabilitate space; then we can rehabilitate some energy and motion.

We are not doing anything different from what was being done in 1948, because the big effort which was being made then, even if not completely articulated, was to try to get the fellow so he would move on his time track. We fished around and fished around until we had validated his time track enough to him, and validated him enough, and validated space enough and so forth, and then all of a sudden the fellow found he could move on the time track.

If anything has happened to date, it has been that this system has been improved on a little bit; we can do it with a little more accuracy. That is the important thing in opening a case, in working a case in its early stages. All the words in the world aren’t going to do your preclear a bit of good unless you can rehabilitate for him time and space.

An auditor who goes in to get words out of an engram is fishing in some other file than the time file if his preclear doesn’t have time and space. In other words, you have a sort of a concept of the thing— and who knows whether the concept is imaginary or what it is? Trying to fish words out of an engram if the time of the engram, the space of the engram and the kinesthesia of the engram are not present is a waste of time. That just makes things more unreal to the person.

Occasionally you can take a case and desensitize some phrase by getting some enMEST off— a little boil- off or something of the sort— and you can all of a sudden make the fellow stop doing something that he was doing before, or make him stop worrying and so on. You can take some tension off this thing. Sometimes you can run a terror line charge off a case. Some of these manifestations are not bad. But here is where you come a cropper: The second that you run a phrase which has no time, space or kinesthesia, you are laying the foundation for a future unreality in the three most important fields of perception You can get away with getting one phrase out. You can get away with getting half a dozen of these phrases out or half a dozen of these line charges off. But you are training him that what is important is words. You are validating words and their importance, and that case will stay completely static on the tone scale or go down. If you keep running this without the three key perceptics, the case will just start on down and get more and more introverted.

This happens because you are running him on an illusion, and the illusion is a word. Words are illusions.

Nobody knows this better than a writer. You can build a world of words, and you can build it so solidly that other people will come in and move the MEST underneath those words. Writers have been doing this since time immemorial, and it is magic— complete magic. It has no more solidity in the field of human reason— except in terms of effectiveness, because it is very effective magic— than the magician’s wand which suddenly conjures the rabbit out of a hat.

Now, we have a time track, and one of those perceptics on it, just one of them— let us say sound— has a great many divisions. Sound has the division of music, which is a valid communication. It has the division of noise, which is also valid since it will quite often warn of danger. It has voices— and this would mean the chattering of the monkey, the barking of the dog, all the rest of it— and then it has human voices speaking words. Do you mean to tell me that you are going to get up just that one part of only one perceptic and process a case? No! And by George, you are not even getting sonic on these voices with most cases.

That is why we talk about twenty- six perceptics. One day I wanted a large number of perceptics, so I went and got Dorland’s Medical Dictionary and it says there are twenty- six human perceptics, and I said, "That’s good enough for me," and I put it down. I had authority behind me and I didn’t have time at the moment to count them. But before I put it out I checked over to find out whether there were at least twenty- six perceptics, and I found that there are at least twenty- six perception I didn’t write them down.

There are a lot of perceptics. There are a lot of things that "I" is able to perceive as a special category. "I" perceives the heartbeat. Also, some strata of "I" perceives pregnancy before it becomes apparent to somebody else or even to "I," because morning sickness takes place. Morning sickness is psychosomatic. I have knocked out too many cases of morning sickness to think otherwise, and yet morning sickness takes place. "I" perceives some of the darnedest things in the body.

So, here we have this large number of perceptics. They form a whole subject, all by themselves. And with perceptics we have to select out what the important ones are. Unless we do this, we really don’t know what we are doing in processing a case.

That is why I have suddenly thrown in MEST Processing. It isn’t that the idea of the physical universe is particularly new, but it is perhaps a new emphasis on this line.

There will be a mimeographed issue sent around that sets up a system for MEST Processing using a deck of playing cards. The number of questions that can be asked for on MEST Processing is too huge for them to be listed. So I set up a system whereby you can make up a little set of fifty- two playing cards by writing the proper designations on them. You can then deal the questions, and you get almost an infinite number of questions on these things.

Now, the whole subject of perceptics is directed toward the activity of the organism in its environment. Are you interested in what somebody says the organism is doing in the environment, or are you interested in what the organism is doing in the environment? Will you take the illusion for the actual fact, or shall we deal with the actual fact? That is about what it comes down to. You can process out of an individual any quantity of illusions; he is aberrated because he has illusions— illusions in his mind put there by words contained in engrams. But they haven’t any high level of actuality. They are illusions because the words in the first place belong to an illusion known as language.

Now, there are many ways that this problem of processing can be entered. One of those ways is through an examination of theta; another one is through an examination of MEST.

By looking over theta and its component parts and what theta is apparently trying to do, we learn quite a bit. We learn that theta is trying to achieve a conquest of MEST.

People have gotten used to thinking of the organism being a composite. In fact, I really don’t know where the theta is contained in the organism. I would be happy to know. I don’t even know if it is there.

Somebody put up a postulate one day and said, "Maybe up in the theta universe there is an arrangement like a couple of telephone boxes, and a fellow sits in each of these telephone boxes and they are actually in control of these organisms down here." That is very interesting, and it is just as completely valid as saying that we are all walking around together.

There seems to be a sort of cosmic consciousness of some kind or other, and that is very interesting to study. In Group Dianetics we find that a group actually seems to attract theta to itself and forms a body of theta which is independent of the individuals in it, but which can be enturbulated by the individuals of the group. A group exists as an organism.

There is a lot of interesting data about theta.

Now, theta, wherever it may be found, is engaged in doing one of two things: It is either going on with a conquest of the physical universe or it is giving up and getting out of there in order to come back and reconquer the physical universe again with a better organism.

That postulate, oddly enough, as esoteric as it may seem (and all postulates are just postulates and they are as good as they work), has solved more problems of human behavior in Dianetics to date than any other postulate: survive or succumb.

Theta, then, maintains itself as long as it possibly can in control of the physical universe, and failing that, gets out; death ensues. That gives us this beautiful cycle of conception, birth, growing, control of the physical universe, conquest of it, destroying it, chewing it up, doing whatever you want to to it, trying to make a little more construction than destruction, but keeping the thing going. And then various things take place: The organism is not as mobile as before— accidents have happened and so on— and all of a sudden this organism is not serviceable anymore and is put in the ragbag.

I am not even trying to foist off on you now a theta body going along an independent experience line. There is evidence that that exists, but if you just say the theta goes along the genetic line, happily and cheerfully, and is an energy which reattracts back to itself when it departs and becomes part of a common pool of energy, you have the same proposition, and biologists would agree with that.

So here is this person with his little halo of theta walking along, conquering the physical universe left and right. As long as he keeps on doing that he is successful, and when he stops doing that he starts succumbing.

All this theta, by the way, may be the same thing, but it gets individualized. It may be that it started with an original body of theta and all organisms were more or less the same organism, but it gradually began individualizing and so on until chips of it started breaking off, and these were individual personalities. A terrific number of postulates could be brought in.

The next thing you know, all of the lore of India and the lore of Cornell start meeting. And the second you start to really look at this idea of a cosmic consciousness, you get all sorts of exciting answers.

The funny thing about an organism is that it is more or less working on the basis that it is the cosmic consciousness. But there has been a very short- sighted look at all this: "Obviously, if this organism thought that it was the one that was taking charge, then it could think only of itself." That is typically sloppy collegiate logic; it is so sloppy that it has messed up the whole field of psychology. It broke the back of psychology because it made it unworkable, and it broke the back of psychoanalysis too. Psychoanalysis says, "This is part of the cosmic consciousness, and so forth, and it enters into the individual, and all he is interested in after that is sex." This is a beautiful mess.

The point of the matter is, if we start looking at it broadly enough to understand it and make it workable, this piece of theta thinks it is responsible for all the things that theta is responsible for. It is responsible for the organism, for the future, for children, for groups, for mankind, for all living organisms, for the whole physical universe and for God, too!

Theta is really terrifically ambitious. It has an enormous scope. This one individual, in an unenturbulated state, is actually acting as a section of all the theta and individuals there are. But it is not acting egocentrically for just this organism; that doesn’t even work out at the most casual glance. How could this person be worried only about this organism if he expected even this organism to survive? He would have to start being concerned about the physical universe one way or the other because the ground he stands on is one of his symbiotes. He has to, in other words, preserve this ground, otherwise he doesn’t have any ground to stand on. This is the sixth dynamic.

He could not possibly have gotten out here and fought all the buffalo and grizzly bear and so forth single- handed, all by himself and without any aid or assistance from any other organisms, because bears have remarkably long claws and buffalo are hard to kill. He would have died out in one summer and that would have been the end of him. In other words, he had to worry about dynamic five, too. He is in contest with five. But if it was possible for him to just say "The fifth dynamic is dangerous; I will kill all of five, just for the sake of this organism," he wouldn’t have been eating, and that would have been the end of the organism.

You can actually figure it out from the basis of the organism if you want to, but it goes much further than that. This piece of theta, then, is not egocentric. This piece of theta is working as though it were all of the theta universe and had all of this in its charge— that is, when in its unenturbulated state, as its observation through the organism begins to develop.

You very rarely have any chance of seeing theta really operating, however, because of the various forces and vectors which are exerted upon the organism at a very early age. By the time an individual is born, he is thoroughly out of control on the entire physical universe. You could postulate that any organism is nuts by the time it is born.

This theta is self- determinism— self- handling, self- motivating, self organizing. It is operating through this one organism in order to achieve survival along eight dynamics; that is the postulate. Achieving that survival along eight dynamics is fine, but as the world starts to kick back against the organism, theta has a harder and harder time trying to control just what it can control and no more, and its sphere of control starts narrowing. By the time the child is born, his sphere of control is pretty narrow, because he has already had self- determinism taken away from him to a large degree. He was limited in his motion in space; he was being taken around in space. He was not self- determined as to what he was doing and where he was going and what was happening to him, so when he got belted in the head or when the corset was too tight, he didn’t determine these things. They were being determined for him. In addition to that, something else was relatively determining the time, but the time was just sloppily postulated there.

Theta, the second it begins to tie up with MEST, gets constricted; and if you don’t believe this axiom will continue out to reductio ad absurdum all the way out, look at the individual who owns a lot of things. As soon as theta owns an organism and starts functioning through an organism, it is limited; it has limited its scope. As soon as an individual starts to own a great deal of things, he starts limiting his scope. The things start owning him to some slight degree.

You never saw anybody busier trying to maintain things and organisms than a rich man. He is limited in what he can do. He can’t go fishing on Saturday like Huck Finn. He has to get down there and get those telephone calls about something or other.

That is just an operating postulate of theta: Theta becomes limited in exact ratio to the amount of scope it can take.

So here is this fellow trying to take care of the whole physical universe as he observes it. If he finds another fellow who will try to take care of the whole physical universe too, they will form a group. It takes affinity, communication and reality for this to take place; these two fellows will operate together as having the whole universe and all its organisms and everything else in their sole charge. Now we add another one and another one and another one, and the group will function well enough for it to actually seem that there is more theta brought into the group than these people furnish.

If we look at it this way we can see something happening: we see that theta is limited, and it gets more and more limited, and by the time a child reaches the ripe old age of three, he is really limited. He has been handled, manhandled, moved, shoved; his time has been adjusted for him, on and on and on, up to a point where the self- determinism is less and less. Furthermore, his self- determinism is reduced to the extent that he can’t handle the organism, much less the environment. Then other parts of the environment keep walking in on this individual, so he gets cut back further and further, compared to what he should be. Finally he gets far enough down the tone scale— at least to a point where he gets a bit egocentric— to believe that he is not in unison with the rest of the organisms and men and so forth, and he has a tendency to get compartmented as an individual.

If you have watched a puppy dog over six or seven months you have seen this; it is very interesting. The first time you saw this dog he came up panting and happy and friendly, and you petted him. Six months later he comes up and you look at the dog and he growls at you. That is what happens to an organism. He has been taught that things are dangerous here and there.

Now, an organism does not necessarily begin to get the idea that any of the other organisms around him are theta- functioning organisms. Man does not generally recognize that his greatest breadth and scope lies in his recognition of the fact that he is a part of the brotherhood of the universe. He is not cognizant of this normally; he sees it, rather, from a narrow slot.

When he gets down to 2.0 and below, he is so egocentric that he thinks the only way of handling things is by controlling them. First he tries to control them by MEST force, and then pretty soon he tries to control them by nullifying them, by cutting them down, and then he tries to control them by getting sort of pulled along with the race, so to speak. But he is definitely on the succumb level below 2.0.

While he is fooling around with the band of antagonism he is fluctuating between surging up toward survive and back toward succumb. This is where you get aberrated conduct in the society. This whole society pays for these individuals continually. It is all built on the basis of "People have got to be controlled." The 2.0- and- downs got in there rather early and they are pretty scared of everything, so they started controlling everything as though it were MEST.

I want you to get that very solidly: as though it were MEST— as though every organism, as though every other human being, were MEST. The whole vicinity of an individual when he is down on the tone scale is composed of nothing but MEST, and that includes other individuals. Other individuals are animate MEST. He will try to handle these individuals like he would handle MEST. It isn’t, then, a cooperative effort.

Unfortunately, because there have been so many of these below- 2.0s around, this has gotten into the society on an educational strata so that all sorts of people are working on an educational basis of "the thing to do is to control, and everything is MEST but me." That is a sort of cockeyed piece of logic: "Everything is MEST but me."

The jealous man is operating on the basis that he owns a piece of MEST, and theta says he has to control and regulate that piece of MEST— he has to. So when this thing becomes a little bit uncontrollable and shows some self- determinism of its own, he starts blowing his stack. It starts to walk off or something like that and he gets very jealous. Somebody else comes along and looks at this piece of MEST, and what he sees is this other piece of MEST looking at his piece of MEST, and he blows up.

Now, you can start to estimate this with children. Most children get driven down below 2.0 rather quickly, and particularly in the vicinity of his home, almost anyone begins life on the lower part of the tone scale because the educational values aren’t there yet, experience isn’t there yet, and the individual has not yet had a chance to pull himself up the tone scale by furnishing accomplishment moments and demonstration of his handling of MEST. Furthermore, his MEST is being interfered with continually by individuals who are determined that this child is MEST.

Did you ever watch a child behave with regard to obtaining a piece of MEST? This child wants a nickel. He will start in by saying "I want a nickel." He doesn’t get the nickel. So he says it a little louder, "I want a nickel!" but he doesn’t get the nickel. Then he gets mad and he demands this nickel or throws a tantrum, and if he doesn’t get it then, he may walk out and come back in a couple of minutes and tell you about a poor old man he saw down the street with a blind man’s cup, or something of the sort. He may go through that particular cycle and he may not. He may demand the nickel again and fall immediately into grief and start to cry because he hasn’t got the nickel. And then he says he doesn’t want the nickel.

That is the tone scale in operation, in reverse, coming on down the line. In other words, the more this child finds himself unable to conquer MEST, the further down the tone scale he goes. He is less and less able to conquer it. So first he starts to try to conquer it by just asking for it in harmony, then he is going to get angry if he doesn’t get it— he is going to demonstrate that he has force— then finally he decides he has lost it, and then he says he doesn’t want it. He did want it but he has gone into apathy and this MEST has licked him.

There is, by the way, another split on the tone scale, and I am not quite sure where it is; it lies below 2.0. But there is a point below 2.0 where the person, just above this level, is convinced that he can own— he is still convinced that he can own— and below this point he is convinced that he can’t. He is still to some degree a theta organism above that point, but below it he is an owned organism.

You can look around and rather accurately state to yourself whether these organisms, these human beings you see around you, are owned or are trying to own. When a person is finally owned, such as a private in the army or a member of a socialist state, he is done. He is really dragging bottom at that point because he is MEST— and what is synonymous with being MEST? Being dead. When a person finds out that he is controlled completely without doing any of the controlling, this person associates himself with being dead and he will either make some kind of a terrific resurgence, temporarily, in order to get up to a point where he is not controlled or he will quit and go into an apathy and stay there.

I am representing this to you so that you can understand how important it is for an individual to feel himself able to handle the MEST around him. If he cannot handle matter, energy, space and time, he is in bad shape, and he starts considering these other organisms, other human beings in his periphery, as MEST. If he is in bad shape he is trying to own them and so forth. Or, if he has gone way down the tone scale where he has the concept of being owned, you have a pretty sick person on your hands because this theta is all enturbulated; it wants to get out of there anyhow. He really doesn’t want to get up in this life, and the dickens with it.

You can salvage this person if you understand what is happening there.

People around 4.0 don’t have much trouble handling MEST; they don’t have much trouble. They take it for granted that they can handle it. Every once in a while the MEST will backfire on them, but if they are not physically injured and driven down the tone scale as a result of having received a bad engram with regard to it, they can carry on. So along about 4.0 you have. a very logical and harmonious effort to conquer MEST, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a pretty savage attack on MEST occasionally, if it is logical and rational that that MEST really should be attacked.

But as you go down the line you start to find individuals appearing as MEST to all the other individuals. The laws being applied are similar. That is why you have such a hard time getting into communication with a 1.5; to him, you are MEST. You are MEST and he is God. That is his narrowness of viewpoint.

I am not now talking about a specialized type of insanity, of paranoia, which demonstrates the manifestation of being God. Actually, his viewpoint at 1.5— no matter what his manifestation— is the fact that he is alive and the best he could possibly do for you would be to control you. And if he is below 1.5, say around 1.0, about the best he could possibly do would be to nullify you, because you are dangerous; you are MEST. Therefore, trying to get into communication with these people is very hard because communication— good, smooth communication— lies above this level on the tone scale.

What has driven this individual down the tone scale? A child is made to be pretty anxious about MEST. By the time he was born he was already anxious on the subject of space; that is pretty definite. He had had some collisions also and he hadn’t been able to get out of their road; that is important. He wasn’t self- determined to the point of being able to get out of the road of sources of pain. So his self- determinism on a cellular basis could be sort of trained into the reactive mind.

After birth we find this individual living in a world of giants. If you ever want to get down on your hands and knees alongside of a little child and look at an adult, you will get some idea of the perspective. They are giants. A very good test of whether or not an individual is actually returning is when you get him into early childhood for the first time, almost invariably he says, "Gee! "

"What’s the matter?"

"Well, the people are so big! Here I am crawling across the kitchen floor and I don’t remember the kitchen floor like this at all. I remember it had little squares, and the squares couldn’t have been that big!"

The world is pretty big and it easily falls in on the organism. The organism does not have very good control over MEST. It comes up and hits a vase and the vase crashes, and that may inflict an injury. Some of the MEST is hot, and all sorts of things can happen. He lives in that kind of environment, and instead of being encouraged, normally the child is merely spanked and pushed around; he is being determined all the time. If he keeps on being determined, he more or less falls into the category of being MEST. And if his self- determination can be completely knocked out— in other words, he is handled all the time— he is then a psychotic. He is MEST, then; he is not an organism which can handle it. Another definition of a psychotic could be an individual who is no longer able to control MEST. So, here we have this little child. MEST for him is awfully hard to handle. For instance, he can’t catch a baseball; he is maybe four or five before he can adequately handle a sphere which is hurtling toward him. But he is learning all this time.

If during this time he is getting continual 1. or 2.0 handling—" Get up," "Go to bed," "Move here," "Move there," "You don’t want," "You want"— he never really has a chance to grow up with himself and learn how to handle MEST as though it were friendly stuff. It is antagonistic stuff all the way up along the line.

He will learn better if he himself can learn how to handle MEST. In his teens, particularly, he will get so he handles it pretty well, and he will start to get a lot of pleasure moments. He will start coming up the tone scale as he handles MEST.

But he was potentially, up to the age of five in almost every case, below 2.0 for that period as far as handling MEST was concerned. That is something for you to keep in mind. That is why you have to head for childhood; there isn’t anything about childhood other than that. It is just the fact that the person wasn’t able to handle MEST very well and he was being determined instead of being self- determined.

How does this tie into basic processing? Look at this individual. What is he basically concerned with? He is basically concerned with handling an organism in an environment and handling other organisms around him, and unless he has some slight control, unless he can affect these other organisms too, he really isn’t controlling his environment very well.

That is where psychology skidded. Psychology skidded so hard on that turn, tore off so many tires, went over so many embankments, rolled so many times and burned so brightly that the whole field has been very badly bogged down. This was called to my attention today when I unpacked a book which came off the press. It is the University of Chicago’s standard text on psychology, a new, revised, latest edition. The last book of that and the first book of Dianetics rolled off the presses of the American Book Company in the same assembly line. So I picked up the last book on psychology, and I turned around to one of the people at the printers and said, "Would you please make a notation in it that this is the last book on psychology published before the advent of Dianetics?" She did, and we have a museum piece.

It says the goal of psychology is adjusting an organism so that it can be adjusted to its environment. It says that in so many words. They are stuck with it now: The mission of the organism is to adjust to its environment. They want the organism to be MEST. They say the organism has to be adjusted to its environment— whereas the only possible way an organism could be healthy and sane is if it controlled its environment or could adjust the environment to the organism.

An organism has got to know it can do that and it has to have latitude and faith in its ability to do that or it isn’t a sane organism.

That is what happens to people in the army and the navy. That is why universal military training would bring this country’s tone scale level down within ten or twelve years, certainly by half a point on the scale. This would come in at the time a man is eighteen, just about the time he is supposed to start demonstrating to existence at large that he can handle it. The young man says the world is his oyster, very definitely, and if he hasn’t got a period in there when he can really feel that and exert his acquired skills into the control and adjustment of his environment to him, he is dead.

Instead of that, at about eighteen or nineteen, you would find this kid going into the service: "Attention! To the rear march. To the rear march. To the rear march. To the rear march." "Yes, sir. No, sir. I didn’t, sir. Yes, sir, I know this body is army property." That is universal military training. It is an effort to control a society better.

We have, then, the basic concepts of what this individual is trying to do. An organism has to feel that it is competent; it has to feel that it is slightly dangerous to its environment. That is known as respect, by the way. For instance, Daniel Boone liked to wrestle with bears. He really went around demonstrating his dangerousness to his environment.

Once a man or a woman begins to lose this concept, he or she gets into pretty bad shape. For instance, if a woman starts to lose the concept that she can influence the men around her, she gets to be in bad shape. She can influence them either by her physical beauty and her poise or by her knowledge of men. (The most dangerous organisms in a vicinity, by the ways are human organisms. Up in Yellowstone Park even the bears run from teenage girls— I mean, a teenage girl is dangerous!) So a woman must feel that she has some control over her environment and can exert and change that environment.

This concept rides right along with most people, and the second the person begins to lose this concept badly, he begins to lose out all the way across the boards.

I will give you an example of that. I was in the hospital up at Oak Knoll, l and early that year they told me the war was over. I played the "Dead March" of Saul to myself and said, "Well, you’re really in bad shape, boy." They argued with me. I didn’t think I was in bad shape but they wouldn’t pass me on an overseas physical. It was the last year of the war; I was feeling horrible about it. They were very dramatic about it, too. I went to see the commander at the base that sent me up to the hospital and argued with him about it, and he said, "Young man, you may not realize this but we are saving your life." So I went to the hospital.

I was MEST for a long time. I didn’t feel like I could exert any control over the environment. After all, I was in the navy and that was bad enough, but I had gotten out to a point where I wasn’t even in the navy— I was under treatment in the navy. I was feeling pretty bad. About July, I went down to Hollywood to see a friend of mine. I was living in a hotel there for a few days, and a ruckus started right out in front of the hotel. I was going downstairs and the clerk said, "Do something about that. I’ve already called the shore patrol." I went out and saw three bluejackets; they were standing there in the street arguing and being very profane. So I just stepped over— this was the first time I had ever said anything to an enlisted man ashore— and I said, "The shore patrol has been called, and if you boys are very smart you will get out of here quick." I started to pass them and go on down the street, and one of them grabbed me by the arm and started poking me with his finger. Then one of them picked up a beer bottle, the other one swung me around with my back to the one with the beer bottle and the guy swung the beer bottle, aiming at my head.

One of the things that I had been doing in trying to rehabilitate myself was carrying on with judo. I had gotten training in judo in 1941 before I went into the service, but up at the hospital it was just regular exercise. The judo instructor and I had had quite a bit of fun.

It was very instinctive to duck underneath this beer bottle as it was coming down, and that made the fellow with the beer bottle come over to the side with his wrist in reach, so what I did was break his arm automatically and throw him over his head into the man who was holding me. That guy went into a bumper and cut his face open and the fellow with the bottle went into him with a broken arm. The beer bottle fell on the pavement, and the third guy got up off the running board of the car where he had been sitting and came at me, so I just caught up the beer bottle and shoved it in his face.

They made me go before a court martial, and it was very funny but the court martial, looking at these three men and the fact that I had been in Oak Knoll hospital, wouldn’t believe me. They were sure that four or five other officers and myself had caught these men one by one and beaten them up, and that this was a cooked story. I almost got in a lot of trouble with this one.

But the old chief petty officer down at the police station, after the shore patrol came and picked these boys up, was saying, "Sir, you were very, very lucky that the shore patrol arrived when it did. You shouldn’t ever have tackled that. Now, we’ve got a report over here that you were fighting with three sailors on the street. You mustn’t do that, because there have been three sailors around town here and they put two officers— a marine officer and a naval officer— in the hospital. The marine officer is not expected to live. You shouldn’t have done something like this...." The door opened and the shore patrol began to help these guys through the police station to put them in the jail overnight till they could get them to a naval hospital. There was blood all over the place! The chief took one look, and he looked at me, and he looked at his first class petty officer who had gone out with that shore patrol and asked, "Did he do that to them?"

"Yes. Darnedest thing you ever saw!"

The chief looked at me and he said, "My God!" All of a sudden I was sixteen feet tall. Actually, I was well from that minute!

Those three men were drunk. Anybody who had had any training in judo would have wiggled out of it one way or the other. It just happened that a sharp- fendered automobile was there to mess them up.

I am not trying to tell you what a great warrior I am, but that what that did for my morale was fantastic. I don’t think I would be alive today if I hadn’t handled those three men.

I did a flock of animal experiments a little bit later that year. Up at the hospital we had a dog that was sort of cowardly. I got hold of this dog and I thought, "If it can do this for you I’ll bet it might do something for the dog, too. He is evidently a psychopathic case; probably under psychiatric care up here." I would invite the dog to play with a stick with me and just shake it a little bit. Of course, this dog was so psycho that if you just shook the stick a little bit he would cringe. But I got him to the point where he would come up to take hold of the stick and then I would drop it and flinch. I finally got the dog to a point where he would bite at my shoe laces a little bit, and when he did that I would ki- yi like a dog, "Yeow- yeow! Don’t do that!" and so forth— act scared of him. I kept giving the dog this kind of reaction on almost anything he would do.

The dog started to walk a little bit tougher and a little bit tougher and a little bit straighter, and his eye got brighter and brighter and brighter. The first thing I knew, he went down the street and bit a marine sergeant! There was ample and adequate proof of this business of trying to rehabilitate an individual’s control of his environment.

You can definitely take a leaf from that book. If you are trying to fix up some individual— process him— you had better find out when and where this individual got convinced that he was MEST, where he had to be so afraid of his environment that he couldn’t fight it anymore. You will find some interesting stuff. Actually, there is data in that which could be applied to psychotics, very definitely.

There is a lot to this, when you talk about handling the environment. What is the environment? It merely consists of matter (with organisms as a subdivision of matter), energy, space and time, in all of their forms and guises; anything that an organism can do to matter, energy, space and time; anything that matter, energy, space and time can do to matter, energy, space and time in the environment, and anything other organisms can do to it. This is the basic activity in which human beings are engaged.

In the navy we used to have a signal system known as MERSIGS; that is an abbreviation for merchant signals. The British navy invented it. I think we had at one time three sets of flags. There were three systems we were trying to use, more or less simultaneously, up in the North Atlantic in 1942. Nobody had adjusted any systems yet. There was the British- navy system, and there was our navy system and then there was the merchant system. These were signal flags; they were in code books.

These are very interesting flags; they have various designs and so forth. There is Able and there is Baker and there is Cast, Dog and all the rest. Each flag has its own pattern and its own colors. They are quite distinctive. The main thing these flags do is regulate formation steaming. The command ship runs up a "turn nine" signal, and when all the ships have it and that is two- blocked and Execute, everybody turns ninety degrees to the left. The moment the flag is jerked in a certain way, everybody does it.

So, that is a flag system. You hoist a little flag on one ship and somebody else on another ship sees that, and then the one on the first ship Executes and the second ship moves in a certain direction.

You don’t have to know anything about MERSIGS, but you sure should take a good solid look at a signal system and say to yourselves, "Language isn’t any different than that, is it?" Because it is not. All language is, is trying to hoist something up in one space and getting a register over in another space. That is what it is. It is a code system. It is so far from being the thing it is talking about that it is an actual code based on that thing. That is language; it is just a signal system.

Now, you want to repair this fleet that has just been shot up: Do you suppose all you would have to do is edit their signal books? Just go over their signal books and straighten out the signal books and erase all the signals, and then the fleet would all be repaired— the Hood would be in good shape again and the Bismarck would still be afloat and everything would just be beautiful?

I hope this hits home, because that is what running phrases is. When you are running phrases all you are doing is running the signals that were put out by one organism to another organism regarding conduct in matter, energy, space and time. That is all you are doing when you are doing processing about words. Now, words are important to this society and they have an important part in processing, but they are just a perceptic. But if you think that all you have to do is erase the signal books and that this immediately puts new plates and new guns on all these battle wagons, then you are nuts!

Don’t let words go on occupying the level of importance which they have been. Words have become terribly important in this society because people wanted them to be important. It is much easier to say to somebody "Damn you! I’ll beat your head in unless you . . . !" than to actually beat his head in. But the words, the threat, are put up as a signal. It says, "You are running into dangerous shoal waters. Better sheer off!" Those words did that other individual no damage whatsoever; no damage was done. But those words go back to the time when this other individual did have his head beaten in.

Now, he knows what a head is; that is an object. Beat is fairly easy; that is a repetitive pounding. In is "in"; the head is round, and if you dented a head, it would be "in." "Beat your head in." As far as the Damn you is concerned, God knows what that means!

The voice tone injects a noise at a jagged level which is intended to be dangerous. It is an approximation of avalanches or something of the sort. Man mimics; he mimics dangerous things when he wants to sound dangerous, and he mimics pleasant things when he wants to sound pleasant, and so forth. There are more sounds than we have ever heard of that we don’t use.

As a matter of fact, you can take a little child and just approximate the sound levels to him; say "Rrroowrr!" and he will lurch. And that is just as effective as saying "If you don’t, you won’t have any supper; you know that, dear? And you want to be a good boy, don’t you?"

Two people walking down the street are making pleasant sounds. Normally they don’t care what the other one is saying particularly, they are just glad to be together walking down the street. Or, if you took a transcript of the conversation of a boy and a girl riding through a park under a bright moon, I am sure that you would get something that would read rather idiotically— but you don’t have the voice tones. The voice tones sound like a pair of lovebirds.

That is just sound, and the sound itself is used as a signal. You are just on the first level of abstraction when you are making sound do something.

Now, this is a very tricky thing, to make a certain sound and thereby make another organism do something. You say, "Rrroowrr!" and this other organism jumps. That is really quite a trick. It is a gimmick. It hasn’t any actuality; it is an illusion.

Of course, if you really want to get this organism trained so it will jump, the first time you say "Rrroowrr!" hit him! Pretty soon you get so that you can omit the hitting and just say "Rrroowrr!" and the organism will jump. You have the organism figured out now, and he has it figured out that every time he hears "Rrroowrr!" it is the pain on the face. They are the same thing, so he wants to avoid the pain on the face and he jumps. That is language.

As a matter of fact, there are about five or six sounds that are dog sounds. I studied dog language one time; I had a lot of fun for about three days. I thought, "If perceptics are merely perceptics and they have nothing to do with language, then you should be able to get the basic language of a dog." What is the basic language of a dog? It has something like "Hello" or "How are you?" It has "Get out of here, this is my front yard," "I am hurt," "I want in," and "I am so sad and lonely." There are five "words," you could call them. All you have to do is approximate these words. And by the way, they really communicate. I went around the neighborhood and talked to all the dogs; I learned a lot too. These dogs all understood this communication very easily— more so than I.

Nearly all animals have some communicational level. Men have gotten extremely complicated about what they do with their communications. And because we punish each other so hard on signal systems, and because man is in such a tremendous level of competition for his control of the universe, he really starts taking this language seriously. A man is so full of theta and is so bound and determined to adventure on a conquest of the universe even at the age of two— that people really have to hold him down. They hold him down the only way they possibly can: they cuff him around and they restrict his time and they send him to bed and they don’t give him any supper, and so on. The training that underlies language can get pretty grim. But more importantly than that, all the rest of a child’s life he accumulates his most basic locks and his most severe locks on the pain training which went with the language.

I want to call your attention to that, very definitely, as something quite vital to your processing. For instance, take a slap in the face that means "Get out of here! " The slap impinges on this child’s face. Out of this go two lines. One says "Get out." All the "Get out" s go into a chain; "get" is a partial chain to that, "out" is a chain to it and the voice tone in which this was uttered is another chain to it.

The other line is a touch on the face driving the organism sideways. This is basic. The language is just illusion; it is there but it isn’t of vital importance. Each time the organism is driven sideways is an incident on a lock chain, and each time something touches this cheek is an incident on a lock chain— independent of "Get out." This line says, "You are MEST. You are losing out in your conquest of the physical universe." And the only reason "Get out" could be enforced upon this child at this time is that the basic definition of "Get out" is "Get out because I can enforce upon you the fact that I am in control of this physical universe and you aren’t."

Now, later on he finds out what the words get out mean. He hears somebody say "Get out" and then sees somebody get out, so he knows what they are. And he is made to get out himself, so he is given a demonstration of what the words mean and so on. This thing is defined. But tactile, kinesthesia and a time interval are all contained in that definition. That is the Serrating line.

At the bottom is the engram, and the engram has, in a very interesting sense, its most important factors in that the individual lost all self determinism over his own organism for a certain period of time. That is dangerous. Then other organisms reached in over that inert organism at that moment, or MEST was able to do further things to this organism without being otherwise interrupted. That is most important. It is important that that individual lost a segment of time there; it wasn’t recorded in the conscious mind but only recorded cellularly. And much more important, the individual couldn’t move for that space of time; it may have been trying to move but it couldn’t, and that is the basic importance of an engram.

How the devil are you going to get away with running engrams, then, if you don’t have any kinesthesia or any space or these other perceptions? It doesn’t matter what the person said. The person could say "You’re a walleyed Turk and you’re growing horns," and sure enough, later on with enough of this stuff you would eventually get an engramic- phrase chain which would produce terrific results. But that produces results in exact ratio to the number of locks accumulated on top of that engram. These language locks get more and more effective the less effective an individual is in controlling his environment.

A person’s travel down the tone scale is a travel down the ability to handle the environment. The command value of action phrases increases as an individual is less and less able to handle his environment. So I am giving you another string to the bow— these MEST locks. You want to get an engram out? Work these MEST locks all the way up the chain. You are then uncovering the main perceptions of the engram itself.

This is pretty basic material. It all evolves from the science of perceptics. About the first thing that you get in the science of perceptics is an evaluation of not only what the perceptics are and how they came into being and why they came into being but also which are the more important perceptics. For instance, the perception of space is more important than the perception of smell. The perception of time, at least some perception of time, is certainly more important than the perception of hearing or sound.

Think it over for a moment, and think what would happen to a person if all of his perception of time was gone. He wouldn’t know when to eat; he would starve to death. That is about the first thing that would happen to him. His perception of time might be regulated on a perception of hunger, but that is one of the things the perception of time is regulated on.

As far as a perception of an object is concerned, what would happen if a person had no way to perceive an object?

These, then, are the big packages: space, time, energy and matter. Now we break those down to the individual perceptics of seeing matter, seeing space, seeing energy, seeing time— in other words, what we have as communication perceptics. We are perceiving only, really, four classes of things, no matter how many perceptics we have in order to perceive them. And all the perceptions sum up to perceiving matter, energy, space and time.

If you want perception of matter, energy, space and time, then, if you want a preclear to really uncover his time file, his data file, his time track, his occluded memories and all the rest of it, you had certainly better work on this MEST level.

It isn’t that you can’t do tricks with phrases and language. We talked a few lectures back about the fact that what the auditor validates begins to be more powerful. When the auditor starts validating language and nothing but language, all the language in the fellow’s bank begins to charge up as powerful. Actually, the auditor can sit there and pay attention to language until he practically drives his preclear mad. We are attempting now to get onto a more rational basis. There are two basic abstractions of thinking: forgetting and remembering.

We are onto abstract thought and off straight perception; perception itself is the most basic. I perceive a glass of water. That is fundamental. But when we get into abstractions of thought, the first abstractions we run into are forget and remember. That is getting really abstract.

How do you make a child forget? How do you make a child remember? Ask yourself those questions, or ask them of your preclear. You had better ask "How do you make a child remember?" first, since your preclear will get pretty lost when you start to ask "How do you make a child forget?" because when you start to ask him "How do you make a child forget?" he goes into the forgetter chain.

You say "How would a deaf- mute make a child forget something?" "How would a deaf- mute make a child remember something?" and various things happen: preclears get all foggy, they start to go anaten, they get confused. If you let them work that out for themselves and just insist that they work it out, they will all of a sudden turn up a terrific amount of stuff.

The next axiom on that is that forgetting is being made to leave something alone. That is the basic concept of forgetting: leave it alone. You take it out and hide it; you get it out of sight. You push the child away from it. In other words, you repeat this and repeat this until he has forgotten it. Understand that this is dangerous, and that forget is a dangerous word and a dangerous action as far as aberration is concerned, because what will a child do the first moment that you take this out of his sight? He will say, "Give it back." Only he won’t be able to talk properly at the time he is being taught this. He will just pad over and pick it up, and you take it out of his hand and put it away again. He will say, "Rrrrr!" and he will get mad and try it again. He will try to get it anyhow, and if you take it away from him then, he will cry. Then what does he do? He says, "I don’t want it anyway." He is in apathy.

So the whole forgetter chain on any case is an apathy chain. That means it is out of sight. The emotion on stuff that is really forgotten is apathy, so if you use this flag system and you say "Forget it," you are saying "Go into apathy about that." This translates straight through with people.

Now take the rest of it: "Remember something." Remember is an enforced thing; the self- determinism of the child has been interfered with. A person can actually be forced to remember until he forgets; you can make it that painful that "You’ve got to do this with this object," or "You have to move your bottle over here." You pick up the child’s hand and put it on the bottle, or you move the bottle, or you spank the child unless he does move the bottle— or get in the kindling or go to work on time or something of the sort. And he has to go through this action.

Memory is normally, as far as training goes, an enforced thing, and that is an apathy track too. You have gotten him down to the point where he will go through a rote. The first time you did this to this child, he had to move his bottle from one place to another. He didn’t like that. So you made him do it again, and if you made him do it very forcefully and so forth he probably got mad. And then you said, "Get mad at me, will you? Move it!" and he started down the line. He probably tried to make it disappear about this point or something of the sort, and then he cried, and then finally he moved it and you said, "That’s a good boy."

If this kid ever has a chance to resurge in life, all the things which are good will probably be the things he will eschew. His behavior and conduct can really be messed up in this fashion. It never occurs to anybody that if you just leave the child sort of loose in an environment— you give him an environment in which he can’t be hurt too badly and which can’t hurt him too much— and if you just let him learn these various things and so forth, he will learn how to handle it. The society is not arranged so children can live; that is a cinch.

Children would eventually, by mimicry, learn these things. They would see Mama leaving without her purse and Mama would say, "Oh, I forgot." And the child would think, "Forget. Yeah, Mama leaves her purse. And then Daddy leaves his car keys. He forgot. They must be characterizing some sort of an action. I wonder what it could be? Must be a lapse of memory."

Now, there is a secondary axiom: A person does with his thoughts what he normally does with MEST objects. Every action is approximated in his thinking machine. He is trying to do the same thing with his thinking machine that he is doing with MEST. This is very silly.

People think that people think in words. That is one of the commonest errors— the idea that people think in words. They don’t. "Stream of consciousness" is some kind of a demon circuit: "Well, shall I go down to the corner grocery store or shall I not? Let me see. I need some pipe tobacco, but I could go tomorrow morning." This is a picture of a man thinking. Actually, thinking is done in milliseconds and the demon circuit then gets around to articulating it all, and that takes up a lot of time. This is "Think twice before speaking once," and all that sort of thing. A fellow gets to be in bad shape.

Don’t underestimate the value of language to aberrate. Language can aberrate, very thoroughly, but it aberrates in direct ratio to the vigor with which the individual is taught language.

A very good exercise for you to do would be to take a page out of a newspaper and go through the various MEST actions that these words represent. You will find out that, for instance, some fellow was knocked down (down— toward the ground) by (by— direct causative action; beside) a car. It always is "beside the car," then, because the car would still be standing there if the fellow was knocked down. But it isn’t always; that is how language gets sort of confused. So, he was knocked down by a car and spent three days in (in— inside, naturally) a hospital. That is all very comprehensible because you can name these objects. Objects have names attached to them. General semantics was only really concerned with the fact that objects were labeled. Labels and objects became confused. I am showing you the action line that goes along with this. This action line is fantastic. You start looking at a few sentences in English and you will start seeing how language is the motion concept of MEST.

If you can learn this thoroughly enough yourself, as an auditor, you can use it mechanically. If you can learn it as a concept you are actually putting a mine under a considerable percentage of your own personal aberration. You will start blowing it galley- west if you try. It is a step forward on a concept. You do a little MEST Processing on yourself and you suddenly start to get a definition for yourself of what language is. Follow the language in the newspaper and you can prove to yourself, if you want to, that language is merely representative signals of objects and action. That is what language is: symbols of objects, actions and states of beingness.

Underlying all of that is reality, but the language is illusion. If you process people on language alone, you are processing illusion. What happens when you keep validating the dub- in of a preclear? He just dubs and dubs, and goes down further and further. When you start validating language you are doing the same thing. So don’t start to worry about processing language.

NOW, MEST Processing questions turned out to be very numerous; the combinations are too many for them to be easily listed. So we have made up a mimeographed issue that is coming out, and it contains how you mark a pack of playing cards. You can write in ink on a deck of playing cards and name each card according to these directions, and you can deal off for yourself MEST Processing questions

You will really hit some ring- tailed snorters, too. I tested this with one of the staff. We were sitting across the leaf of a desk from each other, and we were busting locks as a kind of game. You sort of feel language coming apart at the hinges when you get into the real stuff.

I expect you hereafter, then, in intensive processing, to get your cases started in the first three or four hours of the thirty- six hour package, really get down to rock bottom of what is wrong with the case in the next six or seven hours, have the primary computation out at the end of twelve hours of the thirty- six hour intensive, have the person a good release in twenty hours and cleared in thirty- six!