MOTION AND EFFORT - PART IIA lecture given on 20 August 1951Self- Determinism An auditor out in California wrote in recently and said, "It seems to me that there are two levels of Dianetic processing: One you might call ‘light processing, ’ which consists of Straightwire and perhaps even Lock Scanning —certainly Repetitive Straightwire. The other one consists of ‘deep processing, ’ which would address engrams and secondaries." I think that is a very good division for you to keep in mind. It is possible to do light processing with the assistance of the author of a book, as in Self Analysis, or even by yourself. People do it all the time; they go around wondering why they are worried about something and then all of a sudden they remember an analytical moment and spring a lock. That is light processing and it is perfectly legitimate. Deep processing, the address of engrams and secondaries, is something that a person should certainly never touch on a self- auditing basis, at least until a proven technique which permits it comes forward. And I don’t think one will come forward. I have been at this a little while longer than the rest of the people, and don’t think I didn’t fish around about three years ago to see if there weren’t some kind of an engram- processing technique that would make it possible to do auto- processing. There isn’t. A person who is self- auditing hits one of these unconscious areas and his analyzer goes down; it shuts off and he comes up out of the unconscious area in another engram, so he runs a piece of that one and the analyzer shuts down again. So he comes up out of that, runs part of a secondary and gets off three tears and then the analyzer shuts down. Next he hits basic- basic, and then he hits a grouper and the track collapses and he says, "I don’t feel well." The old E- therapyl technique was "great stuff": it was absolutely guaranteed to make a nut out of you overnight. So that is the process of going around self- auditing. If you find anybody self- auditing, the best favor you can do for him is to extrovert him to a point where he will stop self- auditing. Now, this classifying of Dianetic processing into these two classes gives you a little bit better insight into it in general. There are these two classes. I don’t think light processing would ever pick up all of a person’s engrams by a long way, any more than a case could be run fully, exclusively and forevermore without straightening up any locks in it. That would be a pretty tough job. The main thing I want to tell you here is this: Evidently what we are trying to do is whip death. It takes a long time for a person to find that out. w He has to fool around with this for quite a while, but he falls wise to the fact one day—" Gee, the Grim Reaper— that’s what we’re trying to lick!" What is the cycle of death? The accumulation of physical pain, secondaries and general enturbulences culminates finally in a deterioration of the organism and the only solution is death. Death has been a solution for organisms for the last few million years. And organisms have been trying to lick death. Maybe we have taken a pretty good seven- leagued- boot stride in that direction; we are probably a long way from there but we do have an indicated course. Nothing impresses one so much along that line as observing some woman who has had her life considerably overburdened by grief, then knocking out a few grief charges on her and having her immediately stop associating with sixty- year- old men and start getting whistled at by college boys. The most startling case of that kind of which I know happened in Kansas City. One of the Foundation people audited the widow of a doctor who had died a few weeks before. He had been one of the mainsprings of Dianetics in Kansas City and the auditor thought Dianetics more or less owed it to him to do something for his widow. This girl was dark- eyed, undershadowed, and her posture was gone. She looked pretty old; her skin texture looked pretty bad and so on. So this auditor worked her for nine hours one Saturday. I saw her on Friday night and she looked terrible. Then I saw her on Saturday night, twenty- four hours later. I was looking at a woman of about twenty- five whose skin had a very nice youthful glow to it, who had no bags under her eyes and no wrinkles. Here was a miracle! That was the most astonishing one I have ever seen. I had seen this happen slowly, but I had never seen it happen in twenty- four hours before. I started to think, then, that what we are really whipping is death— certainly a little piece of death. Theoretically, there isn’t any reason an organism has to die except to make room for other organisms. And if one wants to be egocentric about being an organism, he really doesn’t share the enthusiasm of life for knocking out one strata of organisms so that life can run in another one. This is antipathetic to one’s general purpose. The dickens with going to all this trouble of educating, grooming and training an organism and then kicking the bucket— that is no good! That is inefficient from the viewpoint of the individual. It doesn’t happen to be inefficient from the viewpoint of races and it doesn’t happen to be inefficient at all from the viewpoint of species from period to period. These species ought to improve, and the easiest way to improve a species is to kill off the old species and build a new one. By the birth- death cycle— birth, death, birth, death— modifications of design are made. We would still be playing crystal radios if the mortality rate of the old crystal radio had not knocked it out so we could put another one onto the assembly line. There is always a better experimental model in the laboratory than there is coming off the assembly line— always! However, as organisms, we don’t particularly agree that death is the mechanism. How long can a person live? I don’t know. But I do know that death does not come about— repeat, does not come about— through cellular deterioration or a plotted pattern of life. Death is brought about, evidently, through the stresses of arrested or perpetuated motions against the self- determinism of the individual and by the interruption of the self- determinism of the individual by gravity. That may sound a very strange statement, but it is not. The amount of gravity which a human being overcomes in a year is a constant amongst all human beings, more or less. It is a pretty solid average. The longevity of the species or the longevity of the organism might be determined solely by its capacity to retain its self- determinism in the face of gravity and motion, because its motions are being continually interrupted. Therefore, if the organism has any pain in the basic area, if it has any pain anywhere on the track, it will die more quickly, because it has to keep overcoming these motions and every time it tries to overcome these motions, it is certain that when an organism has a few thousand engrams it is going to get one restimulated. A person’s self- determinism and his longevity are to some degree interdependent. Let’s just advance this as a radical theory— just something that one doesn’t have to believe or anything. We aren’t going to get a proof of this for scores of years anyhow. I intend to be whistled at, though, forty years from now. Earlier, I gave you the tone scale on deterioration of life and the approximate tone the life is at, and I showed you how it fell off down the line when you plot it against time. You can plot a person on the tone scale by the number of his dreams which have died, or by his ability to persist in the face of the limitations of his environment— to persist against the forces of his environment which are leveled against him. It is very interesting that threescore years and ten, on the average, would be just so much interruption. The organism today may very well be subjected to more limitations from the environment than the organism was originally. But this organism sort of fell into line on this design: Man walks upright and he performs certain motions. It may be that cellular structure makes it possible to perform these motions for just seventy years before the dwindling spiral goes out the bottom again. One of my grandfathers was ninety- five and still walking ten miles a day just to keep his health up a little bit. He would never ride with anybody; he would walk. However, he was a man who had never known space limitations; when somebody moved into sight on the horizon and settled down he figured the country was getting too crowded for him, so he would move on. He was a man who was adjusted to lots of space. His son was subjected to fewer limitations than others, perhaps, save that he had seven daughters and one son. They really raised the mischief with him. He died when he was sixty- four. He did not have this feeling of overcoming space. What are the attitudes of the various ages of life? They are the attitudes of, How well can we overcome our environment? How much can we move in this environment? How much of this environment can we handle? We find that there are certain definite restrictors in the environment which are unalterable, and one of those restrictors is gravity. Maybe this upright organism is delimited to some degree by gravity, because the gravity would keep on making lock chains— MEST lock chains— continually to some degree. Now, on the reverse, if a person just set out to conquer his environment on the validation side, and kept on going and did keep himself above the environmental level and so on, he could keep going for quite a while. But how would he have to do this? In order to validate his conquest of the environment he would have to keep demonstrating that he had freedom of motion in that environment and he would keep validating himself into a higher and higher longevity. He would have to have freedom of motion in the environment. Freedom of motion does not include sitting behind the wheel of an automobile getting stopped by traffic lights, by the way. One of the Freudian boys told me one time, "It’s obvious about automobiles," and he was explaining all about it. "You see, every automobile is really the womb, and the reason men like automobiles is because they have sexual appeal." I went out and I could imagine myself kissing this battered, mud- splattered machine; I decided he was wrong. I thought about it a long time. However, it suddenly occurred to me that there are three or four things we have set up in this society which are just lead- pipe cinches when it comes to aberration. One of them is a traffic light. It is perfectly arbitrary: it doesn’t matter whether cars are coming or anything else, the traffic light changes and you stop. This is a flash signal system which continually interrupts one’s self- determinism. Another thing is that an automobile keeps the wind, the rain, the dust and so on off you, and one is sitting in a position in an automobile which is just a suggestion of a womb position. When you are running along in an automobile, you are not really conquering space at all; you are sitting there completely protected and a carrier is taking you around— and if that isn’t prenatal I don’t know what is. It is no wonder people are nuts in this society! If a fellow would get out and walk it would be quite different. Look at the difference from a horse- assisted society: Here the fellow got on a horse— this was a conquest of an organism, he was on top of the horse. Furthermore, he was controlling the horse and the horse was very valuable MEST. An organism is a more valuable piece of MEST than an inanimate object. Riding a horse required exercise and motion on the rider’s part; he also had the perception of air against him and he could demonstrate that he was conquering his environment. He felt it! He had a definite sensation of doing so because there was a lot of exercise concerned in riding. That society wouldn’t be one, then, that would get as Serrated as an automobile- carried society. But what chance does a fellow have to really exert himself against his environment? Longevity may very well go up because of penicillin, better food and so on, but aberration goes up too. And this would result, in a very few generations, because of contagion of aberration, in markedly shortening life by markedly increasing the incidence of psychosomatic illness which would be concomitant with any mental aberration. All this is very highly speculative; I am just trying to punch home to you the fact that these locks exist. Now, one could overcome, by his own motion, the realisation that at one time or another he has not been able to move if he perceived the fact that he was moving. Perhaps one’s perceptics could be so dull that he wouldn’t even really perceive he was moving. How bright is the environment in which you live? How good can food taste? That is a question that isn’t very easy to answer until you have suddenly experienced a tremendous resurgence and you found that the environment had gotten so colorful that it was almost blinding! You hit something in which you have been held for half a lifetime and you come out of it and your sight perceptic turns on. All of a sudden red becomes red ! And you look at this environment and it is a strange world to you. It is like the optometrist would like to have you think you look at the world after you put on a pair of his glasses. I never saw such a frustrated man in my life as an ophthalmologist here in Wichita; he got so mad at me because I wouldn’t agree with him that I had to put on a pair of glasses immediately. He told me I had to. I don’t believe this fellow could possibly be part of Wichita because no good citizen of Wichita would be going around trying to hang glasses on people’s noses with positive suggestions. I took an examination for the Veterans Administration and this was part of the examination, but they didn’t have any ophthalmologist at the Veterans Hospital so I had to take the examination downtown. This doctor ran these whirligigs and blinding, flashing lights and crosses and so forth. He found my eyesight was down to about 20/ 17 or something like that. It used to be something like 20/ 3 and 20/ 5. It really was a case of "What wall?" But now it has gotten pretty good; I have ditched my glasses. They started out thick and got less each time, and now I have thrown them out. Anyway, this doctor found out he actually could put a prescription on my nose, and it infuriated him that I wouldn’t accept it. He said, "Now, here’s your prescription so that you can get a pair of glasses." "I don’t want a pair of glasses!" "Why, a pair of glasses would keep you from squinting! " "I don’t squint." "Well, what’s that crease there between your eyes if you don’t squint?" "That’s because I used to squint! That’s ironing out." So he turned on the other angle: "The world would look so much brighter to you— things would look so much better to you, so much sharper, so much clearer." "But I don’t want a pair of glasses." "But it isn’t a very powerful prescription you would have to get and it’s very simple." "But I don’t intend to wear glasses again, ever." "Well, it will stop you squinting!" I couldn’t get anywhere with him. He walked out and came back in carrying this card he was supposed to write on, and he looked at it and said, "Your name is Hubbard, isn’t it?" "That’s right, Doctor." He very frostily signed it at the bottom and showed me to the door. I could just see him thinking, "Dianetics— that’s going to ruin everything, I know." He was dramatising a past motion. What kind of a motion was it? These terrific aberrational patterns, like going down and volunteering to join the army or voting for some of these politicians, all have their seat in an effort to answer or to meet in some way a situation having to do with motion. And they will all boil down to this. Now, there are two reasons a person who is stuck in birth gets fat: one, he is trying to expand, and two, the growth factor at birth is very high, so that he gets a glandular adjustment which feeds him lots of food, a lot of fatty tissue. But it is interesting that there should be such a tie- in between motion and age, that there should be such a tie- in between motion and death, that there should be such a tie- in between motion and sanity. If we were in the field of psychiatry now, we could take a patient and do some human experimentation, going to some enormous extreme. We could put this person in a small room and put him in a straitjacket so his hands would remain crossed, put muffs on him, chain him down to a bed— restrict his motion— and then observe him and see if he didn’t become more psychotic than before. Of course, nobody would do that to a human being! But if we were really mean and vicious we could try this out and see if it increased the aberration. Actually, the reverse has been done in several institutions in America now, through the efforts of a society which is trying to do something about these treatments. By the way, we really don’t have to worry about psychiatry. Do you know that there are thirty- five societies so violently opposed to psychiatry— they even call themselves anti- psychiatric societies and so forth— that they are just gibbering, frothing screamers on the subject of psychiatry? And there is a society which is trying to knock all of the institutions in America out from under psychiatric control and so on. Once you start to look into the field you find out they really have enemies. Why should we worry? So we are not going to worry anymore; I wasn’t worried anyhow. But the restraints were taken off every patient in a mental institution, and they gave the patients a little sunlight and fresh air, all at once. That is all they did to them! And the incidence of disturbance and violence, riot and other upset almost vanished in that institution. So they tried it in another institution with the same result. Just restoring some freedom to these inmates jumped their sanity level. Therefore, by restricting an individual you can reduce his sanity level. You certainly can. So, what do you as auditors want to do? You want to go back into the past and find all the times when a person was restricted. What is pain? We have a lot of technical explanation for what pain is, but, actually, pain is the highest- level resistance between the organism and the environment. That is pain. In other words, that is super arrestment of motion, one way or the other. Did you ever consider it peculiar that burns were painful? When a piece of metal becomes hot it vibrates at a higher speed; there is more motion in it. You heat up a piece of iron and the motion of its component parts speeds way up. There is a great deal more motion involved in it. Energy is just that— lots more motion. A burn is nothing more nor less than a corrosive action on the cells. MEST has been speeded up to a vibration which is above the level of vibration which can be withstood by cells, and this causes a corrosive action. There is an increased and intensified vibration and an energy emanation; that is all heat is. Electrical energy is just the vibration of electrons, a particle flow. A lightning bolt is just a particle flow, actually, traveling at a very high rate of speed. This also has a corrosive action. But if you slow down the motion of molecules too much so that it no longer compares with the motion of the physical body’s cells, you get corrosive action again. There is no difference whatsoever between corrosive action from too much heat and corrosive action from the absence of heat, or cold. It doesn’t matter whether you put your hand on a piece of dry ice or a hot stove, you get the same physiological reaction. Now, we evidently have to be in a universe which is vibrating at a certain speed to exist, and sure enough, that is true. That is why we have clothes, houses, oil heaters and so forth. We are just bound and determined to keep the MEST in our vicinity at some temperature which is compatible to our 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Man is in a highly critical state: he can’t get too cold and he can’t get too hot or he perishes. The motion has got to be pretty much just so or he can’t live. A man couldn’t live in too much gravity either. If you suddenly jumped a man’s gravity five times he would be in a very bad state. Imagine living, with the same physical strength that you have, on a world where you weighed a thousand pounds. You couldn’t get up off the floor. What would happen to a man if he tried to put 840 pounds on his back? That would tear his muscles, break his legs— it would be quite painful, wouldn’t it? A sudden impact of motion on the human body or the continuous overstress of weight on the body, or any one of these things where there is too much contact and where the body has insufficient effort to overcome it, causes physical pain to greater or lesser degree. The lesser degree of it would be mild, like the pull of gravity on your feet as you walk down the street. Because you are moving and because you are overcoming gravity, there is enough victory contained in it to overweigh the other, but there is still a cellular drag. Gravity becomes aberrative only when a fellow goes pretty well down the line; when he has had a lot of accumulated, arrested motions, lots of locks, then gravity would really start to take hold. It takes a long time. Individuals start to bow down to gravity as they get older; they get smaller and so on. But that is just one example of a kind of stress you have to overcome. The only reason I am telling you about gravity is that it just happens to be a kind of stress that we are all familiar with. I don’t know if you have ever thought of it that way before; you get so used to it. You lift your hand and you can feel gravity. If you have ever watched a little iron bar tug toward and jump on a magnet you have seen that the magnet is exerting a compulsive force on this little iron bar. Now, if you want to feel the same manifestation, just raise your arm. You will see that there is a pull. You are overcoming that pull twenty- four hours a day, one way or the other. That pull isn’t laying in very heavily if you are overcoming it continually and successfully— in other words, if you are successful in life and you can move around and so forth. But when you are tired or hurt it starts really laying in the locks. That is arrested motion. In order to get a fellow up the tone scale you would have to get him at least to perceive that he was winning. And the way to get him to perceive he is winning is to get him to perceive that he is recording effort in the overcoming or continuance of motions. If you can get him to recover that perceptic he will come up the tone scale faster. That perceptic is worth recovering. There are many entrances toward it: sight, sound— all of these things are aids and assistances. Observation of external motion. What you are finally working down toward is awareness of one’s own body, awareness of one’s existence. Then you can sharpen up that awareness of existence; you will be amazed what a difference it makes to an individual’s ability to think. The two tie together very strongly, because a person parallels with his thoughts what he is able to do in the field of the finite universe. If he loses something, it will get lost in thought too; that is a forgetter. If a person keeps failing one way or the other in life— if he keeps failing to move MEST when he wants to, if he keeps failing to make his efforts good, if he keeps failing to exert his self- determinism on his environment— then he will start failing with his thoughts and imagination. You can actually take a fellow who has a very bright, sparkling imagination and put him in an occupation which is sedentary, where he has no victories to weigh against the defeats of the finite universe in the field of motion, and you will watch the deterioration of an intellect. You will certainly watch the deterioration of his imagination. This happens to practically every writer. It takes, on the average, three years of working hard, sitting at a typewriter and not getting out, to wreck a writer. It isn’t the stress of rejection slips; he just isn’t moving around. It doesn’t matter when he gets up, it doesn’t matter when he goes to bed; he is his own boss. It takes just about three years of that and he is through. If he is really good and very, very persistent, he can generally last five or six years, but what is carrying him the last two years is not his imagination. What is carrying him through is the mechanical, technical skill which he acquired just with words and the mechanisms of his field, and he will go on that alone. It is elementary that a young writer has all the spark and dash and an old writer has nothing but technical accuracy and skill; he becomes a craftsman rather than an inspired artist. What comes in and slaps these writers on the head is they just aren’t overcoming the physical universe; they start to live exclusively along a strata which will not support itself, which is the strata of thought. It has to accompany a certain amount of effort. There used to be in the days of the ancient Greeks what were called walking academies. They never taught sitting down; all the lecturing and so forth was done in motion. It is interesting that as our society declines now, we teach sitting down. We ride to work sitting down. Man is going to have his legs rot off one of these days, and it will serve him right! Then he will really be aberrated. Now, you could sum all this up by saying that man is in contest with his physical environment. But he is in contest particularly with the motions in his physical environment or his motions as they attempt to overcome the physical environment. Just to give you an idea of how this works, I want to give you a little demonstration.
I was on a small yacht, and I had been out in the Gulf Stream in a DE, with a wind blowing against the Gulf Stream. A DE is a pretty good- sized ship, about the size of an old four- piper. And the wind blowing against the Gulf Stream made such a cross- chop that of course the bow and the stern of the DE went up simultaneously, but the area around the stacks went down. As a matter of fact, on one ship I had, we had hinges painted on the deck with a little sign, "Don’t stand here, you’ll get your ankles broken." You could, by the way, look at that ship when she was going through very tough waves and watch her sunfish just like a bronc. She was built out of the thinnest stuff they had so that they could charge the government the most. Anyhow, this DE was just bad enough. There was a big gag on board that they didn’t have to take in any water through the condenser pipes of the hull— they just had a valve open on the stack and they used all the water that came down the stack to cool the engines. So, a couple of years later I was out there in a yacht, and the wind was blowing against the Gulf Stream and I ran into one of these seas. That yacht was just all over the sky. The worst part of it was trying to secure a sheet that had gotten loose from the clew of the jib, standing up on the starboard bow, because the deck would leave me, and about the time I tried to get my feet adjusted to catch the deck, the hawse would come up and hit me. It was not soft either. This was a real yacht. Yachts are like kept women; people spend an awful lot of money on them and they are no good for anything. They are just lovely, but so impractical! Those beautiful varnished decks that are put on them— you could stick to them easier if you painted the whole deck with grease. Then you put on top of this varnish the fine salt crust that you get off the Gulf Stream, and a bear on skates wouldn’t have had any more fun. I had about three men with me, and we were black and blue for about two weeks, and all we had done was go outside of the harbor at Miami and foolishly take a look around and come back in again. Now, there is a violence of motion, because it is uncertain motion, it is unpredictable, and a person will get a holder out of it. Why? Because he is trying to check himself at every motion that happens, otherwise he will be thrown against something. That should give you an idea. I am trying to illustrate a point: This stuff is trying to move you all the time, so you have to brace yourself against it. That is a holder. It is highly aberrative.
By the way, she thinks he is screaming and crying because he doesn’t like her words. That isn’t the case; it is because he is being held. That is the most effective thing you can do to a child to beat him down along the line. All right. What about a time when you were trying to stop and something was interfering with your trying to stop and you managed to stop anyhow? (pause)
Now, if you could get this perceptic into full play, and if you could get these motion locks off the engrams— either by just unbaling whole chains of them with Validation Processing or by knocking them out as enthetal locks— you would unburden the engram of some of the most serious entheta that is on it. Grief finds the body pretty badly immobilized. A person does not move around much in grief. A person only moves when he is told to move in apathy. There is no self- determinism in apathy; he is exteriorly determined.
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