MOTION AND EMOTION IN PROCESSING

A lecture given on 27 August 1951

Putting "I" Back in Control

I have been working recently on a new experimental technique. I set out to find out something, as one usually does when he sets up experiments.

I have not and will not give up the concept that one of these fine days we will be able to hit a push button someplace in the human anatomy and have the preclear hit the ceiling, bounce off the floor, stand up, glow a bright purple for a couple of minutes and be all set. But this happy circumstance has not yet arrived.

I have just been testing an avenue that might possibly lead to this, and I got the hives and a headache, and I was pretty badly off for a while.

In this lecture I am going to tell you about motion and emotion and in particular the human mind along the analogy of a switchboard. If you understand this very well, you can understand quite a few things.

We begin with the awareness- of- awareness unit. This might be called the theta center control board or it might be called the central part of the central nervous system. It is the inner sanctum of inner sanctums, or it might be the outer sanctum; I don’t know where this "I" is located and neither does anybody else, but I am honest and I say I don’t know.

Somebody might consider the "I" as being resident in the head. This would be an easy thing to say since one does have two eyes in his head, and reactively, of course, "I" is then in the head. As I have mentioned before, the Greek thought it was in his stomach, and maybe he was much smarter about that. If you start examining the world of reality you will find it has a lot to do with the stomach. The indication is that life is not worth living unless you eat. But "I" is resident someplace; it is very hard for us to conceive of something that is not resident anyplace.

You can conceive of a switchboard that will carry messages, receive reactions, record and store information and you can conceive of this as existent at some distance from its commander in chief. In other words, you can conceive of a switchboard being in Augusta and the commander in chief being in Topeka, so if he wants something done in Wichita it has to come through Augusta. Theoretically, you could go into Augusta and take a scalpel to the switchboard— or a pair of pliers or some other device— and you could just fix up that switchboard royally and the message would never get to Wichita. You could do a lot of things to this switchboard. You could put voltmeters on it and you could carefully measure the fact that somebody was calling 211 West Douglas in Wichita. That is the data that you could get off there, because this is an impulse line and there is an impulse going through, and the other end of this connection is plainly 211 West Douglas, because you have the telephone number, you look it up and that is 211 West Douglas.

In such a way, you could go around in the human mind and you could find out where all the nerves ended and you could find out that when you jiggled a wire here and a wire there, sparks would fly someplace else. This is very simple. You could also find out that if you plugged in one side of this switchboard and then plugged in the other side with a reversed current on it or something of the sort, you would get entirely different messages. In such a way, you could cut out a piece of the human brain and thereafter the person would see everything upside down, or you could cut out a piece of the human brain and fix it up so no messages would get through. In fact, you could go as far as psychosurgery and kill the person, but we won’t go that far.

Just tapping various parts of the brain— in other words, the various lobes of the brain— to discover where they connect in the body doesn’t give us the residence of "I."

As an electronics man in the Foundation said last year, maybe up someplace on a cloud or something there is somebody sitting in a telephone booth and he keeps pouring orders into this telephone, and it hooks up with the brain and the body acts. Maybe there is someone right next to him in another telephone booth, and if you have two fellows sitting having a Coke or something down below, the two monitors are sitting at some unimaginable distance away giving the orders back through the telephone booths.

Maybe they can also occasionally short- circuit by one fellow leaning out of the telephone booth and saying, "How are you doing?" and the other fellow saying, "I’m doing all right." That would be ESP. Otherwise they would only be sending their orders through the telephone booths and they would be communicating only through air and sound vibrations, as in hearing.

This is just to show you that the problem is an interesting problem. It is not one of these little light problems that you brush off and say it is solved, because, believe me, it is not solved.

For instance, we don’t even know where memory is recorded. Somebody came up with an interesting postulate one day and said it is probably recorded on the track of time. I thought that was interesting. How would we recover a memory if it were recorded exactly on time itself, not recorded in the body? As the flow of time went by, what you perceived would get recorded on it, and then the way you would communicate with this and remember it would be through cells which were really radio sets. They would just communicate back to this point in time when such and such a thing happened.

You can get into some very interesting speculations on this. The whole point is that "I" is apparently a different type of energy from a different source. It is not physical electricity. Nerve impulses go along an ion beaml principle; they travel at the rate of about ten feet a second or something like that. That is not theta traveling; that is an ion- beam electrical transmission.

Theta has as its component parts, evidently, ARC, and the last time I looked at electricity it didn’t add up that way. As a matter of fact, if you want to prove that theta is not electricity, you take a person and you put him on an’operating table and strap him down, give him a hypodermic so he goes to sleep, and then you take a couple of electrodes and put them on his temples and turn the rheostat on full. You watch the sparks fly and Saint Elmo’s fire develop on his hair and on his toe tips, and then you shut it off again. The funny part of it is that this person isn’t as alive as he was before. Even if you put just a little bit in, he would not be as alive as he was before.

However, this cutting down of the person’s aliveness can pass as an "improvement in his neurotic condition." I had that described to me one day by one of the staff. He said there was a fellow in an asylum who used to walk up to the wall and hit the wall, knock big chips out of the wall and get his hand all bloody. So they took him one day and gave him a lot of electric shocks and some psychosurgery and so forth, and after that he would walk up to the wall and just tap it with his fist. That was listed as an improvement. In other words, you could cut a person’s volume down that way.

Now, "I" is definitely in control of the body. I can say that. There are a lot of things I don’t know, but I do know that the amount of control that the awareness- of- awareness unit has over the physical organism and the health and sanity of that organism form a constant. In other words, the less self- determinism "I" has— the less in control "I" is of the body— the less sane he is and the less healthy that body is. This is very easily demonstrated. Any of you auditors recognise this.

So, "I" is definitely in control of the structure to the degree that if you aberrate this awareness- of- awareness unit, the body will aberrate. But there is something funny about it: You don’t necessarily aberrate "I" if you aberrate the body. It doesn’t work backwards as thoroughly as it might, although the source of aberration is that backwards current.

"I" has the remarkable characteristic of being able, evidently, to put enough impulse into the body to practically straighten it out overnight. .

Faith healing is interesting stuff. There is a place down in Ecuador that is really fascinating. People come up there gimping along, and they have leprosy and palsy and everything else, and they walk in to an altar. (It is supposed to be a Catholic church but, confidentially, I don’t think the priests or the natives believe it; the old Inca sun god designs are all around it.) A man will walk in on crutches and then turn around, take the crutches in his hands, pitch them on a pile and go walking on down the mountain. There is a mountain of these crutches there.

In other words, "I" can do some wonderful things.

When a person gets pretty far down the tone scale, of course, he is less and less in contact with the awareness- of- awareness unit. In other words, his reality, his ability to communicate and his affinity go down; he becomes, you might say, heavy on the MEST side of the ledger. He will favor handling the organism or trying to give it therapy from the MEST side, not from the "I" side.

I will say this right now because it is very important and it is something that you really ought to know: As long as you handle processing from the awareness- of- awareness side, the theta side of the switchboard, your preclear is going to get well. You may possibly cure up some psychosomatic illnesses from the motor side of the switchboard, but if you work on it long enough from the motor side of the switchboard— favoring that, processing that, giving that the heavy attention—" I" is going to decrease in effectiveness, the sanity of the preclear is going to drop and he is going to drop on the tone scale. He could theoretically become completely well physically and go utterly mad on the theta side. This is theoretical, but you could actually postulate that.

As a matter of fact, I have worked out a brand- new technique in connection with this, and I will cover that later.

Now, "I" is in control of this organism-— that is, if he is in control of the organism. If the awareness of awareness is in control of the organism and is in control of the environment of the organism to some degree, then he will be pretty healthy. He will be sane and he will have high reality, good affinity and good communication and be way up the tone scale. But when "I" is diminished in control of the organism it is very bad.

"I" could be said to be putting out impulses down to this motor switchboard. I even gave you a postulate of approximately where these switchboards may be located (and they may not be located there): There are two strips on either side of the head, the sensory strip and the motor strip. Evidently, all the muscles and motor system and so forth connect up to an outer strip on the side of the skull. Just inside of it, the various perceptic lines and so forth evidently connect up to the sensory strip.

We could consider this sensory strip to be where theta stops, and the motor strip to be where translation occurs into the organism in MEST terms. Up to this point of the sensory strip, we could postulate that the impulse is carrying forward on theta energy and that there is a booster/ converter arrangement of some sort, and it becomes MEST energy from there on. In other words, theta gets the concept of moving; theta says, "Better get out of here," and that impulse comes down and converts. The muscles which cause one to move then go into function and they are handled directly from the motor strip. This is just a postulate; you can see how this starts adding up in a moment.

These impulses go down to the body and they go down to the environment in general. The body is handled by these impulses. For instance, theta— the awareness of awareness, the "I" of the individual— says, "Turn the eyes," and that impulse comes down and hits the switchboard and the eyes swing after the impulse has been translated into muscular motion or joint motion and so on. That happens as a secondary impulse.

Now, as often as there has been a backlash in this circuit, as often as there has been a kickback in this circuit, there is an aberration. It might be a very heavy one, such as the kickback which occurs during unconsciousness, or it might be a very light one, such as the kickback which occurs when you start to pull out a drawer. Have you ever had a drawer that stuck? You pull a drawer and you don’t expect the kickback; you put an impulse into it, you say "Move" and your muscles pull on the drawer, but the MEST (it is enMEST, actually; somebody low on the tone scale built this drawer or has fixed it up) gets stuck and it jolts back. An impulse goes back up that says, "Didn’t work." The next time you approach the drawer, you put a little more force into it, and of course it sticks harder. You get another impulse up and it says, "That drawer is pretty tough." So the next time you come around to this drawer you begin to develop a feeling that you don’t want to get the things that are in that drawer. Each time you start to pull it out you have a fight with the drawer and every time you do that there is another kickback in that switchboard. "I" says, "The muscles are to do so- and- so and the MEST in the environment is then to do so- and- so," and the impulse goes out, but it doesn’t work that way, so "I" is wrong; you get a kickback and there is a little lockup of the circuit. In other words, it will fuse one of many billions of connections.

That is learning the hard way. If you are fairly high up the tone scale you will pull the drawer all the way out and put some soap on it or something of the sort, and if you let this drawer really worry you into an apathy you won’t do anything about it. There is a point, by the way, where you will fix the drawer and a point where you will never afterwards fix it.

Now, matter, energy, space and time are over on one side of the switchboard, and theta and affinity, communication and reality are on the other— MEST on one side and ARC on the other.

Here is where the postulate of the reactive mind can come in. You could consider there was a reactive mind: all of these assembled kickbacks. "I" said to do something and something else happened. Those assembled kickbacks all lumped together would make a mass of Disconnections, distortions, fusings, upsets, feedbacks, backfires and so forth which would eventually get a person into a "normal" condition. The seat of the reactive mind would be all those kickbacks.

What happens to an individual who is unconscious? "I" has practically been severed out of connection from the muscular controls. "I" becomes submerged, then somebody comes along and moves him and a movement has taken place which "I" did not plan, didn’t record, and which doesn’t register on the theta side of the ledger; but it registers on the MEST side. So it is not into awareness; one is not aware that one has moved. He gets hit by a car one day and he wakes up in the hospital two weeks later. He has been moved, shifted, all sorts of perceptions have been active in his vicinity and they have all been recorded, but not by "I."

In other words, this person has another set of "I’s" moving him around. And that is the way it registers in the switchboard system— that there have been other "I’s" in control of this organism. So the organism is to that degree obedient to the environment wherein the organism was unconscious.

Again, "I" is in nice, smooth control of the organism and then he drives into a big town and wakes up two weeks later in the hospital. All of these things have occurred, but "I" doesn’t even know they have occurred; they have never been registered. Then a few months later something in the environment kicks into this— restimulates it, in other words. It is as though an "I" exterior to the body had issued an order. Somebody comes along and says, "You better lie down now," and that is in there already. So "You better lie down now" is registered again, restimulates this earlier time and goes into action.

The second that goes into action it says, "Pain in the right shoulder." So the fellow goes a little bit anaten and he has a feeling like he ought to lie down— he ought to be obed sent to this, in other words. Of course, the muscles were under somebody else’s orders at that time. Somebody said, "You better lay him out," or something of the sort, and he got laid out. It is perfectly natural how the somatic system could make the error, even if it were totally awake, alive, uninjured and everything. Somebody said, "You grab his feet," and the feet were grabbed. Somebody else said, "I’ll take his head," and the head was moved. Somebody said, "Hold him back while I work on him," and then the body got manipulated.

Even if there weren’t any pain there or anything else, a person would have a tendency after a while to think "I am not me at all. Me is out there someplace"— just like a "normal." And that is actually the drop of sanity. The drop of self- determinism is, how often has the environment determined the motions and conditions of this body? The more times that it has done so, the less able "I" is to assert its own control. "I" doesn’t even have to get reduced in potential to make itself less and less felt on the organism, because what is happening here is that a switchboard is getting loused up.

This is an interaction of the environment and the body. Somebody comes along and moves the fellow’s arm, and a pain registers. In order for this arm to be moved under the direction of "I," "I" would put out an impulse which would then join up in these switchboards and the arm would move. But now the arm has been moved without any impulse from "I," so there is just an impulse coming in from the environment. Then another impulse comes in from outside, and more of them come in, but at no time is there a connector through from "I" and unless there is the connector through from "I," there is no memory. There is no recording.

The arm gets moved when the person is unconscious; therefore the motor side of the switchboard goes into action, there is a reflex and the condition is registered just that far and no further. Then one day a fellow drives up behind him and honks his horn and he feels himself jump— "What the dickens? Well, I don’t like the horn. That’s what’s the matter." He goes along for a few weeks, nothing much happens, and then all of a sudden there is this same horn tone again and he feels his arm move. There is something wrong here, definitely something wrong. "I" is not in control of that motion because "I" was not in control of the motion at the time.

What that was, perhaps, was an automobile accident. The horn sounded and the car was struck. The body then has a tendency to go through the same motions as before. Oddly enough, if the body doesn’t go through those motions it even further scrambles up this board and will turn on the somatic —the pain that was with it— because actually this sequence has now created a new command post which commands the organism on the stimulus in the environment without recourse to the orders or wishes of "I."

What you are trying to do in Dianetic processing is put "I" back in control over the muscles and the organism.

Now, there would be two ways to go about that; One would be to work from the theta side of the ledger— ARC, memory, high reality, all the rest of these things— to see if you could build a fellow up.

The other one would be to just take this out as a bypass. Neurosurgery doesn’t know it, but neurosurgery is trying to carve this out. They sense there is something there that is not all well lined up, so they think if they just take a knife and cut it all out, everything will be fine. I saw a magazine article a short time ago which showed an engram actually being cut out of a fellow’s brain. Sure, those things are recorded, those nerve impulses are there, and sure, you can sever them so they won’t happen again. Of course, the fellow isn’t very sane or human either after that, but that’s beside the point!

There would be another way to go about it. You could find what chemicals catalysed this reaction. What chemicals could you throw at a person that would cause this jam- up to dissolve?

That would be the dream of a one- shot Clear. That would be the nutritionist at work— health food and that sort of thing.

As a matter of fact, you can do some remarkable things. You can produce things with protein which are quite interesting. Protein as an assist to rehabilitating "I" is quite workable. But to just take a fellow and start to feed him on the idea that he will unaberrate because he is being fed won’t work worth a nickel. It will have an effect, however. You could theoretically feed somebody until he no longer had arthritis, no longer had rheumatism, no longer had any of these other things. You could actually dream up a diet for him.

The odd part of it is that today there is no diet, evidently, adequate to feed a human being. There may be some other explanation for this, but I know that the dramatisation of engrams and that sort of thing is cut down by the introduction of protein in heavy doses into the system. And if you start giving the broken- down amino acids to a preclear. his memory line will come up and his activity line will come up.

Evidently, one of two things has happened: either, because of aberration, man has lost to some degree the physiological ability of breaking protein apart into its twenty- three or more amino acids and thus resolve some of these blocks, or man once upon a time was fed a much different diet than he is now. That one is not too hard to figure out. We started cooking meat not too long ago, and cooking definitely does things with protein that might not be good. Food that is cooked is easier to chew and it is easier to digest, but is it as nutritious? Somebody else will have to figure that one out.

Now, there is another thing about the meat that we get: Is this fed in any way that would actually make it a heavy protein and vitamin intake for us? No, it is fed alfalfa and old moldy straw, and the pigs out in the New Jersey marshes are fed the garbage from New York City, and that’s -a little bit different. Pigs used to live on acorns, and that is a highly nutritious diet.

I saw a piece of virgin prairie up at Lawrence, Kansas. It is astonishing, the difference between a piece of ground that has been plowed over and things raised on it and so forth, and a piece of the prairie as it was a hundred years ago. The number of wildflowers, the tremendous variety of grasses and so forth in virgin prairie is quite astonishing. So the cattle feeding on these very vital plants might have a much higher protein intake. Then you eat the meat and so on.

The point is that with a heavy protein intake certain reactions definitely occur. Aberration starts to dissolve on protein intake. It doesn’t go far enough, but it is definitely an assist. If you let a preclear live on coffee and sandwiches, infrequently eaten, you will spin him if you are giving him routine processing and he is pretty far down the tone scale. That is the best way I know of to spin a preclear. Just starve him awhile, or feed him on ice cream and cake and other good, delicious but not nutritious foods, and then just audit the devil out of him and keep him up late at night. Then ship him off to the spinbin— because processing seems to demand a lot more vitamins and a lot more protein out of the system.

By the way, you feed a person protein without feeding him vitamins and you will get another interesting effect. He starts getting D. T. ’s. The protein will go into effect in his system and then will begin to demand more and more vitamin Be, and suddenly there is no more Bl left in reservoir. Evidently, delirium tremens is mainly an absence of Bl. Your preclear starts to have nightmares, he starts to have very bad dreams, his sense of reality starts to go to pieces and so forth, if he is too short on Bl.

Now, the reverse isn’t true: you could overfeed him on Bl and nothing much would happen. I am just pointing up these various ways you can tackle this.

But if you fed him protein and you fed him B., if you gave him massages and a few other things to a sufficient degree, you could really make him healthy.

Why did the West Point football team turn out to be a flock of crooks? Why does an athlete get fewer good grades? It is not massaging; it is just the fact that the athlete’s "I" says "Move!" and then the other guy hits him in the chest— crunch! Then he jumps over a couple boys to grab the ball but the ball is not there, and then he trips and falls and runs into what is commonly called MEST— crunch! Then a couple more pieces of MEST fall on him, and he climbs out of that and gets back into the line. And when he is all set and into the line again, somebody cracks the signal and he is all set to go forward but he goes backwards, and this is upsetting. If the athlete does enough of this, his switchboard gets all jammed up. Finally it gets to the point where, when you ask "How do you spell cat?" though "I" would dearly love to write C- A- T and "I" knows that it is C- A- T, with all of this backwards- andforwards motion, this man is still lying out there in the middle of the football field and it comes through K- A- K. Of course, every time he is knocked out somebody is saying something around him, and there is the yell of the crowd.

You take a boxer who is punch- drunk. It is very interesting to resolve these punch- drunks. The fellow says, "I am now going forward," and he goes backwards. "Now I am going to hit his jaw," and he hits a glove.

The pitcher in a baseball game says, "Now I am going to pitch a strike and it’s going to go through to the catcher," but that ball gets hit, and there it goes. That wasn’t on schedule.

The batter steps up to the plate and he gets all set, and he is swinging away and he knows doggone well he is going to hit that ball. He is all set to feel that ball crack into the bat, only it misses. That isn’t on schedule either. Then he is all set to run and everybody out on the diamond, everybody at the bases and out in the outfield and infield, is waiting for this batter— he is going to hit that ball this time, but he doesn’t. They get all set to move, in other words— they get all set for action— and then they delay the action. So they are all set now, and they have delayed the action again, only this time the guy hits a two- bagger.

In other words, these uncertainties keep happening all the time, and as a consequence, the athlete gets into pretty bad condition. He gets so that he doesn’t think well.

Now, you could straighten an athlete out; it is pretty easy. All you have to do is give him a lot of ARC and process him on the theta side of the ledger. You don’t even have to start knocking out actual physical injury and so forth in the bank to start clearing up all these uncertainties.

You could go down to the telephone exchange and look down that long row of switchboards, and if you just went down and started pulling out handfuls of switches here and there at random and then fusing others in place at random-, you would get that switchboard to look the way an athlete’s switchboard becomes, probably, in a season— particularly a boxer, because a boxer is stopping it up close.

"I" will stay in command in spite of all this sort of thing as long as "I" is winning. But the margin of win gets less and less and less, the potentiality of win gets less, because this board starts getting snarled up. One fine day they lose the game, one fine day the fighter loses the fight. He has been crowding this thing on up and he is just getting along fine, and then all of a sudden— bang!

Joe Louis, right now, is probably a mess. If that man is not disassociating I would be surprised, because at first he stayed up there for a long time; he didn’t have much trouble. Somebody would walk into the ring, he would hit him, and that would be the end of the fight. Every time his "I" said "Hit him, knock him out," he hit him and knocked him out. That was simple. But then he got the living daylights beaten out of him in a couple of fights; he really got badly mauled. After that it wasn’t a matter of "Hit him and knock him out." It was "Hit him and maybe we’ll knock him out." And then he took a terrific beating, I think, his fight before last. Then in the last fight the guy just murdered him; he was a mess.

As a net result, you would have to take Joe Louis and process him for hours and hours and hours before he could be champion of the world again. Wouldn’t I like to do that! What I am really waiting for, though, is for the Foundation to get about $100,000 stashed away someplace so that we could bet on it. We would wait for about three or four years until the odds would really be fantastic, and then all of a sudden put him back in the ring again.

Anyhow, you can see what happens to an individual.

People have been wondering for a long time why this society gets more and more aberrated. Some fellow will come up and say, "It’s because the Democrats are in," and somebody else will come up and say, "It’s flaming youth!" Have you noticed that about this same time after every war we have flaming youth? I am going to check back through the papers of four or five years after World War I and see if the stories don’t completely overlap on what they are now publishing.

The society is going downhill all the time, we are told, and everything is going to pot and somebody is always coming up and postulating the answer as to why it is going to pot.

It is like the Indians who said the reason the white man was victorious all across the West was because of the dogs. An Indian messiah really went through the Middle West selling the Indians on the idea that the reason the white man was victorious and the buffalo were gone was because of the dogs.

It is very interesting how low people can get on the tone scale. The buffalo bones were lying all over the plains— the plains were white with them— and the Indians still wanted to know why the buffalo didn’t come back. This messiah walked through and said, "All you have to do is kill off all your dogs and the buffalo will come back." So the Indians killed off all of their dogs but that wasn’t the reason. And they moved further west.

Everybody else has put a reason onto the agenda as to why this society is going to the dogs, so I might as well put one on. It is stoplights! You are driving down the street and everything is going along fine, there are no cars in any direction and then all of a sudden the light changes. Stop. Then it turns green and you go off again, and then— stop. You are in a hurry to get someplace, but you get stopped.

Or one day you are running along and you are not in a hurry to get anyplace, and the light is green, and you start to go across rather slowly but the fellow behind you is in a hurry to get someplace. In other words, anybody driving around the town is continually being interrupted in his self- determinism by an arbitrary— a stoplight. It hasn’t anything to do with other cars, it is just a stoplight. That is the reason everybody has gone nuts!

Now, the last three days I have been conducting an experiment to find out once and for all whether we couldn’t simplify things and drop entheta as a postulate. It won’t be dropped. There actually is enturbulated theta, evidently.

But let’s clear all this up from the other side of the ledger. Let’s come down into the line of the body and set a backfire here and clear out this whole board beautifully, and then everybody will be well, happy, cheerful and so on.

The manifestations of this body line are boil- off— the stuff you get off when you yawn— weariness, the lactic acid in muscles and other physical waste products. So, all you would have to do is get this switchboard clear on the muscle side and the theta side would take care of itself, "obviously."

I have watched a lot of fellows processing themselves, self- auditing and so forth. There have been various techniques going around, like the one where you ask the preclear for a phrase that will get off a circuits for him and then have him repeat this phrase. He doesn’t know where it is from or anything of the sort; he just repeats the phrase a few times and goes into a dope- off. l

You let him ride through the dope- off and when he comes out of it again you make him repeat the phrase a couple more times and he goes into the dope- off again.

That might be workable, with plenty of work on the theta side. But just as itself— just getting off dope- off, getting off enMEST, sending the fellow up and down the track and into this and out of that and so forth— it is not a workable technique. It is spectacular, and things happen to the preclear. he curls up in a ball, he straightens out, he curls up into a ball, he straightens out; he rolls over on his back, he rolls over on his other side, he turns over a couple of times, then all of a sudden he boils off. It is very spectacular.

It is all being handled from the MEST side. Running this, you are not asking the fellow for a real concept, something that was really existence to him. You are not asking him for his level of reality; you don’t care anything about his level of reality, you just want to get off some enMEST. So you go on working on it any way you can think of to get off enMEST.

Now, though, I have this new technique. Believe me, it makes the guy who designed that boil- off technique look like a piker. What you do is separately exercise each limb or set of muscles against an opposition to its motion. In other words, you conceive of an opposition to the motion, conceive where that opposition is and then conceive of the limb moving against the opposition. You will get boil- off in a hurry! This is really dealing with the root stuff. The devil with these phrases; you are processing an illusion when you are processing words anyhow. And let’s not worry about any half- concept that "maybe it happened when I was . . . but I am not sure." Let’s not worry about chain- scanning through all these engrams, when the fellow isn’t even sure of their existence.

It does a lot of good to take off boil- off, but the more boil- off you take off, the lower the preclear goes on the tone scale.

Now, this muscle- opposition technique is a very interesting one. You take the limb which is hurting and think about which direction it would be opposed from if you moved it. Then you move the limb in that direction (you don’t really have to move it at all; you just postulate it is there) and you move it until you boil off. You can take any set of muscles, particularly where you have a chronic somatic, and get rid of that chronic somatic.

A technique could be erected on this basis so long as much more emphasis is put on ARC than is put on this other system. You could probably get rid of somebody’s chronic somatics and then patch him up so he would be sane too. You would have to patch him up from the theta side of the ledger, give him lots and lots of Straightwire and then work him out this way. You could have a technique.

But this muscle opposition is so spectacular and it gets off so much boil- off that some people would say, "Well, we don’t have to worry about running the ARC; we’ll just go on doing this." But if you did only this opposition technique, he would just kind of fade off into the blue. Then he would come out of it and you would run it again and he would fade off. After a while he wouldn’t boil off on that one anymore and he would have to go into something else.

We had a technique last year called freewheeling. Freewheeling was evidently just starting a series of muscle ripples on this motor control board; evidently you could just start a series of muscle tensings and relaxations on the board and you would turn on somatics all over the body. You could give a preclear freewheeling commands, and he would go from then on getting a somatic here, a somatic there and then a somatic someplace else, and all of a sudden he would hang up in a somatic. So you would ask him for a holder, and he would say yes and give you a holder, and then the somatics would keep on running again. Of course, the preclear would go pretty nutty after a while. That was freewheeling; it didn’t work out as a technique.

I have seen freewheeling knock the somatics out from the middle of engrams and do various other things, so that if the preclears were audited afterwards and audited well they got into pretty good shape. But just freewheeling? Oh, no!

Now, this mechanism of moving against the opposition to the muscles I don’t recommend, but if there is somebody around who can give you some Straightwire afterwards, you ought to try it. Take some place that has been hurting and just imagine that there is something opposed to it and then imagine moving into that opposition, and then just keep on doing it.

For instance, imagine your mouth is open and you are trying to close it. Imagine trying to manipulate the muscles that close your mouth, which has been sprung open against your will. Just imagine that, and then there you will be in that dental operation. The next thing you know, you will pick up heart somatics and hip somatics. You just start out with one and then soon you have dozens.

The first few times you try it, it is all right. You will get away with it. But then after a while, somehow or other it is not quite so good, and then it doesn’t work out very well at all. Then somatics start turning on and they won’t turn off. So you start feeding yourself full of protein and vitamins and so forth and start all over again. Then you can get off more boil- off and you can get through more somatics, but for some reason or other you don’t come up the tone scale any! But by just boosting more protein into the system, boosting more vitamins in and working more with these muscles and imaginary thrusts and so on, "I" starts coming down the line. "I" perceives that something is happening in the body and cannot get the cords straight to figure out what is happening.

You just have a normal amount of entheta over on the theta side of the ledger, and with this process, all of a sudden you start getting all kinds of entheta piled up there, and these two sides fall more and more out of phase with each other. Now with this process "I" can’t identify where that pain is coming from, obviously, and the sub- levels of "I" are not very acute. All of a sudden there is a pain in the hip, but observation demonstrates clearly that nobody just hit that hip. Nobody is in the vicinity of that hip; there is nobody there. What does this do to reality?

One portion of the computer figures out what is going on and it says very clearly, "We are doing this process." But "I" observes pain in the heart, yet nothing happened! It is a sharp pain; it feels like somebody put a knitting needle in there or something, but "I" can’t see where it is from.

"I" records this as unaccounted- for muscular activity; it is not connected. So you get these backfire mechanisms, and you get more and more stuff coming back. You start to get some circuits there, and more stuff comes back. All of this is coming from the environment— more environment, more environment, more aberration, more aberration.

Sure enough, you are knocking off lots of boil- off. And, yes, the case will run more easily after that boil- off is off, providing it is completely straightened up and lots more time than was given to boil- off is given to rehabilitating "I." You can get "I" connected back in again.

But actually it is easier to straighten it all out from "I" in the first place and let the rest of it go hang.

This technique is not efficacious unless you have the whole thing running. You take a preclear back down the time track and put him into an engram with which he has no real contact except the pain. He doesn’t have a good reality on this engram, but you take him back down the track and put him in the engram and start running him through it. You give him flash phrasesl and so forth, and he has no reality; he keeps telling you, "I don’t know whether this is happening or not," and he boils off. But you are getting more phrases off the thing, and it is wonderful the way he jackknifes until his shoes fly into the air! He is just in "beautiful" shape. You tell him, "You’re getting well, you’re getting well." Pretty soon he sort of apathetically says, "Yeah, I guess I am. You know, I really don’t believe that hundred- and- fifth AA with an acetylene torch. I don’t believe that."

You see, you are the environment and the environment is repeatedly kicking back. The first thing you know, poor "I" is in a bad way. That is what happens with a case which has been run on that boil- off technique.

In other words, the handling of the body from any other source but "I" has a tendency to be aberrative.

If there had never been any unconsciousness in the person’s life, "I" could resolve all of these sudden stops and starts. But in view of the fact that there has been unconsciousness, there are already points on this motor switchboard which are occluded as far as "I" is concerned. "I" doesn’t know they are there and tries to understand why they are there but can’t make it out, and "I" has a rough time.

You could take an individual and start working his arm, and after a while you could tell him, "The arm will now move," and his arm would move. He would say, "What the devil! How do you do that?"

"The reason I am doing that is because you are hypnotised and that means I have power over you."

"Oh? Must be true— my arm is moving."

That is all there is to hypnosis. The operator, as part of the environment, uses past moments of unconsciousness and he asks for, muscle by muscle, the control of the other individual’s body— toes, hips and so forth —and tires the perceptics so that the sensory board will start going off. That is why hypnotists use spinning wheels and that sort of thing, or get the person to look at something directly and fixedly. In other words, the hypnotist tires the communication line and that starts knocking out the power of "I." He is cutting communication off the theta, so "I" starts to drop reality. He takes over, muscle by muscle, by telling those muscles what to do. The next thing you know, the hypnotist is hooked directly into the switchboard and he then has muscular control of his subject’s body.

When the hypnotist has picked up this control and is directing it as part of the environment, he has short- circuited the commands of "I." Therefore he can lay anything he wants to in there and "I" will have a hard time trying to countermand it because it happened during a time when "I" was not in command.

People can only be hypnotised if they are pretty low on the tone scale, which is to say when there is lots of background material there. The hypnotist just starts piling stuff on top of the background material and he says, "Now, the right hand will rise."

The person’s hand moves up and he thinks, "Must be hypnotism. Then I have to believe what he says, because that’s what happens in hypnotism— you believe the hypnotist and then you do what he says."

Actually, it is not so much a matter of belief; it is actuality. All the hypnotist does is go in and restimulate a lot of engrams and then seal them all down with forgetters crunch them in and say, "Your eyes will no longer hurt you, and you won’t find it necessary to do anything about the eyes, and you will be able to see perfectly."

Then the person goes around with the world blurring in front of him and he says, "I am seeing perfectly. It’s the world that is blurry."

You could theoretically do a Swedish massage or something like that, actually manipulate a person’s body with massage and so forth, until the motor controls were so backfired that you would have knocked out a lot of chronic somatics. You could rub them all away. But the control and command of the organism by "I" would be enormously reduced.

These are directive, environmental punishment- drive therapies. The environment has adjusted "I" to it completely, down to the point of almost killing him.

As long as "I" is completely in command of that organism, the organism finds it practically impossible to be ill. Differentiation stays very high. Environmental control of the individual is very low.

But you can cure— banish so it won’t return— the somatic side of an aberration, and only succeed in further enturbulating the self- determinism of that organism. You could "cure" a person right straight into an insane asylum. You could drop "I" lower and lower and lower in potential, because there is such a thing as entheta. There is enturbulence of the theta on its side of the sensory strip, and there is more and more enturbulence, more and more enturbulence, and "I" is not able to get through its own upsets; it can’t get through them. So over on the MEST side the whole thing could lookjust as smooth as anything you ever saw, but on the theta side, "I" could not control the organism.

Theoretically, you could clear an individual of all of his somatics and leave him nutty as a fruitcake.

So the emphasis in processing must be establishing the highest possible affinity with the physical universe for the preclear. establishing the highest possible reality for him, establishing good communication for him with the universe around him. You do it out of agreement with him that it should be done. You get into agreement with him by raising his level of ARC and kicking in there with yours, working from the theta side of the ledger, and he will get well.

Now, theoretically the condition could exist that an individual could be way up the tone scale, very happy, very effective and very sick physically. That condition can obtain. In fact, you probably know of such people.

There are people who, oddly enough, have no somatics; they are beautifully built, they are nice, muscular, handsome people— and they are crazy! Every once in a while you will run into one of these. I have seen a great deal of this.

You will find this condition existing in climates where there is lots of sunshine and lots of warm weather— nice, quiet, agreeable weather— the year around. Such a society forms when some race from a harsh, forbidding land comes into that climate. This race will just blossom over a period of a few years and be terrifically brilliant; they will overcome the environment— just flow all over the environment. But their children, or at the very latest their grandchildren, will be perfectly formed, beautiful people who aren’t worth hell room.

That cycle happened in Greece; it happened to the Vandals when they went into North Africa. In fact, you can count on such a cycle occurring where all of a sudden the weather is so beautiful, life is so easy, the people don’t have to think particularly, they get lots of exercise and grow nice, big muscles but they no longer care about anything intellectual in life.

This also happens when everybody is regimented: "Now, we want nice, beautiful youths; that’s what we want. And we want them all in the nicelooking uniforms and we want them all out doing beautiful dances and so forth." This is great stuff! It is no way to make man free, but I guess you would sure get a lot of ditches dug that way if you wanted ditches dug.

In the same way your preclear could be handled by you as an auditor. You as an auditor could work your preclear from this side of the ledger: "Oh, you’ve got a somatic! Well, we’ll take that out," and you boil him off and boil him through the somatic and so forth.

And he would say, "Well, there’s no sense of reality here, but the somatic is gone and I guess that’s all right." The next thing you know, he would become really healthy— but very apathetic.