TIME AND MOTION

A lecture given on 4 September 1951

The Lowest Common Denominator of Aberration

Time and space are the two wild variables in the business of living and being, but of the two, time could probably be said to be far more of an upsetting entity.

There is a very good reason why time is an upsetting thing to man. One can say that man is as healthy and as happy and has as much survival as he has control of the physical universe around him. The physical universe consists of matter, energy, space and time. A man can have control of matter, he can have control of energy, he can even do some controlling of space, but he cannot control time. It goes on in an inexorable flow. It is established in a very, very precise fashion by the rising and the setting of the sun or by the length of time it takes light to get from one place to another. It is arbitrary insofar as one can see motions in the physical universe, but it is an arbitrary we obviously can’t do very much about. And because it is out and beyond our immediate control and regulation, it is highly aberrative.

It is the time part of motion which permits motion to be aberrative. One could say that the lowest common denominator of aberration is time. We don’t even have a definition for it.

That is a nice word: time. We see a clock face; hands turn on it and after the hand has gone so far we say so much time has gone by. That is very interesting, because we didn’t see time go by at all; we saw a clock face and we saw the motion of a hand. What we saw was movement in space by a piece of matter. But in order to have motion you have to have time. It is the time part of that operation which is the spook part of it, the part that really makes one nervous.

The most aberrative thing you can do to an individual is mess up his time. As a matter of fact, aberration can be planted to such a marked and tremendous degree that people can get to a point where they will observe routine. Those time clocks that sit on the side of factory walls might as well be big, black Ethiopians with enormous whips in their hands—" You no punchy me just right, you starve, bud!"

Man has sensed that time is highly aberrative, since he uses it as the primary punishment motivation. He uses space and time in prison, but he uses time all by itself, more or less, as his prime punishment mechanism.

You take a very bad "criminal," such as a five- year- old child; he goes up for a stretch of about twelve years. He goes to school for twelve years. He doesn’t go to school for twelve understandings, he doesn’t go to school for eighteen accomplishments or anything; he goes up for twelve years. This is fascinating. The fellow who dreamed this one up was a sadist of the first order.

Time, then, is used to introduce an arbitrary into living. But there is a natural reason that arbitrary has come to be: The one thing that everyone has in common on the physical- universe level is time; everyone has that in common. So in order to make an assembly- line operation run smoothly, everybody’s watch has to be set just right and each watch has to agree with every other watch. But more important than that, everybody has to agree that it is important. After we have agreed it is important we can have an assembly line at Dearborn or other "worthwhile" things such as beach landings in amphibious warfare. These tremendous accomplishments can then be achieved by agreeing that time is important and that it is an arbitrary and that a clock hand moving around a dial will establish the passage of time. We agree on this and then people can come along and say, "Everything depends upon achieving a maximum coordination of time, one with another." When somebody doesn’t achieve this coordination, people say, "You were late for your appointment, bud," and all sorts of ornery things.

Do you realize there are men sitting in the naval prison at Portsmouthl right now who disagreed ten days’ worth in time of war? They were absent without leave. What does that say? Lease is a granting of a certain amount of time to an individual. So they took more time than they were supposed to have.

But how do you take time? How can you take time? Do you reach out and pick it up? Can you have a pound of time? No.

Back down the ages sometime, some great genius looked up one day and found that the sun went overhead every day. He thought, "This is remarkable. Every day it goes overhead. It goes over there by the old spruce tree, and pretty soon it’s up there and then it’s over there. This happens every day." And he went around and told people about it.

They said, "Well, you’re right, but who cares anything about that?" Little did they know that he was opening the first gates on super aberration. Of course, everybody told this fellow, "Well, you’re nuts. You haven’t any right to pry into God’s domain this way— observing that the sun comes up and goes down over there. You know that the sun is a god, and therefore he couldn’t possibly have any arbitrary factor about him."

This fellow said, "I know that it takes the same length of ‘ugh’ every day for him to come up over there and go overhead and sit down over there. I know it!"

And they said, "Humph!"

This probably was one of the first great philosophical battles royal. But when he had made his point, finally, that the sun took the same amount of time to go from A to B every day, all he had succeeded in doing was winding the argument in a circle. Now the argument is a circular argument. You measure time by the sun which comes up in the east and goes down in the west. Then you time the length of time it takes the sun to go from there over to there by the length of the time that it takes . . . in other words, A= A= A= A. It is circular reasoning because there is no definition; there never has been.

Any time, back down the ages, when you have found something that could not be readily defined, you have gathered around that subject aberration, because you get identity thought. The only way people reason about it is that it equals itself. And they prove it along the lines of "It equals itself, doesn’t it? So it equals itself. Well, naturally, then, it equals itself!" And they sit back very proudly and look like a psychiatrist and think they have proved something. A= A= A= A.

In other words, in the absence of a precisely defined natural law you get aberration. You also get authorities and critics— all sorts of aberration.

Here we have a subject— time— which has no definition.

Take a quart bottle of water and punch a hole in the side of it, then measure how long it takes, when that quart bottle of water is filled, for the water to leak out the side. How long does it take? I will tell you how long it takes: You take another quart bottle of water and you punch a hole in its side and you fill it up full and find out how long that one takes to run out. That is how long it takes. And if somebody argues with you, then you show them that that is really how long it takes; you take a bucket of sand and open a spout on it and show how long it takes that sand to run out. And how long does it take that sand to run out? Naturally it takes as long for that to run out as it takes for the water to run out of the bottle.

How can you prove this? It is obvious: you just look at the sun. It comes up over in the east and it goes high and it comes down over in the west, and that takes as long as the sand. Great!

Nobody knows what time is and yet everybody has grandly overlooked the fact that nobody knows what time is. Only in the past twenty or thirty years has the physicist been eager to tangle with this one. But a physicist had to learn sooner or later what time was. I could give you the nuclear physics equation of time; it is a beautiful thing and as a matter of facts it shows that time changes. Maybe time does change; we don’t know that for sure. Now that Einstein is an authority, everybody will accept this one, but that isn’t a good reason to accept anything. It might be wrong, this equation. It simply says that as matter approaches the speed of light, time approaches zero. It is a fancy formula, but that in essence is what it says.

In other words, if something were slowed down its time would get longer, and if something were speeded up its time duration would get shorter. It is very interesting. One goes over into the realm of science fiction very easily with this one.

An editor of a science- fiction magazine told me one day, "Everything has been written on the subject of science fiction; practically everything has been covered."

And I said, "Everything but the center symbol basics of science fiction —the centers of things. The middle road has not been covered. Everything else has been covered, but not that one."

"Such as what?"

"Such as the definition of time and space."

"Oh."

We had a lot of fun with that one. As a matter of fact, after that was sent out to the field, some of the boys were sending in mathematical computations yards long, demonstrating this and that and something or other.

They used to prove things in the old physics classes by saying, for instance, "Gravity on the moon is only one sixth what it is on the earth; therefore, if you went to the moon you could jump thirty- six feet high if you could jump six feet here on the earth, and that demonstrates there is less gravity on the moon." And everybody would say, "That’s fine. Just think of jumping thirty- six feet in the air!" They were very impressed.

That is just taking the same thing and- putting it in another reference; it doesn’t for a moment say what gravity is. Nobody knows what that is either.

Light travels at the rate of 186,200 miles per second. Now, supposing one went at 185,900 miles per second: his time would get very short in terms of the space he occupied. For the first time one would get a changed time reference.

This sort of thing would happen: He would go to, say, Alpha Centauri (which is too near for this equation to work out, but we’ll use it anyway) at that speed, land there, turn around and come back. But all the old people he would see in the street would be his friends— those that weren’t buried. Time would have passed to the extent of seventy years on the face of the earth, while time for the man traveling to Alpha Centauri was only two weeks.

So you can change a space- time ratio according to the Lorentz- FitzGerald- Einstein equations These were the first leg up on a definition of time.

Time is relative in space. But it postulates immediately that there is something else besides time, which is fascinating, because if time can change in space, then time and space are not a constant and motion must have something else in it besides time. And it does.

It is very possible that there is no such thing as time. Every time somebody comes around and bats away at one of these strange entities, somebody is always willing to get up and say, "It is obvious, then, that there can’t be any such thing." So that is the first thing to assume— that there is no such thing as time. Then what is there?

There would be an observation of change. But change needs time to take place, and we are back on the circular line again.

Time, very possibly, is the bridge between theta and MEST. It is very possibly the bridge between theta and MEST. It is not too difficult to assume what this means.

Theta cannot move through time unless it is connected to the physical universe which contains time. It very well may be that theta in itself is motionless without physical- universe time, and it may also be that the physical universe is motionless without theta time. There is very possibly a bridge between these two things, and that bridge could be called time.

Certain it is that this will work out along with the Lorentz- FitzGeraldEinstein equations very handsomely.

The theta universe is engaged upon a conquest of the physical universe, but maybe it also has to be coexistent with the physical universe for the physical universe to go on existing.

There is theta matter, there is theta energy, and there is evidently something vaguely like theta space. But in the physical universe there is no theta time. Thought is instantaneous. Computation in a body is slowed down evidently by one thing only: It takes about a tenth of a millisecond for a synapse— a relay— to open and close. That is one ten- thousandth of a second. That is pretty slow.

In other words, the relay- reaction system of the human body takes time because a physical- universe motion has to take place to close the gaps on the electronic circuit in order to operate the physical- universe muscles. As a consequence, time to an unthinking observer seems to be inherent in thought. But actually the only thing that can really be said to be inherent in it is the fact that it takes a little time for thought to translate into physical action because of the millisecond or two that is required for a number of computations to go through into muscular action.

We must not forget that when we are observing a physical body we are observing life plus the physical universe. We are observing these two things. They are interoperative and they are right there and they can’t exist without being together; they can’t exist effectively against the physical universe unless they are together. So they are the same thing as a unity. But they are not necessarily the same thing; just because they operate together does not necessarily mean they are the same thing. Theta doesn’t have a time factor.

Lord knows what you could do if you finally walked in on top of time and said "This is it!" and weighed out a pound of it. It is evidently part of the physical universe. But every time life marches in on the physical universe it says, "Time, change, motion— these things are part of the physical universe," and it observes the fact that a thought takes a little while to go into action, so it says, "The thought must then be partly time." It is not.

If anybody cares to check up on a lot of data that Rhine and a few others have been playing with in the field of parapsychology, he will find some very interesting material. (That material will become understandable some day when we have para- Dianetics, I hope.)

The material in parapsychology is being collected these days, not on a charlatanistic basis, but on a rather highly scientific level. A field which is under attack has to be more scientific in its developments than a field which has already achieved the pretense of being scientific, such as medicine. A field which is aborning has to be very careful and has to be very scientific.

Rhine and a lot of the boys who are working with ESP and poltergeists and the rest of these things have had to be terribly careful because they are being challenged all the time anyway. People just look at parapsychology and they say, "Ha! It’s all fake!"

Rhine and the others are pointing out, "No, look, there is some stuff here that has to be investigated."

"What was good enough for my grandfather is good enough for me, and he believed— wait a minute. He did believe in it. Well, I’m modern, so I don’t believe in it!"

What happened many years ago in parapsychology was that people had a certain belief in ESP, telepathy, clairvoyance, clairaudience and so forth, and having these various beliefs, it was very easy for charlatans to take advantage of them.

There was, once upon a time, a philosophical school known as the magicians, and this philosophical school believed that you could postulate a cause and get an effect, and that was what it believed. They believed in a definite code, a philosophic code, along this line, and they did a very, very interesting job of it. They were just philosophers, they weren’t trying to do very much. But then very ignorant people around them— superstitious people— said, "You mean you could wave something in the air, or talk to a ghost or demon or make it appear or something of the sort?" Reality in those days included a world which was full of ghosts and demons.

One of these magicians one day (he must have been very tired) unfortunately said, "Yes, that’s what we mean," and then the fakers, the charlatans, got into the field.

Now, the symbolical language of the magician had to do with a wand, a cup, a disc and a lamp. This was symbology to them; they didn’t do things with wands, discs, cups and lamps. But the charlatans said, "Now, let’s see. You take this wand and you pass it over this cup." A little stick passes over a hat and life comes out of the hat— a rabbit out of the hat. You have seen this; it is stage magic. That trick is almost a thousand years old. But it is symbolical; the wand is symbolical and the cup is symbolical. They are the male and female organs which produce life. The magic of man was what the whole field of magic was trying to figure out. What is this magic of life? We take two beings and we get a third being. And where does it come from? What is it all about? They were trying to riddle this out.

But the stage magician, instead of asking these philosophic imponderables, takes a hat (which is the cup) and a stick (which is his wand) and produces a rabbit out of the hat, and this never fails to get an audience; it never fails. That is the most interesting magic we have around us— the rabbit out of a hat, the child, the generations of time into the future; there are unnumbered generations going out.

These unnumbered generations go out into the future, but how are they produced, one after the other, and what is the purpose of them? This is the big riddle.

But in every field you get a certain amount of charlatanism. Somebody comes in on the field and he says, "There is a possibility that this can exist. Therefore I can tell these people— who don’t know as much about it as I do, and I know just enough about it to fake it— that this is the way . . ." So we have Lady Anne the Prophet, who will read your crystal ball for practically nothing and advise you to buy a certain amount of stocks that she is in cahoots with the local stockbroker on.

And people find it a very handy way of controlling and guiding men. In other words, something like this will come down the tone scale to around 1.5 or 1.1, and by that time people are getting gain from it. They are trying to get gain out of it instead of direct magic. That is parapsychology today.

Parapsychology, nevertheless, has a lot of data in- it. The 1890s were the heyday of fakerism in parapsychology. There were charlatans all over the place who would produce paraffin gloves out of thin air—" obviously produced from a ghost." There were fellows who were so adroit that you could tie their hands and yet they could free their toes out of their shoes and play a trumpet, so you would have the lights out and there would be the trumpet music of the spirits and that sort of thing.

Some men like Houdini went around and invalidated these charlatans. They showed that this sort of thing didn’t exist. So naturally, since most of the society goes along on the equation A= A= A all the time anyway, people said, "Oh, it’s been showed up that it’s all a fake, so it doesn’t exist and there isn’t anything valid about it anymore."

Modern science today has taken the whole field of parapsychology and dumped it overboard. That is silly. There is obviously evidence. Why not investigate it? It is as much as a man’s life is worth to investigate this field. Rhine only manages to stay in the running by being very scientific.

What happens with ESP? A fellow is asleep and he dreams that his mother is dying. He sits up in great alarm and telephones some friend of his or something of the sort and says, "I just had this dream, so- and- so and so- and- so." There is a record of it, in other words. Twenty- four hours later his mother dies. Something is out of line in the time span.

Now, you could hazard a guess: I wonder if she died because he had that dream? I don’t think that is a valid line, because this sort of thing goes on. Quite often it is coincident. A death occurs and some near loved one to that person will get a shock or an impression.

Back during World War I people were going goofy running around checking up on these stories.

So, here there is a parity in time. In other words, thought happens to just be going through this time span. When it happens that there is a death and then twenty- four hours later a fellow has the impression, this seems more logical to us because the fact is accomplished so therefore it should be followed through. We call it clairvoyance when the impression comes before the occurrence and we call it a natural consequence when it comes after the occurrence; but it obviously isn’t either one.

Thought doesn’t have any time clock on it according to our time. Thought is instantaneous. When ESP registers— and it is going to register— it doesn’t register at 186,200 miles per second, because it doesn’t in other forms follow along the curves and laws of light.

What is it?

There is a postulate of theta— all thought— as a unity, individuated in certain ways so that the individuals are still more or less connected to a body of thought and are that body of thought.

Anybody who has ever formed a group has seen this phenomenon. It is extremely hard to tear up a group; a group will go on living. You can keep extracting individuals out of it, but- the group goes on living. Something has happened there to attract theta into a certain proximity. There is a theta body in a group. Just try and kill off a group; it will die just as hard as a living organism. And the group is not the individuals.

So long as the postulate was that "the theta of the group or the sanity of the group depends upon the individuals who compose that group and their state of mind," Group Dianeticsl did not work. In other words, we were saying that "everybody in the world has to be brought up to 3.0 before we have a 3.0 society," we were addressing the problem on an individual level, and as long as that was the postulate Group Dianetics just did not work out; it was stuck in the mud very badly.

Suddenly, on sheer observation, it was observed that a group’s level didn’t agree with the level of the individuals of the group. It was the collective group life and goal that had a tone level, and you could pull it up above the level of the members or you could put it down.

How do you make a fine organisation (as it has been from time to time in the past) like the United States Marines out of bums and criminals and so on? The marines used to be the "French Foreign Legion’’l of the United States. We have just seen it come through a war and we have soft of forgotten its dark and sordid past.

A fellow could join the Marine Corps any time he wanted to and give a wrong name; he didn’t have to show a birth certificate and he was immune from the law. The Marine Corps had a rather hard job of recruiting from time to time— only a fool would go to sea back in Farragut’s day. They used to have a hard time and yet they put together an organisation out of component parts who were criminals, jailbirds, bums and hobos, and when they came together they became a nice, bright, smart, alert organization with a very high esprit de corps. I cite the Marine Corps because of all the military organizations in the world, I believe the U. S. Marines has more actual esprit de corps. I know of nothing else which would more accurately spot tone level than the existence or absence in an organisation of esprit, and the U. S. Marines have esprit; they have very high esprit. But what do they make it from? The people poured into that organisation in the old days were not the kind of people who would ever measure up. But suddenly they were marines and they walked around cockily and they would fight at the drop of a hat to protect the corps and so forth.

During the war when they fed such enormous numbers into the corps, the esprit had a tendency to sag. But even then they had tremendous esprit, which was much better than navy or army esprit.

The army moved in on Korea at the beginning and they were pretty well stuck in the mud. Of course, most of them were just occupation troops. One had a harder time dragging them out from underneath bushes than he did forming them up on any battle. That was a rough deal; they were not trained or anything and the army’s esprit was very low in Korea. There was, though, an army cavalry outfit with a pretty good esprit.

All of a sudden the marines turned up— I think it was the First Division. The marines were all sitting around looking kind of nervous and upset, and the war correspondent came up and asked, "What’s the matter, boys?"

"Well, we want to get this show on the road. Let’s get going. This war has been going too long. Let’s roll. The marines are here now, let’s roll!"

How does something like this get built up? You are looking at an organism and a theta body. It has life. Its component cells just happen to be individuals, but it is something.

A whole nation, right now, is trying to run exclusively and on nothing else but the third dynamic; that is Russia. Russia says, "There is no such thing as a first dynamic; you must negate against yourself completely. Sex, family, life, that sort of thing— out the window. That is a lot of bunk. The third dynamic is all there is. Live and die for the state!"

That doesn’t work well but, by golly, if you select the third dynamic out all by itself, the next thing you know, you have quite a driving force unless you suddenly oppose it with a driving force which counts dynamics one and three as being both valid factors in it. That would lick a force every time which worked only on dynamic three, because it allows for individualism rather than a slavish attitude toward the group.

What I am trying to get down to is the fact that we are not dealing in Dianetics with physical bodies. Physical bodies are just physical bodies. They are animate and they move around or they don’t, and when they don’t they are dead. When they are dead you bury them and they push up daisies; they make good fertilizer.

There is a place over in France where a battle was fought some unimaginably long time ago and something like ten or fifteen thousand menat- arms and cavalrymen were slain on that field of battle. All they did there was heap the dirt over them. It is one of the most fertile fields they have.

Gruesomely enough, this is the physical body. It is chemicals mobilised and evolved in the physical universe in order to preserve or perform a certain function. That is all a physical body is.

The physical body is prey to time and theta is not. Here you have something that is terrifically prey to time. You leave a rock sitting out there on the hill and let the wind blow on it long enough and the rock will vanish. Erosion takes place. That is over a period of time; it is measured against time.

There is some uranium in a uranium pit, and if you look at it, it tells you how old that pit is geologically on the basis of how much of it is gone, how much of it has already radiated out. So what is the half- life of it and what was its mass?

The whole physical universe is prey to time. So a validation of the human anatomy is a validation of time and a validation of the deterioration of the human body.

It is a very funny thing that the second you start freeing up some of the combat and action that has taken place around the physical body, it starts looking younger. In other words, the theta starts to set it up more or less at the optimum level where it ought to operate. It doesn’t try to bring it back to four years of age where it had a good time, because four years of age is not very efficient. It would prefer something like twenty- two, twenty- three, when a body has good glandular function, its weight distribution is very good and the elasticity of nerves and bones and so forth is all very good, so it evidently tends to set it back there.

If you clear up a child he will look older. Take a nine- or ten- year- old child who looks very young and clear him up— get a lot of the grief off and so forth— and he will look a little bit older.

That is peculiar, isn’t it? Theta is trying to set up an optimum unit, and the only optimum unit it can set up at the present time is inherent in the body already, so it tries to set it up. How it does this is beside the point. But the mind, as mind, doesn’t get old. It does not deteriorate; what it does is get enturbulated. It gets hooked in to the physical universe, and the second it gets hooked in to the physical universe it becomes prey to time. Just that much of the mind— its enturbulence— is prey to time. You can actually make the statement that the only enturbulating factor there is to theta is time. The amount of time which is injected into theta is the enturbulence of that theta. If you could pull the time out of the theta, there would be no turbulence. You could speculate on this for a long time.

Any subject which gets along on the basis of "time is this jar which runs out so much water" has something wrong with it. You know that it takes "that long." Notice that phrase, that long. That is a wonderful phrase. Long is something measured in space.

You say, "I was so tired. I had to wait"— wait. It doesn’t mean wait at all: it means weight. It says, "I was prey to gravity here on this spot and I don’t like it; I had to weight"— weight.

Or you say, "The time expired. " Dead bodies expire and air expires from footballs; a lot of interesting things take place but time does not expire. That is a manifestation of energy in matter.

All around we see light in space and energy in matter, except this one spot that is quite dark: that is time. In this area lies an answer. It is a question so big that if you answered it you would outdate every science in existence in the world today. You would so far outdate them that their obsolescence would just cause people to abandon them.

There is no answer yet brought forward, but to say that there is no answer there is a defeatism such as was practiced too long on, for instance, the field of the mind.

People said, "Nothing can be done for a person who is psychosomatically ill; nothing can be done for a person who is insane. So we won’t even try." But here is a segment and a factor in the field of all the physical sciences, in the field of the mind and all across the boards which has a hidden answer in it: time. What is time?

What is the first thing, then, that you should straighten out for a preclear?

I have been giving you what may have sounded to you like a lot of double talk. I merely wanted to demonstrate to you that you have too long taken time for granted. You go on taking it for granted as long as you have been, and just letting the watch on your wrist say "This is time. Time is expiring because these hands are moving," and then one day you are dead. That is about the net result, because you have invested in an illusion that doesn’t exist. The illusion is that you know something about time when you look at a watch, and you don’t.

You could very possibly stay young practically forever, not just by finding out what time is, but by keeping all the concepts of time completely straight in your case. And that is an easy one; we can do that.

How do you straighten up time? The way to straighten up time is to keep all motion straightened up. Time is a part of motion, so if you keep motion straightened up you will straighten up time automatically. We cannot, then, attack the problem right on the nose and say "Here is time." But we do know what time is a part of; time is a part of motion.

If you move your hand, a motion takes place because there is a certain lapse of time that it takes for your hand to move across that space. It is space plus time that makes motion. Space is static, so we have to have time in order to get motion.

We have a quantity known as motion which contains, as one of its parts, an unknown quantity. We can solve this quantity known as motion. We can solve it, and that is really a very close approach to knowing something about it. If you know what something is a part of and you say so clearly and recognise clearly that it is a part of that thing, you have come awfully close to solving it. So, as time is a part of motion, you resolve motion, and if you resolved all the motion in a case you would resolve all of the case. This is all in terms of physical motion— nothing esoteric like the motion of light waves going hither and yon.

You resolve all the times an individual has moved. If you took all of the inhibition of movement off an individual you would have a person about twenty- two years of age who could possibly stay twenty- two years of age for the next five centuries, barring accidents and illnesses.

For instance, Mamie Glutz lies down on the couch and blows one terrific grief discharge; she had been arrested, more or less, in space and time. She had been arrested in time. In other words, her theta had become so impinged upon by the physical universe that it had stopped functioning and stopped moving and stopped flowing. That is important.

Theta gets moved in on by time, -and when theta gets moved in on by time, motion in the theta universe stops. Evidently time is a bridge. So we blow a grief charge and when she gets up off the couch she looks much younger and she is much more energetic. Now we keep on working with this girl. She was a long way from the point of no return. She looked like she might have been thirty- five or thirty- six and she was a long way from being an old woman, but nevertheless we turn back her clock physiologically.

One can turn back a person’s clock physiologically a lot more easily than that, though, and recognizably change his apparent physical age. It is very easy. You take anybody who can move on the time track, throw him back down to a time when he was arduously trying to advance or come back in some part of the physical universe— just take this part of the track when he was very young— and kind of stick him in it a little bit and then let him come up to present time. It is very remarkable: he will look somewhat like he did in the year that you latched him up in.

Have you ever seen any of these people who look like they are about twelve? You see some people walking around who look like they are about four. Give one of them a time flash, and he will say "Four!" or "Twelve!"— whatever he looks like. Work him for a little while and in a few days you will see him grow up.

You are working with heavy magic. I dare say that any of you working in Dianetics have seen the apparent age of an individual shift— have seen him look older, have seen him look younger— because it happens quite continually. So this is an easy one to handle.

What happens when you get all the motion off a case, all the latched- up times in a person’s life when he has been unable to move or has had trouble moving? The theta, all the way back as far as theta will go back, has been affected by an injection of this "time virus," so to speak, and it has turbulences wherever physical- universe time has been interrupted. That has immediately thrown some time into the theta and enturbulated it just to that degree; it has locked it up in the motor switchboard.

By the time this has been multiplied and this amount of energy has been absorbed out of an individual over a long, long period, his time gets to be in very bad shape.

So, you could work on nothing but motion with preclears— nothing but motion from the theta side of the switchboard— and you would untangle their time. Don’t try to work it backwards too much. Try to work out all the times when they have had high ARC, when they have been awake (analytical, in other words) and have had their movements impeded. You can forget words and phrases. You will get the perceptics anyway, whether you want them or not. But you could even neglect them if you could figure out some way to work out motion without really tuning up perceptics— which you won’t be able to do. The second you start working from the theta side of the switchboard, you are working with a heavy communication channel, and perceptics start turning on when you start working with that. But what you are trying to undo is motion.

You could get a preclear back down the track and ask him to start running phrases. You say, "Where are you on the track?"

"I don’t know; this may be when I’m twelve or it may be when I’m two months postconception, and it’s . . ."

"Well, what is somebody saying?"

"I don’t know who is saying "

"Say the phrase anyway."

Nuts! That just confuses him further on the subject of time. Why does it confuse him on time? He is not here but he is there, and the difference of time span may or may not be twelve, fifteen or forty years. He doesn’t know what this time span is because he has no measuring stick for his time track. He is back down the track someplace but he can’t tell you where. But there is a phrase there so he goes off with it. Sure, you get some enMEST off it but it doesn’t do him much good. He can flounder through engram after engram with a low level of reality.

What is meant by "a low level of reality"? It is whether or not he can measure the universe around him and measure the time. If he cannot, then that is a low level of reality. Where does this thing spot him on the time track? Really good reality has it spotted immediately.

So when you are processing engrams, secondaries and so on, it is terrifically important to get off impeded or impelled motion. It doesn’t matter what else you get off the case. But if you don’t get that off first and foremost, if you don’t spot this incident that he is trying to recall in time and if you don’t spot his motions and what they were or work in the direction of picking up his perception of motion to a point where he can spot them, you are not processing him, you are just having a tea party— because it is not processing.

Sure, you can actually get a preclear to act less aberrated in some ways by running off a lot of boil- off from his case, but there is a saturation point. You can run off boil- off from a case for three or four days and run phrases off the case like mad for three, four or five days and just have a fine time doing it. At the end of that time your preclear feels pretty good, but then he goes lower on the tone scale than he was when you picked him up.

If you boil a person off without any concept of where he is in time and without any attention to his motion or the motions around him, and you boil this person off for four or five months, you will practically spin him in— although he "obviously is getting well"— he is running off all these phrases.

You, by looking at your preclear and by feeling nonantagonistic toward him, are actually permitting him to put you on his time track. You are safe to put on the time track. You are not destructive to him; he can communicate with you; you are agreeing with him. As a net result, you have suddenly spotted something in the stream of time that he can tie to and identify.

That is very definitely a basic way of stating what ARC is and why you should establish ARC in order to get accessibility from a preclear. You establish you on his time track, then establish his environment on the time track, then at least get him in something like contact with present time, and then let him take a look and start spotting incidents in his past. He isn’t building back a track, he is unburdening a track. You are realigning where this happened and what occurred and so forth.

That is the point standard processing has reached at this moment; this you should know about Dianetics.

It is important, then, for your preclear to know (1) when an incident took place— he has a feeling that it occurred sometime or other, but when did it take place exactly?— and (2) what the movement was which was involved in this. What was the motion involved in it?

If you could get the answer to those two questions, you could probably just straightwire a preclear out until you finally had straightwired him through every engram and secondary he had— and I mean straight wired

It is very simple up to that point. That is what you hit for; that is what you want. You will produce more results faster with that than with anything else I know of.