THE CELLULAR POSTULATE

A lecture given on 17 September 1951

A Past Theory of Memory Recording

Dianetics has just entered its second echelon of research. The first echelon is pretty well buttoned up. The first echelon was embraced in the discovery of life energy.

Consider all knowledge to fall above or below a line of demarcation; everything above this line is not necessary to the solution of man’s aberration and general shortcomings and is inexactly known. Such a field of thought should be considered to embrace such things as metaphysics and mysticism. On the other side of this line of demarcation could be considered to lie the finite universe. All things in the finite universe, whether known or as yet unknown, can be sensed, measured or experienced.

Now, we have either expanded the finite universe, or we have crossed the border. I used to tell friends of mine at George Washington University, "Someday you will be able to put this life energy in a pipe. There’s a guy lying there stiff, stark and cold and you run this stuff into him and he gets up and walks away."

Life is an energy. It may not measure up to what you know about energy in the field of electricity— neutrons, protons, all the rest of that— but it is an energy nevertheless. That is to say, somewhere, somehow, it has a definite quantity that can be sensed, measured and experienced. Someday it may be isolated, identified, measured, and conduited or manufactured.

But at this moment we are at the point where we handle this energy with an "Oh, well, another engram." It is pretty simple. We have actually gotten to a point where we can, to some degree, experience it as an energy, we can change it as an energy and we can bring about alterations in its shape and potentials. That is the first echelon.

The second echelon consists in description and identification to a point where it can be very easily identified and handled as an energy in other words, isolated. That is the second echelon.

And I don’t care whether theta lives in the finite universe or doesn’t live in the finite universe. That is beside the point. But I do care about isolating it.

Bergson had something he called elan vital. There are a number of descriptions which have been thrown in, in the past. People talked about the spirit, about this and about that. The lowest level of observation on it is the fact that life is alive.

Now, an investigation of theta demonstrates theta to be peculiarly without time, which immediately lifts it out of the category of electricity but does not necessarily lift it out of the category of atomic and molecular phenomena. It is merely a phenomenon of theta that it doesn’t have wavelength. That is pretty hard for people to grasp because they have been looking at electricity so long.

But nevertheless, here is an X— and that is all we know it as. Right now it has a lot of variability. The precise isolation and description of theta and its measurement is the second echelon. We are into that echelon.

But this does not mean that we are into the field of mysticism. We have certainly knocked a lot of questions out of mysticism. It is very interesting how much we have taken out of the fields which were terrifically inexactly known, and made known. That is the progress of all knowledge— an advance from the known into the unknown. Then you go back into the known and find out if what you now know compares with reality or rearranges or changes anything, and you go back up toward the unknown again and then you come back with whatever you have located there and see if it compares with the real universe around you. You just keep this cycle up.

It would be unfortunate if anybody came along and said we were going into the field of religion. For all of the emotional connotation to this scientific research, we might as well be going into the field of milk testing or something of the sort. It is like dealing with a great big jigsaw puzzle, in that when we first looked at this field the pieces were all different colors. They were just lying all over the place and each one was different from all the rest. A person sitting down to work this jigsaw puzzle would look at it for a few minutes and say, "It’s all too complicated for me and therefore it can’t be solved," which I do not think was a legitimate conclusion.

It is complicated. But when you start to look at it with the technology of looking at things contained in atomic and molecular phenomena and in mathematics, and when you see that it is necessary to apply a few things to it that have never been applied to it before, though the tools were there to apply, the first thing you find is that there is one variable so wild in its behavior that it had better be investigated.

That is one of the fundamental laws of research: Don’t look for constants (anybody can find constants), look for variables. Look for something that varies radically and without apparent reason, and then investigate it.

The variable in this case was hypnotism. There were a lot of allegations about hypnotism that claimed that it did this, that and something else, but when I looked at hypnotism I found that it d idn ‘t do this, that and something else. I found a bunch of supersalesmen tearing around through the society saying, "Hypnosis is the thing. All you do is shoot the guy in the arm; you get deep- trance hypnosis. And then he runs back and all of a sudden you get a release of affect, and the trance drug wears off and he goes crazy— no, that isn’t what he’s supposed to do. But it’s a good idea!" That was hypnotism.

They would sit a person down and get his arms and legs all working in some fashion or other and then suddenly say to him, "You are strong, you are powerful, you are good, you are kind. Your eyes don’t hurt anymore and you are in beautiful condition. When I count from five to one you will wake up. Five- four- three- two- one— wake up!"

Then the fellow would say, "God, I feel horrible!"

"But you’re not supposed to feel horrible. Now, you do feel good, don’t you?"

And the fellow would say dazedly, "Yes, I feel wonderful."

Sometimes the fellow would wake up and he would feel good. The hypnotist would put him to sleep and say, "Everybody likes you." The fellow would wake up and thereafter be charming— a great social success. But that was one case in many hundreds.

The hypnotist would put the next person into a trance (they used to call it "put him to sleep" which was interesting bad semantics) and say, "Everybody likes you." Then the fellow would wake up, and it wouldn’t have worked. But the hypnotist would say, "But it ought to work! It ought to work this way."

In other words, they kept on saying authoritatively "Hypnotism works this way," and they never believed it would work any other way and they went on using it. They never said "It’s wild. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t work; sometimes you can do this with it, sometimes it does that. What weird stuff!" And nobody ever sat down and said "We have to get to the bottom of this subject." In all the field of human behavior this was the wild variable.

Any research engineer looking into a new field looks for the wild variable. I investigated hypnotism, found it had quite a few interesting things, found out you could do quite a few things with it and found out that it jumped all over the place, and then I went in to find out why.

You understand that one didn’t go into all of Dianetics from the jumpoff of hypnotism. One went into Dianetics after an origin of some basic philosophical principles, such as purposes and goals, shapes, behavior and axioms, just laid out as common denominators, as things observable in any society anyplace. What was the common denominator of all the societies of men? There were those common denominators. But with Dianetic processing, it was hypnotism that had to be investigated.

People occasionally get the idea that Dianetics is really hypnotism. They haven’t yet caught up to the fact that this little nut has been cracked. I will give you a definition for hypnotism: Hypnotism is merely the process of restimulating states of apathy for the introduction of additional engramic content which will thereafter be as compulsive as the other data in the incident. That is hypnotism. Mechanically, hypnotism is the seizure by the operator of motor- control determinism so as to bring about a state of apathy. That is the mechanics of hypnotism.

Now, you can take that mechanical definition and extrapolate it out and you will get every brand of hypnotism there is and you will get every lesson of hypnotic behavior. You will also get why it is wild and variable: It is wild and variable because it gets laid into engrams which are not constant. They are constant in their shape but they are not constant in their content.

The operator takes over this subject and hypnotizes him, restimulates this level of apathy and lays in this content. Only it is sitting in the middle of a tonsillectomy. Now this fellow goes around and does all these things; he has to do this or the tonsillectomy pain will turn on. But sometimes it just restimulates the tonsillectomy, so the subject comes out of the hypnotic trance with a headache and a sore throat, or he comes out of the hypnotic trance mad, or distrustful of the operator because the operator hooked herself on to the doctor.

Sometimes a person could be hypnotised by a woman but not by a man. This individual happened to be sitting in an incident where a nurse was nice. The woman was the ally so the operator hooked herself on to an ally. But just as often, an operator could hook himself on to an antagonist. In other words, the subject, in this state of apathy, was unable to differentiate, so he hooked up the operator with the personnel of the engram and then considered that this was compulsive. And why shouldn’t he so consider it? After all, wasn’t he sitting in this chair with people hammering, pounding, sawing on him and so forth? These people had a lot of authority over him, didn’t they? Therefore the hypnotic operator has just that much authority.

Hypnotism is not half as difficult as playing marbles. People say, "But everybody can’t be hypnotised. Some people can be but some people can’t be, and not everybody is subject to it." These were all its variables. Anybody who has an engram can be hypnotized. The way you do it is to go in with Dianetics and run him back into the engram and dope him off, then lay your plant and then bring him up to present time, and there he is. Now he has been hypnotised and he will behave just like a hypnotic subject with regard to that. Because what has the hypnotist done? He has taken an engram that wouldn’t reduce, or something of the sort, and he has laid some additional content into it.

So, that finished off the first echelon of Dianetics. That was a complete circle.

This big jigsaw puzzle, then, was suddenly found to have a couple of white pieces. And then it was found to have a third white piece, and a fourth one and a fifth one and a sixth one and a seventh one. And all of a sudden we had the nicest, neatest square area of white pieces you ever wanted to see.

There is only one trouble with this kind of research, though: Every time you find a new white piece and you put it in, you look up and find a piece which, a few minutes ago, was purple with orange stripes but which has turned white while you had your attention off. You look back and all of a sudden another piece is white, and every time you see another piece turn white about fifty more turn white. In other words, every time you pick up a new white piece— find out a new piece has turned white— you see that about fifty more have turned white. There is no horizon. These pieces just go out to glory in all directions. And every time you pick one up, an enormous number of them turn white and the puzzle gets bigger and bigger, and it won’t stop growing— because, each time, we look for a variable.

This type of research was first originated by Francis Bacon, was followed through by Newton and was brought up to date and into the field of energies and so forth by later researchers such as Maxwell. The mathematics of it were actually introduced as a hint of and a takeoff from the mathematics of Albert Einstein. Einsteinian mathematics are one thing; he goes on out over the hills and far away. You might say this is a very proud and boastful thing to say "the mathematics contained in this were derived from those of Albert Einstein." That sounds just a cheeky remark. Einstein’s mathematics aren’t that direct; these are a lot simpler than that.

Albert Einstein developed his theory of relativity from the work of Lorentz and FitzGerald. The Lorentz- FitzGerald equations had introduced a new thought on the subject of absolutism and introduced the basic germ of the nonarithmetical mathematics that we are calling gradient scales and that you know very well. A little failure added to a little failure added to a little failure added to a little failure puts a person a little bit closer to death; adding that to another failure will add up to more failures, and all of a sudden he is dead. This is in contrast to the viewpoint of he is alive and then he is dead. How does he get that way and what is the gradient scale of his getting that way? That is a simplicity.

A little success and a little more success and a little more success, and this person will keep on building on up the line. His survival is determined by this.

If we look all through Dianetics we find that we have gradient scales; we don’t have absolutes. Oddly enough, every line of philosophy which has been even remotely successful has included some form of gradient scale.

I think in that line you can also include Aristotle’s philosophy; it was successful enough to be chosen as the only line of education by the Catholic church and it stayed so for about fifteen hundred years. I would consider that relatively successful. He had the theory of the pendulum: A pendulum would go over to one extreme and then go over to the other extreme and when it finally settled down it would settle down in an average. This theory of the pendulum was actually— and he did not state it so— a sort of nonarithmetical mathematics. He said everything settles out more or less and comes to center. That is the background, by the way, of Emerson’s essays on compensation.

So, we came up with this gradient scale proposition. Actually, it took off from Aristotle and it took off from Newton’s calculus. Newton’s calculus measures little bits of things in order to find out what the whole thing will do. That is the whole theory of calculus. You just take a little bit and you examine it and you find out what it will do, and then the whole thing will follow this same rule.

The same thing happens in Dianetics, except that you are establishing the facts of what the established dynamics of existence are, what life is, what death is, and how much life there is in a person instead of whether he is alive. And you are establishing the fact that most things run on energy. This material on gradient scales isn’t very complex, but a lot of people had to do a lot of thinking before we could come anywhere near it.

Now, there is another variable. We are staring straight at another variable. Hypnotism was a variable; we resolved hypnotism. The second echelon starts with another variable: the energy of life itself. As far as we have measured this variable right now at the present moment, we cannot answer these questions:

Is the energy deposited within the organism or is it outside the organism?

Does the organism influence the energy or does the energy influence the organism?

Does this energy have wavelength, physical weight and body or doesn’t it?

These are only a few of the little questions that can be asked about it.

There used to be a professor up at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology— the school amongst schools for engineers, particularly electronic engineers. They called him "99 Percent Jackson." Old 99 Percent Jackson got his name because he said, "Any time you ask the proper question, you have got 99 percent of the answer. All you have to do is ask the proper question of the universe and you have got 99 percent of its answer." I consider that right now we probably have 99 percent of the answer; we have the questions right now which inherently contain the answer. We have seen them in behavior enough.

Now, if somebody wants to write and say that Dianetics is a religious cult, that is interesting. Newspaper editors are actually a much worse religious cult. I have followed them carefully and have found that they are the harbingers of disaster and bad tidings. They belong to a cult of couriers which originated shortly before the College of Heralds and was composited into the College of Heralds and then degraded gradually down through the slums of humanity— William Hearst and the yellow journalists— and finally went downhill even further through and below the ranks of white slavery and dope peddling and so forth.

It is tough to set out to investigate something and suddenly find that you are walking slightly into the field of religion. Actually, we are not far into the field of religion; we are not far into the field of spiritualism.

It has been said that nothing is so strange or absurd that it cannot be found in the books of the philosophers. It is interestingly true that there is nothing in Dianetics that cannot be found— unlabeled, unevaluated and considered more or less unimportant— in the past ages of thought. It is all there. Research in these fields has been something on the order of taking a drop of water and dropping it down a sink in Wichita, waiting for eight months and then picking it with great accuracy out of the Atlantic Ocean. All the data is there but nobody has ever evaluated it. Now we are evaluating it and getting it into some kind of order so it will work, because data won’t work unless it has a value on it. People are apt to neglect that.

I am reminded of a textbook on navigation called "Dutton." "Dutton" is the bible of all naval officers at the naval academy. A naval officer goes to the naval academy in a high patriotic fervor: he goes out and he drills, he doesn’t mind that; he meets second classmen, he doesn’t mind them; he meets first classmen, he doesn’t mind them; he gets demerits, he doesn’t mind that; he has to go out and sweat in the sun rowing boats, he doesn’t mind that; he marches, he gets punishment drills— but then he runs into "Dutton" and he faints.

I wondered why on earth this book causes so much turmoil and why young officers don’t really like this book but navigators swear by it, so I looked it over. "Dutton" is a book which is of use to you only after you know the subject thoroughly. Then "Dutton" has it all there and you don’t have to read "Dutton" after that.

You never walk up to a navy fourstriper and start talking about navigation without his getting a very complacent, silly look on his face and saying, "Well, I like ‘Dutton." ’ As a matter of fact, he has finally run the engram of having this thing shot down his throat at the academy and he has gotten to that point on the tone scale where he realizes his main level of importance is convincing people that he knows what they don’t. So a young officer comes aboard saying "Dutton," and the fourstriper says authoritatively, "Oh, ‘Dutton’!" The young officer is cowed, and he looks on the senior officer thereafter as God.

There is only one thing wrong with "Dutton": it is all solid information, but no one phrase in it is punched up to be more important than any other phrase in it. "Dutton" would be a good book if they would just put a scoring system in the front of it: Five lines under a sentence means it is. terrifically important, four lines means not so important but very important, three lines means it is pretty important but it is right there in the center of the knowledge, one line says "You had better know this, people ask you every once in a while," and no line at all says "Skip it." But "Dutton" is of no use to man or beast right now, actually.

This was the way with all the material of philosophy, with one additional thing. Everything in "Dutton" is true, but everything that has been written about the mind, spiritualism, magic, mysticism, religion, science, biology, dog training, psychology and all these things is not necessarily true. They are interlarded with, I would say, as much as 99 percent false data. So you would have to know the answer, but now that you know the answer it is very easy to pick up any textbook from the past and open it up to page 165 and find right where it says an engram is very important.

Somebody shipped me a book from Germany, and the author of this book had written about engrams as being very important. He didn’t say they were very important, but he wrote all about engrams. That was a very fascinating book. The emphasis was all in the wrong spots but the data was there. This book existed in an enormous field of books. You would have had to have had some sort of clairvoyance to know that you should pick out that book and then what pages to pick out of that book to have come up with the answers about engrams.

One had to arrive at the problem in another way entirely, not by going out and studying data out of books. One had to keep taking a look at the real universe and finding out what was true in it to find a very variable substance and make it as clear- cut as one could and find out why it was a variable.

That is what we are doing with theta right this minute. It is in that state. It is a variable and we have to find out where it varies and why.

Now, I can tell you where it varies. "Everybody knows" that all memory is recorded in the cells, that the cells are physiological units mainly composed of MEST and that therefore all recording and perception is done with the cells. In view of the fact that there is nothing else in the body but cells, it must follow, then, that all thought is being done with cells and that therefore it must be electricity (you get this non sequitur suddenly) and wavelength energy which is causing thought and memory storage. That is existing technology. As a matter of fact, that is, if anything, just a little bit in advance of existing technology.

I am going to explain this theory to you. This is the cellular postulate.

Once upon a time there was a cell. Its name was Algae and it lived very happily in a big lake. All day long the sun shone on it and all day long chemicals kept bumping into it. So it absorbed the chemicals and absorbed the sunlight, and one day it subdivided and became another Algae. So Algae Junior was now the same as Algae. It kept this up for a long time and finally it got up to a point where it united into a whole flock of thises and thats and varied itself. The first thing you know, it became very antisocial— it individuated, in other words— and it began to eat other algae.

But it evolved a bit further and one day it got up to a point where it could eat what was eating algae. And then it evolved a lot further and it got up to a point where it could eat what was eating what was eating algae. It came along the line and began to develop vertebrae so it could swim like the dickens to catch what was eating what was eating what was eating what was eating what was eating algae.

Then one day it crawled up on the beach or did something remarkable. And then one day there was a man. And a man subsists and is assisted by eating the thing that eats the thing that eats the thing that eats the thing . . . that eats algae. That is evolution.

I think nothing is truer than evolution, looking it over. Except we shouldn’t fall into the decline of accepting, hook, line and sinker, the basic theory of evolution. If you go back and look up Darwin you will find that the field of cytology— which is supposed to be the study of this sort of thing— and Darwin’s theories are not compatible, and yet they exist and are taught in the same university side by side. A student can go from a class in cytology into a class which is teaching evolution and biology, and they teach him one thing in cytology and another thing in biology.

This is something like the Old Testament and the New Testament. The Old Testament says, "I am the God of vengeance," and the New Testament says, "Love thy neighbor— I am the God of love." So people, without the slightest ripple, picked them both up and printed them in the same case, as the Bible. The New Testament was a terrific revolution in Old Testament practices. Nobody has really ever noticed the difference.

What did Jesus say? "The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath. ’’l As a matter of fact, he was a revolutionary of such character that he finally got crucified for it. The Romans didn’t do it to him, the old religion did. Now we take the book of the old religion and we print it alongside of his revolution. I think if he came to earth tomorrow he would be upset. They believed him.

Cytology and biology, then, don’t agree; that is because only parts of the answer are in each one of them.

Now, it is very interesting to look along this line of extrapolation and find that man is living on sunlight and minerals. He is living on sunlight and minerals because the basic building block is living on sunlight and minerals and he is living on the building blocks all the way up the line. Have you ever tried to deny a man minerals and deny him sunlight? You can feed him all sorts of things, but if you don’t give him enough of those two things, as contained in vitamins and so on, he gets into bad shape rather rapidly. Furthermore, he follows the same behavior pattern, physiologically, as these basic monocells. He is awake in the daytime and he is asleep at night— except in New York. In New York he has lots of electric light, so he is led to believe that one should be up at night. But you give a man a lot of * darkness at night and he will go to sleep. That is interesting.

The sleep cycle is a food cycle; it is the same thing. Algae live on sunlight and minerals. There are minerals available at night but no sunlight, so men sleep at night. I don’t know why. This says that there is a lower energy gradient at night than there is in the daytime, and that is true. More people die at two o’clock in the morning than die at two o’clock in the afternoon. In fact, the bulk of deaths from natural causes take place between two and four in the morning. That is the time of lowest energy level.

This is sort of built into the machine, but it can sure be upset. Man’s cells may have become habituated to this, but he is not dependent upon direct sunlight; he can get it through food and artificially. However, he has never quite turned the cycle over so he is awake twenty- four hours of the day as he ought to be.

There is probably no reason at all for sleep. I could make sleep vary around so fast by shoving engrams around in people that it would be a crime. I think that the reason people sleep on the low energy gradient probably could be overcome if one administered enough vitamins in balanced ration and got this habit out. A person has confirmed it all during his youth. All you would have to do would be to plow up all the nights and plow up all the times he has been asleep and find out what happened.

There is an interesting little datum, and it could be set up on research.

Now, obviously this cell had to be able to record light because it fed on light. People will tell you that "seeing is believing" (and engrams say this too); the funny part of it is, seeing is believing. There is more truth to be derived from the perceptic of sight than there is from the perceptic of sound. There is more reality, then, in sight because there is more truth in sight. It is harder to change sight around to make it lie. It can be done, though it is harder to do. People depend on sight. When you turn someone’s visio off his reality really goes by the board.

We can see that this cell is perceiving. It has to perceive. But as it builds along the line and becomes a more complex organism, any wave form or energy manifestation or entity in the physical universe will sooner or later become a subject for recording in a cellular body.

In other words, just the fact that there is light causes sight to take place, that there is something to touch causes touch to take place, that there is a force concussion wave causes hearing to take place. Something has developed to record all the forces which are recordable. If you want to know how many types of recordings there are, or how many types of perceptics there are, just write down all the things there are to perceive and you will find that that is how many perceptics an advanced organism has.

Now, "obviously" these things are recorded in physical- energy waves. They are received that way, aren’t they? So "obviously" they are recorded that way. There is only one thing haywire with this. This is where we run into our first awful variable.

I showed this to a fellow by the name of Dr. William Alanson White. He was in charge of St. Elizabeth’s at the time. I had done a calculation on the size of neutrons, protons and electrons, the smallest units of energy known, and it was obvious that they were much too gross to store memory. They are about fifty to a hundred thousand times too gross to store memory. So that blew a hole in this theory.

Biology and cytology had been getting along just beautifully. The only trouble was that the second anybody came into that field who just happened to have the technique of computing the size of energy manifestations, he suddenly found that this line went along just fine up to the point where it said "the organism receives a physical- universe force wave," but it didn’t work to add the second part "and records that energy." Because it can’t record unless there exists an energy so minute— and yet finite— that it is thousands of times smaller than any known physical- universe wave or particle.

The best theory on this that anybody has brought up was the idea that there are ten holes in a protein molecule and that you store a thousand memories in each hole. This was brought up by some genius over in Vienna. He was a genius in the field of biology undoubtedly, but he should have sneaked over and opened up a physics textbook and taken a look.

Light is pretty gross. Electricity is terrifically gross, but light is uery gross. Do you know why you can’t build an optical microscope that will show a virus? It is very simple: because there is no light with waves that small! The light waves are too big! In other words, a light wave is something that almost is visible; it is a wonder you can’t see the gaps in waves with your naked eye. Now, a virus is composed of energy particles, but a virus in its complete form is too small to be adequately viewed using light which is right up against the ultraviolet band. Light waves just don’t go down that small. But if you could imagine something that did, you could try to build something.

We started out and got pretty good results with ultraviolet microscopes; we used ultraviolet light to take photographs. We saw more with ordinary photomicrography than had been seen before, just with this gimmick over in the physics lab. All we did was turn on an ultraviolet light and use film which could only be exposed by ultraviolet light, and of course we could see smaller things because we were working higher up the wave band.

Then they built an electron microscope. They built the first one and it occupied a whole room at Harvard. (Now they make them portable.) These microscopes fire electrons left and right, and the electrons go around objects and you can see the measles virus and other things like this.

In order to make something visible, it has to be hit with a wave emanation which every umpteenth of a split second shoots it with several hundred waves. So a virus— this little tiny thing that ultraviolet light jumps over— is shot by several hundred electrons, and then the absence of the electrons on the screen (because they are being diverted by the virus) makes it possible for you to see a virus. That is how tiny electrons are.

There is no way you can record thought on a wave band unless this terrifically minute gradient exists. Maybe it does. We could allow that it does— but it would have to be five hundred thousand times smaller than any known wave or particle of physical- universe energy.

Then there is another thing. You find when you run a preclear back down the time track and he starts striking incidents, and the incidents are quite real and the energy storage is all there, that this is coexistent with present time. Why? Because he doesn’t change the physical- universe energy when he goes down the time track. Therefore all this energy must be available in present time at once— simultaneously.

You look over these cells and you find that they are carbon- oxygen motors. Each cell is a little storage battery and it runs on carbon and oxygen. It is a beautiful setup. You breathe in oxygen and there is carbon from the food, and these mix together and furnish good, solid finite- universe energy, and this energy is used. So the scientist said, "You see, the human body is a carbon- oxygen motor and obviously it moves. So therefore, being a carbonoxygen motor, it is very simple: the whole thing is run on an electrical principle. And now we’ll go off to something important!" They just did another one of these big jumps.

Have you ever seen someone digging an excavation with a steam shovel? Here is a unit of theta which is pushing buttons on a steam shovel, and the steam shovel goes up and down, scoops earth, dumps it in the truck and so forth. "Obviously" the steam shovel is alive— the steam shovel is alive and there is no man in it! How do you prove this? The steam shovel runs, doesn’t it? This is exactly the same kind of logic as in overlooking these other factors about theta.

The body is a heat engine, by the way; it runs at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. The brain runs on 2.4 watts— I can give you lots of statistics. It adds up to a terrific pyramid of data, and as long as you don’t look out of the corner of your eye it will hold up. But as soon as you glance over to the side and find out that a person can go back and recover the pain in the past or the pleasure in the past and activate it himself in the present, it all collapses.

Now, let us take a cellular line. The first cell is active and recording at one year; the next cell is active and recording at two years; the next cell is active and recording at three years; the next one is active and recording at four years. It looks, very simply, as if you just take present time energy and hit the cells which have those memories stored in them, and the memory activates and that is the end of that. That looks simple; now we can go on to something important.

But you had better not leave this problem before you realize the violence of energy which can be stored there. MEST- universe energy does not store like this. Have you got any idea whatsoever of the real violence of an engram? Did you ever see a preclear practically plaster himself all over the ceiling just because you hit an energy area like that? And do you mean to tell me that the force of that energy has been stored there all that time ever since? It "obviously" has, hasn’t it? The guy is sick from it; the body deformed because of it. No. His body didn’t.

This person had an operation and then went on for twenty years and nothing happened. But all of a sudden one day he is tired, he comes home and his wife says, "Where’s the dog?" and he blows up.

She says, "But I only asked you where the dog was," and he goes and gets a shotgun and shoots her or does something "reasonable" like this. And this has to do with his being mauled by a dog when he was two years of age.

When we run him into that engram— we take him back to the time he is two years of age— he really hits it. Pain, physical energy, really starts burning up around about the place. You really get action out of the thing.

"Of course," all that energy was just stored there in the cells. Maybe so, but this is very peculiar insulation!

Now, the Indians say that all animals were built by a character who was known as Old Man. Old Man was a very prankish fellow. He used to come along and find an animal that wasn’t doing anything, and he would give the animal something to do. If it didn’t do it, he would change the animal in some way. For instance, he took the beaver and put his tail down on the river bank and hit the tail real hard and knocked it out flat so the beaver would have a flat tail.

Anyway, the Indian Old Man had some interesting habits like that. He came up to the pack rat one day and the pack rat had gotten in all of his winter storage and his food, and he was sitting on the bank of a creek, feeling very cheerful and pleased with himself and idle, and Old Man said to him, "What are you doing?"

"Oh, nothing, I’m just resting."

"Have you got everything fixed up for winter?"

"Oh, yes, all fixed up. Everything is all fixed up."

"Well, have you got any pucktash?"

"Huh?"

"Pucktash!"

The pack rat said, "What is it?"— because he knew what happened to animals.

Old Man said, "Well, never mind what it is, but the next time I see you, if you don’t have any pucktash . . ."

Ever since that day, the pack rat has been getting hold of everything he could lay his paws on in the hopes that when Old Man comes back again, Old Man will look through the pile and say, "Yup, pucktash."

That, by the way, is a satire on scientific research as done in most fields.

Anyway, have you got any idea how much voltage it would take in an engram to make a human body move as much as it will move if you run a screamer that is really painful in somebody?

You may have had something to do with little power tools and electric motors: Would a quarter- horse electric motor bow a preclear off the couch so just his heels and the back of his head are touching, and keep swinging him up into the air like that— a 180- pound man? No. So it isn’t a quarter of a horsepower. Would it take a half- horsepower motor? I don’t know. We could make scientific tests on this, and I think we would find out eventually that it would take a pretty high- powered motor to do this.

We could work it out to say that any time a person gets injured all the energy that comes in encysts and this terrific energy is stored on a condenser basis. Then, when the auditor goes back down the track again, he gets into these areas and he just gets to the point where this encystment isn’t quite yet constructed fully so that he can discharge these condensers, and that is why it all works out. He goes back to the time before the shell which insulated the cell encysted the pain and that makes it able to explode. But it won’t explode in present time, except occasionally when it gets much more heavily charged up. I hope you follow this; I don’t! But that would have to be the basic physical- universe explanation of it.

Actually, that would be a physical- universe shell around physicaluniverse energy, and therefore you couldn’t send him back to his crib to have him bite his rattle in half. And his rattle back there doesn’t get bitten in half.

By the way, you can prove this. Take a piece of chalk and take a very careful look at it. Now return to the moment you looked at it and break it. Of course, if it was broken two minutes ago, it will be broken now. And that would prove that a person could alter the physical universe by returning on the time track.

Now, aren’t you going to buy the cellular postulate?

That is what is wrong with this goofy theory of cellular energy. By going back on the time track to change something, a person could never get to a time when he could discharge this energy unless there were some unhappy or strange coincidence of some sort or other. But that energy is a very strange thing.

This cell that was injured at that time has subdivided some thousands and thousands of times since it was injured. Every seven years there isn’t a cell left in your body that was there seven years earlier. "Obviously" you have no recordings more than seven years old!

So there is something wrong with all those theories.

Theta does the strange thing of remolding the physical organism— changing it, altering it. In the first place, theta came down and put some of it together or organized some physical- universe energy— or the physicaluniverse energy organized and put out theta. Only, if the physical- universe energy organised and put out theta, it was a very, very funny- looking contraption: something made out of energy consisting of wavelengths made something which didn’t have a wavelength. And theta doesn’t have a wavelength. It can’t have a wavelength, because if it had a wavelength then physical- universe energy would have to be stored. But all there is, is a repetition of it being stored or a trigger with regard to it.

Now, you actually could figure out a theory whereby you send "I" back from present time and this energy merely plays over the recording bank and suddenly develops in itself, all of itself, in no other way, these terrific enturbulations just by reading what is on that bank. Only that isn’t the way it handles. This would mean that the more times you took it back to the cellular recording, the more in turmoil it would be. That isn’t the way it works. It works just the opposite; it gets smoother and smoother and smoother.

So that is the cellular postulate. As in the field of hypnotism, where they said something worked all the time which was found not to work, we learned something. I have only given you two absurdities in the postulate of cellular recording by physical- universe energy. There are many more.

You might have a postulate along this line, that theta in its shape has the recordings inherently in it or is potentially a recording.

How strong can that recording be? How much of a somatic can you turn on? Can you turn on a somatic comparable to the incident? Yes, you can. You can turn it on to a level comparable to the incident and reduce it. That is a pretty high somatic.

How would you like to experience, awake, being practically disemboweled— with the full somatic? Theta is capable of reproducing that. I can tell you that. I have a back tooth with a chip knocked out of it. I reproduced an accidental shock across the side of my face, using a new technique, and the fact of the matter is that the thing must have knocked out a baby tooth or maybe two or three baby teeth. It must have been that rough. I was holding, in this incident, a light switch that was live, and I backed up against a doorknob so that I got enough kick, evidently, to knock out the teeth.

Electric shocks group. That is why psychiatry uses them. They group a track; they will group a whole bank— that makes them very good, very effective "therapy." Euthanasia is illegal, but not electric shock.

Anyway, that was an energy kick strong enough to be quite painful when it was revivified in present time with sufficient strength and magnitude. How much could it be turned on?

I found that I can turn on any somatic that anybody has practically to the full intensity it had originally.

By the way, this opens up a method to deal with these chronic somatics. Some preclear comes in to the Foundation and says, "I have had lumbago all my life and I want to get rid of it." So the auditor audits her for a week and doesn’t get rid of the lumbago; she is disappointed, naturally. With this method, in its present state of refinement, she will either go away from the Foundation without the lumbago or just be carried out— one or the other! Because all you do is just turn the somatic on full and kick in with enough protein and so forth to feed the body up so it will repatch the area. Here is an energy- level activity of considerable strength and magnitude.

Isn’t it a funny thing that protein is necessary in this process? That is peculiar. It is because what you ate when you were five is not going to patch up what you were doing when you were five. Those aren’t the cells that you are trying to repatch; you are trying to repatch the cells you have now. But why do you have to repatch them? The energy is obviously being burned up in present time because you have to replenish it, like stoking an old woodburning engine. You really have to stoke this body with proteins, vitamins and minerals. It is present time energy that is burning, it isn’t released energy, because if a preclear gets too tired and you run into one of these things, you will spin him. And if he isn’t up enough on food— in other words, if he doesn’t have enough residual energy— it will spin him. Therefore it is saying to you right there with that data that the energy is in present time. The energy burned up is present time energy, not residual energy. Therefore the theta is probably superimposing the energy over the organism.

How tough can it get? I turned on that somatic full and it kicked a piece out of my tooth. This was not the strain from biting down, for the good reason that my mouth would not shut. My jaw was sprung open and would not close; there was no physical proximity of any other tooth to jump across and knock it out. But that piece came out.

Now, this had gotten into restimulation some time before and it had knocked a little tiny piece off, but the tooth had been kind of bad and I thought I had bitten something and I didn’t think anything about it. So when I got to thinking about this experiment, I began to wonder about it and I said, "I’m going to try it."

That is how tough a somatic can get.

The facsimile theory would say that what the theta did was reconstruct and make the body reconstruct and find energy to reconstruct an electrical arc to approximate the initial arc, which would have enough strength and power to do what the initial arc did. If you could reconstruct all of it in present time— if you had a method of reconstructing all of it in present time simultaneously— that would be the result. And that was the result.

So we are off into the second echelon. Apparently the first answer of it is that theta superimposes these somatics on the organism and that it approximates the energy present in the somatic by recreating the energy from the physical- universe matter present in the organism. Thus, you get pretty tired running engrams and you can change the body around wildly. The theta shapes the body again, possibly, on the facsimile postulate, and you can watch this if you want to.