SELF- DETERMINED EFFORT PROCESSING

A lecture given on 20 September 1951

New Axioms of Dianetics

For the first time in the history of psychology, I think a person may be able— just possibly— to drive a dog stark, staring nuts! And there is a vague, million- to- one possibility that he might make the dog sane again, but that is very doubtful.

I think you will find that as I go into this material, the appeal to your reason is such that you will be able to extrapolate out along this line very easily, and I don’t think that you are going to finish up with a question of "Well, I’ll try it." I think you have handled enough preclears to get your data aligned around the fact of "I have seen it."

There is a new axiom, the second axiom of Dianetics. The first is, The dynamic principle of existence is survival. The second one is roughly stated as, The survival is done by continuing motion at a certain even rate. This is physical- universe motion. The modus operandi of survival is motion.

The third axiom says, The one unconquerable arbitrary is time. We have gone into this before. You can, however, process time because time is always a part of motion.

This means that processing comes down to the processing out of existence of "over" and "under" motion— too much motion and too little motion. This is the compulsion- inhibition cycle.

We have talked about inhibited ARC and we have talked about compelled ARC; throw that out the window. What is inhibited and compelled is the effort involved in motion. Motion has in it an effort— and this also has to be integrated into these axioms. Motion is basically effort.

The individual is engaged in a contest between himself, other individuals and organisms and the material universe, whereby the individual Maintains a motion which is prosurvival to him and to his symbiotes and so forth. He maintains this motion, and this means that he has to overcome motions or efforts which inhibit him, and I mean by that the physical efforts to inhibit him in the continuance of this motion. He also has to overcome efforts which increase his motion beyond an optimum.

This all may sound very philosophical, but it is not, really.

A person wants to sit in a car and drive the car. A stoplight stops him. This isn’t enough to bother with— it would be a lock at most— but that is inhibited motion. For his survival, it is necessary for him to remain in motion. It is possible that he doesn’t extrapolate out to the point where he sees he has to have these stoplights in order to remain in motion because otherwise the traffic would get snarled. People don’t think that far, so these things become locks.

If we called them "start lights," by the way, they would be much more acceptable. Also, we could have "start signs." You could change the whole morale of a city if you just did this: Instead of putting stop up on cross streets, put up a start. A fellow has to stop to start, doesn’t he? In order to get a start you have to stop.

Now, this person is driving along and someone comes up behind him and hits his car. This puts him into more motion than he should have. His contest in driving is to maintain motion of a survival tempo in a survival direction.

Effort is the word in physics which covers motion and direction, so we will stop worrying about motion and start talking about effort. You must keep in mind the basic definition of effort: foot- pounds (or whatever units) of energy applied in a given direction.

Every one of us is trying to maintain, by foot- pounds of energy, a course of action in a given direction, even though our antagonist may be gravity. That gravity may or may not be optimum. The world is spinning so that a surface point on the earth moves at the rate of about a thousand miles an hour; that has terrific centrifugal action. If it weren’t for gravity, we would fly off the earth. So what is the balance between ourselves and gravity? Gravity only becomes bad when we try to jump, when we try to go beyond the motion indicated. We try to jump six feet and the gravity pulls us right back. Maybe we wanted to jump eight feet, and so we are balked to that degree by gravity. That sort of thing would be what is known as the inhibition of the environment.

This would also include a fall. You are opposed. You want to get down off some place, so a certain height could be an inhibition because the gravity would pick up your velocity to a point where you would land with a considerable shock.

All this evolves very simply from the fact that the only thing you want out of an engram— and I mean this— is effort. That is all you want. But you want a reality with regard to that effort, because if you don’t have a reality with regard to the effort, you don’t get the effort.

Now, if I were to say that all you want out of an engram is motion, that would be wrong, because motion can imply randomity. It could go in any direction and so forth. Motion has no direction. But effort has definite direction and purpose. This is the effort factor: The effort has to have the direction and the opposition or the compulsion in order to be an effort. In other words, motion, to be effort, has to have direction and inhibition or compulsion at a known point in time.

That is how effort is different from motion. Motion could be anything. But effort has to be specific: it is at a known point in time, it has a known direction and it is known whether it is inhibited or compelled. We have been expressing this by saying "reality"— the reality of an engram that a person feels and so on. What gives it reality is the fact that he has identified the effort; it is established in time at a certain point and in a certain direction. Therefore, if he knows these points he knows which way he was going and what he was trying to do.

Unless you have these factors in the effort, you are not getting all the effort out of an engram. It is very vital, then, when processing, to make sure that the orientation of the preclear in the environment is beyond question to the preclear. Otherwise, you can’t process his effort because he doesn’t know what his effort is. Unless he knows what the environment was and what the situation was, unless his own conclusions with regard to it are there, he doesn’t know what the effort was. And you can’t tell him what the effort was. Therefore you have to process it on, as we say, the theta side of the ledger. That is to say, you have to have an awareness about this thing.

The point of lowest awareness of effort is of course the center, the deepest point of anaten, of any engram, and that is an axiom. This is apathy, because it is effort applied in all directions unsuccessfully with a resultant series of commands which go in all directions so that there is never a resolution of effort. There is never a force vector to go with it. The person doesn’t have a force vector at that point; all he has are random vectors.

By the way, there is a magnitude of threat to survival: The magnitude of threat to survival is that thing which modulates the amount of effort d emand ed by a rational mind .

Aberration is a failure to add up the amount of effort, the magnitude of the effort, necessary to the solution. Aberration can then be caused by lack of data, or it can be caused by poorly or wrongly met efforts in the past, so that you get randomity.

Now, let’s postulate a force— a person’s own effort— that says "Get up out of that chair." So we have a person trying to get up out of a chair. He tries to get up out of the chair one way, but no dice. He tries to get up out of the chair another way, but still no dice. He can’t go through the bottom of the chair. Suddenly there is complete randomity: Instead of a directed effort, there is anaten!

Those are the basic principles.

Rationality is recognition of the magnitude of effort necessary or recognition of the magnitude of effort being applied to the individual. Unless he knows this he can’t be rational.

Anybody who has suffered from this randomity to too great an extent is no longer able to add up magnitudes of effort because he is continually suffering from past efforts which were unresolved.

Now, the next step consists of this: The mind can be considered to be, basically, an aligned x quantity protoplasm. I don’t care what you want to call it; call it ectoplasm, call it anything you want to, but it is this x quantity which is pliable and amenable as a safety factor. Centrally aligned, and basically, the mind aligns the effort of the organism or those things dependent upon the organism. That is rational action. It aligns the efforts of the organism or those things dependent upon the organism or those things of which the organism is a part. That would be the whole definition.

It says, "Go here," "Do this," "Imbibe that," "Put out this," and so forth. It is directional.

Any mind is potentially the central directional hub of all minds. In a wholly unaberrated state, in other words, any mind potentially could direct all minds. In view of this, you have within a race a postulated randomity: The whole race has not agreed upon its goal! So no matter how many minds were there and no matter how clarified they were, there would be conflict. And from individual to individual you would get this process of randomity.

So as a race or as a group or even as a small unit of the family, without an agreed goal (and even with one) you get this randomity. The effort is being applied in many directions and it comes into conflict from mind to mind; it definitely gets into conflict. The first thing you know, any mind, in trying to make good its effort that it conceives to be necessary, will come into conflict with other efforts. These efforts impinge upon the individual to inhibit or compel.

Now, the mind is in good shape until it starts down the tone scale. And how does it start down the tone scale?

Here is the tone scale:

Tone 4.0 is recognised, well- directed, controlled individual effort which is meeting with effort on the parts of others in the vicinity. That would keep a man at tone 4.0.

At tone 3.5 the effort is more or less still all going in the same direction.

Tone 3 is below that.

Then for the first time, at tone 2.5, some of the force vectors reverse so that the person is not sure which way he is supposed to be going. He has been inhibited and compelled enough— just analytically in his society— to bring him down to a point of boredom. This could pertain to any one action or it could pertain to a lifetime.

When we get to 2.0, the vectors start to come the other way. There is more force directed toward survival as long as the person’s efforts are toward survival.

Now we get down to randomity, and all of a sudden the effort starts to weigh over in the direction of succumb. At 1.5 there is a greater level of randomity, but there is still magnitude of effort. The magnitude itself is not starting down very markedly until we get down lower. And of course as we get down into the lower areas, more and more of the vectors are off in the direction of succumb, until we get down to death.

The tone scale is a graph demonstrating how much the 4.0 vector toward survival has been turned around and pointed toward succumb. That is the tone scale.

What turns these vectors around?

Physiologically, individuals are capable of being impinged upon by inhibitive or compulsive efforts on the parts of others and registering them as such. The mind registers effort directed toward inhibition and compulsion. Every time an effort is physically impeded or compelled there is a tiny amount of anaten. When I say "physically impeded or compelled effort," I mean actual physical effort; this does not mean somebody saying something. For example, you start to walk into a room and somebody physically stops you from walking into the room. He doesn’t say "You can’t come in"; doing that, the person is just depending on people who have stopped you before. You start to walk into the room and he suddenly puts his hands up and stops you.

If you want to process one of those, just find such an instance in someone and process it, and if you are very alert for it you will find that there is a little bit of anaten under it, because the muscular effort has been impeded. There was an energy flow in a certain direction and this outside effort has thrown the energy flow back; the outside effort has stopped it and has turned it back.

There is an energy flow in a certain direction; this is an effort a person is making. (There is also a tone scale on this effort.) The individual meets the effort against him and his effort has a tendency to turn. But the central control unit hasn’t yet got the word, so it keeps putting out this effort to keep on going into the room. But the end result of that effort is being blunted. The central control unit gets the word after a while, and if the effort against him is such that it reaches all the way down into the central control unit he really gets unconsciousness. But a person can analytically understand that his effort to go into the room could be stopped. Normally, if it is just mentioned to him or something of the sort or he observes the situation and sees why he shouldn’t go into the room, he just turns around and goes away. It doesn’t upset him any, because that is his handling of the organism.

However, if he is physically stopped and he doesn’t see why he shouldn’t go into the room, his central- control effort will keep him trying to go into the room and he will get a randomity of effort, because out of the lines of application of effort he is getting reversed vectors continually, until all of a sudden there is enturbulence and it comes right on back into the individual. If that effort is then continued he will go unconscious.

Any individual as an individual, regardless of other people, could apply enough effort toward survival to knock himself unconscious. This would be trying to overcome more than he could overcome physically. For instance, have you ever seen anybody push on a car up to the point where he went blue? He had just not estimated the magnitude of effort required; he had decided that he could do it somehow or other, and a person could knock himself right out that way.

So, we have the efforts involved in trying to stand still and being moved and in trying to move and being forced to stand still. Those are really the two kinds of aberration. Of course, the gradients of that are trying to move and being forced off into other channels and so on. These are the basic actions.

Let’s take a look at a cross section of anaten. We have the person going along when all of a sudden an effort balks him and throws an area of time into randomity. It leaves a deposit. It is

an unsolved problem. That is to say, he did not overcome the effort, and there is no difference between saying "an unsolved problem" and "the effort not being overcome."

Maybe that was just a little one, just bumping into a post— hardly anything to bother with. Let’s take a bigger one now: The fellow is going along and he bumps into something, and his persistence is such and the bump is so hard or the compulsion against him is so hard that he cannot block the outside effort. The second he cannot stop this effort he goes into apathy.

Apathy is just getting a lot of randomity of effort. These lines of effort cannot operate all of a sudden, and right there he goes into an apathy. In other words, apathy and being unable to overcome effort are the same thing.

For example, take a pilot doing a 9G power dive: There is a certain amount of unconsciousness induced by pulling out of that dive. When he comes out of the anaten he is still in control of the airplane, most of the time. But at the bottom of his unconsciousness, you will still find an apathy. And if you let a pilot pull out of enough 9 G power dives, what you have left is a man who is very badly aberrated.

Now, supposing you just picked up anaten; supposing you picked up nothing but anaten anywhere. The anaten is only a physiological manifestation of the randomity of effort. That is all it is! It is not the effort. So processing the anaten would be processing a physiological byproduct of this randomity.

There was a technique put forward of running off anaten, whereby one processed words to get people into these areas of randomity. That technique picked up just one perceptic to get the preclear into it and it was the wrong perceptic.

The perceptic you want to pick up to get a person into the center of one of these things is just plain, ordinary effort. And it has to have reality because without reality it isn’t effort, it is only motion. Don’t process motion; process something that is spotted well in time with the environment and in which the problem is obvious. You should understand that in the middle of any of these areas of anaten is zero reality.

"I" was once upon a time in beautiful control. Then he ran into an area of randomity. What is the process of losing self- determinism? We are not in any philosophic echelon with this; we are really down to practicality. Let’s consider "I" to be a motorman who is handling the physical lines of effort. He has to observe where he is, what he is doing, what he has to oppose and what he has to overcome in order to apply any effort so that it can go into an aligned vector and become real effort. He has to know that. But he goes unconscious. First he is putting forth an effort and he is doing all right; "I" is doing okay and the effort is not bad and everything is going along all right. Then all of a sudden something opposes his effort and "I" goes unconscious— that is to say, randomity overcomes the individual because of the opposed effort. All of a sudden he gets a sock in the jaw. The last moment "I" had an alignment of effort, "I" was aligned with the body in a standing position, and the next moment "I" tries to take over the body all the levers have been changed and he is in a position flat on his back. The hands should be set up the way "I" left them but they aren’t.

The process of trying to regain consciousness is the process of "I" trying to hook up with the motor- control buttons, and none of them are the same. The motor- control buttons are all different.

One of the things that has happened is that the body has moved in time and space while "I" was not monitoring. So every time the body is monitored by somebody besides "I," "I" can’t connect up with the proper control buttons. But then "I," after this randomity is knocked out, has to come back and establish a new control post, and it may take "I" anywhere from one minute to a year to assume a new control post.

The only perception point that is worth anything is the center point. The center point of the mind is the good one. But "I," because of randomity, is continually forced to move off it and moves further and further from it and as a net result loses perception.

The perceptions, by the way, are always recorded at this center point. Perceptions are not newly recorded someplace else. No new center post is formed for recording, but new center posts are formed for command. Therefore this is where you get the whole problem of valence and all the rest of those problems.

That is a pretty tight package to say. But look what happens: "I" has had to grab hold of new buttons and new levers that are off the center point, and finally in order to do anything he has to come out and take over from a new point. This new point was moderating the whole organism at one time during a moment of unconsciousness, and "I" can be that point and can monitor the central control unit from that point. In other words, a valence can control the body because a valence has controlled the body. But what will a valence do to the body? We know that if a person goes way out of valence his recall perceptics go off. That is because a valence is too far removed from the center control point.

Now, it is not only that his perceptics go off; what is the purpose of that valence? It may basically have been to help the organism, as in an operation, but it is mainly hurting the organism.

This is the person who goes into auto- control; he goes into one of these valences and continues to operate on himself. And what did the person in that valence do to the organism? He hurt the organism. So all a person who is auto- controlling will do is continue to hurt the organism, because that is the sole purpose of the command post he has assumed.

To exert force against the organism is not for the organism to exert force against the environment. We know that when a body is extroverted— in other words, working against the environment or working with the environment— it is healthy and in good shape, and we know that when it is not extroverted it is not healthy.

You can just look at an individual and measure how successful he is in the environment and immediately tell whether he is being monitored by one of these valences or being monitored more or less by himself.

Now, it is possible for this horrible sort of thing to happen: The body can be completely overcome, dominated to such a point that a valence can reach all the way over the whole surface of the mind so that that valence point is in the point of central contact. The valence "I" is then in the point of central contact. There you have a wide- open case. l The "I" which has been assumed is a terrifically valid "I" as far as that person is concerned. And why is it a valid "I"? Because it is right there; it has all the fingers on the buttons. It can’t reason, really, and it can’t handle the organism very well, but the perceptics are available to it.

So a person could be occluded for a long period of time and then all of a sudden have his perceptics to some degree come on. This is what we call a dub- in case, because "I" isn’t monitoring but perceptics are available. This is a screwed- up mess. Or you may suddenly see some wide- open case walk in that is really daffy. This case is not really wide open—" wideopen case" being just slang for it. This is where an outside "I" has so taken over the organism that it even has a proximity to the perception point.

We consider this center point a perception point, you understand. An outside "I" can overcome the organism; this organism can be opposed, invalidated and pushed around to a point where "I" gets superimposed by another "I" so thoroughly that the outside "I" has perception right out of this central perception point.

The person who is occluded has just backed off the point. He will back off the point sooner or later, but if he suddenly goes into one of these valence "I’s," it will be a perimeter "I." If he starts self- auditing he will just continue to hurt the body.

That is why a person who is self- auditing can’t tackle anything but somatics. A person who is self- auditing cannot keep himself in the line- up of Validation Processing. He goes off immediately into entheta, because the purpose of the "I" in which he is established was just the purpose of the effort which it had at the time it became impinged on the organism.

What you are trying to do is strip the organism of all its inhibitive or compulsive efforts in terms of physical action. So you have to pick up the lowest, most forceful effort against the organism that you can pick up at a level of reality which still lets "I" see that it is "I."

In other words, you can only go into an engram or into one of these moments of anaten— a moment of inhibited or compelled effort— which is of no greater strength than "I" can handle and know where it was in time and space. That is the deepest you can enter any case on the first slug.

These efforts build. You want to find where the organism "I" had contact with the monitor controls of the body, so naturally that means the earliest engram you can possibly get on the case, because the earlier the engram you find on the case, the closer "I" will be to those monitor controls.

Now, this is extremely important: What do you want to take out of that earliest engram? Sonic? Visio? None of them. All you want is the effort.

You are not going to choose something like a birth unless the preclear knows he is there. The more you process these blank spots, the more you are walking him into the middles of areas of randomity. Therefore his reality gets lower and lower and his ability to handle his effort in the physical universe gets less and less no matter what you take off these things, because you are just handing him more and more randomity. You can even get rid of a chronic somatic and do all sorts of things to him, but you can sure mess him up and he certainly is not going to come up the tone scale.

So you enter the case by picking up any active area where the fellow was well oriented with regard to what he was trying to dxo and what was being done to him, and you take the effort out of that. You take the opposition effort out of that. The way you do this is simple. It is a Validation Processing action. You don’t let him concentrate on how he was opposed, because if he concentrates on how he was opposed he will run it out of valence; he will take the role of what was opposing him or compelling him. So you don’t say "What was the effort compelling you or stopping you?" You say, "What was your action to resist the effort that was stopping you?" and you keep him in valence. And then ask him something like "What does your big toe think about it?" because his natural effort will be to oppose whatever it was— his stomach, his leg— that was stopped. And "I" concentrates on that because its effort was stopped, so therefore its feedback tells him to keep on moving it! So his concentration is on this part which was stopped. You don’t want that. The second that you make him concentrate on some portion of his body other than the part that was stopped, the effort directed against him will turn on, because he was still being influenced, he wasn’t influencing.

Whereas there is an effort which was implanted into him at this point which influences him, and he will take the part of what is influencing him. He will go out of valence. He will take the part of what is influencing him: "Yes, well, I was stopped. A big pressure against my leg."

"Well, all right. Now, let’s go through it again."

"Yeah, I stopped the leg."

If you just keep on validating this, sure, you are going to get off some anaten; but you are going to leave "I" of the opposing force sitting in control of the leg. I want you to give that some thought. You can apparently reduce the thing but leave the "I" that opposed the leg in control of the area.

He naturally will say, "Yeah, it stopped it," and so forth, and you say, "Well, what did your left leg think about it?" (I don’t give you this as a specific command to hand the preclear but this is the basic idea of it.) The "I" that opposed him did not oppose the left leg, so he has to get back to himself to find out what the left leg thought about it. And the second he concentrates on this leg he is concentrating on his own "I," his own self. This turns on the effort directed against him.

Now, there are two possible errors in processing— two possible errors. Error one is to process motion rather than effort, and by motion I mean also deposit; so that is motion or lack of it, regardless of effort. That is an error that you can make, and the error is simply that the individual is being impinged upon by motion and he has no reality with regard to where this motion was or what was taking place, so therefore it is not effort. Effort has to be pinpointed in time and environment. And the effort that you are interested in is the effort the individual was making, not the effort being made against him.

What makes alliesl very tough to get out is that they are assistive efforts. The fellow is sitting there as a little child and a barking dog comes along, and he says, "I want to get out of here!" So Mama comes along and scoops him up and carries him away. Obviously, Mama is part of his "I," because she keeps answering what he wants to do physically. So the dog hit him and he wanted to be out of that area and Mama came along and picked him up while he was a bit anaten. Now he has an implanted ally.

That is a bad business. You say, "Well, what was your effort with regard to that?"

"Well, I wanted to get out of there!"

"All right. How did it feel getting out of there?" And he gets the feeling of Mama’s assistance, Mama taking him out of there. So you busily, happily process Mama taking him out of there, and then you have given the valence of Mama a boost. The devil with that, because Mama is antipathetic all the way down the line in other places, and you could really mess this preclear up by doing this.

Now, the second error that can be made is the matter of validating the external effort toward the person and invalidating his opposition of it. For instance, take a fellow who is being hit over the head. You say, "Can you get the somatic? Can you get the kinesthesia? ’’l You can go through your patter and so forth and he gets a somatic, but what kind of a somatic does he get? The devil with the pain connected with it— the pain is just a sort of unit of the touch system and it is only an indication of randomity. It is just the force contained in there and the force of randomity, and the actual pain is probably the opposing vectors in terrific conflict.

So you could actually get the preclear into a state where he would have his right arm coming in toward his body and his left arm coming in toward his body and you could make him concentrate on it until he developed a pain, because you would have two forces of his body opposing each other, and if you oppose them seriously enough you are going to get a tension in there and you can get a pain. Pain is evidently this randomity.

For instance, the pain of a burn is the force. A force has been applied, a motion has been applied and this motion is running up and recording. You don’t want the motion that is running up and recording— the devil with that! You want the motion that is going back down to oppose this motion which is coming up and recording, until you get rid of it. And this is the way you restore self- determinism.

Self- determinism is whether "I" has the motor controls or the environment has the motor controls, and that is all there is to it.

We could take a dog and shoot him full of some drug and knock him out colder than ice. He is lying down upstairs when he goes to sleep. Then we take him downstairs and we move his legs around and change his position entirely so that when he comes to he will be lying on his head. This stores some pain in there.

What is pain caused by? Pain is caused by the shock of opposed effort, so that randomity is set up along the line. You can cause it by slow pressure or fast pressure.

We stand this dog on his head so we get real severity of tension and put him down in a corner downstairs and let him come to. He is going to have a devil of a time getting himself reoriented, because "I" was in control when he was lying upstairs, but when he wakes up and "I" tries to control that area "I" can’t control the area because there is too much randomity. And every time "I" tries to put a finger on some part of it, "I" just triggers another tension spot and the tension spot goes bong! and once again "I," which was opposed during the process, flies off the control center.

The process of reducing and erasing an engram involves going through and finding physical pain. The physical pain itself will drive a person out of valence— but that is not actually a correct statement. The crossed effort— the randomity— in the middle of an area of anaten drives the person out of valence. He naturally, then, starts flying over into the valence of the effort which opposed him, whether it was a bedpost or a human being or a doctor or anything of the sort. You try to get him into the area, he hits all of this randomity and then he flies out of it.

Now, because he has so many areas of randomity— going back to the beginning of time— he gets signals mixed up in them. He gets the signal, the words and so forth, mixed up with actual effort, and as a consequence, in later incidents when somebody says one of those signals it restimulates an earlier incident. So, if somebody puts a lot of talking into one of these areas of anaten, he is obedient to those words— very literally obedient to them.

That is, however, only an interesting manifestation of language in engrams. Its causative value is zero. It is a secondary echelon manifestation, and if you process that, all you are going to process is illusion. You will just keep right on processing nothing but illusion right straight through. You cannot make a preclear Clear or get him well or anything else by processing this.

Now we come down to how much you want out of the basic engram that you finally find in this case. You will find, if you can get to it, if you can unburden this case, that you can get some grief off it and you can unpack this line, because here is the matter of loss. Loss always entails something being wrenched away or taken away. And a loss— such as a burned finger— is accompanied by pain, therefore loss is very painful. So a person will after a while begin to cry on the subject of loss, because he gets down into the grief bracket. I think if we looked at it biochemically we would find grief had something to do with tension on glands— nothing more than that, just tension.

Anyway, when you get into the basic area what do you want? You don’t want the effort of the walls of the womb against him, you don’t want the effort of Mama’s walking; you want his effort of opposing Mama’s walking; you want his effort of opposing Mama’s womb.

In the case of a sperm, you don’t want the effort of what was opposing the sperm in its progress; you want the effort the sperm was trying to make. Every time you strike one of these areas where the sperm was opposed for a moment, you will find that there is a little blurred area in there. What you want to do is straighten that out from the viewpoint of the sperm, until you have gotten the preclear wholly and completely a sperm. I don’t mean revivified in the spot, but you get him to a point where he is really an unopposed sperm. And I don’t care how many hours you have to process that! If you had to process that engram one hundred hours it would be worth it to get every last, solid, tiniest speck of effort back out of that engram— every one of them. You will find out that when you get the effort straightened out, the perceptics will turn on.

I could show you some interesting manifestations on that. You can make a person imagine that he is bent over in a position where he would be vomiting and then you can make him imagine straightening up from that position, and you can flex it. You start straightening out effort and all of a sudden olfactory and all the rest of the perceptics start to turn on, because the perceptics are caught in this area of randomity and they just turn on automatically.

So always maintain a level of reality. And when you get your pc up the tone scale by maintaining these levels of reality through processing effort in the physical universe, the physical environment— from his viewpoint only— you can get him back down the track and get that basic engram out. Even though he can’t run late engrams and he is pretty occluded, you can go back there and find one someplace— in a past death or somewhere, I> don’t care where you find it. Back down the track there is an early engram out of which you can process every single tiniest erg of opposition.

An engram can appear to erase merely by the preclear being thrown over into the valence of the thing which opposed him. The engram can sort of disappear and the effort can be aligned, but it can be as easily aligned for the "I" which was doing the opposition as it can be aligned for the individual.

We should make very sure, then, that we get all the effort out of it and that we get every single speck of that effort out on the most basic engrams we can find. We find the next engram we can take any effort out of and we process it and process it and process it. The preclear says, "But, my God, I won’t. I can’t even find any piece of this engram anymore!"

"That’s all right. Now, let’s really get this. How does it feel?" And all of a sudden he will pick up another little speck of effort in it, another little perceptic of some sort.

When the effort in that engram is— not erased, that’s a bad word to use— aligned, completely and utterly aligned, so that he is utterly cheerful in that motion, we have gotten the basics off all the rest of them. Then we just have to take every one that comes along and establish its alignment. And when we have finally succeeded in doing this to six, eight, ten or twelve of these basic area engrams— if we can just work into the case to a point where we can align the potential contained in the early ones and validate the fact that he was putting forth effort which was being opposed but that his effort was now apparently successful during that period— we will start to strip the randomity out of every other engram on the case.

The amount of anaten, by the way, which you will get off recent— that is, late life— engrams is practically nothing if you take it off the early ones. In other words, why take a thousand quarts of anaten off the top of the case when all you needed was a pint off the bottom of it? So let’s not worry too much about taking anaten off the case. Let’s not worry about the anaten factor. There has been too much stress on it because it was a new gimmick and it was kind of successful. Let’s concentrate on getting the realest reality we can find and getting the effort with regard to it.

Now, Validation Processing is a sidetrack on this, actually, but it is very good because it keeps validating the effort of "I" in his environment. It shows "I" that he could move, that he could exert effort. And every time "I" tries to exert effort one of these periods where he couldn’t do so starts to straighten out.

Treating an individual’s perception of his present time environment and treating his perception of what has happened are two different things, because he is receiving direct to the command post on two lines. "I" reeeives present time perceptics directly and records them. That can be aberrated but it is pretty powerful— the perceptics coming in to "I." But they are recorded, and the moment "I" tries to get one of these recordings back, he has to go around Robin Hood’s barn to do it if he is out of valence and so forth, so he has a heck of a time getting it back. That is the process of recall.

Now, there is another method of treating a person’s perceptics, and we will go into that in the next part of the lecture.