STATICS AND MOTIONS

A lecture given on 9 October 1951

Cause and Effect

There are a certain number of things which you may have been given as your technique of Effort Processing; most of them are right, but one of them is wrong and I am going to cover that right away.

Some of the data have been squirreled up a little bit on ARC. The definition that has recently been handed out on ARC is, just between ourselves, bunk.

ARC is still ARC, and don’t doubt that for a minute. What happens is that ARC sags into belief. As soon as the apparent absolute of a belief starts entering into ARC, there is unfluid understanding and it doesn’t become understanding at all; it becomes belief. Belief, on the lower ranges, to an organism which has to be in motion to support itself, is of course apathy, because belief is no motion and ARC is motion. I will make that much clearer to you. But don’t start abandoning ARC just because it can sag into belief.

I am going to give you a very brief resume of the Axioms themselves, and I will give you a little bit higher level of initiation of the Axioms than is given in the Axioms themselves. It is contained actually in a definition of Dianetics: Dianetics is a science of statics and motions pertaining to human thought and behavior. Statics and motions: Don’t get so static that you ignore motions in Dianetics, and don’t get into such furious motion that you ignore statics.

The whole of the postulate of statics and motions has to do with the fact that the highest echelon which is now contactable has been an echelon which has been contactable in a nebulous sort of a way for a great many centuries. They have called it a number of things, but all it is, is a static. It is a thing of no motion, and that is theta. The difference is that we have built a bridge to it. It doesn’t make Dianetics a religion any more than it makes physics a religion, because physics starts with a static too.

So we start with a static, and it is a very strange static: it is causative. It is a causative static.

One has the choice in this of being cause or effect, dead or in motion. In other words, you have a point from which motion is entered, handled and controlled, and this point itself is not in motion. It is an anchor point. That point is belief, faith— it has been called a thousand different things. We are calling it theta just now, which is a mathematical symbol, not a new name for the human soul.

So here you have a static point. When a person dies, he loses physical universe motion; he is therefore static. In order to go into motion again, he would have to become alive.

It is beside the point whether people die and come to life again. The point is that there is an optimum motion as established by the range of tolerance of the human body. Your heart beats at anywhere from sixty to ninety times a minute and your temperature hangs between 95 and 100— maybe lot, 102— degrees Fahrenheit. If it gets much above that it gets to be pretty rough.

When you have a body which is alive, then, you have a body which should be moving somewhere in this rather narrow tolerance band. Man is on a terrifically small tolerance band. Actually, he goes up three or four miles and he is done for— he can’t breathe. He goes down in the sea two feet and he can’t breathe. He is in a tolerance band as far as space on earth is concerned and he has to get artificial thingamabobs and whatnots in order to exceed this tolerance band. Right on the surface of the earth, it can’t be too cold or too hot or he perishes. Man is a delicate little microbe. His body temperature should stay at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. His body— not the causative force, but his body— is a carbon- oxygen engine. It doesn’t fit to say that because a person is a carbon- oxygen engine, there is nothing else there. That is something like saying "A railroad locomotive runs on steam" and then forgetting the engineer— pointing to it and saying, "You see, that runs all by itself! Now, that’s the way the human body is, and if you just cut out the engineer occasionally, why, that steam engine runs better," and a lot of other odds and ends of strange conclusions.

To say a person is an engine is true only in the sense of his physical self. He is an engine in motion. He is a motor, engine, propulsion mechanism— he is a lot of things, but sitting along with that is what causes him to be an engine.

In the physical universe we have a science of physics, and physics tells you very adequately how this carbon- oxygen motor can work but it can’t build one. It is a very interesting motor. It is so fascinating that people haven’t been able to get their attention off the drive wheels and things in order to take a look at what makes it run. It is fascinating to see a motor which repairs itself, which is self- determined, which has a lot of very interesting variations in it and which produces biochemical products that are not duplicatable in the field of chemistry today by any other form or means than by employing life forms themselves. This is a very interesting thing.

We can take a look at this carbon- oxygen motor and find out that it is in motion and that it has to sustain a certain optimum motion. You try to make the thing go too fast or you try to make it go too slow and it ceases to go into motion, it ceases to be in motion; at the moment it becomes static, it dies.

So there is a cycle going on there of causation: This causative force, theta, starts in and something goes into motion; it follows this more or less optimum speed and it goes along with an optimum speed for a while, and then it stops and they bury it, and that is no- motion. So it goes from no- motion to no- motion through a rather narrow tolerance band of a certain type of motion.

It is interesting that there are little gradient scales, and here is where we get gradient scales coming in. The body objects strenuously to either side of an optimum motion: it objects to motions which are too swift and motions which are too slow— both sides.

Whenever the body is slowed down to a point where it is momentarily static (by which I mean the heart skips a couple of beats, the bloodstream doesn’t pulse quite right, the nerve energies don’t channel and align and the alignment of the cells themselves is destroyed, the alignment of axons and molecules inside the body is thrown out of kilter— in other words, a moment of stopped motion which is not followed by death), the person has come up against a static and he will behave thereafter to avoid that static, either to attack it or to get away from it or to do something about it. He will do something about that static. He doesn’t like that static!

The worst thing that can happen to a person is to stop altogether, so he fights any intermediate static. Any injury is a static. And he will also fight something which forces his heart rate up to 250 a minute or something like that. That also is starting to approach a static because it will go up to just so fast and then stop. So he fights away from the upper and lower motion band and tries to stay in the middle of it, and tries to stay in a tolerance level of operation. As long as he does this he is alive. As long as the organism can continue to do this, it happens to be healthy. When it can’t do this anymore it ceases to be healthy.

Now, the way that you "train" one of these organisms is you beat it and you put it in jail and you lock it up in closets and you slow its motion down any way you can, and after a while it gets obedient. Obedience is faith, it is belief; that is obedience— motion slowed way down or speeded way up. And when the organism falls over into either of these two statics— too fast or too slow as far as it is concerned— it goes into apathy and hands its own identity over to the counter- effort which forced it to do so. Hence, you get valences. (That will be much more clearly explained as we go along here.)

As long as this organism is moving within the tolerance band, it has understanding. But a stop or a threatened stop by "too fast" or "too slow" sets up a wave. At the very least it sets up a wave which is a noise type of wave rather than a smooth wave. You could graph sudden halts or sudden propulsions of the organism, and you would regard that as a jagged noise wave. But in the middle, between these two extremes, you have a harmonic wave with a certain amount of randomity to it, a certain amount of variation to it. This certain amount of variation varies, but in that band we have. affinity, communication and reality— only in that band. It is when affinity, communication and reality fall off into the zero motion of a static that it becomes a belief, and at that moment the body ceases to operate properly; it becomes sick.

Invalidation and domination are only efforts to slow down or speed up the body. They all come into that category. Some people are running faster than others, so they try to speed up the people who are running slower. People who are running slower try to slow down faster ones, and so forth. Within the species there is an effort, then, to control and keep going an optimum motion. So people who are moving too fast get into conflict with people who are moving too slow and you get a noise- level effect on ARC, and they go out of communication and so forth with each other to some degree. They can’t hook in on each other’s wavelength.

But when ARC is deprived of motion it can become belief. And what you are processing with Effort Processing is belief— not understanding, but belief.

There is a cycle in progress whereby you get belief, understanding; belief, understanding; belief, understanding. That is a cycle. It goes like this: Way up the tone scale is cause without effect. Greeks used to call this the Prime Mover Unmoved— cause without an effect. This is rather a weird sort of an idea, but actually, if you could just put down as a philosophy of existence "I am going to live as a cause and not as an effect of my own causes," you would be a happy person. As a matter of fact, you can try to keep from being affected by your own causes.

When you self- determine non survival activities, you are, at that moment, becoming an effect of your own causes. You postulate; you say, "I am now going to . . ." or "From this moment on I decide that . . ." like people are supposed to do every New Year’s. Here you are as cause; you are postulating a cause. Now you step forward in time and become the effect of your own cause.

If you could just get up all the decisions a person ever made about himself you would have a well man.

Cause and effect: If we diagram it, we start with cause without an effect and then we have, below this, motion. That is the initial motion, and then we have another static and a secondary motion.

You can plot the tone scale just on the basis of statics.

The church is quite correct in saying "Above all is faith." That is one of the thousand various ways of saying that cause is cause and shouldn’t be an effect of its own cause. But then they come down the scale and they say, "And you’ve got to have faith!" That is just great! That puts them into the position of being a causative agent and gives you to them as MEST, because they say "You’ve got to have faith!" The joke is on them: you have faith. Nobody can take that away from you. But they start telling you you have to have it, and that says you haven’t got it. And the second they say you haven’t got it, you don’t have it. This is one of the neatest little invalidation mechanisms known. It runs over into all fields of invalidation. You could extrapolate all invalidation’s from this.

Here goes a fellow— everybody likes him, he is cheerful, he is happy— and somebody comes along and says, "You know, you should be careful the way you treat people because I’ve heard lately . . . You’ve just got to be good to people. You’ve got to be kind to people."

This fellow starts worrying. He says, "Gee, I thought people liked me." He is made self- conscious at that moment.

There is almost no limit to what a human being can do as long as he doesn’t have this variety of stuff thrown at him in the guise of affinity, communication and reality. People are postulating new realities for him and every time he accepts one of these new realities, he is sort of sunk. He can have any quantity of engrams or anything else and he will be perfectly all right until he accepts one of these postulates that is handed to him, adopts it to himself and by his own self- determinism says, "From here on that’s the way it is." That is a little boy suddenly saying to Mama, "All right, I give up, I’ll mind. I’ll mind." He goes out of valence, he ceases to be alive; he has hit a static. He goes out of valence (you can watch this either in yourselves or in preclears) and his reality crashes. His perceptics shut off.

If you want to start turning perceptics on in the preclear. you want to find the effort to believe—" What is your effort to believe?"— and he will turn on somatics, face slaps and every other darn thing. You want the effort to believe, not the effort to agree, because he is not agreeing, he is just believing; he is in a static state and here he goes, out of valence, and off go the perceptics.

Ask him for his effort to believe Mama at this point: "What is your effort to believe Mama at this point?" He will just go into apathy, but then all of a sudden, "To heck with her!" You have gotten the effort.

Now you want the effort not to believe Mama. Visio, brightness of the scene, a whole lot of recollections and everything come swarming in on him again. His childhood was blank. Everybody says this—" My childhood is blank." It is just as blank as he has had to believe without understanding. It is a sort of a slave- state philosophy to tell people that they don’t have understanding and that they must believe— because they have belief; what they have to acquire is understanding. The component parts of understanding are affinity, communication and reality. The modus operandi of theta moving into the physical universe is understanding, but unfortunately it is accompanied by an enormous amount of force, and it hits a great many statics. Every time an organism dies, it is in a new static. As a

consequence, it keeps coming down the tone scale— statics, statics, statics. So all you have to do to a human being is convince him that he has to believe, and if you just work on him hard and tell him he has got to believe, he has got to believe, he has got to believe, and don’t invite any understanding— if he says "Well, I don’t see it," you say "Well, I tell you, God is good and we’re going to kick your teeth in unless you believe it!"— the fellow gets into a bad state right away because he starts to sink down toward the static of a past injury. That has statics in it.

So when you force him into the static of belief, you are forcing him into this low level of theta and promptly you restimulate an old static. You can demand a person into a severe illness by making him obey.

You want to know why childhood illnesses are so frequent? There is a direct index between the illnesses in childhood which are long, arduous and severe, and the amount of blind obedience which a child has to go through.

Understanding is something else. Here we try to postulate something into the individual’s sphere of experience which he himself has observed. And from this sphere of experience we now get new data. We ask him to compare data and so forth.

There are two levels of training. One is every time a little child goes into the room and knocks over a vase, you knock his head off so that after a while he doesn’t knock over vases— you think. The funny part of it is, he will keep on knocking over vases. The other level is to let him go on knocking over vases until he knocks his silly head off on one, and then he will take a look at it and say, "Look, it’s the physical universe doing this to me. I evidently have to be a little slippier in the physical universe."

On the matter of possessions, he keeps destroying his possessions and destroying them, and messing them up and misusing them (they are his possessions), and then all of a sudden one day he picks up something that he wanted and liked and he finds out that he broke that too. He says, "That isn’t so good. I guess I’ll have to stop breaking my possessions!" He has come to a conclusion now. He has postulated something that he should do and he promptly becomes the effect of his own cause. Later on you will find him trying to take care of the weirdest things.

But at the same time, that is the operation of training— he hits a little static himself. As long as he has a self- determined operation going, his health stays up pretty well, but as soon as you give him a lot of statics instead of training, instead of ARC, his health gets very bad. ARC is a very mysterious commodity in some respects. It has been derived from several places. It is based on the fact that the material universe is as it is because we agree it is. That is a fact— we do; we agree it is. We actually find that that is quite workable. Where you have agreement you have reality, and where you don’t have any agreement you don’t have a reality. Nothing gets constructed or comes into existence that is not agreed upon.

You and I agree that there is a chair sitting on the floor, and then somebody comes in and says it is a horse. We promptly look at him and have him locked up or something of the sort. (Actually, we probably wouldn’t; we would probably process him, but that is what would normally happen in the society.) That would be a level of disagreement; disagreement is unreality.

You can’t have a communication without an affinity, and you can’t have any affinity without an agreement on something, and so it goes.

Now, you can get a shadow of ARC by the creation of statics— belief: "You have to love Mama," and so on.

"Why?"

"Because I say so."

That operation immediately starts the child down on the dwindling spiral. But this is what you are processing out of people; you are processing beliefs out of them.

I don’t want you to believe a single one of these axioms until you have looked it over and seen what you have seen in the physical universe. Otherwise, the same thing will happen here that happened in organized religion, and we don’t want anything to do with that. They say, "Now, you’ve got to have faith, and we’re going to explain to you so you will understand." You might as well say "The reason why we have a can of lampblack here is because it’s all full of white paint— but it’s lampblack."

"Have faith, and now you understand why you have faith."

People say, "But I don’t understand why it is that Mohammedanism and Buddhism and Christianity are so much alike and yet they had all these fights." They might as well save their breath. They are talking about faith and there is no understanding on the subject required!

Now, authoritarianism is a static. That is why it is not liked. Somebody says "Now, you’ve got to believe so- and- so and so- and- so about this," and people say, "Why?"

A poor little child in kindergarten says, "But why do I have to believe this is the United States of America?"

Nobody takes him over to the window and says "Now, you see those trees and so forth out there? Well, that’s land and there is lots of land in the world. Here’s a globe and you can look it all up if you want to, but only one section of all this sphere is the United States." No, what they tell him is "Well, you had better believe it and be quiet or go home," or something like that— or give him a whack with a ruler. Right away he is off; his understanding is undermined to the degree that authoritarianism is employed upon him. They can generally get as badly off, even, as a modern university student. It could get that bad; you wouldn’t believe it, but it could.

I don’t want you to be under any misapprehension with regard to ARC and start thinking you have to process ARC out of people. Don’t do that. What you want to do is process out statics.

You can get statics just as quickly, by the way, by running somebody going too fast— flying through the air at such a terrific speed that a static is introduced.

Actually, statics are introduced by monotonous conduct; it becomes the same thing— the same wave, the same wave, the same wave— until all of a sudden it doesn’t appear that time is going by anymore. That is just the same action in the same space, and the same action in the same space, so it all looks like the same time and you get a static. That is why people get bored in life— because that repeated static of the same motion looks like they are dead to that degree. No time is passing. They have to keep convincing themselves time is passing, so they do it this way this time and then another way the next time, and then this way and then that way. As long as it is a smooth wave, let’s get some variation in it.

Take the pilot who flies from Albuquerque to Los Angeles to Albuquerque to Los Angeles to Albuquerque to Los Angeles for about ten years: he finally crashes. Why? He is dead. He was dead before he crashed because he had been doing a repetitive motion without enough variation for so long that he actually lost his skill.