THE THETA FACSIMILE PART II

A lecture given on 29 October 1951

Responsibility for Your Own Condition

I pulled a very mean trick on myself recently: I picked up the postulates about smoking cigarettes. I wasn’t thinking very much, and I was just doing it as a test. I found myself sitting there without the least desire for a cigarette.

I found out that I had postulated that when I grew up and got big I would show them: I would smoke cigarettes— they couldn’t then take them away from me. Somebody had stolen four cigarettes off me— which I had stolen someplace— and accused me of being a very vicious criminal for having stolen these four cigarettes. So they stole them off me. I considered that this was horrible; I made a postulate that I was going to smoke— come hell or high water I was going to smoke. I picked that up and I sat there for a while without any desire to smoke. So I had to make a new postulate that I wanted to smoke!

Now, I want to tell you some more about theta facsimiles. The center button of the case, you will find, is nothing more nor less than the decision to use a harmful theta facsimile. The decision to use a harmful theta facsimile, when put into action, if it meets with failure, will turn against the individual. That is to say, he has made the postulate to use it and now he is stuck with that postulate. He has to use it, but he can’t make it effective upon the person he wants to affect. However, he does have some MEST which cannot be contested in any way— namely, himself and his own body— so he uses it on himself.

You can trace this course of action very easily. You can sit down anyplace, anytime, and you can think back to a time when you wanted to harm somebody, you wanted to stop somebody from doing something, you wanted to start somebody doing something; you wanted action or no action —one or the other— out of another human being, and you found out that reasoning with them, ARC, did not prevail. You couldn’t appeal to their reason, you couldn’t do this, you couldn’t do that; they were just noncontrollable, so as the last resort you picked up a nice, juicy force facsimile and you said, "Here it is!" The facsimile said, "I am going to beat you up unless you do this," or "I’ll kick you in the shins unless you do this," or anything along in that line; you were using an experience which was already in existence. You had the theta facsimile of this experience, and having that facsimile, you postulated you were going to use it.

Then you couldn’t use it on that person— a part of the material universe —so you used it on another part of the material universe, your own body. Remember that you as an individual are primarily a command post, a control center; this control center is effecting motion and action in the physical universe but it is not itself the physical universe, and your body is under the control of this control center but is part of the physical universe. So you have elected to use this theta facsimile against the physical universe and it will wind up in your lap. That is all the mechanics there are to it.

If you see somebody going around with a shin that is out of order— a twisted bone or something like this— when did they want to kick somebody in the shins? It is just as simple as that.

They say, "Nobody."

"Well, did you ever want to kick your teachers in the shins?"

"No! "

"Ever want to kick your mother in the shins?" "No, absolutely not."

"Ever want to kick your father in the shins?"

"Oh, perish the thought."

"Did you ever want to kick your...."

"I never wanted to kick anybody in the shins! What are you talking about?"

And you say, "Did you have any brothers or sisters?"

"Oh, yes."

"Well, when did you want to kick your brother in the shins?"

"Oh, I— yeah, the big bully. You know what he used to do to me?" Yakety- yakety- yak .

As an auditor you are not interested in yakety- yakety- yak any more than what is necessary to get the conclusion that he arrived at that he was going to kick his brother in the shins.

So here is a little boy; at the age of five he had a broken leg. Now at the age of twenty- five we find this individual slightly crippled. Obviously, his broken leg has restimulated. What is the root of that restimulation? What is the exact mechanism that occurs with regard to this facsimile of the broken leg?

The broken leg was really all right for quite a while after he broke it, and then for some reason or other it just stopped growing.

If we look we will find something ridiculous happening, and it is not the broken leg.

Now, we can take away the broken- leg engram and the present- time broken- leg situation can then no longer be effective, so the leg will start lengthening. But that is the long way to do it, and it has a liability which I will tell you about in a moment.

He knows that getting one’s leg hurt hurts; he knows this hurts. Therefore when somebody tries to pick on him, he does the first, handiest, most painful thing that comes to mind: he tries to give them a broken leg. Simple, effective, proven, true— no slightest doubts about this, the broken leg hurts. He knows this by experience. So he tries to hand it out.

Of course his brother is bigger than he is and he only succeeds in getting in one kick and— bang!— there he goes, down on the floor. That facsimile didn’t work. So he decides he is really going to put this one into action now and the next time he gets into a fight with his brother he is really going to give him a broken leg: kick! bang! whop!— there he goes, down on the floor again.

He can’t be wrong; remember that. He is determined to put this theta facsimile into operation on somebody else.

So for a third time he kicks his brother in the shins and his brother turns around and shoves him down on the floor once more! At this moment he goes into apathy, but not quite. He is not dead; he can demonstrate that, because the business of living in its operation is the business of using theta facsimiles. One cannot live without using them. One has a right to use them. One must justify his right to use his own memories, his own personal recollections— these are his. And he must demonstrate the fact that they are his and that he is self- determined on the thing. He has determined the thing will go into use, so he puts it into action in the physical universe. But the only physical universe left remaining to him is himself. And naturally it fits beautifully, since it is his own engram. So he has it now. You can labor around at the times the leg hurt him and get the locks off and get the time he got sympathy for it, and you can work and you can work and you can work. You will finally get down to the basic engram of the broken leg and run it out and the fellow’s leg will straighten up— but his temper won’t, because it was a service facsimile.

Let’s take a fellow standing there with his own rifle and his own bullets and you walk up to him and— whap!— you take the rifle away from him. You say, "Now you can’t shoot anybody and you’re perfectly safe." How does he feel?

He does not like this. It is said that in the best regulated societies, individuals frown upon other people who disarm them. All kinds of people in the society are dramatizing this. And an auditor can dramatize it too. He is taking weapons away from his preclear. These entheta facsimiles are really weapons.

This preclear is, of course, going to become a better person: he has fewer weapons. And you could take more and more engrams away from him; he will have fewer and fewer weapons to use, and he will be more and more cheerful— he thinks— and everything will be happy. But every once in a while he will go into relapse slightly. He will eventually wind up in a little skid and suddenly decide that he hates his auditor.

So, the more you do for a preclear by taking away his weapons, by reducing engrams, the worse in Dutchl you are going to get with him, until you finally by this operation alone restore his self- determinism— just because he gets mad about it finally and decides to be self- determined. Yo u have seen this happen.

He doesn’t get mad at you if you start taking away his self- determined efforts to knock himself to pieces, because this way you are rehabilitating his self- determinism; you are giving him more and more choice to use weapons, so you will wind up his friend.

There are therefore two ways to go about this sort of thing: one is to take out the service facsimiles, the other is take out the decisions to use them.

Unfortunately an individual very often postulates in the middle of an engram; he makes postulates in the middle of an engram. Generally, if these postulates were ever going to be used, they are in recall. A person will often come out of an operation telling people that he remembers a certain part of it. It is that part of that engram which will contain a postulate. He has made a decision with regard to it. In other words, you don’t even have to run the full engram to get that. Get enough effort off the engram by Effort Processing just to uncover this postulate and blow it, and then get his agreement with you that he should gQ back and pick it up, because that is also an agreement to use and have the engram. Clean that postulate up and the engram will disappear.

He can go back and pick it up again. But what you want to do as an auditor is get this fellow into a situation where he is so much at ease, he is so self- confident, he is so capable and able in the universe at large and with his fellow human beings, that he has no slightest desire to use it. His selfconfidence emanates from him to such a degree that people really aren’t too afraid of him and he is not afraid of anybody else; he is not going to use these things. You put him on a basis where he is going to reason things out, where he is going to persuade or coerce rather than force.

Below 2.0 on the tone scale, individuals employ entheta facsimiles in any and all transactions. Above 2.0 on the tone scale they employ them seldom. And way up on the tone scale, they don’t employ them at all. This should tell you an awful lot about the operation of a human mind. It self- determines action in the physical universe and then carries out that action on the physical universe, even if it is on itself. When it postulates a bad action on the physical universe, it is using a theta facsimile— an actual facsimile— and when that action backfires, that facsimile will backfire with its full somatics.

When was the first time any organism decided to use an entheta facsimile? I have been asking that question now for months. When was the first time an organism decided to use an entheta facsimile— a physical- pain engram, if you want to put it in other language? When did it decide to use one of these things the first time?

Obviously you have to figure out, too, what was the first entheta facsimile ready for use? We find out that it couldn’t possibly have come from another organism, but must have come from the physical universe itself. It was in terms of being beaten up in the surf, having a cliff fall on it, getting torn up by the roots or something of the sort, way back on the genetic line. These genetic blueprints are still available.

Therefore it was the physical universe sort of falling in on somebody. This is force. This is painful, very painful. And so the organism gets a facsimile.

Then the organism feels itself attacked from some quarter by something —maybe another life form. It feels itself attacked and it will pick up this physical- pain engram, this theta facsimile, entheta facsimile— they all mean the same thing— and try to hand it out, dramatize it.

It knows on the receipt of this pain that it has been nullified in its operations and actions. Therefore, while it is being attacked, it wants to nullify the operation of another individual or another thing, so it switches this thing around and tries to use it, postulates that it is going to use it, and if it fails, it gets the backfire because it got it in the first place.

For instance, have you ever had a dream of falling and not hitting the bottom? The physical universe at some time or other fell in on you, and you found out that it stopped you. So now it follows that you are the countereffort and you can stop it. This is experience: one learns that this can happen; therefore he gets the postulate, silly or otherwise, that he can stop the physical universe one way or another. So after a while when he starts to fall, he uses this entheta facsimile of being stopped himself and tries to throw it back against the universe. Halfway through a fall he will suddenly pick up this entheta facsimile and say, "There it is, and I stop right here. Obviously, I hang in midair."

By the way, if you have ever worked a preclear through effort, it is very amusing to get him near the top of a fall and try to get him to fall, because he has so many built- in mechanisms whereby he can stop time and space, having been stopped himself so often, that he can stop himself in midflight— so he never hits bottom in a dream.

An individual in an actual fall pretends not to hit bottom; he won’t finish that cycle of action because it is death for himself. It has been said that all one’s life passes before one’s eyes when one is falling. I don’t know about "all one’s life," but I can certainly tell you that a person probably does a very fast shuffle through entheta facsimiles to find out what he can throw at the physical universe in order to keep himself alive. That is the mechanism behind this sort of thing.

Therefore, you get up the choices and they deintensify.

Now, getting up a postulate that one is going to use an entheta facsimile is very simple. You know how to reduce a lock: a lock is reduced by going over it several times. A conclusion can reduce the same way; a conclusion flies out or deintensifies just like any other lock, with this exception: An individual will not let it go unless he gets the reason that goes with it. If he can remember he made such a conclusion, you have to also ask him what the reason for making it was, and this will let it pry loose from the rest of the bank.

What you have done is that you have found the conclusion, but it was based on a reason. So you want to make him look at the second echelon of the bank and then that conclusion will fall out. It is very simple. Conclusions have to be deintensified just like anything else.

By the way, you can use repeater technique on conclusions, as long as the preclear knows that he is using repeater technique on conclusions— his own, not somebody else’s. This technique could probably be very easily overused. This individual knows, for instance, that he has to wear glasses. He has told himself somehow or other, somewhere back down the track, that he had to wear glasses. Of course, a little earlier he was trying to put somebody’s eyes out with this engram, but nevertheless, it will help his eyesight slightly to get up just the postulate "I have to wear glasses."

So you say, "Well, what did you think when you first put glasses onyour nose?"

"I don’t know."

"When did you think it?"

"Oh, I must have said something on the order of ‘Well, I guess I can’t see so good. ’ "

"Repeat that."

He will actually find himself in his own postulate. Very intriguing, isn’t it?

It could very definitely be overused. I have sent two preclears into past existences with repeater technique on their own conclusions with considerable aid and assistance to their general health. But at the same time it is very upsetting to somebody who doesn’t know anything about any kind of an existence to find himself shuffling through the theta facsimiles that he didn’t know he took. That is always startling to an individual. He thinks he knows all the pictures he has ever taken of anything, and then he suddenly looks and finds a new file that he didn’t know was there. It shocks people.

That is a good trick, by the way; you can pull it on people any time you want. Have them say something like "I will not ever again ride in a surrey," "I hate clavichords," or a few things like that; you will wind them up in the conclusions. You estimate the conclusions by what the fellow doesn’t like to do in this life, and whether or not there is any connection in this life with that thing he doesn’t like to do.

For instance, it is mysterious to you just why he hates traveling, because you really can’t find any time he took any serious journey, anything about traveling or anything of the sort; you can’t really find any real dope on the subject. You can actually repeat him, by use of other vehicles and things like that, way back down the track. This you can do with anybody.

You find this fellow standing in a French cocked hat; it is embarrassing. The fellow says, "Well, of course there is no such thing as past lives and so on, and a fellow gets found in a cabbage patch, as everybody knows. This is scientific theory and so on."

You say, "‘ I will never again ride in a surrey. ’ Please repeat that." You have got him.

So, here we have found a use suddenly for an earlier technique we thought we had left behind. Overused, though, it could probably get people in trouble.

Now, if you try to run too many engrams out of your preclear without at the same time rehabilitating his self- determinism and doing a lot of other things, you are going to have your preclear mad at you, because you are taking his weapons away. These are his; he owns them. On some preclears, if you just start reaching for any of their theta facsimiles they will pull them all out of sight. What you want to start in on, then, is finding conclusions that people are going to take things from them. Because just as fast as they conclude that they are liable to lose something, so they will conclude automatically, willy- nilly, to hold on to their theta facsimiles. And they will hold them so tight and will bury them so deep to get them away from you that they can’t get them anymore. So all you have to do is pick up the conclusions to hide them from you, and a few other things, and they will come right back to battery on it. An auditor definitely should appreciate the business of living. It is fairly logical; people live fairly logically. Life is composed of a relatively few basics.

People want to get rid of contrasurvival objects, individuals, times and so forth— they don’t want these things around, they want to get them away, usually— unless they have found a "survival use for them," as in the case of kicking their brother’s shins; they want this one.

The more of these entheta facsimiles which they have used successfully, the meaner they get, because they get down along the tone level of what they are using. The old mystic would have had a lot of fun with this, because it was one of his prime principles to "do unto others what you would like to have done unto yourself— or else, bud!" That is an old mystic principle; that goes back 3500 years that I know of.

The "exchange theory" has been very badly applied and misused and so forth because people use it on the basis of enforced ARC: "You’ve got to be nice to people and you’ve got to get along with your fellow man, or else! " In other words, somebody has taken an entheta facsimile on this one and thrown it at people. It is just good sense not to use entheta facsimiles any more than you need them.

One day you suddenly wake up and find you have corns. Don’t be so dishonest with yourself as to say "Well, God has afflicted me and the environment has turned upon me and I now have corns. And it’s probably those shoes that I bought." You bought those shoes to give yourself some corns. You had better decide when you decided to stamp on somebody’s toes.

Little children generally don’t find very much of their opponents available. The opponents are rather large and have a tendency to loom, and consequently there are only the toes, the shins and such things to pummel and kick and bite and so forth. And in order to pummel, kick and bite, the only things a child can use are the entheta facsimiles of being pummeled, being kicked and being bitten. Children pick these up from other children. As a matter of fact, they go out and they practically manufacture them: they tumble, they wrastle— puppies fight with each other and growl and snarl. These are beautiful entheta facsimiles they are manufacturing for each other. When they get in a real fight, they can really use them. Play is very necessary: "Bang! Bang! You’re dead!"

"No, I’m not! You are!"

You should, then, know something about the average course of human events. People get born and have trouble with their parents and fight for their own self- determinism.

What do you usually figure about school? A person gets out of school and he says, "Well, I’m through with that! I never have to go back into that again! I want to forget the whole subject as fast as possible, now that I’m educated!" As a net result, what happens to educations?

One is generally so confoundedly happy to get out of the state of being the pygmy in a world of giants that it is with great relief that he reaches the age of six, seven or eight and is able to sit at the table at his own request and so on and not be mauled by his environment— like "Isn’t he cute?" "Giveums Mama- ums a kiss," and so on, daily assaults on his dignity. People are very happy to get out of that period, so they just close up childhood. They say, "Well, I am grown up now, you hear me? I am not a child! I will not be spoken to that way! And you can’t spank me unless you can catch me, and I can run fast now! You used to have the edge on me, but not now— I’ve been sprinting here for days." These are the basic contests of any individual.

Then there is the contest of youth with age: "I’m young! I’m vital! I have ideas! Those old fuddy- duddies are trying to hold me down."

"I know I’m old. I have a great deal of experience and a great many things to offer. Of course, I don’t think so fast, don’t get any new ideas, but these things are useless. Actually, it’s only experience, particularly bad experience. The bad experiences which I have had are the only really useful things. So the thing to tell youth is ‘You should have bad experiences, and really, pain is the thing; you learn by suffering!" ’

"No singer is a great singer unless they have first suffered!" An old opera star tells a young opera star this, and she is thinking, "This will choke her throat down, the hussy!" Hand her an entheta facsimile any way you possibly can. That will keep you up there. This is sort of the way it goes.

An individual in his or her old age has made a whole bunch of postulates about "I’m not attractive anymore," and so on. He’s got to take a teaspoonful of soda in a glass of warm water every morning before breakfast, and he’s got to do this, that and something else to keep himself going. A person has all of these postulates; he has just built them up. What he is doing is mounting on all the conclusions of youth, and youth is full of alibis. Youth says, "I’m sick," youth says this, says that, and tries to get around. It gets to be quite a dizzy spiral.

An individual should also know something about the basic happenstances of love; these are very interesting. Human beings fall in love, one with the other. They almost never fall in love with each other unless they tell themselves to. That is correct. Somebody is busy dying of a broken heart; I hate to invalidate this beautiful sentiment called "love," but this person has picked up some lovely entheta facsimiles from Princess Rosamundl in early French romance, he has picked up fairy tales and that sort of thing. These were beautiful facsimiles and they made him feel very noble; they had high aesthetic value. So he picked them up and said, "I’m going to fall in love." He walks down the street and meets somebody and says, "I’m in love with that person!" and he is in love with that person. Then he says, "Well, I’m going to suffer now," so he suffers. Then he says, "She has left me; my life is ruined!" so he is ruined.

This is all very simple— elementary. But you should understand that human beings go through these things.

So when you look at your preclear, don’t think you are looking for the archeology which would relate and apply only to the Egyptian priesthood of the later Abyssinian period. You are addressing something which is terribly rudimentary in the basic classification; it has a great deal of variation. But the rudimentariness is wholly postulated upon what they have postulated, and at this time in our society their postulates are very simple: "I am sick; I am well."

Now that we know this mechanism, it can really get complicated. A person can postulate all sorts of things in order to unpostulate other things which he hasn’t postulated. He can really fix himself up with this now. He knows the basic rules he is running by, so he can find some other rules to hide from himself. But once you know this, you are scraping bottom on answers.

When is the first time you decided to think slowly? Do you remember when you decided to think slowly?

I will tell you the exact instant: It was the first time you didn’t want to agree with somebody and you said, "I’ll think it over. I need a little time to think it over."

Thought is completely instantaneous; it requires no time at all. But you said to somebody, "Well, I will think it over." You didn’t have courage enough to say at that moment "I don’t agree with you and I’m not going to do that." It was probably back to your parents and you would have got your block knocked off, but you should have had courage enough to say it.

They said, "Now, Rollo, I want you to understand that we are doing this for your own good," and so forth. You didn’t want to agree, but they already had the aberration so they said, "Well, you think it over for a day or so."

The proper statement to make, instead of "think it over," is "I will gather some more data," because that takes time; but it doesn’t take any time to think.

You say something to somebody and he sits back and just looks at you and blinks. I don’t know what this person is doing; he is not thinking. It doesn’t take any time to think. The unfiling of theta facsimiles is instantaneous. It is even faster than the speed of light; it is at no speed, which is infinity speed. So this individual who is doing this is aping somebody, he is mimicking somebody or he is putting forward an effort of some sort by which he wants you to believe that he is wise, because "everybody knows that wise men think very slowly." They tell you this in school.

The way this gets around is that older writers always want to fix up young writers who are such horrible competition. The older ones can’t do so well these days, so what they say to the younger writer or the rival writer- is "Do you realize that you wrote that thing in ten days, and therefore it can’t possibly be any good." This is just a comment on the typing, not the thinking or the quality of the manuscript. But if the older writer can just make this stick so that his rival now believes that in order to have a good story it takes three years, look at the competition he has knocked out there; look at the beautiful markets opening up.

As a matter of fact, I remember consciously thinking and realizing that offering advice to young writers was the most deadly thing you could possibly do— telling them how to write, how to think about writing, how to plot. There are things called "plot genies" and all sorts of things— how to plot. If a human being can’t think out a plot, he has really been inhibited by some teacher or other.

Now, I want to show you another interesting mechanism. There is a mechanism called the governor. The governor is actually not even faintly influenced by entheta facsimiles originally, nor does it depend upon entheta facsimiles for its operation. It is a sort of a speed- control mechanism.

If an individual is riding at tone 20.0, he is riding there because he is running at the speed of tone 20.0. He is set up as an organism to run at optimum speed, and he sets himself up. It is part of his self- determinism. An individual speeds himself up or slows himself down in order to meet various situations in life.

You can see him do this when he decides to walk or run, but it is more subtle than that. The metabolism and everything else concerned with the body can be speeded up or slowed down by conclusion, postulate and so forth.

You can find this governor in yourself. It is not even as difficult as learning to wiggle your ears.

I will show you how this governor works. The governor uses theta facsimiles, but it doesn’t depend on theta facsimiles. The governor puts the theta facsimiles of the chosen speed into use.

In other words, the governor says, "I want to run slow. The best way to run slow is to pick up a slow theta facsimile," or it says, "Now, I want to run fast; therefore, I’ll pick up a fast theta facsimile." And it does worse than that: it can postulate or imagine a slow theta facsimile and then run on it, or it can postulate a fast theta facsimile and run on that.

I can give you an example here of "run slow": Think of something very sad. Think of something very, very sad; think of a little child being run over out in the street and being dragged by an automobile, or something of the sort— something sad.

The governor is right back of that thought and it slows you down because the governor says "Slow down." That is a down vector.

Now think of something happy. Think of something happy and cheerful. This might be a little bit harder to do. You can turn this vector around, just automatically, and start thinking of an up vector. You can just start thinking about that and you will start manufacturing your own facsimiles; I don’t have to tell you what they are. Just imagine to yourself being able to conquer the whole cockeyed universe, doing anything you want to do, being utterly, completely unrestricted and free in all directions to do whatever you pleased— bad, good or indifferent— and being strong, powerful and unassailable. Just think of yourself in those terms. That governor starts you speeding up.

Just think of yourself as doing that. Go ahead, think of yourself along that line.

I will tell you a little mechanism that is probably going on in your mind: The second you start to think that idea unlimitedly, you start bumping into postulates where you excused the fact that you weren’t running at that speed in the past. Isn’t that right?

But if you just sit down and say to yourself "This is the way I think about things, and I’m going to think about these things in spite of anything that comes up," you will be bringing in your own postulates against this and just knocking them out, because they come in and try to go up against it and they blow, and they just keep blowing. You have turned this speed up— you are going to be expansive and conquer everything, you know you can embrace the whole universe, you know that nothing can stop you. You just go ahead on this forward vector and you will keep running into these locks and they will keep blowing. This is practically an automatic clearing device. I don’t know how many hours you would have to sit and postulate that in order to blow everything out, but everything would blow.

So, there is a very simple mechanism. That governor brings you up to speed. You start running at a higher level of speed and everything that you brought up to make you run at a lower level of speed will blow.

As a matter of fact, it is much shorter and simpler than this. If at this moment you simply made up your mind that you were handsome, beautiful, strong, dangerous, powerful, that you knew everything there was to know, that you were totally capable in any job that you undertook or any sport you undertook, and if you really believed that— and you can believe it— your face might change physically right there.

There is this mechanism. You study your own self a little bit and you will suddenly find it. It is very simple to come by.

Now, I want to show you something about another tone scale. This tone scale is a very simple one. It runs on the basis that individuals operate between the static of 0.0 and the static of 40.0. The first one, 0.0, is death. And 40.0 is eternal life; it is the absolute, theoretical static of the complete power which runs all the motion you will ever command.

Don’t get mixed up, by the way, and think that this is trickling through from some eon in the past up the genetic line to you here and now, because it is not. You are in direct contact at this moment with ARC; you have your own ARC. It is here, now; it is not coming to you through your past experiences. Your past experiences are modifying— modulating— on your permission, your present available source of ARC, which is pure. You are adulterating your own ARC as it comes to you, in other words.

Efforts in the past have received ARC and wrapped it up; they are still there in entheta facsimiles. They are still available and you can bring them up to present time. But that is not where your supply of ARC is coming from. Your supply of ARC— or theta, or the postulate or the static which permits you to be in motion— is right here with you. And then you take it, you monkey it up and you throw a few circuits across the line, a lot of apologies and a whole flock of postulates, and you say, "My whole past is responsible for my present being and that is why I am not able to pole- vault fourteen feet anymore. That is why I drive this car, which could very ably go at ninety miles an hour, at fifteen. And this is also why it’s falling apart, as I have no time to do anything about it and—" apologies, apologies, apologies. And you get this whole supply of ARC snarled up with old postulates.

So you take out these old postulates and the whole problem will resolve —or you simply say, "Well, the devil with it!" and they will blow.

Anyway, at 40.0 we have a static. It is a static in that it is a static capable of monitoring motion.

Down at 0.0 there is also a static— that is death. It is an individual who is completely out of ARC. But he is completely in ARC with the conservation of energy and the other laws of MEST, because his body has become MEST. As far as his body is concerned, he is MEST. And as long as he is with a body, thinking about the body, modified by his own body as he modifies it, he goes down the tone scale and then out the bottom. He stops. And there is the other static. At the instant of death there is a static. So people run between this 40.0 static and this 0.0 static.

At 20.0 you have optimum speed, which is to say that not only are you operating at optimum speed in your environment but also your heart is running at the right speed, your glands are running at the right speed and everything is functioning the way it is supposed to function according to blueprint. You are working just fine. You may feel that 4.0 is a good speed, but you are actually just beginning to enter at 4.0 a kind of existence which is bearable, because at 4.0 you are still employing a lot of ARC.

Now, I want to show you something else on this line. Up at the top of this scale we have "know," and way below that is "you know" and even lower, "somebody else knows."

At this basic level between 20.0 and 4.0 you have "understand." Below this you have all the interplay of "seeking to understand"; part of this is you seeking to understand, and below that is somebody else seeking to get you to understand or else. So, ARC goes on a dwindling spiral. This "understand" is actually a sort of optimum randomity position, but it has a character of static in it too, in that it is instinctive, intuitive, it doesn’t require time to figure out— you simply understand.

You have listened to a lot of people play a trumpet; you have watched people playing trumpets. You have trumpet facsimiles galore. So one day you reach over and you pick up a trumpet and you play the trumpet— there is nothing to it. Lower on the scale, though, you practice! You seek to understand. And the second you say "I am seeking to understand, I am trying to understand," you are disturbing the fact that you understand. So you don ‘t understand as long as you seek to understand . This is almost too simple, but it is horrible.

From your instinctive understanding you can go into the next loop up, and up there is a species of ARC, but also there is an increasing randomity toward the upper static— faith. So a fellow as he goes on up the line actually understands less and less and knows more and more, until he understands nothing and knows everything. That is very simple, because he is then in the static and he is not living.

There is a terrific thirst for experience. That is because this static is minus 270 degrees centigrade; but a living body is 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit— much more comfortable.

You may think I am joking. As an individual starts either way from understand, he moves from an optimum randomity toward a static. Therefore, the interplay of his life is where he races along this level, and he will swing much wider. Individuals elect to swing wider. This fellow says, "I’ve been going along at this optimum randomity level for a long time, and gosh, it’s a bore. This place is a static!" So he goes out and sees how close he can come to killing himself with a racing car or something of the sort, or he gets a motorcycle and rides it down the highway at 120 miles an hour. All he is doing is swinging out of the line.

Or he can say, "Now I’m going to be very holy." (Actually, he is daring death.) "I’m going to reach into the inner portals of the inner, inner, inner, inner portals and I’ll practice yoga." He actually knows what he is doing: he is courting death. It is a randomity.

You can get really tangled up in this upper bracket. The Rosicrucians say, "If you look at a candle for fifteen minutes a day and concentrate on that, particularly if there’s a mirror sitting in back of it, all of a sudden you’ll see a face in the mirror"— and they don’t mean yours! You start sitting that motionless and you will start up toward that upper static. And then all of a sudden you say, "Gee, you know, I want to see that face, I want to see that face, I want to see that face," so you pick one out of your last appendectomy and you say, "There it is, and it stabbed me!" Wonderful!

If an individual could only keep out of that one, which is low on the scale, he could undoubtedly do lots of strange things in these upper brackets. As a matter of fact, if you as an auditor got up there along about 30.0 and if you could maintain it, you could take one look at your preclear and he would come right up the line.

Your preclear would be sitting on the couch saying, "Oh, I’m terrible, and I get beaten every day at home, and my children are all mean to me, and they feed me garbage. And I just got divorced because my husband burned my feet; he made me sleep every night on red- hot bed springs. Here are the marks to prove it." A grim case.

You as an auditor would say, "How are you feeling?" The preclear would brighten up, come right up the tone scale, and you would say, "That’s fine. Pay the cashier." You would be so close to this upper static that you could actually sort of transmit the level, and you would be acting as a sort of conduit. This is a wonderful mechanism.

As a person started to come up into this upper end he would also get into telepathy and clairvoyance and all sorts of things. Of course, you can always see theta facsimiles in the future even though they haven’t been manufactured yet, because you can always manufacture them. But more important than that, theta has nothing to do with time and theta facsimiles of the future are there already, so you can look at them anyhow. You get your "extracurricular" theta manifestations up there.

If a fellow really starts spinning in and spins in by this route, just before he starts kicking off, he will go psychotic and he will get these same manifestations .

You go around an insane asylum and you will find people talking about ESP. They explain it very foolishly sometimes; they say, "The Western Union telegraph office has just hooked up two wires to my mind so the federal government can listen in on my thoughts. They’re all plotting against me, you know." But it is the same manifestation.

In other words, there are two sides to this tone scale. At the top you are seeking to know, and down below you are seeking to understand. At the top you are seeking to know more knowingly, to become more static about statics. And down below you are becoming more understanding about the MEST universe. At the top MEST is just nothing to you; down below you are trying to understand it. ARC applies to MEST. There is no ARC at the top.

I hope that clarifies a couple of things for you.