BASIC POSTULATES

A lecture given on 12 November 1951

Creating Your Own Life

At first, certain phenomena in the mind were discovered which could be treated and which produced a rather marked change in people’s psychosomatic illnesses. This was a system of running engrams (moments of pain and unconsciousness) out of a person’s life, and of running out secondaries (moments of grief and stress).

There is a commentary here upon the transiency of human emotion: It has always been a stet, fixed thing, up till this last year, that when a human being became sad, he became sad. But now a fellow’s best friend or closest relative could die, and if there were an auditor around, there would certainly be no repercussion.

You have seen people die and the people around them become ill and sad and their life go all to pieces. "Ever since poor old Bill insisted on getting in that automobile wreck, my life has been ruined," and that sort of thing.

But in Dianetics you can run what is called a secondary— that is, the moment of receipt of news of loss— run that straight on through, perception by perception, to the end and discharge the grief in such a way that the human being comes out bright, sunny and cheerful.

I saw a woman who looked about fifty. I was told that she was only twenty- eight and that her husband had died about two weeks before. There were two other auditors and myself in the area, and I said, "Why don’t you do something for her?" She was going around in black and she was all hollow- eyed. If anybody said anything to her, she would just cringe and start to weep again. She was in bad shape; her endocrine system was going to pieces. Her husband had been a medical doctor who had had great hopes for Dianetics. So finally one of the auditors who was with me took her and put her down on a couch and said, "Let’s go back to the moment when you learned of your husband’s death."

It took about nine hours to discharge this secondary engram and three or four other such deaths in her life. I saw her about four hours after the session had been concluded. She was wearing a red dress and she looked like she was about twenty- three. She was bright, cheerful, sparkling, and life was wonderful.

Somebody remarked to her, "Why, your poor husband died."

She said, "Yes, but I’ll just have to make the best out of it."

So there was efficacy in doing this.

It hasn’t changed a bit that an engram can so affect or influence a person. As a matter of fact, you could take the subject of Black Dianetics— a very simple subject— and use this material. You hit somebody over the head, shoot him in the arm with some sodium pentothal or something like that— rat poison, whiskey, anything poisonous— and stamp on him so it doesn’t leave a bruise or anything, and then you read him off an engram with all kinds of phrases in it.

He would wake up and not be aware of what had happened to him, and neither would anybody else.

This is not against the law, by the way. The only person who could complain is him— and you would have told him to forget it. It is not against the law. Any time he went up to the D. A. ’s office and said "Do you know that so- and- so knocked me out and read me an engram and kicked me in the stomach while he was doing it?" they would say, "Yes, yes," and send for a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist would come up, take out his pince- nez, look at him and say, "These are the symptoms of paranoia. Yes, that’s the way all paranoiacs act, and that’s what they claim— that somebody has drugged them. You have to send him to the insane asylum." And they would send him to the insane asylum and give him electric shock or give him a prefrontal lobotomy.

That is Black Dianetics.

An engram is an engram. That is all I am trying to drive home here.

But there was more to the picture of Dianetics than engrams, and little by little, that "more" has been showing up. Nature has been revealing her little treasures and secrets at a very slow rate of speed. It has taken over a year and a half to solve all the riddles of the human mind, and that is a long time in Dianetics. There is a whole world to be won out there, and here we are still fooling around with trying to convince an auditor that the best thing he should do is not hit the preclear over the head.

It is a fact that just now we are up to a codified procedure of such simplicity and efficacy that you can call it the twenty- five- hour process.

About four months ago I busily postulated— in order to sell the United States government a nice package whereby all of its pilots, would- be dictators, bureaucratic heads and stenographers could be snapped to— that we would have to have about a twenty- five- hour process. It couldn’t take longer than twenty- five hours to bring people up the line pretty well. In relatively unskilled hands, it could boost up to fifty or seventy- five hours, but a person would just be wasting that much time in it.

It did not come about that one arrived at this twenty- five- hour or fifty- hour process by simply canceling out the identity of the engram. There was more to its anatomy than had hitherto been seen. And that "more" became self- determinism, and that "more" became effort.

It has been discovered and can be very easily demonstrated that an individual chooses his own service facsimiles. He makes himself sick.

How does he make himself sick? He goes back and he gets a complete picture memory of being sick and he holds it up in present time and he says, "See? Don’t hit me, I’ve got glasses on. Look at me, I’m going along bravely— martyred, of course— but somehow or other I’m getting along, in spite of this wooden leg which I seem to have (although my leg is not wooden). I keep telling the doctor . . . he keeps shooting me full of hormones and such, and nothing seems to happen. Now, I want this cured!"

If you told the fellow "Well, you wished it on yourself; why don’t you wish it off yourself?" it would be impolite, it would be blunt, he wouldn’t like it— but it would be true!

Of course, he had a very good reason for wishing it on himself: he suddenly failed and he had to have a failure explained. How did he explain this failure? He said, "Well, my head ached. I had such a headache this morning I just couldn’t go to work." The funny part of it is that about the fifth time he pulls that gag he gets a headache! Two years from then he is going into doctors’ offices and saying, "I don’t know what happened to me, but I’ve got a migraine headache and it just comes on and I can’t do a thing about it." So the doctor gives him some hormones or drugs, he shoots him with this, he gives him that, and he sends him bills; sends him bills and sends him bills; it is very remunerative.

Anyway, a person actually wishes these things on himself. For instance, a little boy doesn’t want to go to school one morning. He doesn’t get up. Mother comes in, and Mother has argued at him before and argued at him. He has found out that nothing works. The more he protests about getting up, the more ambitious his mother becomes about getting him on the deck— cap, shoes, pants, jacket, out. He gets this routine every morning and he gets pretty desperate after a while, so one morning he says, "I think I’ll tell her I’m sick." (Of course, you haven’t ever pulled that trick!) He says, "I’ve got a bellyache this morning; I just . . ."

Thirty years later this person, who is now the assistant executive to the assistant executive secretary of some large corporation, is carrying upon his head all the weight and nervous tension of making General Motors or Wheaties or something, and he has got ulcers. Where did he get them?

The psychiatrist would say, "Well, it has something to do with the mind. It’s probably a libido theory that goes back into the more or less cross- eyed ramifications of the second ruddy rod. And of course you wouldn’t understand this because it’s all very complicated. If we just cut out your prefrontal lobes, you’ll be all set. The operation costs $2900 and there are other fees involved." But when they get all through he still has ulcers.

It was too simple. The fellow said, "I’ve got a stomachache."

The next time he had found out this gag worked. Mama at that time said to him, "Oh, well, Rollo, you don’t have to get up— poor boy. I’ll get you something that will soothe your stomach." That was nice sympathy.

So he felt very smug about it, and about two weeks later he said, "My stomach feels very bad."

A person puts his life together by saying what his life is going to be. A person says, "I’m going to be a great actor." That is the way ambitions come in. A person sees factors in life that he would like to approximate, and he postulates what he is going to be.

It works the same way in illness. By the second or third time that this boy has pulled this it is becoming automatic. He says "stomachache," and by golly, he has one. Give him another two or three years of talking about this stomachache and the first thing you know, he has forgotten— because he didn’t know the mechanism involved— that he ever pretended to have a stomachache. It is real!

Now a terrible thing happens to him: One morning he wakes up, when he is in college or something, and final examinations are coming on. He knows he is going to flunk "monotony." This is the day he is to take that examination and he has a bad stomach. He just can’t go down there and take that examination, that is all.

His roommate says, "Get out of there. You know that isn’t a bad stomach. It’s just because you don’t want to take that examination in monotony."

"Oh, yes, I do have a bad stomach!"

"Oh, no, you don’t!"

He goes down to the dean’s office and the dean says, "What’s the matter? You faking being sick so you can get out of this examination?"

"Oh, no, nothing like that. I really do have a bad stomach." By golly, by this time he really does have one. He has really fixed himself up royally now, because in order to make these other people wrong and in order to make himself right, he has got to have that bad stomach for keeps.

These service facsimiles are merely used like you deal cards. They have about that much importance. You use your experiences. As a matter of fact, a man’s personality is actually the compound of all the things he has been— but much more exactly, all the things he has decided to be. With that, we are just a little closer in on it.

When a person is very young he probably has a very high sense of justice. Let’s say he is playing with a little girl named Agnes. Agnes gets up on the second shelf, she pulls down the cookie jar and it breaks and throws cookies all over the floor. His mother comes in and he says triumphantly, "Agnes did it this time."

And his mother says, "No, she didn’t, you little beast; you’re not going to lie to me anymore!" Whap- whap- whap- whap- whap! Now he is really squirreled up.

This is justice. A human being has an enormous concept of justice. If he had broken the cookie jar, if he had lied about it, then all he would have had to have said was "Well, all right, I didn’t get away with it." But he didn’t break the cookie jar and he has been punished!

This punishment doesn’t have any cause; his mother is wrong. How is he going to demonstrate that his mother is wrong? He thinks about a time when his mother was sympathetic.

Actually, being sympathetic is being wrong. About as far as you can go on the way to the nice granite memorial is sympathy. This is wonderful stuff, sympathy. You can kill a man with sympathy quicker than anything else in the world, including an atom bomb, because you have to make the atom bomb first but everybody is sympathetic.

So the little boy says, "I don’t feel well." He has gotten over his crying and everything else, but this afternoon he says, "I don’t feel well."

"Well, that’s too bad, Timothy. That’s too bad."

That isn’t good enough, so he thinks, "When was she really . . . ? I’ll get her yet. Gee, I was awful sick one time— the time that bee bit me. Gave me a headache." He says, "I have a headache, Mama."

She has got to be wrong, and he will jockey around until he has finally gotten her wrong. But after he has had her wrong for a while, all of a sudden he gets tired of the game himself, maybe. Let’s say he wants to get up and go out and play.

"Oh, no! You’re sick. You stay right there." He has failed, actually, when this happens to him.

Maybe he goes on a little bit longer and he tries to get sympathy from somebody else. Maybe he marries a girl who reminds him of Mother. The way he handled Mother was to have these terrible back pains. He handled Mother beautifully that way, but this girl he marries doesn’t seem to have any sympathy for these back pains. That means it has failed. The facsimile he was using, the memory he was using of his own back pains, is real. They were real, actual back pains at some time or other. He is using real experiences; he is just displacing them in time so as to suit his purposes. The second that mechanism fails he is hung with those back pains because he has to convince her now that she is wrong.

So he convinces her she is wrong. He can convince her she is wrong to the degree of getting lumbago; he can even go so far as to go to a doctor. He will eventually work it around till he comes up with X- rays, with a medical diagnosis, with something highly authoritative that says in so many words "This is a sick man." Those words translate "He is right"! At this time, the person he is trying to convince is supposed to break down and be wrong. "You see all the horrible things you’ve done to me? And here I have been sick."

I am not just explaining the anatomy of hypochondria. The whole human race comes into this category, and sometimes— sometimes— an individual does these things without realizing he is doing them. They manifest themselves in terms of glasses, summer colds, winter colds, fall colds, spring colds. They manifest themselves in glandular interruptions. For instance, a little child is born into the world awfully brave, and then he finds that somebody gets sympathetic because he is afraid. He is all set then: he has a service facsimile. He may discover this by accident or he may postulate fear on himself just like this: Somebody is telling him a ghost story and he wants to be obliging, so he says, "Woooo! I’m scared." He is all set now; something can approximate this ghost story and he has already set up the chain reaction. Pretty soon it will get so automatic that he can’t even examine his own thinking processes with regard to it. All of a sudden he is scared. Something happens and a fear reaction turns on. This is irrational. It is merely irrational because he doesn’t know that he is postulating it. Actually, he postulates it so rapidly that he can’t even keep track of his own thought line on it.

You can take a preclear back down the track, take him into one of these incidents and run him through slowly, and you can actually find the moment when he said "All right, I’ll be sick."

You say, "Why? Why did you want to be sick at that moment?"

He will think about it and say, "Well, I got fired three days before." Here is his failure explained.

In other words, this mechanism of self- determinism was discovered to be very important. We knew it was there but didn’t know the magnitude this thing could assume. We know the magnitude now. It can assume the magnitude of killing yourself—" You’ll be sorry when I’m dead."

How many children do you know (of course, you would never have done this!) who have walked down the street or across the lawn and behind the shrubbery, saying, "They’ll be sorry when I’m dead. They’ll look into that coffin and they’ll look on my stone- cold face, and they’ll be sorry they were so mean to me and said such horrible things to me." Your mind might be going back to wonder whether you did. I assure you, most people have done this, one way or the other. That is death you were asking for there.

A little child can do these things and more or less handle them very easily. A child’s mind is very free, very plastic. He can handle it beautifully. He is in pretty good shape. He acts awfully crazy, but he is actually pretty sane: he knows what he is doing.

People then start telling him how serious life is. I don’t know when life became this serious. Personally, I have never found it this serious. (I have, a few times in the past, but I have had all those reduced or erased now, so to heck with it.) People start this campaign of "It’s serious, Johnny, you must get A, " "It’s serious, Johnny, you must wear overshoes— you’ll catch a cold unless you do," "It’s serious, you must take care of your health," "You must worry," "You must be a good boy," "You must mind," "You mustn’t get run over by trucks." They tell a child the most obvious things. They convince him that life is serious.

The child gets run over by a truck— so he gets run over by a truck! It is his life. Actually, if he had a viewpoint of this character, he would probably go on and wind up being a pretty hard morsel to handle along about the time he got to be twenty- five or twenty- six.

Wouldn’t it be interesting if there were fellows who weren’t convinced everything was so serious and who knew they postulated all these things and were pretty well swamped up, when all of a sudden the president sent out "greetings." A fellow would just scribble across the bottom of it "I am too busy" and mail it back. That would be interesting, wouldn’t it? What would they do to him? I can tell you they wouldn’t do very much to him, if you had ten million men who did that.

The Selective Service is set up on this life- is- serious proposition. They get these capsules out of the buckets so that they can make the world safe from plutocracy or something, and they start mailing these things out— but the boys mail them right back. They turn around to their armed services and say, "All right, the Fort Myer Cavalry will now charge on the Selective Service station at Ninth and H Streets, round up all these recalcitrants and bring them in."

Then the cavalry says, "We don’t believe in it."

This would be a horrible situation. It would mean that somebody in government at that moment would have to get reasonable. Their brains would probably blow up!

It is so easy to handle people with fear. All you- do is post a set of regulations and you say, "You will do so- and- so and be at such and such a place or be shot for pusillanimous conduct in the face of the enemy." "You will go to such and such a place." "You will pay your taxes here— so much of your income." "Now, you’ve got to be on the job every morning at nine o’clock. It doesn’t matter what you do, but you’ve got to be there. And you leave the job every afternoon at five o’clock"— and we all go like automatons.

All you would have to do to make a flock of automatons is simply cover up this datum about self- determinism. You just mask it. You just say, "The environment handles you; it isn’t you but the environment."

Psychology says, "Man has to adapt himself to his environment in order to survive." That is the way not to survive. You go around adapting yourself to your environment and you are dead! You just get all nicely adapted to environment A- 26, and what happens? Somebody changes the environment on you. That is grim.

What happened to the dinosaur? He built himself a mountain of flesh, and then somebody changed the climate on him and he didn’t have any food left— big joke. There are no more dinosaurs.

If you had just gotten beautifully acclimated and you had gotten completely adjusted to driving only a T- Model Ford, where would you have been, even by 1930, when they had the Model A?

The military is the only organization in the world which can survive without changing with the environment. It has worked out a way of doing this by just being so stupid nobody can do anything about it. For instance, in 1895 the navy was building a full- rigged ship of the line. Somebody in the Senate Investigations Committee came down and asked, "What are you doing that for?"

And the navy people said, "Well, they’ve always been good. They’ve always been good."

"But there’s been armor plate now for the last forty years. Don’t you think it’s about time you knocked off building this ship of the line?"

So they knocked it off.

I went up to the Senate one time and I brightly asked a couple of senators up there, "Did you ever hear of propaganda?"

They said, "Yeah, it’s bad."

"No, no. You use it. You use it on the enemy. You fight ideas with ideas. They are sending an idea at you; it’s caving in your labor forces and everything else. Well, you give them an idea and they don’t stop the idea."

"What are you talking about?"

I said, "Well, that’s about the only way you’ll be able to fight communism— give them an idea."

"Don’t you know what we’re supposed to do? We’re authorized to take a boy and train him, and we are authorized to give money to somebody to make a gun. We put the gun in his hands and we send him over to shoot communists. That’s the way it is done." In other words, governments have a hard time changing too. One government gets just a pace above the other one in terms of warfare, weapons or anything else and people start dying— and not slowly.

So, the individual has to be able to change to fit his environment.

Now, what happens to you when you lay down a postulate? Suppose you say, "I like T- Model Fords; I am never going to drive another car." You will wonder for years why you are having so much trouble with that Buick. You have made a promise to yourself and if you aren’t faithful to yourself, then you are not faithful to anything and you wouldn’t be handling yourself at all. So you have to be faithful to yourself. The second you lay down one of these postulates— one of these conclusions— you self- determine that you will do or be something.

A very little time goes by and you are in the time stream which is subject to that postulate you have made, and you are now subject to it. So in order to change, you have to change that postulate.

We know what facsimiles are, we know what memory is, we can handle memory, erase it, turn it upside down and wrong side out— we can do almost anything to it now— so it is all right. You can very swiftly change these postulates.

A person who has a lot of set postulates on the line cannot change. He has hung himself. And he just gets worse and worse and finally they bury him and say "Poor old George." It is a simple mechanism.

A fellow says, "I hate to be young. I don’t like being young. I want to be old." He will get old. But he has also said, "Old people are dreadful. I don’t like old people," so when he gets to be old, which he wanted to be, he can’t like himself because he is now old. This is squirrel- cage stuff.

About the only safe way you could handle this would be to pick up the postulates you make. Make all the postulates you want to and then remember that you made them. It is actually very simple. It postulates a new way to do your thinking. You can be as serious as you want to. You can keep your word if you want to. Some people do.

That is another factor in the society, by the way, which is quite fascinating: the insistence of the society that a person who is honorable keep his word. What a beautiful Black Dianetics gimmick! If you can just force a person to always be consistent and always keep his word, then you make him immediately subject to all of his postulates. And the second you have succeeded in doing that you have practically killed him. This is a wonderful gag.

Of course, we couldn’t have business without people keeping their word, because business is honest and ethical— never otherwise! That is why everybody gets it down in writing. When you have it down in writing, you can see what that does. You sign a contract; the notary public comes in and stamps it and seals it. There are signatures all over it and there are whereases and wherefores to make it legal. (No document is legal, of course, without three whereases and two wherefores in it.) As a result, what do you get? You have a contract or a postulate.

The contracts you make with yourself are a lot more binding than a business contract because you just can’t go up to the court of law and beat the rap.

You said to yourself when you were three, "I’ll get even with her. I’ll break out in a rash like I did last week. I’ll lay down on the floor; I’ll scream. I’ll fix her!" You know very well you are doing it when you are three; by the time you are seven you are not quite sure what is doing it, and by the time you are twenty- seven you are in horrible shape.

When you were three you signed a contract, and that contract is still in existence. The only way to get out of that contract is to die. If that contract fails you— you make it and it fails you— then life has it all worked out; it has a beautiful bear trap fixed up for you. You get up to a point where this contract is no longer workable and you are suffering from it too much, and life has a solution for you: you die. Then you have a clean slate and you can make a lot of new contracts, unless you have found some use for some of the last contracts that you were using on the genetic line.

So you get this out- of- valence situation— an individual who ceases to be himself, who becomes Mother or Father, and so on. You look for the point where the person swapped valences; it follows a point where he failed. Let’s say that he was trying to tell Father off the way Mother did— which is to say, he has taken Mother’s valence as a set of facsimiles. He is telling Father off and then Father somehow or other sees to it that he fails. Nobody is going to talk that way to him (except his wife, of course), so he breaks the child down. The child will go out of valence at that moment, because he chose a valence, he knew he chose it, but now it has failed and he steps out of valence and into something which he doesn’t think he has chosen. But he has. He just sort of dies— he gives a token death, you might say, at that point.

There is hardly a human being alive who doesn’t have half a dozen of these token deaths back on the track. They are in major prominence. As a matter of fact, there isn’t a person around who can’t remember an incident which occurred to him which changed his life— one incident which changed his life, a major incident of some sort or other. Just earlier than that incident, you seemed to be going along one way, and just after that incident you were definitely going along another way. There is a disconnection in that incident; there is a valence shift. It changed your life and you started out, more or less, with a new life.

Right after an operation, for instance, it is very difficult to get people to remember things. If you were to give a person an IQ test before and an IQ test after they get an operation which jars them up, you would find out a lot of their data had gone by the boards. They are now thinking from a new point. They are thinking, actually, as a new identity to some degree, because that little operation was a token death. They failed: they had to be operated on, didn’t they?

You can watch this on the time track. We can take some of these people who are very seriously out of valence and start down the track with them, and we can find places where they apparently should be or seem to be in valence. They are not all the way out of valence and so on, and we just go back and forth over a certain point on the track and find out where they went out of valence. And we can put them back in valence— not by just telling them to, but by other techniques.

It was nonetheless valid, then, that an engram could do what it could do or that a secondary could do what it could do. But the only reason a late engram or a late secondary— one of these grief charges, a moment of mental pain— could do what it could do was that you chose much earlier to be affected by such things. You chose much earlier in this lifetime to be affected by them.

A child has a great big goal: the goal of growing up. This goal is big enough for him, and a child’s concentration is on physical development rather than mental development— activity— and as a consequence, a little child actually finds it pretty easy, pretty early, to handle his mind. What he is having a hard time doing is handling his motor controls.

If you— just as you are now— were taken down to the local aircraft field and put in a four- motored bomber and told "Okay, take it off," you would look at those throttles and meters and say, "What do I pull, push? Undoubtedly the whole thing works, but how do I work it?" A child is to a large degree in this sort of a situation. He is confronted with a very complex switchboard. How is he to make it work?

A little baby will be goo- gooing and so forth for the first week or so, and then all of a sudden he will discover his finger. He goes through a whole process which is just as difficult, muscle for muscle, as it is for you to learn how to wiggle your ears. You have to find the right muscle, you have to find the right nerve connection and so forth.

Finally he gets it so the toes wiggle, the ears wiggle, the eyes will cross and look outward. Actually, nobody has completed that process. That process can be carried on much further than a child carries it on. There is the process by which you can make one hand go in a different direction and speed than the other hand. Somebody who plays a piano learns how to do that. He struggles at it for a while, but he finally finds the right motor controls, and then he has it. He is just hanging together his physical motor controls, because the body after all is just a carbon- oxygen engine with a switchboard.

Another one that would be a little more difficult— but which you could sit down and practice if you wanted to, and you would find out you could do it— would be to slow down or speed up your heart action voluntarily. It is like learning how to wiggle your ears: you have to find the right muscles.

A bunch of Hindus came over to this country and visited a school of medicine. I was fascinated when I read about this. The doctors all looked at these people with great astonishment, because these people could slash a vein and start and stop its bleeding at will. A lot of hypnotists came around and said, "Well, if you could hypnotize yourself, you could do that, of course." Actually, a hypnotist knows that he can take a subject and put him in a trance and slow down his heartbeat or interrupt his blood flow. You can actually, with hypnosis, knock all the blood out of a hand or an arm so that it goes ice- cold and practically into rigor mortis.

These Hindus could bleed at will. Doctors in the United States went delirious. They almost fainted. This was something brand- new. It was only 3500 years old!

I learned about this when I was about fifteen, so when I read this— medicine, big new discovery and so forth, doctors all agog— I was fascinated. That was my first inkling of how far behind the United States was on just plain ordinary observation.

You, or anybody, could sit around and practice this for a while and you could finally do it— so long as your blood didn’t give out on you! Of course, the way to do it is to learn how to voluntarily cut off the blood flow to your own hand. You would say, "All right, what is the muscular control of cutting off the blood flow to this hand?"

We have been told that there are a lot of automatic responses in the body— involuntary air- warden systems or something— whereby little nerves run around and do involuntary actions. Oh, no, they don’t.

Did you ever become conscious of your own breathing and have to sit there and breathe consciously for two or three minutes until you finally got it back into an involuntary proposition? Breathing is very easy to handle. It is intimately connected.

The system is not as automatic as you would think. You can make any part of your living come under your own analytical determinism— anything. If you were, for instance, to make a tremendous postulate of "I’m going to start life anew. I am going to be completely different after this moment. I am going to be brave, strong, beautiful, healthy and so forth," you actually could do it. The thing which you would dislike doing is throwing away your old memories. If you sat down and made that postulate solidly and if you then went back over it in memory as to what that postulate was like, you would find yourself flicking out of valence at that point. You just got through killing yourself. It is as simple as that. You say, "Well, I’m dead. As far as my past is concerned, it’s all gone. And this is new and this is the future. And from here on it’s going to be nothing but future, and none of this past stuff is going to worry me anymore."

What is that operation? That is the life- death cycle itself, and you can postulate it in this life if you want to. It is all right for you to postulate it. You can always go back and remember postulating it and pick it up.

Self- determinism reaches, then, very deeply. But what is it which makes it possible for one’s self- determinism to handle oneself so admirably? What is the monitor system used by self- determinism to handle the muscles? That was another piece of the picture.

Of course, the muscles are concerned in effort. The mind— the physical mind— is concerned with estimating efforts. You walk up to a door and you just do an automatic computation: "How much energy is it going to take to open this door? What is the amount of friction I need to establish between my hand and the door handle?" Every once in a while you are surprised. You walk up to a door and you confidently reach for the door handle and pull, and it stays there. You go down in tone immediately because you have been wrong.

You estimate the effort that it will take to do something. Generally that effort is right, but every once in a while it is wrong.

Do you have a sticking drawer in your home? Anybody who will tolerate a sticking drawer is asking for it because he will go down in tone every time he tries to open it. He estimates the effort to open this drawer, which is not very much; he should be able to draw it open easily, but he pulls and it sticks, and then he has to yank on it. After a while he will go into apathy about it, and anything that is in that drawer he will leave alone. He won’t touch that drawer anymore.

Maybe it contains the telephone book, and he will say, "Well, I guess I won’t call him now." If he examines this, it is because he doesn’t want to open this drawer. It always fights him.

He can whip that drawer very easily by saying, "The estimation of effort to open this drawer is a jerky, twisty sort of an effort that takes a couple of minutes." If he did that it would never upset him because he would have made a proper estimation of effort.

What he insists on doing is going on his original estimation of effort. He keeps insisting that first one was right and when the drawer sticks, each time he gets worse off. He is saying the contract is so- and- so, and it is never that way.

This physical effort is very interesting. It has to do with motion that is stored in the body and utilized in various ways by the body. As a matter of fact, the whole genetic blueprint, the whole blueprint of your physical construction, depends upon efforts and counter - efforts in which you have been involved along an enormously long genetic line.

What are these efforts? They are contained in memory. They are in what we call facsimiles. That is a handy way of saying a memory, because nobody has mentioned the word memory as though it were an item. People say, "Well, I remember that," or "My memory isn’t so good." A person’s ability to recall these pictures he has taken with all of his sense perceptions— sight, sound, hearing and so forth— may be poor, but believe me, they are all there. Everything which you have experienced, everything which you have seen, heard, felt, the temperature of your body at any moment in your lifetime, and so on— all this is on recall; it is all on record. We call these records, and would they make a fancy- looking motion picture! They are in color, they are three- dimensional, they are smellies and feelies, as well as talkies. One of these facsimiles is a great big package.

When you get sick you keep on recording. It becomes a little bit difficult to recall back into it, mostly because when you were very young you agreed not to remember times when you were unconscious.

You may have agreed afterwards just with yourself because you found out it was kind of painful. It is usually on this basis, though: "No, Willy. Get in the dentist chair. Now, the dentist is a nice man."

"Well, why? I don’t want to get in the dentist chair."

"Well, he wants to pull your tooth. You just sit down there and you won’t remember a thing about it and you won’t feel anything."

"I won’t?"

"No. No, we’re going to put this nice mask over your face, and you will just go to sleep and you won’t remember a thing about it."

"I will? All right, I will. Okay. That’s fine with me." What he is actually saying is "I agree at this moment that when I go unconscious I will not remember anything that happens to me during that period of unconsciousness."

This is a lot of malarkey. It is all on record. As a matter of fact, it is in full analytical recall as soon as you get that earliest postulate out. And those of you that have been having such a hard time bucking into engrams and trying to knock the things floppy have been fighting up against one of those original postulates. Some of these cases just run through these engrams like nothing. They say, "Yes, I always knew that." They just never agreed not to.

So, here are these moments of physical pain. That is just another package. It is just another theta facsimile. Whether you are down at the drugstore eating an ice- cream soda or in a hospital getting your head sawed off, it is all the same kind of facsimile. It isn’t anything special. One we call an engram because it has physical pain in it, and the other we call a memory. Call them both facsimiles because they are basically the same thing.

After an operation, for instance, maybe the fellow is feeling pretty good. He is lying there and this pretty nurse walks in and says, very sympathetically, "And how are you now?"

"Gee, I don’t feel so good. I feel pretty bad." (He didn’t feel bad at all.) "I feel pretty bad."

"Well, now, we’ll make you feel better."

So he says, "Gee, this package that’s just happening— boy, is that valuable! I’m in bad shape. I’m supposed to have— it says here— sympathy, bed, not go to work, not go to the office. I’m going to be sick for weeks, it says right here. I read in a book once whereby people were sick for weeks after this happened to them. I’m all set." But there isn’t any reason why a person can’t walk out of a hospital.

It is interesting that the Tagalogs weren’t ever told that you were supposed to stop when you were hit by a bullet. So they would get hit with three or four bullets through the heart and one through the head and then run seventy- five yards and take a machete and whack off an American soldier’s head. This was disconcerting to our troops during the Philippine insurrection. So we sent a lot of people in and convinced them that when you were hit by a bullet you were supposed to die. They have never repeated this performance. That is an interesting datum. And yet there were lots of Tagalogs running around getting shot at during World War II and none of them put on this kind of a performance. What actually happened to them was mechanical.

Evidently it doesn’t have to take a person just a short time to die with a bullet in his heart. Evidently he dies over quite a little period of time sometimes. It is how much fluid he loses, how much blood disappears out of the organism. It is just like shooting a bullet into a machine.

But the mental part of him says, "I can die right now or I can wait a while," and the actual truth of it is that you can die or wait. Most people kill themselves off just on the basis of "Well, it wasn’t such a good life anyhow"— boom !

Intention has a lot to do with dying as well. If a fellow is all nerved up and he gets hit by something, he will go instantaneously into rigor mortis. He has postulated that he is supposed to be rigid and so forth, the bullet hits him and he freezes right there.

During the Civil War they were making a big examination of this. There are some reports on record and some photographs by Mathew Brady showing snipers and so on who had been suddenly hit between the eyes in action, still holding their rifles, still holding them alert, still propped up against a tree, finger on the trigger, not a thing disturbed about them at all— but stone- dead.

The fellow felt so punitive at the moment he was doing this that it was impossible for him to be hit, changed or hurt, and then all of a sudden he got a nerve shock in reverse and it just froze him because it was so directly opposite to what he was doing. There are a number of explanations for it, but the point is that this individual was already holding on at a mad rate, and he held on to all the incoming impulse and he held on to himself and he just froze.

Another point of it is that somebody, after he has been dying for half an hour or something like that, will eventually get tired of it and freeze and stop. He might think he is stopping pain, or something else, but he is really just stopping motion. Rigor mortis sets in; he gets rigid.

People wish all sorts of things off on themselves. I dare say you remember wishing something silly off on yourself. I would say offhand there is probably some period when you said something that wasn’t quite as sensible as it might have been, such as "I am not going to go to school anymore because . . ." or "I’m not going to talk to him anymore because . . ." or "I’m going to leave him because . . ." or some postulate on this order.

An auditor, going over this line so far, could on the one hand take up effort— which is to say, the receipt of motion and the giving forward of motion— and he could process this out of the facsimiles. He would find that there are motions with which people hold on to facsimiles. For instance, somebody gets hit with a baseball in the forehead, and the moment he gets hit he has a tendency to remain at a state of rest. He wants to remain where he was, whereas the baseball says he is supposed to remain where it knocked him. He still has an impulse to hold his head solidly, and this actually has a tendency to put an effort in the engram which holds the engram in. He is resisting the baseball and he could keep on resisting this baseball. Actually, theoretically he could go on resisting this baseball for the rest of his life and would, except that he would only hold on to that facsimile in the event that he had made earlier postulates to hold on to such accidents.

The holding of these facsimiles in order to invalidate people, to show the world it is wrong, to do this and to do that, we call the self- determinism of a service facsimile. And these painful incidents or pitiful incidents that a person is holding on to and showing to people we call service facsimiles.

So a person can self- determine this; he can say, "Well, I’ll show them that I was right." Justice and other things get involved here, and he says, "I’ll show them I was right, and here, it’s left a mark upon me," and " You’ve done this to me"— that sort of a thing— and he starts holding up these service facsimiles. There will get to be a whole chain of them. All the auditor actually has to do is blow out, theoretically, just the person’s self- determined decision to hold on to these service facsimiles. These are psychosomatic illnesses. These are your habit of smoking, your eyeglasses and so on. Somewhere on the track you made a postulate that you wanted to prove somebody wrong or that you were done an injustice or something of the sort, and you said, "I’ll show him!"

You have used eyesight many times as an excuse for failure. You didn’t read a road sign, you went on by, and you said, "My eyes aren’t so good." This explains everything. Nobody can jump on you for that! The horrible part of it is that your eyes are good. There is nothing wrong with your eyes at all. You can take glasses off people’s noses with Self- determinism Processing fairly rapidly.

But perhaps a little more important to us is the emotional curve and emotion, and how to process emotion, and what kinds of emotions there are. In the next part of the lecture I am going to give you a little process that you can do yourself. And if you can’t improve your morale and your state of being and your health about two or three hundred percent in the next few days with this little gimmick, I will be ashamed of you. Everybody who has been handling it so far has been flying out through the roof and growing horns and all sorts of things.