PRIME THOUGHT

A lecture given on 12 November 1951

Cycles of Action

I want to tell you about an emotional curve.

The individual, the personality, handles the physical body with an action relay system— the glands, the endocrine system. The endocrine system is monitored, evidently, by the individual himself— that part of the individual which is his own center of awareness. In other words, the awareness of awareness of an individual handles the physical action and records physical action through an emotional relay system.

It is a very interesting system. It is not very complex, actually, but the compounds in it are very complex. It took life a long time to tailor up and square around all of the various types of compounds which go to make up such things as thyroid, testosterone, estrogen, adrenaline and so on.

These compounds, by the way, can be injected into animals which have not developed those glands, and they will produce the same result. If you were dealing with mobile bacteria, which obviously don’t have such a gland, and you put some adrenaline into their environment so that it would be ingested, you would get a catalytic action on them. In other words, this material affects the stuff life uses to form bodies.

We have, then, three levels of operation. The first is thought, on the basis of awareness of awareness: a person says to himself so- and- so and he does so- and- so. Everything in thought is preceded by physical action. In other words, before there is a thought there has to be a physical contact with the physical universe— except one thought. That is prime thought.

That is the first thought, and everything succeeds this first thought. So we call this thing prime thought. It doesn’t depend upon physical action. It doesn’t have anything to do with the Prime Mover Unmoved; it is just prime thought. A person thinks a thought, and that thought is a very specific thought and it is merely the thought to be. He thinks, "I will be," and he is.

Now, there is a second thought which is— but does not have to be— all by itself, and that is "I will not be."

Thinking is categorized in these brackets of "I will be" and "I will not be." In other words, a person assumes the state of beingness or steps away from the state of beingness. And the whole cycle of life is simply this cycle: the person says "I will be," and he goes along, then something happens and he says "I will not be." As a result, you get this curve.

The funny part of it is that prime thought does not just begin at the beginning of track on the genetic line; prime thought can happen at any time. It can happen at any time that a person, without cause, reason or anything else, can suddenly say "I will be" and be. That is the one independent thought. The other one is more or less dependent upon other things, because the thought "I will be" is so natural, but to fall away from it is not quite as natural, since it denotes failure.

A person, then, at any time could say "I will not be," just totally independent of anything.

In this particular super controlled age we have been instructed into the idea that it is all stimulus- response, that we see something happen in the environment and then we do so- and- so. Oh, no, we don’t.

A person who is aberrated almost to the point of insanity does operate on a stimulus- response mechanism. Actually, though, if he has an engram that tells him to do something or other and something happens in the environment which restimulates the engram, it restimulates the engram on this pattern: "Well, there is something in the environment. Oh, yes. I think I will let that remind me of something or other," and he shoves a theta facsimile at it and there he is.

The whole process of restimulation has in it this intermediary step of saying "I will do that." Even though it is very swift it is still there. It is not automatic; it has just become condensed in time, because it has become a part of almost any engram which has been permitted to restimulate.

In other words, an individual at any time on his own free will can suddenly say "I will be." I am sure there are very few people who have not had the experience of being all dragged out and knocked down, when life has walked all over them and they have gotten footprints on them and they have been sick for a long time, and then all of a sudden, without any associative reasons whatsoever, they said "Well, I will be," and they stopped being sick and started being effective and accomplishing things and going out along the line.

But you can say "I won’t be" too. This happened to people in the service quite often. They would look at all these second lieutenants that were fresh- graduated out of Vassar and they would say, "Well, I won’t be," and they would stop being. After the war was over most of them neglected to say again "I will be," so they stayed in sort of a state of being not quite pleased with life. Life looked to them a little bit trying.

If you have been in the service, by the way, you can just postulate this for no good reason at all. Just say, "Well, I’ll be again. I stopped being once; now I’ll be again." That is thinking a prime thought. It doesn’t carry with it any vast strain or strenuousness or anything of the sort, because that is when you start to add effort into it.

So, there is that echelon of operation. It does accumulation of data, computation and so forth.

The next one down is the way that thought and self- determinism subjugates the body to put it into the required activity. It does this with the endocrine system. There is a little motor switchboard somewhere in the body, and thought just says, "Well, arms and legs, move," and so forth. It doesn’t move the arms and legs on the principle of pulling wires on a puppet. What it does is level endocrine catalysts into the motor areas. For instance, the pituitary has about forty- seven known parts which act as catalysts of various sorts.

It is very easy to touch a little tiny electronic button and blow up an atom bomb. On the same principle, the awareness of awareness has enough contact to turn on an endocrine activity, positive or negative. It can say "Withdraw," it can say "Charge," it can tell the body to do anything; it can say "Leg, move to the right," or "Hands, be graceful." Any one of these things can be monitored by an endocrine system.

The next level down is, of course, the level of actual physical action, of effort. This is the muscle that swells up; this is your hands going out and moving something. It is very quick by our frame of reference.

And to show you that this is very self- determined, there is nothing you can alter faster than your reaction time in Dianetics. You can really alter that in a hurry.

So here are these three levels. The second level has been relatively neglected until very recently because we couldn’t figure any way to get a purchase on it. Various thoughts and experiments were tried, and finally the answer rolled out and it was so simple that of course it was missed. And that is the fact that the emotional reactions of the past can be very easily and simply contacted by contacting the curve of change. By giving the person a comparison of one emotional state with another emotional state in the same period of time, he gets an awareness of time itself, since time is known to us through change. As a result, you can run the emotional curve on an individual. I don’t think you will have any preclears who can’t find that emotional curve in one bracket or another. It is very easy to locate.

Before I tell you exactly what it is, let me tell you first about the cycle of action: Life always attempts to complete a cycle of action. This is very, very interesting in human behavior. Regardless of what kind of a cycle of action is begun, life tries to complete it.

Now, the basic cycle of action is conception, birth, growth, level, decay, death. That is the big cycle of action as far as one lifetime is concerned. You can see a cycle of action that way.

We have to look a little closer to see these second cycles of action; they are little fellows. A person says, "I’m going to be a streetcar conductor." He says this when he is five. He started a cycle of action when he said that. He will go around and play being a streetcar conductor for a while and then "forget about it." Then one day when he is about forty, he is riding along and he says, "Gee, it would be fun to drive this streetcar. I wonder how you would go about it."

A person says he is going to do something, and come hell or high water, he will. But he starts cycle of action after cycle of action after cycle of action without finishing them and then wonders why he is confused at the time he is about thirty- five or forty. He is pretty cluttered up by that time. He has started thousands of cycles of action each year he has been alive and he has finished maybe one of them, leaving an unfinished quota which would take him many, many lifetimes to complete.

All you have to do in processing is get an individual to remember when he started one of these cycles of action, and the impulse to finish it will slow up.

This is very dangerous on such a level as suicide. A person starts the cycle of action by saying "I’m going to kill myself." He has started a cycle of action right there, and he will go along for years trying to complete this action— till he finally sees a psychoanalyst and kills himself. (Didn’t you know that was what they were for?) That is a very dangerous cycle of action, though.

There are other cycles of action. A person starts in, in high school, and he says, "I’m going to be a teacher. I want to be a teacher." He has met a teacher he likes very much so he wants to be a teacher. He goes along through college, but by the time he gets to college he has "forgotten" about this. Then he gets out into life and the next thing you know, he has made a very successful business building trucks. There is only one thing they don’t like about him down at the plant, though: he is always coming down the production line showing them how. He is trying to complete that cycle of action. He said he was going to be a teacher, so he is stuck with it.

There are two things that happen to a cycle of action: it succeeds or it fails. A person starts a cycle of action and if he starts it in earnest and it fails, at the moment of its failure he has to pick up an explanation of why he failed, and he will pick up at that moment a facsimile and offer it to the world, to himself and so forth.

People used to come around to me when I was a brash young writer (writers take themselves very seriously, particularly when they are very young) and they used to just drive me crazy! I had put in years pounding a typewriter. All the time I was studying everything else I was still pounding this typewriter, keeping myself alive and keeping the daily bread rolling in and so forth. It is quite a business, writing, and it has nothing to do with the American university. The American universities ruin about 280,000 writers a year— that is how many A. B. ’s they graduate. They ruin them, because they teach them that one has to be taught how to write. And the second that a writer says "All right, I agree to be taught," he has given up all of his rights as an artist, because the act of being an artist says "I know." That is self- confidence: "I know."

As soon as he says "I have to be taught before I know," he has had it. What he has to do, actually, is go on counterfeiting that he knows until he does know. You will find most brash people will do this.

People used to come up to me and say, "Well, I would have written too, except that I never could get to college." I used to go nuts on this. They were trying to say all you had to do was study and then you would get to be a writer. I felt very defeated about the whole thing because it was my belief that writing was a talent. I find out, now, it is nothing more nor less than self- confidence and ability to use the English language. Very few people are allowed to. What talent there is, I don’t know. When I was a child I used to have to get out of a lot of things by telling a flock of lies, and I thought this was the training which later on let me write fiction!

Anyhow, people would come around and tell me about this incomplete cycle of action: when they were in high school they wanted to be a writer.

People go into apathy about existence. Every time they start a cycle of action they will go into apathy if they don’t finish it. You wonder why we have an apathetic populace? It is because all of these postulates— one after the other— which begin these cycles of action are laid down and fail. If you fail enough you are in apathy, because every time you fail you have to explain it to the world and that means that you have to pick up some past experience or deficiency or something of the sort.

You pass a signboard and you say, "I couldn’t see it— my eyes are bad."

You send in a story to the editor and the editor sends the story back with just a printed rejection slip. You say, "Well, it’s because the paper was wrong," or "It’s because he’s mean." Of course, you don’t dare say the story isn’t good enough. You could say, "Well, I can do much better," but even this is a sort of a little admission that you failed because you didn’t do your best before. So the best and easiest and fastest way out of it is to say "Well, I was tired the day I wrote that. Yeah, I was tired. Typing is tiring." After that when you sit down to a typewriter you get tired. It is very simple.

All of this is so simple that it has been most fantastically overlooked. Nobody under the sun dared to take this square a look at the physical universe and say "Gee, I was guilty. I did it to myself!" In Dianetics, after all of this tremendous amount of research, I have to get pretty well up the tone scale and so forth before I take a look at it. And it is pretty grim.

I remember the first day I took a look at this I went down into apathy— and I mean apathy. It worked out by extrapolation. It figured out mathematically that self- determinism both existed and was the cause and reason of. Oh, no! I sat around all one afternoon with hardly enough energy to move my right toe, I was so apathetic. Then I started going back and picking it up, and all of a sudden I started to feel good because a lot of points that had been missed along the line in preclears and in auditing in general and so forth were suddenly revealed to view, and at one solid slash perhaps 99 percent of the auditing time necessary to resolve a case had been knocked away.

This is a cycle of action, then. A cycle of action generally starts out on a fairly high level. It starts out on the level of "I will" or "I do"—" I will be," in other words. You are enthusiastic, determined, have no sense of failure, no doubt of existence or anything of that sort. It starts out high. Then all of a sudden you trip over the first rope that is laid across the path.

It is said that no society’s ethics is ever higher than at the moment when it is formed. There are reasons for this. It’s the same way with this cycle of action. The cycle of action dwindles and it doesn’t increase unless it gets processed in the meantime. So now you can keep a cycle of action going on with greater and greater horsepower, because all you have to do is keep knocking out the failures and leaving the successes intact. The first thing you know, you are nine feet tall.

A person starts a cycle of action— he says, "I am going to be." Then he gets a little doubt, a little failure; then he makes a tremendous effort to struggle out of this somehow, and then he recognizes "I don’t believe I can do it." That is awful; that is terrible. Doubt comes in there, and then all of a sudden he says, "I didn’t do it." Actually, a person isn’t even down the tone scale at all until he says he is. He says to himself suddenly, "I failed. I observe physical evidence around me that tells me I have failed." That is death!

The cycle of action of life is to come into existence and live till you are dead. So on this little cycle of action, the failure says "dead." How wrong can you be? Dead. It is very simple.

Usually that failure has to be explained, for this reason: "I’m dead but I’m not dead— my heart’s still beating. I failed." You will find this very evident if you take a person back down the time track. You will find these points of failure, and those points are where he went out of valence. There is where he died!

As an excuse for still being alive he has to pick up one of these service facsimiles and show it: "Oh, I’m alive but I’m very sick. See? Dermatitis." The point is that a person will coast through an illness or a mental disturbance ordinarily after such a thing. Because of how "normal" he is, he goes through this mental disturbance and will continue in a fairly disturbed fashion to the beginning of the next cycle, which is the end of the present cycle. In other words, he will come uphill through a recovery or something of the sort and then hit this new high. That is generally because he has met up with a new ally. l He has made an ally out of something.

So an auditor should pick up the whole curve from beginning to end; at the beginning of the dive he will find the first small failures, and at the bottom of it he will find the major failure. At the bottom of the slope he will find an illness and at the top of the next hump he will find an ally. It is so mathematical I am ashamed of myself.

At the beginning of the cycle of action is big activity. It starts to decline at the beginning of small failures, it collects doubts and major failures, then all of a sudden there is a big failure and a dive. The beginning is up around tone 4.0 or something like that, and the end is really about 0.0.

There is an instant where a person will go into pretended death on the recognition of a failure, even if he just sits still. All of a sudden he recognizes that he has failed at something. Have you ever seen a person who suddenly realized he had failed? He just relaxes. He dies and then he comes to life a moment later when you speak to him.

So a fellow comes along after the failure and there is a period of varying illness or something of the sort. Now he starts uphill and there at the top you will find a new ally. If you want to know why you have never been able to find Grandma on some case or other, it is because Grandma always appeared at this top line, and you couldn’t get at the top line till you got this curve of the failure out of the road.

It is very easy to get an individual to find this curve. As a matter of fact, you can remember a time when you were happy and then you felt sad. You first felt happy— you were feeling all right— and then something happened and you felt sad. Somebody made a smart crack, or something like that happened. That is a little curve.

You can find that curve. You can get your preclear to reexperience that curve. He spots the moment and you get him to reexperience it. Make him go over it a few times and the most astonishing things will come out. All you are getting him to reexperience is the emotional curve. You are not getting him to experience a difficult emotion like grief or fear— although he will pass through those stages on this curve. You are asking him for the time when he was happy and the time when he felt rather apathetic— that is, success and failure; happy, apathetic, happy again. And when you get him back into his early, early youth, you will find out that he was happy, then sad, sick and then back up. There is the establishment of the facsimile pattern, and there is the emotional facsimile pattern.

It so happens that these engrams are hooked in and contain this emotional curve, and if you take the emotional curve off them they go by the boards. You don’t have to work their effort. If you can’t find the thought right away in them, just work the emotional curve of engrams for a while and all of a sudden the postulates will start turning up.

It is just like opening up a magic bag of tricks as far as an auditor is concerned. Here is an emotional curve. You just give him this and he finds, maybe, "Well, yes, Josie called me a liar three days ago."

"All right. Let’s see if we can find the period where she did. Now, we’re not concentrating on anything but the emotion. You were feeling all right. You were discussing something and all of a sudden you were called a liar. How did you feel then? Well, let’s see if we can go over that a few times. Can we find an earlier time?" He has suddenly got the whole bank open on this subject, only he doesn’t realize it yet. You take him back just a few days and he will find another one, another one and another one. The first thing you know, he has walked right into the service facsimile. And again, all you really have to take off a service facsimile is its emotional curve.

That leads in, then, to all that a person is using to keep others away from him or keep himself in line or something of the sort. That is all he is using. He has self- determined some cycle of action. The cycle of action failed, and then he picked up a reason why it failed. He comes back up the scale when somebody else comes along or something else comes along to pick him up. And if you run that emotional curve on a case just over and over, many, many times, you will find him starting to shed all his service facsimiles very quickly.

It is so easy to find emotion. Sometimes you will not get the bottom curve. Maybe there are other curves on this, maybe the case is terribly occluded, but you can find something on that case.

Let’s run sympathy— every time you ever felt sympathetic for anyone on any dynamic: for yourself, for children, for dogs, for groups, for the starving Armenians they used to get you to eat food by telling you about, and so on all the way along the line. Any of these things, any sympathy, can be run.

Sympathy is pretty low- toned stuff. You can kill a man with sympathy. Sympathy runs from 1.1 to 0.4, way down at the bottom of the tone scale. It is an awfully simple fact; it is primer material. Even the medical profession knew this.

The medical profession found that there were three methods of treatment. One, you could do something for a man’s ills if you could, or you could make him comfortable. That was the second echelon of treatment— if you couldn’t cure him, you could make him comfortable. And the third one, the last resort, was to give him sympathy.

There is something very funny about sympathy. Sympathy is just what it says. It says "I am you." You start going around feeling sympathy for dogs that are limping and you are liable to start limping. You start feeling sympathetic for poor Mama’s bunions, Mama having to work so hard all day sweating over a hot cook stove, and nobody is nice to her and nobody appreciates it, and you, as a little child of about six or seven, say, "Poor Mama, poor Mama. If I could only do something for my mother, only do something for her. If I could only make life easier. I will grow up and be a millionaire and give her a million dollars."

That whole thing is 1.1. It isn’t cute; it is terribly aberrative— terribly aberrative.

The 1.5 mother keeps laying it into the children: "Well, when I am old and gray and dead you’ll certainly appreciate me then. I work so hard, nobody cares— nobody cares anything about me; I am a martyr to my task. Here I work all day over a scalding hot washing machine and there you are out playing; you never even bother to help me."

The next reaction is that the child gets all broken down. He realizes he has "done something bad," and we get the anatomy of sympathy. Maybe you have never looked at this anatomy before, but it is hideous.

Sympathy is at 1.1: propitiation, covert hostility and so forth. Down at 0.5 is grief.

You are feeling perfectly happy and somebody says something to you or does something to you or takes something of yours that brings you down to 1.5, and now you do something. You take an action or you say something and it hurts them, and right away you go down to 1.1. You may not think it until you look it over in your own mind, but every time you have ever felt sympathy for anyone it was because you had just gotten through being awfully mean and nasty to them.

What is the mechanism?

You say to Joe Blow, "You think you’re so good looking, you ought to be ugly," or something of the sort— any kind of an insult— and he feels crushed by the thing. He really goes into a decline on it. You think to yourself, "I shouldn’t have said that. Poor Joe."

You just handed out a service facsimile. Regardless of whether you knew where it came from or why you picked it up, you had it and you threw it at him.

"Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." Any action that you take on any dynamic will recoil on you the moment it fails even slightly. And you fail if he fails. So you can take a successful curve of action— that is to say, you start out to win over Joe Blow— and if you can go along and really win, you are in fine shape. But don’t try to take a dirty, underhanded, unethical 1.5 theta facsimile of something that has been done to you and hand it along to him, because if he caves in on it, you get it back automatically. Then you go into sympathy and you are Joe Blow. This is really terribly grim.

You start examining a preclear and you say, "I notice that you sometimes exhibit a little embarrassment. Who did you want to feel embarrassed?"

"Oh, my Aunt Sousaphone. She always used to get into restaurants and scream. I used to feel very embarrassed for her." (Even the terminology we have in the language describes the action: "I used to feel embarrassed for her.")

"Well, did you ever accomplish anything by feeling embarrassed for her?" "No, no."

Of course, that was an action which failed, so he got it. There is your preclear, feeling embarrassed. He wanted Aunt Susie to feel embarrassed, so he got embarrassed.

You will find little children wishing the grown- ups around them were blind or being tortured to death or almost anything. Then one day the child fails in some overt action in that direction. His cycle of action then is to get back what he sent out. We could read some terrifically nice, quiet, moral lectures into this, but there is only one thing which I wish you would read into it: Don’t fail!

If you set out to do something to somebody, don’t just make them feel bad, kill them— but don’t fail!

Here is another point about this: You go out and you see a deer trotting along— beautiful deer— and you want that venison, so you lift your rifle to the shoulder and you drill that deer right straight through the brain pan; it takes one bound into the air and falls dead. You can go over and cut up the deer and pack it home and feel fine.

What would happen to you emotionally, perhaps, if after you had shot the deer you found out you had missed and the deer was dragging one foot along and bleating piteously, and at this moment, maybe, you saw the fawn coming along after the deer looking for its mama, and this poor deer is completely ruined and now you have nothing to do but kill it out of mercy. This is pretty messy emotionally.

The whole point is don’t miss! Don’t misevaluate your efforts. If you think that to go on surviving you have to put somebody out of action, put them out of action. Don’t mess around with it. Don’t nag at them, because you will wind up down at the bottom of the tone scale, and then somebody will have to come along and spend forty- five minutes or an hour processing all this stuff out of your life.

If you go back and pick up all the sympathy you had for your father, all the sympathy you had for your mother, all the sympathy you had for Aunt Bessie, right then you will probably feel like you are about eight feet tall. Just pick up this emotion of feeling sorry for them. You can recover it. If I asked you "When in your life did you do something bad that you felt sorry for immediately afterwards?" you could undoubtedly find a time.

What was destructive was feeling sorry for it afterwards, because that shifted valence. That put you over and nailed you down at that level of the tone scale on an emotional basis. All you have to pick out of it is just the emotion of being sympathetic.

You start picking out the number of times you felt sorry for somebody, and the next thing you know, you will start running into the times when you felt agreement with certain things that you didn’t want to feel agreement with. That is way down at the bottom of the tone scale too— feeling agreement with somebody you don’t want to agree with. That is holding yourself in line, and it is an emotion. ARC— these things are emotion. The feeling of talking to somebody you didn’t want to talk to— get your preclear to reexperience the emotion of doing that. You will find out it is a curve too. He started out feeling perfectly happy and then this person showed up and started talking to him and he slid right down the scale.

If you just work on sympathy all by yourself, you are going to pick up more postulates of things you have postulated in the past, because this sympathy has got it all masked. It has dropped the curtain on it.

What did you really think about the situation? The sympathy there, guilt, recrimination and all the rest of this sort of stuff slopping around will stop you from picking up your own thought on the subject. You start picking up your own free thought on the subject and you will find out you wished it all on yourself anyway, and it will blow.

This sympathy, remember, goes on all dynamics and that includes you. When have you felt sorry for your eyes? When have you felt sorry for your mouth, for your legs, for yourself? What is the emotion of feeling sorry for yourself?

You could take a great, big, beautiful ship that has been groomed up and paid for at twice as much as it is worth by taxpayers’ money, manned by officers and gentlemen by act of Congress, give her everything she needs, but give her a captain who is sorry for his crew, who doesn’t want to hurt them. Why not just take her out and sink her? Why not just run her out on a reef someplace and rip the bottom out of her and let her go to the bottom peacefully instead of becoming a hell ship for every man aboard her? Because that is what happens. He is afraid to hurt somebody and the next thing you know, he has hurt everybody so desperately that they are like to die, because this is actually another method of revenge, no matter what else you call it. It is too low on the tone scale to be anything else. Remember, you can kill people by feeling sorry for them.

If you see somebody walking down the street and you suddenly start talking to him as though you feel sorry for him, you will have him dragging the gutters, if he doesn’t know Dianetics. These are terrible weapons we put in your hands!

This captain of the ship feels sorry for everybody, he doesn’t want anybody to be in bad shape, he sympathizes with everybody that comes in, and the next thing you know, all the authority of his petty officers is gone, all the authority of his various department heads is gone, all the pride of the crew in themselves is gone. The guns start to go to pieces and they start to stow things wrong. Everybody feels sorry for themselves if they have to do any work. And one fine day everybody is feeling so desperately sorry for themselves that they sink it anyhow.

The process of saving person after person’s feelings, of never telling them the truth, of always avoiding it with a social lie or something of the sort, is a form of cowardice. It is at about 0.8 on the tone scale. It is much better to say to somebody "You know, I’m mad as hell at you!" than it is to say "Oh, yes, I think you’re just swell" and then tell somebody something or do something off to the side that is going to wreck them. That is what a person at that position of the tone scale does.

We have talked about a naval vessel where the captain feels sorry for everyone. Now let’s talk about you and your awareness- of- awareness unit in your own body. Your body is made to be used. You as a living organism are made to be pitched into the caldron of action and committed to the adventures of the business of living. And when I say pitched into, I mean pitched, because there is no adventure worth going into unless your intent in going into it is to give it everything you have. The second you stop living like that, the same thing happens to you that happens to the naval vessel. You might as well go run yourself aground. You are going to get diffident, scared of this, cautious about that, figuring this way. You will get sick. You sit around and you say, "My poor legs, my poor legs. Poor me." "I got my beautiful back all sunburned." You can actually start feeling this way on that band of the tone scale about yourself, and you can practically destroy yourself.

It is a funny thing that the parts of the body act just like individuals. There are various nerve centers which act as sub- brains in the body, and you start feeling sorry for one of those sub- brains and it starts going all to pieces.

How do you feel sorry for it? You wish a facsimile off on it. The way it first happens is like this: Maybe Mama burned your hand and then you said, "Look— look what you did to me. You see, you are wrong." The next thing you know, it is the hand that gets the facsimile and then you get dermatitis.

When you have some sort of a chronic somatic like lumbago or something of the sort— you are gimping around with lumbago and feeling sorry for yourself about having to gimp around with lumbago— you know how you can clear it up? You just go back and find the times when you were sorry for somebody who limped and sorry for yourself for having limped: sympathy toward anyone else who limped, sympathy toward yourself.

What sympathy have you felt toward somebody, for instance, who wore glasses? And what sympathy have you felt for yourself for having to wear glasses? And out of that sympathy will suddenly turn up your postulates, because that is the easiest part of the engram to run. The easiest part of the facsimile to run is that sympathy curve. You run that sympathy curve and the postulates turn right up out of it very easily. There is nothing much to it.

So when you get balked on a case and you can’t find the engrams readily, you start running the emotional curves in the case. You can generally go from there straight into emotions, and you don’t have to run emotion with great drama. It can be run very lightly, actually, and very effectively.

I want to tell you about a very special emotion that you are subject to and didn’t know it. It is a horrible thing. It turned up by just figuring if these other things are true then this one is true. So we tried it out, and on being tried out, it works.

"Determinism" itself is an emotion. You start making yourself do things, and you monitor it with a certain endocrine combination which sums under the word determination. It is aberrative as the devil. It probably isn’t very necessary. There probably isn’t any reason for you to grind your right heel into the ground every time you determine to spit. There probably is no reason for this at all. There probably is no reason at all why you should grit your teeth or stick your tongue out when you use a pencil. But that shows "determination ."

What is the emotion that permits you to go into such actions to demonstrate determination? Did you ever "look determined" for somebody else’s benefit? What emotion do you use to turn that thing on? This is actually an emotion. It is fairly well down the tone scale, probably around three or somewhere in there. I am not quite sure where it is, but believe me, you can find it. And when you find it your chronic somatic is going to have things happen to it, because after you determined to have this thing, then you went into a long, long lifetime of determination not to have it.

Every determination that you made to see in spite of your glasses was against a determination not to see, and there you are. So you just run the determination to see.

What is the emotion of determination? Run these emotional curves a few times first to find out what that emotional curve is, to find out what emotion is. Then you will find periods in your life when you were being determined.

If you have arthritis, for instance, you are determined you are going to get rid of this arthritis. You are going to find a way to get rid of this arthritis; you are determined about it. You turn on this emotion and the next thing you know, your arthritis starts getting worse and worse and worse. You are pouring determination into it and it uses that determination to come back at you, because you are validating it. You are feeding it its own determination. You can’t just suddenly say "Well, I will no longer have these facsimiles." You can say all of a sudden to yourself "I will be" and let all the rest of this go hang. You can say that and you will recover just by laying aside your whole past suddenly. But if you are determined that you are going to get rid of something or determined that you are going to be something or do something, this is an emotion. And it can be run as an emotion.

You will find normally in preclears, when you first start to run this, that their favorite expression of self- determinism will show up— the favorite expression— like a frown of concentration or something like that. You don’t want the muscular effort; the dickens with the muscular effort on this line. Just get the emotion of being determined about it and the first thing you know, the postulates will start to fall out.

Take somebody who is interested in building things— he builds houses or something of the sort. He has a bunch of workmen and they are all working for him but they are not working very fast, and if they don’t work fast he is going to lose money. So he stands around determining that they work fast. This hasn’t anything to do with what they actually will do.

He will be very determined about it too. He will look at them and he will want them to pick up those boards a little faster. He may go over and say so, but he will fall back and look at them picking up those boards. He will be determining them to pick up those boards. He is under the idea, true or false, that he can inflict theta facsimiles on them in some fashion or other to make them move fast. And of course they don’t move any faster, which makes him fail.

This emotion of "determinism" is sown from the beginning of one’s life to the end of it with failures. If the car doesn’t start, you are determined you are going to get the car started. So you determine the car gets started. The starter doesn’t start it and you have to call up to the service station. Somebody comes up and fixes it and you didn’t start it. You are stuck with that one; that is a failure. And these things multiply, on and on and on.

Every time you postulated a cycle of action, somewhere along that line you became determined that you would carry it forward. A person who doesn’t have this emotion of "determinism," who isn’t monitoring himself, has no persistence. But a person who has continually postulated and continually felt the emotion that he absolutely had to do it— determination as an emotion— failed and failed again. Even though he was really succeeding, this emotion, occasionally, will break down into a failure, and he will come out one fine day and it won’t monitor anymore by self- determinism. He has gotten the switchboard so jammed up with this emotion in such quantity with so many failures that it just doesn’t work on a self- determined basis anymore.

But all he has to do is just swamp up all the times he was determined and it becomes a free emotion.

You know that your ability to feel pleasure is an emotion— you can run this. You can simply run it on the basis of every time you felt pleasure, just as the emotion; you hardly bother with the perceptics or anything. But just feel these, and all of a sudden you become more capable of feeling pleasure. Isn’t that interesting? You become more capable of feeling pleasure. It isn’t because you restimulated a flock of pleasure incidents, the way we used to think; it is just that you clear the switchboard of letting the emotion of pleasure come through. It is as simple as that.

You can use an emotion and use it and use it and use it and all of a sudden there is so much on that channel that has failed that your emotion is jammed. So you are no longer monitoring that part of the switchboard self- determinedly, but the surrounding area is monitoring it for you, or it is just jammed up and you feel like you can’t feel anything about life anymore. Life doesn’t look quite as bright to you as it looked before.

In short, the way to remedy this is to just free up the emotions on a case. It is very easy to do. You start running sympathy off parents and you will get some of the most surprising results on cases.

The way, evidently, to trigger into emotion is to trigger into it on this curve; get the time when the fellow felt happy and then he felt sad. The fellow will flounder around for a while and all of a sudden he will get hold of this, and it is as though he has just learned to wiggle his ears. Now he can run emotion.

You straighten up a case, get the sympathy off it, get these curves off, and you will find the service facsimile. If you can’t get all the service facsimile off, just start pulling off sympathy all over the place— lots of it. Pull off sympathy. You will also get some agreement off. The next thing you know, the whole service facsimile chain will show up and you will get the postulates and why he had to hold on to it, why he wanted to hold on to it.

Now, if you find a person’s persistence in life has gotten pretty poor, you just start running determinism and all of a sudden you will find its curve— the curve where the person felt happy and excited about something, then less happy and excited but he was getting determined, and then he failed at it. The next time he wasn’t quite as determined, and the next time after that he wasn’t quite as determined. The first thing you know, he has lost the emotion.

Failure is defined as an incomplete cycle of action. A cycle can be held in abeyance and be unaberrative, but if a cycle is broken by failure— the person is happy, he determines he is going to be happy all evening and somebody makes him sad suddenly— that is a broken cycle of action, and when an individual has these break on him time after time, he picks up more and more bad experiences in the past and bad things such as psychosomatic illnesses and so forth in order to explain why.

Here is a common one: You run out of the house determined to have a good time downtown— but you have left the iron on. Explanation: "I forgot." This is a nice mechanism, a good explanation. But what a hideous thing to wish on yourself— a bad memory— just to explain to Joe Blow why you left an iron on.

There was some kind of a lapse, though, of why you left the iron on. You search around and you will probably find that you made a strong and steady postulate just before that to turn that iron on and work until you were finished with the ironing, and then partway through it you suddenly decided that you were going to go downtown and have a good time. You left the iron on to complete the cycle of action that you postulated first. It hasn’t anything to do with a bad memory; it has to do with incomplete cycles of action. You get the idea?

Think of all the cars which you have had or run and which you determined that you were going to keep and keep up forevermore. If you made such postulates, of course you failed, because sooner or later the car broke down and you sold it. That is an incomplete or failed cycle of action right there. It will finally result in your being rather angry with any car you get into, or apathetic about cars— if a salesman walked up to you, he could sell you anything.

You make determinations and you put no time period on them. You just take them literally.

The body is really terrifically obedient, and so are your mind and thought processes. You have horsepower. But if everybody keeps coming around to you saying "Well, actually, we experiment on dogs and rats because they’re so much like human beings, and it’s really just a stimulus response mechanism. And all thinking is done by association. You think of this, then that associates with something else and that associates with something else. And you’ve got to adapt yourself to the environment and you’ve got to make yourself a social animal and we’ve got to punish you until you are social, you animal," you will keep falling for this bag of tricks. Sitting right behind all of this terribly black curtain is the actual truth that you are a powerhouse, and you keep on running as such— unfortunately, disconnected. You keep laying down these postulates sweepingly.

I dare say if a person were really cleared up on this and he said "I think I will have four legs," he would probably grow them. When you realize what you can do to yourself, certainly the sky is the limit.

The way to ruin a person is to deny that he is self- determined, tell him that he has no willpower, this and that and a few other things— give him standard child and school training, in other words. It doesn’t cut him to pieces except on his belief about himself. Right behind that belief, though, he keeps running like a skyrocket. When he says he is going to do something, he has made a postulate, and you might as well try to contain the explosion of an atom bomb in an inverted cup as try to stop that postulate. It just couldn’t be done, because the postulate is effective.

Now, of all things, they teach people how to hypnotize themselves. This is wonderful— self- hypnosis. They fix a fellow up so that he can hypnotize himself and tell himself to do things. This is certainly putting a coat of red paint on the gilt which is already paint. It is silly. You are in complete rapport with yourself anyway; you do whatever you say you will do. No matter what you think about it, you will afterwards do what you say you will do. You have to change the thought in order to keep from doing what you say you will do, and the only person you are at war with is you.

Go back and think of the times, for instance, when you decided this and decided that and decided something else. Think of this one: When did you decide not to be angry anymore? When did you decide not to show your temper anymore? Do you remember telling yourself "I won’t get mad anymore"? Do you remember telling yourself "It’s no use anyway"? Do you remember telling yourself "I’ll never get anyplace"? (That is a wonderful holder. l)

All of these various postulates are very effective, and if you want to really start showing up in life and throwing your shoulders back and being nine feet tall, all you have to do is (1) figure on it for a while until you realize that you are making your own postulates and that you are doing it to yourself, or (2) sweep back just by sitting down and remembering a few times some of the postulates you have made surrounding certain incidents, surrounding certain actions.

Now, you could make a list of ten things that you think are wrong with you, five of which are mental inability’s or foibles and five of which are physical disabilities. Just start over this list, remembering the postulates you have made about each one in turn, until you pick up the first time you wished it on yourself. Pick up that postulate. You will find it. You could even sit there and run some emotional curves on yourself, if you wanted to, until you have picked up when you actually wanted these things or postulated that these things were necessary. Areas of your life will open like a steam shovel mouth. It is quite an adventure finding out that you are really running you after all.

Now, you can think also of a number of things which you feel compelled to do— like salesmen do. You feel compelled to do something about something or other. When something happens in your environment you feel compelled to act in a certain way; when somebody says something, makes some noise, disagrees with something, you feel compelled to act in a certain way. In other words, you feel compelled to agree somehow or other with the environment by reacting.

This is very interesting. All you have to do is find out when you desired to act that way. When did you want to? When did you think it necessary to? You will find that it immediately follows— if these things are really non survival— a failure of yours. If you want to get rid of the failure just run the emotion out of it. The emotion of being happy, cheerful, everything going along all right, then being determined you were going to succeed and then failing. The emotion of failure— just run that curve. You will disclose these things like mad.

I sincerely hope that you will give a little thought to this matter of what you can do to yourself and what this thing called emotion is. See if you can’t recapture one of these emotional curves— feeling happy, then feeling sad. It is quite an adventure, by the way, finding out that you do it. And in view of the fact that this is a tenet which has not been held by anybody that I know of, except mothers—" You did it to yourself. Now it’s your fault"— it should, by postulate, make a considerable change in the happiness and freedom of an individual. And by actual experiment it makes a fantastic change in them.

You will find as you run this thing that you will trigger some real secondaries sooner or later on it, but a person goes up pretty high. You run a minimal amount of effort, but effort is really something. You can do quite a bit with effort. But you don’t have to do very much with the effort if you can desensitize by running the emotion.

Now, very soon we will have a little manual coming out called Advanced Procedure and Axioms. The Axioms will be brought up to date in it, with the numbers they will probably continue to have from here on, and there will be some new axioms of logic in it. It also includes co- audit processing as it is to date, in fifteen steps, so that what the auditor does is finish one step completely before he goes on to the next, and he gets each step done. When he gets through to and finishes step fifteen, he is through with the case.

One could probably do a lot more with the case, but he will probably have it up too high to be recognized as a human being anyhow.