CAUSE AND EFFECT - PART I

A lecture given on 19 November 1951

Being and Not Being

To start with, I will try to give you a few buttons. I know that you have all of your buttons, but there are a few buttons which can be pushed in cases, which produce most remarkable results.

The whole subject of push buttons is very interesting. There is one set of push buttons which could be said to loosen up a case and another set which could be said to resolve a case. Somewhere there is one which, when you push it, causes the preclear to have large, ten- thousand- volt arcs come out of his ears, spin twice and scream, and then he is Clear. It may be that in this array of push buttons, this one push button exists. But certainly we have the modus operandi.

By a push button, of course, I mean that computation or that foible or quirk of the human mind which gets wrong and which can be righted merely by touching one factor. The optimum push button would do what I just said with a preclear. This second battery of push buttons takes a little longer.

Some of these push buttons are very, very general. In fact, the only ones that I am specializing in now are those which hit, as far as I know now, every case. There is a good and adequate reason to believe that there is just one somewhere, but certainly this secondary battery is such that it will one way or another find what we could call the computation on a case very rapidly. One of those buttons is the trust- distrust button.

We work on the basis that what a preclear is doing is being done across all the dynamics; that is to say, when the preclear does something to himself he automatically does it to every other dynamic. If he does something to any dynamic, he automatically does it to himself.

Each individual is made up of a central thrust through existence which we could call survive. (Actually we can for the first time refer to it as something else than survive, which I will tell you about a little later.) We call this drive, this thrust through existence, survival. It is the effort on the part of the organism to survive.

That is just one. But if we take a look at the one through a magnifying glass, we find that in this one thrust there are actually eight thrusts.

The first dynamic, of course, is the dynamic of self.

The second dynamic has two compartments: one is sex and the other is the rearing of children. These two things are very closely connected. Nobody has done any "spontaneous combustion" for a long time!

Dynamic three is groups— the group. That covers any kind of a group— temporary or permanent groups, political groups, social groups, anything like this.

The fourth is the dynamic of all mankind.

Dynamic five is that one pertaining to life— just life in general. That is vegetables, fish, trees, any kind of life.

The sixth dynamic is the dynamic we call MEST— matter, energy, space and time. That is the material universe. The individual actually has a thrust for the survival of the material universe. You talk to people about some science blowing up the world these days and they raise a fuss.

Actually they would raise a fuss whether man were there or not. If you said that they were going to knock twenty- nine stars out of the sky and make them disappear forever, people would get upset.

The seventh dynamic is the dynamic we call theta. That is the life static; that is the stuff from which life emanates.

And the eighth dynamic we write as a number eight on its side, which stands for infinity, and this would be the dynamic of a Supreme Being, a Prime Mover Unmoved, a Creator or whatever you want to call it.

By inspection of man himself, an individual seems to have a thrust in each one of these departments. In other words, an individual is interested in the survival of groups on a parity with his own survival.

Some of us have been able to resist it, but we have been taught that everybody is very self- centered, that a little baby, for instance, is his own world and that is all he is. This is a cute thing to say but it doesn’t happen to be true. A little baby doesn’t express his survival along these various lines for a very good reason: he doesn’t talk. But if you get a little two- year- old and start asking him about the rest of the human race, you will get some answers.

This would be the comparison between the line Dianetics has taken and the line which has been taken in the past. The line that has been taken in the past was to read a textbook in order to form a textbook, so that somebody else could read that textbook in order to write another textbook.

Take, for instance, the curve of sleep. There is a sleep curve which is printed in books about the mind, which has been riding around for thirty or forty years, and it is wrong. It is completely wrong. It shows depth of sleep after various hours of slumber. Somebody dreamed it up one day after reading a textbook and did the curve and then handed it out, and they have been printing it ever since. One young fellow working for his doctorate almost got himself thrown out of his profession— tarred, feathered and so forth— because what he went and did (horror of horrors!) was go out and measure the depth of sleep after a certain number of hours. He found out it was quite variable and that the curve was entirely false. He published this as his doctor’s thesis. The university gave him his doctorate hurriedly and got rid of him, and nobody has ever heard of him since.

This business of reading a book to write a book so that somebody else can read the book to write a book is apt to push a whole field of research out someplace into abstract areas that have nothing to do with the real universe and nothing to do with actual behavior.

You can take any one of our codified observations and take a good solid look at the human race— not at a book, but at the race itself— and you will learn a great deal.

A two- year- old child is very intelligible on the substance of groups, his family and what he wants to do, on his father’s part and so forth, if you can get into communication with him. Grown- ups very seldom try. They say, "Coochie, coochie, have a piece of candy." A little child doesn’t have words to fit exactly what he is thinking about. But if you just sit down with him and try to talk to him and let him talk down to you a little bit, you will learn some amazing things. But there is a trick in that: let him talk down to you.

Dynamics one to eight are expressed even in a little child. A child has a lot of trouble. The reason they say a child is self- centered is that a child is actually in trouble. He gets born into his body without his motor controls connected.

If somebody took you out and sat you down in a four- motored bomber and said "Okay, bud, fly it," you would look at those throttles and gas gauges and landing flaps and generator and oil gauges, and say, "What do you push to get what done?"

A baby learns this very gradually. Actually he inherently knows where these motor controls are, but the trouble is he keeps fishing for them. Eventually he finds them, with a great deal of relief. Did you ever watch a baby find his hand, find out how to move his hand? He will put his hand up and look at it, and he will finally find out he can move it around. He will be very pleased— he has that one connected. Then he will get his fingers connected; he will find out where their buttons are. He gets all this coordination done. It takes him a couple of years to get his coordination back. He is trying to lick a piece of the physical universe called "himself," and he goes on from there.

Now, as soon as you knock out one of these dynamics on a human being and you say "For this individual, this dynamic cannot possibly exist," you get trouble, because they all get knocked out. They come down on the same level, in other words. If you cut out half of one dynamic, you have cut out half of the rest of the dynamics. This package of dynamics is very vital to the survival of an individual.

If you get an individual who is going around beating the drum and saying "There is no such thing as God, and I will shoot the guy that says there is," he will get away with it for a while and he will keep at it. But one day he will strike some sort of phenomenon or other— whether it is rigged up or otherwise doesn’t matter— but he will all of a sudden become convinced there is God, having spent a lot of his life in proving that there wasn’t. This is a failure on the eighth dynamic and he will go out through the bottom of the barrel.

His error was in not being consistent about the whole thing. He was saying there wasn’t an eighth dynamic, and as long as he successfully said so he was all right. So the second factor enters in on this: You can do anything you want with any one of these dynamics except fail. Don’t fail.

Suppose you join a monastery someplace and practice flagellation every day and practically kill yourself twenty- four hours a day as a first dynamic— terrific abuse. If that is what you are doing, for heaven’s sake don’t suddenly find out that it was not worthwhile, because that is a failure. That is a failure. In other words, there is a consistency involved here, a definite consistency.

On the fourth dynamic, somebody goes around saying, "Man is no good." Don’t let him ever find out man is some good: a change will take place.

Right now we have a whole society which is educated along the line of "man thinks for himself alone." People have to be forced, whipped, beaten and educated to have a third dynamic. They have to be jailed, they have to be sent to school, they have to be punished, fined, taxed, made to go to the polls and vote Democratic. All of these various things have to be done in order to make a person have a third dynamic.

In other words, in this society they are working like mad to build something which is already there. But take away all of these big structures of socialization of the individual and you will find lying behind these structures a much prettier structure and a much stauncher one than any artificial structure being built.

It is the same way on the fourth dynamic. Have you ever known anyone who thought only cats were fit to associate with and that man was no good? There are such people, I assure you. "Men are no good. Men are cruel, they’re beasts, they do terrible things. And the human race is no good and man is no good. But cats and dogs and dear little dumb animals, these are what are nice." In other words, this person throws it all over on the fifth dynamic. She will be all right and she can go on living only until that concept fails on her, because it is an artificial concept.

Man can do almost anything he wants to these dynamics as long as he is consistent about it. The second he gets inconsistent along any line he is in bad shape.

We have a society at the present time which is thoroughly educated into "stand up for number one, nobody else is going to. Man is not interested in anything but himself. Everybody is very selfish. People will only do it for themselves." The society is sold on this idea.

Now somebody comes along and tells the society they are interested in other things, and it is only because they actually are interested in other things that they will buy this at all. They can see it demonstrated. Unfortunately, it will cave in some earlier concepts. So you can only actually carry this to the limit that it can repair the damage it does, because it can actually do some damage in that it changes the consistency of an individual.

Someone has believed all his life that he is only standing up for number one, and then you come along and prove to him in two quick seconds that he is not: "Well, if that is so, why did you work for three and a half weeks last month in order to make your Boy Scout troop do better?"

He says, "Well, their fathers are all in business, and . . ." He knows that isn’t the reason and he is stuck with it.

The factor is there. It is making a man look at it sometimes that is difficult.

This whole array of dynamics is a beautiful, embracive set, by the way. If anybody knows of any more, let them tell me. But that seems to be about the score on it.

Now, let’s say the individual, as number one, assaults dynamic three. He assaults some group and he says they are no good. He assaults number three and he goes on assaulting number three, and as long as he gets away with assaulting number three he is going to be all right. He can go on with the assault as long as he keeps winning.

But all of a sudden he fails in that assault— boom! Actually what folds up in him is number three, but what it manifests itself as, to you and me, is number one. It is three itself that folds up; he fails on three, and it folds up the whole strata.

You will see it in this fashion: A fellow goes out and starts hitting a horse over the head. That is number five. He starts hitting a horse over the head and calling the horse names in order to make the horse obey, and the horse obeys, and the horse obeys, and the horse obeys. But one day, in spite of the number of times he hits the horse over the head, the horse does not obey but goes on doing exactly what it pleases and is out from underneath this individual’s control.

Nothing would happen to the fellow if he hadn’t hit the horse over the head, but the actual fact of the matter is that he will get a headache. The individual himself will get a headache; he will find a service facsimile of some sort that will excuse this whole fact, and the second that he fails on number five, he gets the headache he tried to give number five; only he will find an actual injury to himself and hang it on himself. This is very observable.

One of the auditors told me she was not going to process anybody with Postulate Processing unless the person had some awareness of Dianetics. She had gotten a young lady in who had terrible stomach pains every once in a while, so she found a time when this young lady had been kicked in the shins and wanted to kick somebody in the stomach and didn’t and was then sick for about three days. They got up that postulate very nicely and then the young girl promptly postulated it in present time and went to bed sick for three days. She promptly postulated it all over again. She had no reason to do otherwise.

This was just a wish.

This should give you some sort of an insight into how human beings handle other human beings. They handle them actually with theta facsimile’s.

What is a word? What does a word mean to you? Actually, a word is a symbol of a theta- facsimile action that has taken place at some time or another, and you as an individual have been aware of the action which underlies this word, and you use the word as a symbol for that theta facsimile. So actually when you are talking you are handing out theta facsimiles. There is a whole stream of them.

Let your words fail in some regard and you get back to some degree the facsimile you have been trying to hand out, but on a failed basis. You failed.

Let’s say you, as dynamic one, are trying to communicate on the seventh dynamic to someone else.

Take Rosicrucianism as an example. The Rosicrucian says, "You’re trying to produce an effect on spirits, and if you sit in front of a mirror for a short space of time, fifteen minutes a day, and you look at a candle and do this and do that, after a short time you will see something. You will see something that is quite unusual."

As a matter of fact, that is very true. If you sit there long enough, you will not only see something, you will get some old counter- effort. The Rosicrucian is telling you "Slow down, slow down, slow down, slow down," and you slow down. But it is also telling you that if you slow down dynamic one "they" will be able to reach you.

An individual happens to be composed of himself and "them" too, so the second you say there is a "they" and that you are not responsible for the "they" but the "they" can do something to you, you get trouble.

It is very amusing. As a matter of fact, almost anybody can sit down and refuse to take the responsibility for something, just specifically, and feel a counter- effort.

Did you ever see a medium sit down and get slapped by spirits? That is the easiest one of them all. She will, too! She says, "Spirits exist and this exists and that exists, and I’m going to sit here quietly in a trance and . . . Of course, you have to be careful how you do it because there are evil spirits and they will sometimes come around and cuff you." She knows this out of her own experience, but believe me, it is a convincer. So she sits down there quietly and relaxes and relaxes, not taking the responsibility for these counter- efforts, and she will all of a sudden get one.

I have never heard one of these things audibly, except when the medium slapped her hands behind her back. But I have seen a medium come up with a black eye on this. What she did, actually, was fail to take responsibility for her little brother’s punch that gave her a black eye, and so she got the black eye back again. This is very simple.

These counter- efforts exist and are effective on you to the exact degree that you don’t take responsibility for them. We will go over that more fully later on.

What I am getting at is that there are a number of buttons which are interactive amongst these dynamics.

There is the trust- distrust button. An individual who does not have good recall, of course, is having trouble with the trust- distrust button. He isn’t trusting himself, because he is not trusting his facsimiles; he doesn’t trust his recalls. He doesn’t trust his recalls, therefore he is not going to get too much out of them. He is an occluded case. He distrusts his own facsimiles.

How did he get in that state of affairs? You are interested in that as an auditor because you want to fix him up so he can get some of these facsimiles and so he can read them.

If you can just simply talk a fellow’s trust up in his facsimiles— just that, all by itself, give him a terrific sales talk— the first thing you know, he can see his own memories. But that is the tough way to go about it.

What happened to him? He made the first error: He conceived himself as an individual and conceived that there was a great deal of strain and conflict between himself and the other dynamics. So, in school, let us say, he found out that he couldn’t trust his playmates. So he distrusted them. Actually he started out trusting people, but then the teacher played a dirty trick on him and his parents didn’t come through with some of their bargains and life started to look pretty horrible, so he decided not to trust, let us say, anything on the second dynamic— his household. He decided he had better not trust them anymore. Actually, he started trusting, so when all of a sudden acts come up that demonstrate to him he should distrust, this is a break in consistency, and as a break in consistency it brings about a lowering down, not only of that dynamic, but of all of them. So the second he distrusts somebody else, he distrusts himself.

We could also take an individual who distrusts on dynamic four: he will distrust on one. If he distrusts on four, you will find him distrusting not only on four but on two, three, five, six, seven and infinity.

You will find an individual to whom somebody gave a big sales talk and he became highly religious. Then all of a sudden one day he prayed to God for a red bicycle and he got a blue one. This was a break of faith with God, and all of a sudden he has no trust on the eighth dynamic. The second there is no trust there, they all lower down just that much.

This is life potential. This is ability to handle motion— ability of the individual to persist, utilize motion, utilize effort and survive on through his span of years. As a result, any time a trust- distrust break occurs, an individual’s life potential is dropped just that much.

Another such button is the serious button.

You could read the Pentamerone of Giambastista Basile, which is a series of stories— the same stories, more or less, that Chaucer picked up when he was an ambassador from London in Italy; he came back to dear old London and started to write in the "vulgar tongue," and he wrote a lot of these stories down. But they were Italian stories. There was only one therapy in existence in those days. Actually there were two therapies: "He isn’t very well off, kill him" was one therapy, and the state used that to a large extent. But there was only one actual therapy that was generally and popularly recognized, and that was laughter.

One of these stories tells about a princess who had sat in a tower in deep melancholy for eighteen years and she had not laughed. Then one day a boy came by leading a goose, and following the goose were five "thises" and eight "thatas," and there was a long parade. The princess saw this and she laughed and laughed and got well, so the king married her off to this goose boy for having cured her.

That was therapy. They recognized that there was some connection between being too serious and being insane.

The old word for insanity or neurosis was melancholy. What is melancholy but sadness, and how do you solve it?

You get a preclear who won’t throw a line charge and you have a case on your hands of incipient or confirmed melancholy. And this is because he is taking things too seriously.

You hear this out in the streets all the time: "Oh, you’re taking life too seriously. It couldn’t possibly be that bad." Actually, that is just a mechanism which makes melancholy come into being.

Anyone has at one time or another been doing something that was fun, that he enjoyed, which was at the same time productive of something, even if only of fun, and somebody came along and said that it was fun. Somebody came along with whom it was necessary always to disagree— such as mother, father, somebody like this, and said, "Well, that’s really not serious business. You should buckle down to your school books and that sort of thing; you shouldn’t do this." The child on whom this is operated has to say "Oh, I’m doing this for serious reasons. I have serious purposes in mind for this. This alarm clock that I took apart, and that string and so forth"— he has to think on his feet—" well, I invented this so that I could sell the kids at school some kind of a device that would close their windows, and I would make a great deal of money." He doesn’t have anything like that in mind at all when he is challenged, but it is necessary for him to invalidate this individual who walks up to him. So here comes Papa, and then it is no longer fun, it is serious.

You follow that track with a preclear and you will discover the most fantastic computations— when he has had to convince people that it was serious, and also the reverse, when he has had to convince people it wasn’t serious. It was serious but he had to convince them it wasn’t, and this turns him into a person who, perforce, has to be very light- minded about everything; he has to write for the New Yorker and do all sorts of onerous tasks.

It can go either way. If you want to solve a case which is much too light- minded and will take no responsibility and so forth, you find the person around that case who consistently and continually insisted that life was serious. To invalidate this person and to keep one’s independence it became necessary for the individual to say "No, it isn’t. Life is not serious at all. Life is gay and happy and I’m happy and everybody’s happy and . . ."

Now, you will also find that there are individuals who actually consider their work to be onerous and laborious. They have had to convince somebody that they were some good to society. They were convinced by someone that you can’t be any good to society if you are having fun, that the only people who are good for society are solemn, long- faced; arduous, hard- working people (who carry a red bandanna with a hammer and sickle on it or something)—" workers ."

The worker has to be in there slaving, taking care of the wife and children, going to that office every morning— in spite of the fact that it "almost kills him." As a matter of fact, he has a lot of fun. He goes down to the locker room and they shoot dice for a while after they have checked in on the time clock, and then they go up and they stand around these big machines that are running and they tell a lot of stories to each other. Then they pull a joke or two on the foreman and so forth. It gets to be noon and they have a lunch which they enjoy eating. And have we tailor- made "seriousness" out of this one!

Work is serious. I don’t believe there is an individual around who hasn’t been told how serious work is. That makes it tough to do. Actually, a person has to make it tough so that it will be serious. He has to go at it the hard way in order to convince people that he is valuable to the family or to the group or to society. If he is really working— in other words, if it takes him two months to knock out something he should have been doing in half an hour— then he is really valuable. This is the computation on that. Work is serious.

You will find, for instance, that a fast production writer out in the field has a tough row to hoe. He sits down and does a novel in seven days. It gets into the magazine, readers read the magazine, they write in a stack of letters of congratulation about this work and everything is just fine. But you ought to hear from some of the other writers. That story "couldn’t possibly have been any good" because it only took seven days to write! They are working on a "serious" computation.

I know a writer who works on one of these "serious" computations and actually his stories are perfectly horrible the fifth time he does them. The first time he does them they are pretty good, but he has to rewrite them four times because this convinces everybody how serious it is to be a writer.

All of his life this fellow has been fighting his family. His family said that writing was light- minded. Of course, I don’t know what could be light- minded, actually, even to a commercialized society, about something which makes a fellow a couple of thousand bucks every month, for which he only really works about ten hours— but "writing is light- minded." He has worked through the years and he has finally got this routine worked out to where he is just ragged after he finishes a story; he is just dead. He told me one day, "I can’t understand it; writing used to be a lot of fun to me and it used to make me very happy and cheerful to write, but now, for some reason or other, I am just barely able to get through it somehow."

He is also convincing his wife how hard it is. He actually goes into his office and lies down on the couch and sleeps for about half an hour after breakfast, and then he gets up and wanders around and reads a novel. Then along about half an hour before lunch he sits down and writes about five pages. He comes out for lunch just dragging; he has forgotten it is a pose, and that is the big crime.

If you make a pose, that is fine. There is nothing wrong with pretense. As a matter of fact, practically the whole business of living is nothing but a big sham. It is a great pretense. But if you make one of these allegations concerning the business of living— whether it is good, bad or indifferent— and then you are forced to accept it yourself, you are stuck. You have to match up with what you pretended was so, in order to convince somebody else that you aren’t a liar, that you are consistent.

Now, this individual could have said "Writing is hard work." He could have told this to everybody around, up to the moment when he failed to convince somebody.

You as an auditor, rehabilitating almost anybody with this particular "serious" button, will find that one day he failed. How did he fail? Who did he fail? He will start adding it up and he will all of a sudden remember somebody he was just never able to convince, and it has been hard work ever since in that particular field. This isn’t only labor, this is any field. That particular field has remained in a bad state ever since that moment, that point of failure. He asserted that something was so, though he didn’t believe it himself. The assertion which he made happened to be harmful to his own survival, but he thought it would be beneficial and he failed to make it stick. When he did, he got it. He sent it over on the third dynamic, it didn’t stick on three, and it came back on one. He has been hung with it ever since.

That is the "serious" push button: "Who have you had to convince that something was serious?" and "Who have you had to convince that something was not serious?"

As a matter of fact, anesthesia and hypersensitivity to pain are on that computation. Anesthesia goes all the way across the boards: pain doesn’t hurt very much, sensitivity is very low, sense of touch is almost absent, and as a matter of fact, along with this goes sexual pleasure. The person has had to tell somebody, who was very concerned about pain, that he didn’t feel. In order to invalidate this person and go on living with any kind of independence of his own, he has had to consistently and continually say "It doesn’t hurt, I feel good, I am all right," because if he sniveled for a moment, right away he would have had to go to bed. The way to get around this was to say "I’m all right; I don’t have a cold," and then go out and flounder around and get over his cold one way or the other.

That is consistent invalidation of pain and feeling, consistent invalidation of a human being who insisted there was pain and feeling. And that is the way the auditor gets into it: he finds the fellow saying, "It’s not serious; it doesn’t hurt."

Now, with hypersensitivity the individual has been surrounded by people who say "Oh, that doesn’t hurt. That isn’t important and that doesn’t hurt." In order to make them wrong, the individual has had to say consistently "Well, it is too! It is painful!" "I am sick!" "It is painful!" "It does hurt!" and so on. And he has become hypersensitive. This is also how you get hypersensitivity of feelings, you get somebody who is too sensitive, who is embarrassed too easily. That goes right across the boards. In the same person you can have both computations on separate subjects.

It is important in auditing to pick up this button. You will find that this button is very close in to center. It will even go so far that when the person has felt pleasure he then has had to excuse it to somebody else as being painful. This is where the whole masochism- sadism combination comes from. The individual has advanced occasionally that something is fun and has had this blunted. The child is playing and then Mother and Father come around and say, "No good," and "You’re not having fun" and "That’s not important." The child finally decides that the only thing that will get any impression on them whatsoever is pain. Pain impresses these people. Therefore a person will even go to the point of— and you can look for this in some of your preclears— taking a pleasant moment in relating to something or other and covering it up with a painful somatic so he can keep it.

You can also reverse it. For instance, take someone trying to convince a group of people that something is fun. He is trying to convince them that something is fun and it works out all right as long as it continues to work, but then one day he fails to convince this group that something is fun, and pain comes into being. This is dynamic one played against three again. He fails on three— fails to convince them it is fun— and all of a sudden he is unable to convince himself that anything is fun. Or he is trying to convince a group— dynamic three— that it is painful; finally he fails to convince this group that it is painful, so he goes into more or less a state of apathy on that pain and will hurt himself in the same way.

There was an electrician who was an expert on the subject of how not to get shocked; I read this in the paper the other day. He had given his ten- thousandth demonstration of how to be safe around a big electrical switchboard, and he was electrocuted during a demonstration. He was an expert and he had demonstrated and demonstrated to groups, and little by little he had become invalidated about this. All of a sudden he went into a state of anaten on the subject; he hadn’t convinced them that it was dangerous, and so it suddenly became not dangerous to him.

It wasn’t that he was trying to prove it was dangerous by getting himself killed. The mechanism is more subtle than that— and worked out on that basis, by the way, it won’t audit. It happened on the basis that he tried to convince them that it was dangerous and tried to convince them to be careful; then he couldn’t convince them, he failed to convince them and then all of a sudden he couldn’t convince himself it was dangerous. He failed on the first dynamic as he had failed on the third.

Any failure in consistency, then, on any dynamic will result in a failure on the first dynamic. The whole moral is, Don’t fail.

This "serious" button is a very important one, and so is the trust distrust button. But you start looking, thumbing through the words of the English language, and you will find a whole tertiary class of buttons that will turn up almost any computation on a case. Those are very centralized computations, though.

Theta is trying to effect a control of the physical universe. We take that formula and we ask, "How does an individual suddenly become unable to handle his own theta facsimiles? How does he become unable to handle his own memories, so that they become obsessive and compulsive to him, so that his own somatics become painful to him? How does his ability to control this break down?" That would be a very interesting thing to know, because that is all that is wrong with a case. That is all that is wrong with a case.

It is not the amount of physical pain in a person’s life, or sorrow or loss or anything else. It simply breaks down to his ability to handle his own theta facsimiles, his ability to handle his own memories. When he can’t handle a certain memory, he is in a tough way. It starts handling him, and this is pretty grim. It even goes to the point where people wear glasses, just because there is some cockeyed theta facsimile sitting here and they can’t handle it. That is all there is to it. They just can’t handle this memory.

This could be worked out very simply. One could merely say that he couldn’t handle the thing when it happened to him, therefore he can’t handle it when it gets into present time. But that is only a very small part of the answer. There is a much bigger answer.

Let’s say you said you were going to do something. This was of your own free will; you said you were going to do something and then you happily went on your way and didn’t do it. Then somebody comes along and says to you, "You didn’t do that."

And you say, "I really didn’t intend to," or something like that.

"Well, you said you were going to!"

So you finally wind up being hung with this postulate. That is how your postulates and conclusions become very strong on you. There isn’t much reason why these things should be so consistently consistent. The computer actually is rigged so that it clears its own postulates. In other words, there isn’t any concern with old postulates, except where you, to be right and to make somebody else wrong, have to take on your own postulates and become "a person of your word."

As soon as you are hung with this, people come along and say, "But you don’t keep your word."

"Oh, yes, I do!" That practically finishes you.

This is a whole system the society has figured out in order to super control human beings. Apparently it is a system which merely keeps the wheels of society running. "If people didn’t keep their word, why, of course society wouldn’t run well," they say. Actually, it is a control mechanism. If somebody can force you to keep your word and keep your promises, they can aberrate you, push you down the tone scale and control you— in other words, eat you. I am sure that you can recall times when you have, of your own free will, decided that something or other was going to be the case and then about fifteen minutes later you found there was some more data and you completely shifted your mind. You changed your mind about it and then somebody, because it was to their advantage, hung you on your first statement.

The whole world of contracture in business was invented in order to suppress other businessmen so that somebody could succeed. The whole field of knight errantry and all of that sort of rot got built up on this basis.

Actually, there is a very definite mechanism behind it, but that is the aberrative side of that mechanism. You can take a preclear along the time track and find lots of places where, out of his own free will, he said he was going to do something and was then forced to do it. Every time this happens he becomes less able to handle his own postulates and conclusions. And those conclusions become aberrative upon him because very often physical effort intervened.

Willy says that every night he is going to put his bicycle away. He thinks this is a happy idea. He says, "I think I’ll put my bicycle away every night; it won’t get rusty." So he decides it and the first night he puts his bicycle away; next night, the devil with it. There are lots of bicycles in the world, after all.

Papa says, "I thought you said that you were going to put your bicycle away."

He is bewildered now. It was out of his own free will this decision was made. So he says, "No. I’m not going to put it away tonight."

"Now, you want to keep your word, don’t you? You want to be a gentleman, you want to keep your word of honor, you want to be a businessman, you want to be a knight, you want to be— " any darn- fool number of mechanisms.

The next thing you know, there he is, with a good spanking back of his belt and under it, putting his bicycle away every night because he said he would. This is the way it runs.

You break a contract and you wind up in court— this is "breaking your word" again. In other words, here again is a force control mechanism intervening on something natural.

Faith and belief are things which are unchanging; there is a consistency to them. But an individual, who starts working out of these static’s, handles motion. Motion is essentially change. Somebody else comes along and hangs him up with a consistency during a cycle of motion. The cycle is uncompleted. He has to remain consistent in order to be, he thinks, and so he hangs himself with a consistency which does not agree with his environment, and that is the trouble with him. His consistencies, in other words, are misinterpreted .

There is only one thing which he has said he would be. Cause is ahead of any effect anywhere. You can talk about engrams, secondaries, locks, all that sort of thing, but actually there is a cause ahead of all of them. Your cause is ahead of all of them.

The first cause, the first prime thought, is "to be"— moving from a state of not- beingness to a state of beingness. That is a decision and that is a postulate. And once that is undertaken it airs out into the spheres of motion or activity in life. To continue being, of course, one has to go through these various changes, because the whole environment shifts. So does the individual. But this decision "to be" is ahead of all these other decisions, and the only thing that can happen after "to be" is modification. You can’t close out that first decision. The consistency of that first decision is very powerful, very strong.

This is the first act below faith. Faith is sort of above all this and faith is actually a state of not- beingness. Faith is the word which describes the life static. That emerges from faith. It is motionless; it is not- being, but it is potentially causative— just potentially causative.

The first decision or thought is undertaken, "to be." "I am now going to be." That starts with the handling of motion, and as long as one handles motion, one is. And even when motion is handling a person, he still is.

And so we have this first postulate of cause which is ahead of all other postulates.

There can be anything on the line from this first instant of beingness on forward to present time, and it could only have modified this initial postulate. In other words, you have, before all modifications, a prime postulate. And that starts existence. We will just go on the postulate that this is the case because it happens to work out this way.

Each and every human being, alive or dead, has started out with this prime postulate. He has emerged from cause into beingness. All of his decisions thereafter are wholly on the basis of "to be or not to be"— good old Shakespeare— whether he is going to be in a state of beingness or whether he is going to have a state of not- beingness on something; whether he is going to be or not be. As long as an individual answers these positively— that is to say, he makes clean- cut decisions to be or clean- cut decisions not to be, on any subject anywhere— he stays amazingly sane regardless of what happens to him. But let him hang between the two and he is in trouble.

This is a matter of yes- or- no decisions. No is a state of not- beingness and yes is a state of beingness, so you answer a problem in existence in this wise: You say, "Should I go to the movies tonight?" and you can say yes or no, but you can’t say maybe. You can say "Maybe I will go to the movies tonight," but what would you do— drive halfway down to the movie theater and park the car and wait for two and a half hours? That would be the maybe, and that is hung up between these clean- cut decisions of yes and no.

Someone comes along and challenges a little child one way or the other— beats him into line, makes him accept a flock of postulates he made himself, warps him around, makes him fail.

The child- at that moment has the decision whether to be or not to be. The child can say, "All right, this is the end of me because I have not made my prime postulate stick. I decided to be and here are all these giants around here and they say not to be. Well, I’m not going to ‘not to be. ’ I’m going to try to keep on being"— on whatever this thing is. But he gets his head knocked in again. If he made the decision not to be— which is his only answer in a positive direction on the negative side— he would die right there. Then he could take another crack at it.

But he doesn’t do that; he hangs up in maybe. He says, "Well, I won’t quite be myself." So he goes into the valence of Mama, Papa, a bedpost, a horse, a dog— he could even go into a synthetic valence, anything. He goes out of valence at that moment and gets this pretense that he really isn’t himself, but he is going to keep on going anyhow— a sort of a covert "to be." He continues along this line of this covert "to be" until something else happens to him, and again he has to choose a middle ground. He really can’t be; he has to take a middle ground. After a person has done this for quite a while he becomes "normal."

Actually, all social teachings are apt to hang one up in maybes. A little girl invites you to a party. You go to the party and she is insulting, so you pick up the ice cream plate and throw it in her face. No, you can’t be that way. So you have to take the middle ground and you have to say "I did wrong." But that is impossible— you cannot admit that you have done wrong. How wrong can you get? Dead! And the personality dies just to the degree that it is forced into admission of wrong. If it is forced too consistently into being wrong it becomes very aberrated.

Early in life one is operating on an enormously wide margin; one can be wrong every once in a while.

Now, knowledge— epistemology— is a subject one had to know before he could know that he knew. Epistemology would be knowledge. This is a state of knowing. It is odd that at the instant before you said "to be," you knew. You knew everything there was to know. And then you said "to be" and became, and from that point forward you said you had to learn.

That is very peculiar, because you know. And you are just pretending that you don’t know, because about the only way that you can get action, motion, progress, survival and so forth is to pretend that you don’t know. You pretend that you don’t know certain things and then you have something to study. You pretend that you are not responsible for certain things, and you have counter- efforts, you have randomity, and you can go fight Russians or something.

As long as you pretend you can’t quite handle something it will give you a bad time, so you have randomity, you have motion, you have action, and you are filling in time. The funny part of it is that you know you are doing it.

For instance, a man is willing to have somebody come along and tell him he has to have faith. He knows essentially this is wrong. If you don’t think he doesn’t know essentially that it is wrong that he has to have faith, just go down and listen to a few arguments on Christianity. I think that with the number of words written on the subject of Christianity, you will find that there must be something a little bit erroneous about it or there wouldn’t have been quite as much argument. Actually, the basic on this is "have faith." The devil with that. You are faith. How can you have faith?

It is silly to tell somebody who is faith to have faith, because this makes him look elsewhere for his faith, not to himself. Yet, by doing this mechanism, one certainly can have some randomity. All one has to do is postulate that there is something outside that he doesn’t have control of and that he is not cause of, and he is all set. Now he has randomity, he has action, he has the Crusades, he has the Baptist Church arguing with the Methodists.

In other words, these are positions which are actually opposed. Without these differences there could be no action.

People talk about death. Man has had a good time for an awfully long time pretending he didn’t know about death. This made it horrible and he could be terrifically dramatic. He also could go in for this wonderful idea of "I give my life for you. I am a hero." Do we buy that one! Rats— maybe he gives his body, but he certainly doesn’t give his life.

Man has managed to obfuscate himself, in other words, and you will find people doing this; you will find children doing this particularly. They will pretend this and pretend that, because life isn’t too serious to them yet. They go on using these pretenses and out of them they produce motion. Then they grow up, and in order to be grown up they have to pretend these pretenses are not pretenses. That is about the main difference between an adult and a child, because the child knows he is pretending and the grown up is a liar.

This situation of being faith or having faith is very interesting. You are faith!

If you want to go feel sorry about somebody getting killed, go on and run a few past deaths. You will be amazed at the aplomb with which you took the last time you kicked off. It is wonderful, but it produces a tremendous drama.

The only reason anybody would have to get up and do something about this is sooner or later it was going to break. People were going to go down and societies were going to go down on the tone scale to the level where it would be too much work to go back and work it all out again. You could do that too, but we might just save a lot of the stuff that is working and look at it a little more sanely and then let somebody go on pretending from there. They will wind themselves up in a generation or two in some very fancy pretenses and have a lot of action and a lot of randomity out of it.

There was action in the Roman Empire. They found out that they had licked everybody, and this was a horrible state of affairs. They just had a few barbarians on the frontiers and these were no longer "worthy opponents," and there was a very long period of peace. So they invented some randomity: the blues and the greens. They had chariots that ran for the blues and chariots that ran for the greens. They had the whole empire carved up into two halves.

A little later example of this is Democrats and Republicans. Everybody says how serious and important a two- party system is. Actually they can’t quite make it stick, but they sure argue. They sure burn up a lot of radio time about it. The truth of the matter is that this is an artificial division to produce randomity in government. Its efficacy does not quite meet the eye, but it is a swell pretense. These are the blues and the greens of our society.

So, if you and I were setting up a university tomorrow, we would probably figure out some way to have the pinks and the yellows or something of this sort— in other words, divide the school up so it could fight itself. Then it would have action.