CAUSE AND EFFECT - PART II

A lecture given on 19 November 1951

Responsibility on All Dynamics

There was a time in your life when you knew very well that you were posing pretenses— postulates— in order to achieve action.

You start working an individual and you only need pick up a lot of these and he will feel better, because you are trying to pick up the moments when he no longer considered them to be his pretenses. Life had become serious. These pretenses had then gone by the boards and become actualities.

One of the favorite aberrations of this society is "Now that you’re grown up..." That is the root to any number of endings. "Now that you are grown up . . ." "Now that you are married . . ." "Now that you have children of your own . . ." and so on and so on and so on. It gets to a point finally where a person is convinced that when he reaches a certain age all of his conclusions are stet— in other words, fixed. The society is rigged so that they teach you that, but it isn’t true. An "old goat" of eighty is just as susceptible to pretense as a child of two. This is a fact.

Now, knowledge goes in a circle. At one point on this circle is "nothing known"; just to one side of that is where "everything is known" and then just on the other side of it there is a point of "one thing known." From that point you go around the circle, and it multiplies with more and more things known, more and more things known, more and more things known, till everything is known.

This is a cycle of knowledge, and if you want to be knowledge you have to pick all this up and bring it around to zero so that you can start it again.

The Egyptian had a very, very interesting character who is still carried forward on Tarot cards. The nearest word we have for this is fool, but the word is used a little bit differently in this society than in their society. The word fool isn’t quite right because what we call fools in this society are simpletons or people that are missing part of their gray matter. The people the Egyptians referred to as fools were people who knew everything and used none of the knowledge.

The Egyptian Tarot shows the fool going down the road blindfolded with some dogs barking at him and an alligator snapping at his heels. That is the card that represents this. He knows everything: he uses nothing. And that actually is symbolic of a very high level.

There is a difference between having faith and applying faith. There is a difference between having knowledge and using knowledge.

If you use knowledge, you come down to understanding. When you seek knowledge you come down to ARC. But when you are knowledge, there is no action except potential action.

So people scatter around "learning" and doing all sorts of things. People have been known to go to universities for four years!

Cause is the same way. It starts out as potential action.

Your whole battle with existence, evidently, can be summed up in a very short sentence: You were trying to maintain yourself as cause on eight dynamics and refused to be effect on any dynamic. You were trying to continue to be cause on all dynamics and trying not to be effect on any dynamic. The state of not- beingness is the state of being an effect— being affected by some exterior cause— and the state of being and beingness is the state of cause.

You can take a preclear and scan him up through his life, through all the times when he sought to be a cause and became an effect, and you will hit the major bumps in his life, just as easy as that.

Because of the "serious" button and certain other buttons, because of sympathy (which should all be run off a case 100 percent because it pins a person down on low tone levels), we sometimes have difficulty getting a case to a point where it can just face this one.

But as far as center buttons are concerned, this center button of cause- effect is a first- echelon button, a very high button.

Now, you can ask a person to make a list of all the things he ever desired to be. He postulated at some time or another that he wanted to be these things, then somebody else postulated that he wasn’t to be them and he became an effect on these lines.

The process I told you about, of trying to do something to another dynamic and failing, is just this cycle. One tries to do something as the first dynamic to the third dynamic. When he tries to do something to the third dynamic (bad, good, it doesn’t matter) and he does it successfully— in other words, he carries through his causative postulate to the third dynamic— the third dynamic is an effect of his cause. Let him fail, though, and the first dynamic becomes the effect of the cause which he postulated— cause and effect.

The motto of existence should be "Always be a cause; never be an effect." How much of an effect can you be? Dead.

So, cause is "to be." "I am," it says. The state of beingness is the state of cause. A person goes all through his life trying to be cause.

It may seem rather funny to you that way down around 1.1 a person is still being cause. True, he is being less cause than he is being an effect, but he is still trying to be a cause. He has service facsimiles that are working for him, he has all sorts of weird panoplies of action, but he is being a cause. And he can really wreck things one way or the other.

A 1.5 is much more overtly a cause. But the only way he can demonstrate his causation is through destroying things, because it is very easy to cause destruction. It takes real skill to construct and very little skill to destroy.

The fact that it takes so little skill to destroy is why governments seldom come up above the level of destruction. If you turned everything over into the hands of government, your whole state would collapse almost instantly.

For instance, socialism even went back and elected Winston Churchill up in the British government. They weren’t down to the lowest depths of socialism yet; all they had done was anchor people to their land and make everybody run on ration cards. As badly off as England was, they could still come back up the tone scale to a point where they put a Conservative in who at least would give them more selection as citizens in what they were going to destroy next.

Now, as an individual goes down the tone scale, he does not cease to be cause until he is dead, and then, evidently, he becomes the cause of a new self.

You can take Effort Processing and just tell your preclear to turn on this effort and that effort, and the next thing you know, he is lying there on a marble slab saying, "My God, how did I get here?" This is like the salesman who came in that I worked for a little while; he looked down as he got into the incident wholly and he saw a Confederate belt buckle. He had just slipped into one of his past deaths. It is very easy to get people into these, and that is why all of a sudden I am talking about past deaths as facts, not as fancies— because there is no trouble proving them.

If you can’t prove anything very much, you kind of come around covertly and say, "Well, it has been said by some of our auditors that they have discovered phenomena in preclears— which may of course be delusion, you know," and so on— the way I have been talking this last year.

But now it has gotten so easy to prove this one: You say, "Well, you’ve been dead. You’ve been dead a lot of times. And if you don’t believe it, that’s all right with me, but practically any auditor worth his salt can put you into an incident." No matter how much you disbelieve this fact, it is a point of actuality which is too great to be missed. You can start turning on efforts, and some of the major efforts that an individual will get will be death efforts— violent deaths.

You may wonder sometimes why so many violent deaths turn up on cases rather than natural deaths. Natural deaths aren’t any struggle; if you die with your boots off in bed, the family is standing around saying, "Poor old Joe, he’s dead." The priest is standing there and he says, "When you get to hell, I’ll pray you on through somehow, but that’ll cost you an extra thirty pieces of silver." (That is his idea of randomity! ) So there aren’t any holders in it. But a person who is going out the hard way with his boots on and his guts full of buckshot or something of the sort is going out under protest. He turns on muscular efforts and reactions and impacts which operate as holders. You get a person into one of these incidents and it takes quite a little time to work him out. He has been there most of the time anyway if you get him into one.

The only thing I am leading up to is really this: Let’s say you are five years old and you have just gone to kindergarten. You have met the teacher and she wouldn’t let you have any ice cream or something of the sort, so you say quite frankly, "You ought to be dead and somebody ought to put your eyes out," or something friendly like that. You are using a past- death facsimile. Don’t get spanked for it, because you will get it.

You have called this thing up and the instant that you called it into being you said, "This has survival value." Now that you have it there you don’t know what to do with it. There it is.

It is a question of handling a facsimile, by the way, rather than exhausting it. When did a person call into being these old facsimiles? Once he called them into being, he never called them out of being again.

Most people handle their minds the way some of the file girls that get hired by business handle files. They have a lot of drawers and they have a lot of file cards, and somebody comes in and asks for something and they bring it out and lay it up on the shelf. Then somebody comes in to file something. And then they have the "G. O. K. file" (the God- only- knows file), the miscellaneous file, "to be filed" and all of that sort of thing. Stuff is called up for action and is never put back in the case.

The way you put it all back in the case is you just find the time a person called it up. You have to know that it is out in order to know what to do with it. And mainly your processing is leveled at "When did you decide to cause what effects?" This gives you some idea of what service facsimiles are being handled.

I handled a preclear not too long ago who was in the valence of a horse. He had been in the valence of a horse for a long time. He had gotten so mad at a horse that he had wished everything off on this horse imaginable and then the horse won. And the preclear went into the horse’s valence. Fact.

You have probably processed people in the valences of dogs and so forth. As a matter of fact, if I were raising a little child, I would certainly hang all the pets out the window and let them run away rather than have them around a child, because the pet is liable to give the child trouble.

The child will be too small but he will start manhandling the dog, and the dog doesn’t want to be manhandled, so the child loses. We don’t know what went on between that child and that dog, but the child probably said, "I’m going to take you and beat you. I’m going to belt you between the ears. I’m going to stretch you till you’re half a mile long and do horrible things to you." Then the dog said, "Oh, yeah?" and stepped on the child’s stomach and went off to play with some other dog.

You just start turning on these facsimiles and you get them back again. The moral of course is not Don’t use facsimiles; the moral is, Always use them successfully and only successfully, and never be anything else but successful— or get killed trying!

So, this is cause and effect. Anything that is wrong with anybody is directly in the field of having become an effect of somebody’s cause.

There are certain causes in the field of theta and MEST which are looked upon as natural laws. You look over these natural laws and see that this is good, consistent behavior; it seems to be part of the system. You know those laws; you knew them once entirely, and now you know them again. Your causes operate within those laws. And if you are operating with a group which consistently, across the board, is following within these laws, you are all right. But if you are trying to operate within a group which is part of the American business system, for instance, you are not going to be all right, because you are consistently made an effect.

I am just going to give you an idea how far this goes. It might have cost the United States Navy some money, though it didn’t cost them very much efficiency except occasionally, but when I was in the navy during the war I enjoyed very much using men- of- war as nice floating laboratories. What do men do under stress? How do groups of men operate? What can go wrong with men? These were interesting problems. Do you need, for instance, the old naval codes of the flog and the brig to handle men? On one ship I tried an experiment.

I knew the basic laws of Dianetics at the time; there just hadn’t been a bridge built to them. They didn’t communicate too well. There had been a manuscript in existence since 1938.

So I stood the whole crew, about a hundred and ten men, up on the forecastle and I said, "The only reason you are here as far as I’m concerned is to survive a war. This ship has got to survive, and you’ve got to survive, and I’ve got to survive this war, and we have got to get some action in. As far as I’m concerned there’s only one way that we will be able to survive this war and that’s if each and every one of you, individually, takes over the full responsibility for the ship, including me."

A couple of the seamen second class knocked their knees together at the thought of what would happen to them if they went down in the engine room and said "Look what you people are doing to this engine room." One of them mentioned it; he said, "We’d get our heads knocked in if we went down into the engine room."

I said, "Well, there’s only one way to really make it stick so that you can go down into the engine room and show them those grease spots— there would really only be one way to make it stick, and that would be to have your part of the deck force in perfect working order. Now, that’s true, isn’t it? Nobody would object to your calling their attention to something if your department was in excellent shape."

"Well, that’s true."

It took about thirty days for this to get through their skulls. In the meantime I just beat it at them regularly and steadily—" You’re responsible for everything else on this ship." I even got to the point of denying a man on the after twenty- millimeter guns liberty because the anchor had not been washed. He wasn’t even responsible for the anchor. He got upset, too!

At the end of thirty days these boys were coming up to stand sea watches— in what was known as the "Dungaree Navy"— in undress blues, l of their own volition.

They got together a court of justice of their own volition. They handled all the cases. There was no further justice meted out by the captain on that ship— it was not necessary. The equipment was in beautiful condition and it all worked, which was something unheard of in the navy all during the war.

You would come up to a boy on the gangway and start to give him a little talking- to, and he would tell you quite frankly, "It’s not possible to have an officer of the deck on a ship with this small an officer complement— only six officers— while you’re in port. Therefore, I am the officer of the deck and I am in full charge of this ship. Now, what do you want?" The three- stripers and eight- stripers and sixteen- stripers and people at desks would come aboard that ship and get terrible shocks.

The boys threw away the ship’s organization book that was handed out for vessels of that size because they had decided long since that it wasn’t workable, but it never occurred to them to tell anybody. Somebody down in Washington who operated a desk next to the desk, next to the desk, next to the desk, next to the desk— and so on— had written it. He had never seen one of these ships. As a matter of fact, the only cognizance he probably had of salt water was the salt water he used to gargle when the Washington climate gave him a cold.

The boys threw this ship’s organization book away, so none of their drills ran off standardly— but, boy, did their drills run off! General- quarters drill: thirty- five seconds to general quarters in the dark of night. If you have been in the navy, you know that is pretty rough; that is awfully fast. They did this blindfolded, and there were all kinds of things they invented and imposed on themselves.

There was about forty times as much discipline on that ship as there was on any ship. Nobody could get away with anything!

I deduced out of this that sooner or later I would probably find the button that caused this, because it was more or less just an experiment out of a hat.

Sure enough, every individual is cause on all dynamics. And when he is unable to be cause on a dynamic, he has failed. And individuals, knowing this, work best together when each one knows he is the cause and operates as such. The odd part of it is that they immediately start operating well; individuals in interpersonal relationships stop quarreling and bickering and growling around and they start operating smoothly, hand in glove.

They are very forceful to each other because each one is "I am." But they don’t get this interplay of wishing off things on each other because of this and that, which is a low- tone- scale operation after all.

Nothing enturbulates any dynamic so much as noncooperation on the part of a couple of individuals concerning that dynamic. Families are representative of this.

So wh at do you do with an individual? In processing, you have to bring him up to a point where he is full responsibility. That is a very high point. That is where he starts operating completely sanely. It is a level which has not been envisioned before by anyone anyplace, because by individuation and because of social training, human beings have more or less been taught to believe that in order to get compliance and cooperation they have to starve individuals, threaten them with loss of security, threaten them with cuts in pay and threaten them with scarcities.

The whole science of capitalism is based on scarcity so that "we can take it away from you if you don’t knuckle down."

That is where communism gets its very wide sweep. It isn’t that communism is any good— it isn’t. Karl Marx must have had eight hangovers the night he invented it. But nevertheless it is- superior to the degree that it says "You are all workers and you’re all lice, and the only thing that owns you is the state— only it really owns you. And you must all work together." In other words, it is a complete enhancement of the third dynamic.

If you could enhance any dynamic utterly and completely, clear up to the neck, you could raise the other dynamics considerably.

So communism moves in on capitalism now like a scythe. The most capitalistic nation on the face of the earth was China, and she is a dead duck.

It isn’t that communism is any good, but it is not quite as bad as a philosophy which tells each and every individual that he has to be chained down. Regardless of whether or not somebody wants to call me a rabble- rouser (I can rouse rabbles with the best), it so happens that communism is not as wrong. It is not righter, it is just not as wrong. It is not much righter than anything else, because most of these political ideologies are nonsense. Nobody thought to put one of them together; they just sort of happened.

An individuation gives people power pushes. Every time I see somebody who is very worried about his own power, I see a man who is sick!

Another man will worry about his power as long as things don’t more or less stay in line, and he will encroach over on to somebody else’s liberty only to the degree that that person is encroaching on somebody else’s liberty. Then he will step back out of it. That is about the deepest you can go in incursion.

But an individual who tries to rule for the sake of ruling is a sick person, because he is scared. He does not consider himself to be cause, and he so distrusts individuals around him that he cannot be safe with them unless he has complete control of them and they are MEST.

That is why the back of capitalism broke. It actually broke in 1928 because it tended not to pull to it the strong men, but to bolster up the weak.

In 1870, capitalism was a fine, full- bodied, gusty philosophy with a lot of guts in it— imperialism. A man would get up and be thinking solely in terms of "Let’s get going! " and the MEST would start to fly at him. Just as a natural consequence he would start to amass a few million bucks. Then after 1870 the money started to get inherited and a lot of things started to happen. People started to hand out money one way or the other and it got very interesting, till in 1928 it crashed.

Another philosophy had come up in about 1870 with Karl Marx. It came on forward. Nobody had anything to hope for in Russia. Anything would have gone there; you could have gone over and sold them anything. They bought communism. They overthrew the czar and they had a lot of fun.

Then they found out the weakest target in the world that owned the most was the capitalist. So they started to batter down the walls of capitalism.

Actually, the United States government today owns and works more out of Karl Marx than it does out of any other textbook. You can read Karl Marx and compare it to our present laws. You will find our inheritance- tax laws, our income- tax laws— a lot of these laws— are based squarely upon Karl Marx. So we don’t have a capitalism here in the United States anymore. There isn’t a leisure class here anymore to amount to anything.

As a matter of fact, somebody had better stir his stumps and get something that fits here, because the only active punitive force in the world is communism and it is really a stinker. It is horrible, because it caters to the fascist type of mind by pretending not to. So the individual who tends to try to rise in a communist society is the individual who will start grabbing individuated power without restoring power. And he can gradually build himself up to a fine crash.

While he is going to this point of power, he appears to be powerful— he has police, secret- police controls and things like that. While he is en route, he appears to really be something. But he comes to the end of the road very quickly and goes off into the ditch and carries a large number of people with him. Hitler did this and Napoleon did this.

As a matter of fact, Alexander the Great did it too, although Alexander the Great should not be classified with any of the dictators because he was working on the very solid postulate given to him by Olympia, the priestess of Lesbos— his mother— that his father was not really his father and that Alexander was a god. So of course he conquered the known world. He didn’t ever have any ARC, sympathy or anything else for human beings. He was running on the postulate he was a god. It was very handy. If you want to raise somebody to do the same thing, all you have to do is start him out in this wise and he will wind up there.

Now, all of these odds and ends are very interesting. But that individual who seeks exclusively to be cause and will not permit other individuals to be cause— will only permit them to be effect— is an individual who is going to fail. He is going to fail himself because every time he makes an effect in such a wise as to cause another individual to fail, he will get the failure back.

In other words, he is perfectly safe as long as he is advancing, as cause, other individuals as cause. But when he is advancing other individuals as effect, the moment that one of those effects breaks off, he gets it right straight back in the face. You understand how that can be.

This is very pertinent to processing because you are processing people who have been raised in an atmosphere which was probably dominated by one individual where the other individuals were effects. You have to find out whether your preclear is still trying to be a cause or has he consigned himself to being an effect, because the effect band is apathy.

That is where a society starts down the tone scale: people trying to make effects out of everybody. The only way you can get them back up the tone scale is to start making causes out of them.

This society went along beautifully as long as there was a pioneer are a where anybody could get outside of the civilization and go out and chop down a few trees and fight a few Indians and get himself killed— in other words, be a thorough cause. But when that disappeared, the only sphere that apparently was left in which one could be cause— to the paucity of thinking which was in existence— was the field of the social structure, to govern other human beings and so forth. This is very bad because it will wind up eventually with everybody going down.

Your preclears have been subject to this on the third- dynamic level. (I am not giving you a political speech; I am just simply trying to acquaint you with some of the modus operandi.) You have an individual who has been the effect of tyranny and who has himself been a tyrant and failed. It is perfectly all right for you to be a tyrant, but don’t ever fail. If you want to be cause on that level and make everybody else an effect, don’t fail, because the second you do, the amount of pressure you have put out on the other dynamics will snap in against your own dynamics and the whole bundle of sticks will crash on you.

If you operate oppressively, it is much easier to fail because there are a bunch of causes standing around who want to cause you to be an effect. The more people you try to affect, the more thoroughly they are going to try to cause you to be an effect until all of a sudden you cave in.

People watch this modus operandi and they say, "Well, if everybody sat down and hated Stalin for fifteen minutes a day he would die." That is not true. That possibly would work— if he knew about it.

No, the way to fix up Stalin would be to invite him in on an enormously broad program where everybody would become an effect, but then rig it in such a way that he would fail. He would cave in. That is the only way he would really cave in.

Now, you are trying to rehabilitate an individual into being a very specific thing. And here is a top- echelon goal of auditing: You are trying to rehabilitate a person so that he is cause on all dynamics— all dynamics. There are eight of them. You can do this.

And one modus operandi, after you have swamped up a case of a lot of sympathy and emotion and a lot of other things, is to get off the case— by Straightwire, scanning and so forth— cause and effect, willing and unwilling.

So there are four things you are going for. The first is "What have you been willing to cause?" What has your preclear been willing to cause in his life?

This consistency I told you about operates in another wise. An individual, theoretically, if he were not engaged in interpersonal relationships, could at any time change his mind, negate an old cause— specifically a sub- cause— and start a new one. But if he is engaged in interpersonal relationships, somebody is going to come along and hang him with it— even if it is just continuance of his own identity. Just continuing one’s own identity demonstrates to him that he has failed. He can’t step out of his valence. He can’t step over into some other life form or some other activity cleanly and clearly for a fresh start, because there is always something reaching for him a little bit.

This is such a roseate dream to man that even President Roosevelt was engaged with Liberty magazine at one time on a plot of how a man could disappear with twenty- five thousand dollars and never leave any trace so that he could start life anew. That was back in the thirties. It was kicked up as a good publicity gag, and Roosevelt was never shy on publicity.

The next one is the same modus operandi. You do the same thing with effect— willing and unwilling. When was a person willing to be an effect? If you find a point where an individual is willing to be an effect, you will find just before it a failure on the part of that individual. It will be a major operation that kicked him off the routes and lines he was on.

On the third part of this, we ask the preclear, "What are you unwilling to be a cause of?"— just like that. "What are you unwilling to be the cause of? What have you been the cause of in your past that you didn’t like to be the cause of?" Guilt, grief and everything else start falling out like inverting the magician’s top hat.

And the fourth part is "What are you unwilling to be the effect of?" "Of what are you unwilling to be the effect?" "What kind of an effect are you unwilling to be?" This is very important.

Those four factors, taken up in a case, will really straighten it out. They operate to straighten a case out.

There is one thing just ahead of this, which you take up before you take this up; it seems almost incidental to it: "What are you trying to hide from other people?"

Actually, what a person is trying to hide is very specific. He is trying to hide the times when he has been willing or unwilling to be cause or effect, when these operated badly. In other words, there is a specimen in each one of these things that a person is trying to hide from other human beings.

This operation of hiding is actually the operation of individuation. An individual seeks to maintain his own identity and his own personality despite the attacks of others around him.

Each individual is actually full cause. But he starts holding off, he starts setting himself up as a mystery, one way or the other. He starts telling the third dynamic and the fourth dynamic and the second dynamic and the fifth dynamic all sorts of things in order to hide. Or he refuses to tell.

And what happens to the first dynamic? You get the individual back and he starts to go into recalls and you find out that he has hidden it from himself. How very fascinating!

So, between "trust- distrust" and "hide," we get the biggest occlusions on cases. Those are occlusions.

"What are you trying to hide?" Just take a preclear and tell him to start working this out, scan it out. "What are you trying to hide?" He will find one thing after another, after another, after another. But you as an auditor don’t ask him what he is trying to hide, because these are- things he is trying to hide. And if he starts in naming them to you, you will get this weird manifestation they get in psycho- analism where they think that if they could just get the fellow to admit that he is guilty, then he wouldn’t feel quite as guilty.

Most psychoanalysis is based on the idea that if you hold the patient down and you choke him long enough, he will finally admit that he is your effect. Then you have an effect and you have somebody you have affected, and besides, you have some money in the bank. Then you are all set up— the devil with the patient. Those are bitter words, but that is about the way it operates.

So you have willing and unwilling on cause and effect, and most of these things you will find under the heading "highly classified," "drawer sealed," "under no circumstances let anybody know anything about any of these." And the person is hiding them from himself. At first he wasn’t.

You will occasionally find an individual, for instance, who has developed an enormous talent for remembering things that aren’t so and who has no talent at all for remembering things that are so. If you start lying about something, it is very necessary to keep those lies in mind. If you go and forget they are lies and you hide the fact (it is all hiding anyway) that they are lies— which is a truth— you end up with a wide- open case. All truth on the case is hidden.

This person concentrates too hard on what he has to remember. It is death to forget what you have told as a lie— you can forget the truth but don’t ever forget a lie. This is the wide- open case.

Hiding can go to the point, then, of substitution. This is the weird manifestation that puzzled psychology for so long, called substitution. People will substitute one thing for another— or so it apparently looks, on the surface. They are actually substituting in such a way that what they have said will be hidden or what they have thought will be hidden, and they reverse it. It is not so much substitution as reversals; they just turn the things all the way over. How thoroughly one reverses things depends on where he is on the tone scale.

Words, for instance, are a point in question. Up high on the tone scale an individual uses the actions themselves that go with the words. But the words are nothing to him. You can’t tell him anything literal. He can reason very facilely. But you start getting him down the tone scale and what do you find? Words become things as solid as a piece of chalk. Everything is literal to him, just like you find it at the bottom of an engram. Everything is literal.

As a consequence the individual has a very hard time. He substitutes everything for everything else. He will not permit himself to have the right facsimile, but he gets one that is similar to it or opposite from it. If he wants pleasure he will get pain. If he wants laughter he will get tears— substitution.

There is nothing like running a willing theory to death. They ran this out in psychoanalysis to the point of the theory of sublimation. This was lovely.

Sublimation was accidentally letting one thing out when you were trying to hide something, but somehow or other you would let it out anyway, and you really didn’t know what was in your own mind. (You can sure tell where on the tone scale the inventors of this one were— way down!) They said, "You really don’t know what is in your mind; you really don’t know what you think, but you think in such a way as to try to do horrible things. And there are these awful green - slime areas in the mind that are so horrible that you don’t dare touch them, but for fifteen dollars we will."

What a lovely mock- up this whole thing was. It postulated the unconscious mind. People knew there was something back there that they didn’t know about. They knew there was something behind them that they didn’t know about which would suddenly give them skills. They didn’t ever think to look for actual experience.

There is evidently a lot of actual experience. Various lives, for instance, get occluded very easily. A death is a very fine failure and so you just close out the life. If you can get the death off the end of the life, the life will open up to straight recall. It has skills in it. There are all sorts of skills buried all over the place.

Another thing is that if you think of the amount of study and training which an individual has done in this lifetime, you don’t have to look for any esoteric reason why little gnomes with crossed eyes and pink ears or something have to jump up on his shoulder and tell him things. We are taught as children, for instance, that there is such a thing as a conscience; it generally has wings. There is a devil that tempts you. All these are wonderful— beautiful delusions.

The net result was that people got a pretty weird idea of what the mind had in it, because they were trying to hide it. But you start skidding over the line on cause and effect, you start skidding over the line on hiding—" What are you trying to hide from others? What are you trying to hide this way, that way, and so forth?" "What did you unwillingly cause that you are trying to hide?"— just scanning over all this, and all sorts of stuff shows up. It produces terrific power, by the way, when a person hides something. Any time you make a mystery out of something it becomes much more powerful. Ask any priesthood about this; they will tell you exactly what it is all about. If you hide something thoroughly enough, then it has power in it— particularly if there is nothing there.

What happens is the individual will start to shake and then he will know there was something wrong. Did he murder his grandfather when he was nine? It was something horrible— he must have stolen something. Maybe he went to reform school and didn’t know. You scan over a few other things he is hiding and all of a sudden this fact turns up, and it turns out that one night he left his dog out all night and he didn’t tell his parents. The non- sensicalities that assume this terrific power!

The fact that it is hidden and can’t be faced says immediately it is dangerous. You only hide things from you which are dangerous, so therefore if you start hiding things it follows that they must be dangerous, otherwise you would be able to look at them.

So when you ask the person to look at them, he says, "Oh, no, no! They’re dangerous!" until he looks. And then he says, "So what?"

There isn’t anything on any case that wouldn’t bear complete exposition —blue laws or no blue laws. And that brings us to the next point: Anything in a society which is surrounded by taboos, which is forbidden, will become aberrative to that society. That is a law. Anything which is taboo and which is forbidden by that society will become aberrative to that society. It becomes taboo and forbidden because it inherently held some destructive element for the social culture at some past date. Now it remains in hiding although it is no longer dangerous. It is thoroughly hidden. So, you could make a whole therapy out of addressing one half of one dynamic— namely, the second dynamic— but you could only do that in this society because sex is a very thoroughly hidden thing in this society. As you go skidding back on the track with a preclear, he doesn’t have to vocalize this stuff and tell you what he is running over, but he is liable to start bursting out into laughter when he finds out the "horrible crimes" on the second dynamic he is hiding. He has hidden them from himself!

As soon as he starts hiding something on the second dynamic, he will start hiding things on the first, the third, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth, seventh and eighth. He is all set. All you have to do is hide one fragment of one dynamic and you have hidden a fragment of all dynamics. So he becomes very upset. Here is data he is hiding.

More doggone stuff will be on that second dynamic in this society, but not because there is anything inherently wrong on the second dynamic. It is because the second dynamic was at one time very aberrative to this society. At one time it was. There was a lot of disease, the family unit was very tough to keep in line and so forth.

Now we have the modern business world; where is the family unit? Women work as well as men. The need of the family went out, actually— as that terribly tight unit, compelled to be tight by the state— at that order of magnitude of importance, with agrarianism. Agrarianism made the family survive. Now the family can go on surviving for a long time, but it doesn’t have to be this protected.

So here is this hidden mass of material. In this social culture, the material hidden on the subject of sex would fill many books.

To assign everything wrong with the human mind to one half of one dynamic would only be justified if what was wrong with the mind that so assigned it was one half of the second dynamic. I would sure like to get a blow- by- blow account of what Freud’s mother used to say to him. She really must have hid it. "You mustn’t mention those words. You mustn’t do this, mustn’t do that. You mustn’t go around with little girls"— bad, hide, guilt. The only time you can have guilt is when something has to be hidden; it is just as simple as that.

What is guilt? Guilt is on the third dynamic. Guilt and shame are emotions which are on the third dynamic at the level of fear and grief. The third dynamic has that special characteristic— guilt. Of course, a person can then start feeling guilty inside himself and so on.

So when you start to pick up "hide," you will find an awful lot of stuff coming up on the second dynamic. Most of it isn’t worth bothering about, but don’t tell your preclear that. The only thing you want is his decisions to hide it. The devil with details. Freud wasn’t even good at that.

Now, on a broader scale, if you want to do a diagnosis of a preclear (I use that word diagnosis against my own protest; there isn’t any other word that particularly fits but medicine kind of nailed on to that one), simply go over all the phases of all the dynamics with a preclear and ask him if he has been cause on this area. In other words, divide all the dynamics— one, two, three, four, five, six, seven and eight— ask him where he is cause and where he is not cause, and you will pick up some stuff that will startle him. You will be right into the aberrative center of the case.

You probably want to know how to get out these tricky computations. A lot of people say, "Well, if I could just straightwire well, I’d do great," and so forth. But these "hide," "serious," "trust- distrust" buttons make up about all there is of Straightwire. The computations just fall out of the case.

"When haven’t you been cause? What aren’t you cause of?"

The person will all of a sudden recognize, for instance, that he has never been cause of anything with a group, that he has always been an effect. In a social group, he has never been a cause. He never starts a conversation, he never suggests a game— he never does any of these things.

Right back there he has a bunch of locks and emotions that simply forbid him to do so. Maybe you won’t find them right away, so you had better run "hide" on it. "What are you trying to hide from other people while you are sitting there?" "What have you tried to hide from people in the past in groups?" You may find it is some horrible fact that he is afraid he will mention if he talks in a group.

That isn’t basic, however. The basic is being shut up consistently; it is being sat on consistently. Here was the family, sitting all around the table as a group, and he was never able to open his mouth. That immediately makes him an effect in a group, so of course he isn’t cause on it.

And now we come to the last point of this whole thing that buttons it up very nicely for you: That thing which an individual cannot conceive to have been the cause of is that thing which the individual cannot control.

What happens to a service facsimile? You cannot control anything for which you will not accept full responsibility.

What is responsibility? It is simply this: Are you- willing to have caused? If you are willing to have caused, then you can accept the full responsibility for. And full responsibility is up above these levels.

Could you accept the responsibility for having been cause along each part of every dynamic? That may sound very weird to you. But you look it over and you will find that you have run on a computation like "Oh, I couldn’t accept cause of that because then I’d be blamed." That is running just half a cycle late. You only get blamed when you have initiated a cause against something else without first having been willing to take full responsibility for the consequences. To be a cause you have to be tough. You have to be able to take all the consequences right up to death.

For instance, are you willing to be fully responsible for what people say to you that makes you feel bad? Oddly enough, the second that you say "Yes, I’ll be fully responsible for what people say to me. Yeah, I’ll be cause for what people say to me," immediately you soar over their heads.

Then somebody comes around to you and says, "Yak, yak, yak, yak. Mary said last night— yak, yak, yak, yak, yak."

" Sure."

"Well, aren’t you worried? Aren’t you upset?"

"No."

This, by the way, really drives the person telling you this into apathy in a hurry.

Work that one out with yourself. "What are you willing"— or unwilling— "to be the cause of?" It is very important.

This is a button which is above any button of which I know in the field of mysticism. It is a very happy moment to reach that button, because we have been building bridges to isolated, unproven and disputed facts, selecting the valuable from the not so valuable. One by one we have been nailing down points. Hardly any of these points were unknown to the race, but they also knew eight billion more that weren’t true.

So we have been building bridges, and all of a sudden we have built a bridge out into space.

Cause and effect— this goes beyond the wildest statements of the eighth and ninth century Magi who were the "ultra- est of the ultra." And it sure goes beyond the statements of people like Sir James Jeans and so on. Yet horribly enough, this one works. This one has that awful, inexorable workability about it.

A person can get this button down and figure this one out. He argues with himself on it: He says, "My God, eighth dynamic. Me, cause on the eighth dynamic? No, no! Thunder, lightning. Wasn’t I almost struck by light—? What’s that got to do with it? Maybe it’s an illusion! Then I would be the cause of the illusion if I . . . But you couldn’t tell me in this lifetime that I was cause between Russia and the United States and all their troubles on the third dynamic, so there! And I ain’t cause of this animosity. I don’t want anything to do with it. I’m scared to death...."

And there is the point you run into. Anything for which any individual feels any misemotion— antagonism, anger, fear, grief, apathy— is something for which he has not accepted his responsibility. And you only get misemotion on a case when an individual has refused to accept the responsibility in that sphere. If he doesn’t accept the responsibility in that sphere then he is going to get misemotion.

He can control anything for which he has accepted the full responsibility. He is unable to control something for which he has not accepted it.

You have a car and the car won’t start because it is cold. You say, "Those dogs up at that Ford Motor Company, when they made this car . . . The last mechanic that repaired this car did so- and- so and so- and- so." Go on, step on the button. Try and start it, I dare you. Try and start it. You will be towed out of there. You talk about magic!

Just look back in the past and you will find that that person with whom you have had the most trouble was the person for whom you least would accept responsibility.

And what happens to your service facsimile? What happens to all of these facsimiles? You suddenly have a psychosomatic illness creeping up on you. You can’t do anything with it.

You didn’t ever accept the responsibility for it. You are not responsible for it. If you are not responsible for it, it is not yours— how can you possibly control it? So it is going to come into present time, naturally. There is the psychosomatic illness.

How do you get rid of it? Actually, there are several ways to get rid of it. The easiest way, but sometimes the longest one to do, is identify it. Identify it and then take the responsibility for all of its efforts and counter- efforts.

You have to know a great deal to be able to do this. You have to be up there with prime knowledge to some degree to encompass the whole thing. I would probably be shot by the governments of Russia and the United States if I were talking to large audiences and saying "It would be a good thing if an atomic war happened." People wouldn’t like that. You wouldn’t like that right now.

What do you do with a society which has come almost up to a static? If you look over life cycles, if you look over civilization cycles, you will find out they go in cycles so they can improve. You find out that people die to get better.

So you take a look at all this and you say, "Well, ho- hum." Then you say, "But, my God, I can’t stand up here and take no action!" Of course, taking full responsibility and doing something about it is a bit down the tone scale: it is down there around 30.0, 35.0 or something.

Now you go down to 20.0. In order to get action, in order to get motion, you have to willfully refuse to accept responsibility for something in your sphere— or you will have no interplay of motion at all.

It is very interesting that you have to make a saint before you can make a man of real action.

"All angels have two faces" is another line that comes in. You are supposed to have been taught that all angels are good. They are so good that they would kill all your enemies for you. But what are they to your enemies?

All angels have two faces: one is black and one is white. That is an old, old metaphysical principle.

Nevertheless, in order to produce maximum action you have to attain something like the point from which you can produce maximum action and then be willing to depart that point and produce the maximum action. You go way up to come down a bit, because you would never have any motion or action, no interplay and no fun.

And by the way, it is only fun when you know it is a pretense. Then it is fun. Only when you are aware of the shallowness of consequences and when you are convinced that they are not quite as serious as they might be, only when you have an optimum consideration on this line, can you enter into the pretense called the business of living and have a lot of fun in the business of living.

What are you trying to achieve for a preclear after all? You want him to be happy, cheerful and have some fun in life.

So, in this condensed version, the formula for doing that is fairly well contained. Go ahead and try it.