CAUSE AND EFFECT: FULL RESPONSIBILITY

A lecture given on 3 December 1951

A Higher Level of Being

I am going to tell you about cause and effect because it is almost the magic button. We have just gotten through taking many, many hours off the completion of a case. What it is down to now, I don’t know, because I haven’t had a broad play at this yet.

Cause and effect: You already know that you as an individual are representative of cause on eight dynamics. Whether or not there is a common source for all life and you are merely a representative of that common source with all of its characteristics or whether you as an individual come from an independent source is beside the point. It works out that you as an individual have the potential of causation in any field of action anywhere— yourself, children, groups, mankind at large, the physical universe, all life and even the static itself. You are cause.

In order to have motion, in order to live, you also have to be an effect.

You could be a cause without action. A cause without action would be above 20.0. There would be no motion connected with it because it would merely be potential. For instance, you can potentially pick up an ashtray. You could say at this moment that you are the cause of any movement of the ashtray at this time; then you move it. You actually come down the tone scale to get into motion. You come down into an optimum range, in other words.

Cause and effect: You are cause! But you go along very far and you find out that you want to eat. The moment you eat you become an effect. There is nothing wrong with this, but it demonstrates how cause and effect interoperate.

It works out, then, that you are cause before you become an effect. And after you have become an effect, it is more difficult for you to be a cause again unless you start all over again and decide "Well, I’m cause again. Now I’m going into a chain of effects." A person does this when he says "I think I will live life now," quits his job and buys a motorcycle and rides off to Puget Sound or something. He is then cause again. He has deserted everything which was going to affect him and to a large degree he can also desert himself on the first dynamic.

You will find an individual every once in a while will postulate the fact that he is dead, just almost out of thin air. "I don’t exist anymore." He says exactly that, really, when he says "I’m through with all that." When a girl says "I am through with him— finished, no more," she is also declaring that she is dead. She says, "I’m going to go out into a new field. I’m going to go from here on and do something else." Now she is cause again.

Life is an interplay of this business of cause and effect. You cause yourself to learn something so that you can perform an act so that you will get paid so that you can eat. You start from cause and wind up, having eaten, as an effect.

Of course, a few generations ago you very often wound up by being eaten, but that is beside the point.

Now, cause and effect add up to this: A person who says "I am not cause" is in bad shape. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. This isn’t just a metaphysical or a mystical statement; it happens to resolve cases. A person says, "I am not a cause; I didn’t cause that," and then he is really off to the races. He will not blame self but blames others. "I didn’t cause that," he says, and he blames something else. The second he blames something else, he is saying "That thing is cause." It becomes more powerful than himself, it becomes occluded and it can thereafter affect him forcefully because he cannot handle the memory of it by himself anymore. He said something else was to blame, so the- memory of that something else is something beyond his ability to handle. He said, "Cause is over there"; therefore cause is there.

What else is he saying? He is saying "I’m effect." There must be a cause and an effect in this situation. "What he did to me was horrible. He’s done these horrible things to me," and so on and so on. A person, all the time he is saying this, is saying "He’s cause." Cause is the big boss. How to make your enemies powerful and yourself weak: "They’re to blame." You assign them as cause, you can’t handle the facsimiles of them and you are electing to be an effect of them. In this fashion we get occlusion.

By the way, if you get a relatively occluded case that has an occasional fragmentary visio, every visio that person has is where he has blamed himself, and it is followed with regret. So evidently blame and regret are highly aberrative. Blame is the artificial or arbitrary election of cause; it is the introduction of an arbitrary cause.

A person who says "It is my fault and I am to blame" is then stepping sideways from saying "I am cause," because he is not accepting the fact that he caused something for which he can be blamed. He has to be able to accept cause, regardless of what happens to the other person.

Let’s say he gets in a fight and he busts somebody’s nose. Then he says, "Well, I am to blame; it’s my fault. I’m sorry. Let me fix up your nose." There is nothing wrong with fixing up the other person’s nose, but the fellow said, "I didn’t cause it. I’m sorry that I caused it. I’m sorry that I am cause." "I’m sorry I’m alive" is the same phrase. "I’m sorry I’m alive; I regret being an active, causative force. I blame myself." That is the same thing as saying "I regret the fact that I can cause." And the first moment an individual says "I regret that I can cause," he is saying "I am not cause." The second he says "I am not cause," he has to find something to blame; this is rationalization .

People go around explaining why this and that happened, explaining why it was: ". . . and the bus broke down and that’s why I’m late for work." Everybody looks at them kind of pityingly; they say, "Well, you shouldn’t be late for work," or something of the sort. An individual could run into all these circumstances and arrive late at the office, and what do you think would happen if the individual simply said, without any excuses, "Well, I’m late; I got up late this morning. How are you?" and started writing at his desk? People would immediately become afraid of him.

What has he done? He has sat down and he hasn’t negated, way down at the bottom of the tone scale, and said "I’m not cause. Everybody else is cause and everything else is cause; I’m not. The car broke down, I couldn’t get the motor started, my wife didn’t get me up in time." Instead of all this, he has just simply said, "Well, I’m late." There is nothing you can do to him!

Any and all rationalization becomes an assignment of cause. But let’s get practical now: A person has a psychosomatic illness— a set of knees that are very bad, for instance. He says, "I can’t walk very far because my knees are bad." Cause is what? A memory. The cause is a memory. The second you blame a memory and say that it is cause, you immediately and automatically negate your responsibility over it and you are not able to handle it, and it will become a psychosomatic illness. It is just as simple as that.

You say, "I’m not responsible for this." Anything for which you are not responsible can really fix you up.

What is the first symptom of a person low on the tone scale? A failure in carrying out responsibilities. You look at an individual very low on the tone scale and you will find an individual who will not persist in responsibility and who is very anxious not to have responsibility. They have in the past assigned cause to this, cause to that and cause to something else— in other words, blame, blame, blame. "All this is more powerful than I." And they have then said, "My environment is cause." The second they said "My environment is cause," they said "I am controlled by my environment," because they said immediately "I am an effect." And an individual who has achieved the ultimate in effect is dead.

There is an interplay between the human mind and the human body. The human mind says "I am cause" and the human body says "I am effect." And so we have mystics, we have religionists and we have individuals since time immemorial saying, "In order to escape it all and rise into the high strata of glory, you must negate the body"— that must go by the boards.

The body is effect to an individual who doesn’t occasionally get a kick out of being a cause. You don’t find very many mystics indulging in very much action. You want to cure somebody of mysticism? The fastest way I know of, next to processing, is to put them on a motorcycle and see how fast the thing will run. Get them into some action! This makes the body a cause. As soon as you get into action the body is a cause. Of course there is an end of track somewhere to it; the body, through all of this unrestrained action, will hit a brick wall or fall five hundred feet or get a bullet in it or get a broken leg or something of the sort. But it is like they say of a Cape Cod cod: "With his mouth full of squid, he dies happy."

A fellow who gets knocked out from action which he himself is causing, oddly enough, heals up fast. But a fellow who gets knocked out without causing the action which led to it is in a bad way.

The soldier who goes over the top we think very mawkishly about as "Oh- h- h, the poor hero." (Of course, what he is poor about is the fact that he will come home and find out that he wasn’t a hero and people will look at him and say, "What Korean War?") But the point is that this individual, when he goes over the parapet, is in action. So he stops a slug, so it tears him up, so it kills him— so what? He was in action. He had as good a chance of nailing somebody else as they had of nailing him. Men don’t go crazy from this.

Where they go crazy is where they are not active— where they have to sit at the quartermaster- depot desk and fill requisitions, where they have to hurry up at Fort Dix so they can wait, where they realize the complete uselessness of the situation. Men actually don’t even protest against close order drill; they like close- order drill. But they sure as the devil hate to stand for four hours to start the drill and then stand for another two hours in line to eat supper. That is aberrative.

I had an interesting experience on this line. I was supposed to have been the first casualty who came home from the South Pacific at the beginning of the war. I woke up in a bed at the hospital and there was a little fellow standing there with thick glasses on, and he held up a finger and he said, "How many fingers have I got?"

I remembered the experience of a girl who was picked up on the street in New York and taken to Bellevue, and somebody said, "How many fingers have I got?"

She said, "Ten, of course." "What time is it?"

And she said sarcastically, "Well, it’s twenty- six o’clock; what d’ya think? Get out of here. Who are you anyway?" They kept her there for ten days.

So I said carefully, "One finger."

He said, "What time is it?"

I looked at the clock and I said, "It’s seven thirty- two and sixteen seconds."

"Hmmmm! "

This was a confused situation. It remained confused for about a week, merely because "everybody knew" that the stress of modern war was such that the human mind and human anatomy could not stand up to it. They "knew"— they had all been stateside ever since the war started, so they "knew." It was very interesting.

The hospital was full of psychotics! I walked around looking at these characters and noticing they had new bars up on this window and that ward had been made into a psycho ward. I said, "I didn’t think anybody had gotten home here yet. What’s this all about? Are these boys from Pearl Harbor?"

"Oh, no. No, they’re from the navy yard."

You examine war neurosis and you will find out it happened so far from any field of action that it was the inaction. During the periods of time when London was under her heaviest bombardment, not one individual reported as psychotic. Think of the bad news they were getting— Dunkirk. Think of the bad news they were getting in the RAF. Think of the bad news that must have been thrown at them every day—" Well, Bill Sykes is dead and so on; got killed in the bombing last night. And your wife and baby just kicked the bucket and we’ve not gotten them out of the wreckage yet," and so forth. This is great stuff. But they didn’t get any psychotics! Isn’t that interesting?

The body, in that case, was too busy effecting being a cause of— rescue, reconstruction, keeping alive, action. In other words, the body was being causative and there was no psychosis. This is in this field of cause and effect.

Now, on effect, an individual can sit down quietly and if he sits still enough and concentrates on not- being hard enough, he will start to get all the counter- efforts in the bank. What is he actually doing while he is sitting there? He is negating against all of the springboards of his own physical action, and the second he does this he says, "I can’t handle them," so he starts to get all the counter- efforts. The second a mystic gets the ambition to study yoga and sit quietly— mystery, wonderful stuff— in order to produce something, he has made a postulate whereby he is negating against his own ability to move, which immediately negates against the facsimiles of motion. He will start to get psychosomatic illnesses right away, because he is suddenly an effect.

The highest points of the tone scale are "I am," "I know" and "cause." Those are the highest points. The lowest points are "I am not," "I do not know" and "effect."

Now, here is something very funny that has jumped into view and you should really know this one cold, because you can apply this in life. I asked a question of myself last week; I said, "What are interpersonal relations?" And I got an answer. It has to do with cause and effect— that little formula that says a person will not be aberrated unless he has consented to be aberrated. Nothing was ever righter. That is right in the groove. A person has to want to be aberrated before he can be aberrated.

Why can’t you make some people get rid of their chronic somatics and their aberrations? They want them— but they don’t want them, they want something else.

A person first opens up the door to aberration and psychosomatic illness by desiring to be an effect. One has to have desired to be an effect in the exact area where he is aberrated or on the exact subject of his aberration before he can afterwards suffer entheta— that is to say, aberration— to come in on that channel. In other words, he opens up the door; he wants to be an effect.

Now, dear old Sigmund Freud (he has probably had a couple of lives since)— I wish I could get in touch with him, because he was almost right. It is a very funny thing: He had no bridge built to this thing and he missed it kind of wide, but nevertheless, of all the boys working in this field in the past, this fellow was closest to it. A miss is as good as a mile, but he was close.

If he had just kept on to find out what was this libido theory, if he had been able to think long enough and far enough, he would have found out this point: Where does a person want to be the most effect? On sex! A person wants to be affected on the second dynamic. He also wants to be affected on the first dynamic by food, which is almost as aberrative. So there you have food, clothing and shelter. Or he wants to be affected by the rites of some lodge or something of the sort; he wants to be affected by his fellow men. That is the third dynamic.

But on the second dynamic, that is a very, very interesting computation, because the individual does not want to be, in this society, a cause.

Children are hard to raise, they are difficult to get born, and sometimes there have been stratas of the United States which frowned upon children born out of wedlock and so forth. So a person doesn’t want to be a cause on the second dynamic. Right away they have negated cause. But they want to experience, so they want to be an effect.

Now, if an individual wants to be an effect and fails, then he gets a bad effect very easily. He wants to be an effect, so the door is open to be an effect; now, he will be an effect all right, but it might not be what he expected. This is why lovers’ quarrels are so tough. This is why Tin Pan Alley makes so much money when they write about moon, spoon, June— love. People want to be affected.

That is why the Freudians made the terrible error of believing that all arts were in the field of the second dynamic, in the field of sex. The Freudians said, "Sex, art— they’re all the same." They were very confused people. But they were almost right.

A person wants to sit in a theater and be affected. He wants to be pleasantly affected by art, music and so forth. Here he wants to be effect.

If you want to clean up somebody’s sonic, you look up the bank for any time they wanted to be affected by sound. You will find them sitting at concerts and all that sort of thing. You will probably trigger a grief charge— this is one of the easiest ways in the world to trigger a grief charge— because somewhere along that line the person wanted to be an effect and got something he hadn’t counted on; but he got it because he was an effect.

So before any individual can be affected by a memory which causes psychosomatic illness, before he can be affected by a memory which causes aberration, he must have desired to be an effect in that field and desired not to be a cause in that field. That opened the gates.

It is not sadness that causes the aberration; it is the failure. The person wants to be an effect and then fails in some fashion or other. This is why little children get very easily aberrated on the second dynamic, and they do. In practically any case you go into in this society, you will find aberration on the second dynamic, because sex is verboten. l Society realized a long time ago that "sex drove people crazy," so they said "It’s no good" so they could drive more people crazy.

Now, it works out for any dynamic that where the individual has wanted to be an effect he can thereafter be aberrated on that dynamic. Where he negates being a cause he can thereafter be an effect. This is so awfully simple that of course it would be overlooked. And so it has been.

I was just running the other day into some of this material and finding out what is blame? what is regret? what is this thing "full responsibility"? Full responsibility is very interesting stuff. Once you have elected yourself to be a cause, you have elected yourself to be cause on eight dynamics.

Then afterwards you all of a sudden blame God. Whether or not you are God, whether or not the most God that you will know is in you, whether or not you have the same characteristic as the eighth dynamic or whether or not you have an actively operating channel right straight from God to you, we don’t care. We don’t have to answer that question. But we do know that when you blamed the Creator— started electing him cause— the darnedest things could happen. You started to blame yourself for blaming the Creator. Then you blamed the Creator for having blamed yourself for having blamed the Creator. It really starts to get fun about that time.

The reason we have to talk about this is because you can solve cases with it. It is a necessary piece of modus operandi in auditing to know cause and effect.

So, the individual then starts assigning cause— assigning cause for his ills— and saying he is not cause. This is aberration. The individual decides he will be an effect— aberration.

You don’t take full responsibility just by saying "Well, I’m responsible for everything, so that’s that." I am afraid you have to run it— on cause and effect, blame and regret.

You could take an individual and do nothing but get him to experience the emotion of regret— just that one little emotion, the emotion of regret. He wouldn’t have to experience it fully; you would just get him to feel some vague shadow of how one feels when he regrets something and just have him scan the track, scan all the regret off the track. Then you could turn around and say, "All right. Now let’s scan all the times you felt something else was the cause and how it made you feel, for the emotion of blame. Let’s scan that off.

"Now, let’s feel how you feel when you blame yourself. All right. Well, let’s scan off all the times you ever blamed yourself."

You would turn on sonic, visio, full perception. Because that is all that is jamming up the track.

The reason we have the acts in Advanced Procedure is so that we can get into the state of affairs which is Act Fourteen— which is cause, effect, full responsibility. You have to get a preclear opened up a little bit sometimes.

But you would be utterly amazed if as an individual you just suddenly sat down by yourself and said, "How do I feel when I regret something?" and then found a visio and ran some regret off it. You would be utterly fascinated at what would happen to that visio. It might be the first time that you ever made a visio do tricks. Naturally, if you are blaming yourself, if you are blaming somebody else, if you are not taking responsibility for these facsimiles— for your memory— how can you handle something for which you don’t have responsibility? If you regret an incident, you regret the memory. And if you busily regret this memory, how can you handle it in processing? Or how can you handle it in thinking? How can you handle it in living? You can’t.

So there are several levels of this. There is cause: desire to be cause and inhibition of being cause, or refusal to be cause; and there is effect: desire to be effect and inhibition of or negation against being effect— two for cause, two for effect.

Now, you can play around all you want with strange therapies or earlier forms of Dianetics, but I assume you want action. I try to talk to you with what I know and what I have tested and what has more or less come along. I hope nobody tries to pick out of it merely that which agrees with his own philosophy. Of course, nobody would do that! But the point I am making is that we are dealing with something that is very mechanical— awfully mechanical.

We have material and a modus operandi, we have a workability and we know these points about it. I am telling you how to fix a clock and this clock is getting less and less complicated, and it has gotten uncomplicated to the point now where it has a pendulum that swings across and turns a ratchet that turns the hands on the clock. That is how simple this clock is.

I don’t expect you to completely appreciate cause and effect until you have tried it.

Where have you wanted to be an effect? There you became an effect. This postulate, again, is at the bottom of the emotion. "I want to be affected by life," somebody says. If you pick that up, you will pick up the pin right out of why the environment can affect him. He decided he wanted to be affected by his own environment. He decided he wasn’t getting the fun he wanted out of life, that he wanted life to affect him. He wanted life to push him around; he didn’t want to push life around all of a sudden, and boom! Life affected him all right!

That is why artists very often wind up low on the tone scale: they want to render what life is like, so they desire to experience life. They say, "Oh, I want to experience it. I want to be affected by life, I want to fling myself into it and I want to have all the sensations of . . ." They sure get them. And that is a negation of themselves being cause.

This works on eight dynamics. If you refuse to be cause on another dynamic you become effect on that dynamic. Let’s say you are talking to a girl by the name of Josie and you refuse to be cause for what is happening to Josie. The next thing you know, you will find yourself being sympathetic toward Josie. Being sympathetic is electing a cause as being exterior from Josie and yourself. The second you do that you are not as alive as you were before. Sympathy— you have looked at Josie and elected to blame what Josie was blaming.

Josie says, "I have a sore throat which is caused by bacteria. I went to the doctor— I was just lying there in agony."

And you say, "Poor dear, poor dear. I’m sorry you are so sick. Terrible we have an epidemic going around— awfully sorry." That is the way the epidemic runs.

You say, "Isn’t it terrible!" and you get all upset about something happening in the society— like when you read any column of any page of a newspaper. You say, "Boy, isn’t that terrible, and isn’t this terrible, isn’t something else terrible?" You are sitting there assigning cause and when you finish reading it you feel terrible.

Now, evidently you can’t (perhaps you can) simply step up to the great philosophic height of serenity and say "I accept the cause of all." Some people work self- determinism this way: they go into the valence of Papa or somebody who was a 1.5 and they say, "Now I’m self- determined!" The funny part of it is you kind of have to be processed up to self- determinism a little bit, or at least process yourself up to it.

It is the same way with full responsibility for everything that goes on in the universe. You have to kind of process yourself up to it.

Somewhere en route in this process you will get up into the static and you will sit there and say, "All right, I’m the cause of everything. So there’s war. Atomic war." You will sit around for a couple of days being cause— "I’m cause." You will see it clearly. You will have processed out an awful lot of things, you will have seen what assigning blame has done to you and you will have gotten up to a point where you are not afraid of assigning blame, you are not afraid of being cause and so forth, and so you will say, "Well, I’m cause." For a moment or a couple of days you will have a tough time. You will have a really rough time being cause because you won’t come down into motion.

All of a sudden you will get tired of being cause and you will elect something to be effect of; you will say, "All right, I’m an effect of something or other." And you can actually find yourself going to the point of saying "Oh, those darn Russians. I’m mad at the Russians." You aren’t at all. You are perfectly willing to take full responsibility for the Russians. But you say, "Oh, those Russians— I’m mad at them now," and all of a sudden you will start to take an interest in life. You will get catalyzed.

You are then starting the same cycle all over again on your postulates. You say, "These people that drive these cars are no good! They don’t know how to drive!" Now you can be nice and mad and drive down the highway and have a good time. But if you stay at cause you won’t do anything!

There was a namesake of mine, a fellow by the name of Elbert Hubbard, who used to have little journeys he wrote about. This is a little journey that a preclear takes up through static and down again. It is a very, very interesting trip. Fortunately we know how to get a person out of it. You just have him go around and elect some effects— elect some randomity, in other words. He won’t stay in motion unless he does. And that is how it all begins all over again.

You can get yourself into more trouble . . . Of course, now you have a new weapon. If you get yourself into too much trouble, process it out. So you get killed— so what?

Now, you realize that nobody could have understood cause and effect or have used it as a process or realized what was happening. This is true on the second dynamic in particular, where a person is very anxious to be a cause but anxious not be a cause; he wants to be an effect but can’t be an effect. In other words, why do you have so much trouble between marital partners? They want to be an effect of each other.

You try to get them processing each other, and does that louse things up! It is very, very interesting what happens. They are both trying to be an effect and each one wants the other one to be a cause, and they will row about processing and everything else because they will start talking about memory. Actually, they are talking on the second dynamic and don’t realize it.

The funny part of all this is that we had to know a lot of things before they could spring out into view. This cause and effect is all right.

But if you were to take somebody out on the street, just cold, and suddenly say, "Cause- effect— all you have to do is take all the responsibility for everything and you are all set," they wouldn’t be able to get there. You are working with a tone scale which has several columns. One of these columns is "I am"— that is the state of being— down to "I am not." Another one has, at the top, "I know" and goes down to "I know not." Again at the top we have "cause," and at the bottom we have "effect"; in between we have blame and shame and so forth. And these levels run right straight across the columns.

Try and get an individual to stop being an effect when he doesn’t know. He will hang up in that column right there— he doesn’t know! And he will come no higher than he knows.

That is why you have fourteen acts in Advanced Procedure. It doesn’t matter what processing you do to this individual in those fourteen acts, as long as you get up some of the service facsimile and as long as you finish off that last act completely, which is cause and effect, the establishment of full responsibility. It will put the individual on his proper service center.

But in those acts, as you come up the line, you are raising the "I know" column. He knows! So you have processing and education going on simultaneously. Therefore you use these acts as fast as he knows what they are. He should be able to get subjective experience on each step so that he knows that that phenomenon exists for him. By the time he gets through to the Fourteenth Act and you start establishing cause and effect, blame, shame and so on— assigning cause to self, assigning cause to others, deciding to be neither a cause nor an effect (that hangs in the middle, it is neither right nor wrong; cause is right and effect is wrong, from the standpoint of the life static)— you have him educated willy- nilly. You didn’t sit there and explain to him, but you have shown him a sample of each of the phenomena and he will start to add this up. When he gets to cause and effect, all of a sudden he is there to understand it. That is why you have fourteen acts and that is why you shouldn’t take very long to do them,

The reason Act Fifteen is there is that when you get through with cause and effect and start going back over this track again, you are going to find out that only then will you get all of the theta facsimile. There is still more of a service facsimile or more facsimiles that he might use; that is why you recheck the case. You may run out a person’s arthritis, but what is arthritis?

Now, there is another button. I have mentioned this button a couple of times, but I didn’t know how important it was. It is all very well to know all these buttons, but to have them evaluated properly is something else. So, we have cause and effect and then there is the "serious" button. If you were to draw a graph to show right and wrong, cause would be over with right and effect would be over with wrong— and serious would also be over with wrong.

Let’s look at this on a gradient scale of evaluation: How right something is would depend on how many units right we assigned it, and how wrong something is would be over the other way. Now, we have survive on the "right" side, dead on the "wrong" side, cause over with "right" and effect over with "wrong." And if you understood completely that you were the complete and utter cause of everything, I am afraid it wouldn’t be very serious to you.

So we have something over with "right" which we had better call "unserious." It is strange, but there is no word in the language for this that I know of. It has been missed. There is no descriptive word of which I know in the English language that fills the exact meaning of this. The boys in philosophy, etymology, mathematics and everything else have missed on this point. So we are obviously into a point which has no forebear; it has, then, no background. We are being cause at this point— unserious.

How serious can you get? Dead. By the time you have gone through life sympathizing with all of these individuals who are in such agony on a sympathy basis, considering that everything is serious, you have really fixed yourself up. Because every time you sympathize with something that everybody claims is serious, you go down the line to that point. This is a horrible thing to introduce into the society. It is brand- new; it is making its debut right now. It is insidious. What will sergeants do after this?

You can elect all the randomity areas you want to, as dangerous as you want to, you can go out and juggle with bottles of nitroglycerin and get away with it, as long as it is not serious.

What happens to an individual low on the tone scale? He makes mistakes. He causes self- destruction. He causes destruction on other individuals. He messes up things. He can’t take care of MEST. He will not carry forward responsibilities. He will accomplish nothing in life.

And what have we got? "It’s serious!" If life gets really serious for an individual, his value goes down to practically zero.

Now, you can hang up in the middle and say, "Well, I negate against everything being serious. I don’t think it’s serious. No, it’s not serious." That is an individual trying to get up to the top.

You can do it with processing. It is a very simple technique. All you do is scan everything off a person’s life where anybody has ever claimed anything was serious on any dynamic. That is all. That is the process. And the real finish- up, bang- up process of all processes would be to scan everything from the earliest moment you could find on the track— no matter how many eons ago— and simply scan off every postulate or thought that something was serious. Just take it all off the bank, right on up to present time.

I will make you a bet that you could take an individual who, for instance, is a sportsman— let’s say a golfer— and all you would do with him is scan off everything that was ever serious to him. You could spend a couple of hours with him working him over, knocking out all the seriousness, and knock from five to thirty strokes off his game just as fast as that. Because it is only when handling a golf club has to be done in a certain fashion— by rote and rite and so on— that a person gets to be a bad golfer.

When you were a little child you could step into the valence of almost anybody and do what they were doing. Did you ever have an older sister or brother going to dancing school or something? The most horrible thing you could have done would have been to suddenly waltz in and go through this dance step and say "Is that it?" Bang!— they would have convinced you it was serious!

Now, driving a car is serious business, and if it is serious enough, you will wreck it. Running a business is serious enough, and if you worry . . .

What are people trying to cure themselves of? They are trying to cure themselves of worry, anxiety, grief, disturbance. They want to have peace.

That is the worst thing in the world you could want, by the way: peace. You don’t want peace; you want action. A person who won’t go out and get arrested once in a while for driving too fast— there is something wrong with him!

All of these conditions sum up to the "serious" button. A person worries because something is serious. It is very doubtful if an individual will be able to improve his lot in life in any way or degree as long as he considers it terribly serious that he is not able to and is trying to overcome these serious obstacles.

You can practically guarantee that an individual would starve to death if he thought eating was serious enough. Did you ever see a food faddist? "Let’s see, we’ll have eighteen and a half protein units of walnuts . . ." Look at where they are on the tone scale. In other words, the more serious they get about food, the worse off they are on the subject of food. And that precedes their ulcers. Getting serious about food precedes the ulcers.

So, how do we handle the "serious" button?

You just take any time during a person’s lifetime and find out what is the emotion of thinking something is serious? Let’s just scan that emotion off the whole bank. Let’s just take it off the case. Let’s not do the fourteen acts, let’s just do that one.

The individual says, "But I can’t do anything like that. My case is in bad shape. It’s serious!"

"That’s fine. Let’s scan all the seriousness off your case."

He says, "Well, you’re just mocking me, but I will do it anyway. Life is too serious."

"Life is not serious to you" is one of the main complaints.

You will find out the only thing there is aberrative about dying is the fact that you considered it serious at the time.

How do you train children? All you do is convince them it is serious.

Take a puppy dog: He is dancing around having a good time. You say, "Life is serious!" Pretty soon this puppy gets the idea.

Yes, the ancient Italian really knew what he was talking about when he considered the only psychotherapy there was, was laughter.