CHAPTER 7 - PERCEPTION, SENSATION, REALITY
SENSATION AND THE DYNAMICS
Inequalities of interest and an unbalanced state of interest on the part of the preclear - that's why we are interested in "can'ts" - resolve down to an inability to draw out of the MEST universe in a balanced state. He's got to take all eight dynamics out of the equation if he's going to leave this universe - all eight simultaneously. The universe will never miss him. But if he tries to take all eight except two out - no! It's not just going to miss him - it's not going to let him go, because, the universe seems to represent a havingness and have-not-ness. To some degree, it owns your preclear. Every time he has a line to it, it has a line to him. So any time he says, "Well, I'm just fine except for the second dynamic; I still seem to want this sensation from these bodies - they're a disgusting thing, these bodies, but second dynamic - hmmm!" It doesn't just mean that your preclear is holding on, because it means that there's a big cable around his neck and it's got him nailed down to a stake. And as long as he thinks he has to be in this universe in order to indulge that sensation, as long as he has to have something else to undo it besides himself, oh boy! Even at a level where it isn't necessary for him to have a body of his own, where he can just take the sensation off any body any place, and the fellow says, "Well, that's great!" - your preclear is still nailed down in this universe, because every one of those bodies will put a line on him for every line he puts on them. And that's how he came down tone scale in the first place.
SENSATION
Sensation is your first level
of desirable energy. Sensation is the parallel subject of interest and
enters higher wave bands along the aesthetics than are entered by any other
type of flow. And sensation itself can be, evidently, above the level of
flow. You can take sensation as a concept, not as an energy flow. It's
a higher sensation as a concept. The most exhilarated you've ever been
in life is probably the moment you had an idea about something. The sensation
of freedom, the sensation of action - these are all sensations, too. And
the sensation of freedom and the joy of pervasion of many things and so
forth is actually much superior to the joy of sex.
This body is baited to a
large degree with the emotion and sensation of sex, and it not good on
a much better one.
The body is frail, it has
a narrow tolerance band. There are a lot of things wrong with it from a
standpoint of action. The big trick here on Earth is to make it look like
there's lots of sensation around and then there isn't any. That's typical
of the MEST universe. Terrific amount offered and none paid. The sensation
of action is superior to the sensation of sex. And you'd have to get up
into that bracket and take a look at it before you'd agree with that. Sex
is very MESTy. A thetan knows it and he feels degraded after he's gone
around and fooled with if for a while. It's terrible.
The thetan builds up communication
lines into the mouth and into the genital area. There are many other of
these little lines too, in addition to these. (From the receiving end,)
a communication line is a tractor wave. You can set up a tractor wave on
something and you'll get communications over that wave and so he sets these
communication lines up permanently. And they're valuable because sensation
comes over those. He's got these lines set and built in to such a degree
that he actually has himself nailed into the body. He might as well have
tied himself in with hawsers.
A thetan is completely dependent
upon sensation for a conviction that he, yes, is alive in this universe,
and what you are rehabilitating there is the only reward he has for living
- the beautiful sights, the beautiful sounds, the beautiful tactiles -
a thetan has thousands of different perceptions. The rehabilitation of
sensation is very necessary, because need for, desire for sensation is
the only thing which keeps him in the vicinity of a body. You rehabilitate
sensation and you hit very early in the case and get out of this automaticity
of using the MEST body to prepare all sensations for us. And how do you
do that? You make him feel emotions from mock-ups. You take the emotions
from low-scale up scale until he can vary the emotions at will in any mock-up
and re-perceive it. And then you get mock-ups which get the highest and
most powerful sensations in them. You discover to him that he can pick
up directly sensations from the MEST universe better than he can pick them
up from the body. And in doing it directly, you will find that he suddenly
really sparks up. He doesn't really need this body. He isn't dependent
anymore.
If he can't get sensation,
he can't get interest. The two interlock, and they follow all the way up
the scale. And that's how you lead a fellow into an operating thetan, you
just make sure that he can feel all these emotions and sensations, first
from the MEST universe itself, and then from mock-ups which are quite actual
and have a greater degree of actuality than MEST universe things. And that
includes any sensation you can name, including the taste of pepper.
SENSATION AND ENERGY
There is a higher dependency
than depending on energy for communication. He started to depend on energy
for sensation. And we get another automaticity which is highly undesirable,
that energy must be used to make an effect out of one. If one wanted to
be the effect of some sensation, then the sensation had another point than
oneself for its origin. He stands over here at A and he wants a sensation
from B. So he runs a line from B back here to A and the line goes in that
direction. B is being elected cause because B has sensation to deliver,
and A then has elected himself an effect.
He has sensation received
from some object and he will gradually get to a point where, as he comes
down tone scale, he will become the effect of any line. He will become
the effect of any energy line and will not be cause on any one of these
lines. He'll elect himself as the effect on any energy beam that happens
anyplace, whether it's a force beam or any other kind of a beam. Therefore
he becomes frightened of all force, and he will cease to use force.
Up scale the thetan can
handle this in terms of space. You can have space without having energy.
You can have theta level objects which are not composed of energy.
Sensations that come in via energy are not the higher level sensations. There are higher level sensations that are independent of energy. But the fellow who has learned how to use energy and has found himself pushed, thrust, slammed into this universe and is right now subject to solidified energy at every hand, that individual had sure better learn how to use energy because he won't get out of here otherwise.
PERCEPTION
In the Philadelphia Lectures,
there's a great deal about Desire and Enforce and Inhibit as the three
stages. You as the thetan actually add interest to things. You can be interested
in something without a dimension and without any energy involved. When
we get interested in something which has dimension, we have to reach out
and approximate its dimension with anchor points in order to perceive it.
How do you perceive? You
put the wall there, and then you reach out and you feel the wall. And you
say, "It's there." You put a feeling called "Wall" out here and then you
put a dimension from you to "wall". We find out we know the wall is there
because we can see it. But you have to put a sight there in order to record
the sight. Get a fellow to realize he's doing that all the time, that he
puts the sight out there.
How many people in this
room felt that streecar motorman go by this instant? Nobody tasted the
workman's lunch box that was on the streetcar. I'll bet you nobody has
felt the silkiness of my tie in looking at me. However, that's within your
field of perceptic experience. But there are very few of you here who haven't
felt the beating of your heart or your lungs or the warmth of your body
or the position of your head or your face. And that is the limit of experience
in a body - and that's pretty narrow.
Lack of perception equals
lack of force. To rehabilitate perception, rehabilitate the preclear's
ability to handle force - electronic force. If you're in the MEST universe,
you're living on borrowed space. You would throw out your limit of experience
and that would be your anchor points. You'd experience everything out to
the limit of the anchor points to the degree that you know that your mouth
at this moment is wet. To solve this anchor point proposition the fellow
has to be able to advance anchor points into everything he detests and
to withdraw anchor points from everything he wants. He has to be able to
do both of these things. He has to be able to advance anchor points completely
relaxedly in the face of everything detested and everything desired, and
pull in anchor points in the face of everything detested and everything
desired. There actually isn't any such thing as a detested thing except
somebody's idea. So he's dragging in his anchor points away from pure chimera,
from pure bunk. He gets smaller and smaller in exact ratio to the number
of things he detests. And he tries to get bigger in ratio to the number
of things he desires.
PERCEPTICS
Sight just happens to be
one perceptic out of a great many. It happens to be the commonest and most
tied to by the preclear because he's interested in energy, manufacturing
it himself or having it from the MEST universe. And so he depends a lot
on sight. But I've known preclears who never saw anything at all, but knew
it was true because they could smell it. They knew they had an engram on
Grandpa because they could smell his pipe.
How fast does your eye photograph?
A trained recognition officer who was trained in the war to glance at a
fighter plane and know whether it was friend or foe, was supposed to do
it in a seventy-fifth of a second. Remark: The described experiment with
the variable shutter and the projected slides, as done in the last war,
eventually resulted in a device to be used by student auditors to be able
to better notice E-meter needle movements.
Why are the guy's eyes bad?
You could look in the real universe, and find out exactly what he's hoping
he won't see. So the first drop you will get is, "Are you afraid you'll
see something?" He doesn't want to see one of these restimulators. He has
agreed that the environment is upsetting, so you'd better gradiently break
his agreement with the whole darned environment.
Sound is an invisible flow.
And it's quite aberrative because a person can't control as well that which
is invisible as he can control things that are visible. Sound, therefore,
has a terrific power over him that light doesn't. and he'll lose his hearing
acuteness before he loses his sight acuteness (or lose sonic before losing
visio, and turning on visio before turning on sonic). It's harder to control
sound because you cant't see it.
One perceptic after another
can be shut off. Perceptics can be occluded one after the other. And so,
as you pursue mock-ups, so perceptics may shift around on the preclear.
And they might be very bad today, and good tomorrow, and just horrible
the day after.
PERCEPTION BANDS
Sound, sight, heat, cold,
electrical, every perception your MEST body's got, plus about eight thousand
more, are locatable on an energy band. They are called perception bands.
What determines the kind of perception you have is the wave length of the
perception. A thetan is active at one or another parts of the band, and
not active at other parts of this perception band.
A perception is a wave length,
a characteristic wave length. Eyes for instance will gravitate to a certain
wave length. And what we're getting here is the various harmonics of affinity
that we're looking at and we can get each one modifying the wave length
of the aesthetic band. And as a net result, you will find an aesthetic,
an effort, and a regard for any of these perceptions, at each one of these
levels on the tone scale. And that means for example that telepathy can
exist at any level of the tone scale. It's a tune in, rather than going
up scale or down scale to.
Outside of the body, the
thetan has to be able to use force before he can perceive. He has to be
able to perceive before he can locate himself well in this universe. Ninety
percent of your trouble in theta clearing is wrapped up in perception.
The fellow gets outside, he says, "I can't see, I don't know what I'm looking
at...", or he says, "I see, all right, but it's another planet." or, "My
perceptions are very good, but there's about three quarters of the room
is completely black." What is missing is his ability to handle force. He's
got a big engram right there, that says, "Look, when you perceive things,
you get zapped!"
You want to make a test out
of a preclear, while talking to him, have him look out the window and start
figuring out which one he is doing, listening or looking. He gets pretty
groggy. You say, "All right, let's look. Now you're looking? Okay, now,
as you look, listen. Now as you listen, feel the weight on your feet. Now
as you fell the weight on your feet, feel your heart beating," and about
that time you will see him start reeling. You've asked him to come off
of some terrific point of concentration that he is fixated on by aberration,
and he reacts to this by becoming physically failed in his balance and
stability. That's because you are asking him to do more than one thing
at once and he knows very well it's utterly impossible to do more than
one thing at once.
PLACING PERCEPTION
Regarding perception, up
scale he places and perceives what he has placed. And in the low band,
he perceives only. And at the bottom, no perception. It goes hand in hand
with automaticity, hand in hand with sensation.
"Places perception" means,
he hands things out to be perceived. He knows so certainly how things would
be perceived if he'd enter in the scale and use energy to that degree,
that he could place it and know how it would be without inspecting it.
Like a golf champ who takes a whoomp at the ball and knows the ball is
a hundred and seventy five yards out there on the green. No strain on perception.
You even don't bother to perceive. That's a level of knowingness.
In the middle of the scale,
you've elected things out to be fifty percent automatic. You've got to
perceive about 50 % of the things, but you still know that when you perceive
you place the perception and then get it back again. You're well aware
of the fact that when you want to feel joy from that person over there
you put joy on that person and then experience the joy.
You can fish through the
ether, so to speak, take the viewpoint of that person and find out how
they are perceiving life. Just make a test of it, then you know what their
emotion, or feeling or idea is about life and you don't have to take this
relatively unnecessary step of putting an emotion onto their stream of
regard for life to find out how they're looking about it.
You got an idea this person
should be sad, he's looking at a wreck and therefore he should be sad,
so you'd have to extend over into his chain a feeling of sadness, and then
reexperience from him sadness. And you'd say, "I know he's feeling sadness."
You'd know at the same time you'd put some sadness over there so that you
could feel it.
Way on down tone scale you
look at him and you say, "He feels sad." It's all automatic by this time.
You just look at somebody and you know he ought to feel sad so you feel
sadness from him. And you omit the fact that you have set up circuits which
automatically install the sensation of sadness in him so that you can feel
it
back again. You don't inspect it in lines of ideas at all.
Your preclear is remedied
in this respect simply by having him mock up things and put the emotion
on it. You make him do this and he'll start to feel all sorts of things
as his automaticity circuits start cutting out on him.
PAIN AND UNCONSCIOUSNESS
Pain is enforced proximity
of particles. A somatic is occasioned by two particles in proximity to
each other in such a way as to make an undesirable condition. These particles
are too close together and that is a stop because these two particles can't
be shifted anymore. You get pain as a result of that. When you tell him
to handle a couple of particles, any way he handles these particles he's
liable to get pain. And that's the reason why he doesn't want to handle
these particles.
Everybody out there has
made an agreement on experience, that experience is a good thing and you
have to hide some experience and some of it has to become automatic. And
they do that by engrams, secondaries, and locks - it's a system. Everything
becomes automatic. We're going to get near something, it has a certain
stimulus, like putting a hand on a hot stove, and we're going to respond
in a certain way. And we want that as fast as possible so - and this is
the error - so we'll make it automatic.
He is then in a state of
complete obedience to the MEST universe. Let's consider the MEST universe
a hypnotist, and let's consider this preclear a subject, and find out that
the subject is as deluded as the hypnotist wants him to be.
When you can deliver enough
pain to an individual to make him dislike it, he would always rather have
some kind of a mechanism by which he didn't have to feel it. So he invents
this mechanism of, "Ow, I'm not aware in that period." That's the big lesson:
I can suspend beingness. A few times he gets caught too fast to make a
good postulate, something hits him so quick that he can't suspend beingness,
he thinks, fast enough. So he says, "Let's make this automatic, and when
anything hits me that fast, to make sure that I have a not-beingness right
then and there I will go two or three seconds before the time I was hit
by it and start not being at that point and that wipes out everything."
Whenever a person abandons
control of space, energy or objects, he's asked them to command him. To
get a person under control, you get him to abandon control of space, energy
and objects. You give him anesthesia. That takes away space of action and
beingness. He'll abandon the space he is in right there at the moment.
With the first book techniques
we succeeded in actually bringing the person up to responsibility for the
moments when he was unaware. We ran them out and brought them back into
being. And whenever we ran one out, we made him responsible for that section
of his life and it ceased to have a heavy command value on him.
PAIN AND ATTENTION
Anchor points are most quickly attracted to the points of the greatest impact. And the points of the greatest impact are the counter-efforts, which summed all together, become a body.
When a fellow all of a sudden begins to stop motion, when he just turns on the brakes - let's say the horsepower rating of this thetan was a potential milli-G (that's a new quantity I just developed) - then these ridges would stand at one milli-G. That's how much energy was radiating around this thetan.
So, when being hit by a lightning
bolt, the best way to minimize damage would be, of course, cause a rarefaction
right there and the lightning bolt goes on through. But the tendency was
instead to try to rush in toward the center to block off Mr. Lightning
Bolt, by putting a lot of particles there suddenly and letting it hit matter.
So a lightning bolt hit this condensation here at the center and a vector
started to go out. The impulse here was out. And what are the laws of motion
and emotion - "we've got to run away from this because we're scared." You
couldn't stop it, so you had to depart from it. That, in essence, is what
happens in an injury. A guy is hit and at the instant he's hit, just before
the blow strikes his skin, there's this odd one.
Fellow always get their
hands hurt before they hit the table. They know their hand is going to
hit the table and an instant before it hits the table their hand hurts.
In they come and they hit the corner of the table and it hits the hand
and their attention units or particles rush to that point to defend, and
blow off the injury, find out they can't do it, penetration continues and
those particles which rushed in now try to rush away from the injury. But
this thing is making more and more ingress all the time. And the particles
rush away and try to stop it again. And all of a sudden he goes into apathy
and he's just null. But each time he's trying to stop, stop, stop - you
can practically hear the brakes squeal on an injury.
If you're running Effort
Processing, just start to work out one of these injuries and you'll find
out that it's going this way. And you work a little further and all of
a sudden the last efforts are run and it all weakens down and bong! - there
goes the injury.
It's a pattern of rarefaction
and condensation of attention units which are rushing in periodically to
push the thing back out, finding out they can't and rushing away. Then
gathering a sort of force and coming back in to stop it again and then
pushing it away. You get the same action as you get with flows, dispersals
and ridges.
If you hurt your hand a little bit like pinching its back, you'd probably only feel it for a couple of inches around and about the injury. But if you were to hurt your hand real bad, you could hurt it so that it would shock clear up here and hurt the elbow. There attention units are rushing down the whole length of (from) the elbow and then they're dispersing back up the whole length of the elbow and then dispersing back down the whole length of the elbow - that's an energy flow and it follows the pattern of flow.
We get right here in the
center of the hit of the lightning bolt this action. There's the center
hardness, and there's an empty spot, and then scattered particles out here.
This gives you a pretty good idea of what goes on in an explosion. If you
were to take a picture of the guts and anatomy of an explosion in action,
you would find there's rarefaction condensation areas in the middle of
it.
If you were to trace these
ridges in any pattern of explosion, you'd find out they were really a flock
of spheres. Energy always bears some relationship to the characteristics
of a floating sphere.
The preclear is stopped someplace
on the time track, otherwise he wouldn't have a single ridge. He's holding
on to these particles in that formation of spherical onion skins. And he's
holding on at a high energy input incident - a few milli-Gs of impact,
way the heck and gone, back on the track.
And he's running around
with a horsepower of one grasshopper erg, and all of a sudden you say,
"All right, now let's reach out there and run that ridge." "Nooo," he says.
Because he instinctively knows what's really on those ridges.
So you're looking at the
pattern of a galaxy, you're looking at the pattern of a preclear, and you're
looking at the pattern of an atom. It has the approximation of the pattern
of an explosion. It also, to some vague fashion, has the pattern of a solar
system.
These things are all related,
because it's a pattern of a method of making a universe.
Everywhere you go in the
universe you find this rarefaction-condensation pattern.
Pain you wanted, pain was valuable. Pain has to do with attention units and various flows going this way and that way. One of the tests of being human is, can he feel pain. Doctor sticks you with pins and finds a place where you don't feel any pain. He thinks this is unusual; he only finds it in practically every patient he tests.
When a person is below 4.0, if he can't feel pain, he can't feel anything. If he can't feel pleasure, he can't feel pain. If he can feel pleasure, he feels pain. Get the identification between those two waves and two ideas and two agreements? Shouldn't be identified at all. A fellow should be able to go out and feel unlimited quantities of endless pleasure without ever once feeling a slightest twinge of pain. If you didn't have pain, you'd have no contrast so that you could feel pleasure. What the hell do you need a contrast for so you can feel pleasure?
ATTENTION
The thetan has an infinity of attention. All of these control mechanisms and other things have abused him into believing that he has an insufficiency of attention. There is no limit to the amount of attention he can have: He could be a hundred thousand people doing a hundred thousand different things and he has enough attention units to do all that. But control mechanisms have been exerted against him to a point where he believes he can be just one person and do just one thing at a time. Oh, boy, that's way down scale.
Just because he's fixing
his attention on an arbitrary point out in front of him, the chronic engrams
in which he's stuck on the track will tend to fly in on him and show up
in general. He thought for the last umpteen billion years that he had to
sit there with his attention on this ball of fire to hold it out there.
He got killed in the incident. He never found that out. His attention stopped
when he tried to stop that thing from coming in and hitting him. It stopped
there so thoroughly, he went right on and got killed, but he's still holding
it off from him. There's where his attention is stuck. Now you suddenly
put it on an arbitrary point out in some other direction and what happens?
It starts to come off of this thing and he goes on and he gets the full
sensation that he's liable to be killed at any moment.
Thetans can concentrate
their attention on any part of space they want to concentrate their attention
on and be there. Principal reason they can be there is because the space
isn't there. And the principal reason why they can concentrate their attention
any place in space is they aren't there. And the funny part of it is, any
time they believe completely that they're in one spot in space, they're
no longer able to concentrate their attention on other spots in space.
But the second that they are able to be any place in space, they can concentrate
their attention on any place in space. The amount of space a fellow has
determines the amount of attention he can demonstrate.
INTEREST
Interest alone carries a person down the track of the MEST universe. So interest alone is all that carries your preclear up the scale as a thetan - toward a higher level of beingness. Interest is the monitoring action. Where there is no interest, there isn't any insanity. Of course, there's also nothing. The state of mind with regard to past, present and future is monitored by interest in it - "Do you care?"
You want to know why theta
clearing can suddenly produce such a change of viewpoint in an individual,
I'm afraid it's contained in that data that I've just given you.
Estimation of the rate of
change of havingness is either interesting, or very interesting, or terribly
interesting, or "Oh, my God! We're lost unless..." and everything is serious
and important. What does "serious" and "important" mean? Interest is intense
because of penalty. Importance is an intense interest because of possible
penalty, and it is as intense as the penalty is envisioned to be intense
or threatening.
We have then to shift it
over to "own universe", and he has to be able to mock up a havingness or
a not-havingness on any one of the dynamics, and particularly where interest
is involved. He has to be able to create anything he is interested in and
continue an interest in it in order to get rid of MEST universe havingness
and not-havingness. And nobody's recommending to you, really, that you
get rid of this havingness and not-havingness in the MEST universe. But
I'm just telling you that the interest monitors it, and that is monitored
by one's belief that it only exists in this universe - (which is the essence
of scarcity) - that there's a penalty in leaving the universe, and the
penalty of leaving it would be the penalty of not any more having something.
REALITY AND AGREEMENT
An agreement is an inflow
and a disagreement is an outflow. A 'not-have' is an outflow and a 'have'
is an inflow. You agree with something, you have it. If you disagree with
something, you don't have it.
At forty on the tone scale,
all that happens is postulates. What's wrong with your preclear is that
nobody obeys his orders. I'm sorry to have to sum it up that fast. Because
you won't assimilate it that fast.
Reality is so obviously an
agreement that we couldn't call anything real unless we'd agreed to it.
And again, there isn't an absolute agreement, and it isn't required. You
had to agree to something before you and a couple of guys or something
of the sort could have a universe. You've decided to fix this stuff up
and something had to happen before you did that. You had to decide that
it was desirable to obtain something called a universe.
Your preclear doesn't know
any difference really between MEST universe space and his own universe
space. He has never differentiated between the two. He's still holding
on to the one and trying to view the other.
A hypnotized person can
see a whole room on fire, he can hear the flames crackle and everything
else. And it's very weird that they think they have to go along through
all this mumbo-jumbo and ritual of hypnotism and be in a state of sound
asleep and be out of control of themselves and can only see this when they're
taking orders from a hypnotist. That's the silliest thing in the world.
We naturally select out and
push out of the group those who do not agree with our MEST perceptions.
Every once in a while, a pc looking at this, he's just getting processing,
and he gets an awfully funny feeling that there's some thought he doesn't
quite dare think. And he comes close to it and he feels the plaster creak.
And then he pats it back very hurriedly and runs away from there. Well,
what he's fooling with is the small atom bomb of agreement.
He's having a tough time
with this little point. He doesn't want the responsibility of undoing the
MEST universe, because he can't handle that much energy. You get him up
to a point where he could handle this much energy, he would face that thought.
And really, actually, probably all that would happen to him is the MEST
universe would momentarily disappear for him. And then he would have to
fish around for a little while in order to get a point of reference on
the MEST universe again in order to get into it again. You just have to
be able to handle space, why, then you can get in and out of the MEST universe
like mad.
You have to agree in order
to disagree. Unless you and your arguing opponent are thoroughly agreed
upon something, you can never fight or have a game. When you see two men
beating each other up, they normally started disagreeing on the assignment
of value to something; one says, it's valuable, the other one says it's
not valuable. One guy says, "Now this is logical," and the other fellow
says, "This isn't logical." And the joke is, neither one is logical.
Agreement with the MEST
universe is similar to punishment. There isn't much difference between
the two. Unless he agrees, he'll be punished.
People know that death is
real. They know that walls and bodies are real. They know all these things
are there. And that's their level of knowingness, because they have to
cling on to a certainty of one kind or another, and that has become their
certainty. But it's a reversed side certainty. There is a higher level
of certainty - it's something he himself creates. That's a mock-up.
You'll find mock-ups are
created of energy quite often. But do they have to be created of energy?
No, the best mock-up is created of nothing. It's merely a postulate that
says it's there. And the postulate is made tough enough and strong enough
- or rather, forceless enough, so that it will pervade enough in order
to occasion the existence of something right there.
The actual capability of
the mind is the capability of producing any chain of agreement which will
wind up into any kind of a set-up. There are auditing processes that give
us a method of recovering that relatively swiftly. The road out for the
thetan is to know he can handle all this energy and then just back off
into the upper scale.
THE FILECLERK'S GUIDE TO THE PDC
CHAPTER 7