
SOLUTION TO BODY BEHAVIOR, PART II

A lecture given on 3 January 1956

The material which we're covering in this prep course is interesting 
material, very interesting material. It is a great oddity that man would 
be liable to so much in the way of quirk or oddity. The fact of his 
overt actmotivator opinions, the actual attempt on the part of the body 
to achieve, evidently, as many motivators as possible, the attitude of 
puzzlement on the part of a thetan, wondering just why this body doesn't 
get along so well, how the thetan has been rather blanked out concerning 
the actual attitude of the body, makes a picture of complexity, if not 
perplexity.

Here we have people trying to get a job done, trying to get around and 
straighten up things and live a good life, and all that sort of thing, 
and they're using a robot which is obsessed. The human body is a 
biological robot. I hope you don't mind my taking that interesting 
attitude toward it. Nevertheless, its muscular-mechanical arrangements 
are not much different than those of an electronic doll, except that it 
is intensely destructible, and it is capable of a great deal of feeling, 
and it seems to be capable of independent thought and opinions.

I know the last time I had anything to do with a robot, I said, "All 
right. Now, let's walk through this fire here," and the robot did. And 
its legs got warm, and they cooled off, and that was that.

But the last time I said to a body, "All right. Now, you stand here, 
good and solid on this bridge, while we run in under the counter of this 
burning freighter," and the body said, "Aaahhhh, no, you don't!" And I 
said, "Yes, we do," you know, and it's - argument. So, we might say that 
the body is a biological robot capable of argument.

Now, in handling this, a thetan gets rather serious. He gets the idea, 
after a while, that this problem is serious. He's been trying to handle 
it for many, many generations. He's been miscuing and, he feels, 
misdirecting these biological robots, and he has found that the 
direction of them leaves a great deal to be desired.

He doesn't know all there is to know about this. Nobody ever gave him an 
instruction book. He took one over at birth sometime or another, picked 
one up, and he looked in vain for an instruction book on how you ran 
this thing. And he was quite sure that it did not have any opinion or 
goal different than his own or the physical universe. He was quite sure 
of that. The goals of this thing were quite similar to his own, and they 
were quite similar to the physical universe; this he was sure of.

And therefore, any error which he made was his fault. Any error which 
was made in his running of this biological robot became his fault. It 
didn't run right because somehow or another he wasn't good enough, or he 
wasn't bright enough. It was quite a puzzle to him.

Now, we do not, must not and cannot assume that every thetan in this 
universe, or in any universe, is dedicated totally to the receiving of 
motivators. We must not assume that, because it's not true. He could 
align himself with this, he could get into this frame of mind, he could 
adjust his considerations this way, but he doesn't necessarily do so.

And by and large, those thetans that you will run into and say hello to, 
in the largest majority, are not subscribing to anything like "I must 
pick up as many overt acts against myself as I can." They just aren't 
doing this, that's all.

They're saying, "I'd like to have a good time. I would like to know a 
few more people. I wonder what kind of a game we can make out of this," 
you know? "A lot of people need help. We'll help them." He's doing this, 
and he's doing that. And somehow or other, however, we find - at least 
on this planet, at this time - a great many who believe utterly that 
they're failing in some fashion and cannot exactly tell us how.

Nobody gave them an instruction book, you see? They took over this body, 
probably a Mark I barbarian-type, and juggled it around and tested out 
the levers and so forth, and it apparently worked. When they said, 
"Walk," it walked; when they said, "Stop," it stopped. When they said, 
"Eat," it ate. And you know, it worked all right; worked all right. But 
it kept going wrong somehow, you know. It just kept running off of the 
rails in some fashion. They would say, "All right. Now, this is a worthy 
cause. Attack that palisade you see here." And all of a sudden, it'd go 
collapse.

"I didn't tell it to go collapse, " the thetan says. "Now, what's the 
matter with it? There are plenty of bodies. They're being made all the 
time and so forth. And it seems to me that it'd be a better world to 
make another body into if we attacked this palisade and wiped this thing 
out. And so it gets nicked, so it gets clipped, so it gets knocked off. 
Well, it can always get another mock-up. This is not tough. This is not 
hard to do." And yet it didn't do that.

So, he says, "Well," (and this was his mistake) "the body is cowardly. 
It doesn't like to use itself as a backstop for cold steel. Well," it 
says, "therefore, I am driving this thing harder than its courage level 
will tolerate. So, the thing to do is just drive it a little less - high 
courage level, you know. Just let's not be quite so adventurous."

And having been a little bit less adventurous, then, in driving it, it 
said, "All right. Now, let's attack the boss's office," and the body 
goes, "N-a-a-a-a-a-h" collapse.

The thetan says, "Oh, I guess we'll just have to lower its courage level 
a little bit. We just can't expect that much of this body. There's 
something wrong in the way I'm handling it. I'm probably mocking up on 
this switchboard the wrong combination. Something is odd here."

And about this time, about this time - in any era, when he has dropped 
down below the point of "Soldier, attack the palisade" and then dropped 
down below the point of "Worker, attack the foreman and get a couple of 
grapotniks more pay" - when it's dropped down that low, why, the thetan 
begins to worry about himself, in any era. And we find him calling on 
the gods or doing strange and peculiar things - entering into unholy 
rights, such as going to the local spa and getting some chuckupnuk water 
or something to remedy this situation.

And some of them even have gone so far as to dip into philosophy in 
order to discover something about this. And this, you could see, would 
be likely to happen in any condition where nobody had ever furnished an 
instruction book.

You see, if you were trying to run a car without any instruction book 
and you'd never had any experience with another car, you'd be having 
some interesting experiences; but they wouldn't even compare to the 
experiences of handling a body. See, because the body had, evidently, 
another built-in mechanism which says, "I must have motivators. I must 
have things done wrong to me. I must be abused. I must be put in a 
position of sacrifice. I must be offered up to the gods in some way or 
another. I must have enough people mad at me so that 1, myself, can then 
continue to exist in a calm state. I must get killed in enough bizarre 
ways to make life justified" - all these peculiar things.

Here's a thetan running something, and as far as its reaction is 
concerned and all the reactive mechanisms in it are concerned, he 
believes that he must not tell it to walk through a live fire. And here 
is something that although it is protesting against walking through a 
live fire, it feels it absolutely must have a nice overt act, like a 
burn.

Witness: It walks through the fire. Does its legs heat up? Even if 
they're not badly corroded or burned, the burn will hang on for a long 
time; the burn will stay there for a long time. You mean this biological 
machine is incapable, with its many capabilities, of healing up a burn 
rapidly, of building up a certain amount of skin area?

That's not true. It is capable of doing these things. It can heal 
itself. You mean to tell me that if it breaks a bone, that it can't put 
the bone back together again? Well, all right. You take a robot. A robot 
can't put the bone back together again, either - a metal robot.

But if you take a bent leg on a metallic robot and straighten it up and 
solder it in place, there is no aftereffect; but if you do that with a 
biological robot, there is an aftereffect. It now has something called a 
psychosomatic illness. It can't have another broken leg, so it keeps the 
old one. Get the idea?

So, a thetan unaware of this, is - and believe me, you - right here in 
this generation, he was unaware of this. He's walking down the street 
one day, and he has a twinge. And he says, "What on earth is this?" And, 
"Well, I guess I've just been pushing this body too hard. It's my fault, 
again, in some fashion or another. I've been pushing the body too hard."

And he's got another twinge. And he goes home, and he's got arthritis. 
And he calls in a doctor, and the doctor looks it over and says, "Well, 
this is caused by this or that or something or other, and we must put it 
in mudpacks or do something with it. And you must lay it up here for 
another two or three weeks, and you'll get over it."

Maybe he does. But having gotten over that, he's out walking again - 
this time it's a bright, sunshiny day, not a rainy day like the other 
time - and he has a twinge. And nobody right here in our generation 
actually, positively knew that it was simply an old broken leg, you 
know. They didn't know that it was an old injury. There was a suspicion 
that it was an old injury.

Freud, with his theory of trauma, was doing some mighty fine 
speculating, very, very fine speculating; but remember, he was 
speculating. It was an oddity that the medical profession accepted the 
theory of trauma, that some kind of a psychic trauma could occur, and it 
was an oddity that psychosomatic illness could arrive and be established 
without ever any slightest proof of source.

This is the wildest buy of this century, by the way. Nobody could prove, 
trace or do anything to actually demonstrate that such a thing as an 
arthritic swelling was traceable to mental causes. People suspected 
this, but they accepted this thing called "psychosomatic illness" 
without proof. We came along; we have the proof that there is such a 
thing as psychosomatic illness.

But we look a little bit further than that, as we're just now doing, and 
we discover that it isn't an accidental stimulus-response, unintentional 
thing. We discover this great oddity: that so far from the body being 
really victimized by the fact that the broken leg recurs - that's the 
original trauma, the broken leg, which recurs as arthritis - so far from 
this, is the fact that the body doesn't ever want to give up that lovely 
broken leg. You see?

There is actually, evidently, not just a stimulus-response mechanism 
here, but an actual desire on the part of a body (which, of course, goes 
through many inversions, and so forth) to continue to have a broken leg. 
We won't worry about the number of reasons it can have a broken leg or 
how it justifies this. We can immediately arrive at forty or fifty ways 
of justifying the body's state of mind concerning a broken leg. You see, 
we can really do that.

We can say, "Well, a broken leg gets attention; it got sympathy. There 
were certain rewards for having a broken leg. The body didn't have to 
work; it could take it easy." We can do all these various 
justifications, and believe me, if you want to go over the whole list of 
them, there are probably fifty, sixty of them. They're good and solid, 
but they're only rationale. They are after this interesting fact: The 
body wanted a broken leg. The others are just "why a body wanted a 
broken leg," you understand. First and foremost, it wanted a broken leg.

So, here's a thetan, he decides that he'll have a good time. He'll have 
a couple of drinks of beer, and he'll go home now. And he takes his 
attention for one moment off this robot. He thinks he has its automatic 
pilot nicely set, you know. It's going to walk right on down the 
sidewalk. And he takes his attention off of it, and it steps off the 
curb and bumps into a truck.

And he says, "Isn't this careless of me." He's been taught, sort of, by 
the body to blame himself. The body never blames itself - never! Has 
never been known to blame itself about anything. It always has to blame 
the other guy. Doesn't operate like a thetan, then. Thetan can blame 
himself

He says, "Look what I did. I got careless." He doesn't even go so far as 
to say, "What a lousy automatic pilot this thing's got!"

If you were to take your directional control off of a biological robot 
anywhere in London, outside of the house and so forth, you wouldn't have 
any biological robot left, that's all. It'd be gone - squash! All right.

Now, if you had, you might say, a metallic robot or some chemical robot 
walking along and you set it to walk in a straight line, it wouldn't get 
any other ideas; it'd just walk in a straight line. Maybe it'd strike an 
unevenness of ground which would tip it over, but you could have seen 
that in advance. You'd say, "Look, there's an unevenness of ground down 
there. I'll set this thing to walk a little bit shorter with the right 
leg than the left leg when it hits that unevenness, and it'll get over 
that," see? In other words, you could predict the course of this 
metallic robot.

Oh, you set up a biological robot to walk over this course: You're lost 
in the woods, so you set the automatic pilot. You say, "This thing must 
have some homing instinct or another; even pigeons do that," and you set 
it to walk home. The next thing you know, you notice some curious 
footprints. You say, "There's somebody else lost in the woods." A little 
bit later you notice another set, and then you say, "Good lord, they're 
mine!"

Well, this, of course, makes you wrong. So, it looks like the body has, 
as part of this thirst for a motivator, an obsession to make something 
else or somebody else wrong. It looks like this is just a straight-out 
built-in mechanism. It doesn't have a good automatic pilot, but it 
certainly has a good make-you-wrong mechanism.

And when a thetan agrees too long and too hard with a body, he begins to 
pick this up too. He begins to look around for somebody else to blame. 
He gets tired of blaming himself; that was all he did for several 
generations, and now he's decided to blame something else for a change, 
he says. But he's actually learned the mechanism one way or the other, 
usually, from the body.

And when he does this, he's in too close in agreement with the body. And 
you, an auditor, come along and you start to process him. You say, "you" 
to him, and he thinks you're talking about and to him, a body. Got it?

So, this condition of "I am a body," is a state of beingness attained by 
thetans who have failed for too many generations to understand or run a 
biological robot, and that's just the totality of it. He just failed too 
long, too often, so he adopts other means of rationale. He says, "I am a 
body. I will die." He just adopts the philosophy of this thing, because 
it has been a champion, as far as he's concerned.

It was incomprehensible. Starting from a state of no instruction book, 
it arrives at a totality of bewilderment, as far as he's concerned. But 
the only bewildering factors in the mock-up - and I will put this very 
strongly to your attention: The only actually bewildering factors in it 
were, one, "Somebody else must be wrong; I can only receive injury."

Now, those two factors are completely bewildering to a thetan, because 
both of them say, "Don't get any job done, if you please. Don't get any 
job done." It says, "In order to correct the fortunes of Earth, we will 
have to attack Russia. Russia can be wrong; we can't be wrong. 
Therefore, there is no reason whatsoever to straighten out our own 
household; there is every reason to attack somebody else's household." 
Do you get the idea?

Which is the very germs of war. "We must always straighten out way over 
here someplace or go way over thataway in order to get anything done, 
because they're wrong; we're never wrong."

Now, if a fellow has a number of factors sitting right in front of him 
which are rather easy to adjust, and he never takes a moment to adjust 
these factors, he's going to get into an interesting condition. He's 
going to run into the wrongness of somebody else, but he's going to be 
tripped by the wrongness which is in front of his own face and in his 
own house. You get the idea?

It isn't necessarily true that he should correct everything that is 
wrong in his own house before he corrects somebody else. See, that's 
fallacy too. You can correct both of them at the same time. But don't 
become totally unaware of the fact that there might be some factors that 
need shifting around close to home.

With what wonderful aplomb can a nation adventure upon war, to correct 
some ideological eccentricity on the part of some other nation; itself, 
all the while, worshiping mud turtles. This is the kind of thing that a 
thetan will do, by the way, because there really isn't anything wrong 
with him, except maybe a little lack of understanding. Got the idea?

But a thetan is still capable of saying, "Boy, there's an awful lot of 
this machinery we're using right here that needs fixing, and it's a good 
game to go over and run into some of their machinery too." But that's 
the way a thetan would look at it. He could look at it rationally unless 
he's driven blindly by these impulses of "We're all perfect here, see, 
and therefore we're going to attack over there because over there is the 
only area that needs any straightening out," see? A thetan would be nuts 
if he did that, and a body is that crazy.

It says, "I'm perfect. They're wrong." At the same time, it is saying, 
"I can only receive injury and be put upon. My total goal is to be put 
upon or to receive injury." It's utterly mad. It is not a logical 
sequence. And an understanding of that, of course, does make it a 
logical sequence.

You can always understand an illogic. And there's where the body could 
lose 100 percent: You can understand an illogic. You can understand that 
something thinks that kiddies' blocks and tank cars are identical.

Now, you might at first protest against this, but you could say to 
yourself, "Well, I can understand how that thing believes that kiddies' 
blocks and tank cars are identical. I understand that it does so. It's 
not logical; it's illogical. It is stupid. But I can still see that it 
does so."

Therefore, you could say about your body, "I still understand that this 
body can never do anything like straightening itself out. It's always 
got to wrong or find wrong somebody or something else. Somebody and 
something else, you see, is the wrongness, and the only intention which 
the body can accept is, of course, injury to itself."

You can understand these two things as a modus operandi, but it 
certainly doesn't run like a thetan, does it? It looks like a big overt 
act on the part of somebody who mocked them up, see? It looks like a 
nice swindle, it looks like a nice problem of some kind or another.

It's an interesting problem right there, if you want to look at it as a 
problem, is how come they got built this way? Because if you were a 
thetan building something and you wanted to play a good, solid practical 
joke on somebody, you are actually not above giving them a gimmick which 
makes their switchboard short out every thirty-sixth hour of its 
operation; you're no above doing that. It's a good gimmick to do 
something like that, but you don't expect it to go on like that forever.

You expect that sooner or later they're going to find out that their 
switchboard is shorting out every thirty-sixth hour and then, having 
found it out, will find out you did it, and then realize they've been 
had. Otherwise, there's no cream to the jest, you see? There's no reason 
to do anything unless somebody is going to discover it sooner or later.

And I don't think that the biological robot's mechanism of motivator 
hunger was ever intended to be discovered. I don't think so, for the 
good reason that - I've been working on this problem for a quarter of a 
century, and during the last five years a lot of you good chaps have 
been working on this problem right along with me, too. And it wasn't 
until very recent - we even had the principle of the overt act-motivator 
sequence. We knew that if you did something to somebody, you expect it 
back. The body doesn't do that. It is simply motivator hungry. And to do 
an overt act is unthinkably horrible, see?

Well now, maybe you could justify this, but only on the basis of 
complete distrust of every life form that ever lived. You could say 
therefore there is no such thing as an ethic or moral principle or 
factor anywhere in the world or anywhere in the universe. You could say 
that no life form is capable of an ethical act.

If you believed that badly, you could rig up a mock-up to keep him in 
line, but listen, that mock-up wouldn't keep him in line. It'd make him 
a criminal. So, the goal of it isn't justified, either. So, we look in 
vain for a good reason for this condition to happen with regard to this 
biological mock-up.

If it were a practical joke, it would have been discovered a long time 
since. If it were done to make you moral, ethical and fall into line, 
there are just too many other ways of going about it which are rather 
practical. You don't put every doll you have out of action in order to 
have a well-arranged and obedient horde of dolls. You don't knock them 
all flat, you know.

So, we could wander around at great length in the midst of a logical 
labyrinth of contradictions to say, "How did the body get this way?" We 
could say, "Well, it got hit and hit until it finally developed a thirst 
for being hit."

Oh, now wait a minute. That's fine. That's good. That's one of my 
explanations, real good; it's real sharp. I thought of it myself. But 
you'd have to have a patterned consideration in order to make that 
happen, you see? You'd have to consider that this was going to happen 
before the condition would happen. So again, it's not a logical sequence 
of events but is an expected sequence of events.

One would have to say, "This mock-up, after it's been hit so often, will 
develop a thirst for being hit." Ah, that's no good. You mean, the 
thing's going to develop such a thirst for being hit, it'll gradually 
vanish.

All right. Let's get over into something very new and very sharp and 
very practical -Axiom 55. Do you want to hear a little bit about Axiom 
55, hm?

Audience: Yeah.

All right. Axiom 55 could be stated with very scholarly words. It could 
probably be stated with great length and unctuousness. But the fact of 
the matter is, Axiom 55's sense is as follows: Any cycle of action is a 
consideration. Any cycle of action is a consideration. It's not an 
inevitability.

The cycle of action of this universe, which is create, survive, destroy, 
is a consideration and does not necessarily hold true, is not 
necessarily true for any part of this universe at any given instant, but 
is simply a consideration.

It's interesting because it wipes out what was to be Six Levels of 
Processing, Issue 6. Now, you're sitting here looking at Issue 7, you 
wonder what happened to Issue 6. I'm always doing that to somebody. But 
the goal and modus operandi of Issue 6 was stated; it was stated very 
clearly. It was stated in just so many words in a recent Operational 
Bulletin, which is circulated to HAS staffs from my office.

You're not missing anything. It's mostly gossip and my general bad 
temper. I have to make everybody think I'm good tempered, you know, and 
a nice chap; but it gets to be a strain after a while, because I'm not, 
you know. And so, I at least issue these Operational Bulletins, with all 
these catty remarks and so forth that I dam up, to the staff.

And anyway, the Six Levels of Processing, Issue 6 was advertised in this 
Operational Bulletin to be something which put the stress on create so 
as to get the chap over to the earliest portion of the cycle of action. 
And that was fine. And so, I then proceeded to make a series of tests 
and investigations concerning the exact processes which would do this. 
And I found out they were just fine, and I found out they were all 
limited.

And I said, "What is this?" see? Wow. They're just fine, and they're all 
limited. They run just so far, they improve just so far, and then they 
cave in. Why?

Looked it over closely and found out that the second you ran out the 
consideration or tampered or monkeyed up the consideration of "create, 
survive, destroy" by running "create, create, create," you were no 
longer taking the fellow to the first part of the curve; you might be 
taking him to the end of the curve. You get the idea? You might be 
finishing up his time for him as well as starting it, you see?

So therefore, they just ran just long enough to unsettle the agreement 
of the cycle of action. And without his cognition of the fact that this 
agreement had been unsettled, we then discovered the unworkability of a 
cycle of action. It's quite interesting.

So, I looked this over a little closer and got a little smarter and 
realized where I had first heard of the cycle of action. It's Vedic hymn 
number 4, "Hymn to the Dawn Child," the oldest piece of writing man has 
any record of. And it says that all things follow this curve. It isn't 
very flowery language, but it says they get born, and they grow, and 
they - so on, and they finally kick off.

But that's about the earliest piece of stuff that man has. It was 
traditional for thousands of years before it was written down; and 
having been written down, it's still the oldest piece of writing he has. 
See, that's pretty ancient.

So, I became suspicious. It looked to me like anything that would 
survive that long would be the least admired thing around. It's using 
our old law of "Those things which are least admired persist."

And then I looked over a chap by the name of J.C. and realized that 
there's a rather large organization dedicated to having us believe that 
a fellow was born, lived a life of the greatest piety and service, and 
was then crucified like a miserable criminal and then was born again. 
And this sure looked to me like a cycle of action, advertised. It looked 
to me like an advertisement much better done than the Bovril 
advertisements, over a long period of time.

Here you had a chap stuck on a cross, like a common criminal, that 
people were supposed to worship. Do you know that Christianity was at 
once - one time was actually booted out of an Eastern nation because the 
head of that nation could not understand why anyone would want to take 
its headman and disgrace him to that degree? And he got such a poor 
opinion of anybody who would display his headman on a cross with spikes 
in him that he disallowed Christianity throughout the whole of his 
kingdom and wouldn't let anybody come in or talk about it anymore, 
because he said it must be awfully degraded.

Well, knowing these little odds and ends and these little items and 
having some good idea that we might not be dealing with the purest of 
the pure - this has nothing whatsoever to do with Christ or whether he 
really lived or anything of the sort; but it does have to do with the 
fact that we have an advertised cycle of action for the last two 
thousand years of "He came to grief by being a good man," you know?

"He was born, he survived for a while, and in spite of all that power, 
they still did him in. And of course, that will happen to you, too. Ha! 
You know, that will happen to you, too. It doesn't matter how good you 
are, how much good you do, or anything else."

And then we get this chap:

"The boast of heraldry, and the pomp of pow'r, / And all the beauty, all 
that wealth e'er gave, / Await alike the coming of the hour: / And paths 
of glory lead but to the grave."
(Part of a poem entitled "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," 
written by English poet Thomas Gray (1716 - 1771).)

Cheerful little piece, you know? Looks to me like this is a swindle. 
Does seem to me that it is, because it doesn't hold true.

There are numerous incidents in this universe, in terms of absolute 
mechanical, chemical things, where this principle of "create, survive, 
destroy" does not hold true - just doesn't hold true.

Take the cycle of matter. Matter is quite interesting. It comes from a 
sort of a radioactive point, which is hardly a creation; it's a 
nothingness. And then we seem to get some matter in a radioactive form. 
And then as it exhausts itself, we fall into a solid. Doesn't look like 
decay at all. It looks like survive is on the end of the cycle. No decay 
occurs.

As far as the radioactive material is concerned, there's some decay with 
it, and as long as we take a partiality to one item that we're studying 
and saying, "radioactive material," we can see something vaguely similar 
to a cycle of action there. But if we look at the actual energy of this 
radioactive material, we find out it sets itself up and survives and 
then goes on and creates things. Isn't that cute? I mean, there's 
something wrong.

You have to think it over. And don't worry too much about thinking it 
over, because there isn't any real cycle of action there, anyhow. So, 
the whole thing gets kind of slippery under your hands.

We can then consider, and with ease we can consider this, since it is 
our earliest consideration and one which is with us all the time, 
because it is the fundamental of the biological robot. You got that, 
now? A thetan doesn't believe this. He couldn't possibly believe this 
100 percent because it's not workable.

You mean to say that after he studies how to become a bricklayer, age in 
and age out, he will eventually decay? No, he'll be a good bricklayer.

Yeah, but you say, "Then if he lays bricks for a while, he'll decay." 
Why? He run out of bricks or something? He can determine that he's now 
tired of bricklaying and do something else, or he can become a master 
bricklayer, or he can do other things with regard to bricklaying, but 
it's not necessarily true that everything he picks up is going to bring 
him to destruction.

And that is what the cycle of action seeks to teach you: that anything 
you pick up or anything you do will bring you to destruction; that if 
you begin to write, you'll go stale in two or three years, and that will 
be the end of your writing career.

You understand that? That if you join a circus and become a performer, 
after a while, you will come to grief. Your tightrope will snap. Not 
necessarily true at all. It might snap and you might land in the net and 
build a better tightrope.

But it is laid in as an almost unarguable fact in these biological 
mock-ups. They are born, they grow, they decay, they die. And boy, we 
just watch that cycle, and we watch that cycle, till the best thing we 
know, as we see John Jones walk down the street, is someday we're going 
to bury him. That's the best thing we know about John Jones.

We see a little boy, we know that he'll grow up. Of course, in this 
Atomic Age, we don't know that as clearly anymore. But we see him, and 
we know he's going to grow up and he'll get married, and then he'll slop 
off and he'll die.

Why? Why? We know that a mammal grows one-sixth of its total life. 
That's another law that comes out of all this. It's quite interesting. 
Nearly all mammals except man grows one-sixth of its normal life span. 
It's an interesting law. For instance, if you grew for ten years, you 
would live to the age of sixty. That is one of the little laws that 
comes out of this.

It applies to every mammal but man; it doesn't apply to man. Man grows 
for eighteen years and lives to be' seventy. But it goes - it even 
applies to sharks and elephants and snakes and all kinds of bric-a-brac, 
so that we have here an interesting thing. We have, with the animal 
kingdom, we seem to have a certain law of growth and death.

And we say, "Well, this is a good thing because the whole world would be 
populated by sharks if sharks didn't die sooner or later." Oh, I don't 
know that it would be. How about getting a cycle of action for sharks 
that they were born and created in full maturity and then dwindled 
gradually away, you see, to birth, and then disappeared. You don't have 
to have them destroyed; you could have them becoming more and more 
active and younger and younger.

Now, it takes a little consideration, rather than persuasion from me, to 
look over and discover the falsity of the cycle of action. There's no 
reason why you, right at this moment, could not advance in time up to 
the age of twenty-one years and look it and then stay there. No reason 
why you couldn't do thatexcept the consideration that "All things are 
born and survive and then die."

And if you're sold on that one, as a thetan, and if your body continues 
to be sold on that one all the way along, of course, it will be true. 
But Axiom 55, a cycle of action - any cycle of action is only a 
consideration. And you start fooling around with this, and it gets quite 
interesting as you find out that there are an - infinite numbers of 
cycle of action. They can do the darnedest things, and they don't 
necessarily have to follow this body curve.

So, there was another little gimmick to know about this biological 
mockup that should have been in an instruction book you should have been 
issued. It should have said, "Mark I Barbarian is furnished with a 
series of beliefs of which this is one: that there exists such a thing 
as a cycle of action, and that anything which is born will then grow, 
and anything which grows will then decay and anything which decays will 
then die.

"And this is an installed mechanism, which you find just two centimeters 
south-southeast of the medulla oblongata. And this is installed so as to 
keep the Malthus theory from working out; but in times of stress, when 
you are losing your husband, it is two centimeters south-southeast of 
the medulla oblongata. And the age scale on the cycle of action can be 
reset to sixteen."

See, that's different - different sort of thing. That would be the sort 
of thing if somebody had played this fair. They issue you a mock-up, and 
then they don't tell you how it works. Well, you don't even know who 
issued you the mock-up. That's the least its instruction book should 
say, "Made by the War Ministry First Roman Legion," something of the 
sort, "Issue:	Speed: 130 paces to the minute."

Well, when something defeats you as often as a body, in that you have 
certain goals and predictions, and then you're unable to reach them, you 
begin to get superstitious after a while because logical has failed; and 
religion and all sorts of other things start to enter in. That's the 
long and short of it. You begin to consult the gods because you didn't 
have an instruction book. Somebody has to know.

And this has nothing to do with the fact there may or may not be gods. 
There are gods; there are plenty of them around, but I don't think 
they're watching the sparrows fall.  I think that was another piece of 
propaganda.

Now, here we have a condition where an individual is defeated. And so, 
yes, he's defeated because he does not predict well. He says, "I am not 
predicting well."

He said, "This mock-up is going to walk from point A to point C and is 
going to arrive at point C." Biological mock-up doesn't do that. It 
starts at A, and unless it is readjusted, guided, and predicted with 
every step, it doesn't arrive at C. It arrives over here at point X, 
see? X marks the spot where the body was found.

You set it up to go in any particular direction. You say, "Now, I'm 
going to teach this whole thing how to lay bricks," and it winds up to 
be a very, very fine ditch digger; somehow or other can't lay bricks. 
You don't know why, but it just can't seem to lay bricks. You know how 
to lay bricks, and it just doesn't lay bricks, that's all.

You say, "Well, I'm going to teach this thing to become a piano player. 
Fine. We're going to play the piano. Everything is going to be fine. And 
we're going to run along and it's going to be a good piano player." And 
it goes just so long, and it ceases to be a piano player. You invest 
seven, eight, ten years at the piano, and at the end of that time you're 
a complete failure. And you say, "What on earth is this all about? I 
mean, naturally, the more I practice on the piano and the more used I 
get to playing a piano, the better piano player I'd be," but it doesn't 
work that way with a body, because a body is following a cycle of 
action.

You create a new skill, the skill will grow for a while, then it will 
decay, and then you can't play the piano anymore. Well, this is a wild 
thing to have happen. You mean, the mock-up has got a say in this whole 
thing? Well, that's all right. It's perfectly all right for another 
mock-up to have a say in the whole thing, as long as you're a mock-up; 
but you're not a mock-up.

You try to use a body along a certain ethical pattern, you try to get it 
into good shape, you try to straighten it up and make it survive and 
live and somehow or other carry on and be a credit to all hands, and 
when you finally get up, why, somebody drops it in a box and pats it in 
the face with a spade. Doesn't seem to be much of a reward for all your 
activity.

And this seems to be the inevitable fact. This is something from which 
you can't escape. This is it. Well, it looks to me like it's a strange 
and peculiar little rat race a guy gets into. That's the way it's going 
to be; that's the way it is.

Well, I don't know any reason at all why it should be that way at all 
because, in the first place, I have occasionally looked at some kind of 
a machine that was very difficult to run. I remember a monocycle - you 
know, monocycles are quite interesting. Did you ever try to run a 
monocycle? Just one wheel and a crossbar across the top of it, and it 
has a couple of pedals like a tricycle, you know. And if you balance the 
pedals just right, this monocycle will stand up on one wheel, and you 
sit up there and go round and round in circles and so forth.

I took a look at this monocycle and got up on the top of it and ran it 
round and round in circles and stopped and stepped down off of it. 
Fellow came in and said, "What are you doing? It takes a long time to 
learn how to run one of those."

And I said, "Oh, it does?" and got on the monocycle again and fell flat 
on my face. Now, something had believed him.

Now, we at least, a few years ago, rooted up this idea of the cycle of 
action. We brought it into view and said, "This is a very, very 
important principle." Latterly, during the days of Scientology, we have 
still said, "That's quite an important principle, that 'create, survive, 
destroy."' And as long as we were laying our bricks, you might say, in a 
good solid agreement with mock-ups and we weren't pushing them around 
too hard and we weren't trying any wild stunts, this is true; the cycle 
of action stayed there, and so on.

But the second that we really started to use modern techniques and 
include with those modern techniques that the cycle of action was a 
fact, not just a consideration, we found out the cycle of action didn't 
hold - didn't hold.

You get a guy - create, create, create, create, and at first he starts 
to wind up, you know, earlier; and at first he does all right, and he 
finds his position and tone change, and then all of a sudden, he'll do a 
skid, and he's liable to wind up anyplace.

What he does, actually, is run out the fact that "create" is at the 
beginning of the cycle of action. See, he just runs this out. And this 
leaves him adrift, without any understanding, somewhere on a cycle of 
action he has himself not determined. In other words, the cycle of 
action itself can be run out.

Now, it's an interesting thing that if the cycle of action were not a 
consideration, the most horrible, grimmest thing that you could imagine 
would be laid in your laps. If it were actually an unalterable fact, if 
it were actually native to the beingness of a thetan, you would have to 
confront something pretty grim, and this grim thing would be this: That 
anytime you tried to make anything better, you would regret it.

Now, if you look that over carefully, you will see how it works. You try 
to make something better, you will follow a cycle of action with it; and 
the end of the cycle of action is destroy. So, you are trying to run 
only part of the cycle of action. But the actuality is you don't start 
to make something better until it's well decayed. It needs repair. So, 
now you're trying to turn the cycle of action backwards, and running 
backwards in time is regret. The definition of regret is to return 
something through time, to run time backwards.

If you ask somebody to do this, by the way, just as an exercise - to run 
an engram backwards a couple of times - he'll start regretting it. The 
emotion of regret is a run backwards.

So, the cycle of action, if it were true, would cause you to regret 
every bettering action which you took. You would be inevitably dedicated 
to crucifixion by trying to better the human race.

In other words, they've even blocked that lowest-level step "Who can you 
help?" If the cycle of action is true, you can't better anything or 
anybody without winding up sacrificed yourself. And that chap they've 
got impaled on the cross is an advertisement of this which says, "You'd 
better not improve the human race. You'd better not do anything about 
this." It's the warning, like the big sign on the empty dog kennel which 
says, "Ferocious dog. Beware." Only there's no dog in the kennel, except 
this one thing: cycle of action.

Isn't that fascinating? It tells us that we'd better not help anybody. 
Well, you can look back over it, you can prove this to yourself. You 
know there's some chap that you've tried to help, and you sure regretted 
it.

Well, the whole race is getting a better and better agreement on this. 
If nobody is going to better anything anywhere, I ask you, if you 
please, how is it ever going to wind up in anything but "destroy"?

That is the surest way in the world, then, to confirm the cycle of 
action. That is the surest way in the world to keep everybody convinced 
that the cycle of action exists - is to let nobody help anything. If you 
help anything, you'll be destroyed, of course. You'll regret it; that's 
the least that will happen to you. But just the forward motion of time, 
all by itself, does not carry with it the cycle of action.

By the way, just an understanding of this, just a good grip on this, 
just looking over how it might be arranged otherwise, just looking over 
the factors involved in it, just finding an example or two where it 
doesn't hold true, and all of a sudden you become free, just to that 
degree; you become much freer. Because it tells you, "Look, you can make 
yourself better, you can make anybody else better, and there's no 
slightest incursion of karma as a result thereof"

It doesn't matter who you help. You can help people. You can make things 
better. You can repair a car, if you want to; it will be a better car. 
It won't just destroy you.

Now, it's an odd thing for a self-enforcive mechanism of this character 
to be built into this biological mock-up. I'd say that it had more to do 
with philosophy than good, solid biology or electronics. And I think 
somebody was stretching a point.

I wouldn't build a robot like that if I were that. If I were building 
some robots, I'd like to have some robots that were good robots that 
would be active and operative. I wouldn't build a line of operating 
robots which would build new robots, you know, and wipe out the old 
robots and then fix it up so that anytime you tried to repair a robot, 
you'd wind up wrecked, see? I wouldn't fix it up that way.

I'd be a better craftsman. I'd have more respect for myself and what I 
was making. I don't mean that as any snide comment, but I just do have 
ideas on this line. I have ideas of what is ethical and what isn't 
ethical. I wouldn't build a chain of robots that would eventually wind 
up to be lousy robots that would just get worse and worse as robots, you 
know; that issue by issue, from Mark I to Mark X to the nth, would just 
get worse.

Wouldn't do that, unless I wanted to get even with somebody, or unless I 
myself were afraid of all life forms, or unless I were doing something 
odd or peculiar that I wouldn't do. Or unless I were just playing a 
joke.

Now, you could have your own speculations concerning this of just why 
you'd go about this or what you'd do about this, and it's an interesting 
philosophical field; but all the philosophy about it, again, is just the 
why. It's the rationale on the fact. The fact is there.

Now, I don't know how many of you have had anybody mock up something and 
then have it - various parts of that mock-up - be considered by him a 
threat to the body. I don't know how many of you have done this or how 
many of you have run anything vaguely resembling problems. But if you 
run these, the principles about which I am talking to you are very 
easily demonstrated. These are some of the easiest principles to 
demonstrate.

It is obvious that you do not want to be eaten by tigers, that you do 
not want your body to be eaten by tigers, right? In fact, you don't want 
to have anything to do with tigers. If a tiger came walking in the room 
this moment licking his chops, you would say, "Well, let's see, where 
can I put this mock-up? How flat can I press it against the ceiling?"

Now, the mock-up, however, doesn't think that way. It actually has an 
impulse in it which would say, "Aahh, tiger. Dine well, tiger. Have 
another arm." And you've gotten this in dream states when you were a 
kid. A terrific danger shows up, and you're not able to run from it; you 
just stand there. That is the body's action. The body either stands 
there or walks into the menace.

Now, the proof of this is the reactions on this basis, the reactions are 
quite interesting. And you have somebody mock up a ravenous tiger, and 
then have him get the idea that that tiger and the ground the tiger is 
standing on is totally there as a threat and menace to the mock-up, and 
the distance between the tiger and the mock-up goes slurp - no distance. 
There is a hunger in the mock-up to be in the tiger and to have the 
tiger in the mock-up. Quite interesting. There is a starvation for 
distance closure. Wow!

Now, this is compounded additionally by having this fact: If you ran the 
process "Invent a specific problem a tiger could be to you," you would 
find the body just going, "Slurp. Oh, boy. Oh, luscious. Mmm, lovely."

Well, now, you want to keep the mock-up on the road and keep things 
squared around and keep life running. Well, you're not going to keep 
life running being hungry for being eaten by tigers, see. So, you don't 
want tigers to dine; and the body would just love to have a tiger dine.

Have you ever run an eating engram off of the track somewhere? Have you 
ever run an old past-life genetic-line eating engram and gotten the 
point where "Oh, boy. Now I'm really serving. I'm being eaten," you 
know. "Lovely, lovely, lovely on being all et up. Isn't that gorgeous." 
I don't think you feel that way.

Well, something feels that way, and it's the biological robot. It says, 
"Oh, boy, being et up. Oh, fine. Tigers. Oh, wonderful. Look at the 
truck coming in over the top of me. Ha! That'll squash me in a couple of 
seconds. Lovely!"

Did you ever see such an avidity to quit in your life? Now, you wonder 
why somebody didn't issue you an instruction book. I think it would have 
been all very well. I think, to many a thetan, you could have issued a 
very specific instruction book and the thetan could have read it from 
beginning to end, and he never would have believed any part of it. It's 
too incredible.

But we have to take these things into account if we're going to separate 
a thetan from one of these biological robots or get one of these 
biological robots straightened out. Number one, you do not have to 
assume that a biological robot will always inevitably follow a cycle of 
action. This is not necessary to assume that at all. You can change 
considerations concerning that. You can get the biological robot in much 
better shape by getting it capable of receiving orders of any kind or 
being willing to give orders of any kind. You can practically civilize 
one by running processes of this kind. You can get these vacuums and 
weak universes and starvation mechanisms eradicated by running problems 
of one kind or another. You can do things with this biological robot 
today in Scientology that you couldn't do before.

I don't guarantee that you will make it a perfect robot. I, myself, if I 
were going to get a perfect robot, would go up to Marcab or someplace 
and pay a few grabutniks into the factory and get a nice mechanical 
robot issued. You know, one that had an automatic pilot, and when you 
said, "Walk from point A to C," it would arrive at C. It's possible to 
play a game with such a robot.

It's also, to some degree, possible to play a game with one of these 
biological robots - to some degree - if they're straightened out. But I 
don't know how anybody could play a game with one, actually, unless he 
himself had a good command of the exact modus operandi on which it was 
working, which is, give it a chance to fail, and it'll fail. Give it a 
chance to get injured, and it'll get injured. At the least propitious 
moment, it gets sick. It does anything illogical it can think of, 
evidently, to defeat the purposes of the game.

These are not thinkingnesses; they are simply considerations built into 
a mass, just like the command "I am a wall" is that wall. You get the 
idea? That wall is a wall. It is a wall because it is a solid command 
which says, "a wall." It also says, "I am solid," and "I'm enduring." 
Now, when you want to see that wall, you have to be willing and able to 
receive the order "I am a wall" or the statement "I am a wall" in order 
to see the wall. You see that.

Now, if you have a biological mock-up that says, "I am sweetness and 
light, and I mean to serve you to the end of your days," but which is 
actually cutting your theta throat from one end to the other, it simply 
has a number of commands of this character built into it, and that is to 
say, "Injury is better than anything we know about." Sounds horrible, 
doesn't it? "The cycle of action is an inevitable fact." It has enormous 
numbers of concepts built into it. They are not thinkingnesses any more 
than that wall is a thinkingness, and yet the biological robot will 
function within this realm of action. And therefore, if you knew the 
realm in which it was functioning, and you knew the limits in which it 
was functioning, you would then not be very surprised, so as to be 
thrown out of order with regard to your own prediction, when it didn't 
quite go the way you intended it to go.

If you had an instruction book, it would cease to have power over you to 
the extent that any failure on its part became a failure on your part. 
Do you see that?

Audience: Mm-hm.

And an understanding of this, all by itself, would serve to assist you, 
a thetan, to be much freer than you ever were before.

Thank you.

Male voice: Thank you.

