
GAMES PROCESSING APPLIED TO AUDITING

A lecture given on 14 February 1956

Okay. Well, not having anything to talk to you about, I think that it's 
possibly best if we go into a rsum of games, and talk a little bit 
about games and talk briefly about their comparisons and so forth to 
processing, and the handling of life and preclears as a result thereof. 
Would you like to hear about that?

Audience: Yes.

All right. The main difficulty in understanding life is the answer to 
the question "Why?" And let me show you at once why this is a difficult 
question.

It is obvious that the only thing that does a thetan any good, really - 
very obvious - is separateness. This is the most obvious thing you ever 
witnessed. You can put somebody in an auditing room and ask them to get 
things they are separate from, one after the other, and their tone will 
start to rise and do a very nice job of coming up the line.

If they don't mess up any energy in any way, if they are run very 
smoothly with no breaks in the Auditor's Code, actually they just come 
right on up. It's an almost - has to be almost an impossibly smooth job 
of auditing however, because somewhere along the line something may 
happen that lets them slip a little bit.

Well now, if we do that, and if this is very beneficial to the being we 
call a thetan, to a human being, then we must ask this question: What in 
the name of common sense is he doing getting all messed up with 
havingness? Why do we see chaps going around driving these 
eighty-nine-ton lorries and just loving it, you know? If it's so good 
for him to be separate, why on earth does he insist on being connected? 
For if we run "Tell me some part of this room with which you are 
connected," he goes down, down, down and out the bottom.

So obviously there's no sense to it. There's no sense to any of this. We 
say, "All right. It's very interesting. An individual goes out and he 
keeps getting run into and he runs into things and he eventually 
develops an obsessive inflow. And out of this inflow, he thinks he is 
being separate when he's being connected and he gets badly mixed up. And 
after that he doesn't know what he's doing, he merely gets confused, and 
he becomes a - oh, a human being, a Homo sapiens or something." You 
understand? All right.

Now, why, though? Why does a thetan who runs only on postulates and 
considerations - and of this we are very sure - why does this being have 
such a mechanism that will invert? So you hit him with a bullet, now he 
wants to be hit with bullets. This is a fact. You could operate on 
somebody to a point of where he begs to be operated on. I've seen men 
lying in hospitals, lying there and smiling and so forth; they were all 
very happy, you know, because they were going to be operated on the next 
morning. Tzzzuhh! And I have seen - I have seen men lying in hospitals 
in a white, cold, rage at all the medical doctors around and about, 
because the medical doctors refused to operate upon them.

Well now, that's a funny state for a being to get into. We must then be 
able to say, "Well, it must be that he really can't get into any trouble 
and he's playing a sort of a joke on himself. He's pretending he can get 
messed up and he really can't get messed up, and really then it's all 
his fault, and he's as strong as he ever was." Only this doesn't obtain. 
We start processing this individual and we find him lost somewhere in 
the shuffle and unable to generate any further power or activity such as 
he was once capable of doing.

Now, what about this? This sounds completely mad. And it is. Here we 
have this individual, he does go down Tone Scale, he does need to be 
picked back up Tone Scale. And the fact of the matter is that whereas he 
will always exteriorize - when he, to be technical, kicks the bucket - 
he will always exteriorize. He doesn't leave a bunch of dead, 
underpowered thetans scattered in the body, he just shoves off. Whereas 
this does happen, he does need help.

Well, how does this being ever come to need help? How could he possibly? 
How could anybody ever need any help if at any time that his body 
expired, he simply went free and there he was in an ideal state, flying 
around through the clouds or nirvana or someplace?

Now, immediately we have these considerations. We could say to 
ourselves, "Then it's just a sham. He really never needs any help - he's 
just - it's something he's doing. I mean, he's just kidding himself. 
He's just trying to be something." And we could shape these things up 
and come up with no answer, because we would have missed the one thing a 
thetan is doing regardless of what level we find him in: He is playing a 
game. But to us this might mean, superficially, that he is involved in 
such a way that he cannot really be sincere about it - he's being 
insincere about what he is doing; he's pretending in some fashion.

No. No, no. Have you ever seen the faces of football players while they 
were playing a game? Is there anything pretensive about them, hm?

Male voice: No.

Have you ever faced a lineup in a football game, looked at the opposite 
side? Crash! There you are.

No, he's playing a game in a much wider sense of the word. He is playing 
a game which he takes more and more seriously and then falls out through 
the bottom of and gets interiorized into, at which place he finds 
another game. And he starts playing this game and he starts going down 
and he falls into and out of that game, and he gets into another game. 
And he is pan-determined at any level where he is playing a senior game; 
he is only pan-determined on games lower than the game he is playing. 
And what do we mean by lower? We mean "of less magnitude."

Thetan gets down to a point of where he's just playing a game with 
himself. You ask this question of Homo sapiens, you are struck with the 
answer - the answer is fabulous. You say, "Can you get the idea of 
fighting with something?"

And he'll say, "Sure."

And if you run this for a short time, "Now, what have you got the idea 
you're fighting with?"

"Well, myself."

Oh no! Why should a man fight himself'? Why should a man be standing 
here, evidently at the same time standing here? He's poverty-stricken, 
he is sick, he can't support his wife, his children, he can't pay his 
bills, he can't do anything, he's almost totally incapable and disabled, 
and yet he is engaged in a fight, he says. Fight with who? A fight with 
himself.

You say, "Well, that's fine. Then we will just simply process this out 
so he won't have to fight himself, and he's all set." So we process him 
and we drop him into a lower game. And now he can't do anything - not 
even fight himself.

A boxer gets in the ring and starts boxing, and the next thing you know, 
he's holding his punch a little bit; he's restraining his punch. We know 
the mechanisms by which this occurs. We know that every forward motion 
earns for itself some sort of a backflow. So he starts holding that 
punch a little bit more, a little bit more and a little bit more, and 
after a while, why, he wouldn't hurt - he wouldn't hurt a pup with his 
blow. And of course, there he lies on the canvas. But there goes the 
prize money, too. And afterwards, why, you'll see him hanging around the 
showers saying, "Well, that big fight I'm going to have tomorrow." He's 
had his big fight tomorrow - it happened years ago, the big fight he was 
going to have tomorrow. He's punch-drunk, he's silly. He's still in the 
middle of that game. That was the last important game that he played. Of 
course that's in the line of a sport.

How about a scholar? He plays a game called "university." And he goes on 
playing this game for years called "university." And you find him years 
afterwards with a crew cut and his nose still stuck in a physics 
textbook, and still right there in school. You'll find him stuck on the 
time track in school. It was a fairly successful game, but here and 
there he lost, and he interiorized into it and he's never gotten out of 
it. This man is being employed - at the present moment, let us say - 
he's being employed as an architect. And there he sits, apparently at 
his architectural bench, happily drawing up plans of this and that. But 
do you know he never feels satisfied with these plans, because nobody 
ever comes along and marks an A on them. Fabulous, but we see these 
manifestations.

A thetan is dead serious about one thing - playing a game. And he gets 
so serious about playing a game, and he accepts its penalties and its 
responsibilities to such a degree, that he tumbles into these games and 
becomes parts of the game. Just like a hockey player becomes his hockey 
stick, and then after a while of being the hockey stick, which controls 
at least a puck, becomes the hockey stick and the puck. And because 
these are both connected with the ice, winds up eventually a chunk of 
ice. This is a fact. He's just getting into the game deeper and deeper 
and further and further and further. He is so stupid about this, it's 
fantastic. He never looks around and says, "The whistle has blown. The 
gong has rung. The game is done. What am I doing out here in the middle 
of this arena, lying here as a chunk of ice?" He never says this. He 
evidently runs on an obsessive line which is strictly thisentirely this: 
"There must be a game and I must be part of that game."

Fact of the matter is, I seriously doubt if anyone can process a thetan 
to the total serenity which is considered so wonderful in that game 
called "sit on a mountaintop" practiced by a bunch of my old friends in 
India. I seriously doubt this. You could get him to play this game, but 
examine one of those chaps sitting on the mountaintop, and you don't 
find him at serenity on the Tone Scale at all. He may be sitting up on a 
mountaintop, but to an auditor he would be down below minus below! He's 
playing a game called apathy. "I mustn't have. I must deny my body. I 
must deny all worldly things. I can't possess any of these things. 
Something bad about them all. I must therefore be serene."

We get people every once in a while, take Scientometric tests, and they 
go way up to the top on serenity. Oh, they're right there at the top. In 
other words, they answer every question in it which puts them at top 
serenity - 200 percent. We give them a little bit of auditing, and you 
know what the next point is that we find them on? Zero serenity. 
Complete agitation. They've gone where they should have gone in the 
first place, but the test couldn't take them there. And we had to give 
them some auditing to get them on the ladder. They're totally serene, 
nothing bothers them.

The criminal is also of this characteristic - nothing bothers the 
criminal. Nothing. He can go out and slaughter more old ladies, more 
women and children - it's all right with him, doesn't affect him, affect 
him, affect himbecause it's part of the game. And part of that game is, 
"Nothing affects me when I'm cruel." It's fascinating, isn't it?

Now, we can chart the succession of games down through which people 
fall, and we find that they go down the Tone Scale one right after the 
other. But the funny part of it is, the Tone Scale only marks one thing 
about games: It marks the mood of play, the mood of game - that's the 
only thing the Tone Scale marks. It really doesn't characterize what 
kind of a game he's playing. That game depends on his relationship to 
the dynamics from one to eight. And he starts to play inverted games 
below one.

Now, as you know, the first dynamic consists of the life unit of the 
bodythe body, the reactive mind, the somatic mind, the various automatic 
mechanisms, the thetan machinery - this is the first dynamic, the way we 
look at it. We have to get clear up to the lower order of dynamic seven 
before we find one of these all by itself, which is to say, the life 
unit independent of body or mind. It's very curious, very curious.

What is this wild obsession? If it gets a man into this much trouble, 
why does he do it? Just why does he do it? To play a game. Well, I know, 
but that's not an adequate reason. Oh yes, it is. The thrill and 
excitement of playing a game is good recompense. It is all the pay any 
thetan ever needs. It is an adequate pay to let him go through almost 
any trouble to achieve it. And he always has the feeling like he himself 
is inviolate, really, down to the final analysis, and that he himself 
will somehow or other come off the whole thing in the end. At least this 
universe someday will run out of time track, and that'll free him from 
all games. And of course he doesn't want this to happen.

Now, you think that an individual - that an individual is braced into 
the past because the past was so inviting. Actually, he's braced into 
the wins and loses of the past. And the wins are as bad as the loses - 
they're just as bad. I know more preclears who have been processed on 
loses, loses, loses, were actually stuck in wins. And I tell - I asked 
an individual, "Is there any time when you won something? Can you recall 
that?"

And he never gets any mock-ups, you know, or anything like this. And he 
says, "Yes," he said, "I won a - I won a skating contest once."

And I say, "You have any picture?"

"Yes, as a matter of fact, that - is that what a facsimile looks like?" 
He's stuck in the win. Because an absolute win takes the game away from 
you just like a lose.

The mechanics and the considerations which go along with playing a game 
are not very complex, but the activity of playing a game may very well 
be very complex, and is sufficiently complex as to make evidently the 
entirety of what we call life.

Why does a thetan wish to stay in conjunction and connection with other 
thetans if he doesn't like anybody? Well, he has a hard time playing a 
game if there's nobody else present.

Now, let's take the dynamics, and we go from one right straight up the 
dynamics, and we discover that - without an inversion - that a person is 
as capable as he can actually work up the dynamics as far as games are 
concerned. He's just as capable as he can do this.

It takes a very capable man to be a member of a team, actually. The 
capabilities of his immediate play, such as throwing a football or 
batting and so on, are not his characteristics with regard to the Tone 
Scale. Some of these star players are minus and below one. But the 
fellows who are in fairly good shape can play up there at dynamic three.

Now, how about the fellow who is in an inverted dynamic three? He's a 
group. He is compulsively, obsessively forced into being a group, like a 
- oh, like somebody who's been grabbed by the government and thrown in 
the army. They say, "You're a member of this company." He's on a sort of 
a reversed third dynamic. He's - you know, he's not there by his own 
choice, and he's playing a game that isn't quite his game - he doesn't 
quite believe in it. There is no enemy, the country is at peace, and 
there he is. And it's a real sour situation to him. He comes out of that 
and you'll find him a little bit antisocial. See, something has happened 
to his third dynamic and it is an inverted third now. In other words 
he's forced to be there.

Now, if he is willing to be there, and if he's capable of being there 
and if he can carry his own weight as a member of the team, you could 
say he - and by "member of the team" we mean member of a nation, member 
of a professional group or anything like that - just call anything a 
team, any group. And we find that this individual is relatively 
unstressed by the group. He can exist in groups easily. Groups are of no 
great concern to him. He'd feel kind of happy if he was all by his 
lonesome half the time and, you know, that sort of thing. He'd hate to 
have to fall out of association with his fellow man.

Well, after you've forced him to be in association with his fellow man 
for a while, then he starts to fall away with groups. Why? The other 
factor of games has entered in: penalty. And one of the penalties can be 
"forced to play a game." That's the worst penalty that could occur: to 
be forced to play a gamewhich is the only thing he wants to do - play a 
game. But the other ingredient is power of choice. Is he playing this 
game on his own choice, or is he playing this game on somebody else's 
choice?

Now, actually, you don't have to introduce too much power of choice into 
a fellow to make a good team member. At least you have to say, "We pay 
pretty good in the army. We give you good chow. There are a lot of good 
fellows in here. Do you want to join? Okay, sign on the dotted line. 
That's fine. Here you go." At least say that - even if you draft him, 
say that, for heaven's sakes! Don't say, "Come here, you!" - send him 
down to the supply sergeant and misfit him. He's had it from there on.

Now, a great many of the current games in which people are involved are 
unknown to them. All they are is an effect of a game they are not even 
onesided about. You see, they're effect of a game which is senior to 
their game. You see that position?

So that this funny thing happens: Here you are, you're playing a game, 
you're getting along all right - you're playing a game called store, 
let's say, and you're doing all right. The customers come in, and you 
sell them stuff, and the store down the street is trying to sell them 
stuff, and you try to sell them stuff - you know, just a standard game, 
it's - so on.

Somebody suddenly sweeps in from somewhere who is playing a game that 
you know not what of, and suddenly tells you that your prices are now 
double. And you say, "Oh no, double prices, less customers. Oh well, 
we'll get on with it." And he gets on and plays the game, but he's a 
little bit leery, because - what's happened to him? He's become aware of 
another game that he can be influenced by, which he himself can't really 
influence or play, you see? He doesn't have any real share in playing 
this other game, but it can affect the game he's playing. Fabulous. He 
gets along all right, he's a little bit leery about the whole thing.

Then one day somebody comes in and says, "You've been nationalized. 
You're now part of the national distribution centers for cocoa." And 
there went his game.

And he says, "Well, you can't do this to me." And he tries to think of a 
reason. He says, "You'll - you'll - l - I won't - I won't be making any 
money."

And you say, "Oh, well, yes. Nationalization - everybody makes money. 
Here, take it! It's all right. You'll get more pay than you had before - 
than you made in profit. See, you'll get more pay."

The fellow kind of says, "Well, all right." But the efficiency of the 
store goes down. Why does it go down? Because he didn't have a part in 
the larger game.

Now, democracy has entered in an ingredient which at least makes this 
acceptable and permits a game to go on. In democracy he is the one who 
can - no matter how small that vote is, and microscopic - influence the 
government, and so he can have a part in the larger game.

Therefore, he always says, "Well, I voted against it and this is what I 
get. But other fellows had the other idea. And well, I'm stuck with it. 
All right. We still had a say about it. If I'd gotten out and talked a 
little bit harder," and so on. But if he did vote for the organization 
that did nationalize his store, he can then say, "Well, I did it," you 
know, "I've had it, that's that. Here I am." That's the other game. 
"Okay, I'll stay in here and play a game." In other words, there's still 
an observable game.

Now, let's get two things then. There is the person who is involved in 
an unobservable game and the person who is involved in an observable 
game.

In the Western world, we have systems of government which permit the 
individual to play an observable game wherever he is influenced by the 
government or otherwise. He still has some little power of choice in 
there, even though it's just one vote or his speaking up at a meeting of 
his party or something of the sort, which influences that greater game. 
If we were to take that away from him, we would get this other situation 
where the unknown game suddenly sweeps in, knocks out his customers by 
doubling his prices, suddenly puts everything on a ration - he knows 
that all the warehouses along the river are jammed with cocoa and they 
say, "You can only sell one pound per day."

"Oh no," he says, "this is it." So he begins to resist, resist, resist, 
resist. So he's resisting the games in which he's involved. He doesn't 
want to play that game.

Now, he may take up hobbies. He may take up something else. But if he's 
in a government that doesn't permit him to vote, he won't get much 
chance to do that.

Do you see, then, how the power of choice influences the game? It 
doesn't much matter how - now get this, get this real straight - it 
doesn't much matter how tough the game is. It doesn't much matter how 
thoroughly arduous - you might say, to be colloquial, "hard-boiled" - 
and mean this game is, how vicious are its penalties, how often he runs 
across heads hanging from the telephone poles. He can survive in that, 
don't you see, as long as he has some power of choice. He's - at least 
belongs to one side - he's a member of the Green Shirts or something of 
the sort. It's a brutal society but he can still survive in it somehow 
or another because he has elected to be a member of the Green Shirts and 
they're fighting the Blue Shirts, you know, and they're hanging 
everybody. It's still a game, it's an observable game that he sees.

But, supposing everybody makes it very nice for him. Supposing everybody 
takes care of him. Supposing there's no Green Shirts fighting any Blue 
Shirts everywhere, and he has all kinds of leisure time. You know he'll 
get an idea that a brutal game is being hit by a match straw. Do you see 
what could happen there?

Now, the funny part of it is, if his power of choice is not consulted, 
and he is put into a position of complete leisure and complete and utter 
relaxation with no worries at all about food, clothing and shelter, the 
next thing you know, he's down there in a dark meeting room saying "raw, 
red revolution." Why? Revolt against what? And do you know ruler after 
ruler in time immemorial has observed this phenomena and has never quite 
accounted for it. "He did everything he could for them."

One great industrialist whose name I'm sure that you have heard 
ofHershey, the maker of chocolates - in his old age spent a moment on 
the top of his factory (which he had very beautifully built for all of 
his people) surrounded, if you please, on all sides by howling crowds 
who had poured out of their special Hershey - built homes to shoot at 
him with live ammunition. They hated him. Why?

They never had any right in the game whatsoever. They had no rights in 
the game. They had no power of choice in the game. Economic duress 
forced them to work in the factory. They never had anything like a staff 
meeting. They never had anything to say about anything. The next thing 
you know, why, Hershey in his great benignity would knock down their 
houses and build another row. Very nice houses, but nobody had asked to 
move anybody from any other company house to another company house. You 
get the idea? And those people went into red revolt, and they couldn't 
have had it better.

So if you just drop out this business of "couldn't have had it better," 
if you just drop out the idea of what is comfort and what is punishment 
and what is affluence - if you just drop these out of the computation, 
we at once see what's happening. We at once see what's happening.

If we have a nation pulling together to pull itself up by its 
bootstraps, you might say, and if everybody has agreed that we ought to 
do this, the most terrific stresses can be put upon that nation, or the 
best prosperity you ever saw could be put upon it, without wrecking its 
morale. Do you see that?

But the second we tell them to be better for their own sakes because 
we're going to make them so, or reversely, if we brutalize them without 
anything being understood by them at all (unobservable game; they're 
just being brutalized, it's not their game) - either of these two things 
will cause a revolution because there is no game in progress in which 
the individual can participate. And he'll make a game every time. You 
follow me? He'll make a game every time.

So we have one great security about a thetan which tremendously affects 
your auditing of thetans. One thing we really know: whatever his other 
reactions are, he will make a game out of anything. No matter what state 
we find him in, he's going to make a game out of it. And if he is given 
no power of choice over the game which he really elects to play, no 
power of choice over it at all, he will then create another side game. 
Therefore, the idea of nationalization versus non-nationalization would 
never be a point. Back of those things we would have lingering, "Is it 
on our say-so or is it on somebody else's say-so?" Do you see that?

Therefore, actually, no democracy has anything really to fear from these 
"superautocracies" of one kind or another. They really have nothing to 
fear. In the long run, the autocracy's people will create a game of 
their own choice. Now that is what establishes the creation of a game.

How far down do we have to go to find that we are doing it on our own 
choice? And that's the game. How far back do we have to fall, how many 
penalty ridges do we have to drop through, to at length find something 
we can do of our own choice? Or how far forward do we have to attack, 
and how much do we have to destroy, in order to assert our power of 
choice and our capability in exercising it? And those two reactions can 
always be counted on and are found in every preclear you audit.

Let's audit this way now: "All right, sit down. No, shut up. Now, I know 
exactly what's wrong with you. Shut up. You - you're addicted to 
mother-in-laws. That's the whole thing that's the matter. I know you 
don't have a mother - shut up. All right. Now, I want you to run (and 
you better had) - l want you to run things that are right about 
mother-in-laws because I'm going to sit here and make you like 
mother-in-laws."

What's going to happen? One of two things, established somewhat by his 
games capability. He is going to fall back in processing to a point that 
he considers his own game. Got it? See just how far back he's going to 
fall? Now, he's going to find a point that's his own game and it doesn't 
include you. And now let's go the other way - let's go the other way 
forward or he's going to attack you to make a game out of this auditing 
session wherein you are the opponent. One of those two things will 
occur.

Now, the apparency to us is that he goes into apathy on the one hand, or 
goes into violent rage on the other hand, and we have ways to handle 
this. But what could you predict then?

Now, here's a great oddity. I have an auditing trick that occasionally 
upsets preclears, particularly preclears that are very propitiative and 
they just couldn't consider anything ever offending them in their entire 
lives, you know? You know preclears, they're very ... And - particularly 
this preclear reacts wonderfullythey all react on this somehow or 
another - but this propitiative preclear reacts wonderfully. We start 
running something, I've been very gentle, I've observed the Auditor's 
Code, I've done everything possible, I'm seeing they're comfortable and 
everything's going along fine. And we open the session very quietly and 
we bridge every command and we're just doing nicely and so forth.

And then the preclear starts to run a little bit out of havingness or 
something of the sort, or something like this happens, and starts to 
dope off. Such a preclear does, rather easily. He's just upset rather 
easily on his consciousness - his awareness balance is poor. And he all 
of a sudden starts to dope off. And I ask him, "What have I done wrong?"

This fellow just comes out of it. "What have you done wrong? You mean to 
say there's somebody in the world that could do?" This is the mechanism: 
"You mean to say there's somebody in the world that could do something 
wrong except myself'? You mean you have really wronged me? Let me see, 
this is a new and interesting idea." And he comes right up out of it. 
Continues to run the session very smoothly.

A little bit later gets agitated. Runs out of havingness again, you 
know. The mechanisms are all there, but he gets quite agitated and gets 
nervous and shifts his feet and so forth. And you know what you've done, 
but you're just not going to take any time to remedy his havingness.

You say, "What have I done wrong now?"

He'll generally find something a couple of minutes ago that he can say 
you did wrong. But he comes right out of it. Something occurs as you do 
this.

Well, what have you done? You've destroyed any idea he had that you and 
he were opposing teams. You've just overtly destroyed this idea with 
him. He went down into havingness. He felt he was being reached by you a 
little bit too tightly. He was trying to dodge a little bit. He thought 
you were chewing up his masses. His consideration was that you were 
about to eat him up whole cloth in some way or another and he started to 
dope or get agitated - and he does this mechanically by running out of 
havingness, which means something is getting his havingness - the next 
thing he's going to do is assume it's you.

So you all of a sudden say, "What have I done wrong?" which is, "There 
isn't this kind of a game going on here." You're saying, "We are 
interested in putting you into a condition where you are capable of 
playing any kind of game." We're saying, "We are fixing you up so that 
you are an acceptable teammate." We're saying, "There's a lot of enemies 
out in life, and you and I are conniving to just fix their clocks but 
good." And he comes right up out of it. He feels much - alert and 
stronger.

An odd mechanism, isn't it? But there are thousands of such mechanisms 
involved in playing games - just thousands.

Life as a whole is a very hard thing to observe. It has enormous numbers 
of facets in all directions. There is all kinds of peculiar reactions. 
Why is it that this being is actually willing to make and guide a 
caterpillar body and get et up every time it turns around? What fun is 
there in being eaten every now and then? Occasionally, by accident, 
being in the wrong place to be run over by a tractor. Just what fun is 
there in that kind of livingness? Well, I don't know - not ever having 
been a caterpillar. But I can tell you rather decidedly that there must 
be some game connected with it. There must be some game connected with 
it one way or the other, or he wouldn't be there.

And if we had an intimate discussion with a caterpillar, we would say, 
"What are you doing?"

And he would say, "Well, I'm spinning a web and getting along all 
right."

"Well I know, but don't you expect you'll be et up?"

"Huh! I have ways to lick that. I have ways to take care of that. Boy, 
will I give the next guy that eats me indigestion!" All right.

So we get to the level of game which is observably a game to the 
individual: It's where he has a response to the game play against him. 
And somewhere a person has a response level, and that is his game level 
that he considers a game. But the funny part of it is, as you raise him 
up the Tone Scale he now has a wider response level. In other words, he 
has the idea that somebody attacks him, he can attack them. Somewhere he 
has this. And as we go up from there, why, there's more of him can 
attack more of them bigger. And he can withstand more powerful and 
treacherous attacks. He can respond on a game level. There is something 
he can attack, something he can whip. And we put him up higher and 
higher and higher, and he always is attaining what we call reality. And 
reality is: What can he protect, and what can he attack? And those two 
items form his reality.

An individual, then, who can only attack himself, and can only be 
attacked by himself, must be playing a terrifically low-order game. But 
it's real. It's a real game to him. That is the game that could be 
improved. The funny part of it is, he won't let go of that game until he 
finds a higher game where he can get a response; where he himself is 
capable of a response to attacks which come in to him.

For instance, we find two little kids - they're eight years old - 
they're fast friends, they fight all the time. They're inseparable, we 
just never see them but what they're together. And they fight, fight, 
fight, fight; we're pulling them off of each other all the time. We part 
them. One moves away, goes to the other side of the town, both of them 
become utterly disconsolate. Two little boys will always fight, one way 
or the other, and they fight with those that they have a good response 
to.

Now these two, oddly enough, will turn outward and fight others who 
attack them. And we have a fairly good picture of brothers and sisters 
andtwo sisters and so forth. Let somebody attack them as a duo and they 
become a team. There's another game in progress. But with that game 
lacking, they attack and counterattack each other, quite naturally. 
Therefore, a game is in progress.

It's quite interesting to behold that an individual who has gone down to 
the point of game where he can only respond to himself, where he can 
only attack himself, still does so. That's what's fabulous - he still 
does so. He can attack himself, he does. But if he does, he will figure 
out a way for himself to attack himself. You got the idea? Because 
that's his level of game, he's got it going both ways. And if he has it 
going both ways, it's actually a game level and therefore responds to 
all the rules of game. All the rules of game then apply.

Now, why do we use games anyhow? Why do we use this mechanism? Because 
it's the most observable mechanism of life as a whole which we can 
regard in a microcosm. Datum of gradient magnitude.

Things are comprehensible when understood by a datum of comparable 
magnitude. We can understand God because we know about the Devil. We 
understand God all by himself, and people say, "There is only one God, 
and then the Devil." They have to say, "and then the Devil," because 
nobody would ever grasp the idea of one God unless there were other gods 
by which to evaluate it.

You would have a difficult time grasping the idea of the livingness of 
another person if you yourself were not alive. You do have a difficult 
time grasping the deadness of a rock if you are not a rock. You say, 
"Well, that's a pretty dead rock." In earlier times, rocks were supposed 
to have talked and walked and everything else - it was trying to 
understand rocks. Well, maybe people could mock up rocks that talked and 
walked, we won't worry about that. But certainly, one rock all by itself 
sitting in the world would become a mystery - become a complete mystery. 
Everybody would go and look at it. They'd say, "Look at that uh, that - 
what is it?"

People would say, "Its name is a rock."

"How do you - how do you pronounce it? Oh, it's a rock."

That's an effort to get a datum of comparable magnitude - a syllable 
called rock that will compare with a solid object called rock. But 
people will still go and look at it, because there isn't another datum. 
This is a two-pole universe, because it's a game universe. All right.

So they go down to Mecca and they see this lodestone which used to float 
in the air, and there was only one like it anywhere in the world and it 
formed a great mystery - completely aside from the fact that it was 
supposed to float in the air. Actually there's no evidence that the holy 
stone down there ever floated in the air - no evidence. But there is 
ample evidence that demonstrates that there wa's an Emanator back on the 
track which was one stone hanging in the middle of the air which gave 
out atomic radiation and knocked guys flat when they looked at it. Good 
recruiting mechanism, too, for somebody else's team somewhere.

Now, we must, at once, then, observe this fact about this universe - 
that this universe is only as good and as visible as it is co-owned. 
That universe which you mock up all by yourself, knowing you mocked it 
up all by yourself, gets very thin and goes pffff! Unless you introduce 
this other mechanism: You mock it up saying, "It's Joe's, he created 
it." And then you've got it. Now that's just one mechanism. Well, that's 
by consideration too, you know. But that one mechanism can be worked 
into an enormous number of mechanisms, because it's the dual mechanism.

You say, "The other team's got it." Or you say, "The other team are 
trying to get this and it's mine." And you didn't have anything to do 
with creating it at all, see. But boy, is it solid. It's the nicest, 
solidest thing you ever saw in your life, this mass that you have there 
of some kind or another. It's being misowned. It takes actually two 
sides to observe a playing field. Now, don't tell me that happened by 
accident.

Datum of gradient magnitude is a little bit different. We understand 
this big thing because we understand this little thing which contains 
all the parts of this big one, see? So when we say "games," we are 
saying just that. There are goal posts - you could figure out a game 
that had twenty opposing goal posts, while you only had one goal post. 
But there are goal posts, there are teams, and you're trying to get to 
the other fellow's goal post and he's trying to get to your goal post, 
and you are opposing him and he is opposing you. There is a playing 
field and there's usually something to play with - such as a ball, 
something like this. That's an elementary game.

Now, there are many other kinds of games, but they don't exceed the laws 
of games. They require opposition, they require a bit of randomity, and 
they require some mass connected with it. Do you see? It just requires 
certain elements. Oddly enough, the elements are freedom, problems and 
havingness - with a consequence below each one of penalties - and mood 
of game.

Freedom can be a penalty: "You, Jones, will now leave the field."

A problem can be a penalty. Football men sometimes sit up all night 
worrying about the enemy tactics. They finally get to a point of where 
it is actually a penalty. They figure-figure and worry-worry and 
worry-worry-worry, and it starts them worrying about life at large and 
themselves in peculiar. Now, here we have a problem as a penalty: 
"You've got to solve this problem. If you don't, that's the end of you. 
Now you sit out there on the sidelines, Jones, until you finally get the 
signals straight."

And havingness: "Jones, turn in your suit. Do not set foot in that 
locker room again." You get the idea?

Now, penalties, then, fit under each one of these things of freedom, 
problems and havingness. Now, we look at life at large and we take 
freedom, problems and havingness and we stack them up on each dynamic, 
and we find then how each dynamic can become a game. Freedom, problems 
and havingness together can be a game, sort of mixed up on the "only 
one" basis. The individual's fighting himself and he's fighting 
something else, and we're not quite sure what he's fighting but he's 
sure fighting something and it's sure fighting him. And there he sits 
with an horrible expression on his face when we say, "Go over that 
again."

Now, freedom, problems and havingness add up this way: Havingness on the 
first dynamic would be the body, its mass. Problems would be the mind, 
including the reactive bank, the somatic mind, and the ridges and 
bric-a-brac and anchor points and stuff and junk, you know? It isn't 
quite observable and it isn't quite mass, but there it is; and it 
certainly co-mixes into a considerable problem. And then under freedom, 
we have here, "thetan." We actually have these three parts being kept up 
in the individual at any given moment. These are the three parts of a 
game.

The mind, if we consider a mind the thinkingness action of a thetan upon 
a body, assisted by various mechanical energy responses - if that is a 
mind, and we could define it just that way - we would find that it was 
capable of problems. It thought. It could pose problems to itself and 
solve problems.

Thetan all by himself can go out there eighty-nine feet back of his head 
and know all about it. No game. Total knowingness equals no game. Total 
notknowingness equals no game. An absolute lose would be "Never play the 
game again." An absolute win would be "This man is the champ. No 
opponents."

Champion tennis player trots down to the court - he wants a little bit 
of exercise, you know. He's all slicked up, and got the jersey on in 
which he won the national finals of something, you know. And he goes 
down there, and an old battered racket, and he's going to just fix 
everything up fine.

He says, "Well boys, how about batting a few across the net?"

No game. Nobody to play tennis with. He's too good. Somebody humors him 
finally, bats some balls at him, watches them come back with the 
velocity of a high-explosive bullet. This fellow, after a while, he's 
going to say, "Hm, now wait a minute here. I'm not getting any game. 
There's nobody playing tennis with me at all. Well, I know what I'll 
do," and I've actually seen a golfer do this, by the way, "I'll strap up 
my arm because it's so bad off, and play golf with one hand." And he got 
a game that way. His golf was never any good afterwards, either. But he 
could play lots of golf, couldn't he? But having made the fatal 
postulate "I shall limit the game," he then may continue to limit his 
game. All right.

So we make a stable Theta Clear out of a preclear. We just sleek them up 
- boy, are they smooth. And they go back to their group, and the group 
says, "Boy, do you look good."

And the person says, "Yes, I certainly do feel good. I feel fine. 
Haven't got a problem in the world."

And the group starts talking amongst itself, and one of them is saying, 
"Oh, I'm having the most horrible time. You know what she said to me 
last night? She said to me you (mumble) just one more time and I'll just 
- boom!"

And the other one says, "Yes, I know how that is. I'm having an awful 
lot of trouble with my husband, he's having a terrible time," and so 
forth.

And they're talking back and forth. And this person sits there, gaahhhh, 
saying, "I feel wonderful" - listens to this for a little while. And you 
the auditor, a short time later, you pick up this preclear and this 
preclear is duhhh. You say, "Be three feet back of your head," and they 
say, "What head?"

You've educated them into what problems they can actually have. They can 
have problems in performance. You've given them a new category of 
problems, and they expertly can fix themselves up with these problems. 
How? Very neat - neat but not gaudy, and very smooth.

What must have happened was that you audited them to a point of no game. 
So we have as an actual technical term in Games Processing, a no-game 
condition. And this occurs when one wins completely or when loses - when 
one loses utterly. It's a no-game condition.

The fellow who still has to drive an automobile after his fifth accident 
with automobiles - you know, trying to get away at the traffic lights 
first, that was his game with an automobile, and he just - well, after 
the fifth accident, he ... He's still driving an automobile. But what do 
you know? It's a no-game condition, even though he continues to drive an 
automobile.

Now, you see what fools us in life. He can tell us, "Once upon a time I 
used to enjoy driving" - after a while he'll forget even this, you see - 
" but I used to enjoy driving and now it's just drudgery. I don't know 
what's happened." Trouble is, he's still playing the game that he lost. 
He's lost this game so well that he knows he lost it, and he's still 
playing it, so it is not a game.

And that is the only kind of livingness that is not a game: It's a game 
that you're continuing to play after a totality of win or lose which 
removes it from your reality of games, because you cannot any longer 
really respond while doing it. You can be attacked without response, and 
therefore it is not a game, and therefore it is not your idea of what to 
do. And you haven't got any idea this is a good thing to do anymore. The 
fellow knows he's just going to go to pieces if he keeps on driving this 
automobile. He'll do anything he can think of to get out of driving the 
automobile, but he has to go on driving the automobile. It's sheer 
drudgery. The thought of taking a long trip is the most miserable thing 
to him that possibly could happen. He's playing a game that he has lost.

And a race driver who has just cleaned up everything everywhere gets 
into his pleasure car - he can beat all the drivers in the world, and 
he's got to drive fifty miles up the line, and you'd think that somebody 
was going to beat him the whole distance the way he grues about it. He 
has been a champion. Maybe he's still champion, but he's no longer 
driving races. And he's then no longer driving. Don't you see? So you 
can go out the spout either way.

What your preclear objects to, then, is a no-game condition. And beware, 
because the preclear, just as - just as soon as not, just as soon as 
looking at you, will make a game out of auditing instead of using 
auditing to find another game.

You as an auditor can audit this preclear with very little success, if 
the game becomes auditing only, unless you break this and rehabilitate 
his ability to play a game. Now, you are trying to put people back in 
the game. You are not trying to free people. You are not trying to get 
an opponent going. I'm sure you're not trying to make slaves. If we ever 
wanted to make any slaves, god help the human race. We don't. You can't 
play a game in that way.

There are enough native and natural, as you might say, natural-born 
enemies to the human race to provide enough opponents for a long time to 
come. We could sit here and discuss possible opponents for hours and 
hours and hours, doing nothing but listing them. Nothing but listing 
them. Man has more enemies than you could easily account for.

But in view of the fact that the individual man has no great response 
value toward any one of these enemies - in other words, flu bugs attack 
you, you certainly don't do much talking about and attacking flu bugs, 
see? You get the idea? They can reach you, you can't reach them, 
therefore that's a no-game condition. You've lost too often about the 
subject of flu, colds. See? You know that can reach you, so it's not a 
game, the combating of flu bugs. It then becomes an unsolvable problem 
or some such category. Or "Somebody else is working on it. I can't do 
anything about it," you see? You get the no-responsibility. It's then a 
no-game. And the person sick with flu is in a no-game condition. Now, 
why is he in a no-game condition? Because he has no response towards flu 
bugs. Isn't this fascinating? Very fascinating.

Everywhere we look, we see that the individual complains about one 
thing: a no-game condition. Therefore, would it follow that if we 
processed only the parts of games, will we have a preclear then that 
wasn't protesting? Will we have a preclear that'd be happy? Will we have 
a preclear that would remain stable where we put him? Is that what would 
happen? And the answer is, yes.

One, he stops playing a game with auditing. In other words, he stops 
fooling around. He stops saying, "Well, you've broken the Auditor's 
Code." He knows he has you in a certain set of restrictions whereby you 
can't claw him. He knows the rules. He knows he's got a certain level of 
response here. He knows you're not supposed to overwhelm him. All of a 
sudden he will become more and more expert on the rules. He'll get so he 
knows the Auditor's Code better than you ever did. You just watch a 
preclear doing that.

Now, a Scientologist being processed by a Scientologist happens to know 
the rules of the game - all too well. And he is very capable himself of 
making a game out of auditing. Instead of a rehabilitation of a no-game 
condition, he takes the game where he finds it, which is right there in 
the auditing chair. And he uses that as a game. Now the funny part of it 
is, is auditing doesn't work as a game. The maker and unmaker of games - 
Scientology - of course is not itself, amongst Scientologists, 
susceptible of game condition. You get the idea?

You as auditors then find that you are doing something else than 
Scientology when you start to use Scientology as a give and take: "Now I 
am going to be preclear and you're auditor, that's fine. Now you reach 
me - touch! Oh no, that's a break - I mean, that technique is not 
supposed to run like that. I heard it, I know - I read it in the book, 
the book's over here. Look-look, says it right there: 'What kind of a 
body couldn't you spit on?'"

"Well, there you are now, running down my havingness - I'm shot. I'll be 
a wreck all night. Touch, we got the auditor that time!"

The auditor finally says, "This guy is a Scientologist, he shouldn't 
behave like this. I'm trying to put him back in the running so he'll do 
a good job of it and so forth," and he starts to reach the preclear. 
Game condition, see? "Let's see if we can bury that thetan just a little 
deeper." That, of course, is the automatic response to putting auditing 
on a game condition.

You audit people to knock out a no-game condition, you see, in order to 
create an additional teammate against another team. If you do it that 
way, it runs like a shot. You never saw a guy audit so well as, "Just as 
soon as I get you swamped up a little bit, we've got to start in on an 
assembly line of preclears. You know, here they all are. All right. Now 
I want you to run out and remedy your havingness of preclears so that 
you'll have an easy time."

Zing, zing, zing - runs easily, "Let's go audit the preclear," see?

It wasn't a game that was occurring, because we're working as a team in 
the creation of a team for a game which is going on, do you see? Whereas 
auditing is the one thing which would make a game possible once more, 
and keeps a game going at the same time. So it's very, very interesting 
what occurs.

Do you realize that the psychoanalyst trying to reach deep and pick up 
that childhood incident is simply trying to reach the goal being 
protected by the patient. Do you see that analogy? He wants to reach a 
goal of some sort.

Well, you're not therefore trying to find something wrong with a 
preclearyou want to raise his capabilities. And you don't have to find 
any goal in the preclear to raise his capabilities, you just exercise 
him through his capabilities and he comes up and all of a sudden he's 
able, and that's that.

Now, do you see what little bug we've been facing, then? Now, does it 
look like - can you look back at some of the cases you've had to do with 
and see that there might be a little something in what I'm saying here, 
hm? It's fascinating, but it seems that looking at this thing called 
games, in all of its parts, that we are looking at the macrocosm of 
life. And so looking, maybe we can learn a great deal more about life 
than we knew before. And we can certainly do a lot better job of 
auditing. The auditing that's been going on lately is fantastic. I mean, 
we're auditing faster and more surely than we've ever audited before, 
using the component parts of a game.

We find the reality of the human race is penalties. And they can be 
audited on penalties. And then pretty soon, having been audited on 
penalties, they come up into a game condition, and they become happy 
then, even though it's just shoveling coal. Okay?

Audience: Yes.

Well, I hope you can use the material. Want you to look it over and see 
what you make of it. Okay?

Audience: Okay.

Good night.

Thank you.

Thank you.


