ORGANIZATION SERIES - PART 18 OF 20

[New name: How To Present Scientology To The World]

RANDOMITY

A lecture given on 13 December 1956


[Start of Lecture]

Thank you.

Well, I'd like to talk to you now about something that is a 
little more pleasant than aberration. But I don't know what it 
is.

It's very difficult to generalize, you know, on the subject of 
aberration, because preclears, you know, are really all 
different. Now, I've told you they were all the same this 
evening. I told you they were all the same. Now, I just might as 
well tell you they're all different.

Every preclear is different than every other preclear. They 
aren't the same at all. They don't respond the same way. Why? 
Because they'd have different tolerances for randomity.

Now, this is an old word, an old word. There's plus and minus 
randomity. Fascinating stuff, this randomity. Because out of 
randomity you get a game. And what makes all the preclears 
different? Well, it's a very interesting thing: they're all 
playing a slightly different game with this plus or minus 
randomity.

Now, "randomity" is a formidable word. When it first came out 
they called it "rondamity." There's "randomity" and 
"automaticity." These are two very formidable words. But yet 
they're very, very easy to understand.

One of those words rondamity, excuse me, randomity, is a simple 
statement of too much or too little confusion -- if you just look 
at it that way. Random: It means a non-set pattern. How random is 
it? Well, it could be not random enough, or it could be too 
random. Well, who's to judge that? The preclear. And that's what 
makes them all different.

"What game are they playing?" is modified by "What speed?" Now, 
this fellow goes to this small, sleepy town and there's nothing 
at all happening at all in the town. And there's a dog asleep in 
front of the general store, and there's one horse, walks down the 
street of the town at a slow pace. And this fellow, if he's from 
New York, says, "Oh, my God. How can anybody stand this sa-a-oo-
oo! It's going to drive me mad listening to all this silence all 
night." See?

Another fellow happens to be from a farm over at Hoot-n-holler. 
And he comes in and he sees that dog asleep there, and he sees 
that one horse start walking down the street. He has a nervous 
breakdown. Goes to see a psychiatrist. Too much motion for him.

Now, this would merely be a difference of what they thought 
motion should consist of. So you'd have the identical situation 
being plus to the fellow from Hoot-n-holler and minus to the 
fellow from New York. So we got plus and minus randomity -- all 
in the same situation.

So it comes down to consideration. What is the person's 
consideration of what is too fast? What is the person's 
consideration of what is too slow? When you establish these two 
things, you then have established his optimum randomity, but that 
is only established for him.

Now, it can vaguely be established for a class of people. A 
motorcycle club, for instance, has an interesting reaction to 
spills. They're all tearing down the highway, one after the 
other, and they're somewhat mixed up: they're only hitting 
eighty, and some guy goes off the curve at eighty miles an hour. 
"Imagine it!" And he breaks his leg, and they drag him out and 
untangle him from the machine, and so forth, and set his leg and 
shove him in to a doctor. And he's out next Saturday with a 
stader splint, riding his motorcycle, see? Hardly anybody yiekle-
yackled about this at all, see? Nothing. Nothing to it.

Well, somebody driving a Cadillac -- driving it mainly to hold up 
traffic, is why I think most of these people drive Cadillacs. You 
always find these big vehicles capable of doing Lord-knows-what 
miles per hour, always doing some other miles per hour. And you 
get this Cadillac, and it's driving down the street, and the 
fellow driving it stops just a little bit rapidly. He stamps on 
its power brake, you see. He almost rushes the light. And the 
lady in the back seat of the Cadillac goes forward just a slight 
little bit and her handbag drops on her toe. See? Cadillac stops. 
Chauffeur gets fired. Goes to see the doctor to have X-rays 
taken. Is in the hospital for a week, you know. Goes to see a 
psychiatrist to see if it had deranged her mentally. Get the 
idea?

Totally different ideas obtained. Now, you consider that 
ridiculous. Actually I saw that happen.

So you want to watch these Cadillacs, by the way. You want to 
watch them. They're the dangerous cars on the road. Driving at 
fifteen miles an hour or twenty-five miles an hour, when 
everybody else is doing fifty, you know? They get in your road, 
and it's an obstacle. And obstacles, when run into, are damaging 
to wheel alignments and things.

Anyway, here is a different viewpoint. So we can assign just this 
nebulousness to class: there is a slight tendency in these 
classes to follow a certain pattern. Just as there was one person 
in the motorcycle club who thought that must have hurt Joe a 
little bit when he went off the curve, so there might be somebody 
riding Cadillacs who would think that it was just a little 
extraordinary for her to have gone to a hospital for a week 
because her handbag dropped on her toe. You get the idea? There 
would be variations within the class, even. And because there are 
these variations we can make this remark: "All preclears are 
different."

What is their optimum randomity? When we say "optimum randomity," 
we're saying "game" in a complicated fashion. But game has more 
in it than motion. A game has purpose and a game has the idea of 
freedom and barriers. But the speed of the game would be what we 
consider random. A game must be to some degree random -- in other 
words, slightly unpredictable.

What is a random particle? It is a particle that we cannot quite 
determine the future course of. That would be a random particle.

All right. If everybody knew that the navy was always going to 
beat the army in football; and it was always going to be a score 
of fourteen to nothing; and the plays were all going to be run 
off in a one, two, three, four; and in the second quarter, first 
play they're going to use a T formation, you know -- nobody would 
go to those football games. They'd go down here to a high school 
in northern Virginia and watch some real football. Because there 
you can't even predict that they're going to play football.

Now, as we look over the entirety of games, we ourselves find it 
rather difficult sometimes to believe that somebody who is in a 
remarkable state of disrepair -- psychosomatically -- is actually 
playing a game. That is his level of game, and the motion which 
he tolerates to a marked degree matches his level of game.

He has a psychosomatic ill: Every time he smells wet paint he 
becomes violently sick at his stomach. You know? You say, "Well, 
it's not reasonable." No, it's not reasonable! It's 
psychosomatic. But it is part of some sort of a game he is 
playing. This is his defenses to some degree. This is the way he 
becomes a formidable object.

If you were to pass a law saying that all people who were 
suffering from an illness known as "woofosis," whereas they 
walked down the street and barked every few paces like a dog 
(woofosis, very deadly disease), and all those people were no 
longer subject to taxation or some such thing, you in a very 
short space of time, I'm sure, would see people walking down the 
street a few paces and barking, and walking down the street a few 
paces and barking. They would go on doing this. You got the idea?

Why? They have a game mock-up. They're in a game condition. That 
is to say, they can almost play this game. But they have a mock-
up which doesn't play a game they can't tolerate. See, the mock-
up won't be able to play that game, but the people in that game 
won't play against them either. See? "Taxation will be canceled 
if..."

Well, there are lots of citizens around who'll still play this 
game called taxation. You know, government issues the money and 
takes it back and issues it and takes it back and so forth. 
Called the ebb and flow of nonsense.

Anyway, this thing called taxation is a game and lots of people 
play it. I know there are millionaires around. They have whole 
teams, rooms full of accountants. You have to get a Mount Palomar 
scope to look down the lengths of the desks. And what are all 
these guys for? Well, their aggregate payroll is, let us say, 
$8,622 a week. To keep from doing what? From paying $1,260 worth 
of taxes. See? It's just a game. Just a game. Nothing more and 
nothing less than a game. It isn't even important to the fellow 
whether he pays these taxes or doesn't pay these taxes, but he 
spends all of his time sitting around figuring, figuring, 
figuring, trying to get some way whereby he can beat somebody out 
of some taxes, see. He's just mad.

Another fellow takes an entirely different approach. He just 
reaches down and pulls a hold of the corner of the rug called 
"government" and gives it a jerk. Somebody else plays that game 
in a different fashion. But it's a game. Don't think that it 
isn't a game.

Of course, it's not a game to an Internal Revenue employee. So we 
don't know who it's a game to on that side.

Way back down the line, sometime in the past, somebody didn't 
like millionaires and he passed a law. And we're probably still 
playing the game with that person. See? Karl Marx -- somebody 
like that. We're still playing the game with him even though we 
apparently have a bunch more players out here. Well, those 
fellows aren't players, they're pieces. Get the idea? On a 
chessboard you have pieces, not players.

Now, in life, an individual is apt to be used as a piece one way 
or the other and be shoved around without any slightest 
determinism on his own part. And sometimes he makes a game out of 
thinking he is a piece. He's being shoved around against his own 
desire.

Funny part of it is, if a fellow ever suspects he's a piece, he 
isn't one. That's the cute one. If he ever gets the idea, "You 
know, I'm just being shoved around here," he isn't a piece. 
Pieces don't think. They never find out. So although he may be 
involved in some game called "soldier" in which he is a piece 
that never suspects he's a piece even vaguely, the game he knows 
he's playing and the game he's being used in are usually two 
different things.

So we have a condition whereby this individual who is a soldier
-- obviously just a piece, in what game he doesn't know. Somebody 
says, "Attack the citizens of Clinton, Kentucky," you know? And 
he goes and attacks them. He doesn't know what game he's in. He 
didn't realize he was winning a presidential election reverse-
wise or... He didn't know what he was doing.

But his game would be, perhaps, in obfuscating the sergeant. You 
know? He's got some game going with the sergeant and he is really 
a player in this game, see, a terrific player in this game. The 
sergeant rolls them out in the morning, you know, and he's got it 
all fixed up so that somebody sings out, "yere" to his name, see.

Sergeant says, "Smith," and one of his buddies says, "Yo," you 
know. And the sergeant never looks up from the roll call, see. 
He's still in bed, see? He gets blackmail on his partners in the 
company -- his other soldiers and so forth -- to make them do 
this, you know. He wins at cards. He amasses large debts to 
himself and so forth, so that when his name appears up there for 
a digging detail, it's Jones that goes out, not Smith.

It isn't because he's lazy at all. He's playing a game with the 
sergeant. He knows he's playing it. With what glee he lies there 
in his bunk and listens to the calisthenics going on outside the 
tents, you see. He knows he's playing that game.

Well, because this condition can exist, many of us become 
suspicious that we are in some sort of a game that we know not 
what of. We're being used in some fashion, and we start looking 
around to find some game we're being used as a piece in.

Well, the funny part of it is, there's a role lower than "piece." 
It's "broken piece." Nobody's using it. And many a time we begin 
to look around and worry about what game we might be being used 
as a piece in and we find out we're not being utilized. Well, 
because this would be too much of a blow to us, we normally can 
be expected to cook up something.

Now, an example of that is a fellow talks about the between-lives 
area. Now, he himself has no real concept of the between-lives 
area. But he says, "The last time they sent me down here..." see? 
He's heard of somebody running this engram or something like 
that. He's trying to get into a game condition even to the extent 
of being a piece, you see. He considers that a little more game. 
And he'll talk about this. As a matter of fact, there's a grave 
possibility that many are used in this category. There's a grave 
possibility that people around are shot from hither to yon for 
this purpose or that, in some game they know not what of at all. 
There's a definite possibility.

One of the oldest whole track gags was to take somebody, knock 
him out, and tell him he had to go over to some other place and 
do something or other that would louse up the enemy in some 
fashion. And the fellow does it, by the way. I mean, he'll go 
ahead and be a piece in a game to this degree.

Well, a few thousand years later he's not in any particular big 
game. He's completely lost from this old game and he runs short 
of games, so he goes around telling people that he has a mission. 
See, he dreamed it up, and the Archangel Mike or somebody is 
sitting two feet back of his right shoulder sending him 
telepathic or teletype messages, and he has a mission.

Well, you want to look at this with some askance, because the 
truth of the matter is that I happen to know Mike, and he's not 
careless with who he picks out. And he doesn't pick out guys that 
blab, you see? If anybody was executing a mission for the 
Archangel Mike, you can make a very sound investment in a bet 
that he wouldn't know anything about it at all. Otherwise he 
wouldn't be a piece.

Now, therefore, when people begin to suspect that they're being 
used in games of one character or another, the usual thing that 
one suspects in return is that they have lost their last game and 
they're dragging an old one into view.

Funny thing how a thetan can actually play a game and not play a 
game at the same time, how he can play a game that he doesn't 
know anything about, how he can be multivalenced on this whole 
subject. It's quite amazing.

But this comes about because every now and then there is only 
himself. Now, those things which are the least admired tend to 
persist. And being all by yourself is not much admired. So people 
eventually drift into an "only one" category, and they begin to 
believe they're all by themselves in some fashion. But they will 
dream up some multivalence situation whereby they are playing 
chess with themselves. And they go from the idea that they're the 
"only one" -- in other words, they run out of games and opponents 
and roles to play -- into playing a game with some mysterious 
opponent. And boy, this guy's really mysterious.

"Every time I go to bed at night something whispers in my ear." 
Get the idea? This is a mysterious opponent. "Something tells me 
that I had better not go down that road." Look! If it said it 
that well, you're the only one who articulates that expertly.

And you've got the phenomenon of the fellow playing chess with 
himself. He sits on one side of the chessboard and he says, "Now, 
let's see. I'm Joe now. Let's see. Uh... well, let's see. I move 
my knight to king's pawn five, there. I think that's very good." 
He says, "I'm not Joe now. Get over here." Bill now, you know. 
"Look at that dog! He moved his knight to... Well, I'll have to 
counter that one way or the other."

Eventually, if he keeps this up and keeps himself from knowing 
he's playing both sides of the board and swapping roles all the 
time, he merely winds up in the center of the board stalemated. 
But he's run almost completely out of game.

But this is very hard for a thetan to do. He's always got a 
couple of games on tap. The game might be called "headache." The 
game might be called "distraught wife." The game might be called 
"caved-in worker." It's played in Russia a great deal: caved-in 
worker. Or "betrayed commissar."

"Here I was, deeply sincere, tried to give my all for the people, 
and look at me now. Here I am sitting here in this office that's 
a hundred square yards on the side, and I have to keep all those 
guards with the machine guns outside the door because everybody 
is after me." As a matter of fact, in a well-run communism, 
nobody would find out he was commissar, see -- I mean, really 
well run.

His game condition develops from the conditions he finds himself 
in. But all of these things are established, in the main, with 
what he himself has come to consider as too much or too little 
motion. Got that?

I should have suspected something about myself one time. I was on 
an expedition up in Alaska. And I was lying in my bunk, and 
everything was going along very smoothly, and we were homeward 
bound and everything had been done. The ship wasn't leaking a 
drop. The stores were all dry. I mean, everything was going 
along. The people on deck were totally competent. There was 
exactly nothing to do, and I realized there was nothing to do. 
And I had this stray thought. I said, "You know, I'm practically 
out of a job. No emergencies at all. There's nothing going on. 
You know, that's an awful situation to be in," I said to myself. 
And forgot all about it quite promptly, walked up to the chart 
table, looked up the tables for tides going through inlets and 
narrows, read the Canadian tide table -- which some days before I 
had noted was an hour and a half different than the American tide 
table for the same waters -- established the route through Dodd 
Narrows at full flood spring tide with a survey vessel.

Now, that's a fantastic thing for a guy to do to himself, because 
it meant that all of a sudden the ship was in a millrace. And we 
got through it all right -- got out the other side. I didn't 
think we could make it, but I happened to remember that... Get 
the idea? I mean...

One sailor we had that was terribly brave, terribly brave, had 
the helm just come loose and just start to spin idly in his 
hands, because both tiller lines had become unmoored from the 
rudder. And there was an auxiliary bar back there and a couple of 
us jumped back and put the bar in place and steered her on 
through. But that randomity wasn't necessary either.

I thought about it afterwards very carefully. Thought over the 
whole thing and tried not to remember that about eight or nine 
days before I had noticed that the tiller lines were almost 
through. Fantastic. But you sometimes catch yourself playing a 
game. Beware of sliding into a condition whereby you are going to 
get some rest or relax, or you're going to do something else now 
that's quieter or better.

Medical doctor plays on this all the time. Matter of fact if he 
didn't, he probably wouldn't ever have anybody in the hospital. 
He says, "Now," he says, "Uh... Mr. Smith, uh... Mr. Smith, uh... 
you're in very bad shape. Your heart, you know. So you've got 
take it easy. You've got to be quiet. You gotta take it easy here 
one way or the other. And uh... you mustn't overexert yourself. 
And don't worry. Above all, don't worry. Yes..."

Of course, Mr. Smith's wife hears this and makes sure that this 
is carried out. And then Smith all of a sudden is back in there 
in a bankruptcy or something of this sort. Or incipient 
bankruptcy, working twenty-four hours a day in order to keep 
things... How the devil did a bankruptcy happen?

Well don't look at that too carefully. The guy was run down, you 
see, into minus randomity -- not enough motion. So he omitted a 
couple of very obvious, logical steps somewhere along the line or 
antagonized the very people that he should have stayed friends 
with, and the next thing you know he's got a plus randomity on 
his hands. He's trying to adjust that minus randomity. Got it?

Every preclear, then, is as different as he runs at different 
speeds. He is as different as he will not tolerate no-motion and 
not tolerate excess motion. See, his intolerances determine his 
optimum speed.

Now, he likes a certain amount of action or motion, and he will 
work things until he gets somewhere in its vicinity. And he is 
only really unhappy -- regardless of the expression he wears on 
his face -- he is only really unhappy when he is missing it too 
widely.

How fast should he drive? How fast should he walk? You got the 
idea? How fast should he eat? How slowly should he read?

I saw a fellow almost go to pieces one time on these read-it-
faster classes. You know, every once in a while the whole country 
goes into a spree that it should be able to read faster. I don't 
know why this is. They'll just eat up the existing reading 
matter. A book costs three dollars. All right. Now, it takes a 
fellow twenty hours to read the book. Well, you divide twenty 
into three hundred, and you get the price per hour of the 
entertainment. Don't you see? Or the three into the twenty.

You get the idea? Now, if he reads faster, his entertainment 
costs him more money. So I don't see what it's all about, myself.

But you see people around with "Reading Faster Self-Taught", you 
know. You'll see people avidly reading this in subways. "How To 
Read Faster". I don't know why they want to read faster. But they 
claim they can absorb more the faster they read. It doesn't work 
that way with me.

I was on a train once doing 105 on a test run and I didn't see 
any scenery at all. I knew I was going 105 though. So I guess 
that's what these people do. How to become aware of less, more 
quickly.

So anyhow, you'll see people speeding up on this. And in one such 
class where... Obviously these chaps were much too slow. They 
couldn't read all of the homework assigned, and so forth, and 
were given this class. And they were all supposed to speed up. 
And I saw this guy just start to crack up. He would read, you 
know, "I see the cat," or something simple like this, you know? 
And you could just see, just as he got about to "cat," why, his 
teeth...

They were forcing him to pass his attention across more in less 
time, you see. But he had something on the order of "I see the 
cat," and he couldn't get "I see" through faster, and he'd just 
go all to pieces. And all of a sudden you'd see him start to 
jerk. Well, I know what was happening to him now. His optimum 
speed of reading -- the safe speed of reading -- was what he was 
reading at. He felt comfortable at this.

Well, there's typists -- very often you think there are slow 
typists and fast typists. No, there are typists who are 
comfortable typing slowly and typists who are comfortable typing 
swiftly.

I knew, one time, a court reporter. And this person just couldn't 
type slowly. It was just a physical impossibility. Didn't feel 
like she was typing at all unless the typewriter was going 
brrrrrrum! jumping, you know, off of its stand, and brrrrr! and 
so on. She'd be sitting there quite happy, you know, chewing gum 
and everything was fine.

Another person comes along and he's being pushed to type, one 
finger, you know. Peck. Peck. Why didn't he relax and write at 
the rate of one letter per minute -- the right, optimum speed?

Now, you could say, then, life would be livable at the speed a 
person had decided it was livable at. Got that? Life is livable 
at a safe speed, or life is livable at an optimum randomity, or 
life is livable so long as one's randomity did not become less 
than or greater than what he thought was comfortable.

It isn't really safe. "Safe" isn't really good, because this 
assumes that everybody considers it necessary to protect himself 
-- which, if you look at these drivers out here and so forth, you 
realize that it's an incorrect premise. Because those fellows 
aren't -- they're not only not protecting themselves; they're not 
even protecting police. It's really bad, because I think the 
society should protect police. It shouldn't be open season all 
the time.

Anyway, where we have, then, one slowed down or speeded up, we 
get maladjustment. What is maladjustment? It's being slowed down 
or speeded up.

Now, here's an awful trick you can play on somebody. You want to 
throw somebody way down Tone Scale? You can throw him down in one 
of two ways.

This individual walks at a certain rate of speed. Well, you walk 
along and carefully accustom your speed to the individual, see. 
Carefully walk just as fast as he's walking, you know. And 
because you're so well adjusted, you can take hold of his arm, 
and he feels very comfortable at this. And then slow down 
imperceptibly, see, pulling him back just a little bit. Meantime 
talk about something innocuous -- politics or something else 
unimportant, you know -- and you'll just observe the fellow... He 
never notices exactly what's happening if you're very adroit, but 
he goes right on down Tone Scale on the subject he's talking 
about.

Now, you can do the same thing the other way: You match your 
speed to his, and now you make him walk just a little bit faster 
-- not much -- than the speed which he set and which he evidently 
finds comfortable. And again talk about politics. And what do you 
know, he'll go right on down the Tone Scale again.

But he will hit it in a different fashion. It'll be hectic. You 
know? He'll feel a little hectic about it, and then he'll slide 
on down. He'll get just as apathetic being speeded up as he was 
slowed down.

In other words, what we're looking at here is a comfortable speed 
of walking. A comfortable speed of working. How much is too much 
chorus girl? See? How much is too much chorus girl? How much is 
too little chorus girl. Somebody goes and sees the Rockettes. And 
I don't know, they've gotten it up to a thousand girls, haven't 
they now, in regimental front? And he sees these Rockettes, and 
you can take him away, and you bring him away from the music hall 
and you say, "Well now, how'd you like the show?"

He says, "Well, the movie was good."

"Well, what did you think about the Rockettes?"

"Oh, oh yeah," he says, "there was some dancing. You know, that 
movie was pretty good."

Interesting. Fascinating. There were too many of them. They were 
moving too fast. They spread out in all directions, and so forth.

You take the same guy down to a burley-burley show and there's 
just one chorus girl, you know. And he sits there and drools, 
drools, drools.

Well, that was evidently enough chorus girls, you see, in one 
direction. Well, how much is too little chorus girls? Well, you 
can't get him out of the theater. You've at once seen too many 
and too few -- optimum in between -- in just one striptease 
artist. You get the idea? See? Less than that -- he doesn't like 
that, so he won't leave. More than that -- well, he resents the 
"in between the acts." See? It would be right on the button.

Well, most people have this, and that is what we know as taste.

Somebody walks into a room and... Park Avenue. Park Avenue: they 
have one color -- one color carpet, one color on the bedspread, 
one color on the wall, one color in the vase, one color in the 
drapes, so forth, and... Gray, see. And it's perfect. Perfect, 
you see. And a decorator comes in and puts one willow sprig with 
a slightly different gray, you see. Person says, "Pretty wild. 
That's a pretty violent thing!" They say, "It's bad taste, 
garish!"

Now we go down in the village, and a girl's got this half of the 
door painted chartreuse, the other half Chinese orange, see? But 
in the middle of the wall, from there to the floor, it's 
brilliant purple. You know? And we go on from there, see.

She herself is wearing scarlet pajamas with a bright green 
turban, you know? Somebody walks in and says, "You must lead an 
awfully dull, quiet life." It would just be the amount of 
randomity in the color spectrum. This establishes taste.

I don't know what good taste is in general, but I could say what 
good taste was for anybody who was tasting. That could be 
established.

So when we try to be too sweeping in our generalities concerning 
preclears -- below the level of stable data, disorderly data, 
stable mass, disorderly particles, and this formula of randomity 
-- when we drop down below that and get into other material, we 
can't really tell exactly how the hat fits until we have looked 
it over. Because this individual says he has a terrible 
intolerance for women.

You say, "Well, all right. What's so bad about women?" you would 
say -- you would not say as an auditor, but if you said, "Now, 
what's so bad about women?"

He'd say, "Well, hair."

"What about their hair?"

"Well, they wear it long."

Because you have a different idea you would say, "Now, just a 
minute. Now, just how does he add this up? There must be some 
deep significance back of this." No, it's just a matter of too 
much hair. I'm sorry, it's just there is no more significance in 
it than that. He doesn't like women because women wear long hair. 
He knows that long hair shouldn't be worn. When the wind hits it, 
it makes a motion. Get the idea?

Same fellow. Doesn't like Roman troops. Why not? Well, they have 
short hair. When the wind hits it there's no motion at all, don't 
you see?

Well, what is the proper length of hair? Well, it's obviously 
somewhere between a crew cut and a pageboy. You're liable to come 
up with some coif of one kind or another and say, "Well, is that 
it?"

"That's fine."

Then he'd go tell his wife, "Listen, honey, this guy's got 
peculiar ideas. Get your hair cut just slightly above the lower 
lobe of the ear, you know? Just about there."

And he says, "My God, you're gorgeous, dear." He's happy with her 
for the rest of his life, see?

This is a completely wild, wild thing because you say it couldn't 
possibly make that much difference. Well, we don't have to 
inquire into the deeper significance of it. A person finds life 
as livable as it matches his idea of an optimum randomity. What 
is an optimum motion? What is an optimum abundance?

You take somebody who's been living in a palace all his life and 
set him down before a turkey dinner served in a middle-class 
home, and he'd wonder, "These poor people. How could they 
possibly get along?" because they were always starving to death. 
There wasn't enough food on the table.

Conversely, you take some guy who's used to eating out of tin 
cans and show him the same dinner and he'd get sick at his 
stomach. He can't understand how people gorge themselves so. And 
he begins to be very upset about people gorging themselves.

Well, mainly people miss in understanding other people and begin 
to look for many more hidden things than this simple 
consideration: How much is too much? How much is too little? How 
little is too little? Well then, what's just right?

Well, if you could get this fellow to get his "just rights" on 
every consideration, and if life was modeled in that fashion to 
match his consideration perfectly, you would see a great 
relaxation. He'd really be relaxed.

I saw an example of this one time. There were a bunch of 
promoters. Real high-pressure, high-speed -- oh, man, they were 
really promoters. They worked in oil stocks and things like that 
up in New York. Whee, you know? They didn't think they were doing 
a good day's work unless they'd taken some widow's last ten 
thousand before breakfast, you know? They were real fast, 
positive con men. They were playing cards. And they were playing 
cards at a rather stiff rate of speed, see? The place was 
absolutely blue-green with cigar smoke, you know. The chips were 
scattered all over the place. They had a radio turned on, and it 
was loud enough to make the people three floors above keep 
calling the police, who kept knocking on the door.

Now, these guys were all talking and the radio was going and they 
were playing cards and it was all totally disrelated, and a guy 
walked in. And he was just back from the Midwest where he had 
gone for his health. And he walked in and heaved a sigh of relief 
and he sat down to the table, sailing his hat into the corner, 
picked up a drink out of a dirty glass, grabbed a cigar, sat 
back, unbuttoned his shirt, you know, and he says, "Boy," he 
says, "It's good to be home to a restful place."

That was home. That was calm. I could get the idea as far as I 
was concerned, you see, of a complete desert stretching out in 
all directions and not a sound on it anyplace, you know, and just 
nothing but rest. No pressure. That was home. That was the way it 
ought to feel.

Well, sometimes you talk to a preclear and he doesn't seem to 
think you're a good auditor. Well, this is just What does he 
consider the optimum amount of sympathy?

I have occasionally surprised the living daylights out of some 
preclear by giving him too much just on purpose. Make him wake up 
to the fact that all he was doing -- he wasn't running at all -- 
he was just sitting there begging for sympathy. Oh, I've done 
such things as get up and throw myself weepingly upon the couch, 
you know, and just sob and say, "My God, how it breaks me up for 
you to have been treated in this fashion. How could they have 
done it!" You know.

The guy would look at me...

That's too much, so he questions it. But imagine my surprise one 
day for it to have been just enough for one preclear. Just 
exactly right. The person never had confidence in me before. From 
there on, boy, I was something. I knew people.

I've known people, their idea of the proper amount of sympathy 
was actually a curled lip of contempt. Only you never would have 
interpreted this as sympathy at all, but they did. That was 
enough minus randomity on the subject of sympathy, you see. That 
was enough minus sympathy -- nonsympathetic.

You'll see troops exercising this. And it becomes immediately 
familiar to men when I say this. Some guy just gets smashed up in 
some fashion and the cracks that are made at him, he interprets 
as sympathy. And, actually, to some degree they're intended as 
sympathy.

Now, this then opens up a new field, a new view to anyone that 
people could all run on the same rules actually, but at different 
speeds. People could all stem from the same component parts, from 
the same sources of aberration, the same mechanical components 
going into their makeup, with a different consideration as to 
what was enough.

Now, you get the young Thor draining the horn of the giants, and 
that was enough to drink, you know. It wasn't enough to drink for 
the giants, though. They considered that was pretty bad "he 
thought." In other words, he had one idea of how much was enough 
drinking. They had another idea of how much was enough drinking.

Here we have the alcoholic. Now, let's really cut in on this one 
on a real tight curve here. We've got the alcoholic. The 
alcoholic once upon a time had an idea of how much was enough to 
drink. Somebody has disturbed that. They have forced it north or 
south, so he has a violent reaction to drink in certain 
quantities, don't you see?

Now, at one time, then, he had a tolerance for a certain quantity 
of liquor. But this, having been violated thoroughly, leaves him 
without a tolerance and with no consideration on the subject. In 
other words, he has been overwhelmed on his consideration of how 
much was enough to drink. He's overwhelmed.

How much is too little? Well, a man can have some appalling ideas 
on this subject of how much is enough to drink. I've been out 
with "Scandihoovian" sailors, you know. And they think a pint's a 
drink. You hand them a pint and they drain it, and say, "Thanks," 
walk on down the street without the faintest reel. That was 
enough to drink, for one drink.

Now, when we look it over, it doesn't explain on the basis of 
tissue absorption. How the medicos would love to explain it all 
on the basis of "Enzymes go around the gemzynes, and little 
bacrobics do this and that, and that manufactures the cross-
paralytics," or whatever -- you know, some nonsense -- "It does 
something medically."

No, it doesn't do anything medically unless you're tuned up to 
that wavelength, you might say.

They throw these data away, by the way, rapidly. They don't look 
at these data. They throw them about, because they're too random; 
they can't be confronted. Obviously, opium is an opiate. It is an 
opiate because opiate is a derivative of the word opium. They 
would explain this to you carefully. Then we get technical on the 
subject and they say, "In it's effect it is soporific. It 
produces a lethargic reduction of consciousness, you see."

And you'd say, "Oh, you mean it knocks you out."

Well, he would be amazed. He would be amazed. Now, he's got it 
all in his pharmacopoeia that so many milligrumps of opium knock 
out somebody. That's what he's got. It says right there.

All right. He takes somebody and he gives them this many 
milligrumps. The fellow sits there, swallows them -- nothing 
happens. Takes another couple of them, throws them in -- nothing 
happens. Takes some more, throws them in, and he says, "Look, 
it'll happen all at once" -- nothing happens.

This guy doesn't happen to have the consideration that opium is 
an opiate. He hasn't read the dictionary derivation. He hasn't 
been overwhelmed by the idea that it's a soporific. It doesn't 
overcome him. It is simply some pills.

If it's explained to him carefully how he has just consumed 
enough to kill him, and show him statistically -- statistically 
demonstrate to him -- that that much opium poured into a small 
dog would have turned him a bottlegreen purple, fellow's liable 
to say, "Well, I guess I'm wrong." Bloo! And out he'd go.

This is an amazing reaction. You take somebody who is nonhypnotic 
and then explain to them that being nonhypnotic is a 
manifestation of being insane. People who are nonhypnotic are 
insane. Prove it to him conclusively. The next time you say 
"abracadabra" or something, he goes "Daaa." Get the idea?

In other words, you have to actually overwhelm that basic 
consideration before you get a violent or non-normal reaction. 
Have you got it?

He's got the idea that so much is all right; so little is all 
right. Now, that has to be overwhelmed before he himself gets 
overwhelmed. Do you get the idea? You've got to really shove in 
his own considerations. But as you do shove his own 
considerations, his considerations narrow -- and narrow and 
narrow and narrow and narrow -- until it becomes very critical 
how much is too much and how much is too little. Got the idea? He 
gets critical about this.

You'll find the fellow measuring out arsenic with suspicion, you 
know. You'll find him taking a pair of gold-balance scales 
that'll measure a gnat's sneeze and being very careful about the 
arsenic content of a drink, or something like that. The fellow, 
in other words, narrows his tolerance to the extent that his 
tolerance itself is overwhelmed. Now, can you enlarge it after 
that basis?

In other words, you've got to disturb a person's basic 
considerations on any given subject before you can overwhelm them 
with that subject.

He considered that being able to read a book every week, being 
able to take a walk -- that was an exciting life. Somebody has to 
come along and convince him it's a boring life before he begins 
to suffer from it. In other words, there's got to be an opposite 
and contrary opinion. That has to be shoved around. That has to 
be moved around. And when his ideas of tolerances are altered, 
then you get him into what we call an aberrated condition. Up to 
that time you can't consider it aberrated.

So aberration is a third-dynamic phenomenon. It is taken apart 
with a third-dynamic activity called auditing. It's not a first-
dynamic phenomenon. Aberration never has been, never will be. 
When the individual faces too much or too little motion within 
his consideration and something bad happens to him as a result, 
then that bad thing that happened to him as a result is actually 
narrowly based on somebody having sold him the idea that his 
considerations were in error.

He had to be made wrong before he could be wrong with regard to 
his considerations. And the more he is made wrong, the more 
narrow his tolerance of any given speed, motion, action, thought, 
belief, custom or moral becomes.

I get a very big kick out of some old fellow that comes along 
and, boy, he's moral. Wow! You know? Oh, man, is he moral! I 
mean, it just hurts, you know, to listen to this fellow. What a 
beating he must take from the daily paper. What a beating he 
would take from the Christian Science Monitor. And he's pretty 
moral. He's very strait-laced. He knows what's right and he knows 
what's wrong. And man, he's got it measured with a micrometer 
caliper. Hey, has he got a past! Mm, wow! Whew!

You start auditing this boy and you start increasing his 
tolerances on what is and what isn't moral, and he's liable to 
take a wild dive on you with regard to his reactions to any given 
question. You find out, well, he wasn't really bad off. He wasn't 
really bad off until he strangled his younger brother. And then 
it sort of settled in on him, as his mother explained to him that 
this was wrong... You got the idea?

Somebody, then, who was intolerant, or you might say has a very 
narrow tolerance in life -- "People must all run at an exact 
speed, neither too fast nor too slow," you know. "Things must be 
done not too good or too bad but just uyu-vhuh. And things must 
be done in just exactly..." "The way you set the table is to put 
the knife there with it's handle touching the edge of the table 
(not in any), you know, with its blade pointing over toward the 
right. The spoon sets in with its handle exactly level with the 
bottom of the knife." This is the way you set a table, see.

Somebody explains this to you. It's all right. A guy in 
terrifically good shape would simply practically toss the 
silverware down and it'd wind up in an aligned fashion. You got 
the idea? But this person goes over and moves it into this and 
explains how it must be that way and practically screams every 
time it is some other way: You can assume that there's been a lot 
of adjustment of opinion on the whole subject of eating. Got the 
idea? We must have had a big adjustment of opinion, because the 
tolerances are very poor. Got that?

So, the consideration itself, broadly then, at first, must be 
viewed as something that was pretty doggone wide. In other words, 
anything in driving between twenty and eighty could be considered 
as a nice, comfortable speed. After a while, you will find that 
it doesn't necessarily have to be fifteen. A person doesn't slow 
down that way. A person slows down to thirty-five and slows up to 
thirty-five. You got the idea?

The eighty became thirty-five. The twenty became thirty-five. 
They become a fixed speed. Riding at that speed they say, "Oh 
well, that's a comfortable speed." You're driving. You're 
driving. You watch their toes. You go thirty-eight miles an hour. 
You see those feet start down there, hitting the imaginary 
brakes, you know. Broad four-pass highway, no traffic. You go 
thirty-eight and their foot goes up there to find the imaginary 
brake. "Well," you say, "well, I'm going too fast for them." Slow 
down to thirty-two. They get restless.

You'd say here was somebody that had really been mauled around 
and had really mauled around other people on the subject of cars 
-- and you would be right. The narrowness of the tolerance is 
measured by the amount of violation of randomity. All speeds are 
bad but thirty-five. Got the idea? Thirty-two is too slow. 
Thirty-eight is too fast. Thirty-five is just exactly the right 
speed.

Now, other people can go just as silly on an upper band, because 
it's just a matter of consideration. It doesn't necessarily 
settle in a mean at all. Somebody who at one time considered 
between twenty and eighty just fine, has been overwhelmed to the 
point where only 118 is a proper speed. It's a new consideration. 
But it's 118. You go 105 and they get nervous. And you say, "I'm 
going too fast." So you go ninety-five. They almost die!

I had a fire-engine driver one time: He was a very, very fine 
driver, but unfortunately fire engines are evidently supposed to 
travel at exactly sixty-two miles an hour around town. I don't 
know why, but it must be, because that's the only speed this guy 
could drive.

Well, I had a car that did well at ninety. And it was a broad, 
straight, unbending, unfrequented highway. He drove sixty-two. So 
I said, "Well, he's being conservative." And we came to a country 
town which had narrow streets which turned like pretzels. It was 
full of wagons, carts, strange vehicles. We went through it at 
sixty-two.

Now, this is also expressed in terms of heat. Heat expresses 
itself this way, too. Originally a person has a very wide heat 
tolerance. Doesn't bother him, particularly, thirty degrees 
above. Wouldn't worry him too much with no jacket. It wouldn't 
worry him too much with a jacket on at 100. See? But, gradually, 
heat becomes associated with wrongness. Various low degrees and 
various high degrees become associated with wrongness. He 
associates these things so that he moves off any consideration of 
his own and only adopts some other consideration on the subject. 
Because he's misowning the consideration, it, of course, 
persists. He eventually decides, as most of the human race has 
decided, that about seventy or seventy-two is pretty good.

But America, oddly enough, has decided something new. And that's 
that seventy-eight is all right inside with a coat off, you know, 
but seventy outside is all right with a slight fur parka over 
your head. I'm fascinated. I see people going around all wound up 
and so forth outside. And I go into their homes you know and you 
wonder what the hell is this, Death Valley? It's hot! You know, 
and the thermometer is way up there and the place is smoking and 
so forth.

Now, this could, then, become specialized. After it's being 
generalized that exactly seventy-three is the right temperature 
everywhere, then you could break this down and it'd become 
individuated again, and temperature could become: inside one 
temperature is correct, outside another temperature is correct. 
Well, that's kind of a silly thing, but you get an individuation 
of the generality and a further complexity thereof.

Well, what is this thing called randomity?

The optimum randomity of a person is what he thinks it is. But 
any fixed, superfixed randomity is apt to be the result of his 
own considerations having been overcome. And if motion produces a 
marked, violent effect upon him, depresses him or pushes him into 
some different state of mind that is quite marked and quite 
violent, then you must assume that his own opinions on the 
subject have been overwhelmed and that the level of wrongness of 
these nonoptimum motions is fantastic.

Now, why a thetan couldn't tolerate -273 degrees centigrade or 
+1600 centigrade with equal calm is a mystery. But they get into 
a body and it varies ten degrees either way and they start to 
scream and call the waiter and leave the place and buy fur coats 
and... You know? It's crazy.

But you get a phenomenon of a person's own considerations being 
overwhelmed, and then you get what we call aberration and so 
forth.

Well, let's look at this in terms of merely a disorderly set of 
ideas. They considered this set of ideas all right. Too hot, too 
cold -- didn't matter particularly; didn't worry them. Now we get 
a disorderly datum into this lineup, and it says that too cold is 
too cold, and too hot is too hot, that there is such a thing as 
too hot, that there is such a thing as too cold, there is such a 
thing as too fast, there is such a thing as too slow with regard 
to any given object.

And they try to straighten that datum out because it is not 
particularly an optimum datum. But they may borrow it because it 
makes a game. And they begin to hold on to a set of ideas that 
they specialize in. And they will eventually find all ideas on 
the subject of heat and cold random or confused or disorderly 
except one: seventy-eight. See? And then seventy-eight -- it has 
to be just exactly seventy-eight or they're miserable. Hotter, 
colder, they're miserable.

Well, all ideas on the subject of heat and cold are disorderly, 
or they came from disorderly sources and so are themselves 
disorderly. So therefore, it must obtain here that only one idea 
of temperature is correct. And of course, that's obviously 
nonsense.

Well, as we look over this whole subject of randomity we discover 
then that all preclears are different, but they're only different 
in terms of their considerations of too fast, too slow, too 
disorderly, too orderly.

Thank you.

[End of Lecture]




