PROBLEMS AND SOLUTIONS

How are you doing today?

Audience: Fine.

Good. This is the what?

Audience: 21st of April.

21st of April.

All right. Well, you’re going to get a very complex, offbeat lecture here today—very complex, very offbeat. Nothing simple today. Tired of talking about simplicities, you just never seem to latch on. Talk to you about a complexity here, and see if we can’t do so.

As you may know, not contained in the body of Scientology but standing aloof, there are a series of research maxims, or data, which I have really never bothered to collect. You’ll find some trace of them in, of all things, Dianetics: Evolution of a Science. It’s got quite a few of them in it. You know, the rationale and the how of how you figure it out. There’s a whole book that was devoted to this—was “Excalibur,” is how you went about figuring it out. And every once in a while one of these things cracks through and you get a grip on the put-together of existence, and that sort of thing, which is extremely useful.

These things vary. I’m not giving you a big mystery. These things vary all over the place; they go from the sublime to the ridiculous. One of the maxims—I’ll give you an idea—is take a body of knowledge which has produced very bad effects and results, and if that’s the case, then you move it out and don’t pay any further attention to it. Take the one which is least productive of results and rule it out, and you can eventually corral truth on this type of an approach.

Let’s take all those things that haven’t worked and let’s throw them out, see? That’s this type of data, see? And this is of assistance on analyzing cases, you know, like mad. You do it all the time. You say, “Well, this fellow has been run on this and he’s been run on that and he’s been run on something else. and nothing happened in those instances, so it must be something else.” See? Well, this can be done on a broad philosophic basis.

But let’s take something of an unworkability and let’s throw it away. Now, that’s a research datum. Doesn’t sound like much, does it? But it has a broad workability. The reverse doesn’t happen to be true: Because something has worked on a case is no reason it will work on all cases. Isn’t that an interesting thing? That is to say, because something is true in one instance is no reason it’s true in all instances. You’ve got to have it applied in several instances and directions before you have any confidence in it.

That’s one that an auditor misses all the time. He gets a tremendous win. He’s got “Recall being drunk,” see? And he ran this on this old lady, and she got a tremendous “send” out of this whole thing, and it gave him a big win. And now he fails to apply this little research datum, this truth of the matter. You see, he’s only gotten a workability on one case here, series of one, and he has no real idea yet whether or not that is applicable more broadly. And yet out of the enthusiasm of his win, he goes ahead and runs “Recall being drunk” on this one and that one and the other one, the village parson, and all of these sort of things, and he doesn’t get any more wins with it. You see? So he feels very defeated.

Well, what he’s done is fail to apply the other side of the thing: Just because it had a workability in this instance is no reason it’s broadly workable, see? That’s the maxim that goes back of that. There are a lot of these, a lot of these. They’re sort of idiot’s-delight sort of things, and rules of thumb by which you progress.

But once in a while one of them turns up that has tremendous value. And this may or may not have some value to you. (This lecture, by the way, is about Levels.) This may or may not have some value to you as a technical datum, but it certainly has tremendous value as a research datum, to such a degree that I was able to crack through some of the wildest web work that I think I have ever gotten mixed up in, with this.

You see, you can get certain things to read on a meter. You get in the vicinity of “create” GPMs—let us just mention that in passing—and you can get, on Monday, this combination to read; on Tuesday, this other combination to read; on Wednesday, this other combination to read; and on Thursday you get an entirely new combination to read. By that time, you’re pretty caved in, so the only thing you can run on is whether or not you’ve got a creak. So you try then to rule out the creak, and you go back over these things. And it just gets to be one of the wildest swamps that you ever got mixed up in, trying to pilot through the basic morass of the individual, because you can get so many things that contradict so many things.

Now, in view of the fact that a pretty well-off auditor, I doubt very much could pilot his way through a goals plot and still have a PC sitting across from him. PC would probably be dead by the time he got the goals plot half finished and there wouldn’t be any point in finishing it. This is grim. This is real grim. I mean, you see the tiger here; he’s got teeth, see?

You get everything checked out, and then it doesn’t check out tomorrow, see; it’s something different. So I had to have a datum which would pilot through this, and I finally managed to tailor-make a datum which piloted through this. And we get a maxim that doesn’t sound like very much to begin with, but it’s very, very pervasive. And that is: A problem is as complex as it presents potential solutions. A problem is as complex as it presents potential solutions. How many wild ramifications has this problem got? Well, you want to know how many wild ramifications it’s got; how many potential solutions has it got? And that gives you an immediate index of how complex the problem is. That’s interesting, isn’t it?

All right. Well, let’s say this perhaps has some workability—there’s some more to this which I’ll just go into in a moment. But let’s dispose of this first one first. Let’s say this PC—this possibly has use in the field of figuring out what’s wrong with a PC. So the PC comes in to you, and he’s been to the chiropractors and he’s been to the doctors. And a last result, last, last, last result, why, he went and saw—something practically nobody who is decent would do—he went and saw a psychiatrist. And he went even further downscale and he saw a medico. And he’s taken up good-luck charms and so forth. Well, all of this kind of thing, don’t you see, is—those are all potential solutions, aren’t they? Potential solutions.

Now, medicine just gets rid of this fellow by saying he’s a hypochondriac. And I’ve run into a lot of hypochondriacs, and they were sick. They were sick enough to be worried about. I remember one famous case of a very dear lady, and her husband was practically ruined through this. He was quite a famous writer—and she always used to be worrying about her health. And she’d worry about her health and worry about her health, and all of his writing friends and all of their wives simply wrote her off as a hypochondriac. And he was dearly devoted to her and doted on her, and probably only the [the only] reason he kept on writing was because she encouraged him, you know, and she—so on. But nevertheless she was always worried about her health. And everybody was very sure that she was a hypochondriac—labeled it as such, brushed it all off as such—right up to the moment when she up and died on them. It’s quite interesting.

That was the end, by the way, of his career. He went down and went to work for the government. He started writing Herbert Hoover’s “Reorganization of the Government,” or something like that, and he quit writing. And the clique that this girl more or less held together all broke up, and so forth. But it left everybody absolutely stunned, you know? She was sick. You know? Well, she was.

Some people are sicker than others and some people talk about it more than others, you see?

And a handy way of getting rid of it, you see, if you can’t solve it or do anything for it yourself, just say “Well, he’s a hypochondriac,” you know, and dust the whole problem off, you see? And in this case, this was all very handy, but the patient died, do you see? Kind of a grim look at the situation.

You get awful tired of somebody who keeps nibbling around and worrying about this, that or the other thing. And you get awful tired of this person and so forth. But the problem they’re presenting can be measured by the complexity of the solutions.

So this hypochondriac who has tried everything under the sun—”hypochondriac”—he’s actually got a problem that’s that complex. Do you follow that? I mean, there’s that complicated a thing wrong with him, see? You got the way this works. This is another way of looking at it.

All right, now this defeats forever the idea that you’re going to slip somebody Pill 62 and have an OT. Now, you see the error? This used to be introduced to me about once a week or once a month. And we even have a clichй that comes forward from that time. It’s called a one-shot Clear, see? It means a one-process Clear or something like that, see? And for years, why, I was interested in this particular line and everybody was always dreaming up with this. A beautiful dream: all you did was sock somebody in the gluteus maximus with a couple of cc’s of “whizzo,” or something, you see, and they immediately went bing!

Won’t ever happen. Why? If this datum is true, it never can happen. In other words, the problem they’ve got is complex as the number of solutions that are pushed in its particular direction, or have gone around its edges, you see?

The problem of government, then, must be terribly complex, because you think of the number of solutions. Look at the number of political solutions there have been to the problem of government. Well, that gives you an immediate index of how complicated is this problem of government. How complex a problem is it? Well, it must be terribly complex, don’t you see?

Now, this thing which has just one little old “whizzo” solution, don’t you see, and it surrenders to that, that must have been a very simple problem. In other words, there’s a comparable line between the complexity of the problem and the number of solutions. See, it isn’t the complexity of the solution, it’s the number of solutions. Solutions, quantitative, and complexity in the problem. I want you to differentiate that rather cleanly, see? It’s not “big solution, big problem,” see? It’s complex in the problem, and numerous in the solution, see? Something you should look at.

So this tells you at once that when a PC comes in there and sits down in the chair, and you have to start running up the solutions to his case, you see, and it isn’t surrendering easily—you always blame yourself on the basis you haven’t used the right process or something of the sort, whereas you merely may be looking at this mechanism. This is a terribly complex case. It’s a very complex case and therefore is going to require numerous solutions. Do you see?

So you’re just defeating yourself. You say you’re going to run one process that’s going to resolve this particular guy’s problem in life. See, you’re defeating yourself, because you’re going to run that one process, and that’s not going to defeat his problem in life. Just make up your mind that if his problem in life has received many solutions, then it is itself a complex problem and will therefore require a complexity of processes to resolve it. See? Elementary.

All right. And let’s go on from there. Now, a solution must be as complex as the potentials of the problem. There’s the other “whizzo” here. Now, we’ll look at it in reverse here. How complex does a solution have to be? Well, it has to be as complex as the potentials of the problem. In other words, here is, again, not a one-for-one. Here you have the solution being complex, don’t you see? This is another view we’re looking at, another maxim: The solution has to be complex because of the potentials of the problem. You get the idea?

Now, what do you mean, potentials? Well, let’s just take old “survive.” This problem has this potential of knocking out of existence survival along various fronts or in various areas, you see? It’s a threat. See, here’s a problem that is a big problem. So, the thing to solve that: you look for a simplicity in the solution to solve this big threatening problem. And here’s a way you get defeated like that: This bird comes in and he’s got this dangerous problem. Now, we’re talking about a dangerous problem, see—potential of the problem, dangerous potential. He comes in and he’s got this very dangerous problem, you see? They’re going to throw him out on the street tomorrow—very dangerous; going to throw him out on the street tomorrow, and he’s going to lose his job as a result, you see, and he’ll probably be sued in court for something or other.

But he comes in and he tells you he’s going to be thrown out on the street tomorrow. All right, now you give him a simple solution. You say, “Well, I’ll loan you five pounds or five bucks,” you see, “and you can pay your rent.”

Did you ever have it happen to you, that you found out that he all of a sudden told you then, “Well, yes, but then how does this take care of Maizie?”

“Well, what about Maizie?”

“Well, she’s pregnant.”

You get it? So you’ve set up a defeat for yourself. He’s got a dangerous problem: You offer him a simple solution. That’s an immediate way of setting up a defeat for yourself. You’re going to be defeated in this. You can sit and talk to these fellows. Eventually you say they’re completely ungrateful. You just sit there and you give them solution after solution after solution, and they can’t seem to buy any of them because they always say, well, there’s always this other thing, too, see, and then there’s this other thing, too, and then there’s also this other thing, too. And then they finally shyly look at you and say, well, actually, the reason they can’t marry the girl is because they’re already paying alimony to a wife elsewhere, you see? You never knew this either. This all has to do with their being thrown out on the street tomorrow. See, this thing just travels miles. In other words, nothing ever really becomes a dangerous problem which is very simple, or the guy would have solved it in the first place.

Problems only become dangerous that are quite complex. They require, then, a complex solution. “Well, what we have to do, I guess, is so forth, and we . . .” Your level of solution—this guy is going to be thrown out on the street tomorrow, and so forth. “Well, let’s see, maybe I could get you a job with United Fruit, and we could change your name. Take a little doing; we have to get you a forged passport. And then, let’s see, I happen to know Joe— that will require that. And you better—in order to get financed for this, you better rob a bank tomorrow,” and so forth.

I mean, you get the idea, this thing is going to mount up into this. If you were going to be real in your solution, to match the thing, see, well, it’s got to be—this is a dangerous problem—if you’re going to be real in your solution, why, give them a real complex solution, see? It’s got to take care of all these ramifications this way and that, and it’s a put-together the like of which . . . Because in order to become a dangerous problem, the thing had to coast practically into an unsolvable condition, and therefore it must contain many “unsolvable” points.

It’s quite amusing to look at advising human beings from the basis of these maxims, see? If you recognize those two maxims, you’d always be a whiz. This girl comes in and she says, “Well, I’m going to leave my husband. I’m going to have to leave my husband, because . . . so forth—things have gotten too tough.”

For you to say at once, like a marriage counselor, “Oh, well, no, I think we could just patch all this up”—you better watch it, man, because this is a complex solution required here, because that’s a dangerous problem. Well, she’s got two kids. She has no means of support. She’s going to leave the guy. She’s going to have no home. Well, let’s just look at this, look at what she’s threatening to do, here, see?

It isn’t just a matter of blow, don’t you see? It’s a matter of she’s got this very, very dangerous problem: she can’t stay with him and can’t go, don’t you see? But this thing is pretty grim, see? Not just grim in her own mind, it must be that grim. Then your solution to that must be very complex. So if you just say ‘Well, I’ll just run a little O/W on him and her and then straighten it all out,” you’re going to get yourself in for a lose, see? Because there’s a tremendous number of things surrounding that problem.

She’s not saying “Well, I’m mad at Joe and I’m not going to serve him any supper,” see? That’s not very dangerous. See, it could be a few pots and pans blow up—but this is going to be a bust-up of some kind or another. This is big stuff.

Well, a marriage counselor always gets it when it’s right on the edge of the precipice, don’t you see? So you offer any simple solution, you know, to this, you’re being a fool, and you’re going to have a big lose. It necessarily requires a very complex solution—nice, complicated solution. So the thing you had better sit down and do is not give her a little “bing,” you know, and say “I’m going to do that.” Sit down and find out all the items that have to be solved in this problem.

Now, that would be your real action. How many angles to this are there? See, not just a glib “Oh, well, I’ll just run a little O/W on it; you can go home,” and so on. No, no. There’s Gertrude, his former wife, who is in Tallahassee, and then there’s the matter of his mother and father, and so forth, and they’re bringing pressure on her mother-in-law, because, you see, they own the mortgage on the house. You get the idea?

This thing builds up, and you’ll just be stonied to find out how many dead ends, see, that there are in this thing. It’s big! See? It’s not little. So if there’s a big problem, dangerous problem and so forth, then you can just count on the fact that this thing has a tremendous number of little things begging to be solved, out here in the woods, that you’re not aware of at all. And we get that just out of this maxim here: A solution must be as complex as the potentials of the problem.

You can get yourself a big win on this sort of thing, you know? This person comes in: Oh, God, they’re going to blow their brains out, see? Well, man, that’s a pretty wild solution. It’s all right for you to say “All right, he’s in GPM ‘destroy self.’ All right, that’s all. So we’ll just fix that up, and so on.” Maybe so, and maybe you would get to first base on it, except for this: The individual is not up to running at this level, and the individual has personal pressures in his immediate environment which would distract his attention to such a degree he probably couldn’t sit still. And what are we dealing with here? We’re dealing at Level 0, aren’t we? So he’s going to come in and he’s going to blow his brains out. Good. He’s going to blow his brains out. Boy, that’s a dangerous solution, you know? People get hurt doing that! You didn’t get that gag! And you just better decide at that point, just better decide that this is begging for a very complex solution, very complex. This solution is going to be awful complex by the time you get through with this threatened suicide.

My God, this goes back to World War II and the orphan asylum and the girl who is writing letters that unless . . . And it goes to this and it goes to that, and it’s something else, and it’s over here someplace.

Well, why—why get all worn out by saying, “Well, there’s just one more.” See, you’re getting in the same frame of mind he’s getting into. Just take your original assumption, which is the correct assumption to begin with, and then work with it.

Well, it’s a very dangerous problem this guy is involved with. Well, let’s see how complex the solution is here. Let’s just find out how many things have to be solved in this problem. Let’s see, let’s roll them off here. All right. “Well, all right, let’s begin. You’re going to blow your brains out. Good. All right. Now, now—ahem. What’s the immediate and direct pressure that’s causing you to do that?”

He won’t give you the immediate and direct, but he’ll give you something or other. Well, he’s worried about his income tax. He keeps figuring it out and the government keeps unfiguring it on him, and so forth.

And you say, “All right, very good.” Well, you say, “Well there’s got to be some solution to income tax, is that it?” And you don’t offer a solution. There’s got to be a solution to income tax for him.

“Oh, yeah. Yeah, but definitely has to be one.”

“All right, fine. Now, let’s see, what’s the next one here? Is there anything”—take it by dynamics, you see? “Any group you’re connected with, or anything like that?” and so on.

“Oh, well, yes. I haven’t paid my union dues, and they’re going to beat me up next week if I don’t. I’ve already been posted for being thrown out, and of course that makes me lose my job,” and that sort of thing.

“Ah, well, there has to be some solution there too. How many—how many of these are problems? Being beaten up? Is that all one problem, or is that several problems?”

“Well, being beaten up. Well, that . . . that’s a problem, yeah, and uh . . . yeah, there’s two or three problems involved there. And I’d have to go and get a job in some house that uh . . . doesn’t insist that it be union members, and so forth.”

“And you been posted, and so forth, for your dues, and that requires money—that comes down to there. All right, now, how many. . . how many solutions do you think we have to have here?”

And he adds it up, see? All right, that’s fine. You got that out of the road. “All right. Now, let’s see, is there any—there any sex mixed up with this? Any sex mixed up with this threatened suicide?”

“Oh, well, yeah, that’s what it’s all about. That’s what it’s all about.”

And, “All right. Well, how many things are there there?” and so forth.

And there has to be this and there has to be that, and there has to be something or other.

“Oh, all right. Fine. Now. Now, is there any other condition? You about to”—go up to the sixth dynamic, you see? “Are you going to lose your possessions, or you’re trying to hold on to possessions, or . . . ?”

“Yeah. Well, I . . . three-quarters completed for the payments on all the furniture in the house and they’re going to take it away.”

“Ah, there has to be some solution to that, doesn’t there? All right. Solution to the payments, time payments, on the house.”

By the time you finish up, you’ve got a big sheet of paper here, see? It’s just scribbled all over. But the funny part of it is, he won’t be blowing his brains out. You didn’t give him a single solution. You just said where they were needed. Takes him out of the confusion, of course, because it puts up the buffer “needed solution” in front of every one of these problems, don’t you see?

And he’ll come down to it, then, and he’ll be able to think his way through to that, and then you can pull it off.

“Well, let’s see, we could start these things one by one, couldn’t we? We could take these things one by . . . Which one of these things could be solved now?” See? And then run a gradient scale on the thing. Straighten out his whole life.

See, if you know this, you could handle Level 0 like a breeze. And Level 0 is the rough one to handle, man. What makes it rough? Well, these guys’ problems are so great they don’t even know they got them. That’s how great that problem is. This fellow is walking around in a body! He thinks he’s an animal! He doesn’t even know he’s a spirit! He doesn’t even know his right name! He doesn’t even know where he is or what he’s doing, and he doesn’t look at the fact of the importance’s in his vicinity at all. He’s looking at a bunch of cotton-pickin’ little pieces of nonsense here that wouldn’t have anything to do with anything. See? Level 0. This guy’s in trouble!

“But that’s the way it is. That’s life. Huh. Everybody else is like this, so I couldn’t possibly be in trouble, because everybody else is like this, see? I’m not in trouble. Blah-lah-ruh-ruh.”

So, you see, his problem is so complex, he doesn’t even know he’s in trouble. No solutions possible in any particular direction, and the man’s state is that way because no solutions have been possible in any state.

All right. Now, any time you dream up a simple solution to a complex problem you’re going to go appetite over tin cup, square on your cranial capital. Simple solution to a complex problem. Nyaaaa. This is how guys go politically bug-eared, see? You got to have something complex, as complex as the problem.

I want to point out to you that the International City—International City, and so forth: you start looking at this confounded thing, it’s terribly complex. You start getting into complexities, you see, my heavens! You’re into economics, and you’re here and you’re there, and banking, and, boy, this thing is complicated, see? Well, actually, if you just blow up each one of its simple mentions into all the potential complexities, you’ve got the size of the problem it’s trying to solve. And it might have a show.

Now, let me show you the simple solution: “Vote Republican. We have a Democrat in, vote Republican. Now, that solves everything, and that’s all you got to do, see?” And we have another four years with things just going worse, see? “All right, now the solution is to vote Democrat. Get that Republican out and get the Democrat in. That is the solution to all our affairs!” See the idiocy of the simple solution? See? Complete idiocy.

First place, you’d have to go find a statesman someplace. I don’t know where you’d find him; going to have to find him. Then you might set him up with a big team of guys that had some inkling of what they were doing, and they might figure out for a little while. And if they worked for a year or two like beavers, they just might be able to cut the fringe off of the problems that the country has. They just might be able to come into something.

Now, all right. This is Levels. Do you recognize I’m talking to you about Levels? Now, as you go on up through the Levels, you’re actually apparently confronting more and tore complex problems and more and more complex auditing. But that is not the case at all. You’re actually confronting less problems, and you have less demanded solutions.

Now, previously, people in motivation—I mean, psychoanalysis—people have been asking me for years, “Do you have any contacts with industry, or doing any work for industry?” I never really realized that they were asking me (psychologists and that sort of ilk, whenever I ran into them, and so forth; I go slumming every once in a while, I have to admit it)—but they’re always asking me, they’re always asking me, if we’re doing work for industry. I didn’t quite understand what they were talking about until I read a review of what psychology was doing for industry.

Psychology is big business now, because it’s moved in hand-in-glove with industry. It is a little bit into government, but mostly into industry, and it’s hiring and firing their employees for them, and it’s selling all their goods for them. And it’s telling them how to advertise and package their goods. And that’s what it is doing. And that is all it is doing. It isn’t doing anything else for anybody. Its testing services and so forth are all in this line. Now that’s where its money is coming from, and of course we’re cutting their throat on testing by simply giving it free in several large cities. This really upsets them.

The point here, however, is not any rant against the psychologist. He, after all, has his cross to bear. This bird is not even vaguely concerned with any of the problems of existence. He’s completely out of touch, man. But he thinks and the psychiatrist thinks that you go down in man’s psyche.

Now, let me introduce to you a brand-new principle, a brand-new principle: You don’t go down through three levels of subvolitional unawarenesses and so forth to rock-bottom motivation, and that sort of thing, the way they’ve got it dreamed up, see? You’re there, man. That’s the one point they’ve never grasped. They’ve not grasped that point. The guy is there.

You have to go up through heightened awareness in order to progress through these “deeper states,” as they call them. In other words, a guy has got to be more and more aware of these various levels of awareness. He’s got to have a better insight into existence before he can see it at all, see? In other words, his perception has got to improve.

He’s at the bottom rung of the ladder, and the only route he has available is up. He really doesn’t have any down route left. There isn’t any hidden, deep motivation. All you have left is the individual and he is motivated. You have a motivated individual. You don’t have somebody who is unaware of his “motivations.” He really is at no point where he is motivating anything; he is being motivated. And that is it. What are these areas?

Now, the psychologist and the advertiser, and so forth, trying to stir up these things which motivate the individual: to that degree they are aware of this but they think that they are proceeding through lower levels of awareness, of less awareness, to reach these things. No. These things are reached through heightened awareness. In other words, as they try to research to find out . . .

This is why they never get anyplace with processing, why they dead-ended in the whole field of therapy and actually jettisoned it. It had been jettisoned, if you want to know the truth of the matter.

Now, this fellow hasn’t got an unconscious to be probed. He’s unconscious. You see? He hasn’t got one to be probed. He is simply the effect of all of this. There isn’t any place you go below his level of awareness. They get this idea because a person can go to sleep, you see. And they get this all mixed up with the fact that he can not be aware and be aware, and they’ve got “sleep” and “awake,” which has nothing to do with it.

Now, they want to know what motivates this guy, so they put him out further, or they search “deeper,” or they plumb into the hidden recesses of his—”hidden?” Gone, man! He’s the fellow that’s hidden! See, they’re looking for the wrong thing. They’re looking for the deeper areas of unconsciousness, when as a matter of fact, they already have arrived there, they’ve got it sitting in the chair in front of them.

Now, in order to discover anything more about this individual at all, you can only go up. You can’t discover more about this individual, you see, by putting him in deeper, or something like this, you see? It’s hard for me to make this point because it’s so ingrained in us that we go deeper all the time, see?

Now, let’s look at it from another point of view. See? You’ve got to make him more aware in order to find out anything about him at all. So there is no shortcut, as we have eventually learned—we even jettisoned Dianetic reverie—but there is no shortcut by which you can get this guy half baked up on peyote, or something like this, so that you get to a deeper level of awareness, which you can then examine to find out what’s wrong with him. You see that as a complete detour? You’re going exactly no place.

I’ll give you an actual experiment on this thing. You could run this experiment on almost anybody. You say, “What have you been upset about lately?” or “Why are you nervous?” There’s a good one. “Why are you nervous?”

And then the fellow says, ahh . . . I—I don’t know. Am I nervous?”

“Well, you look so. You keep going like this all the time.”

“Uh . . . well, I—I—I—I don’t know. I—I didn’t—don’t—I do—don’t know what’s making me nervous. I—I—if—if I am nervous, I don’t know what’s making me nervous!”

Run this little test, like this: “Well, what considerations have you had about your state?” Run it for a few minutes and then ask him what’s making me [him] nervous, and he tells you at once.

Well, that’s very interesting, because, in other words, you had to heighten his awareness by pulling charge off of this subject of his state of beingness. And now he knows. He can tell you. Well, this isn’t him going into his subconscious, you see? This is opening up a little bit upper strata above him. You’ve made his awareness a little bit better so he can look better, and you’ve gotten him up to a point of where he can look at a little higher condition of beingness.

And that’s the route that you take with a PC. And you can very easily get terribly confused and upset by current nomenclature, Freudian nomenclature and current understanding about having to go into the lower levels of consciousness of the mind in order to . . . No, there is no spook. There’s no bogy sitting down below, you see?

It’s like on a ship, you see? It’s like you’d walk down through all the ladders of the engine room, and you finally run into this black, grimy character, covered with coal dust, and he is sitting there staring into a huge, roaring maw of a fire. And you say, “I’m looking for the fireman.” And he starts accommodatingly looking all over the whole fireroom to find the fireman.

You see, this is the exact idiotic thing that they’re doing with regard to the mind, see? And he will be very accommodating. He’ll go into every corner of that fireroom, he’ll go all through the engine room, he’ll look under the gratings, he’ll look in the bilges, and he’ll cheer you up on the road and everything else. And he’s looking for the fireman.

Now, if you were a Scientologist and you just ran a few considerations about his identity, see, made him a little bit more aware of things, and so on, he’d say, “Ha-ha. Oh! I’m the fireman!” You see what’s going on here, you see?

So we must be careful not to fall into this same parallel line of balderdash. You’re looking for man’s spirit, see? Great! Men will accommodatingly walk with you almost every place to find man’s spirit, you see? And there he is, right there! See, he’s it!

Yet how many times have you had to explain to somebody, “We’re not interested in your soul. You are your own soul!” See?

Everybody says, “A what? I—duh-uh!” See? That’s the same gag as the fireman. Duplicate gag.

No, the guy is there, see? There are no rungs—try to go further south than the bottom plating of the ship. There’s no ladder going down there because there’s nothing there!

So, the fellow is almost at total effect. He has lost his identity, he’s lost his true beingness, he’s associated himself with other things. Now, you’ve got to increase his awareness to find out anything.

There is no reason why—and by the way, I’ve made tremendous experiments in this particular direction, in all ways and directions. You can’t shoot him full of scopolamine or truth serum or something like this, or hypnotize him and ask him something or other. All you’d restimulate is the GPM “to create the past,” or something like this, you know. And he’ll create a nice past for you, because he’s less aware now than he was before.

See? So you reduce awareness, you find less person, and you’re looking for the fireman and you already got him, see? And that’s all there is there. And you’re at the complete bottom rung of the ladder.

All right. Now, how do you get anyplace else? This is your problem as the auditor, see? Well, there are seven Levels up. And these Levels are determined only by this—only by this: an increased awareness of his beingness and his relationship to existence, and the problems and solutions of life. You just increase his awareness of this. What is a problem to this man? And if you simply ask that of each one of the seven levels as you go up, you could draw those levels very nicely. What is a problem to this man? And when you raise him up the line, in some horror you get up about four levels up—oh yes, he’s calmer about everything now, but he can take a look at the problems he has got, man. He’s better able to confront them so that he doesn’t shudder with horror. But if you were to pull him out of 0 and put him at Level IV with one dull thud, and say “Now look at the problems you really do have, brother,” he is not going to be able to look at those problems at all.

One, he has never climbed a single line of the stairs, because you’ve never increased his awareness of his relationship to existence. Only by increasing the individual’s awareness of his relationship to existence can you bring about any heightened condition of ability, performance, livingness or anything else.

Now, this seems to be argued with by the fact that some guy can fill himself up full of Bromo Seltzer or heroin or something like that and perform very fantastic feats in some direction or other. And you know, I think they’re all fairy tales? l did a tremendous amount of research with drugs back in ‘49, ‘50, and so forth. And the only thing that ever happened people went to sleep.

I’ve never seen any of these marvelous experiments that I see Mitten up with such glibidity. I never see the results of these experiments. I read all about them, but a scientific experiment is something that can be duplicated in a laboratory, and apparently none of these experiments so advertised can be duplicated in a laboratory. That’s an interesting one, isn’t it?

Yes, you hear about this fellow, he drinks a half a gallon of rum and therefore he can lift up a horse, you know? I’ve seen guys drink half a gallon of rum. I’ve seen them think they could lift up a horse. I haven’t seen any horses rising off the ground, man. Their coordination gets worse.

There are some writers that think they can write better when they have some drinks. Old Dash Hammett used to have a ring, one of these fancy service things that has a shot glass in six or seven holes all in a little wheel, and all of the thing beautifully rigged up here, so all you had to do was turn it around and you could pick out the next shot glass, you know—these little salon presentation pieces of stuff. And he used to set that down the side of his desk; and when he would finish a chapter he’d pick up the next shot glass, you see, and down it, and go so . . . I heard all about this and how well he did it.

But I ran into some other writers that weren’t so good this way. And one finally put the cap on the whole thing: He says, “You know,” he says, “I can’t write when I can’t spell.” That actually wipes out the whole theory of “how much better I write when . . .” A guy thinks he writes better because he’s less aware. If he were a little more aware, he’d realize that what he was writing stunk! I don’t know if you’ve ever risen in the middle of the night and written some deathless prose or poetry. Let’s say your sense of appreciation was heightened by being half out.

See, we hear about all these things, but in actual performance, and so forth, we don’t see these things get delivered. We don’t see the half-drunk guy suddenly capable of magnificent feats of something or other, and we don’t see this and we don’t see that. But we see guys saying that they are this way. See?

So we can see here that there’s a bit of a hole in some of the logic that is presented to us whereby “if we just became a little less conscious of everything, why, we would be a lot better off.” Well, naturally, that rationale is a very current rationale, because it’s been extant since the beginning of this universe, and is probably the basic rationale that lies back of solutions to all problems— is “become unaware of them.” And that is the final solution: become totally unaware.

There’s one just before you become totally unaware, and that is “Whatever you’re doing makes you right.” Regardless of how irrational what you’re doing is, it’s this last point of assumption that, well, you’re doing right, you see? Completely irrational action.

Well, just below that, as the next solution down, is simply “become unaware.” That’s the gradient scale of solutions, if you want to know the truth of the matter.

Now, where you’ve got, then, an individual who is trying to improve himself, and so forth, he has two routes open. One is to become more aware of existence so as to cope with it, and the other is to become less aware of existence: Become less aware and hope that you don’t get run over. Or become more aware and be jolly sure that you don’t. So the dwindling solution, the solution which is going out the bottom, and so forth, is full of hope, full of a lot of things, but actually doesn’t lead anyplace. And it is a very treacherous solution, because it is simply hoping it will be all right. “Well, I’ll just forget about it and hope that it doesn’t bother me.”

We see this type of philosophy: “If you want to know why you are overworried, remember what you were worried about yesterday and realize that you aren’t worried about it today. And I’m very glad that all the things I have been worried about never happened.” This kind of philosophy Well. it’s very witty philosophy, but is it at all factual? How do we know that that fellow’s worry and the actions he took in relation to that worry did not prevent the total catastrophe? See, we’re not sure of that at all So this other solution is a complete slipshod one and is hardly any solution at all, which is just become less aware.

As one is standing there and the lion is charging down on one, of course it’s always offered as a solution: faint. See? In the nineteenth century, it’s practically the only solution womankind had. She was not in a position—she was still in a state of chattelism. She was not in a position where she could fight back in any particular way. Her word wasn’t really very good in court and that sort of thing. But she could still faint. She fainted like mad and she fainted by degrees. She “Camille’d,” also.

So, this is a solution of sorts, don’t you see? If you can’t confront it, and you can’t move away Tom it, why, you can become unaware of it. The black panther mechanism, I think we used to call this in Dianetics. Some such— “ignore it,” you see? This is worse than the black panther mechanism; this is just become unaware.

Now, therefore, it becomes somewhat terrifying to people when you reverse the flow on them. And this is one of the reasons why it’s difficult for you to do this. Although you can do this as an auditor very, very easily, it’s still sometimes quite terrifying. And you’ll have some people wondering whether or not they should run out their GPMs, or something like this, see? Almost anybody will hit that one. You know you’ve got him running pretty good if about the third time you start to audit him he becomes not quite sure that this is a good idea.

You’re asking him to reverse the flow of the universe, which is gradient unawareness. This universe has simply been a progress of less and less awareness. It’s the route to the total sleep. And the trick of the whole thing is, it’s so rigged that you never get to sleep. The lower you go, the more problems you’ve got, because now the littler problems seem bigger. And nobody ever looks at this parallel route as they go down the route of unawareness.

Actually, their becoming unaware of the big problem brought them less power or force it reduced their confront—and so now they are less able to confront little problem at that level. So therefore it seems as big now as the big problem seemed, and just one stage back. And it seems far more dangerous and threatening and—because it is! What’s the condition of some individual who, because there’s a slight wind blowing, goes into terror? What is this condition, you know? There’s a little bit of wind blowing, not much, just a little bit of wind, and this individual is in white, blanched terror.

Well, now let’s map exactly what happened to this fellow. There was some bigger problem, on the same gradient, that he ceased to confront. He became unaware of it—almost purposely— and this put him into a confront of a slight wind. See, he came down to where he could only confront this little breeze. But the big problem was full of terror, so the breeze is full of terror.

And there’s your trick when you uncover hidden memories, and this is the big invitation to go uncover hidden memories; because you often can uncover a hidden memory, and incidentally increase the individual’s awareness slightly, you see—and uncover this memory by some kind of trickery—and the individual will lose this particular little fear. That he shifts over to another fear now and doesn’t go any further than this, is something they never really bothered to investigate.

Well, I could take almost anybody who had a phobia, and most of you too, put them on the meter—you old smoothie—put them on a meter and start figuring out, “Well, what are you afraid of?” you know? “Oh, you’re afraid of this. Oh, all right.” And let’s just find the bigger fear that made them prone to the lesser fear. See? This that I’m telling you, then, has direct application— actually wraps up psychoanalysis. Freud can go back quietly to sleep in his grave. This was what he was looking for. This mechanism I am telling you right now is what he was looking for—the only mechanism he was really looking for.

All little fears are irrational and are based on a bigger fear. That’s what he considered, see? He said the little fear is irrational, so therefore we’ve got to find the bigger fear that promotes the littler fear. And he went off into all kinds of symbolism and everything else. He got lost in the rat race; he got lost in the maze before he got through. But he nevertheless was on this thing.

Now, why does that work? It works because the individual solved the bigger fear by becoming less aware. That’s the solution to the bigger fear. And let me tell you—because I’ve practiced in the field of psychoanalysis—you can throw the individual back into the bigger fear and knock him galley-west!

You can sit here with your meter and you can smoke the whole thing out very carefully—not processing him, see, not getting any charge off, no TA action or anything like that; just sort it out on the meter.

“This fear you have of cheesecakes: now, does this associate with your mother? Your father Okay. Cheesecakes, and so forth. All right. Were you afraid of your father? Did your father ever eat cheesecakes?” And all of a sudden the PC has got two directions to go: One, cognition, he blows some charge, you see, and he feels better about it. That’s almost totally an accident from your point of view, because—I’m talking to you out of experience—you can just as easily throw him over into a complete gibbering terror.

And the reason why, in psychoanalysis, 33 1/3 percent of their patients commit suicide is because they’ve put their foot into the wrong bin. They have accidentally pressured the individual’s awareness up to a point of intolerance, and the individual explodes. Without increasing his ability at all to become aware, they suddenly confront him with the tiger. And he goes boom!

See, there’re two things he can do. One is suddenly blow some charge at this point—becomes more aware and says, “Oh-ho! I’m afraid of cheesecakes merely because the old man hit my mother over the head with some when I was two. All right, fine. That’s—that’s—ha-ha! Pretty good. Yeah, oh, that’s— that’s very good. Yeah. Yeah. Feel much better now; I don’t have to be afraid of cheesecake. I can be afraid of tie pins now.”

See, that’s one route. That’s one thing that could happen to him. But remember this other thing can happen to him, too. You’re steadying him down, you’re saying “Father,” and so forth, and “Mother.” All of a sudden, a horrified look comes into his eye and he begins to shake.

“What’s the matter?”

“I don’t know! I’m really just terrified!”

See, you could play hell trying to push him any further down that track, now. He got some horrible idea, “Oh, my mother is dead!” and all of a sudden he starts screaming and howling and goes into a complete dramatization and crawls up in a ball, and you call the men in the white coats.

I’m not saying you could do this accidentally, because you don’t process this way. I’m just giving you a little bit of warning about “processing” this way: “Reaching into the deeper states of consciousness in order to discover the fears that motivate this individual.” Blooey! That’s from nowhere. There’s no route.

Because the dwindling spiral of consciousness has brought him to ignore his problems, see? And the bigger problems are less and less and less

Ah ! Let me give you a practical example—not boxing around with nothing here. Let me give you a very practical example.

First time I binged out of me bean in recent times here and started looking around about three hundred miles up and that sort of thing, I thought, “Hey, what do you know,” you know? “Ho-woo-woo! Wait a minute, you know? And aren’t these clouds high. Everything’s fine,” you know? And all of a sudden a problem hit me about eight miles high, see? I’d forgotten about that. This was one of the prices of freedom.

Well, it was totally unintentional getting out of me ‘ead anyhow, see? And it was just a flip in that particular direction, and we were taking off some charge in another area. And I got hit in the face with a problem that I had buried beautifully! It had sod all over it. I wasn’t in any gradient up to being able to confront this problem, see? “Oh, look, I’m free! Hurray! Hurray! I’m free. Everything is fine.

“What the hell is that?” Interesting, see?

Another instance of this: I’d forgotten that some time ago I’d had a fear of being drawn into the sun—a reverse light vector. See, I’d forgotten this. Completely unbraced, all of a sudden there’s the sun—here I come, you know? Beams screech, you know, rubber burning. What’s this, you know? No gradient. See, that was just me being unwontedly brave.

Now, of course, one ordinarily retreats.. . The reason a person exteriorized, see, and then went back into the head and you couldn’t get them out again with a can opener—I’m giving you what exactly this mechanism is, see?—without taking off the charge of why they were in their head, you took them out of their head, and they suddenly confronted the problems that they had long since dwindled down on unawareness, so they’re no longer aware of these problems. They had those nicely handled. You all of a sudden bang him out of his head, he all of a sudden looks these problems square in the teeth— like, you know, little things, like “How do you keep yourself centered in a room? I don’t know. I can’t keep myself centered in the room. I keep going one side of the room. What’s all this black stuff around here? I didn’t know I had all this black stuff around.” Pang! Back into his head, see?

Or, “Gee, there’s my body down there and my car is caught in a traffic jam. What am I going to do?” Bang. “I’m liable to suddenly lose my car and lose my body too. To hell with this racket!” You see? He’d forgotten that he had to retain a certain skill to run a body remotely, see?

So back into his head he goes. Now you try to get him out of there again. Bluooh, no. He knows better now. Ho-ho, he knows better. He’s smart now!

“Come on, just one more time out of your . . .”

“No! No.”

He even sometimes gives you tremendous reality being outside just vivid, see? Everything 3-D and all set up, man. He’s all set. He’s all roaring to go. Something like this happens to him, you see, he confronts some of the old problems that he’d become unconscious of. Carefully, he made himself less conscious so he wouldn’t be aware of this problem. He never solved that problem; he just became unaware of it. He took that line of “solution,’! see?

So, back into his head he goes when he confronts that problem again, only this time he now has the awareness that there was some reason—this still sticks at him—there was some reason he went into his head. He can’t quite spot what it is, but there is some reason.

So now you give him the business, you see? You say to him, “All right. Now, but you had a good reality on it while you were outside. You know, then, that you are a spirit, that you are not a body. You know all this. You’ve got this all—”

“Ho-ho, no. I haven’t got any reality on that. Outside? When was that? When was that? I didn’t do. Not—not me! Oh, I know we thought something happened, but probably just my imagination.” You ever have anything like this happen?

Well now, this is why this happens. It’s the dwindling spiral of unawareness.

Now you’re all of a sudden going to take this individual that you’ve walked down into the bowels of the ship and asked him where’s the fireman, and he accommodatingly searched for two hours when he was it—you’re going to take this individual, and you say, “All right, it’s very nice in the crow’s-nest. You can see every place. Now, we’re going to put you in the crow’s-nest.” Swump-glump, into the crow’s-nest.

Crow’s-nests have their disadvantages. They reel. They are not warm. They are lonely. They are dark. When one falls out of them, one splashes. You haven’t got him in that crow’s-nest two minutes: He’s saying, “Why, hey, look how nice it is around here!” you know? He’s saying, “Gee whiz, oo-oo, I’d forgotten there was such a thing as the sea. Gosh!” you know? “And all this fresh air. Golly, I—no—no coal dust in it. Hey, what do you know!” And he’s enjoying all this, and all of a sudden he’s starting to look sort of haunted and he says, “Take me out of here.”

And you say, “What’s the matter?”

“Oh, don’t bother with what’s the matter; take me out of here.”

You get him back down in the stokehold; you could come down and offer him a thousand pounds cash to sign on, not back in the crow’s-nest, but even on the deck force, and he wouldn’t have anything to do with it. What happened?

Well, actually he didn’t become aware enough of what happened for him to really be aware of what happened. He came to an area of something he didn’t understand. And this was alarming to him, and he saw that his position was insecure and he was very unsafe, and that he compared it to how safe he had been—if uncomfortable—down there in the bowels of the ship. So his vote is in, with a great big X on the ballot box, for “in front of furnace door, coal dust everywhere; I at least knew, by experience, that I survived there, and I know that it’s impossible to survive in a crow’s-nest.”

This is his total rationale. In other words, you put him into a higher level of awareness. There is no deeper subconscious for the individual to go in.

You put him in this higher level of awareness, one of the things he becomes aware of is the problems he has not handled. So this alone makes it necessary for the forward progress of the individual to be by gradients. And you can make it, as long as you gave him a chance to sit down occasionally and admire the new view.

In the first place, he’s a victim of charge—self-created, tremendously restimulated, or quiescent, masses of charge. He is not aware of these things, really, at all; but the second he becomes more aware—he starts to get aware of them—he doesn’t really want anything to do with them, so he ducks out on them again. You do nothing about these things, you do nothing about this charged-up atmosphere, you do nothing to take—”just take charge off.” What am I talking about? I’m talking about you process this guy without tone arm action. Take charge off: get tone arm action on this individual. As he is getting tone arm action, he gets about so much tone arm action, he’s moved up to a new level of awareness. Having moved up to this new level of awareness, he’s able to look around, and he is perfectly comfortable where he is.

Actually, the preclear who is progressing just looks a little better and a little better and a little better. It is not a spectacular activity. Now you’ve got him up to a point of where you can take more charge off per unit of time. And the charge is more fundamental. That’s why you have Levels.

Now, actually, the charge which you can take off at one fell swoop at Level IV would practically kill somebody if you tried to do anything about it at Level 0, see? Now, as they move up the line, their problems are apparently greater. No, their problems aren’t greater, they can see better. Actually, their problems are less, and they are more capable of handling them. And so it stays in better balance. They’re more satisfied. But they can handle more breadth of problem than they could before. As they go up they can handle more problem; the problem is less upsetting to them. As they go down they can handle less problem, and these problems are more upsetting to them. That’s just the awareness of the problem, as you go up and down.

Now, the complex individual who requires the complex solution is the guy at Level 0. There is the boy who has to have the complex solutions. His problems are terribly complex, and his solutions have to be numerous. And the potentials of the problem are dangerous in the extreme to him. And therefore the solution that is handed to him must be relatively complex.

Now, how do we get around all this? Just let me give you this in a very, very rapid rundown here. How do we get around this? You know that solving somebody’s problems doesn’t do anything for him, because the new solution becomes a new malady. The old solution is all he is sick from now. Everything is a cure for a cure. Cures cure cures. It’s a gradient scale of curing somebody’s old cures. I can tell you what fellow has been a man-o’-warsman, or something like this, by his reaction to rum. This was about the only cure he had. It was a cure for fear, and it was a cure for this and cure for that, cure for being wet. Never had any dry clothes, they just gave him a drink of rum.

Rum now turns on chills, gives him a cold, and makes him terrified. Why? It restimulates rising to the zone of these old problems, which it cured. So now you have to put him through a course of treatment to cure him of rum.

Now, what gets us away from this? It’s just this: we are not giving people solutions. What is the only thing that divorces us from this in processing? How is it that we can get around this at all? Well, it’s elementary how we get around it. The basic error is the most fundamental part of the problem that can be as-ised. The basic error that you want to as-is is a fundamental part of the problem, because of this chain of solutions.

You, as an auditor, are attacking it at a problems level. You are not giving the PC new solutions for his livingness; you are taking out of existence old solutions which now exist in the form of problems. In other words, you’re as-ising past solvents. You’re as-ising what has been solved in the past. You’re taking him in the same direction up, see? See, you’re backtracking the same track he came down. You’re not giving him a new solution to the condition he is in. But you’re taking out of his think the old solution which made him drop down and become more unaware. You’re taking this out of his perimeter of existence .

In other words, you’re not attacking the problem by giving the PC new solutions. You’re attacking the problem by as-ising old problems. That they, in their turn, were solutions is beside the point. From an auditor’s point of view, just for simplicity, simply attack the problems the fellow has had. Well, you run this gorgeously in, what, 1C, 1CM—R1CM and so on—problems, solutions: What problems has he had? What has he done about these problems? What considerations has he had about these problems? Any such action as this—and particularly, how has he solved these problems? What solutions has he had to these things? And you start backing the guy up, and you’re actually backing him through yesterday’s problems.

When you start running solutions on somebody, you’re running yesterday’s problems. See, if you run it as a problem, you are running it below its point of awareness and it won’t as-is.

I’ll let you in on a little trick, here. You have been told that you must not run problems at R1C. Well, that is simply a blunt technical statement, and it’s perfectly true and valid and workable.

But let’s ask “What the devil is a problem?” You’re told that you can only run solutions on this person. Ah, but what’s a solution? A solution is a way you don’t have to confront the problem. And a problem is something you don’t want to confront. By definition, what is a problem? A problem is something you don’t want to confront. That’s why it’s a problem.

So your effort to handle it is solve it in some way, and when you solve it in the direction of becoming less aware of it or turning your back on it—when that comes in as a solution—you have now moved into less levels of awareness. So the way you as an auditor are backtracking this thing, you’re actually looking at yesterday’s solutions. And you start to ask the PC, “What problems have you had?” “What problems have you had?” “What problems have you had?”

He’s just saying, “This I couldn’t confront, that I couldn’t confront, this other I couldn’t confront.” And so you don’t get any meter, see? You don’t get this

But you say, “What solutions have you had?”

He’s saying, “This problem and this problem and this problem that I could confront.” Do you see that? It’s the difference between running no-confront and running confront.

See, today’s problem was yesterday’s solution. So you inevitably are running solutions regardless of whether you call them problems or not. But if you call them “problems,” then you’re saying the individual couldn’t confront them; if you’re saying “solutions,” then you’re saying he could confront them. You see this?

You got to backtrack this boy’s solutions, because then you’re getting rid of the problems which he set up so that he couldn’t confront anything. And this is how this all degenerated. So you’re actually cutting in at an entirely different area. You’re cutting in at the solutions the fellow has had, which of course in their turn were problems.

And therefore, processing can solve the way back up the whole track, you see? And he becomes more and more aware, he’s more and more capable of confronting, so therefore these terrifying things—you know, like going out and seeing the street—these terrifying things are less and less terrifying to him. And what’s the final there? He just graduates up through these various levels of awareness, up to a point of where he can confront the problems that made him start getting unaware in the first place, and he finds those, in turn, were solutions, so there he’s all set. And he moves on out to freedom.

And this is the route to freedom, through becoming more aware; it’s expressed on your tone arm, it’s expressed on the fact that you’re attacking the various solutions of the past. And this holds through even to GPMs at Class VI.

What were these things but very complex solutions? Extremely complex solutions. Well, there must have been a hell of a problem back of it, man. That’s obvious! There must have been quite a problem back of all that. Well, the problem back of all that and so forth was only a problem because the individual wasn’t confronting it. So he took an extraordinary-solution way out called a GPM. It was a pretty wild thing to do. But there’s where the areas of confront go.

Now, he got himself so thoroughly bogged down in all the charge and mass that his chances of becoming aware enough to even know what this problem was became very remote indeed. If he were suddenly to walk back and face this old problem, he’d fold up like a tent with its tent peg pulled. Crash!

Just ask him “Go ahead and face this old problem.”

Hhahh!

You say, “Get rid of these GPMs.” You got rid of the charge now, which were the solutions, and all of a sudden he suddenly turns around and confronts the problem that he had. He will confront that portion of it that he can confront. You start handling this and work him through that and he can confront more and more of it, and then he’ll finally laugh at himself.

But that’s what Levels are, that’s why they’re there. And it just behaves on this basis on the operating principle that the individual, at any given time, is at his lowest level of awareness, no matter what level he’s in. And you’ve got to walk him up into further awareness, further comprehension, understanding, for him to be able to hold his own in the environment that he has now entered.

That’s the rationale of Levels, and why you bring the individual back up. That’s how to process an individual. That’s how you keep from stampeding an individual in some particular direction. That also explains why you occasionally turn on a manic on a PC: “Oh, it’s wonderful! Every—wonderful!” And three days later the PC collapses. He was put in there too fast, too quick, with too much.

You see, you don’t need tougher processes now, see? You need more adroit use of the processes you’ve got. And you walk an individual up this track. He might tell you he wants to become OT tomorrow, but that’s a solution. What’s an OT? “It’s a person who’s totally unaware of anything and has buttoned the problem up.” You see how that would work?

So when we look into this, when we look into this, we see how an individual can be made better, how an individual can recover, and we see the direction we’re trying to put him; and we see that trying to put him there in a disorderly fashion and not knowing what we’re doing would arrive at very little gain for the individual and a lot of loss for the auditor. If you just realize that you’re simply increasing the individual’s level of awareness, you’re getting off the charge which debars him from confronting the problems which he had deserted—and if you look at it from that point of view, with that degree of simplicity—then it doesn’t matter how complex a problem is. It doesn’t matter how complex the solution is. But always remember that a problem is as complex as it presents potential solutions. And the man down there in the firehold, you’d be surprised how many solutions it takes to keep him alive and keep him going. Man, they’re just fantastic.

These start to drop off as you walk the individual back up. The most complex being that you confront is the PC at his lowest level. And therefore this requires the most complex solutions.

But you bypass that as an auditor by having the key to the gates. You start getting rid of the solutions he has had, and therefore the complexity of the solutions he is now adding on reduces—reduces because the problem all the time is less and less complex. See, reduce the complexity of the problem by reducing yesterday’s solutions. And this is how processing works, and this is what handles it and this is the direction you steer it. If you steer it in any other direction, you will have a severe loss.

But this way, if you understand it this way, then—let me add one little point here, now: The thing it takes to drive this home real good is to ask that little proposition I gave you. Ask some individual for an answer to something (he won’t give you the answer), then take some charge off, his considerations or solutions he’s had to it, and then ask him again for that datum, and he’ll give you the datum. Well, how come he could give you the datum now, when he couldn’t give you the datum then? He was barred from the datum before, he had retreated from the datum before; you raised his level of awareness, you got the charge off, you got him—upped his confront, upped his awareness, and he all of a sudden could give you the datum.

Nothing is more positive than this than trying to get an individual to understand an item, or something like this, in a GPM. You start this one, and the guy will sit there, “How do dogs bring about masters?” you know?

“I couldn’t imagine that. What do dogs have to do with masters? Dogs don’t have anything to do with masters, and so forth. Doesn’t . . . dogs doesn’t . . . bring masters . . . Oh, it doesn’t make any sense to me at all! Dogs. Masters. No connection. No connection whatsoever.”

You say, “What considerations have you had about it?” (In other words, what solutions have you had to this and what have you been doing about it?) And you run this for a few minutes and say, “All right, would dogs bring about masters?”

He says, “Of course, you fool! Anybody would know that.”

Well, you say, “What was that all about?” Well, what that was all about, a very simple thing. Overcharged area, too mucked up with solutions: guy couldn’t think, he couldn’t see, couldn’t be aware in that particular area. And for you to get him anywhere at all, you had to take him through the charge.

So the road out is not by a spectacular open sesame or a wave the wand, or something like that. You take them back out through the charge they came down to avoid. What’s that charge consist of? It consists of the solutions they had to other charge they couldn’t avoid, they couldn’t—didn’t want and became unaware of, see?

So the road into this universe is successive unawarenesses. And the road out is successive awarenesses. But not just bare-breasting your chest to the whole universe. No, you have to find out why the individual didn’t want to be aware at those points, and he didn’t want to be aware because he solved it. Well, what’s this solution? Well, that was yesterday’s problem. Yesterday’s solution, problem, solution, problem, solution—they’re all the same line of cat.

He got himself into trouble by solving himself into trouble. And when he has solved himself all the way into trouble totally, he’s here, and he’s the fireman down in the stokehold. And therefore there are no lower levels of subconscious for you to explore; there are only upper levels of awareness.

Thank you.