6110C18 SHSpec-68  Valences -- Circuits

     "Are all thetans equal?" some pcs ask.  All cases are rough, but some are
rougher than others, regardless of equality of thetans.  However, we find that
all beings in this area of the universe have the same type of aberration,
differing only in magnitude of aberration.  This is contrary to Kraepelin's
index of insanity, which points out its many different manifestations.  The
only question answered by such a classification is that of how aberrations
manifest themselves.  But all aberrations arise from the same causes, having
only different manifestations and magnitudes.  The reason why we are clearing
people is that we are taking people out by the same route they went in.  So
you have to parallel what the mind is doing.

     It works like this: a thetan, being and acting in this universe, loses
confidence in himself, in his ability to do and to survive.  Having lost that
confidence, he then assumes an identity which he considers will stand instead
of self.  He himself goes down into degradation.  What he is overwhelmed by,
or what he has overwhelmed consistently, is adopted by him as a package of
behavior, and that is a valence.  A valence is a substitute for self, taken on
after the fact of lost confidence in self.  As a thetan sinks into degradation
and lost confidence in self, he goes down into personal oblivion so that he
has no further memory of self but only memory of a valence.  Having taken on
this valence, he then carries it on as a mechanism of survival.  He does a
life continuum, actually, of what he has overwhelmed or what has overwhelmed
him.

     At the point of degradation, you will find it backtracking this way: just
before he assumed the valence, he has a problem concerning his own survival
that he himself could not solve as himself.  Just before that problem, there
was a tremendous confusion in which, by process of overts and withholds, he
became enturbulated at himself.  These overts and withholds were against the
various dynamics.  That was the route by which he went in.  He missed his way
and had overts and withholds against the mores of the group in which he was
operating, and he lost confidence in himself completely.  He felt he couldn't
go on as himself, which gave him a tremendous problem relating to survival.
He felt he couldn't solve this problem, so he adopted an identity he thought
would stand as a solution to this problem.  Then he went on as that identity.
Now that identity was in turn submerged by the same cycle.  As the identity,
while a member of the group, the thetan committed overts and had withholds
from members of the group, which produced an insoluble problem.  The thetan
usually "solved" the problem by the acceptance, not of another valence, but of
a change to another status.  The cycle is always the same.  While a member of
a group, having certain goals, he commits overts and has withholds from other
group members, from which arises a confusion.  This confusion summates into a
problem, which he then solves by _______ .  The _______ is the only variable.  Early on the track, the thetan always used a valence.  But the common denominator of all his solutions is change.  This has always been an element.  That is equally true of the first assumption of a valence and of every new lifetime, etc.

     The whole of the Buddhist concern was the life-death cycle.  The goal of
the Buddhist is to escape the cycle; he's afraid of change because he could
become responsible for wider changes.  This is almost on the principle that
"If I shirk enough responsibility, I'll just float out of my head."
Unfortunately, it doesn't work.  It is true that occasionally, accidentally, a
thetan can sit down and go out of his head, sproingg!  The way he does it is
that he has set up an escape mechanism to spring him out of dead bodies like a
fighter pilot ejection seat.  Usually they don't work.  Every now and then one
works.  It's actually a mocked up heavy-energy guillotine.  Pcs think that if
they feel enough pain they won't be able to think, so they set this up to be
triggered by pain.  At a certain time, they get enough pain and the guillotine
is supposed to knock off the body.  So people wind up by now with the belief
that you have to kill a body to get out of it.  Actually, unless you had
overts on the body, you would practically float out of it.  People who are
going around sick may have triggered the ejection mechanism and had it fail to
kill the body or eject them.  It's a failed solution.

     One of the mechanisms of the series of truths the Buddhists believed was
that the world was horrible, poverty stricken, etc.  The basic truths they put
out were so interlarded with these other exaggerations, overts, and unkind
thoughts, criticisms, and so on, that it operated as a self-trapping
mechanism.  If you get a guy to be still long enough, you will key him in like
crazy.  All the motions of the past will come in and kick him in the head.
Why do you find a PC sitting in the middle of a problem, sitting there with
that solution.  And why is it such a still solution?  It's a still point on
the track, and every time the PC has tried to rest, he's practically been
overwhelmed.  When you get the problem out of the way and look back for the
motion and confusion, the motion and confusion run and the still spot
disappears.  The still spot is held there by the pressure and duress of an
active spot behind or earlier than the still spot.  So when the PC tries to
rest, the motion threatens to overwhelm him as it gets restimulated, so it's
upsetting to him to be still.

     There's nothing to do, once one has blown out of one's head, so the goal
of the Buddhist must have been to do nothing.  That is the defeatist goal.
People in defeat will say they want to do nothing, in some variety of ways.
Of course the nothingness is the point of overwhelm.  So people who yearn for
nothingness inadvertently yearn to be overwhelmed.  So every great culture
strives for peace.  They get so much peace; there's so much peace everywhere
that some barbarian comes along and knocks the whole thing off.  They achieve
perfect no-motion, which is death.  So a thetan's ambitions can often be
contrary to his best interests.  This is not surprising, in view of the fact
that there are no real liabilities to being a thetan, except the liability of
no interest, inaction, nothing to do or have or be, nowhere to go.  When you
see people preaching these, you see people in the finest possible games
condition.  They are playing a game of seeing other players overwhelmed, using
the mechanisms of the track which would most easily overwhelm the other
players.  It is not really in the best interest of the other to advise rest,
peace, and inaction.

     The proof of this are all over the place.  E.g. a soldier gets wounded,
gets front-line first aid.  Result: a lower death rate for wounds treated
there than for similar wounds treated at the base hospital.  Society
subscribes to the idea that someone can kill himself with work.  This is a
complete red herring.  How does a thetan get sick?  You know that when you
release the still he is stuck in, he'll get well.

     What has happened to a thetan that he doesn't just heal up an injured
body on the spot?  He has been leading too quiet a life, that's all.  People
in circuses take falls that would kill a regular person.  The only reason an
injured body doesn't spring back into shape is that it's held out of shape by
stills.  Things wrong with people are held wrong, with considerable energy.
The effort it takes to stay crazy must be fantastic.

     The best way to get sudden recoveries is to run withholds, because
withholds are the motion before the still that was going on while the person
was not participating with the motion.  He was withholding himself from the
motion, so he was already being slightly still.  He eventually withdraws so
hard from the motion and commits so many overts against the other participants
in the motion that he backs out all the way and becomes still.  When you
haven't any right to be part of a motion any longer, you have only one other
choice -- to be still.  That's the mechanism by which you can get confusion,
overts and withholds becoming a problem: a problem is the still.  After the
problem comes the solution to the problem.  Of course, since the problem is
motionless in time, the solution becomes continuous in time.  Now the thetan
has the problem of how to get some motion.

     Although motion is evidently "bad" for a thetan, he nevertheless likes to
move and insists on doing it.  If he hadn't done so much motion in the past,
his present "still" would be OK.  But as with a car, having its bumper up
against another car's bumper should do no harm, unless it was previously
traveling at 165 miles per hour.  It's the motion prior to the still that
produces the impact.  There's nothing wrong with a still if there hasn't been
some motion.  And motion is fine, if a still doesn't occur.  If you can
tolerate both motion and stillness, you won't have any trouble but there are
certain motions and certain stills a thetan cannot tolerate.  You could move
insane people up the track just by giving them a huge boulder in the middle of
the courtyard to look at, to familiarize themselves with a still.

     If we look at how a thetan got aberrated, we see that it's a cycle of
action:

           1. Overts against co-action

           2. A confusion leading to

           3. A problem, which is a stop, leading to

           4. A change to solve the problem.

The cycle keeps repeating itself.  The thetan keeps picking up new bodies, who
are somebody else.  This really makes it complicated, since each of them is an
identity.  He doesn't stack up any new valences, however, because the basic
valence is in there so solid that transient valences don't overwhelm it.  The
basic valence, motivated by the basic goal, is the biggest single change that
takes place in a lifetime that is available to an auditor.  It is available on
anyone with whom you can communicate.  If you can't communicate, you can still
use CCH's.  They aren't used otherwise, now that the problems intensive can be
used to get off hidden standards.

     What other changes besides valences are available?  One is a new body.
Every death is preceded by an unsolvable problem to which death was the
solution.  A new body is a solution to death, which left the thetan in
inaction.  All illness evolves from unsolved problems; it's always a gradient
scale of dying.  People even get sick when they win a prize or get new
possessions beyond what they feel they should have to survive.  It can be too
much change and too much havingness -- unsafe because of one's liability to
being attacked.

     Thetans aren't stupid.  One of their aberrations may be a stupidity, but
according to the computation on which they are living, what they are doing is
very clever.  You'll always find that the very stupid have a great belief in
their cunning; often, too, the very bright consider themselves to be stupid.

     How many changes can occur just after a problem?  In terms of mental
changes, very few.  They could suppress or enhance certain characteristics,
get rid of or adopt certain manifestations, and that's about all.  The
earliest step is taking on a valence.

     A valence both limits and exaggerates a person's own skills.  A thetan
can only set up a valence or a circuit to do what he can already do.  A thetan
can, without a body, walk out on a stage, pick up a 1000 lb weight, turn it
around and drop it.  But he's so dedicated to the idea that it takes a strong
man's body to do it, that he only does it when he's in a strong man's body.
Then it gets to the point that he can only do it when in condition, when he's
well, when he's employed to do it, when he has no problems with his manager,
when he believes in himself and feels powerful.  These are all vias.  The
basic truth is that he can just do it.  Each of the limitations and vias he
puts in there is a solution to a problem he couldn't otherwise solve.  The
problem got there because he was trying to get something done as part of a
group, and in that motion has overts and withholds, and these resolved into a
problem.  The whole cycle has to take place every time to wind up with a
solution like that.

     The problems and changes you are interested in as an auditor are not very
many.  You are not interested in his being in a body; he has been in and out
of bodies before, or he wouldn't be here.  But what is he doing with this
body?  He isn't being the body he is in; he is being a valence which is in a
body.  In other words, he's a failed thetan being a failed valence in a body.
Up to this point, he'd be easy to communicate with, but new problems and
changes interpose such things as constant somatics.  Then you are auditing him
through the problem which is the constant somatic.

     A circuit is like a subsidiary valence.  It is a mechanism which modifies
a valence, a solution to the realization that the valence can often be wrong,
so it needs to be dictated to or to have things hidden from it.  So when the
thetan, as a valence, runs into a problem where the valence has failed, he
sets up a valence that can think and a circuit to modify the thinking of the
valence.  After the thetan has failed, everything he adopts after that is
subject to failure, and each one of them becomes a barrier to processing.  A
circuit modifies the thinkingness and doingness of the valence; it is a
dictational machine.  Circuits slow down or speed up, show things or hide
things, etc.  If they get too wild and complicated, the person can modify the
circuit with a somatic.  When you get this much bric-a-brac, somewhere along
the line you could get a hidden standard, which knows more than the valence,
which knows more than the thetan.

     A hidden standard is just something which knows better, to which the
thetan is paying attention.  The thetan's concentration on this item can be so
great, the dependency on it so heavy, that the thetan only knows if it knows.
If it tells him, it's true; if it doesn't tell him, it's not true.  When you
are auditing him, he lets it tell him.  He pays so much attention to it he
hardly sees you at all.  To some degree, everyone's attention is absorbed in
some part of the bank, but where a total overwhelm exists, attention is so
absorbed that only it knows.  People run totally on social circuitry.  For
instance, parents often have totally unreal ideas about their children, whom
they have never observed at all.  Circuits are often so idiotic that when they
are activated by what they are set up to produce, they criticize as if it
weren't there.  E.g. one has the circuit, "A child's appearance should be very
good." So if a child's appearance in the vicinity of someone with that circuit
is very good, he's criticized; if the child's appearance is very bad, he's
ignored.  This confuses children and causes them to feel betrayed.  Most
things that a person protests against he will do himself.  We call this
hypocrisy; it's caused by circuits.

     Circuitry is an escape from knowing and confront, vias used by the thetan
to divorce himself from life.  When you audit him, you are a part of life, and
you will hit his interpositions.  You will thus be auditing a circuit, which
prevents him from being able to go clear on straight Routine 3.  If you get
off his PTP's, ARC breaks, objections to the room, etc., he is less likely to
interpose vias, and you can then talk to the PC, not the circuit.  But people
have problems of such magnitude on the recent backtrack that they set up a
permanent circuit, so you are always auditing away at the circuit and making
slow progress.

     The problems intensive directly handles and knocks out circuits so that
you can audit the PC out of the valence he is in.

