I want to talk to you about overt acts, motivators and the DED. Although you will find the sequence I describe to you invariable, the conditions resulting from it are quite complex.

There are three circumstances. An individual has something done to him and then he turns around and does it to somebody else or something else. And then he says, “I shouldn’t do that,” so he holds himself from doing it again and he brings the first time it happened to him and the time he did it close together and they wind up in a ball no matter whether they’re ten billion years apart or ten minutes apart. They’ll wind up. One is the motivator, the next is the overt act – the same, similar efforts.

Person receives an effort and he thinks he ought to be able to use any effort he has received. We get this sort of situation here: I showed you the dish and the tennis ball circumstance here. In comes this effort. Now, if it comes in and hits him, he makes a facsimile of it, he feels he should be able to put that facsimile into play at any time.

And so one day he starts to put this into play and we finish the cycle – it gets there and he says, “No!” And when he says no there, he says no there. In other words, he stops the thing coming in and going out if he stops it going out. Why? Because when it was a counter-effort he stopped it and tried to stop it from coming in. So what does he use to stop it from going out? The same force that he used to keep it from going in.

So, this one as it starts in here at the top, it’s coming toward him – this is earlier on the track – this is the motivator and this, of course, is antipathetic to his survival, being a heavy counter-effort. And as it comes in he says, “No, no, no, you must not come in.” And he tries to force it and keep it from coming in, but it comes in anyhow. And he makes facsimiles of it coming in and his stopping it and his being unable to stop it. He makes a facsimile of every sequence of the entrance to him of this counter-effort.

Now, once upon a time – or a little bit later, “then” upon a time – he will say that “This is a similar situation. I’m going to do it to somebody else. I want to put this person in apathy,” he’ll say, “and here’s a facsimile of a good, strong counter-effort. I’ll give him this good, strong counter-effort.” And he’ll start to give him this good strong counter-effort and you’ll get a cogeneration of energy there. And he’ll say all of a sudden, “I don’t want to put him into apathy, really, because he is me and I am him, because here it’s happening to him and it happened to me, so therefore I must be the same as him.” And this is very simple and very sensible.

You’ll find all people who get motivators and try to use them as overt acts come to this conclusion that “I am he,” until they get a cross-identification across the whole human race. They think everybody is them and they pick up everybody’s facsimiles and they pick up all sorts of restimulations. They don’t pick up anybody’s facsimiles; that’s a very special activity. You can grab somebody’s facsimile, but you’re not grabbing his facsimile at all – you’re taking a photograph of his facsimile or you’re pushing him through his own facsimile. You’re not taking his facsimile, it’s different.

Now therefore, people, when they’ve have lots of motivators which they’ve tried to use as overt acts, will eventually come to the conclusion that they and the rest of the human race are the same person. In other words, their own individuation is squashed. Why is it squashed? In comes a counter-effort, they stop the counter-effort from coming in. They make a facsimile of it. They start to use it one day. They want to put somebody into apathy or put somebody out of action or nullify them-something is happening. So they take this thing that happened to them and they say, “Here it goes” and start to use it and they find the other person putting up the same resistance they put up, which identifies them with the other person because of an interchange of energy.

There’s an actual energy flow and this other person says, “No, no, no!” The person who is doing it to them feels “No, no, no!”-as an energy flow, not the words or anything. There’s an actual energy kickback. And the second this kickback hits, it restimulates very mechanically the other side of this motivator. So it makes the person who is doing the overt act the same as the victim. It gives him a confusion of identity. And the second he gets this confusion of identity, he says, “No, no, no. I mustn’t do this to me.” And so he holds it up. And he tries to say, “I didn’t do it,” and he tries to pull it back. He gets regret. Regret is the action of trying to make time run backwards.

And so he holds it up and here it was on the way out. But here is a facsimile now which is holding it up. Who’s he? Is he the person who is holding it up or the person who is putting it out? Well, he must be both people. Well, if he’s both people then he can feel sympathy for the person he was doing it to. But, of course, if he feels sympathy for the person he was doing it to, this makes him the same as the person he was doing it to, because anything you feel sympathy for, you identify with yourself. So it becomes an immediately unsolvable situation unless you have the reduction and erasure techniques of processing – Dianetic processing. If you have these techniques you can resolve this. It couldn’t be resolved before. So there we are.

The overt act here becomes involved with the motivator there. The two of them lock together and make maybe.

A person hangs up, then, on the time track. That’s a standard situation and when you try to take apart a balled-up time track or a balled-up situation or a compulsive thought level or an inhibitive thought level, you’ll find a motivator and an overt act, one way or the other, mixed up at the bottom of this thing. You’ll find them interlocked and you start to run a preclear through one. You start to run him through this, you say, “Ah, now we got a nice bop on the E-Meter and the E-Meter says that he did this and it was at such and such a date.” You’ve gotten all this off the E-Meter. You’ve asked it if it was so many years ago and it was this and that and you’ve got the complexion of this overt act: Who did he do it to? What did he do it to? And you start to run it. And so he goes through the action.

By the way, it’s very amusing to make people go through these overt acts sometimes. Because as they start to go through them, they get just weak. They go into their own apathy level. If they’re a severe overt act – let’s say you’re running an overt act of somebody choking somebody. And you say, “Well, go ahead now, take your hands and choke somebody.” And the fellow will start. At the first moment of it he’ll say, “Well, yeah . . . ” He says, “It’s funny, my arms feel all limp.”

Well, the odd part of it is, is he’s trying to force somebody into apathy if he’s choking somebody and so this person is actually exuding an apathy wave, because he’s trying to force the person into apathy. He’s saying, “Go into apathy, go into apathy. Don’t act, don’t act. Don’t move, be still.” And as he does this, his intention matches the return wave.

See how that is? I mean, he says, “Go into apathy, go into apathy.” So the person goes into apathy and then all of a sudden emanates the wavelength of apathy. Very simple. So the apathy wave hits the person who is doing it and makes him feel weak, because that’s apathy. But the second he feels weak he says, “It must be happening to me.” Because how did he feel when it was done to him in the motivator? Weak, in apathy.

Now, he wanted the answer to this problem: “Here is another being and I w ant to put this other being into apathy. How am I going to put this other being into apathy? I have a very sure method of doing so. I was put into apathy once by being choked. Therefore, the way to put this person into apathy is choke him.” Simple solution. So he chokes him. His intention is to put the person into apathy. The person exudes apathy, apathy comes back at him. He says, “Therefore I must be in the motivator. Oh no, I’m not. I’m in the overt – no, I must be in the motivator.” And that’s the way it acts in auditing.

So you run it through once. You make this fellow choke somebody. T hen he chokes them again. He says, “I feel hands around my throat.” Well, the re’s something else complicates it. It’s an actual fact that as his hands closed around this person’s throat, it made the cells and area of this throat actually exude an area of pain and because they are the cells of the throat they will mirror a wave into the cells of his throat. You know, the victim’s throat starts to emanate pain. What’s the most likely thing to pick it up? The identical cells in the overt act person’s throat.

That’s a very, very mild little manifestation. T hat’s tiny, that isn’t big. T he mechanics of it are the fact that he thinks because he feels this slight impulse – he says, “Oh-oh! It’s happening to me again. I am the victim. No, I’m not. I’m the person who’s doing it. I’m the victim. No, I was the victim. No.” He doesn’t know, because he starts going down Tone Scale. Why doesn’t he know? Because the bottom level of the motivator, w hen it happened to him, was “I don’t know.” So he just says, “I . . He just doesn’t know what’s happening. It’s very confused.

You start to run him through, you make him choke this person’s . . . And you say, “Go through the action of choking somebody.” And he feels all weak and he starts to choke somebody and he goes on and starts to cut off their head with an ax or something. And says, “Oh, I don’t w ant to do that. I wouldn’t – I wouldn’t do that.” And you make him go through it.

And he said – all of a sudden he says, “Gee, my–my neck, I–glug–glug–feels horrible. Got a somatic.”

Well now, you can go on forcing him to choke somebody, but you’re actually, to some degree, defeating your own purpose.

I ran some clinical experiments on this to find out if you could run overt acts through just by running overt acts through. And it’s pretty hard to do. It will happen, but the person insists on running the motivator – running the time it happened to him. So the fastest way to do it and the way to do it now, according to procedure and according to test, is you run him choking somebody and then you run him being choked.

You run him being choked himself until such time as you find it getting very sticky indeed. You know, slows down-starts to be hard to audit. First moment it starts to get hard to audit, make him choke the other person. And he starts choking the other person and make him choke the other person till that gets a little bit hard to audit and then get him choked himself. And you’re reducing them selectively, each one to each one’s level.

And if you run one of these overt act-motivator ballups on the track that way, you will find out that you’ll get a very speedy reduction. They’re very fast to reduce, then, so you don’t have to work on it for hours and hours and hours. . . .

Want, to talk to you tonight about the resolution of effort and counter-effort.

The only reason an engram will not run and the only reason a moment of pain, the only reason a moment of unconsciousness will not reduce properly or erase properly is in the matter of effort and counter-effort. Effort and counter-effort form a heavy-enough block on some engrams they become very difficult to work out.

Of course, you understand there’s another item and that is one’s own intention or one’s own self-determinism with regard to it. It matters much more what the individual says than what is said to him. So one’s own self-determinism can be a large factor in auditing out an engram.

But the effort and counter-effort are actually what hold it down because they sort of wrap up the self-determinism, they sort of lie around it. Self-determinism can get swallowed up by effort and counter-effort. Such a situation as this: An individual comes out of a door and somebody else comes in the door and they collide. Well now, each one has the intention and postulate of progressing forward in the direction he’s going and they collide. And they stop for a moment. And to A, who is coming out of the door, B is a sudden counter-effort. And to B, going in the door, A is a sudden counter-effort. The two of them meet, maybe bump their heads together, both of them would go unconscious. You see, unconsciousness is actually a manifestation of one’s self-determinism being upset by a counter-effort, that is what unconsciousness is.

The equation one works on, actually, is “If I can’t make my self-determinism count, then I must be dead” and he goes down curve rapidly toward death. Unconsciousness is just a – light or deep – is merely a slide in toward death. Now, effort and counter-effort, then, contain a very large part of the answer of auditing out an engram. Your preclear can get so bogged down in some postulate, in some statement he makes himself, underneath this effort and counter-effort-that he’s made when he received it or made just before he received it – that he will concentrate in such a way on this effort and counter-effort that he does not pick it up.

Now, that may seem to you rather odd that you could concentrate on a counter-effort and be, then, unable to contact it. The trick is to concentrate on another point than the point of impact and only then will the counter-effort come in. The reason for this is very simply expressed. One’s own effort is always to some slight degree directed toward the receipt and expulsion of counter-efforts. Now, the receipt and expulsion of counter-efforts requires that one fix his attention upon the counter-effort. And one’s attention, therefore, is fixed on the effort in order to expel it.

What is actually happening is you are no more and no less than a complete bundle of counter-efforts. Thought picked up its first counter-effort way back at the beginning of time, turned it around and used it to overcome the physical universe. And this sequence: picking up a counter-effort and then using it, picking up a counter-effort and then using it, picking up a counter-effort and using it, should demonstrate to you that every effort which you exert has, at one time or another, been a counter-effort.

A physical-force effort then has, at one time or another, always, in every case, has been a counter-effort.

The only reason a counter-effort in a facsimile becomes troublesome is because an individual’s self-determinism depends to a large degree upon his right to use any counter-effort he receives and turn it around and send it the other way. Now, he thinks of himself as having this as an inherent right. Therefore, when he receives a counter-effort and is then inhibited in using it, the counter-effort will eventually come back against him because he will go back to the point where he realizes the counter-effort is dangerous, he’ll start examining it and he’ll throw himself back into the first facsimile of its receipt. This is highly mechanical-very, very mechanical.

Now a counter-effort then, let us say, of being hit hard by a truck, to use a very standardized thing (hitting by a truck is quite ordinary these days, drivers being what they are, particularly in Kansas) – so your counter-effort comes in, bam!

Now actually, in order to use this, the individual would have to hit somebody with a truck. Well, he knows he’d better not hit somebody with a truck because this would be in violation of the dynamics as well as city ordinances. (At least most cities have ordinances against this sort of thing, I’m not sure about this particular city.)

The point is that one has received a counter-effort which he cannot employ and so it’s worrisome. Well, there are two things to do about it: one is not to get hit by a truck and the other one is, if hit, be in a high enough tone so that that facsimile, being in the counter-effort band, won’t ever be contacted by you anymore-or audit it out. Now, these are several courses that you can take. All right.

Here is the matter of receiving a counter-effort and not being able to use it. An individual is killed, let us say. I hope that doesn’t sound particularly amusing to you-he’s killed and later on can’t use the counter-effort, but that’s exactly what happens. The individual is killed, let’s say he’s strangled, and later on somebody does something to him and his response is to take his lily-white hands and strangle the other person.

Now, he may do this several times. He may do it very successfully several times and one day, after he gets through strangling somebody, maybe back in the Stone Age or something of the sort, he takes another look and it’s a girl and that was the wrong use of this counter-effort. Or it was a baby-wrong use of the counter-effort. He’s trying to use this counter-effort and here he’s used it wrongly. What happens to him? Instantaneously and immediately, he gets the somatic of being strangled, because he tries to regret this matter, he tries to figure it out. He says to himself, “My goodness, how could I possibly have strangled this woman?” “How could I possibly have strangled this baby?” (whatever he did). “Well, how could I have done this?”

Well, when he says to himself, “How could I have done this?” he starts picking up the facsimiles which gave him the counter-effort which permitted him to do it. And of course, he hangs up with the first time it was done to him. And we call this first incident, when it was done to him, the motivator.

The motivator is then employed and may be employed relatively successfully. He can go around choking animals, choking horses, choking anything, it doesn’t matter, choking men-they’re all on a parity with him-it just doesn’t matter. He doesn’t regret these fellows. And then, one fine day, he chokes the wrong person, which is to say, he chokes somebody that is not a legitimate target, which is to say, he has no justification for the act. Insufficient justification creates, then, what we call the overt act. An overt act is the misemployment of a counter-effort – the misemployment of a counter-effort. And the counter-effort thus employed against a target that is not a legitimate target, backfires on the individual. He’ll go back down the time track and get into the motivator. He gets into the motivator immediately. He gets the somatics, plainly and simply, that were administered to him. He gets those somatics himself.

Thus you find, on the track, a person begins to accumulate overt acts – many of them. He maybe has one big motivator, one incident that he can’t do anything about. He has received a counter-effort and every time he tries to use this counter-effort, which is his perfect right (he thinks), he finds out that it is such a large offense against the other dynamics that he pulls back and resigns his right and he cannot, then, be self-determined. So his self-determinism sinks because he can’t use this counter-effort.

As a result, the accumulated overt acts can get up to a point where the individual will suffer no matter what he does to anybody. He begins to believe that he cannot use a single counter-effort. This is a condition we know as apathy: all counter-efforts go through and one puts up no effort to resist them. That is apathy. That is also refusing to use one’s right to utilize counter-efforts. That’s the bottom of self-determinism, then. One can’t use a counter-effort, therefore one has no self-determinism, therefore one is in apathy because all efforts go through him-all counter-efforts go through him.

The Tone Scale – the whole Tone Scale can be derived on these emotions to this degree: how much overt action has the individual suffered from? That is to say, how many times has he failed when he tried to employ a counter-effort? The degree to which he is unable to employ counter-efforts is the degree or the band he lies in on the Tone Scale. Should be very simple, very easy to understand.

If a man can’t use any counter-efforts at all, he cannot resent anything that’s said to him, he cannot strike back at anybody that does anything to him, he is incapable, then, of defending himself or the other dynamics and, as a result, more or less ceases to exist. That’s apathy. The bottom of apathy is death. One then won’t even resist the counter-effort of sunlight or anything of the sort.

Now, way up the band, one is so extensional against counter-efforts that they really don’t even arrive. They don’t arrive. He not only is capable of employing all counter-efforts, he doesn’t need to, he’s way up above. Now, when a person, let us say, is well up the band, let us say that he begins to use, for some reason or other, counter-efforts-he uses some old counter-effort against one of the dynamics. He comes down the band a little bit. He uses another counter-effort against one of the dynamics. You see, it’s non-survival to go out against the dynamics – it’s not good sense!

So, he uses these counter-efforts and he uses them and he uses them and he uses these motivators, one after the other, and gradually uses them wrong this time and wrong that time and comes, eventually, down to the bottom of the Tone Scale.

In order to audit him back up again, one could, actually, merely pick up his overt acts. You can locate them on a psychometer. His overt acts. What has he killed and when? When has he misemployed counter-efforts? Against what? Against himself, against children, against women, against groups, against Man, against animals, against the MEST universe and so forth, right straight on up the line.

Particularly interesting is the counter-effort against Seven – theta – the Seventh Dynamic. The overt act against Seven is very interesting because it results in an individual believing he has offended to such a degree that he has to get into the valence of something which is offended. Now, that unsnarls very easily.

Christ bore the burdens of all Man and the world, didn’t he? So, if a person keeps on offending, offending, offending against the Seventh Dynamic, he will eventually offend so wrongly and so widely and broadly that his only solution to it is to wind up as Christ.

Now, as we go up the scale, then, a person commits actually less and less counter-efforts but is capable of committing more and more. The bottom of the scale, in apathy, is when a person has committed so many counter-efforts, so many overt acts, he’s done so much without good justification that he must now do nothing but justify whatever he’s doing. Well, what does he do to justify? He starts wearing the somatics, starts wearing the pains and infirmities of his motivator. It has turned on him, at last, and you’ll have this …

You can run, by the way, a great many people through the Crucifixion. You can actually run them through the Crucifixion. They’ll get it very nicely. They’ll take enough facsimiles and put them together to have one wonderful crucifixion. They’ll get themselves really crucified. Why? Well, any time you find anybody running a crucifixion, you start looking around to find out when they started offending against the Seventh Dynamic and you’ll find plenty of offenses. And instead of running the Crucifixion (which is, after all, merely satisfying this person), find their overt acts against it and run those out and the tone of the individual will come up quite markedly. That’s a symbolical performance in this society, this society being what it is-running the Crucifixion. You’ll find that as an incident in many people. Don’t bother to run it.

Find out when they cut the throat of the priest, when they set fire to the nun and other little pastimes in which they have engaged during a dull day and an idle moment, [laughter] . . .

Now, the only reason anybody is carrying around an aberration or a somatic, by the way, according to theory, is that he has used some counter-effort he received sometime to destroy along one or more of the dynamics. That’s one for you to note in auditing.

The phenomenon of the overt act is very important. You hit Bill, you hit him, and a few days or weeks later, your eye isn’t so good and you can’t find out why. It’s because you hit Bill; you regretted hitting Bill.

Now, if you’ll take an overt act and run it backwards, you’ll get the regret off of it. Because what is a person trying to do with an overt act? He’s trying to get it undone. He doesn’t want to go forward through it again. He wants to undo it, he wants to un-enact it. He hit this fellow – he’s in a terrific tearing rage – and he hit this fellow and the fellow fell down and the second that fellow fell, all of a sudden he said, “I’ve just hit my brother. Huhhh! No, I didn’t do it. That wasn’t I.” He then invalidates it all over the place. “I didn’t do it, I had . . . ” Then he says, “I had ample justification.” He knows he doesn’t have ample justification. He can’t quite untangle this thing, because there that fellow lies on the ground in bad shape-that’s just hitting somebody in the eye.

You’ll find in almost – in any man’s childhood, he has hit another child. And you can find that. And you will find that hitting this other child has been an additive factor, just one of the many factors, which is holding in suspension the somatic which that man in his adulthood is carrying.

Now, that’s just hitting a little child in a childish quarrel. How do you get rid of this? Run through it, identify it. Put him on a psychometer and find it is the best way to do, because you can fish around for a long time on overt acts by just guessing. You can spend a lot of time, but a psychometer will tell you immediately where they are.

Run this incident backwards. Have him withdraw the blow, withdraw the blow, withdraw the blow and all of a sudden he’ll find he’s impossible to keep withdrawing this blow and the film will start to run the other way. And then it’ll run the other way for a few times and then he starts withdrawing it again. And in such a way, you work the time out of the act. Because, you see, the reason it gets into restimulation is very simple – very simple, the reason the overt act gets into restimulation. The person has jammed time on it, he doesn’t want it to happen. So having jammed time on it, time becomes timeless and so the overt act can float with him from there on. He has put himself before the incident happened. Therefore, any time he moves forward, the incident occurs. There, maybe, is one of the reasons he has sinusitis and so forth.

Any time a person has performed an overt act, he has suffered from it to some degree or other. . . .

Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health
Chapter III: The Cell and the Organism

Now in the case of the woman beaten by her husband, the engram contains just two valences. Who won? Here is the law of “tooth and claw,” the aspect of survival in engrams. Who won? The husband. Therefore it is the husband who will be dramatized. She didn’t win. She got hurt. Aha! When these restimulators are present, the thing to do is to be the winner, the husband, to talk like him, to say what he did, to do what he did. He survived. “Be like him!” say the cells.

Hence, when the woman is restimulated into this engram by some action, let us say, on the part of her child, she dramatizes the winning valence. She knocks the child down and kicks him, tells him he is a faker, that he is no good, that he is always changing his mind. What would happen if she dramatized herself? She would have to fall down, knocking over a chair, pass out and believe she was a faker, no good and was always changing her mind and she would have to feel the pain of all blows!

“Be yourself” is advice which falls on deaf reactive mind ears. Here is the scheme. Every time the organism gets punished by life, the analytical mind, according to the reactive mind, has erred. The reactive mind then cuts the analytical mind out of circuit in ratio to the amount of restimulation present (danger) and makes the body react as if it were the person who won in the earlier but similar situation where the organism was hurt.

Now what happens if “society” or the husband or some exterior force told this woman, who is dramatizing this engram, that she must face reality? That’s impossible. Reality equals being herself, and herself gets hurt. What if some exterior force breaks the dramatization? That is to say, if society objects to the dramatization and refuses to let her kick and yell and shout! The engram is still soldered-in. The reactive mind is forcing her to be the winning valence. Now she can’t be. As punishment, the reactive mind, the closer she slides in to being herself, approximates the conditions of the other valence in the engram. After all, that valence didn’t die. And the pain of the blows turns on and she thinks she is a faker, that she is no good and that she always changes her mind. In other words, she is in the losing valence. Consistent breaking of dramatization will make a person ill just as certainly as there are gloomy days.