A fellow says, "I hate to be young. I don’t like being young. I want to be old." He will get old. But he has also said, "Old people are dreadful. I don’t like old people," so when he gets to be old, which he wanted to be, he can’t like himself because he is now old. This is squirrel-cage stuff.

About the only safe way you could handle this would be to pick up the postulates you make. Make all the postulates you want to and then remember that you made them. It is actually very simple. It postulates a new way to do your thinking. You can be as serious as you want to. You can keep your word if you want to. Some people do.

That is another factor in the society, by the way, which is quite fascinating: the insistence of the society that a person who is honorable keep his word. What a beautiful Black Dianetics gimmick! If you can just force a person to always be consistent and always keep his word, then you make him immediately subject to all of his postulates. And the second you have succeeded in doing that you have practically killed him. This is a wonderful gag.

Of course, we couldn’t have business without people keeping their word, because business is honest and ethical—never otherwise! That is why everybody gets it down in writing. When you have it down in writing, you can see what that does. You sign a contract; the notary public comes in and stamps it and seals it. There are signatures all over it and there are whereases and wherefores to make it legal. (No document is legal, of course, without three whereases and two wherefores in it.) As a result, what do you get? You have a contract or a postulate. The contracts you make with yourself are a lot more binding than a business contract because you just can’t go up to the court of law and beat the rap.

You said to yourself when you were three, "I’ll get even with her. I’ll break out in a rash like I did last week. I’ll lay down on the floor; I’ll scream. I’ll fix her!" You know very well you are doing it when you are three; by the time you are seven you are not quite sure what is doing it, and by the time you are twenty-seven you are in horrible shape.¹

When you were three you signed a contract, and that contract is still in existence. The only way to get out of that contract is to die. If that contract fails you—you make it and it fails you—then life has it all worked out; it has a beautiful bear trap fixed up for you. You get up to a point where this contract is no longer workable and you are suffering from it too much, and life has a solution for you: you die. Then you have a clean slate and you can make a lot of new contracts, unless you have found some use for some of the last contracts that you were using on the genetic line.

So you get this out-of-valence situation—an individual who ceases to be himself, who becomes Mother or Father, and so on. You look for the point where the person swapped valences; it follows a point where he failed. Let’s say that he was trying to tell Father off the way Mother did—which is to say, he has taken Mother’s valence as a set of facsimiles. He is telling Father off and then Father somehow or other sees to it that he fails. Nobody is going to talk that way to him (except his wife, of course), so he breaks the child down. The child will go out of valence at that moment, because he chose a valence, he knew he chose it, but now it has failed and he steps out of valence and into something which he doesn’t think he has chosen. But he has. He just sort of dies—he gives a token death, you might say, at that point.