This is an additional chapter to the original manual written by the editor, Roger Tandry.

The first thing to know about the postulate failure cycle is that, well, postulates can fail. It’s inevitable in games play where one pits their postulate against another, there is going to be a failure on one side or the other.  The next thing to know is that postulates fail and change in a particular sequence. For example, in compulsive games play, if you are postulating something ‘must be known’ then you are going to overwhelm the other into ‘knowing’ it, forcing them into the ‘must know’ postulate.  That’s how it all starts.  

Your self-determined postulate of ‘must be known’ is at the same time a pan-determined postulate of ‘must know’. You’ve committed an overt, your opponent receives a motivator and is forced to adopt your pan-determined postulate of ‘must know’ as his own self-determined postulate of ‘must know’. 

But then your opponent throws a ‘must not know’ postulate at your created effect, committing the overt, you receiving a motivator, and now your postulate regarding the effect is “must not be known” because that is the result of his ‘must not know’ postulate when it succeeds, it throws you into ‘must not be known’. 

You can also look at this as you forcing him to know and him responding by preventing from being known. 

This will become clearer to you in this example:

Note that once the father prevents her from being known, in other words, enforces his ‘must not know’ postulate on her, she reactively makes the corresponding ‘must not be known’ postulate and is now actively making sure that her father does not know her by running away. This, in turn makes the father pursue her because he now opposes the very postulate he pushed her into which she is now dramatizing, but as her own.  It’s kind of like she is saying, “Hey I want you to know me, but if you don’t want to know me, I am going to make sure you don’t know me.”

On with the story…

Now consider carefully what happens next and why. The girl has already tried and failed in her ‘must be known’ postulate (the screaming), and then failed in her ‘must not be known’ postulate (running away).  So, she isn’t going to react to being discovered like this with either of those postulates. Those postulates are already in failure.

      Instead, she is going to go into her father’s valence (remember, a ‘valence’ is an identity assumed in games play).  He’s obviously won this round of the game, so she is going to adopt his postulate of “must know”. Those who have studied Dianetics will recognize this phenomenon of ‘taking on the winning valence.’

He found her, and discovered she is smoking. She’s forced to be known. She is going to turn the tables and force him to be known now!

See what just happened? The father prevents himself from being known, thus preventing her from knowing him, so she not-knows him. In other words, she was forced into not-know, and now she is actively making that postulate her own, so to speak. 

We started out with the girl forcing the father to know, and now the girl is at the end of the cycle, being forced to know.  She has given and received all possible overwhelms. All postulates are now in failure.  What happens next?

 She shifts to her father's valence.  Her father is forcing her to know him, so she goes into her father’s valence and forces him to know her. But she started the last game by screaming, and look where that lead her to eventually—complete postulate failure. So, she starts a new cycle with a new effect.

And so on and so forth, and as the cycle continues, things just get worse and worse between the father and the child…

I will now express this series of events just labeling what the overwhelms are:

1)   Forcing to know

2)   Prevented from being known

3)   Preventing from knowing

4)   Forced to be known

5)   Forcing to be known

6)   Prevented from knowing

7)   Preventing from being known

8)   Forced to know

… Then a new cycle would begin after that with 1) above, but with a new effect.

When you get to level four of TROM, this series of overts and motivators, known as the Eight Classes of Overwhelm are run in reverse. After all, one gets into the trap in a certain sequence, so one gets out of the trap by reversing that sequence. These overwhelms also appear on the postulate failure cycle chart used in level five. But for now, let’s just stick to what we have just learned:

1)   Forced to know

2)   Preventing from being known

3)   Prevented from knowing

4)   Forcing to be known

5)   Forced to be known

6)   Preventing from knowing

7)   Prevented from being known

8)   Forcing to know

On level four, one stimulates the mind to produce scenes to timebreak with 1), then when all possible scenes are timebroken, they moves to 2), timebreaks all of that, then 3) and so on, and then starts again at 1) once they have covered one cycle of 1) through 8).  This peels the mind away in layers in the reverse sequence the overts and motivators occurred in life.  That is level four in a nutshell, but please read the full instructions for level four before trying this, and of course, make sure you have done levels 1-3 before attempting level four. It’s quite all right just to study it at this time if you haven’t completed those levels yet.

I want to note here that the woman whom I used as an example previously, in running level four on herself is NOT going to run the scene of her father forcing her to know, then jump to preventing her father from being known (her ignoring him) then jump to 3) when he was ignoring her. No, she is going to, at 1), timebreak ALL events that come up that involve that overwhelm, then at 2) timebreak ALL events that come up involving that overwhelm, and so on. 

Level five gets more complex in that you aren’t just dealing with overwhelms, you are also dealing with the conflicts that occur in between the overwhelms.

Prior to one getting overwhelmed by a ‘must be known’ postulate forcing them into ‘must know', one resists their opponent with a ‘must not know’ postulate. So just prior to the overwhelm there is a conflict, or a game. 

Let’s take look at the chart, but just a portion of it:

Confusing at first glance, isn’t it? Well, I am going to walk you through it. Remember, the chart is the reverse of the sequence as it occurs in life, because its purpose is to guide you into un-doing life’s damage in therapy, as mentioned before. 

Now look at column 2B. Here we have, as in our example, the girl is ignoring the father and has overwhelmed him into “mustn’t be known” with her “must not know” postulate.

...until finally, at 1A she can no longer resist and is overwhelmed and forced to know.

Those are the basics of how all this works.  I am going to now let you back to the original work, the chapter on the Postulate Failure Cycle as written by Dennis Stephens. I believe once you read this, you will understand the wisdom behind how this edition of The Resolution of Mind a Games Manual does not start out with this section like the original did, and why I am so heavily prefacing it.

-Roger Tandry

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