The chart is divided into 8 major levels; each level is sub-divided into two sections. This gives us a total of 16 possible games situations regarding an effect. You’ll also notice that the chart is divided into Origin and Receipt, and Self and Others. Self and Others is self-explanatory. Origin means the originator in a game; Receipt means the responder in a game. Receipt responds to Origin; Origin causes Receipt to respond. It’s purely a matter of who starts, or originates, the game.
So, we have 16 possible game situations regarding an effect. There aren’t any others (There’s a standing prize going for the first being who can find any!).
The 16 consist of 4 overt overwhelms, 4 motivator overwhelms, 4 origin of games, and 4 receipt of games.
Life goes from 8b to 1a; we work from 1a to 8b. Always. The reason for this is that later games occlude earlier ones. So, we start late and go early. This means we are running life in reverse. You’ll soon get used to this, though early on it can be a bit puzzling. We don’t have any choice in the matter. Have you ever tried peeling an onion from the inside? You peel it from the outside inwards; you peel your mind the same way. Your mind is very much like an onion in this respect. If you want to waste time, you’ll run the chart from 8b to 1a; it’s a great way to get nowhere fast. It’s also a guaranteed way to put yourself into deep apathy (Oh boy, if you really wanted to louse this Level Five up, that is one sure way to do it. Talk about booby traps…).
The being, in life, enters games with an effect at 8b; after many vicissitudes he quits playing games with this effect at 1a. No more games are possible with this effect once 1a is reached, as all four postulates are now in failure (overwhelm) both as SD and PD. Check it through and you will see that this is so. He now goes back in at 8b with a substitute effect, and starts the circuit* all over again. (Talk about futility!) So, the chart is really circular, and 8b should be folded round to join 1a forming a cylinder (I believe there is something in Eastern religion called ‘The wheel’ which is similar to this. Or maybe they had this chart once out East and lost it).
*Circuit: a roughly circular line, route, or movement that starts and finishes at the same place: "I ran a circuit of the village"
The next point is that the chart only shows the SD postulates. The PD postulates you’ll have to put in yourself. There’s no difficulty in this, for they are always the complementary postulate to the SD postulate. To save you looking them up in the Theory Section the list follows:
SD PD
Must be known. Must know.
Mustn’t be known. Mustn’t know.
Must know. Must be known.
Mustn’t know. Mustn’t be known.
You’ll need to learn this list; it’s not difficult.
Next, I’d like to recap for you, so you are absolutely sure of what we are doing on Level Five. It’s necessary to be very clear in your mind on the differences between the following life situations.
A no game situation.
This is a complementary postulate situation. You look at a wall; the wall is there to be known, and so you know it. It is ‘be known’ and ‘know’; complementary postulates. This is not a game situation. There is no postulate conflict; all the postulates match up. I will leave it to you as an exercise to spot life situations for the other three sets on the above list. Remember: Complementary postulates enhance affinity; conflicting postulates detract from it.
A voluntary game situation.
This is a conflicting postulate situation. You look at a wall; the wall is there to be known, and you decide you don’t want to know about it. It's ‘be known’ and ‘not-know’; conflicting postulates. Thus, this is a game situation, for there is postulate conflict; the postulates are in opposition. I will leave it as an exercise for you to spot life situations for the other three sets on the above list.
A compulsive game situation.
This is identical to the voluntary game situation except that the game is compulsive. The being feels compelled to play it; he has lost his freedom of choice in the matter. He sees the wall and has no choice but to ‘not-know’ it.
While the game is voluntary, the being can always end it by adopting complementary postulates. For example, he stops fighting the wall and adopts a ‘know’ postulate regarding its ‘be known’ postulate. End of game. All games can be ended in this manner. No exceptions. If you want to stop any game you are engaged in you only have to adopt the complementary postulate to the one being held by your opponent, and the game promptly ends. He too, of course, can end it by adopting the complementary postulate to yours. You cannot force any being into a game who insists upon adopting complementary postulates to your own. Thus, a being who is free from the compulsion to play games can never be forced into a game against his choice. He’ll play only as long as he wants to play then if you try and force him to continue he’ll merely go into a complementary postulate situation with you. There’s nothing you can do about it. I mean, you can’t even complain that you’ve lost the game for you’ve clearly won it! Or have you? For you never overwhelmed him. I leave you to ponder this, for it has many interesting philosophical ramifications.
But what of the being in a compulsive games condition? Ah, he must go on playing. He cannot ever end the game. He’s in it for keeps. He must go on, and on, and on... Just like time goes on, and on and on in the universe. Now do you see what I mean when I say that in the absence of games, space and time cease to exist? The whole universe is kept chugging along through time and endless change by life engaged in a compulsive games condition. A being achieves Nirvana when he can adopt complementary postulates with the whole universe. Then, and only then, can he leave the universe and go in search of pastures new. Until that point is reached the being is always to some degree trapped in the universe.
The route out is from the compulsive playing of games, through the voluntary playing of games, to an ending of all games by the adoption of complementary postulates and so the achieving of a non-game situation: Nirvana.
So let us be very clear about the direction in which we are traveling on Level Five. There is nothing wrong with playing games, for games are fun; but there is an awful lot wrong with having to play games. The trap is not in the playing of games. The trap lies in the fact that the playing of games leads to the compulsive playing of games. That leads straight into every trap this universe contains. We only have to return to the being his freedom of choice in the playing of games and the job is done.
Now, once more take out the Postulate failure Cycle Chart. The chart can be divided into 8 ‘games’ levels, and 8 ‘overwhelm’ levels. ‘Game’ and ‘overwhelm’ are all part of games, but we need to separate these levels from a practical point of view.
First, the game levels. In each one of these levels there are actually four postulates on the board (The term ‘on the board’ comes from the game of chess, and I use it in the sense of ‘in play’). There is your SD postulate (shown on the chart), your PD postulate (not shown on the chart); your opponent SD postulate (shown on the chart), and your opponent’s PD postulate (not shown on the chart) is where you are; your PD postulate is ‘out there’ where your opponent is. Your opponent’s SD postulate is where he is; his PD postulate is over where you are. You are trying to get him to adopt your PD postulate; he is trying to get you to adopt his PD postulate. If either succeeds an overwhelm occurs, and the game is lost or won; the overwhelmer is the victor, the overwhelmed is the vanquished.
The overwhelm levels. In each of these 8 levels there are only 2 postulates on the board: Those of the overwhelmer. His SD postulate is still where he is. His PD postulate is now entirely round the vanquished (who is convinced of it). The SD postulate of the vanquished has now gone off the board; with it, of course, goes the PD postulate of the vanquished. Both the SD and PD postulates of the vanquished are thus off the board (out of play) at the point of overwhelm. Where have they gone to? They are in failure: they are no longer considered tenable* in that game (The vanquished may resurge and play another game of this type later in time, but that game with that particular effect is lost in the opinion of the vanquished).
*Tenable: able to be maintained or defended against attack or objection: "such a simplistic approach is no longer tenable"
So, in all 8 game levels on the chart there are 4 postulates on the board, while in all 8 overwhelm levels on the chart there are only 2 postulates on the board.
In the overwhelm, the vanquished literally buys the PD postulate of the overwhelmer. He considers this PD postulate as his own. Thus, in every overwhelm we see a mis-ownership of postulate. It’s entirely a matter of conviction. The overwhelmed is now convinced that ‘this is the way things are’ - and so mis-owns the PD postulate that overwhelmed him. However, as soon as he spots the mis-ownership the overwhelm vanishes, and his own postulates reappear. But until he mis-owns the postulate the overwhelm never occurred! See it? It’s all a matter of conviction. It’s very necessary, when working at the overwhelm levels of the chart, to be aware of this overwhelm and the mis-ownership of the PD postulate. These levels don’t come apart otherwise. Once the being has fully bought the PD postulate of his opponent in a life game, he now adopts it as his own SD postulate and moves to the next level upwards on the chart* (towards 1a). In the exercises, however, once he frees the mis-ownership at the overwhelm level he is able to move down (in the direction of 8b) to the next level of the chart, for these postulates are now once more available to him.
*Note how in the example of the girl and her father how the father forces her daughter into ‘must not be known” by covering her mouth. Then she makes that postulate her own and runs away.
If you have been following this closely, you’ll have realized that at the overwhelm level we have the semblance of a no game situation, for there is no longer any conflict between the postulates; they are indeed complementary. (Every torturer knows that sufficient torture will render his victim ‘compliant.’ This is also why a being cannot immediately be free of the entrapping influence of past games by adopting complementary postulates in all directions in his everyday life. All he will succeed in doing is throwing himself into his past overwhelms*. This is why the edict** ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself’ is so incredibly difficult for a being who is heavily enmeshed in games to apply with any great benefit. I’m not saying it’s impossible, and is not a route out but I am saying that due to the overwhelm mechanism, it’s incredibly difficult to apply across the boards and so attain Nirvana. Level Five gets over this difficulty by simulating the overwhelm, and thus freeing the being from it; by playing these games in exercise form he comes to grasp the true nature of the factors involved, and thus is no longer influenced by them. It also gives him a look at his own overt overwhelms - which is quite salutary***.
*You can think of this as “restimulation”. A past moment of someone forcing you to agree with them makes it now difficult for you to voluntarily agree with others, because the act of agreeing with someone else brings about the discomfort of previously being forced to agree with that previous person. The past is once again stimulated in one’s mind by something in the present, thus the term “restimulation”.
**Edict: an official order or proclamation issued by a person in authority: "Clovis issued an edict protecting Church property"
***Salutary: (especially with reference to something unwelcome or unpleasant) producing good effects; beneficial: "a salutary reminder of where we came from"
We are now almost ready to embark upon Level Five. However, before we do so a word about RI. Level Five is by far the most destructive of past importances of all the levels. Mental mass is vanished at a truly startling rate. One would expect this to be the case, and we must be prepared for it.
I can tell you right now that the only thing that will cause Level Five to grind to a shuddering and painful halt for you is insufficient RI. Indeed, your total progress on this Level is determined by how regularly you repair your importances with self-generated ones. Perceptual RI is just not good enough at Level Five; only creative RI will do the trick. So, sort one out if you haven’t already done so. If you’ve successfully completed Level Four one or other of the creative versions will now work for you.
This matter is so vital that I’m going to give you, here and now, the details of the Level Five Repair Session. I don’t have to be told that you’ll fall flat on your face sooner or later on Level Five. So, I’ll tell you what to do when it happens. This is not me being pessimistic; it’s me being realistic. I wouldn’t expect any being to start feeling his way through these raw postulates without coming a cropper*. You’ll learn how to do it properly - but only after you’ve got your teeth kicked in a few times during the process of learning. This Level Five Repair Session will quickly get you back in one piece again, and fit to carry on.
*Coming a cropper: 1. fall heavily. "He came the most appalling cropper—I think he knocked himself out" 2. suffer a defeat or disaster. "The club's challenge for the championship has come a cropper"
Level Five Repair Session.
a) Stop doing Level Five exercises.
b) Run RI until no further change.
c) Timebreak all mental mass in view. If it’s not pt universe mass Timebreak it.
Repeat b); then c). Continue to alternate b) and c) until all has quietened down, and there is no further change.
d) Return to Level Five.
This repair will always work for you. The trick is to use it before you have to. It’s like eating ‘All-Bran’ for breakfast; if you eat it, you never have to eat it.
The datum* behind all this is: The only mistake on Level Five is to leave a level while it’s still producing change (Over-run is not harmful at Level Five, for the exercises are entirely creative**). But. And get this very clearly. If RI needs running you don’t spot that the level is still producing change. And so, you leave it. Bingo! Very soon it all collapses round you, and you are wishing that mum had given birth to anyone but you. So, when it all falls apart you just know you have left a level before you should have. After you have done the repair, you go back and find the incomplete level (It will stand out like a third ball on a greyhound). Then you run it fully. Then you move on. Until the next time it happens. But you are learning all the time. Eventually you don’t make this mistake. And then Level Five runs like a well-oiled dream.
*Datum: A piece of information. It’s the singular of “data”: “I read all the data and found only one datum useful”
**Level Five is ‘creative’ in the sense that one puts out the postulates himself, creating the postulates that will stimulate scenes/mental mass to be timebroken. Therefore, if one continues to do this even though no more mass for timebreaking appears, all he is really doing is creating postulates. This exact procedure will be explained later in the book. It is quite different than levels two and three, where objects and incidents are taken from the past, and there are no added creations. RI is also a creative process, and so also has this property where there is no harm in over-run.
So help me, there aren’t any other snags on Level Five. Just keep your importances topped up, Timebreak as you go, and you’ll win all the way. It’s very easy to get terribly significant* about Level Five - simply because you’ve got deep significances flashing around you all the time, and it’s too darned easy to reach out and grab one (Old Mosman** proverb: ‘He who grab at passing significances is running scarcity of them; he should run RI’).
* “Importance is the basis of all significance” (from earlier in the manual). When Dennis says you have deep significances flashing around you all the time, he could just as easily have said ‘importances’. “Getting significant” about things can also involve looking for the meanings of things. If you find yourself in such a state, just run more RI so you can get your ‘significances’ or in other words, ‘importances’ quota all topped up.
**Mosman, New South Wales, Australia
We now need to take up the sense, or meaning, of the word ‘must’ on the chart. With one exception the meaning is ‘got to’; it’s a striving to make the postulate effective. The only exception is at the overwhelm levels. At the point of overwhelm ‘must’ means to the being overwhelmed ‘cannot help but’; it echoes the failure of his postulate in the game. So, keep this in mind as you work through the levels.
Now we come to the question of what effect do we use when running Level Five? We don’t. We don’t put up effects at Level Five*. We only Timebreak effects at Level Five. At Level Five we only put up postulates. The mind throws up the effects, which we Timebreak. In this way we guarantee that we take the mind apart in the exact manner that it is available.
*As opposed to how you create ‘effects’ doing RI, or put up effects from the past in the form of objects and people from past scenes to be timebroken on level 2. In level five, one uses postulates alone to stimulate ‘effects’—mental masses— to be timebroken using the same method you learned at level three. The section you are reading is now known in TROM as level 5a. Later, Dennis developed levels 5b and 5c, and on 5c you will be putting up postulates as well as effects. But until you reach 5c, you only work with postulates. There is also a level 5d but it is not covered in this manual, but is in the later 1990s lectures.
At Level Four you experienced the phenomena of taking bits from here and bits from there off your time track while using the 8 classes of overwhelm; well, at Level Five you will see the same phenomena occurring. The mind comes apart easiest in the sequence that it is available. This is not necessarily in its temporal sequence. There is no reason why it should come apart in a temporal sequence. Trying to make it do so is merely trying to fit the mind into someone’s preconceived idea of how it ought to come apart. It’s one of these pieces of fiction that was dreamed up one day by a psychologist who’d never got closer to a mind than observing his guinea pigs in their cages. Because man is such a slave to time it seemed reasonable, and everyone has been going along with the idea ever since.
But it just won’t do if you ever hope to get your mind apart cleanly and efficiently. You just have to take it apart in the sequence that it’s available. You just put up the postulates*, Timebreak everything that shows up, then, when putting up the postulates produces no more change, you move on to the next level. It’s as simple as that. In fact, it is so simple that you’ll have to resist the urge to make it more complicated.
*Unfortunately, a shortcoming of the original TROM manual, there is no precise explanation of how the postulates are ‘put up’. And the original readers of this manual wondered same as you wonder now, “How exactly do you do this?”
Luckily, a friend of Dennis’ inquired as to what the step-by-step procedure is, and he sent her a cassette ‘lecture’ about it (Dennis as he got older sent correspondence via tape cassette rather than writing or typing letters), going step-by-step through the process. Instructions sourced from that lecture transcript are in the next section.
When putting up these postulates don’t be miserly. There’s no shortage of them, you know. Churn out as many of them as you need. If they fade out, then create some more. Abundance is of the essence. Put them where you like. Just make sure you keep the ‘self’ postulates separated from the ‘others’ postulates. That is all.
Early on you will find that as one level goes null you find yourself ‘sliding’ into the next level on the chart. Later on, this stops and you have to do it all yourself. This, again, is as it should be.
One final point. As you move from level 4b to 5a, and from level 8b to 1a, you will feel a definite ‘flip’. This is the valence shift that exists between these levels. Early on it can be quite startling. Later you just note it in passing.
Don’t try and rush things at Level Five. There is always an urge to race round and round the levels - rather like writing faster and faster so as to finish off before your pen runs out of ink. Resist this urge. Null each level as you go. One of the signs of over-run of a level is boredom; it’s a sure sign that it’s time you moved on. You will soon learn to strike that happy medium of leaving a level (of the chart) as soon as it goes null. Always run RI between levels. If a level is still live at session end, then pick up that same level again next session. Start your sessions with plenty of RI, then Timebreak out the day’s happenings, and off you go.
You will find quite a number of incidents that showed up at Level Three and Level Four showing up again at Level Five. You are just taking more off them, that’s all. You will continue to do so until you’ve got the lot. Then they will Timebreak out completely and you’ll never have them cropping up again (These are the ‘stickers’ I mentioned back at Level Three). Indeed, very soon you’ll probably never even think of them again. They will have no more significance to you than the number of the bus ticket that you casually glanced at that wet Wednesday night back in 1962.
Just keep going round and round that chart, level by level, Timebreaking as you go, and running plenty of RI, and you will make it to Nirvana. Remember: There is no place to go after Level Five. There is no Level Six*. And don’t get sidetracked into playing around with other goals. ‘To know’ is the granddaddy of them all. All the roads lead back to the goal ‘To know’. So, stay on that one from beginning to end; and you get there fastest (It took me a year of research to discover this truth, and there’s no need for you to waste time).
*In your later study of TROM that goes beyond the original work, you may find lectures labeled as ‘level 6’ and for a while he was calling some newer exercises ‘level 6’. Eventually he realized these exercises properly fit into TROM level 5 and incorporated them into that level. TROM level five as put forth in this manual consists of three sublevels: 5A, 5B and 5C. You are now reading about 5A. “Level 6” later became 5D. Without getting too far ahead of ourselves, this level is explained in detail in the 90s recorded lectures, but Dennis also does mention that you can still get the whole job done with just this manual. Learning the data in the lectures does develop a deeper understanding of TROM, making the practice of it more efficient, and are recommended study AFTER gaining a thorough understanding of this text.
And now, a final word about these practical exercises. Don’t become an exercise-fanatic. You won’t get there any faster by making a hermit out of yourself in your urge to get there. Live your life too. Just fit your exercises into your normal life; that is always the best way.
Good Luck.
Dennis H. Stephens
Mosman, NSW
Australia.
February 1978.
