5. THE TREADMILL: GENERAL INFORMATION

10 June 1990.

Also see "The Treadmill: Crossover Platen" in the following section.

The treadmill was built in the Games universe for use as a punishment for troublemakers. I believe that it was used as part of the procedure for sentencing people to the Motion universe, but this is still under investigation (it might simply have been used on people in the Games universe).

A simplified mockup of each of the 64 penalty universes was used. A universe dramatizing a negative goal was appended to each of the 64 positive penalty universe mockups. The penalty universe crashed the positive goal down to zero which is a point of complete overwhelm and solidity. Then the negative goal is dramatized to unmock everything until you go out the bottom. At the end, you've destroyed everything so that there is no universe left and you get a false native state. This is then made to equal the native state at the top of the next positive goal.

The bottom of the final negative goal was connected to the top of the first positive goal (To Create) so that you just keep going round and round through the cycle of 128 goals. Getting this keyed in seems to give one a spinning sensation.

In the treadmill, the positive goal begins with Platen 1 (just like the original penalty universe). But the symbols etc. are not used. Instead, the implant goes straight into "TO (goal) IS TO POSTULATE BEING THE (terminal)". Then a limited subset of items duplicating the penalty universe are done. But the positive goal ends differently. Once the terminal's body dies, you are allowed to exteriorize from the grave. Once your floating above the grave, then the items in the Crossover Platen are done. This has you abandon the goal and then swings you into the negative goal for the purpose of getting even with everyone etc.

See the crossover platen. Item 4 on this platen is the end of the positive goal. When running it, you should spot the top of the goal (Native State) because BTs and Clusters are sometimes hung up at this point trying to avoid the start of the negative goal.

Crossover item 11 is really many individual items and there may be other items such as wealth, revenge, satisfaction, etc. But you only need to glance at this portion lightly and then spot the negative terminal on item 12.

Originally, I had a lot of trouble spotting the top of the positive goal while handling the negative goal. The entire weight of the positive goal having been collapsed down to zero is sitting on top of the negative goal. But by itself, this was not enough. What really nailed this down was later implants that ran a short series of items on the positive goal and swung it around to the negative goal. This sort of implant was done often, it restimulates abandoning the positive goal (the point of crossover).

The original version of the Hellatrobous Implants, done around 2 to 3 quadrillion years ago during the theta-MEST wars is the heaviest of these later implants. It shows you a scene (in an old style Kansas like environment) with the positive terminal, runs a small number of items against the positive goal, and shifts to the negative goal (the terminal changes to the negative one). This is the "inversion scene" referred to in the crossover platen and described in the master list. Spotting it relieves considerable stress on the positive to negative inversion.

After spotting the inversion scene, you can spot the treadmill implant making you abandon the positive goal. Once you've done this, it should be possible to spot the top of the positive goal from the negative goal.

In the implant, following the crossover platen you become the negative terminal and go around unmocking everything one way or another (depending on the negative goal). Finally everything's gone. This creates a tremendous amount of unreality and loss of havingness. This makes you want to go on to the next goal so that you can have something.

The loss of mass and unreality in the negative goal is probably the reason for low TA. Note that a low TA represents a body that has less electrical resistance than a dead body (see E-meter essentials). This should be impossible. But it happens anyway. Apparently, the mass of the body is not-ised so heavily that it ceases to impede the flow of an electrical current. I have seen the TA drop below 1.0 briefly while going around the dial through 7.0 on an item, and that is such a low resistance level that I see no way of attributing it to some minor effect.

Low TA can come from out-lists. It would make sense for this to be due to restimulating the abandonment of a goal (wrong item given to PC means that the right one is invalidated and abandoned).

Heavy glare-fight level TRs and invalidation of the PC would also seem to be pushing the PC down into the zero point of abandonment and unreality. If a person is mishandled to the point where he wants to get even for real or imagined outrages, the TA probably crashes.

I have noticed the treadmill spinning sensation and feeling of unreality during those times when my TA was really low (generally due to the two reasons above). I did have the TA crash once on seriously mishandling a positive penalty universe goal due to errors in running it. Getting the TA back up required both fixing the errors and also running the crossover platen (because the treadmill had gone into heavy restim).

Note that most errors will not crash the TA even when mis- running a positive penalty universe goal. It probably only occurs on goals that are already heavily submerged and weighted down with later overts (I.E., your already stuck in the inversion on that goal). Even so, it takes mis-running on top of that before the TA will dive on you. Unfortunately, our platens and procedures are not yet perfect so that the materials themselves might occasionally cause an error (this level releases so much free theta that usually you just barrel through things).

With this new insight, we might eventually find some quick way to blow a low TA up into range the way we can handle a high TA most of the time. Past experience has been that once the TA goes low, it is slow to come back up even after the error has been fixed. This is because of the not-isness stemming from the inverted goal which makes it hard for the person to as-is the error and get back on target. There might even be low level techniques such as assessing for what dynamic has been abandoned (or "What has been abandoned" run in the same manner as "What has been overrun" can be used on a high TA). Of course, if it crashed on an error, you have to fix the error first. This is highly experimental since I don't generally have a low TA to try things like this on.

This goal inversion shows us something about society as well. At the top we have a free theta anarchy and positive chaos (i.e., lots of motion and randomity with plenty of as-isness and alter-isness). Sliding downscale, we have more and more rules and restrictions (to protect people etc. - i.e. all the 64 goals sliding down). At zero, we have maximum other determined activity (i.e., total rules with everyone being robots). Then people start sliding over the edge and going into the negative goals to get rid of the rigid controls etc. This is a fast downhill crash into a negative anarchy and chaos (i.e., lots of not-isness and destruction).

From this, we see that there is a both a positive chaos/anarchy and a negative one. The bottom of the scale mimics the top. We are against destructive anarchy. But the right direction is towards a constructive anarchy (creative free beings) rather than towards maximum rules and order. Our society has not yet gone over the brink into destruction. But by constantly legislating more laws, instead of stopping crime, we push more and more people over the edge. So always work in the direction of removing non- essential laws and restoring freedom to the people. You can't pull out all the laws at once (people are too low to reach the high scale anarchy and so will slide into the low scale one instead), but you can follow a gradient of increasing freedom and less barriers.

Early in researching this, I tried to run the native state item on these negative goals and got into trouble. It is at the very end of the negative goal run. As part of the research, I then put together an approximation of the entire end of the negative goal implant. This should not be run. But it can be examined (without fitting a goal into it) to blow charge on how the negative goal was made to swing around into the next positive goal. So I'm including the platen here.

REVERSE PLATEN: THE END OF THE NEGATIVE GOAL

Do Not Run This With A Negative Goal Item. It is at the very end of the negative goal run and will restimulate the weight of both the positive goal being caved in and the negative goal crashing downscale below that. Run the Crossover platen instead (that is the start of the negative goal).

This is only included here to show how the negative goal was swung around into the next positive goal in the series.

1. To (goal) is to withdraw
2. To (goal) is for there to be NO ....value, meaning, beauty, truth, love, communication, reality, space, mass, time, energy, agreements, postulates (these are 13 separate items).
3. Before the beginning, now and forever, is the urge and the urge is to (goal)
4. To (goal) is for there to be no beginning.
5. To (goal) is the urge toward nothingness.
6. To (goal) is to be the static
7. To (goal) is Native State.
8. There is nothing.
9. There is no Time.
10. There is no Space.
11. There is no Energy.
12. There is no Matter.
13. To be nothing is native state.
14. To (next positive goal) is native state.

(and at this point comes platen 1 for the next lower positive goal)