Trom (The Resolution of Mind)

Wow, this is subtle. A bit too subtle for me!

Yes, self is at cause (origin) in levels 2A, 2B, 4A, 4B etc.  On the time track, a person starts out at cause in each leg in turn, and ends up at effect.
1A (the bottom of leg 4) looks superficially like 4B (the top of leg 3) because they're both MK facing a MBK. The difference is that at 4B Self is winning, getting the knowledge they want, but by the time they've got down to 1A they're unwillingly knowing something they don't want.

To quote: "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."

But it's not much use trying to figure all this out if you're not yet running on Level Five of TROM.  (A bit like wanting to know what cognitions you'll get on a process before staring to run it.) Please get each of the preceding Levels flattened, in sequence, before worrying about the details of Level Five.

Greetings, mjh

It might be easier to understand the postulate failure chart if you keep in mind the differences between this and the games matrix.

First Dennis presents the games matrix with four legs. This describes the time track that an individual lives through as they pursue games with a given effect. It proceeds from Must Be Known to Must Not Be Known, to Must Know and finally to Must Not Know. An individual can only go in one direction through this sequence because they start in Leg 1 (Must Be Known) and each leg in turn becomes un-occupiable (by the person's own consideration, that is) as that postulate goes into failure. One ends in Leg 4 (Must Not Know), the low-toned end of the line for playing with that effect. The only way forward from there is to start a new cycle with a new effect.

Further on he introduces the postulate failure chart with its sixteen levels from 1A to 8B. These are instructions for therapy at Level 5 of TROM, and it goes in the opposite direction, from late to early on the time track. As he wrote, "The Time Track runs from 8 to 1. You work from 1 to 8, around and around." Someone running Level 5 starts at 1A which is the overwhelmed state at the very end of Leg 4. At 1A their 'Must Not Know'postulate has been defeated and they submit to knowing whatever effect their opponent was trying to make them know.

5A to 6B correspond to Leg 2, and 7A to 8B correspond to Leg 1. So in the case of a person getting into Leg 2 "by being overwhelmed by a Mustn’t know while being in the Must be known leg", he's overwhelmed by the opponent's 'Must Not Know' SD postulate at 7A and finds himself changing his own SD postulate to an enforced Must Not Be Known. Then when he moves into Leg 2 at level 6B he has adopted Must Not Be Known as his new SD postulate.

The complementary postulates at 1A, 2B, 3A, 4B, 5A, 6B, 7A, 8B are enforced complementaries. Check the origin and receipt columns to see who is enforcing what on whom. For example, at 1A Self apparently 'wants' to know the effect, but only because Others have rammed the effect down Self's throat. In running the postulate failure chart we're only seeking to run out games conditions and overwhelms, not the times when we happily had complementary postulates with others. Just as in scientology we were trying to run out aberrative incidents, not free track.

Anyway, I hope this is a bit helpful and hasn't created more problems. I didn't find the postulate failure chart easy to understand until I'd completed the earlier levels of TROM. When I finished Level 4, which removes charge from the whole subject of overts and motivators, the postulate failure chart started to make sense. Then on Level 5, understanding of what the levels mean in practical terms keeps changing as you run through them cycle after cycle.  These changes are the cognitions on each of the 1A, 1B etc levels within 5.  I've only recently started on Level 5, and expect to have many, many iterations of the chart before it's flat.

Your aside about twinned aspects is an interesting question too. It leads into the matter of competition, something that Dennis did not find it necessary to discuss. On the other hand, games theory in the biological sciences is all about competition: predators competing for a limited number of prey, birds competing for a limited number of nest sites etc. And games theorists in biology use the mathematics that John von Neumann developed in the 1940s to find optimum competitive strategies in business, poker and war. I've been trying to write a blog post explaining competition in terms of TROM, and if I ever get it finished I'll post a link here.  Briefly, competition (a.k.a rivalry) is an example of a junior game within a senior encompassing game, when there is relative scarcity on the other side. Dennis didn't need to address it directly because it collapses when the main game is resolved.

I'm inclined to agree with you that in the basic games package the only real conflicts would occur between paired outflows. An image comes to mind of two rival jazz trumpeters trying to out-play each other. In other game packages such as Eat there can be competing inflows, for example two plants in the same small pot competing to suck up a limited supply of nutrients.

Hi Jason, and welcome!

I agree that scientology auditing works, sometimes. Probably when a preclear has a big issue all keyed-in ready to be handled. An auditor saved my life, over 40 years ago and that win has never dimmed.  But I made the mistake of thinking I could go on having similar wins just by buying more auditing. In fact, a preclear needs to become self-reliant in handling their case as soon as possible, and that's just what TROM offers.

In scientology you have a D of P and the other terminals breathing down your neck to demand that you do the action now,now,now.  So whatever benefit there is from the tech, it eventually gets suppressed by this denial of self-determinism. With TROM you do a session when you want/need one.  Interest is one of the best indicators; if a person doen't need a session immediately it isn't necessarily out tech or out ethics, maybe they're just too keyed-out.  Someone (I forget who) wrote that TROM tends to be self-regulating in that once a person has exhausted the charge at one level they lose interest in that and find themselves running into the next level.

In my experience, while scientology restimulates the bank, TROM takes the charge away gradually and gently until a person no longer needs to mock up that bank. Perhaps it's easiest for wide-open cases who grew up with vivid mental imagery.  But RI should work for anyone, and then Level 2 actually develops the ability to see past objects and scenes.

Personally, I enjoyed Level 3 which rehabbed the state of clear achieved in scientology long ago, and had some amazing cognitions on Level 4. The biggest cog happened when I had a serious problem in life and set out to use TROM to address it. Have just started on Level 5, taking it slowly, with more cognitions.

I think that's a good point about the charge being in the similarities, running out the times we have wrongly perceived different things as being the same, even though Dennis put it the other way in the lecture Level 2 TROM:

So we are separating all the time, every time we are doing the command on Level 2, the “Difference” command, we're separating out all the time and we are running all the “similarities” simply to keep the flow balanced out, that's all.

Either way, it's plain that both similarities and differences need to be run.

On Level 2 I had mostly compared past people with present objects; trees worked well for this.  I also tried bringing a recall of my late mother up against my wife in PT, this timebroke very quickly. For example, my mother was the taller of the two - I'd just never remarked that fact before, never having seen them together in life. 

Timebreaking persons against objects seems reasonable considering that all we are timebreaking is their body, which is just another created effect. I don't think it's possible to timebreak the persons themselves (thetans) since they are causes, not effects. But I'm inclined now to try a Level 2 session in a busy place outdoors, as someone suggested on the mailing list, to see if anything more can be got from timebreaking persons against persons.