12. THE PENALTY UNIVERSES OF THE HOME UNIVERSE ERA

The home universe matrix had been built to keep people from messing up each other's creations. As such, it was a bit like sending the children to their rooms because they are fighting. But this only works if you can keep them out of each other's home universes, and without any means of enforcement, it was not long before pranksters were sneaking into each others spaces and making trouble again.

And so we came up with the idea of punishing people for breaking the rules. Everyone agreed that this was a good idea and intended it purely for use on the bad guys. Nobody expected that it would be used on them. It was the typical stupidity that has carried us ever deeper into this trap.

But we were still immune to force and there was little that one individual could do to another. However, by working as a group, it was possible for us to build a complex series of sub-universes that would at least make somebody feel uncomfortable and unhappy for a little while. And so we created the penalty universes.

These penalty universes laid in the idea of descending down through a scale of emotions beginning with a high exhilaration and working down through anger, fear, etc. The scale is the emotional tone scale observed by L. Ron Hubbard in the early days of Dianetics and extensively researched and documented by him in 1951. And everybody is going up and down that scale to this day, but it is arbitrary and has no other reason for existence save that we picked this pattern (almost at random) to use in building these penalty universes.

A thorough discussion of the penalty universes needs it own book. For now, let us just say that they were full of all sorts of interesting symbols and body types which caught your interest combined with all sorts of new degrading ideas such as sex and eating which were presented to the person as interesting goals to pursue. Since these were actual universes that you went through, the experience was real, and yet it was all carefully orchestrated and twisted to give you experiences which would convince you of all sorts of ridiculous and abberative ideas (such as needing to eat) which later became part of our everyday lives.

At first, these penalty universes hardly bothered us at all. And they were not very effective at reducing the amount of mischief being done. But we kept tossing each other into them for an extraordinarily long time and eventually we became quite compulsive about dramatizing the arbitrary and degraded ideas that they presented.