[Start of Lecture]

[Start of Lecture]

Thank you.

Thank you.

Methods of education. First method of education would be talking. That doesn't work.

There's a rumor going around that I'm supposed to talk to you about how to instruct people tonight.

Another method of education would be beating. That is very successful, providing you don't care what you're teaching somebody.

Now, somebody tells me that that's what I said earlier today, but I have been run on not-knowingness, and the process was never flattened. We got back to five lives ago and I quit. I said, "That's that," I said, "That's that. If there's... If I've got all this to not-know all over again, to hell with it."

So the first method that I would even vaguely recommend in the field of group teaching would be the method used in the PE Courses, where we take a definition of some kind or another, and we read it off. And then we take the data that is being defined, nothing more than that, and get the audience to define it.

I want to talk to you about instruction. Instruction is an interesting subject. It's a very interesting subject, because we seem to be in the business of instruction. Now, you think of yourselves as auditors. Auditing techniques are a method of bringing people to know. Think it over.

And we don't get them to agree with our definition; we get them to define what we're defining. And we get each person to define, here and there scattered through the audience, and ask the rest of them if they think that's what it is.

A great oddity here is that the common denominator of living appears to be learning. In Dianetics we had survival as a common denominator. In Scientology we discover, much to our embarrassment, that that's inevitable. So we have to find another excuse, and the best excuse we can find without looking too far or weighing our brains down too much is learning.

Now, this method, of course, can utilize one word at a time, a group of words, and so on. It is only useful as a method when one uses rather fundamental items in life. Now, you could ask somebody to define apple pie for a long while without any great leap of IQ. You might be able to increase, here and there through the audience, the gastric appreciation for apple pie.

Apparently learningness has great breadth, and we find learningness at almost any level of action, living or operation.

Therefore, the educational system is not quite as broad or permissive as it appears to be. The Instructor is very carefully segregating, out of the vast body of data available in this universe, a few cornerstones of knowledge: things which are intimate to the livingness of the audience concerned.

Now, learning would encompass this operation: Fellow looks at the wall and learns it's a wall. You got that? So recognizingness is the lowest level of learningness and is still learningness.

Now, with great success, you could use apple pie, definition of, with a bunch of cooks, pastry cooks.

We meet Joe. If we're in good shape, we can learn that it's Joe by looking at him. Some of us who are not in very good shape meet Joe and talk to Father.

"Apple pie. What's that mean? What do you think an apple pie is?"

Now, do you see how this fits? See how this could be pushed over into a learning category?

And we'd kick this around for a while, and the group would become more real to the group, and apple pie would become more real, and the job would become more real, and so on. But that is a specialized application.

Now, don't be fooled. The truth of the matter there is there's an awful lot more (this is between us Scientologists) to livingness than learningness. There's a lot more of it. There is creatingness. There is a number of other factors than learningness. We're not going to go into any of them. We're just going to talk about learningness, and we're going to show how everything could be pulled in and by some slight adjustment, and maybe going around a few fast curves, be common-denominatored into learning, which would make education our forte. Education.

Now, let's take something much more general, then, for a general group. And if we pick a general group, then about the only thing we can handle with a general group are very, very specific items pertaining to living itself in its broadest definitions.

The odd part of it is that a Scientologist can educate people that no one else has ever been able to educate. How do they do it? By auditing them. One of the main things that rises in auditing is IQ, which tells you of course, secondarily, that learning rate goes up. What is IQ but relative cognitionability?

Then we'd have to take such things as cycle of action, affinity, reality, communication, various parts of communication. We'd have to take oddities of phenomena which are still very general and broadly effective. We could actually ask a group of people about the parts of man. We could read it off hurriedly – preferably very hurriedly – in one category, you know: "A body. Well, all right. What's a body?"

Now, what then are we doing, what are we doing in actuality (below the level, of course, of Solids and Effort and so forth), but pushing thought around one way or the other? See, we're pushing thought around.

Got the idea? Well, this they all hold, obviously, in common. And so we could establish an agreement this way.

Now, people who think there is only thinking of course buy at once the totality of cognitionness. See, they buy that as the totality of any action. If you can learn about it, you got it. They do this so well that they invent so many things to learn about that nobody is ever then able to get Clear by processes of education alone. They booby-trap the line.

Well, I'll go over the method. The method is very, very specific.

Some fellow has a body; he can't look at it so he looks at somebody else's. He can't look at that so he looks at a dead body on the dissection table. He finds an awful lot of spare parts as he begins to cut it up one way or the other. He looks over all these spare parts and he begins to realize that there is no way he can bring order into the chaos of blood and confusion from this cadaver except to apply new titles to everything that comes under his hand. So he writes a learned textbook on the subject. But actually he doesn't do anything. He doesn't even do a good job of cutting the corpse up, but he does do a splendid job of titling parts of the corpse. And he does a wonderful job of this, and he spends the rest of his life readjusting his titling.

Originated this originally in London, but hadn't thought too much about it or done too much with it until here at the Academy, just before the congress.

This is about as close as anybody ever looked at a body – I mean directly – in the healing professions. They've even taken the titling and put it over into a dead language that nobody ever speaks anymore, you see?

We hadn't actually beaten groups to pieces with this in London. I had merely experimented in Dublin and London enough to know that this was intensely effective. That's because I hadn't done much teaching. See, I hadn't done very much teaching of these general groups.

A psychologist trying to occupy a brain that is to him only a series of titles will not get very much reality on the close proximity of brain cells. He has so many parts of the brain that he is living in the midst of a bunch of titles.

And all of a sudden, why, here we were and I had to give the optimum method that I knew in teaching a PE Course, and so that's the method that was given out. I knew it was successful.

Now, learning can very easily, then, be subjugated to learning some complexity which has been invented about something that one never looks at. And so learningness itself can get to some degree into disgrace.

Well! Much to my amazement! Much to my amazement, after I went back to London and tried to get this going in the PE Course as a standard operation, dudurrrrr. The Instructor didn't want to do it. He almost blew the place apart with it.

There's an obsession about learningness which is quite interesting to handle: the technique of craving to know – "Put craving to know into the walls," and so on; makes people sick at their stomachs, and all sorts of interesting things.

Why?

Now, here's learningness, then, at its worst: learning large, long categories of invented knowingnesses disordered into some kind of a chaotic catalog, with another curve of another language being applied, and so on.

Well, this Instructor is a good boy, and he's doing it now and doing it well.

Botany is one of these classification subjects. And I'll tell you the total thinkingness that went on concerning botany. It would interest you very much. It was done by Francis Bacon in a little essay, and he laid down a (quote) "science" called botany because he supposed that this would be a good way to lay down a science. So he just took something that hadn't been laid down and dashed it off in a paragraph or so, that this is the way you would put together a science about flowers, growing things. He dashed off this little paragraph, and that, since the sixteenth century, has been a science called botany.

Now, get why this method didn't come to view and isn't generally used, and wouldn't be generally used if it had come to view. It's quite one thing to sit and talk to an audience, who, by the social patterns of discipline, will remain seated and listen. That's one thing.

Well, it's never moved in its actual technical activity from those few sentences. But, brother, has it got classification! Wow!

But how about delivering the whole thing over to the audience, and still holding that audience under control?

Now, you didn't know that a skunk cabbage was actually intimately related to a wallaby rose, did you?

And this evidently is not a capability possessed by everyone (that they know about).

Well I didn't either but the... some botanist would undoubtedly be able to accomplish this in some associative fashion.

Now where, then, do we use this successfully in Scientology? Where else could we use it?

All right. Now, let's take learning about the mind. I said some psychologist would be in the middle of a bunch of named parts, he wouldn't be in the middle of a brain. Well, then his ability to contact or look at his own brain has been so low that it has escaped him that the classification of the brain was the classification of an item in which most of the psychology world has been totally, embeddedly resident. So this whole fact has escaped them.

Anyplace, providing it was done by a Scientologist.

Now, let's look carefully why it has escaped them. They couldn't look at it, so they looked at a substitute for it. They couldn't look at the thing, so they looked at a substitute for the thing.

So we come very specific here. A Scientologist would have to know that he was being a little bit overawed in order to bring himself up to confront what was overawing him slightly. Here he's presenting to the audience these data, key data of one kind or another, and asking this person to define it and that person to define it. And he gets a squirrely definition there, so he goes over there and he asks that person to define it. And he gets a good definition for there, and so he says this and that.

Now, let's go on into basic therapies, old-time therapies of one kind or another, and we find one of those was psychoanalysis. And psychoanalysis is so interested in the significance of the experience that they have never looked at the experience.

And all the time asking the rest of the group, "Well, now, do you agree with that? Do you agree with that, really? You think that is the definition to it?"

So education has been in the past, or learning has been in the past, a system of avoiding observation. So a systematic avoidance of observation will sooner or later get something into trouble, and into trouble has come the whole of education itself.

Somebody defined a cycle of action as something used by a trick cyclist. And he looks around to the rest of the group, and he says, "Now, do you think that's what a cycle of action is?"

We send a man to school for – I don't know, I think it's gotten up to an optimum now of sixty years till he gets out of college; and this individual actually has been put in a groove of avoiding knowing. You see that? He's on a system whereby he can avoid knowing something. How does he do that? By studying it!

The rest of the group says "No, no, no." And somebody starts to mutter in the back.

Now, there are significances, and there are basic associations, and there are mock-ups, and there are floors and walls and machinery and cogwheels and botanical gardens. There are all these things. And anybody that you're trying to teach anything is normally into an interesting avoidance of the object by learning its invented knowingnesses.

And he says, "Well, all right, now you tell me what a cycle of action is," see, and "Do you think that's what a cycle of action is?" and so on; just variations on that theme.

Here's a great big machine, has chromium-plated cogwheels and gold-plated levers and – oh, it's a gorgeous piece of stuff, you know? I mean it's huge, so on. Two men walk up to it. One of them says, "What's that?"

Well, the reason this is so formidable is actually more than simply the control of people. The person doing this is confronting the exact mechanism that got him that way in the first place: a vast mob of people agreeing that that is the datum.

And the other one says, "That's a Nash-Wheelsy."

So a fellow to do this has to realize that. And the only person that would realize that would be a Scientologist.

"Oh? Oh, is that right? I didn't know that." And they walk away.

So it's no wonder that it wasn't invented and used. But it's a killer.

How easy it is to satiate somebody's appetite for learning by giving them a name for something. You ought to make a study of this. Somebody comes around to you and asks you, "What kind of a circumstance is this whereby somebody goes off the end of the pier because of a divorce? What's wrong with such a person, they had a divorce and they want to bump themselves off, and so on? What is that all about?"

Now, if you wanted to teach a bunch of stenographers how to stenographer – supposing you were running the Gregg Business College, or something of the sort, and you were a Scientologist.

And then you start to explain to them, "Look. What this person did to the other marital partner is kicking back as a motivator, you see? The person who is so upset about it must have done something."

Every once in a while somebody writes me and says, "I have left Scientology professionally now. I am running a mortuary business," or something, "and I'm using it in my business, and the business is very successful, and I owe all this to Scientology, and I'm getting some other morticians interested." And yet he began the thing by saying he was no longer a professional Scientologist.

Now, you explain this and you possibly would get it across very nicely. You see, possibly. You see, you would just take the actual straight-out anatomy of the marital difficulty. One person, after a divorce they want to kill themselves, and so forth. Well, they must have done something in order to inherit a motivator to this degree. Well, we explain this to somebody, we would give them some information. Why is it information? Because it can be used in the game of life.

I guess people had the narrow definition that a Scientologist would be totally one who audited individuals. I guess when they said then they weren't any longer in Scientology, they meant that they weren't in auditing.

But now let's just completely and utterly sidestep any responsibility we have as Scientologists, or just kick it over sideways and say, "Ahhhh!"

Well, the funny part of it is, a person couldn't do this with a group unless he could audit. It's actually an auditing process, one kind or another, and you have to handle that group as, not a series of preclears, but as a preclear, or as a composite of circuits of some sort or the other. And one comes up and another one comes up ... And you just run it out.

And they say, "Yes? What's the matter?"

And why is it so successful? And why do people gain in IQ with such rapidity? Of course, they gain in IQ if you simply stand and talk to them about these same data. But this is nothing compared to the gains you get on this agreement.

"Well, that person has a-a-a-a-pseudomania. I mean it's a very serious circumstance. It's an illness – it's an illness which often comes after a divorce. Pseumania – pseudomania marititus." And you would be fascinated how often this deep, profound piece of nothingness would turn somebody else around and send them away perfectly satisfied, evidently. You know? They "know" now. Well, what do they know? They know something to remember, that's what they know. And that's all they know.

"Now, what do you think that means? Now you tell me. How about you?" And so on. And variations of that theme.

All right. Let's look at this, and let's take a little closer view of this, and we discover then that that person is willing to avoid the situation. The person is willing to avoid the situation and you gave him an excuse to. You gave him a fancy name. He didn't have to invade the thing any further. That was that, he could just avoid it from there on out and he's all set.

Well, one thing it does is quite amusing. Somebody says that a cycle of action is a trick cyclist. Well, the rest of the group says, "Ha-ha-ha-ha!" And he says, "Hey, what do you know? I'm not in agreement with the multitude. I'd better take a look at my values."

Or you have given him a little thread off your cloak of authority. An authority has told him this, so now he is an authority. And he goes down and tells his fellow mechanic "You know – you know Pete?"

He does. He thinks it over, he talks it over a little bit, he mutters about it, and the next thing you know, he comes off some false values which are discursions from the basic agreement of that particular pin of life, see?

"Yeah, what about Pete?"

So the individual who gets it dead wrong can be counted on to do some advancing, even if he gets mad. He'll do a little advancing, just like that, by having his opinions called to account. Because if his opinions are off beam on these exact fundamentals of what he is doing, which is living, then he's doing a nonfundamental job of living. That's all there is to that. It's as simple as that.

"Well, you know Pete – Pete's in a bad way."

Now, we take these stenographers in Gregg Business College and we could, of course, and should, really, continue with just the same thing: cycle of action, ARC, and that sort of thing, and get these things all thrashed out, till they all reach an agreement on them.

"What about Pete?"

And if we're really doing a thorough job, then we'd go all over them again. We would do this repetitively several times, and, man, we'd have people who were way up in tone. But we would include some specifics that addressed exactly their professional activity.

"Well, Pete has uh... pseuda... um... has... uh – he's got a dreadful disease!" That's the end of that datum.

"Give me a definition for typewriter. All right, you, Maisy: definition for a typewriter. Mm-hm. That's fine. Now, the rest of you agree with that, hm? Do the rest of you agree that a typewriter sometimes serves as a paperweight? Do you think this is right?" And here we go, see?

All right. We find, then, if this is dominant as a method of conveying understanding, that people must be avoiding to a very marked degree the actual objects, actions or beingnesses of life. Must be! They must be running on "avoid," somehow or another. They must be going off this way when they, as far as we could see, could go right on that way.

The next thing you know, they would be in communication with a typewriter better, because they'd found out that a typewriter was a machine with a goal of obeying a typist and putting letters on a piece of paper in a roller. We don't care what kind of a definition they finally agreed on; we don't even care how sloppy the English in it would be, or how many modifying phrases and participial clauses there would be attached to it, or how cumbersome the thing was. This we wouldn't care about.

Some fellow wants to know how to build a small concrete dam. You teach him how to mix concrete, you teach him how to make a form, you teach him something about the pressures of water at certain depths and the need of side embankments. And it's quite a subject, but you could probably teach him all this in an evening. They don't do that in this society. They send them to college for four years. And when they come out, they don't even know what a dam is. And they don't give a damn either.

All right. So, education could be one of several things, one of which could be the science of avoidance – how to avoid. And we could do all that up, and we could do a wonderful science. It'd be terrifically acceptable. We would write it up in such a way that never could anybody find out anything, anyhow, anywhere. We would teach them a system whereby, if they looked at a wall, it was then necessary to look it up in a book. And having looked it up in a book, they would then have to address a small slide rule which operated in phonetics. Then they could look at the name on the slide rule, one way or the other, and it would give them a combination of syllables somehow or another, and this, we would say, was it.

We'd be waiting for somebody to say "The cycle of action is create, survive, destroy."

You would be very amazed, but a book on this subject written with a very sober, pompous style would probably be enormously successful. "The Science of Knowing How to Study," or something, you could call it, you know. You'd be all set.

Not a soul there ever read the book. They don't know that.

You would do this by catering to their avoidance mechanisms. You'd permit them to avoid, wouldn't you?

Somebody would come up and say, "Cycle of action – we finally got this cycle of action. And a cycle of action, we finally figure out, and the cycle of action means that something starts and keeps going for a while, and then it flops."

Well, our systems of education are less merciful, much less merciful, because we operate on the very sound principle that it won't kill anybody to know anything. And they operate with the associative datum – you see, the datum instead of the thing, and so forth – they operate on the theory that a little bit of learning will kill you deader than a field mouse; that learning is dangerous.

And this is perfectly acceptable.

There's even an old proverb, "A little bit of learning is dangerous," you know? How they would love to include into that "A little bit of learning or a whole lot of learning or any kind of learning about anything will kill you dead." That is the theory of avoidance in education.

"The rest of you agree with that?"

Now, we come through and we don't subscribe to this. We don't subscribe to it at all because we know for a fact – we know for a fact that a person (that is, the person, not his body) could actually connect with or associate with anything with impunity. And the only things that are giving him any trouble are those things with which he dare not associate. The things that he's unwilling to learn something about are the things that are giving him trouble.

"Yeah." Bunch of truck drivers. "Yeah! Yeah, that's it! That's true! That's the dope! Right! We got it! It's like a tire: gets manufactured, runs for a while, boom!"

And then, what does learning mean to us? It means, simply, communication. It doesn't mean a substitute datum. That's awfully, brutally, horribly simple. You want to learn about something, communicate with it, see?

So the fellow teaching it would have to be a Scientologist. He'd have to know what a cycle of action was. He'd have to be able to sort of have a picture of it in his mind, you know? Eyuh-thuh. Somebody comes up and says that.

Now, one of the ways of communicating with it is talking it over. Now, supposing it's just a datum. Supposing it isn't a solid object, supposing it's just some thetan's postulate. The only way it disappears is to talk it over, and in many cases, think it over.

Now, a fellow who didn't know anything about it couldn't do it. Because he wouldn't know when to stop. He's liable to call to account definitions which are on the beam.

Now, a person gets down to a point where he can't think it over anymore, then he has to talk it over. But most people do both: they think it over and talk it over, and it goes boom.

You get the idea? He's liable to say, "Yeah, well, all right. Do the rest of you think that's it?"

Data consists of the postulates, or assignment of value, of thetans.

Get the difference.

That's data. That's all data is.

Well now, that system would then be used to clarify livingness in general or specific capabilities or characteristics amongst a certain group of people.

Now, when they have assigned a value on which they have rather uniformly agreed, they have a fact. You got that? Now, would anybody please tell me how the association only with these agreements, or the communication only with these agreements, would kill anybody? That's for sure.

Now, let's take acting. If you took a bunch of actors, and you wanted them to be better actors, you could process all of them. But one of the actions you'd have to undertake to consolidate a company of actors would be this type of an activity.

Well, it so happens that the walls got there that way. That's packing a postulate that says "I am a case of thereness, agreed upon and ratified by the Treaty of Ugveldt, eighteen miles south of cloud nine." That's the wall.

And you'd have to reduce acting to its common activities, those that had common denominators to all acting. See how we'd have to do that?

So if there's a vast difficulty in associating with other people's agreements, of course then we'll have vast difficulty. Because the vast difficulty is just another postulate.

We could go over this, then; we reduce it to maybe fifteen titles, each one, one after the other. Each characteristic – we'd wind up with about fifteen of them, or something like that.

So we get down to the fundamental of Scientology education, and that is that it doesn't hurt a thetan to communicate with anything, anywhere, at anytime. And to educate him, all we have to do is teach him that. He has to know that. He gets to be a mighty smart boy if he subjectively knows, knows by experience – may require some processing, you see – that it won't kill him to know about something. If he learns that, then he learns learning.

We'd even take the parts of acting. We could take the stage. We could take an audience. "What's an audience? All right, you define an audience."

It's a great curiosity that to go on then from that point and make any great tremendous complexity out of it is really rather difficult. A person can learn about what he can communicate with. And it won't hurt him to communicate with it.

"Rryrrr-rowrr! Yeah, that's what an audience is."

Now, it does hurt – you understand, this is the cross-up that gets this all off. When you push a body into a buzz saw, parts come off, which by common agreement is painful. That's quite different though – it's quite different – than a thetan communicating with a buzz saw. You get somebody exteriorized and push him into a buzz saw and he says, "Whee!"

And you'd at least let them work out a tremendous amount of hostility on the subject of hostile audiences and so on. You'd probably run the last two or three flop plays out of them, just with just that, see?

Now, the funny part of it is, if the body wasn't rigged by agreement to be destructible by its own experience – a body has agreed already to be destroyed by its own experience, you see – you could push it into a buzz saw, and when you pulled it off the parts would simply reassemble. If there was no experience factor added to the body, that wouldn't be painful either. But if you add an experience factor to the body, then you let people in for pain and destruction.

In other words, you'd have to break this subject down. So you'd have to know a great deal about Scientology and a bit about what you were trying to break down. You'd have to have observed what was going on.

Old-time education could be defined in this wise – in this wise (it's horrible): placing data in the recalls of others. Therefore, old-time education accepts hypnotism, does not really allow for the usableness of the information, does not analyze doingness and completely avoids any havingness, which of course permits nobody to be anything. But putting data into the recalls of others causes others to rely on experience, not perception. These are two different things. Remembered experience is quite different than perception and estimation of the situation.

Now let's take several other fields.

Now, I'm not running down old-time education completely; I'm just burying it.

Let us take the field of medicine. Now, how much medicine would you have to know to run this on medicos? Really not very much.

Scientology has an entirely different category of action. Now, this has not at this time been laid out perfectly, all squared up at the edges and so forth. But it goes something like this: You offer data for the assimilation and use of others and facilitate their absorption of it to the end of permitting them a better control of a better life. That would be a much longer definition, but it actually is more factual.

"So, what's a patient? Now we're going to define patient. Now, you, Dr. Jones, how would you define a patient? Oh? Ho-ho! Somebody who pays a fee. Very good, very good."

If you're going to attempt education at all, then it has to be a game with a goal. There has to be some reason why. And unless you add that into your definition you're going to get nowhere.

We'd eventually get back some of the ethics and so forth that they had in medical school and lost there. We'd eventually get this and that and clarification. We would also get greater interest in their own profession.

So when we offer a person a datum, that datum must be under the self-determinism of the other person, not in his recalls. Get the difference. It must be at the disposal of his own determinism. And if it is not, then it cannot be used thoroughly in living.

Now let us take an organization, and this becomes very, very, very important, because it is a part of organizational Scientology.

So we give them data in such a wise as to give them control of the data, and then permit them to use that data, align and evaluate and apply that data to specific beingnesses and actions in life. And we never let a datum hang up in the air without anything with which to unite.

Organizational Scientology is moving right up to the front, because we are actually processing more and more large firms. And so far, we are simply processing them either on a PE basis, just teaching them fundamentals of life, or we are doing it individually. That is, the Association is doing this, and it's doing a great many of these. Some of them are coming up every time you turn around, all abroad. It'll be happening here in America soon enough. Individual or PE Course.

Now, what I just said originally about the avoidance system of education happens to be any preclear you ever processed. He's sitting there in his mother's valence. He has a very bad heart, terrible! You say, "Anybody you ever know have a bad heart?"

Now, you have to know something else here. You have to know this other thing about special activity.

"Oh," he says, "yes. Mother."

Now this same method of training can be used on an individual. And the second you move into settling an organization in place, you use a different type of education than would ordinarily be used.

And you say, "Well, all right. Do you ever remember a time when Mother's heart was bad?"

You don't issue him 825 directives, all of them more or less conflicting, but beautifully typed. You issue him instead a Scientologist, who takes up his job with him. And you put this individual on post. I'll tell you much more about that when I start to tell you how to run a practice. But, you put him on post, and you get him to define his activity until he has a stable datum for it. And you just keep doing this with him.

"Oh, yes, yes. Lots of times," and so on.

Oh, he'll weep and tear his hair. He's liable to do anything before he gets through. It's quite an adventurous activity. Just exactly what you did with life, with a group, you do with an individual. And it's the darnedest auditing you ever ran into.

You say, "Well now, what about your own heart? Do you suppose that could have anything to do with it?"

You run out a whole field of confusion when you do this. One of the most vital activities that could be engaged upon by a Scientologist. It's quite interesting. But as I say, we'll know more about that later.

"Yes, I dare say it has a great deal to do with it."

Now, here then is the special characteristic or just the fundamentals of life. Remember the rule is that you have to get a person to define it, find out how much of their agreement exists with it, discover any further ramifications or things that have to be added to the definition, and then you eventually get them to achieve a stable datum on this subject.

No data would fall out. It's all in there in complete black basalt.

The moment you do that it as-ises a tremendous quantity of confusion; when they really do it.

I've had people sit and tell me exactly what was wrong with them. They'd studied it all out. It was still wrong with them, still wrong with them. They hadn't gotten rid of a scrap of it. Well, how come? It was probably all the wrongness they had left. It was probably the only lesson they had ever learned.

So here we have a group activity going down to an individual activity.

Now, anything that is wrong with anybody is simply a lesson they've learned. Well, people know this so they avoid lessons.

It always used to be that an individual activity expanded out to a group activity. But here's a new one.

But the first thing that got wrong with them was to avoid a lesson, and then this permitted them thereafter to avoid more lessons, and every lesson they avoided could then victimize them. So here we go, here we go.

This same process has been used very successfully, and is being used successfully, which was originated on a group and now it's applied to individuals – see that? – as instruction.

How many ways could you devise to simply teach somebody a great deal about education? How many ways could you possibly do so? Well, how many auditing techniques do you know? There's quite a few, quite a few. But in view of the fact that you're doing an educational activity, it of course depends in a large measure upon communication. So communication must be demonstrated to exist before any education can be undertaken that will become education in the Scientology sense, not another engram.

Instruction. Odd kind of instruction.

You can always beat somebody's head in and say, "That'll teach him." It will, the rest of his life. It'll teach him every day. To what? Lord knows! Completely random, completely random.

A fellow's an accountant. You say, "All right. Now here you are, and here I am and..." Sort of an "Am I here?" sort of a "Is this a room? Is this a session?" sort of a conversation, you know?

Supposing the phrase in that head-beating was "He is no earthly good." We actually got somebody from Northwest Airlines, I think it was, that had this phrase in the bank, and everything he had done on the ground had been a total failure. He'd taken to be a flyboy, and he hated being a flyboy; but he was no "earthly" good.

"I understand you've been on the job quite a while," and "Do you know Mr. Smithers well?" and so on, "your boss," and two-way comm. And "All right, well, we're supposed to do something here. I want you to explain something about your job to me."

Some other fellow with the same, identical phrase becomes a parson. Man will insist on using his power of choice and he'll insist on doing something about anything. But unless his power of choice is in plain sight, and unless his somethingness is in very good view, unless the individual has a command over something and knows what he has a command over of, you know – that's very important.

Well, he's always willing to do that. He thinks you're there to explain his job to him. And this takes him by storm, because you don't do that. You say, "What is a good definition for accounting?"

I've heard it said that when you're training lions you really should know it's a lion you're training. See, I've heard of this. Some cautious souls have brought this up from time to time.

And he gives you some long, involved thing out of the Alexander Hamilton Institute for Higher Federal Swindling.

If you're handling a human being, why – huh! Lord knows what you're handling. You might be handling a lion, or you... Look at these little kids. They run up and down the street snapping cap pistols at each other, and so on. You can't tell from one minute to the next who they are. Who are they? Oh, I don't know. They're anybody: Davy Crockett or Buffalo Bill or Nathan Hale or – he got hanged – somebody. They're being somebody. They're being somebody they're not. It's only when somebody becomes somebody he is that he gets worried.

And he gives you this, and you say, "Well, that's very good. But do you think that is – just think it over for a moment – do you think that is..." Pick up any clause in it, any phrase in it. "Do you think that belongs there?"

All right. Systems of education, then, must only take into account the unharmful aspects of communication, and the formulas of communication, and the facts of communication, and an alignment of the data to be transmitted so that it may be employed in living by the other person.

"Well, I don't know.

Terrific dependency, though, on communication, isn't it? Communication and its whole formula. Every time that was avoided when you were a little kid in school, you didn't learn something. There was something you didn't learn. That's for sure. They didn't bother to get your attention, they didn't bother to tell you where it applied; there you went. And to this day you probably think two and eight make twelve. Of course that's your postulate. If you were good enough they would, but that's beside the point.

"How would you rephrase that?"

Now, education oddly enough contains a nearly complete – outside of the definitions of it, itself – rendition in the old Logics of Dianetics. And those are the anatomy of education. They might be called the axioms of education. They were totally missing in the field of education.

And it's a funny thing that you're asking him this question, because he's never thought about the definition before.

Some of those were almost known back in the days when they used to teach a subject called logic and argumentation. Wonderful subject. I had a textbook on it once. Just gorgeous. Such simplicity! How you defeat an opponent in a debate. Wonderful list. I mean, they took up the subject, they really meant to defeat an opponent in a debate; they had a complete anatomy of how you defeated somebody in a debate, which had nothing whatsoever to do with the debate and they said so; how you distracted his attention. It ran down to the most mechanical things you ever heard of: Have him called from the wings occasionally. It did. I mean, it was a wonderful textbook. Practical! Wish I'd studied it.

And he starts knocking it together, and after you've done this with him for maybe an hour, this professional accountant comes up with a definition for an accounting, something he never had before.

Anyhow, one of the little data in there – one of the data in there was the most marvelous thing you ever heard of. "Never engage the actual data of your opponent in a debate. Always engage his sources." How fiendish!

And all of a sudden, about eighteen hats he thought he was wearing disappear, and about three more he didn't know he had appear, and his job starts to orient. And being a stable datum now, he can handle his communication post, which is all he is occupying.

The fellow says, "Two hundred and ninety-one tons of uranium were used last year." He's demonstrating the value of uranium, you see, and the expenditures on uranium, and so on.

All right, now, let's see, then, that there is a method of teaching by definition and getting agreement. There is a method of teaching that way.

You don't say "Ah," or "Well, what do you know." You never agree with him. A debate's an argument. It makes that very clear in this textbook – printed by the way, about 1866 or '67 – at no time do you agree with him. You find out "Who said that? Where did you get that datum?"

There is another method of education, which is lower than this, and which is quite fabulous. It's fantastic. In fact, I'm ashamed to mention it. It's too fundamental. It's right down in the bottom drawer.

"Oh," he says, "that's Borks and Snorgelberg, their mining reports, published in the Miners Quarterly," and so forth.

I'm going to pick somebody very bright here in order to do this with. And you understand this is just a demonstration. Have I got any volunteers? Thank you, Harold.

And you say, "The Miners Quarterly of what organization?"

PC: Okay.

And he says, "Why, the United Mine Workers, of course."

LRH: All right. Now I'm going to say something, and then I want you to say something. Is that all right with you?

And you say, "Ahhhh."

PC: Yeah.

It wouldn't have mattered if it was the Republican National Committee, you'd have still said "Ahhhh."

LRH: All right. One, two, three.

I think they killed everybody off that knew the subject. I think they all got annihilated for it, so we don't have the subject anymore. It was a gorgeous textbook. I don't even have a copy of it anymore.

PC: One, two, three.

But anyway, if we want to relay a datum completely so that it fixes forever and it's not under anybody's control, we have to lose or lie about the source; we have to get the source out of sight completely. We have to give it some other source. Then we have to alter it a little bit. And then we have to deliver it with enormous authority; and if anybody says that isn't the authority, or the authority is nothing... has nothing to do with the datum, then let's back up the whole artillery on them. Let's flunk them, let's put them back half a term, let's send letters home to their parents. Sounds kind of wild, doesn't it? Just because they said that Snorgel and Fuggelbaum did so-and-so, why, all these penalties get lined up. If you don't believe it, you've had it.

LRH: Now, that's very good. Now, did you say that?

Well now, that is old-time education. What good is the datum? It's no good at all. So Snorgel and Fuggelbaum said this – so what?

PC: Yeah, I said that.

Einstein – here, I'll give you the reverse, now. Einstein had a lot to do, they say, with inventing the A-bomb. Well, it was invented on his authority or something. It was appropriated for on his authority. And we get down the line after a while, and Einstein at no time can say, "The A-bomb will not explode tonight." He can't say that and have it happen. What the hell is this about authority? What difference does it make?

LRH: Well, why did you say that?

Actually, it has nothing to do, really, with the behavior of the bomb at all. The bomb explodes or it doesn't explode, and that's all. It's an open-and-closed fact. Mostly because Einstein himself is outweighed by a tremendous number of people who all agreed on the backtrack that atom bombs exploded. He's outvoted! So you get pushed into the horrible position that I'm pushed into of simply categorizing the majority decisions.

PC: Because you said it.

But the whole alliance of authority and education is apt to bring people into a fixed state of mind. If what is being taught is true then they themselves will recognize its truth, since nobody can be taught, thoroughly, anything that he himself does not already have some knowledge of No matter how ghostily, no matter how thinly, there's some knowledge of it.

LRH: Oh, I said it and then you said it!

For instance, you can't be taught usefully – so that you can use it – any datum about the human mind that you have not already agreed to. You can be taught an invention concerning the human mind if you are taught that it is an invention. Otherwise, you would have to be taught hypnotically, merely given a new conviction which you could not use or alter. That would have to be done on an hypnotic level. What good would it be? Well, it'd add a new datum. And if enough people were hypnotized into believing this, that all brains had Ford coils in them or something, I imagine the genetic line would grow Ford coils. But it hasn't yet. Remember that; it hasn't yet.

PC: Uh-huh.

In other words, we learn most easily that to which we have subscribed. This is why so many people flunk science. Science is the doggonedest mass of invention you ever cared to read, but it's a rather uniformly agreed-upon invention which is built on top of an already top-heavy series of inventions or postulates which are agreed upon. This already top-heavy mass of agreements, then, needs no further inventions, I assure you. And yet, just for the sake of teaching somebody something, these things get invented. You get the idea?

LRH: Now, do you remember what you said?

Now, it's a sure test of a teacher whether he knows his stuff or not, the number of data which he insists on everyone assimilating without question. If he insists that a great number of data be assimilated without further analysis or question in any way, shape or form, we know this boy doesn't know his business. He's scared. Somehow or another he feels that nobody must be permitted to examine these data. So he's doing something else. He's doing something else.

PC: One, two, three.

Now, educationally, it is absolutely necessary for the teacher to preserve the power of choice of the student over the data which he is taught. And if it is not in agreement with the experience of the student, and will not be found to be true in the environment of the student, he permits the student to examine this and say so, and operate accordingly. Only in this wise would you have anything used or useful.

LRH: That's very good. All right. Now, you see how this goes now. All right, I'm going to say three more numbers, and I want you to repeat them, okay? That's good.

Engineering fails mostly because all of the originators in the field of engineering have died off. They're way back on the track.

PC: Mm-hm.

A chap came to me recently – he rather surprised me; I was a little bit overwhelmed by this experience. He came to me in London, and the appointment was made by cable two or three days before the fact. The first whisper of it was about two weeks before the fact, and then the exact appointment was made about three days before the meeting. And he wanted to come by and see me at my office in London. He said he wanted to talk to me. He didn't say it was urgent.

LRH: All right. Six, eighteen, twelve.

So I sat there wondering what this could be all about, as the chap has a rather famous name. He's probably the leading boy employed at this time by the U.S. Air Forces in the field of aerodynamic research.

PC: Six, eighteen, twelve.

And I thought, "What on earth does this fellow want to see me for?" I haven't done anything, honest. You know?

LRH: All right. What did I say?

And he sailed into the office, he sat down, he took one of my Kools, he accepted a Coca-Cola, rejected an offer of some vodka – said it was not national with him – and chitter-chatted with me for exactly one-half an hour, talking about some recent developments.

PC: Six, eighteen, twelve.

I agreed with him, I thought these were fine, understood them a little bit, got some kind of an inkling of where he was going, fumbled with it a bit, said that's fine. He intimated that he was looking for some much younger man than himself, since he was about seventy-one and was right in there with the Wright brothers, to replace him someday, and intimated – oh, how cursorily – that someday he might want me to process somebody for him. But this was quite obviously not the object of his visit.

LRH: Is that what I said?

Well, he looked at his watch, went outside, got in the U.S. embassy car, went back to the airport, climbed aboard a U.S. Army Air Forces airplane, and was flown on to his destination, which was Brussels – a large conference in Brussels – and then flown home. That was all he wanted to do in London. And I sat there and I scratched my head, I couldn't figure out what in the hell was going on here. Didn't have any idea at all. No idea at all.

PC: Yeah.

And finally – after a lot of time went by I finally figured out what was wrong. The guy was lonesome! That's all. Haven't heard from him since. Told him to drop by here, he said sure he would. He isn't home yet. But this is an interesting thing.

LRH: You're sure that's what I said?

But in his conversation it was rather easy to detect the fact that in his field he alone, he felt, was running on choice of data and theory. Everybody else in his field, his own associates and assistants, particularly his assistants, were all running fixedly on data which had now become agreed-upon data in the field of aerodynamics, but which is not necessarily true at all. In fact, I never have been able to figure out – and neither could he – how anybody ever applied calculus to an airfoil, and managed to build the same airfoil off the same mathematical sheet. He said he always inquired whether or not they had sent the test model over for measurements in building the actual model, and never felt comfortable unless they did.

PC: Yeah.

But this man was a realist, terrific realist. If you couldn't think about it and look about it, you couldn't know anything about it, so what use was it? And that was the way he operated. That was it.

LRH: Well, do you recall what I said? Do you really...

I am afraid that in the field of knowledge, to me nothing, including Scientology, is sacred. In fact, I'd have to be argued with and shot at awfully long for anybody to convince me that a datum was an unalterable datum which must never again be reviewed. I'm afraid I would be very hard to convince this way. Of course there'd be ways to do this. You could kidnap all of you and hold you for ransom until I admitted that the moon was green cheese and – oh, I'd probably say the moon was made out of green cheese, because I'd go easy the other way too.

PC: No, I recall what I said.

I am not trying to hold up an inviolable integrity at the expense of something or other, I know not what, don't you see?

LRH: You recall what you said, not what I said?

The only fate I'd know which was worse than death would be "totally fixed on the entire track with all data which had ever been invented and agreed upon." That's the only fate I'd know that'd be worse than death. But there's another fate which is almost as bad, and that is to shy off every datum simply because it's been agreed upon, see? You have to remain fluid in both quarters. In other words, you don't have to accept every datum as a fixed, unalterable datum, and you don't have to shy off anything that looks like a fixed, unalterable datum. You don't have to do either one. Don't have to accept them, don't have to reject them. Yawn once in a while. It's not that important.

PC: Yep. Yeah.

So here, here we have, worked out in Scientology, a great many data which are apparently the common denominators of agreements on the whole track, arrived at evidently by the bulk of the people who perceive them now. And people have become disabused or have disabused themselves of their participation in their creation, and many of these people are shying off of them and avoiding them, because if they thought again what they had thought once it'd evidently kill them. And so as we inspect this we arrive at certain definite methods and agreements by which we can reach these and turn them around one way, or fix them better the other way, or do something with them. In other words, we are actually capable of twisting and turning the various fixednesses and unfixednesses of existence.

LRH: Well, that's very fascinating. Well, what number was it?

Now, sometimes we do this well, sometimes we do this poorly; but we always unfix as easily as the thing was unfixed in the first place, and we always fix as easily as the thing was fixed in the first place. We always do those things, see? We can always unfix something that was awfully unfixed.

PC: Well, it was three numbers: six, eighteen, twelve.

You know, a fellow's walking down the street and a thought flashes through his mind that maybe some of his behavior is not entirely masculine, maybe it is slightly effeminate. In other words, the datum is there "Maybe I'm a girl." Well, it's... You see, it's very nebulous. You know, maybe – he's just playing a game with himself of worry, something. We come along, we pat him on the shoulder, he tells us what he's worried about. We don't even have to tell him "You're not a girl," see? I mean, he just tells us what he was worried about, he – boom! See, it's gone that quick.

LRH: But you do remember it, don't you?

He's walking down the street now with another datum – another occurrence. He's walking down the street with a datum that he's a man. That's pretty fixed, isn't it? He's walking down the street and he's wearing men's clothes and a man's head and he's got a man's haircut, and he's really convinced he's a man. Now, we would unfix that one with a little more difficulty.

PC: Yes, I do.

Of course, they do it easily in Hollywood, but we're not going that way.

LRH: Well, do you recall me saying it?

Do you see, though, that the relative fixation of the data has a direct bearing upon our ability to unfix it. You got it?

PC: (pause) Mmm... not as well as I recall me saying it.

Now, we can easily fix in his head that he's a man, can't we? He already thinks so. And we might have some success in fixing in his head this other earlier datum that he's effeminate. See, here's fixing and unfixing data, see? He's got the little ghosty notion that some of his actions are effeminate. We hear this, and we don't permit him to complete his communication, we shut it off in some fashion or another, we turn it around a little bit and we ask him very searchingly whether anybody has mentioned this lately to him or not. And then we look very learned and we say, "You're sure – you're sure you don't remember it? Oh," we say, "it's a bit occluded, eh?" He's wondering what's happening here, you know?

LRH: You remember you saying it better! Well, that's very interesting. All right, now, that's good, that's fine. All right: thirty-two, sixteen, eleven.

And we say, "Well now, I'll tell you how you cure this. I'll tell you how you cure this. One of the best ways I know to cure this would be to overcome any impulse whatsoever to wear feminine clothes or to use feminine things, you see, by simply buying some and putting them on the dresser. Therefore it'd be very easy for you, you see, to realize that they're not yours and that you have nothing whatsoever to do with them. And every time you look at them, get the idea that they are not associated with you in any way."

PC: You want me to do something with that?

In other words, by this way and that way we might have some chance of fixing the idea in his head that he's a girl.

LRH: Sure; say it!

But by paralleling life we can take a lazy man's look at it, and a fellow walks down the street and he thinks he's a man, and we pat him on the back and you say, yes, he's a man. That's the easy look, you see? He says, "I'm worried about being a girl" – he's worried about it, that's good enough for us. Talk it over and he's no longer worried about being a girl. Don't you see? That's very easy. It's very simple.

PC: Oh! Thirty-two, sixteen, eleven.

Well, we do much better than that. We teach people how their minds get fixed and unfixed. We do better than that. Then we show them how they can fix and unfix these various agreements and things and postulates. That's the business we're in. We do this well.

LRH: Very good, very good. What did I say?

Here's an organization, a business organization, that even we consider disorderly. Some inkling has come through to its boss – to its boss – some inkling has come through to the boss that this might possibly be a prevailing circumstance throughout the organization.

PC: Thirty-two, sixteen, eleven.

Well, we could straighten up his personnel and his comm lines. And we could look over this situation; we could do pretty well with this. Realize that if we didn't facilitate the communications in the organization that it would remain as confused as it was. We could do something about this. We could alter the situation more in the direction of a tolerable unit.

LRH: All right. Do you recall me saying that?

Now, what do we mean by a tolerable unit? Well, we could say "The unit works better." That's fine. "It better meets its goals" is a better statement. If a man is trying to be more a man, we can make him more a man, just achieving his goals; or we can get him to change his goals.

PC: Yeah, but not quite as well as I do me saying it.

Now, a business that thinks it's confused, we could come along and educate it that it is totally confused. We could. We could simply go into nooks and crannies and pull old junk out, and keep calling management's attention to how this person and that person in the organization had been stowing stuff away, and forgetting stuff, and so on; and offer him no solution to this, you see, and carefully tell him every time to refrain from boiling over about it and not to get mad concerning it, because the entire tone of the organization depends utterly upon his own mood. We'd produce chaos! I mean, the place would look horrible before you got through. I mean, you'd really have chaos.

LRH: All right. That's very interesting, isn't it?

You could say, "Now, don't say I told you, because I don't want to get in trouble, and don't mention it to anybody, but actually your stock department, you see, is keeping all of the out-of-date stock and refuses to order any of the up-to-date stock. And then it won't release any stock to anybody else in the rest of the shop. And the fellow there has to be treated very carefully, because he's in a kind of a bad condition. Now, you treat him very carefully, and so forth, and don't go in suddenly and mess all this up, because your attention really is needed over here on much more important things." Get what you'd do here. It'd be pretty wild, wouldn't it?

PC: Yeah.

So, you could intensify any given situation, or simplify any given situation; or, by the correct handling of data, return to any given situation its own self-determinism over what it's doing.

LRH: All right. Now we're going to go a little further into this, if this is all right with you, huh?

Just by the process of education alone, just by the process of educating the people immediately associated with living a marital life, on the subject of "These are some data about life. You pays your money and takes your chance. There they are. You want to look them over, okay. If you don't want to look them over, all right. Because this is kind of the way it seems to be. Let's look around and see if that's the way it seems to be." Orient them a little bit, give them some stable data, restimulate some stable data. All of a sudden, why, their environment is liable to straighten out and run much more smoothly. This you would call counseling. Or would you call it education?

PC: Sure, sure.

Now, here then is a tremendous field in Scientology, and it does appear that all you're doing is not just increasing the learning rate of a person, but increasing his power of choice over what he has learned. And if you can do that, why, then he can lead a much better and more successful life.

LRH: All right: A hundred, twelve, sixteen.

Thank you.

PC: A hundred, twelve, sixteen.

Thank you.

LRH: All right. Did I say that?

[End of Lecture]

PC: Yeah.

LRH: Do you remember my saying it?

PC: Yeah.

LRH: You do remember it?

PC: Yeah.

LRH: It's easier to do now?

PC: Yes, it is!

LRH: Well, all right! All right.

PC: Yeah, after all that.

LRH: All right, I'm going to say three more numbers, and I'm going to ask you to say them after them. All right?

PC: Right.

LRH: All right. Three, two, one.

PC: Three, two, one.

LRH: All right, that's fine. Now, do you remember the first numbers that we used? The first numbers I said?

PC: Mmmm... no.

PC: Oh, oh!

LRH: Yeah, what were they?

PC: One, two, three.

LRH: One, two, three. All right. Very good. Well then, you can remember what I say, can't you?

PC: Yeah.

LRH: Huh? You can remember what I say, and you can remember what you say, can't you? Huh?

PC: Yeah, yeah.

LRH: All right and it's not very difficult, is it?

PC: No.

LRH: It's not very difficult at all.

PC: No.

LRH: Well, all right. Now, I'm going to ask you something, and that is, did you feel any physical pain while I was saying these numbers to you?

PC: No. No.

LRH: In other words, repeating them and remembering them didn't cause any physical pain. Is that right?

PC: No, it didn't.

LRH: No physical pain at all?

PC: No.

LRH: Well, all right. I'm going to say three more numbers, and I'm going to ask you to say them after them, all right?

PC: Right.

LRH: All right. Eight, seven, six.

PC: Eight, seven, six.

LRH: All right. Now, how do you feel about that?

PC: Good!

LRH: You feel all right about that?

PC: Yeah! Yeah.

LRH: In other words, there's no great tension involved here?

PC: No.

LRH: You sure? You sure? You sure there's no tension? Huh?

PC: Nah.

LRH: Less than there was?

PC: Yeah.

LRH: All right. Now, what was the last thing I said?

PC: Eight, seven, six.

LRH: In other words, this is easy to remember, huh?

PC: Yeah!

LRH: Yeah, it's easy to remember what I say, huh?

PC: Yeah.

LRH: Well, all right. Now, what do you think about it?

PC: Well, I think it's pretty easy to remember what you say.

LRH: All right. You think it really is?

PC: Yeah.

LRH: All right. Now, all of these data, of course, I've been giving you are very nonsignificant.

PC: Yeah.

LRH: There is no great significance to this data at all.

PC: Mm-hm.

LRH: Is that right?

PC: That's right.

LRH: All right. Now let's get just a little more significant, all right?

PC: Okay.

LRH: All right. All chairs are purple.

PC: All right. All chairs are purple.

LRH: All right. Well, is that true?

PC: No. No, it's not.

LRH: Well, what did I say?

PC: You said all chairs are purple.

LRH: And then what did you say?

PC: I said all chairs are purple.

LRH: All right. We both said all chairs are purple.

PC: Yeah.

LRH: Are they?

PC: No.

LRH: No. All right, then you could disbelieve something I said, couldn't you?

PC: Yeah!

LRH: You could throw it out, huh?

PC: Yeah, yeah.

LRH: All right. Well, that's good, that's good. Now, let's try that again, all right?

PC: Yeah!

LRH: All right. The ceiling is an inch above the floor.

PC: Okay. The ceiling is an inch above the floor.

LRH: All right. How's that?

PC: That's all right.

LRH: What did I say?

PC: You said the ceiling is an inch above the floor.

LRH: All right. Can you throw that out?

PC: Yeah, sure.

LRH: Do you have to believe it?

PC: No.

LRH: It's not a vital datum?

PC: No. No.

LRH: Is it true?

PC: No.

LRH: Not true?

PC: No.

LRH: In other words, you got a power of choice over something I said, haven't you?

PC: Yeah.

LRH: Well, that's pretty good. That's pretty good. All right, now let's go just a little bit further with this, shall we?

PC: Okay.

LRH: All right. Preclears should always be acknowledged.

PC: Okay. Preclears should always be acknowledged.

LRH: Mm-hm. Well, all right. Is that true?

PC: Mmm... Well, if you want to help him, it is.

LRH: Huh?

PC: Yeah, if you want to help him, it is.

LRH: Well, yeah, but the datum was preclears should always be acknowledged. Is that true?

PC: No, that's not true.

LRH: That's not true?

PC: No.

LRH: What do you think about it as a datum?

PC: I think it's a pretty good datum.

LRH: Yeah? Pretty good datum, but not always true.

PC: No, not always true.

LRH: Well, I tell you what. Let's take a little example of this here, one way or the other. Let's take these two objects here. We'll call this object the preclear, and we'll call this object the auditor, all right?

PC: Okay.

LRH: All right. Now, I want you to give me an example of that datum, "preclears should always be acknowledged." Now, if that datum were in existence, what would be the action of the auditor here to a statement on the part of the preclear? Now, you just tell me.

PC: Well, acknowledge him; say "Okay" or "All right," something of the sort.

LRH: Mm-hm. All right. Well, now you have the preclear here say something and have the auditor acknowledge it, okay?

PC: Oh, "Gluck!" You know, "Okay."

LRH: All right. You bet. All right. Have the preclear say something.

PC: "Gleeck."

LRH: All right. Now what does the auditor say?

PC: "All right."

LRH: Okay. Is that... that's an acknowledgment?

PC: Yeah.

LRH: And the datum says what? "Preclears should always be acknowledged." What's that say there?

PC: Well, that says that the auditor should always acknowledge...

LRH: Yeah...

PC: ...something from the preclear's statement.

LRH: Well, give me a more graphic example of that.

PC: Well, preclear says, "I'm hungry."

LRH: Mm-hm.

PC: Auditor says, "Okay."

LRH: Mm-hm. All right. But the datum is a preclear should always be acknowledged. Now, can you give me a graphic example of that? Using these two items.

PC: Using those two items... (pause) I don't know! No, not very well, using those two items.

LRH: Why not?

PC: Well, that's not a preclear, and that's not an auditor.

LRH: Well, that's true... That's true. I agree with you there. It's perfectly true. Perfectly true. In other words, you didn't even have to accept my assignment of value to these two things.

PC: No, no.

LRH: You didn't have to.

PC: No.

LRH: Did you really agree with the assignment of value to them?

PC: Well, for a little while there.

LRH: But not now?

PC: Yeah, not now.

LRH: Well, not now. All right, shall we assign value to them again?

PC: Well...

LRH: Why don't you assign the value to them? Which one's the preclear?

PC: I don't know that I'd want to assign that value.

LRH: You don't know that you'd...

PC: Well, unless I wanted to assign more values to them, and said that the, well, the glass, you know, could talk or do certain things...

LRH: All right.

PC: Yeah, you know. And I could do that.

LRH: Okay. Well, do so. Go ahead.

PC: Oh, go ahead? Okay, well, it's all right the way you had it there. The glass can be the preclear.

LRH: All right. All right.

PC: And the Coke bottle will be the auditor.

LRH: All right. Now let's get an example of this datum we're examining.

PC: Okay. The glass, as a preclear, says, "I've had enough of this; I'm leaving."

LRH: Mm-hm.

PC: And then if the auditor, which is the Coke bottle, must always acknowledge the preclear, the Coke bottle says, "Okay."

LRH: It's not very workable, is it? All right! All right. You got a good grip on this datum, though?

PC: Yeah.

LRH: All right. Well, let's modify it so it is true. Now, how would you modify it so it's true?

PC: Well... (pause) Well, something to the effect that if an auditor wants to get good results, you know, if he wants to handle this thing, then he will acknowledge. You know...

LRH: You were...

PC: Like, for example, an auditor might just be trying out, to find out for himself whether acknowledgment was worthwhile or not. So in that case maybe he wouldn't acknowledge, just to see what would happen.

LRH: Mm-hm. Well, give me a datum then that could be taught to somebody.

PC: Hmm...

LRH: Concerning acknowledgment.

PC: Well, something like "You want to be an auditor, you're going to audit a preclear, try this for yourself and see if it works: When your preclear originates something, you acknowledge. See if you get good results." Something of that sort.

LRH: Mm-hm. Well, can you just codify it as a datum?

PC: (pause) Mmm... (pause) Well, just acknowledge your preclear.

LRH: Mm-hm. You'd want to make it that brief?

PC: Well, you might add something about results in there – get certain kind of results. I don't know for sure.

LRH: Well, "acknowledge your preclear": is that much of a modification from "preclears should always be acknowledged?"

PC: Well, I don't know about this should always be acknowledged...

LRH: Oh! You don't like that should always.

PC: Yeah, I'm not sure I like that.

LRH: Well, how would you vary that?

PC: Mmm. I don't know.

LRH: Well, let's vary it so that it could be stated. Preclears what, concerning acknowledgment? Just anything you want to say.

PC: Oh, I'd be more inclined to say... I don't know.

LRH: Come on, let's make a datum up here.

PC: (pause) I don't know. I'd just say "acknowledge your preclear."

LRH: You just would say "acknowledge your preclear."

PC: Yeah.

LRH: Hm. Nothing cautionary about it?

PC: I might make another datum that says – that would put this datum under "For good auditing..." I mean, "These are the rudiments of auditing," or something, "Acknowledge your preclear." And then tell the guy, "Well, you try doing it, or you try doing it – try not doing it, and see what happens."

LRH: All right. All right. What conclusion do you think he would attain then?

PC: Well, I think he'd come to the conclusion that when he wanted good results, that he would acknowledge his preclear.

LRH: All right. Well now, supposing you tell me that datum.

PC: Well, if you want good auditing results, acknowledge your preclear.

LRH: If you want good auditing results, acknowledge your preclear.

PC: Right.

LRH: Is that what you said?

PC: Yeah, that's what I said.

LRH: Did I repeat it?

PC: Yeah, you did.

LRH: Oh, I'll repeat something you said.

PC: Yeah.

LRH: Is that right?

PC: Yeah.

LRH: Well, say it again.

PC: If you want good auditing results, acknowledge your preclear.

LRH: All right. If you want good auditing results, acknowledge your preclear.

PC: Very good!

LRH: All right. Okay. Thank you very much, Harold. End of session!

All right. Now, do you see this particular method of instruction?

It takes a nonsignificant datum and teaches somebody that the repetition of the datum does not bring about chaos, does not hurt him any, that he can do it. Right?

Then you teach him he could remember it and so forth.

Now, although he is taught data all the time, it might be, because of association of something with you, he is not necessarily convinced that he could accept your data. Some people are safe and some aren't, you see? Got the idea?

So if you wanted to teach him something, why, you would have to give him a test of this. Let him look it over.

And you'd do this, of course, with a nonsignificant datum: one, two, three; a hundred, thirty-two, sixteen, see? Just numbers. Just nothing to it, nothing to it at all. You get a repetition of this, and then he can remember it, and he will find out that his own – usually, this is fairly standard – he'll remember that his own repetition is safe, and that yours is a little bit held off, see? Then he finds out immediately that's not so bad; I mean there's nothing wrong with that.

Now, you do something else with him. He's so used to being taught by life with duress, and not with a power of choice, that you take a totally incorrect datum. You know, you showed him he could remember it over a long period of time, like the trick of giving him the first number backwards, and letting him repeat the first number again.

But you give him an incorrect data. There would be no argument about the incorrectness of the datum. And you let him throw it out. And you give him another datum, incorrect, and let him throw it out. And if he has any difficulty with the nonsignificant items, you would, of course, keep repeating these until we could do it smoothly and this worked out.

I don't care how long it took.

And then, you would keep giving him incorrect data and letting him throw it out, and show him definitely and positively that he could give it the yo-heave. You got it?

Now, you've shown him that he can remember something or reject it, and that is the definition of power of choice.

You've shown him and demonstrated to him – probably at much greater length than I have demonstrated to you here, you see? You have demonstrated to him that he can take nonsignificant data and give it the yo-heave, he can take completely incorrect data and give it the yo-heave, and that he can remember any of this data. And also that it didn't hurt him and it didn't kill him. You got it?

And then you give him a datum which is the datum you wish to teach him. And you give him power of choice over the datum. But the pitch is to give it a little bit exaggerated in force. You got it? "Preclears should always be acknowledged." It's not true. Not true.

Let him quarrel with it. Let him chew it around. Let him add it up and look over his experience.

And make him give you an objective example. That is a vital part of this particular operation – a vital part of it.

Have him set up a dummy situation somehow or another, see? If you're teaching him that it is wrong to run off the road with a car, or something stupid like that, why, you have him show you where the road is on the table and move the salt shaker off the road, see? You get the notion, see?

You give him an objective example. He has to then translate your statement into action. Got that? He must do this, and he must continue to do this until he can do it, one way or the other, so that it ceases to be a bunch of words.

There's many an excellent student to whom all of education is only a bunch of words, and somehow or other they've mastered the mathematics of words so that they can make the words change and redefine and come back, and nothing ever hit reality at all. In other words, the avoidance factor is so strong that they have worked out a complete mathematics of symbols. And they can be very convincing. They can give you examples.

But to point to objects, to make them give direction to the objects, intention to the objects, and so forth, is quite something else. It removes this thing, then, from the theoretical class and moves it into the world of doingness.

So you remove this datum into a bit of a better definition, and then you remove it into the world of doingness. You argue some more with him and agree with him – you pick an agreement with him – on the subject of the definition itself, until he can state it fairly well. And then you make him give it to you, and you repeat his definition.

It shows him he can do this, too.

Fascinating thing is he's liable to relax about the whole datum.

Now, one item came up with relation to this particular demonstration session. Of course, the amount of stress that we were putting on it is of course brief We did this very, very briefly, with somebody who already knew the datum. That's why it could be brief, don't you see?

No subject has more than half a hundred important data in it. I don't care what you're doing. They don't have more than a half a hundred really vital, top-flight data.

The running of a truck company: some guy who knows how but can't tell you how, and that sort of thing – got it bred in the bone, and all that sort of thing – you better not count on him in any push. Because he can't state what he's doing; therefore, it's all in the field of action. So therefore it must be to some degree obsessive.

He always has to get the trucks out. There's eight broken down. If they run any further in the condition they're in, they'll burn up his trucks. Well, some hidden datum is in there someplace about always getting the trucks out.

So these eight trucks, in spite of the protests of the mechanics and so forth, hit the road anyway, and there's an awful lot of dollars in trucks suddenly burned up, you see?

I've seen shipping companies do this. The ships must always go to sea and be making money for their owners.

Or "Paint is expensive!" or something like this. And this is a monitoring, important datum.

All right. Now, in view of the fact that we are doing an evaluation of data, if you please – please, look at this – the evaluation up to this moment is in the hands of the Instructor. You got it?

Now, we have to run another type of session, which is best done on the ground with the subject matter of the person. We run unimportances. We run unimportances, that's all.

We don't run importances. Why?

Everybody in the universe has always been running importances. Everything was always important. Anything was important.

"It's very important that you put your hat on this particular peg."

"Why?"

"Well, because it's important!"

Well, why is it important? What's important mean? Important means punishment. Got it?

People are taught to do things, not because they're sensible or because it's a good game, they're taught to do things because of consequences – dire consequences.

So you can cover the whole field of any activity in terms of consequences by covering it in terms of importances.

Now, you could do consequences or importances and wind up more or less with the same result.

You're teaching somebody to drive a tractor. Driving – teaching of driving – is quite an activity. There are a lot of driving schools in the United States. They teach people to drive.

There are a lot of police schools that teach people to drive better. They do a fine job of it, too. They send the people out to have more accidents. It's very good. I mean, it's very good. They have trouble, you see, with employment in the traffic department. And if they had less accidents, why, they'd have less employment, so on. You got to keep it up somehow or another; it's the only way I can figure it out.

But they teach everybody how important it is to do this, and how important it is to do that, because of the dire consequences of.

And I've never heard anybody in a driving school... And I've looked this problem over very interestedly. We even devised a very beautiful little test that someday we're going to shove under the noses of people who are taking driving tests. And when they flop it, they flop. That's that. It's an amazingly insignificant little test to show up the tremendous stress of confusion in the individual. Because only 10 percent of the drivers make 90 percent of the accidents. And all you have to do is eliminate them, and we would see a lot less red lights.

I've never heard an instructor say, "You drive this way because it's the aesthetic thing to do," or "because this is the way to drive gracefully."

They don't do that. And yet that's the only reason that appeals to a thetan. It's the only reason people buy automobiles today: they look aesthetic in them, they think. Or they drive aesthetically or something. You know?

Maybe somebody's got a reverse on aesthetics, and ugliness and aesthetics have reversed somehow – beauty and ugliness have reversed in the field of aesthetics – and so he knows how he looks aesthetic in a car: old slouch hat, Model-T Ford, you know? That's the aesthetic setup.

So what would you do? What would you do with somebody if the importance of the situation is rather for the birds. It really doesn't get too far.

I was rather amazed to learn a complete report about all of the kids of a town in England are taught continuously and yanked back in. Nobody ever stops teaching them how to ride their bicycles and walk safely. They're always taught this. Ride their bicycles and walk safely.

And the report goes on and on, saying then the importance of an educational program in preventing accidents, since they've had no accidents in that town for motor traffic, which is fairly heavy through it, for many, many years. And this program has been very thorough and has been followed very, very well.

The datum, of course, makes good sense in favor of "make them all study safety, and they have a safe record," until you learn that they are conducted through these exercises and so forth on the ground.

It amounts to learning how to walk and ride bicycles on streets. They take them out and... They must include in it, for the thing to work at all, the lesson that "you, too, can safely ride a bicycle and don't have to worry about it." And that must overweigh the importance factor; otherwise the program would not have mounted up this way, see?

It's quite interesting.

Now, if you have no time to educate anybody, if you're very careless, you don't care anything about it, and you feel pretty sadistic, you say, "Nobody is going to leave this post tonight."

You're a general or something, and, you know, uncontrolled. And somebody named Slovick or something or other leaves the post, and you shoot him. You show other people the dead body and you say, "You see?"

That is, if you're real stupid, this has a workability which is a usable workability – if you're real stupid. You haven't any imagination or something, you can do that.

Well, this has a rather broad appeal, for some reason or other.

I'll show you; it's intensely workable, this method by force: "If you kill. somebody, you'll get killed."

Very forceful; it works: murders stopped a long time ago. Hasn't been a murder in years, obviously, because there've been an awful lot of hangings. Proves itself, doesn't it?

Education by importance, then, is all right as long as you're in terrific ARC with your people.

You can say, "This is an awfully important datum. Look it over and see if you don't think so."

If you're not in terrific ARC with the people, not close up and in terrific ARC with them all the time, by golly, you certainly... It isn't power of choice you have to return to them, it's relaxation. That's what you've got to return to them: relaxation.

You've got to get them to relax about the body of data before the importance of the data shows up.

So, you teach somebody to drive a tractor by having him select the unimportant parts of it: things that he's sure are relatively unimportant about the tractor, the control or handling of which is relatively unimportant.

And you know, before you've run it very long, this tractor will become the most important thing he ever saw. I mean he won't be able to run it very long before "But it's all important!" you know?

And you say, "Oh, come on. You can find something else about this tractor that's unimportant. Oh, come on; let's find something else." You're running a covert kind of 8-C, of course, at the same time, which is highly successful and mustn't be neglected on the educational factor.

"One more unimportant thing about this tractor."

Well, he finally decides that the coat of paint that is on the exact front of the crank is probably unimportant. He probably decides that.

And you keep nailing him and nailing him and nailing him. The thing gets more solid to him – one of the things that happens. But the other thing that happens is, the allness that he finally comes upscale into starts to disintegrate.

He finds out after a while that the controls – he doesn't know anything about the tractor; he's just been examining it. He will finally select the controls and the exact items which are control contacts of the tractor as the most important things of the tractor from his standpoint. And then hell select these down, and gradually, why, hell have it taped.

The funny part of it is, if you do that, he ran get in and drive the tractor. Fantastic!

In other words, it isn't so important that it'll kill him if he doesn't know. And if he's on a craving-to-know anxiety all the way through his learning to drive a tractor, it practically kills him. And someday the tractor probably will kill him. It's all so important that he convinces even himself by running off of a cliff with it.

He suddenly fumbles for the brake at the last moment, you see, and hits the choke, and it merely advances the speed of the engine slightly. And he says, "Something is wrong here," he says. "It's all so important."

So there's a whole series of tricks educationally that center around the devaluation of importances of the unimportant parts of the subject. Got it?

That's a whole field of education. Go take somebody out and show him a hydroelectric dam, find the unimportant parts of it.

My God, it may take him ten months! We don't even care who he talks to or anything else. But we don't let him simply study it out of its manual, see? We don't do that to him. He has to select the unimportances.

Now, one of the things that is very amusing about this: I quite often show somebody how to use a camera, because that's a dramatization on my part of Fac One, of course.

And I have pretty good luck. I pretend to take film out of the back before I show people the snapshots and so forth. And it's quite interesting that people in Scientology are very, very easy to teach about a camera. Very easy. Fac One or no Fac One; it has no bearing on it. They're just rather easy to teach the mechanical operation of something. You show them this and show them that and they say, "That's fine," and wind it up and "click," you know. They're fine.

Except for somebody who has never selected out the importances of Scientology, and who still believes that every datum in Scientology must be totally memorized, because it's just as important as every other datum in Scientology. And Scientology is the same order of magnitude as yoga; it's the same order of magnitude as something else; it's same order of magnitude as psychology; the same order of magnitude... It's all-all-all-all- all, see?

And you look up this person's past, and they've been punished within an inch of their lives. Direct coordination. It's all important.

So if you said to somebody, "For good auditing results, preclears should be acknowledged," something on that order – if you just said that to him, and you said to him, "Preclears sit in chairs and stand up," and "Textbooks vary in price." Now, you give him this data, and you say, "Now, study for examination."

So they memorize "Textbooks vary in price."

You will find this person likewise is incapable of putting the material into use.

So you have to devaluate the unimportances out of this allness.

All right. I was showing somebody this in Scientology – how to run a camera (this was not very recently) – because I wanted this person to get a couple of snapshots at a congress. "You go over there and snap them."

All of a sudden realized that I'd hit a peculiar strata of "it was all very important," because they were being taught something – because I was teaching them this, you see?

Its order of magnitude jumped out of groove. See? And the anatomy of a preclear and how you snap a camera became of equal importance, you see?

They were going this way: "Yes. Yes. Show me that again. Sh--show me where the – where the release is. Show me where the – where the release is."

And I said, "Well, which release are you talking about?"

"How – how you take the film out."

Well, what could we have cared less about taking the film out of the camera they were only going to use for two shots? Yet they were fixed right on it.

And I said to them, "Well now, tell me confidentially: Do you think what I'm telling you is very important?"

"Ha-ha! Ha-ha! Ha-ha! It's not at all important, is it? Ha!" and they all of a sudden went outside and went into hysterics.

Person's whole auditing characteristics altered – their abilities altered – just on suddenly realizing something was out of line on the allness of the importance of everything.

In other words, we just shook one little brick loose in this formidable wall, and the rest of the wall caved in.

Now, the shaking of the allness and everythingness and uniformity of the importance and heaviness and conviction of, and so on, is probably one of the best educational maneuvers that a fellow can undertake with somebody who has already been educated in a subject. So we even can undo old-time education.

Now, I told you education has something to do with fixing data and unfixing it, changing existing data, either by making it more fixed or less fixed. So today we have under view and in view, then, a technology, with its importances, and any variation of it, which can undo to a marked extent a very thorough education in some subject and return it to the power of choice of an individual.

Now, because some people are so far out of communication, the technique of teaching them something often has to include auditing. So they'd have to be audited and uneducated.

But this you find is the most formidable task of the educator: to take somebody who has been educated in it. You hand a bunch of new radar and stuff to the Andrea Doria. Everybody on there has been going to sea all this time. They are all terribly experienced; they know all about it. They never look at it.

And in a fog one day somebody thinks they're depending on it, and they're not depending on it, and they've got a cross-up, and they have never been uneducated from other methods, and they're supposed to accept new methods, and they're all equal – lahlah... And the Andrea Doria is on the bottom.

See what happened? You didn't try to uneducate them before you educated them.

Now, everybody knows that a thetan is a bottomless pit. But not on the subject of education. He absorbs just about so much on a subject, and then he knocks off.

So you have to get him to evaluate it, reevaluate it, and assume its various levels of evaluation under his own power of choice. And then he's got a subject in more useful state than he has ever had it before.

And now I hope you know perhaps a little more about how to teach people to know less about what they know all about.

Thank you.