You want some data?

Thank you.

Audience: Yes.

This evening we will have some Group Processing. Right now I'd like to talk to you a little bit more, if you want.

Want a chart, too?

Audience: Yes.

Audience: Yes.

We have quite a bit of data here in Dianetics 1955! which is compressed — pretty thoroughly compressed, actually. It deals, basically and primarily, how-ever, with two things: It deals with the existence of the energy-production unit which we call life, on the one hand. And it deals as deeply into mechanics as the ARC triangle, on the other hand.

Female voice: We want anything you'll give us. (laughter)

We're looking at two things here. We are looking at the production unit of space, energy, matter, time; and we are looking at, on the other hand, the thing which produces them. And this is quite a trick. I don't know where that puts us, really, because there isn't anything else.

This lecture is on the subject of communication, which has to do with the text in Dianetics 1955! and which clarifies something we have known about for a very, very long time — the ARC triangle.

We are dealing at once with quality and quantity. And the only time anybody, in studying existence, has made a serious error or has gotten into trouble, has been when he has confused quality and quantity. In the physical universe we can have things which have both quality and quantity. We see a car. That is a quantity of matter occupying a quantity of space with the quality known as car. See? So there's quality and quantity.

Now, you know about that ARC triangle: affinity, reality and communication. This triangle was first conceived in July of 1950.

So here we have a form. We have a form and we have something here, say this piece of furniture here, and it has a quantity of space and a quantity of material and it's occupying a certain quantity of time (measurable) and it has the quality of being a piece of furniture. And it's thee and me which assign the quality to it. And it was thee and me which put the quantity into it. We made the quantity possible for it now to occur. But you've done that, and that's across a nice long period of time. So all you have to do now is assign qualities to it.

I was being audited at the time and I all of a sudden said, "There's an awful lot to do between affinity and reality — and a — terrific amount." I sat up and went back into session again and I said, "Communication has a lot to do with affinity and reality."

And we find the essential difference between life in a pure state, if you want to call it that, and life in a mechanical state. We have in life, before it has produced anything or when it's just stepped back from producing something, we have it in a state where it is totally quality. It is all quality. You see, it has abilities. It doesn't have quantities of abilities; it has just that — just abilities. It doesn't have quantity of time, it has the ability of making or experiencing time but not a quantity of time.

Well, we walked around with this one for days. I tried to find some other factor that probably fitted in here. Affinity, reality and communication went together, and there must be something else went in there, but there wasn't anything that's gone in there. There's just that triangle. And here, four years later: affinity, reality and communication — still the triangle.

When the fellow comes around and he says to you, "(pant, pant) I haven't got enough time to do anything. (pant) I just don't know how I'll have any time to do it. (pant, pant)" He's being an object. And he's not being very alive.

Now, that triangle is a very, very simple triangle. A very basic statement of it is that — have you ever tried to communicate with somebody for whom you felt no affinity at all? And have you ever tried to communicate with somebody with whom you had no agreement of any kind whatsoever? And have you ever tried to reach an agreement with anybody you couldn't communicate with? And have you ever tried to communicate with anybody who didn't feel any affinity for anything?

Because that individual has the potentiality, the quality, of making time. And thinking, then, that he has a quantity of time to occupy, is something like the Fleischmann yeast plant itself feeling bad because it's not a yeast cake.

Well, it's sort of obvious, isn't it, that these three factors must be present for interpersonal relations to occur. Well, if this is the case, then a great deal about life is probably contained in this triangle.

Now, here we have something, then, that is capable, able and has quality but which does not have any quantity. And this is a very strange thing for somebody who is entirely quantity oriented, who thinks in terms of money, in terms of so many dollars. Money is a fait accompli, not something which you can make or create or become possessed more of. Money is just so much, you see? His idea of security will be "How much money do I have in the bank?" That's his idea of security. That's an awfully poor idea of security.

Now, I never came out flat-footed and said one corner of this triangle was more important than another, until now. The most important corner of the triangle has been isolated and understood much better, and that corner is communication.

I'll tell you how secure he is. He is secure as he can bring into existence, wealth. And when he loses the ability to bring wealth into existence, even though he has saved a great deal of money, although he has a lot of quantities of money scattered around, he's liable to find himself a pauper.

And communication is so, so superior to reality and agreement, and is so superior to affinity, that by communication alone, reality and affinity occur — fascinating. By communication alone, reality and affinity or some degree of, occur.

Now, there is such a thing as a fellow who has a million dollars in the bank and who is a pauper. There's many a fellow been picked up in some old decayed house full of newspapers and bric-a-brac with a hundred thousand dollars in a tin can sitting on a shelf, dead because he hasn't eaten for three or four weeks. See? This fellow then — his security or longevity really didn't depend on that hundred thousand dollars.

And by affinity alone, nothing happens. And by reality or agreement alone, nothing happens.

Well now, we look at it from a highly — what we call practical, sense and we say, 'Well, that's all very well for you to talk, but it'd be awfully nice right this minute to have a couple of thousand bucks in my pocket."

Now, as an example of the nothingness which occurs when you only have reality, let us take the fate of a contract. The contract is the basis of a social agreement. It is the social agreement, you see, expressed in relatively solid form. And it's expressed in solid form in the hope that it will continue along the time track and continue to be a communication. And that is why a contract is so expressed. But if this is the case, and if agreement all by itself could stand or were very important, then we'd never have a court of law The contract is there, it's signed, and then communication between the two parties cease — ceases, and they go out of agreement. And the fate of a contract is almost always litigation. Because a contract is an effort to maintain an agreement without further communication. And it won't work. And so we have courts.

Well, why haven't you? It's because you can think in terms of "It would be awfully nice to have," saying at the same time, "I don't have," saying at the same time, "To some degree there is some obstacle between two thousand bucks and me."

The court is a necessary communication terminal when a contract has been signed too long. And the inevitable fate of any agreement where communication becomes absent is to cease, quit and go out of existence.

Now, if you think it over, you realize that money is the attention unit of the society. That's about all it is. They scatter these attention units around, and society does the astonishing, the marvelous, the fantastic trick of actually taking pieces of paper — not any longer silver and certainly not gold, (that would be too nice for everybody to have, so they don't issue that anymore) — and they take this stuff and they actually can convert it. You take a whole stack of these pieces of paper, you know, and you go bing, and you got an automobile. That's a magic of some sort or another, and it is so magicful that people become criminals and acquire the automobile without making the money go boomp. That's what's known as criminality.

And where you have two contracting parties, the first thing they start complaining about is communication. They've contracted about this and that, and you'll find inevitably that the next thing they start arguing about is the fact that they're out of communication on something.

But on the upper band, the impossibly high band from our standpoint at this time, an individual theoretically could be sufficiently able not to make the money go boomp, but to simply say, "Automobile zing." And you'd have an automobile. See, that's an impossible height.

Contract: the one party is out of communication with the account books of the other party. And he wants to get into communication with these account books to find out how much he's being gypped. Or they want to get into communication to modify the contract. Or somebody wants to get out of communication so he won't have to follow the contract.

But by the introduction of a via called money into every transaction, then a group can monitor the individual of the group by giving him, on rations, just so much of this stuff which is convertible, whoomp, into automobiles and food.

Now, let's take citizenship and the criminal. Citizenship is a contract no matter how the state likes to look upon it. Citizenship is a contract entered a — R into — between the individual and the group. And this individual declares himself to be a party to a contract known as citizenship.

So, by introducing this via, you put in a barrier; a barrier to acquisition, a barrier to havingness. It's not a bad barrier. Did you ever play an old game, years and years and years ago, called Monopoly? That's a fantastic game. People sit up all night long, converting these little houses and little pieces of paper just as though that wasn't what they were doing all day long, too. That wasn't a game, that was a dramatization.

And when he's no longer willing to carry forward his part of the contract, all he can think of is to get out of communication with the group — the criminal. All that a criminality is, you might say, is the abrogation of the contract of citizenship.

Well, here we have — here we have, then, a game called money. And a game is something in which two or more life units — get that now — two or more life units to be a game. It becomes a stuck flow if you have less than two life units playing this game. And it becomes nothing at all if there are no life units around. But we have a game defined as an activity engaged upon by two or more life units. And that's — we just define it quickly, loosely; we could say that's a game. All right.

And if the group goes into communication again with the criminal, we discover he becomes less criminal. But when a group goes out of communication with an individual, we get the individual going into a criminality.

Now, these two or more life units, in order to have a game, also have to have some barriers. The first barrier is space. Although they might coincidentally occupy exactly the same space. And they can, you know, occupy the same space and still communicate. The perfect communication is not no-communication; that's death. The perfect communication is total communication. And this would only be achieved if you were occupying exactly the same space as somebody else. But if you have total communication, you've got no game.

Whether or not that criminality is that of a Hitler, or Greek tyrant — when the individual is pulled away from by the group, when communication is broken between the individual and the group — that individual goes out of communication with the group. And thus we get the queer acts and the strange things done by the leaders of people. They go out of communication with the group.

So the first step of the game is Joe and Bill occupying the same space and in good communication and good affinity and everybody all happy and cheerful, and they've got good agreement and everything's fine. They're going to have a game now.

Marie Antoinette rides along in her carriage and says, "You say, 'They're short on bread.' Well, let them eat cake." Then somebody comes along and cuts off some heads.

Well, Bill says to Joe or Joe says to Bill, "Hey you. You get over there. I'll stay over here. And we'll have this much space between us. And then I will say, "How are you?' And you say, "I'm fine." And I'll nod. And then you say, "How are you?' And I will say, "I'm fine.' And then you nod. Okay? Let's go."

It could be said that the effort of a society to handle criminality by imprisonment is simply a dramatization of keeping the individual out of communication with the group.

And the cycle starts. We've got a communication going. So actually the first entrance into mechanics is communication. But it's a game. And as long as a game is going to continue, and as long as you occupy a universe created for or by games, and as long as you're alive, and as long as you're part of that game in any way, shape or form, you have to go on communicating. Why? The second you do, you will continue action and life. And the second you don't, you'll be dead and you will fall out of the game.

And the jailing of the criminal will never resolve anything. And the insistence of the group that it remain out of communication with a leader or a military conqueror will never resolve that person's aims and goals or make them more real to the group.

But to make a more complicated game, we break or interrupt this communication. And it makes a much more complicated game as any program director knows who has just had his program cut in half to announce the fact that: "Bulletin — President Eisenhower has just sneezed." You see, this type of interruption — that makes a game. He goes around afterwards and he says, "What's the idea, coming in and interrupting my broadcast that way?"

It's a fascinating fact that where communication ceases, reality and affinity cease. This is so much the case, that if you at this moment were to go off and leave your body utterly and completely, cutting all lines on all dynamics, considering the body was your only communication media, you probably wouldn't have any memory at all of what you'd been doing or how you'd been doing it, or who you know. Why?

And the fellow says, 'Well we had to, it was an important public bulletin."

You depended upon a certain thing to be a communication media and this is no longer the media, and so the reality and the affinity cease, and when you say reality and affinity, you say memory.

And he says, 'Well," he says, "you shouldn't have done it."

Memory is the effort to communicate with the past. And memory is a very, very frail thing because when the past is no longer there, when there's nothing there to communicate with at all, and while the individual still believes that he has to have something in order to communicate with something, we get a difficulty. We also get the facsimile.

And they, "Yow yow yow yow yow," at each other.

An individual's effort to communicate with his own past is the facsimile, the engram. The individual's effort to break communication with the past reverses reality and affinity. And an individual is as bad off as he is attempting to break communication with the past.

'Well, who's program director around here anyway?"

Hence, Freud's fixation upon the past; hence, the fixation of many philosophers upon the past, and so on. Their effort is to get into communication with the past in the belief that if you could permit somebody to get into communication with the past or if he would permit himself to get into communication with the past, he would get in far better condition. He'd be more able.

"Well, whose program is it? I'm the one that's trying to sell Easy-wheezy Soap Flakes, you're not." And "I'm the fellow the sponsor pays for and you're just the mechanical gimmick around here."

This effort to communicate with the past rather leaves out of existence the present. And people can become so frantic and so fixated on the idea of communicating with the past, that they'll leave the present entirely disregarded. And so they will go back into time. By doing what?

"I am not."

They made a facsimile of something, knowing they wouldn't have it the next moment, and now they say this facsimile, this image picture, this memory picture, is the thing. And if it is the thing, then they believe, when it goes into restimulation later, that they are in the past.

"Who are you talking to?" Back and forth.

They are not in the past. They are wrapped up in a picture or terminal of the past. Hence, we have an old man's fixation upon youth. He's trying to pick up those terminals in the past. He hopes there are some there. People make these facsimiles just to have a terminal in the past. They want something to communicate with.

And if they keep this up very long, why, they'll get at a very tolerable sort of a game. It'll be a sort of a bicker. But if they stop talking about it, they will just get madder at each other, and madder and madder and madder and one of them will quit and that's the end of the game. You recognize that? Well, that is the evolution of games.

Well, if this is the case, then it must be that there's a scarcity of some-thing in the present to communicate with. Well, if you don't think that wall is there, of course you have a scarcity of something in the present to communicate with and much more important than that, if you don't think anybody else is alive but yourself, you have nothing to communicate with and so couldn't be anyplace else but into the past.

The game goes all to pieces when you stop communicating, and you're not playing a game when you're not communicating to some degree. But the first step of any game is communication.

So where an individual suffers from a lack of interpersonal relations or interpersonal communications, where an individual is no longer free to go out and talk to anybody he meets or to have a lot of people to talk to, he of course has a tendency to believe that this has become so scarce that he has to start making pictures of everything he really contacts. So he contacts Joe, and he makes a picture of Joe.

So therefore you could say a couple of terminals communicating are to some degree a barrier. You bet they are; they're a barrier of space. First barrier. And then they also have to have the barrier of time, they have to do this weird and impossible thing. Do you know they have to pretend the other fellow isn't talking so they can talk, and then vice versa pretend that the condition has reversed? And so we get time.

Later on, in the many hours ensuing, he feels — Joe's gone, you see. Joe is way away. Joe is really gone. He's miles away or blocks away or something. He's no longer communicating with Joe. Therefore, he will take this picture of Joe or just the knowingness memory of what Joe said, you see. And he'll think, 'Well, little old Joe is really right."

The Sun shines. It doesn't shine. It shines. It doesn't shine. And of course if you stand around waiting for the Sun to shine all the time and don't shine any yourself, you'll get stuck on Earth, too. That's a cinch.

Of course, if he's away from Joe a week or two, he'll think, "Old Joe is probably wrong." Get the idea? But he'll get these pictures, and he'll use these pictures as substitutes for actual communication.

But where we look over games, we find out that game is essentially a communication. Well, don't let two teams play consistently against each other too long. They won't have a game there anymore, either, because they won't be antagonists; they'll be friends.

In the entire mechanism of the mind, in making and then picking up again facsimiles, image pictures, engrams, is its belief that there is a scarcity of things with which to communicate in the present.

Such a thing has happened many times in wars. Some isolated sector of the line — they forget a division, you know, or a regiment or a squad or something, and they leave it out in some isolated corner of the battle and there's — the enemy leaves another squad there and they're supposed to be shooting at each other. And they'll shoot at each other for a while and they'll shoot at each other and they'll shoot at each other.

Thus, we find a desert rat in not too good a condition. If he talks at all, it's probably to his burro. I can almost index the sanity of a desert rat by finding out whether or not he has a burro — something to talk to.

And then one will put up some washing or something like that, a little bit, you know, and that will remind the other fellow, "Say, you know, we haven't washed our kits for a long time." So they get their long underwear and they wash that. And they go on this way and that way.

Now, after a while, an individual starts talking to himself. You wouldn't credit that in the middle of New York City there could be an absence of people with which to communicate — yet there are. I have lived in an apartment house on Riverside Drive and not known the names of the people who lived in the apartments on either side, or the floor above or the floor below. Knew nothing about these people whatsoever — fantastic.

And the next thing you know, my golly, the trouble some general has, he comes down here and these guys are sitting around in the same dugouts swapping lies. That is the awfullest thing a general has to put up with, by the way, is they go into communication.

We went into communication, though, one day. This was back in the old days when this fellow, Hitler, was yow-yow-yowing and 1.5-ing at the German people and saying, "The German, he is separate from the rest of the world. He is different. He is a superman. He is a superman. He is a superman. He is a superman. He can't go into communication with the rest of Europe. He can't go into communication, so he has to kill everybody." Nice philosophy, but not entirely workable from the standpoint of the other people.

And do you know that they shoot people in time of war for going into communication with the enemy; they do. They stand up a man and shoot him because he's gone into communication with the enemy. I'd like to know what they're doing when they stand up on a parapet and fire a rifle, except communicate. Of course, it's kind of a hard crude way of communicating but it's nevertheless communication.

So, every afternoon I'd sit down to put in a period of writing — I'd sit down and write on my typewriter, bangety-bang. I was running a big electric, and it had spark gaps that acted something like one of the old spark transmitters. And every time I'd press a key, why, we'd have a large gap occur in there, you know. And the people next door turned me in to the New York light company to trace down this static which was occurring.

It's a cinch that if you shot at a fellow long enough and he shot at you long enough, you would wind up bosom buddies. That's a cinch.

And I had been aware sometime previously, fascinatingly aware, of the fact that Hitler was talking around in that building somewhere. You could hear this, "Yow, yow, yow. Mein garbage. Mein herring."And however, when I'd turn on the electric typewriter, of course, that made enough noise to drown out anything, even Hitler.

Now, the only way you could really keep a war going and keep things really hot, anywhere in the world, would be to put up a communication barrier which admits of no communication whatsoever. And that would be a perfect solution to an end of game or a continuing war.

So they turned me in, and the next thing I knew, why, the light company was knocking on the door with their cute little radio detector device — a little radio detector device, a little antenna coming out of it — and they says, "Aha!" As soon as they brought it near the typewriter, why, the dial went clang, clang, clang.

The war would not continue beyond a certain point because that thing which has been barriered out of communication just so long becomes unreal. It ceases to exist. So, actually, if you could hang a — it isn't a good solution but it's a partial solution. If you hung up an iron curtain here on Earth — you hung up an iron curtain and wouldn't let anybody communicate on the other side of the iron curtain — nobody communicate on the other side of the iron curtain (nobody communicates over here), one day somebody would walk up to you, say, "Say, you know about those Russians . . ."

And I said, 'Well, that's right. I write on this typewriter."

And you'd say, "The what?"

And they said, 'Well, you'll have to get a spark suppressor and hook it up to the typewriter so that this won't happen anymore."

He'd say, "The Russians, the Russians, you know who I'm talking about." And you'd say, "No, I don't know. Where are the Russians? What are the Russians?"

So, I did, at vast cost — a couple of bucks. And was able to suppress this. But, I hadn't realized it but that typewriter during my writing hours with its spark gap had been keeping off the shortwave program of Herr Hitler every afternoon. And now that I had the typewriter dumb, "mein herring, mein garbage" was into my apartment with many decibels.

"Those people over there beyond that iron curtain."

So, I bought an electric razor and every time I would hear "mein herring," I would shave him.

And you'd say, "What curtain?"

The electric light company came many times to the door with their little antenna and found nothing — spark suppressor okay, everything okay.

See, there'd be no reality here on the fact that Russians existed. Similarly, if somebody in Russia would come around and said, "You know all those capitalists?"

And one day I was walking out in the hall and a fellow who was a refugee from Germany because of his race met me there, just going into his apartment. And he says, "Please," he says, "you are making us miss all the programs."

And the Russian would say, "Capitalists? Go on! Where?"

And I said, "Why don't you listen to some American programs?" New thought — clang!

"Well on the other side of the iron curtain there."

This man had fled that many miles, clear across an ocean, and was yet so fixated on the thing which had turned him out of his homeland that he had to go on listening to it. How's this for a circuit? He couldn't abandon Hitler's voice.

"Oh, you silly little muzhik you know that the world ends at that iron curtain. The world is totally flat, Lysenko says so. And you fall off into a nothingness and never, when you walk across that iron curtain. There's nothing over there whatsoever."

Well, I talked to him. I was the first person, except the immigration officers, he'd talked to in America. We had gotten into communication. How? Spark gaps and electric razors. And although we were very mad at each other and he was very mad at me and I was very mad at him, the anger just disappeared when we got to talking about the whole thing.

That's right. That's what happens when you cut a communication.

And you will find it is the case with man, if you can just get him to communicate with man, that the anger against man ceases.

But, of course, a total cut of communication is almost impossible in present time — a total cut. You still get things leaking through like C-A-R-E. Like the United Nations' manifestos that are issued by the Kremlin. You get all kinds of little fragmentary communications. They keep tapping the world on the shoulder and saying, "Hey, there's some Russians over there." And they keep tapping the Russians saying, "Hey, the outside world is over there some-where." You know, just a little bit of a trickle of communication. And that is absolutely dynamite. There's not enough communication to make any A or R — just enough to nudge them into an existence of something.

What, then, are we doing putting a criminal in a cell? We know that this system, first adopted in Philadelphia in 1825, has never worked and was abandoned after it was first tried, and was subsequently reassumed, and that every state and most of the nations of Earth have adopted this system of putting the criminal out of communication with the society in the silly attempt to make him non-aberrative to the society, whereas the only salvation at all along this line would be to go into communication with him in some fashion or another.

Just like a guy with a circuit; it taps him often enough so that he knows that it isn't quite nothing there. And he'll get awful mad at that after a while; he's out of communication with it but he's not really — was in communication with it but he is in communication with it because he gets — some impulse or instinct somewhere, somehow comes through to him that he is a bum. Every once in a while he has a feeling like something is saying, "You're a bum."

And so it is with a preclear. A preclear's been locked up in a little prison called a skull — out of communication on all sides. And his anger against his — man, his anger against himself, against his body, turns in on himself and he gets sick. And there's no reason he gets sick other than this one reason.

He's saying, "You know there's something wrong with my mind." All you have to do to solve the thing would be to either totally cut communication, you know, put him way out back, or go the other way around and put him into communication with it.

He's even stopped communicating with his body. He's communicating with himself if he's communicating at all. He's a sort of a desert rat walking around without a burro, even. At least a desert rat with a burro talks to the burro. This individual for a while talked to his body. You know? He said, "Foot, what are you doing, itching?" You know? He said, "Well, I don't know. I guess I'll — my fingernails look pretty good now. You look pretty good, don't you." You know?

Actually, the best route is to put him out of communication with it and then put him into full communication with it, at which moment it will cease to give him any trouble whatsoever.

After a while, as a energy production unit, mired down in a lot of energy, he was talking in circuits to himself. He would send out a communication impulse and bring it back into his skull again. The communication impulses which went out came right home again.

A fellow with a broken leg is just fooling around, you know. It's nudging him, he's nudging it. He isn't in full communication with it. The way to get him over a broken leg would be to pull him off from the broken leg so he's no longer in obsessive communication with this broken leg. And then put him into communication, full communication, with the broken leg at which moment it'd heal quite rapidly. You get the idea?

But he had to have some terminal to talk to of some kind or another so he'd talk to terminals of his own manufacture. And thus we get circuits, thus we get voices or silences or blacknesses that we find in people's heads. They are communication points, in absence of communication points. They are substitute communication points. That's all there is to it. That's all there is to aberration. It's really as simple as that.

We're not interested, then, in a partially cut barrier unless it's simply to promote the game. But the game is a very, very important thing. In order to have a game, you have to have mechanics. In this universe, we have to have space, energy, matter and time. Life in any universe has to have at least some of that.

It isn't that he is mad at the world or that he is in disagreement with the world. It's that he's out of communication with the world.

So that we get the quality which says, "I can produce and play a game," and then we get the byproducts of that unit which would be the playing field, the gimmick they're playing for, the quantities of stuff they've got to cross or handle in order to have a game. So we have something that wants a game and we have the mechanics of the game. And when we go in and look over life, we find out that we shouldn't confuse these two things. We should simply say, "Well, now there's something that is capable of a game, has the quality of playing a game, originating games, continuing games, participating in games. And then there are all these byproducts over here which make games." And that would be a very marked division between two things, and we could understand things very well.

Now, you as an auditor sit down. You start to talk to this man. He's talking to somebody about a rather intimate thing: his personality, his ability, his disabilities. And simply talking to somebody is a benefit. So we have two-way communication as a process. Simply talking to somebody is a benefit. And if there was any benefit to psychoanalysis, it was just that. He could talk to somebody. You see how the therapy of this would work itself out?

Now, this thing which can play the game or participate in a game or continue the game or originate the game, has quality only. It can, by its own consideration, be a quantity. It could say, "I am a private soldier. I don't know who else I'm fooling but I'm really fooling me," he'd say, you know, "but I am a private soldier. I am a quantity of army. I am one private soldier over army worth of army. I'm a quantity which is a part of a game."

He would start abandoning these set-up, mocked-up terminals to the degree that he actually had somebody to talk to. And so there would be some tiny, small workability in any process which just let a guy talk. That's all. I mean, if he could just be permitted to talk and he could get an answer now and then, that would be fine.

And now if he were utterly and absolutely and entirely sold on the idea that this was all he was, you would find an aberrated person. He'd be an aberrated person. He would take no fun whatsoever in being part of the army or playing this game. He would not be aware of the game being in progress, the moment he is totally and only one private soldier.

It's like the old lady I knew of that had a husband who would be put in a little rocking chair with a shawl wrapped around him, and he'd be taken off to bed every night, and every morning she'd put him back in this rocking chair. He never said a word or anything. But he was at least, she said, something alive around the house. All right. How much better — how much better it would have been instead of something which potentially could talk, he had actually talked to her occasionally. Why, then, she would have been perfectly happy about it.

Now, you get people in times when the civil populace has surrendered itself up to the military and a lot of civilians are walking around in uniform and getting a war fought, you get moments like this: Individuals who are supposed to be just one private soldier according to the rules will actually tell you, "Well, I'm a newspaper reporter. I was a newspaper reporter on the Clarion Bugle Gazette of Sioux Falls and that's really who I am," you know He's got a reserved identity.

Now, you are told when you're young that silence is golden. Huh! I don't know who's responsible for that. I'd like to get the guy. I have a Mauser bullet with his name on it (laughter) because he's the fellow that's causing us an awful lot of trouble. Silence is so far from golden, that if you hit it, it gives an awfully brassy sound.

And you go around and you try to get a reserve officer to confess the fact that he is just a lieutenant or something of the sort, he never tells you this. He says, "I am a lawyer. Before I got in the service, I made 850 dollars a month. I'm a big wheel where I came from." See, he is reserving his identity. He's not quite in the service. But you get a lot of high-toned action when this happens. You do actually get a period when in an army and a navy there are people around who do not entirely and only hold motion. (laughter)

They teach children it is better to be seen than heard. Somebody is so far out of communication, evidently, they can't stand the thought of being in communication. You see that? How it could invert? The individual gets to a point at last where he doesn't desire any further terminal. He knows they don't exist and when they come in and they say, "Look, I exist. I'm a terminal," they say, "Ah, I know better. This is all unreality and hallucination. Be quiet. Silence is golden."

These people are capable to some slight degree of playing a game and they do the darnedest things. The War Department goes slowly mad trying to keep track of the darnedest things they're liable to do. You know, they'll see an enemy someplace or another and they'll figure out something or other, and the next thing you know, why, they sneak around the hill and capture the division or something — like Sergeant York.

We used to have a little legend in school,

They do the darnedest things. They all of a sudden discover they're out of rations, you know, or they're liable to be out of rations, and they see that they can only have rations after they've signed eighteen hundred slips of paper in quadruplicate or quintuplicate so they decide to short-cut the whole thing and they have rations. And nobody can quite explain where all these rations came from, but boy, is it "legal" — typical activity. And everything just goes to the devil. These fellows introduce more randomity than anybody can stand so they have to end the war. (laughter) And they finally get to the point and they say, 'We can tolerate any action which will put a stop to this sort of thing — even peace."

"A wise old owl sat in an oak, The more he saw the less he spoke; The less he spoke the more he heard, Why can't we all be like that bird?"

Well, so we get a game in which nations play, called war. And it's only when these people get completely dredged down to the idea "I am a German." "I am a Russian." "I am a private" "I am a captain." When they've got this one hundred percent fixed, and they are that thing — that we can find these wars with tremendous quantities of brutality, very little understanding, no sympathy and nothing but destruction. And when those things occur when everyone gets superfixed in his identity, "I am a duke." "I am a prince." "I am a colonel," we get something like the Hundred Years' War.

You remember that one?

We wonder what happened to knighthood. They got killed in the Hundred Years' War. Nobody knew how to end that one. Everybody was being himself, one hundred percent, which is to say, he thought of himself as a piece in the game called the Hundred Years' War, you know? Boy, did they have fixed titles and identities. Mmmph! They were really that.

Audience: Yes.

There was no flexibility in which they could become responsible for any other dynamic than themselves. You see that? They'd have just the fixed responsibility and they had no further responsibility from that. So they could pick up some civilian and torture him. So they could burn a village without even thinking about what happened to the kids in it. Here is game without any responsibility.

Well, give it the bird, will you? (laughter) Not true!

War fought by people who are capable of responsibility is a skylark. War fought with no responsibility for the enemy, no responsibility for any other identity, is simply a slaughterhouse madhouse.

Now, you wouldn't think in a city like New York City that I just told you about before, that somebody could sit there having arrived in America, and be entirely out of communication with everybody in America to such a degree that he could only sit listening to the person who had driven him out of his home country. It was at least a communication terminal.

Where you have a game breaking down into brutality, where you have it breaking down into a slavery where nobody can change his identity, everybody's fixed utterly and so forth, only then do you get cruelty, brutality, criminality on the part of its participants. These things are not present in the position where individuals have still some freedom to choose that they are playing a game.

See, he could still listen to Hitler anyhow. Hitler was somebody who was talking. And that is the motto of life: Somebody talking is better than nobody talking. And anything talking is better than nothing talking. Get the idea?

Have you ever noticed some little boy in the neighborhood who couldn't play the game? Who goes into a fighting fury with other children over their toys? This person who can't play the game. They're going to play a game of marbles, so somebody breaks out some marbles and lays them in the sand and they're all set and they draw a ring, and then all of a sudden this little guy comes up and he grabs all the marbles and shoves them in his pocket and runs. And the other kids say, "No, Henry." And after they've said, "No, Henry" five or six times, they go out and get him and punch the devil out of him. And then they really fix him, they say, "You can't play with us anymore." They really fix themselves, too. Every time they try to play marbles, little Henry will be up there with a BB gun. This is the degeneration away from playing a game.

But after it goes completely out of reality and it goes out of affinity with the world, it doesn't believe anymore that there's anybody that could talk to, or with. And so, of course, nobody exists anymore. And everything looks sort of unreal. And there's nobody to talk to, or with. So they go around muttering at their circuits which mutter at them.

Now, the big difference — let's get very close to fact with this — the big difference between the preclear you had an easy time with and the preclear you had a hard time with, was the preclear you had an easy time with could play a game. He could still play a game.

I've known fellows, every time they accomplished something, a little voice jumped up and said, "Heh, heh, heh, heh. You think you're pretty smart, don't you? Heh, heh" — little voice. And some fellow that, after he'd think of a good idea, why, a little voice would pop up and say — or a little idea would occur, "Well, you might think it's good, but . . ."

And the person you were having an awfully rough time with had gotten so fixed in some kind of an identity that he says, "This is entirely, completely, real and serious, no matter how aberrated or cockeyed it appears," and "it's not a game, this is reality, this is sincerity," see? And he's fixed, and he can't change.

Well, just chalk it up to this: there's no significance in this, other than the fact it's better to have some communication than no communication. If it came to a choice between no communication at all and a scathingly critical circuit, take the circuit. See how it works? All right.

And the first thing you notice about him, he has difficulty playing a game. That's the first thing you notice about him. First thing that seems out of order about him. You'll notice that by saying, "All right. Now, let's walk over and touch your finger to that wall."

We get somebody that's been moved all over the world, who has lost many friends, he gets into a state of unreality after a while. He doesn't believe there's anybody to talk to anymore. You'll find many people are in this condition. They have lost so many friends, they've lost so many allies, they've lost so many things they did think were good to communicate with, that they can no longer communicate at all. And they just drop out of communication. And you'll get what is known as a comm lag. Well, a comm lag might as well be called an agreement lag.

So, the fellow walks over, says, "Why should I?"

A communication lag is a technical thing. It is the length of time intervening between the making of a statement or asking of a question, and the answer to that statement or question. It is exactly that time regardless of what happens in between. It isn't necessarily silent in between.

You get some little kid who's totally capable of playing a game and you say, "Go over and touch the wall," so he goes over and touches the wall, bang.

The person might talk about something else. He might answer some other question. He might just talk completely disrelatedly or he might try to get the semantics straight on the question that was asked. That's another communication lag, you see. He didn't answer the question or answer the statement made. So a communication lag of ten seconds would be as follows:

And he says, "Now you touch a wall." He can sometimes play too much game for some auditors. All right.

The fellow says — you walk up to this fellow and you say, "Hello."

We have a gradient scale of being able to play the game and that gradient scale is the gradient scale of fixed identity as a part of the game or quantity. It's a gradient scale of "How much quantity am I in this game? — identity/quantity. I am one man, you see. I am one person named Jones and that is all I am.

(pause) He says, "Hello."

Now, all due respects to thee and me, that's not a very good condition. A person who can't be Smith sometimes isn't really aware of playing a game. It's all for sure, for sincere, see? You know, it's brutal. It's earnest. It's real. "Tell me not, in mournful numbers . . ." (laughter)

You get that? That's a communication lag of ten seconds.

Now, it's an odd thing that a person only gets latitude of action when he has freedom to play. When a person feels that he chose to play this game, then it's a game. And when somebody else chose the game for him and put him in there, one way or the other, he has no freedom to play this game but is playing the game under duress. And a life unit that plays the game of having to play the game under duress will be in pretty sad shape in the auditing chair — have a rough time. You know, "I'm playing this game under duress. What wall?" Playing the game under duress.

This is also a communication lag of ten seconds: You walk up to the fellow and say, "Hello."

You say, "Go on over and touch that wall."

And he looks at you, "Huh! What have you got on? What are you doing? Oh, uh, how are you?"

"No."

See, that's also a communication lag of ten seconds. See, other things intervene between the thing. But no matter what intervenes, it's a communication lag of that many seconds, minutes or hours.

Now, the odd part of it is, this freedom of choice is so significant in auditing that we find individuals, who are brought in by Mama or Papa and given auditing with no idea of what's happening, get well much more slowly than the fellow who thought it up himself.

Now don't think you can have communication lags only of minutes. We have seen them of 150 hours. Communication lags can be real long.

He says, "You know I think I'll go get processed. I'm not so well off these days — I keep going like this . . . (laughter) and I'll go get processed." So he walks in and he sits down and he says, "Process me." And you go ahead — and so on. You see, he still has a freedom to change his role. He changes his role in life. That's why he can consent to come in and be processed.

Did you ever walk up to some fellow and say, "How are you?" And he said, "I'm fine." And then an hour and a half later, apparently just from no reason whatsoever, this fellow says to you, "You know, I feel terrible."

The difference is not whether or not the fellow chose. The difference between these two people — the fellow who won't be processed even when he's sitting in the auditing chair and the fellow who just comes in and wants to be processed — the difference is actually a case level difference. It is not simply difference of attitude. It isn't that one chose to be there and the other one didn't chose to be there, (laughter) you know, that makes the difference in auditing. That's not what makes the difference in auditing. The difference in auditing is made this way: This fellow can choose to be somewhere and to change his role in the game. And this fellow, way down here, can't change his role in the game anymore. So he thinks this auditor is going to make him change his role in the game, and he knows he can't change his role in this game.

A social machine jumped up and said, "I'm fine." And he himself got the question and got to thinking it over and pushed it through enough circuits, filters, resistors, transistors and tubes, and got it back to a point where he really did get an assay of his beingness at the moment, and finally did get the answer sorted out that he felt terrible. And then he gave you the answer.

Now, if we were to take somebody and fix him in a chair and go "Swami, swami, hypnoanalysis, pooey, pooey," and shoot him with a little bit of narcowell, I wouldn't say what came up just that moment, but anyway .. . (laughter) — anyway, we shoot him and then we give him a slight little bit of shock, all the time saying to him, "You are a jockey. You can never be anything else but a jockey. You are a jockey." Bzz, bzz, bzz. "You are a jockey. You're nothing but a jockey. All you could do is be a jockey. You'll never be able to change being a jockey." And we just kept that up with this fellow for a few hours and repeated the treatment for a few days .. .

Well, there's such a thing as shock as a communication lag. Individual gets in an automobile accident, jumps up right after the accident, carries out the four other people hurt, puts them in the ambulance, fills in all the papers for the police, so forth, goes home and all of a sudden says, "Nyaaa!" That's a communication lag in another line.

We bring him into an auditing session. We'd have to drag him in at the end of a leash or something. We'd have to drag him in, we'd have to force him to sit in the chair, so forth. He was unable to change his role, you see? This he's convinced of: "I can't change my role. So therefore auditing is going to do me no good. I am a quantity of game and I am not a quality of anything beyond just this one thing: The only quality I have is jockey.' The only quantity I have is this body, and this funny little silk cap." All right.

But to an auditor it just means this: It's the length of time, regardless of what occurs in between the making of a statement or question, and the answer to that exact statement or question.

This would make a real rough preclear — real tough preclear. Don't think that you can't break such a case, you can break such a case. You have to do all sorts of action to get into communication with him because this person won't go into communication. He's a jockey. The only way he communicates is on a horse, this way ... (laughter) And it goes round and round the track, that way.. . (laughter)

And it could be said that the physical universe is itself simply one long communication lag. You probably at the beginning of the physical universe said, "Hello" to somebody, and you're still waiting for him to say, "Hello" back. The only reason anybody gets stuck in a trap is a communication lag — lack of an answer, or lack of an originated communication.

Psychodrama is that effort to get jockeys to be jockeys, on the theory that if you can get them to be jockeys long enough, they'll get unhorsed. But again, unless they chose to decide to be a jockey, they wouldn't become anything else but a jockey.

He snaps terminals on everything that doesn't talk. Isn't that interesting? It couldn't be that somebody wanted you to stay in school when they said, "A wise old owl sat in a golden apple." They couldn't have wanted you to stick on something, could they have? One of the reasons people teach you out of books is because if they taught you live, it would be fun. All right.

Now, there is a process you could run on this fellow, if you could ever communicate it to him; that is the difficulty. You see, he's fallen out of communication. The distance they fall out of communication is the distance they fall away from the game into a fixed quantity of something.

So this is a communication lag at work. Well, let's take that communication lag and translate it over to another corner of this triangle.

And the more they go into communication, the more they're able to change the game, change the role — they don't have to necessarily, they just can, you see, quality, the ability — until they finally get up to a point and they say, "Well, hey, what do you know, hah, I can play any kind of a game I want to. Guess I'll go on playing the same kind of a game I'm playing, but that's fun." They didn't think it was fun when they started in getting audited; they didn't think so even vaguely. But now it seems to be an awfully good joke to go down to the office and write on little pieces of paper endlessly. It's very funny.

Here we have chart 1. [See chart 1 in appendix] We have here, communication, reality, affinity.

Everybody comes in, bug-eyed, how important it is, see? You say, "That's fine. Let's play this game some more." And these people become very hard on the people around them because these people think they're playing hard, you see. And this individual sees — "Gee, here's an interesting game," and he starts to play about eight times harder than anybody else in his vicinity, and everybody gets worn out. Because this guy is playing a game, and the others are there because they have to be — difference of viewpoint.

Now, if we have a lag in time here, [tapping on chart] then there's probably a lag in time here and probably a lag in time here. Did you ever meet anybody that you liked right away when you talked to them? Well, that would be a no affinity-lag.

Well, we get a fellow who is able to play the game as he can go into communication. There's nobody quite as out of communication in a football game as the water bucket. Yet all the players come around and drink out of it. But it never positions itself; it's always positioned. It's filled, it's emptied.

Do you know there are people around who, you bring up somebody's name, and you say, "Well, Bill," one fellow says, "Yeah, frmmm-drrr-frmmmm-zruhhh-da-zuh-zit. Yeah, um — Bill — um — yes. Sorry, I haven't met him, as a matter of fact, so-and-so and so-and-so. Bill, you know, zuh . . "you go on and he talks this way, and so on, "(sigh) Well, he isn't such a bad fellow, I guess."

Now, there's an interesting kind of a water bucket that will fill itself and empty itself, but it has two legs and it's called a water carrier, to a game. And generally this is some bug-eyed kid full of hero worship, you know, "Hey, Joe, can I give you a drink now, huh?" He's playing the game. He'll be in there playing the game left and right. He hasn't yet gotten the fixed idea that all he will ever be is a water bucket.

If you kept at it for a little while talking to him about Bill, he would finally come through and say, "Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know Bill, nice fellow"

Now there's the ratio of age to aberration. You say people who are older are harder to process. No, they're not. That is not even vaguely a true statement. I know lots of kids that are harder to process than old people. I know lots of old people that process just like anything; just — it's nothing to it. I've never found much coordination of age. Because psychology pretended to is no reason for us to believe it's true unless we can see it and demonstrate it.

That's a fact, you see. That's an affinity lag — an affinity lag. Now, how about this fellow that only really likes people he's known for a long time? Just an affinity lag, that's all it is.

I have found people, however, who are quite old who are hard to process, just as I have found people who are quite young who are hard to process. But there is some tendency in this" direction: An individual becomes more and more fixed in his role. At twenty-one he could choose what he was still going to be and he could still get away with this swindle: He could say, "Well, I really don't want to be a bank cashier but I'll just be a bank cashier here until I learn how to play this piccolo. And then I'll be a piccolo player. And I'll become very, very famous."

Well, what about this reality lag up here? Must be something about reality, and there is. Reality lag is known as a judicial answer. It is the decision which has to be reached after the weighing of a great deal of evidence. That's a reality lag. Do you see it as a reality lag? In other words, the answer, the solution or a reality on an agreement is only obtainable after an awful lot of yak-yak and walla-walla.

Now look, we have confused goals and dreams a little bit here, and thought they were an end in themselves. When a person has goals and dreams, he's merely expressing this one fact: He can change his role in the game. He is expressing his confidence that he can change his role in the game. You see that? And the manifestation of it is goals and dreams.

The fellow who is being impartial, who is waiting to see, who is waiting to find out, who always depends upon his impartial opinion as a guiding light, is crazy!

Don't ever try to process anybody in the direction of ideas alone. Because any thetan, even when bad off, can get different ideas. A life unit can do nothing if not get ideas and shift ideas around. It's how convincingly it can get ideas, that counts. If it can really get convinced of an idea — it's really fixed in some kind of a role — it has very few goals and dreams because it doesn't have to have. There isn't any reason to. It's fixed in this idea now.

Therefore, when you have Professor Whoomfguttle writing and saying, "Well, I don't know, but according to Professor Whampfguttle writing in the Whampf Journal some years ago, he said ... But of course there's always Professor Dud . . ." and so on. And when you read columns of this kind of thing, you're not reading any reality or agreement, believe me. It has nothing to do with reality. All right.

Now, here we are, a bank cashier. And here we're going to be forty-nine and a half years from now, a bank cashier. Of course, he doesn't recognize that till he's thirty-five. And he's noticed that the fellow who married the boss's aunt and the fellow who married the boss's daughter have both been promoted over him; although he always did all of their work because they couldn't do it. He's forgotten how to be a piccolo player because he missed out his installments on the piccolo and they took it back. And he's — recognizes at last that he is fixed into the identity of being a bank cashier. And if he sells himself on the idea "I will never be anything but a bank cashier," why then, of course, he's ended his goals, dreams, future time track and he has become a quantity of something. He's become a quantity of bank cashier — one bank cashier, you see? Not a capability of becoming a lot of things, if he really put his mind to it.

So we have here communication instantaneous, reality instantaneous and affinity instantaneous in order to obtain an instantaneous reaction from life or to have no time lag in reaction.

All a thetan has to believe is that he can do a lot of things and be a lot of things — he doesn't even have to do and be them — he's in good shape. But the second he gets the idea that he can only be one thing and he'll never be anything else but that one thing, he's dead! How dead can you get? Believing you can only lie there.

If we had an individual in fine shape and an individual who really could drive a jet plane, his communication lag would be zero, he could make his decision immediately and instantly, and his affinity for the world and things around him would be instantaneous. And that individual could then drive a jet plane better than anybody else could drive a jet plane if they didn't have these figures.

When you believe at last you can only lie there and that's all this body is capable of, is simply to lie still and grow a little bit cold and worm-eaten at the edges, you shove off — so would anybody. Because that is end of game as far as you're concerned for that particular cycle, you see. It's a totally fixed identity. You're no longer even able to change the position of the body in space. It just lies there. See that?

Now, why is it that a combat pilot has more accidents than a transport pilot? Is there any relationship between these two things?

So change comes first in the ability to change one's ideas, then in the ability to change one's location and position in space at will. That's a mechanic, you've moved into mechanics. And now at last, when one loses even that, he's dead. When he's lost the ability to change his location and position in space at will, he says, "I'm dead." There's probably nothing more to death than that.

You bet there is. A combat pilot is taught to hate. He's taught to stay out of communication. He's taught to destroy and he's taught to kill. And what do you think that does with his A? And that's why he has wrecks. And that's why military equipment is so hard to maintain. Decision cannot exist in the absence of affinity — good decision.

I imagine you could take this jockey after he had been a jockey for a while and then convince him he couldn't move and he'd know he was dead, and he'd leave and he'd be dead. You get the idea? All right.

So we can't have the standard villain of fiction. He doesn't exist — this standard villain of fiction. He is something that has been put off upon the world and the public by writers such as a couple in the audience and myself.

We look over the anatomy of games, we look over the anatomy of communication, we find out that communications are necessary barriers in order to continue a game. In the absence of communication, you don't have any space or time. And when you get no communication at all, space and time collapse, and so you get collapsed terminals.

This cold, calculating, inevitably and always right villain does not exist. If he is cold and calculating, his A is missing. And if that affinity is missing, R, the ability to make a decision, is also missing. And so the decisions he makes will most often be wrong decisions. And there goes this villain — Dick Tracy's stock in trade.

Have you ever had the experience of some fellow having to walk right straight up to you and talk to you, you know, "Say ya, Joe, uh, uh . . " They often enforce this by eating garlic or something first. They say, "Hiya Joe" — collapsed terminals.

If a detective has a hard time solving the activities of criminals, it's because the detective is stupid because there's nothing quite as stupid as a criminal — unless it's a general.

Well, that fellow has a hard time. He snaps terminals. He is so close to no communication at all, he has to be that close in order to perceive that there is any. See, he has to come up real close to find out if there is some. He can only make a couple of inches of space, when he should be able to make a few yards, anyhow. All right. He snaps terminals, he has to come close.

Now that triangle contains in it a tremendous number of answers, but the key to all of its answers, really, is communication. If you can get anybody into communication of whatever kind or how, you will inevitably improve his decision and improve his love of his fellow man.

Then there's the fellow who gets on the inversion of this who doesn't dare have anybody near him. And you walk up to this fellow and he's standing there, you know, and you walk up to him. He's on the streets, perfect stranger, you're going to ask him for a match. And you walk up to him and you say, "Say, buddy . . . Wonder where he went!"

Therefore, you could say any kind of communication is better than no communication. And you can bless your preclear for at least having a few circuits. If he had none at all, he'd be entirely out of communication and he'd be very overt in his hatred or completely dead.

That fellow is so certain that he can't make any space that a couple of inches be darned; he does a compulsive reversal. The second that you come up, he knows you're going to make lots of space and he can make none. So he accommodates it by creating the lots of space you would make. He has to get out there far enough to agree with his idea of how far he has to be away to answer you.

How dead can a person be? Entirely out of communication.

In your neighborhood you probably had some little kid that used to come around and throw sand down your neck or something of the sort. He'd run way off from you and he'd say, "Nyah, nyah, nyah," you know. And you try to close terminals with him, he just goes further away. He's separated out of the group. Henry who couldn't play marbles. He knows he can't play the game and he runs away from anytime he sees a game occurring.

Somebody said one time, also in an effort to misinform the young — that, by the way is quite a game: the misinforming of the young. They have a club, I think, of fellows who sit around and dream up answers — it's right next door to the physicists club — who dream up answers on how to destroy soldiers and how to misinform the young. And they say, "Well, we'll invent spelling."

There's your criminal. The criminal, I swear, is totally and entirely on the run or totally entirely fixed in one place. See, he just goes from one great extreme to the other.

Sometime after preclears have gotten fairly well up the track, you ought to go back and find out where they first became concerned with such things as spelling just as an adventure. You'll find out that it was after Shakespeare's day. Shakespeare wasn't even vaguely concerned with spelling. The boys who sat around the Swan used to have an interesting contest: You were as bright as you could spell a word differently.

He hasn't done anything criminal for five or six years, he's living in this small town, he's got a job in a garage. And one day a police car drives up to the garage and all that was wrong was he has a soft spare tire he wants pumped up. When the criminal starts breathing freely again, he has moved to Los Angeles. He went out the back door. Just the appearance of this symbol called "police car" is enough to send him hundreds of miles — immediately.

Well, this information would be very interesting if it were just information but it's just a little bit more than information. Out of it comes applicable formulas. And we discover, then, that of all these factors, an isolation of each one, of all these factors, the most important scarcity there could be, would be communication — not communication terminals. The most important scarcity would simply be communication — not even communication sounds but communication ideas. The idea of something alive communicating, whether it has mass or has no mass, is the most important datum to be derived out of all this material.

Well, this is a curious manifestation, isn't it? It all has to do with the ability to play a game. The fellow who has to talk very close to you, he has a tough time having any game at all, but remember he's still got a game of some sort. And then the fellow who's got to run like the dickens every time you start to communicate, he's getting close to not having any game at all. He's trying to preserve what game he does have because he knows you're going to eat him. Then we get down to the fellow who doesn't close terminals and doesn't run. And we have, at that moment, the catatonic, and they just lie still. And you pick up their hand, you drop it... .

Now, let's take a good look here, chart 2, [See chart 2 in appendix] and let's draw a communication.

Had a nurse one time in an insane asylum show me how bad off this particular catatonic was. She says, "She doesn't even respond to needle jabs."

Here would be one lobe of a communication, and this would be "A." [LRH drawing on chart] All right.

And I said, "No?" I said, "That's very interesting." (Reverend Hubbard was talking to her.) And I said, "That's very interesting."

Now, this lobe starts in over here with a fellow by the name of Bill. [LRH drawing]

And she says, "Yes, look." And pulls a safety pin out of her garter belt and jabs it to the hilt in this catatonic schiz. Catatonic schiz didn't twitch. She says, "You see?"

Bill says, "How are you?" And he's talking to a fellow by the name of Joe. So we have Joe over here as something alive to be communicated to. He's something alive to be communicated to. But at this point of the curve, Joe's total action is being a recipient of the communication. You actually at this point have cause. And you have here distance. And over here you have effect. So we have cause, distance, effect there but we don't have a really complete communication yet because we've got to have, in order to have a full cycle of communication, we have to have Joe answer.

I says, sort of green, "Yes, I see."

So we get Joe prime. And Joe prime says, "I'm okay." But we haven't got a full cycle yet, because who does he say "I'm okay" to?

And she says, "She doesn't even jab [respond] when you do it here," bang!

He doesn't say to this Bill here who is emanating, "How are you" — "I'm okay." We have to have time in there: Bill is now Bill prime.

The only thing people find wrong with those people that run away, that snap terminals, that lie still, is they're kind of hopeful there might be an opponent there and they're sort of trying to shake somebody into existence so they'll come alive enough to play, you know?

So, he says, "I'm okay."

And the only thing you really feel bad about, about an ally, is the fact that he has quit when he's died. You know, he's no longer there to play the game. He ran out on you. That ended that game, woof You weren't through, there were still fifteen or twenty chips in front of your place — a broken communication.

We've got to have Bill prime over here acknowledge the fact that he has received the answer and so we've got our second line of cause, distance, effect. Only this is cause prime and this is effect prime.

Now, a game is only possible as long as there is communication of some sort. You will find that as you monitor the communication rather poorly — pardon me — sporadically (it's occasional, it's sometimes surprising and so forth, back and forth, it's not good you know, but it's still communication), why, you will have an antagonistic sort of a game where you've got two sides playing. They will fight. That's war. You know, surprising, occasional, unpredicted heavy masses being exchanged back and forth, one way or the other, and you have a war. All right.

So we've got a full cycle of communication and it went this way: Bill here says, "How are you?"

A game, then, is monitored in its quality by the communication involved. Now let's see that we have not — we haven't actually excluded bullets or teapots when we've talked about this communication formula.

Joe receives it, and then Joe prime answering says, "I'm okay."

Now, a complete communication between two soldiers would be as follows: Bill shoots at Joe. Joe prime shoots at Bill prime. Misses all around. So Joe shoots at Bill. Bill prime shoots back at Joe prime. They both shot both ways. They both originated an attack. You watch out, they're liable to wind up as friends. It's only when Joe was careless enough to shoot Bill in such a way that Bill couldn't shoot back, that we get serious about it. And that is bad marksmanship. That ends the game, right there.

And Bill prime just nods, you know, he gives some signal that he's received it. All right.

And when enough Joes and enough Bills have either failed to originate communications in return, or have failed to answer communications, we get law and order: No shooting — no shooting allowed.

But that isn't a complete communication yet. That is not a complete communication yet. Let's look at what has to happen to have a really complete communication here.

We get a state of affairs, by the way, exactly in the number of years which have elapsed, which is the most curious thing. It's the number of years which have elapsed — give us the amount of law and order which will occur on the subject of who shoots or how much you're permitted to shoot, something of the sort. Let's take New York City — oh, let's get a little older than that, let's take London. I imagine the fellow who walked down the street in London with a six-gun buckled down and in plain sight would not be arrested. He would probably be taken over to Bedlam and locked up. Or the bobbies would want to know what show he was in. That would be about all there would be to it. Nobody would really take it as a crime. I'm sure that nobody would really think of it as a crime anymore.

In graph B, we've got Bill here. Joe communicates to Bill, and in his turn says, "How are you?" [LRH writing on chart]

You walk down the street with a gat buckled down in New York City, you're going to be, not credited with insanity, you're simply going to be thrown into the hoosegow unless, of course, you're a known criminal, at which time they'll just take your gun away from you and set you free. And we get the fact that, if in New York, you possessed a gun and kept it in your desk drawer, you could be arrested and sent to the pen. That's a fact. If you had a gun, you kept it in the car, you'd go to the pen. If you had a gun, if there was some gun rust around anyplace, you could still probably go to the pen.

Bill receives it. And now we've got Bill prime here, who says, "I'm okay." And we get over here now to Joe prime, who receives it.

Now we move a little further west, we get the condition of affairs in Chicago. You actually would not excite much attention in Chicago if you were to take a rifle down the street, or even a gat. You could possibly have a gat, and again, it'd be the same condition: If you were a known criminal, you'd probably get your gun back after they'd arrested you. "Tools of the trade," they call it in Chicago. All right.

And that is a two-way cycle of communication, and that contains the most important parts of communication.

And now we get Arizona. And we walk up to — in a hardware store in Arizona and we see all these gats and these revolvers and pistols and so forth, and rifles, and they're all laid out on the counter and so forth. And there's a little slip of paper up in the corner of the counter, and it said, "Anyone under eighteen years of age must have the permission of his parent or guardian in order to purchase and have firearms." And "This will not, in any way, be construed as a law demanding the licensing of firearms."

By the way, if you feel kind of spinny after you've listened to this graph for a while, just imagine the state I was in when I was trying to write this stuff down in Dianetics 1955! You start following and plotting the communication graph very, very closely and you sort of feel the wheels start to go.

And you say to this clerk, "Well, you see that .38 Smith & Wesson there? Well, I'd like to buy it. Load it up." Then pay your money over, take the Smith & Wesson, put it in your pocket, walk down the street. Cop found you — if a cop found you with that weapon concealed, and so forth, he probably wouldn't think very much of it. He'd merely think you were being polite. You were not offending the public view — something like that. But if you had it concealed or buckled on or shoved in your car or in your pocket or anything of the sort, the police would not think very much about it.

Here we have, as the first cycle, we have Bill saying, "How are you?" Joe receiving it.

But the very funny part of all this is, is these guys are still willing to play a game. Couple of fellow — the police are still willing to play a game. The police in each one of these places have drifted away from punitively playing a game.

Joe saying, "I'm okay." And Bill receiving it. That's one-half of the communication.

We get into an interesting state of affairs whereby very little attention is paid to petty crime in Arizona. Sheriffs get interested only when it gets adventurous. They can do something that looks fairly interesting to them, they'll go ahead and do it. But the rest of it — skip it.

The other half of the communication requires an origin by Joe of a communication, its answer by Bill prime, and its acknowledgment by Joe prime. So, our principal parts of communication here, in just so many words, are contained on that two-way graph.

For instance, there were a couple of boys held up — an armed — armed robbery, it was, of a service station. And they drove down the road like mad, and it got out on the police radio in the next county and so on. Couple of deputy sheriffs jumped in a car and formed a roadblock. These two bandits saw the roadblock, turned their car around, drove it way off the road and into the brush, got out of the car and ran like the dickens across sand and rocks and so forth.

And we look over here, [See chart 3 in appendix] we find our next parts in communication then, or the principal parts, are origin, [LRH writing on chart] answer, acknowledgment. And that's all you have to remedy the scarcity of, to solve the problem of the human mind.

And all these deputies got together and they said, "Hm." And they carefully tracked, Indian-tracker fashion, these guys, clear across this desert. They found their car, they tracked them halfway across nowhere. And they sat down and waited until — they realized these guys were probably taking a sleep up there someplace, you know. And they sneaked in on them real carefully. And they took their guns away from them and then woke them up — good game. Wouldn't have been played that way in New York.

It's just as simple and elementary as that. You have a two-way cycle of communication. We find out if there's a scarcity of communication, then there must be a scarcity of origin, a scarcity of answer and a scarcity of acknowledgment of answer.

In the first place, you wouldn't have gotten anybody to have dashed out and formed a roadblock. That would be adventurous. That would be doing something to mess up your forthcoming pension. Furthermore, you'd have probably gotten bawled out by the commissioner for going into that much motion.

There's also one more scarcity which isn't expressed: a live form. See, that was what was at Joe. Joe, in that first graph A, was no more, no less than somebody standing there alive to be talked at. That's a necessary part of it.

Now, when a game drops from communication, it drops into motion and it first drops into rather fast light motion and then it goes into heavier and heavier motion, until nobody can move the game around at all and it's just stopped. And that's Earth. Earth is a pretty solid game — very solid. It's a fixed identity. It's a place called Earth. The number of times this planet has changed its identity in the last twenty-four hours are very few.

But if we take these two cycles and we take them apart, we find out that we have origin, answer, acknowledgment in a live form. That's the works. Let's remedy the scarcity of origin. And let's give you a proper example here of what we mean by origin.

The playing field in this case has gotten awfully solid. And people have started to get mad at all things, they've started to get mad at the playing field. Now, what would you think of a bunch of football players who got daffy enough to get mad at the area between the goal posts? And they stopped playing football and started to sit down and pound on the ground. What would you think of these people? Be pretty batty, wouldn't they?

Here's a fellow who is a writer. And he's been writing for years and years and years and years and years and years and years and years. He hasn't been reading anything written by other writers to amount to anything — not in proportion to the amount of stuff that he's putting out.

What do you think the physicist has done? What has he done? He kept looking at pieces of energy and matter and so forth, and it refused to move and it refused to obey and it refused to be good and it refused to do things, you see? And it didn't give him answers. Of course, it couldn't give him answers; it isn't alive.Go into the exact sciences someday and you will find around you, guys that are pretty hectically obsessed with trying to get MEST to answer up. The physicist and the electronic engineer build things that talk, build things that think. 'We'll do anything to make this stuff answer." Their wife is standing there all the time going, "Gab, gab, gab, gab, gab, walla, walla, walla" but they know she's not there.

And after a while, we get him on a stuck flow. What is a stuck flow? A stuck flow is any communication flowing in one direction without completing the cycle. Anytime you don't complete the communication cycle on both two cycles, you get some tendency to stick — see, a scarcity, a waitingness. A person starts waiting for the communication. All right.

And the physicist gets more and more fixed. This stuff doesn't answer up. It just won't answer. It won't answer. And of course, they say, "Well it might be this theory and it might be that theory." That's their way of saying, 'Well maybe it'd answer this way, maybe it'd answer that way." They're kind of mixed up. They're using the stuff through which you communicate, to communicate to: an inanimate terminal.

We have this fellow being on graph A, this writer. And he's sitting there and he originates and he originates and he originates and he originates and he originates and he originates and stick, stick, stick, stick. This manuscript gets lost and that one doesn't get answered, and he gets no acknowledgment from the public, but more important than that, there isn't any graph B going. He doesn't have another writer there who is also writing, see?

Well, almost anybody has some of this inanimate-terminal fixation. You can get them over a lot of this by simply having them touch walls. And they say, "See, there is a terminal right here. What are you hanging on to that old one you've got for? What do you want that old garden wall for? You got a perfectly good building wall right here." That's what 8 -C does, Opening Procedure.

The missing point is he's missing the whole second cycle. He doesn't have intimate contact with another writer who is writing — fantastic. What will happen to him: He will eventually become obsessed with the idea of writing. His stuff will go down in quality and then, as will happen, he will stop writing and writing itself will become a sort of a solid ridge and that is his fate if he does not complete the two-way cycle of communication — if no one else is writing in his vicinity. You follow me?

But your physicist has gone out of communication to the degree that he now believes that no communication is the best possible communication, so let's get rid of the playing field. "Everybody get rid of the playing field. We can't get it to answer. But we can get far enough to blow it up. And at least it'll say, "bang!"

He isn't reading. He doesn't recognize that other people also write. He maybe thinks the books just occur except those that he himself writes. He knows somebody alive writes those. But he doesn't know any other writers are alive. He'd get into a horrible state of affairs. You see, he'd get a stuck flow and then he would get so stuck that it would all get sort of solid. And that is the way you make a ridge.

Now, the only secret there is about secrets is the lack of an answer. I'm not just identifying answer with answer, this is true. The answer, when absent, makes a secret. What is a secret? A secret is an absence of an answer. How do you get into secrets? By saying, "Bow are you Bill?" (pause) (sigh) You say, "Bill, how are you?" (pause) "Bill, how are you?" And at that moment, you become absolutely certain that he is holding one of the deepest secrets you ever saw in your life. Why? Because he doesn't answer. And that's the only secret there is — no answer. That's all the secret there is — no answer.

Now, I've just spoken of a writer because that's kind of an obvious example. Let's take a less observable example. Let's take somebody who is completely out of communication. You've got this person around the house, completely out of communication and you. walk up to them, and you say, "Well, how are you today, Bess?" You really didn't care how Bess was today. You just thought it was a good question, you see. No answer.

You look that over, you'll find out it's true. The people that you will believe to be very, very secret people, simply didn't answer you very often. And if they answered you little enough, then you became convinced that they must be very wise, secretive people indeed.

So you say, "Well, mm-hm," and you walk off. And next time you see her, you say, "Do you like your — those new gloves you got, Bess?"

And so you get the wise old owl who sits in an oak. And the less he spoke, the more you figured he had some secrets to hide. And maybe he did once, but I'll give you a tip: He's forgotten them.

Well, the next morning, you're rather unguarded about the whole thing, and you say, "How are you, Bess?"

All of this material sum mates into just one thing. We have been looking for answers to what? The answers to answers. What is the answer to an answer? It's an answer. That's what it is.

Do you know that you will get obsessed on how she is? You'll get frantic on the idea of "How are you, Bess?" Well, that's the most obvious thing. And you will begin to be sure there is some horrible secret about her health.

And we take somebody who's convinced there are tremendous secrets in everything and we simply process him by making everything he thinks is secret, answer. And the next thing you know, he knows all about it. Because he knew everything there was to know in the first place. This is very simple.

And you just get a stuck flow. You're liable — if you don't watch it, you're liable to go around saying, "How are you, Bess? How are you, Bess? How are you, Bess? How are you, Bess?" Get the idea?

So we now, by this process alone, actually can obtain any answer we want out of anything. We can actually make anything talk, whether it's space, matter, energy, time or Mama.

And you'll get stuck on Bess, and if Bess leaves or goes away, for years you'll carry around an image of Bess here, hoping it someday will speak. All right.

We get fixed on things simply waiting for an answer and after a while, they become secret. And that's what we've been looking for in Dianetics and Scientology. And if you think it over, I think you will agree with me. We have the answer to secrets. And the answer to a secret is an answer. Supply the abundance of answers, and you don't have any secret anymore about life, or about anything.

Let's, then, look at what else is missing. Bess never came up to you and said, "How are you?" Just never happened. Bess never came up and said, "How are you?" No originated communication there. And even if Bess answered all the time — you said, "How are you, Bess?"

Okay, I'll see you this evening.

And she said, "I'm fine."

Thank you.

And you said, "That's good," and went on your way.

And the next time you said, "How are you, Bess?" she said, "I'm fine." Go on your way.

Even though this happened all the time, after a while, you'd start to get very; very suspicious of Bess. What would be missing? The whole second cycle — the whole graph B — the whole thing is missing.

See, Bess never originates the communication back at you. As a matter of fact, you will only find people in a somewhat hypnotized state who will answer you immediately and never originate a communication themselves. A person has to be in pretty good shape to answer you immediately, or completely hypnotized. If they're hypnotized, they never originate a communication.

You could say, "How are you, Bess?"

She'd say, "I'm okay."

And you'd say, "That's good."

"How are you, Bess?"

"I'm okay."

"That's good."

"How are you, Bess?"

"I'm okay."

"That's good."

After a while this cycle — keep going — if she'd never originate a communication, oh, she would just be in a sort of a social automatic response situation. "I'm okay." Because if she were really alive, she really couldn't stand not some time or another completing the cycle.

Now, did you ever have anybody give you a Christmas present and you not give them one? You suffer, don't you?

You say, "Hey, by golly, we — we — we didn't get Joe anything. I think maybe we'd better go out and find him something and say we bought it before Christmas and forgot it." You feel bad, you see? You didn't get a two-way cycle of communication going, even with an object.

It's perfectly all right, he gave you something, you gave him something. Well, that's the way universes get made. You know, you're sort of in communication on an intuitive basis with some thetan and you say something to him. And you say, "Hello." Or you make a small mock-up or something, you know.

And then he makes one for you and you get this kind of a picture: [See chart 4 in appendix]

Here's your graph A. [LRH writing] And here is graph B. Now, here is your cycle of communication, which has your origin, answer, and acknowledgment. And here is your origin and here is your answer and here is your acknowledgment.

You know what these two people are doing? They're making space. And that's how you get space. One fellow originates some space, and the other fellow says he has done so. This fellow says, "I originated some space," ("How are you," you know) — "I originated some space to this fellow"

And this fellow says, "Okay, you originated some space."

Fellow says, "So I did."

And they got some space, too. See that? But when they stop communicating, we get down here at graph C, no space. See, that's snapped terminals.

And over here in graph D, this fellow keeps saying, "How are you, Joe?" And Joe never originates any communication. So you have an imbalanced space. This fellow gets the idea that he must be talking across some terrific, fantastic difference, and nobody else is making any space but him. And so he gets stuck on the idea of insisting that somebody else make some space, for heaven's sakes. He keeps going around here.

Graph B over here never gets finished, so the guy keeps going around saying, "Hello. Hello. Hello." And he'll acknowledge and so forth, but he should be saying, if he wanted to put it into words: "For God's sakes, make some space. Please, somebody else make some space. Why do I have to make all this space?" You get the idea?

So, he's not — he doesn't have somebody else making space. Well, after this fellow said, "How are you?" at origin here, and he's gotten his answer, "I'm okay," and he's gotten his acknowledgment here, we go over on this side and we find out that the fellow he talked to originally here, now originates a communication to which this fellow can now answer and give an acknowledgment.

The other fellow in graph B is now saying, "Okay, I'm making some space."

This fellow says, "You did."

"Good."

So, the communication goes this way:

"I'm making some space," in graph A, "I'm making some space." "You did. Now I'm making some space," in graph B.

"You did." See that?

"Now I'm making some space."

"You did."

"Now I'm making some space."

"You did."

"Now I'm making some space."

"You did."

"Now I'm making some space."

"You did."

Get the idea? They got distance, they got particles, they got space, they can have some affinity, they have different individualities and they can have a game. And a game can be played without affinity. And a game can be played without reality. But there wasn't ever a game on Earth played with no communication. That's the most essential character, then, to the making of space and the making of universes — communication.

And if you ever felt bad about anybody, it was because he didn't balance out your efforts to make space by making some himself. Or it's because he never said, "Okay, you made some space."

And reversely, you might feel bad because you just never told somebody, "You made some space." See, you just never told him this.

He comes around and he says, "Hello," you ignore him. He says, "Hello," you ignore him. He says, "Hello," you ignore him.

He's saying, "I made some space."

And you're not saying, "You made some space." See, you just ignore him. And the first thing you know, he snaps terminals on you and you're never rid of him. See why? See, he's saying, "Hello." He's saying, "I'm making some space here. Hello, I'm making some space here."

And you're not answering him.

"Hello. I'm making some space here." He's liable to come up and sock you after a while. You see why? He's insisting you give him some kind of an answer so he'll have some space.

And in the absence of communication, there is no game, there is no universe, there is no affinity and there is no agreement. By processing and remedying the scarcity of just that, communication, alone, you can remedy anything that is wrong with a case.

So, rightly or wrongly, I have some feeling that we are at least well on our way to solving cases rapidly.

Thank you.