This is one of the more important things with which we have to do. Scientology has always been the science of knowing how to know. With some diffidence I tell you it is also the basic science of education. Education happens to be just one part of a large whole. Education is seldom creative and is, therefore, just a middle ground of activity. Getting people to know something rather than getting people to invent something to know, you will see are quite different. In Scientology itself, however, we engage in a great number of educational activities and just for that reason alone you should understand education.

Education really takes off from a series of basics which we have a good grip on, and nobody ever knew where education took off from before. Well, it takes off from Scientology. This is factually true: nobody ever before had these basics. It is quite amazing. If you asked an educator about these things — on how you taught people and so forth — he would be flabbergasted. Some of his ideas are interesting and complicated enough to be fascinating, but they are not sufficiently effective. In order to educate somebody you had to know what the mind was all about, and unless you knew the nearly total anatomy of the mind you could not hope then to do much educating, and the educational world did not know the anatomy of the mind and so they didn’t do much educating. That is the simple background of the situation. But the funny part of it is, that if you tell an educator some of the basics of education he will agree with you all the time. He knew these things all the time, he will tell you, but a little conversation will show you that these things are not aligned properly and are tied up with all sorts of extraneous data and that he has no idea of relative importance of the various data, both pertinent and extraneous. He could not evaluate for you the data you have fed him, but would be in such total agreement with the basics that you feel that he would be rather apt to go anaten, stagger, yawn, etc., but he would know for sure that he had met someone who could tell him about his business.

If you know about the mind you can educate a mind. This is certain and quite true. Now here is the coordination: You have a wall say to yourself, “This means go to_____.” What are you actually doing? You are really running out the total significance of a wall. You are evidently doing about half a hundred different things while doing this process. If you listed the things which make this process work you would be likely to have a couple of sheets of foolscap. But let us take one of them here and let us see how walls are always teaching you something, how fire plugs are always teaching you something, and how grass is always teaching you something, etc. The least that a wall teaches you is that it is a wall. Now when you ask a preclear to walk over and touch that wall as in Step A of 8-C, he finally finds out that there is a wall there, which is the goal of the process. Now what is this but learning that he has a wall there?

Now process lag and learning lag would be the same thing for these purposes. It takes him this long to find out there is a wall. You will understand that the wall gets more solid to the preclear and a lot of other parts of Scientology immediately accrue that are off the subject of learning rate, but we are just taking up this one thing. We call this thing a learning lag. A learning lag is how long it takes the wall to get the message through to the preclear. Well, it takes as long as the preclear is in a high unknowing games condition. High unknown games condition is “no effect on self and effect on other things,” and yet his ability in the universe depends upon his differentiation amongst objects. For the wall says to him “This is a wall,” but because there can be no effect on self in a very obsessive way, the wall saying to him “This is a wall” means of course “This is a hospital spittoon.” No differentiation in perception. This is sometimes quite evident in a sudden exteriorization because of a loss of havingness which occurs at that time.

It is not that his MEST body is what gives him perception — this is not true — but the havingness of the MEST body makes his perception possible. You reduce his havingness by exteriorizing him suddenly and his perception goes by the board and of course he goes downscale, and LOOK is way up there at the top of the Know to Mystery Scale just below KNOW and you drop him down the scale to NO-LOOK, and sometimes in a sudden exteriorization you may drop him down to a delusory look. They not only don’t see what is there, they see something that is not there. Well what is this in essence but an inability to perceive, which is an inability to learn?

Suddenly exteriorized, with havingness dropped, they look at the ceiling and it is the same ceiling they were looking at a moment before with their MEST body’s eyes. But it is now a hospital ceiling. Well some via is occurring between themselves and the lesson the ceiling is trying to give them, and that lesson is “This is a ceiling.” They don’t perceive that, they perceive a “better” lesson. What do we mean by a “better” lesson? We mean a more convincing one. The hospital ceiling was a far better lesson, it was much more convincing. It was saying “This is a ceiling” to somebody who was so anaten and fogged out that he just could not resist learning that lesson or differentiate, and so the hospital ceiling kept saying to a person in this condition “This is a ceiling” until it became all possible ceilings. The moment you reduce his havingness he drops in tone and picks up the most dominant lessons.

As we go downscale, then, with a preclear, he can be expected to pick up more and more dominant lessons. And what is aberration? Aberration would simply be a pattern of convictions, and we could say for the purposes of education that aberration is really a series of lessons that were learned too well. For example, a fellow was raised in a tough neighborhood and was taught that the thing to do to get on in life was to bash everybody over the head, and he learnt this lesson very very well. But he never learnt another lesson which was presented to him later in life that the way to get on in life was to be able to live with the people. Therefore, we find that what is wrong with him is a lesson learned too well — a wrong lesson. The schoolboy who studies his lessons very often reads something which is not in the book and learns it much better than what is in the book. This is because we get into alteration and change of location at once. Now a wrong location and a wrong datum are more or less the same thing. When we move data into solids we get the most dominant thing they perceive — location. First we have postulates and then we have located postulates. That is a lower order of postulate, but is still higher than most people’s heads.

We find out, then, that aberration consists of a number of lessons which a person has learned too well. That would be an interesting way to talk about it and would certainly grip the imagination of an educator. But there is something else riding alongside of it which wipes it out as a total explanation, and that is his willingness to learn a wrong lesson and that is his learning lag. Now why is he willing to learn these wrong lessons? He just is. He has decided some time or other without any prompting that this was the way things were. Now many people, simply by getting into the band of agreement are way up tone scale from where they were before, but remember people can go downscale into agreement too. So the datum is confirmed, he generated it himself, and then it was agreed.

Now and only now do we enter the field we could call learning rate or learning lag, or education. Just for no reason at all, he assumed, for instance, that his mother was a bad woman. He had no reason, he just assumed it — no prenatals in other words. One day he decided she was a beast and went along playing the game that he was a sad little orphan, just out of “thin air,” and then one day (he had been postulating this all the time) she blows up which she never did before and does something dreadful to him like sending him to bed without supper, or issuing threats, etc., and this confirms his assumed belief. Now take the reversal that he has postulated his mother as an angel and all of a sudden she turns and becomes a drunkard, etc. He is then always trying to convince people that she is a good woman and yet he knows that she is a bad one. Then one day he gives up entirely and he now has another conviction, only he didn’t generate this conviction, it was exterior to him.

Now one of the fondest things that your preclear thinks is that he caused everything everywhere but he covers this up and advertises to one and all, including himself, that he is not responsible for anything that ever happened to him. Now this is quite remarkable, because it is a complete reversal. In advertising that he is totally irresponsible he yet really believes that he basically caused everything. Now you know from old-time Ownership Processing that if you misown something it gets very real and solid-so at least 50% of the things that happened to him have been from exterior sources. If they are in restimulation they are the things that didn’t happen to him, you see, and the things that did happen to him are misowned the other way. He is misowning both ways. He says he caused something but this was really caused by someone else if it is in heavy restimulation. In other words, there are other things that work in the universe besides the preclear. He not only has to discover that he exists but that other things exist too.

The random factors in a case lead us, then, to conclude that the premises of education and conviction only go for a short distance. They go up to self-generated data, and that’s quite a way, but it doesn’t take us the whole distance. Therefore, handle this thing as far as it goes — handle the premise of learning rate and lag and other material of this character just as far as it goes. It is terribly effective as far as it goes — it is so effective that you are likely to go completely overboard and then wonder what happened — but what happened is that you moved out of that range into the range of self-generated non-caused attitudes. Non-caused attitudes are undone by communication, so we find communication vastly superior to education. Communication will always undo education, but it has to be terrible communication to do nothing but fix ideas.

What do we have in terms of processes here? Well, we have a lot of processes. I am not trying to give you anything but a decent resume here of the exact place something occupies before I tell you about it, because this is so good you will possibly try to supplant communication with education. You must not do that because self- generated data can supplant education. Now where do we go, then, with this thing called education, learning rate, learning lag and so forth? Well, let us become glib — not me, but all of us-with regard to such a thing as industry and learning rate. We will take that up in the next PAB.