What did you gentlemen learn yesterday?

You didn't learn to nod your head. What did you learn?

Male voice: Well, one thing we learned was that dunnage done with ease relieves the preclear of tension and awareness that he's being audited, and that it gives him a feeling of freedom — that this is not serious and it can be a game.

Uh-huh. All right. What did you learn yesterday?

Male voice: I learned a lot of things I've been doing wrong and how to do them right.

Is that all that impressed you yesterday, that you were doing things wrong?

Male voice: I learned how to do things right and I've been doing .. .

You learned how to do them right. Good. Let me ask you, who's been audited by him since then? Anybody?

Male voice: I have.

Was he doing better?

Male voice: Oh, yes.

Much or just a little bit?

Male voice: Well, we were trying the .. .

He was trying.

Male voice: All right, we were doing very...

Did he do you any good on your case?

Male voice: Yes, he did.

That's the purpose of auditing. Sometimes somebody who is not trained and who does not know his basic principles will take the fact that the goal of Dianetics and Scientology is the improvement of a case as an excuse to do various peculiar things with processes and so forth.

Actually, I want to impress upon you very thoroughly the singular difference between somebody who knows his process, can run at it, can get good results with it, and then can keep up a two-way communication, and away she goes, see; throw dunnage in the line; discuss things with the preclear; evidently get non sequitur; go around Robin Hood's barn to get to some point the preclear hasn't noticed. He can do all sorts of things. Why? Because he's running the process all the time. Now, that's a real expert. That's a real ex-pert. He really knows what he's doing, you see. And there's many a boy who would happily pass for an expert, who doesn't know his process, who has no certainty on its results and who, thereby, uses nothing but dunnage.

Well now, it'd be very, very good if the Sierra Nevada Mountains, being a quite considerable mountain range, was totally composed of gold. Wouldn't that be fine? It'd be very fine. But it happens that, once upon a time, there was simply a mother lode of a relatively small amount of gold — just a few hundred million, maybe three or four billion. Who knows. All right. Here's this tremendous Sierra Nevada Range and you could call that dunnage over this gold vein. You see?

All right. There are some auditors who are a total Sierra Nevada with absolutely no gold vein at all — none. And the auditor who is much better off, of course, would be one who just had nothing but a gold vein — if a small vein, nevertheless, had nothing but that gold vein. You see?

And then there's that auditor who has a vein of gold and can put it in any setting he wants. See? He can throw any kind of dirt or trees or anything else on top of this vein, you know. He doesn't forget the fact that he's using a gold vein.

Now, that may be a very, very crude allegory but it's right in there with that word dunnage. Overburden is what you call it in mining. In mining, they have to take account of the fact there is overburden. They have to mine over-burden.

Similarly in a preclear. When you're looking at a communication lag, you're actually auditing him all the way. It is not lost time. If you consider it lost time, you've made a mistake. It's not lost time. It tells you how bad he's off. A communication lag, you see, tells you how bad he's off. But the funny part of it is, that all the time he's lagging, he's running.

Now, there's another mistake that auditors make: They just want to get this procedure going; see, they've just got to get this preclear in auditing, you know; and they've got to dispense with these communication lags.

And I've gagged around with some of the Advanced Clinical Units by — occasionally, when I was just giving them demonstration auditing — say to somebody, "Hey you, let's not have all this communication lag while the guy's talking. Let's really get this auditing going." Just a gag.

And one of the Advanced Clinical students of a very much earlier unit came around to me afterwards and he says, "I used that auditing trick of yours." I said, "What trick was that?" He said, "Well, speed up the communication lag. You know, tell the pre-clear to speed up the communication lag." And he says, "My preclear got very upset." He thought it was good auditing. All I was doing was merely mocking some of the auditors present who did this all the time. I was just making a gag out of this and he missed the joke.

You'll find out, by the way, that there's a direct index on the Tone Scale for a sense of humor. And a sense of humor, by the way, starts in very high as: everything is pretty darn humorous, you know; it's interesting, it's fun, and so forth. And it goes right on out where less and less is humorous, and it gets down to about 1.5 where about the only thing that is humorous is what they call a pratfall in vaudeville terminology. You know? A guy has to fall down or break his arm before it's a big laugh.

Well, we go down below that and, of course, at grief, nothing is funny at all, neither at fear — fear, grief — these things are not funny.

But there's a sort of an hysteria that goes on around about 1.1 — below this level of a fellow falling down stairs or breaking his arm or something. Right below that there's a sort of an hysteria, a set of giggles. And you quite occasionally will run into a preclear who is stuck in this.

It's a sort of an embarrassed tittering or giggling or laughing. It's quite embarrassed. It looks strained to you and it feels strained to him. Don't mistake that for humor: they're merely trying to reject something. Humor is rejection; the ability to reject; the ability to throw something away. That's humor, you see? So as you go way on down the Tone Scale, of course, you get down around there, around apathy, and it's not funny.

Now, you've never seen MEST laugh. You've never heard a note of laughter come out of MEST. A person has to be free to get a joke. So occasionally you will find yourself explaining things to students and telling them a joke, some-thing like that, and you'll occasionally find them incorporating this as a complete fact, if you're teaching from altitude. Well, it tells you at once the level of the case: he's below the ability of getting a joke.

Well, we'll go back to this thing of communication lag. Your boy is along about 1.0 or 1.1, 1.2, right in there. He is actively considering. He's actively considering during the whole lag.

Now, you understand there could be a momentary position on the Tone Scale, and a chronic position on the Tone Scale — one which endures and one which is momentary. You can take any fellow in enthusiasm and hit him with a bullet and he won't laugh or be enthusiastic for quite a little while. You know, I mean he'll drop in tone.

Well, similarly, in running a communication lag, a preclear goes up and down the Tone Scale, all around on the Tone Scale. But all the time he has a lag, whether he's talking or whether he's being silent or whatever else, or even on a diverse answer, you're actually running a two-way communication on him. You're auditing him the whole time. He's running something, he's as-ising something, he's pulling cause and effect points apart. You see that? He's yanking them apart. And therefore, it isn't up to you to speed him up. It's up to you to flatten that lag.

You flatten the lag by not permitting auditing to go into different kinds of auditing or questions to go into new kinds of questions, but you simply stick with the question he's lagging on. Well, he's as-ising the whole time; no matter what he's doing, some part of him is actively working upon this problem. So let's not look with impatience on somebody who is running a communication lag.

I saw an auditor one time get so nervous, so extremely nervous in running a preclear, that he finally got up and threw down the books (notebook and a couple of other volumes he was holding in his lap) and pounded with his fists on the bottom of the couch, and said, "God damn it, if you don't start running faster I'm just through with auditing you. That's all!" That person I would leave unnamed. The preclear used to get way down, eight miles south of nowhere, and his conversation would become an indistinct, sort of a bumbling mutter — probably had something to do with ma-chines or men from Mars, but you couldn't quite tell, you know — and just peel right on off and go out, just as simple as that. And then it'd run for a while and then it'd start into this mutter again and then it'd turn on, and he would be running again in the incident.

Well, it's a curious thing: he was running with great rapidity. See?

There was no communication lag. Time factors were shifting so that it sounded, when he was running the one I just described to you, as though he had said, "Well, then my mother came back in and she hit me. Yeah, there's the slap." That's what it sounded like to him. You see?

But the way it sounded to the auditor was, "Hmm, something about my mother. My mother. My mother. Yeah, let's see, (mumble). (Sigh!) (Pause) She came in, I guess. I don't know what for. Must have been, and uh ... Yeah, there's ... Something was stinging there — something stinging my cheek. Yeah, I guess something stinging . . . Yeah. Yeah, it's uh . . . My ... my cheek smarts. Yeah. Cheek smarts. Yeah, Mother came in and . . . and uh . . . (mumbles) Quite a burning sensation in my cheek." His recall on the situation would simply be, "My mother walked in and slapped me." You see? It looks two different ways.

So their time factors go out. And you, by jumping them or speeding up their communication lag, even by repeating the question constantly, are in-validating their time factor. Time looks perfectly normal to them, but it's moving in a slow motion. Now, that's one manifestation of communication lag: all the time they're lagging, they're running something. Something for you to know.

Now, when you start to throw dunnage in on the line, don't throw it into a communication lag. That's the primary point I'm getting across to you on the use of dunnage — don't throw it into a lag. They're running the whole time, they're not sitting there idle or they're not talking idly. Some machine's talking while they're thinking and the circuits are going round and round. So don't throw that dunnage into that comm lag. You just let the comm lag take place. Throw your dunnage in when they've answered a question. See? And ask them about things and find out what the preclear is doing.

Now, let me drive this one point home real hard with you here. We're getting you finished up here so that you really know what you're doing, and this one point is an interestingly important point: When your preclear is all the way through with a communication lag, and answers the question, the computer is free. You get the idea? It's free for a moment until he notices something else. By a few additional questions you get him to straighten out or as-is any tag end that may have appeared to be there.

Now, his computer is free, but free is only in a relative sense. You see? Very often a person answers your question rather indefinitely, but answers it, you see — you could say, "Well, that's an answer," so on — he's still monkeying around with it a little bit.

Another question on the same subject, on your part of course, frees it up more. So that repeating the same question over and over, over and over, gets a more and more precise answer, which frees up the computer more and more, so that when he's actually answered the question the computer's free on that question. Now, you follow me?

All right. We say, "What kind of hats do you like?" And he says, "Oh, hm-ha-hm-er-uh-zea-hm ... hats. Did you ask about hats? Oh, hats. Yes. Well, hats. I like, uh . . . uh . . . street hats. I like street hats. Ah, yeah, that's ... I like street hats."

"Well, what kind of hats do you like?"

"Well, hm-hm-hm-hm ... I said I like street hats."

"What kind of hats do you like?"

"Well ... I don't like women's hats."

"What kind of hats do you like?"

"Oh, street hats. I like street hats. I like sombreros, too. You know? They're ..." You've just jumped — get the idea — you've jumped out of one computing circuit having to do with some kind of a bog-down on street hats, over into sombreros. But you're still moving in the same circuit, you're just on a different subject. See?

So you go on asking this question about hats and he'll become more and more definite in his likes and dislikes of hats. He'll become more and more decisive, in other words, more and more able to be choosy. And then he will get so that it doesn't matter but he could make the choice on what appears to him to be the proper choice. See?

All right. We've cleared up just one subject, hats. But if we had just asked the question and gotten the answer, even though it was the definite answer to the question, we have cleared up one facet of communication lag which was just one question.

Now, there's another lag there. There's the length of time it takes the whole circuit to clean or clear or get free. And, of course, that length of time is how long it takes you to run out that question. And we call that a process lag. See? That's the process lag.

Well, if you're running Opening Procedure 8-C and you have to run it on a preclear fourteen hours before he seems to be in good shape on the thing, you have done, then, a process lag and you have cleaned up a process lag. How long did it take for this process to be effective on the preclear? Fourteen hours.

So you see that chopping up a fellow's communication lag is comparable to chopping up his process lag. Just as you would not chop up a communication lag, so you wouldn't chop up a process lag. How do you chop up a communication lag? By throwing an enormous amount of dunnage, assistance and yak-yak and so forth into the actual lag area.

You throw in your dunnage after you get the question answered. You get it answered once, you can throw some dunnage in there and keep him in communication and talk about it for a moment or two, and so forth, and ask him the question again. You see? But don't throw your dunnage into that lag area. See? Just throw it in after the answer. Or throw it in before you ask the question. But keep it out of that actual lag area.

Well, this means that you're sitting there silent when he's sitting there silent, and that's a good duplication, isn't it?

Now, the other point is, when he's talking, you talk. That's good duplication, isn't it?

You say, well, don't talk at the same time he's talking. Why not? I often do. He simply takes it as a symptom of interest: you've got too much interest about this to wait for him to completely finish. But don't talk so loud that you beat him down. You'll measure this as you're auditing people.

So as we don't throw dunnage into the actual communication lag, so we don't throw other processes into a process lag. See this? We don't do 8-C and then Spot Some Spots, thinking maybe this will assist 8-C in clearing up, and then something else — and it's hoping we'll assist 8-C in clearing up, and so on and so on.

Now, you could take a very poor case, and you could take a very easy process, such as two-way communication or Elementary Straightwire, and you get him into less trouble by interrupting the process lag. But, remember, you're always courting trouble when you monkey with this process lag. Just as you won't throw dunnage into the communication lag, then don't throw strange and odd processes into a process lag. You follow me?

The least damage that can be done on a process lag is simply talking about it. And that's two-way communication and that's good processing and it will fit into anything.

So what we're calling dunnage is dunnage in every process except two-way communication, which is all communication or could be considered, from your standpoint, to be all dunnage. See? Two-way communication.

Well now, in carrying your two-way communication all the way up the band, up toward 40.0 — you know, as you come up the band — carrying your two-way communication into these other processes is what we're calling introducing dunnage. It's still a process which is being done in addition to other processes.

Now it doesn't look quite so random, does it? Hm? Remember, two-way communication fits in every other process. It's the lowest process there is. And so we go all the way up the scale on the thing.

We have an HCA over here some of you boys will have to take apart one of these days and demonstrate to him that he is not quite the hot auditor he thinks he is.

He's made a vast discovery. He's very cocky. One can appreciate this. He has more successes than the rest of his classmates. This still shouldn't make him as cocky as it's made him, however, because he's going to fall on his face. Because he's in position where he's getting set on some trick that has worked. See? And he discovers some trick of his that he's introduced into the process and he's found out that the process worked at that moment.

Now, whether it's accidental or not, we don't care. But the point is, he's sticking himself in a whole series of wins. And he will wind up, a few months from now, with something that doesn't even vaguely resemble Dianetics or Scientology.

And how will he do this? He'll stick himself in all these quirk wins. He's doing the process, he throws in some dunnage. The process starts working at the moment he threw in the dunnage, so he says, "That's the thing to do." To some degree this sticks him on the track. Now he throws in some more dunnage a little bit later, you see, and by golly, it just seems to work at that moment. He's doing 8-C plus two-way communication. You see? So he starts thinking it's the things he has said. See? He hasn't got a good, exact picture of this; he thinks it's the things he said that have done this and, therefore, you should plug them into the case.

And he finally discovered that if he does everything, while he's processing, that the preclear does, physically, that the processes work several times as fast. Well, I don't know what preclears he's processing, but this would only work with the most elementary cases that you ever walked into. See?

It's a psychotic process that he's throwing into all other processes. He stuck himself with a win there and he stuck himself with a win several other places and he's going to come up with something brand-new. And one day he'll start processing a preclear and nothing will happen, nothing will hap-pen and nothing will happen and nothing will happen and nothing will happen and nothing will happen and nothing will happen. And about this time he will really get frantic and start altering everything he is doing.

The symptom of failure is to alter. When they fail, you've got a change. See? So he stacks himself up first with a lot of wins ... And this is the way life does it too. He stacks himself up with all these wins, and then as he tries to repeat these wins — you know, stimulus-response-experience behavior, you see — as he tries to repeat all these wins, those wins don't belong there.

It's like this fellow rushes out and he picks up a club and he hits a dinosaur on the head and the dinosaur drops dead. He doesn't examine the dinosaur to discover that at the moment he hit him on the head the dinosaur was practically dead from just having fought a Tyrannosaurus rex and that his heart was about to fail anyhow, you see?

So he goes around pounding his chest to the rest of the tribesmen, saying, "Wonder of wonders, I am a man of great power and mighty means and when I hit a dinosaur on the head, he stays hit. In fact, there's one out there right now stone dead." And he goes on and he feels like he's a big man. He's a real big man.

And so he's galumpfing down the jungle trail and everything is going along fine. And there's a dinosaur standing there, eating a couple of treetops. So he shins up a tree with his mighty war club and he hits the dinosaur on the head. And the dinosaur shakes his head a little bit and says, "Gnats," and looks into the treetop and says, "What is this particularly luscious fruit that has four pins sticking out from it?" and eats the guy up. And that is the end of our tribesman. His win, you see, stuck with him as the thing to do.

Now, an auditor who is kind of foggy on his basics has never discovered why what he is doing is winning, you see. He hasn't made that discovery. But he discovers by experience, stacks himself up with a bunch of wins, and then tries to repeat these wins. Don't ever do that, please. Because you can wind yourself up in one of the weirdest squirrel cages you ever saw.

Look at it, rather, this way: Anytime you can increase the ARC in a session, you have made the session more successful — okay? — anytime you can put ARC in a session, any way you can inject it in very nicely.

This does not happen to mean, on the Know down to Mystery Scale — as they do in psychoanalysis — the interjection of sex into a session. It doesn't add much ARC there. It puts a lot of problems into it for psychoanalysis. So much so that Frieda Fromm-Reichmann devoted her handbook for psychiatrists mainly to adjudications and so forth to the effect that, well, they shouldn't sleep with all of their patients. They ought to at least leave the boys alone.

The psychiatrist, of course, is not adding any more ARC than he can add into it. He possibly feels that this could add some ARC. It might even be an honest effort on his part, you know?

But anytime you add real ARC into a session the session's going to improve, isn't it? Now, that's the most fundamental of fundamentals. ARC is synonymous with understanding, which is synonymous with granting of beingness. Hm? Which is synonymous with life. In other words, anytime you can give the preclear some more life, it's going to be a more successful session. See, you could say anytime you add more ARC, why, you're going to see the preclear with some more life.

All right. It's synonymous with understanding, so therefore, anytime the preclear understands his own beingness a little bit better, why, naturally you're going to see an improvement in the session. Right? Now, anytime that this preclear is able to grant some beingness anywhere in his vicinity while he is running in a session, you will find that it improves the case. Right? And, of course, ARC — being made up of affinity, reality and communication — anything which improves the reality of the preclear, of course, is going to improve the session, isn't it? So anything which improves (as we've just said) the affinity of the preclear, and so forth, that's going to improve the session again. And anything which improves communication and eases it down and so forth is, again, going to improve the session.

So what are these various factors we're going to look at? Now, we can consider granting of beingness as an exterior factor to ARC, simply because it really is. Granting of beingness really takes this connotation: There is a wooden image out in the backyard and we say, "Presto chango," and throw some energy and life into it, and it walks away. Now, that is an extreme ex-ample of the granting of beingness. See?

But how would we reinterpret this with ARC? We walk up to this wooden image, we talk to it so sweetly and so convincingly that it answers back. You see? Bang.

All right. Granting of beingness, then, is a specific act. Understanding is a specific summation of ARC. And life itself, when we speak of it from a Dianetic viewpoint, means: alive forms, the aliveness of form. So if we improve the aliveness of form in the preclear, in other words, just if we — just by the exercise of walking around or something like this, he gets to the point where he feels more alive. Well, that's all very beneficial.

In Scientology it means something else. It means the endowment with animation of life principles. See? It means the thing which endows. There's a slight difference when you shift up those dynamics, you see. Life is an endowment. In Dianetics it's a form. It gets more airy and loose as you go up the dynamics.

All right. Here we have this preclear sitting there and he's doing San Francisco style — which is actually nothing more nor less than Group Duplication. And he takes his right hand and his left hand and right hand and his left hand. It's good for an auditor if he doesn't like to see a preclear moving. And, right hand and ... It keeps the auditor from getting tired, watching all this motion. Right hand and the left hand, the right hand and the left hand.

All right. Let's take that process. That's one of the more elementary processes. You've seen this in operation at the last congress — this very elementary process. And now, let's figure out ways of improving this process. Anytime we make it more complicated we don't improve it, we deteriorate it. That's law one: Simplify. First law on doing anything with a process — simplify it.

If you're going to change Opening Procedure by Duplication, change it into a simpler form. Just ask them to look at the object and ask them to look at the other object. But, simple or not, remember that the simplest thing there is, is a static. But remember that a static is not nothingness. These are not synonyms. We speak of it carelessly as a nothingness, very carelessly. That's because we say nothingness in relationship to the space and objects of the material universe. Life has a quality, it has an ability.

And we say nothingness, we simply mean it has no quantity; there is no quantitative factor; there aren't quarts of life. See? Neither quarts nor pounds nor square yards of life — no quantity involved. But quality? Oooh, you said it! — terrific qualities involved here. And these qualities are summated of the potential of knowingness.

The potential of knowingness, of course, breaks down into the potential of understandingness. Capable of being understood, capable of understanding — that's almost synonymous with knowingness. But it could break down into that as an experience.

Knowingness could simply be a potential. Understanding could be an ability being carried forward, an action taking place. See? Understanding is an action. Understanding is knowingness applied to a certain direction, an object and thing, or action. See? The understanding is knowingness in action.

All right. And we break down this and we get affinity, reality and communication. Now, don't think if a guy is sitting there like a lump of lead, that his motionlessness qualifies him as being alive. Just because life doesn't have position and isn't necessarily moving doesn't mean that a fellow sitting there like a lump of lead is alive.

So in order to get him alive, you have to get him into motion. And having gotten him at least into animated, determined motion that he is determining, you've made him more alive, haven't you? Well, there's the most fundamental thing in the world of 8-C, is you get the fellow into motion.

All right. Let's add some communication to it. See? Let's just add a little communication. And we say, "Well, how does it seem to you, walking around the room?" Now, let's just take a real simple process — like 8-C — and now let's add, selectively, ARC to this process. Now, let's get real smart. Let's add ARC to this process which is a similar process to 8-C. But the only similarity is that we have asked the preclear to be audited, see, and he's standing there in the middle of the room, and we have a terrific paucity of language — we're not going to be able to talk very much to this preclear — but what we do say, we're going to drive home.

Now, one of the things we could do would be to make him move around the room. See? That's just something. Now, right away he is at least dramatizing a communication particle, isn't he? Well, that's closer to communication than a lump of lead. See? So he's dramatizing, at least, the particle. We've got him moving around the room.

Well, let's just take a process by which the auditor just sits there and has the preclear walk round and round and round and round and round the room. Would this ever be a workable process?

Well, listen, that process is sufficiently workable that one of the most raving cases of postpartum psychosis I ever saw was cured with it. This per-son was completely out of communication. But just as a last gesture, the patient was made to get out in the street and walk. And walk and walk and walk and walk and walk, and walk clear out into the country until she dropped.

"Well," you'd say, "there's something about this — exhaustion had some-thing to do with this." No, it didn't. It had nothing to do with it. She didn't get so tired that she finally collapsed. She finally got convinced she had the body in motion, and at that moment could relax out of this manic psychosis which made her want to destroy all children. This is a rough, roaring case. And they just kept this person walking. It wasn't because the person got tired; the person became alert after a while. It wasn't that . . . By the way, machinery was making her walk. You understand that? Nobody was dragging her down the road to make her walk.

She had been persuaded that it might be a good idea if she walked. And she grudgingly agreed, sort of, to walk — you know, duplicate the person who was walking with her — and finally got so she was walking harder and harder, and finally got so she was walking more and more, and finally got up to the point where she realized she was making the body move. And as soon as she realized that, why, the tiredness which had been creeping up on her through no sleep for about two months ... You see, she just all of a sudden relaxed, and wham! When she woke up she was sane.

So, theoretically now, we just take this basis and we get a preclear into motion. We're sitting there in the auditing chair and we just have the pre-clear walk around the room. He isn't touching anything, he isn't looking at anything; no other auditing commands. He's just moving around the room, isn't he? Therapeutic, interestingly therapeutic — twice as good, though, if the auditor walks around the room with him.

Why? It's duplication. There's two terminals. The fellow will come off being a communication particle onto being at least one end of the communication line, because he sees there's another end to the line.

Elementary material here from cause-distance-effect; elementary material out of this. He just sees he must be either at cause or effect if there's another end of the line there, see.

So the auditor walks around the room with him. See? This would be an improvement in the process. Well, that's an awful elementary process.

Now, supposing the auditor felt friendly toward him as they walked around the room. Let's get some A into this. See? Supposing they felt friendly as they walked around the room. Well, it'd be very therapeutic.

All right. Let's get worse than this now. Supposing, as they walked around the room, the auditor by some direction or another occasionally felt a wall. Hm?

The auditor did this; he didn't tell the preclear to do it. The preclear after a while, as he's walking around the room doing this duplication, would occasionally feel the wall. The first thing you know, he'd recognize some reality and we would have added some reality into the process.

So we put ARC. First communication, you know? He must be making a body walk around because a body is walking around, therefore some communication is occurring here, see? Cause-distance-effect must be taking place. If the auditor walked around with him, then he was either cause or effect and the auditor was either cause or effect, so there was a visible communication line.

And now the next one: The auditor didn't feel mad at him while they were walking around the room. He wasn't growling at him; in fact he was smiling at him. Well, we've added some affinity, and so, bang! It's more therapeutic. And by the way, that will turn on some nasty somatics, if you're very friendly as an auditor. Do you know why people like to keep you hostile? Because it hurts them when you get friendly. The bank starts to run. The second you turn up with a lot of sunshine and light, their bank starts to run. And they hurt and they shut you off.

All right. So the auditor's friendly. We added that in. Now we touch the walls a few times. And, of course, naturally we've added some reality on the situation. The first thing you know the preclear understands something about his case. Naturally. I mean, what proceeds here?

Now, understanding is not what it's commonly thought to be. Under-standing is commonly thought of as an explanation. Well, an explanation is a sort of an other-determined proposition. Understanding has as its component parts, ARC. I'll tell you how you wouldn't learn anything. Let's talk about understanding a little bit more in Scientology. I'll tell you how you wouldn't learn anything about Scientology at all.

If I stood up here every day in a lecture and I said to you, "I have just never seen such foolishness" — not teasing, you understand — I just said that:

"I've never seen such foolishness in my life. You couldn't even vaguely do these processes. Of course, you realize that if you don't execute these commands exactly as they're executed, that you'll be punished. We have punishments here — we can easily take care of this. We can have somebody throw you into restimulation. And we have other gruesome punishments. Further-more, we could have you blacklisted in various places. Now, you'd better learn these processes straight or we're going to blacklist you, and you will never be able to practice in any degree or anything of the kind. And that's the end of that!" Do you think you'd have very much understanding of this subject? Hm? You sure wouldn't.

Well, you see, that's still better than no communication; but it's still worse, you see, than a friendly flow of communication. See, it's not good.

Now, supposing I taught you just by standing here and glowering at you. (Pause) Did it make your hair stand up just a little bit and make you feel embarrassed? All right. That's the kind of thing that would cut down understanding of Scientology, wouldn't it? You'd fall right away from under-standing of it.

When you find a body of troops that hate the army — each individual hates the army — you might find a lot of discipline. When the going's rough you won't find much action. In the first place, they don't understand the situation. They don't understand orders. Anytime you give them an order, why, they didn't understand it.

If you want to test the condition of any body of men or any group, walk in and ask somebody what the group at large is doing. This becomes a very interesting thing. He doesn't understand what the group is doing. He's completely fogged up on the situation. Well, you can just count on the ARC factors being missing.

On this whole subject of ARC, it might interest you that, mathematically, all mathematics can be immediately and intimately derived from ARC. You take affinity, reality and communication as factors and you can derive all mathematics from them.

That was, by the way, the first clue I had, when I did this derivation in 1950, to the effect that we were actually dealing with understanding when we talked about ARC. I think first there was — if I remember rightly — I think there was A and C were the first two things.

You didn't have a communication but you had some affinity. And then I recognized that there was something else there and suddenly woke up to the existence of agreement. There was agreement, there was affinity and then there could be communication. So, therefore, we had affinity, reality and communication as intimately interlocked and connected; and therefore, we had understanding.

If you want to understand the preclear you could make a very close, sharp statement on it. My understanding of the preclear is simply this: He is as understandable as he is willing to accept and give out affinity, as he is able to assume or discharge reality and as he can communicate. And that is my understanding of the case: He has as much understanding, and he is as understandable, as he has ARC.

I told you here the other day, don't you ever, ever, ever, ever, never, never, never, under no circumstances, don't ever, don't ever, from this moment on, ever, get confused about a case. Don't ever get confused about some-body's case.

Because how bad off are they? They're incomprehensible. You under-stand that? They're so bad off they're incomprehensible. Well, that's just a measure of their being bad off. They are as understandable as they are understanding. They are as understanding as they are understandable. You get that? Their ability to understand is comparable to their ability to be understood.

And let's get off the purity of factors, a la general semantics or some such thing, and just recognize that something can be incomprehensible. Now, how does it get to be incomprehensible? The ARC drops out of it. When ARC is practically all the way out of it, you see — not upscale, but down; none of this ability or quality of life left around it — of course, it becomes incomprehensible.

Now, some living thing could come along and give it a comprehensible form. Now, what things in life can be as-ised by a life form having an awful lot of ARC? A life form having lots of ARC — in other words, lots of life, lots of understanding — would, of course, be able to as-is understanding with great ease.

But it might never occur to this life form that something could exist which was incomprehensible — nonunderstandable. The factor of nonunderstandableness, see, it wouldn't occur to him that this exists.

So that's how you got MEST. That's how you got walls. It's incomprehensible. The form there, the form of the atom, the form of the molecule, all these various forms — the form of the wall itself, the formation of the paint, the chemical compound of the plaster — all these things are comprehensible. But they're form, aren't they? They're form impressed upon that stuff. But the actual stuff of which all this is made is incomprehensible. It is incomprehensibility: Life can look at it and it doesn't disappear. Follow me?

Here's life, something which understands, looking at something which is going to endure. Well then, of course the thing that's going to endure has to be nonunderstandable. You follow me? And the most internal postulate there is in MEST is incomprehensibility. That's just a postulate, see.

I mock up this big mass of stuff here — out of which I may make some-thing which will then of course endure — but I mock up this big mass of stuff as an incomprehensibility. Therefore, it can never be as-ised. It'll never there-fore disappear, will it? It'll be right there!

Many a preclear is going around with a black sheet over his body. He uses it for various things, such as converting sun energy and so forth. But he's going around with all this black occlusion or something of the sort. And you try to run understandingness into this stuff — it's not possible. The stuff is not composed of understandingness, it is composed of incomprehensibility. That's why it doesn't as-is. That's why his engrams don't erase. They're all knocked down to that portion of them which is incomprehensible. And so he's left with an incomprehensibility. You follow me?

Now, we know the duplication formula and we know what as-isness is: cause-distance-effect. Now, cause has to assume some of the characteristics over here of effect in order to create the effect. Right? To even make a duplication possible, see, it has to assume some characteristic over here of the effect. Therefore, you find a man trying to control or talk to men, assuming a man's form. You find a thetan trying to communicate with ants would sort of have to mock himself up a little bit as an ant.

All right, now let's take this thing which is basically nothing but under-standing. It is understanding. It is ARC. It is knowingness. How would we keep it from as-ising every effect there was anyplace? Hm?

Why, we'd just have to make these effects incomprehensible, of course, wouldn't we? So they'd be nonunderstandable. So when we have understandingness facing nonunderstandableness, we've got a picnic on our hands.

And you come along and you see Joe Jinks, and this Joe Jinks is in terrible shape. He's trying to understand himself. He'll write you reams of paper which are supposed to be understandings of himself and — because he's a thetan up against a body which is composed of incomprehensibility.

The body form, the form and action of the heart — all of these things are comprehensible, because they're forms. Forms are always comprehensible; but they're made of an incomprehensibility. See, the statue form itself could be knocked to pieces, but what would happen to the plaster or bronze of which the statue is made? This stuff is actually an incomprehensibility; the basic stuff.

All right. That's all it is, by the way, is a postulate. It's nothing more than a postulate. It's incomprehensible, so it doesn't as-is.

All right. We get this preclear, and you're looking at him, and you go home and you worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry. "I don't know. I do not understand this man. He does these strange, unpredictable things, you know. I'm not predicting him at all. Something must be wrong with my auditing. I ought to do something for this case." Worry, worry, worry, think, think, think, think, think, think, think.

Hey, you know what you're doing? You're trying to comprehend some-thing that is, by degree, an incomprehensibility. Of course, he isn't a total incomprehensibility until he's total MEST, but he's getting right on down the line. Not much ARC in this boy. He snarls at you as a preclear, he raises hell with you one way or the other. He gets sullen, he doesn't communicate, he's apathetic. And you're trying to understand what's wrong with him. Will your effort to understand what's wrong with him ever really result in a release of what is really wrong with him? What ails him is an incomprehensibility.

Now, life's a tricky mechanism and it actually goes upstairs the second it recognizes this principle: that it, being understanding, can understand the existence of a nonunderstandable thing. The second it can do that, boy, life gets awful plain, though.

There's this preclear walking around. This preclear is an incomprehensibility, see. Now, the funny part of it is, that they're just above the level of complete incomprehensibility of these other survive factors about which I've been talking to you. They do what is safe. That's a sort of an incomprehensible formula, isn't it?

This girl's got a very bad back because her mother had a back. Because Mother was Mother and the daughter is Daughter, it is therefore safe for Daughter to have a bad back. It's not even logical, is it?

Well, it's not till a person gets way down below understandingness that this type of illogic starts cutting in. Now, she's heading for incomprehensibility. So most of the people you've been associated with, that you've had difficulty understanding, still had quite a bit of comprehensibility left, but there was a heck of a big share of incomprehensibility there. And part of that incomprehensibility is demonstrated in such a thing as, "I've got lumbago be-cause Papa had lumbago," see? You know, therefore it's safe to have lumbago.

Well, it's not safe to have lumbago. It means lumbago is enduring. And what is the one thing that will endure? Incomprehensibility. What survives? The incomprehensible, of course. Follow me?

So here you have a living, thinking being. He sails into this universe, he takes a look around, he finds all this material surviving. So he starts out to understand it. That's cute, isn't it? It won't as-is as long as he's trying to understand it, because it's not trying to understand anything; so it's not a duplication at all and it won't as-is. You follow me?

So anytime I catch an auditor puzzling over the exact button that is wrong with the preclear, and trying to figure out a logical reason why this preclear's in bad shape, we've got an auditor who hasn't grasped or ever accepted the idea that something could be incomprehensible. It's incomprehensibility that's wrong with the preclear. It's lack of ARC — nonunderstandableness.

And what do you complain about in a preclear? They don't go into communication. They have no reality about anything. And they feel no affinity for anyone else.

Well, what's this, reduced to the extreme, but a total nonunderstandingness. And so we have these people walking around being incomprehensible. Boy, are they enigmas! They are enigmatic. They're hard to understand. The society has a hard time trying to understand them.

Let's take the criminal. He has a hard time being understood, under-standing anybody, or anything of the sort. He's an incomprehensibility. But that's what's wrong with him — he's incomprehensible! It is no more complicated than that. Just stop it right there on the center button and you've got it, you see?

So we go around and we look at a piece of MEST, and it's incomprehensible why it doesn't do anything. You say, "Well, I look at it, it should as-is, you know? So therefore ... There it stands! Then there must be something wrong with me. I don't understand why it is still standing there. Well, maybe I had better find out what it is really made of." So we study chemistry and physics. You know? We get more laws about its incomprehensibility, you see?

And, actually, the laws of chemistry and physics are quite interesting. It demonstrates that there is a basic agreement just above incomprehensibility — the basic agreement which results in gravity, as just an example of it.

Gravity, by the way, is a manifestation of affinity, and it's not totally incomprehensible, is it? Because there's still a little affinity left in it. There's enough affinity left in a couple of pieces of matter to make them stick together.

You're still as-ising off, or skimming off, if you please, what remains of the understanding, see? Gravity is just a very heavy form of affinity — like taffy is a very heavy form of affinity, see. Well, it's not totally incomprehensible. The form still holds. The material coheses, adheses, hangs together.

If you were to get down to a total, total, total, absolute zero of incomprehensibility, you would be at — 273 centigrade. And you start all over with nothing. Remember, as you scale down there and get awful close in towards the bottom, it becomes incomprehensible.

That's what's wrong with your preclear. At one time he was very alert, he could understand, he knew what people said to him, he didn't have any comm lag, he could think very rapidly and remember everything he tried to remember. And, oh, he's getting worried!

Why should he get worried? He's been up against the incomprehensibility for so long that he thinks he's an incomprehensibility. All these things add up to bad memory, can't remember, can't compute, doesn't get new ideas, doesn't create. Of course, this just adds up to an absence of ARC, doesn't it? Well, he's been up against this stuff, duplicating it all the time. He's gotten so he's held off from duplicating it, he's afraid to duplicate it.

All right, you start to understand this stuff and it's very lousy indeed. So one of the best processes you could possibly do is just go over and touch it; or hold on to the two back corners of the room and not think. You're as-ising MEST. You'll also as-is an enormous amount of bank, won't you? That follows. The best way to handle the stuff is just handle it and don't think.

When you get into the field of physics and start handling it via the laws of physics, you are simply agreeing with the laws which are the last-ditch laws of ARC — the last-ditch! And, of course, you get into total agreement with that, and working only with that, you naturally will lose a lot of your own ARC.

Your auditor, in handling a preclear, should then handle him in the direction of ARC. Preclear suddenly understands something about himself; this is an improvement. If the session ends a little friendlier than it began, this is an improvement. Preclear has a little more reality on existence; this is an improvement, isn't it? If the preclear is in a little bit better communication, then this is an improvement.

Why? They're all up there toward knowingness. They're all up there to-ward knowingness itself. The route toward knowingness is through understandingness.

All right. It's indicated, obviously then, that some process must lurk around here. Well, actually, it's a process in the printed edition of The Auditor's Handbook called "Conceiving a Static." A thousand ways to conceive a static; almost folly to write down a list.

But I can give you a very interesting method of conceiving a static: Let's put affinity in the walls. Let's put a friendly feeling in the walls of the room, alternately, one wall after the other, the floor and the ceiling. And let's just put friendliness, friendliness, friendliness, friendliness, friendliness, friendliness in the walls.

That is just one way. It's quite an interesting factor. Well now, let's look at them as we're doing it. And we're adding communication into the line. Aren't we? And we've already said there are walls there, while we're doing the process, so this, of course, puts reality in there. So it's quite a process.

The only thing wrong with it is it actually disintegrates matter. And the first matter handy to be disintegrated is the rather nebulously united matter of the body itself. So you start ripping up ridges. But this doesn't mean it isn't a good process. This is a good process. Nothing wrong with it at all — Conceiving a Static.

Now, you ask somebody to be three feet back of his head, he isn't three feet back of his head; this, he couldn't do either — he couldn't put a patch of ARC or understanding three feet back of his head. So ask him to do it. Ask him to spend quite a little bit of time doing it. Whatever is back of his head will blow.

Ask somebody to put ARC into his house. Just "Where is your house? Let's mock up some ARC in it. More ARC. Put some affinity in it. Now let's see if we can put some reality in it. Now let's put the idea of people communicating in it. Let's put some idea of understanding in it." Any way you could relay it, you see, to the preclear, to get the information across.

And he'd just keep putting it in and putting it in and putting it in. Well, the house would probably get the normal size that it was. Although he was seeing it as a tiny doll's house, it would all of a sudden get to a large size.

If you asked him to put it into a car he always had trouble with, he'd probably stop having trouble with the car. Because he himself was the author of the trouble with the car. So we keep telling him to put ARC into the car — put it into the car, into the car, into the car.

At first you get the most malevolent feelings coming back from [to] him, from the car. And then the first thing you know, why, he gets a kindly feeling in the car. It's quite a process — just postulating ARC.

Now, I carried on an experiment of having an auditor postulate under-standing at a preclear for some little time, expecting the preclear to get bet-ter. He didn't get better: he merely got more and more hypnotically obedient. But it demonstrated that something happened in the session. Something definitely happened in the session. All the auditor did was sit in one corner of the room and postulate, silently, ARC at the preclear sitting in the other corner of the room. The preclear got up, he was just like an automaton as far as the auditor was concerned.

All right. ARC is the most powerful stuff on earth — of course! It's life. People would have you believe that bullets and bombs are powerful; they're not powerful at all. The most powerful thing there is, is ARC. You can just swamp anything with it.

I had a little interesting adventure, just last night — a guy going yap-yapping at me and barking around. He was out of present time; he was drunk, and so forth. And I just yo-heaved some ARC at him — more or less verbally, not particularly sequitur to what he was saying or anything. He all of a sudden became sort of hangdog and started to come upscale from degradation, and sobered up and decided he'd been a bad boy, and he began to have some understanding of the situation and ... Quite a curious experience. Nothing happened though; we didn't discuss what he was trying to discuss.

As far as two-way communication on the subject, he had no two-way communication. The only way he could establish communication was upscale. When he was forced to establish communication upscale, he understood the whole situation. Wild.

It's a way of living as well as a process.

Okay.