Today, we have something here.

To continue with how we use this factor of learning rate and learning lag and so forth. You can interest an industrialist by telling him that it is learning rate that is impeding his own operation. How many instructions has he put out that have not been followed? You can say that these people really do want to cooperate with him but that the learning rate is so poor that these people cannot absorb the instructions. This is the stable datum — something he will understand — a better stable datum than anyone else will ever give him. “Labor is all bad” is the usual stable datum given to him. You will explain to him the trouble with his executives and foremen, etc., the reason why his production curve is down, or his machinery busted up, etc., is entirely because the learning rate varies from person to person. You can remind him of the stupid child and the bright child in the same classroom — one child doesn’t learn as much as the other simply because it takes one child too long to learn what the other child learns rapidly. But it is learning rate; it isn’t learning quantity. Now you get very technical at this point and explain the difference between these two children is the learning rate.

To apologize to anyone for any fumbling I may have done in a line of research which Man has consistently muffed for the past 50,000 years is unthinkable, since at any given moment we have had more progress than has before been attained. This is not a light statement nor lightly made, for today’s results can vouchsafe for anyone the truth of these words.

Do not go into quantity — but he will assume at once that the length of time it takes somebody to learn something establishes then how much he knows. That is not quite true, but it is awfully convincing. You can say to him, “Now actually there are not thirty people, Mr. Industrialist, in the thousands in your plant, who are really the cause of your labor difficulties. Certainly not more than thirty. These people are against you because they don’t know you.” Immediately he will say, “That is so true.” You continue, “They don’t know you because their learning rate is so poor that they have no idea what you are trying to do or what you want them to do. They are merely in revolt and they don’t know against what.” This will make sense to the industrialist. You tell him, “Now, I could pick these people out with the greatest of ease.” You could do this through the use of Personality Analysis tests which should make it quite clear to you, and he could check these against their service records, and you can be quite sure that the records would agree with your analysis. He will wonder how you could establish their learning rate so rapidly when you didn’t even talk to these people. Just use “learning rate” as a substitute conversationally for aberration, comm lag, etc., and it translates. So we are in communication with him even if it is a bit of a stretch. We are in communication.

As every Dianeticist knows, we have since the beginning had the foremost clue to the condition of the mind and the aberrated state of individuals or groups. The mental image picture, carrying a record of the past which could be restimulated and thus made to react against the body was, one might say, our entrance point into the solution of the subject of the human mind and beingness.

I’ll give you an example. A stupid judge is one who can’t learn the rights and wrongs, the in’s and out’s, from the witnesses, and all the attorneys will tell you at once that this man is a stupid judge because his decisions are incorrect. But sometimes they take a person who is simply a stupid judge and they say he is a vicious judge, but actually you could say his difficulty in learning is so great that he becomes emotionally disturbed at the thought of learning and therefore exerts punishment in revenge on the people who have brought this torture upon him. His learning faculties are so poor that it becomes painful for him to learn.

Following from there, it was necessary to isolate any and all important parts of the human mental anatomy, and to bring about an understanding of any vagaries or wild variables which might occur.

You see how you could just talk to somebody and without accusing anybody of being insane or aberrated, etc., you could probably sell him processing for the whole of his executive and foremen levels of his staff to increase their learning rate. And the reason for this? So that his postulates will stick; that is, what he can see will happen. But this is not what you do.

It was important, further, to establish whether or not it was thinkingness or mechanics which gave us the best exit route from the involvement of life which we found beyond our control. The decision was finally made and proved that it was the mechanics of the mental image picture rather than the significance in the mental image picture which best surrendered to our efforts. Handling the mechanics made it possible to resolve the significances, and even though the significances were the greatest difficulty from the viewpoint of a human being, it was found that adequate handling of the mechanics eradicated the villainy of the significances.

At this point, you have a point of agreement and you as a Scientologist take departure from it. You have made a point of agreement that it is learning rate and learning lag that causes randomity on his communication lines. You can tell him this and convince him because it is almost true, and it is certainly true within the realm of his experience. But you, in actually processing people, depart from it. You’re not interested exclusively in the employer’s postulates sticking. You’re not interested at all in this. You are interested in giving the person determinism over data. You’re not interested in a person’s learning rate really, but in his power of choice to establish or review the importance of data. This is what you re-establish with the person. You don’t teach him, then, to get into a state of hypnotic impulse; you teach him power of choice over data, and only then will the data become of use to him, and then only can he become social in his behavior.

An astonishing number of characteristics and potential abilities were unearthed in this course of study, and it was a difficult task which had to be painstakingly done to isolate the most important.

The answer to the question is in total disagreement with the industrialist’s modus operandi. It is not in agreement at all. I have talked to some of these boys within the last year, and it is quite interesting that the moment I started to establish the fluidity and the right to think for labor, the right to live, and the right to be for labor, we were talking on different planets, and this is the secret of their failure. If their system of money control was a successful system there would be more of it today than there is, and it would be an increasing system, and it is not. It is a decreasing system. They must have a short glance at something, but you’re not going to involve yourself with this short glance. Management will buy learning rate completely. They will buy this whole thing because they themselves cannot face communication, but they can face learning. Communication is too high for them, and we have tried to sell them this for several years. It is too high for them because you are trying to make them face a Static. They will not do this, but they will, however, face learning rate.

It will be discovered in any other activity or line of endeavor that the Prelogics of Dianetics are missing from that course of study. Therefore the Prelogics themselves have given us our course and have taught us which way to go in our courses of investigation. Thus it will be discovered that the work of many failed to stress the greatest importance, but gave us a rather aesthetic view of a great many facts, all of which were true but none of which were sufficiently isolated to undo the riddle of existence. Taking older works, one can find in them, here and there, bits of Dianetics and Scientology, but a careful study of them reveals that at no point does one of these factors have greater stress than another factor. This single difference must be understood, otherwise our people will continue to study and search in ancient texts, and these have in common the frailty of failing to stress the importance of various truths, even though they give us a great many truths, many of which we have regained today. Unless this is clearly appreciated, then the value of Dianetics and Scientology cannot be entirely experienced, for one is continually chasing down corridors where all pillars are like all pillars, and all pillars in the corridor seem equally true. It is not a fact that truths are equal; there are truths which are greater than other truths, and the greatest of the great truths have been isolated in Dianetics and Scientology, even though our answers today seem extremely simple.

So what do you tell them, knowing this full well? You say you are going to increase the learning rate of their staff members. You don’t discuss technically how you do it. You just give him wonderful examples, e.g., ask how long it takes a person to learn to use one of his machines well. He may say it needs an apprenticeship of five years. Then you can reply, what a long time, obviously due to the very slow learning rate. Then ask him, how does he know the man can really run the machine — ask him about his repair and maintenance bill. You can tell him that certainly, he, personally, knows about these machines, but that is why he is sitting at the top in an administrative post. But what about these other people? How does he know that they know?

Today, once more, the mental image picture has taken its stand as the foremost discovery of Dianetics and Scientology. By the handling of the mental image picture concurrently with the handling of present time, it is possible not only to destimulate the bank in its entirety, but also to bring about a number of abilities by which the individual can recover data of the past much more easily than ever before. This, everyone who has had anything to do with Dianetics will understand, is extremely worthwhile.

Take the junior executive who is not very effective, doesn’t get things done. His learning rate is so poor that he doesn’t understand what his employer wants done. It could be that he is very willing to do anything for him, but he never finds out what. Now let’s have a conference with this employee and see if this is the case. And sure enough, it always is the case. If you’re dealing with somebody who can’t get things done, you are for sure dealing with someone who cannot absorb data. And you just prove it by getting into communication without mentioning communication. You will talk about learning rate and learning lag. I’ve tried this out and found that you can do wonders with it in ordinary conversation.

We set out, in the beginning, to bring into being a state which we called “clear.” Although this seemed relatively simple in 1947, as the years progressed it became more and more difficult. Just why this was is not clearly understood even today, although it could be said that those people who began to think on this subject reduced their havingness considerably, and we had to do mostly with people who had been thinking on this subject. Therefore, we were starting below the level of case which I had started upon in 1947. We had not yet learned, from ‘47 to ‘56 that significances or thinkingness was not the route. Therefore it was very easy to use these and handle them, and, as a result, to suppress the case level below an easy recovery point. There is no apology in this; it is simply a liability of investigation. That many people were cleared goes without saying, but these unfortunately became more interested in living than processing, in the most part, since none of these had been trained before they were processed. Thus, knowing nothing about the subject, and simply attaining a state which they themselves did not particularly understand, they saw no reason to continue on in our midst. Thus we did not find ourselves surrounded by clears and we ourselves were not clear.

The definition of you, as a Scientologist, in such a circumstance would be someone who decreases the learning lag of people — increases their speed of assimilation of data. This is how you could describe your job. You can talk about reaction time and the vast amount of data that the environment demands of people, etc. Take a professional football team; one of the most difficult things here is that they have to learn new plays all the time. What if they have a good player who cannot learn new plays and always uses the old ones? That is where they lose their games. Well, what do we do? We speed up the ability of learning new plays. Now you can really start to get technical. You have some agreement here, your listener has not yet begun to suspect that you can do something for him, but that will be a matter of just a short time.

Clearing today, and the attainment of the state of clear, exactly as given in Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, Chapter II, is once more easily obtainable and is, through what we know today, extremely simple, providing we ourselves do not have to be so complicated that we override the goal.

Learning rate is important to the truck driver. He has to learn that there is a truck in front of him on the road before he can put his brakes on. Now, suppose it takes him a long time to learn this — he has a wreck. So people with low learning rates are accident prone. Your job as a Scientologist is to make sure that people have fast reaction time by increasing their learning rate. But do not forget that this is purely a method of obtaining agreement and introducing your subject — it is not an end in itself.

Today a procedure exists which is known as Procedure CCH. This stands for Communication, Control and Havingness. This procedure is used directly toward the accomplishment of a technique known as “Then and Now Solids.”

This occupies a fairly interesting section in Scientology, but its accomplishment is not effected by direct drill. This is never done. Why did it take people nine months to learn to recognize an aircraft in 1/1 25th of a second on the aircraft recognition courses? Because it was done by drill and the recognition officer very, very often was not so good at recognizing planes. But increasing learning rate by drill, etc., usually only increases familiarity and automaticity.

The auditing of this particular procedure is much more difficult and much more exacting than any auditing which has ever been attempted. The precision of the results is attained only by a precision of application. Therefore, it is unfortunately rather necessary that auditors be trained, not indifferently by someone who “knows all about the subject,” but in a regimented course of study, by which-the individual can himself attain sufficient subjective reality upon the techniques to follow them along and to be able to predict what is happening with the preclear. Thus the auditor today should have training. Fortunately, the many past years have given us techniques and technologies for training which bring us to an achievement of our goal in training rather easily. We can, today, make a very excellent auditor in only eight weeks. This in itself is news, and is very worthy of comment amongst the great number of advances which we have made. As a matter of fact, we could probably make a very good almost anything in six or eight weeks today, since we have unearthed and put to use the technologies of training itself.

Learning rate governs reading time. There are many systems which speed up your reading time, but the practice of reading or the practice of acting simply increases the familiarity with what you are doing to a point where you can neglect it, and that is never the goal of a Scientologist. His goal is not to get something more automatic, his goal is to establish or re-establish power of choice over data.

Then and Now Solids is not attainable by many preclears on a straight route. It is evidently necessary to carry through a very precise series of exercises to better his abilities up to a point where he can accomplish the technique. Then and Now Solids is not susceptible of being run, unfortunately, by a large percentage of the cases to which it is addressed until certain preparatory steps are accomplished. These preparatory steps are not difficult, and are the stepping stones toward these greater abilities. The steps themselves are apparently complete, and anyone who is faintly conscious can be pulled forward up to an ability to do Then and Now Solids through a series of gradients.

A totally fixed datum is in the past. Where would a person have to go to recover it? In the past, of course. A person, to stay in present time, has to have all his data in a relatively fluid condition, so the re-establishment of the power of choice over data — to be able to accept it or reject it at will — comes first, and the whole process of increasing learning rate, which is a secondary thing, is the process of recovering power of choice over data.

Then and Now Solids consists exactly of making the preclear capable not only of contacting and handling present time, but also any segment of the past.

All education is trying to do is fix data and all Scientology is trying to do is fix or unfix it at will. This is what a Scientologist is doing and that is the goal of the processes used, and incidentally, they are the only things that will increase learning rate and cut down learning lag and increase reaction time, etc.

Evidently we have been under a misapprehension with regard to the character of past and future. The fact of the case is that mental image “pictures” are, in effect, only de-solidified present times. By a sequence of de-solidifying present time, one evidently achieves time. This is a crude and not entirely exact explanation of the matter, but serves us in our processing. It then behooves the individual who wishes to be clear to achieve the ability of creating a present time out of any segment of the past track.

But the final product in the framework of the society itself is actually coming from something else than the society believes it is coming from. Now anybody will happily let you come in and teach or process a person as much as you please about his job if they think this is the drill to increase his learning rate, and so you have freedom to process people. But what you are doing, is re-establishing his power of choice over the data he has. He always then winds up knowing more about it, and his learning rate depends upon that power of choice to fix or unfix data at will, and some processes which I will be giving you in future PABs will be aimed at doing this very precisely.

The length of time required in processing today is sufficiently short as to be accomplished in almost any case in under two or three hundred hours. This is a much better look than it has ever had. At any given instant of this processing, the results obtained are superior to those which we have been led to expect by our own experience. Thus, one must realize, when I say two or three hundred hours, that one is in actuality saying two or three hundred hours for a new and heretofore unenvisioned goal. Our ability to process upwards has gone so high that there is no real comparison with what we have done in the past. Furthermore, our ability to reach low has extended sufficiently that we are able to say with some aplomb that we are not balked by states of case. Naturally, the insane pose a problem to us, and always will, but our business is not with this peculiarity of mental mix-up. One of the more heartening factors is that insanity is found to be a highly peculiar form of composition of the mind, and is not an immediate consequence of livingness. To undo insanity, one today has the techniques if he also has the patience. So only insanity itself is set aside in this estimation of two or three hundred hours, since it is true that two or three hundred hours of processing might be found necessary on some insane people simply to bring them up to a rational response to the auditor.

Age also poses some limitation. Not old age, as it has in the past, for this is not today important, but the very young preclear, up to the age of six, seven or eight, will still be found to give the auditor difficulty. The reason for this is the attention factor. This is not the same thing as the attention factor in insanity, but is handled in much the same way. The attention factor of extreme youth has been discovered to be a disorientation factor brought about by the inability to handle the body and the environment, and is not an immediate “natural state.” A child is a thetan in usually rather bad condition. The attention factor has to be widened before much processing can be embarked upon, along a line leading to clear.

We have then achieved our goals in terms of processing. It is necessary now to apply those goals, and in order to apply them it is necessary to learn what there is to know about auditing itself. Today, we can make excellent auditors. We are doing so. We are making auditing training available in any way we can.

We have never been more sincere about our goals, and we have never been more successful in achieving them.

The race with the atomic bomb was, years ago, more or less a method of comparing Dianetics and Scientology to the physical sciences. Today it is a fact and an actuality. The consequences of air pollution and other matters, consequent upon the possession by not too sane governments of weapons of this magnitude, make it incumbent upon us to do our job here and now. It is actually not that we wish to any vast degree to save Earth. As I have said before, it has been saved too many times. But here we have a playing field, we have trained auditors, we have organizations, we have the technologies, and here we can exert a higher self-determinism than ever before. Here we can do the job of Dianetics and Scientology. We have factors in our immediate vicinity seeking to destroy the riches which we have assembled in getting ourselves out of this jackpot. We probably will have to solve the atomic puzzle on the third dynamic if we can hope for much further progress in livingness.

Dianetics and Scientology are today more alive than ever before. We know more, we can do more, we can achieve those things which we set out to do.

Those of us who were basically interested in Dianetics and Scientology for ourselves and others, today must be informed and must understand that whatever vagaries in our career of research and investigation, whatever organizational upsets we may have had, have never at any time been capable of swerving us from our basic goals and our determination to make it this time. We are making it this time. Whatever you wanted out of Dianetics and Scientology is yours today. It is only necessary for you now to reach out your hand in order to achieve it.

May I ask you to extend that hand?