Although the principal emphasis of this text is on the use of the ELECTROPSYCHOMETER, an instrument especially developed for use in Dianetics, the Modern Science of Mental Health, the data contained herein is equally applicable to any “lie detector” as used by police and in psychology laboratories.

The measurement of thought with a meter is not new; the understanding and accuracy of measurement is new.

Einstein is reported to have said that all an observer should be permitted to do is to read a meter and report the message of the meter. This is true enough. But the observer of a human mind can read it with a meter only if the meter is an accurate and constant meter, and only if he knows what questions to ask. The constancy of the meter and the questions to ask are the subjects of this operator’s manual. E-Metering is a science and an art.

It has been known to a variety of beings for a very long time that thought and electrical manifestations were closely associated.

This knowledge is to the sorrow of many. One can say with truth that this bit of information, the connection between thought and electrical impulses, is the most thoroughly overworked datum known.

In recent Earth times, less than two centuries ago, the relationship between physical activity and structure and electricity was “revealed.” The first experiments were upon frogs and it was demonstrated that when a frog, even a dead frog, is shot with a current of electricity, his legs jerk. The “discovery” of galvanic action had a value which was not quite discernible to the scientific eye. But, one might say, with the jerk of a frog, the electronic era of the mind bowed into view on Earth.

The datum opened — or one might more truthfully say, re-opened — the doors of knowledge. Along this track of knowledge have lain and will lie more abuses and benefits to beings than in any other single area of information.

If electricity could make a frog’s legs jerk, it naturally followed that it would make psychotics sane. Thus psychotics are electric-shocked wholesale, and although it rarely if ever makes any of them sane, it certainly makes them jerk, which in itself is an interesting manifestation — necessarily so since it has engaged the greatest “authorities” of “mental healing” for many scores of years. There is an excellent method of treating psychotics with electrical fields but it makes them well and does not make them jerk and so has not been surveyed.

Some half century ago, the police became electrified by the discovery that electrical impulses would betray guilt and, being quite fascinated with guilt detection in any form, slowly put the datum into use in the form of the “lie detector.”

It has always been a popular sin to look into the mind of Man and see what he really thought. This public tacit consent, grown out of a public guilty conscience, no doubt, has considerably impeded the acceptance of “lie detectors” by juries. However, very few modern police forces are without this interesting instrument for reading the criminal mind.

The title and operation of the police “lie detector” are misnomers. In the first place they do not detect lies and in the second place the police have known too little about the human mind to know that their instrument was actually accurate to an amazing perfection.

These instruments should be called “emotion detectors.” And they do not have “vagaries” or errors and, used with a knowledge of the human mind and its actual history, they demonstrate an accuracy which borders on the incredible.

The standard police “lie detector” consists of three units. The first is a bloodpressure meter, the second is a respiration recorder, the third is a galvanometer.

The principle of the instrument is stated to be as follows: “An individual goes under emotional stress when he knows he is telling a lie. The lie causes a change in his heart rate, respiration and sweat. By measuring the rate of change of these, it becomes possible to establish whether or not the criminal is lying.” This explanation is very roundabout and why one talks about lying at all is a wonder. For the police officer is looking for a crime. The criminal under examination knows the police officer is looking for the crime and that if the police officer discovers it, the criminal will be punished. Thus discovery, fear of, is a considerable factor. But the actual emotion involved in the incident where the crime was committed is almost ninety percent of the charge which the police officer discovers with his recording.

A proof of this, that the charge recorded by a “lie detector” is the emotion residual in the actual moment of the commission of the crime, was worked out and put into action by myself in 1947. On before and after “lie detector” tests on the same crime, it was first shown that the criminal, according to the machine and very correctly, was guilty of a certain crime. The incident of the crime itself was then addressed by Dianetic processing and the entire charge of emotion removed from the incident. After tests then showed no machine reaction although the criminal was just as guilty and just as surely faced punishment if apprehended in that guilt by the machine. In the after tests the criminal lied. He stated that he had not committed the crime. The “lie detector” agreed with him.

The “lie detector,” then, is registering the emotion contained in past incidents or present time situations which depend on the charge in the past incidents. This applies to emotion. It also applies to effort and to physical pain. And it applies to thoughts when the thoughts overlie emotion or effort.

This is very simple. A man robs a bank. As he is going through the actions of robbery he is under heavy stress of apprehension, fear, anxiety and concern in general. This makes a memory, a “facsimile” which contains this stress and anxiety. When this man is put on a “lie detector,” any question which tends to throw the actual incident of the robbery into restimulation will cause a change to take place in his mind which influences his physical being.

The blood-pressure device is an ordinary blood pressure measurer. Effort or emotional stress causes the heart to beat more rapidly. This makes a memory of the heart beating rapidly. When the memory is touched by questioning, the heart action again approximates the way it was in the actual incident and so there is a change in the strength and in the rapidity of the heart action. This records on the machine.

The device measuring respiration records both the depth and rapidity of the breathing. When questioning touches upon an incident where effort or emotion affected the breathing, this same manifestation will occur again on the recorder.

The third measuring device of physical-mental change has been misunderstood. It has been thought that a galvanometer measured the sweat exuded and thereby increased electrical conductivity of the hands. This does not hold up under examination. The galvanometer measures, actually, the density of the body. Under various stresses the body is more or less dense and the density alters swiftly. Density naturally influences the ability of the body to conduct electricity. Thus, the galvanometer portion of a “lie detector” measures density-resistance of the body. A glance at a man showing anger will show you his increase in physical tension. He is giving more resistance to his environment; when a trickle of electricity is going through him he is capable of changing its flow by changing his density.

Of the three separate parts of the usual “lie detector” two are impossibly complex and uncomfortable from the standpoint of the therapist.

Anyone keeping a standard blood-pressure meter on his arm for an hour will feel the discomfort very intensely; further, the instrument breaks down the capillaries and is physically destructive.

The respiration device tells much, but any auditor, simply by watching the preclear’s chest, can devine as much as the respiration device. The psychotic breathes flutteringly and sporadically, with a pattern of long pauses followed by rapid breathing. Long sighing, very deep, means grief. Yawns mean a release of an incident. Snores mean that the preclear is asleep.

Of the three possible devices, then, one to measure heartbeat, another to measure breathing, a third to measure density, the first two are impossible to the therapist, being uncomfortable and not very sensitive.

A device measuring density, then, must be the only useful method in current electronics which would permit one to use the datum that there is a relationship between thought and electricity.

When I first attempted to use this density factor, however, no instruments of any kind existed which were adequate to the task. A Bell engineer whom I had asked for data on it, casually informed me that one sure method of measuring body density with a trickle of electricity would be to hook electrodes into the neurones of the brain. I explained that this was impractical as it necessitated first removing the skull and at least in my field it was desirable to have patients live. He shrugged and told me that it was still the only method.

The ordinary psychogalvanometer, the instrument used on police “lie detectors” and others for single use are of very little value, for they are insufficiently sensitive and are too slow. Further, a low-toned case cannot be gotten on the machine and a hightoned case is also out of reach.

In the early days I used to audit preclears by keeping my fingers on the pulse in their wrists and was crudely and unsatisfactorily able to detect when my questions were leading to a heavily charged incident. But I could tell almost as much from their hand positions and tensions. And no instrument had been manufactured which could assist.

During a series of lectures in 1950 in California, I mentioned this state of affairs and an HDA, widely known for his inventions in the motion picture industry, heard the statement, went home and built the first electropsychometer, the only instrument of its kind and the only instrument capable of measuring the rapid shifts in density of a body under the influence of thought and measuring them well enough to give an auditor a deep and marvelous insight into the mind of his preclear.

This instrument is not just an aid to Dianetics. It gives Man his first keen look into the heads and hearts of his fellows.

The nimble needle of the electropsychometer can detect with accuracy things which would have been otherwise hidden from Man forever.

The invention of the electropsychometer, like so many important things in this cynical and dull age on Earth, is not cited by our generation as very important. Yet in a future time historians may well spend pages and pictures upon it.

For if the truth be known, the electropsychometer utterly dwarfs the invention of the microscope, for Leeuwenhoek found the way only to find bacteria; the electropsychometer provides the way for Man to find his freedom and to rise, perhaps, to social and constructive levels of which Man has never dreamed, and to avoid perils in that route which Man, in going, would have found more deadly than any bacteria ever evolved or invented.

There may be those who underestimate this achievement; but they also underestimate themselves.

The first thing one should know to understand and operate an E-Meter (as Electropsychometers are called by auditors), is the concept of a “facsimile.”

In Dianetics it is conceived that a memory is a combination of motionlessness, its base material, and motion, the material of which the material universe is built.

This motionlessness is a “static,” a “material” which has neither wavelength, space nor time. This static is capable of holding the impression of motion, wavelength, space and time.

The entire physical universe is composed of motion. From atoms to mountains, one has only vibrations which, having a pattern in space and time, behave to form gases, fluids and solids. One could say that the physical universe itself was a series of motions, yet in motion, held on a background of motionlessness.

Consider a lake. Here the smooth surface mirrors, apparently in three dimensions, the trees and hills, flying birds, even the face of the spectator. Consider the surface the “theta” or thought, the picture in it the motion. Here is a good example of a “facsimile.”

A human being acts or perceives action in the physical universe. This action is more or less permanently engraved on his “theta.” He has made and stored a FACSIMILE of the physical universe.

Throughout his lifetimes, an individual is perceiving and “storing” facsimiles. Anything he has ever seen or felt or heard or done is stored somewhere and somehow in his “mind.”

A facsimile has a double action. It receives and it impresses. Anything which has been perceived and made into a facsimile can be activated and impressed again on the physical universe. One receives motion, one activates a facsimile and impresses motion on his environment. His body is part of his environment. He has perceived what has happened to and what he has done with and to his body. Every action is stored as a facsimile. Now, to accomplish action again he is able to take these stored facsimiles and use them to produce similar circumstances, actions and conditions.

Those thoughts which contain considerable thought, emotion or effort, including pain, can be called into action once more. When these facsimiles come into action again, they have the power of creating their identical circumstances on the body.

Further, any “heavy” facsimile (one containing considerable thought, emotion, effort — or pain) can be called into action on the body by another person. Suggest to a person how tired he looks and a “tiredness facsimile” will come into action and he will FEEL TIRED. An old memory of being tired activates at the suggestion of the other person and then an individual feels the primary characteristic of the facsimile — tiredness.

A facsimile contains a recording of each perception of which the body is capable, and these number well over half a hundred. Everything and anything which can be formed of motion is included, as an impression, in a facsimile. Weight, light, sound waves, heat, electrical fields and impulses, pressure, the quality of surfaces, all these and many more have their exact duplicates in memory. And when a memory containing any one of them is brought into “restimulation,” which is to say, recalled into present time, that factor of the facsimile is capable of re-impressing itself upon the physical universe. Memory, you might say, holds physical universe factors in trust and places them again into action on command.

A facsimile has, as its primary parts (made out of the motion of the physical universe), thought, emotion and effort. The pattern of the attention units in the facsimile determines the emotion in part, wavelength determines it.

Pain is an attention unit pattern of intense confusion. When a facsimile contains pain, the facsimile is “heavier,” which is to say, contains more compact motion, than other facsimiles. Similarly, a facsimile containing heavy emotion is “heavier” than other facsimiles. A facsimile which contains heavier effort is again more dense than other facsimiles.

Thus, the difference amongst facsimiles. One is dense and confused, another is light and containing even, flowing waves. Another is scarcely discernible, so fluffy is the perception it maintains.

Now you should understand a very important thing about facsimiles. Facsimiles themselves have no weight or wavelength, space or time. They have “pictures,” if in full color and motion and depth, of motion in space and time. A facsimile has no “size.” It has no geographical point of storage. It isn’t in a bin or a file or on a shelf or in a cell or connected to some neurone. This fact is adequately demonstrated by very exacting tests.

However, a facsimile has this ability: it can cause a reaction in the material universe by imposing itself again upon the physical universe.

If you want to test this, now or later when you will be working with your E- Meter, place the electrodes in the hands of a person. Then pinch that person. You will see the needle of the E-Meter duck. Now tell the person to go back to the moment you pinched him and “feel the pinch again.” He will do so and you will see that the needle ducks just as it did when you first pinched him. In other words, you made a facsimile containing pain when you pinched him. Now you command the facsimile to come back. You see it read again on the meter just as it did when you pinched him. If you make him go through the pinch several times you will find the needle action grows less and less. This, in essence, is a primary principle in Dianetics: that facsimiles exist. It is a prime factor in Dianetic processing that facsimiles can be reduced in intensity.

The entire test of any theory is its workability. And you will find that this theory works, and works so well that it should be called a law. For people become physically and mentally better by using the laws of Dianetics, and there is no other theory or law known on Earth which makes them better.

A facsimile is a “picture” of motion. When the picture comes again into play, it produces motion. When it is not in play, it is not producing motion.

The relative thought, emotion and effort of a facsimile, then, produces, when the facsimile is called into present time, relative thought, emotion and effort on the body and even in the environment.

Some action or motion happens to a person. Whether he is asleep or awake (as your E-Meter will prove for you if you ask what happened during sleep or any unconsciousness) that action or motion will be recorded as a facsimile. During the moment of the recording, the body is tense or limp, emotionally charged or careless, under physical strain or without such strain. When the facsimile is recalled into presence, by being attracted by some similar circumstance in the environment, it imposes again upon the body, the same conditions as when it was received — or if only lightly called, a shadow of those conditions.

The E-Meter works on a very easily understood principle. It measures the relative density of the body. The relative density is changed as the facsimiles change. The E-Meter then registers shifts in thought. And it registers in particular shifts in thought relating closely to the questions asked by the E-Meter operator. The operator asks, the facsimiles shift under his asking. The E-Meter measures the shift. Thus the mind is read.

If you understand the workings of a facsimile, it is very easy to understand the workings of an E-Meter and to audit with it. If you are a wizard in the field of electronics, if you have a Phi Bete in mechanics and a magna cum laude in meters and yet do not understand facsimiles, forget about results for you won’t get them. But if you are an utter dub on electronics, meters and physics and yet understand facsimiles, an E-Meter will work for you in a beautiful and awesome style.

So if HE is an expert in wires and solder and you are not, if HE knows all about ohms and you only know about omens, but if YOU know your facsimile theory and

HE doesn’t, don’t be awed. You will be able to make an E-Meter play Strauss while he can only make it play “where’s the blasted part” on the repair bench.

In short, and I cannot say it enough or with loud enough capitals, the art of using an E-Meter does not depend in the very least upon a knowledge of electronics. It depends upon a knowledge of facsimiles.

The designer knew all you had to know about electronics in order to make the E-Meter work. If you have enough mechanical knowledge to turn on a dial switch or adjust a needle, you have all the mechanical skill needed to run this instrument.

Once he knows the theory of what is happening and knows what the facsimiles are doing, or are capable of doing, he can become an artist with an E-Meter; his preclears will get well rapidly, his auditing time per case reduces to as much as an hour where he needed fifty or a hundred before — but actually there is no time comparison, for without the meter he cannot get comparable results. One has to be a meter auditor to produce optimum results. An intensive run delivered without the pc holding the electrodes is actually a theft of the pc’s money, no matter whether you think that is a sales talk or not.

The E-Meter is a sensitive but sturdy instrument. You cannot do very much to harm one.

The principle on which it works is very simple. Electricity comes into the machine from the wall plug. It is cut down in intensity by the circuits and resistances in the machine. A very small trickle of this electricity is permitted to run from one electrode (the can the pc holds) down through the wire, into the meter itself, out through the terminal and up the other wire to the second electrode (the other can), through the pc’s body and so into the first electrode.

In other words there is a very faint current of electricity, barely discernible by the most sensitive preclears, running through the body of the preclear during the entire time that he is holding the cans.

This current of electricity is a very constant flow of a very minute amount. This is the secret and the superiority of the machine. Any old fashioned galvanometer might work except that it varies wildly every time somebody turns on a light or retunes a radio or pets a cat. A hundred thousand dollar electroencephalograph also puts a current through the body that is faint enough to register the effects of different thoughts. But the patient has to be in a wire cage to cut out electrical fields which come from car generators or the nearby trolley line or the doorbell. And the current has to be graduated through fancy transformers, specially cooled and balanced. And this hundred thousand dollar wonder isn’t as much use to an auditor as his fingers on the preclear’s pulse.

The E-Meter floats one current in another current and stabilizes the flow so that the meter reads minute changes of thought, and it reacts to outside fields only when they are very heavy and sudden, and, such fields being rare, keeps an even needle reading.

The E-Meter’s trickle of constant electricity records on the dial of the instrument the relative density of the preclear’s body. DON’T MAKE THE ERROR OF THINKING THAT THE E-METER GOES THROUGH FACSIMILES. It goes only through the body.

The preclear, under the questioning of the auditor, pulls into present time, usually without much conscious awareness of it, old facsimiles. These, on a sub-awareness level, modulate or change the density of the preclear’s body.

The thought of the auditor translates into pc thoughts. These re-echo in the thought, emotion and effort of the preclear. The facsimiles of the preclear move into play. That is between the auditor and the pc.

The electricity measures density. This changes as the pc’s facsimiles change the density of the pc’s body.

Stress makes the pc’s body more tense. This tenseness makes the body more resistive to electricity. This change in resistance shows up in a needle reaction. The facsimiles usually can shift very rapidly while the questioning is in progress. Therefore the density of the pc’s body shifts rapidly. Thus the needle reads rapidly, following the changes very closely.

Any time a situation containing stress, whether it is the stress of emotion or pain or effort, comes into play under questioning, a reaction on the meter can be read.

One is interested in METER CHANGE. He is not interested even in which way the needle surges, but the usual charge shifts the needle to the left as you face the machine. Fear, being a dispersal of attention units, sometimes reads as an upsurge, but this is of no importance. The upsurge usually means a difference from unpleasant subjects shifting to pleasant ones. Or it denotes a pleasant experience, pleasure facsimiles being lighter than stress facsimiles.

All that you read from an E-Meter, then, is change. The amount of change tells you the amount of stress. Stress alone is aberrative (heavy emotion or pain or effort or thought). What the auditor wants to find is stress. The E-Meter tells him with accuracy where the stress is located.

An E-Meter detects a lie only because lies are emotionally full of stress. The lie is told, a stress facsimile moves in, the machine registers. That it detects a lie is very secondary in importance, mostly because it does not detect a lie but the stress of telling a lie. In the course of auditing, the E-Meter is never read for lies, but only for stress. A surge does not mean the pc is lying. It means he has stress connected with the question. And stress is what the auditor is trying to find. For stress is the thing which makes the pc ill and aberrated.

Further, when a THOUGHT is a stress, that thought gains its density from an underlying, usually earlier heavy emotion facsimile. And the heavy emotion facsimile gains its force from an earlier effort facsimile which contains pain. Thus, basically, the auditor, when he finds a thought dropping the needle, can expect to find an earlier incident where emotion is dropping the needle. And if he looks even earlier he will find that he has a physical effort facsimile, very heavy, probably containing pain.

The auditor is looking for the needle to swing enough to tell him that he has called up a heavy facsimile to the pc whether the pc is aware of it or not. When he sees it swing he then knows that he has detected a facsimile connected to his questioning. That’s all he needs.

If you can turn on an electric light, you can set the dials of the E-Meter. The setting of the dials is too easy to be greatly discussed. The art and skill all lies in the interpretation of the meter needle.

The instrument is turned on simply by swinging the tone handle clockwise. It heats up in a few seconds. If you have left the electrodes touching each other (the cans), the needle will swing violently to the left and stick and this is bad for the instrument; so it is better to give the cans into the pc’s hands and then turn the instrument on.

Turn the “sensitivity knob” so that it points straight up. Pull the range expander over to minus position (all the way counterclockwise). Now turn the handle until you get the needle reading in the black area of the dial. If the needle persists in remaining all the way over to the left, put the range expander so that it points straight up. Then work the tone handle (the big handle at the upper left) back counterclockwise until the needle is in the black area. If the needle is still over at the left solidly, put the range expander all the way over to plus and then work the tone handle. You can get a little more high range by putting the sensitivity knob all the way over clockwise.

The reason the sensitivity knob is carried straight up is that this gets an averagely good reading and good needle action, and by making this a standard position, you can get used to judging the needle swings. So don’t ever carry it in any other position except in two cases: one, when you cannot get the pc “on the bottom of the machine, at which time you back off sensitivity until he will register; the other, when you are trying to get a pc back on the machine when he has gone off the top.

Otherwise, standardize. CARRY THE RED SENSITIVITY KNOB VERTICAL AT ALL TIMES SO THAT YOUR INSTRUMENT NEEDLE ALWAYS ACTS WITH THE SAME DEGREE OF ACTION. This lets YOU adjust to judging the charge on a facsimile relative to other facsimiles.

Always use the range expander in three positions only: all the way minus, straight up at neutral, or all the way plus. Don’t vary the needle with the range expander or adjust the needle with the range expander. This again is in the interest of letting you get used to standardized readings.

Vary the needle, handle the machine, pull the needle back into the black all with the tone handle. Doing so, you learn to read constants. Vary only one thing. Then you can tell whether your pcs are coming up session by session or going down or what.

Now none of this is much in the interest of setting up the E-Meter to use. That is simple. It is in the interest of reading the needle. Are your pcs high or low toned? Are they getting higher in tone or dropping?

You can set the instrument constantly the same or be sloppy. If you are constant in your setting, the term BIG CHARGE always means “big charge” to you, small charge is what you call “small charge.” By carrying the sensitivity knob in various ways, the same charge can be made to look big or small. Thus today you read BIG CHARGE with the machine set to magnify charge, and tomorrow you read SMALL CHARGE on the same incident. The charge didn’t change, your settings did. So keep the settings constant as above and then the machine will be easy for you to interpret once you have begun to read it.

Carry the needle in the black area of the dial. You don’t care where the needle sets. All you want to know is how the needle reacts and how much it reacts. Giving it the black area as a usual place gives it lots of room in which to drop to the left if you hit a heavy facsimile. If the needle is permitted to ride too far left as a usual position, a half a dial drop in charge will not be observed, for the needle runs into the left side of the meter and you don’t know how much further it would have fallen.

Setting the needle with the tone handle also has a trick to it. If you, as an auditor, want to lose as much as possible, you may fall into the habit of asking a question and, before the needle can react as an answer, setting the tone handle. This is a very clever trick and keeps the auditor from winning. Just ask the question, set the tone handle, and the needle, being in motion, won’t tell you a thing.

Always set the needle, then ask the question, let the needle behave as it will, and after that, if necessary, reset it again. Err on the side of not resetting it enough, rather than on the side of always resetting it. The reason for this is that the preclear often has sudden thoughts which make the needle react strongly and into which the auditor should inquire immediately with a “What did you think about just then?” This often gives unexpected clues.

The whole point of the instrument is to get the needle to react, to note how much it reacts and to note the characteristic of the reaction. Thus we want the instrument with a constant set (the knobs as mentioned earlier). And we want as little interference as possible with the needle readings.

With 1952 techniques, you will discover that any incident which drops the needle less than a quarter of a dial isn’t worth auditing. The only exception to this is the “stuck needle” which is the most interesting of all.

Thus we are no longer interested in little eighth-of-an-inch bobs except as they may lead in as clues to heavy drops. So it is not necessary to watch this needle with a magnifying glass. When the incident has any importance, the auditor will find the drop as noticeable as dropping the baby on concrete.

The drop of the needle is customarily to the right (see figure 1). A sudden lift to the left (as in figure 2) denotes a cheerful moment, usually, or enthusiasm.

It once in a great while means fear, but the auditor, noting this, can easily tell the difference between the way the needle lifts for fear and the way it lifts for enthusiasm. Fear usually drops to the right.

There are five characteristic actions of the needle which are of interest to the auditor.

Above these is reaction itself. The auditor knows that needle action means facsimile change. A drop always means a heavier facsimile. It takes a very heavy facsimile to make a heavy drop.

The auditor should also know that the E-Meter action is NEVER in error. He should have full confidence in what the instrument tells him. If there is a drop, there is a facsimile which should be audited, either blown as a lock or addressed as itself.

The ONLY time the E-Meter registers on dub-in is when the pc is giving the auditor some tale of a MOTIVATOR (something that happened to the pc) in an effort to JUSTIFY an OVERT ACT. Once in every thousand facsimile reactions, a very upset pc will start giving a THIS LIFETIME account of a false incident. The E-Meter will register madly upon it. But it is very improbable AND it will not reduce when audited but keeps on registering the same after a few passes through the incident. The E-Meter is not lying. It is registering for an earlier life motivator and it is honestly registering a charge that is present. BUT the charge is on something the pc did to somebody else, even though he says it happened to him. In other words, the pc, not the E-Meter, is lying. The pc may think he is telling the truth, he may believe fervently that this horrible thing happened to him. The E-Meter swings radically on the dial. The incident will not reduce. AUDITOR ACTION: take the substance of this incident and make the pc tell when he did it to somebody else. The incident will reduce and the action will subside on the meter. But, remember now, this is not ordinary or routine. It is rare. And it is resolved by the E-Meter. And the only criticism of the E-Meter here is that it persisted in saying there was charge here and in appearing to verify the pc’s tale. Very far from all motivators act this way. This instance is given as the single frailty in interpretation known. Otherwise, verbatim, the instrument answers up with accuracy on motivators and overt acts and tells correctly which is which. Only when the instrument reaction will not subside after some recounting by the pc should the auditor suspect that the motivator is actually an overt act with the pc “begging” to be let have it happen to him instead. Even so there is always a motivator to match the needle swing in an earlier life, so the E-Meter was really only in error about WHEN.

The five reactions of the needle are as follows:

The first is the single drop. It is a slow downward sweep (to the right) which may go from a quarter of an inch to a whole dial. This means simply that a heavy facsimile has been brought into view. The second is the stuck needle. The needle becomes motionless, is sluggish when it does move. This means that the pc is stuck on the track, usually in an apathy incident. It is a very important manifestation. The pc is taken out of it by light auditing with TECHNIQUE 80.

The third is the “theta bop. ” This is a narrow, nervous “hunt” of the needle. It goes from one end to the other of an arc perhaps a quarter to half an inch wide, giving a tiny jerk at each extremity. This means that theta is there still or thinks it is there. Auditing an incident which does this produces a remarkable rise in tone, and actually is the only incident manifestation which produces marked tone rise. So the auditor looks for the “theta bop” and audits it by preference over any other incident.

The fourth is the wide, gradual upswing. This is manifested by the needle proceeding gradually uptone to the left and means a gradual tone rise and denotes improvement. The auditor keeps on working, ignoring this save as an indication that he is doing all right. As soon as he gets into a new, heavily charged area, he is going to get a cessation of this manifestation.

The fifth needle action is the sudden jump to the left. This jump means a release of charge. It is not too common.

Knowing these characteristics of the needle, the auditor can get excellent results.

After an auditor has been using an E-Meter for a while, he can take one look at the preclear, set the machine and, putting the cans in the pc’s hands, find he has set the instrument correctly. Certain things assist him in this. If the pc invalidates the instrument, says, “Oh, one of them things. I hear as how they ain’t regular,” the auditor knows he is dealing with a case he will have to use a dredge on to find bottom. For this character sees in the E-Meter something which is going to “find him out,” something he cannot cheat and lie around, something which will locate and bring sunlight into the dark caverns of his loathsome and horrendous guilt. In this E-Meter he sees a tattletale which will expose his extracurricular activities on the second dynamic, his masturbation at the age of one and the real reason dogs hate him, why he shoots ducks and committed grand larceny in college and makes improper proposals in the little boys’ room. He doesn’t spell it “E-Meter,” he spells it “Enemy.” And when put on the instrument he will usually register almost “off the bottom”; that is to say, the range expander will be over at minus, the tone handle so low the light flickers and the sensitivity knob so shut down that when asked about the time he murdered his mother, the auditor has to have a magnifying glass to see if the needle moved.

This case has to be detected with skill, of which good eyesight is the better part. This is an apathy case. Handle him on light 80 or he’ll spin.

This case will also tell people afterwards that he “controlled the machine,” a thing one cannot do except by getting tense or relaxing and giving the cans a squeeze.

As a tip, to get a better read on him, get some huge, massive copper wire as the leads to the terminals and make these leads as short as possible. Then maybe he’ll read on the machine.

The usual normal case runs on the instrument set of vertical sensitivity knob, range expander all the way to minus, tone handle between 2 and 2.5.

A fairly live, quite dependable individual will register at neutral on the range expander knob and about 2.5 on the tone handle.

A very high-toned person will ride with the sensitivity knob vertical, the range expander all the way at plus, the tone handle well to the left (above) 2.5.

If somebody goes off the top of the instrument (and they will if their auditor is worth anything and knows 80 and 88), don’t invalidate him to get him back on. Replace the white lead wires to the electrodes with fifty feet of single strand insulated wire for each lead, preferably thin wire. He’ll come back on again. Or put a resistor ahead of either electrode terminal. Or connect the two electrodes together with ten or twenty feet of light iron wire. In other words, put resistance into the circuit.

For low-toned cases which have difficulty in getting on the machine, decrease resistance in the leads. For high-toned cases which fly off the top, increase resistance in the leads.

A man is as sane as he is undense. So there was something to the old folk saying about people being dense.

Some preclears mistake the cans for semaphore signals and wave them around. Some confuse them with cymbals and knock them together. Some are quite agitated about it all and jerk. Some have the idea they are holding nose scratchers or back scratchers.

For those who bang the cans, put a rubber mitt over one can. That lets them bang away without shorting out your readings.

For the nervous ones, learn to read through their jerks, for the jerks and squeezes make one kind of reading, facsimiles another.

And there is the pc who proudly shows you that he can make the needle react by putting fifty pounds of grip on the cans and shows you thusly that the instrument “ain’t reliable nohow.” He overlooks the fact that his changing grip reacts very slowly and distinctively on the needle and can’t be confused.

Then there is the preclear who thinks he is playing an ocarina and keeps lifting his fingers, making sudden, violent surges on the needle.

In all these, none are as bad as the pc who, just as you ask the incriminating question, coyly has to have a cigarette or gets a nose itch.

They do not know that these manifestations are each of them as good as watching the needle. For these are all dodges and they mean the pc is in an incident which is heavily charged. Light 80 will bring them up to a few less jerks.

In handling psychotics, don’t give them sedation and then put them on an E-Meter, for it only stirs them up and they get worse. Most of them cooperate after a fashion.

All these people can usually be persuaded into a recognition and remedy of their error.

It does not actually matter much whether the pc sees the needle as you work or not. Often, because you ask many questions which tend to contradict him, you will find his tone and general alertness will stay up if he does watch the needle with you. But if he does, don’t let him start charging off, altering his answers until he gets a needle reaction. You ask the questions. Get his answer and ask another. Stop his tendency to go into an argument with the instrument.

And remember this about the mind: It files first by time. Therefore, your best approach is by asking WHEN. And ask until you get a reaction on your numbers of years. And then, by small reaction adjust to bigger reaction. Ask GREATER THAN? LESS THAN? your query. If it bobs left, it’s NO. If it drops right, it’s YES.

Ask if it was tens of years ago, hundreds, thousands, millions, billions, trillions. Ask until you get a drop, even a slight one. And then go above and below that number until you get a really good-sized drop. That’s how long ago that facsimile was recorded. For facsimiles have sharp date lines in them even when all else is foggy.

And use the newspaperman’s questions: WHEN? WHERE? WHO? WHAT? HOW? and WHY?

This E-Meter will find lost articles for anybody simply by dividing up the area of the loss and going over each area with a question and then narrowing it down until you get a drop. It will spell words of towns, names, by dividing up the alphabet and asking. It sees all, knows all. It is never wrong.

And now you’re on your own.