[Start of Lecture]

Now, I'm going to talk to you about talking to you. That's quite something interesting — talk to you about talking to you.

The basics of auditing begin with communication. They begin with communication. There is so confounded much to know about communication — just that — that to launch into the remainder of the twenty-six steps of SLP 8 becomes a very, very easy, quick few-days pass. Just a pass at it — in a few days I can do that. To get over this first one will probably take almost the remainder of this course. That's communication.

Now, you are doing a fundamental of communication, and all of you have some reality on this fundamental called communication. You know very well that it fits with affinity and reality. The fundamentals of communication as practiced in an auditing session are so important to auditing that unless auditing is accompanied by good communication it doesn't occur. So a definition of auditing could be — isn't, but could be: An operation which succeeds only in the presence of communication. And a definition of auditing itself could be called: An operation depending upon communication.

Now, to give you some sort of an idea of how this works, the only time anybody ever fails in the HGC to better a case is when the pc goes out of communication and the auditor doesn't recognize it. Now, this is a pretty thin little margin. Here are people who are auditing, closely coached, cases are taken up, gone through very carefully, the whole case is sorted out, and now and then one gets by. And a case only gets by when communication is overlooked. It's the only time a case gets by and doesn't improve.

Now, I'll give you an idea of this at once. If you notice on an APA profile test you have one point there that said „Scattered, Nervous.“ Do you know that point on the APA profile test? Well, it is very interesting that a case that is entirely down at the bottom of „Scattered, Nervous“ — in other words, it's completely down at the bottom there — responds only to one cognition. Very fascinating. Very fascinating. They respond just to one cognition only, and therefore you can take a test after an intensive, and although it has improved elsewhere somewhat, you know that there has been a communication failure if it remains at „Scattered, Nervous.“ Now, that is the one point you watch on that test. This becomes fascinating the second you realize this: That if the preclear had ever had an auditor present during the entire intensive, „Scattered, Nervous“ could not have remained where it is.

Let's look at confusion and a stable datum. A confusion is rendered less of a confusion by the presence of a stable datum. Now, we will go into that arduously some other time. But here is a confused area, and in this confused area we have no stable data. Now, if the auditor becomes a stable datum to the preclear, if the preclear has a reality on the auditor, then we find „Scattered, Nervous“ no longer hanging at that point. So if we find „Scattered, Nervous“ hung up, we know the auditor did not succeed in getting into communication with the preclear. All you have to do is look at a profile test and look at „Scattered, Nervous“ and see that it didn't move to know that the auditor failed to get into communication with the preclear.

A policy at the HGC is when this sort of thing happens, we recoach the whole thing and we give them another week. That's what we do; that's our policy. There is something missed; something has been missed and that something is communication, because it's by communication that the auditor informs the preclear of his presence. And when the preclear, without duress or upset, can accept the presence of the auditor, then we have a stable datum which as-ises to some marked degree the confusion of the case. Just the fact that an auditor is present and is alive tends to level off the amount of confusion present. And it's as elementary as that.

In other words, the APA has a gun against the auditor's temple; you can read right off of it. Now, you can tell when the auditor suppressed the power of choice of the preclear too thoroughly and arduously — a nice point today, since a preclear has to be kept under control in the session and his power of choice yet has to be liberated.

In other words, you build a brick wall without using any bricks. That sort of a problem is what this amounts to, and yet you have to get over that problem. Because the moment that the auditor- preclear relationship alters from auditor in control to preclear in control, we have the preclear out of session and once more we do not have any case advance. So as long as power of choice can be maintained in a free state and control can also be maintained, your preclear progresses satisfactorily in some other portion of the APA — which isn't under our discussion right now, and I'm not talking to you about the APA. I'm just showing you just that one little point of „Scattered, Nervous.“

Power of choice, however, does not enter in any way into that „Scattered, Nervous“ column, but recognition does. Recognition is accompanied at all times by communication, and in the absence of communication, recognition does not occur. Sounds like one of these horribly simple, elementary things — let's build ABC blocks — but that's where we are and that's what we're studying. It's the ABC blocks of auditing. This datum is so simple that it could go grandly overlooked by the entirety of all former professions which sought to treat the mind, and was so overlooked. In a gibble-gibble-gobble-gabble fashion, psuckoanalism — analism, excuse me — made somebody go yap-yap- yap-yap-yap-yap-yap.

I notice a chap I used to respect, named Philip Wylie, has lately been psuckoanalized. And he says wonderful things happened to him over a course of a year but he didn't improve much. Now there is a case of over-communication, wrong-way flow, upset. And if you read a record, as an auditor, of one of these analyses, you'd be horrified. You would be horrified! How would you like to have somebody there run you through a tonsillectomy once, run you through an automobile accident once, run you through an exodontistry once, run you through an appendectomy once and call it a day? Boy, you'd be calling it a day as a preclear, let me assure you.

And yet these tramps, these fakers — I don't wish to use any hard terms — these sexual perverts actually have the nerve to call themselves practitioners in the field of the mind. They're not practitioners in the field of the mind at all; they're mechanics in the field of the brain, and very bad ones. I'm not actually, really saying anything to you but fact.

Why? Because from the day of Sigmund Freud onward, they kept falling over one tiny point that they never cognited on. Certain people were considered to be detached cases, and these, at the end of his twenty-eighth lecture, Freud said „are not to be helped by us.“ What are these detached cases? We look it over very care fully and we find out its a case that couldn't become the analyst. Who wants anybody to become the analyst? A world of psychoanalysts would be a gorgeous thing to behold.

Now, we Scientologists very often, some of us, make a slight error. We think Scientology is totally auditing. Scientology is not totally auditing. Scientology is a broad address to life itself.

I just received a letter from an auditor who says, „I am not working professionally in Scientology now,“ and then goes on to say that she's running an accounting business which is succeeding wonderfully because she's using Scientology in it. And she's handling all her help with this and handling all of her customers with this, and she's getting along beautifully, and she's straightened out her home with this. And it's never occurred to her that she is operating as a professional Scientologist and could simply expand that accounting business of hers to organizational accounting, with Scientology, to a level that she hasn't dreamed of yet.

She has thought of Scientology as simply auditing — just auditing a preclear to better his health. That's what she's thought of Scientology as. Now that's an awfully narrow look — an awfully narrow look. But there are those of us who do just this and do no further than this. And that is all right too, because in order to run a business with Scientology, or to conduct yourself as a professional business Scientologist, you would have to know auditing and be a very, very good auditor. Because it's essentially the action of bringing people into an awareness of themselves, their surroundings and you. Now, you see, that's an auditing operation. Now, how is it done?

The psychoanalyst never in Gods green earth achieved it. He doesn't even know its mechanics. He knows nothing about it. He breaks more ARC in less time than you can shake a stick at. He depends exclusively — exclusively — upon the individual insight of each analyst. And he says this is the reason why some of you produce results, because you have a certain individual touch which he cannot define.

I'm supposed to be all right. It's very odd, some of the psychiatrists that are really getting pushed around have gotten defensive, and they tell all sorts of stories about how insane I am and so forth. But actually, twice as many more carefully explain it to people that Dianetics and Scientology actually never amounted to anything, but „Hubbard is such a good practitioner simply because he has insight,“ and then „What he says that he does of course has no bearing on what he does at all.“ And they wipe out the subject in this fashion, don't you see? That's an untruth. It's a complete untruth.

Well, not wandering around on this, what is the common denominator of what we're doing? We've known it for years and it has achieved more and more importance to us. That common denominator is communication. Where you fail with communication on a preclear, you fail with the preclear. Where the old Egyptian priest failed with communication, he failed with his priesting. When a church or an organization gets frantic on the subject of communication, they wipe themselves out. And if they don't understand communication, they get frantic on the subject.

The Spanish Inquisition, conducted by one of the lesser cults that has sprung up here in the last ten thousand years, is a sign of a whole organization cognizant that it has somehow or another gone out of communication with all of its people, and is now insisting with fire and sword — the one thing it was founded to wipe out — in putting everybody into communication with them. They eventually became so obsessed with the idea of communicating with human beings that they were burning them and torturing them on the rack. Do you know that they would not accept without torture the statement of any witness? No statement of any witness was valid without their application of torture, and all those statements had to be signed and witnessed by the torturers before they could be accepted by a tribunal of the Spanish Inquisition. Now, what is this but an anxiety of communication?

Now, we find psychoanalysis — I have become far more contemptuous of psychoanalysis. Not too long ago I started to do an analysis of psychoanalysis in order to let auditors in on some things to avoid. I knew there were two or three things to avoid, and I thought we had better go over these and look at them rather carefully. And I wound up having to do an analysis of psychoanalysis, and I couldn't find anything in it — not a thing in it — that was therapeutic! Now, somebody sooner or later should have added up... Fifty percent of it, just by accident, should have been therapeutic, you see? But I looked over these various practices and could not discover how any of them were therapeutic, so I began to regard psychoanalysis as a pitch. It's a pitch of some sort. I won't even go so far as to say what. But this number of practitioners practicing that long certainly would understand something sooner or later.

All right. They sit there and they grind away, and they're perfectly content to grind away for five to seven years on a case, all the time getting nowhere. A case ends when its money runs out; that's how long a psychoanalysis runs.

Well, let's look at another cult that sprang up: the psychiatrist. He got into the same kind of state of mind as the Spanish Inquisition. He was unable to get into communication with his patients and so he began to torture them; simply, modern machinery is the only difference between the Spanish Inquisition and modern psychiatry. A prefrontal lobotomy was bettered by the transorbital leucotomy. And the transorbital leucotomy has been bettered now by a treatment for schizophrenia which has absolutely no slightest case history to demonstrate that it has any usefulness, but is being done. They slit the top of the skull and slide a silver plate between the two brain halves. Schizophrenia means a double personality, so they know how to handle a double personality... It doesn't do anybody any good but they do it.

Now, why do they do it? They do it because of an obsession on communication. It tells you that the psychoanalyst has failed to communicate and so he has run Freud's three or four Saturday afternoons on a patient — which is about what Freud spent; a relatively short space of time — up to a year, to two years, to five years, to seven years. And they're still at it on some kind of a grind-grind-grind basis, you see?

Psychiatrist comes along, and Bedlam was kind compared to modern psychiatric (quote) „treatment“ (unquote). Psychiatry, as far as I can understand today, as a society or social organization, is an appropriation racket. It's a racket by which they worry people about the tremendous number of insane cases, you know? And they get everybody worried enough so they appropriate billions and billions of dollars, and then this can be spent any which way. It's a racket. I say that advisedly. You took over the bills which they press through the House and Senate and through the state legislatures, and you'll find a great many false statements in these bills. But professionally they are something else: They are in an anxiety of communication.

Now, let's go out here in a bar, and let's take a look at a couple of drunks. And one of the drunks says, „I think Eisenhower is the best Democrat the Liberals ever had.“

And the other one says, „I'm for Lincoln.“ And after a while the fellow who was talking about Eisenhower and in favor of Eisenhower can't get his communication through, so he drives it through with a fist.

There's a gorgeous record made by I think it's — who is it, Cyril Smith (or whatever his name was) the English comedy-hall boy? Fantastic chap. And I think Rudy Vallee also did a record on this one time. It's „What Starts Fights in Bars.“ One of the fellows looks up at the picture over the bar and he says, „Just about the greatest man that England ever 'ad.“

And the other one says, „Who?“

And the first one says, „Gladstone! That's who.“

„Who's Gladstone?“

„He's the man in the picture.“

„What picture?“

„The picture above the bar.“

„Who's that?“

And it goes on for the entirety of a little ten-minute record. It is one of the more excruciatingly funny things I've ever heard. And they eventually wind up with a resounding crash — somebody has clobbered somebody! Now, this is simply psychiatry on the road.

The U.S. government starts falling out of communication with its citizens and begins to punish them. The citizens, unfortunately, are another entity and they fall out of communication with the U.S. government. The government is not now acknowledging communications. You write most of the government bureaus and you get nothing back. Somebody tried this recently with the most excruciatingly funny results. Somebody did it in England too and found out the British government was about the same state. Wrote in to ask to one department where he got a gun permit and received a long and involved letter (this was one of the — I think the only communication he got back) a long and involved letter that they couldn't find his gun permit. They'd looked everywhere for it and they couldn't find it. Nobody else replied.

Now, here is a state of communication. Now, this always carries dynamite with it. Continuous refusal to talk to Russia about H- bombs will wind up in an atomic war. This is for sure. You mean to say we haven't got enough guys down in Arkansas and long- winded birds out in the middle of Arizona, and so on, that we couldn't keep Russia talking about H-bombs for a long time? Sure we could. Every year we keep her talking about H-bombs is another year they're not going to get used.

The United Nations does have some benefit. I know you doubt this, but it does provide a place where people can talk. It is a communication center of some sort. The biggest mistake the United Nations has made was resorting to force of arms. It resorted to force of arms as itself and, therefore, is not well trusted at this time by peoples elsewhere in the world. Even here in the United States there are people who don't trust it. In other words, they say it can't get into communication either. Why do they know this? Because it resorted to force of arms. What is the test of „I was not in communication“? The most elementary test, most widely recognized is: There was a fight, therefore there was no communication. People instinctively realize this, but it takes us to come along and state this. It's a thing that everybody knows, that nobody states.

Well then, therefore, what is this thing called communication? If it's this important, what is it?

Well, we have a great many formulas connected with it — we have in Dianetics 55! — and in other parts of Scientology we have a great many discussions of communication. We stress the amount of importance of communication. We talk about it and talk about it and talk about it. In other words, we're talking about talking. And it's only been a relatively short time — really, just almost recently — that we started to take communication apart in the Indoctrination Courses. And right this moment... I just now had a conference with the Indoctrination Instructor on making these parts of communication even more obvious and getting them through. We have invented a new method of teaching. Basically what must be wrong here is that we're having a difficulty communicating a few very basic data which apparently are themselves sufficiently simple and restimulative that they do not themselves communicate.

Now, all that stands between an auditor and good results is his communication ability. This is all that stands between an auditor and his results.

Now, if a man is very, very good at communication, if he is excellent at communication and he is dealing in the marts of trade, let us say, he's a success! But why do we leave this on an accidental? Because some people are accidentally good at communication. We say it has something to do with tone, and it does for sure. For instance, I can pick out a flaw in communication, show you a flaw in structure between the designer and the character of a building. I can tell you what his communication bugs are by looking at a building that he designed.

A man laid out telephones — just this morning I was going over this and rather surprised somebody fairly close to me. I just looked over the telephone stations that had been selected by a certain person and then turned around and described (to this person rather close to me) that person. I described that person. And this fellow close to me said, „Have you talked to him?“

„No, I'm a Scientologist. I know about what the score was.“

He had bunched them all together in one small place so ridiculously that it was quite obvious that we had a tremendous confusion on the subject of communication. But in view of the fact that they were all in places that nobody could talk, we could immediately select the fact that this person didn't talk — confused about it — and the way he met the confusion was not to talk at all.

This was quite obvious because nobody could have talked at any of these places that they had a telephone station. You don't put telephone stations exactly at the top of a flight of stairs, for instance. Some person would have to stand there with one foot on one of the stairs in order to use a telephone. Well, he just didn't intend anybody to have any communication of any character whatsoever, and so he did that. But he put in a lot of telephone connections. There were several of them scattered around in exactly one place, not permitting any communication to the rest of the house. Then what was this all about?

It meant that he didn't talk and he had a confusion about talking. All I had to do was add that to the carelessness with which the ingresses and egresses of the actual grounds had been built, and we saw a state of resistance on the part of this individual, so we could draw him anatomically. Fellow wasn't pushed in or timid. The barriers he put up were way out there — massive barriers, way out. Add this to talking or not talking and we had a beefy, noncommunicative 1.5. And that was the person. And naturally, then, all we had to do was follow across the rest of the Tone Scale, nice as you please, and just describe a few other aspects of the fellow's life, right off the Tone Scale, and the person to whom I was speaking, of course, does not believe at this moment that I had not met, talked to, and thoroughly investigated this fellow's past.

The keynote is communication. We learned many years ago that communication was more important than affinity and reality. We learned this so well that we forgot to look at R — reality — in relationship to C. We find that R characterizes C and that you as an auditor deal with this all the time, and your understanding of R actually makes or breaks your use of C.

What is R? What is reality in the ARC triangle? That's what this amounts to. What is R? What is the exact character of reality, person-to-person?

Well, it goes like this: Above 22.0 and down to 22.0, we have R occurring by postulate. It is real, therefore it's real. That is the totality of R. We don't even have to mock anything up. Don't have to take any action at all. Whatever we characterize as real is real, and that's that. Now we go from 22.0 in a nose dive clear down to 2.0, and we have this entire thing on a gradient of agreement. The most carelessly understood agreement could become at the person's choice — at the top of this, 22.0 — a reality. He would have a reality on what the other fellow's reality was very easily. He could have, then, selective realities. He could have realities on Joe and Bill and Tom, and this would be rather easy. He could have their realities. In other words, he would have a reality on what their reality was. Got the idea?

Now, as we start on down the scale, when we get down to around 5.0, or something like that, we get the necessity of an agreement for a reality to occur; That's an absolute necessity. There must have been a complete agreement.

When we get down to 3.5 (see any banker) we know very, very well — that' s being very flattering to bankers — we know very well that at 3.5 an agreement must take the form of a contract: It must be written; it must be sealed; the witnesses, the notary or whatever else is on it must be there for that agreement to be an actual agreement.

And now, as we sag a little bit further downscale, we find that this amount of solidity has now entered into a very thorough solidity — a thorough solidity. And from 2.0 down, the only reality there is, is solid, and there is no agreement associated with it. People completely lose the agreement factor of reality. It is there, they are convinced it is there, and they know it is there so long as it is solid. Space, by the way, ceases to have any slightest reality, you might say — is no longer part of reality. We're dealing now with masses. That's all we're dealing with from 2.0 down.

Now let's take another figure which I have not precisely labeled. It is probably about 0.7, or somewhere in that vicinity, but I wouldn't positively label it at this time. It is at that point where the terminal ceases to exist and the line becomes solid, and the only reality is a solid comm line with no terminals at either end, and that is reality.

Now believe me, it took an awful lot of digging on my part to finally find this out and to recognize it for what it was. Somewhere around fear the terminals start to disappear as real. Around 1.0 the terminals start to disappear as real, and lines begin to take on something more than an emptiness. The lines themselves become tensible, feelable, sensible — the lines. And somewhere down around 0.7, the terminals are entirely gone and only the line is there. And from there on down, the line itself is solid and the terminals aren't. Do we see that? The line is solid, the terminals aren't They aren't even there.

Now we just slide a little bit further down the line and we find that reality is a confusion of communication lines to which there is no terminal connective. Reality is a confusion of communication lines.

And then we begin — at the really psychotic band of this — we begin to characterize all matter (get this carefully) as a confusion of communication lines, and no matter has any character as a terminal. What does matter consist or. It consists of a bundle of communication lines. That is matter. They're little doodle-daddles that chase in this way and that way, and they don't stand up against anything, and there isn't anything there because it's space. And it's actually — if you got enough communication lines and you jammed them in close enough together, you might get a solid mass. And if you pile up enough particles on top of something or other particles are not real either, but they're there — and you pile those up enough and stack them together enough, why, you'd finally get some solid mass. Only this wouldn't be a terminal; it'd just be a collection of things with no terminals. You got it? And you got the science of physics.

Almost anybody getting processed starts to run out physics. And they become very amused, very amused at this. You ask somebody to keep a wall from going away for a while and one of the things that happens to him is he loses all of his study of physics. The classrooms of physics start to go by, because it is not a sane teaching.

Now, that's an interesting thing. But I'm not really trying to condemn physics; I'm just saying it is a very weird look. Now, they've combined it into certain mechanics of one kind or another, which mechanics are involved with other mechanics. And because all of these things stem from the observed behavior of something that was already solid, we must assume then that the upper scale of physics must still lie below 2.0 on the Tone Scale, because we watch the behavior of solids to determine the future, see?

Machinery and that sort of thing tends to run on this level. You take somebody who is in too much contact for too long with machinery, you find out he's pretty batty. Of course, you take somebody that's in consistent contact with electronics, or something like that, and he's plain insane. I mean, the natural course of events; the little doodle-daddles running up against the thingamagubs, you know?

Now, the funny part of it is that these things have a workability and these things do function. That's the funny thing. But that just tells you how unchangeable agreement becomes at the level of solidity. That's the only thing that's a comment on — how unchangeable agreement gets when it gets down to the level of solidity. You can always count on it doing just this. You drop a marble on the floor and it'll hit the floor. Drop it toward the floor and it hits the floor. It hits the floor at 32.2 feet per second, you know, acceleration. See? That's a funny thing. Why is it always 32.2? Well, I used to respect this subject, and I'm merely acquainting you with just the fact that I don't any longer.

But this gives you a certainty, it gives you a playing field, it gives you all sorts of things if you can tolerate the nuttiness of this amount of fixation. And man's difficulty, and the difficulty above that of a thetan, is accustoming himself to this amount of constancy and no-change and invariability — without violating it. And that's a very hard contest.

But you aren't dealing, essentially, with walls. You aren't dealing, essentially, with mechanical gimmicks. You're not. You're dealing with live beings that energize and make alive, spaces and masses. You're dealing with live beings. So therefore, the laws on which you proceed are the laws of life, not the laws of death. But it so happens, oddly enough, that your laws of life on their lower harmonics run right straight in to the laws of mechanics.

It's a very fascinating thing (you ought to do it sometime as a mental exercise; it's quite amusing): You start upscaling the postulates which must lie behind any element. When you've located them you can do weird things with the element. There's a certain set of postulates lie behind each element on the periodic chart. You can do weird things with various things if you know the center postulates of their fixation, and they're all thought postulates. There isn't a single item in the physical universe I have yet located which does not stem as a solidity from some peculiar, particular consideration. And this consideration, becoming fixed and immutable, is then discovered as „real“ matter. It's quite interesting.

You would be amazed, by the way, at some of the postulates which go into (quote) „atoms“ (unquote). Really wild. That stuff is sacred — it is sacred. Of course, it has to have such a postulate inside of it; otherwise, you'd blow it up or you'd look through it or you'd communicate with it too well, and it'd be gone. So the postulate that is sitting there is that it is sacred. And it is a very, very strange thing that in this day, just as we move out of the field of religion, we find science itself becoming more or less a religion, you see, in their studies of it.

Now, it can go one of two ways. Either we get to a point where the nuclear physicist crosses himself in the sign of the beaker or something of the sort before he addresses a piece of electric wire, or we go the other way: We simply get into the total unworkability of anything. You see? He could go on with this idea because we are running out of the barriers of religion, and even science itself is becoming less and less a religious subject — although they're trying to put it into a mystery with atomics and so on. It could bypass this entirely. And if it bypassed this entirely, I'm afraid you'd find some of the immutable laws of science getting nonfunctional. See how this could be?

Somebody would start communicating, maybe even obsessively, far, far too well with some object or something of the sort, and we would get some changes occurring with regard to it, because he's no longer restrained by the idea that it's sacred and it was made by God. That's the one thing, evidently, that proofs the MEST universe from disappearing: God made it, He's somebody else, and it's sacred. And you mustn't come that close to it.

This is so far from a theoretical subject — so far from a theoretical subject, you can actually bluntly ask a preclear about his relationships with atoms, let us say, or with material objects. You can just address the subject quite bluntly, and you get a fantastic auditing question when you do this. It's an interesting question. The auditing question is „What would happen if you could safely go into communication with everything?“ or some paraphrase of that question. It's a question you yourself can ponder. It's terrifically therapeutic. You can ask yourself, „Would it be safe for me to go into communication with everything?“ That's kind of an elementary question; doesn't carry the whole punch. You would say, „What if I could go safely into communication with everything? What would be the result of that?“ It's fascinating, you see? It's a tremendously interesting question. It's the center pin on why the universe is still here!

Now, there was a tag still hanging out. We found out that you talked too much with a preclear — two-way comm — and you'd start as-ising too much havingness. That's one of the little points in there.

Well, I'm not going to attempt to solve for you the total answers to those nice little questions concerning what would happen if I safely went into communication with everything or would it be safe for me to go into communication with everything or what would be the end result of a total communication, or so forth — it's just a question to ponder. You'll find out at once that stuff is sacred.

I don't know quite what you're supposed to do. I suppose you're supposed to draw a ring around your head or something when you look at it. I imagine that the physicist's idea of an atom probably comes from some religious symbol of some kind or another that's way back on the track, and he's probably simply dramatizing it. Instead of crossing himself, a fellow wound his finger around his head a couple of times. And we have that today. We don't wind our finger around our head like this, though. We wind our finger this way, which is a universal symbol for nuts!

All right. The power contained in communication is, by and large, the active power contained in the action of auditing. The real power of Scientology is in the knowledge of existence which it contains. But when you get into an action, a doingness called auditing, the power is found to be resident in communication.

Now let's look this over very rapidly again. I want you to learn this — not to hang yourself with it. You don't have to make up your mind that this is the way it is because Ron says it's this way. That has nothing to do with this whatsoever. I want you to look this over and see if you too don't come to this conclusion that from way down south, the earliest rung of communication, up to about 0.7 or thereabouts we don't have an absence of terminals and an isness of communication lines. The lines are real and solid. The terminals aren't. Above that we have, of course, for a short space there, we have the terminals and the lines solid, and then we have the lines less solid and the terminals more solid. And we get our reality then on just a solid terminal, and eventually the reality also includes the space. But by the time we've moved into space also, we have also moved into the lower rungs of agreement and affinity. And as we move up with affinity, then, we see that reality takes on the complexion simply of an agreement.

Now, this should tell you at once that it doesn't do any good to use a communication bridge on a psycho. Why? A communication bridge simply establishes agreement. That's all it establishes, doesn't it? So it establishes the reality of a session if you can establish the agreement with the preclear. But if the preclear's reality is not on the level of agreement, what good does it do you to establish an agreement? We find, four questions deep, he's out of session. Why? The agreement has gone by the boards because it wasn't quite real in the first place. He'll even claim you're changing the auditing command when you're not changing it at all. His agreement, he thought, was on some other auditing command. These are all symptoms of a low tone.

So what good does it do you to establish agreement? Well, it does just as much good as to take somebody down here that's a fairly hot athlete, and you postulate to him the reality of an opponent who is running the race with him. But the opponent doesn't appear. We simply tell him the opponent is there, and he's going to run the race with this opponent. We've postulated it, don't you see? He doesn't accept that other opponent. He couldn't play a game that well. He'll argue with us. He will say, „Tha-tha-tha- tha.“ Now, you'd have to make an agreement with him to pretend that another opponent was there that ran the hundred yards in eleven seconds, and he's going to race against this theoretical, pretended opponent. And you and he agree that that opponent is there and you're all set.

Now where'd he lie? He was just above — he was well above 2.0 and in pretty good shape (athletes normally are) and he was in pretty good shape and we therefore could get a complete reality on it. He'd say, „That's a good idea. There's nothing wrong with that.“ That's practically routine. Somebody is always mocking up a pretended opponent for him. He thinks that's all right, agrees the fellow is there.

Now, of course, if you were really up above 22.0, I'm afraid that you would simply put an opponent alongside of him who would appear suddenly. And if you were not careful, you might clothe him in the days of ancient Greece or something of the sort in order to run this race. And you might not be too careful with your mock-up and you might mock him up with a Greek stance, which is quite different. The Greeks used to make running very difficult; they would hold their hands up and so on. One of the reasons they held their arm positions is they were not trying to make speed so much as effective advance. They weren't running; they were attacking, don't you see? And when you can run with your arms up, you can throw a spear while you're running and you can do all sorts of things. It was a war game.

Well, if you did that and it suddenly appeared alongside of him, I'm afraid you'd shatter his composure. Well, his game sense isn't good enough to accept even the knowledge that somebody could do this. His game sense is not that good.

Well, you just bluntly tell him there is somebody running alongside of him, and he wouldn't understand you. He'd think you were crazy.

At a lower level, you just tell somebody, „We're in agreement. We're going to do this auditing session. I want to make an agreement with you“; he thinks you're crazy. Whoever heard of anybody agreeing with anybody? According to him, it's an effort to pick an agreement. And that's a rough thing. So we go down to solids.

Now, if you sit across from the normal, run-of-the-mill preclear as a solid body, why, he knows you're there and you're perfectly real to him. He knows you're there.

You, by the way, will just have to get some reality on the fact that people do become unreal. I'm sorry to have to make what appears at first glance to be a stupid statement. But you'll just have to get some reality on the fact that people can face people who are completely unreal to them, because the level of unreality of this person they're facing is an unreality that you yourself would probably find very amusingly thin. They look right through people. People aren't there at all. There is no body sitting in the chair.

Now look, up here, there's no body sitting on that ledge, you see? Unless you mock one up there's no body sitting here on this ledge. Well, just look at this spot I'm pointing at up here. Do you see no body there at all? Well, that's the unreality of a person in fear! That's what they see when you're sitting there!

Now, I do a dirty trick on an auditor every once in a while when I'm processing him. He gets down to a fag end of apathy and below scale and don't care and oh-my-God degradation — he sounds something this deep in the bank. And I'm liable to hit him — because he's an auditor — I'm liable to tap him a little bit on the knee, and I say, „You remember that point, will you? After — we'll talk about it after the session. You remember it.“ This is a dirty trick to throw this in on that point. Then we run it out. After it's all over I say, „Do you remember that point?“ and he'll fish around.

„Oh, yeah! Bleeah!“

I say, „How'd you feel?“

„Well, I don't know. My God!“

„Well, did you feel like you could do anything? That you could act or anything like that?“

„Act! Well, at that point you couldn't consider acting! Just being is so intolerable that you couldn't tolerate the idea of acting.“

Say, „Good! Now you know how some of your low-scale preclears feel all the time, while you're auditing them!“

And the guy sits there and he says, „That's not possible! Nobody could feel that way all the time!“

Few days later he audits somebody, and all of a sudden he recognizes this flop, you know? The person comes in, they flop. And they kind of plaintively say something or other and so on. And all of a sudden, why, the auditor gets the idea, „Ahhhh, yeah. No kidding? This poor dog feels that way? Well, so help me God, let's see if we can't fish him out of that trough of despond.“ See? „Let's see if we can spot something around here or do something he can do.“ They don't immediately say, „Well, now, let's see. Probably it's his mother. How about splitting the valence? The best way we can go about this case is I will run a technique on him where he mocks up and pretends his mother is shouting at him, and he shouts at his mother, and we will get this all going, you know?“ And he tells the preclear to do this, and the preclear (quote) „does it.“ Oh, no, the preclear doesn't do it. The preclear says, „Duhhh. What a horrible thing to contemplate.“

„Uh-huh, did you do that?“

(„Well boy, I certainly couldn't answer him no, because he'd just make me do something more difficult.“) „Uh-huh.“

You get where that preclear is living? His highest defense is to tell you that he executed. And he can even get quite industrious at this, since he can't get industrious in any other direction.

I do that to an auditor once in a while, see?

All right. Now, how about this empty ledge up here? They know a voice is talking to them. Now, I'm not now talking about insane people! Please! I'm talking about Johnny Q. Public that's walking up and down the streets and is driving automobiles. How do they ever get in a state of mind where they run over somebody? The person isn't there! Get the idea? Accidents happen when people are tired, exhausted, mentally upset, emotionally disturbed, and they've been cast into some low-toned category or another. One or the other parties present are in this state of mind.

I had a young lady run into me one time when I was sitting calmly parked, waiting for a stoplight to change. And the young lady passed a car and came across the crosswalk and then, where there wasn't even a road, simply turned into the side of my station wagon with a crunch. It was an interesting thing for anybody to do, if you are interested in such things. But after we picked up some of the pieces and got her in a little bit better frame of mind, and so forth, why, she gave me her card — her father, rather, who was riding with her gave me her card (and you all heard about this particular accident; happened years ago) — and her name was Wanda, the Psychic Reader. And she was „wanda-ing,“ all right. But the girl was tired, the girl was upset and, already dabbling around with too much mysticism, was of course at a mental stretch. And there was no car there; the road was just placed twelve feet wrong — I knew what was wrong with her. Cop came around, other people kind of yow-yowing at her in one way or the other.

I said to her — confidentially, I said, „Did the road move?“

And she looked at me and says, „It's back where it was now. It went back again.“ She was looking at a highway that was shifting.

In other words, the crossroad that she wanted to turn on moved over to be twelve feet further on than it was and then moved back to where it now was again, and she just took her choice and, you know, she turned where it was. Now, you'd always turn where the road was too, wouldn't you? And she turned where the road was. You got the idea? And there was no car sitting there because cars weren't real to her.

Understand this. Understand it and you'll get results in auditing. Go on and fight it and protest against it too much, and so on, and eventually some day, why, we'll all be gnawing at people's brains, trying to get the thetan out. You get the idea? Because this is the easy one; this is the easy one.

Now, let me tell you something: Your hand is a communication line if it is lying under somebody's elbow. Your hand is a communication line.

Now, the funny part of it is, people have enough dead spots in the bank — even a person who behaves, normally, in good condition, under auditing can be discovered to have enough dead spots that they can actually pick up a resurge by having somebody do a contact with them, which they can tolerate, of using the arm for the communication line. Do you got that? Now, first you establish a presence of some sort or another. This you do by regulating the feelingness which they're in contact with, see? You could take them by the elbow and shake their elbow just a little bit, see? That stimulates their feelingness, doesn't it? So you're monitoring their feelingness, got it?

First reality: „Something is monitoring my feelingness.“ Got that?

Next reality: „There's a hand monitoring my feelingness.“

Next reality: „A communication line composed of the hand and the arm is running between me and something.“

Next reality achieved: „I am here. Here's a communication line of one or two comm lines. And the two comm lines are here, that's obvious, and I have two comm lines that meet these.“ We're doing mimicry by contact.

In other words... Put your hand up here a second. Now, would you follow my motion and contribute to it. All right. Okay. That's it. All right. That's it. Thank you.

You got that? We had our hands in contact, and we did a mimicry whereby the person was following the auditor's motion in contact. We had a solid comm line, didn't we, composed of their arm and my arm — other person's arm and my arm. All right. See? Now, that's building a comm line. And having established the comm line, you then establish the existence of a terminal on your end, and a terminal on his end, and he and you become real. And „Scattered, Nervous“ shoots from way below the line, clear up above the center point.

I don't care how many hours it takes you to establish it. You can run „Look at me. Who am I?“ with your hands. It's a contact process — as a contact process, you see? Instead of sitting there verbally saying, „Look at me. Who am I? Look at me. Who am I? Look at me. Who am I?“ you jog their elbow. You get the idea? You're holding on to them. You show them a hand and say, „Whose is this?“ Then you show them a hand you're holding on with. You say, „Whose hand is that?“ And they say, „Look, there's a hand around my arm.” Then they notice their own arm. Then they noticed one of yours. You get the idea?

Now, the funny part of it is, its such positive communication that any high-toned person can harmonic all the way to the bottom. Almost any case has a tendency to resurge if you do this properly. It's quite amazing. It's quite amazing.

You run „Look at me. Who am I?“ then, with solid lines. Then you finally run „Look at me. Who am I?“ with solid terminals, and you'll get somewhere. But there is your elementary beginning of communication — a solid comm line. Not a solid terminal, but a solid comm line. And picking it up from there you can, by gradients, carry a case all the way to the top.

Thank you.

[End of Lecture]