In Dianetics we have a magic triangle — only we don’t call it a magic triangle. It is just called ARC.

The first thing I would like to do is give you a very quick review of what was covered earlier on the subject of motion and emotion. These two things are very closely related. I want to give you a very precise example of how motion and emotion go together.

We find that the item known as life energy and the item known as physical-universe energy are not the same. They have some parallels; otherwise they would not be able to unite. They have a vibrational level in common, or they would not be able to unite and react with each other.

A human being has two strips on either side of his brain. Each strip is a duplicate of a human being. It is actually a little man hanging by his heels, a thin sheet of nerve fiber. Actually, they seem to be switchboards. The hand is very exaggerated and the tongue is very exaggerated, but otherwise these are quite close to a real human being.

But electricity — that stream of electronic impulses surrounded by a magnetic field, which takes place because there is a magnetic field or because there are impulses or for some other reason — and what we call, in Dianetics, theta are energies of an entirely different kind. In order to emphasize this, we make it fairly plain that we are not talking about a physical-universe energy by saying we consider theta to be exterior to the physical universe. Actually, it seems to have its own codes, its own behavior, its own wavelengths and even its own time. Theta time and theta universe time are not physical-universe time. The times are different.

One of these goes to the motors — you might say the muscles. That is the motor switchboard. The other is evidently the thought switchboard; at any rate, that is a good analogy.

There is such a thing as theta matter. Theta matter would be an idea. If you don’t think there is such a thing as theta matter, just think for a moment of the culture of a nation. That culture is actually thought and ideas which have become solidified into patterns. You can even plot whether a thing is still a fluid idea or whether it is a fixed idea.

This motor switchboard is very interesting. A fellow thinks, “Move the index finger,” and the thought “Move the index finger” causes the sensory switchboard to wiggle. First there is a thought impulse, and then he gets a buildup — possibly on the order of a photoelectric relay system, whereby a thousandth of a watt can build up to a kilowatt. So maybe only a thousandth of a watt of thought permits the sensory index finger to move, and possibly some mechanism in there builds it up to maybe a watt of current, which transfers down through the nerve trunks and out to the fellow’s index finger, and the index finger moves. In other words, he thinks, “Move the index finger”; that registers on the sensory switchboard and kicks over into a higher magnitude on the motor switchboard, and the index finger moves.

All of this is very nebulous. One of these fine days we will know a lot more about it. We didn’t make any real advance, however, in the study of aberration, the human mind and behavior until we recognized that there was such a thing.

Now, these switchboards are certainly more complex than anything Bell Laboratories is building or working on.

Now, although it was not described (since it was mainly talked about by people who did not know how to use or treat or describe energy as energy), this item — theta — has been talked about, discussed and taken for granted for some thousands of years. It is woven in and out of philosophy to such a degree that there is hardly a book of philosophy which does not mention in some way the energy of life — and then run away very happily and play skip-jack or bean bag, ‘ and not have anything more to do with this. The most adventurous fellow in the past century or so on this subject was Bergson, and he called it elan vital; he gave it a label and then he hastily went off and left it.

A professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois did a good piece of work. (I am very glad he did that; it makes it so the whole field isn’t completely barren.) He figured out that if the human mind were done in terms of modern electronics — if you built a machine with vacuum tubes and electricity which could do a lot of the things the human mind could do — it would require enough electricity to light the city of New York, it would require Niagara Falls to cool it and it would require, if vacuum tubes were one cent apiece, a million dollars’ worth of vacuum tubes. The life of a vacuum tube lets you figure out how long that machine would run uninterrupted, doing computations and calculations such as the human mind will do: it would run uninterrupted for one eighteenth of one second. Then you would have to replace a tube.

Now, if you look at it from an engineering viewpoint you will see that this energy has to have vibrational rates and that it can form into wave patterns which have tone, volume and quality. In other words, it has all the requisites of an energy; it can be described to some degree. As soon as we began to describe it that way in Dianetics we began to get much better results; things began to happen and things we couldn’t understand before were understood better.

This machine, this computer we have, is a very interesting one. It does all these various computations, handles all of these various motor impulses, and it takes three-dimensional television in color and sound, records it and makes tapes for replay of those things. It does an enormous amount of memory storage and so forth, and in addition to all that it is portable. So you can see that there is quite a piece of equipment here which is all boiled down into a small package. That is why hardly anyone knows anything of structure. They can get into the brain with a probe or something of the sort and wiggle part of it and some other part of it will wiggle, but this is experimentation on the level of crudity of galvanometers and frogs. If you take a dead frog and shoot him full of static electricity he will jump; you get a nerve reflex action. Very little is known about this.

We know quite a bit about it, actually. The energy of life unites with the physical universe in such a way as to form an organism. And an organism is part physical universe and part theta; it is motivated by theta.

These assumptions being made seem reasonable, although I am taking this data from a field which is in poor repute as far as accuracy is concerned — psychiatry, psychology. Nevertheless these panels would seem-to answer no other purpose than just that. They give you a picture of a switchboard system by which every nerve line in the body can connect up.Every nerve in the body, every nerve ending in the arms, the legs, the torso and so forth, seems to have a connection in here. This makes a great big switchboard which is running on a certain amount of current.

Theta has an energy value. It has three component parts: one is affinity, one is reality and one is communication, so we have a triangle — A-R-C. Those are three parts of theta. They are interdependent to such a degree that if you interrupt any one of them you will interrupt the flow of the other two. Theta is flowing as ARC.Let’s take affinity: It is obvious there is such a thing as affinity. You can call it, sloppily, love, but that is hardly descriptive enough. Affinity is the sympathetic coexistence of two things or two parts of the same energy or something of the sort.

Now, in order to make this thing work there has to be some kind of a buildup system. This is the only reason for these two strips that I can see, because the medical textbooks have so little concept of what it takes to make an item run that they just keep assigning things the most beautiful, wonderful names you ever saw in your life, and they don’t tell you what these functions are.

When we take a tuning fork in the physical universe and strike it and it starts vibrating at its particular frequency, another tuning fork with the same frequency will begin to vibrate too, though it has not been touched. If you damp the first one out you find the other tuning fork is ringing. They are in the same level, so therefore you could say they have sympathetic vibration.

Certainly we have a computer system in here — at least the switchboard of one — because we don’t even know that thought is done in the body. We know that there is a system running and we know that the nerve fibers do carry something very like electricity. That, interestingly enough, doesn’t seem to be life force. It seems to be current force. It is definitely physical universe energy of some sort and it travels at the rate of about ten feet a second along these nerve lines.

If you were dealing with theta you would say they had affinity, they were similar, they were parts of the same and so on.

That is why the brontosaurus had to develop a sub-brain in his tail. He was about eighty feet long, and some tyrannosaurus would come along in a puckish mood and stamp on the brontosaurus’ tail, but the brontosaurus wouldn’t know about it until quite a few seconds later. So he would turn around and there would be a piece of his tail gone; this was nonsurvival. To move that tail, he would have to think “Impulse received from tail.... Pain.... Move tail!” The impulse would go back to the tail, but by that time it would be too late — the tail would be gone.

Two men talking with each other either are in affinity with each other or they aren’t. If they are not, they will argue. If they are in affinity with each other, two other things have to be there: they have to have agreed upon a reality and they have to be able to communicate that reality to each other.

The structure of this whole nervous system that goes along with mammals, reptiles and so forth very rapidly becomes nonoptimum above the size of a man. Actually, even a man is just a little bit too big for an efficient level on this system. It takes a man about a sixth of a second to pull his toe out of the way.

When you speak of reality, physical-universe reality, it is a very interesting thing. I told you in an earlier lecture there is really no such thing as the physical universe; there is a motion. But we sense something; we see something with our eyes, we hear something with our ears, we smell something with our nose, we touch something with our hands, and we decide, then, that there is something. But the only way we know it is through our senses and those senses are artificial channels. We are not in direct contact with the physical universe; we are in contact through our sense channels with it.

So, here you have this switchboard. “I” thinks something and that goes into an impulse. Now, you have probably seen pictures of these big telephone exchanges with all the transcontinental calls going through the switchboard, and there is a very angry and efficient supervisor and all the girls are working at top speed with their hands full of cables and lines, plugging them in and saying “Number, please,” and so forth. That would be about the amount of activity it would take to run this switchboard, because there are so many structures and actions involved in getting a message down to a channel.

Those sense channels can be blunted. For instance, a man loses his eyesight, and as far as he is concerned there is no light or shape or color or depth perception to the physical universe. It still has a reality to him, but it is not the same reality as another person’s. In other words, he is unable to conceive a physical universe completely without sight. One can’t conceive these things without senses. So the physical universe is seen through these senses.

I don’t think there are enough plugs and so forth at a local telephone exchange to handle as many message impulses as it would require to make a simple muscle movement. Stop and think of the number of muscles, the number of bones and the number of joints involved, the skin tension, the endocrine rebalance, the energy, the oxygen input — on and on and on. The whole body is kept informed about the body’s operation continually.

You and I can take a look at a table and agree it is a table — it is made out of wood, it is brown. We agree to that. Of course, you understand that when I say “brown” and you hear “brown,” brown actually to you may be purple but you have agreed that it is brown because all your life people have been pointing to this color vibration and saying “brown.” It might be really red to me, but I recognize it as brown. So we are in agreement although we might be seeing something different. But we agree this is brown, this is wood, this is a table. Now a fellow walks in the door, comes up and takes a look at this thing and says, “Huh! An elephant!”

I wanted to impress that upon you as a complex system which is nevertheless very simple. The system is simply this: “I” receives a stimulus from somewhere in the body. He does a computation on this system according to past experience or education or genetic memory. (It is hard to keep from personifying the awareness-of-awareness unit, “I.”) This impulse comes in from the body. Possibly there are other switch impulses that come in straight from the sight to this sensory panel without coming through the motor panel, although you have to go to the motor panel in order to shift the eyes. The message coming in through the eyes probably goes in the sensory panel.

You say, “It’s a table, see? Elephants are . . .” “No — it’s an elephant.”

Now, this unit probably works both ways. As the impulse comes in, this unit probably takes the current impulse down to where “I,” which is very sensitive, can register. The impulse would have a certain intensity and it would be broken down into the sensory strip, so that a watt coming in, by the time it gets to the sensory panel, may have gone down to a millionth of a watt, and then it goes over to “I” as a little impulse.

So we say he is crazy — he doesn’t agree with us. Do we attempt further to communicate with him? No. He doesn’t agree with us. He has not agreed upon this reality. Are we in affinity with him? No. We say, “Go downstairs and call the little men in the white coats. This guy is crazy.” We don’t like him. We don’t want to be around him.

“I” thinks something, it goes out and builds up into the motors and something happens in the body. “I” puts in an impulse to this sensory panel that says “Thumb nose at Bill,” and this builds up to a higher impulse and then all the messages necessary to complete this action go out.

Now let’s say you and I are arguing, and you say, “That table is made out of wood,” and I say, “No, it is not. It’s made out of metal which is painted to look like wood.” We start arguing about this; we are trying to reach a point of agreement and we can’t reach this point of agreement. Another fellow comes up and takes a look at the table and says, “As a matter of fact, the legs are painted to look like wood, but the top is wood and it is brown and it is a table.” You and I then reach an agreement. We feel an affinity. All of a sudden we feel friendly and we feel friendly toward him. He solved the problem. We have reached an agreement and we go into communication.

If you are wondering why I am stressing this, you are looking right now at the very heart and soul of aberration. It would take a lot of channels to resolve all the computations and put them into effect, and this switchboard could really get fouled up.

How do we go into communication with each other now?

As long as “I” can receive stimuli, resolve the stimuli according to past experience and return an impulse to answer the situation or plan an impulse which can go into effect, “I” remains in control of the situation. But remember that “I” is not a hundred-thousand-watt station; as powerful as the awareness-of-awareness center is, the whole brain operates on 2. watts, so the amount that can be handled there is not a very high volume.

There is a theta-level operation of some sort or other. There is too much data too badly evaluated about life energy; a lot of it is bogus data, a lot of it is nonsense. A lot of it may have some truth in it. But nobody has ever gotten into that bin of knowledge and really scrambled around and held up this item and that item and gotten the most important items together and formulated and organized them. There is spiritualism, clairvoyance, clairaudience, ESP, faith healing and so on — all sorts of manifestations. There is a tremendous quantity of disrelated, discoordinated, mostly discredited, data about this, but it is very interesting that man keeps on talking about it, and he has been talking about it evidently for fifty thousand years. That bin is really active as a bin of knowledge. Nobody has ever gotten it lined up, but it is very active. Rhinel has awful arguments with some of the other people in this field. They write letters back and forth all the time and none of them know a thing about what they are talking about, but are they having a hard time trying to reach an agreement on what they don’t know!

This load quite normally, let’s say, is along the line of a tenth of a watt, which steps down to a millionth of a watt when it hits “I.” Now suppose that all of a sudden two watts came over that line and hit this switchboard and this damping operation here were insufficient, so that “I” got hit with a tenth of a watt. What would happen is that “I” would blank out. There is evidently a fuse system in there and the fuses blow. But these switchboards, under a sudden impulse of that character, are not well protected.

The amount of dissension in the field of religion, for instance, should demonstrate to you that it is a level of abstraction about which very little agreement can be reached; therefore there is very little affinity in brotherly love sometimes.

Suppose lightning hit a telephone line and there were insufficient fuses on that telephone line, and you had a couple of thousand plugs in a couple of thousand switchboard holes and the lightning hit in such a way as to carry through those lines and fuse those plugs in those holes. Those calls are then in forevermore. That is an analogy of what happens when pain strikes the brain.

When it comes to an agreement, we can obtain agreement on the physical universe. Mr. A and Mr. B might possibly have a communication channel through the theta level. There are some indications that that exists, though it is not very positively identifiable. But their main communication channel is through the physical universe.

Pain creates an energy impulse in the nervous system. The whole nervous system, by the way, was designed to handle, evidently, the impulse of energy and output of energy created on the injury of cells.

Mr. A has an idea. He puts the idea on the sensory switchboard, it goes over onto the motor switchboard and the vocal cords operate and put air into vibration. This vibration goes over, reaches Mr. B’s eardrum and puts it into vibration. It hits the motor switchboard, hits the sensory switchboard and goes in, and Mr. B gets it. Now, if Mr. A has used words on which there has been an earlier agreement on what the physical universe is (there might have been a disagreement on that; one might have been from North Carolina and the other might have been from Nebraska), they can get into agreement. But they are getting into agreement via the physical universe.

Matter in general, when condensed, stretched, stamped on, pulled apart and so forth, generates a current. A small group of cells, when struck, will generate a current. You can actually put a galvanometer on one. I imagine if you hooked up a couple of electrodes to a frog and hit him with a sledgehammer it would really make a galvanometer jump. That experiment was overlooked when they were putting electricity into the dead frog and making the dead frog jump. What is the matter with hitting the frog with a sledgehammer and measuring the current that comes out of him? You would find there was current there.

When Mr. A says “Up,” that sense message goes through that channel and strikes Mr. B. But if Mr. A had an idea of an elevator moving when he said “Up,” and if Mr. B receives the idea and he has the idea of a rocket going up — different velocities of up — they can get into an argument. Mr. A says, “I think it ought to go up,” and Mr. B sees a rocket going and that would be much too fast to send this item up, so he says, “No.” Mr. A says to himself, “An elevator is nice and slow,” so he says, “It could go up,” and the other fellow says, “No! “ Then they argue for a while, and then they finally get to a point where Mr. B realizes that Mr. A is talking about an escalator; he can see this escalator motion and he gets the idea of up. In other words, the word up means different things to them, but they can get those things enough into approximation — they get agreement — to have a reality. Then they stop lambasting each other.

In other words, cells release current when injured. This is survival. This current or impact is damaging. In order to keep an injured cell from damaging its immediate neighbors, then, the body evidently built up a nerve conduit system to take away this energy. This energy required a shock absorber, so specially adapted cells were developed that could stand such an impulse. A big cushion finally came into being at that point of the body which is the most liable to impact — normally the forward end, the head.

But when they were arguing — ”No! You don’t mean up, you mean up!” and the other fellow was saying, “Of course I mean up! But you don’t mean up, I mean up,” and so on — their affinity was down and their communication lines were pretty jagged.

The body not only developed a terrifically twisted nerve system there to absorb impact, but also got a skull to protect it, which is a special kind of nerve cell re-formed into bone. If you looked that up you would find out they have known that for a long time, but they never added it up. I am just giving you a postulate as to what happens.

As soon as they reach this agreement, though, they say, “Well, of course I said up and you know it’s up too, and you’re a good fellow and I’d like to go off and have a beer with you, and everything is fine. I love you dearly. We’re in communication. I want to tell you about my wife....” They have an agreement — ARC.

Injury, then, shoots a current through the body and it gets absorbed throughout the nervous system. The nervous system is actually a blunting, a shock absorber or something of the sort for those inputs. When “I” starts to make an action and gets a heavy impulse in return, there is three or four — maybe a hundred — times the energy that “I” could put out at that moment. “I” can put out a millionth of a watt or something like that, and he is putting out this impulse and getting an impulse back which is very high. This system is not sufficient to fuse it out so “I” loses control of the organism and goes unconscious. The intended action of “I” has been swamped by a muscular demand, position and action from the exterior.

In order for there to be communication, there must be agreement and affinity. In order for there to be affinity, there must be agreement on reality and communication. In order for there to be reality and agreement, there must be affinity and communication — one, two, three. If you knock affinity out, communication and reality go. If you knock reality out, communication and affinity will go. If you knock communication out, they will all go.

Now, just as “I” can say “Move arm” and this impulse goes on through and moves the arm, so does the arm with a pain impact get moved; the whole system will just operate backwards and “Move arm” will fuse in on this switchboard. When “I” tries to move the arm against that impact it locks up the switchboard.

This is the life energy. If you take a man and thoroughly disagree with him, go out of communication with him and withdraw all affinity from him from his fellow human beings, he will die. You could actually disagree with a man to an extent where he would die.

Let me give you a much better analogy. Let’s take a little guy, and he has a job. He lives in a cubicle and this cubicle has a number of hoses coming into it and it is this person’s job to keep these holes plugged up. He doesn’t do too badly; a squirt of water comes in and he goes over and plugs up that hole, and then a squirt of water comes in somewhere else and he plugs up that hole, and a squirt comes in another place and he plugs that one up. He is being very successful. But all of a sudden one plug blows, so he plugs it up again. Another one blows and he rushes over and plugs that up. And then some of the others blow and he plugs those up. He can go along for a long time plugging up these holes.

There are several ways to block a communication line. I won’t go into all of those, but one of them is to cut it, another one is to make it so painful that the person receiving it will cut it, and another one is to put so much on it that it jams. When it comes to communication, then, you could make it painful, you could refuse it or you could put so much on the line that he cuts it off. Those are three very important things to know about a communication line. Also, that communication must be good communication — the necessary data sent in the necessary direction and received.

But what happens with him? He will get sore after a while. First he will get antagonistic — he will say, “To heck with these darn things! You stay plugged!” Then he will get mad and he won’t care whether he plugs them thoroughly or not, just as long as he plugs them savagely.

All that communication will be about, by the way, is reality and affinity — reality and affinity concerning the physical universe. The discussions and so forth will be whether there is or is not affinity, or whether there is or is not agreement and where the agreement is particularly disagreed with on the physical universe.

And then he will get scared that he is going to get swamped, because that place is going to fill up. So he will plug holes at a great rate but he still won’t be able to keep them all plugged. He will finally say “To heck with it” and sit down.

As far as affinity is concerned, a research team took a bunch of forty babies in Boston; twenty of those babies, taken at random, were sent home after they were born and they all got along fine. The other twenty babies were left in the hospital, and nobody went near them except to feed them; those babies that remained got ill. There was no affinity.

That would be “I” on current returns, if these hoses were current returns which were coming back in to the central awareness-of-awareness unit. “I” is trying to compute and figure things out. But every once in a while as life goes along he will get too heavy an impact — he will get knocked unconscious or operated on by a doctor, or some other calamity will occur.

Now, affinity can be built up in a number of ways. You can talk to people and build up an affinity with them. But remember this is communication, not just talk. There are many, many ways to communicate. Two people can sit and look at each other and be in communication. One of the nicest ways to go into communication is by tactile. You can pet a cat, and the cat all of a sudden starts to purr; you are in communication with the cat. You can reach out and shake a person’s hand and you are in communication with him because tactile has taken place. The old-school boys with the tooth-and-claw idea that “everybody hates everybody really, and everybody is on the defensive and that is why we have to force everybody into being social animals” said that the reason men shake hands is to show there is no weapon in the hand. No, it is a communication. And in France, Italy, Spain and so forth they throw their arms around each other; there is lots of contact and that contact is communication.

It is just a little more complex than this. These two panels in the head — these switchboards — get jammed up. They fix up the fuses. The fuses have to get heavier and heavier because experience has dictated that the pain coming through is pretty heavy. So these fuses have to be kept pretty heavy and the ability of the impulse to filter through isn’t good.

If a person is badly out of communication and you reach out and pat him on the shoulder and he dodges slightly (he considers all things painful) even though he doesn’t go on, you will find he is also out of communication vocally. You try to say something to him — ”You know, I think that’s a pretty good project, Project 342A, and I think we ought to go along with it” — and he will sit there and look at you and nod, and then he will go down and complete Project 36. You say, “Project 36 has just been thrown out. We weren’t going to go through with that at all,” but he hardly knows you are talking to him,He dodges everything you say. Or he may talk to you so hard and so long you don’t get a chance to tell him you want to do Project 342A; that is dodging you, too. In other words, he is out of communication with you; therefore his affinity is low and he won’t agree with you either. But if you can get him into agreement, communication will pick up and affinity will pick up.

This whole structure has to get to a point finally where these heavy pain impacts can be stopped. The only way to do that is to arrest them as they come in. So these switchboards don’t let through quite so much in the way of energy, because there has been a lot of pain; there is pain on this switchboard. They make it a little bit harder for energy to get through and hit “I.” “I” will then go unconscious less, but the same thing happens in reverse: “I” has a harder time getting an impulse out. As time goes on, “I” starts to operate with more and more realisation that he is going to be kicked back every time, so a light order doesn’t go out; it has to be a fairly heavy order.

This is about the most important data I have ever run across in the field of interpersonal relations, control and management. Super-bizarre techniques which do not have this as a precise working axiom are apt to fail — as often as they do fail right now.

He can’t say cheerfully, “Would the right index finger please move.” No, he gets to the point after a while where he is saying, “The right index finger had better move!” He has to put out a heavier impulse, in other words. He has to make this impulse heavier, actually, to get the right finger to move.

Let’s take a group of men in a room, and you are talking to them; you are trying to reach agreement with them. If those men are pretty spooky and pretty low on the tone scale, you can advance the most beautiful, wonderful reasons under the sun, and they will still remain antagonistic toward you. Are you communicating with them? That is the question. The low-toned individual doesn’t take a high-toned communication. If you are not communicating with them, they are not agreeing with you and you haven’t any affinity with them, and they are not going to agree with or do what you say. They are going to kick back at you one way or the other. There are ways to get into communication with that group.

After a while, so much pain has come back and his switchboard has been arrested so much — his actions have been so impotent, you might say, from time to time — that the awareness-of-awareness post of command will begin to consider that there is nothing there but resistance. So every time an order goes through, he puts it all ahead flank. There is no more of this coasting up and down the river very nicely; it is all ahead flank all the time. He says, “Move, and I mean move!” He turns on the endocrine system at the same time — anger. He demonstrates anger in practically every motion because he has to tone everything up; he has to pull up the endocrine system to actually almost an emergency level twenty-four hours a day just to get his messages out, just to get his computations out and get them resolved physically. Of course, as soon as he starts that, stuff comes back more heavily and he will go down the line to fear, he will go down to grief, he will go down to apathy, in direct ratio to the amount of jam-up there is on this switchboard. This switchboard gets badly jammed up after a while and “I” can’t get it out.

You can take any group of workmen — any group of men working on a similar project — and take one look at the foreman and the men and tell whether or not these people are in communication with one another. If they aren’t, they are not working as a coordinated team. They are not in communication, perhaps, because they are not agreed on what they are doing.

Also, there is a circuit response in there whereby other elements can command the body. When the pain made the arm move, this was more forceful than “I” trying to make the arm move, and as a result the exterior world began to command the body. The exterior world began to command the body, not “I.”

All you have to do is take the group, put them together and say, “What are you guys doing?” You don’t ask the foreman, you ask the whole group and the foreman, “What are you guys doing?”

The decline of the individual on the tone scale is in direct proportion to his inability to move his body in his environment. In other words, as a person comes down the tone scale he is less and less able to command and move the body and is then, because of these jams on the switchboard, more and more susceptible to exterior stimuli. He sees exterior stimuli and the exterior stimuli goes straight to work on the motor control board; it does not go through the sensory board to amount to anything. And the body moves.

One fellow says, “I’m earning forty dollars a week. That’s what I’m doing.” Another one says, “Well, I’m glad to get out of the house every day. The old woman’s pretty pestiferous.” Another one says, “As a matter of fact, I occasionally get to drive the truck over there and I like to drive the truck, and I’ll put up with the rest of this stuff. I drive the truck, and I’ve got to work anyhow.” Another man might say, if he were being honest, “I’m staying on this job because I hate this dog that you’ve got here as a foreman. If I can devote my life to making him miserable, boy, that makes me happy. I really lead him a dog’s life, too.”

The sensory board, in other words, is short-circuited straight into the motor control board and “I” hasn’t got a thing to say about it. All these connections get frozen on the switchboard. So the fellow sees a dog and he has a jam-up in there which says “Dog! Dog, bite; pain, run,” so he turns around and runs — only it is a Pekingese. That is aberrated!

And all the time you thought that those men thought they were grading a road. Not one of them thought they were grading a road. You thought they were building a road between Augusta and Wichita, and they weren’t. Not one of them was building a road; not one of them was even grading.

By the way, when they are doing this, people sometimes get a glimmering themselves; they observe themselves doing these confounded foolish things and they don’t seem to be able to do anything about it. For instance, a man gets mad at his wife and hits her over the head with a flatiron or does something of that sort — something “mild.” And he will keep doing it. He would like to be able to check himself but he seems powerless to do so. What he has is a jam on the board; his sensory perceptions have perceived certain voice tones and certain other things in his wife that are jammed into the board, and the board just goes into automatic operation. In other words, the environment around this man is handling him; he is not handling himself. And the more the environment can handle him, the less able he is to behave rationally in the environment — even though he can still think; he can’t put the thoughts into proper execution.

So you get them together — this crew may be unhappy and inefficient and so forth — and you say, “Well, you know, some day a lot of cars will go over this road. Maybe they’ll wreck themselves occasionally and so forth, but a lot of cars will go over this road. You boys are building a road. You’re building a road from Augusta to Wichita, from Wichita to Augusta. It’s a pretty hard job, but somebody’s got to do it. A lot of people will thank you boys for having built this road. I know you don’t care anything about that, but that’s really what we are doing around here. Now, I’d like a few suggestions from you people about how we could build this road a little bit better.” All of a sudden the whole crew is building a road. Affinity, reality and communication go right up.

By the way, this is hypnotism too. People in grief and people in apathy are very hypnotic. They are so hypnotic that when you say something to them they just accept it literally. As a matter of fact, if you weren’t aware of this, you had better be, because you can talk to somebody who is on that grief or apathy level of the tone scale and just tell him quietly to do something, and unless there is too much conflict otherwise in the environment he will do it. In other words, you can take over his body just by talking to him because you are exterior stimuli. That is hypnotism. You are exterior stimuli, so you just substitute for his “I.”

If you have a foreman on the job who is around 3.0 or 3.5, something like that, and who still has some theta volume, knows his job and knows what he is doing, you won’t have any trouble with that crew. They will be building a road, the whole crew. (A crew as dispersed as that probably had a 1.1 or a 1.5 foreman.) If you get them to agree on what they are doing, they will be all set.

A lot of people, particularly laymen, are very misinformed on this; they think hypnotism has something to do with spiritualism. Hypnotism has been around for a long time. It is a mechanism by which the self-determinism of the individual can be submerged so that he will obey literally the orders given to him by another individual. That is all hypnotism is.

Communism has a number of instinctive tactics, and one of those is built sort of empirically upon the fact that a bunch of Swedes went down into Russia and whipped them about A.D. 900 and put a czar in. Actually, the Swedes went down there as mercenaries — they had been driven out of their own country by a revolution — and worked for all the petty princes in these petty principalities. The Swedes formed the bodyguards of all the princes of all Russia, and one day all the bodyguards revolted and chopped off all the heads of the Russian nobility and took over Russia and elected a czar and unified the Russias. The czar, after he had been reigning for a year or two, took a Russian name; they became White Russians.

And the process of hypnotism is to tire the sensory strip, to tire the perceptions — that is to say, get this strip shaken up — and to get the person’s muscles to relax. In other words, what the hypnotist is doing is, just by talking to the fellow, getting him to take all of his own keys out of the switchboard and then the hypnotist purringly puts his in, and they will stay there!

During World War I, in 1917, the Russians stood the lineal descendant up and shot him dead. They had lived all those centuries with an alien race in control and they resented it. That alien race was capital — aristocracy. And now they are trying to sell the whole world the idea that it is being governed by an alien race. You couldn’t possibly pound it — with a hammer, a sickle or a sledgehammer — into the skull of a Russian that the capitalists of America are of the same race as the laboring class of America. You couldn’t convince them that people here are all Americans and they were all born with more or less the same chance and they could all get there. You couldn’t convince them of this. Their only response would be “No. They’re those Swedes. We know. And you’ve got to kill them; that’s the only way you can do it.”

It is interesting, however, that a person to be hypnotic has to be pretty well down the tone scale. The environment must have taken over already. What the hypnotist is doing is simply taking advantage of an enormous amount of preparation.

This philosophy gets imported into this country via the sewers or something. These people work inside the unions and they have been telling the unions now for decades “You are really being governed by a bunch of White Russians — a bunch of Swedes or something — and they are a different breed of cat; they are different people. They are not your people; they are not like you. You are laboring men. The thing to have is sweat! And those guys with the brains, you don’t want to have anything to do with them because they belong to another race.”

Now, people who are hypnotic are very bad people to have around on a job. They will look fixedly at a board, for instance, that they are supposed to operate and throw switches on, and if they have to fix their eyes too long on that board they will go out. They will sit there with their eyes wide open, inactive. Sometimes that period of inaction will only last for seconds, sometimes it will last for minutes. They appear to be abstracted and they think they are; they think they are thinking or dreaming about something. Actually, they have just become fixated on a piece of bright metal or something of the sort.

Then management tries to come in, and labor has been educated into believing that the whole of management and the whole of capital is made up out of a different kind of individual, so no similarity or affinity can exist, therefore there can’t be an agreement on reality and there can’t be a communication.

People low on the tone scale will fixate. They will fixate suddenly, particularly when they are tired, because when the body is tired “I” is less able to make a connection and the environment is more able to make a connection. There is evidently insufficient internal energy to drive the body. That is what is known as being tired. And at a time the body is tired, the environment can take over the body and push it around because there is less resistance.

About the first thing you can do with people in interpersonal relations with labor is set up every possible communication line you can to labor and let them find out, if you possibly can, that they are not being run by White Russians. You will get some sort of an agreement. If you agree they are men, they are liable to agree that you are a man, too. They resent being owned very much because theta only functions when it is self-determined. You have to have self-determinism in a man or in a group. This does not mean socialism.

People, then, would be low on the tone scale to the degree that they were unable to handle their own bodies, and as they drift down the tone scale a standard or fixed level of endocrine response would be necessary for them to handle themselves. For instance, the fellow has to be mad all the time to handle himself because he requires that much output just to get over the level of energy charge. Furthermore, he has to turn on so much velocity or so much volume with “I” that he turns on the endocrine system too, and it will stay on.

You try to turn management over to a group of men who have no concept of management or executive lines, and can they pray and beg! I had this happen once. I threw a whole operation at the staff. One of them got up a few days later and said, “I have a motion to put on the floor. Will Mr. Hubbard please take charge of this operation?” They hadn’t known it was that complex. All of a sudden we got an-agreement. They said, “That is a specialized operation. That is a specialized operation, and he is human and we are human and we are in communication and he has been talking to us, and we do have some affinity and he does want these things to happen for our own good,” and so on. We had interpersonal relations all of a sudden, and we had management-labor relations too, the like of which we had never had before. This didn’t mean collectivism; it just meant simply letting the boys get together once in a while.

Quite in addition to that, the exterior environment will start hooking him up and it will hook up his endocrine system just like it hooks this switchboard up, because that is just another switchboard. He will stay hooked in permanently.

Having management interested in getting labor together as individuals is quite an innovation. The union can only exist as a union as long as it has affinity, communication and reality between the union leader and the union member. Psychological warfare consists of cutting a communication line or demonstrating that a difference exists where they thought reality existed, where they thought they had agreement.

Any person who is highly rational is able to hook in and pull out his switch links at will. In other words, he can call any part of the body at will; he can start or stop any operation of the body at will. And when he turns up a little bit of anger or something of the sort, he can also turn it off.

Union leadership has supplanted management in the affections of labor, but union leadership does not constitute the working brain force and regulating force which is going to keep labor working. What can you expect but failure of an economic system that is being run so cockeyed?

Actually, a person who is very high on the tone scale doesn’t get angry so much as he just turns on more energy. This anger response is minor. It is when the whole endocrine system becomes aberrated that it starts to grow up to where the adrenals will get way oversized and so forth.

Similarly and simultaneously, how do you expect a human being to operate when he doesn’t have agreement within himself? The liver does not agree that the pancreas is doing a good job. The communication lines between the right hand and the right ear are cut, not because the nerves are severed, but because there is a jammed switchboard. The communication between “I” and the right foot goes haywire every once in a while. The fellow has a toe that occasionally twitches and “I” says “Stop it!” but it goes on twitching.

That is an extrapolation, then, on the difference between self-determinism and exterior-determinism. As the exterior world begins to take over an individual more and more, so that individual becomes less and less efficient, less and less able to survive, and less and less desirable to have on a job or in your periphery.

In other words, unless there is an affinity throughout the body and its various parts, it doesn’t get along well. Unless there is good communication — good nerve channels, smooth switching connections and so forth — throughout the nervous system, there is no communication that is any good. And unless the whole body has agreed on what it is supposed to do, it doesn’t get along well either. For instance, some fellow thinks that the best thing to do is to sit at his desk and work like the mischief and make lots of coffee and cakes, only the back doesn’t agree with this. The back says, “I’m tired.” All of a sudden he goes out of communication.

For instance, take a person who is at 0.5. You find it very easy to handle this person. You say, “Go here, go there, do this, do that,” and you have this person well under control. He is very amenable to what you are saying and you trust this person.

How does this apply to the tone scale? It is not very technical. Let’s look at theta: You can imagine a free-flowing, smooth-flowing energy that is just doing fine. It has three component parts — affinity, communication and reality. These three parts, when flowing smoothly in conjunction with each other, produce a nice harmonious union with MEST — the physical universe. The body — the physical universe and theta — just goes along fine. As a matter of fact, theta which is running nice and smoothly will lay out over items and people in the physical universe and things will just run like a clock.

You are trusting a robot. Anybody can come along and throw the switch. Now your worst enemy that wants to know anything and everything you are doing comes along and he wants to louse you up. All he does is get a cross-reference on your subject; he just says so-and-so and so-and-so and so-and-so, and your subject turns around at 0.5 just like a robot.

But the second affinity, communication and reality start damping out, we start to get disharmony, dissonance, as in a musical note. The second we start to get dissonance, life begins to kick itself out of the organism, which is dying.

A 0.5 can be talked to by a union leader at a great rate: “Capital is selling you out! The reason we are at war is because American industry and American executives want us at war!” And he says, “Now, here’s this gun. You take this gun and you shoot the next executive who walks out of that door.”

Let’s say that this ARC can exist fairly well down to 2.0. It is pretty bad when it gets to that point, but at anger it is nice and jagged, and then in fear it is further apart, it is separating. And when you get down to apathy and death, it is null; affinity, communication and reality are not interacting at all — they are not functioning at all.

“Uh-huh” — bang! There is no moral interruption. In order to be moral, in order to be ethical, “I” has to have something to say about it.

How out of communication can an individual get? Dead. If you ever tried to communicate with a dead man, you would agree with me.

On this tone scale, 2.0 is the dividing line; above 2.0 the person is tending toward survival and from 2.0 down they are tending toward destruction and death. There are two reasons for this: The first is that the mechanism of death becomes necessary after the individual is no longer able to assist life in its conquest. The other is that, when the individual is getting down to a point below 2.0 where he is more than 50 percent being handled by the exterior environment, the people and items around him are regulating his conduct to such a degree that his conduct is irrational. It is as rational as his environment. If everybody around him is acting rationally, then he will act rationally — no more, no less.

This is the tone scale again, only this is actually, technically, the engineering derivation and extrapolation of that tone scale. Where it came from is the recognition of a null vibration and death being the same thing, the recognition that the halfway point would be a half cancellation, and so on. Below 2.0, they are still fighting exteriorly to try to stay together, at fear they are afraid they won’t, at grief they know they won’t. At apathy ARC is gone, and that is death.

You walk in on a person at 1.5 or 1.1 or something like that, and you start acting in some other fashion, and you will get the response.

Theta has those three component parts — affinity, reality and communication. It is very important to know that because it tells you immediately what we are talking about in the communication section of the Chart of Human Evaluation where it says the person is out of communication.

Down in the Malay Peninsula when I was a kid (I was young and open-mouthed and chewing on a straw, practically) I walked down a street with a friend, and he pointed at someone and said, “There is a slayer.”

This is the basic extrapolation of this chart. What will a 1.5 do with communication? He will turn it straight around. You tell him “black” and he will say “white.” Even though it would serve his purpose, you might think, to say “black,” he will say “white.” He doesn’t look angry, unless you know the tone scale. You tell him, “Would you go over to the other end of the shop and tell George ‘black’?” and you see him go, but he tells George “white.” If you told him to tell George “white,” he would tell George “black.”

“A what?” “A slayer.”

Agreement can be procured anywhere on this scale at the person’s level of the scale. In other words, you can enter the vibration level. Talk to an angry man angrily. If you don’t attack him and if you appear to be agreeing with him on the subject and agreeing with him angrily, you are in affinity with him and you will be in communication with him. But you won’t be in communication with him anyplace else on the scale.

“Oh, he kills people?”

It is pretty easy to go into communication with people high on the scale.

“Oh, no, no, it’s a native word. Watch.” He looked at the fellow and sort of whistled to get his attention. Then he moved his hand, and the other fellow moved his, too. Then my friend bent down, and the other guy bent down too. The fellow was a mirror image — anything you did he would do too. Finally my friend took a rock and threw it at him, and that broke the fellow’s rapport and he went off down the way.

If you have a stenographer at 0.5 and you give her a letter, “To Wilkes Brothers. We have your order of the sixteenth instant... shipment was received. Yours truly,” and so on, that thing will be all nulled out. In the first place, she really doesn’t agree with you that you ought to be writing that letter, just because you want it written. The letter will probably read, “Dear Mr. Thompson. Your order of the sixteenth instant has been received and everything was broken in it.”

My friend told me, “There are quite a few of them around here. There is evidently some drug they smoke that does this.” Actually, that fellow was way down on the tone scale.

Or you ask her, “Would you please go down to the traffic court and fix up this ticket for me,” and you don’t think about it again. If you have a 0.5 in the stenographer’s chair you had certainly better think about it again, because you don’t get action at this point. Do you see how far down the scale it is from a standpoint of life? Life has damped out at that point, so there is no persistence, there is no action, there is no responsibility, there is no motion, no movement.

Imagine my surprise to go into a psychiatrist’s office in a southern town about two and a half years ago (I was still trying to work with psychiatry) and find a psychiatrist who was a slayer. He didn’t know it — poor guy. He was all ready to pass in his chips.

You say, “Here is this, here is that. Do something else, do something else, do something else,” but you don’t get them done. This is where the tone scale becomes very important. Here is ARC at work.

I noticed it when I first reached for a cigarette. He reached for a cigarette a moment later. So I dropped my cigarette and he dropped his cigarette, and he went on talking to me as though nothing were happening. I crossed my legs and he crossed his legs; I crossed my legs the other way and he crossed his the other way, too.

Let’s look at affinity. You have somebody you are working with and this person is at 1.1. This person appears to have affinity for you; he says he likes you and he says it quite often. (As a matter of fact, this is very propitiative as a level.) He likes you a great deal. But you wonder why you keep getting unhappy around him. After all, everything he says is “for your own good.” You get very unhappy and then you say, “Well, the poor fellow, he’s trying his best.” He is trying to kill you. It is just as simple as that. It may take him five years, but he will do it. He works along at that level. In other words, he is working below this 2.0 line and he will keep swinging these covert activities at you.

The last thing in the world that man should have been doing was associating with psychotics, because look at the behavior patterns he was getting! That is what happens to those poor guys, by the way. They are up against this terrible environment continually and they start skidding; they get low on the tone scale, and the next thing you know, they are picking it all up on a hypnotic level and jamming through.

Don’t think he won’t introduce a covert activity in the business. He will apparently demonstrate an affinity — he will say he has an affinity. But his agreement is very poor; he will take everything that is good news and make it kind of shabby and he will go into communication only along the line of gossip.

The way an individual goes down the tone scale is this: A movement is ordered by “I” but countermanded by the environment. A stimulus comes in, “I” tries to react to this stimulus by ordering a movement, the environment says, “Move otherwise,” or “Don’t move,” and “I” is balked and is unable to direct the motion of the body.

You come in at eight o’clock in the morning and sit down at your office desk and you are just doing fine, you think. You had a game of golf that morning and you are kind of tired but you sure enjoyed that game of golf. However, that 1.1 is out in the office: “You know, confidentially, the boss came in at eight o’clock this morning. He looked pretty tired. He wasn’t wearing his regular business clothes, either.” And this gets back to your wife, going through the hands of other 1.1s, getting a chain reaction and so forth: “You know, Mamie, I really hate to tell you this, but I’m telling you this for your own good. But, you know, George was out all night the other night. I thought you ought to know. There is a stenographer down at the plant, you know.” That is the only line a 1.1 will carry.

That, really, is all there is to know about human aberration.

It is just wonderful. The news which will go through one of these low-level communication lines is a certain brand of news.

An impulse comes in and tells “I” to do something and “I” tries to do it and the environment countermands it. The impulse says, “It hurts here — move!” so “I” tries to move. He says, “Move,” but nothing is happening. He says, “Move the arm,” but the arm doesn’t move. “Move the arm! The arm is hurting,” and it doesn’t move. So “I” says, “Get up and walk out of this place!” but the body doesn’t move. So “I” starts throwing over all kinds of switchboard mechanisms and so forth to get the body moving, and those are liable to be canceled out and the environment switchboard connectors are liable to fuse. That is a holders on the time track, for you auditors.

A 1.5 communication line carries destruction, because that is what it is and that is all it will vibrate to.

However, if “I” gets up a tremendous effort to move and finally accomplishes it, the effort to move is such that he leaves everything plugged in at such a heavy rate that he has what we call a bouncers.

A 1.1 communication line will carry gossip, covert hostility and propitiation: “That’s a very, very pretty dress you’ve got on, Marge; I always have liked it.”

If “I” has had to throw out so much energy and has had so much energy coming in that the whole board shorts, he has a grouper. But it is the same thing; it is the environment countermanding the orders of “I” and “I” trying to countermand the orders of the environment, resulting in fixed behavior patterns which reduce the self-determinism of “I.” And so you get an individual going on down the tone scale.

On a line at 0.5, the only thing that will go through is hopelessness, and if you try to give 0.5s much that isn’t hopeless they will pass along hopelessness. You can explain to a 0.5, “Now look, everything is going to be all right, and the whole operation is going to succeed, and we have just gotten in some new capital. Everything is just fine and we are all working hard on it now. I want you to pitch in and do your best. You will, won’t you?”

You get a person who chronically, because of the exterior environment, can only get through this maze of locked panel connections (and by the way, that is what a lock is) by being angry. He has to get angry to push through the board to get any motion at all, and his motions are all anger motions one way or the other.

“Oh, yes, yes, yes.”

Below anger, he has to get up the stimulus — the run preparation — of fear in order to get through the board, so he has to tell the body “You’re in deadly danger” all the time just to get any motion out of the body. Or he tells the body, “You can’t get through at all,” and the body is mostly left unmanned. Here, he is in the hypnotic levels of grief and apathy.

You come back past that 0.5’s desk a moment later with your ear cocked and you will hear “And he was just telling me that we were almost ready to collapse. He said the new bond issue — they would try but, you know, I don’t think it will go through. I could tell by listening to him.” This is interesting.

Notice an individual when he tries to move a piece of MEST. First he gets conservative about it, then he gets antagonistic and then he will get angry if it doesn’t move. Then he will get scared of the thing if it still doesn’t move; he will decide that it is really something to be afraid of.

Life is being kicked to pieces when it gets down below 2.0, and it starts kicking the individual to pieces below 2.0, because he is not in communication. He is not in communication with, he does not have affinity for and he is not in agreement with himself, either. These are the levels of neurological illnesses. Have you ever run into somebody who detested himself? It is the same thing.

In the same way, if you take a foreman trying to handle a group of men and these men don’t do what he says, he will get kind of antagonistic toward them. If they still don’t do what he says, he will start to get angry at them. And if he can’t move them after that, he will begin to believe he has lost his grip and he will back up on the job. That would be just the normal cycle, where he isn’t securing cooperation. If he is at the level where he is angry at them all the time, they get afraid.

Now, I want to give you a little bit of a physiological description of each one of these individuals. This description will be more generalized than the chart; these are just things that you can glance at suddenly to tell where the person is.

That is another extrapolation of the tone scale.

I am going to start at the bottom. A 0.1 is something that you won’t find walking around in the society. The 0.1 will be pretty gray in the face. The skin circulation is almost absent. This person is pretty badly off. He would have to be a stretcher case.

But just above that at 0.5 the same skin condition obtains. There is a slight grayness to the skin, particularly in the cheeks and so on, to a greater or lesser degree. It is not always present and it is not always detectable. But when it is detected, that person is a 0.5. The fear and hopelessness and so forth actually mixes up to make the blood tend to leave the surface; it is even afraid to be on the surface. The blood goes in and lakes in the center of the body to some degree. If a sharp noise occurs, the blood lakes immediately in the center of the body. It falls away from the skin.

This skin condition obtains particularly at 1.1; it is even worse at 1.1 than it is at 0.5.

The 0.1, of course, is pretended death. You won’t be troubled with a 0.1. But you will find 0.5s around. One of the things that marks a 0.5 particularly, physiologically, is chronic malfunction of organs. This body is trying to die. Take, for instance, a young girl who is a 0.5, and her endocrine system will be so badly off that the fatty tissue of her body is all displaced. Her body isn’t pretty; the fat is on the wrong places. She doesn’t have an endocrine system that is working smoothly and evenly.

A man at 0.5 has a shoulder slump and so forth; he looks old. He is pretty well gone; he looks like the last rose of summer. He is sad. But the funny part of it is that when he is very young he can manage to carry along all right. He can even fool you sometimes a little bit; he can merely appear to be rather obedient. He is too quiet, though — no hilarity or anything like that. One of the things this person will do is try to damp out any loud noises in his vicinity or something like that. He would much rather go to a funeral than a movie any day. He weeps rather easily and looks on the hopeless side of things. He is untidy in dress.

Up above that level in the commoner levels, around 0.9, the person is in a relatively acute fear bracket — a continual acute state of fear. This person is afraid. Here is where you get this grayness of face and so forth. You will find that this person has a habit of sort of withdrawing; he will withdraw very easily. As a matter of fact, if you were to talk to this individual and raise your voice any at all, this individual would back away from you. Also, if you care to look at them, the pupils of this person’s eyes are always slightly dilated; they are a little bit bigger than they should be for the light he is standing in. If you were to make a sudden noise — not even a very loud noise, but a sudden one — and watch the pupil very sharply you would see it flash out to the edge of the iris and back in again. That is the expression of fear.

As a matter of fact, if you make a real loud noise around a 0.9 you can put him in a trance. Oddly enough, though, if you try to hypnotise a 1.0 or a 1.1 they will just keep on making fun of you. They feel silly, they feel foolish, they do this and they do that. That is because they know they are annoying you when they do it. If you try to knock somebody out into a hypnotic trance or a drug trance at that level, you will really have quite a time, because that person is afraid. He is afraid of what will happen to him. He is so aware and he is so alert to anything that might hurt him. The exterior environment is so much in control, and yet he can still balance it to such a degree that he keeps holding on to that balance. Here is an inability to relax.

You shake hands with a fellow whose palm is always moist and you are dealing with somebody from 0.9 to 1.6. This person has nervous mannerisms also, and he has ulcers of the stomach. It is rather easy to tell this band. Also, this person talks to you in slight non sequiturs almost continually. You say, “We’ve got a pretty good plant here,” and he takes a look at it and says, “Our plant at Willow Run was — yes, we had a good plant.” It is not quite what you were saying. It is not far enough off to cause any startlement, but it is not what you were saying, definitely. You were trying to tell him about the plant and he told you about some other plant. Also, he told you about a plant that is just a little bit bigger than yours. If he happened to discover what pay you were making even though you didn’t tell him, he would have to tell you that he knew somebody who made more pay than that — but he wouldn’t say he did.

If you said “I want you to take over and get acquainted with this particular section of the office, because next week I’ve got a vacation coming up and I’m going up to Colorado,” it is very funny but he would have a friend who is going up to Aspen, Colorado, to one of the biggest hotels there. But he wouldn’t advance this in such a way that you could notice it. As a matter of fact, you don’t own anything good but what somebody owns something better. Your height, strength, brains and so forth — he is just going to put Xs across the lines, but he will never do it in such a way that you will find out that he is doing it. It is so apparently on the groove that it is very difficult to distinguish. But if you were ever to take umbrage at this continual hammer and pound of invalidation he would soon have you spinning.

You say, “But I didn’t say that!” “You didn’t say what?”

“I said I was going to Colorado and you say somebody else is going to Colorado. What’s the idea of telling me the other guy’s going to Colorado? The only reason I told you I was going to Colorado was so that you could . . .”

“I didn’t say anything about anybody else going to Colorado.”

Now he has really got you; he has got you spinning. So, he didn’t say that. “But you did say that!”

“Well, as a matter of fact, what I meant to say was. . .” and he will tell you something else. He says that is what he did say.

“But you didn’t say that! “ He didn’t say that and you know he didn’t say that. And if you happen to, that day, be drifting down around 2.0, you are going to find yourself down the tone scale. If you keep this up very long, you will first find yourself at 1.5 and then you may find yourself where he wants to put you: 0.5. You will be a temporary 0.5, because after you have been doing this for a while all you can do is sit down and weep.

You want to look at this person’s files. Maybe he is keeping files or something like that; just look at his files someday. The surface is pretty but don’t look behind it. He has told you they are all up to date. But if you go in and check it, you can’t quite tell that they are not all up to date. You are looking at a fine surface with this fellow.

His physical manifestation tends to be thinness rather than obesity — but that doesn’t mean that everybody who is thin is a 1.1. Obesity starts swinging in at about 1. or 1.4; these people start to get fat. The 1.5 is pretty chunky; he tends toward being square. That is just one of these rules of thumb that you can’t take too seriously, but it is something to be alert to. That doesn’t mean that everybody who is of athletic build is a 1.5, but they tend to be a little bit too squarely built. You will sometimes see a 1.5 with a very gray complexion, but this is a 1.5 who has only recently been beaten down below the line and who is still holding on to it somewhat but finding it hard to do.

Now, if you ask a 1.5 about offices, you are not going to get any covert level of activity. This person is going to tell you right out that this office furniture you have is pretty bad. He is going to tell you all about how awful it is. Hate and destruction — he tries to destroy with words and so forth. But education may have smoothed him out to a point where he doesn’t talk outrightly so. Watch what he does with things.

As you come on up the line you start to get up into the average, and you start to get into better and better physiological types and higher levels of efficiency. You can tell these people: they look, from that level on up, healthy.

One of the fastest ways of telling a person’s tone level, by the way, is by the state of health of the individual. The chronic illnesses, chronic malfunction of organs, endocrine and neurological illnesses, depository illnesses, and severe, sporadic illnesses (that is to say, usually the person two or three times a year gets very sick) — any one of those categories points up a liability in employment. That includes arthritis, sinusitis — any one of these items. You can look at a person’s health record, if you have his health record over a couple of years, and see pretty accurately where he has been on the tone scale for that time. It doesn’t explain away, either, when he says “Well, I was wounded in the war.” That tells you almost certainly that he is fixed at that level by aberration. It is too bad, but it is heartlessly true. He says, “I was wounded in the war and that is why I’ve had sinusitis ever since.” He was wounded in the war, but what you want to know is whether he is up or down on the tone scale, and that says he is down on the tone scale no matter how he got put there.

Your best bet is to take a glance at his health record and it will give you a glance at his mental record. Right there you can peg him on the line. This health record is pretty accurate. That is the Medical Range column on the chart.

The next step is to attempt to establish affinity with him. You will find that from 2.0 down the individual is liable to fawn upon you — be too agreeable, unctuous and so forth. You don’t expect a 1.5, by the way, to be angry with you. The 1.1 will bring you presents, lots of them — no matter where he has to steal them.

So, you want to establish affinity, and then try to establish agreement. Find out how much agreement you can establish rapidly with this person. If you can establish rapid agreement with him, he is up the tone scale a ways — either that or he is hanging at your level.

Communication is very important. ARC is of the essence in this. Try to get the answers to the questions on an application blank. If you have any difficulty getting those answers on that application blank, this person is going out of communication with you and he is down the tone scale. If for any reason or other he can’t fill out this form the way it is — it is a peculiar case and he has to have another form and that sort of thing — just drop it. He is out of communication; he is down below 2.0. He doesn’t want to communicate through this piece of MEST with you. He has to have a specialised piece of MEST.

Or maybe he is having difficulty: “How old are you?” “I’m . . . urn . . . I’m . . . urn . . . thirty-eight.” “Where were you born?”

“Um . . . um . . . Wichita.” “You were born in Wichita.”

“No, that’s where I live. I live in Wichita.”

Get rid of him quick. He is nervous in your presence; he is very nervous in your presence and that is a symptom, too. You want a person who can come in and talk to you. If he is nervous in your presence he will also be nervous in the presence of a machine.

I know that that is awfully rough and that it is a bad indoctrination and so forth. Sure a man can shake a little bit in a strange place or something like that, but if this bird is so nervous that he can’t communicate well with you, he is just communicating at his own level on the tone scale.

It isn’t any super special deal. As a matter of fact, some people will be a little bit nervous with you and yet will still keep right on communicating with you. So this is quite important.

Now, the reason you look at application blanks, actually, is that you really do use some of this data on the tone scale whether you call it that or not. For instance, it asks where this man has been employed and what his employer has to say, but that is not what you want to know. Just forget what his employer has to say; that is probably some 1.1’s opinion on a 2.0 or something of the sort. That data is no good, but this data is good: He wasn’t employed there the same length of time he said he was. That is important because that spots him for you. That doesn’t just say “Well, this fellow lies, and I guess most anybody lies this way.” A fellow who starts to disarrange data which it isn’t even necessary to disarrange is waving a red flag. This person is a 1.5. That is about where it starts getting disarranged badly. A 1.5 will turn facts right around. He will tell you he drove a truck in this place, when, as a matter of fact, he was a file clerk there. He didn’t work there between 1943 and 1944, he worked there between 1939 and 1941. He doesn’t have any reason to vary this data. From 2.0 down, no reasons to vary it are necessary; it just gets varied.

There is a problem that police have about criminals, by the way. It is not that all people below 2.0 are criminals in their surface reactions; but the police have an awful problem with criminals. The cops always expect the criminal to do the survival thing and the criminal never does. The cops go thrashing around Chicago trying to find this man who just broke out and shot a guard; he said he would never be taken alive and he has the guard’s riot gun. And they find him sitting on a streetcar reading a Bible and he says his name is something else.

What more did they expect? That was non sequitur and nonsurvival as far as this man was concerned and yet that was the way they found him. He had reversed anything that they expected. There was no constancy in the matter.

The police always give the criminal a chance, by the way. They will give a criminal a chance to turn state’s evidence: “We’ll save you your trip to the death house if you’ll turn state’s evidence on your pals.” But he won’t. And they figure out, “Well, this fool is ready loopy. Why?” As a matter of fact, sometimes it even works this way: They say, “If you turn state’s evidence, you know we’ll electrocute you,” and he turns state’s evidence the next day. He is doing the nonsurvival thing. The police keep trying to police people on the theory that they are rational, but these criminals don’t do the rational thing.

For instance, a murderer always leaves a clue on the scene of the crime. He will always carefully register the gun in some other town with the number and so on and then leave the gun on the scene of the crime, or he will do something of this sort. It isn’t very hard to trace criminals because they always tell you what happens. That is the only reason cops succeed. A criminal is just looking for a way to get himself in trouble. But the cops are always very puzzled as to why it is that criminals are so dumb in their commission of crimes, and they can’t figure this out. All they are doing is running a free boardinghouse for people to fail to.

The criminals are repeaters because they repeat. The cop says, “Now, we’re going to treat you nice and we’re going to take care of you and we are not out for you. You have done your time in the big house, and here you are and you’re a nice guy and you’re here in town. You keep your nose clean, you get a good job, and it’s hands off as far as we are concerned. We’ll give you every boost in the world.” And they pick him up the next day in a stolen car. How do they pick him up in a stolen car? It is because he drives in front of a police car and kills his engine and lets the police car run into him. This is wonderful. And the great criminologists — J. Edgar Hoover and the rest of these people — think they are doing such tremendously brilliant and clever things ! Of course, they d o do very brilliant things. But these criminals are all set to be picked up.

They have a rule in the city of New York: The person who finds the body killed it. This rule works 80 percent of the time. The person who finds the body killed it. This person will come around and make sure he is on the scene of the crime all ready to go.

If you want a real commentary on the efficiency of police in the United States, by the way, only 30 percent of the murders committed are detected by police, only 3 percent of those detected are brought to trial and only 0.5 percent are ever executed for the crime. I thought I would let that data out; J. Edgar Hoover was trying to suppress it to a bunch of us writers a few years ago.

Criminality is the kind of operation that you will come across below 2.0, but don’t think a 2.0 is necessarily an outright criminal or a 1.5 is an outright criminal or anything like that. The criminality is a sort of special strain. Criminality is something that is against the law. The law of being decent men is the only law that people are against from 2.0 down.

So, you feel affinity for a person and you go into communication rather easily with him; there is always the third one: Are you and he compatible in what you agree upon? You want to watch that one, because two of them can slightly and apparently exist and the third one will be almost absent. If it is, the other two are too weak to take any chance on. It isn’t that you want slavish agreement either; you find that it doesn’t have to be slavish in order for you to get into agreement with somebody. If you get an agreement with somebody you will get an agreement with him, and that is that.

Another thing is the amount of fault a person finds and the amount of turbulence. This tone scale is actually a graph of turbulence. Life energy is more and more turbulent the lower it is on the tone scale. An apathy case creates the maximum turbulence. He can’t move, he has to be waited on hand and foot and he really causes turbulence. He demands an enormous amount from the society.

But the 1.1 causes turbulence with gossip and the 1.5 causes turbulence with rage. You see that there might be some affinity, you might be in communication with this fellow to some degree, and then he starts telling you how badly off you are or what you ought to do to improve something! And he starts telling you about all the things that are wrong. Have him shot or fire him or something, because this person will cause you more trouble, turbulence and upset than anything else. Nothing is ever right around this person and nothing will ever go right around him either. The girls in his office and everyone else will get pretty well knocked to pieces. This particular operation is most chronic at about 1. on the tone scale. There is a fantastic amount of upset and it really keeps you chewed up. This person can apparently be very constructive; he appears bright and alert, but that is just a method peculiar to 1.2.

Now, the ARC of an individual, the amount of life he has at his level, the vibration (I hate to use those words — it sounds like spiritualism or something), actually seems to have an effect upon the material universe. around him. You can tell a person’s position on the tone scale by the condition of the things he owns or has care of. You look at a person, and his shoes, for instance, might not be shined, but are they cared for to the degree that they could be? A person can even take a little bit of care of a pair of work shoes, not to make them pretty, but to keep them serviceable.

Take a carpenter on the job, or something like that. Are the clothes he wears suitable to the work he is doing — that is to say, does he keep them suitable? How about that car he is driving? Maybe it is an old car and so forth, but does it run? Just look at a car’s fenders and you can tell an awful lot about the owner’s position on the tone scale, or maybe the position of his wife. So, as the person goes down the scale the physical objects in his vicinity are themselves affected by his position, so that below a certain level he starts to bring about breakage, carelessness, upset, wear-out and so on to these objects in his vicinity.

As you come up the scale with an individual, he might not have muchX but what he has he will care for rather well. By the way, it is very interesting that along in a certain level of the scale, individuals start to accumulate wildly. They have lost so much in life that they then start to accumulate things. But they know they haven’t any right to accumulate any real MEST So they will accumulate nothing but junk, and they will carry this forward to a terrific level. You can’t get them to throw anything away; you can’t get them deprived of anything. Open a man’s desk sometime when he isn’t there and slam it again. That is all you need to do; you can spot him right there.

The Indians tell a story about the pack rat. The pack rat was told by the Indian god, Old Man, that he had better get some lohhn. The pack rat said, “What?”

And Old Man said, “Well, you’d better get some lohhn. Next time I come back, if you don’t, you know what I do to animals.”

Pack rat has been trying ever since. He doesn’t know what it is, but he is going to have a sample of something to show when Old Man comes back!

That spots the person on the tone scale. He is afraid he is not going to have it.

Now, there is a standardised test being made up by the Foundation. It will take a little while to stabilise this test and get it adequately processed. It will be a relatively simple test when finally finished; it will be a written test which can be given and rather easily graded which will give you the individual’s position on the tone scale.

More important than that test, though, is your observation of the material universe around you and the organisms in it. You should cultivate observation. Whether you are observing for the tone scale or not, you should cultivate observation anyway. That is just a good piece of advice.

Before you start to accept this very widely, I would like very much for you to do a little observation on it. Look at the people you know. Take a look at their records in life. Look over the general situation with them. Scout around a little bit and find out if there is any validity to this or not. Find out if it works. Does it carry through? You know this fellow who has arthritis, so look into it a little further. You don’t have to be snoopy to do that. You can find out a lot about people by just listening instead of talking for a few minutes.