[Start of Lecture]

Want to talk to you some more about communication, and this time in relationship to learning.

There is a specific process which goes this way: You ask the preclear to put into the six sides of the room (the four walls, the ceiling and the floor), in regular order, the statement to him or some part of his body „This means go to ____,“ and the preclear furnishes the location. He puts „This means go to,“ and then he adds „Poughkeepsie.“ And the next side of the room (say he put it in the front wall) why, the right-side wall he would put „This means go to,“ (he furnishes the place) „Albany.“ The left-side wall he would put in something like „This means go to,“ and then he would furnish „Washington.“ And the back of the room, he'd say, „This means“ — he'd have the wall say to him, and so on — „This means go to,“ and he would probably put in „Africa.“ Only he puts the whole postulate in. Then he'd put that same thing in the ceiling and he'd put it in the floor, in that order. We don't care what order you use, as long as you continue to use the same order. Regularity has a great deal to do with the efficacy of this particular process.

All right. Now, we've gone all the way around the six sides of the room with this particular postulate. At first the walls say it to him; and then after a while he'll shift it off and have the walls say it to his body. You can see this as a symptom of exteriorization.

The next time around he puts into the walls „This means don't go to ____,“ and he furnishes the name, and we go all the way, six times around with „This means don't go to ____.“

And then we go back to „This means go to ____.“ And finally we'll get this thing sort of flat. „This means go to ____.“ „This means don't go to ____.“ Six times around on „This means go to ____.“ Six times around on „This means don't go to ____.“ Six times around on „This means go to ____.“ Six times around on „This means don't go to ____.“ And those two things are run in alternation in that fashion until it seems fairly flat.

Now, the reason why you ask him to add the name is not so as to stir up randomity, but simply to see how his comm lag is coming along. If you didn't ask him to add the name, you'd never spot his comm lag particularly, and he could do it rather cursorily, bang-bang-bang-bang-bang. You know? „I'm Tone 8,“ you know, sort of thing and so on. But when you ask him to originate a location, this puts a little stopper on the line.

Now, when we have that pair fairly flat, we have the next pair. And the next pair: „This means stay in ____.“ „This means don't stay in ____.“ And we run „This means stay in ____,“ and he furnishes the location — one wall and then the next wall, and so on, until we have covered the six walls. And then „This means don't stay in ____,“ furnishing the location, six times around. Then „This means stay in ____“ six times around. Then six times around for „This means don't stay in ____.“

Now of course, this is essentially the anatomy of a confusion. And we have a confusion, basically, at a person's being told to do two things at once. So we get him to sort out the stable data. That's all. And this is a technique which has been with us for some time. It is what we call one of our specifics — just as in medicine they develop certain specifics for things, which they more or less call specific.

They wear out, by the way, these specifics. Quite amusing. A specific only stays specific for a certain length of time and then it ceases to be a specific. Well, this is different in Scientology; it will keep going.

Now, that is a specific. Call the technique „This Means Go To,“ see? And you just use that on a terror stomach. That's a specific for a terror stomach. And boy, that is something for you to have! This is something for you to have, because these terror stomachs, when they show up amongst your preclears, can cause you more difficulty. For instance, one of the commonest things that you find in prison work or in people who are under the gun from the police one way or the other is a terror stomach. Some people, just the thought of possibly being arrested for something they didn't even do would turn on one of these things. Well now, just why police is the commonest restimulator for the terror stomach lies, of course, in a long story on the backtrack.

The stomach is terrified. Of course, the stomach is guilty of an overt act of eating. It is continuously guilty of this, gets more and more guilty of this, and becomes quite frantic on the whole subject of being incarcerated. Well, that's very funny because the stomach is already incarcerated. But it is continuously incarcerating: it's putting food in jail three times a day. And so we get police, or putting somebody away, as being the commonest restimulator of this terror stomach. Well, all a terror stomach is, is simply a confusion in a high degree of restimulation somewhere in the vicinity of the vagus nerve. And this nerve is one of the larger nerves of the body and goes into an agitation.

Now, medical science has long since solved this. And naturally the specific is no longer needed, really, because medical science has already solved this. I have placed emphasis on the scientific aspects of medicine. They know how to take care of this: They simply cut the vagus nerve. That this completely disrupts the entirety of the gastric system, of course, is — well, it's not worth considering. That it results in a decay of the nerve system — that's not worth considering either. That it brings on a fairly early death is, of course, the least of anybody's worries.

Like electric shock. Electric shock is almost uniformly followed by an early stroke, only nobody has ever bothered to trace this.

Now, here we have a specific — all sarcasm aside — and it hasn't had any alleviation from any other process prior to spring, 1956. Then some other processes came in which are to some degree faster, but they haven't been tested on a terror stomach with any thoroughness. The new processes are more powerful, but they haven't been tested thoroughly against a terror stomach. And with good auditing and good communication, apparently, at any tone level we seem to be able to get away with this process. Quite remarkable. Seems to be effective, and the terror stomach flattens out. And if it does reappear by restimulation afterwards, it is quite minor, and it means the thing wasn't entirely flat; that something else was still there that could be restimulated, possibly another type of incident, something that wasn't hit by the auditing. And if it did reoccur — and a preclear should be told this — if it did reoccur, why, he's just supposed to come and see the auditor again, and he would just continue it out and flatten it.

Now, it's quite remarkable that this is a specific, and for a long while it stayed in an isolated state. I discovered this and tested it and figured out that a confusion was a confusion of where to go and where to stay, and figured out disenfranchisement of the game, somewhat (although that didn't have too much bearing on it because we didn't have Games Processing yet); disenfranchisement brought about a condition of confusion which was best expressed in the stomach, evidently.

Well now, that's one of the rougher ones. And we can handle that today. I can tell you with some confidence that the only thing that would interrupt your ability to handle that would, of course, be your communication with the preclear. This would have to be pretty good before you could sail into this.

Well, establishing communication with somebody who has a terror stomach in complete restimulation is one of the more interesting things to do, because he's quite frantic. He starts flying off in all directions as though somebody had stuck a rocket into him, you know, and fired it off. And he leaps around and squirms around and goes in and out of session and so on. Nevertheless, in spite of this, it is a specific and it does level out one of these terror stomachs. All it is, is really just a bundle of confusion.

Now, this apparently would be a no-game condition because something is talking to the preclear, but remember that the preclear is making something talk to him for the first time. The walls are always telling people something. And when walls become warnings and when the various items of the universe become associated all under the heading of warning, then you have a terror stomach. See? That's what it is. It's one of these mechanisms where everything everywhere is warning somebody.

Well, a warning is not conditional, actually. It's a warning about change of place. When you hear of a fire truck coming down the street, that siren is telling you that you better change position. And warnings in general do have this as a common denominator: Change position.

Well, what has deteriorated there? It is the ability to differentiate messages; that is what has deteriorated, and that becomes a bundle of confusion. So that all messages mean, „Go to Poughkeepsie. Don't go to Poughkeepsie. Stay, of course, in Denver. Go to the South Pacific. Fly straight up. Go straight south. Dive into the center of the Earth. Remove yourself from the room because you've got to stay here.“ It runs out, in essence, the bad 8-C of the universe, and you just turn it into good 8-C in a somewhat complicated way. Want to make sure that he furnishes the name, you see, and so on; add those complexities to it. Ask questions that make it even more significant, just to carry it along the line. Ask if he was putting the postulate just behind the wall, in the wall or just ahead of the wall. How is it going now? What is the progress of these various points? Exactly how much space is the postulate occupying now? Is he putting it in a small section of the wall or a large section of the wall? Does he have any effort to put it in the whole building? Does he have any compulsion to do this or that? Just keep policing it, you see?

But don't slow it down too much with policing, because it's how many times he puts it in the wall. This is a quantitative process, unlike almost any other process we have. It's very lowscale and so is quantitative. Quantitative. How many times he gets it into the wall, how many times he gets it said, how many walls he spots in rotation, has a great deal of bearing on it. So you want him to do as many of these as possible, don't you see? „This means go to ____.“ „This means don't go to ____.“ „This means stay in ____.“ „This means don't stay in ____.“ And here we go.

All right. Now, the reason I bring up this process, one, is to acquaint you with it and acquaint you with a rather formidable tool in auditing; and the other one is because it so wonderfully illustrates the relationship between aberration and learning rate.

Learning rate. This is one of the more important things with which we have to do. Scientology has always been the science of knowing how to know. With some diffidence, I tell you that it is also the basic science of education. This, of course, may give you some idea that we should all dive overboard at once and become educators and so forth. Some new ideas have come up along this line.

Education happens to be just one part of a large whole. Education is seldom creative and is, therefore, just a middle ground of activity. Getting people to know something rather than getting people to invent something to know, you see, are quite different. Just getting people to know something, and getting people to invent something to know: This is quite different. Well, in Scientology itself we engage in a great many educational activities, and just for that reason alone you should understand education.

But education really takes off from a series of basics which we have a good grip on. And nobody ever knew where education took off before. Well, it takes off from Scientology. That's what it takes off from. That's factually true; nobody ever had these basics.

It's quite amazing. You ask an educator about these things and if you didn't impart any information to him, you just tried to get information back out of him about how you taught people and so forth, you would get flabbergasted. Some of his ideas are interesting. Some of his methods are complicated enough to be fascinating, but they're not effective.

In order to educate somebody you had to know what the mind was all about. And unless you knew the nearly total anatomy of the mind you could not hope, then, to do very much education. And the educational world did not know the anatomy of the mind and so they didn't do very much education. Simple. Simple background.

But the funny part of it is, if you tell an educator some of the basics of education, you'll find he's agreeing with you all the time; he knew all these things, he knew it all... And he hasn't got this selected out yet at all. He hasn't got it evaluated with importances. He would say, „Well, you have to take a class roster...“ That is just as important, you see, as establishing which of the people in class have a high learning rate and which have a low learning rate. I mean, it's just as important to take a class roster as it is to establish the characteristics of those who are in class. As a matter of fact, they might consider the secondary datum unnecessary. Might be much more important to take a class roster than to establish the learning rates of people there.

You see, they could not evaluate for you the data you have fed them. But they are in such total agreement with the basics that you feed them, that they are rather apt to go anaten, stagger, yawn. They'd be very fascinated with what you were saying and so on. They have obviously met somebody that could tell them something about their business.

Now, therefore, let's not get too overboard; at the same time, let's not get education too isolated and so on. If you know about the mind, you can educate a mind. This is for certain. This is certain. Quite true. If you don't know about the mind you'll run Columbia or Yale or something. You get the idea? It's just that great a difference.

Now, here's the coordination. You say into the wall, back to yourself, „This means go to ____.“ What is that? What is that you're doing? You're really running out the total significance of a wall. You're doing, evidently, about half a hundred different things at the same time you're doing this process. You sit down and list the number of things that go into making this process work and you're liable to have a couple of sheets of foolscap.

But let's take one of them here, and let's see that walls are always teaching you something, and that fireplugs are always teaching you something, that grass is always teaching you something. Now, the least that a wall teaches you is that it's a wall. Now, you ask a preclear to walk over and feel walls with 8-C, Part A, until he finally finds out there's a wall there. See, that is the goal of the process: He has to find out there's a wall there. Well, what is this but learning that there is a wall there? Now, process lag and learning lag would be the same thing for these purposes. It takes him this long to find there's a wall.

You understand the wall also gets solid, and a lot of other parts of Scientology immediately accrue that are off the subject of learning rate, but we're just taking up this thing.

So we call this thing a learning lag. What is the learning lag? How long does it take the wall to get a message through to the preclear? Well, it takes as long as the preclear is in a high, unknowing games condition.

High, unknowing games condition is no effect on self, total effect on other things. And yet his ability in the universe depends upon his differentiation amongst objects, so that the wall says to him, „This is a wall.“ But because there can be no effect on self, in a very obsessed way, the wall saying to him „This is a wall“ means, of course, „This is a hospital spittoon.“ Some people exteriorize and find the hospital ceiling up there, they find the old front yard they used to play in under them, and they find the various walls around are quite different walls than the walls they saw with their physical body's eyes.

Now, when you exteriorize somebody you actually reduce his havingness, and he is apt to react at once to this sudden reduction of havingness. He experiences a loss; he feels maybe that grief will overtake him at any moment, because he's just lost a body. Well, he's kept dying and dying and dying. And every few years in the past, why, he's up and died, and he gets a restimulation of this rather indifferent fact. But his havingness reduces, that is what happens. And he comes out — and it isn't that his MEST body alone is what gives him perception; this isn't true. But the havingness of a MEST body, therefore, makes his perception possible. You reduce his havingness by exteriorizing him and his perception goes by the board. And of course he goes downscale. And Look is way up there at the top of the Know to Mystery Scale, just below Know, and you drop him down to no-look. And you'll probably sometimes, every now and then, drop somebody down — on a sudden exteriorization — you drop them down to a delusory look: They not only don't see what is there, they see something that is not there.

Well, what is this, in essence, but an inability to perceive, which is an inability to learn. Exteriorized with havingness dropped, they look at the ceiling and it's the same ceiling they were looking at a moment before with their MEST body's eyes, but it is now the hospital ceiling. Well, some via is occurring between themselves and the lesson the ceiling is trying to give them. And that lesson is, „This is a ceiling.“ They don't perceive that, they perceive a better lesson.

Now, let's be very careful here. A better lesson, what do you mean by a better lesson? More convincing! The hospital ceiling was a far better lesson. It was much more convincing. It was saying „This is a ceiling“ to somebody who was so anaten and fogged out that he couldn't resist learning, or differentiate. And so it said, „This is a ceiling“ until the hospital ceiling became all possible ceilings. The moment you reduce his havingness, he drops in tone and picks up the most dominant lessons.

So as we go downscale with a pc, as a pc goes downscale, he can be expected, then, to pick up more and more dominant lessons.

And what is aberration? Aberration would simply be a pattern of convictions. And we could say this, for purposes of education — what is aberration; bend it around so somebody would understand us better — and we could say „Aberration is really a series of lessons that were learned too well.“

You say, „What do you mean?“

„Well, the fellow was taught that — he was raised in a tough neighborhood, and he was taught that the thing to do to get on in life was to bash everybody in the head. And he learned this lesson very, very well.“

But he never learned another lesson which was presented to him later in life, that the way to get on in life was to be able to live with other people. He never learned that lesson, but he did learn this lesson about bash everybody in the head. Therefore, we find what is wrong — that what is wrong with him — is a lesson learned too well. Wrong lesson.

The schoolboy who studies his lessons very often reads something that isn't in the book, and then for some reason or other, learns that much better than what's in the book. Now, why does he do this? We get into alteration or change of location at once. Now, a wrong location and a bum datum are more or less the same thing. When we move data into solids we get the most dominant thing present: location. First we have postulates and then we have located postulates. That's a lower order of postulates but it's still higher than most people's heads.

So we look at this carefully and we find out that aberration, then, consists of a number of lessons which a person has learned too well.

Well, that would be an interesting way to talk about it. It would certainly grip the imagination of an educator.

But there's something else riding alongside of it which rather wipes it out as a total explanation, and that is his willingness to learn a wrong lesson. And that is his learning lag. Now, why is he? He just is. He has decided, sometimes just on his own volition somewhere or another, without any prompting from anything, that he doesn't want to be there. He just decides this. Everybody wants him to be there and so forth; he decides they don't want him there. You see, we've got a random datum here. Just how did he get into a state of mind where he believes that his presence or absence is not the thing?

We get into postulates, and an educator doesn't understand this because postulates are self-generated knowledge. You see where we fly apart right here? We're quite glib, though, right up to that point. Now, you as Scientologists mustn't forget that there is a point where all this smooth description of how learning rate is aberration and how it's all really education and so forth — you mustn't forget that it flies apart somewhere, and that it flies apart on the basis that there is such a thing as a self-generated datum. And that's the end of that.

Education applies itself in the main to agreed-upon data. The translation and handling of these agreed-upon data, that's in essence the subject matter of education.

But there is this thing called „making up his mind about his attitude.“ Until you can get a preclear into pretty good communication and show him that you can undo some of these things, he's very often completely unwilling to change an attitude. His attitudes, then, are quite dominant. And because postulates are well above agreements, it takes some digging, auditor; it takes some digging sometimes.

Preclear sails along with no change, no change, no change. Well, you realize that you can change the mechanics of the case, you can change an awful lot about the case, but there's always self- generated data. There's always that, and it's a random, variable factor and is completely outside the field of education, because it's the creation of data. But it's the creation of data, correct or incorrect, by whose determination? Nobody's. There is nobody to say whether his attitude is correct or incorrect in the final analysis, for him. See, nobody really could judge this, because we might say it is hard on the society or it is hard on his body or it's certainly impeding what he apparently wants to do. But in the final analysis, what is it? It's self-generated to a very marked degree.

Now, you can't hang a preclear with this right off the bat. You can say he was raised in an atmosphere and an environment which rather persuaded him that... And this all goes along very well. The environmental people do very well — heredity versus environment, you know? But environmental characters do very, very well; they do a wonderful job, right up to the point where they have to look at the actual data which comes under their hands. And there we find a rich man's son who goes around — he had everything his whole life — and he beats people over the head. And we can't trace this back glibly to a life in the tenements. See, we just don't trace it back. But it's the behavior pattern that the behaviorist insists comes out of the tenements, but it's being behaviored by somebody on Park Avenue. And this doesn't quite mesh, you see; it's not quite there.

And then we find some chap and he's a fine fellow. There's nothing wrong with this fellow at all. I mean, he's in good shape. He's in good communication. He's very active. He's quite capable. He's very brilliant. And above all things, however, he's a gentleman. And he likes nice things, and he doesn't go to excess on them. But he gets along all right and so on. We find out he was raised in the tenements.

Well, of course, the self-generated data or attitude or consideration plays hell with these other generalizations put out by the behaviorists — heredity, environment and so forth. They all have holes in them, because attitudes can be assumed.

There is this saving grace, however: An assumed attitude can be confirmed. And only when it's confirmed does a person find it difficult to alter it. You got it?

Now, you as a Scientologist can sneak right up on him, then, by unconfirming his most confirmed data. Now, he wants them unconfirmed; he wants them unconfirmed in many, many cases. Even though he assumed this attitude, it was his attitude, it was a random attitude, didn't belong in his environment at all. He just made up his mind one day he should do this and weeks went on and months went on (and he kept doing this, because it seemed like a good game and things were dull), and he all of a sudden one day had it confirmed: That's the way it was! This, then, becomes an agreed-upon reality, and so he goes into a downscale characteristic with regard to it.

Now, many people, you see, simply by getting into the band of agreement, are way up Tone Scale from where they were. But remember, somebody can come downscale into agreement too.

So the datum is confirmed. He generated it and it was agreed. Now, and only now, do we enter the field that we could call learning rate, learning lag or education. He's now learned he was right.

Just for no reason at all he assumed that his mother was a very bad woman. No reason at all, he just assumed this. He didn't have any casus belli here at all. (Pun. No prenatals, in other words.) And he'd gone along all right. But one day he decided that his mother was a beast. Oh, she's a horrible beast. And he went along playing this game of being the sad little orphan, you know, just out of thin air. Kids do this; people do this all the time.

By the way, when people grow up they don't cease to be kids, you know? It isn't that they're immature; they just don't cease to do these things. They maybe do them privately or more overtly.

And one fine day, why — he's been postulating this around in the atmosphere all the time, you see, and he's been kind of making her fall over him — and one fine day, she blows up (and she never did before) and does something dreadful to him, sends him to bed without his supper, tells his father on him, gets him in trouble all the way around the boards and so on, and he says, „Uh-huh, it's just like I suspected!“ Now, he didn't suspect it at all. It's postulated. „Just as I postulated,“ it's coming true. And this will follow out with another concatenation of incident.

What's lying at the bottom of it, however? Well, he postulated it.

Now let's take the reverse of this situation. He postulated that his mother was a good woman and everything was fine and so on. And then the environment went into a wild disagreement with him. She all of a sudden turned around and became a drunkard, started to beat him, threw him out of windows quite regularly, was unfaithful to Father, did all sorts of things and so on. And for the next fifteen years he struggles along trying to convince all of his friends and everybody that she's really an angel. He does this all the way along the line. He dramatizes this every once in a while, but he's convinced, really, that she is a very bad woman. Get the idea? Then one day he gives up entirely trying to convince people that she's a good woman and agrees with the fact she's a bad one. And that's that. Now he has another conviction. Only he didn't generate it. It was exterior to him.

Now, one of the fondest little things that your preclear thinks is that he caused everything everywhere. But he covers this up and advertises to one and all, including himself, that he's not responsible for anything that ever happened to him. Now, this is quite remarkable because it's complete reversal, and advertising that he is totally irresponsible, he yet really believes that he basically caused everything.

Now, if you look at old-time Ownership Processing you will discover very definitely that if you misown something it gets pretty real. It gets very, very solid, you might say.

So at least 50 percent of the things that have happened to him have been from exterior sources. If they're in restimulation, the things that didn't happen to him, you see, and the things that did happen to him, are misowned the other way. In other words, he's misowning both ways. He says he did something or caused something: That was really caused by somebody else if it's in heavy restimulation. He said he didn't do something and it was caused by something else and so forth — well, he really did it. Don't you see? Misownership tells you this at once.

In other words, there are other things at work in the universe besides the preclear. Well, he not only has to discover that he exists, but he has to discover that other things exist too. Therefore, with these random factors — these random factors and considerations in a case lead us, then, to conclude that the premise of education and conviction only goes a short distance. Goes further than anything else, up to self-generated and otherwise-generated attitudes and considerations without cause. That's quite a ways. But it doesn't take us the whole distance.

Therefore, handle this thing as far as it goes. Handle the premise of learning rate, learning tag and other material of this character, and communication itself, just as far as it goes. And it's terribly effective as far as it goes. It is so effective that you're liable to go completely overboard and then one day fall flat on your face and wonder what the devil happened here.

Well, what happened there is that you moved out of that range into the range of self-generated, noncaused attitudes. And the second that you ran into noncaused attitudes, wow!

Now, noncaused attitudes are undone by communication, so we find communication vastly superior to education. The fact or action of communication will always undo education. Always. It'll achieve it or unachieve it. But it has to be pretty lousy communication; it has to be pretty terrible communication to do nothing but fix ideas. That has to be bad communication. It just violates the communication formula so much that you would kind of grimace at the thought of applying „communication“ to it.

What do we have in terms of process here? Well, we have a lot of processes. I'm not trying to give you anything but a decent résumé here of the exact place something occupies before I tell you about it. It's so good that you will try to supplant communication with education. You mustn't do that. All right. And of course, self-generated considerations supplant communication, but communication can modify it.

All right. Now where do we go, then, with this thing called education, learning rate, learning lag and so forth? Well, let's become glib — not me, but all of us — with regard to such a thing as industry. Now, you can move up on an industrialist by telling him that it is learning rate that is impeding his whole operation. How many instructions has he put out that have not been followed? Bwl-bl-ra-ruhhu!

Well, you say, „These boys really do want to cooperate with you, Mr. Industrialist, they really do. They would like to, but their learning rate is so poor that they cannot absorb the instruction“ — that cute, smooth explanation. That just as-ises all the randomity. Now, you can lay this in as a stable datum; it's good enough to lay in as a stable datum and it's something he will understand. It's a better stable datum than anybody else will ever give him. „Labor is all bad“: that's the usual stable datum. „You can't do anything anyhow“ is the stable datum he will adopt at sixty-five. He'll just make decisions of this character based on his (quote) „experience“ (unquote).

But you can undo all this. You could say, „The trouble with your executives, the trouble with your plant foremen, the reason why your production curve is down, your machinery is busted up, is entirely because the learning rate varies from person to person.“ Get fundamental with him, but very technical — always very technical. „You heard of a stupid child and a bright child in the same classroom. Now, what is the difference between these two children?“ Become at this moment very wise. „It's learning rate. It isn't learning quantity. One child doesn't learn as much as the other child because it takes one child too long to learn what the other child learned rapidly.“ Now, we just bypass the whole idea of quantity; don't go into that; don't bother with it because knowledge doesn't have quantity and it's a damn lie. But he will assume at once that the length of time it takes somebody to learn something establishes, then, how much he knows. That's not quite true, but it's awfully convincing. Very convincing.

„Now, actually, there aren't thirty people, Mr. Industrialist, there aren't thirty people in the thousands in your plant who are really the cause of your labor difficulties. Certainly not more than thirty. These people are against you because they don't know you.“

And immediately he will say, „That's so true.“

„They don't know you because their learning rate is so poor that they have no idea what you are trying to do or what you want to do. They are merely in revolt, and they do not know against what.“

„Mmm!“ Makes sense, doesn't it? Makes lots of sense.

„Now, I could pick this out,“ you say, „I could pick these people out with the greatest of ease.“ You'd give them all an APA and anybody that drops the furthest below the line, you just pick these up as the suspects and hand them to him and say, „You see? Now, these people have all given you trouble.“

„Let's look over their service records,“ he says. „Sure enough, they all have!“ It's very interesting, you see? You're a magician at this point. „How did you establish their learning rate so rapidly? You didn't even talk to these people.“

Learning rate: Just use it as a substitute, conversationally, for aberration, comm lag and all the rest of it, and it translates. So we're in communication, even if it is a bit of a stretch. We're in communication, that's for sure.

For instance, a stupid judge is one who cannot learn the rights and wrongs and ins and outs of the evidence from the witnesses. And all the attorneys will tell you at once that this man is a stupid judge because his decisions are incorrect. But sometimes they take a person who is simply a stupid judge and they say he's a vicious judge. Just level that one out: Say, „Well, actually, his difficulty in learning is so great that he becomes emotionally disturbed at the thought of learning and therefore exerts punishment in revenge on the people who have thus tortured him. His learning factors are so poor that it becomes painful for him to learn.”

You see how you could talk to somebody? And without accusing anybody of being insane, without accusing anybody of being aberrated, without walking into the field of psychoanalysis, therapy, without discussing, without modifying Scientology at all in your definition, you could probably sell him processing for the whole executive-and-foreman level of a plant to increase the learning rate — so what? So his postulates will stick! That's what he conceives will happen. And that isn't what you do.

Now, at this point you have a point of agreement, and you as a Scientologist take a departure from it. You've made a point of agreement that it's learning rate and learning lag on the part of his foremen and his executives that make randomity on his communication lines. All right, you can get an agreement there. You can sell that. You can convince him, because it's almost true, and it's true certainly within the realm of his experience.

But you, in processing people, depart from it. You're not interested exclusively in his postulates sticking. You're not interested at all in this. You're interested in giving a person determinism over data. You got that? You are not interested, then, in a person's learning rate really — just between ourselves here — you're not really interested in the learning rate of an individual. You're interested in his determinism over his data — power of choice to establish or review its importance. And that's what you reestablish with the person.

You don't teach him, then, to get in a state of constant hypnotic inflow. You don't teach him that. You teach him power of choice over data, and only then will data become of use to him, and only then can he become social in his behavior.

The answer to it is in total disagreement with the industrialist's modus operandi; it's not in agreement at all. I've talked to some of these boys within the last year. And it's quite interesting that the moment that I started to establish the fluidity and the right to think for labor — the right to live and the right to be, for labor — man, we were talking on different planets.

And this is the secret of their failure. If it was a successful system — the system of moneyed control in the world — there would be more of it today than there had been. It would be an increasing system. And it's not, it's a decreasing system, so they must have a short glance at something. Therefore, you're not going to involve yourself with this short glance.

Management will buy completely „learning rate.“ They will buy completely this whole thing because they themselves can't face communication. But they can face learning. So communication is too high for them, and we've tried to sell them communication here for several years and we have laid some gorgeous ostrich eggs. It's too high for them. You're trying to make them face a static. But they'll face learning because they have had time themselves to see what the inside of a school is like, and that's learning to them.

So what you do then is, knowing this full well, don't become an unwitting partner here in a swindle — because it's not a swindle. You say that you're going to improve their learning rate, and then you don't discuss technically how you do it. You just give him wonderful examples. You say, „Well, how long does it take a person who is a machine operator here — he operates one of these big diesels you have down here running — how long does it take that person to learn to run that diesel well?“

„Oh, well, we have to have a fellow around as an apprentice on diesel operation, and so forth, for about five years and so forth.“

„What's he do during that time?“

„Well, he learns to run diesels.“

„Oh, I'd say that was an awfully slow learning rate. Wouldn't you?“

„Well, it's necessary.“

„Yes, it's only necessary because the learning rate is slow.“

„Well, you can only trust them then.“

„I don't know that you can trust them now,“ you say. „How do you know they learned right?“

„Well, the machines are still running.“

„Are you sure they're still running?“

„What was your repair and replacement bill this last year?“ You say, „Well, how did you know that they know? How do you know they really know?“

„Well, I know how to run all those machines!“

„Yes, but you're you. That's why you're you and that's why you're sitting at the head of the whole shebang. They're not as good as you are, or they'd be.“

You get the kind of argumentation you've got here? What is their learning rate? What is their learning rate?

„Now, you take this junior executive.“

You say, „What's the matter with him?“

„Well, he's just not very effective.“

„What do you mean he's not very effective?“

„Well, he just doesn't get things done.“

„Oh, he doesn't get things done. What do you mean he doesn't get things done?“

„Well, I give him something to do and it never gets done.“

Well, then you say, „You've said something else now: You've said you've given him something to do, and he didn't get it done. That's a little different than his doing something and not getting things done. That's a little bit different. Could it be that his learning rate is so poor that he doesn't understand what you want done?“

„Just the same, is there a possibility that he is very willing to do anything for you but never finds out what? Now, let's have a conference with him. Let's talk it over with him, and let's see if this is the case.“ And boy, it'll always be the case.

If you're dealing with somebody who can't get things done, for sure you're dealing with somebody who cannot absorb data. And so you prove it. You get it? You're just proving it within the realm of understanding, however, of the world at large. If you want to get into a discussion with somebody or anybody in Scientology, I advise you to just beat this one to death: learning rate. It's a wonderful phrase, isn't it? Sounds like it's always existed. Hasn't. Learning lag — technical as hell.

Well now, I've already tried this out. And I have found out that you can do wonders with it in ordinary conversation.

Somebody says, „Scientology is... What do you do? What do you do?“

„Well, I decrease the learning lag of people.“

„Oh. You what? The learning lag of people. What's that?“

„Well, increase their speed of assimilation of data.“

„Oh?“

„Yeah, I increase their learning rates — technical term.“

„Oh,“ the fellow says, „Is that right? Well, how is that?“

„Well,“ you say, „there are so many sciences in existence today, there's so much data; how can anybody possibly keep up to date? There are so many changes and that sort of thing. The only way you can get... Well, take some big corporation, you have to go in and fix up everybody so they can learn what's going on all the time. Fast!“

„Oh? How's this?“

„Well, take sports. Take sports. Professional football. Now, one of the most difficult things there is in a professional football team is to teach the professional football team...“ Football players, your boy knows, are stupid. They're not, by the way, but he knows they're stupid. That's because they're big and heavy and could beat him up; has to be something wrong with them. So you say, „All right, now you take a professional football team — has to learn new plays all the time. What if they've got a good player who can't learn new plays but always plays the old one?“

„Well, that'd be a mess.“

„Well, that's the way they lose games.“

„Well. Well, how will you do it?“

„Well, you speed up the ability of learning new plays.“

„Hm,“ he says.

Now you can really start to get technical. You got some agreement there. He sees that there's some use, that you have a value in the world. He has not yet begun to suspect that you can do something for him, but that will be a matter of just a short time.

You say, „Now, you know what reaction time is?“

Fellow says, „Yeah, yeah. Reaction time, that's the time it takes you to react.“

You say, „That's right. Now, you say, what's...“ You say, „Now, take learning rate. Now, look how important learning rate is. A fellow has to learn there's a truck on the road in front of him before he puts his foot on the brake. Isn't that right? Well, suppose it takes him a long time to learn this? He has a wreck. So people with a slow learning rate are accident-prones. That's all.“

„Oh, you go into that sort of thing too?“

„Oh, no, no, we just make sure people have good, fast reaction times by increasing their learning rate, that's all.“

„Yeah, it's a very, very complicated subject.“

You haven't told him anything complicated yet, so he thinks he's a very bright man. You get how you could bend this around a corner? Well, don't ever forget you're bending it around a corner.

It occupies a fairly interesting section in Scientology, but its accomplishment is not affected by increasing anybody's learning rate and, therefore, it's a misnomer. You don't directly make a fellow drill to learn something faster; you never do.

Why can't you teach people to read a whole book in two hours? There are people who practically do that. Well, there are many systems extant which speed up your reading time, and undoubtedly they do, if your reading time was that much faster. But the practice of reading or the practice of acting, simply increases the familiarity with what you're doing to a point that you can neglect it. And that is never the goal of a Scientologist! His goal is not to get something more automatic! His goal is to establish or reestablish power of choice over data.

Now, where do you suppose an old, learned datum is if it were totally fixed? A totally fixed datum, where is it? It'd be in the past. Where would a person have to go to recover it?

So a person, to stay in present time, has to have all of his data in a relatively fluid condition. So the reestablishment of power of choice over data comes first — to be able to reject it or accept it at will. Free it up. And the whole process of increasing learning rate — that's a secondary thing — is the process of recovering power of choice over data.

And all education is trying to do is fix data. And all a Scientologist is trying to do is fix it or unfix it at will. Got it? Fix it or unfix it at will. And that is what he's doing. And that is the goal of the processes he uses. And they incidentally are the only thing that will increase learning rate and cut down learning lag and increase reaction time and all the rest of it.

But the final product, in the framework of the society itself, is actually coming from something else than the society believes it's coming from. Now, anybody would let you happily go in and teach his junior executives or his plant foremen, or anybody else you wanted to, as much as you pleased about his job. They would let you do anything if you said this is a drill that increases his learning rate. They wouldn't mind you standing him on his head for hours at a time. You understand? And so you have freedom to process people. But what you're doing is reestablishing his power of choice over the data he has. He always winds up knowing more about it. And his learning rate depends upon that power of choice to fix or unfix data at will.

And the processes you'll be running this next week are directly aimed at doing just this, very precisely.

Thank you.

[End of Lecture]