All right.
This is January 24, AD 8. That's "After Dianetics" — much easier to remember. And our problems today are probably very many, but I'm going to answer a theoretical question: "How does an E-Meter work?"
Before me I have an E-Meter, an electrometer, and it works very interestingly. You could draw a physical graph of its electrical circuit and simply put the preclear's body in there as a resistor. Put the preclear's body in as a resistor between these two cans, and you have merely completed an electrical circuit of a certain number of milliamps, microamps. That's all. And up to that point, you would get no variation.
Now, let's look at this. Let's draw a closed circuit — closed electrical circuit. It's got a battery in it, it's got a meter and so forth. And we simply interpose a resistor in between these two cans, and that's the preclear's body. You understand that?
Now, it is at that moment merely a physical electrical circuit. That is all, see? There's nothing mysterious there at all. A lot of people have tried to make something very mysterious out of these meters, but it, I'm afraid, isn't very mysterious to us in Scientology.
Now then, if you did merely complete this circuit — this circular swing of juice from the battery and around through the meter and past these two electrodes, you see — if you merely completed that, you would get no variation on this needle, see? For instance, if you put a dead body in between these two things (these two cans here, the electrodes which are held by hand) — if you put a dead body in there, you would simply get no variation here. You got that? The meter itself would never quiver.
Now, the instrument, actually, is not very marvelous. This is to be very frank. Because nothing in it — nothing in the meter measures the area between the body and the thetan. All it measures — it's just an electrical current, you see? It's just an electrical circuit and it's constant and it doesn't vary a hair.
Then what varies? Well, you'd have to stretch this meter out here — just representing it as a circuit — and this can and this can, and put a body in between these two cans. Make it a dead body, you know, no variation, no thetan. You get no reading until a thetan came along and started to monkey with this dead body, see — maybe bring it back to life or do something with it. But whatever he did with it, it would change the characteristics of this resistor. You understand that? And the gradient scale — which would be marvelous if you could approximate it in the physical universe circuits — the gradient scale of touch is between a thetan and the body. And that is the marvelous gimmick, you see?
Now, we don't care what this thetan does to the resistor: whether he makes it more dense, whether he puts it under heavier tension, whether he relaxes it, whether he puts some insulators in it. See, we don't care what the thetan does to this dead body in order to change it. The point is, he changes it. Now, I'll tell you that nobody knows exactly what he does to change the body so that this machine will read.
We know that he changes the body, but what characteristic in the body he changes, we do not know. We have only theory. See that? That is not a lead-pipe cinch. Now, I got to whip this thing out after, and when we've got some time, by symbolic logic and so forth, we're going to just vary all the variables — yes-greater-than-no, no-greater-than-yes sort of thing — and just eliminate all possibilities electrically until we find out exactly what the thetan varies in the body to make it read. But that is an engineering project and is undertaken simply to assuage our curiosity.
When a thetan flinches on a question in some way, it doesn't register over here on the needle. That isn't really what happens at all. It varies the resistance of this resistor between these two cans. See, it just changes that resistance. You got that? And for our purposes we could say — but theoretically, only — that it simply made the body more dense or less dense. That isn't actually accurate. But he's afraid he'll be caught, so he tenses up, you see? He makes the body tense up, and you'd get a lie reaction. You get the idea?
But, the point is, we don't care what he makes the body do. The point is, the thetan makes the body do something which changes its characteristics as a resistor. You see that? And then this machine measures only this: different resistances in this resistor. That's all the machine measures. So it isn't a very wonderful machine actually at all, since, truthfully, every testing instrument that is used in radio shops and so forth, is potentially the same machine. Got that? Since most of these things could be made to measure the strength or resistance of a resistor. You get that? All right.
Now, this thing, however, is clever only in this degree: that it takes the range that the resistor can be varied and stays in that range; whereas a machine taken off the laboratory bench or the electronic shop bench or something like that, would be all over the place. See, it would be above and below and so on. So it has been made practical.
Now, when anybody tries to tell you a lot of hocus-pocus concerning one of these meters, remember this: The first E-Meter was not made by Mathison. The first E-Meter was actually made by Dick Saunders here in Washington, DC, in 1950. And Dick was interested in showing psychiatrists and psychoanalysts that an engram existed, and so he had some sort of a meter. And I don't remember exactly what this thing was, but it was simply a sort of a meter you'd take off of a laboratory bench, you know? And it didn't have any batteries connected with it, which is kind of marvelous.
Now, I don't know what he fed into anybody to have a current ride on it, but he was getting a reading of some sort or another, and it worked like this: He'd give the preclear the two electrodes and then he'd pinch the preclear brutally. He was a very brutal young man. And he'd pinch the preclear, and the preclear would flinch, and you would see this flinch register electronically on this crude old meter, see? And then he would send the preclear back to the moment of the pinch and get the pinch again without pinching him.
And this really had some "psuckoanalysts" around here going mad. Why did it register again? Well, Dick would simply say that is an engram and its influence. And he'd proceed to erase it and after that, you couldn't get a flip on the meter on the same pinch, don't you see? But it had to be a pretty brutal pinch, let me assure you, to generate enough electrical current to flip. But it evidently did. Now, I don't know what kind of a meter that was because I, myself, didn't have my hands on it.
I gave a lecture on this subject in Los Angeles, and a fellow down there who was more in psychoanalysis than anything else, breadboarded up what you now know as — in its various versions — as a Mathison electropsychometer. And this proved very good. And most of the research material that was done early was done on the first models of this electropsychometer.
However, it didn't have enough range and so was expanded. And the total heyday, the ultimate height, the ne plus ultra zenith of that particular meter, you might say, was the HIR 52. I think that was the best of these meters. And it simply had a range expander and a high range and low range. And it was pretty good. The only thing wrong with that meter is it pours one wham of a current through a preclear. Some terrific thing, probably — well, some of them as much as ten times as much current as this meter — real high. It was an AC meter. This is a DC meter — that's correct.
But it was quite successful, and I did all the research of backtrack with that particular meter. And it worked very well. And then we found other ways of measuring what we wanted to do with the preclear such as comm lag, cognition and return of an ability. You know, there are three things — you can tell a process is flat: comm lag (when the comm lag reduces), and when a cognition is gained, or an ability is regained. And we use that most of the time but we weren't using processes to do that.
Actually an oscilloscope for the 8-80 techniques — just a plain, ordinary, run-of-the-mill, laboratory test-bench oscilloscope is hotter than an E-Meter for numerous things. In the first place, you plot a sine wave onto the thing with a preclear, and there it sits with a scope and it's got one sine wave on it. And you ask him various questions and you get different wave characteristics, which is quite interesting. And, in addition to that, you can tell which way he is flowing — out or in. And it gives the direction of flow. Mocking up something and shoving it into the body would have registered in one direction on the oscilloscope, and mocking something up and throwing it away would have registered in another direction on the oscilloscope. And you would have been able to tell exactly which way he was going on the thing.
But those are rather dear. They are rather expensive and they're quite fragile in numerous ways. And they give you so much more than what you want that you get altogether too fascinated with their reactions. And as a result we have here something that's giving us exactly what we want.
Now, the important thing about one of these meters is simply the meter action itself. That is the important and expensive thing about one of these meters. Now, Don did something rather wonderful with this meter in that he designed it down to low consumption — used transistors to relay the signal through and so got it into a steady stability that no other meters had. The Mathison, occasionally, you turn it on and it's this, and you turn on the next time and it's that. But this has been stabilized rather carefully, and this is a pretty good meter element. And as a result we do have, then, something that should stick around for a while.
There is nothing in it much to wear out. But we probably could improve this meter one way or the other — not much point in doing so. It does tell us what we want to know, and we only want to know this: Is the thetan thinking that thought or doing that action, still automatically and without thought on his part to do so, changing the resistance of a body between those two cans? You got that? Is he still, automatically and without thinking about it, changing the resistance of this resistor? Is he? If he is, it's "not flat." And if he can do this, now, without changing the resistor, then he doesn't have it all dubbed into the bank. You get the idea? He doesn't have a bank connected up automatically in all directions, so that every time he thinks a thought the resistance of the body changes. Do you see that? Now, that is all there is to one of these meters.
And it's very easy to run one of these meters. All you have to do is set it up so a hard squeeze of the can gives you a third or a half a drop on the dial. You hand — simply hand these electrodes to the preclear. Actually, that's very, very badly put: You hand them to the preclear's body, preclear's body takes hold of them. He's still running the body, and he has unwanted charge on numerous thoughts and incidents and so forth, from the bank; but regardless of what that is, you just simply hand him the electrodes and you set this thing up so that it reads in the proper area over here. When he squeezes the cans, you get a third to a half-a-dial drop.
Now, when we say "tone," we mean this tone arm here. This tone arm. There you are. That's throwing a nice beam between it, isn't it? We get a half-a-dial drop when we throw these things, which is about so. You'd get a drop that's about so. It'd look like that.
But after that you're simply interested in null. Now, that's sitting there very comfortably at null. And we get a half-a-dial drop on that one — we ask the person to squeeze the cans. After that, when we ask him a question, if the question is charged from our standpoint, the asking of it changes the resistance in the meter and you get a drop.
Now, when the thing is not dropped, you get a null. And when this needle here is not moving — going down, you see — you say it is null. You ask him a question. You say, "Have your grandmother — did your grandmother ever beat you?"
And he says, "No," and the needle stays right where it is, why, you've got a null. It's a null question. Now, had his grandmother beaten him, and if he had a lot of engrams and so forth on this subject, you'd get an entirely different reaction. The needle would drop. It's charged.
Now, there's a way to set up a series of tests on this thing that you ought to know. The first test, the most classic one, is after you've got the needle set up and you've got the thing riding there, you put your finger on the back of the fellow's neck and ask him — or the girl's neck — and say, "Have you ever been kissed there?" There should be a meter response, a tiny one or a decent one, but there should be a meter response. Then you know that the meter is reading the preclear and it's not reading some internal misconnection or some television broadcast station wave or something of the sort. Now, if he doesn't act on that, you probably don't have enough sensitivity because just your fingers touching the back of his neck, let me assure you, alters the resistance of the body. That's why it's a good test — not because of the tricky wording, but just because you add your body resistance somewhat to his, you see? And you move it around and you get a change. And you should get that change on that needle, see?
Now, you ask him to answer no to every question you ask him. He's to say no regardless of what you ask him. And you say, "Are you in this room?"
And he says, "No."
Well, that is a lie, and you should get a reaction on the needle. And if one is working right, you should get a reaction.
Now, as people get up into the Clear range, the responses on this thing are not good. They are not good. Why? Because you have a thetan handling a body, usually, by postulate and you don't have electrical responses. And the body isn't wincing and flinching every time a thetan wiggles, so you don't get resistance changes. Do you see that? And not getting resistance changes, you, of course, don't get reads. So it's on the road to Clear that this thing is needful. That is where it is necessary — on the road to Clear. It's vital for that area. If you're going to clear somebody, you can probably add 25 to 30 percent time to the length of time it'll take to clear somebody by not using a meter. Omit the meter, you'll increase the time by at least 25, 30 percent.
You might do something else, you see? I mean, you might have a much harder run at it, but at least that will happen. Because, as you're doing this verbally and watching the preclear, you actually are not looking at his bank. You're looking at the preclear. And this is perfectly all right, but what are you doing? You're merely measuring the behavior of a resistor. And there are other ways to measure it, this is for true. But you can measure it very directly. And why shouldn't you do so? And it gives you a look at the bank. You get a look at the bank.
Now, as you go along, you want a null. Well, what is meant by null? It's just a motionless needle — not a stuck needle. A stuck needle is really a frozen one; you could kick him in the shins and it wouldn't move. But sometimes they get on a stack of engrams like all of these cards I was telling you about, with the chewing gum and the rock candy on them.
Now the — you ask him for a present time problem, and you get no — the needle is still free, you know, but you're not getting a drop when he thinks of a present time problem, then you skip the present time problem. But if you ask, "Do you have a present time problem?" you get a significant drop. He doesn't have to answer you, by the way, to make this thing read. Actually, he answers your thought, and it reads his answer. And did you know that you could run somebody 100 percent with his never opening his mouth with one of these meters?
I started in on a criminal one day, with one of these meters. And this guy was probably half dead from shock when I finally got through because I had wormed the whole thing out. I had just taken the whole thing from one end to the other, you see? Just scouted the whole thing — even gotten names after him in this fashion: "Well, the name begins with a letter which is in the last half of the alphabet. Hah! The name begins with a letter in the first half of the alphabet. Very good. The name begins with the letter A, B, C, D, E, F, G" — needle drops. "Fine," you say, "fine — name begins with G."
All you'd have to do, you see, just plaster the whole thing up. Why anybody worries about interrogating criminals or spies, I wouldn't know, because if you're quite clever, you can make these things simply talk right straight up. You can make them do wigwag. So that your interrogation and so forth does not depend on his verbal response. It merely depends on the meter response. And as you interrogate him, as you put your question to the preclear and as you ask the preclear, "This — that — that," you'll get these reactions. Well, if you got a drop on a present time problem, you'd of course run a present time problem until the meter was no longer acting. And then it was flat, see?
But supposing he said he had a present time problem, you didn't get any meter drop. Don't run it. Oh, he sounded terribly worried and so forth, "My mother left me this morning."
And you say, "Well, that would be a good present time problem. Obviously the fellow has a present time problem," so you decide to run it. Hah! No needle reaction, no meter reaction — don't touch it.
You say, "Yes, but it's reasonable that he would be worried and have a present time problem if his mother left him this morning." It's your place to audit, not to be reasonable.
And we had a preclear in here last week that had a present time problem, present time problem, present time problem. He finally pulled the auditor in on it. He finally got — the two auditors he had in a row that he hornswoggled into believing in his present time problems. And he finally up and confessed that his present time problem — that it was that he couldn't feel bad about any of his present time problems. Yet he was actually burning up plenty of auditing time. He burned up the better part of fifty hours with this kind of nonsense. There's no reaction on the meter, don't run it on a present time problem.
Now, quite different — quite different is the matter of a null on an object that you're going to run on "Mock it up and keep it from going away." There you want a null. So he mocks it up and then keeps it from going away, and you sorted the object out. You found out that he didn't have any drop on apples. What if you found out he had a drop on Cadillacs? Well, you would just go on to something else.
He'd say, "Well, yes, I can mock up Cadillacs."
You say, "You mock up Cadillacs." The meter goes dyaaah. You say, "Well, can you mock up hats? Cows?" Try something else, you know. You just avoided that sweep. You didn't Q-and-A with that. You didn't follow in down there simply because the needle dropped, you know. You wanted a null. You wanted a no-read. You finally found out for some reason or other that he had no drop of any kind on mirrors. Well, all right, he had no drop on mirrors. So that's a null item. So you can have him mock up a mirror and keep it from going away.
You have him mock up a mirror in front of him, behind him, above and below, right and left; keep it from going away. You'll probably get two or three commands into it before you get your first drop. And now you get a drop. The needle falls to the right as you face it.
By the way, you never let a preclear watch this dial. This dial is a mystery to him. The needle is facing you, not facing the preclear, because he'll start to monitor the needle all by himself, and any thetan can do that. All right.
You had to give him anywheres from two to ten commands before you finally got a surge. You had him mock it up and keep it from going away, and mock it up and keep it from going away, and mock it up and keep it from going away. But finally, all of a sudden, the thing started to surge. Now, the usual course of events is that it will surge harder and harder per command, see? It'll really drop for a short time, and then the drops will ease off, ease off, ease off, ease off, ease off. And you've, again — find yourself looking at a null. You've taken the restimulation out of the object, you see? You again have a null. That's why we say, "Run an object from null to null," see? No reaction to the needle, through reactions to the needle, to no reaction in the needle. You got that?
Now, if you wanted to do a very, very exact job on this sort of thing, if you wanted to do a very exact job on this sort of thing you would pull off tone to tone. You pull off tone to tone. Now, this is your tone arm, over here. This is your tone arm. Preclear starts with the tone handle vertical. After you've asked him a half a dozen questions, his tone has dropped down, clear over to the left somewhere. You see, it's down here about eight o'clock — something like that. His tone has dropped off to eight o'clock on this dial. It was at twelve up. You can run him on any given subject until he has a twelve o'clock read again. Now, that would be running him from tone to tone. This is the tone arm — tone to tone. Got that? So you can run him null to null — now, that refers to the meter needle — or tone to tone, which refers to the tone arm over here. You got that? Two different things you could do here, right? And a perfectionist does both. Got that? A perfectionist does both. He runs apples, "Keep them from going away," back to null, and the tone arm back up where it was before he began the process. Do you understand that?
But he doesn't have to run the tone arm. But he absolutely must run the needle on the meter. You got that? He absolutely must run the needle. This is not as vital, but you will find out that a person who has run this tone arm back up again feels better, and there's no restimulation because of the session. You also usually run the whole session out, too, when you get it up tone to tone.
Now, actually, he'll go higher than this, and a fellow who is trying to go for broke can get too eager and try to run this tone arm up to three o'clock or something, on one process. Well, I'll clue you: There are — there is no possibility of clearing a person with one command, one object. You see that? One command, one object. So don't try to clear the fellow with one command on one object. You get the idea? Be happy to take a gradient scale. After all, you're doing it, and it's never been done before. Be happy about something for a change.
Well, that's a very nice, very nice little meter. It — serve us very well; we're getting enough of these things now.
The whole subject of clearing is, actually, the subject of influence or association. And it's the difference between willing, knowing association and unwilling, unknowing association. A person who is not Clear is subjected to many unwilling, unknowing associations. Let's not worry about our definition of Operating Thetan for a moment; let's just look — take up this whole subject of association. Question here is, what is association?
Now, unwilling, unknowing association — the first postulate on this sort of thing: A fellow has to make up his mind that there must be something harmful about association before he gets the idea of unwilling, unknowing association. There must be something wrong with it. He must also get the idea that he can associate with something and not-know it before he can go into this. But you have all the mechanical aberrations there are in this universe when you say "unwilling and unknowing association." Those are mechanical aberrations.
Quite amusing, a lot of people have drummed on this thing called association. There's Freudian associated words. A much better one than he had: Dianetic flash answer — instantaneous association. Freudian practice would sort out some bedded-down, bogged-down associated word after lord knows how many hours and tests and everything else. The Dianetic auditor used to say, "The first word that will flash — " or, "A word will flash into your mind when I count from one to five." "The name of your mother's family will flash in your mind when I count from one to five and snap my fingers."
But, naturally, your instantaneous response would be your automatic association, wouldn't it? So the file clerk was a nonexisting, instantaneous associator. Got it?
You walk up to most people and say, "How old are you?"
And this person says, "Dahh — wurr — uhh."
"Well, when I count from one to three and snap my fingers, your age will flash. One-two-three. (snap)"
And the fellow says, "Two. Wait a minute, I'm not two!"
Now, Freudian had a thousand-, fifteen hundred-, ten thousand-dollar look at it, and the Dianetic auditor had a five-minute look at it. It all amounted to exploration of the subject of association. A gradient scale is simply logical association.
Now, it's an odd thing that there is such a thing as logic. It's quite interesting that such a thing as logic exists — it is. But what it is, is a gradient scale of how things should be associated. And logical association is very interesting.
Now, when you have an association of sizes in, let us say, shotgun shot, which builds from size twelve, the tiniest, on through eleven, ten, nine, eight and so forth, down to zero, and it's the largest shot, double-zero — you have a gradient scale of something getting gradually larger, don't you? Well, as long as you can differentiate at all amongst the sizes, you have similarity and logic.
But let's take the biggest shot, number double-zero, and put it over here alongside of number twelve and say that is a scale. So you have this little tiny shot and there's a great big shot, see, and then a smaller shot and then on up, and then a blank file up here. Something is out of order in the gradient of association, right? All right, then that is a bad association and that is not a gradient association. Something is confused with something. Something is out of order or out of line. Something is improperly associated according to the logical scheme of things.
Now, let's take association and move it upstairs, and we get Dianetic identification — A=A=A=A. "He rowed a boat. He road a boat. He r-o-a-d a boat. So boats are used on roads, of course. You get all of your nonsensical bric-a-brac.
All there is to an insanity is too much and too good an association, so that it becomes an identification. That's all insanity is.
Now, association can get so good that it sounds like disassociation. But remember, it doesn't look like disassociation to the person who was associating. It looks perfectly logical to him — remember? So the misnomer of disassociation rather leads us and red-herrings us astray. We rather go astray.
We go over the hills and far away, the moment we start thinking about disassociation — that there's something wrong with a disconnection.
Now we get the liability of exteriorization. That is, somebody believes something is wrong with disconnection. Nearly all the psychiatrists back in the middle ages of the twentieth century would have told you that disassociation was very bad, so therefore, if you couldn't associate something between two objects, you were a sick man. You see, that was their craziness.
You know what's meant by disassociation, don't you? A person goes out and gets a giraffe and says, "Well, that belongs in the front room," see? Seems very logical to this person that the giraffe belongs in the front room — gets very angry because the giraffe isn't in the front room. Walks up to a zebra and says, "Hello, Mother." Can't understand why everybody is upset over his action. Do you see that? Well now, he's associating too well, but it looks like he's disassociating to the outside observer.
So we have association that's too good and becomes identification. But if we had separation, or disassociation, why, we would really have something. We'd have a separation. Well, they don't — you don't get separations; you get logical connections that become more and more illogical until nobody can tell any gradient between the two except the insane person. Gets absolutely furious because the policemen do not live in bathtubs. When asked to explain this action, he explains it this way: He says, "Well, policemen are bathtubs."
Well, how the hell did he get policemen and bathtubs together, you see? Your logical person starts going "Dog — wog — wog — wog — let's see, 'Policemen are bathtubs, policemen are bathtubs.' Now, how did he get an associated line between policemen and bathtubs?"
Well, he hasn't got an associated line between policemen or bathtubs — I'll clue you. "Policemen are bathtubs," that's what's wrong, see? He's not disassociating. He's . . .
You can get another mechanism whereby all facts seem to spring to part and he can't connect anything with anything again. That's because everything is everything.
But the — well, the point I'm trying to make here is that association seems to be a common denominator of all thinkingness, particularly figure-figureness — association. And you're dealing with a very, very hot common denominator. It is not the least common denominator and is not the most explanatory one but it is a terribly interesting one and it is of great use in processing.
Now, a thetan who picks up a body is a case in association. Only it has become what? It's become identification. Spirit picks up the body, then says, "I am the body; the body is me." Now, we get a total disassociation when somebody comes along and says, "Well, there's no such thing, then, as a spirit." See, this is totally irrational — "There are only bodies." Maybe they wish there were only bodies, but it's not true.
We get mest, which was created by the spirit, taking charge of the spirit, you know? Carts before horses, and all sorts of cliches. We get somebody who's really spun in — too much cold weather, too much vodka, too much revolutionary literature, too many commissars — somebody is crazy, see? Somebody has just gone utterly mad. And we get him down to a point to where he says, "All thought stems from matter." And we get this subject called dialectic materialism. That's what it's called in Europe, it's called psychology in the United States — same thing.
Dialectic materialism — "All thought is the product of two opposing forces." Well, you take somebody who's 90 percent knocked out and you hit him on both sides, you're liable to jolt him into thinking a thought. But this is nonsensical, as saying, "All action stems from emergencies." See? Same thing.
You can always make somebody think by hitting him in the belly and the backbone at the same time. But that isn't the only thing that makes him think. But people who were bogged down with commissars and Marx and other things are liable to get into that state.
Now, what's real wild is that the Russian is totally dominated by thought — totally haunted by spirits. Man, I don't think there's a muzhik, or whatever they call themselves now, goes forth for a walk but what he doesn't consult the rain gods, or something, you know? Man, are they superstitious! Their icon has Lenin's head in it now, but boy — boy they're wild.
They're wild on this basis: somebody suddenly jumps up and says, "I'm Peter the Great." His friends have known him all of his life. He's just some dumb peasant in some part of some village and he's just some stupid guy. And he all of a sudden jumps up and he says, "I'm Peter the Great. Well, let's march on Moscow and kill everybody." Everybody goes out and gets their hammers and sickles and pitchforks and follows him to Moscow. He's "Peter the Great."
Well look, unless they had some reactive idea of the spirit taking root in other bodies, they'd never follow this one. And yet this alone has been the source of most of the Russian revolutions — this alone.
People suddenly jump up and say they're somebody. The reason they keep Lenin's body on display, very publicly, is so nobody will jump up and say, "I'm Lenin."
Now, they've put spirit on total automatic. And although they say there is no such thing as a spirit, they go mad at the thought of being hit by one. I think probably the most haunted thing you have in Washington is probably some psychiatrist. Now, I'd hate to appear in the room as a dull glow around some psychiatrist. He'd go stark staring mad. And yet all of his textbooks say, "There is no spirit — there is no such thing as a spirit" — that sort of thing, you see?
So there you have disassociation. But oddly enough, the more the facts of the case are disavowed, the more apparent and isolated they seem to become. Most scientists wind up in the spiritual bracket sooner or later.
Well, what does all this add up to? It adds up to the fact that things join things, and then things join things too well and become things. And then, after that, they apparently separate, but they don't.
Now, all of you are totally familiar with this inversion phenomena: They join things so well that then they separate. This fellow is so solidly in his head that he can't get near it — the inversion factor.
And we run into some people who are "exteriorized." They're not, they're noninteriorized. See, quite different than being exteriorized because you have to get them assembled before you can pull them apart. See that?
Well, the laws of logic and the laws of association are all parallel. Gradient scales, things like that, are all germane to these things. But out of all this, we would have to ask what the basic association is.
What I'm telling you about is right now much less important than it was just a few weeks ago when I was sorting it out for the last time before we took a crack at clearing sweepingly. I wanted to find out if there was something there.
Well, yes, there's a great deal there, and you use it all the time, but we don't have to pay too much attention to it. But because it is there, it makes an interesting variable factor. And therefore, you should know something about it so that you won't get all snarled up with it.
When a person puts a thought in the wall, he can then conceive himself to be stuck to the wall; but only if he considers himself the thought. Got that?
And so therefore we have the basic association, which is "I am a thought."
And the next basic association is, "A thought can be in matter or space. Thoughts can be in space and matter."
Now, those two associations are necessary in order to get an E-Meter to read. You think that's an awful fast curve back to home plate, don't you? But you see, that's necessary. A thetan has to think of himself as a thought. He must have identified, in our usage of the word. You see, he must have jammed himself in totally on thinking he was a thought. See, that's not just an association, that is an extreme association or an identification. He must have gone at least that far or even into a disassociation before he can get stuck anywhere or can be trapped. He must be a thought.
All you'd have to do to fish somebody out of a trap would simply — to get him to postulate enough thoughts until he realized he wasn't thinkingness. See that? Be very easy to free a thetan out of a trap. You just say, "Postulate something," and get him to do it until he realized he wasn't the postulate. Don't you see? And as soon as he found out he wasn't thoughts, he would free.
Now, he actually could come out if you could touch that one. I'm not saying that this is possible — to just run this process only and get this result. I'm merely saying it's theoretically the basic process. It would be "Think a thought" of some sort or another, see?
Now, this would eventually bring him into a realization that he was the creator of thoughts and that he was not what he created. All right.
On the other side of it, that a thought could stick in space, energy or matter or time — he'd have to have that. He'd have to believe that a thought could stick in space, energy, matter, time, you see? He'd have to have that idea.
In order for him to get stuck on a time track or stuck against walls or stuck anywhere, he'd have to get this idea as a total association: "Thoughts can stick in." You see? So you'd have to get an association over there which was an identification.
Now, if you got both of these identifications — both of them — you get a preclear. See, the fellow is capable of sticking on the track. He's capable of sticking in locations. You can't go out here and pick up a Homo sapiens without discovering somebody who is stuck in his childhood home, you know? You just ask somebody, "Where did you live when you were a child?"
"Well — uhh — duhh — duhh," so forth and so on and so on.
"Well, where is that from here?" and if it's south, he'll point north, you know? He'll be all messed up. If you keep running Change of Space, just spotting it, "Spot your childhood home. Spot this room. Spot your childhood home. Spot this room. Spot your childhood home." The next doggone thing you know, why, he's sitting in the kitchen in the childhood home, you know? "Ah, ya-heh."
Well, obviously, he had to think of something getting stuck in the childhood home before he could get stuck in the childhood home, right? So a thought about being in the childhood home must therefore be in the childhood home to some degree, to stick him in that area to some degree, you see? Then he must have thought of himself as that thought in order to get stuck there himself, you see?
So there are two — only two conditions necessary for an entrapment. And one of those, a thetan must think of himself as a thought and he must conceive that a thought can be stuck in matter, energy, space and time. Get that?
Somebody comes along and they say, "Your name is Joe."
And then you say the most remarkable non sequitur thing: you say, "I'm Joe."
Look those — look that over carefully. They come along; there you are lying there defenselessly. They sprinkle some unholy water on your head, mutter some incantation over you and say, "Your name is Joe."
And then you grow up a little bit and you say, "I am Joe. I am Joe. I am a significance named Joe." Get the idea? It doesn't follow. It doesn't follow.
You get the idea when everybody comes by and says, "Hello, Joe." After a while you get the idea you're a Joe.
Well, man, very oddly, has called this " identity." It's almost as though he knew what was going on. Interesting and wonderful choice of words, to call this an identity. The name is the thing.
Now, the whole field of general semantics rose simply out of such a mess as this. Korzybski. Korzybski, and before that, Ouspensky and some of these boys, Gurdjieff — they did a lot of work on this: "Is the name the thing?" and so forth. And they tried to clear up people's minds on this. They tried to get them to think about the dissimilarity, you see, instead of always identifying. And they tried to get them to place themselves, thinkingly, where they were and they discussed all these various aspects of it. They have some later imitators. I think there's some guy named Hayakawa and so forth, I think, who is still around.
I suppose you know that Dianetics practically wiped out general semantics, don't you? Was an unintentional act. A great many general semanticists swung over into the Dianetic camp, and the general semanticists at one time, by the way, offered the whole kit and caboodle, lock, stock, and barrel, to me. They sent their secretary over to Elizabeth saying, "Why don't you take over this outfit?"
I said, "I'm busy." That was a very stupid thing for me to say, but I was busy.
But this was a very noteworthy effort to free thinkingness. And you read some pretty wonderful philosophic dissertations in Korzybski's work. Hayakawa — that's junk; but Korzybski is pretty terrific.
Now, here we had an interesting phenomenon. Here and there amongst the general semanticists, somebody did get free. See, he did all of a sudden recognize something about association. He did recognize that two objects could not occupy the same space. Unfortunately, a Scientologist doesn't recognize this at all. He knows damn well two objects can occupy the same space. So he isn't resisting it all the time. All you have to do is resist this "two objects occupy the same space" and the whole works will start collapsing on you.
But they actually did, here and there, bring somebody out of the doldrums and smarten them up, and they really started wheeling. They had some interesting phenomena just on taking apart association in the individual, getting him to understand the association rather than to unthinkingly identify everything with everything. They got him to put his universe in order, one way or the other. That it made him too careful, that this was not a good way to go about it, that they didn't know about processing, they had no Auditor's Code and so forth — this is all beside the point. It was a very noteworthy effort.
Now, when you are taking apart a pc, the component parts you are separating him into take place to the degree that he recognizes identification and association. Do you see that?
You don't have to strain at this at all. It all takes care of itself. You haven't got a thing to worry about but you should understand the basic anatomy of the beast. It's almost as if we're studying the number of bones and sections and specie of a rhino because we're going out and shoot some rhino, you know? It's not necessary, but it's nice. And what you're doing is separating a thetan from his thinkingness, and his thinkingness from his energyness, see, and his energyness from matter, energy, space, time — physical universe and so forth.
Now, these things all get crossed up in the second universe, the universe of the mind. And every once in a while you get a spectacular result by making somebody simply change the content of an engram or something of the sort. Well, all you did was alter the thinkingness content of the engram, don't you see?
But these basic concepts are the basic concepts of entrapment, but they are not just vicious. You realize that you couldn't be here unless you held on to your ability to associate to some degree. And people refuse to get well when they think you're going to destroy their ability to associate. Well, you're not trying to destroy it; you're trying to put it under their control.
So it's unwilling and unknowing association, or identification, that turns out to be insanity, aberration and all the rest of the bad crew. And it turns out to be willing and knowing association, and even identification, and even disassociation — that turns out to be control of the game. And again you have the unwillingness and the unknowingness factor. There's nothing bad about association, except when you don't even know it.
The wonder of somebody who runs into a stuck needle: Now, a stuck needle is a mark of just total association, which means identification on one subject. It's A=A=A=A. And then you get a stuck needle. Everything equals everything. And you will get some of the most remarkable things you ever heard of.
By the way, just in closing here, running Problem of Comparable Magnitude to, the severity of the problem is measured by you, the auditor, by the degree of disassociation the person demonstrates in getting problems of comparable magnitude. "Invent a problem of comparable magnitude to your sister," you will say as the auditor.
And the fellow says, "Well, uh — polar bears fishing, and they can't find anyplace to throw the fish so they make me hold them," or something.
You say, "Wow! How did we get over here?" Well now, that is identification. That's your system of logic violated. And eventually it'll get up to a point of "Problem of comparable magnitude to your sister."
"Oh, somebody who stands around and spits all the time."
You can understand that, see? That's on the gradient scale. But the other seemed quite real to him. And you've got to pull these identification spots into association spots before the problem is anywheres flat and the fellow is sane on it.
Okay?
Audience: Yeah.
Thank you.