Thank you.

Well, I’m glad to see you, too. What’s the time?

Female voice: June the 18th.

I’m getting so I think in terms of broader periods of time. It’s quite amusing to me, but I notice the 16th took two or three days to go by and the 17th has taken two or three days to go by, and now we’re on the 18th, so this is 18 June AD 14, Saint Hill Special Briefing Course.

The things are swinging along beautifully and it’s quite a tribute – this is not germane to the lecture, the lecture is on something quite important, but – the lecture is about studying – but it’s quite interesting that a very – a rather indirect tribute can be paid to the auditing of Saint Hill students who’ve been through their lower Materials and come on up to the co-audit, and so forth. They have actually kept their pcs going, over a considerable quantity of bypassed charge.

That isn’t said as a gag, you see? It’s the truth, see. Because the top of the reactive mind, you see, the top of a GPM, is the hardest thing to find out what’s in it. You haven’t been over this – these humps, and you probably won’t have to be, but just let me give you this in passing.

The hardest thing in the world to find are the top items of a GPM. I don’t know how many potential oppterms and terminals were discarded before the actual ones were found, see. It’s up – oh, I don’t know, the arrangements of that bank are almost uncountable. You have, at the moment, a perfect line plot. That’s why you’re getting away with it. But the top of a bank, you see, the whole reactive mind would be equally hard to get to because the thetan is sitting on all that charge, you see?

Similarly, the top of a series, you see, would be the hardest thing to find the root words of, don’t you see? And that is the scramble which has been going on before the thing was finally taped. It’s very funny. I’ve got the rest of the root words of the series, you see? They just run out like hot butter, there’s nothing to those. But getting those exact top ones, that was the tough one. And in putting that material in exact lineup, of course, we had momentary stumbles on the line of exactly what was this thing. Of course, you know, you could have laid off and knocked off and not done any auditing on this, you see, for a couple of years and let me have run the whole bank out, don’t you see? But you were running this danger, is by the time I’ve run the whole bank out, I might not be interested. Gag.

But it was a considerable tribute to the fact that there was – there was some missing elements there, perfect line plot they started with – didn’t start with a perfect one, but had one within 24 hours – and the materials pretty well lined up, exactly how they went, what the patterns were, and that sort of thing. This was pretty well ironed out, but nevertheless, nevertheless, there were quantities of bypassed charge, huge quantities such as no Co-audit will ever face again, you see? And the auditors in the co-audit actually were sufficiently smooth as auditors, and so forth, that their pcs just kept going along and they didn’t have any big casualties or anything else.

Now, in the clumsiest look, they would have killed somebody with that much charge, see – the clumsiest look. And if their auditing had been the least bit crude, and so on, why, those people would have just been flying apart at every joint, you know. There would have been ARC breaks and rabble rouses and so forth, and max-mass exoduses and people checking out and… You know, I mean, it’d been – it’d been horrible. Because if you can see the amount of catastrophe caused by just missing one item, and so forth, well, here they had a whole series missing. And yet they were auditing over the top of this and actually were making very nice gains and gave me yesterday afternoon a very beautiful series of reports. Everything was going along fine.

Now, by George, that’s pretty good auditing, that’s pretty doggone good auditing. So I wish to give them a compliment right now, on the subject of their auditing. They must be awful good. All that’s straightened out now, and I imagine in today’s sessions the cases just took off like rockets. They must have gotten into the top of that other series and so forth, and it just must have run swish! In fact, I never saw anything connect up with such reads as the – as connecting up the missing element with what had been bypassed. That really shot the lot, rerunning it and connecting it up.

So the upshot of the situation was that I was very, very pleased with that. They’re making terrific progress and everybody is very, very happy about this and very enthused about this. And I get a side note occasionally on letters going out of here and I’m not having to say, „This is it,“ now. „This is it“ is a very, very calm statement compared to some of the statements I’ve heard going out of here on various lines. And there isn’t, I don’t think, any doubt in anybody’s mind who is in the co-audit, they’ll eventually make it. They may make it with only one leg or something like that, they’re figuring at the present moment, but they’ll make it, they’re on their way and the door is open, wide open.

All right, the situation with regard to auditing depends on another subject and that is a subject called study. If you can’t learn anything, why, then you can’t find out how to do anything. So just as I talked to you in the last lecture and told you that communication was not an end-all of processing but was absolutely vital if an auditor was ever going to get to a pc to do something for him, so it is true that study operates as the door, open or closed, to learning how to audit.

If an auditor can’t learn anything, then of course he won’t be able to audit, regardless of the attitude he has towards the human race or his wish to do something for people or his desires in any way, shape or form. These all would be barriered by just this one point – He couldn’t learn anything.

So in order to teach somebody how to audit, it’s necessary that they be able to learn. Now, this is terribly fundamental, awful. This is down there scraping the bottom of the barrel with regard to fundamentals, and yet all great successes are built on attention to fundamentals. Everything is built on a fundamental. Unless you can isolate these fundamentals, you of course leave your building with a – with an incomplete foundation. It’s sort of sitting in the air ever afterwards unless you find the fundamental with which to proceed. You wouldn’t build any skyscrapers if you didn’t put down a foundation.

Well, what is the foundation? That foundation in auditing is, of course, study – the ability to learn. And failing that, why, an auditor has an awful hard time.

This next datum I am going to give you is something – is something I really don’t want you to park behind the left lobe and skip, because this is going to make all the difference in the world to the future of Scientology. And that is a knowledge of this one point, this one point: That better than 50 percent of Scientology consists in the discipline of application, consists in the technology of application, consists in the know-how of application. And that’s better than 50 percent of the subject – better than 50 percent.

Now, perhaps that datum is not very impressive, but let me – let me amplify this and I think you will see how that datum is impressive. You could give the entirety of the processes which have produced results in Scientology – and there are a great, big, many of them – you could give these in their entirety to a field of mental practice, carte blanche – that’s just the processes, you understand just the commands – and they wouldn’t be able to do a thing with them. They wouldn’t be able to get any result with them of any kind whatsoever.

They would turn out an asinine statement like the University of Chicago. It’s a college. That’s what we used to say about it at GW. We used to be tolerant about Chicago. Most of us wanted to go there because you only had to go a couple of years before they handed you a sheepskin and we were bored. But this outfit uttered this asinine statement: „We have tested all the techniques of Dianetics and found out it didn’t work.“ Well, in the first place it’s asinine because all the techniques of Dianetics didn’t exist in published form and were not available to them to test, see? So right away, that was nonsense.

For instance, I know of techniques that were released at the first Foundation in Elizabeth which have never seen the light of day; I have never seen them published or anything else.

Matter of fact, I saw three or four splinter groups suddenly Start up on stuff that was merely designed to take care of one pc or something like that, and then they decided that this would apply to all pcs and so forth. There are several brands of therapy which are adrift today which simply consist of one technique developed for one pc at Elizabeth. So for any outfit – for any outfit to grandly look down its nose and say, „We have tested all the techniques of Dianetics,“ you know? Well, what a statement, see? They haven’t got them to test. How would they even know if they had tested „all the techniques“? Right away they are irresponsible. And then to say they didn’t work would also be asinine because if they had tested even sloppily, they would have gotten some result someplace, unless they were simply uttering a publicity statement to protect the vested interest.

But that is aside from the point. The point is simply this: Yes, they could have had all the techniques. They could have had them all. They didn’t, but they could have. And they could have, in their haphazard, bunged-up way, have tested these techniques and they wouldn’t have worked, because they didn’t have a Dianeticist in the lot of them. There was nobody there trained in the basic disciplines of Dianetics. And that was 50 percent or better of the technology which they might have gathered. Quite important, don’t you See?

Now, give you another one: Reg and I, sailing around on the deep blue sea, invented a – dreamed up a course that was – had nothing to do with Scientology but had to do with business and commerce and nevertheless was a very broad application of Scientology to business and commerce. But the course was for another reason entirely and Reg thought this was a good idea, and he went ahead and he executed this course. And this course has been marvelously successful. It’s running, I think, at the present time and it’s doing fine, you see?

Only trouble is, everybody else is now trying to get into the act. It’s a goodwill gesture. All this course is, is a nice goodwill gesture; it’s trying to increase the salesmanship, and so forth, of retail merchants and their clerks, you see, so as to move more equipment and that sort of thing, see? That’s what the course is designed to do. And everybody tried to get on the bandwagon, you see? There were other people started teaching this course, teaching their own courses to accomplish the same end, you see? And recently some company or another requested that Reg’s course be taught to all of their staff and so forth. They get requests of this particular character.

But Reg made the broad statement there that is particularly applicable to this lecture, and so on. He says, „Well,“ he says, „you don’t have to worry about any competition or other people giving this course. They’ll start and they’ll fail, and so forth, but they won’t be able to duplicate the course.“

Well, that’s been the facts of the thing. This course could go on, they could (quote) „teach similar courses,“ do this, do that, do the other thing, but of course, they are always aware, if only this, that they are teaching a substitute, that they are not teaching the real one. And people are always faintly aware of the fact that they are not taking the real course in salesmanship.

Well, this in itself, you see, enters enough – even on the copyist – in the way of an overt or something like this, so that he then goes into an obsessive alter-is and the statement that Reg made was, „They cant duplicate it,“ becomes completely true. They can’t and they won’t duplicate it and that is the end of that. And that – these other courses have probably risen – I don’t know what the history of this – I haven’t kept up with it too well, but I think there are other courses have risen up and faded away by this time and a lot of enthusiasm has been generated in this quarter or that on duplicating this course and I think this course is still going on. Very successful. Probably one of the more delicate goodwill gestures that’s been entered into by a company for a long time.

Well, of course, one of the reasons it’s successful, it’s somewhat oriented Scientologically. But that course wouldn’t be duplicated and therefore wouldn’t be tremendously successful.

Now, supposing they taught the exact same methods; that is, they used the technique or something on these other courses that are being taught which are copy courses of this course, you see? Supposing they did that, and so on. There would still be some element missing of some kind or another. That element would be the missing thing that would make the course that was being taught fail.

I don’t wish to belabor that particular simile, but it is merely interesting, it is merely interesting that even there, even there on such a thing as simply teaching some salesmen how to be nice to their customers and that sort of thing, that this thing, too, fails when you move it out of its own perimeter of discipline. So even on a thing as slight as that, you see, that one fails too; and so it goes along the line.

I don’t know how much technology a university loses because every professor makes 90 percent of his salary by making the students buy his personal books. I think by the time you’ve rewritten James Watt, I think you’ve lost steam engines. And it’s highly probable that there probably isn’t a steam engineer in the world today that has really got the technology of steam. It has been perverted and twisted aside and misduplicated, and so on.

And I go back to some of these old boys that knew their business, and so on. One time I was covering an air meet and there was a fellow standing there – it was a bright sunshiny day and he was standing there with rubbers on and an umbrella. The umbrella wasn’t unfurled, but he had that umbrella handy. It was a beautiful midsummer day, you see, and I wondered what this character was doing at an air meet – all these daredevil racing pilots and that sort of thing around; and I was covering this thing for The Sportsman Pilot. But I thought this was good side color, so I surreptitiously took a shot at him with my press camera and got his name.

His name was Young, and he was the second man in the world beyond the Wrights to fly. Ha-ha! He was probably one of the most famous early birds there was. My face was a little bit red, you see? He had become cautious in his old age, but in his day – I imagine his caution still didn’t extend to flight – but in his day they used to fly a plane off the ground with an ambulance running along below it. That’s right! They saved more pilots that way. This was a man who was a wild man along this particular line. Well, I was very interested in talking to him; I did an article on him eventually, and he showed me his scrapbooks, and so on.

And I was particularly fascinated that there were 13 methods of flight, heavier-than-air methods of flight – 13 of them – of which the motionless wing was only one, and by the way, one of the less favored ones. And one of the reasons it was favored was because – at all or done at all is because it didn’t take much mechanical ingenuity to build it. But there were twelve other methods of heavier-than-air flight-heavier-than-air; that’s not ballooning or zeppelins. There’s all kinds of methods of keeping aircraft aloft.

There’s the principle of the rotating stick, that if you throw a stick in a certain way it’ll hum – spinning, you know – it’ll hum and you will see it curve straight up into the air. It’ll do the darnedest ascendancy and that’s just a rotating stick. There is method after method of flight of this particular character.

Because they concentrated on the one wing, it won, see? And you now have aircraft all over the world which are going along with this stiff wing out there from the fuselage, mostly because the early birds didn’t have any of the wherewithal or anything else to build something a little more esoteric or different, so it got the concentration of research and that is what we now call an airplane.

But it was interesting listening to old Mr. Young – who was designing these things back when – it was very interesting to listen to him on a tone of disappointment that they had chosen that particular one to push forward in research because it was one of the less workable and one of the less efficient.

Here was this vast body of technology, see, which had never been developed and which is lost back there in the first ten years of this century. All kinds of methods of flight; none of them ever went forward. Well, this one that was easy to do did get developed.

Well, it’s very interesting that one of them emerged and went forward; that’s probably the one thing one should look at. But it is customary almost in civilizations for a body of knowledge to come into being, then get grooved into a certain specialization – some piece of it, don’t you see – then that piece of it poorly duplicated and the rest of the technology to be lost.

Boy, would I like to talk to James Watt on the subject of steam engines. He probably could tell you all about high-pressure boilers. See, he just didn’t have the time, money, materials, to build one. But maybe there were dozens of methods of utilization of steam which have just been lost, you see?

What you’re studying now is lost technology, lost technology. „Now,“ you say, „the civilization goes forward and wins anyway.“ Well, may I invite you to go almost in any direction from where you are at this moment at Saint Hill, for a distance of ten or twelve miles and try not to find the remains of civilizations which did not win. They are all over the place here – civilizations that are dead, civilizations that are missing, civilizations that no longer are with us. They are all on the basis of lost technology. They start specializing in one gimmick, there’s nothing to amplify that gimmick, they finally lose the pieces of it and it vanishes. The civilization may be very well dependent upon that one gimmick; they have nothing to back it up. They lose it, in other words. Fascinating, the changes and turns and twists that these things take.

Now, you could say a lot of other things about these civilizations, but the only thing I am pointing out at the moment is they’re not here. See, they’re not present. We don’t have them with us. And they were good civilizations as they went: the Roman-Briton civilization, the Danish civilization that was here, the Saxon civilization here – all these things terribly different – the Norman civilization that was here. They’re all over the shop.

How about the Celtic civilization that existed before? Must have been quite a civilization. You read casually about wicker chariots charging through the Ashdown Forest. What’s this – wicker chariots charging through the Ashdown Forest? Well, our good friend Caesar reports as such.

Well, this civilization has went. We know nothing about this civilization. It must have been pretty well advanced. And yet the scene of this battle, and so forth, is within about ten miles of Saint Hill. Well, where did that civilization go? What was it all about? That’s a pretty esoteric civilization – wicker chariots, see? Maybe some somebody forgot how to weave wicker. Who knows what happened to that civilization, see?

Now, the situation here is that technology gets lost and we have to study how it gets lost. And it’s – gets lost because people can’t study. That’s really the only reason it gets lost. That’s quite a – quite an interesting fundamental, to reduce everything down to that particular fundamental. We don’t, then, go into the esoterics of „They couldn’t duplicate“ and „They couldn’t this,“ but that’s only why they couldn’t study.

Civilizations tend to rise forward to a certain peak. And then under the stress of combat and the various elements and so forth, they start losing their technology. Well, they lose their technology simply because nobody studies the technology.

How about this fellow, the silversmith of England? England’s no longer today turning out the silver it once turned out. Its silver craftsmen used to be very, very famous. And then they got a Labour government, and it put the tax up on silver to a point where British silver no longer could be sold. They might as well have stood the British silversmith up against the wall and shot him because he drifted off then into other trades and the technology became lost; and it’s practically a lost technology at this moment. Now, this has only been lost in the last decade or so. You’d have to talk hard to a – to jewelry store managers and that sort of thing before you understand why it is that you can’t buy silver. You can buy antique silver, you can buy yesteryear’s silver; there are two or three of them still in business, and so forth.

Well, what about these fellows? There are fellows around who learned this and there are plenty of textbooks on this subject and that technology still exists but it’s going to be lost. That’s for sure, it’s going to be lost. How about the one old craftsman who is left in the plant? You see, he knows all about that. He’s surrounded by people, and all of a sudden there might be a resurgence in that. Well, everybody merely depends on him; they don’t learn the craft. You see, they simply depend on him to know it. It all comes up against the dead end of not being able to learn, not being able to study.

Well, I always prided myself in being a very quick study, so I, myself, can speak from fair expertness in this particular line. But I know my own history on this and I know my own blind spots on this. When you become less worried about your mental status or something like this in the world, you can actually look at it and find out if there is anything wrong with it and dare admit that it could stand a few improvements here and there.

One of the things about study itself is that there are a great many things around that are false and you could study a lot of false things and therefore become disabused of studying because you had studied something false. This would be one of the reasons why you might cease to study. I really don’t see that that has anything to do with it, except that it enters the idea of judgment of what you’re studying. So if one studied without any judgment whatsoever of what he was studying or ability to evaluate what he was studying or know what he was studying, why, his ability to study would be very poor indeed. He’d just be Chinese in aspect.

Nothing wrong with the Chinese, but I remember going to school, the eighth grade, I think. I spent some months going through grammar school, all on different stations and places. And the situation that arose in the eighth grade was that nobody could get an A mark except two Chinese who were in the school. And they had – they had learned how to study but so have parrots learned how to study if that is their study.

And they would get up and they would reel off the page number and the paragraph and everything else of the history book assignments, you see, and they’d give it to you verbatim. Most marvelous job of total duplication you ever heard of, but they would not be able to tell you what universe. And if you had – if you had varied one comma or asked for an opinion on that material studied in that way, they would have come a cropper at once, and very frequently did. They would have to remember whether it was in the middle of the book or the back of the book, as to what period that it applied to or something like this.

Most marvelous job of carbon-copy duplication that I ever saw, and it used to irk the rest of us, you see, because they would always get A-plus, and it held up such a horrible example to the teacher that the teacher would, of course, then give nothing like an A-plus to any mere knowledge of the subject, you see? So our renditions of it were quite rapidly thrown away and we usually got D. I’ll never forgive them.

But anyway, joking aside, these – this is – this is a case of perfect, perfect, complete perfect duplication without a grain of sense connected with it; and that’s absolutely deadly, so that isn’t how you study. Deadly! But perhaps you should be able to do that, but I would consider that a mental feat, and I don’t think study has anything to do with mental feats. Study has to do with understanding.

Study has to do, basic and most formally, with just really one thing: willingness to know. That’s the first little gate that has to be opened to embark upon study: willingness to know. If that gate remains closed, then you’re liable to get into such things as the total verbatim, rote system; you are liable to get into all kinds of other systems, none of which will add up to any knowledge.

Now, when you recognize that in Scientology we have one thing – one thing – which is not very easy to put into texts and which may never be put into texts: the discipline of how you do it. But when you recognize that that one thing actually is difficult to transmit in – by the written word – and is very easy to transmit by example. And when I call your attention to an earlier part of this lecture, when I said that it amounted to at least 50 percent of what we were doing, and I’ll point out to you that there’s a frailty involved in the relay of this information that’s the future success of Scientology, and that frailty is right there. It could very easily, very easily become an unworkable subject.

You could take all the GPMs in the world – what do you think would happen if you took all the GPMs and the total map of the bank and everything exactly right and gave it at this moment to psychiatry? I know what they’d do. They would immediately analyze Poe to see how many times one of these words had occurred in one of his books, and then get the fractional recurrence of and then try to explain why Poe was mad, or something like this, don’t you see? This is probably what they’d do with this material. It’d be monkey tricks, you know?

I even thought vengefully one day of sending all of the whole plot to the American Journal of Psychology – which, by the way, would absolutely fall on its face and bound its forehead to flinders if I were to give them an article. That’s one of the reasons why they’re a little bit mad at us. I have been soundly berated by them for not publishing it with them at least one of our case histories, because it would revolutionize all… You see, it can’t revolutionize anything unless published in their magazine. I’ve been scolded by them for this but I thought vengefully of just giving them the whole plot and let them publish it, see? And that would eliminate that.

But the point, the point I’m making here, is that all of this technology that can be written down, and so forth, could be relayed with the same result of the University of Chicago: no result, see? Because it has this element missing from it: the discipline of how you do it.

Now, when I tell you that an auditor can get so good that a gross bypassed charge exists in a session and his auditing is sufficiently smooth that nowhere and on no student in that co-audit did it get keyed in – wow! See, this is an almost impossible auditing feat. That’s walking around the edges of the lion’s cage, you see, so neatly and adroitly that there didn’t even have to be bars there. This is pretty terrific, see?

Well, what did that? That’s auditing discipline. That’s the communication formula, that’s this, this is handling the meter, this is what you do with a pc and what you don’t do with a pc, and so forth. This is omitting from the auditing sessions the things that Mary Sue comes down as GAEs on, on Wednesdays, on TV demos; weeding these things out, keeping that line straight – over 50 percent of it.

We must, at this particular time, then, do this rather superlatively well here at Saint Hill. Because if any serious goof existed on the part of any of those auditors in the co-audit, any such consistent GAE as we see when a person first arrives here, he would have just wound his pc up in a pile of junk because there was enough there to have jammed the pc into a pancake against the brick wall, see? There wasn’t any slight bypassed charge to be triggered, see? They weren’t even aware of the fact that it was there and they were auditing around it sufficiently smoothly that it didn’t cave anybody in.

Well now, on the reverse side of the coin, on the reverse side of the coin, if they had had all of their materials absolutely perfect right at the outset and if their auditing discipline – their ability to audit – had been as poor as it might have been, with all the materials and technology perfect and the process being done, they would have turned their pc into a pale pink pancake up against the brick wall. Do you understand? That’s the other side of the coin!

Now, if you appreciate that, you can appreciate the remark I make when I tell you that the technique is one thing but the way it is applied is what makes the car go down the road. And that thing is the most likely thing to get lost. So therefore, were in business as long as an auditor can learn how to audit.

You see, you don’t have to learn anything actually to run GPMs. You can be handed it on cards. Did you – you realize this? You could probably be handed it on cards and you could reel it off one way or the other in some kind of patter. You wouldn’t even have to learn it, you know? You could just let it sort of go off water like the – goes off the ducks back, you see? You could parrot it, you see, from a – from a list or a card or something like this. You wouldn’t have to be learned. You’re not up against learning in that burrow. In fact, if I ever hear of an Instructor making some new student memorize a line plot so that he can run it better, I’ll give him a GAE with exclamation points – the Instructor, see? That would be the most gruesome thing. So actually, in that particular case the technology is not something you would learn. You wouldn’t even learn the – what’s called the technique – you wouldn’t dare! It’d just kill the student; that’d be it.

If you ever have a – have a – find yourself, bird-dogged by a spy from the Federal – I don’t want to be – pardon me, I’d – there are ladies present – why, just decide that he had better learn by heart – don’t even pick out anything very rough, just give him one of the Helatrobus line plots and tell him, well, he has to start in by learning that by heart.

So therefore, when I am talking to you about learning, we’re practically not on the subject of technology at all. We know what grade certain technology belongs in and so forth, but – I do it myself very often, write the process out rapidly below the meter, so that I can put my pencil – let’s say it’s a multiple question. I don’t want to involve my wits, which should be involved with auditing, with remembering what question the pc is stumbling along on. I don’t want to involve my wits with that, so I’ll just write down the four or five commands, or whatever the thing is in rotation, and just stab the one with my pencil that is currently in action, you know; and when I come to the next one, why, I see that all is well and I look down at the paper and refresh my memory of the thing and give it to him again, don’t you see?

Well, that leaves me free to audit; has nothing to do with that. In fact, there’s tricks like you’re running a multiple alternate question, and so forth; your positive is your index finger and the negative is the middle finger, and so forth, and just touch them with your thumb. Touch the positive question – you’re on the positive question. Well, your thumb is on your index finger; negative question, your thumb is on your middle finger, and so on. You don’t get mixed up that way, and you don’t mix up the pc either nor do you have to sit there saying, „Now, let me see, what am I now…“ you know? That’s for the birds.

So frankly, aside from classifying and know where the technology goes, I wouldn’t say there is anything to learn in that zone at all. You’re not going to learn auditing commands. You know what type of command should be there, you’re going to learn that but not the command. You’re not going to learn line plots or GPMs or something like that. Well, this changes the complete complexion of, „What – what – what are we supposed to learn? Then what – what learning is he talking about?“ I’m talking now about learning how to do it, how to apply it. See? That’s what I’m talking about.

Well, it’s quite fascinating that there’s many a guy shows up, he just wants a couple of processes so that he can learn these processes, and so on, and then he thinks he’s educated and he can go on his way because he knows he can apply those; and then somehow or another they never seem to work for him, and he’s always missing as to why they’re not working for him.

Well, what he should be learning is the subject of auditing. Bulletins connected with good indicators, bulletins connected with comm cycles, and this type of thing. What are the tools of the trade here? Where – what’s the categories of these tools, and so on, and how are they applied and what judgment do you use in connection with them? Learn those well enough so you’re relaxed about them. Now, that’s something to learn. And yet, I guarantee you, that that consistently will get brushed off lightly in comparison to some gimmick or trick or process, see? The person, in other words, will be very happy to learn what are the auditing commands for something or other but have nothing whatsoever to do with a comm cycle.

Now, a comm cycle takes some learning, man, as you know! You can’t even glibly say, „Well, it blah blah blah blah blah, and it starts and continues and it finishes, and – and that’s all there is to a comm cycle and now we know all that. All right, now what’s the auditing command, you see? That’s what’s important.“

No, that’s not what’s important. The auditing command won’t work unless you arrive, unless it arrives with the pc. And it’s got to arrive with the pc along with certain „How do you do it? How do you act like an auditor? How do you sound like an auditor?“ That’s the stuff, that’s the stuff that gets it there.

Now, I had a recent experience which is quite amusing. I have my lighter moments and I decided that I had better make an independent study. There’s no sense in getting too concentrated on any one particular point, and I was going along like a shot rocket in the direction of Class VI materials and working on them very hard and very concentrated and that sort of thing, but I didn’t figure that was going to keep my mind that involved. I find – I felt I might as well take up another subject which was entirely independent, you know? Give me a nice shift of attention.

So some years ago I had incautiously and in a moment of weakness bought a course of photography. Of course, I’ve been at photography since I was a kid; a nice hobby, and I have a lot of fun with it, and so forth. And at one time or another, why, I’ve sold pictures and so on. It’s just one of these hobbyist things that you fool with. I’d probably classify as an advanced amateur; one time I classified as a pro, when I was in college. Used to make a lot of money, National Geographic and so forth. I think there’s some geography books around that still carry pictures of mine in them.

But the upshot of it is, that I decided that in view of the fact that my mind was very heavily in this direction, I might as well put it in another direction. So I took up this correspondence course in photography – the New York Institute of Photography, one of the best – and rolled up my sleeves, and found out I’d never gotten deeper than about the third lesson. So I decided I would learn a little bit about study and I would start and study this thing up and I would get myself pushed along the line and get all my lessons done like a good boy, and send it all in, lesson by lesson, you know?

Well, what do you know? What do you know? First time in my life I learned something about studying. I learned something very subjectively and very real about studying. The only reason I’m telling you this is not to amuse you particularly, but you might be able to use this. And it’s just this: I began to wonder why I had stopped at the third lesson. I was tolerantly going on forward studying the remaining lessons, and so forth, but why had I stopped at the third lesson and why was I bogging here and there along the line? Because this was not going easy.

Now, of course, this is a very, very wild, occasionally very dry, very often, very stupid subject, the subject of photography, because it gets into optics. Well, you want to take a picture, not study optics, you see? But optics are apparently something that people who want you to know about photography hold very dear to their hearts and they nag you about, you see?

And then there’s the subject of chemistry, and chemistry is very interesting. There are numbers of chemicals and they have something to do with the picture appearing on the thing, but that’s something you really don’t know too much about. If you can walk into a darkroom and turn yourself out a good negative and a good print, who the devil wants to know anything about chemistry, don’t you see? This was more or less my attitude.

But I went on studying like a good boy and passing my examinations at the end. Every booklet has an examination. And all of a sudden it dawned on me that although I’d been interested in this since I was 12 years old, I didn’t know anything about it! Horrible, dark thought. I’ve taken pictures, I’ve published pictures, people have paid me good cash money on the line, my pictures have been on covers of magazines, a very slick fellow. And I don’t know anything about this subject! It struck me like a thunderbolt! This is a subject I had been at, if you please, since I was 12, in this lifetime. And I suddenly realized I didn’t know anything about it. And it wasn’t a case of sudden amnesia or something. It was just… „You what?“ you know, and „It’s – it’s which?“

And I suddenly rapidly reviewed what my reactions had been and made a very careful analysis of the whole thing and exactly what had happened. I’d had a particularly great subjective reality on this. I was studying an allied subject; I was forcing all of you to study; I should know something about the subject of study. And so I had, more or less, to some degree, started out to learn something about study and I learned something right then.

The tolerance that I had toward them had brought me up to a point where I was perfectly willing to learn a few gimmicks from them, and that was the state of mind I had entered that course upon. I was perfectly willing to learn a few gimmicks from them. I realized that my arrogance on the subject has absolutely – unprintably unspeakable. My arrogance was absolutely fantastic!

But look, I’ve been at it since I was 12. I studied photography under some of the – some of the old boys that were kicking around at that time. Some of the government photographers and scientists up in the National Museum were patient enough to teach me about photography, I read books on the subject, read this and that, even worked in professional darkrooms.

And the evidence was right in front of my face. Good heavens! People pay you money for pictures. I used to take pictures for Underwood and Underwood.

And I had always said that the trouble with my photography as I came on up the line – I had it all beautifully explained – the trouble with my photography as I came on up the line was they kept changing their methods. I had it beautifully explained. So therefore – well, actually, since I started photography, miniature cameras have come out, panchromatic film, different types of developers, flashbulbs have come out; they’ve changed all these things. As a matter of fact, they’re changing one on me right now. I had one film made by Ilford so tame that I could turn out a fine grain negative on this stuff, and they went and changed the speed rating of the film. Now you can’t get the old film, so I don’t know how to do it now. I was – this was blame on my part, you see? They kept shifting materials on me.

And what had dawned on me is, what I was being struck with in these texts – because this is a good professional course, see; this is nothing for any amateur – what I was being struck with in the text was known by Mathew Brady in the American Civil War. The basics and fundamentals that I didn’t know had been present in that subject since 1860! Had nothing to do with changing materials. I didn’t know the first fundamental of why the picture got took in the first place!

And all of a sudden, at that moment, it dawned on me with a tremendous crash that I had been very arrogant and that I really didn’t know all there was to know under the sun, moon and stars on the subject of photography; I really wasn’t the world’s past master on the subject of photography because I had gotten a few results in my day, but that there was something there to learn. That’s what I was struck with. And boy, I buckled down and started to study.

Now, the speed of advance is very interesting: three books in three and a half years; eight books in two weeks. And one is prior to that realization and the other is post that realization. I suddenly looked at it last night and realized I was halfway through the course. Three and a half years it took me to get the first three of the fifty – some books that comprise the course.

Why was I unable to move through that? Well, I was studying something I knew all about. I could not bring myself into a relaxed frame of mind of „Here is something to study. Let’s study it.“ No, I was studying it through this screen: „I know all about this. I know everything there is to know about it.“ Well, will you please tell me why the devil I was sitting there studying it, then? If I knew all about it, why was I sitting there studying it? And yet I was putting up this pretense of studying it. I was even pretending to myself I was studying it. I didn’t realize that I was pretending. I thought I was really studying it, you see? I’d read it, you know, and so on. But it was all from the viewpoint that I knew all about it. And my arrogance was such that I was perfectly willing to learn a few tricks from them, and I think that was very tolerant of me.

Now, the funny part of that is, in subsequent study and so forth, my whole viewpoint has shifted on the subject, the whole viewpoint of what I’m willing to take a picture of; and my critical standards of what’s a good picture have shifted utterly. I’m even criticizing their examples of perfect pictures, see? Very critical, but very well-founded criticism.

I couldn’t learn because I knew all – that I knew all about it, you see? Now, that passed from a realization that I didn’t really know a thing about it; I had to get right back to fundamentals and study those fundamentals. Once I got those fundamentals in and had those fundamentals well studied, and so on, and moving along the line up there, then I got to a point where I was not only perfectly willing to learn, I was also perfectly willing to talk back. I wasn’t in any slavish state about learning. I knew my fundamentals now. I could see where they applied, and so forth, and within the scope and limits of that educational course was able to talk up. In other words, I could have an opinion. I could now have an opinion, I could exert judgment.

I had no judgment on the subject before. I merely had some fixed ideas, just fixed ideas, and these fixed ideas told me that I really knew all was to know about the subject. When I finally found out – the big breakthrough was I found out there was something there to learn – that I didn’t know. It wasn’t a matter of a few gimmicks. Then this reversed around the other way, and with hard study, all of a sudden made another breakthrough:

I freed my own judgment.

I’d talk to any of these birds now. There are texts there by some very famous photographers. Good, hard, tough slugging this thing is, but one of those guys, I’d say, „Ah, come off of it,“ you know? „You’re talking like this, but this picture here, man, I – how come? Look, you’ve burned out all of the…“ This would have been legitimate. He would have talked to me about it, too. I’d say, „Look-a-there. You’ve burned out all of the highlights. You just burned them right straight through. Why? You might even have at least remedied it in the darkroom, for heaven’s sakes.“

And he would have said, „Well, I didn’t think anybody would notice.“

I’d say, „Well, I noticed.“

Critical. Not that criticism is bad, don’t you see; but I developed a critical eye, did not have to slavishly say, „This is a picture by Sam Falk, New York Times magazine, one of the greatest exhibition photographers of all time. Therefore it is holy.“ See? Gone completely through that and up to a point of where, „That’s an awful good picture. That guy really has a good sense of composition, terrific sense of Composition. What the hell was he doing that day in the darkroom? Drunk?“ See what I mean? And I could have put my point-finger on a point which I’m sure that Sam Falk himself would have agreed with.

He’d say, „That’s right. I didn’t even hold back the enlarger light on that burned off highlight over at the side, and it completely washes out that bird’s features over there. That’s right, you’re right. Attracts the eye over to the side of the picture, not to the principle subject. You’re right, could have been improved, could have been improved in the darkroom.“ He wouldn’t have argued about it. Or he could have said to me, „You don’t know how bad the negative is!“

You see what I mean? Then this would have been a sensible discussion because in the meantime, by burning the midnight-dawn actually; I’ve been using this to go to sleep on.

But the point had come up here, where one’s fixed slavishness to something was there because one really didn’t understand it in the first place, so he had to have fixed opinions to safeguard himself.

„Perspective: Perspective is handled by making something dwindle into the distance. Well, there is – if I don’t have something go ‘dwindle into the distance,’ the picture won’t have perspective.“ You know, this kind of a slavish fixed idea on the subject of perspective. Not „There are a lot of ways to give pictures a three-dimensional effect.“ See, that’d do you a different point of view, see. And „Perspective is accomplished in several ways.“ A different viewpoint, see? Then, once you understand that, then you can look at a picture and say, „Well, that photographer had a good command of perspective,“ or „He didn’t.“ See? You say, „This guy had stepped over here another couple of feet to take his picture, he probably would have had a different depth, and it would have looked a lot better,“ see? Because, look, here’s a couple of advantages he could have taken that he didn’t take.

In other words, you have a flexibility, you have a flexibility of route, so therefore you can have an opinion, not a fixed idea or a prejudice. There’s a big difference between a prejudiced or a fixed idea and the ability to have an opinion.

An opinion could be based on many things. But when an opinion is based on an inability to find out what it was all about in the first place, a man looks like a fool, and he suddenly looks like a fool even to himself when he makes a breakthrough.

So that my ideas on the subject of photography were not resulting in a finished picture. That’s one of the first things I suddenly recognized, you know? The lightning struck. That was not necessarily what broke me down on the line. I’d broke it down before that, but I recognized that afterwards. Well, a guy’s as good as he can finish a picture. It doesn’t have anything to do with anything else. It obviously can be done, so therefore, why, there it is.

And this also included overshooting the mark, which you might find interesting. Previous to this breakthrough I made and the realization that I didn’t know what the devil I was doing when I took a camera. I know how to clean lenses and do all sorts of things, but I didn’t know what I was doing when I picked up a camera. I mean it was just ridiculous to even think that I did. A few lucky breaks, you know, and you seem to be so hot, but what about this?

It’s a bum day and you want to get a picture and if you’re real shaky and you don’t know your business and so forth, you say, „Well, it’s a bum day. That’s one day I don’t get a picture.“ See?

Well, if you really knew your camera, you wouldn’t pay any attention to the fact that it was a bum day. You’d say, „Oh, yeah. Well, all right.“ Bangbang. „What do we want the effect here? Bright sunlight. Good.“ Bang, boom! You’d say, „That’s kind of interesting; awful foggy out there. Well, let’s make the fog a little bit worse, and let’s get it – real spooky – looking picture,“ see?

If you knew your business, then you could turn the tool to your advantage, any which direction you could, see? You weren’t the victim of everything that occurred. You weren’t the victim of every little splinter on the road, see?

„Well, it’s too bad a day. The sun’s not out and – oh, we’ll take that picture tomorrow or some other day when the weather is nicer,“ you know? Well, what’s – what’s this? You mean – this can – this can exist to such a big goof that you don’t get a picture at all then? How do you like this?

And yet a guy would not be able, who couldn’t say, „All right, let’s see,“ pick up a camera and take a picture, see? He’s supposed to get a picture. Well, he should know his subject well enough that he can get a picture. That’s fairly easy. All he’s got to do is put himself in the vicinity of what he’s trying to take a picture of; if he knew his tools real well, if he knew his darkroom technique real well, he’d p – he’d get a picture. See, he’d get a very acceptable picture. Now, the degree of picture that you would get depends a lot on practice and that sort of thing.

So, I learned that lesson, too, in a big way, that the conditions of the activity around me did not necessarily monitor whether or not I got a result or not. „Pc nattery today, therefore we couldn’t get much auditing done.“

What the hell! Are you an auditor or aren’t you, see? I mean that’s it. Nattery pc, snattery pc – who cares? You’re going in to do a session? Well, do a session. So it takes you a little bit longer to get the session wheeling. Well, get it wheeling. That’s the difference, don’t you see?

But these are the things I learned through this little side study, and it was – I found it, myself, very interesting to pick up a completely alien subject to what we are doing – it had been lying around for quite a while; it merely exists in the field of hobby – and find all kinds of applicable materials on the subject of study, and to find out that the first thing that barriers learning is the consideration that you know all about it. And if you want to build up a ridge on the subject of learning, man, that’s it! Just consider you know all there is to know about it.

And the next thing – the next thing is, don’t let your idea of what you know – this is most amusing – don’t let your idea of what you know get contaminated in any way by the fact that you’re not producing. You’re not getting any result, see? You’re not getting any result and this is quite – rather obvious to you that you’re not getting a result, but this doesn’t challenge for a moment the idea that you know, see? Yeah, this never causes you to question it for an instant. See, you’re not getting a result; you know that you know; and the fact that you’re not getting a result doesn’t challenge your conviction that you know.

The other thing is the fixed – the idea of the fixed opinion. One has to have certain fixed opinions to protect the fact that he’s stupid on the subject and that he can exercise no judgment of any kind whatsoever as long as he’s mired down in a bunch of fixed opinions. And that afterwards, that judgment, then, depends on a freedom from fixed opinions and an actuality of a – of a good assessment. You know what you know, you know what you don’t know, see? You know what you know, you know what you don’t know. In other words, you’re not fighting this chimerical thing. You’re not protecting your nebulous reputation to yourself about how wise and how marvelous you are. You’re relaxed on this subject, you see? You can say, „Well, there’s one section of this I don’t know anything about. Have to look into it some day.“ But at the same time this doesn’t bring you into a feeling that you don’t know what you do know.

Utilization of judgment, then, depends on a very thorough knowledge of a subject, and if you haven’t got judgment on a subject, why, it’s because you don’t know the subject. That’s just that. If you find your judgment is very often false or bad in some line, well, you must realize that this signals to you in some way or another that this – maybe you don’t know all there is to know about this certain situation, see? If your judgment on it was bad, why, it must have been bad because of an absence of knowledge of the subject.

So, what it boils down to, what it boils down to is an auditor’s ability to learn depends not necessarily on his saying how stupid he is, but depends certainly on a willingness to learn – just a willingness to learn. He’s willing to learn, and so forth. And the biggest single barrier is a preconception that he knows that is not attended by any singular result.

For instance, let’s hear a remark something like this: „Well, I – I know Scientology. I’ve studied Scientology a long time and I know it very well. In fact, I audit very well. Of course, I don’t get very good results.“ Well, this is that thing – same thing in a nutshell: this – the fact that he isn’t getting results – results can be gotten; he’s heard of these things, he’s seen them around, and so on; results can be gotten. But this fact does not at all challenge his implicit confidence that he knows all there is to know on the subject, you see? Doesn’t challenge him for an instant.

Well, of course, that’s just a lack of perceptiveness. A fellow cant see. He’s not capable of judgment with regard to his own skill. His judgment, then, with regard to what he’s doing is at fault to that gross error. He is uttering the fact that black is white. He can’t do it, yet he knows all about it. He knows all there is to know about doing it, yet he cant do it. Well, that’s a silly statement, and that is the lowest ebb of judgment on any one particular subject.

You get into a – you can get into an area of examination of this sort of thing, you find out that nearly everyone is put up in some particular sectors to status. Status has an awful lot to do with this, you know? And he gets pushed up into a feeling like he has to protect his own status by a certain arrogance or pretense, even to himself He has to think well of himself, don’t you see, by pretending that he knows something or appearing very clever to himself or so forth. He’s really – really, you can head it under the heading of „self-esteem,“ one of the methods of bolstering self-esteem. Nothing particular wrong with this. I’m pointing this out in a very mild way. It’s necessary that an individual feel somewhat confident in some direction. But it’s also very interesting that this need for status and self-esteem evaporates in the presence of real knowledge and a real esteem takes its place. And it’s that real esteem which is most impressive to self and to others because it’s producing results. The – competence – there is no argument with competence, no argument with it at all.

It doesn’t then really come down to a test of „What does a person know?“ but it comes down to a test of „What can a person do?“ And if you just adjudicate this on the basis of it’s not – well, psychiatry should serve as a wonderful example to you in this, man. I hate to run these boys down because they are being kicked to pieces anyhow, but let me tell you, I have never been as surprised over things as I have been by that particular crew. It’s not that I’m even terribly fascinated with what they’re doing. But do you know, I read one time what an examination for a diplomate in psychiatry consisted of, and do you know, it only consisted of the date and the context and title and the place of publication of Freud’s lectures! Not what was in them! Not „What could you do in the field of psychiatry?“ But it was just that: „When was the lecture given? What was its title?“ don’t you see, and „What publication did it appear in?“ And that’s an examination for a diplomate, the highest degree in psychiatry!

Oh, some psychiatrist will come along because they’re always trying to make a liar out of everybody, they come along and tell, „Oh, that’s not true, that’s not true, that’s not true.“

And you say – they’re doing this down in Melbourne right now.

„Oh, that’s not true, that’s not true, that’s not true. And well, he doesn’t really know anything about psychoanalysis,“ and so forth.

„Well, does psychoanalysis assert that sex is the basic mainspring of life?“

„Well, yes“

„Well, does the article say this?“

„Yes.“

„Well, is that true about psychoanalysis?“

„Well, yes; but, you see, Hubbard doesn’t know anything about psychoanalysis.“

„Well, what doesn’t he know about psychoanalysis?“ See?

„Oh, well, he wouldn’t know anything about it, because he just wouldn’t know anything about it,“ and so forth.

„Well, what psychoanalysis are you talking…?“

„Well, we don’t know. There’s various brands of psychoanalysis.“ You always would get into this kind of an argument. It’s something like walking into a swamp when you – when you try to talk on this particular subject, you see? So it’s not very sensible.

Well, I’m just pointing out to you that that is really pure idiocy – that’s really pure idiocy.

One, could you learn anything from that lecture? And two, how have you been able to apply it? And three, if the fellow really knew about it, he’d be able to answer the next question. If he really knew up to this point, he’d be able to answer the next question: Well, what opinion do you have of it? What opinion do you have of that subject matter? See? If he really – if he really knew the subject and he’d studied that, and he really knew that and he could apply that, and so forth, then he’d have a free opinion on it. He wouldn’t have to be protecting himself with his free opinions. See, it’d have nothing to do with esteem or anything else. He’d just have a free opinion on the subject, you see? In other words, he’d have judgment.

But if you fix it on „Give us the lecture and the date and where was it published and that’s all you have to know about it,“ you know, you of course have taught the man nothing more than you could learn from a card-catalog system. Well, it doesn’t have anything to do with doingness.

Well, in photography – which I’ve just used as a somewhat amusing sidelight to this to you – the test, of course, is whether or not you can get a picture. That seems rather obvious, doesn’t it? That would be – it’s different than in – well, you conclude photography now is an art, which is interesting, because it’s only graduated into that field very recently. Metropolitan Museum, and so forth, has exhibits on it now as a fine art, but – didn’t used to be.

Now, a critic could exist in the field of painting, merely through his knowledge of painters and paintings, and that sort of thing, and he could have opinions on the subject. These things would probably be very basic, and that’s all very fine because here’s a very wide, very complex field. And maybe you could have a critic in the field of photography who didn’t really have to be able to produce a picture. Maybe he could just criticize pictures and maybe to a very good extent.

But the odd part of it is as you enter into a technical subject out of a purely artistic subject, this burning question comes up: How the devil would he know whether or not that was a good darkroom piece of work? He would have to be able to know what can be done in a darkroom, so he’d have to answer the question, „What is done in a darkroom? Is this better than what is done in a darkroom or worse than what is done in a darkroom?“ because you’re up against this technical fact.

A technical fact intrudes here, unlike art. You can take a handful of mud and throw it at a rock and say, „That’s a great painting.“ See? Well, maybe it does have form and design. Who would know? Because there is no real technical backup with regard to art at large. It’s great, great, wide, huge subject, you see? Depending on, mostly, on whether a person is pleased or displeased with some form, color, object or significance. It basically forms an opinion anyhow.

But the second that you get into a technical fact, when you get into the technical line, well, you have to know what can be done, you have to know if it is done well, what is being done and what isn’t being done, see? This, then, you would have to know pretty well before you could have much of an opinion on the subject.

In other words, there could be an art critic quite legitimately, but I don’t think there could actually be a photographic critic who didn’t really know his photography. See, he’d have to know his photography to be a – be a critic of it, because he’d have to know what the devil to compare it to.

And actually, there wouldn’t be any auditing critic who couldn’t audit. You couldn’t criticize auditing if you couldn’t audit. You’d have to know what could be done and what couldn’t be done.

I think anybody that’s been over the jumps of the co-audit here recently, and so forth, he’d be quite a critic of auditing – not on a basis of my giving an examination and finding out what he knows about auditing but just on the basis of the trial and error of just the last two or three weeks. I give you that as a very broad test, man. I don’t think there ever again will be such a test, never again. Probably won’t be that much bypassed charge, you see? But that’s a terrific test; wasn’t given to them willingly or anything of that sort, it just occurred that way. What a fantastic test! Those people must really know how to audit, see? That’s the test, because under similar circumstances, you ARC break a pc on itsa – oh, you get the comparison; very simple. Ha-ha-ha, you see?

Well, God, all you have to do is drop a toothpick in R6 and you ARC break one. That must be pretty smooth. Now, I don’t think there’s anybody – doubts in anybody’s mind in R6 that they aren’t going places and that the technology in running GPMs isn’t doing some fantastic things, one way or the other, for pcs, and so forth. The result is being produced; the result is being produced smoothly. It’ll of course be produced much more smoothly and much more rapidly, as a matter of fact, with the top of the bank being cut into, exactly correctly. But even with that, it’s producing results, see?

All right. Then that tells you that there must be an awful difference between a Level VI co-audit auditor and somebody who would ARC break a pc on itsa.

But I’m willing to make you a bet that the auditor now in Level VI co-audit, asked for an opinion of auditing, would probably give you a very honest, offhand, very certain, very firm opinion – boppety, boppety, boppety, bop.

You ask him something about, „Well, is that person’s auditing good or bad?“ or so forth. Or „Was that a proper way to do it?“ and so forth. He’ll give you quite an opinion, see? Boppety, boppety, bop. Wouldn’t be any status connected with it, see? He’d just give you an honest opinion on the subject, you see? And you ask this person that can ARC break a pc on itsa for an opinion, he’d give you a couple of fixed data but he wouldn’t be able to give you much of an honest opinion.

Something else that would be different, something else that would be different: I’ll just bet you that a person in the Level VI Co-audit at the present moment, you gave him something to study and so forth, he could find out what was there and know what knowledge was there, without questioning whether or not it was good, bad or indifferent that he learn it or whether or not it was damaging for him to learn it or whether or not it was this or that or whether or not he knew all about it. You wouldn’t run into much of that argument.

But the person who would ARC break a person on itsa: Don’t challenge that arrogance, man. He knows all there is to know about it; he has known all there is to know about it from the beginning; he will notice all – knows all there is that will ever be known about it; he knows all this perfectly, and he would be deeply insulted if you even inferred there was something on the subject that he didn’t know. Do you see? There would be this significant difference. If you asked him at the same time if he was willing to learn about it, well, he’d hedge. Of course, he isn’t. He isn’t willing to learn about it. He’s on the false premise that he knows all about it. Well, you want to ask him, „Well, what are you there for? Why are you studying it then, if you know all about it?“ This might shake him up.

But you only really have to shake up this point in that auditor. He isn’t being bad, he’s merely being arrogant. He lacks the humility of vast wisdom, and in its place he has the arrogance of „know it all,“ when he knows nothing. He doesn’t even know what he doesn’t know.

And there’s the gates of study; they’re right there. That’s the gate of study. That’s the gate you got to crack, that’s the one you got to kick down before you walk any road in toward any subject. And I don’t care whether that subject is auditing or photography. I think you would hold – it would hold good uniformly and straight through, and so forth.

So I’ve been over the jumps on a completely alien and different subject and I have found certain things held true and I compared them to the experiences I’ve had in trying to relay, interpret or teach Scientology, and so forth. And I’ve found that they held good. I’ve found out that they held good straight through. I can give you dozens of case histories and I can’t really give you a lot of exceptions outside of this field, and I can even tell you – you say: „Well, there’s the case of the fellow who can’t see, and doesn’t know the language,“ and that sort of thing. I don’t know, what’s the matter with him that he can’t see and doesn’t know the language? He must be arrogant indeed! Very, very funny, but you’ll find that that would hold good, too.

If you don’t believe it, talk to a field mouse some day. Talk to a field mouse about the ways of man. It might be a very entertaining conversation, if you could talk to him. And there, man, you would find arrogance. Electronics, nuclear physics – he’s never heard of them but he knows all about them.

And there is the only place that we in Scientology are going to break down, if we break down at all. And there is about the only place where our technology will break down. It won’t break down just on the basis of getting lost and drifting off and all that sort of thing. It won’t get lost that way, because we’ll take good pains that it doesn’t. The only place it can get lost is an unwillingness to learn about it, and the only place that can get lost is just not knowing it at all, and not knowing particularly that the reason why one can’t learn is one thinks there is nothing there that he doesn’t know, and he feels he knows it all, so he doesn’t learn it. And that’s a very silly fundamental, it’s almost an idiotic fundamental. It’s like „The way to cross the river is cross the river,“ you know? I mean, it’s one of those stupid data; but stupid data are the ones that have a habit of getting lost, and in the final analysis it’s brightest to remember.

You will always have difficulty if you do not get down to the true fundamental and the true fundamental is always stupid and is always nonsensical and is not really worth knowing, which is why it remains unas-ised till the end of time. So it itself stays in for the same reason: nobody bothers to know it.

Trying to teach – trying to teach some savage how to tie his shoes will always be very upset, and be a very upsetting procedure, if he doesn’t have any reason to wear shoes and doesn’t know what they are, and so forth. So you go in it upstairs trying to teach him how to tie his shoes; you haven’t taught him that if he wants to look civilized he should wear shoes.

You see, you can always fail utterly in teaching somebody something by not cutting in at the lowest level of entrance and reality on the subject. There is always a first lesson to teach. And where you fail in instruction is you haven’t isolated the first lesson to teach. There are numerous examples. I could give you tons of data on that subject, all by itself. Very interesting.

But on the subject of learning itself, the first datum to teach is this little – and the first barrier to crack is this datum about „Why are you studying it if you know all about it to begin with?“ This is your first datum, there is your fundamental, there’s bedrock on the subject of learning a subject. And if you just remember that, you won’t have any trouble trying to teach somebody. You realize he’s having an awful time, it’s taking him an awful long time to learn this; well, then, you’d better get right in at rock bottom on the subject of education, and the first thing you’re going to find out is he knows all about it; and the next thing you’ve got to make him find out is, if he knows all about it, why is he studying it?

And then somehow or another you’ve got to crack that door open. If you get that door cracked open, then he can learn anything from there on like a shot.

Okay?

I hope that will be of some help to you.

Thank you very much.