November 19th. This is a footnote to the first hour, morning lecture.

If you want to understand a little bit more about this — you were just asking questions and so forth, seem a little bit puzzled. Get this learning technique: One has the idea that if he goes through the motions enough times, he will then know how to do something. You get that as "duplication is learning."

Male voice: Repetition.

Repetition. Duplication.

Male voice: Practice.

That's it. Now, that's what I mean by duplication. Continuous duplication. And it sets up machinery which then lets a person do something automatically.

Let's apply this to driving a car, and it becomes very intelligible. You simply drive a car and drive a car and you repeat the motion; in other words, duplicate it, duplicate it, duplicate it, and pretty soon you have done it enough times, you feel, that the machine will now let you drive a machine. You see that? That's inherent in our learning pattern.

Now, this is insisted upon in schools. Insisted upon — that you must remember or recall, see, the effect which you have received. You must remember and recall — so repeat, repeat, repeat. Actually, one has to do this in the first bridge of getting across information, merely because it is so thoroughly agreed upon. Oh, the biggest agreement we have: that repetition will eventually produce a smoother operation.

So this machine is considered to be very necessary, and there are billions of these machines in the bank. You just start knocking out one or two, however, and the rest of them kind of start folding up.

But a person will think twice or six times before he'll give up the — why, it took him years, he just went through the motions just continually to learn how to run this spaceship! There are no more spaceships around here now, but you see, there might be. And he'll hold on to anything he has learned how to do, or any experience. He'll go around saying to himself, "If I could just learn how to do something or other, I would be happy." You see that?

Now he has the idea that the datum is the important thing. Knowingness and certainty is the important thing, because when one can do it there, he can do anything. But if one has to learn it through repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition, why, then he has this horrible, sneaking hunch all the time that he'd better repeat it a little more often.

For instance, nothing would teach you more about auditing — nothing would teach you more about auditing — than to be at a level of certainty yourself where you look at the preclear and you say to the preclear, "All right, now, I want you to look around until you see enough of your ridges, machinery and so forth." And you give him a little boost there, see, he can look around, and "You see all that stuff? Now take a good look at it and see what it's all for. Now blow it up!"

A fellow could do that to a preclear — and a preclear did it, you'd sure know all there was to know about auditing.

Male voice: Teach him to walk all over again, too.

That's what everybody starts putting the brakes on about.

Male voice: Well, I learned how to walk. I learned how to breathe. I spent thirty years learning to breathe.

That's right. We've got your case right there.

Male voice: Well, let's crack it. (audience laughter)

You see? "Boy, am I convinced!" is the motto, see? "I'm convinced I have to duplicate to learn. And I am convinced I have to have a machine to do it." A person gets convinced that he has to have an automaticity to permit him to breathe, to permit him to walk and so forth, see? And the amount of conviction he has is actually what's wrong with his case. Just that — the amount of conviction on repetition.

So the machine which duplicates the effect, necessity to have, is the worst machine in the bank. And it's apparently the finest machine in the bank. It's a good, big wolf in sheep clothing. You see that machine? Well, that's what you just have to work forward until you can get.

What we're trying to create — re-create — is a state of mind in which a person's creation potential is so high that he can, at any moment, perform an action after a glance. That's what we want to create. That's what we want in the preclear. We don't want to create in the preclear a new pattern.

People in Scientology, studying Scientology, create a pattern of being audited. They've learned how to be audited. And their cases just go on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on. Well, it's real silly.

You take somebody off the street and you say to him, "Okay. Now double-terminal Mama. You know, put up Mama four times there. Now how do you feel about Mama? Oh, you feel fine. Good."

But this learning pattern, the machine which duplicates the effects, keeps coming up and coming up.

Now, people have machines which will prevent an effect which is too strong from being duplicated twice. That's "it must not" — "it won't ever happen again" and "it must not happen again." You see, the machine — the dangerous effect, this machine immediately cuts in and makes you swerve off from doing that, and that is learning through pain.

Child comes up and puts his hand on the stove, and the stove burns his hand, and he's found out that's a real bad effect. Well, what a dumb brat! See, he just can't look at the barrier called a hand, and look at the stove and measure the heat of the stove, without touching the stove with his hand. Well, he's already way down scale: he's got to touch the stove to measure the hand. You see, he's just being random cause and effect. He just flubs around, and he thinks this is the way to do it. If you just sort of dump yourself into life, life somehow or other will shape you up one way or the other, see. If you just kind of dump yourself in, it will shape you up. Life itself has been set up as an automaticity which, by its very randomity will produce you a machine. You see how that is? Well, I tell you, it doesn't take very long to learn any new item. Learning rate is quite important, but learning rate, oddly enough, is best when it's gone to zero — zero learning time. And that would be infinity lookingness. And an infinity of lookingness — there isn't any reason why you have to memorize the contents of the Library of Congress if you can read out of any page in any book in the Library of Congress, any quotation which you want to read without going to the Library of Congress.

The wrong way to do it is to make — read the book and make a facsimile of it, and put the facsimile in your pocket. That's an unwillingness to look at mest. You can look at the books of the Library of Congress. There isn't any slightest theta trap around there anyplace, and there isn't any reason why you should get — ever get caught in any theta trap. You don't even have to go down the stacks. You don't even have to read the book — you can simply know it. You don't even have to look to know. It's so easy.

I just beat the ivory off my teeth on this, just trying to tell people this is real easy; and they keep coming up with good reasons — good reasons why they shouldn't find it easy.

Male voice: Did you have this in this lifetime, this ability?

What's that?

Male voice: Were you born with it?

No. No. No, I didn't ever know I had any ability. I right now run on a level of — it defies study. Every once in a while I decide, well, why don't I study myself and then I'll learn a lot about Homo sapiens. I just bog. I just sit there and — just doesn't seem reasonable. And it isn't. That's why, not too long ago, I took a case which I considered as far south as you could possibly get, and started just looking at the basic mechanisms and the workable mechanism. This summated a long series of cases, and I'm just handing you the fastest, most workable techniques which came out of that case.

The technique isn't the thing. The technique is the thing which strips off the machinery. Now, we just get to that, why, we're all set, see? And we can do that. I already know what we can do. Because I know what I can do with a case.

I'm unwilling to blow up everybody's bank and just de-identify everybody, and you would be too — just completely. Why, that's the most silly thing in the world. The equivalent of doing an operation, that line, or doing an operation with force and fear, is the same thing as suddenly blowing up the playground. This is real silly, you know?

You wouldn't go down into the fifth grade school and blow up their swings, would you? If they had some swings down there that had nails on them, and they were not getting any fun out of the playground because the slide there was nothing but solid barbwire all the way down the slide, you'd have a tendency to take some hammer and nails and a pair of pliers and try to fix up the swing. Or give them a new swing, even. But you wouldn't blow up the playground.

People have a hard time understanding that one, too. I've had people argue with me more times on this subject. And I find out later that they were almost invariably on this one: "Let's blow it all up!" (audience laughter)

Okay.