I want to welcome you to the Communication Course. It seems that a Communication Course is necessary as the first step to an auditor. And if an auditor doesn’t successfully pass the Communication Course, then to the end of any curve he has as an auditor, there will be something wrong with his auditing.

It is very odd that one of the highest levels of indoctrination, Tone 40 on an Object, is most often unsuccessfully approached by a student at the HPA or HCA level when he has flunked the one I am going to talk about right now, which is a newcomer’s first look inside the Academy at communication. And that is Dear Alice, part A.

It would have amused you the other day to have found a former Director of Training of an organization being sent back by the HCO Board of Review coach in his coaching to Dear Alice so that he could get good enough to pass Tone 40 on an Object. But it was absolutely necessary that this happen, because he had for some reason or another, being an old-timer and having been in it for a long time, never hit Dear Alice. It had been omitted from his training. In spite of all the auditing he had done and all the experience he had had, at the end of this time we find him sitting up in the coaching room, good as gold, perfectly comprehensible, doing Dear Alice, part A — a man who has probably audited two or three thousand hours’ worth. But everywhere he had difficulty with a preclear, that difficulty stemmed from an inability to do Dear Alice, part A, which is in effect to deliver an auditing command in a unit of time as a completed cycle of action — he delivered an auditing command.

Well now you have to get up to step 2 and even step 3 before you can call it a full cycle of action. But as far as the auditor is concerned in Dear Alice, part A, only, his job is done when he has delivered an auditing command to a preclear. He didn’t deliver it over the hills and far away or to the window; he delivered it to a being and he delivered it from where he was to where the preclear was — and it’s so easy.

Anyone to whom this was described briefly, insufficiently, out in the street would, flunking it at the same time, tell you, “Of course I can communicate to people! Well, yes! There’s nothing to it. I’m a salesman, you know. I run the Atomic Energy Omission. I’m a big man! Of course I communicate to anyone.” We look in that man’s vicinity and nobody’s heard anything he’s said since the days of Noah’s Ark. He never said it to anybody in the first place. He sort of throws things out, you know, and he just hopes they land. Well, that’s what passes for communication, and it isn’t by a long ways-he throws out a statement of some sort or another and he thinks he’s communicating with somebody.

It’s a great oddity, but I must confess to you at this moment that the third dynamic is simply an agreement. It is an agreement which people have agreed to and therefore it has an existence and we certainly cannot live in this world without it, but it’s a violation of the communication formula. A violation of it. The only thing that you can talk to in the final analysis is a living being, and all third dynamics are composed of individual dynamics. And you can summate them and you can say this is a third dynamic, and that is the agreement on which we go, and it is quite factual and they are quite actual unless we stress them with the communication formula — so that you don’t talk to all preclears, you talk to a preclear.

There was a fellow by the name of Franklin Delano Roosevelt that never talked to the nation — he never talked to the nation — he talked to an individual citizen. And therefore he communicated.

There was another fellow who spoke the most beautiful English I have ever heard, almost incomprehensibly parsed. Perfect. Would have passed any Oxford English Professor’s most critical look, and that was Herbert Hoover. And I don’t think Herbert Hoover ever said hello to a dog. I don’t think in his whole life he ever said anything to anybody anywhere. And when this man uttered pronunciamentos they pronounced nothing to anybody anywhere. And therefore he couldn’t lead a nation out of a depression. He couldn’t lead anything for an excellent reason. He had no concept in the final analysis of talking to an individual, of getting his communication to land right there.

Now this is a touchy point that I open up. You say, “Well, how about you, Ron? You talk to an awful lot of people.” Well, that’s the whole secret of Scientology-I don’t talk to an awful lot of people — I talk to you. I haven’t any concept of a large multitude that reads my books or listens to my lectures. I can get a multiple concept of talking to a great many at the same time by talking to every one of them individually. Therefore I perhaps add a little conceit to the line, but I do communicate.

Therefore someone wanting to know how to speak to a crowd would first begin with Dear Alice, part A. So it is very, very far from an unimportant step. It is not just the entrance step that you have to get through to get your Communication Course over so you can really learn something. That is not what it is. It is the first door that opens and that door opens when it opens, and it opens when you can communicate a statement from you to a person. We won’t worry about a preclear, because really the person in dummy auditing who is sitting there as preclear is really a coach, you know. But you’ve got to get something across from you to that person. And it has to be from you to that person — it has to be a communication. And when you can do that, well, you’re all set.

I once told somebody that if he had a very difficult student — not you — but if he had a very very difficult student, the thing to do with this difficult student would be to put him through seven weeks of dummy auditing and then teach him in the last week to remedy havingness and turn him loose with a certificate and it would be a safe investment. We would be perfectly safe in doing that. But to give him one week when he needed two or three on dummy auditing and then try to cram him full of data and hope that the processes would carry him through somehow didn’t make an auditor, it made a liability — both to himself and to preclears.

So this first step is not just an easy one — it is the toughest step you’ll perform in Scientology and that’s why it’s right at the beginning. It’s to say something to somebody with the full confidence that they will receive it. And that’s quite a trick.

All right. How exactly is this done? We give a person a book. The book is Alice in Wonderland. Why Alice in Wonderland? Well, that’s just because it is. No further significance. We give him this book and he is supposed to find any sentence in that book that he cares to find. (These people who just want to read the book consecutively to the preclear are not doing dummy auditing. They again are not in communication with the preclear.) He is supposed to find a line. Now he doesn’t put “Alice said” or “The Queen said” or something like that on the line. He just puts the statement itself, you see. “Why do they run so fast?” Well the book says, “ ‘Why do they run so fast?’ the Queen asked.” Well we don’t use “the Queen asked.” We just say, “Why do they run so fast?”

All right, he picks that up out of the book. Why out of a book? Why not out of his head? Oh, remember. Remember something — in using the English language, you are not using your own ideas, you did not invent the words. You only helped invent the words that compose the English language. You are already using somebody else’s ideas. Now there is nothing wrong with your composing these into new ideas of your own, but remember you are already using somebody else’s ideas when you’re speaking English.

All right. Now let’s get it a little bit further. We are given a set pat process. Oh I know I dreamed it up, I found it one way or the other, but an awful lot of auditors worked with this. It’s had a lot of looking at, and it’s become phrased in a certain way, and that certain way might very well be taken by you out of the textbook and given to the preclear, and it won’t ever work if you do. “Do fishes swim?” is not a therapeutic procedure — it’s not. The repetition of it can be very good for an auditor, but it’s not a therapeutic procedure. But the statement “Do fishes swim?” is not yours really, at the beginning, is it? You got it from the instructor or off of a book, and then you used it. Well when does it become yours? Well, any idea is yours that you make yours. We won’t go along with dialectic materialism and say that no ideas are new, because that’s not true. There can be new ideas. But if you get an idea from someone else, it is not still their idea. It’s your idea. There is nothing wrong with mis-owning ideas, there’s no mass in them to get you confused.

You take an idea out of a book, it becomes your idea, and then as your idea you relay it to the preclear. And that is all there is to it. It is coached this way. It is not from the book to the preclear. It is from the book to the auditor, and then the auditor, making it his own idea, expresses that idea to the preclear in such a way that it arrives at the preclear. So it’s from the auditor to the preclear. But we give him the book as the third via because most of the material he is going to handle in communication is from a source outside himself. You’ve just got to get used to the idea that there is nothing wrong with using another person’s ideas.

I always know what someone’s state of learning is in Scientology when they speak of Scientology as “your” ideas. They say, “I’ve been reading your ideas.” I know at once this person can’t communicate. It’s a great oddity. It’s quite wonderful. Because they reveal at once that they cannot take this first basic step of taking an idea and then communicating it to someone else. They are standing back looking at the world in some large sense and they are not any part of it, because they can’t own any of the world’s ideas. If they can’t own any of the world’s ideas, then they won’t own any of the world, because the easiest thing to own is an idea. No mass to impede it.

So, we coach just exactly in this way. We want the person to find a phrase in Alice in Wonderland and then, taking that as his own idea, communicate it directly to the preclear and he can say it over and over, the same phrase if he wishes, in any way he wishes to say it, until the preclear (who is really a coach) tells him that he thinks it has arrived.

Now sometimes the preclear, the first day, feels just a little bit strange about these communication lines, too, and sometimes has his entire criticism based upon the erudition, the pronunciation, the way the auditor holds his little finger while he announces the phrase — this has nothing to do with it. It is the intention that communicates, not the words. And when you have the intention to communicate to the preclear, and that intention goes across, it will arrive. If you broadcast that intention, no matter if you’re saying it in Chinese, if you’re a Scientologist, it will arrive.

One of the steps of the much higher indoctrination level, Tone 40 8-C, consists entirely and completely of saying things in funny voice tones while one is communicating an intention — using very odd voice tones; well, this is not part of Dear Alice. The voice tones are unimportant; pronunciation is unimportant. It’s whether or not the person could take that idea out of that book, own it, and then communicate it. And the intention must communicate. And it must be communicated in one unit of time. That is to say, it isn’t repeated from the last time it was repeated. It is new, fresh, communicated in present time. The fifty-fifth command of “Do fishes swim?” is the fifty-fifth, not the first repeated. So we have one unit of time, one command, and the intention. And when we have those things relayed across, then he can find another phrase and communicate that. And that is the way we do that, and I hope you find it helps communication.