Have a lot of data this evening of one kind or another. A lot of things have happened here in the last four years, just to take a wide look at things, since the advent of Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. But two very, very important things have occurred. Two extremely important things, I might say, have occurred on that line of research and investigation into the field of human livingness, and that is simply this: A human being as such is not a body – very demonstrable and highly therapeutic, but he is not a body. And that by the treatment of a body we do not particularly aid or assist the person we are treating.

That is a lesson which medicine has yet to learn, which psychology (late, lamented psychology) unfortunately never did learn right to the day of its death – never did learn. It thought it was treating a bunch of neurons and it was not treating neurons. Now, we know what it might have treated, but it didn’t treat it and so it’s gone.

Well, anyway, our next important discovery came out of an earlier discovery, which was quite important, which was a triangle. And this triangle was a very interesting triangle.

So let me go back into ancient history for a moment and let’s take a real good look at this triangle.

Here is the ARC triangle. [See ARC Triangle in the appendix.] This triangle was discovered in July of 1950 to have an enormous bearing upon life and existence at large. Doesn’t look like much, is it? It’s just a triangle with A and R and C at the corners of it. But this triangle encompasses understanding; it encompasses as well mathematics. And you omit any corner of this triangle and you will discover that the other two corners will collapse.

Now, this triangle has affinity, reality and communication. Now, those three corners one after the other support one another. In support of this, did you ever try to talk to somebody with whom you had no agreement of any kind? Sometime try to talk to somebody who just landed from Mars, just do it as an experiment, and you will discover that, one, you have no agreement on language and so immediately you cannot communicate – that is the first thing.

You will discover, next, that you not only won’t like him but you will probably fear and suspect him – so there goes affinity. When the agreement goes out, the affinity goes out. When communication goes out, agreement goes out and affinity goes out.

Now, let’s say we have somebody that we decide we’re going to do business with one way or the other in spite of the fact that he is a dog, a bum, and in spite of the fact that you never met such a louse in your life. But we’re going to do business with this dog! And we go over and we try to talk to him, masking the fact that we have no A at all – masking the fact that we have no affinity. And what is going to be the result of this? No C. You won’t be able to communicate with him. You talk to him for a short time, you’ll become speechless, or you’ll wind up in a fight or an argument. But C will break. Why? Because affinity was not present – you didn’t like him.

Under affinity we have whether or not we like people, whether or not we can live near people, whether or not we feel emotional toward people. Actually, affinity – the technical definition of it – is the consideration of distance, but that takes in like and dislike and the emotional scale.

In Scientology, in Dianetics, we have this emotional scale [See Emotional Tone Scale in the appendix] which starts in with apathy, above it is grief, above that is fear, above that is anger, next is antagonism, next above antagonism is boredom and above boredom, conservatism, and there we find enthusiasm sitting on the top. All right, that is not the top of the scale but that’s merely the emotional scale. So we go up this emotional scale and we find human beings can be found at one place or another on this emotional scale.

Well, if we have a person who is chronically in grief… Let us take somebody who goes to all the funerals in the community. I knew one fellow one time who was not chronically in grief who went to all the funerals in the community and he was a very interesting fellow – very, very interesting fellow. He went to the funerals on Sunday and foreclosed on the widow on Monday. And I guess the reason he went to the funerals and furnished his car for all the funerals in the community was just to make sure the fellow was good and dead before he dropped the axe on the fellow’s relatives. He was a banker, a small-town banker“ the most hated man there, but he went to all the funerals. He was chronically somewhere on this Tone Scale.

But you have met somebody that you would swear had just that moment come from a funeral. They’re always ready to cry about something. They’re always in grief. Life is sad. Life is a sad thing. Have you ever run into anybody like that? All right. Then such a person could be said to be chronically in grief – just part of this emotional scale.

Have you ever met somebody who was always mad about everything? It didn’t matter what he was mad about, he was just mad about something. But it turned out to be practically everything. So you come in and you say, „Good morning.“

He doesn’t say, „What’s good about it?“ – that would be in antagonism – he’s angry though. You’ll find out he’s angry about the morning mail, he’s angry about the state of the office, he’s angry about this, he’s angry about that. In other words, he’s angry! Well, he actually isn’t angry about anything. He’s just parked at this point on this emotional Tone Scale. He is angry, period.

Now, once in a while we run into… on the upper scale we run into fixed conditions. Now, in the old days, nineteenth-century material would label this as manic, a „manic“ state. A fellow – he always felt real good and so forth, a lot of push and bang and so forth. He’s actually stuck on this emotional Tone Scale. Well, the optimum condition on the emotional Tone Scale is to be able to change your position on the scale. After you’ve been angry for a moment, you should be perfectly willing to merely feel antagonistic and then bored, you see? The fellow who is stuck at anger only goes in one direction, and that’s down. When they start sticking on this scale, there is only one way they go – down.

The angry man can be counted on sooner or later in his career to go into self-destruction – apathy. Hitler, Hitler was an angry man and he eventually went into suicide, and anger. Was simply a chronic state. He was in a fixed anger band and then when he pitched off of that he went downscale.

Well, all of these emotions about which I’m talking about, and these emotional conditions, are under the heading of affinity – that is the degree of affinity.

All right, now, if these angry conditions, griefy conditions, and so forth, are part of a fixed scale, then we would expect R (reality) and C to equally be part of that same scale. So we have actually here a scale of a series of these triangles, see?

We could have these triangles in such a line as… We’d say this one is apathy – this person is always apathetic. And this one, let us say, is anger and this one up here, let us say, is enthusiasm. All right. What is his degree of affinity? His degree of affinity is apathy, here. What is his degree of affinity here? It’s anger. What is his degree of affinity here? It’s enthusiasm.

All right. Now, let’s take this R. This individual who has an affinity of apathy is then going to have a reality which matches apathy, and what kind of a reality is that? Apathy is „Oh, well, it doesn’t do any good anyhow. Oh, (sigh!) there’s no sense in doing anything about it. It’d just get worse probably.“ This sort of an enthusiastic existence we find in apathy has the same reality and we find the fellow meets ex­istence and makes agreements on this band. He actually only agrees with things which are on this affinity band. See, he’s in apathy so he agrees with apathetic things.

So we find out that if he picked up a pet, it’d be some cat that could barely drag itself along. But mostly it had better be a cat that doesn’t move at all, that’s much better. And if he started to find out what life was like, he would have an interesting observation – life is all in apathy. The only thing this individual would actually see sharply would be those things which were apathetic, so he would make friends with apathetic people. He would find himself involved with apathetic organizations – if he did any circulation at all. Let’s say that such a person could get out far enough to be part of an organization (they usually don’t). But anything that „nothing could be done about“ would be right there for him to observe. His world is the world of apathy. Now, much more important than that, is even this apathy very real to him? No, it’s not – it’s an apathetic reality. When he looks at the wall, „The wall. Well, might be there, might not be there. It’s a wall, I guess, but of course one never knows about things.“ And he wouldn’t get up for one moment to walk over and touch the wall and find out whether or not that wall had the slightest reality as we see it, you see? Solid. „It might or might not be solid.“ See? But his curiosity is insufficiently aroused about this condition and he will walk around through life rather under the impression, probably, that walls „Well, they are or they aren’t.“ Once in a while his body will run into one, and after he’s hit it very hard he’s liable to stand there for a moment or two before he bounces.

Now, that is his reality, and a thin, soupy-looking world this would make, wouldn’t it? Because under the heading of reality we get perception. What does the world look like to this man in apathy? It’s very hard for somebody who is not in apathy to really get down and understand what the world looks like to him, but believe me it’s a kind of a soup. The walls are sort of soupy and they might or might not have form. The statue out in the park is a sort of a gelatinous, shapeless mass. That’s the way the world looks to him; it’s an apathetic world.

The odd part of it is that he could go out and stare straight at a pile driver which, on an anger basis, is going „crash, crash, crash, crash,“ and, you know, he would never see or hear that pile driver rise or hit. What he would see, however, is the fact that the fellow who’s supposed to be watching it isn’t moving and he’d notice this lumpy mass that he would figure out possibly was another human being sitting there motionless. But the pile driver itself could be in full action and go unobserved by the individual. That’s the truth about apathy. Hard to credit, but that’s the way the world looks to this fellow.

So that if somebody comes into his plane of vision who is moving, who has some life in him, something like that, that person might as well be invisible – just might as well be invisible. And then he’ll turn around and try to understand this fellow for a moment, but that’s an apathy too, and we’ll get to that after a moment.

Now, reality is what is perceived. That’s perception to the degree of: What is perceived? What does it look like?

This C over here is the action of perceiving and so we have communication at the band of apathy. What do you think it is? What do you think communication might be at the band of apathy?

Fellow manages to drag himself in the front door and he slumps in the chair. The other person, let us say, is in apathy and the other person is already slumped in a chair, and they sit there. That’s communication – they sit there. You come along and you say to this person, „Hi, Joe.“ I just told you that if you were in a state of liveness that there’s a definite possibility that he won’t see you. Well, boy, there certainly is truth in that, because he doesn’t hear you and he doesn’t answer you. He actually will not answer you. We call this – a technical word – communication lag.

Now, communication lag assumes that the person actually has heard you and is going to answer you. And that’s too high for apathy, because this person has not seen you or heard you and this person doesn’t reply to you.

A rock, actually, or a piece of bread dough is in apathy. Did you ever say hello to some bread dough?

All right. Now, this triangle, then, in all three of its corners is native to apathy.

All right, let’s go upscale here and let’s look… You understand that right above apathy there is a band called grief, and right above grief there is one called fear, and then we get into anger. There’s also one in there, resentment: a person doesn’t dare be angry anymore but he’s… well, if he just had a little more energy or if he was a little bit better known or he had a little more money, what he wouldn’t do! But he doesn’t say that to the person. He knows better than to get angry anymore; he’s caught below anger.

All right. We have in this triangle all parts native to this band „anger.“ In other words, affinity matches up on R and on C. All right, let’s take a look at… we know what affinity is for anger: the fellow is actually holding. Anger is not a motion particularly. It is actually a bursting, destructive action held from acting. A person who is being emotionally angry is generally not striking. See? He’s being angry! He’s actu­ally holding himself as much as he’s driving himself, and boy, does it make a complicated picture.

These people who are in chronic anger reach out and hold back to the same degree, but both with equally violent force which makes a very chaotic picture. A fellow in anger is apt to pick up something and restrain himself from throwing it, you see? But then he does throw it, then he wishes he hadn’t thrown it, you get the idea?

He’s up, down, back, and actually he’s traveling a distance up and down across overt action and withholding the overt action.

All right, this individual in anger has a reality of angry, he likes violence. Wagner. Oh, that’s good. That’s good music. Yeah, particularly when it’s utterly discordant. If you could… he would never really be satisfied with Wagner unless you could play two of Wagner’s pieces simultaneously.

All right. So our next look, as far as his reality is concerned, is to find that masses – heavy withholding forces and masses – attract him a great deal. Things have to be kind of massive.

So we have some nations that have been in anger. Germany during Hitler’s period is rather typical. Boy, the art during that period – man, did it have mass! You know, it was mass. We won’t mention the art, but it was mass. And by the way, what do you call them, the WPA… No. The Works Progress Administration Division of Arts that painted all the pictures in the post office? You know, that had the cogwheel, you know, and the overmuscled fellow and the woman who is much, much too thoroughly constructed in some areas. You know that school of painting, actually, came over here – Russian, German – that school of painting. That is what we call… These, by the way, all have arbitrary numbers in Dianetics and Scientology: that’s 1.5; apathy is 0.1; 0.0, the guy is dead. So this is 1.5 art – mass, you know, heavy massiveness.

Now, his reality, then, his reality only matches up where he sees something which is counterbalancing great forces. And this he considers – „That’s real, that’s real.“ Now, this fellow could see a perfectly… You can walk up to this man with the greatest of enthusiasm and you can explain to him how he’s just inherited a million dollars – enthusiasm, good news, good shape and so forth. And do you know there’s a possibility that he wouldn’t see you or hear you, and a little while later might turn around and remark to you that you were in his office, what were you doing there? If he did take in the news, it would be a shock to him. Why would it be a shock? It violates his reality. He knows everything is bad, and you’ve just told him that something was good. And if he had to accept something that was good, his reality would be violated.

Well, now we have a band that we can call sanity, only that actually is the lower margin of sanity – 2.0. When people fall below 2.0, tsk! as a chronic state and never change that state, they are insane.

But above this state we do have various other emotions… Most people, by the way, are 2.5 or something like that. They’re just mildly bored. You know, existence is sort of onerous, but we kind of try to make nothing out of it somehow. We get up here to enthusiasm, we find that we don’t have anything much in common with anger. Anger doesn’t have very much in common with apathy, but anger can sink rapidly into apathy and enthusiasm can sink rapidly into anger – change of tone. That’s how those tones change. The individual who is violently angry for a while will go into apathy and say, „Well, go ahead and shoot me, what do I care?“ You know, he’ll just skip it – the whole thing.

But enthusiasm up here will react down into anger sometimes. The individual has gone out and he’ll say, „Come on, let’s go. Let’s get this job done. Let’s be this way, let’s be that way. Let’s be hotter than a firecracker, you know? And let’s get the show on the road for the team, you know. And throw your money in the box, and we’ll build all this and we’ll get it all straight,“ and so on and so on. And you know, „Nobody’s doing it!“ And he’s down there in anger.

All right. Now, anger does have a C. But what kind of a communication do you suppose an angry man has? It’s again not much of a communication, is it? You probably would get an answer out of him if you walked up and said „Grrr.“ You’d undoubtedly get an answer out of him.

Well, all of these three corners of this triangle are similar. Now, give an angry man a communication to hold and pass on to somebody else when he sees them. Do you suppose that communication… Let’s say a man is violently angry and we give him a letter to mail. Do you suppose the letter will ever get mailed? It sure won’t. He’ll stick it in his pocket, he’ll throw it away or do something of the sort. But he won’t pay any attention to this letter.

Similarly, we tell him something. Have you ever tried to convince a very angry man that there was certain information on the subject about which he was angry which he might be able to use? What do you elicit? You just get more anger.

All right. So A-R-C here – we’re right close together. There’s darn little communication at anger. We’re still below 2.0. Now, we get up above 2.0, we get into the bands of first antagonism, then boredom, then conservatism, then enthusiasm. And we get up here to enthusiasm and we have a fellow who is at outflowing communication, and the C at enthusiasm is outflowing.

The odd part of it is that if an individual were stuck at enthusiasm, apathy would be almost invisible to him – incomprehensible, invisible. So this enthusiastic person walks around; he thinks the whole world is enthusiastic just like he is because he doesn’t notice anywhere in it that anybody is apathetic. Someday somebody forces this upon his attention and he goes into anger. But his communication, quite normally, is an outflowing communication, and the one which inflows to him… Here we have communication moving though, that’s sane. Communications which move in he can receive if they are on the enthusiasm band, but he will not receive a communication which isn’t if he’s really stuck on this band.

Things which he sees in the world are those things which give promise, being better and being more usable and so forth – these are the things he sees. He doesn’t see the angry things, the apathetic things. So therefore life is disillusioning to him after a while if he is stuck at enthusiasm, but who wants to be stuck any place on this scale?

An individual should be able and be at liberty to be apathetic, angry or enthusiastic, bored, antagonistic or anything else as the environment seems to indicate, and that is the answer to it.

Because these people who are stuck on this scale are not evaluating their environment. They are being angry without the environment calling for anger. And that’s the interesting thing. The environment doesn’t call for him to be angry, there’s nothing going on, and yet he’s angry. The fellow’s got lots to eat, and he’s living well, and so forth, and the environment says „No rea­son for apathy.“ And yet he sits there and he says, „I get so discouraged.“ What does he get discouraged about?

All right. Let’s go into the other portion of this – understanding. This ARC triangle makes up understanding, and these tones are the lower tones of humanity. These are the tones of humanity, which is why we stress them. There are many other tones, and they go upscale from there and they even go downscale from there.

But as far as humanity is concerned is they hang around to a large degree in this band and we find these are the most common – enthusiasm, anger, apathy, the rest of these – are the most common emotional states of the people we run into.

But each ARC triangle here, or any ARC triangle, would be a triangle of understanding. And what is understanding? It is the ARC of the individual. That is understanding. Now, you could teach a parrot to say „How are you Joe?“ But that doesn’t mean that the parrot understands that there is such a thing as Joe or even that he’s talking. He might have an idea he’s making a noise as a copy, but he is not doing, one, communication; he’s not in agreement with the message which is „How are you Joe?“ In other words, he’s not greeting Joe. And over here in affinity he doesn’t care whether Joe lives or dies; it’s all the same to him. So he doesn’t have any understanding about it. He might be talking, but he’s not doing any understanding.

For understanding to occur, A, R and C must be present. But we have differences in levels of understanding. What does an apathetic person understand? He understands that life is sort of a lump of bread dough – his reality – he knows that nobody ever talks to him and that he doesn’t talk to anybody else, and he knows that there’s no use trying to go on anyway because you can’t win.

The very word apathy, by the way, comes from Zeno’s Apatheia, writing in the later days of the Roman Empire, who wrote a philosophy on the line… Oh, this is the most popular philosophy of the later Roman Empire, a gorgeous philosophy, „You can’t win, so why try?“ And the name of that book is Apatheia – Zeno’s Apatheia. It’s where we get the word. You can’t win, so why try? Well, he knows this is what the world’s all about: You can’t win, so it’s no use doing anything about it.

At least Schopenhauer writing many centuries later did have enough anger in his philosophy to say „The thing to do about life is to stop the whole thing. Don’t let it go any further. That’s what you do with life.“

All right. This apathetic man’s understanding of life is in this framework then of ARC. And you could understand what his understanding is by locating his feeling or his experience in any one of these corners – then you know what his understanding is. You think a man in apathy really understands anything? He does, he understands apathy. That’s all he understands. And when a person is momentarily in apathy, that’s what he best understands – apathy. If you were to walk up to a person who is saying „I can’t win so why try?“ and you were to say to him, „(Sigh!) Well… hi, Joe. Joe, you know, you can’t win so why try?“ He’d understand you perfectly – buddy. He’d understand you, but that is all he’d understand. He’d understand that particular transmission.

This angry man, he understands anger, and this enthusiastic man he understands enthusiasm and that is all he understands. This world – his reality – is built out of enthusiasm.

This man’s world is built out of anger. And with anger goes of course breakage, stopping, not running, withholding.

An angry man in raising a child will do one of the most weird things – a chronically angry person – one of the weirdest things you ever saw. He’ll say „Johnny, Johnny, go and get me my cigarettes.“ Johnny starts to go and get him – “Come here!“ Get the idea? He says, „Come here. I’ll get ‘em myself.“ He probably will. Johnny was perfectly willing to get his cigarettes. He knew right where they were and would have brought them to him in one moment. But the mere fact that Johnny started out made Johnny come back. You get the idea?

All right. We just had a conference with this very angry man and we have agreed on such-and-so and so-and-so and we start to leave the conference – see, we start to leave the street corner where we came to this agreement. And we start to leave, and he’ll say, „Oh, just a moment.“ And then we’ll have to wrap the whole thing in some opposite direction. You see? Stop that motion. Stop any motion you start and start any motion you stop and you’ve got anger. And that’s his understanding of life. It’s all stopped, but if it starts, stop it; if it stops, start it; if it tries to change, kill it.

Enthusiasm, the same way, you come along and try to explain to this enthusiastic man who is normally quite enthusiastic about existence or about a project – you try to explain to him „But people don’t want a Utopia. People… they can’t win and they know they can’t win and they don’t want a Utopia, and there isn’t any reason to go on with this thing.“ You just might as well stand there talking to the wall. He doesn’t understand you. He will tell you so immediately, „I don’t understand what you’re talking about. This is just nonsense. It has no bearing on any reality.“ And the truth of the matter is probably the Utopia would meet that kind of a reaction. No, he’s all wound up in the idea and the only thing he can understand is enthusiasm.

Now, actually, if we have this triangle here, this ARC triangle, and if it’s so important, there probably is something more important to know about it. And I always had the hunch there was something more important to know about it but didn’t quite meet up with it until some months ago when I suddenly tripped over – slightly, just a slight stumble at first, caught myself and walked on down the line with aplomb – over communication as being slightly more important than anything else.

„Hm,“ I said, „that’s real interesting.“ Research and investigation is always very interesting because you never know what you’re going to know even though you know what you’re trying to find out already.

And there is this business of the two-dimensional worm: Two-dimensional worm is crawling on a two-dimensional plane. This sheet is a two-dimensional plane, it has no height. Let’s say there is this little spot on this sheet and let’s say that it sticks up this way towards you a quarter of an inch, see? That makes it three dimensions. But this is a two-dimensional worm; he lives in a two-dimensional world. And so he’s crawling along here and he’s having a fine time. And he crawls along and he all of a sudden bumps into that third dimension, you know? He just ticks it slightly on his way back. Oh well, he’s probably dreaming, hallucination or something of the sort. Skip it!

So the next two-dimensional worm crawling along. And he hits it kind of solidly and he says, „You know, this shouldn’t have happened. There is something wrong here.“ So he goes on back and along the line and he runs into another worm and he says, „You know, the funniest thing happened to me. I was walking along and I… and I don’t know,“

So this other worm goes over and runs head on into this thing, see, crash! And he backs up and he says, „That is not supposed to be here.“ So he tells his grandchildren about it and shows them the bump.

But another two-dimensional worm comes along and climbs the pole slightly. All of a sudden he’s being very brave, you know, he’s looking up. And all of a sudden he says, „What am I doing here? Where am I? Where have I gotten to? Oh, my God, isn’t it a horrible long way down.“

The reaction… we used to have a phrase for this in Dianetics. We’d call it „up the pole.“ A guy got up the pole. We’ve seen them. The guy would all of a sudden get completely esoteric on some point or another. He couldn’t express it to any other of us two-dimensional worms, but he sure was trying to talk about something. And all of a sudden he’d look around and he’d say, „My God, how did I get up this high?“ And he’d fall off and feel terrible and so forth. Up the pole, a rather strange manifestation.

Well, anyway I bumped into this little post. Well, now the ARC triangle, I point out to you, is perfectly flat. See, it’s a perfectly flat triangle. It has no poles in it. And I was crawling along one day and I ran into a pole that I thought was right there at C. All right, so it was there at C – something a little more important at C than at A and R.

Well now, this was totally contrary to the agreed-upon society in which we live, because this society’s psychology, long dead, had already determined completely that the important thing was reality and so had everyone determined that the important thing was reality. And that all we had to do to make somebody well was to make him face reality. And this was the total trick, but it never worked. And I had eaten this up with my professor’s Scotch as a fact, and it’s not a fact.

You can agree to anything you want to, wherever you please and whenever you please, and it won’t do a thing to you. You can agree on anything. But if you talk to somebody and he doesn’t reply, you’re stuck. And the important corner of this triangle is C.

The entire mechanism of how this energy-space production unit, the awareness-of-aware-ness unit which you are, gets stuck in a body, gets stuck in a universe, is totally contained in communication and is not contained in affinity or reality at all – although these two slightly monitor the condition of being stuck. A guy can be happily stuck or unhappily stuck. He can be married to a gorgeous woman or a bum – he’s still married. He can like it or dislike it-he’s still married. He could have agreed to it or it could have been done by a shotgun – he’s still married. How do we get him unmarried? In processing you can do it with C alone – communication.

Communication is the most imp… single most powerful item or object in this or any other universe – with communication is created space, energy and time itself. And the only way that anybody gets stuck to anything is by a failure to complete something known as the cycle of communication.

And this cycle of communication is a very quick thing to look at here – hardly anything to it. The cycle of communication over here: [See Cycles of Communication, Cycle 1, in the appendix] Bill says to Joe, „Hello.“ And Joe’ – same Joe, you see, but now prime to do it – says „Hello“ back and is heard by Bill’. And this is the origin and this is the live form – of course, he’s a live form too but he’s a special live form, the origin live form. And this over here is the answer and this over here is the acknowledgment, and that is the mechanics of one cycle of communication. Somebody originates a communication. He says, „Hello.“ This person receives it as a live form, and this person who has just received it now answers, and this person who originally spoke is now answered and acknowledges the fact that he’s been answered. And that is one side of the cycle of communication.

And now we go to the other side [See Cycles of Communication, Cycle 2, in the appendix] and we find out Joe this time says, „Hello.“ And now, we have Bill being the live form. Bill’ says „Hello“ back and Joe’ acknowledges.

Now, this is better explained with „How are you?“ Bill says – he’s the originator – he walks up and he says, „How are you?“ And Joe, the live form, the person addressed, hears him and says, „I’m fine.“ And Bill receives that again as the second live form.

That communication having been gone through with, Joe says, „Well, how are you?“ And Bill says – he receives it here – says rather unimaginatively, „I’m fine,“ and Joe acknowledges it here.

So we have Cycle 1 and Cycle 2. And here again we had origin, we had live form, we had an answer, and we had an acknowledgment and as long as we complete this whole two-way cycle of communication on any subject in any kind of a temper or anything else, no aberrative action has been taken – no action has been taken which could even vaguely be aberrative no matter what’s said. R covers what is said (reality, reason, significance) – doesn’t matter what is said as long as this two-way cycle of communication is uniformly carried through.

Bill comes along, he originates a communication. He has interchanged it, talked to Joe and gotten an answer back. Then Joe originates a communication and is answered back by Bill, and they can talk there… they actually theoretically could talk there for a hundred thousand years without picking up a single aberration between them as long as they followed these rules.

And the second that they break these rules or any part of these rules, they get into a misalignment with each other and they get upset, and you get different types of personalities that react differently on the communication line. They could talk this way for a hundred thousand years and it wouldn’t matter what they said; they could sit there and they could say to each other: Bill would say, „You know, you are the lousiest, scurviest dog which I’ve ever met, Joe.“

And Joe could say – he hears this and he could say, „Well, that is your opinion.“

And Bill could say, „Mm.“

And then Joe could say to him, „I have seen swindlers in my time. I have seen fellows who have done every single crime in the calendar and multiplied them across the line, but you very easily are the crummiest of them all.“

And Bill could say, „Huh! That’s what you think.“

And Joe could say, „Mm.“ And they could go on this way and on, and be in a horrible temper with each other and they’d all of a sudden find out that they weren’t mad at each other anymore. They would be actually deaberrating each other.

But Bill can walk up to Joe and he can say to himself, you know, kind of „Well, there’s that nice fellow Joe over there. I’ll say hello to Joe.“ So he’ll say, „Well, how are you, Joe?“

And Joe hears him and doesn’t say a thing. And the next thing you know Bill will break his neck one of these times. This can go on just so many months or years, and one of these days, why, Bill can be certain to break his neck. But at the same time Bill will find that he looks at Joe longer and longer, sticks around him more and more. Insidious, huh? A lack of a cycle sticks Bill to Joe.

Now, we try to find out how this works in real life – believe me, it works in real life. And you can take a family, you can take the person in the family who is least following these communication cycles and find right there the aberrative member of the family – the aberrative, not the aberrated – but the person who is causing the rest of the family to be screwy. It’s a fascinating thing.

Now, we look at a marriage and this fellow says, „Your Honor, I didn’t do a thing to her. I was always a quiet fellow and minded my own business. I worked at my job, brought home my wages every Saturday night, did everything I could to make a good home for her, Your Honor. And then she ran off with the chauffeur! It’s not my lookout, is it? (Sniff!)“

And Your Honor says to the girl, „Did you do this?“

And the girl not knowing anything about the laws of communication and having no argument in her defense says, „Yes, I did.“ So she is deprived of home and mother, or whatever they do in courts these days – cut off five inches of her hair or something, I don’t know.

And yet the truth of the matter was, this was what went on in that family: She’d get up in the morning and fix his breakfast. He’d get up, sit down at the table and she’d say, „Well, Bill, how are you? How are you this morning? And isn’t it a beautiful morning. And I’ve just made some hotcakes here especially for you and…“ He walks out the door in the morning and she says, „Goodbye, dear.“ Nothing. He comes home in the evening. She walks up to him; she gets his slippers, gets his pipe, gets his paper, has a snack before supper, all set, and says, „Well, dear, did you have a nice day?“ Nothing. And she put up with this four years before she ran off with the chauffeur. Why? Because at first she stuck harder and harder and harder waiting for that answer – that’s all, just waiting for the answer. That’s all that she wanted. He could have said, „Go to hell.“ It would have been a perfectly valid answer of some kind or another; at least he was alive. And for the first two or three years she was simply waiting for the answer and waiting for the answer.

And then she inverted till the point where she knew darn well she was not going to get an answer, and instead of sticking to, started to fly away from. Get the idea? People come in just so hard and so close on no communication, then they’ll invert and they’ll start to get away from things that won’t answer them. But it takes quite a while for the cycle to run.

So eventually there was nothing else she could do but run away with the chauffeur. She would have run away with the garbage man or his office secretary if it had been legal.

Who’s the offender? Well, that’s a question for jurisprudence to answer, not us. But I can sure tell you how people get aberrated and I can tell you, out of all the data of the human mind, that there’s not very much of that data that is very important. There are easily fifty thousand separate phenomena, all of which are well worth cataloging. Psychology found over three of them. But out of all of these fifty thousand phenomena, the phenomena which I’m giving you tonight in very shorthand form – because you have to take a pretty close look at this – is nevertheless the aberrative phenomena and does open the door to what we call treatment or processing.

And for the first time, with great security, with great certainty, Dianetics and Scientology can move very comfortably out of the field of aberration. Who cares about aberration. All we’re interested in is ability.

Thank you very much.