This is the Tuesday morning lecture of the Third Unit and I believe the date is the 5th of January 1954. And this morning, we are going to chew right into it and cover, I hope, sufficiently elementary theory, sufficiently elementary so that we do not have very much brain strain before we get some auditing in.

I don’t mean that sarcastically. The truth of the matter is that people in Scientology, as in Dianetics, become a little bit slap-happy with data. What you might call data-happy. And you have to get them audited and counter-audited and so forth and audit tapes out of them and so on.

Well, that’s all very well, but when you fill a preclear up with too much data, he knows what to expect and, as a consequence, auditing becomes more difficult.

That’s a tough thing to face, isn’t it? Because you as a student are getting audited at the same time. It will probably take you roughly three times the number of hours if I fill your ears too full of data this early in the Unit, so we’re not going to do that.

As a matter of fact, right now I could give you enough data to stagger you the rest of the day, just not even be complex about it, just tell you about the theory of communication and duplication and differences, identification and differentiation in the MEST universe. And we’d be allset, we would be all set for days - casewise. Because you’d sit there and you’d watch this stuff show up, because you’re talking about some of the greatest fundamental there is. And you sit there as an observer. So instead of a preclear, we make an observer out of somebody.

It must have been very remunerative to psychoanalysis - with which we are not running a dichotomy or a comparison, but it must have been very remunerative, as an example, for Freud’s books to be available to the patients. It must have been very remunerative to the psychoanalysts because now they could put in five times as much time. The stuff didn’t work anyway and it was all on the Second Dynamic. And what it would do, actually, was bleed the bank of sensation (which was really all they were really doing anyhow) and when they got finished, why, we had a fine restimulation job on the Second Dynamic, that’s all we had.

But any slightest chance of hitting the magic button would have gone up in smoke. So you found analysts being analyzed ten years at a time. You just never got an analyst out of analysis and yet the answers to their problems were very simple and just before their faces.

For instance Walnut Lodge - they don’t see any humor in that name as a nuthouse - Walnut Lodge just outside of Wash., DC. It is, by the way, the institution in the country which takes schizophrenics and the way they define that is anybody who is transferred to Walnut Lodge is a schizophrenic.

And I went over this and over this with the head of that organization and several of the staff, trying to find some chink in their armor somewhere, but they just sat there placidly and thought that this was the very most reasonable thing you could possibly have heard of: that a person who was a manic-depressive at Saint Elizabeth’s, when transferred to Walnut Lodge became a schizophrenic. And a person who was suffering from dementia praecox in Georgia, when transferred to Walnut Lodge became immediately a schizophrenic.

Why? And they’d go over this with me, over and over. I just never got it even vaguely run out. They would look at me and they would say, “Well, that’s because at Walnut Lodge we handle nothing but schizophrenics.”

They saw no humor in this, there was no ... Well, they sent a boy down to observe in Dianetics in 1950 when I went down there with... Well, I went down there just before the First Book was really sweeping very widely. It was within a day or two after it had left the publisher’s desk to get out to the distributors and I went down there because that is the hotbed of psychoanalysis. I believe the American Psychoanalytic Association as well as Boy Scout headquarters are in Washington, DC.

And there are a lot of these boys and they’re real good boys down there and twenty-one of them came in to a series of basic lectures and I had, immediately, I had eighteen proposals from all of them to treat them? No. Treat their wives. Because everybody knows that nobody can do anything for a psychoanalyst’s wife. And we know now by Acceptance Level Processing why an analyst’s wife is nuts. That’s his acceptance level, of course. So this is a problem which is very elementary but is very difficult for them, so we had immediately these proposals.

In fact the dean of psychiatry on the East Coast (that is not a dean of a university; in psychiatry they’re sort of a - their organization calls for deans and things like this), his wife was pipelined up to me a very short time after I went back to Elizabeth, for training.

Well, the organization at Walnut Lodge, by the way, to get back on the subject, sent me down a young fellow to observe and to report to them what Dianetics was. It was very fascinating. The young man was in trouble, he wasn’t even vaguely in trouble. As we’ve just coined a new state of case, we did have a “What wall?” case, we have this worse one now - а “What fog?” case. And this bird was a “What fog?” case.

And all he could do was sit there and he’d do this big long communication lag, you see. And then he’d - big long lag, you see - and then he’d come up with a “Nooo.” See? And then you’d say something else and then he’d get this long lag and then he’d say “Nooo.”

I’m not giving you the lag we got, by the way. By the way, in a communication lag, all we’re talking about is slowness of response or brightness or dimness of reception. These things are all the same package - it’s communication. And when we say an extreme communication lag, we’re talking about three to five minutes for a response.

And it goes like this, “How are you?” [pause] Now, there’s no reason to burn this much lecture, see? Three minutes later we get “Okay.”

And they’ve never noticed, in spinbins ... The only reason we’re talking about spinbins this morning is we’re trying to get over to an extreme of “What fog?” so that we can superexaggerate a few factors here so that you can be alert for them in sane people where they’re not that observable. All right. The only reason we’re interested in insanity is it’s a good zoo. That’s right. Because half of the guys there have already departed, it’s a flock of GEs walking around.

Now, we get over here and we find that we say “Good morning” to this fellow today - and they’ve just really never, never tallied this or put it on a scale or written it down or noted or taken notes on it, because it would have told them something fabulous. It would have given to them on a silver platter the gradient scale of communication - if somebody had just started noting this. It was the most easy thing in the world to note.

So we go way over here and we said “Good morning” to this fellow on Monday and, on Saturday afternoon, he sees us and he looks at us and says, “Good morning to you.”

And we get no connection between what we did on Monday and what he said on Saturday, but there is a definite connection. It took that long for that message to route through this person’s circuits and come back with the answer. And all it tells you is how much excess communication line is unnecessarily strung in this guy’s bank and that’s the only thing it tells you. It tells you that this is a bypass circuit. Any straight communication line is instantaneous because thought itself is instantaneous.

So any time we add time into communication, whether artificially or otherwise, we are stringing additional circuits which are bypass circuits and the longest one I have an accurate record of is now ten and a half years. A fellow asked himself a question and ten and a half years later got the exact answer to that question and wondered why, in the middle of listening to an opera, this confounded answer came up and was so hauntingly strong and was so familiar and seemed so right and it had nothing to do with the opera. And it worried him for several days, until he suddenly remembered asking himself the question ten and a half years before - in the same opera house.

Now, that is what we know as a bypass circuit. The MEST universe adds time to a communication - the thetan doesn’t. So we have as much time being added into the normal communication as the person is bad off. Got a direct index. Just gorgeous.

It’s the most visible thing and the most condemnatory thing and the most wonderfully diagnostic thing that you could possibly run into is this communication lag. And it is important to you, like water to a fellow walking in the middle of the Sahara Desert. Because it tells you that: one, the step level of the case. It tells you, two, how fast to audit the case. It tells you, three, what is relatively wrong about the case. And it tells you, four, whether or not you’re improving the case. And it gives you all these answers. And what is it? It’s communication lag. And if we were to draw SOP 8 on a scale, we would go over from SOP 8, Step I and we would put letter A. SOP 8, Step II and we’d put letter B. And SOP 8, Step III, we’d put letter C and so on, right down: А, В, C, D, E, F, G. And G would be your Step VII.

You see now that SOP 8 is a scale of case difficulty with techniques aimed in the direction of resolving the difficulty. You see, it is a pattern which we’re now using for numerous other patterns. So it is the basic pattern. Each step has a name. Each is a type of case that this step best fits and so forth and it’s a very smooth package with regard to this. But if we moved over to an А, В, C, D, E, F, G scale, that scale would only be a communication lag scale.

And let’s take then - it doesn’t run a straight line like this but it’s just an example: if it took one second to get a reply for an A level or a Step I, on the same question (all things being equal), if the case were a Step VII, it would take a seven-second interval.

Now, that’s not the way it goes. It just shows you, though, that you could say that it’s at least seven times as long on a Step VII. As a matter of fact, it isn’t. It’s closer to seven hundred times as long or seven thousand times as long. So it gives you an idea, though.

Now, you want to know, what is the step problem? As we go down these steps, what’s the problem? Very, very simple. We simply go into the communication lag of the case.

Well, a communication lag also tells you how well the fellow sees. It also tells you how much he knows - really knows. He can be an awfully smart fellow, you know, with a potential knowingness of (arbitrary figure) eight thousand, potential knowingness figure eight thousand and of this potential eight thousand, he knows ten units. And he could still be a smarter fellow than any you’d find out on the street who had potential knowingness of two hundred and knew one unit’s worth.

Well, our problem in communication lag is a problem of diagnosis and this should be very plain to you. And it ought to be consistently before you and it ought to be the thing, as an auditor, you eat with and sleep with. And as an Instructor, it ought to be something that you pay a great deal of attention to, as far as your instruction is concerned. Because if you hand people too much data that overrides their communication lag, what are you doing? Well, you’re setting up an echo circuit that echoes itself and your guy’s going to do nothing but sit there and spin.

And now, as an Instructor, let’s take a look at communication lag. And I come up to you this morning and I say, “All right. Now let’s take up this data. All right. Now in the subject of communication we have point C, we have a line and we have point E. Now, at point G, we put in a causative impulse and at point E, we receive an exact duplication of the causative impulse.”

“Now, I want to show you that a thetan, therefore, is trying entirely and continually to vary the causative impulse at the receipt-point and is trying to differentiate in such a way as not to become an exact duplication of what is put in in Causation and he does this for the sake of randomity. The definition of randomity is the ratio of predicted to unpredicted motion.

“Now, let us take up automaticity this morning and go into that strongly and show how it works in the field.”

Where are you people?

Male voice: Back there.

Yeah. All right. What have I done? Have I (quote) “slapped you with too much knowingness”? No, no that isn’t what I’ve done. Is, I’ve given you data hammered at the wrong communication lag, that’s all. There isn’t a single thing I said there - you see, not a single thing I said that isn’t immediately decipherable if you take a look at it. And if you had drawn a note in your notebook and you looked it over, you could take those exact sentences, you could take them apart, you’d sit there and look at them for a while. You could walk around the building a few times and sit out on the street and figure-figure for a while and look-look for a while and, all of a sudden, differentiation and identification would be extremely plain to you and what a thetan’s trying to do and why duplication fits in and all that. But that’s - what’s the matter?

Well now, it’d be very nice if I could say that. And you would set up a circuit which would simply regurgitate what I just said, word for word. You’d put it down on an examination paper. That’d be cute too.

That’s the way they do in universities. And I’m not being facetious now, they really do do that in universities.

6 I had a course once that - if I ever meet the instructor of that course again I’ll give him a handshake he’s not liable to forget. Because I learned judo after I took a course from him. This dog set up Materials of Construction as a summer course. And, of course, I did my education at a hammer and tongs basis and it was a summer course. And he set up the book Materials of Construction to be memorized. Honest, to this moment I could just stamp my feet in rage at this guy. Did you ever hear of anything more asinine!

And do you know that no civil engineer got out of that course who knew a damn thing about concrete? They knew all the mixing formulas of concrete. And these boys - and I looked at these and, boy, at that time the American college student and I just parted company, right in that course.

The first place, I hadn’t had the tradition of going to school consecutively since I was small, to that period. And I had for quite some time, before I’d been in the university, had been Mr. Hubbard. And had dropped back to “Hubbard” (which is the US university method of addressing a student, you see, bong! You!) with great reluctance.

And the point I’m making is, is this man had no concept of educating anybody in terms of anything. He was a damn phonograph record. And the students I was with were such sheep that they immediately voided my self-respect for me for being with them - much less them. Respect for them - we won’t even talk about that. But that they would actually sit there and tolerate a course which ran like this:

“The moisture content of concrete when manufactured in spring in April in Michigan is normally .665. Whereas, the moisture content of concrete manufactured in Georgia in June is .772. Quiz: What is the moisture content of concrete manufactured in Georgia in January?”

And we were supposed to know something about how to build when we got through that? We were supposed to know materials of construction when we got through that? Oh no, we didn’t.

And do you know I run into these poor young civil engineers kicking around and I say, “Hey fella, let’s lay a concrete walk out in front of that” or something of this sort. And the fellow says, “Well, let’s see, what... what... what’s your normal temperatures around this area? Let’s see ... let’s see, we ... I guess - have to have a pretty wet concrete here. What hardness level do you think we ought to have on the surface of it? And ...”

You say, “No, no. You’re not talking about the same thing I’m talking about. Let’s have a concrete walk out in front of the building here.”

“Yeah, but let’s see.. .um.. .uh.. .what have we, uh.. .mmmm.. .uh ...”

You say, “For, Christ’s sakes, are you or will I go in and pick up the phone and call the Concrete Auto Mix Company and have it delivered?”

Now, one young chap after another fails professionally because he hits a tremendous 7 communication lag. Something interposes between his getting something done and his being told that something has to be done. And boy, something has already interposed between his seeing that something has to be done and doing it.

You know, what you’d call “top-crust initiative” is a fellow walks in, he hasn’t got any authority, he has no badge, he isn’t on the payroll, he suddenly sees that something is wrong, he walks into the proper people that have those particular departments, calls it to their attention, orders the proper supplies, puts it across the proper line, it comes down, so forth. The foreman comes in five days later in order to figure the job out and it’s all done. And that’s what’s known as high decisional level. The fellow who will do that, in a few weeks in this society at this time, will own the whole company, believe me.

Because he practically doesn’t exist. He is being spoiled - by what? The interposition of a communication lag.

Now, you thought I was way off far afield didn’t you? And here we are right back. I surprised you - randomity.

Communication lags are built up by data, data, data, data, data. See? And then you have to get the swamp through the lag lines. So you see how that would work? Hm?

You just keep shoving too much data to be referred to, in the bank, until at last, there’s too much data to consult in any finite instant. So the fellow consults the data instead of the situation.

If this room was one-quarter full of molasses and three-quarters full of air, you’d still breathe. That right? If it was half full of molasses and half full of air, you’d still breathe. If it was seven-eighths full of molasses and one-eighth full of air, you might possibly get some breaths in. But believe me, if it was 99 percent molasses and 1 percent air, Homo sap’s GE wouldn’t function very well. Why? Because he consults the molasses every time he thinks of air.

And there, in essence, you have aberration. The guy is hungry and instead of consulting the nearest drugstore, he consults the bank on these aberrations concerning hunger. And here we have the percentage of molasses. See how that is? He consults his pocketbook, he consults this, that, the other thing, his diet, what his doctor said, whether or not he shouldn’t wait for a little while and merge it with supper. He’ll spend the rest of the afternoon trying to figure out whether or not he can afford to eat when, as a matter of fact, two alternatives immediately offer.

If he just does a fast run downtown to any salesmen ad that he sees in the paper, he can always get five dollars. That’s first expedient. He’d go out and sell a few magazines, too. (This is all during the time he’d be figuring out whether or not he should eat on his economic budget.) It’s a very, a very simple solution. He can always get five dollars in applying for a job or something like that, or get a job. I’m not talking about if he does it honestly or dishonestly, we’re not talking about ethics, we’re talking about expediency or whether he eats.

And you’ll find eatingness has very little to do with ethicness. Because in essence, it’s a breach of ethics, it’s a breach of confidence these poor little hens and pigs have in you. The other one is, is go swipe it. I mean, if he’s really up against it and nowadays there is what you might call the law of hunger.

I think the cops who will be very, very tough on somebody who is starving to death and steals some food, I don’t think they exist in the US. And if you were talking to a convention of police officers and you wanted to describe a tough cop, you would describe him in that extreme form. It’d be somebody that would throw somebody in the clink because they’d hooked a couple of bananas off a fruit stand when they were starving to death. That would be a real tough cop, even to cops, see? This guy would be an extremist.

Well, what’s your molasses got to do with it and what’s food got to do with it and so forth? It’s just straight line - is the decision line - the data line into the molasses, into the consulting whether or not one’s diet should be so-and-so and so-and-so. All of this is a lot of data, data, data. And all of this data interposes and the data as it interposes comes around finally, usually, to a poor state of decision.

Here’s your other law - there’s a law in this, two laws, and let’s not make them stated 9 like laws, let’s remember they prelaws. And one is: The case is as well off as it has communication speed. And let’s state it and we’ll just make a nice clumsy statement out of this - I mean, a nice simple statement - let’s remember it’s a law. I don’t care whether you state it in those words or not, just remember that this is a thought and that this thought then goes this way: A case is as bad off as it has communication lag.

The other point that we’re into here is what is communication lag? And we answer that - is “How red is a red bicycle?” Here’s another case where you could take a great deal of exception to engineering. We could say into engineering training - one way and the other, we could say, “ Well, let’s see, how red is red? Well, it’s the number of photons which bounce off a Koenig photometer when running at wump-pump-lump, res-rif-ref, umph-ump. And this, when all reversed down and looked up on the table, shows that the temperature of the color is 3-4-0-0 К on a Kelvin color scale” and so on. And if you worked all this backwards, you’d find out how red the red bicycle is when any kid down the street. ..

You say, “How red is that bicycle?”

And the kid will say, “Oh, it’s awful red.” Or “It’s not very red.” And you know how red a red bicycle is. You get the problem? How red is a red bicycle? Well, you know how red it is or how red it isn’t, because consideration, in essence, is the final consideration in all problems. Consideration is the consideration. How red do you consider red is? You see?

Now, we look around here and we don’t find anything terribly red, maybe outside of my hair and that’s not very red. Alphie’s got a tie there - that’s kind of a red, an inoffensive sort of a red. Oh, we’ve got a red shirt back here. Now, you see, none of that’s very red. Let me see if there’s anything . .. Well there, give me that packet there. All right. Now we’re getting red, see? You know how red that red is. Yeah, and we’ve got that red there and so on.

Now, as we go into this problem of redness - yeah, there’s a red dress back there - when we go into this problem of redness, we find we don’t have any very reds here. See there’s nothing very red. But if somebody came in with a terrifically red something or other, boy, you’d all say, “Gee, that sure is red.”

Now what have we communicated? Here is our agreement and consideration on red. Now, there’s a red pen back there that’s getting quite red. And I imagine there are a couple of lipsticks in the crowd that are this carmine red that are pretty red red. Well now, that’s getting real red.

Well, how laggy is a communication lag? Well now, don’t you go around trying to tell Ю me later on that you have figured out, for promulgation throughout the “I Will Arise Society” or something, a communication lag index scale which is based on a “pogorometer dafinibilation” which works by the fact that a string of wax, when stretched between two wheels, parts at a certain incidence when the communication lag of the preclear is something or other.

Out of your experience as a human being and my experience as a human being, we discuss human beings and we say, “This guy was slow.” And we know what we’re talking about, don’t we? And we say, “Boy, he was real slow.” We know what we’re talking about, don’t we? And we say, “He was quick and alert” We know what we’re talking about, don’t we?

Well, why destroy that knowingness with a flock of figures, by entering some more data into the line. Now, you thought I also departed from the communication line, but there we are right back at that.

Data can be a pretense of exactitude. And where we have data pretending to be more exact than we need exactness, we get a communication lag.

How much data do you have to know to live? Well, if you have to have - want to know how much data you have to know to live as a thetan, that’s one problem. Because he doesn’t need much data. He can get into and out of more trouble faster, so he doesn’t need much data.

Now, how much data do you have to live, as a Homo sapiens? Quite a bit more data, merely because Homo sap can’t get into and out of trouble with such speed and he has a survival index. You see, his survival index has something to do with this. He has a narrow tolerance band. He doesn’t live well five miles up in the stratosphere. And he doesn’t live worth a doggone, ten miles deep in the ground. It’s too hot down there. It’s too cold up in the stratosphere. A candle goes out at about eighteen thousand or seventeen thousand feet and it’s very remarkable that a man will keep on breathing and functioning for five, six, eight thousand feet more. Fantastic how little oxygen he’ll run on, but he runs out of it by the time he’s gone up five miles. Okay. He has a narrow tolerance band.

So how much data do you have to know to be a Homo sapiens? You need as much data as the fellow thought he had to have who eventually became the Homo sapiens. What is the agreed-upon amount of data? - is the rest of the answer.

Well, that would then make up the agreed-upon amount of communication lag which would fall into this, wouldn’t it?

We’re using English (such as it is) and using English, it takes a certain length of time to pronounce English. It takes a certain length of time for the eardrum to get back at it again. Now we can talk English an awful lot faster than I’ve been talking English to you this morning and put the point across just as well as we have before, [said rapidly] But you get all tensed up on it. Why? It’s just not a normal speech level.

Now, you do tricks with speech. You say, “Now, I want you to listen very, very carefully because I have something terribly important to tell you.” [said slowly] You make the guy wait, so as to hold him in time, so to speak, and then you reduce his havingness in terms of words and so he’ll stick on the time track.

You see that trick? That’s an easy trick isn’t it? Well, essentially, that is the reason why the fellow started to speak slowly and have a long communication lag in the first place, is he wanted to impress and stick others on the time track and so he does. Do you get that?

So you can say to any case, “Who is the slowest-talking fellow you knew?”

Fellow says, “Ooh. Oh.. .ah.. .ahem.. .let’s see ...” He’s dramatizing it right there, he’s stuck. That’s why he answers you that way.

“Who’s the slowest-talking fellow you know?” And you can just feel your own brains go down to a kind of creak, creak, creak. “Let me think.”

Well, I can tell you immediately the slowest talking person you know with whom you had to associate intimately, familially - famille, not just some casual friend - but the slowest-talking family member was the most aberrative person in your bank.

So how do we just settle out this preclear and knock him appetite over tin cup and know his case inside out and solve him all up and run him down and know when he’s better and so forth? Communication lag. And why is it that we don’t have to take for truth this fact out of this case? See there’s one we don’t have to take for true:

We say, “How do you feel now?” We only want to know how long it takes him to answer, we don’t want to know the words.

And when you can train an auditor to not giving a damn what the preclear says in terms of words, you’ve really got the boy trained. Because he’ll be a happy auditor. The only thing he wants to know is how long did it take the preclear to answer? Real cute, isn’t it? This will tell him, immediately, whether he has done anything for the case. That is his first index.

So he says, “Well, now that we’ve had the session, how do you feel now?”

The fellow says, “My God, I never felt worse. Do you know every time you get into this sort of thing, I just get terribly intolerant of the whole subject.”

The auditor says, “Fine. Okay. Well, I’m sorry you feel like that, Mr. Binks” - being polite and so on. “We’ll take that up during the next session.”

“Well, I don’t know whether I’m coming back or not.”

“Well, I’ll see you next session, see.”

And the auditor says, “What do you know, I sure kicked that son of a gun around. Ha-ha, ha-ha, ha! Busted that right across the middle,” he says. And when he can sit to himself and be happy with his own decision, he also is in very good shape because that is a good definition of what being in good shape is. Be happy with your own estimate of the situation. Don’t need any other G-2 than you. (G-2 is American for G-2. Yeah, I’d forgotten that all-G-2 has become famous through all the gangster - war pictures - the gangster war, type of picture.) Anyway ... He’s got the answer.

Now, as you go along day-to-day in this, you’re going to take a small pair of opera glasses and look around to see if there isn’t a better one, see? That’s fine. It’s okay. Going to take a big-power pair of field glasses and sit around and look if there isn’t some kind of a better way to know whether a preclear is well or sick. And that’s fine, go ahead and do that. And take a telescope and look all around the horizon. And then go out to Mount Palomar and look and you sure let me know - and I’m not telling you not to look - but you sure let me know if you find a faster, quicker method of telling whether the preclear is sick or well or whether you’ve bettered him any.

Now, that datum - let me give you value: throw the pearls and rubies away because they’re trash. That’s the value of that datum.

If you ever let an auditor forget it, you’ve done a bad job of instruction. If you ever forget it yourself, it’s because you don’t want to look at life.

Communication lag index. And somebody sooner or later, up the track someplace, is going to dig himself out to a point where he finds this and he’s going to decide that because we’ve said communication lag index that there has to be an index. Somebody is going to decide that and someday this may get taught this way: in January and in July in Georgia, the moisture content of concrete ... What is it in Michigan in August?

And nobody ever will find out whether a preclear is well or made better or sicker. Everybody will be looking at “lagometers” that they’ll be carrying around, these little lagometers. And that turns on the preclear, you see, you turn this lagometer on the preclear and it shows the “radatrons” of the “comanomes” or something as they pour off the preclear or if they fail to.

Follow me closely on that because that’s the datum I hope you will cherish and hold to your bosom, because it will act as armor plate against more doggone disrelated data. It operates against this disrelated data:

“Well, I don’t know frankly. I., .1 tell you, I’ve thought this over for some time and it seemed to me that my.. .well, my wife ought to come in and have a session with you. And, uh.. .um, you know, she’s a.. .well, I guess.. .it’s kind of funny. Um, she uh.. .she never was sick much, but after we.. .after we got married, well, she keeps saying I probably ought to have uh ... But there’s really nothing wrong with me.”

And you’ve answered the process right there - who do we process? What’s wrong with the case? Well, that’s one of these big obvious ones and you wouldn’t ordinarily look for that one. I noticed I just made you - made some of you people just squirm, groan. Horrible, isn’t it? Well, it’s how you stretch time into a case and get a communication lag.

All right. Now, how important is it? Well it’s important enough for you to pay attention to, at the minimum rate of once every eight minutes and the maximum rate of about once every two minutes. And the reason why I’m giving you those all-of-a-sudden finite minutes on the thing is because that happens to be the length of time. Not because we thought it up.

In a case that’s going at a heck of a rate of speed, see, brrr-rrrr-rrrr, you’re just rolling this case - the case exteriorized. And you’re drilling him this way and you’re saying - you’ve gotten the case up to speed and it’s gone too far and too fast for you to keep up with verbally. Because a thetan goes above that level, we do something like this, we say - one guy was doing this trick, there’s a dozen tricks - he’s saying, “Now be in Spokane, now be in New York. Okay. Now when I tap the table this way, you’re in Spokane. Go to Spokane. And when I tap it this way, go to New York. Okay? Have you got that now?” Okay. (Now, I’m not sending anybody here by the way.) “You got that now?” Now, look at the - look at my finger rate if we use English. All right. Spokane, [tap] New York, [tap] Spokane, [tap] New York, [tap] Spokane, [tap] New York, [tap] It’s too slow.

So now we’re going to get a boy who is up around Theta Clear and he’s just rolling fine - and mind you now, this is Spokane [tap] and this is New York. We’re just going to clean up the whole doggone lifetime of this fellow, which was mostly spent in Spokane, and the rest of his lifetime, which was spent in New York. And we’re going to clean up all the bank on this as far as he’s concerned. Okay. He’s exteriorized see and he’s being in one place and the other, [tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap] And it goes like: [tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap] “Okay. We got that one. Now let’s take your naval career, [laughter] All right?”

Now, it’s Change of Space Processing and run at a speed which is agreeable. But you can overreach speed with a preclear very easily. Now it’ll go up to that fast speed, but you can overreach speed with a preclear to a point where he feels he’s being pressed to the point he’s being harassed and he just doesn’t go anyplace.

But that’s no reason why you should go slower than the preclear. You always ought to run just a little bit faster. And if you always run just a tiny bit faster than the preclear - even though it’s just a millisecond faster than the preclear - you know, he always knows who’s the auditor and he never gets confused into self-auditing.

How do we do that? Well, we ask our next question this way. All right. He’s saying “Yup” to everything he’s doing. All right, “Yup.” (This is Scandinavian for yes.) Anyway...

Now, the way you would audit normally - you would think you would audit - you’d say, “All right. Now let’s duplicate your mother.”

And he says, “Yup.”

“All right. Duplicate her.”

“Yup.”

[delivered more rapidly] “Duplicate her.”

“Yup.”

Okay. Your “duplicate her” comes in — if you’ll just condense it just to this degree, it s enough.

“Yeah.”

“Duplicate her.” You see, your “d” and that “p” overlap. Yup-y-u-p-you see, the conversation, it was going: he said “Yup.” And you said “Duplicate her.’ All right. You just let those two overlap. So you say “Yup.” I mean, he says “Yup.”

And you say, immediately, that he gets out the “Yu—,” “Duplicate her.” You just knocked off the p off of his “Yup.” Now that is crushing right along the line.

Now, you can make that “d” fit in closer and closer to the “p” until it knocks it out and as he comes up speed on the thing, actually, he will drop off saying “Yup” and he will just give you a little sharp nod because he’ll find out “Yup” isn’t fast enough, you see?

And you will eventually knock off “Duplicate her” to any kind of a code that you can assign, that is a rapid enough code to fit the communication channel. In other words, in auditing, as you go up toward Theta Clear you run out of English. And if you keep depending on English, you keep everybody slowed down to the pace of English and that’s not very fast.

It’s not fast enough to drive a jet plane. You couldn’t articulate the number of commands necessary to a jet pilot to control a jet plane. What do you know? It’s not fast enough to run an automobile. You can’t articulate the number of commands necessary to drive an automobile. Well, what do you know? It isn’t fast enough to walk. You can’t articulate the number of commands necessary for an individual to execute to walk.

Hey, what are we getting into here? You mean English is practically motionless? Well, that’s what I mean. And that’s - essence is - the language is not at fault, really, the language is only an agreement with what the communication lag is.

We’d have a faster language. There’s a language known as speedwriting. And I wonder why anybody has ever asked to pour out the number of words or use - or why publishing companies or newspapers have to use, at the expense of our forests and so forth, the vast number of trees to make paper - the vast amounts of paper they use, when, as a matter of fact, almost every word there is can be reduced materially.

I don’t know what the ratio is, but it’s something like maybe an eight-letter word can be reduced to maybe three letters, four letters - three letters. Most two-letter and three-letter words reduce to one letter or to two letters. And in other words, that’s speedwriting and it condenses right on down. In fact, it’s a shorthand.

And this is so articulate and in view of the fact that it’s all in phonetics anyhow, I haven’t any real idea why anybody uses written English, except that everybody agrees that we ought to communicate this slow. See, it isn’t really the English imposing on anything, they would have faster Englishes if they had.

But you could say, “Well, they get accustomed to this and then they think that’s about the rate that they should think” and you are off on one of the kind of arguments which is not profitable. It doesn’t matter whether the English is at fault or wheiher that is the communication lag. It’s a cinch that English assists a communication lag and it’s also a cinch that individuals have one. And it also is true that there are other things than language which aberrate people, so we’ve got the problem pretty well boxed in.

That’s the first thing I’m going to ask you to do, as far as actual alertness is concerned and observation. I’m going to ask you to look on this subject of communication lag. And you will find, very shortly, that it isn’t just a hearing communication or a speaking communication lag. It is an actual perception lag which shows up in sight and in touch.

Now, let’s take a fellow who is talking about “Well I... Mmm.” I won’t do it to you again. And he’s talking about the rate of speed there. And we get this kind of a thing on touch: Now I take this lighter and I touch the lighter, you see? Now when do I feel the lighter?

Now, the dinosaur felt at the rate of about ten feet per second and eventually had to grow—in the brontosaurus - another head in his tail. Because nerve impulses only travel at about ten feet a second or something like that. That’s pretty slow. But, the fellow who wrote that figure down was a very adventurous man, let me assure you, a very adventurous man, as so many have been. People accuse me of being adventurous. Ha-ha. I at least try to find out what I’m talking about before I utter a sonorous finality on the subject.

And this ten feet per second is not any kind of a testable figure in the first place. And it’s one of these wild things, this - what I’m talking about is - here is a wild variable! When do I touch the lighter and feel it? Now, that’s a communication lag. All right. I reach over here and I touch the lighter and you think that that’s an instantaneous proposition, probably. And it’s not at all an instantaneous proposition. You’ll never realize it more than when you’re, exteriorized doing just that. It’s sort of like watching the slower part of a sandlot baseball game.

You know, you wait for the pitcher to wind up, you know, and he throws the ball down toward the catcher and the batter braces himself and it’s a real slow ball [said slowly]. You know, that kind of thing. He’ll sit back with the same bored feeling that you just had in listening to me wind out these things watching a touch communication line connect.

The fellow reaches out and he touches something and then as he touches this something, the contact is made and the skin is pressed at the end of the fingers so that there is an actual force moment. Then, this goes back up the arm and reaches toward the thetan who is feeling it anyway, in this peculiar system, [said slowly] (This is a real peculiar way to feel anything, by the way, it becomes laughably peculiar to you after you’ve done it for a while.) And he finally finds out that he is touching it. So the thought impulse has to go back down the finger in order to motivate the part of the arm to pick up the arm off the thing which is being touched, [said slowly]

And what I’m just describing to you, from the viewpoint of a thetan, would be a guy grabbing ahold of a very hot poker. You know, where he apparently has touched and let go so fast that there is hardly any chance for anything. Well, boy, there’s plenty of chance, because he got burned, didn’t he?

What’s the matter with this peculiar beast that he can get his hand that close to a hot poker without immediately knowing that it is a hot poker? And what’s the matter with the beast anyway that he has to get near a hot poker to know that there is a hot poker in the room?

This is a peculiar sort of a creature this Homo sapiens, this GE. He’s real slow. He’s no-know. It describes him very well. He has to look before he knows and so forth.

All right. Communication lag. Now, there isn’t any real reason, you see, why I couldn’t just tell you all there is to know about Scientology and SOP 8-C, at this stage, in the next couple of hours and you digest it and be experts this afternoon. See, there’s no real reason, except a reason. It’s the single factor of reason. It is reason itself which imposes between thee and me in doing just that.

That’s peculiar isn’t it? We had an Age of Reason once. I invite your attention to the fact that everybody who was anybody got his head cut off in it. That was the years of the French Revolution. That was called the Age of Reason.

Now, knowingness hasn’t any data connected with it. Fellow just knows - hasn’t got data connected with it. And someday, why, you’ll get those two pried apart and when they come apart, there will be a large sort of a splashing sound, like picking a plunger off a piece of porcelain, and you will all of a sudden be flying free thereafter. That’s crude but true.

If you think, actually, that you figure something out, anything you figure out you can be sure you’re wrong about. Anything that you know, you’re right about. It sounds idiotic, doesn’t it? Huh? But it’s not, it’s not idiotic. When we talk about know, we talk about certainty. And when you’re certain of something, why, you just go ahead and be certain about it, huh?

Now this shows up in auditing this way: Preclear walks in, you’re there making a couple of notes on the last person you were auditing or something of the sort. And you don’t look toward the door, you suddenly know, in a split flash, there’s an individual with a very long communication lag who is standing there in the door and that he’s - for some peculiar reason you suddenly spot the fact that twenty-five dollars in cash is in his right-hand pocket when it ought to be in his wallet. And you know that he’s large and beefy and is wearing a green overcoat. You know all this, see? You haven’t yet looked in his direction and your concentration is still on what you are doing in taking these notes.

In order to reason with this and perceive afterwards, you would have to obliterate all of this information, mask it over, pretend that you had nothing to do with it and then fit it into the MEST universe span, look at him and wait to find out from him that he had the twenty-five dollars in - because you put him there in the first place. So you would have to mask the fact that you put him there in the first place, to know that he was there.

So it’s how much data or reason can we enter in on the line in order to get randomity? And it’s where do you want the preclear to come out? If you bring him out where he went in, exactly there, you’ve got your hands on somebody without randomity, with complete serenity who will be content thereafter to sit around and regard his navel. That’s Buddha’s favorite occupation you know, he merely sits around with crossed legs and studies his navel.

This is all very well. That’s where he’s going to park the GE. He’ll go off and do something or other in a complete state of serenity. But what will it be? It’ll strictly be a case of “cloud nine.” Why? (If you were really to do that.) But do you know that it would take a bigger trick than you can do or I can do to make somebody do that? Because they come up to 20.0 instead of 40.0 and that is the sadness of it all. They come up to about a 50 percent unpredicted motion - which is to say 20.0 on the Tone Scale - 50 percent predicted motion, 50 percent unpredicted motion and we have the guy taking off.

Most preclears go into action long before they reach 20.0. You start speeding this guy up, you try to take him out where he went in and you wind up by picking him up at the point where he’s got, oh, he’s still got 89 percent randomity in his existence. You know, unpredicted motion, things happen around him all the time.

He takes off, he gets tremendously successful, he’s going to lead a grand life and everything is going along and he’s going to tear along at a mad rate and this is he. And that’s where he leaves you. He kisses you goodbye, right at that point.

Won’t do you any good to stand there and say, “Look fella, we can make a Buddha out of you without very much trouble.” He isn’t going to be interested. To suppress the self-determinism of a thetan and convince him how the - it gets real silly. We talk about exteriorization - that a thetan can be stuck inside somebody is like trying to trap a molecule of air in an ocean of it. Trying to trap a molecule of air with an ocean of air or trying to make a jail out of the space between here and Arcturus. You know? And tell the fellow he has to be right there where you can find him between here and Arcturus.

It’s almost impossible to trap a thetan. So you just start lifting the gate a little bit and you’ll find out, boy, is there pressure on this case. Some of the pressure blows, he finds this out, he goes into action, he stops figuring and he reasons because it’s fun. He goes into action and motion and he parts company with whatever you’re doing.

Well, as wonderful as it might seem to you, as an auditor, to be a god to gods and turn out nothing but gods, see? - “We turn out nothing but gods here in our shop,” you might hang up a little sign that says - you would have a little difficulty with your product because it’d keep coming up to very good Theta Clear and vanishing on you.

And it just does this rather consistently and that’s because life is not horrible, life happens to be a lot of fun. And you just show somebody just a little bit of fun about it and that’s enough to start him off at a very, very fast rate.

You know, once in a while persuade the fellow - to say, “Hey, hey, come back and stay here a moment and let’s process you a little more.” He’ll be doing nothing. He’ll just be sitting there all the time in a sort of a vacant boredom. He’s bored with the idea of not being in action and he keeps extroverting.

Now, there’s the other thing that happens on a communication lag. Every time a communication lag breaks, you get an extroversion. Now, every time a communication lag takes a breakup - you understand, gets a little bit faster - you get an extroversion. Because you’ve taken a chunk of reason out, you get a perception in. In other words, he does some lookingness around.

He thinks about present time when you take a lot of thinkingness about the past out. Thinkingness about the past is, in essence, a communication lag. That’s how the communication lag gets in there - it’s past. There isn’t any present connected with it. And the communication lag is all past and when it gets total past, the fellow has a total communication lag and he’s totally in the past.

So what happens to our preclear? We spring him up to the point where he extroverts and then, unless we want to sit there with an electronic zap gun or something, we’re not going to introvert him again, that’s all. Because when he extroverts, he extroverts!

Now, you’ll watch this happening as a gradient scale in a case. And a case that doesn’t, will start in at first by - he first starts getting absent-minded about what he was doing. You know, you’re running him for a little while and he all of a sudden starts getting absent-minded about what he was doing. By the way, he’s kind of plowed in and blurry. You know, I mean he’s real bad off. But he asks you once in a while and he says, “Huh, what was I running?”And you say, “Well, what were you just thinking about?” That’s your proper reply, because you generally pick up some hot dope.

And he says, “I don’t know, I just seemed to have a little bit of a dream. I was just kind of thinking about something else there for a minute and I - I just kind of - things kind of - and I kind of blurred out and everything went kind of different, you know?”

And you - “What did they get, brighter?”

“No, no, no. I just - I - I don’t know, I just felt different.”

That’s about the first extroversion. Well, don’t miss that as an extroversion, it is an extroversion. You broke a chunk out of the guy’s communication circuits.