This interesting, interesting dummy auditing step has a villainous and vicious goal. It makes somebody duplicate. ‘Way back in 1950 we found out that auditors, in order to be interesting, would vary their pattern; and every time the pattern was varied, every time the auditing command changed, the preclear received a little jolt. There was an upset because of it. A long time ago we would have considered it fairly legitimate for an auditor, using the auditing command “Do fishes swim,” to say, “By the way, do finny creatures wiggle in the water?” — and next time to say, “Say! does the funny tribe bathe?” — and the next time to say, “What brands of fishes are there that progress from point A to point B in liquid habitats?” That possibly would have been legitimate then, but we don’t do that today. We do a horrible thing. The auditor says, “Do fishes swim?” And, just to vary it, he then says, “Do fishes swim?” And, just for good wild variation, he then says, “Do fishes swim?”

This is where we learn why we were so insistent on one command in one moment of time back in Dear Alice, part A, because we don’t repeat the first “Do fishes swim” another thousand times. No auditing command should ever depend for any of its meaning on any other auditing command ever uttered. Each one exists, theoretically and purely, in its own moment of time and is uttered itself in present time with its own intention.

Now this is quite important. Do you know that the basic auditing process of CCH does not work unless each command is in a separate unit of time? If you run it this way, “Give me your hand — thank you; give me your hand — thank you; give me your hand-thank you,” it’s not very therapeutic and nothing happens to the preclear. Why? Well, we’ve got a machine which is simply repeating the first “Give me your hand” over and over again. We’re not saying it — there’s no intention there. Do you know that if you told somebody to give you his hand with enough intention behind it his body would respond without any via through the thetan? The body doesn’t obey the words, the body obeys the intention to extend a hand. Therefore, when you are asked to express an auditing command with the same words over and over and over, each time you must express it in present time as itself with its intention. It isn’t just a long duplication of it. Just duplicating something over and over and over is sometimes so trying that people wonder how auditors ever arrive at all. Nobody could sit in a chair and say each time with a new intention, “Do fishes swim,” for seventy-five hours. It’s beyond human possibility, according to some people. But the trick is that if it’s always uttered in present time it could be said for a thousand and seventy-five hours. It’s only when it’s repeated — only when the first command is repeated over and over and when no new intention arrives — that it becomes very arduous. Only when it goes on to a machine does it become almost impossible to do.

Communication is reached by control plus duplication. At first you find that to make each utterance of the command different in its own unit of time you use different voice inflections. But as you come up the line on this you find out that you actually can pattern the same tone and each time have it entirely new. It would be very, very incorrect to teach this, to have the auditor each time duplicate his own voice tones as they were the last time, because that is making an auditing command depend on the last auditing command. We couldn’t care less; and, after a while, you couldn’t care less, either, what voice tone you’re uttering, but each intention is new and fresh. The intention is to ask and get an answer to this question, “Do fishes swim?” and, each time you utter it, it is uttered newly and in its own area of time. That’s really the only stress there is. One command per unit of time. Each command separate, and each command containing the words, quite incidentally, “Do fishes swim?”

Here we learn a great deal about the duplicative factors of communication. We find out that, in having to duplicate, we think we actually lose some of the communication at first. It’s utterly idiotic — how could you possibly maintain ARC and therefore, of course, interest, asking a person over and over again this silly question, “Do fishes swim?” Who could do this? Well, interest in communication has everything to do with the intention to be interesting and very little to do with text. Furthermore, it is not the auditor’s job to be interesting. Being interesting is a part of the communication formula, but to an auditor the least possible part, as far as the preclear is concerned. He’s not there to interest and intrigue the preclear. Right away, people think they are. Place two people in chairs facing each other and each one of these two people feels the compulsion to be interesting to the other. That’s not auditing, that’s being interesting, that’s being social and so on. So if a person had any difficulty doing Step Three, Do Fishes Swim, the instructor would be perfectly in order if he simply told the person to sit in that chair and told some other student who wasn’t doing too well, or just some other student, to sit in the other chair, and told them just to sit there and look at each other without saying a thing or being embarrassed or anything else. Interesting drill, if you think of it. We do have variation, and therefore interest, in the first and second dummy auditing steps; but now we reach this one and it is utterly devoid of interest. We’re saying the same thing over and over and over and over. And if a person can’t do this he probably has a compulsion to vary, to alter-is, to be interesting, and he wouldn’t find it easy just to sit in a chair and face another human being and not say a word and not do a thing but just sit there and look at the other human being. And if I were coaching someone that had difficulty in repetition of steps, I would do that for an hour or two that day.

All right. It is absolutely necessary that an auditor be able to duplicate. But answer me this: Is a person who is saying something in present time each time really duplicating the last moment of time? He really isn’t, is he? And so this duplication that we do in Scientology means only the ability apparently to duplicate while being in present time.

The greatest motto of experience and the life we have lived is this: I won ‘t ever do that again. This is the one thing your mama wanted you to promise. If you did nothing else, if you lived a completely sinful life, why, mama still wanted you to learn by experience; which is to say that when you did something wrong, or did something, you weren’t ever to do it again. She hoped perhaps you would eat enough candy to make you so sick that you wouldn’t “wolf’ candy again; that you would eat enough ice cream so that ice cream would make you so green that you wouldn’t make a pig of yourself over ice cream again; that you would become so embarrassed and lose so many friends that you would not do that evil thing again, whatever it was you did; and thus learn by experience never to do it again. And this is experience talking. One thing you must understand — that experience teaches you — is never to do anything the second time. This doesn’t necessarily mean that all experience is painful, but people who are having a hard time tend to believe that it is; and when they begin to depend upon experience and stand by this lesson of never doing it again, they can no longer duplicate. And what do you know — they can’t communicate. Also, their bank jams. All sorts of interesting things occur. All moments become one moment. One moment becomes all moments. Identification occurs all over the place. And just the action of repeating something like “Do fishes swim?” as an auditor, with a full intention, has a tendency to unjam the time track.

You should know that this is what this step is up against. It is violating all of that hard-won experience that you have accumulated in the last seventy-six trillion years-if you believe an E-Meter, you’re seventy-six trillion years old. And all that hard-won experience, all that wonderful, wonderful lot of mess that you got into, added up completely to Never do it again. And so you’ve been taught not to live, which is what happens when you get experience. And when you can duplicate an auditing command over and over again, you will find out that auditing does not become a painful experience. A person who can do this well, by the way, never gets restimulated. Why should he — he’s not in the moment of time in which the restimulation took place.

There is a more basic step to this particular one, by the way. This is to pat the wall five times and then distinguish one of the pats from the rest. An instructor can do that on a student with some profit. Pretty soon the student can tell all five pats apart, and when the student can tell them all apart, even though they sounded all the same, he can also duplicate an auditing command in present time all the way. I’ve broken cases with that one.