Phyll Stevens Class VI, N.Z., has made the following digest of my tapes for use in HAS and Level 0. This is a very good summary and is recommended for use pending a book on the subject.

The Body. The part of ourselves that we are most certain of, most aware of, is the body, We all know that we have a body. Touch your own body. Is it real, solid? Now have a look around at your fellow students. Do they have bodies too? Yes. So we are all agreed upon the fact that each of us has a body. Now I would like to show you in a very simple way how your body works. (Have a simple marionette type puppet with a wooden crossbar and strings leading to the hands and feet. Show the group how you can make the body parts move by moving the crossbar: that the movement starts with the crossbar, goes along the strings and causes the hand or foot to move. Then liken the crossbar to the brain, the strings to nerves. You can also demonstrate that when one of the strings is removed from the crossbar, no matter how you move the bar, the message does not go to the body part. Explain that the brain is simply another body part, similar to the nervous system, that receives and sends impulses to the body parts.)

The Thetan. Just as I am the one who is causing this crossbar (brain) to send messages along the strings (nerves) to the body, you are doing this to your brain and body, I am now going to explain what the you part is. You are the thinker, the observer, the thing that knows what it is looking at, the part that decides things, that gives orders to the brain to make the body work. In Scientology, we call this a Thetan. (Write „Thetan“ on the blackboard.) Thetan comes from the Greek letter theta, , just a letter from the Greek alphabet like A, B or C. The Greeks used their letter theta to symbolize thought, and we used this term for a being because he is capable of thinking and thought.

We needed a new term because the words spirit or soul which also mean what we mean by a thetan, have lots of other meanings as well.

If I started to talk about spirits, a lot of you would have all sorts of ideas about it. You might think of anything from ghosts and fairies to bottles of Whiskey.

And in religion, the word soul has come to mean some­thing that you have! They say, “You have a soul”, “Your soul will go to heaven”. So it sounds like a possession. If they said you are a soul, it would be right. So we have coined this new word “thetan” to avoid any confusions with past ideas on what you are.

You are a thetan. You are able to think, to work out problems, make decisions, make your body do things, have opinions about things. You use the body’s eyes to see with, ears to hear with, hands to touch with, and tongue to talk with, but the important thing here is, there is someone who knows that he is seeing and hearing with his eyes and ears, and can interpret what he sees and hears and make decisions about it and draw conclusions about it. That is you, the individual, the thetan.

You could say that a camera “sees” a tree. It takes a picture of it. But, the camera does not know that it has seen a tree. If you take a picture of a tree with your eyes, you know that you have seen a tree.

The Mind. Now let’s have a look at “Mind”. First of all, I want you to do something for me. Close your eyes. Think of a cat. How many of you got a picture of a cat? Was it a cat you had known sometime? It does not matter if the picture was very clear or just a hazy impression. We can all do this to some degree. This is what your mind consists off pictures from your past experience. The thetan has the ability to call up pictures from his past in order to compare and draw conclusions about what he is now looking at. For example, if I touch this wall, I decide that it has been painted with a matt paint. How do I figure this out? I have mental pictures of having seen and touched many walls I some painted with an enamel paint which has a smoother sur­face, some papered, come plastered, some with a matt paint, and having quickly looked at all these past pictures, I decide about this wall. Now I want you to do a similar thing. I want you to figure out how old I am. (They could do other things such as guessing the length of the duster or the size of the blackboard.) (When several of them have got an answer, take the one closest to the mark and ask them to explain to the class what old pictures they looked at in order to work out their answer.) (It generally takes much longer to explain than it did to arrive at the answer. So you could point out that the mind does this so fast that most of them are not aware of how they use their minds.)

Don’t forget that although the mind presents the pictures, it is you, the thetan, who knows what he is looking at and who draws the conclusion and decides on the answer.

We call this mind the Analytical Mind because it is the mind which analyses (Def: sorts out) the data which it has received. If that was all there was to the mind, then we would have a perfect mind; one that never made a mistake, never came up with the wrong answer, never gave the body a wrong command. But this is not the way people are, so there must be something else that we have not discussed yet.

The Reactive Mind. There is a part of the mind that is not under the person’s own control. We call this the Reactive Mind. It reacts, or acts in response to outside influence not to the influence of the person who owns it. e.g. Think of times when you nave made decisions to do things and have not been able to. Like giving up smoking. Some part of the mind influences you to do otherwise.

Try not to think of an elephant.

Do you ever see pictures or think thoughts you don’t want to have?

The Reactive Mind is the part of your mind that stores up all the bad things that have happened to you and throws them back at you in moments of danger or upset and so dictates your actions along lines that you have not decided on. It is supposed to protect you when you are in danger. e.g. If you have ever been in a oar accident and been hurt, from then on you are supposed to run away whenever you hear a squeal of brakes or a car horn. An animal would do this, and people who are not analytical at all would run away, but most of us use some reason and work it out that the car is on the road and we are on the footpath so there is no need to run, but just the same we react, and feel fear or are upset to various degrees.

When the Reactive Mind is recording the bad things that happen to us, pain, fear, emotional upsets, etc, the Analyti­cal Mind is not working and being aware of what is going on. So, we do not have pictures of this to analyze with. The pictures are there in the Reactive Mind where we have no control over them. Take the example of the child who has been badly scratched by a cat. In later years, this person may dislike cats or even get a pain in her hand every time she goes near a cat or people talk about cats. If she got a pain in her hand when there was nothing actually causing it right now, we would know it came from the Reactive Mind. If you were that person and knew about minds sooner or later you would begin to realize that the pain in the hand came every time cats were talked about and you would see the child­hood picture of the cat scratching you and suddenly remember all about it. At that time, the picture would come out of the Reactive Mind and go into the Analytical Mind where it would no longer influence you without your knowledge.

The Reactive Mind is the mind that people who are experimenting with animals talk about. They can prove that an animal reacts to things and then say that it is the way human beings are. Well, human beings are like that sometimes but there is an Analytical Mind which is working most of the time, and above all there is the thetan. You have the ability to overcome your reactions and to reason things out and to make up your own minds about things. The more you know about your mind and your capabilities, the more you are in control of your life and can shape you own future. (Example for the class.)

Write of a time when you overcame your reactions by being analytical (by reasoning things out).

Materials: Each student to have a copy of the sheet of basic Scientology definitions.

The instructor reads out the definitions one by one asking the group to say if they do not understand any of the terms, defines them and gives a brief explanation of each definition.

Materials: Each student to have a copy of the sheet of basic Scientology definitions.

The instructor reads out the definitions one by one asking the group to say if they do not understand any of the terms, defines them and gives a brief explanation of each definition.

2nd half. Communication

Get the group to give their idea of what communication is. They usually end up with “Getting an idea across”.

Tell them it is possible to communicate with animals and objects but that we are going to look at communication between people as being the most important. Ask how many people are needed for communication and when they tell you at least two, draw two stick figures a distance apart on the blackboard with the “idea” going across the line between them.

Now we are going to look at what else is necessary for a good communication besides two people and an idea.

First of all, we have to have one person who starts the communication. We will call him the cause-point because he causes the communication to start. (Write cause-point under the first figure.) The other one receives the communication, so we call him receipt-point.

Now we come back to the cause-point and we know that if he is going to get his idea across, he has to intend to reach the other fellow, so we put intention on his side. He also has to have some attention on the other fellow to see if he is ready to be talked to, so we also put “attention” there. Receipt-point, in order to receive the message, has to have his attention on the sender, so he has „attention“ too.

There is one other factor that has to go in here for there to be a good communication and before I tell you what that is, I will tell you the story of the message that the battle commander sent back to headquarters from the battle. This message was, “Send reinforcements. We are going to advance.” But the message had to be passed by word of mouth from the front line and by the time it got to headquarters, it said, “Send three-and-fourpence. We are going to a dance”. What was the missing factor that made this an imperfect com­munication? Duplication. Each person getting the message didn’t copy exactly what was said. This is where most commu­nication breaks down. Because we didn’t get the person’s attention or because our own intention to get our idea across wasn’t strong enough, the idea is not duplicated or understood, is not received the way we meant it and so misunderstandings arise.

(This is what should now be on the blackboard»)

Out of this picture, we now get the formula for communication, which is Cause, distance, effect, with inten­tion, attention and duplication with understanding. That is the way an idea goes across from one person to another.

When two people are in good communication, A sends his idea across to B, B receives it, then sends his reply or answer back to A who receives it. A then does what? Mostly he does nothing. There is a missing part here that should be in a good communication. The missing thing is acknowledge­ment. What is acknowledgement? It is the way you let some­one know that you have his answer. It could be a nod or a smile, a thank you or an okay. It simply lets the person know that you received him. If I ask you for the time and you reply “It’s 9 o’clock”, how do you know I got your reply if I don’t give you some acknowledgement? You would not know if you had been heard.

This lack of acknowledgement is very frequent in society today, and is the cause of a lot of communication difficulties. You will see people who do not talk at all. They have long since given up the idea that anyone has ever heard them, will listen to them, or wants to listen. Similarly the person who talks all the time is quite sure no one has heard them and is still trying to get through. If there was someone around them who could acknowledge and let then know they had been listened to, they would improve.

We also get very tired of doing things for someone who never acknowledges what we have done. A little acknowledgement goes a long way. It is not necessarily praise, just a sign that we have noticed that something was done. You will see the people around you become more cheerful if you acknowledge their efforts and their communication.

“I see that you’ve done the lawns”, “Thank you for iron­ing my shirt”, or to your child “Thank you for going to bed when you were told”. We are only too ready to notice a mistake or pay attention to something not done, or complain about a question not answered, we should be just as ready to acknowledge these things when they are done or answered.

Research for the class to do.

1. Try acknowledging someone for having told you something or done something for you. Note if they seem more cheerful or more willing to help.

2. See if there is someone you know whom people like to talk to. Note if that person uses a lot of acknowledgements in his communication, and if he really listens to what others have to say.