Thank you.

All right. This is lecture two, July 17 AD 12, Saint Hill Special Briefing Course and this — easiest thing to do is to give you a lecture, but I might give you a question period. Which do you want?

Audience: Lecture.

You want a lecture?

Audience: Yes.

All right. I’ll go on and give you a lecture on the subject of ARC breaks and their anatomy. The training of metering is probably the hardest hump to cross in the absence of proper educational aids. During World War II an enormous number of visual aids were developed and the whole principle of visual aids sort of moved into view.

And at one time or another in Scientology, we’ve had visual aids of one kind or another, but the biggest need at the present moment is a visual aid which parades out meter reads. And we’re lucky here at Saint Hill having a TV closed circuit television. And this assists to a remarkable degree and of course, tomorrow night three luckless students whose names are not yet known will benefit us with some sessions.

I wouldn’t guarantee that they — that we won’t get a repeat of one or two of last, you know. I saw they were — I just looked over and saw they were feeling comfortable.

Now, because one television camera is posed on the meter which the auditor is using and another one on the session and because you have a picture of the thing going on, you have it pretty well taped. You can sit there and you can watch it and so forth.

But of course, that’s for a limited period of time. And although — to give you very sharp examples of how auditing is done, this is invaluable.

We nevertheless need an extension of that particular type of training. We’re working right now on stereo equipment whereby one side of the tape is used to duplicate a meter read and the other side of the tape gives you the vocal. And then you hook the meter, you see, onto the meter-read-stereo line and then you hook a speaker onto the verbal side and, of course, you get coordinated meter reading. Estimate was given me the last night that we’ll probably have this in a couple of weeks, which is very, very rapid.

This device of course, is exportable. By using the same stereo tape recorder and by copying the tapes on stereo recorders, we can actually put these tapes all over the world. In other words, we can put proper sessioning all over the world. Our sessioning now is very standardized in that it’s a very smooth workout of repetitive commands and that sort of thing. And no great changes are expected in that, so the tapes will be valuable.

But the idea is that you’d have a number of auditors sitting there each one — this is the ne plus ultra. I’ll expand the idea a little bit for you.

Of course, you could have one stereo tape recorder and one meter and one auditor being trained. But last night we were going into it a little bit further here, the auditor could push a button and get some help and the guy who was monitoring all the co-audit sessions could throw a switch and read the meter on the session that was going forward and so forth.

But a similar circuit to this probably will eventually be worked out whereby several meters can be plugged into a switchboard and will all read and where you either have a microphone to each of these auditors sitting there holding one of these meters or you just have a central microphone in the room, whatever is simplest.

And this thing of course, makes all the meters read, so you’re not butchering up some pc. The problem is you got some pc who is sitting there and you’re asking him questions; you’re not clearing it up and all that sort of thing and the pc knows it’s sort of a test and so on.

Nevertheless, a little bit of strain goes on the thing and I imagine before now you’ve probably had to clean up some of these practice sessions when you’re actually in the auditing section. I imagine you’ve picked a few of those things up.

And that’s rather hard. Particularly since TR 1 tends to be very poor at that particular stage because the auditor really doesn’t want to know the answer. He’s asking the guinea pig pc, you see, who is not a pc at all, various questions in order to get a meter read, not to get the answer from the pc. So this, of course, throws TR 1 and its basic fundamental completely out. It’s — TR 1 is the desire to get a response from the pc. And you want a meter response from the pc, but you really don’t want to know. you get the idea? So this really crosses up the wires on the poor pc.

Nevertheless, I imagine this system of instruction will continue on to the end of time. Here and there you will still have nothing but that system of instruction, you see.

You’re going to teach fifteen auditors who are in lower south Pasadena and you’re going to train these guys up to a point where they can read a meter. And you haven’t got any stereo and you have no tapes and you have no switchboard and that sort of thing, so how are you going to do it? Well, you’re going to do it by butchering up pcs, see. It’s more important that you learn than it is that some pcs get somewhat upset, because you can always straighten it out if the sessioning is good. But if an auditor, you see, doesn’t ever learn how to do it, you’ll never straighten out anything!

So what takes priority? What takes priority is the auditor learning how to read a meter. And if you ever get too softheaded and you find yourself completely without equipment and too softhearted, you see, about the whole thing and decide this is too hard to do and decide to fake it up by lifting fingers on cans and doing other things of this particular character, my advice to you is, don’t, because the very pc who is sitting there serving as a guinea pig depends utterly, in nearly all cases, on auditors in his vicinity learning how to read a meter for his own solution of case and his eventual clearing See. So it’s sort of give a little, take a little and get a little back. And get an awful lot back, you see.

But, I’ll give you that as meter training. That is the most fundamental action then of meter training — is for this exact combination to exist. The auditor sitting there holding a meter. The (quote) „pc“ sitting there holding the cans. The coach standing there back of the auditor correcting the auditor on the reads. The auditor asking questions — we don’t care what he is using. It is perfectly all right to use somebody else’s goals list. Don’t read the pc’s own goals list to him, by the way. That’s verboten. You can always take somebody else’s goals list. You’ll get reads on it. They won’t rerun out either. Very virtue — they don’t flatten.

I actually would — you’d need practice in asking rudiments questions or something like that. Well, that’s a horse of another hue. you probably should use the right rudiments questions because they’ll be the most likely to get cleaned up in the long run.

But the person who’s doing the auditing is asking a question and getting a meter read and then calling it and getting an answer or not from the coach. In fact, he probably better not get an answer from the coach. It better be understood that nothing is to be answered. That makes it all missed withholds, but then it’s understood and the reality of the situation is far better.

And then you’ve got this coach standing back of the auditor looking at the meter and correcting whether or not the auditor read them right.

All right. Let me show you the — at once the basic difficulty is we have no guarantee that the coach knows how to read an E-Meter. No guarantee whatsoever. So we just enter this fantastic piece of randomity that, for the purposes of the drill, the coach is right. That’s fantastic randomity to enter into the situation, see.

The immediate result of this is going to be in the initial stages of the drill, a fantastic confusion. And it’ll get so confused that out of desperation everybody sooner or later is going to learn how to read the meter.

Now, as I say, that is the most fundamental and the crudest form of meter training. And yet I dare say in the year 2000 or 2050, why, there’ll be somebody in upper Lower Slobovia having to train some auditors and that is exactly the way he will do it. It’s inevitable because he hasn’t got the rest of the equipment, don’t you see.

Now, out of this, believe it or not, comes learning. You eventually learn it, but the confusion that results — you see the needle fall off the pin, and the coach says — you say, „That reads.“ And the coach says, „That’s null.“

The coach is forcing you to agree to a falsehood. So don’t agree to it. Just let him say so. Nobody asked you to agree to it. He simply called it. Isn’t that right?

I used to get by in being audited — I could be audited by everybody or anybody for the simple reason that I’d always answer the auditing question. I only came a cropper when I was given four auditing questions and not told which one to answer. That fouled me up a little bit, but up to that time the stable datum I got by on, is somebody asked me to do something I did exactly what they asked me to do. you would be surprised how mild an approach that is to pc’ing. Just always do exactly what you’re told and you don’t get into any trouble, of course, because there’s no alter-is in the situation.

The auditor says, „Do you have a present time problem?“

And you say, „Yes.“

The auditor sits there alertly waiting for you to say something else. And of course, you don’t say anything else because he hasn’t asked you anything else.

And finally the auditor says, „Well, what was the problem?“ And you tell him, see.

The auditor says, „Take your right hand now and put it on the back of your right hand. Go ahead and try to do it.“ The auditor will wake up after a while that you can’t and cancel the auditing command, you see.

You can only get into trouble by saying, „I can’t do that. What are you doing tearing me to ribbons, see, by asking me to do things that are impossible? And why don’t you go back to the Academy and learn how to audit,“ see.

And you can get in trouble that way because you’re protesting the alter-is. But don’t worry about that. As pcs, you’ll always protest the same way, so nobody’s asking you to be a certain type of pc. I’m just giving you an example of the thing.

So in these drills you will get a certain amount of alter-isness and confusion. And I wouldn’t be a bit surprised but what somebody — could get away more or less with reading the meter, wouldn’t pass into a stage of not knowing whether the meter was actually on his lap or not, much less what it was reading, you see.

Falls off the pin, the coach says, „That’s null.“ And the thing is absolutely motionless. It hasn’t moved for a minute or more. And the question is asked and the coach says, „That’s a read,“ see. Well, you get beyond your confusion by not getting into fights about it.

Now that is very crude — a very crude drill and so on, but as I say, it’ll be used for a long time.

Now, as we improve on this drill with a stereo tape and other mechanisms, we of course, can play back play a tape and make maybe four or eight meters, something like that, in people’s hands, read. And maybe, so we don’t get any room lag, a microphone speaker around the neck of every auditor, so he hears the tape. And he hears the auditor say, „Do you have a present time problem?“ Sees the read, you see. Then you have the coach who is working off a mimeographed sheet, because the correctness of every read on that tape has been established. And it’s marked by rudiments. The first question, „Do you have a present time problem?“ is followed by a reaction and it says what it is on the tape.

Now, these tapes are not perfect meter tapes. That is their main virtue. Some of them are early. Some of them are late. Some of them are on the button. And some of them are called reads when they are actually null. you know. There’s a confusion involved with it. you see?

And so it says, „Do you have a present time problem?“ and then right under it in a long string, „Right-right-wrong-right-wrong-wrong-right.“ See, that’s all the coach calls. See, there are just that many reads and they are — that many were right and that many were wrong in that sequence and order. So it becomes very simple coaching.

That’s just one use of the situation.

Now, your next action would be something like this. We put a whole bunch of auditors, about eight auditors in the room, with meters on pcs and we have them all onto a switchboard and that is — goes to one stereo recorder and in turn we take a section of each one’s session.

We got a microphone hanging on the chest of each one and the cans pass from the pc to the switchboard back to the auditor’s meter. And then they bypass off that onto the Instructor’s meter, amplified and onto a stereo recorder. So at the end of the goldfish-bowling, all he has to do is start the tape again.

Have some people coach this or inspect it or look it over. They will see how many reads they are missing. They’ll see — they’ll see everybody’s auditing. They won’t see all their own auditing, but they’ll see some of their auditing, don’t you see. Take some of each session that was going on in the room and then play it back to all auditors.

See how many types of arrangements that can be made on this. Well, you could make an endless number of tapes in that particular line, so that’s what we’re — particularly what we’re trying to develop.

Now, the difficulties of teaching an auditor to read a meter are enormously rewarded by the fact that you have productive sessions. And I assure you that there is no benefit in being audited by an auditor who cannot read a meter. That’s pretty ghastly because it leaves one out of session. One’s statements are not being accepted. One’s reads are not being accepted, see. One’s no reads are not being accepted. And the net result is the pc is sitting there trying to keep his own rudiments in because, of course, the meter and the auditor have cancelled themselves out by incorrect reads here and there.

We can’t have an occasional correct read, see. Actually, we can’t even afford an occasional error. Well, a lot of sessions running along, early on in student auditing have an occasional correct read. And then they graduate up to only an occasional error. And then they would graduate on up to no errors. Actually, that tolerance can be attained. I don’t have ARC breaky pcs. My pcs don’t ARC break. Once in a blue moon I’ve chopped one or gotten mad at one, snarled, something like that along the line — even as thou. And of course, have gotten an ARC breaky pc. But then turned right around and pulled them right straight out of it so they were all smiles.

But my expectancy of auditing is a no-ARC-break session. In fact I would be quite amazed to have an ARC breaky session. It would startle me no end. And that’s with very rough pcs, you see, easy ones, rough ones and so forth. I have no expectancy of an ARC breaky session.

I expect to get everything that the pc tells me. I expect to find out everything I’m supposed to find out about the pc. That’s the expectancy. Now, I’m not talking about what a good auditor I am. I’m just talking to you about what my personal experience in sessions is.

So you are fighting with a problem I don’t have. So give me that, because it’s taken me a long time to understand what you were doing, see. Any trouble you were having was relatively incomprehensible. I have — haven’t got a reality on it as an auditor, but I do have a reality on it as a pc. And of course, as a pc I never knew what was going wrong on the other side of the meter because I wasn’t reading the meter while I was being a pc, so that datum was barred to me, too.

I would occasionally think that I was kind of in rough emotional condition or I must be tired or I must have too many present time problems or something like this. The pc actually never assigns the right reason for his ARC break. That you can count on. The reason for the ARC break is almost never accurate. Even if it’s on the same subject like, „You missed a withhold on me“ the pc will give you the wrong missed withhold, see.

The ordinary action is and what you can ordinarily expect, is that the pc is upset and that there is some truth in what the pc is saying, but that what the pc is calling the actual cause is not the actual cause, that the actual cause occurred earlier than the pc is telling you. That is routine. You could expect that just as much as you can expect darkness when the sun goes down.

Even if he told you exactly what was wrong in the session, that you had missed a read, it will not be the read that he says you missed. It will be an earlier read whether by five minutes or ten minutes or something like that.

If he — if he calls you on the third rudiment which is now the „PTP,“ see — and if he calls you on that one, there’s probably one in the first rudiment, you see.

He says you missed the read on the PTP. You probably didn’t miss the read on the PTP — you probably did, but the one that is upsetting him is the one on the auditor. See, you missed an earlier one than he says. That is invariable. There will always be that much alter-is in a pc’s protest. It’s always earlier than he says.

But because the pc is in a state of alter-is anyhow — you touch a pc’s bank, he’s in a state of alter-is. You can count on that. Absolutely count on it. Touch a pc’s bank, he’s in a state of alter-is. That’s one of these other — another invariable maxim or figure lines.

You run — you run ARC Straightwire and the worst pc will never answer the auditing command at all. Will say he did, but he doesn’t. Therefore, you must never run a, „Yes“ response-type process without also asking, „What was it?“ Otherwise, you never spot this alter-is. I’m now talking about the — well, this was given in the 3rd ACC. Alter-is. Pc always does something else. Or does something entirely different. You say, „Recall a time you were in communication with someone.“ And the pc will actually sometimes think that he has done this when in actual fact he has recalled a time he was speaking not to anyone at all.

Now, that is a very innocent pc error, see. That’s a very mild one. In the pcs that are the worst that you will have to do with — your very neurotic institutional type — you know, I mean in that band, they never even answer it as a communication.

You say, „Recall a time when you were in communication with someone,“ you see. And they won’t even go so alter-is as to recall a time they spat, see.

They will alter-is completely over on to something else. They will mock up a dog. Not even that they ever communicated with dogs. These things are totally disconnected and disassociated.

You say to them, „Put your shoe on the window seat“ and they will throw their hat out through the area over the door.

And here’s the oddity. They think they’re doing what you said. To look at them and to listen to them, they think you’re doing what they said. But, if you let them get away with this you have stepped on this button of acknowledging a lie and will at that moment, by the missed command doingness, set up that alter-is in the session. So you’ve acknowledged a lie.

Now, Mr. Pc, let’s say this is institutional stuff and you say, „Now put your shoe on the mantle“ and the pc takes his hat and throws it in through the port over the door. And if you say, „Thank you very much. That’s fine,“ you have ended the session right there because that pc becomes unauditable.

Because the degree that they alter-is monitors the degree that they protest alter-is. These things are a constant. They are of the same order of magnitude. If a pc alter-ises, he screams like mad if any alter-is occurs. That is if you acknowledge the alter-is. See, he screams as hard as he alter-ises. Got the idea?

So the worse off a pc is, is measured by the degree that the pc alter-ises in his thinking. That is a direct index of bad off. But of course, it’s bad off on certain subjects because one person will alter-is on one subject and one will alter-is on another. And it’s only those pcs that alter-is on all subjects that are — fall into the neurotic and — oh, pardon me, pardon me, fall into the psychotic band.

But, the worse they do it, the less they can tolerate it. So you mustn’t say cheerfully, „Oh, thank you“ and „That’s fine“ when the guy throws his hat out the door. you told him to put his shoe on the window. Now, of course, telling him to do something before you have some control of him, tell him to do some independent action that you aren’t exactly monitoring before you have any control of him at all, is just asking for it.

You should be walking into this by gradients. But about the only way to solve that situation is just skip what he did with the hat, take his hand, lay it on his shoe, take his shoe off, move him over to the window and put the — put the shoe via his hand on the window ledge and then say, „Thank you very very much.“ And do you know, he’s liable to scream at how terrible you are and what a bum you are, but auditing will continue.

So you mustn’t acknowledge the improperly done auditing command because you are okaying alter-is. And that renders you very suspect. And yet the pc acts as though he wants you to and acts as though the only thing that will please the pc is the same alter-is. This is what he wants you to do. That’s why you never do what the pc tells you. It’s fatal.

The pc acquires this alter-is. Oh, God. Talk about logic, man. They can back it up with ENIACs and Einsteins. Every reason under the sun why you ought to do exactly what they said just now.

Truth of the matter is just before they started giving you orders they alter-ised something. They flipped a command on you, they didn’t do what you said, they — something went wrong in the session. Something went haywire. And then they started giving you orders because they’re trying to keep their own session in. you see what happens?

They start giving you orders when they have ceased to accept you as an auditor. It’s not actually something that you ought to pay any more than diagnostic attention to.

You say this pc has some missed withholds. What’s a missed withhold? Well, it’s an unintentional withhold perhaps. The pc tried to tell you something and thought you didn’t get it. See, that’s the commonest one. The most fundamental, however, is the meter read missed withhold.

Earlier than all of these difficulties existed, you read something wrong. And you told the pc he didn’t have a present time problem when he did have. You told the pc that he did have a present time problem when he didn’t.

So you get — you’ve acknowledged something wrong in the session that is one of the deep fundamentals of the session, such as rudiments. You’ve acknowledged something wrong. You’ve done something reversewise and after that you can expect alteration, alteration. And alteration will exist up to the point where the pc started to give you orders.

Now, how come the pc’s giving you orders? Well, the pc’s giving you orders because the pc has ceased to have an auditor.

The gradual breakdown of a session passes through that as its low point on the totem pole. Pc suddenly tells me, „Would you like to — you should really let me go to the bathroom and smoke a cigarette and that sort of thing.“ If I — got to that point — I don’t get to this point in session, but if I got to that point in a session — I would not say, „How am I going to acknowledge or handle this situation?“ see. I wouldn’t waste any time on that. I would say, „What was wrongly or not acknowledged, when, earlier in the session?“ That’d be my first mechanism, see. Just bang What is it. See, back there.

It would be something like this: „When did you first feel I didn’t hear you?“ With enough confidence in my meter to know that I didn’t miss a meter read, I’d fall back on the other. I’d have to think that the pc said apples or peaches and then thought I didn’t get this, see.

Pc has got an inadvertent withhold, now there’s no communication existing. But it would be earlier. I wouldn’t take up the idea of the pc giving me orders. I’d trace this thing right back in the session to the first time the pc had gotten an inadvertent or actual withhold or didn’t do the auditing command, which of course amounts then to a withhold. See. What — what happened? When? What happened back in the — early in the session? Let’s put that area right. Let’s not start to cope with the building falling down. Let’s not worry about that because we got something wrong earlier.

Now, the reason some people wind up not understanding that a missed withhold is the cause of all ARC breaks is they don’t look early enough and, therefore, don’t cure it with a missed withhold.

See, this pc says, „Well, you better let me have a cigarette now and give me a break, because in actual fact I’m pretty tired and so forth.“

If your response is to find out what withhold you just missed you probably won’t get it, because your pc has gone to that length, time has stretched out after the withhold and it’s minutes, tens of minutes, earlier. When you’ve had a blow, the blow has actually begun an hour to an hour and a half before the blow occurred and it’d be a missed withhold of some kind or another.

And you’ve tried to acknowledge something that you shouldn’t have acknowledged or you’ve shoved off on the pc something — like you’ve got a present time problem when he didn’t have or something like that. Some fundamental alteration has taken place where you were acknowledging an untruth and ignoring a truth.

And that situation has existed much earlier. And when that situation first started to exist, you got the beginning of the deterioration of the session. And to trace it back, you’ve got to trace it back earlier in the session. Therefore, a very good way to handle this kind of a situation is to end the session and begin one.

See, that’s short sessioning. That, of course, gets you back to your beginning rudiments — is where you probably missed it.

Now, regardless of the complications of what you do about it, let’s handle instead the fundamentals of exactly what occurs.

ARC — this is about September 1950, California lectures and I think it’s contained in Notes on the Lectures and an axiom about 1952 contains the data that ARC is the equivalent of understanding. And the component parts of understanding are A, R and C. I won’t bother to go into the dissertation by which this is evolved, but you frankly can mathematically evolve this fact. And it’s quite fascinating. Affinity, reality and communication are interdependent upon one another. And the sum of affinity, reality and communication or the absence of affinity, reality and communication add up to understanding or misunderstanding.

Low on the Tone Scale the ARC is, of course, nothing but a misunderstanding, see. you don’t have any reality on Russia. Russia doesn’t have any reality on you. Of course, you don’t understand Russia. Russia doesn’t understand you. Of course, there’s no communication between you and Russia. See, it’s as simple as that. Therefore, everything is misemotional from that point thereon.

Now, when a pc gets going, you’re liable to attribute the lack of comprehension in the session to anything except the mechanics. You’re not interested in what’s comprehensible or not comprehensible or sensible or not sensible. You just got to make sure that you understand what the pc said.

When you fail to understand what the pc said, ARC breaks down, because understanding has broken down. And that is the anatomy of TR 4. TR 4 says that you comprehend what the pc said. you understand what the pc said and you acknowledge what the pc said and you return the pc to session. And every time I turn around somebody’s trying to give me the word that we need a new TR 4. I don’t see what they need a new TR 4 for, they haven’t used the one they got. Perfectly brand-new. I mean, why use a new one? They — you see that understand is the clue. That is the key to this.

Now, in-sessioning is, of course, interested in own case and willing to talk to the auditor, of course, about one’s own case. But interested in own case and willing to talk to the auditor. So if understanding drops out, willing to talk to the auditor drops out and then interest in own case tends to drop out because one feels one doesn’t understand as much about one’s own case as one just understood.

Now, the greater the understanding the easier it is to blow things. In other words, you can start — if your understanding on something is high it goes out zip-zip-zip-zip-zip. And if your understanding on it is low you stand there and gaze at it stupidly. There it is. What are you going to do about it? Nothing Huh, da. See?

Yet all of a sudden you say, „I know what that’s all about.“ Zip-zip-zip. And that’s — that’s it. You’ve done an as-is.

So, as-isness depends on understandingness.

Alteration inevitably pursues lack of comprehension. Alteration pursues failure to understand. You get an alter-is when you don’t get an understand. You see?

And not-is accompanies the notion of incomprehensibility. You can’t understand it. It’s not possible to understand it. Therefore, let’s just shove it out of sight. That’s what any nonsentient society or very unalert society does with its insane. Nobody can understand the insane, so you’ve got to put them out of sight.

And the degree that they don’t understand the insane or think they don’t understand the insane so they hide them. They squash them out of existence and they actually try to kill them one way or the other. In this civilization today — very modern, very kind, very genteel and so forth — they sterilize them, they cut their brains out, they make idiots out of them, they subject them to tortures the like of which wouldn’t have been tolerated from the barre noir in the middle of the Dark Ages, you see.

Fantastic. You mean in this enlightened time all this is going on? Well, of course, they’ve alter-ised — they failed to understand the insane, then they alter-ised it. And now they’ve got it into place where they’ve even got psychiatrists in charge of them. you see how far you can get.

And this is total alter-is. And they don’t look at what’s insane about the person, they give them classified labels. They label them. And the label actually, has nothing to do with the insanity. The label has to do with the insane asylum the person is in.

Oh, you think I’m kidding you as usual. But that happens to be the truth. If a patient is moved from an area that has sex criminals, you know, he ceases to be a sex criminal and becomes a schizophrenic if he goes to a hospital that specializes in schizophrenics. Patients are now classified after the hospital they attend. See how nutty you can get. But, of course, what is comprehensible about this situation? Well, that people don’t comprehend it. Don’t you see? That itself is an understanding. All they had to do is say I don’t understand it and they come off immediately off the high horse of pretending to understand the alter-is and of course that is the deepest lie of all.

So you get this kind of a situation of pretended understandingness, followed by fantastic cruelty and downscale activities going in that particular cycle. So if you sit there complaining — I’m not putting you in the same category at all — but you will actually in some little vignette run this cycle.

You sit there and you pretend to understand the pc when you don’t and you pretend to understand him when you don’t and you pretend to understand him when you don’t and the next confounded thing you’ll be mad at the pc here. And you go out of session spitting your teeth out about this pc — the stupid jerk and yip-yap and snarl — and you’re snarling about the pc.

When you find yourself snarling about a pc, all you have to do is recall the first time you didn’t understand what the pc was doing.

Now, that is not as successful as treating the mechanics. You see, understanding is in the realm of knowingness and not-knowingness. That’s a very very high echelon pair of postulates. That’s right after Native State. And we’re really in the esoteric wonder world. So those buttons don’t operate very smoothly on people. To some degree they operate, but you’ll find they occasionally lay an egg, too. They’re too esoteric, see. They’re way off, you see. That’s really running the pc over his head. No, but a severed communication line is very comprehensible. That’s very comprehensible.

So the missed withhold, the intention to put a communication line through or the intention not to put a communication line through, each one treated in reverse to the way it ought to be treated, is the way the pc understands this. This is where understanding comes in with the pc, see.

He sees that. He sees that and he reacts to that right now. Therefore, we talk about missed withholds, missed withholds. Actually we’re talking about understanding and ARC on a very high echelon.

But you can handle the mechanics of the missed withhold — bang, bang. Everybody understands that. Because it’s the cure, because it’s a sufficiently low-level concept that the pc understands it and you understand and his mind responds to it and everything is dandy and it all works out when we say, „Missed withhold.“

Now, what actually could be a missed withhold? We have the communication intended and not received. See, that is truth unacknowledged — recalling you to the first lecture.

Pc intends to communicate and it is never received. We express that as the inadvertent withhold. But that’s unacknowledged truth, the very thing he has protested about since the beginning of the universe, see. And it sits on prime postulate and his own goal line and everything else. So he screams like a banshee when you run into this one.

He says, „It’s hot in here.“

And the auditor says, „Sh-nyaa.“ Or the auditor says nothing.

You will then find the pc saying, „It’s hot in here.“

And if the auditor says nothing, watch the pc start to sweat. The pc will start to manifest it physiologically if he cannot put it across verbally. He’s going to make this stick. Thetans are fantastic to this degree. They’re always going to make it stick if they possibly can. And you’re not now in a session. You’ve got somebody who’s trying to set up a brand-new universe all based on the postulate that it’s hot in here. And the session becomes a ball of universe based on this, „It’s hot in here“ because it’s an unacknowledged truth. You got that side of it? See, that’s just 50 percent of it.

Now, the other 50 percent is he tells you, „No, I have never had anything to do with women.“

And you, you knucklehead, say, „Good. Fine. Thank you very much. Here is the next rudiment or question or Zero.“

Now what have you done?

Understand it in terms of communication. He’s put through a whopping big lie. This has no truth in it whatsoever. And you have said, „Wonderful! Fine! Thank you! Oh, give me some more lies!“

In either case, your session will blow up. That’s how you blow up a session, see.

Now, there you can see it visibly on the communication line. As far as the reality of it is concerned, do you see that the reality also fits in there? The reality of it is the pc thinks it is hot in there. It doesn’t even have to be hot for the pc to have a reality that it’s hot. This is actually the only thing he’s trying to put across — that he thinks it is hot in there. His commentary. You see?

And all you acknowledge is the fact that he thinks it is hot in there and everything is fine. As long as that truth is acknowledged, you don’t leave him on a withhold of truth.

Then everything goes along fine because the R stays up. And then, of course, perforce, the A stays up.

Now, he put you through, „I have never had anything to do with women in my whole life.“ Now, he has actually posed a very low R. It’s a lousy lie. He can’t think much of you if he thinks he — you know, if he’s postulated the A of, „You’re a nut“ and he doesn’t like you. you see that? Because he said already, „I can’t trust you with the truth,“ — not as a consequence to your having missed something else. This would be an entirely independent operation, see.

He says, „Well, I can’t trust you with the truth“ is what he’s saying He’s saying you’re not trustworthy. What is your A there? Your affinity’s very poor.

So now you say, „Oh, fine! Thank you! Oh, good! Yeah! Three cheers, you know. Oh, fine!“

And he says, „Well, if this is the kind of session we’re going to have around here, we’re going to have A of that character where I don’t trust the auditor. We’re going to have R which is a cracking big lie like this and therefore this wasn’t a C at all because there was no truth in it to be comprehended.“

And the funny part of it is, is you can reverse the whole triangle — flip — by making sure that you didn’t buy that lie. Making sure what you bought.

Your Zero Question of, „Have you ever had anything to do with women?“

And your pc says to you, „Ah, no, I’ve never had anything to do with women in my whole life.“

And the auditor says, „All right. I’ll check that on the meter. Have you ever had anything to do with women? That reads.“

And the pc says, „Ho-oh-ha-ya. Ha-ha-ha-ha. I did have a little bit to do with women. When I was two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven and twelve, there were incidents. And when I was thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen and twenty, there were incidents. And then we really got busy.“

And you get these all stretched out, why, you’ve bought nothing from him but the truth, man. The ARC is out of sight.

You cannot create an ARC break by establishing truth. You can only create an ARC break by refusing truth and by accepting lies. And of course, the whole thing sums up under the heading of refusing truth. You refuse truth, you have an ARC break. You fail to establish truth as an auditor, you’ll have an ARC break. You cease to handle truth, you’ll have an ARC break. You cease to have as your primary stock in trade the ingredient known as truth and you, of course, have no more control in the session. Because you don’t have a pc who is in-session.

You sit there and handle anything but truth and you’re in the soup. And a lot of you go on the basis and get into trouble, because you think it’d be terribly unkind to prick this guy’s bubble.

You say, „Well, I don’t know. I mean he says he’s never had anything to do with women in his life. Well, it’d be awfully embarrassing . . .“

I feel this on TV sometimes. I’m rather unwilling to expose all of the pc’s overts, be responsible for… I’m perfectly willing for the pc’s overts to be exposed to me, but I am actually not willing to possibly damage the pc by exposing his overts elsewhere, don’t you see. So, on TV I feel a little bit queasy like this. So I know how you feel sometimes.

And this girl says, „Oh, I’m a virgin.“

And you say, „Well, that’s nice. That’s sweet.“ And you let it go by. And she’s cutting your throat. And she’s not in-session. What’s going to happen? And you have this . . . See?

You’re running something like old Formula — what was it — Thirty-three? „What question shouldn’t I ask you?“

And it’s very very often you’ll get this from a girl, „Oh, you shouldn’t ask if I’m a virgin.“

„All right. Are you a virgin?“ — see, it was just the old pattern response.

And she says, „Well, yes, I — I — I am a virgin.“

And you say, „All right. Good. Fine. Thank you.“ Because you think it would be unseemly or something to inquire further into this thing. You should ask yourself why the hell she mentioned it in the first place. How come she brought it up? See.

So you got — that’s what you got a meter for. And later on in this session, why, she’s blowing her top and way out of session. You can’t get the rudiments in and that sort of thing. Well, you departed from truth. You didn’t follow it down and get at truth. That was all. There was a moment of untruth in the session. It is very unkind to leave one of those things in a session — to be so diffident that you don’t want to establish truth because it might embarrass somebody or hurt somebody’s feelings. That’s never a good enough reason to ruin a human being

They don’t suffer from having their feelings hurt, let me tell you. They only suffer from being permitted to depart from truth. That is all. And this E-Meter is not a lie detector. It’s a truth verifier.

The reason it’s unpopular in the world is because the police started calling such machines lie detectors. Actually, comparing this to a police lie detector is something like saying the 1886 Mercedes-Benz is as good as the modern Jaguar, you see. Because the sensitivity of the instruments is not even of the same order of magnitude. And that doesn’t matter that the police lie detector costs $18,000. That has nothing to do with it. This is a truth verifier.

An auditor is an establisher of truth. And if he can establish the truth of the situation and then acknowledge what he has established as the truth of the situation by accepting it and so forth and that he does not avoid the truthful statements of a pc and does not accept the untruthful statements of the pc, of course, never after that does he have any ARC breaks. It requires something fundamental in the auditor. It requires that the auditor is not shy of establishing the truth of a situation.

A pc will actually protest very loudly sometimes when you’re trying to establish the truth of a situation. But you notice they’re also blushing at the same time. It’s a — it’s a confusion. If you’re — if you get very clever and experienced, you will always know when you are establishing the falsity, you see, of the situation that has been uttered by the pc and that you’re establishing the actual truth of it. The pc has attempted to establish falsity and you are attempting to establish truth. And it’s a pretty weird look on the pc when you’re doing this.

I don’t care how loud the pc sounds. He ordinarily won’t, after a very short time, sound loud at all. The only way you ever come out the other end as a friend of the pc and he’s a friend of yours, is if you’ve established the truth of the situation regardless of embarrassment and regardless of anything else.

Those considerations are entered into the track to make you more reactive bank — that we must have social lies. Very often playwrights come along and they tell you, „Well, if anybody told the truth for twenty-four hours without any difference whatsoever, he would lose all of his friends.“

And it’s one of the old-time favorite themes in this universe, because they’re trying to establish the validity of a lie. That will establish mass and get everybody in trouble and it’s quite a — quite a black operation. Whereas it’s not true at all. If you were to sit out from the human race’s social lies for twenty-four hours and do nothing but tell the truth for twenty-four hours and insist on nothing but the truth for twenty-four hours, he would wind up top dog. He would not be in a mess at all. Do you see that a lie has been entered on to the track here that you could not tell the truth for twenty-four hours? Yeah, you’d wind up wonderful.

In the first place, if you really insisted on the truth, you would wind up at the end of that twenty-four hours having some friends, where you only thought you had before. But it requires a very strong man to enter into the first part of that. Because it’s repercussive.

I’ve told the truth to somebody and had them scream enough to take the roof off. By the time you’ve told them again four or five times, they eventually listened. Then it didn’t seem so much.

It is stepping back from the establishment of truth that pitches one heels — one’s heel over the edge of any grave he may fall into. That is the way down.

Now, wherever an individual sits into an auditing session with social mores and kindnesses in full play, he can wind up with the most confounded mess of junk you ever, as a session, you ever heard of.

Pc wildly out of session and so forth. It would actually be unkind to ask this girl if she had ever stolen anything. So we will say, „Have you ever stolen anything?“ And then we will just ignore that read on the meter because it isn’t necessary to go into it.

Actually, an auditor’s mind doesn’t really operate like this. He’s just blind. He needs glasses or something. I’m just warning you that the wrong direction — just giving you this word of warning — a wrong direction is in the direction of buying lies or letting lies go by in a session. You’re always in trouble.

And what we call this, „Letting the lie go by“ is the missed withhold. Remember, there can also be the inadvertent missed withhold of letting the truth go by, see. So, if you let a truth go by without acknowledging it and let a lie go by without challenging it, in either way you’re in trouble. Because you just restimulated the guy’s whole track.

And of course, the ARC sinks, the corners of the triangle start to explode with small firecrackers and debris scatters around the scenery and there it is.

You want ARC to drop out of the session, why, just follow this same basis. That is why your metering has to be 100 percent. And why, incidentally, in passing along, your TR 4 has got to be pretty good. But your TR 4 will be pretty good if you just remember to understand.

All right. Let’s all agree you’re a complete knucklehead when pcs start muttering. Let’s just, you know, take that as a basis: The pcs are rather incomprehensible and nuts on this line and that you are particularly knuckleheaded where what they’re saying is concerned. You’ve got a perfectly safe basis. There’s nothing wrong with the statement at all that prohibits auditing

Well, you could accomplish auditing with that statement. But if you pride yourself that you always understand everything the pc says and never have to inquire into what the pc is saying and that it would look awfully stupid of you to have to inquire again about what the pc is saying, you’ve laid the basis to the damnedest messes you ever saw. They won’t be sessions.

I’m perfectly prepared to be stupid as far as a pc is concerned. Perfectly prepared to be stupid because that’s the isness of the situation I’m handling is stupidity, aren’t I?

So the pc says — he says — he says, „Yagagayaga-plitzou.“ And ha-ha, I don’t depend on my altitude for appearing bright. Why should you? No point in it.

You say, „What did you say?“

And the pc says, „Wiggle-wiggle plitzboom.“

Well, don’t show any misemotion. Say, „Well, I’m just particularly stupid today. I didn’t get it. You’ll have to say it in English. You’ll have to drive it across this wagon one way or the other so I can see what it is.“

And he says, „Oh, skip it.“

And I say, „No, that one we’re not going to skip. I’m just particularly stupid. What is this ‘wiggle-wiggle plitzboom?’ What is it? I mean what are you saying?“

And he says, „Well, you wouldn’t understand.“

And I say, „Well, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I don’t understand what you’re saying,“ and so forth. I’m perfectly willing to sit there for half an hour and go over this thing.

And he finally says, „Well, I mean that the chair leg has come down on the tip of my foot.“

And you say, „Well, all right. Thank you very much. Slide it out. All right. Now, here we go.“

And you find out your session doesn’t come to grief. The way to make a session come to grief is the pc says, „Wiggle-wiggle plitzboom,“ and you say, „Good. Fine. Thank you very much“ and go on. You’ve had it. You’ve entered pretense into the session and it didn’t live there.

No, as long as an auditor considers himself an establisher of truth and as long as he refuses to do anything less than establish truth, he’s all right.

From then on, why, he can’t have any real difficulties, because a pc will forgive an awful lot of fumbling if, during the fumbling, an auditor has only one intention: is to establish the exact, „What is it.“ See, if that intention is totally clear, the pc can forgive a lot of fumbling.

Don’t ever try to look brighter than you are. And never be dumb enough to do otherwise than pursue truth and you’ll have it. In essence, you’ll build a whole universe out of bad auditing sessions simply because you’ve continued to alter-is the basic truth of the pc and the basic truth of the universe. And it’ll all just mess up like fire drill.

And of course, the meter is simply nothing more or less than establish a truth. And you ought to be lucky you have it. Think of the lies you lived in before you had it.

So if it’ll do that, why, you at least have the responsibility of reading it right all the time. And then you’re true with the meter. Okay?

Thank you very much.