You want some data?

Audience: Yes.

Want a chart, too?

Audience: Yes.

Female voice: We want anything you'll give us. (laughter)

This lecture is on the subject of communication, which has to do with the text in Dianetics 1955! and which clarifies something we have known about for a very, very long time — the ARC triangle.

Now, you know about that ARC triangle: affinity, reality and communication. This triangle was first conceived in July of 1950.

I was being audited at the time and I all of a sudden said, "There's an awful lot to do between affinity and reality — and a — terrific amount." I sat up and went back into session again and I said, "Communication has a lot to do with affinity and reality."

Well, we walked around with this one for days. I tried to find some other factor that probably fitted in here. Affinity, reality and communication went together, and there must be something else went in there, but there wasn't anything that's gone in there. There's just that triangle. And here, four years later: affinity, reality and communication — still the triangle.

Now, that triangle is a very, very simple triangle. A very basic statement of it is that — have you ever tried to communicate with somebody for whom you felt no affinity at all? And have you ever tried to communicate with somebody with whom you had no agreement of any kind whatsoever? And have you ever tried to reach an agreement with anybody you couldn't communicate with? And have you ever tried to communicate with anybody who didn't feel any affinity for anything?

Well, it's sort of obvious, isn't it, that these three factors must be present for interpersonal relations to occur. Well, if this is the case, then a great deal about life is probably contained in this triangle.

Now, I never came out flat-footed and said one corner of this triangle was more important than another, until now. The most important corner of the triangle has been isolated and understood much better, and that corner is communication.

And communication is so, so superior to reality and agreement, and is so superior to affinity, that by communication alone, reality and affinity occur — fascinating. By communication alone, reality and affinity or some degree of, occur.

And by affinity alone, nothing happens. And by reality or agreement alone, nothing happens.

Now, as an example of the nothingness which occurs when you only have reality, let us take the fate of a contract. The contract is the basis of a social agreement. It is the social agreement, you see, expressed in relatively solid form. And it's expressed in solid form in the hope that it will continue along the time track and continue to be a communication. And that is why a contract is so expressed. But if this is the case, and if agreement all by itself could stand or were very important, then we'd never have a court of law The contract is there, it's signed, and then communication between the two parties cease — ceases, and they go out of agreement. And the fate of a contract is almost always litigation. Because a contract is an effort to maintain an agreement without further communication. And it won't work. And so we have courts.

The court is a necessary communication terminal when a contract has been signed too long. And the inevitable fate of any agreement where communication becomes absent is to cease, quit and go out of existence.

And where you have two contracting parties, the first thing they start complaining about is communication. They've contracted about this and that, and you'll find inevitably that the next thing they start arguing about is the fact that they're out of communication on something.

Contract: the one party is out of communication with the account books of the other party. And he wants to get into communication with these account books to find out how much he's being gypped. Or they want to get into communication to modify the contract. Or somebody wants to get out of communication so he won't have to follow the contract.

Now, let's take citizenship and the criminal. Citizenship is a contract no matter how the state likes to look upon it. Citizenship is a contract entered a — R into — between the individual and the group. And this individual declares himself to be a party to a contract known as citizenship.

And when he's no longer willing to carry forward his part of the contract, all he can think of is to get out of communication with the group — the criminal. All that a criminality is, you might say, is the abrogation of the contract of citizenship.

And if the group goes into communication again with the criminal, we discover he becomes less criminal. But when a group goes out of communication with an individual, we get the individual going into a criminality.

Whether or not that criminality is that of a Hitler, or Greek tyrant — when the individual is pulled away from by the group, when communication is broken between the individual and the group — that individual goes out of communication with the group. And thus we get the queer acts and the strange things done by the leaders of people. They go out of communication with the group.

Marie Antoinette rides along in her carriage and says, "You say, 'They're short on bread.' Well, let them eat cake." Then somebody comes along and cuts off some heads.

It could be said that the effort of a society to handle criminality by imprisonment is simply a dramatization of keeping the individual out of communication with the group.

And the jailing of the criminal will never resolve anything. And the insistence of the group that it remain out of communication with a leader or a military conqueror will never resolve that person's aims and goals or make them more real to the group.

It's a fascinating fact that where communication ceases, reality and affinity cease. This is so much the case, that if you at this moment were to go off and leave your body utterly and completely, cutting all lines on all dynamics, considering the body was your only communication media, you probably wouldn't have any memory at all of what you'd been doing or how you'd been doing it, or who you know. Why?

You depended upon a certain thing to be a communication media and this is no longer the media, and so the reality and the affinity cease, and when you say reality and affinity, you say memory.

Memory is the effort to communicate with the past. And memory is a very, very frail thing because when the past is no longer there, when there's nothing there to communicate with at all, and while the individual still believes that he has to have something in order to communicate with something, we get a difficulty. We also get the facsimile.

An individual's effort to communicate with his own past is the facsimile, the engram. The individual's effort to break communication with the past reverses reality and affinity. And an individual is as bad off as he is attempting to break communication with the past.

Hence, Freud's fixation upon the past; hence, the fixation of many philosophers upon the past, and so on. Their effort is to get into communication with the past in the belief that if you could permit somebody to get into communication with the past or if he would permit himself to get into communication with the past, he would get in far better condition. He'd be more able.

This effort to communicate with the past rather leaves out of existence the present. And people can become so frantic and so fixated on the idea of communicating with the past, that they'll leave the present entirely disregarded. And so they will go back into time. By doing what?

They made a facsimile of something, knowing they wouldn't have it the next moment, and now they say this facsimile, this image picture, this memory picture, is the thing. And if it is the thing, then they believe, when it goes into restimulation later, that they are in the past.

They are not in the past. They are wrapped up in a picture or terminal of the past. Hence, we have an old man's fixation upon youth. He's trying to pick up those terminals in the past. He hopes there are some there. People make these facsimiles just to have a terminal in the past. They want something to communicate with.

Well, if this is the case, then it must be that there's a scarcity of some-thing in the present to communicate with. Well, if you don't think that wall is there, of course you have a scarcity of something in the present to communicate with and much more important than that, if you don't think anybody else is alive but yourself, you have nothing to communicate with and so couldn't be anyplace else but into the past.

So where an individual suffers from a lack of interpersonal relations or interpersonal communications, where an individual is no longer free to go out and talk to anybody he meets or to have a lot of people to talk to, he of course has a tendency to believe that this has become so scarce that he has to start making pictures of everything he really contacts. So he contacts Joe, and he makes a picture of Joe.

Later on, in the many hours ensuing, he feels — Joe's gone, you see. Joe is way away. Joe is really gone. He's miles away or blocks away or something. He's no longer communicating with Joe. Therefore, he will take this picture of Joe or just the knowingness memory of what Joe said, you see. And he'll think, 'Well, little old Joe is really right."

Of course, if he's away from Joe a week or two, he'll think, "Old Joe is probably wrong." Get the idea? But he'll get these pictures, and he'll use these pictures as substitutes for actual communication.

In the entire mechanism of the mind, in making and then picking up again facsimiles, image pictures, engrams, is its belief that there is a scarcity of things with which to communicate in the present.

Thus, we find a desert rat in not too good a condition. If he talks at all, it's probably to his burro. I can almost index the sanity of a desert rat by finding out whether or not he has a burro — something to talk to.

Now, after a while, an individual starts talking to himself. You wouldn't credit that in the middle of New York City there could be an absence of people with which to communicate — yet there are. I have lived in an apartment house on Riverside Drive and not known the names of the people who lived in the apartments on either side, or the floor above or the floor below. Knew nothing about these people whatsoever — fantastic.

We went into communication, though, one day. This was back in the old days when this fellow, Hitler, was yow-yow-yowing and 1.5-ing at the German people and saying, "The German, he is separate from the rest of the world. He is different. He is a superman. He is a superman. He is a superman. He is a superman. He can't go into communication with the rest of Europe. He can't go into communication, so he has to kill everybody." Nice philosophy, but not entirely workable from the standpoint of the other people.

So, every afternoon I'd sit down to put in a period of writing — I'd sit down and write on my typewriter, bangety-bang. I was running a big electric, and it had spark gaps that acted something like one of the old spark transmitters. And every time I'd press a key, why, we'd have a large gap occur in there, you know. And the people next door turned me in to the New York light company to trace down this static which was occurring.

And I had been aware sometime previously, fascinatingly aware, of the fact that Hitler was talking around in that building somewhere. You could hear this, "Yow, yow, yow. Mein garbage. Mein herring."And however, when I'd turn on the electric typewriter, of course, that made enough noise to drown out anything, even Hitler.

So they turned me in, and the next thing I knew, why, the light company was knocking on the door with their cute little radio detector device — a little radio detector device, a little antenna coming out of it — and they says, "Aha!" As soon as they brought it near the typewriter, why, the dial went clang, clang, clang.

And I said, 'Well, that's right. I write on this typewriter."

And they said, 'Well, you'll have to get a spark suppressor and hook it up to the typewriter so that this won't happen anymore."

So, I did, at vast cost — a couple of bucks. And was able to suppress this. But, I hadn't realized it but that typewriter during my writing hours with its spark gap had been keeping off the shortwave program of Herr Hitler every afternoon. And now that I had the typewriter dumb, "mein herring, mein garbage" was into my apartment with many decibels.

So, I bought an electric razor and every time I would hear "mein herring," I would shave him.

The electric light company came many times to the door with their little antenna and found nothing — spark suppressor okay, everything okay.

And one day I was walking out in the hall and a fellow who was a refugee from Germany because of his race met me there, just going into his apartment. And he says, "Please," he says, "you are making us miss all the programs."

And I said, "Why don't you listen to some American programs?" New thought — clang!

This man had fled that many miles, clear across an ocean, and was yet so fixated on the thing which had turned him out of his homeland that he had to go on listening to it. How's this for a circuit? He couldn't abandon Hitler's voice.

Well, I talked to him. I was the first person, except the immigration officers, he'd talked to in America. We had gotten into communication. How? Spark gaps and electric razors. And although we were very mad at each other and he was very mad at me and I was very mad at him, the anger just disappeared when we got to talking about the whole thing.

And you will find it is the case with man, if you can just get him to communicate with man, that the anger against man ceases.

What, then, are we doing putting a criminal in a cell? We know that this system, first adopted in Philadelphia in 1825, has never worked and was abandoned after it was first tried, and was subsequently reassumed, and that every state and most of the nations of Earth have adopted this system of putting the criminal out of communication with the society in the silly attempt to make him non-aberrative to the society, whereas the only salvation at all along this line would be to go into communication with him in some fashion or another.

And so it is with a preclear. A preclear's been locked up in a little prison called a skull — out of communication on all sides. And his anger against his — man, his anger against himself, against his body, turns in on himself and he gets sick. And there's no reason he gets sick other than this one reason.

He's even stopped communicating with his body. He's communicating with himself if he's communicating at all. He's a sort of a desert rat walking around without a burro, even. At least a desert rat with a burro talks to the burro. This individual for a while talked to his body. You know? He said, "Foot, what are you doing, itching?" You know? He said, "Well, I don't know. I guess I'll — my fingernails look pretty good now. You look pretty good, don't you." You know?

After a while, as a energy production unit, mired down in a lot of energy, he was talking in circuits to himself. He would send out a communication impulse and bring it back into his skull again. The communication impulses which went out came right home again.

But he had to have some terminal to talk to of some kind or another so he'd talk to terminals of his own manufacture. And thus we get circuits, thus we get voices or silences or blacknesses that we find in people's heads. They are communication points, in absence of communication points. They are substitute communication points. That's all there is to it. That's all there is to aberration. It's really as simple as that.

It isn't that he is mad at the world or that he is in disagreement with the world. It's that he's out of communication with the world.

Now, you as an auditor sit down. You start to talk to this man. He's talking to somebody about a rather intimate thing: his personality, his ability, his disabilities. And simply talking to somebody is a benefit. So we have two-way communication as a process. Simply talking to somebody is a benefit. And if there was any benefit to psychoanalysis, it was just that. He could talk to somebody. You see how the therapy of this would work itself out?

He would start abandoning these set-up, mocked-up terminals to the degree that he actually had somebody to talk to. And so there would be some tiny, small workability in any process which just let a guy talk. That's all. I mean, if he could just be permitted to talk and he could get an answer now and then, that would be fine.

It's like the old lady I knew of that had a husband who would be put in a little rocking chair with a shawl wrapped around him, and he'd be taken off to bed every night, and every morning she'd put him back in this rocking chair. He never said a word or anything. But he was at least, she said, something alive around the house. All right. How much better — how much better it would have been instead of something which potentially could talk, he had actually talked to her occasionally. Why, then, she would have been perfectly happy about it.

Now, you are told when you're young that silence is golden. Huh! I don't know who's responsible for that. I'd like to get the guy. I have a Mauser bullet with his name on it (laughter) because he's the fellow that's causing us an awful lot of trouble. Silence is so far from golden, that if you hit it, it gives an awfully brassy sound.

They teach children it is better to be seen than heard. Somebody is so far out of communication, evidently, they can't stand the thought of being in communication. You see that? How it could invert? The individual gets to a point at last where he doesn't desire any further terminal. He knows they don't exist and when they come in and they say, "Look, I exist. I'm a terminal," they say, "Ah, I know better. This is all unreality and hallucination. Be quiet. Silence is golden."

We used to have a little legend in school,

"A wise old owl sat in an oak, The more he saw the less he spoke; The less he spoke the more he heard, Why can't we all be like that bird?"

You remember that one?

Audience: Yes.

Well, give it the bird, will you? (laughter) Not true!

Now, you wouldn't think in a city like New York City that I just told you about before, that somebody could sit there having arrived in America, and be entirely out of communication with everybody in America to such a degree that he could only sit listening to the person who had driven him out of his home country. It was at least a communication terminal.

See, he could still listen to Hitler anyhow. Hitler was somebody who was talking. And that is the motto of life: Somebody talking is better than nobody talking. And anything talking is better than nothing talking. Get the idea?

But after it goes completely out of reality and it goes out of affinity with the world, it doesn't believe anymore that there's anybody that could talk to, or with. And so, of course, nobody exists anymore. And everything looks sort of unreal. And there's nobody to talk to, or with. So they go around muttering at their circuits which mutter at them.

I've known fellows, every time they accomplished something, a little voice jumped up and said, "Heh, heh, heh, heh. You think you're pretty smart, don't you? Heh, heh" — little voice. And some fellow that, after he'd think of a good idea, why, a little voice would pop up and say — or a little idea would occur, "Well, you might think it's good, but . . ."

Well, just chalk it up to this: there's no significance in this, other than the fact it's better to have some communication than no communication. If it came to a choice between no communication at all and a scathingly critical circuit, take the circuit. See how it works? All right.

We get somebody that's been moved all over the world, who has lost many friends, he gets into a state of unreality after a while. He doesn't believe there's anybody to talk to anymore. You'll find many people are in this condition. They have lost so many friends, they've lost so many allies, they've lost so many things they did think were good to communicate with, that they can no longer communicate at all. And they just drop out of communication. And you'll get what is known as a comm lag. Well, a comm lag might as well be called an agreement lag.

A communication lag is a technical thing. It is the length of time intervening between the making of a statement or asking of a question, and the answer to that statement or question. It is exactly that time regardless of what happens in between. It isn't necessarily silent in between.

The person might talk about something else. He might answer some other question. He might just talk completely disrelatedly or he might try to get the semantics straight on the question that was asked. That's another communication lag, you see. He didn't answer the question or answer the statement made. So a communication lag of ten seconds would be as follows:

The fellow says — you walk up to this fellow and you say, "Hello."

(pause) He says, "Hello."

You get that? That's a communication lag of ten seconds.

This is also a communication lag of ten seconds: You walk up to the fellow and say, "Hello."

And he looks at you, "Huh! What have you got on? What are you doing? Oh, uh, how are you?"

See, that's also a communication lag of ten seconds. See, other things intervene between the thing. But no matter what intervenes, it's a communication lag of that many seconds, minutes or hours.

Now don't think you can have communication lags only of minutes. We have seen them of 150 hours. Communication lags can be real long.

Did you ever walk up to some fellow and say, "How are you?" And he said, "I'm fine." And then an hour and a half later, apparently just from no reason whatsoever, this fellow says to you, "You know, I feel terrible."

A social machine jumped up and said, "I'm fine." And he himself got the question and got to thinking it over and pushed it through enough circuits, filters, resistors, transistors and tubes, and got it back to a point where he really did get an assay of his beingness at the moment, and finally did get the answer sorted out that he felt terrible. And then he gave you the answer.

Well, there's such a thing as shock as a communication lag. Individual gets in an automobile accident, jumps up right after the accident, carries out the four other people hurt, puts them in the ambulance, fills in all the papers for the police, so forth, goes home and all of a sudden says, "Nyaaa!" That's a communication lag in another line.

But to an auditor it just means this: It's the length of time, regardless of what occurs in between the making of a statement or question, and the answer to that exact statement or question.

And it could be said that the physical universe is itself simply one long communication lag. You probably at the beginning of the physical universe said, "Hello" to somebody, and you're still waiting for him to say, "Hello" back. The only reason anybody gets stuck in a trap is a communication lag — lack of an answer, or lack of an originated communication.

He snaps terminals on everything that doesn't talk. Isn't that interesting? It couldn't be that somebody wanted you to stay in school when they said, "A wise old owl sat in a golden apple." They couldn't have wanted you to stick on something, could they have? One of the reasons people teach you out of books is because if they taught you live, it would be fun. All right.

So this is a communication lag at work. Well, let's take that communication lag and translate it over to another corner of this triangle.

Here we have chart 1. [See chart 1 in appendix] We have here, communication, reality, affinity.

Now, if we have a lag in time here, [tapping on chart] then there's probably a lag in time here and probably a lag in time here. Did you ever meet anybody that you liked right away when you talked to them? Well, that would be a no affinity-lag.

Do you know there are people around who, you bring up somebody's name, and you say, "Well, Bill," one fellow says, "Yeah, frmmm-drrr-frmmmm-zruhhh-da-zuh-zit. Yeah, um — Bill — um — yes. Sorry, I haven't met him, as a matter of fact, so-and-so and so-and-so. Bill, you know, zuh . . "you go on and he talks this way, and so on, "(sigh) Well, he isn't such a bad fellow, I guess."

If you kept at it for a little while talking to him about Bill, he would finally come through and say, "Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know Bill, nice fellow"

That's a fact, you see. That's an affinity lag — an affinity lag. Now, how about this fellow that only really likes people he's known for a long time? Just an affinity lag, that's all it is.

Well, what about this reality lag up here? Must be something about reality, and there is. Reality lag is known as a judicial answer. It is the decision which has to be reached after the weighing of a great deal of evidence. That's a reality lag. Do you see it as a reality lag? In other words, the answer, the solution or a reality on an agreement is only obtainable after an awful lot of yak-yak and walla-walla.

The fellow who is being impartial, who is waiting to see, who is waiting to find out, who always depends upon his impartial opinion as a guiding light, is crazy!

Therefore, when you have Professor Whoomfguttle writing and saying, "Well, I don't know, but according to Professor Whampfguttle writing in the Whampf Journal some years ago, he said … But of course there's always Professor Dud . . ." and so on. And when you read columns of this kind of thing, you're not reading any reality or agreement, believe me. It has nothing to do with reality. All right.

So we have here communication instantaneous, reality instantaneous and affinity instantaneous in order to obtain an instantaneous reaction from life or to have no time lag in reaction.

If we had an individual in fine shape and an individual who really could drive a jet plane, his communication lag would be zero, he could make his decision immediately and instantly, and his affinity for the world and things around him would be instantaneous. And that individual could then drive a jet plane better than anybody else could drive a jet plane if they didn't have these figures.

Now, why is it that a combat pilot has more accidents than a transport pilot? Is there any relationship between these two things?

You bet there is. A combat pilot is taught to hate. He's taught to stay out of communication. He's taught to destroy and he's taught to kill. And what do you think that does with his A? And that's why he has wrecks. And that's why military equipment is so hard to maintain. Decision cannot exist in the absence of affinity — good decision.

So we can't have the standard villain of fiction. He doesn't exist — this standard villain of fiction. He is something that has been put off upon the world and the public by writers such as a couple in the audience and myself.

This cold, calculating, inevitably and always right villain does not exist. If he is cold and calculating, his A is missing. And if that affinity is missing, R, the ability to make a decision, is also missing. And so the decisions he makes will most often be wrong decisions. And there goes this villain — Dick Tracy's stock in trade.

If a detective has a hard time solving the activities of criminals, it's because the detective is stupid because there's nothing quite as stupid as a criminal — unless it's a general.

Now that triangle contains in it a tremendous number of answers, but the key to all of its answers, really, is communication. If you can get anybody into communication of whatever kind or how, you will inevitably improve his decision and improve his love of his fellow man.

Therefore, you could say any kind of communication is better than no communication. And you can bless your preclear for at least having a few circuits. If he had none at all, he'd be entirely out of communication and he'd be very overt in his hatred or completely dead.

How dead can a person be? Entirely out of communication.

Somebody said one time, also in an effort to misinform the young — that, by the way is quite a game: the misinforming of the young. They have a club, I think, of fellows who sit around and dream up answers — it's right next door to the physicists club — who dream up answers on how to destroy soldiers and how to misinform the young. And they say, "Well, we'll invent spelling."

Sometime after preclears have gotten fairly well up the track, you ought to go back and find out where they first became concerned with such things as spelling just as an adventure. You'll find out that it was after Shakespeare's day. Shakespeare wasn't even vaguely concerned with spelling. The boys who sat around the Swan used to have an interesting contest: You were as bright as you could spell a word differently.

Well, this information would be very interesting if it were just information but it's just a little bit more than information. Out of it comes applicable formulas. And we discover, then, that of all these factors, an isolation of each one, of all these factors, the most important scarcity there could be, would be communication — not communication terminals. The most important scarcity would simply be communication — not even communication sounds but communication ideas. The idea of something alive communicating, whether it has mass or has no mass, is the most important datum to be derived out of all this material.

Now, let's take a good look here, chart 2, [See chart 2 in appendix] and let's draw a communication.

Here would be one lobe of a communication, and this would be "A." [LRH drawing on chart] All right.

Now, this lobe starts in over here with a fellow by the name of Bill. [LRH drawing]

Bill says, "How are you?" And he's talking to a fellow by the name of Joe. So we have Joe over here as something alive to be communicated to. He's something alive to be communicated to. But at this point of the curve, Joe's total action is being a recipient of the communication. You actually at this point have cause. And you have here distance. And over here you have effect. So we have cause, distance, effect there but we don't have a really complete communication yet because we've got to have, in order to have a full cycle of communication, we have to have Joe answer.

So we get Joe prime. And Joe prime says, "I'm okay." But we haven't got a full cycle yet, because who does he say "I'm okay" to?

He doesn't say to this Bill here who is emanating, "How are you" — "I'm okay." We have to have time in there: Bill is now Bill prime.

So, he says, "I'm okay."

We've got to have Bill prime over here acknowledge the fact that he has received the answer and so we've got our second line of cause, distance, effect. Only this is cause prime and this is effect prime.

So we've got a full cycle of communication and it went this way: Bill here says, "How are you?"

Joe receives it, and then Joe prime answering says, "I'm okay."

And Bill prime just nods, you know, he gives some signal that he's received it. All right.

But that isn't a complete communication yet. That is not a complete communication yet. Let's look at what has to happen to have a really complete communication here.

In graph B, we've got Bill here. Joe communicates to Bill, and in his turn says, "How are you?" [LRH writing on chart]

Bill receives it. And now we've got Bill prime here, who says, "I'm okay." And we get over here now to Joe prime, who receives it.

And that is a two-way cycle of communication, and that contains the most important parts of communication.

By the way, if you feel kind of spinny after you've listened to this graph for a while, just imagine the state I was in when I was trying to write this stuff down in Dianetics 1955! You start following and plotting the communication graph very, very closely and you sort of feel the wheels start to go.

Here we have, as the first cycle, we have Bill saying, "How are you?" Joe receiving it.

Joe saying, "I'm okay." And Bill receiving it. That's one-half of the communication.

The other half of the communication requires an origin by Joe of a communication, its answer by Bill prime, and its acknowledgment by Joe prime. So, our principal parts of communication here, in just so many words, are contained on that two-way graph.

And we look over here, [See chart 3 in appendix] we find our next parts in communication then, or the principal parts, are origin, [LRH writing on chart] answer, acknowledgment. And that's all you have to remedy the scarcity of, to solve the problem of the human mind.

It's just as simple and elementary as that. You have a two-way cycle of communication. We find out if there's a scarcity of communication, then there must be a scarcity of origin, a scarcity of answer and a scarcity of acknowledgment of answer.

There's also one more scarcity which isn't expressed: a live form. See, that was what was at Joe. Joe, in that first graph A, was no more, no less than somebody standing there alive to be talked at. That's a necessary part of it.

But if we take these two cycles and we take them apart, we find out that we have origin, answer, acknowledgment in a live form. That's the works. Let's remedy the scarcity of origin. And let's give you a proper example here of what we mean by origin.

Here's a fellow who is a writer. And he's been writing for years and years and years and years and years and years and years and years. He hasn't been reading anything written by other writers to amount to anything — not in proportion to the amount of stuff that he's putting out.

And after a while, we get him on a stuck flow. What is a stuck flow? A stuck flow is any communication flowing in one direction without completing the cycle. Anytime you don't complete the communication cycle on both two cycles, you get some tendency to stick — see, a scarcity, a waitingness. A person starts waiting for the communication. All right.

We have this fellow being on graph A, this writer. And he's sitting there and he originates and he originates and he originates and he originates and he originates and he originates and stick, stick, stick, stick. This manuscript gets lost and that one doesn't get answered, and he gets no acknowledgment from the public, but more important than that, there isn't any graph B going. He doesn't have another writer there who is also writing, see?

The missing point is he's missing the whole second cycle. He doesn't have intimate contact with another writer who is writing — fantastic. What will happen to him: He will eventually become obsessed with the idea of writing. His stuff will go down in quality and then, as will happen, he will stop writing and writing itself will become a sort of a solid ridge and that is his fate if he does not complete the two-way cycle of communication — if no one else is writing in his vicinity. You follow me?

He isn't reading. He doesn't recognize that other people also write. He maybe thinks the books just occur except those that he himself writes. He knows somebody alive writes those. But he doesn't know any other writers are alive. He'd get into a horrible state of affairs. You see, he'd get a stuck flow and then he would get so stuck that it would all get sort of solid. And that is the way you make a ridge.

Now, I've just spoken of a writer because that's kind of an obvious example. Let's take a less observable example. Let's take somebody who is completely out of communication. You've got this person around the house, completely out of communication and you. walk up to them, and you say, "Well, how are you today, Bess?" You really didn't care how Bess was today. You just thought it was a good question, you see. No answer.

So you say, "Well, mm-hm," and you walk off. And next time you see her, you say, "Do you like your — those new gloves you got, Bess?"

Well, the next morning, you're rather unguarded about the whole thing, and you say, "How are you, Bess?"

Do you know that you will get obsessed on how she is? You'll get frantic on the idea of "How are you, Bess?" Well, that's the most obvious thing. And you will begin to be sure there is some horrible secret about her health.

And you just get a stuck flow. You're liable — if you don't watch it, you're liable to go around saying, "How are you, Bess? How are you, Bess? How are you, Bess? How are you, Bess?" Get the idea?

And you'll get stuck on Bess, and if Bess leaves or goes away, for years you'll carry around an image of Bess here, hoping it someday will speak. All right.

Let's, then, look at what else is missing. Bess never came up to you and said, "How are you?" Just never happened. Bess never came up and said, "How are you?" No originated communication there. And even if Bess answered all the time — you said, "How are you, Bess?"

And she said, "I'm fine."

And you said, "That's good," and went on your way.

And the next time you said, "How are you, Bess?" she said, "I'm fine." Go on your way.

Even though this happened all the time, after a while, you'd start to get very; very suspicious of Bess. What would be missing? The whole second cycle — the whole graph B — the whole thing is missing.

See, Bess never originates the communication back at you. As a matter of fact, you will only find people in a somewhat hypnotized state who will answer you immediately and never originate a communication themselves. A person has to be in pretty good shape to answer you immediately, or completely hypnotized. If they're hypnotized, they never originate a communication.

You could say, "How are you, Bess?"

She'd say, "I'm okay."

And you'd say, "That's good."

"How are you, Bess?"

"I'm okay."

"That's good."

"How are you, Bess?"

"I'm okay."

"That's good."

After a while this cycle — keep going — if she'd never originate a communication, oh, she would just be in a sort of a social automatic response situation. "I'm okay." Because if she were really alive, she really couldn't stand not some time or another completing the cycle.

Now, did you ever have anybody give you a Christmas present and you not give them one? You suffer, don't you?

You say, "Hey, by golly, we — we — we didn't get Joe anything. I think maybe we'd better go out and find him something and say we bought it before Christmas and forgot it." You feel bad, you see? You didn't get a two-way cycle of communication going, even with an object.

It's perfectly all right, he gave you something, you gave him something. Well, that's the way universes get made. You know, you're sort of in communication on an intuitive basis with some thetan and you say something to him. And you say, "Hello." Or you make a small mock-up or something, you know.

And then he makes one for you and you get this kind of a picture: [See chart 4 in appendix]

Here's your graph A. [LRH writing] And here is graph B. Now, here is your cycle of communication, which has your origin, answer, and acknowledgment. And here is your origin and here is your answer and here is your acknowledgment.

You know what these two people are doing? They're making space. And that's how you get space. One fellow originates some space, and the other fellow says he has done so. This fellow says, "I originated some space," ("How are you," you know) — "I originated some space to this fellow"

And this fellow says, "Okay, you originated some space."

Fellow says, "So I did."

And they got some space, too. See that? But when they stop communicating, we get down here at graph C, no space. See, that's snapped terminals.

And over here in graph D, this fellow keeps saying, "How are you, Joe?" And Joe never originates any communication. So you have an imbalanced space. This fellow gets the idea that he must be talking across some terrific, fantastic difference, and nobody else is making any space but him. And so he gets stuck on the idea of insisting that somebody else make some space, for heaven's sakes. He keeps going around here.

Graph B over here never gets finished, so the guy keeps going around saying, "Hello. Hello. Hello." And he'll acknowledge and so forth, but he should be saying, if he wanted to put it into words: "For God's sakes, make some space. Please, somebody else make some space. Why do I have to make all this space?" You get the idea?

So, he's not — he doesn't have somebody else making space. Well, after this fellow said, "How are you?" at origin here, and he's gotten his answer, "I'm okay," and he's gotten his acknowledgment here, we go over on this side and we find out that the fellow he talked to originally here, now originates a communication to which this fellow can now answer and give an acknowledgment.

The other fellow in graph B is now saying, "Okay, I'm making some space."

This fellow says, "You did."

"Good."

So, the communication goes this way:

"I'm making some space," in graph A, "I'm making some space." "You did. Now I'm making some space," in graph B.

"You did." See that?

"Now I'm making some space."

"You did."

"Now I'm making some space."

"You did."

"Now I'm making some space."

"You did."

"Now I'm making some space."

"You did."

Get the idea? They got distance, they got particles, they got space, they can have some affinity, they have different individualities and they can have a game. And a game can be played without affinity. And a game can be played without reality. But there wasn't ever a game on Earth played with no communication. That's the most essential character, then, to the making of space and the making of universes — communication.

And if you ever felt bad about anybody, it was because he didn't balance out your efforts to make space by making some himself. Or it's because he never said, "Okay, you made some space."

And reversely, you might feel bad because you just never told somebody, "You made some space." See, you just never told him this.

He comes around and he says, "Hello," you ignore him. He says, "Hello," you ignore him. He says, "Hello," you ignore him.

He's saying, "I made some space."

And you're not saying, "You made some space." See, you just ignore him. And the first thing you know, he snaps terminals on you and you're never rid of him. See why? See, he's saying, "Hello." He's saying, "I'm making some space here. Hello, I'm making some space here."

And you're not answering him.

"Hello. I'm making some space here." He's liable to come up and sock you after a while. You see why? He's insisting you give him some kind of an answer so he'll have some space.

And in the absence of communication, there is no game, there is no universe, there is no affinity and there is no agreement. By processing and remedying the scarcity of just that, communication, alone, you can remedy anything that is wrong with a case.

So, rightly or wrongly, I have some feeling that we are at least well on our way to solving cases rapidly.

Thank you.