Thank you.

24 May, Saint Hill Special Briefing Course, A.D. 12.

All right. Now, you seem to be considerably interested in what meters do, and you seem to be having an awful lot of trouble, one way or the other. I was going to talk to you about Goals Assessments in this particular lecture, but I won't. I will talk to you definitely about meters.

You know, you can get into more holes full of complication than anybody could easily dig you out of in a long while. You get complicated. And if you just would stop figuring and start looking …

I remember when, one time, got a motorcycle off the boat, and I was straightening the motorcycle up and trying to get the thing to function out in Camden, New Jersey. I was trying to get this motorcycle going, so … Lights wouldn't light, you know, and so we kept throwing a switch, and so forth. And it was just at that time this first cliche - first time I had put out this cliche, and so on; it was "Look, don't think," see, which was very funny.

And this little Francis-Barnett British motorcycle had a very complicated Lucas light system - headlamp and everything else. And it was very complicated, very hard to get apart. All kinds of wires and condensers, and all sorts of things.

So I started taking it apart, and took the bulb out and took the wires apart and unhooked everything. We had parts that were lying around a good square yard. And then I happened to look down at the battery, and the terminals weren't connected. We had all the job of putting it all together again. It would have taken about one minute to have put the terminals on the battery.

That was a marvelous example of "Look,-don't think." Because I'd sure done a lot of figuring right there on that motorcycle, you see, and the net result was dismantling the works.

You get doing this, and you get to figuring out what this is and the significance of that, and the complications of something else, and so on. And I know what you're up against, because …

There's a textbook called "Dutton's" which teaches navigation, and it is the textbook used by the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis. It's their key book on the subject. And no doubt about it, it's a marvelous textbook. There is no doubt whatsoever that "Dutton's" is just absolutely wonderful as a textbook. Not a single datum of any kind on the subject of navigation that is not to be found in "Dutton's." They modernize it, also, every year - it's marvelous! You open it up, and sentence by sentence they machine-gun you with exact pertinent data with no amplification or further definition of any kind whatsoever. They don't bother to tell you it's a textbook on navigation of ships from here to there. They simply start in telling you "This is the earth and the sun and the planets and the alidade-amplitude angle dihedral in betwixt...." "A barograph is an instrument used to measure barometric pressure. It is read at two o'clock, four o'clock and eight o'clock." I don't know; what do you read? You read its directions? What do you read? You read the manufacturer's label on the bottom of it? What do you do? Well, "Dutton's" never bothers to inform you about that. They're above all that, you see? Unfortunately I collided - on a restudy of earth navigation - I collided with "Dutton's" back in the middle thirties, hard, you see? There was everything there but an understanding. See?

There was no understanding of what this was all about whatsoever, but there sure were hot data. Man, every datum in it was hot.

But there was never any side amplification, such as "You must always precisely locate the exact position of a battleship." See? See, it never says, also, that it is sometimes disastrous not to locate the position of a battleship. Your imagination is never invited. It is a dry feast of bare bones. It drove me stark, staring mad. I never learned how to navigate from it.

Finally got a book that - I think Mixter's Primer of Navigation, or something like this, and read this book, and it didn't treat it very seriously, and it was very happy about the whole thing, and I dug up a few data from that.

Actually, though, I thought it would be easier to go back and evolve the whole thing, so I did.

Some time in '44 an admiral was walking around on the bridge, and I was calculating something or other, and he says, "Well, I see," he says, "that you - how is this?" He'd just flown in, you know, from stateside. He wouldn't be there long because it wasn't very safe where we were. And he said, "I see" - he said - "But - but how is this? You're using Commander Weems' new textbook on aerial navigation." And it puzzled him because it was just now in print in the States, and we couldn't possibly have connected that fast. No, I had accidentally evolved it as a simple method of navigation, and somebody else had evolved it.

That was all. But it didn't come from "Dutton's," but I imagine it's now part of "Dutton's." And I imagine nobody can savvy it now. I mean, I imagine that's totally, totally lost.

But this is a method of losing information, is you just give a bunch of machine-gun data and expect everybody to hew the mark on that exact data, and it's never amplified, you see? So we have lots of examples of that particular character.

It is the importance of a datum that must be weighted. Weighted. You weight the importance of a datum. And you are so accustomed on this planet - you are terribly accustomed - to studying unweighted data.

Somebody opens up Krishnamurti, and he shows you three places in this book of Krishnamurti's whereby it's exactly parallel to exactly what we say in Scientology, so therefore Krishnamurti is Scientology. And poor old Peggy Conway - I showed her one day that these were totally unweighted data. They had no importance assigned to them whatsoever, but were there with equal importance with about three or four thousand other datum. These other data were all there of equal importance, and they were - some of them were really wild data. See" So they were all equally important. in other words, there was no selection of importances.

And people keep forgetting this. They think all data are equal, and it's as big a mistake as to consider all people are equal or anything else is all equal. Because it's pretty hard to get an equality. Mathematically it's impossible to get an equality. You take an apple out here off a tree, and if you had another apple which is exactly the same size, shape, age, skin thickness, pattern of the skin, everything else, you'd say, "Well, that apple is equal to that apple." No, they're not equal. They're not occupying the same space. How could they be equal? All the characteristics of one apple would have to be equal to all the characteristics of the other apple, and they're both occupying different positions in space, so they can't possibly be equal.

Now, in order to study … I've heard this phrase "learn how to study." I've had it thrown at me in very fine universities, very fine schools, and so on. "Learn how to study," they say, and then they sit back. We should remember this: that there are several ways of laying out data. One is to lay it all out with equal weight with no amplification, no other explanation, nothing to assist understanding; we just machine-gun out a whole bunch of data - brrrr, see? That's supposed to be real good. Your technical-scientific writer of today is educated to do this and sometimes criticizes the writings of Dianetics and Scientology because it doesn't do only this.

All right. Now, there's another way of handling this stuff, and that is to throw it all out with tremendous obfuscations. You sort of interlard it with "Of course, you boob, you couldn't understand this anyway because it's all so complicated." And they do that in various ways.

With footnotes: "Refer to Jervis Crack, page 39," you see? Of course, that book hasn't been available for the last century. So you've had it, you see? Well, what they're doing is doing a priesthood type of action. And most of the professors writing in modern university, and so on, are guilty of that. They're trying to create a priesthood.

Now, the reason navigation sprung to mind, and the reason I talk about navigation, is they're exclusively devoted - not this "Dutton"; it's of another kind - but the navigator himself is devoted to the development of a priesthood. It is not for nothing that the early navigators of the South Pacific were a priesthood. And they were the reigning priesthood of Polynesia. Well, those birds, with a hole in a coconut shell and that sort of thing, navigated themselves all over the place. Quite interesting how they did it, but it was a priesthood. And they surround this with a bunch of magic, and they surround it with a bunch of nonsense of one kind or another.

Well, a chemistry professor is just as guilty. He gives you a whole bunch of nonsense.

But the reason a navigator springs to mind: if you were to go on a bridge of a naval vessel that had a navigator and to ask him how he was finding his position … He won't have you shot because that's illegal. Instead of that, he will either ignore you with a contemptuous sniff or utterly overwhelm you with a bunch of irrelevant bunk. That man is totally dedicated to the protection of a cult. Navigation is what makes him important, and if every fool knew how to navigate he wouldn't be important anymore. And that'd be that.

The textbook "Bowditch" on this subject… I'm choosing an esoteric field - navigation - not that you're interested at all in navigation but just because it's far enough afield that it won't confuse the issue.

Bowditch was a fellow up in the New England states who decided that celestial navigation should be decelestialized. So he did a bunch of tables and things of this character, and he went out on a China trip; and out of his little manual, which was about quarter of an inch thick, he taught even the cook to navigate by star sights. It was marvelous. He taught everybody on the ship. He was teaching everybody up and down the New England coast how to navigate out of this little, tiny book.

You should see that book today! Ha-ha-ha! It's also published by the United States Navy, and it is that thick, it's that high and it's that broad. It's the most marvelous thing for keeping a passageway door open you ever saw.

But it has everything in it that has nothing to do with navigation, and it has tables developed which nobody has used for ages. And his original tables, I don't think, are even in it anymore.

And yet it's called "Bowditch."

See, the whole thing has been obfuscated. Whole thing has been masked.

That is the way somebody swells up his importance. He makes himself very important: He's one of the twelve men in the world that can understand Einstein. Oh, I don't know. If there was anything there to understand, I think that more than twelve men could have understood Einstein. I took one of the twelve men in the world who could understand Einstein, and I went around to him to have him explain it to me, as the associate editor of the college paper, in a short article. (I was making friends in those days.) I wanted him to give me a short article for this college paper so that I could explain Einstein to the student body. He was very insulted. He was very upset, but his - I wrote an article.

But years afterwards, I was talking to a friend, and he was a pretty good scientist. He was good enough to be kicked out of the government; he was one of the sixty-four that were released for doing their duty. And he said, "Theory of relativity? Well, let's see. Mass equals MC 2 well, let's see if we can't do … I wonder if it couldn't be explained rather simply."

And so we boiled it down and told it to a kid, and he understood it perfectly. There wasn't much to this. Except what? The vast importance of the person. See? Somebody is using this as a cloak of rare bird feathers, you see, so he can stand before the idol and tell everybody how important he is, see?

Well, these methods of communication of thought, methods of communication of data …

Now, we're in an interestingly peculiar field, because the data that is being communicated is in actual fact totally new data that everybody already has. That makes it very peculiar data indeed.

Now, there's no language that embraces this because language comes after the fact - before the fact, rather - of the data. And so you get a few terms mixed up in it. It's nothing compared to medical terms or other fields. Nevertheless, it has the frailty of having new terms. But you have to have new terms, otherwise everything you described would be a whole package.

I could probably dream up an example and say, "Well, the combined impulses derived from force and duress in the past which have become forgotten but which are capable of impinging themselves upon the individual …" Wouldn't you like to say that every time you said "reactive mind"? That would be pretty grim, wouldn't it?

So naturally, you get conversant with this, you start developing a bit of a shorthand. But the shorthand mustn't itself be terribly obscure, and most of our stuff is not obscure. We don't invent words where we don't need them, but we do invent words where we shouldn't be confused.

Now, we lack a complete dictionary. That we should have - there's no doubt about that - so that you could look up any phrase and understand it better. We've been in the throes of making up a dictionary for years. I had the notes on my desk recently - just a few days ago - to start recompiling the thing.

Trouble is, it's costly. That's the only thing that's wrong with a dictionary. You'd have to put two or three people on it for several months to really knock a dictionary together, because you'd have to listen to every tape on which every word had ever been defined at any time and put all the definitions down for a single word immediately following it, and then that would be a worthwhile dictionary. Would also he quite a worthwhile textbook.

But it happens to be a labor. It's mostly labor: listening to tapes, taking down every definition; looking up all the textbooks, taking down every definition, you know; writing each word on a piece of paper, and then writing each definition that has ever been defined for it, because they've been defined several times.

Well, we - that is a barrier. There is no doubt about that. But. what 1 try to do, the way I try to teach you this, is teach you one very simply and try to give you the weight of the datum - you know, how heavily this is weighted in comparison to other data, see?

I tell you, "This one is important," see? And then because there are quite a few important datum, I very often make the mistake of not saying to you that there's a lot of data along this line that's not important, see - that don't amount to anything; they're merely interesting. Well, I tell you that - even that too, occasionally. That's an awful lot of bric-a-brac and phenomena.

Well, what happens is that I give you a datum that's important, and you very often pick up a piece of bric-a-brac that's right next door to it that is interesting, see, and you get the two things confused. You know, this other one is fascinating. There's no doubt about it. You start fooling around with things in the mind and there are fascinating things. The floor of the 'ead is strewn with them, man. I don't know how you can live in there.

See? There are many fascinating data - they are terribly, terribly interesting. Why, if I sat down and wrote everything I knew about needle phenomena or phenomena which could be disclosed by a meter, my God, it'd be something on the order of four or five million words! I know tremendous lot of oddities - fantastic things that you can do - all of which amount to a hill of beans. They're just of no importance at all. Amongst all of that, there are only a few important data and they are boiled down into that savagely condensed book E-Meter Essentials.

Now, that is an example, by the way, of a terrific boildown. The instant read, however, is not described in that book. It is now described in the second edition, but in the original edition it's not described.

Now, obviously, it should also be part of my responsibility to tell you what's not important.

But look, but look: that's four or five million words, see, compared to a few hundred. That would be a job, man!

And you want to know about teaching you some of this stuff .. What is utterly, staggeringly fantastic, you see, is trying to guess what you're going to do wrong next. And I tell you, man, that would keep somebody awake all night if he really worried. You know? I worry about it enough. But trying to guess which way the mistake is going to go … Because, you see, it can go into any of those unimportant channels. See? And they're just infinite in number.

Now, right now you're riding the hobbyhorse of the interim read; the prior and interim read, because the word latent read is forbidden, you see - I mean, the subject of latent reads we're not interested in. I've omitted saying that there's such a thing as a prior read, see? Well, it is also forbidden. See? A prior read is as bad as a latent read. You only want an instant read.

But what is an instant read? It is that read which takes place immediately after the expressed thought. Now, if you sum that up as a definition, you will see that it precludes - that it is thoughts that impinge, not words, on the reactive mind. It's thought, not words. You may express them in words, but they impinge in thought. The reactive mind doesn't actually react to words. The words translate through symbolism into thought, you see? You got the symbols of the words, and then that melts down into thought. The reactive mind responds to the thought impulse. So you can have a lot of thought impulses in one thought.

"Have you seen any gorgeous, good-looking, luscious, marvelous, sensational women lately?" How many reads would you get? Man, that's up to you and the gods.

Now, because you are thinking the thought, and if you read this as a straight thought through, the reactive bank, at first - only at first - will impinge on every thought contained in the major thought. So you get a whole bunch of prior reads. And then it finally grooves in that this is what you're talking about, see?

The major thought is "Have you seen any women lately?" see? "Have you seen any gorgeous, beautiful, luscious, you know, women lately?" That's the big thought. And it'll register as "Have you seen any beautiful women lately?" as well as "you" and "seen" and "gorgeous" and … Get the idea?

Well, the funny part of it is, is you can groove in the major thought or the minor thought.

"Have - you - seen …" See? You're going to get reactions by this time. That's a sort of a punctuated reading of something. You're going to get action, action, action, action, and then action on the thought.

Well, you saw an example in the demonstration I gave you last night of a prior read, and I threw it away and asked the pc again because I couldn't tell if it was a read or not a read. I just threw it away. I didn't pay any attention to it. It was the one time in the session when that occurred, that something fell on the middle of the last word. Obviously invalid, but it showed that it might have been instant; it all depended. So I just checked it again. But that only happened - in a whole hour of session, only happened once. See how rare that was? Now, you got the packaged thought. Now, if you repeat that thought through to the pc, you have restimulated the thought majeure, see - not the thought mineure, the thought majeure. We could have a lot of fun if we were really, fish-end tails, white tie, you know, type of subject treatment, you know, on the subject of Dianetics and Scientology, you know? And you would be learning about the thought majeure, you see, and the thought mineure. Oh yeah, we could be fancy. Don't let me kid you.

Actually the trick of communicating the whole subject of the human mind with as few words - new words - as we use is quite a trick. That is actually one of the big things that we got, you know? We don't have to go four years to study Latin so that we can abuse it.

No, the thought "You seen any beautiful women lately?" is inherent in your statement, and so most of the time you simply read it - and "you" almost always will get a reaction, by the way, and so on - whatever it is.

All of your interim spots may get a reaction, but you're only interested in the reaction which occurs with the last word - the end of the last word. It's not after you stop speaking, it's when the whole thought is completed.

Therefore, you'd never use more than one clause, but you can even get away with using several clauses and still get a reaction - lot of phrases and clauses, and so forth.

But it may take you two, three or four reads to ring it in. That is one of the reasons you read a goal three times: it might fall interimly, might fall randomly. But you want to get the thought expressed. The thought has got to be expressed through to the pc. So you could never read it really successfully less than three times aloud to get the whole thought, that's all. The whole thought delivers through.

Most of the time, oddly enough, the whole thought does deliver through and react. But just that once in the hour's session, you see - well, we got some other interim reads, but only one interim read came so close to the end that a fellow could have made a mistake.

Indistinguishably close, halfway through the last word.

Well now, the point is this, is the pc's thinkingness isn't turning on the read. It's the pc's reactingness which is reading. So there's no understandingness of any kind consulted on an E-Meter read. It is all stimulus-response. There is no understanding of any kind. It's as though the reactive bank can listen and react. Oddly enough, it can.

It is the auditor to the reactive bank, not the auditor to the analytical mind to the reactive bank.

That always gives you a latent. read. You got an instantaneous proposition here. Doesn't matter how mysterious it is or isn't. It's just, you've just got an instantaneous proposition. It's, you read the thought, and it reacts in the reactive mind. And honest, the pc can be doped off, nine-tenths unconscious, goofed off, everything else, and it will still read. I've seen a pc sitting there practically snoring and everything reading. I made several tests on this. I was flabbergasted! You could have said to him, "Women, women, women." You got react, react, react, see, just this nice pang! pang! pang! - three instant reads, nice strong ones. And you could have said, "What did I say?" And he'd say, "(snort) What? What's this? What? I don't know. What did you say?" He didn't know, either. See how crazy that is?

Until you actually explore that, it still looks to you as though you say something, the pc analytically hears you and then reacts to what you said, and it is not that cycle at all. That is not the cycle which takes place. I don't care to elucidate even what cycle takes place rather than invent knowledge, but that cycle does rat take place. See, I can tell you which one doesn't take place.

You say it and he reacts. What reacts? Reactive mind. And that's got to contain timelessness and not-knowingness in order to get a reaction. If you don't have timelessness and not-knowingness, you don't get a reaction on the meter. It's as simple as that. If he thinks of something in order to get a reaction, you always get a latent read; you don't get an instant read.

Oh, you want black magic? There it is. The reactive mind of most people is black enough.

Look at the GPM sometime.

But of course, you have all of your latent reactive thinkingnesses of former identities are stacked up there like Genghis Khan's pyramid of skulls. There's plenty of them. And all of that combined thinkingness and reactingness and so forth has amounted to a GPM. So it'd be wonderful and marvelous that it didn't respond. But remember it - it, I said. It, not the pc.

Actually, this is technically incorrect: "How did the pc respond on the meter?" The pc never responded on the meter! It did. It did. And when it responded, it did it instantaneously, exactly, peculiarly, at the end of the thought majeure.

I'll hang you with one just so you can feel upstage. So if you're at some party sometime where there's nothing but professors, you could say, "Well, we mostly deal in the thought majeure." But there is this weirdity. Now frankly, you think sound travels at eleven hundred feet per second, and so forth, and such. And undoubtedly there are lags developed in here because of sound, and so forth, but remember, I don't know that. See, this is to some degree an invented piece of knowledge.

And we could calculate it out and say that the auditor's length of time to pour out to the end, plus the length of time of his voice impulse to the pc's ears, plus the length of time to the reactive bank, plus the time consumed in restimulating the electrical responses of the reactive mind, plus the lag of the E-Meter would be how long it took for the read to read instantly.

Now, I don't know, maybe we could sit on one mountain top and have an E-Meter lead from Mont Blanc over to Mt. Punk, or something of the sort. And we yodeldeehoo, you see, across and ask some restimulative question and see how long it takes, and measure the electrical current and measure the amount of time in the air; and maybe we could do a lot of things like this and maybe we could learn a great deal. And I'm sure if some professor liked to mountain climb, he would spend the rest of his life establishing that fact. However, we're more interested in the subject majeure rather than the subject mineure. Anyway.

So, the main thing we're interested in is the thing reacts instantly, and it reacts instantly at the end of the thought. And, of course, it will react to interim thoughts. You say, "Have you, you swine, damaged any pigs lately in this session?" See? Well, now you're throwing yourself a curve if you add "in this session" because it's a clause after the thought. The modifying clause coming after the thought fumbles the whole thing up. So you should say, "In this session," and then you should drop the interjection "you swine," and you say, "In this session, have you damaged any pigs?"

Now, this is the liability of reading a meter. Supposing the pc has an item called pigs. Now you'll get into one of the world's most marvelous tangles, because it's reacting on the word "pigs," and you don't know whether it's acting on the thought majeure or the thought mineure.

You don't know which is which. And that's the only time you can really get tangled up.

Say the pc's goal: "to catch catfish." And you're trying to test out the way to list it. Now, "Want to catch catfish," you know, "Who or what would not want to catch catfish?" "Who or what would not oppose catching catfish?" "Who or what would oppose catching catfish?" will all react on an instant read just like the goal, won't they? Isn't that horrible? That's very confusing, because then you can't tell which is the right phrasing to line up on unless you read them two or three times to groove it home, at which time, oddly enough, the goal will no longer react as the goal but will only react as a thought majeure. And that's a little test that you ought to make just to convince yourself, show yourself what it is.

Take some highly restimulative interimly-worded sentence - I don't care what it is - that as a major thought adds up to a whole, that you know would be hot on the pc. He's got some old item that's still in, see? Some kind like this. Put that on the end. And then you will see, after you have read it about three times, that it only acts on the thought majeure and will not act on that item. But the item will act separately.

You can take the item out of the sentence. Even though it occurs to the end of the sentence, you can take it out of - it's just marvelous, you know? - and you can set it out there all by itself, and you say, "Pigs, pigs." First time, it doesn't react; it's cautious, see? "Pig." Now you say, "Pigs, pigs, pigs, pigs." After that, "Pigs, pigs, pigs, pigs, pigs."

You put it back in the thought majeure: "In this session, have you injured any pigs?" No read.

This is mysterious, man. Of course, it might read the first time as just an additional "pig," but then groove it in again - groove it in again. "In this session, have you injured any pigs?" No, it won't react. Mysterious!

Now, the mysteriousness of it is, is below the unknowingness there is a terrific power of retention in the reactive bank. It is another one of its characteristics. It has fantastic continuity, fantastic survival. Otherwise it wouldn't be here. And what is put into it then acquires this characteristic of fantastic survival. So you have time, not-knowingness and survival. So what you pour into it will continue to react.

The delicacy of its operation is another astounding thing. If the goal is "to injure pigs" - that's the actual goal - and the wording which you have on the list is "to injure a pig," at first "to injure a pig" will react and will then cease to react, and will react and it'll splutter and monkey around, and you won't quite know what you're doing on the thing, and all of a sudden the pc - you can never change it for the pc - the pc is liable to say, "Oh, well, that's - that … that's to injure pigs." Pang! It's a marvelous precision. This is an old study in Dianetics, is the fantastic precision with which this thing will do it. "To injure pigs," that's fine. it'll react from there on out. See? But "To injure a pig" - sporadic, not in.

Don't also think that total retention is total wisdom. It isn't. So you get this kind of a circumstance where if you're a tiny bit offbeat you won't get the reaction.

Now, oddly enough, you can get a generalized thought which is close enough in to get the reaction, and that's where you get your What questions from. That's why you actually ought to fish for your What question. "What about wrecking cars? What about stealing and wrecking cars?" The pc unfortunately used the word "swiping cars," and you're trying to get on "stealing cars," and my God, you never get a What question.

Last night we had a word. If I'd used any other word than that exact What question, if I hadn't used the word conned, it wouldn't have reacted. The pc said it so that must be at the base of the chain of the overt. Your clue must be taken from the pc.

Now, you can play ducks and drakes with this thing. You can throw it all over the place, and so forth, as long as a central pin stays there to hook in and identify. You got to have something that will identify. You got to have a thought that associates, and so on.

Well, you're doing an interesting thing. You're taking the whole of an overt act, which was all in terms of action anyhow, and you're putting it in terms of English, which it might not even have occurred in, and that thought embraces the action which took place which was the overt.

Oh, my God! Nobody would be able to build a machine that did it. That would be utterly incredible. And yet the reactive mind can do that much of a stretch.

But "What about stealing a lot of cars? What about stealing cars? What about stealing and wrecking cars?" Bang! On another instance the pc said, "Well, I swiped a - a scooter." And you say to him, "What about stealing children's toys?" You know? BBC, you know, type of response. Nothing happens. See, you have to sound out your What question.

Now, you can alter it this far: "What about swiping toys?" That'll be dead on. That's okay.

But you altered the doingness, you see? And the thought of the doingness shifted. You have to keep that pretty well the same, don't you see? And you have to have at least some associated object, to make this thing react, but it will react every time.

The odd part of it is, why does it react after "toys"? Why does it go "toys," see - "toys" click.

Why? It's the total thought. All I can tell you is it does. And if you have a question which reads "What (tick) about (dirty needle) stealing (tick) toys? (fall)," you ignore everything but the fall.

You don't do another blessed thing with a prior read. You just skip the lot. If it doesn't fall at the instant you said " s.. ." See, "toys," "toys" (fall). If it falls at "t - " (fall), it's not an instant read.

Don't tell me why the reactive mind does this. I couldn't care less. Just take it from me that it does. Then it cleans up and everything squares up and the pc feels better and it falls apart. It's almost as if it's drawn itself a complete plan of "how you take me apart." Most fantastic thing.

All you had to know about the whole thing from beginning to end was exactly - you had to be able to look and observe.

Interim reads are so common that if you tried to pay any attention to an interim read on "Have you tried to damage - in this session, have you tried to damage anyone?" Suppose you're asking such a question, and it fell on "damage" - you knucklehead! The worst you could do - you saw me do it one time on an earlier session; I wrote "damage" over in the margin. I knew it would be a hot Prepcheck question, but ignored it for that because it didn't fall on "anyone - ." See? It's just a curve of the e and then the action. See, "In this session, have you tried to damage anyone" - uhp! There it goes, right on that e, see? Not earlier, not later, but right on.

Marvelous. Why it works this way, God knows.

You know, I think even people with the big-thetan theory would - would doubt - would doubt it. It's too incredible. But that is the fact. And you'll find out this pans out every time. You find out if you clean off that instant read at the end of the thought major, you'll be all set. And if you start monkeying around with the interim reads of the thought minors, you are going to fall on your 'ead every time.

Now, you very often will get into severe trouble putting together goals. "To go out and pick potatoes and sometimes have a girl in the potato patch." Man! And it falls on "to go out," and it falls on "and pick potatoes" and "to have a girl," and it falls on "potato patch." And there's no instant read after "patch." After you've said it three times, there is no instant read after "patch." Well, I'd say it has something to do with the goal, probably, in some version or form or another, as it will eventually arise. And I'd get all the invalidations and the missed withholds and suppressions off of listing.

That's another one I should take up with you. I'll take it up with you right now. When I say "listing," I don't mean items. When I say "Take it off the subject of listing," I don't mean take it off the items of listing. When I say "listing," I just mean listing. You say, "Is there any missed withhold on listing?" See? "Have you suppressed listing?" "Have you invalidated listing?" "Have you ever committed an overt with listing?" That's the way you phrase it, see? That's listing. Listing. It is a subject. You could even say "goals listing." And when I tell you "items" or "individual items," why, then, I mean a goal or an item or a straight line.

"Is there any item on this list which has been invalidated? Thank you. Is there any item on this list on which there is a missed withhold?" Too complicated a phraseology, you can't get across the thought majeure easily, so you say, "Is there any item on this list which has been invalidated?" Say it the second time. And you get your click. Marvelous to behold; you'll get your click, and you clean that click off.

There is the subject of listing, and then there's the subject of goals, there's the subject of items in general; all of these things are different things that you can do things with, you understand?

Now, in this rundown of the goal, if you don't get your instant read on the end of the goal by the third time you've read it, it ain't it. And you certainly better ignore it. But very possibly - not positively at all, but very possibly - potatoes have something to do with this goal, or maybe it's girls have something to do with the goal. Of course, we can't guess.

Now, I've even gone so far, experimentally, as to try to pick out all of the various words that have reacted and put a goal together for the pc. Doesn't work. Evaluates for the pc and throws the whole thing into that. The pc will give it to you eventually. You get all the withholds off the subject of listing, all the withholds off the subject of auditing, all the withholds off the subject of items, goals, that sort of thing, any overts that might have occurred in this direction - just explore around, get them all over - and all of a sudden you say, "Well, are there any more goals?"

"Oh, yap, yap, yap, yap, and yap, yap, yap and yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, 'To lay girls in the open.'"

All right. You're nulling on down. There was your potato patch. See? Only this one will go "open" (bang!), "open" (bang!), "open" (hang!). You see your read? instant read, instant read, instant read every time.

It does not matter how many reads you get that are prior to the instant read. You ignore them.

Please believe me. You just ignore them. it does not matter how many reads you get after the instant read. Ignore them. But you must put across your thought majeure to the pc. And if you got the thing all participially occluded, why, prepare to stand there for several reads before it'll finally embrace.

But oddly enough, no matter how complicated it is - I don't know, I think you could probably get a fall on Uncle Tom s Cabin where it says "The End"; you get your instant read, you know? But you would have had to have read it to the reactive mind fifty or sixty times, and I don't think anybody could stand that.

So, that stable datum - get used to that stable datum, live with it, and you won't have any trouble on the thing. And God almighty, never ignore one. Teowuwtsw! Never ignore one.

On the subject of rudiments, middle rudiments, something like that: "A little while ago when I was talking to you about that goal, did you get an ARC break?" And it goes zumph-zzm - ARC break, goal - zzzm-zzzumph, you know? "A little while ago when I was talking to you about that goal, did you get an ARC break?" Now you'll notice there's less randomness in it. "A little while ago when I was talking to you about that goal, did you get an ARC break?" Clank! You put the thought majeure across, and it now is impinged, and it will react. But why did it take so long? That's because it's so complicated.

You would have gotten your instant read like this: "In this session, have you had an ARC break?" Clank! See? Simple: fast. Complicated: takes you a while. A complicated thought majeure takes a lot of pounding before it is finally embraced and will give you an instant read.

Now, you say, "In this session, have you told a half-truth? Untruth?" see? That package question possibly leads you astray, because there you are using a packaged bunch of instant reads. Actually, you're shorthanding "In this session have you told a half-truth? In this session have you told an untruth? In this session have you tried to impress me? In this session have you tried to damage anyone?" See? Oddly enough, you could package the whole thing together and use the interim reads. Oddly enough, only that one will go down; particularly after the third or fourth or fifth session with the pc, because the reactive bank is now grooved into that thought majeure. They're very obliging. A pc who is under control really responds.

This is all rather incredible. Why does the reactive mind react? Why does the E-Meter work? Well, I won't be so stupid as to try to force on you the same orders that the six hundred had at Balaklava. (Which is some sort of musical instrument they didn't play well!) There's this type of think about this: I could say to you, the instructors could say, everybody could say to you, "Now, look! When it gets an instant read, read it! Now, you don't have to understand it.

Just - when it gets an instant read, read it that way. That - that's it!" See? And you say, "Yeah, but why does it read that way?" see, and so forth. You've got a perfect right to ask that question, see? Got a perfect right. Why does it only give an instant read? And why can you groove in a thought majeure? And why does it sometimes read on the thought mineure? See? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Like little Arthur says, see? You've got a perfect right to say that.

And I got a perfect right to tell you "I don't know!" It just does! This is a whole set of fortuitous accidents based on direct lookingness and on no figureness. There's very little think involved with this thing, you see?

The E-Meter itself, I think, was a Decca voltmeter which a guy held both sides of, and it reacted, in its most primitive state. I think it was Richard Saunders at Elizabeth, New Jersey, was monkeying around with this. He wanted to show doctors that there was a response, and he knew they would look at meters. So he pinched the living daylights out of a pc, you know - made him black and blue, you know - while they were holding on to this thing, and then told him to recall it and got the same response on the meter.

Well, fortunately today we're not dealing with that level of insensitivity on the subject of meters, because think of how you'd look at the end of session.

But this was picked up one way or the other or independently gone at by Mathison. I gave a lecture, described what kind of an instrument we really had to have. Mathison went home and he breadboarded one up. It functioned remarkably well for its original state. It was very limited. Pcs went off the top of it and went off the bottom of it with the greatest of ease. I think they possibly still do on Mathison's.

But anyway, time went on and around Washington, why, I eventually thought it would be a good thing to have this one, and Don Breeding and the rest of the boys got scratching their head over this thing, and old Joe Wallace, and so on. And they kept hanging things together.

And then they'd do a perfect one, you know, and then they'd scrap it because they could do one that, you know, behaved electronically better, you know? And I'd take a pistol out of my desk and hold it on them and make them build the first plan.

And then they'd put fifty on the line or twenty-five on the line, or something like that, and come back and tell me that if they just eliminated the ruddy rod and put a couple of condensers there that it'd work much better. And I'd say, "No, you don't. You build the original one," see?

And they built some of these other ones, and they responded perfectly electronically, but they did not respond mentally. This meter responds mentally. Anybody alters that meter, it's practically over our dead body because it's just empirically worked out. It's marvelous that it works at all.

But, do you know, people give you explanations for the working and for the circuit and for this and that about this thing. They're talking in their hats. They're talking through their hats. They can give you all of the stuff, and so forth, but that stuff all got assembled in there on the basis of just breadboarding something.

Now we've developed theories as to how this thing works. Now we've developed all kinds of things. There's a magnetic thing in here that swings that.... We're dependent on James Watt, Edison, all the modern electronics guys, transistors, everybody else, on all of their know-how, but this hung together makes an E-Meter. Why? I don't know.

We've got a doctor's meter. Costs several times what one of these things cost. Reg got me one.

We played around with that thing. It doesn't work. We don't know what it does, but it does something else. The needle goes by so fast, you can't even see it go. We've learned exactly nothing from it, which I think is marvelous, except this one fact - you all knew that - that's doctors are frauds. But we have an example of this: they've tried to copy our E-Meter, and they just haven't gone anywhere with it. They couldn't tell anything with this thing. It's marvelous! And we got it, and I'm glad to have it! It's not a wasted instrument. There is the peak of medical electronics.

Now, why does it work? Why does the reactive mind do this?

What you figuring for? For God's sakes, the thing is laid out on a red carpet. This is how it works, this is how it reacts and this is how you use it. Oddly enough, it's invariable - utterly invariable.

Now, one of these days you're going to get Clear, you're going to get very bright, you're going to figure out exactly why an E-Meter responds this way, exactly what wavelengths the thetan operates on in order to put a reactivity together, exactly how many condensers fit together amongst the ruddy rods. You understand? And how you can all do it on thought transference and set up an E-Meter on a table and read President Coolidge's reasons why he wouldn't run, you see? Read through time.

Yes, by all means get in that shape! Yes, by all means get that design. When you do, write me a letter. I'll publish it.

There's more phenomena around this subject - not just this meter - than you could easily count up on an IBM Comptometer, and there's an awful lot of particles in one of those.

Now, where do we got the figure? Where's the think?

Reg's engineer, who is a sharp apple - you see him around here once in a while - he has a hard time with this, man. It violates all of his principles of electricity and the body and everything else. This thing is a ghost instrument. He concluded the other day that, well, there's nothing else to register there but thinkingness, or what did it? or how did it? or something.

It wasn't that he was baffled that this reacted against the mind, because that's rather common.

He's baffled about other things. He always thought it worked on the amount of sweat, and then he suddenly realized that you can't sweat and unsweat that fast. So there must be something else involved here, and a lot of things. But you walk up to most guys and they'll tell you it's sweat - measures sweat. All right. Good. Measures sweat. I don't know what that's got to do with it either. It doesn't measure sweat. It measures think.

But there's a lot of boys can put these meters together that don't measure think. Oddly enough, you can put the commonest type of Wheatstone bridge together and give it no damping, and the thing oddly enough will register even think. So there's nothing very mysterious about it.

The mind is hung together electronically, it's hung together with electricity. There are standing waves, standing masses, in it which are timeless. These things are drifting along in present time - and it obeys all of your electrical laws and impulses.

But remember something: the human being is the author of this universe and he's also the author of all the electronics in this universe. Actually, there are flows and currents in the human mind that have not yet been discovered in electronics. See? That a junior subject can now study a senior subject is, of course, a weird joke. But it can, which is quite peculiar.

Now, you're not interested in why an E-Meter reads really, unless you want to do some research in that particular line - beyond this one thing: a thetan is an electric eel and it measures electric currents. That's about as close as I care to come to it myself. I never speculate on this.

But you talk about oddball, offbeat data on the subject of the E-Meter. Why does the meter go tickity-tick, back and forth, with an exact pattern every time when a person wants to leave or go away or blow out of his head, or so forth?

The theta bop. The study of the theta bop could be very long and very involved. I can tell you numerous ways to produce a theta bop. Lots of ways. "Did you ever think of leaving anybody?" You get a theta bop, you see? "Did you ever think of dying?" You get a theta bop.

"Try not to be three feet in back of your head." You get a theta bop. Shoot him with a .45, you'll get a theta bop. I mean, it's an interesting thing. Well, we get the coordinative action then, and one of the ways that you could deduce or surmise that people could exteriorize and what exteriorization was and how people leave their bodies at the time of death and that sort of thing can be traced with a theta bop.

What do you want to trace it for? Why don't you just learn how to get out of your head and see how it is and get back in again. See? You don't have to figure these things out because you're on the main road anyhow. You don't have to go at it with a bunch of logics and substitutes, because it's there to look at. So you can go around picking up pebbles all over the road. You can get them in your shoes. You can fall in the ditch. You can run into milestones and culverts and bridge abutments and the neighbor's fence. You can do all of these things, but let me call to your attention that there is a main highway, and you can go down it at 110 miles an hour.

And it's the instant read; prior reads don't count; latent reads don't count. Just instant reads, that's all. And the instant read will abide by the major thought that you're putting across to the pc and, oddly enough, will occur exactly as though somebody over there had been informed when you were going to stop talking. Probably the OGPU or the NKVD. I don't know, they have an intelligence service involved.

You can be very mysterious about the whole thing, but the funny part of it is, it becomes terribly simple. And when you look at it in that way, when you clean up everything in this way, E-Metering becomes very odd.

Now, if you're so involved in prior reads and so involved in latent reads and so involved in why it reads, and if you also have a number of invalidations of the meter and also suspect that it doesn't work because it hasn't worked on you - you see, one day it didn't read when you knew it should have read - why, naturally you're going to have a hell of a time with a meter.

So break it down to that simplicity. Look at the only important read that is on the machine and you've got it.

The only other thing I can tell you about a read is when it goes more than one simple read, it is a dirty needle and is measuring, somewhere on the track, a missed withhold.

All the goals and items that you want have a single tick. The only reaction you will get on a proven goal item - single tick.

Double tick? Then the whole goal or item is a missed withhold. Soon as you get the missed withhold off, it'll no longer read. Missed withholds are always more than one tick. You never have goals and items finally proven out with any other pattern.

I have seen some prove out with a rock slam. I've seen some prove out with a rock slam. But laterly, I have realized that there wasn't much of a list every time that occurred. If there'd been a little bit more of a list, they would have proved out with a tick. It's all right as a goal, but I see these things months and months afterwards when they've settled down, and they all prove out with a tick. You understand? That's all you're really interested in with a meter.

Now, you talk about speeded rises, speeded falls, slowed rises, slowed falls - yeah, but those are all instant reads. Now you're talking about out rudiments. Now you're talking about reading the significance of the thought majeure, but it's still an instant read. It is merely a change of needle pattern. So there's significances about what this read is and what that read is, and I've just rattled them off to you. See?

There are no more than that, you see? The dirty needle is always a missed withhold. That's a double-tick arrangement. Any change of needle pattern at the instant you're finished is an instant read. And that goals and items when they check out, if they're valid, turn out to be single ticks.

Frankly, you could get along with just the data which I've given you in this lecture, and if you applied that and didn't go scrambling around the road for a bunch of new data, why, man, you'd have all the rudiments in, you'd be sailing and everything would be fine.

Okay?

Audience: Yes.

I don't say stop thinking. Think all you want to. But don't stop looking.

Thank you.