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ENGLISH DOCS FOR THIS DATE- E-Meter (SHSBC-191) - L620719
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CONTENTS THE E-METER

THE E-METER

A lecture given on 19 July 1962

How are you tonight?

Audience: Fine.

Better?

Audience: Yes.

All right. Well, this is what?

Audience: 19th. July the 19th.

Nineteen July AD 12. All right. So be it. Let's have tomorrow be the 20th. First lecture, Saint Hill Briefing Course. The results of last night's TV demonstration, in one session that was given, gave me unlimited hope. It gave me a great deal of hope, because it shows that auditing can be done. That was pretty doggone good. But it was slowed down slightly by the failure of some of you students to recognize that it was an excellent session. And you left me flabbergasted. I don't want any withholds from you, but that's a fact. How couldn't you see that auditing presence and the fact the boy was reading the E-Meter pretty doggone well? How couldn't you see that? How couldn't you look at the pc and tell whether the pc was in session or not, see? Your ability to look and see what a good session is has got to be improved. See? Going to raise your criteria. If you haven't got one we'll audit one in. But that's definitely a very, very hopeful sign. Very good auditor presence. Pc put into session with a slash and that was it. you got to learn to see that.

Tonight we're going to talk about the E-Meter. The E-Meter is an instrument mentioned in a lecture by L. Ron Hubbard in October of 1950. And I said if I had one, that would be very nice. And for about a year and a half or two years I had been trying to find out how to get an auditor to observe a pc, and I hadn't been successful at all. And I myself — I myself saw that one had a much greater need for direct and positive observation. And I've audited pcs with my fingers on their pulse and done other things trying to find out what was going on and if there was any detectable reaction. And out in California on, I think it was about the twentieth of October or something like that, I described such an instrument in a lecture and said it would be very, very, very useful. And a fellow by the name of Mathison went home and he put one together on a breadboard and I got it in very early 51. That is, I probably got it a little bit before that, but I got down to experimenting with it.

Now, these comments are very germane. The genus of the E-Meter is not, as one would like to say for the benefit of licensing and patenting and the law and public credence and all that sort of thing — just forget all those things — the genus of the E-Meter was exactly just that and it was no more than that. It was actually not born out of the Wheatstone bridge. That Mathison knew the existence of the Wheatstone bridge didn't cause him to build one. The first Mathison really isn't built that way. This was just developed just like that, to detect an electronic impulse in a human being

Now, up to that time they didn't even have the theory of a meter straight. You must realize this. Man has had these things around but they didn't even know what they were measuring. And you yourself will run into arguments about this, so you should — you need a little of the background music. They think it measures sweat. In other words, you don't have instant reads, you have instant sweats, and instant nonsweats. And the reason for that is the early galvanometer is so thoroughly insensitive that they wouldn't know whether they were measuring sweat or what. But they think it is sweat.

We had an engineer here the other day that our TV circuit was designed and built by — Reg's engineer. And Reg had him going in circles on an E-Meter, and he was saying kind of "Well," and so on. Because, you see, he knew about galvanometers, and they think these things are — they measure the amount of sweat in the palm. Sort of on the basis that if somebody gets nervous his palms get sweaty. That's how far back the animal psychologist is in it, see? And Reg talked to him for a while and of course there was a meter up there. Of course, unobserved, why, he could take hold of the thing and fool with it a little bit and so on. And pretty soon he was rather diffidently shocked about it. He was coming to the conclusion that it must measure something about an electrical or mental impulse. See? He'd come toward that conclusion. Now, possibly there's more to the story than that but that will serve our needs at the moment. That it was an electrical read, not an electrical measure of a physical read, that it was all electrical, that — something like this. Something was dawning on him that it might be in that direction, that it really was reading thought and so on. Spooked him quite a bit. Now, this is a very knowledgeable man, you see? He knows his stuff pretty well.

And engineers in Scientology and electronics men in Scientology have not always recognized, have not always recognized completely, that this is a wild departure from standard thought on the subject; we're doing something else. The meter is designed to do something else than the old psychogalvanometer or any part of an old lie detector or anything else.

Now, if they'd known how those things work maybe they would have developed one that did work. But, as a matter of fact, they don't work. And if you get somebody who is accustomed merely to the old psychogalvanometer, or something, to fool around with a circuit or something and build an E-Meter — and he doesn't know anything about Scientology or anything like that — one of the first things he does is protect the movement. It's necessary, you know. Meter comes first and subject comes second. And they build a lag into the movement of the thing And to this day you can see homemade E-Meters around that have built-in comm lags in them. And it's about a half a second to a second built-in comm lag. It's pretty grim. The instant read, then, occurs a half a second to a second late.

Well, this was true of all earlier meters, so, of course, nobody did any observation on it because the electronic circuit was not a direct circuit. And the Keeler galvanometer, I think, has this same fault, and I think they read prior reads.

Now, I don't know. I haven't been through their course up near Chicago. Because I get mixed up. I don't know whether the alcoholic cure is Keeler, see, or whether that's Keeley. See? There's somebody down in the southwest that cures alcohol and their name is Keeler or Keeley, see? And this other outfit near Chicago is named Keeler or Keeley, so I can't even write to them. I'm liable to, you know, insult them or something so it's put me pretty badly out of communication. Otherwise, I'd go up and take their three-and-a-half-day course on the operation… I probably would, too, and see what they teach is which. And I might know a little bit more about the background music.

I only know what I have found from police operators who have had that course. And the police operator uses a lie detector in combination with a blood pressure meter and a breath meter. And it's a muscular-strap arrangement that goes around the chest and if the guy goes "uh-ha-uh-ha-uh-ha-uhha-uh-ha," it registers, and if a guy's blood goes pound, pound, pound, pound, pound, it registers. And these three needles — one from a galvanometer, one from the blood pressure, and one from the breath — are all joined together on an endless tape which has three needles, and you can make notations on the side of this tape as to what this was a reaction on. So the fellow writes down "bodies under bridges" — give you an actual case — "bodies under bridges," you see, and then asks the question, "Bodies under bridges?" and sees if there's any disturbance of these three needles on that area of the tape that says, "Bodies under bridges." Now, this is just about as crude as you can get because none of these reads are instant reads. The galvanometer's motion is protected so the actual read is always too late to be considered, of course. It's prior reads that they consider, so any restimulative word causes the police lie detector operator to immediately say, "He's guilty. Take him out and hang him."

But over the years they've become wise to this. They've gotten a coordination of cases and people have turned up often enough, after they'd burned the guy in the chair, and things like this, and confessed to the actual murder, that they've got a coordination of data, and their vital statistics demonstrate to them that it's 9.5 percent to 15 percent wrong. And their data also says that a certain percentage, which is not announced but is probably the same percentage — they would condense this data, don't you see? They'd say 9.5 percent to 15 percent of the people who are put on this lie detector machine cannot be detected by the machine. See? So they expect the machine to be that much in error, always. They do not distinguish, physiological or any other way, prior to the reading of the machine, whether the fellow will read on the machine or not, and they don't take any particular characteristic of the machine as saying whether he will read on the machine or not.

Now, the early Mathison that — no matter what Mathison did afterwards, give the man credit, see? Mostly what Mathison didn't do is he wouldn't listen. He kept building things that had long tubes and that you glued onto elephant's toenails and — I don't know, my God! He finally got up to a fourhundred-dollar lie detector that has two dials and five or six adjustments, all of which throw inconstants into the read, and about that time an auditor couldn't read any part of any of this, you see? But to this day he still carries "Tone Scale" on his tone arm. See? I told him about the Tone Scale so he drew an arbitrary Tone Scale over this, and this became known as the tone arm. He built these things for a while for chiropractors and so on. Possibly even today he builds some of them. But he wouldn't groove the machine in to practical auditing.

So the first year that I had this machine, it was refined two or three times, and the first two or three times it was refined on request. And the very first Mathison would not read on a large percentage of the cases. I don't know what the percentage was because I didn't have enough people on it, but it — recognizably more than 10 percent. The people would come in off the bottom of the dial — see, you couldn't wind it down enough to catch some people — and you couldn't turn it up enough to catch some other people. The sensitivity knob in those days couldn't be advanced enough to separate the read of a low-tone pc. And if a fellow was sitting there in a lot of mass, you just couldn't get him on the machine. You just couldn't ever get your needle on the dial. So I got him to expand this and got him to make this more flexible so it'd take more people, and so on, and we expanded the thing, and made him adjust the sensitivity of the thing and so on. By the end of 1952 we had a pretty good meter — pretty functional.

And unfortunately Purcell grabbed the first of these things which would be a good museum piece, and it had probably been thrown on a junk heap someplace up in some junk-heap state. "Kanzarkansas," I think the name of the state is. I keep forgetting these things that have alter-ised the track so badly. I think the name of the town was Mud Bayou, Kanzarkansas. Yeah, I think so. Where the presidents don't come from.

Anyhow, I'd still — I'd like to have — I'd like to have those, because there was the original meter, the original Mathison, was not unlike the face layout of this meter; not unlike it at all. And it had a dial and it had a tone arm and it had a sensitivity knob and it had a jack and you plugged in the cans, and so forth.

Well, the thing wouldn't read mental thoughts when we first got ahold of this thing. Let's go back to that first machine and our trials and tribulations with it, and I think it will remind you of some of your own trials and tribulations with this machine.

It wouldn't read. Oh, you could jump on the electrodes. I think they eventually — they had an egg — no a tea strainer — the tea strainer electrode eventually evolved along this line. But the original ones had just a little bar and you were supposed to put a plastic bag over the pc's hand, one hand, so that he couldn't knock the cans together. And this was Mathison's first concern. He was always worried about knocking the cans together because he was afraid his meter would short out, of course. And that was a mains meter, and that — that plugged into the mains, and all kinds of valves in the back of the thing glowed and so on. And the production line of these things had the frailty of very often having the chassis grounded to the pc, and now and then you'd pick up the electrodes on a Mathison and get 110 volts right straight off the mains. And, once in a while, an auditor whose Mathison had been operating just fine would reach over to start to move the machine while it was switched on and get 110 volts off the back of the case. They were jolty. They sort of made things respected — made themselves respected in this fashion.

And the thing — the thing had tiny little bars for its electrodes and when it was first delivered up to the house, Mary Sue — she wasn't around when that thing first arrived, but she was around shortly afterwards when we were doing things hot and heavy with the thing. But a fellow named Jim Elliot was there at that time and Jim and I sat up most of the night. I finally got disgusted with the whole thing because we couldn't make it read, couldn't make it do anything.

And one of them was a projection meter. There were two, and one of them was a great big projection meter, sort of a magic lantern with an element built across a huge magic-lantern lens with a reverse Tone Scale on this thing so it projected right into — when it hit a screen. It was an interesting and a very, very good projection meter. I've never seen as good a projection meter. If it had the guts of a Mark IV to that needle across the lens, that would be the finest projection meter anybody would wish for. But he fooled around with the projection meter, and I was fooling around with the other meter, and after a half a dozen shocks and no mental reads and a few things like that I was getting awful disgusted with this thing.

And I don't know whether it was Jim or whether it was me, but somebody thought of soup cans. By increasing the amount of electrode area we might be able to increase the mental read. And so we went out in the kitchen — and I think V8 vegetable juice or something like that; and we got awful tired of that stuff after a while, you know. Because, you know, American Can Company won't sell you just plain tin cans. You've got to go out and… If they do sell you tin cans, they cost as much as a can of soup anyhow, and you can't get them. For some reason or other these big can companies won't sell you cans. Sears and Roebuck at one time had home-canning outfits, and I hoped to be able to get spare cans from them, but we've never been able to run down just plain cans! We've always been going to the grocery store and buying a couple of new brands of vegetable juice or orange juice or something of the sort that were the right size, bringing them home, drinking the stuff down and washing them all out and hooking them onto the meter. Some day somebody is going to permanently paint cans, you know, and they won't have paper on them, and we'll be sunk. They don't realize — they don't realize what scientific advance is hanging on this whim. Hey! We'd be out of business at once.

And it must have been two, three, four o'clock in the morning when we finally hooked up these cans, and so help me Pete, we could get a reaction that was understandably and visibly and undoubtedly a mental reaction. And at that point I knew we had something.

We went on and fooled with that thing for quite a long time. Did various things with it. I put different types of people on it; studied their reactions. And to this day I go back to that work every time I turn around.

You know, you get a constant, agitated rock slam on psychotics. You possibly didn't know that, but you'll be horrified someday. You'll be down in the local spinbin; they've just laid out the red carpet for you and that sort of thing; and the psychiatrist is standing there with his staff drawn up on dress parade, surrendering the place to you, you know, handing you the electrodes of his electric-shock machine or something like that. And you'll go in there and you'll put some — with great confidence you'll put some psycho on your meter, thinking you are going to do something And you're not going to do anything — not with a meter, man.

Fortunately, it coincides with this: when a person's needle is in constant, agitated rock slam — a manic-depressive, schizophrenic, these people — constant agitated rock… Oh, it's just horrible! Just all over the place. Nnzzrrrr! As soon as you pull it down far enough on sensitivity, why, you're below his read because the guy is just pounded in, in concrete, don't you see? Fortunately, no E-Meter process will work on these people and you'd use CCHs anyway. See, that's just fortunate because it means that we really don't have to develop a psychotic-detecting E-Meter. But you will be horrified when you first see a real full-blown psycho on an E-Meter. The needle will either be stuck like the sword in the hand of a statue, or it'll be so agitated that you can't read any part of it.

Now, if it isn't that way — if it isn't that way and you can talk to the person, the person is auditable on an E-Meter. It's a fortunate coincidence.

It's just a coincidence that if you can read a psychotic on the E-Meter he'll run a Prepcheck process. See? If he'd speak to you or answer the auditing question. But if it's too agitated for you to read it on the meter — we're not talking about the little dirty needles that you guys get occasionally. This is violent, man.

Your little dirty needle cleans up when somebody finds out that the TR 4 was mishandled in the beginning of your first auditing session, or something wild has been going on, and various oddball things. You know you can get a dirty needle from people objecting to the electric current they feel in their hands, even on a Mark IV? If they've got an awful lot of overts on the electrical line. I cleaned up a dirty needle one time with just running up those overts. You know, "shocking people" and things like that? Cleaned it up very nicely.

It's just a happy thought, it's a very happy thought, that if you can read the person — you can get a reaction on the person — why, you can audit them with a think process, you know? They can audit with a conversational process — you know, repetitive process of some kind or another. You get your rudiments in, everything. No matter how batty they look, or what their reputation is.

I found out also that psychiatric assignment or classification had nothing whatsoever to do with sanity, through an E-Meter. Hasn't any bearing on sanity. As I told you before, I finally found out what this was (not afterwards but before I had the answer to this), and it was the institution they're in that determines the type of psychosis they have, which I think is interesting.

So the meter, to that degree, will detect whether or not a person is auditable. I learned that very early on.

Now, I went on from there and developed this — the second model of it and a more sensitive third model and did an awful lot of work with this thing

The result of that work is still extant in The History of Man. Mary Sue and I worked on that, I guess, for the better part of a year. And my God, you talk about chasing each other and everybody else, and so forth, all over the time track picking up this and that. If you want to see a sixteen-dial drop on one of these things, why, just take the Grim Weeper or something like that in The History of Man, and you'll see a sixteen-dial drop. They're sixteen-dialdrop incidents. They go on and on and on and on and on and the needle is falling fast all that time. It's not a slow fall. And you just keep trying to free it off the pin. And your effort to keep freeing it off the pin will be something like five down . . . See? Your tone arm is reading something like this. Sixteen dials. And those incidents still exist in everybody's bank.

Now, the meter, then, landed us in a complete cul-de-sac. As you know, if you stay in this lifetime with a Prepcheck you can make somebody look pretty good. But what we ran into, unwittingly, because of the meter, was the whole, open span of the backtrack. Now, the E-Meter didn't pilot this out. I'd found backtrack earlier than that, to such a degree that the board of the first Foundation was resigning all over the place if I dared go on and research past lives. It was the damnedest thing I ever heard of. Anyhow . . . And it was the first time they found out I could get mad. And they said afterwards that was what really shocked them, you know? That sort of thing. They had to pull themselves out of the plaster from the wall back of them. And that really shattered them. That was probably the beginning of the end of the first Foundation, right there. But I thought, "There can't be people around to tell you what to research and what not to research, man. That would be the end of all."

But it wasn't until we had the E-Meter that we went back and found out how significant all this was and how fantastic all this was and the number of engrams that actually exist on the whole track of the pc. And the number is infinity. Whew! And don't kid yourself, that was an awful research blow. And that was pounded right into view by the E-Meter. Because it meant that Dianetics was wrong. As far as I could see, Dianetics was wrong.

Now, what I had been doing previous to that was taking this lifetime's engrams, taking these engrams, taking something like conception and birth, something like that, and on a case that could run an engram you could clean that case up and make them look awful good. Oddly enough, we've come right back to it again in Prepchecking As long as you keep somebody around this lifetime, you can make them look awful good by just running this lifetime.

But this was an end of track, as far as I could see at that time. I didn't care why this was, or if there was any saving graces about it. It became absolutely positive and obvious that to make a Clear Clear — exclamation point Clear — by first-book definition, which is to run out every incident and every engram on the track, that this was impossible. You just didn't have enough time to do it, that's all. There are too many. And that was where the first E-Meter landed us. And that was an interesting research datum. You can do it to this day. If you want to fool around for a year or so with an E-Meter, you can plot up whole track on people in the most general incidents and so on. It's pretty hair-raising. But you will soon come to the conclusion that if we had to do it engram by engram, or even chains of engrams, if we did it on a whole-track basis, we're in for four or five lifetimes of engram running And that was the first thing we learned from an E-Meter.

So Suzie and I went down to the library, and we started hauling books out and looking for words. And we finally found scio and we find ology. And there was the founding of that word. Now, that word had been used to some degree before. There had been some thought of this. Actually the earliest studies on these didn't have any name to them until a little bit along the line and then I called it anything you could think of. But we found that this word Scientology, you see — and it could have been any other word that had also been used — was the best-fitted word for exactly what we were — wanted.

Scio means knowing in the fullest sense of the word. It is one of these ultimate or exclamation-point words. Translated across it becomes scien. And we went down and we made sure that that was the right word and that was what we were trying to do and that was what I was heading for and so forth. And she was very good about it. she was lugging the books and I was turning the pages. You know, proper division of labor. And we said, "Well, that's what we've got to do."

Now, one of the reasons this was so is because we had to move out — I had to move out of the field of studying the mind into studying knowingness. Simultaneously during this work, I wrote the first axioms of Dianetics (doing the first E-Meter work) and the first axioms of knowledge. And that was a wonderful weapon in itself. I assembled the means by which this was done. And the mind is only a vessel of knowledge. If you want to know the conclusion I came to, it was just that: it's just a vessel of knowledge. So what are you studying the earthenware for, see? That's what that amounts to. So it required a brand-new approach. And it was. It was a completely reversed approach to what we had been doing before.

Exteriorization, other things, started coming up. We went on down to Phoenix and I kept on studying this and that and well, we had fifteen-dozen ways of trying to study and view this idea of looking at a thetan and so on.

And one day Evans Farber — one night — he showed up on the front porch out in the desert there, and he wouldn't go away; he had to see me. And I'd had a hard day and I was there watching Mr. Farber decide he wasn't going to go away. And I was feeling mean about it, as a matter of fact. I was just feeling darn mean. And by golly, he went out on the front lawn and he lay down and he wouldn't go anyplace. Well, Evans had had many wild ideas at one time or another and he'd occupied hours in trying to relay these things. And I was very tired, I'd been lecturing all day, and I just was bound and determined I wasn't going to see him! That was all! Just mean. And I finally said — conscience got the better of me — said, "What the hell. He's lying out there on the front lawn, exposing himself to the Arizona night."

So I went on out the front porch and I said, "All right, Evans, what have you got?" Well, actually, Suzie was pretty cross at both of us the next morning because we'd been making so much noise the rest of the night, and so forth, she couldn't sleep. But it was the "Try not to be three feet back of your head." That works to this day.

He'd taken two lines out of a bulletin and combined the two things, and he'd looked this over, and then he had decided that it would be a reverse vector. So he had put the magic words — not "be three feet back of your head" but "try not to be three feet back of your head." And he found out he was getting the largest proportion of people he addressed these words to — they would fly out of their heads like they were shot from guns. He was having a ball. So he blew me about halfway across Arizona, and I blew him out of his head. Nobody had said it to him yet. We went around patching things up.

The things I've been through. What I have done for you, my God!

Anyway, old Evans was very elated with all this and he finally went off home. And that was practically the end of the E-Meter. Because you can't register a thetan out of his head.

I came over to England. We fooled around a bit more with E-Meters, we were still using E-Meters on detection, we were still working with E-Meters to some degree, but it wasn't making any real advance, don't you see, because I wasn't depending on them. And I tried to develop a thetan detector. I took one of these magic eye things that had just been designed — it's a little bar; it's not the round magic eye but it's the little bar magic eye — and by amplification was trying to test exteriorization. I was up at 30 Marlborough Place up here in London for a long time. And we were trying to test exteriorization. How do you test an exteriorized thetan? See? And the difficulty with the meter was, if a being in his head or out came within a circle of about ten to fifteen feet from this antenna it started registering. Now, you could blow somebody out of his head and make him sit on the table or around the antenna and you'd get the read, providing the auditor then didn't approach the antenna; or if he was within ten feet of the antenna didn't wiggle his head. you get the idea? It was very unparticular on what thetan it registered.

Now, the gimmickry on that was really — not really worth preserving. I've even forgotten exactly how it was amplified and so forth, but it was mostly because it was such common electronics that any good electronics man could reapproximate this thing. It just super-super-superamplified and then you read the thing on an expanding beam of light in a tube. you got the guy — or you could put it on just ordinary E-Meter providing the meter was far enough away from the antenna.

We made several mains E-Meters. We had trouble making E-Meters. E-Meters were around for a long time. We used them more or less. There was no real improvement in E-Meters and about 1955, 56, something like that, I think we stopped using them entirely. Didn't have anything to do with E-Meters for quite a while. And then all of a sudden we moved in toward the first Clearing ACC over in the States. And I did assessments on a lot of people with the E-Meter. But, basically, it was on this basis that E-Meters revived.

There were several chaps around the Washington organization and to give any one of them full credit along this line would be a mistake. Well, Dale had been around talking about this sort of thing, and Pinkham, and there'd been a lot of this sort of thing over a period of time and they'd done various things with circuits and meters and so on. And I wasn't paying much attention. I'd listen, but I wasn't paying it any real attention because I didn't have an immediate or real use for this machine.

Till all of a sudden one or another of these designed the first transistor meter, which is the direct grandfather of the Mark IV. About 1957 that thing was released and the immediate result of offering this E-Meter, you know, in an auditing session and taking the amount of material that it could give you and so forth — the immediate and direct result of this was leading directly up to clearing And we made a whole bunch of first dynamic Clears (something on the — I've forgotten the percentage; it was fifteen out of sixty, or fifteen out of seventy or something like that; it was some fabulous percentage) on Help — a 5-way bracket on Help. And there was only one bug to the process. There was a big bug on the process. It was, I had to do the assessment. That's a horrible fact.

We were assessing on machines and factories and all kinds of circuitry. We were assessing circuitry. And there were three types of circuitry and — there's an awful lot of technology all mixed up in this, you know? All these types of circuitry — oh, I guess, I look around here; some of you were there — and you could detect this circuitry, and then if you got a terminal that fitted that circuit, of course (we know now) you had the name of the terminal, you see? So therefore, everybody who had a beingness goal (this we know now, didn't know it then), everybody who had a beingness goal and who happened to choose the terminal of that beingness, you see, goal… And we ran a 5-way bracket of Help on this thing, we got a first dynamic Clear who might fall in again because we hadn't got any of the GPM really out of the road. We just got it keyed out.

In fact, let me see, there's somebody right now I just remembered that is here — Tony — and we had something on you that was heading for the direction of Clear. And if they haven't got his goal right this minute, I could exhume what this was, do a list like I just did on Jean. I knew that the word doctor was kicking around because she went Clear on this down in South Africa, so the goal must have contained the word doctor. Had her auditor do a whole list of these things after she was — I beat her a few times and managed to get her to do it. And got a whole list of these goals with the word doctor in them. They assessed out this short list and they got the goal. See? Tricky, huh? We could probably do the same with Tony. I just remembered it.

In other words, you could clear anybody with these technologies, whose terminal was also his goal. Do you see the basic limitation of this thing Terminal was also the goal.

Well now, how I did these original assessments — because I assessed everybody on that ACC, the whole lot. I did them in two afternoons, fifteen minutes per person. And the — the trick of assessment, you see, was to find exactly what the — I don't know if we were using the word Rock but it was what the Rock was, anyway. I didn't remember if I applied the word Rock till the later part of the course or the early part of the course. But anyhow, this was the Rock, whatever it was, and naturally that would be — if that flukily coincided with the wording of a goal that would clear them; we had a Clear.

Well man, the meter was in. The meter was in. It proved itself right there. There wasn't any more monkey business about this. I couldn't find out how you could do it otherwise. That was it. Took this type of assessment. Well, before, assessment had not been this vital. But it became obvious to me at that point — about 1956, 57, during that period sometime — it was getting more and more obvious to me that you weren't going to clear anybody without a meter. And this was horrible because I'd never been able to teach an auditor to use one!

Ah, the cat is out of the bag! I'd never worked very hard; I'll give you that. I'd never worked very hard to teach auditors. But I used to watch auditors sitting around with a meter in their lap and the needle's waggling — particularly if they got one of these whizeroo Mathisons that had to be driven in on a truck. And the needles would be going back and forth in conflict and dials ringing and gongs going and . . . We've even got one of these old beep meters upstairs. I'll have to break that out because it proves something else entirely different than E-Metering.

But we were in. That was it. you weren't going to clear anybody without an E-Meter, because you had to be able to look into their bank and find the anatomy of that bank and find the proper button to press; and if you pressed any other button — as some of you either have learned or may, I hope not, learn from experience on a pc and I — certainly not on yourself — the bank beefs up and goes blooey. Everything goes wrong if you get the wrong button.

You're going to run the wrong button long enough or hard enough on a pc with a clearing process and you'll practically ruin him. The remedy of it is to find the right button and run that. But they're awful uncomfortable. And the Step 6 phenomena that we ran into in clearing, shortly after all that, was wrong button. You get the pc mocking up something that's off his goal line and the bank beefs up because of the goal. And it isn't that creativeness mocks up the bank. See? Finally been able to understand the rest of this Step 6 phenomena — why Step 6 worked on some cases and didn't work on others. Naturally, if you had the guy's goal run out, or desensitized, he could then do all types of Creative Processes which are not in conflict with his goal. That's Step 6 phenomena. You're not terribly concerned with that one way or the other, but I just mentioned it in passing. It's actually running the wrong goal.

I mentioned to you in a recent lecture that the phenomena of alteration of creativeness was your highest pin. So therefore religion and who created this universe plays an enormously strong role in banks and that sort of thing. Well, you run — you collide with that when you get the wrong goal for the individual, and just everything starts to beef up and go solid.

Now, when a bank goes solid, that's no fun. That is no fun. I can tell you that by experience — personal experience. I've had my own bank beefed up to a point where it was just nothing but concrete and you practically had to take small hammers and chip them off of the area in front of my eyes so I could see, you know? What I've been through for you. Anyhow, a very good subjective reality on that. And of — one of the things — reasons I've "been through things for you" — not putting it that way — but one of the reasons I've been through these things: I very often will refuse to subject a pc to an experimental process that I halfway feel will knock his block off. so I feel I could dig myself out of it and usually have.

Now, the difficulty, though, of auditors finding the right Rock loomed enormously, because I've never known a proper assessment. I've never known of one.

So from that point till now, two things have been in action, two separate things: is technology which unwound any accidental out of this package of clearing. We must understand everything there is to know about clearing. There must not be any unknown data. And the data we do find must be interpretable by an auditor on an E-Meter. Well, this required a meter. And the first British meter was simply built, I don't mind telling you, as a mere copy of the American meter. I didn't even possibly think it would be as good. I hoped we could build as good a meter over here as the 1957 American meter. Sounds funny, doesn't it? Because I should have known from my earlier experience with British electronics people that they're pretty sharp on an individualistic basis.

America is the mass-production area of the world. See? They will build it better, they will build it so it works more automatically, they will build it so it works longer with less repair, and they will build more of it than anybody could possibly have any use for, see? But they won't, and apparently almost can't, build a little of anything on a company or manufacturing business.

And I might have realized that these boys Fowler and Allen, when I first collided with them — I'd collided with another E-Meter manufacturer uptown and a few geniuses on the line and that sort of thing, but none of these could really answer up to what we wanted. And when Fowler and Allen came along, why, I thought, "These are pretty sharp boys." And I started telling them what it was all about and that sort of thing, and they made the first of these present series of meters. And they didn't have any reality on what they were making; they were not Scientologists; and they were just hooking wires together. They took the green and gold meter that somebody was making uptown up here (was a copy of the American meter), and they didn't like this meter. They didn't like the meter they were copying it from. So they asked me if they couldn't do this and that, and I looked over some of the stuff they were doing, and I said, "Well, that's good. That's fine. Just so it works." And they built the first of these meters.

Well, one day, Fowler, no, it was Allen was sitting across the desk from me and I told them how these meters worked. And of course, they thought they were building something that looked like a psychogalvanometer, you see? And they were trying to add up all this theory together and they — and so forth, and they didn't have a clue what they were doing

So I sat this fellow down across from my desk and I ran a responsibility process on whatever he was looking at, and put him on the meter and asked him a few things and located, oh, a dead war companion and his feeling of overts against that one and some things, and then found out that he was just looking at blackness but — surrounding a window. But he had a window. And I thought, "This is intriguing." So I asked him what part of that scene he was looking at could he be responsible for. (I don't know if you've ever run this on a pc or not, but the results are sometimes quite fascinating.) And the next thing you know, he had more and more room. He was seeing more and more room, you see, in the picture. He was backing up from this window, and he saw more and more room. And all of a sudden the atomic bombs went off through the window, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, and he turned around and ran away from the window, ran out of the room, jumped into his car (small space opera-type vehicle) and took off over a hill with full kinesthesia. Sitting right there in the chair across from me, you see, he got the full operation of jumping in the car and the car speeding off and accelerating, and then going over this hill, you know. And you know how light you feel sometimes when something goes over a hill fast. And he didn't have this picture anymore. And he didn't look the same either. And they became rather mystic about it all. They weren't quite sure what had happened, but they knew something had happened.

Well, on numerous occasions I explained to them bits and pieces of the operation of the E-Meter and odd bits of this and that, and they finally began to recognize that it was reading something, and they learned how to read it on each other a bit, you know, and that sort of thing. And they got accustomed to what we were doing, and I got them to do some work on the OT meter and — eventually. But that's ahead of the story.

On this meter, they went on and built the Mark II and they built the Mark III and I smoothed that out, and built the Mark IV, the present meter. Well, they built the Mark IV by the time they were pretty knowledgable about things, and they changed a lot of things around. For instance, the early meter can occasionally get a big rock slam on the thing and you'd have to throw the dial — this is true of the American meters — and they have to throw the dial back and forth hard to clean the dust out of it. Well, this has got a pot in it that that can't happen with. There's several oddities here that have been built into it that are quite distinctly different. But more than that, the circuit is a bit shifted here and there and sensitized up, and the thing has its own balancing mechanisms and so forth. And they've solved quite a few interesting electronic problems, such as the drift of the meter during auditing and so on.

And they have also built two or three monstrosities as prototypes for this and that, and they have been rejected. In other words, there's been a lot of hunt and fumble here. There was one meter that — you would have laughed; it had — and you wouldn't have used it either. It had two dials down here and you switched the meter on and then you adjusted the needle to set with one of these dials and then you waited for one minute — I can see you waiting for one minute — and then you plugged it in and adjusted the other dial to set and actually after that it would not creep either way. That was fixed in but they balanced it twice. We rejected that.

Anyway, they finally not only got the meter's design we finally wanted, but also did this so that it's a good — a pretty consistent production. And although we check these meters out, there's less and less variation from meter to meter. They smooth these things out as they go along. They find parts that wear in them and they make sure that the next time they build a series that the part doesn't. And the meter, although it's a Mark IV, is actually in constant state of refinement as far as the actual parts are concerned. For instance, they just offered me a new cord today that could be buried at the bottom of the sea for 150 years without any deterioration. But you're not going to be auditing down there, so I . . . It felt just a little bit sticky to my hand and it smelled slightly medical, so I rejected the stuff. Anyway . . .

I just designed a case for these things, by the way. I don't know if any of you have seen those E-Meter cases or if any of them have been shipped in. Maybe they're under manufacture at the present time. They take a clipboard the size of an auditor's report. They take the meter, and they take two soup cans, and the lady's powder puff and a few things like that, and then flap over and strap over your shoulder. And the more important part of it is, the case can be rolled up into a relatively small ball and still protect the meter when the meter is in it. odd things like this are going along.

But the meter, as far as that's concerned, is still designed to do just one job. And that was from 1950 on forward. And that job is simply to detect what the pc has in the reactive bank. That is the job the meter is designed for. And it is actually incidental that the meter detects what the pc is thinking or doing or withholding or anything like that. Somehow or another we could probably get by those later points. But we would never get by "What does he have in the reactive bank?" You see? That is the basic mission of the E-Meter.

And you go on and start fooling around with meters or trying to design them or trying to do something with them and start stressing that it's just what the pc is thinking, what the pc is withholding from you, does he have problems and that sort of thing, as the important line, you could totally miss this other one. And that is what the meter is built to do. And the meter is not built just to keep rudiments in or something like that. Those are auxiliary uses of the E-Meter.

The meter therefore must be sensitive enough and must be built around this one point of the detection of a prime postulate in an individual. If a meter will not detect a prime postulate, that meter is useless — just pointblank — because you wouldn't ever clear anybody with it.

Now, I probably haven't talked about this for a long time. you probably knew a lot of this or maybe it set some of your data straight because some of the propaganda issued in the early days and so forth — not necessarily totally factual. And I've given you a very — a very straight story of this E-Meter.

Now, the greatest liability of the meter has not been a poorly built meter. We have always been able to refine a meter down to a point where it would read the prime postulate. It takes pretty fine doing. It has to be a very sensitive meter — far, far more sensitive than you would dream of. Because when you really find one today after listing 850 goals or 1,000 or 1,500 goals to where there's no tone arm action left on the goals list — and by test there should be 7X0 tone arm action left on the goals list before you start nulling the first time — when you get down to that point the goal probably reads something on the order of about a fifth to a quarter of a division of the dial at sensitivity 16. And that would be the absolute minimum sensitivity that a meter could have to operate with. That'd be absolute minimum because you couldn't detect below that point. But if you have a meter that is too sensitive, it picks up all the body reactions and everything else the pc is doing — digesting, blinking his eyes and twitching and anything else — and it becomes an unreadable meter. Now, there's possibly design ways to get around that but they haven't been designed to do it.

Now, this meter — this meter has the liability of auditor reading. And it has always had that liability. And I had not realized until just last week — to show you that a terrific advance has been made here . . . You think it's just done so that you would be kicked around, but that's not true. A terrific advance has been made here: E-Meter reading has been singled out as — given the existing technology — as the weakest point of auditing today and the one point which must be corrected in the auditor before he can be called a safe auditor. That is the one point. Now, that has always been the toughest point about an E-Meter: getting an auditor to read one.

Now, so much technology has gathered around this point because of so much difficulty in getting this done… See, I learned how to read one of these things in 1952, and there's never been any doubt in my mind about it as to how they read or what the read looked like or anything like that. Well, I'm way ahead of you on practice, and additionally I'm probably ahead of you on just the basic idea of obnosis. I'm perfectly willing to sit and observe what's happening without dreaming up any reason why it happened or anything else, you see? And I'm willing to sit there and look at the needle. One day you will acquire this. you won't do anything else; you will look at the needle and then you will act.

And the gist of this is that the meter has been abandoned on at least one occasion for a period of two or three years because I despaired of teaching auditors to read the meter. But at that time very little had been articulated about meter reads. A tremendous amount of information now exists on the subject of meter reads because I've been analyzing everything I've known about meters all these years and everything that's done with these meters and how they respond and behave, and limiting down exactly what auditors do wrong with meters. And I've had a great deal of attention on that.

And I find, in the final analysis, that it is simply an auditor has yet to acquire an everytimeness for a clean or a reaction on the part of the meter, and that's the only thing that an auditor is missing on. And that's what he is missing on.

Some auditors choose to have trouble with coordinating the last syllable of what they are saying with the read of the meter in order to get an instant read on the thing Well, I don't really buy that that is any difficulty at all because I never watch a needle for any read until I have enunciated the last syllable. See, let's say out was the last word in the goal or something like that or the line or the rudiment, and it's basically — not even bothering to look, you see? Let's say, "How would you find out?" You see? All right. "How would you . . ." It's really this way: "How would you find out?" See? But that introduces a comm lag, so your trained response is really this: "How would you find — out?" And then your eye is on the thing during the period of the articulation of the t of out and of course you see the read. But you're going to wear your eyes out looking at it. "How would you find ." Who cares? See? "How would you find ." You introduce fantastic quantities of eyestrain and that sort of thing into meter reading. It's just like the needle must be on the dial at the moment you say the last syllable. It doesn't matter whether it is or not before that moment.

You could be looking at this. you could look at the pc. "How would you find out?" Yeah. And your coordination between the enunciation of the last syllable and the instantaneousness of the read is then done all in a split second. You lift your eyes off the meter or don't bother to look. can you fix your eyes on something without looking at it? You can. you can. There is an additional action called looking that has nothing to do with pointing the eyes. Learn the difference sometimes. Just fix your eyes on the wall and look at it, and then don't look at it. Look at it, don't look at it, see? Look at it, and don't look at it. It's looking in that instant that is giving you the trouble on some cases.

But the technique of how you read one, the drills of how one should be — read one, should contain equally "it isn't reading" with "it is reading." "All right, point me out some no-reads," you should, as coach, tell the student. "All right, give me a no-read." And he's got to show you times when the meter is not reading.

"Not reading, not reading, not reading, not reading."

"All right. Give me some times the meter is reading."

"Read, read, read, read, read."

Just watching a needle, no instant read. Just the thing drifting around.

"Give me some not-reads."

"That's a not-read, and that's a not-read, and that's a not-read, that's a not-read."

"Give me some reads."

"That's a read. That's a read. That's a read. That's a read."

Get the idea? Just that type of drill. Then let him hook it up to his own vocal cords. Because that's a separate action.

But now I believe we know how to teach people to read an E-Meter and if we don't know I'll jolly well find out, because I have made up my mind not to any longer retreat on this subject. If you're going to clear people, you're going to have to be able to detect the thing in the mind that is keeping the person from not being Clear. I know of no other way to do it except with an E-Meter. If you're going to clear people, going to have to learn an E-Meter.

So I have finally made up my mind — which I never had before, completely — that you've got to learn how to read an E-Meter. Also, that you can and will learn how to read an E-Meter. That is all. Because there's no way around that particular impediment on the track. There isn't any other way around it. There isn't anything else can be done for you except that fact. We can give every assistance in the world in learning how to read one but we've got to cross that hump. And that's what you've seen happen here in the last ten days or so. And I've given you a resume of all of this oddball oddities of history just to show you that there's quite a bit of background to the E-Meter, but there's never been this background to it: You've got to learn how to read one and you will be able to read one. See?

So that's the background we have added to this, because it comes along with this other datum: that the only reason one auditor seems to be better than another auditor is because one auditor can read an E-Meter and the other auditor cannot. Presence is marvelous. You can acquire all these things. The drills are very interesting; they're very easy. Everything is very smooth. You can smooth a session out. you can do all kinds of things. You can get your auditing questions answered. You — all of these things are fine, but in the final analysis it's whether you can read a meter or not read a meter that makes you a good auditor or somebody who can't audit.

All right. I have spoke my piece on the subject of E-Meters, and I've had it on my mind, and I thought I had better tell all.

Thank you.

Audience: Thank you.