'[Start of Lecture]'

The learning processes are, all of them, extremely interesting to the auditor, because it brings to his attention at once that the common denominator of communication and aberration is at once telling somebody something; it's a good common denominator: it's telling somebody something.

You say to somebody, "Hello," you mean, in essence, "I am here, you are there and I recognize it." It is the relay of an idea.

Well now, learning itself has been, for I don't know how long, very sharply compartmented. It's been very carefully grooved, so that learning as we speak of it then prior to 1956, meant what they meant in school, and that was the inflow of ideas.

Now, if inflow of ideas answered up to this, why, then they would have had it, you see, if it had to do with an inflow of ideas only. So when you speak to somebody out in the public about learning, he thinks you're talking about an inflow of ideas, don't you see, from some source or another. That's what he thinks you're talking about, either from a book or a teacher. Now, that is a very narrow thing, and when I talked to you about this before, I was using learning in that definition; an inflow of ideas. It is not true that learning rate, or the rate that one will permit ideas to inflow is the common denominator of aberration or anything else; but it certainly looks like it. See, it looks like it; it looks awfully like it. The truth of the matter is, if you only considered the inflow, it would be like considering the motivator without the overt act.

Now, you know as an auditor how important it is to look at the overt act rather than the motivator. You get the idea? Don't look at these inflows all the time. You continue to look at these inflows, and nothing but these inflows, and you will make as many mistakes as have been made in the past umpteen thousands of years in the field of education; and let's not make those mistakes all over again.

Education could have been defined this way (it was not, but everybody would agree with this definition, I'm sure): Education is the process of placing data in the recalls of another. Do you see that? That is what education thought it was doing; it thought it was placing ideas, data, in the recalls of another, and making a recall possible by somebody else, of data relayed to him. Now, that's not very complicated, and that's the trouble with it. It's not complicated enough. Now, we deal with simplicities, and this is the first time that we really find fault on the line of simplicity; it is an idiot's definition. And that is the process which is being carried on at this moment at Yale and Princeton and Harvard and Columbia, down here at George Washington, at Oxford, Cambridge, the Sorbonne, any place across the world that they really consider themselves tops in education, they are placing ideas in the recalls of another.

Now, a few schools departed from this from time to time, almost accidentally, and usually under the duress of their student bodies. Heidelberg is one example of this. Heidelberg never considered the relay of ideas important; it considered having been to Heidelberg important. It was quite different. Now, Oxford had this to some degree; Oxford has, actually to this day, a way of being admitted whereby you don't take any subjects, you simply hang around Oxford and acquire the atmosphere. And you're a duly enrolled student at Oxford, but you aren't studying anything, except you're just trying to absorb the atmosphere; you're trying to get the air. A very interesting place, Oxford. To an American, used to the rather sleek aspect of a university, the aspect of Oxford impresses him with its age; he becomes very impressed with its age. They have Plato's head and other heads there in very solid captivity around one building; they have a great deal of captured information. Now, exactly what they do with this information, of course, is something else. Only recently have they put in a science department which can teach modern handling of scientific subjects.

But there was a school that went on for a long, long time; but that idea rather departs from it. Here we had a whole atmosphere being valuable, and as I said, some schools in Germany had this too.

But, this again is an inflow, isn't it?

Now, as long as we get on and maintain this kick of inflow only, we're in trouble: Education does not happen. If education means inflowing ideas, then we're also talking about hypnotism. You see, there's no differentiation there. We're talking about beating somebody up and laying an engram in. This then, too, would be education, wouldn't it? So, we have education and aberration very, very closely associated. In fact, education was aberration. Life was busy teaching somebody a lesson, and the lesson it succeeded in teaching him was not to do any more living; and that ultimate lesson, then, was always at the base of education as it was done, so that education itself could be considered aberrative. You see that? In other words, the educational systems did the lazy thing, they did the easy thing, they simply paralleled the action of the MEST universe in teaching somebody not to live. And having paralleled it, why, they then thought they were doing a good job.

But let's look at education as it was done. You taught somebody something by saying, "Pigs have snouts. That's good. Now, pigs have snouts," you would say to them, and they aren't supposed to say, "Yes" you know, they're not supposed to answer up, see? A classroom is supposed to be quiet, see? And later on you put an examination paper in front of them, and it says a question "What do blanks have?" And you're supposed to immediately answer up and write there, "Blanks have snouts. " You see, you're supposed to be able to associate this completely. So it's just a test of recall.

Now, as you know, therapeutically recalls — and by the way, if you don't know this, try it sometime. Just sit and ask somebody to recall something about some person, and do nothing but that, and notice that we get a decline of case; that's an interesting thing. You had to use the whole of the ARC formula: "Something really real; some time you were in communication with," and the reverse side of it too. In other words, an entirety of the ARC Straightwire formula, inflow and outflow, you could get away with it. But if you just asked somebody to "Remember something about George; remember something else about George; remember something else about George." If you asked him what he was doing, he's picking up every moment he ever saw George motionless. This leaves what? This erases, you see, all of the rest points of George, and leaves nothing but the confusions and the halfway feeling that George is there; so we sort of move George as a disembodied entity into present time and confirm the valence.

Now, this is quite a trick; quite a trick. We'll go into more about rest points and confusions later, but you just knock these rest points out, and George becomes a confusion.

Therefore, nothing but recall used therapeutically or educationally, would wind somebody up in a rather confused state. He would be sort of half hypnotized; just nothing but recalls, nothing but recalls. So that if you gave people data like "Pigs have snouts" and then ask them "What blank has a snout?" or "What blank has a blank?" you gave him a stable data, and now you're taking it away from him.

You might look up sometime a university record as to suicide and nervous breakdown, if such a record is honestly kept. I know I did this once and I had more trouble. I wanted to know how many students had committed suicide in that university, and I had more trouble. This they wouldn't own up to. I found out there had been quite a few, been quite a few, and there had been a great many nervous breakdowns, all at examination time. They spend the whole semester giving somebody some stable data, and then at examination time they take them all away suddenly.

In other words, simply implanting the recall and then pulling it back out again, while it has been defined as education, is nothing but a black operation, nothing but. To do this to little kids is to do away with their initiative. Therefore a time for revolution in the field of education is definitely at hand.

Education would have to be defined much more broadly. Education could be defined many ways; you could offer many stable definitions for education. You could say "Education is" and then so on, so on, so on. But remember in the old Logics and so on about action definitions. Well, you'd have to give it an action definition. It would have to be a real definition that gave it use and purpose, for it to be any kind of a game at all. The reason teachers go into a no-game condition is because teaching itself is not really a game; it is putting a bunch of other people in a no-game condition. Now, of course that's only part of a game.

To teach a subject, it would be necessary: one, for the person being taught to be able to receive a nonsignificant, disrelated idea from another. See, that would be a necessity in order to teach somebody something.

All right, the next condition that we would have to meet would be making certain that this person could maintain his power of choice over the data given to him. That would have to be the next thing ascertained there. He'd have to maintain his power of choice.

So we would give him some data which were incorrect, and giving him the data that are incorrect, we'd find out then: one, if he could remember them; and two, if he could reject them. And the idea of being able to reject a datum, and still remember it, to know that it is untrue and nonfactual, and still be able to recall it, is of course bettered by a further action: being able to wipe it out completely and not even recall it. And that is a skill, that is a skill.

The next thing would be to offer him a data, have him give objective or action examples of this data so that it is not then just a string of words, and then ascertain whether or not he could still reject it or accept it, and then ask him to rephrase it; and eventually he will form something which to him will be an agreeable stable datum. And having done this, we would then have accomplished power of choice over a datum.

At first, the longest row would be simply to get him to remember or repeat a nonsignificant datum, that would be the longest haul at first. And you may find people who have a terribly long haul on the subject of incorrect data: You give him an incorrect datum and he cannot reject it. But when you have made that possible, you can then give him a datum, have him give objective examples of your datum, have him rephrase it, give objective examples of his data, reject it, accept it, handle it, throw it around, and the next thing you know he has then something which will buff the entirety of confusion surrounding that subject. You have created something there which is armor-plate, as far as he's concerned. He knows a datum.

Now, he doesn't know it as a recall. That's the trick, see? You got this? I mean, it's entirely different. Now, it's a very, very hard thing to describe how he knows it, because there's nothing there to describe except the datum itself. So to write long chapters on this new type of knowingness would be an impossibility; it is something that is experienced; it easily goes on beyond the field of description.

All right, let's take a look, then, at education and find out why you would do this that way, rather than just to place something in somebody's recalls, to have him really know it as a datum. Why would you do this? Would there be any sense in this at all? Well, yes, there certainly would be. This individual would be able to use that datum; he would be able to evaluate its importance; he would be able to handle it, and handle with it many other things; in other words, you have given him something for his utilization.

Now, how fast you could teach the subject of geometry, how fast you could teach it to a desirably useful level, is still a tremendously open question. See, we're just standing now on the threshold of something that is education, a something that wasn't yesterday.

Now, just how you'd compare yesterday's knowledge of geometry and tomorrow's knowledge of geometry isn't observable either, because you have two different knowledges of geometry. You have a brand- new thing here, you have the ability to create geometry. You see? And that isn't knowing geometry. Euclid was a nice writer; he was a smart boy; nothing wrong with Euclid. Only trouble is, he was a fortuneteller. All of the early geometries are descended from the Chaldean school through Babylon, through Egypt to Greece. Very interesting subject, too: You do all sorts of fascinating things; you forecast the future with geometry; you probably didn't know this, but you do. Geometry isn't something that is used to do engineering work; oh no, that would be a blasphemous use.

Now, arithmetic probably is better known to you as a mystic subject; and arithmetic was a Chaldean subject, which became Babylonian, which became Egyptian, and which was dragged into Greece by a chap you know best for his work in geometry (but he actually transplanted arithmetic, that's how confused this whole subject is): Pythagoras. I don't think you realize some things about arithmetic; I don't think you realize that arithmetic is really a very, very deep subject, and a very sacred one. Oh, I'll bet you you don't know what the number 8 really is. Well, that's a deep subject. It isn't that many units; it's a bag of money sitting on a bag of money. You didn't know that, did you?

Now, I'd hate to get Freudian on you and tell you what 1, 2, and 3 mean. I'd hate to get Freudian, but that's their total significance: second dynamic; 3 particularly.

Now, you look these over very carefully, and you find that it's a very, very deep, complicated subject. It is so deep and so complicated that it is not only avoided as it comes forward, its own beginnings, but it also is beginning to avoid, in every public school, the slightest communication with any student; because geometry and arithmetic, of all subjects, are simply arbitrary subjects; they are not necessarily true at all; they are arbitrary. You could start modifying arithmetic around and it begins to be a very senseless subject.

Now, when you put data of this character into the recalls of somebody only, you've really done an operation, because it's not a true subject. And you tell him "This is how he thinks:' He doesn't think that way. The modern textbook in geometry as issued in the high schools of the United States tells you that this is what logic is; this is how logic is done; this is how you think. And more students rebel against this, and say this isn't so, and try to throw it out the window, and something, but everybody keeps bringing the book back inside and saying, "Well, to pass this course, I'm afraid you have to say that."

It doesn't even vaguely approximate logic. Geometry is not logic: it's a special brand of logic known as Aristotelian, which is a black and white "yea, nay" logic if you want to call it that. It is the logic of the Catholic church, actually the official logic of the Catholic church: Sin is sin, and virtue is virtue, and never the twain shall meet; no gradient scales.

The moment you enter gradient scales as an idea into the subject of geometry, you destroy geometry. It goes boom! Well, you know yourself that to make a preclear well you have to employ gradient scales. Well, look this over. Does it seem perfectly right and just that you should teach him a subject that will make him sick? Does that seem to be the right thing to do?

Actually, geometry is a method of surveying. There are lots of methods of surveying; I know a half a dozen more than geometry that make just as good sense as geometry. Why then does it have to be taught as a fixed and arbitrary subject? And why does somebody have to move sideways and call it logic? Unless somebody is not educating, but doing something else; and that possibility as we examine the history of education is always before us: that education the way we would like to understand it was never intended.

Now, of course you can understand that this is just a criticism from me, and I am a very critical person, and it doesn't necessarily mean that people along the track intended to take the children of the better families and mess them up. I don't think this was really intended. I don't think it's factual that the American university exists solely to deprive the country of decent leadership. I don't think this is right. I think this would be too whole-hog a statement. But no more arbitrary a statement, if you please, than the exact statements that are made every hour of the day in every university and high school and grammar school of the country. They are just as arbitrary as that, just as sweeping as that, and really just as baseless. If they were so ignorant they didn't know how to teach anybody, there is no reason why we have to come along and hang them with sabotage; but they make themselves peculiarly liable to sabotage.

Now, I want to tell you a little difference in the field of education itself. The stress of (quote) "teaching" today in a modern school is this: how to occupy the child's time. That is right, that is what they are taught in normal schools: how you occupy the child's time. Great stress is put on this: You have a child just so long; he has to be taken out of his home because his mother doesn't want him underfoot for that length of time; and you have to keep him occupied in school, and that's about it. And you wonder why a child at 12 or 13 doesn't really know how to spell, his penmanship is poor, his reading is worse and so on. That's because a different thing has come into view.

Now, this is not the tradition of the little red schoolhouse of song and story, back through the generations. There was another tradition in this country, and I don't know where the tradition I have just described came from; but this other tradition was the American tradition, and it went like this: You had to get them and put some shoes on them in a hurry, and teach them reading, writing and arithmetic as well as you could and as fast as you could, because they weren't going to be in school very long. And the teacher who was put through normal school (so-called) a hundred years ago was taught that. You got to be fast; you never know when Papa is going to take him out and put him behind the plow. Give him some education before it happens to him. You probably will get them in the winter months when there's not much work to do, but in summer you're never going to get them. You wonder why you have a summer vacation. This is sort of an odd thing for a child to have, by the way. And this older tradition still survives by not teaching the children during the summer. That's a very peculiar thing. But that was when all the farm work was done, and even in home manufactories that was when the child was needed around home, when the weather was good. So when the weather is at its best we still don't teach the child. Well, that's sort of silly.

Well, of course the child loves this idea. He does not have too much sympathy, in the most part, with education as it is performed. But if school really educated him, I am afraid you would have an entirely different attitude on the part of the child.

Now, I have known, been very fortunate to know in my life, quite a few real geniuses, chaps that really wrote their names fairly large in the world of literature and science, and I consider myself very fortunate because they are very rare. What made them so rare? I found something very peculiar about these fellows; they were for the most part taught in peculiar schools; they were taught in some YMCA school, or they were taught by some Englishman that ran a little college that wasn't very big, for difficult children up the street up there. They were all taught, it seems, in some kind of an off-breed school. This is real peculiar. And because the school existed to a large measure to take care of people who were slop-overs from the usual educational system and so forth, there wasn't much "education" involved. The fellow would come in, he'd be interested in something, and therefore the headmaster would give him his head, that's all. One chap, by the way, who gave us solid fuel rockets and assist takeoffs for airplanes too heavily loaded from aircraft carriers and all the rest of this whole panorama of rocketry, who formed Aerojet in California and so on, (the late Jack Parsons, by the way) was not a chemist the way we think of chemists. He was not taught in the field of chemistry beyond this fact: there was a little professor who opened up a school (and nobody could do anything with Jack, he was a pretty wild boy), and though, they sent him over there and this fellow found out that he was interested in chemical experiments, so he turned him loose in the laboratory and gave him a lot of encouragement. And this was quite a man.

Now, it was very interesting, very interesting: this completely sloppy method of education is apparently quite workable. Now, that doesn't mean that every man we have around who is a genius or is brilliant in some line or another has been educated in that fashion. Some have actually survived the other educational system! It does, however, take a high survival level. You have to really be a fighter; and these boys, many of them, bear the scars of this.

Well, now this becomes important to us today because we live in a complicated society which requires many skills. Just this morning I was involved, by the way, in an interesting operation of teaching an Italian maid, who does not speak very much English, how to use American automatic washers, dryers and ironers. I acquired the skill from their instruction books; this took me something on the order of a very short space of time. So I had to brief myself very rapidly in order to do a little instruction, and I had to read the instruction books, but I didn't have time to read the whole instruction books, and they were very poor instruction books.

Neither instruction book said what the machines did; they said what knobs you turned; they kept talking about the "entire cycle" of the machine. This word they repeated over and over and over, I mean, this phrase: "the entire cycle is completed, the entire cycle this way, the entire cycle that way," and I couldn't find out what the entire cycle was. What is this thing called the entire cycle? Just what do these machines do? That was omitted from the instruction book.

But even with this idiocy of a type of instruction book — because I became used to this, and nobody ever taught me how to navy; that's a very interesting thing to do. I never got taught how to navy; I sort of picked it up. You know, a war comes along, and they throw some braid on you, and they say you're in charge or something, and you go navy, or you go army or you go air force or something. They say, "This is a bomber, they push that button to start it, and that's it, now." "Mission number one will now take off," you know?

They do, however, fortunately, leave lying around quantities of instruction books sometimes. Of course, getting a bomber with no instruction book is embarrassing, I am told. But an American is somewhat in the tradition today, of the instruction book. You read the instruction book and you apply it to the machine. Bang! Bang!

Now the funny part of it is, I was stonied one time to find an enormous number of people couldn't do this. Just fascinating! They can't do it!

Well, I didn't have too much difficulty with it this morning; I read the directions and I finally, to find out what the entire cycle was, I went down and set the machine for its shortest period of wash and pushed a button, and then stood there and listened to it go through its entire cycle, and said, "Ah! That's what that means," and sailed from there.

And got lots of understanding and a tremendous amount of argument. The maid was saying you couldn't wash too many times, or wash too many items separately, because each one took a third of a king-size box of detergent. I don't know where she got the instruction on that, but of course you use a tiny — about a third of a teacup full of detergent. See, there's a slight figure difference there.

And we were able to get over this in about total lapsed time, about 25 minutes. See, from reading instruction book, punching the button on the set, finding out what it did do, then turning around and telling somebody what it did do. Got the idea?

But I don't say the cycle, the entire cycle of the education is completed. I'm sure it isn't. I'm sure the information I turned over to the maid, although it was well agreed with, argued with - - all of the arguments were with something that I hadn't told her. All of the arguments were with something we hadn't covered, and didn't quite have to do with what we were talking about.

Well, I taught myself how to wash this morning, but I'm afraid that it's going to take a lot longer than that to teach a maid, because it'll have to be recorrected, recorrected, recorrected. Why? At no time has she ever had any choice over data; no power of choice over data, no power of choice over the washing machine.

The washing machine is not something that you run; it is a thing, it is a mass, it is rather formidable. If it is too simple, she'll find some method of making it incomprehensible. Actually it's doing a rather magical thing: You dump the clothes and the detergent in, you push a button, it fills itself with water, it washes everything very nicely, it half spins them dry, it rinses them, it shakes itself up, spins itself, spills all the water out, fills itself up back up with water again, shakes that up, spins that about half dry, and that's that. Gorgeous! You never saw anything work like this; magic. It's too simple an operation, too simple an operation.

Now, what procedure would you have to use? Now, the only reason I'm bringing this up is because I just want to show you where all this fits. Would it be enough actually to get her to memorize the directions? Now you see, I've already learned something, or never learned something. And I've never learned that I don't have power of choice over a direction book. I can read it or not read it as the case may be. Another thing is I don't necessarily have to believe that that direction book applies to that machine; they often don't. You read it with what glee, saying "Now I have the total gen on this;' and find out that it was a WS56 that the directions were for, only you've got a WD56, slight difference of total purpose.

Now, where would this learning have to start? It isn't enough just to say: direction book applied to the machine. You would have to have other basic lessons. And now let's get down and dig some paydirt here, and not just chitter-chatter. Have to have certain basic lessons.

Where would you begin? Where does that cycle of learning begin? Well, you, a Scientologist employing these materials and having to cook up the basic stable data or the most fundamental step of any operation for a preclear, or in a plant or any place else, had certainly better know that you probably will have great difficulty in some cases in getting the place of start.

That's what's important, is finding the place where the cycle starts. Where must you start the cycle of education, Scientology style? Where are you going to start?

Well, down in South Africa they teach "Soil Erosion, Principles of Prevention of," and of course, the English nation knows more about the South African native than the South African does. This has always been true: The further you are away from something the more of an authority you're apt to be. And the English nation has many, many good points, but plumbing the level of start on the learning cycle is not one of them. And so they've spent this tremendous amount of money, and actually more or less forced the South African government into this particular groove of "teaching the native how to conserve soil!" And the natives didn't get it.

You plow this way, you keep the erosion from occurring, you do this, you do that. Tremendous program! Very expensive program! And it has — the level of bite is as effective as putting out a program to moles on how to look at the moon. No bite at all! As long as a white foreman is there, they will prevent erosion; but the moment that a white foreman turns his back — boo! There goes the whole program.

The program is neglected not because the native is averse to the preservation of soil, but because the learning cycle is not started where it must start to obtain an agreement with the person being taught. So we come to our first real rule in teaching somebody something, and in auditing somebody, the same rule applies: You have to find a point of reality which can be attained by the preclear And some where on the learning cycle there is such a point of reality, there is a point then, where agreement is obtained. In other words, your viewpoint of what you're doing, and his viewpoint of what he's doing coincide, and that sometimes is a very, very idiotic point, or it's a terribly complex point.

Now, I have taught quite a few natives of other lands to do this, that and the other thing. And it's not necessarily true that you must start with a very simple point, and it's not necessarily true that you must start with a complex point; it is only true that you must start with a point with which they agree is vital and necessary.

The South African probably could tell you that the native is not entirely aware of this interesting fact: that his soil or land will ever become his son's. Their ideas of time are not that good. You'd have to start this whole program of "Soil Erosion, Conservation of Soil" in South Africa at this fundamental point. Please let me teach you this one because the only place you will miss in trying to teach anybody anything is this one point. Where you have to make guesstimates at where you start, your snidest moments wont tell you until you finally find yourself doing it. In other words, it's much further south than you think — always. And you're running the preclear above his case, see, and he gets no reality on anything you are telling him. The machine isn't real, the directions aren't real, nothing is real. You have to teach a South African to teach a native at some point of reality, and then the whole program would be a howling success. It isn't that the native is recalcitrant, its that nobody has scraped his level of complex foible-foibles and agreement on the matter of soil conservation. That's all.

You'd probably have to teach him, "Now look, land: here is a piece of land, this is a piece of land. Belongs to you and the tribe. Right?"

"Yeah."

"Yeah, all right. Now look, there's no more land."

"Oh, I'm not too sure about that!'

"How long has it been since you have conquered an enemy tribe?"

"Say, you've got a point. Ooh, Matabele — it was way back, way back, way back! That's right, we aren't getting new pieces of land!"

Well, you're liable to get the guy so excited at this point of the lesson, or some thing of that sort, he's liable to go around the village and convince everybody of this, and they say, "Yes, you know — what do you… well, what do you know! By golly, that's the truth! That's the truth! That's a big thing, you've just discovered something! By golly, now that's a smart white man. You're smart! What do you know? You mean, we're not at war? We're not going to acquire any more land? These pieces of land which we've got right here we will continue to have probably, but we're not going to have more land than this. And, gee, you know, that's terrific, we just aren't getting in any more land these days!"

Well, you'd probably just have to let that die down. That would probably be a big cognition, see? You'd have to let that splutter out! You might not be able to give the next lesson for a week, which is this: "If you don't have very much of something, you take care of it." Oh, boy, what a figure-figure machine that would start; what an abstract principle! All of a sudden, guy cognites — guy would cognite like mad if he cognited on this point at all.

He'd say, "What do you know. If you've only got two wives, don't beat them, because they can't perform work. That's why no work gets done around here!"

And for another week everything goes to hell! And you finally get up to the point of where he's supposed to take care of something, a lesson which has never been taught to the native of South Africa.

And now we come along with a fellow who doesn't have that in mind, and we teach him soil erosion. Wow! Wow! Let's just run this guy on, "Sun, moon, Earth. Sun, moon, Earth. Sun, moon…" He's dead in his head, black basalt. Let's say, "All right. Now, go to the sun. Go to the moon. Go to Earth. That's fine. How are you doing?"

"I'm not doing anything. What the hell are you talking about?"

Got the idea?

So, the native learns he has to take care of something. And then he learns that "the way to take care of it is…" You got it?

Always be prepared to discover something remarkable. Man, what I was facing this morning — the reason I didn't get it across — is that the machine isn't thinking, that there's a set of cogwheels that make a machine do this all the time. You got the idea? That the machine will continue to do this, that it doesn't have to be worried about, because the big flaw is that the automatic controls are being interfered with by the person doing the washing. Got the idea? Changes the automatic controls during the cycle of wash, doesn't realize all you had to do is punch a button, and the whole cycle will be gone through with again, or any part of the cycle will be recovered. No, a person is standing right there hugging that machine, no trust, no trust in its automatic repetitive cycle. No reality at all on a repetitive cycle without human regulation.

Where do you have to go to teach about an automatic washing machine? Otherwise that thing is going to get busted up, misused, chewed up, no clothes are going to get washed, so forth. The machine isn't real. What the machine does isn't real. The purpose of doing it isn't real either.

Now, I don't know where you'd have to start with a native in the Wallabi Isles, I wouldn't have any idea where you'd have to start, how to teach that person to use an automatic washer. Wow! It'd probably be: "There are clothes. " Don't you see? A person would have to get some kind of a cognition on the grass skirt being clothes, or something, see? You'd have to teach the whole idea and principle of clothes. And then you would have to teach another principle: that dirty clothes are not socially acceptable. How in the hell you'd get that abstract point across, I don't know! See? But somehow or another you'd have to get it across.

Oh, I don't know, you'd have to set up some sort of a social strata, so girls that wore dirty clothes wouldn't be called on by boyfriends, or I don't know, something or other; you'd have to get it tangled into some other chain of thought somehow or another, and get it across, because it is a highly abstract principle. And only then could you teach them anything about making clothes clean. You've taught them that it's necessary to clean clothes then you could teach them how to do so. If they don't know its necessary to clean clothes, how in the name of common sense could you ever teach them to do so?

Now, you think maybe, we have to go to the natives of South Africa and the Wallabi Isles to get into this kind of a situation. Oh, no you don't! You walk down to the Hartford Arms Corporation and find somebody down there running some kind of a steelcutting machine, and this machine is always getting busted; somehow or another it just doesn't work right.

Now this is how you establish a missing principle. The principle is missing or the purpose is missing if something is going wrong. If something is going wrong with the machinery habitually, there could be two reasons why: The machine was built poorly in the beginning, or the machine is not being used exactly for the purpose intended. That's an interesting one, because you find everybody that has trouble with machinery uses it for some slightly different purpose than it was built for.

Now, you might have to undercut somebody running a machine on the basis of assignment of intentions. You might have to give him the cognitions that things have intentions. It might be that abstract principle that you're hanging up on: that things have intentions. See? I mean, that a chair is for sitting in. The intention of the builder of a chair was to manufacture something in which to sit. The designer of a chair intended it to be sat in.

Now, how many people actually believe that chairs are something you put your feet on, chairs are something that you hang your clothes up on, chairs are something that you decorate the — oh, this is all through the New England states — something that you decorate the living room with, but not to sit on. You get the idea? I mean, it's just the established intention there is not the intention.

So, the steelcutter, the fellow handling the steelcutting machine might have no very exact intention at all. He's just throwing levers, and you come in and you start in at the level of "Which levers do you throw next?" He can learn which levers to throw next, and then every once in a while he throws the wrong lever.

And you say, "Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Now, really, you throw lever one, then lever two and then lever three."

And he says, "I got that. It's easy, nothing to it."

So he throws lever one, lever three, lever two. The machine goes clang! Crash! And a big piece of steel goes clatter! and that's spoiled. They put a new cutting edge on the roller. Every few days this happens.

The man doesn't have a machine in front of him. The machine doesn't have any purpose; he doesn't know what's being made in the plant; he doesn't know that he is part of an assembly line which adds up to the manufacture of an item. He doesn't know there is a plant there. He doesn't know he is working.

I don't care where you go on the "don't-knows," it's some place wild, and really, if you go in and just teach him: "Now, one, two, three," you say to him, and you go through some kind of a routine and you finally say, "Now, it is necessary to push the sequences of levers to run this machine," you're right back where you started from. You could teach him this but you haven't taught him anything. Why haven't you taught him anything? It's not real. The machine has to have intention; it has to have purposes; he has to have intentions and purposes to run the thing. The activity must be a complete activity; there must be a reason why; the machine must fit into other activities one way or the other; the associations between the machine and the plant, the machine and other machines, the machine and the raw material, the machine and the finished product, would all have to be more or less straightened out. But maybe you couldn't straighten those out until you found out whether or not he was ever there at all.

And one accident-prone that I interviewed and straightened out one time for a great big lumber company: This fellow was a curiosity; they didn't know what to do with him. They knew that accidents were being caused in his vicinity, but they themselves could not believe that it was because of his influence. And I picked him up down at a medical center. He had just had one too many accidents, and this time he'd gotten hurt too, and I backtracked his history. The accidents in his vicinity were very well known. Well, I wasn't straightening him out on learning rate or anything, I didn't know anything about it then, but I did know something about causing accidents, and I finally established enough purposes for accidents so that he finally cognited that they were real, that accidents did occur; it could happen that something happened. It was as silly as this. I mean, I know you look at that and you say, "Nobody could possibly cognite on this. You mean, the fellow sees a whole machine blow up, and pieces of human being fly all over the place, and so on, and after that, why, it wasn't real to him?" Well, no, it wasn't real to him; wasn't real to him at all.

And halfway up the line an obsession, a perfect, beautiful glee of making these things happen turned on, which made him just prowl around the room and just gloat over the idea of blowing up whole machines and plants, and tearing everything up, and how wonderful it was, and then picking out his fellow workman that he would love to kill next. Now, this guy was perfectly sane!

But I first had to establish, to get anyplace with it, an agreement that I knew and he knew that accidents happened. We started in on people hurt; people got hurt; things happened to people. But what we were doing, we were just looking for people — old, old-style stuff we were using — who had a bad attitude toward other people. That's all we were looking for; we were trying to find some of his relatives or allies, you know, old- style stuff, that had a bad attitude.

Well now, I can assess this. And what he did afterwards was quite puzzling to me, you see? I mean, prowling around the room counting what employee he was going to butcher next, and all that sort of thing. This was not at the time very comprehensible to me, but we had started on a learning level, one way or the other; all kinds of fixed data that shouldn't have been fixed, and all kinds of unfixed data that should have been fixed, and between these two we had a whole category of difficulty occurring on every side.

When he pushed a lever — actually these accidents weren't metaphysical — he was generally the one who never threw the switch on the little cart train, you know, that went through the place, he always threw the wrong switch. And he would actually make enough mistakes, errors and monkey business in his immediate vicinity that other personnel would become excited, and then they'd make mistakes. And that's usually, you will find, the accident-prone is not very mystic, he is directly causative.

All right. What do you establish then? How basic do you go? Where is south? And that is the main thing you have to do in running these processes.

Now, it's all very well, it's all very well to ask somebody, "Is communication real to you?" Or "Communication should be real to the preclear," or any other stable datum you care to feed him. All perfectly well to do this, providing it answers its first requisite. And what is that? That you have a fact on which he can agree, that you can find some further agreement on. In other words, you improve his reality on that particular level of data.

Maybe there's no such thing as auditing. You're asking preclear, you're asking communication, maybe there's no such thing as auditing, you know? I've had experience on people who were being audited, who knew as their biggest datum that they could possibly have in their whole lives, that no curative action could ever occur successfully. This was the biggest datum they operated on: No cure was possible by any means, anywhere, at any time. And you're auditing this guy? Only conviction sitting there. Didn't matter what you did for this person, you didn't do anything. You understand? I mean, there's just one datum.

Now, if you take the preclear's data and overthrow it and unstabilize it, tsk, you're asking for trouble. You've got to substitute data for it. So it's better for you, with no clue from the preclear, to start out feeding him stable data. You teach him stable data that you thought up, and you hope that it doesn't coincide with any of his stable data. Now, you don't care whether your stable data is right or wrong, correctly or incorrectly phrased, it must be somewhere close to a key datum. It must be then transmittible to him and rejectable or acceptable by him, don't you see? Otherwise, otherwise, you unsettle him and pull him into the bank; you drown him in confusion.

I know of only one method of picking up a preclear's stable data, and this method is not the best method there is in auditing, but it's a rather surprising and startling method, is you ask the fellow for a stable datum for the confusion he has just gone through, or you ask him for a confusion for an area: "Give me a stable datum for Washington."

And the fellow says, "Oh, I don't know, a stable datum for Washington, the Washington Monument."

And you say, "That's fine." Now you make him mock it up. And you make him mock it up, and you make him mock it up, and you make him mock it up, and you make him mock it up. Nothing else, just the Washington Monument. Make him mock it up, and mock it up, and mock it up, and mock it up, I don' t care how long, until he can get a perfectly clear, clean Washington Monument. At that time he will have no more trouble with Washington. It's not an easy technique to run. It's a rather hard technique to run, because all the confusion of Washington, he considers impinged upon the Washington Monument and by the time he's mocked up enough Washington Monuments, he will have absorbed the confusion of Washington into the mock-ups. It's quite, quite remarkable. Then sooner or later you have to have him mock up some confusions just to remedy his havingness on those.

You ask a fellow, "Give me a datum for your life."

And he says, "A gravestone."

Have him mock up a gravestone until it happens. That method alone could get you out of this. Otherwise, you feed him the stable data, but get stable data that will get his level of agreement on the subject and the action that is to hand and that is being learned. Find what that level is and start from there.

Thank you.