How are you today?

Audience: Fine.

You alive?

Audience: Yes.

Let’s see if there’s anybody who isn’t. Doesn’t seem to be. All right, this is the what of the what?

Audience: 29 September AD 14.

What date?

Audience: 29 September AD 14.

Ah, yes, you’re more certain about that. Twenty — ninth of September AD 14, Saint Hill Special Briefing Course.

All right. Going to talk to you today about a rundown of levels and classifications, and give you some kind of an idea on how this is all packaged together. And also give you a couple of elementary actions about auditing pcs. This seems to be a scrambled sort of a lecture to give you all at one and the same time, but believe me it’s the same lecture. And you could call this lecture „Gradients.“

A gradient — a gradient is an extremely interesting concept, very interesting idea, and it has bypassed a great many Scientologists. The idea of a gradient. Whenever I see you sit down in a session and have difficulty pulling a withhold, I know what you’re up against. You’re not up against the fact that you haven’t got nerve enough to pull a withhold. That’s what you think, you see. You’re just up against a gradient when you’re up against that, that’s all. Whenever you have trouble auditing, you’re having trouble with gradients. It’s the only thing. And if you knew gradients like crazy and you knew what a gradient was and you had it straight, you’d never have any trouble with any pc you ever had anything to do with.

Clichés such as „You have to learn to walk before you can run,“ that’s a gradient. You can’t enter the hundred and fifth story of the Empire State Building without going into the ground floor, that’s a gradient. You can’t climb a vertical hill, but you might climb one of a ten percent grade, that’s a gradient. And if you really had this one mastered you’d never have any trouble with any pc you ever had anything to do with. And you notice my lectures tend to go toward definitions, basics, very definitely. Notice I was talking to you about Clears and clearing. Well, we got the clearing technology. It’s the first thing I’ve been trying to straighten out is what is this thing called a Clear and what is clearing and what does Clear mean.

All right, now let’s get into the fundamentals of an auditor’s auditing, and we find we’re up against this word called „gradient.“ And you haven’t got that thing grasped so that you can wrap both arms around it and say „buddy,“ you’re going to have trouble! And every student on the Saint Hill Sp — Briefing Course, and I’ve seen them down the time when we were — from the basement of the Manor and so forth on forward, and they’re sweating and screaming and having a horrible time trying to pull somebody’s overts. He wasn’t having any trouble with overts. He was just having trouble with gradients, that’s all. Having — not having trouble with it, he just had never learned what a gradient was. That’s all. That’s the principle that was missing in his auditing. A gradient.

It wasn’t there so he couldn’t pull any overts. Elementary.

So what — what you have trouble with is usually not what you’re having trouble with apparently. It works in training the same way it works with the pc. The pc says, „Oh, I’m having terrible trouble with my wife, well, you know, and my wife and I…“ Well, you process it and so forth, and the next session, why, „I’m having terrible trouble with my wife“ and so on. And you process it, and next session, „I’m having terrible trouble with my wife,“ and so on.

You say, „What’s the matter here?“ Well, you’re — one, you’re not advancing his case. I call to your attention that it’s stuck. The main trouble that you’re having in this particular case is — this particular case — is the fact that you’re not auditing what’s wrong. Otherwise something would happen.

Now, there could also be a gradient error here in pc isn’t having trouble with his wife, man, he’s just having trouble on such a broad line so that he can’t possibly orient himself and he’s just merely blaming it on his wife or something like this, and he isn’t then attacking that part of his life he can do something about, so he’s foisting off on you the fact that he’s having trouble with his wife. Well, all right, so he’s having trouble with his wife. Great. But if you processed it for a session or two and nothing resolved in this particular direction then that isn’t what’s the trouble. That’s one of the things that could be there, that isn’t the trouble.

The trouble must be something else because this trouble isn’t folding up.

And you see, you can’t — you can’t get somebody over a trouble he isn’t having is the point I’m making. It’s very hard to do. And you’re up against the problem of gradient there, and it’s the gradient of confront. What can he confront about his existence and so on. And he claims he can confront his wife, see. But no, he claims this, but his analysis of his case and his difficulties is just too high for what the thing is, see?

Now, you ask him — if you were to ask him — let’s apply a gradient to this. I’ve given you the other ramification, he isn’t having trouble with his wife so therefore you can’t do anything about it. He’s just blaming his wife for all the trouble he’s having, you see. There’s — be a difference here of some kind or another. He may have attacked his case on the wrong gradient.

Now, there’s this foolish gradient — and this is a silly one but it’s a very good example — there’s certain rural parts of farming districts will always breed this particular joke. And that is if you took a calf and you lifted him every day from the time he was a tiny calf up to the time he was totally grown, why, you would eventually be able to lift a full — grown bull, of course.

There’s that joke, and then there’s the wrong way gradient and so forth is that they’re trying to cure this horse of eating by reducing his feed one straw per day, and by golly before they taught him not to eat he starved to death, you know. I mean … Silly jokes of this particular character.

Nevertheless, they do have something to do with gradients, even though they’re wrong way to and impossible, don’t you see. But they’re still a gradient.

Now, someplace in this fellow’s existence he would be able to put his feet on the road of something he could do something about or some direction he could go and this is something he could do. And then having accomplished that he would then find the little more that he could do, and then that, we would find a little more that he could do, and having found that, a little more that he could do, and find that. Now that’s built in as an automaticity into many processes. „What can you confront?“ would be a built — in automaticity here. You’d say — well, automatically if you assess the pc what he could confront you’ll find out that he eventually will be able to confront more and more and more, see. Do you see that?

You have some fellow — well, you can see this. You can say, „What in this room can you see?“ The fellow says, „Well, the whole room, yes, yes, the whole room.“

„Well, what particular point of the room could you see?“

„Well, that and that and that and that and that and that and that,“ and all of a sudden he’ll brighten up, and he will see the whole room, don’t you see. So you’ve seen that work as a gradient, and the mind just goes in this direction so of course it very rapidly lends itself to being an automatic process, see. Automatically. If the fellow starts becoming familiar with something, he will become more familiar with more. Well, because it happens anyway and because the mind goes in this direction is no reason that you must go on leaving it on automatic. Do you see? I know I’m using some GPM terminology there, but you’re up to it.

The point — the point I’m making is here that … Yeah, „automaticity“ is one of the — a word of that character is one of the items in the GPMs which is probably why you become very devoted to it.

But here is — here’s the point: If you ask somebody to confront something they will confront a little bit and then will confront more and confront more and confront more and confront more and more and more and more and more and then he’ll be able to confront a whole lot, see; that’s a gradient. But just because he does that without you doing anything more about it than utter the repetitive process is no reason why you can just abandon yourself following the gradient. See, you’ve got to follow this gradient, you’ve got to make this come about. Not with that particular process, that will happen anyway, don’t you see? I’m talking about the fact that your address to the case has to be planned on a gradient.

You can’t just say, „Well, all these processes automatically follow gradients,“ see. No, you’ve got to plan the gradient. Now, he’s saying, „Well, I’m having a lot of trouble with my wife and a lot of trouble with my wife and trouble with my wife and trouble with my wife and trouble with that.“ Well, this is a gradient. „Well, what part of all that trouble have you felt you could do something about? What part of it?“ And he comes down to some part that he actually can confront and he can do something about and then hell move further on into it and be able to confront the whole problem and then you’ll be able to audit the whole problem. You got that?

In other words, you could take some little section of this pie and address this section, and then move on into other sections. Well, you normally regard that not as a gradient but as taking a part of the whole thing. Actually, it is part of the whole thing but it’s also a gradient. You’re taking a little bit and going on to a little more and a little more and a little more and a little more and a little more and more and more and then you’ve got the whole thing.

Processes are all designed on the basis of starting in with a little bit and winding up with a lot. All processes are designed that way. Classification, which I said I was going to say something about, is also designed that way. This fellow can handle a little bit or a little piece of auditing and a little bit of a pc or a — or a kind of a routine pc. He can sort of handle a pianola pc, you know. „Pianola,“ an old term, plays itself. So he can handle this pc — pc would — this pc — I’ll give you the gradient of pcs, you see. This pc say, „Well, I have a headache — well, it’s gone.“ See? Well, a guy at Class 0, you see, well, he could handle that. Says, „Anything wrong with you?“ Person says, „Yeah, I got a headache.“

„Well, how do you feel now?“

„It’s gone.“

You see, he could handle a very easy pc. Well, the gradients as they go up the line progress into tougher pcs, but not — they’re not graded against tougher pcs, they’re graded against more of the case, don’t you see? But along with this, you also get the tougher pcs. So as he goes upstairs in his classes, as he starts walking up the grade of his classes, he of course can handle more difficult pcs and he can also handle more of the pc’s case. And this is what is being asked of an auditor in an advanced classification. A very early classification, we don’t expect him to handle very much of a pc’s case and we don’t expect him to handle a very difficult pc. See?

The way we handle that is we don’t try to train this fellow up instantly and immediately and give him a full HCS Course in the next three or four minutes as we’re coaching his auditing. We just say, „Well . . .“ — he just isn’t getting anyplace on this pc at all. We’d have to figure out what kind of a pc is he running here? Well, he’s running a tough one, man. I — this — I’m — I remember this pc because this pc’s given us a tough time in instruction and this pc’s given us a tough time here and there, and we’ve got this fellow and what’s his — what’s his class? Well, his class is that if he’s trained very, very hard and puffed his cheeks up very hard and got very red in the face he would be able to push a grain of a sand one millimeter. See?

Well, we can’t demand this of him. We handle the situation actually by saying somewhat offhandedly and grandly, we just simply say — we don’t try as the HAS Co — audit Instructor to handle this case and so on, we just say, „Well, the best thing for you to do,“ we say to the pc, „is get some HGC auditing.“ Easy way to solve it or field auditing or the best thing, if we’re running a field PE and so forth, „Best thing for you to do is get some auditing over the weekends and we’ve got auditors who can audit you because you’re difficult — more difficult case and so forth than this particular level of training calls for.“ You’ll find out very amazingly this guy’ll say, „Oh, I’m something special, I’m called a difficult case.“

Well, go ahead. Remember some auditor somewhere along the line will have to run out the fact that you told him he was a difficult case. But if you knew your gradients and you knew this, then you wouldn’t bang your head up against this thing of saying, „Well, Joe Class 0, you certainly aren’t handling this pc, Mr. Mountain. You certainly aren’t doing a good job of itsa there because Mr. Mountain is just getting ARC broke and he’s just a — blowing and he’s having an awful time, so you just aren’t doing a good job.“

No, he’s doing a fine job of Class 0 auditing. He’s doing exactly what he’s supposed to do but Class 0 auditing just doesn’t happen to be up to handling Mr. Mountain. You see that?

All right, now supposing we ran into the HAS Co — audit — that’s the difficulty of the case — now supposing we ran into the HAS Co — audit the fact that they were only going to run GPMs. Well, that would be complete psychosis, because it — you’re saying to the beginning of the gradient, „Handle the whole, total case at one fell swoop.“ Well, of course nobody’d get anyplace. Nobody’d do anything. Every once in a while you see this ambition come out all the time, somebody wants this one — shot Clear, you take a twenty — two grade horse needle or something of the sort and shoot it into the gluteus maximus and this guy goes „Spung!“ and he’s instantly OT and so on.

Actually, it is very nutty, but it is not unusual, because practically every psychiatrist in the world is walking around in this delusion, and there’s some little outfit — I’ve forgotten its name; Harvard, Harvard, some little school — that sends out demands for contributions all the time because they’re trying to find this magic ingredient in biochemistry. And they’ve got a big biochemical project going and they want lots of money in order to find the perfect biochemical thing that’ll put everybody back to battery instantly with one shot in the gluteus maximus. And of course, they’re getting that straight out of our early rumors of the one — shot Clear, this sort of thing. They probably read that and they said, „Well, they’ve got something called a ‘one — shot Clear’ so therefore that would be a shot in the gluteus maximus, there.“ And therefore their thinkingness, „If we could just get together enough money and put enough people to work on it, why, then the problem would solve.“

Why, I think that’s a marvelous idea they have in modern science anyway, that if you put enough money on anything and enough people on anything that it would solve. I call to your attention that it doesn’t work in government! Governments are now hiring one government official per citizen. I mean that’s about the ratio, and that’s enough people working on something, isn’t it? And talk about enough money, well, they’re getting something like a 105 percent of everybody’s paycheck, and they still haven’t solved mankind or war or anything else. So it doesn’t necessarily hold true that if you put enough money on something and enough people on something that it’ll solve, see.

What is true, however, is if you tackle the first fundamental that needs to be approached and handled you could probably eventually handle the whole thing providing you were content to walk this grade. If you go up this gradient, step by step, take a little more in stride, if you figured out what’s missing …

Well, I did an interesting one the other day. I got a long, involved letter from the British color council. The whole world of photography is on its ear on the subject of color. And they’ve got it all planned out, color harmony and color this and color that. They’re having an awful time. They’ve got some new toy called „High — speed Ectochrome“ or something of the sort. And it’ll take color. So right away they all figure they have to know more about color.

Well, of course the designers and the architects and the paint companies and everybody else, these people are all interested in color. And then there must be something mysterious or peculiar that they haven’t known yet about this subject, so they’re hammering and pounding along this line. And then in addition to that, big advertising agencies that wish to compel more sales on the part of more citizens are interested in color from the standpoint of ads and packages and so on. So color is big money these days and it’s a big problem these days, and you’ve got a lot of bums — I mean a lot of chaps, a lot of fellows — standing around making an awful lot of money producing nothing in the line of color research. See.

But what they haven’t done is attack the fundamental problem that has to do with color. And the fundamental problem that has to do with color is color is essentially light wavelength and light wavelength can’t be looked at by anything else. We’ll go into this slowly: You cannot look at light with something else.

Now, let me give you an analogy. You can look at sound. You can look at sound electronically. You can take electronics and examine the living daylights out of sound. And as a matter of fact sound engineers of recent times can synthesize, put together, just out of drawing sound waves in electronic patterns can produce sound that sounds just like a piano and sounds just like a guitar, sounds just like anything. In other words, they can resynthesize the harmonics of any instrument and produce the instrument. And I heard a record the other day whereby they had just worked and fiddled around with electronic waves until they’d produced a whole orchestra. And somebody had really had a ball, you see, they just kept playing this tape through and adding new electronic vibrations to the thing till they had a whole symphony going on the thing.

There was an earlier one called Nola. They had a piano going there playing ragtime music and that sort of thing, and of course there wasn’t any piano and there hadn’t been any piano. What they did was just calculate the harmonics of the sound electronically and then feed those things through an electronic recorder and mix them, and at the other end the thing sounded like a piano, you get the idea?

But you were looking at sound with electronics. Well, now the wavelengths of light and the wavelengths of electronics are the same thing, see. What are we going to do here? How can we — see, what are we going to look at color with? See, sound, that’s a very gross vibration. That’s a big vibration. It’s very easy to use light to look at sound. But you couldn’t use sound to look at light. There isn’t anything smaller than light with which to examine light. So of course then they can’t determine what are the harmonics of light. They can measure a wavelength, they can measure this and that. But what are its harmonics. What are its dissonances? You know, if you thought — talked of light in the same form as music, you’d say, well, music has clashes and it has counterpoint, it has this, it has that. Well, obviously the same things exist in light. But how are you going to measure them? You don’t have anything smaller with which to measure them. There’s nothing to look at light with. If you don’t believe it, turn out the light and try to see something.

But there is something that can observe color. There is something that can observe color and can react to dissonances and clashes and smoothnesses and chords, if you want to put it into music. And that’s you. See, there’s a thetan. Now, he can inspect color. So when they try to work out color harmony or what color should you paint the walls, it then comes down to taste. Something we call taste. A person feels some particular way about seeing red with green polka dots, you see. He feels in some peculiar way about this, and so therefore somebody — and because he felt this way, then he decides there must be a law about it so he said, „Red with green polka dots won’t do.“ See.

So then if you set up an authority like this, then the authority passes a law. And it says, „There shall be no green polka dots mixed with red.“ But you see, they don’t know. And yet the amount of money that’s being spent in this area of research is fabulous. But nobody is attacking the basic problem of it, because you’ve got to have something with which to look at color which can be measured or which is capable of measuring beyond the idea of mere opinion. And then you could put together a science of color.

Ah, but there are billions being spent on this right now. Tremendous quantities of money being spent on color. And there are more authorities walking around saying, „Well, it’s very complex of course, only an expert could understand this.“ You see, you want to be aware of these subjects where only an expert can understand them, you see. You say, „All right . . .“ I’ll tell you how to throw them. „All right, I’m an expert, get me to understand it.“

„Well,“ they say, „Well, you don’t know this and you don’t know that and you don’t know something else.“

„Well, I’m perfectly willing to learn your vocabulary and your terms, and understand it.“ This outfit will, of course, very — get very fast driven to the wall. Then, they will have something else. They will say, „Well, you haven’t gone to the right school. You may know all the subject, but you haven’t gone to the right school, so therefore of course you couldn’t understand it.“ Where are we winding up here, see? We’re just winding up into the old hedge, see.

This guy is backing up. The more you say, „Look, I’m willing to understand it, let’s try to understand this situation, let’s try to get a grasp on this situation,“ and so forth. Well, if they — if he doesn’t immediately lead forward and try to give you the understanding that is there on it, well, you can assume then that there probably is no understanding but a great deal of fakery connected with it.

I was giving you color. I hope I didn’t miss any words. They’re very unimportant if I did. But the whole point is the world has a craziness about this sort of thing and they will go for ages and ages and ages studying the upper story of something. They’re always skipping the gradient, see. And they’ve got engineers that they’re training right this minute, that they’re training how to fix up bridges and how to supertest the high tensile strength of supersteels, you see. All of that just — you know, they’re just training them within an inch of their lives, you know, that sort of thing. And they’ve neglected to train them such little fundamentals as what does two plus two equal. What is — what is the basic idea of stress and strain? Why do you have stress and strains in the first place? What do these things mean? You know? What’s the vocabulary of engineering You know, I mean, little — these things — these are the things these guys have a hard time with.

There they are, up there, see, „Oh, we’re going to build it. We’re going to do that and so on, ruh ruh ruh.“ They couldn’t even bend a pin! See. They just jumped this zooom! see. They’re way up on top. And in the world of color here they’re building this fantastic structure and they have not studied this basic area, „What are you looking at color with? What could look at color? How could you look at color so as to produce a constant record of reaction?“ See? I mean, they’re really closer into our department than they are into the department of engineering, because the only thing I know of that can look at and record color is the thetan. He has taste. He has feeling about it.

He says, „This room is very harmonious. These dark green walls with the light green striping and so forth, that makes me feel very nice.“ See? So he’s measured the color harmony of the room. He says, „Color harmony of the room, very good,“ see. He goes into this room and it’s orange, it’s got orange walls and the room has got an ultramarine floor, and the thing is a bright shade of lime all over the ceiling, you see, and there’s magenta or purple carpets. And he walks into this room and he says — he says, „I don’t like this.

I don’t like this.“

Now, that’s as close as they come to it. Of course, they have certain mechanics, they find out that certain colors cancel out certain colors, and interact one way or the other in pigment so as to make gray and in light so as to make white. So they think they’re onto something. And they’ve found some of the harmonics of the wavelength. But I never even heard the word „harmonic“ used amongst them.

They say these are complementary and they’re this and that, as though — as though a band of waves which begins with A and winds up with B is always a circle. Well, it couldn’t be a circle, because it’s just a stretched — out band of waves, that’s all. I mean, one wave is — let’s not use the color terms — but you say is one inch long and the other — next waves up the line are two inches long and the waves up the line; we get on up the line in the thing and the bands are one mile long. Well, we wouldn’t then be able to join the one mile into the one inch. So it can’t be a circle.

I mean, these are the things that have not been examined. It isn’t huge complications and millions and billions and that sort of thing. They haven’t — they haven’t taken a look at this thing and said, „You know, this thing we call a color wheel doesn’t always produce immediate and direct results, so therefore there might be something wrong with it. Let’s see if we cant work on this color wheel a little bit more,“ see. Well, they go off into these terrific terms.

You read a book on this subject now and it’d just crack your brains. You could just feel them crack right down the middle. I’m not kidding you. Ooh! Mireds and Greek letters, and densities and percentages of transmission and you get to looking at this thing after a while and you say, „Boy, there must be something known here, it’s so impressive. Something very impressive.“ Well, I’m afraid it’s that impressive because somebody has skipped. They haven’t ever tried to come in the front door of this thing, they’re still trying to get in the top of the building, see.

Now, how is it that you can join up a lineal — that is to say a straight line — series of wavelengths which would run — as I’m giving you the wrong measurements, just to give the idea — from one inch to one mile, and then say the one mile one then joins up at the one inch one, that there’s a one mile one right next to the one inch one. Well, you’d have to do that, you see, in order to make a color wheel. There’s some place on that wheel where the wavelength is one mile joined up to one inch. And that is supposed to be the progressive point of the wheel. No, the wheel wouldn’t go that way, don’t you see? You couldn’t possibly have this little tiny wave right next door to this great big wave and say, well, those are the adjacent waves. Couldn’t be done. No stretch of the imagination. But that is such a fundamental observation that it’s never been made. They don’t make that fundamental type of an observation, don’t you see?

So the reason they’re in trouble and the problems they’re having is because they have never started to walk that path where it starts. They never tried to clarify, „What problem are we having?“ They’ve never tried to clarify, „What are we doing?“ They’ve never said, „Well, what are we working with?“ See, just that fundamental. „What’s got to be licked around here?“ You know, this sort of thing.

Instead of that, they’ve invented this fantastic amount of balderdash, you see, which has got all kinds of signs and symbols and laws and rules and authority and you can’t read a book by Zuck because it’s in contradiction with a book by the name — by Zack, you see, and he is a big authority because he studied Monet.

Well, Monet didn’t know anything about these things. He was a good thetan. He knew what was agreeable and what was disagreeable, don’t you see? Just a good thetan on the subject of color. And he also was capable of hitting an average. He not only knew what he liked, but he had a feeling for what would be liked. See, so he could register color like a lot of people could register color, don’t you see? So therefore his work was pleasing.

There’d be no point in studying Monet. You’d have to study Scientology, then you might get someplace. What was Monet? Now, we’d have to take Monet apart, and we’d have to admit the fact that there must be something else there besides some meat.

You can take an awful lot of meat and put it up against an awful lot of color and it won’t register anything. You see where I’m getting to? So here’s a top — heavy subject.

Now, you probably missed a lot of that, but I don’t care because it’s unimportant. You can get as stupid as you like on this subject because you’d just get stupid as everybody else is on it.

But here’s where you join up: When you don’t know this thing called gradients you get into the same Condition and you try to build a castle on top of a palace on top of a complication that you call the pc’s case; because you never walked up the gradient, then you never see the case, don’t you see? You arrive instantly at the totality, and of course you can’t get any right answers to this case. You might have the theoretical right answers in Scientology, but to this particular case you never get the right answers. And the reason you never get the right answers is because you never picked up anything that was fundamental that the person could confront. You never picked up anything that the person could start with. And so, of course, neither he nor you ever observed his case. And you wind up with psychoanalysis. Or you wind up with some squirrel process. But you certainly wind up with a fantastic notion of the horrible complexities of existence. It’s overpowering.

I mean, you say, „My God! That poor fellow. He’s got all these problems with his wife. And he’s got all these problems about his job. And he has all these psychosomatic difficulties. And the best thing for him is some paraglutenous magnoid shot into the rectabulous skootum.“ „Doctor, hand me the flit.“

You see, your answers — observations are nonsense, so therefore the solutions are going to be nonsense. And you can put those things together any day of the week. And you see a bunch of nonsense solutions then you know darn well that the observation has been nonsense. Those two go hand in glove. So you sit and look at this pc and you say, „Ron said we should observe this pc. All right, I’ll sit and observe this pc. My God, problems about his wife, problems about this, problems about this. Isn’t he a confusion!“ Yeah. A Confusion to him, too.

But if you keep trying to observe the totality of the case without ever once finding one little thing you could observe about that case, you’ll never get a gradient, you’ll never get on the track, you’ll never get the gradient that leads toward an observation of the ease. Let’s just look at it from the standpoint of observation. Let’s take — sit and — just look at somebody for a while. „What’s this guy doing that I can understand?“ Let’s take the poor auditor, not the complexities of the case. „What’s he doing that I can understand?“ And you actually have to take that before you can remedy a case.

You see, he’s „Sooooo wwaahhll and so on and it’s all … Oh dear, and trouble with my wife, and so forth. And then there’s my sciatica, and of course if I get rid of my sciatica I’ll lose my bonus, and I’ll lose all of this other stuff you see, but actually it was my mother and father, they fought like cats and dogs, you see, and my father was a circus animal trainer and he used to beat me all the time. And so life has been very complicated, and when I was psychoanalyzed before I got the electric shocks . . .“ And you say, „Woooow.“

Now, if your observation of this case is based on the fact that you’ve got to grasp all of this then you haven’t started a gradient observation, and you’ll never really be able to remedy a ease. The Book of Remedies when it comes out will be nonsense to you. What have you got to do to start to remedy this case? Well, you have to notice something that you can understand about the case, and then you’ll find something more that you can understand about the ease. And then having found that that you can understand about the case, you’ll now find something else you can understand about the case. And the next thing you know this ease … Well, actually you never do get up to understanding the complexities of the case, because if you understood it that far the ease starts to fall apart and you haven’t got this complex case sitting in front of you any longer. Do you follow this now?

In other words, this person is in terrible trouble, this person is an awful state, this person is very complex. This person is all messed up. You give him a solution, you see. „Well,“ you say, „well, actually if you get a divorce wouldn’t it be mu — .“

„Oh, no, I couldn’t do that, you see, because my mother is dead against divorce; she’s Catholic.“

You say, „Well, are you a Catholic? What could you do about your mother?“ and so forth. And he says, „Heh. Uh — um . . . „ You’re lost. He’s had you. Well, you’re trying to understand the incomprehensible. You’re trying to understand the totality. You’re trying to reach out and grab everything. And you’re just going to get loses all the way along the line if you do that. Well, what could you understand about this case? And you look this case over very, very hard and you look over your situation and if you remember what I’m telling you about this self — discipline on the subject of gradients you won’t make this mistake.

You’ll say, „What can I observe about this case? Well, he isn’t getting any tone arm action. Good. All right, well, let’s look it up in The Book of Remedies. ‘No tone arm action … no tone arm action … no tone arm action … no tone arm action and ingrown toenails!’ That’s it! He’s also got ingrown toenails. Therefore, we run this.“ And you run that and the case starts falling apart, see. You got the idea?

You’re always setting yourself to climb the whole road. That’s because the pc is always giving you this. Well, what state actually is the pc in? Pc is in the top of a gradient he hadn’t climbed. So of course he’s always inviting you to be at the top of a gradient that isn’t climbed. And you get suckered in on it. Every once in a while you get pulled right in, and you say, „All right, we will solve the whole case in the next two days.“

Well, in the next two days if you found something about the case that could be resolved you would be making progress, wouldn’t you? But if you tried to solve the whole case in the next two days, you wouldn’t, would you? So the road of the gradient leads to big, permanent wins. And jumping all the gradients leads to a total loss.

Now, let’s take up this whole subject of overts. And let’s take up the whole subject of overts at one fell swoop and wind them up on the subject of gradients. You sit down and you say to the pc, you say, „All right, pc, have you ever committed any crime that would land you up in jail if it were found out about?“ I guess that’s the end of that overt pulling!

We fly at once to the top of the building, ask for something that we might conceivably get after maybe fifteen or twenty hours of auditing, we ask for it right now, we don’t get it, but we restimulate it. ARC break the pc nicely. Upset the thing. Then we decide that we can’t pull overts. You see all the nonsense that proceeds from jumping the gradient, see.

Well, what’s the first thing necessary for the pulling of an overt. What’s the first point of the gradient? Well, we have to consider the line that the overt is going to be pulled on. And that is normally called a communication line from the pc to the auditor. Now, if it consists of a little wire which is a tenthousandth of an inch in diameter and you say ten thousand volts must now go over this wire, it’s going to blow and break, and that’s going to be the end of that wire.

So there are two things you can do here actually; the thing is very susceptible to solution. You can get yourself a stronger and stronger wire. Pc is more and more willing to talk to his auditor. That’s because it’s building up a good strong communication line, see.

And then, we start feeding on this communication line some little overts that easily carry on it. And then we’ll find quite wonderfully that bigger overts will follow on this. And bigger and bigger overts will follow on a bigger and bigger communication line, see? And all of a sudden, why, we’re sitting there looking at somebody whose — all of whose overts are pulled. And we say, „Well, that wasn’t very tough.“ See? Do it by gradient.

Now, there are two gradients involved. One is the gradient of the pc’s willingness to talk to the auditor. That’s one gradient, had nothing to do with overts. It’s just the fact that it’s got to be there before you can pull any overts. And the other is the gradient of what overt is he willing to talk to you about.

Now, let’s go into this a little bit further. Did you ever notice that there were people around that you were willing to say good morning to, but not to discuss how good it was. And then, there were people that you could discuss how good the morning was to, that you would not discuss personal plans with. And then there are persons that you would not discuss personal plans with, you see, or say good morning to or anything else. In other words, there are different degrees of willingness to communicate.

Now, here’s this bloke, he sits down in the session, he’s in the state of willing to say good morning to you. He’s not willing to communicate any further than that to you, the auditor. All right, so now let’s pull a big overt.

Then we have the auditor practically in tears saying, „I can’t pull overts.“ Well, of course he’s given us the wrong analysis of the situation. The analysis is incorrect, entirely incorrect. He hadn’t got a communication line to pull overts on and he isn’t trying to pull the overts that the guy can confront. So there are two things wrong here. This is no communication line and no gradient of overts. So there’s no gradient of communication, no gradient of overts. So of course he can’t pull overts. Elementary.

Now, if you merely built up the pc’s communication line to the auditor and never did anything with it the pc’d feel much better and think you were a great fellow. This perhaps could be a profession in itself, but is not where auditing ceases. Having done that, then you can do things with this line. The pc along this line is then willing to communicate. But what is the pc actually willing to communicate? The pc is now willing to communicate what he, himself, is willing to confront. It isn’t whether you feel odd about it or not, it’s whether he would feel strange about it or not.

You see, it’s the datum in his own reaction to his own data, see. We’ve now got it pretty well straight that he’s willing to talk to you, but now we’ve got the factor of his own reaction to his own data. In other words, what could he confront in his own bank? What of his own misdeeds is he willing to confront? Well, that’s the first overt that he will give you. And of course, having given you that one, then he’s willing to confront a greater misdeed. And having given you that one then he’s willing to confront a greater misdeed. See?

So we build up the gradient of communication, he’s willing to say good morning to you, he’s willing to discuss his personal problems with you, he’s willing to discuss his very intimate problems with you, see. We build that up along that gradient, and then we get what he could confront that he has done, he himself, and then we get a little bit more that he could confront, then we discover some things he’s done that he didn’t even remember or know he’s done. This stuff starts to fall out of the hamper, and if we handle all these things well and maintain the communication line while we’re doing it, the guy unloads all of his overts, see.

Well, it’s — therefore, you can arrive with this thing accomplished, providing you follow a gradient. And of course you get nowhere by not following gradients. It’s the difference between being able to walk and the difference of being — and not walking at all ever. And that’s what gradients mean. Unless you walk the gradient with auditing, unless you attack the thing on a gradient scale, unless you approach these auditing activities — a little bit, is followed by a little more, is followed by a little more and a little more and a little more and more and more, and a lot and a lot and a lot more than that and the big lot and so forth — why, nobody will go up through the grades.

Training, similarly, is arranged on what could the person confront as an auditor. What could the person accomplish or do as an auditor. And you can’t just say, „Well, all right, get in there and pull all of the GPMs.“ Well, my God, that — we have enough trouble with a Class IV Auditor who’s been in the snake pit for many a year confronting pcs and so forth, and you should see the green look around his gills when he first starts to run some GPMs out of a pc. He looks pretty pale. His hands are pretty nervous. He starts in with this and these tigers are awfully big tigers and he then, of course, gets belted in the brisket a few times, gets restimulated himself, you see, and knocked in the head and so forth, and he is definitely of the opinion that he’s handling a tiger.

Well, this is somebody who’s walked the trail, somebody who has had successes in auditing, somebody who is in pretty good Condition to be able to confront. And if this is his reaction on confronting, what do you suppose it would do if you started to run them on an HAS Co — audit? What would happen? Well, they wouldn’t know what they were confronting, they wouldn’t know anything about it, their mystery on it would be total and you’d have people curled up in a ball and chucking their cookies and winding up in the local hospital and being operated on by the local brain shrinker. Wow, see! I mean, you’d just be confronting total catastrophe You’d just wind up people in the hospitals and mortuaries and so forth just left, right and center. Bang, bang, bang! You wouldn’t miss.

Somebody gratuitously the other day on the west coast of the United States from here gave a lecture on Clay Table. Well now, you say, well, come off of it, Clay Table. I mean, couldn’t possibly do anything on Clay Table. He managed! Somebody went home, woke up the next morning, lips all swollen up, terrible Condition, so forth. Clay Table! He just showed them how you symbolize something in clay, see. Well, it was too restimulative for his audience.

Now, that’s interesting because it would never occur to you that this would be too restimulative for anybody. Not at your state of training. Not at your ability to — level to confront at this particular stage. Never occur to you that this would knock people in the head. Yeah, well, I invite you, I — that — at this low level, you say, „Well, you represent stuff in clay. You just take a piece of clay, you see, and you draw up a mountain in clay, you see, and isn’t that nice and so forth.“ And that’s the person’s present time problem. Have somebody quietly keel over in the audience, you know? Well, you’re dealing with — you’re just dealing with the ability of people to confront and approach things.

Well, you get around some people — you get around some people just discuss some mild locks. Think yourself of the least, you know, what you do is think of the least possible restimulative thing that would still have something to do with the bank. Not the least restimulative subject you could think of but the least restimulative thing that you could have to do with with the bank. And then say something about this to a green, fresh, new group of people. And exert your power of observation and look them over. Somebody there is going to turn green around the gills; if not all of them.

You say, „Well, all right, there’s locks. Person has operations and so forth and later on every time they see a knife or every time they see a white basin or every time they see somebody in a white cap. . .“ he’s giving little examples, see, „why, they feel that their head’s being operated on or drilled into, so forth. Well, now that is a lock.“ And you’ll see, well, you’re so accustomed to this line of thought that it would never occur to you that somebody would come dreadfully ill over this, see. That’s your gradient, see. That’s why on PE you must attack the gradient of definitions. Don’t talk about — much about the thing that is being defined but talk about the definition.

Define life, you know; what do we mean by life. Take up dictionary definitions, don’t even take up Scientology definitions. You find out you’d get along fine, but you’d still be stretching — not overreaching — but you’d still, here and there in the — in an audience that you are addressing, be stretching the gradient. Life. And somebody’d be sitting there, „Life.“

You say, „What’s the matter?“

„God, I just realized I’m alive!“ Well, you actually have seen things like this happen in PEs and things like this. You see these — what appear to you to be totally nutty cognitions. And you look, and you say, „What! How could this be?“ you know? Well, on a broader basis you’ve probably had this experience yourself in the early days. Just spot three spots in the room, three spots in the body, all of a sudden recognize that you had a body sitting there in the chair.

I’ve had somebody emit a piercing scream! They suddenly found out that they were in a body and that there was a body there, and so forth. Well, this is — you say, wait a minute! That’s the most ordinary type of a — of an action you could think of And of course everybody in life considers it ordinary. Well, what’s ordinary about it is nobody pays any attention to it and nobody confronts it. That’s what’s ordinary about it. And now all of a sudden you start to actually pick apart the pieces of life, and you start showing these things up on a gradient of just this is the name of. This is the name of, see. „The thing which you have there, the arms and legs and so forth, that’s a body.

B — o — d — y, body.“

„Body.“

And you — right away, you’d have some girl thinking, „Well, you know, they’re pretty nasty things.“ And somebody else will be saying something or other, and so on, somebody else will be saying, you know, „It’s this body, and they’re awful heavy and get in the road and so on, I have a lot of trouble with my body these days. Body, body, you know, brrrhh.“ Locks flying off. I know it doesn’t seem likely to you, see. But you blow a whole chain of locks. And somebody goes out the door he feels wonderful! What the hell does he feel wonderful about? He realized all those people around him had bodies. And you look at this and you say, „How could he be so far out that that would be terribly significant? That this would be an upscale walk for him?“ Well, it’s just how far out he is. See?

What is the gradient you’ve got to start with in addressing people or addressing a subject? And of course, the top gradient that — I mean the — pardon me — the gradient that you could approach — about the bottom gradient that you could approach is thought. People can confront thought, oddly enough, more easily. You know, they can confront think or significance, to give you some other words for it. They can confront that more easily than they can confront masses or things.

So if you give them definitions about think then these will be the easiest things there are to confront and that will gradually walk forward to a definition about a mass. And they can get a Definition about a mass. But the reason they don’t grasp definitions about masses is they’re actually upscale. You start telling somebody, „This is an E — Meter, this is a table, this is a floor.“ You can get them to notice and ask them where these things are and so forth, „But this is the Definition. Now, why do you suppose this is called an E — Meter?“ and so forth, and start concentrating their attention on that sort of thing.

You can get much further by saying, „Now, worry is the Condition you see, by which an individual becomes and feels confused, his survival is threatened, he conceives his survival is threatened, and he worries. And you will very often see people worrying. And they worry for various reasons. But actually nobody worries unless he is — feels that his survival or the survival of something that he is very interested in is threatened.“

And people say, „Wow!“

What you — what you’ve done there is you’ve entered up — close as you came to mass is the survival of things, you see, but they kind of brushed off, they’re just all whole masses, you know, they’re all indefinite, they don’t have to be real and that sort of thing. But you’ve got this thing called worry. He’s very accustomed to worry — this worry. And he right away says, „Tsk tsk! Three cheers.“ You know. „Worry. I know what worry is.“ He’ll go out of that course thinking, „Beautiful, beautiful, absolutely beautiful, I know what worry is. Somebody thinks he’s threatened. Something’s threatening him. Therefore he worries about it. He is seeking to figure out what to do about something that is threatening him, so that is worry. And when somebody is worrying, then he feels he is being threatened or that something else is being threatened in his vicinity. Yes.“

They’ll go in the next morning to their boss, and they’ll see the boss sitting there, you know, worried like that. And they will say to the boss quite brightly, „What do you think is threatening? Is it you or the organization that you think something is threatening you or the organization? Now, what do you think the threat would be?“

And the boss says, „Well, so — and — so and so — and — so,“ and of course it isn’t a very steep gradient, it isn’t very much, there’s not very much relief to be gotten out. „Well,“ he says, „Well, if you think of it that way, that’s pretty — this Blitzen Company with that new machine that they put on the market, man, that’s going to cause us a lot of marketing, and so on. Yeah. Yeah, I’ve been worried about Blitzen Company. I feel better,“ fellow will say. Yeah, because he’s — what he’s done is make the person perceive what the person’s action in this particular department was, you see, and so he’s had a win. You get the idea? In other words, he can then see how to apply the data that you’re giving him, because he himself can see the data you’re giving him. But when he can’t see the data you’re giving him, he can’t apply it. And he flies up into the top floor of the building and adds a bunch more complexities to this data and considers that it’s very complex and that there’s no fundamental there, don’t you see? So he invents a whole bunch of nonsense with regard to this thing and misses it entirely and never gets any result with it, do you see that?

So you have to be very careful about gradients when you’re training. Now, in auditing a pc, if you ask a pc, „Well, what in life do you think you could — have been successful in handling?“ you’re liable to get yourself an hour or two comm lag. Because the idea of having been successful at handling anything is quite foreign. This he has never had as a cognition. He has never thought of himself as having been the successful in handling anything. And he gets a long comm lag. And he goes over this and over this and over this and he’ll finally give you an answer. And he’ll very often feel lots better for having given you the answer and for having asked the question. I’m not saying that’s too steep a gradient, don’t you see?

But that gradient would just be an upper border. It takes him a long time to answer it, don’t you see. He has to grapple with this thing for quite a while before it comes home to him. Then finally, why, he comes to a conclusion about it or he gives you an answer to it. Well, that’s not bad, when you run into that. What you want to be afraid of is glibidity. You haven’t had any new words lately; I’ve been very nice. And that isn’t a new word; I’ve used it before. He gives you very glib answers. And you very often run into this in pcs and you wonder, „Well, this fellow is so good that I couldn’t possibly process him upstairs any place because he’s there.“ You get glib. You say, „Well, what could you do?“

„Oh well, I could build the Empire State Building.“

„Well, what could you do?“

„Well, I could move Earth.“

„Well, what could you do?“

„Well, I could turn the sun off and on at will.“

„Ah, what could you do?“

„Well, I could collapse the universe,“ and so forth.

No comm lag. And he’d explain to you also quite glibly if you ask him, „If — well, all right, if you can do all of these things, why are you getting audited?“

„Ah, well, trying to teach you how to audit.“ Or something like that. You’ll get — you’ll get various responses. All unreal. It’s nowhere.

Now, trying to find a gradient for that fellow to enter in on, because he’s already stuck on the top floor. Now, trying to find a gradient that he can enter in upon, approach and go forward in life, I mean in processing and so forth, is fantastic. Because it’ll be the size of the reduced image of the shadow of a grain of a molecule. Small. See, tiny. You actually have to fight around for a while before you can find your first gradient in because obviously nothing is real to this person. You sometimes find out a guy walks in; he’s only got one leg; his ambition is to be ballet dancer. You’ll run into this once in a while in Clay Table Clearing.

It’s not for you, man, it’s not for you to question this ambition. But you certainly better recognize that your gradient on this must be a very slow, low approach. So right away there’s something to understand about the case. If you listen, why, you can always find something to understand about the case and enter in on a gradient of solution to the case. Your gradient of solving the case, of course, is finding something about the case that you can grasp yourself See? Not try to find something the pc can grasp. Let’s not be so introverted as — and transferred or whatever you call it, and then go ahead along the line and see some progress.

Sometimes you undercut a case too far and the case is insulted. But that’s only when you undercut it on the basis of sanity or some other unreal measure. You’re not undercutting on the basis of sanity, you’re undercutting — or insanity — you’re undercutting on the basis of ability. Let’s find out what the guy can do and then let’s get him to do it better. That was the old line. But that first one: let’s find out what he can do. That’s easily missed because if YOU listen to the pc, very often he can do everything, you see. But he cant do any of these things, and so we really miss, we’re thrown.

All right, now the only time you really have to start investigating a case and looking it over real hard is when the case isn’t making an expected line of advance. Case isn’t going along and getting better and feeling happier and more cheerful and so forth. Well, about that time you’d better start looking. You’d better start looking. And you’d better find something about the case that you can grasp. And along about that moment you’ll say, „Well, he isn’t getting any TA. I can certainly understand that about him.“ All right, well, let’s solve that one before we go on doing something else. Obviously no TA, got a present time problem or something of the sort.

Next time you start to pull an overt on somebody and you feel queasy about asking this person for overts and so forth, well, just sum it up. Where are you entering the gradient? One, have you got a communication line with this person? Is he in a state of being able to say good morning to you? Is he in a state of telling you about his personal affairs? Would he naturally and promptly confide to you some of his deeper secrets? Well, if the answer to all of those things is no, you certainly had better build yourself a communication line. When you haven’t got — do anything else but build a communication line, that’s the only thing you’re going to do; you’re not going to pull any overts. What you going to pull them on? There’s no line. What are they all going to do, magically and mystically develop because you think a thought in some yogi position? No. You got to have a communication line.

Then, now — now that you’ve got that one licked, recognize that you’ve now got your next stages which is what can the guy himself confront? Now, you got to start there and that might be very small indeed. And you start asking, „What have you done?“ And there’s various ways of approaching this sort of thing. „What have you done?“ Well, he can’t confront having done that so you can ask the reverse question, like justifications, don’t you see? „Well, why wasn’t that an overt?“ He’s got it all explained. Well, that you’d — that — you got that one from him in the first place, you got that „done,“ what he said he did, that he then had justifications for, showed you that he himself was not capable of confronting what he had done. So therefore, you got — what you’ve got to find out is something he will tell you that he has done that he can confront having done. So that is your next action in the pulling of overts.

You not only get a line to pull them on, and that itself is a long gradient, but now you’ve got the next line and so forth. What does he confront that he can tell you about? Now that you’ve got a nice line there. Then you have to keep the line in and — while you’re pulling overts. And how do you do this? How do you do this? Well, that again is very elementary. It is a problem of overts — just a problem of gradients, gradient overts.

You’re sitting there and you’re saying, „Well, you say you upset a cup of coffee. All right, thank you very much. Now tell me this, ‘Have you ever tortured animals for the fun of it?“’ There goes your communication line, man, you can just hear it snap. Why? Well, the first place you — he may have, and you restimulated the living daylights out of him. You’ve ARC broke him. He doesn’t consider you real, his reality drops and everything else. Well, it isn’t anything that you’ve asked him that’s socially incorrect — is you just asked him for more than he himself could confront if he had done it. See, that’s the problem.

So it actually isn’t a problem of being polite or holding your finger right or smiling in a certain way while you’re asking the E — Meters or being pleasant to the pc or … That is not the problem at all. It’s just simply the problem of asking the guy for overts that he can confront on the gradient that he can confront them. And you ask him for these things and you’ll find out that it’ll build up on a nice, smooth gradient and he’ll give you more and more and more overts and you’ll find out as long as you’re doing that your communication line doesn’t snap and your actual attitude has nothing to do with it. And the communication line itself won’t even quiver, as long as you don’t jump this thing.

But you instantly, having given him some very easy ones to answer, you all of a sudden ask him something that he has been hiding from himself for a very long time and you ask him for it suddenly, quickly, without any gradient whatsoever with no approach and so forth, communication line itself will snap, too. Now you’ve really got a job on your hands; you’ve got what’s known as an ARC break. And that’s either a session ARC break or it’s something of that sort, and you get ahold of it, but you’ve restimulated some bypassed charge and however you get it off you get it off. Or you get somebody around that can do it to get it off.

Now, the point I’m making here … I mean, that’s only for a very lowerscale auditor. He shouldn’t be permitted to handle ARC breaks because, of course, his gradient of training is such that he hasn’t got the data of how you handle ARC breaks, so he starts handling ARC breaks and all he does then is re — ARC break the pc, so now he has two ARC breaks where he only had one. Now he starts to handle these two, don’t you see, and he’s going to have four, and then he’s going to have eight, and he’s just heading for the long chute. So he should find somebody who knows how to handle an ARC break and get them to do the ARC break assessment, and then he can go on with it.

Do you see, it’s a matter of gradients?

Male voice: Yes.

This is where it goes. Now, in training, similarly, you start pushing too much in on a person too fast and too suddenly that they cannot confront or have anything to do with, you also have a jumped — a gradient on learning. And they get very, very confused. The fastest way to jump a gradient on learning is to, for instance, teach somebody to read a foreign language which you haven’t taught them to read the alphabet of I think that would be a marvelous way to jump a gradient. Not let them define any of the letters that mean any of the words. You haven’t taught them any ABCs, you see. And just say, „Well, there’s that squiggle — wop with a curly tail, and so forth. Now, explain to me what that word is. Explain to me what the word is.“

„Oh, I can’t pronounce it. I don’t know what word it is.“

„Well, you should know the word, you’ve been studying Arabic now for a month.“

He’ll miss, very often miss, and not see how the gradient is being shoved. See, he’ll not see how we’re jumping the gradient, and he just ARC breaks on it. He thinks we’re being terribly unreasonable. We’re actually not being unreasonable, we’re just being out of gradient. We didn’t teach him the alphabet; we don’t — he doesn’t know how those words sound, because he doesn’t know how those symbols that represent the sounds are. He doesn’t know how they’re pronounced. So therefore he can’t add it up to the sound of a word. Now, if he could add it up to the sound of a word he might possibly then remember having heard the word or knowing what letter comes first, he could at least look it up in the English — Arabic dictionary. See, he could do something about it if he had the alphabet.

But let’s take some poor bloke and let’s teach him German. And never point out to him that the German language, which looks very, very similar to English in its — very similar, but it isn’t the same. And not point out to him that that particular type of use of letters and that sort of thing are different, and let him get no familiarity with these letters and how they’re formed and how they’re pronounced. And then all of a sudden start taking up „hausfrau“ and this sort of thing with him. Then we wonder why he can never make any progress in German. Well, you’re never going to make any progress in German. He’s going to — he could go to school for years without making any progress in German. Then if nobody came along and pointed out the fact that he had never learned the German alphabet he would simply be telling you the rest of his life, „Well, I tried to understand German once, but I wasn’t good at it.“ This is as close as he got to understanding what was wrong between him and German, see. „I wasn’t good at it.“

Well, I don’t know, he can learn a new word out here, somebody drives up and says, „This is a new Spitzburgen type super snap,“ you know, drives it up, „A new Spitzburgen type super snap. It’s got twelve roarers inside.“ And he says, „Roarers? What the hell are those?“

„Well, that’s a new capping device that goes on the cylinder. It presses the fuel down hard and it actually injects solid fuel. And that’s what they call roarers, you know?“ Some crazy word like this.

„Roarers? Is that so?“ And you find him next day, using it like that. But he tells you, „I couldn’t understand German.“ Well, what was German but a whole bunch of „roarers,“ see? See? So there must be something peculiar going on here that he can’t get on to a — he can’t speak German, and the only thing peculiar about it is, is he never walked the gradient necessary to learn German. He didn’t walk that gradient. And not having walked the gradient he then walk — wer — wounds up in the upper story with the conviction that he can’t speak German.

He never analyses it, so we have this person out here who is having an awful time in life. And he’s never walked a gradient toward livingness. See? He went in over his head someplace. And he never passed that point of the gradient. Man, he’s still there. And when we pick up those points of the gradient he has bypassed and get him to understand them and so forth, we call this clearing. Because at those points of the line he had wrong answers or he had omissions or something of the sort, and when we’ve got those cleared up, of course, then he can live life, because he has wound up on the gradient to the point where life can be handled and confronted. Very easy.

Now, that doesn’t mean that you always have to approach things slowly. You very often will find a student in school and he’ll say, „Oh, this is arithmetic.“ And you’re getting — opening your mouth to say, „Well, you see, that’s a 2, and that’s a 2, and when those two things are added together you get 4.“

And he’s already been scanning the textbook while you were talking and so forth, and he says, „Yeah, it’s also the square root.“ Now, we mustn’t become so dedicated to the gradient that we say, „No, you’re not ready for that yet.“ He just happened to — what throws us in education, why we have very little good experience on the subject of education, I mean we have very little purely — viewed data on the subject, you see — we have in Scientology now, but I mean the world at large — is because they never recognized that people have been educated before. People are up against all sorts of back — pattern jams on the subject of education, and also back — pattern educational things. For instance, we’ve got a carpenter out here now, he was raising chickens and having an awful time. One day he picked up tools and all of a sudden found out that he could — he could make most anything he laid his hand to. And he could use all the tools and it was all very simple, so he went on using tools and he has been a carpenter ever since. A gradient of exactly nothing.

Well, the way life explains this — people explain this — they say he had a talent for it. He didn’t have any talent for it! They had a staff auditor here one time, old Robin, she was auditing him busily and so forth and, my God, they picked up more deaths as a ship’s carpenter than you could shake a stick at, and they even found his last grave down here and a few little things like this. Very unacceptable data to society at large because it restimulates them.

But nevertheless here’s this fellow’s — this fellow’s accidental talent, you see, and ship carpentry was based upon, well, probably ages and ages and ages of carpentry. He had also, must have been based on the fact that he had walked a smooth gradient on the subject of carpentry. He hadn’t done many other subjects, but carpentry, he at one time or another, whether in the Roman republic or some place, had learned carpentry right. Somebody had said, „Now, this is — this is a hammer. And you hold it and you bang it down, and so forth, and that’s what that is for. And this is a. . .“ — we’ll go back earlier — “. . . piece of flint. And this flint when rubbed over a stick will cut shavings off of it. Now, let’s see if you can do that,“ see. They didn’t come in to him and say, „All right, now, we’ve got a new palace to be built out of sandalwood here — and you’ve just started in on this job and so forth — we’ve got this new palace, it’s all supposed to be carved and gilded and so forth. And there’s very careful joisting and fitting that goes into this place, and I want to make sure you’ve got it right, now finish it up tomorrow.“ The usual gradient run in life.

There he would stand, you see, and that would have been the end of his carpentry. But a gradient started right is running right. Now, you’ve noticed that if you start auditing a pc with some little wins and the gradient is correct and so forth, the pc goes on up the line, and you keep that measured well, you keep the pc winning, little wins as he goes along, and so forth. You notice the pc just gets better and better and better and everything seems to run all right and you don’t run into any trouble. Next pc, he didn’t get started right, started by somebody else, of course, and he has just been running wrong ever since.

Well, if you straightened out his auditing, it’s not — this is why you get education mixed up with auditing. He thought something about a session which wasn’t right. In other words, he thought something was true of auditing which wasn’t true or he had auditing added up in some way that had nothing to do with auditing. And as elementary a thing as that could prevent him from ever going into session.

Considerations he has had about auditing, almost an itsa process, might straighten these things out, wham. And all of a sudden put him right straight back in the groove. Of course, he’s had enough experience since to learn that what he thought earlier wasn’t true but he’s never reanalyzed what he thought earlier. He’d never collided with this. So all of a sudden you can turn a pc from a fast progress — from a slow progress pc to a fast progress pc.

Now what is the total thing you’re using in any one of these cases? You’re just using gradients. Whether you’re training somebody, whether you’re processing somebody on a routine approach to auditing, whether or not you’re trying to remedy or straighten out a ease, fix up a ease that wasn’t running well, whether you are trying to pull overts, whether you are trying to get PTPs and so forth, they’re gradients. It’s what can be done that will be real, what can be accomplished, what can be confronted, what part of this fundamental situation do we have to know about in order to resolve the rest of the situation. How do we take this problem apart so that it can be approached. This is the whole — the whole think on the subject of gradients.

And if you haven’t got that pretty well taped, sooner or later you’re going to say, „Oh, my goodness, I can’t pull overts.“ Or „Something is wrong with my auditing in this particular quarter or that particular quarter and so forth.“ And I think you almost inevitably find that it would boil down to a failure on gradients. Either your own gradient of training was jumped too quick at some point or another or you’re jumping this pc too quick or you had several pcs that you’ve made gradient mistakes on so you began to get a new notion about what pcs are like whereas actually you just keep making the same gradient mistake, see? You try to pull overts before the pc is in communication with you, you see. If you kept making that, pc after pc, you’d only audit four or five pcs to suddenly decide that you couldn’t pull overts. See, you’d have new false conclusions. And those false conclusions come into being only because you had jumped a gradient.

The early training somebody gets in Scientology is doubly — trebly important to what it ever was before. But we haven’t actually done too badly in this. We have made a few mistakes here and there inevitably, but I think we have done pretty well. And Mary Sue was going over — as far as gradients are concerned in this society at large — Mary Sue was going over Founding Scientology reports and letters from people and so forth last night, and she was quite astonished at the tremendous number of wins and so forth on the part of people who had only read a textbook or who had only read this or read that. They had approached the thing at the proper gradient. Those people who didn’t approach it at a proper gradient or weren’t steered on a proper gradient into their studies, didn’t make it, didn’t have those successes, you see, and so forth, and they’re no longer with us. So in the future, all we have to do to swell up the ranks of Scientology and so forth is just remember that in training, auditing, and the introduction of the work and so forth to hit it on a proper gradient. And we’ve got it made all the way.

Thank you very much.