[Start of Lecture]

Now, this is Monday. What's the date?

Audience: 7th.

January 7, 1957. ACC lecture four. The 16th ACC.

Talking about Learning Processes here. Very fascinating. Very fascinating.

I want this class, now, to speak up loud and strong and tell me at once why a Learning Process does not improve an APA, does not improve IQ.

Male voice: Because you said so.

As a matter of fact, that would probably work though. I probably could say so and it wouldn't work. Come on, come on, somebody tell me.

Please! Please! Please!

Yes, John?

John: Reduces havingness.

Oh, that's a point. But that isn't the answer.

It is a no-game condition! Please! Just because we're talking about communication and control and havingness as the total material of this course, is no reason why we're going to forget, just flat out, this whole hard-won category of game conditions and no-game conditions. It puts the preclear at effect, if you please!

Now, I talked to you about this some days ago. Got this now? I talked to you about it some days ago. You all feel like a bunch of dumb lunks now?

Yeah. You ought to.

All right. An auditing session is drawn this way: Auditor at cause, preclear at effect of auditing; preclear at cause, bank and environment at effect. In other words, the auditor runs the preclear. The preclear never notices that he is at effect, as far as the auditor is concerned, to such a degree that it keeps him from advancing. Have you got the idea? He doesn't notice that — that isn't punched up — because you're permitting him to be cause. He's always had something or somebody standing over him, anyhow, so one more auditor won't matter. See? That isn't ruinous.

But a Learning Process does something fascinating: It takes ahold of this preclear, and it gets him by his right ear and his left ear, and it says, „You, son, are an effect!“ Got that? You say, „One-two-three.“ Preclear says, „One-two-three.“ See? Got that? Boy, you know, there's no bank around. The total environment is you. You got this? So, it's a fantastic thing. You have to know it. You will use it many times. But it's not a technique. It is not an auditing technique, that's all!

It's absolutely fascinating that people run on these Learning Processes don't change on the APA or IQ — which is the handiest, niftiest little validation of games conditions and no-games conditions that you ever wanted to see.

All you really have to know about a game condition is simply and entirely this — this is all you have to know about a games condition: Preclear at cause, bank or environment at effect. And that's all you have to know about a games condition. Now, there are several major points in games conditions, which are listed in Scientology: Fundamentals of Thought. And that, by the way, isn't the total list. The total list was in a Briefing Bulletin — a Washington Briefing Bulletin. [See the full list of games conditions and no-games conditions in the Appendix of this volume.] And those are the major points of a games condition. But all you have to know about any part of it, from a practical standpoint, is simply this: Preclear at cause, environment or bank or both at effect. And that's games condition.

I know it's not therapeutic. It's not healthy for anybody to be at cause all the time. That's why he's crazy. That's why he's sick. That's why he has psychosomatics. He's on the most gorgeous stuck flow you ever saw. Well, you think the answer to this would be to reverse the stuck flow. Well, it so happens, experimentally, that you don't reduce and reverse the stuck flow in any other way than having him dramatize in an auditing session, if you please, always and never any other way than being at cause, with the bank and environment at effect. And when you do that, you have well people. And by golly, you got to know that. You got to know that!

If you were sorting out some auditing questions, you could make one of the most catastrophic boo-boos anybody ever ran into by running a no-game condition on the preclear. Now, this is quite important. You just could mess him up like a fire drill. Perfectly wonderful rationale: The theory of what you're doing is marvelous. Your auditing procedure is just without reproach. Perfect! And the preclear would just go thnnnnnnnnnnn-splat!

Now, that is the major thing that was learned in that last year of 1956 — the major thing that was learned: games conditions, no-game condition.

It's odd that the list of games conditions are all lies. They're lies from top to bottom. If you look up in Scientology: Fundamentals of Thought and look at that list there that is headed under „Games Condition,“ you'll find each one of these things is a lie. It had to be a lie; it had to be invented; it had to be pretended before it could exist. And we look under that whole list of games conditions… The idea „no effect on preclear,“ see, that's a games condition. „Total effect on the enemy,“ that's a games condition. They're lies. There is no such condition. It couldn't exist: a total condition of no effect on self, with a total effect on somebody else? Oh, it just won't work, ever.

And yet, that is the happy optimism on which a little thetan lives! That's a lie that you could have a circumstance like this, that you could go out and kill a man with no repercussion. I don't care if there was no law. I don't care if police were as bad as they are today in the United States, and as sloppy. You'd say, „Well, if there were no police and no court and no liability and there'd be no fine and so forth…“

Nobody could kill another human being with no effect on self. See, it just couldn't happen! Yet the thetan thinks it could. Even if you just reduced it down to the idiocy of the jolt from the gun. He felt the jolt from the gun, he'll also feel the jolt from the fellow he killed. See, there's a lot in this.

You don't even have to have overt act-motivator sequence involved here. Overt act-motivator sequence is what occurs because a thetan thinks that he can do things with no effect on him whatsoever, and that he can render a total effect on something else with no effect on himself. That's his happy frame of mind, though. That's the way he says life should run. That's it. And that's a games condition.

Now, there are a lot of these other items that are listed as games conditions. They're all lies, and that is what is wrong with the preclear: lies. And when you run games condition, you run these things out of the preclear's bank. And when those things are out of his bank, he's in good condition.

A fellow tells you, „Oh, I'm just suffering from this terrible operation. I just had this awful operation, and they just cut me to ribbons. And the doctor put my kidney on one shelf and the liver on another shelf and wound my intestines around the chandelier and just did a standard, good, solid medical operation — just ruined me, just ruined me!“

So you say, „Aaah. I know what's wrong with this fellow's stomach! We'll just run this out as an engram.“ Now, this was what was the matter — if anything was the matter — with Dianetics. We ran out the operation, and we had some gain — perhaps. But in many cases nothing happened, and it didn't lift and it wouldn't lift and it wouldn't erase and it wouldn't run. Why? Oh, the guy just got through spending five consecutive lives as a surgeon! It was all those operations that he performed, all the times he put a kidney on the shelf and the liver over on the table. See, it was all the times he did it, meanwhile saying, „It has no effect on me. No effect on me. Hm-hm!“ Carve, carve. „No effect on me at all.“ Carve, carve. Actually, it was as much as saying that there could be no effect upon him, see — there could be no effect upon him at all — that was the lie.

You mean you're going to stand a body up against another body that you're going to hurt, and you're not going to get any reaction? Well, the more the fellow said, „No reaction, no reaction, no reaction, no reaction,“ one day you ran his operation, and you ran into what? No reaction! And you tried to run the operation; you couldn't get him to do anything on the subject of the operation; you couldn't get him to do anything on the subject of the somatic at all. He just couldn't do it. And if you did do anything for him, he said no change took place.

Now, please observe it, because, my God, you'll break your heart as an auditor if you don't understand this. You work with this fellow 816 hours. Finally, at the end of that time he tells you, „Nothing happened.“ What's he saying to you? He's saying, „No effect.“ So he's saying to you what? „No possible effect on self.“ So he's saying what? He's saying, „Game condition, game condition, game condition, game condition.“ You understand that?

It'd just be almost a murderous action for you to say „All right, Mr. Jones, now — audit it here. I want you to get this table… Stand up alongside of this table now, Mr. Jones, and I want you to get the idea of lying on this table. And now, here, take this table knife, and let's cut him up.“

Now, this fellow that couldn't have the engram of an operation run on him would do a fantastic thing: he would say, „Scream! No!“ Fascinating.

You see, it was this „case that never responded“ that caused us all the trouble in Dianetics. And the trouble with the case is „never respond.“ Q&Q, A&A. Case never responded. What was wrong with the case? Case went through life not responding, you know, „Grrrrr, grrrr, grrrrr, grrrr. It's not going to touch me. Not going to hurt me.“

For instance, these (hah!) „scientists“ down here in the… They're all working for commercial corporations, by the way; they aren't working for the government. When we say „government scientist,“ we're using something else; we're talking about something else. He doesn't exist today, evidently. They're evidently private-corporation people or something. I can't quite figure out what they've done, because they've really gone out of sight.

But these fellows go home at night, you know — they've thrown strontium 90 all over the place, and they've gotten radioactivity pasted all over the sands of the desert and the buildings and the oceans and islands and countries and so forth. And they go home at night and Johnny's got a cold. They say, „My, virus is getting bad these days.“

You could sit down and you could tell one of these boys, „Now listen, if you keep plastering the world with radioactive materials, you are going to not only make your family sick and your friends sick, but you too.“

And he'd say, „Oh, no, no, no, no! It's impossible. It's impossible. Impossible!”

As a matter of fact the AMA has evidently just bought out a whole magazine section — Parade, I think it was, something like that - - in Sunday supplements. The whole thing from beginning to end is pro „let's blow everything up“ propaganda. Why should it come from such a quarter? It's because these people say, „Nothing can affect us,“ and it is a lie. See? But they are actually convinced.

You'd sit down as an auditor and you would say to them, „Now, listen, if you blow this much guck all over everything, if you blow this much junk around, if you put bombs underneath sand and you blow radioactive sand all over the southwestern United States, you yourself someday will become ill from it!“ And this person would not be able to understand you! Why? His guilt is so fantastically great that he must say, „It is no effect on me.“

Now, if you took him as an auditor, and you said to him, „Now, look. Look here, fellow, I want you to mock up a whole bunch of kids against the wall over there. Now, shoot 'em all down.“

„Hwoooo! I couldn't do that.“

„Go on, do it.“

If you finally persuaded him to do this about eight thousand times, he would eventually say, „Say, you know, I've just had a cognition. Uh… maybe if we keep blowing bombs off, maybe my own kids will get sick.“

You get the tragedy of this? He wouldn't have any cognition on it, though. Why? Because he's in obsessive games condition.

A couple of Scientologists over in London thought I was exaggerating when I said these people are amoral and conscienceless, in that they have no concept of the humanitarian aspects of their actions. And they thought I was drawing a long bow. They knew scientists were kind and generous, and so forth. And they happened to be at a party where there were two British nuclear physicists. And these two British nuclear physicists engaged them in conversation and said, „Well, what do you mean it's a crime to wipe out a whole city? What is the difference between wiping out a whole city and wiping out one person? There's essentially no difference. And what difference would it make anyway if you wiped out the whole human race?“ And with comments of this character, vastly embroidered, to these two Scientologists, these two Scientologists came back — I met them the next day — and, boy, they were in straitjacket condition on the subject.

They said, „Man, there's about only one thing you could do! We've heard them now! We've heard them. We've found out there's absolutely nothing wrong with killing everybody, with butchering us, with butchering everything, with wiping out cities, with wiping out man. We found out there's nothing wrong with any of this. And we've found out something else that is twice as important: that it would have no effect on the two people who were talking to us.“ Now, that's what you call an obsessive games condition. You got it? That's no effect on self, total effect on everything else.

Now, it isn't a moral aspect which checks a thetan. It is not a moral aspect. Kant couldn't. With his Critique of Pure Reason, he tells us that man has an innate moral sense. Well, that is very fine. It made very, very bad writing. I think that Kant is amongst the greater abusers of language. He should have been arrested for cruelty to language. But this man told us that there was such a thing as innate moral sense. Well, there may appear to be. There may appear to be. But anything he could have seen as an innate moral sense doesn't exist.

There is an ethical sense, and a thetan high on the scale does have it. But then one day he says to himself, „I can hurt everybody else and it won't hurt me.“ Now, he could do something else: he could say, „Well, I could hurt everybody else, and me too.“ See, that's the facts of the case. He would. He could say that. That's a fairly factual statement. Yeah, he says that's right.

Even a healthy action: „Well, I've got to beat his head in, and I probably will get my teeth knocked out.“ But he does something like that, and you run the engram of the fight, and you find out there's not much engram there.

But it's this other condition: He says, „Under no circumstances will anything happen to me because I victimize others.“ And when he makes that postulate, he walks himself all the way down the dynamics to number one. Pop! There he is: first dynamic. And the most he could be at that stage would be one-eighth alive. So he couldn't be very thinking or very reasonable.

Now, when we see this games condition in operation — and you should look around and see if you can't notice it in operation, and satisfy yourselves that there is such a thing. You take somebody who acts pretty dippy most of the time, and you will notice that they are obsessively trying to make a total effect on everyone that gets no effect on them at all. See? And when you've satisfied yourself that this exists, you will be able to understand this a lot further. But you should satisfy yourself. You shouldn't take my word for it; you should look over people; you should think this over; you should look at them.

You also probably should run some reverse processes, such as this one: „Look around here and find something that would have an effect on you.“ Well, doesn't it sound reasonable? Nothing wrong with the process. Except your preclear goes out of session — out of his head after a while. All right. We say, „Mock up something somebody has done to you.“ Obviously nothing wrong with this process. Except it pulls the rug out from underneath the preclear, and that's that! It'll throw him downscale with such rapidity that you will be amazed. Only Scientology can push them around on the Tone Scale like this. But that is the little clue of how to push them around.

Now, the commie with his (hah!) „brainwashing“ did a fascinating thing. He did a very fascinating thing, as a commie would. He spread out this tremendous complexity called „brainwashing.“ There was only one factor in it that had validity: He made everybody make a postulate (who got into his hands) that they would somehow get through it without it having any effect on them! And the psychiatrists and other mental plumbers who analyzed these reports have never isolated that one as having any significance. But the fellow is made to feel that if he braces himself against this, it can have no effect on him; it mustn't have an effect on him; it's no-effect on him. Of course, that's impossible.

Now, then they complicated everything and got stupid by making some tortures and, I don't know, feeding them round circles or slavering dogs or something of the sort, none of which had anything to do with it, see? If they'd just get a man to make this postulate, „It's not going to have any effect on me! I'm going to stand up to it somehow or another!“ grit his teeth real good and keep his teeth gritted for about three or four months on this subject, the guy will go into a mental collapse. Got that? Because they've asked everything in the environment, then, to collapse upon the individual. They have made him put up resistance, and that which you resist, you become.

All right. I'm afraid you've got to know this, otherwise you'll never understand why a Learning Process — even if tremendously useful — is not a therapeutic process.

Now, I've told you it is not therapeutic. But let me call something else to your attention: you're engaged in more than one action. You can change people without changing their personality very much. There are other things to change about somebody than his reaction to cats. There are other things to change about people than his IQ. And don't get so narrow about what can be changed about a person. So his intelligence and his aptitude, and two or three other factors probably, would remain relatively unchanged in the face of a Learning Process, but something else would change: his ability to perceive information — which you say, of course, is intelligence. No it isn't. I'm sorry, but it's not. Intelligence is the ability to relax.

Here's a fellow doing an examination. You see him way up on a high games condition, see, „No effect on me. I'll get through it somehow. Make total effect out of the paper.“ He's got his pencil stabbing, not only through the paper, but each other copy below the paper and the top of the desk! You want to go around to examination rooms sometime and you'll see the imprints of the answers all over the desk. People have really been bearing down! And the person who bore down did not get a good grade.

It is very annoying to teachers (who have a little bit of brainwasher in them), very annoying to them sometimes to see somebody come into an examination room, take this big piece of paper and sit down and say, „Oh, that's what you want to know!“ Zip, zip, zip, zip, and hand it back. Huhhhhh! They know he's supposed to work for it, see?

Back in the old days of the early career as a fiction writer, it just used to make my fellow writers just absolutely gibber sometimes, just gibber. I'd see them at a party, and I'd say, „Well, I got to go home. Got to get a story in by tomorrow morning. Somebody's asking for one.“

They'd say, „Yeaaaaaaah!“

They'd run into the editor the next day, think this was a good gag. And he'd say, „Well, yes, he did turn in a story the next morning.“

Ask me, „When did you write that story?“

„Oh, after I left the party.“

„But you were in terrible condition after that party! „

„Well, do you have to be in good condition to write a story? What's that got to do with it?“ See? What a dirty trick.

I had a fellow one time tell me that such-and-such a novel was a good novel because it took seven years to write it. Fine. And I said, „Well, how about David Copperfield?“ I said, „Was that a good novel?“

And he said, „Oh, that's another good novel.“

So I said, „Well, how long do you think it took him to write David Copperfield?“

„Oh,“ he said, „he must have taken about ten years to write a novel that good.“

Horrible part of it is — I don't know the exact time — but David Copperfield was written at the rate of five thousand words a day, which made it about a six-weeks' job. Zoom! Now, there were two novels, and one took seven years and has hardly ever been heard of since, and so on. It doesn't much matter whether you take seven years or seven minutes to do something, since the time has no aesthetic bearing. It isn't how hard anyone works at it.

Now, the learning rate could only cure somebody of thinking he had to work at it hard to understand it. See, that's the only thing it could do, or might do. It just might reorient him on this subject. And changing his mind on that subject, yet not wreck him — because the attention of the auditor, and so forth, is sufficient to keep him coming upscale as fast as you drive him down with a Learning Process. You got the idea?

In other words, you do a smooth job of it as an auditor, and because you're there and you're making him aware of you, see? „Look at me. Who am I?“ is a therapeutic process. „Look at me....“ „You pronounce my identity“ is what it says — „Look at me. Who am I?“

Now, you see that he could go through a tremendous amount of effect on self and have the session itself bring him up as much as you knocked him down? For instance, a frog will stay in the same place if, while he climbs two inches, you push him back two inches. See? And he could still have his mind changed on some subject. And the subject might, in this case, simply be „Well, what do you know, I can learn something!“

Now, anytime that you think learning rate is the total of human action, reaction, test, anything else… It talks so well, you see; it sounds so good. You say, „Well, that fellow has a very slow learning rate.“ You've dismissed him. You've annihilated him.

You know, the learning rate of a person actually has practically nothing to do with his IQ. I don't know why these are so disrelated, but they happen to be. That's only because IQ apparently stresses somebody's ability to read a line off of a piece of paper and put down an answer to it. So you say there is some learning in there, so therefore, that would influence his IQ. Well, then you're telling me at once that his IQ has some bearing upon his worth or ability. Well, it very well may have, but it doesn't have to have. And they're not related subjects, learning rate and intelligence.

Now, I know you think this is the wildest statement we ever made, but remember, we are not teaching rat-ology; psychology is not under discussion here. And psychology has identified these two things. See, those two things are identified in another subject; they're not identified in Scientology. And I can tell you a lot of other things that are identified in psychology — rats and human beings, for one thing.

You test a rat, and that tells you what a human being will do. Well, I don't know that that is the case at all. A rat is almost totally „I'm-supposed-to.“ He's a total machine on I'm-supposed- to. His habit patterns go back generation after generation after generation. They are not changeable, not variable at all. He's a fixed commodity.

Now, we don't even know if each rat is run by one thetan, or if a thousand rats are run by one thetan. We don't actually know the answer to that question. Are rats just totally machines, activated by some ratmaker someplace? See? And the fact that he gives all the rats, like God, some attention, activate the machinery? I mean, we actually don't know the answer to these questions. Anything I would say on it — unless I started to study it — would be silly. Nobody knows the answer to that question.

How do you get armies of marching ants all acting in coordination? A fantastic question! I would hate to do it, myself. And yet they do that down in South America. They all seem to be driven by a common intelligence. Well, how did they get this common intelligence? How did they learn to do „squads right“ and „squads left“ to this degree? They do fabulous things. Well, you're going to tell me that „Each ant is run by a thetan,“ „Every thousand ants are directed by a common intelligence,“ „All ants in the world are directed by a common intelligence.“ I mean, each one of these statements is, of course, just shooting the moon. We don't know. We haven't looked. And because we haven't looked, we can't be positive on this subject. And therefore, we are irresponsible if we say that any one of those things is a fact.

And the reason why you find Scientology relatively easy to study is because those things which do not exist are not called facts. And you are perfectly at liberty to change your mind about any part of Scientology if you can't find out how something in it isn't a fact. These postulates and agreements which make up the reality of this particular universe, of course, are studied in the field of Scientology.

All right. These are agreements, or they're not. That's all. They are data, or they are not. They are the king points and the twistings and turnings of track and reason, or they are not. It is not up to our puny judgment to say they are or they aren't.

That's quite an adventurous statement for me to make. But I can make it from the pinnacle of being able to be reasonable about anything. I can be more reasonable about unreasonable things than you can shake a stick at. As a matter of fact, every once in a while somebody in my office goes looking around for a pistol to blow his brains out. He has pronounced some idiocy to me, and I have shown him how it was a total reality of reasonableness. Got that? Just a gag.

You see, you can make almost anything reasonable. You could be didactic. You can be authoritarian on almost any subject, and on almost any weak premise. Don't ever be fooled by reasonability and explanation. Things are, or they are not. And if you fall somewhere in between, then you're not on either point. If you've got something that appears to be, but maybe isn't, but is, but maybe only appears to be, you're still in a puzzle. And the way to solve the puzzle is find out which is.

Now, I'm not trying to tell you that all things are Aristotelian, but I am telling you that the postulates and agreements which make up this universe and life are positive, succinct and definite. They are not made up out of question marks, except question marks themselves. Question marks themselves are made out of question marks, and they behave in a peculiar fashion. They bring things in on them; they do all sorts of things. But either things are true, and were a common postulate, or they were not. And to this degree we agree with our old friend Aristotle.

In other words, something is an axiom or something is not an axiom. If we say something is an axiom sometimes, you have described an aberration. An aberration is something that is an axiom sometimes. See that? Somebody says, „Horses sleep in beds.“ See? Well, maybe the whole race of „dumbwhuffs“ believe horses should sleep in beds. And we look at them, they're sort of peculiar. And we look them over, and we find out this is true for dumbwhuffs but it's not true for life in this universe. Well, all right, then there's something wrong with the dumbwhuffs. And you look a little bit further, and yeah, that's right, there's something wrong with the dumbwhuffs: they're aberrated. In other words, they have stepped aside from a common, workable agreement.

All right. Now, if this is the case, you have a sort of a black- and-white, yea-or-nay proposition here. But when a thetan adventures into this black-and-white mispostulate… It's a postulate. It's very general, but it is that thing from which everything stems that leads in the direction of collapse.

If you want to find the road to collapse, it's a little sign that says „Not going to affect me.“ A person who is part and parcel to this universe is inescapably part of the fate of this universe. I'm not trying to lay that into you with a club either. It's very possible, knowing that, to escape the total fate of the universe, you see? But your preclear who says, „This can't have any effect on me,“ he very often is saying, „This isn't having any effect on me.“

Now, I'll give you an interesting example of that: air-invisible particles. He breathes it all the time, and he says, „It isn't having any effect on me.“ Oh yeah? One day you get a preclear sneaked out of his head, and he goes back in with a yo-yo, fast. What did he hit? Some air. „Well,“ you say, „is it the air?“

He says, „No. Air doesn't have any effect on me.“ You got that? In other words, he's blinded himself to the reactions of existence. And when he has blinded himself to the reactions of existence, he has cut his awareness down, and he doesn't even know what he won't. He just loses that completely. You get very aberrated conduct, you get unreasonability, you get aberration, you get inability, you get low IQ, and you get all of these things.

Well, Learning Processes batter right straight against that barrier. You just mount yourself a demi-cannon, and you cram it full of powder and shot, and you point it straight at the preclear, and you say, „In spite of all the postulates you have made about never having any effect occur on you in school, in spite of all these postulates, we are going to shoot you right between the eyes and there's nothing you're going to say about it at all!“ The only thing therapeutic about it is the fact that he finds out it won't kill him. Therefore, his learning rate changes.

Well, if his learning rate changes, naturally it's going to change his entire character. Nah! Not going to. You didn't run out the „no-effect-on-me“ proposition. That was not run out. What you did was convince him it was going to have an effect on him, which at all times runs somebody down. So you, obviously — because you're handling auditing procedures correctly — run him up a little bit (because auditing procedures are therapeutic), and by the technique, you ran him down a little bit. And he more or less stays where he is and changes his mind about his ability to learn. See? Your auditing takes him up, the technique takes him down — because it's not a technique.

Now, we could probably say an awful lot about learning, learning rate. I gave the 15th ACC a very fine talk, a very convincing talk on the subject of how learning rate was the total basis of everything. Very interesting talk. And then showed them very clearly that it was not.

Now, wherever you look, you're going to find people busy learning. You're going to find people learning, aren't you? I mean, they have to learn. A fellow has to know where he is; well, he has to learn it. See? Except a fellow really never finds out where he is by learning it. See? He kind of has to say he is there before he then finds out he's there. Don't you see? It's quite amusing if you look at it as postulate — counter-postulate contradictoriness: „I-won't-let-my-left-hand-know-what-my-right- hand-is-doing-at-any-time“ sort of a process here.

But let's take up this, now, just on a very blunt, forward basis. You're making this person learn something. All right. To the degree that you run Mimicry, it has some slight therapy. You say, „One-two-three,“ he says, „One-two-three.“ Now, that means that you have made him make his voice say „One-two-three.“ See? You have showed him that he can mimic another action. You can do that all day, as long as he is making something make a mimicry. See, you give him a mimicry, and then he makes his hand do a mimicry, and so on. To that degree — to that degree — you have a plus therapy. See? The mimicry. That's a plus therapy.

But now you're going to get him to consider that he has learned something. That's effect on him. Now, that isn't going to change anything more than a small idea or two, and is certainly going to be an effect on him, and it is certainly not — directed straight at him — therapeutic. It's just not therapeutic, that's all. It's the same process, almost, as „Look around here and find something that could have an effect on you.“

So fine is this hairline between a games condition and a no-games condition, so critical is it in its understanding, that I have had every auditor — good, brainy auditors — do this same thing: They've said to me, „Oh, yes, I get that. No-games condition, games condition. Yeah. Nothing to it. Very clever. Very witty. I appreciate that, Ron. Thank you,“ and so on-walking off down the street and going on about their job — and anywheres from two to five days later, suddenly come around and look at me and say, „No! You mean…!“

„Oh, yes!“

And they've cognited on it. I'm afraid it's a slow-fuse proposition. That's why I'm punching it up to you. But the difference between knowing about games condition and not knowing about it is the difference between, let us say, Scientology and yoga.

Now, why is it that the boys in Tibet didn't burn the world up? What slowed that down? Something must have slowed it down. Because a white man goes over there and he studies the thing, and he winds up with his head in a wonderful condition of short circuit. He just can't quite make this out: It can do things, it's interesting, it takes so long to learn, so hard to do, it is so impractical. Final analysis: He sits still for twenty years, and at the end of twenty years he can sit still. Does not appeal to the Western mind at all.

And yet, there is just the thinnest difference imaginable between that and Scientology. You could actually study Scientology for years and be absolutely certain that you were studying yoga. It's not their practices are similar; they're not. But people in Tibet, working with the work of Gautama Siddhartha (Buddha), actually were walking along a very, very exact philosophical track that has so many truths in it that it must have been totally true, and which would lead to an enormously interesting expansion. If it had ever been expanded, it would have become Scientology — see, if it were expanded. I'm not saying that this work is better than the work of Buddha or anything like that. All I'm trying to say is that we're working with much the same tools, much the same observational position.

What's different then? It's quite amusing, quite amusing. The forms vary, you might say. This varies and that varies, but there's a lot of similarity. Probably the greatest thinker of his time. Because thinking in such high levels of reference in a world so steeped in ignorance was a much greater feat than anyone in a scientific, mathematically-oriented world putting together such truths. Thinking, back in the relative dark ages of about 625 B.C., was really a trick. That was really a trick; that was a light.

But he didn't say one thing: A yogi sits and meditates. You understand? He sits and meditates. And a Scientologist would make his body sit and meditate. Got it? Boy, that hairline, its width is not measurable by micrometer calipers. And yet it is the difference between a progressive science and something which is just stuck on the time track for twenty-five hundred years.

A yogi would sit and meditate, sort of expecting something to happen, maybe. He would sit, he would meditate. And boy, you can do that for a long time. The Scientologist would make his body sit and meditate. Not that there's a difference between the thetan concept. Because the one group in the world who knew about thetans — our work is not patterned on them; it just happens that they did know about this, we discover later — who knew the most about this, was composed of those lamas, and so on, of Tibet in the world of yoga.

All right. Now, if they are this well advised, why didn't they unwind the whole thing? I mean, why didn't more fantastic things happen than have happened? How is it that the Dalai Lama can be chased out by a bunch of commies? See, that's an interesting question. The United States government might breathe down the back of our necks occasionally — undoubtedly will, every now and then — nevertheless, it's changing things around right this minute, because we think it to be a good idea. But the Dalai Lama ran when the communists came in. It's because we have the thetan at cause, and the bank or environment at effect. And the yogi has the bank or the environment at cause, and the thetan at effect. Complete tsk! Actually, graphically, just swapped ends. Got that?

Yet I imagine you'll find, someplace in yoga, large statements concerning the fact that you must be cause; and it's all a big rundown and a lot of talk about it. And then you'll look at the actual processes and find out they have not been carried over into it. The closest thing to a Scientology process on Earth before our time was yoga; this was the closest thing to it — yoga or Zen Buddhism. These were the closest things to processes. Many of the principles with which we work can be found in those works. But we are not working with these principles because we found them in that work.

When I was very young, after studying that work quite a bit, it became obvious to me that there was something wrong with it, and so went on an entirely different, independent developmental line. Knew about that work and, in some degrees, it closes.

Don't let somebody come along in yoga and say now, „Oh, I see what you're doing; you're doing yoga.“

You say, „Well, I see one thing about you is you don't know what I'm doing.“ See, that would immediately become clear to you.

Another thing is they pull the sin of tremendous number of data, none of them evaluated for importance. Data is not classed in importances. The data is just endless. If there was any „most important datum“ in the work of Gautama Siddhartha Buddha, it was „If you can conceive mind essence, you will be free.“ That's the most important statement he made. But that isn't isolated. And he goes on at once to tell you then, „You must not enter into the worlds of motion and not-motion, of separation and not- separation.“ There are twelve dichotomies there that you mustn't have anything to do with on processes.

And actually, our processes based on motion and not-motion, and separation and not-separation, and so forth, snap people out of their heads and achieve the exact result which Gautama Siddhartha Buddha was trying to establish and achieve. You can just ask somebody, „Find something around here and say you're connected with it,“ or „…say it's connected with you.“ (To be exactly precise, to illustrate what I'm saying here.)

„Connected… connected… Well, that light's connected with me. That's connected with me. That's connected with me.“

You keep this up for a little while on a not-too-bad-off person, and actually not a very well-off person, and next thing you know, they're sitting eight feet back of their heads. You can take a person who's fairly well off and run Separateness and get the same thing. In other words, run either one of two techniques he said you must never run and you accomplish the exteriorization for which he was striving with twenty years of meditation, gazing at your navel. Got the idea? Hm? So therefore, there is something wrong with that work.

Yes, if you can conceive isness, if you can conceive isness with no further complication, you've got it. And the second you try to conceive isness, the world caves in on it. See? You say to this fellow, „Mock up a girl.“ See? He does this two dozen times, three dozen times, and all of a sudden the bank just goes squash! Little particles start running around. Motions, actions occur of one kind or another, and all of a sudden, why, boom! He's got chaos. Why? Because he couldn't conceive mind essence. What is mind essence? Mind essence is probably a thetan. Well, if you could conceive the idea of a thetan, believe me, you would be in wonderful condition — providing you could do it. But we ask almost anybody to conceive a static, and he gets awfully ill. So it means at once that this one-shot Clear, Buddha fashion, was not an attainable thing — for the bulk of the people.

We're working on something else entirely different. We are not trying to free somebody into some mythical heaven where he can stand still forever. That's not what we're trying to do. The goals, everything else, are different.

Yet, I'm merely telling you all that simply — not to downgrade Buddhism. I'm telling you this is a wonderful and a great thing that happened here on Earth twenty-five hundred years ago. A fantastic thing is, out of the darkness and ignorance, somebody steps forward like that and carries forward the only civilization that Asia has had to date that has been stable at all (due to his work and his teachings), and was able, without any frame of reference in the field of mathematics, science or anything else, to isolate so many interestingly true principles. For somebody to do that under that condition, that's heroic. That's great! For somebody, today, to dream up Scientology, put it together out of mathematics, science, and so forth — there are tremendous fields from which to draw for this information. You see? That was a great feat!

But, the main thing I am telling you is this singular little difference between the two things: The Buddhist would sit and meditate for twenty years, expecting something to happen, see? And the Scientologist would make his body sit and meditate. The Buddhist would do it this way: He'd say… twenty years later, see? A Scientologist would run it this way: „All right. Now I'll make my body sit and meditate. Ah, that's fine. I did it. All right, I'll make my body sit and meditate.“ And he'll go ahead and do it. He would do it to the body. All of a sudden he'd probably say, „Well, you know, this isn't having any effect on me!“ But he would say it from about two light-years back of his head.

The slight time difference might interest you: I suppose, ten to twenty hours versus ten to twenty years. Buddhism would take ten to twenty years. But where he's gotten at ten to twenty years, I am not prepared to say. Because they do not look as alive and do not act as alive at the end of the period.

All right. Now, a Learning Process is making a thetan an effect. This does not make it dangerous to run. This does, however, make it nontherapeutic. So you're going to change somebody's case level, you're not going to run Learning Processes. But if you're going to teach somebody how to run a „geewhumpus“ or a shredder machine or calculus, you've asked him to invite his attention to something long enough to find out that it won't bite. You run these exact Learning Processes on him, and then he is capable of learning the subject which you yourself were addressing.

Now, why this particular line? What happened that you did this? He just found out that particular segment was not what he was guarding against and being no-effect against. You left the rest of the universe for him to guard against, but you opened the gates and reassured him on one little tiny subject. Anytime you want to reassure somebody on one little tiny subject, they'll be able to be easy and able on that subject; but it doesn't generally improve their personality at all.

And you'd better learn these Learning Processes and learn to use them well, for this reason: I know no faster way to put anybody into the running, as far as teaching is concerned, than this.

Each Night Instructor of the 15th ACC came away from his first night's instruction — after these Learning Processes had been run by the class — saying, „Wow! There's an awful difference between that group of people and an HCA class. Wow! These people really learn it.“

Yeah. Well, the 15th ACC fell on its face about the end of about the first week — on learning. We ran some Learning Processes, and after that they learned. Didn't change their cases any, but they could certainly learn Scientology after that.

Thank you very much.

[End of Lecture]