[Start of Lecture]
Thank you.
Methods of education. First method of education would be talking. That doesn't work.
Another method of education would be beating. That is very successful, providing you don't care what you're teaching somebody.
So the first method that I would even vaguely recommend in the field of group teaching would be the method used in the PE Courses, where we take a definition of some kind or another, and we read it off. And then we take the data that is being defined, nothing more than that, and get the audience to define it.
And we don't get them to agree with our definition; we get them to define what we're defining. And we get each person to define, here and there scattered through the audience, and ask the rest of them if they think that's what it is.
Now, this method, of course, can utilize one word at a time, a group of words, and so on. It is only useful as a method when one uses rather fundamental items in life. Now, you could ask somebody to define apple pie for a long while without any great leap of IQ. You might be able to increase, here and there through the audience, the gastric appreciation for apple pie.
Therefore, the educational system is not quite as broad or permissive as it appears to be. The Instructor is very carefully segregating, out of the vast body of data available in this universe, a few cornerstones of knowledge: things which are intimate to the livingness of the audience concerned.
Now, with great success, you could use apple pie, definition of, with a bunch of cooks, pastry cooks.
"Apple pie. What's that mean? What do you think an apple pie is?"
And we'd kick this around for a while, and the group would become more real to the group, and apple pie would become more real, and the job would become more real, and so on. But that is a specialized application.
Now, let's take something much more general, then, for a general group. And if we pick a general group, then about the only thing we can handle with a general group are very, very specific items pertaining to living itself in its broadest definitions.
Then we'd have to take such things as cycle of action, affinity, reality, communication, various parts of communication. We'd have to take oddities of phenomena which are still very general and broadly effective. We could actually ask a group of people about the parts of man. We could read it off hurriedly — preferably very hurriedly — in one category, you know: "A body. Well, all right. What's a body?"
Got the idea? Well, this they all hold, obviously, in common. And so we could establish an agreement this way.
Well, I'll go over the method. The method is very, very specific.
Originated this originally in London, but hadn't thought too much about it or done too much with it until here at the Academy, just before the congress.
We hadn't actually beaten groups to pieces with this in London. I had merely experimented in Dublin and London enough to know that this was intensely effective. That's because I hadn't done much teaching. See, I hadn't done very much teaching of these general groups.
And all of a sudden, why, here we were and I had to give the optimum method that I knew in teaching a PE Course, and so that's the method that was given out. I knew it was successful.
Well! Much to my amazement! Much to my amazement, after I went back to London and tried to get this going in the PE Course as a standard operation, dudurrrrr. The Instructor didn't want to do it. He almost blew the place apart with it.
Why?
Well, this Instructor is a good boy, and he's doing it now and doing it well.
Now, get why this method didn't come to view and isn't generally used, and wouldn't be generally used if it had come to view. It's quite one thing to sit and talk to an audience, who, by the social patterns of discipline, will remain seated and listen. That's one thing.
But how about delivering the whole thing over to the audience, and still holding that audience under control?
And this evidently is not a capability possessed by everyone (that they know about).
Now where, then, do we use this successfully in Scientology? Where else could we use it?
Anyplace, providing it was done by a Scientologist.
So we come very specific here. A Scientologist would have to know that he was being a little bit overawed in order to bring himself up to confront what was overawing him slightly. Here he's presenting to the audience these data, key data of one kind or another, and asking this person to define it and that person to define it. And he gets a squirrely definition there, so he goes over there and he asks that person to define it. And he gets a good definition for there, and so he says this and that.
And all the time asking the rest of the group, "Well, now, do you agree with that? Do you agree with that, really? You think that is the definition to it?"
Somebody defined a cycle of action as something used by a trick cyclist. And he looks around to the rest of the group, and he says, "Now, do you think that's what a cycle of action is?"
The rest of the group says "No, no, no." And somebody starts to mutter in the back.
And he says, "Well, all right, now you tell me what a cycle of action is," see, and "Do you think that's what a cycle of action is?" and so on; just variations on that theme.
Well, the reason this is so formidable is actually more than simply the control of people. The person doing this is confronting the exact mechanism that got him that way in the first place: a vast mob of people agreeing that that is the datum.
So a fellow to do this has to realize that. And the only person that would realize that would be a Scientologist.
So it's no wonder that it wasn't invented and used. But it's a killer.
Now, if you wanted to teach a bunch of stenographers how to stenographer — supposing you were running the Gregg Business College, or something of the sort, and you were a Scientologist.
Every once in a while somebody writes me and says, "I have left Scientology professionally now. I am running a mortuary business," or something, "and I'm using it in my business, and the business is very successful, and I owe all this to Scientology, and I'm getting some other morticians interested." And yet he began the thing by saying he was no longer a professional Scientologist.
I guess people had the narrow definition that a Scientologist would be totally one who audited individuals. I guess when they said then they weren't any longer in Scientology, they meant that they weren't in auditing.
Well, the funny part of it is, a person couldn't do this with a group unless he could audit. It's actually an auditing process, one kind or another, and you have to handle that group as, not a series of preclears, but as a preclear, or as a composite of circuits of some sort or the other. And one comes up and another one comes up … And you just run it out.
And why is it so successful? And why do people gain in IQ with such rapidity? Of course, they gain in IQ if you simply stand and talk to them about these same data. But this is nothing compared to the gains you get on this agreement.
"Now, what do you think that means? Now you tell me. How about you?" And so on. And variations of that theme.
Well, one thing it does is quite amusing. Somebody says that a cycle of action is a trick cyclist. Well, the rest of the group says, "Ha-ha-ha-ha!" And he says, "Hey, what do you know? I'm not in agreement with the multitude. I'd better take a look at my values."
He does. He thinks it over, he talks it over a little bit, he mutters about it, and the next thing you know, he comes off some false values which are discursions from the basic agreement of that particular pin of life, see?
So the individual who gets it dead wrong can be counted on to do some advancing, even if he gets mad. He'll do a little advancing, just like that, by having his opinions called to account. Because if his opinions are off beam on these exact fundamentals of what he is doing, which is living, then he's doing a nonfundamental job of living. That's all there is to that. It's as simple as that.
Now, we take these stenographers in Gregg Business College and we could, of course, and should, really, continue with just the same thing: cycle of action, ARC, and that sort of thing, and get these things all thrashed out, till they all reach an agreement on them.
And if we're really doing a thorough job, then we'd go all over them again. We would do this repetitively several times, and, man, we'd have people who were way up in tone. But we would include some specifics that addressed exactly their professional activity.
"Give me a definition for typewriter. All right, you, Maisy: definition for a typewriter. Mm-hm. That's fine. Now, the rest of you agree with that, hm? Do the rest of you agree that a typewriter sometimes serves as a paperweight? Do you think this is right?" And here we go, see?
The next thing you know, they would be in communication with a typewriter better, because they'd found out that a typewriter was a machine with a goal of obeying a typist and putting letters on a piece of paper in a roller. We don't care what kind of a definition they finally agreed on; we don't even care how sloppy the English in it would be, or how many modifying phrases and participial clauses there would be attached to it, or how cumbersome the thing was. This we wouldn't care about.
We ourselves could not operate from only a memorized definition to do this. If we memorize a definition, "Cycle of action of the MEST universe is create, survive, destroy… That's fine. I got my stuff. Now I'm going in and teach this class. All right! That's fine. Now, what do you think the cycle of actWe'd be waiting for somebody to say "The cycle of action is create, survive, destroy."
Not a soul there ever read the book. They don't know that.
Somebody would come up and say, "Cycle of action — we finally got this cycle of action. And a cycle of action, we finally figure out, and the cycle of action means that something starts and keeps going for a while, and then it flops."
And this is perfectly acceptable.
"The rest of you agree with that?"
"Yeah." Bunch of truck drivers. "Yeah! Yeah, that's it! That's true! That's the dope! Right! We got it! It's like a tire: gets manufactured, runs for a while, boom!"
So the fellow teaching it would have to be a Scientologist. He'd have to know what a cycle of action was. He'd have to be able to sort of have a picture of it in his mind, you know? Eyuh-thuh. Somebody comes up and says that.
Now, a fellow who didn't know anything about it couldn't do it. Because he wouldn't know when to stop. He's liable to call to account definitions which are on the beam.
You get the idea? He's liable to say, "Yeah, well, all right. Do the rest of you think that's it?"
Get the difference.
Well now, that system would then be used to clarify livingness in general or specific capabilities or characteristics amongst a certain group of people.
Now, let's take acting. If you took a bunch of actors, and you wanted them to be better actors, you could process all of them. But one of the actions you'd have to undertake to consolidate a company of actors would be this type of an activity.
And you'd have to reduce acting to its common activities, those that had common denominators to all acting. See how we'd have to do that?
We could go over this, then; we reduce it to maybe fifteen titles, each one, one after the other. Each characteristic — we'd wind up with about fifteen of them, or something like that.
We'd even take the parts of acting. We could take the stage. We could take an audience. "What's an audience? All right, you define an audience."
"Rryrrr-rowrr! Yeah, that's what an audience is."
And you'd at least let them work out a tremendous amount of hostility on the subject of hostile audiences and so on. You'd probably run the last two or three flop plays out of them, just with just that, see?
In other words, you'd have to break this subject down. So you'd have to know a great deal about Scientology and a bit about what you were trying to break down. You'd have to have observed what was going on.
Now let's take several other fields.
Let us take the field of medicine. Now, how much medicine would you have to know to run this on medicos? Really not very much.
"So, what's a patient? Now we're going to define patient. Now, you, Dr. Jones, how would you define a patient? Oh? Ho-ho! Somebody who pays a fee. Very good, very good."
We'd eventually get back some of the ethics and so forth that they had in medical school and lost there. We'd eventually get this and that and clarification. We would also get greater interest in their own profession.
Now let us take an organization, and this becomes very, very, very important, because it is a part of organizational Scientology.
Organizational Scientology is moving right up to the front, because we are actually processing more and more large firms. And so far, we are simply processing them either on a PE basis, just teaching them fundamentals of life, or we are doing it individually. That is, the Association is doing this, and it's doing a great many of these. Some of them are coming up every time you turn around, all abroad. It'll be happening here in America soon enough. Individual or PE Course.
Now, you have to know something else here. You have to know this other thing about special activity.
Now this same method of training can be used on an individual. And the second you move into settling an organization in place, you use a different type of education than would ordinarily be used.
You don't issue him 825 directives, all of them more or less conflicting, but beautifully typed. You issue him instead a Scientologist, who takes up his job with him. And you put this individual on post. I'll tell you much more about that when I start to tell you how to run a practice. But, you put him on post, and you get him to define his activity until he has a stable datum for it. And you just keep doing this with him.
Oh, he'll weep and tear his hair. He's liable to do anything before he gets through. It's quite an adventurous activity. Just exactly what you did with life, with a group, you do with an individual. And it's the darnedest auditing you ever ran into.
You run out a whole field of confusion when you do this. One of the most vital activities that could be engaged upon by a Scientologist. It's quite interesting. But as I say, we'll know more about that later.
Now, here then is the special characteristic or just the fundamentals of life. Remember the rule is that you have to get a person to define it, find out how much of their agreement exists with it, discover any further ramifications or things that have to be added to the definition, and then you eventually get them to achieve a stable datum on this subject.
The moment you do that it as-ises a tremendous quantity of confusion; when they really do it.
So here we have a group activity going down to an individual activity.
It always used to be that an individual activity expanded out to a group activity. But here's a new one.
This same process has been used very successfully, and is being used successfully, which was originated on a group and now it's applied to individuals — see that? — as instruction.
Instruction. Odd kind of instruction.
A fellow's an accountant. You say, "All right. Now here you are, and here I am and…" Sort of an "Am I here?" sort of a "Is this a room? Is this a session?" sort of a conversation, you know?
"I understand you've been on the job quite a while," and "Do you know Mr. Smithers well?" and so on, "your boss," and two-way comm. And "All right, well, we're supposed to do something here. I want you to explain something about your job to me."
Well, he's always willing to do that. He thinks you're there to explain his job to him. And this takes him by storm, because you don't do that. You say, "What is a good definition for accounting?"
And he gives you some long, involved thing out of the Alexander Hamilton Institute for Higher Federal Swindling.
And he gives you this, and you say, "Well, that's very good. But do you think that is — just think it over for a moment — do you think that is…" Pick up any clause in it, any phrase in it. "Do you think that belongs there?"
"Well, I don't know.
"How would you rephrase that?"
And it's a funny thing that you're asking him this question, because he's never thought about the definition before.
And he starts knocking it together, and after you've done this with him for maybe an hour, this professional accountant comes up with a definition for an accounting, something he never had before.
And all of a sudden, about eighteen hats he thought he was wearing disappear, and about three more he didn't know he had appear, and his job starts to orient. And being a stable datum now, he can handle his communication post, which is all he is occupying.
All right, now, let's see, then, that there is a method of teaching by definition and getting agreement. There is a method of teaching that way.
There is another method of education, which is lower than this, and which is quite fabulous. It's fantastic. In fact, I'm ashamed to mention it. It's too fundamental. It's right down in the bottom drawer.
I'm going to pick somebody very bright here in order to do this with. And you understand this is just a demonstration. Have I got any volunteers? Thank you, Harold.
PC: Okay.
LRH: All right. Now I'm going to say something, and then I want you to say something. Is that all right with you?
PC: Yeah.
LRH: All right. One, two, three.
PC: One, two, three.
LRH: Now, that's very good. Now, did you say that?
PC: Yeah, I said that.
LRH: Well, why did you say that?
PC: Because you said it.
LRH: Oh, I said it and then you said it!
PC: Uh-huh.
LRH: Now, do you remember what you said?
PC: One, two, three.
LRH: That's very good. All right. Now, you see how this goes now. All right, I'm going to say three more numbers, and I want you to repeat them, okay? That's good.
PC: Mm-hm.
LRH: All right. Six, eighteen, twelve.
PC: Six, eighteen, twelve.
LRH: All right. What did I say?
PC: Six, eighteen, twelve.
LRH: Is that what I said?
PC: Yeah.
LRH: You're sure that's what I said?
PC: Yeah.
LRH: Well, do you recall what I said? Do you really…
PC: No, I recall what I said.
LRH: You recall what you said, not what I said?
PC: Yep. Yeah.
LRH: Well, that's very fascinating. Well, what number was it?
PC: Well, it was three numbers: six, eighteen, twelve.
LRH: But you do remember it, don't you?
PC: Yes, I do.
LRH: Well, do you recall me saying it?
PC: (pause) Mmm… not as well as I recall me saying it.
LRH: You remember you saying it better! Well, that's very interesting. All right, now, that's good, that's fine. All right: thirty-two, sixteen, eleven.
PC: You want me to do something with that?
LRH: Sure; say it!
PC: Oh! Thirty-two, sixteen, eleven.
LRH: Very good, very good. What did I say?
PC: Thirty-two, sixteen, eleven.
LRH: All right. Do you recall me saying that?
PC: Yeah, but not quite as well as I do me saying it.
LRH: All right. That's very interesting, isn't it?
PC: Yeah.
LRH: All right. Now we're going to go a little further into this, if this is all right with you, huh?
PC: Sure, sure.
LRH: All right: A hundred, twelve, sixteen.
PC: A hundred, twelve, sixteen.
LRH: All right. Did I say that?
PC: Yeah.
LRH: Do you remember my saying it?
PC: Yeah.
LRH: You do remember it?
PC: Yeah.
LRH: It's easier to do now?
PC: Yes, it is!
LRH: Well, all right! All right.
PC: Yeah, after all that.
LRH: All right, I'm going to say three more numbers, and I'm going to ask you to say them after them. All right?
PC: Right.
LRH: All right. Three, two, one.
PC: Three, two, one.
LRH: All right, that's fine. Now, do you remember the first numbers that we used? The first numbers I said?
PC: Mmmm… no.
LRH: The firstPC: Oh, oh!
LRH: Yeah, what were they?
PC: One, two, three.
LRH: One, two, three. All right. Very good. Well then, you can remember what I say, can't you?
PC: Yeah.
LRH: Huh? You can remember what I say, and you can remember what you say, can't you? Huh?
PC: Yeah, yeah.
LRH: All right and it's not very difficult, is it?
PC: No.
LRH: It's not very difficult at all.
PC: No.
LRH: Well, all right. Now, I'm going to ask you something, and that is, did you feel any physical pain while I was saying these numbers to you?
PC: No. No.
LRH: In other words, repeating them and remembering them didn't cause any physical pain. Is that right?
PC: No, it didn't.
LRH: No physical pain at all?
PC: No.
LRH: Well, all right. I'm going to say three more numbers, and I'm going to ask you to say them after them, all right?
PC: Right.
LRH: All right. Eight, seven, six.
PC: Eight, seven, six.
LRH: All right. Now, how do you feel about that?
PC: Good!
LRH: You feel all right about that?
PC: Yeah! Yeah.
LRH: In other words, there's no great tension involved here?
PC: No.
LRH: You sure? You sure? You sure there's no tension? Huh?
PC: Nah.
LRH: Less than there was?
PC: Yeah.
LRH: All right. Now, what was the last thing I said?
PC: Eight, seven, six.
LRH: In other words, this is easy to remember, huh?
PC: Yeah!
LRH: Yeah, it's easy to remember what I say, huh?
PC: Yeah.
LRH: Well, all right. Now, what do you think about it?
PC: Well, I think it's pretty easy to remember what you say.
LRH: All right. You think it really is?
PC: Yeah.
LRH: All right. Now, all of these data, of course, I've been giving you are very nonsignificant.
PC: Yeah.
LRH: There is no great significance to this data at all.
PC: Mm-hm.
LRH: Is that right?
PC: That's right.
LRH: All right. Now let's get just a little more significant, all right?
PC: Okay.
LRH: All right. All chairs are purple.
PC: All right. All chairs are purple.
LRH: All right. Well, is that true?
PC: No. No, it's not.
LRH: Well, what did I say?
PC: You said all chairs are purple.
LRH: And then what did you say?
PC: I said all chairs are purple.
LRH: All right. We both said all chairs are purple.
PC: Yeah.
LRH: Are they?
PC: No.
LRH: No. All right, then you could disbelieve something I said, couldn't you?
PC: Yeah!
LRH: You could throw it out, huh?
PC: Yeah, yeah.
LRH: All right. Well, that's good, that's good. Now, let's try that again, all right?
PC: Yeah!
LRH: All right. The ceiling is an inch above the floor.
PC: Okay. The ceiling is an inch above the floor.
LRH: All right. How's that?
PC: That's all right.
LRH: What did I say?
PC: You said the ceiling is an inch above the floor.
LRH: All right. Can you throw that out?
PC: Yeah, sure.
LRH: Do you have to believe it?
PC: No.
LRH: It's not a vital datum?
PC: No. No.
LRH: Is it true?
PC: No.
LRH: Not true?
PC: No.
LRH: In other words, you got a power of choice over something I said, haven't you?
PC: Yeah.
LRH: Well, that's pretty good. That's pretty good. All right, now let's go just a little bit further with this, shall we?
PC: Okay.
LRH: All right. Preclears should always be acknowledged.
PC: Okay. Preclears should always be acknowledged.
LRH: Mm-hm. Well, all right. Is that true?
PC: Mmm… Well, if you want to help him, it is.
LRH: Huh?
PC: Yeah, if you want to help him, it is.
LRH: Well, yeah, but the datum was preclears should always be acknowledged. Is that true?
PC: No, that's not true.
LRH: That's not true?
PC: No.
LRH: What do you think about it as a datum?
PC: I think it's a pretty good datum.
LRH: Yeah? Pretty good datum, but not always true.
PC: No, not always true.
LRH: Well, I tell you what. Let's take a little example of this here, one way or the other. Let's take these two objects here. We'll call this object the preclear, and we'll call this object the auditor, all right?
PC: Okay.
LRH: All right. Now, I want you to give me an example of that datum, "preclears should always be acknowledged." Now, if that datum were in existence, what would be the action of the auditor here to a statement on the part of the preclear? Now, you just tell me.
PC: Well, acknowledge him; say "Okay" or "All right," something of the sort.
LRH: Mm-hm. All right. Well, now you have the preclear here say something and have the auditor acknowledge it, okay?
PC: Oh, "Gluck!" You know, "Okay."
LRH: All right. You bet. All right. Have the preclear say something.
PC: "Gleeck."
LRH: All right. Now what does the auditor say?
PC: "All right."
LRH: Okay. Is that… that's an acknowledgment?
PC: Yeah.
LRH: And the datum says what? "Preclears should always be acknowledged." What's that say there?
PC: Well, that says that the auditor should always acknowledge…
LRH: Yeah…
PC: …something from the preclear's statement.
LRH: Well, give me a more graphic example of that.
PC: Well, preclear says, "I'm hungry."
LRH: Mm-hm.
PC: Auditor says, "Okay."
LRH: Mm-hm. All right. But the datum is a preclear should always be acknowledged. Now, can you give me a graphic example of that? Using these two items.
PC: Using those two items… (pause) I don't know! No, not very well, using those two items.
LRH: Why not?
PC: Well, that's not a preclear, and that's not an auditor.
LRH: Well, that's true… That's true. I agree with you there. It's perfectly true. Perfectly true. In other words, you didn't even have to accept my assignment of value to these two things.
PC: No, no.
LRH: You didn't have to.
PC: No.
LRH: Did you really agree with the assignment of value to them?
PC: Well, for a little while there.
LRH: But not now?
PC: Yeah, not now.
LRH: Well, not now. All right, shall we assign value to them again?
PC: Well…
LRH: Why don't you assign the value to them? Which one's the preclear?
PC: I don't know that I'd want to assign that value.
LRH: You don't know that you'd…
PC: Well, unless I wanted to assign more values to them, and said that the, well, the glass, you know, could talk or do certain things…
LRH: All right.
PC: Yeah, you know. And I could do that.
LRH: Okay. Well, do so. Go ahead.
PC: Oh, go ahead? Okay, well, it's all right the way you had it there. The glass can be the preclear.
LRH: All right. All right.
PC: And the Coke bottle will be the auditor.
LRH: All right. Now let's get an example of this datum we're examining.
PC: Okay. The glass, as a preclear, says, "I've had enough of this; I'm leaving."
LRH: Mm-hm.
PC: And then if the auditor, which is the Coke bottle, must always acknowledge the preclear, the Coke bottle says, "Okay."
LRH: It's not very workable, is it? All right! All right. You got a good grip on this datum, though?
PC: Yeah.
LRH: All right. Well, let's modify it so it is true. Now, how would you modify it so it's true?
PC: Well… (pause) Well, something to the effect that if an auditor wants to get good results, you know, if he wants to handle this thing, then he will acknowledge. You know…
LRH: You were…
PC: Like, for example, an auditor might just be trying out, to find out for himself whether acknowledgment was worthwhile or not. So in that case maybe he wouldn't acknowledge, just to see what would happen.
LRH: Mm-hm. Well, give me a datum then that could be taught to somebody.
PC: Hmm…
LRH: Concerning acknowledgment.
PC: Well, something like "You want to be an auditor, you're going to audit a preclear, try this for yourself and see if it works: When your preclear originates something, you acknowledge. See if you get good results." Something of that sort.
LRH: Mm-hm. Well, can you just codify it as a datum?
PC: (pause) Mmm… (pause) Well, just acknowledge your preclear.
LRH: Mm-hm. You'd want to make it that brief?
PC: Well, you might add something about results in there — get certain kind of results. I don't know for sure.
LRH: Well, "acknowledge your preclear": is that much of a modification from "preclears should always be acknowledged?"
PC: Well, I don't know about this should always be acknowledged…
LRH: Oh! You don't like that should always.
PC: Yeah, I'm not sure I like that.
LRH: Well, how would you vary that?
PC: Mmm. I don't know.
LRH: Well, let's vary it so that it could be stated. Preclears what, concerning acknowledgment? Just anything you want to say.
PC: Oh, I'd be more inclined to say… I don't know.
LRH: Come on, let's make a datum up here.
PC: (pause) I don't know. I'd just say "acknowledge your preclear."
LRH: You just would say "acknowledge your preclear."
PC: Yeah.
LRH: Hm. Nothing cautionary about it?
PC: I might make another datum that says — that would put this datum under "For good auditing…" I mean, "These are the rudiments of auditing," or something, "Acknowledge your preclear." And then tell the guy, "Well, you try doing it, or you try doing it — try not doing it, and see what happens."
LRH: All right. All right. What conclusion do you think he would attain then?
PC: Well, I think he'd come to the conclusion that when he wanted good results, that he would acknowledge his preclear.
LRH: All right. Well now, supposing you tell me that datum.
PC: Well, if you want good auditing results, acknowledge your preclear.
LRH: If you want good auditing results, acknowledge your preclear.
PC: Right.
LRH: Is that what you said?
PC: Yeah, that's what I said.
LRH: Did I repeat it?
PC: Yeah, you did.
LRH: Oh, I'll repeat something you said.
PC: Yeah.
LRH: Is that right?
PC: Yeah.
LRH: Well, say it again.
PC: If you want good auditing results, acknowledge your preclear.
LRH: All right. If you want good auditing results, acknowledge your preclear.
PC: Very good!
LRH: All right. Okay. Thank you very much, Harold. End of session!
All right. Now, do you see this particular method of instruction?
It takes a nonsignificant datum and teaches somebody that the repetition of the datum does not bring about chaos, does not hurt him any, that he can do it. Right?
Then you teach him he could remember it and so forth.
Now, although he is taught data all the time, it might be, because of association of something with you, he is not necessarily convinced that he could accept your data. Some people are safe and some aren't, you see? Got the idea?
So if you wanted to teach him something, why, you would have to give him a test of this. Let him look it over.
And you'd do this, of course, with a nonsignificant datum: one, two, three; a hundred, thirty-two, sixteen, see? Just numbers. Just nothing to it, nothing to it at all. You get a repetition of this, and then he can remember it, and he will find out that his own — usually, this is fairly standard — he'll remember that his own repetition is safe, and that yours is a little bit held off, see? Then he finds out immediately that's not so bad; I mean there's nothing wrong with that.
Now, you do something else with him. He's so used to being taught by life with duress, and not with a power of choice, that you take a totally incorrect datum. You know, you showed him he could remember it over a long period of time, like the trick of giving him the first number backwards, and letting him repeat the first number again.
But you give him an incorrect data. There would be no argument about the incorrectness of the datum. And you let him throw it out. And you give him another datum, incorrect, and let him throw it out. And if he has any difficulty with the nonsignificant items, you would, of course, keep repeating these until we could do it smoothly and this worked out.
I don't care how long it took.
And then, you would keep giving him incorrect data and letting him throw it out, and show him definitely and positively that he could give it the yo-heave. You got it?
Now, you've shown him that he can remember something or reject it, and that is the definition of power of choice.
You've shown him and demonstrated to him — probably at much greater length than I have demonstrated to you here, you see? You have demonstrated to him that he can take nonsignificant data and give it the yo-heave, he can take completely incorrect data and give it the yo-heave, and that he can remember any of this data. And also that it didn't hurt him and it didn't kill him. You got it?
And then you give him a datum which is the datum you wish to teach him. And you give him power of choice over the datum. But the pitch is to give it a little bit exaggerated in force. You got it? "Preclears should always be acknowledged." It's not true. Not true.
Let him quarrel with it. Let him chew it around. Let him add it up and look over his experience.
And make him give you an objective example. That is a vital part of this particular operation — a vital part of it.
Have him set up a dummy situation somehow or another, see? If you're teaching him that it is wrong to run off the road with a car, or something stupid like that, why, you have him show you where the road is on the table and move the salt shaker off the road, see? You get the notion, see?
You give him an objective example. He has to then translate your statement into action. Got that? He must do this, and he must continue to do this until he can do it, one way or the other, so that it ceases to be a bunch of words.
There's many an excellent student to whom all of education is only a bunch of words, and somehow or other they've mastered the mathematics of words so that they can make the words change and redefine and come back, and nothing ever hit reality at all. In other words, the avoidance factor is so strong that they have worked out a complete mathematics of symbols. And they can be very convincing. They can give you examples.
But to point to objects, to make them give direction to the objects, intention to the objects, and so forth, is quite something else. It removes this thing, then, from the theoretical class and moves it into the world of doingness.
So you remove this datum into a bit of a better definition, and then you remove it into the world of doingness. You argue some more with him and agree with him — you pick an agreement with him — on the subject of the definition itself, until he can state it fairly well. And then you make him give it to you, and you repeat his definition.
It shows him he can do this, too.
Fascinating thing is he's liable to relax about the whole datum.
Now, one item came up with relation to this particular demonstration session. Of course, the amount of stress that we were putting on it is of course brief We did this very, very briefly, with somebody who already knew the datum. That's why it could be brief, don't you see?
No subject has more than half a hundred important data in it. I don't care what you're doing. They don't have more than a half a hundred really vital, top-flight data.
The running of a truck company: some guy who knows how but can't tell you how, and that sort of thing — got it bred in the bone, and all that sort of thing — you better not count on him in any push. Because he can't state what he's doing; therefore, it's all in the field of action. So therefore it must be to some degree obsessive.
He always has to get the trucks out. There's eight broken down. If they run any further in the condition they're in, they'll burn up his trucks. Well, some hidden datum is in there someplace about always getting the trucks out.
So these eight trucks, in spite of the protests of the mechanics and so forth, hit the road anyway, and there's an awful lot of dollars in trucks suddenly burned up, you see?
I've seen shipping companies do this. The ships must always go to sea and be making money for their owners.
Or "Paint is expensive!" or something like this. And this is a monitoring, important datum.
All right. Now, in view of the fact that we are doing an evaluation of data, if you please — please, look at this — the evaluation up to this moment is in the hands of the Instructor. You got it?
Now, we have to run another type of session, which is best done on the ground with the subject matter of the person. We run unimportances. We run unimportances, that's all.
We don't run importances. Why?
Everybody in the universe has always been running importances. Everything was always important. Anything was important.
"It's very important that you put your hat on this particular peg."
"Why?"
"Well, because it's important!"
Well, why is it important? What's important mean? Important means punishment. Got it?
People are taught to do things, not because they're sensible or because it's a good game, they're taught to do things because of consequences — dire consequences.
So you can cover the whole field of any activity in terms of consequences by covering it in terms of importances.
Now, you could do consequences or importances and wind up more or less with the same result.
You're teaching somebody to drive a tractor. Driving — teaching of driving — is quite an activity. There are a lot of driving schools in the United States. They teach people to drive.
There are a lot of police schools that teach people to drive better. They do a fine job of it, too. They send the people out to have more accidents. It's very good. I mean, it's very good. They have trouble, you see, with employment in the traffic department. And if they had less accidents, why, they'd have less employment, so on. You got to keep it up somehow or another; it's the only way I can figure it out.
But they teach everybody how important it is to do this, and how important it is to do that, because of the dire consequences of.
And I've never heard anybody in a driving school… And I've looked this problem over very interestedly. We even devised a very beautiful little test that someday we're going to shove under the noses of people who are taking driving tests. And when they flop it, they flop. That's that. It's an amazingly insignificant little test to show up the tremendous stress of confusion in the individual. Because only 10 percent of the drivers make 90 percent of the accidents. And all you have to do is eliminate them, and we would see a lot less red lights.
I've never heard an instructor say, "You drive this way because it's the aesthetic thing to do," or "because this is the way to drive gracefully."
They don't do that. And yet that's the only reason that appeals to a thetan. It's the only reason people buy automobiles today: they look aesthetic in them, they think. Or they drive aesthetically or something. You know?
Maybe somebody's got a reverse on aesthetics, and ugliness and aesthetics have reversed somehow — beauty and ugliness have reversed in the field of aesthetics — and so he knows how he looks aesthetic in a car: old slouch hat, Model-T Ford, you know? That's the aesthetic setup.
So what would you do? What would you do with somebody if the importance of the situation is rather for the birds. It really doesn't get too far.
I was rather amazed to learn a complete report about all of the kids of a town in England are taught continuously and yanked back in. Nobody ever stops teaching them how to ride their bicycles and walk safely. They're always taught this. Ride their bicycles and walk safely.
And the report goes on and on, saying then the importance of an educational program in preventing accidents, since they've had no accidents in that town for motor traffic, which is fairly heavy through it, for many, many years. And this program has been very thorough and has been followed very, very well.
The datum, of course, makes good sense in favor of "make them all study safety, and they have a safe record," until you learn that they are conducted through these exercises and so forth on the ground.
It amounts to learning how to walk and ride bicycles on streets. They take them out and… They must include in it, for the thing to work at all, the lesson that "you, too, can safely ride a bicycle and don't have to worry about it." And that must overweigh the importance factor; otherwise the program would not have mounted up this way, see?
It's quite interesting.
Now, if you have no time to educate anybody, if you're very careless, you don't care anything about it, and you feel pretty sadistic, you say, "Nobody is going to leave this post tonight."
You're a general or something, and, you know, uncontrolled. And somebody named Slovick or something or other leaves the post, and you shoot him. You show other people the dead body and you say, "You see?"
That is, if you're real stupid, this has a workability which is a usable workability — if you're real stupid. You haven't any imagination or something, you can do that.
Well, this has a rather broad appeal, for some reason or other.
I'll show you; it's intensely workable, this method by force: "If you kill. somebody, you'll get killed."
Very forceful; it works: murders stopped a long time ago. Hasn't been a murder in years, obviously, because there've been an awful lot of hangings. Proves itself, doesn't it?
Education by importance, then, is all right as long as you're in terrific ARC with your people.
You can say, "This is an awfully important datum. Look it over and see if you don't think so."
If you're not in terrific ARC with the people, not close up and in terrific ARC with them all the time, by golly, you certainly… It isn't power of choice you have to return to them, it's relaxation. That's what you've got to return to them: relaxation.
You've got to get them to relax about the body of data before the importance of the data shows up.
So, you teach somebody to drive a tractor by having him select the unimportant parts of it: things that he's sure are relatively unimportant about the tractor, the control or handling of which is relatively unimportant.
And you know, before you've run it very long, this tractor will become the most important thing he ever saw. I mean he won't be able to run it very long before "But it's all important!" you know?
And you say, "Oh, come on. You can find something else about this tractor that's unimportant. Oh, come on; let's find something else." You're running a covert kind of 8-C, of course, at the same time, which is highly successful and mustn't be neglected on the educational factor.
"One more unimportant thing about this tractor."
Well, he finally decides that the coat of paint that is on the exact front of the crank is probably unimportant. He probably decides that.
And you keep nailing him and nailing him and nailing him. The thing gets more solid to him — one of the things that happens. But the other thing that happens is, the allness that he finally comes upscale into starts to disintegrate.
He finds out after a while that the controls — he doesn't know anything about the tractor; he's just been examining it. He will finally select the controls and the exact items which are control contacts of the tractor as the most important things of the tractor from his standpoint. And then hell select these down, and gradually, why, hell have it taped.
The funny part of it is, if you do that, he ran get in and drive the tractor. Fantastic!
In other words, it isn't so important that it'll kill him if he doesn't know. And if he's on a craving-to-know anxiety all the way through his learning to drive a tractor, it practically kills him. And someday the tractor probably will kill him. It's all so important that he convinces even himself by running off of a cliff with it.
He suddenly fumbles for the brake at the last moment, you see, and hits the choke, and it merely advances the speed of the engine slightly. And he says, "Something is wrong here," he says. "It's all so important."
So there's a whole series of tricks educationally that center around the devaluation of importances of the unimportant parts of the subject. Got it?
That's a whole field of education. Go take somebody out and show him a hydroelectric dam, find the unimportant parts of it.
My God, it may take him ten months! We don't even care who he talks to or anything else. But we don't let him simply study it out of its manual, see? We don't do that to him. He has to select the unimportances.
Now, one of the things that is very amusing about this: I quite often show somebody how to use a camera, because that's a dramatization on my part of Fac One, of course.
And I have pretty good luck. I pretend to take film out of the back before I show people the snapshots and so forth. And it's quite interesting that people in Scientology are very, very easy to teach about a camera. Very easy. Fac One or no Fac One; it has no bearing on it. They're just rather easy to teach the mechanical operation of something. You show them this and show them that and they say, "That's fine," and wind it up and "click," you know. They're fine.
Except for somebody who has never selected out the importances of Scientology, and who still believes that every datum in Scientology must be totally memorized, because it's just as important as every other datum in Scientology. And Scientology is the same order of magnitude as yoga; it's the same order of magnitude as something else; it's same order of magnitude as psychology; the same order of magnitude… It's all-all-all-all- all, see?
And you look up this person's past, and they've been punished within an inch of their lives. Direct coordination. It's all important.
So if you said to somebody, "For good auditing results, preclears should be acknowledged," something on that order — if you just said that to him, and you said to him, "Preclears sit in chairs and stand up," and "Textbooks vary in price." Now, you give him this data, and you say, "Now, study for examination."
So they memorize "Textbooks vary in price."
You will find this person likewise is incapable of putting the material into use.
So you have to devaluate the unimportances out of this allness.
All right. I was showing somebody this in Scientology — how to run a camera (this was not very recently) — because I wanted this person to get a couple of snapshots at a congress. "You go over there and snap them."
All of a sudden realized that I'd hit a peculiar strata of "it was all very important," because they were being taught something — because I was teaching them this, you see?
Its order of magnitude jumped out of groove. See? And the anatomy of a preclear and how you snap a camera became of equal importance, you see?
They were going this way: "Yes. Yes. Show me that again. Sh--show me where the — where the release is. Show me where the — where the release is."
And I said, "Well, which release are you talking about?"
"How — how you take the film out."
Well, what could we have cared less about taking the film out of the camera they were only going to use for two shots? Yet they were fixed right on it.
And I said to them, "Well now, tell me confidentially: Do you think what I'm telling you is very important?"
"Ha-ha! Ha-ha! Ha-ha! It's not at all important, is it? Ha!" and they all of a sudden went outside and went into hysterics.
Person's whole auditing characteristics altered — their abilities altered — just on suddenly realizing something was out of line on the allness of the importance of everything.
In other words, we just shook one little brick loose in this formidable wall, and the rest of the wall caved in.
Now, the shaking of the allness and everythingness and uniformity of the importance and heaviness and conviction of, and so on, is probably one of the best educational maneuvers that a fellow can undertake with somebody who has already been educated in a subject. So we even can undo old-time education.
Now, I told you education has something to do with fixing data and unfixing it, changing existing data, either by making it more fixed or less fixed. So today we have under view and in view, then, a technology, with its importances, and any variation of it, which can undo to a marked extent a very thorough education in some subject and return it to the power of choice of an individual.
Now, because some people are so far out of communication, the technique of teaching them something often has to include auditing. So they'd have to be audited and uneducated.
But this you find is the most formidable task of the educator: to take somebody who has been educated in it. You hand a bunch of new radar and stuff to the Andrea Doria. Everybody on there has been going to sea all this time. They are all terribly experienced; they know all about it. They never look at it.
And in a fog one day somebody thinks they're depending on it, and they're not depending on it, and they've got a cross-up, and they have never been uneducated from other methods, and they're supposed to accept new methods, and they're all equal — lahlah… And the Andrea Doria is on the bottom.
See what happened? You didn't try to uneducate them before you educated them.
Now, everybody knows that a thetan is a bottomless pit. But not on the subject of education. He absorbs just about so much on a subject, and then he knocks off.
So you have to get him to evaluate it, reevaluate it, and assume its various levels of evaluation under his own power of choice. And then he's got a subject in more useful state than he has ever had it before.
And now I hope you know perhaps a little more about how to teach people to know less about what they know all about.
Thank you.
[End of Lecture]