[Start of Lecture]

Thank you.

This is the 17th of January and the twelfth ACC lecture of the 16th ACC. Right? All right.

I'm talking to you about the third dynamic. Almost every lecture I have given you right up to this moment had to do with the third dynamic, right across the boards. I haven't talked to you about other dynamics to amount to anything. I have said they were included. But I've talked to you about stimulus-response, and I have only mentioned in passing that all the dynamics are something one goes into agreement with. And having gone into agreement with all the dynamics across the boards, then to deny, without undoing or changing the agreement, a dynamic, then forces one back down to the first dynamic. Right? I have told you that. You recall that. All right.

But nearly everything I've talked to you about stressed the third dynamic. It had to do with communication. And when you have a communication, you have a third dynamic. When you've got a live two-way communication — when you've got a live communication, you've got a third dynamic, obviously.

The day a dog opens his mouth and says hello to you, you would have a fifth dynamic. Dogs, we know, do a certain amount of live communication. Their communication pattern, by the way, follows the same aberrative pattern as anyone else's. Dogs have comm lags and obsessive communication and all sorts of things. It's quite amusing. But at the same time, we wouldn't at once qualify them there because we have a disparity of communication.

The things we say to a dog are not the things the dog says to us. So we're not then, in essence, talking about a fifth dynamic. We say hello to a dog, he says, „I love you,“ see? We say, „Would you like something to eat?“ and something or other, and he wags his tail and grins. Fine, fine. Dog almost never comes around and says, „Would you like something to eat?“ You see? So it isn't a communication that can take place in balance. Well now, because we know this cannot take place in balance, we actually do not fully include the animal kingdom in our communication formula. We're sparing in its inclusion. We do it somewhat, but it's a limited approach — limited.

A similar limited approach would be the approach on the seventh dynamic. Man has indulged in many of the more humorous idiocies in communicating with the seventh dynamic. We have spiritualism, séances and so on, some of which may be factual, some of which may not be factual, but none of which I ever saw were factual — I don't care in what land, time or place. And believe me, I've attended a lot of séances under an awful lot of fancy, interesting names. A witch doctor's exorcism of the dread and evil spirits is actually done, more or less, in the atmosphere of a séance. And that handling of the seventh dynamic is much further from good communication than communication on the fifth dynamic with a human. See, that's much further.

In other words, the type of communication man has attempted on the seventh dynamic is humorous, to say the least. It's funny. He expects spirits of the dear, dead, departed husband — the old crock couldn't have dragged himself off the couch if you'd held a twenty dollar gold piece to him. And the dear, dead, departed husband walks forth and blows a trumpet loudly, and leaves a paraffin impression of his hand, you know. I mean, if he could do this, he wouldn't have lain on the couch, you see?

It is a subject which opens itself rather widely to hoodwinkery. What you can't see, you can't prove. So, we have all sorts of charlatans — Catholic priests, and so forth — indulging in this. The baptismal ceremony of the Roman Catholic church is an interesting dabbling into the seventh dynamic; it's just a dabble. It says, „Get thee hence, thou foul demon.“ That's what they say to the baby. In other words, there's an exteriorization sentence in their baptismal ceremony, which I think is very funny. Now, I'm not being anti-religious when I'm being anti- Catholic. I hope you understand that. Very few people are real clear on this point. I know a financial fascism when I see one.

In other words, here again is a limited communication. And every once in a while we have somebody who goes low on B,, does a lot of self-auditing, something or other happens to this character, and all night long he's chased by black demons. He comes in, tells you he's been chased by black demons all night, something like that; he was up all night fighting these demons. It's quite curious. It's amusing. It's probably even very upsetting to the individual. But it's a funny thing that B, would work so similarly to the burning of sulfur in the exorcism of demons.

You give him some B1 and the next night he's not up all night fighting black demons, you see? They're exorcised; in the former night they were exorcised. All right.

When we see departures from the communication formula, we are apt to see hoodwinkeries which are obvious hoodwinkeries. When we get off the third dynamic, we see something that we consider peculiar, because we know it's not communication. Let's take praying to the great god Maul, somewhere on the track. He's an image, he sits there on a stone pedestal, and we say this is spiritual release for the people or something.

Well, down in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, I was quite amused to find a Buddha there that is used quite commonly in nearly all of the temples of Japan. They have him sitting there, not in his curtained alcove, but out in the bright sunlight. He's out in a sort of a patio they have there, and several curiosities are in this patio. And this Buddha is just like all other such idols, whether the great god Maul or anything; it's a graven image. But they ungraven it this way: This Buddha, in company with all of his cousins (stone images), has a little door. And this little door, right at his back, is very handily opened, you see (from the back of the alcove), and a person can easily climb in this door. And then the Buddha's face is so fixed that it megaphones, and changes the tone and resonance of anybody's voice.

(This was a rather good one, is the only reason I remembered this particular Buddha.) Therefore, anyone coming up with supplications can always be told to drop the proper number of silver pieces in the slot, and his prayers will be answered. But who tells him? This is again a third-dynamic communication — a pretended eighth, but actually a third.

In other times and places, people have gotten disgusted with images. They fell over and hit them on the toe, or something of the sort, you know? Or they're clumsy to move around. Or they lost their temple so often — it was burned up so often by barbarians that they despaired any longer of building another temple and putting a good image in it, so they have an image that is space. They start worshiping space. It's usually a manifestation when people's religious sense goes downhill they get the worship of space. And they point these communications up into space and expect the thunder and lightning to answer them. I'm talking from a rather enlightened, not a cynical, viewpoint. I say space because we are accustomed to believing that only the current Christian deity is a god who occupies all space. Actually, he isn't a space god, he's a MEST-universe god. He occupies everything and anything. Only two or three specialized Christian religions devote themselves entirely to the worship of space.

But this space god is quite interesting. He's a trap, because if one talks long enough at space with no reply, he'll get stuck in space, if you can imagine that. He gets fixed into space — in other words, a one — way communication. He's been made to believe that something in the space will answer him, and then nothing in the space ever answers him, so he has to guess at the answers or do something or get stuck. And what's he do? He comes back to the first dynamic.

The eighth is very often steered straight back to the first dynamic without ever God as such (as a large concept) ever having been contacted. A person steers into the lower levels of the eighth dynamic and finds himself back at one. Why? Because he has to mock up the answers himself. And he does so unwittingly and unknowingly and to fool himself, and he's back on the first dynamic. See? That's not then a third-dynamic activity.

Now, I hate to bring up such unsavory subjects, but it quite often occurs that women who don't talk either know what they're doing or they're making a terrible mistake. Either one or the other, because there's an inevitable result. That's the second dynamic. You don't answer a man, don't answer a man, don't answer a man, don't answer a man, don't answer a man, don't answer a man, and bang! You get the idea? In other words, communication itself, depended on to some degree to create the space, isn't answered, and you get a closure of terminals. So a man will start paying more and more attention to a woman who never says a thing.

The most successful woman on the second dynamic would certainly be one who was quite pretty and awfully silent — pensive, at best. If you think that all the men in creation would just ignore her and forget her, that isn't the case at all. Quite the opposite would occur. That's because it isn't a communication. And it's almost as if the second dynamic came about because of the absence of communication. An individual is able to attain so little communication that he begins to believe at last that there aren't enough people. So he uses the second dynamic to remedy this. I'm not being entirely facetious with this, see? This is how he gets convinced there aren't enough people around, see?

He says to Joe, „Hiya, Joe.“ He says, „Joe, how are yah?…“ „Gee, could it be I'm alone?“ And gradually, the compounding „Hello Joes“ never answered up, result in the rather definite belief that there aren't any Joes. So therefore, there must be a scarcity of male bodies. That's about the way it works out. It wouldn't matter how many male bodies there were observable; it'd be how many male bodies there were in communication. See, it has nothing much to do with the quantity. It'd be the fact of communication which established whether or not there were quite a few people. You see, it's an unconscious mechanism that occurs.

All right. On the fourth dynamic we are being highly specialized, but we cannot talk to all races. The average person cannot talk to all races because he doesn't know all their languages. So again, the fourth dynamic is not a total in-communication. Everybody thinks that everybody should be able to talk, and they can't talk to them, so they wind up electing politicians and having wars. That's probably the best reason for wars, is one knows very well that he should be in communication with a certain race, but never at any time is he able to attain communication with that race. He can't speak Indonesian, see, and you eventually get upset with the Indonesians.

Now, it's a funny thing that just another race speaking your own language can also excite a feeling of „expectedness not met,“ where you are concerned. Another race speaking your language can answer up on this — another race that speaks your language, you know, speaks the same language you do. Because they may speak it enough different than you, that it isn't quite comprehensible — and you know, basically, that they are talking your language, but you cannot understand them — therefore, there is something wrong with that race. And maybe it's just the matter of pace, colloquialisms, accent, and so on. Trying to get directions, for instance, from a London bobby is quite often a harrowing experience. You say, „This is English?“ And it's rather amusing that the chap from Oxford has more or less the same trouble with the same London bobby. They don't even communicate well inside their own nation.

I caused a great deal of upset, if you please, in England by asking people what an English accent was. It upsets them, just as it'd upset us if we had to answer the question „What is an American accent?“ But people had mentioned to me over there that I had an American accent. I don't happen to have an American accent. And this was rather wild, rather peculiar. So I, of course, just countered on the whole thing by insisting that somebody find an English accent for me.

And some chap that wasn't too offended and I got together one day; we counted up forty-six. I know there are forty-eight American accents, and he had forty-six English ones which were quite distinctly different. That accent which the Englishman most believes is an American accent, by the way, I think is spoken in West Kent or some such place up there. It's where the ships of Drake and other malcontents were recruited. And evidently this became the popular language of the New World, where English was spoken, and that evidently is an American accent. It's quite interesting. It is really basically an English accent.

But you see, people who can't quite understand other people, and whose customs of speech are a little bit different, often can achieve war and fall out of communication. Isn't that correct? Hm?

All right. If people fall out of communication who are as close together as the English and Americans… And they've just gone through a rather idiotic — I should say their politicians had just gone through an… There's only one thing that I find funnier than an English politician, and that is an American politician. And I find most of us Scientologists over in England say the only thing they find funnier than an American politician is an English politician, you know. Both the English and American peoples are rather broadly in disagreement with the whole theory of government. It's quite interesting. They are the most self- governing, insistent-upon-it people in the world, and I think they got this way simply by detesting government in all forms. Their method of not-ising government is to be democratic.

And here we have a possibility of war. And there have been two or three wars with England — a couple prominent ones. So the fourth dynamic actually doesn't furnish us, again, with good communication, does it? We, of course, could easily go to war with Chinese. Everybody knows about Chinese: they're not even human. Everything they do is backwards. As a matter of fact, it is backwards to American and English customs — quite amazingly so; practically so, too.

They celebrate at funerals and do all kinds of wild things. Almost any American or English custom that you know about would find, in the Chinese, an exact 180-degree switch. If you eat dinner in the morning, they'd eat dinner in the evening; only you eat dinner in the evening, well, they eat dinner in the morning. You know, that kind of a switcheroo. But it's obvious that this is another race, in another planet, in another time, as far as other nations are concerned. It's not so obvious that those more closely related by blood and language are disrelated, but it doesn't form good communication.

So we establish this rule — to some degree establish it; it's not one of these hard and fast things. But you would say that communication exists (a little law) to the degree that an observable similarity occurs. In other words, communication occurs most frequently (real communication) when observable similarities are observable. Similarities. There must be a fairly close similarity.

Now, when the similarity is too close, we get this oddity (which is again not communication) of the first dynamic talking to itself — like the fellow talking into space on the eighth dynamic. The fellow's talking to himself A fellow talks into space and there's nobody there, so he answers back. Well, people do this on the first dynamic all the time. But this is not communication; this is identity. And this, again, is not a useful mechanism but is so common that a great many races believe that everybody is a splinter off the old chip, you see. They see what they think. They think we've all broken off and we're all talking to ourselves.

When a race begins to believe that we're all one, that race is pretty far up the spout. You can establish, by the way, how far a race is; you can relate its customs to the Tone Scale rather easily and spot them, and expect and predict their behavior. It's quite amusing. But an identity gives us no communication. In other words, first dynamic talking to the first dynamic; the fellow's talking to himself. He's got a no-communication.

Now, just the belief of identity gives us no-communication and miscommunication. Joe is exactly the same as Bill. They won't talk. If they talk at all, it is to find differences between Joe and Bill. You suppress any organization rather arduously into uniforms. It shows a tremendous surrender when you're able to get a race to accept a uniformed soldier, a rigorously uniformed soldier. I mean, really uniform, see? Each one in the same type of dress, more or less chosen by heights, and so on. This race has had it. True enough, individualistic troops are seldom as effective as uniform troops, but this is just the strength of the third dynamic manifesting itself. It isn't manifesting itself on the first dynamic. Uniform troops are rather uniformly worse off for having been troops. Because it cuts the communication to pieces. Their communication mainly consists of trying to prove to one another how different they are from one another.

The first time a reserve officer at the beginning of any war finds himself rather permanently in uniform… Up to that time his uniform has been hanging in the closet, and he hasn't been wearing it. Maybe he wore it once or twice, and the wife said he looked nice. Or he had a picture taken in it, something like that. And probably the reason he joined up was to get a picture taken in it. And all of a sudden, he finds himself thrust into the military services. And with what dismay he will at once tell you what he was in civilian life. We don't care what he was in civilian life. He's a member of the armed services, and there's obviously enough occurrence and incident in his immediate environment to interest him. There is, obviously, at this time and place. After all, he's in motion; he's part of a military service which is dedicated to some emergency of some kind or another — the Martians have just landed in Antarctica, or Eisenhower has just landed on the Hill, or some type of military action is taking place — and you'd think that a fellow would be interested in this, but he isn't.

He tells you right away, he says, „Now,“ he says, „I was an attorney in civilian life.“ He said, „I had a living room the size of our present mess hall…“ It's rather amazing, the subterfuges, digressions and departures from truth in which he will engage to tell you that he is different. Why? He has suddenly found out that he was dressed the same as everybody else and an identity exists. And he tries to sort this out at once. He's upset about it, he doesn't like it. So he tries to tell you all sorts of things that knock this identity out. All the while he's standing there in the same uniform that you're wearing.

A man who can be dressed exactly the same as, and could look exactly the same as, other men, and who can yet be distinguished from them, would be an interesting personality to meet. Be quite a trick. Only then could you move widely into the sphere of ability. Now, ability could then be considered the last ditch of identity. When clothes fail to tell the difference between two individuals — while they are yet similar, their clothing tells the difference between them — when clothing no longer tells the difference, when body shape would no longer tell the difference, when nothing would tell the difference between the two of them, from a mass-space standpoint, we would have to fall back on this characteristic called ability.

I suppose right here amongst us we have probably several people who are still trying to recover from space opera. Space opera: an activity which has been going on for very much longer than science-fiction writing, and which is going on right at this moment right in this universe. It's quite amazing. The government down here keeps issuing reports on space opera — flying saucers and that sort of thing. Nobody pays much attention to them until they get to such things as an executive order: „All planes of the Eastern Fighter Command will hereafter fire on all flying saucers whenever met.“ I mean, such an order was posted. When it gets into the casualty lists: „Major Dawson, Captain, USAF, died in a crash after a collision with a flying saucer.“ You know, you read this and it's factual, you know? Nobody gives it a tumble.

So, space opera is very often accomplished by things called dolls. And they're turned out on an assembly line. The only difference is there are crew dolls, petty-officer dolls and commissioned-officer dolls, you know? And crew dolls are only supposed to talk to crew dolls, and petty-officer dolls are only supposed to talk to petty-officer dolls, and commissioned dolls are only supposed to talk to commissioned dolls. But they look exactly the same. If you walked in and met Doll 642A, it would only be his class which told you the difference. Actually, class and class distinction and class societies, such as India, are simply another effort to still talk. (I'm beating myself to the punch there a little bit, but it's class distinction.) So here are these dolls, they're all the same. You'd have a distinguishing feature there in ability. See, this doll could talk better or faster, or he could talk more wittily, or he could perform; the thetan then running the doll was more agile than other thetans running their dolls, or something. There'd be a difference.

Well, we find, then, that when identities are too widely distinct for an easy similarity, that races will concentrate rather consistently on the creation of identification. In other words, we have lots of dissimilarities. You know, we have tall people and short people and fat people, and people wearing pink sweaters and people wearing green sweaters and people wearing blue sweaters, you know? And we've got these differences, and people who live here and live there, and people of different ages, and people with different appearances. You get the idea? Such a race will attempt identifications. They'll say, „I also belong to the Elks.“ They'll say, „I'll take up piano playing so I'll have something in common with Ebenezer, who also does piano playing.“ You see, they're attempting an identification; they're attempting to get more similar. Got that?

And when they get too similar, then they fight to get differentiated. You see that? And the only thing that monitors this is optimum communication. If there's too much identification for communication to be optimum, then they'll differentiate, one way or the other. They will say, „Well, I… at home I had a living room as big as our present mess hall,“ finding himself too well identified with these other people. He's used to an easy one: He wears tweed; the other fellow's wearing serge, you know? That's easy to see. At once that he finds himself in that position of too much identification, one with another, he tries to differentiate. He tries to say, „I'm different from you.“

Now, it isn't true that people or a race or a class go only in one direction from there on out. See, they don't just say „Identify, identify, identify, identify, identify, identify, identify, identify, identify,“ see? They don't keep on forever under that kick. They will keep on that pitch so long as they scent a difference too great for good communication.

Now, they achieve that; they achieve good similarity… You get a Golden Age. You get things going along nicely. You get something happening. I mean, it's a nice society, and so on. It only stays that way maybe for a few years, maybe for the lifetime of one man in any given race, and then it'll move out and try to adjust itself in the other direction because its impetus was to move in. So it gets too identified.

See, for just a little while it was optimum, and then it got too identified. The age of Praxiteles degenerates into an age of „I am a citizen, too. I wear a toga.“ See? And then the people will start fighting against this „too close an identification,“ and they will march out then toward a greater differentiation, and they always go too far again. Now they get terribly individualistic.

The revolution which always takes place on the heels of what we call today „regimentation“ -- which is, by the way, a rather new word. Everybody looks the same, it means. Everybody works the same, everybody eats the same: that's supposed to be kind of what regimentation is. Everybody is swung together to do jobs of work, and so on. We have a special connotation for it, and it's not quite the same as what I'm talking about.

When we get this „too close an identification“ — the society is going along; it's like a society of ants — he'll get too much so. You don't know whether you're talking to Bill or Joe or 132. You are issued a wife; you're never thereafter quite sure which wife is home that night with you. You even take to taking a nail file and making a small scratch on the back of the heel to make sure that you get a good identification. See? Intolerable situation.

When a person starts in toward that situation, a society starts in toward that situation, they hit almost an explosion of differences. In other words, their impulse to move out fast is overdone. They move out too fast, too explosively. They get too individualized, see? And you have these periods where the fellow wears the same cravat two days running — ugh! That fellow's in a rut! He's not in the fashion. Get the idea?

Women get into this rather easily. She walks all the way down Fifth Avenue, and there are women there who are differently costumed than herself the whole distance of Fifth Avenue. But there was one girl who had a purse exactly the same as her purse, and it spoiled her whole day. You get this reaction.

Well, that's not necessarily a feminine reaction. You shouldn't label it such, because it belongs in another set of reactions. It is, simply, women a very short time ago were chattels. You could buy them and you could sell them if you were a man. And that's too damn much identification to suit any woman, you got it? They've just come out of it. It's within some of our memories, women's suffrage. They're just moving out of this. And we're entertained at the same time with this phenomenon of „Boy, do we have to be different!“ Get the idea? That's to attain communication.

When a woman's a chattel, she doesn't get very much communication. Somebody talks to her, or somebody talks to the barmaid, somebody talks to the postmistress — somebody talks to somebody. It doesn't matter much whether „who-which“ she is. You see, she isn't entitled by class distinction or respect, or anything else, to real communication. So she is too well identified under the heading of „she's owned property,“ and she resents this, so she explodes into this violent difference. Got that?

And people go both ways, and they're always sure to carry over beyond the optimum point. They go both ways. In other words, they get into extreme differences or they get into extreme identities.

At the year 1972, men decide that they have become too uniform; they decide they've become too uniform in 1972. They are simply all wearing more or less the same type of outer garments. They are being regimented in a certain fashion. There is a growing tendency on the part of the government not to call them by their names, but to number them. They call them by their social security numbers.

Why else would you have a social security number save that that eventually could become your identity? Well, you could say also there are too many Mary Andersons in the country. Oh, there are too many Mary Andersons that were born at Duluth on March the 13th, 1862? There are too many of these, huh? Uh-huh. Yeah, you can't tell the difference between these people in your file system, huh? Much easier to have numbers, isn't it? No, it's not. A clerk makes a little mistake with a number and then there's no differentiating who the devil it is. But you can always single out Mary Anderson who was born in Duluth.

Men are beginning to be called by number only; outer garments the same. And they will all sort of make up their minds that „You know, it's getting too cockeyed identified around here; getting too identified around here.“ You know, it'll be something like 1978 before they react.

In other words, from '72 to '78 they will go on getting more and more identified, in spite of the fact they've already protested. Got this? And at '78 they're in a desperate state. Now they're desperate, you know? „We've got to stop this tendency! If my boss calls me, just one time, '72' again, I'll scream!“ See? Horrible! See? And nevertheless, this identification goes on and on and on, and it sort of explodes out. It's got impetus now toward differentiation. You'll find the old habits and customs breaking off. You will find these wild young fellows who are dressing differently. You'll have the older fellows talking about this to some degree, you know? You'll have complaints about „What is youth coming to?“ You get all these things.

Yeah, what's youth coming to? Youth at this stage is coming to better communication. And that is always what man is coming to. He's always coming to better communication and, unfortunately, almost always overshoots. He overshoots so widely that it rather causes us some amazement, the degree that he can overshoot.

The regimentation of Sparta, the first social-communist state, was unbelievable! You say, that couldn't happen. Yet, it happened! And we've got the entire penchant of the Russian — in spite of the fact that he was enslaved in a class society, and everything else — his complete penchant was difference. Only he used insanity for his differences. He uses personal characteristics or insanities. And he was insistent upon this. It was all a contest of differences as „I'm crazier than you are.“ That was what he was insisting upon, because he was involved in a slave state.

Well, he tried to explode into a difference, but his weight and inertia, you might say, or his carry-over on the whole subject of identity, toward identity — because of this penchant for „I'm crazier than you are,“ and so on — he's getting more and more identified, more and more identified, more and more identified. And at the same time he's saying, „We're different, we're different, we're different. We have a new philosophy. New philosophy: 'Workers of the world, arise,' see? We've got a new philosophy which will make us all different: 'Workers of the world, arise; we're all the same.'„ See? He's in this kind of a squirrel cage right now.

Well now, the trouble that Mr. Khrushchev, and Bulgie… I haven't liked them ever since one of their confounded secret agents inspected my passport at London Airport. It's an interesting thing to find yourself looking at a Russian agent in a British country inspecting a passport. Krushnose and Bulgie were just about to arrive and, of course, they knew that the French were going to send over a lot of agents that were going to knock them off. So they were investigating everybody at the airport. And they tried to look me up on their subversive list. And to show you how lousy their intelligence is, they couldn't find me. He passed me on through. He's in for a lot of trouble. He's in for a lot of trouble.

This much effort of identification is going to put people out of communication. And it's happening right this moment. We hear the internal rumblings of Russia right now. It always has had bad digestion, but right now it needs an awful lot of bicarbonate of soda. And one of these days, it's all of a sudden going to explode outwards toward, again, higher levels of differentiation, see? The tide is getting in there. But it's going to carry over a bit.

Russia, for instance, hasn't mentioned for some time numbering everybody. They were going to do this not very long ago, but they haven't mentioned it lately. They're exploding outwards. You'll find now that they have divided themselves into a class society - - another mechanism which is used to accomplish communication. You have classes, and you only talk to your class, you see?

But that's all right. You only talk to your class, but there can be differences amongst the class. This still makes a randomity of communication. And after a while, the only thing one does is talk out of his class, which is what happened to the British nobility. It got so déclassé to talk inside one's class, and so much the thing to talk only to the working class, that the next thing you know, all of the nobility were working, and are today.

Now, what happened here? Same phenomena took place, you see? There is a class system, but to seek identity one divides the society up so as to get a class system and to have people in that class who are one's equal, to which and to whom one can talk. And that goes on for a while, and then they start jumping classes. See, they start jumping out of that groove; they use this for randomity and to achieve communication. So this is the way it goes.

Perfect communication is described in Dianetics 55! But it is only possible because Joe is Joe, and Bill is Bill. Do you see that clearly? Joe has to be Joe, and Bill has to be Bill. Bill knows that Joe is Joe, and Joe knows that Bill is Bill. They know that. They're different people, and they can talk. They have different ideas, different experiences. There are things to discuss. There's chitchat back and forth.

Now, Bill question mark (you know, Bill?), and Joe question mark (you know, Joe?) — no communication. You got grope. Most of the people walking out here that are having any trouble are just a case of grope: „Are you really my wife?“ you know? Most of their communication is centered on an effort to identify.

So we get communication not only taking place at optimum — if an unachievable optimum — an optimum identification and an optimum differentiation. See, it's just enough identification, just enough similarity between the two, and just enough difference between the two to make communication. And we get optimum communication. And then we get communication, any time this flies out of gear from optimum, mostly concerning itself with efforts to (1) differentiate, or (2) identify.

An old man's maundering is mainly concerned with an effort to identify himself He's still trying to tell you he's some punk. He's sitting there collapsed. If he tried to break a toothpick, it'd probably break his finger (that's the way he feels; probably isn't true, but that's the way he feels about life), and he tells you about how powerful you had to be to have survived the kind of life he has led, in the atmosphere and climate in which he was raised. Got the idea? But what's he doing? He's identifying himself so that you'll continue to talk to him. He conceives you to be a strong person, a vital person, and he tries to tell you that he's a strong and vital person. This is mainly what his communication consists of

So we can actually forecast what kind of communication there will be in many instances. People who are too close together, too much identified in their own consideration and opinion, will seek to differentiate and have a perfectly happy time telling each other how different they are. In another time and place, this could be the most pleasant ARC you ever heard of; two people get together and discuss their differences.

Here, where the society is still seeking an identification, it is called an argument. They even say „differences“ as a simile for an „argument,“ see? “Settle our differences.“

Now, two people who are too different will feel around sort of in the dark… It's in the dark as far as they are concerned, because they don't clearly see the other fellow, you see? They're too different. They'll feel around and try to find similarities.

It's quite interesting to find a soldier of one army trying to establish communication with a soldier from an entirely different army. The way these fellows will claw around and eventually achieve an identity is quite amusing. I've heard a Russian soldier trying madly to talk with a United States marine. The United States marine did not speak Russian, the Russian soldier did not speak English. And yet they were seeking to hold a communication. And they came to the final conclusion that they both had rifles. They did; they showed each other their rifles, and so on. Their equipment had certain dim similarities, and they were trying to force these similarities into action. Actually, they eventually became very good friends. I talked to this marine later, and he was quite glowing in his tales of the prowess of this Russian soldier, see? I mean, they just respected each other as fighting men, you see? Quite amusing. Here's terrible dissimilarity, but you get them laboring at this so that differences are brought together toward identities and identities are spread into differences.

This has a lot of bearing on the preclears which you're talking about. As you move up and down the dynamics, we see that communication takes place to the degree that a similarity can exist. Right?

The word similarity embraces at once identification and difference, doesn't it? So that if two dynamics are too far apart, by consideration, they are too different for communication to occur. And if two dynamics are quite adjacent and quite similar, maybe communication doesn't occur because of identity. Do you see? Identity, too, could be quite similar.

For instance, Freud had two dynamics absolutely jammed. He had the second and first, and they were just totally identified. So he must have been an awful stranger to sex to have worked so hard to identify the first, second and third dynamics. All of his work is devoted to making a jam out of these things, see? They've got to be more identified.

If Freud had been entirely successful with his work (which he wasn't), if he'd been entirely successful in propagating his work, somebody sooner or later would have to come along and just work like mad over the establishing of the differences amongst these dynamics. See, the first is not the second is not the third. Only somebody would really have to slave at this. We're not slaving at this. We're bystanders in this fight; we don't care about it. Freud to us is more of an historical fact than a research fact or a forerunner or anything.

He's an interesting fellow. He's very much to be respected. He taught the world that there might be some similarity between mental and physical disease. He taught the world that there was something you could do, possibly, about mental illness, and he was the great crusader in this field. Actually, it's because of his work, to a large extent, that we can function today. But only to that degree you have to live down this terrible jam between the first, second and third.

It might have been very different, and much too different in Vienna, for Freud's liking. See, the first dynamic was way over that-a-way, see, and the second dynamic is way over that-a-way, and the third dynamic is way up that way. For instance, never in public could you possibly in Vienna have mentioned the word sex. This possibly was not a thing that could happen. In other words, the public could not associate with the word sex. No individual — particularly archbishops and things, and respectable people — ever indulged in a sexual activity. But the individual was probably not considered to be part of the society as a whole. Probably the society as a whole was composed of a society without anybody being an individual in it.

We have such a phrase as „the masses“ that we use today. Anybody who uses „the masses“ doesn't have a single person out there in the masses, let me assure you. There are no people there for him. See, there are just no people there; it's masses. He doesn't know what he's talking about. He might as well be talking goat talk for all the comprehensibility there is to this. He's usually terribly divorced from these, and quite antisocial.

But these three things must have been awfully far apart in old Vienna. Perhaps even due to Freud's work, they are much less far apart today. I imagine in the average high-school corridor, these three things — the individual, sex and the society — probably routinely get mentioned in the same sentence. It's taken for granted that babies are not found in cabbage patches, but came about because of intercourse among people who compose the society. See, that's accepted fact.

Now, that will get too close, and maybe already has. Those three dynamics have been approached too closely in association. One of these days, you're going to get a wild crusade. New monastic orders of some kind or another are liable to be created to spring these apart again, see? You get how they go?

Well, so do all of the eight dynamics go. Every once in a while, they get so jammed up that one is no longer able to communicate with or about; they're too tightly in. Everybody says that everything is influenced by everything that is. There's a total interconnection and association amongst all factors in life on whatever form, shape or size. Everything influences everything. Modern psychology tells us that — tries to tell us that. Doesn't talk very loud, fortunately. They tell us everything is associated with everything, and the only reason you think is because you had just thought of something — which I think is the most wonderful, provable-or-unprovable gag anybody ever originated. The guy who did that was a mental sadist.

The only things you think about are the things which were suggested by the things which you just thought about. Boy, that's the awfullest piece of substitution I ever saw in my life. You mean everything is the substitute for everything that ever thing. It's quite amusing. All right.

Now you see, all of life got too associated. Now, what are we doing? Look at this; what are we doing? We're actually pulling things apart, see? And we've pulled them apart eight dynamics worth. Now, somebody is going to come along someday on this impetus and insist that these eight dynamics are actually subdivisible, each one, to the square root of eight — or something abstract like this. I can read it now: „Each dynamic is subdivisible to eight squared,“ something on this order, „and each one of those is subdivisible again to eight cubed. And eight cubed: each one of those is divisible to…”

You get it? Boy, are we getting differences.

They'll have enough differences that somebody trying to understand Scientology, out of self-defense, will have to read your notes or mine, in spite of the fact that nobody ever speaks that language anymore. It's like having to learn ancient Icelandic so that you can read some of their sagas. It may even get to that point, but would get to that point. Everything would get differentiated, differentiated, differentiated, differentiated until nothing interrelated anymore. There was no sense could be made out of any of it.

No substitution or rationale or gradient scale was possible between any two facts, which means there would be no communication. You'd get almost a total disintegration of everything. And what'll happen at that time? Somebody'll come along, and he'll get a snowplow on all these facts, and he'll jam them all together, and he'll convince everybody of the oneness of the universe, the oneness of man, God and nature, the oneness of this, the oneness of… He'll get it up to this impossible one again.

But this is all because of, and in favor of, communication. Communication is the motivator here. It isn't that people like to be different or people like to be the same. It isn't even that people have to have a game or not a game. You don't have to stretch it that widely, since a game — you will learn after a while, I'm sure, if you haven't gotten down to it — is merely a good way to state communication. A game is a very complicated communication gone solid.

All right. Now, communication must, then, have some reward. There must be some need for it. There must be some reason to engage in it. There must be many, many things in favor of it. There are probably lots of things against it. And you could probably make an awful concatenation out of all those facts. The truth of the matter is, you shouldn't.

Why don't you just suppose the isness of communication, huh? Communication is. Communication happens. Now you can figure out a lot of consequences when there's too little communication. You'll either get things identified or differentiated if you get too little communication. You'll get the same things exactly if you get too much communication. You'll be different if you get too much communication, see? It can go either way on the same considerations. But these are considerations of communication.

Of course, the most intimate considerations in communication are similarities. Similarities are the most intimate considerations with regard to communication — which is to say, differentiations and identifications. Those things are quite intimate. And out of this we get the R button of the ARC triangle. And the A is, of course, how you feel about it.

But communication is not bad, communication is not good. Communication is, and people do it. And the funny part of it is when they don't do it, they do something about it. So we must assume that either they are totally obsessed on the subject, or that it occurs, or it's necessary, or it has a necromancy connected with it in some fashion, but it is certainly an attractive thing. Because when people get too much of it, they try to adjust it to optimum. And when they get too little of it, right afterwards, they try to adjust it back to too much.

You hear a bunch of people, a bunch of pilots that haven't been flying around the world, and they haven't been seeing each other for a long time. And they get in a locker room, or something like that, or at the club, and they're all talking totally independent of everybody else. They're actually not communicating; they're talking in the hopes that communication will occur out of a great scarcity.

In using this on preclears, it is only necessary to understand that his communication lag or obsessive flow is the result of too much or too little communication. If he has an obsession — obsessive communication, compulsive — he's had too little. If he doesn't answer up at all, he's had a bit too much. The main reason he's getting audited is to adjust toward what he considers to be an optimum amount of communication. He very often considers an optimum amount of communication none at all, in his consideration, or all the time. And as this is obviously not communication, you the auditor are expected to adjust it. Good luck to you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

[End of Lecture]