Thank you. Thank you. I would accept it except you didn't stand up.
I think they were running "lecturer indoctrination" — stop the lecturer.
Thank you very much. Thank you.
Well, it's a good thing you are all in a good mood tonight because I have some very, very serious news.
The truth of the matter is — the truth of the matter is, from here on no Instructor is supposed to pay any attention at all to a blow. They are only supposed to pay attention to those who are doing superbly well.
And another piece of information here that might interest you greatly is the fact that the "Field Validation Certificate," that is to say, the one which is validated for field validating (one who could validate other certificates) will be a gold certificate. And the thing that determines it is coaching ability. That is what determines the color of that wafer. And I thought you might be interested in that.
You understand that's very logical. It should be a person who is capable of doing a fine job of instruction who should get that gold wafer. I choose to believe this is acceptable to you? Is it?
Audience: Yes.
All right. You got that on tape; they agreed to it.
All right, and the next piece of news I have is, this is the ninth?
Male voice: Ninth.
. . . ACC lecture, 18th ACC, July 2-5, 1-9-5-7, AD 7 — After Dianetics.
Okay. Tonight we have to cover some very arduous ground and the whole lecture could be summated under one title: scales. Scales.
We have so many scales and so many of you do not know some of these scales, that this lecture was just a little bit hard to plot. How far south do I start?
Well, I'll start this far south: the scale is based on tolerance of space or inversion thereof.
"Zero" means zero spatial tolerance. Below zero is inverted space. What do I mean by "inverted space"? It went by and he didn't notice it. He's operating five feet behind where space isn't, or he's operating five feet in front of where space ceased to be. In other words, one can have an inverted idea of space.
Now, this actually is the reactive mind. The reactive mind is a total structure — as a total structure, is based upon inverted space and inverted time. It says, then is now; where it doesn't have space there is space; where it has space there is no space. It's a total backwards contradiction.
We see some manifestation of this in mirror image. Some people, you say, "Show me your right hand," and these people instantly show you their left hand. They deal with a great certainty on this. A lot of us are confused because right and left are just words and we don't have bodies labeled as well as some societies, some "cults" do — such as the AMA; it's one of the larger cults. I heard somebody laugh about that. That's a serious thing — that's a serious thing.
Every time I make a crack about these societies, you realize it has to be edited off the tape. You know that. But actually there is nothing wrong with the AMA that a counter-propaganda campaign wouldn't cure, because it's just propaganda.
Now, the AMA has a lot of ills, tremendous numbers of ills; they have these things classified, reclassified, declassified and all of them usually top-secret. They get these ills in long catalogs and if the patient doesn't have enough, they can always invent some more. They follow the practice of naming something and then saying, "That is it." Labeling is a solution of sorts. Don't you see? But they still have drugs and needles and things like that. And they go into a doingness on the basis of putting more mest into a situation which has too much mest in it already. And various things.
And you'll notice that they are in the business of curing. And that is a dreadful business to be in, I assure you, because the cure for any problem is only the problem. And if you go all out as an auditor to cure everybody's lumbosis, you are going to be in very fine condition yourself, let me assure you.
The liability of curing lumbosis, because one cannot confront lumbosis, is to get lumbosis. Curing it proves one can't confront it. Curing old age proves one can't confront old age.
Numbers of other mechanisms of this character go on and on, but we could say, offhand, for our purposes, that all solutions are at the low end of all scales. So if you expect a scale to solve anything, you are going to be terribly much upset because it won't solve anything. These scales are not solutions. All they are is graphed understanding.
A total understanding of a medical problem would as-is the problem. Now, we are not in the business of curing and never will be — because we know better. But we are in the business of understanding. And if you understood a thing completely and acknowledged that you did understand it, it would probably vanish.
Therefore, scales, when they're extremely accurate, tend, themselves, to vanish. You no more than get a good, accurate graphing of conditions and everybody says, "Well, I understand that," and turn away and skip it. Well, that's as it should be. So graphs just — which are correct and are accurate tend to disappear.
Now, graphs of profit and loss assist understanding. But I have known people who ran businesses — I have known people who ran businesses that spent all of their time with graphs and none of it with business. With the result of course, that the graphs just had to get more and more complete, and they went down and down further and they were totally absorbed with the business of understanding a graphical representation.
You have the same sort of thing in semantics. People get so absorbed with the exact meaning of a word that they lose sight of the substance which the word names.
Well, similarly, none of these graphs will do anything for anybody except understand. And if they were perfect they would as-is. Thus, don't be surprised that we keep drawing up graphs and they keep disappearing into the backtrack. Whenever we've drawn up a rather accurate graph it has tended to drop from view.
For instance, very few people are thoroughly acquainted with the Chart of Human Evaluations; very few people are thoroughly acquainted with this chart. They look at it, it embraces their understanding, they say, "Yes, that's the way it is," and that's that — there it goes.
Well, we have the shortest scale and the newest scale is the Effect Scale. It is so easy to represent and it understands the situation so well that I doubt that we will see it around very often or in very many publications. It's that good.
All it says is the top is tone 40. That means unlimited space at will. It doesn't mean "the greatest space." The greatest space would be something that would happen about tone 20 or 22. At tone 40 you would have space at will. And with the Effect Scale we have any effect acceptable, whether received or delivered. In other words, effect on others, tiny or great, is okay; effect on self, tiny or great, is still all right. No real concern, worry or seriousness over effect. Axiom 10 has not yet totally congealed somebody's thinking.
So Axiom 10 as a postulate gets made, a person gets anxious over cause and effect — which side is he at? Well, he must only be at cause, he says, and he slides down lower. That postulate is made at about 22 on our graphical arbitrary representation of numbers. And he makes this postulate that after that he must only be cause; it is never safe to be effect. Well, at this time of course, he has something to protect. And so we get possible, occasional interi-orization; looking after possessions, other things occurring here at about tone 22. And of course then, if we enter in possessions, we enter in games. There can be no game without possession; something to get, something to have.
All right. It goes on down scale then and dwindles out to zero. And at zero, why, all causes would be all effects and all effects would be all causes. But what is the actual frame of mind of a person who approaches zero?
Just before he has a total tangle on the situation, he's in this interesting frame of mind — and this is a little gem of discovery here that took seven years to whip up, and it finally explained so much about behavior that the Effect Scale all by itself renders understanding of all of the other scales rather pale. So as I say, I expect it to vanish and you'll never hear of it again.
Now, the Effect Scale tells us at that point just above zero, that an individual must have no effect on self and total effect on everything and everybody else. Now, that is the category of "only one." This person can never communicate on a team basis. Really, he can never communicate because he can never find out if he has communicated. And we have one-way communication at this extreme point as the only communication possible. But that isn't communication! So this condition sets in at about tone 22 and then gets worse and worse and worse and space decreases more and more. And this idea that he must have total effect on other things or, higher on the scale, he must have great effect on other things and very little effect on self — becoming at length total effect on other things and no effect on self — is actually what jams the space. You keep that up very long and everything you're trying to affect, you'll be in. And so we get the zero position of the scale.
A thetan trying to make an effect on a body, who must have no effect on himself — see, the thetan must have no effect on himself and he must have a total effect on this body — can never get an incoming communication that will tell him that he has had an effect on the body.
You might say, a hunter or a criminal or somebody picks up a double-barreled shotgun, walks up to another human being, puts both muzzles of it against his chest, pulls both triggers. The other guy just flys to flinders, you know? The head goes in one direction, the feet go in the other direction and the blood spatters all over the place, including on the person who shot him. And this very messy, gun-smoky scene — you would say, "Well, he knows he's done it now."
No, he probably says (after the other fellow is lying there dead or been buried for days), why, he says, "Why are you still standing there!" You got it? "Why are you still standing there!" He couldn't possibly find out that he shot the fellow. He couldn't discover that he has shot the fellow, because he can't have an incoming comm. So he cannot observe that the other fellow has been shot. So next time he has to get a five-inch gun or something and shove it into somebody's chest, you know, and pull the lanyard on it. And it goes booooooom and there's the — and he says, "Why are you still standing there!" You see, the guy's gone, buried, nobody ever heard of him anymore.
And the guy finally goes out and he invents an atom bomb and he throws the atom bomb on the city and — blows up, you know, and kills all the women and children. And you could just see this guy just absolutely gibbering in his laboratory: "Why didn't it kill anybody?" You know? Blood all over the place. Get the idea? No incoming effect.
Now, you'll notice this particularly at about 1.5 on the scale. It's a pretty tight interchange, 1.5. A fellow still can find out something at 1.5. But a fellow at 1.5 will take a human being and he will beat him and beat him and beat him and beat him, way beyond any possibility of the beating being received. He never finds out the other fellow is being beaten up. Do you understand that?
All right. These total-effect boys (down around zero) don't even get the satisfaction of having made a total effect. They never find out. Even if they read the newspapers they'd never find out.
What they do — from tone 22 down, a person starts going through this category of a space getting smaller and smaller. Why? Because he's got to get closer and closer to find out if he did make an effect. And he finally goes into the thing he's trying to make the effect on and then uses it to make an effect, and then goes into the thing it makes an effect on, and tries to use this new combination to make an effect, and you get this interiorization, interioriza-tion, interiorization, interiorization. And you look over a human body and you find out that it looks like a telescope; it's just got life after life after life (facsimiles of) all jammed into it and valences and identities and everything else crowded into it one way or the other. Because successive generations of thetans, (thetans don't have generations, but every generation, why, there's another thetan) and these fellows then start jamming this up, one way or the other. And you get a no-space condition.
Now, if it just — if it stopped at no space it would be all right. Fellow would just wind up with no space. But he doesn't do that. He keeps up the same action. Only now it goes on a gradient scale of "total effect on self, no effect on anybody else" — it flips and we have the victim. "It only happened to me," the fellow says.
He goes out and does these interesting things and every time he spits he feels spittle in his face. Get the idea? He can't do anything without getting his teeth kicked in. Overt act-motivator sequence sets in. He says, "Boo" and dies of terror. Now, that doesn't take place exactly at zero. It gradually sets in. After this total effect on everything else has taken place, you start to get this thing as a switch.
And the bottom of the last awareness level is that every time a pin drops in the universe, he has his head blown off with an atom bomb. Any cause, any place, would cause a total effect upon him. And that is an accurate statement of the bottom of the inverted Effect Scale.
You understand this — human behavior gets so much like an open book that you really don't bother to read much.
You see this fellow coming in, he's got a wild blazer on and one of these super peaked caps that's got neon lighting on either side and he's coming in and he's talking at a high scream and he's in total motion, agitation, really tearing up things in all directions, you know. He just walks into a restaurant like this, there's a — there's just this commotion where he is. It's just — there's nothing there at all. It's an interesting thing that he doesn't know anything he is saying is reaching anybody, anything he's wearing or doing, he doesn't know that these things are reaching anybody.
Well, his answer to this is not to try to reach people but to wear a louder shirt and a louder cap and to get brighter neon lights. See that? He's got to go in the direction of more effect.
Well, the Effect Scale — a complete comprehension of the Effect Scale — tells us rather accurately that if an individual wishes to remedy this condition at any point of the scale, all he has to do is find out if he is creating an effect or find out what he can really create an effect upon that he is willing to observe he has created an effect upon. Do you see that? Now, run at the very low levels of the scale, it's — is an unfortunate thing that he will never find out.
You can't take this direct approach. You have to be very covert about it; you have to let him find out that you can have an effect on him. And when he finds out you can have an effect on him, which doesn't kill him, he finds there is something less than a total effect. Now, that's the first thing a person has to discover in order to ascertain reality at the lower end of all of this Effect Scale: that an effect can exist. And that's all you have to establish. But of course he won't understand this at all unless the effect is observable by him.
So we say, "Well, we know how to process these preclears — there's just nothing to processing these preclears. Take a double-barreled shotgun and an electric shock machine and we kick them and we beat them and we hit them with chains and we blow their brains off and they'll find out they've been processed!"
Now, in corroboration of this, ask somebody who has treated human beings with extreme violence, if he's ever hurt anybody. Ask somebody in the death house that's about ready to get roasted, "Did you ever hurt anybody?" And we look up his record and we find out he brutally murdered eight women or something of this character and he says, "No. It's all a frame-up, society is against me. I didn't do a thing. It's all justified. I didn't even hit her. She just — somebody came along and said, 'She's dead' and then — she's dead and so on, and that's the way it is."
But of course, that phenomenon isn't as near as asinine as the attitude of the society which permits it. The society which permits it has an entirely different attitude. They say, "If we just kill enough of these fellows, then they'll find out they mustn't kill anybody."
All right. Speaking of social reactions, let me assure you that no posted law, in the long run, ever restrains any crime in societies. And that is a sad thing to observe!
Now, there are such things as laws whereby we agree that on certain streets we shall stop and look for traffic and on other streets we shall run free without having to inspect the side streets. Well, that's all right. But when these things just cease to be agreements for convenience and become fixed martial laws of one kind or another, to be enforced with a sledgehammer, they defeat their own purpose at once. Because the only people who cause accidents are the people who must have total effect on others and no effect on self. So if there's no effect on self, they never find out about the law. Even when they're sent to jail, fined, driver's license taken away from them, they never find out. They could never discover what the law was. In the absence, in the past, of somebody going over this with them and trying to be understanding about it and trying to see what their problem was — perhaps somebody just talking to them in social work or something like that could have established some gain of this kind. But a Scientologist certainly could.
You'd have to teach this fellow the law on an interesting basis: you'd have to show him that there was an acceptable effect of one kind or another, there was a tiny enough law that he could obey. But first, there's a law that's tiny enough and ineffective enough that he could find out about it. He can't find out about these big laws which promise enormous effect on self. He just can't find out about them! And when he drops from that point, the fact that somebody is willing to knock his block off just suits his appetite to the core. "Ha — slurp. You mean they'll execute me? Slurp"
Men are walking into police stations all the time saying, "I did it." And they say, "Did what?" "Oh, murdered the woman." "What woman?" "The one you found in a culvert last week. I murdered her." "Well, yes, well how did you do it?" "Well, I did it with an ax!" And they say, "I'm very sorry, but she was shot."
It's the business of courts and so forth to put up with this nonsense. But court is the last resort of a society which has already discovered that beings cannot live with one another. Well, beings can't live with one another only to the degree that they can't communicate. They can't find out what the agreement is; they can't find out they're part of the society, they can't find out there's anything you could do about anything anyhow and they can't have an effect on anybody else anyway. And they don't need any law restraining them — they know if they shoot somebody in the forehead that it won't hurt him. And you get this very fascinating, lopsided thing called an only one, and he can't read.
All right. The rest of us have stop signs. When we see a stop sign we have a stop sign. We don't plunge out into an arterial. And we stupidly, confidently drive down the arterial thinking people stop at stop signs. Ah! But the state has already licensed, at this dark age, anybody to drive a car. And if anybody can drive a car, including all those people who must have total effect on others and no effect on self — they can't read those stop signs! It isn't a case of passing enough laws to make them stop at stop signs. It's simply a case of getting a stop sign they'll read. I mean, it's as idiotic as this. And these people plunge through the stop signs and out onto the arterial and we hit them and we say, "What on Earth was that doing here!" That was doing there because the Commissioner of Motor Vehicles doesn't know his job. His job is to license competent people to operate vehicles. And he doesn't do that so he could probably be arrested for every accident there is. Anyway — it's an interesting thought though, isn't it? That's bypass the circuitry and find the guy there.
All right. We have a point here on the Effect Scale where this inverts and we have the people who must have a total effect on others getting along beautifully with the people who must have a total effect on self. And they team up and we have a government. Quite fascinating. I mean, these two go together hand in glove. Their mental attitudes are both below death, because death is no deterrent. Death does not tell them they can no longer have. Death is not real, nothing else is real. There are no restraints of any kind, but then there is no universe anyhow. But then, there's nobody there anyway. It's a rather interestingly ghastly state of mind to get into — but it's definitely attainable. And it's that state of mind at the extreme bottom, where the fellow must have total effect on self and could not possibly make any effect of any kind on anybody else, that we call "all the way south." It's below death.
Everything happens to him, nothing ever happens to anybody else, much less his doing something to somebody else. That's all the way south. Now, when that gets up on its — before it inverts, the person has to have total effect on others and couldn't possibly have any effect on self. And we get some rather interesting thing — we see people like that doing interesting things.
I've seen them in war and so on, they — somebody puts a slug through them, something like that, and they look rather curiously at the wound and go on walking and so forth. They're not very aware of the fact they've been shot, somebody calls it to their attention after a while that they have been shot. And when the ridge snaps with which they're holding that whole wound in suspense, of course it becomes about a thousand times more painful than it ordinarily would. They just flip on that one particular incident to, "I have not been shot," to "I have been shot all to pieces!" See? It's a fast flip, quite ordinarily, that you'll see this happen in.
Well now, if we understand the effects of the Effect Scale; if we understand the downward level on this, we'll just never have any trouble understanding communication. Because communication requires space and the Axiom 10 tells us that from about 22 down, we have the main game just making an effect, just causing an effect.
All right, if a person has a game of causing an effect, he had better find out that he had caused an effect, in order for him to know that an effect has been caused, which will end the cycle of that. It's when he doesn't find out that he has caused an effect that he goes on and tries for a bigger effect. And he never finds out that he created that effect, so he tries for a bigger effect. And then he didn't find that out, that he caused that effect, so he tries for a bigger effect and we finally get somebody willing to work on an atomic project.
My, you're certainly going to have to edit these tapes. Anyway . . .
Here we have, then, an individual who is in this frame of mind: he is totally willing to create bombs of sufficient magnitude to blow Earth in half. Yeah, you get ahold of him and you say, "Now, look son, look, you've got a family, wife, you're not doing too badly (the taxpayer's money). You're not doing too badly. Now, if you blow Earth in half with this new creation of yours, let me point something out to you. You'll blow you in half too." You'd expect, well, this will have an effect on him. You say, "It'll knock off your kids, it'll do this; it'll do that."
Nope. Nope! I had one say to me, that I followed this course of logic with, and he says, "Well, they'll" — this was the exact remark after I had pointed out the fact that it would kill him: he said, "Well, they'll just have to look after themselves. That's all I've got to say." I don't know how that fitted in, but it fitted into the conversation.
Well, a fellow of this character I was working on, I — telling him he'd — his continual subscription to the idea that we ought to use weapons of great magnitude and so forth would eventually wind him up in the soup, and I tried to convince him of this. Just, I was being vicious, to tell you the truth, because I was trying to flip the lower end of the scale on this guy. And I didn't.
Scientologists are condemned to a certain horror: the horror of doing good. You work on somebody, wishing to wrench his head away from his vertebrae and you find out after you get through he feels better. Anyway — it's a terrible thing to do. And I went through all of his possessions one after the other; how they would be affected if the world were destroyed or the place were atom-bombed. And it wasn't until I got to his social security card (we remember this), that it suddenly became real to him! And I told him he'd lose his social security card too, if he got blown up. And right after that he said, "Well," he said, "I — I'd better do something about it. I better lay in some of the food they've been telling me about in civil defense work. I better stock up on some of that food."
Well, how tiny an effect this was, you see? That something would affect his social security card was real. Well, we hope that in any case there is some level of reality which can be attained. If you attain that level of reality, you can continue to improve the acceptable effect. And improving the acceptable effect, we of course have a person less and less anxious to create a total effect. He has a much more sane reaction toward his people, fellows, and he certainly gets into communication again.
All right. Not all people who pass into these levels, by the way, are vicious or wish to destroy everything; this is just a peculiarity. It just hasn't occurred to them. They're not that imaginative. But they will subscribe to people who would destroy everything. See, they themselves would not but they will subscribe to such people. And we get a Germany, on which a can't-have was run all during the period between World War I and World War II. Can't have, everything was can't have. They set up a rather successful government there, and other nations were pledged to support it — the Weimar Republic — it folded up.
They finally elected into power a fellow by the name of Schicklgruber. Now, Mr. Schicklgruber, sometime corporal of the Austrian army, was one of these total-effect-on-others boys, no effect of any kind on self. He wrote a book called Mein Kampf and we had other people at that level who were not violently pitched or framed, who were simply willing to subscribe to this philosophy as a good philosophy. And they voted Mr. Schicklgruber into power and he went on acting like a corporal and that was the end of that particular nation to all intents and purposes.
Now, here's this level of effect on others, total effect on others, no effect on self — engrosses our attention for this reason only: it has been one of these can't-handle mechanisms. It's one of the mechanisms which we've always said can't be handled. See, it can't be handled — mechanism cannot possibly be handled. We just can't get to this fellow, see?
We'd say something to him, we'd — let's say he just drank; he drank all the time. He'd come into the house and he'd pick up a bottle and drink. And he'd go to bed and he'd drink. And he'd get up in the morning and he'd drink.
And we say to him, "You're ruining yourself, your digestion and so forth. And you're spoiling any life that you have. And you're making others around you miserable. Won't you please stop?" And he'll say, "Rah-rah-rah-rah-rah." And after a while we say, "Well, there's nothing you can do about an alcoholic." Oh, yes there is! Oh, yes there is.
Something rather interesting. We feel that if we could set him a horrible — we used to feel that if we could set him a horrible enough example or a big enough example — see, we're going down the Effect Scale with this too, on this particular point.
You understand that a scale can apply to a particular incident or type of consideration, or it could apply to all considerations. Anybody has been on the down side of the Effect Scale, about something, at some time or another. Well, there is something you can do. It's just don't go down scale about it, go up! Well, how do you go up? You just be willing to settle for the effect that can arrive, and that's all you have to do to go up scale.
In the case of the alcoholic you'd have to give him something of an effect which was acceptable. Now, what is acceptable to an alcoholic as an effect? We want to say something to him which will deter his drinking. So we say, "Whiskey will rot your guts! You'll wind up insane, raving, behind bars." You say all sorts of things, you know, like they tell little boys.
Anyhow, we'd say to this fellow all these various things and we're just going down scale on the Effect Scale. We're trying to make more and more of an effect and the first thing you know, if he stopped drinking, we wouldn't find out about it.
Now, nearly all alcoholics discover this to their horror: they haven't taken a drop in months, they've been holding a job, they've been walking the straight and narrow and everybody goes right on treating them like an alcoholic. Why? Because they got everybody into a total games condition about them. And these people cannot now observe them. It wouldn't matter what they were doing, they're still an alcoholic! Because everybody has a total effect on the alcoholic, you see? "We've got to do something! Horrible! Terrible!" They go right on chattering about him, talking about him and how bad he is and how he'll never recover and never reform, and the fellow could go right on up and become president and the people in his hometown would never find out about it.
What would you do to reverse this thing, just examining this Effect Scale? Well, it just tells you that there is something that is acceptable on the subject of alcoholism, and you would simply work around it until you found it. You know, outside of session just talking to him, you work around it.
And I had one of these one time and he was in a logging camp. I was surveying the Canadian border — they didn't have enough to teach you down here in Washington, and so we went up and surveyed the border. And we found it, too; it's still there. It wasn't for quite a while. It had been lost for some time.
But this individual in a logging camp would get up in the morning and he'd down a pint of "Golden Wedding" and he'd go to bed at night and he would down a pint of "Golden Wedding," you know? And all day long, why, he would take a quart every now and then.
Well, in view of the fact he was supposed to be the cook, nobody could get any cooking done. And these boys were all government men and this was during prohibition times. And they kept telling everybody they were just surveyors, survey crew, my — just chainmen, you know, and rodmen. They're government men. And they'd stop these poor bootleggers coming down across the border, you see, with a hundred pounds of hooch on their backs and they'd say, "We're government, man." And the bootlegger would fish out a pint and hand it to them, or a quart or something and go on unmolested. And there was no lack of liquor!
So how did one deter this sort of thing? Well, it was fascinating. It was fascinating. I found this out very much by accident. I told this fellow that the liquor had been packed down on people's backs and had probably been very roughly handled. And I was being very offhand and go-to-hell and sort of showing off in front of the other kids in the camp. But I had him — had him backed up, more or less, against the stove wondering why we didn't have any dinner, you know? And I explained to him about liquor (and I knew he wasn't getting it anyhow) so I just got more and more sarcastic. And I said, "Do you know one of those bottles might be cracked?" He said, "No! No! No!" And practically passed out and he wouldn't touch it afterwards.
And not until recently did I know what had happened to the man. A little chip of glass might have gotten into the whiskey, which he might have swallowed in some fashion. And it would take something that tiny to kill him, of course. Which was just idiotic chatter at that time, from me, but wound up in the fact that he got breakfast and all kinds of things — somebody'd gotten through to him.
And I used to catch him when I'd come into camp, looking at me sort of fearfully and respectfully. I know all that happened to the man. But let me tell you — every one of these chainmen and rodmen, at one time or another, had beaten him up. And they were big guys. And they'd come in there with hamfists and the cook wouldn't have any dinner or something of the sort, and they were hungry and they'd knock him all over the cook shack and out the door and kick him in the ribs with their gumboots. It didn't have any effect upon him at all. But, "One of those bottles might be cracked . . ." It was not my perspicuity; I was just gagging.
And it mystified me for a long time, what had happened. But the principle is very sound. The principle is very sound.
I told a cop one time who was waving a gun around — he was going to shoot a guy who was slightly inebriated and there was no reason to shoot him; and I nudged the cop and I said, "You're going to get some grease on your hand." And the cop put his gun back in the holster and got out his handkerchief and wiped his hands off. And he didn't know what he was doing.
These are just shots in the dark, you understand. I mean, they're just a tiny enough something — the fellow's social security card.
So don't be amazed sometime when you're auditing somebody who's been saying, "Well, I don't believe this. Scientology isn't doing any good for me; it isn't doing anything," and so forth. And the last engram you ran out completely changed his color from bright purple to scarlet, and so on but, "No effect on me, no effect on me, no effect on me." And you happened to give him an acknowledgment, you know, your throat fails or something, and, trying to shout it down and you say to him, "Good." He falls out of his chair and goes into a cataleptic fit and gets up and says, "Boy, you needn't take it that heavy on me!"
Now actually, all this comes under is the proper estimation of effort. That's the heading it comes under at the lower end of the scale. But it's "What does it take to make an effect?"
Now, you could go on and blast atomic scientists and scream and fight and say, "Well, they're going to kill all of us someday," and other nonsense, and yell at the Atomic Energy Commission. And then one day, misspell its name in the press or something of the sort, and have the whole organization disband, fall apart, nobody'd belong to it anymore. Get the idea? It'd just be something completely nonsensical. Not necessarily nonsensical, but it'd be a tiny little thing that just wouldn't have much to it.
You want to beware in trading chit-chat with somebody who is obsessively teasing you. This person is always teasing you and you say something one day, a rather faint joke as far as you're concerned; and you find out you wounded them to the quick and they've taken to their sickbed and they're almost ready to die.
The road up is the road marked by acceptable effects. And if acceptable effects are to be acceptable, then the person causing those effects certainly has to have a very fine estimate of this.
Well, other scales which were previous to the Effect Scale actually delineate the acceptable effect at the various levels.
Let's take, at first glance here, just the Havingness Scale. Havingness Scale, at the bottom — there are several variations and inversions down below — and all of them are packed into the first rung and then they kind of spread apart and go on up. But in general, the Havingness Scale runs "waste," and above that we have "have" and roughly, giving you the big jumps on the scale, you have "handle," "confront," "contribute to," and "create."
All right, we paired this up, we would see that this individual had to have a pretty considerable effect on others, you know? He just had to work like mad.
As a matter of fact, you know, it's the more relaxed people that have the wider effects on people. But this individual, as you think, he just has to hectically get up there, you know, and pound that through, and hammer it in somehow or another and so on. And you say, "What's acceptable to this fellow?" See? "What would be the acceptable effect?" Well, it would possibly have something to do with waste. It'd be something that was wasted.
Now, just above that level, this individual never knows when an argument's finished. This may be a woman, or a man, never knows when an argument's finished. They go on arguing after the point; they're not necessarily trying to make total effect, but they just go on talking about it and arguing about it and you know this is a characteristic of theirs.
The most disgusted feeling came over me one time when I found out that such a person could be handled with such ease — that all during the time of my acquaintance with this person, I had permitted myself to suffer in any way at all. And I just — it's — I felt like it was the biggest cheat that had ever happened to me.
This person, a girl, yow-yowed and yow-yowed and yow-yowed and yow-yowed, long after the fact. See? There — it wouldn't matter what happened. You're ten minutes late for a date or something like that, you see, you heard about it for the next two or three hours! Of course, now I would say well, the person never found out that you said you were sorry or anything. You see? The person never found out that anything had occurred. And they just couldn't get this settled — couldn't get any situation settled.
Well, after one of these rows which was just, oh, it was just a horrible row — the person just kept talking and talking and talking, and finally said she would never see me again, or have anything to do with me again. I didn't even know who she was talking to by this time. I don't think she did either.
I went downtown the next morning and quite carelessly and stupidly I saw a blue negligee in a window and I told the clerk to pack it up and send it to this girl. And he did. Next time I saw this girl, I don't know, it just — there was this characteristic was missing. The person didn't do that anymore. All at the price of a blue negligee.
What was this all about? I didn't know for years what this was all about. I was through with it. It was over, done forever as far as I was concerned. Because it's no fun to stand there being talked to by somebody who hasn't the least clue whether or not you ever say anything to him or not — or her. This is nuts! But it just shut off the characteristic just like that! The person was at "have"; personal possession settled anything. Personal possession just settled anything with this person. And of more recent times I have had to go into this again and look this over more. And it happened when I was young and even more foolish than I am now (if that's possible). And I didn't appreciate it until fairly recently.
And it works at a much lower level; it works so startlingly, if you pick up the person at that level. They're not trying to render a total effect; they're just trying to keep the effect going. And you reach in your pocket and you take out a penny and you give them a penny and they shut up.
This sounds utterly incredible. I know some of you just don't believe me. You got it all set but your agreements on this are on social patterns. You know what you do with somebody who argues and argues and argues at them — you argue and argue and argue back. That's the thing to do. But it doesn't get anyplace because your argument is not acceptable to them.
All right, now if they're stuck at "have," you can give them anything! Just anything. It doesn't matter, as long as it's small and rather insignificant. And they shut up. You feel like a fool for ever having argued with the person.
I often thought about this blue negligee. It evidently changed a person's whole life. But it didn't really change their life, it just toward — changed their attitude toward one person. Me. After that there was never a cross word. It was quite fantastic.
People are misestimating on this Havingness Scale against effects all the time. At higher levels, why, you'd think that your handling the situation would take care of it.
Had a second lieutenant once, when I was down here in a fancy-dress Marine company we had in college. And he just used to keep giving orders. He was a geyser of orders. And he just gave orders-orders-orders-orders-orders and he gave them so fast that they couldn't be executed in any way whatsoever. And all the men around were stupid enough to believe that if they handled the things he was telling them to handle, they'd make it. But the truth of the matter was, this individual would have required something else like a — he wouldn't have shut up if you had broken his jaw, you understand. He probably would have shut up if you had tapped the button on his shirt. See? Tok-tok. He probably would go … But the misestimation on the Effect Scale versus the Have Scale was simply this: the boys would go on trying to handle what he was telling them to handle and it drove him nuts! Well, where was he? He was below such a level. He'd required something back one way or the other. But there are people on the Effect Scale — those that are well off — they tell you something and you handle anything in their vicinity, they shut up.
Now, I'll bet you there are very few people present who do not believe that if you stand up to somebody with a strong face, and really stand your ground, that it'll settle the whole thing somehow. You got that? That if you front up to the situation, you front up to the person and stand your ground, why, it'll settle somehow; it won't be that bad. If you could just bring yourself to do that, why, it'd end the whole thing. Well, that's just a fixed estimation — that's confront.
And there are people, who when they're going yow-yow-yow or doing this or that or trying to render a total effect, if you simply stood up and looked at them, they would simply stop and that would be that, and they'd be very happy afterwards.
Now, we go up on the upper harmonic of "contribute to." I don't know exactly what we'd do, because getting up to "contribute to," we're getting up above the level of insane psychotic spins on this subject. But I would say that possibly something like this would work: the fellow is yelling like hell at you, and you get up and start yelling like hell at the place you've been sitting down.
The way to handle people, however, is never to create a worse situation than the one that has just messed things up. That never works.
But you get how these two scales can be paralleled one against the other? Just giving you an example. This is very, by the way, is very rough, that I'm giving you — no effort to make these things fit in smoothly. Just showing you that the Effect Scale, because of Axiom 10, then clarifies all other scales. And other scales are what effect they have on which, across how much space or inverted space.
And it's quite amazing that the Effect Scale is the leading scale, the top scale, that clarifies all other scales. Therefore you should know it rather well.
But as I've already said, there isn't anything about it much to know. You look at it and it's a rather total understanding and it doesn't have any way-stops. So that's why we've got to make it so complicated by making it compare to other scales, and then this is quite never — not quite ever exactly the case. And maybe the Effect Scale will stay around for the benefit of future generations of Scientologists.
But in any event it is never a good policy to simply Q-and-A with whoever is rendering the effect — that is what he expects to have happen. In other words, he's trying to render a total effect, you render a total effect. Russia tries to bomb the United States, the United States bombs Russia. It never winds up in anything because it creates a new situation.
In the field of effects and the creating of effects, it is the creation of an effect which solves it every time. But what kind of an effect? If you want to solve the creation of effects, you will create an effect. With this slight difference: you create an acceptable effect, which is to say, one which is real. The person is certain that an effect of some kind or other has occurred.
It's sometimes very funny in playing with little kids, they "boom-boom" at you with a cap pistol, boom-boom, you know, and you say "Ahhh!" and fall dead, you know?
Boy, if you want to upset a kid, do it sometime — they just didn't intend that much of an effect, that's all. Come over solicitously, and . . . But some little kid who is pretty badly off, you do that to — oh, boy, that is cream in the coffee. That — that's ice cream soda in the cup. He thinks that's wonderful. Well, what was his actual intent? To bump you off, of course.
Well, thus we have these scales and the clarification of an Effect Scale in your mind would actually render a great deal of advance on your part — make you capable of a great deal of advance, in understanding of people. And remember that if you could understand people, it also clarifies other scales.
And the next time you look at other scales, why, look back at this — what I have been saying about this Effect Scale and you will see at once that it becomes much more comprehensible.
Thank you.
Thank you.