I don't know why it is but you all look brighter tonight.

Female voice: Good.

Oh, you took that as a compliment — that was because I had some auditing, not because you did.

And this is the seventh lecture of the 18th ACC, July 23, 1957. And we have to cover some very, very important material tonight having to do with auditing.

Auditing is a practice, not an art. Any objections? Psychotherapy in the past has always been an art. Definition of art: something about which nobody knows anything. Anything is an art which can't be defined.

Someday we'll tackle the field of aesthetics and after that, why, we will be able to practice aesthetics. Up to this time we're entrapped by them — we merely experience them.

The entirety of Scientology today so far as its practice is concerned could be considered to be a fait accompli, certainly a productive practice when done exactly as it is supposed to be done.

Now this doesn't say that there isn't a field of Scientology today that doesn't go up into the field and the high stratosphere, the ionosphere, the sunosphere of unknown. Because it definitely does. The unknown is still there. But where? Above Homo novis. And that's a pretty good place for it to be. From the grave — cheerful place, worms live there — to birth — there may be a few spots that aren't quite spotted, there might be a few places where you've been where I haven't. But wherever these are, I can assure you of this: we know how to handle them on a mest, human, Homo sapiens and even Homo novis level. We know how to handle these things.

Now wherever any subject achieves a high and invariable workability it achieves at the same time a stability. And the stability becomes an area of practice rather than speculation. We know certain things can occur if certain things are done.

Knew a cook once — she was a bride for many, many years. Every dish she did was experimental. And she hung on in agony expecting somebody sooner or later to praise a dinner. And ore day it was discovered that she never followed the recipe she had executed before; she never cooked the same dish twice. Every dish she cooked was an experiment. And this is adventurous but it didn't get many plaudits. Because one could say, "This dish has too much salt in it," but in view of the fact that the dish would never be cooked again nobody learned from that data at all. Well, I don't say this particular cook reformed. But I will say that had she discovered that certain people who ate regularly her dinners liked certain things or responded to certain things and if she'd cooked those same things with the same recipe every time, she would have had this tremendous reputation for being a cuisinary expert. But this reputation she did not obtain and was still making bride's biscuits years after she was a bride. Never cooked the same biscuits by the same recipe.

Now, this is all very well and is undoubtedly adventurous. But it certainly leaves a lot wanting in a performance of an action. Now, nobody's trying to force people into being absolute, unquestioning — be questioning, the day you cease to be questioning you won't be here. Probably if you just stopped questioning you'd exteriorize too. But if you were extremely happy with a result, don't go around wondering how we got that result. Know how we got it; know it was so much baking powder and so much flour mixed up in such and such a way cooked in an oven of such and such a temperature. (Not a General Electric or Westinghouse electric oven; I'm talking about an oven. Even an old tortilla baker from down in the Mex border is better than one of these modern monsters. You turn on the heat and the thermostat is shifted; you know, it's terrific, but it doesn't cook biscuits. It does everything — it'll burn your hand, but it won't cook biscuits.) So, follow a recipe and you get a result. Well, you have the satisfaction of having gotten a result. I don't know what else one's working for unless the satisfaction of doing one's job well.

Of course there's the satisfaction of looking at brand-new horizons. But here is the catch in Scientology today: until you can look at any brand-new horizons you had better doggone well know how to make biscuits.

I love these speculative auditors who without knowing that space is the viewpoint of dimension, discover an eighth dimension and leave their pre-clear stuck in it.

In the first place, I don't think there's anything experimental that could be done today that has not been done in Dianetics or Scientology with the body, the mind of Homo sapiens and a fellow who could exteriorize and stay exteriorized. No greater ability than that, see. But if he could stay stably exteriorized up to that point, it's pretty well been done.

We have pulled the dead back from the between-lives area, much to their consternation. We have processed the Assumption out of babies before it was well implanted or even cool. We have processed all manner of Homo sapiens and even some beasts — other beasts, excuse me.

Homo sapiens, definition of, you know, is a beast who used to have a soul he took care of and sent to hell when he was sinful, but who has now forgotten that he had one. So he patronizes phrenology.

The thing here is that an individual to perceive has to be brought up to a certain level of perception, and I would say the base level from which perception could be engaged upon, above the level of Homo novis, would certainly be thetan exterior. Now from that point on I cannot tell you what there is to observe. And from that point on there is a great adventure, certainly. Probably many data that we have only guessed at are rather easily proven above this level or disproven. Probably many abilities of a thetan which at this moment are only barely skimmed, you know, are not even — not even known, not even guessed at, would emerge. Tremendous numbers of things could happen above that level.

But it is well to understand that up to the level of pretty good shape and able to handle a body rather easily and handle other bodies rather easily, up to that point which is the outpost point, there are evidently no further outposts. That's a sad thing. It's a sad thing.

I remember back when Mary Sue and I were cooling our heated brains over E-Meters, pcs, we covered the whole track from one end to the other and left 99 and 9,999/10,000ths in restim. We found out that the same pattern of the mind was just more pattern and that any further advances on it consisted of just more of what we were already looking at. But we covered a lot of subjects which until very recently weren't at all known and which you haven't even had the benefit of information on.

But some of these subjects that we see as new today, why, she and I, working with an E-Meter back in 1951, 52, so forth, with pcs and so on, were actually cataloging phenomena.

How much phenomena was there?

Well I would say there isn't very much in the world of electrical phenomena that we haven't a good clue on. We might not know its exact map, but we have the clue. But this does not blind us to the fact that much phenomena lies way and far beyond, far, far, far, far, far beyond the world of space and electricity and matter and this continuum of incident known as time.

I would say offhand that anyone pretending that matter, energy, space and time as he knows it here in this universe and in his own mind at this time is all there is to know about this subject, I would say that that man was either a charlatan or a stupid jackass. In the first place, three-dimensional space is simply a simple space concept, and to say that there are no other space concepts would be about the same — saying as people who are crosseyed don't see double images. It's simply a phenomenon of perception; that is all this space is.

Energy could be conceived to be a phenomenon of belief. Mass could be said to be a phenomenon of experience.

I said advisedly that energy was a phenomenon of belief because I myself have never seen any independent of mass. And I don't think anybody else ever has either. They are still measuring electricity by magnetic effects, and nobody's ever seen any yet.

You could probably tell some scientists working on companies contracted to the AEC this and they would start to argue and they would probably flip — they'd probably spin in before dawn. Because they know basically this is true. And their stable data tells them that they are in a nonadventurous world up to the point where they begin to reach just about to the boundary and then they find that energy isn't energy anymore and mass isn't quite mass and nothing behaves unless you throw in a bunch of factors to make the equations balance. Their world of stability ends. So even in the science of physics there is a finite end to this matter, energy, space and time which we know is experience.

But here is the great oddity: to know matter, energy, space and time of this universe, one's fellows, the animal kingdom, in other words, the dynamics from top to bottom, is not to know every universe, every life form and every phenomenon which could exist. You understand that? Well, on that basis — that other universes of other patterns made out of other things in other ways and behaving on other stable data could exist. You understand that? And we don't know a blessed thing about them.

So before we get too proud with the stability of our subject we should glance upon the humbleness of the fact that all we know is this universe and all we know about any other universe is that it or they might exist. And it boils down to the fact that all we know in actuality is the way a thetan has behaved and reacted so as to culminate in this particular universe, the development of bodies, development of forms, practices, development of animal kingdom, all these various things. But in view of the fact that the remainder of the scientific world has not at any moment a millionth of the information we have, we can still boast a little. But only by comparison with a bunch of dumbbells.

So, when I tell you it's stable, I say its practice is stable. Stable where? Stable for this universe. Stable for what? Homo sapiens. Toward what goal? Homo novis, which is simply stable exterior without too much difficulty.

Don't for a moment exaggerate what you know, and don't for a moment minimize it. Don't do either one, but maintain a clear perspective. You can do what you can do if you do what can be done to accomplish it at this level, this universe, this time. And we have certain practices which I don't think will go out or blow up or disappear so long as there's a universe here. I don't see any way out except the simplicity of what we learn in such things as the TRs. I know that many, many years of a great deal of heated mental activity have given us no more than two or three dozen workable processes which could be counted upon to work under all circumstances. And I know enough about what has gone on before in this universe and enough about what man has responded to to be able to say rather didactically that there's not much chance of this changing.

But that doesn't say, one, that there's no chance of it improving. It can always improve, providing it improves simply. The way not to improve something is to get complicated. If any improvement is more complicated, gaze at it with at least a sneer held in reserve. Somebody says, "Well, we used to do it this way. We used to walk up a rug this way, you see; and now we have a better way of walking up a rug, you see, and it's this way." You say, "Oh. Oh, yeah?"

Somebody tells you there's a better way of running Confronting 0 — Training 0, Confronting. (Confronting 0 was the trick name of it originally.) There's a better way of running it. Instead of the auditor sitting in the chair and looking at the coach, what he actually does is lock his hands back of the chair and at each five-second interval, while confronting, he twitches his fingers and thus releases the nervous tension built up by the confrontingness. You say, "Oh, yeah! Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah." It isn't true. There's more to do and whenever there's more to do you should ask yourself whether or not that is the direction progress is made.

Once upon a time people thought they knew something about the universe. They thought they knew a lot about the universe. And then it became more and more complicated, and more and more complicated, and more and more complicated and all of a sudden it has become something that nobody could know anything about.

Well, isn't that remarkable. All he has to do is look at the walls, look up at the sky and count a few stars, he knows about all there is to know about the universe. I mean, that's it. It's basically a very simple subject. You walk across fields and you'll see different colored rocks. You take some ocean water and — or look in the mountains and you'll find different minerals of one kind or another. And you can tie up the color of the minerals with the color of the rocks if you want to. And you could have a good time. But at no time was it complicated until gold became some exact number of electrons spinning insanely around an exact number of protons, which is measured out in so many molecules of whumph and flunked in a chemistry test.

Right about then you should say, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, hm, hm, hm, hm, how very interesting!"

Now all that sort of thing does is to lead to greater change at a faster rate. You want to run fresh out of universe, just make enough of those changes. Get just enough chromium-plated Cadillacs that get up just close enough to the speed of the rotation of Earth so you always have high noon while driving — you've just about had it. The apparent distances of Earth will become zero.

Fly up to the sun for another tankful of plutonium and come back before breakfast, and the distance between here and the sun has become so small that you've just about run out of universe.

Get it fixed up so that you never have to look for a pretty girl. You drop two bits in a slot machine and a reasonable facsimile drops out. And you've damn well run out of universe.

There is a point where something passes a peak of advance, and that advance beyond that point is something like taking a three-layer chocolate cake and adding layers of chocolate to it. And you just put on more chocolate and more chocolate and more chocolate. And you'll find out proportionately you'll have less and less cake.

Well now, I do not pretend that all of the TRs or the CCH processes are there. I don't pretend they're all there. I don't pretend that you're holding in your hot little hand the final, complete rendition. That comes up in the Student Manual.

Now, the direction of change to be beneficial should be in the direction of simplicity. That is the direction of change. When a direction is in the direction of complexity it soon becomes individuated to such a degree that you lose it. It goes into the hands of a specialist. And you at length have a specialist on TR 4. He never heard of TR 0, 1, 2, 3 or 5, but does he know 4! And you lose the workable whole of the subject. Now here's why I tell you that we are at something like an optimum stability because we have a subject which is yet in a sufficient simplicity that any person with some study could grasp every facet of it. Now, do you understand that? Much more added to it will bring it into a category where the Director of Processing understands only processing; he can never train anybody. The Director of Training understands only training and can never process anyone at all. You understand that? The entrance of the super-expert.

And right now, up till this time, Dianetics and Scientology, in spite of numerous changes, in spite of many, many investigations, has remained a subject which was capable of being embraced by one mind studying himself. That's quite remarkable. That's quite remarkable. Perhaps the whole field of science was that way once. Perhaps. It's very possible that it was if Scientology ever existed before. Because right now you have enough tools, enough axioms, enough material, in actuality, to be processed yourself up to a point where you could then follow again any track of investigation undertaken to this moment and advance your investigations beyond the point where they are now in certain definite directions.

Now you can take an old E-Meter, you can build one. They're simply a Wheatstone bridge in spite of the original manufacturer's nonsense. That's all they are, they're just a Wheatstone bridge. There's a few tricks in using them, but there's even been a book written on that, Electropsychometry. And with the aid of that and a preclear with fairly good visio who wasn't scared of getting into trouble with facsimiles, you could undoubtedly map the entirety of the genetic line. The entire map of the body from the moment when it arrived on Earth to now.

But I can tell you for sure that you would not find otherwise than that it arrived. It arrived on Earth. It didn't rise in seas of household ammonia. The genetic blueprint all the way along the line is fascinating to follow. Absolutely fascinating. This is a great study that will someday be undertaken, I am sure, but is within the capability of almost anyone in this room right at this moment.

Why?

Because the rules don't vary from anything we know. We have various ways of undertaking it which would be rather fabulous, such as Then and Now Solids. If you just ran Then and Now Solids on a person who kept it firmly in mind that he was his body, which I was running into this afternoon . . . My auditor was having a bad time with me this afternoon. I was a very bad preclear. I insisted on following some of the auditing commands and found out they couldn't be followed. It's embarrassing. I always follow the auditing command, however, no matter what it does to the auditor.

Now as we look across this vista called the genetic entity line we find all The Factors once more — The Factors, you know, technical piece of writing that belongs to us, man, and we'd find the Axioms and we would find all these various things. In other words, we could take one process on a person who is not too badly off or we could take a person who is very badly off and get him up to a point where he could run this one process and he could go back and then, fixated on the genetic entity line by agreement and constant command and so forth, he would then wind up with a complete map of it and he would be on top and in possession of all this information; even though it were not written down.

Sounds to me like an awful stable subject which will reextrapolate or regenerate itself. You could find this material all over again.

It's quite interesting sometimes to audit somebody who is green as can be, never heard of it before, a person who wasn't in too bad a condition, and Johnny-come-lately hasn't been crashed here on Earth any length of time at all — crawled out of his rocket, picked up an injured kid or a baby or something of the sort and says, "Where am I? I'll play at this game" — blow him out of his head and all of a sudden have him sit there telling you all about the Axioms. You know, telling you the Axioms, one after another. He'll say, "These are the agreements that the universe is made out of." See? And he'll start chattering these things off. Quite remarkable.

But that actually is a tribute to accurate work, rather than something one would regard jealously saying, "Well he's evolving it all again, kill him!" You know. That's the general scientific way of going about it. Somebody evolved the same formula, you generally have to have him shot or expelled or something. Liquidated I think they call it today in the American universities. Anyway . . . There are two universities today who aren't socialistic. There are two, so I couldn't say all universities, could I?

Anyway, they have a capability — these Axioms — also of evolving the remainder of the Axioms. So that you take a person and run him on some research process and all of a sudden he'll start to evolve the remainder of the Axioms from the one he was run on, which is quite amusing. I mean, they evolve themselves irrespective of the track.

I want to tell you tonight about two or three of these research practices. There are procedures which you should know about which may or may not have any therapeutic value. But they're certainly interesting. Now if you want to establish certain data, there are certain research procedures which can be run as long as the preclear can stand it, and you'll pick up the required data.

Now, one of those is very interesting, is you mock up something and give it the idea that. . . Now, the — the actual therapeutic value of this thing is negligible, I assure you. Because it's a games condition to end all games conditions. And the amount of havingness that you put up or mock up or do something with and so forth is not necessarily compensatory for the amount of bank disturbance which occurs. But it's interesting.

Now, if you mock up somebody and give him the idea that — anything — the agreement will either restimulate or the auditing command will run out. If there is an agreement of that nature on that case, then the agreement will come into restimulation of one kind or another and the preclear can tell you quite a bit about it. But if there is no agreement of that nature around, the auditing command runs out instead.

Now, it's already allowed that the fellow can do mock-ups, you see. And it's already allowed that if he does them he won't get into terrible restimulation. But "Mock up something and put into it the idea that _____" will establish almost any control operation for what it is and get you the rest of the information connected with it, right out of the bank. Bang. Bang. Bang. Give you some sort of an idea.

Here's one. Let's take dialectic buffoonery, I think they call it. Mock up somebody and give him the idea that — you see, this is the games condition you're running — give him the idea that all thought comes from energy. And he'll very shortly tell you, well, that this is an operation to end all operations. And if you wanted to get somebody into real trouble all you'd have to do is simply tell him and convince him that all thought came from energy and matter. "Oh," you'd say, "is that so?"

"Yeah," he says, "this is an old one. I know I — I got the idea this is very old. I mean, it's been done, it's been done — a lot of things."

"All right," you say, "that's fine. Now mock up somebody and give him the idea that it's all been done before." These are simply dialectic materialism statements. There is no originality, all ideas come from force. I see by your faces that you're not too well aware of what this dialectic materialism is. It is a subject, it isn't just nonsense. Those are two of its premises. All right.

A fellow would start telling you about control operations and how these things could be used, and he'd give you an awful lot of stuff on this. It's all right, so the next one you'd say, "Well, mock up somebody and give him the idea that individuality is a sin." You know, the cult of the personality and other things that dialectic materialism comes down on with a thud.

Here we fed him three principal ideas out of a broadly understood subject. Now we take his answers and what he has to say about it and what he dreams up while this is being run on him and we put the rest of it down and we will have the practices of it and perhaps some of the things which eradicate it. Now if we keep this up on several people we will undoubtedly wind up with the answer to the eradication of the subject.

Now you got that as a research procedure?

One I have used. Quite interesting. It's a very reliable research procedure. You'll find out that their answers from person to person don't vary enough to bother with. You take the three pins, you see, out of dialectic materialism. Have them mock somebody up and give them the idea that, it puts certain things into restimulation in the bank, the rest of the material which has been known in past ages about this comes into your possession. So that's a fascinating thing to know, isn't it?

Now, Then and Now Solids has the power also of revealing considerable information concerning the subject of life — what has been done, what has been lived — but is not very good as a research procedure because it is too confoundedly therapeutic. Fellow doesn't introvert and figure-figure the way he does on this other one, see? It's too good for him. He gets terribly interested in having been a Roman senator. But that's a personal interest, isn't it? Terribly interested in cataloging just where he was during the great plague, but that is a personal subject. And the research subjects are generalized subjects, not particularized. So Then and Now Solids is not as good as this other one.

All right. All right. The E-Meter is a very, very good research instrument if you know how to use one and if you do not mistake your answers — quivers of the needle for answers when they are merely the fact that the fellow has started to get his — thigh has started itching.

The chap who used to make those things used to give us some interesting things. He had a one-handed electrode — this was never as good as an ordinary tin can, never as good as an ordinary tin can.

I have a vested interest in the E-Meter. Actually, every time the thing — every time I'd want something more workable, why, I'd get it simpler and more capable of registering, and then it'd drift for six months and get more complicated and unusable. And then I'd have to get a model which was more simple which could be used. And I think the final model that came out — 400 — 1 worked on one just the other day and was able finally by cutting off all — practically all of its dials and all of its lines and cutting a bunch of wires with pliers and so forth, I finally got it down to a point of where it would register a case, not passing cars. And it was quite workable after that.

Actually a Wheatstone bridge with a battery in it has only the liability of a comm lag. It takes it maybe a half a second to respond to the question you answered when they're battery, DC operated. So you ask the question and then the needle sits there for a half a second, maybe even a second, and then registers. Well, you in your swing on through questions and so forth may be thinking that's null and gone off to another question. The pc also, you think, might have thought of something else, and a doubt has been entered into it. So an AC meter is a better meter.

But the use of this thing is something I should give you for what it is worth in case you ever want to follow along some of these lines.

The way you set one of them. Regardless of what kind of a needle or dial the thing has, the preclear with his hands held evenly on the can gives the can a sudden, hard squeeze. See? Just a sudden, hard squeeze. The surge that should produce is one-third of the meter dial. Got that? Anything else is insufficiently correct — insufficiently accurate. If it is less than that, less than that one-third surge, you'll miss some. And if it's more than, you'll think everything is hot.

You've got to cut these things back in their reads so that they read intelligently, so that you can differentiate. And you want lots of things that might possibly flick or read just a little bit, you know, you want those to be just dead as doornails if you're doing research. You don't want that needle jumping at every flick that goes through the fellow's mind. You got the idea? You only want the big ones. You want the two-dial drops, the fifteen-dial drops. But neither do you want it so insensitive that it will fail to pick up what we call a theta bop.

Now a theta bop has become very interesting to us of recent times. It is a certain behavior of the E-Meter needle. It's a hunt. And it goes like this. And it's just that much dial, little tiny bit of dial, and the needle is unmistakably coming over this way and then it goes over and it hunts over on the other side and then — so on, and it's just bopping, bopping. And it just keeps bopping. And that means not a death as we thought it did originally but an exteriorization incident. An incident in which the preclear exteriorized is registered by a theta bop. And that's what that theta bop is.

There are some other characteristics. One is the totally stuck needle. (There aren't many of these characteristics, by the way: they're just the surge, the theta bop and the totally stuck needle. The only remarkable things so far as research is concerned.) The totally stuck needle gives you a case that's just off the bottom of the dial. You could actually hit him on the head, as I have done, with the side of your fist, you know, bang, with no registry on the dial, even though the dial is set on surge, one-third of a dial when you squeeze the cans. Really. You know? I told him I was going to do it and I said, "All right, here we go now." Pow. No read. No read of any kind. Just z-z-zit. The man could have murdered somebody yesterday and he still wouldn't have gotten any read. That man is fixed against surprise and could be called a surprise-absorber. Nothing will bother him at all. He doesn't necessarily have criminal patterns or tendencies. But criminals also can have this reaction.

Criminals can also go all over the dial. Psychos can be totally stuck or so wild even while sitting still, you know, holding the cans, perfectly relaxed and so forth, and here goes the needle. And you just tune it down, tune it down, tune it down, tune it down until you finally get a reaction on some questions. You'll find that that again is answered by this one-third of the dial surge. But just sitting there quietly they're in total dispersal. And this other person sitting there quietly is in total freeze. Those manifestations are important to anyone doing research.

Well, you can swing on down the line, you can find out more doggone things in less time and put it down.

But here is the great oddity with the E-Meter today: we can run an engram up to a point where it is in full reality. And it's a technique which is quite valuable — it's terribly valuable. And in your forward career you will hear so much about this and you will do so much with this that you will be quite bemused by the fact that it went overlooked this long. Because it is the basic technique of control.

Now it would be one thing to sit there with the needle telling you everything, and if the preclear wasn't getting smarter and smarter and didn't know it himself and couldn't look at it and assist you very much — you would be groping. To a marked degree you'd be groping. There'd be much data that would remain unrevealed.

But you can take an E-Meter today and run the technique which I'm about to give you and actually have the preclear give you the rest of the story, even if he starts in with a circuitry don't-know at the beginning. In other words, you just spot something in terms of time; you spot the fact that it was 1162. Theta bop. He's evidently exteriorized. Magnitude of time — the manual on electropsychometry goes into all of this, by the way — you establish these moments by time. And we don't know what a galactic year is or something of the sort, but the — a thetan evidently does, only he doesn't let himself in on it. And let's say we found an incident with a theta bop in it where the person's evidently stuck in an exteriorized type of incident in 1162. Now before, the only thing we could have done was to have restimulated it and restimulated it one way or the other by questions until the person finally told us what he saw in the picture. That was Dianetics.

Now, let me show you the slight difference between Dianetics and Scientology and explain to you further why Scientology is a stability where Dianetics didn't have a prayer of being a stability. With this process you raise his recall to a point where he tells you — the fellow, you know, I mean the pc himself — where he tells you out of his recall and without the aid of pictures the rest of the incident. Got that? In other words, he gets it on a total reality, full recall basis.

Now, the E-Meter was always invalidative in the past. That is to say, your constant questions about which the preclear knew nothing and about which you seemed to know more and more, finally just drove him into the ground.

Well, what you do with one on research these days — you've all been — probably sat there being invalidated by the needle; it was talking about things you didn't have a clue of — well now, this process reverses that procedure. We find a theta bop at 1162. We've checked it by — we've asked the preclear, "Something bothering you?" And he said, "I don't know." You say, "Well is there anything I should know about?" And he has a slight drop. And we say, "Well, how long ago was it? A few years?" and we get no reaction. We say, "Tens of years?" We get no reaction. "Hundreds of years?" We get a tremble.

So we say, "Well, was it five hundred years?" And we get a little drop. And we say, "Was it more than five hundred?" And we get quite a drop. And we say, "Less than five hundred?" We get no drop. And we say, "Well is it around 750, is that about it?" And we get a drop. And we say, "Well is it less than 750 or greater than 750?" You know. And then get a drop. We're inspecting. Less than 750 is what gave us the drop. We say, "Well then, it's evidently 600 or thereabouts, is that right? More than 600? Less than 600?" You get the idea? And we find out that it was 602 years ago, 1355. We say, "Is that the date, 1355?" And it goes wham! wham!

"Well, where were you at that time?"

"Ahwo." Here we go. See?

All right. Now if we'd located it with that procedure, we would say, "Have you got a picture?" And the preclear would say, "Well, yeah. I — picture. Doesn't mean anything to me. I mean, it's just — just a little old body lying there on the pavement. I mean, there's nothing to that. See it any day, you know, in the Washington Post, they publish dead bodies all the time." And this is the point where you would use this technique.

You would say, "What in that scene could you handle?" And that picture will sort out and sort out and sort out and all of a sudden he will say, "Well yeah, my name was Kleine Schweinhund and we were raiding on the outside of a village just to the north of Rome and I never liked the centurion and he had me thrown in the clink. And I'd just gotten out and he was in a wine store and I remember there was — Tiberius was on one side of him and Maxim was on the other side of him and I didn't pay any attention to it; all I did was shoved a shiv in his back. And he was a member of the same legion and you know, I don't feel so good about that."

"Well, what's this body?"

"Oh, well, that's just me." Well…

Anyway, right about that time if we kept this sort of thing up and didn't let him let the pictures get too automatic, you know, just shift over to other scenes and other things — we just held him there, because the shift is an avoidance of something in the scene, you see. We don't let them go up and down the track: we hold him on that picture, until it finally is in total recall. Every time he goes up the track he's running away from that picture. Every time he goes down the track he's running away from that picture. Don't you see? Until he can just put it there, throw it away or put it there and throw it away, why, it's still got dynamite in it. Don't you see? And you can tell by his emotional reaction whether or not the thing is flat.

Well, in other words, from that point you could actually establish the customs, general orders, name, rank and serial number and anything else of that time and place with the greatest of ease. And furthermore, this has been done and it is of tremendous interest.

Now, what if the fellow running on the meter went up and into the future and started getting facsimiles of the future? Use the same process, "What is there in that scene that you could handle?"

Now, there's a variation, sometimes, evidently required in the question, and that is, "What in that scene could you have handled or could you handle?" It's a double. See? "Could you handle? Could you have handled?" There's a difference there you'll notice in running it.

And in the future it would be, "What could you — handled, or what will you be able to handle?" Different.

And all of a sudden he'd say, "Well, poor old Earth, poor old Earth, the atomic termites finally got loose from the US Army Bacteriological and Insect Warfare Headquarters and they started eating all the paper and no government was possible."

In other words, you have a great deal of knowledge at your tap and the E-Meter now ceases to be invalidative, because you easily recover any lost ground by the processing that you do.

Now, you could stick with the meter if you wanted to and still keep check on your preclear. You could keep checking it up. Might be an interesting thing to do. And when the theta bop is gone, why, the incident is pretty flat; he's onto other things and moving free on the track and you'll get other needle reactions.

It's a neat operation handling an E-Meter. It's a tremendous research instrument. Now what's interesting is that an E-Meter would also detect criminal practices or detect anything else. The E-Meter used by a Scientologist understanding it is undoubtedly — well, it's not even to be compared with a police lie detector. I mean that's in the kindergarten, buy-it-at-the-dime-store variety.

Every once in a while they run into a murder in a past life, you know. And they've got a criminal there and the criminal's sitting there with the — with the blood pressure and the breathing mechanism and all of the other … I don't know, they hang him up with tubes and space hats and things. And he's sitting there all wrapped up and getting blood poisoning from this and that, and they say to him, "Well, did you or did you not commit the murder?" And then the — everything goes boom! You know. And the blood pressure goes up and the breathing goes uh-hu-uh-hu-uh-hu. And they say, "Well I guess we — guess he's guilty. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. Well, we got you now!"

I don't know, they never ask him when he killed somebody. Never ask him the fellow's name. Never ask him if it was a dog. They never get the gen, in other words. They aren't intelligent enough to know anything about this.

But you cannot operate a lie detector or a police lie detector accurately. They're about 15 percent completely inaccurate by police findings. So I don't know, they're 90 percent wrong probably.

When addressed to this, "Did you commit this crime?" or "Did you speak to that person?" the reaction is not reliable for the excellent reason that they never clear the auditing session because they don't know how to audit. It's an auditing instrument, the lie detector is. It is not a police instrument that's worth a nickel. And you have to hunt up and down and clear this thing any way from Sundays.

I know of an instance, once, where a person was asked if they had been misbehaving. You know? During a certain period of time. And the needle went, plongo! You know, and the person running it says, "Aha, I caught somebody; I caught somebody scarlet-handed right here. Uh-huh-huh-huh-huh-huh-huh." Only it wasn't misbehaving that the needle was reacting to: it was fear of punishment in case somebody thought — and this is the only thing that cleared the needle; needle kept reacting until this question was hit — fear of punishment in case it couldn't be proved to the person that behavior had been good. See? It was this complicated a reaction that was making the needle ping.

Before you monkey around with the mind, you should know something about the mind. And outside of Scientology they don't.

Well, anyhow, there's a research instrument. Well, there are research processes and research instruments and with these and with various techniques of this character the entirety of our present stability could be recovered. The one thing that probably couldn't be recovered easily would be the amount of technology which has been assembled, investigated and abandoned. And that piece of the work would probably have to be done all over again. Whether it is possible to do that or not I do not know. But it was trial and error, tremendous numbers of people and so on.

For instance, to find out how to train people — take seven years to find out how to train somebody in a subject is rather a critical thing to have happen to us. We should have been able to do it much faster than that. But if we think this is the case, look over the fact that the last 2,500 years of training have revealed no method which trained anybody. No methods.

In the absence of willingness, there are still no methods. And that's very accurate.

So it has to do with goals and willingness and still falls back to some degree on auditing. You'd have to make somebody willing to be trained before training would benefit him at all.

But we are nevertheless justified in this. If the subject were to be reconstructed again from scratch, it could be reconstructed fairly certainly with instruments such as the E-Meter and with auditing. In various ways you could get this whole assembly of knowledge together again. How long it would take I don't know. I couldn't guess at that. I think we've been going at breakneck speed to do it in seven years.

But it is itself, is all I'm trying to say. It is itself. It is a stability in that it could be reextrapolated. It could be re-created. It could be gone over and put together again. And that is important because it doesn't leave a lot of tag ends hanging out that there's no explanation for.

Now, there's one word I would give you of caution in practice. Don't do a thing unless you have some understanding of it. If you don't have an understanding of some of the things you are doing, then you certainly had better look it over from all sides. Because to learn something by rote, to learn something just because it is and to deny it your appreciation, by which I mean your ability to understand it, is not to have it at all.

Now the subject is there. It is a thing. On low — on its lower levels it is a stability. And being a stability at this time it is capable of being understood. There are lots of people who understand every quarter of it.

If you don't understand some quarter of what you are doing in the TRs, in the CCHs, in some of these others you could only be criticized if you didn't try to look at it again and so understand it better; and if you didn't ask anybody about it out of some misguided pride, you would be denying yourself a full knowledge of the subject.

Now that's what you're here to attain. That's what you're here to learn. You could extrapolate the entirety of this subject from one end to the other, put it back together again. Certainly it's an easy job to look over that part of the subject which is here and find out if you do understand why these TRs exist, why these processes exist, why we're doing what we're doing and how these various Axioms work, what the Code of a Scientologist is, why it is that way and what the Code of the auditor is and why it is that way.

If there are any blank spots here, now is the time to haul them out, take a look at them, and don't put it off till tomorrow if your Instructor's giving you something today that you don't understand: you look at it harder and understand it better and you will go out of here much, much wiser than you came in. And that's what we intend to have happen.

Thank you.