The second lecture on this subject talks about processing. This is not a long lecture. It has to do with the whole idea of processing and what we are doing in that.

Man can be said to be not quite optimum. Man very often stops and scratches his head when he should be running and very often runs when he should stop and scratch his head.

When you see somebody eating by pouring porridge into his shoes, you would know he was aberrated. Isn't that so! It is a little less obvious that a man is aberrated when he simply says, "Now, let me think." Oh boy, is he nuts.

"Let me think." He thinks that thinking has something to do with time, and he thinks the more you think, well, the better the solution is going to be. That's evidently what he's operating on. "The longer it takes me to think of the solution, why, the better the solution is going to be." He operates on that. "It must be a good book. It took him eight years to write it."

And you know, the big joke on that last one is very, very - is a very big joke. You go through the famous books that man considers today to be classics and find out how long it took that author to write that book in each case. You will be stunned,

You had a fellow by the name of Dickens. Dickens is an interesting fellow. He's what we'd call a fast-action writer. He's a high-speed word mechanic, high speed. Do you know that there isn't a penny-a-liner or a newspaperman or a magazine writer working in the world today who comes up to the production speed of Charles Dickens? And he did it all by hand. It was all "writ by hand," so to speak.

That's interesting, isn't it? His stuff is still around. He was slapping that stuff out at five thousand words a day. I'd like to see one of these huh! - I would like to see Charles Atwood Inkslinger writing at five thousand worlds [words] a day. "It took him - must be a great book; it took him twelve years to produce it."

No, it's just not sensible. When you're dealing with thought, the better thinking is done in the less times. Because thinking which is done in terms of energy is bad because it's very reactive, very reactive, Heavy energy thinking is very bad. A nation tries to work out its problems by going to war with tanks and guns. That is what's known as heavy thinking. And it's slow and it doesn't solve much.

The more one gets into energy, the less applicable, generally, the solutions will be. That's just a little truism; happens to work out that way.

So that what a man is really saying when he says, "Let me think," he's saying, "Let me look for data." Well, there's nothing wrong with finding data with which to think. Well then, the man would be the smartest who could find the data fastest. Isn't that so!

Now, someone who says, "Let me think," he probably means "Maybe" Or "I don't want to do it." He's using some sort of a stall there.

But here he actually believes it takes him a long time to think of something, and he's considered it carefully. Well, if he considered it carefully, if he just went and thought and thought and thought and thought and thought and thought and thought - oh, no. Oh, no, he isn't considering it carefully at all. He's lust being totally reactive and sort of walking around in small circles and so on.

If he went and he got this problem and "Let me thin," and he got the problem and then he said, "Let's see. Now, the data associated with this problem are so-and-so and so-and-so, and I'll have to go look that up and I'll have to think of this and I'll have to ask so-and-so and so on. And I'I1 get this data together, and then I'll know the answer and it's obvious. Yeah. And there's the answer," That would be time in thinking. Yes, it takes a certain amount of time to go through the motions of acquiring data, and it sometimes takes a certain amount of time to recall data. But the accumulation of data to the solution of a problem is not length of time spent in considering. And yet, man uniformly has this level.

Now, there are other fellows that go around and they think out loud, and they talk to themselves, or they think vocally in their heads. This is wonderful. Fellow says, "Now, let me see, I don't know quite where I should … I guess I better go down; I better take the tube. Yes. No. I better not take the tube. It's only two or three blocks, I'll walk. No, I'I1 take the tube. No, I just decided to carry this bundle here. This bundle is very heavy. And I wonder what…?" Actually? Actually. The modern writer has gotten so daffy, Boy, is he a reactive character. He puts down "stream of consciousness" for all of his characters. And the world has really become convinced that this is the way people think. Well, it's the way crazy people think. (audience laughter) You take Gene O'Neill's Strange Interlude, for one play. There's several other plays and so on, where the characters - the characters say, "I hate you." And then sort of turn aside - Shakespeare, other modern playwrights do this - turn aside and say, "The reason I hate him is so-and-so and so-and-so and then so on," And they vocalize a stream of consciousness known as - early in theater - as an aside, and later and very, very modern in theater, the stream of consciousness.

The only consciousness of a stream of consciousness would be the passing and shuffling of energy. Energy doesn't think, man thinks.

So this would be a real daffy one. And yet, you find practically anybody doing this. So what's human aberration? Well, I'm afraid it's being human, That sounds a little extreme. Only thing I'm trying to deliver to you there is a datum: is that insanity is not an absolute, neurosis is not an absolute, aberration is not an absolute and sanity is not an absolute, None of these are absolute data. All data is relative to data. A man is crazier than others, A man is saner than others. A man is more susceptible to correct solutions than another man. You get the relativity here we're dealing in.

Now, it is true that there is a state where everyone agrees somebody is crazy. There is that level. There is a state. And so we're dealing with what the society or the group thinks is or agrees is aberrated, as our term of aberration.

Now, we've gone a little bit further than that in Dianetics and Scientology, and we can actually graph a state of ability to estimate correct behavior to solve problems and so on. We can graph this with great ease and we can demonstrate it in various ways. So we have an arbitrary numerical value which could be assigned to this. But we agree on that.

And so again the public at large simply agrees what's psychotic, what's neurotic, what's aberrated and what's sane.

It's very amusing that the one they haven't agreed on most is what's sane. You'll find practically nobody getting together and discussing how sane anybody is. And if they do, the subject of the conversation is found to be some intolerable sourpuss who is merely terribly, practically stubborn. They're very sane and very practical. That's right.

Did you ever run into one of these practical people? The definition of being practical is not doing anything, I guess, or that you can find them doing very little.

Now, in short, we don't have a basic definition here which is susceptible to an unquestioned or absolute value, but we do have definitions. And you could say sanity is the ability to resolve problems. You could say a person is sane when he can resolve problems with a predominance of correctness, Person would be sane who solved problems. Will solve problems in what way? Solve problems in the direction of survival for himself or the upper dynamics. You see?

So, the relative ability to resolve problems relating to survival would make a gradient scale of how sane a person was. And that would - it requires a definition of right and wrong which is an acceptable definition. This definition of right and wrong is sufficiently acceptable to have caused the committee on evidence of the New York Bar Association to meet, and they are still in the progress of considering changes in the rules of evidence, because these new data have thrown out old data on evidence. We have actually spearheaded in the field of jurisprudence with this.

Sanity is the ability to tell right from wrong. That is the definition under law. That's sanity, the definition - tell right from wrong.

It's a pretty good definition, by the way. The fellow who thought that up was very good. Because you get a little kid, and you ask him what's right and what's wrong. And he can tell you pretty well. He knows what's right and what's wrong.

But if you find a real bad one that is completely - just seems to be utterly uncontrollable, you ask him what's right and what's wrong: one, he doesn't care or he doesn't know.

Now, that's fascinating! Some children I have worked with have told me bluntly, "I think my father and mother must be crazy, because they say that it's possible to tell right from wrong." Put that down. So it's a wonderful little definition, actually, but it was completely useless as long as we did not have a definition for what rightness is and what wrongness is. It just put it - moved it over one category. We had this definition that sanity was the ability to tell right from wrong, and insanity or criminality were the inabilities to tell right from wrong. And then we never said what right - what was right and what was wrong.

Wrong according to who? A man goes out and shoots a duck. That's right according to the man; it's awfully wrong according to the duck. All right.

So right and wrong is the crux of the matter. So we have to define right and wrong. And we have a workable definition for rightness and wrongness: That thing is right which contributes to the survival of the entities or beings on the greatest number of the dynamics. In other words, an optimum solution, the rightness of that optimum solution, or its degree that it is optimum, depends upon the amount that it benefits the survival of the most dynamics. And a problem is wrong in the degree that it inhibits the survival along the dynamics, So maximal benefit to the survival of all those things concerned with the problem would be right. Minimal destruction to those things concerned with the problems would be right. Maximal destruction to those things concerned in the problem would be wrong, and minimal constructiveness or benefit would be wrong.

So you see, rightness, then, is that which assists survival; wrongness is that which inhibits survival. And we get these two principles and we find an astonishing number of problems will solve themselves.

For instance, is it right for you to live? Well, that's a nice question, but.,. All right.

Now that you are living, is it right for you to take any benefit from others? Is it right for you to think about yourself at all?

Now, that's an interesting question, because most people will hedge and because of political this-and-that, social something or other, they will say, "Well, hm, well, humh-urn, huh."

You can almost ruin a man by simply demonstrating to him that he is receiving some benefits from others.

You say, "Look, somebody's doing something for you."

"Oh, no, they're not."

You find some people charming. Do you know that people exist in the society and depend for their total ability to live on this: They let people do things for them. It's the truth! I mean, the blind man down on the comer serves a very, very excellent purpose in the society; he stands there and lets people give him something.

Never thought about it this way, did you? But you can think back across your own past, and the most trying person you knew was the person you couldn't help. And that person you could help the least is bound to be that person who is the most aberrative to you.

You take a man down here in an asylum and he is - terrible condition. You go straight across the boards with him trying to find out what you can do to help him. You get no attention whatsoever from him. You're trying to make him sane. You're getting nothing in return until you will give him - perhaps you will be able to do this, perhaps not - you will be able to establish something he can still help. That's interesting, isn't it? There's something he can still help. Well now, you wouldn't think that would make a man sane, but it will.

If you were to take an E-Meter and put an insane person on the E-Meter and just go over the things in the various dynamics: "Can you help children?" "Can you help cats?" "Can you help this?" "Can you help that?" You all of a sudden might find out that he's able to help horses. Send him to a horse farm? He'll be the sanest guy on it! Just like that. (snap)

Doctors say, "Well, you can't tell about insanity because you're liable to get an instantaneous remission at any time." They've never looked into these so-called instantaneous remissions. Once in a while they happen on this basis: A patient faints and there's another patient present. And they say to the second patient, "Help me lift this person up," and the second patient does so and is sane after that! Ha-ha, you're not dealing with something light and tiny here; you're dealing with something that's very powerful.

What can a person help? What can he still help in life? That's not the highest level of establishment, but it's an interesting one. And a person, when he believes he can no longer help anything in life, believes he might as well be dead. You can convince him then that he might as well be dead because he can't help anything. He can no longer assist anything in the world.

He's as healthy as he can assist things in the world. So don't for a moment think that there isn't some end to all this, because here in the field of sanity and insanity, you're not just working for nothing, you're not working unappreciatedly. You sometimes sit down and feel very sad about the fact that you are, but you're not; you appreciate you. And quite in addition to that, many people do. Many, many people do. And it's only by convincing somebody he can't help that you ruin somebody.

Let's take a little kid. There's little Johnny and he runs his legs off. Every day he runs his legs off for his family. He just works for his mother until you just know that he just couldn't … And his mother is kind of mean to him. And everybody is sort of… And you say, "That kid is a setup. That's the one that will fold up."

Because here's little Oscar over here - Oswald - and you could look at this child and he's got everything and he doesn't have to do anything, and he's strictly a fruitcake.

Well now, this doesn't follow. Here's the child, everybody is mean to him and he works all the time, and he's sane and happy and cheerful, And here's this other child over here who nothing - he doesn't have to do anything and everybody is good to him and they give him everything, and he's crazy.

Why? The difference between the two children is the ability to help: One is permitted to help and the other one is not permitted to help. And the one who's not permitted to assist knows he's no good; he just knows that. Why? Nobody will let him help, so of course he can't be any good.

Now, you want to know why people drive these omnibuses out here and why people - why people sit at government desks and why people teach school and all sorts of things?

[At this point there is a gap in the original recording.]

Continuing this second lecture. The idea of assistance to others goes hand in glove with the idea of value of self; one is as valuable as he can assist.

And because people throughout life evidently feel there's a big scarcity of things they can help, they will prevent others from helping. You can talk all you want to about, "Let's all get in there together and help," but the point is that when you go along this line too much, you get - people will try to cut other people out. Somebody will come up to you and say, "You really aren't helping your class, but I can."

You know, they say this in various ways. They say, "Little Johnny that you thought was getting along so well - you know, you thought he was getting along so well. Well, he died yesterday."

They're just trying to convince you that you can't help people that way, and that's sort of - they kind of figure out dully that that permits them to. All right.

So, what's our … You just work on that operational level - we find out that the mind is running along in terms of energy in most cases. It thinks it's thinking with energy. It doesn't think with energy, but it thinks it's thinking with energy. Therefore, only because it thinks it's thinking with energy, not because it does, it believes that it is a sort of a computing machine. Now, basically, as you sort out somebody's mind, you'll find this to be the case.

The mind is there to pose and resolve problems relating to survival. It thinks it solves these things with energy, so it works very mechanistically, And this isn't just from my viewpoint. I mean, this happens to be true.

The mechanistic viewpoint of the calculating machine is not one which can be broadly used in terms of the human mind, because a calculating machine is neither very able nor very accurate. It's accurate within the realms of a mind directing it to be accurate, but it can't protect itself against bad data. So, therefore, it's not a very good computer.

Anybody can go up to the thing and say - instead of two million, it can write two-hundred million on the calculating-machine tape and punch it in, and it'll go on stupidly computing on two-hundred million instead of two million, and all of its answers will be wrong.

So, bad data, now, is very aberrative; bad information is very aberrative. The evaluation, then, of information is quite important. And one is as able to think as he can evaluate, not as he can memorize, Don't ever lose sight of that. He is as able to think as he can evaluate; he is not as able to think as he can memorize.

You notice the interesting child who can come in and recite the World Almanac from cover to cover, and yet who just can't seem to take care of any of the most primitive functions. You'd say, "Strange." Well, you're sort of talking to a recording tape, and it all goes in and it all comes out and so on. It's very interesting, but this child is not evaluating.

Some other child is apparently incapable, you'd think sometimes, of absorbing information, and all he does is evaluate information, and he doesn't record worth a nickel. And he's made the evaluation already. He's very hard on you sometimes as an instructor. You will make an evaluation… You instructors, you haven't got anything to teach him. And if he's made that evaluation at the beginning of his course or his school or his training, it's going to take you a long time to get anything into his head.

Now, he could evaluate and he wouldn't remember, and the other child can remember but can't evaluate. And those would be the two extremes of human aberration you had to deal with in terms of education, in terms of righting things.

Now, let's take this idea of the adding machine again. Let's look at aberration in terms of an adding machine. And let's take an adding machine such as they had at Harvard and aberrate it. Well, this adding machine they had at Harvard - very interesting machine. Or maybe it was Yale or Princeton or someplace or Oxford, I don't know. It was one of these lesser-known schools. Anyway, they had this drop of solder - aberrated the machine.

And this is what happened. One day they went in and they put a problem on this machine. And it was the kind of machine that calculated the square root of the length of time it took for a photon to travel a circumnavigation of the orbit exiture or something, you know - one of these things with lots of factors and summations and all that sort of thing, and the machine turned out the wrong answer. So they put the machine - put it on again, and the machine turned out the wrong answer.

So somebody put an elementary problem on the machine and he merely says ten times ten, and he got a hundred. And he says ten divided by ten, he got a hundred; five hundred times ten, and he got twenty-five thousand. (Those of you that aren't up on arithmetic, that should be five thousand.)

So then he put on two times five and got fifty. You know, this machine would be considered aberrated after a while, And he went on with this for quite a while, and then it finally turned out that the number five on the machine had a drop of solder shorted out on it, so that every problem had the - was factored - multiplied rather, by five. Every problem you put into the machine got multiplied by five. And every time it went across anything connected with five, it multiplied by another five. Little, tiny short circuit in the electronic circuits of a huge, big, giant electronic brain.

And how did they repair it? Well, they just sawed off that little piece of solder and disconnected it, and after that the machine gave right answers.

Now, let's take little Johnny there that isn't studying, isn't studying at all. How does this analogy fit with him? He's got a held-down five someplace, That machine is aberrated, that is to say, is giving wrong answers, incorrect solutions to existence because of a held-down five. What is this held-down five in the case of little Johnny? Well, it could be a number of very special things. You'd find those in Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. You could call these - infinite number of combinations that could hold down five, but it's a cinch it's "hold-down five."

Let's say it's something simple like he made a postulate or he made an evaluation when he first came to school that he would never learn anything in that school. And he's convinced of this because he convinced himself of this. And everything that goes through that you're - expect him to learn is tearing right across the lines and his "I won't ever learn anything in school."

"Columbus discovered America in 1492. I won't ever learn anything in this school," And you'll find all of the information you are trying to pour into his head over here in a big bin that says, "I won't learn anything in this school." It's there, but it's over there in the bin. Now, it's fascinating that one day you suddenly crowd at him with some processing and knock out that datum, and he remembers everything he learned in the school.

Now, that's - becomes very interesting, The mind works on a series, then, of bins and trunk systems and bullpens, to be technical - that's the technical terminology for electronic brains, by the way - and it has these large compartments. You're dealing with data. Therefore, the storage rather than the origin of data is of interest to you, and the use of data in computation of new answers is of interest to you.

[R&D Note: bullpen: (computers) an area in early electronic computers where material that didn't match up with anything else was held until new material that connected with it and made a complete solution was fed in. Used figuratively in this lecture.]

Well, therefore, if you start dealing with a machine which has consistently held-down data, every time you throw a datum into his head, he says, "My mother is sick."

Did you ever have a little kid who is having home trouble, family trouble at home, or a man at work, he's having trouble at home - and somebody walk - and you say, "Two times two equals four," On any kind of a problem that you - or solution that you'd give him, it would go through his mind like this: "Two times two is four, and my mother is sick at home. What did you say?"

And you say, "Two times two is four."

He's - "When did you say that?"

"Well, I just said it?"

"What did you just say?"

"Two times two is four,"

It registered "Two times two is four, my mother is sick."

Now, you could ask him, "What is two times two?"

And he would say, "Two times two" - he'd be perfectly good; span of attention is way off, you see - "Two times two equals my mother is sick at home," and "Two times two equals my wife is angry with me."

Yeah, that's right; that's how he's thinking, It's flagrant. If you want to plumb into this and to ask the questions which will spring it into view, you'll be shocked at what some people are thinking in offices. (audience laughter) Mail goes through their hands.

Of course, it isn't so bad on the other level. When they've had a good time, they can work. That's because the good time runs out all their worries. They're not liable to sit there, oddly enough, and say, "Here's a nice letter from James and Company with a thousand - a thousand new reams of paper has been ordered, and that's just fine. And let's see, now what do I have to do? My, did I have a good time last night. That's what I have to do now. Now, I had to have a good time last night. Yeah, that's good."

No, they don't squirrel like that. Working with a different sort of a thing when you work with a worry or a problem or trouble because you're working with pain. Pleasure runs itself out. Pleasure is the enemy of pain. Pain sticks. And every time you have this abstraction, you get held-down data.

Now, there might be some terrific sort of a data. There might be some little kid who is sitting there held in his bike accident two months ago, and he's been stupid in class ever since. And his grades have been kind of poor, and you haven't been able to do anything for him and get anything across to him.

You don't know where he is? You think he just isn't paying attention. Well, the thing to do, of course, is to punish him, to send him home and give a note to his parents and sspprruuhh.

No, he's - happens to be lying on the pavement three blocks from his house, and he's been lying there ever since he fell there three months ago.

Well, you know he isn't lying there - he was taken inside and given a lot of sympathy and so on. And he's been sitting here in class and so forth. You know it, but does he know it? Well, that's a good thing to check up on, does he know he's …

Because you're interested in what he knows about himself, not what you know about him. You'll know a great deal more about him from an outside viewpoint than he'll probably ever know, so we better know what he knows about himself. And we're liable to find him now stuck on the pavement. All right.

These are held-down fives. Just think of that as an analogy It's a crude one, it's relatively workable, it's a fast explanation. What is it, then, that keeps a child from paying attention, keeps an adult from being interested in life, keeps somebody in an insane asylum there? It's a problem of the held-down five. There's a datum which is held down in the computer.

Now, if you want to be very brilliant, you can go through this computer from one end to the other and you can look it over very carefully and you can find - this, by the way, in the first book was known as shooting circuits - you could find the datum which was coloring all other data and just go boom and shoot it out of the bank. You actually could do this with marked changes in personality. What art, what skill, Oh, oh!

Now, later techniques, you could do it by shooting out an incident in which he was stuck. And with later techniques you could put him into a condition whereby he wouldn't get stuck that easily, and he would become unstuck somewhat from where he was. And by later techniques, you could do even more remarkable things with him.

And then we wind up with a very interesting battery of techniques: one, we know what the held-down particle is that is the held-down five. We know what it is. It isn't seven other particles, it happens to be just one. And it's the one that you wouldn't quite suspect, but you know it after you've run into it. And what is this particle? And why does it hold down five? We'll talk about that later.

But you want a technique that will just, no matter how long it takes, unsolder those fives. That's all you want. If you've got that, you've unsoldered the five and then you're in good shape, and that is the goal of processing.

A person with all of his fives unsoldered would be known as a Definition Clear. Why? That's an adding-machine term; that's a electronic-brain term. You clear a machine when you take out all of its former computations off the machine.

In other words, a fellow can think straight if he could think without these colored evaluations before. He can evaluate present time in terms of itself, not so much in terms of its past.

Clear is a very relative state. Don't become confused by it. It is not an absolute state. It merely means he's in pretty good shape and he'll stay that way. That's all it means. There are various kinds of Clears and they mean things very specific.

Well, a preclear, then, is somebody who still has a held-down five but is in the process of getting rid of it. That means a person who is undergoing processing either in groups or individuals, but it's most likely to apply to the individual rather than to the group.

The auditor, the auditor is one who listens and computes, and that's what auditing means: to listen and compute. Well, we still use the term auditor, but he's not doing very much listening in group auditing. And the truth be told, today's technique, he does dam little listening. He just sits there and rolls the stuff out.

Well, every once in a while he's called on to listen and compute, and it's a bad auditor who doesn't listen and doesn't compute when he has to. There's many a case will come to some other auditor for patch-up, and they can't figure out why this other auditor didn't do it. Well, the guy didn't listen; somewhere he didn't listen. He wasn't willing to receive some information of one sort or another. That's the most usual fault in auditing.

Now, we have what you could call a Book Auditor, That is an untrained auditor who has gotten his information out of publications. Unheralded and unsung, the Book Auditor has been carrying along for a long time and has been accomplishing very remarkable things. He can accomplish and he does accomplish them.

I have seen Book Auditors as good as professionals and I've seen Book Auditors that you, with even a poor Level of judgment on the subject, would have shot! In other words, this meant merely somebody who had these techniques from reading only and without any contact immediately with professional training of any kind. It doesn't mean that a man is bad or good, under that circumstances. A man is as good as he is.

And there are people who are Book Auditors who are practicing outright hypnotism. There are people who are Book Auditors that are right up there with professional auditors. The Last, by the way, is very rare. As a matter of fact, it is so rare that I only know of it happening once in the US. Odd, but true.

Now, there's self-processing, and self-processing would be just reading over lists, such as those contained in Handbook for Preclears, which is now outmoded as a process; it's not outmoded as data. And the most modern available list is the Self Analysis in Dianetics. And that disc - that list and those lists are very, very useful to you because they're the lists you use. And these are addressed toward Creative Processing, and those lists are just a part of Creative Processing.

And Group Processing would be the application of read lists to the group in such a way as to permit the maximum number of members of the group to receive benefit. Those are the various types of processes by list here.

Now, the kinds of processing - these are the people who process and their goals - and the kinds of processing, I've already covered earlier. And I list them here.

There's just a complete knowledge of the subject all the way across the boards, of anything that's been written or lectured or anything that's been learned from other professionals who practice and so forth. That would be just anything.

There isn't a process anywhere along the line there in this group of materials that doesn't have degree of workability, by the way. It's which one is more workable than another. And this again is evaluation. There are some of the old ones which are - which an auditor will still use. I was using the other day - not the other day. I was using - not too long ago, I was using a Book One technique. The preclear wouldn't, just wouldn't go for anything else, he just wouldn't buy anything else. It was the easiest one to process him with, so I just simply reached back into 1949 really, and picked up this old, moldy, moth-eaten technique and swung him into present time with it and shook him on the hand - by the hand and kissed him goodbye.

Now, Standard Operating Procedure Number 5 is the subject of the Professional Course to a large degree - that and many other things. Then there's, as I say, Self Analysis; there's Creative Processing in general as a more advanced level; and then Group Processing - there's some slight difference between the way you process adults and the way you process children, All right.

I hope you have, now, a broad and vast understanding of human aberration. And so we'll close up the subject there and take a break.