E-METER TIPS
A lecture given on 29 November 1961

Well, here we are. What's the date?
Audience: 29th.
Twenty-ninth of November, AD 11.
Year drawing to a close, drawing to a close.
Well, the process of going Clear is a new technical term. It has to do with after you find the terminal and you are feeling fine and so forth, then you go the rest of the way and that is a process known as being pushed through the knothole. And, frankly, it's pretty ghastly, pretty ghastly.
Well, we're really not going to talk about that tonight. I'm going to talk about E-Meters. Your particular tool of the trade. This is not a comprehensive or broad review of the E-Meter. This is a bits and pieces, "How can you be that stupid?" sort of lecture, you see.
I have just learned why there aren't any Clears over in America. I received a cable and you know the old American meter that was—the old blue meter that was made prior to 58—that's all right. But they haven't been since. They haven't been since. None of them give an instant read. Meters made in 59, 60 and 61, not under my supervision, give a sporadically noninstant read. They've got a delaying, damping action in them that sometimes operates to do weird things. That's very interesting, isn't it? So sometimes it happens at once and sometimes it doesn't. But basically what happens is that you don't get an instant read. There's a delay and it's different apparently from meter to meter.
So I think that's all very interesting and that's why I cancelled out that particular type of meter construction. And we're using this Mark IV.
Now, actually I've got lots of Mark IVs coming up the line. So it won't be too bad. They'll be easy to get hold of. They're cheaper than an American meter. But basically the thing will read and that I can guarantee. It will read. And that's all we require of an E-Meter, is that it read. We don't require that it has hot and cold running water. We simply require that it reads.
Now, where you get a lot of squirrel meters around or a lot of oddball meters or a lot of non supervised meters and that sort of thing, you apparently can guarantee nothing This has been quite a shock to me. I just received it by cable. I have now handled it. I was getting a checkup on this. Actually I didn't ask him for a checkup, but he sent me one gratuitously. And it means that America, where we had floods of offball meters and where we had this more modern American meter which wouldn't read—we haven't got any Clear in that area—don't have nobody, see? So that's a weird one. Oddly enough the last Clears, for what it's worth—it may not even be a well-coordinated fact—were made with the original meter which Breeding and Wallace and so on and myself were sweating the midnight oil over and I was keeping Breeding from changing it and Breeding was keeping Wallace from changing it and so forth.
And that was the last batch of meters. Actually we got a stack of those still back in the FCDC—should still have them. Well, those are very reliable E-Meters and apparently everything since that time hasn't been on that same order which is quite interesting.
And in England here, we have, frankly, hardly any standard meters of any kind whatsoever. We got an old potentiometer that somebody got off of a Spitfire and it's connected up to a couple of radial props and it stirs up the pc from behind or something of the sort. And it's sold at a cut price but of course you . . .
Reminds me of a story, you know, of the old pitchman who was selling watches down in New Orleans. And was a perfectly good watch, a beautiful case, beautiful case. And you hold this watch up to your ear and you could hear it tick and it had a marvelous solid gold case and it had hands and everything was fine. And he was just selling these things like hotcakes, you see. But the trouble is the things ran down after a few days because the cricket he put in them died.
So that's kind of the way it is, you know. This Mark IV has this liability. If it is shipped to you by air with its batteries in it, in these new stratospheric jet planes, your baggage goes through a hot-cold cycle. Every time it lands it's hot, you see, because of the various air routes usually, particularly the Commonwealth areas. And then it goes straight back upstairs, you know, and drops to 30, 40 degrees below zero in the baggage compartment because it's not warmed like the passenger cabins. And the batteries burst—which as I've told you before in a lecture are just a liability of that. So, if you're going to ship it in your suitcase, for heaven's sakes take the batteries out of it and put them in your pocket and put them back in when you get at the other end. Nothing else is going to happen to it, just the batteries are going to burst. And it'll be unworkable at the other end, possibly, for that reason—unless somebody put it up against a container of uranium being shipped to the Atomic Energy Commission's advance headquarters in Australia or something, why, you've had it, you see. Of course, you've had it then, too, because at the other end it's radioactive.
But we've now got these things down so that they have a simple battery which is everywhere procurable and it's very easy to put the battery in an E-Meter.
There's a—the newest issue of these Mark IVs are supposed to have a design underneath the little lid. And you lift it open with a . . . If you don't have electronic equipment, why, go to your wife and get her nail file or pick out your own nail file or buy one for a change and unscrew the top plate on the little battery compartment which is right underneath the can compartment. But if you get those batteries in backwards it won't operate. And it's a very complex way the batteries go in. They had to be plus-minus, minus-plus, and I've never been able to do it myself. I always send it back to the factory when I . . .
But I'm trying to get the battery design doing it. So if you have to open up one of these meters to change its battery, why, when you take that wooden plate off of the thing, sketch the pluses and minuses. See, just sketch it, don't touch the batteries, just sketch exactly where they lie in it. Draw a picture and show even where the dial is so that you won't turn the picture upside down and put the batteries in reverse end to. You got the idea?
So draw this little picture and when you put the batteries back in, fold up the piece of paper and shove it in underneath the cover and you'll always have it. And you'll be able to get the thing straight. It's very easy to change batteries in one.
The way you test for batteries in the thing is a switch over here and it says "Test." And if your E-Meter is functioning, your Test brings it right straight over to the pin. See? All you do is turn this thing over to Test and it goes over to the pin. Now when that needle on Test—you turn the meter on and you swing its other button over to Test. And when you do that sometime and you find that this needle here is not in this little last test range—you see there are two lines here in the last test range. See those? All right, when it's not inside those your meter won't function. It hasn't got enough juice left in it to drive the pc. Something's got to drive the pc so make sure that that needle is well within the test. And frankly, when it gets to about "T" on Test you ought to be going down to the drugstore and investing four or five sixpences or some vast sum or forty cents or something and buying yourself some new batteries for the thing and throwing them in; because it's not going to read well after that. And when it's completely outside those two bars, well, it just hasn't been operating for some time and that was why you didn't do much for the last pc you were auditing
But you can suddenly look up with a start and wonder what's happened to your E-Meter and in view of the fact that the batteries are changed so seldom—that's one of the difficulties of this Mark IV, you almost never change the batteries in it, you see—that you get out of the habit of testing for it and then you one day swing the thing, "I haven't been having good luck lately. Pcs have been blowing, you know." And you find out when somebody else gets one of your pcs that them rudiments were all out and the pc had many missed withholds. Well, that's about the time that you took this little black button down here to the right of the Sensitivity knob and turned it over to Test. Because probably it'll come up to Set. And the battery—the thing will appear to be operating, you know, but it just doesn't operate. There just isn't enough juice in it.
Now, there's no reason to put a red light on it to show that it's always charged up, because it would consume more juice than the whole meter. So there is no way to put an additional indicator on it except this test switch.
Now when you carry this meter around, put it over here on Transit. And actually at the end of session, if you really want to take care of your meter, turn your meter off and turn your Set over to Transit. In other words, vertical knob. In other words, you have to do those two actions to turn an E-Meter off. Mainly just turn it off and then turn it over to Transit. And that keeps your meter from being jumped up and the needle banging around and so forth, that's all that does. But it's easier on the meter doing that. Actually you should do it at the end of session even carrying a meter downstairs; E-Meter will last longer.
All right. Now, another tip on this meter is setting the meter to exact Clear read. Now, this one, quite by accident, since you saw me fiddle with the knob a moment ago, is sitting here very nicely at Set. You turn this to number 2 sensitivity dead-on and you turn it to number 2.0 on the tone arm dead-on, exact. And then, you take this little knob down here at the bottom and this thing is called the Trim knob and you bring the needle to Set. And you bring that needle right to Set. And that is with the cans unplugged. You actually can have the pc on the cans and set up your meter. But in order to do that you have to pop out this meter connector just halfway. It can still remain in the socket.
In other words, if you want to test this thing suddenly, all you have to do—you're sitting there, the pc is on the cans.
Don't ever fool around with the meter or set it up after you've got a session started, by the way. Just leave it alone! Thing busts, why, sit there interestedly and finish the session. You really need the data of the meter to finish the session—which you normally do—then just run end rudiments paying close attention to a busted meter and end the session. And during the break get another E-Meter, borrow or something, or bang it against the radiator or something and make it work. But don't go fooling with a meter. So a can leads breaks during a session. Well, that's just rough. Just leave the pc sitting there holding a broken can. Never even make a gesture toward repairing it, fixing it up, nothing. Because it is a serious error when a pc particularly is running a process or he's deeply interiorized—he's very much in-session—all of a sudden the auditor's interest is on the meter. And the second the auditor's interest is visibly on the meter, the pc knows that the auditor's interest is not on him; the auditor's attention is no longer helping the pc plow through his bank and it yanks the pc straight out of session.
I don't care how the pc said he didn't "mind" it. Look at your tone arm reads, if you could. Or fooling around with a busted meter, suddenly shaking it, you know, and saying, "Oh well, what the hell is so-on-and-so-on," you've had it. Your pc is—you've just laid in a nice juicy interruption of session. It can be far more important than you realize. So when your meter busts, your cans break, anything of this sort of thing happens, if you can carry on the rest of the session without an E-Meter, why, just do so, come to a normal conclusion of the thing, run your end rudiments with your eye on the pc and —you know, keep an eye on him, glance at your meter if you want to, don't make a fake out of yourself. And bring your session to a close. If you can do anything about the meter, why, do it during the break, see? Don't monkey with the meter during session ever. That is just a hallmark of a nervous auditor who just doesn't know his business, because smack, the pc's attention comes off, blang, the bank goes in on the pc, boom! And it's a cruel- thing to do.
Now, when you're testing for Set, then, the pc could have been given the cans. But you couldn't possibly have started the session yet. Well, the least commotion you can make, if you notice the jack that goes into the side of Mark IV, here, is quite long. Well, all you have to do is pull the jack out just to that degree that it isn't connecting. You see? That's very short in, see? Just—it's just not connecting. There's only maybe a half an inch of jack shaft showing. And that is plenty in order to set your Trim knob. In other words, you just pull that out till you feel it unsnap. That's all you have to do. And bring it over here to 2.0, and then bring your Trim knob down here and snap that jack in and it's functioning right this minute. Got the idea? So to test, you just feel that thing unsnap. Don't take it out just when you test the thing Just feel it unsnap. And now you can set the thing to Set. Now snap it back in. It's a very fast action that you can take there. It doesn't take very long
Now, these Mark IVs are the first meter that doesn't have drift. This is the first meter that doesn't have drift. The Mark III, the Mark I in the progress of a session would go off as many as four or five dial marks. It would drift. Those Mark Is would drift that far off. This isn't important of course, unless you're testing for Clear. But you've got to have some kind of idea of it. If you're auditing somebody who's getting blowdowns and that sort of thing, you've got to have some idea of what that thing is, accurately, session by session. Otherwise, your tone arm reads are all different. Session by session your tone arm reads are different. But in the course of an hour or two, the 1957 American meter by warming up and—there is some slight warmth that goes into the transistors in spite of this. But the American meter, of course, burns much more juice than this Mark IV, enormously. This thing will run for a year or so without any battery shift and that other one, actually, if it's used—if you happen to leave it on accidentally overnight, why you've probably had it.
Anyway, to get back to what I was talking about—when you set this thing up, it will stay that way. Because the Mark IV is the first meter which has got a counterbalance. Now there's a way to set this up so that it will never drift. But this is sort of taking a micrometer caliper, you know, to measuring a lady's dress. You just don't need that—quite that much accuracy. There are two separate components which set up the trim on this. It's a very tricky little arrangement on the thing. And I knocked out the first one. I would not okay the first arrangement. It would have driven you mad, because you turned on one knob and set it and then waited for a minute and then trimmed it with another knob. And it had two trim knobs. Well, that for sure never, never would have drifted. It was there with a clank. But it's just like measuring a lady's dress with a micrometer caliper. It's just too much precision.
This one has solved that situation by putting both of these components into the same trim knob. In the first few seconds that your meter is on, you're going to get drift because your current is adjusting through the transistors. That's just the first, very short period that the meter is on you will sometimes see a bit of drift. You'll see it expressed by the tone arm. It has to be shifted. You put the pc on the cans—are ice-cold and it's really the pc gets the cans warm, more than it is the meter. But the moment that these aluminium cans adjust to his hand temperature and the transistors got that first surge of juice through them, the Set then remains.
Now, even up to the Mark III you had a condition occasionally where the meter audited itself. And it would develop a rock slam all by its lonesome, without any slightest assistance from pc, auditor or anybody else—which I think was pretty smart. But it was anticipating things a little bit and so on.
Well now, what that's all about is dust in the pot. Now, these terms are not my terms. They are terms from that unlikely race called electronics men. And this unlikely crew managed to name things F2-4Rs. If you ever have any complaints about Scientologese and its nomenclature and so forth, get into electronics sometime. That's really a ball. Listen to a couple of hams burning up vast amounts of electricity talking to each other from Canada to Panama. And one may be talking with an English accent, and one may be talking with a Spanish accent, but inevitably it will be, "Well, I've fixed this rig with an F4R now and it condenses far more better, but there's a leak going through the six-seven." I listen to it by the hour because it's sort of—there's a wonderful fascination to listening to total gobbledygook.
There's no end of these terms. I thought, well, after you've been a ham for a while, you see, why, you could run off maybe fifty, sixty of these terms, you know. And you just had it cold and you could lean casually up against the set and say, "Well, ya know, I've just transferred the F4R and the six-seven is operating very smoothly." I thought you could do that. But holy cats, there's six-sixes, six-eights, and six-nine-and-a-halves, but there is no six-nine. You know, I mean it's . . .
They sure have a good time. I mean, you can turn them on here if you can get them on the air on your portable radio. And you can listen to them sawin' away about their six-sevens and F4Rs. It's all they ever talk about. The whole area could be burning down, in total flood, and thousands of people dying, you see, for lack of communication, and they'd sit there and say, well, their six-sevens did not adjust now well with their F4Rs. It's marvelous.
I've had a battle, by the way, in progress with an electronics operator on my end, as my talker to combat craft that were in action. And all they could ever talk about was, "I am hearing you, Sail One. How—how am I coming through? Have you adjusted your six-seven?" and so forth.
And I'm trying to tell him, "Listen, are you talking to that guy at all?"
"Well, my 4R is at . . ."
"Listen. Are you talking to him at all? Can you hear him at all?"
"Oh, oh, yeah, yeah. Well, not very good. We haven't got it tuned in."
"Can you hear him at all? Can he hear you?"
"Oh, well, yes, yes."
"Well, goddamn it! Tell him 'right standard rudder' and get out of there! He's about to be sunk!"
"Oh, well, okay. Well now, my six-sevens are.. ." Poor coxswain on the other craft. He doesn't even know anybody's trying to get in touch with him.
Now, I've had a time with this sort of thing. Undoubtedly developed overts in one lifetime or another on this subject.
So anyway, I always consider that a bit out of my province. I've had enough overts on it so I've kind of backed out of it if I was ever in it.
But anyhow, the thing is called a pot which sits underneath this tone arm. And this is a pot. And they have carbon pots and wirewound pots. And carbon pots wear out. And God help you if you've got some squirrel meter with a carbon pot. It's very hard to get wirewound pots. They have to be specially made, and they're very specially made for these Mark IVs. They're wirewound so that the component parts of the thing don't wear and loosen. On earlier American meters, as I understand it—and anybody should forgive my ignorance in this particular line, because I just designed the thing, I didn't make it. I didn't really design it either. I just made sure that whoever designed it followed his first ideas. You know, that sort of thing, and then made sure that he redesigned it so that it worked too. I did the sjambok work on it.
Anyway, the pot here can—on a carbon pot, which you get on a cheap meter—is wearable. It wears. Then dust gets in it. And one little, tiny particle of dust in that pot, which is the pivot and set capacity here on this sunk-in area—one little particle of dust in there, and it won't connect straight. It has interference in its own lines so you busily set it up here and you get wobble, wobble, wobble, wobble, wobble, wobble, wobble on your meter. See, you got interference into the pot. Furthermore, the dust gets into it—as I understand it—because of the wear. If they're ordinary carbon and nothing but carbon, the wear factor is great enough to permit dust to get into them. And if they're wirewound you don't get that much wear and you don't get this same dust interference. In other words, that "audits itself," apparently comes out of this pot. 
Now, there is a way to take an old meter and stop it from auditing itself. You take some lighter fluid and squirt it down here on the pivot, underneath this tone arm, and work the tone arm rapidly. But sometimes in session if it started auditing itself—one of the old-type meters—if you simply shiver the tone arm this way, it'll stop rock slamming And sometimes won't. But some lighter fluid squirted in there on that sudden rock slam—there it is. Now the way . . . would fix it up.
But the way to find out if a meter is working is not to leave it hooked in. Don't leave the meter hooked in and so forth, on the leads. If you want to find out what's happening with the meter—if it's the meter's fault—just snap that lead out.
I'm not recommending you do this while you're auditing a pc. This is during the break. You just snap that—just unsnap that thing and then set the thing over here to Set. And if it's doing something weird and if the meter itself is off and is wrong, why, of course the pc isn't connected to it now and if it goes on rock slamming or goes on doing something peculiar it must be the meter because there is nobody else on it. It's a gremlin in it that's being audited. So that's your first action if you want to find out if your meter's auditing itself or something of that sort or if it was the pc. Just disconnect this thing over here. Just disconnect it. Disconnect it and you then have your pc off of it and if the meter is doing something, why, there it is.
Now, the first thing you want to know about an E-Meter and this is a serious—this is actually such a simple piece of stupidity that you wouldn't think anybody could ever do it. But I've done it, and for sure you can do it. Every once in a while you will—because the more reliable a meter gets, the less attention you pay to the actual meter. And every once in a while you pick up a meter and you put the pc on it and you won't realize that you're auditing the pc on a broken meter and just nothing happens and the last thing you look at is the meter because it doesn't happen very often, you see. So you want to know first and foremost, at the beginning of every session, if the pc is reading on the meter. Do you have the pc hooked to the meter? That's what you want to know. And that's about the end of the test.
See, is your meter sitting there quietly with no pc on it? Well, you learn that when you put the Trim knob to Set. Until you set it up here with sensitivity 2, tone arm 2.0, bring it over here to Set with the Trim knob—bang, bang, bang One, two, three, see? And of course if you had your Transit in the proper place, you turn your Transit to Set, click the meter on, on the Sensitivity knob, put it to 2, put the other one to 2.0 and then trimmed it over here to Set. All right.
Now you can understand that's not hooked into the pc. See, you haven't got that lead snapped in. So if the meter is dancing or the meter is wildly swinging or you're getting a marked rise, or something else is going on on the meter, well, it must be in the meter because the pc isn't hooked to it. See, that's your first adjudication. So if that's just part of your drill, why, one, you find out the meter's all right. It is sitting there quietly. If you wanted to make doubly sure—except it isn't worth testing except very infrequently— you just swing it over here to Test. Bang! and it goes way up.
By the way, you know, I made a mistake in the original drill-out on this when I was testing this. I gave the manufacturers of this thing—they've been in conference after conference—they consider me a very trying fellow and so on. And then one day I got one of them on the meter and I showed him reactions on the meter and I audited a black area he was stuck in and moved him with a tremendous sensation of speed. That is to say he had this fantastic sensations and they've been very respectful of the meter ever since—that they do a good job now. But they consider I'm pretty picky, picky, petty. I want leads that don't come off the cans all the time and other petty things, you know—hardly worth it. 	The last wire they offered me for testing before we went into the present production run, by the way, smelled just like a hospital. You could smell it all over the room. It was some new kind of plastic. Wouldn't that have been lovely to audit anybody with and so on. You no more than break out your E-Meter, he goes into the engram of the operation. I don't know where they got that plastic wire. I made them knock it off. They did so, but it was very petty of me. Who'd mind an odor like that?
Anyway, they're good fellows. They got this thing into a state of steadiness and somnolence and all of that sort of thing. And I tested it out and then accidentally left the meter on, because it was just a test meter and I wasn't doing anything with it. Didn't mean to really test it, and left it on for a day or two or three, and all of a sudden its—well, I'll show you what it is. Can't make this one do it. They fouled me up. I can't make this one do it. No, they—this one's too live. The original model of a Mark I—they gave it to me—and after the thing was over here at Set, you could turn the Trim knob and bring it down off the Test area. If your Trim knob was totally out, in other words, the meter would test as though its batteries were flat. Got the idea? You could shift the Trim knob so that you'd get a zero battery charge. You had no battery in it. Obviously, the batteries were run down. So I said, "What the devil! How much stuff is this thing consuming?" You know, and big ruckus, you know, about it. Peter handling the correspondence on it, you know, and calling up on the phone calls. And back and forth, and so forth.
"Meter is wearing out," you know. "Batteries wear out in this thing in twenty-four hours. It's no good—pile of junk, you know, that's why. We got to cut down its battery consumption." Well sometimes, of course, you'd turn it on and it would show full charge; but then because you could vary the Set position with the Trim knob, of course, your Test over here could be varied, too. And I notice now on the Mark IV, they've disconnected it so we can't make that mistake.
Anyhow, so they left one on for weeks and weeks and weeks and they couldn't get it to run down. So we were having a terrible argument. I was sure the thing was running down and they were sure that the thing was lasting for weeks. And then we finally found out what was going on: The meter was being set up in a certain fashion that its Trim knob could vary its Test over here.
Wonder if there's any way under the sun I can make that do that now. By George, you know? Ha! Pretty smart fellows. They fixed that up so it wouldn't do it. They said, "Well, if the old man can do it we better do something about that." And they did, by golly! It won't make that mistake.
Anyway, just to get on with this, you'd snap it over here onto Test, see if it landed, for a full battery charge. See, make sure your batteries were charged by the needle going on over and being in the proper area. Bring it back over here to Set, adjust that Sensitivity knob to 2, adjust the other one to 2.0, bring your Set up here on your Trim knob to Set, and then—that's halfway out theoretically—snap it in and then tell the pc to squeeze the cans. He thinks that's for him. That isn't. It's for you. You want to see how much he's dropping, you set him with a third-of-a-dial drop. Well, if this meter is 
out of operation and it isn't connected to the pc, you're not going to get any needle behaviour when he squeezes the cans and you'll never make the horrible error of running a pc on a dead meter. See, you'd never make that mistake. It isn't likely to happen with these new meters, but it sure was likely to happen with the old ones and it could happen again.
Now, there you are cheerfully sitting there being an auditor left and right and center and somehow or another the pc is—seems to be over here around—he seems to be—he uh—hmmmm . . . Huh-huh. Where is he at? Or the pc gets no reaction and no tone arm action so the process must be flat. Process must be flat. I mean, there it is. See, that could be disconnected. Just look-a-here. But supposing you just sat there and you audited something on this order. And you just went on auditing You just went on auditing. You just went on auditing You just went on auditing Yeah, I know the can isn't plugged in.
Female voice: What if you've got your jack partially plugged in?
Well, you see, you'd even get some motion occasionally.
See what you could do. And it wouldn't have anything to do with the price of fish, you know. You'd say, "Well, I don't know. I'd never get that down. Oh, yeah. Actually getting very live." "There we are." You go nuts, you know.
So frankly, if you were going to make a thorough drill that would never get you in any kind of trouble of any kind whatsoever—what you do, you see, is just plug it in. You just take it up to Set here very nicely. True, true, true. Then snap it in and tell your pc, tell your pc to squeeze the cans.
What's the matter with this meter? Hmmm! Meter's off—it isn't reading at 3.0 with me on it. Anyhow, I must have been working hard today.
But anyhow—no, it isn't off. The first action is, is the meter working? And the second action, is it working on the pc? And if you keep those two things in order and always keep them in mind, you won't make some silly mistakes occasionally as almost any auditor sooner or later has made. One, is the meter working? Well, of course, that's easily told because you set it up here for Set, 2.0, and so on.
Now, just look at it a moment, don't you see? And say, "Well, I don't know. Is it doing anything peculiar? See, is it racking around? Is it doing anything peculiar?" No. It's just sitting there being a good meter. Furthermore, battery test. If you wanted to do something like that, that would tell you even further that it was charged up. Except I assure you, it's not going to run down but about once a year, if that. You know you can leave this thing on day and night in the box? It burns up just about the same amount of current on that it does off. That's one of the most fantastic things. I wouldn't have believed it. I wouldn't advise you doing this because it—cans might be shorted or something out, you know? If you did this, I'm sure it would burn more current.
Supposing we had this, see? That's great. Now, you got your cans together, that's a dead short. Well, of course, that's going to consume more current. But with your cans apart, as far as it goes, with the cans apart and your lead unplugged, the thing will just sit there. Actually, with the cans connected to that degree, the thing will just sit there endlessly. It won't burn any more current on than off, which is a remarkable fact. Then you'd make sure your meter was okay, and then you turn it over to the pc here. You put the pc on the cans and you'd say to the pc—it's off the same way—and you say, "Squeeze the cans," see? And all right, to the degree that he squeezes the cans—you got the idea, see—to the degree that he squeezes the cans coordinates with the meter. In other words, you see the meter act when he squeezes the cans. You know, you see him squeeze the cans and you see the meter act. Well now, you are absolutely certain that the meter is reading the pc. And that's for your own assurance. Now you say, "Fine," see? Do something like adjust the pc's chair and get the rudiments in. But that is the end of your meter worry. Now, you don't worry about that meter from there on. And if the meter suddenly does something weird, goes utterly flat, one of two things can be wrong The meter can read at 7.0, between 6.0 and 1.0; 7.0 is located between 6.0 and 1.0. Because of the construction of the meter itself, it won't go to 7.0.
Actually, a person can read at a Clear read of about 2.0 and be a totally dead thetan—get your E-Meter Essentials—and when the case starts to improve, he improves by going down to 1.5, 1.0, 7.0, 6.5 and you occasionally, in running people, will have a meter which has to be caught between 1.0 and 6.0 and 1.0 and 6.0 and all of a sudden the pc isn't on it anyplace and you think the meter's busted. It'd be very rare, probably won't stay there more than half a session or something like that—blah-da-de-bleh-zzh—where is he? In order to keep the meter at all you were probably going like this already, see? And then all of a sudden, uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh, pc cannot be found on the meter. The pc is at 7.0. He might stay there for a while. He might stay there only for a few minutes. He might stay there for a while, but it's apparently a very rare position. It's very difficult to maintain. That much density is very hard to master. And it's almost an intolerable position, so he won't be there very long.
I think it's happened on this course once, hasn't it, Suzie?
Female voice: Yes.
Yes, and an auditor was sitting there going batty. Who was that? Somebody—they were sitting—she was sitting there going mad because she thought her meter was out. You see, that's one chance in years of auditing it happens, because it's a very hard position to maintain. I don't know how— people can evidently maintain a 1.5 on the sensitivity—on a tone arm. They can maintain 1.5 and just sit there. They can get to 1.2 and that's all right and get down here to 1.0 or a little bit below, and it becomes very unstable. They become unstable. That is to say there's too much density. They can't tolerate it, and their next stopping ground is about 6.0. But they can, very, very rarely get hung up on 7.0. You'll think your meter isn't operating.
If you want to check your meter, just check it as a meter. Unsnap your jack over here and is your meter operating? See? Meter's operating And all of sudden, you put him on, you won't be able to get him on the dial with the tone arm, see? But he shouldn't stay there very long. It'll happen to you very rarely.
If your meter's gone out of operation, you're usually aware of it from other sources and causes. The thing is still on in some fashion and so on and just isn't operating. But the chances of the meter going out in the middle of a session are quite rare. The meter is usually knocked out, not by sessioning. A meter is knocked out by being dropped, sat on and used to eat ice cream with. And somebody pours a quart of wine into the thing because they haven't got a cup, or to oil up the works during a drunken New Year's Eve party, or something. Of course you'd have to run it as an overt afterwards.
You've got a bad situation with the meter normally when it's out of use. And the meter is usually in far more danger out of use than it is in use.
Very seldom does a meter get beaten up very badly in a session. But just casually you put your meter back with your baggage in the back end of a car. You don't know what that meter's doing during that trip. That meter might be shifting away from the suitcase and it might be going up against the spare tire and maybe it's sort of hitting the edge of the spare tire and bouncing onto the rim and off, you know, during the whole trip. And you get at the other end, your meter isn't operating Well, you'll catch that before the session begins.
The other thing is, is they don't half break. A meter never half breaks. It either—it's a kind of a yea or nay, it works or it doesn't work. Well, there's no reason to hold your head in your hands over whether—is the meter working? And don't develop any big anxiety because I think I've only run one session in my life where a meter started doing something weird and that was with an old American meter with a carbon pot and about the middle of the session the pc started to rock slam and rock slammed continuously no matter what I did and I finally got smart enough to realize there was something wrong with the meter, turned the meter off and finished the session. And that was when I first learned about lighter fluid. And that fixed up the dust in the thing and it operated all right afterwards.
Now, in other repairs—in other repair factors or detection factors on a meter, you've got this, this to consider. Once in a blue moon you will see any meter drift. It starts drifting Now, all of the old meters drift, and you just can't do a thing about it. In other words, with the cans unplugged here, and with the thing on Set properly, you'll see that needle start to depart in a reverse rise. It'll start to go away from Set toward Fall. It's unplugged, see, and you haven't got anything plugged in and it'll just start going in the direction of Fall. It looks something like this. Oh, much slower than this. And it's very even. It just starts drifting up very evenly in the direction of fall, the word fall there. Just evenly drifting And it'll just go on drifting. It's all unplugged and so forth. That's because its transistors and so forth aren't well equalized and it won't settle itself down. Maybe it stops it after a couple of minutes, at which time that's all right. In other words, the old meters—the old Mark Is, Mark IIs, Mark IIIs and the old American meter and Lord knows what the last three years worth of meters—American meters—do or don't do. But here is—this thing will always drift.
You turn them on, the cans are not plugged in, the jack isn't in and it'll drift. Well, don't worry about it. Don't worry about it because that's just normal to the meter and it's going to drift for two, three, five minutes. And if you want to do a Clear checkout you've got to reset them, and if they haven't got any reset on the thing, well, the best thing to do is to get a 5,000 ohm and a 12,500-ohm resistor and plug it across the cans and find out how much your meter is off and re-mark it with a piece of sticky plaster. That's all you can do. You can find out what is the resistance across the two cans—12,500 ohms, you just plug it. Plug a resistor across and then set the tone arm here exactly where it's supposed to go and then 5,000 ohms across the two cans and set the tone arm where it's supposed to go. Mark it in those two positions and it will give you the Clear read for that particular meter. You can get these resistors. They look like a little piece of lead or something with a couple of clips on the end of them. You can buy those things. They cost you practically nothing at an electrical shop. They have resistors like mad. They're always having resistors. Electronics men deal mainly with resistors. And so you got lots of them.
Anyway, you can set one of those old meters. But it's going to drift. Don't think that it won't. It's going to drift. That isn't serious. Well, now listen. When one of these British meters starts drifting, when a Mark IV starts drifting, get it to somebody to fix it because there's something wrong with the meter. There's something wrong with the meter. You dropped it or it's got a transistor shaken loose or there's something gone wrong in the meter. You notice as I sit here this thing is not drifting You can turn it off, cool it, that is, it goes totally cold. Turn it back on again, it'll be right there, bang. But my own personal meter, which you can imagine gets some of the roughest of use as far as auditing is concerned, was a Mark III and that was pretty well adjusted. And a few weeks ago I looked at it and it was drifting. I sent it back to the manufacturer and had it fixed up. And well, it's just—it had aged. It had aged. It had lived a long and active life and it is no longer keeping its Set mark. But there was something wrong with it. There was a disconnection inside of it.
Now, how do you get a missed—one of these things repaired? Well frankly, we've had to send them to the Commonwealth areas so often, that we have, pretty well, a full set of specification of what gets wrong with them, because the Commonwealth areas have had to make these up. And Joburg, for instance, has a whole rundown on what gets wrong with this meter. They know far more about what gets wrong with all the old Mark Is, Mark IIs and Mark IIIs than the manufacturers did, because they had to take them down there, and whenever they'd repair them, why one of the instrument people in the immediate area, they gradually assembled this information. They got its circuits from the manufacturer. They checked it out and they finally got so they could snap a meter back into action faster than scat.
But I'm just trying to tell you that repair manuals for an electronics man someplace or another will be in existence and at the moment are obtainable.
Your easiest method of getting one fixed—usually you send it to Central Organization. They've already got somebody all contacted to fix up the E-Meter with a snap. Or HCO WW, we send it to Fowler and Allen with a sneer. There's always a sneer enclosed with the return. You send it to us, we put the sneer in, and send it back to Fowler and Allen, you see? And they can fix them up. They're good boys.
It's taken them quite a while to get this meter so it can be shipped, so it can be dropped, so it can be kicked and booted around and arrive at other ends of things.
One of the major things that happened to the Mark I, II and III, for your own interest, is the little transistors in the things became disconnected in shipment. Actually, extreme heat or cold or something—it had something to do with the solder they were using or something. But actually it popped out. They'd arrive at the other end with a disconnected transistor or a break. But they were not in proper packing at the time. And they now come to you in a very sleek latex or cardboard, pressboard, form fit cover, when they're shipped airmail.
Your first action on receipt of one of these things, of course, is to put the batteries in it and so on or get some batteries and put them in. We, of course—HCO WW will always put batteries in your meter for you free of charge. We couldn't care less. That is the wildest manufacturer's guarantee you ever heard of. Not that we're manufacturers, we're not. But you could always make this kind of a claim. Because you put in maybe one shilling worth of batteries every couple of years. That doesn't seem to be much of an action. We said that early when we were putting in an odd kind of battery. But these new kinds of battery are very stable.
But I'm just giving you some odds and ends of background. Maybe it's interesting to you. Maybe it isn't. But it has been quite a fight trying to get a meter and trying to get it stable and trying to get it so it can be shipped and trying to get it so it can stand up to some of the pcs that look at them. And you need something that's quite close to indestructible. And this meter takes quite a beating. And we've gradually worked those bugs out of the thing
Just in time, too, because apparently we'll have to replace nearly all of the meters in Central Organizations in the United States, here in England and so forth. We've got to get rid of the rest of these meters. The old ones, because they won't clear anybody and they apparently don't operate sufficiently accurately on a Sec Check.
Well, you ask somebody, "Have you ever murdered your wife?" He's just got through with it—the grave dirt is all over his shoes, you see—and it falls by the time the next question is asked, you know? "Have you ever powdered your nose?" That's an exaggeration and a dirty crack, but you can see that your instant read law doesn't apply to them.
Well now, the use of the meter depends mainly on the operator. This particular meter cannot be influenced by looking at it or putting pieces of energy into it. I do have a meter, however, that is right here. I think we have a meter, the beep meter. And I'll have to break that out and show you all about how you can influence a meter, because you really can influence a meter. You can't influence this meter to make it read or to do something peculiar, but don't think you cannot influence another person's body with energy. That is—once you get the knack of doing it.
By the way, a non-Scientologist just can't do it. You can give them all of the understanding they possibly can have; you can make them do it all right. They can follow all the directions, but they just don't have enough horsepower. And it's called a beep meter, and you put it up against somebody's cheek—it detects pain. Chiropractors used it. And you can put it around and where a fellow has a pain—or on his spine or something, you know, old piece of beer bottle's lodged in the spine—I don't know quite what theory they go on. But anyway they have pain, and you put this beep meter over the area of pain, and—if it's tuned right—and the exact area where the pain is—the patient is feeling pain—you put the meter on it, and the meter says, "Beeeeep." And you take it off the area of pain and the meter ceases to beep. Fascinating It's an interesting piece of electronic mumbo-jumbo.
Well, that's fascinating because the first time I started playing around with one of these things—back in Phoenix a long time ago, I took a look at one of these things—and I wondered what made it do that, you know. And I absentmindedly—it was against somebody's cheek—and I just absent-mindedly said, "Well, that ought to be well connected, you see," and it went "Beeeep." 	Well, I went around for several days, you know, thinking I was the only one who wore ostrich plumes, you know? And I showed some of the boys around the place all about this and so on. And they got very interested. And they'd grunt a few times and grit their teeth a little bit, and all of a sudden "Beep." They could turn it on on anybody else. In other words they take this electrode, and Mr. Doakes, having nothing to do with the person who was performing it, puts this little button against his cheek. He could feel a tingle of electricity in it, but the meter's dead null. Now, the operator is over there several feet away and at will can make the meter turn on by connecting this to Mr. Doakes's thetan. Get the idea? And he'd connect this up and make a current go through it. You know, he's several feet away and he can look at him and just go errr, hmm, click, you know?
Actually, what you do is turn any black area you see white. You know, you (quote) "see" the black area or "see" the barrier, (quote) (unquote). And you just see it and then just turn it white, you know. And you make it connect, see. And the meter will go "Beeeep." And you can turn it off and then turn it on and turn it off and turn it on and finally even you realize you're doing it. The first moment that you realize you're doing this it makes you quite nervous because you're not even near the meter and you're not even near the person who is holding it and you're not in him at the moment. And yet you can turn that thing on and off, on and off, on and off
So since then, subsequently, I have shoved this beep meter at a lot of people who were not Scientologists. I've tried to show them, you know, I'd turn it on at will, you know. I'd have to move my hand, you know, saying, "Well—" I make the thing beep along with my hand and so they realized what was doing it, and they couldn't—"What?" you know. And I'd say, "Well, you go ahead and do it. All you do is look, you see. And you just connect the thing through, you know. It's an easy trick. You just connect the electrodes through to the person, you see?" They'd say, "Yeah. All right." And they'd grit their teeth, you know, and they would grunt and ohhh. The beep meter sits there quiet as a mouse. Won't do a thing. Just won't do a thing. It's quite interesting.
I also ran into this on testing corn, on testing the liveness of plants and that sort of thing.
Newspaper reporter can actually come along and take the leaf of the plant and crush it in his hand, bap it, touch it, so forth, and nothing happens to the meter that's connected to the plant. I walk by the plant and the meter goes boom! Just touch one leaf with my little finger, you know, just "clich," and it goes "znnnn," See? The meter reacts. And you could do it. I suddenly realized that this was something Scientologists could do and people couldn't.
That was my first detection that we must be of a different crew. But people actually cannot turn this beep meter on unless they themselves are in fairly good shape. It's not that they're into a trained skill, they just have less horsepower. They can see these things. Yes, you can show them to them. Yes, they can see them and they grunt and they grit their teeth to get it to connect, to get it to connect and the meter sits there.
You come along, you glance at the electrode, it goes beep! Master's voice. We have that meter. I'll have to bring it out and set it up for you. Practically electrocutes you. It's a Mathison. If you want to—that's not a dirty crack necessarily. That's a hallmark of all of these mains meters. Not only do they vibrate as well to the elevator going up and down as they do to the pc, but they also vibrate very splendidly, very gorgeously to any slightest interference inside the meter itself. And they make the pc very nervous because they throw—I don't know, 340 or I'd think it's about 240 volts go through the electrodes. You can really tell they're on. And the more you're processed—the more you're aware of things in general as your awareness goes up—of course, these things become almost intolerable. I hate to hold them myself. It's all right.
I was holding 240 volts the other night. I had a dryer in the darkroom on some pictures I was making, and it decided to short out, and it—240 volts. I didn't mind anything but the force involved with the thing. It's quite an amount of force in that much dead short. But some pcs, it actually feels that bad to them on some of these mains-connected meters. And this thing—you get a burning sensation off of the electrode. There's just too much juice going through it. We never were able to cure the manufacturer of pouring the juice into the pc, not into the valves. So, probably could be sued for libel for saying so, but I would prove it in court. No, he wouldn't dare sue me for libel. I'd put him on one of his own meters. And say, "Is it actually true that you have an overt against us?" you see? "Now, whom have you shocked with electricity?" And of course he'd get the—just restimulate the motivator because he wouldn't ever give me the withhold, you see? And then he'd multiply the amount—say, that's a pretty good idea, you know? Any one of these days I'll go back to practicing law. Anyway, it's an easy life. You never, never really have to do anything.
Anyway, not just to tire you out on the subject, the meter itself is uninfluenceable from a standpoint of looking at it from the back and sitting there and making it read like an E-Meter should read. You understand? Making it read like an E-Meter should read. Therefore, you've got to do body motion drills, and you've got to know what an E-Meter looks like when it's reading on a pc. You understand? It's a—requires that kind of view.
Now, Ray made a film several months ago, and I finally reviewed the thing, which is a training film on E-Meters. Just an experimental film. He didn't intend anything more than that for it. I learned quite a bit from the technical manufacture of the film—what we'll have to do in order to square it up and make it read. One of the things I learned that we don't dare use: a faked read. We don't dare use animation, in other words, to get our E-Meter reads in the training film. They look like what they are—body motions. And if you learn to read a body motion—if anybody were doing this which is quite unlikely I assure you, but if anybody were doing this—they've got the back of the meter to them, so it's very difficult for them to find the needle. There's no sense in going into the guts of the thing and pushing currents around in the guts of it. That's silly. When, really, the way you can influence it and make it read, you can as a thetan knock the needle with a beam. And it looks just exactly like a body motion. And you—see, I'm using my finger to show you— but you actually get this thing in some kind of a state and you just knock the thing back and forth. 	
No more force and you can actually make it tick. But it's a jerky tick. You know, it is you, not your body, but it is you and you can actually put a beam on the side of the needle and slap it. You can make it go click, click. And I've practiced on it quite a bit. I can never make it look like anything but a body motion. I can't even make it look like a good, healthy rock slam. It'd never fool an auditor. It might fool somebody who doesn't know much about E-Metering, but it would never fool an auditor. 	
First place, I wouldn't use it to fool anybody. I'm just trying to find out about moving around objects. And one of the easiest objects to move around is the E-Meter needle if you stand back looking at the dial and make it go ting, ting, ting, don't you see? That's an easy thing to do. But it should never fool you as an auditor because it looks like just what it is which is a mechanically influenced motion.
Now as far as influencing the E-Meter is concerned, you don't have to worry about the pc influencing the meter if you put in end rudiments, "Have you influenced the E-Meter?" That should take that off of your mind. Now factually, for any read that you're going to get consistently on the thing, for somebody throwing the E-Meter so that an experienced auditor couldn't tell it, he'd have to be pretty smooth because he has to get to the same speed of reaction of the reactive mind which is instantaneous. And you always get latent reads on an influenced meter. So you never pay any attention to them anyhow. The fellow has to hear "willow wand" then he has to think, "Oh yes, that's the terminal I want. Oh, all right now, I will wiggle my toes." And the way it looks to the auditor, of course, is "willow wand"—click, see? "Willow wand"—click, "willow wand"—"oh, that was the one,"—click. And it doesn't look like an instant read. And furthermore, it always looks like a body motion.
Now, I saw a very experienced auditor fooled with a body motion one time, fooled with a body motion. You talk about influencing the meter. Actually, pc said, "I cannot keep my hand from trembling when you say that word," and was flickering their little finger on and off the can, see? Knowingly, see, flickering their finger on and off the can, you know? Dah-dah-dahdah. And you'd say, "willow wand" or "waterbuck" or whatever it was and you'd say, "Willow wand" and, "Well, there's—there it is. You know, I just can't keep my hand from trembling."
When the auditor finally detected it, "Your hand's trembling when I say that?" "Well, yes, I just can't keep it from trembling." And do you know that the auditor actually told me, "You know, it's a funny thing that she can't keep her hand from trembling whenever I say that." Three or four or five sessions later, when additional assessment had been made on this pc, it all of a sudden came up as a withhold. They had knowingly been trembling their finger on and off of the can while "their hand couldn't be controlled." Get the idea?
But you will get a latent read because they can't hear it and put the thing into action as fast as the reactive mind hears it and puts it into action, you see? And it's always a bit late. Therefore you shouldn't ever monkey around with a meter with latent reads.
Now there's a damping action put into most offball, offbeat meters. No meter I have ever okayed has ever had a damper in it. I've found a lot of meters that had dampers in them. The old green and gold English meter had a damper in it so that it was guaranteed to read one and one-half seconds late. And before an ACC got going I had a poor electronics man around there with a pair of snippers taking these dampers off of them. And, man, there was wire lying all over the floor when they finally got loose, but those green and gold meters always afterwards, providing I had—they had gone under my notice at all, had no dampers in them. And they would read instantly. But there are many meters that this has not happened with—there are many offball meters, and nearly all of them have dampers in them. So you say, "Waterbuck." Read. "Have you ever burned down a house?" Read. Maybe. All right. Now, the latent read would be, "Have you ever burned down a house?" Read.
You just haven't got that much time. In other words, you couldn't even assess with one. You could go down an assessment list and by the time you would hit the second read, you would get the first read. See, you would say, "Waterbuck," "Waterbuck," and you'd get a read. Only it's the read for the first waterbuck you said. Got the idea? So you wouldn't know what it is.
Now let's look at the additional complication. You would say, "Has a waterbuck shot you?" You know, that's your test question. All right. "Has a waterbuck shot (read) you?" Oh, it was "waterbuck" that read. If "shot" was alive, it would have come in well after "you." So you would have had, "Has a waterbuck shot"—read—"you"—read. See? And all of a sudden you Don't know what's reading. 
And if you notice in your Prehav assessing you have to carefully say— and if you hadn't realized this, you realize that your terminal is active and that the activeness of your terminal interferes with the Prehav level read. You notice that? So you've got to have an instant reading meter and you've got to have the Prehav level distinctly read different than the terminal. So you say, "Has a waterbuck"—let the read get out of the road, you see—"shot you?" Well, you actually don't have to pause after "shot" because "you" is not charged usually. So you say, "Has a waterbuck—shot you?" Well, that lets waterbuck's read get out of the road before we run into "shot" you see? And when you're assessing like that, you have to pay attention to that because you get a sporadically reading terminal that you say—you test it out in the first place—say "waterbuck, waterbuck, waterbuck, waterbuck," and you'll see that it reads, see? All right. That's a constant read. That's fine. You could always tell that, but "waterbuck" read, "waterbuck" no read, "waterbuck" read and of course your terminal is getting weak at this time and it's fading out and it's not reading well and you're trying to assess for the thing. So you wouldn't quite know what was lagging and what wasn't lagging or if it wasn't or isn't, so you just put in the pause anyhow and you have to have an instant reading meter.
You cannot assess on the Prehav Scale—and nobody has ever been able to assess on the Prehav Scale—in the absence of an instant reading meter. Now do you see why I say American clearing, English clearing, could very well have gone up the spout just on these factors? You could never have assessed the Prehav Scale. "Has a waterbuck shot you?" Read. "Oh, well, 'shot' is alive." Oh, no, hell, it was waterbuck that read way over there. And you never could have disentangled them so that you always would have been running the wrong Prehav level; the least that would have been happening on the pc.
As far as Security Checking is concerned, they just don't security check. I've already tried to security check on an offbeat meter and have laid an egg and made one of the most serious errors I think I ever made in auditing, trying to do some kind of a Security Check to get rudiments in and get the pc in communication and I just missed like mad. Why, I had every reason to—I was using one of these old, wooden potentiometer pieces of junk, a DC Decca voltmeter, practically nothing more than soldered leads into both sides of a potentiometer, you see. And I didn't know that in that particular one the electronics man had built in a damper. Not only was it a lousy meter, but he had also built in a damper so that you would ask your question and you say, "Well, has a waterbuck shot you?" read. And it read like that on all of these questions and I couldn't sort out the read on the thing—I didn't quite know what was the matter with it—but I couldn't sort out a withhold. And not having sorted out the withhold, I muffed on that pc. I just couldn't get the withhold, couldn't get it straight, I couldn't get what the pc was all about because sometimes it was damping and sometimes it wasn't damping It was never instant reading but sometimes the damp was sufficient to take all the read off the question so I would think it was clear, you see. And it would ride like that for four, five questions at which time I was perfectly happy to let go of it, see?
Subject comes up again in another five minutes, I ask the question and it's still live on a lag read. And I finally got wise to the fact that the confounded thing—it isn't that the pc is reading sporadically on this at all, the pc is reading wildly accurately on this—but what the hell it is I can't find out because the meter is only registering the pc now and then. Ooooh, that was a nightmare! I never did get the pc straightened out or in-session.
Anyway, I'm just giving you a little background music and a little data on this thing and try to take the pressure off your brains at the present moment because the pressure on your brain must be considerable. Some of you are running terminals which are going up to 8, and it isn't even on the tone arm dial so that must be very rough indeed.
But where your handling of an E-Meter is nervous, I can tell you just as a summary here, it's because you're not familiar with the thing. You're not familiar with it. You haven't slept with it. And you haven't eaten with it. And you're still handling it as though it's a strange cat. And just reach and withdraw from the meter, I mean that, just reach and withdraw from the meter for a while. Just say, "What is this thing" and all of a sudden it will seem more like an old friend.
The next thing is, is you're not sure it's registering the pc. Well, all right. Be assured of that by making the pc squeeze the cans and then you'll find out that at least it's registering his body motion so the probability is it will register something else. At least assure yourself of that. Does it read the pc? And if you're nervous—ever get nervous about meters, it's because you have never reassured yourself that the meter is just sitting there idle; that it doesn't do anything itself when it's not hooked into the pc.
So if you take your drill and on the basis you pick up the meter—I don't care if you give the pc the cans or not; he hasn't got anything to do and he'd rather you be handing him the cans than him be sitting there while you fiddle with the meter, see? And just don't plug it in, just put it in a little bit, into the jack and then, if you want to be very thorough, click it over here to Set, click to Test, click it back to Set, turn the thing on here, up to 2.0—set it right on 2.0—turn this over, set it right on 2.0, come on down here, set it there and sit there for just an instant and look at the meter. Is it sitting there quietly? All right. Now, squeeze it in and tell the pc, "All right. Would you please squeeze the cans?" And then have him squeeze the cans enough time for you to be absolutely sure you've got a third-of-a-dial drop or a dial drop— whatever you're fishing for that time.
Now, you know that the meter reads null without the pc on it and you know now that the pc registers on the meter. You know the meter is set up right and at that moment you can forget any nervousness about the meter and just go on about the business of reading the meter and that's all there is to that. You just simply go on about the business of reading your meter and if your meter goes out and it all of a sudden wildly rock slams and you can't explain it and you can't get the rock slam off or something like that, you can always surreptitiously disconnect that thing halfway and throw the tone arm over here casually while carrying right on the session, distracting the pc not at all. And if that thing is disconnected and your meter is rock slamming— it'll only be doing this on some old meter—but if your meter is still rock slamming, just slide it back in casually and forget about it. That is your safest action.
You can, however, on some of the old meters, jiggle this tone arm two or three times here, but now you're liable to be distracting the pc. If you jiggle it two or three times and your meter now doesn't rock slam, don't be at all sanguine that it won't start in another three or four minutes, you see. So the safest thing to do with the thing, you slip that thing out, smiling sweetly at the pc the meanwhile and you look at the thing and while it's disconnected from the pc set it over here so that it's near Set with the tone arm. It's rock slamming, heh, heh, heh, heh. It's rock slamming. Just slide the thing back in, go on, carry on your session. If you're assessing, well, God help you. Say, "Well, that's fine now. Well, we made pretty good progress on this list. We got three level, we got—well, we got three items straightened out." "All right. That's—that's fine. Now we're going to run—now we're going to run some Havingness. Now we're going to run some Havingness. And here we go." We run some Havingness. "Now we're going to run end rudiments and some more Havingness." Well, guess you got through the last forty-five minutes that you had left of that particular session.
But don't get through the last forty-five minutes by shutting it off suddenly, and just say, "Well, just a moment, I'm not going to end the session now because this isn't going to take very, very long." I wonder what's the matter with this thing? I've never—" and so forth, and go rushing down into the other office, you see, and so forth. "Joe, have you—have—do you know what's wrong with this meter?" and so forth. Skip it. That one action—that one action has cost more pcs their aplomb than anything else I can think of.
Now, another thing is we've tried to get these cans fixed up so that pcs can direct orchestras with them. But by George, it's a hard thing to do. You notice on the old ones, however, that the lead can be split further than they ever split them. Have you noticed that? You can always pull that lead a little bit further apart when the two wires are lying close together. But on new ones with a solid cord all the way, you can't do this and sometimes they're too close on. So you have to split them, somehow, some way, split your wire down. Get it far apart. This meter, by the way—this particular set of cords—if I were using this meter and making it my own instead of just the lecture meter down here.. . There we are. Now, you notice here that I have that that far apart. Do you realize that is not far enough apart because a pc, see, he gestures out with one hand with the other one in his lap, and he can't make a full gesture.
The width you want this thing apart is enough to make a full gesture, you know. And it's exactly right. It's exactly the right width, if with one can in the pc's lap, the other can can be held at arm's length by the pc—and now you're not going to get into any trouble. But if the pc ever goes like this, you're not quite there again. So if you've got a pc who commonly stretches with the cans or something like that, split the thing a little further. You might not notice that it is the shortness of the wire from the V split that gives you all the trouble of the can coming off of the end. The cans will never come off the end if there is enough wire on each independent can. You understand? That's the only real trouble you have with that. I've recently made the wire quite malleable in these particular leads so that it's not a brittle wire.
Also, the original British electrode was soldered. And that was no good because I could see my pretty girl auditors every once in a while getting this thing torn out and not having a soldering iron in their pocket like some of the male auditors had. So these things, these little—on the electrodes here—this screw you find on the electrodes of the Mark IV and the little nut that you see inside is not a crude manufactured item. It is practically over the dead body of Fowler and Allen. They don't want to put them on like that. They want a nice, neat, electronic job. And I want a job so that when the pc yawns—a six-foot, eight-inch pc yawns, you see, and tears the thing apart—at least you've got a session break at which time all you have to do is take your nail file—notice the width of that screw? That's nail file width. You can take a nail file, you can open that thing up, you can skin down the wire very easily, put a new coil of wire around the nut, holding the nut inside with your index finger, screw it up again with a nail file and you have done a fast repair job which is quite a permanent repair job. So those things I insist on. I insist that you be able to reconnect your own cans because if this thing is going to break down, well, let's have a point of repair where it's going to break.
Some of the old meters and cheap meters have malleable wire which is—pardon me, nonmalleable wire. It's brittle wire inside these insulation areas. And the friction of the wire, you know, friction of the leads, will sometimes make it break inside the wire. And your leads won't connect to the E-Meter or connect sporadically and so on. And it's just lousy wire, that is all, it's just bad wire in the E-Meter leads so we insist on that being nice, soft wire.
But remember that can still happen. Somebody can come down on that with the heel of his shoe exactly right against a concrete floor or something like that and manage to practically sever one of these wires or sever one, and you would never notice it, you would just never notice it because the insulation is still sound and whole, but the wire inside the insulation is broken.
So if you got to a desperate state as to why the meter didn't register on the pc—if it sits quietly all by itself and the lead, it's—when plugged in, won't do a third-of-a-dial drop, it's in these leads. You very often just grab yourself off another set of leads, plug it into the same meter and you're off to the races. But, remember, because I insisted on repair, do-it-yourself repair is possible on these electrodes, you can always—because this is a very simple jack here—you notice how simple that jack is? You can always get yourself another piece of ordinary house-wiring wire, preferably soft copper, preferably covered with plastic which won't go brittle on you right away and you can fix up one of these jacks and one of these leads very easily no matter where you are. You can always get a piece of wire. If you're in a hotel room someplace, why, just reach into the molding, you know, and get some of the telephone wire and snip it off and so forth. Might even tell the management about it when you leave.
Anyway, that is—these are nonsense points that don't have very much to do with anything and you possibly haven't learned very much today, but I just wanted to talk to you about the gimmicks and nonsense of the E-Meter and give you a few tips.
By the way, I will say, before I close the lecture, there is something I am sure some of you do not know. This is the older model, isn't it? These things— when these leads get loose, you can always tighten them up and you should. Or you can also get little lock washers and put on these things, little tiny lock washers and so on. I love British manufacturers. It's marvelous. The only place it ever falls down is lock washers and gasoline lines. They don't like lock washers and gasoline lines. I always have to take a whole car apart and put lock washers in everyplace and put in a new gas line. I'm joking now. I never take them apart. I have somebody else do it.
But you might not know that this meter is a self-propping meter. It's just a chance that you might not know it. These things come down and go over this pin. It's never been done with this one so therefore it's all completely haywire. Did you see that? Did you know that a meter did this?
Well, the meter makes a little tent all by itself. I'm sure you knew that, but also I'm also sure that someplace or another somebody doesn't know it. That's a little invention. That's one of these inventions I do by the process of telling people to do it in a very firm tone of voice. You know, "Fix it up so it will stand all by itself for an auditor." And they say, "But how?" I say, "That's your job. After all, I can't have a total monopoly on all the thinkingness in the world."
So anyway, somebody else dreamed this thing up and I think it's a pretty nice rig. These meters stand up better than any other meters I've seen. And sometimes these little hooks get off. You can buy those hooks at any hardware store or dime store where you can buy these nuts and bolts and put them back together again if somebody treats your meter too rough. Okay?
Well, those are the nonsense parts of the E-Meter and if you ever get stranded in the middle of the Gobi Desert without an E-Meter, don't try to clear anybody.
Thank you very much.