METER TRAINING
A lecture given on 12 July 1962

Thank you.
This is the second lecture, 12 July, 12, Saint Hill Special Briefing Course—and it has to do with E-Meter training: E-Meter training.
If people can't read an E-Meter, what's the matter with them? Obviously, it's bank. Obviously, it's lots of things.
Well, I'll tell you what the answer isn't. It's to audit everybody until they're Clear and then let them audit. This is very often proposed to me as a solution. Somebody calculated it, that it'd take twenty-nine thousand years for the auditors now trained on the east coast of the United States to finish up New York City—something like twenty-nine thousand years. And they're not that durable! That was my own comment on the thing, you know? You see, that's not and never has been a solution.
Another solution that's been proposed to me is that I audit everybody. That's not a solution either.
No, the solution we're working on is a perfectly valid solution. Now we've got it narrowed down to—its most random factor at the present moment is the variability of meter reading—one auditor to the next. Auditors make mistakes reading meters.
Now, it isn't their banks, except indirectly, because the thing can be countered educationally. It can be countered very easily educationally. And you could say, "Well, the fellow's bank . . ." so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, et cetera and et cetera. Oh, that's perfectly true—perfectly true—but it can be countered educationally more easily than by processing. That's quite interesting. And it's a fact tremendously in our favor.
First thing that's wrong with auditor meter reading is the auditor can't see. Now, that's a—that's not all of it, that's not all of it—but the auditor has a difficulty in seeing. And Scientologists, quite understandably (and I could compliment them for it) don't like to wear glasses. Fine, fine. But I'm afraid that the order of magnitude of the crime of wearing glasses doesn't even vaguely compare with the crime of not reading a meter. So that's first and foremost.
So this is—actually, this is a lecture of what we're going to do about this, you see? This is a lecture of what we're going to do about this.
When a person is going to be an auditor—not the pc off the street, the raw-meat pc—and we're auditing them, when we first audit this person, we should make out a Case Assessment Form. This more or less falls under the heading of Academy auditing—course auditing Make out a Case Assessment Form. It's the old one; same one you would do if you were going to do a Problems Intensive, but you don't do the final two sections that you would do for the Problems Intensive. And in the process of doing this you'll find most paper matchbooks have some fantastically small printing in them. you look around on almost any paper of matches and you'll find some very tiny printing of one kind or another. Says all the advertising or something like that on it, and then it also says that it was printed and made in Racine, Birmingham, or something. See? Or a railway timetable—that also has some fantastically small print. Not supposed to be read by anybody because they'd never take the trains if they could read it, you know?
Reg suggested the other day the stock market report in the newspaper is awfully good. That's an eye strainer to end them all. It's anything, you see, that's about four-point type. Tiny, tiny, tiny type. There isn't anything that small on the E-Meter. There's no type that small. So you can't turn around and have them read something on the E-Meter. Maybe we ought to put over in the corner of the E-Meter some type that small. You see? Then everybody would find out what it was, and the test would be invalid. Or we take an insurance contract and take the small print section of it. That would be a good source of it. But you understand I'm talking about tiny printing And it's very legible but very tiny.
And you hold it the distance away from the pc's face—the distance that he would ordinarily be seeing a meter if he were sitting back in his chair— and ask him if he can read it and have him tell you what it is. And if it's obvious that this pc can read this, we mark the top of the Case Assessment Form that his eyesight is good. Now, we don't care how it is good—whether it's good with glasses or without glasses, you understand? But if with glasses is the only way he can read this, then we will put the additional remark "Eyesight is good with glasses." And we'd just do this as a subtle tip-off that we're liable to have meter-reading trouble with this character if it isn't good. And if he can't read that tiny print the distance that meter would ordinarily be away from his eye, we put "eyesight poor," anything else we care to put, such as "requires adjustment" or "should have glasses"—anything we want to say. But that, we for sure add. And this will call to people's attention, such as a D of T or a Course Supervisor or something like that, that he has someone in his midst who, the second they start auditing, is going to be a liability. See?
So, let's get rid of the bad eyesight at one fell swoop. We don't care whether we have to get a magnifying glass—and one day Reg got me a crane-neck magnifying glass that went over the face of one of these meters and I've still got it upstairs; I'll bring it down—sure magnifies a needle. I was using it for microscopic reads to check up on old goals and things like that.
Glasses, anything you would care to do. But a magnifying glass, I should point out, is no universal answer, because everything might be blurry at the range of two and a half feet, which is about this range.
We can do something about it, and in the process of making this fellow an auditor, this is already called to somebody's attention because it's sitting on his Case Assessment Form, right at the top under his name, preferably written diagonally. And if you've got a red ballpoint, put it in there. If his eyesight is bad, well, for heaven's sakes, underscore it a couple of times. Because you're setting up sessions to be very rough, ARC breaky; auditor is going to go into unusual solutions; auditor is going to depart from the standard drills. All of these kind of things are going to happen, because in anxiety to make the pc better, why, he's going to do anything And he will really never suspect that it's his own meter reading. He might suspect it, but he'd probably never confess it to anybody. See? So let's get that one out in the clear when we're running courses and that sort of thing.
And let's take a practical section and we're first teaching people about E-Meters. Let's pull out a timetable or the small print of an insurance contract or a book of matches and let's just hand it to the guy—holding it about two and a half feet away from him—and say, "Read that." This is an additional provision, don't you see? "Read that."
And the fellow says, "Uh—mm-mm . . ." It's an ad for Bispicks, see? And he says, "Yeah. I can read that: 'Bispicks.' "
And you say, "No. The small print right there at the bottom."
"Oh," he says, "you mean the staple?"
Then the first step that Practical Section Instructor should take is to make that student take steps to provide himself with some glasses that are trained at two and a half feet, so that he can read a meter. You see? That would be his first step. He can make him go through set-up drills, and so forth, whilst the "occultist" is making them up. you don't need any fancy glasses. They should ride on the nose. Girls tend to go in for things with diamonds scattered out along the rims and that sort of thing, but they're not really necessary.
Now, we think that's good enough. You think we've taken care of it then. No! Ladies and gentlemen, in Scientology we have not at that stage taken care of very much except maybe the next few days, because eyesight changes in Scientology like nothing else does. And it's quite upsetting to some pcs because their glass prescription is always shifting around one way or the other. All right. If we know we've got to do it, we can cope with it, can't we? But nevertheless that makes it a little bit hard to do.
So, any time Practical Section gets somebody back for a GAE, they pull out the insurance contract, the matchbox, and with the person's glasses sitting on the end of his nose, say, "Read that," holding it away at two and a half feet. See? So that's a good safety margin, because people's eyesight changes.
Now, this will get worse if everybody is reading meters darn well. Then processes bite harder and you're going to get faster eyesight changes. But we can still cope with it. All right. That's fine. We just want them being able to keep seeing it out there.
Now, the trick is that you actually cannot trust the person to read a meter at that distance who can't read that print at that distance, because the amount of shake of the needle that is a read at sensitivity 16, that he'd have to follow down in many cases, is as much as print is blurring at that distance. In other words, if everything blurs to him, then the needle could move just under the blur and because the needle is moving, it just looks like it's blurring. See, it isn't a blur; it's moving But he is so used to seeing things in a blur at that distance that it looks to him like a blur and therefore is not moving. You get the error that sorts out of this? See? Well, it's quite important to keep an eye on this as we're training people along and processing them up the line.
This is just for the greater good of the greater number of students. Don't you see? This fellow can always read this, and so forth. Well, that's fine. We'll still always do the drill. The person came back for some more meter work or something like that—he came back for some more this or that into the Practical Section, having been found wrong in auditing—let's assume that the first thing that was wrong that he did was not what the Auditing Supervisor said. Let's assume automatically that he couldn't see a moving needle. See? Let's just assume that. We don't care what the Auditing Supervisor said; we'll assume that. We'll take up also what the Auditing Supervisor said in the Practical Section, but we will just always add to it to this degree. We'll assume there might be something wrong with meter reading that we haven't caught yet. Got that?
Now, this merely takes care of the idea of focus. So far I've merely spoken about focus and being able to see a certain distance, and I have not talked about many other factors involved.
We have now hit the most elementary and the most obvious level of straightening up meter reading when we're straightening up people's eyesight with glass prescriptions or magnifying glasses or something like that. See, that's the most elementary level, but quite necessary. And the next level doesn't necessarily invalidate this at all.
Let us go into a much wider theory now, which is the width of present time. How wide is present time? Is present time a thousandth of a second wide? Is it zero wide? Is it two seconds wide? Or is it ten minutes wide? Now, you would be reading the future like mad and could win your fortune at Monte Carlo any time if present time was ten minutes wide. you might even be able to win some horse races. You know, get the bet down and—just before the window slams shut. And you still might be able to get your bet in under in time to get the horse in, see? But that would be bordering on what most people would call the ability to foretell the future.
I mention the word ten minutes because it's not impossible, because I myself have a ten minute band on TV and movies and that sort of thing I never bothered to investigate it, but I have a subawareness of what is going to happen any time within the next ten minutes on the film. Now, this is very annoying. Spoils all the plots and so forth. Now, I first thought it was simply writer training, and I've since begun to watch some soap opera that no writer was ever near, you see, what passes for TV plays these days. Well, it happens just the same, you know? Suddenly find myself thinking about somebody being hanged, you know, then suddenly realize that this character who just walked in is about to be hanged and realize—then I realize how he is going to be hanged. You see, it's spreading down now from the ten-minute mark as the zero, and we're marking off one minute at a time. We come down somewhere within four or five seconds—that is the period in which I am actually watching the film. I'm aware of this.
So you see, by drawing that out I can conceive of a present time ten minutes wide. See, there's nothing more—nothing esoteric about this. I'm not trying to tell you that it's some wonderful ability. As a matter of fact, I very often would like to lose it.
A person who is cleared gets into the fantastic state of being able to tell at every intersection some fifty to a hundred feet before they get to the intersection, if anything is coming down the intersection and from which side and about how fast. See, it's almost as if they have a radar vision that looks around the corner, and it looks to them as though they have developed a perception which is lineal, present-time perception. And they think they're looking around corners. No, they are not looking around corners. They have a wider present time and haven't accustomed themselves to it yet, and they are looking at a fringe of knowingness which is many seconds up the line. They're looking at something like a fifteen- to twenty-second fringe of knowingness. See, they know what's going to happen in fifteen or twenty seconds, but it comes through to them as an impression. So they think they are looking around the corner at the truck which is coming down the street. But they try to do that, and that doesn't work. And this is quite baffling to them. It's reading the future is what it is. But it isn't reading the future. It's not even being in the future. It's just that PT is that wide. That's the thing.
Now, somebody who is really sharp as an athlete . . . oh, I don't know, I suppose Sam Snead has a present time from the drive of the tee to the landing of the ball. I suppose that all takes place in now. And if you asked him very closely, he would get the sensation as he hit the ball of knowing exactly where it was going to land or just before he hit the ball he knows where it's going to land. And everybody says, "This is skill that is doing this," you see? Well, it is not skill that is doing this. Actually, he knows where the ball is going to land, that's all. It's—he doesn't even have to go through the idea of following at a line of flight to find out where it's going to light. See? The ball is lying there and he is hitting the ball in the same band of PT.
Of course, the poor sods go out there and try to whip this guy Snead, you see, and nothing happens, you know? He feels a little stretchier one day and goes out and breaks the course record, you see? And then he feels a little stretchier the next day so he breaks the record he made, you see? This guy is terrific. But it looks very easy to him. And so it would look easy to you if you had control of both ends of the flight of a golf ball.
You see, people believe they can do this. Have you ever seen anybody stand on a golf green, and as the ball is rolling across the green, they go—and try to push it into the hole. See? "Missed," you know? Do you see people do that? You ever seen people follow the course of a bowling ball, something like that, and twist it back straight, and so forth, get down finally? Do you ever see people try this? Well, why do they try to do that if they know they can do that? It isn't the projection of the control they just did with their hands. They're aware of the fact that the event is not predicted and they're trying to predict and control the event. And their stretches and strains around in the thing is in despair of not having done so. Because it's always despair. It isn't really just . . .
Well, if you were going to knock a ball into the—into the cup on the green, you certainly wouldn't go on—oooahhh—grunting and straining and doing all sorts of things. You'd just go ptt, and it'd go right in the cup, bang! You sort of brush a beam at it, you know? Well, how about at the moment you hit it it's already in the cup? Well, that's controlling both ends of the span of PT and this is your great athlete.
Great athletes, by the way, are always exterior. And you show them the Axioms of Scientology—"Oh, that's what I've been doing! Oh, yes! Good! Yeah, fine! Oh. Oh, that's what that's all about! Mm-hm. Well, of course, anybody'd know that. Yeah. That's right." And they go right on down the list of the Axioms—brrrrrrr! Quite remarkable. But what I'm calling your attention to is, their PT is wide.
Now, frankly, they don't think of their PT as containing motion. They think of it as containing control. Motion doesn't happen randomly in their PT. When they're doing something, they're controlling all the motion in that PT because they are in that PT and they have the width of that PT in which to decide. It's almost as if at the end of two seconds they could undecide what they decided at the beginning of two seconds. So therefore, they have terrific judgment. They don't have to test-decide anything, because they know which
decision is right because they saw it happen. You get how silly and involved this can finally become? All right.
Those people are capable of perceiving motion. They can also perceive stillness as a total isness.
And then we get down to the guy who has a present time one one-thousandth of a second wide. And he is in nothing but anxiety—continuous anxiety. He's always regretting what he just decided because it's already too late. He's always in trouble. But it's an anxiety he feels. That would be a crazy man's present time, see? It's all wrong all the time. There's no telling what will happen. He doesn't even know if the bed will continue to sit on the floor, don't you see, because he can't perceive the bed sitting on the floor. See, there's no test line.
Actually, as you look at those TV sets up there, you recognize that those TV sets are continuing to be there. Don't you get that idea?
Audience: Mm-hm.
They're continuing to be there. You look at me; you know I'm continuing to sit here in the chair. How do you get the idea of continuance? You don't get the idea of continuance by comparing the fact that I was here and therefore I will be here. That isn't what you figure out at all. No. All at one glance you see me across a span of time, so you know I'm continuing
Now, how about the fellow who can only see me across a span of one one-thousandth of a second? He'd be mighty anxious. He'd be mighty anxious. "Is he going to exist or isn't he going to exist? Is he going to sit down there?" And he'd wind up telling you, "you can't tell what I'm going to do next." He'd tell you, "You make me nervous. I don't know what you're going to do next." Well, how come he's so uncertain about it? Well, that's because you're not there while you are being there in the same PT, you see? It's a little bit hard to talk about because language isn't nicely matched up to this phenomena. It's unexamined phenomena. All right.
The less PT a person has, the more difficulty they have with the perception of motion and stillnesses. The more present time they have, the easier it is to perceive motion and stillness. Elementary.
Therefore, just to give you an odd example of this, an individual could be run on "Look around here and tell me what you're absolutely sure will be here in one second." Of course, all of you look around and you say, "Well, everything in the room will be here in one second," see? But then we start grading that up: Five seconds. Twenty seconds. Half a minute. A minute. Five minutes. Ten minutes. And all of a sudden, about this, we're hitting—we're hitting such an—a wider fringe, the span is too great, and we have to look for a specific object and figure out a continuance for that object. But nevertheless this drill, phrased in any way that it could be put together—such as "How long are you absolutely sure that door will be there?" and take your answer—you would drill the person's perception into a broadening of present time.
There happens to be a process. (I don't say that these processes are the answer because they are not. I'm just giving you data.) you say, "Look around this room and find something that's having an effect on an effect," or "Look around this room and find something that's having an effect on something else."
The latter one, particularly, when tested, will be found occasionally to turn on for a pc, for fifteen or twenty minutes or maybe the next hour or two, a fantastically widened PT. You can sometimes get the same phenomena that a Clear gets of knowing about the cars coming, knowing whether lights are going to turn, when they're going to turn. His prediction goes way up.
"Look around here and find an effect that's having an effect on something," or "Look around here and find something that's having an effect on something else"—your commonest wording.
So these processes do exist which widen PT. They're specifically addressed to it. Nothing much to do with somebody's goals. Nothing much to do with anything else. But if you look it over, you'll find out that they're not so much processes as they are drills. They're practices. They're just practices.
So, widening of PT any way that you possibly could do it would improve a person's recognition of motion and stillness of a needle, or of course, change of rate of motion. Now, some auditors can—have no real difficulty in telling whether a needle was in motion or a needle was still, but do definitely have difficulty in establishing a change of rate of motion. The sudden tiny acceleration—the very slight acceleration which occurs in the middle of a fast rise: At what moment did that rise faster than the rest of the rise? Or, an accelerated fall: At what moment did that fall fall faster than that fall?
Now, we're not talking about good or bad meter reading. We're talking about the absolute minimum meter reading and that is meter reading. See? It's not a freak to be able to tell an accelerated fall or an accelerated rise. you have to be able to because they are reads. So even that skill—being wider than merely still and in motion—has to be under the hand of the auditor. He has to be able to tell that it's rising faster than it was rising. See, the—for one division it rose a tiny bit faster than it did in the three divisions before and the three divisions afterwards. That's the accelerated rise. You've got to be able to detect that because it's a read. He also has to be able to tell that it didn't do that, because that is a clean. And now we're getting down to very, very narrow limits of needle perception.
Now, the first is purely the problem of eyesight: Can the fellow see lines and circles and so forth at a distance of two and a half feet on very tiny print? That's purely eyesight. Now we're getting into—with this next echelon—the relative ability amongst people to perceive motion when it exists, lack of motion when it exists and change of rate of motion when it exists. A slowed rise, a speeded rise, a slowed fall, a speeded fall—he's got to be able to tell those. And all of this depends on the width of present time.
Now, what perception can a person have? What can he do with his perception? How can a person improve his perception? Well, as a matter of fact, there's a fellow named Bates in the United States that developed a whole system and wrote a book about it. So much so that I think he got to be known as "perfect-sight-without-glasses Bates." Now he wrote this book, Perfect Sight Without Glasses. Terrific number of drills contained in this thing. Well, they've departed beyond this particular book and they have all kinds of drills whereby a person follows with his right eye one line and the left eye another line and that sort of thing. And they have machines you look into and it exercises the eyes and the fellow perceives, and that sort of thing. Very often this will alter the characteristics of a person's sight. I'm not saying this is any panacea. I'm not recommending this in any way, shape or form. I myself have tried some of these things and they've gotten no place. But I have seen sight improved by this—in other words, perception improved by this.
But we're out and beyond perception. We're into consecutive awareness when we're reading meters. There are three moments that we have to perceive in order to find out if a needle is still. Of course, at first glance you say to yourself, "Well, yuueearree [there's] only one moment that you have to perceive to find out if a needle is still, and that is simply look at it, and in that moment it isn't moving, so therefore, the needle is still." That's not good enough because you have nothing to compare it with. you have to have the moment before, the moment it is still, and the moment afterwards to make sure that it is still still. How wide are these moments? These moments may only be a thousandth of a second wide. So a still needle is read by "it wasn't moving, it isn't moving, it won't move; therefore it isn't moving and therefore it is still."
Now, a moving needle requires at least two observations and it is therefore easier to read than a still needle. A moving needle is always easier to read than a still needle. If you don't believe this, go out in the forest sometimes and try to find a deer that is standing behind a thicket watching you. Just try and find him. And, by George, you may be out there looking at him and in his direction for a half an hour and you'll never discover that he's there, because he's still. And you don't discover he's there until he takes off. You pitch a bully-beef can in that direction of that thicket thoughtlessly and he takes off. And you all of a sudden are aware of the fact that a deer has been standing there watching you—probably all the time you've been there. Startles you half to death. Well, how is it that you didn't perceive him when he was still but do perceive him when he was moving? "Oh, well," you say, "the relative thing, and it attracts the eye, and motion attracts the thing; and then there's more things to perceive, such as noise and . . ." you can figure it out and you can figure yourself half to death!
The thing is only, basically, that motion requires only two observations and stillness requires three. The motion takes part of the responsibility of directing attention, don't you see? Whereas stillness takes no responsibility for directing attention. You see, the motion almost pulls the eyeball along with it. Do you ever get that idea?
All right. Now, let's be a little less esoteric than that. But a motion is detected simply by observing that something was in place A and then observing that it was in place B. And you observe these two consecutive actions, you know it moved. That is all you have to know about it: that it was in place A and now it's in place B and therefore has moved.
Now, how narrow together can place A and B be before you detect that motion is occurring? You can gulp over that one. That's one of these questions almost: "How long is a piece of string?" But on an E-Meter we can answer it. It's something on the order of a tenth of the width of the tip of the needle, to the right or to the left, is a motion. Now, that's pretty darn microscopic. In view of the fact that the needle is sloped out and gets wider rapidly as it comes down, that tenth could be interpreted in all different and wide and peculiar ways, but I'm talking about the tip—the top tip. A tenth.
Now, most Mark IVs jiggle before you put in the cans. They all jitter. They all do. That's nothing because the stabilizing factor is contained in getting the circuit completed. That stabilizes them at once. This is nothing to worry about. Only start worrying about your Mark IV when you've got the can jack plugged in and the pc on the cans and it's jiggling. Now you can get worried because there is something wrong with your meter. Usually it's a grain of dust or something has gotten into the tone arm swing, but we've put a new tone arm carbon-brush arrangement in there, and they don't do too much of this now.
But most people are not aware of this. This meter is jiggling right this minute. You see this meter jiggle?
Audience: Yes. Hm-hm.
Hm.
Male voice: Big jiggle. 
Well, the read that you're supposed to read is about one tenth of that jiggle. You having a hard time reading the jiggle?
Male voice: oh, I can see the jiggle, but one tenth of it—uh-uh.
Yeah, one tenth of it. Ha-ha. That gets rather small, doesn't it? Well, to be absolutely safe, that's what you should be able to do.
Female voice: Hm.
I've seen a goal that read no more than that jiggle, and was the right goal, read every time. yet nobody could locate it. I thought they were all nuts. It was obvious the goal was reading. Nobody else could see it move.
Width of present time could then be broadened to a point of where you could perceive motion or stillness by various drills of perception.
Now, your next level, let's take up, is brevity of perception. What section of the present time you are in do you require to perceive an inaction or an action? And as soon as we have said that, we actually open the door to the solution to this problem. Broadening your present time is most easily done by clearing you. And any other processing leveled in that direction of broadening your present time is frankly a waste of time, because it's all going to come out right when you're Clear.
But the proposition that you must be Clear before you can audit anybody is totally unworkable and never will work. There are several reasons for this, having to do with practicality. And one of the reasons you perhaps are not too aware of, and that is to say, cleared raw meat with no reality on what has happened is enormously inferior to somebody that has the data and goes Clear. They get a subjective reality on what it's like trying to wrestle with the problems of it. They understand this. Their comprehension and understanding of the problems and so forth, are infinitely greater. They're left with a capability of understanding people, even though Clear. Whereas you clear raw meat and you're liable to find somebody now very impatient with people— wonders why he's associating with them or something of the sort. Gets all involved. I've had some interesting letters on this subject, by the way.
It's easy to follow some person's worries when they're jammed in their heads and aren't thinking very straight. That's easy to follow, if you can follow it, when they start figure-figuring It's dead easy, you know? A guy is dead in his head, and the pattern of his thought is now going to repeat itself. You're going to have a way to figure this out. you may not get it the first pattern, but you'll get it the second pattern. You'll figure out finally what he means.
Well, this isn't true—you get a Clear who is doing a figure-figure and you've really got something on your hands. Trying to understand a Clear when he's figure-figuring is one of the more difficult things that you will be called upon to do here and there. Because you will inevitably make, sooner or later, a raw-meat Clear, and then he's going to ask you the damnedest questions. You've had answers to these things all along. And, of course, he's much smarter at asking questions now. It's rather interesting. They've asked me all kinds of—I've been asked very, very complicated questions on the subject of why people behave as they do. Or how you—how I could possibly stand to associate with people or . . . You know, all kinds of oddball questions.
It just shows you that the poor guy has suddenly been launched into the stratosphere and is being expected to fly without having found out that he's in an airplane. He has no comparative data, don't you see? He'll be fine. I mean, he'll do well in life and that sort of thing—not that I'm trying to run down the state. But as far as the idea of the mind and people and this universe, there is no substitute for a guy being as spun-in as you are and then going Clear, because you go Clear on it with all the data.
And listen, if you can understand what's going on now, you'll understand it real well; you'll get it nicely sorted out. There's a lot of virtue to be said for this. So, completely aside from any other understanding here, you get much more comprehending people this way. That's why clearing everybody without training any auditors is not a solution.
Now, when we look at the problem of time, we see that you have to have a little more time to conceive a stillness than you do—have to have a motion, because we've got to see three things, three moments of time in a stillness, and only two moments of time in a motion. And people, by the way, are more intolerant therefore and thereby of stillnesses. Whatever other value this philosophic observation has, they're much more intolerant, because it takes more time to see one; takes more time to observe one. They always think of stillnesses as absorbing tremendous quantity of time. They get very, very tired.
They see an oak tree out there motionless in the pasture and for a little while they'll "ooh" and "ah" over this marvelous oak tree. But they may go out and sit in the pasture themselves and look at this oak tree and then just suddenly be overwhelmed by the terrible standing-thereness of it, foreverness of it, see? Th-uth-zz-zz, you know? Whereas they look at something traveling rather rapidly, like a colt, and the idea never comes to their mind. Has nothing to do with the gra- the development of the colt. Has the idea that the colt is in motion, so therefore he—his continuance does not have to be as great as something that is standing still. See? Three moments as opposed to two moments.
So the period of time required to observe can be shortened until a person can observe in the tiniest, narrowest present time—three moments of time or two moments of time. Let's say this poor sod's present time—let's really cut it down, see—is a millionth of a second, see? Well, we're out beyond the realm of being able to observe anything at all. See? So he's had it. We're not training him as an auditor. He's leaning on a tree in some cemetery feeling sad for himself, you know? He isn't even picking up a body, this one isn't.
No, let's take a tenth of a second as somebody's PT. Oh, well, let's be better. Let's take a twentieth of a second—twentieth of a second. Now, that takes us down to almost anybody. See? And now let's be able to carve a twentieth of a second up into three pieces. And of course, we get three periods, see, of each one—what is it?—a sixtieth of a second in duration. So we then have to be able to observe an instant in time which is no longer than a sixtieth of a second. And we can observe three instants in time in the guy's PT. Therefore, he sees that the needle is still. He observes it's there, it was there, it is there, it will be there, all at one fell swoop and recognize that he has no motion involved with it.
So, you might then say the moment of tolerance of observation is a sixtieth of a second. You must be able to perceive an isness only a sixtieth of a second long You see, this is not trying to expand somebody's PT before he's Clear, you see; this is cutting it down to where a below-average PT can perceive it. And now let's educate him by practice and drill into actually perceiving what he can already perceive. He can perceive a sixtieth of a second.
I don't know if you ever looked at the shutter of a camera that is set for a sixtieth of a second, but it's very perceivable. You take a shutter of a camera and set it for a twentieth of a second or something like that, why, you can almost see images in the room through the thing. You look through the back of the thing, and it goes click and it's—oh, it's dead slow. The diaphragm opens and closes again and it's—it's terrific, see?
All right. You set that camera for a five-hundredth of a second and you have to ask yourself for a moment: Did it open and close? You're more told by the fact that it clicked aurally, see, than the fact that you perceived the light. Nevertheless, you hold a camera at a five-hundredth of a second up to a light and most people will be able to perceive, at least—even if it were wide open as a lens—they'd perceive something about the size of a sixpence or something like this. They perceive a smaller diameter than the diameter of the lens. Actually, it's in direct ratio: The amount of PT that they can observe easily, see, is reflected in the narrowing diameter that they could perceive of that diaphragm. We won't bother to get into this too technically like that, but some people will see it as a pinpoint. See? And other people will see it at a five-hundredth of a second; they will see the whole lens. It just varies from person to person. I only make these remarks and add this into the setup because it gives you an index of actually indexing people's present time, which you might find of some use sometime or another—choosing pilots or something like that.
Now, if we take a sixtieth of a second as a tolerance point—let's be twice as good and let's make it about a hundred and twenty-fifth of a second. Let's be able to perceive an isness in a hundred and twenty-fifth of a second. And you'll find out without broadening PT that most people will be able to be drilled into this.
Now, it goes something like this: They can perceive an isness in a second. You show them the lantern slide of a chair for one second on a screen and nearly everybody present, except somebody who is stone blind, will say to you, "That was a chair," but won't be able to give you much of the detail of the chair in that one second. But we keep showing them the chair and we keep showing them the chair and showing them the chair, and finally—it isn't that they stack up a number of observations; we could show them different observations of the chair—and they eventually would see the chair better. And they would see it better to the extent of telling you how the seat was finished—whether it was in cloth or embroidery or leatherette or something of this sort. They'd tell you how many rungs it had, how many verticals in the back of the thing and if there was anything else in the picture. And they eventually perceive everything that is there. In other words, they wrap themselves around the isness of the thing.
All right. We take another picture—let us say a table—and we show this to them for a half of a second, and a half a second, and a half a second—we show them the same picture half a second, or different views in a half a second—and they finally are able to pick up all of that. In other words, they can see in that half a second. We take another slide, entirely disrelated to it, and you'll now find out these people who have learned to see in a half a second will get all the detail—if they have drilled adequately on it—will get all of the detail necessary, or that's in the thing, in that half-a-second look, see?
All right. So we slow it up now to a quarter of a second. And we show them a picture at a quarter of a second. If before they were drilled at one second you had shown them the picture at a quarter of a second, to a lot of people it would have looked like a blank. But now we're working on a gradient scale. We've shown a second, we've shown a half a second; now we've got it down to a quarter of a second, so we show them the views of something or other at a quarter of a second till they can see at a quarter of a second without questioning. 
And having done that, we move down to an eighth of a second and we repeat the same drill in an eighth of a second. You've got a magic lantern, is what you've got, or a projection machine of some kind or another, which has a photo diaphragm which can be adjusted from one second—well, it's got to have a time device on it so it can be left open—but it's adjusted from one second to a hundred and twenty-fifth of a second. We get everybody that's involved in the drill accustomed to seeing things at an eighth of a second there and at the eighth-of-a-second flash—they can get everything out of an eighth-of-a-second flash that they would get out of it.
Now we move down, of course, to a fifteenth of a second—that being a handy halving used by a camera—and at a fifteenth of a second . . . That, by the way, is the speed of a Brownie box camera. Have you ever looked into a Brownie box camera and seen the lens travel across in a fifteenth of a second? You'll be able to perceive everything that is perceivable in the picture in that fifteenth of a second.
Now let's take it at a thirtieth of a second. And let's perceive everything at a thirtieth of a second. And now we're up to a sixtieth of a second, and that's the first admissible point for absolute reliable reading. A sixtieth of a second. We get everybody in so they can see it and then we move them on up to a seventy-fifth, or some such thing, and then speed it up until we eventually get them to a hundred and twenty-fifth of a second.
In other words, if there's anything on the picture at all, the person's eye and viewingness and alertness on the thing can be trained up to see at a hundred and twenty-fifth of a second if it is there or if it isn't there.
What I'm giving you actually, is naval recognition training, World War II. There were a lot of these ideas kicking around California and other places and the navy and the army got up into certain problems they couldn't immediately solve, so they picked up educators here and there and they finally developed things like this recognition training.
I went a little bit further with it. We had outfits of one kind or another. You can teach kids the alphabet. You can teach people when they—that can't read, and you can teach them to read very rapidly. You can teach little kids to—arithmetic with great speed, as well as to recognize what kind of an airplane it is, given the briefest glimpse of it—all of these things. That was the intention with which the stuff was used.
They've brought it up into reading now. Now it's in reading, and they issue you books in the United States now that have timed slides on the side of them. you set this thing and you've got to be able to see a single word or see a group of words and they give you different shutter speeds with which you can perceive these, and it's speed reading. And as an attesting to it, actually a United States senator was able to read—he had trained himself up to read, I think it was Oliver Twist, in fifteen minutes or something like that—at least he was standing there—but because he's a United States senator I don't believe that. you wouldn't either. Anyway, the fellow had actually condensed his recognition line.
That's the use that's being put to today. So they're still using this principle. That came off of aircraft recognition.
I never used it myself. I trained men on it and that sort of thing. I had an entirely different attitude toward aircraft recognition. I was in South Pacific at the beginning of the war. The extant philosophy at the beginning of the war was "If it flies you shoot it down because there are none of ours up there anyplace," and you sort of got into that habit. I got into a nasty habit with regard to aircraft: is—it flies, shoot it, you know? And in fact it's a good sport. He's shooting at you, shoot at him. What's the difference?
And I was never under the delusion that the Army Air Forces were on our side. I never was. I never made that mistake. We used to talk it over occasionally, and we always came to the same opinion—that we were not fighting the same war. Anyway, they had an IFF, Identification Friend and Foe radar, and your radar screen would hit the aircraft and if it was equipped with IFF or if the IFF was working, it flashed back a signal and it told you that it was a friend. You just shot at everything else. So I never used this system. But I did train a lot of people up in it and used it in various ways, and have myself been trained on this system itself and I know it's quite remarkable.
The first time I ever saw—I think it was a Japanese bomber—slide of a Japanese bomber at a hundred and twenty-fifth of a second, let me tell you, I didn't even think there was a blackboard there that the thing was shining on. Hundred and twenty-fifth of a second, you know? And I sort of saw it wink. I wasn't even prepared, you know, to greet this thing at all. I didn't even know what was going to happen, you know? And blink! And I was in there with a bunch of advanced students. The Instructor says to the students, "What was it?" And they say, "A Mitsubishi yump-shomph-womph-womph something or other bomber" you know? I just looked out the window. I didn't see any. And I finally dug what they were up to. And I saw a group of sailors pass from a second of scratching their heads to find out whether it was an airplane or a fly or what it was that had been flashed on the screen during that second, to being able to hit it on the button in a seventy-fifth of a second with the greatest of ease.
Just that training gives you a method by which you can bring a person to observe stillness or motion in the tolerable instant of time. Now, we're not now talking about rigging up anything very fancy. This isn't a very fancy rig. This is any old projection machine fitted with a camera shutter that will take speeds of time of one second and down to a hundred and twenty-fifth, so it's not even a good camera shutter. Most of them will take you down to a five-hundredth and a lot of them to a thousandth, you see? You don't need it that fancy. But it has to be a fairly big shutter, and it has to be installed in such a way that it doesn't interrupt putting in slides. If you were just to take some pictures—pictures of pretty girls, (anything), or pictures of handsome and strong men (anything)—and just flick these on with some distinguishing feature, or if you were just to take numbers written on a piece of paper, see, that went into the slide just so it projected clearly on the screen, and you did this same drill of just shortening the length of time necessary to perceive it . . .
Of course, it's best to have a large assortment of drills that goes in one after the other, because people very quickly will learn rotation, and they fool you in various ways, so that you throw in these slides variably, you see? Anything that they could recognize. It wouldn't matter what it was. A series of numbers. Anything, see? Blondes and brunettes. It doesn't matter what it was, as long as it was there to be recognized and you could tell whether or not the fellow had seen it. you could gradually work up his ability to perceive in briefer and briefer intervals of time until, of course, he could perceive in the three intervals, one sixtieth of a second each, necessary to tell him if that meter was acceptably still. Now, you'd have it. That would give you perfect meter reading. 
Now, this is an interesting approach—an approach through a lot of training methods, visual training aids and that sort of thing, which were developed a long time ago but which were very successful. It gives you more than this. You could get into a situation here where you fit this thing up with an E-Meter element, and you actually see a still needle, and you actually see a moving needle. And seeing a moving needle for one hundred and twenty-fifth of a second would be asking the person to perceive moments of time consisting of a three hundred and seventy-fifth of a second. To perceive that it was still, it'd have to be a three hundred and seventy-fifth of a second that the person could perceive an instant; and to see that it was moving, he'd have to be able to perceive a two hundred and fiftieth of a second instant. That's far beyond the tolerance absolutely necessary for a person to read an E-Meter. But if you're going to train people, train them good, you know?
Anybody could make this kind of a rig and experiment around with it until he found out how to shorten people's necessary period of observation.
The psychologist, who has made many mistakes—and by the way, apologized to us the other day. The big chief in South Africa apologized abjectly to me for daring to use my name in vain, and our solicitor turned the letter back and said that it would have to be publicly published, and so on. He was saying some dirty words concerning me. He was inferring I was a psychologist, I think.
Anyway, a psychologist has observed this interesting error, that the eye has a shutter speed of about a twentieth or a twenty-fifth of a second. This is a stupid lie. The eye has no shutter speed. You gaze into some girl's eyes, and if you're not terrifically stricken along other emotional lines, you maybe perceive that there is no Compur shutter installed back of the iris. I know it seems sacrilegious to gaze into some girl's eyes just to understand whether or not there's a Compur shutter back there, but nevertheless, you have to do some things for science.
But the point is, is there is no interval. But there's a thetan back of the eyeball, see, back of the channel line, who has a width of PT and who tends to fixate on what he considers an observable moment. And then he—if it takes place shorter than that, it isn't observable. Well, he very rapidly— because you're narrowing time—can follow it easily. See, he can train himself down into narrower glimpses and it appears very comfortable to him finally because he's actually looking at segments of his own PT. And he finds his own PT fairly comfortable—relatively speaking—and so therefore he can comfortably observe briefer moments than that.
I mention this thing about the eye being a twentieth or twenty-fifth of a second, or something like that, because somebody will bring it up and tell you how it is sooner or later and doesn't happen to be factual. There is no shutter.
What the eye perceives as motion and what it perceives as stillness is almost as variable as there are people. This is not any constant.
To teach people never to miss a read consists solely and entirely of being able, for those people, to establish what is still, without any question in their mind, and what is moving, without any question in their minds, and what is moving faster or moving slower than it was. That's all they have to establish and be satisfied with in their mind and read a meter.
Meanwhile, you have none of these training aids, none of them. They are things of the future. So you are the children, the forgotten children of yesteryear, who grew up in the dark ages when we didn't have these things and somehow learned anyway.
But I call your attention to the fact that this can be taught, can be acquired and you can acquire it directly on a meter. Just by watching a meter, observing what is moving and what is still, you will eventually come to read it anyhow.
And remember this: that one read, wrong, to clean a clean or to ignore a reacting, moving needle in a session, are intolerable at the level of one per session. You can't even have one per session. It's zero per session.
So that is the direction I want to see you go and that is the direction I know you can go.
And we got the hump—we got the hump crossed and that is very good news. Now all you've got to do is read that needle.
Thank you very much.
Good night.