AWARENESS LEVELS
A lecture given on 27 April 1965
Thank you. Thank you.
Well, you look better today. Sorry to have to tell you, but you look much better today.
What’s the date?
Audience: 27th of April AD 15.
All right. Twenty—seven April AD 15, Saint Hill Special Briefing Course.
Ah, dear I haven’t really—I can tell you with great honesty, I haven’t the least idea of what to talk to you about today. This was simply a Tuesday in which a lecture came up.
I have been working extremely hard trying to handle a—what amounts to a false report which had come in over the world and didn’t know I was handling a false report until just last week. And that was a false report on rates charged by organizations. Nearly every organization in the world had covertly, unreportedly reduced its rates so that when the new pricing pro—gram went into effect and they were asked what their rates were, they simply gave their advertised rates. They did not give the rates they actually charged. In fact, I would go so far and could add somewhat cruelly as I don’t think the top executives in the orgs knew what rate was really being charged.
So, on the basis of this false report given last autumn, a pricing program was arranged with national councils through the world, and they happily and pleasantly agreed to a price increase that amounted to 400 to 1000 percent above their 1964 prices without saying a word.
As a result, the public was considerably shocked. And the funny part of it is, I couldn’t even find out what they were shocked about since according to the pricing program and the reported rates that were being charged by organizations, the pricing program, frankly, reduced several of their advertised rates. But that was only on paper In actual fact, the public at large knew very well that this had not been the fact. The rates, therefore, were enormously increased and as a result, why, business slackened up and activity damped here and there but all I was aware of is the fact that when I came back from vacation, why, they all had a down curve, except Saint Hill. And they all had this nice down curve and this was reported to me somewhat late in the report—and I got onto it as soon as I found this out and started to solve this problem.
And it took a long time. It took the—a long time for me. It took—it took the better part of three weeks to finally find the engram necessary to resolve
the case. And that engram was a false report and it was a universal false report—each org had done this. And we were very fortunate to have found this before we began to expand, because frankly at the rates they were charging and for the service they were going to give for the rates, had I not pulled them up and standardized prices and found this engram they would have expanded into insolvency. Because the rates they were charging would not have covered the costs. And if a thousand persons had been driven down on the org for training and processing, don’t you see, and if they had trained and processed these people at the costs which they were really training and processing them at, it would have cost somebody, a nonexistent somebody, don’t you see, several thousand dollars a month that would have gone into the red.
In other words, the organization would have expanded into the red. And for some reason or other, nobody really had courage enough, I suppose, in these national councils to say, ”But, Ron, uh—heh, HAS Course, you know, only—only gets two pounds, huh—huh, in our area or in perhaps Los Angeles. Ah yes, but, we’re—we’re charging—we’re charging only fifty cents for ten thousand hours of processing plus—plus a promise to Clear and OT.” Do you follow? Do you follow? An incredible situation, then, had existed.
But what we discovered is not the fact. We discovered that an organization can be pounded by the public in the form of one, two, three, four suppressive people, you see (this sounds like the public, you know—these are the blokes that specialize in ”Everybody says!” ”Everybody thinks!” don’t you see) into believing that they mustn’t charge anything for their services. And there was therefore, in extant, a tendency to downgrade service.
Well now, that is the surest way in the world to wipe service out, because it costs money to run an organization or an auditor or a staff and so on. And ”if you could just pound the income of Scientology down far enough, of course, there would be no org there to help these nasty people we’ve got to get even with.” Do you follow? And the tendency, then, was to reduce prices covertly by strange and peculiar discounts which were then not announced or put on the line, do you follow? So that these discounts and so on, mounting up, gradually would take the price of the service down below the cost of the service. And what we gained out of it was the recognition of the fact that there was this tendency and that it required an extraordinary effort to hold a price line once set. And so we can make that extraordinary effort.
We’re now—my desk is covered with cable traffic and telex traffic right at this minute which is readjusting this whole situation. But the public in the meanwhile has been informed that all organizations have fallen back to their 1964 prices, and they’re at this moment mailing an HCO Policy Letter out to the public at large which returns to their 1964 prices.
So that was the end of that. And we just wiped out the engram, you see? The basic idea of the 1964 program was not pricing. The basic idea of it was simply that we take all membership monies and all book monies, and we put them in a special account and then we use that for advertising Scientology and Scientology books. And that was the basic idea. And to that became added, then, pricing complexities and so forth by this person’s objection and that person’s objection, don’t you see, and counselor action of this kind or another It got into a pricing mess. Well you see, the basic idea is quite sound and will, of course, be followed. But the pricing situation and so on was what was out, and that was what caused the January—February slump of this year in most organizations.
And I—right now, as I say, I’ve got a desk covered with the most incredible figures, which are the most incredible departures from anything ever reported before, you ever saw, because I sent the HCO Secretary this morning in every org in the world down to Accounts to ask Accounts, ”What is on the invoices of 1964?” Not what’s in the literature, but what’s on the invoices. And I tell you the things that are on the invoices would fry your hair, see? One month of training: Ten rand. Oh, yes! Marvelous. Yes, that’s what it was. So, of course, the public was suddenly confronted with this tremendous price jump, and this get—made them all very nervous and so on.
But it’s very interesting to read the Ad Comms. Here’s the boy on the ground. See, you read the Ad Comms and all the Ad Comms ever hit were locks. They never said there was a price jump in January. They said, ”Well, price changes are what drove things down. The fact that we changed some prices drove things down.” You see? That’s not true. The fact that we increased prices 400 to 1,000 percent is what drove things down!
Now of course, we can actually retain those 1964 prices and just fool everybody, see? All I’ll do is re—tailor the service to fit the money, and that will be that. It takes some gymnastics, but it’s held up the release of your org board because I was not about to release an org pattern of some kind or another which might require adjustment, and instantly released, instantly adjusted—the devil with that. So until I got this whole situation, this basic engram, cleaned up and figured out, I knew I’d better not go ahead and publish that org board. Now I can go ahead and letter the thing. But it’s quite, quite laughable when you get to thinking about it.
I suppose a Registrar hearing suppressive Joe and suppressive Pete, and so forth, walk in and say, ”Oh, the people are bhal—hmho—rorra?’ you know, and so on. He’s being asked for ten shillings for a week’s co—audit, you see or something. And, ”Oh, that’s too much money! And blah! blah! blah?’
And pretty soon, she gets the idea, ”The public will not pay any money,” see? ”Well, let’s see, how can I covertly reduce the price?” you see?
So in a casual conversation in a coffee shop, you see, with the Assoc Sec, she says, ”Everybody thinks that…” you get the idea—she just passes on the same engram, you know? ‘And therefore the HAS Co—audit and so forth really ought to be priced a shilling.” You see? Well, that’s fine, but you can’t have an Instructor there. Do you follow? So this sort of a tendency—this sort of a tendency had to be spotted and cleaned up. It’s something that you should guard against very carefully in your own individual activity and so forth.
It’s very amazing, but I can go back over the years on the subject of prices and pricing and I find this peculiarity also isolated out: In those orgs where I was functioning straight on in direct management and so on—in those orgs, staffs always made good pay. You can go back and verify that. That’s Washington, London in the days when I was riding them straight to and close to and so forth. You look at it; it’s above the average of what they would get on what’s called fixed pay. In other words, their unit pay was above their fixed pay. Now, when I moved oft you would say offhand, ”Well, management wasn’t so good; it was more careless.” No, when I moved oft somebody changed the prices. See, they would figure some method.
I’ll give you an idea. This idea of scholarship. Scholarship was something that was handed to the field auditor to give to a friend. You see? Now this was a very happy thing, because the first genus of it is, of course, he wants somebody to help him where he is, so he gave this scholarship which he was sent as a field auditor—he just signed it and handed it over to somebody he wanted trained. Therefore, that person could be trained cheaply and go back and help the field auditor.
Now, that line collapsed up to the front corner of the Registrar’s desk, so that anybody who walked in the shop is just dealt this scholarship, see? You got it? See, it was never intended for that at all. It was intended to help out the field auditor and it had very little to do with money. It just had to do with the fact that this bird who the field auditor wanted to have help him, you see—this guy could be sent into the org very cheaply. And this guy in the field, you see, why then he had somebody to help him who was trained and it wouldn’t break their finances to get going in that immediate area. And that was what the scholarship was all about.
See, but it got upgraded more and finally got up to a recognized discount. And then it moved up on the Registrar’s desk and then, of course, these things just got dealt. Well, of course, that immediately cut the price. I think it was something on the order of—the price of an HCA Course in London was seventy—five pounds and the—scholarship or something like that, cut it to thirty—six pounds. So then it’s—the price of an HCA in London, reported at seventy—five pounds was in actual fact thirty—six pounds uniformly. Now do you get the picture, see? It was never sold for seventy—five pounds.
Now, why anybody would tell the public that an HCA Course was seventy—five pounds while as a matter of fact it was always thirty—six pounds, see, I wouldn’t know. That would be a wonderful way of knocking business apart, see? Gorgeous, see? You say, ”Our prices are very high!” to everybody out in the field, you see, and so on. ”Well, we have very high prices!” But the second somebody comes in, they say, ”Have you got ten cents?”
So I—I’m very happy to have run this engram and it’s in the process of running out now and the preclear is doing very well. And I’m very proud of the preclear for sitting there quietly now and answering up. I’ve never had anything answered up so smart in my life as it was just last night when the telexes flew out of here asking for the vital data and actually it’s all sitting on my desk and has been there for hours. In other words, they really answered up on this engram. So that was real good.
Morale in organizations is out through the roof. I mean it’s in terrific shape. I’ve never seen morale better because one of the things is I’ve been telling them to do this and to do that and to do the other thing and they’ve been getting Sec EDs and they’ve had a heavy policy—letter line during all this period. There’s been lots of policy letters, but they all refer to the new organization, you see?
These policy letters are simply being put with them so that they won’t be in the dark when they get their new org board. And they’ve been running not on policy letters, but on Sec EDs. Well, I just skipped the policy line, and although you’re getting policy letters, what you’re doing is the Sec ED, see? And the policy letters go into effect when the new org board .
But anyway, they’ve managed to look under the corner of these policy letters and look at some of these figures and department and division numbers and so forth on them, and they managed to sort of put together what the org board must look like, don’t you see?
But they’re running on the Secretarial Executive Director Now, Secretarial Executive Director is an issued by air letter or wire or cable or telex which is simply issued to HCO. HCO types it up at once in the form of an order, and stamps it as official and posts it or circulates it through the organization and that operates as an immediate order
As a matter of fact, something could happen at eleven o’clock in the morning in an organization, and usually by three or four they could have a Secretarial Executive Director out on it if things were really running hotter than a pistol, you see? So there is no such thing as a ”remote management.” It’s not very remote. It’s right up there. These Secretarial Executive Directives are issued for all organizations or for one special organization. In other words, you can issue one for Saint Hill only, let us say, or for Johannesburg only or Los Angeles only and then you can issue a general one.
The other thing which they had done in—throughout organizations was quite marvelous. They had not complied with an order last autumn to compile all their mailing lists and to cull through all their invoices and get their organization mailing lists up. And very few had done anything about this. So when we started to send out Auditor 8—which is, by the way, quite an issue—when we started to send this out we asked for addresses for all their inactive and active lists.
Give you an example: Auckland reported eleven hundred names on their mailing list. For a Central Organization? Eleven hundred names? What’s this? Their congress list? See? And Johannesburg, which has been having a dreadful time and so forth, reported five hundred names. Five hundred names? We just never heard of these figures, don’t you see?
And you know, it’s ”what wall?” because we have this datum in our background: That when the London list of about six thousand—I’ve forgotten the exact figure—it was something like six or eight thousand Certaintys going out to six or eight thousand people, you see, each month. When that was cut to save money on the magazine, see—”Magazine mailing cost very expensive, you know. We’ve got to save money”—when that was cut to seven hundred names, secretly, all of a sudden London’s business hit the skids. Nobody walked in the front door That was it! And when I finally got back to England and picked it up off the ground, it was twenty—two thousand pounds in the red and going into the red faster every minute. And boy it took me a year and a half to put that organization back together again. I picked it up and got it going again and kicked it into line and we eventually put it back up where it could stand. But that was just because seven hundred names was the only mailing, you see?
Now, you get out a bunch of promotion or information or data and then you find you’ve only got an audience, you see, of maybe five hundred. That’s nothing! See, that’s exactly nothing. So they’re culling through their addresses now and they’re culling through their invoices.
And New Zealand went back through its past invoices for its mailing list—you see their names all appear on their invoices—and they’ve picked up three thousand just like that and will be up to four, they think, before they’re through. There’ll be about four thousand names. Well, that was actually the field of New Zealand. Well, of course, that’s got to be much higher than that, and I’ve set them some various figures and other ways of doing this and so on. They’re gradually building these things back up again.
The only trouble we’re having, a little bit of trouble with Johannesburg. Johannesburg keeps insisting they have got all of their addresses and so forth. No, an organization couldn’t be—couldn’t have lived over those years and still only had five hundred names, don’t you see? It couldn’t have. So we’re about to do a terrible thing to them. We’re about to send for all of their invoices ever since they’ve been in operation, by air freight. We’ll tell them we’ll give them to them back. But either they don’t have any invoices at all—see? There’s another fib there.
What we’re operating on—Johannesburg will do all right and they’ll survive—mostly because I said so.
But here’s the main point: is over a period of time, I tried to—I just dropped everything, I think, in 1963, January 22nd, when there was a considerable amount of governmental attack and so forth. I just dropped everything, and in the ensuing year, why, I did what would have amounted to maybe ten years of normal research. Pushed it right straight up to R6 materials and so I could look on the other side of it and see where we went with OT, you see? I did nothing but that.
I just said, ”To hell with it. Go ahead,” I said, ”Go broke. Die. I don’t care.” See? I know this: that there’s only one answer to government attacks, see, and that’s to complete the research. That’s the only thing they could do us up with—they get us so involved one way or the other that we couldn’t end the cycle on the research line to a total, finished, OT product, see? So that was it. And of course, we’ve been paying for it, because I came back on the Bridge, you might say, in April of 1964. And I had all the material there. I didn’t bother to round off all the material. As some of you R6 students notice, the material is not cut or edited in various places. It’s all there, but I didn’t bother to polish up the material or finish up the line or anything like that, because now it was in a shape where it could be finished up and would finish.
And I went ahead, then, into the field of management and started in on organization to save the bacon of some of these organizations who had begun to slip. And they had slipped! And that inattention for that period of time was, of course, dearly paid for But nevertheless we’re bringing that right out into the open now and straightening that on up. It was a calculated risk. I knew very well how far they could go.
It’s something like you’ve got two kids, one sliding off one side of the boat, one sliding off the other side of the boat—calculated risk of which one do you save, you see, knowing very well that you can reach three feet deep in the water for the other one and get him by the collar before he goes down the third time, don’t you see? It’s that type of calculated risk and so on. This was—this has been very tight and very, very, very closely played in the last couple of years, and they lost. Now we’ve just got the thing of straightening up orgs.
But it was very funny to have a great big engram sitting in the middle of the recovery line. That’s of course why they didn’t recover fast. There was this big engram sitting there, hidden, unsuspected and so on.
The main difficulties that you run into in handling Scientology, and so forth, are not with Scientology organizations; they’re with the public. And the poor organization sits there and wherever the public impinges upon the organization, you can count on that point enturbulating. That—you’ll know exactly where an organization will erode. It’ll erode exactly at the point where the public impinges upon it, you see?
Well now, this is very, very curious. How we got this far, I’m sure I don’t know. There was good luck and good management and a lot of dedicated work by staffs and that sort of thing, and they’ve—they’ve really done a fine job. Having scolded them and snarled now about their covert pricing, don’t think for a moment that I’m mad at any of them because I’m not. I see exactly how it arose.
But at those points where the public hits or where they impinge will be the most enturbulated points. And it is the public which is in a confusion and we’re trying to put a stable datum called a Scientologist or an organization, you see, into the middle of this confusion. And frankly, an individual cannot stand alone with Scientology. He will just get knocked appetite over tin cup by the public. I can tell you that by vast experience—vast experience. If he’s not backed up organizationally—if he doesn’t have an organization—then he can’t get off the launching pad, get his case gains and so forth up the line. Because, of course, every Scientologist in the world and every organization in the world is connected with a suppressive thing called the society. Do you see? So they’re going to go appetite over tin cup, bang, if they are left all by themselves to fend.
Now, you take one of your pcs and you send him back home, and he was bright and shining and so forth. The chances of your picking up that pc, bright and shining in just another month or two months in the same condition as he left your session and so forth are so remote as to be nonexistent.
That guy is going to be batted! He’s going to lose part of that gain. This is the frog who climbs up three inches in the daytime and falls back two inches at night. And it’s that chug—chug type of advance which you can count on your pc making. He will make it to the degree that he continues to have confidence in you, oddly enough; even though he’s a long way away from you, he’s now got confidence in you. He’s got ARC with one human being in the world. Do you see? That’s his auditor I’m talking now about a field situation.
Well now, that auditor is being knocked around, of course, because he is a public front gate. Now, if he can’t himself lean back against a stronger entity, such as an organization that will support him, why, he once more gets knocked around. Now, if the organization once more cannot lean back against a stronger entity—a larger organization, you see—why, it gets unduly knocked around. And then, of course, the larger organization with good handling of all organizations is a pretty big organization, see? And that way, why, you can lift man up by his bootstraps. You can get this thing off the launching pad. But you are dealing in a psychotic society.
There are thirty—two levels below zero. The average public is at least fifteen levels below zero at an average. And neurosis starts in at ten levels below zero. Neurosis only goes a few levels and then it’s psychosis. Psychosis is an inability to observe, an inability to be aware of anything but the wrong thing. And that’s your public.
And I took a look at it the other day. And I’ve had two interesting experiences in the last year, personal experiences, that you yourself may someday run into.
When I first had a total reality, last year sometime, on the exact character of the reactive mind, of exactly how it was there and exactly what it was calculated to make an individual do, I just said, ”Oh nooo!” And I sort of sat down and I looked at that, and I thought, ”Ah, that’s just too gruesome.” It was a sort of an ARC break. And I said, ”Now, if anything—it—the truism is if somebody is shocked by something (and this is quite commonly true) if someone is shocked by something, it—normally there’s something wrong with what he’s shocked with.” Don’t you see? So it was—that rule applied to this. I said, ”Well, I must have something wrong with the structure that I have got here for the reactive bank.” So I promptly went all over it. Suppressed it good. ARC broke it. Turned on enough somatics to blow your head off and so forth, and then finally ran out all the suppressions and challenges on the thing, and that was still it.
The shock was not actually with the reactive bank, but the pretenses that had been made about the character of man. And amongst those pretenses is, ”Be glad you’re neurotic.” And I thought, ”My God! Something that makes a man an obsessive murderer, and he’s got to have this in order to live or be artistic?” Ughhh! And it was a considerable shock to finally confront this thing called a reactive bank and see exactly what it consisted of and exactly what trash one had been led to believe was vital and valuable in the business of living because it couldn’t make anything but bums, criminals, dogs, don’t you see? And it was a shock! It was a shock. And I got over it in about forty—eight hours and so forth and finally said, ”To hell with it.”
And as a matter of fact my case has gone—I’m having an awful time trying to get you the data right now. I’m trying to hold onto the case long enough to get it plotted. But it’s blowing. And I now can’t get a tone arm to rise. And I’m afraid that just behind that the needle action is going to go. There’s plenty of mass there and there’s plenty to be run out there. There’s plenty of this and that to be handled. You understand? But it doesn’t have enough effect. Do you understand?
For quite a while now my cognitions—”Oh, so that’s why people. . .” you know, had no cognition of ”This is why I am…” That has gone sometime since. I used to have a ball with that. ”Oh, that’s why I so—and—so. Oh, yes. Mu—mm!” I haven’t cognited like that for ages. But I’ve been very carefully holding the bank there in order to get you the exact proper plot, see? And I can’t hold it there. It’s disintegrating, and it’s gotten now to a point where the tone arm won’t rise and it’s sitting down around the Clear read and the needle looks awful funny. It’s very floppy. Reads very well. This stuff reads nicely still.
I know the symptoms. First the tone arm action goes out and then the needle action goes out when you’re really flattening something. Don’t you see? First you lose the tone arm action. Well, that’s gone. And what I did was contact the fundamentals below the GPMs, and they’re what’s blowing. And I’m trying to plot the GPMs when I don’t have to run them. And that’s quite serious. Of course, it’d ruin somebody to do this. You know, I mean, you bypass all the GPMs and try to run out the lower stuff He’d go colder—he’d feel like he was in an icehouse and the somatics would tear him to pieces and so forth. But you actually, theoretically, could run the bottom pinning out of the bank and the rest of the bank would disappear Well, unfortunately I contacted the bottom pinning and the rest of the bank is blowing. I can’t stop it blowing. So if you never get a complete plot on this, why, you know what happened.
It’s not that I’m in fabulously marvelous shape at the particular moment—handling all this stuff and working day and night on it and that sort of thing. But the main—the main thing about it is, it doesn’t have any particular effect—it’s having an effect on my body now. The masses move in against the body and make an impression on the body, and I know that, and I can feel that and I can see these things and that sort of thing.
I haven’t got any time track anymore. And that’s awfully disorienting. I miss it, miss it terribly, I can assure you of it. It’s like missing the tin cans after you’ve eaten. You sort of say, ”What the hell happened to the tin cans? Huh? Where’s the garbage?” But whereas previously I used to be able to think of, ”Well, now let’s see. What did I read in such and such a text at such and such a time,” and so forth, I’d get a beautiful picture of it—gorgeous, you see—and even be able to read it and so forth. Nah, I don’t get any picture anymore. I just know what it said. And it’s disconcerting only if you look at it in retrospect. Seems perfectly normal, but you look at it in retrospect—you say, ”Well, some somatic like that would come from some cracking big engram.” See? So you say, ‘All right, where’s the engram?” There’s no engram there, you know? A GPM that’s half discharged sitting in front of you, see? And you say, ”Oh, that. Oh. Well, where’s the picture?”
Or you—sometimes you will notice the fact—the tail end of an engram, see, and it’s sitting down on top of a GPM that hasn’t been contacted or plotted, don’t you see? And you say, ”Golly, look at that g—.” Of course, you remember what it was all about, but—it doesn’t leave you in a mystery—but you haven’t got a nice billboard picture of it anymore, don’t you see?
Now, the funny part of it is you could turn around and make a picture of it. See? You could—you could turn around and make a picture of it, and you could probably even put it on automatic and hold it there, don’t you see? Next day you say, ”What the hell am I doing with this picture?” Throw it under the bed, you know?
But pictures of course are completely unnecessary for any kind of a recall at all, which is probably about the only change there has been from the definition of a Book One Clear The other change is that a Clear apparently is the—oh, not apparently; it’s true—he’s the original electric eel, so on, and apparently affect physical objects without half trying in that state. That is to say, you can warm something up or something. This isn’t phenomena that you would consider even very good phenomena; I mean, it isn’t very advanced, don’t you see?
Now, you can see very easily that throwing a lightning bolt couldn’t be very much of a trick. It merely depends on practice in holding your position. If you could hold your position very accurately, why, you could throw a lightning bolt that’d probably char the Empire State Building. But that’s beside the point. That’s just—that’s just theoretical.
What you’ve got here in actual fact is that things—that by staring at things you can make them warm, and things like this, you know. You pick up a—here’s a glass with some ice in it, you know? You stare at it for a few minutes and you haven’t got a glass with ice in it. It’s the warmest Coca—Cola you have ever had anything to do with, don’t you see? This is—this is very, very low—scale phenomena. It’s just monkey business. But there isn’t—I was just giving you the departures.
On the one hand the eidetic recall and that sort of thing, considered desirable and so forth, actually vanishes. You just get knowledge. And you can put it back there so you can read it again, but why? Do you see?
And the other thing is that there is an energy phenomenon which was not forecast in the first book. I’m just bringing you up to date on the data. There’s energy phenomena—is forecast—not even mentioned until two or three years after the first book. Then we began to mention energy phenomena of some kind or another But you apparently can do various things in this particular direction. It’s a long way to go. You start reaping benefits from this sort of thing way before you start reaching any kind of an ultimate condition. And those benefits are sometimes quite amusing.
You suddenly realize that you no longer have ”bang—bang,” whatever it was, you see? And you say, ”Why, I’m not—and as a matter of fact, I haven’t had it for a month.” You know, negative gain. You stop hitting yourself on the head with a hammer and then you pass up into your gains. In other words, the basic phenomena of case gain is negative gain. It’s apparently a negative gain which also takes place in terms of positive ability. And the ability seems very natural to you, and you don’t miss the headache. See, on the one hand you don’t miss your headache, and on the other hand, why, you don’t question the fact that you have regained an ability.
So people going up the line like this are not in a case of startlement or ”Golly, look how much better I am!” you know, and ”Gee, yeah! Gosh! Yeah! Boy, am I getting wonderful!” you know, and so on. They’re not in that state of mind at all. If a pers—you saw a person in that frame of mind and saying those things and so forth, why, you begin to wonder if he hadn’t hit an end word that says ”wonderful” or something, you know?
On the one hand he takes his renewed abilities for granted. His new energy level—that is to say his new ability to act or move or reason or ferret things out—he takes that all for granted, you see. That’s just natural. See, and it’s been natural for a day, you know? And—but it’s just natural. And on the other hand the hole in his stomach and the pain in his back and so forth, these things are gone and of course, like mother-in-law, you don’t want her back. But you wouldn’t think of it coming back because you haven’t got them. Do you follow?
So, you see, on the one hand you have an undetected negative gain because it’s a gain by absences, and on the other hand you have an undetected increasing ability because it’s natural—because it’s your ability anyhow. There’s nothing unnatural about the two actions so an individual sometimes has to get down and think rather hard. And you say, ”Well, have you had any case gains lately?”
And he’d have to think about it, and he’d say, ”Well, yes, I’ve had some case gains lately.” Yes, he knows that.
”Well, what were these case gains?”
”Well, let’s see.” He sort of has to mock up what was wrong with him, you see, last week. What was wrong with him last week? Let’s see, what did he have last week? What was he moaning and groaning about last week? Well, it’s hard to remember because, you see, he doesn’t have to worry about moaning and groaning about it again, because he knows it isn’t going to happen to him again. And he suddenly remembers, ”Well, since last week I’ve been able to see. Yeah! Yeah, that’s right. I couldn’t see before last weekend. Yeah, I’ve had a case gain.”
But it’s taken for granted, and that is the factor you want to look for in case gains. If you think as an auditor your pc should always be patting you on the back in a high degree of euphoria, that’s just what it is—euphoria: meaning gleeful happiness about something, you know? ”Oh dear, you are a wonderful audi—!” I always look at a pc when he starts telling me about that, man. ”Oh, you are a wonderful auditor You are so magnificent. Oh, auditor I worship you!”
”What the hell have I run into here?”
And one of the things I know about it is that in three days it’s going to collapse. That’s a—that’s a bank phenomenon and it is simply going to destimulate. You know, everything destimulates in from three to ten days ordinarily, and so on.
I remember the first pc that ever did this to me, you know? I felt rather uneasy about this, you know. They felt so ”wonderful!” you know, and I ”Ooooooh,” you know, ”What is this?” And three days later that pc couldn’t have been scraped off the pavement.
But anyway, your negative gain proposition makes it sometimes rather difficult. But sometimes, now and then, you will get a positive mechanical phenomenon which is suddenly called to your attention. You say, ”This tone arm doesn’t rise anymore”—like I just told you a few minutes ago. This tone arm is blowing down now only 2.5. That’s a blowdown. The needle throws a dial wide at sensitivity 2 but returns.” A meter doesn’t act like that, see? You—suddenly, you will get—you’ll get an outside or external measurement, you see? Probably there are lots of these things.
You’ll probably get up along the line and get Clear as a bell so they ping you and they—you’ll ring for hours, and you’ll be talking to somebody rather excitedly and explaining to them how you really don’t take all the garbage cans and put them in the basement; that you put them outside. And he won’t quite understand what you’re talking about, and then you realize that the person has got a red flush on his face. Person is quite feverish, as a matter of fact. You’ll suddenly say, ”Oh, I shouldn’t talk to him quite that sincerely.” And say, ”Well, that’s all right. Just remember after a while—you know, put the garbage cans out back,” and you go walking out. You go on talking to him very much longer, you’re going to have a fried Homo sap. You got the idea? Be too much for him.
And you’ll, in other words, get an external measure. See, that will be the external measure of the thing, see? You’ll be running a machine and this machine will be—not firing on something, you know? ”And so it’s not firing on this and so on and that’s that and so forth. Ooooh, it’s just that. That’s it.” Then the machine purrs off and you sit down and you say, ”What the hell did I do?” See, you get the external phenomenon sometimes feed back on you.
But you begin to be able to perceive external relationships and see the difference in their relationship to yourself between the reaction of things to yourself and so forth. You’ll notice such a thing as you’re talking to a group of people and they’re all listening to you very nicely and they’re all very interested and very cheerful with you and so forth. And you’ll notice one of them starts to talk to the same group and they don’t listen. Got the idea? They start chattering amongst themselves. He’s saying things quite as interesting as you were saying.
Well, what’s this? You sort of scratch your head. And you could say—be very reasonable about it and say, ”Well, he isn’t as popular as I am.” Ah, let’s not pat yourself on the back so hard. His communication level isn’t as high as yours. You see, you’re probably going out on three, four, five communication channels simultaneously, see? He’s going out on one vocal communication channel. Do you understand?
I mean, you’re starting to run into some other factors that you don’t quite yet have a grip of. You don’t quite know what these things are but you notice that there’s a difference, see? You notice there’s a difference between you talking to somebody and another person talking to the same person, don’t you see?
And you’ll notice all of a sudden that your room is neat and didn’t used to be. You might notice this comparison, don’t you see? But everything seems to be in apple—pie order all the time.
Then you begin to notice that you’ve got more time, but then you’ll also notice that you haven’t got enough time. You begin to notice something is wrong with your time factor And that’s because you’ve noticed other people acting in the same time span, and you yourself are acting in a slightly different time span than they’re acting in. In other words, your perception of a second has become different than their perception of a second, don’t you see?
This doesn’t throw you into any disagreement; it’s just something that you see. You just notice this.
And these things will flick across your awareness or consciousness—oh, every few days or few weeks you’ll run into one of these things, you see? And they aren’t all good. They aren’t all good. You maybe have not looked at some sphere or some dynamic someplace in existence. And you just have never looked there. And then you will look there. And you say, ”Oh, no!” and you’ll feel sort of ill and for a moment, you know, you feel sort of like withdrawing, you know, and don’t want much to do with that. Don’t you see? Then you begin to look it over and you understand it better and so on, and you very rapidly get familiar with it.
But you get little starts—little shocks. ”Well, how in the name of God could they be so cruel as that!” You see? You’ve never noticed that there’s a tremendous cruelty going on in some section or another You’ve not been aware of the fact that that is apparently standard behavior in that activity. You say, ”Wow!” Shocker
The other big shock that I had was just a very short time ago. I sat as innocent as could be. I was happily plotting away and working out the logical reduction for common denominators of behavior, and I found out the common denominator of behavior was degree of awareness—which you can put down if you want to as a very interesting datum. It’s the degree of awareness is the thing in common to all life.
In other words, there is no level called ‘Aware” see, or ‘Awareness.” That’s—it’s degrees of awareness. And the difference between Person A and Person B, regardless of the other phenomena, is their degree of awareness, so that A is not as aware as B or something of that sort, don’t you see? Or he’s aware of different things. And then man as he advances up along the line therefore goes over across certain points. There are certain things of which he would become aware in order to get a case advance. In other words, if you skip one or two or three of those, then he can’t become aware of this higher one.
So I was just plotting it all the way down to the public. I was plotting this scale of awareness. Which is what it takes—you know, your old Know to Mystery Scale and your sub—zero Tone Scale and all that sort of thing—I was using this kind of thing and running into these things and replotting it and straightening it out, trying to get this Bridge down to Homo sapiens.
You see, you’re not aware of the fact that you’ve advanced anywhere along the line particularly. You’re hard at work, and you’ve got a lot of things to do and a lot of responsibility and that sort of thing, and you’re just working along, and you don’t—aware that you’ve been opening a gap. There’s a gap occurring behind you. See? You’re not noticing these negative gains, you see, and these positive gains. And this gap is getting wider and wider and wider, and then one day you say, ”Well, happily, happily, we’re turning around. Let’s plot this down. Where does this preclear lie?” And you reach, and you reach. Say, ”What the hell? He’s not on any scale I’m doing here. All right, let’s do a theoretical scale of all of this, and let’s run it right straight on down, and let’s find out where this thing is!” And boy, I got thirty-two levels below zero.
Give you some kind of an idea—this is not the final scale at all. No figure to make. It’s just this is research in progress. But the twenty—eighth level below zero is criminal. See, so we obviously aren’t there because he’s still functional. He’s to some degree functional. See, he drives cars and smokes cigarettes and he does this. But there he is. He’s twenty—eight down from zero—so he—I can’t tell you that this is the—this only goes thirty—two. That’s all I’ve been able to strain my brain to look, see?
But I was figuring out these things, and I was replotting what we know in these lower sub—scales and upper scales and so forth, and what were the various phenomena meeting up with this, and I went into another one like I went last year I suddenly found myself looking at the human race and it was a horrible shock. I never had quite looked, see, not to that degree. And I felt rather weird. And I guess I went around in the doldrums for about twenty—four hours, you know? I didn’t like this.
I finally got used to looking at it, and I got over it to realize that you could process a dog, then. That sounds like a funny conclusion doesn’t it? And it didn’t compare the human race to a dog. But I had to immediately relate it because—look, look, look, I was dealing with the average public preclear at ten or twelve levels below communication. Well, it was more than that, but you’re at least ten or twelve levels below communication. Oooooohh! Well, how the devil are you going to give this individual an auditing command? How—how—how can you grapple with this thing at all? Don’t you see? And that was part of the aghastness. Is—well, if you haven’t got communication then your communication processes won’t reach him, and then no matter what auditing command you gave and so forth, why—you see, all of a sudden you don’t have an auditing command that you can give. Because you couldn’t give an auditing command because you haven’t got a communication line. So how in the name of common sense do you process him?
And Anton was talking last night about running Give Me That Hand on a dog. We got to talking about dogs. And that little Vixie that you see around here—of course, the society at the present moment is going to do to Vixie, if we don’t watch it, what they normally do to a psychotic who starts to get well. Because these bands through which they come up are not social bands! See? There’s a few propitiative, unaware, caved—in bands mixed up amongst them. They’re sort of resting places, you see? An individual is kind of inoffensive, you know? ”Yeah, yeah, yeah.” ”Well, he’s a good boy now,” you see?
They get psychotics this way with electric shock. One psychotic that had been displayed as a marvelous cure and so forth on a stage before a whole hall full of psychiatrists, and so forth—and a newspaper reporter asked him, ”Well”—you know, your newspaper reporter had more sense than the psychiatrists. He said to the guy—he said, ”Well, how do you feel about all this?” And the fellow said, ”Well, I bloody well learned to keep my mouth shut.”
So start to make a game—we had one like this in New York. Some field auditor up in New York would process this girl and bring her up to a point of where she was just tearing the whole place apart, see? And I mean literally, you know? And the family would instantly institutionalize her And they’d get her some shocks and knock her down again. Field auditor would get ahold of her, process her up the line again, you see? And she’d just start tearing the place apart, you see? And the family would institutionalize her and put her in a straitjacket, you see? And then she’d get out finally and the field auditor would get ahold of her—some other field auditor, see—and they’d run some process on her, and they’d get her up to this point again, you see? And they could never get her up to a point of going into what would be motion for that particular level, you see, without the family suppressing it.
So little Vixie is probably running into this band right now. Because I’m trying to teach Vixie how to talk. And of course Vixie’s idea of talking is quite boisterous. And she’s gotten so that she will talk about most anything but it’s always in the same bark but it’s very loud, and her increase in communication is expressed, of course, in the amount she will communicate and the duration of the communication, you see—the volume and duration. So she’s getting better in terms of volume and duration. Here’s this little dog—this very short, tiny little dog—little corgi; dwarf. She just has gotten from a point of, you know, of purring slightly and so forth when she is very pleased or something like this. Well, she’s gotten to a point now where she runs into Mary Sue’s room, looks demandingly at the mantle where she knows some candy is kept for her, you see, and then just barks like the devil! See? She’s saying, of course, ”Give me some candy, damn it!”
And I brought a cat up along the line once. Old John W. Campbell Jr. and so forth was really the source of this because he hated cats and he used to kick this cat, and this cat was a nice little calico cat, so forth. So I just simply processed the cat up to a point where the cat, every time John W. Campbell, Jr. would sit down, would go over and tear his shoe laces open, you see? And then if John made a motion with his foot, why, the cat would just score his ankles up gorgeously. And finally that cat had him in full retreat.
Actually, I brought the cat up to a point where the cat would obey commands which is almost impossible with cats and so forth. It came when you whistled and do various tricks along this particular line. It had very good recognition level and so forth. Very, very—self—determinism of that cat just went up through the stars. But it was just run on a reach and withdraw basis, and I got the cat to reach more, and got the cat to reach more, and got the cat to reach more, and got the cat to reach more, and finally the cat was coming uptone all the way.
I know these things about processing, then, an inarticulate person who is relatively out of communication. And when I say ”person,” just take it as what I intended: a complete short circuit. Because you’re looking at somebody who happens to be able to erect a machinery because of vocal cords to say things which are no more meaningful than a dog’s bark.
I know this brands one as a antisocial—type activity. No, quite on the contrary, because my worry was mainly about ”How do you reach them?” See? How can you—because I’d suddenly seen, ”My God, there—you know, that gap behind is too big! And how we going to bridge that gap?” Well, we’ve already got them. We’ve got Give Me That Hand. We’ve got Body Mimicry. We’ve got—we can perfect a bunch of reach and withdraw things.
But more important than that, we know now exactly what various strata the public will respond to. They will respond to such things as suffering. They will respond to various other things. Hope is very high scale. And worsening—there’s a whole band there where an individual would become aware of the fact that worsening could occur And all you’d have to talk to him about would be worsening. And this would perform a very, very difficult feat for an auditor if an auditor didn’t have this scale.
And therefore, the scale is going to take a little time to completely adjust. I’ll release it in an unadjusted form but when you’re getting down the line like that, you—these—these levels tend to jam. They’re hard to recognize: Which one is the upper level? Which one is the lower level? When you get down toward the bottom, exactly how do these things fit? Well, experience will tell exactly how these things fit and it—the—the pattern is more or less correct, don’t you see?
But you get way down there and you’re liable to have trouble. You know, skip a band accidentally. There is a band there and you’ve skipped a band. And frankly, it’s very easy to handle because it’s merely awareness. Of what can the person be aware of?
So if the person is at band—well, just some artificial number—band A, you see, why, then they would improve in case if they could become aware of band B, and then become—improve in case again if they could become aware of C, don’t you see? So it would merely be means of making the person aware.
Now, we could get carried away with this sort of thing and become far, far, far too enthusiastic, because you’ve got such bands there as hysteria. And this band ”suffering” is quite an interesting band. An individual gets up to a point where he can suffer And that’s fairly high—toned. A lot of institutional cases are lying around complaining mainly about the fact they can’t feel anything. Well, they must be just below suffering or they wouldn’t be aware of the fact that they weren’t reaching suffering.
So you’re processing in that particular character—without putting the person under duress. But this is why the psychiatrist when he has any luck at all with electric shock is being fortunate. You see, he’s just accidentally picked a person out of these many bands—picked the person up whose next band for increase is suffering. So therefore, he gives—makes him suffer and the person has a case gain. Do you follow?
But if you took a person who was up here on the upper, what we consider Scientology, bands and you made him suffer, he jolly well wouldn’t have a case gain. He’d become quite upset. Do you follow?
So anyway, looking at the broad panorama of the human race and so on, one is apparently on a gradient scale that goes down to nonarticulate unawareness of various lower, lower, lower, lower, lower degrees. In other words, the awareness is getting less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less, less. And I realized afterwards that we had it pretty well whipped. Because all you have to do—it is a Scale of Awareness. This is what you have to know about it, you see? It is a Scale of Awareness, and therefore, if you find a person anyplace on that Scale of Awareness then the next action which you have to do in order to give him a case gain is to make him aware of the next level above that.
Now, it doesn’t say, then, that you would necessarily sit down across from him and process him. Do you follow? You wouldn’t give him auditing commands or something. You might—you might—it might be as dim as you sit on—he—he’s sitting on a bed and you’re sitting on an—on a chair and whenever he makes an accidental move of some kind or another, you make the same move—something like this. This would increase an awareness, but that would be about as low as you could get with a process. And that would be a type of mimicry, you see? He does something, you do something. And therefore he becomes aware that he’s doing it because he sees you doing it. ”Hey, what do you know,” he said, ”I very often nod my head. Ah, ha, yeah. Ah, what do you know? Hm, hm, hm!”—case gain, see? He’s a little more in control of this thing.
Oh, but below this there would be—there’s all of the phenomena of awareness applies, and that phenomena is not the phenomena of communication but the phenomena of an increasing perimeter Awareness is always a matter of an increasing perimeter Now, it can increase into delusion, which is one of the things that bugs you. In other words, he can become more and more delusive, further and further away from him, see? Well, that would be an inverted awareness. So that sort of upsets one. Then he doesn’t quite understand what is this scale, see, called ”awareness”? Because this fellow sure is getting more and more delusive, and here is this person that thinks that every time he thinks the wrong thought, why, thousands of people die in Poughkeepsie, you see? Well, that’s certainly a long reach. Well, yes, it’s a reach into delusion. But then you have to state that what you mean by this is you’ve got to increase their awareness in the direction of sanity or reality.
In other words, you’ve got to increase their awareness in the direction of a real increase of awareness. That’s the thing of don’t invalidate, any more than you have to, a reactive bank, you see? Don’t worry about that reactive bank. Get the reality on the line. That’s an old rule. Don’t process the person in the direction of getting more and more unreal. I process him in the direction of becoming more and more real. So you see, having nightmares every night would be an improvement if he had it—had them only once a week. Do you follow?
So he—his—awareness would be changed by the degree that you could simply increase his perimeter of actuality or his perimeter of reality. So it still holds to a real perimeter And what do you mean by a perimeter? It means an expanding circle, concentric circle. You’d have a circle—a pc is, let us say, imagined to be standing in the middle of a circle which is one inch in diameter And by expanding the perimeter, you would mean, well, you now have a circle two inches in diameter, you see? And now we get—can get a circle that is one foot in diameter You’ll find that a psycho quite ordinarily is unaware of anything beyond the reach of his fist. That’s very peculiar but the real he—if anything is further away than the knuckles of his fist from him, he is not aware of it. Beyond that point delusion sets in. So what you’ve got to do is increase his awareness beyond those knuckles. Don’t worry about the fact that he can only reach to the knuckles, you see? Don’t try to do too much about that. Just try him—to get him to reach as far as an extended finger.
In other words, awareness has to do with perimeters, an expanding perimeter The person is more and more aware of more and more inside a bigger and bigger circle or sphere. Do you follow? Well, you’ve got an individual who could only be aware of what was going on, on his—well—around the skin of his face. Well, you might be able to get him up to a point of where he would be aware of a—of a—a wall which was close beside his head. Do you follow? Well, that would be an increased perimeter, see? You’ve only got that few inches from the thetan to the skin of his head, then we increase it that extra inch, see, by having him become aware of a wall which is one inch further away than his head. You got it?
Now, we could increase that again by another inch, don’t you see, and you’d get some sort of an… Well, I’ll give you an idea. In 8—C for instance, which ran with the person’s arm further and further away from him when he touched the wall. Do you follow that? You flatten a two—foot 8—C, see, and then you flatten a three—foot 8—C and then you flatten a four—foot 8—C. Don’t you understand? It’d just be how much further the walls were away from him and then you get an expanding perimeter of awareness.
Well naturally, he will come up through, then, the bank from the bottom right straight on up to the top, and oddly enough so would any living being. And there’s not much communication involved in it because in 8—C or Give Me That Hand or some such process as that, if he does not execute the auditing command—you speak it, but if he does not execute it—then you execute it for him with his body. And you can keep doing this, and he suddenly gets a communication here and he recognizes that there is some connection between your speaking and his acting, you see? And that would be a tremendous cognition. And unfortunately you could take many a grocer’s clerk out here and find out that that would be a great cognition for him. That there is—there is a coordination between the customer’s order and filling it. He’s doing it all the time but he’s never noticed this.
So the other thing we get is you can have action without awareness. And we’ve had that around for years. We’ve said, ”social conduct” and ”social machinery” and that sort of thing. Actually you can have action without awareness. Sounds pretty wild, but you could have—you could have a person who ate and dressed and went to the office and did work and so forth, and never knew anything about it. Didn’t know a thing about it. And we’d call to his attention that he was going to the office and going to work and nobody has even noticed this about him. A sudden sort of blankness would have occurred across his eyes, you see? It ticks the next level of awareness of some kind or another
You’d say, ”Well, a fellow like you day after day going to work and coming back home again must get pretty bored with life and so on.” It’s—all of a sudden you get a sort of a dull look in his eyes. ”Huh. Never occurred to me.” You called it to his attention that he’s doing a repetitive action. He’s never considered it a repetitive action before. In fact, he’s never noticed that he was doing it.
Well, you take a person with a bad tic; they quite often do not know they have a bad tic. And sometimes when you mimic a tic something—the tic vanishes because the person becomes aware of the fact he has a tic. They very often do this.
Somebody will come in who—with a—with a—with a broken leg and complain to you about his headache. He hasn’t noticed he’s got a broken leg. Do you see? And this is awareness. It is, what the individual is aware of and what the individual is doing are not the same thing, ever. You got it? That was why man couldn’t make any forward progress in the human mind in spite of fifty thousand years of headaches. Do you follow that?
Therefore, the observation of conduct of the person will not diagnose the person unless you have a little secret scale of your own. In other words, you’d have to know the secret of what the MEST universe dictates as a gradient scale. Man, of course, didn’t have that. So you follow this? An observation of conduct will not lead you to a solution of a situation.
I think it’s quite remarkable when you get right down and look at it because it’s one of man’s most fixed ideas that all you have to do is observe conduct and you know all about it! And he just jolly well keeps falling on his head with that conclusion. Homo sap can’t get anyplace as long as he’s got that stupid conclusion.
So that you get all their mental healing sciences and that sort of thing, so—called and so on over the years, were based on observation of conduct! That was, the doctor was supposed to observe the patient’s conduct and then diagnose that and then cure it accordingly. And in some instances they happily cross—sectioned something that illogically fitted with something else, and they would call it something because they could produce a slight effect upon it, don’t you see? But usually they just observed the conduct and labeled it and then, of course, they couldn’t do anything about it.
So what’s had ”mental science” (quote) absent on this planet, and in this universe, actually, has been this fact that by observing conduct you cannot establish an accurate diagnosis. And if you, uniformly, diagnose inaccurately, you can’t, of course then, have any sort of a remedy to apply to the situation. And if you did have the right remedy and did all your diagnosis by conduct, you would wind out never applying the right remedy to the person. You follow that? And that would be what the situation has been.
You cannot watch Joe Blink activities and then know that Joe Blink is a ”bang—bang” or know that he is a ”paranoid dipso dementia praecoxo,” see? Or a ”psychiatrico nutto” or something. See?
The reason this girl keeps going to the water fountain is she’s thirsty, you see? And you base this diagnosis on the fact that there’s a—there’s a ”gymnastico potto” is a firebug and is uncomfortable when they are absent from water And so this person is seen to be going to water rather routinely, so you say he’s a ”gymnastico potto.” You see?
No, that had nothing to do with the case whatsoever. The case happened to be thirsty. Case is stuck in an engram actually which is in the middle of the Sahara Desert, and they’re a member of the French Foreign Legion, see? And they know at that moment they are a member of the French Foreign Legion, and is awfully thirsty, and that their water bottle has run out, see? And the trouble with this person is this person can be aware of all—all that they can be aware of and so forth is privation. They can be aware of not having anything. See, that’s the diagnosis, you see? Well, they can at least have water. And the remedy of the case might take an entirely different thing than water or thirst or fire or something associated with water That’s just that. It’s just something else. But the conduct would not be a direct entrance to it. As a matter of fact that one is too direct.
Trouble with psychosis is it’s psychotic. It’s very hard to understand. But the moment that you grasp this one principle about psychosis and about neurosis and about other mental disabilities, and so forth, or about being a Homo sapiens, you get this as a stable datum and you’ve got it: That—don’t diagnose by conduct ever Don’t. Don’t draw any conclusion from conduct. This—just skip that, because that’s going to be a blind alley.
What you want now, if you see some conduct that you didn’t expect, then all you know at that moment is that you don’t know about something. See? But that is something to know! Now, instead of jumping in there with a bunch of pretended knowingness and say he’s a ”gymnastico psychatrico potto squigo,” you see, and ”That’s what’s wrong with the case, see?” with great pomposity and, ”Why, he’s a ‘gymnastico—potto,’ you know, and so forth. And you will find that written in the text of Mr. Wumphgulum, yes.” Damn it, the person is still in an institution! You get the—but this terrific false pomposity, you see, of giving them some beautiful label because they have some conduct or another doesn’t lead to a solution, and it’s bad science.
The physical sciences have gotten ahead because they long ago left the various schools of astronomy and so forth which said, ”There couldn’t possibly be an eighth planet because seven is the perfect number” That’s actually true in the—in the annals of astronomy. That statement was said. All kinds of wild things.
Well, when science departed from that and says, ”Well, when you don’t—when something isn’t working you haven’t got the answer” That’s all science had to find to become science. And from that moment on, why, the physical sciences have advanced by leaps and bounds. Because when they find something doesn’t work or the situation didn’t resolve and so forth, they don’t sit back with great pomposity and say, ”Well, that’s the Einsteinian ‘pocomoco.’” They say, ”Well, hell, that must be wronger than a three—dollar Confederate
note. Let’s see, what is the reason behind this?” See? ”What law is applying here?” you see? They have the advantage of having the workable thing right out in front of their face, and they can see whether it works or doesn’t work, you see? But you start substituting an authoritative utterance, you see, for a resolution of the situation, an—you can go mad, and that is psychosis. And that’s where the mental sciences were parked when we came along—right there.
Now, this goes further than that. When you’re trying to find out about some pc in order to run some process on the pc or straighten the pc out somehow or another, and you base what you do on the conduct of the pc other than his good and bad indicators—good and bad indicators, conduct: That’s the visible fact of are you going the right way or the wrong way? That’s just a few little road signs. But you base what you do on what the pc is doing and you’ll go—you’ll go round the bend right along with the psychiatrist.
This pc is nattering at you, so obviously conduct would indicate that you must have done something wrong. This is one of the hardest things that an auditor has to learn. The pc is nattering at him, ”Nah, I’ve had better auditors than you, and so forth, back in the co—audit. Nya—nya!” See? And we get all this mad dissertation and so on.
Well, if the auditor—can take that as an indicator, see? Now he knows that he doesn’t know. There is a datum there he doesn’t know. Just forget about the missed withhold aspect of it. There’s something he doesn’t know about this pc. You just ask this pc, ”Is there something about you I don’t know?” You don’t have to worry about the mechanics of missed withholds, you see? You’ve uttered the utterance which is true, and that’s the truest utterance. He is behaving in some way which you didn’t expect, so therefore, there is something about him you didn’t know!
Now, the remedy of the situation is, ”What about you didn’t I know, brother?”
”Well, nyah—nyah! Well—well—well, you could put it that way, and so forth. Well, I ate your lunch today. That’s why you couldn’t find it! Ha! Ha!”
So, when you see—when you see conduct that is not understood by you, don’t give it a label! Don’t give it a label; know this thing now—know this thing about that: Know that you don’t know. And learn to be humble enough to admit when you don’t know something. Otherwise you’ll just go on being authoritative and pomposity will rampant itself all over the place. Do you follow?
If every time you saw some situation that you didn’t understand and, because you had to maintain your dignity or your classification or something, you promptly said, ”Ah, that is ‘gumbo potto gymnastico,’ ye—e—s, hmmm,” you’re being a fool, because the situation isn’t going to resolve. That situation will not resolve. Because the only thing that keeps the situation from resolving is the unknowness or unawareness.
So if the scale of sanity, of course, is awareness all the way up, then the scale of aberration as you go down is degree of increasing unawareness. So the nuttier they are, the more unaware both that person and yourself would be regarding what’s going on! And the more unaware they get, why, the harder they are to handle because it is hard to get their attention long enough to find out what you don’t know! Not to find out something to know, but to find out what you don’t know. You understand?
You get into a tremendous blur of the ”don’t knows,” man, are skywide and deep, see? Your—when you got a person that’s way down at the other end
of this Scale of Awareness, why, the degree of unawareness, you see is fabulous! So just trying to get—you’re just trying to push at the person enough so that he will become aware enough so that you can find out enough to find out what you don’t know about the person, do you understand—would be the entrance point.
Now, the gain would be, is ”What can I now find out about this person, and what can this person find out about himself?” And by increasing that awareness scale as you come up the line of course the individual will get saner and saner and brighter and brighter and come back to battery and become more aware, be himself, and his old abilities will come back, and he’ll lay aside some umpty—ump trillion—trillion—trillions of pure mud. He all of a sudden will be himself
But as, of course, he comes up the scale and becomes aware of some—thing, he’ll hit various dynamic situations that he becomes aware of, see? And sometimes these are a little bit hard to take.
Sometime somebody who has been howling around about his family and how his family was mean to him and that sort of thing—one fine day wakes up to the fact that it’s a great probability that his family never even saw him in all the years he was with them, and that all of his propitiation and figuring and striving and struggling was all in vain because he was dealing with mama and papas, and sisters and aunts that never would have seen it if it had turned into a thousand dollar bill under their noses. See, they never would have become aware of Johnnie.
And when you realize how far one might well have taken his life off of its normal course in order to do something that somebody like that would approve of’ it’s a horrible shock to realize that such persons would never have noticed it to approve of it. And then this becomes even more complex as they very often would have approved of things that hadn’t happened at all. Give one a tremendous sense of unreality. ”Dear Johnnie, I’m so very glad you have been made a general lately.” And the guy was just dismissed with a dishonorable discharge, you know? It can get that gappy. Sometimes one doesn’t detect them and one sometimes falsely pretends on these things and accepts things or statements from people which have no bearing or reality on what is going on.
So this study of awareness of what can somebody be aware of is quite a subject. And what you—you have to eat humble pie, you see, to begin this subject at all. You have to know that there is something in the universe you don’t know, and that, for a person who is way downscale, is the most dangerous utterance that he could possibly make, because he’s already totally sealed off from everything, and if everyone realized how blind he was and so forth, of course, they’d just eat him up!
So he compensates for his unawareness by automatic mechanisms of pretense. And you’ll find some bird that’s way downscale like that and, my God, the things he knows that he doesn’t know are fabulous. And the last thing in the world he wouldn’t have courage enough to say, ”Well, I don’t know anything about that.” And yet he can’t resolve any situation until he says, ”Well, what do you know! I’ve got an area where I don’t know!” See, at that moment he can make a tremendous amount of progress because then he can start pulling on that area and taking a look at it, you see, and he’ll all of a sudden find something in that area that’d be quite surprising and quite interesting and quite necessary for him to locate.
So, when you see somebody behaving oddly, why, the first thing and really the only thing you know is that there’s something there you don’t know. There’s something both you and he are—there’s something you’re certainly unaware of and there is something where he is probably unaware that he is unaware of it. Now, he’ll cover that up with a pretended awareness which doesn’t exist and you get these various delusive things.
This becomes a very fascinating study, and you have to keep yourself very steady on this and you have to look at—look at—over a situation. And it’s going rahr—rahr—rahr—rahr dhu—dhu—dthu, bop, plop, you know, and it looks like one of Yellowstone Park’s geysers, you know, about to explode and so on. It’s going to explode. You don’t know. You don’t know what’s going on. But there is a way to know something about it. There is a way to know something about it. And this is quite a trick. After you’ve gone through the valley of despond and despair you can come up on the other side and here’s a—here’s a new trick. There is something you can know about it. About anything that you confront, there is something you can know! There is something you can know about that thing! You can know that you don’t know, and that is the first thing you should know about it.
So you know now there’s something about the situation that you don’t know. So, now you will take the action to find out and just in the process of finding out, the whole thing will clarify. It’s the most magical thing you ever observed in your life. That’s that first thing.
So there is something you can know about anything. There is something you can know about the internal government of Russia. Never read a textbook on it, never looked at it, nothing; but there is something you can know about it: You can know that you don’t know what it is. Now, knowing that you don’t know what it is, and so forth, why, you can get ahold of a little textbook or something and you can also know this: You can know that that guy doesn’t know either.
But here’s the amazing thing about aberration and here’s where you come in and where’s—here’s where this is very, very valuable: If you did find out, the internal government of Russia would either go Clear or collapse. That sounds utterly impossible, but happens to be true.
So running an engram out of organizations, running an engram out of the individual, running somebody Clear, and so forth, would be to simply continue to pull into view something he didn’t know about. And the only way you could fail to pull something into view and so forth would be consistently to suppose that you knew all there was to know about it and there wasn’t anything else for you to learn at all about this, because there’ll always be some curve on it.
Even though you knew the whole bank, the end words very often have become upside down and backwards and reconnected—although they will run straight according to plot, and so forth—the upside—downness and backwardness of the arrangements the way he’s got them squashed up will make quite a different situation. You don’t know what he’s got stacked up where. That’s one of the things you don’t know. Do you see? Well, you can find all these things out.
So, on the basis of it, this has been very well worthwhile. And becoming Clear, you might say, is a process of becoming more and more aware, and you become up to a point of where you also become aware of where you are unaware, and you see that rather quickly. And then when you notice one of those, why, you either decide that it is—you should find out or it doesn’t make any difference, you see, whether you do or not. And if it’s some area where you should find out, you can pull on it very quickly, and magically will appear into view the doggonedest situation that you never suspected before and when you pull that situation into view it quite normally collapses all by itself.
Now I suppose as some of us cross this band and get onto the other side, we start asking questions of the human race—we’re not quite sure what will happen. But that won’t excuse you from studying to get there on your own steam.
But a great deal of realiv—revelation does occur. It’s not always palatable; not always nice to find out these things—but the clearer you get, why, the shorter time you find it distasteful and the more familiar you can be with it.
Well, I hope it’ll help you out somehow or another in handling pcs and processing and understanding the human race to realize that they go thirty-two levels below zero and I don’t think I’ve hit bottom yet. We probably are merely to the upper class of the society. But then I’m just being snide.
Thank you very much.