GRADIENTS AND ARC
A lecture given on 1 September 1966

Thank you. What’s the date?
Audience: 1st of September, AD 16.
First September AD 16, Saint Hill Special Briefing Course. This lecture doesn’t have any title because I don’t have anything to talk to you about.
Well, I could talk to you about a lot of things. And there was a request that I speak to you about how to coach. And actually I’ll teach you how to coach this way: Anyone who doesn’t coach well should be labeled suppressive. Now, you can learn all about coaching.
Now, there is a lot of—coaching is an area of opinion and it’s an area of ”How do you go about it to do this and that?” Well, normally I go about it simply to help the bloke that I’m coaching and I try not to give him so many flunks that he quits. And I try not to give him so few that he winds up lousy, see. So I strike a happy medium and the number of flunks and the number of encouragements went… My interest is simply trying to make him sound and look like an auditor And if you follow that rule, rather than a bunch of mechanical rules, why, you will get there very well.
But I’ve had this question thrown at me now for a number of years, and you know it’s notably absent—the ”how to coach.” I’ve seen other people write up lists of how you do it and that sort of thing. But I don’t have a list of how you do it. I just do it. And I know that’s a risky line to go on, ”Well, you just do it.” In actual fact I can’t see anything very complicated about it, if you want to make an auditor You know how he ought to look. It’s pretty obvious how he’s flunking and flubbing. You know, fellow sits there and he says, ”Do fish swim?” You say, ”Ah, come on now, boy.” ”What preclear, from hell to Halifax, could ever hear that? Now speak up, man. Get it over here.”
”Well, do fish swim?”
”Now look, are you going to cooperate with me or not? That was a flunk.”
”Oh, you really want me to do something.”
”Yeah, that’s right. Stop talking in back of your head and start talking in front of your face. Now say it around me.
”Well, how should you say it?”
”Well, you should say it so I should hear it.”
”Ohh!” And that’s the level of entrance on coaching, see.
And you’ll find out—but in actual fact, any coaching can be improved. And I have stepped in in the old days, on session after session that was being coached and unwound the guy as a mixed—up auditor and made him audit.
Made him sound like an auditor on one or another of the TRs. It is merely what it says. If you yourself know what the TR is supposed to do, it’s very easy to coach it. Then there was other suggestions. I’ve forgotten what they were now. They were important, too. What were some of these suggestions? Very important. Let me see.
Was it how to be a course supervisor? Let me see, was that it? No, that wasn’t it. Oh yes. It’s ”How do I get Clear?” That’s the burning question.
Well, today—frankly, I’m always giving this to you as a gag—I don’t have anything to talk to you about, but actually I have nothing pinpointed today—I think you’re doing fine. I think things are rolling along pretty well, indeed. And the HOC in a mad burst of enthusiasm has just run itself out of pcs. Which, of course, was exactly what I intended. Now we’re going to run the Dissem Division, you know, a bit mad. But Qual’s statistic—Qualification’s statistic dropped, so with all the messed up cases there are around I should think they ought to be able to drum up some business, too. So you will probably get approached—the students probably will be approached and staff members and so forth. And that’s fine and by all means cooperate. But I would like to see more of the public approached.
I’ve noted something recently. I’ve noticed that there were several aberrated people in the broader bulk of humanity. I’ve noticed this. You have to have a quick eye, you know. But if you’re an expert, you can detect it. Fellow’s going like this, you know. Yes.
But anyway, Scientology has arrived at a very enviable point today and we’re—we’re holding—my heels are getting walked on right now on the OT Course. Clear, that’s all wrapped up. But the OT Course, that’s giving some trouble. That’s giving me some trouble, see. It isn’t giving the students any trouble, it’s giving me some trouble simply to keep my heels from being walked all over, you know.
You always—these times occur Every year or two, why, I get to a point where I’m just ahead of the hurricane, you know? People are right there and they’re waiting for that next bit, you know. Well, it takes them three seconds to run this next bit on the OT Course and it takes me sometimes hours to figure out what it is, you see. So the ratio is pretty good. But the last bit, the last important bit, it took me actually eighteen days to wrap it up and that was long and arduous. And it took me eighteen days to wrap it up—and the bit just completed—I mean the bit before last took eighteen days, and the bit just completed only took two days. So, the ratio is getting better, and my heels are less walked on.
Now, you recognize that materials at this echelon are not in actual fact denied to you out of any willfulness or the feeling that psychiatrists will pick them up and do something with them. They will eventually pick them up and do something with them. They spin. Hate to have to say it. But it is actually a matter of protection of the Scientologists and the public. You can get sicker than a pup on upper—scale material. The body goes creak and bango and so on. So you shouldn’t get in the idea that there is a bunch of security being applied, for some reason best known to somebody else, because the reason is simply that it makes people sick—and if not given proper protective security and so on, it would have half of the—well we would have the lower class staff, you see, out on their ears if it were flowing through the lines, and so on. And then people starting to audit it, very often need very careful supervision and direction or otherwise, why, it knocks them kicking. And those who have been through this, of course, they just toss this off This is nothing, of course. That’s right—it’s nothing.
But before they did I call their attention to when they accidentally skipped half a page of materials. And then went appetite over tin cup for about five sessions, before they finally got back to finding out what they did, you know? Or just accidentally turned the wrong page and glanced at the wrong thing and have the meter practically lock up and that’s it.
So, when you begin to estimate the velocity or ferocity of material, you have to estimate it against the power of the individual. Let’s take a wog out here. He’s running on about one—quarter of one grasshopper power, see, and he looks at a lock and he thinks that—well, let’s go back to Freudian analysis, see, let’s go back to way back. And for five years the psychoanalyst worked hard with his patient, in order to discover a hidden memory of a sexual attack of somebody waving a book with a naked woman on it before him, while he was a baby, you see. And they worked for five years and they finally found this and explained it all to the person, and so on. And they were spinning because these were so powerful as aberrative incidents.
All right, on the Dianetic course, you find the only thing that was wrong with 1950 Dianetics is we just kept throwing people in over their heads. After you’ve run a few locks, why you can face some engrams. Do you see? After you’ve run a few secondaries you can face some pain and unconsciousness. And it’s a matter of just that. So it is all gradients.
And you’ll find throughout Scientology, the gradient approach is a primary and regulating factor. And the gradient approach has been very, very important in this line of research. It is incidentally quite new. You’ll find it here and there. You’ll find it mentioned, and so on. How do you empty a grainery? Well, somebody will say, ”Well, how would a bunch of ants empty a grainery? One kernel of grain per ant, you see, in the line, and eventually little by little…” Well, that isn’t a gradient. That isn’t a gradient. The gradient would be the ant beefing himself up till he could carry the grainery, see. From one kernel to the granary. Now that’s the gradient.
There are jokes that go along with this, you know that illustrate a gradient. But a failed gradient is the fellow who was teaching his horse not to eat. And he got him taught so he didn’t eat, all right, but doggone the horse died before he could benefit from it. Now that would be sort of a misapplication, because he probably didn’t do it on a proper gradient, really. Then there is the fellow who has got the gradient and he was going to be able to pick up a bull. And so he starts in with a small bullcalf and lifts this bullcalf every day for a very long time, you see. Well, the joke is of course he didn’t have any processing, so he didn’t make it.
But the essence of a gradient is just being able to do a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more until you finally make the grade. And the gradient gets invalidated when you do too much of a jump, you know, you go from fifteen kernels to fifteen bushels all in one step, you see. No gradient, you know. Or you take too long to go from fifteen kernels to sixteen and one—tenth kernels. See, you do that in steps of one hundredth of a kernel, see. And the gradient is so shallow that the fellow gets bored to death, before he has any chance to improve on it.
See, so there are two gradients.
Now, this is less typical of life at large, than it is of a thetan. A spiritual being responds in this particular direction like a bomb. But a body doesn’t, because a body is—a body has limitations. It’s built into the stress and strain of the universe. Its legs can only stand so many hundreds of pounds, you see, before they snap. And the body—it is not good—not a good example—trying
to pick up a bullcalf every day until you can finally lift the whole bull, you see. That’s not a good example because it’s a gradient of a body.
Well, a gradient of a thetan is quite different. His power is probably very close to infinite and it can be walked up the line. Now I did just hit some stuff that threw my body back out of a chair. And I thought that was interesting, because I was confronting stuff and it didn’t bother me and I didn’t notice right away what was happening. Because it didn’t seem to me that there was that much stress and strain contained in it, do you follow?
Now, similarly, you look at a pc some day and you go and you do a wrong gradient. You can do too shallow a gradient—you can do too steep a gradient. Now you, up the grades from where he is, don’t necessarily react to the fact that it’s a steep gradient. You overlook this fact. You can’t see why he’s having a bad time answering that question, because you can answer it easily. It’s comparable to what you see in circus performers. You ever watch these acrobats and things like that—throwing themselves in the air and doing the wildest things, you know. Well, they’ve been trained from babyhood, you say, and so forth. But supposing somebody told you, ”Well, get up on that trapeze and balance by one heel, as you swing back and forth across the top of the tent,” and you’d say, ”Yulp.”
Well actually, you watch those chaps go up a rope without using their legs, they’re hand over hand up a rope, you know. And if you went out there and took hold of that rope, why, you would find out you would—not only wouldn’t go up it hand over hand, you probably couldn’t get yourself off the ground. But that acrobat, if he were trying to teach you—and he didn’t know very much about it—if he were trying to teach you something about acrobating, why, he would probably do something remarkable like, ‘All right, let’s get up to this trapeze, here, and I’ll teach you now how to time a trapeze.” And there you would be trying to climb up that rope. It didn’t occur to him that was a problem. See?
Well, that is the source of most failures on cases. Either too shallow or too steep.
Now supposing—and you’ve seen this one, too—supposing that acrobat, equally bad in instruction, said, ”Well, in the next couple of years we will teach you how to go hand over hand up a rope.” Well, your ultimate goal is acrobating, not going hand over hand up a rope. You figure you can learn this in two or three months at the absolute outside and you say you got to spend that long at it, why you become very, very tired indeed at just the thought of doing all of that to achieve only that, do you see?
So, when you’re handling a preclear, your failures are in actual fact—and in training—your failures are in actual fact, a violation of a gradient which can be tolerated by the person. And I always use a gradient which is just a little bit tough. I never use an easy gradient—I use it so it’s just a little bit hard all the way. It’s a bit of a strain all the way. But not a strain that gives failures. Just hard work.
Now in that wise, you have to estimate pretty well the individual student or the individual preclear. What is a strain to him? You find oddly enough, in wogs, that you can make an error—a great, great error—and you can actually assume that the person is at a level of gradients, simply because something doesn’t bother him. The reason something doesn’t bother him to do it, is because he has no reality on it at all. We used to run into this in 8—C. We would occasionally—where we had them touching the walls, that old process; CCH’s—and we would actually find people that could go through the whole thing just like a breeze. There was absolutely nothing to it, there was no change of any kind whatsoever—and they were just as aberrated as coots. And the whole point was, it was too steep a gradient. There was no reality on it. They didn’t have to confront doing it because they weren’t doing it. It was all on automatic. Life was on automatic. The walls weren’t there anyhow, so nothing was going to happen anyhow. So nothing mattered anyway. Do you see?
So you can be tricked sometimes into believing that you have achieved a proper gradient because the person simply has no trouble at this particular point, whereas they don’t have any trouble at that point because they have no reality on it either.
A fellow probably, who was unable to see lions and tigers, would undoubtedly have no trouble whatsoever walking through a cage full of lions and tigers. Except, of course, accidentally he gets eaten. But he—it doesn’t bother him a bit. He simply walks through the cage because there are no lions or tigers in the cage.
Well, you have to have a fairly good estimate of the degree and steepness of aberration in order to draw up some kind of an estimate of what gradient to apply to it. And now and then you undoubtedly will run across somebody who has no degree of response on the 0 Processes. You’ll find somebody—the 0 Processes don’t bite, nothing happens. This would be a rare action and you seem to be up against some sort of an impasse where you can’t make a Grade o Release. Well, the reason you couldn’t make a Grade 0 Release is either it is overrun or he isn’t up to it. It isn’t that you need more processes at Grade 0. If Grade 0 didn’t make a Release, well, then he already was one or it’s just completely over his head. He has never had any trouble talking to anybody because he has never confronted anybody and he’s never said anything, he just talks continually. So he hadn’t any trouble at Grade 0. Had no trouble with communications with anybody, because there’s nobody there. You see?
You could run into that kind of a circumstance. I think somebody that you took out of a spinbin, this person—undoubtedly you would find among such inmates (and I don’t tell you to go process such inmates but I’m just using it as an example) you would find amongst these people a lot of people who did a lot of talking but didn’t say anything and weren’t confronting anybody and it was quite obvious. Now it’s obvious when you know what it is and you look for it. You know what you’re looking for You’re looking for somebody who doesn’t have anybody there to talk to so he doesn’t have any trouble with Grade 0 Release, see. He doesn’t have any trouble with the process and he doesn’t make a Grade 0 Release, either You could find such a circumstance.
Now, this would be quite interesting. How do you undercut that? Well, if you look it over you will find out that communication has an anatomy and that communication only takes place in the presence of some reality, the ARC triangle.
So if you want to raise one corner of the ARC triangle, you can raise either of the other two. If you can’t approach communication, you can certainly approach reality, or you could approach affinity. Do you see? It’s obvious that there’s a whole series of processes that you could go downstairs on, that would raise the person’s communication level. You’d have to be thinking on your feet. Actually it’s more or less done for you. If you could get some—this person to audit a lock, something like that, why you would find out that you had undercut it already. Dianetic processing does undercut it.
Ordinary auditing of locks and so on, has been applied to psychotics with great success. And it goes way downstairs, because you see there doesn’t have to be anybody else there. They come up to finding out there is some—thing else in the world besides their own spin, or their own delusion, or their own hallucination. But they can audit locks and they can audit light materials.
Now, the reason why this was not successful earlier is that estimate on a gradient, you see, that estimate of a gradient was not properly made—the estimate was not made on the basis of ”what can he run?” Obviously the fellow in the institution is in a desperate condition, so you must then run something desperate. And that is the mistake that the psychiatrists make. We call that a Q and A: Question is the answer—the question itself is the answer to the question by perfect duplication.
So therefore, a person who is dramatizing this, of course, just does what is being done. And he gets a sort of a communication, that he is very satisfied with.
For instance, if somebody is jumping up and down, why if the other fellow jumps up and down, why there is some vestige of communication there. So we take this and instead of condemning it, we find that one of the very, very early entrance point is mimicry. But you don’t happen to need a psychotic in order to practice mimicry processes.
Mimicry processes are very interesting. And you can do them on subways and in buses and in stores, and so on. It’s very fascinating. You see some little kid and he can be a very, very young kid and you just run some mimicry, see. He smiles, you smile. That’s the tiniest point of it, see. But you happen to notice he’s wrinkling his nose at you, you know. He’s going like this, you know. So you go at him like this and he becomes very interested. A communication has been formed at once. As you get good at that, why you’ll find out that a child is very enamored with this. You’ll find out, oddly enough, that he likes you. And then you will find out of course that he has a pretty good reality on you if you could plumb that estimate.
For instance, if you were in a whole mob of people, he would pick you out. Now you would say of course, because he knows you. No, no. Because you’re real to him and the others aren’t. Knowledge and reality are the same thing. That is what is known is real. That which is, is. You know that philosophers of the ages have stubbed their toes and tripped up over this thing of ”What is reality?” until I have gotten more tired eyes, reading their text—books on that one subject than on any other subject I know anything about.
You take the questions of,, ”If there was nobody in the forest and a tree fell, would there be a sound if there was nobody there to hear it?” Oh, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Would there be a universe if anybody was in it? If nobody was in it would there be a universe? Could there be a universe with nobody in it? Is the universe you? Is all mind, mind, infinite mind? You know, I mean these preponderated propositions are merely a perpetuation of idiocy. Because reality is very easy. It’s merely what is. But of course that doesn’t fill up any textbooks.
Now the reality of somebody is the point of approach when you cannot attain Communication 0 Grade Release. There is the point. Now, affinity could also be a point of attack, but is usually one which occurs, rather than that. Reality is something you can do something with.
Now, what can you do with reality? Well, I’ll tell you what not to do with reality. He says, ”This room is full of spiders and they’re crawling all over me.” Now, the method of handling that which was used, BD—before Dianetics—and those who haven’t gotten the word still use this method. They’re more barbaric types, they can’t read, you know, and they don’t know the trend of the times. They’re stuck back in the nineteenth century Psychiatrists. These birds have as their sole approach to this problem, ”There aren’t any spiders on the wall. You’re crazy.” ”Now what you must do is face reality and realize there are no spiders on the wall.” Well, they just threw away their first gradient. The guy did have a reality on the wall to the degree that he mentioned there was a wall there.
Now, if you validate his insanity too hard, you’re liable to find yourself in trouble because you sort of fix him with a win. He’s been telling everybody about these spiders for a very long time and you say, ”Of course, I see them too.” That’s a lie, isn’t the truth and actually gives him an acknowledgment and rather sticks him with the win. And he knows you’re crazy, because basically he knows there aren’t any spiders on the wall, too.
But, let’s pick out of his sentence what he said. ”Spiders on the wall and all over me.” See? Well, we have two points of reality: we have the wall and me. Th hell with the spiders.
So if you were to simply ask him, ”What kind of a wall wouldn’t spiders be on?” or ”What kind of a wall do spiders like best?” or ”Who would you have to be not to have spiders on you?” And you would shift his R.
Now, admittedly, you have to be clever to do this sort of thing. I remember being clever about these sort of things—and toward the end of the 40s all by myself. And it was almost disastrous, because there were more psychotherapies originated in 1949 than in any other year known to psychoanalysis. Every time I audited anybody while anybody else was watching, it became a school of psychotherapy, because they couldn’t integrate it. They couldn’t integrate it with what I was doing, which they didn’t understand, so it in itself became an approach all by itself, and was therefore not something with which you thought, but simply something which you totally copied. And we got all kinds of therapies. I’ve seen textbooks on them and so on.
I’d audit Joe Blow and we would see Gestalt iggerbits therapy by Joe Blow. Promptly and at once. It was the process that was run on him and it would have a derivation something like this, you see. How do we get into communication with this bird or what part of the bank, you know, could we approach? Or what idea would he agree with? And then this idea that you have used as an entrance you see, of course, gave him a terrific change of case, so it was that idea which everybody had to be approached with, you see. So everybody had to be fitted on this same gradient. And I despaired of ever teaching anybody anything.
To this day there is a bit of a tradition that I—I’m terrific as a psychotherapist—there is nothing to Dianetics and Scientology—it’s just my touch. What a method of invalidation. I had heard it and heard it and heard it. ”Undoubtedly Hubbard has a knack, undoubtedly he is one of these gifted individuals who” something or other. But teach anybody to do that, of course that’s impossible. Well, I’m giving you why. They wouldn’t know such a thing as a gradient scale or the ARC triangle or any of these other tools of the trade or use those in any way, but would simply totally copy something. That was done for one particular psycho or one particular neurotic, you see. And then they would say that you do that for every neurotic.
Well, everybody didn’t believe there were spiders on the wall, you see. They believed that there were policemen camped on the front porch. And if you could have—could have taught them something on this, could have said, ”Look, the operative line there is front porch.” You see, they may have policemen on the front porch, but they’ve at least got a front porch. So they got porches. So then they can have a variety of porches. And A = A = A, so he has identification. He’s got all porches identified with a porch. If you can introduce differentiation amongst porches on that particular case, therefore and thereby the person will improve casewise and will increase his reality and therefore will have a better communication level and will like people better. Too much.
We’re asking somebody to work out the solution to a case by mathematical formula, if you want to know it. Now this planet doesn’t have symbolic mathematics. It doesn’t understand them, it has nothing to do with them. When they get into symbolic logic, they put words into algebra and call it symbolic logic. Oh, blah! Mathematics—these mathematicians that go around and scribble, ”X equals the umpty—umph, blash—plunk!” and wind up with an A—bomb. It’s no wonder they wind up with A—bombs instead of something that will help things, you know. Their mathematics is so terrible. That’s a very definite statement straight from me. Mathematics is in kindergarten on this planet. Symbolic mathematics has nothing to do with doing algebra with symbols instead of numbers the way man thinks it is if you look it up in the dictionary or the encyclopedia.
It is solving a vast number of nonnumerical variables by the use of comparisons—similarities, identities and differences. And you have to be a real whiz—bang, because you can’t write it down on a sheet of paper.
Now, man even goes so far as to say geometry is logic. There would be nothing sillier than a fellow who went around all the time using syllogisms. A = B, B = C, C = D. Well, all right, that syllogism might possibly work. It’s obvious that B and C being the same, why A and D would be the same. And that works out fine as long—as long as you’re using only one apple. There’s where mathematics falls down. Because it applies the suppressive generality of a number to the specific entity which is being calculated.
Two plus two, oh I know that sounded very esoteric but it’s very simple: 2 plus 2 equals 4. It hasn’t, it doesn’t and it never will. Two what?
Now, if you say there is a theoretical formula which has no basis in reality, called addition of 2s you would have pronounced a truth. But they teach a little kid two plus two equals four, and we mean any two plus any two equals any four.
Oh, no. Two girls plus two boys equals four orchestra members. The—instantly you answer the question ”What?” in an inspecific way you have insanity. So man is no higher up than an insane mathematics, so don’t blame him too much for never having worked anything out.
Zero is the wildest variable that anybody ever had anything to do with, because it’s simply on the basis of zero what? No what? That’s the elementary question. Well the fellow says, ”Zero zero, of course—zero?’ You say, ”Yeah, you idiot, what, what? Zero of what?” And he says, ”Zero of nothing.” Well, you say, ”In what interesting universe is this zero of nothing? You locate it or not locate it.” He can’t tell you zero of what.
So every time they accidentally enter zero into a mathematical formula they get any kind of an answer you can name, and that is nuclear physics, the mathematics thereof which they use today. And to this day they don’t know when one of those confounded things is going to explode. They run their power plants by tickling the tiger’s tail. They figure it all out, then they throw that in the waste basket and they walk into the laboratory and they very carefully do it empirically, by experiment. They can make an accurate guess because their formulas now have enough bugger factors in them to represent—that’s what they call them—to represent what they have actually found out empirically, so they jostle these things around, so they have entered mathematics and experience close together—so therefore they can now make an estimate of what might happen but they never follow it. That’s what’s interesting. They never follow it.
The guy goes in and he takes the long rod in his hot papa suit with a big lead wall in front of him and he takes the long rod and he adjusts and adjusts and he uses a little micrometer screw of adjustment to find out just how close you can get piece of plutonium A next to piece of plutonium B and to get a current rather than a bang.
Now he knows, as the counter starts going tick—tick—tick—tick—tick bluh—bluh—blb, that he’s too close, so he backs it off. He didn’t figure it out in mathematics at all. And they make my belly tired. They’re a bunch of fakes. Somebody can say, ”Listen who’s talking—yes sir, listen to who’s talking, man.” They’ve never accomplished anything and we have.
Now, the main point I’m making here is that logic is done by you. And there are various hints that you can have to wind up with a logic. There are various hints you can have. But in the final analysis, it depends on you and your concept of reality. And mathematics is actually a very low—grade expression of A, R and C. Now A, R and C combined add up to understanding.
To understand anything, you have to have A: affinity; R: reality; and to be able to communicate with it, C: communication. A, R, C. Affinity, reality and communication are always necessary to understanding, and oddly enough are understanding. As far as mathematics are concerned that’s understanding.
But what is doing the understanding? You are. So if the mathematician says there is no such things as a living being and he doesn’t exist he has instantly dropped out of his mathematics what is using the mathematics, what asks the question and receives the answer, so he then doesn’t have a mathematics. So in actual fact mathematics cannot exist without live interpretation.
Now, the mathematicians—oh, oh that’s silly—says you could come along here and figure out a robot. You could figure out a robot and this robot would operate on syllogisms. You know what I mean by syllogism—Aristotelian syllogism. You know, if monkeys are like donkeys, why, then monkeys’ heads are like donkeys’ heads or something like this. You see, if two things are similar to each other, then two other things that they’re similar to are also similar to each other You’ve taken geometry, you know. Side, angle side and all that sort of thing. Syllogism. Invented by Aristotle in a more vicious moment of his career.
People will actually… You open up most geometry textbooks that are taught in the high schools of the United States and they say this is logic. Brother, it has nothing to do with logic. It has to do with syllogisms. It was what one thinking being—Aristotle—laid out as a method. So the final ask of the question and receipt of the answer is by a being.
You can talk about UNWACs, ENIACs—they can work on the most weird whirring wheels. They’re all very clever. They’re all marvelous—I’m not running them down. They’re a lot of fun; but notice that something had to give it the question and something had to receive the answer Now that could have been the most idle action in the world that there could’ve been use for it. But there is an interpreter Mathematics does not exist independent of living thought.
So therefore, mathematics could be simply defined as a method of memory used by a living being to make inanimate objects or other things appear to think or appear to act. Do you follow? Now, it’s very handy not to have to count the number of bricks in a side wall, but only have to count the number of bricks along the top and the number of bricks up one side and multiply the two together and have the number of bricks in that entire wall. That’s great. A very proper use for mathematics. And that’s almost as far as it goes. It doesn’t go much further than that. You can tell how many square feet in a piece of ground. You can tell how high is a cat, by measuring him and multiplying and averaging cats. And you can do all sorts of interesting things, but remember it is always you who are asking the question and you who receive the answer
Now, any time you escape that proposition, you immediately have permitted yourself to be overwhelmed by methodology. Now, you will be as good logically as you are Clean And you will be able to be cause over the whole thing as much as you are OT. Because the more livingness you can exert or employ on any given subject, why, the more logical you can be about it. In fact, you run up to a point where you don’t any longer need mathematics.
Now, one of the things—one of the things which has been baffling about Dianetics and Scientology is ”How did he figure all this out?”
I can give you a whole lot of formulas. There were a lot of formulas and things used and so on. They find them in such early literature as Dianetics, Evolution of a Science. There are a lot of little rules of thumb which have been used. Those are shortcuts, and so on. But I haven’t been at this for two minutes, you know. This is an old line. And I’m very familiar with it.
Now, it’s a simple matter, it’s a simple matter of A, R and C. Very simple because it’s a matter of potential understanding. Now, the A, affinity, you can’t stand back and hate men and then find out any reality about men. You can’t have a total unreality about men, sitting in some ivory tower someplace. You know, never go out, never meet anybody, never talk to anybody, never get mixed up with pickpockets, you know, give all bandits a wide berth, never talk to headhunters. See, you can’t go about it that way and have a reality on man. It’s impossible.
And communication—well, you can’t go about it being careful of what you say and careful of what you hear. Anybody who is easily offended had better never go into the business of understanding. Because he winds up only with prejudice. He’s so offended by what he hears that of course he can understand nothing. That of course explains in a nutshell somebody who is terribly offended by Scientology. He’s so offended by what he hears he can’t understand anything in the first place, you see. The whole thing is his C is madly out. He can’t read, he can’t interpret, he can’t duplicate. The whole formula you see would be out.
Now, these are the adjuncts of life and livingness. And the first thing you have to do to tackle any subject like this is to be alive. Not dead or disciplined or approved of. If you worked to be approved of all the time, you would wind up approved of The most approved of thing I’ve seen around, the only time I see wogs really en masse as a common denominator gather round and go into affinity and so forth is when somebody’s dead. As far as I can tell the most approved of thing in the society is something very dead.
I know the two crimes you can commit in this society is you can be there and you can communicate. Those are the two basic crimes. Notice the police say he had an alibi so he didn’t do it. Well that’s—they proved that he wasn’t there so of course he didn’t—he wasn’t guilty. Be there and communicate.
Now, therefore the basis of all Scientology and Dianetic research has been understanding. Somebody tries to look for some peculiar way in which this was done, you see. They’re liable to run into the answer of nothing. There’s just no such answer there. It’s just done because of comprehension. Association with man. Communication with him. Communication with life. Reality on existence. What is it? What isn’t it? And so on. And not any vast feeling of terrific fear, or mustn’t hear that and mustn’t say something else. We sometimes get victimized by it. I’ve said something I have found, there was no particular reason to withhold this. The only thing that I withhold on any of these lines is simply when I have found something that is on the upper road that is going to make a wog awfully sick and maybe put him in a hospital. Why, I don’t really care to release that generally to psychiatrists and to people in general. I don’t want to see other people ill.
So, when you look over this general situation it was done by awareness, so on. But awareness is proportional to how alive you are. Now, I’m not trying to say I’m more alive than others. I just am.
Well, all of this, of course, is not apropos to me but is apropos to you in trying to estimate auditing and cases. The clearer you are the easier it is to do. And the reason for that is, is it’s not done by any other than the most fundamental laws. And the most fundamental law in the whole field is A, R and C and this comprises understanding.
But of course you must be capable of understanding before you could start to extrapolate or figure out or develop things to do with somebody which departs from a very standardized procedure. And when you run into somebody who won’t go Grade 0 Release and who can’t be rehabilitated on Grade 0 Release, even though you rack up the past lives and everything else trying to find out where he went Grade 0 Release, you can’t find that. You must conclude that you have a problem here where the reality must be approached rather than communication and even sometimes where it must be approached through affinity. And affinity is lower than reality in its reach down. It can exceed reality. It sounds very peculiar and I have no reason for saying that except the fact that I have had insane people who had such a dim reality that it was almost impossible and had a terrible reality on me, yet feel enough affection to—because I asked them to—go sane.
Well, you’d say that required communication—well, the tiniest fragment of communication that anybody ever heard of. I’ve actually seen it undercut a question concerning reality.
So that these are the three pins on which you adjust any auditing session. And all auditing sessions go by gradients. And there actually isn’t really much more to it than that. If you—there are a great many things, a great many things perfectly true and so forth, I am talking now about the estimate of what you do. The estimate of what you select to do. If you are confronted with such a problem, then that problem has to be resolved in the zone of affinity, reality and communication.
Well, auditing is pretty well wrapped up. You don’t have to worry too much about auditing. You’re not really going to be called upon to operate on psychotic patients. The number of people that you will find who will not resolve by a little very low—level Dianetic auditing, if they can’t get up to Communication Release, are so few as to be nonexistent. Because you can get down below that reality on an unconscious person, you know, just making him feel the bed or the pavement or something. He isn’t even aware—not even aware of the command. You just keep touching his hand gently giving him a command touching him to pavement. He’ll come out of it, see?
Rather, you don’t need any particular reason in application of technology to depart one iota from what you already have laid out. As a matter of fact, as you get into the upper grades it becomes more and more serious to depart from it, because the mind happens to be put together in a certain precise way. And it’s been figured out as to how it is, so why bother figuring it out?
But how about this whole zone and area called life? How about the whole zone and area of interpersonal relations? How about the zone between your—self or the organization and the world around you? Well now, we have the problems of gradients. And we have the problems of affinity, reality and communication. And that’s the problems. We have the problem of interfamilial relations. Well, there are two ways to solve interfamilial relations.
The first and most effective way of solving it—the first and most effective way of solving it—is by individual processing to bring the people up to the point where they can understand each other. That doesn’t even process them on the idea of being a family or on their family problems. You just process them just on the gradients and don’t give it any particular attention, anything except standard processing, and you will get there and that’s the best way to approach it.
It is so senior to education that I don’t think I would ever give any family members advice. Ethics is there to force them, not to advise them. When they can’t solve it, why you say, ”Solve it, or off with your head!” you know. Person can’t make any progress at all, why, you can give him a hard shove in that direction. But the other way to solve that problem, the other way to solve that problem or figure out what could be done about it, would be in the zone of affinity, reality and communication. But, of course, you’re limited if you haven’t anybody present to understand. Understanding is composed of affinity, reality and communication and if their affinity is low and their reality is low and their communication is nonexistent, they’re not going to understand. So if they don’t understand, they’re not going to do it. And that’s why education is unbeneficial to solve these very, very rough problems.
In handling a problem between the organization, the society around us, we keep desperately looking—or as an auditor and his environment, and so on—we keep desperately looking for some marvelous solution. Some marvelous solution where full—armed we will spring from the brain of Jove and conquer everything. And there will be peace on Earth and goodwill toward men, see? And it’s got to be this marvelous solution, by which we do something inside the organization or we say something to the public or something like that. Well, stop straining your brains. Because you’re dealing with this factor: There is no solution, at any time, superior to the ability of the person asking for it to understand.
There is no mathematics that could possibly work any such thing out. I don’t say that mathematics shouldn’t work things out and you shouldn’t do things with mathematics. I get a lot of fun out of figuring how much would the propeller have to be pitched in order to make the boat go at eight knots with 161 horsepower. I think that’s great. That’s great. And after I’ve worked it all out, I usually guess at it more accurately. But I use mathematics.
And I’m not in the position, you know, of somebody who hasn’t studied his mathematics. I’ve studied them all. Almost got expelled one time for finding a use for a dead mathematics. That was one of the wilder experiences I’ve ever had. It so enraged that professor he almost turned purple and pink. It was horrible. It was a dead mathematics which was totally useless and I found a use for it. And I went up and I told him very proudly and I showed him there was a use for it in aerial navigation and he almost blew his gasket. He flunked me at the end of the year. And I had to go to the Chair of Mathematics and take an examination in that mathematics that covered every tiny theorem in it. You know, one of those vicious things. I got 99 on it, and this guy—it practically ruined his teaching career—he had to pass me. But I had found a use for a mathematics which was a classical genius thing, you know, classical little thing for which there was no use.
So mathematics, we know, is sacred. But I studied this subject and I don’t find it sacred. I find that mathematics is as good as it can be employed with understanding, that it’s as good as the understanding of who asks and who receives the answer. And that’s as good as mathematics is. And the answer to becoming better at mathematics is become clearer. The answer to any problem is to become more alive and more capable of understanding. That is the answer which pays off.
Now Scientology is a way. It is a road. There is a standard way of getting there. People do get there on that standard way, and there isn’t much you have to figure out about it today. But it is a way toward greater understanding.
This world today is not expressing very much affinity or very much reality and I think it says its reality on communication is so faint to make it no communication at all. Duz—daz—diz—the soap of the future. What they are using their communication media for—dyah! The newspaper for instance. They call it news. Why if a woman were to act like that in a village of 200 years ago they would have put her in the stocks for six months, for a vicious, malicious gossip. Never has anything good to say about anything or anybody, and that is the modern newspaper and that is communication in this society.
All you had to do is read a few stories about yourself to know the stories on the both columns of—besides the one about you are totally felonious. Not even erroneous—felonious. That wrong.
You can absolutely count that if President Johnson is reported as having gone to Warm Springs and so forth, that he is out at the Space Port in Keokuk, you know. You can count on it. I just never did see quite as many errors made per pica of type as can be made in a modern newspaper. It’s gorgeous. And yet the public thinks it’s informed about things. You say, ”Well, there’s some tendency and so forth…” Yes, you become aware of the fact that there’s a war going on someplace. They specialize in those things.
But I’ll tell you, man, that 100,000 babies could’ve suddenly been rescued from an epidemic and all been made well miraculously overnight and the newpapers would never even mention it. Too high—toned. So the communication of this society is poor. Reality is poor. And affinity is very poor. Any time a world can be subject to wars you know very well that the affinity is rather poor.
So how do you do all this? Well, you process them. You say, well how can you get them all to stand still to process them? Well, now you’re getting into OT stuff Because you sail very easily outside the understanding and reality of beings. At along about VI you are actually departing from the zone of comprehension of the normal human being—at about Grade VI. It isn’t even at—it isn’t even as high as Clear. It’s low, see. But that I would say would be a very, very high estimate. It’s maybe even at Grade 0, see.
But you for sure, I just know for sure, you’re right outside the normal reality at Grade VI, much less Clear. And you go around trying to talk to these people and educate them with data from Grade VI and you are going to fall flat on your face and I’m sure many of you have done it. So what can you do from Grade VI? If you can’t feed them all data about you’ve all lived before, and you’re this and that, and they haven’t got any of the reality on any of this and they’re wogged around, you know. They’ve come out of the night and they’ve seen you for a moment and sort of looked at you and thought there might be something there, you know. And then you told them a whole bunch of data and drove them back into the night again, see.
After that cycle has been executed, you should sit down and think for a moment and say, ”Wait a minute, is there something I can do from this point that would influence these people or give them better lives or bring them up the line?” And the answer is yes! Yes, there is affinity, reality and communication adding up to understanding. And it’s not even difficult.
You see, it’s essentially a terribly simple answer. You might say just be. But there—that has—that has value, see. If you are a high state of release and you simply are, you would just be surprised how much value that has in your immediate area. You don’t have to hang up advertising signs or sandwich boards on you. People see this rather easily.
So what can you do? Well, affinity: you can feel an affinity. You can have a reality on what’s going on, don’t kid yourself; you see. Don’t let your affinity overwhump your reality, see. You don’t say—you don’t say, ”I’ve got to feel good toward man so I must not see all of the evil things he does.” No, feel good toward him and see the evil things he does—very elementary. And as far as communication is concerned, just never allow him the luxury of cutting you back from communicating. And you’ve done it. Because out of that combination will come an understanding and you will understand what he is all about. Understanding is a sort of a total solvent. It’s the universal solvent. It washes away everything.
So you see, you actually are not in a position as you go up in the line, to educationally reform the society in which you find yourself You actually err when you tell them any more than and we commit these errors—but tell them any more than they need in order to know that there is a way there. That there is a way they can travel and there is a road out. Now, that becomes possible. There is a way. Now, when you communicate to them more than that, you’ve simply so bedazzled their understanding and they’ve gone blind over the whole thing. Because you actually are deficient in understanding what they can understand.
So the final analysis of ”What can an organization do in the society around”—the most fundamental and basic thing that it can do is found in the triangle of affinity, reality and communication. It can have a reality on the world around it. It can have an affinity that will not be alloyed or destroyed because of various acts of men. And it must continue to communicate. But communication, remember, is always within the reality of the person who can hear it.
Now, it is perfectly true that there exist strata so far above the reality of man, and so demonstrable actually directly to him—he couldn’t miss seeing a wall fall down, don’t you see, or a bowl of fruit move through the air. He couldn’t miss this, you know. It would baffle him. Now you run into the possibility of throwing him into awe, worship, religious frenzy. Because you’ve now overwhumped him and so he assigns his reality—it is some wild assignment and he goes to pieces under it. This has happened many times in the past.
So, if you take that line, you have to be extremely careful not to throw him into a frothing fit. Because, actually, instead of leading him toward greater understanding, you have depressed him into a total unreality.
So how do you handle man and handle a situation? Well, to stand there in a body which is vulnerable to bullets; to have an identity which can be advertised or flaunted; to in various ways go on being intentionally vulnerable; you can check the degree that you can afford to be understanding or to comprehend the situation around.
It’s all right to be so understanding. You can see why this guy just got through hooking the beans, but the truth of the matter is as long as you have anything to protect, you must, of course, at the same time while understanding why he hooks the beans and that he is hooking the beans, you also have to prevent him from doing so.
So the net solution to the problem is that you are limited to the degree that you are vulnerable. But you become less and less vulnerable the more and more you are capable of understanding.
Now, of course, vulnerability ceases at the moment when you can’t be personally injured. But then that is simply a state of case. You have gotten up to this state of case.
Now, what I am talking to you about might sound like it’s very old and you’ve heard it all before and so on. But you actually at this time are facing a crisis in Scientology. It is right around the corner It is just over the tip of the hill. And the crossroads is simply: Do we get so tired of them, we just overwhump them? Or do we stay true to our own beliefs in continuing to suffer the slings and arrows which are thrown at us, still go on in a high state of ARC? This is a very interesting proposition. And of course there is no arguing with it. The greatest good for the greatest number of dynamics is the optimum solution.
But this is a time in the history of Dianetics and Scientology when this question begins to stir. What are we going to do? With the planet? Not how are we going to fight down a newspaper proprietor You notice these governments lose. They lose. The questions are not how are we going to prevent bad press, any more than it’s how are we going to cure all the insane people in the society simultaneously by dropping a pellet in the water supply system, or some other idiotic thing, you see. That’s not the question. The question is what are we going to do. There are various things which we can do. And we’re on a very gingerly point here. We’re on a point where we could go wrong and a point where we could go right. Because at this particular time our power exceeds our understanding.
Now, it won’t exceed it very much or very far, but the reason it does this is very simple. It isn’t that people are going to do a lot of things bad. But when you’re trying to keep a bridge open and you’re trying to keep a way open for a lot of people, and those people are still vulnerable and can be attacked and so on, you tend to take protective measures or you tend to plan protective measures or worry about this type of thing.
If it were just yourself the answer would be very easy, don’t you see? So it comes up to a question. And there is no mathematics under the sun that will solve it except those which are inherent in the development of Scientology. And those that are inherent in the development of Scientology, of course are such things as, A, R and C add up to understanding. They are various axioms, they are various data.
So we are at this interesting point in our history—is what are we going to do with the planet? Because the last thing in the world I want is any more administration. I’m awful tired of administration. There’s nobody going to get me in on administration.
So, nobody wants the planet. But a hurricane is in actual fact a soft summer wind compared to the amount of power which is now becoming available in Scientology. The direction of that power, its utilization and so on, will inevitably work out for the greatest good of the greatest number of dynamics. This is inevitable. The main question then is how does it work out with the minimum number of casualties? But we are right at that point of the road which all of you at one time or another have sensed. What are we going to do if…? What are we going to do when…?
Well, we’re at that point of the road and I don’t pretend at this particular moment to have any answer to it. There’s no figured out answer to it at all. In the first place, I’m too far out of ARC with Victoria state. Joke.
But we are in the interesting position today—the interesting position today of having been yapped at, shouted at, booted around, attacked, reviled, ridiculed and so forth, and holding in the palm of our hand the answer to all the tomorrows this planet will ever have. That’s one of the most fantastic situations that anybody ever heard of.
Man is sitting out there without the faintest inkling—or maybe he does have and that’s why he is screaming. But the main point of all this is—is we are at that point where we have Clears. They’re being achieved, people are moving forward up to OT. The more a person develops, his understanding increases. His affinity, reality—sense of reality—and his communication ability increase. The amount this can be increased is almost infinite.
Now, we have the answer in that our understanding itself will of course pilot the way and all that sort of thing. We can logicize ourselves into a somnolence about this whole thing. But we’re at a crossroads. And at this particular crossroads I don’t have any really ready answer. No canned answer to suddenly give you, on a silver platter, of exactly what we are going to do. I have already explored various lines and so on for the eventual salvage of Scientology in the event of an international cataclysm before we really got there. I’ve been working on that for about six months. And I got that pretty well taped. Scientology won’t perish because of some convulsion in the northern hemisphere. And our processing and so on is moving up along the line. Our results are fabulous. It’s a 1, 2, 3 proposition today.
And sitting there auditing a preclear up through the Grades, I suppose in every preclear you are facing this same question. As his power increases, what do we do? Well, probably his good sense will dictate what is to be done and our good sense undoubtedly will go on dictating it. I think we have been fantastically forbearing. Now, it is only hoped that our reality on the situation doesn’t degenerate as a point of connection, don’t you see, to a point where it no longer matters what happens to the little guy.
But we as a group have achieved an historical point which probably should go down resoundingly in history. We are governmentally, and so forth, very unacceptable and they depend completely and utterly upon our goodwill. It’s a fantastic position for any group to be in. Every religious organization of the past, every group of betterment and so forth of the past has flunked this test. I just hope we don’t.
Thank you very much.