





E METER DATA: INSTANT READS

PART II

SHSBC 149 renumbered 163

A lecture given on 24 May 1962

[Based on the modern level zero cassettes.  It was not
not included in the older pre-clearsound cassettes
and has not been checked against older versions]


Thank you.

24 May, Saint Hill Special Briefing Course, A.D. 12.

All right. Now, you seem to be considerably interested in
what meters do, and you seem to be having an awful lot of
trouble, one way or the other. I was going to talk to you
about Goals Assessments in this particular lecture, but I
won't. I will talk to you definitely about meters.

You know, you can get into more holes full of complication
than anybody could easily dig you out of in a long while.
You get complicated. And if you just would stop figuring
and start looking ...

I remember when, one time, got a motorcycle off the boat,
and I was straightening the motorcycle up and trying to get
the thing to function out in Camden, New Jersey. I was
trying to get this motorcycle going, so ... Lights
wouldn't light, you know, and so we kept throwing a switch,
and so forth. And it was just at that time this first
cliche - first time I had put out this cliche, and so on; it
was "Look, don't think," see, which was very funny.

And this little Francis-Barnett British motorcycle had a
very complicated Lucas light system -  headlamp and
everything else. And it was very complicated, very hard to
get apart. All kinds of wires and condensers, and all sorts
of things.

So I started taking it apart, and took the bulb out and
took the wires apart and unhooked everything. We had parts
that were lying around a good square yard. And then I
happened to look down at the battery, and the terminals
weren't connected. We had all the job of putting it all
together again. It would have taken about one minute to
have put the terminals on the battery.

That was a marvelous example of "Look,-don't think."
Because I'd sure done a lot of figuring right there on that
motorcycle, you see, and the net result was dismantling the
works.

You get doing this, and you get to figuring out what this
is and the significance of that, and the complications of
something else, and so on. And I know what you're up
against, because ...

There's a textbook called "Dutton's" which teaches
navigation, and it is the textbook used by the United
States Naval Academy at Annapolis. It's their key book on
the subject. And no doubt about it, it's a marvelous
textbook. There is no doubt whatsoever that "Dutton's" is
just absolutely wonderful as a textbook. Not a single datum
of any kind on the subject of navigation that is not to be
found in "Dutton's." They modernize it, also, every
year - it's marvelous! You open it up, and sentence by
sentence they machine-gun you with exact pertinent data
with no amplification or further definition of any kind
whatsoever. They don't bother to tell you it's a textbook
on navigation of ships from here to there. They simply
start in telling you "This is the earth and the sun and the
planets and the alidade-amplitude angle dihedral in
betwixt...." "A barograph is an instrument used to measure
barometric pressure. It is read at two o'clock, four
o'clock and eight o'clock." I don't know; what do you read?
You read its directions? What do you read? You read the
manufacturer's label on the bottom of it? What do you do?
Well, "Dutton's" never bothers to inform you about that.
They're above all that, you see? Unfortunately I
collided - on a restudy of earth navigation - I collided with
"Dutton's" back in the middle thirties, hard, you see?
There was everything there but an understanding. See?

There was no understanding of what this was all about
whatsoever, but there sure were hot data. Man, every datum
in it was hot.

But there was never any side amplification, such as "You
must always precisely locate the exact position of a
battleship." See? See, it never says, also, that it is
sometimes disastrous not to locate the position of a
battleship. Your imagination is never invited. It is a dry
feast of bare bones. It drove me stark, staring mad. I
never learned how to navigate from it.

Finally got a book that - I think Mixter's Primer of
Navigation, or something like this, and read this book, and
it didn't treat it very seriously, and it was very happy
about the whole thing, and I dug up a few data from that.

Actually, though, I thought it would be easier to go back
and evolve the whole thing, so I did.

Some time in '44 an admiral was walking around on the
bridge, and I was calculating something or other, and he
says, "Well, I see," he says, "that you - how is this?" He'd
just flown in, you know, from stateside. He wouldn't be
there long because it wasn't very safe where we were. And
he said, "I see" - he said - "But - but how is this? You're using
Commander Weems' new textbook on aerial navigation." And it
puzzled him because it was just now in print in the States,
and we couldn't possibly have connected that fast. No, I
had accidentally evolved it as a simple method of
navigation, and somebody else had evolved it.

That was all. But it didn't come from "Dutton's," but I
imagine it's now part of "Dutton's." And I imagine nobody
can savvy it now. I mean, I imagine that's totally, totally
lost.

But this is a method of losing information, is you just
give a bunch of machine-gun data and expect everybody to
hew the mark on that exact data, and it's never amplified,
you see? So we have lots of examples of that particular
character.

It is the importance of a datum that must be weighted.
Weighted. You weight the importance of a datum. And you are
so accustomed on this planet -  you are terribly
accustomed - to studying unweighted data.

Somebody opens up Krishnamurti, and he shows you three
places in this book of Krishnamurti's whereby it's exactly
parallel to exactly what we say in Scientology, so
therefore Krishnamurti is Scientology. And poor old Peggy
Conway - I showed her one day that these were totally
unweighted data. They had no importance assigned to them
whatsoever, but were there with equal importance with about
three or four thousand other datum. These other data were
all there of equal importance, and they were - some of them
were really wild data. See" So they were all equally
important. in other words, there was no selection of
importances.

And people keep forgetting this. They think all data are
equal, and it's as big a mistake as to consider all people
are equal or anything else is all equal. Because it's
pretty hard to get an equality. Mathematically it's
impossible to get an equality. You take an apple out here
off a tree, and if you had another apple which is exactly
the same size, shape, age, skin thickness, pattern of the
skin, everything else, you'd say, "Well, that apple is
equal to that apple." No, they're not equal. They're not
occupying the same space. How could they be equal? All the
characteristics of one apple would have to be equal to all
the characteristics of the other apple, and they're both
occupying different positions in space, so they can't
possibly be equal.

Now, in order to study ... I've heard this phrase "learn
how to study." I've had it thrown at me in very fine
universities, very fine schools, and so on. "Learn how to
study," they say, and then they sit back. We should
remember this: that there are several ways of laying out
data. One is to lay it all out with equal weight with no
amplification, no other explanation, nothing to assist
understanding; we just machine-gun out a whole bunch of
data - brrrr, see? That's supposed to be real good. Your
technical-scientific writer of today is educated to do this
and sometimes criticizes the writings of Dianetics and
Scientology because it doesn't do only this.

All right. Now, there's another way of handling this stuff,
and that is to throw it all out with tremendous
obfuscations. You sort of interlard it with "Of course, you
boob, you couldn't understand this anyway because it's all 
so complicated." And they do that in various ways.

With footnotes: "Refer to Jervis Crack, page 39," you see?
Of course, that book hasn't been available for the last
century. So you've had it, you see? Well, what they're
doing is doing a priesthood type of action. And most of the
professors writing in modern university, and so on, are
guilty of that. They're trying to create a priesthood.

Now, the reason navigation sprung to mind, and the reason I
talk about navigation, is they're exclusively devoted - not
this "Dutton"; it's of another kind - but the navigator
himself is devoted to the development of a priesthood. It
is not for nothing that the early navigators of the South
Pacific were a priesthood. And they were the reigning
priesthood of Polynesia. Well, those birds, with a hole in
a coconut shell and that sort of thing, navigated
themselves all over the place. Quite interesting how they
did it, but it was a priesthood. And they surround this
with a bunch of magic, and they surround it with a bunch of
nonsense of one kind or another.

Well, a chemistry professor is just as guilty. He gives you
a whole bunch of nonsense.

But the reason a navigator springs to mind: if you were to
go on a bridge of a naval vessel that had a navigator and
to ask him how he was finding his position ... He won't
have you shot because that's illegal. Instead of that, he
will either ignore you with a contemptuous sniff or utterly
overwhelm you with a bunch of irrelevant bunk. That man is
totally dedicated to the protection of a cult. Navigation
is what makes him important, and if every fool knew how to
navigate he wouldn't be important anymore. And that'd be that.

The textbook "Bowditch" on this subject... I'm choosing an
esoteric field - navigation - not that you're interested at all
in navigation but just because it's far enough afield that
it won't confuse the issue.

Bowditch was a fellow up in the New England states who
decided that celestial navigation should be
decelestialized. So he did a bunch of tables and things of
this character, and he went out on a China trip; and out of
his little manual, which was about quarter of an inch
thick, he taught even the cook to navigate by star sights.
It was marvelous. He taught everybody on the ship. He was
teaching everybody up and down the New England coast how to
navigate out of this little, tiny book.

You should see that book today! Ha-ha-ha! It's also
published by the United States Navy, and it is that thick,
it's that high and it's that broad. It's the most marvelous
thing for keeping a passageway door open you ever saw.

But it has everything in it that has nothing to do with
navigation, and it has tables developed which nobody has
used for ages. And his original tables, I don't think, are
even in it anymore.

And yet it's called "Bowditch."

See, the whole thing has been obfuscated. Whole thing has
been masked.

That is the way somebody swells up his importance. He makes
himself very important: He's one of the twelve men in the
world that can understand Einstein. Oh, I don't know. If
there was anything there to understand, I think that more
than twelve men could have understood Einstein. I took one
of the twelve men in the world who could understand
Einstein, and I went around to him to have him explain it
to me, as the associate editor of the college paper, in a
short article. (I was making friends in those days.) I
wanted him to give me a short article for this college
paper so that I could explain Einstein to the student body.
He was very insulted. He was very upset, but his - I wrote an
article.

But years afterwards, I was talking to a friend, and he was
a pretty good scientist. He was good enough to be kicked
out of the government; he was one of the sixty-four that
were released for doing their duty. And he said, "Theory of
relativity? Well, let's see. Mass equals MC 2 well, let's
see if we can't do ... I wonder if it couldn't be
explained rather simply."

And so we boiled it down and told it to a kid, and he
understood it perfectly. There wasn't much to this. Except
what? The vast importance of the person. See? Somebody is
using this as a cloak of rare bird feathers, you see, so he
can stand before the idol and tell everybody how important
he is, see?

Well, these methods of communication of thought, methods of
communication of data ...

Now, we're in an interestingly peculiar field, because the
data that is being communicated is in actual fact totally
new data that everybody already has. That makes it very
peculiar data indeed.

Now, there's no language that embraces this because
language comes after the fact - before the fact, rather -  of
the data. And so you get a few terms mixed up in it. It's
nothing compared to medical terms or other fields.
Nevertheless, it has the frailty of having new terms. But
you have to have new terms, otherwise everything you
described would be a whole package.

I could probably dream up an example and say, "Well, the
combined impulses derived from force and duress in the past
which have become forgotten but which are capable of
impinging themselves upon the individual ..." Wouldn't
you like to say that every time you said "reactive mind"?
That would be pretty grim, wouldn't it?

So naturally, you get conversant with this, you start
developing a bit of a shorthand. But the shorthand mustn't
itself be terribly obscure, and most of our stuff is not
obscure. We don't invent words where we don't need them,
but we do invent words where we shouldn't be confused.

Now, we lack a complete dictionary. That we should
have - there's no doubt about that - so that you could look up
any phrase and understand it better. We've been in the
throes of making up a dictionary for years. I had the notes
on my desk recently - just a few days ago - to start
recompiling the thing.

Trouble is, it's costly. That's the only thing that's wrong
with a dictionary. You'd have to put two or three people on
it for several months to really knock a dictionary
together, because you'd have to listen to every tape on
which every word had ever been defined at any time and put
all the definitions down for a single word immediately
following it, and then that would be a worthwhile
dictionary. Would also he quite a worthwhile textbook.

But it happens to be a labor. It's mostly labor: listening
to tapes, taking down every definition; looking up all the
textbooks, taking down every definition, you know; writing
each word on a piece of paper, and then writing each
definition that has ever been defined for it, because
they've been defined several times.

Well, we - that is a barrier. There is no doubt about that.
But. what 1 try to do, the way I try to teach you this, is
teach you one very simply and try to give you the weight of
the datum - you know, how heavily this is weighted in
comparison to other data, see?

I tell you, "This one is important," see? And then because
there are quite a few important datum, I very often make
the mistake of not saying to you that there's a lot of data
along this line that's not important, see - that don't amount
to anything; they're merely interesting. Well, I tell you
that - even that too, occasionally. That's an awful lot of
bric-a-brac and phenomena.

Well, what happens is that I give you a datum that's
important, and you very often pick up a piece of
bric-a-brac that's right next door to it that is
interesting, see, and you get the two things confused. You
know, this other one is fascinating. There's no doubt about
it. You start fooling around with things in the mind and
there are fascinating things. The floor of the 'ead is
strewn with them, man. I don't know how you can live in there.

See? There are many fascinating data - they are terribly,
terribly interesting. Why, if I sat down and wrote
everything I knew about needle phenomena or phenomena which
could be disclosed by a meter, my God, it'd be something on
the order of four or five million words! I know
tremendous lot of oddities  - fantastic things that you can
do - all of which amount to a hill of beans. They're just of
no importance at all. Amongst all of that, there are only a
few important data and they are boiled down into that
savagely condensed book E-Meter Essentials.

Now, that is an example, by the way, of a terrific
boildown. The instant read, however, is not described in
that book. It is now described in the second edition, but
in the original edition it's not described.

Now, obviously, it should also be part of my responsibility
to tell you what's not important.

But look, but look: that's four or five million words, see,
compared to a few hundred. That would be a job, man!

And you want to know about teaching you some of this stuff
.. What is utterly, staggeringly fantastic, you see, is
trying to guess what you're going to do wrong next. And I
tell you, man, that would keep somebody awake all night if
he really worried. You know? I worry about it enough. But
trying to guess which way the mistake is going to go ...
Because, you see, it can go into any of those unimportant
channels. See? And they're just infinite in number.

Now, right now you're riding the hobbyhorse of the interim
read; the prior and interim read, because the word latent
read is forbidden, you see - I mean, the subject of latent
reads we're not interested in. I've omitted saying that
there's such a thing as a prior read, see? Well, it is also
forbidden. See? A prior read is as bad as a latent read.
You only want an instant read.

But what is an instant read? It is that read which takes
place immediately after the expressed thought. Now, if you
sum that up as a definition, you will see that it
precludes - that it is thoughts that impinge, not words, on
the reactive mind. It's thought, not words. You may express
them in words, but they impinge in thought. The reactive
mind doesn't actually react to words. The words translate
through symbolism into thought, you see? You got the
symbols of the words, and then that melts down into
thought. The reactive mind responds to the thought impulse.
So you can have a lot of thought impulses in one thought.

"Have you seen any gorgeous, good-looking, luscious,
marvelous, sensational women lately?" How many reads would
you get? Man, that's up to you and the gods.

Now, because you are thinking the thought, and if you read
this as a straight thought through, the reactive bank, at
first - only at first - will impinge on every thought contained
in the major thought. So you get a whole bunch of prior
reads. And then it finally grooves in that this is what
you're talking about, see?

The major thought is "Have you seen any women lately?" see?
"Have you seen any gorgeous, beautiful, luscious, you know,
women lately?" That's the big thought. And it'll register
as "Have you seen any beautiful women lately?" as well as
"you" and "seen" and "gorgeous" and ... Get the idea?

Well, the funny part of it is, is you can groove in the
major thought or the minor thought.

"Have - you - seen ..." See? You're going to get reactions by
this time. That's a sort of a punctuated reading of
something. You're going to get action, action, action,
action, and then action on the thought.

Well, you saw an example in the demonstration I gave you
last night of a prior read, and I threw it away and asked
the pc again because I couldn't tell if it was a read or
not a read. I just threw it away. I didn't pay any
attention to it. It was the one time in the session when
that occurred, that something fell on the middle of the
last word. Obviously invalid, but it showed that it might
have been instant; it all depended. So I just checked it
again. But that only happened - in a whole hour of session,
only happened once. See how rare that was? Now, you got the
packaged thought. Now, if you repeat that thought through
to the pc, you have restimulated the thought majeure,
see - not the thought mineure, the thought majeure. We
could have a lot of fun if we were really, fish-end tails,
white tie, you know, type of subject treatment, you know,
on the subject of Dianetics and Scientology, you know? And
you would be learning about the thought majeure, you see,
and the thought mineure. Oh yeah, we could be fancy. Don't
let me kid you.

Actually the trick of communicating the whole subject of
the human mind with as few words -  new words - as we use is
quite a trick. That is actually one of the big things that
we got, you know? We don't have to go four years to study
Latin so that we can abuse it.

No, the thought "You seen any beautiful women lately?" is
inherent in your statement, and so most of the time you
simply read it - and "you" almost always will get a reaction,
by the way, and so on - whatever it is.

All of your interim spots may get a reaction, but you're
only interested in the reaction which occurs with the last
word - the end of the last word. It's not after you stop
speaking, it's when the whole thought is completed.

Therefore, you'd never use more than one clause, but you
can even get away with using several clauses and still get
a reaction - lot of phrases and clauses, and so forth.

But it may take you two, three or four reads to ring it in.
That is one of the reasons you read a goal three times: it
might fall interimly, might fall randomly. But you want to
get the thought expressed. The thought has got to be
expressed through to the pc. So you could never read it
really successfully less than three times aloud to get the
whole thought, that's all. The whole thought delivers through.

Most of the time, oddly enough, the whole thought does
deliver through and react. But just that once in the hour's
session, you see - well, we got some other interim reads, but
only one interim read came so close to the end that a
fellow could have made a mistake.

Indistinguishably close, halfway through the last word.

Well now, the point is this, is the pc's thinkingness isn't
turning on the read. It's the pc's reactingness which is
reading. So there's no understandingness of any kind
consulted on an E-Meter read. It is all stimulus-response.
There is no understanding of any kind. It's as though the
reactive bank can listen and react. Oddly enough, it can.

It is the auditor to the reactive bank, not the auditor to
the analytical mind to the reactive bank.

That always gives you a latent. read. You got an
instantaneous proposition here. Doesn't matter how
mysterious it is or isn't. It's just, you've just got an
instantaneous proposition. It's, you read the thought, and
it reacts in the reactive mind. And honest, the pc can be
doped off, nine-tenths unconscious, goofed off, everything
else, and it will still read. I've seen a pc sitting there
practically snoring and everything reading. I made several
tests on this. I was flabbergasted! You could have said to
him, "Women, women, women." You got react, react, react,
see, just this nice pang! pang! pang! - three instant reads,
nice strong ones. And you could have said, "What did I
say?" And he'd say, "(snort) What? What's this? What? I
don't know. What did you say?" He didn't know, either. See
how crazy that is?

Until you actually explore that, it still looks to you as
though you say something, the pc analytically hears you and
then reacts to what you said, and it is not that cycle at
all. That is not the cycle which takes place. I don't care
to elucidate even what cycle takes place rather than invent
knowledge, but that cycle does rat take place. See, I can
tell you which one doesn't take place.

You say it and he reacts. What reacts? Reactive mind. And
that's got to contain timelessness and not-knowingness in
order to get a reaction. If you don't have timelessness and
not-knowingness, you don't get a reaction on the meter.
It's as simple as that. If he thinks of something in order
to get a reaction, you always get a latent read; you don't
get an instant read.

Oh, you want black magic? There it is. The reactive mind of
most people is black enough.

Look at the GPM sometime.

But of course, you have all of your latent reactive
thinkingnesses of former identities are stacked up there
like Genghis Khan's pyramid of skulls. There's plenty of
them. And all of that combined thinkingness and
reactingness and so forth has amounted to a GPM. So it'd be
wonderful and marvelous that it didn't respond. But
remember it - it, I said. It, not the pc.

Actually, this is technically incorrect: "How did the pc
respond on the meter?" The pc never responded on the meter!
It did. It did. And when it responded, it did it
instantaneously, exactly, peculiarly, at the end of the
thought majeure.

I'll hang you with one just so you can feel upstage. So if
you're at some party sometime where there's nothing but
professors, you could say, "Well, we mostly deal in the
thought majeure." But there is this weirdity. Now frankly,
you think sound travels at eleven hundred feet per second,
and so forth, and such. And undoubtedly there are lags
developed in here because of sound, and so forth, but
remember, I don't know that. See, this is to some degree an
invented piece of knowledge.

And we could calculate it out and say that the auditor's
length of time to pour out to the end, plus the length of
time of his voice impulse to the pc's ears, plus the length
of time to the reactive bank, plus the time consumed in
restimulating the electrical responses of the reactive
mind, plus the lag of the E-Meter would be how long it took
for the read to read instantly.

Now, I don't know, maybe we could sit on one mountain top
and have an E-Meter lead from Mont Blanc over to Mt. Punk,
or something of the sort. And we yodeldeehoo, you see,
across and ask some restimulative question and see how long
it takes, and measure the electrical current and measure
the amount of time in the air; and maybe we could do a lot
of things like this and maybe we could learn a great deal.
And I'm sure if some professor liked to mountain climb, he
would spend the rest of his life establishing that fact.
However, we're more interested in the subject majeure
rather than the subject mineure. Anyway.

So, the main thing we're interested in is the thing reacts
instantly, and it reacts instantly at the end of the
thought. And, of course, it will react to interim thoughts.
You say, "Have you, you swine, damaged any pigs lately in
this session?" See? Well, now you're throwing yourself a
curve if you add "in this session" because it's a clause
after the thought. The modifying clause coming after the
thought fumbles the whole thing up. So you should say, "In
this session," and then you should drop the interjection
"you swine," and you say, "In this session, have you
damaged any pigs?"

Now, this is the liability of reading a meter. Supposing
the pc has an item called pigs. Now you'll get into one of
the world's most marvelous tangles, because it's reacting
on the word "pigs," and you don't know whether it's acting
on the thought majeure or the thought mineure.

You don't know which is which. And that's the only time you
can really get tangled up.

Say the pc's goal: "to catch catfish." And you're trying to
test out the way to list it. Now, "Want to catch catfish,"
you know, "Who or what would not want to catch catfish?"
"Who or what would not oppose catching catfish?" "Who or
what would oppose catching catfish?" will all react on an
instant read just like the goal, won't they? Isn't that
horrible? That's very confusing, because then you can't
tell which is the right phrasing to line up on unless you
read them two or three times to groove it home, at which
time, oddly enough, the goal will no longer react as the
goal but will only react as a thought majeure. And that's a
little test that you ought to make just to convince
yourself, show yourself what it is.

Take some highly restimulative interimly-worded sentence - I
don't care what it is - that as a major thought adds up to a
whole, that you know would be hot on the pc. He's got some
old item that's still in, see? Some kind like this. Put
that on the end. And then you will see, after you have read 
it about three times, that it only acts on the thought majeure 
and will not act on that item. But the item will act separately.

You can take the item out of the sentence. Even though it
occurs to the end of the sentence, you can take it out
of - it's just marvelous, you know? -  and you can set it out
there all by itself, and you say, "Pigs, pigs." First time,
it doesn't react; it's cautious, see? "Pig." Now you say,
"Pigs, pigs, pigs, pigs." After that, "Pigs, pigs, pigs,
pigs, pigs."

You put it back in the thought majeure: "In this session,
have you injured any pigs?" No read.

This is mysterious, man. Of course, it might read the first
time as just an additional "pig," but then groove it in
again - groove it in again. "In this session, have you
injured any pigs?" No, it won't react. Mysterious!

Now, the mysteriousness of it is, is below the
unknowingness there is a terrific power of retention in the
reactive bank. It is another one of its characteristics. It
has fantastic continuity, fantastic survival. Otherwise it
wouldn't be here. And what is put into it then acquires
this characteristic of fantastic survival. So you have
time, not-knowingness and survival. So what you pour into
it will continue to react.

The delicacy of its operation is another astounding thing.
If the goal is "to injure pigs" - that's the actual goal - 
and the wording which you have on the list is "to injure a
pig," at first "to injure a pig" will react and will then
cease to react, and will react and it'll splutter and
monkey around, and you won't quite know what you're doing
on the thing, and all of a sudden the pc - you can never
change it for the pc - the pc is liable to say, "Oh, well,
that's - that ... that's to injure pigs." Pang! It's a 
marvelous precision. This is an old study in Dianetics, is 
the fantastic precision with which this thing will do it. 
"To injure pigs," that's fine. it'll react from there on 
out. See? But "To injure a pig" - sporadic, not in.

Don't also think that total retention is total wisdom. It
isn't. So you get this kind of a circumstance where if
you're a tiny bit offbeat you won't get the reaction.

Now, oddly enough, you can get a generalized thought which
is close enough in to get the reaction, and that's where
you get your What questions from. That's why you actually
ought to fish for your What question. "What about wrecking
cars? What about stealing and wrecking cars?" The pc
unfortunately used the word "swiping cars," and you're
trying to get on "stealing cars," and my God, you never get
a What question.

Last night we had a word. If I'd used any other word than
that exact What question, if I hadn't used the word conned,
it wouldn't have reacted. The pc said it so that must be at
the base of the chain of the overt. Your clue must be taken
from the pc.

Now, you can play ducks and drakes with this thing. You can
throw it all over the place, and so forth, as long as a
central pin stays there to hook in and identify. You got to
have something that will identify. You got to have a
thought that associates, and so on.

Well, you're doing an interesting thing. You're taking the
whole of an overt act, which was all in terms of action
anyhow, and you're putting it in terms of English, which it
might not even have occurred in, and that thought embraces
the action which took place which was the overt.

Oh, my God! Nobody would be able to build a machine that
did it. That would be utterly incredible. And yet the
reactive mind can do that much of a stretch.

But "What about stealing a lot of cars? What about stealing
cars? What about stealing and wrecking cars?" Bang! On
another instance the pc said, "Well, I swiped a - a scooter."
And you say to him, "What about stealing children's toys?"
You know? BBC, you know, type of response. Nothing happens.
See, you have to sound out your What question.

Now, you can alter it this far: "What about swiping toys?"
That'll be dead on. That's okay.

But you altered the doingness, you see? And the thought of
the doingness shifted. You have to keep that pretty well
the same, don't you see? And you have to have at least some
associated object, to make this thing react, but it will
react every time.

The odd part of it is, why does it react after "toys"? Why
does it go "toys," see - "toys" click.

Why? It's the total thought. All I can tell you is it does.
And if you have a question which reads "What (tick) about
(dirty needle) stealing (tick) toys? (fall)," you ignore
everything but the fall.

You don't do another blessed thing with a prior read. You
just skip the lot. If it doesn't fall at the instant you
said " s.. ." See, "toys," "toys" (fall). If it falls at
"t - " (fall), it's not an instant read.

Don't tell me why the reactive mind does this. I couldn't
care less. Just take it from me that it does. Then it
cleans up and everything squares up and the pc feels better
and it falls apart. It's almost as if it's drawn itself a
complete plan of "how you take me apart." Most fantastic thing.

All you had to know about the whole thing from beginning to
end was exactly - you had to be able to look and observe.

Interim reads are so common that if you tried to pay any
attention to an interim read on "Have you tried to
damage - in this session, have you tried to damage anyone?"
Suppose you're asking such a question, and it fell on
"damage" - you knucklehead! The worst you could do -  you saw
me do it one time on an earlier session; I wrote "damage"
over in the margin. I knew it would be a hot Prepcheck
question, but ignored it for that because it didn't fall on
"anyone - ." See? It's just a curve of the e and then the
action. See, "In this session, have you tried to damage
anyone" - uhp! There it goes, right on that e, see? Not
earlier, not later, but right on.

Marvelous. Why it works this way, God knows.

You know, I think even people with the big-thetan theory
would - would doubt - would doubt it. It's too incredible. But
that is the fact. And you'll find out this pans out every
time. You find out if you clean off that instant read at
the end of the thought major, you'll be all set. And if you
start monkeying around with the interim reads of the
thought minors, you are going to fall on your 'ead every time.

Now, you very often will get into severe trouble putting
together goals. "To go out and pick potatoes and sometimes
have a girl in the potato patch." Man! And it falls on "to
go out," and it falls on "and pick potatoes" and "to have a
girl," and it falls on "potato patch." And there's no
instant read after "patch." After you've said it three
times, there is no instant read after "patch." Well, I'd
say it has something to do with the goal, probably, in some
version or form or another, as it will eventually arise.
And I'd get all the invalidations and the missed withholds
and suppressions off of listing.

That's another one I should take up with you. I'll take it
up with you right now. When I say "listing," I don't mean
items. When I say "Take it off the subject of listing," I
don't mean take it off the items of listing. When I say
"listing," I just mean listing. You say, "Is there any
missed withhold on listing?" See? "Have you suppressed
listing?" "Have you invalidated listing?" "Have you ever
committed an overt with listing?" That's the way you phrase
it, see? That's listing. Listing. It is a subject. You
could even say "goals listing." And when I tell you "items"
or "individual items," why, then, I mean a goal or an item
or a straight line.

"Is there any item on this list which has been invalidated?
Thank you. Is there any item on this list on which there is
a missed withhold?" Too complicated a phraseology, you
can't get across the thought majeure easily, so you say,
"Is there any item on this list which has been
invalidated?" Say it the second time. And you get your
click. Marvelous to behold; you'll get your click, and you
clean that click off.

There is the subject of listing, and then there's the
subject of goals, there's the subject of items in general;
all of these things are different things that you can do
things with, you understand?

Now, in this rundown of the goal, if you don't get your
instant read on the end of the goal by the third time
you've read it, it ain't it. And you certainly better
ignore it. But very possibly -  not positively at all, but
very possibly -  potatoes have something to do with this
goal, or maybe it's girls have something to do with the
goal. Of course, we can't guess.

Now, I've even gone so far, experimentally, as to try to
pick out all of the various words that have reacted and put
a goal together for the pc. Doesn't work. Evaluates for the
pc and throws the whole thing into that. The pc will give
it to you eventually. You get all the withholds off the
subject of listing, all the withholds off the subject of
auditing, all the withholds off the subject of items,
goals, that sort of thing, any overts that might have
occurred in this direction - just explore around, get them
all over - and all of a sudden you say, "Well, are there any
more goals?"

"Oh, yap, yap, yap, yap, and yap, yap, yap and yap, yap,
yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, 'To lay girls in the open.'"

All right. You're nulling on down. There was your potato
patch. See? Only this one will go "open" (bang!), "open"
(bang!), "open" (hang!). You see your read? instant read,
instant read, instant read every time.

It does not matter how many reads you get that are prior to
the instant read. You ignore them.

Please believe me. You just ignore them. it does not matter
how many reads you get after the instant read. Ignore them.
But you must put across your thought majeure to the pc. And
if you got the thing all participially occluded, why,
prepare to stand there for several reads before it'll
finally embrace.

But oddly enough, no matter how complicated it is - I don't
know, I think you could probably get a fall on Uncle Tom s
Cabin where it says "The End"; you get your instant read,
you know? But you would have had to have read it to the
reactive mind fifty or sixty times, and I don't think
anybody could stand that.

So, that stable datum - get used to that stable datum, live
with it, and you won't have any trouble on the thing. And
God almighty, never ignore one. Teowuwtsw! Never ignore one.

On the subject of rudiments, middle rudiments, something
like that: "A little while ago when I was talking to you
about that goal, did you get an ARC break?" And it goes
zumph-zzm - ARC break, goal - zzzm-zzzumph, you know? "A little
while ago when I was talking to you about that goal, did
you get an ARC break?" Now you'll notice there's less
randomness in it. "A little while ago when I was talking to
you about that goal, did you get an ARC break?" Clank! You
put the thought majeure across, and it now is impinged, and
it will react. But why did it take so long? That's because
it's so complicated.

You would have gotten your instant read like this: "In this
session, have you had an ARC break?" Clank! See? Simple:
fast. Complicated: takes you a while. A complicated thought
majeure takes a lot of pounding before it is finally
embraced and will give you an instant read.

Now, you say, "In this session, have you told a half-truth?
Untruth?" see? That package question possibly leads you
astray, because there you are using a packaged bunch of
instant reads. Actually, you're shorthanding "In this
session have you told a half-truth? In this session have
you told an untruth? In this session have you tried to
impress me? In this session have you tried to damage
anyone?" See? Oddly enough, you could package the whole
thing together and use the interim reads. Oddly enough,
only that one will go down; particularly after the third or
fourth or fifth session with the pc, because the reactive
bank is now grooved into that thought majeure. They're very
obliging. A pc who is under control really responds.

This is all rather incredible. Why does the reactive mind
react? Why does the E-Meter work? Well, I won't be so
stupid as to try to force on you the same orders that the
six hundred had at Balaklava. (Which is some sort of
musical instrument they didn't play well!) There's this type
of think about this: I could say to you, the instructors
could say, everybody could say to you, "Now, look! When it
gets an instant read, read it! Now, you don't have to
understand it.

Just - when it gets an instant read, read it that way.
That - that's it!" See? And you say, "Yeah, but why does it
read that way?" see, and so forth. You've got a perfect
right to ask that question, see? Got a perfect right. Why
does it only give an instant read? And why can you groove
in a thought majeure? And why does it sometimes read on the
thought mineure? See? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Like little
Arthur says, see? You've got a perfect right to say that.

And I got a perfect right to tell you "I don't know!" It
just does! This is a whole set of fortuitous accidents
based on direct lookingness and on no figureness. There's
very little think involved with this thing, you see?

The E-Meter itself, I think, was a Decca voltmeter which a
guy held both sides of, and it reacted, in its most
primitive state. I think it was Richard Saunders at
Elizabeth, New Jersey, was monkeying around with this. He
wanted to show doctors that there was a response, and he
knew they would look at meters. So he pinched the living
daylights out of a pc, you know -  made him black and blue,
you know - while they were holding on to this thing, and then
told him to recall it and got the same response on the meter.

Well, fortunately today we're not dealing with that level
of insensitivity on the subject of meters, because think of
how you'd look at the end of session.

But this was picked up one way or the other or
independently gone at by Mathison. I gave a lecture,
described what kind of an instrument we really had to have.
Mathison went home and he breadboarded one up. It
functioned remarkably well for its original state. It was
very limited. Pcs went off the top of it and went off the
bottom of it with the greatest of ease. I think they
possibly still do on Mathison's.

But anyway, time went on and around Washington, why, I
eventually thought it would be a good thing to have this
one, and Don Breeding and the rest of the boys got
scratching their head over this thing, and old Joe Wallace,
and so on. And they kept hanging things together.

And then they'd do a perfect one, you know, and then they'd
scrap it because they could do one that, you know, behaved
electronically better, you know? And I'd take a pistol out
of my desk and hold it on them and make them build the
first plan.

And then they'd put fifty on the line or twenty-five on the
line, or something like that, and come back and tell me
that if they just eliminated the ruddy rod and put a couple
of condensers there that it'd work much better. And I'd
say, "No, you don't. You build the original one," see?

And they built some of these other ones, and they responded
perfectly electronically, but they did not respond
mentally. This meter responds mentally. Anybody alters that
meter, it's practically over our dead body because it's
just empirically worked out. It's marvelous that it works
at all.

But, do you know, people give you explanations for the
working and for the circuit and for this and that about
this thing. They're talking in their hats. They're talking
through their hats. They can give you all of the stuff, and
so forth, but that stuff all got assembled in there on the
basis of just breadboarding something.

Now we've developed theories as to how this thing works.
Now we've developed all kinds of things. There's a magnetic
thing in here that swings that.... We're dependent on James
Watt, Edison, all the modern electronics guys, transistors,
everybody else, on all of their know-how, but this hung
together makes an E-Meter. Why? I don't know.

We've got a doctor's meter. Costs several times what one of
these things cost. Reg got me one.

We played around with that thing. It doesn't work. We don't
know what it does, but it does something else. The needle
goes by so fast, you can't even see it go. We've learned
exactly nothing from it, which I think is marvelous, except
this one fact - you all knew that - that's doctors are frauds.
But we have an example of this: they've tried to copy our
E-Meter, and they just haven't gone anywhere with it. They
couldn't tell anything with this thing. It's marvelous! And
we got it, and I'm glad to have it! It's not a wasted
instrument. There is the peak of medical electronics.

Now, why does it work? Why does the reactive mind do this?

What you figuring for? For God's sakes, the thing is laid
out on a red carpet. This is how it works, this is how it
reacts and this is how you use it. Oddly enough, it's
invariable - utterly invariable.

Now, one of these days you're going to get Clear, you're
going to get very bright, you're going to figure out
exactly why an E-Meter responds this way, exactly what
wavelengths the thetan operates on in order to put a
reactivity together, exactly how many condensers fit
together amongst the ruddy rods. You understand? And how
you can all do it on thought transference and set up an
E-Meter on a table and read President Coolidge's reasons
why he wouldn't run, you see? Read through time.

Yes, by all means get in that shape! Yes, by all means get
that design. When you do, write me a letter. I'll publish it.

There's more phenomena around this subject - not just this
meter - than you could easily count up on an IBM Comptometer,
and there's an awful lot of particles in one of those.

Now, where do we got the figure? Where's the think?

Reg's engineer, who is a sharp apple - you see him around
here once in a while - he has a hard time with this, man. It
violates all of his principles of electricity and the body
and everything else. This thing is a ghost instrument. He
concluded the other day that, well, there's nothing else to
register there but thinkingness, or what did it? or how did
it? or something.

It wasn't that he was baffled that this reacted against the
mind, because that's rather common.

He's baffled about other things. He always thought it
worked on the amount of sweat, and then he suddenly
realized that you can't sweat and unsweat that fast. So
there must be something else involved here, and a lot of
things. But you walk up to most guys and they'll tell you
it's sweat - measures sweat. All right. Good. Measures sweat.
I don't know what that's got to do with it either. It
doesn't measure sweat. It measures think.

But there's a lot of boys can put these meters together
that don't measure think. Oddly enough, you can put the
commonest type of Wheatstone bridge together and give it no
damping, and the thing oddly enough will register even
think. So there's nothing very mysterious about it.

The mind is hung together electronically, it's hung
together with electricity. There are standing waves,
standing masses, in it which are timeless. These things are
drifting along in present time - and it obeys all of your
electrical laws and impulses.

But remember something: the human being is the author of
this universe and he's also the author of all the
electronics in this universe. Actually, there are flows and
currents in the human mind that have not yet been
discovered in electronics. See? That a junior subject can
now study a senior subject is, of course, a weird joke. But
it can, which is quite peculiar.

Now, you're not interested in why an E-Meter reads really,
unless you want to do some research in that particular
line - beyond this one thing: a thetan is an electric eel and
it measures electric currents. That's about as close as I
care to come to it myself. I never speculate on this.

But you talk about oddball, offbeat data on the subject of
the E-Meter. Why does the meter go tickity-tick, back and
forth, with an exact pattern every time when a person wants
to leave or go away or blow out of his head, or so forth?

The theta bop. The study of the theta bop could be very
long and very involved. I can tell you numerous ways to
produce a theta bop. Lots of ways. "Did you ever think of
leaving anybody?" You get a theta bop, you see? "Did you
ever think of dying?" You get a theta bop.

"Try not to be three feet in back of your head." You get a
theta bop. Shoot him with a .45, you'll get a theta bop. I
mean, it's an interesting thing. Well, we get the
coordinative action then, and one of the ways that you
could deduce or surmise that people could exteriorize and
what exteriorization was and how people leave their bodies
at the time of death and that sort of thing can be traced
with a theta bop.

What do you want to trace it for? Why don't you just learn
how to get out of your head and see how it is and get back
in again. See? You don't have to figure these things out
because you're on the main road anyhow. You don't have to
go at it with a bunch of logics and substitutes, because
it's there to look at. So you can go around picking up
pebbles all over the road. You can get them in your shoes.
You can fall in the ditch. You can run into milestones and
culverts and bridge abutments and the neighbor's fence. You
can do all of these things, but let me call to your
attention that there is a main highway, and you can go down
it at 110 miles an hour.

And it's the instant read; prior reads don't count; latent
reads don't count. Just instant reads, that's all. And the
instant read will abide by the major thought that you're
putting across to the pc and, oddly enough, will occur
exactly as though somebody over there had been informed
when you were going to stop talking. Probably the OGPU or
the NKVD. I don't know, they have an intelligence service
involved.

You can be very mysterious about the whole thing, but the
funny part of it is, it becomes terribly simple. And when
you look at it in that way, when you clean up everything in
this way, E-Metering becomes very odd.

Now, if you're so involved in prior reads and so involved
in latent reads and so involved in why it reads, and if you
also have a number of invalidations of the meter and also
suspect that it doesn't work because it hasn't worked on
you - you see, one day it didn't read when you knew it should
have read - why, naturally you're going to have a hell of a
time with a meter.

So break it down to that simplicity. Look at the only
important read that is on the machine and you've got it.

The only other thing I can tell you about a read is when it
goes more than one simple read, it is a dirty needle and is
measuring, somewhere on the track, a missed withhold.

All the goals and items that you want have a single tick.
The only reaction you will get on a proven goal item - single
tick.

Double tick? Then the whole goal or item is a missed
withhold. Soon as you get the missed withhold off, it'll no
longer read. Missed withholds are always more than one
tick. You never have goals and items finally proven out
with any other pattern.

I have seen some prove out with a rock slam. I've seen some
prove out with a rock slam. But laterly, I have realized
that there wasn't much of a list every time that occurred.
If there'd been a little bit more of a list, they would
have proved out with a tick. It's all right as a goal, but
I see these things months and months afterwards when
they've settled down, and they all prove out with a tick.
You understand? That's all you're really interested in with
a meter.

Now, you talk about speeded rises, speeded falls, slowed
rises, slowed falls - yeah, but those are all instant reads.
Now you're talking about out rudiments. Now you're talking
about reading the significance of the thought majeure, but
it's still an instant read. It is merely a change of needle
pattern. So there's significances about what this read is
and what that read is, and I've just rattled them off to
you. See?

There are no more than that, you see? The dirty needle is
always a missed withhold. That's a double-tick arrangement.
Any change of needle pattern at the instant you're finished
is an instant read. And that goals and items when they
check out, if they're valid, turn out to be single ticks.

Frankly, you could get along with just the data which I've
given you in this lecture, and if you applied that and
didn't go scrambling around the road for a bunch of new
data, why, man, you'd have all the rudiments in, you'd be
sailing and everything would be fine. 

Okay? 

Audience: Yes.

I don't say stop thinking. Think all you want to. But don't
stop looking.

Thank you.


