Dianetics 55! 1955 Chapter 8
Chapter 8: The Application of Communication
If you think we are talking about anything very esoteric, or highly mathematical, kindly read the communication formula again. Just because we are speaking of the basic fundamentals of sanity, aberration, freedom, ability, truth, knowledge, and secrets is no reason why we have to be complicated. We expect the fundamentals of behavior to be complicated simply because so many highly complicated people have discussed the subject. If Immanuel Kant couldn’t, and if Adler addled communication, there is no reason why we should.
As we speak of the applications of communication we are looking at complexities of these fundamentals, and having isolated the fundamentals, we do not then see any complexity in the product of the basics. Let us say that we thoroughly understand that two plus two equals four. Now we write this on a piece of paper and put it on a table. It is still understandable. Now we write on another piece of paper that two plus two equals four and put it on the same table. Now on a third piece of paper we write two plus two equals four and add it to those on the table. We take four tablets full of paper and on each sheet we write two plus two equals four, and tearing each sheet out, add these. Now we get some blocks of wood, and we write two plus two equals four on these blocks of wood. We get some leather and charcoal and write two plus two equals four, and add that to the table. Then we get some blackboards, and on each one white two plus two equals four and put them on the table. And we get some colored chalk and write two plus two equals four in various colors on another blackboard and put it on the table. Then we have two plus two equals four bound in vellum and add that to the pile on the table. Then we get some building bricks and we scratch on them two plus two equals four and put them on the table. Now we get four gallons of ink and pour it over two plus two equals four, and smear everything we’ve put on the table. Now we take a bulldozer and push the table out through the wall. We take a steam roller and run over the debris. We take some concrete and pour it over the whole and let it dry, and we still have not altered the fact that two plus two equals four.
In other words, no matter what mechanics we add to the communication formula, no matter what form we use to communicate, no matter how many types of words and meanings we place into the communication formula to become messages, no matter how we scramble meanings, messages, cause points and effect points, we still have a communication formula.
Here we have an individual. He has been living for a many- evented lifetime. He began life, let us say, with a perfect grasp of the communication formula. His experience has been a consistent departure from the communication formula only to the degree that he failed to emanate or failed to receive, twisted, perverted, or failed to return communications, and at the end of that lifetime all we have to do to put him into excellent condition would be to restore in its complete clarity his ability to execute the communication formula. The only thing which has happened to him has been violation of the communication formula. He emanated something that was not received; when it was received it was not acknowledged; when it replied he did not receive it; and thus he begins to look further and further afield for communication and becomes more and more complicated in his view of communication and becomes less and less duplicatable, is less and less able to duplicate, his intentions swerve further and further, his attention becomes more and more altered, what should have been straight lines wind up in a ball, and we have our preclear after a lifetime of living with homo sapiens. All we have to do to get him into the most desirable clarity would be to restore his ability to perform the various parts of the communication formula and his ability to apply that formula to any thing in this or any universe. He would have to be willing to duplicate anything. He would have to be willing to make himself duplicatable. He would have to be able to tolerate distance and velocities and masses. He would have to be able to form his own intentions. He would have to be able to give and receive attention. He would have to be able to take or leave at will the intentions of others, and more important, he would have to be able to be at any point and make it cause or receipt point at will. If he were able to do this he could not possibly be trapped, for here we are intimately walking into the deepest secret of the trap.
What is a secret? It is the answer which was never given, and this is all a secret is. Thus knowledge and use of the communication formula within the framework of Dianetics and Scientology resolves any and all secrets and even the belief in secrets.
The only thing that could be said to aberrate communication would be restriction, or fear of restriction. A person who is not communicating is one who is restricting communication. A person who is communicating compulsively is afraid of being restricted in his communication. A person who is talking on another subject than that to which Cause was giving his attention has been so restricted on the subject of communication elsewhere, or has experienced such a scarcity of communication elsewhere, that he is still involved with communication elsewhere. This is what we mean by „not in present time.“
When we look at problems without which humanity cannot seem to live we discover that a problem is no more and no less than a confusion of communication lines, missing cause or effect points, undeterminable distances, misread intentions, missing attention, and failures in the ability to duplicate and be duplicatable. Move off the communication formula in any direction and a problem will result. A problem, by definition, is something without an answer, not because the two words are similar, but because all of humanity has confused them. We find that answer to a communication and answer to a problem can, for our purposes, be synonymous.
When one has failed to get answers consistently to his communications, he begins to run into a scarcity of answers, and he will get problems in order to have solutions, but he will not solve any of the problems because he already has a scarcity of answers. An auditor walks in on a preclear who has a scarcity of answers, finds the preclear has a circuit of problems, tries to resolve some of the problems of the preclear, discovers that the preclear creates new problems faster than old ones can be resolved. One thing the preclear knows is that there aren’t any answers – not for his particular kind of problems. He knows this is to such a degree that he is unable to conceive of answers, which means to him that he is unable to conceive of solutions. He is like the old man in Manuel Komroff’s story who, after his release from prison, yet created a cell of his own. He cannot look at freedom. He does not believe freedom exists. He cannot envision a world without tigers. The remedy for this, of course, is to have him remedy his lack of answers by having him mock up answers.
That confused look you see on a mathematician’s face is the task he has set himself to procure symbolic answers to hypothetical abstracts, none of which, of course, are human answers. The longer he symbolizes, the more formulas he creates, the further he drifts from the human race. Answers are answers only when they come from living units. All else is a glut on the market. No mathematical formula ever gave anybody any answer to anything unless it was to the problem of communication itself, but this I’ll invite to your attention, was not involved with, and was not derived from, mathematics as we know them. The communication formula was derived from an observation of and working with life. It could be derived only because one had entirely abandoned the idea that energy could tell anyone anything. Life is not energy. Energy is the by-product of Life.
Your recluse is one who has become so thoroughly convinced that there are no obtainable answers from anyone that he does no longer believe that Life itself exists. He is the only living thing alive, in his opinion. Why? Because he is the only thing which communicates. I dare say every recluse, every „only one,“ every obsessively or compulsively communicating individual has so thoroughly associated with „life units“ which were so dead that it became „very plain“ that no one else was alive. The attitude of a child towards the adult contains the opinion that adults have very little Life in them. A child, with his enthusiasms, is in his family everywhere surrounded by communication blocks of greater or lesser magnitude. His questions do not get answers. The communications which are addressed to him are not posed in a way which can be duplicated. In other words, the adult does not make himself duplicatable. Freud and his confreres were entirely in error in believing that the child is totally self-centered. It is not the child who is totally self-centered. He believes that he is in communication with the total world. Investigation of children demonstrates that they are very heavy on the First, Second, Third and Fourth Dynamics. The child is so convinced of his ability to communicate that he will touch a hot stove. Life has no terrors for him. He has not yet learned by experience that he cannot communicate. It’s the adult who is drawn back into the „only one“ and one believes that the inspiration of this continuous belief on the part of a psychologist and psychoanalyst that the child is entirely self-centered and living in his own world must be the expression of an opinion held by the psychoanalyst and psychologist out of his own bank. As one grows one goes less and less into communication with the environment until he is at last entirely out of it. Only he is out of it in the wrong direction – dead.
Where you see aberration, where you would wish to detect aberration, you must look for violations in the communication formula. People who consistently and continually violate portions of the communication formula can be suspected of being just that dead. The further one departs from the communication formula the more death exists for them. The more concentrated they become on secrets, the more they question intentions, the less they are likely to assume the point of view called Cause or the point of view called Effect.
One should not go so far as to say that Life is communication. It is, however, a native condition of Life to be able to communicate. Life, the awareness of awareness unit, the ability to have unlimited quality with no quantity, or do produce quantity, is capable of communication. And here again we are consulting ability. Ability, first and foremost, could be conceived to be the ability to BE, and also the ability to vary being, and this means the ability to communicate. One has to be able to be in order to communicate. One has to be able to vary one’s beingness in order to return communication.
There is the manifestation, then, known as the „stuck flow.“ This is one-way communication. The flow can be stuck incoming or it can be stuck outgoing. The part of a communication cycle that goes from primary Cause to Effect may be the flow that is stuck, or it might be the other from „b“ back to „a“ that is stuck. Here we have several possible methods of achieving a stuck flow, and several conditions of flow, four to be exact. The flow can be stuck from primary Cause to Effect, from the viewpoint of primary Cause. The flow can be stuck from primary Cause to primary Effect from the viewpoint of primary Effect. The flow can be stuck from Effect-turned-Cause to final Effect, from the viewpoint of Effect-turned-Cause. The flow can be stuck from Effect-turned-Cause to primary Cause, from the viewpoint of primary Cause. These four stuck flows can become – any of them or a combination of them – the anatomy of a communication lag of a case. A person can hear but cannot answer. A person can cause a communication to begin, but cannot receive an acknowledgement. A primary Cause can be totally engrossed in keeping the flow from arriving at primary Effect, etc.
A failure to complete a cycle of communication will leave some part of that communication in suspense. It will leave it, in other words, silent, and this will stick on the track. It will float in time. It will restimulate. It will attract and hold attention long after it occurred.
Unconsciousness itself results from the receipt of too much, too heavy, communication. It can similarly, but less often, result from the emanation of too much, too heavy, communication as in the case of blowing up a large balloon, where one becomes dizzy after the expulsion of too much breath. Theoretically, one sending a large mass towards another might fall unconscious as a result of sending too much mass away from himself too suddenly, and we find that this can be the case. This is degradation because of loss. One gives away too much, or loses too much, and the departure of the mass, or even the idea, can bring about a drop in consciousness. In view of the fact that a thetan can create at will this is not a very dangerous situation. One can receive too much communication too suddenly, such as a cannon ball. Unconsciousness will result from this. Most engrams are composed of too much incoming mass and too much outgoing mass, so as to make a confusion into which any answer, any phrase interjected can then be effective since there is a scarcity of phrases and a plus in masses. One could even go so far as to say that the only reason a mass interchange is ever effective in the line of unconsciousness is that it does not have enough reasons with it. I suppose that if one explained carefully enough to a soldier why he had to be shot, the arrival of a bullet would not make him unconscious or hurt him. But again this is theoretical, as very little reason goes on in war, thus it has never been subjected to a clinical experiment.
The resolution of any stuck flow is remedying the scarcity of that which stuck the flow. This might be answers, it might be original communication, it might be chances to reply.
The communication formula at work is best understood through the „communication lag.“