Exteriorization by Distance, Cause (7ACC 540701)
Series: 7th Advanced Clinical Course (7ACC)
Date: 1 July 1954
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
Okay. We're now going to take up a process known as Exteriorization by Distance.
Exteriorization by Distance is a development extending immediately and intimately from the Formula of Communication which has long since been developed. We find the factors involved in communication are the following by list: Source-point, Receipt-point, Cause, Effect, Duplication, Distance, Impulse, Particle and, above all these, Consideration. That is the anatomy of communication.
It is drawn or posed this way: Source-point, Distance, Receipt-point. For Source-point we can transfer or exchange Cause; for Receipt-point we can exchange Effect—so that we have Cause, Distance, Effect as a Communication Formula.
There is one more factor in communication which is an understood factor: Attention. This is an understood factor in communication rather than an anatomy. Obviously, you cannot have Cause to Effect unless there's some attention put in at Cause in the direction of Effect and unless there's some attention at Effect to intercept what is coming from Cause.
In view of this, we seem to be dealing with intentional communication rather than accidental communication.
As communication drops down from intentional to accidental, we have simply introduced this factor: the suddenness or abruptness of the attention. You follow that? The suddenness or abruptness of the attention introduces the accidental factor. He accidentally caused something. In other words, without quite looking and without much direction, his attention went in a certain direction. That attention might be represented as a machine, but it's still attention and it went in that direction without intention—clear-cut intention.
People are so suspicious of accidental Cause that they have believed for eons that there is a sub-significance in an accidental Cause. "He really intended to do it," they say. "An accident-prone really intends to cause the accident," they say. Whereas all it might be is an unattention machine, you see, a machine which cuts off and misdirects attention. That's all it might be that caused an accident-prone. His attention goes suddenly in a certain direction without control. That's all that an accident-prone might be. Somebody whose attention goes suddenly in an unforecast, unpredicted direction and without further control will, of course, cause accidents because he's always putting in accidental source-points. See, "He didn't mean... he didn't he didn't know the gun was loaded and he didn't notice which direction it was pointing, but it went off," see?
Well, this just might be somebody who is terribly deficient in attention and not only might be somebody who is inefficient in attention, but is somebody. And the direct factor of this unseen, accidental Cause is traceable to the amount of attention which can be concentrated by a living entity upon the environment. And when people can't concentrate much attention upon the environment, and cannot selectively put the attention on various parts of the environment or several parts of the environment, they therefore become subject to accidental Cause. You see, they—just their attention is hanniiyahhh, you know?
For instance, a machine breaking down is almost impossible in the ground of accidental. The breakdown of a machine is almost impossible. The machine was made in the first place to r n. Anybody who is operating that machine should have enough feeling for the machine—in other words, should be able to pervade it sufficiently—to know whether the machine is running securely or not.
For instance, I well recall an incident of going down, just outside of Mobile, Alabama, a highway there and I just picked up a Cadillac. It was a nice old Cadillac. Old lady had bought the thing, didn't know what to do with it, left it sitting in a garage for eighteen months. They were so happy to get rid of that Cadillac— they didn't know what they were doing—when I walked in and flashed some Yankee folding money in front of them. And it had been sitting there, however, for eighteen months. Its tires looked excellent. It looked excellent. It ran wonderfully. It had barely been broken in. I bought it for practically nothing, by the way.
And I took it out on the road and started to run it up to speed—the speeds Cadillacs should go, you know, 105 and so forth, normal speed, Cadillac. And all of a sudden I knew there was something very wrong, and I couldn't check up with myself what was wrong exactly and took my foot off the accelerator and I didn't brake her down, I just let her coast downstairs in speed till it dropped down to about 40. It hit 40 and the front right tire blew out. Well, that's an accident, isn't it, that I would be slowing down right at that moment. Obviously I must have summed it up later that there was something or other happening. You know, I must have added the reason afterwards.
Well, the fact of the matter is that I went on up to speed again and you could say by that time I was fairly leery. I got the tire patched and exchanged and so forth and I got on up to speed again and got her up good speed and all of a sudden says, "Uh-oh," and slowed her down and held on to the wheel mighty steady-like and the other front tire blew. And my passenger at that time said, "Hey! What's going on here?" And then he was dopey enough to say, "Did you blow out the tires?" You know, that sort of a reaction.
Well, I speeded her up again, and she went tearing down the road and we were in pretty good shape by that time. And obviously two in that many miles, obviously there could be 11? more. And I got up toward a curve and all of a sudden said, "Oh-oh," and slowed her on down to about 25. I was getting cautious then because she really did lurch around considerably when a tire blew and slowed her down to 25 and the tire blew.
Well, this fellow then believed that the car was blowing out its tires because the car, in slowing down, introduced a new type of friction into the wheel which must then have acted to cause a blowout. Well, this would have been all right.
We stopped at a service station and we got two of these blowouts replaced and the other one beautifully fixed up and it was very nice and so forth and we went on up the road about ten miles. I slowed the car down this time to about 10 and let the rear—last rear tire bl w. Opened up the back of the car for the extra spare which I had bought for this eventuality and by this time—this time my passenger, having noted that I did not slow down at any time except when the tire was going to blow, decided it was all being done by spirits or mirrors. He was right in the first instance: being done by a spirit—me.
Pervasion. Now, anybody who is pretty good with machinery or fair with machinery actually the average American kid who is used to the stuff and so forth, he knows When it's sour. How does he know? He knows by prediction. That's because he isn't of the machine. He's perfectly willing to predict it, so therefore he isn't holding his attention off of it. If he is unwilling to predict it, he'll hold his attention off of it. So as long as his attention is being put on the machine in a very relaxed fashion, he isn't concentrating on the machine, you see, taking it all off the environment and putting it on the machine. He does that when he's seventy-two years old. He takes it off the environment and puts it on the "knock" and then runs into the pedestrian as he goes through the crosswalk. He takes it off the environment, you see, and puts it on anything wrong in e machine.
Well, this is a concentration and where the machine is telling him what to put his attention on. Let's get the reverse of that: an individual simply has pervaded the machine.
He's driving it, so naturally he's pervaded it. So something goes wrong and, of course, he would notice it since his attention is all through the machinery. Goes wrong—before it heats up, blows out, springs a gasket or anything else, why, he shuts it down.
Therefore, under somebody who likes machinery and who is used to machinery and who is good around machinery and so forth, you don't get machines breaking to pieces. But the difference in riders, for instance, on motorcycles, drivers of racing cars, chief engineers in steam vessels and so forth, with regard to the machine, is very, very definitely known. And they look at the repair records of chief engineers, for instance, and if a chief engineer has too much repair record, they'll find themselves another chief engineer. What's it mean? It means he didn't notice or couldn't determine that this piece of equipment had a flaw in it which, when it went, would cause then widespread breakage through the machinery. That's what it is. You just note that it isn't running right.
Now, this isn't even mystic. Pistons don't break suddenly. They go ssi... ssi, bang! Well, you had seconds there, you could have shut the throttle on something, see? A clutch, for instance, doesn't burn up suddenly. It starts to heat and it heats and it heats and it heats and it heats. And actually it'll take—if you're yanking some heavy load on a big truck or something like that around, it'll take it almost an hour for a clutch to get up to a point of where it's dangerously hot. Therefore a truck driver requiring lots of truck repair just didn't have enough sense to stop the truck when the clutch went out of order. You see, he could have determined that the clutch went out of order, simply by knowing whether or not it got hot.
Well, how would he know whether or not it got hot? I don't know, how do you know you're perspiring? Well, that's your forehead, isn't it. Well, that's understood and we all know that, you see. How do you know you're hot? Well, that's you. I mean, you know, of course. Only it isn't "of course."
Anybody who has his attention on his body to where he only knows the temperature of the bod while he's walking through an environment has lost the environment as part of his attention span. He isn't spanning his attention into the environment. A person who is in good shape can walk down the street and he can tell how hot everybody else feels on the street, too. And of course, the less he really worries about how hot they are, the more h is able to tell how hot they are, which is quite curious.
You could, if you were in really good shape—you're nicely exteriorized—just go through a bus barn sometime; just dive through sort of longitudinally through a bus barn. And you'll be ab e to find out all the broken-down trucks—you know, buses. You'll find them all.
How would you do this? You have to know mechanics, of course. No, no, there's just that much worry has gone on over this machine and there's just ridges sitting on it, that's all. It's just that simple. As a matter of fact, you could sit in New York and tell somebody in Los Angeles which bus, what number, was going to break down next. This is attention span.
When an individual has his attention very, very thoroughly concentrated upon one object such as a body, he, of course, can only tell what's going to go on in that body and not what's going to go on in the rest of the environment. And this is not a desirable state of affairs because when he does this, he will get accidental Cause.
Now, you thought I'd wandered way off the subject and I fooled you—I hadn't. Accidental Cause. He s got his attention on the body and all of a sudden a pedestrian steps off of the curb in front of him. He's got his attention on his body, you see. And ten yards ahead of him a pedestrian is going to step off the curb. How does he know? Well, a person can get pretty spooky about this if they really don't have their attention scattered around—you know, if they really don't have their attention loose. Then they start to guess and get it by telepathy. They think it'd be a telepathic message which would teleport by The Teleportation Union Message Service from the head of the person on the curb to the head of the driver, which would then result in you knowing what the message was and what the intention—no, no, no, no, no.
You're just going down there, and ten yards away to be able to sense the muscle tension of the person on the curb would be the easiest thing that anybody ever did. He doesn't have to go over there, you see. You think maybe your only method of communicating is looking. Oh, no. I assure you, when you're in real good shape, you don't have to be downscale to feel the effort in an environment, too. You only miss feeling the effort in the environment if you don't like effort. So you'd know whether or not this person was going to step off the curb. As a matter of fact, you wouldn't have to think about it at all. You would just know whether or not this person was going to step off this curb by the amount of tension in that body, whether it was being held or whether it was being forwardly propelled. There isn't any message involved in it, not even a communication involved in it.
If you don't think you can communicate with somebody else's body, realize—and particularly with Exteriorization by Distance—you realize sometime that this person got into communication with a body at birth. And he got into communication with it as mechanically as you would get into communication with a carton of cigarettes. Anybody else can get into communication with it, too. It's free communication ground— 100 percent free ground.
He happens to have it nailed down and it happens to be tuned to his determinism, so he can make it act faster than anybody else, but don't think for a moment that somebody else can't make it act! They can. They can. And they make it act intentionally to the direct degree that they have their attention free in the environment.
In other words, a person is positive Cause, intentional Cause, in direct ratio to the amount of attention he has free and relaxed in an area. And accidental Cause is proportional to the amount of fixation of attention which an individual has.
Now, that's very interesting, isn't it? So we take accidental Cause and we take intentional Cause and We find the preclear we're having a hard time working is actually being, to a large degree, other-determined. So we have a new kind of Cause. Ah, but this is Cause on another line. Somebody else causes an impulse to occur which the preclear then follows.
Now, as a relay point, the preclear, of course, is Cause. He is at that Source-point line. He's at Source-point, but somebody else gave him an impulse to put him on that Source-poi t line. And this individual can determine this to the degree that he has free attention in the environment, and is mystified by it to the degree that he doesn't have free attention in the environment but has fixed attention. And so people who go around wondering who is making them do this sort of thing know that they themselves are putting the impulse on the line but feel that somebody else is handing them the impulse. So they look into the past, they look into the people around them and they try to put the past and put the present on somebody else. And this is a direct ratio to the amount of attention which the individual can collect or disperse, the amount of control he has over his own attention. And that's about all there are to that. That's just nothing much—that's proportional to this.
So, you see, that attention is an understood and very important part of Cause and Effect, but you see, you couldn't have Cause and Effect if you didn't have attention, and you'll find very often that we talk about Cause and Effect without mentioning attention. Well, it's perhaps bad to have something that thoroughly understood, but nevertheless, if you went n explaining attention all the time with regard to this, you'd have everybody groggy.
Now, the most accessible point, as far as exteriorization is concerned, of the Communication Formula is, of course, the distance factor. That is the most accessible part of the formula. This distance can't exist at all, though, in the absence of total duplication. I mean if duplication were totally absent, rather, why, we wouldn't get—we can't even vaguely have any kind of a communication. We're not interested now in a distance factor—just blahhh and no duplication. You won't even get an identification if you had totally absent duplication. You wouldn't even get an identification. Lord knows what you'd have.
The point here is that you have to remedy some duplication before you start remedying distance. And the truth of the matter is, you have to start remedying some attention before you can remedy duplication. So let's look back at an optimum auditing session and see what we're talking about.
We say an optimum auditing session—two-way communication with a preclear. Now, what is that? That's attention, isn't it? Let's get the preclear to at least put some attention on us (that's just talking) and now let's get him to spread his attention a little bit further by having it on the auditor and maybe part of his bank. Ah! Now the auditor, part of his bank and the body. We're spreading attention.
As a matter of fact, the individual who goes anaten in an auditing session has just been called upon to give more attention than he thinks he has to spare. He thinks of attention as quantitative and so it behaves. He thinks there's a quantity of attention—you know, like you have five quarts or six watts and that's how much attention you've got. This is not the case. You have as much attention as you consider you have, that's how much attention you have. So you want to change his consideration about how many things he can put attention on.
The fifth step of Procedure 30 is concerned with attention. It's just putting your attention on several objects at once. Right now, for instance, you could look around the room, you could look at me and then realize that you could also look at the microphone and then also realize that you could look at the other microphone.
When you get an individual up along the line on this he could see three things with equal reality. They would all be real to him. The next thing you know, as you build this, you'll find the entire room has become real to the individual. The test of this is an individual discovers a reality first on one object. You get him free enough so that he can put his attention on one object.
Extroversion and introversion of attention is an exercise that does this sort of thing. We're not talking about these exercises right now. We're showing you what you build up to when you get to Exteriorization by Distance. In the absence of some attention—that is the main problem with the psychotic, by the way, he won't give the practitioner any attention a all. But there are ways to make a psychotic be attentive: Mimicry. He'll get rather attentive if you mimic him, even a catatonic schiz will. So we go into it by attention and then we've got to have some duplication there, see, to the degree certainly that the auditor can issue the order and the preclear will execute it. Well you see, that is a duplication and that's Opening Procedure 8-C. It's not crowding the preclear very hard, you see, but he's still duplicating the order without quite knowing he's doing it.
Then we would go into Opening Procedure by Duplication as the most deadly step which could be taken at that point. And having remedied duplication a little bit more and attention to this degree, broadened attention a little bit more, put him more into communication with his environment, you could then attack the problem of Exteriorization by Distance.
Tolerance used in the auditing command formula—tolerance used in the auditing command formula is itself defined by how close and how far; how big and how small; how prese t, how absent; how connected, how disconnected. This is tolerance. And just giving hi the idea of tolerance is just fine, but what do you know, the distance itself establishes the definition of tolerance—the distance. The tolerance is then a feel and it doesn't ha e to be defined as a word.
And a distance itself is recognizable in the field of lookingness or knowingness, isn't it? Lookingness and knowingness immediately define distance. It doesn't need a word, does it? It doesn't require a word, hm?
All right. Now, let's go a little bit further than that and realize that the parts we are talking about (in view of the fact that they exist) are objects. They are not words, are they? We're directing attention, which again is not a word, across a distance to an object which we could define not with a word but with—by pointing. You could somehow or another rig out a method to run this by hand signals, you know. Gesturing the fellow, "You, you know. How much distance between you, you see, and your foot," "See? Oh-oh." Well, it'd take a guy a long time to get it, maybe, because he's not used to receiving communications that way, but he could sooner or later get it with effort on your part.
Some clever auditor sometime or another is going to dream up a complete method of communicating this to the deaf and blind (at once deaf and blind) and to a foreign-language person, so that it could be run in a foreign language without either the auditor or the preclear speaking the same language. Some clever auditor someday is going to do that, just getting distance. You could do a whole processing session mostly by visualness or touchingness or something of that sort, you see?
Now here is the most important factor in it. A case which is parked in symbols, when asked to do something which could be communicated by signal, no longer is in symbols. Symbols are no longer being validated in Exteriorization by Distance. Symbols are no longer being validated—all he is doing there in terms of words and so forth. His meanings are so easily expressed mechanically that you can't get a symbol mix-up on the line. It's impossible to get a symbol mix-up on the line.
Also, we already have codes with which to attract attention. All I have to do is [slap] slap my hands together and somebody's attention goes on that fact, you see, so I mean that's a code. And as far as parts are concerned, you see, that's a code. And as far as distance are concerned, you see, I mean it can be coded, but it doesn't have to be. You point, you see. You can point to anybody. People who are not speaking the same language, trying to converse with one another, spend most of their time pointing, gesturing and making facial expressions which are meaningful.
And now, let's take duplication. Duplication itself can exist in the absence of the word duplication, see? It itself is communicating. We could make somebody do Opening Procedure y Duplication without any words being interchanged at all and without any commands being given. We'd simply lead him from one object, make him look at this object, lead him over to the other object and make him look at that object and then just indicate with our finger back and forth what he was doing.
What do s this mean? It means that these processes exceed the necessity of symbols. And the moment that you have a process which exceeds symbols, you drag everybody out of the symbol band which is below the effort band. So you make a remarkable advance right there imply by pulling him out of symbols.
Further ore, it can actually be communicated. There is no discussion of how real it is or what is real. There is no discussion of when so we have left time out of it. We're not validating at, you see. There is no time beyond a consideration, so why validate it. And we have se up here a little system of practices which communicate.
They not only communicate easily from me to you, they communicate very easily from you to a preclear. And they communicate very easily between the preclear and his bank, the preclear and his body. And so in essence, by taking the component parts of communication itself—Source-point, Distance, Receipt-point, Duplication, Attention—we then have something which exceeds language. And we are talking now about the fundamental which sooner or later will get so involved that it will become language. See? Source, Distance, Effect, Attention, Duplication. And when you mix up objects and criteria and opinion with it, you get language. When you put time and speed, motion and other qualities into this, you get language.
Language was born with the considerations of this formula and thus this formula will unwind any case. Now, we want simple processes? There's simple processes.
Understood factor there is the affinity the auditor feels for the preclear. He doesn't get raging mad and so forth. That's an understood factor. Another factor that's in there, of course, is the agreement. The auditor and the preclear have some agreement that the preclear can get better or get worse by doing this process, you see? So the agreement is there, more or less understood. The affinity is there almost understood.
Some of you will wake up someday to realize that agreement and reality itself is the duplication part of communication.
Now, here we have then a rather simple series of processes and the effectiveness of Exteriorization by Distance, since it cannot be invalidated by language, since it itself forms language.
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EXTERIORIZATION BY DISTANCE, PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT 2 7ACC-09A - 01.07.54
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