View source for Communication and Problems (UC 541230)

'''Series:''' UC

'''Date:''' 30 December 1954

'''Speaker:''' L. Ron Hubbard

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Hiya.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Want to talk to you, now, about human communication. Would you like to know something about human communication?

Audience: Yeah!

Communication is, of course, an inevitable problem in any human society. It's also a problem in ant societies. It's a problem. Because the anatomy of all problems is communication.

When you would take ARC, we then add the intention, the attention, and the reason why we're communicating. But communication all by itself will bring into being—as I was telling you a little while ago, the fellow with a piece of pipe finally dreams up an answer as to why he has it there. Just the fact that somebody sees it and comments on it means there has to be a reason for it. And that's all the reason why there is.

Well, communication and problems are very intimate. And if we have said that every human being is going around playing a little game of problems and that if everybody that we get to process can have a scarcity of problems and can get to a point where he no longer has any problems, and is therefore very unhappy, we then recognize the fact that the anatomy of a problem is a tangle of communication.

Now, in almost any language of which I have any cognizance, the word answer (meaning reply) and the word answer (meaning solution) are the same word. But this is more than an identification. This is more than one of these Dianetic phrases that gets stuck and misinterpreted.

Remember in the old days, "He rode a horse." R-o-d-e, "He rode a horse," would be interpreted, as a psychotic, on a level with "He rowed a horse," r-o-w-e-d. See, it'd mean the same thing just because they sound alike.

Well, answer and answer can get even further confused because they are the same word. But the solution to a secret is an answer, and the absence of an answer gives us a secret. And that's all you have to know about secrets. There isn't anything more to know about secrets.

Now, you can go charging around all you want to, looking for secrets, but what you're seeking is an answer. And in the absence of an answer, you get a secret. All right.

We get this condition: we have, this girl named Grind—works at Burlecue Theater. (laughter) Anyway, this girl called Grind is completely out of communication on a verbal level. People walk up to her and they say, "Hiya, Grind. (pause) tsk—huh!"

And then they see her the next time and they say, "Well, how's tricks, Grind?" (pause)

And they see her at a party and they say, "You having a good time, Grind?" (pause)

And after a while they tell each other, "You know, that girl has an awful lot of secrets. She certainly knows something."

And the fact of the matter is that a microscopic examination of her medulla oblongata as well as her skull, which has probably never before been examined, would demonstrate immediately and conclusively that she not only did not have a secret datum but she didn't know nothin' nohow. But she would get a reputation for being a very mysterious person simply by never answering, which would mean that she would have lots of secrets. Follow me?

So people, when they don't have—don't have answers coming back from people, they begin to assume that they have strange motives. They begin to assume that these people have something up the sleeve, or that they mean wrong.

Now, all you have to do is to go out of communication with a business partner to have him hire a set of auditors (of another kind) to audit the books and find out just what you are doing to him. What are you doing to him?

You don't say, "Hello" in the morning; don't say, "Goodbye" at night.

And he will very soon come to the conclusion that there's something wrong with the account books of the firm: "This fellow must be hiding something."

And it doesn't follow at all. What he is doing is adding the R to the triangle. Because the C has dropped out, he tries to put something there on the triangle. You know? "Let's have some triangle, little bit of triangle, please—at least an R. Otherwise, we'll go completely out of affinity with existence." So he tries to get a reason why. He wants the rationality of why this communication is dropping. And because there is no C, then there is no R.

Now, people who have consistently failed to communicate to you probably have become enigmas, they have become secrets, they have become people with suspicious motives, people who have causes which are very strange.

I imagine the failure of the Communist Party to answer up to Senator McCarthy many, many years ago in those dark ages of senatorial investigation, the failure of the Communist Party to tell Senator McCarthy what it was doing, has given Senator McCarthy the conviction, the utter conviction, that they are hiding many secrets. You follow me?

Whereas, if you know any communists, you will know they're incapable of holding anything. That's what's wrong with them. They've got to give it all away, you see, give it to the people, and then they never determine where the people are to be given things to, you see. And everybody has got to own everything. Give it all away. They can't hold anything. They have no secrets.

They hire expert people to take all the secrets we have so we don't even have any secrets from them, now. But just the failure to answer up has given many people, like Senator McCarthy, the belief that communists and communist nations have strange, terrible and peculiar motives which cannot be readily understood in a civilized world.

Now, one of the ways to utterly upset this computation would be if the Kremlin started to answer, or write letters to, or answer all the things that Senator McCarthy was saying. If they just started to pour a flood of communication at McCarthy—supposing this was communication on the basis of:

"We want to put you on our monthly mailing list for the agricultural contest figures for the Four-Star-H." "Here are the statistics of how many nuts and bolts have been found missing on collective farm tractors during the first two months of 1952." "Dear Senator McCarthy, we have understood that you have some interest in bears and we wish to report to you that the Himalayan bear. .."

It wouldn't matter what they said, you understand? It would not matter what they said. Just simply a bunch of communication to Senator McCarthy would find him in this interesting condition of believing that the most open and aboveboard organization of which he had ever heard was the Communist Party.

Japan, by the way, in continuing to negotiate with the United States, was able to apply a surprise attack to the United States at Pearl Harbor. Because the communication was there, nobody in Washington could envision the fact that any lack of affinity was there. And so there would be no reason why anything should occur, like a sneak attack. And that's what we call treachery.

See, the wrong reason why in the existence, and a wrong affinity, actually masked by continuing communication. That's a complexity and a problem. That makes a very neat problem. But what happens to any problem if you start communicating at it or with it or around it?

Well, let's take a very practical application, one which we know of that's very old. We have a fellow who has a bum right foot and we ask him to "Put a communication line through to your right foot." This is a real old process, way back: "Put a communication line through to your right foot." "Now, have your right foot put a communication line through to you." "Now you put a communication line through to your right foot." "Now, have your right foot put a ..."

All of a sudden—boom, bang—something occurs, facsimile blows, something happens and the difficulty with the right foot disappears and that is the end of that difficulty. This was a test process. It didn't work sometimes because a person was unable to put a communication line through to his right foot in the first place. He simply wasn't doing so, so his right foot got in bad condition. Right foot out of communication, still being used by the individual, therefore will get into bad condition.

So, in the absence of communication, we had psychosomatic illness. And that's true. A person who is having difficulty with his body is out of communication with that point of his body, and this we can say very neatly and very nicely. A person who doesn't like his body or who finds something very wrong with his body, is out of communication with his body. We can just draw this instant conclusion. There's no further argument or ifs, ands, or buts about it.

If a person says, "Well, I want to get exteriorized because I've got to get rid of that nasty old thing. I don't like that body, it's dirty and it's awful, and I want to get exteriorized." Well, maybe they could exteriorize on a compulsive or an obsessive basis.

Usually if you said, "Be three feet back of your head" they'd be passing by Arcturus in an awful hurry, they'll—zoom! But that is not a rational action.

The actual way to get them out of the body is to put them in communication with the body, and then get them out of the body. The reason why people don't move easily out of bodies is because they're not in communication with bodies. Get the idea? It's a very simple solution.

Well now, let's take all problems. Let's look over all problems and discover that a problem becomes a problem when communication breaks down somewhere. The birth of a problem would be the break of a comm line. Any time you cut a comm line, you get yourself a problem.

Now, it's a fact that you could ignore some communication lines. You could ignore quite a few communication lines—you actually could. You could just walk off and forget about them, you know? As long as you weren't really in communication on that line anyhow, you can leave it alone.

But let's pick up the line, let's start to fight it: we're going to have a problem. We could ignore it but if we start communicating and then we cut communications, we thereafter will have a problem. It's a horrible fact because you've gone out of communication with a lot of things, willy-nilly.

You lose a ring; you're now out of communication with a ring. Well, it didn't create much of a problem but one of the things that you will ask is, "Where did I lose it?" I think that's one of the silliest problems I ever heard of. You know, this fellow walks in and he says, "Where's my hat? Where's my hat?" He hasn't got his hat and he's going to leave, he's got to go to the office or something, "Where's my hat?"

And somebody says to him, "Well, where did you lose it?" If he knew where he lost it, he could find it. It's lost because he didn't know where it is. And yet this is the first thing anybody says to you when you've lost something, "Where did you lose it?"

Well, here we have a problem resulting from a break of communication. Now that's the most elementary sort of a problem break—problem lost because of communication breaks.

Now, the problem is lost when the communication is restored or when processing, or some type of processing just breaks it up as a problem.

A problem actually has mass. There are no problems without mass, really—no problems that would ever worry anybody. Take even arithmetic: "two plus two equals four" never worried you until you had to ask this question, "Two what plus two what equals four what?" Now you really have a problem. You only have an equation before that, not a problem. You have a formulary statement of an arithmetical piece of misinformation. All right.

Two plus two never equaled four. I mean, the four is over on that side, the twos are there (two what, you know) so therefore you could make some theoretical statement without having a problem. But you could say two plus two equals question mark.

Well, the formula immediately assumes that you've put the two twos together to get a four. The truth of the formula is, two plus two equals two plus two. But we have changed communication or condensed communication to get "two plus two equals four" so it couldn't be the right answer—and so it isn't the right answer.

More mathematicians are staggering around trying to solve problems, where the initial error in the problem is something like "two plus two equals four" they have said somewhere way back in their figures, you know? And then they've gone on and they've gotten the square root, the cube root and all these logarithms. Then you get over on this side and you take the extrapolation of the hyperbolae and that becomes very hyperbolical, and they haven't got the right answer.

So they just add some figures and wonder whether or not that won't give them the right answer. In other words, they go on adding symbols, adding symbols, adding symbols, hoping some time or another they'll get a solution to the problem. And that's what life's been doing.

Break of communication: "Well, now if we can just add enough symbols over here, see, why .. . Well, that didn't work. Let's add some more symbols over here. Well, that didn't work. Let's mass these things up now. All right.

"Is that right? No, that's awful puzzling. Well, let's put some more symbols on this thing and add that up, and get a higher level of complexity if we possibly can, and then maybe it can be solved by theory of equations and we can just skip trying to solve it by arithmetic. All right.

"So here's some more symbols and some more symbols, and we put some more factors. And now we'll discover some more data and pull that in on the problem, and then some more factors and some more factors and some more factors and … All right.

"Now is it solved? Well, we don't know, we've forgotten what the original problem was." That is the way life has gone. It has added more and more data, more and more masses, and more and more complexities to a point of where it's forgotten what the problem was.

And actually, the dynamic principle of existence, discovery of, shouldn't have been any discovery at all. The problems are based on this basis: How long can we play this game called survival? Well, the way you win the game called survival is to survive.

"Wait a minute. Wait a minute. You … How long do you have to survive to play this game?"

"Well, you just have to go on surviving."

"Now, just a minute—if we have this game called survival, the winner of the game is one who would survive longer than anybody else. That would be right, wouldn't it? Well, how does anybody survive long enough to prove that he has survived?"

And nobody knows, and that's the joke, which makes quite a game. It's the ideal game that goes on forever.

Now, the problems of that game are the problems we have to solve in order to survive. But the funny part of it is, we actually can't do anything else but survive. It'd be utterly, physically, thetanesquely impossible to do anything else than survive. A thetan has to work very, very hard to put periods on lives and discover everything new again, and run the glorious irresponsibility of being a baby, you know, and say, "I never lived before, I don't know anything—ha, look at me—don't know a thing!"

And we would believe that, and we would buy that if we didn't take—let's say we take ten children. And these ten children have had an equivalent environment and there's never been a piano around any of them. None of them have even vaguely heard of this thing called a piano—theoretical experiment.

Now, we take these children and with a good instructor we start to teach them all how to play the piano. They see the piano for the first time, they see the music for the first time.

We find out one of them who has good manual dexterity, can't play the piano. He can't touch it. It upsets him—the thought of coming near a piano. And another one, he can get near the piano and play bink, bink, bink, bink but he can't read the notes. He can read English, he could learn French, but he can't read notes of music. Whhhh! Well this is a wild variable, isn't it?

Well, there is no sense in looking in his cortextural response which runs between his korgypsky and his oblongata. There's no sense in looking in there because the answer to his inability to play the piano is because he played one once and he lost. He went out of communication with a piano and now he's being expected to pick up communication with a piano again.

He's not going to pick up communication with a piano because if he picked up communication with a piano he'd pick up communication with a life. And the game he has to play is this: "I've got to show myself that I can't survive in order to prove that I can survive. We've got to have nonsurvival in order to have survival. And if I went and remembered all this stuff, all the way, then …"

"But then look-a-here, you'd win. You'd prove that you'd been surviving."

"Yes, but I wouldn't have any liability on the game of survival," you see?

What's wrong between this kid and the piano? Now we take the remaining eight kids. We found one that just—ooohh—he just even couldn't touch a piano, one that could touch a piano but couldn't read music, and eight more, and they all have more or less equal manual dexterity. And they sit down and they, "Do, re, mi, fa, sol," "every-good-boy-does-fine," "f-a-c-e," and finally get to a point of where they play the piano very nicely—very, very nicely.

Except one of them—one of them is all of a sudden playing Prokofiev, Grieg, Brahms, Mozart, Bach—without the music! But of course we can overlook all this and say the cortextural responses of the korgypsky are such that they replot. And we hope that's an answer, but it's not an answer.

Fact of the matter is that the fellow who couldn't touch the piano at all had some terrible failures on the subject of pianos. He probably tried it many times and was successful once, is stuck in some wins and then he failed and failed, and then he just says, "Pianos—I'm out of communication with them. I don't want anything more to do with a piano." He said this. "Don't want anything more to do with pianos or concert halls—nothing more to do with pianos. Thank you," and he's true to his word a few lives later.

And the next one was a composer, and oh, boy, did it hurt every time somebody put out a new, more popular tune than his. Cost him money, cost him fame and there he is—sniff—his music neglected. So he gets to a point where he won't look at anybody else's music. He won't have anything to do with it. It's completely nonsurvival to touch somebody else's music.

So we sit down and we say, "Now that's f-a-c-e and every-good-boy-does .. ."—this guy can write music, see. And we say, "And now, this is the way you play 'Tom and Ned out in the snow, now they're playing Eskimo,' and that is the way you play this piece. You see? And that's what you do." Blaaa! But he could sit there and go bink, bink, bink; but he wouldn't read music. All right.

Now, let's take this—we have several kids there who merely learned how to play the piano just completely nyaah—you know, set them up: "Now, company, here we want to show you how Roger can play the piano," you know, and everybody has to sit there and listen to these boo-boos—the boo-boo rag. And so, seven of them were like that.

But this remaining one—this remaining one who just played everything, and that's very fine—all of these people have a variation of experience on the subject of pianos. And all of them have a varying degree of communication with regard to pianos. And this last one who could really play everything had never really had a win with a piano, he'd never had a lose with a piano, he had simply studied a long time on a piano, and he was all ready to go and somebody suddenly put him down at a piano and said, "play f-a-c-e, every-good-boy-does-fine," and he was very tolerant of that and went on playing Grieg. But he himself didn't know how come he did this. He would be the most innocent fellow you ever talked to.

But once in a while I will get down on my knees to a little ol' three year old and I'll say, "Hey, what did you do in your last life, bud?" And he'll look at me, "Who wants to know?" And by the time they're four it's usually been beaten out of them so they can forget with glorious abandon. But take any three, four months old baby, and if you refuse to credit their noncommunication with you, you can go into easy communication with.

The funniest thing I ever saw was a two months' old baby that couldn't understand a word of anything, didn't pay any attention to anything or anybody, but every time you picked this little baby up and said, "Well I think we'll keep you around," the baby would say, "Sigh!"—never sighed otherwise.

And you can do that to almost any kid—pick them up and say, "Well, here's a good one. Think we'll keep him around. We need him."

"Gee!"

But they can't talk English yet—the vinyl plastic sheathing is not yet formed around their neurons. (laughter)

We get into the most interesting series of problems you ever saw in your life when we start to believe that a person is in communication with Earth and humanity for the first time. This makes a fascinating series of problems—problems called eugenics, heredity—and none of them have ever wound up anyplace but the garbage can. These problems are just endless. There are whole libraries to explain this terrific behavior on the part of three of these kids.

We put somebody into a sort of a trance and the person starts to talk French but the person has never learned any French. "Ooooh, how do you explain this?" Well, the easy explanation—it never occurs to anybody—the person can speak French!

Now, wherever we look in the field of humanity, we find that we've got, whether playing a piano or driving a car, a great difference of ability expressed by the individual. This ability could have two sources: One, it would be that people are not necessarily all just as bright as everybody else. This is not necessarily true, but let us assume that it had some basis. Then how do you account for these strange contradictory vagaries, and what would you categorize them under? It would be under this: the make and break of communication. Whenever they have broken communication they have gotten a problem.

These people, these kids we're talking about had broken or not broken communication with pianos. Now what's the proof of this? Now, I mean, we just lay it down like that. Say this person is a bum driver, therefore we assume that he has broken somewhere on the track, somewhere, communication with vehicles—seriously broken communication with vehicles, you know, just chopped it—had communication, then broke communication with vehicles.

We get the army, and we find that this fellow can shoot and that fellow can't shoot. Well, the fellow who can't shoot has seriously broken communication with weapons. And just start explaining all these vagaries and differences of skills more or less in this fashion.

We'd take somebody, then, who really could shoot, he'd go out, he's a kid—a kid did this one time. I never saw so many writers lose so much money in my life. This little shaver, he was about nine or ten, walked into my studio. I had a big studio many, many years ago—had this big studio and at one end of it I had a target rigged up that had a cotton back to it so that you could fire in the studio, you know. And rainy days I'd sit there and bang away at the target when I wasn't doing anything else, keeping my hand in.

And so I had a couple writers come and see me, and then a couple more came down and see me and then three or four more arrived and we had a weekend and we—quite a weekend. So, Sunday morning everybody was pretty bleary-eyed and we were sitting around, and I picked up the small air rifle I was using for target practice and shot at the target, and handed it on to another guy and he shot at the target.

Well, of course, we started betting on this after a while, and we started throwing in a dime a shot and making a pool, you see, and then the best shot would get this pool. Well, one of these boys couldn't take it very much, so he started throwing in a dollar a shot.

This was getting serious. I was the host, I couldn't object to this, but I did at least have the good grace to abstain right about this point. But my abstaining didn't help his luck out any at all. See, it was my rifle and my target—that wouldn't have done to have won money. Well, that's a fact. Whether the other guys were better shots or not, my experience with that particular target would have made them real sore.

But one of them had brought his little boy along, a little boy about—oh, I guess the kid was about nine—little Mac. And little Mac walked in the door and he heard this going on. Well, of course that was his sort of weapon, you know, small weapon, air gun. And he says, "Daddy, can I have a turn?"

And his father who was losing very heavily at this time says, "Go away, Mac. Go away. Go away."

And the kid says, "Well, just let me shoot once."

So I said, "Go on. Go on. Let the kid shoot once."

Father says, "All right," and throws down a dollar for the kid. I hadn't intended the kid would get into this pool, see.

And he cleaned them! (laughter) I can just see that kid now, back in the Kentucky hills, years before. One of the people that he cleaned was an ex-sergeant of Marines and a distinguished marksman present at matches. You can just see that kid now—because the kid was not shooting the way he should have been shooting. He'd throw the rifle up to his hip and fire, and it'd be right in the center of the target. (laughter) Now, somebody can explain that by environment, maybe, but this kid's environment was a New York apartment.

Now, these differences, on make and break of communication—if this were human behavior and the problem of communication amongst people, why, then we certainly ought to be able to use the dickens out of it, shouldn't we?

Supposing it's just making and breaking communication, not affinity, not any reason why but just make and break communication with the object. Supposing we just reduced these vagaries of behavior down to that. How about it? Supposing we had this thing down to a point of where it was simply make and break of communication in any sphere where the fellow had a disability. Or we use make and break of communication more wisely in any sphere where we wanted to increase the fellow's ability. All right.

Let's take somebody—here was an actual case. Somebody wrote in from London the other day—quite amusing. This lady had gone down and taken a driver's examination, and she'd gotten into the car and she'd said, "What gearshift?" and gone around the wrong way, around a couple of turns, and the examiner had said, "Oh, no." So she'd left. She was feeling very sad about it because she couldn't pass her driver's examination. Now, she'd passed a perfect written examination, something like that, as far as I know, but couldn't drive well enough to suit anybody.

So her husband, a Scientologist, decided that he would do something about this. So he put this into practice. He took her outside and made her touch and withdraw from the car: touch and withdraw from the gearshift, touch and withdraw from the wheel, touch and withdraw from the hubcaps, touch and withdraw from the license plate, touch and withdraw from the motor—a half an hour a day for a couple of weeks. And when last seen she was driving with no assistance, license in pocket, through Piccadilly Circus.

And everybody knows that nobody can drive through Piccadilly Circus. (laughter) All right.

We'd apply the same principle on a little higher, less romantic level—jet pilot. And we would find this jet pilot had lost his peaks, you know. He was still a good pilot, you know, but he no longer quite hit the landing strip straight. He landed once in a while twenty feet above the strip. And his CO is hoping that he doesn't start landing twenty feet under the strip.

And what would we do about this boy, knowing this data, assuming this data is true, what would we do? We're handling two things now—we're handling air, we're handling a vehicle, and one other thing incidental to air, called height. We'd go out there and make him make and break communications with that airplane and every part of it, and we'd do it an hour a day for a week or two. Just take him out there and say, "All right, now you see that stripe on the tail,"—Step A, Opening Procedure 8-C, with an airplane—"see that stripe on the tail, go back there and touch that. All right. Let go of it." You know, we'd chase him around the plane, have him touch it—make, break.

Now, we'd have him touch air. How would we make him let go of it? We'd exteriorize him, of course. There isn't any air up there a couple of hundred miles—not enough to bother with. Three hundred miles is the air layer, they say, but the last time I was two hundred and fifty miles high I don't think anybody could have breathed—fact, it looked awfully like a vacuum. But you could actually make him reach and withdraw, while exteriorized, from air. That sounds mighty fancy but it's pretty easy to get a guy out of his body today—trouble is keeping them in. A black V told me that the other day.

Oh say, some fellow wrote me the other day on the subject of black Vs and white Vs and exteriorization, which was very cute. He wrote me a letter and he was very angry. There'd been something around called a white V. I'd heard about this thing called a white V—it was a person who thought he was out and who could see the room and everything, but he was really a white V.

And I never knew who the devil invented this thing called a white V. It's just a black Vs excuse for not taking the guy on a Route 1 tour or something, you know. He says, "Well that guy really isn't out, he only says so. I mean he isn't out. So I can't see him, so therefore he isn't out."

And, so he wrote in and bawled me out for making a crack about white Vs and said that the crack was deliberately aimed at him, personally and individually, for inventing the word white V. So I wrote back and thanked him very much, I hadn't known who had done it up till then.

Here we have just make and break of communication. Well, you exteriorize this boy. And you make him reach and withdraw from air. Or in a body, you could simply make him feel the air and then not feel the air, and feel the air by moving his arms, by taking him out, by getting some air—air, you know?

And now let's find out about distance. And let's make him find some distance and then not pay any attention to it. And then find some distance and then not pay any attention to it. And find some height and then take his attention off the height. And find some height and then take his attention off the height. And then find some height and take his attention off the height. And funny part of it is, his depth perception, his ability to fly, would come way up above—it was when he was a cadet.

Now, let's supposing this fellow goes down, he wants to belong to the Royal Air Force or something, and he walks down and he gets himself into a place called the Examiner's Office, and they say, "Strip and cough."

And they get him there and they find he's a perfect physical specimen, he's in good shape. He gets two fingers together and they only miss by four inches. His reflexes are good: they hit in the back of the neck and his big toe jerks. They kick him and he moves. And they say, "This fine physical specimen now is going to be a pilot."

So they send him to ground school and then they send him other schools, they send him other schools and send him other schools and send him other schools and finally get him close to an airplane, having expended considerable sums with time, considerable time which is there to be burned, after all.

And they get him all set up, and he gets one foot on the wing of the airplane and gets airsick. And they say, "This is strange. Well, take him up anyhow, it'll show him right." But after twenty hours of instruction he not only has not soloed, he has also not been able to keep breakfast down. They find out that he can't stand on his bed and look at the floor without getting airsick.

It's like they used to get ninety-day wonders—never occurred to them that some of these boys might get seasick. And very, very often we had to put two petty officers, one on each side of one, in order to hold him up on the bridge long enough to stand his watch.

And we found out it was bad philosophy to let them go below just because they were seasick, because nobody was ever anything else in corvettes, except people with cast-iron stomachs or people who didn't have any stomachs at all, such as mine. It was the only thing that could live on a corvette. But they never asked these fellows whether or not they got seasick or carsick or anything. This was not part of the instruction.

So they get this fellow way up there. What can we assume about this pilot who has been trained at vast expense and now can't stand any height and gets sick all the time? What can we assume about this boy? Well, we can assume that he can't stand communication with an airplane. That's all we have to assume. I mean, we don't have to assume anything else.

But as we're running him, the funniest thing will turn up. It'll turn up that two hundred thousand years ago on another planet which is not too far away from here, they'd had airplanes just like the airplane he's being asked to fly. And this is highly coincidental, but this is the kind of airplane they had there. And the kind of airplane they have here … Hmm. And this kind of blows off. But of course we don't even have to pay any attention to that. We don't have to validate it—that a couple of hundred thousand years ago was the last time he cared to have anything to do with an airplane and after that broke communication with them completely.

We start putting him back in communication with the airplane and these things turn up. We don't pay a bit of attention to them today. We don't even vaguely pay any attention to them today, we don't care whether it happened, whether it didn't happen, whether it's valuable, whether it has—nyaaah.

We'll leave that up to the psychologists of the twenty-fifth century to research. I think he will have heard by that time that the reason he's been out of a job for four or five centuries was Scientology. We don't care about these things.

All we know is that people go out of communication with something and then, if that break of communication has been made by them in a final enough state, they won't, further, have anything to do with that or any skill connected with it. All right.

This makes all of us doctors of education—every one of us. We had a boy in here the other day, a very interesting fellow—been with us for a long time.

He's a nice guy. He's been intimately involved with the operations years and years and years and years. And we said, "Learn those axioms." He was a nice guy, he was a prince; but we said, "Learn those axioms!"

And he said, "Noooo!—under no circumstances. Bring on your whips, bring on your chains, cut my throat, give somebody else my post. I can't, I won't." And then we had him mock up textbooks saying, "Hello" for a few hours, and he now knows all the axioms. This man's former training is that of an instructor or teacher in the field of education and he'd just seen himself one too many textbooks, that's all. That was all that was wrong with him. It was causing this much upset.

That's a funny thing, isn't it? But not very funny when you consider that a book is an inanimate object. It's not alive. It's a pretense. It's a fake. It's a pretense that the author is standing there looking up at you from your lap saying, "Yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap." And he's not. He's probably off with a blonde somewhere.

And although the information is there, the live communication of that information is to some degree missing. And if that information does not lead intimately and immediately to the solution of the problem of the textbook, sooner or later, that textbook is going to become aberrative—don't care what the subject is.

Now, we all know these perfectly plain things about the—you know, examples like the young doctor: He goes to medical school and the first two years of medical school he has everything that he reads about. We know that. You know, they come in and they say, "Oh, what a horrible disease; your nose swells up and it causes itching, itching—(oh, oh no, my left eyebrow has itched lately), and this happens generally to young men (whistles)—(I'm sick!)"

And that's a fact, that's the history of a young doctor in training. He gets everything he reads about. And don't think that a psychiatrist doesn't. And don't think that an old-time auditor didn't either.

Well, why? Why? Why? Why does this occur? It's just because the textbook is a symbol of life and is not, in itself, life.

Now, here's a very funny thing: The CECS—been kicked around an awful lot but actually shouldn't be kicked around. All it's been trying to do is just exactly what it says: Committee of Examination, Certification and Services.

And its mission is to keep the communication lines as clear as it can. And it actually hasn't taken very many overt steps. It probably intends to take some more. At one of its last board meetings it said that it decided that it could still be punitive, and that all was not sweetness and light everywhere, that it insisted on communicating, and it said so.

So, it isn't dead by any means, but somebody as far away as Australia in one direction and London in another direction, already shudders every time anyone mentions the CECS, and of course they blame everybody but me which is the way it should be, see? (laughter)

But, actually, the punitive thrust, the punishment, is not the mission. And the only thing that's happening is occasionally somebody's been cutting Scientology communication lines. You know, he's actually been cutting a communication line—actively.

By the way, one day there was a publication being published, which a person, we'll call A, thought was very funny—thought this publication was utterly uproarious. And thought, "Boy, that publication was really getting off some quips, but it was really, really needling Ron and the HASI." And this person, you know, thought that was real funny, "Eh-heh!"

And he came in the other day and he was white and gray, and ready to kill!—ready to maim! He had a fifteen-hundred-dollar preclear all signed up, ready to process, and that preclear got a hold of that publication, decided that Scientology was a lot of bunk, and knocked off the processing and went away.

And now, auditor A no longer has this sweetness and light attitude of, "let everybody talk—even when they cut communication lines." That's the history, then, of the CECS. It doesn't like to see a communication line cut and it knows a communication line could be cut if somebody were too obsessively mauling around the communication lines of Scientology.

Supposing somebody came in the office every day and took all the files and papers and so forth, and threw them all up in the air. You'd have even more of a chaos than you've got now. And that's actually what happens in the society.

When we put out a communication it's the experience of a half a dozen auditors with regard to a certain type of process, and somebody who is a poor auditor, at best, conies in and says, "No, that's a lot of bunk, yap-yap-yap-yap-yap, funny gag," you know, "wa-wa-wa …" What's he doing? He's taking those papers and throwing them up in the air. If he wants to say something about it, let him find out something to say. See, that's the difference.

So that's what the CECS is interested in. It doesn't want to see the communication lines of Scientology utterly messed up. Well now, it has a very nice decision to make, doesn't it? Very horrible. Whose communication line is it going to cut if the general policy of the organization is, "Let them communicate."

So if the CECS is in argument with anybody, it's in argument with the organization because it has to keep the communication lines as clean as it can and still stay within the bounds of reason. So this is a rough deal. Anybody occupying that post is going to have some fun anyhow. He's certainly going to have somebody to fight.

By the way, most of the fights that occur of this character really occur for one real reason only, just one reason, and that is that there are insufficient things to fight. There aren't things which are worthy of being fought. Actually psychiatry is not worth fighting, you'd look in vain for a live terminal.

Well, let's get back to books. The book is not a live communicating thing, is it? When you say, "Hello" to the book it doesn't say a thing. You've got to turn over a lot of pages and then one page or another will say, "Hello," if the word happens to be in the book, but it has no intent or direction, does it? It really doesn't give you attention. It is something you handle, that you push around, it is an object, and that's a book.

And after a person has been going just so long at books, whether writing them or reading them and so on, and has to a marked degree stopped looking and talking to and communicating with other life forms, he gets over here with a scholar's squint, fixed upon the printed page and no longer with any attention for life at large. He's simply operating on a scarcity of answers. He thinks that books are going to give him answers. Look at that. He thinks that books are going to give him answers. A book can't answer anything. It can't say a word. You see, a book can't answer anything.

But there can be this strange thing which has occurred: an analysis of what a book can or cannot do so as to actually get an answer out of a book. You have the preclear put a book out here and have it say, "Hello." And if this man has been an instructor or if he's been a writer, it'll practically kill him. It's the most violent thing you could do to him.

Have a book out here say, "Hello" and "Okay" and so on. Or get a real live book and set it up here, and have it say, "Hello," "Okay," and so on. Follow me?

Yet the book is better than no communication! So the first thing the fellow fell out of communication with was life itself or he wouldn't have transferred his attention over here to the book, would he have, hm? He must have gone out of communication with life, over here to a communication with a book as better than no communication. All right.

If this is the case, then we must assume that the main thing wrong with life is not the fact that it is out of communication with existence but that it is out of communication with life. That's the first thing we'd have to assume.

Therefore if we'd want to make somebody well, we would audit him, and we'd put him back into communication with life with a two-way communication. The very fact that you as an auditor are sitting there, a live being, talking with this person, would be sufficient to that degree—put him in contact with existence and life. And that's quite a process all by itself, if it's followed with a two-way communication. We keep the cycles going and just works out beautifully—answers, back and forth; acknowledgements, origins.

Where we have depended upon machinery, energy, space, time of any character, to make up for this lack of communication from life, we've gotten, to some degree, in trouble. There's just that much less communication.

Now, all you have to do with the individual is to restore his ability to communicate in any field where you wish to restore his ability. To restore his total ability, it is only necessary to restore his ability to communicate with and in that field. And this becomes very simple.

Do you know that there's many an announcer who walks up to a microphone and shudders. He is afraid. He's upset. You know why? This happens to them when they've been at it a long time mostly. It doesn't happen to the Johnny newlys.

That microphone has yet to say hello, and yet it's been talked at and talked at and talked at and talked at. And he'll identify the microphone with the receipt-point of the communication line. And having identified it, then he actually will begin to expect this microphone to say something. And it never will.

The worst thing you could do to him would be to rewire or back-wire a microphone so that someday when he's saying, "Hello folks out there. How are you Mr. and Mrs. America?" the microphone would say—a chorus: "Hello, Joe."

The inanimate object becomes a substitute for the live object, and a nonlive thing made out of space, energy, mass, time, will never substitute for life. And fixation upon these inanimate objects will bring about, at length, a break of communication even with them.

So the first thing we do to restore ability is to put a person back into contact with the physical universe itself. That's the first thing we have to do. And having done that, we can put him into communication with something alive. And having done that, we've got a Clear. That's all there is to it. It's real simple.

Now, there is no reason why a Doctor of Scientology, a Bachelor of Scientology, HCA, should not be called a Doctor of Education because with such a process, he, amongst all educators, could achieve education. The very funny thing about it is that it really means education anyhow—DSCN, BSCN, and Doctor of Divinity.

By the way, Doctor of Divinity and Doctor of Scientology mean the same thing—mean exactly the same thing. Divinity simply means knowingness or wisdom; how to divine, divining, predicting, forecasting—same word. Divine: how to forecast, how to know. And a Doctor of Scientology is a Doctor of Knowingness. So a DD or a DSCN—one wonders exactly why we've got so many degrees that say the same thing. They look pretty on the wall and they actually have been very, very arduously won, to tell you the truth.

Now, by knowing that it takes a make and break of communication—and that alone—to restore ability, such a person is in command of wisdom because wisdom comes about to the degree that a person can make and break communication with existence. And ignorance and stupidity come about to the degree that a person has ceased doing so. When a person stops communicating, when he breaks off communication and says, "Nevermore," he has established an inability or a stupidity in that particular field.

In order to keep himself from breaking off such communication, he very often keeps around tokens—like the football player, the football star of 1932, has probably still got his football, you know? He's still got a picture of himself and the team. He hasn't completely broken communication with football. That little token there keeps him in.

And then a little bit later, when he's lost the football and lost the picture, and so forth, he'll still keep some facsimiles or mock-ups of some kind or another about this football. And he'll still know that they existed.

And then after a while he hides them utterly and they become completely secret. And after that, in that hidden state, they hurt him or kick back against him every time he tries to reassume communication with the game called football.

And so it is with the game called life. Everybody has hidden the game called life in the form of terminals, unknown and hidden masses in their universes to such a degree that when they start to touch life something hurts. The tokens jump up, they say, "Oh no, we've broken communication with that." And that's why people aren't as alive as people should be.

The entire mission of the auditor is to rehabilitate ability, and the entire method of doing that is to rehabilitate communication in all directions regardless of whether they're broken or not. And so, we know all there is to know to make all the Clears we want.

Thank you.

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