View source for Reading E-Meter Reactions (SHSBC 610609)

'''Series:''' Saint Hill Special Briefing Course (SHSBC)

'''Date:''' 9 June 1961

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

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Okay. Here we are at the 22nd of November 1961. And there you are.

Horrible, isn't it? Grim, huh? All right.

Your E-Metering is the sole reason you are having any difficulty making anything work – period. That is it. Now, gross auditing errors are always something you look for.

If you're ever supervising a group of auditors or an HGC or something of this sort, let me call attention to one horrible, horrible fact: the request for the extraordinary solution. Anybody supervising a group of auditors routinely gets requests for extraordinary solutions, and if you don't know this little datum, you will lay ostrich eggs. You will give people the extraordinary solution.

It is never the extraordinary solution that is needed. What you have to do is locate the gross auditing error. That is always the case.

I myself have had to learn this the hard way over the years. Staff auditor used to come to me occasionally and say, “Well, so-and-so and so-and-so and we have to do this and we have to do. that, and my goodness, and the pc just can't remember, and the cats are running in and out of the bank, and everything is going mad and would you please, please, please tell me some good process to run on this pc that can handle all this.” Well, I'd take what he said, dream up a process for what he said and then go in and run – he'd run it on the pc. All right.

That was very fine. But here was all that was wrong. Usually, by the way, the next day he would come in and say, “Well, that didn't work.” How interesting.

And I eventually learned to be smart enough and clever enough that – I was taught this in California, by the way; I was taught this the hard way – to say, “Well, what didn't work?” I'd told him, you know, this or that or the other thing, and then he'd say, “That didn't work.” And I would say, “What didn't work?” And he's supposed to have run this, you see, within the last couple of hours. “What didn't work?” Well, he'd very often fumble with his papers or try to remember or something of the sort. “Well, come on. What didn't work? What were you supposed to do?” And I finally found out that the extraordinary solution was never applied.

It wasn't that didn't work; it was whatever was done didn't work. But there was a wide difference between what was supposed to be done and what was done. READING THE E-METER 2  All right.

That's not apropos of anything. That's the gross auditing error. The gross auditing error is the extraordinary solution which was thought up at such ardure, of course, never got applied to the pc and so, of course, it didn't work, and that was the gross auditing error.

Do you see what I mean by a gross auditing error? All right. Gross auditing error – another example of one: They didn't have a session.

See, that's order of magnitude, see? I don't mean they sat there and didn't do it right. I mean the pc just didn't arrive and the audit – or the auditor didn't report.

See, that's the gross auditing error. That's why the process didn't make any advance, why the pc didn't make a recovery. All right.

The E-Meter was broken throughout the session and the auditor didn't notice it. Gross auditing error, you see? And your imagination, when you're called upon to do supervision work of this kind, must never be drawn in – as it would be, actually; it's quite natural for your imagination to be drawn in, wondering what is wrong with this pc; because you yourself are an auditor, don't you see, and you know if you were sitting there, you'd be worried about the pc.

So when the – when it's reported to you such-and-so about the pc, you of course do a Q-and-A and you start worrying about the pc. Well, don't worry about the pc if you're supervising auditing Worry about the auditor. Just short-circuit it just like that, because today, today we don't have flubs.

Five years ago? Yeah. Six, seven years ago?

Oh, yeah. Extraordinary solutions required every now and then. But you mean to tell me that somebody can actually have a Problems Intensive run on him right and not have anything happen of any kind whatsoever?

You mean to tell me that somebody can have a Form 3 Joburg run on them from one end to the other and not get any kind of a cognition or a case gain? This, by the way, is just not possible. It just couldn't happen if the Joburg were administered, if the Problems Intensive were done.

See? So, now, look at it this way: Nothing happened to the pc's case by reason of having had a Joburg run from one end to the other and a Problems Intensive. And we get the pc's profile, and it's not gone down into a more normal profile from a very, very high one, or it's not gone up from a low profile to a middle-ground one, or something like this; there hasn't anything happened to this graph, and yet for twenty-five hours, allegedly, somebody was supposed to be giving this person a Problems Intensive, and somebody was supposed to be giving this person maybe a Security Check, you see, along with it, or security checking the areas of prior confusion and nothing happened to this graph.

Ah, well, don't blow your brains out because you haven't got technology that works. No, you've got a gross auditing error of some kind or another. And the gross auditing error is of the order of magnitude that I just gave you.

It actually isn't even as mild as, well, the auditor hasn't been security checked and therefore he doesn't have much reality on a Security Check or has withholds and won't dig them out of a pc. You see, these are all rationalizations,  READING THE E-METER 3  and these are all true, but they are not big enough to get in the road of a gain. See, that's what you should realize.

These little errors aren't big enough to get in the road of a gain. Honest. You can sit there practically cross-eyed and run some sort of a Form 3 and clean up every question on the thing And you mean to tell me at the end of this thing your pc is not going to be in good shape?

Oh, but you could run a Form 3 this way: broken E-Meter, cans aren't connected, break in the wire, thing sits at 2.0 all the time, still. “I know,” you say, “well, that's impossible for anybody not to realize that.” Well, that's the trouble with it. It is so incredible that it never gets recognized. What is going on is so incredible that it evades your sense of propriety, your sense of the fitness of things, your sense of what is right and what is wrong And it is so violated – that sense – you see, that you never see what is wrong.

You may have a whole HGC – maybe new auditors, something like that – and they're all running Problems Intensives, and they're getting no results. Oh, yeah? Well, how fascinating!

Well, then, let's look at the D of P. Does he know how to run a Problems Intensive? Let's look at these auditors.

Do – what are they doing? Well, maybe using some version or form or something There's something wrong here someplace. Or they aren't holding sessions.

Or one of them is a yogi, and all of the pcs are sitting there meditating for twenty- five hours. Or there's something real wild here, man. And amongst these wildnesses is not reading an E-Meter.

And that's what I'm talking to you about today. Just reading an E-Meter. That's all.

I'm trying to make the point here. Not reading the E-Meter is a gross auditing error. That's all.

Now, you cannot afford a difficulty with an E-Meter while doing a 3D. Ha-ha-ha-ha! Ka-wow!

In the first place, you're sitting there chanting over and over and over opposition terminals and opposition goals to a pc who is at best in a rather shaky state. And he just feels like he's being totally overwhelmed. And if you don't read an E-Meter rapidly and you don't assess rapidly, the pc just goes more and more sluggish and gets actually harder and harder to read and it becomes more and more difficult to do an assessment on the opp goal and the opp terminal.

Well, what could start this? Some misconception. It isn't anything esoteric.

It is just some misconception about an E-Meter. It's just something that the auditor just had not quite had straightened out, that's all. He's been – well, I've used this example before.

The old-time, self-taught pilot was the most interesting character amongst all this. The old-time, self-taught pilot used to go out and get in an “airyplane,” and he used to take it off, and he flew by the seat of his pants, and he had no bank-and-turn indicator and no altimeter, and he got accustomed to knowing when he was a thousand feet high because the houses were of such and such a size. But, of course, this has never been borne out by an altimeter.

And he gets in a modern plane that's all equipped  READING THE E-METER 4  with instruments, and he looks over the side, and he sees the houses are of such and such a size, so he knows he's a thousand feet high. Well, actually, from the day he first started to fly, there has been no slightest check on this particular point. He knows when he's a thousand feet high.

He knows this, you see? And he's supposed to be in a flight pattern, and the flight pattern can't be varied by more than five hundred feet either way or he runs into other airplanes. And right away his estimate of a thousand feet high is put to an instrument test, and it is found to be very incorrect.

He's always been flying at two thousand feet when he thought he was at one thousand feet, and I mean it's as simple as that. Now, because he has learned this way, he gets into the habit of challenging the ammeter – the altimeter. The altimeter says that he's at two thousand feet, so it must have been broken, it couldn't have been set back at the last field, obviously, so he ignores it.

See, he still takes the size of the houses. And then one day there's a dull, splintering crash in the sky above the control tower and bits of passengers come fluttering down like snowflakes. You see, he didn't know he was doing anything wrong, and anything that contradicted his basic training pattern, of course, must have been wrong, so he never did a cross-check.

And we have auditors around who are doing this sort of thing. Now, before you feel bad about it and feel that I am chewing you out in any shape or form about it, let me tell you a funny story. Once upon a time, in 1951, at 910 North Yale, Wichita, Kansas, an instrument was laid down on my desk.

And it was a funny-looking instrument: It was black, and it had a dial, and it had some – it had a kind of a needle on it, and it had a – some knobs on the front of it. And so I looked at it and yawned and said, “Well, that's very interesting,” and so on. And there was a message with it.

It was from old Volney Mathison, and he said, “When you gave a lecture out in Los Angeles down at South Hoover, you said you would give anything to have an instrument . . .” (it was – it must have been in November of 50) “. . . have an instrument that would tell what the pc was doing” And I had meantime been trying to develop all sorts of observational things, you know? You know, if a pc does this or that. I've even run pcs with my fingers on their pulse, you know? “If I just had such an instrument, or if such an instrument could be developed (because it doesn't exist at this moment; the old galvanometers are too bad), why, I would be a very happy man indeed.” And actually he'd gone home and breadboarded one up, and it had taken him many, many months, and he'd finally hooked together this contraption, and he'd sent it to me and there it was.

So I thought that was very, very interesting. And I had it taken home to 910 North Yale, and that night, why, I sat looking at this thing, and we hooked it up and put somebody on it and tried to make the needle wiggle, and so forth, and it didn't work. The needle wouldn't wiggle.

And – couple of little tiny metal bars – they were only about a, I don't know, a quarter of an inch in diameter. Somebody was supposed to hang on to these metal bars, and they just were not big enough to even wrap your hands around. So I got to thinking  READING THE E-METER 5  about this, and Elliot got to thinking about this, and so on, and all of a sudden, why, got a brilliant idea and said, “You know, I believe a couple of soup cans, if they could be hooked on to those wires, might give enough surface to read.” Because we couldn't get a read.

We couldn't even tell if the pc was on it or not on it, you see? And so Jim went out in the kitchen and he took the labels off a couple of soup cans, and he came back in and he screwed a couple of clips onto the leads, and he put these soup cans on the thing, and then we could squeeze them, and, by George, a pc would read and the thing wouldn't be flickering all over the place, and it was – you could read something was going on. So we knew something was going on, and that was what we knew about it.

A projection meter showed up a short time later, but it was the same breed of cat. Wasn't anything you could do with these things. They were very interesting and something might come out of them.

That's why you occasionally hear electrodes called cans. That is the total reason. Because for the first many years of E-Meter history they were always soup cans.

And at the HGC in Washington, DC, people have just been stuffed to the gunwales with V8 vegetable juice, for the excellent reason that the American Can Company will not sell a naked tin can. You have. to buy it full of something So the way they got electrodes there, for the manufacture of E-Meters, was to buy V8 vegetable juice, being the cheapest tinned anything And, of course, they're perfectly marvelous steel cans, and they cut the tops off very carefully and poured the vegetable juice down anybody, you see, that would stand still, rather than throw it away. Everybody was sure healthy in those days.

And those were the – those were electrodes. And so fixed was the idea finally in my mind – because I've seen plenty of them. I've seen tea strainers with a strap around the middle of them that could be held in one hand.

That's very nice – a tea strainer, could be held in one hand, separated one from the other. It's a little – looks like a little egg And a can lead to one side of it, another lead to the other side of it, and that held in the hand. They're actually not very good, but they do work, but not very well.

And Mathison's got sold on that and of later years he built nothing but tea-strainer-type electrodes, and he didn't get very good reads either. But anyhow, that's a workable type of electrode. But I was so used to people changing electrodes and so used to the behavior of an E-Meter when operated on a metal soup can that I couldn't shift.

I didn't know what I was reading the second we moved out of that perimeter. See, I'd gotten everything more or less trained into that perimeter, until the British meters coming over to be checked out by me all had these aluminum pipes. And I'd look at them, and I didn't know, and so forth, and I'd take the aluminum pipes off and put vegetable cans on and test the meter.

And then I would send the aluminum pipes back with the meter and tell them they better use cans, and so forth. READING THE E-METER 6  And one day I asked old Don if he wouldn't run a check between these aluminum pipe pieces and tin cans, and he found out there was no difference between the two. Now, actually there is a difference between the two.

The tin can gives you a better surge on a can squeeze. And the aluminum pipe being smaller, when the pc closes his hands to get a drop, more skin is touched to the thing and gives you the appearance of a looser needle than is actually there. Interesting.

Whereas a tomato-juice can, it's the metal itself which is collapsing, and you're not getting additional surface by reason of a can squeeze. And they're actually a bit better, even today. But anyway, to go back to old 910 North Yale, for days and days the thing just sat there.

I didn't pay any attention to it. And then Mary Sue and I got busy on the thing, and I started sketching it out, and I'd put her on the thing, and then we'd put somebody else on it, and we'd test things out, and we finally got so we could locate incidents. That was very early in 51.

And we got so we could locate incidents pretty well and then started to do actual research. And the first skill of the E-Meter was actually dating That was the first skill of the E-Meter: dating – learning how to date something on the track. And the second we started dating things on the track, we started to find the most incredible things.

To this day I can still find a sixteen-dial drop on almost any pc. Did you ever see a needle drop sixteen consecutive dials? Well, the incidents on the beach, the on-the- beach incidents, and so forth, if you locate them just right and you move into them suddenly, will give you a sixteen-dial drop.

Interesting, isn't it? That's the widest drops available. All kinds of electronic incidents.

We explored all over the doggone place with this E-Meter. And I finally got so that I could operate an E-Meter. But I still thought the higher it went, the clearer the person was.

Imagine that. During all of 1951 that error progressed, and you will see it to this day on Mathison meters. The old Mathison meter is now built for chiropractors and has fifteen or twenty dials that operate on the front and back, and you have to have both your own feet bare so as to have spare hands to twist dials.

It doesn't give you any gen. Chiropractors just get them to impress the patients. They don't read anything with them.

But the meter is now totally impractical – that particular meter. But nevertheless, it's – the germ of the E-Meter was in that chassis. I had to fool with an E-Meter for about three or four months before I could make one do anything.

They were just dead ducks as far as I was concerned. They were just a piece of metal. And I'd put it on a pc and I would much – be much happier to take my judgment of what was wrong with a pc than what the E-Meter said.

And the first five months of E-Meter experimentation and use, and so forth, were on – right on that basis. I didn't know what a meter was talking about. I had no reality on the meter.

And here's something else: For the next three years, at least, any time you put another E-Meter in my hands I had to learn to use an E- Meter all over again. All you had to do was change meters on me. Well, of course, meters in  READING THE E-METER 7  those days were tremendously variable.

There were big differences from meter to meter, don't you see? But it would really just take me weeks of fooling around with the meter until I had any confidence in what it was reading at all because they looked different to me. Now, that's why I insist on standardization.

And that is one of the reasons why I raise so much Cain about squirrel meters, meters built to anybody's specification. Somebody says, “Well, I want one with a very sensitive needle.” You see? Well, all right.

So you build a E- Meter, and that fellow will learn how to use that E-Meter, but that E-Meter now doesn't react like any other E-Meter, so you can't relay data between him and somebody else, don't you see? And if that E-Meter ever falls into another auditor's hands, the other auditor isn't used to it and doesn't trust it. See, it takes a terrific standardization of meters.

That's why I reserve the rights to check out and pass any E-Meter and why we actually are the people who put them together. Because if we – it's not that we maybe put them together better or worse than anything else, although we have achieved some tremendous gains in these things, but we know they're standard. We know we can take this meter here and issue it to you, and it will behave the same as the last meter of this type you were running, see?

And I can pick up any meter out of stock and operate with it and it won't operate any different than any other meter. It's perfectly all right. Of course, I've gotten used to it to a point where I can actually run these old-time battery meters.

We've got some in the electrical shop in there. You ought to see the things. They were the original London meters.

They are the weirdest meters you ever wanted to see. They're a little battery-operated meter with a funny-looking circular dial. They're funny.

You wouldn't hardly believe they were an E-Meter. And as far as operation is concerned, their sensitivity is that if you had a bull on one and you hit him with an ax, it'd register. But anyway, on this basis it would actually take me weeks to learn a new meter.

And if anything happened to my E-Meter, I would just groan loudly because I knew now that I would have another meter around and I just had no confidence in the new meter at all. It was something – I didn't know what it was telling me or why it was telling me that, and so on. So I have a very vivid subjective reality on what an auditor faces when he starts learning to run with an E-Meter.

Now, for a number of years we went along without E-Meters. Now, one of the reasons why, through the middle fifties, we didn't press E-Meters or do anything much with E-Meters, and so forth, is they had become too complicated. And if you leave anything in the hands of Homo sap very long, he will manage to complicate it.

He'll put two dials on it where it only needs one, and he'll put three or four variables on it, and then he'll hook some more pinball machines to it, and the next thing you know, you've filled the room full of junk in order to find the temperature of somebody's tea. You know, you've got all kinds of relays and shunts and printed circuits and electric bars and everything else, and eventually you can tell how hot  READING THE E-METER 8  the fellaw's cup of tea is when all you had to do in the first place was ask him to sip it. The order of magnitude which they run into of accuracy and all that sort of thing is too bad.

But, auditors, frankly could not run E-Meters easily or well, and it was enough of a barrier to me that I just called a halt on the thing, and eventually in Washington in the late fifties got a meter designed which I was happy with and which was fairly steady and reliable. We're working on that particular basic meter, which was transportable. Do you know the old meters were mains meters?

You plugged them into the mains, and you didn't know whether you were going to electrocute the pc or not. One of the reasons we stopped using Mathison's is because you could get full mains current between the two electrodes, occasionally, and the cases very often shorted. They were not well made, and you put a pc on them, and he's liable to get a bad shock.

But more important than that, even when they were working properly, the current between the two electrodes was some high amperage and the pc could feel it. You know, any pc could feel it. Now, once in a while you'll get a pc on one of these little battery meters, one of the modern meters, and he'll tell you he can feel the current.

Well, he's really being very hypersensitive to electricity. It isn't uncomfortable. He can feel a kind of a tickle of a surge and so on.

Well, that means he's just implanted too many people in his day, that's all. That's – it's made him nervous about electricity. Because I don't know what the true amperage is that goes between the two electrodes in a modern British Mark IV, but it is something very microscopic.

I haven't measured it so I won't give you a figure, but it's just so tiny as to be nothing Now, we've advanced meters to a point, actually, where the shelf life of the batteries in this meter – the old meters, you see, were mains meters. We tried to make battery meters, and then the batteries would go flat in the middle of the session, and you'd have randomity this way. And we finally got a meter here that the shelf life of the battery – that's how fast will the batteries discharge lying on a shelf – and the operating current of the meter is almost exactly the same.

And it – frankly, it doesn't matter whether you leave this meter on or turn this meter off; it uses the same amount of current. Isn't that interesting Now that – that was quite a development. We're indebted to this Fowler and Allen over here for that.

Now, the British Mark IV, of course, has a high degree of standardization. Some improvements could have been made on the meter, such as improving the sensitivity so that you could turn it off further. But what do you know?

If you turn the sensitivity down any further on a meter than is on this British Mark IV, the pc never reads anymore. You've got to have a certain degree of sensitivity in order to get the pc to read. And on a full-dial drop at zero, you'll notice the pc reads, if he's about – well, he's a – if a pc is a Release, why, he will read then pretty well.

Well, if you could reduce the sensitivity, the first thing that would disappear off of it would be the pc. Get the idea? I mean, it has to be a dial drop on a Release.

READING THE E-METER 9  As a person becomes closer and closer to Clear, although the needle is swinging wider and wider, the surge that the pc puts into the meter is less and less because he's got less and less charge on the bank. So you have to have that high a setting to get the pc to register. And as a person is run through 3D, you'll notice this particularly.

You'll notice that you start getting the thing wider and wider swing, and it starts banging around, but frankly the pc isn't reading very much, and you're down there just trying to read just awful hard, and you've got an awfully wide swinging needle, and the pc isn't reading very much. Actually, that little tiny read would have been quite a charge. Now, when you start out the pc, there is no excess swing.

It is all pc. The pc is plugged into the. physical universe with soldered connections, you see? And you say, “Well, do you have a present time problem?” H-wha-a-am!

You see a half-a-dial drop. “Yes, well, what was the problem?” you say, thinking, you know, the bank has been robbed or he's just been disinherited or something of the sort. And it's, “Well, my – I don't know. Well, ug – actually, it was my wife looked at me as I went out the door, and uh, I don't know whether she's mad at me or not.” And you look in vain for anymore problem than that.

But it's a terrible problem, see? Well now, that similar thing, “Do you have an ARC break?” and you get this little tiny twitch. And, “Yes.

When you came in and shouted at me that you weren't going to audit me anymore.” And it's just a little, tiny twitch. See, the pc isn't heavily charged. These things don't have a violent effect upon the pc, but they still can be read.

Do you see what I'm talking about? As the case advances, actually the amount of charge still on the case is less, so therefore you don't get much read. But therefore you have to have a fairly advanced sensitivity in order to read what charge is left.

That's the important point on that. Well, all these meters these days read the same, and that's a good thing. Actually, the British meter reads remarkably similar to the early American meter.

All meters from here on will be British Mark IVs. We're cutting out the original American meter. Why?

Well, it just hasn't kept pace with this meter because I've been, of course, working with development on this meter here for another two years beyond the American meter. The American meter is more rugged and stands up to more punishment than the first British Mark IVs, but we finally got these things so they don't. Actually, the American meter will do the same as a British meter if you do the same things with it.

You realize that a British Mark IV most of the time has been shipped through stratospheric conditions before it arrives at an other-continent destination. And it busts it up. It – that is to say, it'll burst the batteries.

You know, subzero cold and all of this sort of thing A meter going from here to Australia has  READING THE E-METER 10  been transferred between British climate and many, many, many, many degrees below zero as the jet flies, you see, and has landed into smoking hot India, smoking hot Saigon, you see, and has gone from ice-cold to smoking hot to ice-cold to smoking hot to ice-cold to smoking hot and is then put into your hands in Australia. Well, that's what we've had to do with meters: get them so they'd stand that, because ordinary batteries won't stand it. If you – if you, for instance, leave this meter, or any meter, in the baggage compartment – you put it in your suitcase, in other words – and let the people put it in the baggage compartment of the airplane, get it the other end, every now and then you'll find your meter arrives unworking Why?

Batteries are shot. It's been treated to extremes of cold and heat but that is not anything to do with the meter. That's to do with Homo Sapiens's inability to construct a proper storage battery.

I remember in the old days we used to have some batteries, you know? They were some real batteries. Be a little thing about the size of a button, you know, and a little tiny disc, and you could carry a half a dozen to spare, and one of them would drive a car a hundred thousand miles or run an artillery cannon, you know?

That was pretty good. You used to shove these things in – that's why you can get these Buck Rogers flying belts and things like that. It's all contained in the battery.

The ability of the mechanics – the electromechanics of any civilization are totally dependent upon source of supply and its portability. I learned that when I was about seven or eight, nine. I was trying to build Meccano set locomotives that would run themselves around on the floor, only I couldn't get a light enough electric motor, and I couldn't get a light enough set of batteries, so the resultant locomotive, of course, couldn't pull the load of its power supply.

You keep running into that all the time. Any civilization is limited in its electromechanics – in its cars, its airplanes and everything else – to the engine or the battery supply. That's the whole works.

Similarly, this one has been limited to that. But that's its main frailty right now, is that if you get it too cold and too hot repetitively, why, its batteries burst. But of course, any batteries burst.

Has nothing to do with the E-Meter. You can't get a battery that won't. But the shelf life of the battery is the same as the running life of the E-Meter.

Don't faint, don't faint because you come in, open up your E-Meter case and find out you left it on. Turn it off by all means and centralize your center button, but don't faint, because it didn't burn any more on than off. And the batteries in them last a year, a year and a half or something like that and then you dig them out and put a few sixpence batteries in them, and they work the same.

All right. Regardless of all that, the E-Meter has evolved up to a greater constant. You can take one meter, and it works the same as another meter, and so it's safe to learn to use an E-Meter.

They're not going to vary, and nobody is going to shift E-Meters on you. READING THE E-METER 11  If we bring out another meter, it will be so confoundedly different than an E-Meter in terms of read that you'll have to learn it all over again anyhow, but for another purpose. It'll be an oscilloscope or something of that sort, although our first little timid ventures into this were – they sort of left a tremendous amount to be desired.

They left me with awe for our present E-Meter. Our present E-Meter is absolutely fabulous. If you don't believe it, conduct some experiments with an oscilloscope and you find out they're all body read.

You can't get the mind to read, but you can sure get the body to read. A person gets within four feet of the electrodes, and the oscilloscope starts dancing In other words, the presence of the auditor against the meter would be probably a greater influence than the presence of the pc against the electrodes. So if the auditor was worried that day, why, you'd get nothing but bounces and crashes.

You see? I mean, there's something. It's a rather marvelous instrument.

I notice now that we have pioneered forward and people are now selling pocket lie detectors and toy lie detectors, and that nearly every large psychological establishment is complete with lie detectors. Don't get them confused with an E-Meter. They haven't got anything as good as an E-Meter, and they don't know how to run them.

Now let me come to this other point, help your pride along a little bit. There are thousands and thousands and thousands of cops, bums, psychologists, tramps, drunks, in the United States that have been trained to use lie detectors, and trained up at the Keeler Institute for a year or two to read lie detectors, and they cannot make any sense out of them at all. So don't feel bad about this.

Now, a lie detector has several different facets that an E-Meter doesn't have. It's an electrogalvanometer, and the original circuit of this is about a hundred years old. It's a Whetstone bridge.

And this is so different than the original Whetstone-bridge circuit and so different than an electrogalvanometer, there's hardly any – they're hardly cousins. They work on the same principle, but you have to know a lot more. And the original is still in an eighteen-thousand-dollar lie detector.

They've still got an original Whetstone bridge sitting there – not a decent E-Meter, you see? You'll be fooled, because you go in and it's got a nice chromium-plated face, you know? The dial is all duded up, you know, and nice curlicues on the needle and very modern pastel designs, you know?

And you'll say, “That's really something” If you took the back of it off, you'd find it's the same thing as Whetstone built a hundred years ago. They haven't advanced a hair. Now, that is an electrode proposition, but is sometimes used as a footplate, sometimes used as a handplate, sometimes used as an armplate.

And one of the ways they do it is put a plate over here on the side of the table and split it in half and make somebody lay his arm on the plate and strap it down. That's one of the crude effects of it. READING THE E-METER 12  What they depend on has absolutely nothing to do with the mental currents in the mind.

These boys are so sold on meat! Man, you know, you'd think they'd been in the butcher business for years. They're really stuck on this stuff.

And they're so sold on meat that they take all of their reads – that they believe – from respiration and blood pressure. In other words, they read the pc with body motion. Don't think there is any difference.

This is what they're using to hang men with. Body motion – that's the respiration and blood pressure. And they take one of these standard – it's the same one that your medico used on you the last time you had a physical examination.

You know how damned uncomfortable that was. They wrap this rubber balloon around your arm and they have a pump over here and they have a mercury stand, and they pump the thing up, see? They pump it up, you know, and the blood goes svooo, svooo, svooo, svooo, svooo.

And you feel all – feel like somebody is break- ing your arm off, and it breaks a lot of the veins in the arm too, by the way. Yeah, you can see the scars of these things for a week or two after they've been on somebody. And they pump it up, and then there's two little pens, and they go along on a long tape, and they trace every pump of the blood and every uh-ha-uh-ha, pant, of the lungs.

And they put some kind of a plate across the fellow's che- . . . When they get this guy in there, you'd think he was being put in a jet plane to go on one of these fictitious Russian trips. Man, he's really wired for sound, you know?

And he's got this thing, and this looks like a backpack or something, and so he goes uh-ha-uh-ha, you know? And that one little- pen goes uh-ha-uh-ha-uh-ha-uh-ha. And then he goes pump-pump on the blood, and the other pen goes tzzzz-zz, and actually this psychogalvanometer, as an afterthought over here, makes another trail on a third pen.

And they have these three pens going like this, and the operator can sit there with this polygraph, and then they write down the various questions on the edge of it, and the pens go wiggle-wiggle, and if the fellow was tired that day and was panting more than the other they hang him. The error of those things is fabulous. The machine costs eighteen thousand dollars.

Now, they try to train people on these, and out of these thousands and thousands of people that they've tried to train, let me tell you something: There are only two hundred operators in the United States the police departments trust. Two hundred operators, out of the thousands and thousands and thousands they've tried to train. That's interesting, isn't it?

And remember that not one of those two hundred operators knows anything about past lives, restimulation, mental masses, mental image pictures, engrams. He knows nothing about the Tone Scale. He knows absolutely nothing about the Chart of Attitudes.

He knows nothing about stimulus-response stimulus. He knows nothing about overt acts. He thinks the mind is a piece of meat, and if the person pants he's guilty.

All right. Now, there's E-Metering as it exists out in the wide, large world these days. So don't you feel too bad if you have a little bit of a struggle trying to learn how to use an E- Meter.

Because if you can't read somebody's breathing, you ought to quit. READING THE E-METER 13  Understand, these are three little pens, and they make a wild, widely different trace. And every time they say “pocketbook” – they've got some pickpocket on the thing, you see – and they say “pocketbook,” and the thing jumps, you see? “Ah well, he's guilty.

That's it. That's it. Arrest him!

Take him down. Shoot him.” Boom. You know?

Well, you and I know – “pocketbook,” for Christ's sakes. Supposing we had a – supposing we put a Scotchman on the thing? Well, there are two hundred of that kind of experts.

So you are actually being asked to go way, way, way, way, way in advance of any of these characters with a much more modern machine, which doesn't have little pens that go blingety-bling, and that doesn't give you a long trace. Now, some chap in the United States invented for us, as a favor, a sort of a polygraph that would give an E-Meter trace, and it gives you the thing on tracing paper and that sort of thing. As far as I'm concerned, one wasn't built up that I was – put into my hands so that I can duplicate.

But it was designed. Now, maybe this would be a good thing that as you were assessing, you could put the number of the assessment question down against each piece of polygraph and then analyze it later, and so forth, at your leisure, and that sort of thing But at the same time, you would find this so gruesome in terms of speed that you would go mad, because you've got to write a bunch of things over here on the polygraph and do a reanalysis of the whole thing, and you wouldn't really know what you were doing at the time you were doing it; you would know later each time, you see? And you wouldn't come up with your answer at the end run.

Well, the way you – the way you've got to do. of course, is to pick off the information as it occurs, and you are actually the recording medium and you write it down – the information that has occurred – or you act on it. But you do something with the information when it occurs. This is a present time machine.

If you get the information you have to use it now. You take a – you haven't got time to analyze graphs or something. If you're trying to get rudiments in and you find a rudiment is out, you want to be able to put that rudiment in now.

So you haven't any time to send it down to the laboratory and then after a while everybody makes it out in quintuplicate and then takes some Thermofax of it and sends it back, and then the following day you have gotten to the second part of the rudiments, you see? You can go on now because you have found that the room was all right. Doesn't sound very practical, does it?

Now, as a substitute for that, you've got to be able to catch these reads on the fly. You've got to catch them when they happen. The read happens, you've got to catch it when it happens, and if you're not sure of it, you've got to ask for it again.

Now, the gross errors, however, in reading an E-Meter – I hate to tell you this to your face because you are undergoing them right this minute, but of course, to an old, grizzled E-  READING THE E-METER 14  Meter operator are, of course, laughable in the extreme. They are utterly ridiculous: like having to keep the needle at set before it can be read. Where did this come from?

See? An E- Meter operator has actually got to be able to read a needle when it just is flying all over the place. Well, that it's flying all over the place doesn't invalidate any information you get off of it.

Your read occurs while it is – while the needle is drifting around. It doesn't matter whether it's drifting up or drifting down. You ask somebody for something, that needle is going to stop for a minute or it's going to shift for a moment in its pattern, and it's going to change what it's doing as a response to your question, and because it changed for a response to the question, why, then, of course, it's a valid read.

But you will find that if we had it here, why, somebody else can run into it elsewhere. And you find out that people actually believe that the meter can only be read when it's at set and dead still. Well now, you cannot crank one of these meters down far enough to make it dead still and still have it read on the pc.

It just can't be done. I'm now – I'm sorry if I'm stepping on some toes here. That's why I've told you.

Now look, I've been all over the ground on this. I even believed at one time that the higher the arm went, the clearer the pc was. And you'll find that marking is preserved to this day on the old Mathison meters.

It shows the Tone Scale is plotted over here and that's why you call it the tone arm. It's a total misnomer, and 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, 5.0 and 6.0 are plotted against those points – this actually – this numbering is different. This is more reasonable because we've gotten at it.

But actually the old Tone Scale numbers that you have on the plus and minus Tone Scale were over here on the tone arm, and if you got over to Tone 40, why, the fellow was totally out the top. So now I've made mistakes on these meters and I've had a hell of a time reading some meters. And I had a manic-depressive on a meter one time.

That needle was shimmying around. Wow, you talk about an unreadable – sensitivity all the way off, and I've never seen a needle like it since, by the way, and it was just in constant hectic motion. It was just swinging about a quarter of the dial constantly, and there was just nothing you could do to shut it down far enough to make it readable.

It just was a wild something or other. Why? Well, it was reading all the time.

Yeah, but what was it reading Of course, that was on an old meter; I couldn't vary the sensitivity. People, you know, often used to go off the bottom of the old meters and off the top of the old meters! This, fortunately, is continuous all the way around.

Nobody ever goes off the top or the bottom of the thing, but they sometimes go to 7.0, and that spot isn't marked on the meter. And because the pot on the tone arm here gets in your road, you can't turn it to 7.0. But you now and then will front up to this incredible thing that your E-Meter isn't reading, and you – don't be embarrassed if the first time this happens to you, you think your meter is shut off or the cans have busted down or the connections are gone or it's unplugged or something has happened because you can't find the pc on it.

Well, the pc lies between 1.0 and 6.0, and I  READING THE E-METER 15  call to your attention that on a Mark IV you cannot get the needle to 1.0 to – between 1.0 and 6.0 at the bottom. Actually, he will go from 1.0 around here to 6.5, 1.0 to 6.5, 1.0 to 6.5, 1.0 – that's to catch the consecutive read. Actually, he's passing through the bottom.

It's 1.0 to 6.5, it's 1.0 to 6.5. You know, instead of just swinging as you would swing between 3.0 and 4.0, you've got to pass around the whole top of the dial in order to get to the other side. You understand?

So all of a sudden your E-Meter will shut off and not be reading, and actually the pointer should be down here at 7.0. So an E-Meter can go to 7.0. Little thing like that...

All right, if you didn't know something like that, first time it happened to you, why, you'd say, “Oh-oh, there's something wrong with E-Meters. I – I – I – I don't know. I don't trust E-Meters.” Well, it's just something you didn't know so you didn't trust it.

The meter is unreadable at that time, of course. The needle is doing exactly nothing. All right.

So I've been over all these jumps and I know the various bulls you can make so don't get your – don't be embarrassed. If there's something you don't know about an E- Meter, ask somebody who knows E-Meters, and be satisfied you've got the right answer, because it's the gross auditing error. How can you get rudiments in if you don't know that a rising needle, stopped, is a read?

All you got to do is make it halt just for a split second. You say the guy has a rising needle. Well, of course the needle rises.

A rise means nothing A gradual rise means absolutely nothing. Any kind of a rise means nothing It just happens, however, that the needle is going over here from right to left. Well, the tone arm would never move if your needle didn't move, so of course the needle is in motion all the time anyhow.

So, up it goes. It's going from over here on the right, up to the extreme left- and somewhere along that line . . . It's just doing that, that's all.

You ask the pc – you say to the pc, “Well, is it all right to audit in this room?” Well, sure, the only action the needle can possibly have is to twitch. It stops a rise. In other words, it just twitches and goes on rising, of course.

Well, that means it damn well isn't all right to audit in this room. That's an out-rudiment. All right.

How about that little twitch? Pretty hard to read, isn't it? You got to be right on the ball there, haven't you?

And if you're not on the ball, there you are. Bang! You missed it.

Another thing is it happens instantly, so if you look attentively at the pc and you say, “Is it all right to audit in this room?” and then look at your meter, of course you've missed the read because the read occurred instantly that you said it. The moment the sense got to him, it registered, and it registered that – for that brief instant and was not registering anymore. Now, a needle swings and moves around, but do you know, we found somebody reading it mostly on body motion, horribly enough.

Don't be a psychologist. Don't read an E- Meter on body motion. Well, what's body motion?

Well, the only way I can tell you what a body motion is, is to have you do the drill very arduously in E-Meter Essentials. Actually do  READING THE E-METER 16  the drill. Actually get somebody to sit down and go through all kinds of body motions, various classes of body motions.

There's respiratory motions; there's fingers off the cans, fingers on the cans; there's this, there's that, and you eventually look at these things and they look entirely different. They haven't any bearing whatsoever on a natural E-Meter read. And as soon as you've seen body motions – you get practice and you know what body motions are – you'll never mistake again a body motion.

But I've seen a very old-time auditor sold with a body motion. I've seen an old-time auditor take a totally incorrect and improper assessment on the basis of a pc selling it. And the pc was lifting her little finger on the back of the can because she wanted that one.

And every time that one came by, the pc would lift her finger on the back of the can and put it back on again. And it gave a little, tiny, funny-looking theta bop. And the old-time auditor said to me, “It is a very peculiar-looking motion to the needle, but that's what it is.” Oh, and a very short time later realized that the assessment must be all wrong because it was all going haywire, and went back and checked, and the pc just lied like a soldier but finally admitted this; and the auditor got the pc to do it, and they reproduced the motion on the needle and that was what the auditor had been assessing by.

It was just a total sell all the way along the line. Very interesting, isn't it? Well, it's very interesting that a pc will throw a session to this degree.

Even an experienced Scientologist being audited can throw a session. Say, “Well, I know what it is. I was up till all hours last night and I was worried about this thing, and I know what it is: It's a soldier.

The devil with this monkeying around. It's a soldier, that's all.” And the auditor the next day says, “A soldier,” and does something like twitch his shoulder slightly, and it gives a read, of course, on the meter. All the pc has done is practically commit suicide.

I mean, it's just as interesting as that. If he wants to really pick up his case and throw it in the sewer – just throw it – try to sell the auditor an improper item, because these items are what they are. But auditors will do it when they're being audited.

Even when they know it, they will still do it. So that doesn't mean just because you're auditing some “old Scientologist,” you know, who's been in the business for a long time, that your assessment is always reliable. Oh, no.

The older they are, the wiser I get. Now I am alert, because this fellow knows how to throw one. He's an expert.

You get a fellow sitting there, and he's trying to cooperate and he helps you out one way or the other – well, if you don't know these various characteristics, you can read them wrong, that's all. Now, there's nothing very esoteric about it. As a matter of fact, there's a wide, wide difference here.

There's a wide difference between a body read and a mental read. They are so recognizably themselves that it's something that, well, it – a fellow feels when he's trying to explain it – as you will someday, even if you don't feel secure about it now – someday you'll  READING THE E-METER 17  say, “Well, how could anybody tell the difference – fail to tell the difference between a theta bop and somebody belching? That would really take some doing” Well, of course, a belch, you're liable to get a rise, and you're liable to get a fall.

You're liable to get the proper body motion – the fall and then the rise usually – and it's to a certain distance. But you certainly would never mistake it for a theta bop. You – it'd look like a belch to you, see?

And when you get that, that type of certainty, where the pc could be sixty or seventy feet away from you in an entirely different room and you couldn't see anything that the pc was doing, you could call your shots on the meter – I mean, what was a read and what wasn't – why, you'd be a very good E-Meterer. And I'll let you in on something I don't think I could do it. I don't think I could be certain every single time that the pc had all of a sudden shifted his finger.

I don't think every time, because one of them might be done perfectly, you see? It might be a total fool. It might be the exact read.

But to get it exactly very often, no. So you've got to double-check: When you don't know what it is, you ask again. And you've got the instant read, and a person can never sell you, if you know instant read and can recognize instant read for what it is, because it takes him a moment to hear you and act, but it takes the reactive bank no time at all to act.

So the instant read on an actual is very rapid, and the instant read on a sell is not an instant read at all; it's always latent. You're now talking between a tenth of a second, you see, and three quarters of a second, and the auditor recognizing the difference between a tenth of a second and three quarters of a second, that's pretty sharp, isn't it? That's pretty close together.

All right. But, nevertheless, you can tell. Now, if somebody is going to throw an item, here's what you do.

You say, “All right, category,” they're falling on this word category, you see, and you have to say, “category,” and then they go “Dzoooh! That certainly turns an awful somatic on in my head.” That's a standard selling tactic, by the way. Pc is doing it consciously or unconsciously – I don't care which; it's still a sell.

The pc knows they're doing it, really. Maybe they do get a somatic in their head. So what?

Maybe it's on some other goal chain, too, so they'd really get in the soup if you bought it. But anyway, you say, “category.” Well now, the person has to hear “category” himself and put “category” into action, and react, in order to react with a sell on “category.” In order to sell you “category,” there's always going to be a late reaction. It's not very late, but it's just a little bit.

Now, the reactive mind doesn't have that much lag in it because time is nowhere in the reactive mind, which is what makes it the reactive mind. So you say, “category,” and the reactive mind goes – well, you hardly got the-y out, you see – “categor-y” – and you've hardly got the-y out when your E-Meter has reacted. In other words, it's a much more rapid reaction than a sell.

But actually visual inspection: Well, it's a – you could be sleepy someday and not see the difference between them and all of a sudden say, “Well, we finally found out what he's got here. He's a 'category.”' All right. That's fine.

You go on and use that in the next  READING THE E-METER 18  assessment. And the next assessment doesn't pan out, and suddenly nothing pans out anyplace, and “Hohh! What's wrong here?” Well, what's wrong here is we didn't read the E- Meter.

Something happened in there. But now the gross auditing error on the E-Meter is not being able to read an E-Meter at all, of course. Somebody walks in off the street into a co-audit, we put an E-Meter in his hand – we don't even let him go through Comm Course – we put an E-Meter in his hands, and you say, “All right, find basic-basic on the Mama chain on this case.” He doesn't even know what you mean, you see?

Do you know the fellow will actually sit there studiously – this is what fools you, you know – and he will figure with dials, and he'll look at it, and he'll think that's all very interesting, and he will look at it very studiously. And he'll spend a lot of time looking at it. Now, if a stranger came along that didn't know much about E-Meters either and looked at him sitting there with the needle, he would immediately think of him as an expert.

Isn't that right? You'll make this error yourself someday. Don't feel chagrined when you do.

You will have somebody sitting there who has been through an HPA Course way back when, and they apparently know how to read an E-Meter, and they're sitting there studiously, and they look at the E-Meter, and they look at the pc alertly and they ask questions, and they look back at the E-Meter, and they look just like they're running a case. It's the darnedest mock-up you ever saw in your life, and you can be fooled by it, man. You have to go back and stand back of the fellow, and all of a sudden you see a little theta bop, see, you see this little theta bop and you say, “What's that?” The fellow says, “What?” And you say, “Well, that – what the needle is doing there.” “Well, it will quiet down in a moment, and then we'll get some other data.” And find out that the person is reading nothing but body reactions – throws away all reads and reads body reactions.

So actually the pc had to move his head or cough or do something in order to get an E-Meter read. Now, that's a gross auditing error! You get what I mean?

But you – don't be too dismayed when you find this. Just be busy and do something about it, that's all. That's the remedy.

Just do something about it. Be effective. Make sure.

Don't ever take chances on whether or not the auditor can run an E-Meter. Always find out whether or not he can. I, frankly, for years have been in apathy on the subject.

That's why you don't see more industry in all directions, you know? And why I'm not always in there, “Now, you make sure you run that E-Meter right!” – you know, in a calm frame of mind about it. I sort of hope that  READING THE E-METER 19  you'll pick it up right, because it's difficult to read an E-Meter.

That's right. It's difficult. It takes a lot of time.

A person should sit down for hours and hours in monkeying around with a case and find out what the meter does and find out what the case does and get used to the thing, get familiar with the whole thing, and then finally find that when he says something that the pc does have, then the pc did get a tick, and he asks and the pc does have that item out. You know? Victory!

And chase it along the line and get used to consulting the meter and feeling certain of what he reads, and knows that what he reads is there, and he eventually fades in and he becomes a very easy operator. And all of a sudden – the magnificence of it is that processes, they go easily; he does assessments, and it takes him a few minutes to find this item and a few minutes to find that item, you know? Well now, from gross auditing error, we get the arduously-worked-with E-Meter: that if we sit on the edge of our chairs and keep our eyes dilated to the proper dilation and watch all the time like a hawk and never take our eyes off the meter really – you know, it's something like there's a snake lying just in back of it or something – take our eyes right off – never really right off the meter, but always kind of ask the pc questions with our eyes glued on the meter, why, we won't miss.

You know, that's a sort of a uh-ha-uh-ha, you know? That kind of an attitude. All right.

That attitude is more desirable than the faked attitude, see? All right. Now let's go a little bit further on the thing, and the fellow who consults the meter when he wants to know something, but consults it with – I've been running a half- flattened goal on somebody recently, and boy, that thing is gone; the person is almost cleared on it, see?

And, man, you talk about something that is microscopic! I've been wondering whether or not we shouldn't get some magnifying glasses for these E-Meters. They have an old radar, an old marine radar – Marconi makes them – and they're a nine-inch magnifying glass that they put on a radarscope.

And you put it over the top of a dial, in other words, and it makes the thing get huge. Magnified read. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if you didn't see something like that come up suddenly.

If I can get a light one that develops easily and that hangs over the top from the box onto the – over the needle area, it might help U9 out, because, man, I've been getting myopia. You know? I mean, I've been reading this meter.

Did it fall? Didn't it fall? Did it fall?

It's just – I'll get – I have to actually set the thing into the set area in order to read it – you'd laugh to see me trying to work on the thing – and measure its motion against those little “set” dashes. You know? And squint down and look at the thing and wonder if it got any closer to the dash or if it didn't.

Boy! You talk about hard to read! This thing is weird.

This goal terminal 3D assessment was done after the goal was half gone, and it's all panned out, and it's just washing out. I mean, there isn't anything left there, but I've still got to have some more items. And I tell you, I've been panting  READING THE E-METER 20  That's why you found me – you found (I know you never expected to find it) – that's why you've found occasionally a sympathetic note struck in my auditing messages, and so forth.

Because I actually feel for you trying to – trying to sort some of these things out. And if you yourself are still queasy about how you run an E-Meter or you don't have any very vast certainty on what you're doing, and then you suddenly have to confront one of these microscopic situations of, “Well, we've got to find one more level on the Prehav Scale and somewhere on the Prehav Scale there is a level here someplace. And if we look close enough to the E-Meter we may be able to spot that there is a level here someplace” – aaaargh!

Or trying to assess out on somebody who – well, his opposition goals list went totally null. And trying to get just one of them to kick, “Just once, please! Just once.

Just one of them, please. Just one. Haaaah!

Well, we can take that one and get on with the 3D.” It's fantastic, you know? Well now, that's very extraordinary meter reading. You should look on it as such.

It is extraordinary meter reading It's not ordinary at all. So you might have been good enough to do a Sec Check and you'll all of a sudden find yourself being called upon to do a 3D assessment on a half-gone goal or something like that, and you find yourself in another category entirely. You find out that there was a – not just a high school of E-Metering, but that there was a college postgraduate course on the subject, too.

Well, I didn't even know that's expected. That has to do with having microscopic, magnifying-glass eyes and a few things of this particular character. Now, they're hard to read.

Now, as we look into our ability to read a meter, however, the basic trouble that you run into with a meter is not, however, of that magnitude. If a fellow is smart enough to read a meter when it's doing that kind of thing, he certainly isn't doing all of these other things. Now, one of the things is sometimes an auditor who is green on an E-Meter – when the needle is drifting around – the auditor has an awful time trying to differentiate.

And you've got a sensitivity 16 setting, and the advance from left to right, and so forth, of that arm has to be considerable in order to keep the needle even on the dial. In other words, you have to keep moving the tone arm just to keep the needle on the dial and readable. And it's moving to the right and left very rapidly.

The natural motion of the machine and the pc, and so forth, are all quite rapid, so that you're getting some kind of an action here where your needle is – wouldn't be doing anything quite as bad as that, but it's rises of that sort – that's a sensitivity 16 on a lot of cases – and you've got to pick out of that thing somewhere a read. And you find that it's impossible to do so. Well, obviously, it's more beneficial to the pc to drag it down to a one-dial drop for your rudiments.

It's more probable that you'll be able to read one if you can't read a flying needle. If you can't read a flying needle, obviously it's better to read any kind of a needle, if you'll make less mistakes, right? So you can back your sensitivity down to a one-dial drop for  READING THE E-METER 21  your rudiments, if you can't read a flying needle, or if the needle is flying around too much.

Obviously, the thing to do is to get the job done. That's first and foremost. Now, don't lay aside the E-Meter in trying to get the job done because I can tell you frankly that for the last couple of years it has not been possible to do an auditing job without an E-Meter.

It just can't be done. You can do kinds of patch-ups and you can do various things, but to really get somewhere with a case you just can't do it. It takes an E-Meter.

All right. Now, the question is, how do you read the E-Meter? Well, you better learn everything there is to know about learning how to read E-Meters.

And E-Meters can be read. They can actually be read. You can catch them as they fly by on sensitivity 16, but if you're not up to that yet, you'd better be reading them at a sensitivity where you still can read them.

You understand? And you'd be amazed, because a rudiment that is really out far enough to cause you any difficulty in an assessment will, of course, read on a one-third-of-a-dial drop. If your auditing is anything at all like auditing, you should be able to pick up the rudiment on a third- of-a-dial drop, that is out.

You should be able to. You should be able to, if it's going to interfere. Well, that leaves these little tag ends and twitches, and so forth, that you pick up at sensitivity 16 just sort of really smoothing it out, you see?

That's the non plus ultra. But let me tell you something: that if you take too much time to smooth it out, you are laying in more out-of-sessionness than you are getting in. Do you see that?

By all of this persnicketiness, you can drive the pc further out of session than the out-rudiment would have driven the pc. By being too slow and too ineffective in handling the meter, and too persnickety about exactly how you're setting up the session, the pc – if you're wasting time at it and so forth – well, you say, “Well, do you have a present time problem?” And the pc says, “Well, yes, I have a present time problem, and it's so-and-so.” And you say, “Well, how do you feel about that now?” And the pc says, “All right.” And you say, “Well,” again, “do you have a present time problem?” and you don't get any reaction on the needle at a dial drop. Let's put this now that you had it at a 16, sensitivity 16 drop, and you said, “How did you feel about that now?” and there was a possibility that that needle vibrated slightly.

So you say to him again, “How do you feel about that present time problem now?” and in doing so, of course, you lay in an invalidation and an ARC break to some faint degree, and you get a tick. And now you try to clear this tick. Well, you put it there.

You see that? So if an auditor isn't pretty smooth at getting the pc over these little bumps, it's actually safer to get him to get it in at a dial drop. Because he'll start reading his own ARC breaks.

Even the faintest flick of annoyance on the pc will read at a sensitivity 16. You know, you  READING THE E-METER 22  would just ask – you've asked the question three times. You asked the question once, and you couldn't get the answer because the needle was flying by too fast at that moment, so just to be sure for your own sake you ask it again.

You say, “Well, do you have a present time problem now?” Well, look, the guy just answered you – no, he didn't have – and you've asked him again now. All right. That's allowable, see?

You get away with that and you say, “Well, that's fine. Thank you very much,” and you go on. But let's say you missed it the second time, and then he said again, “No,” and your fight is between you and the E-Meter, not between you and the pc.

See, the E-Meter is not a tool; the E-Meter is getting all the attention in this session. Remember what I told you: You could get away with anything in an auditing session as long as the pc was absolutely sure that your attention was on his case. And if he begins to believe that your attention is much more involved with the E-Meter and much more interested in the E-Meter, and that you are much more fascinated with what the E-Meter is doing than what he's doing, he's going to ARC break on you, and you're never going to get the meter clean.

You see? So there's a point of tolerance in here. Now, therefore meter reading cannot be separated from smooth auditing You've got to be able to do a smooth auditing job to do a good meter-reading job.

But when we get down to gross auditing errors: The auditor is auditing; he doesn't know how an E-Meter operates. He doesn't know if an E-Meter – that's worse – he doesn't know if an E-Meter operates. He doesn't know what the E-Meter is supposed to be doing, and he can't quite possibly be sure if he does say.

So to check himself and his knowledge of the E-Meter, he is always asking the E- Meter again, and he seems to be very nervous on the subject of the E-Meter. You've violated in-sessionness on the pc. So it goes from gross auditing error, such as can't read it at all – doesn't really know what it's supposed to be doing and saying.

We pass from that into a sufficient fumble that we manage to knock all the rudiments out faster than we get them in, you see? And then we pass over into acceptable E-Metering. And so we start a session.

We set up the E-Meter. We're very comfortable about the whole thing. We ask the pc, “Do you have a present time problem?” We don't get a fall.

We say, “That was – that's fine. Good.” And we go on to the next, and we go on into the session. We start an assessment, and we know where this thing is going to fall and how it's going to fall and what it's going to do. so it doesn't bother us; and we're reading this, and the pc – this is not getting in the road of the session.

We're – feel comfortable enough with this E-Meter that we're not getting in the pc's road, and the pc, of course, will just roll these things out just one right after the other. You pick these things up, straighten them all up, just nothing to it. Now, that's the bridge I'm trying to get some of you across.

We're knocking the gross auditing errors out. But the other thing about it is, is now we've still got to get the confidence  READING THE E-METER 23  and the roughness – the feeling of roughness – out of the session just because there's an E- Meter sitting there. You know, I mean, all this stuff.

You'd be surprised how difficult it has been for me to do this half-gone goal on the basis of actually not being able to read the darn E-Meter because it's flicking so little. So I've already come up against that problem: trying to read the E-Meter as it flew by on a twitch that might have been there but wasn't, but maybe it was; and then not asking again more often than is absolutely necessary in order to keep the pc in-session, who isn't very interested in it anyway. And it gets up to quite a test of E-Metering.

So there's various degrees of E- Metering. Now, when you leave here, I want you to know everything there is to know about this – the handling and operation and behavior of this machine, and I don't want you to be making any goofball mistakes with the thing. Why?

Because you'll pass them along See? There's only a few ways to read an E-Meter that are right. There are only a few reactions that are right.

There are only a few things to do that are right. The main thing I want you to do is get rid of your additives. You know?

Like you always have thought that an E-Meter actually should be set – if the E-Meter was not reading on the Clear reading of the pc at the beginning and end of session, the rudiments were out or something I get hints of that every once in a while on an auditor's report: “The tone arm was very high.” All right. So the tone arm was high. So what?

This is news? I got this on an auditor's report just last night. Don't anybody who wrote this feel chagrined, but – because it's not very much.

But it was this: “I seem to get the tone arm down lower in finding the last two items and in checking the last two items of 3D than I did in getting off some withholds off the pc.” Well, look! 3D is, this is something like saying, “The power plant over there that has a hundred-thousand-horsepower diesel engines in it develops much more horsepower than Johnny's little steam engine.” Well, of course! You know? But of course.

But the auditor was apparently amazed about this, you see? There was some amazement about this, that, you know? He'd gotten so used to getting the tone arm down by getting off some withholds that he thought this would always happen, and that withholds – you get the withholds off, that was the best way to get the tone arm down.

Now, you start telling some people, “Well, the best way to get the tone arm down is get some withholds off.” Oh, no. There's a better way of getting the tone arm down, and up, too: 3D. That's infinitely better than getting withholds off.

But, of course, getting withholds off is infinitely better than anything we had before that. Well, we've got orders of magnitude here which are not comparable. I can just see somebody sitting over in Canada someplace at the present moment on a private-practice thing just absolutely sure they weren't doing well with the pc because at the end of the session every time the tone arm did not come down to the pc's Clear read and just  READING THE E-METER 24  worrying themselves sick about it, and just nagging the pc, “Well, you must have another withhold,” you know?

They got the pc sitting in the middle of the battle of Acre, you know? “You must have another withhold about your wife,” you know? “Are you sure there isn't?” Just must have. Why? Because the tone arm is up.

You get what I mean by additives? Now, you know, it's very hard to imagine these additives – for me to imagine them – because it looks so simple. But I know that I myself, in years gone by, have been guilty of additives about an E-Meter, such as the higher the tone arm gets, the clearer the pc is.

That's an interesting assumption to make, isn't it? Well, it's an easy assumption to make because you get – some pcs feel better with a high arm than a low arm. Did you know that?

They get that arm up there, and they're in the midst of all of that black, “goovey,” asphalt mass, and they just feel fine and – sort of an anesthesia, you know? They're three-quarters unconscious. And you get the tone arm down, and then they move and they can breathe, and it hurts and they don't like it.

And you listen to a few of these pos-, you will eventually make that con – you'd be tempted to make that conclusion. Well, it's better to have a high tone arm than a low tone arm. All depends on the level of case that you're busy auditing.

Well, I don't mean to labor the point. I don't think the point can be labored, however. If you're having a hard time with assessment, don't kick yourself in the head.

Find out what you don't know about an E-Meter, that's all. Don't put on any brassy front about it, because I've already told you it took me years. All right.

Well, it shouldn't take you quite so long, but remember that you have to be satisfied that the E-Meter is operating and that it is reading and that there is something there when it reads. And when you're satisfied with this, of course, then from that point your certainty goes up, up, up, higher and higher and higher, easier and easier and easier to do. and finally the E-Meter is not a very important part of the session. It's a vital part of the session but not an important part of the session.

It's not something you spend a lot of time worrying about or being upset about. When you've got that kind of thing out of the road and you're no longer worrying about what you're doing, you're not self-conscious, you're not pressuring against the E-Meter about everything you're doing and it's not nervous and all that; you know, you'll be absolutely fascinated at your ability to hold a pc into session with anything Just be fascinated. Why?

Because you can put some time on putting the pc into session. You know the rest of the tools. You see that?

So the more attention you actually have free to put the pc into session, why, the more the pc is going into session. I have been able, while doing all this microscopic stuff, to carry on a rather chatty-type process with this pc, by the way. This pc was tremendously amused at some of the things she was running across.

Tremendously amused. Sections of track she'd never heard of before, you know – on a goals terminal – goal-plus-modifier terminal run. And the whole area had been  READING THE E-METER 25  covered before arduously by a 3, a Routine 3 run.

But there were areas of the track which were now being disclosed she'd never dreamed of because now she was closer in to them. And she was discussing these things, she was being very happy about these things, and she was saying how nice these were and how amusing that was and laughing about it all. I've been holding the pc in-session, and keeping the pc from comming themselves out so they didn't answer the question, you know – just, you know, talking themselves down too much – still staying very interested, everything going along fine, and at the same time reading this cotton- picking needle.

Impossible, you know? Was the thing moving? And watching this tone arm like a hawk, because it – at any time that thing might go up there and start parking, and I didn't want it to park too hard and erase what little motion there was left in the needle.

But that comes of experience. I hold a pc in-session, of course, because I'm actually not too worried about this. Of course, the E-Meter is an old friend.

I've done more doggone research with an E-Meter and found out more things about an E-Meter. The first thing I had to find out about an E-Meter, however, was did it work? Did it actually register something in the pc?

And when it was talking, what was it saying And how was it saying it? And after I got into communication like that, well, it only took me for – a few years. And admittedly, you're smarter than I am so it only should take you a few weeks.

Okay? But please when you leave here, make sure that you're very expert at this – in your own minds. Be satisfied in your own minds.

For instance, if you've had some assessment flubs – if you've had some assessment flubs – don't take it for granted that it was difficult to do the assessment. Don't blame it on the pc. Just start wondering, “Am I doing something odd here?

Am I doing something odd with the business of assessment? Am I reading a meter in some peculiar way?” It's just like the old airline pilot. He looked over the side and he always knew when he was a thousand feet high – except he was always two thousand feet high.

And it's just that kind of an honest error. And so, make inquiries. That's why you've got Instructors.

If they can't answer it, ask me. I can. I don't think there's anything an E-Meter will do these days that I can't predict one way or the other.

And I know very definitely that an E-Meter has a limited usefulness because it only goes to Clear. All right? So there's a whole new frontier got to be developed beyond that point.

And that's a wild frontier. But you're having to cope with a meter which isn't reading much toward the end of the run anyhow. And right now, with a half-run goal, trying to assess it, trying to get Prehav levels for it, all that sort of thing – ha!

I feel sympathy for you because I'm doing it myself. But remember, I'm winning doing it. So, so can you.

All right. But get certain about meters. And if you're ever, ever around supervising other auditors, just because they're sitting there looking intelligent, and you're not getting any kind of results from standard things, what's the first thing you ought to suspect?

That all of that  READING THE E-METER 26  sitting there looking intelligent at the E-Meter had nothing to do with handling E-Meters. That there is something wrong with E-Metering, and that's the point I wanted to make in this lecture, and I hope you'll profit by it. Thank you.

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