STUDYING: DATA ASSIMILATION A lecture given on 9 July 1964

[auditor]

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STUDYING: DATA
ASSIMILATION

A lecture given on
9 July 1964



How are you today?
Audience: Fine.
What’s the date?
Audience: Nine July.
Nine July. Nine July AD 14.
All right. Now, what are you weakest in?
Female voice: Auditing.
Auditing. Yeah. Frankly, I haven’t anything to talk to you about because you’re all doing so well. It’s I who am lagging, you see? But I’ve given you quite a few lectures about study and how to get through it and how to do this and how to do that and there’s very little that can be added to what I have told you, but I better add that very little.
In trying to—in trying to assimilate a piece of information, these are the points to watch and these are the points that trip you. Nomenclature.
Nomenclature: what does a word mean? And that’s what trips you basically, because then you cannot read a sentence with that word in it and know what the sentence says. So nomenclature is a major stumbling block in any study.
Now, there are no vast, well worked—up glossaries in Scientology, but there is a glossary on Class VI material, and part of nomenclature is the recognition of what the definition is. It’s one thing just to have the definition and it’s another thing to have an idea of what the definition means.
Now, you get yourself a thing like a GPM. All right, let’s take that as nomenclature. „GPM“ means Goals Problem Mass. Unless you combine such a thing with an observation and work on the clay table, and so forth, even the nomenclature is relatively meaningless. It is a thing, in other words. There is something called a GPM. It’s not an idea. It is a GPM. Now, there are—there’s one or two pcs around (not necessarily in the course) who are stumbling all over the place on a GPM, because they are in disagreement with that piece of nomenclature. And they are saying, „Well, it doesn’t have mass, it’s just Ron’s idea that it has mass, see, and it doesn’t have mass. So therefore, of course, there is no such thing as a GPM.“
Well now, trying to audit somebody on something of which there is no such thing as, is just a little bit difficult. Now, if you’re running GPMs correctly, the mass simply expresses itself as heat and pressure. It does not express itself as a visio. You never see it unless you’ve made a mistake. When you’ve made a mistake you’ll see it. You get an end word in the wrong situation and you can see this long parade of mass going out there. Well, there must be something wrong with it to see the mass.
So here is the oddity about this—the GPM. It’s true it’s a goalsmatched items, one against the other, and very matched and held in midair, from which it gets problem, although that isn’t too good a word because „problem“ is an end word also and „mass“ is also an end word. So, that nomenclature is adapted to the subject at a time when not all is known about it, so it can be described and worked with, don’t you see?
Now, we move on a little bit further and we find out there probably could have been better nomenclature, but by this time everybody knows this as a „this“ and you would get a total catastrophe if you went and shifted the thing, and we can’t go on referring to it as „the thing.“ So we go on calling it a GPM. Well now, of course, GPM means „Goals Problem Mass,“ but that’s not important. It’s not important what the „G“ means or the „P“ means or the „M“ means. This is a symbol that stands for something. Well, what is this thing So, if you’re simply content to say, „Well, a GPM is a thing and it has this form and construction,“ and work with it on a clay table, all of a sudden you begin to understand what it is.
Now, you’re in a never—never land that has never been explored. There is no language to adequately represent any of these parts of the mind. If you used any terminology that is used by the psychiatrist, you don’t know what you’re getting into. You, frankly, have no clue what you’re getting into because he’s way—out, man. And when he uses a word to describe something, there may be innuendoes in relationship to that word that would, if we then used it, would impart a totally incorrect zone or area and would make somebody think he knew what you were talking about, when you hadn’t a—he hadn’t a clue what you were talking about. So, you’ve crossed up your terminology with some other field that meant something else.
Well, the reason you can’t cross it up: it has a different purpose—that other field—it has a different target and it has an entirely different basis of operation. Their—well, their purpose is to make people quiet, to give you how wildly different this is. You want to get upset when you see a very quiet pc, man. His idea of treatment is based on the common denominator, as far as he’s concerned, that men are animals that rose spontaneously from a sea of ammonia and he wots not of and all thinking is done by the brain, and so forth.
So, this is a different—completely different—zone or area. And it has not produced results, so we needn’t pay any attention to it. We don’t care how loudly somebody beats the drum and says, „This is authority.“ Those people are the authorities who can get the results and those are the authorities. A painter is somebody who can paint a picture. An „authority on painting“ has been Hobson-Jobsoned over into somebody who can criticize a picture. Well, anybody can criticize a picture, so I guess any child, then, is an authority on painting. So that the thing doesn’t hold up when you take it from a critical viewpoint, you see?
No, an authority is the fellow who can do it. And the world in apathy and failure, driving out in various lines and directions where they have been unable to do anything, have elected authorities on subjects that can’t do them. So, therefore you would become all crossed up with fields that have failed. And that would enter, all by itself, an ingredient of failure into Scientology.
So, we have to leave their technology alone. We have to leave their nomenclature strictly alone. We cannot talk about „ids“ and „egos.“ We can’t really talk about the unconscious—which, by the way, is another end word in GPMs.
We can’t discuss, in other words, what we are doing in terms of what they were doing, because they didn’t do anything. And we would immediately come a cropper and we would be in very bad shape indeed. So we have to have technology named in a certain way as to convey a meaning. And we are the people who can get results in the field of the mind, so therefore we are the authorities.
So therefore, we don’t have to pay any attention to anybody else who sets himself up an authority, because any raving madman could go down here at the crossroads and say, „I know all about grapes,“ see? „I am the world’s greatest authority on grapes.“ And any raving madman could do this, you see? He could just go on screaming, „I am the world’s greatest authority on grapes!“
Well, he could get a few other madmen who would come around and say, „You’re the world’s greatest authority on grapes.“
Nobody ever would think of asking this madman, perhaps, the question, „Have you ever eaten a grape, seen a grape, raised a grape, or done anything with a grape?“ and of course, if the answers were all „No“ to those questions, then of course, it would be quite obvious that he was a raving madman.
And that’s the psychiatrist, you see? He has never seen a mind, he never created one, he never changed one and he never brought about any results in this particular field. And the only thing he can brag about is being a bit destructive on the subject. And he’s screaming that he’s an authority, so therefore, somehow or another, you should borrow his nomenclature.
Now, any one of you, sooner or later, is going to run into this down at some crossroads, „Why don’t you use standard terminology?“
Well, the answer to it is, „Whose standard terminology?“ It would have to be the terminology of a person who could produce a result, before it could be said to be even terminology.
So man has had not much understanding of this particular field and has even gone into an inversion, where he has elected to have the nomenclature of the field standardized by people who know nothing about it. Now, that’s a wildest inversion that anybody could ever dream of Not only is there no terminology, but there is a great deal of false terminology. That terminology is false. And you start to lead down that line, you’re going to be in trouble. Somebody’s going to say to you sooner or later, „Why don’t you use standard nomenclature, why don’t you do this and why don’t you do that?“
Well, my rebuttal on it, of course, is always very savage. When somebody starts in on me like this, I have no idea that they’re trying to be helpful. I never make that mistake, so I just cut them up and serve them for dinner. And it’s something on this particular—particular line, I would answer, „Well, why haven’t you developed anything that could be used?“
So Doctor Spinbin is standing there, „Well, why don’t you use standard terminology so that somebody can understand you?“
„Why the hell haven’t you invented any?“
„What do you mean?“
„Well, why don’t you know something about the mind? What do you stand around being such a fake for?“
„Well, really! I have a degree!“ „I know that. That degree doesn’t mean anything. Take one of these patients out of one of these rooms that you’ve got down here. Bring him out here and heal him. I want to see it!“
„Well, you can’t do anything like that.“
„Therefore you’re a fake. To hell with you!“
This is my idea of a polite conversation with one of those guys. I hate fakes. And it’s interesting that the only mud they can throw at us is that we’re somehow fakes. See, „The overt doth speak loudly in accusation.“ Shakespeare rewritten.
Now, therefore you can’t help but have trouble with terminology—nomenclature. I’ve had trouble with it, don’t think I haven’t. How do I dream up some word that will describe something, that can be found, can be examined and does exist, that will not conflict with some other school of nomenclature, which has failed? How do I move into that perimeter? Oh, we could probably do a much better job, but part of the trouble is you.
You accept certain lines and start using them in your common communication and then the last thing in the world that I could do is pull them away from you and say, „Well, actually a better word is so—and—so, what little Scientology terminology you know, is now dead and nonexistent. We’re going to substitute a brand—new terminology,“ and you would be upset. Right?
So, terminology has to deal with this factor of evolution in use. We not only have evolved it and they’ve wobbled a little bit on their meanings occasionally, but then they get into use and they get fixed on the printed page. They get into bulletins and they get into your certificates, and so forth. Certify an HCA, well, he’s supposed to know what a reactive mind is. Great.
So the next day we’re going to call it something else; we’ve immediately wiped out part of his education, haven’t we? And we’ve made it hard for him to communicate with anybody who is trained later. If we want dissonance, why, we’re going to get it in a very large cacophony if we go knocking apart the terminology we have developed. So we have to safeguard the terminology we’ve developed. So therefore, when we learn more about the subject, you see, the word may become unreal, but we’re still using it.
So, the only thing we can do is actually elect those things which are the most important in the mind and keep that terminology as standard as possible. First try to evolve it as cleverly as possible, so that it won’t conflict—first try to evolve it cleverly, so it won’t conflict and bring about a misunderstanding in some older activity. And then we’ve got to carry it forward as a standardized item and then not go changing it all over the place just about the time everybody learns what it is. So, there’s a certain necessity here to maintain a constant on nomenclature and terminology. And the word „GPM“ will never, never be changed. It’s in too much, too long, too often, don’t you see? And even though „Goals“—end word; „Problem“—end word; „Mass“—end word. But it becomes just „GPM.“ Well, it could become „XYZ“—it wouldn’t matter much.
Now, another responsibility is not develop too many of them, not to—not to go whole hog on the subject, not to try to name everything in sight some new peculiar name that nobody would ever get around the end of. The vocabulary of Scientology is probably about 472 major words, which is a small enough technical vocabulary. The medical vocabulary is something on the order of 20 to 40 thousand, somewhere in that range—of very peculiar words that don’t mean a thing.
So, your task in learning „Scientologese“ is relatively short, relatively brief compared to other technical fields.
Now, you could complain about any technical field on the subject of its nomenclature and its nomenclature is just, very often, five times as silly, if you look at it that way, as Scientology is inapplicable. Some of these specialized fields are really marvelous. But if you have a bent for it, if you have a knack for it and are amused by these nomenclatures and terminologies and special languages, you might say, you can have a lot of fun with some of these.
I know I recently have been hobnobbing in the world of the circus. Well, fortunately I know a little of the circus terminology, but from an American circus viewpoint. And I don’t know that this holds good in the English circus, you see? Well, you daren’t use—Ill show you now the upper class of terminologies.
They’re all „snob“: These languages are all snob languages, including Scientology, see? The boy that comes out of his HCA class, you see, and he throws off a couple of words; there’s two or three who understand what he’s talking about, and so forth, and they chin—chin together, see? They—it’s like the „lodge“ has just passed the password, see? Other people stand around with their jaws dropped and say they are listening to the upper elite. Well, to that degree they are, you see? Somebody has a superior understanding. But this is a signal system and actually, I couldn’t take that away from the subject if I had to. If I didn’t invent it, you would.
Give you—in the circus world if you use carnival—the carnival, you see, is pretty downscale. To the circus, a carnival is almost beneath contempt. These things are quite definitely fixed on the social strata. So you daren’t use carnival terminology, of which I know of about four or five hundred words in carnivalese. You daren’t use that in referring to the same identical objects and actions in the circus world and the circus world has maybe seven—eight hundred, a thousand words, you see, for these same things. It’s—you’ve seen the same thing, there, you run into it in Low Dutch and High Dutch, in languages and so on.
So you have to be very careful about some of these. But quite the reverse, you can tell a real organist—this is in the world of music. You can tell a great concert pianist by the awe with which he speaks the word „Steinway“ and with which he speaks of his instrument and with which he speaks of his scores and so on. You can tell him. He acts the part of a snob in his longtailed coat and his flowing gestures and his poseurs with his hands over the keyboard and all that sort of thing. You know this boy for what he is, you see? He is a classical pianist, a classical concert pianist.
Now, his terminology is quite staggering. If he and a symphony orchestra conductor were to start a Conversation in your immediate vicinity you would be snowballed. You’d never know that many musical terms taken into or out of Italian and other—and German and that sort of thing, could exist. And it would, frankly, be over the head of most of the very men in the symphony orchestra. They would say, „God, listen to that,“ you know?
But the field of the organ does a complete reverse. Now an organ is an instrument which a piano is not. An organ is a percussion instrument, only to the degree that you turn on a percussion key and beyond that, you can get music out of it. But a piano, of course, is solely and only a percussion instrument. This is according to modern classification, see? They classify it as a percussion instrument.
Well, it’s a pretty trick percussion instrument and you have to be very virtuosity on it, but an organ will also—you can throw a key on an organ and make it sound like a piano. You can also make it sound like a clavichord. You can make it sound like almost anything. And I’ve been hobnobbing recently with pro organists. Real pros, you know? Theater organists, circus organists, guys like this, you know? And I actually—my hair’s been standing on end. These boys rank in their field just as high as the concert pianist ranks in his field—in fact a bit higher. Because you’ve got to grow—you’ve got to be like Vishnu, before you can play an organ, you know? Eight arms. And their terminology would absolutely bowl you over.
There’s two fields of terminology and when you get to be a real pro in the field of the organ, where you’re an organ designer as well as performer, you know, real upscale, you actually shift gears on terminology and the organ terminology with which you’re familiar is the organ terminology which is referred to by the musician, the normal musician. But when you go up scale, you go into a new field of terminology. So there’s two fields of terminology in the field of the organ.
And the real pro and the real snob in that particular field does a volte-vis—complete volte-vis when he leaves the field of mere music into the field of playing an organ and designing them. Second we get into that field, we’re in another pasture. It doesn’t even look or smell the same thing. And that is so rarefied that when I first heard those boys talking, and so forth, I wotnotted anything they were saying, you know? It was just like listening to the Hottentots jabbering about the next feast of roebuck—I didn’t have a clue.
Well, I finally got hep to it, and did a bit of organ work and designing and that sort of thing and hobnobbing with these birds and I still don’t have but a small edge on their terminology and they’re always startling me. But I’ve gotten to a point now where I know what they’re talking about, you know?
Well, for instance, the organist at Saint Paul’s Cathedral who probably would be—probably the top—top—top amongst mere organists, you see, in England, refers to the „pedal—board,“ see, those are that board that you walk on, you know? Well, he calls that a „pedal—board.“ When you get into the real snobs that is no longer a pedal—board—that’s „firewood.“
Now, the top organist at Saint Paul’s undoubtedly refers to „notes“ and „pipes“ and „footages“ and the real snob calls them „noises.“ They’re „noises,“ and he says this with a complete—complete straight face. So, the first time I heard this I thought they were gagging, you see? And every time I’ve heard one of these things I’ve made the repeated mistake—which I am now beginning to recover from doing—of laughing like mad, you see, thus displaying my great ignorance of the whole subject. I’ve gotten so I can chatter back and forth on it now.
What the hell was it that I heard the other evening? I think it was a „Blackpool snarl.“ „This organ was capable of a—was capable of a good, solid ‘Blackpool snarl.“’ I think I’ve probably got the word „snarl“ wrong, but it was—it was capable of making a „terrible, clashing dissonance which would reverberate,“ see, and that was the way it was described, see? You catch up with it after a while.
I’m getting there though. I’m getting there, I’m getting there. I’m getting up to a point where I’ve now developed something that I don’t think they’ve thought of yet with regard to firewood. And I can play a piece on firewood that they haven’t thought could be played on firewood, so I’m practicing this very hard and the next time I’m going to get even—I’m going to throw them.
But the point is, as you enter into the inner sanctum of any profession, you quite normally leave the purely snob language and get into a „slanguage.“ Lord knows what a medical doctor calls tonsils while he is dining with other medical doctors, see? But he probably calls them something else. His terminology shifts, then, from the very formal with enormous, forced formality that almost has worship mixed up with it, you see, and shifts, then, as his familiarity increases with his subject into something that sounds more like slang.
And we have not bothered, then, to go through the country of pomposity to reach the world of slang; we’ve just short—circuited the whole thing. This is true what I tell you about nomenclature; as nomenclature really gets up amongst the knowing, it is never serious. It is a very unserious subject. The things which great electronic engineers that can whip you out a rocket for the moon—wiring circuit or connection—probably what they call it is not what is taught in college, you see? They’ve got this stuff and it’s a rattledybang, it’s almost jive talking moved upstairs into the profession, you know? It’s pretty wild.
Well, we’ve taken a straight road. Since none existed, we haven’t really developed a secondary language. We’re in our secondary language. So that is another way that the thing has been narrowed down. We could develop a highly pompous, formal nomenclature; a vocabulary, perhaps, of two or three thousand words, and expect you all to learn it verbatim and be able to discuss it with great solemnity—only to have you eventually evolve a much less lengthy vocabulary which is in the field of slang. We’ve taken the step at one jump. So, our language does not sound dignified, see? Our nomenclature is not pompous since there was no reason to enter this other extraneous step into it.
Now, anybody then who is talking to you about not using proper psychoanalytic nomenclature probably himself is the veriest tyro in the field of psychoanalysis, see? He—he’s just a—well, if he graduated well and kept his nose clean he’d become a neophyte, you know, or he wouldn’t be expressing this reverence for nomenclature, because it’s symptomatic of the stage where you are simply memorizing without knowing. After a boy gets to know something, and so forth, he normally shortens his nomenclature quite markedly and rapidly.
And of course, what an organist has to know who is up in the field of engineering and design, and so forth—this circus organist, Kit Francis, for instance, hasn’t any „stop.“ Well, actually the stops on his organ do not agree, I’m sure, with what it says on the stops and he’s pulled out most of the stops—he’s thrown them away. When he had the organ rebuilt, he threw them away. What he did was just get the noise combinations from the generators and he put a stop on each variable noise combination of the generators, knowing how they hooked up and he knows that if he throws bing—bing—and why, he’s got then these two noises come out of the Generator. They will combine and they’ll sound in a certain way. He’s setting it up by electronic sound; electronic combinations of sound. So he’s even done away with all of the izzards and piccolos and diapasons and nothing says anything, you know?
There it is. It’s just ...
As a matter of fact, the other day I saw him throw a 64—foot pipe together out of an upper scale. There weren’t any even 32—foot pipes in the thing, but he just got a couple of things that would then sound like they built down and he threw those in. And the next thing you know, why, he had Saint Paul’s Cathedral going at a very mad rate, but that organ doesn’t happen to have any such stops. So, he doesn’t even refer to noises by their traditional names anymore, see?
In other words, when a guy gets to know his business he generally throws away—when he really knows his business—he throws away the nomenclature he doesn’t need. He gives it the yo heave and he quite commonly, amongst his brethren who are in the know and part of a lodge, develops a short—circuited slang—type nomenclature to describe what he is.
Well, knowing some of these things, and so forth, I’ve tried very hard to reduce the nomenclature of Scientology as far as possible and keep it only in the realm of slang where it would have evolved to anyhow. And that would save you a lot of trouble.
But if you went back over the years and found the name of everything that had been named, you would probably arrive with a much larger vocabulary than 472. But a lot of those things have been given the yo heave. But a lot of old—time auditors would still know what they were. You talk about a DEDEX—most any Johnny—come—lately would look at you with his eyes „What’s that?“ you know? Well, actually it was a DEDEX, that’s what it was.
Now, the dependence of knowledge upon nomenclature is extraordinary, and as a matter of fact, almost never appreciated by teachers or students. They are trying to talk and use a language they don’t know. And this can get so bad that they think the subject is incomprehensible or that they are incapable of understanding it, when as a matter of fact this is not what is wrong at all. It’s just that they haven’t grasped the meaning of some of these Symbols that are being used to designate. And they haven’t got an instantaneous grasp of these meanings. They’ve got a „fumble grasp“ of them. That is, if they thought for a while they might possibly be able to remember what an engram is, see? Now that’s the grasp of it.
So they read a sentence and it says, „Of course, there may be an engram in the middle of the GPM.“ That’s not necessarily true, but it’s certainly true of implant GPM. And they have to think, „There might be an engram—an engram—an engram ... I don’t quite—know quite what that means, so I’ll just learn this much of it. There might be something in the middle of a GPM.“ And they go on into the next paragraph and this has made an impression on them, that there’s something they don’t know about a GPM and that’s what carries on into the next paragraph.
And as they go on studying past these points of uncomprehended nomenclature, they begin to stack up an opinion that they „Don’t know about it.“ And it isn’t „it“ that they don’t know about.
To get a persistent thing, you see, you’d have to have a lie, and the lie is that it isn’t the subject they are having trouble with, it is simply the nomenclature they are having trouble with. They don’t know about the nomenclature so they, however, wind up with an opinion that they don’t know the subject or that there is something very incomprehensible about this subject. No, it isn’t the subject at all, they just don’t know their nomenclature.
Now, it may start back someplace in HCA, see, or HPA class and one day, why, somebody jumped up and he said, „Well, that’s a lock,“ and the individual, you know, he said, „Well, you see, that’s not important, because it’s just a lock, you see?“
And the person says, „Just a lock—a—lock—lock—lock—what’s a lock?“ And then he was interrupted before he could think the thought through and remember what a lock was. So this, in actual fact, stays there as a little basic incomprehension of nomenclature and that’ll hang up on the track and he will develop an automatic comm lag around this word „lock.“
He’ll get up to a point where he’s reading a sentence here at Saint Hill and it says, „You want to check this out, because it might be just a lock.“ And again that hunted feeling comes over him, you see, and now he thinks he doesn’t know much about checkouts because he will misassign, the other being out of sight. So, his opinion now is that he doesn’t know much about checkouts. No, he didn’t know a word in a sentence discussing checkouts.
You see how important nomenclature is? But a comprehension of the nomenclature which is used is primary to the study of anything.
Now, for instance, I’m studying a parallel course to get insights into study of Scientology. And a very, very smart thing—an extremely smart thing to do—is to take a page of material and look over it for words you don’t know—words that don’t instantly react to you.
Circle each one of those words or make a list of each one of those words and look up and study their definitions or ask people and get definitions for them. Find out exactly what those words mean. Don’t tackle the subject of the page. Just tackle the nomenclature of the page. Get that nomenclature slick as a whistle, tackle the subject, you’ll find out the subject was very easy. All the thing was trying to tell you is that if you went ahead and ran a service facsimile which didn’t give TA action on exploration, why, the pc would get loused up because you were running without TA action. And this is all this whole thing is devoted to.
But one runs across this thing: „Service facsimile—ohhh! What’s that?“ Another word: „Ohhh! What’s that?“ you see, and „What’s that?“ and „What’s that?“ Well, if you want to put yourself in a total mystery, go ahead and study pages you don’t know the words on. Then you can put yourself into a gorgeous mystery.
Now, this language is so common to your Instructors, it’s so common to people around here and their „snob action“—which we have—don’t doubt about that, see, and will continue to have, because it is an index of status and competence, will cause them to explain these things to a student with a bit of a sneer.
And they’re liable to cure you of asking, „What is a service facsimile?“ because you will hear in the answer that comes back to you at least the tone for, „Well, you idiot! Why don’t you look it up in your bulletin, you know? Fancy anybody not knowing that!“ see? This is sort of reflected in the atmosphere you get back when you ask these things. And that, again, makes you feel stupid for not knowing. Well, actually nothing can be done to minimize this latter.
Why, I could say, „Always answer a student’s questions politely,“ and you’d probably only build up a covert hostility. They’d answer the questions politely and flunk all tests for 24 hours, you see. Something wild is liable to go awry when you start to put the brakes on some natural action.
So, the only point I’m making here is: Don’t let yourself be put off because somebody thinks you’re stupid because you don’t know it. You’re not stupid because you don’t know it, you’re simply uninformed. Well, if you’re uninformed, don’t get so status happy of thinking that you must appear bright in order to be thought well of, when it has nothing to do with it. You’re here to learn and anybody is studying anything, is studying it, I suppose, to learn it, not to acquire—he may acquire status through having learned it, but he doesn’t acquire status by pretending he knows it when he doesn’t. As a matter of fact he acquires himself quite a headache.
So, the point is, in spite of any rebuff that you get, or of difficulty digging into some book to find out what it means, you actually put yourself in ä soup at once, the moment that you leave one word in a sentence behind you, you do not know the meaning of One unknown piece of nomenclature left behind you can absolutely ruin your comprehension of the whole thing you’re studying. Now, if you want to speed up your grasp of the situation, apparently do it the slow way. This obviously is a slow way to do it, isn’t it? But it’s not the slow way to do it because it snowballs.
You’ll get faster and faster and faster, whereas if you don’t do it this way you will get slower and slower and slower. So, never leave a word behind you in a study that you don’t know the meaning of And when you hear me use a word in a lecture—and I try to minimize nomenclature, actuary, in lectures—when you hear me use a word in a lecture that you don’t know the meaning of, for God’s sakes, write it down in your notes and right after the lecture find out what it is. „What is that word?“ see? It’s something that has passed you by.
Well, it’s that which you don’t understand, not the mind, not Scientology, not the theories and practice of Scientology. The stumbling block, first and foremost, is simply nomenclature.
Now, nomenclature will be there regardless of any reform undertaken, because, in the first place, we are examining things which are not hitherto known. So they have to have a name. Now somebody uninformed may try to tell you that some of these things were known but that’s merely his misinformation talking. He doesn’t know what you were talking about so he thinks it was previously known. He will try, for instance, to compare an „id“ and a „thetan,“ see? And he says, „Well, Freud described all that. He said, ‘id,’ and an id was something, and...“ Well, probably a person saying this to you really doesn’t know what Freud said was an „id,“ see? His nomenclature failure is prior to his misunderstanding where you are, see?
So, if you want to wind yourself up in a ball and become very confused and get a lot of slow passes and go slower and slower and slower and slower, just start leaving words behind you you don’t know what they are. You get halfway down the page, all of a sudden there’s a word you’ve never seen before. Just say, „Well, I’ll catch that later,“ and go on. Why don’t you just say, „Well, I’ll cut my throat right now and add several weeks onto my course progress?“ Because that’s just what that’ll do. You cannot help but wind up at the end of that page.
Now, the next thing is the subject matter itself, Arrangement and understanding of Now, this is your second one. Now, it’s all right to name something and get a definition for something, but what is being named? And if you were very, very clever, you would worry it and worry it and snarl at it and walk around the circles of any piece of subject matter; now we’re talking about the—a thing, see? We’re talking about—we’re not talking about the name of the thing, we’re talking about the thing. You’d walk around any one of those pieces of subject matter until you had a good comprehension of what that was all about. „What the devil are we talking about?“ see?
I’ll give you an idea: You say, „Well, a person has a bad opinion of another person because they have an overt against that person.“ All right, there is a thing, you see? That is the—a mechanism that surrounds the overt—motivator sequence. That’s one of the phenomena. Joe is mad at Bill and if you search a little bit, you’ll find out he’s mad at Bill because he’s done something to Bill. Joe has done something to Bill. Now this is contrary to the explanation everybody makes in life, so it is very easily read this way, see? Because life is that way you can get this thing—scoong!—wrong way to, in your skull, see?
So „‘Joe is mad at Bill, because Bill has done something to Joe.’ Yes, I understand that.“ Well, you missed the whole point. Thereafter, if you’ve done that, you will really never then understand how to pull an overt or why you must do so. See, that has just gone up in smoke, see? Very important mechanism! „Joe is mad at Bill because Joe has done something to Bill.“ All right, that is the thing.
Now, several things can get in the road of the acceptance of this thing and first and foremost is, it isn’t usual or ordinarily thought of this way and that gets in your road by misinterpretation. You think you’ve read something you haven’t read, see? Because it’s so usual for it to be the other way you think you’ve read it the other way. Or it is so widely accepted the other way that it is simply unbelievable.
So there’s the next thing that gets in your road, is the unbelievability of it. You say, „Well, that couldn’t possibly be true.“ Now, for heaven’s sakes, make sure when you come to the unbelievability of something that you know what you’re unbelieving. Now, that’s important—that’s important. Let’s know what we’re unbelieving.
Now, to know what we’re unbelieving we have to take the first step again—the nomenclature, you see? Did I get the word right? Now, the thing, the mechanism—phenomenon here, have I got that right? And you’ll find in about ninety percent of the cases that a reexamination at this „unbelieve“ step—you are unbelieving the wrong thing. You weren’t unbelieving what was there. You were unbelieving something else, see?
So, when you run into a total „gawp,“ see—YOU know, you say, „That couldn’t be, you know? Wha—wha? I—that—that couldn’t be. I—no, that couldn’t be!“ see? And instead of going out and jumping in the lake or something like this or taking cyanide, the thing to do is to check over nomenclature and the description of the thing itself Now, if you check those two over, you’ll find out you probably had something in crosswise and that this „unbelievable“ was not unbelievable at all but is quite—quite easily seen. That’s about ninety percent of the time.
The other ten percent of the time you just can’t see how that works that way. Go back and check your nomenclature, check what the thing was that you’re not believing, and so forth. Get down to this other thing, you still can’t see how it’s that way—set yourself up some examples of how it’s not that way and how it is that way.
Now, this is the—really the first place where you really have to apply it to you and life, where it becomes an abs—a complete must. You must apply it to you, you must apply it to life. „Does this thing exist in life or doesn’t it? Has it existed in my life or has it existed in anybody else’s life that I know of? Is there any incident here that demonstrates this phenomena?“
And you’ll start looking at it and you’ll find out that the reason it wouldn’t go that way is normally a button got in its road or something like that. You know, you didn’t dare believe that it was this way; something like that—just an examination of it, trying to, „How does it apply to me? How does it apply to life? Has it ever applied to life? Did anybody ever see this thing“ you see, and „Do I know of any incident or anything of the sort which would exemplify this thing“ Why, the other ten percent that I’ve been talking about here, that will tend to evaporate too and you’ll say, „Ah, yes, now we got it.“
Now, this procedure followed actually gives you a terribly firm grip on what you know. And careful study is not necessarily either thorough or brilliant or wise or anything else. It’s merely careful. And if you work right along at it on the subject of being careful with it and what you’re careful about is—as you’re going down the page pocketa—pocketa—pocketa, you all of a sudden see this word „boojum“ see? „What the hell is that?“
Now, I’ll show you how you can be stupid: that’s to go on. Read the next word to it in the hopes that somehow or other the explanation will all drop out into your lap. Gloss over that word, you’ve done yourself in. „What’s this word ‘boojum’?“ Boy, you better find out right now. You might glance at the rest of the sentence: „Does there—a parenthetical description what ‘boojum’ is in it as you sometimes—occur? Or a—there’s nothing there. It’s evidently a word I’m supposed to know. It’s not a new word, because it’s not explained in this paragraph, so it’s a word I know . . .“
Boy, you go any further than that, you’ve just hung yourself up in a nice little brass mystery and there you’ll be: going around with a lamp looking into the dark corners and wondering what you’re being mystified about. And then you’ll think you’re mystified about the subject, you’re mystified about anything—it’s tracing back to this time you read this paragraph and you didn’t understand a word in it so, of course, then it didn’t communicate.
By not understanding the word you inhibit any communication. You’ve inhibited communication between what you’re studying and yourself You’ve also inhibited your communication between yourself and other auditors and you also, oddly enough, have inhibited your communication with yourself and a pc, because this is something in a pc that you will not thereafter recognize because you don’t know what it is.
Now, following down some sort of a—of a routine like this in study, you’ll find out that you can study. It’s all right for somebody to come around and say, „Well, you can’t study and you just don’t apply yourself,“ and that sort of thing and they’re—they’ve done this to people in school—they’ve done it to me; they used to do it to me in school; they used to say, „You don’t know how to study.“
And I used to say, „Gee, that’s very interesting, you—I don’t know how to study,“ and I accepted this—that I didn’t know how to study. And I don’t know that I made much of a ruckus about it, but I did manage to finally find out that this was not accompanied by any method of study.
In other words, you were saying—somebody was saying to you, „You don’t know how to hang up a skyhook, and therefore you’re very stupid indeed, because you don’t know how to hang up a skyhook.“ And it’s sort of like catching snipes, same kind of a gag, see? You’re supposed to stand out in the woods for hours holding a sack while they drive them in on you. Actually they’re home having some coffee, and you’re standing in the damp woods for hours, you see? It’s just that crude a gag.
They say, „You don’t know how to study.“ Well, what pretentious people! They don’t know how to study either, see? There is no—there’s no subject called „study.“ If there was a subject called „study,“ they’d start teaching it to you in kindergarten. They would certainly start teaching it to you before you were into the—your high schools and that sort of thing. They’d say, „This is how to study.“
I’ve run across various systems, but they’re not in the formal textbooks. I’ve seen them in—remember the Pete Smith specialties from way back when that used to show on the screen, and so forth, gag, one—reel comedies and so forth? Well, I’ve seen methods of remembering things, and methods of knowing things, and so forth, come up in that form. But I’ve never seen it on a textbook basis.
I myself developed a method—a (quote) „a method of study“ in defense and I remember vividly applying this in the field of history; it’s just not going onto the next paragraph unless I could shut my eyes and rattle off the last paragraph, see? It didn’t increase my knowledge of history. I actually get along better just by reading a history textbook. At the end of the line when I finish off the history textbook and somebody asks me for dates, I look in the book. I find that is the best method by which to do this.
The only other method of study that I ever developed for myself in school might be of some interest and that was just to get every book on the subject I could get: hold of and read all of them and not try to concentrate on any of them, you see?
I think one of the most stellar grades I ever got and bragged about all over the place, and so forth, and called upon to give lectures on every hand, made me feel a little guilty. I was taking American history and I simply got hold of every textbook I could find on the subject of American history and read them all, including Woodrow Wilson’s five—volume history of the United States, you see? That’s one of those things that you put on a bookshelf to hold it down in case of an earthquake.
And I read all these textbooks, but I don’t think I ever told the professor that because I was allergic to its very, very bad prose, that I had never read that class’s textbook. I’d never read the class’s textbook. I’d read all the other textbooks I could lay my hands on, but I couldn’t stand its prose. Its prose was horrible, and I—it was sort of socialistically weirdly put together and it was pedantic in the extreme.
It wasn’t that it was full of difficult words. As a matter of fact the fellow was sort of underplaying—the places where he should have used a good, big, pompous word, you know, why, he’d put some offbeat word, and so forth. He didn’t know how to write, see, and so I didn’t read the school’s textbook, but I read all the other textbooks and I got—oh, I don’t know—A pluses and gave lectures on history for them and got gold stars and silver cups and all this sort of thing as being a terrific student. Well, actually it was just to the degree that I just covered everything in sight. And I find out that’s fairly reliable as a method—fairly reliable when there isn’t any training available, you know, like an American school.
When there’s absolutely no training available, why, what you want to do is just get ahold of every book on the subject in sight and then just read them all from cover to cover, see, making very sure—I would now and do and always did—that you didn’t cross over words you didn’t know. Get yourself a great big dictionary and get yourself some kind of an anthology or something that went along with it and look up a word you didn’t know and find out what that was related to and then get that word real good and then go sailing on your way.
It wouldn’t matter if you read a book in five hours, you see. It wouldn’t matter how fast you read the book or didn’t read the book. That’s in absence of formal knowable training on any subject. That’s a very good method—excellent method as a matter of fact because you wind up at the end of the thing—you’ve seen this word so often, you’ve looked it up so often, you eventually know what it is, you know?
You say, „There again is the ‘Rembrandt Profile.’ Now, what the hell does it mean, a ‘Rembrandt Profile? ‘Well, a ‘Rembrandt Profile’ is actually—well, I guess it must have been something painted by Rembrandt, but they must mean something here. I’ll turn back over here—I saw a mention of it over here. Here’s a description of the thing: Yeah, well, so on and so on and so on and so ... Ohh, oh I get it! It’s the main light is not showing on the front of the face. Oh, good. Yeah, it’s just the fill shows on the thing. Ahh, that’s good, yeah. I got that now. All right.“
Sail along the line, and so forth, and finally, why, forgot all about that, you see, but chapters later we run into a „Rembrandt Profile,“ see? „A what? Oh, something about a fill. Yes. Well, I know where I can find it. I’ll go back—ah, yes, yes. Main light back of the person, fill in the front of the person. Yeah. Main—face mainly in shadow. Yeah, I got it. Nothing to it.“ All right, running down the line chapters later, in another textbook on the subject. „ ‘When shooting a Rembrandt Profile so on, so on, so on, so on . . .’Oh, that’s how you do! You add a spotlight to it also. Okay.“ You see, the word no longer operated as an impasse to your study.
Looking up words and meanings and so forth, is sort of the erosive course of the river and it eventually grinds away on the banks until it has a good, strong flowing stream, you see?
Actually, I don’t think there are bright students and dull students. I don’t think this at all. I don’t think so, because I’ve never seen any real coordination between knowledge of the subject and the brightness and dullness of a student. But there is a careful student and a careless student.
Now, a student can be very fast and still be very careful. It hasn’t even too much to do with speed. But he knows when he’s whipped. That’s about the only thing he knows. He’s reading down this paragraph and all of a sudden he wakes up to the fact he hasn’t the foggiest clue what the devil he’s talking about—what he’s reading about so he goes back and finds out where he got tangled up. Ah, well, here was a word and here was a phenomenon he didn’t know anything about.
Now, if he’s a careful student he puts it all away until he finds out what that word and what that phenomena is and exactly what that is and he gets that straight. He may cruise around in the thing just a little bit further to find out if it’s defined in that particular publication, see? But he’s looking for the definition—he’s not any longer doing it.
Now, there’s a careful student. And his brightness on the subject is dependent upon the degree he does this. It isn’t dependent on any native talent or anything else. It isn’t even dependent on his buttons.
And in Scientology, because of the tremendous amount of breadth of study we are doing and because we are studying what we study with, why then, it’s necessary to have some command of the subject of study. It becomes absolutely imperative in our field to know something about how to study and it’s no longer walking up to some poor luckless student and saying, „Well, the trouble with you is, you don’t know how to study,“ then walking off, you see? Or saying about some other student, „Well, he’s just stupid. That’s all, you see? That explains it all, see?“ Frankly, it doesn’t explain a doggone thing.
We’ve talked—we hear about the lightning—quick student. We hear about the very, very fast, fast, fast student and we hear about the very, very, very, very slow student. And we hear about the grind and we hear about the brilliant student and honest, those classifications have no more validity than the field of psychiatry. Why? Because they have never produced uniform fast study. They’re apparently merely excuses and justifications of something. They’re an effort to classify on something nobody’s cracked. So, why should we talk about dull students and slow students and brilliant students, and so forth?
There are certain phenomena in study which are worth commenting upon and one of those is the oddball who can memorize almost at a glance and who can go back and spit out the memorized words. I’ve known Chinese students that got anybody whipped I ever—in the Anglo—Saxon world or in the Western world—anything whipped on this line. I know Chinese students who could go ahead and give you pages of mathematical formulas and things of this character and descriptions of it, and so forth. About the wildest thing you ever listened to and they’d come to school the next morning with their lessons and ka—wow! You ask them, „All right, now let’s go into the slope formula.“
„Well, the slope formula is so—and—so and so—and—so and so—and—so kow—kow, pow—pow, kow—wow.“ It’s all there, see?
You say, „Wow!“ Don’t say instantly, „Well, then this is the very man we need to build the dam,“ because building dams has very little to do with study of that particular kind or character. We don’t even know if he could solve the problems on the page, but he sure could remember them. Now, that’s a test mainly of memory.
Now, if you want to be sure of this person, in examining this person you’ll find immediately what’s going wrong here. Immediately you’ll find what’s going wrong. There’s a way of examining this person that would only be fair to the instructor and to the student alike.
Take any oddball word that occurred in the first paragraph you have just got back so glibbishly and ask for a definition of that word (the definition is not given on the subject matter which the person is doing). And if you want to see a hunted, horrified look come into anybody’s face, it’s the perfect memory repeat, see? And you’ve thrown an ax into it because you’ve asked for something which isn’t memory.
You’ve asked for the definition of a certain word. And if this person—now look at this—if this person could give you this whole paragraph and tell you all about it but couldn’t define a word in it, that person must be in total mystery about that.
So the missing ingredient is understanding. And then naturally the missing ingredient, application, will show up soon afterwards. Do you see how that would work.?
In other words, this very, very fast study falls down exactly as the slow study would fall down. In other words, everybody eaves in on this same point uniformly. Now, if somebody comes up and he takes this same thing and he stumbles all over the place and he tries to get it out and he spits it out, and so forth, the examiner could ask him too, the same word. „What’s the definition of that word?“
And he’d say, „Well, I don’t know.“ Puts him in the same boat as the fast study, doesn’t it?
So, the direction and end purpose of study is understanding and, of course, you—with an unknown word in the middle of it, and an unknown phenomenon in the middle of it—you’re not going to get understanding at all. You’re going to get disbelief, noncomprehension. You’re going to get mystery. You’re going to get, of course, also nonapplication.
Now, if we examine study a little bit further, the main complaint about study is that it does not immediately and at once result in good, clean, clear application. This is one of the primary scolds about modern education—primary criticisms—is if you educate an engineer—or it was—you educate an engineer and you don’t dare send him out to build a bridge, see? Well, that’s in the field of application or practice of application. But if this man can’t go out and build a bridge after he’s been taught to build a bridge, the familiarity ingredient, of course, is missing.
But even so, if somebody had borne down on him like mad for the definition of every word that he was stumbling across in the direction of bridge building, he should be able to go out and unroll his sextant and transit and get to work. He should; he should. He’s now got the horrible task of acquiring his familiarity, but he wouldn’t be doing it across the barrier of a misunderstanding of his terminology and a misunderstanding of his tools and he theoretically could do it.
I found myself doing it the other day. I just had a textbook command of a certain problem on this line—parallel line—I’m studying. I just had a textbook command of the thing; nothing but and I saw it, saw it happened and applied the textbook and it resolved, bang! And I had about something on the order of maybe two or three seconds to do the whole thing. Because something was happening and I had to straighten it out fast, see? Just textbook. It worked—it worked perfectly.
So therefore, you could and should be able to take a purely textbook thing—if it was a valid textbook and a valid subject—and apply it directly without familiarity. Now, think of what a whiz you would be, however, if you also had the familiarity at the same time. And that’s why we study auditing while auditing, see?
But if this other ingredient of careful study is missing, the nomenclature is missing, you can’t make the boat. It just won’t make the boat.
I studied—been studying this parallel subject very hard because it is a bearcat on the subject of terminology too. It’s terminology that you’d think anybody that had been around photography very long would be very familiar with. He couldn’t help but be familiar with it—oh, no, no, no, no. Not when you’re studying text after text after text after text after text!
Well, if you were taking some little course that didn’t have much to do with the price of fish, that didn’t intend to make a pro out of you along any line and „This is, see, this is how you develop pictures“—the Eastman book for the home beginner, you know? I’ve read those by the ton. No, that hasn’t got anything to do with it. It says, „Hammer, pound, hit ‘em with the grape, you know—no holds barred. Now we charge with the bayonets. You take the metabisulphite and pour it into the yattapin,“ and you say, „You take the what?“ you know.
And then you’re busy in the very next lesson studying a completely disrelated field of the same subject, „Make sure that you adjust the headscreen.“
„The what? Where the hell did this come from? I’ve never met it before around here anyplace. A headscreen, a headscreen. Now, what is a headscreen?“ Scatter, scatter, flutter, flutter, look in the dictionary, and so forth. „What do you know? It isn’t in the dictionary. It’s so common they don’t have to define it. But I don’t know it. No worry now about how stupid this makes me, you see? Flutter, flutter, bing—bang. Finally figure it out by context and by illustration. There was a picture of all of the photographic material needed. A headscreen? Obviously a headscreen was what you hold back a corner of the main light force so as to get a prominent ear to be less prominent. Obvious, isn’t it? Headscreen! Who would have dreamed it, man?“ A nonsensical but very usual piece of equipment.
The guy writing the textbook, being so familiar with his subject, would make the same statement that you would make, you see? You say, „Well, you set your E—Meter down on the table first, of course.“ You have said it almost sarcastically, you see? „Well, you set your E—Meter down on the table, of course, before you start auditing.“ If you want to be really sarcastic, you’d make such a remark, you see?
This guy, this bloke, this expert on portraits to end all experts on portraits says, „Well, of course, you adjust the headscreen to hold back that. That’s the way you subdue the light.“ He just says this parenthetically, you see? „This is how you make less prominent, undesirable features on a subject in portraiture. You hold back the light on them.“
„What do you hold back the light with?“
Get the same answer out of the textbook. „Oh, don’t be an ass.“
„Yeah, but what do you hold back the light with, you know?“
„You hold it back with a headscreen, of course, you idiot!“
„What’s a headscreen? What is a headscreen? What is this thing?“
„Put it over the piece. Put it over the lens of the camera so it doesn’t show the fellow’s head?“
So, this has been—it’s been very amusing, because I can look at a subject, you see, from an oblique—look at the same study problems that you run into. And I’ve been analyzing these problems and putting them together. What I’ve been talking to you about and what I’ve talked to you about in recent things has been the views I’ve had on this as worked out and as I know they apply in our own field. And I think you’ve been making some progress as a result.
But there are just these points about study and you expected there would be probably a lot more complex points about study, but there are no more complex points about study than I have just given you.
Now, of course, if you didn’t read or write English there would be a further study on nomenclature. But remember it would just be a further study on nomenclature. So, it even falls into that particular field. Now, the person who can’t talk at all, or let us say, an animal trying to arrive at this particular line—he’s totally out of communication, he hasn’t got the vocal chords, he can’t be educated in the first place. You say, „Well, that’s a totally lost field.“ Well, I’m—I’m not completely willing to lose that field utterly because I’ve already raised animals in tone to a remarkable degree and I’ve already met dogs that could talk, see?
Yeah, I met a dog one time—he used to say „Hungry“ every time he wanted chow. He managed it somehow. He used some Hollywood scheme of how you breathe from the diaphragm, you know? But he could say it clear as could be—that he was hungry. Startled people almost to death because they’d say, „Well, that’s funny. The dog probably makes a grunt, you know? And this mistress that’s taught him and so forth is just being too too for words.“ And then they’d hear this dog and this dog would say „Hungry“ and they’d go „Ahhhh!“ And I was talking to an elephant the other day that wanted his picture taken, as I told you and I’ve run into animals that know their cues much better than their trainers and have to pull the trainer through the act somehow and make him look good.
So I don’t know what the barriers to communication are. I have a greater insight into the fifth dynamic lately than I have had before and I have found that they’re—you can go a lot deeper into the fifth dynamic. In fact, I’ve pretty well got an idea of what GPMs, and so forth, certain animals and insects and so forth get stuck in. And just about how they go into that particular zone or area and how they go out the bottom. I’ve had a little—quite a little bit more insight into this.
But anyway, that being as it may, the point is that the communication of the nomenclature of the language—of the ability to talk or communicate—would be the first barrier, don’t you see? And so it remains into—the fellow who does know English, who can read, who sits there and so forth—it’s still his first barrier. But, of course, he is so high on this level of communication he is contemptuous of these little inabilities to communicate and so neglects them. And neglecting them, then of course, he comes an awful cropper when he gets into the field of study. And that is about the first place where he really falls down.
There are many ways you could make a person fail in studying, but mostly it would be in denying them an insight into the necessity of understanding the communication symbols used. That would be a big failure in delivering the field of study.
We never published a dictionary as such. There are several manuscripts of dictionaries around but they unfortunately all depend on my re—editing from beginning to end and they just go fantastic quantities of words and it is just those extra twelve hours on top of the forty—eight in the twenty—four—to get such a job completed. It’s a very rough—rough beef And I particularly would not want to attempt the job until I felt it was pretty wrapped up, so it’s just about now it would be wrapped up. But I did have definitions of the various words at Level VI, and so forth, codified which I’m sure has been issued and—so that you could look those things up and know what the score was on that.
But despite the lack of a glossy dictionary, you nevertheless can look up these words and they are known and people all over the place know what they are here, and there really isn’t much excuse going to one. So it takes you a half an hour to learn what this word is. Boy, that’s a half an hour that won’t get multiplied and added on to the end of your course, when you’re busy floundering around wondering why you just can’t seem to get to first base on that particular quarter.
Well, I hope what I’ve told you today will be of some use to you.
Thank you very much.