THE TONE SCALE AND HUMAN EVALUATION

A lecture given on 21 May 1951

An Expansion of the plane Scale

In Science of Survival a great deal of stress is laid on the tone scale, and with this book we have the Chart of Human Evaluation. A well- known psychometrist down on the coast called this an important milestone in the field of psychometry, and said that it compared in psychology to Mendeleev’s Periodic Table of the Elements, which in chemistry is a standard chart of reaction.

There is a possibility that with this Chart of Human Evaluation we now have somewhat the equivalent, in the humanities, of that periodic table. That would be important if it were true; I hope it continues to bear out.

I have gotten in trouble twice with this chart. Each time I didn’t believe it myself and I said, "Although this chart by derivation and past experience with preclears indicates that the person with whom I am dealing here would stab a kitten in the back, I don’t believe the chart and I will treat this person as an honest human being." And all the bad publicity we have had and everything following through is because I did not evaluate the human beings involved according to my own chart! I taught myself a lesson! I am never going to jump this chart again or throw it aside.

But you as auditors are probably, each one of you, going to learn this lesson yourself. You will get some case which is wide open and this person says, "Why, I’m in beautiful shape. And my father and mother were always so sweet to me and everything is fine and I’ve been so constructive all my life and I have no domestic trouble at all."

And you will say, "Gee, this case has got sonic and visio— and can this case run on the time track! Well, I’ll have it cleared here in no time, and there is no reason to check it up on this chart."

So you will send the preclear charging back down the line to basic basic. ’ Thud! The preclear will scream a couple of times, moan faintly and never get up to present time again until you have treated this case the way you should have— as a psycho. This case was probably in a manic, and maybe that sonic and visio was a hundred percent dub- in.

Each one of you will probably do this at least once, in using the chart, before you are convinced.

When you take people at random you should not tell them where they lie on the chart, because people— the aberrated people who come to you— are pretty far down on this chart. I have marked normal at 2.54 on this chart and that was very charitable. Normal is below that, I am afraid, in this current society. It might have been higher than that and the general tone of this society might have been higher before World War II, but a lot has happened to us; it has been very enturbulating during these past ten years. People are not very high on this chart.

Now, you know the original chart well, undoubtedly. It starts at 0 and goes up to 4.0; that is the original chart. Tone 0 is death and 4.0 is ostensibly a MEST clear— clear of engrams. That is all clear means— no engrams. A 4.0 could be anybody, however.

At some time during your life any one of you has been 4.0. Did you ever wake up when you were a little kid, and the bright dew was on the leaves and the day was so bright and crystal clear, you had so many things to do and you were tremendously enthusiastic and you just knew nothing could possibly go wrong— you didn’t think about things going wrong— and the air was so fresh and your breakfast tasted good and you went outside and you loved everybody and so forth? That is tone 4.

This has happened to a lot of people a lot of times. There is hardly anybody who has not experienced at least a few periods of 4.0 in his lifetime.

We have a difference, here, of definitions. A person could have three quarters of his engrams intact and still be at 4.0. It is not an absolute state. You could take a person at 4.0 who had few, if any, engrams and you could still get him enturbulated so he would momentarily act at 1.5.5 It is certain that you could. You could throw him enough bad news and enough trouble to enturbulate his existing Theta and he would come down. The difference is that he would go back up. But the person with lots of engrams and secondaries, if pulled down that suddenly and that sharply would only go back up partway. That is the liability of the engram. Anybody, then, could be a 4.0, just like anybody could be dead.

Now, halfway up the scale we have 2.0, and at 2.0, of course, is the band of antagonism— the person is pretty antagonistic. We use this in Dianetics as an arbitrary split point. It is more or less an arbitrary point but it is borne out by empirical evidence. We can say that people above 2.0 tend more toward survival than toward non survival. Their solutions and actions will tend more toward survival than non survival. But people below 2.0 will tend more toward succumbing than toward survival, and the lower they get on the tone scale, the more they will tend toward succumbing. For instance, you get around a 0.5; 1 he is talking all the time about suicide, or he is talking about suicide so that you will get so unhappy that you will die— because of course a 0.5 would try to work 0.5 on all the dynamics including you.

If you get a person at 3. o, about all this person does is try to get you to survive! You put a 0.5 and a 3.0 together and the 3.0 is saying, "You want to go on living— of course you want to go on living. Life is beautiful, wonderful! Look, see?"

The 0.5 looks around and he doesn’t see, and he says to the 3.0, "How can you possibly go on living in this horrible, ugly, disgusting world? This is a horrible world, you know that!" There is a difference of viewpoint— or is it a difference of viewpoint? One is trying to die and the other is trying to live.

People below 2.0 will, in spite of themselves, attempt to commit suicide. Maybe they will only try to kill off their automobile by running into the curb regularly, but they will do some destruction toward it; they will push the automobile toward death.

If you loaned your car to a 1.03 for a very long period of time you would find out that this car did not run as well as when you loaned it. And if you loaned your car to a 3.0 you would find out that the car would normally come back to you in better condition than when you lent it.

These derivational differences, then, are not quite as arbitrary as they seem.

The tone scale derives from an observation of the emotion exhibited by a preclear while running a low- toned secondary or engram. The preclear starts in, if it’s a very low- toned engram— for instance, an apathy engram— at apathy and he works up the band. All preclears do this. Sometimes they skip a manifestation or two on the band but they go through this same procedure until they get up to 4.0 regarding this engram, at which time it erases.

Some auditors don’t realize this and they will drop the engram when the preclear is only at 2.5, which is boredom. The preclear is bored with it and he says, "Do I have to go through with this again?"

The auditor thinks, "Evidently that doesn’t worry him anymore; we’ll go on to something else," and he says "No." He hasn’t pulled this up to 4.0 at all! He has one and a half points to go before that engram is up to the top.

The first time the preclear runs it he is apathetic about it, let us say. Then he is very sad, and then he is afraid. The next time he runs it he is kind of covert about it; he would kind of like to get mad about this but he doesn’t dare. He would love to say, "I think my mother. . . !" but he doesn’t; he says, "Well, she probably had her worries. She was very good to me." And then he gets to 1.5, which is anger, and he snarls, "So, at last I’ve got her!" Then he gets to antagonism, so he says, "She was certainly ornery to me. Yeah, I’d sure like to give her a piece of my mind now." And the next time he goes up and he is bored with it.

If you dropped it at that he would be in bad shape, so you run it again and you find out that he doesn’t care much about it. As a matter of fact, he would like to think about something else. He is kind of happy about other things and he is glad he is getting rid of this thing. And right there it may do a bounce: it may come up to a false fours and then sink again. All of a sudden there is a little relief and he laughs about it for a moment and then it comes down and you have to pull it back on up again.

It will finally stabilize at 4.0, and he is perfectly happy about the whole thing at 4.0. He not only does not care about it but he is not bored with it. It is no longer of any importance to him and he is happy with life. That is 4.0.

So, observing this reaction on the part of preclears it was possible many years ago to postulate the existence of some sort of an emotional band and study this, and a great deal of material has turned up by studying it.

It is now possible to take affinity, communication and reality and treat them at the top as relatively pure manifestations and then see that they become more and more dissonant until they finally get so far apart, the three of them, that they null each other. That would be death.

The best way to visualize this would be as a pure piano note, and then a piano note with another one struck which is slightly off. That would be 2.5. It is not bad enough yet to do anything about but you don’t care for it. And then you strike one that is a little bit further off, and you don’t like this; it antagonizes you a little bit. Then you get one that is harshly counteracting, and that is anger. And then there is one that is a little bit too far off; the person isn’t angry but it just vibrates badly, and these affinity, communication and reality lines are having a hard time hanging together at that point.

A little bit lower than that, it is obvious that they are not going to hang together, and that is loss, or grief. Then they aren’t hanging together, and that is apathy; and then they don’t hang together at all, they null each other, and that is death.

You can figure this out, by the way; it figures out very neatly. You could have rederived the tone scale from affinity, communication and reality, and could have postulated that a preclear would go through these various manifestations as he ran an engram. That is the backbone and the origin of the tone scale.

Now, the tone scale had so much more data in it that it had to be expanded. It has expanded into human evaluation until it has gotten to where, if you find out where a person is on the tone scale, you can tell how much responsibility he is going to manifest or how much persistence he is going to manifest. You can tell how he is going to treat children; you can tell how he is going to talk to you, how he is going to listen to you. You can tell what he will do with a message that you give him to give somebody else. You can also tell rather automatically the physiological condition this person is going to be in.

If somebody came up to you and said, "This is a 1.1l that I am talking about, " you could do a forecast in your mind of the kind of person you were going to meet. You could figure out what this person would do under any given circumstances. If this person was estimated accurately at 1.1 on the tone scale, you would know immediately what you were going to meet in the way of personality and you would be able to predict more or less the reactions of this human being all the way along the line.

Now, that would be a handy thing to have around, wouldn’t it?

One of the things on the chart which is established very clearly is the ethic level of the human being. Get somebody at 1.1 who tells you "You know, I’m all in favor of having a Board of Standards. We have got to have standards because this has got to be an ethical operation. I am very ethical! I won’t stand for anything unethical!" and he may talk like that (and a lot of people at 1.1 do), but if you look up some of his manifestations and you see that these manifestations pin him at 1.1, watch out! I don’t care how often this person says he is ethical; this person will cut your throat.

On the other hand, if you have a fellow who is 3.5 on the tone scale and somebody comes up to you and says, "You know, this fellow murdered a man and robbed his dear old mother back in Keokuk, and we have positive and absolute evidence that he did this," you can ignore that; he didn’t. He just didn’t do it, that’s all!

An auditor watching this and studying his preclears over very much of a period of time would be able to forecast, then, what a human being would have done in given circumstances.

This is a chart of evaluation, and with it it is possible for you to pick out the kind of processing this person needs and the kind of processing which will work on this person by looking him up on the tone scale. You can evaluate him and find out where he lies on the tone scale, and once you have evaluated him, it will tell you the ratio of Theta to entheta on his case. But you don’t even have to know that the chart tells you the ratio. You look over in the processing section and it says, for instance, to lock- scan but not to run any engrams, or it says you can run secondaries if you are careful. In other words, it tells you the type of processing you ought to use on this case.

Once you evaluate him, then, you can’t make a mistake because we know that at various positions on the tone scale these types of processing can be done. For instance, you can chain- scan a preclear at 3.5; you can chain- scan engrams at 3.5. You can run a person through physical pain and it will erase just about as fast as you hit it. But that is at 3.5! This person is a Dianetic release already— most of the entheta is gone out of the bank. If you started to chain- scan somebody at 1.5 through engrams, though, you would crash the case. Now, let’s say you start to run an engram on a person who is a 2.5— that is fine. You can run an engram on a 2.5 and get away with it very nicely. But suppose you didn’t run this engram out and there was an action phrases in it that caused the track to group: the track might possibly group at that point temporarily until it got keyed out by Straightwire.

But if you ran somebody at 0.8 through an engram and you hit one of these action phrases— boy, that engram command phrases is law! And if it says "Everything comes in here at once," there goes the time track— crunch! He now has a grouped track. Furthermore, this person does not have enough Theta to invest into this thing to undo it, so you have just made the case tougher.

Therefore, this chart tells you what you can and can’t do with a case. And you will find out as you process that you can get a case that is well up the line and start working with the heavy, slugging kinds of processing and actually bring him back down the line again.

Now, I am going to tell you about the four types of cases— there are really only four types of cases (this is derivational as far as the tone scale is concerned)— and I am going to show you the basic theory of processing. You can read this tone scale and it will tell you what you can do and what you can’t do, and you can evaluate human beings very precisely. You will have to do this, really, in order to produce people who are good releases and so forth rapidly.

There are four types of cases. You can represent a time track as a straight vertical line, with conception down at the bottom, birth partway up and present time up at the top.

On the first type of case, all around that track, all the way up and down it, is entheta. It looks like a plume. That is case type number one. This case is very heavily occluded, or this case may be wide open— and that is important. This case might have sonic and visio and everything else, but the track is just shrouded in entheta. If the person has sonic and visio and has the track completely covered and his whole life span just bogged down in entheta, he is obviously psychotic. This is the worst kind of psychotic you can get. He doesn’t have any shut- offs by which he can protect himself or protect his existing Theta. You have to fish this person up by inches.

Or this could be the occluded case which is actually performing well up the tone scale but has a portion of the analyzer blocked off and is using just that remaining section of the analyzer. This person would have to have a pretty heavy endowment in order to function and be a 2.5 or a 3.0 as far as conduct is concerned. But his case would not be at that level. As soon as you start into that case you will see that it is heavily shrouded, and you have really got a job on your hands of pulling this case to pieces and doing something with it.

Very often even low- toned cases, if they have a heavy Theta endowment, can function way up the tone scale. These people are in danger because when something hits them, there is too much there to trap the enturbulation, and this results in their existing Theta endowment becoming enturbulated.

Now, on the second type of case, you can represent the time track as a vertical line again, with big circles on it showing clouds and areas of entheta— only, on this one, there are blanks in between those areas. This is representative of less enturbulence on the case. The time track is not completely covered; the entheta areas are broken up into chunks instead of being one whole mass of entheta.

The third type of case has cigar- shaped blobs of entheta lying across the track. There is very little entheta on this case; it is centralized and not terribly effective. The incidents are all lying there separately. They are not great masses of entheta, but they are still kind of hard to hit.

On the fourth case, you have the vertical line for a time track with conception at the bottom and present time at the top, and straight lines crossing it to demonstrate the engrams and secondaries.

These would be the four types of cases— but this is all progressively the same case. A case can start in anywhere, on any one of these things. A person can be a case number two with great blobs of entheta more or less separate, or a person can have these smaller areas of entheta on the track, or a person can have each incident lying separate, distinct in itself, with all twenty- six perceptics on every engram.

An individual can be a wide- open case and can still be number one. Everything this person runs into on the track is kind of sad; the whole case is enturbulated. This is the dangerous one. This person can merely be very heavily occluded, or he can be heavily occluded and still have functioning free Theta with the case still very much snarled up— he has compartmented off his Theta so it doesn’t enturbulate like the entheta on the case. He has sort of split up his personality and laid away a compartment of it, and he thinks with that section. As far as the rest of it is concerned, he has put it behind circuits and walls.

This should tell you immediately not to tackle circuits. Don’t worry about circuits anymore; they fall in and collapse by themselves.

What is the difference in these four cases? The first one has a terrific quantity of entheta compared to the existing Theta and is very heavily masked. On the second type of case there is more entheta than there is Theta but the entheta is still lying in patches. And the third type is getting up to a solid ratio of about 50/ 50 but the entheta areas still have a lot of locks in them. Then there is the last type of case where you have the precise incident.

You must realize what happens and what an engram looks like as it is carried along through life. At first it is just a straight line over on case four. Then one day the thing gets keyed in and goes into restimulation and gets a little bit of a lock. And then the fellow gets a secondary on it and we get this blob as in case three. Now that engram has gotten fatter. It is harder to reach; some of the perceptics are cut off in it. Although the secondary apparently lies much later in life, it is actually lying right on top of that engram and charging it up.

Then you get a few more secondaries and a few more locks, and that engram starts to be a great big entheta area and pulls all kinds of experiences into the thing. It has gotten so fat by this time that an auditor couldn’t possibly contact it as an individual incident. In other words, the entheta is so heavy as to repel Theta.

The physical pain permitted the engram to start trapping entheta, and every time the fellow got enturbulated a bit this engram would grab some more entheta. It gets more and more entheta and finally it gets to a point where the combination of the auditor and the preclear in trying to tackle this thing is not enough. They just bounce off of it; they can’t come near it. The preclear doesn’t get a somatic on it, he has no sonic on it, there is no reality, there is nothing, because affinity, reality and communication down in this engram band below 2.0 are completely reversed to unreality, no communication and no affinity, or hatred or dislike or hostility. So he bounces off of this engram very mechanically, without a bouncers ever being there. He can’t get near this engram. It gets more and more heavily charged and when he has really had it laid into him with secondaries and locks and everything, it becomes the first type of case. It is very heavy, practically a plume of entheta. All these incidents are jammed up.

Now, this could be called also— although it wouldn’t be exactly true— the "four ages of the aberree." Number four with those precise lines is a little kid; life is still pretty happy. Number three with the cigar- shaped blobs— not quite so happy— is a teenager. That is about the time they become political revolutionaries and subscribe to Frank Sinatra and so forth. Then there is case two, and this could be called "after she was married" or "when he lost his first job." And then case one is your "successful," "well- adjusted," completely occluded, to- hell- with- life- it’s- no- fun- anyhow person.

I have painted up very extreme varieties of these cases because I want to show you that the difference between case number one and case number four is primarily a difference of getting off locks and secondaries, not a difference of erasing engrams— converting the entheta to Theta.

About all you can do with this first type of case is take the existing Theta, and by Straightwire— just memory— on any subject you can think of, keep refreshing his mind and taking what existing Theta there is and start to open up the case. When you have opened this case up a little bit it will disenturbulate considerably. The person can have affinity, communication and reality in his past. He can feel that there is some reality about these experiences. His perceptics will pick up a bit. There are various ways of doing this, but what you are trying to do is hold up a reality level.

You go into this case, and at a certain level of reality you keep on picking up deposits of Theta along the line, and the fellow will start to disenturbulate a bit. Finally his track should start breaking up; from the heavy coverage mass it should start breaking up into these lighter, smaller masses, like number two.

Then on case number two you are using by this time affinity, reality and communication breaks— enforcement’s and inhibitions. You get the locks out of that, and maybe even a secondary, until you have a case number three.

Now you try to run off secondaries and more ARC breaks and do some Lock Scanning, and get rid of locks any way you possibly can to streamline this case down to a point where those engrams are lying there in their pristine purity.

At this time you say, "Go back to basic- basic. You will now begin to scan through all engrams forward to present time. Begin scanning. (snap!)" He gets to present time, you do that a few times, and you haven’t got any engrams left.

Now, you will occasionally find yourself running an engram out of case number two without wanting to. Certainly you will occasionally find yourself running an engram out of a number three. And certainly out of cases one, two and three you are going to get all manner of enMEST manifestations. But if you pay any attention to enMEST manifestations beyond letting them take place you are making a serious mistake!

What I mean by enMEST is gas, solids, energy and so on. For instance, if your preclear cries, that is enMEST; those tears are enMEST coming off the case. When the enMEST comes off, the entheta can convert back to Theta again.

Then there is dope- off. All of a sudden, without any volition or any desire on your part as an auditor, your preclear suddenly goes out like a light. You have asked him to remember this and remember that and the first thing you know, he dopes off. You just let him go into that dope- off, and when he comes out of it a little bit you ask him to remember something else, and the first thing you know, he will go back into the dope- off. Then you ask him to remember something else and he will go back into the dope- off again.

Now, you can ask him for a phrase which will bring on these dope- offs, but you are liable to get him pinned up on the track if you are working a very rough case. So what do you do? You validate his analyzer and him. Don’t validate his engrams. In other words, work on the theory of "what you pay attention to makes that thing important."

You as human beings can create tomorrow’s reality by what you think today or what you believe in today.

If you believed hard enough that there was going to be a monument a hundred feet square and two miles high to the pioneers of aviation, and you all believed this and you wanted it to be there and so on, there would be one there one day. That is because you believed in it. But supposing you believed that there was going to be nothing but a rotten, mucking hole in the ground, and you all believed this. Then somebody builds a tenement somewhere else and they throw some dirt somewhere else, and they want to have a city dump someplace. And if you all believed that this one square that we are talking about was going to be in horrible shape, the next thing you know, it would be a rotten hole in the ground.

It depends, then, on what you validate. If you start validating a demon circuits it will start taking over the preclear If you start validating the reactive mind exclusively— if you only pay attention to the reactive mind— the analyzer will cut down its thinking capacity just that much.

People who go around saying "Oh, you’re talking out of an engram" are validating the reactive mind and invalidating the analyzer. But if you told someone "You couldn’t possibly be talking out of an engram; that must be an analytical computation," or "You are so prone to analytical computations; I’m happy to see that you never talk out of engrams," then the first thing you know, he doesn’t.

An experiment has been carried out on the line of telling the preclear that it is not necessary to pay any attention to action phrases. Unfortunately, this does not work in the least below about 2.0, but you can get a person up there on the borderline at about 3.0 and you can actually talk him into ignoring action phrases. Now, if you talked to him and said, did he have a holder? did he have a bouncer? did he have this? did he have that? he would actually be held and bounced and so on. But if you talked to him on the line of "There is a holder there but of course it couldn’t affect you," it wouldn’t have any effect on him. So way up the line at 3.0 the action phrase can be argued into existence or out of existence— in other words, validated by the auditor or invalidated by the auditor.

But it is not what the auditor cancels out in the preclear it is what the auditor believes in in the preclear It is the thing to which the auditor gives his affinity, his reality and his communication that becomes live and working in the preclear This is something on the order of waving a magic wand at somebody and having sparks come out of the end.

For instance, this person says, "I know that’s just a demon circuit answer. It couldn’t possibly be my file clerk."

If you said "It probably is; let me talk to the demon circuit, then," you couldn’t mask off the file clerk any more certainly.

But if you said "Oh, I think the file clerk could get through that all right. Let’s just give it a try," you would be surprised how many times that file clerk will come through. It is what you validate!

If you believe in this human being as a sane human being he will act sane, not because you coax him to, but because you are validating this. The sanity, then, is his reality. You are telling him his sanity is reality.

But supposing you treat him all the time as a neurotic or an aberrated human being, immediately this person will become more neurotic. People who are entirely concentrated on nullification, people who are afraid or timid, or people who build up their own superiority by making other people less superior— who count on that mechanism to get along in life— are very dangerous because they keep validating the shortcomings and the weaknesses of those around them. By validating those weaknesses and shortcomings they actually bring them into being and make the person weak and make him exhibit more and more shortcomings and so make the person less and less strong, and that is how they win.

Of course, the person at 1.5 goes at it a little more directly; he just says, "You’re no good!"

So if you follow a general rule of never taking something that is unreal to the preclear or never demanding that he believe something that he doesn’t feel like believing, if you just follow the general rule of always entering the case only on the last limit of reality the preclear will buy, you will keep pressing this case forward on and on into the entheta with Theta. But if you go on forward into this case and keep taking things from the preclear which are unreal to him, you are advancing the entheta back into the Theta. You have just reversed it, and that is bad auditing.

What you want to do is pick up high levels of Theta, if you possibly can, and sweep out any quantity of entheta that you can reach. That is the forward way of doing it. Furthermore, you validate the analyzer. If the preclear starts to boil off, you don’t snap your fingers at him and ask him for a phrase, necessarily. Of course, you can on a fairly high- toned preclear, but if you take one that is way down the tone scale and start to ask him for a phrase every time he gives a manifestation, the first thing you know, this guy starts thinking in terms of "I wonder what phrase causes this?" instead of saying "That might be a phrase but I can overcome that."

It is what you validate that counts. Your belief in the preclears ability to recover is very important. Your belief in his ability to think straight and to know what has happened to him is terribly important.

A reevaluation of what I was doing in auditing and what auditors were doing in auditing calls clearly into view the fact that I was invariably trying to coax into being all of the high- level person I could get my hands on and to forget and nullify, more or less, the bad section of the individual— in other words, ignore the entheta as being important. Don’t give it importance: give the Theta importance.

I have to go back over and review things like this to try to find out what I was doing that produced rapid results, find out why they produced rapid results and then try to find out how to communicate what I was doing.

Now, by using this same theory— the Theta- MEST theory— you can derive about all you need to know about raising children.

For instance, Indian children are very obedient and very cheerful. They are quite something to be around. An Indian tribe in the old days used to be in connivance on every child; they were all plotting against the child’s insanity. Every time the child, voluntarily or otherwise, would pick up a stick of wood to put it on the fire, no matter who was there, they would say, "Oh, what a good child!" The child would go down to the brook, really intending to take a little bag of something down there and throw it away, and somebody would say to him, "Oh, you’re going to get some water; what a good child." Or "You’re helping your mother; what a good child." "You’re being obedient. You’re a good child." And when they were bad children, people ignored them. They just shut them off.

It requires pretty steady nerves and a lot of outdoors to do this! The only reason I am using it as an example is just to demonstrate what you validate in a child.

I have seen Indians work this by the way— Blackfeet. It is the most fascinating thing you ever saw in your life. This kid will suddenly look so bewildered! He is caught off base. What he was actually intending to do was to blow up Bull Moose’s tent, and then somebody says, "Oh, you’re taking that over to your father to give it to him. What a good child!" And he says, "I guess I was."

So if you keep validating people (and this is particularly important in the Foundation, which is inundated all the time by preclears with entheta; there are lots of engrams around and so forth), you keep raising them up the tone scale. And if you start raising them up the tone scale they get more and more Theta, and all of a sudden they are liable to disenturbulate a large area that they ordinarily wouldn’t.

Sometimes you get a funny kind of Straightwire. You get a preclear way up the tone scale and start directing his attention toward entheta areas in his life— ARC breaks or something like that— and suddenly these things will start to go out, one right after the other. Preclears have described it to me like something going up in a little flash, almost an electrical impulse. They suddenly remember a time when they were a little kid and they were kept in bed and beaten for three weeks, and there are a lot of somatics on it and everything else, but they have come so high up the tone scale to be able to remember this thing by Straightwire that the whole period goes out. You take them back through the thing and it hasn’t any importance anymore. It is gone!

Do you get the idea of maintaining a high tone- scale level? If you can get the person up the tone scale, then he is reaching higher and higher levels, there is more and more Theta (you get that out of locks, occasionally out of a secondary) and the first thing you know, the circuit automatically goes out. It is made up of a big computational portion of a person’s mind that was all entheta, and it is suddenly up against so much Theta that it goes poof! And if he is way up the scale it will blow out.

But maybe just the circuit itself caves in. If the circuit itself caves in he will go clear back down the tone scale, and you are suddenly working a preclear who is way down the tone scale; he has just been flooded with entheta. But he comes back up again.

Sometimes a preclear works in a cycle. You raise him up to the top of the tone scale, then he will hit a big deposit of entheta and get enturbulated and he will go down to the bottom of the tone scale. So you raise him back up the tone scale again, and each time his average tone comes up a little bit higher; that is to say, the Theta he has got is higher and he is manifesting higher on the chart all the time.

When you can really get a fellow to where he is functioning fifteen hours a day at tone 3.5 he is not much trouble to process. You start working him and the entheta just starts going out like breaking electric light bulbs— ping! ping! It is wonderful to watch.

The best approach to auditing that I can possibly give you is this: Do not at any time swamp your preclear with entheta and enturbulate what Theta he has got. Don’t swamp him, don’t snow him under, but lead him up the scale; do anything to get him up the scale.

As a matter of fact, a motion- picture show is sometimes a better evening’s processing than processing. Some people have had so few good present times that their whole life is pretty absent on the subject of Theta. Remember, that time track is never anything but a stack of present times. It is present time, present time, present time, present time— throughout a whole lifetime. They are consecutive moments of present time.

For instance, this instant with you is a present time, and therefore it is perfectly valid processing to try to contact this instant. But why go through all the mechanisms of merely recalling it? Why live two minutes beyond it and then go back to it and recall it? Why not experience this minute? It is here and all your perceptics are here. How much are you recording of this moment?

You get a person who is pretty low on the tone scale and if you just invite him and persuade him to contact this moment or some portion of this moment, or if you can just get a person to come to this moment, and if you are successful in doing that, you can end a psychotic break in some cases.

Some of the psychiatrists in one sanitarium wondered what this Dianetics was. Somebody told them what it was, and they also told them, "If you just go around the sanitarium and say to people ‘Come up to present time, ’ occasionally one will." (I did this many years ago. That was all it took. You get the most remarkable results.)

There was one girl in that sanitarium whose face had been in horrible condition with acne and who had been very uncommunicative for a long time and never talked to anybody; she was quite insane. And one of the psychiatrists walked up to her and said, "Come up to present time!" That night they were having a party and she gave a speech to the party on how glad she was to be there. She stayed in present time and her acne disappeared and she manifested sanity. That is quite a remarkable mechanism. Yet you could walk through any insane asylum of any size in the land, and here and there you would find somebody who (unless he had been electric- shocked, transorbital- leukotomized and psychiatricized in general), if you just told him to come up to present time, would turn sane. This fellow might have been there for years.

That is how important it is to process present time or recognize that a present time exists.

Now, all I have given you here is basic theory. Maybe I have snowed you under a little bit. I hope not, because although there are a lot of particularities to know about the tone scale, about evaluation, about the tricks of practice and so forth, actually I have just given you all there is to know about basic theory. If you can follow this through, or thinking it over, follow it through and understand it, you will have a grasp on the subject and a grasp of the subject on all its dynamics which will be far in excess of anything that has been known before in Dianetics, and you will be able to produce better results and more results and faster results with this knowledge.

The main thing that you should remember, as far as your preclear is concerned, is that life is made to be lived. And it is just as valuable sometimes for you to straighten out this preclear’s present time a little bit, or send him out and make him have a good time for a while, as it is for you to sit down and process him, because it is present time that counts. It is life and living that counts. You can undo yesterday’s mistakes for an individual, you can undo the pain in his lifetime, you can bring about remarkable results; but if a preclear is very enturbulated in present time, if present time situations are too much for him and you start sending him back down his track, then his past comes up and hits him too. And that makes him pretty unhappy.

So you see what you are trying to do. You are trying to make available, in present time, all of the Theta which you can possibly get. Add to it all you can with your own friendliness, with your own affinity and reality and communication with this preclear, and then knock out, not engrams, not secondaries, not this or that, but the whole thing— knock out entheta in whatever form you may find it, whether it is present time entheta by present time situations or actual entheta stored in the case on the time track. However you can disenturbulate it, that is good, valid processing and that is valid Dianetics.

Any method which increases the amount of entheta on the case or enturbulates present time for the preclear is not good processing.

So, if you follow what I have given you, if you understand that it is a process of bringing a person little by little up this tone scale to a higher and higher average tone throughout his day so that his behavior and his happiness and his manifestations are better and better and better— if you understand that this is your target— you will also be able to make tone 4s and make people stable at tone 4. This is not static, because they will still get mad when life hits them. But if you can make it so they can come up to tone 4, so they can be happy, you will be doing a good job.

One of the reasons it has been very difficult for people to bring a person up the tone scale has been because the auditor might have been 1.5 and he was trying to bring the preclear up to 4.0. He never will. He might bring his 1.1 preclear up to 1.5. But then somebody has to raise the other one to 1.6, and then they have both got to hit a parity on that. Then they had better get each other up to 2.0. If one drops behind, the one who was higher had better bring up the guy who was lower. And in such a way, by the use of "tone jacks," they could get themselves all the way up to the top of the scale.