6207C19 SHSpec-172 The E-Meter The E-meter was devised as an aid to help an auditor observe a PC. It certainly beats fingers on pulses! The first Mathison meter wasn't built as a modified wheatstone bridge. Until E-meters were developed, people thought such galvanometers were reading sweat, not thought, because the earlier galvanometers were so insensitive. Engineers and electronics men in scientology have not always recognized the possibility of a meter that directly reads electric thought-impulses, not the physical results of these thought-impulses. Home-made E-meters built by people who do know something about psychogalvanometers, often have a built-in lag which is meant to "protect the movement". The needle is damped down, so reads are late, you read "sweat", etc. Hence no instant reads. The first Mathison meter wouldn't read on a large percentage of people, so LRH got Mathison to expand it. By the end of 1952, we had a pretty good meter. The very first meter had tiny electrodes -- little metal bars -- and didn't give mental reads. LRH and Jim Elliot got the idea of using soup cans, which did result in being able to get reads. The E-meter can detect whether a PC is auditable. It is a coincidence that it just happens that when you can read a PC on a meter, that PC is in good shape. When a person's needle is in a constant agitated rockslam, e.g. with a real manic-depressive or schitzophrenic psychotic, no metered process works on them anyway. CCH's are all you can use. Fortunately, they are available. If you can read the meter on him, he can be audited on a think process, e.g. prepchecking. The meter ran us into a complete cul-de-sac. We had had knowledge of the whole track before, but the meter made it clear how many engrams there were. This made dianetics look wrong. As long as you audited only this lifetime, you could make someone look very good, but it was obviously impossible to run out every engram on the whole track, because the number is infinite. LRH, in the past, had refused to let PCs be subjected to experimental processes because they might get their heads blown off. Sometimes he used himself as a guinea pig for that reason. The board of the first Dianetic Foundation started to resign when LRH started looking at whole track. They discovered at that point that Hubbard could get mad! His attitude was that no one was going to say what could or could not be researched. They decided that he must not be clear! At that time, which was the time of early research with the E-meter and A History of Man (1952), LRH and MSH went down to the library and started looking up words. They came up with "scio" and "-ology". This seemed to express what we wanted: moving out of the field of the mind into the field of knowing. The mind is only a vessel of knowledge, so a new approach was required. Exteriorization started coming up. LRH and MSH went to Phoenix. One night, Evans Farber showed up And wouldn't go away. LRH finally asked him what he wanted and found that he had discovered the process, "Try not to be three feet back of your head," as an exteriorization process. That was practically the end of the E-meter, because you can't read a thetan who is out of his head. LRH tried to develop a Theta-meter. The trouble was that it detected the auditor as well as the thetan who was the PC because it didn't require one to be exterior to read on it. It was very simple, electronically. It used a "magic eye" type detector. In about 1955 or 1956, E-meters went out of use. They revived after the Clearing ACC [Probably in 5802C07 19ACC-15 "Help -- How to get Started" and 5802C13 19ACC19 "Other processes -- the Help Button". Other tape titles from this ACC may be more relevant, but I don't have them.] in the U.S., when LRH assessed people with the meter. Don Breeding, Joe Wallace, Pinkham and others were working on meters, and one of them designed a transistorized E-meter in 1957. It was found to be very useful in clearing people. It was used with a five-way help bracket to clear fifteen or twenty out of seventy people, as long as LRH did the assessment. We know now that the people who went clear were those who had a beingness goal and chose the terminal of that beingness goal to run on the five-way help. They made a first dynamic keyed-out clear. That is, you could clear anyone with help whose terminal was also his goal. The trick of assessment was to find the Rock, which would sometimes coincide with the wording of a goal. This got meters back in, when it became clear that you wouldn't clear anyone without a meter. This was horrible, because LRH had never been able to teach an auditor to use one. Not that he had tried very hard. The Step Six phenomenon that was run into not long afterwards was the result of running someone on a button that wasn't on his goal line, not from creativeness beefing up the bank, per se. If his goal was run out or desensitized, you could then run any creative process with no bad effect. Otherwise, the button of alteration of creativeness can get activated, which is the bank-creator. [See pp. 285-287, above.] When a bank starts to go solid, that's no fun. The difficulties of auditors finding a correct Rock loomed enormously. We now had two factors that were missing: 1. We needed technology that would unwind any accidental out of this package of clearing, so there would be no unknown data. 2. We needed to get to the point where an auditor could interpret the data we did find. The first British meters were copies of American meters. Fowler and Allen built them, at first, with no idea of what they were building. One day LRH sat Allen down and ran a responsibility process on him on whatever he was looking at, put him on the meter, located his dead war-companion that he felt he had overts on, and found that he was looking at a window, surrounded by blackness. He ran responsibility for this scene and got more and more room in the picture. Suddenly, he got the whole sequence, with full kinesthesia, all sensations, and no more stuck picture. LRH explained bits and pieces about the E-meter to Fowler and Allen. They went on to build the Mark II, III, and eventually the Mark IV, with an improved circuit. They also worked on an OT meter. The job of the meter is still what it always was: to detect what the PC has in the reactive bank. It is incidental that the meter detects ruds, problems, or what the PC is thinking or doing, or whatever. What we need most is to know what he has in the bank, so that the bank can be assessed. The E-meter has been designed and must be designed to detect the PC's prime postulate. Otherwise you won't clear anyone. If a meter won't detect a prime postulate in an individual. it is useless, even if it could be used to get ruds in. A good meter must be very sensitive, yet not pick up everything that the PC is doing physically. But this has not been the main liability of meters. The liability has always been auditor reading. Now that this has been singled out as the weakest point in auditing, it can get fixed. Also, more is known now about meter reads and auditor ability. All the auditor is missing on is certainty on whether the needle read or is clean. Trouble with knowing when it read is solved by not looking until you say the last syllable and by drilling on when the needle is or isn't reading. So all auditors must learn to read an E-meter, or they simply cannot audit. You have to be able to detect the thing in the mind that is keeping the PC from being clear. You ve got to learn to read meters. A good, safe auditor can read a meter; an unsafe one cannot.