6207C12 SHSpec-175  Meter Training

     Auditors make mistakes reading meters.  While the basic reason for this
is in their banks, poor metering can be countered educationally.  The first
requirement for accurate reading of a meter is good eyesight.  The first thing
we find wrong is that the auditor can't see.  It may he necessary for him to
wear glasses, unpopular though that is amongst scientologists.  When a case
assessment form on a new PC, we should take something with extremely small
print, like a railway timetable or the stock market report in the newspaper
and hold it as far from the PC's face as a meter would be and have him read
it.  If he can read it, make a note on the assessment form that his eyesight
is good -- with glasses, if that is true.  If he can't read it, put down,
"eyesight poor." This will make D's of P and D's of T aware that his metering
may be suspect when he starts to audit.  Check eyesight again when doing
practical sections on auditing courses.  Since a person's eyesight changes
with auditing, recheck the eyesight if, as an auditor, he gets crammed for a
GAE.  Let's assume that all auditors who goof have something wrong with
metering.

     How wide is present time?  This is the next area to look into.  One could
have an awareness of present time as much as ten minutes wide.  LRH has this,
at least for movie and TV plots.  A clear can tell, fifty to a hundred feet
before an intersection, whether there is anything coming; he may find himself
"seeing" the truck coming around the corner before it does.  He is not looking
around corners.  He may think that it is a new "linear" perception, but it is
not.  It's just that PT has gotten a bit wider than the instant that most
people perceive.  He has a wider fringe of knowingness.  A really sharp
athlete also has a wider PT.  For instance, Sam Snead can look from the point
of driving the ball to the point where it lands and know where it lands as he
hits it.  Great athletes control both ends of a broadened PT, so you get a
hole-in-one, a perfectly placed serve, etc.  They are always exterior, and the
axioms seem very obvious to them.  They don't think of their present time as
continued motion.  Motion doesn't happen randomly in their PT.  They think of
it as continued control.  When they are doing something, they are controlling
all the motion in that present time, because they are in that present time and
they have the width of that present time to decide.  It is as if at the end of
two seconds they could undecide what they decided at the beginning of the two
seconds, so they have tremendous judgment.  They know which decision is right,
because they saw it happen.  They can perceive both motion and stillness as a
total is-ness.

     Then there's the guy whose PT is one thousandth of a second wide.  He is
in continuous anxiety and regret.  It is always all wrong.  That is a crazy
man's present time.  He doesn't even know if the bed will continue to sit on
the floor.  You only get the idea of continuance by perceiving across a span
of time, not by comparing different times.  The less PT a person has, the more
trouble he has with the perception of motion and stillness.  So you can run,
"Look around here and tell me something you are absolutely certain will be
here in one second," and keep increasing the time-span.  You could drill the
person's perception into a broadening of PT.  You could also run, "Look around
here and find something that's having an effect on an effect," or "Look around
this room and find something that's having an effect on something else." The
latter will occasionally turn on a very widened PT.  Such processes are really
drills rather than processes.  An auditor needs to have a broader PT than most
if he is to be able to spot a speeded rise, for instance.  Reading a meter is
spotting motion, no-motion, and change of rate of motion, when it exists.

     This is beyond perception.  It is a matter of consecutive awareness.
There are three moments that must be perceived to find out if a needle is
still:

          1. The moment before.  (It wasn't moving.)

          2. The moment it is still. (It isn't moving.)

          3. The moment after.  (It will not move.)

You need comparison.  You are not just looking at one moment.  A moving needle
requires only two observations, two moments of awareness.  Thus it is easier
to read than a still needle.  For instance, a sitting pheasant is harder to
see than a moving pheasant, not because motion attracts the eye or some such
reason, but because motion requires only two observations to perceive, while
stillness requires three.  "Motion takes part of the responsibility for
directing attention, whereas stillness takes no responsibility for directing
attention."

     In perceiving motion, all you have to do is to observe that something was
in place A and is now in place E.  How narrowly can

     Places A and B be spaced and still have perceptible motion between them?
One tenth of the width of the tip of the needle apart.

     The next question is, "What section of the present time you are in do you
require to perceive an action or an inaction?" This opens the door to the
solution of this problem.  Broadening PT is best done by clearing, but it
wouldn't work to insist that auditors must be clear before they can clear
someone.  Actually, clear raw meat, with no comprehension or reality on what
has happened is enormously inferior to someone who has the data and goes
clear.  Training gives a subjective reality on what it is like to wrestle with
the problems of clearing someone; trained individuals have a capability to
understand people, while clear raw meat is likely to be very impatient with
people.  A raw clear will also ask the damndest questions.  He is very oddball
and unpredictable.  This guy has been launched into the atmosphere and
expected to fly without knowing that he is in a plane.  It is better to go
clear with the data.  You get more comprehending people that way.

     Because it takes more time to see a stillness, an individual has less
tolerance for it.  Hence a person is impatient with observing stillnesses.
His "continuance" has to be too great.  Stillnesses absorb time.  They give a
sense of foreverness.  Something that moves does not have to have such a
continuance.

     However, the period of time required to perceive motion or stillness can
be shortened until the person can observe, in the tiniest, narrowest PT, three
moments (stillness) or two moments (motion) of time.  You do this by practice
and drill.  If a person's span of PT is a twentieth of a second long, he would
need to be able to perceive an instant of time that is no longer than a
sixtieth of a second, in order to be able to observe three moments in time in
his PT, and therefore to be able to perceive that the needle is still.  He
"must be able to perceive an is-ness that is only a sixtieth of a second
long."

     The amount of PT someone can observe can be tested with a camera.  You
could set the lens wide open and vary exposure time.

     The less PT span they can observe, the smaller the diameter of lens that
they will be able to perceive at a given speed.

     A suitable target would be to get to where we can perceive an is-ness in
a hundred and twenty-fifth of a second.  People can be drilled to get up to
this speed, without broadening their PT.

     You could do it gradiently by flashing, say, a slide of a chair for one
second, over and over, until the students can actually tell you all about the
chair.  Then cut it down to half a second, a quarter of a second, etc., until
you reach a hundred and twenty-fifth of a second.  The student will gradiently
improve until he can get everything in the slide in a hundred and twenty-fifth
of a second.  "The name for the viewing device is "a variable speed
tachistoscope".  The Navy used this system during world War II for an aircraft
identification drill.  It is now being used to teach reading and to improve
reading speed.

     Even without these devices, you can learn to read a meter.

     This is necessary, and now we know that it will he done.  The result of
the training should be an auditor who can tell that a still needle is present,
given only a twentieth to a sixtieth of a second's observation time.  The old
saw about the eye having a "shutter speed" of about a twenty-fifth of a second
is a stupid lie.  There is a thetan in back of the eye "who has a width of PT
and who tends to fixate on what he considers an observable moment."