6409C01 SHSpec-37 The PE Course

     Here is some data from the field of study that relates to the PE course:
New people hear incomprehensible words and don't return.  That's it.  That is
the reason why you have fifteen people on Monday who dwindle to two people on
Friday.  What has been discovered here is the act that exists prior to the
overt and which illumines the overt-motivator and O/W sequences.  "Before
there is an overt, there is a non-comprehend."  So the overt-motivator
sequence goes:

     1. A misunderstood word.

     2. A non-comprehend.

     3. A belief that it is OK to commit an overt.

     4. The commission of the overt.

     5. The withhold of the overt.

     6. A blow -- an attack or a withdrawal.  This can be big or small.

[See also HCOB 8Sep64 "Levels II to IV: Overts -- What Lies Behind Them?"]

     A critical thought is a justifier, a lessener of the overt, and therefore
a symptom of an overt.  If you ask the PC for an overt and he gives a critical
thought, of course you don't leave it there.  You ask for the done.  Having
gotten that, you could ask for the non-comprehend, and, behind that, for the
misunderstood word.  Get the nattery student to find (on his own, before the
next course-time) all of his misunderstoods in previous courses or studies and
get them cleaned up.

     Someone who can't do anything about anything is reasonable about it all.
This is a disease that a civilized person gets into.  "Being reasonable"
doesn't solve anything.  You "can't do anything about it", so you get
reasonable about it.  Being reasonable is what someone does who can't make his
goals anymore.  If you really find out what the score is, you don't have to be
reasonable.  You can do something about it.  If a guy is having trouble
understanding and is nattering about scientology before he has had time to
find anything to natter about, there is a word or words in a prior related
subject that was misunderstood.  Someone who has misunderstood words in a field
that is allied to scientology, will be unable to learn scientology.  This is
why someone who is a psychologist has trouble learning scientology.  He could
do some clay table processing to handle it.  Or you could assign him a
self-audit, looking up the words in psychology that he didn't understand.
This takes care of the natterer in the PE course, as a very precise action.

     If you get someone in the PE course who is trying to get it but can't,
ask him for the word that you have used that he didn't understand.  If the guy
is simply trying and failing to grasp a word, he just has an in-context
misunderstood word.  Find it, and he will brighten up.

     Then there is the perfect PE student who sits and nods but hasn't a
clue.  This is handled by having people give written examples of the point
that you have made, taken from real life.  This permits a return flow and lets
you spot the fellow who is utterly glib and can't apply, the fellow who hasn't
connected.  Get him to give you a list of words that he hasn't understood
since starting the course.  Take up those words and clean them up.  Probably
some other people on the course haven't got them either.

     Suppose that you were offered a course, to teach you all about
automobiles, and you had never seen one, but you had sort of vaguely heard
about them.  You had heard that they travel over the ground at tremendous
speeds.  This sow ded rather neat and intriguing, so you decided to take the
course.  Then, suppose you got hit with three nights in a row of how neat cars
are and how fast you can go in them and how intriguing they are, and you never
got word one about what an automobile is, what makes it work, or what its
parts are?  So when you teach scientology, teach it.

     An overt against scientology is a justification for not having understood
some word or concept in scientology.  Keep it simple and keep it defined.  As
much as possible, keep it familiar.  People like the familiar.

     People don't like things that are totally new.  The public likes the old,
with maybe a little bit of improvement, not new subjects.  So you had better
represent scientology as what it is, which is the only conservative study in
the field of the mind.  It follows the traditional patterns of philosophy,
religion, and the mind.  Your own interest in it may have come from your
recognition, in it, of the philosophy of Greece and Rome, and of faculty
psychology.

     People justify not having understood a subject, so they commit the
overt.  That shows that the subject is no good.  Present-day psychologists
think of a man as a machine.  Psychology has a stable datum:  "Perception
depends on association and sensation."  According to the psychologist, there
is no perception in the absence of sensation and association.  That is, a
machine, in the absence of someone tickling its gears and certain things
making other things happen, is incapable of noticing anything that is
happening.  This notion puts conditions upon being able to perceive anything,
and it is not true.  It would be true of a machine with nobody in charge, but
it is not true of a being.  A being does not require sensation with
association in order to perceive.  Only if a person were a piece of meat would
this be true.  "Before I can look at a field of hay, I'd have to have received
a sensation from [it] and [to] have associated it with my childhood."  A robot
would have to do that.  It would have to have associative memory, etc.
Psychologists believe that Man is a robot.

     When you say that "perception is engaged upon by the being himself as a
means of communication with the universe around him and other beings," you
would have been welcomed by the sixteenth century faculty psychologists, but
you are damned by the moderns.  You have introduced volition: volitional and
non-volitional acts.  "You have set up the individual as seeing what he wants
to see and not seeing what he doesn't want to see.  You have set up the whole
mechanism of power of choice, and you have set up the dignity of the
individual.  And that they want nothing to do with, because they, ... in not
understanding Man, have gone the route of the overt. [See earlier part of this
tape: pp. 661-2, above.]"

     "That's why psychiatry cuts out brains.  They've got to make nothing out
of Man, because they haven't understood him."  And the misunderstood word that
it goes back to is "psychology".  Every psychiatrist is in the frame of mind
of a con man.  They are ARC broken with their own subject.  They know it
doesn't work.  This is where their contempt for Man comes from.  They dominate
thought in universities.  They teach that Man is no good.  He is just a
machine.  Such a philosophy became "necessary" when leaders entered wars that
killed off thirty million people at a crack.  This philosophy justifies the
overt.  "You have to have a philosophy that Man is no good, in order to go on
committing overts."

     "So ... Man's mental subjects first didn't bother to understand anything
about Man, and so then began to commit overts, and then employment was found
for these blokes by fellows who had to have their overts justified": the
Hitlers and the Stalins.  Man is not more degraded than he was.  It is just
that Man's mental sciences have "departed from the traditional, which had to
do with the dignity of Man."  Wundt made his big mistake at Leipzig, in 1879,
and Pavlov and psychiatry came riding in.

     Scientology is in the great tradition of the dignity of Man.  The ideas
that we are moving along with are the traditional ideas.  These ideas have to
do with attention, perception, power of choice, and motivation of behavior.
We do not go on the basis of how wicked everyone is.  We just ask what these
things are.  The idea that men are animals was always there to be bought, but
it wasn't until 1879 that it got taken up.  So modern psychology is the
upstart subject.  Modern psychology and psychiatry came from the Russian and
the German -- two groups of people who have no enviable reputation for
humanitarianism.  If the Germans had just stopped with

music and cameras, we would be fine.  But every once in awhile, they got
careless with guns.  Psychiatry came from Germany and modern psychology came
from the Russians.

     Psychology is really a sub-study of scientology, and, as such, it is our
property.  After all, psychologists can't even define "psychology".  It should
have its spelling changed to psyche-ology -- study of the soul -- so as to
reflect its true and traditional meaning.

     It is the psychiatrists and "psychologists" who are the radicals.
Scientologists and the traditionalists.  We are the conservatives.

     Psychiatry, psychology, philosophy, and religion and all subsumed in
scientology.  The radical approaches have had their chance and have failed to
produce results.  They should stand aside in favor of the more traditional
approach.  Psychology, as psyche-ology, should be seen as being part of
scientology.

     The eyes can see by putting something there to be perceived, as well as
by perceiving what is there.  Learning nomenclature is equivalent to learning
what is there.  Treat the PE course as an area where people can learn the
language and find out what is there to be named, and students will come up
smiling.  If they don't understand the words, they blow, natter, and commit
overts.  Thus we build our own opposition.