THE TONE SCALE IN LIFE AND PROCESSING A lecture given on 12 June 1951 Handling Individuals by Tone Scale Level I want to tell you "how to win friends and influence people," or how to gain your own ends, or how to drive people insane easily and in a very short time. Let us not be so narrow that we just try to win friends and influence people on the first dynamic; let's also consider the whole broad field and understand how to drive them insane, too. You never know when you might want to talk to a psychiatrist or a politician, and I wouldn't want you to go into the whole conversation blind! You get agreement at the tone-scale level a person is at chronically. If you want to talk to and be in agreement with a person at 1.5, then you have to get angry at the things he is angry at. This is a form of mimicry, but it is just the mimicry of wavelengths. Now, if you wanted to influence someone at 1.1, you would start by getting an agreement at his tone level. You would talk to him at his own tone level: "There was a little kid who lived on our block when I was young. And I used to take him-when nobody was looking, of course- I used to take him down to the river and throw him in. He couldn't swim! And then I'd drag him out at the last moment, about the time he was going to drown." This fellow at 1.1 then would say, "Yeah! This is very funny, but this little kid I knew had this dog and he liked this dog very much, and I used to take the dog and hide him. Oh, I was a devil! I used to hide this dog so the little kid would think the dog was lost and then I'd let the dog show up suddenly and tell the little kid I'd found the dog. And then I would charge the little kid his week's allowance for having found the dog, and he was my friend." There is 1.1. Now you have affinity with a 1.1 on that. Let's take a grief case. If you wanted to sell this grief case against, for instance, a new park the city wanted to build, you would say tearfully, "You know that lovely place up there where they have all the nice old tin cans (sniff! snip./) and everything? They are going to plow it all up and sow grass in it." That would sell him against the park. Or you could say the land could be used for a cemetery, and the guy would oppose the new park because he would rather have a cemetery there. This shows you the tone scale of Los Angeles, by the way, because even though Los Angeles has hardly any playgrounds inside the city, they had this enormous slope right in the most beautiful part of town and they turned it into a cemetery-Woodlawn Cemetery. They have little signs alongside of the road, "Does seepage bother your loved ones?" If you were talking to someone down along the line of apathy, and you wanted to sell him on this park, you would say, "It's hopeless to try to stop them, hopeless to try to stop them from putting that park in. Well, we won't be here long anyway." He won't oppose the park then. But way up at tone 4.0 you would say enthusiastically, "Gee! You know what they're going to do? They are going to build this big park and all the kids can have a place to play! There will be big, shady trees, and birds, you know? And it's right by the river and there will be green grass and everything, and all the kids in these tenements can play there-and isn't that swell?" And he would say, "Gee, isn't that swell! What do we have to do to make it go through?" That is tone 4.0. At 3.0 you would have to say, "They have a wonderful idea up at the courthouse. They are going to put in a park. Of course, I don't say that this is the best idea in the world. This land may be useful for something else, so I don't know that it's the best idea to build this park. But there are some people in the city who are experienced in this sort of thing." (Don't take the opinion on yourself.) "There are some people" (then you name a couple of important names) "who are interested in that sort of thing, and they claim that the health of the children-and you know, we have to think of the health of future generations-in that area might possibly be bettered by putting in this park. Now, I don't claim that this is my opinion, but that is what is being said. And they say that the bonded investment is not too great in order to accomplish this. Now, I know we don't want to get enthusiastic about this thing because it might never come to pass, but at the same time . . ." And you do it like that, like a college professor-very conservative. A college professor's idea and brand of talk is like this: He puts a firecracker down on the experiment desk, lights a match and touches it to the fuse. He has already exploded five up on the end of the desk and they all went off. He has got the sixth one burning merrily and he says, "It is my studied opinion that I believe it is possible that, unless some untoward incident occurs, this firecracker may explode. This has happened in the past." The thing goes bang! and everybody says, "You know, he's a very wise man." That is the level of conservatism. Just below this level the person starts to get into insouciance; he is very bored. If you wanted to sell him on the idea of this park, you would talk to him on the order of "It isn't any use anyway, but I guess they are going to go ahead and do it. It's kind of a silly idea. I can just see these old dames riding around there now, with these little tiny exercise pads on their horses. They have decided to do it anyway, so we might as well not do anything about it." The guy will be in full agreement with you if he is at 2.5. This is how you influence people. Voice tone has a lot to do with it. Just listen to the way a person talks and you can tell more or less where he is on the tone scale. Then you start asking him questions or trying to find agreement with him. Don't try beating him into line by saying "Oh, so you don't agree with me? I think personally that you're stupid!"-in other words, a good standard argument. If you really want to win an argument with someone, just go up and down the tone scale with your type of data and tone of voice and you will find his level. As soon as you have his level, announce what you want to have announced, couched in terms which will get his greatest response for that, and you will get agreement. This is agreement. You get reality with him because you will be able to communicate with him at that level. Now, don't take a person down near the bottom and get mad at him. It doesn't do a bit of good. Don't take a person down along the grief level and enthusiastically say, "Look, the birds are flying, and look at the beautiful blue sky! Everything is happy and cheerful, and isn't it good to be alive? Please, if you'd just pick yourself up, and throw out your chest and look at this beautiful day"-the person will crash! That is the surest way to kill this person, because a person at grief is all entheta and if you come up with this big impact of Theta, you just crunch into that entheta and the person goes into apathy. You can drive this person into apathy because you are smashing against the wavelength of entheta at that point. So that is how to influence people. Unfortunately that is not necessarily the way to win friends. The best way to win friends is to look around and find somebody who is more or less in your level of the tone scale, or a little bit higher or a little bit lower, if you know your level of the tone scale, and you will just get along fine. That is how you win friends. It is a very simple subject. Now I want to tell you how you drive people crazy, and I don't mean with a needle or an ax, creating engrams or doing bad things to them, but just by talking to them. If you are living with somebody you want to drive crazy, this is the method you use. What locks are there? There is the whole lock of understanding; understanding is ARC in a package. If you get affinity, reality and communication all together as they act against MEST, YOU get computation. That is thought. Affinity, communication and reality interacting with MEST is thought. That is computation, or understanding, or thought; and then there is affinity, and then there is communication and then there is reality. Now, there is enforced understanding and ARC-its component parts; and there is inhibited understanding and ARC-its component parts. All you have to do to drive someone crazy is operate in present time to put locks on him. It is very simple. All you do is either enforce or inhibit understanding or ARC on any subject that comes up. One of the ways to do it would be to say "You ought to like people. You really have got to like people more, and the best way to do it, you know, is just to like them. You really ought to like them. I have talked to a lot of people and found out they didn't like you very much. Therefore you have got to like them more." You have enforced affinity, and then you have inhibited all the affinity around the person. That is a very neat operation. You could say, "You have got to understand; you're so damn stupid!" Just keep up a line of chatter like this, good and forceful. "Haven't you any comprehension at all? I don't think you have. I don't see how anybody can be as dumb as you are. Of course, I appreciate that you don't understand this sort of thing. I don't want to be over your head, but as a matter of fact a lot of people I have told this to understood it. It's awfully hard talking to you." That just takes their understanding-takes all their ARC-and puts it down on the tone scale a little bit. These people have engrams. You don't have to push their buttons to drive them crazy, just use these mechanisms. Of course, if you find they have some of these phrases as chronic dramatizations-ARC enforcement's and breaks or understanding enforcement's or inhibitions-and then you turn around and use the phrases that lie in the engrams of this person's bank, that really does it! The psychoanalyst does a good job of this. He says, "The trouble with you is you have a guilt complex. You think people see bad things in you. Now, actually, you have to brace up and control yourself and look at the world square in the eye, and you have got to face reality. That's all there is to that." Or the person is sitting there all anaten and says, "It has often occurred to me that I have a feeling I'm insane." And the psychoanalyst says, "You mean you feel like you're insane?" "Yeah. Insanity has been running in the family." "Oh, insanity has been running in your family, has it?" "Yes. As a matter of fact, my mother-my mother was in an institution." "Oh, went to an institution, did she? Did she ever go back to the institution again after she left it?" By this time the poor patient is starting to spin. He says, "Well-and my father had a bad heart; he was always complaining about a bad heart." The psychoanalyst says, "Oh, your father had a bad heart, complained about it all the time. He did complain about it? That's very interesting. Now, it is necessary for you to have friends. You have got to make yourself like people. Furthermore, you have a very repressed libido." Psychoanalytic patients have a high percentage of suicides! This is the mechanism-enforce and then inhibit: "You've got to listen to me! You don't hear very well," or "Now, look at me! Stop running away from me. Now look at me!" You don't even have to run action phrases in on the person, but that helps; that always helps! "Sit right there and listen to me!" or "Come back here. Don't leave while I'm talking to you. Now, you've got to listen to me! You never hear a thing I say! You never pay any attention to me." The funny part of it is that a position on the tone scale actually causes an automatic reaction of this. And all the so-called self-control in the world-always control circuits-won't pull a guy up the tone scale to a point where he can not do these things without so far suppressing the rest of his Theta that he becomes relatively will-less or unable. If you want to win friends and influence people by enforcing these things upon yourself and upon him and inhibiting things in yourself and in him, then I can assure you that you will probably do all sorts of things, but it will not accomplish very much. The thing to do is pick up the tone level and get some processing and get it up to the point where your self-determinism is very high. Then there is lots of accomplishment and lots of willpower, and the people who are more or less around your level of the tone scale, with similar experiences and so forth, will become your friends anyway. Now, if you really want agreement with a psychiatrist, you will have to go into a lower band, as I have normally discovered. This is the way you talk to a psychiatrist: "You know these fellows who go into a terrific manic-the kind you have to put restraints on?" He will say, "Yes." "Don't you find it's best to give them some sedation? You know, inhibit them? Sometimes you can build them up to a dramatization and they will have a release of affect. You know, enforce it." You will find agreement. But don't say to a psychiatrist "The thing to do is to take off all restraints, restore the person's self-determinism, make them as free as possible and let them come to reason out of their own experience, not because you tell them to. Leave them alone; they have a right to live." That is too high on the tone scale. The reaction you would get would be "Kill him! Cut his throat! Get him out of here. What the hell is this guy talking about? He must be crazy! Throw that book in the wastebasket!" Now, it is very good for you to know how to win friends and influence people in the Held of trying to give people Dianetics. You walk up to somebody who is pretty low on the tone scale and you try to sell him Dianetics by saying "This is going to make everybody in the world sane." This is something that a 4.0 would accept, but it would be considered very dangerous even by a 2.5. You walk up to an old man and tell him, "I have methods by which future generations are going to live forever," and this fellow says immediately to you, "For God's sakes! You mean the world is going to get overpopulated like that? Take that idea and throw it out, because I wouldn't have anything to do with it-and that is a lousy thing to propose." Actually, you are going up against old age with a proposal of youth. You could say that these are the two opposite ends of a spectrum, and they won't mesh. When you start up against a person in grief and you tell him enthusiastically "Everything is going to be happy and everything is going to be wonderful, and you are going to feel so good!" this person takes one look at you as an auditor and says, "No! Get away!" So how to win friends and influence people has a lot to do with how much you can audit them. Just try sometime-in practice, not in actuality- to be too many bands away from your preclear and see how far you get. The thing for an auditor to do is be way up at the top of the scale and be able to talk down at the bottom without being particularly affected. This preclear has volume and he will disenturbulate and so forth, but it is none of the auditor's business to try to beat him into going up the tone scale by saying "You're going to be happy, you're going to be cheerful!" This is enforced reality. "You are not going to be sad anymore!" is an inhibition. This person can't be anything else but sad; this person will only vibrate to that. If I had two tuning forks, both pitched at 512 vibrations, and I struck one tuning fork, the other one would ring without being touched. On this tone scale, from the bottom to the top, from the top to the bottom, you can hit a vibration which will cause the other person to go into vibration with you. If you think of yourself as a tuning fork that is hitting some pitch on this tone scale, you will realize that you will get response. You will go into communication, you will go into agreement and you will go into affinity with the person at that level on the tone scale, but you will not do it anyplace else. You can't sit up at the top of the tone scale and expect a person who is way down it to respond. So the way you go into a grief case is to talk to him at his level-in grief-and say, "It's very sad; I know it's sad. You need help; I know you need help." If this case is a very bad grief case, way down at the bottom, you add, "And of course, there's nobody to help you, is there?" He will say, "No. No, there sure isn't." You don't then, from way up the tone scale, say, "Now, let's go into that big secondary engram there and run off all that grief." No, you tell him sympathetically, "Let's go find the times in your life when you were as happy as you might have been if all this hadn't happened to you." And he will go and pick up some Theta here and a little Theta there and look at it, and he will say, "(sniff) I was happy then." And then you say, "Do you remember a time when you didn't have any ice cream for supper?" And he will say, "Yes (sniff). " That is a big, heavy loss. "Do you remember a time when you spilled your picnic plate on the ground?" Another big loss. But those are tough locks for this person. He will probably get them up, but don't try to do it if this person is all the way down in grief, and don't just keep slugging him into this sort of thing, or he will just stay at grief, because you are putting him into more and more grief. You are not investing enough Theta on it to straighten it out. You have to somehow smother anything he has left in the entheta band with his Theta. So collect everything you can find in the Theta band. You can take a grief case, then, and start picking up Theta moments. Pick up the Theta moments behind the grief and you will start getting grief line charges. There are tone 4 line charges; you have seen those. On a grief line charge the person cries and doesn't know why he is crying. Your preclear will just sit there and cry, because he has had enough Theta picked up on his case for the grief that has collected and flowed over onto the time track to spill automatically. You are starting to pick up the Theta and all that enturbulated Theta will start disenturbulating. But if you try to get his Theta to attack his entheta, it won't do it. If he is down at the grief level and you then try to take this person who is enturbulated-who may even have a present time situation that is still causing him grief, which is quite normal-and run his present time Theta into past grief, you are not going to be able to do it at all. What you are going to have to do, maybe, is try to straighten out present time. Then you are going to have to try to pick up a little Theta here and there: "Go to that great big pleasure moment when you first saw an automobile." He probably won't be able to reach those big pleasure moments. The reason pleasure moments are occluded low on the tone scale is simply that there is too much entheta around. You have to release this condition of affairs, and it releases fairly rapidly. All you have to do is start picking up and restoring to the case as much Theta as you can lay your hands on, and the case will start disenturbulating and coming up the tone scale. Somebody told me once, "I have been working Dianetics wrong. I have been running prenatals on some psychotics, and I must have been working Dianetics wrong." I asked him how he was doing it, and he said, "I go into the case and I pick up the ARC, and get very high ARC with the psychotic, and then I run these-oh! I've answered my own question." Just by his presence and by mimicry and so forth he was getting this psychotic back into contact with present time, if only during the period when the auditor was present. He was raising this present time available Theta up high enough so the person was not psychotic at the time he was operating with him, but was well up the tone scale-if temporarily. Of course he can go back and run out a prenatal engram! So by establishing a high-level ARC in present time with your preclear, or by establishing agreement with your preclear or by reinforcing whatever is happening with your preclear you can get a lot done on a case. This is validation reality-type processing. If any cases around here are bogged down and you find that you cannot budge them by running out engrams and running out secondaries-of course, you will really get them down if you do that-ask them to remember something that seems real. Ask them to remember a time when they were really in communication, when somebody was communicating to them, when they were communicating to somebody else, when they were seen, when they were heard, when somebody felt them, or when they saw, heard or felt something, or when they were talking to somebody, or when some music was playing at them or they were playing some music at somebody else-any of these communication factors, any affinity factors, any reality factors. Start picking up standard incidents. Somebody wrote in saying, "It is a funny thing, but I seem to be able to get grief off any case that comes along merely by telling them to go back to a happy incident in childhood. They go back to this happy incident in childhood and the next thing I know, they are spilling tears." So the conclusion was this: "The way to run a case is to send the individual back to the happy moment in childhood." That would be a very shortsighted look at this same theory. What you have done is send him back to the happy moment in childhood-but that is a deposit of Theta! And this case has been in a status quo, so you get that much Theta and it will attack the next level up the line. If it is grief that is ready to come off this case, grief will come off and start coming off right now. But if it isn't grief but fear, fear will come off. If it is apathy, then apathy will come off. Whatever it is that is going to come off will come off, if you pick up enough Theta and keep the case unbalanced. What I am trying to persuade you to do is simply to unbalance the case upward-not downward by making the person's Theta attack his entheta and nothing but entheta and preferably heavy enough entheta. For instance, you as an auditor say, "No wonder this girl has boils! Now, the thing to do is to find that engram in which she has the command or the situation which gives her these boils, and knock them all out and then this case . . ." That would be lovely if you could do that; but the funny part of it is, the way to get rid of these boils is to run all the times she went to dances. All of a sudden she hasn't got any boils anymore. Just bring her up the tone scale a little bit, above the tone level of that engram, and the engram will key out. Furthermore, it is a very "smart" thing to go around and point out people's aberrations to them. But it is a much smarter thing to do to point out what they do right. Pointing out their aberrations is toward succumb; pointing out what they do right is toward survive. Do you want your preclears to survive or succumb? Obviously, then, don't keep on driving them continually and in no other way than into entheta, because you will just drive them down toward succumb. Of course, because we know the mechanism all along the line, it is possible for us to free enough Theta to replace the Theta we have invested. If we just keep this up, then one day we get very lucky and all of a sudden hit two or three secondaries and the guy comes up the tone scale a little bit. But this is the tough way to go about it. The easy way to go about it is to get him way up the tone scale, make a 4.0 out of him and then process him. And if he sags and his tone goes down, bring him up and make a 4.0 out of him again and then process him-not by telling him he has to be a 4.0, but just by picking up all available Theta on his case. There are many ways to run pleasure moments. The ways to run pleasure moments are to find out what this person considers to be pleasure in the first place and then try to run something on that. Don't try to even run a perceptic-by-perceptic lock-scan through them. Start giving a person Straightwire, left and right-lots of Straightwire-on incidents where he was in communication, incidents where he was cheerful and so forth; keep on giving him more and more Straightwire and the first thing you know, this case will extrovert. You can actually work a person thoroughly enough this way-and keep him from attacking too much entheta-so he won't be interested in being processed. You can get him so high up the tone scale that for a while he is not interested in being processed. If you are working a person who can only be processed about twice a week, don't slug him into entheta a lot. Keep slugging him into Theta, and the first thing you know, he will be perfectly happy to be processed twice a week and he will be very stable. If you validate the analyzer-and these pleasure moments are analytical moments-the person will become more analytical. If you validate the reactive mind by saying "Look at what those engrams are doing to you! What's the phrase that causes that?" and so on-in other words, tackle nothing but entheta-you are saying, "The only thing important about you is entheta," and this person will get more and more reactive. He will associate more and more tightly, he will differentiate less and less, and he will become less and less analytical. If you want this person to be as high as possible on the scale, validate him. And the way you validate him is to pick up the highest level of ARC which is available on this case, because that's life. A, R and C all together make understanding. If you want to take a person who is stammering, for instance, you will have better luck by scanning and processing all the times when he was speaking well and all the times when he was comfortable, rather than the times when you found him stammering, because the first thing you know, if you pick up all these times when he was speaking well it will start kicking in sideways against his stammering anyway and he will find himself in these locks. Let him find himself in the locks, but you keep telling him to go to times when he was speaking well, when people appreciated him. That is all people need, that is all we want-just a little appreciation. This actually carries forward on an automatic basis: you pick up all the Theta you can get on a line and some entheta will show up and knock out. In other words, you will find the person in locks. Now, if you are having a pretty tough time and you are pretty enturbulated yourself, your tendency is to go toward entheta, not toward Theta. So I have given you this on an educational level. If you are sitting at 1.5 on the tone scale and you are trying to process some preclear, it is pretty hard for you to believe that what is causing all of his trouble is not anger- "Anger must be the thing which is causing his trouble. Who got angry? When was he angry?" In other words, the auditor gets interested in the incidents of the preclear which are in the auditory own personality band. A 1.0 auditor gets interested in the covert things that have happened. The 1.1 will be interested in all the times a woman was raped. But the auditor who is way up the scale will be interested in all the times somebody kissed her very satisfactorily. So, just as a matter of education, in bringing the person up the tone scale, validate Theta and bring them on up. Don't keep plunging at entheta and throwing them on down. I am not trying to tell you not to run engrams. You are going to find yourself wrapped up in engrams when you start picking up Theta on a case. The trouble you will get into, however, is resolved by finding more Theta, not by putting more horsepower into your voice when you are auditing. Find more Theta rather than snap your fingers more often. A quiet and gentle approach is fine. There was one preclear I had to audit one time, and I had to be mad all the time I was auditing him; he was right there at 1.5 on the band. We got along in perfect agreement and the case was resolving. I had to do this because his pleasure moments were all angry moments. The greatest pleasure moment that we ran out before this person really started to come up the line and become a human being was one time when he was a little kid and he got sore at Papa and Mama and he told them off! They were so shocked and stunned that all they did was make him sit on a hot stove! This was the first contact-an actuality and reality-we had had on Papa and Mama, and after we got rid of that incident we went on and found other incidents when he felt like getting mad toward Papa and Mama, and we kept picking up odd punishments and so on. The case didn't resolve well before we started to conceive that a pleasure moment could be anger. That is one for you to remember. I wish you would take very much to heart this business of trying to validate the preclear The Foundation, for instance, would have a much happier atmosphere if you were doing that. Every student here would be climbing on up the tone scale. Even the professional auditors might be cheerful and happy! It might get to such a pass that if we had enough people here and everybody was high enough up on the tone scale continually, and we had the entheta lines all compartmented into some desk drawer where they would just disappear, then a person could walk in the front door and go way up the tone scale-boom! It would be like Manning's Coffee Shop in Seattle. They have a coffee roaster. Now, they could get all the roasted coffee they wanted someplace else, but they have a little coffee roaster that sits right in front of the window. It is not there for display; it is there for a high-powered electric fan to blow across and straight out into the street. And people who walk by on the sidewalk pick up that aroma, and they go in and buy coffee and sandwiches. That is what we want to do with the Foundation, but doing it with Theta. You will find out that it is much easier to process via Theta than it is to process via entheta, and you don't get nearly as enturbulated and you won't spin in nearly as fast. I am appealing to those people who want to go on surviving, and there are those few who do wish to do so. By the way, you don't find someone on the tone scale by walking up to him and saying "A number will flash when I snap my fingers. Where are you on the tone scale? (snap!)" This doesn't work very well. The best way to do it is to talk to somebody for a moment and find out where he is on the tone scale. Don't then try at that moment-particularly if you have just got a couple of minutes-to charge at the incident which is making him feel sad. This is a terrific thing to resist, I know. For instance, a person is walking around with a little bit of a headache, and you say, "What happened?" He says, "Well, I had a terrific argument with a streetcar conductor this morning, and the next thing you know, a cop came up and scolded me, and you know, I've had this splitting headache ever since!" Don't at that moment say "Let's go back. Now, what did the streetcar conductor say?" It is a late incident-a late lock-and the next thing you know, if you run it a couple of times, the person says, "I remember another argument I had with a streetcar conductor." If you want to really mess him up, you say, "How about that? What was the first phrase of it? (snap!)"-take its reality down and get it by flashes, don't let the guy remember it; pick it up quick, get the file clerk to say so and then insist it is right if the file clerk says so. There is nothing more unreal than this to the person. You can get the flash of what this fellow said. But if he can't remember it straight, you have got no business in that incident! So-still trying to run this thing-you say, "All right. Let's go to the first time, then, that this streetcar conductor argued," and the guy runs out this vague, unreal incident and you say, "Is there an earlier time when you had an argument with a streetcar conductor?" "Oh, yes." And then the next thing you know-"My God! It's birth!" Then you have him really fixed! There he is, in birth, and he will gain thirty or forty pounds in weight. So that is not quite the way you go about it. The way to go about it is to say, "What were you doing before the argument?" "I was looking in a hockshop window." "What did you see in the hockshop window?" "Well, there were some guns!" You have found a 1.5; you say, "What kind of guns were they?" "Oh, they were good guns! There was a shotgun there with a barrel that big! " Talk to him about it for a moment and then find another incident; go off on guns if you want to-anything-only stay away from that argument. Then, all of a sudden, he says, "By the way, this morning I had an argument with this conductor, and we were standing there and a cop came . . . My headache is gone." Furthermore, you don't even have to tell people to come to present time. This tells them they are out of present time, so don't bother. Just tell them to go to moments closer to present time-in other words, "What did you have to eat this morning for breakfast?" That brings them up to today.