This is an essay on understanding, but not just the understand you may be familiar with. This is understanding on a whole different level.

Let me give credit where credit is due: This essay springs from a video done by Trey Lotz. I won't cite the video here, since Trey is not Source. I'd prefer, uncharacteristically, to cite the actual source material in the original lecture.

Robert Heinlein, in his science fiction novel *Stranger In A Strange Land* coined a term called "grok". It is a verb, and it means, more or less: "understand it so thoroughly that you merge with it and it merges with you". So it's a level of understanding of something not normally encountered or practiced in life. It could be thought of as not just as "understanding" but as "total" understanding. Keep this in mind as you read along. We don't use this term in Scientology and I'm not encouraging its use unless you just want to. But it does illustrate a point I want to make.

For years or decades, I've attempted to sort out what is "understanding". I know the definition of it. And I can see it in practice. But I've also noticed that there are distinct levels of it. And most of the "understanding" I see in practice is of a lower level than what seems to be theoretically possible for any given concept or idea.

Recently, I came across the LRH reference that explains all this. It is the lecture from the "Study Tapes" called Training: Duplication (SHSBC #104, 24 Jan 1962). It's been about 40 years since I did the Student Hat, so I hadn't really thought about this lecture in decades. But it is worthwhile to revisit it, as it clears up something I'd had attention on for 40+ years.

This lecture deals, in general, with training auditors. The first more than half the lecture talks about the jump from not knowing to actual duplication of a datum. It talks about all the obstacles to actually getting a thetan to duplicate a datum. All the obstacles a person or trainee will introduce before they finally duplicate a datum or fact.

Example:

You say, "There is one Christmas in a year."

And the person would say, "Of course I know there's only-- any damn fool knows there's only one-- what-- what is this all about?"

And you say, "Well, all right. Good. But-- just-- just-- let's just repeat this after me, 'There is one Christmas in a year.'"

"Well, there's no sense in it. Of course everyone knows that there's one Christmas in a year," and so forth.

LRH is talking here about a simple datum, unrelated to anything, and an attempt to simply get someone to just duplicate it. He gives several examples like this, and the various non sequitur responses one might typically get from a person. But they all add up to a failed duplication of the actual datum, and how you sometimes have to repeat the operation quite a number of times to get the person to just duplicate it.

Now, people who don't like this and are still enturbulated on it say, "Well, you're making a slave there," you see, "that's slavery," or something like that. "That's something very deep-seated and very significant. There's something very significant about this operation. If you can get a person to do this, he of course thereafter is a slave, see, obviously!" --except the data is never borne out. The only time you really get a person to talk back sensibly is when he can do this, because he can observe what he's talking back about; and up to that time you get people talking back about things that aren't happening, and that's very disconcerting.

I don't want to venture too far into politics, but if you're following politics at all in this day and age, you're seeing an awful lot of this exact kind of talk from people who clearly have no concept of what they are talking about. An example of this from education today: When I was a kid, in about second grade, we learned our addition and then our multiplication tables. Those were tables of all the whole numbers from 1 to 10 added together, and then all the whole numbers from 1 to 10 multiplied together. Pure memorization. But pretty handy later in math. Today, they don't do this. They make the poor kid calculate these answers each time they encounter problems that involve addition or multiplication of whole numbers 1 to 10. Why? Because we don't want to make "slaves" out of these poor kids by making them memorize things. And if one of them happens to come up with 2 + 2 = 5 on a test, why, we give them a ribbon for participation, because Lord knows we don't want to hurt their precious little feelings.

By contrast, when I was on staff, we mustered together every day in the hall, and "chinese schooled" the "awareness characteristics" on the org board, departments 1 to 21. That is, the Cope Officer would point at each awareness characteristic on the org board in turn and we would, in unison, recite what they were. After a week or so, you knew them all cold. These awareness characteristics are mighty helpful if you want to understand how an org board directs products from one end to the other. And remarkably, none of us got turned into slaves as a result. We were not asked to understand or explain them, just duplicate them. If you'd done your "staff statuses" (basic staff courses in an org), you'd already listened to a lecture called "Org Board And Livingness", which introduced the awareness characteristics and the org board built upon them.

Fair warning: I don't train auditors, and it's been many years since I trained anyone to do anything. But I have noticed precisely what LRH details here, not only in training people, but in observing the execution of simple daily tasks by people in numerous situations. And I've had occasion to argue with supposed "experts" on a variety of subjects (something I'm very prone to doing), which sadly has convinced me that most of these people really have no idea what they're talking about.

One of the things I've particularly encountered on many occasions is a sort of robotic execution. I've given the student/employee/whatever the how of doing something. And they do it, however imperfectly. Then something random happens. Suddenly they're lost. They can't cope. Why? Because, although they somehow managed to duplicate the actual steps I gave them, they utterly failed to also grasp the why or background or context I also explained to them. They failed to proceed to the next step, which was "understanding". They fixated on the rote steps, and utterly ignored the context in which those actions were taken. They could do the actions, but did not understand why I did them that way. I've often wondered what was going on in their minds. Did they think I took those particular actions in that particular order because it was Tuesday or something?

Some of this can come down to the following:

The entirety of study materials depends, then, on the material to be studied and the attitude with which it is being studied; the purpose and intention of the student. Now, if you were to go over Dianetic materials and Scientology materials just on the bases of "How can I apply this, and how can I use that, and how can I apply this?" and if you examined principally on the basis of, "All right, we've got Bulletin number 642"... "How do you apply this?" ... You just read it. I bet you would get an awful look of horror in many a student's eye. He has read it to be examined on, he hasn't read it to apply it.

So the first condition is that the person doesn't know the datum. Next you must get them to just duplicate the datum. But there is more.

"Full understanding" appears to proceed in three distinct steps.

Your first is noncomprehension, non-duplication, confusion. Your second one is merely the ability to duplicate. And after that, we get the ability to comprehend, to understand, and therefore get ability to observe. Judgment lies in that field and this is the road to judgment.

And some of you haven't noticed that you've gone through having been taught it. You've come up on the other side of the thing into a realization of it, not because you've been taught it, but because you realize it. And this is what we know as "making it your data". You've often said this to a student but some of you perhaps have not looked too closely on what we mean by "make it your data".

In other words, he has to go along the line of duplication of the data to an understanding of the data, and with that understanding of the data he has the final step, which is the realization, totally self-determined, of the existence of the data. And when you're dealing with truth, you always have this fourth step. You have the ability to realize and perceive.

Thus, in training, it's not enough for the student to simply duplicate the data. He must be led to understand and ultimately exercise judgment in the field of execution.

Routine and rote, in other words, are a poor substitude for understanding. And the place I'm trying to get you to is a place where you can process by realization, process by comprehension, process by exercise of judgment.

I can attest personally that this was always LRH's intent. Ron was typically against giving auditors rote commands for auditing processes, because he felt that in doing so, it would allow or cause auditors to fall into a sort of rote treatment of the session, the case and the PC. And that was the last thing he wanted. Instead, he wanted auditors who could think on their feet, and deal with the PC in front of them in a thoughtful, expert fashion, not like some guy who'd just done a bunch of drills. (Can you say, "GAT"?)

And now we get to my main point. I've seen an awful lot of robotic execution. And I've even seen execution with understanding. But one thing I've also seen is a lot of execution without that third, superior aspect of being able to exercise judgment in an area or activity. And I've seen it in spades in Scientology, among people who should know better. (To be fair, it's worse in the wog world than in Scientology.) It's always sort of puzzled me until I listened to Trey's video and re-read this reference.

The "why" still puzzles me. How can you spend so much time studying something, yet not really be able to think with the data? How is it that you don't proceed to that next level of being able to exercise judgment, to perceive and realize? I still don't know the answer. Perhaps the answer does lie in studying for the test instead of studying for application. I don't know. If I find out, I'll let you know.

Being able to cite sources for information appears to be the highest skill many Scientologists ever master. A person who can cite where things come from is considered a hero in Scientology, someone you stand in awe of. I mean, wow! But being an expert "citer" doesn't get PCs audited or students trained. The ability to act with the data, to apply it with full judgment is a vastly superior and worthwhile skill.

As you proceed along in life, try to note where you see this sort of superior execution and "understanding". And if you simply must stand in awe of someone, stand in awe of people who can do it in any given area. They aren't superior human beings. But they do have a superior "understanding". They grok.