Wandering about New York the first day, like a tourist from another planet, you can imagine! … Thay thought he heard the … to him … all too familiar droning of monks mumbling mantras on the corner of Fifty-sixth Street and Madison Avenue. Like a man in a trance, Thay made straight for this old rotten building … 563 Madison, I think it was … it’s since been torn down. What Thay really was hearing was the first murmurings of GRAMMA. You’ve heard of them … No? Well, if Thay Himmer and I hadn’t put a spoke in their prayer wheel, GRAMMA might have swept the U.S. with its simple techniques for creating human ability out of … so to speak … nothing, nothing at all. Any two humans you put into communication can create this increased ability to a measurable extent! Human ability could put the atom back in its place … if we harness it … and the fact that GRAMMA techniques really do work. I’ll have occasion to show you, Hassan, GRAMMA really had something going … so I took it from them. That’s one of the power factors I’m depending on right now in Africa. Empires are taken … not given. Nobody ever gives you or even sells you power or special knowledge in this world … or the next, I suspect. You have to take it … steal it to make it your own. That’s how the Masters play the Game. Real Players don’t need any Guides. You grab what you want in the Big Bazaar: if you’re feeling good you toss out a buck, saying: “Keep the change, my good man! Keep the change.” Thay didn’t do that: instead he joined up with GRAMMA and was playing their game, until I came along and snatched him up out of there … out of the marketplace of Madison Avenue where Thay Himmer the Seventh simply didn’t belong!
GRAMMA was a splinter-group of something called “Logosophy” … a do-it-yourself psychology system put together by a group of more or less anonymous professors working for the Ford Foundation … who later disowned it. Essentially, it was … is, rather … a compilation of simple-sounding communication techniques which can be exercised by any two people willing to play. You can do “Gramma-calls” … reciprocal word combinations batted back and forth, even over the telephone, for hours. You can do “Gramma-rubs” … two people touching each other in turn … at home or even in the office. As a weapon of wordsmanship, too, Gramma is great! You can “grammatize” people in business … at home in your family … or out at the beach. GRAMMA founded itself as an organization when a group of go-getters on Madison Avenue read the book. They tried the techniques out on each other … and were absolutely overwhelmed … as I was to be later in Switzerland where I first came across it. In New York, they rented this condemned building and … by the time Thay Himmer happened along … they had the entire office-space humming like a Tibetan lamasery. They needed competent new operators to handle the hundreds of people who came in at fifty dollars a head for a twenty-minute half hour of chanting back and forth at each other: “Hello Yes Hello!”
It’s so simple, it sounds almost simpleminded but “Hello Yes Hello” is the ineluctable law of all verbal communication which most people fumble just as your Moroccan did with me on the phone, tonight: “Halloo Yass Halloo!” … he said it so loud and so often he couldn’t hear one single word I was saying. Just think how often that happens! Haven’t you noticed how often the people you talk to don’t even hear a word that you’re saying … really hear you: take it in? People just rattle on about themselves like squirrels in a cage … and you know it. Most people communicate very imperfectly and some not at all … like my first husband, Peter Paul Strangleblood. How do you get them into communication? Well, it’s so simple, it’s almost … sinister! No … I’m only joking. You do it like this:
First, I say to you, “Hello” … that’s to initiate this particular communication. What I do is I offer to communicate.
Now, you must answer back to me: “Yes” … a signal which shows you’ve accepted my offer. This move … in our discipline, Hassan … constitutes the first half of a Link.
Then, you say back to me: “Hello” … to show me you are willing to communicate … to go on communicating with me.
Therefore, I accept your fine offer very positively with: “Yes.” The First Link, Hassan, has been made in a chain a lot longer than from here into any next week. All Eastern philosophies are hung up on the Word … “In the Beginning was the Word.” Well … I’ll tell you the Word, Emperor Hassan! The Word which created the world is Hello!
GRAMMA initiates … and I use the verb very thoughtfully … initiates anybody and everybody into an area where communication is clear … and very often for the very first time in their lives. The results are usually spectacular yet it’s really quite simple:
You sit like this … face to face, toe to toe … no creaky old Freudian couch in the corner … I ask you to situate yourself spatially … to look around and see just where you are sitting right now. You’ve done that? Good! Now make yourself aware of the two corners of the cave above and behind your head. Take a look around, if you like. You’ve got them? Good! Now, we start in with “Hello Yes Hello,” and we’ll run it back and forth for the next twenty minutes … half an hour. When I first tried this on Peter Paul Strangleblood, he screamed right away: “I can’t take this! I can’t take any more of this! Stop!” Now, just from reading the book, I realized Peter Paul had coughed up one of his “ingrams” … the ingrown word-clots which made it impossible for him to take anything out of life … and, partly, because he put so little into it, he was simply not in communication with life at all. That therapeutical side of the business is what first got GRAMMA in trouble with the AMA … and then they had a rumble from Internal Revenue so they incorporated as a church: The First Grammatic Church, practicing Grammatology. That’s when Thay walked in. He saw right away what brand of word-magic they were up to … and he laughed. He laughed to himself just like one Farout magician laughs when he meets another Farout magician coming down the Farout jungle path. They both sit down … facing each other … and have a contest to see which one can make the more horrible scary face. When Thay began showing them their own business at GRAMMA, they sat back simply stunned. It was like a bunch of businessmen watching someone spread out a million-dollar invention with no possible patent protection. Thay assured them he couldn’t teach them to walk on water in a week but he could and would teach anyone in Grammatology who wanted to know, how to walk over fire … they did it all the time in the Farouts as the very first lap of any initiation, he said.