A Bright, Resistive Case (7ACC 540705)
Series: 7th Advanced Clinical Course (7ACC)
Date: 5 July 1954
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
Okay. Now, let's go a little bit further but not in quite as positive a direction and let's discuss some cases. One of the very resistive cases, extremely resistive cases ran into lately, ran something like this: Person apparently was just a whiz at knowingness. You know, they just seemed to have—just get a lot of things, birrrrt, you know? And they—every once in a while you run into a case like this—and yet all his past was a complete tapestry which sat always before him, the facsimiles all dovetailed and scrambled and interwoven.
And this case knew he was not in good shape, but yet he couldn't say wherein. And auditors were unable to do anything very much about this case because the case, obviously, was so very bright— and very, very bright, very clever and very personable and yet at the same time, case wouldn't move.
What was wrong with this case? Well, you would have had to have listened just a little closer than auditors were listening to have done anything very desperate about this case. This knowingness of which we speak was all a sort of a mass shotgun consideration. If you were to have asked him, "Where would your mother be safe?" (an 8-D question), why, his answer would have been in this class: "Well, anyplace where my father wasn't around."
And you would say, "No, give me a spot—a spot where your mother would be safe?" "Well, h, anyplace there—anyplace there. I remember a lot of locations where she'd be perfectly safe. Just as long as Father wasn't around, why, she'd be perfectly safe. Ha, ha, ha." You'd say, "Well, now, give me a spot where your mother would really be safe. Now designate this spot."
"Oh, just practically everywhere. Everywhere under the sun."
Yes, this case was very, very bright. There was no doubt about it whatsoever—unless you were to have asked him wherein he was so bright. And there you would have run aground. You would have run aground right at that point. You would have found possibly a superficial cleverness, but as far as brilliance, creative brilliance is concerned, it just wouldn't have been there, that's all.
And this case could fool you as an auditor because the social responses and patter of the case could be so expert, so smooth, the lack of a surface time lag so manifest. You know, person merely seemed to be very reasonable. But unless you'd inquired about specific things, you wouldn't have found out that the case would have been entirely out of communication with you as an auditor—just entirely out of communication with you.
Here was the way communication was carried forward. Now, it'd take an auditor to see anything wrong with this type of communication. You would have said, "Where did you leave your car?"
"Oh, I—I generally park it on the street." Now, this out in the public is so common that that is a perfectly reasonable answer, but that is not what you asked him.
And if you'd ask him again, "Yes, but I asked you where you left your car."
And he'd say, "Well, it's perfectly safe to leave it on the street, isn't it?"
You'd say, "Where did you leave your car?"
"On the street!"
"Exactly where on the street did you leave your car?"
"Oh, outside."
"No, where exactly from here did you leave your car? Point in the direction where it is." Now, if this case was still spunky, this case would have gotten a bit mad at you at that point. But if this case were not spunky, the case simply, without much emotional change of any kind, would have at that moment rather slowly pointed out exactly where his car was parked.
If you'd ask him for several objects one after the other, where he had left them or what he had done with them, and made him each time point them out, this case would go anaten. Something would happen. This case would slide out of present time. This case is unable, actually, to specifically locate anything in time and space and yet this case would have missed almost anybody but an auditor—actually would have missed anybody but an auditor. This person would have seemed very reasonable.
The funny part of this case is, case had a lot of Dianetic processing. Did no good whatsoever—no change. Case had a lot of this and a lot of that—no change, no change. Case had even been subjected to CO2—no change; a slight worsening as time went on. But you wouldn't even have detected what this slight worsening was unless you had known the primary manifestation of the case.
The case had to go into blanket, dispersed considerations instead of locations. This case was so unable to occupy any position in the physical universe that all he could do was think about occupying one, and as close as he could come to thinking about occupying one was everywhere, see. I mean, all over.
Now, this case would have and did, by the way, take an old-time psychotherapist and almost drive him mad—Freudian analysis. This Freudian analyst finally came to the overt and downright conclusion that this case just didn't want to get well. Oh, no! This had nothing whatsoever to do with it. This case did want to get well. It just happened that psychoanalysis did not have the weapons. And the weapons did not exist in Dianetics to make his case well, but they exist in Scientology.
And w at would have made this case well was making him spot spots in space. Yes, but look, he can't remedy havingness. Yeah, he's that bad off that he can't remedy havingness. That's tough! "Locate some spots in space." See, that's just tough. You would have seen a great deal of change in this case on this.
Now, Opening Procedure by Duplication would have made enough progress on the case to have gotten him so that he would indifferently well follow orders. But Opening Procedure by Duplication itself would not have been an end-all process. You see, I mean, you simply couldn't have run him Clear on Opening Procedure by Duplication, simply because is case was so unwilling to take any responsibility for anything going on that he would set up machinery and shove off the responsibility for any action he was doing, so rapidly, that an auditor would be utterly dismayed in trying to keep this swamped out. See, I mean, he'd pick up Object One and inspect it and go to Object Two and then Object One and then Object Two and Object One and Object Two and then you would find out oddly enough that the auditor was doing it. You know, he was merely being obedient because this might make him well.
Was he holding Object One or Object Two? Nope. Nope, not him! And you would have pushed his attention back to that and back and forth and back and forth and then he would have slid out from underneath you again.
Now, you are asking him to locate two objects, but he can predict (clever little guy that he is), h can predict which was the next object. So these two objects, being predictable, just become an everywhere blur to him.
Now, it's undoubtedly true that Opening Procedure by Duplication is terribly necessary on such a case, because he ordinarily finds it so dangerous to locate anything in time and space that he doesn't locate you, the speaker, who are giving him the command, much less locate the command you just gave him, much less do it! And therefore, the indicated process, by the way, is not Opening Procedure by Duplication, but 8-C, the first process that you would swing in on. And you would simply keep telling him what to locate and where to locate it and so forth until he got good enough, to a point of where he could make up his mind about a spot, you know, locate a spot and then get that. Part (b) there is the most important part of Opening Procedure of 8-C, Part (b). Make him select the spot and then put his finger on it and then let go of it. Don't ask him to make a decision. Any decision that he made would get you into a lot of chatter and so forth on it. And he would have required a lot of that before he could have gone on.
Opening Procedure by Duplication—imagine this—it would be far too tough for this case. And now by test that's the way it worked out. I mean, the case was not in a sufficient level of reality and he would simply go into a sort of an intellectual anaten about the fourth or fifth time he picked up an object consecutively, you see, one object to the other. He'd just go, "Nah, the auditor's doing it or somebody else is doing it. I don't have anything to do with it." He'd sort of get the idea that something is walking back and forth there, but it wasn't him. Too tough for him, in other words; he's too far from being able to duplicate.
8-C's Part (b) was found to be very, very workable with this case. But the funny part of it was, the auditor who was doing it continued to be taken over by the obvious cleverness, the obvious brilliance of this case. The auditor kept being fooled all the time. How can a person who is obviously this bright be actually incapable? And if a person is this bright and obviously this capable in life, and good line of chatter and so forth, how could this person fail to do Part (b) of Opening Procedure?
So the auditor took about one pass at it and then skipped it. And then did Opening Procedure by Duplication for several hours and then went on to some tougher processes.
Oh, no. That just wouldn't work at all, see. I mean, a tougher process would just be so unreal that your preclear would not be in communication with it, that's all.
The body, by the auditor's command (because the auditor would be the one controlling the body), would walk back and forth. And when you find Opening Procedure by Duplication isn't improving perception, it's because you, the auditor, are monitoring the body—not the preclear. So you want him to go around. And the toughest one which a case like this would be able to do would be locate these spots in space. That would be real tough for him. That's 8-D's Opening Procedure: "Locate a spot in space."
By golly, that would be, oh boy, he would just walk around and walk around and walk around and walk around before he could finally find a spot in that room which was divorced from an object or anything of the sort. All these spots were dependent on all these objects and so on.
Now, if he had to use his choice on locating spots in space, then, of course, a lot of Part (b), you see, of Opening Procedure of 8-C followed by Spots in Space would produce a considerable result,
Because here's the basic rule you're processing under (and don't you ever get yourself all befuddled with one of these cases: no progress, obviously brilliant, obviously able—obviously, you know), is they can't give you a location, they give you a catalog. They give you a generality. When they don't give you a location—you ask them a question which requires a specific answer and you get a generality. And you ask another question which requires a specific answer, you get a generality. That is being buttered all over the universe. You see, this person has viewpoints everywhere. They're scattered all over the place and they can't see with any of them. This is your case.
He can't have any space. A person who answers in generalities is simply under this consideration: He cannot have any space; he cannot remain anywhere. Anyplace he gets to, he'll have to leave. And in view of the fact he's depending upon facsimiles in order to remember, this is very unfortunate, since every time he found himself in front of a facsimile that would tell him what he was doing, why, of course, the first response he would get was, he'd have to leave it. Wonderful forgetting mechanism, isn't it? He'd just forget everything. He couldn't linger anyplace long enough to look. He sort of reminds you of somebody that was walking on hot eggs when eggs are twelve dollars a dozen. He just goes on in this basis.
Now, there is one of the most puzzling cases you will ever run into, so don't ever miss on it. You just ask this guy the question and he gives you this big generality. Qualification is another way that you could state this. He qualifier wildly and widely everything said—qualifies.
"Well, that would be true, of course, under these circumstances, of course, and the exception is so-and-so and so-and-so." He sounds like one of these basic sciences like—oh, I don't know, nuclear physics. They give a rule and then they give eighty-five exceptions to it. Has to qualify every statement.
You'll find this case is below a case which is simply hewing to the truth. There is above this level—there's a case: everything he says is true. It's true. Everything he says is true. He won't say anything that isn't true. He is just—you know, it's all true. He wouldn't tell you a part of the past that wasn't true. In other words, solid agreement with the MEST universe. You know, he has to have a solid agreement with what's actually happened, see?
That's the difficulty with that case where everything is true. He would have to tell you and would, ad nauseam, exactly what the incidents were of the night of June the 31st. If he could remember them, he would go into it lump of sugar by lump of sugars all through the tea party. And he would go on on this monotonous catalog if he could remember the details. Well, this other fellow has already—the one who is in a high level of generality and qualification—he's already agreed. He's gone through that stage and he's agreed with the physical universe 100 percent and found it didn't pay. Didn't pay. He wasn't even safe then. So he is inverted.
Above this truth level, you get the child's imaginings, the individual's imaginings, a creative artist's imaginings, so on. He just paints up a better day. He just lived through one and found it relatively unsatisfactory, so he just manufactures a much better day to have lived through. He's perfectly willing to do this; he knows what he's doing. And this is perfectly all right. A child does this, a creative artist does this, any intelligent person can do this. Nothing wrong with it.
But this other fellow—you see, then we go through this strata of "We've got to agree with it." And you ask the fellow what he did that day; he wouldn't think of it in terms of interesting you or something of this sort. He would start going painfully through exactly what he had for breakfast with long communication lags and arguments with himself, "Well, was this the morning he had the board meeting or was that Tuesday morning? Or was it the winter of the great snow? No, that was the winter of the big rain." You know, he's got to have all these facts all tied down and real accurate.
Well, below that level you get into an inverted lying, a compulsive lying where the individual actually doesn't know he's lying. See, he thinks he's agreeing with the physical universe. But, actually, it's dangerous to agree and he's drifted off of this basis and he just gives you what he thinks will satisfy you.
Well, this was a marked characteristic with the case I was just discussing. He would tell the auditor anything he would think would satisfy the auditor. He would do anything that he thought was satisfactory to the auditor. There was no object in anything he was doing other than sort of going through a parade of some sort or another.
When asked about his personal affairs or his personal life, he would string you a long song, but there wasn't a word of truth in it. But the funny part of it was, this individual thought it was true. So we get into self-determined untruth and other-determined untruth. People have never examined this basis of untruth to amount to anything because it's not nice to tell lies. You're supposed to be good little boys and girls. You're not supposed to lie. The truth of the matter is, your salvation depends upon your ability to lie. When you get up to those pearly gates and tell the truth, they'll say, "Well, here's another one," and probably kick you out. Anyway…
There is this level of self-determined untruth and other-determined untruth. Now, when we say other-determined untruth, we are into the field "hallucination."
What do we mean normally by truth? Normally we mean "agreed with other people's recalls on the subject." Actually, truth has a very narrow definition to the people at large in this society, very narrow definition. One of the most pauperized little skeletons you ever saw is this definition of truth.
It's "We all agreed on what really did happen," and that is truth, see? Actually, hadn't any bearing at all. Who cares whether we had spinach or tomatoes for yesterday's lunch? Well, after a while it'll become terribly important to an individual which he has had and he would rather cut off his right hand than say he had spinach when he really had tomatoes. This would, to him, be honor and ethics and communication lag. This would be about the way he would add it up.
So an individual goes from a completely romance luncheon with the Duchess of Sheba as a self-determined untruth (using an untruth), just a self-determined imagining of what were the events. He knows what the events were, but he's perfectly willing to corrupt, pervert, twist and snarl them and give something else, see? He could—"So what!" See, he's not enslaved to others' realities yet. Now he goes in through this band of where he compulsively has to tell the truth. Now we get to this lower band where we get "luncheon with the Queen of Sheba" but our person thinks he did have luncheon with the Queen of Sheba.
Now, here's the way you can catch this case off base. You can just get these levels of truth, you see, or you can just knock them off. You can recognize them any time, any place. You walk up to somebody and you say, "Do you know that the giraffes here don't have bow ties?" or something like this in a very concerned voice. And the individual will look at you and he'll do this awful struggle and you kind of see his brains wheel and creak and he will get rid of this datum far enough out from him long enough to say, "People wear four-in-hands these days!"
Now, there's your other truth. But you can watch this guy try to get his ejector mechanisms into line in order to give this datum you just handed him a push. That little datum that you gave him is heavier than he can handle. That's another person's untruth, see? And his world has an awful lot of hallucination in it. I mean, it's weird. No telling what he sees on the streets.
Now this boy, by the way, he might be in the bank taking care of your money very nicely. He might be the cook who serves up your food for lunch. He might be a very average—or the truck driver who just took that truck down the road at seventy miles an hour. The main point of it is, is society will use and hire anything, because it's all they got.
Now, all I'm trying to bring up with this case, and the general discussion this morning, is the social position, the educational attainments, the clothing and the ability of your preclear to perform, all of which looked at very lightly and with no depth or something, tell you nothing about a case. His educational attainments, his social responses, his abilities to perform, actually his ability to go through some of these drills in a cursory fashion, you see—I mean, just a light look, these items tell you nothing. Don't ever get fooled.
You have rules which tell you about cases and these rules are such things as communication lag. This fellow could do Opening Procedure of 8-C Part (b) very nicely. You know, he does it very well. He does it very well. And then you ask him to spot a spot in the space of the room. "Oh, no." Ask him to spot another one and you find out he was doing Opening Procedure of 8-C on your drill. If you just said to the body, "Now, do a jig," it probably would have started to have done a jig before he checked it—too much motion. The only reason he would have checked it would have been too much motion.
The actual reality of the walls of this room are so poor—so, so poor that he couldn't have told whether he was spotting a spot in space or not. You could have done this with this preclear: you could have made him make several repetitive motions and then get him to tell you the difference amongst these motions. You could have gotten him to go around—all around the environment trying to find something he could get into communication with. You could have done a lot of things with this case.
Now, they might apparently perform very well on an Opening Procedure, you see—I mean, not much lag or anything. Well, of course, they perform well. You're sitting there jerking the marionette strings. Why shouldn't they perform well?
Well, now here's this case that really does perform well on Opening Procedure. What's the difference between these two cases? One is running self-determinedly, the other is running on an other-determinism. You know, you, as you come up Tone Scale, really don't find any difficulty in monitoring another body, no real difficulty in monitoring another body. You can sit around and look at a body rather—ah, you don't have to look at it very hard either. You can think the word "jig" at it hard enough and get the idea of that body jigging and you'll see the guy start to shuffle his feet and get very restive and very upset.
The point is, the criteria under which you're acting here—this consideration with qualification instead of location—that is the surest one to pick up one of these cases. You know, he gives you lots of shotgun considerations when you ask him for some specifics. No direct answers, see? When you get into that one, why, you're no auditor at all unless that suddenly looms up before you as one of the most interesting things you've seen about this case—ah, ha, ha—one of the most interesting things you've seen about the case.
Fellow was well dressed, he evidently could do 8-C very easily. He's just fine. He's going through it. Everything is fine and all of a sudden you ask him, "Well, now, where did you park your car?"
"Well, I always park my car on the street." See? Oh? This is real interesting. "Let us know more about this car," you say to yourself. Yes, let's know some more about some other things, too. "How long have you lived here, around this immediate vicinity?" You'll get some interesting answers to such questions as that. Just—they're questions which require specific monosyllabic answers. And you get these big supergeneralities. "Well, actually my family has been in this area for some time." That wasn't what you asked him. Now, this is so common in this society, this is so common in the society that it passes for social chitchat.
Now, I told you earlier I was going to talk to you about reality and unreality and I really skipped it a little bit. The very obvious thing which we're confronted with—with degree of reality—is the ability of the individual to be there establishes his reality. That can be stated two ways: The ability of the individual to be there or not to be there at will; the ability to have other people there or not to have other people there, objects there or not there—establishes his reality. He makes things unreal when his ability to locate things in time and space is altered—overcome by other-determinism. See that? And that is unreality.
Now, the drill which solves reality and unreality is the drill I gave you in the first half-hour, Spotting Spots in Space. And that's what resolved this case that I've been talking to you about. That solved this case. Spots where he had been but didn't want to be, and spots where he wanted to be but couldn't be. And we just spotted these and spotted these. This poor guy couldn't remedy havingness; he got sick at his stomach and so forth, but it solved the case.
His level of reality picked up so markedly that he found out that he was willing to be in the auditing room, at which moment it became real and present time became real. That in essence is the criteria on present time: wanting to be there and being there.
CERTIFICATES OF DIANETICS AND SCIENTOLOGY
A BRIGHT, RESISTIVE CASE PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT 8 7ACC-11A - 05.07.54