Auditing by SOP 8-C, Formula H (2ACC 531220)
Series: 2nd Advanced Clinical Course (2ACC)
Date: 20 December 1953
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
This is the second lecture of December 20th—December 20th, second lecture.
Tonight we're going to take up just a little bit more about auditing. It do seem to me—and as I browse around and park an ear against this and that, and listen to what is being done, I can tell you—that here and there it's not being done at all; simply because the auditor has overlooked a few of the most fundamental fundamentals imaginable.
Now, it's too bad that a technique which is capable of doing something for a case—it's too bad when that technique is used without understanding. Because when he uses it without understanding what it's supposed to do, why, he doesn't find out whether or not the preclear's doing it. And if the preclear's doing something peculiar, if the auditor doesn't understand what the technique is supposed to do, then he will never know whether or not the preclear's doing it peculiarly.
And let me assure you that a preclear is the world's greatest dodge. I tell you that comets don't dodge the way preclears dodge. You've practically got to—and excuse my colloquialism—but you almost have to rub their noses in it sometimes.
Now, let us see what reach and withdraw do, in terms of the clarification of understanding—Formula H.
There is no step in SOP 8-C, even though it has eight steps, which has reach and withdraw in it. But, you could write on the border—you know, vertically— you could write on the border, all the way up the border, "reach and withdraw," see? And on the other border, opposite, you could write "doingness," you see, and you'd just about have it. There aren't specific doingness steps. All of the steps are doingness. And there isn't a specific reach and withdraw step, because all the steps are reach and withdraw.
Now, there are several other definitions that could be scattered around, but they happen to be included in SOP 8-C. Amongst them, the definition of space, which is "viewpoint of dimension." A person has as much beingness in terms of the MEST universe as he can occupy space. He has as much beingness as he has space. He has as little beingness as he doesn't have space. He's having as much difficulty as he doesn't have space. And here we go. Viewpoint of dimension.
Well, that could be scattered around there pretty liberally too, but doingness would be on one border and reach and withdraw on the other border.
Now, why doingness? Well, if the preclear isn't doing the steps, the process isn't going to do him any good. There isn't any specific step in there which devotes and dedicates itself to doingness. You notice there's beingness in there, and there's havingness, but there's no step that says doingness. That's because all the steps have doingness in them. So he's supposed to do the steps.
And you as an auditor are supposed to make sure he does the steps. But you as an auditor have some understanding of what highest denominators you're working with. And amongst those denominators is this one of reach and withdraw; and the other one, space is a viewpoint of dimension.
Now, if you keep that pretty firmly in your grasp, it's almost impossible for your preclear to do something wild and peculiar on you. Almost impossible for him to do so, as long as you check him up and get what he's doing every little while as he does it.
Now, you—just don't look for just communication changes. That's the most important thing there is to look for, but every time you tell a preclear to do something, you better find out immediately afterwards how he's doing it. Because let me assure you, he's probably doing it wrong because that's what's wrong with him—he's wrong. That's the most thing that's wrong with him— he's wrong.
And so in view of the fact that he knows he's this wrong, when you tell him, "All right. Now take that pencil and duplicate it. Get a picture of it and then duplicate it again, and then duplicate it again and duplicate it again," it's always a good thing to say immediately after you've done that—very early in the processing till you got this fellow real settled down—it's pretty much to the point to say, "Now, what did you do?"
"Oh," he says, "I—I did what you said."
Oh no, that's not good enough. You want to know exactly what he did. Well, there was this pencil lying out in front of him there and you said to duplicate it. All right. The first thing you want to know is, is where did he duplicate it? And why do you want to know where he duplicated it? Space is a viewpoint of dimension. This has everything in the world to do with his case. Where'd he duplicate it?
You, knowing where he's supposed to duplicate it, naturally assume he duplicated it there. But that's because I've pounded around and hammered around and we've talked around to a point of where we've driven you somewhere in the direction of being right about this, see? Well, this preclear hasn't been under this duress, and so the place he duplicated it was in his head.
And you say, "Well now, why didn't you—where did you get that picture?"
"Oh, in my mind. Of course, it's just my imagination."
Oh boy. You say, "Now—in your mind. Now I want you to put a picture of the pencil just like the pencil out there on the desk alongside of the pencil. That's where we want the duplicate."
"Oh, I couldn't do that," he'll say.
"Well, why don't you try it?"
"Well, there isn't any second pencil there."
Well, you say, "Well, now let's see. Give me some places in the room where there isn't any pencil."
Now, he'd say, "Well, over in the corner and over there and over there. There are three places—no pencil in these three places," so on and so on.
And you again would pull a blank on this case and could go on by rote if you didn't do this: "Now where did you say there weren't three pencils in this room? Now get the first place. Now where is that?"
"Well, I just know there aren't three other pencils in the room, there's just this one lying in front of me."
"No, no. I want you to tell me the three places in the room where there isn't any pencil."
"Well, three places—any of those places."
Now you say, "Give me them one at a time and give me ..." I was listening to one auditor's session here in particular, I really felt for her.
Female voice: I hope so.
You suddenly recognized it, huh?
Female voice: I hope you did. (laughing)
I was there Charlie, yes. (laughing)
Now, you'd say, "Now I want where the first pencil isn't."
"Well—well, there just aren't any other pencils in the room."
"Let's find out where that first pencil isn't."
"Well, it's not over there in the corner."
"Now, where do you mean 'over there in the corner'? Exactly what part of the corner do you mean?"
"Oh—oh, over in—anyplace on that side of the room."
What's this preclear doing? Reach and withdraw. This preclear's running like mad from his environment. He says, "No—all right, three pencils in the room? No, there's na-na-na. That's all there is to it. Ha!"
Of course there's none there. Boy, there's no room there either. This person is withdrawing so madly from everywhere, that the thought of putting something someplace or not being someplace, of course, is beyond the person's capability until you really coax them.
Now, you remember, this place then—space is a viewpoint of dimension. A person has as much beingness as he has space. Okay. So this person can't find three places where it's not. Why? Because he can't contemplate any part of this room. Cannot contemplate any part of this room. That's interesting, isn't it? So this preclear looks and acts like a jumping jack to you. That's about as bad off as they can get. Why? Just any time they put their thought or concentration on one point or another, they've got to come off of it—right away, quick.
Now, that is just withdraw. Every time they perceive, they have to withdraw. If they perceive, they have to withdraw. So they say, "Oh, there's no other pencils in the room."
See, just the thought of having to look out through the room makes them go ssllrrp back. See? That obvious to you? Space is a viewpoint of dimension.
Now, let me give you something here about this technique that you might not have suspected. This technique, as the technique which puts emotion in things, builds space for the preclear. It builds space for the preclear. By finding places where something is not, he finds places. So it isn't enough just to get someplace where it's not; get the place, too.
So this individual that you're processing along, you say, "All right. Now give me three places where you're not in the room."
And he says, "Mm, mm-hm. Okay."
"And give me three more places where you're not in the room."
He says, "Mm-hm, okay."
And you say, "Three more places in the room where you're not."
"Mm-hm, okay."
And you don't say anything, about that time? I don't care if he's been working well an hour before, you better check up.
You say, 'What were the three places where you weren't in the room?"
"Well," he says, "well, there's—no place in the room, I'm not anyplace in the room."
This person is unwilling to make space and this is a covert method of making him make space—telling where things are not. Make space in the past, make space in the present, make space in the future by getting exact places, geographical locations. Make him make space if you have to kill him.
When you get places are not, things are not, you want to know the place. You don't want to know whether he knows they are there or not. You want the place they're not. This case will surprise you—just amaze you sometimes—if you start to check up.
Now, here's this perfectly orderly old fellow, and he's just so nice and he's just so mild, and is nothing wrong with him, except he just doesn't happen to be able to see, that's all. And he's got lumbago and sciatica and he's had bad stomach trouble, of course, and his recreation is beating a cat or something. But he's a nice, mild fellow. And you say to this fellow, "Now give me three places where you are not."
You, in your innocence, suppose that the quietness with which this person is seating himself in that chair has anything to do with what he's doing. So— and this is, by the way, why cases very often start slowly. It takes an auditor a long time to get onto this preclear. He processes him for five hours and then he finds out the preclear isn't doing anything like what he said. Of course, the preclear thinks he's obeying, he thinks he's being very compliant.
So we ask this nice old man, we say, "Give me three places in the room where you're not."
"Okay," he says.
Well listen, he hasn't looked at one of them. And the essence of the technique is make him look and see whether or not he is there. Because he doesn't look there real quick and he knows real fast, for the good and excellent reason that he better not look too close because if he does, he'll find himself. That's one of the things that'll happen to him.
So if he can just kind of—sort of skate through life without looking at anything, he's all right, see? That's the way he figures. If he doesn't pay any attention to anything, nothing will pay any attention to him. He's withdrawn.
Now, there's what's known as a negative withdrawal. The fellow withdraws, withdraws, withdraws, withdraws, withdraws and then he gets in too tight, and the more he withdraws, he starts to go out again. That's what's known as an inversion. And you see that? Everything turns upside down. Then after that, as an auditor, you process him and you say, "All right, put some emotion in the wall." The second he pushes out toward the wall, he gets it back in his face— I mean instantly.
Any motion out—every time he starts to make a motion out, he gets a motion in. You know, he starts to pull something in, it goes out. This is real peculiar, he thinks. Well, he's reversed on reach and withdraw. That means other-determinism has taken over, but completely. The only thing he can dramatize is other-determinism. And other-determinism, of course, reaches when he withdraws and when he reaches, it withdraws. So, of course, when he starts to reach, he withdraws. And then when he starts to withdraw, he reaches. And this will baffle him sometimes. Well, it better never baffle you as an auditor—the fellow's just inverted.
You keep him working until he can actually make something go in the same direction he intended it to go. You can do it in many ways, by having masses of things go, or by getting down to the most basic techniques, such as this very technique of "Where are three places in the room where you're not?"
So he looks over in the corner finally, under your browbeating and your hammering and your insistence, he looks over in the corner. And he—this time he inspects it rather critically—you told him to. And you get an entirely different reaction out of exactly the same question, exactly the same technique.
Fellow looks over and he says, "I—I don't think I'm in that corner. And no, my body probably isn't in—well… No, it's not in that corner." You threw his guard. And now he's got to produce. He's got to look at these corners.
You'd get another reaction if you told him to close his eyes and find the three corners. Tell him to close his eyes, "Now give me three places in the room where your body's not." He's lost.
"Room, what room?"
See, it's all gone out of focus and direction and location. See that? So we get a constant and recurring problem with every preclear, and that problem eventually boils itself down to whether or not the auditor makes sure he's getting a communication/perception change out of the preclear. That's one, see? And it's the most important of it, but possibly—hardly of the same order of magnitude, since one assumes if he's checking for communication changes, that the preclear is doing what he asked.
And the other important job of the auditor is to find out what the preclear's doing. And it isn't going to make any sense to the auditor unless he knows what's supposed to be happening with the techniques. Well listen, by the time a fellow has looked at corner A and corner B and corner C of a room, he's made a piece of space.
Covertly, yes, but he's—nevertheless, he's got a piece of space out there. It doesn't stay there, he didn't form it, he knows nothing about viewpoints, he knows nothing about the mechanics of what you're doing at all; but they happen to be the mechanics he's operating on. So you don't have to worry about whether he knows it or not, he'll ask you, "What are you doing this for?"
Well, you tell him, "I'm doing this because I'm doing it. Seems like a good idea to me, it'll seem like a good idea to you after a while, let's keep it up."
So you say, "Give me three more places in the room where you are not. All right." It's all right for him to know he's not at these places of the room. It's all right for him to know this; nothing wrong with that, except it'll never get anyplace. Because he's going on a thin-ice sort of a thing, very often. He's skating along on thin ice, and if he answered your questions directly, he'd crack through. And he'd go into exactly what you want him in, so that you can get off this thin ice. You're trying to show him he isn't going to fall through into ice-cold water. He's just so scared of water that isn't there, that he skates all the time, very thinly.
I've seen some of the most obliging preclears be obliging up to the time where I finally hauled out an E-Meter, and they became something less than obliging. They became rather cross, rather irritated and rather impatient.
Why? Because I'd turn the dial to me and give them the electrodes and say, "All right, now will you please do what I was asking you to do?" The main reason I would do this is because the fellow's been processed for forty-five minutes without a communication changed. And I've suddenly realized he isn't even vaguely doing it, because he's not telling me what he's doing. This person is beyond the point of informing me what he's doing. He just isn't giving me the dope, that's all. This person is skating around and so forth, and maintaining a good, acceptable level of calm in the face of screaming hysteria which is liable to break through at any minute. Or he's trying to do this or he's trying to do that—but he's not doing what I asked him to do, that's certain. And even after I explained what I wanted him to do and he still said he was doing it, he was getting no comm change—well, that's the time for the E-Meter.
And then we find some of the most interesting things. We say, "Now, did you do the last process I gave you?" The E-Meter goes chonnk! It didn't move while he was (quote) "doing the process" (unquote).
And you say, "Well, now how about going over this again and let's do the process this time, huh? You know, just for sake of change and excitement?"
And so he starts, actually, this time, doing exactly what he was asked to do. And he does that just about so long, and he'll start to crack up. And he'll go into other things. And he's liable to track all over the track before you can get him out of it again. He gets in real miserable shape, one way or the other. And then comes right on out through it again, and all of a sudden gets calm. And boy, that's the first calmness he will have seen for a long time. He'll be calmer than he was before.
But he'll only get calmer than he was before if you as an auditor know what you're doing. You don't have to know too much—really, really, honest. In spite of all the billions and billions and billions of words I have poured into your poor ears—in spite of that, it boils down to different manifestations of the same thing.
You get the preclear to do something, that's the first thing. You get him to do something under direction. Well, believe me, that alone is one thing that a very few preclears, when you first get hold of them, do. They—it's one thing they hardly can do. It's about—practically all he can do, to do something under direction.
They have fought and used … Get this: exterior direction is their basic, number one randomity because exterior direction and other-determinism are the same thing. And you'll get preclears that have reversed on this.
So, exterior direction and other-determinism—same thing. Self-determinism, self-direction are the same thing.
Now, they're preserving the last tiny drop of their self-determinism as though it's a quantity, by heavily resisting exterior direction; which will of course—will inevitably gobble up that last drop of self-determinism they're exerting. It's being encroached on them with every inch of effort that they put out. And so you're—you come along and you say, "All right. Now let's use some of this and build some self-determinism." Okay, well how do we do this?
Well, the guy's got to have some space and he's got to have—be able to reach and withdraw, and he's got to be able to face things in his existence and see that they aren't bugaboos and whatnots in the physical universe. There's a lot of things that he can do to do this. But the point is, the first thing he's got to do, is right under that heading "exterior direction." He has to be able to carry through a routine, rather simple, command and discover that it doesn't kill him. And there your processing begins.
Now, if he does it in a flighty fashion or a stubborn fashion, so on—we don't care. We just get him to do that one thing.
Now, it doesn't matter whether that's Step Ia or Step VIIa. We don't care what it was, we get him to do one thing. Ordinarily and routinely, just having a fellow walk around to the corners of the room would be one of the easiest ways in the world to get him in the groove, because he's taking exterior direction. He still thinks he's a body, and he's this and that, and you get him to go around to one corner of the room, to another corner of the room—he's taking, then, exterior direction. And he's found out that it doesn't kill him.
So he starts resisting just a little bit less. So he takes a little more exterior direction and he finds that doesn't kill him, so he resists just a little bit less on this business. You're getting him away from resisting other direction; because the—listen, the resistance to other direction is going to kill him. If he resists it hard enough, it's guaranteed it'll swallow him up.
Because that's all this universe can do—this universe can only engulf that which fights it. If it can't get somebody to fight it, it's done. It can only engulf that which fights it.
Now, an individual, then, has to be gotten into doingness on terms of direction. Let's just take this up in the most rudimentary fashion. And so we get "doingness" written all up the side column of SOP 8-C. It'd cover all the steps.
Essentially, the auditor does one thing—the auditor does one thing—which the preclear can never do for himself. The auditor can furnish exterior direction. The auditor can furnish something to resist the preclear, you see, which doesn't murder the preclear. And when the auditor gives the preclear direction and the preclear discovers that he's not dead thereby, you've jumped over the first hurdle of the case. And the more you do this, the better your preclear's going to get.
Now, there is what was being talked about in the most interesting nomenclature and terminology you've ever heard, read, seen or that could be invented, I'm sure. And that was in Freudian psychoanalysis. Dear old Freudian psychoanalysis. They said, "You've got to get—you've got to get the patient to transfer!"
And you said, "What was transference?"
"Well, that's where the will of the predenominator upgluts on the wittlewaf," and they went off into necromancy. I mean, there's no—was never any sound reason why they had to have this transference. As matter of fact, they were trying for something else. They thought they were trying to supplant something or the—they were trying to make the id boop the ego or something.
That's a very—I studied this stuff. I tell you, my respect for the world of learning, by the way, is, fortunately enough, no greater and less than my respect for my own learning—and it's not great. And when I was very, very young I studied Freud. And I'm afraid that I was too young, at that time, to appreciate with proper reverence what should be done about that. The same way with psychology, it—I didn't have enough reverence about this whole thing.
But that was one of the first things that struck me in it, was the very able teacher I had—he'd just gotten through studying under Freud—that was the one thing which I couldn't quite justify myself, was why I couldn't be told or find out what was being instructed. You know, that seemed to me—I was young, you know, and ignorant, of course, and it seemed to me to be a vital step in the process of instruction. It just seemed to me to be vital. And they kept telling me it wasn't vital. They said, "You'll understand when you get older," and I don't know, gave me a lot of other things, but they didn't tell me why this was.
Well, that's because they didn't know. And it's taken me an awful long time to try to figure out why this thing of transference occasionally was beneficial. Well, evidently they effectively, some time or another on the track, got the individual to realize that other-direction was not going to kill him.
Well now, the defeatist school of analysis finally got what they called "permissive psychotherapy." I talk about psychotherapy merely because it's a problem in handling people's minds—we might as well be talking about armies. Except this one really fits, because here was man trying to grope around and do something for man. And he was really trying to do something for man. Old Man Freud was dead set on it.
And so here he, however, was degenerated by people who were trying to study in that, by this: These people got down to what they called "permissive psychotherapy," which is nobody ever said anything except the patient. And the patient went on yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap for an hour, and dropped his money on the desk and left. And he came back the next time and said, "Yap, yap, yap, yap, yap" for an hour and left.
Now that's—that, by the way, is advocated in certain schools. It's known as—Freud had something to say about this too, but he didn't go quite that far— they call that "free association," I mean, amongst other things. Only there's something wrong with that phrase "free association" because every time I use the phrase "free association," somebody that hasn't read as much of this as I have gets into a bog on it, and he can't define "free association" for me, but he always defines it some new way.
Free association to me was associating one idea with another in chain fashion, until a fellow finally had a mental catharsis and so on.
It's sort of a—this technique was a sort of a psychotherapy Ex-Lax. And after a fellow had done it for a couple years, then he didn't know what he was associating with, but very often it'd work. His free association chain would lead him down to spring—now, let's be technical now with what we know and can do— and this free association chain would lead the guy into a gradual unburdening of an unpleasant incident. You'll hit the same kind of an incident in any—that he hit in two years, you'll hit the same kind of an incident in any fifteen minutes of "Where are you not in the past?"
I mean, if there's anything going to happen like a mental catharsis as a result of suddenly springing into view hidden incidents, you're going to reach it in fifteen, twenty minutes of "Where are you not in the past?" You're going to hit it. And you'll get it, too. All right.
There's a faster technique, by the way. There's Reach and Withdraw in the exact direction he isn't reaching and withdrawing. You just take an assessment of the case and you find out on what dynamic he's shuddering—where do you get a needle wobble—and then you take that one, you get him to reach and withdraw for things related to that dynamic and all of a sudden the thing he's shuddering away from will show up.
How long does it take to do that? Well, it all—that one just depends on how fast you are as an auditor in setting up an E-Meter and putting it in his hands and talking to him. Because the preclear doesn't have to say anything.
And he just keeps holding the electrode and the E-Meter does the registry, and you sit there and pound the questions at him. Doesn't matter how flighty he is or whether he's concentrating or not, the bank's going to trip him. He'll get a needle wobble.
And you take that needle wobble, then—let's say it's on the fifth dynamic. Okay, animals. And you just go over animals—snakes, birds—birds, beasts and fish is one of the easiest ways. And it wobbles on beasts so you say, "All right. Domestic beasts? Wild beasts?" Wobbled on wild beasts. So you say, "Beasts of the Western Hemisphere? Beasts of the Eastern Hemisphere?" It wobbled on the Western Hemisphere. Okay. So you say, "Ferocious beasts?" and it doesn't wobble. And you say, "Cute beasts?" and it wobbles. And you say, "Ah, must be something like wild rabbits or something of that sort."
And you say, "All right. Geographical area on cute beasts—east of the Mississippi? West of the Mississippi? North of Milwaukee? South of Milwaukee?"
You finally narrow it down. It's the state of Maine, and it's the time the guy up and shot a rabbit. That's what he's avoiding. He shot a rabbit, and the rabbit lay outside the tent all night and screamed in agony and he didn't have nerve enough to go out and shoot it. That's the incident we want, just at the moment, see? Then we'd go back and we'd find another incident just by doing a reassessment on all the dynamics. Reach and withdraw.
What would we reach and withdraw for? Well, we'd just sort it out somehow on the E-Meter so that we knew something to reach and withdraw for, and we'd get it down to a point where we knew it was cute wild animals and we would start him reaching and withdrawing from cute wild animals. Well, you don't even have to go that far on an E-Meter. You just get the fact it's wild animals and you'd say, "Reach and withdraw from wild animals." And then he'll get flocks of them come up and finally he'll find the—you'll find the rabbit screaming outside of his tent.
Ah, but he's—they sometimes go into the overt act—motivator sequence whereby he's screaming because lions are eating him or something and he starts reaching for that sort of thing, but it's actually the rabbit screaming outside the tent. That'll show up too. See that?
Here we just have a mechanism which speeds through in a hurry and hits the same thing we were trying to hit with the mental catharsis. We're way out beyond psychotherapy—we're not doing psychotherapy. But I'm just going over a back track historically and showing that these same techniques apply in a same way. All right.
What's the difference between making space and asking a person where three things are not? It's because you don't compel him to put anchor points in the places he looks. But you do compel him to look. And when an individual looks at three places, he's got three places which in themselves compose a piece of space. He's the fourth place. There's some depth to it, so you've got some expansion involved in the thing.
But if you say, "All right. Give me three places in the room where you're not," and he's—glance around the room and he's, "That's—that's right, I got them." And he glances around the room—swish again, he's got them. Swish, he's got them. Swish, he's got them.
Well, that's the way he's traveling through life—swish. He—if he didn't look real quick and if he looked real fixedly at the pavement, do you know that boa constrictors would appear on it or something? Something's liable to happen if he looks hard. "You mustn't look" is one of the things he's running there. So he's doing a chronic withdraw.
Now, there's the opposite case that you'll run into, of course, which is the super-reach case. And you'll run into this case all the time, and he isn't withdrawing, he's reaching compulsively and he can't stop himself, and this fellow is (quote) "buttered all over the universe."
You say, "Give me three places where you're not."
"Hm! Well," he says, "I'm not here." That's really, if he were being honest, the first thing he'd come up with.
So instead of that, you're getting him to establish space more solidly and with better confinement. So you say to him, "Give me three places where you're not."
And he says, "Oh, yeah."
You say, "Where were they?"
"Well, (mumble) mm-hm."
"Where were they?"
"Hmmm! What do you want to know for? Er …"
You say, "Point to them."
"Okay, mm-hm."
"Well now, point to them with your hand—the three places where you are not."
"All right. I didn't get three places."
"Well, why didn't you get three places?"
"Well, I don't know. I get an idea I'm not there and I put my body there and it slides out into the corner of the room and it's not so good. That doesn't make sense, it shouldn't do that."
Or he's on the turn of the thing and he says three places he's not. They were all in his head, see? So he's got three places he's not. He's nyyhh—only he never articulated them. He doesn't dare articulate a place. He's got maybe some machine that if he articulated a place he'd go to it or he's got to—so that if he doesn't hold in, he'll splatter out or something. And you, you dog, you— doing a good job, you've tripped this guy's favorite mechanism by simply being so doggone persnickety as to actually inquire into his personal affairs which is where are the three places he's not—you want them!
You're not just asking him to—for exercise, you want these three places. So he says, "All right, there's nothing to it. I don't know why I'm doing this technique, it's these three corners of the room, I'm not in any of them."
And you say, "Well now, check each one of them and get that you're not in them as you check them."
"Rrrzzz, my ex-wife," he says.
This is real, real interesting—this is real wild stuff sometimes. But the preclear's avoidance is one manifestation, and their fixation is the other manifestation.
Now, they're avoiding a place. Now, that's fairly easy to cope with because you can always spot it. They just fly off the locations. Very easy to do. They've got to do it all too quick. They know they can't stay there, if they did their feet would grow roots and they'd turn into a tree or almost anything could happen. But they're not going to stick around and spot these places because if they did, then they'd, you know, be liable to be shot for looking or one of the other great crimes. So instead of looking, they just glance over the whole thing—swish, see? Swish, real quick.
"Everything is quicksand" is the motto of such a case in its extremities. All is quicksand.
Now, the other case is "It's all a rock and I'm it too." That's the other extremity. So you say to this fellow, "Give me three places where I am not."
With great deliberation he can tell you exactly that "he is not over there and he's not over there and let's see now, well, he's not over there. Mm-hm, that's real easy."
Now, do—you say, "What did you do as you did that?"
You see, now you apparently—see, he's working just fine, he is. Like hell he is. Let's take what he did. He's not over there and then, you see, after he put his attention over there, he kind of had to pick it up, you know, and pull it loose and then look at the next place, and put his attention there, you see. And he's perfectly willing to put his attention there, but now it's going to persist there for some time, and now it's over here. Well, he'll tell you after a while that he's used up the three corners or something. If you keep asking him, he would tell you he now has to do it some other way because he's got these corners completely full of bric-a-brac. They're all full. Full of what? They're places where he's not!
Well, he—you see, he has to put something there in order not to have anything there, because if he looks at someplace fixedly, why, he gets something there, of course, but it's not him, so that's all right—what he's getting there is really a dog. Or what he's getting there is a big hunk of energy. Or what he's getting there is something else, you see.
Now, he's building space with anchor points—compulsively. Every place he looks, he gets some energy. He can't take his attention off of one place and put it onto another place at all. What do you do about that case? You just keep it up till he quits it. Or you handle it as an automaticity. But you know what he's doing now, simply because you played it smart and asked him what he was doing.
Now, this fellow who just does this, he—evidently he's perfectly all right. He said, "Didn't get it there, and then not there and I'm not there."
"Okay. Another three."
"I'm not there, I'm not there, I'm not there."
"Okay. Another three."
"I'm not there."
And "Three places where other people aren't?"
"Well, there's nobody there, nobody there, nobody there." He's evidently checking these places, you see? He's looking and he's apparently just doing everything just dandy. Well, he is. Except after he does it for five minutes, he gets no communication change.
What do you go on doing? You sure don't go on doing that, you do something else. You see why you do something else? Just because he didn't get any communication change.
He evidently, for some fluke or peculiarity, can get away with doing this process. It doesn't enter into his immediate trouble. His immediate trouble will show up sooner or later. And it'll always show up under the heading of reach and withdraw.
Present time happens to be—I had a preclear do this one time. He— I processed him and I processed him, and he'd do all these exercise techniques and he—he's just beautiful. He could do Self Analysis and oh, he was just fine and he was—he took so much pleasure at being processed. This was the only thing that had me really suspicious: the great pleasure he had in being processed. I got real suspicious about this, because the only time he'd ever have a happy smile on his face was when he'd sit down to be processed. Otherwise he was grumpy and he was upset and so on.
So I asked him one session, because he—oh, he was progressing, but very slowly. And I asked him, I said, "What about this processing we're doing? Where are you putting those pictures?"
"Oh," he says, "I'm putting them right here."
I said, "Yeah, well, where's here?"
"Oh," he said, "right here in this room. This nice, comfortable room." He said, "It's so nice to be able to sit down in a chair and to have you there, you see, and so forth and then I can contact present time so nicely and everything, and it's a warm, comfortable feeling of human companionship." And he went off into this long dissertation on the subject, and I come to find out he spends every night in chattering terror with his head under his covers because he just doesn't dare be alone and so on. The one place he mustn't depart from is the places he can immediately keep his eye on. Boy, is this fellow suspicious, see.
If he can see those walls and see the room and see you there, why, he knows it's all right. But the second he can't see you there and the second he closes his eyes and he can't immediately see those walls—oh-oh, oh-oh, oh-oh, oh-oh. And, of course, this other—this case was still manifesting rather—other peculiarities, which was making me rather critical of the case and I was gradually working it out with Future Processing.
Well, we weren't able to get a tree which wouldn't be dying of some disease. He would sit there with the sweetest smile on his face and he just couldn't get a tree that wouldn't be dying of disease. And when you talked of him dying, why, everything was very pleasant, and this was real fine.
You see what was wrong with this case? He was just—the only time he ever came aware or alive was, he was being reassured because there was somebody there caring for him.
Now, you—always tell you there's somebody stuck on a track, they're always stuck on a track someplace. I wasn't using any past techniques of any kind on this case. And we were gradually, little by little by little, pulling him out of one incident: his mama taking care of him when he had measles. And when his mama would sit there and read a book to him, why, the horrors didn't come. But when she went away and they pulled the blinds down and it got dark, then he got horrors. And boy, he was stuck but solid at about three and a half. Real interesting, huh?
The fellow's only pleasure in life was being processed. Not so it'd do anything for him but because it gave him "human companionship."
Well, now what settled this case and what tripped this? It was just my getting suspicious, after a relatively short time of processing, of somebody who took so much pleasure in being processed and was obviously so bad off right after the session. See, there's something wrong here. And this was all keyed out, but I tried in vain to get a good, solid communication change. He was just getting progressively just a little bit better. But that case would have told me anything to have kept me there processing him. Anything. He would've been agreeable to almost anything. I could have probably sat there and cursed him during the entire session for two hours solid with the vilest things I could lay my tongue to. I could have hired a marine sergeant to have cussed him for two hours and he would have just sat there with the same happy smile on his face.
Otherwise, in the rest of his waking days, when he wasn't getting direct and immediate comforting attention designed to make him well—you know, companionship and to make him well with attention immediately centered on him—he was thrashing around in a nightmare, rather perpetually, of measles, with the shades drawn and everything dark.
So here we had the case where the processing immediately fitted for the dramatization. And you'll find this happens every once in a while, because people who have had lots of attention only when they are sick tend to come around and find an auditor to give them some attention when they're sick. Well, it's a good thing to spring them out of it. I got him out of it very easily. I just had him reaching and withdrawing for present time and objects in the past. And the horrors occasionally would hit him in the processing and so on, but then we, by matched terminals and other means and so forth, fished him out of the incidents. You have much more direct methods than I was using at that time. Three places he's not in the past. Only get him to spot them.
Now, any locational technique, then—you can put this down—any locational technique is limited to spotting. If we called these techniques "spotting practice," we would know exactly what we were doing with them. So you can call all those techniques "spotting practice." If your preclear doesn't spot the space, it's not doing anybody any good.
Now, let's get the other side—I said on the other side of SOP 8-C, there's this reach and withdraw. He actually reaches and withdraws from every space he looks at. So you're making him all the time, with the process, reach and withdraw. And if he's not actually, actively, really looking at the place and then taking his attention off it, he's not reaching and withdrawing from it, and so you're not exercising him as a thetan.
So one side of it, if he isn't looking at the spaces, he isn't making space. And if he isn't reaching—looking at them and inspecting them and spotting them exactly and then withdrawing from what he has spotted, he's not reaching and withdrawing. You see that?
So a case which doesn't progress under these techniques is doing just exactly what he shouldn't be doing. He's probably saying, "Yeah, I know I'm not there, I know I'm not over in the corner and so forth." And generally when a case is doing this he is really inverted on reaching and withdrawing or he's very upset on it. And you never bring it to his attention at all. You just insist that he spot the corner.
I'll give you an example of this: "Now get that you're not at the forward part of the room. Now get that you're not in those two upper corners of the room."
Well, now let's do it this way. Let's do it this way just to exaggerate this, to show you really what we're doing.
"Now let's get that we're not in the left-hand upper corner of that room to the degree of inspecting it very closely. Now let's get that we're not in the upper right-hand corner of this room and inspect it very closely. And get that you're not in it."
Well, you see, we're making the fellow reach and withdraw as a thetan, aren't we? Okay?
Now, you could go a long time with those processes on a preclear and not gain any vast advance in the case, if you scouted these two things—you weren't trying to make him make space and you weren't trying to make him reach and withdraw.
So I say reach and withdraw doesn't now appear in any of the steps of SOP 8-C. Doingness doesn't appear in any of the steps. We have one assigned to space—space is a viewpoint of dimension. But every technique there reaches and withdraws, is in itself doingness which addresses the subject of energy— directly addresses the subject of energy, and every one of them there, one way or another, assists the individual in controlling space. He can get more space or get less space. And you just make him do it under all these various eight conditions. So there's these eight conditions, you see. And we've got those listed under 8-C.
There are eight ways of making him reach and withdraw. Eight ways of making him spot and make and control space. And if you look at these techniques that way, under that frame of reference, all of a sudden you know a lot about what you're doing. And if he doesn't look at it in this fashion, why you'd certainly better know it.
Now, where you have, in the main, difficulty with the preclear, the primary difficulty is a communication difficulty between you and the preclear. And we won't mess around and try to avoid the fact that trying to get into communication with some preclears is about the roughest thing there is.
You say to this person, "All right, now see if you can't get a picture of this."
And this person sort of flies in your face—well now, he's one way or the other. You know, "Well," he says, "I can't do that." Or "I don't know whether or not that exists." Or "Yeah, I can do that but, of course, you realize I'm just thinking it up."
And he's got all these reservations about it and then you—if you have that much communication difficulty with the preclear, this is probably what happened: The preclear finally agreed with you in order to get rid of you. He didn't do it. They will do that. They will do that.
The reason you are processing them is that they do not know how to communicate and they couldn't convey truth to you if they had to, because they themselves can't recognize it. And it isn't that truth on the subject of agreement with the MEST universe is terribly desirable, but it is that truth itself, which is good operation and so forth, is desirable.
A fellow who communicates only by agreement with the MEST universe, very—is often having a rough time of it. You know, he is compulsively telling the truth.
Then there's the fellow who tells the truth but not—and puts it on MEST universe lines, but not because he has any necessity to—he just tells the truth because it's the most exact communication system with which he can operate. All other communication systems are more complex.
And then there's the upper level line that there is such a thing as truth. And it's very much easier to deal with it. Unfortunately, the fellow who has the upper level can also imagine like mad. Unfortunately for the society at large, because if he starts to imagine, then he starts to create his own future.
And gee, he starts to change things and gosh, he's liable to make more money and he's liable to be better professionally than somebody else and you won't be able to eat him. He becomes less edible, so, of course, less desirable to have in the community. That's the way some people figure on it.
But a great truth, a great truth is in itself pretty self-evident, unless people have learned how not to know it. Most everything that people know about the world, they have learned the other way, you see? They've learned how not to have the world. They've learned how not to do something.
People who have difficulty with communication have learned arduously and at great length how not to communicate.
Did you ever see a baby with very much communication trouble, really? I mean he looks, and he lets you look at him, and as a matter of fact, if you fool around with many kids you'll find out they'll look at you very overtly. They'll look right straight at you. And it's very upsetting to people, but they do. And— that's no communication difficulty there. And a puppy, before he's kicked around, is usually very proud of himself and he's very cheerful and he's smiling and he just communicates wide-open in all direction. And then he learns how not to communicate. So one never learns how to communicate, one learns how not to communicate.
Your auditing, in essence, is unteaching the guy on communication. And if you can unteach him well enough, why, he will get to a point where he can really deal with truth. And the less he deals with actual communication, wide-open in all lines, why, of course, the more lies he enters into it.
One of those lies, of course, is stuff like Ohm's law. That's, in essence, a communication breakdown of one sort or another because it's gotten a rigidity, an arbitrary restriction—it is an arbitrary restriction upon current flow and so on. And, of course, arbitrary restriction on a flow is in itself a—means less flow. But, of course, that arbitrary is a constant arbitrary. It's there, so electricians, electronics men work with this arbitrary and they make the arbitrary behave. Because they found the arbitrary—found by Mr. Ohm. And Mr. Ohm having found the arbitrary—or was it found by Mr. Ohm? Anyway, they, having found the arbitrary, can employ the arbitrary to control similar arbitraries. But those are all arbitraries.
A lie, for instance—a compulsive lie is an arbitrary. Well, your preclear is generally pretty bogged down on the subject of rote communication systems and his case doesn't alter until you've altered his communication system. If he's unable to do certain things, those are just inabilities of communication.
And, of course, the thing he can do—there's two conditions of communication. There is potentially wide-open communication which is at the same time controlled. It's potentially wide-open. There isn't any reason, other than just controlling it, why it's restricted. And then there's the communication system that has to be controlled because something dreadful might happen. There's the communication system controlled because we have to have secrets.
So we get: Communication system that has to—that can be a potentially wide-open communication system that is being controlled, is a desirable state of communication. Then you simply channel it in any direction you want to channel it and there's no restriction and there's nobody saying you couldn't channel it there except you. And you say you can't channel it there, just so that you can have a randomity of communication.
Now, when you can't communicate because somebody else wouldn't appreciate your communication or because of arbitrary laws which have to do with wopenglop and yup-yup or something, when these arbitrary laws all enter into it, they are forced upon you because you're unable to communicate in that fashion, so you have to communicate in a very restricted and constricted fashion. Well, that's the state your preclear's in. He knows that if he communicates in the ways you're asking him to communicate, he just—if you just suddenly asked him to communicate the way he would be communicating after you'd given him twenty hours of processing, he would know completely that you had posed him an incapability that was so far beyond him, that it was so far beyond any human being, that he would seriously doubt, really, if it was the thing to do.
So, in essence, you sneak up on his communication lines; you open them up little by little, while he still has control of them. And as they open, little by little, you'll get these communication changes. They better, they worsen, they do this, they do that. He's progressing as long as you're altering his comm lines. When you cease to alter his comm lines, he's no longer progressing. Because the only direction he can progress is toward wide-open communication.
You see, he spent an awful long time learning how not to communicate, because if you said this or you said that, or you did this or you did that, or you thought this or you did that, why, you got knocked on the head or sent up to the front of the room with a dunce cap or you got ostracized or you got shot. For instance, you—if you start thinking it over, there are just tremendous numbers of things which you must not say verbally under various conditions.
Let's take the things you mustn't say to a police officer, as the most obvious one. Well, there's just a lot of them. They go on and on; they—can't say those to a police officer.
In a country which has the greatest freedom of speech in the world—and I possibly could be accused occasionally of taking more than full advantage of the freedom of speech offered the United States. No. No, I'm not being near as outspoken as my own forebears. This country always insisted on being able to state its opinion. It's only recently that its opinion's been constricted very much. Their—they've got freedom of speech now retranslated into freedom from speech.
And however, the society, even though it talks about freedom of speech— and by the way, having done my little bit to ensure that we kept on having freedom of speech, I still reserve the license myself to use that all I please. Comes down to a basis of freedom of speech which is not to the point where the general level of decency is offended. In other words, people don't become ill or offended and so forth.
Well, that's an acceptable freedom of speech. But there is no such thing as a wide-open, complete freedom of speech if we only verbalize it to the direction that there's only so many words in the English language. There aren't enough words in the English language to furnish every concept of which anybody could think easily.
Well, just from that alone, a paucity of imagination imposes a limitation on free speech. And then there's a great deal of vocabulary, second dynamic vocabulary, used by the declasse which is not printable nor speakable, but, by the way, is not even—that isn't, by the way, much of an encroachment on freedom of speech. Because you know that practically at any time I've used the proper English in the most public places for almost anything you know of in the whole second dynamic vocabulary. It's totally acceptable.
I mean, people sit there and they listen to you without blinking an eye. It's— what they object to, then, is crudity of speech. So they have certain classifications which are under the heading of abuse of vocabulary and these become restrictions on speech.
Well, your preclear is under just these restrictions if he's under no other restrictions, but believe me they're way beyond that. Papa, Mama: "Shut up." Schoolteacher: "You mustn't whisper, you mustn't talk, you must speak. You mustn't talk, you mustn't rrrahh-rrrahh-rrrahh-rrrahh"—all his life.
Now you come along, and you covertly—by making him do something and find out that he doesn't get killed for it, making him reach and withdraw and making him create space—why, you finally bring him up to a point where he has a completely free communication line, which at the same time is completely under his control. And that is the desirable condition you're trying to attain with the preclear.
If you don't know what you're trying to do, however, you can muff the preclear and the techniques will just go through your fingers like so much sand.
Okay.
AUDITING BY SOP 8-C, FORMULA H PAGE 2 2ACC-29A - 20.12.53