Auditors Code (500926)
Date: 26 September 1950
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
We have a minimum amount of time in the next few evenings to try to cover the latest procedures and to cover first and foremost a review I want to start talking about the Auditor’s Code. It is in the book. People don’t take it seriously. I guess the main part of the cases right now that are stalled or bogged down have been bogged down solely because of breaks in the Auditor’s Code. So this is where we begin.
The Code is not there just because it is nice or because it is the thing to do or because I had an idea and wrote it down. When it is not observed, the cases do not advance and sometimes get in a remarkable state of affairs.
The Auditor’s Code is herewith quoted from Dianetics: “The auditor should be courteous in his treatment of all preclears. “The auditor should be kind, not giving way to any indulgence of cruelty toward preclears, nor surrendering to any desire to punish. “The auditor should be quiet during therapy, not given to talk beyond the absolute essentials of Dianetics during an actual session. “The auditor should be trustworthy keeping his word when given, keeping his appointments in schedules and his commitments to work and never giving forth any commitment of any kind which he has any slightest reason to believe he cannot keep. “The auditor should be courageous, never giving ground or violating the fundamentals of therapy because a preclear thinks he should. “The auditor should be patient in his working, never becoming restless or annoyed by the preclear, no matter what the preclear is doing or saying. “The auditor should be thorough, never permitting his plan of work to be swayed or a charge to be avoided. “The auditor should be persistent, never giving up until he has achieved results. “The auditor should be uncommunicative, never giving the patient any information whatsoever about his case, including evaluations of data or further estimates of time in therapy.” There is one part—be courageous. That is very, very, very important. You are going to have cases that explode in your faces. As a matter of fact, back in Elizabeth, I had a little of that the first Saturday night class that took the Basic Course there. Everyone was cool and collected and I looked around for someone to demonstrate on and I guess I was not too alert. The first thing I knew I had chosen someone with line charge and lots of it. I put him there on the couch, the boy was very cool, I was very cool. I started out, “The file clerk will select the engram necessary to resolve this case. The somatic strip will go to the beginning of the engram. When I count from one to five the first phrase of the engram will flash into your mind. One-two-three-four-five.” (snap) He ran through it twice calmly. And then he was that high off the couch and knocked about four yards of plaster off the ceiling! And I could see the whole class’ hair rise on end. I took him through the engram with all the works, sobs and screams and everything. I have seen auditors get into cases like that. But a fellow can back out of an engram and then wonder why the next morning the preclear is found in a corner of the room in a fetal position. So no matter what you hit, go right through with it. Ride it through. No matter what you hit, go right through. No matter how hard you may think this is, ride it through. Never get sympathetic. There are three levels of healing: one, be efficient and do something; two, make the patient comfortable if you can’t do something about it; three, if you can’t make him comfortable, sit there and hold his hand. There are an awful lot of cases that are not advancing because people are holding hands.
I wish to stress this point. Any auditor who says, “This poor fellow!” had better get his own engrams picked up. There is some engram which inhibits his going into the engrams of the “poor” preclear.
This can be a very rough thing, perhaps, but the end is calmness. If you can get line charge off the case, if you can get tears by actually running an engram, you are going to get results from that preclear. But if you find yourself holding off from a case because this case may explode in your face, you are not going to get results. It takes nerve. A young man in Washington, DC, came down last spring and brought a young woman who was psychotic. On the couch she started to run birth. She ran birth with all the screams in it begging all the while, “Please let me come up,” and suggesting I ask the file clerk to do such and such. But I wouldn’t let her out and ran birth all the way through, got all the charge off of it, rolled it and took her somatics off The young lady who got up off of that couch had a very, very sane light in her eyes. It was awfully tough and I had to go upstairs later and run the sound volume out of my ears . . . you know, actually at times it is like somebody had been working on you with pneumatic hammers. So be courageous when you go into one of these cases. Don’t quit and don’t let anybody fool you. The preclear may say, “I think I had better run that incident when I was burned.” Maybe his wife is auditing him. Session in and session out they are avoiding anything which will do him any good. Let the auditor make up his mind what he is going to do and then carry it through.
Unless some of you have run a screamer you haven’t any idea what a screamer can do to you. You can feel your own engrams rising up, but sit there and ride it through.
A person can rise above his own engrams if he is auditing. I see people doing it. They are running engrams similar to their own and are ready to pass out and yet they go on. One young man back East was not quite this determined, however. He and an author’s son had been working each other and the group had left them alone late that night. Somebody came back at about two o’clock in the morning and found the author’s son lying on the couch moaning and the other fellow sitting in the corner holding his stomach; they had been like that for three hours. It was mutual restimulation and the auditor did not have nerve enough to carry it through birth and the prenatal area. This is not good Dianetics. The moral of the story is watch that one in the Auditor’s Code about being courageous.
Another point is so vital I do not think it necessary to tell you what it is: Don’t evaluate his case for him. That is, in effect, to make a blanket coverage and actually out of that evaluation the most important thing is don’t invalidate his data. You will have him in a very sad state if you do. His mother may be fighting off three Zulus and maybe to you it is impossible, but never as his auditor say, “You know that didn’t happen!” I saw this softly said one time, and immediately afterwards saw that preclear knock his auditor practically cold. There was a sudden reaction on the thing. That auditor didn’t do this anymore! However, I don’t want you to have to have this kind of experience.
It doesn’t matter what he is running. Don’t suggest by word or gesture that you believe that it is dub-in. Handle him very calmly, let him run it through, and then see if you can’t find a valid engram or if this one has any somatics, because it may turn into a real engram. Let him come to his own decisions. It is really much less harmful if you say, “I think you have a bunch of AAs (attempted abortions).” And he may say, “My mother wouldn’t have done that to me.” And you still may notice that he says, “I just can’t get rid of this one,” and you feel sure this comes from an attempted abortion engram, you can say to him, “I believe you have something of that order . . .” You know, that is much less harmful than ever to say, “You know, I don’t believe it; it seems to me you are just imagining.” If you do that to a preclear it will stop his case. It is the most deadly sin in Dianetics. Right beside it is leaving an engram unreduced, so there are two very deadly sins. But invalidating data can snarl him up and get him in very, very bad shape.
I am going to tell you something that will explain something about invalidating a case and it is something not in the book. A lot of this stuff is not in the book. I am stressing certain points for you, and my job for you is to help you pick up auditing skill and pick it up very quickly. But first let me tell you that Dianetic research just keeps going on. More and more gets known. It is very hard to keep up with it. If thirty days pass without Dianetic processing making definite advances, the people at the Foundation sit down and think everything is going to pot—that there is nothing new.
It is very good to keep in close touch with the Foundation when auditing. Things happen which are enormously valuable.
Just to illustrate, this little postulate came in about two months ago. I had been puzzling about the question of what had communication to do with reality. It happened I was giving a lecture and something flashed into my mind and I wanted to stop right there and study it, but I couldn’t because, well, the show must go on. So I just stood still there and thought for a few moments and suddenly something congealed there.
That is the way these things come up. Down in Rochester, one of the boys called me up and said, “Say, when someone gets out of valence, his sonic shuts off.” That gave me a key.
Communication and reality and affinity are a vital trio. I could give you a two- or three-hour lecture on this. Affinity is that part of living substance, force which coheses man. You can call it love. Affinity is the term which was used by engineers. It is more expressive than love, perhaps, which has been slapped around a good deal by Tin Pan Alley. This force is a kind of Q factor, the cohesiveness, the love of man for man, the affinity of members within the social group. And this social feeling must be very strong, otherwise you wouldn’t be here today. Destruction would have overridden this force and that would have been the end. Let us see how man senses reality. If we look over the function of reality, some things seem very real and others not so real. But to say there is an absolute reality is something no physicist would do. He talks in terms of time, space, energy. There has been much written and talked about these things, but what do we know about them? We know only what we see, feel, hear, taste, touch and so on—our communication. That is our touch with reality. We call a person crazy only because he doesn’t agree with us. Now, we naturally select; we reject the disagreements. We have not rejected reality.
We know that matter is made up of energy, and energy seems made up of motion. But energy is made up of the interrelationship; here is our affinity, our agreement, our affinity about a reality with which we are in communication by our perceptics. If you break any one of those three— affinity, communication, reality—you break the other two. There is a lowest common denominator behind those things and I hope one day we may find out what it is. But you can use these facts in your auditing. That is why I am telling you about it. You break down the affinity with a preclear and his sense of reality diminishes. Break down his reality, and his ability to contact his engrams disappears. You can very subtly break down these things until they won’t believe anything; they won’t believe the outside world or anything else. Take a person who is wide open, with sonic recall and everything. You can take a pianola case and simply by breaking down his sense of reality, you can cut the sonic off. Cut sonic off and you block his sense of reality and affinity.
We are going into straight line memory now. This is very important to you. Straight line memory depends on picking up certain points, freeing attention units, as well as locating data which will be valuable to you. Therefore, if you take a preclear and you make him recall in full recall when his mother said, “I don’t love you,” you have connected up just that much of his sense of reality. Those whose recalls are bad have a very bad sense of reality. The person may be contacting engrams, but he will say, “I don’t believe it is happening to me,” and so on. Such a person is really aberrated to some degree. Find the time when somebody broke affinity.
Actually the loss of an ally causes grief and this is the breaking of an affinity. The dirtiest trick an ally can play on a preclear is to die. If you pick up some of these deaths, discharge them as grief engrams, this person’s sonic recall may go up, tone will go up and his sense of reality will go up.
What are the various emotions? You can consider pleasure an emotion—a child has joy just from being alive. As a persons joy rises, his ability to feel, see and hear rises, too. You have pleasant emotions in singing, in eating well, living well, feeling very much in common with all of life. But sometimes when you take a pleasure, so-called, and relive it, the charge on it becomes pain. There is loss right there, pleasure turned backwards. When somebody breaks affinity, somehow or other, you get pain. Every terror is actually a feeling of loss, a fear of loss. Abject fear is fear of the loss of one’s own life.
We drop down the Tone Scale from infinite survival to death. Infinite survival would be infinite pleasure. Getting down towards death, we get into the area which blinds his ability to perceive. Communication cuts off. A break of affinity, a break of communication. “As far as I am concerned, this situation doesn’t exist,” he seems to say. It is this you try to straighten out when you clear a person. You try to pick up pain.
The real breaks are reached by physical pain. Maybe a boy is running and he falls over a rock. Immediately his reaction is to kick the rock: broken affinity. As he goes on through life, his dynamic pushes him towards survival. He grows older. Rocks are against him; perhaps his mother isn’t so nice; somebody else doesn’t like him. The more the boy is hurt, the more he is blinded. He can survive all his experiences on the analytical level easily, perhaps. But how about the bruises he got off the rock? That is pain. Something has become painful to him. Then on top of that he met the other breaks. But the basic break is physical pain with communication closure, with caution. He becomes cautious about rocks, he inspects them carefully. The reality of rocks is quite real to him, but in terms of pain.
This whole proposition—communication, affinity, reality—works in using Straightwire. A fellow doesn’t have sonic, no sense of reality, because it has been broken. Reach these incidents in his life and free attention units. This gets the pressure off his life and then he can be processed.
You can attack those incidents anywhere and you can come up with results. You might have a preclear who told the truth when he was a little boy and somebody came along and said, “You know you are lying!” Now, that doesn’t hurt him much; he knows he is telling the truth. But then he is punished and forced to admit that he had lied. That puts in physical pain.
If you find any such incidents back along the track, you are going to have some severe affinity breaks and have a person who doesn’t have a very great sense of reality. His perceptics shut off.