Intensive Procedure - Lecture 3 (7ACC 540707)
Series: 7th Advanced Clinical Course (7ACC)
Date: 7 July 1954
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
Okay. Now continuing with this third lecture on Intensive Procedure. This procedure is as good as communication is established. At all times it is as good as communication is established and at no time is it any better than communication is established.
The case that is dragging its heels, that you're having any difficulty with whatsoever, is a case which has not yet established communication. It's going on getting audited. Yes, it'll sit here as the words come in, it does something about them, but as far as an actual communication is concerned, no. Hasn't any real reality on what a communication would be or an actual perception would be.
What this case is doing; he looks at something and he waits for something to happen, you know. You know, the auditor attracts his attention to something, so he says – oh, so he lets his attention over on it and then waits for something to happen. Then he puts his attention over on something else and he waits for something to happen. I mean, naaaa. This is the truth of the matter, no matter how industriously he appears to be working. He'll tell you he's working at it too. What he does is put his attention somewhere and then expect something to happen.
Well, the reason for this is he has got a consideration there that when you put your attention on something, something happens. So, therefore, you better not put your attention on anything very heavily and you better have it pretty unreal what you're communicating with anyhow. Because if it were real, why, who knows something might happen. And so, of course, that's what the auditor wants to have happen, is something to happen.
Well, of course, nothing is going to happen as long as he isn't going to get into communication with anything. Well, he knows this, you see. He knows that if he can just safely kind of stay halfway in and halfway out of communication with everything, then nothing is going to happen. So, he can sit there and wait for something to happen, and that's much more comfortable than having something happen. Because when things happen, why, one gets hurt and other things occur. So that his manifestation will be alternately sitting there waiting for the facsimile to do something or the point or the spot or the concept to do something – he waits, and that will be alternated with an occasional somatic. See, he waits for something to happen and what does happen, of course, would naturally be a somatic. Well, this is curiosa to this degree. Actually, an awful lot of things could happen besides a somatic – an awful lot of things. What happens there: he categorizes pain and unconsciousness; they are the first things he has happen. So he gets a little dopey and then not quite so dopey – so something happened. And then he gets a little somatic and then no somatic – so something happened. This merely proves that something happened. That's all he's interested in. It proves that something happened. Now this is about as far as you can get from cause. See, that's about as far as you can get.
Now, we examine the Formula of Communication and we just perceive here that attention is necessary. You must be able to put enough attention on things, and the difficulty of cases is a gradient scale of scarcity of attention. The most difficult case has attention which is the most scarce. The rationale behind this is simply that the less attention you put on something, the less it can do to you. Well, that's true enough, that's true enough. That's the best operating principle anybody could possibly work on. If you won't go into communication with something, why naturally, you won't go into communication with something. There's only one trouble, you go halfway into communication and start pushing hard on something when you're already inverted, and it just simply closes terminals with you.
You see how that could be? Individual decides to resist something. Well, if you were to ask this preclear to put out some flitter – that is to say, kind of get the idea of something emanating from him and then bring it back in again – what he would do would be when you told him to push some flitter out he'd pull some flitter in. And this would surprise him very much. His command to push out, pulls in. His command to pull in, pushes out. What's flitter? Well actually, on a case in that kind of condition it'd be kind of dull, but flitter is the gold sparks that a thetan can put out.
Therefore, attention is requisite here. Well, how do you attract anybody's attention who knows if his attention is attracted that something bad will happen to him? Well, naturally, his entire restraint is on getting his attention away from everything so it won't be attracted. He doesn't want to be distracted. The word attracted is completely perverted by him to distracted. Now, he evidently must be paying attention to something else, otherwise he could never get distracted. It is an essential of being distracted that your attention must have been on something to get pulled off of. So, he proves this to you by putting his attention solidly on something and then keeps it there forever. So then, anything that happens around him distracts him.
We could do lots of things to this fellow. You could fire a gun off behind his back during an auditing session – you find out he'd get distracted, all right. He'd pull his attention off whatever he had his attention on and the next thing you know, why, he'd have a half a dozen facsimiles caved in on him. This would be his course of being audited.
One facsimile he lets go of and that falls in on him; and another facsimile, he lets go of that and that falls in on him; and another one, he lets go of that. Actually, it's a pretty hopeless picture and there's no possible chance of his getting well. At least, this is what he'd tell you.
Funny part of it is there's factors which mitigate his condition and these are that attention is not quantitative – not quantitative. You can conceive all sorts of drills by which he can demonstrate that his attention can be spread all over the place. You can demonstrate that he can put his attention on an engram and hold it there and also listen to a phonograph record. See, he could do these two things at once. Also (only I don't advise you to do this as a technique) he could be audited and listen to somebody reading a book. As a matter of fact, the truth of the matter is he could listen to two people reading books simultaneously and follow each plot and get audited at the same time. But I'm afraid if he could do that, he wouldn't need much auditing, would he? So it isn't possible really – probable – that the experiment will be performed.
The normal course of existence tells you continually – since everybody is hungry for attention to some degree or another – tells you that you mustn't put your attention on more than one thing at a time. If you had a mother around who had a psychosomatic ill, why, you would discover that it was as much as your life was worth to put your attention on something else while she was talking to you. See, that's obvious – truth. And your father, he probably had some kind of an idea that you shouldn't go on reading the funny paper when he was talking to you. People are quite shocked, occasionally, to discover that although you did go on reading the funny paper, you had heard every word they said.
You audit a kid sometime – he's in pretty good shape already, he's flying around the room, crawling under chairs and that sort of thing. And he'll keep up a running – fire conversation with you and get interested in things and do all the things that you ask him to do and do a lot of other things too. This is too much motion, usually, for an auditor. But it can be done that way.
Now parents, teachers, other people, traffic cops – I mean, the next time you get arrested for speeding or something like that, just make this little experiment. As the cop is talking to you, turn on your radio and sit there and say, "Dum-de-dum, de-da-da-da, de-dum, dum, dum." And just try that experiment.
Now, he believes that attention is quantitative and that there's just so much attention in you to give him. Actually, he'd be quite surprised, as one did the other day whose hair started to get a little bit warm, his collar started to get warm. And as a matter of fact, he started to heat up all over. He didn't feel good after a little while and he got back in his car and went off. He forgot to give me a ticket too. But anyhow, he wanted attention to be concentrated upon him and I hadn't been doing anything particularly odd. Truth of the matter was, he wanted to know if I'd seen the accident down the street, but that was beside the point. The point is he was taking up my time and so on.
He had some idea that I might possibly have come too close to some car or other. We weren't sure that there had been an accident or – you know, he was kind of a vague state of case. And he knew that somebody might have been on the street at the same time there and he'd better talk to somebody about it. In other words, he was very positive and direct about what he was doing. Actually, he was much more confused than I'm making him. I'm being nice about the whole thing. But he insisted on getting some attention, so he got some attention.
And the attention, of course, is never quantitative. You've got as much attention as you postulate you have and that's all the attention you've got. If you postulate you've got enough attention, you could fry somebody in his tracks. That's all that fries anybody: you know, a thetan's ability to zap somebody, a thetan's ability to do several things at the same time. All of these things simply stem from simply his making a postulate that he is doing so. And he makes this postulate that this is taking place. And if he, then, doesn't check the postulate and say this is taking place and so forth, it'll go all the way on out as simply if he postulates it to go all the way on out.
Now, we go down and talk to a banker and the banker says, "Well now, let's take up this uh – new account here. Uh – let's see where did I put my pen? Yes. Mm-hm, mm-hm, I wonder, yes, mm-mm, aha. Uh – Miss Smithers uh – did you take care of that real estate matter? Mm-hm, mm-hm, hmm. Oh yes, how do you do, sir. What can I – oh. Oh, we're talking up this account. Yes, now taking up the subject of this new account. By the way, Miss Smithers, do you have a pencil? What did they say about that real estate matter and so on. Just a moment while I answer the phone. Well now, I don't know really. Uh – just a moment. What'd you say Miss Smithers? Oh, the phone is ringing." Okay, Rrrrrrr.
There is a fellow who is alternately dispersing and directing and dispersing and directing attention all over the place. But what is he doing, essentially, that we could use, that we could understand? What he is, is in a rather chaotic state. He's afraid, actually, to put his attention on anything and he feels his attention is so scarce that if he puts his attention on anything, he must immediately take it off. So, he finds out something else to put it on. You have the environment dictating to him continually and he is not doing anything about the environment. Although the environment tells him to find a pencil, he doesn't really go through the motions of finding a pencil or a pen. It tells him to, he echoes it with his speech and so forth, but then he doesn't do it. The environment tells him to answer the phone but he doesn't do it. Well, here's action. This is attention. This is also energy and this is also objects.
Now, where's your preclear cut in along this line someplace? Well, your preclear almost always, in this society at this time, cuts in on the level that you can put one – just, you know – one thing at one time. And he's obsessed with this. If he's obsessed with anything, he thinks he can put his attention on just one thing at one time. That's silly, but he thinks so. And so, therefore, when you give him an order, a command, why, you always make sure that he performs the auditing command before you give him another one.
Now, you haven't run into the preclear yet that can perform three auditing commands simultaneously. That's because you haven't audited each other hard and you haven't gone for broke on the subject of auditing each other. I mean, you keep fooling around. I mean, this is no criticism here, no criticism is intended. Just some efficiency is asked for.
All right. On the subject of Intensive Procedure, then, an increase of the number of things you could put your attention on would be a very, very clear-cut thing, wouldn't it? I mean, you'd have to be able to put your attention on more and more things clearly. And finally, not only put your attention on them but do something about them.
Now, a person – put his attention on one spot at a time (any spot in the room) and then put his attention on another spot, and then find a new spot and put his attention on that, new spot and find his attention on that – will gradually discover that after he's taken his attention off of something, he doesn't see it or he can continue to see it at will. You know, he doesn't have to take his attention off of one object to put it onto the next object.
Well, now when he does this on a self-determined basis, all right. When it's on an other-determined basis where every object he looks at then drags his attention from there on, why, oh-oh! He's in bad condition. So, we have two degrees of attention. And attention is self-determined or other-determined attention. Other-determined attention is perfectly tolerable. There's nothing wrong with other-determined attention unless one believes one's own attention to be very scarce.
Well, as we analyze this and as we go along the line, look it over, we find very clearly that we are trying to put the preclear over into a category where he can be self-determined – first, you see, first determination – that he can be self-determined about his choices. In other words, he can be cause on his communication line. And we try to bring him up to a point, immediately, where he is cause on his end of the communication line. And it will follow through that his attention will free to a slight degree. He'll be less distracted by other things in the environment.
Because we are auditing on the Third Dynamic, when we have restored a great deal of his self-determinism, see, our next goal is to permit his toleration of somebody else giving and choosing some attention. This is not harmful. I mean, he is of the consideration it's very harmful for somebody else to select points of attention or to attract his attention or to communicate with him and so forth. But this is not harmful. In other words, let's go up above this level much higher. There is an essential point here: Self-determinism depends upon an identification with something which can be self-determined. And, therefore, a thetan in really good condition can be self-determined and other-determined at will.
Oh, wait a minute, we're going right on up to the Eighth Dynamic here. Well, so what. You see that? Only an individual who has identified himself with something very thoroughly with a receipt-point or a cause-point – very, very thoroughly identified himself with that to the exclusion of everything else – only that individual gets pinned with the idea of self-determinism and other-determinism. One has to have identified himself with a receipt-point or a source-point and thereafter is hung with guarding one side of the flow but not the other side. So, he becomes concerned at that time with being self-determined or other-determined.
So what do you know. We have with this (Intensive Procedure) walked out of the sphere of self-determinism as our top goal. It's not our top goal. What our top goal is, is willingness to be cause or effect, source-point, receipt-point, willingness to be anything, to cause anything, to be the effect of anything, willingness to tolerate any distance, tolerate mass or lack of it and tolerate the whole business of knowingness, understandingness, so on.
Tolerance. Well, there could be two kinds of tolerance. One is very, very apathetic sort of a tolerance, "Well, I'll just lie here and say I'm tolerating everything," you know. And the other kind would be, you'd tolerate it so well that you would just as soon go out and blow a castle down. You'd just as soon be blown down, so you'll blow a castle down. Nothing to that! I mean, somebody comes around and remonstrates and says, "What's the matter with you? What's the idea of blowing that? Don't you realize that's eighteen hundred years old and it contained the head of King Smorgasbord III" and so forth.
And you say, "Well, I'm perfectly willing to contain the head of King Smorgasbord III and I'm perfectly willing to blow down – get blown down. Go ahead, blow me down."
Now, that's not a reasonable attitude. Now, the society has it set up so that if you kill somebody, you get the electric chair. It depends upon individuals not wanting to get into the electric chair, the lethal gas chamber to enforce the law against murder. Well, this is silly. What if somebody came along sometime or another who was perfectly willing to get electrocuted or put in the lethal gas chamber. Well now, in a body form that wouldn't be very possible, would it? And I think actually the private goal of psychiatry at large, you see, was to get people to tolerate electricity to the point to where they'd kill anybody no longer being afraid of an electric chair.
I had a discussion with this – with a psychiatrist. He took the whole thing seriously and he's probably still thinking about it because that was only a couple of years ago.
We're not trying to promote people into a state of where they will be widely destructive, this is not even vaguely our goal. But fear of being destructive causes an individual to be obstructive. That's funny isn't it? Fear that he's going to be destructive will cause him to destroy everything.
I imagine I can just see Hitler now settling down just before he started to write Mein Kampf on the subject and he decided he was going to be a very constructive young man, I'm sure of that. And he possibly was afraid of destroying things. That's why he got so mad afterwards and then why he destroyed everything. It was quite interesting. He must have been a fairly high-toned individual to have done anything at all. And yet he slid down past that band and all he could think was in terms of make nothing out of everything.
Make nothing out of it, oh boy, more nothing out of it – lime pits, knock it all flat. I don't believe you ever saw a Nazi news release or war film (speaking about ancient history now, World War II) that didn't have a fire burning in the background. Well, the fire is the symbol that Man uses, up to atomic fission – the one he used – to make nothing out of things. So, there was his goal.
Now, let's look this over and find out that our preclear must be willing to be the cause or the effect or tolerate the distance or duplicate anything and everything across the boards. And we go right out of the whole subject of "Is he self-determined or other-determined." We're immediately out of that subject, see. So we've hit a new high echelon. He has to be in a position where he knows what was the source-point and what was the receipt-point. That's what he has to know. And if he knows that completely and accurately – what source-points and receipt-points are, where they're located and so forth – and if he can tolerate distance between these two things and if he can tolerate mass or lack of it en route between one and the other, and if he can tolerate any of the velocities between one or the other, he is no longer superconcerned with identifying himself with either a source-point or a receipt-point, but he can identify himself with either at will. And if you have somebody who is capable of identifying himself with either the source-point or the receipt-point in a Communication Formula at will, of course, you have somebody who is no longer worried about self-determinism because he's no longer worried about self.
Now, what you've done there essentially – we took this up in an early Unit – what you've done essentially is back the person up from an inverted-dynamic scale. That is to say, maybe he had a little obsession that maybe he was God or something, you know. And Eight, Seven – he had the idea, you know, that he was a spirit on the "I'm over there basis" – Six, Five, Four, Three, Two (this is just scale of progress), First Dynamic. We got him to the First Dynamic. But we really did get him to a First Dynamic where he knew he was he and he was him and that was that. See, he could be at that point and so on and be the cause of things, and he could be at that point and be the effect of things. He was identified with and was willing to identify himself at least with one object or with one location. He was willing to do that and at that moment he hit the First Dynamic.
And it was after that that you ran the Sex up to Know Scale again – only you ran it straightwise this time. You just started to increase his ability to handle things. And from the First Dynamic then he went on to an honest Second and Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh. And if you didn't watch it, he's liable to come out the top. See, how he could do that. He naturally would not concern himself with selfness. He'd be perfectly happy and he would probably be capable of more individuality than anybody you'd ever run into, but he wouldn't be concerning himself with selfness.
It was upon this stumbling block that the early Bodhi tripped before Gautama. That was just this: that after you ceased to be self, why, you just get into Nirvana, you know. They had the idea that being associated in with everybody else, somehow, you know – be part and parcel of everybody else. Well, look at that as a confused picture of what we've just been talking about. An individual got so he could be fully self-determined and then passed right on out of that to a point of where he could be self-determined or other-determined at will.
Well, this didn't mean he was buttered all over the universe, see. He knew where he was better than anybody else knew and he knew what he was and he knew where he was. And he also could duplicate himself and be in the two places at once. And he was a very confusing boy, maybe, for somebody to select out for randomity, because they wouldn't be able to at all. They would never get him totally to identify himself so absolutely with something that he would then never be capable of identifying himself with anything else. Such people are quite confusing to have dealings with. People do this on a low scale where they don't quite know, you see, who is cause or who's effect. Then on a high scale, they know very well what they're causing and who's causing and what's the effect.
And they're able to estimate it and predict it and so forth, and they're willing to be at either end of the thing for the fun of it. But having pinned at either end of the thing, they are not then eternally, individually, solely and separately committed to a persistent continuation of that action on a dwindling spiral to the end of rime.
Now that is what's happened to any preclear that walks in. He's committed himself to so many actions, solely and completely and only, and he finally winds up with his only goal of just persisting forever as what, he doesn't even hardly inquire. Now, he just loses himself. What's his viewpoint? Well, his viewpoint is not flexible; he can no longer take viewpoints at will.
Then what's the goal of all of this Intensive Procedure? Is it to restore the self-determinism of the preclear? No. It's to rehabilitate his communication, his affinity and reality up to a high enough level of knowingness so that he can communicate or not communicate at will. He can feel affinity for or not feel affinity for at will. He can feel the reality of or the unreality of, or the lack of, anything at will. And he has the greatest flexibility in whether he is cause-point or receipt-point. He's willing to be either one in any situation. And he's willing to tolerate any distance between those two points or any mass at any velocity between those two points. An almost unthinkably vast goal, but that's the goal of this procedure.
The goal is very difficult to attain, actually, until exteriorization is reached with certainty and then is attained rather rapidly. If you know all the parts of the goal, why, then it's pretty easy to attain. But here we have this; by remedying the various abilities of the preclear in the field of communication with its component parts and affinity and reality, we gradually boost him up to the point of where we exteriorize him. And it has two Routes.
Route 1: well, he exteriorizes quickly and we just go right on through then and consummate this goal. Because after we go through Route 1, you see, with this process, then we go right on straight through Route 2 with the same preclear. A Route 1 preclear we just – this is actually mapped completely out for, and then he runs into what we would run on Route 2 first. Why is this? Because you start in auditing a Route 2 person as another being: a body. You've got to audit the body before you can audit the thetan. This other one, you didn't have to do that. Simple isn't it?
All right as we look over our goals then we recognize that today as in no other time on this planet, it is possible for an individual to reach this almost incredible rationale to where he's – doesn't matter whether he is (quote) "self-determined" (unquote) or not. Self-determined interpreted as occupation or beingness at a point-occupation of a point or being at a point. And he doesn't have to occupy that point forever and a day and, as a matter of fact, could occupy (as I was talking about attention) about a hundred thousand points simultaneously. But that doesn't mean he's buttered all over the universe. That means he is totally aware of exactly what he is doing everywhere he is doing it.
Well that's quite a goal and that's the goal of Intensive Procedure.
INTENSIVE PROCEDURE: LECTURE III PAGE 2 7ACC-16 - 07.07.54