Practical Auditing (501107)
Date: 7 November 1950
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
It’s very simple for people to get into animals valences. I knew a girl once that was in the valence of a horse. That’s right. And there was a fellow once that was in the valence of a pig—pet pig evidently—looked like one too. Yeah, facial changes took place on this person. Very interesting, how all of this happens. So when you’re dealing, you know, with cases of non-reality, you can best spot them by trying to find out whether they ever dare occupy their own valence—they are also usually cases of out of valence. Now they may even be able to go into valence in the basic area and be so faintly in contact—nonsonic and all that sort of thing, that—pretty hard to work. It’s pretty good to invest time on this person, just to pick up reality, pick up communication, pick up affinity and get them rolling.
Just reminded me of this other case; he was in a dog’s valence and the dog hadn’t occupied very much time in his life so he only had about five or six spots on the time track where he could see anything. The rest of it was very badly occluded. A professional auditor worked this case for engrams. He was terrifically anxious to get an engram to show up on this person, because this person needed some convincing as far as Dianetics was concerned. It would have done Dianetics a little good if this person could have been convinced that an engram existed. But of course this fellow could have been taken into all the engrams in the world and he wouldn’t have known what to do with them. He was out of valence, his sense of reality was very poor, he had not a friend in the world obviously, he said so himself—his affinity level, you know—very poor, non-reality, so on.
Poor guy. Well, I took him back down the track and for about forty-five minutes did nothing but try to contact pleasure moments. And when I say try to contact them, I just mean try—and found this dog and got him out of the dog’s valence into his own valence at the age of about four and brought him up the track and showed him a couple of more things and he was still way out of valence. Everything on that whole case from beginning to end was just way removed. And brought him up to present time, and I said, well, I’ve laid an egg too.
This guy wouldn’t be able to contact an engram if you gave him one. And funny thing, he sat there for a moment and he blinked—oh, this person’s highly skeptical and all that sort of thing—and he blinked. “Isn’t that funny?” He didn’t know anything about affinity, communication, reality. “Everything looks more real to me than it’s looked for practically all my life. Isn’t that funny?” he said. “And you know,” he said, “I feel I like you.” He says, “I never felt I liked anybody before.” Boy, this was a strange one. And of course he started communicating like mad, just talking like a jaybird. And I passed him off down the line—somebody else. But there was forty-five minutes of trying to run pleasure moments. And it picked his sense of reality way up. Now, you can keep on with this sort of thing and try to knock out some of these charges, some of the little light ones. Try to get him in his own valence.
In other words, just work with him, trying to get him oriented with his own life. You don’t have to jump in and start running engrams right off the bat. Yes, running engrams is terrifically important. Yes, that is the thing which we are trying to do. But before you run engrams you better get the case in shape so that it will run engrams. There’s no reason just to keep on trying to run engrams when you can’t run engrams.
Now, this may seem terrifically obvious, an obvious sort of remark. If you have somebody that keeps telling you that he doesn’t know whether or not he’s in an engram or not and he’s having a hard time about the thing, it’s worth your while to spend a little time to pick him up to a point where the next time you throw him into running an engram he’s in an engram! You see? Now, his sense of reality is picked up when that thing is erased. It does no good to run one in which you’re not getting the somatic—you should be able to get at least 50 percent of the somatic out of it. But you keep running these little tiny light things where the fellow, “Yeah, just a minute, let me think for a minute, yeah, yeah, I think I’ve got a somatic on my right eyebrow. Yes. All right, we can run this engram now.” One of the ways, by the way, to find engrams on this case is to put them on a freewheel, a Guk freewheel. This person is normally out of valence amongst other things, and if you haven’t got a lot of time to work this person—you’ve got lots of people to work and so forth—put him on a Guk freewheel and check him over every few days. As a certified auditor, I’m talking about now—that’s somebody in private practice, something like that. And you’ll find this sort of situation will take place. First they’ll start to run these little light ones. This has happened in a few cases—the few cases I have observed that have done this. This isn’t any superscientific fact that is grossly proven. This is in a state of—you know, like sure-fire medical proof; I mean, we practically know nothing about it. It’s like ACTH. So, these little tiny light somatics will run for a while as he’s freewheeling. Of course you get him unstuck on the track. You can’t freewheel anybody who’s stuck on the track. He’s got this little light somatic and so on, and he’s got a somatic over here, and three, four, five days go by and all of a sudden he starts to get somatics. Big somatics.
Now he’s sort of rolled the somatics out of his case enough so he’s settling into his own valence. That all by itself will produce a better-running case. Sometimes you can go into a case like that and you get enough somatics so that you can convince him.
Now, it’s an odd and peculiar thing that the strength of the somatic, all by itself, will convince people of an engram.
You get him into an engram that’s hot enough, I don’t care what this fellow’s sense of reality was, he’s not skeptical anymore and he’ll run much better. I used to specialize in this—walk up to a fellow suddenly and with a sharp order to the somatic strip, “Go to the beginning,” you know, bang! Boom! Just take him completely unawares, no canceller, nothing like that, you know, and just deliver it when he’s standing around or sitting down in a chair or something like that. Couldn’t get himself braced—and into the engram, beginning of the engram, bow! Roll over on the floor, writhe, convulse! And he’d be convinced that engrams exist. And after that he was pretty easy to run. But somewhere along the line this persons case might deteriorate. You know, he might have an environmental upset or something of this sort and his sense of reality would get very—poorer and poorer. Well, I just couldn’t get him into another one that was good and hot, I’d just start pecking away at the case, making him remember this and run through this lock and that lock and finally get him patched up.
Now, it’s an odd thing that right at the beginning in Dianetics, in its researches, when I knew absolutely nothing about prenatals or birth—never knew that these bear traps were waiting for me—I was trying to produce results with people knowing that engrams existed but trying to produce results with people along just one line of knocking out later moments. You know, after two and a half years—old age! And I was trying to run stuff off through there to produce results in a case. Well, I was continually confronted with locks and I’d spend the beginnings of most cases playing around with locks. And finally it settled down to a terrific routine with me. So even after I knew about prenatals and basic-basic and the rest of the stuff, I would still, in the opening guns of the case, work locks, fool around, get them to return to this and that and sort of get them evened up on the perceptics, get them sort of adjusted on the case. I’d turn on sonic in these people. Then sometimes I’d spend ten hours, fifteen hours, doing nothing but going back and finding the time that Mama slapped them and going and finding the time that—well, Halloween when the two bad boys jumped out and said, “Boo,” and finding out the time they fell off their tricycle. In other words, just fool around with the case, get the guy used to it and so on. And then, all of a sudden, catch him when he least expected it and boot him all the way back down the track and hit an engram down there, knock him into his own valence, square him around, run the engram out and start the case on an erasure. And I was making fast progress on these cases.
You could spend twenty-five hours at the beginning of every case doing this and you would save a hundred hours in the process of clearing it. The ratio of training it is great. This case isn’t likely to bog down. Evidently you’ve already collected a lot of stuff out of the bank, a lot of attention units. You’ve done well with this case. This case doesn’t stick on the time track as easily. Then I had to go and rediscover Straightwire. That had been an old one. Pleasure moments came up and put their head up again as a very specific technique and so on. And we started patching back on something that I’d done a long time ago and then I’d gotten careless and forgotten to do.
I thought all of a sudden that cases had gotten much tougher in the world. That’s right, I just thought all of a sudden, well, I was running into tougher kinds of cases. The actual fact of the matter was, I’d stopped running pleasure moments, I’d stopped running straight memory and other things. I never used to run an early youth lock, for instance, without putting it on Straightwire afterwards. You know, I’d get it very thoroughly knocked out. And here’s a trick in Dianetics that isn’t in it anymore, that I used to do, which might interest you. You might find a use for this sometime. You run out a guy’s birth and it refuses to lie flat, parts of it keep going into—they go into recession and then they come back again. Bring the birth up to present time and run it in present time. It’ll knock out and it won’t ever go back again.
It would seem to you, offhand, a waste of time. But supposing this person comes in to you with a fine case of asthma and you haven’t got any time to spend with this person running out this and that and getting this and that to reduce and so forth. This person you’re only going to treat just a few times, and you find out that you can get into the beginning of birth. Well, you start to run birth through and you find out it’s going to be a tough one, but you can run it. So you run birth through; so you spend yourself five hours running birth and you finally get birth so it’s pretty flat, particularly those portions of it that pertain to asthma, bring them on up to present time; bring birth up to present time. Tell him so, “Birth will now come up to present time.” (By the way: cancelled, in case anybody’s birth came up to present time.) And run it in present time.
You’ll find out that an engram will change position on the track if you do that. I wouldn’t advise you to do this, but it’s a trick that you can use. Sometime if you get a case that is loused up in that fashion, run out the restimulated engram by bringing it to present time and running it. And it will stay flat and it won’t come back again. Isn’t that fascinating?
In lots and lots of cases you can run birth out, find out that you can find one prenatal, that the one prenatal will erase and after it has erased birth will reduce, flatten out, three or four childhood locks can be flattened out. And you bring the person up to present time, run all these things out again, and their chronic epizootics will disappear.
Yeah, you haven’t been down to the basic area, you haven’t fooled around, maybe you’ve run five engrams in the case. It’ll happen. You can call this person a fairly good release. Of course, they’ll still beat their kids and husband, maybe. And they’re still Republican. But you’ve got the case up along on a little bit above normal and the person, by the great tolerance of our society, can be lived with. Or he can live with himself or live with his chronic somatics.
Very interesting that there are quite a few things in Dianetics which have been picked up, researched and passed over. It’s one of the little crosses which Don Rogers and the rest of the boys have to bear. But I never bothered to put down anything. I didn’t have time. Dianetics was sweeping along so darned fast—people were coming at me in such streams. I’d make notes—I’d try to file them. Any stenographer or secretary that I had was so confoundedly busy doing stories, with which I was supporting the research, and anything I wrote in forms of words was so jealously guarded by me for stories—I mean I could write for stories—that would carry along the research. So I wasn’t putting down any research. And of course a chap walked into 42 Aberdeen Road last June and he gave me a long list of things that he wanted to go to work for. He was a great professor from a great university and he wanted to validate Dianetics. Well, he was a psychologist, and this guy presents me with this big list and he says, “Now,” he says, “I want you to go over these, and all you do is tell me about these and then I go ahead with my work.” And I looked over this list, and it said, “History of Dianetics, first researches, early tenets. Any errors made therein, any reworkings.” It said, “First Cases: complete descriptions, et cetera, changes in the evolution of the technique.” And I look at this thing, it would have taken me about three months to have outlined it and about two years to have written it. And meantime, here’s the Foundation,4 people to be trained, everything else going along, boom, so we adopted at that time a policy that, well, Hubbard will carry it around in his head and maybe in his old age he’ll tell us all about it. In the meantime we’ll just backtrack as best we can and get this thing squared around.5 Because I haven’t got time to sit down and talk to somebody for three months just to make an outline of this stuff. So what happens is that there are a lot of these little odds and ends of technique, things that have been discovered and passed over as not being optimumly workable. Things that had bugs in them, things that didn’t lead right on a straight, clear road to a positive solution, so they were parked.
We get these in the mail quite regularly as brand-new discoveries. And people will go around and if—Don or somebody will be very disgusted. I’ll come along and I will say, “Well, you know, I tried that in 1946. In 1946 it didn’t work out too well because you’ll find the person will break out in boils” or something like that. And he’ll say, “Well, I just got through spending two weeks looking this thing over.” That’s something that can’t be helped when you consider the body of the research and the enormous spread of this field.
I’m telling you this for two reasons. You’re going to find, many times, that you think you have a very valid departure from Standard Procedure, which you ought to use. If you are an absolute expert on Standard Procedure and if Standard Procedure works for you invariably, then you have written your own ticket to go and think something else up and use it. But if you’re shaky with Standard Procedure and you don’t know it cold, don’t run anything else in on it. The chances are, it’s already been run in on it and thrown away.
In other words, it doesn’t take too long to learn Standard Procedure and to carry along on it; it doesn’t take too long to practice up to where these tools are very sure and secure in your hands. A few months, then cut yourself loose. Do what you want to do along the line. You’ll probably come back, most of you, to Standard Procedure. But we have here something that keeps people out of trouble and gets the engrams. What I’m giving you through here and what you’re getting in Dianetics in general has been tested over and over and over and over again. It can be communicated to people easily. It has its various workable factors and, as far as we know today, has no bugs. It’s like getting some car that has only been manufactured for a year, when you take up some of these other things—there are bugs in it. We have some advanced techniques around there that haven’t been used very long, and they’re being used at the present time by experts and—but they’re like the automobile which has only been built for a year—it’s got bugs in it.
What happens on the relay of the information to new auditors, God knows! We know what happens here. They keep their noses clean and go ahead and slug on the thing. Eighty-five, ninety percent of the cases they run, they’re going to get good, solid, positive results. As they become more and more skilled and practiced, they start picking up on the remaining percentages until they can hit the limit and carry along with it. There are no uncrackable cases, as far as we’ve learned. There’s one gentleman that I’m sure could have been cracked. But the probability is that a long time before you have to swap over to something else, we’ll have had it, and it will be in your hands.
You’re going to start running, maybe, isolated cases. It’s a mistake for an auditor to run just one case. In the first place, he learns Dianetics as it applies to this case, and his tools get rusty, his imagination stultifies on him. That’s not practice. The best way to conduct a private practice is to start picking up people and opening their cases. And team them up and send them home to work on each other and check run7 them regularly. And not do the hour-by-hour slug work. There aren’t enough professional auditors. There aren’t enough of them around for one to tie himself down to Mrs. Gotbucks. So what you do is you collect teams and you open the cases of two people and you get them rolling along and you maybe carry them through up to a point where their cases are well open or even to a Release. And then you turn them loose on each other and let them carry—and correct their auditing. You come back and let them pay for a case opening every once in a while and you get them rolling again. Let them call you on the phone, ask what’s going on with their cases and so on. And you’ll find yourself in about the same position that I was in much, much earlier. That was the only thing I could do.
Yeah, there’s grief in this occasionally. You get one of the cases back that was running so well for you, and you find out that the guy you assigned to him is doing nothing but pat-a-cake.8 Then you find out that you have to spend a little time training and so forth in order to get people to work smoothly. You’ll find out the case that was beautifully opened is now bogged down and you have to open it up again, at which moment you can cuss and swear somewhat. But you’re still doing more people more good.
Standard Procedure will open more cases smoothly and keep them rolling than anything else of which we know, although we know of other things.
Now, this last few minutes of the lecture here is just, again, an effort to overcome, perhaps, a certain lack of experience on your part and to build up, I hope, your faith in your tools and your ability to work cases.
I can tell you very bluntly that when your tools are very rusty and you’re—are not rusty, but when your hands are not used to them—before you build up a nice fund of knowledge—one of the things that an auditor builds up, by the way, is a fund of phrases, a fund of experiences, so on, so that he looks at this case and he’s seen this situation before and he just fills in what’s missing and the preclear hits it and off they go again—fast.
Well, before one has built all that up, there are going to be cases you’re going to run into and just tear your hair over. And even cases which you just up and quit on. Don’t feel that you’ve got to hit a 100 percent average in cases. You hit 50 percent of it and you’ll be doing darn well. Then go back to the real toughies, after you’ve had a lot of experience, and go over those.
Don’t permit yourself to bog down on a very, very tough case. All cases are somewhat complicated but they’re not all tough. And if you take unto yourself a diet of nothing but tough cases, your morale and your confidence in your tools are going to go down. Your ability to audit will then go down. So you want to pick up a variety of cases. Don’t work just one. And as you work longer and longer and you get better and better, then you can—you’ll find out that your opinion of what is a tough case will change, until a person really has to be inaccessible, stuck on the time track, a hundred electric shocks and so on, to be what you would consider a real tough case. This is in the realm of experience.
Now, there’s one thing which you will develop, unless you are a writer, which is very necessary to you. Writers have this naturally. It’s something that everyone should know about. It’s called dialogue sense. You’re dealing with engrams, but the personnel of engrams are human beings, and human beings talk. Now, until a person has been around very long listening to people talk, with purpose in mind, he doesn’t really register to what people say. It is a specialized observation. Yes, one goes around in society, he listens to people talk, he listens to people talk to each other, he talks to them himself, but normally doesn’t make the specialized observation which would permit him to write the dialogue of these people or to fit in the dialogue of these people. He isn’t able, at first, unless he makes a specialized investigation, he is not going to be able to have an instinct as to what’s going to be said next.
Now, an auditor who doesn’t have dialogue sense is a lost auditor. But every human being who talks has some little grain of this sense and it’s something that’s very easily developed. Dialogue sense. You should know about this.
If Mama says, “I just don’t have anything to wear,” if you have any idea of Papa at all, you could probably dub in, “Oh, my God, are you going to go into that again?” You spot this, and all of a sudden Mama says this and Papa has been talking just before this, but all of a sudden there’s no more conversation.
Well, “Are you going to go into that again?” is enough to kick him out. So—you know that conversations don’t end on that note. If you know the personnel in the engram at all, you know this person—you get very, very well acquainted with the persons parents. You get up to a point where you know just exactly what they’re going to say next and if they don’t say it, you become very sharp and you take a look over this engram. What’s happening here?
The most rudimentary part of dialogue sense calls for you to know how people talk when they talk to themselves and how they talk when they’re talking to somebody else, so that you can spot whether or not somebody else is there.
One of the tricks, one of the main tricks that will be played on you, continually, is for somebody to be in a valence—out of his own valence and into another valence—and do nothing but run off Mama’s conversation or do nothing but run off Papa’s conversation—and will tell you, assure you that this is just monologuing. Well, it certainly isn’t monologuing. Papa is right there and he is talking. And the dickens of it is, his phrases are probably the superaberrative phrases on the case, and they’re not being said, they’re not being run over, but they’re merely being restimulated.
You can bog a case while it’s like this, running it way out of valence and running off, let’s say, Mama’s conversation. And it’s so obvious and so easy to do. You just keep your ears open about it; it’s so simple.
Mama says, “I just don’t know what’s the matter with you. Well, don’t say that again. All men are alike.” Well, you’ll run this off as an engram. Well sure, but the devil of it is, about 50 percent of this thing is missing. Papa had something to say between each one of those sentences. But, being out of valence and so forth, the preclear isn’t recording it and may not even be aware of the fact that Papa’s there, because the preclear isn’t thinking very well when he runs through these engrams. So it’s up to the auditor to alert the preclear to the fact that somebody else might be present. And you can even get a file clerk flash on the fact.
The severely neurotic and the psychotic have very, very sharp and solid valence walls—terrifically sharp. They get over into one of these valences and nothing else comes into this valence at all. And then the auditor must be aware of the fact that somebody else is probably talking.
You go down to an institution and you listen to a dramatizing psychotic walk around and dramatize an engram. You listen to this engram and you’ll find out that it’s got gaps in it. It’s not sequitur. That is why it sounds so strange to people. It’s because the other person’s conversation is missing in the engram. The psychotic is dramatizing just one valence. It’s the other valence, probably, which is holding him suppressed on the track. So it wouldn’t do anybody any good just to let this psychotic go through this engram that he’s dramatizing all the time, without shifting his valence.
You can change the whole dramatization of a psychotic sometimes just by saying, “Now, what would your papa say?” And the guy goes into a completely different dramatization. But it’s the same engram, see? He just fades across the line. Now you make him run off what Papa said a few times and you can occasionally get some tension off of the thing. All you’re trying to do with this fellow is get him up to present time.
Dialogue sense. You’re listening to people talk. Don’t ever treat an engram any other way. They’re human beings and they’re talking. And you should know what human beings say. And just for practice, open your ears as you walk around the town and listen to other people talking to other people. Find out what they’re saying to each other. You will be amazed to find out that you’ve probably never listened before. They say the damnedest things.
Of course, this is old stuff to a writer. Somebody showed me the fact that writers seem to make better auditors. Writers and engineers seem to have somewhat of a priority on being good auditors. But writers seem to be able to do it very, very well. Now, we’ve thought it over for a while and it finally boiled down to dialogue sense. That’s actually all a writer’s got—a little more imagination on dialogue that you can fit into a case. Now, you can develop that.
Now, this particular sequence of data which I’ve been giving you here with regard to Step Two—I’ve tried to keep it fairly well in line; there’s a lot to say on this subject. I want you to—working with your preclears and so on, I want you to look over this question of reality, communication and affinity. I want you to look around and see—to check up how well the preclears running, and I want you to try Straightwire on the auditing sessions which you have had with your preclear. Just look it over and see what happens and watch the effect of picking up this sense of reality by running a little bit of—even an incident of boredom or a little incident of fear, if you can’t get grief off your preclear.
I want you to look over this thing and reassay each case that you are working.
Okay. Thank you.