The Difference Between a Good and a Bad Auditor (7ACC 540715)
Series: 7th Advanced Clinical Course (7ACC)
Date: 15 July 1954
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
Want to talk to you about the difference between a bad auditor and a good auditor, Subject should be of some interest to auditors in general, since you very often will inherit cases from bad auditors.
Now, let us say that – yes, "What have they done?" you'll want to know. What made them a bad auditor? What is the common denominator of all this bad auditing? And what makes a good auditor?
Now, an auditor could know the Auditor's Code backwards, forwards and could comply with it all the time. And all he would have done in that case is simply have proofed up the obvious errors which could be made and might be overlooked, which is what the Auditor's Code consists of. It's the compounded experience of four years of training auditors and observing them. Very well.
If this thing is not included in the Auditor's Code, then why an Auditor's Code? Well, we can at least, as auditors, get people to avoid those errors that are in the Auditor's Code.
In the first Auditor's Code, Book One, we had (I think, page 178) the line in there which covered it, but it didn't cover it because it was an inadequate description of it. And it said, "An auditor must be courageous." And this was dramatic and it was interpreted dramatically. It is not in the 1954 Auditor's Code simply because it takes a little bit broader statement to cover this particular quality that makes the difference between a bad auditor and a good auditor.
I have just kept an auditor on a case who should not have been on the case, and have just looked around and finished off some observations of auditors and have summated these observations, and find that we are facing a common denominator wherever we find a poor auditor. And it is something, then, that you should know in instructing auditors and it's something you should know since you often inherit a preclear from a poor auditor.
What has happened? Basically, in theory, we could say the auditor was playing the game of death. He was trying to give death to the preclear. But that's dramatic, too. And this other is not. It's not dramatic – what goes wrong. It's a very simple thing.
This test could be made of an auditor: when somebody becomes emotional toward him, would he check their emotion or run away or do something else to combat that emotion?
Now, let's be more factual here. If somebody became motional – not emotional, motional – if somebody went into motion in his vicinity, would he go away or turn his back or flee? If somebody moved erratically, suddenly and so forth, would this person have the feeling that he should leave the environment? Therein lies the test which will establish whether or not an auditor is a good auditor or a bad auditor because that itself is determined by his attention span in general. But that factor determines the amount of attention he will put on various techniques. And an auditor who will turn away from people who go into sudden motion or anger or something of this sort, who will turn away from them, can be counted upon to ruin cases. Why?
Because the processes he uses which really start to run the case, will put the case into motion, will put the case into an emotional state simply to the degree that the preclear is
not entirely in control of himself. He is doing the process and he is damning the process. He might not be wild, you know. We're not talking about wild violence. We're just talking about a preclear becoming uncomfortable and complaining to the auditor or complaining to the technique or just muttering or – in other words, presenting a restive picture.
And the auditor, at that moment, will cease to use that technique and will shift to another technique. He will run away from the technique which made the preclear motional and emotional.
Anything, then, which started to do anything for the case would be abandoned by this auditor and, furthermore, the preclear would be abandoned by such an auditor at any moment that would be the worst possible bog for the case.
In other words, this case has been running along, has been soldiering, you might say – just doing, you know, left dress, right dress, about face – very nicely and very neatly, and then all of a sudden on running something or other (just a little less mild technique or something of this sort), why, we found the case saying, "I don't know whether I could touch that wall again or not!" To get what? To get the auditor abandoning the process in favor of a process that won't cause the preclear to do this, which leaves the preclear stuck and inhibited from getting off anything during auditing. Because he knows, he learns with such auditors that to become motional or emotional or restive, to complain, to be upset in any degree will cause the auditor to abandon the case at that point and go on to some other process.
What is there in auditors that causes them – there are several factors involved here but it's very simple, the manifestation of it – what is this factor that causes an auditor to run fifteen or twenty techniques, one right after the other, in an hour's processing? What is this factor?
Well, he can't duplicate. He himself can't duplicate. Well, that's bad enough, and that's a wicked factor, but there's another one that stacks right in there in the same computation: What's a reason why an auditor will not run an effective technique? Because it stirs up another being into that horrible thing called motion or emotion. It upsets this other individual and we can't be in the same room with somebody who has gotten into the violent rage of saying, "Doggone it."
And if you will trace back cases which complain of having been audited poorly, you will find that this is where the case is sitting. This is the important one. Anybody can have fifteen, twenty techniques run on him in half an hour, that won't kill him. But what will upset him is that anytime he starts to let go, to be free to any degree in the running of a process, the auditor abandoned the process and went onto another process, And that left the preclear in a bog because that process which turns on a set of somatics or a condition is the process which will turn it off. That's right, isn't it? All right.
If this is the case, the rest of it wasn't run, was it? Wasn't run. So he's been run just deep enough into the process to teach the preclear that he must not emote or express himself or let anything come off. He's been run just that far into the process and then his auditor suddenly turned around and ran another process. "You know, let's run something a little less violent. Let's run some concepts, let's run some … let… let's … let's take this immediate problem, this … this fellow's angry, so therefore, let's take his … let… let's … let's find out who was angry. Who … who in your family got angry?" or anything. It can be that desperate, but ordinarily it isn't. It's not even detected by the preclear or the auditor, ordinarily, when it occurs. There's simply a sudden shift of technique.
What happened at all these sudden shifts of technique? The preclear started to emote. It is not that the auditor does not want the preclear to get well. He wants the preclear to change his mind at the very least, he wants the preclear to be better, even if only for him. But his motives are not bad, but his tolerance of emotion and motion are so poor – his tolerance is so poor that he cannot face an active, running technique, which tells you immediately why people stayed with Dianetics and wouldn't move on the way into Scientology. And why I never worried for three seconds when they stuck in that position on the track.
I knew we could pick them up sooner or later and we will, But I knew this: that they couldn't tolerate anything that worked. I just knew that instinctively, but I never analyzed it. Because they wouldn't run Dianetics (most of them) so that it'd work. Dianetics works, you know. What didn't work in Dianetics was too many auditors – they didn't work. And that was why Dianetics had to be refined over and over and over, completely aside from the fact that we didn't have the last answer there was to existence. We had the best answer there was to existence at the time.
But why did these people stay with that? Because you could always throw somebody into that optimum technique which was invented in the San Francisco area called "PCM." You could always get somebody to boil-off. Oh, what a relief for an auditor! Look, he's got somebody completely motionless there, expressing nothing, not communicating in any way, somebody who's entirely anaten and would stay anaten for hours and hours and hours.
Now, I got curious about this manifestation after a while and tested it – whether or not it was therapeutic and discovered that after three hundred hours of boil-off, the case of a preclear had not altered one iota; hadn't made him any better, hadn't made him any worse. But they'd had a lot of fun for three hundred hours, hadn't they?
What a relief for this auditor, though. He just could sit there and the preclear – not moving. What an ideal case: no change of any kind.
Now, if you think there's bitter and heavy sarcasm in my voice here, I want to disabuse you of the fact. It is not sarcasm, it's overt abuse, [laughter]
If you were to trace back in your own auditing, you may discover that you had an auditor who did this, here or there, once maybe. You started to emote, you started to warm up to this whole proposition, you just started – get going real good and you found yourself running something else. Now, because you were immersed in your case, you might not have noticed this tremendously or too much.
Now, we could say many things about this auditor. He couldn't arrive, he couldn't do this, he couldn't do that. But the best thing that we can say – we could apply all of Scientology to him. We could say his case is in bad shape and so on. But instead of doing that shotgun, let's look at this specific thing of somebody going into motion and emotion.
The preclear starts into motion and emotion. Just that there's something moving there would cause the auditor to withdraw hurriedly from that particular process. Actually, all he does – he doesn't run away or anything of the sort. He's running this kind of a process: he says to somebody, "All right. Give me three things that you're not creating at this time." Let's just take this one – old 8-C Process, "Three things you are not creating at this time."
And the preclear says, "Yahhh," bogged a little bit. "Jesus! Goddamn, that's an awful pain in my head!"
"Well, let's take up the pain in your head." You get how smooth that is? How quiet that is?
Some action turned on. He got a manifestation there and he couldn't be the effect of that, so he shifted over, if only on to the subject of the headache. What did this headache have to do with it? This headache had nothing whatsoever to do with the process being run, beyond the fact that the process had turned on a somatic. And our attitude today and for some long time towards somatics is: when they turn on, they'll turn off. But only if we run them out with the process that ran them in. That's the one little guiding law – the one little guiding law on processes: That which turned them on will turn them off.
Now, when we say that, by the way, we're talking about the processes of Scientology, we're not talking about an upset, twisted around, appetite-over-tin-cup process like an electric shock. It's not true that an electric shock will turn off what an electric shock turns on. All it'll ever turn off is the preclear, but thoroughly.
All right. Now let's look at the auditor in that state, and now let's use the same principle to a field which is not necessarily in the same category as Scientology. Scientology happens to embrace that particular field, but otherwise is not close into it – the field of psychiatry. And let's find out, as we look around institutions, that the electric shock machine is used on those people who go into motion. Regardless of what they say it's used on, let's look around factually and discover what it's used on and they'll find somebody who begins to run up and down a corridor and so forth and, boy, they'll have him down there under the machine in a hurry. Bing! They can't tolerate this motion, they can't tolerate this emotion and they seek to punish it.
Now, auditors are a much better breed of cat. But the poorer of auditors will be sufficiently intolerant – whatever else their thing – of motion and emotion that they will abandon the process. They won't abandon the preclear ordinarily. They won't do anything bad. They will just shift the technique when this occurs – sometimes to a heavier technique, sometimes to a milder technique just because they're not particularly sensible about it. But at least we will go in some direction which doesn't produce this much motion or emotion on the part of a preclear.
Now, this one happened once upon a time and I was forced to let this auditor go his way. I couldn't seem to do anything about it because he refused to have any processing at all. This happened, by the way, about five times with him. Preclear would go into grief, you know, a low-tone, emotional upset, a discharge of some kind or another and this auditor would sit there speechless, saying absolutely nothing. No matter whether the preclear pled with him to say something to get him out of it, no matter what happened, the auditor at the slightest show of emotion would sit silent, unmoving, unresisting and unassisting alongside of the couch. Now, that's quite an interesting thing, isn't it? This auditor went completely paralyzed in the face of it. Oh, this must be awfully dangerous stuff, human emotion. It just must be the most dangerous stuff in the world.
"As a matter of fact, I well remember – well remember – there were a bunch of shells coming overhead, but they weren't anything. There was a Japanese first sergeant on the beach who was becoming antagonistic about lieutenants. And I couldn't stand it. We had to leave the battle, [laughter] Yes, one has to take care of himself. Almost anything is liable to happen in the face of an emotion."
"I ran into a mouse once that was resentful, [chuckling] And I could have stood his clawing and so forth, but that resentment, that's what we had to get away from. So I went to the other side of the world and lived as a hermit."
What I'm saying is actually no more stupid than somebody sitting alongside of a preclear – what's he trying to do with the preclear? He's trying to get a release, he's trying to get a little more freedom, and if a preclear has been troubled with headaches now and then, for years, he hasn't even bothered to tell the auditor particularly. But all of a sudden this headache turns on and he – "whoo! rrrr! rrrr! headache."
And the auditor who has been running comfortably at this time, "Give me three more places where you're not" – and, by the way, when it comes up against space and havingness, this is not true. We run havingness in any time that we're spotting spots in space. You understand that? Any technique which spots spots in space goes along with Remedy of Havingness. Any technique which reduces havingness includes with it, as part of the technique, Remedy of Havingness. This is not a change of technique.
But this fellow – he's getting places where he's not, and this headache is coming on worse and worse and worse and worse, and the auditor suddenly says to him, as he's getting more and more restive, "Give me something real about your mother." What the hell has this got to do with it?
Well, maybe the auditor computed at that time that this headache – he actually had learned that his mother had headaches and he's learned all this and he's put it all together and so on. Well, that is not what he was supposed to be doing at that moment. What he was supposed to be doing at that moment – the most change of technique he'd give, would be remedy the guy's havingness. Well, let's remedy his havingness a couple of moments and go back to this process which we started. See that?
Now, we have just run an experiment along this line and I had begun to raise an eyebrow when this auditor had audited too many hours on a preclear. He had audited this preclear very many, too many hours, since I had audited the same preclear and many had, and each time had received a change in the preclear. So I wanted to know what we were doing here. I found out what we were doing. We were doing this same trick I'm telling you about. This is the last of the series as far as I'm concerned. We've learned all we want to know now about the subject.
This auditor uniformly was abandoning any process which produced an effect on the preclear. Anytime he found there was something the preclear could not do, the auditor – you see, the preclear, not being able to do something, would become rather emotional – the auditor would simply abandon that process and we stacked the preclear up three times with this. Three times we stacked up this preclear and had to be bailed out of it. Interesting, isn't it? Fantastic that an auditor, every time he started to get a change in the preclear, would abandon the process which was going to do the change.
You can say whatever you want to say. You can say it's because he can't tolerate the idea of emotion. You can say he can't tolerate motion. You can say he can't duplicate. You can say it's a very basic line in communication. You could say that, basically, the whole thing stems from attention. It's because the auditor's attention span is too short. But whatever you say about it, this is the final manifestation: that when the preclear starts to get into heavy weather, a bad auditor can be counted upon – after a very short space of time, if not immediately – to change the technique.
And a good auditor can be counted upon to run the manifestation flat with the technique which turned it on, interspersing into that technique no more than these
factors: Remedy of Havingness and spotting some spots in the room, to get the preclear back under control when the preclear has completely flown out of control.
See, the preclear says, "I won't do it. I … come down. I just… I quit, I… I … You can't make me do it again. That's utterly impossible" and so forth.
And the auditor says, "All right. Let's spot a couple of spots up on the wall up there."
And the preclear, "Well, I can do that. I've done that before." And see, spots them and spots a couple of more spots and a couple of more spots and so forth. And the auditor puts him right back into that technique, having regained control of the reins.
And the other allowable thing to do is to remedy the preclear's havingness. He's getting sick at his stomach and, for some reason or other, the technique we're running – we don't even have to know why – is evidently reducing his havingness, because he's getting sick at his stomach. You can just go on running the reduction of havingness, and an auditor will just make a preclear sicker and sicker. Well, the best way to handle it is anytime you're running a process which is reducing havingness, madly and so forth, is remedy the havingness and then what? Go on with the same process that reduced the havingness because you're on a surefire track which leads back toward the ability to create energy and tolerate it.
The difference between a bad auditor and a good auditor is not necessarily the difference between a good human being and a bad human being. It's not even really the difference between a fellow being able to perform well as a case and not being able to perform well as a case. Let's just throw these out as little pat catalogs.
And let's classify for once and for all, the difference between a bad auditor and a good auditor. Difference between a bad auditor and a good auditor doesn't happen to be whether they know the techniques better, one than another, see? When we say, "bad auditor," in this category, we mean an auditor who will utterly wreck a case, no matter what his apparent intention is. We mean by this, the bad auditor who will utterly smash a case. And that's the auditor – and what we mean by a bad auditor – that's the auditor who will start a technique that produces an effect upon a case and, because it is producing that effect upon the case or for any other reason, will withdraw from the technique and use another technique before the first technique was run flat. And that is a bad auditor.
Now, he could do this many ways. He could simply sit silent when the preclear got into trouble. The worst thing he could do! The preclear gets into trouble – the auditor just sits there silently. That's bad! You see? And of equal magnitude with this – because he didn't change technique; he didn't change technique, you see – he just dropped the whole technique.
So, the common denominator at the bottom of this is the definition of a good auditor. He will run the technique until it has ceased to effect a change in the case, until it stops changing the case all over the place. He'll run the technique as long as is necessary to flatten the technique. That's a good auditor.
Now, whatever else we say and whatever else we do and however else we classify, from where I sit – and believe me, that's been a grandstand seat of an awful lot of people auditing here for a long time – it seems to me that this is the only major fault an auditor can have. The other ones, somehow or other, we can get by. We can get around the other ones. We can get by the fellow who sits down with a perfectly simple process and has it built up to the Empire State Building before the end of the session, who has 152 ways to run a bracket. We can get by this boy, if he will simply run flat what effect he turned on. You see that? We can get by this boy.
Then there's the fellow who will be very overt, cruel, crude to a preclear. We can get by him, too. And then there's the fellow who just hasn't quite learned all there is to know, and by golly, we can get by him, too, if he will simply flatten out the effect which a process generates.
It isn't a matter of just abandoning your preclear. That's pretty horrible. It isn't a matter of just throwing him away when he gets into trouble. It isn't a matter of just changing technique.
Let's not think of the faults here. It's a matter of an auditor going on with the process which started to produce the effect and make the preclear run it!
Now, I hadn't mentioned that other factor up till this minute, but that's the rest of the definition of a good auditor. You see, that's just an amplification of the same thing, though. A good auditor will run flat a process which has turned on a case change. He'll run it flat!
If he was so ill – advised as to start using this process, God help him! But if he started using it, go on with it until it runs it flat and that means he's got to make the preclear do it, regardless what the preclear does! That's a good auditor. We can forgive a hundred million classifications of fault, but that one we can't get around because of the mechanic that a case left in a bog will bog, and it'll take an expert to get him out of it. And because of that mechanic alone, we have to then define the difference between a bad auditor and good auditor.
The bad auditor will run the techniques flat only when they produce no effect. A good auditor will run a technique flat to no communication lag – physical, verbal or any other way – even though it's breaking the preclear in half. He'll run it flat, remembering to remedy havingness as he goes. And that's the substance of it.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A PAGE 2 7ACC-21 - 15.07.54
GOOD AND A BAD AUDITOR