The Goal of Auditing (Clearing Congress 580706)
Series: Clearing Congress
Date: 6 July 1958
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
Is there anybody here still in the process of arriving at the congress?
Audience: No.
Did the last lecture influence your anaten?
Audience: (various responses)
Oh, it did? Well, I'm awfully sorry about that. Actually, it rather throws at somebody—to give them the dope and the data—it rather throws at somebody the idea, you know, that there's something that they're doing they don't know about. And of course, that's probably the biggest operation that you can pull on anybody. But in this case it happens to be a solvable operation, and it happens to be a fact.
I don't want you to get the idea that if your case has not advanced easily that you are mysteriously and unknowingly mocking up something that you know nothing about. I don't want …
But I want you to get the idea as an auditor that when the cases of your preclears have not moved satisfactorily that they are mocking up something they don't know anything about.
And if you should happen to find something which sticks you with a thud on the needle, don't discover it while auditing somebody else. Thank you.
We are now going to engage in the introduction of some people I am very fond of and very proud of: The staff of the Founding Church of Scientology, Washington, DC, and the various HASI offices throughout the world—those who happen to be present.
Now, this is a great staff—this is a great staff. It's really a pleasure to work with these people.
Do you have any real idea how long it takes to accumulate a staff that's compatible with itself and that does a job? Hm?
You thought there were a lot of people on this stage just a moment ago, didn't you? You thought there were quite a few people to comprise the staff, the Central Organization, and you undoubtedly thought that yourself: "Well, gee, there are an awful lot of people up there."
I'll let you in on something. To adequately handle the Central Organization job of Scientology would require three or four times as many as these people. It really would. The staff is that size simply because there are very few capable, additional people who are immediately available for it.
We hate to take a successful auditor from the field and put him on staff. I'll tell you why. It leaves a hole. We hate to see somebody go off staff because it leaves a hole, and if we don't watch it, we're dealing heavily in holes.
The fact of the matter is, when you don't get service out of this organization lately, it's because they're terribly overworked. They're terrifically overworked. The pressure is rising, rising, rising—volume, correspondence, interest and that sort of thing.
The FC does something else quite interesting. It operates numerous field area offices: New York, Los Angeles, so forth, and it does administration for them. They very often get very cross with the FC because they don't immediately get somebody snapping and popping and answering up to their mail. They don't realize that there were three emergencies in the basket before theirs came along.
The answer to this sort of thing is a simple one. We have found that staff requires this prerequisite: a good Scientologist.
A long time ago they used to tell us what we needed was a good businessman. We've had good businessmen, and we fired them.
What they used to tell us was, what we needed was a good publicity man that was really trained in publicity. And we've had them and they laid an egg, and we fired them.
And every once in a while we have had to fill a post with somebody who was not quite up to handling that post, and we missed. And we finally found what the common denominator was of an individual who could handle the post in an organization or any post in the organization. And that person was—the common denominator is—a good auditor. If a person is not a good auditor, there will be something wrong with his organizational activities.
Boy, that is something to remember. That's also something to tell somebody who is a big business executive, you know, and he's busy running Philco combined with General Foods, or whatever they're doing these days. And he's pouring out Cadillacs by the quart, and here they go, and so on.
He says, "What do I want to become an auditor for?" Boy, that's the most shortsighted look.
There are people around that believe that a Scientologist—a Scientologist is somebody exclusively who audits people professionally. There are a lot of
Scientologists who do this. But that is not everything one does. Let me tell you that on staff, as sharp as we are about this sort of thing, we find that a person who is not a good auditor (that's not a good Scientologist)—a good auditor, who can sit down there and turn out an excellent session, who can get good results on a preclear, is the only person we really like to have on staff because they always do a good job. They always have the ability to understand the problems of those around them, and they have the ability of handling a situation.
And somebody who has the old practitioner idea (the old idea of the psychotherapist is nuts, as you see in all the cartoons) is talking about a psychotherapist. He's not talking about a Scientologist.
If the head of Philco would descend from his empty mightiness and get back from behind that hundred and ninety inch mahogany desk long enough to come down and be an humble student at the Academy, he would be able to go back and do a far more adequate job on his post. He had learned how to clear people, or he just learned the basics of auditing, or he'd merely become proficient at the TRs—he would be a better executive. We don't push that hard enough.
We have solved a great many things organizationally. An organizational pattern today is like a fine watch. There are two dominant patterns: One is the national office pattern and the other is a—three patterns—and one is a big city office pattern combined with a national office. That's London. And then there's an area office, and it sort of combines the factors of these two.
But we have learned organization from scratch—from scratch. It's been a fantastic thing. Not only did we find ourselves living in an area of time and in countries which did not include in their civilization ways and means of handling human frailty; not only did we have to start from scratch and develop and pull out of the hat know-how to do these things—the imposition was multiplied enormously by having also to pull out of the hat almost the total science of organization, administration and business conduct.
And I think either we've been cheated or somebody else has been riding on a lot of laurels they never bothered to earn.
How the average company in the world manages to keep its wheels turning is the greatest mystery of all. The human mind is no mystery compared to that one. And we have had considerable experience with that. We do quite a bit in—business way. I get reports from here and there. I hear of businesses being investigated, and so forth.
And once in a while I start to climb in, around and through the communication lines of something or other, and I find out they're violating all the principles of communication and fifteen others that they themselves mocked up. You haven't got the terminals nor the communication lines, something of the sort.
And the other day there was a government bureau, and I happened to notice it going by (there was a slight odor), and I looked, and there was a government bureau. And this bureau was doing a job of work, but they, you know, the papers were going this way and that way and the other way, and so on.
And somebody confided to me about this bureau—that its total occupation was taking in each other's despatches. And that was its total activity. It had no outside connections to anything. And I gave the guy who was telling me about it a major cognition. It was very interesting.
I said, "Well, what is the defined purpose of that bureau?"
"The defined purpose of the bureau? Hm. The purpose of the bureau? The purpose of the bureau? The purpose—the actual purpose of the White House staff. The actual purpose of the Treasury Department. The purpose of the government. The purpose of this." He said, "Good God!" he says, "Man!" he says, "To tell them what their purpose is would begin a total revolution of this government." Fascinating.
You look at one of our organizational charts, and you'll see the office or department name, and then you'll see the purpose of it under it. And we quite commonly discover that when we've got something that's going along rather limply, that something is missing or wrong with the purpose. It's not necessarily wrong with the people, but it's wrong with the purpose.
In other words, no goals are set up for that particular division that are adequate. And we did this once with the Academy, and had an astonishing increase in training ability on the part of the Academy.
We said that, "The Academy must turn out auditors that we would not be ashamed to use," (or words to that effect), "in the HGC." That's purpose; that's what it's supposed to do. That was purpose and a standard, see?
Oh, the poor students. Right after that they just got flunked, flunked, flunked, flunked! They come in; the Director of Processing—and Director of Processing would take a look at one of them, something like that—the Director of Training—and say, "Well, I know. I know. What can I do?" And the Director of Processing would be saying, "You're just not up to my standards." And the poor student was just being ironed flat.
All of a sudden, the students themselves got the idea that "nothing less than an ability to audit was needed to get out of the Academy." A big cognition, you know!
It wasn't how many pieces of paper you wrote down on, and it wasn't how many tests or book reports or something you had, it was how well you could audit that got you out of the Academy.
No, I think if the head of The Brainwashing International or some such industrial organization—Madison Avenue Advertising Agency or somebody like that, were actually to walk through, for instance, the London office or the office here, so on, and really look at some of these patterns which have been developed and so on, they would get the same sort of a boot as this fellow got who realized that we, right here in Washington, were proposing revolutionary principles in terms of organization. They would get a terrific bang out of it.
I'm just not talking into empty air now. It happens to be a fact that it's taken us eight years to develop an organism known as an organization and find out the principles of it, and so forth, and take off from scratch.
And I think you'd probably have to work with the organization for several months to really become acquainted with all of the bits and pieces and vias, and so forth.
The public at large, having no concept of it, conceives of its principal purpose of breaking up the orderliness of the organization. That's its prime purpose—of the public. The public comes in and they go over to the Receptionist—and says, "Where is my book?" And Receptionist says, "Well, you should go down to the people who sell books. And they're downstairs, and you go around there and you talk to them. You see?"
And so this person who came in and asked about the book goes over to the Director of Processing and says, "Where is my book?" And then eventually, why, the public, if left to have its way, would then go around and see Dick and say, "Well, where is my book?" And it would become an organization in the best meaning of the word out in the society at this time- where the executives do everything, and the people who are supposed to do them aren't permitted to by either the executives or the public. And out of this confusion, we get what they laughingly call "progress."
GE, I think it is, that says, "Our greatest product is progress." Isn't that the outfit that says, "Our greatest product is progress."
I ran into a fellow from GE not too long ago, and I said, "What is progress?"
And he said, "Um …"
I go, "You people ought to have an indoctrination course to tell the public what you make."
"Oh," he says, "I know what we make all right."
I said, "Well, what do you make?"
"Oh," he said, "we make electronic goods of one kind or another, electrical gear, appliances, that sort of thing."
I said, "Well, according to all your advertising you make progress." And I said, "What is this stuff 'progress'?"
And he said, "Oh, you're joking with me."
And I said, "No. I'm not joking with you. What is this thing called 'progress'?"
And he said, "Well," he said—finally, really ground down—he said, "it means that this year's iceboxes are better than last year's iceboxes."
And I said, "Well, that's good. That's good progress. All right, now we know what progress is. How do you mean 'better'?"
"Well," he says, "They uh …"
I said, "Come on now. What do you mean 'better'?"
And he says, "Well, um, um …"
I said, "Well, let's see now. What could we mean by 'better'? Would we mean more economical?"
"Oh, well, no." He says, "You—get into that."
I said, "How about greater longevity? The product lasts."
"No." he says, "We got a directive the other day that said that when we started turning out iceboxes that last forever, we would eventually stop turning out iceboxes, so that we had to keep an eye on that in the design department."
"Well," I said, "that isn't better. How about better appearance?"
"Oh," he said, "I guess so, guess so. We turn out better appearing iceboxes."
And I said, "Well, doesn't an icebox look pretty much like an icebox?"
And he said, "Well, I guess so."
I said, "Well, we can cancel that one out, can't we?"
And I said, "Well, have you sold more iceboxes this year than you did last year?"
"No, as a matter of fact, we've sold lots less."
So I said, "Well, then you're not improving their salability. That isn't a point of progress, is it?"
And, "No. No." That wasn't the case.
I said, "Then we get down to the fact that what you do make is progress. Is that correct?"
And he said, "Yes. And I mean," he added with a considerable sense of humor, "and we make it as long as we don't have you around to mess up the definition of it."
The whole world of salesmanship, production, and so on, itself runs in very interesting fads and stampedes, one kind or another. And Madison Avenue has finally heard of psychology. Madison Avenue is where most of the advertising agencies are in America, I'm told. Those that are not on Madison Avenue are on Madison Avenue.
And the advertising agency has the idea that there's something called psychology. I'm going up there some day and get some of those boys to do some defining when I feel real sadistic and mean. They are certain they know that there is something called psychology that they use, when as a matter of fact they use hypnotism, and they use mass persuasion, so forth.
And I had a discussion with one of those boys not too long ago on the subject of the repetitive use of a brand name. Was he absolutely sure that the repetitive use of a brand name sold more of that brand?
"Yes." He says, "Obviously," he said, "that is the fundamental of advertising!"
Oh, I did a dirty trick. I mean, I shouldn't have done it. So I said, "Say water." And he said it. And I said, "Say water." And he said it. And I said, "Say water." And he said it. I said, "Say water." He was pretty hard to hold in session, but I managed it.
And after about thirty times, we got one of the more astonishing reactions—one of the more astonishing reactions. He was perfectly willing to utter these words, these syllables wa-ter. But he didn't have really a clue what it was.
I went back over and caught him while he was groggy, and I said, "Then is it true that the repetition of a brand name is good advertising?" That's the way we run an engram, keep publishing it.
They have now gotten to a point of covertness which is fascinating in the extreme. The covertness is to have a stroboscopic speed flash of a picture and a command of some kind or another while you're looking at another type of picture.
You look at a scene of a beautiful girl or something and there's a little sign that says, "Smoke Bingo," or something of the sort. And at the same time, faster than the eye can (quote) perceive, (unquote) you have another sign at the same time going off and on at a tremendous rate of speed, and it says, "Drink Coca-Cola. Drink Coca-Cola. Drink Coca-Cola. Drink Coca-Cola. Drink Coca-Cola."
And in several movie houses they have found out that when they flash this on the screen while the picture was playing, at the intermission, why, people rushed out and bought more Coca-Cola than they had previously, which I think is very interesting. And I've been meaning to find the manager of one of these test theaters and ask him whether or not, wasn't true that his postulates were pretty weak, he didn't have the power of influencing an audience himself anymore.
Because, frankly, if nobody ever perceived it—let's look this over carefully. You never see it at all, but it influences you. Now, you didn't mock it up, and you aren't the author of it, and you have no connection to it on the background—is it perceivable?
Well, there's a high probability that it is perceivable. But if it worked and if this is factual, which I don't at all know whether or not it's factual, I don't know if it's possible. I think it's just good propaganda. It's a wonderful opportunity, you know, for some political party to say, "You realize that people are very impressionable, and they see, 'Vote Republican. Vote Republican. Vote Republican,' you see, being flashed faster than the speed of sight on the screen," you see, while you're looking at some mild little fairy tale like Gunsmoke, and it'd be possible for this political party simply to rumor around the fact that this happened in every motion-picture house without ever doing it. And I think if they keep up this publicity, we are left wide-open with a wonderful, wonderful opportunity.
It's almost—it's almost too much. And if Madison Avenue will just keep up with its good work, why, then we can come in with our rumor that on every motion picture and television screen routinely and regularly at fifteen-second intervals throughout the twenty-four hours a day, "Be processed," is flashed on the screen. Looks to me like a very easy way of going about it.
Reminds me of the old thought-tower days. I'd hate to go into space opera and start talking about space opera because it's getting too humdrum, too ordinary.
Flying saucers are taking off and landing, and little men are appearing in government. And… But in the old days—I can't forbear to make a few comments on it because every space society follows a certain curve. The machine gets more and more powerful, more and more powerful; the man becomes less and less an individual. And they begin to use more and more duress and hypnotic techniques in order to get him to cooperate.
And the more these gimmicks and gadgets are employed, the more they have to parallel them with thought duress. And in some town, some space-opera town, you're liable to have a big tower, and this is a thought tower. It's a huge tower, and it sits up above the town, and it's got lobes on it, you know, like antennae—some drawing out of Jules Verne or Robert Heinlein or L. Ron Hubbard—and you've got these lobes, you know?
And everybody in the town knows one thing about the tower, and knows it well—that it is a thought tower. And that tower operates on a radio-type frequency to pick up all disloyal and destructive thoughts in the town. And that their thoughts can then be picked up on the central tower and recorded and put on record. And if they're reported at once, there is simply corrective therapy employed. But if they're not reported at once, then criminal punishment has to be engaged in by the town.
So, somebody thinks, "You know, that … that … that guy in charge of things? He really flubbed yesterday. Oh, wait, a minute, you know. Oh, well!" He walks down to the police station and reports himself for having thought a disloyal thought. And of course, they put him in a box and give him an electric shock, and he promises never to do it again and goes out.
The thought tower in no case has ever been connected to anything and has never been known to record anything yet.
You get more and more of these gadgets as science takes over—more and more of this gadgetry occurs.
In the first place they don't really get the problems of space solved. They just put men in tin cigars and shoot them out with "do or die" postulates.
But the way they indoctrinate a crew is quite interesting. When he goes—reports aboard—he lies down in his bunk, and a little speaker over his head starts talking. The medico comes along and gives him a shot. He feels himself getting draggier and draggier and sleepier and sleepier. And this voice keeps talking on and on and on. And it says things like, "You are now a member of this crew, and the rules and regulations of this ship are so-and-so. And you cannot at any time disobey an officer. You must not speak to an officer. You must not look directly at an officer. You are a member of the crew. Your job is so-and-so. And you're supposed to do so-and-so." And it lays it all out and puts a terrific implant on the situation.
But it's talking all this time, it's saying all these things, you see? And the fellow—his last recall is this thing going on and on and on when he drags off into slumberland, you know?
And when he wakes up the next morning, they tell him that that went all night, and that it went straight into his unconscious. And then they won't tell him the total content, but they do convince him one way or the other that it is totally compulsive.
The odd part of it is that the officers of the same ship go in and lie down on their bunks, and they're told that they're officers, and they must never fraternize with the crew, and their duties and activities are so-and-so and so-and-so.
From our standpoint, one of the more interesting points is this: that part of the crew indoctrination is that they must never leave the ship without having permission, and this and that sort of thing, but they mustn't leave the ship, and they mustn't step out of the ship out into space. You find more preclears sitting in one of those ships.
Now, we wonder why at this time when we are on Earth developing space opera, why do we find so much space opera in people's banks? So it must be just a manifestation of the environment, mustn't it? It isn't real, and there's no backtrack or anything of that sort.
Now, this is the mechanism of restimulation. If you had a society which was totally barbaric and which had a future of additional barbarism, you would find reactive banks reacting to compulsive mock-ups connected with barbarism. Do you see?
If you had one that had to do with the "Do or die," Queen Victoria sort of idea—"Do or die for King and Country," that sort of thing—which Russia now has by the way. They are in their Victorian Age—about the only thing that makes them a dangerous enemy. If you had people in that sort of an atmosphere, and it must all be soldiers and war and that sort of thing, you would find people restimulated into this sort of thing. Well, you would find a total back-bank that goes all the way back through the type of civilization that they are in because it is continually restimulating them, and they are continually mocking up the whole track behind them. You see how neat this mechanism is. It's not even hard to understand.
So, that in a space-opera society, you would find people mocking up space opera. Every place on the track that they had collided with space opera, they'd be mocking it up.
Atomic fission makes its appearance, so they mock up everything back along the track having to do with atomic fission, you see?
And therefore, you get any population restimulated by its current environment. Think of that for a moment. They are so used to copying things that when the environment itself is there to be copied, they copy everything connected with that environment which gives them whole track copies. And you'll get—you'll find in people that you're investigating, you'll find any planetary civilization, more or less like this planet, in restimulation. You see that?
Well, this mechanism of: "What is restimulated in the preclear depends to a large degree on the environment in which he is living at this time"—it isn't that he only has this type of experience. See, he has all kinds of experience, every breed of cat you could name, but that which he's obsessively, unconsciously and unknowingly mocking up is the type of experience which he is experiencing at this time. You see that?
And therefore, his present time or present life always appears to be aberrative. You get this? It's the mechanism that works.
So he gets married, and he says, "Marriage is aberrative," if he has any difficulty with it at all because he then goes and mocks up all the things that give him the experience of marriage. And you get a whole chain of marriage in restimulation simply by the act of marriage.
Well, if you try to correct his present marriage only, you are simply correcting something on a minor assist basis. What you have to correct, actually, is this obsession to create every bad incident connected with everything that happens now! And it's obsessive and compulsive creativeness that makes victims of us all.
So, knowing creativeness would be the panacea or cure for everything, wouldn't it?
But don't be—don't be alarmed because you find the preclear in restimulation on subject A, space opera, and a few weeks later when he's just gotten through reading a book on the deep South, find him in restimulation on slavery. You see what he might do? At one time he's mocking up his environment which happens to be sort of space-opera-ish, and a few weeks later, why, he's mocking up an environment which isn't space-opera-ish at all. It's—has to do with slavery.
Well therefore, if you sought to clear him by clearing up the significance of space-opera-ishness, only in a couple of weeks you're going to have a brand-new bank called slavery, and you have to clear it up, too.
So, what you're really trying to solve in any case, is to get in there and resolve obsessive and compulsive creativeness and put it on a knowing, understanding, capable basis, rather than a totally unable, compulsive, obsessive basis. You see?
And it's that factor which you're resolving with a case, not a series of special dramas. I can tell you that because you're going to get plenty of drama trying to find out what this character is obsessively mocking up. It's enough for him to be obsessively mocking up just one thing and not know about it, to then obsessively mock up many things and not know about them. And you knock out the one thing that keeps him at it all the time, and you'll get the rest of it, too.
And this mechanism of compulsive creativeness of a reactive or subconscious or unconscious or reconscious bank, therefore becomes a very understandable situation. Only the unconscious mind does not have- beyond a button sort of thing—a pinpoint obsessiveness. The total content of a reactive mind is associated with this held-down five, and its content of the bank at large is not constant.
That's something to understand. The bank is not constant. The reactive mind contains different things for different stimuli that the person is meeting in the environment. You see that?
Male voice: Yes.
Therefore, you can publish a book called Freudian Analysis and have an awful lot of people read this book and have it key in all the other times in the last 76 trillion years that they believed obsessively that sex was bad or aberrative, and you have plentiful bait there out of which to make a total unconscious mind.
So at any given time in history, any type of book published would have created that type of mind, don't you see?
Now, all we'd have to do is write a new book on Freudian Analysis, describe it some entirely different way and find numbers of model patients which match this new book. And then under another pseudonym write another book over here which described an entirely different unconscious mind, and said that was the thing. And we'd find numerous patients which fitted it exactly.
The common denominator of what is wrong with all these patients is handled in Scientology and is a very, very simple one: It's a compulsive and obsessive creativeness of mental images, spaces and pictures.
And when that compulsive creativeness is totally submerged and out of sight, and the individual obsessively mocks up this thing, he's running a terrific, "Now I'm supposed to keep it all created. In order to survive I have to die, of course." And other oddities, to say the least. We get right alongside of it the surface view of the unconscious mind, and this surface view gives us any background to the restimulative environment.
Therefore, to study types of minds would be the greatest waste of time that anybody ever engaged upon because I could show you conclusively that we could change types of mind as fast as we change schools of thought- one right after the other. Brrruupt.
It's no wonder that people have distrusted former schools of thought because they were all different.
Now, we did investigate in Dianetics the past track on the subject of the present lifetime—what types of facsimiles can be found in the reactive mind. And we pretty well covered the subject.
And a little bit later on in History of Man, we covered it a little bit further. These were types. I call something to your attention: They were types of pictures, they were not types of mind. They said a mind is a mind and that's the way it is. And there's an uncleared mind and there's a cleared mind.
Well, an uncleared mind could be mocking up visibly or could be mocking up and inhibiting, and so be mocking up invisibly. In other words, you could have a person who had pictures or a person who had a field. The field is the inhibitor of the picture. So you'd have different manifestations, but they were all mental image pictures, and they were all being mocked up, and we know, now, that they're all being mocked up in present time as fast as they're mocked up. And that they're mocked up with terrific violence against self because it's obsessive and compulsive mocking up. And the person doesn't know he's doing it, but he is doing it. And it's this kind of a piece of nonsense. It doesn't leave a person with any choice, and it doesn't leave an auditor with any real choice but to resolve compulsive and obsessive creativeness.
And I spoke of purposes a little while ago. Well, that is the basic purpose of auditing today, which results in a state of Clear. And the people feel wonderful and wonder what on earth they were doing all that for, and they don't key in and get all caved in and unstable, and so forth, if they're really cleared.
But Clear doesn't mean rid of all of his pictures. It means able to create any picture he wants knowingly and not creating any pictures unknowingly that he doesn't want. And that is the basic task of the auditor today if he wants a good, stable result.
Now, you wonder how long a Clear would remain stable? He would remain stable for an awful long time because it took him 76 trillion years to get as bad off as he is right now and undoubtedly, then, we could put, as a conservative estimate, his state of case will last for another 76 trillion years.
And after another 76 trillion years if they're all that bad off again, it's all gotten down to this once more, why, one of you will come along or I'll come back, and we'll do it all over again.
Thank you.
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