Things an Auditor Should Know (7ACC 540727)
Series: 7th Advanced Clinical Course (7ACC)
Date: 27 July 1954
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
An auditor who is auditing in ignorance of the definition which underlies what he's doing is something like somebody walking through the North Woods blindfolded, without a compass or a guide. So many data could occur, which might or might not have significance, that lacking information in his subject, he then begins to seize upon every datum which produces an effect and begins to consider these the important data.
It takes a very, very solid discipline in order to investigate, since one has to set up a theory (by whatever intuition, we will not inquire) and then has to have sufficient discipline to carry forward that theory. Not some changed variation of it, you see; he has to put that theory he got there into practice. And when he has some more data, then he has to have courage enough to modify the theory he started with when he's done some observation.
And having done that observation and achieved, perhaps, a modification of this theory, he will find himself in possession of a new theory, which he must put to test so that he can observe its workability and then, again, must go back and look at his theory – not some other theory.
A researcher has no business adjusting to his environment. Any man who thinks he should adjust to his environment has no business in the field of research and investigation. It is a philosophy entirely foreign to research and investigation. He can adjust theories to his environment, but he'd better not adjust himself because he will wind up with the environment telling him disassociated data, which is not uniformly organized, which is not properly observed. And he will be dealing with a non-orientation and he will become promptly non-oriented.
Now, if in addition to that, he set up all of his experiments with which he was going to observe in a very, very sloppy fashion, and he set these up in such a wise that these experiments might or might not produce the result or they might or might not be on the subject of his theory, why, then he could look for a little bit of confusion.
Now, we're dealing, then, in the field of postulates with the same thing as a universe. Now, let's look at this. A theory is a postulated orientation-point. Data become, then, the symbols of that orientation-point. And therefore, the only symbols you have any business looking at from that orientation-point would be the symbols of that orientation-point, because only then would you get symbols which could move in common in relationship to each other and which would relate to the orientation-point.
If you were researching in the field of hydraulics, you had better severely leave alone an investigation of rubber boots. It might be tempting, it might be tempting. You might be able to connect those two things very, very nicely, and so on, and many people do. But if you were adjusting continually to your environment, if you yourself as an investigator were, then every time the environment said "rubber boots," you would come off the field of hydraulics and research rubber boots.
And then, as soon as you were researching rubber boots very nicely, the environment came up with garden hoses. Well, this seemed to be related to the whole subject, so you research garden hoses. And you'd no more than started researching garden hoses than it came to your attention that garden hoses had washers. And this seemed to be very important, so you investigated washers.
Well, this led you into an investigation of circles. The investigation of circles, of course, is very, very interesting, but the second you started to investigate circles, you discovered something called the Archimedes' spiral. So this is obviously what we ought to be investigating.
And you get a Case V running his own case. Every datum which jumps up in front of him seems to be a very important datum which sweeps aside all other data. He's not operating from a central theory, he's just operating from the fact that he's operating. And so we get the most disconnected series of things.
Now, you'll get this experience: Sooner or later you're going to have a preclear who will come to you every session with reams of paper, typewritten, on all the things wrong with his case. That man has been running himself between those two sessions and that is an ill. It's definitely an ill. And he'll have more reams of paper! And you will notice that he has now decided between these two sessions that it actually was his mother at fault. But between the next two sessions he's going to decide that it was actually teachers that were at fault. But between the next two sessions after that, he's going to decide that it wasn't teachers or mothers or anything alive that was at fault, it was dead men. They were the ones that were at fault. So it was the absence of life which was at fault.
And now we're going to go between – and each time you will get a ream of material on this subject. If you pay very much attention to it, you're a very foolish auditor. Just pay enough attention to it to keep in communication with the preclear. It really doesn't contain much data relating to his case. It's just this sort of research and investigation which has passed for investigation in the field of the mind.
Now, there is the blunt and horrible truth of the matter. In the research – in investigation in the field of the spirit – who would possibly investigate the field of the spirit? Who would ever dare do this terrible thing? You obviously couldn't research and investigate in the field of either the mind or the spirit because you were investigating with a mind or with a spirit!
Well, look, if you're investigating with a mind or with a spirit, obviously, you must be looking at a mirror. So your environment would be yourself. Well, this is a terrible thing. Nothing could possibly make a – you just have to be a better spirit than a spirit, that's all. But you can do it, simply by setting up the theory that you're a better spirit than yourself that you're investigating, even if you only had to investigate yourself, and therefore that you could investigate yourself. But again, you would have set up this framework by which you were operating from an orientation-point. You see that?
It's very important. An auditor in working a case is always doing some shadow, at least, of research and investigation. He's looking into a life. His preclear is a total universe, he's a total universe. Even if he were not in the physical universe, he would yet be a universe because he has accumulated to himself a considerable amount of bric-a-brac. He does have all sorts of objects which are native in relationship to each other as to time. And so his engrams and facsimiles themselves do, themselves, form a time continuum, not because so much space intervenes or so much motion intervenes, but simply because they are native to each other because they are native to that viewpoint. And so naturally, then, we do have particles in motion which create a space of some sort or kind of it or another. Isn't that right? Then we do have something of this order going on here. We do have all of the conditions necessary to a universe. We have a preclear who is viewing particles in motion and that's most of the preclears you run into.
Now, you want to look at the composition of this universe. Well, if you look at it, and simply look at it and recognize it for what it is and recognize the mechanics which underlie it, you will run an As-is immediately on the preclear. As far as you're concerned, you'll run an As-is on him. What is left to restimulate you? Nothing.
But supposing you considered the basics probably didn't apply in this particular case. This case is very complicated and mmmuuuh it just doesn't follow the rules, that's all. And so therefore, maybe… And the next thing you know, this person had headaches, and the next thing you know, you've got a headache. Well, you're trying to change something which you don't understand and that is a sure one-way ticket to restimulation.
This isn't warning you against restimulation. Go ahead and get restimulated, that won't kill anybody. But the main thing about it is that your viewing of this preclear still leads you into this one: He is operating on certain basic fundamentals and the first fundamental is that he is a universe. That's the first fundamental – that is to say, if you're considering him as a universe.
Well, if he is a universe, then it must follow that some portion of his being is a static, in its purest sense, retained, as a purity. It is a static. The basic core of this individual has no mass, it has no motion, it has no wavelength. The basic core has none of these things and that is the person. That is the thinking, producing, acting preclear, without mass, without motion, without a name or an identity and without a location in space. And that is the preclear. And the only thing wrong with him could be summed up to this degree, just to this degree: He has mass, meaning and mobility. In other words, he conceives himself to be a symbol. He comes into the auditing session and he says, "My name is Jones."
You say, "Are you certain of that?"
And he would say – this is not the way to start an auditing session – and he would say, "Well, yes indeed so. I'm Johnny Jones. Come from the Jones boys."
And you say, "Are you sure of that?"
"Yes. They're from West Skowhegan, the Joneses of West Skowhegan."
"And where's that?"
"Well, everybody knows where West Skowhegan is. Of course, it's right over there. It's…"
"How far? Where's that? Now, what's your name?"
"Well, my… my name is… uh… my name is Jones, um…"
"What's your name?"
"Jones. It's… my name's Jones. I mean, I'm from the Jones family in West Skowhegan. It's right over there. What are you talking about?"
"What is your name?"
"Jones."
If you kept that up on an individual, you'd sure shake the meaning out. You would.
In a story by Rudyard Kipling called Kim, we get a mention in our Western civilization of a very, very common practice in India, and that is, an individual sits down when he feels uncomfortable, when he feels upset. Kipling merely mentions this as a little trick. But when an individual feels very, very upset and he is very distraught about life, he will sit down and simply say his own name over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over – "Who am I?"
He isn't anybody. He'll just rob himself of his identity, just like that. Well, of course the second he does that, he to some degree regains to one-third – regains his being a static – just like that, he's a static. He hasn't meaning.
Well now, if he went ahead – they don't do this, by the way, but we could add this now: we could set it up as a self-auditing process, which you'd get a Case V into the most horrible trouble he'd ever gotten into in his life.
But if a person who is operating pretty well – he's cleared and so forth and he's exteriorized very well, stably and so forth – he goes around and all of a sudden his body gets into trouble, things get into trouble or a truck hits him and he kicks off, something of this sort happens to his body, you know? And he wanted to avoid going in between the between-lives area and go in through the endless succession of births and deaths which the Buddhists talk about. We would find that all he'd have to do, the second he exteriorized, is not feel how horribly degraded he was (that's the first sensation that comes to them immediately after they exteriorize from a dead body), but if he were to say to himself – well, say his name was Jones – if he were to say to himself, "I am Jones. I am Jones. Let's see, my name is Jones. I am Jones. Uh… I… I am Jones. I am Jones. Let's see. I am not Bill. I am not Pete. I am – well, I'm not Jones, either.
"Now, let's see. I am here. I am here. I am here. I am here. Here? Well, I'm here. I'm here. Here?"
And if he said at the same time, "I am going to that place. No, I'm going over to that place. No, I'm going over to this place. No, I'm going over to that place," he would have stripped, in this crude fashion – just remembering this definition of a symbol – he would strip, in this crude fashion, mass, meaning and mobility right out of himself, zoom.
You say this would leave him with no havingness. Maybe it would, but it would leave him with enough wisdom so he could carry on. It'll leave him in a position where he could acquire some. What chance has Johnny Jones got of becoming Bill Smith? He hasn't got any chance because he always knows that he's got to hide it even from himself that while being Bill Smith, he is Johnny Jones, really. So he's very dissatisfied with himself.
His next body becomes then – his next body becomes the symbol of, to some slight degree, his last body. And so he just starts flicking into the between-lives area, back and forth. He just goes into apathy about the whole thing. He can't find himself. He knows there's got to be an orientation-point someplace, someplace, someplace.
Well, of course, there's another way he could go about it, too. He could just run 8-C on himself. Immediately that he came out of this body or was having a trouble getting out of it, he's stuck or something of the sort, he'd just start locating the environment – bang, bang, bang, bang. Now, he wouldn't have any MEST eyes anymore, you see, with which to locate things, so he'd have to look for good.
And he'd look around and he'd spot spots and spot spots and spot spots. And he'd say, "Hey what do you know, that's a facsimile. All right. Let's spot some more spots and spot some more spots and spot some more spots – and what beautiful funeral music. Yes, that's very nice. That's – oh, that's lovely funeral music."
"Now, let's spot some sounds in the funeral music. Spot one spot, spot some sounds, spot some more sounds, spot some more parts of the sounds, some more – let's spot all the high notes. Bing bing. Yeah, there's a high note. Bing bing. Yeah, now let's spot low notes. Boom, boom, boom. Fine. Fine. Got my sonic on real good. Oh, what a beautiful prayer. That's very interesting. What a fascinating prayer. I didn't know I was that good a fellow. If they'd found that out earlier, why, I would have been in better shape, that's a cinch."
"Let's spot some more spots around here now. Bing bing bing. Now, let's spot some smells. Boy, that formaldehyde is terrible. And lilies of the valley are worse. So, well, let's spot the formaldehyde. And let's spot the lilies of the valley. And let's spot the formaldehyde. And let's spot the lilies of the valley. Let's spot the – oh, here's face powder. Let's spot the formaldehyde and the face powder and the lilies of the valley and the formaldehyde and the face powder and the lilies of the valley," round and round and round.
And he'd get his perception on because he'd locate himself very sharply as to exactly where he was and what he was doing. Standard procedure for somebody that's just knocked himself off: just orient himself in his environment rather than go chasing off as a new – as a symbol to become something else just because he feels degraded.
You could also do this sort of thing if you were a real good auditor. You could sit down and you could say – you'd say, "Let's see, now. Give me three things around here which don't feel degraded. Let's see. Now, what is something I could have in this environment?" You know, repair your havingness.
"All right. Let's mock-up an avalanche of planets." Zoom, "[sigh] I feel better."
"Now, let's see. Let's spot some spots in the environment." "Okay. Here I am." "Let's spot some sounds and things, so on. That's real good. Well, I might as well follow the procession out and find out if the fellow really says it sincerely and says it well. Might as well. Might as well look it over, make sure that it's done well."
And there you go. There you go. Well, you can do anything you pleased after such a thing.
By the way, somebody sooner or later is going to wonder, "Gee, what should I do now?" Well, you can do almost anything you want to. As a matter of fact, being that free – death has always been looked upon as the only mechanism by which to make a thetan exterior and it's a very handy thing. Your perception is rather full at such a time and you could simply build yourself on up and hit the level of Operating Thetan, which probably is what you should do.
Now, knowing how to shift from one universe to another universe, you'd simply – "Now, let me conceive of a head. Okay. Now, I'll spot some spots in the environment around this head. So-and-so and so-and-so and so-and-so…
You'd sort of take potluck. You're liable to land almost anyplace. It'd be adventurous.
If you were to feel very bad, recognize that most of your feeling is "a responsibility to," a responsibility to people that have to go out and put a body in a ground. If you're very, very smart, you wouldn't possibly let yourself get buried in the ground. This whole idea of preserving the body is very nonsensical. As a matter of fact, a thetan can get very, very upset about a body still preserved. He likes to get it out of sight and make it disappear, if possible.
And also, if a fellow is having an awful hard time exteriorizing, a little furnace fire helps out enormously. It does. A cremation helps out considerably.
You think I'm being facetious now on the subject of death and I would never once be otherwise than very solemn on the subject of death because everybody knows it's a beautifully sad occasion. It's about the only time in a person's life when everybody can be counted on as saying something nice about him. It has its values. Well, anyhow – so don't ever think I'd run it down.
Now, if you cruise around a little bit, you may find yourself in excellent communication, and being in excellent communication, you can do whatever you please. Well, you can do more exteriorized and without packing a body around than you can do with one. That's a cinch.
One of the ways to go about it is to go out and sit down on a cloud and just sit there for a little while and just get calm about the whole thing. One of the ways to do… Before you make up any outrageous plans, because they're mostly based on your past enmities – the fellow who shot you, the other driver of the car, something of the sort, you're liable to be upset about that. And if you're in fairly good condition, if you don't watch yourself, you're liable to go out and clobber him. It's a fact, it's a fact.
One of the reasons why dueling was unpopular in very, very early days is after you killed somebody, you'd get attacked. And there's many a poor boy who has had the great triumph of having spitted his opponent upon a rapier only to discover that he was being rapiered himself right around the neck, period. If you don't think you can produce an effect upon a body, you ought to try it sometime. Bodies explode under the impact.
Now, the other thing: supposing you touched a body and interiorized into the body while you were roaming around, and so forth. Remember the definition of a universe: To have any space, you have to have three points to view. You'll have space right away and you'll be right on out of the body again. You just train yourself to see three spots simultaneously and you could have at least three-dimensional space wherever you went – except in some areas, which have five-dimensional space, which is more confusing. That's just a confusing universe, that's all. They've really gotten lost there. That's really lost.
Well, all right. An auditor, much less a thetan – an auditor processing without an immediate command of the simplicities of his work, wrapping that work up in tremendous significances, getting it all involved one way or the other, will start paying a great deal of attention to the significances of his preclears. And instead of seeing this person as an imperfect universe – you see, he could see him as is, an imperfect universe, which thinks of the body more or less as a mobile point from which he is not looking.
And we see this clearly and we see that all we have to do would be to reestablish this individual, sort of collect him, at least let him hold on to this head as "Thank goodness. Here is one motionless point in this universe" – you know, that sort of thing, however you do it. And then, get him so that he can look at one object and then shift his attention so that he can shift it back and forth between two objects. And then get his spanned attention on those two objects and now three objects and get his spanned attention on these three objects.
And if we know this, that that's our procedure and whatever else we're doing – whether it's Opening Procedure 8-C, Opening Procedure by Duplication – whatever else we happen to be doing, if we remember that this is the basic definition, the anatomy of universes: It is a static without mass, meaning or mobility, without wavelength, without a location, which has the power and capability of locating itself, which has the power of perceiving or creating space or objects and that this is the thing we are processing, this is the spirit. And that this, to have a complete universe in which to move around – which universe it would be moving around – would have to have at least three anchor points and would have to be able to view those anchor points simultaneously.
And if we know that a preclear is always to some degree in his own universe and that he has to be in the same universe as the auditor, and this would at least be one whole universe he was in, we recognize, then, that bringing him or collecting him into almost any universe so he is positive and certain and so he's at least got a motionless point – you know, we've got a universe to view from this point we're in right this minute – knowing that, knowing that anatomy, an auditor cannot go astray. He simply cannot go astray unless he is doing a Q and A.
Now, what does an auditor do when he Qs and As? That is, he gives the same answer to the same question. In other words, he does a duplication on an enforced or a compulsive or obsessive line. Preclear screams, the auditor has a tendency to scream, in other words.
Now, the way he does that – the preclear is running all around the place, tearing at the walls. So the auditor immediately recognizes that what he needs is a process at least of the order of magnitude, velocity and ferocity of running around the walls and tearing at them. This is the obsession which brings psychiatry into electric shock, prefrontal lobotomy, straitjackets, brought old Bedlam into using clubs, and so forth.
Well, an auditor can use clubs too. You know enough about the human mind so that you could bring up a communication lag question that would practically fell your preclear in the tracks. There are things which you can say to a human being which utterly stop him. You could make a study of this. If you did, it would stop him.
Why would you do such a thing as that? You mean, the fellow is already out of control, and now you're going to throw somebody out of control into a state of apathy. So he's out of control now in apathy. At least he was in motion before.
So an auditor should never Q and A on a preclear. That's the only reason why a Book Auditor fails. Some young auditor comes to you: He's read a book or two and he's not completely trained. And he comes to you and he says, "Give me a process to run on my wife."
"What's the matter with your wife?"
"Well, my wife has fits."
Daa-da-da. That is the time when you know, as a professional, that this boy is going to Q and A, regardless. It doesn't matter how much material he has, how much you tell him, and so forth. Well you could, of course, go ahead and warn him about it, and you could educate him up to it, and you could give him some experience, but what the devil are you making there? You're making a professional auditor. All right. This is a different thing.
Now, he comes up to you. He wants to run this on his wife. You might as well just forget utterly giving him any information to run on his wife because he won't run it on his wife. He'll Q and A. He's in too close a familial relationship with this person. And this person starts to get frantic or go into a fit and the auditor goes into a fit. Only how does the auditor go into a fit? He goes into a fit by picking up a technique which he considers to be the same order of magnitude as a fit.
And if he's heard, by the way, that if you Match Terminal "constancy" you'll practically kill a man in his tracks, he'd probably be in there screaming at the preclear, "Stand still and Match Terminal 'constancy.' "
See, the process which will get the preclear out of that fit is a proper process which is quiet and mild and which will recentralize the preclear, which will collect him, which will put him in control so he'll know that he's standing on one end of a communication line, so he's got a straight wire to the environment, not a crooked one.
And if you're processing, then, in a full understanding of definitions, just of a static and of a universe, you're able to make progress on any case you tackle. And if you're not processing in an understanding of definition, then you're liable to do what they've been doing in the field of research and investigation in the mind. A datum turns up, you turn up a datum. Another datum turns up, you turn up a datum. That turns up a datum, you turn up a datum. Q and A, same thing.
"It's a wild and complex universe. Therefore, anything we must do here is wild and complex. So therefore, the study of the mind is wild and complex."
It is not. It is elementarily simple. It is too simple for most men to grasp and that's why we're studying hard at it right here. But we're doing a good job of grasping it, which men haven't for the last many thousands of years.
Okay.
THINGS AN AUDITOR SHOULD KNOW PAGE 2 7ACC-31D - 27.07.54