View source for What is a Withhold (SHSBC 620220)

'''Series:''' Saint Hill Special Briefing Course (SHSBC)

'''Date:''' 20 February 1962

'''Speaker:''' L. Ron Hubbard

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Okay. You have, by the way, seen an example of Sec Checking on rudiments as op- posed to Prepchecking And you had three or four rudiments live on the other session, the first session you saw, do you remember that? The earlier session, same pc.

And the auditor just swept these by grandly. Do you remember? Audience: Yes.

Hm-mm. Hm-hm. And you gasped with horror?

You remember gasping slightly with horror? And you didn’t use any sound. And today you saw me handling them with Sec Checking and going in and straightening up every rudiment, or trying to, and bypassing Prepchecking.

We never got to Prepchecking, did we? Never got to our business at all. If it’s all right with you, Fred, we will now ask the pc.

You understand this is not pre- ordained particularly. This isn’t taped as to – so as to give you an example of which is which. It just turns out that you now have an example of which is which.

All right. Which session gave you the most gain, Fred? Male voice: First one.

The first one? Mm. We handled the whole ruddy lot with Prepchecking, didn’t we?

Hm? And on the other one we never got any auditing done to amount to anything, and go ahead and tell them what you told me at the end of the session about having the areas con- fused. Male voice: Well, he was asking me about the withhold on something.

Had to do with money. And I had three different areas, if you noticed: the Center Theater, the American Theater Association, a big area there, and this area here. And I wasn’t sure about which area the withhold was in.

And on Thursday, in Prepchecking, coming around to “What about such and such,” the number one question – you see, every time he came around to the number one question, I knew where I was. I could locate myself, kind of, on the track or what are we working on together here? You see, how you’re working?

I knew where I was every time the number one question came around. And we got a new number one question, we kind of nar- rowed down to one area and cleaned that up before it went on to something else. This time I wasn’t sure, and so I kept saying, “Well, gee where, you know?

What?” or something like this. WHAT IS A WITHHOLD? 2  Okay. All right.

Male voice: I’ll keep prepchecking. Good enough. Okay.

You see this? You see this? Well, we learn what we learn.

That was not scheduled, to teach you these two things. But you get out – you understand, these are live sessions, they are not demonstrations. And you learn what you learn out of something like that.

Of course, I feel silly when I don’t get a pc pressed on forward. I didn’t intend, actually, to run onto this much crash on this. And frankly, an hour, an hour-and-fifteen-minute session is a very short session for me.

I normally will audit three to five hours in a session. And I’m having to scale my sessioning down, see, to match the demonstration. But frankly, it is my opinion after this session – it’s my opinion after this session – that the more you monkey around with rudiments, except for Havingness, why, the less auditing you’re going to get done.

That’s just what we sort of mean. That does not apply to 3D Criss Cross. But, we’ve got Prepchecking now and it is a highly precise activity.

And I don’t think that Sec Checking even vaguely compares to it. That’s my opinion. I couldn’t get it off the launching pad, see?

If we’d gone on auditing, I would have given him a break. And I’d have said, “Well, none of this is clear, none of these things are null.” I would have given him a break, and we’d had a cigarette and I would have brought him back into it and started a new session. See, I would have ended that session and started a new session instantly and I would have swung right into the rudiments. “All right.

This one’s live and this one’s live.” I would have told him, see? And then I would have come down on Prepchecking, and I would have said, “Well, what about money?” See? Or “What about taking money?” or “What about this subject?” be- cause this seemed to be the subject we were on.

And then I would have gone ahead and cleaned it up by area and type of withhold, and so forth, and I would have cleaned it up prop- erly. But I was trying to clean that up with the who and the when, if you will notice – just who and the when – and, man, it didn’t spring, did it? So scrub it.

It didn’t spring. If I can’t do it, I can’t expect you to. Okay?

There’s no substitute, apparently, for just full dress parade, clean zone, troop the col- ors, Prepchecking Get a 0, proceed from the 0, go to your 1, proceed from your 1 to your 11, you know? Whatever it is. There is no substitute for it.

I’ve run a couple of sessions since I was – that, well, I ran another session particularly, I was just standing on my head. I could have been sitting there knitting like the children’s tutor does. she teaches them school while knitting It requires no strain on the auditor. This was quite a strain on the auditor; wondering where the hell you were going, see?

And this other, I ran a three-and-a-half hour Prepcheck  WHAT IS A WITHHOLD? 3  session; terrific numbers of withholds falling off the line. And it was just dead easy. There was nothing to it.

Sunday night. I woke up, you know, “Well, let’s go to a dance,” you know? There wasn’t anything to this on the auditor.

Okay? All right. This is Saint Hill Special Briefing Course.

What’s the date? Audience: Twentieth. Thank you.

What’s the month? Audience: February. Oh, thank you.

What’s the year? Audience: AD 12. AD 12.

All right. All right. We will let you away with that.

Thank you very much. Special Briefing Course, Saint Hill. Now, I’m going to talk to you about withholds.

And this is all about withholds, so a rather – relatively brief lecture. But I have now found the common denominator of withholds. You didn’t get an opportunity to see it in today’s demonstration but that doesn’t make any difference to that.

What is a withhold? A withhold is something that a person believes that if – if it is re- vealed, it will endanger their self-preservation. In other words, a withhold is something that endangers the self-preservation of the pc.

Now, that is a very important definition. It’s taken me a very long time to get that definition. It gives us a new line for 3D Criss Cross, although this is not about 3D Criss Cross.

And it, worked back and forth, is an absolute killer because this is the reason whole track is occluded. This is where your whole track memory went. And this is the button on which it is sitting.

So this is a very important discovery. Therefore, we would consider that that person who had very little whole track recall would consider themselves in a very dangerous posi- tion. In other words, you’ve got a gradient here.

The less whole track recall, the more the person considers they are in danger, and the less likely you are to get a withhold off of them. The more fantastic the whole track recall, the same thing we are dodging here, somehow or another, with that. Now, that’s quite important to you, because it gives you and gives me – haha-ha-ha- ha-ha – the exact reason – this is why you get off such as I am now going to say, and call them withholds.

These are actual student withholds. WHAT IS A WITHHOLD? 4  “I went outside and looked at the sky and felt strange.” And an auditor bought it as a withhold and worked it over. “I had a picture of my mother’s bedroom and I don’t know why.” That is a withhold. “I spoke crossly to an Instructor.” “George and Bill told me that they had heard that Agnes…” And that is a withhold. Why is that a withhold?

All right. Let’s start with the first one first. Of course it’s safest to get off other peo- ple’s withholds.

These are all safe withholds. They are so safe. And that is all students tend to get off on each other, is safe withholds.

I’m sorry to send that arrow so deeply. They get off safe withholds. If they reveal these things, they – it’d be perfectly all right to reveal them, because it’s perfectly safe to reveal.

Now, why do we get into a tacit consent of this particular kind? Very interesting why we do: overts on other people’s withholds. We take somebody’s withhold and we yap-yap at them and we trip them up with it and we make them guilty with it and we sort of punish them a little bit for having gotten off a withhold.

We yip-yap on the subject. And after that, we are a little bit afraid to get off a withhold of ourself because we have an overt against the other per- son’s withhold, so therefore, we don’t consider it safe to get off a withhold. Do you see what the – what the rationale of the overt is?

We have an overt on other people getting off with- holds, so we don’t get off withholds, you see? Because it isn’t safe to get off a withhold. Now, of course, the more unsafe you make it to get off a withhold, the battier it all be- comes until you get a civilization like this one.

Now, the one thing by which the communist profits in Australia and Suid-Afrika1 are the laws against perversion. The state, of all means, is regulating how you are going to per- form the sexual act. I think that’s very interesting.

I’ve seldom seen any police officers in my bedroom. And I’m afraid if I did they’d have short shrift. Of course, I have – I have had the people the police officers are supposed to restrain trying to crawl into my bedroom windows and a few things like that, you know, but that, of course, they wouldn’t be interested in.

Now, what are they doing? They’re just trying to invent some new withholds, aren’t they? I think that’s fascinating, because the communist uses blackmail of this particular kind as a means of controlling heads of state.

In other words, if the state itself lends its weight to punishment of withholds, see, it has just laid itself out to be crazy. Because now, anybody in the state can be blackmailed so as 1 Suid-Africa: the name for South Africa, as it is said in Afrikaans, an official language of South Africa which developed from seventeenth-century Dutch. WHAT IS A WITHHOLD? 5  to overthrow the state, because the state will punish the overthrow or the withhold.

Do you understand this, or any part of this? Audience: Yes. All right.

Now, there it is on the third dynamic. The state makes it unsafe for anybody to confess to anything. So everybody is withholding from the state.

What happens if you withhold from the state or the state misses withholds on you? Of course, you begin to hate the state, and that is the downfall of nationalism. Of course, this may be very fortunate.

But nevertheless, they have sown the seeds of their own destruction by the number of great laws which they – arise on how a person shouldn’t get off withholds. Let’s apply that to an auditing session. The auditor upsets the pc or tries to make the pc guilty every time the pc gets off a withhold.

Therefore, the auditor is making it unsafe for the pc to get off a withhold. All right. Then therefore the auditor trains the pc not to get off unsafe withholds.

The auditor then trains the pc to get off only safe withholds. And we read on an auditor’s report, “I went out at night and looked at the sky and felt strange.” And that is a withhold. Great day in the morning!

That’s a safe withhold, isn’t it? Well, of course, the funny part of it is, there it is. It’s not a withhold.

It’s not a with- hold at all. So you can actually get into a games condition with your pc by punishing the pc for his withholds. You can actually get into a games condition where the pc will only try to get off safe withholds.

And there you go. Now, if a pc isn’t giving me withholds, I’m afraid that I would become persuasive. A withhold is something that, if revealed, would be prejudicial to his survival.

Now, naturally, his individuation comes from his withholds. This hyper-individuation of the pc, this only-oneness, this withdrawal into only self – all of that – and withdrawal out of groups and withdrawal here and there and so forth, all of these things stem exclusively and only and entirely from, of course, withholds which, if gotten off, the person believes would injure their survival. Now, the funny part of it is, is these – is this is not true.

The person gets an aberrated idea of what would injure his survival if he got it off, don’t you see? And it’s this aberrated idea of what they dare get off that brings about the condition of aberration. I think that possi- bly you’ve got one, two, or three apiece – some kind of an average like that – that if you re- vealed it in the wrong quarter, your – it’s factual that somebody would be likely to take ac- tion.

See, if the state of New South Guinea, or something of this sort, found out about this, well, huh, might be a poor show. WHAT IS A WITHHOLD? 6  You’ve all got some that were factual. There are some factual ones, see?

Some real ones. And you get those real buried and they get very encysted. And the other aberrated idea builds up on those and we get a build-up of that.

Now, the punishment of our parents, of course, we feel offhand that – this comes from past life; 3D Criss Cross gets these areas cleaned up – but when we started this life, we al- ready had the idea that if we disclosed certain things to our parents or we did certain things or we were – didn’t withhold mean words and so forth from our father, or something like that, we’d find ourselves suddenly without food, clothing and shelter. In other words, we get this exaggerated idea. Well, it’s built on our past life structure.

But that’s a bad enough basis. Now, we take off from there and we move into areas and then do commit something which, if revealed, would be very upsetting, or would have been very upsetting And then other little things start piling up on the top of that, and so on. And we get up to a point where we become quite aberrated, quite individuated, and we get so we can’t even communicate with parts of our body.

And the result of all this, naturally, is a feeling of high antisocialness. And somebody comes close to these withholds and we believe implicitly, you see, that if we got off this withhold, naturally we could just see the police running in, my God, the si- rens going in all directions, you see, and police by the squad coming bursting in the front door, probably with battering rams, you know? And they got handcuffs and they’re all ready to put them on you, you know, and drag you off.

And naturally the cell they’re going to drag you to is not any of the modern jails, you know, which just dramatize withholds; it’s probably one of the old-time dungeons, you know, where they bury you up to the neck in water and leave you there for forty years or something like this, you see? You get an aberrated idea of the punishment in a jail. And this all of a sudden rekindles, you know?

The auditor gets close to one of these things, and this idea, ooooooh! you know. Oooo-oooooo-ooooo-ooo, you know? At any minute this horrible series of circumstances are going to occur, and naturally we consider the auditor dangerous.

No, listen, the auditor is only dangerous if he doesn’t pull the withhold. And that is a recurring phrase that is starting to happen here in this school. There are certain auditors that we designate as dangerous auditors.

Why are they dangerous? Because they will only tick and not pull a withhold. And we call those people dangerous auditors.

Why? Their pcs are all going to be mad at them, they are themselves going to goof up and get lots of loses one way or the other and they’re going to always be involved in ARC breaks of some kind or another and they’re going to have people going around gossiping about how bad Central Organizations are and how bad they are and how bad everything else is and so forth. And they are dangerous.

WHAT IS A WITHHOLD? 7  But from the pc’s viewpoint, the person becomes dangerous the moment they might find out whatever this thing is, you see? And the auditor appears for a moment dangerous. The auditor might find out.

And the pc gets ARC breaky, however, only when the auditor fails to find out. The auditor has to go the whole way. And an auditor who won’t go the whole way, an auditor who will only get off safe withholds off of a pc is dangerous.

And that is today’s adjudication on whether a person can audit or not: Are they a safe auditor or a dangerous auditor? Oddly enough, it’s a complete reversal. The auditor who gets off safe withholds is dangerous.

And the auditor who will get off unsafe withholds is safe. You understand that? Now, you’ve got to – you’ve got to bust through any feeling you have on this and look at this square in the teeth and follow it through, because your – actually – all of your activities as an auditor are totally, 100 percent, based on this one little fact.

It all cones down to this: An auditor who will not pull dangerous withholds from the pc is a dangerous auditor. You’re going to have an ARC breaky pc, your pc is going to be upset with you. There are only two or three ways you could possibly mess it up, but how could you fail to do this?

One, you could fail to use an E-Meter. You could fail to make an E-Meter play any tune that was ever written by Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, you see? You could just fail to make an E-Meter talk.

In other words, you look at the thing and the needle falls off the pin, and so forth, and there it is, and the parts are all collapsing and so forth, and we say, “Well, that needle, that’s null. Ha-ha. That’s a null needle.

Ha-ha.” Hm. God, man. Well, you don’t have to clean it up in one session, but you have to make sure that you’ve got another session.

You notice I had about two or three rudiments banging there in that demonstration today, and even missed a withhold as banging. And the pc didn’t spit at me because the pc knows I know that they’re missed. See, and the pc knows I know where we’re going on this sort of thing.

Pc has confidence in this. All right. But you go a whole intensive and you never pull any of these things and you never ask for missed withholds and you never try to inquire any deeper into any of these things and that pc blows up in your face.

Every ARC break you ever got off of a pc was due to missed withholds. Although missed withholds is brand-new as a principle, it’s been functioning this whole time. And every time you failed to get off a withhold – you missed a withhold on the pc, you ticked it – you had an ARC break.

That accounts for every ARC break you have ever had with a pc. That accounts for every pc who never wanted to be audited again by you. That accounts for all of your own difficulties with pcs; right there in one fell swoop.

Now, you could accomplish it by not operating with an E-Meter. You could accom- plish it by a very unreal or nasty auditing approach. Every time the pc said something, you  WHAT IS A WITHHOLD? 8  say, “Nyaaaaa.” You know, something like this.

You could accomplish it by just having your technology all backwards and shuffled into another deck. You could accomplish it by just poor auditing. But in the final analysis, poor auditing only exists if a person is determined that they’re never going to hurt a pc by getting off any nasty withholds.

They’re going to be nice to pcs and they’re only going to get off safe withholds. Uuuhhhrr! You almost have to use sjamboks2 and clubs on some auditors.

I’m not kidding you. My method on the thing is just to stampede the auditor on the subject and there’s more than one here who’s already been stampeded by me straight at the subject. You know?

What – the only thing you want to worry about, the only thing you should really worry about, is when I give up on you. I’ve done that, too; just quit, you know? And then you get very nice auditor reports.

You get an initial or something like that. I just won’t do anything more about it. Why?

I know you won’t. But that doesn’t include very many, and the other ones is you start missing withholds… Pc goals and gains: “Well, I didn’t make any goals and I didn’t make any gains,” and so forth. Well, it might as well have been printed in letters of fire! “Auditor has missed with- holds on this pc.

Auditor did not clean up things on this pc. Auditor read the E-Meter upside down.” Something wild went on here. That’s all.

I mean, because frankly I have to tell you this. But I’ve got you in a box right now with Prepchecking You’re taped and targeted. The auditor who cannot get a result with Prepchecking will not audit.

Uuuhhrrr! It’s been weaving closer and closer to this point, see? We’ve been converging on this point.

Tech- nology has been getting better and better and better and better, and here we sit looking at Prepchecking. Well, Prepchecking gets a little better. There was a little change the other day in 3D Criss Cross.

As soon as I found out that this applied to 3D Criss Cross, I realized that you can’t let a pc cross out anything on a list. Because – that’s you, not me – because the pc says, “That’s pretty dangerous. Let’s see, that’s pretty dangerous.

Let’s see, that’s pretty dangerous. And I think this – this item, I think that’s awfully dangerous. I think we ought to have that off the list and that off the list and that off the list,” and we just cross the whole list off.

It’s all too dangerous. And then you have missed an item which actually amounts to a missed withhold and so the person gets upset with 3D Criss Cross. So we can’t allow the pc, once he has put it on the list, after we’ve blackjacked him, tricked and hoodwinked him into getting it onto the list, we can’t let the pc take it off, even though that makes more work on differentiations.

I found this is the case. I find pcs will take live items off the list if you don’t watch them. So, there it is. 2 Sjambok: A strong, heavy whip made from thick, tough hide, such as that of the rhinoceros or hippopotamus, used in South Africa for driving cattle. (World Book Dictionary)  WHAT IS A WITHHOLD? 9  So some of your lists are disappearing into smoke, and some of your items are being crossed off because your pc has misgivings upon the safety with which they can be revealed since all of these items went out of sight to some degree or another because it was very unsafe at some time or another to reveal them.

I’m looking at somebody right now that was going around with a very, very hot termi- nal tucked under her arm in a family who believed implicitly that the exact reverse of this terminal was a way of life and how to be closer to God. And this pc just had to withhold this one like mad. And of course the whole – more the pc withheld it and so forth, why, the hotter it got.

See, the whole family – this would have been heresy. It’s like the son of a priest, you know; he wouldn’t believe in God. (Nobody gets that joke. Boy, you’re slow today.

You’re very slow today. Wake up.) The son of a priest and he has a terminal called “atheist.” See? That would be very upsetting, very upsetting.

He’d have withholds. So would the priest. But anyway, as you get this straight across the boards, we find that a hundred trillion years ago, why, well, let’s take an example.

We had one mentioned in the session today, something like, well, let’s just call it out of thin air “embezzler,” or something like that, you see? And this fellow was born in a banking family where integrity is all, you see? And he hears from his father and he hears from his mother and he hears from his brothers and sisters in the business and he – and 90 forth, and he’s got a hot terminal.

He’s been one of the best embezzlers that the country has ever had, don’t you see? Something like that. And here he has to live in this atmosphere with this terminal.

Hot, you know! So all the time he’s pulling this terminal back. (I’m not saying that’s the terminal but…) You get the idea? That’s a withhold!

Man, would it be unsafe to be that embezzler. Right? And he might dramatize it at any moment.

And so he fights it and he fights it and he fights it and then one night he goes into the bank vault and he cleans out the whole thing and goes over the hill. See, the wrong time, wrong place, wrong terminal, see, for his environment. And when these things get badly restimulated and so forth, why, they’ve had it.

All right. Now some auditor is auditing him, see, and we get down to this terminal. And, “Who or what would enforce an outflow from others?” See?

And he puts down “An embezzler.” And he goes down the line, and the auditor goes down, and they – he had a little ARC break with the auditor, something of this sort. The auditor looked at him crosswise or didn’t acknowledge him just right – and it’s not really an ARC break; it was just that. And he clicks on that other one, you see? “You know this – I don’t,” auditor has already missed a withhold on him, and so forth, and he’s a – he says, “I – I don’t know.”  WHAT IS A WITHHOLD? 10  We’re differentiating the list, and we get down to “embezzler,” and we – he thinks we better cross that off so he says, “Well, it – it really wouldn’t enforce an outflow.

Cross – cross that off the list.” Gives him a second thought, and we mustn’t let the pc have that second thought. So there’s that little change in 3D Criss Cross. You see why it is?

All right. Now you see that the pc – now let’s take up Prepchecking. These two things, you see, suddenly go hand in glove.

In other words, we have one straight line. We have Prep- checking as a basic for this lifetime that keeps the pc in-session and then we have its exten- sion, 3D Criss Cross, and both of them are devoted to the same thing of letting the guy stand in the sun. They’re both devoted to the same thing, you see?

Getting him over all of his odd- ball notions about how dangerous it would be to reveal the fact that he had a crooked left ear. Nothing to it. I mean, he looks at this after a while and laughs.

But he isn’t laughing at the time you start auditing him. You say, “All right, now. Okay.

Now, what about that activity there that was going on in Tacoma?” And, “Now, let’s see. If I think of something else or if I can get the auditor thinking or talking about something else…” you know, this is all reactive, you know? “So let’s – let’s – let’s move it all over onto some other perimeter.” Then he says, “Well, it has to do actually with Mexico City.” In other words, he’s trying to throw red herrings. He can get into a point of reactively regretting having mentioned it.

And you’ll see him pass through that little band of regretting he brought it up in the first place. Now, if the auditing is bad, he does this often. If the auditing is good, he only does it once in a while.

It is always present, no matter how good the auditing is. “I’m kind of sorry I brought this up. Now what is going to happen to me?” Of course, all the time he’s being sorry he brought it up, you’re just crossing into the actual zone and area. You actually have tremendous unknowns left on the whole subject.

And the pc does not know much and a great deal about this. That’s what the difficulty is. In other words, he still has tremendous unknowns.

Now, in Prepchecking – in Prepchecking, also, there’s been a little discovery here about when the pc – Prepchecking – when the pc equivocates, you know you’re looking at the package; when he starts to explain. Watch when the pc starts to explain. At that moment add a What 13, or whatever it’s coming up this time.

And let’s find out what this little hot subject is he’s going over right this minute. He’s explaining. Now, there’s a rule.

There’s a rule about this, about asking What questions. And this isn’t really about What questions but I’ll just show you what this is. WHAT IS A WITHHOLD? 11  The first rule is: When the pc gives you a motivator, you know you’re on hot ground and so you always ask a What question that’s rather overt.

Says, “Well, my mother beat me every day.” My What question, I’m afraid, at the moment is “What have you done to your mother?” I would not even monkey with this motivator, see? I wouldn’t fool with it at all. The next gradient up – that would be – that’d be the most certain ground to mine.

Mo- tivator, motivator, motivator – man, that just takes the What question and practically writes it in legible script in front of your face, you see? Your next one up the line from that is the person is critical. The person is being critical of somebody.

Well, the criticalness – you can go on and pull criticism forever without getting anyplace. You want to know what he did, did, did, did, did, done, done, done, done, action, action, action. There must be action back of that criticism.

Otherwise, we wouldn’t have it, see? So, criticism is a sure indicator of an overt. Now let’s take the milder form of it which is explaining why it happened.

The pc starts explaining – I don’t let the pc explain very long without giving him a new 1 sub-something or other on the What question. I give him a new What question to clean up. Pc starts explaining and says, “Well, actually, the truth of the matter was that I was on the ferryboat.

I hadn’t – I hadn’t actually meant to be on the ferryboat, you understand, but I was coming down from the taxi rank, and I just saw the ferryboat there.” I’m liable to cut him off at that moment, on whatever we were talking about, and ask a little more pinched-in-close What. “What were you doing?” you know? Something like this. And he says, “Well, oh-oh.

Oh, that!” And it alerts him. So you have these various indicators. They make a gradient.

Pc gives you a motivator; oh well, that’s an absolute certain indicator and you must pull the overt straightaway, just convert the thing into an overt without any slightest… Person says, “Well, my – just my mother beat me every day, just on and on and on. And beat me every day and so forth.” It’s just a lead-pipe cinch. “What have you done to your mother?” I mean, it just might as well appear – be printed on the auditor form, you know? I mean, it’d be that inevitable.

Your next one is criticism, criticism, criticism. Well, there’s a real overt back of this, and so forth. Now, we’re not going to dignify getting off other people’s withholds by even classi- fying it.

An auditor who would do that, oh, man. That’s very safe, but it’s so safe that they’re not withholds. They’re not his withholds.

What are you doing – what are you doing monkey-  WHAT IS A WITHHOLD? 12  ing with somebody else’s withholds? They’re not this pc’s actions. Perfectly safe to reveal other people’s withholds, isn’t it?

Or it might be, unless they find out about it. But – then your area of explanation. And then there is the actual withhold.

Now, of course, the actual withhold: the person says, “Well, I – I used to stand down on the Battery and bung paving stones through the windshields of cars,” see? And you’ve got your tailor- made What question standing right in front of your face, because it’s not “What about bung- ing paving stones through windshields of car on the Battery on July 1st, 1962?” or something like this, you see? That’s not the question.

The question is, “What about damaging cars?” or something. But there’s your What question. It’s tailor-made because it’s the withhold.

Now let’s drop downstairs a little bit and we find the pc is explaining something so we get the What question out of the bulk of his explanation. He’s saying, “Well, I actually – I actually would never – never really liked – liked – liked my wife, and I really never liked her, and so forth. And this was easy to understand.

I, of course, was – came home late and all that sort of thing, but she never kept herself up and she never really did anything for me around the house. And she never really paid much atten – .” That’s – actually, he hasn’t given a motivator, you know, he hasn’t given an overt. It’s just an explanation of how it was all messy.

And you could just cut him short on his explana- tion, get your new What. Now, I’ll give you an example out of your session today: we had two or three periods of explanation, when I wasn’t doing Prepchecking In view of the fact that I wasn’t doing Prepchecking, I of course could never get to the bottom of it. It was just crippled, you see, because I couldn’t slide in the What.

See? Because in clearing rudiments, I was avoiding Whats, and I certainly wasn’t Prepchecking, you see, I was sec checking. Doesn’t work.

All right. So next indicator is the pc is being very critical about something or other. He’s being very critical of you, the auditor.

That’s a very special case. If he’s being critical of you, the auditor, you have missed a withhold and you better find out what it is. “What should you have found out about?” “When did you think I was a fool?” Anything that you could pos- sibly mention that would throw a missed withhold into view – that would be the stage at which you pulled this particular one. But it’s the criticism.

You want to find out what has been done. The missed withhold, underlies all of these things, by the way. But you can find an actual doingness at the point of criticism.

He’s saying, “Well, I,” natter, natter, natter, “and actually I always thought, always thought that he wore the wrong color ties. And that was why I didn’t like him,” or something of the sort, and so on. Well, he’s done something to that per- son or done something to a person like that.

So your What question is tailormade out of that. And then there is your fundamental fundamental – is motivator. Man, red flag!

Let’s just find out what he’s done to the source of that motivator or the type of beingness of that  WHAT IS A WITHHOLD? 13  motivator. Just overtly find out what he’s done. In other words, you’re getting off overts and so on.

Now, if you look at this as a scale, you will find out that the withhold is measured by the degree of danger – the only reason I’m giving you this scale; I’m not talking about how you ask What questions – the degree of danger the pc conceives to be present on the subject of getting off the withhold. All right. If the pc doesn’t think it’s very dangerous, they give it to you directly and straight.

If the pc thinks it’s a little bit dangerous, they explain around the fringes of where it might lie. If the pc thinks it’s rather confoundedly dangerous, it’s getting just a little bit grim, maybe on the jail borderline on that chain, the pc will criticize. See, criticism enters.

And if it is so dangerous that the pc believes – you understand I’m saying pc “be- lieves”; I’m not saying it’s factual – the pc is right up to the point where, with a jingle jangle the patrol wagon arrives, the officers pick up the battering ram, they knock down the front door, they come crashing in with the handcuffs and leg irons, you see, and drag him scream- ing off, towed back of the Black Maria, you see? Something like this. And they can see this is going to happen if that withhold is missing; they give you the motivator.

They always give you a motivator. Flat, flat, total motivator – a hundred percent. Now, what – how do you use this?

Well, it gives you the gradient scale and indexes of all cases. A case is not as bad off as he is crazy. A case is not as bad off as he is aberrated.

A case is not as bad off as anything, except how dangerous he considers it would be if he re- vealed himself. And so you have from the top to the bottom, all cases on that gradient. Just like you have the What questions and the degree of the withhold and the safety on those – that gradi- ent, so you have all cases on that gradient.

And the person who will die before he will reveal himself is also on that scale. So you have them from the case that you could audit to Clear in twenty-five hours. See, bang!

You sneeze, the person is Clear. Well, this person has not had any great idea that it’d be dangerous to tell people things. That’s the index of that case.

All right. Now, the person who went 150 hours to a Routine 3 kind of Clear. Well, that person doesn’t have very much he considers his – be all right.

Pretty easy. Now we have the case that we went 200 hours on without finding – only finding a goal and terminal. Well, ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha, that case has got quite a little hatful.

There is a nice little hatful of stuff that if the individual revealed any part of that, he thinks, he believes, that hmmm, it would be, well, it’d be rough. It would be pretty rough. He’d probably lose his fam- ily and he’d lose this and that, you see?

WHAT IS A WITHHOLD? 14  And now you take the person who went 500 hours with no goal and no terminal and no gain, and that sort of thing. Now, we know darn well this person has moving up into the pe- rimeter of the police breaking in the front door, if it were learned about this person, see? And now we take the case – the case that actually goes to the spinbin rather than reveal things.

Well, man, that’s in extremis. Because insanity is the last protest against punishment. See, “I cannot feel your punishment.

I do not even know about it. I’m not even a rational be- ing. You’ve driven me out of my mind.” you see, that’s a total motivator on the subject of punishment.

So, where we go. Then you’ve got your whole – your whole thing. It’s just length of time in auditing Your length of time in auditing is indexed by the danger the individual be- lieves would be present if he revealed certain things.

And danger to reveal is the direct index of length of time in auditing. There it is. Want to know how long it takes to clear somebody?

Well, how dangerous does this person consider it would be to reveal certain things. Now, how could you cut down this length of time in auditing? Well, I’ve given you the answer.

Don’t pull safe withholds. Just move in and pull actual withholds. Don’t fool around with it.

And use Prepchecking And you’ve got that, all right. Now, that gets this lifetime’s danger out of the way. And I’ve even given you a new type of line and a slight change in 3D Criss Cross that does not permit the person to escape once you’ve got the item on the list.

And the type of line is – the line for 3D Criss Cross, of course – is “What identity would it be unsafe for you to reveal?” or some such wording. See? And they will blow into view.

And, “What identity would it be safe for you to reveal?” of course, could be a relief line, which would just be non- sense. But it would sort of balance the thing off and throw the other one into view; in other words, just be a trick line. In other words, you could drag these things out, and you could – you know now what the pc is doing, so it becomes relatively simple.

That is what the pc is doing. While he is there sitting in front of you, he would like to reveal himself. He would like to reveal this and he would like to get out of it, but he does not know how to get out of it.

And the person is always hoping that somebody will come along and give him a shot in the gluteus maximus with some magic fluid by which he will not have to reveal a thing and become totally Clear. And anytime anybody has ever proposed that to me, why, I’ve had an instinct on the subject. Now I know why!

I should go back through the files and find out who’s proposed it because we would have an index of some of our roughest cases. It’d be the person who wants to be cleared without revealing anything Now, the people who get spinny in processing, you must be tripping right over – you must be falling right over something  WHAT IS A WITHHOLD? 15  Well now, Prepchecking will get it for you. There is no contest about it.

This is a very easy, easy activity, because a person moves right up into it. But the basic Prepcheck question that would get them all would of course be one of these “unsafe to reveal” questions. Your Zero: “Have you ever – have you ever done anything that might have been un- safe to mention?” See, that would be your Zero. “Is there anything you’ve ever done that would be unsafe to you if you told about it?” “If you reveal certain things about yourself, would it be unsafe to you?” Some such Zero, don’t you see?

Doesn’t matter how it expresses to the pc. Then you get your What off of what the pc said. Then you’d mine that down; you’d strip the whole bank.

Interesting “Safe to reveal.” This is the index on it. Now, you must figure it’s awful safe to show up with a mest body, a meat body, you see; and then you get the idea that it’s unsafe so you begin to take it down. That must be what old age is.

That must be the only thing old age is. So take heart, girls. Now, you just look at this as the idea of apparence – apparency, appearances, disap- pearances, being there, not being there, well, it all passes over into the field of fact.

Offering the fact is dangerous. Withholding the fact is apparently not dangerous. All it does is pull the person to pieces.

That’s the trick of the Body Builder. That is the basic trick of this universe. And the basic trick of this universe is, if you withhold it, it won’t hurt you any.

And of course, that is a stinking lie. So they get everybody to withhold things. They invent codes of law and that sort of thing, and these things are all supposed to get everybody to withhold the thing, and then the thing – thetan gets to packing up mass and occupying less space.

And he occupies less space and less space, and he can permeate less and less things, and here he goes. He’s got it made. Yeah.

But who’s got it made? Of course, that is a game nobody wins. Scientology is the only game where everybody wins.

Now, there’s your – there is your index of withholds. There is your – what they’re about. That is why your pc won’t talk to you.

That is why your pc reveals what he reveals. That’s why you sometimes look very silly writing down, “Well, the pc has a withhold that the pc has a bent toe,” and why, after you’ve prepchecked a bent toe for five or six sessions, there has been no gain on the part of the pc. You see?

You see how this might work? Does this straighten out anything for you? Audience: Hm-mm.

Now, you could use this principle, but if I give it to you, you’ll work it to death, in- stead of using it as a Zero, you can flip over, and you mustn’t work this to death. WHAT IS A WITHHOLD? 16  “Who would have been dangerous to have revealed that to?” could be a version of the Who question. But you get on some hot line and the person is talking about having robbed every restaurant in the entirety of New York – and he’s robbed every restaurant in New York practically, and so forth, and he just keeps going on and on; you don’t seem to clean this up.

The Who that will clean it up is “Who wouldn’t it have been safe to have told about that,” and “Who didn’t find out about it?” And of course, he’d say, “Well, the restaurateurs.” And he’s been saying “The restau- rateurs” all this time, and all of a sudden he looks at you and he says, “Well, all right. The police.” “All right. When did they fail to find out about it?” And we get the rest of the chain and it blows.

Do you see that? Now, there is – there is your gradient of the value of the withhold to the pc. I call very strictly to your attention that I have said the pc “believes” it would be unsafe.

And that is what is most interesting: “believes” it would be unsafe. And of course, these things – I think, I think the crime you committed – I think they probably run out of witnesses. I think the – I don’t think the government would spend a cent trying to dig up enough witnesses, or even find the records, in order to prosecute you and so forth, particularly if it was a real crime.

The government is much more interested in minor crimes than real crimes. And the essence of the situation, however, is one little thing like that gets stacked up on other little things and something else gets stacked up on that and the next thing you know a person believes it’s very dangerous to put his nose out of doors. Can’t!

Can’t go outside. And there’s your “can’t go outside” thing. God-awful things are liable to happen to this person if they go outside; liable to be recognized as the person who committed the murder, only they kind of vaguely think maybe they have committed a murder, which is quite interesting.

You have very few backtrack things on this that are hot, but every case must have a few on it. You suddenly say, “Oh man, I bet they’re still waiting for me. I bet they’re still looking for me someplace or another,” and the pc is liable to have his hair almost stand on end for a moment when he hits one of these things.

And then he suddenly, “Well, that’s nonsense. Been a long time ago. Long, long ti I wonder if they are.” But this equally applies to 3D Cross Cross and to Prepchecking but is most salient in your use of Prepchecking And there is where you should use it.

And I won’t get nasty or mean with you, or anything I will just forbid anybody to get off your withholds if I hear any more session being spent on “I went out in the evening and looked at the sky and felt strange.” I wouldn’t even try to make anything out of it except that some pc had a hot area someplace and had just thrown me a great big floppy, squishy red herring. And I don’t like red herring, so I would let that one drop. WHAT IS A WITHHOLD? 17  There are certain withholds you let go by.

You just let them go by. You don’t do a thing with them. And there are certain withholds that you hang to till grim death, until they are all revealed, and you’ll just have to learn which ones.

And the index of it is what is it – the pc consider it safe to reveal; what does the pc consider it unsafe to reveal. And that unravels the whole problem for you. Thank you.

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