View source for The Itsa-Line (Continued) (SHSBC 630821)

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

'''Date:''' 21 August 1963

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

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What’s the date? Audience: August 21st. Twenty-first.

Twenty-first August AD 13. All right. We could cover an awful lot of stuff here.

Be very easy to do. The main things in which you are involved at the present moment probably look far more complicated to you than they are. I’m going to talk to you some more about the tone arm and the itsa line, and forms of sessions.

Things look to you a lot more involved than they actually are. Sitting somewhere back of every thetan’s bank is some tremendous insecurity in which he believes implicitly that the universe is dangerous, or that he himself is in danger or that he cannot live or survive as a powerful being. And whatever that state is, and however that state is created originally is not particularly germane to this lecture.

But the discovery of the itsa line may look to you to be a highly simple little thing, perhaps even a duplication of psychoanalysis. After all, they talked. And if you didn’t know anything about the itsa line, you could draw all sorts of wild conclusions, you see?

Make the mistake of saying, “Well, it’s a communication line, and therefore any communication line is an itsa line, and therefore if you let anybody talk about anything, why, he will get better.” We already know if you let a fellow talk on an entheta line very long, he’ll run his havingness out the bottom. So the complexities of the itsa line are really quite something. It sits on a tremendous amount of technology, but in itself is very simple to understand.

There’s nothing much to understanding it. If you understand it you’d see-you’d see actions like this very readily and immediately, and these actions would be something like this: Pc said, “I-I don’t know whether it was-let’s see, now, it was-twenty, twenty, twenty-I guess about twenty years ago. And the fellow said uh-I don’t know what he said, but I know what I think about it.

I - I - I know that I-I know I think it was a big swindle of  THE ITSA LINE (CONTINUED) 2  some kind or another. And-Come to think about it, I don’t know whether I said that or he said that.” Auditor: “It reads that he said it.” Oh, wait a minute. What happens at this point?

What occurred there, exactly? Well, you know at once what occurred, if you know the itsa line. The auditor put in the itsa with the meter, leaving the pc in a zone and area of insecurity.

Now, we say, all right, the line plot. The line plot: that tells the pc what items are in the GPM. See, just like that, see?

So obviously we say, well, this to some degree puts in the itsa line for the pc. Well, no, no. That could be said to, but we get across the proposition of the lesser of two evils.

If you’ve ever seen a pc wrapped around a Telephone pole with undisclosed charge from running a GPM he knew not knot of, or did not know any of the elements of, you will use line plots. If the thing is a known line plot, we will use it. Why?

Because that was a predesigned plot in the first place. It was an other-determined design-you understand that somebody else determined the design. What’s important about it is the charge that is on it, and what’s important in the auditing is to get off the charge and get the pc to identify, to his own reality, that itsa.

See, if the line plot you handed him on a sheet of paper didn’t agree with the thing he was running, you will very shortly hear about it. He can get wrapped around a telegraph pole with great speed. But that’s a shadow of putting in an itsa line, isn’t it?

That’s a shadow of putting in the itsa line with the pc-but a necessary action. Now, I’ll give you its similar borderline: Pc says, “Oh, it’s twenty years ago, it was fifteen-no, it’s eighteen-eighteen, four-twenty, twenty-two-. It’s twenty-two year-I think it was twenty-two year-.

No, no. It-it must have been twenty-five-thirty. No, twenty-one-I-I don’t know.

I don’t know. I just don’t know when it was.” He quit, see? He quit cold.

What you going to do? Sit there with a pc who has quit cold? Or are you going to say, “All right, I’ll give you a hand.

Was it more than twenty years ago, less than twenty years ago? Was it twenty years ago? All right, it’s more than twenty years ago.

Is it more than twenty-five years ago? Less than twenty-five years ago? Less than twenty-five years ago.

You got some idea of it now?” “Yeah! It was twenty-three years ago.” Or, “Was it more than twenty-five? Less than twenty-five?

It was less than twenty- five. Twenty-three? Twenty-three?

I’m getting a read here on twenty-three.” “Yeah. It was twenty-three.”  THE ITSA LINE (CONTINUED) 3  Get that? So you didn’t totally put in the itsa line.

See, you could start putting the itsa line in and the pc catches the ball, put it almost totally in and the pc catches it, see, and get right onto the hour and the minute, and the pc never caught it, but at least you don’t have something wrong dated. And those are the gradients of putting in the itsa line. And the last one-it’s a little bit of a lose to have to put it all the way in for the pc, see?

All right, now, look at the length of time you and other fellows around have been stumbling around on this planet. There’s a number of thousands of years. And the number of thousands of years you’ve been in the Marcab Confederacy are quite numerous.

They probably run up to two or three hundred thousand years that you’ve been inside this system. And let me call to your attention, never during that time could you put your foot on the first step of the road which led back to a better life and some happiness and freedom, see? You couldn’t get a foot on that road at all.

All right. Right now you have technology. You have a map.

The map has got all kinds of blank spots in it, but nevertheless, there’s the type of map it is, don’t you see? And those are persuasions toward an itsa line. And the only time you totally lose-the only time you totally lose-is when you have to put the whole itsa line in.

Give somebody the pattern for a goal: All right, he has to list for the actual goal in that sequence and find it. And he has to list for and get the top oppterm, to make it, in order to fit the pattern, and then he’s got to fit the pattern together. And this is an awful lot of itsa.

See? Well, all right, so you’ve got the preprinted pattern. Give him this, and he just reads it off.

You understand? This is less desirable, but it’s still feasible. All right, now let’s put it totally in.

Let’s put it totally in. Let’s just hit him with a lightning bolt so that he can’t contact any of the facsimiles in it, and we have medical psychiatry. See, the evil involved in this is putting in an itsa line in such a way as to have no self-determinism, no power of choice left in the pc at all.

Total wipeout of power of choice, don’t you see? Now, you can fall short of that in various degrees. Little kid is going around, see?

He’s real unhappy about the whole thing, he’s real unhappy about life and he’s walking around in circles and so forth. And you say to him, “That is your bed.” Well, you haven’t really done very much for him, but you have improved his state of mind or his peace, see? Just to that degree.

You understand? You say, “That is your bed.” Nevertheless, you have put in the itsa line. He himself has not found out that it is his bed, you see?

But look, he’s still very happy to have the bed. Now, when we get down into pure, unadulterated evil, we get a denial of the itsa line and we go into aberration, creation of. See, this whole thing inverts, and we get KUCDEIOF- that whole scale of means of perverting the itsa line.

THE ITSA LINE (CONTINUED) 4  Now, those means, well, include an inability to ever find anything, an inability to reach anything, and so forth. Well now, medical psychiatry (to amend what I was saying a moment ago) is of the inclination that it is better, you see, for nobody to have anything to do with anything, see? See that?

Now, look at that as an inversion. That’s an inversion of the fact. Now, the aberration of this line-perversion of this itsa line-has to be very direct in order to be very aberrative.

You have to pervert the line, you see-just outrightly put in something false, or put nothing there, you see, and so on, or inhibit very directly, and you have to work at it. It has to be worked at and so on. Given the slightest chance, why, the pc will start putting in his itsa line.

But what does he put his itsa line in on? All right, let’s take Freudian analysis: he puts in his itsa line on childhood sexual incidents. They’re not aberrative!

Anybody get anyplace? Old Papa Freud did contribute something. He said there was a possibility.

Great, let’s applaud him for that. But he was putting the itsa line in in directions that didn’t wind up with anything, and then after he got through he put the line in, totally; the practitioner put the line in. See, he said, “The reason why you are aberrated now is we have finally found out that you had a fetish going.

You had a fetishism. And actually, your little brother’s right shoe has aberrated your whole existence, and that is why-that is why you are always talking about the feet on chairs, you see? And now we’ve got this all explained, and you are better.” Now, that’s all very fine, but he didn’t look at the hypnotic character of the statement “You are better.” That’s putting in the itsa line.

All right. We got some guy walking around in circles out here. (Let’s take a look at these various gradients of putting in the itsa line for somebody; you’ll gradually see what I’m talking about and what I’m driving at here.) Got some guy walking around in circles and, man, he doesn’t know which way to turn. He’s got lumbosis and he’s been aberrated by hearing of a psychiatrist when he was young and he’s got all kinds of things, you see.

He’s having a hard time-having a hard time. And you say something can be done about it. Well, you’ve put in some variety of itsa line, haven’t you?

And that’s what you call a hope factor. And this guy very often responds to this, and he feels much happier about this, don’t you see? You see that-that the hope factor, then, is to that slight degree putting in the itsa line, see?

It’s not really much of an itsa line. You’re not saying-but you’re saying, “It is not-it is not hopeless!” See? You’re sort of putting in a negative line for him a little bit there, and you carry him along.

You see, as we look at this problem, we’ll see that there are various degrees of putting in the itsa line for somebody. See, there are various degrees of this, and these things vary from the very, very evil-which is to say, hand a guy a pomegranate and say, “That’s a bomb.” See, that’s putting in a false itsa line. They vary from that up to a-well, making it impossible for  THE ITSA LINE (CONTINUED) 5  him to put it in. (That’s a lower grade, making it impossible for the person to put in an itsa line.) Varies up to the little necessary actions necessary to begin the flow of the itsa line.

See, and these little necessary actions are such as “Start of session.” And the basic intent is what makes the difference. That’s the first fundamental difference, although this, too, can go too far. But the basic intent is what makes the most fundamental difference.

Do you intend to improve this person’s itsaing ability, or do you intend to knock it into a cocked ‘at? Which? So it begins right there with the intention.

And that gives you the difference between the cowboys in the white hats and the cowboys in the black hats, see? And it’s right there, man, bang! Intention: decrease this person’s ability to itsa-cowboys in the black hats.

Intention: by some or any means, to improve this person’s ability to itsa-cowboys in the white hats. That’s good and evil, defined in terms of the itsa line. That’s the difference between freedom and slavery, that’s the difference between making freemen and making slaves.

You make slaves by the intention to decrease the ability to put in the itsa line. That’s how you make a slave. And that gives you the whole textbook of how to make slaves, right there, complete with gold letters and a chain-pattern cover.

And the other way is to improve the person’s ability to itsa. In other words, to identify, to spot, to find out. And there we have that point from which we can separate the Scientologist from the medico, we can separate the decent civilizations from the lousy ones; we can go right on through there.

This quarter of the universe, by the way, is suffering from an overdose of lousy civilization. See? That’s what it’s suffering from.

It apparently has been recently conquered in recent times (in the last few hundred thousand years), but those who were conquered had already been-their governmental actions-had already been set up for their own failure, see? They’d been set up to be conquered by using, themselves, mental technology which made slaves. They implanted their own troops.

Oh-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho, ah-ah-ahah-ah-ah-ah-ah. “We’re going to plant somebody up to be a loyal soldier, to fight bravely, to never give up his body so long as it is alive, to be true to the empire.” We’re going to plant somebody, are we? Remember, every one of those items we put in, to stick, has to have ä negative item! And that doesn’t just cut it down 50 percent, that puts it in the betrayal line.

It cuts it down enormously, because some empire that would do this to somebody gets their support like giving them the itch, see? “Yeah, we’ll help the general out,” you know? Help him into the car so that he goes through the other side and falls out the opposite door, you know? It’s an accident, you know?

When the planes take off, half their motors don’t run, you know? Just-they’re just running up against total sabotage, because they’ve already got a slave empire. THE ITSA LINE (CONTINUED) 6  And you may be able to force a group by slavery and so forth into a semblance of a civilization, but it’s only ever a semblance; there’s never anything to which anybody freely, wholeheartedly contributes.

It has no strength, it has no power. Because remember, 50 percent of the implant is “Don’t be a good soldier.” And then the fact that the implant occurred at all, of course, is enough to knock one’s loyalty in a cocked hat. Let’s take an earlier and probably still extant organization, the Galactic Confederacy: eighty trillion years, smooth as glass.

No implanting. Interesting? I don’t know the exact length of the Espinol Confederacy, but it’s probably something on the order of a few hundred thousand years.

Implants-no empire. The figures read themselves. Rome died at the hands of her slaves.

That’s for sure. She was never conquered by the barbarians. I know it looked very nice in the history books, but the truth of the matter is, who wanted to fight for Rome?

You get through with a war, you come home, you find out the slave civilization has already taken over the farms. There’s no need for your production; there’s no need for a freeman; there was no pay to be a freeman. That was the reward and the pat on the back for having fought through the wars, you see?

And it started going into a civil-war situation. And half of the Roman Empire was always fighting half of the Roman Empire. I don’t remember the exact name of the battle; it doesn’t occur to me.

I read it in Gibbon (and it’s probably wrong in Gibbon) and got cluttered up on it-it’s either Messana or something like that. But the reason the first barbarians got to Rome was because-she didn’t have very large numbers in her armies, but forty thousand of her firstline troops lay dead at Messala in a civil war caused by unrest caused by slavery. And they had no first-line troops.

That was practically the entire call-up of the empire. And historians today trace back to that battle as the reason the barbarian was able to conquer the thing. Well, you trace back the battle, and you find the battle came because of civil war.

And we find out why the civil war came and it came by slavery. The American Civil War, that destroyed one of the better agricultural areas of America, and so forth, was again a battle about slavery, one way or the other. Every time you have slavery, you have trouble.

See? You don’t even have to be sentimental about it. You don’t have to be sentimental.

You can be terribly statistical. You don’t have to say it’s good or it’s bad or anything else. You don’t have to beat the drum for it, or be a person who wants to reform things or something like that.

Just look at the statistics. Slavery never pays off. That’s it.

That’s that. It’s dangerous. If anything is dangerous, it’s slavery.

You don’t suppose America would be having very much trouble right now with its race riots and 250 thousand Negroes about to converge on Washington, and so forth, if they  THE ITSA LINE (CONTINUED) 7  hadn’t kicked off this slavery. And it’s very funny, but the most involved people in American slavery were the Bostonians. Used to have what they called the “triangle trade.” They’d send ships loaded with rum down to Africa, use the rum to buy blacks (as they referred to them), use the whip and Christianity on them to bring them back over, and they traded in the blacks down around the West Indies, and so forth, for sugar cane, and they brought the sugar cane up to Boston and they made rum, and they shipped the rum to Africa, and they just had that worked out.

And practically the first families of Boston are founded directly on slavery. Kennedy missed that. He wasn’t there at that-family wasn’t in America at that particular time.

His family got out from underneath another type of slavery: the landowner, the absentee landlord, the high rates-this type of economic slavery, and so forth. And these things go back to roots. In other words, we have catastrophes in all directions.

We have the catastrophe of Boston, the catastrophe of Kennedy. We’ve got a situation here whereby you trace world trouble, and you trace it straight back to slavery. I’m not trying to beat the drum for anything.

Why do you think Russia cant get its feet under itself, and why is everybody having such a hard time with the Russians, and why are the Russians so silly as to evolve a slave economy such as communism, and so forth? What’s all this fuss? Well, this fuss goes back to the idea in early Russian history that a man belonged to the land, and when you sold the land you sold the man with it.

Well, the European civilization got out from underneath that, two or three centuries before, and Russia has not yet got out from underneath that. She is still carrying the burden of her past chains. And therefore she can’t think straight.

She’s like trying to get a pc to think in the middle of a session, you know? Can’t do it. That’s a little more touching picture than they actually are painting.

Actually, what I think is, is the White Russian prince and that sort of fellow, you see, he went back to the between-lives area and he came back and he picked up a body and became a commissar. I don’t think they’ve really changed their faces very much. But the trouble with world affairs today is slavery.

The greatest empire Earth ever had went down in the dust with slavery. The British Empire right now is having a rough time and is staggering around because of its efforts to colonise, and to do this and to do that and do something about this, and to free man and not to free man, and somehow or another to hold him in economic duress, don’t you see?-and not let him free but then to let him free, and-you know? You got all this trouble down here in Africa running around in one way or the other.

Well, that’s the sort of trouble you get when you suddenly start taking the lid off something that has had the lid nailed down on for a very long time, you see? And without anybody around who really knows much about it, why, we get those boys going back into slavery too. THE ITSA LINE (CONTINUED) 8  First action of a new African ruler is ordinarily to throw the whole opposition in jail because they are insufficiently enslaved by his regime, you see?

This viewpoint. This viewpoint. Now, I’m not discoursing on this just because I have a bee in my bonnet about it, because I frankly couldn’t care less, as far as this planet is concerned.

It’ll never get out of any mess unless we get it out of that mess, and I’m just using the situation just to show you the liabilities of slavery. You always get a lash back-always. Because a thetan never gives up!

That’s it. He really never gives up. He’s lying there.

He might look awful quiet, he might look terribly dead, he might look like he doesn’t interfere with anything, you see? But, in actual fact, he really never gives up! He’s got some trick: You can put him in jail, immobilize him, wrap him all up in adhesive tape and electric cord, and so forth, and he gets even with you: he sits there and thinks how he’s right.

He even goes down to that point, see? He can hold that postulate clear on down through the lowest levels of unconsciousness-that he was right. Well, I think that’s very interesting.

Because if he ever gets out of it, he’ll go on being right, see? If he ever gets out of it, he’ll go on being right about what he was being right about before he got put in that state. In other words, the effort to dominate, the effort to dominate and deny power of choice is the road that this universe walked toward the hell it became.

Fear-the unlovely specter of fear stands ahead of all of those. Let’s trace this out very carefully: To survive. All right, very good.

This guy wants to survive. Whatever put him in the state of mind that he had to survive? Because this is your biggest piece of nonsense.

A thetan can’t possibly do anything but survive. In fact, it’s probably the trouble with him. And that’s certainly the trouble governments and things have with him.

That’s the trouble the Marcabians are having with him right now. How to kill a thetan is the biggest problem in this universe. See, it’s just not solvable.

They thought they had it all solved and we came along. See, they just never really are able to whip this problem. How do you kill a thetan?

Well, it’s not an elegant problem to whip. Now, how can a being-who actually can’t be struck at, who cannot do anything but survive and cannot die, who can pass through various lapses of 9t memory and that sort of thing-how can this being get into a state of mind whereby he’s concerned about survival? Well, it takes quite a lot of trickery to do that.

Usually it’s on the extension of self into a possession, like making a minion. You mock a mock-up up and then you endow it with some life, you see? And then somebody comes along and starts to kick its head off, so you protect it and you identify yourself with it.

Or you construct a civilization and identify itself with it, and you’re trying to get the civilization to survive, so that eventually you get worried about your own survival. You see the mistake which has to be made there? That mistake actually has to be made directly before a thetan gets worried about his own survival.

THE ITSA LINE (CONTINUED) 9  In other words, he has to extend some type of line onto something that he feels can’t survive, and then identify himself with it to such an extent that he feels his own survival can be affected. And this is your first step into aberration. All right.

Your next step forward from this is an elementary step: Because one is now worried about survival, one resolves the problem of survival by domination. This is not any kind of a solution at all. It’s a lousy solution, but it gets used and is probably-that which is not admired tends to persist.

That very definitely applies in this particular line, because domination is probably the least admired thing in this universe, and yet, oddly enough, is continuously successful. But it’s really not successful. So, domination-domination comes in here.

And we have thetan A and thetan B, and the way that thetan B is kept from destroying thetan A’s construction or civilization, don’t you see, is by thetan A dominating thetan B, you see? That is the formula by which this is arrived at. So thetan A, to protect something he wants to have survive, therefore seeks to dominate thetan B.

And then being in a frame of mind where he feels he himself cannot survive, then he just obsessively goes on and dominates thetans B, C, D, E, F --and G, see? But he overlooks the fact that if he dominates thetans B, D, E, F and G, sooner or later, thetans B, D, E, F and G in their turn are going to dominate. Do you see?

Because we’ve set up a cause-effect line, and the best thing you know about a cause-effect line-we may not know much about overt-motivator sequences; we know all about the cause-effect line from which the overt-motivator sequence comes. And the best thing about those things is that communication contains cause, distance, effect, with intention and duplication. And because of the duplication of the intention, then any communication line will reverse.

That’s the easiest thing a communication line does is reverse, because of course it has duplication on both ends. It’s very easy for cause to become effect and effect to become cause, because there’s a duplication in the communication line. All you have to do is make a slight mistake of which is cause and which is effect, and you have the waiters, which at one time through the last century served people, in black tuxedos-You know, the guests all wore black tuxedos, and so forth-you have the waiters now wearing black tuxedos, you see?

And you look at any custom as it comes along in this universe, you are actually studying the cause-distance-effect-duplication aspect of a communication line. It’s going to reverse. Well, there’s lots of ramifications whereby we protest and we do this and we do that.

But this fact of any custom you see on this planet at this time-you could absolutely count on its having been the reverse custom at an earlier date. Now, this makes an awfully broad statement, but if you look into it, you’ll see that’s the ease. You take the clothes today of women, and the clothes today of men, see?

Well, you don’t have to look back very far to where you see that that one flipped, you see? And you look into-into almost any custom you can follow down and you will find out it slipped. It went the other way to.

THE ITSA LINE (CONTINUED) 10  So the formula of communication, and communication itself, then, is the most important factor in looking for aberration. It’s very elementary why: It’s cause, distance, effect with intention, duplication. The duplication factor, then, makes the C very easily look like the E, and the E look like the C.

So of course the line can reverse around the other way to. And we get all sorts of superstitions about overt-motivator sequences, and we get all kinds of things. Of course, that’s factual, but it’s simply based upon the nature of a communication line.

We beat somebody’s head in and we beat somebody’s head in and we beat somebody’s head in and we beat somebody’s head in. Of course, at cause you have the intention to beat somebody’s head in, and at effect we have somebody’s head being beaten in. That’s pretty elementary.

And then one fine day we wake up with a headache. Where did the headache come from? Well, one slipped.

One slipped. One made a misidentification of the C and the E on the line, see? It was quite accidental.

You’re reading a book by Montaigne, or something, and it said, “And thy servant, he is a man too,” see, something like this, you know? Guy just, you know, just blah ... (I don’t even know if Montaigne said that. But you have to add these erudite points when you don’t have your quotation dictionary handy.

Besides, I usually find out I can make up better quotations than they said anyhow. I figure out their works were culled. I used to work on the basis that if you wrote enough words, you’d say something clever, and that saying things clever was usually solved in the field of philosophy by writing enough words.

See, just by law of averages you would eventually be clever. Anyway ... Fifty thousand monkeys writing for fifty thousand years apparently by accident would write all the books of the world, and I think they did!) Anyway, you see what happens here now?

Do you see? There’s a switcheroo on these lines, and you get what looks like an overt-motivator sequence. And almost any pc you audit at the level of Homo sapiens, and so on, has got this so switched that you can absolutely count on O/W working.

But as I’ve often told you, it’s not a high-level concept. See, it’s limited. It only goes up so high because it depends upon this error of identification, you see?

But you can always get a case result by saying, “What have you done?” “What have you done?” because you’ve freed up now some vicious communication line. And it’s certain that he made a misidentification from that point up, see, and so therefore we can free some somatics or something like that. We can practically count on the fact that if some guy has got a sore neck, that if we just find out what sore necks he has caused, we will eventually tear apart a couple of facsimiles of some kind or another, which will straighten it out, and he’ll cease to have a sore neck.

Because he obviously had given somebody else a sore neck, you see, if he has a sore neck. I mean, it’s that elementary. But what is this really based on?

It’s based on the misidentification of a communication line because of the duplication factor in communication. Can’t communicate  THE ITSA LINE (CONTINUED) 11  without some duplication. That duplication, of course, sneaks up.

You can’t communicate at all without duplication. Well, all right, if communication is so dangerous, why is any thetan communicating at all? Well, he communicates because he wants to be oriented.

And we’re back to why he communicates. He wants to be oriented. Of course, I don’t-then, of course, he takes his best tool, getting oriented, and proceeds to aberrate it by using it to dominate, to do people in, and to mess up things that he tries to identify with, see?

He messes up his own communication line. In other words, he misuses his communication line. Now, the communication line is there because he’s lost and feels the need of orientation.

Hence his desire for communication. There’s an insecurity back on along the line which causes him to use this communication line. As I say, we haven’t got the full answer as to why that is.

I’m just showing you what this comes from. And that gives us, directly, the itsa line. So don’t regard the itsa line as a low-level concept, it’s actually Scientology Five.

It’s not Scientology One, but it’s used in Scientology One, and I’m sure will be used well for a long period of time, will also be used very blindly in many quarters. But let’s appreciate what we’re using. We’re using the obsession to identify, which lies back of the communication line.

But we’re using a principle higher than communication, coupled with communication, in order to orient and rehabilitate a thetan. You’ve made a full statement of processing at that moment, see, except for this one little fact: Is there anything else earlier that gave this guy an insecurity? The original one, in the absence of communication, is somewhat hard to understand-particularly at our states of ease, see?

A little bit hard to understand. What the devil was it? This guy, you see, isn’t communicating, he doesn’t feel insecure, he is not protecting anything, he hasn’t got any reaching going on, he had no real reason to reach, and so forth.

How did anybody get to him? You can figure out a lot of answers to the thing, and they all wind up with a communication line mixed up in them. And of course the moment a communication line is mixed up in them you haven’t got the answer.

How did he originally feel the need of orientation and familiarization in order to be comfortable? See, how did he do this? How was this done to anybody, and how did he do it to anybody else?

And if so, why? So, there is a riddle still sitting there, see? There is a riddle.

But we have the walkway back to the answer to that riddle. And what you’re walking, on the line of OT, is you’re walking to the answer of that riddle. And the funny part of it is, when you put your foot on that which lies on the other side of all of the energy and all of the Confusion and all of the overts and all the misidentification and everything else-which you’re handling right now as cases, and auditors, see-right on the other side of that, just as it took one  THE ITSA LINE (CONTINUED) 12  step to get on the road, it only takes one step at the other end of that roadway to suddenly go OT.

OT is a gradient process for a long period of time with a sudden fantastic upsurge. You’ll get shadows of that upsurge as you’re processing somebody. You haven’t made it yet, but he all of a sudden will do something peculiar.

He’ll do something very OTish-and the next forty-eight hours shake in his boots because, you know, ha-ha. Blu-uh! Guy starts to reach for the Telephone and it leaps to his ear, you know?

Scares hell out of him. Next session you’ll spend processing it having happened. But that’s processable too.

These are just the lines up. But the realization at the other end, the solution to that riddle and any of its ramifications, determines more or less the state attained. In other words, processing is the cure of having to be familiarized with things and having to itsa things, and so forth.

The end product of processing is no further need to have to do these things. And as soon as one attains that no further need to have to do one of these things, one would find he would suddenly snap back to all of the power that he possibly could want. At which moment he probably turns around, and he’s so mad at everybody because of that time he spent there being right that he rights the various wrongs that he was going to right, and he probably will take a dip at that point and then he’ll come back up again.

And there will be various curves and toboggans along on this road that will probably look very dizzy, but that’s okay. So that’s the way it is. Now, we’re undoing-we’re undoing, then-this obsession to itsa by using it.

And because the dependency on it is so great, you’ll never get a bank taken apart, as far as I’m concerned, until it has been utilized to its full. Now, self-determinism, pan-determinism, personal beingness, personal power, restored to the individual, is done on the road of minimal help, maximal recovery of self- determinism-or maximal recover of self-ability to itsa. See?

That’s up. Now, as the case goes along, its progress is measured directly and immediately by the degree that this is returned into the pc’s hands. Therefore, you could get a fantastic number of engrams run-now let me show you how you can mess this up, see-you get a fantastic number of engrams run and a fantastic number of GPMs run, and the pc would be foggy and wouldn’t be much alert, and so on.

Oh, you haven’t really harmed him. You’ve slowed down the recovery in just this one way, by every time the pc says “Uh ... let me see, there’s a picture here, and I think it’s a . . .” “Oh, all right, I’ll date it for you. Is it greater than a hundred trillion years ago?

Is it less than a hundred trillion years ago? Was it a hundred trillion years ago? It’s less than.

All right, is it greater than eighty trillion years ago? Less than eighty trillion? It’s less than,” so forth and so forth. “The date is so-and-so and so-and-so and so-and-so.” And the pc says, “Oh, all right.

Hm-hm. Okay.” See? See the nonsense involved in this thing  THE ITSA LINE (CONTINUED) 13  And it just goes much more subtly, see, much more subtly: “You know, I think I must have been one of the Brobdingnagians.” Little tiny head shake as one looks at the meter and sees that it didn’t read on Brobdingnagians, but did read on Lilliputians, see?

And then, “Oh, well, I didn’t mean anything. I-helping you out.” You actually have the identical problem that a mother has, auditor. And some mamas solve it and some don’t.

They help little Roscoe to a point where, at twenty-one, little Roscoe can’t shovel soup into his gullet, see? Of course, there’s an equal extreme the other way. They don’t help little Roscoe to a point where little Roscoe, at the age of twenty-one, shoots them!

Puts cyanide in the soup! See, all of this is a happy mean, you see? And it isn’t constant one pc to the next.

That’s what the trouble is, because one pc requires more help than another pc, because they’re at different levels of independence. And you get a pc who has a very high level of independence and a very deep level of aberration, and of course you’ve got trouble! I mean, the guy can’t walk, and he keeps putting his feet in the stew and in the mud and everything else.

And you watch this guy caroming off into doors, and it practically hurts, you know? “Oh, I’ll do it, I’ll do it!” and at that moment, why, spills the tureen over his head, you see? Well, that’s all within the margin of an auditor. That’s where his ebb and play comes in, is how much does it take to improve this guy’s independence and self-determinism?

How much does it take to improve his ability to know? How much help does he need in order to know? And you’ll find out that’s a varying quantity, see?

Here’s this poor guy off the street, he doesn’t know which end the door is, you know? And he’s helped enormously because you actually show him where the door is. It makes him a bit better.

You understand, from there on he can find the door, he can itsa the door from there on out. See? So you haven’t taken all of his itsas away from him.

All right, well, that’s the extreme case. But let’s handle that extreme case wrong. Let’s handle this just dead wrong: We tell him he never can know where the door is.

See? And let’s build him a special set of rails so that when he walks toward the door he runs into it. And every time he walks around that particular end, why, he’ll collide with the door, see?

Well, at this point, of course, you have exceeded the degree of. In other words, you haven’t helped him at all. You have deteriorated his ability.

And what you want to do is take what ability you have, that you find there, don’t you see, and gradually uncreate any dependence that is created. And the perfect formula is reduce it. See?

Give him all the help he needs to get along and then gradually reduce it. That is always safe. Give him whatever help he needs to get along and then reduce it-which makes something like 3N into about four or five different routines, which is quite remarkable.

And eventually,  THE ITSA LINE (CONTINUED) 14  why, he isn’t even given a line plot. But that’s getting pretty adventurous, don’t you see, because he can get himself in more trouble without a line plot. It’s almost a dirty trick to turn somebody loose into a wildcat GPM before he’s run a few that are line-plotted, you know?

You can make a pc fly, but then the pc says, “I don’t think-I don’t think, I don’t think this sequence follows on through this way. I think it cuts off someplace here. Something cuts off.” “Well, follow your line plot!

Follow your line plot! The line plot. Give me the next item, the next item.

That’s what I want, next item.” “Yeah, but . . “Next item!” Well, even if it was there, the pc sooner or later is going to be right enough to convince you that it isn’t-because you never let him find out. Now, combining all of this nice sense of judgment is the extra bonus of your own flubs, because you cannot reduce them to zero. Don’t ever try.

Don’t ever go beating your brains out. Because you get caught in cross-plays of communication where you didn’t quite understand what the pc said when you thought you did, don’t you see? And so you said, then, at that time-the pc is saying, “Let’s see, what was that series we found?

It was-let’s see, I think I found early-earlier that such a series we found. . .” and so on. Well, you say, “Well, you’ve already found it, you see? It’s been found for several sessions, and it’s 25.4 trillion years ago,” see?

And he’s trying to find this date, you see? He’s trying to reremember what the date is, and you’re just trying to get the series started, see? So you say, “Well, that was-that - oh, you’re talking about the 25.4-trillion-year-ago series.” He says, “Yeah.

Yeah, I guess so. I don-I-I do-get the.... No, you see, that isn’t the point.

Um...” And you finally let him stagger through this, because you’ve, see, flicked his attention and slipped him the mickey with the wrong communication line because you didn’t understand. That wasn’t what he was saying at all. He’s trying to find that lock incident that defended on the series, and his communication being a little bit blurry, why, he’s not really communicating what he thinks he is communicating to you, so you make a mistake on it.

And because the pc’s communication line is so often fogged up in session, for an auditor, then, to do a perfect job of handling the communication line is impossible, because it depends upon the pc’s articulation and communication being perfect. Sometime a pc will say something to you like this: “Well, I suppressed my gains for this session.” And what do you do? Well, is he giving you an itsa?

Is he announcing a catastrophe? Is he getting off a suppression? See?

Does he want you to do something What’s the intention of his communication? Well, maybe he doesn’t even know, either. And almost anything you answer to this, you’re going to be wrong!

See? THE ITSA LINE (CONTINUED) 15  So don’t go around in fear of being wrong, and don’t teach people to be afraid that they’re going to mishandle one of these lines, because you’re teaching them to be afraid of something that’s going to be inevitable - inevitable. The pc all of a sudden looks up and he gets a starey-eyed look in his eye and he says, “Say, I don’t think that’s true.” You’re running a Helatrobus implant, you see, and “Say, I don’t-I don’t think that’s true.” And you say, “Well, what?” He says, “That.

You know? I just don’t think it is.” Well, what do you do? Is he talking about the Helatrobus implants?

Probability not. He’s skipped into something. What’s happened here?

What’s he collided with? We don’t know. All right, to ask him for more data than he’s got is a fatal auditing error, so we ask him for more data than he’s got and we are in trouble.

We don’t ask him for the data he does have, we are in trouble. Don’t you see? Because, these are the troubles of handling an indefinite communication line, and troubles always originate.

The communication line at its source is indefinite, so therefore the handling of it becomes a situation. So that just makes you have to get very slippy. And you have to learn various things about the intention line which we’re not particularly discussing today. “Do you want to tell me about it?” Ha-ha-ha-ha-cut your throat.

How do you put the pc’s attention on anything? How do you put his attention on a chair? You say “chair,” don’t you?

How do you put his attention on a house? You say “house,” don’t you? How do you put his attention on a date?

You say “date,” don’t you? How do you put the pc’s attention on the auditor? You say “auditor,” don’t you? “Do you want to tell me about it?” Clang!

Out of session, ARC break, house falling down, everything going to pieces, gains being wrapped up, everything betrayed-Christ, what happened? Ha-ha! You in vain try to trace back anything you did.

Naturally, you tend to blame yourself for it. Well, you, in actual fact, didn’t do anything except inadvertently direct the pc’s attention in a direction where it wasn’t going and give him a sudden attention shift, because of your misunderstanding of what the pc was talking about in the first place. Do you see the liabilities of this kind of thing?

So, know how to do it right, and do it right most of the time! See? That’s the only thing you can expect and hope for.

All right. This pc itsa line is going to get better to the degree that it is permitted to exist. This doesn’t mean to the degree that you let the pc talk, necessarily.

It means the degree that you keep the pc’s attention directed in directions where he can find things to identify: in his bank. And when he’s found things in his bank to identify, let him identify them. THE ITSA LINE (CONTINUED) 16  He says-You say, “All right.

Now, I want you to take a look at that incident there that has the robots in it. Good. All right.

That’s fine. All right.” And he says, “Say, . . “Yes, I know. They’re robots.” Well, I’d just say that was too corny for words, see?

All right, you keep up that sort of thing with a pc very long, and you tell him what he is looking at always-see, it isn’t a 100 percent proposition there, either. You sometimes tell a pc what he’s looking at, see? You put his attention on the track to some incident that you know is there, and he doesn’t know is there, well, you’re certainly giving him something to itsa, aren’t you?

So you’ve given him something to itsa, and he’ll start itsaing it, happy as a clam, see? But if you prevent his itsaing it after you have given it to him to itsa, you will see a gradual deterioration over a period of intensives-now, not one session, it’s a long period-of his ability to identify. You’ll see this deteriorating.

You’re creating a dependence on your metering. You can create a dependence on your recognition, a dependence on his confirmation as to whether or not he’s right. He says, “Well, I don’t know if it was the cowboys in the white hats or the black hats, and cow ...

You look on the meter,” he will say. “Look on the meter.” One of the ways an auditor gets this started is invalidating a pc’s data. He invalidates the pc’s data a little bit, and-you know, tends to somewhat, and sounds doubtful, and the pc sounds this-and finally the pc will say “Look on the meter.” And the auditor cuts his throat and looks on the meter. See?

It’s a case of he should say, “Well, I believe you. I don’t have to prove it,” see? “If you don’t believe me, look at the meter.” Proper response is, “Well, I believe you. Go ahead, tell me what it Don’t look on the meter.

Eventually you’ll get a habit started whereby every time the pc wants to communicate anything to you, he convinces you by showing you that it bangs on the needle. And his itsa line will start deteriorating. See, this can be done in various ways.

That’s confirming his itsa line, which leaves him with no positiveness. It leaves him with no sensitivity as to what’s right and what’s wrong. Well, that’s an ability that you are trying to improve.

And if you look on it as an ability that you’re trying to improve and as the chief ability which is there to be improved in a case, you really won’t make many mistakes on it. Your mistakes will be cut to a minimum. But if you look on a case as something from which significances have to be removed in any way that they can be removed, regardless of the self-determinism of the pc and regardless of his ability and regardless of his knowingness and his recognition and so forth, oddly enough,  THE ITSA LINE (CONTINUED) 17  you will still make it, but you’ve multiplied your time factor considerably.

Time factor is going way up-ten to one, something like that - because you’re deteriorating his ability. Now, just auditing the pc in general, you’ll see you will inevitably get an improvement of the ability by the removal of charge. Now, if at the same time you’re creating a dependency, to the degree that you’re increasing-you see?

You can increase and decrease, and whereby he’s getting more track and more charge in his vicinity, his actual Potential of improvement is being cut back by his dependency on the itsa of the auditor, see? It improves anyhow. But the auditor is cutting it back, and he’s just costing himself more auditing time, more auditing time, more auditing time, more auditing time.

More difficulty, more ARC breaks, more upsets. There’s many a-many a way, many a way by which all this can be handled in various ways. See, you have what you call an ARC breaky type pc.

Well now, this pc probably has a high degree of independence and probably has a high degree of itsa ability already, but possibly is a bit swamped with charge, see? All right. Now we take this pc and we deteriorate his ability to itsa, you see, by creating a dependency on the auditor.

You know, by telling him everything, by telling him everything. You know, “That read. That didn’t read,” and so on.

Of course, the funny part of it is-there’s one other point of this I should mention in passing-if you don’t tell a pc when an item is finally discharged, in the early stages of running GPMs, he’ll leave items charged, and the mechanics of the bank will cause him to bounce and ARC break. See? So that again is one of these factors whereby you’re putting in the itsa line-itsa discharge.

Now, but sooner or later the pc is going to start telling you when it is discharged. Well, that’s damn well when you better stop telling the pc that it’s clean. Do you understand?

You just better stop telling him at that point. Ah, but you’ve got an interesting problem here. Maybe you’ve stopped telling him at the point where he still can’t tell.

Now you’re going to have hell raised, because you’re going to have him stuck in incidents. You’re going to have RIs live all over the place, you’re going to have his postulates live and so forth. I think I’d start working on a campaign on him: “Well, run it until you’re very sure it’s flat” is the kind of a campaign I’d start running, is “Get that item until you’re very sure it’s flat.” “All right,” he says, “that’s flat.” “Okay, say it again.

Good. Fine. You’re right, that’s flat,” see?

And he all of a sudden, “See, I can tell you.” You know? “All right, good. Good,” see? “Fine.” And wean him. And gradually don’t check, see?

Don’t check. Say, “All right, I can depend on you.” Because he can tell you, eventually, when it’s flat. THE ITSA LINE (CONTINUED) 18  He’ll also get very bored with an item and leave it half-unflat.

You can sometimes make a citizen out of him by letting him do so. Trouble is, he’s liable to have bounced and gone into something else. Now, there’s various problems involved here.

I’m not trying to tell you this is simple. Don’t get so involved in the problems, however, that you miss the basic mechanics of the situation. Basic mechanics of the situation: the pc is the one who is living with this bank, and if he can’t tell what’s in it, and so forth, he can’t live with it.

Obvious? I mean, that’s one of these ne plus ultra things. You’re unfortunately, or fortunately, not going to be at his side for the next two hundred trillion billion squillion years.

See, you’re not going to be there telling him whether it is a GPM, you see? Going to have to find this out for himself So sooner or later, you’re going to have to kick him off with regard to this bank. The time to start is when you start auditing him.

You start auditing him, why, start weaning him. Don’t increase his dependency. Decrease it.

Give him all the help he needs! But isn’t that a tricky statement? How much help does he need?

Well, you know if he doesn’t have line plots and a design on the track and the concepts of life, and that sort of thing-if he doesn’t have something like that-he’ll never put his foot on the road at all. And we know that if he doesn’t have a line plot for a standard GPM that he’s got to run, and so forth, we know he’ll wrap himself around a telegraph pole, man. He’ll practically finish himself off by giving you wrong items and upside-down items and missing items, and so forth.

And the next thing you know, why, the penalty is much worse than the cure, here. See? Well, where do we go?

Well, how much help do we give him? Well, we give him all the help he needs. How much help does he need?

Well, that is something you establish individually in each pc. You’re going to get ahold of some pc sometime or another-you know, he possibly hasn’t been down here long, or he got here by accident, or something of the sort. And this pc cognites on the Axioms, knocks out the bank, does Change of Space Processing between your auditing room and the next building for a while, goes around and thanks you very much; you’re left with your jaw dropped because you haven’t had an opportunity to get your meter on and tested.

Well, don’t feel so betrayed that you didn’t get a chance to audit. You audited. So, there are various degrees by which you have to approach this problem, and that’s the difference of pc’s.

Now, these very, very ARC breaky pcs sometimes get a reputation for being ARC breaky and they get very upset this way and so on. It’s actually where their concept of their own independence is being invidiously cut up by people putting itsas in for them. And the charge on the bank is too great, so that they get into this stuff and they’ll dramatize at the drop of a hat.

And this is upsetting to them. It’s more upsetting to them to dramatize, but  THE ITSA LINE (CONTINUED) 19  how did they dramatize? They dramatized only because somebody put in the itsa line they were not able to.

So, what do you do with such a pc? Well, a pc who’s routinely ARC breaky must obviously have something wrong with the itsa line. Well, he wasn’t the result of auditing- It was probably something that occurred before auditing, because we are not in the business of aberrating people.

Well, it must have occurred in some aberrative area. Well, you can do such a thing, as give them an eighteen-button Prepcheck on the itsa line. Simple.

Now, an eighteen-button Prepcheck is not thrown out by the itsa line because the eighteen buttons are the select choice, very best, grade A, straight-from-the-ocean itsas. You realize that a Prepcheck is almost the perfect series of itsas. Most powerful buttons, so they’re most powerful itsas in existence since the beginning of the universe. “Since your beginning of travail, has anything been suppressed?” Wonder how long that would run.

But that’s an itsa, because he must have itsa’d by suppressing. So you’re getting off the crisscross, see? If he suppressed it, then he can itsa it.

If you get the suppression off, then he can itsa. These are almost perfect itsa lines. The Prepcheck actually comes into its own.

But very interesting about a Prepcheck. You can prepcheck the itsa line. See, on that?

That takes the cake, man. Now, you take one of these very ARC breaky pcs that has a very great reputation for being ARC breaky, and you put the itsa line into some comprehensible thing. Very often, if you just explain to them what the itsa line is and prepcheck it, you’ll be better off than trying to redefine something, because you won’t then be prepchecking the itsa line.

But this takes some doing. An auditor has always got to be able to interpret the auditing command and clarify the auditing command so that the pc knows what it is. One of the best ways to clarify an auditing command like “Recall an ARC break” is explain an ARC break and give it to him, because you use any other word, you’ll run into some GPM-almost certain to run into GPMs. “ARC break” is contained in no GPM and therefore is a totally nonbackground word.

See? Give him a new word, new symbol. All right, so you say, “Itsa line-well, your-your recognition of things.

Your consideration of things. What you think life is all about. Your opinions.

You know, somebody says, ‘What’s a cat?’ and you say, ‘It’s a four-legged animal.’ I mean, your right to do that.” You know, go on, go on, explain it any way you want. Prepcheck the itsa line. Or get some other designation for it.

But prepcheck it. And you’ll be very fascinated that the pc who is the ARC breaky pc is not really ARC breaking because of auditing and bypassed charge. This pc’s itsa line is cut right here and now as his most colossal PTP-by something else, nothing to do with auditing.

THE ITSA LINE (CONTINUED) 20  I’ll give you a marvelous example of how somebody’s itsa line is cut right here and now: He’s on this planet, isn’t he? If he tries to get off, he hits the between-lives area. His itsa line is cut because he can’t itsa anything else in the universe.

He can look at the stars, but he can’t tell what condition they’re in. See, he’s the prisoner on the island who looks toward the mainland longingly, so his itsa line is cut. See, there’s all kinds of ways of cutting the itsa line, don’t you see?

No reason to dream them all up for the pc. Put in a Prepcheck on his itsa line. You’ll be astonished.

He’ll make some case progress-sudden case progress, and cease to be ARC breaky. Other ways of attacking this same problem sometimes give us the very, very fascinating and interesting aspect of somebody who has found that the ARC break is a solution to some problem. So he solves the problem by ARC breaking.

There’s various ramifications, but he normally runs into this when you prepcheck the itsa line. You have a big piece of understanding here. It’s a big, new, whole piece of understanding.

It’s a new piece of the jigsaw puzzle which has fitted into place and made citizens out of most of the center pieces, and has shown us that there’s just this little few out here on the edge, of how come a guy had to identify and familiarize himself in order to feel alive or secure? How come a guy got into an obsessed necessity to itsa? That little piece is about the only piece missing right now, and it’s up here in the corner.

And it’s missing just to this degree: You show me a problem, very shortly later, I’ll show you the answer. Thank you very much.

[[Category:Lectures]]
[[Category:Lectures SHSBC]]
[[Category:Lectures 1963]]