View source for Basics of Auditing (SHSBC 610829)

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

'''Date:''' 29 August 1961

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

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This is the 29th of August 1961, and I’m often gagging about using notes in lectures. But this particular lecture I have some notes for, believe it or not. That’s because this is a very, very tricky subject.

And I’m going to talk to you about something that is going to make you more auditing gains in less time as an auditor and make us more Clears than any other single subject we have opened up on in recent times. Now, this is quite an important lecture. This lecture should be a basic on HPA and an absolute necessity at the level of HCS/BScn.

And if a DScn is missing these points, we ought to revoke his thetan. But this is quite important, this material; not to give it an overstress of some kind or another, because I don’t think it could be overstressed. Now, you see, earlier this summer I was confronted with the fact that with all the materials in hand as to how to clear people, very few Clears were being made.

Interesting, huh? But every time we have borne down on the subject of auditing and accuracy of auditing, all of a sudden we have people finding their goals and terminals on, you see, finding goals and terminals on pcs and we have more Clears being made. This is very direct.

We have had this experience here. We are all, I’m sure, agreed that it was a matter of the rudiments were out. And just as soon as I said, “Well, we’ve got some kind of a games condition going here, and the rudiments are out, and you’ll find it in the first 150.” It’s proven true.

I think maybe we got, maybe, something on the order of one or two goals out of fifteen cases that are still not found since that was released just a few days ago, right? Female voice: Yes, two cases . . . Just two cases.

Female voice: . . . who are hanging. See? Interesting.

And in every case, the goal was within the first 150 and yet they had assessed for weeks and weeks and weeks after that first 150. See, they’d added it up to a thousand and all gone up and on and on and more and more goals, and longer and longer  BASICS OF AUDITING 2  assessment. And I said, “Well, go back to the first 150.

I think that’s where you found them, isn’t it?” Interesting, isn’t it? So that all the time after the first 150, certainly, goals were taken, then the rudiments were out during auditing. Obviously the rudiments were out.

The goal was buried. And as soon as the rules were put right, the goal came back in, perked up and pangity-pangity-pang, and everything was going along gorgeously. As my friend Paul said the other day, we were all off at a smart trot.

Now, here’s a point, then. Here’s a point of some interest: that by improving auditing technology and the skill of individual auditors, we then some closer to very broad clearing. It is not case difficulties that are restraining the pc now from getting Clear.

All the evidence is in, and that’s what it ads up to. All right. Therefore, the stress must be on auditor technology – the handling of technical aspects of Scientology.

Now, the better that is, the more Clears you’re going to make. We’ve got the weapons with which to make Clears. There aren’t any bugs in it.

I haven’t written up your last Prehav Scale, but you mostly have it right now. There’s no missing items of any importance that would restrain this from happening. So therefore we come back on auditor technology.

Now, I don’t want you to accept anything I am saying as accusative casewise, or anything like that. I’m simply going to give you data here and this data is very well worth having. This data was arrived at the hard way.

It’d be a withhold from you to tell you otherwise than that it was arrived at, at a hard way – on a hard line. I’ve been getting some auditing. Sessions have been going out.

We sat down and analyzed, and we have analyzed now, all the points where sessions were going out and so forth. I got a good reality on that, and Suzie got a good reality on it, and we were straightening out these points. Because, frankly, we weren’t doing it particularly to find out more about auditing; but it’s just stuff that came up and we analyzed accordingly.

And apparently what it boils down to is not auditing attitude or anything as nebulous as this. It boils down to very concrete data, which you’ll be happy to find out. Now, as an auditor, perhaps, you say, “Well, there’s so many rules of auditing, and which one of these rules of auditing should I be following, and how much memorizing of rules and all of this sort of thing should I do?” Well, basically, first and foremost, if you are worried about the rules of auditing, there is something wrong with your auditing approach.

We can count on that, then, as a stable datum; that if somebody is worried about the rules about auditing and the zigs and the zags and so forth about auditing, and terribly concerned with these things and so forth, then there’s something basically wrong. Because auditing, fundamentally, is simply this – it goes back to The Original Thesis: The auditor plus the pc is greater than the pc’s bank. And the auditor is there to direct the pc’s attention and to keep the pc in-session and to remain in control of the session and get auditing done.

BASICS OF AUDITING 3  Now, there’s... Aside from saying what auditing is – therapeutically supposed to be doing this and that, and make Clears and freeing up attention and the various theoretical and technical aspects of Scientology – when you’ve talked about auditing, you’ve said it when you have said that. Auditor plus the pc is greater than the pc’s reactive bank.

The auditor is there to direct the attention of the pc and get the pc in there and get these objects confronted and straightened out, and the unknowns off and the bank straightened out and the track straightened out, and so forth. And he winds up at the other and with a Clear. That is what it amounts to with the technical knowledge of what you do with a pc.

It all boils down to that. You are there to get auditing done. The less auditing you do which is effective auditing, the more upset your pc is going to be.

Now, let’s take the first object lesson here. The auditor sits down in the auditing chair; the pc sits down in the pc’s chair. What is the contract?

What is the understood contract as of that instant? That understood contract is a very simple contract. The pc sat down to be audited.

What does the pc understand by being audited? He basically understands it as getting on toward Clear. What he means “toward Clear,” we’re not sure a lot of the time, but even that – he senses it is there, he senses he’s got a direction to go, he senses that he can arrive at a certain destination, and he’s there to get that done.

Now, he’s not there to have ARC breaks run, present time problems handled; he’s not there to straighten out the auditing room; he’s not there to have any of these things done at all that we call rudiments. He is there to get audited toward Clear. Well, the first observation we can make, that rudiments go out to the degree that auditing doesn’t get done.

That’s a direct ratio. Rudiments go out to the degree that auditing does not get done. Now, this poses you a problem.

If you are using no session to put rudiments in, if you use up no time at all to put rudiments in, of course, you’re apparently around the bend as far as handling the pc, because the rudiments are out. you see, here’s a puzzle that we face at once. If you’re not spending any time putting the rudiments in, of course the rudiments are going to go out. But the more time you spend putting the rudiments in, the more rudiments you’ve got to put in.

Have you got that? So, somewhere here there’s an optimum amount of rudiments putting-in and it’s not very much. It’s on the order of five minutes.

You know, five minutes and the rudiments are in; the pc will bear with that, but not much more. And when it goes to a half an hour, his present time problem is actually, basically, the fundamental problem of getting auditing. Now, he’ll say the present time problem is something else, is something else, is something else, is something else; but his basic problem: is he going to get any auditing?

And after he’s had half to three-quarters of the session thrown away on a bunch of things that he didn’t care about, why, of course now, he has a new present time problem called “getting  BASICS OF AUDITING 4  auditing.” In the next session, he comes in with this new present time problem: “Am I ever going to get audited?” because he doesn’t consider any of these other things auditing. Now, that’s quite fascinating. He doesn’t consider them auditing.

So therefore, of course he’s out of session. From a pc’s viewpoint, auditing is a direct press forward, getting himself straightened out so he can get a good Goals Assessment, and finding his terminal – if he knows anything about it at all, this is what he demands – and getting auditing straight along on the road to Clear, and knowing he’s getting someplace and all of that sort of thing. This is what he really settles for.

This is by experience. They will even hang on for months, as we know now, getting assessed for goals. Even though the goals are all invalidated and everything else, they’re still interested and they’ll still go to session, don’t you see?

Even though the thing is being run completely crosswise, you see, they’ll still go to session and still be assessed. You got that? Well, they won’t be run endlessly on general processes that don’t approach them any closer to Clear.

They’ll only go for maybe seventy-five, a hundred hours, and they’ll leave the HGC, and they take a lot of persuading to get back, and they won’t want to be audited by you anymore, you know, in private practice, and so forth. What are all these things from? – from the basic present time problem of not getting auditing. So actually your main chance is simply to audit the pc.

If it comes to a question of whether to audit the pc or go through some arduous flipperoo on straightening out some kind of a super-relationship, or something – audit the pc first. See? Now, you’ve got to find out what the pc’s attention is on and what he considers auditing; and he very often considers it a chronic present time problem of some kind or another – or a long-duration problem.

And he judges everything as to whether or not he’s making progress by whether or not this problem is getting stronger, getting weaker. The hidden standard sort of thing; he’s got all that sort of thing. Well, he’ll be interested in that.

Why? – is his attention is on it. So that’s auditing. So auditing could be defined, to the pc, as anything which is handling the things his attention is fixed on.

That’s what he considers auditing. If his attention is superfixed on it and it’s being handled, he considers that auditing. And of course his attention is superfixed on goals, so you can get away with assessing practically forever.

He will stay in there being assessed longer than he will stay in there being run on oddball, bit-and-piece general processes that don’t lead toward Clear. Isn’t that fascinating? That’s an observation that I think you’ll find is quite valid.

Now, if it came to a choice as to whether or not we went about it endlessly, endlessly, endlessly running rudiments to get them in, or auditing the pc, you would always choose what  BASICS OF AUDITING 5  the pc considered auditing. You would always choose what the pc considered auditing, and let the rudiments go to hell. And the next thing you know, they’ll disappear in importance.

Remember, what you validate becomes important. You start handling too many present time problems and ARC breaks too arduously and too long and believe me, you get more ARC breaks. Why do you get more ARC breaks?

You get them simply because auditing itself is a present time problem, because he isn’t getting auditing. In his viewpoint, he is not getting auditing, he is not sure he will get auditing; therefore, his contract is violated so he is in disagreement with what is happening in the session. Do you follow that?

Now, a pc will sit there and endlessly run 1A. Why? Well, his attention is stuck on it.

His attention is stuck on all these problem points, you see? He considers it auditing as long as you are auditing in the direction of his problems – of course. So he will settle for 1A.

It’s amazing how long he will run how many versions of 1A. See? This is amazing, too.

If you were to flatten 1A, then – as we already have talked about – and gotten problems and Security Checks totally out of the road, you would find your pc would stay in-session and think he was going someplace, and of course he is going someplace. And if you were to flatten 1A, giving the rudiments a lick and a promise before you did a Goals Assessment, you’d find out your rudiments were in when you were doing the Goals Assessment. Because, you see, the pc now can confront problems.

You’ve already brought him up to the point of being able to confront the rudiments before you started fooling with the rudiments. You got the idea? Although you run rudiments every session, although you try to find out what they are, although you try to knock them out, although you do run some Havingness on the room – and you keep the rudiments in, nobody is saying just forget rudiments – but don’t consider rudiments anything like a session.

Don’t ever make the mistake that the pc will think he is getting a session when rudiments are being run. You’ll find pc after pc, when you ask him, “Do you have a present time problem?” will groan. Because he knows now that his session is going to be endlessly chewed up with the John and Mary of life, and he doesn’t consider he’s getting anyplace.

Why doesn’t he consider he’s getting anyplace? Because he knows he’s getting no place with his wife, and so forth. Well, you say, “Well, that’s a problem.” But he doesn’t consider this the general problem of his case by any means.

You have found a problem. He is worried about having to write Blitz and Company. And you say, “Well, we’ll have . . .” and you just start to make the motion toward handling this problem of having his attention on Blitz and Company and the letter he’s got to write to them, and you get “Oh, no!

My God!” You’ve heard him, huh? Well, why do you get this? He doesn’t consider Blitz and Company auditing.

He doesn’t consider Blitz and Company as any difficulty. But he does consider that not getting auditing will produce an enormous difficulty. BASICS OF AUDITING 6  The value which a pc assigns to auditing should be appreciated by you.

It is terribly highly valued – very highly valued by the pc. And this is a great oddity, because actually, psychoanalysis was never highly valued; hypnotism is not highly valued; psychiatry, they spit on. They go back for their electric shocks like wound-up dolls.

But you say, “Well, what do you think would happen to you if you didn’t have any psychiatric treatment?” “Oh, I’d probably be just the same as before. What’s the difference?” You say, “Well, would you walk across the street for psychiatric treatment?” “Hell, no.” Well, that’s an oddity in itself. See?

This is an oddity. You’re dealing with a commodity which is very highly valued and which the society has been trying to put into the field of psychotherapy, but psychotherapy is not highly valued. So what you’re doing basically is very highly valued by the pc.

So the more you don’t give him of it, the more difficulty you’re going to have with him. If there’s ever a crossroads of decision as to whether or not we’re going to endlessly get on with this, even a crude remark of this character, “Well, I see you’ve got a present time problem. Yeah, have you got a little bit of an ARC break?

All right. Well, okay. To hell with those.

We’re just going to run now . . .” And you give him the process and you go on and run it. And you’ll be amazed how often the pc will say, “Hey, you know, he’s right in there pitching.” He might grump for a minute, you know, and say, ‘Well, it’s not according to Hoyle, you know?” But you’ll just be amazed how many times that will win where the endless handling of rudiments won’t win. The endless handling of rudiments is a limiting factor in auditing, because it produces eventually the ARC break of obtaining no auditing.

So the decision is, audit. You’ll have less ARC breaks the more auditing you do. And of course, if your auditing is flawless from a standpoint of Model Session, and if some of these other things I’m bringing up are also present smoothly in the session, your days of having ARC breaky pcs end as soon as you recognize that point – that he is there to be audited, and his basic contract is the basic contract of being audited.

And the more you audit him on the things his attention is fixedly on – I mean fixedly on, on the long track basis, you see – and the more attention you give to that and the more you handle that, the more he knows he’s being audited, the less ARC breaks you’re going to get. It’s amazing what a pc will put up with to get auditing, quite amazing what they will put up with to get auditing. Why make them put up with anything, but at the same time go on and audit.

So the best, hottest message 1 can give you on that exact subject is audit! Don’t fool with it; audit! See?

BASICS OF AUDITING 7  What a pc responds to best: “Oh, well. All right. You’re here to be audited.

Good enough. Fine. Now, we’re going to go over the rudiments.

All right.” And you rip on down the rudiments line. And you notice there’s a bad flick of some kind or another. You say, “What’s that?” He says, “Well, that’s so-and-so.” You say, “Good,” and you ask it again. “All right.

That’s good, good. It’s still flicking. Is it still worrying you?

Anything else about it worrying you?” “Well, so-and-so’s worrying me.” You say, “All right. Good.” Get the next one, bang! the next one, bang! You say, “All right.

Now, now let’s get down to business. Now, this is the process I’m going to run, and here it is.” And he says, “Well, I don’t much care for that process.” (I’ll take this up in a moment.) And you say, “I don’t care.” you say, “I care for it. Do it.” you know, that kind of an aspect.

And he says, “But so-and-so technically, and it said in bulletin so-and-so...” You say, “Well, all right. I read it, too. Do it.” you find the guy doesn’t go into apathy.

Quite the contrary – he goes spark, spark, spark, spark, spark, and you’ll get good gains. All right. There are some more aspects in that.

But that whole first section of what I want to talk to you about is: for God’s sakes, just audit the pc. Don’t fool with it, just audit. You see?

Just go right in there and saw it up and chew it up and push his attention around and get him through to the other end and . . . Well, get 1A all straight and handle whatever you want to handle. I don’t care what you handle, because this would hold, possibly, if 1A ever became ancient history this would still hold.

Run the pc toward Clear and have minimal chop behind your back, you see, minimal unkind thoughts, minimal ARC breaks, minimal difficulties in sessions. These all just tend to disappear. Because he might say, “Well, that auditor of mine is a cross son of a bitch, but, jeez, he sure audits!” You know, this would be kind of the idea. you got the idea? “He sure audits.” It might be terribly profane, the opinion, you see? ‘Well, you don’t do right in a session, she’s a real bitch, that auditor, you know?” You know, that kind of an aspect and that kind of conversation. “But I’d rather have her audit me than anybody else I know.” you know, that kind of song.

The HGC – as soon as that became prevalent in an HGC, and as soon as HGC auditors… You just try and change the auditor on the pc. They had this auditor last year or something like that; and well, they just don’t want to be processed unless they can be  BASICS OF AUDITING 8  processed by the same auditor, because they’re very sure that auditor can audit. But it’s not can audit, although they always use can audit.

The secret is will audit. And the auditor who kind of won’t audit, they don’t want. That’s the secret of “being wanted by” as an auditor – is how much you get down to business and how much business you get done.

All right. Now let’s take up something a little more esoteric here under the heading of “escape” as a philosophy. This is a very complicated subject.

This is the orientation of an auditor – has to do with his orientation. This is the only point where an auditor’s orientation can seriously get in his road. As long as he follows Scientology and goes on auditing and using the principles of Scientology, this one can get in his road.

All those levels of the Prehav Scale that have to do with escape – that is: Abandon, Leave, anything like that – if these are in any way, shape or form “hot” or if they’re not thoroughly flat on an auditor, you’ll get two aspects. You’ll get the auditor letting the pc escape. He wants the pc to escape, because this is the auditor’s modus operandi of handling situations.

And this is as wrongheaded as you could get, because the only way a pc will ever get Clear is by turning around and fighting down the devils that pursue him. And if the auditor’s philosophy is “the only thing the pc should be permitted to do is escape,” the auditor will never control the session. And this is why an auditor doesn’t control a session when the auditor doesn’t control a session.

He thinks he’s being good. He thinks he’s being nice to the pc. Now, let’s go about this on a little wider basis.

And oddly enough, under that same heading comes case reality necessary in an auditor. And we’ve got the same heading. It’s “escape” as a philosophy.

Case reality is necessary in an auditor. Exactly what is this that we are looking at when we find that a Scientologist has never seen or gone through an engram? When we find that a Scientologist has never collided with a ridge?

When a Scientologist is not aware of the thenness of incidents? If the Scientologist is not aware of those things, he will continue to make mistakes and no amount of training will overcome it. Knowing this – just knowing this – will overcome it, because it all of a sudden sees lots of light.

Lights begin to flash in all directions. If a Scientologist has never been through an engram, if a Scientologist has never been stuck on the track, if a Scientologist has never seen ridges or any of the other mental phenomena, it is because his basic philosophy in life is escape. Now, there is all the wisdom there is in it.

I will go ahead and tell you all about it, but there is all the wisdom there is in it. Of course, if he’s never seen an engram, what is he trying to do? He’s trying to escape from engrams.

So he escapes so hard from engrams that he sees a little flick of a picture and he’s away, man, he’s away. He’s off like a rocket. He’s off like the Russian never went.

See, he’s over the hills and past Arcturus. There’s a little twitch of a somatic and pshew! he’s gone. Why?

BASICS OF AUDITING 9  His basic philosophy is that if you can run fast enough you never get bit. So, of course, he doesn’t have what we call case reality, because of course he’s running from his case. His basic philosophy is, “The best way to handle a case is get out of it!” So that’s all he ever does with the pc – takes the pc out of his case.

So therefore a pc will never be in-session with him. Oh, lights begin to dawn, huh? It is pure kindness.

This auditor will find the pc getting interiorized a little bit and he’ll know that this is the wrong thing to do. So he will take the pc’s attention out of session. Some of them do it very flagrantly and some of them do it very pleasantly.

It is nevertheless true. one of the ways of doing it is change the process. Another way of doing it is Q and A. Pc says, “I don’t want to be here.” The auditor says, “Of course, you dear fellow, you do not want to be there.

Let’s be somewhere else at once.” Pc shows the slightest inkling of digging into it in the bank and the auditor pulls him out. The auditor is selling him freedom. At what cost?

The cost of never getting Clear. But the auditor sells him freedom; and it’s a good thing. It’s kindly meant.

This same auditor well might have a penchant-doesn’t necessarily-but might have a penchant for going around opening all the canary bird cages in the world. But then, by George, never follows up the fact that the canary birds are inevitably eaten by cats or killed by hawks, promptly and at once. Don’t you see?

The auditor is saying, “Escape, escape, escape.” The auditor is actually saying, “Don’t confront it, don’t confront it, don’t confront it, don’t confront it, don’t confront it.” The processes he’s running are saying, “Confront it, confront it, confront it,” don’t you see? But the auditor, with his auditing technology, prevents the pc from confronting it, and so therefore runs rudiments forever, does other things, doesn’t quite let the pc go into session, (quote) “makes mistakes,” (quote) “changes the process often;’ (quote) “ends the session irregularly”- does something odd. And all of these oddities could be said to be backed up by this one philosophy, the philosophy of escape.

The kind thing to do is to let him out. The guy is settling down on the track in some fashion or another and he’s going out of present time-oh! let’s not let him do that, because that’s the wrong thing to do. Now, this is compounded-this is a complex subject, which is why I said this - earlier in the lecture it was.

The auditor who has no case reality, of course, dramatizes this point. You cannot see engrams while you’re running from them. Let’s take a model engram that this person is in, and let’s take some of the things that this person has happen to them.

The model engram he is in-he’s being whipped. The Jesuit fathers, or something of the sort, have decided to really lay it into him on the backtrack, you see, at some time or another; and they’ve got him tied to a post, and he’s being whipped. So  BASICS OF AUDITING 10  he cannot leave that post, so he fixes his attention on a section of sky and says, “It isn’t happening.” That’s escape, isn’t it?

So what does he find when he gets into that engram? He finds an invisibility called “sky.” He doesn’t find any whiplashes; he doesn’t find any post. He doesn’t find anything; he finds a section of sky.

That is the final mechanism: escape. Now, he escapes mentally. He doesn’t just run away, he escapes mentally.

Don’t you see? All right. So that worked; he didn’t feel them after that.

So it was a workable philosophy, perfectly workable philosophy. Unconsciousness is also a workable philosophy. So he’s being tortured on the rack- ah! - he fools them all.

He goes unconscious; he can’t feel it anymore. We don’t have, then, an engram of the rack, we have a period of unconsciousness. You see that?

He’s actually in the incident, but he’s only unconscious. All right. Now, let’s go a little bit further here, and let’s take a look at this-a little bit further-and we’ll find this person has odd somatics and odd difficulties that he cannot account for.

And if he never sees any engrams or sees them very rarely, of course he can’t account for these difficulties at all. In Book One, it says they’re all contained in pictures, and he doesn’t see any pictures; and yet here are the somatics, and there’s no pictures. Of course there’s no pictures, because his attention on any given point is the solution “escape.” Escape mentally, escape mentally by forgetting it, escape mentally by looking at nothing, escape mentally by saying it isn’t there, you know?

The various mechanisms of not-is. Yet the somatics have not been not-ised. And this person, every time he (quote) “contacted an engram” actually contacted a nothingness, and then was left with a nagging somatic or a sensation that he could not then account for and which seemed to be very mysterious to him.

And therefore didn’t connect any of these sensations much with his bank, don’t you see? And knows he feels uncomfortable, but can’t really connect it with any given engram. Got it?

All right. Let’s take an actual case in point. Person does in running on the track, contact an engram.

And there it is, all 3-D and so forth – people standing on the bank throwing a spear. All right. Spear comes across the river, goes through the pc’s ribs, and the pc has a hell of a somatic and that is the end of the picture.

This person, now auditing, says, “Well, why doesn’t this pc handle incidents like that? Well, nothing to it. Spear went through you and of course phsst – momentary, you know?

Flat and gone and you’re out of it, and that’s it. I don’t get this idea of being stuck on the track,” you see. “Hooh! Nobody should be stuck on the track.

Why doesn’t this pc just flick his attention out, you know? Well, I’ll fix this pc up so he can flick his attention out. I’ll pull this pc’s attention out.” Don’t you see?

This is the best mechanism. You ask this same person (this is an actual case), you say, “Do you ever have a somatic in that area you just indicated that the spear went through during that incident?” “Oh, yes, all the time.”  BASICS OF AUDITING 11  “Well, does it have anything to do with that spear?” (Person didn’t say “all the time”; person said, “Yes, very occasionally, but . . .”) “Does it have anything to do with the spear?” “No, uh . . . Well uh – or does it?” “Well, do you have a lot of odds and ends of somatics of this particular character?” “Oh, yes.

I do.” “Are they connected with pictures?” “No.” (Actual conversation that took place.) “But I thought all that went out with Dianetics, and in Scientology you no longer had to confront all of these things.” Well, here immediately, of course, you have the tag end of every engram that the person has contacted is just stuck, stuck, stuck, and where are they all? They’re all in PT. So what is PT to this person?

PT is certainly just PT, but actually it’s a jam of engrams; so therefore the pc should be in PT all the time – because the auditor is. The auditor is never out of PT, so therefore the pc is never out of PT. And this auditor will not actually guide the pc’s attention through an engram, because there’s no reality on it.

The best thing to do is to yank the attention out of the engram. So the auditor will not control the pc’s attention because escape is the better philosophy. Don’t you see why this is?

So there’s the reality. Now, there’s a direct cure for this. And if you wanted to get anybody who didn’t have (quote) “any reality on the past track, no reality on engrams, no reality on this and that” as far as these things are concerned, and was thinking people are being unreasonable who go into engrams and get stuck and whose attention are not in present time – this person, then, is not operating on a reality.

They can’t quite tell what the pc is doing, don’t you see? So they’re always worried about what the pc is doing. Because they themselves have never been in this identical situation, they get a little bit impatient with the pc, don’t you see?

So they’re not actually doing a guided tour of a bank. They’re doing a guided yank of a bank. And if you were to run this process on that unreal case – it’s just one process, a one- shot process – you would suddenly find that they would have an enormous shift of reality on what we’ve been talking about all these years.

And the process is: “What unknown might you be trying to escape from?” That’s the process. And at first glance, that would become a very brutal process, of course, because it’ll just start unstacking this. And one of the first things this pc would see, who had this brilliant reality on the people on the bank who threw the spear, would be to find out the water was cold.

And the pc, I happen to know, has cold feet all the time. Of course, there’s that piece of that engram, see? So, that piece of that engram would be contacted.

And you just keep contacting these pieces of the engram, because of course you’re running the reverse mechanism now, not the philosophy of escape. But the only philosophy that works in Scientology is “confront it.”  BASICS OF AUDITING 12  It isn’t that you have to erase it; it is only that you have to become familiar with it. All you have to establish is familiarity with the bank; you don’t have to establish an erasure of the whole bank.

It would take endless time to do that. And all of a sudden this auditor who’s been having trouble guiding a pc’s attention will not have that trouble anymore. They will recognize at once, “Oooh-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho, I’ve been trying to get the pc – oh, I see.

My – my – pardon my red face! Oh boy, is this what it’s like down here!” You know? Now, what happens is every time this auditor yanks the pc’s attention, the auditor is not aware of the fact that he has got the pc in one time stratum, called engram time, and is pulling the pc’s attention to present time, and locks the incident the pc was in, in present time by an attention shift.

Any kind of a mechanism, whether you call it faulty technology, changing the process, changing one’s mind, doing something of this sort – whatever you want to define it or whatever rationale went with it – this is actually occurring. And of course, it is painful to the pc to have this happen; so the pc, of course, protests and this is a basic difficulty with ARC breaks. You get a basic difficulty at once, because the pc was there and now he’s here, only he’s not here and he’s not there and where the hell is he?

It isn’t that a pc should be regressed on the track and totally impressed by this past- time incident to a total point of overwhelm, but the pc is in another time stratum, usually, when he’s being audited, even on a conceptual or permissive process. Pc appears to be sitting in present time, and the pc is not in present time. So, of course, the pc can neither be talked to nor handled as a person would be handled in present time.

It is not a social tea party – auditing isn’t. The pc is not there, really; the pc is in another time stratum. And if you practice the philosophy of escape on somebody who doesn’t have to escape but is trying to do the bank, the auditor’s goal is different than the pc’s goal.

And the pc is saying, “Well, I’m confronting it and I’m getting familiar with it, and here it all is.” And the auditor is saying, “Come away, come away, come away, it’s dangerous.” Reactively, this is what is happening. So the auditor is saying, “Come away,” and the pc is saying, “Let’s stay here,” and between the two, you get ARC breaks and arguments. You would inevitably, wouldn’t you?

And as soon as the auditor takes a guided tour of this thing called an engram bank, you see, with the spears whizzing from both banks of the river – this particular person has probably never noticed that not only were there spears coming from one side of the river, but that probably there were whole volleys of arrows coming, too. Those somatics haven’t appeared yet. you got the idea? There’s other things missing in all this, and of course it all looks very mysterious.

But the person gets down there and they’re trying to escape from it – that would be their first action – spear goes through them, they say, “Escape.” Boom! “Let’s go.”  BASICS OF AUDITING 13  Well, it’s one of the basic thetan mechanisms. It’s why he never as-ises much track. It’s why he doesn’t become familiar with his bank.

So look how prevalent this thing is – very prevalent. And a thetan would be in a bad way if, when you killed his body he couldn’t exteriorize, see? So it’s an absolute survival mechanism for a thetan.

So, you see, it’s not a bad thing to have escape philosophy or to be able to escape. But let me tell you, when a person is compulsively escaping, he of course never escapes. And when you get a pc that you’re getting to escape all the time, of course he never escapes, and his case just winds up in a little black ball. you got the idea?

So, therefore, we can say that escape as a philosophy very much gets in the road of auditing when the auditor has this as a total philosophy, you see? And we can say also, then, that a case reality is very necessary in the auditor. But of course, what do we mean by “case reality”?

Well, “case reality” is willing to stay there and take a look, you see, instead of running out on the incident when it comes up. These two things, then, are under the same heading and they are the same subject. A person who doesn’t have a reality on the bank has consistently escaped from the bank; and then that person, of course, does odd things in auditing.

And we say, “Well, that person is a bad auditor.” “That person is not so good,” or “That person doesn’t get results,” or something like that. Well, we can say that much more succinctly and much more kindly now, much more effectively. We can simply say, “Well, this auditor has escape as a philosophy and hasn’t got much reality on the bank.

So therefore, when he audits a pc he doesn’t know what the pc’s doing.” And when the auditor doesn’t know what the pc’s doing and can’t fathom what the pc’s doing; and the auditor thinks that the pc shouldn’t be looking at all that stuff, too, of course we don’t get any clearing. Because clearing depends on a familiarity with the bank. I’m not telling you, you all stick on the track; I’m merely saying that it’s necessary to have a familiarity of what can happen.

You know, there you are in the middle of the river and stuff is coming from all directions; and you’re confronting it and you got it and you’ve got a sensation of fear or something, or confusion, already that’s going with it, and all of a sudden the auditor says, “Well, that’s the end of that process. Let’s run something else.” God, you don’t know whether you’re on the track or in present time or something like that. You’ve been betrayed, in other words.

But you could educate this auditor endlessly – just endlessly – without producing a single change in that philosophy, unless you hit the philosophy itself. Got it? You cannot educate an auditor who has that as a philosophy into giving what you would consider a smooth session of keeping the pc in-session and his attention on his bank.

Do you follow that? BASICS OF AUDITING 14  So that’s exactly where that button sits, and that’s exactly what button you press. And when an auditor makes consistent mistakes; when an auditor yanks the pc’s attention; when the auditor is doing a lot of Q-and-Aing – there’s more about Qing-and-Aing – but when he does a lot of this, a lot of shift, we just assume that – that the auditor has a total philosophy and fixation of escape, and therefore is letting the pc escape.

And he isn’t being vicious, he isn’t trying to cut the pc to pieces. He knows what’s best for the pc: “Get out of there, man!” Not even “Get rid of it,” just “Get out of there.” Pc starts to look a little bit indrawn, go into session, the auditor will pull him out every time. You probably couldn’t even list the number of mechanisms auditors use to effect this.

So there’s just no sense in putting up counter-laws to each one of these mechanisms that’s used, is there? There’s no sense in doing that, because we have the basic mechanism for it. All right.

Now, let’s go a little bit further here. Here’s another subject on this: Responsibility for the session. In The Original Thesis, way, way back when, you had the rules, the laws, the basic laws of auditor plus pc greater than the pc’s bank.

Pc less than pc’s bank. Obvious, a pc must be less than a pc’s bank or the pc would never be troubled by the bank, don’t you see? So that’s why self-auditing doesn’t work, by the way – the pc is less than his own bank.

Also, he never can get in-session, because a bank won’t go in-session. You can audit valences and that sort of thing. Oh, don’t mistake me; I mean, there’s. . .

You can’t say that self-auditing does not produce a result. It does produce a result but the result is quite minor. And actually all self-auditing is, is remedying havingness on auditing.

Self-auditing always, always, always begins on scarcity of auditing. A pc would always rather be audited than self-audited. But they could get to a point finally where auditing is so scarce...

You know, people have been (quote) “auditing them” (unquote) without auditing them, and auditing thereby gets scarce. So, pc starts auditing and can come up to a point where the scarcity becomes so great that they begin to assume virtues, like the fox who loses his tail, you see? The great virtues of having no tail, the great virtues of self-auditing.

Simply the lack of havingness of auditing can result to the fact where self-auditing can become quite a virtue. And a person can say, occasionally, once in a while, rarely, you’ll have somebody say, “Well, I want to do it myself” – as far as self-auditing is concerned – “I really want to make the grade myself.” And you look back over the history of the case and you’ll find out they didn’t feel that way a year before. They just didn’t have auditing.

So you can actually have somebody sitting there, and an “auditor” (quote, unquote) there, and the person getting no auditing, don’t you see? And this denial of auditing, denial of auditing – by being yanked off the track, by endless rudiments, by never getting anything on the road, by never really getting in there and pitching, you see, one way or the other, the  BASICS OF AUDITING 15  person is being denied auditing. And the person will be denied auditing to a point where they self-audit.

That’s what self-auditing is. You find a pc self-auditing, you can be sure that the pc has such a scarcity of auditing that your auditing is having considerable difficulty arriving. You don’t have to do anything about it except just reestablish the pc’s confidence in the fact that he is being audited and will be audited.

That’s basically what you do, is just audit, and the pc will come out of this. But it requires auditing. But the pc less than the pc’s bank – otherwise the bank would never be giving him any trouble.

Yes, I know he’s creating the bank, on how many vias and that sort of thing. But he’s created a Frankenstein monster – and it’s about to eat up Frankenstein, you see – called the bank. And Frankenstein’s monster inevitably will eat up Frankenstein.

He’s created a bank. He’s created all these various valences and that sort of thing. He’s denied full responsibility for having done these things, and so on.

And the result is that he’s having difficulties with a bank. This is not self-auditing now, I’m just talking about pcs in general. I’m talking about Homo sap; I’m talking about the farmer that’s walking down the road; and I’m talking about this guy and that guy and the other fellow, you see?

And these chaps are all in this sort of a state of less than the bank. When we say a man is aberrated, we say he’s less than the bank. When we say somebody is psychotic, of course this person is not just less than the bank; this person is nonextant and is the bank. you see, he’s done a...

There’s a total overwhelm, and that’s all psychosis is: total overwhelm by own bank. Now, the gradients of cases is the degree to which a person is overwhelmed by the bank. Now, recognizing this, that you’re auditing somebody who is a bit overwhelmed by his own bank, and recognizing these laws in Original Thesis (simple and elementary as they are; they are, nevertheless, they’re very sweeping in their truth in auditing), we get this kind of a condition here.

The auditor has got to be cooperating and running the pc’s bank, you see, and running the pc at the bank in order to get auditing done, inevitably. When the auditor withdraws from doing this, he collapses the pc’s bank on him. you see? When an auditor is auditing and suddenly stops auditing – like, you know, a shift of attention, spills the water glass, tips over the ashtray, something of this sort – he, of course, has to some degree withdrawn his control of the pc’s bank, and you get a minor collapse.

But there is a way to get a major one. And this has never been articulated before in Scientology and it’s terribly important. Whenever you take a direction from a pc and follow it, you collapse the pc’s bank on him.

These poor guys. I know two or three fellows who will only let some weary, very weak auditor audit them, you see, and give the auditor all sorts of directions as to how to audit them. And of course this is just a self-audit.

They don’t make much progress. They make some, but they don’t make very much progress. They’re usually in  BASICS OF AUDITING 16  misery.

They’ve set up a booby-trap situation here, because of course the auditor is taking directions from the bank and following them. That’s part of it. And the other part of it is, is the auditor has subtracted himself from the basic equation of auditor plus pc is greater than the bank. you see?

So, when the auditor takes the pc’s directions, then it looks to the pc at once as though only the pc is confronting the bank; and he loses the illusion of the auditor’s confronting the bank, and of course the bank then collapses on the pc. Do you follow this carefully? It’s one of these simple arithmetical propositions.

It’s one plus one is greater than one and a half; but one is not greater than one and a half. And what you’ve done is subtract a one from the one plus one, and of course you get immediately the one and a half greater than the one. You’ve only got one left, you see?

You haven’t got a pc sitting in the pc’s chair; you’ve got an auditor sitting in the pc’s chair. So the pc is now both the auditor and the pc, only it doesn’t add any ones. So instantly and immediately you, of course, get the bank greater than pc, and so therefore the pc is promptly and instantly overwhelmed.

Pc says, “I think you really ought to ask about that present time problem another time.” Oh yes, pcs can do anything they like and they will say things like this, you see, in a perfectly good situation. They have sort of taken over-because of anxiety for auditing and other things-they’ve taken over the idea of auditing and they’re afraid some auditing is not going to occur And so they sort of merge up and something in the bank is this and that and they sort of say, “Well, I think you ought to ask about that one more, because I think there is one. And the auditor does ask that one more.

And instantly, pshew! the bank collapses promptly and instantly on the pc. Got an ARC break. You never notice it, because it takes an hour or so to swell up, but the pc thereafter is running on auto.

All you’ve got to do is take one direction from a PC and you collapse his bank on him. You must understand exactly how that occurs, you see? Here’s the PC and the auditor and the pc’s bank.

And the auditor plus the pc are greater than the bank. Now of course, the moment that the PC becomes the auditor, even to just any tiny degree, you no longer have the equation of auditor plus pc. You have the equation of PC plus pc-being-auditor, which of course still adds up only to one person-the PC.

And of course this is not greater than the bank. So you get a collapse of the bank. And I do mean a collapse of the bank.

You can make the bank go pshew!-just hit him in the face. Blango! Now, just look this over, because it’s the first time we’ve ever examined this mechanism, in spite of the fact the laws are some of the oldest laws we have.

I think the only two laws earlier than that is: Survival is the dynamic principle of existence; and the purpose of  BASICS OF AUDITING 17  the reactive mind, purpose of the analytical mind-those are the only laws that are earlier than these laws-I mean, in terms of time and development. So, let’s take another example. Auditor says, “Do you feel all right now, or do you feel too tired to go on?” And the PC says, “I feel too tired to go on.” And the auditor says, ‘All right.

We won’t go on.” At that exact instant, you’ve collapsed the pc’s bank on him. I mean, it isn’t a simple thing, that the Pc is suddenly dismayed or goes out of session or something like this. An actual mechanical fact happens- whether the PC perceives it or not-the bank collapses on the pc.

Of course, because the bank is being held out, basically, and the PC is being held in position and the bank is being held in position only by the equation of auditor plus PC. The presence of the auditor drops and the auditor ceases-that’s what we mean by “ceases to take responsibility for the session.” Now, that’s an esoteric statement; it hasn’t any mechanics with it that give you any explanation. But that is the primary method by which the auditor does not take responsibility for the session.

And that is the exact mechanism by which an auditor gets into trouble-the exact mechanism. It’s down there to a hairline. All the auditor has got to say is, “Is it all right with you if we run this an hour and a half?” And the pc says, “No, I don’t think so.” And the auditor says, “Well, all right.

Then we won’t.” Well, on the surface of it, it is the socially acceptable, kindest thing you can do. The poor fellow feels tired, so we just won’t go on with it. And at that moment, we just picked up the stew pot and hit him in the face with it.

See, we collapsed the bank on him. The bank will collapse-can be counted on collapsing – instantly that this occurs. He’ll get a reaction from the bank, bang!

That means actually, probably, that the Model Session should be rephrased on a discovery of this magnitude. But worry about it until you see it in an HCOB, because it may be and it may not be. Because basically the Model Session is written up just to get the illusion of courtesy.

I say, “Well, is it all right if we end this session now?” And the pc says, “No, it’s not all right. I’m having a great deal of trouble here and I’m struggling around,” and so forth. I say, “Well, all right.

I’ve made a mistake, and we’re now going to end the session.” It’s always all right with the pc. I decided to end the session. If I decide anything else now merely because the pc told me something else, I’ve had it, because the bank just will go splat!

BASICS OF AUDITING 18  Now, if I don’t want this pc to be butchered up, I certainly better stick by my own ideas of what I should be doing, no matter how wrongheaded or inopportune or upsetting those ideas may appear to be. So you just have to take fate in your own two fists on such a situation. You say, “Is it all right if I end this session now?” It’s courtesy.

And the pc says, “Well, yes, it’s all right. Except I’m pretty far back on the track.” All this is, is a comment to the effect that “Well, you knucklehead, you didn’t ask me where I was on the track before you sprung this other one.” Don’t you see? Well, if you now say, “Well, all right.

We will run it ten minutes longer in order to get you up to present time,” you’ve had it at once! You’ll never get him to present time. why won’t you ever get him to present time? Because you just collapsed the whole track on him, that’s why!

And then you probably didn’t do anything to reassume the control of the session. Do you see what happens? So you just never, never, never, never do what the pc says. you just never do what the pc says.

I don’t care how logical it is; I don’t care how wrong you are. If you’ve given him a totally wrong, upside-down, incorrect instruction, you can do something more wrong than that. You know, English doesn’t permit the deepening of the word wrong.

You can’t be “wronger,” apparently, according to English. But boy, I’m telling you, you can be wronger. It doesn’t matter how idiotic the auditing direction was, how noncompliable the auditing direction was – it just doesn’t matter.

If the pc now gives you some advice concerning it and you take that advice, you are promptly and at once wronger. You have just lost the control of the session, but that isn’t what’s important. Mechanically, you’ve collapsed the pc’s bank on him.

You just must never do it! That’s just something an auditor must never do. He says, “All right if I end this session now?” And the pc says, “No, it isn’t all right.

I’m stuck down the track.” And the auditor says, “All right. I’ll run the process for ten minutes longer.” Well, this is the kindest, most sensible, decent thing you can do, isn’t it? And it winds you up every time in the soup.

Then you probably will spend the next five hours trying to end that session. Why? Because you are no longer auditing the session; the pc is. you haven’t got an auditor plus pc greater than the pc’s bank, so the pc of course can’t come up to present time, so he just struggles.

See? The mechanics are just dead against it. That’s the way the reactive mind is, not the way I think it is.

So that is a primary method of getting into trouble. A primary method is to violate that original equation. Auditor plus pc must both be there in order to be greater than pc’s bank,  BASICS OF AUDITING 19  and when the pc says to the auditor, “Advice, advice,” and the auditor takes it, of course then at once, immediately, instantly, then, the pc becomes quasily the auditor He is running his own bank on a via, he’s no longer greater than the bank; it only takes a split second to happen- he’s in the soup.

Got the idea? Well, it isn’t that pcs mustn’t give advice to auditors. By all means as a pc give the auditor all the advice in the world.

You understand? Give him all the advice in the world. If he takes any part of it, he’s a lousy auditor.

That’s all. Because he at once passes over control of the session. It’s something tantamount to walking out in front of the troops and handing your sword over, see?

I mean, it’s something of this order of magnitude. Promptly and at once you’ve lost the war and that is it. There’s going to be reparations charged and the United States will be sending three-quarters of the national income over to rehabilitate the country.

But if the United States doesn’t hear about it, then nobody is going to rehabilitate anything. Now, there’s the whole situation in controlling a session. And there’s the primary difficulty an auditor runs into.

Once more, it looks like pure kindness and it turns out to be total viciousness. All right. Let’s take up one more point here.

You can also put a pc at responsibility for the session by a bunch of “pcs ought to;’ and individual considerations about what ought to be going on. This is a little more esoteric, but becomes less so when I say something like this (this also comes under escape as a philosophy): “Well, he ought to be able to get out of that very easily.” See, the auditor says, “Well, he couldn’t be in any great trouble. He ought to be able to get out of that very easily.” Well, you see, what did he do?

Even if he did it silently to himself, he says immediately, “Well, the PC is responsible for the condition he’s in.” And you will find the one plus one greater than the bank also operates. That promptly operates, and the bank will cease to behave. It’s quite esoteric; it’s quite odd.

You say, “Well, pc shouldn’t be in that much trouble. A man of that age shouldn’t have all of those difficulties with women. After all, after you’ve lived for forty or fifty years, you certainly should know something about women.” You know, something like this.

You have some kind of a little unkind thought of this character. But it’s an “ought to be,” you see? And you have just shifted responsibility for the session over to the pc, just as neatly as though you’d suddenly crowned him with laurel wreaths.

You see how you’d do that? The Pc “ought to;’ the pc “shouldn’t ought to.” Now, here’s a whole class of things, you see? “The pc shouldn’t be screaming at me.” Well, that would be the best way in the world to bring the scream up four more decibels. Don’t you see?

That would operate at once to put this PC at cause. So, of course, immediately eliminates and deletes the auditor plus Pc over bank. It eliminates the auditor and of course, collapses the bank on the pc.

You get how this would work, you see? The pc “ought to;’ “shouldn’t ought to.”  BASICS OF AUDITING 20  “Well, men are always like that.” That isn’t so bad, that type of consideration-it just denotes an inability to do something about it, so an apathetic acceptance of a condition which one is confronting. Well, this merely lowers control over the pc’s bank slightly; it’s not a very great thing.

Well, that doesn’t amount to a great deal. It’s when you really drop it out; when you really say, “Well, the pc should be” or “the pc shouldn’t be,” or something of this sort – Dang! You see, you’ve gone into the same old violation of this original rule.

No, a pc is doing what the pc is doing. And the pc ought to be doing what the pc is doing. You see?

And the pc oughtn’t to be doing the things the pc isn’t doing. And the pc does what the pc does. you get the idea? And considerations as to what the pc should be doing up on top of this, of course, interrupt responsibility for making the pc do something.

You get the idea? Now, of course, so long as your intentions are totally wrapped up in what the pc ought to be doing with inspecting pictures and so forth; you, of course, are making this occur! You are doing this, you see, so it isn’t an “ought to be” or a “shouldn’t be” or something like this, see?

The pc is going up and down the track and around the bank. Well, he ought to be doing these things, you see? And you know that he should be doing these things and he knows that he should be doing these things.

He should be following the auditing command and you know that he should be following the auditing command, and all that sort of thing. I’m not talking about that class of thing. I’m talking about another class entirely; that instead of making the pc do or become what you want the pc to do or become, you add this sneak one into it, you see?

The pc “ought to,” you know. And you sort of said faintly to yourself, “Well, I’m not doing anything about it, and he shouldn’t really be upset about that ARC break. That’s really nonsense.

He shouldn’t be upset about it. He shouldn’t be – oh well, it’s a. . . Well, he shouldn’t have that present time problem, not now.

We’ve only got two hours here and, God, he shouldn’t have this present time problem. No, no. Heavens on earth.” No, the pc has got what he’s got, don’t you see?

You just look at what the pc’s got, and then you can go ahead and you and the pc can make him “got” something else, don’t you see, with greatest of ease. But if the pc “ought to” without any further action on your part, of course what do you wind up with? You wind up with a collapsed bank.

Is that clear to you? That is not as serious or as general as the other. Now, Q and A – Q and A.

Every time the pc says something you follow it, is the most prevalent method of Q and A. You say, “Well, how’s your mother? How’s that about your mother now?” And “Well, it’s not my mother now, it’s my father.” “Well, how about your father?”  BASICS OF AUDITING 21  “Well, it’s not my father so much, it’s . . .

My father’s okay, but it’s actually my Aunt Bessie.” “Oh, well. Well, all right. Now, how does that apply to your Aunt Bessie?” And by the time you’ve done this of course, you of course are doing two things.

You’re letting the pc spot what you ought to be auditing – you’ve dropped responsibility then – and you of course permitted him to escape from the original questions and you haven’t followed it through. You’re permitting the pc to escape. And the pc will go along a whole sequence and series of escapes.

And if you follow along this sequence of escapes without ever once saying, “Whoa, now, pc! I asked you about Pop. I want to know about Pop and I’m not interested in Aunt Bessie.

Now, Pop!” You can say it as rough as you want to. It won’t affect the pc, because he knows confoundedly well that’s what he ought to be doing. And he says, “Oh, oh, oh, oh, I – ha-ha-ha-ha.

Fly cops are on my trail, and I didn’t get a chance to duck up that alley. Well, I guess I just better not. So that and I better come back here and take a look at Pop.

Okay. Well now, what did you want to know about Father?” You say, “Well, all right. I just wanted to know how that was about Father?” “All right.

Well, it’s all right about Father.” “Now, what else about this? Yeah, well, how is it all right about Father?” “Oh, kill the son of a bitch as quick as look at him, that’s how all right it is about Father,” and so forth, see. “Oh,” you say, “well, all right Now, you got a picture there or something” “Well, sure 1 got a picture there! What else do you think I have?” “You’ve had a picture there?” “Oh, yes, of course I’ve had a picture there!” “Well, all right.

Now, what don’t you know about it?” “Well, I don’t know this and I don’t know that and I don’t know that and don’t know that and don’t know that and don’t know that, there, there, there, and . . .” “What else don’t you know about it?” “Well, I don’t know so-and-so.” “All right. That’s fine. Now, you still got a picture there of your father?” “No.” “All right.

Now, how about your father?” “Well, all right. Take him or leave him.” “Okay. All right.

Now, we’ll go on to something else.” Got the idea? BASICS OF AUDITING 22  The pc never wants to handle what you want him to handle. You can just put it down – he never wants to handle what you want him to handle.

I don’t know a pc yet that will handle exactly what you want him to handle! When a pc sits there smiling sweetly, I get very, very suspicious. I say, “What are you looking at?” He said, “The same incident you told me to look at.” “Yeah, well, what incident was that?” “Oh, this incident about picking these flowers out here in the field.” And I say, “No, we had an incident there about burning down a house.

What happened to that?” “Oh, you caught me. Oh, well, all right. Burning down a house,” and so forth.

And somewhat grumpily they’ll go back in and look at it. But they don’t like you when you let them escape, because they know way down deep that it’s wrong. They know way down deep that’s wrong.

They know the road out is the way through, and the road out is not a bounce. The guy has been running away for two hundred trillion years; and he’s looking for somebody to stand and hold the ground and say, “All right. Let’s pick up these devils one by one and fight them down.” He will say, “That is the most horrifying, shuddering thought that anybody has ever pushed in my direction, but I know damn well he’s speaking sooth.” Now, it actually hasn’t worked for the last two hundred trillion years – running away.

So, he says, “Well, here’s a picture.” And you say, “Good. Got any other pictures?” “(Ah, these guys are going to let me run away.) All right. Yeah, I got some other pictures.” “Good, you got any other pictures in there?” “Oh, yes, I’ve got some other pictures in there.” “Oh, yeah.

Well, how’s your father?” “All right, fine.” “And how’s your mother?” “Okay. Fine. Oh, yes,” and so forth.

And the fellow says, “Well, it wasn’t my mother I was thinking about, actually. It was my Aunt Bessie.” “Oh, well, how’s your Aunt Bessie?”  BASICS OF AUDITING 23  And the pc right at that time says to himself, way down deep someplace, ‘That’s all we’re going to do now is escape, and I know that it isn’t the road out.” So he has ARC breaks because he knows he’s not getting auditing. It’s a very funny thing.

Not overwhelming a pc, not pounding him down. Pc says, “I have to go to the bathroom.” You say, “You damn well sit there and don’t go to the bathroom,” and so forth. And the pc says, “Well, I have to go to the bathroom, it’s a present time problem,” and so forth.

And you say, “Well, I’m not going to let you go to the bathroom till 4:30. That’s the end of session and that’s the end of it,” and so forth. Well, you keep this kind of thing up forever and eventually the pc gets an overwhelm.

He’s pounded into a position. See, all of this stuff is moderated with reason, don’t you see? That isn’t any kind of a session direction.

Pc says he has to go to the bathroom. All right, say, “Go to the bathroom.” All right. Now go into session.

You’ll find he’s slightly out when he comes back. So put him into session again; put him into session again with a crunch. But five minutes later he says, “I have to go to the bathroom.” You say, “I’ve heard that before.

We’re now going on with the session.” He’ll be back in processing again. Invalidation is the basic overwhelm. The pc says, “Oh, it was my father doing all this.” And the auditor says, “It couldn’t possibly have been your father.” You get the idea?

Now, there’s where overwhelm comes from: invalidation. Pc says, “I think it’s an automobile mechanic. I think it is.” “Couldn’t possibly be an automobile mechanic,” you know?

You could run a whole case, possibly, by saying, “Who’s been invalidated?” See? What’s death? Death is invalidation – invalidation of a terminal.

What’s sickness? Invalidation of a terminal. What’s punishment?

Invalidation of a terminal. I mean, all things add up more or less to the invalidation of a terminal, don’t they? And as a result, why, you’ve got a button there that you’ve got to lay off of, which is just invalidation.

Pc says, “It’s made out of green soup.” You say, “All right. Solid green soup.” As far as he’s concerned, that’s the way it is. It’s just that’s the way it is.

BASICS OF AUDITING 24  And this sort of a matter-of-fact situation is – in a few minutes the pc says, “I made a mistake. It is not green soup.” The wrong thing to do is to tell him, ‘Why, I could have told you that earlier.” You’re taking him on a tour of a bank. You’re getting him familiar with various things by various mechanisms.

He’ll wind up in the other end not afraid. Now, what basically then, would best answer up these conditions? Certainly not escape.

Don’t let him escape. Make him face it up. You’re always safe.

Pc starts using rudiments for escape – omit them. Always the better choice is to audit – always the better choice. If the pc gives you directions as to what you ought to be doing in the session, give him the cheeriest acknowledgment he ever received and go right on doing what you were doing.

Don’t ever shift. Now is the time not to shift, because you’ve run into some kind of a valence or a machine which tells you “Change, change, change, change” and you start going change, change, change with the pc, it’s a Q and A, and of course you’re going to get no place at the other end. Now, these are very important considerations in auditing.

And if an auditor were to do these things, pay attention to them and handle those things, he actually could be quite ignorant of some other facets of technology and he’d still win. He’d be right in there pitching. No, there is no substitute whatsoever for having a reality on the bank.

There is no substitute for it at all, because now you know what’s happening to the pc, you know where his attention is, you know where he’s going, you know what he’s doing. And you don’t make the mistake of believing he’s in present time and this is all a social chitchat that we’re indulging in. We’ve known auditors who have thought auditing was that, and they always, of course, wound up with pcs with no gain and tremendous ARC breaks and rudiments out all the time and that sort of thing, because the pc’s attention was never in session.

The basics of auditing, however, require that the pc feel able to talk to the auditor, so you don’t necessarily shut the pc off about things like this or directions like this. you let the pc tell you. But it’s a great oddity that when the pc has told you that the process is wrong and that he’s having difficulty answering it – it would be a great oddity if, when you acknowledge this, and you say, “All right. I’m sorry, but that’s the process we cleared, and here is the next auditing command.” And the pc will say, “Oh, hell,” then he’ll go on and audit it.

And you’ll wind up, oddly enough, without any much of an ARC break. But you say, “Well, now let’s see; let’s just shift the process. He says he can’t answer this, so let’s change the wording of the process.” And of course, don’t be amazed that for the remainder of the session, and maybe for the next couple of sessions, you get absolutely no change of case.

Why? There’s no auditor there. Why?

Because the pc did the auditing. BASICS OF AUDITING 25  So these various considerations are right there amongst the fundamentals, and they’re things to pay a great deal of attention to. And if a pc is moving through a bank you should have some idea that people can get stuck on the track.

And you’ll get an idea of “other timeness” than here and that things can happen, and that somatics and so forth are directly connected with pictures (which they are) and that sort of thing. There’s no substitute for that sort of thing. And in training auditors, one of the things you should always ask an auditor is, “Well, do you have any reality on an engram?

Do you know what an engram is? You ever seen one? You ever had a somatic out of one?” Not necessarily “Have you ever had sonic?” or something like this, but “Have you ever seen one of these engrams?” and so forth. “Well, have you ever had a moment there when you were on the track when you did not quite know what was happening?” “Oh yes.

Yes, yes, I have. Yeah, ooh-ooh, yeah, ooh, well, sure, yeah. I was running this one about elephants and these elephants were walking all over me.

Goddamn it. And I don’t think it ever got flattened. Feel an elephant’s footprint on my chest right now.” Ah, this is a safe auditor Why?

He’s not running a big philosophy of “escape, escape, escape is the road out,” don’t you see? If you asked this auditor, you say, “Well now, have you had any reality on the track?” “Well, I’ve read about it in Dianetics: Modern Science of Mental Health.” “Well, have you ever run into an incident? Have you ever run into an engram?” “No.

No, I know they exist, intellectually. I have good intellectual reality on them. Ron wouldn’t lie to me about that.” No matter how kind this auditor appears, this auditor is not safe as an auditor Why?

Because this auditor practices escape. That is the only reason why the auditor has never seen an engram, you see? So if they’ve practiced the escape from the bank, they have practiced the escape in auditing, and they will yank pcs out of session.

Okay? These various considerations are very pertinent to training, to auditing, to understanding; and I give them to you at a time when they’re easily remediable. There is no difficulty with these things.

I’m not citing you any 120-foot board fence that you have to climb over with your fingernails. That process which I gave you is the most revealing process to somebody who has no reality on the track. That is most revealing.

They say, “Ooh, wow,” you know? “This is what I’ve been pulling people out of And it was a good thing I did, too!” Okay. Well, possibly many interpretations could be made of this particular lecture. But just remember that it, too, just means exactly what it says, which is do the auditing, get the show on the road, get the most auditing done in the least time that you can-your pcs will be very happy with you and they won’t ARC break, either.

BASICS OF AUDITING 26  And you’ll be amazed how seldom you have to put the rudiment in. When you come into session, you bang yourself down in a chair, you move the pc’s chair slightly. You tell him, “Sit there.

Hold the cans. All right. We are now going to start a session.

Start of session. Good. Now, process we left unflat yesterday was so-and-so and so-and-so.

The first auditing command is.. “-bang! Pc will say (pant!) ... He’ll say, “But wait a minute.

I’m not even in- session. You haven’t run any rudiments. You haven’t done any this or tha-” “The first auditing command is. . “-bang! “Answer it, answer it, answer it.

Answer it!” The pc says, “Well, let’s see. What is it again?” “You heard it. Answer it.” “N-ohhh-uh...

Yep, what unknown stomach. What unknown stomach.” You say, “Good. What unknown stomach don’t you know nothing about?” The pc answers the auditing question.

Chops back at you maybe a little bit here and there-says, “Boy, this is rough, man. You’re rough, rough, rough, you know? Do you realize I’m stuck all over the track here; I got everything all messed up; I don’t know whether I’m going or coming.

And you just keep pouring these auditing commands at me.” You say, “Good. Here’s the next one. Pc, at the end of twenty-five hours - he may or may not tell you anything about it-goes around and tells the D of P or another student or somebody like this, “My God, that person certainly gets a lot of auditing done!

We’ve certainly had a lot of auditing done. Yes sir, that person really will audit.” And the whole aspect of the thing changes. Now, I’m not recommending that you let the rudiments be out; I’m not recommending these various things.

I’m just giving you the frame of mind in which sessions run well, and they do run well when they do that. When the pc says, “I think I ought to be running something else,” you say, “You probably should be. But right now we’re running so-and-so.” Pc is all ARC breaky about not running something else: “But my last auditor. . .

But my last auditor was running a five-way bracket on Mother, and it was never flattened. And I just keep telling you this, that it was never flattened.” You say, “Well, all right.” And at this point you might think to yourself, ‘Well, maybe I ought to ask what part of it isn’t flattened. What was the auditor’s name?” Something of the sort.

And, man, you are handling a twelve-inch stick of inch-thick dynamite with the fuse lighted. This is a booby trap; don’t fall for it. You say, “Well, good.

Good.” Even cheer him up. Say, “Well, I hope it gets flattened someday.”  BASICS OF AUDITING 27  I think you’ll find that this is the winning card. And if you look this over and you follow some part of this and you get an understanding of this, why, I think you will get some fantastic auditing gains, and your days of loses will simply be in the long-distant past.

Okay? Thank you. Audience: Thank you.

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