View source for Communication, Overts and Responsibility (SHSBC 640616)

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

'''Date:''' 16 June 1964

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

----

← [[Lecture_Index_SHSBC|Back to Series]]

How are you today? Audience: Fine, thank you, etc. Good.

This is the what? Audience: The 16th. The 16th of June in these stirring times.

June 16, AD 14, Saint Hill Special Briefing Course. Well, looks like we’ve got lots of people here; we’ll be getting rid of them very shortly. Going out in all directions.

I probably ought to start giving you some lectures of “Son, as you go forth into the world…” “Men are not evil, they’re just nutty. All is not good that glitters.” You know, that sort of thing. But in these high and stirring times, it is very easy to forget the fellow who is out there slugging in at Level III, trying to get a result in an HGC or private practice on somebody who is mainly concerned with the fact that every now and then he has goose bumps, you know.

And this type of approach we’re liable to forget, because it is still with us and frankly there is nothing you can do for that fellow in terms of GPMs or anything like this. You just got to get down and do a ground-level job of auditing. And it’s a funny thing, but people don’t realize how far that ground-level type auditing carries somebody.

It’s quite remarkable. I’ve – ran into somebody’s pc who was round the grounds here some little time ago and this was the height and level of his worries. It seemed like they only had auditing on the weekends and it really wasn’t quite enough auditing to take care of all the problems he was having with his wife.

And if he – he thought maybe if they could just have auditing a little faster or a little bit more, then he would have a chance maybe to catch up with his problems with his wife. This was his zone and horizon. This was as far as life extended.

And during a session, toward the end of a session, he could suddenly begin to get an insight into the fact that there was something could happen to him that was better than had been happening in life, you see. And he’d just about grasped this insight and then he would go home and have some more trouble with his wife, don’t you see. And this was the sort of a treadmill he was on.

COMMUNICATION, 2  OVERTS AND RESPONSIBILITY It’s a hard thing for a person who has been in processing and has been processed for quite a while, to look directly and straight into the teeth of this factor, that individuals are so wrapped up and involved with their immediate environment that they have no time to think of themselves or case gain or anything like that. It’s just an effort to control their immediate envi- ronment. And they’re in some fabulous contest with the immediate environment.

And if you could remember this as an auditor, and if you can process at this level when you are handling such people, you will have remarkable – remarkable success. Only thing I’m trying to tell you here is that the individual – that the individual that you process that isn’t going to OT – he’s just going to a sigh of relief see, I mean, that’s about the highest level of gain which he could attain to – this fellow is in contest with his environ- ment. It doesn’t sound like much, don’t you see?

It doesn’t sound like any more than their problems and cases sound like, don’t you see? But nevertheless it is the key, the direct and immediate key, to the case. Now, what’s his environment?

Well, this is your job as an auditor to find out. That’s your first job. What is this bloke’s environment?

Now, we will just take off from this point: The individual is in contest with his envi- ronment. We’ll just take off from that point. Now, that’s a very true observation.

Particularly, if we qualify that observation just a little bit further and we say that a contest is not necessar- ily a battle of fisticuffs. There are various ways to react to the environment. You can react to the environment by going into catatonic schizophrenia, complete immobility.

And yet, do you know that that is a method of handling the environment? If you get down to rock bottom on this thing, any- thing your pc is doing at these lower levels is an effort to handle the environment. It is an ef- fort to do that.

Once umpty-skillion years ago I got swatted, and sat there very, very immobile, being right. I went on being right for quite a little while. See, by permitting myself to be immobi- lized, it made the other fellow wrong.

It didn’t – wasn’t really doing anything to him, taking no action, absolutely no forward thrust of any kind whatsoever, no outward motion, no out- ward flow of any kind, not even a thought of an outward flow and yet that was the method of handling the environment. So the way we qualify this is… The method is not necessarily smart. And right down to the lowest rung of the ladder – to the lowest rung of the ladder, this individual is still in contest with his environment, is still reacting toward his environment and is still seeking to handle his environment.

Those things are quite true. That’s true of any case, see. A thetan never gives up.

COMMUNICATION, 3  OVERTS AND RESPONSIBILITY Now, these methods are not clever. They are very often downright stupid. And the frailty of these methods is so great they’re – you see, they’re just solutions of one kind or another – and the frailty is so great that you can very easily unsettle the solution.

You see, it isn’t a good method to begin with. And just by circulating a little mental energy around it, the slightest peek underneath the edge of the rug pulls the rug out. See, it’s not hard to unsettle one of these things because they’re not smart.

See, it isn’t a clever method to begin with. All right, so I got swatted, see? Give you an idea.

All right, I got swatted, you know, good – good blast, see. So I sit there immobilized, you see, being right, see. And this made the other fellow wrong but he’d left, see.

Now, if anybody – now if anybody – if anybody had come along and had said to me at that particular time, “Well, just how does this straighten this situation up?” I possibly would have said, “Well uh – mmmm – heh, it doesn’t.” And that would have been the end of that, see? Do you see? Very easy to unsettle these things.

Now, oddly enough the more irrational – the more irrational the solution or the han- dling of the situation, the more easily it is unsettled. You can unstabilize it as a solution in direct ratio to its uselessness as a solution. Now, how in the name of common sense alienists and the witch doctor and the other blokes up and down the track have never run into this as a rule, I don’t know – I don’t know, it makes me ask some very searching questions.

Did they want anybody to get better? It makes me ask mean questions like this, don’t you see? Because this rule here is perfectly visible.

It’s a very visible rule. You start fooling around with this very long and you will find out that the more irrational the solution, the eas- ier it is to unsettle, the harder it is to maintain. Well now, let’s give you an example out of life.

Let’s say that this fellow has a solu- tion of keeping the hind wheels of his car off the road as a method of safe driving. That’s a good irrational solution, see – good and irrational, see. He wants to drive safely so he’s going to keep the hind wheels of his car off the road.

Well man, look at what he’s got to do to put this solution into action, see. He’s either got to run along behind it – if it’s a mini Morris or something – and hold it off the road, you see; or he’s got to get a wrecking truck to follow him with the hind wheels pulled up, don’t you see; or he’s got to hire a helicopter, see; or he’s got to put on some kid’s roller skates on a platform with a building jack on top of them, you know. This thing is – this thing is crazy, see?

Well, look at the number of frailties in any solution that he gets there, see. You get an irrational solution, it is very difficult to maintain. So the helicopter pilot has a cold, you see, and can’t come that day, don’t you see?

Any one of these points – because we’ve added more points to the solution, so therefore, we have added more points of frailty to the solution and it is harder and harder to maintain. COMMUNICATION, 4  OVERTS AND RESPONSIBILITY So the rule is: The more irrational a solution is, the harder it is to maintain. And this would not be – this would not be legitimate as a comment unless it were borne out in actual practice and application.

And it is borne out in actual practice and application. The way a madman works at staying mad is absolutely fabulous. He sweats over it, man.

He’s in there twenty-four hours a day keeping himself good and mad, see. It’s marvel- ous. He works at it.

He’ll once in a while catch himself out being slightly sane about something and you’ll just see him grab for it and put it all back in the madness range, see, clank! You can observe this in action. Now, that’s – let’s take a psychosis – using a dirty word, the slight – slighter manifestation of it, a neurosis, they’re very hard to maintain, it’s irrational.

And the only requisite to unsettle it is of course communication. If you’re trying to pull a pole out from underneath a skylight to close the skylight, you had better have an ade- quate means of grasping the pole to give it a pull. In other words, there has got to be contact here of some kind or another.

Probably one of the reasons why they were incapable of observing this – they’re mad themselves, of course – one of the reasons why the observation was never made may have been that they got all involved in trying to make the first contact – trying to get a communica- tion through or in, in order to begin an unsettling process. And you would very easily have so much trouble with this one point, you’d just have so much trouble with this one point of try- ing to communicate on this subject or about this thing, that you might then entirely forget the fact that, if you could, unsettling the neurosis or psychosis or loopiness or worries of the in- dividual was dead simple. See, you could have so much trouble trying to talk to Joe that you’d totally lose grasp of the simplicity of what was wrong with Joe, see.

So you’d skip – you’d skip that, and you’d put all of your – all of your time and energy here on this basis of trying to contact Joe, see? Now, you could become so frantic, you see, given the fact that, “Well, he thinks there’s alligators in the corners of the room,” don’t you see. And you know that if you could just ask him what this was – what this solved or something like this, it’d all fall down like a house of cards and the alligators would fall out of the corners of the room and that would be the end of that, see.

Given that, see. The reason you don’t observe this is because you seldom get to such a person with a communication in order to disabuse him of this idea, see, and pull the props out from under- neath this idea. So you could get so frantic over here trying to communicate to Joe, you could get so driven through your own skull, that you become frantic on the subject of communica- tion.

COMMUNICATION, 5  OVERTS AND RESPONSIBILITY And psychotherapy would then park on this basis of communication. And the frantic- ness of trying to communicate would bring about more and more brutal means of communica- tion. Until you get modern psychiatry.

See? They take an operation developed by Adolf Hitler, no less, and his very expert medi- cos of the Third Reich – the prefrontal lobotomy which was developed to make slaves – make farm slaves. Take undesirable nationalities who were not the super race, you know – he did eight hundred thousand of them, interesting round figure, had himself a lot of farm slave labor.

Now, how this ever got to be a psychotherapy I myself am absolutely gasping about and I pursued this one day and I asked very searching questions on how it did. And it turns out that there was a blacksmith’s assistant in Bavaria. This always happens in Bavaria, if you know there are ghosts or werewolves, they always put it somewhere over there.

And old American weekly, if you want to go back a half a century and look at its files everything al- ways happened in that corner of the world. Well, this one happened there too. And it seems like this blacksmith’s assistant was standing by the forge when the forge blew up.

Now, the fellow was a kind of an idiot, and the forge blew up and a crowbar about an inch in diameter and very long was driven through his skull from one temple to the other temple and com- pletely severed his prefrontal lobes. Now, you can go on and wait for the rest of the story just like I did. The – only rest of the story is he didn’t die.

He didn’t suddenly become sane. This is not part of the clinical re- cord, see? He didn’t become sane, he didn’t regain speech, he didn’t become president, nothing happened here that was astonishing and marvelous.

And that’s the end of the clinical history. And you can actually delve deep and endlessly trying to find the rest of this and how this brought about a reasoning whereby if you give somebody a prefrontal lobotomy he turns sane. And you know, that’s your assumption as to why they’re giving a prefrontal lobotomy.

That’s not the psychiatric assumption. That’s an interesting view, isn’t it? A legislature will assume this in passing laws.

And everybody assumes this, we usu- ally say, “Well” immediately, “Oh, so.” “So,” you say to yourself, writing scripts, see, like mad, “Oh, I understand. He was a – he was an idiot and the crowbar went through his skull and immediately he was totally sane and an acceptable member of the society and that’s why the…” You’re writing script, boy, that’s no part of the – that’s no part of the clinical record at all. It isn’t even inferred in the clinical record.

So, as far as they’ve gotten is just this rationale: That if you cut somebody’s prefrontal lobes up, he doesn’t die right then. You think I’m jok- ing, but it’s true. That’s where the rationale goes.

I’m just giving you – I’m not berating psy- chiatry. Heh, who has to? The point here is just this: that that is an anxiety of communication the like of which nobody ever thought of.

See, these boys have been totally educated into believing to reach the brain. They don’t know what they’re talking to, that’s how far back they’ve gotten, see. So  COMMUNICATION, 6  OVERTS AND RESPONSIBILITY they got to reach this fellow, so that means his brain or his thinkingness, you see?

And their irrationality is simply and totally evolved around the one point of “We weren’t able to contact him,” so we get into this total frenzy of contact. “We finally reached him, huh? We finally made a result on this blankety-blank-blank-blank, see? It’s against the law to shoot him, see, but we finally recorded from A to his brain B, and we produced a result.

He hasn’t said any- thing for days, huh-huh-huh!” You see, it’s as insane a solution as insanity. But now, this is just not for the pleasure of berating psychiatry. This is solely and to- tally to this point.

I want to bring about to you and give – give you this clarity of under- standing of this one point: That regardless of the frailty of the neurosis or psychosis, the quicksand on which it is built will very fast go away – regardless of that. The effort to com- municate to the person can assume such baffling forms and shapes, can give you so many bar- riers, so many insurmountable barriers that you never do get around to studying what’s wrong with the pc. You never do get around to there, see.

You’re so involved with the outworks of the castle that you never even find out what the shape of the donjon keep is. You don’t get within arrowshot of the walls actually. You’re out there with the chevaux-de-frise, and you never get near it.

Your communication effort is where you wind up. So just remember that to do anything for an individual requires, as its first and primary action, communication to that individual and communication from that individual. Don’t then, because that is true, immediately assume that communication to the individual solves all.

This is merely a step. It is the necessary step. And you will find, where Scientology breaks down in the lower levels, that it breaks down in the vicinity of effort to communicate to the being.

That’s where it breaks down. And that’s why you’ll get some weird and fantastic notions of what you should do for or with somebody. That’s the zone and area where those appear.

An inability to communicate to the individual, an inability to get the individual to communicate, results in a frenzy of effort. Then we get the Auditor’s Code being broken, we get the pc being overwhelmed, we get various actions that are not really capable of bringing about any result at all. Now, we get these things in almost a standard practice, you see.

You – in other words, the whole subject could break down right at that point. Because that’s where every psychotherapy breaks down. So there’s no reason why a study such as Scientology – even though it is not a psychotherapy – there is no reason why it shouldn’t break down there, too.

And in the individual practitioner, there’s where it breaks down. And that’s what you’re not able to quite get across to the HAS, the HQS, the early HCA. That’s what’s hard to get across.

That’s why you have to keep telling them, “Acknowledge, acknowledge, ac- knowledge. He said something, acknowledge.” That’s why you sweat it out keeping those parts of the comm cycle in. That’s why you work on it.

Because when that disappears then  COMMUNICATION, 7  OVERTS AND RESPONSIBILITY your ability to do anything about the case vanishes. See, so that one, that one is the point of concentration. Now, we know the formulas of communication.

We know how communication can be built up. We know about gradient scales, and we know other things in this particular line. You should know those things for what they are.

They’re something you’re working with in order to do something with or about the individual. And you must continuously and repeatedly fol- low that particular channel and work along that particular channel, see. And you mustn’t spoil that channel.

Because the moment the channel is spoiled – such as, well, you don’t give an- other auditing command. You’ve gotten one accepted and answered, maybe you even ac- knowledged it but then you didn’t give the next auditing command, see? See.

Yet these are really goofy errors, see. But yet they happen, yet they happen. Because the individual himself in an effort to do something for other people has long since thrown in the sponge a few times on the subject of communication. “Well, you can’t talk to him any- way.

Well, there’s no reasoning with him. Well, there’s a…” Round, round, round, round, round, see? So that actually doing something for an individual at the lower levels is dependent upon what degree of communication can be entered upon with the individual.

And if you want to know what makes a level, that’s what makes a level, see. It’s just the gradient scale of what communication can be entered upon with the individual. And the individual who can’t have much communication entered in upon, of course would be in a lower level of activity; he’d be down there in Grade 0.

He hadn’t been talked to yet, see? That’s in actual fact what makes grades, what makes pcs, what’s the difference of cases and that sort of thing. Now, once you get this first series of shafts through very nicely, and you’re reaching the individual now, the individual is responding to you, ah, well these other things are a house of cards.

First thing you’ve got to take up is the goofiest solutions he has for his environment. That’s about the first thing you’ve got to find. And then we get to what you’re trying to do for the individual.

What you’re trying to do for the individual is alleviate his contest with his environ- ment. Now that he is in contest with his environment, of course, barriers communication from his environment. And you’ll find he will eventually solve the fact that he is being communi- cated to by his environment by moving you out of the environment as his auditor.

That is to say you are no longer part of his normal environment. And he solves this very, very well. He says, “Well, there are human beings and there are auditors.

And I won’t let a human being talk to me, but I will let an auditor talk to me.” See? He starts solving it at a rather early stage in his processing. This is why any group that has ever been able to help anybody or do anything for them at all eventually assumes an ethereal, a spiritual height of some kind or another and takes  COMMUNICATION, 8  OVERTS AND RESPONSIBILITY on a special status in the society, see.

Because the individual is in contest with his environ- ment and if the group communicating to him were part of the environment he’d feel like he was being driven around the bend. So he just solves the whole problem by moving the group up into a very esoteric level. See, very simple.

So that you take on – to some of your pcs you take on almost holy proportions. They’ll credit you with all kinds of various facilities and abilities and all of this sort of thing. What they’re doing is solving this one point.

They can’t bear to communicate with the envi- ronment and you’re communicating with them, so therefore you can’t possibly be part of the environment and then they prove it to themselves by saying these other things, you see. It’s interesting that the Melbourne inquiry tracks along this way rather consistently, and so forth. And the people who are attacking the organization the hardest are actually hang- ing around the neck of the organization a rather supernatural atmosphere… I told Mary Sue here some months ago, the one thing that’s going to come out of the Melbourne activity, we will be unnatural beings, we will be supernatural beings of some kind.

And yes, it’s gone fur- ther and further. Of course, as they run up overts against us – knowing very well they shouldn’t be running up overts of this particular character, see – why, they’re having to re- move us further and further out of the real environment, you see. So the other day a very seri- ous discussion took place in the hah! court down there on the subject of… You see, it isn’t even a trial, it’s just a bunch of guys shooting their face off and – at vast expense.

They – they took it up, as they were – now you’d say, “Well, would a Clear be – could you see through a Clear?” you know. You’d say, “Well, people could understand a discussion along that line.” But no, no. The discussion had gone much further than that, much further than that.

It’s, “Why did I ap- pear sometimes tall and sometimes short and sometimes broad and sometimes thin?” And, “Why did Clears in general appear this way?” It was no longer a question that they appeared this way, you see. That was not the case in point. It was wondering why they did.

Marvel- ous! Therefore, if you can reach or talk to people when other people can’t, you immedi- ately will assume some status with the person which is quite different than from any other status he has any knowledge of. He will put you into some status or another which is quite pedestaled and quite out of this world, you might say.

Because it proves itself. He’s in contest with his environment. He’s having trouble with his environment all over the place, and he’s not having trouble with you, so therefore, you can’t be part of the environment.

I mean that’s all there is to that, see? He solves the problem very nicely. This is the common solution to that.

Well, it isn’t even worth doing anything about. That’s the way the thing rides, you see? I would never pan- der to it or aid and abet it particularly.

But at the same time if your communication line de-  COMMUNICATION, 9  OVERTS AND RESPONSIBILITY pends upon his ideas of you, I would not sit around now and use the fact that I could talk to him to clarify his opinion of me. See, I would use the time and ability to talk to him to pull the props out from underneath a few of these flimsy structures that are called neuroses or oddball ideas or something, see. That’s the time I would use.

I wouldn’t get into an endless discussion with him about whether I were sometimes large or sometimes small, or had come to him in the middle of the night and given him an auditing command. I wouldn’t – wouldn’t bother. I just would not discuss it.

I’d say, “Well, all right. That’s fine.” I wouldn’t even jump in and say, “Do you think other people come to you in the mid- dle of the night.” I’d understand what he was trying to communicate to me. He’s trying to communicate to me that he was in communication with me, was not in communication with other people, so therefore I wasn’t other people.

That was all he was trying to communicate to me, see. I wouldn’t use this as a symptom at all, or wouldn’t even rack it up as part of his symptoms, see? I’d get very much more interested in those things he was in contest with.

And that’s what you’ve got to handle. That’s what you’ve got to handle. What is he in contest with that’s real to him?

Now, get your communication line in and then handle that. Now, just getting your communication line in is more of a trick than any field of mental healing, psychotherapy, spiri- tualism or religion has ever been able to uniformly accomplish. You see that?

They can’t uni- formly accomplish that. Some priest walking around in circles talking about these heretics, and so forth, is simply saying, “There are some Joes around that I cant get next to. I can’t commu- nicate to them,” see.

His failures of communication are what weigh him down. Now, we’ve pretty well solved this business of the communication to the individual. Given half a chance at all we can communicate to the individual, see.

There are various… Well, we’ve developed many methods which we no longer talk about anymore. There’s communica- tion by mimicry. By knowing the communication formula in full, you can, of course, introduce the various factors of the communication formula into your communication with the individ- ual.

So your communication with the individual is not dependent on merely saying something to the individual, see. You ever want to put a kid in a good humor, and so forth – he accidentally wiggles his nose, wiggle your nose and he bobs his head and you bob your head. And the next thing you know, why he’s in a high old time, man.

He’s in a marvelous state. You haven’t said a word. It’s mimicry, just nothing but mimicry all the way through.

Well, you can even talk to a raving madman along this particular subject line. So you’re using various parts of the communication formula as they exist in The Crea- tion of Human Ability and in other places in the early works. Taking those parts apart and un- derstanding what those parts consist of.

And then realizing that you can use any of those parts or any variation of those parts to bring about a communication with the individual. And  COMMUNICATION, 10  OVERTS AND RESPONSIBILITY then by using any – gradient scales – by using any communication which you’ve established with the individual to increase your ability to communicate with the individual, see – more and more communication, better and better, see – you can then get around to doing something for the individual. Now, what fools you is that by your communicating with the individual, he gets bet- ter.

There’s some part of the environment that he’s in communication with and this will of course make him better. And so this other thing has this other liability. That by doing a com- munication with the individual, and by building a communication, getting the individual into better communication only with you, you see, you could of course increase his ability to han- dle his environment and you can bring about a better state of mind in the individual.

And the reason that’s a fooler is you’re still back there in the first step. And it’s almost as much a mis- take to stop there, don’t you see, or to use that, as it would be to go into a frantic state trying to communicate with the individual. In other words, say – be frantic about trying to communicate with the individual, “So, I finally communicated with him, I hit him with a club,” see? “See, I finally… I communicated with him, I hit him, see.” Well, it’s just as – just almost as much a mistake as just saying, “Well, I’ve done something for him because I now communicated with him.” Don’t you see, you’re now using communication as the end-all.

It’s just a channel. And what the fooler there is, he really is better, see. He’s really a bit better off, don’t you see?

And he is so much better off when he is with you or around you that you eventually won’t believe he’s still daffy around other people. And therefore, you become very hard to convince along this particular line. And you lay in a big problem for yourself here.

You can no longer see that this fellow is showing any nuttiness and you say, “Well, we’ve cured his odd- ball battinesses, and so forth.” Yes. He doesn’t exhibit any of them around you, just around other people as before, see. You can get into an odd ridge here.

Well, just recognize where you sit with relationship to the case and it solves the thing, see. Now, here you are, communicating to this individual, see, you’ve got past the frantic point and you built it up and that sort of thing, and you’re not going to make the mistake of saying, “I’ve cured him because I can now talk to him.” You’ve got yourself merely set up to do something for the case. That’s as far as you’ve gone.

You haven’t gone any further than that. And don’t kid yourself that you have or you will have some singular losses in process- ing. You will have some very singular losses in processing.

Sooner or later you will get into some kind of a state of beautiful comfort with regard to some bird and he goes home and slaughters the whole family, see? You say, “But what happened? You – he seemed so calm!” Yeah, around you.

In the first place because you could communicate it to him, you weren’t part of the environment, therefore, you were some special type of being. You were in an eso-  COMMUNICATION, 11  OVERTS AND RESPONSIBILITY teric relationship to him. You probably didn’t use this on a command basis or an overwhelm.

And he wasn’t any saner elsewhere than he ever had been. But in your vicinity he manifested sanity. See, a sort of a Christ manifestation occurs, you know?

You appear; all is calm, see. Well, don’t forget, after you disappear all goes to pieces, too, see. That can also happen.

So that will happen to you and you will say, “What in the name of common sense occurred?” You end the fellow’s intensive and he was just fine at the end of the intensive and a week later, you see, he shoots a cop or something. Something wild occurred here. Well, just recognize your relationship to the individual is special, and communication with the individual is not an end-all of processing.

That is simply the beginning. That is all. There is nothing more to that.

So, all right. Given communication with the individual, now what? Now what?

We say, “Oh well, that was – that’s been such a big psychotherapy problem, ‘How do you communicate to the individual?’ and that sort of thing. ‘You mean you do something with it? I mean – you mean, you go some – from here’?” Yeah, there’s where you start, see. Now, you start to do some- thing for the individual, see.

Now, this requires this next piece of understanding, which I’ve already given you, that the individual is in contest with his environment and he is using very, very nutty solutions indeed with regard to his environment, and he is using these – he is using these nutty solutions for just one particular and continuous reason: because he’s in contest with his environment and therefore his environment looks very, very dangerous to him. And that’s the whole lot. Well, how do you enter on upon all this?

How do you start this? How does this occur? How do you undermine all of these nutty solutions and let them fall down?

How do you go about it? Well, of course you can’t go about it at all if you don’t have a communication channel. You must have a communication channel.

Now go to work. You’ve got to find out now the dangerous things that are in his environment, the menaceful things that are in his environment, and the solutions he’s using to combat and contest these various things. And in actual fact, you shouldn’t really use to too great a degree problems and solu- tions.

This is something that’s very okay for the very, very beginning of the case. But you go too long along this direction, you’re going to get in trouble because these are GPMs – prob- lems-solutions. Solutions are GPMs.

That’s a part of the reactive bank. And that’s restimula- ble. All of that is restimulable.

And as a sober fact, that isn’t the basis of his activities with his environment at all. It’s not problems and his solutions to them. It’s what he does to solve them that keeps him obsessed and pinned in against them.

COMMUNICATION, 12  OVERTS AND RESPONSIBILITY You must immediately and directly assume, of course, that if an individual has a prob- lem, he’s going to do something about it. How do you know that you haven’t gotten a present time problem of a pc? Now, that’s the oldest one you know of.

That’s the oldest one you know of. How do you know that you haven’t done anything for the pc? Present time prob- lem, you’re processing a present time problem, how do you know right away that you haven’t handled a present time problem?

There’s one there – just like that. He’s going to do something about it. The pc who leans back suddenly in the session and says, “All right.

Well, I understand that now, I really haven’t got a problem with the dentist. I’m going to so-and-so, and so-and- so and see Dr. Jones.

All right. I have that all settled now and we can go on with…” Oh, bull! You haven’t settled the present time problem.

You haven’t handled the present time problem. And that’s something auditors have known for years and years and years and years and years. That’s an old, old, old one, see.

If you haven’t handled the PTP at the beginning of session, the pc is going to do, something about it. And that’s the biggest index that you have. That is the biggest index that you have: He’s going to do something about it, so there it is.

Now, the whole contest then that you are up against is to find out what is the individ- ual continuously and perpetually doing as in his environment. And it falls under the heading of O/W. It doesn’t fall under the heading of problems and solutions at all.

It’d fall under the heading of O/W. Because the more he does about this thing he’s obsessed about, the more he’s going to get stuck in it, and the more he’s going to get obsessed with it. What brings about – what brings about undue concentration upon a subject?

What brings about his absolute conviction that he has this tremendous contest with this environ- ment? What brings about this absolute conviction? It’s because he’s doing something about it all the time.

How do you unpin somebody from worrying about the United Nations? Guy goes around all the time, he’s worrying about the United Nations. You finally find out that the rea- son he wears a green hat is because the United Nations’ flag is blue or something, see, some- thing wild here.

And this is the genus of all this. Well, how come he’s so pinned in to the United Nations? Well, he must be doing something, odd as it may seem, he must be doing something to the United Nations or about the United Nations every few time intervals.

And it must be something real or actual. It might dwindle down to the level of a critical thought, don’t you see. But he’s been active in this particular direction.

And you don’t have to go into other life- times – it’s this one. The real problems exist in this lifetime. You don’t have to go very far adrift to unpin these things.

Actually, they’re so simple to unpin that it’s a wonder to me that anybody had any trouble unpinning them. They’re quite laughable. But the secret of it is O/W.

COMMUNICATION, 13  OVERTS AND RESPONSIBILITY You see, he himself is mucking up his communication with the environment because his communication is a series of overts. So therefore, he better not communicate with his envi- ronment because it’s an overt against the environment. So therefore he better have some kind of a wild solution so that he won’t have to communicate with his environment.

And it isn’t that it all comes down to communication, it just happens to be riding on the communication channel which is what broke down his communication with his environment. See? He can no longer recognize what part of his environment he’s in communication with.

He can’t tell. He doesn’t know what’s there. He put up a screen, long time ago, against tigers, and he’s never been brave enough to take the screen down since, and he’s now forgotten what’s behind it.

But he’s fighting something in that direction. He knows he has to keep fighting in that direction. He’s not sure why he has to keep fighting in that direction but he just knows he has to.

And his method of fighting in that direction may take innumerable forms, such as: never looking in that direction, never looking in that direction. Oh, let’s find a fellow whose head is swiveled over to the side and he has chronic arthritis of the neck, and he can’t look to the left. How come his neck is swiveled over this way, see?

That seems to be an odd way to carry a body. And particularly and peculiarly odd, you see, because he’s even used calcium deposits to cement in the vertebrae so that he cant turn it over. How come he’s doing this?

Now, if you’re in communication with the individual you have the possibility of find- ing out. You can bunt and punch around, you eventually will find out on various channels, and so forth, that he’s liable to commit some other solution, some other action. He’s liable to do some other overt if he looked to the left.

I would eventually recognize that somebody who was never paying any attention to the left side of anything had something there that he was doing something to or about. You may even find out it’s his wife. He’s stuck in the marriage ceremony or something, see?

That’s right! You may find some weird things. May find he’s got a ghost relative in the room, or may find all kinds of odd things about this fellow.

But he’s doing something. Now, the reason he does low-level overts on various dynamics is because he’s afraid he’ll do high-level overts on the various dynamics. And his reactive bank is so manufactured that the one thing a thetan gets in trouble doing is committing overts.

And the whole – well, I’d say, better than fifty percent of the reactive bank is tailor-made to force him to commit overts. See? So here is a being whose sanity depends actually on not committing overts, who has a reactive bank which forces him to commit overts.

And I think this is probably the basic mechanism of enslavement of the thetan. Pinning him down, trapping him and so on, is proba- bly the – I would say, not positively but probably – the grander plan of the trap. See.

You’re just continuously a – these people, just people must – every piece of their reactivity is driving  COMMUNICATION, 14  OVERTS AND RESPONSIBILITY them to commit overts. And they mustn’t – they just mustn’t. And the broader angle is, is even if he didn’t have a bank, he’d get into trouble committing overts because it violates the communication formula, and communication formula is above the reactive bank.

So this gives us two mechanisms which are above the reactive bank. One is the com- munication formula and the other is O/W. Now, that puts somebody who is early on in processing in the driver’s seat, because he’s got two things that are superior to all the aberration the pc packs.

In one fell swoop he’s got all of it. O/W is one of the frail spots of auditors. I must say that with some regret, but it is true.

It’s a frailty in a lot of auditors. Well, you’d naturally get the perpetuators of any given trap spreading around a lot of propaganda about the invasion of privacy and about the this and about how it wasn’t nice, and how people were entitled to hold their withholds and you get all kinds of wild propaganda going on, on this particular line, see? If people are crazy along this line in general, then you can be sure there’s a lot of crazy propaganda on the same subject.

So, you get men that ought to know better leaping about talking about lie detectors and all of this kind of thing. You get a whole government rising up and seizing an organization’s E-Meters, see. It’s a nuttiness, see.

If you don’t think they’re nutty, why look at the facts of the case, you see? Well, they turn them right over to the War Department and they investigate them up at Walter Reed and they’re very grateful for the thing, but they’re not even sane enough to pat us on the back, you see, and give us a couple of quick bucks for the patent rights, you see? But if they’ve seized them, you see, this makes it somehow all right.

This is craziness, see. It’s craziness at work. Where would you expect to find the most craziness?

At the door to sanity. You’d find out that the greatest amount of barricade would be along that chain, that channel, see. And if you – if you look over any group of auditors, a great many of them unfortunately will fringe by, not very positively, but they’ll sort of fringe by this invasion of privacy, and so forth.

They won’t really sit there and clean that needle. You know, they just won’t sweat at it, you know? Well, their reticence along this line comes from their fear quite naturally of breaking their communication channel with the pc.

And they’re afraid they’ll break this communication channel so therefore, they don’t press home the therapy. In other words, they preserve the communication channel but arrive at nowhere because of its preservation. So anxious to pre- serve it that they never do anything with it.

So they, well, very often – I’m not running down all auditors – I’ve just noticed in training auditors that this is a point we have to get them over. COMMUNICATION, 15  OVERTS AND RESPONSIBILITY And there are many right here that we’ve gotten over this point. But it’s a point that people hit and that they have to be gotten over.

That’s where it breaks down. They say, “All right. This individual is worry, worry, worry, worry, figure, figure, figure, think, think, think, think, think, obsess, obsess, obsess.” “Is he?” I don’t know.

He’s just ruh-ruh-thuh-thuh-thuh on this one subject, you know. Green horses or something, I don’t know. Instructors, something else unreal, see?

And the individual just goes on, on, on, on, on, on, on, over the rest of this thing, see. And the auditor says, “All right, have you done anything.” Well, obviously the guy must have done something or he wouldn’t be pinned in, see. That’s the part of the equation you may not – some people have not totally looked at: That in order to be pinned in on some- thing, he must have done something to it, see.

Because there isn’t any way anything could get in communication with a thetan in the first place. You want to solve a problem, man, there’s a nice problem for you. How does anybody ever get in communication with a thetan?

Of course, it’s impossible. The origination must have been original with the thetan. Why, he’s invisible, you couldn’t even find him, he doesn’t even really natively have any location in space – nothing.

So he must have originated, and that must be the basis of the do. And that’s how he gets pinned into anything. And he can get it all disguised so that it’s impossible for him to understand how he’s pinned in, which is – which is quite remarkable.

And he tries to unpin himself with obsessive do. He’s got to do, do, do, do, do, do to unpin himself. And boy, any- body will fall for this.

I catch myself by the scruff of the neck every once in a while. “Well, if I just wrote up a couple of letters, it would straighten it all out.” Then, of course, I know, I’ll go ahead, write a couple letters, straighten this out. This point’s worrying me one way or the other, I’ll write the couple letters. Then I find out I have to write another letter, see.

You know, I have to write another letter to straighten that out. And then I think, well, maybe it’ll be a good idea if I just wrote four or five more, you see, and straighten that out, and that particular… Then I suddenly realize what I am doing. This is why I’m worrying about it.

It’s because I’m writing letters about it, see? Simple, see? Realize that and all of a sudden cease to worry about it.

Bang! It’s gone, see. So anybody, even when he knows the mechanism, can be caught in the same mecha- nism because it’s the basic mechanism of entrapment.

There is no more subtle mechanism of entrapment than that. That’s the lot. So this is what you must realize about this thetan.

That it isn’t – we sit down with the thetan and we’re processing him and we say, “Oh well, what have you – what have you done to an Instructor?”  COMMUNICATION, 16  OVERTS AND RESPONSIBILITY And, “Well, nothing really.” Audience: God! “I-I-I listened impertinently when he said, ‘Good morning.’” See? “All right. Good. Now, what have you done to an Instructor?” you see. “Nothing really, nothing really, but I thought they were awfully wrong when they chopped me all up and they did this and they did that and they did the rurur, motivator, mo- tivator, motivator, motivator.” And the auditor says, “Fine,” and asks the next question, not having gotten his ques- tion answered.

Now, right there, in the mechanism of the session, you see, he’s pinned him in tighter. He bought a motivator, he pinned him in tighter. Do you see that?

It isn’t whether or not it’s social or not social, it isn’t anything else, it’s just good sense technically, see. And they don’t want to break their communication channel or their feeling of rapport, being simpatico with the pc, you see, by being challenging. Where as a mat- ter of fact they’d be a far better friend of the pc, it’d be a much more honest thing: “All right.

That’s all very well, but now what the hell have you done to an Instructor that’s got you this worried?” “Oh, well, you put it that way, I well, well, backing out of the parking lot and hit his car the other night. Didn’t tell him about it. He hasn’t found out the fender’s dented yet.” See?

Right away, bang! The guy’s unpinned, see? Because he goes through – he goes through the action of.

He does something, not nec- essarily intentional, he does something and then he does something to justify having done this thing. And then he does something to justify what he has done. By this time he’s getting pretty pinned in and he keeps on trying to do this thing.

And then he eventually will be physically batting away from this thing as though he’s trying to push himself off a wall, see, and the next thing he does, he does the only thing left to him – he blows. He has to leave physically, or he has to do something else physically. Well, if he can’t leave physically, he has a dwindling gradient of the things he can leave physically by not leaving physically.

You know? You can leave physically, all right. But how do you leave without leaving physically?

Well, one of the ways – you could become groggy, see? You could become less alert. You could show people that it was wrong of them to have you there, see.

You could show that you were pinned from leaving, you see, by developing a bad spine so that you couldn’t walk. See, all kinds of wild solutions. Now, these are the solutions that I’m talking about.

The individual can’t leave the uni- verse physically so he tends to pile up all these solutions. You get married and you can’t part  COMMUNICATION, 17  OVERTS AND RESPONSIBILITY company easily, and stay in the marriage but then leave the marriage, but not physically, see. Can’t leave the marriage physically because that’d be too irresponsible, see, so you leave the marriage!

Now, if you want to see something complicated, it’s the number of ways a thetan can leave without shoving off physically. And practically, psychotherapy is just a study of that. You can go down into making people sorry that they didn’t let you leave, don’t you see.

You can make them guilty of having put you in a situation where you couldn’t leave, by in your turn, appearing so nasty – that’s a wild pitch, isn’t it; well, they all have a wild curve on them like this, you see – by appearing so nasty to everybody when you were so happy before. See, it’s not necessarily an unimaginative set of factors, see. But the basis on which they’re based is very, very simple.

There’s very – very little to this basis. Basis is: the indi- vidual commits an overt, intentionally or unintentionally, he commits some other overts and he goes a whole gamut of commission of actions. He never really stops committing actions but now he commits them with a negative reason.

He commits them in order to get out of there. If he can’t leave at all, now he has a whole bunch of solutions that go downhill from that point. I mean, you just get the wildest things.

And it’s really a study of assertive thereness right on down to not-thereness, and a sort of a gradient scale of these two factors involved. And all of this – all of this being on communication channels and being like a communi- cation channel requires communication of some kind or another to resolve. But we’ve got this factor of the regretted action or the regretted reach or something like this; we got this factor, and we’ve got the factor of the communication formula, both of them superior to the reactive bank.

Now, the reactive bank booby – traps this to some degree. Communication is mirrored in the reactive bank. There isn’t any word “overt” in the reactive bank that I know of at this time.

But the whole thing is just a study of overts, from beginning to end. The word “with- hold” is definitely in there and it’s in there so often that we must really cease to use it. Too restimulable.

Too restimulated, the pc would get if you continued to use it. Substitute for it and you’ll find out it actually works better, “What he didn’t say.” See. “What have you done?” “What haven’t you said?” “What have you done?” “What haven’t you thought?” “What have you d – “ see. “What action have you taken?” and “What action haven’t you done?” Don’t you see? Just play both sides of the coin.

Understand the principle rather than get the parrot rating, see. And the word “withhold,” although we have it around and although we wouldn’t be able to root it out of our technology, actually couldn’t – can remain in the technology but not in an auditing command. Because it restimulates the pc and you get false TA.

You’re moving banks around and you’re getting false TA on the thing. It’s just bank discharge is all you’re  COMMUNICATION, 18  OVERTS AND RESPONSIBILITY getting. You’re actually not doing anything.

And it’s really not bank discharge, it’s tone arm action being occasioned by a GPM coming in and it eventually will freeze up. I know that makes it sound grim but you’re perfectly safe as long as you just don’t use that word “withhold.” It won’t happen. You can say, “What haven’t you said?” You’ll find out that you’ll have a ball with that.

That’s gorgeous. You could even sort out the thing: said, thought, acted, not acted. “What action haven’t you taken?” You could sort the thing out, see, and get the fellow right where he lived and by building up from that point, free him on innumerable points and knock out a whole bunch of these weird nonsenses. But of course, you realize that you can’t do that easily unless you’re in good communication with the individual.

Now, one of the principal factors that you bat your head against, then, in a case, is the inability of a case to admit any action or take any responsibility for action. If a case can take no responsibility of any kind for any action ever committed, that case is committed forever to the deep. There isn’t anything you could ever do for that case.

He’s just buried in the five-mile Philippine Deep and that is the end of that. But you understand, I’ve said take no responsibility for any action he has ever done. I’m not now talking about an overt act.

See, don’t interpret it from that line and you’ve got it pretty well won. But that’s the lost soul. The lost soul who is being shredded between the worlds with a soundless wail is the person who can take no responsibility for any action he has ever done.

And that is a statement of exactly where a case ceases to be within range of assistance. This makes those things you can’t talk to pretty irresponsible, doesn’t it. Well, they are.

I can imagine a conversation, if you could achieve one, with a spider. The tremendous importance of the spider, the fantastic put-uponness of the spider, and the utter irresponsibil- ity of every action the spider takes and undertakes, would be something that would drop your jaw. The inability to communicate goes along with the irresponsibility for actions.

See, that’s an index. Those two things go straight together. As the ability to communicate drops out, responsibility for actions, as a factor, falls.

As responsibility for actions, as a factor, falls, ability to communicate falls. Now, don’t come around and write me a despatch sometime and ask me how to cure a stutterer. That’s a deteriorated zone of communications.

It doesn’t mean that there’s anything fabulously in error about this individual. It does mean that there is some zone or area of an irresponsibility. Because those two factors rise and fall alongside of each other.

They don’t go on a scale, like the scale of justice; they go up in a pair of elevators. Responsibility for one’s  COMMUNICATION, 19  OVERTS AND RESPONSIBILITY own actions rise, ability to communicate rises. Responsibility for one’s own actions fall, communication falls.

There they are. They ride side by side. And Joe Spider out here in the garden, an examination of his responsibility for why he’s in the garden and for what he’s doing, and if you could get a heart-to-heart talk with him, which of course you can’t because of this other factor – I won’t say that you can’t, maybe some of you someday will – this bird’s not talking.

Doesn’t even make noise. But yet his con- cept of responsibility would be utterly fantastic. Everything is all done.

Actually, the reason he spins webs – he can actually see himself spinning webs and has very detached viewpoint, if he can see himself at all. And it’s a mecha- nism that was laid into him by God. And he does this because of a compulsion that was handed him, you see, at this time.

And the flies that get into the web are driven in there by some guardian spirit of spiders, you see, that had a battle in Valhalla with the wahf-wahf. And that’s why they are destroyed. And the reason they are consumed is to keep the garden clean for Jub-bub. “Who’s that?” Well, I don’t know.

You find out that spider is not doing a confounded blasted thing. He doesn’t spin, he doesn’t eat, he doesn’t do anything. He’s a model of nothing.

And he can’t talk, see? He can’t deliver any lectures on the subject of spiders. You see this?

You see this as a factor? Now, think of this – think of this when you see madman X leaping about in a padded cell, covered with his own filth and that sort of thing, and gibbering and yapping. And some- body says to you, “Well, if you really knew anything about the mind…” I don’t know why they put this up, see.

Well, that’s the same mechanism at work in another line, see? “If you really knew anything about the mind, why, you could do something for that madman in there.” Take a look at it. Of course, they want you, if possible, to commit an overt against that madman. Then they’ve got you, see.

But there you are looking at – here you’re looking at the factor, “How mad is this man?” This is the first question you would ask, “How mad is this man?” Well, this man happens to be as mad as you can get into communication with him – as you can’t get into communication with him. It’s an inverse ratio, of course, in that particular instance. He can’t – he can’t make any sense, he doesn’t pay any attention to you, and so forth.

Well, he’s pretty mad. First thing you’d have to do would be to build up a communication factor across the fact of no responsibility at all. That’s quite a trick.

But you could build it up with mimicry, you could build it up in various ways. You could build it up by a timed hello: every day you come by and say, “Hello.” That’s all, just one. He’d eventually be over at the bars saying, “Hello.” Might be six months, you see, but he’d eventually get at this.

And providing of course that somebody else didn’t do something gruesome to him in the meantime, why he would – he would eventually be able to recognize that you were different from the rest of the  COMMUNICATION, 20  OVERTS AND RESPONSIBILITY environment. You see, he’d work it out here somehow or another and he’d eventually start responding to you and that sort of thing. And then, you’d have to find something that he did, something that he had done, some- thing he really knew he’d done, something he could take responsibility for.

And just expand that perimeter and you would return his sanity. There is no more complication in the basic theory than that. There aren’t exceptions to this basic theory.

Where the exceptions come in is how in the name of God you eventually bring this fellow about to talk to you. The gradient you have to run in order to get this individual into communication with you. How you put it to him – how you put it to him, that you want to find out what he has taken responsibility for in his environment.

These are the factors that require genius. See, there’s a bit of genius mixed up in this, man. You’ve got to think on your feet.

This individual starts to go that way, you got to round him up and head him off and bring him back again, you see. You say, “All right, now what part of your life did you like best? Oh, your early teens.

All right, all right. Now, what did you most enjoy doing in your early teens?” See, you got it right there, see. He can answer that question.

If you can find that question to ask, an- swer that question, up she starts going, see? And then some nuttinesses start chipping off because his ability to observe what his environment is, and so forth, will again pick up. He’s less in contest with that environment, you see?

You’ve made an inroad on it even though he considers you a plaster angel that has descended just to assist him. Regardless of that, he has nevertheless made a crack in the envi- ronment. So responsibility for own actions doesn’t then merely mean overt actions.

It just means actions of any kind. What can he do that he’d take responsibility for? The worse off an individual is the less responsibility he can take for anything.

But the genius required is: Where do we hit this case to pick up its zone of responsibility? And those cases that are having a rough time… Of course, we hit them around here at a very high level with, such as, something like this, “Well, now what have you done that you know confounded cottonpicking well you shouldn’t ought of been doing that you can take responsibility for?” See, that’s more or less in that line. “What have you done around here that you really know you’ve done, Bud?” “Ah well, awa-wawa-wawa.” And then all of a sudden the guy will hit something and it breaks, you see. He starts to straighten out in this direction.

But recognize that is a fairly high level of action. It pays you the compliment of considering you’re sane – can take respon- sibility, but that your wheels were slipping for a while, see. That’s the – but that’s a high level of action.

COMMUNICATION, 21  OVERTS AND RESPONSIBILITY “Have you done anything today that you know you yourself did?” Let’s get this level of action now. Oh, that’s another level of action, isn’t it? All right.

Now, there’s an undercut, “Where have you been today that you know you have been?” That’s done by reason of placement. Let’s work up a gradient scale to where the guy decided to be someplace and was there. See, let’s work it up on the basis of responsibility for placement of self, not even con- test with the environment.

You see, there are various ramifications here that you can work on. There’s various gradients. But this is not really the principle of this lecture.

It’s just this, you’ve got these two factors: Communication – and even though that’s in the bank, the formulas of communication are superior to the reactive bank – and you’ve got the idea of responsibility for own action. And responsibility may or may not be part of the reactive bank; and it just wouldn’t matter, if it was or wasn’t. The truth of the matter is it exists as superior to the bank.

Responsibility for own actions, which is the very woof and warp of being a thetan. Can you decide to do something and do it? Can you be somewhere?

Can you be out of some- where at will? These are the abilities of a thetan. And if you cant do those things then you’re slipping.

So where do you start somebody in to get those things done? And that’s a very impor- tant question. So you’ve got two factors here which are superior to the reactive bank, which are superior to this universe and which are native to a thetan.

Now, I’ve always said that the overt act-motivator sequence was not necessarily true. No, it isn’t necessarily true. It isn’t true, but it fades out in terms of consideration higher than any other consideration.

It goes higher and is still a truth after other things have become lies, before it becomes a lie. Do you understand? It’s pretty high.

These two factors ride right to- gether. And it gives you all levels of processing from IV on down. And it gives you all levels of cases.

Now, how many ways you can go about doing this, how many processes you can adapt into this, how many systems as they exist in Scientology right this minute to achieve communication with the individual, how many systems exist after you get through to pull the rocks out from underneath some daffy consideration… Daffy consideration – that’s obviously married up to the fact that it’s the individual’s doing something that is daffy, see. Those things will fall apart very easily to the degree that the individual can accept doing something. And if you’ve got those two factors, however many ways there are of getting at those things, you have all these lower levels of processing, you have all these lower levels of case.

And there in actual fact is no real excuse – no real excuse at all, for you to be in the dark about why you’re not making progress with a case. Because whatever other factors are present, see, what other factors are present, these factors are more present. COMMUNICATION, 22  OVERTS AND RESPONSIBILITY See, it may be true that this fellow is so harassed in his marriage that he can’t put his mind on anything of the… “What’s he stuck in like that for?” is your first question.

Not how terrible his environment is. Well, look at how he’s stuck into his environment. All right, where is he stuck into his environment?

Let’s get a pc just talking one way or the other. We’re asking him in effect, “Hey, Bud, where are you stuck in?” See, “What tank trap have you run into that you’re still treading your wheels in,” see, “you’re skidding your treads in?” See, “Where are you?” is what we’re asking. Now, this individual is at his job, or he’s at home, or he’s here, or he’s there, but he’s being there all the time while he’s elsewhere, see.

He’s really stuck in, you see. He’s Rommel stuck in at Tobruk. He’s so frightened on this front that he never has a chance to fight the war, see.

He’s stuck in someplace. And just with general itsa and that sort of thing, you, very soon, very shortly, find out where this individual’s stuck in. Now, the burning question is: Is what responsibility can he take in that zone or area – for his own actions in that zone or area?

Now, you frankly don’t care at a lower level of case whether this individual is an- swering overts or unsaids or withholds or anything else. You just don’t care about any of those factors. All you’re interested in, really, is responsibility for own actions or responsibil- ity for lack of actions.

What is he certain he hasn’t said? That would be a very gentle entrance point. But of course you couldn’t play that out question after question because it’s an out of ARC process.

You’d have to quickly shift on over to the other side of the picture. You just get his responsibility for action in that zone or area and all of a sudden that house of cards will fall down. Sometimes it takes quite a little while to steer it around, steer it around, get it more real, you know, and get a better view of the situation.

All of a sudden one will fall out of the hamper and you’ll find out this individual is not now as obsessively wor- ried about something as he was before. Now, there’s one thing that gets in your road as you go over this ground. And I will admit to this, that there’s one thing that gets in your road.

An individual can have a piece of the GPM keyed in to such a degree that it’s driving him half around the bend, see. At the lower levels you’d just better leave it alone, at this particular time. But I have done something by reading off a short list of words that possibly were authoring the condition and seeing if one read, and then telling him that was an integral part of the reactive bank that was influencing him, and it discharged at that particular moment and he ceased to become obsessively worried.

That’s another root on the same basis, see. But is not one that you would commonly care to practice. And probably is a little more dangerous than it is safe.

COMMUNICATION, 23  OVERTS AND RESPONSIBILITY If you follow the other one around, you’ll find out it’ll apply very generally to all cases. That’s how you crack one of these cases, that’s how you go about this sort of thing. And that’s what in essence auditing is about.

One of the ways you can badger somebody into finally getting off of a certain merry- go-round is a very interesting one too. Of – I’d say there’s lots of methodology about this, very interesting one too. You say to him, “All right.

What have you done that you really know you have done …” in that particular zone or area that he’s worried about, see – “What have you done that you really know you’ve done?” in that particular zone and so forth. And he tells you. “Wow, I know I’ve done this,” you see. And he comes up, and you know, the glibness with which he comes up with this thing, he really has taken no responsi- bility for it.

This is – the responsibility factor is lying there like a sleeping dog. The fellow might tell you glibly, but there’s no responsibility. The rebuttal on such a thing is to get him to explain to you for some time how he has not really done that.

Can’t play it too long because it’s a cut comm line type of approach, don’t you see. But you can actually get him to explain this. “Oh, I-I-I busted up the old man’s car and ran it off a cliff, ha-ha.” “All right, very good. Well, how didn’t you really do that?” Oh, well, he’ll let you in on it now.

And boy, there’s the most tortuous logic you ever heard of in your life as how he never really did that. He took the car, he didn’t have permis- sion. He was at the wheel of the car.

He ran it down over the concrete abutment and into the arroyo. But somehow or another… No responsibility, see. It’s a some kind of a solution to this situation, you see.

The responsibility factor – you’ll just see it. You can sit there with your jaw dropped sometimes. He didn’t really do it.

He wasn’t really in the car. The car just sort of whistled him over and made him sit down in the seat and… And then it’s the old man’s fault because the old man never had a restraining-from-the-curb thing put on the car that made the wheels turn away from the curb, don’t you see. And it’s actually the fault of Newton for pointing out gravity that made the car go down the arroyo, and… It’s pretty wild, pretty wild.

But you get him to explain all this and all of a sudden it begins to dawn on him gently that he had something to do with this action. And you play around the perimeter of this thing, and all of a sudden it breaks and the case does a tremendous send. The reason why you can’t run straight O/W and get this tremendous send, because they’re not really overts.

The individual has no responsibility with them, you see? You get him to explain how he never did them, and we enter a lower level of responsibility factor. We all used to have it, “What part of that action could you have been responsible for?” or “could  COMMUNICATION, 24  OVERTS AND RESPONSIBILITY you be responsible for?” Don’t you see, as a direct approach process.

There’s another indirect approach process, “How didn’t you really do it?” Little higher level, “What reasons did you have for doing that?” Get him to as – is all of these things. And then don’t let him get into a state where he’s running up more, because you are the auditor and he’s trying to look good to you. A certain amount of genius is involved here on the part of the auditor.

But knowing these factors and playing them one against the other and back and forth, and so forth, you could bust almost anybody out of these immediate environmental situations which have him doing such weird and wonderful things, and so forth and you had to have auditing actually below Level IV. Because you’re using two principles which are senior to the mind – to all other considerations – for those lower levels, and you’ll make it. And I wish you some success when you’re using it.

Thank you. Audience: Thank you.

[[Category:Lectures]]
[[Category:Lectures SHSBC]]
[[Category:Lectures 1964]]