View source for The Difficult Case (SHSBC 621113)

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

'''Date:''' 13 November 1962

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

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Well, we haven't seen you for a long time. I took pity on you. I had a lot of material of one kind and another, and I put it into bulletin form last week.

I wrote six highly technical bulletins last week – the better to teach you with, my dear. Okay. This is what?

Audience: 13th of November. Thirteenth of November, AD 12, first lecture, Saint Hill Special Briefing Course. Nobody has given me a list of goals found or not checked out or anything recently, so I can't give you much of a report on that.

I can, however, read to you a very interesting – nonapropos to the lecture I'm going to give you – a very interesting letter which I have received. Undoubtedly it's a personal letter, and I thought you would all be interested in this. He says, “Dear Ron.” We, by the way, are a new address.

We're a new address here. We're Saint Hill, England. After a while, anybody addressing anything to England will simply write Saint Hill, you see?

Only they'd better not write “The government of Saint Hill up to London.” Anyway, this letter follows: “Dear Ron, As the fellow that won the door prize at the congress, I would like to have some more – like you to have some more reality on me and I want to tell you my view of how things have gone. I am sure you have the auditor's reports. “Prior to the congress, I was in a particularly bad, withdrawn condition, but I went to the congress with a purpose. After Jim found my goal, I was in a wonderful, euphoric condition.

I was dramatizing my goal, but the most significant thing was a complete separateness from bank. The second most significant was a thousand-fold increase in communication with people. “I made arrangements with the Center to start listing. I went Clear on 16 lines in forty hours.

During this time I felt increasingly better and more stable. There was a low point at the end of fifteen hours. I wrote a letter describing my case and the auditing.

I went out the bottom for three days until I cognited on what had happened. Your advice on not discussing your case in any fashion is absolutely right. My reality is that pcs during goals listing – that  THE DIFFICULT CASE 2  is, listing on the goal – are exceptionally sensitive in this regard.

It isn't like any type of case auditing. “I, of course, got many cognitions. The most important resulted in a change in beingness, a change of direction in my life and establishing definite goals as opposed to sometime nebulous goals. “After the clearing of 16 lines, there were still little edges of uncertainty – doubt on my stability and wonder about reaction to my environment. The next week – I went Clear on 29 September on 16 lines – we proceeded to do the 114 lines.

These went free in three hours. The uncertainty and doubts, and so forth, cleared up. In my reality, the final key to Clear was acceptance of total responsibility for me, my body and my bank. “I have been going back to the Center each Saturday for a check – Tiger Drill and so forth, and a few buttons which might have something in present time on them – but after one or two interrogations the needle cleared.

Last Saturday there was nothing. I picked up the cans and according to the auditor read 3.0 with a free needle. I was and am stable in my reality, and all the buttons were clean. “There seems to be some confusion in the org and HCO about a final Clear check by a Class III Auditor.

I have not had the final check as yet, so end-of-cycle is dragging a bit.” That's merely the formality of checkout. “Now, Ron, about the month since I've been Clear, my environment has gotten very busy and very active with Scientology. I find that my postulates work fantastically quick, easy and without enturbulating problems. I was able to extract my sister from a very messy personal situation that I could not have handled previously.

And I was able to communicate with my environment and her without any difficulty and accomplished her enrollment at the Academy as a student in the HCA. First, she took a fifty-hour intensive and made MEST Clear, and this is now an enthusiastic student.” I'll tell you more about that in a minute. “My wife, Ethel, has completed a fifty-hour intensive and has started listing goals. My family life has never been so smooth, communicative and real.

My family responsibilities – all this used to be a problem; it isn't now; it is easy and I love it – my family responsibilities (five dependents) require continuous, sizable income as well as continuing them all in auditing and the HCA. My enrollment in the HCA will be delayed pending the completion of the latter. “I retire in three weeks from the Air Force, and I will move immediately – and I will move immediately into a management position in industry. There I can still contribute to the national defense as well as expedite the progress of my family and myself in Scientology. “I have, since 1955, occupied myself with Scientology and do consider myself a  THE DIFFICULT CASE 3  Scientologist and live accordingly. “It's a good game, Ron.

Let me postulate more good hunting for you and all Scientologists. “ARC, Bob.” Very good, huh? All right. Now the ...

Shows you what I can do if I set my mind to it. Anyway, there's this mention about this girl going MEST Clear. Now, I'm having this looked into at once very thoroughly, but this was done by Fred as an auditor in the HGC in Washington, and he has already given me a very thorough report on this and it was merely a standard Problems Intensive.

But it was run very, very permissively, extremely permissively. Not so permissive as somebody in Y Units have been known to do, of leaving the button red-hot and passing on to the next button. But no Q and A of any kind.

It was just cleaning it up, you know. I mean just a standard, smooth auditing job. There were no frills on this thing.

And this girl was stuck up at about 4.5 or 5.0, very rough, very wobbly, sticky needle, inclined to all manner of – well, poor auditing reactions we would call them – and life had been a bit of a this and that. And he just went in with this Problems Intensive. And he did the first twenty-five hours and she got quite a bit of good out of it.

So he did a second twenty-five-hour Problem Intensive. And at the end of that time, her tone arm was at 2.0, her needle was free on all buttons, and nobody could get any kicks out of the meter. I think this is very interesting.

It opens up this chapter to us that a Problems Intensive is apparently capable of producing an old Book One MEST Clear. And it opens up this very suspicious – two very suspicious points for me: is what are they doing elsewhere with this Problems Intensive? How much Q and A?

How many lousy assessments? How much no-follow-through? Well, somebody went back from here and gave his wife – who was stuck up at about 5.0 or something like that – he tried to find some goals, and he couldn't get to anyplace, so he went immediately into a Problems Intensive, and he brought her tone arm down to 2.0, and everything was looking much better and she was feeling much better and everything was fine.

The dirty needle was gone, and all that. Well, this is very interesting. It may just be that people don't know what a free needle is because there's people who've had as many as three Problems Intensives up in London.

Well, the tone arm comes down and everything, but they don't mention free needles. You understand? I mean this is either a fantastic piece of lousy observation on the part of auditors or there's something very rough about their auditing or something else is occurring that we don't know anything about.

Well, I consider this very, very interesting as a sudden breakthrough. And – some of you know Johnny, he's a old-time Dianeticist – and he heard about this  THE DIFFICULT CASE 4  in the HGC, so he says, “I just want to make sure that this is put down as a matter of record,” and wrote me about the case. He evidently was the one who got everybody to report it.

Now, this needle was inspected by person after person – Saint Hill graduates – see, and it was free, free needle. Problems Intensive – MEST Clear. Of course, that's a Key-Out Clear, but that grades up with what we were doing two years ago with Routine 3.

Now, I want you to put a little attention on this. I'm going to have some more to say about this in bulletins, and so forth. But if you're running Problems Intensives, apparently, they have a capability – when run right and assessed right and done right – they have a capability of producing a MEST Clear.

So pay some attention to this. Why aren't they getting them? Why aren't they being reported elsewhere.

I think it was somebody like Johnny, who after twelve years of being around and knowing the answers to things, he said, “Hey! You better tell Ron about this, you know. I want this to be a matter of record, you know.” Because he's very interested in special programs over there, and he's doing this health and suppress program angle.

And of course, he looks for a lot of these Problems Intensives to be run on a co-audit basis. So either everybody's been stone-blind or they're varying the procedure of a Problems Intensive or this is just a freak. But I don't think this is a freak because this was an extraordinarily rough case.

All right. You want to make some comment perhaps on the speed with which these lines cleaned. Don't think that this was an easy case.

And this is the lecture I'm going to talk to you about here, the first lecture is “Cases, Types Of.” As far as clearing is concerned, there are many types of cases. But this was a rock slammer. He was a rock slammer, Bob.

Rock slammer is severely defined not as somebody who rock slams but somebody who believes Scientology is in opposition to his goal or some part of it. Now, he was not an easy case. He was not easy to assess.

You couldn't even tiger drill a goal out on him except at the point of a drawn gun practically. And we picked off his goal on the fly. You know, there it went by on the E-Meter.

And I only got this, is what would be the – here's how we got his goal: I told Jim to ask him – we would have gotten his goal twenty-four hours earlier if this action had been reported to me when it was done – I told him to ask him, “What would be the consequences of our clearing you?” and to be sure and report to me the answers. The answers were reported to me much later than they should have been. I didn't ever see the – the needle was slamming when he first came up to be volunteered and tested, you see.

But on what nobody noticed. And “the consequences of our clearing you” were so catastrophic and so terrible that I merely says – using a term we use now to this effect – “The guy's a rock slammer. All right.

THE DIFFICULT CASE 5  List goals which would be in opposition to Scientology.” It didn't even have to actually be picked off on the meter as it went by. That was not a fluke. It would have been on the list anyway.

All right. Now ... The goal was “to live” by the way.

Now, this fellow was not an easy case but he was very, very well audited. He had about three, four Saint Hill graduates sitting on the back of his neck, see. That thing was being piloted through with a very close hand.

It simply amounted – nothing clever, but very usual auditing with nothing unusual occurring, you understand? Very usual auditing. Nobody Q-and-A’ing.

Nobody bullying him. Nobody doing this. So therefore, we must take up this aspect of auditing: is, there is a case and then the aspect of the case depends on the way the case is handled in most cases.

You understand? Now, that's the first, first thing that you must recognize in classifying cases or types of cases or relatively difficult cases. The first thing which you've got to recognize is this one, see: that the way the case is handled – even to the degree of sometimes you entered it unluckily – see, the way the case is handled gives you an aspect of relative ease or relative toughness of case.

That's about the first thing an auditor should learn about cases, that the way the case is handled has a great deal to do with. how rough the case looks. Now, we're talking now completely free of OCAs, APAs, graphs, tests or anything like that, see. Case A, Case B.

They're both, you might say, similarly difficult cases. But Case A is handled with great usualness with very, very good, smooth, unexcited, unupsetting approach with a lot of hope factor, a lot of R-factor, and so forth, and runs like an easy case. And then there's Case B.

And this Case B, let us say, is handled with great unusualness. Well, they enter it from the wrong side and it's prepchecked on the wrong buttons and there's ARC breaks and there's present time problems running and they never kept the rudiments in, don't you see? And Case B pretty soon is sitting in the pc's chair self-auditing and getting his own rudiments in and coming down the can leads to the auditor, don't you see?

Looks like a fantastically rough case. Becomes in appearance an impossible case. See, break anybody's heart.

And yet they're similar cases. Now, you should recognize that as an influencing factor in determining whether cases are easy or tough. Now, I'll give you a wonderful example of this.

Psychiatric classification, psychiatric treatment, behavior in life, all these things have no bearing – within reasonable limits – have no bearing on the ease with which you're going to handle the case, see. What the person does in life, person's psychiatric classification, neurosis – any of these things, don't you see? I mean these have no bearing on whether that case is going to be easy to handle or tough to handle.

You can just throw overboard any preconception about the fact that he's a black five or she's a theetie-weetie, or any of your case classifications. I don't care whether it's our classifications or some, ha! classifications they've had in the past like the  THE DIFFICULT CASE 6  Kraepelin category. You know, everybody thinks that's a joke, you know, and it's not, you know.

That's the basic psychiatric classification of cases. It's the Kraepelin code. Now, it just doesn't matter.

This amusing example I'm going to tell you about – I've mentioned it in lectures before, but for other purposes. This girl stumbles in the front door. Some auditor up in Spokane had gotten furious with her in a session and practically spun her in.

She'd had a long, bad history of treatment and mental nonsense. And so she stumbled in the front door – and Suzie happened to be doing some Registrar work and at that particular time I was auditing outside cases – and she came in and – it wasn't a question of her buying auditing – and Suzie asked her for her name. And so she offered several names so Suzie could take her choice because she didn't know.

She couldn't remember her name. She didn't know who she was. And, man, you talk about somebody that apparently was in foul shape, you see.

Well, somebody would practically have put her in restraint. If she'd ever walked in front of a mental hospital, up to the front entrance, why, they would have sent for the butterfly nets, you see, at once. And so I just grabbed a hold of her.

I think I audited her, in all, two hours and a half. I think I audited her two sessions – total about two hours and a half It was – it wasn't any – it wasn't any purchased intensive or anything else. I just saw the girl and I called her in my office and audited her.

All right. And I really didn't run anything very sensible on her. I sort of asked her what she was trying to do, you know, and what things were.

And I gave her a few tests, and so forth. She did anything I asked her to do in the way of a mental put-together, don't you see? And she realized that she was sort of trying to disgrace herself – what she came to realize.

I was giving her kind of an SCS. That's what I was doing with her, and I wasn't even escorting her. I was telling her to walk across the room and notice she didn't run into anything.

I remember that was one of the processes. And didn't run into anything until she ran into something, you know? It was a great relief to her to find out there were no barriers except where there were barriers.

You know, she was getting oriented. And then she finally found out she was trying to get even with her parents by becoming a prostitute. And this seemed to be a big cognition to her of one kind or another.

And I know there must have been a couple of moments there when we shed items of some kind, and – because she recognized things. She all of a sudden remembered her name and all that. And I knocked out a bad auditing session she'd had up in Spokane.

And she went out of there walking straight up, and beautiful shape, and she went out and met some nice guy and got married and that was it. Now, the length of time it took to handle the case does not compare, let me point out to you, with the terrible state of the case. Now, you see, I've done this often enough now and had it happen often enough that I  THE DIFFICULT CASE 7  don't pay any attention to the pre-Scientology state of the case.

I pay no attention to that at all. Quite fascinating. Now, some case or another which has a tendency of spinning or something like that is hard to spot, but let me tell you, it takes awfully rough Scientology to make them hard.

You see, now, I'm trying to bring this up to you: We're making our own hard cases, see. We get preconcepts of some kind or another as to whether cases are easy or hard. And you'll get some poor case that's got a terrible reputation in the HGC, you see, for being a horrible case.

And then the auditors don't quite want this case, and all this kind of thing is going on. And this fellow gets a reputation for being a tough case, and he's a tough case. Now, I'm not saying that all cases are easy.

No, I'm saying quite the reverse: All cases are hard, you see? Basically, there are no easy cases. But let me stress this, that these preconceived notions of the roughness of a case or classifications of a case into this category or that category, “and therefore they're very hard to audit” have all been bypassed by existing technology.

You can forget them. If you can get somebody to sit still and answer questions, you see, that's about all you ask of the case, and if you can't, you've got the CCHs. But relegating somebody to the CCHs and telling him he's got to have 8,762 hours of the CCHs before you can audit him, you're just manufacturing a tough case, don't you see?

I remember one girl – another girl one time in the same locale. I was doing a lot of research auditing at the time and I remembered she had been pronounced nutty as a fruitcake. She was straight out of an asylum everything else.

I brought her in and she could control her mock-ups. She could mock up something sitting in the corner and keep it sitting in the corner and do this and that. I told her she was an easy case.

And she was. You get the idea? I didn't say, “Oh, my God, you've been eighteen months in a sanitarium.

And, oh, oh, that's pretty bad, pretty bad. Your record's here. Oh, dear.

Look what Dr. Flumfbottom says about you. Oh, dear.

Oh, well. Don't think there's very much we can do for you. You came to us much too late.” Evidently, people were on the track before psychiatry, you know, because they're always coming to psychiatry too late, you know?

Now, let's get down to the basis, see. I'm not saying all cases are equal, I'm saying they're all rough. But the case you're going to have trouble with is always a spook and always a sleeper, and you never suspect it and it hasn't anything at all to do – nothing whatsoever to do, believe me – with the psychiatric classification or the psychoanalytic classification or what the OCA said or anything else.

That's not the rough case. Yeah, we used to have a hell of a time getting these people up off the bottom of a graph and that sort of thing. Well, you've got the technology, don't you see?

You can pull them up off the bottom of the graph. You can sit there and run a Problems Intensive on them, for heaven's sakes; they'll snap out of it. Do various things with these cases.

THE DIFFICULT CASE 8  Now, the case you're going to lay an egg with, see, is the same case you've always laid an egg with. That's just a spook case. And they look sane and they look able, and they lie like hell.

And it's just a matter of they don't do your auditing commands. And so you never get the auditing cycle completed with this case, you understand? But this case is already very touchy and if you bear down too hard and you're too nasty and Q-and-A too much if they find – to find that they've done it or not done it, you're going to upset the case and make the case rougher than it is.

You harass the pc and make the pc worse than the pc is, see. They respond less well to auditing because you're always in there saying, “Did you answer the auditing command? What did you do with that?” You know, suspicion, suspicion, suspicion, see?

Now, the way to judge this case is simply if after a short period of modern auditing the case hasn't recovered, then ... This is honest to Pete, I mean – I sound like an echo of myself. This is a lecture 1953.

First time this has been ... The case hasn't done your auditing commands or you haven't audited the case. Sounds very peculiar, see.

Now, the case hasn't done it. That's all. Now, these characters will take a command, do something else with it and then say yes or they've done it.

Now, there's an old HGC auditor sitting over here. I can see, he knows that one well! You sit there for twenty-five hours, see, and you're saying, “Tell me a time you really communicated,” you know, and the case is saying, “Mm-hm, yeah, yes.

With Joe and with Pete. Joe and Bill, yes. With Mama.

Yes, with Daddy.” I don't know. They've got a machine out here. It says Joe, Bill, Daddy, you know; hadn't anything to do with what they're doing.

They never heard a thing you've said to them. See, in other words, this case interrupts the auditing cycle, and that's the only case that you're ever going to find tough or have anything to do with. Now, let's look at – the most extreme condition of this.

The guy is sitting there going buuuuuuu. See, he's been around psychiatry too long, you know. He can't communicate at all anymore.

He's sitting there. He can't even tend himself in the natural functions of nature. He's sitting in the corner of a padded cell, you know?

And you say something to him and you get no response and no execution. Got that as the extreme end of this case, you know? Well, another extreme end.

The guy has no perception. He can't hear. You say something to him, of course, he doesn't do anything.

And there's another example of the foreign-language case who can't speak any English. You're telling a Japanese to make that body lie in that bed and, of course, he doesn't know any of those words. You see, those are all communication breakdowns.

Well, you understand those. See, that's dead simple. You're not going to stand there  THE DIFFICULT CASE 9  like an idiot looking at this bird sitting on a stool in the corner of his cell going buuuuu, you know.

He's had the very best treatment the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, could possibly authorize. Very best. Yeah, I wonder if you realize that they okay all the electric shock machines as perfectly valid shock machines that kill patients.

We're going to take care of them. Well, anyhow ... We got them on the list over here.

Anyway ... We already sent them a bill for interrogation and consultation services and we've now got the government crying faintly and nattering and wanting to – it to be itemized and specified or something of the sort before they pay it. They came around and investigated FCDC so we – I had them send them a bill for $275 for consultation and briefing.

They're apparently going to pay it. You should realize the magic of billing. Anyhow, so there he sits with the very best the Food and Drug Administration could authorize, and you'll say, of course, “I would have to take his hand and make him touch the wall, and do it and do it and do it, and take his other hand and do it and do it and do it, and get him into communication with his environment,” and so forth.

Yeah, you'd recognize it would do absolutely no good to stand there and say, “Recall a time when you communicated with somebody. Thank you. Recall a time when you suppressed something.

Thank you.” You know? You recognize, see. That's lights, bells, everything, see.

You know there's nothing going to happen. All right. And you take this guy that's stone-deaf, and he's got a great big hearing aid of some kind or another that goes off at fifty-five decibels between his ears, or something.

And there's an on/off switch on the thing and it's off, see. And you know better than to sit there and say, “Recall a time you invalidated something,” see. You know better than that.

And you got somebody who speaks only Igloo, and you know that there's no sense in saying this. Well, that's so obvious that the next obvious thing is you miss: There's many a fellow who sits there who ostensibly speaks English, who can hear, who never executes your auditing commands. That's the one you're going to lay an egg on.

This person doesn't execute your auditing commands and doesn't give you a factual report on what's happening in the auditing. Now, you'd be amazed, because that goes on a gradient on up till it really includes every case at its top level. Every case sooner or later doesn't quite do the auditing command, don't you see?

Well, the spook that you're going to have trouble with is the one who just never does the auditing command and is always doing something else. Now, I'll show you how crazy this goes. The auditor sits there for seventy-five hours of auditing and keeps giving him this command, you see – “Who haven't you ever helped?” see? “Who hasn't ever helped you?” you know; some failed-help process – and sits there, and the tone arm moves and the needle moves occasionally on the E-Meter, and so forth.

And then  THE DIFFICULT CASE 10  at the end of the intensive, why – the first twenty-five hours – the fellow says, oh, he feels lots better. And the next twenty-five hours he says, “Well, I didn't. . . It hasn't worsened any.” And the next twenty-five hours, well, he's sort of scraping off the floor now.

Now, the auditor's been sitting there giving him commands that whole time. And he has yet to do one. And actually that happens.

That happens, and that's the only case you're going to have trouble with. It has nothing to do with diagnosis or. . . He's got itemosis.

He's got an item here, and it hears and then it relays it to him and then he says to this item over here that it should do it. See? He's wired up a set of valences.

Pc isn't there at all. Pc's backed way out here someplace, don't you see? Pc hasn't got anything to do with all this.

If you ask the pc about it, if you communicate with the pc at all, why, the pc would just be sitting back there in sort of a comfortable, relaxed puzzle about the whole thing. And nobody's answered the auditing command. Now, auditors sometimes sense this and they become desperate.

And they start pounding the pc and harassing the pc and chopping the pc up and just going up in a small balloon because they know there's something wrong. After all, you're not always wrong. You have been known to have correct intuitive feelings, and you just feel intuitively that this isn't all it should be.

You don't feel in good two-way comm with the pc, you see. You don't like the way this soup tastes, you know? You can't quite isolate whether it's got too much salt in it or too much pepper or too much butter, but it just isn't quite right.

And you start chopping the pc up. You start moving in on the pc, you know? You start getting insistent.

You start getting this. You start getting that. And the tone arm moves even less.

Moves less. Now, this case is the last one in the world to admit in any way that he has misappropriated the auditing command. Last one in the world.

All cases to some slight degree do this and you don't harass those. Well, why harass this guy? Because he's always doing something else with the auditing command.

I'll give you an idea some of the things he does with the auditing command. Some are really gorgeous. He hears the auditing command and that reminds him of something that he ought to do that will make him better, so he does that.

He hears the auditing – this is rather uncommon, but is an actual manifestation. Every auditing command the pc receives, he runs through an electronic incident because he knows if the electronic incident changes in character that he will get well. He knows what's wrong with him.

It's an electronic incident. So every time you give him an auditing command, then he runs through the electronic incident a little bit further or tries to take the auditing command and apply it to the electronic incident and he's sitting there auditing an electronic incident. And you're not auditing him.

You follow this? Well, you say, “Well, how the – look-look-look-look now, Ron, you've just told us, you know – wait a minute. You've just said ...

Look, you mustn't Q-and-A, and you mustn't  THE DIFFICULT CASE 11  jump down their throats” – I've sure inferred that “and you mustn't harass them, and you mustn't bother them. Well, how the hell are you going to find out?” You see, if he's running through the electronic incident, of course, you'll going to get tone arm motion. It won't be very much, but you'll get some tone arm motion.

See, he's running himself through an electronic incident while you're auditing him. And you think the tone arm motion is coming from the fact that you're auditing him, see. But it's not.

It's coming from the fact he's moving through an electronic, see. So you even get tone arm action and we're not supposed to Q-and-A and we're not supposed to ask the pc what he's doing particularly. We're not supposed to harass him particularly.

Well, hell, it couldn't be any possible road out of this. Oh, yes, there is. Yes, there is.

It isn't grabbing him out of the chair and racking him over to the wall and start doing the CCHs either; it's you watch that when you are running the pc's right Havingness Process. And if you want to be extreme and you want to make a test out of it, you run a separate process which has something to do with the physical universe around the pc. And if that gives you a great deal of tone arm action, then you damn well flatten that tone arm action against the physical universe!

I don't care whether you use SCS, Op Pro by Dup, CCH 1, 2, 3, 4. 1 don't care what you use, you understand. It'd be a matter of “Pat the desk. Thank you.

Pat the desk. Thank you. Pat the desk.

Thank you. Pat the desk.” You're going to get tone arm action, see. Now, the reason you don't often notice this is because the pc hasn't got his hands on the electrodes when you're running a touch or a Havingness Process.

See, very often on most – on lots of these processes, pc doesn’t have his hands on it. Now, look. If a pc gets a lot of tone arm motion in the rudiments – and that's not a very good statement, because there's not much of the rudiments contain – the beginning rudiments contain the MEST universe, see.

But if you were to get lots of tone arm action in the rudiments and damn little tone arm action in the body of session, you know at once that the pc never does your auditing command. Look at it. Isn't that self-evident?

You say, “Look at the wall. Look at the ceiling. Look at the floor.

Look at the wall. Look at the ceiling. Look at the floor.

Look at the E-Meter. Look at the beam. Look at the floor.

Look at the mike.” And he's sitting there holding the cans, and this thing starts going brr-brr-brr, and the tone arm starts going all over the place, and then you're going to move into the body of the session. You're going to start up this 155-horsepower diesel tractor called a Problems Intensive, and you're going to get an eighth of a division motion? Now, look, I'm just appealing to your common sense.

This pc is capable of tone arm motion. You have proved it. You said, “Look at the ceiling, look at the floor and look at the walls and look at the room and look at me and look at you and. . . “ There you are, see.

And you got tone arm action. THE DIFFICULT CASE 12  You talked about his environment and asked him if he had any problems and you started getting tone arm action. Of course, that's starting to get a little subjective.

Not really as valid a test, don't you see. But he's looking straight at you, and you say, “Since the last time I audited you, have you done anything you are withholdine. “ He's looking at you, and he's talking about present time. Now, listen.

Such people have a span that goes back very shortly into the past. The past starts closing in on these people awful soon, back from present time, don't you see? And their span of reality on what's going on in the world ceases maybe five minutes ago in extreme cases, two days ago, five days ago.

See, in back of that there's no real reality. So you ask him in the rudiments about the realest area of their lives which is very close to present time. You know, “Since the last time I audited you, yesterday.” You're going to get tone arm action.

And, brother, if you don't get as much tone arm action auditing the pc in the body of the session as you do in running the rudiments, please realize that we would be clearing people with the rudiments, see, if this were true. We'd never do a body of a session. We'd only do rudiments.

You follow that reasoning? Because tone arm action mirrors directly and immediately the amount of change which is being secured on the pc. That is your direct index of how much this bank is changing and shifting, is that tone arm.

Now, when that tone arm is going up and that tone arm is going down and that tone arm is going back and forth, you know you're getting change. And when that tone arm isn't doing anything, you know you're not getting change. So we start running the rudiments.

We get into the Havingness Process at the beginning of the rudiments – where it isn't anymore. Do something. We all of a sudden notice, as we're starting to break this case down and straighten this case out, we run a rudiments and havingness session.

Now, you start going in for a goal finders Model Session and the listing of items on this case – well, you could do a lot for the case that way – but you've immediately lost all your indicators for the case. You start doing a Problems Intensive without ever finding his Havingness Process or anything like that, you're never going to know any of this about the case, are you? It's going to evaporate.

So, you want to find out what this case is going to do? You want to find out what kind of a case you're dealing with? Find out how much tone arm action is produced by a process which has to do with near present time and the immediate environment.

And when that gives a tremendous amount of tone arm action, you've actually got somebody who is drifting far away, because the case that had good reality on the bank, was in control of the bank, would not get that much tone arm action on the present time. You see? Do you realize what tone arm action means?

If you get tone arm action on a  THE DIFFICULT CASE 13  Havingness Process, a lot of tone arm action on the right Havingness Process or any contact process or any CCH – if you're getting tone arm action – do you realize that he is actually becoming aware of the walls of the room. Oh, we're not kidding when we say “what wall?” See, this case is really faded out. It isn't bank mass that's causing the tone arm action to go.

It's the increasing mass of the walls of the room. Must be. That's all you're having him look at.

Now, of course, we know very well it'll move bank. But look, look, if we have him start looking at the wall and looking at the floor and looking at the ceiling, and so forth, and we all of a sudden see this tone arm go up here to 4.9 and then break down to about 3.5, and then start up again to 4.5, what's shifting it? His concept of mass is being shifted by confronting the environment in which he finds himself.

Well, he sure is in no shape to be audited because where is he going to audit from, to? You're auditing a case who does not have the stability of present time to audit against. So any address to the track throws him in total confusion and he can't answer your auditing commands.

He has no point of reference. Cases are audited against the point of reference of present time. Oddly enough, the memory of eight million years ago totally depends on knowing it was eight million years ago from where?

From where? How come we say eight million years ago? Now, this guy who is stuck in the electronic which occurred three million years ago and is still in it, will get tone arm action when you get him to look at the environment in his immediate vicinity.

Otherwise, he will run a Problems Intensive from a point three million years ago, which is a nonstable point. So you're running a confusion against an instability. And two confusions never made a stability, man.

So, of course, he really doesn't know how to answer your auditing command. You say, “Recall a time you communicated.” All right. Recall a time he communicated.

Well, if the time he communicated is up the track from where he is, how can he recall it because it hasn't happened yet. So, therefore, he knows he can't do that auditing command, so he does one that he can. And he says to himself, “Well, the auditor just communicated to me.

He said so. So, therefore, I will recall the auditor saying something to me.” So he does that a couple of times. He's heard of mock-ups, you see, and he decides that he'd better use this auditing session for something – there's no reason to let this auditing session go to waste.

And so the best thing to do is to mock up his psychoanalyst alongside the auditor so as to match the terminals, and if he holds this psychoanalyst very carefully up alongside of the auditor during the auditing session, then he knows he'll have gotten something done. So he trains himself up to say “Mm-hm.” Every time he says he has answered the auditing question, he says, “Mm-hm.” Or he says some irrelevant object or something of this sort while he is holding this  THE DIFFICULT CASE 14  thing. You'll find some guy sometime or another who's holding the two back corners of the room.

That's what he's doing in the auditing session. He doesn't want to waste the auditor's time so he holds the two back corners of the room during the auditing session. He's not doing the auditing command.

And as far as I am concerned, tone arm action on the rudiments and present environment of the pc is the only indicator I know of that uniformly isolates this case for anybody. That isolates it for anybody. You can tell if your TA is moving against the environment.

Now, it becomes very important, then, to prepare a case. And although it's all very fine to have this case come in and sit down and you find some items and the case straightens up like mad, and everything then goes along swindiferously, and all that; you're kind of trying to plow ground with a Cadillac, you know. And the funny part of it is the Cadillac won't do it.

You get a Cadillac out amongst the plowed furrows and I don't care how much horsepower it's got or how many cigarette lighters, it's not going to pull a plow. It's going to bust its springs and it's going to knock off its exhaust pipes. It's going to do something weird.

Ah, you're just using the wrong vehicle. Now, basically this gives you an answer on the sub act of clearing. j Hardly anybody hears me on this or pays much attention on this, but a case that is wildly out of present time seldom answers the auditing command or executes it. And auditing depends exclusively on getting the auditing command executed.

Unless the auditing cycle of action occurs every time the auditor opens his face in a session, you will find the whole thing starts stacking up. If the auditor is saying, to a person with a hearing aid shut off, commands, he knows they're not going to be answered. But how many other of his pcs is he saying commands to who never executes them?

Well, the answer is not to harass the pc. The answer is to run objective-type processes, put in rudiments, do things, and watch that tone arm because if that tone arm is moving well – three cheers. It's moving well.

Well, all right, let's move it well, huh? Let's just keep on doing some more of the same. Let's get the motion out of that thing.

And when the motion comes out of that thing, then you'll get motion in the body of a session. But your body-of-session processes, when they demand a subjective reaction only on the part of the pc, may have missing present time – that area against which the pc must relate everything. And if present time is missing, why, the pc is not going to get very far.

Also, he won't – really won't be able to answer or execute the auditing cycle. Now, your trouble is the same trouble with a pc that you've had for a long time; that is  THE DIFFICULT CASE 15  you don't recognize your auditing cycle is not occurring. But there is a positive test.

Now, I've scraped the bottom of the barrel looking for a test as idiotically simple as this that requires no equipment of any kind whatsoever, and you'll find out that the gradient scale of toughness of cases is directly proportional to the amount of action they get on the tone arm using present time or near present time addresses. You know, like, “Do you have a present time problem? Anybody in your environment you're worried about?” That sort of thing.

You're getting tone arm action, man. Huh! See, it's the old-time beginning-rud type of approach and you're getting tone arm action.

That's a direct index. The case is as tough as he gets tone arm action on present time or the environment. Simple, isn't it?

Audience: Yes. Now, if you want to get a good subjective reality on this, take somebody with whom you have had an awful wrestling match with 3GA Criss Cross and run him on some idiotic Havingness Process and watch the tone arm. Get in their PT – get their PTPs off for the last couple of sessions, see.

Watch hat tone arm. You're going to see that thing move. Now, if you want all cases, then, to be easy, then you will audit only cases which have had all tone arm action taken out of the present time environment.

And then, of course, all cases would audit easily with 3GA Criss Cross. Now, why does one girl sit down – rough shape – get a standard Problems Intensive, go down to 2.0 with a free needle on all buttons; and another character come along and sit down in the chair and all buttons are run, winds up at the end of seventy-five hours and very far from totally straightened out? What's the difference?

Well, one of those auditors was getting a cycle of action – the auditing cycle of action was occurring – and the other auditor was not getting the auditing cycle of action. And therefore, that other auditor should have done something. I don't care what!

He's got the CCHs and everybody thinks they're supposed to wind-up-doll and go through the CCHs. All I want you to do is understand what you're trying to do. Not go through some motions.

Understand what you're trying to do. You're trying to call his attention to the workaday world in which he lives; call his attention to the walls of the room in which he's being audited. I don't care how you do that.

You do that, you run the tone arm action out of that, the guy's sufficiently in present time to get the auditing command. You've got to get a pc there before you can audit him. And in most cases you're neglecting that elementary step.

The auditing cycle cannot occur in the absence of a pc. It just can't. That sound reasonable?

Audience: Yes. Well, it's very true and that actually has practically everything there is about the relative toughness or hardness of cases. Because basically what have we done?

We've gone  THE DIFFICULT CASE 16  over the top of the toughness or the hardness of the case. The techniques will take care of it. But the cases which you have trouble with are the cases which, of course, the auditing cycle isn't being completed on.

There's something wild going on here of some kind or another. I can tell you dozens of ways to enter cases and get rock slams and to do this and to do that. But when you ask, “Who or what would feather a nest?” have you any guarantee that you get a list that has to do with feathering the nest?

Or do you just get an automatic shuffleboard? Have anything to do with the case at all? Well, let me tell you, if you have to do that too often and too long, then those lists don't have very much to do with the case.

If you've gone on and on and on and on and on and on and on and you're not even in a vague reaching distance of it, recognize the condition of the pc before you began – what it must have been. Yes, you've improved it. Yes, you've listed lists and you've improved it.

But you're actually doing it the hard way. The easy way to do it is clean up PT, you know. The easy way to clean up PT would be a Problems Intensive with a terrific amount of present time contact.

You know, lots of rudiments of one kind or another. Lots of Havingness. Give them things that are very easy to answer.

You'll find out the problem assessed is probably day before yesterday if you really did a good job of assessment on it. And run it, and all of a sudden, present time-needle moves like mad, and the pc moves into present time. Life looks much more this and that.

And then the pc's there and you can audit the pc and you can run the rest of it. That is the basic analysis behind what is wrong with a case that doesn't move fast. It isn't the relative toughness of the items.

They're all tough. Why make a distinction? They're all stinkers.

Why make a distinction? All the somatics are horrible. Why make a distinction?

Sen is ghastly. Why say some sen less than others? But you start plowing a guy in when he'd get tone arm action on present time, pushing him on down the track, shoving him into hot masses of one kind or another, pushing him around one way or the other, man, you're going to get sen like you never heard of.

It's all sen, because you just move him two days ago, and it's so unreal that everything gives him sensation. Of course, he's got sensation. He's in the middle of a confusion because he has no referral point called present time.

And having no referral point called present time, how do you expect him to be anywhere but in a confusion. And that is the basic thing that sen is: the pc in the confusion. At least give him present time for that.

And then you can run him. Has any of this made any sense to you? Audience: Yes.

Good enough. Thank you.

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