Opening Procedure 8-C (7ACC 540623)
Series: 7th Advanced Clinical Course (7ACC)
Date: 23 June 1954
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
I'd like to give you now a few uses for Opening Procedure. Opening Procedure—you needn't bother your notebooks, this isn't important. [laughter] The few uses of Opening Procedure consist of this: The handling of children is assisted by Opening Procedure. The handling of businesses in general are assisted by the use of Opening Procedure. The handling of preclears are assisted by the use of Opening Procedure. The handling of personnel in general is assisted by the use of Opening Procedure.
The understanding of the character of an individual is enormously assisted by the use of Opening Procedure. The IQ of a person can be measured by Opening Procedure, what he likes for dinner and why he had to marry the girl can all be used by Opening Procedure and measured competently. It's not particularly limited. You can do anything with Opening Procedure you want to do.
I want to tell you a little story right now. Generally, most anything I'm talking about in one of these Units is present time. We could always talk about the past if we ever had any time to talk about the past. But the past is awfully lived-over, you know? And as a result, why, we don't have too much time to talk about it. So what I generally tell you is currently what is taking place or what's happening or what people are doing.
And yesterday a young lady whose name I do not yet know, since she was unable to recall it, walked into the office and just after the staff meeting from 4:30 to 6:30 yesterday afternoon or something on that order, pounced on me—had to see me as an emergency.
She knew it was an emergency, but believe me, that's all she knew. Rather good-looking young girl. No wild look in her eye, nothing peculiar, nothing strange, nothing odd about this character.
She could have walked down the street and some of the boys would have whistled at her. This is routine. Good-looking, she could have probably walked into a business office and if she hadn't talked too much, probably could have applied for a job, probably could have gotten one. Who knows.
Nobody in the outer office (and they are accustomed to this sort of thing) recognized that anything was unusual in taking place. They figured out, well, maybe it's somebody in the Phoenix group or something like that, and somebody is dying or something in a hospital and this person has a message about it.
Hah-hah! This person was strictly "What universe? What fog? What wall? What phrase?" Just as psycho as they come.
"What is your name?"
"Name? Name? Well, I don't—I just have to see you. I am worried."
Well, at least to this degree this person was not psycho. See? Just on that one point. And, "Where have you been," so forth?
She named off an auditor or two here and there that she'd vaguely heard of and had their locations all scrambled. These auditors—none of them that I know of are in Guatemala. She was what's known as a disassociating psychotic. Disassociating. When they disassociate, that's really something. You know, they connect nothing with anything and no two objects in the room fitted in the same environment. See that? What we would call a multivalent person: several people operating, apparently, in the same person. Who is causing her to sit there? Who is sitting there? What room is this?
"No, no room."
Hmm! It's interesting to have loaded on you at 6:35, just after you've talked to people as hard to get along with as the HASI staff. [laughter] But obviously something had to be done, since one never quite knows what such a person is going to do. And if the person had had enough sense at least to walk up those steps, why, possibly something else could happen.
Well, what do you know? The person responded to "remembering something real." She was stuck—under the many places she was stuck—at sixteen, being assaulted sexually. Only she had it down as a quiet little incident, but she knew it was terrible. But she never quite added up what the incident was because she never could be sure who it was. And I got her to remember something real about the person. She remembered that he wore glasses. This was a perfectly real fact.
Now, this is a strange thing, isn't it? As a case entrance to find a person that much out of contact and yet sliding them into contact that way, after a little cross talk with them.
The reason why is because she put her chin on her palm, like this, and was sitting there. So I put my chin on my palm, like this, and sat there. She reached back and stretched; I reached back and stretched. And she was in communication.
See? Then she knew she could talk to me. Mimicry. Slid right into communication and immediately responded to "Can you remember anything that is real to you?" by saying, "Well, let's see. There is a box, I think, sitting there on your desk and it must have been there when I came in. So therefore I must be able to remember that it was there. [sigh]" Big relief. Big, big release of affect. She felt happy about it, she smiled, she kind of relaxed. The next thing you know, "Now, let's tell me something about your past or something of the sort or your present time problems."
And she said, well, all of a sudden it occurred to her something had happened to her at sixteen. She wasn't sure what happened to her when she was sixteen. She wasn't sure. Must have had something to do with cars because cars frightened her. She wasn't sure who else was present. A man was present.
"Well, what sort of a fellow was he?" No recall.
"Give me some recollection of anything about him whatsoever." "He wore glasses. [sigh]"
See? Big, big sigh. Terrific. I mean, you wouldn't for a moment look to find a question running next-to-the-last list, shooting this far from a mark and producing relief on a preclear. Was.
We finally found out she was sitting on the driver's side. Why did I pick this? Well, that was where she was. She wasn't in the room. So I at least got her out of the incident she was sitting in. By directing her attention to the incident? No, no. Just asking her to remember something real.
And it finally comes up that she was sitting on the passenger side of the car in the front seat. And the car was stopped, it was not in motion. And having remembered this, she slid out of the incident.
That was enough, you see. We had really contacted something real. Well, that was the realest thing there. The room wasn't real or anything else was real. And right away, quick like a bunny, I grabbed her, you might say, by the nape of the neck and threw her into 8-C, Step (a) of Opening Procedure. Just like that.
Because I'd already said, "Is there anything in this room that is real to you," and gotten "No." So I just indicated things. She walked over, she touched them, she let go of them. She walked over to them, she touched them, she let go of them. She walked over, she touched them, let go of them. All of a sudden she began to hallucinate, got very vague, got quite upset, got a little bit sick at her stomach, touched them, let them go, hallucinated some more, thought she was someplace else, wasn't sure. All of a sudden remembered that she had been audited once, but not very long, by somebody somewhere. Reached over, walked over, touched something else, let go of that and got over her sickness and all of a sudden line-charged.
She couldn't be sure whether or not she was letting things come or go or what she was doing or whether she was walking around. But she had an idea that she was in another environment than she had been in previously. That was the end of session. That was the goal of the session.
She is not here yet, you see. I mean, she's in another environment than she had been in. And although all environments were dangerous, this environment was not as dangerous as the one she had been in. That was more or less her conclusion, but the funny part of it is, she was not disassociating. She was still not in a condition where she could, however, tell her name. Okay.
I told her to come in at 10:30, so I think she came in at 8:30 and then went out again and came in several times, making sure that somewhere on the random time track she would somehow or other hit 10:30.
Well, she got there at 10:45, which was pretty close, came in and this time was not diving around but was talking. And she was associating, she was not talking about anything sensible, but what she was talking about was at least connected to the situation she was in. All right. What did I do with her? Gave her Opening Procedure 8-C, Step (b). I let her pick out the places. Well, this was quite interesting. And she did that for quite a little while, but you have to be careful with these people because their attention span is terrible. Their attention span falls very markedly, very rapidly. They start dispersing rather quickly. And you ask them to do anything over too long a period of time during one session and they go into a terrific exhaustion.
Opening Procedure by Duplication, you see, would just be far, far too tough for such a case. Because Step (b) of 8-C was real tough.
"Let's see. A place... a place in this room, see. They're all dangerous." That kind of an attitude, you know. Then she finally got so she very rapidly would select places.
And I'd keep badgering her. I badgered her, too. I just would "Well, who's selecting that?" Well, she wasn't sure. And she wasn't sure who was selecting it and then finally she decided she was. And by the time she decided that she was doing the selection—even though it wasn't quite certain whether or not she was doing the selection, she decided that chances were pretty good that she was selecting those things—we went right on up into very advanced and violent procedures: Step (c), SOP 8-C. Opening Procedure.
Now, an auditor could have been sitting there. He could have looked at this case. He could have seen engrams to run. He could have seen secondaries to run, situations to size up. He could have seen more darned bric-a-brac and phenomena lying there right on the surface that he could have grabbed, put his hands on and done something with.
Well, that's why he's an auditor: because he can see these things. And I'll tell you why else he would be a good auditor: if, having seen them, he didn't then immediately suppose that the preclear was capable of seeing them. The preclear is not capable of seeing these things. You see that in fairly normal people.
Fellow says, "You know, I'm the calmest person you ever saw."
He'll tell you that very factually. You're standing there looking at a terrific tic of some sort or another and yet this person is telling you how calm he is. He doesn't notice that he has a tic. It's obvious to you.
Well, just that way all phenomena, all phenomena of any kind can be obvious to an auditor, but it can't be run on the preclear. It's too tough in most cases.
You could get it somewhere along the line, but we have to do what the preclear can do. And that is usually something very simple and very elementary and there it makes an auditor very impatient.
There is the preclear lying there like a carpet, see, all this phenomena just rolled to view. Why, there's nothing occluded or strange or peculiar about this preclear. Look at that communication lag. Every time this person thinks or says anything about Mama, he nods to a space right in front of him.
Well, Mama is standing right there. Mama is another person in the room not even vaguely distant. This person's mock-ups, by the way, were so solid . I did something I shouldn't have done. When she got sick—I made a mistake, when she got sick at her stomach (it wasn't much of a mistake), but when she got sick at her stomach in spotting objects, so on, I wondered whether or not she could remedy havingness. Just wondered, you know, whether she could get a mock-up. So I just asked her to get one mock-up. She mocked-up a curtain. She actually did stuff it into her body. And I said, "Well, that's interesting. She can remedy havingness."
Well, sometimes you can do just a few mock-ups of this character and something remarkable happens to the individual. Because I was afraid the preclear would go on being sick at her stomach, you see, and we wouldn't get over this.
The fastest way to get over it would be remedying havingness. Well, so I went just a little bit further out than I should have gone, although by this time she had become very competent with (b) of Opening Procedure in 8-C, you see. That's Step (b), very competent by then. Asked her to make this duplicate of the curtain. She did, she did stuff it into her body. So I asked her to make a duplicate of a solid object which was in the room and shove that into her body.
And she says, "I can't because every time I try to push it in, the metal rim cuts me."
Hmm-hm-hm, so I says, "Well, that's fine, Now, duplicate its cutting you a couple of times." Did that. And we just forgot about mock-ups. We just forgot about that completely because her mock-ups were much more solid than the actual environment!
If anybody had asked her to put up a couple of anchor points, she would have hung up a couple of cast-iron pyramids. Well, this was the state of the case.
I strayed from that just for a moment, wondering if I could advance the case more rapidly. If I could have, that would have been fine, you see.
Well, then I got her to Step (c) of Opening Procedure. That was this morning, about an hour's auditing there this morning, little less than that. And I got her to that (c) level. And had her deciding when to touch and when to let go. And boy, after she had let go, she would sit there and she would think it over. "Now, did I decide to let go or didn't I?"
And then she'd try it again and decide again.
"Now, let's see. Did I do that or didn't I?"
So I gave her a few pieces of paper. I just handed her some pieces of paper and (just non sequitur to anything else) and told her to throw them away. You know, just changing her attention span for a moment, because we'd done this Step (c) quite a while. I just handed her these pieces of paper and told her to throw them away. She wadded them up, she threw them away all right.
And I said, trying to encourage her, "Well, who threw them away?"
"Let's see. [sigh] Who threw them away?"
Question going in, see.
"My arm. My arm threw them away."
Satisfactory answer to her. She had located the actual propulsive mechanism as to what had discharged this wad of paper, see. And then we just went on, just mostly because she was getting a little bit weary, a little bit groggy and I didn't want to blow this case all over the walls, you see, by keeping up a repetitive system too long, because this case was psycho, see. Opening Procedure by Duplication was way, way, way too tough for this case, see. And therefore we do a little variation with Opening Procedure of 8-C so that we don't make it into a very duplicative procedure.
We do the same things every time, but they're in different location. They're different objects and occasionally we talk about something else, you see, just to keep the case from breaking down on this approach to duplication. All right.
And what did she do? She suddenly decided that she was letting go. She was letting go. She was the one who was letting go of the knob of the door and so forth. And she all of a sudden got quite certain of this, but she'd get uncertain of it a little bit afterwards. But she'd get quite certain at the moment she was letting go that she had let go and she was the one who was having herself let go.
Well, this was quite important to her. She line-charged. So I said, "Well, find the floor." You know, just to get her into a little more contact with present time before we ended the session.
"Uuuh! No."
I said, "Well, stamp on it."
"Oh, I can't do that! [sigh]"
You would say to yourself that you had made a mistake at this time. The case was all right, doing fine, and then all of a sudden you had butted in and dislocated everything.
What did I ask her to do? One of the most routine commands that you possibly could ask anybody to end a session with, which is "Find the floor beneath your feet." And this was way above the case's level of ability to do. Give you some kind of an idea of this case.
All right. She found the floor by discovering something hard was underneath her feet.
She couldn't decide it was the floor, but then when she stamped on it, she suddenly said,
"There's something you have to say when you stamp your foot."
And I said, "Well, say 'I hate you' and stamp your foot a few times."
So she did this two or three times and her papa, who was a big, black bat who usually hangs around in the corner of the rooms, came down and wrapped himself all around her head—naturally.
But I said, "Well now, stamp your foot and say 'I hate you' a few more times and find out if it happens again or if you get killed or anything dramatic occurs."
And so she did and no more black bats flew down and this was quite a relief to her. And she said there was just that one.
And I said, "Well now, reach around your head and find out if a black bat is wrapped around your head."
And you know, darn it, she found out there wasn't. At that moment she line-charged considerably. She line-charged.
She walked around, she felt more natural, the strained look was gone out of her eye. And now she was talking sequitur. She was no longer disassociating and she did know her name. And she knew pretty well what the score was and she felt pretty good about it.
There's another step that I made her do. I made her walk across the room several times from corner to corner and notice that nobody stopped her. A variation, another little variation thrown in, not because of its therapeutic level but to keep from handing her duplication on Step (c), Opening Procedure.
You see, you can tell a person that a few times and they're duplicating. And this person mustn't duplicate or they just blow their lid off. So let's go into it easily.
So I asked her to walk across the floor a few times and find out if anybody stopped her. That was about all we did. Didn't and we went back to Step (c) again. In other words, I did Step (c)—several little breaks, something like hand her a few pieces of paper, make her walk back and forth across the floor and so on.
Well anyway, I closed the session and she was standing much straighter and she was talking straight. And she'd come in there that morning a psychotic and she walked out the door a neurotic. She's merely neurotic. I mean, she's all right. Nothing is going to happen to her.
But I'll probably audit her again tomorrow. And tomorrow I will be very, very original and I will give her just exactly, you know, good, heavy, solid techniques. I don't know, probably run birth or something like that, something that you would expect to do on her. No, I'm afraid what I will do is a process to get her exteriorized (she can't exteriorize otherwise, I found that out right away), which is not a process you would use on a psycho but which is a little side—you wouldn't necessarily use this on a psycho or not on a psycho. Psycho has nothing to do with it.
The process would have to do with this: You would take Part (c) of Opening Procedure of 8-C—you know, make your decision when to let go—and you have them hold on to parts of their body and decide when to let go with their hands. Hold on to parts of their body and decide to let go. It's a group technique, by the way, and it usually results, in an hour or two, in very thorough exteriorization.
So I'm going to blow her out of her head just by using this particular process. That's one of the very many processes, but is a more simple process than is ordinarily employed. That's a very, very simple, elementary process.
Actually, it's exteriorization coupled with SOP 8-C's Opening Procedure, third step, see? It's Step (c). You see how that would work? You ask a person to hold on to a part of his body. "Locate a part of your body. Okay. Hold on to it. Now, decide when you are going to let go and let go. Okay. Did you let go? Did you decide when?"
"Well, I don't know whether I did or not."
"All right. Find another part of your body," see. "Hold on to it. Now, decide when you're going to let go and let go." "Ha-phavhhh. "
Quite common.
And a person who's not exteriorized, of course, is a person who is being asked to let go and can't let go, obviously. That's why they don't exteriorize.
They're holding on to their head, holding on inside the head, of course. That's why (c) is so darned effective as a process. Now, very few auditors ever run this (c) for blood—I mean, SOP 8-C, the third—which is to say, Part (c) of its Opening Procedure. Very few auditors ever run it for blood.
So I told the last Unit that this they ought to do. I didn't even tell them. I just mentioned it in passing, that hardly anybody did this for real keeps. And they took one of the staff auditors (if I got this story straight afterwards, which I might not have) and they had him prying his fingers loose from objects to crack up his letting-go machinery.
You see, everybody has automatic machines which let him let go, but they very seldom have automatic machines that make them grab something. It's the letting-go machinery that becomes automatic.
That's promoted, you see. That's emphasized by stoves. You touch a stove, you count on the heat driving your hand away from the stove rather than making a decision to do it. You think you can do it faster if you let the stove tell you when to let go, you see. So you'd have this tremendous amount of automatic letting-go machinery.
Well now, a person who has too much of this automatic letting-go machinery can't exteriorize. Whatever you say about exteriorization, however its mechanics fit together, that's about the most elementary statement that could be made about it.
He can't escape, I guess would be the earliest, lowest level. But somewhere along there, he has beams on his head and masses of energy on the body and he's grabbing hold of the body in various directions. Now, he took hold of this body sometime in the past and evidently didn't let go. So let's just drill him back to a point of where he'll let go. That's an elementary process.
If somebody really gives you a bad time with exteriorization, why, just run letting go of the environment and letting go of the body and, you know, vary it. Walk them around and have them make up their mind when they're going to hold on to something and then when they're going to let go of it, and do it; and when they're going to hold on to it and when they're going to let go of it and when they're going to hold on to it. And they hold on. When they're going to let go of it and they make up their mind when they're going to let go and they let go. Then they grab hold of the body, hold on to it. "All right." "Make up your mind when you're going to let go." "Now, make up your mind when you're going to hold on to the body—find a spot in the body, make up your mind when you're going to hold on to it." "All right." "Grab it." "Okay." "Whatever you say. Got it. Okay." "Now, you make up your mind when you're going to let go and then let go." And the guy does, you see.
Same thing on the body as the environment. And you're running "Spot three spots in the body," "Spot three spots in the room." "Spot three spots in the body," "Three spots in the room." "Three spots in the body," "Three spots in the room." Only at this level, you're exercising the automatic machinery that goes on and keeps the thetan pinned down in the body. This is elementary.
You can see how this would be. Well, that's what I'm going to run on her tomorrow morning and blow her out of her head, one way or the other. Of course, it's quite common for a psycho to waiver a bit for a few days until they stabilize.
But she was really in pretty good shape at the time she left. And she will probably, undoubtedly be in good shape, much better shape, really. It's not a question of whether or not she'll hold this level as to whether or not she will hold it or improve it.
And she'll probably be in better shape. And if she's in real good shape, that's about all I'm going to do to her. "Find places in the room." "All right." "Now, go over and make up your mind when you're going to hold on to them. Do so when you make up your mind to." "All right." "Make up your mind when you're going to let go." "Okay." "Let go when you make up your mind to." "Okay." "Now find something else. Make up your mind when you're going to hold on to that." "Okay." "Now make up your mind when you're going to let go of it." "Okay." And back and forth. "Now find a part of your body.
Now make up your mind when you're going to hold on to that and hold on." "Okay." "Now make up your mind when you're going to let go and let go."
Back and forth. The auditor sitting back, watching this for a while can sort of watch the tubes and rheostats and so forth in a lot of this automatic machinery, exploding with faint pops and leaving debris around on the floor, because it's an interesting process.
Well anyway, by using the most elementary procedures, by using these very elementary procedures on cases and completely ignoring the fact that we see this phenomena but find no reason whatsoever to audit it—see, we don't audit this phenomena. We see it, we understand the case, we know what's wrong with this case, we know which way it could go. It'd be very senseless of us either to point this out to the case or try to run the case on such a thing as Mama's universe.
Let's supposing now I'd made a terrific blunder on this case and a case had walked in—this would have been an awful blunder—case had walked in, I'd immediately recognized
that her mama had used her as a puppet and I had suddenly said, "Well, the thing to do with this case, of course, is 8-D. Here we go."
Not talked to her, found out anything about her. Would have spotted three spots in space, she would have been violently sick at her stomach and vomiting. If she'd gotten over that, she wouldn't have been able to exteriorize. She was stuck in her head. She couldn't have duplicated anything because the duplicates would have frightened her to death. She couldn't have held on to the two back points of the room, they're too dangerous. She couldn't have found places where she's not because she's everyplace, of course.
There would've been all those consecutive failures and then we would have said, "Give me some places where your mother is safe." This is 8-D. "Give me some places where your mother is safe."
"Mother. Boo-hoo-hoo." Release of affect. Oh, yeah? You mean just a nervous breakdown.
That would have been the end of that case and we could have gone on to the next preclear. When in doubt, talk to the preclear. If you're still in doubt, 8-C, its three parts, Opening Procedure.
Okay.
CERTIFICATES OF DIANETICS AND SCIENTOLOGY
OPENING PROCEDURE 8-C PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT 9 7ACC-01 - 23.06.54