Present Time, Self Analysis (3ACC 540115)
Series: 3rd Advanced Clinical Course (3ACC)
Date: 15 January 1954
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
A lecture given by L. Ron Hubbard on the 15 January 1954
And this is January the 15th, 1954.
There are several things which you have probably caught up with, by this time, in terms of communication and experience and havingness and time and so forth. And if you haven't caught up with them, you still have your written form of SOP 8-C, you still have your codified rote processes – just Six Steps to Better Beingness, Short 8. Short 8 is not anywhere near the process that Six Steps to Better Beingness is, by the way. And in addition to that you have, of course, as always, Creative Processing and Self Analysis.
When all else fails, why, pick up a copy of Self Analysis and you'll find the fellow will come out of his slump. That's an interesting fact, isn't it? Because it's a slow process, nobody really pays as much attention to Self Analysis as he might. This is an interesting thing that the amount of actual relief and power could be in a little book like that and have as little attention paid to it by an auditor.
An auditor is always thinking there is something very, very much better, there is something very much faster and this is very true, there is. But in terms of patching somebody up so he really feels like he is something, why, you have a very, very good weapon in Self Analysis.
All right. You've got a preclear who is pretty rocky. And his rockiness is to a large degree – well, it rather escapes your immediate ability to grab on to. You know, you – hold the two back anchor points of the room – he can't concentrate that much, he feels bad, his reality is poor, he doesn't know what he can do or what he can't do. He's not in good shape. All right.
You want to do a fast patch-up job on this person, you know, you want him to feel better, you haven't got much time to invest on this, let's say, you're not going to go all the way out and so on or you're just simply balked. None of the other things which you know seem to function with you. Incredible as that may seem, a fellow can sometimes get a case sufficiently parallel to his own cross-up or something like that that he just doesn't seem to be able to make any progress with this case.
Well, you know whether you're making progress with a case or not after you've audited it half an hour. Your time look is awfully long right now, by the way, it's terribly long. You're evidently measuring auditing in terms of fives of hours or tens of hours. And when you can start measuring auditing in tens of minutes, you will start getting yourself some terrific results. Because you will be willing to shift what you're doing rapidly enough to meet up with what's working on the preclear.
In other words, if you don't get a communication change in a couple of minutes, a perception change in a couple of minutes, you're just not on the right track, that's all. Well, you just better drop down later into the process or you better do something else.
But getting back to Self Analysis, once in a while you've audited somebody for a half an hour or forty-five minutes and you're getting no perception change. Well by golly, there's one way to make that fellow feel better. And whereby he may not say he's had it or something of the sort, you just reach back and pick up a copy of Self Analysis, open it up at random, see what he does with these mock-ups. He says he can't get them. He can get the idea of them, but he can't get them otherwise.
And you say "Well, okay." And you turn over to the next-to-the-last list of the book and you read that or you read any of the back lists of the book for that matter and rephrase that next-to-the-last list, you know?
Instead of saying, "A time when somebody was in good communication with you?" ask the fellow sometime, "How about a time somebody was talking to you and you knew what he said?" Some good communication. And this is just evading him, well, just find out "When was somebody talking to you and you knew what he said?" "Well, what did he say?" You just go over that a few times, give him a few mock-ups. And this person will not immediately grow an aurora borealis, but he'll feel good. He'll be able to function. Remember that, he'll be able to function.
Now, there isn't an auditor along the line in America who I know, who is using Self Analysis for what it is, which is his security on a case. And that's not true, however, in Great Britain. The boys know what that book can do over there and they use it quite uniformly and they get very excellent results with it.
Now, I think the main reason for this is the desire for the spectacular, probably, in case recovery. You know, as a case drifts south on the Tone Scale, you're getting, for every tone down, a much longer recovery period. See, you get that? I mean, it's a compounding inversion. You know, as you go up, why, things are wider and wider apart and more and more differentiated, but as they are more and more identified, yeah, there are actually longer and longer time periods involved in the recovery.
Let's take somebody who is a real screaming psychotic, I mean, a real screamer. And we worked with him real hard for a day, two days, something like that, and we've got him up to a point where he's neurotic, see? But that's with the most modern techniques, the best use possible of the most modern techniques. Day, two days, three days, we've got a neurotic case after we've finished up to that level, you see? It took a long jump, that's a long jump.
Now, we go up through this neurotic band and that's quite a jump too. It's nowhere near as long as a psychotic jump. But now we go up from neurotic into the milder ones and we get fast jumps. There, with the most modern things we're doing, the jumps are pretty fast.
Well, now let's compare this, actually, with what we were doing a year or so ago. And honest, that psychotic jump could be months long. Now, I'm talking right straight out of the record book, now, of what auditors have been doing – understanding it or not understanding it with the material to hand – and they have occupied months on one psychotic. The least paying proposition I know of. That isn't why I say "the dickens with the psychotics," it's the fact that if you start paying attention to the lowest band of the society and validating it, why, you're just helping the society cave in. Let's think about the Third Dynamic. All right.
SOP 8-C, for instance, four weeks ago, was applied by a real good auditor, very good auditor, applied just as it sits there, no other way – no sudden spurts of intuition or anything of the sort – on a woman who was a real screamer. You know, I mean, it was strictly "What fog?" and a real screamer. And three days later, this woman was in excellent condition and a Theta Clear, They exteriorize very well – very stable, very sane and very happy about existence.
Now, that went from Opening Procedure just done down the line and it actually took this auditor about three days to wade through the whole works. And she didn't exteriorize immediately, he had to do quite a bit of patch-up before he could get her to exteriorize. Well anyway…
There, however, was the most optimum use of the most optimum technique by one of the best auditors we've got. That's awful fast. This same auditor has had some comparable results. Another report which I have as of about three weeks ago, a five-day period was required on a man who was also strictly a screamer, as we used to say in Dianetics. You know, you run them into an engram, they start screaming, Boy, do they scream. The power of a human voice. I've heard them three, four blocks away and have had complaints from two blocks away. And here again, about five days. Now, this auditor wasn't quite as good as the other auditor, that was one of the differences there.
But we can't actually count on this happening, psychotic after psychotic. Right at this moment I can't tell you with any great assurance that we can simply take psychotics and in three days or five days, if we were well trained, turn them out. Well, I think we could if we were talking in terms of a couple of weeks or three weeks.
Well let's, however, look at this three-day problem and find out that it took about one and three-quarters days or something like that to bring the person out of the psychotic level into a neurotic level. And then she started going on up and she spent probably something on – this is just estimations of the time required – probably half a day in the neurotic level. And then she went the rest of the way she was going on the rest of the band.
You see that time lag, how it also enters auditing time lag.
All right. I'll give you a case I did a few weeks ago. And I spent two days on this case and I do not know at this moment, really, tell you the honest truth of the matter, I don't know whether this person is going to, as a GE, pull it or not because the case was all but gone. That's one of these cases where you actually almost fish them out of the coffin. And how this person had the nerve to walk into my office – just nerve to walk, I don't know. And well, for me to suddenly take a bite on that one – just that sudden and swift – pretty rough.
Well, the first auditing period was four hours and the second auditing period was five hours. There were nine hours of auditing involved here. I made a Theta Clear. But the body had deteriorated way, way beyond anything you thought the body – the body was practically rotten at the toes. This was very interesting. The thetan, however, wound up in excellent condition. However, this person exteriorized rather easily. It wasn't any particular difficult job, it was rather a routine job.
But the first four hours of that nine were occupied in trying to strike through a communication barrage which was completely nonsensical – getting in one auditing question every fifteen or twenty minutes. Fabulous, huh? Just one of those things. That was the first. Now, you can consider that a lag. How many auditing commands can you get in, is an index of what the comm lag is of the preclear. You see how this would work out? So there are different – looking kinds of comm lags – it's all the same thing, communication lag, but how many different kinds are there?
Well, the funny part of it was that I broke the crust on this case with, as usual, the next-to-the-last list of Self Analysis. I got this person moting from, well, pretty close to a psychosis and up through the neurotic band just by getting that sort of a twist on the case. It broke up through the neurotic band, got an exteriorization, went through some Spacations and one of the most beneficial things was getting the preclear to make some space and sit in it for a while and this was very relaxing, indeed.
And then I handled the person's name which was one of these "pun names" and handled the name by Postulate Processing. And then did locational drills and just did a tremendous number of locational drills and did goals on the person and then did the Grand Tour.
But the whole thing was a rather easy job of auditing, except those first few hours. That was brutal. I'd rather have been shot than leave my body sitting in that chair leaning up against the chimney looking down through the roof saying, "Grief. Yeah. Okay. Yes. Yeah, it's very interesting. That's very interesting. Now can you remember s – ? Up against what?"
"Yapity-yapity, yapity-yapity, yapity, yapity, yapity, yapity, yapity, yapity, yapity, yapity, yapity, yapity, yapity, yapity, yapity, yapity, yap, yap, yap, momm-bow."
Comm lag. Now, there's the other kind of a comm lag where they go silent. And this silence is about the same breed of cat, it's just the other side of the apathy band. You know a person can be in perfect apathy and still use their voice to defend. I talked to you yesterday about defend, you know? Well, this is just another symptom of defense. A person can throw up such a barrage of words that you plain ordinary never get through this barrage of words, that's all.
So, where our difficulty lies with a preclear is getting in that original communication and that's your trouble with the psychotic, you see? Getting in that original communication.
But how long does it take to take a case from all the way south to Theta Clear? Well, it would find most of its time occupied in the lower band. You know, the first jump would be the most difficult one and then the jumps happen with greater rapidity.
Well, there are very probably techniques which, as we swing along, will find our people more and more receptive and more and more – well, easier and easier to communicate with and will find things in a far better state of auditing in general. Probably, there's a lot of things that we're using crudely now, we will refine in their uses. But there isn't too much reason to go around hoping. I mean hoping, you know, all of a sudden, well we'll drift along and we won't study this because Ron's going to come up with something that is newier and brassier. That was perfectly true a few months ago.
The funny part of it is, right now, we find ourselves using, though, such a process as Self Analysis. That's funny, gee, that's been around now over a year the way it's now written up.
All right. What are you going to do with this preclear who doesn't make a good jump? Let's take a preclear who's occluded, doesn't exteriorize, has no certainties and so on. If you audit that preclear for fifteen minutes and the preclear is not feeling well, doesn't feel at all in company with life, you can do a lot of things but, the odd part of it is, one of the more beneficial things you can do is just reach for a copy of Self Analysis.
Mind you now, this preclear's occluded, can't get mock-ups, has no great certainty on anything and so forth. Now, that's quite interesting, isn't it?
What you do is at least get him to make the gesture toward havingness. All right. If this person has the gesture there ready to deliver, you know, "Put up a mock-up of you getting an idea of doing something," you'll at least get an associated chain of thought going. And you get a little mass added to the case. Quite interesting, isn't it?
Now, some of the somatics that go through as a person is just gesturing at putting up these things is fantastic. That's because his havingness is being rebalanced or unbalanced and so on. So you can change the case. That's the main thing which you are trying to do anyway. I hope you're trying to do that.
Now, where do we expect, then, our case to bog or where is the toughest point of auditing? Well, it happens that it's right at the beginning, right there at the beginning of the case. I'm sorry that it is that way, but it is. Right at the beginning.
Now, you people could feel very discouraged about one preclear or another who insists upon being too this way or too that way, you know, doesn't quite increase and so on. Well, with such a preclear you're making what we would call a long haul and you're making some kind of a break, up through the level.
Now, you're going to slow yourself down to the degree that you get anxious and start pressing. You know the fellow that presses on the golf club – he never gets on the green. Well, you're going to err more times in auditing, in that direction, than in any other. You're going to be pressing on that golf club and feeding out techniques and thinking it's a fancier technique that's needed, thinking it's a fancier computation, and all the time, it's right there on the stove – the old frying pan that this preclear ought to be cooked in – it's just an ordinary frying pan and it's just exactly what you're doing. Your speed picks up markedly when your understanding of this point picks up.
And one of the reasons a preclear doesn't operate and one of the reasons that an auditor doesn't operate very easily on this early span, or the early run, one of the best reasons why he doesn't, has to do with his urgency, you know. He gets this feeling of urgency from the preclear or he gets the feeling that nothing can be done from the preclear. Here's the big point, see? Urgent! Urgent! You know it's very urgent. It's an emergency proposition.
Well, let me tell you how to handle an emergency: be efficient. That's how to handle an emergency.
I've seen more emergencies go to hell and really deteriorate simply because everybody had to be fast and it didn't occur to anybody to be efficient.
I well recall one time an engine had a shell in it. And boy, everybody was rushing around there trying to put out a resulting fire and, man, they were running around there with empty extinguishers and empty buckets of sand and they couldn't find bales of rags, but when they did find them, they couldn't find knives to cut bales of rags and so forth. And do you know what was sitting immediately above that engine? Immediately above the engine was the valve which flooded the engine room with spray.
I listened to this hubbub going on down there – just time after time, I'd call down through the speaking tube and say, "Have you got that fire out?" Expecting the tanks to go up at any moment or something to happen, see? "You got that fire out yet? Is it under control?" And then give a couple of more conning orders and then stand over the thing.
So finally, I took the coolest looking fellow I could see on the bridge and so forth and I said, "Go below and put that fire out."
And he came back a couple of minutes later, just that, a couple minutes later and he says, "The fire's out, Sir."
I said, "What happened?"
"Well, nobody had pulled the sprinkler cord."
Well, I swear they were fooling around with that fire for about twelve, fifteen minutes. See, it was an emergency and people get wasteful of time in the face of an emergency.
And you as an auditor, when you feel yourself getting very, very anxious about this case and pressing very hard on the case, do you know what you should do at that time? Just a little discipline for you: just reach back and pick up a copy of Self Analysis. Now, that you have done so doesn't mean you're rattled on the case, you understand, but this is probably what the case needs. The case actually is benefited by the feeling that there's something slow going to be done. It gives him the reassurance too, "Well, it might not all have to be done by five o'clock." See that? So here's something for you to – here's a security for you to depart from.
I recommend very thoroughly to you, this, and I recommend it in the face of an awful lot of data. I've seen that, however, deteriorate when an auditor didn't – well, when he had too much urgency, that's all. There's too much emergency in the air, so on, and they don't pay attention to that little book.
I'll tell you the routine course of a preclear in bad shape, applying to my office for assistance. First thing I do is write them a letter – I've gotten down to a point where there's a pattern of these letters.
The first letter says, "Well, here's a copy of Self Analysis and get somebody to read it to you or read it to the person who is in trouble, either way. Now, tell me how you make out."
The second reply is to the effect that the person has now gotten worse and what are they going to do? So the letter that goes back in answer to that is, is "Get the copy of Self Analysis and use it." And the next letter that comes back is in a reply to this copy of Self Analysis. They have received it, but they think it's best to take the person to see somebody in Salt Lake City or on the Moon or someplace.
And then, finally, you'll get a letter in – months have gone by, by now, and they write in to you and say, "Well, we took the person to Salt Lake City and we, finally, wound up and saw a psychiatrist and been in and out of a sanitarium now and has had five electric shocks and so forth and now what do we do?"
And you write back and you say, "Please open the copy of Self Analysis and begin on page (I think it's 66) and start in."
Six, seven, eight months is a lag on this.
And they finally do and the person finally bails out of it – if they do it at all. But by not reaching for the technique that has some resolution for the case, they sacrifice six or eight months! Now this is what? This is a psychotic communication lag, isn't it? That's all.
So, if you know that this is a symptom: an emergency and waste – you know the amount of waste there was in the war? When they waste time, they have to waste havingness and everything else. They finally wind up – in any emergency Homo sapiens winds up much worse off, ordinarily, than if he'd just stood back and let the damn house burn down! You see that? That an emergency attitude is one which worsens, not one which betters the situation.
Honest! In most fires, it would actually be better if they just stood back and let the house burn. I've seen a fire take place on a street and the only efficient thing that was done about the whole thing was to turn some water on the two or three neighboring houses so they didn't catch fire too. That was efficiently done. And that was done by the people who owned the two or three neighboring houses, usually, and was done with a garden hose.
But here are all these firemen all over the place and here are these tremendous streams of water and here are the axes and the battering rams and so forth and inevitably you always go back to the place the next day and take a look, it is burned to the ground. And I mean, there's nothing salvageable about it.
Well, now it didn't much matter how much effort was put forward into the fire, ordinarily. The result is about the same – with this difference: is the more emergency there was about it, the more additional property to that property was injured.
I have seen the most wonderful things happen in fires. One time, I saw a lady in the fifth floor of a building which was on fire. She was completely neglecting the fact that she had better come downstairs and bring that baby with her. And she had some Hepplewhite, or something, china or whatever you call it and she did it all up in a blanket and she took it out on the fire escape and without even saying "Stand clear" to anybody below, dropped it five floors! Yet, she just had seconds left to clear through the areaways. That was efficient, wasn't it? The horrible part of it was the fifth floor never burned. She would have had all of her china.
Now, I've seen people rushing grand pianos out of parts of houses that weren't even vaguely threatened during a fire and knocking their legs off and busting up their keys and everything else. And if they'd just left it alone and concentrated on the fire, they'd have had a grand piano the next day.
This is what's known as an "emergency frame of mind" and it is a technical thing for you, I mean, it isn't just a commentary name.
Now, this seems like I've spent a lot of time telling you about nothing, huh? Nothing. No great wisdom involved here. Well, if you just put it down there that the "emergency situation, the emergency attitude," when we say it in Scientology, we mean a very technical thing: we mean something which is occurring without time enough and so it's going to take a great deal of time to get it done.
When an author gets rather bad off (he has the novel to write), do you know, he'll stand and look at it for months before he does it? He just can't write it! Why? He hasn't got enough time to write it.
Well you say, "But look, you've already wasted three, four weeks. Why don't you just sit down and write it?"
"Well, I cant write it, I don't have enough time."
Well now, it sometimes occurs with an auditor that he looks at that preclear and he realizes the preclear is real bad off and the preclear doesn't have enough time and this is restimulative, so the auditor doesn't have enough time and so we get a fascinating problem. We get no recovery.
And when I see cases hanging fire consistently and I see that we're not getting perception changes at the time ratio of a case level in a Unit such as this – you know, we're not at a terrifically low case level. But I see that a person is trying to audit the data which has just been given him or something of the sort – actually, what it is, to a large degree, is an emergency factor. The golf club is being pressed so hard that the ball stays right there on the tee.
The auditor wants to shine, he wants to do something terrific, he wants to do something sensational. What he probably ought to do if his preclear isn't making adequate progress is simply reach back for that little copy of Self Analysis and start in. Not that he can't do it himself just that way – you know, you can just know that type of technique so well, you can just start reeling it off. It isn't any particular insult to the preclear either, by the way.
Honest, if I could just communicate to you the number of times when I have seen a neurotic person or a person who was rather badly bogged in present time problems recover on an hours' worth of mock-ups and that type of Straightwire. And I've seen these people snap out of it, stop acting goofy, stop trying to commit suicide, stop trying to do all sorts of things. It belongs in Steps VI of SOP 8 and a Step VI really doesn't really respond to much of anything else.
Note: This portion of the lecture contains sound distortions introduced in the original recording.
Now, the funny part of it is, it's so mechanical that the "sanity index of the person," which is a different thing, a little bit, than his "case index" – you know, how much problem have you got, is the big question, "How much problem do you have to handle?" Well, a person is not nearly – really just as sane as he's handling his problems, he's as sane as he thinks he is. And so sanity is something different than the mechanical aspects of a case and unwinding him.
It's a very funny thing that all these years they've been going forward at insanity and unreasonableness and all of that when, actually, there was a terrific amount of just mechanical bric-a-brac which was standing behind and interrupting the flow of communication and so on. The guy – really perfectly sane, but his ability, mentally and so on and creatively, is markedly cut down by mechanical bric-a-brac which doesn't have too much to do with his sanity. Well, Self Analysis will even crack through that if long enough applied.
There was one fellow who was one of the roughest V's I ever saw. And he got Self Analysis for a couple of hours a day for three months – that's a hell of a diet, isn't it? And it never occurred to anybody to tell him just to be two feet back of his head and one day one of his friends did, almost jokingly, and he was. He'd worked himself up – sometime down the line, why, he'd cleared up enough so that he could be exteriorized easily and with some certainty and became a Theta Clear within the next day or so.
By the way, you work somebody who is notoriously a V and you work them as a V for a long time and you just keep on working them as a V, you don't realize that he's become a IV and then a III and he's up around II now. You just kept on working this V – which is persistence.
Okay. Let's move up the auditing a little faster by being a little more sensible about it. In other words, let's step our pace up by being efficient rather than being in a state of emergency.
Always about this time of the Unit, evidently, you'll get a slight bog along the line somewhere, here and there, and if we don't interrupt it rather sharply here and there, why, it'll continue. Well, what happens is, is auditors have gotten a little bit disappointed here and there in a preclear or something. It never occurs to the auditor he's probably overreaching the ability of the preclear, quite markedly. And it's time when you look at a preclear – there's plenty of time, there's always lots of time.
The MEST universe is kind of short on matter, that's true. A planet here and a planet there and a sun here and a sun there and lots more space than there is matter. That's true, we're kind of short on havingness, but at the same time, let's not try to do it all in a minute. That attitude of trying to do it all in a minute is what prevents you from doing it all in a minute.
And I look over this case and that case as they come along and, for instance, there isn't a hard case present, there isn't a real hard case present – not a real hard case. Because I've seen hard cases in my day. When they're almost totally occluded and almost totally psychotic, you've got a hard case. That's a rough case. Not just an occluded case, that isn't a very rough case. That'll work out one way or the other.
Now you've got a weapon, "double-barreled shotgun," for one of these cases that's tippy about this and that. Very often, you can overaudit the case, you can give them the technique they need, obviously need – the obvious computation – but this person is so bogged down in significances they can't reach it. That's true of a case that I saw last night. All this case needs – obviously, all this case needs is just run "Don't touch." That is obviously all the case needs. We just run all kinds of variations and brackets on "Don't touch."
Case was raised to be very polite and, you know, well bred and cultured and so forth and has gotten to the point where, of course, he can't touch anything. And if you just got "Don't touch" in various ways with Opening Procedure and brackets and "Where aren't you trying to touch something now?" And "Give me three things that aren't touching you at this moment." "Give me three things which don't want to touch you at this moment," back and forth and around and around, in all possible combinations, including running some flows and some agreements and masses of viewpoints. Get masses of people out there, all of whom are agreed now (that's Viewpoint Processing, by the way) – masses of people, all of them are completely agreed that nobody must touch anything and then duplicate it and duplicate it and duplicate it and duplicate it and duplicate it – that sort of thing, you know? Just "Don't touch," why, this case would recover.
And instead of that, this case gets plunged into all kinds of stuff. I mean, stuff that's way off, far away and so forth but is liable to be very quick. And everybody has been trying to heal this case quickly for over a year – case must be healed quickly. Well, if the case had been healed slowly it could have gotten well in a week or two. That's real weird.
Note: This lecture is continued on the next disc.