Accessibility (501122)
Date: 22 November 1950
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
Now, the first thing that we wish to cover with Standard Procedure is the subject of accessibility. Actually, a Standard Procedure chart should begin with accessibility. It actually begins with “For accessible cases.” There isn’t any difference in Standard Procedure for an inaccessible case and Standard Procedure for an accessible case, except one is just a little bit further removed from a pianola case. The effort is the same; the distance is much greater.
I am afraid that insanity in the past has been measured in terms of the danger the society could expect from the individual rather than from the rationale of the individual. Therefore, we have made an error in the society of just branding as psychotic, you might say, certain people who are intractable and who are dangerous to themselves or to society. And as a matter of fact, you start to go into legal codes and you will find out that this occupies a very dominant position in every code—it’s whether or not this person is dangerous to himself or society. That certainly does not include all that it should include.
The rationality of an individual is very much to point, because that individual who will not ably care for himself, for his family, for his group or for mankind is not rational. And that person who by his acts actually endangers himself, the future, the group or mankind shouldn’t—the classification should not be limited just to a person who strikes a blow or tries to eat razor blades. That person who is so irrational, for instance, as to believe that the atom bomb is the answer to our future security is, of course, insane. What’s insanity? It’s just irrational. And does he threaten the society? Oh yes, he does. So let’s look at the psychotic in terms of a time factor. Let’s not overlook the important by stressing the dramatic, since the important is not always dramatic. The sudden punch, the immediate slam of impact, that’s very dramatic.
You look in the newspaper headlines and you see, “FIVE-BILLION-DOLLAR WAREHOUSE BURNS UP.” Boom! That’s news. And right alongside of it, it says—a little tiny item and it says, “The United States now has three and three-quarter million juvenile delinquents.” I’m afraid that warehouse can be rebuilt rather rapidly, but the job of rehabilitating three and three-quarter million juvenile delinquents is an enormous task, and it means so much in terms of the survival of this society that if one ever had a rational press—I know that’s too much to hope for, but if one ever did have —that’s with all due respect to any gentleman of the press who is here. I wouldn’t go so far as to say the press was irrational. It’s nuts.
The evaluation of the data is all wrong. “Three and three-quarter million juvenile delinquents” is this big and “FIVE-BILLION-DOLLAR FIRE,” that big, all over the headlines, so forth. You find three persons died in this five-billion-dollar fire, and you look over here in this juvenile delinquent column, you’re probably looking at hundreds of thousands of dead people. You see? The value of a sudden punch to news. The time factor enters in here. In other words, if we spread bad news over a long enough period it’s no longer bad news. Now, is that rational? If bad news is spread over a long enough period, no matter how bad the news is, it’s not bad.
Well, what one’s doing is walking away from these sudden impacts that cause these communication, affinity, reality break engrams. You know, there’s a time factor involved there. Boom! A sudden impact and so on creates an encystment, rapid encystment; but if it were spread out, and if it could be spread out over periods of days or weeks—if it could be spread out over days, it wouldn’t be so bad That is, the information just trickling through a little bit at a time without creating any anxiety (since this is a dispersal of attention and is in itself bad)—so that if it could be spread out over this long period of time, it wouldn’t deliver this impact. But it is no less serious on an analytical level. On a reactive level it is extremely serious. But is one driven to the conclusion, then, that the press is mainly interested in reactive news? And is one driven to the conclusion that the field of healing has been too interested in reactive logic (if you can call it logic)? There must have been a lack of rationale in the way one regarded the problem. That regard must, in itself, have been a reactive regard. They’ve been living on an awful lot of engrams in the society, and so on. So the five-billion-dollar fire gets the headlines.
Actually, war news more closely approaches important news, and so we get the old truism that if we can just get a good war started the newspapers will sell like hotcakes.
Willie Hearst made himself a war one time. He sent a photographer down to Cuba to get pictures of “that there Cuban war”2 before we went into it, and the photographer cabled back and he said, “There is no war down here.” And Hearst sent him back a message and said, “You get me the pictures and HI get you the war!” He did, too.
Now, a war is a great menace to the society. It menaces lots of people. It continues over a long period of time at a high dramatic level, and so we concentrate our attention upon war. But it’s an interesting thing that the focus of attention is so sharp on something dangerous that man begins to look like a bird hypnotized by a snake.
Reactive attention is very interesting. When an attention is too fixed (just like when a datum is too fixed in thought) when attention is too fixed, one cannot be rational regarding that thing at which one is looking; completely rational about it—too fixed. In other words, he isn’t evaluating what he is looking at with relation to the rest of the environment around it. See, he’s just looking at it.
That’s what happens in a war. Everybody starts looking at the war and their attention gets fixed on the war because it’s “good” news, it’s dramatic, it is dangerous and so on. The attention gets fixed on the thing and gets more and more fixed, and the society gets more and more psychotic on the subject of this war.
Now, actually there are two reactive things about attention. The other one is, too great a dispersal of attention is very bad. That, actually, is fear of the unknown. The mind is hunting; it knows there is danger in the vicinity; it’s trying to find it. It can’t fix that danger on anything and so it hunts, distracted—can’t fix itself. All of a sudden such a mind may, out of sheer relief, fasten upon one thing and then fold all of its attention in on that one thing and fix it too closely. The optimum attention, you see, would be a little span wide enough on the subject to see on either side of it and evaluate it but not too big a span to lose sight of that thing which is being observed. And so we have a great deal of reactive attention.
Now, you will find that this is the main trouble with an engram. It either disperses the attention completely or it fixes it completely; it deals in lights and darks. And this is the main trouble with news as it is promulgated. It seeks to fix and root the attention by making a big, dramatic splash, whereas an evaluation of the situation would demonstrate that there are much more important things, perhaps, in that same newspaper than this thing which is supposed to fix the attention. Unfortunately, papers are thought to sell better, and so we get poured at the society continually, and punched up, five-billion-dollar fires and this and that and so forth. Interesting.
Now, the rationale involved, then, has something to do with the time span. Five-billion-dollar fire (said very rapidly): that’s very interesting, a sharp point. But a five . . . billion . . . dollar . . . fire, would, by proportion, not be as interesting. It has a momentary punch there.
I’m talking about papers here more or less as a gag. American press—I’m a fairly good writer on papers myself, but lately, for some reason or other, somebody took off and started to give me a pasting on the subject of press. They never bother to come around and see me. They just go dashing off on their bicycles and write something down and hand it in to the managing editor and make it good and spectacular. For instance, they punched up this big fight between Dianetics and the medical profession. There is no fight. And they’re trying to get that stuff in the arena there. They’re trying to get that blood to flow, uchhhhh! But there isn’t any blood. So they come around and they do all sorts of things this way. I’m just trying to demonstrate to you this real state of a psychotic. I’m not talking about the press.
The span of attention, then—if a person is suddenly dangerous, you would say immediately—or suddenly all-in-a-pile irrational, you would say, “Yeah, oh, obviously a psychotic.” But if the person is just sort of all-the-way-along-the line irrational and none of this person’s acts draw any blood from anybody, apparently, you say, “Well, this person is not particularly irrational. This person couldn’t possibly be a psychotic.” And yet actually they should be so classified.
The society, the group, the family, the future—these things are most seriously menaced by these things that go along nice and plainly, not the ones that punch up and hit people in the face—that’s obvious, the obvious sort of thing. It’s the ones that just go along, psychotic all the way through.
You know, I’ve talked to the most (quote) reasonable (unquote) people on some subjects, who were actually gibberingly insane. And you go down to an institution, you can always find somebody there who makes more sense—he just makes the best sense. You listen to him—only trouble is, after you’ve listened to him for a while you just don’t add up anything he said. It just didn’t make sense all the way along the line. But it did make sense because he’s “so rational.” Our standards of requiring rationality from human beings are very low—very low. We are very tolerant as to the amount of rationality which we expect from people. And as a consequence a great many inaccessible psychotics go unnoticed right in our vicinity.
Until one day you as an auditor sit down and you start to talk to Grandpop. Well, Grandpop has always had the pip and he’s a bad hypochondriac and so on, and he, by the way, he takes care of the baby most of his time. And here’s the old man and you say, “Well, he’s got a bad headache and this pip and so forth; let’s see if we can’t do something for him.” So you say, “Would you like to feel better?” “Yeah, yeah, gotta take that Tanlac, take that Tanlac, that’ll make me feel better. That’s—that’s the stuff.” Tanlac happens to be 85 percent alcohol. And you say, “Well no, I mean—let’s—we could really do some-thing about this. Now, you—you see what it’s done for Betsy Ann, you see what it’s done for Uncle Joe and you see over here what it’s done.” Here’s evidence all over the shop, see? No, he’ll stick with his Tanlac. You’ll try to get him to do something about this, uh-uh.
Watch this man’s patter, watch his pattern. It’s fascinating. Not because he’s resisting any processing; that is not your test. That happens to be an excellent test but it is one which you should not use; it’s not kosher. Compare him up with what his environment demands of him and whether or not he answers up to the demands of his environment. There is rationale. His environment demands certain things of him. Does he do those things? He demands certain things of his environment. Does he accomplish them? There’s actually your full-dress-parade rationale, including the dynamics, including competence and everything else — this interplay.
It isn’t whether he matches up to one thing. You could actually start to address him on almost any subject and you would get more or less the same answer. (I knew a lady one time that had an open mind, by the way—it was always open to doubt.) And he’s very skeptical and doubtful but he says he’s so reasonable about all of this and so on. You’re talking to him about the fact that maybe it would be a good thing if he moved down to the house down at the other end of the garden down there, he could have all by himself. And you talk to him about it and he’s very reasonable about the whole thing but it just somehow doesn’t get accomplished. It’s actually desirable from his standpoint, it’s a lot better, but he just doesn’t go down there. It never works out and you can’t quite put your finger on why it doesn’t work out. It’s like trying to pick up hands full of water.
A social worker goes down and she knocks on a door and here’s this man and he’s pretty badly unshaven, and she wants to know why he doesn’t go to work and support his family. Here he is, an able-bodied man and so forth. He’s got the best reasons you ever listened to. Wonderful reasons; he’s apparently very rational. But there is work. There’s kind of work that a human being would normally desire to indulge in. He is starving, the children are sick and dirty and his wife is in bad shape and he should do something about this. No, he’s got lots of reasons. And that fellow passes for a sane individual. Only he’s not. He is one of these—actually, an inaccessible case. We’ll just drop this word “psychotic” (giving you to understand that it means the sudden punch). We’re talking about the inaccessible case.
This case is inaccessible to the social worker. This case will probably be inaccessible to you. This case is also inaccessible to the medical doctor This case is just inaccessible across the boards to anybody except the bartender’s offerings, maybe, something like that.
Here you have a consistent, continual break of communication between this individual and his environment and the environment and this individual. You’ve got a broken communication line. Every time you’ve got one of those, you’ve got a broken affinity line too, and you’ll also find the broken reality line is there. This person isn’t facing reality at all. He isn’t in concourse with his fellow human beings at all. He’s just sort of going through the motions.
Now, the test of such a person (and as you begin to address such people, you’ll begin to appreciate this more and more) is whether or not he can, for instance—well, if he can communicate on any subject lucidly, clearly and so forth, that’s fair; that’s just fair. But let’s see how many subjects he can communicate on and let’s find out if he’s really communicating on these subjects, or is he just sort of running on? Does it really make sense, or is he a Republican? (LRH and audience chuckle) Is he facing the reality of his environment, or isn’t he? There is your test of accessibility. And what do we mean by accessibility, then? It is whether or not these lines of force flow more or less uninterruptedly between the individual and his environment, and the environment and the individual. That is the measure of accessibility. Is he capable of affection? Can he communicate with things and can things communicate with him? Does he see a reality in various situations? Can he create, himself, a reality? One of man’s greatest functions, by the way, is creating realities.
Little kids are always at this and they generally get cuffed for lying. They understand so little of what reality is that they think it’s perfectly kosher to create them all the time.
I wish I had some of that imagination left, though. Gee! Boy, you can sure write fiction once you have data. The only trouble is, the more data you get, why, the less you do it.
Now, there are your tests. And I place in your hands, right here, an intelligence test, you might say, and a measure of rationale which you can use without any paper or pencil or anything else. If you understand this, you can talk to this person for a short time and you will be able to get a fair measure of his accessibility without putting him in Dianetics at all.
When you start to put him into Dianetics, you will start to measure his accessibility more closely because you are testing now his ability to communicate with his past, his affinity with himself . . . [gap] . . . sense of reality about his own past, and you are measuring those things directly. And so you know more about his accessibility. And just because a person will lie down on the couch and close his eyes and go back down the track is no reason that this person is accessible. This person may be standing way outside of himself, completely. He may not really be in contact with any part of his past; he may be in contact with a past that never existed; all sorts of things. But you see, it’s fortunate if you can at least get him to lie down and go back down the track because you can do something about it. The cases you’re worried about are the cases that won’t lie down and go back down the track. So your measure of accessibility more or less boils down to that at its optimum. And it becomes a little less optimum when: will this person answer questions?
That may sound ridiculous to you right now as a gain: will he answer questions? Well, regardless of whether the answer is rational or not, will he just answer them? And you think maybe that is a ridiculous point, but I could see somebody walking down the cells of an institution and about the fifteenth or twentieth cell saying, “This guy’s all right—he can answer questions!” and feel very relieved that you’d found somebody who was practically sane in relationship to his environment. So will he answer questions? If you can get a person to answer questions, you can start to regain attention units. You can get his attention on you and the second you do that, you can build up his affinity a bit with you and you do that by getting him to agree with you.
You should understand this in processing, that you should get a fellow to agree with you. By golly, if you can only get him to agree to the fact that there’s a day, not even if it’s a good day or a bad day, that it’s just a day—and he says yes, you have already punched up his reality, his communication and his affinity, just there. So you get him to agree with you and you agree with him. And sometimes some very adventurous and quite brilliant psychiatrists in the past have gotten into superagreement with a psychotic by imitating them. The psychotic picks up a chair and he smashes it against the wall. So the psychiatrist picks up a chair and he smashes it against the wall. What is agreement but mimicry? And so, the first thing you know, the psychotic goes into affinity with the psychiatrist. After that they can talk. You see? He just built up an agreement, which immediately built up communication and built up affinity. So when you’re talking to an inaccessible person, relatively inaccessible—you’re talking at them—if you can get their attention just long enough to get them to agree with you, find some points in the conversation on which they will agree and stress those points and then agree with his points even though they seem a bit irrational to you. Pick an agreement with him, in other words. And you’ll get the whole stack of triangles marching up the line. That’s one of the best ways to begin, if you can possibly get anybody to begin that way.
Now, you can conduct a few experiments on this. It’s worth doing sometime, particularly with psychotics, meaning the extreme inaccessible, reality zero and everything else zero as far as you can tell. It’s an interesting thing, if you were to go into a padded cell with one every day at, let’s say, about ten o’clock and did what he did, just for a moment—just made the same motion that he made and walk out again. And just do this for a while, I think you would find yourself eventually getting up to a point where when you said what he said you could interject something with which he would agree. And if he demanded something of you, you would agree on that and demand back and forth. If you kept on doing this, you would eventually get into communication with this person and this person would probably sit down on the edge of his bunk and have a long conversation with you. He might not talk to anybody else, because you’ve just built up one person as a reality to him, but you’ll pick it all the way up the line. If you can get one person to be real with him then you can get other people to be real with him. And finally, what you’re really trying to do is to get him out into the world where all is real.
At any point you can pick up the triangle and increase it just a hair, you have picked up each of the other points. And so you have brought about accessibility. And the whole problem of inaccessibility is the problem of a person being low on the Tone Scale reactively. That’s the whole problem. So what you want to do is to pick up the points of this problem, pick an agreement with him. [gap] Now, you see now how the problem integrates. What I’ve been talking about the last couple of days to you starts to break down to something very useful. Number one on Standard Procedure, accessibility: how do you increase this accessibility and how accessible should a person be to run engrams? And right here, pay very particular attention to this: you should understand how inaccessible cases really are. You understand, it’s a gain if you can get this person to answer a question. If he can answer a question and remember something about his own past, oh, that’s a pretty big step. If you can get him to actually contact a pleasure with his eyes closed, or contact anything with his eyes closed, a big gain there. Now, if you can get him to move down the track and contact his past, ah, it’s a big gain. But don’t think that the person is accessible yet, until he can run an engram with all twenty-six perceptics, in valence. The person at that moment is accessible. There are darn few people who are.
That’s now the problem we’re going into, here, is the problem of the normal person. You know, the “n—n—normal” person. (LRH and audience laugh) Yeah.
Now, that Standard Procedure up there says, “For accessible cases.” Actually, no threshold has been considered at the time that was written. I never wrote that on there, by the way. No threshold was considered. What is the threshold of accessibility? And the threshold of accessibility is just that that I told you, just then. This person is accessible, you might say, to run engrams. Accessible to run engrams, but when he can run them with all twenty-six perceptics, in his own valence, just doing fine. Of course, he couldn’t run them with twenty-six perceptics out of valence. So when he can run the engrams in that fashion, then he is accessible for running engrams. Earlier than that, he is accessible for repairing breaks on communication, affinity and reality. Earlier than that, he’s accessible for being talked to. Earlier than that, he is accessible for being looked at. Now, you wouldn’t consider that that had anything to do with accessibility offhand, would you? It’s awfully hard to audit somebody who is running so fast you can’t catch him. So the problem of accessibility is a problem of “degrees of.” But let me point up that last degree there. That is the pianola case—the case that plays itself. That is what a pianola case is: able to run engrams with all twenty-six perceptics. And you keep patching up and repairing and taking circuitry out of this case until such time as it will do that and then you run engrams, unless you actually can get charge off of the case. But again, you’re really dealing in terms with accessibility to run engrams. But you can sometimes have to run engrams with the person out of valence, more or less, because they’re pretty jammed up there and so on. But it’s not a good thing to do. You can get tension off the line. You’ve regained a few attention units and so on, but you haven’t fixed up that case yet. When you start to take circuitry out of the case, for instance, you will very often run engrams with high line charge. Very intense, with the preclear out of valence. You’ll run the charge off of these things. You’ll try to get him into his own valence. Try to get him back down the track to the earliest time this circuitry appeared. Try to do all of these things. Don’t think you’re really running engrams off of this case to the degree and magnitude that you should. You don’t start an erasure on this case when it’s doing that—that is just the beginning.
Anybody, for instance, who goes down into the basic area and starts to run out, in a routine fashion, engrams on a person who is consistently and continually out of valence, whose sense of reality is very poor, whose affinity is very bad and is running them more or less—the person gets some kind of a vague impression that something might be happening but he isn’t quite sure, and so forth. And the auditor who will go along and run that case that way is going to be very confounded—he is going to be a very confused auditor before long because he’s going to find the darned engrams seem to reappear. Of course they never went anyplace. He’s going to find that the person’s valences are all messed up. He’s going to start getting unconsciousness. By the way, after a person has been run that way long enough, unconsciousness will start to come off on every moment of the past. In other words, you send him to yesterday when he was wide awake and you run him through a moment of yesterday and unconsciousness will start to come off. Why? It’s because you have restimulated unconsciousness on this case to such a degree that it’s just loaded with it. And it just comes off anyplace.
It’s an interesting thing; but that would be thoroughly bad auditing. It means that the auditor has attempted to pronounce a case pianola and run it long, long, long before he should have. He has abandoned the job of taking off painful emotion, communication invalidations and reality breaks. He’s abandoned this job long before he should have abandoned it. He has just kicked all that out and he’s said, “Well, there’s no reason to go after these things; there’s no reason to get any circuits off the case, there’s no reason to—we’ll just run engrams.” And you’ll find out that something that’s somewhat like a file clerk will work with you and the somatic strip will work with you and you can get the guy to move on the track and you can get him to run out a valence, maybe. Very, very low sense of reality. Very, very poor communication with his own engrams. You go on and run that case and you’ll find the engrams—I repeat—reappearing. Of course, they never disappeared. And you’ll find all sorts of strange things happening to this case. And when that is occurring, it means simply that the auditor pronounced the case accessible long before it was.
Now, that’s what we mean by accessibility and that’s what we’re trying to attempt. There’s your first step, your first major step: is determining the accessibility of the case and repairing the accessibility and increasing the accessibility up to a point where it can run engrams— physical pain engrams in the basic area with all twenty-six perceptics on. And you keep working at this case until you can do it. And you don’t do anything to this case which keeps the case from doing it. And the first thing you know, your case will be running fine. This is Standard Procedure.
Now, we’re going to cover all this in detail. I have to take a rather wide look at it today for you, to cover this problem of accessibility, show you how to patch up and put together the affinities, the communication abilities and the reality conceptions of the individual. The tools with which you do this, we’ll cover later. But I point out that these things have to be done and you have to get out the circuits. And you have to get the person in his own valence. You have to work with this case, sometimes a long, long while.
Now, I wouldn’t really call a case open until it would run an engram in the basic area with all twenty-six perceptics on. That case I would call open. Not, “Well, we can get this guy to move on the track; his case is open.” Not, “We can run an engram way out of valence.” And not, “We can run some kind of a grief discharge or something on this person. He’s crying his mother’s tears of course, but he’s at least crying.” That would not be an open case.
The case is open, you might say, actually, under two conditions: when a major portion of the grief is off of the case, you might say; you could say, “Well, the case is open.” Or when you got the central grief engram off of the case, yes, you could say the case is open. Or when the case would run basic-area engrams with all twenty-six perceptics on, then the case is really open because it says immediately that you must have gotten some grief off of it, and it says immediately that you must have repaired these vectors of communication, affinity and reality.
All right? Now, we have walked that far in the Standard Procedure. And I leave you to ponder—those of you who have done a great deal of auditing—upon your sins!
Thank you.