General Discussion of Auditing (500831)
Date: 31 August 1950
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
I’ve seen several small errors being made, errors such as this one: “Let’s now return to this engram.” The fellow says, “I can’t see. I have bunions. Dogs are all green.” And the fellow says, “Now, go over it again.” “I can’t see. Dogs are all green.” And “Uh-huh.” And then the auditor says “auditor” is used in a very advised sense here—he says, “It’s file clerk now: ‘Is this erased?’” And the fellow says, “Yep.” And he brings him up to present time and he says, “Now, you see, that’s an example of an erasure.” Anything like that is, of course, very, very bad auditing. People here are running phrases and calling them engrams.
It is true that with Guk, occasionally, once in a great while, you can tear up a whole chain of phrases all at once. But that doesn’t keep one from running an engram. Standard Procedure, Standard Procedure! There is no such thing as standard Guk procedure. There’s just Standard Procedure. That’s all—Standard Procedure. You audit a fellow just like it says in the book, just like we give you examples up here. We don’t have to count on a couple of other little minor things there. We are depending more solidly on the file clerk than the somatic strip, but it’s just Standard Procedure. Now, all that Guk is just to make a case more alive. Nothing magical, except the engrams come up more easily and they can come up more swiftly and sometimes they will come up in whole chains but this doesn’t mean that anything strange or unusual has happened to these engrams. Guk does not particularly capitalize grief. It makes the incidents below it more accessible, but you still have to work for grief. It won’t come off automatically.
Now, when you put a person on what we are calling “freewheeling,” bring him up to present time. He is all the way up to present time. Your standard operating procedure, that is to say, Standard Procedure, is over. You don’t have a transition from Standard Procedure into Guk procedure, or anything like that. You just finish Standard Procedure, just as you would. Your responsibility is every bit as great if you have the person on Guk as when you have the person out of Guk. See? Now, once you have him back in present time you give him a canceller, everything. Now you can put him on freewheeling, and you put a person on freewheeling—used to distinguish it between that and autohypnosis, which people talk about running automatically. It’s certainly not autohypnosis or auto. So we take that word out, although it’s auto. We call it freewheeling. What one does then, Standard Procedure is all over, one puts the person in freewheeling and the way he does it is very simple.
He says, “The file clerk will furnish somatics. The somatic strip will sweep the somatics and erase them and the analytical mind will stay in present time.” And then you just walk off. And then every once in a while you check this person, find out whether or not—whether he is moving or anything of that—what you are checking specifically is this: you are checking whether or not somatics are turning on and off. If he’s gone for a couple of hours without a new somatic turning on, he is not moving on the track. What is supposed to be happening is that occasionally strange little aches and pains turn on and off throughout his body. Once in a while he will get a sunburn turned on so that his face will get very hot. Some people say this is the effect of niacin. It’s awfully interesting that niacin can be so effective as to stop the tingling immediately at the waistline just above the trunk line and immediately start them again on the thighs. Now, it’s not necessary to know when it was run. It isn’t necessary to know when it took place or anything of the sort. All that is necessary to know is, are the somatics turning on or off? That’s all that’s necessary. And you get the report from the file clerk on a yes-no basis. You can say, “Are you moving?” or something like that. He says no. So you ask him for a holder. He gives you yes or no. Bouncer? And so on. It goes through the procedure. Get a yes or no on any one of these things. He gives you no on everything, and no on “not moving,” then he has got an engram there that says no. So you run “no” out. So you just have the holder, whatever it is, repeat it two or three times, not very much. And then you ask him, “Are you moving now?” And you get a yes or no. And if you get a yes, leave him alone. Now he can walk around, do anything he wants to do, drive the car, go outside, anything you please, except that I would advise against going swimming in areas where one is apt to be out of sight of immediate aid and assistance because of somatics which are restimulatable. And a fellow’s liable to have had a cramp in swimming or something or other, and the thing might come back on him.
Further, if you get a sudden somatic and you are driving a car, why, pull over to the side of the road until the thing runs itself out. This is not dangerous. This is just to the effect that one should have a good grip on himself when he’s driving. Now, Guk does not knock out automatically—that is, just because a person takes Guk, he doesn’t immediately—he is still a human being, subject to circuitry, subject to valences, et cetera.
On Guk procedure, a case which is very badly out of valence, you will find him moving on the track but what he is running is a shadow of a somatic. That is to say, it’s a somatic which was worn by the valence. Of course, that is borrowed from his own engram bank, but he will run these little tiny somatics that don’t amount to anything. He has to stop and feel real hard whether or not he is running a somatic. Well, the ordinary course is that he may do this for two or three days. If he is just on freewheeling or after he has had some Standard Procedure run or anytime—very same somatics turning on and off. And he doesn’t really know what’s happening. Once in a while his face will be a little bit hot or something like that. And then one fine day, maybe about three days later, he gets several that are a little tougher. See, he is getting into his own valence a little bit more. So the thing will freewheel a little bit more and the somatics will be quite variable. But he doesn’t have to stand still and feel for them anymore. He knows they’re there. And then they get tougher than that, to a point where he is liable to be sitting in a chair and talking to you saying, “Well, last night when, ouch! Jesus, that was a good one.” And he won’t get very many of those. But those are his own somatics.
He may find something occasionally like a knitting needle going through his stomach or something of the sort. Nice, sharp and clear. Now, it happens that in the freewheeling, unconsciousness quite often comes off the case with the engram. So a person will find himself going along and all of a sudden feel sort of dopey and he yawns and yawns. Then he stops yawning and he doesn’t feel dopey. That was just the unconsciousness coming off an engram. That doesn’t mean you have to force it or pay any special attention to it. So if you feel tired or your tone level goes down, don’t say, “Well, it’s all over now. I can’t go on.” Be cheered up. Another thing that happens occasionally—well, that is more or less uniform—is that the person will have a whole series in one area. That is to say, take the mouth or something, have a whole series in a mouth of injuries, injuries, injuries, exodontistry. So he will run some in the leg here and there, some in the arm and then, all of a sudden, another one of these mouth somatics. And it will last a minute or so, two or three minutes, and then run one in his foot. You will find yourself maybe going around all day long running stubbed toes. Yes, sure. But these are just shadows of the real injury, of course. But they’re quite unmistakable. When one is badly out of valence on Guk, it is not possible to get freewheeling unless the person is moving on the time track. So the important thing is to get him moving on the time track. If you achieve that, use Straightwire, this and that, as the Standard Procedure. You put him into Standard Procedure, he goes no place else than the Standard Procedure, you reduce what you lay your hands on, bring him back up to present time again, cancel it out and reinstall him on freewheeling. That’s a different operation. Treat them as two distinct operations and don’t for a minute consider your responsibility is any less on Standard Procedure with or without Guk.
The auditor is responsible for reducing all these engrams, for making a good case out of it.
Male voice: What about a canceller for the freewheeling?
You can put one in if you want to. As a matter of fact, I do. And that’s a good one there. That’s a self-evident step. I put one in. All right, bringing that up brings up the general idea about cancellers. You will occasionally find some auditor who doesn’t put in cancellers. He is either, one, very careless or two, the preclear he is working on is so— well, he’s accustomed to observing people; he’s been auditing for quite a while. He’s accustomed to observing people. He can take a look at them and he can see that these people aren’t in any kind of a trance or anything of the sort and he decides just to throw a chance on it.
Actually, failure to install the canceller is a breach of the Auditor’s Code because it falls under the heading of not sufficiently safeguarding the preclear. The canceller does work; a person does not have to be hypnotized to have it work. It works anyway and is particularly efficacious when somebody’s been way down the bank someplace, he’s done a deep, deep dope-off and a lot of words and things have happened like that. Then he comes back up to present time. There’s still material on this case. You give him a canceller and it will take it out. So you can’t predict what’s going to happen. Now, in the case of a loud noise occurring in the vicinity of your preclear—this is another problem—in a case of a loud noise occurring in the vicinity of your preclear, what you want to do is—he may be right in the middle of running an engram—make him run that noise, because it’s been planted at that point on the track where the engram was, to some degree. So you make him run that noise. For instance, a telephone rings. You say, “Go over the telephone ringing.” And he will go over it, “Ring, ring, ring, ring, ring.” “Okay? All right.” Because he might have gotten quite a shock out of it, you see? And you go over it and knock out the shock of the telephone ring and then run him back through it again. Or somebody comes busting in, rushes in, slams the door open in the usual, quiet way some people have and says, “Say, there’s no phone so I . . .” And you say, “Shhhhh.” “What’s the matter, you auditing somebody?” Well, anything that happens like that, the first thing you do is hit the person who came in over the head with a transducer (laughter), put in a canceller so it won’t give him an engram—and then let him lie there quietly until you’ve finished auditing.
Now, this will teach him that people who are unconscious record things. Now what you want to do is run off something like, “I am dead. I am dead. I know I’m dead. I have got to come back. I have got to stay here. This is the end. All is over. I’m unconscious. I can’t see, feel or hear. I can’t remember a thing,” and so forth. You get this fellow who is a screamer, you see, running this alongside the unconscious person and it will teach the unconscious person that engrams can be planted and that loud noises are undesirable in the vicinity of an individual who has analytical attenuation. (laughter) There’s another remedy there short of boiling oil. Stick him in birth, and then, “Stay there and run this. Every time you come up to present time, you have to run birth.” (laughter) Or say, “My time track is all upside down, so that when I come up to present time, I go to conception.” (laughter) Or say, “I am 180 degrees outside of myself, facing myself.” I mean, there are a lot of trick commands here for people who come busting in.
Male voice: Is light as bad as noise?
Yes, light will give a little bit of a shock, but nothing like noise. Light has to be very bright, it has to be bright as these damn flashbulbs to really kick. For instance, every time one of these flashbulbs was hitting me in the face, I would just click back over the thing and knock the attention out of the eyes again. Because they hurt.
An intense perceptic, any intense perceptic can cause analytical attenuation. Can cause a little tiny bit of unconsciousness. So if you want a fellow to—theoretically, if you really wanted him to have a bad time, you could make him look right straight into one of these flashbulbs at about that distance and bang it off on him, and it would really hurt. So when you go back over it again you find out there’s quite a bit of pain in the thing. Same way with sound.
You run somebody whose sonic has lately turned on, he isn’t aware of the fact yet that having sonic has some liability. See? This stuff has been there and covered up and masked. And now you turn loose sonic on the thing and you’ll find that many of the noises which he has heard in the past, which are painful, he’ll have to flick through the thing.
You can actually go up and down the bank and knock out the noise chain. You go to the earliest time he ever rode on a subway or something of the sort; you get the first couple of instants of it. Any one of these noise somatics is just like any other engram. You just have to get the first few times it happened. Let’s say we have got a fellow with a firecracker going off and the first time he ever heard a firecracker almost blew in his eardrums. Weil, knock out that firecracker, the first one. Then we’ll knock out the next firecracker, even though they all happened the same day. Knock out the next firecracker and the next firecracker and the next firecracker. You’ll find out that all the noise somatics are latched up on the first firecracker.
Male voice: All on firecrackers.
Yes, but by the time you’ve gone ten, the rest don’t bother him.
I had a slightly interesting experience: I was sitting down quietly and minding my own business and somebody started talking about kamikazes and the war and so on and asked me some sort of a question. And I had been just dreaming around and thinking about some engrams and going over a couple of minor things all by myself. So I just flashed up to this moment and there were five-inch guns, forty millimeters, twenty millimeters and so forth, all going off at once. And it was quite a shock. I just came up unsuspectingly in the area, and clap! clap! And I realized that there was an experience there that had made me deaf for about four days. And it was just impact of sound, you might say unconsciousness had taken place in the eardrum, finally, to a point where they wouldn’t register. They’d gotten a resurgence to the point where they’d get their resistance to sound way up. See? And then hold it there and then I couldn’t hear for about four days. Well, I ran unsuspectingly into the middle of this and I’d never recognized before how vividly sound can hurt. And it impressed me a bit.
Other people I’ve seen had this experience since. Take a little child. A little child’s ears are peculiarly sensitive and you get the same sort of a thing there. Wham! Some loud sound, something like that. The worst sound engram I ever picked up, was Papa trying to shoot Mama with a .45 pistol. And he missed, but the .45 was about that far from her abdomen. She caught the muzzle blast of it and she got some burn on it.
Of course, there was the blast of the .45 accompanied by the emotional shock of the thing, and the suddenness. And that thing was really loud. That was recorded as a pool of sound there, on which practically all sounds of the child’s whole life had latched up. And it, in effect, was the primary reason for the sonic shut-off in this case. Because one didn’t turn it on because it was too thoroughly painful. Just actively. It didn’t even say it was painful. It was just painful. So that sound had come forward and it somehow or other registered in the ears, although the child at the time of course had no ears.
Male voice: How about baby’s crying registering in his own ears?
He will occasionally register on that. You will pick up—this is a standard engram. This poor little kid is put into the nursery and all the other kids there are going “Wah, wah, wah.” The first time you take somebody back to the area and he hears all this sound and so forth, he makes a complete mistake as to what the sound is, very often. He doesn’t realize where he is, it’s right after birth. He’s been put in the nursery, and hears all these strange animal cries. And some nurse may pick up—I ran across this one one time—may pick up one of the little newborn babies and show it to one of the incoming babies, you know and say, “Well, here’s your new roommate,” something like that, and the kid has recorded this: a ferocious beast, making these horrible sounds, has just appeared before the eyes.
Now, I am going to tell you once more about Standard Procedure. Very few of you have heard about Standard Procedure but it is a method of taking a case step by step and bringing it through to a logical conclusion. The existence of Standard Procedure is owed to the fact that many cases are left hanging because the auditor doesn’t know what to do next. So there is a chart of Standard Procedure which tells him what to do next. If you fail to use Straightwire, for instance, on Guk, just because all of a sudden we have Guk—you know Guk is wonderful stuff; Guk does do a tremendous boost on a case. It makes a case less dangerous.
Standard Procedure starts with an inventory, goes through the running of engrams, goes into Straightwire to locate analytical demons and valences, goes into the running of engrams and so on. On the inventory to find out who’s dead, try to find if somebody else is dead, you try to run some more grief. In other words, you resolve this case. You should never make the mistake that Standard Procedure is not Standard Procedure. It is what it says; it’s exactly what’s in the bulletin. It’s no more than this. There are no techniques by which one suddenly erases a whole chain. If a whole chain starts erasing the second that you pick up the bottom phrase—as will happen sometimes if you’ve got that, that’s fine. But that’s just an added bonus.
You run the engram. You run it until it erases. The engram erases when you have the first moment of pain in the engram, all the first moment of pain. You run the engram all the way through, you come to the end of the engram, you go back to the beginning of the engram, you run it all the way through. Yawns will come off of the engram, the somatic will disappear and nothing else can be found in this engram. Now, a person can bounce out of this engram with no yawns or anything much happens, and the engram not being there anymore, this does not mean that he has erased it.
Some of these people that you will be working on, some of these cases here believe, perhaps, that everything they’re saying is imaginary. There are a few cases that do this. It is the rarity, not the ordinary. Two things wrong with cases that do this: the central engram or the grief charge has not been contacted. There is a tough engram in that case somewhere along the line that is holding it up, and for some reason or other, the file clerk can’t give it to you. Try to open up a case as much as possible with Straight wire, if you’re working Straightwire.
Now, we all want a royal road to Clear. Anybody who believes the full progress to Clear is a short and easy one, he is making a mistake which will cause him disappointment. I don’t want to disappoint you. What you should do, what you should realize is that about half the way up to Clear, from Release to Clear, the case is deintensified to such an enormous extent the fellow has to think a couple of times to remember that he’s still in therapy, occasionally. That is to say, he gets up so high that sometimes it requires somebody else’s attention on the subject in order to take him all the way through. For instance, I’m in that spot; been at that spot for a long time.
The boys around the Foundation walk up to me and, “Are you getting any auditing, Ron?” And I say, “No. Uh, no.” “Well, I’ll have to do something about it. You want to come up after lunch and get some auditing? Okay?” “Okay, we’ll be right there at 3:30 sharp and we’ll get some auditing.” So there I am at 3:30 sharp and usually there are also four other guys, and then they start into the case and they start to pick something up and start worrying about whether it’s this or that, you know, and we find some butt ends of this, some butt ends of that, a little bit of the beginning that isn’t yet erased, somebody’s left the beginning of an engram there, somebody’s left something else on the case. A lot of locks that haven’t blown yet. It’s just swamp-up. And it’s stuff that doesn’t even interest me. It’s just—I could probably run into an engram that said now, “I am dead, I am dying. I am absolutely floored. I’ve got to settle down and control myself, and I am deaf, dumb and blind,” and so forth and so on. Aberrative effect is slight, and the interest in the engram—once upon a time, you hit an engram like that, “Gee, that’s really something!” But actually, the whole engram bank deintensifies, and you have to keep alert to the subject if you want to get all the way through.
Furthermore, my case was badly complicated by guinea-pigging. I did a lot of guinea-pigging on the basis of having psychoses and neuroses laid into me in amnesia trance. I had to know. And these things sometimes turn up. The sensitivity of the prenatal is very slight, there isn’t anything very much there. But they’re there just the same. I’ll come along on a certain period of track and all of a sudden I’ll go out of valence, whack! Off will go sonic, whack! Everything will shut down, or a lot of engrams or bunches of them—I have hit one of these, maybe, suggestions, or an engram that had a lot of groupers in it. And it will stay that way for five or ten minutes and then resolve and everything will go back into place again. But my case isn’t normal. At the same time, I still—it’s so darned deintensified, I don’t pay any attention to it anymore. You will find out that people will do this.
Actually, you get busy about halfway up through, and you don’t see much—you feel good. You don’t get tired. You feel able to cope with things, and you’re always saying to yourself, “Well now, we’ll have to take up next weekend and get the rest of this.” This is quite a common failure with people coming up, particularly when they’re terribly busy, and particularly when they’re all wrapped up with Dianetics.
However, we didn’t used to think anything of a five-hundred-hour case: “Five-hundred-hour case? Poof! That’s nothing.” This case may run a thousand hours. Well, this guy’s got dub-in; a thousand hours, maybe twelve hundred hours. Run some bad auditors on it, maybe two thousand. Well, what about that? Nothing.
Now, with Guk, we have speeded the dickens out of this thing. We have really capitalized on it. I don’t know how fast we can make a Clear with Guk. We haven’t any representative cases that come through. We just know that we can speed up cases. But it speeds up the case, it doesn’t excuse us from using Standard Procedure. (Recording ends abruptly)