CRAFTSMANSHIP: FUNDAMENTALS
A lecture given on 3 May 1962

Well, how are you doing tonight?
Audience: Good.
You're looking better. Anyway, I'd like to make a few small comments on the session you saw last night.
Let's see, this is what? Three Mar. [May] AD 12, Saint Hill Special Briefing Course, first lecture. Where is the pc? Is it all right if I make a comment on that?
Female voice: That's fine, yes.
All right, very good.
This lecture, in general, is what I expect out of an auditor. That's what this is. But before we go into that too broadly, I want to make a few comments on that.
There's apparently a considerable amount of surprise expressed here and there that one would stop buying skim milk. And if you were to replay that tape, you would find out at the beginning that the auditor spent something like five or six minutes getting the pc to say something she had done, not something she had intended. Got it?
A missed withhold picked up in a session is anything the pc thinks, anything the pc is withholding. That doesn't matter. That's a session missed withhold, you understand? Pc didn't tell the auditor he was uncomfortable. That's all right for a session missed withhold. But we were prepchecking, and Prepchecking means meat. We only buy meat in Prepchecking, see? We don't buy skim milk. See, we want meat. Preferably with blood dripping off of it. Get the idea? We want some meaningful acts; we don't want meaningless acts. That's a big difference, see?
We don't want antisocial acts, particularly, like "I picked my nose," you know, just because this is seamier—the seamier side of life, you see? An auditor can actually start specializing in just the seamier side of life. And they have nothing to do with anybody, didn't do anything to anybody, don't you see, and specialize in picking up weird and peculiar practices on the part of the pc. He didn't do anything to anybody, you understand, he just had a weird and peculiar practice, you know? It doesn't mean shucks! Heh! Worthless.
For instance, you could take some of the Book One subjects, like masturbation, something like that. Oh, this is embarrassing Yes, it shows up as something of the sort; it's the human race, you see? And it's not really doing anything to anybody, unless it is doing something to somebody. You get the idea? A lot of auditors specialize in embarrassing things, see, as the very thing you must pick up. To hell with them! You know? Well, pick them up, but thathathabooh! 	No, we're interested in things people have done to people. See? We're interested in overts. We is not interested in a withhold because it is simply seamy. Do you get the difference here? There's a considerable difference. He'd done something to somebody. He has an accusative attitude toward somebody, and we want to find out immediately afterwards what he'd done to somebody. Accusative attitude—so what? It merely means he's done something to this person, that's all, see? He's critical of Joe. Well, why is he critical of Joe? Well, he's critical of Joe because he's done something to Joe. See?
Heh, you pick up a missed withhold, "Well, I was critical of Joe." Balderdash! Nonsense! You can pick up 8,762, see, and the pc won't be any better. And all of a sudden somebody gets bright, and say, "Well, what have you done to Joe?"
And he, "Oh, this is nothing—slept with his wife. Didn't tell him. she committed suicide later. He always thought he did it. I realized all the time I had, you know?" Oh yeah. This starts getting something, see? This is more the comparative side of existence, don't you see? I mean, this is more factual. Done something, see?
Now, in this session we found out something—and a good auditor could have extrapolated from this—we found out affection was trapping people. See, it was a bad thing Affection was a bad thing.
Now, if you reach way back into your fundamentals: Auditors either audit by fundamentals or by music. And the best auditors audit by fundamentals. But the job can be done auditing by the words and music, see? You know, just auditing by rote and ritual. Fundamentals. There's an old triangle, and if you think real hard you might be able to remember it. It's called the ARC triangle. And we have found the A triangle was an overt. So therefore, things must look pretty unreal. So therefore, communication of any kind is an overt; so therefore, the thing to do is withhold. And withholding is a virtue, not an overt.
So my next Zero question, having cleaned up the Zero question we went in on, would have been, "What communication, in some portion or another, added up to an overt act?" Got the idea? As a matter of fact, we were picking some up. "Hit a girl with a rock in the stomach." Communication, overt act. See?
Now, part of the present time problem was the dissemination of Scientology. If affection—let's just audit by the seat of our pants here, see?—if affection is trapping people, then communication of Scientology would be reprehensible reactively. You got it?
Audience: Hm-mm.
I'm sorry, pc.
Female voice: That's fine.
That's an evaluation.
Female voice: Thanks.
All right. But there it is. see that? She had two PTPs and we were cleaning up two chronic present time problems. And one of them was a continuing present time problem she's having all the time with her husband which enters into a communication battle all the time, see? See? Letters and telephone calls, and then she has an upset and can't get into session, see? 
How could anybody sit around and look at this for a long time, you see, without doing something about this? See, at this point I should get cross with you, because obviously, obviously, there's something else. See? Must have been. But you didn't have the technology. You didn't have the technology down pat.
All right, let's get the technology down pat. I understand you had the technology down pat today, and that is it must have been a missed withhold of the magnitude of a doingness to cause a continuous present time problem—the withhold missed by the person with whom we had the present time problem. So that cleaned it up, huh? In the process of doing this, we didn't have a second session following immediately after this, but the second session we would have cleaned up the other side of the PTP, which is "can't disseminate Scientology." And we had the answer, right there, see? Got the answer gratuitously. See? ARC. If affection trapped people, then communication must do them up in a ball. See? All right, so we'd have to clean up communication withholds. That is, things that she had done with communication that were reprehensible. See? We clean some of those up and we find out, all of a sudden, the whole problem falls apart. We also find out any IQ difficulty that she kept complaining about—the IQ would soar. Do you see why it'd soar? See, it must be down, because she mustn't communicate, which in itself is a continuous withhold. And stupidity equals withhold, you understand? So she feels stupid, so therefore it's the area of withhold. Okay? That make sense to you?
Female voice: Yes.
All right.
That's auditing by fundamentals. See?
I wanted to call something else to your attention, which you might have found very, very interesting, is that we had twenty or thirty incidents on that chain that we never touched. The old man just went earlier. Do you realize I picked up the first incident on the chain? Huh? And went earlier? What was I doing going earlier? If the first incident on the chain showed that there was no sexual activity prior to the first incident on the chain, what were we doing going earlier? Well, I just went earlier because you go earlier. And did you see that the question nulled? Nulled beautifully. Do you realize there are twenty or thirty incidents the pc probably never recounted? Well, where were they? What happened to the charge? See, that's the mystery of it all. What happened to that charge?
Well, you pull basic-basic on the immediate chain by pulling all the underpinnings out of basic-basic, if you want to get it that way. Anything that added up to why she would do this, we pulled. The rest of it must have just gone brrrzt! See?
So if you go at it on the basis that you're running engrams called withholds, and you run every engram, do you see—if you're going at it on that basis—it's going to take you forever. See? I think the pc will tell you we had a nice win last night. See? Yet we never did touch the upper part of the chain. We never even touched the subject of the PTP. Isn't that fascinating? There was only one comment on it and then from there on we cleaned it up. you see that? Audit by fundamentals. Get the earliest on the chain and release it. And if you can get the earliest on the chain, you can pull it out of the mud, and all the later ones go.
There was one oddity about this case that you might find real odd: is that basic-basic was a not-knowingness about a nothing Fascinating, you know? That was fascinating. There was no basic-basic. The pc thought there was. And we looked in vain. And why did we look in vain? Because every auditor had always looked in vain.
How come you're always looking for a somethingness? This was a trick case. This was very trick. The whole trick about it was, is there was nothing at the basic. And she hadn't done anything but thought she had, and must have because auditors had kept her looking for it. But we must also add into the fact that she must have kept handing it to auditors. See? And then we must have had the auditor never look at the E-Meter.
Now, did you see this last night? I said, "What happened when you were four years old?" And we had some ticks and tocks, and we cleaned that up. Now, "What happened when you were four years old?" And eventually we could find nothing. There was no charge on anything happened when she was four years old. Obviously nothing had happened. That was very tricky and very freaky. But how come I found it? Well, I found it simply because I audit by fundamentals. A not-knowingness is a not-knowingness.
Wrote a story once called Fear. A guy lost four hours and his hat, you know? All you have to do is lose four hours and your hat sometime and you've had it, see? Particularly if somebody keeps insisting that something happened. I'm sure some of you, in college or around and about, have tried to convince some compatriot of the terrible things he did while he was drunk, or while she was drunk. Of course, it adds in a not-know because they can't say they did and they can't say they didn't. So you'll get a not-know basic which serves, mechanically—it is a not-knowingness that begins the chain. So, of course this chain stood hooked in because there was a not-knowingness about it. But the not-knowingness was in reverse at this time—there was nothing had happened. Right? It's just crazy.
You by the way won't find that ordinarily in auditing pcs. That was just freaky. But you audit by fundamental, and of course a not-knowingness at the bottom of the chain of course is just a not-knowingness at the bottom of the chain. It doesn't have to even be a not-knowingness about something. It doesn't have to be anything about the bottom of the chain. That's elementary. Well, enough about that.
This should give you some kind of an idea of what I mean by auditing by fundamentals. You just never give up on the fundamental. Now, I'll give you an idea here, see? Pc: "Yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, and I am tired of listing!" See? And "I can't think of any more."
Now, the reasonable auditor says, "Of course you can get tired listing." And it is true, he couldn't think of any more. This is absolutely true. But the auditor says, "Have I missed a withhold on you?" See, he audits not by reasonableness, but by a fundamental. When the pc gets nattery, he has a missed withhold. He doesn't care whether this missed withhold is justified or not justified, understandable or not understandable; he just audits by the fundamental that a missed withhold must be present, and you ask for it and pull it, and the fellow keeps on listing again. That happened today, and I was very, very interested to hear about it. See? You mustn't be reasonable, you must be fundamental.
There are certain basic truths and laws about the human mind. They are not very many. They are astonishingly few. you audit by those, not by how reasonable it is that something else would be the case. you actually have to isolate out for yourself what is true and what is fundamental. I could give you a list of things here and punch it down your gullet and get you examined on this thing until you were green in the face, you see? And I'd say, "These are the truths and that's all there is to it." Well, that's something like feeding this boa constrictor I was talking about, see? And if the auditor is unable to regurgitate the proper datum at that instant, why, he'd be sunk in any tough situation, you see, in an auditing session, wouldn't he? He'd be sunk, right there.
Well, actually, a stable datum fixed in by a confusion, and not by understanding, doesn't happen to be available in a tight spot. So you don't audit by fundamentals, you audit by being reasonable. So you must recognize a fundamental for what it is. A fundamental is a fundamental. I can go this far: I can say to you, "This is a fundamental. Damn it all, find out about it!" And tell you eight, ten, fifteen times, "It's a fundamental; find out about it!" See?
And then one fine day you say, "Well, I haven't got anything else to do; I think I'll find out about this. Oh my God, it is a fundamental." At that point it becomes a usable tool.
You can go on believing these fundamentals are fundamentals and never using them or never spitting them out at the time they're required and you'll go on being a ritualist. You go right on being a ritualist. All of a sudden, pc after pc you'll miss on. And you say, "Why am I missing on this pc?" It'll be something on this basis—since here was a pc we hadn't been missing on one way or the other—be on the basis of the auditor does not feel free to recognize that a fundamental applies here.
We're always asking this question, "What is an overt?" To one case it's one thing, and to one—another case it's another thing But we had this gratuitously offered, see, on this case I audited. Case described an overt. Well, we're not much interested in sensation—auditing sensation—so therefore affection, see, traps people. All right, great. I can tell you a secret, that it isn't going to move very far in Prepchecking Why isn't it going to move very far? Well, because you're just auditing straight sensation. You're saying, "Have you ever grief?" "Have you ever grief?" "Have you ever grief?"
"No."
"Have you ever—have you ever used communication so as to harm somebody?" or something like that. Oh well, now we're on real fruitful ground, aren't we? See, by taking the ARC triangle and moving around to another corner of it that does apply, we've got it. Well, that's fundamental.
All of you have ARC down real well. Well, it's fundamental. It exists. When the R goes down the A goes down, the C goes down; when the R goes up, then the C goes up, when the A goes up, you know, they always go up—all of them, all together.
So there's an opportunity to improve communication. And of course, lack of communication or jammed communication (withholds equals stupidity)—we could have made the case brighter. This is by fundamentals, you see?
One day you yourself will be puzzling around. You will be puzzling as to why a withhold makes people so stupid. And after you've sat there being stupid about it for some time, you will suddenly realize that it has something to do with something that has nothing to do with communication; that the reverse of communication must be happening here. And you'll eventually think the whole thought out all by yourself and look back on it and say, "Oh, well! Heh-heh! Huh. I sure been feeling stupid for the last five minutes! I wonder if I was withholding something? Well, I was withholding the answer to it," or something like this. And you suddenly add it up and say, "Ha-ha-ha! 
Withholds equal stupidity. Heh! For sure!" See? So therefore, lack of communication equals stupidity, you see? Quite fascinating.
But you can take these things, and because these data are known, you can get a hopped-up, speeded-up, enormously increased look at the things. You got a chance to look at these things and you will eventually see that they knock out other things. And you don't need these 8,655 superstitions like "I must not stand under a karo tree because it's what gives women babies," you know? I mean, other true data of the human race. I imagine there's girls right here that have been Polynesians or something like that, and have been part of a taboo-ridden society, and they don't realize why they always flinch alongside of lampposts, or something like that.
And on the other hand, some of us have often lived a canine life. But these are superstitions. And when you get down to the bottom of the pile, why, all these superstitions become understandable.
But what I expect of an auditor is to audit the pc that's right there in front of him by the most fundamental fundamentals that he can command and understand. And if he does that, he will always get wins. See, this auditor will always get wins. He won't go around in any kind of a fog about it. And he'll see that the Prepcheck system is put together very adroitly. But it becomes totally nonfunctional when you take off from a Zero question, get no overt, put down any What that should have been a Zero A or something, get no overt on it, buy a lot of "thinks" and "supposed-to's" and that sort of thing, go on down a whole long chain of meaningless stuff—you know, not even getting the soles of the shoe wet. And nothing is clearing up and it's all very arduous and just goes on and on.
When you've done that a little while, you get the idea "I wonder if there isn't some better way to go about it?" And you go for broke about that point. And I can put your attention forward to this point: that unless you get something the pc has done, you see, for your What question, a specific incident (I don't care whether you're asking for missed withholds because it all depends on the Zero, what you're asking for), but unless you get a specific incident, and it actually has doingness in it, and you make a chain at that point—you just spot that there's a chain here at that point, and word it at that—that you're not going to get anything happening You will see this and then the mechanics of the mind sort of start unraveling "Oh well, yes, of course!" you know? And after you've run some of these chains down to the bottom then you'll find out that all chains are anchored because of not-knowingness in the bottom incident.
I point out something to you: on two or three demonstrations you have seen that my What question was not on the button. See? It was close enough to have created a breeze past somebody's ear. See? But it was not dead center. Because the only time you know enough to ask the exact What question is when you've finished Prepchecking! See? And then you can ask the exact What question. And if you want to appear a genius to an instructor, why, never write the What question down until you've finished the session, see?
The What questions are never quite on. They're just sighting questions, that's all. They're never quite on. Because you really don't quite know what's on that chain, you see?
So you should realize that if it's that unknown to the pc, what Godgiven, turban-wearing prescience do you have that you're going to know all about it when the pc doesn't, and you haven't found out from the pc yet? Well, you can't find it out that exactly. But because when you're auditing by fundamentals, you know something about it—you know about what's going to turn up—you ask a What question that will probably turn up something that resembles this. And I'd say it's the sheerest luck, one out of a hundred, that a What question is dead-on. We had a What question of "What about sleeping with men to trap them?" See? Oh, that's pretty good. That was pretty good. Served our purposes beautifully and went null gorgeously. But it wasn't the chain. The chain all followed that What question. We had a chain that went on from there, but we were actually taking it back from an incident and were asking questions which relieved the What question which wasn't described by the What question, which I thought was quite fascinating But I never expect your What question to be any closer on than that.
Pc gave you an overt, you actually did get an incident, and the pc actually did something in this; and then you put your What question to it, 80 as you get a chain of that type of incident, and then go earlier, you'll almost always find yourself out in the blue if that was the first incident. But it doesn't relieve; there must have been a lot of other factors. And you find yourself asking questions about other types. They're almost on, don't you see?
They'll be on the same dynamic. They will be the same type of personnel, you know? And you get those erased and all of a sudden the rest of the chain will blow. Your What questions are almost never dead on.
You would be a swami beyond all swamis if your What questions were absolutely accurate every time, see? So you just get a What question which describes the incident, in its workably general—not too general—terms and 'ope for the best! And fire from there. And you'll work it out every time. And that's all you're bound and determined to have to get null, is the incident you found. And sometimes the incident will go null. Well, if you notice, in working a Prepcheck question, I will only go over these things a couple of times, with me eye on the meter—and nothing was dying down. And that told me loads. Because I tell you, one withhold system, you know, I mean, one "When," "All," "Appear," you know, and "Who," and it didn't blow, well, it's something like the curiosity: "Well, we fired an 18-inch shell into the middle of the jam tin and it still sat there!" There must be some other thing holding down this mirage called a jam tin. We couldn't possibly have fired at the jam tin. We must have an image of the jam tin. Now let's find the jam tin. See? And the jam tin always lies earlier. Nothing ever locks up because of a later incident.
And you all of a sudden, when you go down, you finally pick up this pebble, and you don't even use the withhold system on it; it just kind of goes whooh. And you go back up the line and maybe use a withhold system on something else that was a little bit hangy and then come back to your What question and just ask the What question again, and it's null, see?
It is an inexact activity. Prepchecking is not an exact activity. It depends on the pc in front of you. I expect you to be able to audit and understand the pc who is in front of you.
Now, here's what else I expect of you: because Prepchecking itself is an inexact activity, I ask you to do it on the framework of total exactitude. See, just groove that in madly. That sounds weird, doesn't it? But give it in a Model Session, God 'elp us! You see? Your TRs, marvelous. Your E-Metering, superb. And when you've got those things all down so that you don't think any more about them than you think about your coat while you're eating dinner, man, can you prepcheck. You see? Got an exact frame: You got the withhold system, that's exact; you got your Model Session, that's exact; your E-Metering is exact; the fundamentals on which your chains are stacked up in the pc's mind will be found to follow those exact rules—always held in at the earliest incident; it's a cousin to the chain—and you take your exactitudes and just play by ear from then on.
There's probably nobody plays by ear better than a symphony soloist. There's nobody better trained in music, you see? These jam sessions—you hear some of these boys whoopin' up down around N'Orleans. Huh! Got a record upstairs that tells how that impromptu jam session was put together, you see? They worked on it eighteen or twenty hours and managed to get its impromptuness to sound imprompt. But the upshot of this is, is—well, you take a symphony orchestra drummer. I don't know how come they get these guys into symphony orchestras, unless it's the high-class or snob-level something or other. And then they get them into symphony orchestras and they must trap them there in some fashion, because these guys make Krupas look awfully, awfully dim! They're technicians. Man, they're marvelous.
One guy, one night . . . you know, your jazz orchestra boys, they all have to use these whiskers, or something. These whisks, you know? And they get one of these whisks and they go over the top of the snare drum, and it says snif, snif, snif, snif, snif, you know, that sort of thing. Symphony orchestra man does it with a pair of drumsticks, and it goes whisk, whisk, whisk, whisk, whisk, you know? And where's his whisker? It isn't anyplace. You know? I swear those guys could play snare drums with their kettle drums if you asked them to, see? They're marvelous.
But they are precision musicians. They really can play by note, you see? They really can do their stuff. And after that, why, hell, they can do anything, you see? But let's get some high-school kid and before he learns how to back up Wagner, why, let's let him extrapolate with some jazz. It sounds that way too. Never seems to—. It's just noisy. See, it's just noise. And actually, this is always the illusion of any craftsman, is that he can do it offhandedly. It looks as though there is terrific ease. There's just nothing to it, you see? You see Weller out here whittling a block of wood. And you say, "Well, anybody could do that"—or look at something he's built, or something like that— and you say, "Well, anybody could do that." Go ahead, see? It looks so easy.
The mahogany despatch boxes that sit on the back ledge of my desk back there—he didn't cause any fuss building those things. They're all hand fitted and hand carved, without any tools to amount to anything, you see? The guy is a craftsman. He's been at that for a long time. And you give old Jenner out here a pile of stone. You see, nobody can work stone. Give old Jenner a pile of stone and you say, "Build me a wall." Well, you can give him specifications about the wall, but somehow or another a wall happens. It's all so easy. you see him working out there and you see stuff going up and there's nothing much to it.
Well, now and then he makes a mistake. But the only mistakes he actually makes is when he and me come into a planning or design disagreement. And once in a while, why, we won't see eye to eye on some planning or design thing—something else is going to go up after that that he doesn't know about or something like that. But as far as actually doing it, it looks awful easy. It looks awful easy till you get somebody else in who calls himself a bricklayer. And the guy goes out, and my God, you know? He works, and he's got bricks stacked up, and he's got mortar, you know? And he picks up bricks, you know, and he puts them down, and he smooths them out and he gets the mortar on top of them, and it falls all over the drive and we've—. There must have been such a bricklayer at work around here, because one wall that we found out there was plumb. And he makes a lot of work out of it, and you wind up with no wall. Well, it's just basically because he just doesn't—the guy wouldn't know really how to handle mortar with a trowel. It comes down to little, tiny fundamentals, you know?
You take the fellow who does a great job of sculpture: He knows his clay, and he knows this and he knows that. They're not something he's trying to learn while he is making the sculpt, see? He's all set, and then he sculpts. He knows how to do these things.
Your old-time painters had this down to perfection. I know; I was kicking around over on that side of the channel, back in them thar days—I mean, the real old-timers around 1350, 1360—the real Flemish school that the other fellows just hah! you know, came along afterward and pspt! you know? Rembrandt—pfhooh! Well, he—copyist. But in those days you couldn't run down to the paint store. You could have run down but there would have been no paint store. And the way you learned how to paint is you went and found a master someplace and you ground color for him. And your little girlfriend would be saying to you, "Jan, how come you is so blue tonight?" And you'd mortar and pestle his color. And you finally found out all there was to know about drying and color and pigment and what pigment did and what pigment didn't and how it was blended and how it was put together and what constituency of it is—and the darned paintings painted with it are still there.
Fascinating They must have known something, huh? When you got all through, you knew how to—you'd find out how to spread the stuff and how to work it, and so on. And you actually go on for years. And someday, one day, why, the master would give you a brush, an old used brush of some kind or another, and say, "Well, you see the wall over there; well, make a paint stroke on it." And then you'd go over and you'd make a paint stroke on the wall, you know?
And he'd say, "Oh, my God! Give me that brush," you know?
You'd say, "What have I done wrong?" you know? Well, he couldn't find out what you'd done right! That was . . .
You look at the Japanese work with brush and that sort of thing They don't do it overnight, you know? It looks so easy. you know, you look at a Jap and he paints his bamboo, you know? He paints it all up and so on. He paints. And when it's all finished here's a beautiful free sketch, you see, of a bamboo.
You say, "That's easy." you take some charcoal or something, you know; you take a big piece of paper and you say, "Well, now let's see." And go bzupt! and bzupt! 	Well, the little Jap, he knows where to get the ink-stone, you know, and he knows how to grind it up, and he knows how to mix it and he knows how to handle brushes. And he could probably write with a brush as fast as you can write with a pen. Amazing!
And all of those things, however, are built out of a great ability to do a small detail. That's the common denominator of all great art. It's great ability to do a small detail. And out of that you get great art. And that's why these schools of drawing that you see down in Greenwich Village—well, they're all lined up along the board fence and so forth, and why in fifty years nobody can find those pictures around. They're definitely not going for 285 thousand pounds for one sketch. More likely you find them filling a mouse hole someplace to keep the draft out. And that's because those boys went on an entirely different idea: They see the ease with which it is done and mistake the tremendous skill in the tiny detail. Because the tiny det- it looks so easy, you see?
They see one of these boys painting, they see the results of the painting; it all looks so natural, it all looks so easy. So they use the same abandon with which the master works, you see? They use the same abandon with which the master works to paint their paintings or sculpt their sculptings, and it's mud. It's mud. And the only thing that's missing is "How do you take a small brush and flip it across a palette to bring it out to a point, and paint an absolutely straight line?" How do you do that?
Give you some idea of this: Michelangelo used to go calling on his friends, and if they weren't home he'd take a piece of chalk and he'd draw a circle on the door. And they always knew Michelangelo had been to visit them. He was the only man in all of Italy who could draw a freehand circle that was perfect. He'd draw a perfect circle. All of his friends recognized it as a badge, you know? Craftsmanship is built out of these—the exact skill, the exact response, the thing. I don't care how great the man's name is, or how splendid the accomplishment he's trying to accomplish, or how tiny or unimportant the thing is. The factor is still there. It's still craftsmanship. And craftsmanship is built out of tremendous expertness on the tiny detail. That's all you really have to know.
Now, our tiny details consist of a meter. One of the reasons we can clear today and get further today on cases, and get Goals Assessments and find terminals on cases, is because we have a better meter. All right, that's all right. That's neither here nor there. It still takes an auditor who is absolutely fabulous on reading a meter.
I went through a session this afternoon that I—. Yesterday my auditor said—he sort of wound up the end of the session and he was sort of stunned because he thought—sudden thought struck him which was: "What if some beginning student had been trying to do that goals check?" It whumped him for a second. He suddenly realized how far he himself had come. He was reading a microscopic clean needle, but it was microscopic. And he was reading some that were going sporadic and some that were going unsporadic, and were going naturally and well, you see? And it was a job of work, you see? And because he was centering in toward the center of a goal, of course he was getting suppressions and invalidations left and right because already he was stirring up its oppterm, you see? He was stirring up both its terminal and oppterm. He was picking off missed withholds, invalidations and suppressions, and getting the read, and getting the read off suppressions and missed withholds and invalidations, and getting the read back on the goal. Then he had to test all of the goals that had been there to make sure that each one of those didn't have invalidations or suppressions, do you see, or missed withholds on them and about them, you see? And then he had to check those to make sure that they weren't still reading—make sure they were null.
And he was working around on this for about an hour or so—well, more than that—checking out this goal line, you see? And the thought afterward struck him; all of a sudden he realized how far he'd come. I guess what thought really occurred to him is what would he have done a year ago? See? The guy was doing it very easily and very naturally, see? There was nothing to it. Meter was talking all the way. Now, he didn't have time to do that and worry about the meter and worry about rote and ritual, and so forth. He didn't have time to worry about these other things. He had to have a lot of things down pat, didn't he? 
He had to know this meter backwards. He had to know exactly what this meter was capable of and so forth. In other words, his attention couldn't be on the meter; his familiarity had to be sufficiently great that he could take the meter for granted and it still wouldn't knock his head off. Furthermore, his Model Session had to be absolutely perfect; he didn't have any time to worry about his Model Session. He had to know the exact fundamentals of what he was handling; he didn't have any time to figure out what he was handling, see? The whole thing was wrapped up in the fact that he was right in the middle of a Goals Problem Mass goal, and all of its little masses and so forth were just kicking the living daylights out of the goal because he had them stirred up like mad, do you see?
And he read the thing out and the end of the line, why, perfectly fine about it. And as I say, it suddenly struck him that what if he'd been trying to do it a year ago? I think that's what hit him. But it was all made out of little pieces. It was all made out of little pieces; the tremendous ease with which he could run a meter, the no worry of any kind on Model Session. He didn't have to fuss around with his TRs, don't you see? He didn't have any worries about these things whatsoever. He was totally relaxed. He knew those things backwards. He knew them forwards. And he knew he knew them. So he had at no moment any worry about them.
Now he could think of fundamentals. And the fundamentals are—is goals get invalidated and rudiments go out in any session, particularly a Goals Assessment. So all he had to do was just outguess the next missed withhold, you see? That's all he had to do. And keep checking and keep rolling And it was dead easy. But it would have been insurmountable, utterly insurmountable, if he had been—had any worry about his meter; if he'd had any worry about his sessioning, you know, his TRs; or if he didn't know for sure that if the pc starts doping off all you did was pull the missed withhold. You know, it goes like this: He sees the pc start to get dopey, he pulls the missed withhold, see? And bang! the pc is right back there again. Get the idea? And he suddenly sees that the goal is not reading, and it was reading a moment ahead. Well, he doesn't say, "Thank God, we have nulled it out at last." He says, "Is there an invalidation on this?" Pang! "All right, what was that?" Clean it up. "Is there an invalidation on that? That's clean. All right." Now, he repeats the goal again, he gets no read on the goal. Now he says, "That's null." Careful workmanship, see? Pays off, all the way down the line.
How do you get to be a superb auditor? It's just by knowing all those little parts. That's all. And just knowing them perfectly. And if an auditor finds out that he is apparently creaking on one of these infinitesimally unimportant skills (you see, hell be creaky on it)—if he ever is sitting there auditing and is saying, "I wonder—I wonder if that pc is getting my acknowledgments"—if he finds himself worrying about this or wondering about that, you see, I swear he'll never have time to do anything else. But what he should do, at this particular time, if he finds himself worrying about these things, ah, he ought to practice with some TR 4, get somebody there until he really gets that TR 4 in there, you know? Really gets it going good—or 3, or 2, or whatever else he's out on, see? That's the smart auditor.
The smart student of auditing would make himself a checksheet of these various parts of auditing I'm talking now about the parts of mixing the pigments, you see? Grinding the lapis lazuli—that stage of the game. Well, just make himself a checksheet on these things, and go over that checksheet very carefully, wondering if at any time, in any recent session, he has worried about any part of his checksheet. See, make a checksheet which includes the various parts of the E-Meter. You know? The sensitivity knob, the trim, the dial, tone arm dial, something like—that he's had trouble with, or worried about. Just go over this checksheet which has all of these various parts and items and TRs and things like that. And go over that, and just ask himself honestly, "Now, in the last few sessions have I had any concern with this?" See? "Well, then, how about this one? I have trouble confronting pcs lately? Oh, yeah. All right. Well, we'll cross that one." And then just take those points he's crossed and just go ahead and drill them. Just drill them. Just treat it like a parade-ground drill, that's all.
A dancer: he finds out that he usually stumbles on his exit. You'll find him going out on the stage and practice that step that gets him exited until he doesn't stumble on his exit.
Only then will you be free to be a craftsman, be a master of what you're doing. Only then will you be free to audit the pc in front of you. you won't be free to audit the pc in front of you as long as you're enslaved with don'tknows amongst your auditing tools. Because you've got a chain of error which mounts in the session on the basic not-knowingness. And your session errors just mount like mad. "Oh my God, what am I doing?" And you eventually, checking these things off—and the chances are you might not find out what you're doing wrong for a little while, until you've cleaned some of the garbage off. And you suddenly find out, "You know, I—I really have never dared ask anybody because of embarrassment, but what is a null needle?" Hmm-hmhm-mm! 	Well, that's what it takes—that's what it takes—to become a master of a craft. And don't think that you're going to get results, real honest-to-God results, if you're anything less. And that's the discouraging point of auditing.
Today's auditing is not aimed at the repetitive process: No attention on the pc; you just run a repetitive process on the pc and you hope for the best. Now, the funny part of it is, is that system circa 50 on—started to develop in 50, was best developed along about 52, 53—that system actually does make a lot of people well. And you could be fooled by the fact that it does make a lot of people well. So does engram running.
See, there's a lot of things you can do with the skills of yesterday. And if anything, we are victimized slightly by the tremendous workability of what we have been able to do here and there. And any auditor who has audited consistently along the line—this person and that person and so on—well, has had some rather interesting wins. He gets hung on his own wins. Because we have never had techniques, before 1962, which reached all cases. And that's something we haven't all learned yet.
And the other thing about it is, is these techniques require a master's touch. They are that strong. They are that powerful. You can unman the pc's mind. His reactive mind doesn't have a prayer, you do these things right. You have broadly, broadly workable technology that's been going in that direction. But at the same time, we inherit along with it a precision of application which knows no second-class or "just as good as." All of the various points which make precision in auditing must be actually precise.
When you sit down across from an auditor who does his E-Metering so well that he never worries about an E-Meter; he does his TRs so well that he never worries about his TRs; he does his Model Session so well that he never worries about his Model Session; he knows what he's supposed to do with the processes he's given, whether they're a Routine 3 or a Prepcheck or anything else, you see, and he does just these things. And honest, the pc, as a pc, he'll just say, "Gosh! You know? Gosh! It's so easy! I am so comfortable sitting here being audited." How come? What makes this? How did that combination of events take place? Is it because the auditor was born as the seventh son of a seventh son? Is it because he gave a present once to the Witch of Endor? Is it some fantastic prescience of some kind? Is it because his thetan can read your thetan? Well, it doesn't happen to be a single one of these things. It would be because the auditor knew the little points of auditing absolutely perfectly, did them as a whole, with perfection, so that he was under no tension by reason of auditing because he knew all the parts and could then apply fundamentals to what he was doing
When you will sit down, someday, across from such an auditor, you'll all of a sudden say, "Whew! Uhh!" And you yourselves, if you learn your business here, will go home and you'll sit down and start to audit somebody—somebody that you used to audit—and they'll say, "My God, what happened to you?" And there really wasn't anything happened to you except you are doing less and you're doing it much less arduously than you used to do. And the results just fly. Nothing to it. you finish up a two-, three-, four-hour session. You're perfectly calm. So what? You'd just as soon audit another two or three hours. Because you're under no tension. You're under no not-knows.
But first and foremost, in order to attain any result requires a technology. Well, we have those technologies. And you have to also get a confidence that when you sit down and audit somebody, he is—by these technologies—he is going to get a result. So that that takes out the last not-know out of it, is "Is the pc going to gain or win?" And what you're doing today, you do it right, the pc keeps winning That pc just wins, that's all. The pc goes on winning and you all of a sudden get confident in the fact the pc is going to win. If you audit him, the pc will win—bang! That's all there is to it. You'll win, the pc wins. Everybody wins. And that's the final tension that goes out of it. And after that, my God! The results you can get in auditing are just fantastic.
And frankly, that's what I expect of you here. That's what I expect you to learn how to be able to do: to audit like a master before you get out of here.
Thank you.