AUDITOR SELF-CRITICISM
A lecture given on 4 February 1964

All right. How are you today?
Audience: Good. Fine.
Well, I’m glad to see you, too. We have a date here. What’s the date?
Audience: Fourth of February.
Fourth February, 1964. The-AD what?
Audience: Fourteen.
All right. All right, I’ll get close to it here. Saint Hill Special Briefing Course.
All right. Well, enough of this goofing off. Enough of this goofing off. I wasn’t speaking about the beginning of the lecture. I’m speaking about auditing. This is a lecture on the use of self-criticism in auditing.
Now, some of you-some of you have been the source of deep wailing, crying in the Kleenex, many puzzled looks on Jenny’s face, incredible remarks in the Instructors’ conference and incredulous gasps. Because the subject of self-criticism of one’s own auditing is very, very, very misunderstood at this particular moment. And the reason it’s misunderstood, of course, is because it’s too simple.
Now, I’ve just been over the high spots in R6 in the month of January. And-my theory being it was better for me to knock me ‘ead off than for everybody to knock their ‘eads off. This being a theory I work on. But sometimes it deprives you of lectures and this body of some years of future life.
Now, we’ve-we got this one pretty well taped. And R6 is of a complexity—R6 is of such a complexity that-well, it’s impossible to learn it; it’s impossible to do it and yet you have to. Its complexities are sufficient to fill the most avaricious appetite of any complexicator. So, we might as well just lay aside complexity until we get to R6. There’s where it lives. R5 seems complex, but R6 is incredible. And yet it’s one little doable action: the running out of the actual GPM. All right, that’s very complex-and, by the way, we’ll be rolling that unit here any minute now and starting in with a dull thud. And what I’m about to give you-what I’m about to give you, by the way, is germane to it, because this point has to be reviewed. And completely aside from all other levels, if you haven’t got basic auditing as required in smoothness at the level of R6, you don’t lay eggs. You don’t lay eggs-you lay ostrich eggs and emu eggs and other large varieties which have sharp corners. So in actual fact, you can call this a lecture for lower levels. And so it is. It’s something that you should learn in lower levels, but it’s peculiarly germane to R6 and you can call this the first R6 lecture.
Now, what’s this thing-this thing called self-criticism of one’s own auditing Well, this is very simple. This is-this is too simple and it misses horribly and everybody gets very tanglefooted in it. And I have seen some of the most remarkable responses I think that anybody could ever add up. And these responses are in answer to the question ”What happened in the session?” They’re-they’re really gorgeous. I should have a stack of papers here in front of me but I will spare you that embarrassment. What went on in the session? Week after week-week after week, papers were handed in to me and everybody was trying to find out what I meant and what I wanted. Oh, I’m actually fairly easy to please, but I just couldn’t seem to be pleased by any of these reports. What R6 requires is one thing but self-criticism of auditing applies to all levels, in actual fact, from III up. II-that’s getting well, you should know it in II, but it’s quite a bit to teach at II. III-it becomes absolutely vital; you’ll still get some results without it. At IV, it becomes pretty confoundedly pressing because you’re going deeper into the case. At V, well, you’d better have it pretty well, and at VI you’re not going to get anyplace without it.
In other words, the deeper you reach into a case the more expert your auditing has to be. And when I mean auditing I mean your basic auditing. The deeper you go into cases-the higher up the level, the deeper you go into the case, of course, and your auditing is-must comparably keep pace. In other words, the more-the more reach the processes have, the more vital it becomes that the basic auditing be perfect, or as near perfect as it can be made.
In other words, somebody could get away at Levels I-at Level 0, I, something like that-can get away with some pretty fantastic flubs. Before I finish that, let me just tell you, self-criticism is simply making a tape of your own session, listening it back, and say what went wrong. I mean that-that’s the whole thing. How could you improve your own auditing? After listening to a tape of one of your sessions, how could you improve your auditing? And that’s all there is to self-criticism. And we’ll go into that at much greater length.
But you understand that at Level 0 or I in a co-audit in Poughkeepsie, somebody can sit down and say, ”Well, what-what solutions have you had to your lumbosis?” and just sit there and run it off. It’s not-it’s not going to do too much because if the basic impingement of the auditor is not very great, you’re not running very deep into the case anyway, and if the auditor makes any flubs, well, the flub isn’t impinging either. You see? See?
So therefore, it sometimes looks very mysterious to one of you, operating as an Auditing Supervisor in a co-audit, to have all these brand-new people fresh off the street sitting there, yippety-yapping at each other and everybody happy and no ARC breaks and nothing going on at all. Well, of course, they’re not reaching any deeper than a molecule and the auditing flubs, of course, have no more impingement than the auditing question, see? So therefore, it looks good. It looks good and you say, ”Well, why can’t veteran auditors audit this smoothly?” Well, the veteran auditor, of course, is going in with a pickax. He’s going much deeper in the case. He’s doing open-pit mining. And he’s got himself quite a battery of processes. And he starts using one of these processes on the pc and he’s no longer dusting it off one molecule thick. He and the process are making an impingement, man! And what he says has an effect on the pc. So, of course, his auditing flub has an effect on the pc, proportionately. Right?
Well, so much-that would be at repetitive level. So it-the bum pieces of auditing which recur at Level II also have an impingement. See, they have an impingement as great as Level II has. And Level II, with a tremendous number of repetitive process-Mary Sue is doing a chart of these things and we’re doing a ”Guidebook to Scientology Processes.” And she’s been digging up some from yars and yars ago, and I never knew there was that wealth of repetitive processes. That’s about the wealthiest level that anybody ever had anything to do with. Good heavens, there are processes that I’d forgotten and put to bed ages ago, and so forth. Did you-do you remember Viewpoint Processing? Well, you may have and may not have because I didn’t, and Mary Sue promptly produced a big sheet that she had salvaged out of an ACC. She’s really done a wonderful job keeping odd bits of records and that sort of thing. And she’d salvaged this sheet out of her papers. And I looked at this-what’s this, you know? Well, those-just repetitive processes, but frankly, they were enough to tear anybody’s head off, see. Viewpoint-rehabilitation of the pc’s space, for God’s sakes. Krrrr!
So-well, that’s quite a bit of impingement. And so we consequently, with that much impingement of process, we’re going to get that much impingement of flub. And so we have to have TRs in pretty good condition in order to run that particular level. Person isn’t going to get much results-we’ll go into results in a minute-if he doesn’t have his TRs in such a position.
Now, let’s take our old friend here the E-Meter. And let’s take Level III with this E-Meter. Now, this E-Meter will dig. It’s all right for the pc to sit there and say, ”Yes. Hm-hm. That was in 1952. That was when my dog bit Aunt Agnes.” That’s all right. That’s fine. But now we’re going to find out the sub-itsa. And as soon as we get the meter we start mining in sub-itsa. Now, we’re just mining in itsa at Level II. It’s what can the pc remember, and the only improvement we get of the depth of itsa is brought about by the repetitive nature of the process, you see? Ah, but now we go into Level III, and we are no longer doing mere open-pit mining with picks and shovels and Chinese wicker baskets, you see. We have moved in a large crane, called an E-Meter, and it’s taking bites out of the earth at a tremendous rate. And the pc doesn’t know what’s going to be bit up.
Just take an innocent question like this: ”In this session, has anything been suppressed?”
Pc says, ”No, no, no.”
”All right, I’ll check that on the meter. In this session, has anything been suppressed? I’m sorry, that reads.”
”It does? Oh. Oh, oh, well, yes. I suppressed-when you said ‘start of session,’ I suppressed it. The session never started.”
Well now, how did we arrive at that? We didn’t arrive at that simply by asking the pc a question and getting the snap off-the-cuff answer which was sitting there ready to be delivered. No, we asked the pc and he couldn’t see anything so we looked at the meter to see if it could see something and, of course, it mines below his itsa level. It will read below where he can see. Well, now we’re getting into an area of more impingement, aren’t we? We’re going deeper. And the impingement being greater, the handling of the auditing must be better. Because now the impingement of the meter plus the process is sufficiently great that the pc, of course, is impinged upon by the flubs that much more heavily.
So he begins to mind these flubs much worse. Now, this really has nothing whatsoever to do with whether one pc is touchy or another pc is untouchy. It has to do with the fact that the pc is being mined more deeply, and therefore the impingement is greater. Now, one of the things which happens when you run somebody over his level-this is only true, by the way, up to Level IV-but when you mine somebody above his level, you’re running him on some process type and so forth that he is not accustomed to. You-he’s over his head. Every time you pick up an answer it leaps full-armed and slays him. See-bong! You see?
This person ought to be audited on ordinary itsa-Level I, you see? So they chatter-chatter, the protective defenses of the mind are not disarmed, he’s perfectly careful, he really doesn’t have to talk to the auditor, he can sort of say, ”Well, it’s all right if I say I did this because the auditor really isn’t there anyway.” He’s got all kinds of things, you see, that he can dodge away from. But as we’ve moved it up the line-as we’ve moved it up the line, he no longer can do this, and when you go into with a crash and ask something that he finds it very difficult to confront, you’ll get things like bypassed charge accumulating. And he says the-picks on these little bits of rough auditing see. And the-he minds these things. He’s very upset about them. And when somebody is audited well above his level you can count on consistent and continual ARC breaky sessions.
It doesn’t mean that ARC breaky sessions totally stem from being audited above the level, don’t you understand? Because if you want to see a real prize ARC breaky session do an R6 with a wrong goal. You’re going to have a sufficiently ARC breaky pc to please the most masochistic auditor ever made. It doesn’t, matter who it is. You see, he’s just being audited wrong. It’s not above his level. But this is true up to Level IV, that if you run a pc above his level you have a greater tendency to have ARC breaky sessions. So up to Level IV, the best handling of a (quote) ”ARC breaky pc” is reduce his level.
Somebody who’s consistently ARC breaky-you simply reduce his level. That’s all. That’s the best handling because when we’re assessing cases we aren’t necessarily looking over the quality of the auditing. And we assume that the auditor was there doing his best, but certainly the level of impingement of the error was much greater than the pc could tolerate. That’s only true up to Level IV, you understand, because at Level V and Level VI the only thing that cures ARC breaks-the only thing that cures ARC breaks-is picking up the bypassed charge that has been bypassed. You reduce his level, he’s just going into a sad effect. You know, you got somebody with a wrong goal so you-he’s ARC breaky, so you reduce his level. Ha! Cut your throat, man. That wrong goal is just going to sit there from there on out, and a week later and a month later and three months later and six months later he’ll still be in the sad effect from this wrong goal.
So Levels V and VI are not included in that reduction of level. Because the person who has been booted up to Levels V and VI jolly well ought to be able to tolerate auditing, because he should have been audited up to a point where he is not frightened of having problems. And he’s not frightened of the horrible censor who stands over with a lion skin on and a club in his hand that Freud put there. The censor was an item invented by Sigmund Freud. We are very indebted to Mr. Freud, and I’m-never say anything that is really to be taken in a derogatory fashion about Freud. But I can never fail to remark some of these things which going further in the work have suddenly revealed some of these gaping holes.
Have you-have you ever audited a psychoanalyzed pc? That is a ball, man! The only thing you get off the psychoanalyzed pc is psychoanalytic computations. And the auditor that will sit there and take these-I don’t know.
This is a bunch of bunk, you see. What it is, is invented items. You’ll find that a person who is given a wrong goal will dramatize it more than his right goals. You tell somebody he has a goal ”to lasso bulls on the pampas,” see? ”To lasso bulls on the pampas,” you see? Well, of course, such a goal is a lot of bull. But we can go-we can get this fellow then, short time afterwards-he’s sold on it, and he’ll just keep talking about having to go to the pampas, you know, and riding his horse while he’s telling you, you know? And he’s got to lasso bulls on the pampas. This is a most remarkable thing. And eventually you’ll pick it up that it’s a wrong goal and he no longer dramatizes it. In other words, you have an installed goal. And because it is wrong, a wrongness has been invalidated, and of course doesn’t as-is, but beefs up. Now, you find the person’s right goal, he will dramatize it less. This is one of the ways of telling what is a right goal-not a very effective way, but a little cute trick that lies alongside of the thing. You tell this fellow-you tell this fellow he has a goal ”to sneeze” and all the next day he does nothing but sneeze. You can conclude at the end of that time that that is a wrong goal. Because if you’d found the goal ”to sneeze,” he would now sneeze less. If it was an actual goal, you see.
But if you found a wrong goal ”to sneeze,” you have validated an error. And he will now sneeze worse. You’ve given it wrong source. If you date a somatic with a wrong date, it won3t go away. That’s for sure. But an auditor can come along shortly afterwards and find the wrong date of the somatic, and get very nice meter reactions and a reduction of the somatic. You understand what I just said? An auditor comes along and he wrongly dates a somatic on a pc. This pc didn’t get any better, see, in fact his somatic probably got a little worse. And then another auditor comes along shortly afterwards, can find the wrong date of the somatic, and even though he uses that as the date, he runs off the charge of it having been wrongly dated, you understand, and the somatic slightly reduces and he thinks he’s got the right date. You understand? Very cute.
Now, of course, if he went ahead and found the right date, the somatic would go completely. You understand? Well, this is the validation of an error, and a person tends to dramatize a validated error more than an actual aberration which has been contacted. This is very mysterious, but is something for an auditor to watch for because he’ll sometimes see some very amusing examples of this. They’re very amusing. The-very often he will get a pc from some co-audit or from some other area who has been told something of this sort, and the pc will sit there with this big sell. Your best thing to do is do a case analysis on it. Find out where he got this idea, see? Where he’s sitting—he’s sitting over there where he got the idea, of course-get the considerations off of the thing and then find out where it really is or if it really is true, see. And you’ll find out these things will go away.
Well, now you could do the same thing with a psychoanalytic patient. I’ve told this story many times but the most unkind thing I did, I think, to-ever did to a pc from his own point of view, was the associate editor of Collier’s magazine, back in the early days. And he had been psychoanalyzed and psychoanalysis had kept him going for a number of years. When the psychoanalyst picked him up, he had ulcers. He had ulcers so you could see daylight through him, you see? And he had ceased to have ulcers, oddly enough, apparently. But he had to be very careful. This is always true of a person who has been-had errors validated by some psychotherapy, or medical treatment or something of the sort. They have to be careful. That’s the common denominator. That is something you want to watch for in a pc. What is he being very careful of? That’s why that Careful button is so gorgeous. What’s he being careful of? You know, well he has to-he has to have nineteen hours sleep a night. He has to be very careful to get nineteen hours sleep a night. You trace that back with some kind of a case analysis, you’ll get into some of the most amusing ramifications you ever heard of. And finally you will find out that this was a piece of advice that he got to cure his insomnia or something, and it was a validated error. That wasn’t what was wrong with him at all, see? Somebody has found the wrong combo of the ease, and worked it around, and now the fellow will dramatize it.
Well, this associate editor at Collier’s magazine had been psychoanalyzed since he was a small boy, and he was being very careful. He-if he-if he didn’t ride on certain kinds of trains (maybe I exaggerate this a little bit, you see) and if he didn’t-if he was very careful to drink only out of square tumblers, and if he only thought the right thoughts, and if he sat in a certain way in a chair, he could live, you see? He wanted to know what this Dianetics was all about and I gave him a session. And the first thing I did was take him back to the beginning of his psychoanalysis and scan him rapidly through to the la-from the first session to the last session he had ever had. At the end of the first scan, his ulcers were on full. Gave him back every symptom that psychoanalysis had cured him of. Every single symptom was there glaring him in the face. We used to audit in those days on a couch. He got up-he got up off the couch and he staggered into the bathroom and he was dreadfully ill in about eight different directions. I scanned him through it another time or two and it eased the symptoms and that sort of thing. But the poor fellow now had nothing to hold on to. He had nothing to hold on to. So he didn’t write a good article about Dianetics, you see. We’d taken away his id and his ego and his mother complex and his censors and how it was looking through cracks in the bedroom window that had aberrated him, don’t you see. And we’d just taken all these things and torn the whole thing up and thrown it in the air and given him back his ulcers in full, but the man could breathe. He didn’t recognize in himself that he was now freer than he’d been for seven years.
And, oh, he got subsequent auditing, I’m sure. But personally I myself was not terribly fascinated. Because he was only supposed to be a demonstration. And he kept comparing Dianetics to psychoanalysis, which I think was awfully fatal for him. He knew at the end of that time that we were sufficiently powerful to be able to tear up another psychotherapy. Naturally, the course of action would have been to just erase the psychoanalysis just by chain scanning and return him into proper cycles of processing and put him back together again and get him into some kind of Condition so that he could function. Obviously his ulcers were not from his id having skidded into his ego, see?
So, I remember then. That was fabulous. Some other auditor took him on. They did quite a bit for him afterwards. But the point startled me. I hadn’t recognized myself the frailty of psychoanalysis-the tremendous frailty of it. In other words, this thing was by inventedness. It was a cure by inventing new evils. And the cure by invention is an alter-is and sometimes you can do things with it. But remember, it would be a very, very grim sort of an approach, that if this fellow had serious headaches to give him an awful stomachache so he took his attention off of bis headache. But don’t you think that that hasn’t been done? And many times, and several therapies can be attributable to it.
But there’s a very shallow draft. That’s a very shallow draft. And actually telling somebody about his ids and skiddings and the censor and how he had evil thoughts all the time and he just thought evil thoughts all the time but had to suppress them-and he was very close to Suppress as a button, don’t you see? All of these things had added up into a very shallow draft action which had simply submerged the actual symptoms. Well, now what do you think an auditor’s flub-a failure to acknowledge or something like that-would have done at that level of case operation? Nothing. The auditor could have failed to acknowledge or acknowledge or double-acknowledge or triple-acknowledge or walked out of the room or sat on the desk with—leaning back with his feet higher than his head, snoring, and it wouldn’t have had much bearing on the case, don’t you see? Case was just plunging himself in with overcommunication of some kind or another. That’s the psychoanalytic approach, you see?
We don’t do anything quite as light as that. In other words, that’s a negative itsa. See, the person is examining things that never existed. Well, let’s look at this. You get an E-Meter loose amongst a ease and you can start pulling a case up by the roots. And this is getting pretty doggone fundamental. You just ask this fellow, ”Since the last time I audited you a week ago, has anything been suppressed?” And he comes up with his problems and upsets and so forth, but he himself is buried. This is sufficiently true that you won’t care to use many ”Since” mid ruds at Level VI.
The reason for that is, of course, they are sitting-all the events of the last week are sitting on the last item you left him in. It’s going to take you about-well, five or ten minutes to list and blow that item. Why spend a half an hour? You see what I mean now by depth? Let’s take those two extremes. All the events of the past week are sitting on this item. Well, you’re going to blow the item. See, it just happens to be the item he’s sitting in. So you don’t pay much attention to it. In other words, you’re now mining so deep that the shallow mining hasn’t got very much bearing on it.
Well, let’s take the intermediate step-Level IV. Level IV, now, we’re going for service facsimiles. We’re going for long chains of stuff. We’re going for assessment-type things. We’re going to plow around in this case and find out what combo of this and that reads. And we’re going to do something with this, with the E-Meter. And we’re going to take up this guy by his roots and we’re going to say, ”How are you making people wrong?” Now, that is a very accusative level of auditing, I must assure you. But it’s nevertheless a very factual level of auditing. Now, if the fellow hasn’t graduated up through the levels as a pc to a point where he can take enough responsibility to have been wrong occasionally or catch himself out doing something antisocial, he isn’t going to buy this at all, you see. So the auditor’s error is a crashing shock to him. See, you’ve got that much charge-that much more charge at Level IV than we had at Level III. Because we’ve got that much more charge, we can bypass it more easily. And bypassed charge is usually bypassed by a session flub. It’s the session flub that will key in the bypassed charge. It doesn’t create the bypass, that was done by a technical error, but it doesn’t-some—very often doesn’t key in until somebody’s made a session flub.
So we have at Level IV a greater opportunity to mine deeper and miss more. Now, at Level V we find the pc in a very nasty, cantankerous mood, anyway. First place, he doesn’t like to be run at the idea of total effect. He doesn’t consider this healthy. It’s not inducive to his fine independence of thought. And that he’s going around on a little post being banged at from all different directions-it gets real enough to him after a while, but he doesn’t appreciate it as an activity. So you leave one of these RIs a little bit charged or you haven’t studied your E-Meter book at Level II and don’t realize that a pc’s sudden exhalations can cause rocket reads. You haven’t studied body movement effects on the E-Meter. You don’t realize that a pc shoving his feet about on the floor can give you some very gorgeous rocket reads, and some pcs simply by stretching can give you some of the nicest blowdowns you ever wished to see. Having missed this chapter on the E-Meter book, you let the pc shout the items. You see? So you get beautiful rocket reads for each one of the items, but they’re all remaining there completely charged.
Now, the auditor gives a sort of a half-acknowledgment. He falls down on the TRs, just a pin-width, you see. He looks differently out of his left eye than his right eye, don’t you see? Bang! ARC break, see? Why? The opportunity for an ARC break is the bypassed charge. It’s tremendous! So any little auditor flub and so forth precipitates it. So therefore, the ability to handle the basics of auditing becomes very, very critical indeed by Level V.
Now let’s move into Level VI. Well, a whole implant GPM sequence of twenty-six goals, twenty-six implanted goals, would undoubtedly produce less commotion if totally and suddenly keyed in on the pc than one actual RI. The amount of charge which you’re handling looms like the Atlas Mountains to the pc. One of these items is standing up there in its pristine ferocity, ready to swoop. And all he does is regard the fact that he is going to list on it and he’s got it right in the chops. You ask him one of the new auditing questions for Level VI-it delivers the item something like shooting it out of a Roman catapult. It almost can’t-can’t help but list the right item. All the auditor does is ask the question and the item is there. Because you’re dealing with the basic, complete pattern of the actual GPM and it has ferocity. Now, I’m not just talking for advertising purposes.
You see, for three years, up to August of 1963, we were insufficiently close to an actual GPM to cause much trouble. You could find a goal, all right. You could run ”oppose” on the goal. And on one goal I ran seventy items out of the goal-and ran it the other day with the actual pattern of the goal with the actual command necessary to run those eases, and there wasn’t one single RI had been touched. It hadn’t even been jostled.
In other words, you could run all over the top of the thing and so forth, and get a lot of charge off and feel fine; get rid of your lumbosis and everything was swell. Of course, we didn’t have it set enough to put the pc into the middle of it. Whu! That’s not the case. That actually hasn’t been the ease since August. And that’s when you saw me close the gate on R6, hastily. We were hanging in August between being able to safely run them and to hell with it, with the old R3 processes, and we were right in the middle. We didn’t have it sufficiently canned to run them absolutely accurately, and we had it sufficiently close to tear the pc’s head off. Now, going all the way through and running the actual pattern with the actual commands-kabang, bang, bang-you actually can get away, perhaps, with a little more cycle flub than if you were running the not-quite-correct commands of this middle band which delivered in nothing but ARC breaky sessions one right after the other, you see. Because everything just stirred up and bypassed, you see.
But the auditor fails to clear the auditing command with the pc. Oh, my God, how-it must have been years since you cleared the auditing command with the pc as a serious operation. Bang! ARC break. Why? Listing from the incorrect goal as an RI into the next top oppterm. And the auditor-never occurred to the auditor to say, ”Is it all right if I ask you this auditing command?” see, but simply asked it. That was enough, see? Because, of course, it was a wrong auditing command because those goals weren’t adjacent. Look at the niceties we are now dealing with.
The auditor doesn’t understand what the pc has said-and wraps the pc around four telegraph poles. Because the pc has said ”second terminal from the bottom” and the auditor thought the pc had said ”fourth terminal from the bottom,” and the auditor started to repair the fourth terminal from the bottom, which was all right, yanking the pc two terminals up the chain and producing a yo-yo effect of the RI the pc was sitting in. See, auditor failed to understand what the pc said. Elementary, isn’t it? Oh man, you’re getting down to basics now. You’re really getting down to basics. Now you know what these things are all about. And as you come up handling each level in turn, handling each level and running through that level, you tend to get cocky toward the end of the level because your auditing has come up to a potential of being able to handle that level. So you get up to the next level and you say, ”Well, my basic auditing is now perfect. I am-smell like lilies all the time and I-no improvement possible!” You know? ”You can’t improve a perfect work of art!” And you go up into the next level, and with a crash you all of a sudden find yourself unable to handle the pc. And I mean, what’s all this happening? Well, it’s simply a flaw-the undetected flaw-in the basic auditing. And that’s what it is.
And you can-of course, to that is added unfamiliarity with the technique, unfamiliarity with how a pc should act and it all looks very clumsy, and you’re liable to overlook this little interesting factor: is the reason it’s happening is because a new strain has been put on your basic auditing. New things are being demanded of your basic auditing. So that’s why some Scientologists think they have to be retrained all the time. Techniques are advancing-their auditing cycle has to advance with it.
Now, I invite any one of you, particularly when he thinks it-on a day-on a day when you feel your auditing is at its absolute lowest ebb, see? You’ve practically blown the session, you’ve chopped the pc to ribbons, so forth. You actually looked at the meter-you looked at the meter and you said, ”All right, why are you such a lousy pc?” you see? I mean ... You’ve done your assessment. At your very worst-at your very worst here, at Saint Hill, I wish you could simply Transport yourself (you will be able to do in not too distant future!) suddenly and instantly into the beginners’ classes of an Academy somewhere. You’d start immediately thinking of yourself not as a work of art, but you’d see that they had a long way to go.
So the division of Scientology into levels is actually dictated by what is demanded of the pc-primarily what’s demanded of the pc-and almost parallel with that, what’s demanded of the auditor. Now, you think it’s divided because it’s primarily what’s demanded of the auditor and secondarily what’s demanded of the pc. No, it’s not quite that way. It’s really what’s demanded of the pc and then what’s demanded of the auditor. Actually, a very educated pc who is fully and thoroughly trained could guide a rather lousy auditor over an awful lot of rocks and shoals in R6. And a fairly well-educated auditor at Level IV can drag a pc who is auditing him through a lot of muddy water. He can suddenly say, ”Hey, wait a minute, did you get a blowdown on that assessment?”
The auditor says, ”I’m-I’m sorry, I-I-I don’t think I did.”
”Well, I don’t think we ought to be running it. You getting any tone arm action now?”
”Well no, I haven’t gotten any for a little while.”
”Well, all right, let’s-let’s look over that assessment list. Let’s look over that assessment list. Where did the tone arm dip while you were assessing?.
”Oh, that was back there at the beginning of the list.”
”Well, read it over to me again and see if you get a read there.”
”Oh, yeah, all right.”
”You got-you got some tone arm there? Oh, oh all right, all right. Well, let’s use that one.”
And the auditor says, ”Okay. Well, what do you know.”
See, that’s your educated pc. And I don’t know. I don’t know. Self-auditing-self-auditing is absolutely out.
I just put in a series of tests and so forth on this-we had to know this point: Could an individual run out his own actual GPM with a one-hand electrode? Could you do this? Well, this is something like tackling lions and tigers barehanded while being painted with bait. And 1 was able to get through-I was able to get through one bank, before it fell in. And you can’t do it. I don’t care if I got through the bank, it can’t be done. Why can’t it be done? Because the mechanics of the situation is that an auditor giving himself the auditing command does not produce tone arm action. Huh-huh-huh! Horrible, isn’t it? So you get down toward the bottom of the bank and you’ve left every item charged behind you. Because really none of them blew. It takes the impingement of an auditor calling the items to deliver the tone arm action out of the GPM.
Oddly enough, you can plot your own goals plots. You can plot your own goals plots. This is not a talk on self-auditing, and I’ll have to give you a talk on self-auditing someday-it’s something that everybody says, ”No, you mustn’t do it,” is usually the upper limits of the thing. There is a certain amount of self-auditing possible and every auditor does it. You burn your finger; you stand there and run the incident out. Or you keep touching the thing you burned your finger on after it cooled down or you give yourself assists and that sort of thing. You wonder sometimes what it was that kind of made you creak in the last session, then you suddenly remember it was so-and-so and so-and-so. Well, what is that? That’s a sort of a type of self-auditing, isn’t it? And-but self-auditing becomes very interesting as you go up through the levels, because there’s nobody there but you, handling your mind. Well, that’s something to think of, isn’t it? That’s something to think of That’s-that’s something to know.
You mean you’re going to be out here, eighteen light-years beyond Arcturus, sitting on a satellite enjoying life, and a comet goes through you or something like this-you’re going to get a session, are you? No, you’re there holding-you’re there in charge of your own mind. And when you come up to a certain level, you are less the effect of the mind and are very definitely cause over the mind. There is a point. I’ve been trying to discover where this point is. See, at what point does a person become total cause over his own mind? It occurs somewhere in Level VII, it doesn’t occur early on in Level VI. But up to that point, an auditor is necessary. Which is the point I am making here.
You can straighten out an ARC breaky session. There are things you can do with self-auditing which are quite remarkable. You’ve had an ARC breaky session as a pc-well, you can go reeling off and get yourself under control one way or the other and say, ”Let me see,” you know, ”maybe I ought to run a little O/W on the auditor.” Finally you get sensible enough to do something like that. ”What did I do to the auditor and what did I withhold from the-oh hell, I had a withhold. That’s why I’m blown up.” And all of a sudden you feel all right, see? You’ve spotted the charge or something like that. You’ve puttied yourself back together again to that degree. Well, that’s all very well, but that is all assist-type approach. And you’re in perfect order to use assist-type approach on your own mind. But what it doesn’t do is produce tone arm action. It doesn’t produce tone arm action. That’s the only thing about it. Well, why doesn’t it produce tone arm action? Well, you’re up against a magical thing called the two-terminal system of this universe. And when a person is this enmeshed into this universe, he is part of the two-terminal system of this universe. This is a two-terminal universe. And because he’s up against this two-terminal system, one terminal all by itself is inert in this universe. And a thetan has become sufficiently enmeshed in this universe and has taken sufficiently the universe’s characteristics as his own that he actually follows to a large degree such things as Newton’s laws: the laws of interaction and so forth. These things are only applicable to the mind when a person himself is pretty confounded MESTy. But then anybody who is smeared into the universe to this-a great degree is pretty MESTy. So he’s following the laws Of MEST to a large degree.
Well, it’s utter magic then, that the communication cycle does produce tone arm action. But that is what produces tone arm action and that’s what blows charge. And it is charge being released that is the primary source of a person’s eventual freedom. There are two things which hold a person down: One is significance and the other is mass. These are the two things that hold a person chained. That is why you are in a body; that is all there is to it, really. Now, to mass, you of course can add the ramifications of energy and space-but the-and time and so forth. But these things are not of primary consideration-you can just say mass. The things which give you the psychosomatics you get, are mass. It’s the significance that makes you think you’re nuts. All the think-this is from way back-there were two effects: a person either could go sort of screwy mentally or he could go crazy physically. This is from 1950-two types of insanity. Some people seem to be able to throw it into a physiological basis and some people threw it into a crazy basis and so forth. There was a lot of discussion of that at that time. At Level VI this breaks down much more simply. There are two things contained in a GPM: thought and mass. There are other things contained in it, such as space and energy and that sort of thing. But mass disintegrates into energy, but it doesn’t translate purely into energy. You get the right item in the right place in the right GPM, and you’ll get a vanishment which is so startling as to leave you blinking.
For instance, here sits a mass. You get the right item in the right place, compared up to the right things in the GPM and it’s just as magical as that. You say, ”Where the hell did it go? Gone.” Here is this towering-this huge, overwhelming piece of mass, which if it hit you in the teeth or got crisscrossed on the track or in juxtaposition with some other item would practically break your neck for you. Would! And you’ve gotten the right idea in the right mass and you get-bong! You see? There it is, there it isn’t. It’s just like that-bang, bang! It’s astonishing. So it isn’t a dissipation, even though you get a resultant heat from it. It isn’t a dissipation because, of course, it’s being created by the unit called a thetan. And the second he triggers that combination, he no longer creates it. So you don’t have the idea of mass dissipating into energy and disappearing. You have-yes, when you contact it there’s heat, but that’s just a symptom of contact. When you get the idea and its location and arrangements, you see, with the rest of the GPM, you just get a no-create of it anymore. And it’ll go psssswww! It’s-it’s—without any pyrotechnics or fireworks, don’t you see, it’s gone! See? It is-it isn’t. Because you’re dealing with the unit, of course, that is making it when you’re dealing with the pc.
All right. Let’s-let’s look at this. Let’s look at this. There’s thought or significance and there’s mass. And these are the two dominant phenomena in the mind. Now, you can change thought, change thought, change thought. But you might not make anybody well, because his illness is being occasioned by the mass. Now, each GPM is surrounded by so many ramifications and locks, so many things are hung up on these things, there’s such an endless parade of things, that you actually come out through all of your levels. And the levels are really just touching them, going a little deeper into the locks, swinging a little deeper in with Prepchecks, going a little deeper with running service facsimiles, and then running off implants at Level V that surround it, and then at Level VI just crashing in on the middle of the thing and tearing it up and throwing it away.
A person, by the way, hasn’t a dog’s chance of getting to the actual GPM successfully and continuously through all of that overburden, unless he has to some degree progressed up through the levels. He just hasn’t got a dog’s chance. In the first place, he has insufficient mental stamina. He understands too little of his mind. He gets too worried, too upset, too concerned about the various things happening. Furthermore, he gets an-all of a sudden his chest caves in. Something goes a little bit wrong and his chest caves in. Oh, my God! If you were to take some man up here on the street and he’s walking along and all of a sudden his chest caves in-augh. Same velocity as though he’d just been hit with a cannonball, you see. Blaugh. Well, man, he’d be up here to the doctors insisting they operate and take x-rays, and he’d worry and he’d sit home and he’d gloom and he’d-”What is it?” And he’d be very upset about it all, and he would be unable to eat or sleep or anything else, because of this very peculiar thing that’s happened to him.
For instance, I know of a girl-a Scientologist now, but I knew her a long time ago-and she sat in the house for several years, because she’d walked into an office one day and found a terrific mass of energy suddenly settle over her head and down around her body with a sudden thud. She just sat down in this office and there was all of a sudden this terrific mass of energy hit her from all sides. And it frightened her so that she went home and didn’t go out of the house for seven years. You going to-you’re going to run this character, huh? Oddly enough, somebody ran her, ran out an engram, straightened her up a little bit, she got outside and she got along on early days. But what was that? That was an RI, maybe only a lock on an RI, but that’s what hit her. And it worried her to that extent that it immobilized her in life. She quit doing everything she was doing-everything else. All right, so a fellow has to become kind of accustomed to living with the tiger, don’t you see? And you take a Scientologist who’s been processed quite a bit, he’s talking to another Scientologist. ”I got an awful somatic,” he’ll say.
The other fellow will say, ”Yeah, where?”
”Oh, I-side. Well, let’s go have lunch.”
I’ve seen-I’ve seen a medical doctor-I’ve seen a medical doctor go, ”Ohhh! Augh! Augh! Put him in bed! Put him in bed! Look at him! Look at him!” You know-absolute hysterics. I’m not exaggerating it a bit. In fact, it was worse. Guy was running a session and he turned on some heat. I never saw such an hysterical response in my life. Fascinating.
In other words-in other words, one has to become to some degree familiar with what’s going on in the mind or in life or, and so forth, before one can handle it to some degree. And the levels are a subject of familiarization with what can knock your ‘ead off. You learn how to handle these things. You get a little bit of cause over these things. You learn to grapple with these things. Well, you’ve graduated upstairs and it doesn’t scare you out of seven years’ growth when all of a sudden you feel your whole body wrapped around with glowing, red-hot energy that is liable to melt you to the bone any second. And you go on listing. And then you say to the auditor, ”I think we’ve overlisted here. That’s my item.” Nothing to it, you see. Compare this type of poise and response in the auditing chair to the girl who had to go home and stay in the house for seven years because she suddenly felt a little energy touch her from all sides. Get the idea? That’s why the levels exist as levels.
Well, what’s all this got to do with self-criticism? Well, it has this to do with self-criticism: is self-criticism is based on the same auditing cycle-all the way. It’s the same cycle. I don’t care whether the person doesn’t know it at Level 0, knows it only slightly at Level I or is using it at Level VI. It is still the same auditing cycle. And it must exist as an auditing cycle, because this is a two-pole universe. And without an auditor you don’t get tone arm action adequate to a case resolution. That is all there is to it.
You can look on it as the auditing cycle is totally magical, if you want to. And it sure looks magical. But it is the basic discovery of Dianetics and Scientology, is the auditing cycle. And all by itself it does things to people in Comm Courses. ”Do birds fly’? Do birds fly? Do birds fly’?” And all of a sudden the guy’s got one less somatic or something. Or he’s got three new ones. But that’s the auditing cycle at work. And you should recognize the auditing cycle as a fundamental—as an extremely fundamental part of your auditing tools. And recognize that it is all right to use a perfectly sloppy auditing cycle at Level I. Remember it’s got to be less sloppy at Level II and it’s got to be less sloppy and more neat at Level III and it’s got to be far more neat and expert at Level IV and it’s got to be a great deal more expert at Level V and it’s got to be smooth as glass at VI. It’s the degree of charge that can be bypassed. It’s the depth that you’re looking into the case. But it’s the same auditing cycle.
And that auditing cycle is with you all the way from Level 0 to Level VII. And only ceases to be necessary somewhere in Level VII. Still necessary in Level VI. You’ve-you get so that you can juggle GPMs around a little bit and you can list up your goals plot and you can do this and you can do that and pretty soon you’re sitting there looking at the meter and you realize that tone arm has had .25 BD in the last fifteen minutes that you’ve been sitting there with a one-hand electrode plotting goals, see? Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, that is not enough tone arm action to care for the amount of charge you are restimulating. So what’s that meter going to do very shortly? It is going to pack up. It’s going to send that tone arm up to about 5.25 and it’s going to lock up that needle very nicely and it’s going to leave you with some horrible, crushing somatic some way or another. And yet you actually had progressed up through the levels to a point where you were actually able to lay out and get accurately which goal followed which goal with a one-hand electrode on a meter, see?
Even though you’d progressed to that extent, the auditing cycle was necessary because you’re still in a two-pole circumstance to the rest of the universe. If you haven’t got an auditor, you don’t get tone arm action.
Every once in a while you hear of somebody plotting his goals out or something like that. Well, don’t blow your brains out. Say, ”Fine, fine. Good. Good. Better get an auditor. That’s-that’s the-the way.” You find somebody trying to self-audit implant GPMS, you know. Well, I’d wait till I was well above Level V before I attempted that. I wouldn’t attempt it from Level II or something. But you get at Level VI, you should be able by that time to be sufficiently competent with regard to this sort of thing to: ”Let’s see, I wonder if that-I wonder if that’s an implant GPM that-I don’t know, I don’t know, Joe found this GPM. I don’t know whether it was really an implant GPM or not. I’m not-I’m not satisfied 100 percent.” You could pick up a meter and you could say, ”‘Nix absoluteably spit.’ Rocket reads. It’s an implant GPM. Skip it.” You say, ”What wild abandon.” Actually, if you were to take some pc as he started in on Level V and say to him, ”Nix absoluteably spit,” you know-this actually is not even the top of the implant, don’t you see, you’ve just slammed him one down-he’d go creak, creak. ”Ow! Ow! What’s this? Brrrr. I’m cold as ice.” He would be, too. You get the idea?
Familiarity-familiarity is operating here. You’re not afraid of the tiger. You’ve had several tigers eat out of your hand. You walk up to the edge of the jungle and you say, ”Whsst! Hey! Come here, puss.” In your first approach to the beginning of Level V, you crept up with a whole safari full of howdahs, three elephant guns handy, you heard a monkey cough and knew it was a tiger and turned loose with howitzers. Difference of level of familiarity. Difference of charge handleable. But how did you get up to that point?
Actually it’s discharged charge. Not only must you get the familiarization as an idea, but you must also discharge charge. If you haven’t got a lot of charge off your case, you can’t do anything with it. It’s like trying to batter through bullet-proof armor-plated walls. You can’t get any answers. You take somebody with no charge off, you might be lucky and find an actual GPM on him. But if you tried to move the GPMs around so that you could find an actual GPMs-gluuuh. They’d think they were being attacked by an army. It would be too frightening to them.
Now, what’s the-what’s the final-what’s the final word, here, on self-criticism? Well, it-self-criticism must be that the auditor’s auditing must be adequate to the level he is running. His handling of the auditing cycle is the only thing which is delivering tone arm action into the session. And I know we say it’s a process, I know we say it’s this, 1 know we say it’s that, I know we say it’s the other thing-but it isn’t. Go back to what I told you. It’s a two-pole system. Self-auditing would be perfectly feasible if it delivered tone arm action, and it doesn’t. Run an actual GPM on yourself, get two tone arm divisions of charge off in twenty items. You know what’s available on an actual GPM? A hundred and seventy-five TA divisions down. Therefore you’ve stirred up and left on the ease a hundred and seventy-three TA divisions down. Gluuuu! You’ll feel like it, too.
All right. An auditor sits there, and he audits an im-a regular, actual GPM and he gets the hundred and seventy-five divisions. Why? Because he’s an auditor sitting there. That’s the magic of the auditor, is the two-pole nature of the situation. The auditor’s auditing, we get tone arm action by the simple fact of his being there and following the communication cycle in the—necessary in the session. And that gives us tone arm action.
So, if an auditor-well, regardless of technique or any of these other considerations-if an auditor’s sitting there auditing, his handling of the communication cycle with the pc must be adequate to that level so that it doesn’t interfere with the auditing, but produces tone arm action. Now, this doesn’t say that the fellow at Level III has to be as expert as he’ll have to be at Level VI. But it says he has to be expert enough to handle Level III. But it’s all the same cycle. In back of all auditing, we have that very interesting discovery. And it is a basic discovery I made many, many years ago. And this brought about the development of TRs and other things.
But remember, it is a peculiarly native and original thing to Dianetics and Scientology. It’s only in Scientology, see, that one thing. And that’s peculiar to it. It is an understanding of this thing that permits cases to get better. It’s a very important bit of stuff. But because it sounds so this or so that or some other thing, well, you have a tendency to overcomplicate it for the level you’re running. How complicated do you think my auditing cycle would be to Mary Jo Ann who has just walked in from the Poughkeepsie co-audit and I’m going to give her an assist? How adequate do you think that auditing cycle’s going to have to be?
First place, she isn’t going to hear me any much in the first place. She’s not going to be able to pay much attention to what I’m saying anyway. I’ll tell you what has to be adequate is your TR 2. You can produce more magic with TR 2 than you ever saw. That’s very, very magical. Wouldn’t matter how long you carried on or what you said or what form your response took. If you could bring home to her that somebody had heard her and that she had been acknowledged for it-if you could bring home this one fact-you would probably get a big send on her case, see? Why, your auditing cycle could be pretty crude and you could get away with it. But that would be no level to think-no reason to think that you were now the world’s greatest gee-whizzer on the subject of the auditing cycle,
Now, let’s move on up through the line, let’s get a little bit later, let’s move on up the scale, and let’s take some self-satisfied, totally successful, never-had-anything-really-rough-happen-in-any-of-his-cases auditor. And we say, ”Son, we is grooming you up. And we want you to run service facsimiles.”
”Well, I don’t know that I’ve ever run any service facsimiles, but I can handle this. Ha-ha-ha-ha!”
ARC breaky pc-what-what the hell? Obviously can’t be his auditing cycle because that’s always been perfect, that has never been left wanting. Ah, but it is. It is, because the auditing cycle which is being demanded of him at this particular level of penetration into the case is very senior to what has been demanded of him before. And he doesn’t see it as a necessity to change or smooth out his auditing cycle. 1 myself have fallen into the trap, so we’re all talking here together with our hair down. I found out when I started to audit Level VI, I was getting dirty needles on a pc and I said, ”Well, this pc so and so and so wha wha”-just like you do, you know-”and the pc-pc’s this, the pc’s that and so forth, the pc would just get enough rest,” you know? ”Pc would just get enough rest, why, be all right and we wouldn’t have all these upsets in session. After 1:30 at-in the afternoon, the pc’s tone arm gets sticky.” Smell. What corn. ”The-this pc is always sleepy after dinner and never gets good tone arm action after dinner in the evening. And that’s why I’m not getting good tone arm action on the pc, because the pc is-.” The pc is-, the pc is-, the pc is-. ”The pc’s house is not in sufficient juxtaposition to the current position of the sun, and Saturn is out of nodule phase to Mars. So therefore we’re having ARC breaky sessions.” You get the idea?
Well, the funny part of it is, completely aside from everything that I have given you as the reason why this gets overlooked and the reason why it’s important, there’s another fact: The auditor’s error is always prior to the rough part of a session. And therefore the error, being at the time it is at, is not therefore easily discernible as having come from the auditor’s action. In other words, it’s after the fact. The pc’s roughness is after the fact of the error sufficiently that the auditor can’t spot it easily. And you get in this self-criticism some of the most remarkable things. But a self-criticism should be run in this particular fashion. We’ll get down to cases now.
An auditor should sit up-set up a session and run a routine session with a microphone on the desk and the session being recorded. Preferably—preferably a very normal session, not a stunt session just to do this, but one of his regular sessions. And he ought to have a couple of hours of tape or at least an hour and a half of tape to run off. Three and three-quarters speed and so forth, and the pc’s voice particularly discernible and the auditor’s voice particularly discernible on the tape. And you should always put a microphone a little bit closer to the pc than the auditor, ordinarily.
All right, the session goes forward. The auditor carefully notes, in running whatever he’s running, any rough moment in the session. He notes it on his auditor report, he makes a note of it. Or he notices any dirty needle or any sticky TA. Any other significant, you might call, bad indicator, which occurs in the session. Any natteriness by the pc. Any point of criticism. Any point of hecticness or anxiety on the part of the pc. Any worry, any appearance of a PTP on the part of the pc. He should note all of those things on his auditor’s report, as they happen, quite honestly, just going on auditing. Not because he’s taping it, withdrawing everything that he can withdraw from the auditing session because it might get on the tape. Just go on and audit normally and make an honest record of everything that’s happening in the session.
Now, that record-that record has a level of importance which is quite remarkable. See, the session is on the tape. But remember what isn’t on that tape is visual observation of the pc, visual observation of the meter behavior, visual observation of the tone arm. Those things are not on that tape. So therefore you make a very good record of that on your report. And having brought the session to a successful or unsuccessful close, you let the pc pack it up and it is now between you and the tape and your auditor’s report. And you don’t give a history of the session. We do not care what was run in the session. And the reason we don’t care is we’ve got lots of processes, but we have very few good auditors.
Now, listen. Let’s take this tape. And just leave it there, as a unit, but with some idea of its time of run. You started the tape at 1:02. Therefore the first moment on that tape is 1:02, isn’t it? Let’s look down here, and we see we had a dirty needle at 1:16. Actually you can figure this out-it’s so many feet of tape per minute. But you see what was happening in that session. You run off about sixteen minutes worth of that tape, don’t you see? You get-let’s pick up that point on the tape. We’re not interested in the auditor listening for one minute to his session consecutively from beginning to end. Scrub it. Who cares. We want him to find these points. But we just want him to find some points on this tape. So we’re going to run off sixteen minutes or fourteen minutes of that tape and we’re going to get this point when the pc was talking about ”yipsnoo” as of 1:16. And now we’re going to go backwards in the session, a few inches at a time, until we find the breakdown of the basic auditing that caused it. Because the auditor is never aware of it until he hears it on the tape.
You’re going back there a minute-thirty seconds, a minute, two minutes, three minutes, five minutes-and you will find it. You will find it. It is what the auditor failed to carry out in his communication cycle. And you listen back there and you will find the auditor gave an auditing command wrong way to and upside down. He’s been saying, ”Do fish swim?” He all of a sudden actually said-this would be pretty corny-he said, ”Do fish float?” See, this is awful corny. We’ll find the mistake. So let’s take this report now and, on tape, what caused it, see? What-what caused it. Let’s write that on the report. What point in the tape caused it, see? Now, let’s take another one of these points, see. Let’s take another one of these points. Pc toward the end of the session all of a sudden said, ”But I didn’t say so-and-so and so-and-so.” Well, this is an interesting-you know, the pc’s being disputive, there. Something about goals. Auditor says to himself, ”Well, obviously he didn’t make his goals.” No, nope, no, no, no-damn! See? Let’s forget about the figure-figure, see-let’s forget about all this figure-figure. The only reason that pc snapped or snarled in any way at all about his goals or had a present time problem, was the auditor did something a minute, two minutes, three minutes, before that point. You understand? This really makes a citizen out of you, man. Wow! This is rough on you. And you take hold of it and you say, ”Aha, there was a snappy moment there, just at the beginning of the goals. Pc-pc anxious about goals,” see, or whatever we put down on the report. Let’s find that point, now let’s roll it back. Let’s roll it back on the tape and listen forward, and roll it back-boy, you’re going to find a piece of corn. And you’re going to say, ”Did I do that?” Because ordinarily when you did it, you thought you got away with it. But it took it a little while to show up. And it will always show up. And if you do it this way, you pick up the bad indicator and then roll your tape to the point of the bad indicator and then roll it back and listen to it-to the point-you will find the breakdown in the auditing cycle. And we’re only studying the auditing cycle. We’re studying the auditor’s delivery of the command, the pc’s receiving the command, the pc’s answering it and the auditor acknowledging it, don’t you see? We’re only studying that.
Pc originates, the auditor understands it and acknowledges, don’t you see? We-we’re-that’s all we’re studying. We’re just studying actually the basic TRs: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4. That’s all we’re studying. How-where-where did one of those break down that caused the pc reaction? And this becomes the wildest thing you ever wanted to see. You won’t believe it until you yourself have done it with your own auditing or have done it on some other auditors. You won’t believe it! A pc never has any independent reaction in a session, independent of the auditor. Never! That’s the wildest thing you ever wanted to see. Listen, a pc can be sitting there on the bypassed charge of wrong goals and wrong items and everything upside down, and audit smooth as a baby carriage. No ARC break, going on reasonably talking to the auditor, everything pleasant-feeling sick, but everything’s pleasant. Aaahh. No—nothing wrong with the needle. Tone arm running okay. Everything fine, all the good indicators, pc’s cheerful-a little sick at his stomach, but he’s cheerful. And you’re going to find something. You’re going to find that the pc never causes a confounded thing in the session. And the pc’s environment never causes a confounded thing in the session. And this is a shock.
There’s only one thing that causes anything in a session, and that’s the auditor. And this is not an exaggerated viewpoint that I’m trying to give you to persuade you to be, all of you, perfect auditors. I don’t care if you’re not perfect auditors. Trying to make perfect auditors out of you-I’m trying to make effective auditors out of you. And you’re in for a shock if you follow that self-criticism through. You will find out that there’s only one source of a session and that is the auditor. And it has nothing—to do with the moon was in Saturn. It had nothing to do with the pc not eating supper right. It had nothing to do with the lateness of the hour. It had nothing to do with how the bank had been sloshed up by Joe Blow, another auditor. That pc behaves exactly in response to the auditing he is receiving now. So he comes into session, he’s got a present time problem, body hasn’t had any supper. Well, there isn’t any reason why this should be handled in any other way than a perfectly cheerful way with all the good indicators in, and he handles the present time problem-that’s great. That’s what auditing’s for. The personal problems. Pc—so he’s just been jilted by his girl or something of the sort; so he’s been jilted, so what? He might cry for a little while, but if he isn’t consistently getting a better emotional reaction straight on up through to a fairly high tone as he comes through that session-well, of course, you can say the right process isn’t being audited on him, but let’s leave the right process out of it. He’s-the wrong process is really not going to make him misemotional. It would be insistence on running the wrong process without getting it cleared and okayed with the pc that would make him emotional, isn’t it?
It’s not accepting the pc’s answer.
”I don’t understand the process and I haven’t got any answers to it.”
And you say, ”Well, I’m going to ask it again, here.” You’re going to have a mess on your hands, man, because you haven’t got an auditing cycle! Where you don’t have an auditing cycle, you haven’t got a session! And where you have a pc that isn’t sitting there with all indicators in and the tone arm flying, then the auditor thinks it’s because the sun is not properly arranged in the house of Leo that the session is going wrong.
This is no effort on my part to suddenly bring it home and put it in your lap. I’m telling you about a technical-a technical discovery. I know when I graduated up in levels, I found that my auditing cycle had to be improved. And therefore this gives me the courage to tell you that as you’re graduating up in levels, I think your auditing cycle could be improved.
But I think it is one of the most astonishing experiences an auditor can have-to do self-criticism on a piece of tape against a timed session of an ordinary kind. It’s one of the most startling experiences he can have. And after he’s done it a bit, maybe two or three times, something like that-he may not have to do it two or three times-he knows now why. And he doesn’t go looking for the lateness of the hour. He flubs an acknowledgment, he knows what is going to happen nooowwww! So he probably puts it right before it has a chance to happen.
And it is quite an experience. It’s quite an experience. And I’ve had the experience and it was a great shock to me. I used to be able to believe that it had something to do with the lateness of the hour when somebody told me that their pc was restive every evening. I used to believe these things. I don’t believe them anymore. Because I know my pcs aren’t reacting that way. They’re reacting very precisely and exactly against the communication cycle of the auditor and they’re not exacting-acting against any other slightest thing under the sun, moon and the stars. That’s what they’re reacting to and that’s all they’re reacting to. And you’re as good an auditor as you can handle the communication cycle; you’re as skilled an auditor as you can choose processes to throw onto that communication cycle line. And when you’ve said those things, you’ve actually said it all.
So, thank you very much. Good night.