THE PRECLEAR AND GETTING AUDITING TO WORK
A lecture given on 19 May 1964

Thank you.
What’s the date?
Audience: 19th May.
Nineteen May AD 14, Saint Hill Special Briefing Course.
The reason why—why everybody showed up here so fast actually has to do only with one fact—is, I haven’t lectured here for a couple of weeks, you see?
Now, you’re—I don’t know why we called this lecture today, actually. I should be up there working on the verification of your materials and so forth which are all pretty well in hand. I think if you were going into the materials which I’m working on at the present moment, why, it would probably be a different story. But the object is not to get you wrapped up, but to wrap up the materials, so I’m doing it.
The—I haven’t really anything to talk to you about today at all. But I think—I think that you probably know all there is to know about auditing. You probably have no difficulties with auditing. You probably have no difficulties with the material at all and everything is smoothed out. And you got all that taped.
Now, I think we probably ought to take up the preclear and getting a win on the preclear, applying the information to a preclear. I think that might—might be germane to the situation.
The situation is pinpointed by the fact that—I’ve forgotten the exact number—I think I had twenty—five provisional Class VIs issued here—what was the—twenty—four?—last week and I think that you all ought to be applauded for getting through to where you did.
The only comment I’d like to make on that is, I never saw such vicious grading in my life! I just never saw such vicious grading in my life. You had some of your papers on your fellow students down to around sixty when the grade was eighty plus, and on one noteworthy example it was down around sixty when the actual grade was ninety. It’s fantastic! Fantastic. But on a classification examination I’m not about to stand there idly twiddling my thumbs and of course I graded all the papers afterwards personally. Took me about six hours, by the way, going through every question and so forth, because all I wanted to know was just—is this auditor competent and does he know his material, you see? And even so, I didn’t have to stretch any points to amount to anything. But those grades were just cut to ribbons. I never saw the like of it and so forth. And I said to myself—I said to myself, ”Well, I hope this isn’t a symptom of what will happen to the preclear!” Pretty ghastly.
Anyhow, you all did quite amazingly well. Your grades were right up there with the Saint Hill Co—audit Course grades on the final exam and your examination was tougher, if anything, than that. So I’m quite happy with that now.
Now, how auditing can occur is probably the greatest mystery to the person who makes it work the least. You’ve got a mysterious mysteriousness on any auditor who is having an awful hard time making anybody recover from something. See? He’s got a mystery. And he may not know he has this mystery. He may not know he has this mystery. But he really doesn’t know why auditing works, or if it does work. And he has assigned some value to the subject of auditing which is different and extraneous to the actual value of auditing, so therefore he makes enough goofs in trying to handle auditing, that auditing doesn’t work. It’s as simple as this, you see?
And he always looks for something more mysterious than is. He looks for something more complicated than is. And you, whenever you have a student that just can’t seem to get any kind of result whatsoever, one—third of the time his trouble will resolve if you simply ask him why auditing doesn’t work and why it does work and get him into a big discussion about this thing.
Now you will have relieved, then, the impediment which is preventing him from perceiving. He will have been impeded from perceiving why auditing works. So a person who can’t understand why auditing works has got a barricade across the line of his understanding which is a presumption that it doesn’t work. Do you see? He is not about to understand why it works, because he already understands that it doesn’t work. On some reactive basis, you see, he knows it doesn’t work. So now you’re going to ask him to try to understand why it does work and of course he’ll hit this other one and he never will grasp it.
Do you see? He’s blocked himself out from a comprehension of it. So therefore, a discussion of this simple basic, to you as an Instructor of auditors, is like diamonds—like diamonds. It’ll cut through most of your more difficult students and so on. The way to use this little gimmick is—you see somebody is having a terrible time with his comm cycle. Now anybody has a little bit of trouble with a comm cycle. You take a pc, he’s all rattled and he’s upset, and he’s this and he’s that and the other thing, and he’s in the middle of the—of the bank, and so on, and his comm cycle response you see is so rough quite ordinarily, that it takes a good expert to even find out, you know, which way it’s going or what it’s doing. You have to be an expert just to get by, see, as an auditor.
All right. So the pc, you see, he’s already all rattlepated out on the subject of his comm cycle, you see. You ask him one question, he gets an answer to something else, you see? And your effort to steer him through this without ARC breaking him and so forth, as I said, that is an expert action—an expert action. Because that is rugged. It’s never quite by pattern from the pc’s viewpoint. And of course, that’s as it should be. So the auditor who understands this aspect of it, he doesn’t have very much trouble with anything but the pc.
Now, supposing he has trouble with understanding what the comm cycle is, understanding why auditing works, and this is added to the difficulty the pc is going to introduce into it. Of course, at this moment we get an unmanageable session. We get no improvement, we get no case gain, we get nothing, you see. Why? The auditor is already incapable because of his own barricade across the line of understanding why auditing works because something is telling him that it doesn’t work or there is some reason why it shouldn’t work, you see, something like this. So that’s already got him stopped. So therefore, he doesn’t understand that it should work. Now let’s put that mess on the line. Then let’s get the routine difficulty that a pc introduces into the line, you see: pc gets all waddle—gabopped, you see, he sounds like ions going around inside of his skull, you know; he’s banging from hither to hence and you ask him, ”Do fish swim?” and he gets ”Do they fly’.?” You know, he’s—that’s why he’s being audited, you see. Because he’s got stuff to walk through, see.
Well, that introduces the problem into the thing and by the time you get the combination of all these factors, why, you get—you get no gain, see. So, I repeat, you have to be an expert to handle the pc’s comm cycle anyway. And therefore, you have to take out of line as an auditing Instructor, an auditors’ Instructor, you have to take out of line those things which make it too difficult to do. And chief amongst those is: does auditing work or why doesn’t auditing work and a discussion of this particular character is very, very, very heavy in its payment. You’ll be quite surprised. I’m not giving you a bum tip here. This is a hot one, see, as far as study is concerned.
All right, now you take this fellow—Ill show you how you spot him, see. He’s sitting there and he says, ”Do—now, have you ever been up?” or whatever repetitive process he’s running, you know, and the pc says, ”Mm—hmm, hmm . . .
”Thank you! Good. Thank you. Have you ever been up?”
And the pc says... ”Thank you. Good.” It’s—it’s—you go, ”What the hell’s going on here?” See? This, this—there’s no comm cycle here. What’s going on, see? Or you’ll get ... There’s so many variations of this it would be almost impossible to mimic them all.
You get the auditor who says, ”How many is up,” or something of the sort, and the pc says, ”Well, actually—actually, it’s a matter of downness. I’ve always thought it was really a matter of downness and so forth, but when you really come down to think about it and so forth, when you really take how many is up, you count them off, and—and so forth and so forth and ... But I don’t really understand that. It’s how many is down that is really got—got the thing important to me, you see, that—that’s what really I keep dwelling on.”
And the auditor says, ”Thank you,” just as though something has happened, you see. And he asks the same question again and he gets another evasion, see. And he never really notices that the pc never has understood or agreed with the auditing question. Now the pc hasn’t got a clue as to what’s going to happen here. Well, pc isn’t answering the auditing question.
In other words, you can just keep adding these various flubs. You see any of them and they all come under the category: the auditor isn’t answ—asking the question, getting it answered and acknowledging when the pc has completed his answer, see? And you get any Variation of that—get any Variation of that, then you’ve got an auditor who has got one over here ... Of course, you show him how to do it and he says, ”Oh, that’s the way to do it!” and he does it perfectly. You see, you don’t need any—any more action than that.
This guy can’t seem to learn it. You straighten him all up on cutting the pc’s responses. Now he asks one question in a 2½ hour session and lets the pc chatter the rest of the time, see. You’ve got him broken of one thing; he goes into another thing, you see. Now, my recommendation is not—as the auditor’s Instructor—not to go into despair, but to examine—to examine this one burning question. Why doesn’t auditing work? Let’s get it out into the clear, see? And you all of a sudden will find some very interesting answers. You’ve got to be auditing on your toes to get these things and catch them as they go by, you know. You’ve got to watch that tone arm. He says, well, something or other, something or other, and you get a wild blowdown on the tone arm. Well, make a note over here to take that one up, too, see. And he all of a sudden will come out with some very, very interesting data. And it will be very revelatory to him, too. And after that he says, ”Well, of course auditing works.” You know?
Now, you say, ”Go back in there again with a comm cycle,” and it’s rat—atat—tat—a—ta—bang and you won’t have any trouble teaching the comm cycle, see. Got this as a side panel to auditing. Says nothing to do with taking care of the pc; this is the auditor taking care of the pc. Why do you have trouble with this, see?
All right, that’s under one heading, then—this one heading. And that’s ”Why doesn’t auditing work?” That—just put that in one big, wide, broad heading. You see somebody who’s having too much trouble, can’t ever get tone arm action, this way and that way as an auditor, that’s—that’s one thing you do with this fellow. And there happen to be two more things and that’s the subject of this lecture here.
Now, in this type of interrogation, this looks very much like an auditing session, but it’s not quite an auditing session. It’s not quite an auditing session because you are looking for something that answers your question that only the auditing will tell you, not really the pc. Do you see, that’s a little bit different. You’re accumulating information so that you’re steering the pc toward a cognition. And he eventually will round up the cognition. You don’t preconceive the cognition, you understand, but you take tone arm blowdowns on everything he has told you, see. Every time he says—he’s saying—I’ll just give you a ridiculous example—every time he says it’s ”adult,” you see, and it’s ”immaturity.” And he keeps—every time he says, ”it’s—it’s adult,” or something, you get a blowdown. You make a note of that, ”adult,” over here, you see. And then he mentions this word ”immaturity,” and he’s still discussing why auditing doesn’t work, you see, and you write down ”immaturity.” And you finally—what’s this got to do with it? See. Well, he’s finished telling you everything—he’s finished.
Now, let’s find out what does ”adult” have to do with auditing not working, you see, and what does ”immaturity,” of it, so on. And he’s got some kind of an idea that everybody is stuck at the age of four, that he got taught in a sociology class, or something of this sort, so therefore they’re not sufficiently mature to face up to the realities of existence, you see. He’s got this all packed in sideways. All of a sudden he’ll get the rest of the puzzle and drag it off. What these blowdowns are, are little flags that tells you there’s dynamite buried here. And you take that up and you can completely change the auditing address and aspect of an auditor’s auditing with such a discussion, as an auditing Instructor. So that’s well worth knowing.
But there’re two other categories, so I won’t say that will work with every one of these cases. And there may be two or three more categories. But I will give you as many as I know and I’m certain of.
Now, let’s give you the next one, not because it’s the next most important, but because it is the—it’s an old one and it comes under the heading of ”help.” Now, unfortunately, you must not use ”failed help.” You mustn’t use ”failed” anything. That’s because of the line plot of actual goals. So let’s just skip this idea of ”failed,” don’t you see? We’ll just have to take up the subject of help. This is another ramification of what I’ve just been telling you, but it hits sometimes very close to home, indeed. There is no GPM about help, so let’s—you can hit it as heavy as you want to, see. That’s something above.
I can give you data of this particular character now, because knowing what is the totality content of the reactive bank, you see, I know some things are slightly senior to the content or don’t impinge on the content and therefore can be cared for independently, you see, without undue restimulation. And this too—this just barely comes under the heading—”Help,” just barely comes under the heading. Therefore, it’s rather successful. It’s rather successful. You may find help in an implant someplace, or something, but it isn’t going to wrap anybody around a telegraph pole. You can take up the subject of help, you see? You can take up the subject of who he’s tried to help and who’s tried to help him and who he’s tried to help and any confounded thing you want to take up under this subject, and you’re liable to get someplace with this auditor who really can’t make auditing work.
”Well, there’s no use trying . . .” You get cognitions like this: ”There’s no use trying to help them because man only succeeds when he helps himself.” See, ”So where the hell did I get that?” you know. He’s standing back and he looks at this thing and he suddenly conceives of dragging somebody out of a stone quarry, you see. And he conceives of standing up on the bank of the stone quarry looking diffidently down into the stone quarry, with the guy drowning down there, you see, and sheer walls, and thinking to himself, ”Well, there’s no reason to give him a hand or throw him a rope, because he really doesn’t deserve help unless he can help himself,” you see. The poor sod down there hasn’t got anything to hold onto, nothing to stand up in.
Of course, this becomes ridiculous, even to him, see. But you’ll find—you’ll find that these—these odd—bit presumptions of some kind or another get wedged sideways in somebody’s skull and you couldn’t begin to make a dictionary of the number of them you will find. They’re just innumerable. So you don’t know quite what you’re digging for, except you’re digging for an impediment on the subject of help. Something is impeding his ability to help or be helped and that’s all you’re digging for. So anything that you talk about help, that he hits on, that is a sidelight to help, that gives you a tone arm motion, you then make a note of to take up independently. And you will chase this whole thing all the way down to a proper cognition and you will therefore take care of his attitude toward pcs and auditing, you see, and all of a sudden he will start using the comm cycle. You understand that?
The whole basis of it is, is the comm cycle is too easy to use as long as the person’s intention toward the pc is good and he’s trying to assist the pc and so forth. So the things which make a person unable to use such a comm cycle are those things, of course, which make a person believe that he cannot assist or cannot or should not, or that it’s impossible to, see? You get the—you get where you enter this? See? There’s where you enter it, see?
Of course, all this works with pcs too, this really works with pcs. This also applies to the pcs who get no tone arm action. Pcs who get no tone arm action and so forth have got one of these buttons. Well, there’s a dangling spring that goes out here about a yard, see, and the button is out here, you see, and all the machinery down underneath where the spring should contact on this button, and so on, is all miswired and filled full of concrete. And you’re not about to get there without a special address to the situation, see.
In other words, this person is sitting there saying, ”Well, I can’t be helped, anyway. Actually nobody could help anybody. If anybody did help anybody, then he would become responsible for the other person’s life. And I don’t want this other person to be responsible for my life because that would be a bad thing to do to them. So, therefore, if I sit here just sort of blank, why, therefore I won’t incur any liability.”
This is some reactive thlthlthlthl that’s going on, see. And that’s why the person isn’t getting tone arm action—given good auditing. But we’re taking it up, of course, here at Saint Hill from the auditor’s viewpoint. That’s all good preclear material.
Now, the other one which I save until last is a bit more esoteric. Now, there may be some more of these things. I wouldn’t say there aren’t. But I notice from a long lock of experience along the line, most of the pcs I’ve had much to do with have come under one or another of these three categories. Now this other one—this other one is a real dog. This other one is a sneaky sneak that probably could furnish the material for a half a dozen lectures. I’ll give it to you very rapidly. This is of great social importance what I’m giving you. This is something to chitter—chatter about.
Now, because it’s so interesting, don’t forget the other two. This is very interesting. And if I were giving this—if I were giving this—(there’s a nice spring rain)—if I were giving this in a broad sort of a way at a congress or something like this, I could really embroider this thing up. I would call the beginning lecture ”Life amongst the lowly.” People, especially Southerners, don’t recognize that’s the second title to Uncle Toms Cabin. It’s very amusing. You can ask a Southerner, ”Have you ever read a book called Life Amongst the Lowly? Have you ever heard of this book?” And they will swear no; you can bet them a couple of pounds and they’ll lose every time.
Life amongst the lowly. Why is life amongst the lowly so lowly? I’ll give it to you right where I caught it—on the entrance point. This was the entrance point to this examination. It’s all right for some professor to sit in his ivory tower and ”ivory—towerify,” and fill books with—full of what other professors in their ivory towers have ”ivory—towerified.” But there’s no substitute for getting down and getting your paws dirty with life to know what it’s all about. There is just no substitute for that. And I’ve rubbed elbows with an awful lot of people at various stratas and classes, sizes, shapes and descriptions. And in rubbing elbows, one fact used to strike me as a wild bit that I never could quite reconcile.
There was this weird attitude which didn’t fit with what they did to people. I’m not now saying there is such a thing as a lower classes. I’m talking about people who under tremendous duress, people who are being hammered and pounded by the economic mills and ground very fine indeed. People who are being hunted. Criminals on the run, don’t you see. This type of person. People that—they’ve more or less had it, you know, from life. And those people in a group do one thing that is a common denominator to the group. It’s always ”Poor Dillinger, they shot him.” It’s always ”Poor Bill, poor Joe.” There’s always grief and supersaccharine sympathy of some kind or another. It really isn’t sentimentality—it’s too gruesome. And I’ve listened to this—oh, a group of guys sitting on a fo’c’sle head, you know, and they’re talking about ”Poor old Bill,” you know, ”the sharks got him,” you know.
And I’ve listened to this and in life they just knock each others’ heads off, see. They’re unthinkably mean to one another. But they’re so supersaccharine—weird aspect, this—and it always just kind of went clink—creak! It didn’t make any sense, you see. They’d just as soon step on Dillinger’s teeth and sell them at the local pawnshop, see. See, but it’s ”Poor Dillinger,” you know? And it’s ”poor you.”
And this ”poor you” gave me a clue to something that is confoundedly well worth knowing and it very well could open up a whole field and make a real subject of sociology. Because it gives us the mechanism by which the lowly hold the lowly down. And which they do to one another constantly and continuously and instinctively. And it’s just about as vicious as keeping a cobra in the cash drawer and then inviting somebody to rob it. It’s a wild mechanism.
Why is it a wild mechanism? I dare say you will occasionally hear this or you have occasionally heard this. But really, you’d have to be on the seamier side of life than most of you are accustomed to, to run into it as a habit and a way of life. The slums—the places where people have zero opportunity, that sort of thing. There is where it is most prevalent. It’s the poor you. ”You poor fellow.”
And now let’s move it up into a little bit more workable technical platform. How you have been wronged. How he was wronged. How they were wronged. Now, let’s just move it into that technical platform. And we all of a sudden see that life amongst the lowly depends exclusively on their continued operation of just this one little gimmick, not on any other gimmick. Were looking now at the common denominator of sociology. What makes a slum a slum? Why can a fellow never get out of the slum? How come? What is this trap?
Well it’s: how you have been wronged, how they have been wronged, and so forth. And not to any great degree except as an example, how I have been wronged. That is not its dominant cord. You will hear that in there as an example, but that, is—isn’t—that’s just a response to the mechanism. That isn’t the important point of the mechanism.
In the early days of Dianetics, we ourselves had this, you see, ”How you have been wronged,” see? And it is the most acceptable thing that you ever had anything to do with. People just licked this up left, right and center. Well, what happened to it? Well, I worked it out along another line—an entirely different line. If you can’t take responsibility for your own actions, and if you can’t recognize the cause of your difficulties, then you’re in a trap and you’ll continue in that trap forevermore; and I became completely unwilling to hold people forever in a trap, by any reason, even that of popularity, which, of course, everybody knows is the greatest god to worship there is.
I’m thinking of Johnson’s poverty programs now and the fact that he had five families sitting down on one of his—one of his farms in the most abject poverty that anybody had ever lived in. The Republicans went down and dug it up. It may have—it probably would contribute to finishing him—Johnson off as a presidential candidate.
The point is here, this war against poverty would have to include an understanding of why people in groups remain poor. This is the missing link, this piece of data I’m giving you right now—quite valuable to the auditor and very valuable sociologically. As I said, I could lecture on it a very long time and it’s very interesting, but let’s get down to what the truth of the matter is.
An individual must accept his own responsibility and his own ability as cause before he can run off his overts. Simple. You can’t have an overt if you can’t recognize yourself as cause. You can’t get out of a rat race unless you can recognize your overts. That’s all there is to it, see. So how do you keep somebody in a rat race? Just never let him recognize his overts. And you say, ”Poor you. Look at everything that has been done to you. And you, you have never done anything, you poor fellow. Look how you have been wronged. There you were, sitting there innocently, doing nothing, and up jumped the regiment and wiped you out. You poor fellow.” And all you have to do is keep up a running fire of this stuff and you effectively suppress and mask the fact that the individual himself is capable of causation.
Let’s just not worry about the overt act, you’re telling this individual that he was incapable of cause, and you are pointing out moments, particularly, when he was not at cause. And you are pointing out the fact that he just—things just happen to him and that he doesn’t cause any of them. Which brings him into a causeless thing, which throws him into the dwindling spiral and will hold him on the floor and on the bottom of the heap, forever. And all you have to do is keep convincing him that he has been wronged and that he himself never wrongs anybody. That’s all you have to do, you just keep that mechanism going and they’ll stay on the bottom of the pile forever.
So life amongst the lowly is a long song of how you have been wronged. ”You never had a chance.” And when you get this tune played out to its bitterest end, you get a person who is bitterly finished. Because he can never get off an overt act. Now, we have to go back into what is really—completely aside from the fact that this does occur in actual GPMs and so forth—what really is obsessedness. How does a person become obsessed with a problem? This is—this is gold, man, this is solid gold to an auditor. How does a person become obsessed with a Problem? How is he always dwelling on it, dwelling on it, dwelling on it, thinking on it, thinking on it, thinking on it. Why, why, why, why, why is he stuck in—how does he get stuck in this, see? Why is this—this is—this describes ninety percent of your pcs, see.
They walk in and all he can think about is Madge left me, Madge left me, Madge left me, Madge left me, Madge left me, you see—he’ll bring it up, and so forth, and they say so—and—so and so—and—so and so—and—so and you think you’ve gotten them out of it now and you’ve processed them down the line very beautifully and all of a sudden, ”Madge left me.” See?
You never can seem to get them off of that—you never can get the needle out of that groove, much less off the platter. They just go on. Days and days they spend—worrying, worrying, thinking, thinking, going on and on about, about this thing, see. They can’t get the needle changed, you see. They can’t get the platter flipped. And you, the auditor, know instinctively that you’ve got to change that tune before you can have anybody in front of you who’s paying any attention to auditing. He’s obsessed with the subject of, ”Well, that all went back—I guess that was in the days before Madge left me.” He had it all taped. You never get tired of personnel like you get tired of one of these personnel in a pc’s bank, you know? ”That was before the bank failure. Before the bank failure. No, that was after the bank failure. You know, the bank failed.”
Now, what pins them into it and what can unpin them? And this becomes very vital information. What can unpin them off of this thing. There’s several systems that can be used to unpin them. We won’t go into all of the systems that can be used, but chief amongst them is the O/W sequence. That is a prime mechanism that pins a person into obsessiveness. They never recognize their own overt in that sphere of existence. And not recognizing their own overt in that sphere of existence they can never unpin themselves from it.
Now let me put it very crudely. Before you get your hand cut off in a buzz saw, you’ve got to get yourself somehow in the vicinity of a buzz saw and you in some fashion or another have got to reach for that buzz saw. It’s actually impossible for you to get your hand cut off in a band saw unless somehow or another you have, by whatever concatenation, arranged that proximity.
Now somewhere, back along the line, before the buzz saw, the individual did something or committed something that walked him on that channel up to getting his hand cut off in a buzz saw. He did something to arrive him there. That is very important. Because he will never get out of there till you’ve tricked the something that actually did arrive him there. It’s not good enough to have him inventing reasons. It’s not guilt, you see, is just—is a—is the inversion of this. You keep inventing ideas, inventing overts. There’s guys around who’ve—who eventually have realized that they have to get off their overts, but they don’t know what they are, they haven’t got an auditor, so they’ll invent overts to get off. You’ve got to beware of this bird, too, see. That’s known as a ”guilt complex.”
Ten thousand Japanese killed in landslide. This fellow was sitting in Birmingham at the time. He says, ”How did I do it?” That’s a guilt complex in operation. So it goes into an inversion and the individual will actually start dreaming up things he didn’t do in order to get out of the obsession of thought, see. He’ll eventually go that far. Well he’s spun by the time he goes there on that subject.
But look—a—here: What is this—what is this constant dwelling of the mind on this action that the auditor runs into continuously in processing pcs? It’s very hard not to run into this. It’s the overt act that he committed, that kept him pinned into that line. And if you want to really find the overt act and monkey around with this, nicely and gently by any overt act system that we have ever had, you all of a sudden will find what he really did do—and you’ve got to beware of the guilt complex of inventing things that he did do that he didn’t do because this is just another alter—is, you see. You see, he can alter—is this, as well as get off his actual overt.
So therefore, you always have to verify one of these things when you’re handling one of these things, on making sure that he didn’t give you any untruths. You’ve got to get your truth answer in there on the E—Meter. In other words, you’ve got to ask him, ”Is there anything you’ve told me that doesn’t apply to this?” you see—or you’re trying in some diplomatic way ”You told me any lies, bud?” You want to get that off. Because they will.
But any one of these dwellings upon it is preceded by a basic overt act which is followed by a withhold and followed by other overt acts. And the individual is keeping himself pinned into this thing by his series of overt acts. He cannot get out of that channel of thought. He’ll tell you, ”I could just give anything, anything, anything—I could just—I’d—I’d just give anything not to be thinking about the service station. If—if—if I could just for five minutes not think about the service station and worry about it, you see, anything!” You’ll actually run into somebody like this sometime or another, you know. ”If—if I could just stop thinking about it, you know? If—if—if I could just go down to the beach or something like that. . .” or so forth, and vava vaa!
That’s a more notable example where the pc is articulating it. Sometimes you merely observe it in the pc or something. Well, what’s the action? Let’s get off his actual overts against the service station. His overts and withholds from the service station and bing! Just like magic. He stops thinking about it.
In other words, all dwellingness on a subject is associated with overts against that subject. You follow that? That’s a rule that you can carry around in your hip pocket and feel like you’ve got it full of diamonds. You won’t recognize that you’ve got diamonds there until you run into this pc who is da—da—da—da—da—he’s got present time problem, present time problem, present time problem; he comes to every session he’s got a present time problem, he’s got present time problem. And it’s a present time problem about his domestic affairs, a present time problem about his domestic affairs, present time problem about his domestic affairs.
So you spend two hours of the two and a half hours cleaning up the present time problem about domestic affairs. It should occur to you now to ask, ”Do you spend a lot of time thinking about this, outside of auditing’.?”
”Oh, oh, ha—ha—ha, yes, I don’t think about anything else.” In other words, he’s really not in—session. He’s just continued his life over into the auditing session, see. Anybody comes up there with present time problems all the time in an auditing session, he’s not free of those things outside the auditing session. And the way for you to cure this is O/W. You run any version of O/W. And we’ve got lots of systems of running O/W. There’s some very slippy ones. There’s various types and kinds of running O/W. This is quite a subject. And it well merits being a subject since it is very, very upscale and is of a greater order of magnitude than the reactive bank itself. It is something that is part and parcel of life which is senior to other types of aberration. Told you something then, didn’t I? It’s pretty horrible to think of.
It is senior in its power even to GPMs. In other words you could be totally free of GPMs and still be colliding with the O/W sequence. You’d still get the consequences of your overts. Now, you can carry it perhaps upstairs in auditing to a point where you no longer have the consequences of your overts and that undoubtedly is true, but I’m just telling you that there it stands and that’s a pretty magnitudinous statement, just between ourselves, that it’s senior to GPMs. So it’s always safe to audit O/W. And it’s always indicated to audit O/W. And that’s one of the things, unfortunately, which auditors do very industriously, but here or there do very badly. They can make a stinking job out of O/W. Just, not to be critical, but just to be factual. It can be the most stinking, driveling job I ever heard of.
They chop up comm cycles and they do this and misread meters—and somehow or another—and then you find out, ”Oh, I finally did, I got the overt.”
”What was the overt?”
”Well, the auditor was thinking hostile thoughts about me while I was auditing him.”
Oh, no! Oh, no! This merely showed bypassed charge in the session. He didn’t get an overt off What auditors will sometimes buy as an overt is a matter of grief to me. It really is. I look over auditors’ reports and they’ve gotten this overt off of this pc. And the pc had been going around all the time, all the time all the time, not sending his mother candy. This is an overt act? You know, it’s unbelievable. It’s unbelievable. But I don’t mean to downgrade you or berate you, but very often some God—awful tacit consent will come into one of these sessions where ”I don’t get my overts off, therefore I won’t get them off you and you don’t get them off me and we’ll all sit here and be happy.” And you know why they do that? And why they’ve done that? Because there’s some thread of this sociological datum I’ve just given you, running through that session.
Ah, yes! So we carried the typhoid fever with us into Scientology. So it’s a good thing to know that there’s a—there’s an illness known as ”you’ve been wronged.” Because it has been the source of great despair to me amongst auditors, wondering why in the name of heaven they just couldn’t sit down and say, ”Whatcha done, sister? Whatcha done?” And she says, ”Well, I didn’t do very much.”
”All right. But how much was it?”
You know and just carry it on through in a workmanlike fashion. And that’s because ”wrong—itis” has entered the session, see. How you’ve been wronged. This is so much a part of the social world around us that it very easily slips into a session, if the auditor is not aware of this fact. So he’s inclined to sympathize with the pc and he thinks it’s a very openhearted, beautiful sentiment on his own part. It’s just about as beautiful as a striking rattlesnake.
We always knew there was something wrong with this. You’ll find it mentioned in the first book. You can only give him sympathy as the lowest level of healing. Well, more—I revise that, man, that’s no level of healing, that’s a method of strangulation. You get my point, now? You get what I’m talking about, here? If the auditor sets there—sits there, see, and the—he says to the pc, ”All right, what have you—what have you done now? You have—you’re thinking all the time about cat fur, now what have you ever done to cats?” you see. ”Well,” the pc says, ”well, cats caterwaul outside my window all night long and keep me awake.”
”Good. We’ve gotten that overt act off.”
What’s going on here, see? See? The auditor very, very slippily will pick up a motivator for an overt and so forth. You ask somebody ... Somebody is unhappy with their auditor or something of the sort. And somebody’ll pick him up and you’ll say, ”Look, get his overts off against the auditor.” And he sits there and listens to an hour’s worth of motivators and says, ”Well, I fixed him up,” and now the guy does cave in, see? They think one is being tough or they can be interpreted wrongly in several different ways.
The only thing I’m trying to tell you is just this—this very, very close point, is if you carry this ”you poor devil, you have been wronged,” into a session, you no longer audit the pc at cause. You’re auditing the pc at effect and so the pc will not get better.
You buy motivators and sympathize with these motivators of all the horrible things that have happened to the pc in his lifetime—perfectly all right, you understand, for a pc to tell you how horrible life has been to him. As long as, with not too tactless a change of pace, you get in and find out all the horrible things he’s done to life.
You’ve got to recognize that the ”you are wronged” is a disease. ”You poor fellow, you have been wronged. You poor fellow, you have been wronged.” And any time you give somebody this kind of a response, of any kind whatsoever, you’re contributing to his upset, contributing to his illness, because the only way he’ll ever get out of it is return his own causation. Not how he’s been wronged, how has he done some wrong to somebody. And as soon as you get the other side of that picture cleaned up, all of a sudden, bing! It’s just like magic.
You see, nothing can hold onto a thetan. There is no butterfly net, there is no electronic switchboard, there is nothing can hold onto a thetan. Nothing. That is—that’s the truth of the situation. There is no hobbles. There is no ropes. Nothing can really hold on to a thetan. It sounds absolutely incredible, but it’s true. Well how come he gets caught? He must have grabbed hold and then forgotten he’d grabbed hold, for him to be trapped thereafter. See, there he is, holding onto the stanchion in the bus, with a third hand he didn’t know he had, and with the other two hands trying to push himself off the bus and wondered how he can’t get off the bus. So now he has to conclude that he is trapped on the bus. Nothing can trap him on the bus, except his own holding onto the bus. He’s got to—he’s got to have hold of it.
Now, what is this third hand? The third hand is his overts against the bus. That’s how he can’t get out of it. That’s how he cannot get out of a—of an engram. That’s how he can’t get—really can’t get out of the bank. This is—so on. He himself has overts. It might add up to something that the one that we are—you’ll find out to really get somebody out of, are the banks he makes himself and has made himself Oh, man! Getting him out of those is rough. Getting him out of an implant, oh, sneeze. See, it’s nothing to get him out of an implant. But how about his own actual GPMs? Oh, wow, see. It’s rough, rough. See?
It’s easily done today, but it’s his own actual GPMs that are holding him. Not the ones that were given to him gratuitously. That’s something for you to recognize. So you sit down and you tell this pc, ”You poor fellow, how have you been wronged in life? Good. How else have you been wronged? All right. Now we both recognize you have been wronged.” Where do you think he’s going to drift? Up or down? He’s going to go down in session, man. He can’t do anything else, because you’re auditing him—one, you’re auditing him at effect. Two, you are pulling on him the gadget that it’s all done to him and he’s never done anything. You are confirming this third mysterious hand that is busy holding onto this thing he’s so—he’s so busy, worried about and so forth. You’re just burying that hand a little bit further. Because that hand is an overt, see? That’s the overt act.
And you’re carrying with you the whole sociological impact of life amongst the lowly. How is it the man can never get out of a slum? Well, you’ll see this dramatized right straight on up into life in its solid aspects of today. You go down to Chicago, you find out there—there are various types of slums. Nothing to do with color, you can find white slums that are twice as slummy as any other kind of slums, you see, there’s nothing to do with color. See, we’re talking about slums. Well, the dominant aspect which you will find in that slum is ”How you have been wronged,” and that nobody can be at cause.
The thing is, you can’t do anything about it. You look in their windows and you’ll find out that lucky charms and things like this, probably occupy the greatest commerce of the whole place, see? It’s all based on some kind of a wild luck, like a numbers racket, or it’s based on: ”Buy your lucky pixie fish,” see, ”today” and so forth, you know? You can’t do anything about it, but maybe some goddess called lady luck, or something like that, nobody has run into lately. Actually she retired. I forgot to tell them that down in Reno. When they opened up Las Vegas she retired because she didn’t like everything fixed.
Anyway, the whole score in that place is ”You can’t do anything about it. Nothing can be done about it,” played hand in glove, counterpoint with, how you have been wronged. And we notice that federal governments which are—national governments and so forth, which are notorious for their affinity for the indigent—they just love the indigent. They won’t take care of any industrious bloke that’s doing a job in the society, but boy, they just love the indigent, to a point where they’d love to make them more indigent. And that is the mechanism they use in their social work. ”How you have been wronged.”
This is the—this is the yap used by the labor agitator, and so forth, to the workmen. ”How you have been wronged.” Everybody always feels worse after he’s talked to one of them but never can quite figure out why. In other words, it’s a black operation. Just pure and simple, a black operation. ”How you have been wronged.”
So when you sit there, and this fellow has actually kicked his sister downstairs and busted her skull in and you let him get off a fact that his father whipped him, ”Yes, father whipped me.” You don’t even say, ”Why did your father whip you?” no, but, ”Well, father whipped me and he was always a brute.”
”Oh, you poor fellow, well thank you, I guess we’ve got that straightened out in your life. Now what else can we find?”
”A teacher was mean to me.” He doesn’t say anything about those frogs in the inkwell, see. ”A teacher was mean to me and everybody’s mean to me.”
The auditor who sits there and says, ”Yes, we agree, everybody was mean. Yes, we agree, everything is fine. Oh, yes.” He’s saying at t same time, ”You weren’t at cause, you didn’t do anything, it was all purposeless, there is no way you can regulate your fate, life is this way.” See? Pah! What a corny tune. And that’s life amongst the lowly. That’s how they keep themselves lowly. That’s how they get themselves stuck in. It’s a series, it’s not hard to understand, it’s just a series of overt acts. Naturally, an individual who’s guilty of overt acts does not like to be cause in that particular direction because he’s held back from reaching in that direction by the fear they will perform further overt acts.
A thetan is basically afraid of committing overt acts. He doesn’t really want to commit overt acts. I don’t care what else is arranged anyplace. And as a result, when he does so, he tends to pull them back. He eaves himself in and there he goes.
So let’s get now—I told you this was a long—a long dissertation to give you this third point, and you can very easily see how this thing could occupy not just a couple, three hours of lecture, but four or five sciences all in one fell swoop, such as labor relations and sociology and war against my not getting any votes, poverty, all of these ... You could open up this subject, see. This subject becomes a big subject. But let’s look at it in just the framework that we’re addressing it in—is why can’t some students audit and why can some students audit and why, more germane—since this is not always at the root of auditing but more germane to the pc—why do some pc’s just never, never, never, never, never, never, never get any tone arm action? See?
Well, I’ve given you two sources and this was the third one. Now you think I’m going to tell you that they believe they have been wronged and you’ve got to get their overts off. No, if it were just that simple, I would have found it out a long time ago. But it isn’t that simple. Remember, I told you a problem—solutions are as complex as the problem and this is pretty complex. This person has been so wronged—how a thetan can be wronged is pretty hard to do—but this person’s been so wronged, that they have no longer any concept of an overt. This person cannot really handle the idea of an overt act. And that’s what’s wrong with that person.
Now the Christian already ran into this in the year yup—gup. He already ran into this and he tried to do something about it. He didn’t run into this, he had another pitch in mind. But he came down the line saying, ”Repent ye, repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand and you’d better repent.” He was pulling an inversion. He wanted people to invert. He wanted people to admit their guilt. And it’s interesting that amongst Middle Western Christians particularly, when you listen to their confessions and so forth, at Holy Roller meetings and so forth, all you hear is a long potpourri of things they never were courageous enough to do in their whole lives. You could ask any one of them this burning question, ”Are you bragging or confessing?”
Now, there is the crux of the situation because they’re getting off false overts in an effort to get off some overts. They feel that they just could say they were guilty enough of something, then somehow or another things would be better. And you’ve got to safeguard yourself as an auditor against a pc walking into this particular instance because they will invert and they go kind of mad on this subject. Christianity was trying to put them down a little bit. You’re looking for the honest, actual overt. The actual one. And that’s what unpins him, because only the truth sets you free, see? It’s the actual overts you’re looking for.
And recognizing that if you don’t find it, why you’ve committed him to a further progress of being stuck into it, see? Now you—what you want to do with this character when you run into him—and he’s very frequent, he is not very unnumerous at all—I don’t know what he runs but he certainly must run something like ten, twelve percent—is, you get him to define an overt act. Here’s one of the gags—I’ll give you a gag. You define an overt act. And then after he’s got it all defined, is ask him why it isn’t an overt and he’ll tell you right away with the greatest automaticity you have ever heard in your life. He’ll go brrrrrr! Call out an overt act and he’ll give you some sort of an answer and so forth, ”Well, if I walked out and pushed a little child in the road and pushed him underneath an automobile, and so forth, that would be an overt act.” That’s an overt act, it’s a—it’s an act of harmfulness against some other person.
And if you weren’t alert you could be pretty, pretty knuckleheaded about this and let it go at that and say, ”We’ve got that licked.” Because you haven’t asked the little gee—whizzer that comes around the back door. And you’re just going to, going to have your eyeballs snapped out about an inch and back into your skull a few times when you work this on your pc sometime in the future. You’re going to really be upset. Even though the pc knew the—knew the gimmick, I mean he can’t get around it.
”All right, you pushed this child out in the street, and so on, all right, very good. Now, why isn’t that an overt act?”
Brrrr! He’ll have immediate instant explanation of why it isn’t an overt act. And they don’t think they can commit an overt act. Well, how are you going to get an overt act off if the person can’t commit an overt act? They’ve committed overt acts, but they haven’t committed any overt acts, so the net—net result of all this is they stay pinned into it tight, because there’s no reality on this as an overt act at all. Then you’ve got to find something, searchingly, that they do really consider an overt, that would really be an overt act. It may be something very mild. The old effect scale tells you that it’d be something very mild on such a person. They’ve done something or failed to do something, and that was an overt act. And now you’ve got a real honest to goodness overt act, and it might be so petty, and so nothing, that it—you’d hardly categorize it as an overt act.
But it’s actually real to this person because they can’t answer this question, ”Why isn’t that an overt act?” ”But it is an overt act.” And sit there and look rather griefy about the situation, see. Didn’t praise their mother’s cakes. Of course, we also know that they knocked their mother down the cellar steps and broke her leg. But that wasn’t an overt act, see, but didn’t praise mother’s cakes and that was the overt act, see. But that’s a real overt act to the person. Now you can go up on a gradient scale like that. And there are numerous ways of tackling this. I’m not even trying to give you the whole embrace of how you tackle this problem. It’s wide. Numerous ways you can handle this situation if you know the situation exists.
How do you walk upstairs on this thing? The individual could get off some overt acts but he wouldn’t get any tone arm action and they’re not real to him. He didn’t do anything. You ask him how he—well, how it isn’t an overt act, on a discussion basis, but not a processing basis. That’s not a process. And he’ll give you some very good reasons why it isn’t an overt act. You know right away that you haven’t got how this is an overt act. That’s that—that’s that discussion level. And that’s a cross—check of one kind or another which is left to your cleverness to walk around and straighten up, see.
Well, how do you finally do something about this? Well, there are probably numerous ways that something could be done about this. Fred here the other day was running ... A person had found a real overt act, a real overt act, they really considered a real overt act and then Fred was auditing him—audited his justifications for having committed it. And as—ised all the person’s justifications for having committed it, like a—an R1 type of approach, don’t you see? Use justifications. Got the justifications off. Well, the thing would be getting realer and realer and realer. Unburden it, in other words. See, that was a very clever method of approach.
Now here’s—here’s a wide avenue of what do you do in order to bring about the reality of this. Now, it’s no good to stand there and try to convince the fellow how serious it is because that’s why he isn’t saying it is an overt, because he’s so convinced that it’s so serious that he can’t confront it. You find, if you went to a prison for instance, to process some blokes in a prison, one of the wildest things you’d run into is the fact that nobody there has ever committed a crime. That would be the most astonishing thing to you. And also how sorry they are for each other, that would also be a little astonishing unless you remember what I’ve told you here.
And also, how they’ve all been wronged and how society has wronged them. Let’s look at where they are. They’re in prison. Well, how come they’re staying there? You see, you can’t put a thetan in prison. Unless he’s committed an overt act. Only then, the overt act, actually, would have to be against the prison or the people who were holding him in prison or prisons in general or metal or—or bars or block buildings or something like that. Otherwise you couldn’t keep him in the place for a minute, you see?
So, what is this? How would you sort this out? Therefore, the criminal must be a very serious problem to the society because they lock him up all the time. But maybe he’s a more serious problem to the criminal because he gets himself locked up all the time. How does he get locked up all the time? Well he commits overt acts all the time. I’m afraid this isn’t a planned idea at all. I’m afraid this is totally reactive as far as life is concerned. Person commits overt acts, why, he locks himself up.
The criminals that go around and ask to be caught, alone accounts for the record of the FBI. Nothing else could account for it.
So there’s the overt act—motivator sequence, see? There it starts operating. This doesn’t mean, now, that everybody is guilty and everybody is this and everybody is that and everybody should be shot down in flames because they are this way. They have forgotten how to let themselves out of the trap. They’ve forgotten how to let themselves out of the trap. They don’t know where the door is anymore. They’re walking around in circles here. And they would as happily get out of the trap as anybody else. But they’ve lost the key and they’ve lost the door and that’s it and that’s the state you find him in. No reason standing around and saying, ”Well, it’s your own fault. You lost the key and you lost the door, so I guess you’re locked up and there you are.” No particular point in—in adopting that particular attitude either. Because that in itself is an overt too, isn’t it?
Thank you.